Tag Archives: political

Voter Registration Drives in Ferguson Are "Disgusting," Says Missouri GOP Leader

by RosellaHahn Posted on August 20, 2014

Mother Jones

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Over the last couple days, voter registration booths have been popping up in Ferguson. There was one by the ruined site of the recently burned-down QuikTrip convenience store, which has become a central gathering site of the protests, and another near the site where Michael Brown was shot.

Voter turnout was just 12 percent in Ferguson’s last municipal election, and in a city that’s 60 percent black, virtually all city officials are white. In December, the black superintendent of the Ferguson-Florissant school district was fired by the then all-white school board, and the longtime St. Louis county executive, who is black, recently lost his seat to a white opponent in a race seen as “racially charged.” “Five thousand new voters will transform the city from top to bottom,” said Jesse Jackson Sr., who told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on Monday that he was meeting with local clergy to organize a door-to-door voter registration drive.

But the prospect of more registered black voters has greatly perturbed the executive director of Missouri’s Republican Party, Matt Wills, who expressed outrage at the new registration booths to Breitbart News Monday:

“If that’s not fanning the political flames, I don’t know what is,” Wills said. “I think it’s not only disgusting but completely inappropriate…Injecting race into this conversation and into this tragedy, not only is not helpful, but it doesn’t help a continued conversation of justice and peace.”

While some on Twitter echoed Wills’ sentiments and painted the voter efforts as Democratic opportunism, other political leaders in Missouri distanced themselves from Wills’ comments. Republican state Sen. Ryan Silvey of Kansas City tweeted, “I have no problem w/ protesters, or anyone, getting registered to vote. How do we keep our gov’t accountable if not by ballot?” And he had more to say later:

In April, an editorial in the Kansas City Star denounced “cheap” tactics by the Missouri GOP to “make voting more difficult for certain citizens, who are most likely to be elderly, low-income, students or minorities. They’re not even subtle about it.” A proposed amendment to the state constitution would require photo ID at the polls, and a proposal to bring early voting to Missouri would disallow it on Sundays—a big day for black voters. The Star pointed out that the photo ID law would cost the state over $6 million next year, “a huge cost, especially because Republicans have been able to produce zero examples of voter identity fraud in Missouri.” In fact, as my colleague Kevin Drum has exhaustively reported, incidents of voter fraud anywhere in the country are microscopically few; the New York Times found just 86 cases from 2002 to 2006, for instance.

“Elected officials don’t have to care about black citizens as long as they don’t fear them at the ballot box,” Dorothy A. Brown, a professor of law at Emory University’s School of Law who’s written a book on race and the law, noted on CNN.com last week. If anything, the Missouri GOP may be on track to increase the number of voters determined to put that notion into practice.

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Voter Registration Drives in Ferguson Are "Disgusting," Says Missouri GOP Leader

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Paul Ryan’s Anti-Poverty Plan Would Cost Billions to Implement. Will GOPers Go for That?

by CSNMindyihta Posted on July 25, 2014

Mother Jones

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When Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) laid out a new set of proposals to revamp the federal safety net during a speech on Thursday at the American Enterprise Institute, central to his vision was the idea of consolidating federal programs to create a “personalized, customized form of aid—one that recognizes both a person’s needs and their strengths—both the problem and the potential.”

The plan, wrapped in caring language about giving the poor individual attention, has earned plaudits from both the right and the left for avoiding partisanship and offering up a concrete idea that policy makers will have to take seriously. Liberals have given Ryan—an Ayn Rand devotee who on the campaign trail reduced American society to one of makers versus takers and whose budgets have proposed slashing millions in spending on the poor—credit for getting out of the office and spending some time with actual poor people during his year-long “listening tour,” whose genuine impact is evident in his proposal.

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Paul Ryan’s Anti-Poverty Plan Would Cost Billions to Implement. Will GOPers Go for That?

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Happy Birthday, Twitter! Here Are 50 Things the Media Says You’ve Revolutionized.

by Kristof0239 Posted on July 15, 2014

Mother Jones

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Twitter launched July 15, 2006. Since soon after its inception, the media has been heralding Twitter’s significance. Here is a not-at-all exhaustive list of things the media has credited Twitter with changing forever.

Social media.

The media world.

The world.

The world of Australian political journalism.

UK Political journalism.

Journalism.

“Journalism for an entire generation.”

Washington relationships.

Politics.

Local politics.

The way politicians communicate with voters.

The way people communicate with people.

The way people communicate with God.

The study of language.

Education.

The job hunt.

Small business.

Technology for business.

Corporations.

The corporate world.

The way we pitch ideas in the corporate world.

The culture of Comcast.

Pop culture.

The face of ballet in NYC.

The way we watch TV.

The business of TV.

TV “as we know it”.

The way TV is made.

The way Ed Burns makes movies.

The way Snoop Dogg makes music.

The way people in Los Angeles eat.

The way people in India talk to celebrities.

The way celebrities talk to people.

The way Kanye West apologizes.

The way celebrities endorse things.

Gilbert Godfried.

The literary critic.

The literary world.

The world of professional poker.

Sports.

The relationship between athletes and sports fans.

The ski industry.

The gaming industry.

The Casey Anthony trial.

Children.

Old people.

The way old people interact with children.

The way hotels interact with customers.

Travel.

The way everyone does things.

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Happy Birthday, Twitter! Here Are 50 Things the Media Says You’ve Revolutionized.

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Scientists Are Beginning To Figure Out Why Conservatives Are…Conservative

by CarolEllington Posted on July 15, 2014

Mother Jones

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You could be forgiven for not having browsed yet through the latest issue of the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences. If you care about politics, though, you’ll find a punchline therein that is pretty extraordinary.

Behavioral and Brain Sciences employs a rather unique practice called “Open Peer Commentary”: An article of major significance is published, a large number of fellow scholars comment on it, and then the original author responds to all of them. The approach has many virtues, one of which being that it lets you see where a community of scholars and thinkers stand with respect to a controversial or provocative scientific idea. And in the latest issue of the journal, this process reveals the following conclusion: A large body of political scientists and political psychologists now concur that liberals and conservatives disagree about politics in part because they are different people at the level of personality, psychology, and even traits like physiology and genetics.

That’s a big deal. It challenges everything that we thought we knew about politics—upending the idea that we get our beliefs solely from our upbringing, from our friends and families, from our personal economic interests; and calling into question the notion that in politics, we can really change (most of us, anyway).

The occasion of this revelation is a paper by John Hibbing of the University of Nebraska and his colleagues, arguing that political conservatives have a “negativity bias,” meaning that they are physiologically more attuned to negative (threatening, disgusting) stimuli in their environments. In the process, Hibbing et al. marshall a large body of evidence, including their own experiments using eye trackers and other devices to measure the involuntary responses of political partisans to different types of images. One finding? That conservatives respond much more rapidly to threatening and aversive stimuli (for instance, images of “a very large spider on the face of a frightened person, a dazed individual with a bloody face, and an open wound with maggots in it,” as one of their papers put it.)

In other words, the conservative ideology, and especially one of its major facets—centered on a strong military, tough law enforcement, resistance to immigration, widespread availability of guns—would seem well tailored for an underlying, threat-oriented biology.

The authors go on to speculate that this ultimately reflects an evolutionary imperative. “One possibility,” they write, “is that a strong negativity bias was extremely useful in the Pleistocene,” when it would have been super helpful in preventing you from getting killed. (The Pleistocene epoch lasted from roughly 2.5 million years ago until 12 thousand years ago.) We had John Hibbing on the Inquiring Minds podcast earlier this year, where he discussed these ideas in depth; you can listen here:

Hibbing and his colleagues make an intriguing argument in their latest paper, but what’s truly fascinating is what happened next. Twenty-six different scholars or groups of scholars then got an opportunity to tee off on the paper, firing off a variety of responses. But as Hibbing and colleagues note in their final reply, out of those responses, “22 or 23 accept the general idea” of a conservative negativity bias, and simply add commentary to aid in the process of “modifying it, expanding on it, specifying where it does and does not work,” and so on. Only about three scholars or groups of scholars seem to reject the idea entirely.

That’s pretty extraordinary, when you think about it. After all, one of the teams of commenters includes New York University social psychologist John Jost, who drew considerable political ire in 2003 when he and his colleagues published a synthesis of existing psychological studies on ideology, suggesting that conservatives are characterized by traits such as a need for certainty and an intolerance of ambiguity. Now, writing in Behavioral and Brain Sciences in response to Hibbing roughly a decade later, Jost and fellow scholars note that

There is by now evidence from a variety of laboratories around the world using a variety of methodological techniques leading to the virtually inescapable conclusion that the cognitive-motivational styles of leftists and rightists are quite different. This research consistently finds that conservatism is positively associated with heightened epistemic concerns for order, structure, closure, certainty, consistency, simplicity, and familiarity, as well as existential concerns such as perceptions of danger, sensitivity to threat, and death anxiety. Italics added

Back in 2003, Jost and his team were blasted by Ann Coulter, George Will, and National Review for saying this; congressional Republicans began probing into their research grants; and they got lots of hate mail. But what’s clear is that today, they’ve more or less triumphed. They won a field of converts to their view and sparked a wave of new research, including the work of Hibbing and his team.

Granted, there are still many issues yet to be worked out in the science of ideology. Most of the commentaries on the new Hibbing paper are focused on important but non-paradigm shifting side issues, such as the question of how conservatives can have a higher negativity bias, and yet not have neurotic personalities. (Actually, if anything, the research suggests that liberals may be the more neurotic bunch.) Indeed, conservatives tend to have a high degree of happiness and life satisfaction. But Hibbing and colleagues find no contradiction here. Instead, they paraphrase two other scholarly commentators (Matt Motyl of the University of Virginia and Ravi Iyer of the University of Southern California), who note that “successfully monitoring and attending negative features of the environment, as conservatives tend to do, may be just the sort of tractable task…that is more likely to lead to a fulfilling and happy life than is a constant search for new experience after new experience.”

All of this matters, of course, because we still operate in politics and in media as if minds can be changed by the best honed arguments, the most compelling facts. And yet if our political opponents are simply perceiving the world differently, that idea starts to crumble. Out of the rubble just might arise a better way of acting in politics that leads to less dysfunction and less gridlock…thanks to science.

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Scientists Are Beginning To Figure Out Why Conservatives Are…Conservative

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Will the U.S. keep spending taxpayer money on dirty coal plants abroad?

by gammak Posted on July 7, 2014

Will the U.S. keep spending taxpayer money on dirty coal plants abroad?

By

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Congress could get in the way of Obama’s efforts to clean up power plants — not just here at home, but abroad.

A year ago, when President Obama unveiled his Climate Action Plan, he declared that the U.S. would stop funding most coal projects in other countries. “I’m calling for an end to public financing for new coal plants overseas unless they deploy carbon-capture technologies, or there’s no other viable way for the poorest countries to generate electricity,” Obama said in his big climate speech. In December, the U.S. Export-Import Bank, which helps American firms access markets abroad, changed its lending guidelines to conform with Obama’s edict.

But now pro-coal members of Congress are moving to block the new guidelines. The Hill reports:

Both of the working proposals in the House and Senate to renew the bank’s charter would reverse Ex-Im guidelines that prevent financing for overseas power plants that decline to adopt greener technology. …

Up until now, coal-state Democrats such as Sen. [Joe] Manchin (D-W.Va.) have lacked political leverage to fight back.

But that’s changing thanks to the looming Sept. 30 deadline to reauthorize the 80-year-old bank. Opponents of the power plant guidelines are seizing on the time crunch to win concessions.

There’s ongoing debate in Congress over whether the Ex-Im Bank should exist at all. Last year, 80 percent of the bank’s funds were used to support purchases from large corporations, such as Boeing and General Electric. Some conservatives say that’s corporate welfare and want to do away with the bank entirely, and right-wing groups like Club for Growth are putting pressure on lawmakers to vote against the bank’s reauthorization.

Meanwhile, President Obama and most Democrats are aligned with business groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and National Association of Manufacturers in pushing to renew the bank and increase its funding. They note that the bank actually generated more than $1 billion for the treasury last year.

But that isn’t such a good deal if the money comes at the expense of the climate. As The New Republic reports, “Ex-Im’s fossil fuel investments in 2012 accounted for $7.2 billion of $32 billion in spending, the second-largest share of the bank’s portfolio. … If Congress passes this exemption for foreign plants, it will reinforce America’s role as one of the world’s biggest public financers of coal, even as organizations like the World Bank have cut funding for such projects.”


Source
Coal poised for rare win over Obama, The Hill
Small business owners: Closing Export-Import bank would cripple our companies, The Washington Post
Political Battle Over Export Bank Heats Up, The Wall Street Journal
Congress Can’t Stop Obama’s Coal Regulations at Home, So It’s Helping Dirty Plants Abroad, The New Republic

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Will the U.S. keep spending taxpayer money on dirty coal plants abroad?

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Courts Should Be More Willing to Weigh in on "Political" Disputes

by CeceliaEllery Posted on June 3, 2014

Mother Jones

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Does the Bowe Bergdahl outrage on the right have legs? Yesterday I didn’t think so. Today I’m not so sure. We’ll see.

I want to steer clear of the fever swamp stuff for now,1 but one aspect of all this prompts me to finally get around to writing something that’s been on my mind for a while. One of the questions surrounding the Bergdahl prisoner swap is whether President Obama broke the law by releasing five Taliban prisoners from Guantanamo without giving Congress its required 30-day notice. Republicans says it’s a clear violation of the law. Obama says the law is an unconstitutional infringement of his Article II authority as commander-in-chief. Who’s right?

Here’s the thing: these kinds of disputes happen all the time in various contexts. Federal and state agencies take various actions and then go to court to defend them. Sometimes they win, sometimes they lose. It’s pretty routine stuff.

And that’s what should happen here. Congressional Republicans should challenge Obama in court and get a ruling. This would be useful for a couple of reasons. First, it would be a sign of whether Republican outrage is serious. If it is, they’ll file suit. If they don’t file, then we’ll all know that it’s just partisan preening. Second, we’d get a ruling. The scope of the president’s authority would become clear. (Or at least clearer.)

But this doesn’t happen very often. Sometime problems with standing are at issue, but not usually. Congress has standing to challenge this. No, the more usual reason is that it’s hopeless. Courts traditionally treat disputes between the president and Congress as political, and decline to weigh in.

This is fine if a dispute truly is political. But this, like many other so-called political disputes, isn’t. It’s a clear question of how far the president’s commander-in-chief authority extends and what authority Congress has to limit it. If Republicans truly believe Obama violated the law, they should be willing to go to court to prove it. And courts should be willing to hand down a ruling. It’s a mistake to simply wash their hands of these kinds of things.

1Speaking of which, you should have seen my Twitter feed after yesterday’s Bergdahl post. Hoo boy.

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Someone Just Spent $1.5 Million on a GOP Senate Candidate. We’ll Probably Never Know Who.

by ValentiPorter Posted on May 23, 2014

Mother Jones

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Arkansas is witnessing what may be the most expensive political ad campaign in state history: $1.5 million-worth of glowing TV spots hailing Tom Cotton, a Republican congressman who’s running against Democrat Sen. Mark Pryor.

The race could decide which party controls the Senate. But no one knows who’s paying for this giant ad buy—and that’s partly because the group behind those ads may have flaunted IRS law in order to conceal the identities of its donors.

A super PAC called the Government Integrity Fund Action Network is footing the bill for the six-week ad campaign, which is airing in three different television markets. But that group has reported only one source of funds in 2014—$1 million that a separate organization, the Government Integrity Fund, donated to it in mid-April. The Government Integrity Fund is based in Ohio and is registered with the IRS as a social welfare group, also known as a 501(c)(4). Its purpose, according to papers it filed with the Ohio secretary of state in 2011, is to “promote the social welfare of the citizens of Ohio.”

Political groups frequently organize as 501(c)(4)s because this type of tax-exempt organization is not required to disclose its donors. So no one in the public knows who gave the $1 million to the Government Integrity Fund that it passed to the Government Integrity Fund Action Network to underwrite these pro-Cotton ads.

If this seems complicated, it’s supposed to be. Political operatives on both sides raise and spend money through 501(c)(4)s and other tax-exempt groups with vague-sounding names to avoid disclosure. Watchdog groups maintain that this is a violation of IRS law. And the Government Integrity Fund already has a spotty record.

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Someone Just Spent $1.5 Million on a GOP Senate Candidate. We’ll Probably Never Know Who.

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Democrats Won’t Boycott the Benghazi Committee

by Patrici1131 Posted on May 22, 2014

Mother Jones

Will Democrats boycott the Benghazi committee? Nope. Yesterday Nancy Pelosi announced the five Democratic members of the committee:

Elijah Cummings of Maryland
Tammy Duckworth of Illinois
Linda Sánchez of California
Adam Schiff of California
Adam Smith of Washington

This ends days of speculation about a possible boycott, and will probably disappoint a lot of people who didn’t want to provide Republicans with a veneer of respectability for their Benghazi witch hunt. But longtime political leaders rarely withdraw from the political process in order to make a point, so this decision isn’t surprising. The fireworks should begin shortly.

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Democrats Won’t Boycott the Benghazi Committee

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It Doesn’t Matter Whether You Call It "Global Warming" or "Climate Change"

by LutherCKAF Posted on May 14, 2014

Mother Jones

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There are few things more symbolic of our climate dysfunction than the strange idea that if only we gave the problem a different name, we’d be able to deal with it. Nonetheless, for years there have been intimations that we should cease saying “global warming” and instead say “climate change”—albeit for wildly different reasons.

The case for this phrase change dates at least back to an infamous 2002 memo by conservative strategist Frank Luntz, who argued that “while global warming has catastrophic connotations attached to it, climate change suggests a more controllable and less emotional challenge.” Luntz was giving this advice in the context of also advising Republicans to highlight the “lack of scientific certainty” about climate change. In a study published in 2011, however, researchers at the University of Michigan actually found that Republicans seem to be more willing to accept the reality of the problem when the “climate change” label was used.

Most recently, however—and as Media Matters documents in the helpful video below—conservatives have seized on the bizarre idea that the environmental movement is now saying “climate change” because it can explain anything, including “decades of global cooling,” as one Fox News host claimed. In other words, the accusation is that this a sneaky way to cover up the reality that global warming is a sham.

Here at Climate Desk, we’ve used the terms pretty much interchangeably. So have scientists. From a scientific perspective, after all, both phrases have validity. There’s no doubt that the single clearest indicator of what carbon dioxide emissions are doing to our planet is a global warming trend. At the same time, though, this trend results in much more than just warming. From changes in rainfall patterns to potential jet stream alterations, the term “climate change” certainly captures a broader range of consequences. In fact, NASA argues, on this basis, that it’s the preferable term.

But which term should we use from a public opinion perspective? What’s the better frame? Riley Dunlap, a sociologist at Oklahoma State University who is currently serving as the Gallup scholar for the environment, has just published a comprehensive polling analysis suggesting that basically, it’s a wash. “The public responds to global warming and climate change in a similar fashion,” writes Dunlap. For instance: When you show people a list of environmental problems and ask if they personally worry about each one “a great deal, a fair amount, only a little, or not at all,” 34 percent say they worry a great deal about global warming, and 35 percent say the same about climate change.

The more pertinent issue, though, is whether ideological groups respond differently to different phrasings. Dunlap looked at that too. Breaking responses down by ideology, he found that only 16 percent of Republicans say they worry a great deal about “global warming”…and only 17 percent say the same for “climate change.” In the other three possible response categories—a fair amount, only a little, not at all—the results were also quite similar, as you can see in the table below.

Gallup.

In sum, 36 percent of Republicans worried a great deal or a fair amount about “global warming,” and 39 percent worried a great deal or a fair amount about “climate change.” By contrast, 83 percent of Democrats worried either a great deal or a fair amount about both “global warming” and “climate change.”

“While there are slight differences in the degree of partisan and ideological divergence in responses to global warming versus climate change,” Dunlap concludes in his paper, “they are not statistically significant, and modest compared with the huge gaps in views of both terms held by Americans at the two ends of the political spectrum.”

That’s not to say there wasn’t a time, perhaps as recently as mid-2009 (when the data were collected for the Michigan study cited above), when conservatives were indeed more open to taking the problem seriously if it was labeled “climate change” rather than “global warming.” But if so, those days are long gone. Dunlap suggests that this is because conservatives have gotten just as used to dismissing “climate change” as they are to dismissing “global warming.” Certainly, the name bestowed upon their favorite pseudo-scandal, late 2009’s “ClimateGate,” didn’t help matters.

Nor does the right’s cynical new idea that the climate crowd shifted to saying “climate change” in order to paper over a supposed lack of warming. “In recent years a popular meme on skeptic and conservative blogs is that climate scientists and climate policy advocates have shifted to climate change because it refers to abnormally cold as well as warm weather and is thus harder to dispute—even though climate scientists have used both terms from the late 1980s onward,” comments Dunlap by email. “The result is that in conservative circles climate change has become as politicized as global warming, and the two terms now seem synonymous.”

So, in sum: If you thought clever word-smithing was going to save the planet, forget about it. It doesn’t matter what you call it: It’s getting a lot hotter.

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It Doesn’t Matter Whether You Call It "Global Warming" or "Climate Change"

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GOP Operative Pulls Election "Shenanigans" In New York House Race

by HartkePoundstone568 Posted on May 2, 2014

Mother Jones

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“What kind of shenanigans are going on now?” That’s what Darin Robbins, a Green Party member in Corning, New York, thought when he learned that a stranger had circulated a petition to place his name on the ballot for a House race.

Robbins had no plans to seek office, so he was shocked a couple of weeks ago when a Green Party secretary called to tell him that a petition had been filed in his name to run against GOP Rep. Tom Reed, the vulnerable first-term Republican who represents the 23rd congressional district in upstate New York.

The story gets stranger. A Republican operative was behind the attempt to put Robbins on the ballot. Aaron Andrew Keister, a notary public who has worked as a video tracker for the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC), the political committee dedicated to electing GOPers to the House, filed ballot access petitions—each bearing the signatures of about 75 registered voters—for Robbins and a second Green Party member. If Keister’s plan had succeeded, it could have helped Reed—the Northeast regional chairman of the NRCC—by putting on the ballot a progressive candidate who would likely draw votes away from his expected Democratic opponent, county legislator Martha Robertson. But Keister messed up: Because he filed the Robbins petition late and got the other Green Party member’s address wrong, neither Green will appear on the ballot for the June primary or the November general election, according to New York election officials.

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GOP Operative Pulls Election "Shenanigans" In New York House Race

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