Tag Archives: political

Liberals Are Heading Down the Path of Fox News. It’s Time to Knock It Off.

by CaitlynWeatherf Posted on February 14, 2016

Mother Jones

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Over the past few weeks I’ve written five posts making the following points:

  1. The acting Oscars are not really all that white.
  2. Flint is not a public health holocaust.
  3. The 1994 crime bill didn’t create mass incarceration.
  4. Photo ID laws probably don’t have massive turnout effects.
  5. Social welfare spending has gone up a lot over the past three decades, and welfare reform had very little impact on either this or the deep poverty rate.

I’m not really very excited about writing stuff like this. I generally prefer to use my emotional energy fighting conservatives and boosting liberal causes. On the other hand, facts and realism matter. I don’t want to see my side adopt the habits that we mock so mercilessly in conservatives.

One of the things that bothered me in all five cases is that these points could all be made perfectly well with the truth. The non-acting Oscars really have shut out minorities almost completely. Lead poisoning of children really is a serious problem. The 1994 crime bill may not have been responsible for mass incarceration, but it had plenty of other problems—though they turned out have a pretty modest effect in the end. Photo ID laws do have modest but pervasive effects on minority voting, and in a 50-50 country this can make a big difference. And social welfare spending may have gone up a lot, but it still hasn’t made much of a dent in poverty.

What to think of this? Maybe it’s just coincidence that I’ve noticed a bunch of items like this recently. After all, everyone in the political arena, friends and foes alike, has long used hyperbole as a way of marshaling action. Human nature being what it is, people just won’t pay much attention to measured and nuanced debate. You have to hit them over their heads to get their attention, and sometimes that means going overboard on the outrage if you want to make a difference in the world.

And in the end, what’s worse? Generating a lightly misleading meme about acting Oscars being white—because actors are the only part of the film industry that most people know or care about—or doing nothing and gaining no attention for the fact that behind the camera Hollywood remains lily white? That’s not always an easy question to answer.

Still, that’s me talking my book. When this kind of thing starts to define a movement, you end up with Fox News and the tea party. We should be loath to go too far down that road. Being reality-based matters, even if it’s not always entirely on your side.

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Liberals Are Heading Down the Path of Fox News. It’s Time to Knock It Off.

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This Defense Of Marco Rubio Is So Stupid That I Can’t Stop Laughing

by EzraY71ypnpc Posted on February 9, 2016

Mother Jones

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Hello.

Marco Rubio keeps humorously repeating the same sound bites over and over again. It’s hilarious.

It is not nearly as hilarious, however, as this tweet which falls nominally in the leave Marco alone camp.

Have a great night.

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This Defense Of Marco Rubio Is So Stupid That I Can’t Stop Laughing

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Even the Guy With the $100 Million Super-PAC Says Campaign Finance Is Broken

by SondraChesser Posted on February 8, 2016

Mother Jones

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You can’t avoid campaign finance reform in the run-up to Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary. It feels a little weird to type that, given the continuous series of setbacks reformers have suffered on that issue over the last decade, but it’s true. Talk to anyone at a Bernie Sanders rally and it’s the first thing that comes up; on the Republican side, Donald Trump has made his lack of big donors a centerpiece of his campaign.

Even Jeb Bush, whose $100-million super-PAC, Right to Rise, is blanketing the airwaves here in the Granite State (and has a spin-off dark-money group, Right to Rise Policy Solutions), says something needs to be done. Taking questions at a Nashua Rotary Club on Monday afternoon, Bush told voters that it will take a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United and stop the glut of dark money entering the political process:

The ideal thing would be to overturn the Supreme Court ruling that allows effectively unregulated money for independent groups, and regulated money for the campaigns. I would turn that on its head if I could. I think campaigns ought to be personally accountable and responsible for the money they receive. I don’t think you need to restrict it—voters will have the ability to say I’m not voting for you because some company gave you money. The key is to just have total transparency about the amounts of money and who gives it, and to have it with 48-hour turnaround. That would be the appropriate thing. Then a candidate will be held accountable for whatever comes to the voters through the campaign. Unfortunately the Supreme Court ruling makes that at least temporarily impossible, so it’s going to take an amendment to the Constitution.

Now, Jeb hasn’t turned into Bernie Sanders. He’d just like unlimited donations that aren’t anonymous, and he’d like whatever is disclosed to be disclosed a lot quicker. The subtext here is that while Bush is benefiting from a nonprofit that accepts anonymous unlimited donations, his backers have expressed a lot of frustration with outside groups supporting Jeb’s rival, Sen. Marco Rubio. Right to Rise chief Mike Murphy said last fall that Rubio is running a “cynical” campaign fueled by “secret dark money, maybe from one person.”

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Even the Guy With the $100 Million Super-PAC Says Campaign Finance Is Broken

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Clinton Opens a New Front in Her Attacks on Sanders

by ElbaOctoman7 Posted on January 21, 2016

Mother Jones

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The Hillary Clinton campaign on Thursday unleashed a new line of attack against Bernie Sanders with a video critiquing the senator from Vermont’s approach to handling ISIS. The move comes as poll numbers show him closing in on Clinton in Iowa and besting her in New Hampshire.

In the video, Clinton’s top foreign policy adviser, Jake Sullivan, speaks directly to the camera and explains that Clinton disagrees with Sanders when it comes to ISIS and Iran. “I have the greatest respect for Sen. Sanders,” Sullivan says calmly. Then he adds that Sanders’ ideas on national security matters “just don’t make sense.”

With a professorial tone, Sullivan analyzes three statements that Sanders has made: that there should be more Iranian ground troops in Syria, that Iran and Saudi Arabia should form a coalition to fight ISIS, and that the United States should seek to “agressively…normalize relations with Iran.” Sullivan asserts, “When you look at all of these ideas, it’s pretty clear that he just hasn’t thought it through.”

This measured attack is a shift from the campaign’s recent slam on Sanders’ “Medicare-for-all” health care plan. That assault, which led Chelsea Clinton to allege that Sanders would leave millions of people without coverage, was widely criticized within the political press. Vox‘s Ezra Klein wrote that the Clinton campaign was “indulging its worst instincts” and had “blundered into a dumb attack.” (Klein has also criticized Sanders’ health care plan as policy.)

By putting Sullivan in front of the camera—and on a conference call with reporters Thursday afternoon to discuss the video—the campaign frees Clinton from mounting this attack herself and coming across as excessively critical of her popular opponent. The video also plays up Clinton’s strengths (her foreign policy experience and readiness for office) while zeroing in on one of Sanders’ presumed weaknesses (his lack of focus on foreign policy). It also seeks to focus the foreign policy conversation on topics other than the one where she’s received the most criticism from Democrats: her 2003 vote in favor of the Iraq invasion.

Up to now, the Clinton campaign’s anti-Sanders efforts have focused on differences between Sanders and Clinton on health care and gun safety issues. Now, in the home stretch before the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary, Clinton appears to be adding foreign policy to her core critique.

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Clinton Opens a New Front in Her Attacks on Sanders

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Mitch McConnell Just Made It Virtually Impossible to Police Dark Money in 2016

by MarcelaWilshire Posted on December 17, 2015

Mother Jones

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Conservative Solutions Project has run more than 4,882 ads in support of Marco Rubio this election—and not a dime of its funding has been made public. As a politically active nonprofit, the outfit is theoretically regulated by the Internal Revenue Service, but thanks to clever legislative maneuvering by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and congressional Republicans, there’s no danger that the IRS will apply any special scrutiny to the people or corporations generously financing this key component of Rubio’s run for president. (His actual campaign unveiled its first ad just a few weeks ago).

Buried deep in the massive end-of-the-year spending bill released late Tuesday night were provisions that not only prohibit the IRS from cracking down on groups like Conservative Solutions Project, but that block the Securities and Exchange Commission from prying into the political spending of public companies.

In last year’s budget deal, McConnell pushed through higher limits for campaign contributions to party organizations, allowing wealthy donors to chip in hundreds of thousands of dollars. During this year’s budget negotiations, McConnell initially tried to further loosen restrictions on how party committees spend money. But he faced strong opposition from an unusual coalition of congressional Democrats and members of the ultraconservative Freedom Caucus. The pushback appears to have caused McConnell, a longtime foe of campaign finance rules, to abandon the plan. But he did manage to slip provisions into the legislation that weakened enforcement and transparency when it comes to politically active nonprofits.

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Mitch McConnell Just Made It Virtually Impossible to Police Dark Money in 2016

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"I Rap About a Lot of the Stuff You Rant About": Killer Mike Interviews Bernie Sanders

by MildredWhittle Posted on December 15, 2015

Mother Jones

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When Bernie Sanders held a rally in Atlanta last month for his presidential campaign, the senator from Vermont was introduced by local rapper Killer Mike. Prior to the rally, Sanders and Killer Mike sat down to record an interview, which was released in six parts on Tuesday. “I rap about a lot of the stuff you rant about,” Killer Mike says at the start, before delving into a broad conversation about economics, criminal justice, gun control, and everything in between.

Killer Mike (born Michael Render) is half of the MC duo Run the Jewels, and has long laced his lyrics with messages about politics, activism, and social justice. His emergence as a popular political figure dates back to an onstage speech at a concert in St. Louis the night a grand jury decided to not to indict Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson for the death of Michael Brown. Run the Jewels released a powerful music video tackling police violence earlier this year. Killer Mike is now the sort of artist who prompts print magazine profiles about how he’s reviving hip-hop as a political platform.

His interview with Sanders, conducted just before Thanksgiving at an Atlanta barbershop owned by Killer Mike, is not an objective examination of the candidate: Killer Mike gushes over Sanders, whom he had already endorsed earlier this summer. “That’s some bomb shit,” Killer Mike says by way of asking Sanders about his civil rights activism with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the 1960s.

“What we saw—if I can use some bomb shit—is our friends getting the shit kicked out of them and getting beaten to hell,” Sanders replies, explaining why he got involved while he was a student at the University of Chicago.

Sanders appears to be enjoying himself throughout most of the chat, awkwardly reaching over for fist bumps throughout the interview. He nods along while Killer Mike calls Donald Trump a fascist and compares him to Hitler and Mussolini. “You’re right, it is scary,” Sanders says of Trump’s campaign. When the two turn to marijuana decriminalization—”I’m a marijuana smoker and I think that’s absolute bullshit,” Mike says of the federal prohibition—Sanders backs him up. “Of course it’s crazy; everybody knows it’s crazy,” Sanders says.

Watch the six-part interview—in sections labeled “Economic Freedom,” “Social Justice,” “Rigged Economy,” “Free Health Care: It Ain’t a Big Deal,” “This Country Was Started As An Act Of Political Protest,” and “Democrats Win When People Vote”—below:

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"I Rap About a Lot of the Stuff You Rant About": Killer Mike Interviews Bernie Sanders

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Marco Rubio Uses Benghazi Committee to Boost Presidential Campaign

by IsiahDelancey Posted on October 22, 2015

Mother Jones

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Ever since House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) blurted out on Fox News that the House Benghazi Committee had the political purpose of hurting Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton, Republicans have spent weeks insisting that the committee’s task is not political.

But on Thursday, as Clinton testified before the committee, GOP presidential candidate Marco Rubio certainly seemed to be using the committee for political purposes.

The tweet links to a petition on Rubio’s website that asks people to “Stand with committee chairman Trey Gowdy as he uncovers the truth about Hillary Clinton’s actions as Secretary of State.” To sign, you just submit your name, email, and zip code. That information, of course, is very useful to a campaign as it raises money and tries to build support in the months to come.

Another GOP presidential contender, Rand Paul, also seemed to be using the Benghazi committee hearing to benefit his campaign. The Kentucky senator’s campaign has been selling anti-Clinton memorabilia for a while now, but used the occasion of the Benghazi hearing to push its merchandise.

This story has been updated to include the tweet from Rand Paul.

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Marco Rubio Uses Benghazi Committee to Boost Presidential Campaign

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Clinton Changes Her Mind on Obama’s Trade Deal

by DakotaMacDonnel Posted on October 7, 2015

Mother Jones

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Hillary Clinton firmly distanced herself today from a top priority of the Obama administration, announcing her opposition to President Barack Obama’s controversial trade deal after avoiding a firm position on the pact for months.

In an interview with CBS’s Judy Woodruff in Iowa on Wednesday afternoon, Clinton stated her opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a deal that, after years of negotiations, Obama hopes will be a cornerstone of his presidential legacy. In the interview, Clinton cited apprehension that protections against currency manipulation were absent from the details of the TPP, as well as her concern over the imbalance between benefits for pharmaceutical companies and those for patients.

“We’ve learned a lot about trade agreements in the past years,” Clinton said. “Sometimes they look great on paper. I know when President Obama came into office he inherited a trade agreement with South Korea. I, along with other members of the cabinet, pushed to get a better agreement. Now looking back on it, it doesn’t have the results we thought it would have.”

Shortly afterward, Clinton published a fuller explanation of her opposition to the deal.

“As I have said many times, we need to be sure that new trade deals meet clear tests,” Clinton wrote. “They have to create good American jobs, raise wages, and advance our national security.”

This move from Clinton is not altogether surprising in the context of her political evolution regarding trade deals. In June, Clinton proclaimed that had she still been serving in the Senate, she would have voted against giving Obama “fast-track authority” to enact the TPP. But in her 2014 book Hard Choices, she wrote that while the TPP “won’t be perfect,” it would still “benefit American businesses and workers.” And as Obama’s secretary of state, she called it the “gold standard in trade agreements.”

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Clinton Changes Her Mind on Obama’s Trade Deal

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Paul Krugman Explains the Latest Draft of the TPP

by LachlanPartlow Posted on October 6, 2015

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Suppose there’s a complex public policy proposal being debated and you want to know where you should stand. However, you really don’t want to devote a huge amount of time to diving into all the details. There are just so many hours in the day, after all.

One possibility is to simply see what people on your side of the tribal divide think about it. But that’s surprisingly unreliable. A better approach is to take a look at who’s opposed to the proposal. That’s what Paul Krugman does today regarding the final draft of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement:

What I know so far: pharma is mad because the extension of property rights in biologics is much shorter than it wanted, tobacco is mad because it has been carved out of the dispute settlement deal, and Rs in general are mad because the labor protection stuff is stronger than expected….I find myself thinking of Grossman and Helpman’s work on the political economy of free trade agreements, in which they conclude, based on a highly stylized but nonetheless interesting model of special interest politics, that

An FTA is most likely to be politically viable exactly when it would be socially harmful.

The TPP looks better than it did, which infuriates much of Congress.

Krugman describes himself as a “lukewarm opponent” of TPP who now needs to do some more homework. I’d probably call myself a lukewarm supporter. One reason is that the dispute resolution provisions, which provoked a lot of anger on the left, never struck me as either unusual or all that objectionable in practice. The IP stuff bothered me more, and that’s been improved a bit in the final draft. It’s still not great, but it’s not quite as horrible as before. So you can probably now count me as a slightly stronger supporter.

But I wonder what Republicans will do? They’re the ones who are ideologically on the side of trade agreements, and they’ve spent a lot of time berating President Obama for not putting more effort into trade deals. But with campaign season heating up, it’s become more toxic than ever to support any initiative of Obama’s. Plus Donald Trump is busily working his supporters into a lather about TPP. I wouldn’t be surprised to see quite a few defections from the Republican ranks.

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Paul Krugman Explains the Latest Draft of the TPP

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Nerds and Hacks Unite! You Have Nothing to Lose Except Your Chains.

by IsabellASV Posted on August 27, 2015

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David Roberts has a long post at Vox about tech nerds and their disdain for politics. He highlights one particular tech nerd who describes both major parties as “a bunch of dumb people saying dumb things,” and jumps off from there:

There are two broad narratives about politics that can be glimpsed between the lines here. Both are, in the argot of the day, problematic.

The first, which is extremely common in the nerd community, is a distaste for government and politics….a sense that government is big, bloated, slow-moving, and inefficient, that politicians are dimwits and panderers, and that real progress comes from private innovation, not government mandates. None of which is facially unreasonable.

The second is the conception of politics as a contest of two mirror-image political philosophies, with mirror-image extremes and a common center, which is where sensible, independent-minded people congregate.

There’s about 4,400 more words than this, so click the link if you want to immerse yourself.

But I have a little different take on all this. The truth is that politics and tech are the same thing: inventing a product that appeals to people and then marketing the hell out of it. Back in the dark ages, this was a little more obvious. Steve Wozniak invented, Steve Jobs sold. It was so common for tech companies to be started by two people, one engineer and one salesman, that it was practically a cliche.

The modern tech community has lost a bit of that. Oh, they all chatter about social media and going viral and so forth. As long as the marketing is actually just some excuse for talking about cool new tech, they’re happy to immerse themselves in it. But actually selling their product? Meh. The truly great ideas rise to the top without any of that Mad Men crap. Anyway, the marketing department will handle the dull routine of advertising and….well, whatever it is they do.

Politics, by contrast, leans the other way. Inventing new stuff helps, but the real art is in selling your ideas to the public and convincing your fellow politicians to back you. It’s all messy and annoying, especially if you’re not very socially adept, but it’s the way human beings get things done.

Well, it’s one of the ways. Because Roberts only tells half the story. As much as most tech nerds disdain the messy humanness of politics, it’s equally true that most politicians disdain the eye-rolling naivete of tech nerds. You wanna get something done, kid? Watch the master at work.

In politics, you have the wonks and the hacks—and it’s the hacks who rule. In tech, you have the nerds and the salesmen—and it’s the nerds who rule. There are always exceptions, but that’s the general shape of the river.

But guess what? The most successful nerds have always been the ones who are also willing to figure out what makes people tick. And the most successful politicians have been the ones who are willing to marry themselves to policy solutions that fit their time and place. That doesn’t mean that nerds have to slap backs (Bill Gates never did) or that successful politicians have to immerse themselves in white papers (Ronald Reagan never did), but wonks and hacks and nerds and salesmen all need each other. The political hacks and the tech nerds need to get together and get messy. And more important: they have to genuinely respect each other. When that happens, you have a very, very powerful combination. So get to work.

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Nerds and Hacks Unite! You Have Nothing to Lose Except Your Chains.

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