Tag Archives: republican

NFL Commissioner Says Washington Football Team’s Name "Honors Native Americans," Native Americans Disagree

by Junko98Watba Posted on January 31, 2014

Mother Jones

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During his pre-Super Bowl press conference Friday, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell was asked if he would ever call a Native American by the name of the Washington football team. Goodell hedged, instead saying the name has been “presented in a way that honors Native Americans.” (Goodell sent a letter to members of Congress last year defending the name.)

On Wednesday, ThinkProgress reporter Travis Waldron published an exhaustive account of the fight to rebrand the slur, revealing that the Washington team consulted with Republican advisers—including GOP messaging consultant Frank Luntz (of “death tax” fame), former George W. Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer (of Iraq War fame), and former Virginia governor and US senator George Allen (of “macaca” fame)—on how to handle criticism of the team’s name.

If Goodell, team owner Dan Snyder, and friends like Luntz, Fleischer, and Allen don’t understand the issue, they might want to take a look at an ad the National Congress of American Indians released Monday. Watch here:

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NFL Commissioner Says Washington Football Team’s Name "Honors Native Americans," Native Americans Disagree

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There’s Not Much Point in Pretending to Care About the New Republican Health Care Plan

by FernandoMerrill Posted on January 31, 2014

Mother Jones

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I have been derelict in my duty. A team of Republicans introduced a genuine alternative to Obamacare earlier this week, and I haven’t blogged about it. I’ll be honest: I just couldn’t work up the energy for several reasons.

Even on fleeting inspection, it’s obviously a feeble plan. It would cover very few people; most of the people it does cover couldn’t come close to affording it; and its policies would offer benefits so meager as to be almost useless.
The small amount of good it does is funded by reducing the tax deduction for employer health care. This is a joke. It would meet with massive resistance from virtually every Republican constituency. In particular, Grover Norquist would score it as a tax hike (which it is) and that means it would be DOA in the Republican caucus.
Even without the tax hike, this bill is going nowhere. I’ll give props to Tom Coburn and his friends for at least taking a semi-serious shot at health care reform, but no one seriously thinks it would have any chance of garnering even majority Republican support, let alone passing Congress.

As Dylan Scott reports, the sponsors of this bill have already watered down the tax hike. It barely took them a day. The new wording is a little vague, but it most likely eliminates the new funding entirely. And without funding, the bill is even more of a joke than it was to begin with.

It’s really kind of pointless to pretend that this is a real plan with real prospects of getting Republican support, but if you want to read all the details plan anyway, Jonathan Cohn has you covered here. As always, Cohn is very gentlemanly about the whole thing, but his bottom line is accurate: “The authors of the Patient CARE Act and many of their allies are acting as if conservatives have some magic elixir for health care problems—a way to provide the same kind of security that the Affordable Care Act will, but with a lot less interference in the market and a lot less taxpayer money. It’s all the goodies of liberal health care reform, they imply, but without the unpleasant parts. They’re wrong.”

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There’s Not Much Point in Pretending to Care About the New Republican Health Care Plan

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Why Henry Waxman Was One of the Most Important Congressmen Ever

by gjrrkjujp Posted on January 30, 2014

Mother Jones

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The news on Thursday morning came as a shocker to the politerati: Henry Waxman is retiring. This Democratic congressman from Los Angeles has been a Capitol Hill fixture and progressive crusader for decades, since he was first elected in 1974. He vigorously pursued Big Tobacco and enthusiastically championed climate change legislation. He’s been a fierce advocate for consumer rights, health care, and the environment. As the Washington Post notes, Waxman, 74 years old, has passed measures “to make infant formula safer and more nutritious (1980), bring low-priced generic drugs to market (1984), clean the air (1990), provide services and medical care to people with AIDS (1996), and reform and modernize the Postal Service (2006). He was also instrumental in the passage of the Affordable Care Act.” In 2005, I wrote a profile of Waxman that dubbed him the “Democrats’ Eliot Ness.” Here are some excerpts:

It’s nothing new, says Representative Henry Waxman. For decades—literally—this Democrat from the Westside of Los Angeles has mounted high-profile investigations and hearings while churning out sharp-edged reports: on toxic emissions, the tobacco industry, pesticides in drinking water. But during George W. Bush’s first term as President, Waxman, the senior Democrat on the Government Reform Committee, established himself as the Democrats’ chief pursuer of purported wrongdoing within the Bush Administration. He has mounted a series of “special investigations”—of Halliburton, Enron, the flu vaccine crisis, conflicts of interest at the Department of Homeland Security, national missile defense. He has produced reports on secrecy in the Bush Administration, misleading prewar assertions made by Bush officials about Iraq’s WMDs, Bush’s politicization of science. And he has won considerable media attention for his efforts. Working with Representative John Dingell, he sicced the Government Accountability Office on Vice President Dick Cheney’s energy task force to get the names of the industry executives who helped cook up Cheney’s energy plan. (Cheney told the GAO to take a hike; the GAO filed suit, lost and then declined to appeal.) More recently, Waxman released a headlines-grabbing report revealing that federally funded abstinence-only sex-ed programs peddle false information to teens. (One claimed condom use does not prevent the spread of sexually transmitted diseases.) With all this muckraking, the 65-year-old Waxman has become the Eliot Ness of the Democrats.

“Waxman has been important for House Democrats,” says Representative Jim McGovern, a liberal from Massachusetts. “With the Republicans controlling the White House and Congress, it’s hard to be heard. He’s found ways to get our message out.” Representative George Miller, the senior Democrat on the Education Committee, notes, “He’s developed the model. It’s what we would like every ranking member to do—to ask questions, be persistent and not accept silence. He’s motivated other Democrats and has even created some discontent within the Democratic caucus because newer members on other committees sometimes don’t think the ranking members are aggressive enough.” And on the Senate side, Democrats–perhaps encouraged by Waxman’s example—have announced they will create their own investigative team and conduct unofficial hearings on alleged Bush Administration wrongdoing.

The snub-nosed, bespectacled, balding and far-from-tall Waxman is not flamboyant or flashy. He speaks softly but directly and has a forceful manner. His Democratic colleagues routinely joke about his persistence and tenacity. “Don’t get into an argument with Henry,” says Miller. “But if you do, bring your lunch. He won’t let you go.”

The piece noted that Waxman had assembled a substantial history of legislative accomplishment:

Through most of Waxman’s first twenty years in Congress, he chaired the influential Health and Environment Subcommittee and mainly focused on legislation—Medicaid expansion, the clean-air law, AIDS, tobacco—winning a description in The Almanac of American Politics as “a skilled and idealistic policy entrepreneur.” During those years, Waxman says, producing reports was primarily a device for drawing attention to an issue and building a case for legislation. For instance, after the 1984 disaster at a Union Carbide chemical plant in Bhopal, India, he and his staff, realizing that toxic air pollutants were unregulated in the United States, investigated the pollution from chemical plants in Kanawha Valley, West Virginia. The resulting report concluded that the valley was being exposed to high amounts of toxic emissions. With that report in hand, Waxman pushed through legislation that required the Environmental Protection Agency to collect more data on emissions. He then used the information gathered to win passage in 1990 of a measure that reduced toxic air pollution.

And I reported that Waxman was not reluctant to take on Democrats—or seek compromises with Republicans:

Working with other Democrats, Waxman notes, has not always been easy. Through the 1980s, he engaged in a now-legendary clash with John Dingell, then the powerful chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee and a protector of the auto industry, over clean-air legislation. Finally, the two hammered out a deal that led to the 1990 Clean Air Act. In 2003 Waxman proposed setting up an independent commission to investigate Bush’s use—or abuse—of the intelligence on WMDs in Iraq. But senior Democrats who deal with intelligence issues would not join him. “More and more,” he says, “I am happy to do things on my own.”

Waxman has been characterized by the right-wing media as a partisan hack only interested in nipping at Bush’s heels. But with no opportunity to legislate, there’s little alternative for him but to focus on oversight. And Waxman has not always acted as a partisan pitbull. In the mid-1990s he spent two years privately concocting a tobacco bill with Republican Representative Thomas Bliley, a champion of the tobacco industry. The two reached a compromise, Waxman says, but the GOP House leadership rejected the measure. During the Clinton campaign finance scandal, Waxman called for Attorney General Janet Reno to appoint a special counsel. “We were not happy with that,” says one former Clinton White House aide. Later Waxman assailed Clinton for pardoning fugitive financier Marc Rich.

Waxman did vote to grant Bush the authority to invade Iraq. He now says, “If I knew then what I know now, I wouldn’t have voted for it.” He points out that two days before the invasion he sent a letter to Bush noting that Bush’s use of the unproven allegation that Iraq had sought uranium in Africa was an act of “knowing deception or unfathomable incompetence” that undermined Bush’s case for war. Waxman was on to the Niger story months before it became big news, but his charge that Bush had peddled misinformation—or disinformation—received little notice in the United States.

Waxman has a safe seat; he handily wins re-election. His anti-Bush endeavors play well in Hollywood. Without having to fret about re-election, he can afford to exercise what Schiliro cites as one of his chief assets: patience. “He doesn’t mind spending eight years working on an issue,” Schiliro says. “He passed AIDS and clean-air legislation, and that took years.” And that may be why, when I ask Waxman if he will be able to remain motivated for another four years of Bush battles, he simply shrugs his shoulders. With four more Bush years to come, Waxman says, he expects to stay the course: more investigations, more reports. On what he’s not sure, but he does say he anticipates continuing his probes of government contracting. “I hope we can investigate this with the Republicans,” he comments. “This isn’t partisan; it involves protecting taxpayer dollars. And there’s been a clear failure of oversight by the Republicans. If they won’t join us, then we’ll just have to get the information out to the public.” But, he adds, “it’s hard for the Democrats to be as mean and tough as the House Republican leadership.”

His retirement won’t mean much in terms of raw politics: His seat is in a reliably safe Democratic district. But it will be a great loss for those who care about clear air, clean water, health care, economic fairness, and much more. Waxman was the ideal House member, skilled in politics and passionate about policy, able to legislate and investigate, and driven by principles rather than ego. He is one of the more—if not the most—effective House member of the past 40 years. You may even be alive because of him.

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Why Henry Waxman Was One of the Most Important Congressmen Ever

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Why Are These States Actively Trying to Confuse Their Residents About Obamacare?

by Stephanj0r Posted on January 30, 2014

Mother Jones

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To help consumers and small businesses make sense of their new health insurance options, the Affordable Care Act created outreach personnel, or “navigators,” tasked with distributing information about coverage and walking people through the application process. On January 23, Texas passed a set of measures aimed at restricting these navigators because of lawmakers’ concerns about patient privacy. That same day, a federal judge in Missouri temporarily blocked enforcement of similar restrictions, ruling that they created too large an obstacle to enrollment.

This tug of war is about a seemingly straightforward program: The navigators, who are required by law to be both unbiased and free, are meant to help uninsured Americans enroll in either Medicaid or private insurance plans. Depending on whether a state has opted to use it’s own insurance marketplace, navigators get funding through state or federal grants. For example, Planned Parenthood of the Heartland, in Iowa, received a $214,427 grant from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to employ navigators, which will give in-person assistance by preparing applications and helping consumers determine which plans they qualify for, in 61 of 99 Iowa counties.

But Republican lawmakers have cried afoul, arguing that navigators could steal private information like Social Security numbers and medical records. In an August letter to Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of the HHS, the attorneys general of 13 states said they were concerned that HHS had “failed to adequately protect the privacy” of consumers because it does “not even require uniform criminal background or fingerprint checks before hiring personnel.” Texas Sen. John Cornyn, for example, praised his state’s regulations, saying on his Facebook, “Obamacare presents enough problems for Texans without the risk of a convicted felon handling their personal information.”

Privacy claims have led to a surge of restrictive measures like those in Texas. At least 17 states have passed regulations on health care navigators since, including Georgia, Ohio, and Tennessee, which barred navigators from educating consumers about the specific benefits, terms, and features of a particular health plan. Here is a map of states that have passed laws restricting navigators:

Many policymakers and health care professionals say that these privacy concerns are unfounded and worry that partisan bickering will hurt underserved populations. After 15 Republicans members of the House asked for details and briefings on 51 navigator groups, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) wrote, “It is an abuse of your oversight authority to launch groundless investigations into civic organizations that are trying to make health reform a success.” The Democratic members of the Committee on Energy and Commerce also noted that there are already significant privacy safeguards in place, including a $25,000 penalty for disclosing personal information and mandatory navigator training.

Peter Shin, professor of health law and policy George Washington University’s School of Public Health and Health Services, says that conservatives are more interested in decreasing enrollment and making Obamacare look bad than they are in protecting patient privacy. “I think the privacy concern is more of a political issue than a common sense one,” says Shin.

The result of conservative politicking? Underserved populations will remain so, as outreach resources are strained. “The purpose of the navigator programs is to help those who will need most in terms of understanding their options,” says Shin. “The more disenfranchised communities will be hurt the most from the navigator restrictions.”

Several navigator programs have already closed shop because of anti-navigator laws. Cardon Outreach, a Texas-based organization that has helped people enroll in Medicaid in the past, returned its grant from HHS. As the Columbus Dispatch reported, Cardon’s chief legal adviser stated in an email that the state and federal regulatory scrutiny surrounding navigators “requires us to allocate resources which we cannot spare and will distract us from fulfilling our obligations to our clients.”

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Why Are These States Actively Trying to Confuse Their Residents About Obamacare?

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How 2 Inches of Snow Created a Traffic Nightmare in Atlanta

by ManieFerrell Posted on January 29, 2014

Mother Jones

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This article originally appeared on Conor Sen’s personal site and was published by the Atlantic. It is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

I know what you’re thinking (I grew up outside of D.C. and Boston): “How can 2 inches of snow shut down Atlanta?”

Before I got here, I thought that too. I wonder it every time there’s a run on the grocery stores before a storm, or when some other city cancels schools before a flake has even hit the ground.

And surely, the drivers play a part. I was out getting coffee around noon yesterday, just when things were starting to get bad (at the time there was, at most, a half inch of snow on the ground), and set out to drive my 2 miles home, a straight shot on a fairly major surface street. It took me around 30 minutes. Part of the reason was one of the drivers in front of me (with Tennessee plates) was going 5 miles-per-hour in a 35 miles-per-hour zone with no cars in front of them. But even with my car—2013 model, 10,000 miles on it—I was skidding at times on the gentle incline of a street that hadn’t been treated with sand/salt/gravel at all.

My wife left work in Woodstock, a city 30-35 miles northwest of here, a little after noon yesterday, and took 3.5 hours to get home. She was one of the lucky ones.

Yes, Atlanta has many drivers who are inexperienced in the snow, but for a region that gets a storm (I know, I know “2 inches = storm”) like this at most once every few years, how is anyone supposed to be experienced in the snow? How do you think San Francisco would handle a couple inches of snow? Going north/south on Franklin or Gough, or east/west on Fell or Oak? How do you think the N-Judah out in Cole Valley or the Sunset would handle it? This is a metro area of 6 million people, and it’s time to think beyond “those silly southern drivers.”

Metro areas of 6 million people need to be prepared for anything.

Which leads into the blame game. Republicans want to blame government (a Democrat thing) or Atlanta (definitely a Democrat thing). Democrats want to blame the region’s dependence on cars (a Republican thing), the state government (Republicans), and many of the transplants from more liberal, urban places feel the same way you might about white, rural, southern drivers. All of this is true to some extent but none of it is helpful.

How much money do you set aside for snowstorms when they’re as infrequent as they are? Who will run the show—the city, the county, or the state? How will preparedness work? You could train everyone today, and then if the next storm hits in 2020, everyone you’ve trained might have moved on to different jobs, with Atlanta having a new mayor and Georgia having a new governor.

Regionalism here is hard. The population of this state has doubled in the past 40-45 years, and many of the older voters who control it still think of it as the way it was when they were growing up. The urban core of Atlanta is a minority participant in a state government controlled by rural and northern Atlanta exurban interests. The state government gives MARTA (Atlanta’s heavy rail transportation system) no money. There’s tough regional and racial history here which is both shameful and a part of the inheritance we all have by being a part of this region. Demographics are evolving quickly, but government moves more slowly. The city in which I live, Brookhaven, was incorporated in 2012. This is its first-ever snowstorm (again, 2 inches). It’s a fairly affluent, mostly white, urban small city. We were unprepared too.

The issue is that you have three layers of government—city, county, state—and none of them really trust the other. And why should they? Cobb County just “stole the Braves” from the city of Atlanta. Why would Atlanta cede transportation authority to a regional body when its history in dealing with the region/state has been to carve up Atlanta with highways and never embrace its transit system? Why would the region/state want to give more authority to Atlanta when many of the people in the region want nothing to do with the city of Atlanta unless it involves getting to work or a Braves game?

The region tried, in a very tough economy and political year (2012), to pass a comprehensive transportation bill, a T-SPLOST, funded by a sales tax. It wasn’t perfect, but it was an attempt to do something. The Sierra Club opposed it because it didn’t feature enough transit. The NAACP opposed it because it didn’t have enough contracts for minority businesses. The tea party opposed it because it was a tax. That’s politics in the 2010s. You may snicker, but how good a job has any major city done with big transportation projects over the past 30 years?

As anyone paying attention knows, Atlanta’s finally moving in the right direction. The Beltline build-out is underway and reshaping neighborhoods. Downtown is finally getting some investment, and we’ll see how useful it is, but it’s building a streetcar that will be up and running this year, with plans in the works for extensions. More and more counties in the region are tipping from red to purple/blue (Henry, Gwinnett, soon Cobb), which should help ease some of the racial and partisan tensions associated with regionalism. Most of the development dollars in a region driven by real estate are now flowing to urban, walkable projects. There are increasingly serious conversations about extending MARTA to the north and east. We’ve become one of the top 3 markets in the country for electric vehicle sales.

But clearly, there’s work to be done.

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How 2 Inches of Snow Created a Traffic Nightmare in Atlanta

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House GOP’s New Anti-Abortion Strategy: Let’s Try NOT Talking About Rape

by FilomenaBrother Posted on January 28, 2014

Mother Jones

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Three years ago, House Republicans pushed a bill to permanently eliminate taxpayer funding for abortions. The proposed legislation included an exception for women who had been raped—but only if it the rape was “forcible.” That language—and later, off-color comments about abortion and rape by two GOP Senate candidates, Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock—kicked off a national backlash against the Republican party. So this year, the House GOP is trying a new strategy: introducing almost the exact same bill to limit abortion rights, while hoping that cutting out controversial rape provisions will limit the political blowback.

To that end, the GOP-run House of Representatives will vote late Tuesday afternoon on the 2014 version of the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act, a bill that would permanently ensconce the Hyde Amendment—a temporary measure that has been around since the 1970s and bans federal funding for abortions—in federal law. The bill doesn’t just ban federal funding for abortions, though—it also promises to limit Americans’ ability to buy private-sector health insurance that covers abortion.

Like previous versions of the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act that passed the House in 2011 and 2012, this year’s measure has no chance of becoming law so long as Democrats hold the Senate and President Barack Obama occupies the White House. The bills, introduced by Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.), are designed to signal the Republican party’s priorities to its most hardcore supporters—and more broadly, to provide a taste of what the GOP would have to offer if it gained control of the Senate and the White House. (House Republican leaders have given this year’s version of the bill the number H.R. 7; the low number is a symbolic nod to its high priority.)

Previous versions of Smith’s bill have cost the party politically. The 2011 version launched the “forcible rape” furor. And this year’s bill, which Smith introduced last May, appeared again to raise questions about what counts as rape. An earlier version of the proposal would have required the IRS to verify that a woman claiming a medical expense deduction for abortion on her tax return was not committing fraud. Women may only claim these deductions if their abortions were the result of rape, incest, or life-threatening medical situations—leading anti-abortion activists to assail the bill’s sponsors for mandating IRS “rape audits.”

The bill the House will vote on Tuesday drops the “rape audits” provision. But Sharon Levin, the director of federal reproductive health policy for the National Women’s Law Center, says this is more of a face-saving measure than an improvement.

“They took out the provision that the public had been focused on to make this more palatable, politically,” she says. “The core of what this bill is about has not changed—making it as difficult as possible for women to get access to abortion.”

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House GOP’s New Anti-Abortion Strategy: Let’s Try NOT Talking About Rape

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Rand Paul: There’s No GOP War on Women, But Remember the Lewinsky Scandal?

by Shelby Morris Posted on January 27, 2014

Mother Jones

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In 2011, after Republicans in Congress introduced a bill that would ban taxpayer funding for abortions except in cases of “forcible rape,” Democrats adopted a new line of attack: the GOP was waging a “war on women.” Instead of changing their policies, Republicans changed the subject, arguing that the sexual behavior of individual Democratic politicians—such as Anthony Weiner—proves the GOP “war on women” is a fiction.

On Sunday, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) became the latest GOPer to adopt this strategy, arguing on Meet the Press that former President Bill Clinton’s affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky means Democrats are in no place to cry foul about the Republican party platform.

Paul made the comments after host David Gregory highlighted a moment in a September Vogue profile of Paul in which Kelley Paul, the senator’s wife, said, “Bill Clinton’s relationship with Monica Lewinsky should complicate his return to the White House, even as first spouse. I would say his behavior was predatory, offensive to women.”

Gregory asked Paul if Bill Clinton’s sexual behavior in the White House would be fair game in a 2016 race involving Hillary Clinton. Here’s Paul’s response:

I mean, the Democrats, one of their big issues is they have concocted and said Republicans are committing a war on women. One of the workplace laws and rules that I think are good is that bosses shouldn’t prey on young interns in their office.

And I think really the media seems to have given President Clinton a pass on this. He took advantage of a girl that was 20 years old and an intern in his office. There is no excuse for that, and that is predatory behavior, and it should be something we shouldn’t want to associate with people who would take advantage of a young girl in his office.

This isn’t having an affair. I mean, this isn’t me saying, “Oh, he’s had an affair, we shouldn’t talk to him.” Someone who takes advantage of a young girl in their office? I mean, really. And then they have the gall to stand up and say, “Republicans are having a war on women”?

When Democrats say there’s a “war on women,” they are not criticizing the personal conduct of GOP lawmakers. They’re talking about Republican policymakers’ sustained attacks on women’s reproductive rights. It’s hard to see what Bill Clinton’s sexual conduct tells us about today’s battles over reproductive rights policy—especially when he hasn’t held elected office for nearly fourteen years.

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Rand Paul: There’s No GOP War on Women, But Remember the Lewinsky Scandal?

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Black Lawmakers Turn Up the Heat On Obama Over Judicial Nominees Who Backed Voter ID Law, Confederate Flag

by YoungBurrows Posted on January 27, 2014

Mother Jones

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Members of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC)—a group of African-American lawmakers in the House that defends the interests of minorities and people with low incomes—are planning to publicly chastise President Barack Obama this week over two of his judicial nominees who have backed racially offensive and discriminatory policies, and what they see as a lack of diversity amongst his judicial picks, The Hill reported Sunday.

Obama has confirmed more African-Americans to the federal bench than any other president, but CBC lawmakers see an “appalling lack of African-American representation” amongst Obama’s judicial nominees in Southern states such as Georgia, Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) told The Hill. If Obama’s nominees to the federal bench in Georgia are confirmed, there will only be one African-American district court judge in a state where 31 percent of the population is black.

And some of Obama’s nominees have “views… that reflect the regressive policies of the past,” Rep. David Scott (D-Ga.) pointed out in a letter to Senate judiciary chair Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) earlier this month. Georgia Court of Appeals Judge Michael Boggs, who Obama nominated to the US district court for the Northern district of Georgia in December, voted to keep the Confederate battle emblem as a central part of Georgia’s state flag when he was a Georgia legislator in the early 2000s. Atlanta attorney Mark Howard Cohen, who Obama nominated to the same court last month, helped defend Georgia’s voter ID law, which voting rights advocates say makes it harder for poor people and minorities to vote.

CBC lawmakers and civil rights leaders have been pressuring Obama for months to rethink these nominations, but to no avail. So CBC members are trying another tack. They will hold a press conference this week to bring attention to the issue, and they’re mulling an opposition strategy to block the nominees.

“We have very grave concerns with certain nominees given disparities that are particularly common in the South,” Norton told The Hill. As my colleague Nick Baumann reported last summer, research has shown that the South remains more racist than the North.

So why did the president pick these nominees, especially now that Republicans can no longer filibuster judicial nominees? It has to do with a procedural hurdle called the blue-slip process that functions as a de facto filibuster. Here’s how the process works: When the president is floating a potential judicial nomination, the senators from the state where the judge would serve are given a blue slip of paper. If both senators do not return their blue slips, the nominee will not be able to move forward to a vote in the Senate judiciary committee. This allows the GOP to exert significant control over nominees. Georgia’s Republican Sens. John Isakson and Saxby Chambliss have used the blue-slip process to delay some of Obama’s nominees to their state’s northern district court for years. To fill those spots, Obama worked out a deal with the GOP senators that resulted in the nominations of Boggs and Cohen.

In an interview with MSNBC’s Adam Serwer earlier this month, a White House official said Obama was not to blame for these nominations, as Republican senators are taking advantage of the blue-slip process. The White House has also pointed out that eighteen percent of confirmed judges under Obama have been black. That number was eight percent under President George W. Bush.

CBC lawmakers are not impressed. As Scott told The Hill: “Do you think a white president, a George W. Bush, a Republican president—any white president—would appoint these kinds of nominees with the confederate flag background? With the voter suppression background? That White House would have been maimed by people crying out.”

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Black Lawmakers Turn Up the Heat On Obama Over Judicial Nominees Who Backed Voter ID Law, Confederate Flag

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Remember How Dinesh D’Souza Outed Gay Classmates—and Thought It Was Awesome?

by LaurenShields Posted on January 24, 2014

Mother Jones

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On Thursday evening, as the news broke that conservative author Dinesh D’Souza had been indicted by the feds for allegedly making illegal campaign donations to an unnamed 2012 Senate candidate (widely presumed to be Wendy Long, a long-shot Republican who was crushed by incumbent Democratic Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand in New York), liberal commentators had trouble hiding their glee—or, what I called on Twitter, Dineshenfreude. After all, for years D’Souza has been a right-wing bad boy spouting the most noxious criticism of the left and being rewarded for his exploits. More recently, he was the fellow who derived the odious theory that President Barack Obama could only be understood if viewed as the secret keeper of the flame of Kenyan anti-colonialism—a notion that Newt Gingrich giddily embraced and promoted. D’Souza’s movie, 2016: Obama’s America, contends that Obama, driven by the remnants of this anti-colonial rage inherited from his father, had a covert second-term plan to weaken and impoverish the United States of America. It depicts Obama as anti-American, anti-Western, and anti-white.

D’Souza’s extremism traces back to his college days, when he was an editor of the Dartmouth Review, the leading conservative college publication of the early 1980s. (Wendy Long was a Dartmouth student and served as a trustee of the Review in the 1990s.) In that post, D’Souza became a hero to young conservatives across the nation (and the right-wing foundations looking to fund them). While he helmed the Review, it published a “lighthearted interview with a former Klan leader”—accompanied by a staged photo of a black person hanging from a tree—and an assault on affirmative action titled, “Dis Sho Ain’t No Jive, Bro,” which was written in Ebonics. (“Now we be comin’ to Dartmut and be up over our ‘fros in studies, but we still be not graduatin’ Phi Beta Kappa.”) The “Jive” article caused Jack Kemp, a conservative icon mindful of the right’s problems with minority outreach, to resign from the Review‘s advisory board. Decades later, it’s clear that D’Souza chose the path of the foul at an early point. But he also had trouble with trustworthiness—as I discovered in an early encounter.

In 1982, I attended—that is, snuck into—a conference for conservative students journalists held at the New York Athletic Club and sponsored by foundations eager to spread the conservative gospel on college campuses. D’Souza was received at this affair as royalty. And at lunch, I had the good fortune to share a table with him. There he bragged about the Review having made use of a list of Dartmouth alumni it had somehow procured—without the university’s approval—for a mailing. (The university maintained the Review had misappropriated the list and committed a copyright violation.) He and his surrounding acolytes also gloated over an infamous Review article that had outed members of Dartmouth’s Gay Student Association and published excerpts of letters written by the group’s members. (As a result of this article, some members of the group had their sexual orientation disclosed to friends and family members.)

Nine years later, when D’Souza was being hailed upon the publication of his book, Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus—the Washington Post called him “palpably smart,” “sober-minded,” and a “gentleman”—I wrote a short piece in The Nation and recalled that I had once witnessed him boasting about improperly purloining documents for the gay-naming article.

D’Souza cried foul, claiming that the Review had not used any underhanded means to gain access to information about the members of the Gay Student Association. I searched my old notes, and it seemed I had conflated two overlapping moments from that lunch, misattributing D’Souza’s boast about the alumni mailing list caper to the outing article.

I duly noted this in a subsequent correction. But here’s where it gets interesting. In his response to my original article, D’Souza had maintained that the Review had only printed the names of the officers of the Gay Student Association, and it had located this information, along with the personal letters written by gay students, in publicly available records the group had filed with the school administration. In other words, the Review had done nothing untoward to unearth the names of the gay students it outed; the paper had merely relied on public information submitted by the group itself. (Put aside, for the sake of this tale, the probity—or mean-spiritedness—of outing a fellow student whose sexual orientation might not be known beyond the campus gay community. As the New York Times reported at the time, “One gay student named by the Review, according to his friends, became severely depressed and talked repeatedly of suicide. The grandfather of another who had not found the courage to tell his family of his homosexuality learned about his grandson when he got his copy of the Review in the mail.”)

At first, I took D’Souza at this word, accepting his account that the Review had used public information for its article naming the officers of the Gay Student Association, and conveyed that in the correction. That was a mistake on my part. After D’Souza complained about the correction, I decided to investigate further. I called Dolores Johnson, director of student activities at Dartmouth. She said it was “absolutely untrue” that the documents the GSA had filed with the school were open to the public. Certainly, she explained, the GSA, like all student groups, had provided her office the names of its officers and a constitution (and perhaps letters written by students about the group). But, she said, “I would never give that information out to the public.” And there was this: She pointed out that shortly before the Review published its article naming the gay students, some documents had disappeared from the GSA’s desk in a student center. Johnson noted that these missing documents were the ones cited in the Review story.

So the evidence—at least, Johnson’s account—suggested that foul play had been involved in the outing article. And D’Souza’s self-serving cover story—we obtained the information from public records—was undercut. He had duped me. Not surprisingly, after I returned to this matter in the pages of The Nation to relate Johnson’s description of the events and partially retract the correction, D’Souza did not respond. His silence spoke loudly.

Much of what D’Souza did in college as a rising conservative star foreshadowed the career of ideological nastiness to come. But relishing the outing of gay students (and at that luncheon there was much relishing) and engaging in dirty tricks to obtain those names—well, that speaks not to ideology, but character. And it is but one reason, even if now dusty, why D’Souza warrants little sympathy for being accused of once again breaking the rules to serve his ideological aims.

Original article: 

Remember How Dinesh D’Souza Outed Gay Classmates—and Thought It Was Awesome?

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Major Democratic Fundraiser Katy Perry Vows To Ask Obama About Potential Alien Invaders

by PierresHood Posted on January 21, 2014

Mother Jones

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For its new cover story, GQ magazine has a wide-ranging interview with Democratic fundraiser/pop star Katy Perry, in which the 29-year-old singer chats about her relationship with the president of the United States—and what she’s eager to ask him about. It has to do with space aliens (naturally):

I believe in a lot of astrology. I believe in aliens. I look up into the stars and I imagine: How self-important are we to think that we are the only life-form? I mean, if my relationship with Obama gets any better, I’m going to ask him that question. It just hasn’t been appropriate yet.

(Regarding her relationship with President Obama, she jokes that she “might have won Wisconsin for him.” Even though she was kidding, The Wire provided a chart-filled debunking of her “claim.”)

Who knows if or when Perry will be able to ask the president about aliens. But in the meantime, it might help her to know that the Obama administration already addressed this more than two years ago. Here’s their answer, written by Phil Larson of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy:

The U.S. government has no evidence that any life exists outside our planet…However, that doesn’t mean the subject of life outside our planet isn’t being discussed or explored. In fact, there are a number of projects working toward the goal of understanding if life can or does exist off Earth…Many scientists and mathematicians have looked with a statistical mindset at the question of whether life likely exists beyond Earth and have come to the conclusion that the odds are pretty high that somewhere among the trillions and trillions of stars in the universe there is a planet other than ours that is home to life.

Many have also noted, however, that the odds of us making contact with any of them—especially any intelligent ones—are extremely small, given the distances involved.

So there it is.

Perry, whose interest in politics and humanitarian aid goes far beyond her friendly relationship with the president (she traveled with UNICEF to visit slums and villages in Madagascar last year, for example), is a fiercely liberal person. She even barred her Republican parents from attending a 2013 Obama inauguration concert at which she performed. “My parents are Republicans, and I’m not,” she told Marie Claire. “They didn’t vote for Obama, but when I was asked to sing at the inauguration, they were like, ‘We can come.’ And I was like, ‘No, you can’t. I love you so much, but that—on principle.’ They understood, but I was like, ‘How dare you?’ in a way.”

Here’s video of Perry performing at an Obama 2012 rally in Las Vegas. Her dress makes her political preference clear:

Link:

Major Democratic Fundraiser Katy Perry Vows To Ask Obama About Potential Alien Invaders

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