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Russia Ran the Most Epic Ratfucking Operation in History This Year

Mother Jones

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Back during the campaign, I was vaguely aware that the Russians had hacked not just the DNC, but the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee as well. For some reason, though, I never put two and two together long enough to think about what this hack might mean. In my defense, no one else seems to have given it much thought either—despite the fact that hacked documents were showing up in local races all over the country:

The intrusions in House races in states including Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Ohio, Illinois, New Mexico and North Carolina can be traced to tens of thousands of pages of documents taken from the D.C.C.C., which shares a Capitol Hill office building with the Democratic National Committee….The seats that Guccifer 2.0 targeted in the document dumps were hardly random: They were some of the most competitive House races in the country.

….In Florida, Guccifer 2.0’s most important partner was an obscure political website run by an anonymous blogger called HelloFLA!, run by a former Florida legislative aide turned Republican lobbyist. The blogger sent direct messages via Twitter to Guccifer 2.0 asking for copies of any additional Florida documents. “I can send you some docs via email,” Guccifer 2.0 replied on Aug. 22….“I don’t think you realize what you gave me,” the blogger said, looking at the costly internal D.C.C.C. political research that he had just been provided. “This is probably worth millions of dollars.”

The hacked documents played a big role in a Florida congressional primary between Annette Taddeo and Joe Garcia:

After Mr. Garcia defeated Ms Taddeo in the primary using the material unearthed in the hacking, the National Republican Campaign Committee and a second Republican group with ties to the House speaker, Paul Ryan, turned to the hacked material to attack him.

….After the first political advertisement appeared using the hacked material, DCCC chair Ben Ray Luján wrote a letter to his Republican counterpart at the National Republican Congressional Committee urging him to not use this stolen material in the 2016 campaign….Ms. Pelosi sent a similar letter in early September to Mr. Ryan. Neither received a response. By October, the Congressional Leadership Fund, a “super PAC” tied to Mr. Ryan, had used the stolen material in another advertisement, attacking Mr. Garcia during the general election in Florida.

The basic story here is simple: the Russians hacked, the media gave the revelations big play, and Republicans gleefully made use of the Russian agitprop. Altogether, the Russians released hacked documents from four different sources:

DNC
DCCC
The Clinton Foundation
John Podesta

But nothing was ever released from any Republican sources—despite the fact that, according to the New York Times, the Russians had hacked the RNC and possibly other Republican accounts as well. If I had to guess, I’d say there’s a good chance they hacked a few people at the Trump Organization too. So here’s where we are:

The Russians ran a very sophisticated operation designed to hack into both US government servers and the servers of US political organizations.
They released only hacked documents from Democratic organizations. Republicans were left alone.
The intelligence community told high-ranking leaders of both parties what was going on, but Republicans flatly opposed any public acknowledgment of what was happening.
Republicans cheerfully made use of all the hacked material, even though they knew exactly where it came from.

At this point, you need to be willfully blind to pretend this was anything other than what it was: a ratfucking operation on an epic scale aimed squarely at Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party. And while it was happening, Republicans were happy to play along.

It’s inevitable that more details are going to emerge about all this—about both the hacking itself and Republican complicity in making use of the Russian material. This is not something that can be forgiven quickly or easily. Republicans may or may not care about this, but they’re going to have live with a smoldering, bitter anger from their Democratic colleagues for a very long time.

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Russia Ran the Most Epic Ratfucking Operation in History This Year

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Trump Likely Broke With His Own Stance in Indiana Manufacturing Deal

Mother Jones

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President-elect Donald Trump and his team are celebrating the announcement that a company that came under fire for planning to move 1,400 jobs to Mexico will keep around 1,000 of those jobs in Indiana. The announcement late Tuesday came after Trump and Vice President-elect Mike Pence, the outgoing governor of Indiana, applied pressure to Carrier, an Indianapolis furnace manufacturer, to keep jobs in the state. At a rally in April, Trump had promised “100 percent” to rescue the jobs at the plant, and Trump and Pence plan to visit Indiana this week to publicize the victory.

But there are still questions about what kind of deal was struck to persuade the company to keep production in the state. Any deal-making would be an about-face for Trump, who as recently as last month derided government incentives to keep companies in the United States.

“I’ve been watching these politicians go through this for years,” Trump said at a rally in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania, on October 10. “I’ve been watching them give low-interest loans. I’ve been watching them give zero-interest loans. These companies don’t even need the money, most of them; they take the money. There were a couple of instances where geniuses with great lawyers gave them money and then they moved anyway…I mean, the whole thing is crazy.”

Trump made the same point in August at a rally in Erie, Pennsylvania. (The Democratic super-PAC and opposition research outfit American Bridge found these examples and shared them with Mother Jones.) “Over the years, I’ve watched, for years, for 10 years, for 12 years, for 15 years, beyond Obama, and I’ve watched as politicians talked about stopping companies from leaving our states,” Trump said. “Remember, they’d give the low-interest loans. Here’s a low-interest loan if you stay in Pennsylvania. Here’s a zero-interest loan. You don’t have to pay. Here’s a this. Here’s a tax abatement of any kind you want. We’ll help your employees. It doesn’t work, folks. That’s not what they need. They have money. They want to go out, they want to move to another country, and because our politicians are so dumb, they want to sell their product to us and not have any retribution, not have any consequence. So all of that’s over.”

If the Indiana deal is any indication, however, these kinds of corporate incentives are not over yet. Neither Trump nor Carrier, which is owned by Indiana-based United Technologies, has disclosed the terms of the deal. CNBC reported that the state of Indiana offered the company incentives to stay. The report also indicated that the company may have chosen to keep the factory in Indiana in order to curry favor with the new administration. United Technologies does lucrative work for the US government making engines for military jets.

Trump was correct that without strict enforcement mechanisms, incentives often fail to keep jobs in the country in the long term if the company stands to make more money by shifting production abroad. Even as Trump has apparently stopped Carrier’s relocation for now, a company a mile away is in the process of shutting down its plant and sending nearly 300 jobs to Mexico. Both Carrier and the second company, Rexnord, had already benefited from tax incentives to stay in Indianapolis when they both decided to move operations to Mexico. Carrier had agreed to pay back $1.2 million to the city. The Indianapolis Star reported in August that under Pence, the Indiana Economic Development Corporation had awarded $24 million in incentives to companies that sent production overseas. Of that sum, $8.7 million had already been paid out.

Trump had railed against corporate welfare long before he launched his presidential campaign. In 2011 and 2012, he repeatedly criticized the Obama administration’s loans to Solyndra, the solar technology company that declared bankruptcy in 2011 despite receiving a $535 million federal loan guarantee through the 2009 stimulus package. “Washington is wasting over $2 billion this year on Solyndra type loans,” Trump tweeted in October 2011. The following March, he tweeted that President Barack Obama “has wasted billions of our tax dollars on speculative green projects like Solyndra. He is an economic ignoramus.”

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Trump Likely Broke With His Own Stance in Indiana Manufacturing Deal

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Clinton Campaign Says It Will Participate in Recount

Mother Jones

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Marc Elias, the lawyer for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, announced Saturday that the Clinton campaign will participate in the election recount initiated by Green Party candidate Jill Stein in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.

Elias, in a statement posted on Medium, wrote that the campaign has been quietly taken “steps in the last two weeks to rule in or out any possibility of outside interference in the vote tally in these critical battleground states,” including combing through election results looking for anomalies “that would suggest a hacked result” and consulting with analysts within and outside of the campaign “with backgrounds in politics, technology, and academia.”

“We believe we have an obligation to the more than 64 million Americans who cast ballots for Hillary Clinton to participate in ongoing proceedings to ensure that an accurate vote count will be reported,” Elias wrote.

On Tuesday, New York Magazine reported that computer scientist J. Alex Halderman and a colleague had found “persuasive evidence” that vote totals in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania could have been “manipulated or hacked.” In a subsequent post on Medium, Halderman wrote that his findings had been misrepresented, and that what he was calling for was a examination of paper ballots and voting machines in those states to see if a cyberattack could have changed any results. Stein subsequently launched a fundraising push that has netted more than $5 million in order to push for recounts, according to the Wall Street Journal. She has formally requested a recount in Wisconsin, and is preparing challenges in Pennsylvania and Michigan, according to the Journal.

In Saturday’s Medium post, Elias wrote:

Because we had not uncovered any actionable evidence of hacking or outside attempts to alter the voting technology, we had not planned to exercise this option ourselves, but now that a recount has been initiated in Wisconsin, we intend to participate in order to ensure the process proceeds in a manner that is fair to all sides. If Jill Stein follows through as she has promised and pursues recounts in Pennsylvania and Michigan, we will take the same approach in those states as well. We do so fully aware that the number of votes separating Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in the closest of these states — Michigan — well exceeds the largest margin ever overcome in a recount. But regardless of the potential to change the outcome in any of the states, we feel it is important, on principle, to ensure our campaign is legally represented in any court proceedings and represented on the ground in order to monitor the recount process itself.

The campaign is grateful to all those who have expended time and effort to investigate various claims of abnormalities and irregularities. While that effort has not, in our view, resulted in evidence of manipulation of results, now that a recount is underway, we believe we have an obligation to the more than 64 million Americans who cast ballots for Hillary Clinton to participate in ongoing proceedings to ensure that an accurate vote count will be reported.

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Clinton Campaign Says It Will Participate in Recount

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There Was No Apparent “Whitelash” This Year

Mother Jones

Among liberals, one of the most popular explanations for Donald Trump’s victory is that it was a “whitelash,” a primal scream of lost influence and latent racism among white voters. I myself certainly talked about racial animus quite a bit during the runup to the election. However, in the spirit of figuring out where we were wrong, the actual voting patterns suggest this is flat wrong. Using exit poll data from 2012 and 2016, here is Trump’s share of the vote compared to Romney in 2012:

Whites voted less for Trump than for Romney, while both blacks and Latinos voted more for Trump.1 There’s nothing here that suggests Trump appealed to white backlash in any special way. Quite the opposite. But now let’s add a column to the table:

Among whites, Trump lost 1 percent of white votes, but third-party candidates gained 3 percent. Among Latinos, third-parties gained 4 percent, and among blacks they gained 3 percent.

This is the big difference. Who did third-party candidates hurt the most, Trump or Clinton? And why? Or was the damage equal? You need to answer this question before you can say anything sensible about race.

It’s worth nothing that this doesn’t mean that race played no role in this election. But it does mean two things. First, white racial animus seem to have played no more of a role than it did four years ago. Second, although Trump’s blatant appeal to white ethnocentrism did him little good, it also did him no harm—and that was true among all racial groups. That’s disheartening all on its own.2

When more detailed data is available, it might turn out there are specific subsets of the white vote that moved very strongly toward Trump. But what we have so far doesn’t suggest anything of the sort. If you still want to claim that whitelash played a big role in this election, you need to contend with this.

1You can break this down by age or gender, but it doesn’t really change anything. For example, white men moved slightly toward Trump while white women moved slightly away from him. Likewise, middle-aged whites moved slightly toward Trump while young and old whites moved slightly away. But the differences are small enough that they don’t change the picture much.

2Since I first put up this post, several people have suggested that national data isn’t the right way to look at voter demographics. Instead, we should look at the key swing states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan. But that doesn’t change things. If you look at the exit poll data, Trump did slightly worse than Romney in Pennsylvania and slightly better in Wisconsin and Michigan. But the operative word is “slightly.”

Still, maybe turnout was up among white voters? That’s possible. But we don’t have that information yet, and I’m not sure when we’ll get it.

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There Was No Apparent “Whitelash” This Year

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Donald Trump’s Campaign Just Scored a Big Win in Pennsylvania

Mother Jones

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A federal judge in Philadelphia has refused a request by Democrats to issue an order that would prohibit the Trump campaign and its supporters from intimidating Pennsylvania voters at the polls on Tuesday.

Pennsylvania is one of the few swing states that could help decide the presidential election. The state’s Democratic Party filed a lawsuit last week—similar to lawsuits filed in five other swing states—alleging possible voter intimidation and requesting an injunction compelling the Trump campaign to not harass voters. In his opinion issued on Monday in a district court, Judge Paul Diamond, a George W. Bush appointee, said the Democratic Party had not proved that a substantial threat of voter intimidation exists in the state. Moreover, he said, the party had waited too long to bring its concerns before the court.

“Plaintiff has not explained what it learned in the last month or even the last week that created emergent conditions. On the contrary, Plaintiff has long known of the acts and statements on which it bases its claims,” wrote Diamond. “Plaintiff has not explained why it filed its Emergency Motion only two business days before the election…Plaintiff has contrived to transform this litigation into a mad scramble.”

The judge also chided the Democrats for using media reports as much of their evidence and for taking portions of that evidence out of context. “I am thus compelled to base a ruling that could restrict Defendants’ Election Day speech and conduct on media reports,” he wrote, noting that several items cited by the Democratic Party as evidence of possible voter suppression actually constitute protected election activity.

Taking issue with the Democrats’ claim that white nationalists’ enthusiasm for the Trump campaign could lead to intimidation of minority voters, the judge wrote, “Unless it is psychic, Plaintiff has no idea who might have been ‘energized by’ Mr. Trump. Plaintiff’s heated suggestion does not even rise to the level of speculation.”

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Donald Trump’s Campaign Just Scored a Big Win in Pennsylvania

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Donald Trump Promises to Sue Women Who Accused Him of Assault

Mother Jones

On Saturday, Donald Trump vowed to sue the 11 women who have come forward over the last few weeks with accusations of sexual assault against the Republican presidential nominee.

“Every woman lied when they came forward to hurt my campaign,” Trump claimed. “Total fabrication, the events never happened—never. All of these liars will be sued after the election is over.”

Trump’s threat came during a speech in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, which was plugged as a major policy speech to lay out his first 100 days in office should he win the election next month. His promise to sue his accusers wasn’t the only notable moment.

While taking a hard line on his accusers, he seems to be softening on a key campaign promise: That the US will build a wall along its southern border and that Mexico will pay for it. Now, according to his speech, his position is that the United States will pay for the wall but Mexico will reimburse the US.

Trump also promised to break up Comcast and NBC as part of a response to media bias against him during the campaign.

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Donald Trump Promises to Sue Women Who Accused Him of Assault

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Donald Trump Is Biff From "Back to the Future" in New Clinton Ad

Mother Jones

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Biff from Back to the Future. Farkus from A Christmas Story. The mean girls from Mean Girls. Donald Trump.

That’s the comparison Hillary Clinton is drawing in her latest campaign ad. Called “America’s Bully,” the one-minute spot shows the best-known bullies from classic American movies interspersed with footage of Trump mocking people and kicking them out of his rallies. The ad ends with a scene from a Clinton campaign event in Iowa when a 10-year-old girl asked Clinton what she would do about bullying.

The ad will air in battleground states of Florida, Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.

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Donald Trump Is Biff From "Back to the Future" in New Clinton Ad

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Bernie Sanders Is Coming Off the Bench to Save the Democrats

Mother Jones

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For a few minutes Friday afternoon in New Paltz, New York, it felt like old times for Bernie Sanders. Looking out over a sea of college students in Bernie t-shirts and Bernie buttons and a very uncomfortable looking Bernie onesie, the Vermont senator ran through the issues that had fueled his strong showing upstate during New York’s March primary: fracking, oligarchy, inequality.

But this time, Sanders was on a different mission—to elect Zephyr Teachout to Congress in the state’s 19th district. National Democrats consider the swing district held by the retiring GOP Rep. Chris Gibson one of their most important pickup opportunities, critical to their hopes of retaking the House, and Sanders was effusive in his praise of law professor and campaign finance crusader he has described as a leading light of his “political revolution.” Of the 435 members of the House, he said, Teachout was poised to be “the most outstanding” of the bunch—”a leader at a time when we need leaders.” When the crowd started into one last chant of “Ber-nie!” the senator interrupted, determined to pass the torch. “Thank you,” he said, “but that ‘Ber-NIE‘! has now got to be directed to ‘Ze-PHYR!'”

Sanders has been mostly quiet since the chaotic Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, when hundreds of his supporters walked out of the arena after he ceded the nomination to former secretary of state Hillary Clinton. But the Vermont independent had pledged to “vigorously” campaign for Clinton and downballot Democrats this fall and launched his own political non-profit to further the goals of his “revolution.” Now, with less than two months to go until election day, Sanders is getting off the bench—and Democrats could really use the help.

After campaigning with Teachout, Sanders boarded a plane to Pittsburgh, where he was set to stump for Katie McGinty, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Pennsylvania. (Joining Sanders in Steel City: Braddock, Pennsylvania, mayor John Fetterman, a Sanders backer who lost to McGinty in the primary.) Then he has a busy weekend of rallies and organizing events planned for Ohio, where he and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) are crisscrossing the state to campaign for Clinton, hitting the cities and college campuses where Sanders performed best in the March primary. After trailing for months, Trump has led the last three polls in Ohio and now leads in the Real Clear Politics average in the state.

Sanders’ campaign tour comes at a time when a significant portion of his supporters are still unsure who to vote for. According to a New York Times/CBS News poll released on Thursday, 36 percent of voters under the age of 30 are supporting third-party candidates. Ten percent of those voters are backing Green Party nominee Jill Stein, who has made a show of appealing to disaffected Sanders supporters and has earned the backing of a handful of Democratic National Convention delegates. In July, Stein even offered to give Sanders a spot on the Green Party ticket if he would drop out of the Democratic race to join the third-party.

The 44-year-old Teachout, a Fordham University Law School professor and former Howard Dean staffer who has written a book about political corruption, was one of a handful of House candidates who Sanders endorsed during the primaries. Two years ago she ran for governor in the Democratic primary against the incumbent Andrew Cuomo and won 32 of 62 counties despite minimal funding and zero establishment support. Her unlikely success, and her unabashedly progressive platform, foreshadowed Sanders’ long-shot campaign this spring.

Although Clinton should win New York’s electoral votes easily, Teachout’s Hudson Valley district—infused with a Vermont-ish mix of family farmers, college students, and old-school hippies—is emblematic of the kind of place in swing districts and purple states where Sanders’ word carries the most weight. A local string band called Yard Sale, which described itself as “local and organic,” performed on a stage fashioned from a shipping container for the crowd compromised largely of students from the nearby State University of New York at New Paltz. “We’re gonna reach out/ for Teachout/ everybody/ join along,” a band member sang.

Sanders couched his support in personal terms, citing a meeting he and Teachout had attended years ago opposing the North American Free Trade Agreement and calling Teachout’s House race the clearest battle on the map between the “oligarchy” and the progressive left. (Teachout has challenged the billionaire hedge-funder Paul Singer, a backer of her Republican opponent John Faso—a former fracking pipeline lobbyistto a debate.) When it was Teachout’s turn, she addressed the audience, many of whom were hearing her speak for the first time, in a language that sounded familiar. She railed against the “hedge fund billionaires,” such as Singer, funding a super-PAC in support of her opponent, and asked her supporters if they knew what her average donation was—a staple of Sanders stump speeches. “Nineteen dollars!” came the response.

But there were plenty of reminders of the challenges facing Sanders as he tries to herd his coalition into the Democratic tent. Perhaps wary of resurrecting old wounds (the Vermont senator was jeered when he called for party unity at a delegate meeting in Philly) neither candidate mentioned the name at the top of the Democratic ticket, and Sanders alluded to Trump only in passing.

Safiyyah Alston, a sophomore at SUNY-Ulster with a Three Bernie Moon t-shirt and flowers in her hair, told me she still just wanted to see Sanders on the ballot. “I support him now!” she said. “If he jumped in the race I’d support him.” But she was still trying to get to yes with Clinton. Lorraine Vigoriti, another Bernie backer in a t-shirt that read “#ForeverBernie” with a drawing of a forlorn looking senator walking into the distance, told me it was “Jill or nobody.” Why nobody? She was worried that if she so much as cast a vote it would be “stolen” by Clinton supporters at the polling location and converted into a Hillary vote; better to just stay home.

As organizers took apart the stage and wrangled attendees for volunteering shifts toward Teachout’s goal of 70,000 door-knocks, I found 21-year-old Oscar Salazar in a onesie covered in photos of Bernie’s smiling face. He had driven up from Westchester County, determined to travel “wherever Bernie speaks or wherever the Pokemon take me,” he said. Salazar had backed Sanders during the primary, of course, and was now leaning toward Stein in the general election. “I’m tired of voting for the lesser of two evils,” he said, although this was the first year he’d ever voted. Still, the primary hadn’t soured him on Democrats entirely. He liked what he’d heard from Teachout—now he was planning to phone-bank for her.

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Bernie Sanders Is Coming Off the Bench to Save the Democrats

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This List Shows You How Divided America’s Schools Are

Mother Jones

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In the wealthy West Jefferson Hills School District in western Pennsylvania, a new high school with an eight-lane swimming pool and terrazzo flooring was recently approved for construction. Meanwhile, in neighboring Clairton, where the district’s poverty rate is 48 percent, officials wrestled with whether to close schools earlier this year.

That striking disparity is just one of many in a new report that maps the country’s 33,500 school district borders and highlights places where high-poverty districts bump up against wealthy neighbors. The report, put out by the nonprofit EdBuild, sheds light on how these well-established boundaries create “barriers to progress that segregate children” and even worse inequities in the public education system. It also notes that existing school finance system, in which districts rely heavily on property taxes as a source of local funding for schools, creates an incentive for wealthier families to move across district lines to more well-resourced areas.

Between 1990 and 2010, income-based segregation among American school districts grew, according to Stanford’s Center for Education Policy Analysis. Such disparities among districts result in unequal access to resources, such as underqualified teachers and subpar facilities, and could lead to gaps in academic achievement. Another recent Stanford study found that children in the wealthiest school districts performed, on average, four grade levels above children in the poorest school districts. In May, on the anniversary of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision, the Government Accountability Office found that the share of schools with a high concentration of poor, black, and Hispanic students increased from 9 to 16 percent between 2000 and 2014.

“We’ve created and maintained a system of schools segregated by class and bolstered by arbitrary borders that, in effect, serve as the new status quo for separate but unequal…” conclude the authors of the EdBuild report. “Increasingly, the story of American school districts is a tale of two cities, one well-off and one poor—one with the funds necessary to provide its children ample educational opportunities and one without adequate resources to help its children catch up.”

Here’s a look at the biggest disparities in poverty between neighboring districts:

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This List Shows You How Divided America’s Schools Are

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The Supreme Court Abortion Ruling Could Soon Take Down Laws in These 8 States

Mother Jones

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In a press call on Thursday, Planned Parenthood announced a campaign to work toward the repeal of abortion restrictions in eight states across the country, in light of the Supreme Court’s historic ruling in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt.

The ruling, announced on Monday, found that two types of abortion clinic restrictions in Texas—a law requiring abortion providers to have local hospital admitting privileges and a rule requiring clinics to meet the strict infrastructure standards of outpatient surgery centers—were unconstitutional because they caused an undue burden on abortion access.

Planned Parenthood announced on Thursday that it was planning to seek repeals of Texas-style restrictions in seven other states: Missouri, Virginia, Florida, Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee. Planned Parenthood also announced that they would begin work toward repealing abortion restrictions in Texas beyond those struck down this week by the Supreme Court.

Missouri and Tennessee each have both of the Texas-style restrictions on the books: an admitting-privileges law and facility infrastructure requirements. In Missouri, the admitting-privileges law led to the closure of an abortion clinic in Columbia, leaving the state with just one clinic. In Tennessee, both laws are being challenged in the courts. The rest of the states on Planned Parenthood’s list each have laws requiring structural standards comparable to those of surgical centers, though the law specifics vary by state.

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The Supreme Court Abortion Ruling Could Soon Take Down Laws in These 8 States

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