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Badass Little Girl Confronts Climate-Denying Congressman With Brilliant Question

by ViolettBugden Posted on April 14, 2017

Mother Jones

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Voters aren’t letting their representatives get away with climate change denial, especially at their town halls this week. Even those too young to vote are getting in on the action, like at a Wednesday town hall in Colorado Springs, where one girl confronted her congressman.

“You don’t want to pursue renewable energy, but please reconsider,” the girl, who identified herself as Haven, said. Haven made her thorough case for solar and wind, noting that these fast-growing jobs were a retraining opportunity for veterans, while reliance on coal, which has the downside of making people sick, is declining. She concluded with an invitation to Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-Colo.) to join her science class next Friday, receiving cheers and applause from the 110 people in attendance. The class will include a presentation on climate change, she added.

In the past, Lamborn has rejected the scientific consensus on climate change and opposed legislation to address the problem. In 2013, according to The Mountain Mail, Lamborn said there are “a lot of contentious facts and claims about global warming and whether it is man made,” adding there is “not much unanimity.” He’s pledged to the Koch-funded conservative political advocacy organization Americans for Prosperity to oppose any climate legislation that leads to more government revenue and, in 2014, argued that the federal government should not issue regulations for the domestic energy industry “designed to curb the possibility of climate change hundreds of years in the future.”

The House Natural Resources Committee member only addressed the first part of Haven’s comment, which focused on supporting renewable-energy jobs for veterans. He told Haven he supported all kinds of jobs and believed “in an all-the-above energy policy,” including hydrocarbons, nuclear, hydropower, and solar. His answer prompted another woman to shout, “How can you sit here and lie to us? You’re lying to us.”

Watch the encounter below:

In response to Mother Jones, Lamborn’s spokesperson, Jarred Rego, declined Haven’s offer. “Congressman Lamborn will be out of town next week and unable to attend,” he wrote in an email. “However, he really appreciated Haven’s question and her involvement in our civic process.”

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Badass Little Girl Confronts Climate-Denying Congressman With Brilliant Question

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Republicans Love Bombing, But Only When a Republican Does It

by CathleenGooge65 Posted on April 14, 2017

Mother Jones

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A few days ago I noted that Republican views of the economy changed dramatically when Donald Trump was elected, but Democratic views stayed pretty stable. Apparently Republicans view the economy through a partisan lens but Democrats don’t.

Are there other examples of this? Yes indeed. Jeff Stein points to polling data about air strikes against Syria:

Democrats are about as supportive of the strikes as they were under Obama, with 38 percent backing them in 2013 and 37 percent agreeing with them now, according to the Washington Post. Now 86 percent of Republican voters back the strikes, compared with the just 22 percent who did so in 2013.

This is a pretty stunning difference. Democratic views stayed solidly negative regardless of who was president. But Republican approval rates skyrocketed from 22 percent to 86 percent when Trump became president. This despite the fact that Bashar al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons was more extensive in 2013 than it was this year.

To be honest, I figured the data on economic views was a fluke. Now I wonder. It’s difficult to make these comparisons over time because you rarely have identical circumstances to compare. Trump’s Syrian bombing is unusually similar to the situation in 2013. Still, there are bound to be others. I wonder if this is a fairly consistent result? What other examples do we have of presidents of the opposite party doing extremely similar things and getting different responses from partisans?

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Republicans Love Bombing, But Only When a Republican Does It

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How Many Republicans Are Atheists?

by SteffenWheen Posted on April 13, 2017

Mother Jones

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How many Americans are atheists? Many people don’t really like admitting it, but Brian Resnick points today to an attempt to get at the truth. In the cleverly titled “How many atheists are there?” a pair of researchers sent people surveys with a bunch of personal questions (Are you vegetarian? Do you work from home? Etc.). But they didn’t ask for answers to the questions. All they asked for was the number that were true for you.

The researchers don’t report the average number reported back. But let’s suppose it was 4.3 out of 9. This is important, because they sent out a second set of surveys that were identical but added one question: “Do you believe in God?” If the average number of questions that were reported true in the second survey stayed at 4.3 out of 10, we can figure that no one believes in God. If it went up to, say, 5.1 out of 10, a little arithmetic suggests that roughly 80 percent of the respondents believe in God and 20 percent don’t.

After grinding through all this, the paper concludes that about 26 percent of Americans are atheists. Maybe that’s a reliable number, maybe not. This needs to be replicated a few times before we believe it. However, I was pretty gobsmacked by this table:

Granted, the error bars are large, but their point estimate is that no Republicans are atheists. None! If this methodology is accurate, it not only suggests a truly enormous religion gap between Republicans and everyone else, but also that self-reporting isn’t worth a damn.

As it happens, the sample the researchers used was probably somewhat self-selected rather than being truly random, and that may have affected the results. There are other potential problems too. Still, it’s an interesting first crack at this, and I hope that others follow it up.

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How Many Republicans Are Atheists?

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Trump Is Now Threatening to Sabotage Millions of Insurance Plans

by DeneenConley6 Posted on April 13, 2017

Mother Jones

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President Donald Trump is now threatening to wipe out health insurance for millions of people in order to make a political statement. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal Wednesday, Trump suggested that unless Democrats agree to his plans to dismantle Obamacare, he might use his executive authority to intentionally trigger a death spiral for the individual insurance markets.

Specifically, Trump threatened to stop making payments to insurance companies to reimburse them for subsidies that help offset the costs of deductibles and copayments for low-income people. Those subsidies are mandated by Obamacare; if the feds stopped reimbursing insurers for this expense, they would likely abandon the individual markets and leave millions without coverage.

The president seemed to acknowledge in the interview that halting the reimbursements would likely result in the healthcare markets collapsing, but he said he might go through with it in order to extract concessions from Democrats. “Obamacare is dead next month if it doesn’t get that money,” Trump told the paper. “I haven’t made my viewpoint clear yet. I don’t want people to get hurt…What I think should happen and will happen is the Democrats will start calling me and negotiating.”

Obamacare includes a host of mechanisms to make buying insurance easier and more affordable for people who don’t receive coverage through their employer and have to buy it on the individual market. The law primarily does this by offering subsidies—varying by income—to offset the costs of premiums for people who earn up to 400 percent of the poverty level. But the law was also designed to provide $7 billion per year in “cost sharing reduction” payments to insurance companies so that people below 250 percent of the poverty line would have lower deductibles and copayments.

These payments were explicitly included in the health care law, but through the convoluted quirks of legislative procedure, Republicans have alleged that Congress technically didn’t “appropriate” money for the program. The Obama administration went ahead and started making the payments anyway, and in 2014 House Republicans sued the White House, saying that the administration shouldn’t be able to spend that money. A federal district judge sided with Republican last year, and the Obama administration appealed.

After Trump’s inauguration, both the White House and Congress sought to stall the lawsuit, asking the courts to give them more time to figure out whether or not Obamacare will be repealed. When the GOP repeal bill failed last month, Trump was faced with a dilemma: He could order the his administration to keep fighting the House’s lawsuit, or he could ditch the appeal and end the reimbursement payments. It sounds like Trump may now be leaning toward the latter. In addition to his Journal interview, Trump reportedly has become active behind-the-scenes, as well. According to Politico, the president called Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price and dictated a statement that he wanted the agency to release on the issue.

As Trump himself said, ending the program would be a disaster for Obamacare. It would cause insurance companies to flee the individual markets (which, in some parts of the country, already suffer from a lack of insurance options). And the remaining insurance offerings would jump in price. An analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that premiums for a baseline plan would jump 19 percent if cost sharing disappears.

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Trump Is Now Threatening to Sabotage Millions of Insurance Plans

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Mar-a-Lago Is the Definition of Excess—Except When It Comes to Refrigerating Raw Meat

by BrianneAplin Posted on April 13, 2017

Mother Jones

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Back in January, the swank South Florida resort Mar-a-Lago got even swankier, doubling its initiation fee to $200,000. Weeks later, its owner, the Trump Organization, got some less appetizing news. In an unannounced inspection on Jan. 26, Florida’s Department of Business and Professional Regulation found 11 violations, including hotdogs, burgers, beef, shrimp, duck, and ham stored at temperatures above 41 degrees Fahrenheit, in two different coolers “not maintained in good repair.”

The “winner,” as the Miami Herald cheekily noted its report, was the ham, which clocked in at a cool—certainly not cold—57 degrees.

The inspection report also cited fish “offered raw or undercooked,” which “had not undergone proper parasite destruction.” Oops.

The inspectors deemed the above-temperature meat and under-processed fish “High Priority violations,” defined as “those which could contribute directly to a foodborne illness or injury and include items such as cooking, reheating, cooling and hand-washing.”

No doubt much to the comfort of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who visited and dined at Mar-a-Lago just days after the inspection, all of the serious violations were “Corrected On-Site” under the inspector’s gaze, the report states.

The Herald reports that in the past, Mar-a-Lago owner and US President Donald Trump was “often involved personally in the day-to-day operations,” and it “wasn’t rare to see him check out the kitchen and give directions to the club’s floor personnel.” The paper adds:

At the time, Mar-a-Lago passed inspections with flying colors, with one or two violations at most.

But as Trump jumped into presidential politics, so did the number of health violations.

There were 11 last year compared to just two in 2015.

If the White House gig doesn’t work out, sounds like Trump can make himself useful back at Mar-a-Lago.

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Mar-a-Lago Is the Definition of Excess—Except When It Comes to Refrigerating Raw Meat

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Trump’s CIA Director Just Called WikiLeaks a "Hostile Intelligence Service"

by Carley20G9701 Posted on April 13, 2017

Mother Jones

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Central Intelligence Agency chief Mike Pompeo on Thursday denounced WikiLeaks as a “non-state hostile intelligence service,” and he singled out Russia as one of the anti-secrecy organization’s top collaborators. Pompeo is the latest top official in the Trump administration to note that Russia hacked into the emails of Democratic staffers with the intention of influencing the 2016 presidential election. Thousands of those emails were subsequently released by WikiLeaks. The intelligence community has concluded this operation was mounted with Vladimir Putin’s approval and was done to benefit Donald Trump.

Pompeo’s remarks were particularly striking because Trump praised WikiLeaks during the campaign and repeatedly referenced the emails it made public. In other words, Pompeo was saying that his boss encouraged an entity he now considers “hostile” to the United States. Trump has repeatedly referred to the Russia scandal as a hoax, yet Pompeo’s comments are predicated on the assumption there is nothing hoax-y about the Russian attack on the 2016 campaign.

Pompeo’s attack on WikiLeaks was also a touch awkward given that during the 2016 campaign, he cited WikiLeaks to attack the credibility of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and the Democratic Party—which was just what Russia wanted. This led to an awkward moment in January, when Pompeo testified before the Senate Intelligence committee:

Pompeo was also caught in a hack-related contradiction. Sen. Angus King (I-Maine), a member of the committee, pointed to a tweet Pompeo sent out in July declaring, “Need further proof that the fix was in from Pres. Obama on down? BUSTED: 19,252 Emails from DNC Leaked by Wikileaks.” King didn’t say this, but his point was obvious: With this tweet, the incoming CIA chief had helped a secret Russian intelligence operation to change the outcome of the presidential election. King did ask Pompeo, “Do you think WikiLeaks is a reliable source of information?” Pompeo replied, “I do not.” So, King inquired, why did he post this tweet and cite WikiLeaks as “proof”? Pompeo was busted. Pompeo repeated that he had never considered WikiLeaks a “credible source.” King pushed on and asked Pompeo how he could explain his tweet. Pompeo stammered and remarked, “I’d have to go back and take a look at that.” Uh, right.

In his remarks Thursday at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, Pompeo said that “WikiLeaks walks like a hostile intelligence service and talks like a hostile intelligence service.” He then cited various examples of WikiLeaks working against the interests of the United States, including working with Chelsea Manning to leak classified documents in 2010.

“It is time to call out WikiLeaks for what it really is—a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia,” Pompeo said.

Pompeo’s remarks coincide with an apparent shift in the Trump administration’s approach to its relationship with Russia. The White House abruptly adopted a tough stance on Russia’s alliance with Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad following Assad’s use of chemical weapons against civilians last week. The foreign policy reversal comes amid multiple investigations examining Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and possible ties between Trump associates and Russians.

During the election, Trump praised WikiLeaks and frequently referred to the organization in his attacks against Hillary Clinton.

“I love WikiLeaks,” he told supporters during an October rally.

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Trump’s CIA Director Just Called WikiLeaks a "Hostile Intelligence Service"

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Susan Rice Did Nothing Wrong, Part the Millionth

by LouveniKolios Posted on April 13, 2017

Mother Jones

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I missed this a couple of days ago, but Nancy LeTourneau alerts me to a recent CNN report about Susan Rice’s requests to “unmask” the names of individuals in intelligence reports that she received when she was Obama’s National Security Advisor. This was all part of the great Devin Nunes fiasco, where he went to the White House to read the reports, came back to Capitol Hill to hold a press conference, and then rushed back to the White House to tell President Trump all about it. But there’s no there there:

After a review of the same intelligence reports brought to light by House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes, both Republican and Democratic lawmakers and aides have so far found no evidence that Obama administration officials did anything unusual or illegal….Over the last week, several members and staff of the House and Senate intelligence committees have reviewed intelligence reports related to those requests at NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland.

One congressional intelligence source described the requests made by Rice as “normal and appropriate” for officials who serve in that role to the president.

Fine. Susan Rice did nothing wrong. It’s not as if we didn’t know that already, but it’s nice to see it confirmed. Rice must be getting really tired of being a handy Republican punching bag.

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Susan Rice Did Nothing Wrong, Part the Millionth

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The Curious Case of Dr. Donald and Mr. Trump

by PearlineVentura Posted on April 12, 2017

Mother Jones

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On Fox Business this morning, President Trump said he’s not done with health care after all. In fact, he wants to take another swing at TrumpCare before he tackles tax cuts for the rich. Just for the record, then, here is what Trump’s domestic and foreign policy has looked like over the past two months:

March

  1. NAFTA is the worst trade deal ever. It must be uprooted and fundamentally reformed.
  2. China needs to stop screwing us on trade and North Korea or they’re in big trouble.
  3. We’re committed to good relations with Russia.
  4. Assad can stay in power. We don’t really care.
  5. Health care is dead, time to move on to taxes.

April

  1. We have a few modest changes we’d like to make to NAFTA.
  2. We had a pleasant meeting with Xi. It would be nice if they helped out with North Korea.
  3. Russia’s actions in the Ukraine, its interference with our elections, and its backing of Assad are intolerable.
  4. Assad is a monster who has to go.
  5. We’re going to try again on health care before we get to taxes.

FFS, does Trump have any idea at all what he wants to do? On health care, I gather that somebody explained to him yet again why tax cuts for billionaires will be procedurally easier if they gut health care first. So now he’s on board with taking another run at it. I suppose that he’ll forget the explanation shortly, though, and make yet another U-turn until someone explains it again.

I dunno. The first few twists in this show were entertaining, but the writers are getting lost lately. In just the past few episodes they’ve given us an EPA administrator who wants additional security to protect him from his own employees; a press secretary whose can-you-top-this bloopers now include a defense of Hitler; a fresh-faced son-in-law they don’t quite know what to do with; and a president who’s ready to go to war because of what he sees on Fox News. I like quirky characters as much as the next guy, but this is getting to be a little much.

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The Curious Case of Dr. Donald and Mr. Trump

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The Daily News Slams Sean Spicer’s Holocaust Remarks with Scathing Cover

by WalkerBorelli9 Posted on April 12, 2017

Mother Jones

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White House press secretary Sean Spicer ignited a firestorm of controversy Tuesday, when he compared Adolf Hitler to Syrian dictator Bashar al Assad, and incorrectly claimed Hitler “didn’t even sink to using chemical weapons.” The false assertion, which was used to defend President Donald Trump’s military strike on a Syrian air base last week, quickly drew the ire of Democrats and prominent Jewish groups, including the Anne Frank Center for Mutual Respect.

On Wednesday, the Daily News dedicated its front page to condemning Spicer for the remarks. The New York paper also featured a scathing editorial demanding he resign from his post over the latest gaffe:

Spicer apologized for the remarks, and said that he did not wish to become a “distraction” to Trump’s agenda.

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The Daily News Slams Sean Spicer’s Holocaust Remarks with Scathing Cover

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Which Airline Kicks Off the Most Passengers?

by Iola82L789 Posted on April 12, 2017

Mother Jones

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With “involuntary deplanings” in the news, Nate Silver points us to some data that’s oddly intriguing. Here’s how often passengers are kicked off flights on the Big Four airlines in the United States. It comes via the Department of Transportation’s latest monthly report:

Delta overbooks at a far higher rate than any other airline. However, it uses an innovative Coasian auction system during check-in to persuade passengers on overbooked flights to give up their seats for cash payouts. As a result, it has by far the lowest rate of forcing people off of flights even when they don’t want to go.

By contrast, Southwest—which has been taunting United over the Dr. Dao incident—has a slightly lower rate of overbooking than the other airlines. However, they apparently have a pretty crappy system for handling overbooked flights, which gives them the second-highest rate of forced deplanings.

United, ironically, isn’t bad on this score. Their overbooking rate is about average, and their “involuntary deplanings” rate is quite low. Depending on how you feel about things, Delta would probably be your first choice on the overbooking front, but United is a solid second.

Like it or not, about 40,000 people a year are kicked off planes against their will. Some of them were standby passengers who knew this might happen. Some weren’t. Given those numbers, the interesting thing isn’t that United had to remove one of these folks by force. The interesting thing is that apparently it’s never happened before.1

1It hasn’t happened while cell phones were recording the whole thing, anyway.

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Which Airline Kicks Off the Most Passengers?

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