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Should Hillary Clinton Endorse Legalized Pot?

by GaleDyason2 Posted on September 30, 2016

Mother Jones

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Today’s chatter is almost exclusively about Donald Trump’s implosion over Alicia Machado, the Miss Universe of 1996, which has dragged his entire team of thrice-married surrogates into embarrassing spasms of hypocrisy and is making Trump into even more of a laughingstock than before—which is quite a feat. I can’t really bring myself to write any more about this at the moment, so instead let’s turn our attention to legal pot. Christopher Ingraham argues that this is Hillary Clinton’s best hope for attracting millennial support:

There is one thing that younger voters like a lot, and that’s legal marijuana….In April, a CBS News survey posed a question that sheds more light on this issue….Most respondents — 58 percent — said that a candidate’s support for legal marijuana “wouldn’t matter” at all. Eighteen percent said they’d be more likely to vote for a pro-weed candidate, while 21 percent said they’d be less likely.

But there were some interesting differences by respondents’ age. Among adults ages 18 to 34, 28 percent said support for legal marijuana would make them more likely to vote for a candidate….These numbers suggest that legal marijuana could give Clinton a boost among younger voters in November.

Well…maybe. My guess, however, is that millennials would instantly see this as empty pandering. It might actually make her less popular among young voters, who seem to distrust her more for being calculated than they do for her actual policy positions.

Besides, Clinton has already come out in favor of reclassifying marijuana from Schedule 1 to Schedule 2 and allowing states to continue serving as “laboratories of democracy.” That means she’s basically endorsed medical marijuana, and it sets her up to endorse recreational marijuana after a suitable period of evolving. Maybe in 2020?

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Should Hillary Clinton Endorse Legalized Pot?

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Donald Trump’s Favorite Anti-Immigrant Sheriff May Finally Lose an Election

by Freddie9132 Posted on September 30, 2016

Mother Jones

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Joe Arpaio, the sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona, walked onto the stage at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, a few hours before Donald Trump was supposed to deliver his acceptance speech. Arpaio, a tough-on-illegal-immigration crusader, flashed a peace sign as the crowd roared its approval. Wearing an oversize black suit and a tie pin in the shape of a pistol, the 84-year-old sheriff said he’s spent 55 years in law enforcement, but his “most important mission has just begun: to help elect Donald Trump president of the United States.”

Trump is the only candidate strong enough to defend the nation from “terrorists coming over our border, infiltrating our communities and causing massive destruction and mayhem,” he said, adding that “criminals are penetrating our weak border security system and committing serious crime.”

Arpaio earned his spot on the RNC stage by styling himself as “America’s Toughest Sheriff,” who famously stops immigrants for no reason, dresses jail inmates in pink underwear, and houses the inmates in Korean War tents in the desert heat. He’s ridden his fame to six four-year terms as sheriff of the country’s fourth-biggest county.

Now running for his seventh term, he’s facing an opponent with better poll numbers whose message is getting a signal boost with $300,000 from liberal billionaire George Soros. He’s also having his own trouble with the law, with a looming criminal contempt referral for disobeying the orders of a federal judge who sought to restrain some of his anti-immigrant excesses. He’s saddled Maricopa County taxpayers with more than $140 million in settlement fees and court costs—the results of his sometimes overzealous approach to law enforcement.

Arpaio has been a national figure for years, but this year’s race underscores the wider political fight playing out across the country: Donald Trump’s xenophobic brand of populist bigotry has propelled the once-taboo and semi-fringe identity politics of white racists back into the mainstream conversation. For years Arpaio has been a leading national figure for fighting and criminalizing undocumented immigrants, and this race is drawing a lot of attention. Millions of dollars in out-of-state donations have poured in for Arpaio, but his challenger—retired Phoenix Police Sergeant Paul Penzone—has also drawn outside support, chiefly in the form of an independent expenditure committee funded solely by liberal financier George Soros.

Trump’s nomination could push the red state blue for the first time in a generation and motivate the state’s Hispanic voters to vote in greater numbers than ever before. A proposal to legalize recreational marijuana, and a minimum-wage ballot question could also drive younger Democratic-leaning voters to the polls. Republican Sen. John McCain’s tough challenge from Democratic Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick has enhanced on-the-ground Democratic organization across the state and won’t help Arpaio, nor will the sheriff’s ongoing “investigation” into President Barack Obama’s birth certificate.

On the other hand, Trump’s intense anti-immigrant rhetoric has galvanized many voters, and Arpaio has been that crowd’s hero for years. “He’s somewhat like me,” Arpaio told the Guardian, referring to Trump. “Or I’m like him. I don’t know which way it goes.” Whichever way it is, Arpaio is still incredibly popular among Republicans in Maricopa County. He easily won the Republican primary in August, defeating three other candidates. (The second-place finisher came in nearly 40 points behind Arpaio.)

So will this be Arpaio’s last election?

“If it’s going to happen, it’s going to happen now,” says David Berman, a professor emeritus of political science at Arizona State University and a senior research fellow at Arizona’s Morrison Institute for Public Policy. “It’s going to be the toughest election he’s ever had.”

Arpaio’s challenger is Paul Penzone, a retired Phoenix police sergeant who came within six points of beating the sheriff (50.66 to 44.65) in 2012. That year, a third-party candidate named Mike Stauffer siphoned off crucial votes. Some Arizona Democrats assumed Stauffer had been recruited by Arpaio’s campaign to thwart a Penzone victory. They wondered again this year when third-party candidate Chad Lisk threw his hat into the ring, only to be blocked after failing to garner the requisite number of petition signatures.

“It’s apparent that the voters are tired of the nonsense they’ve seen from the sheriff the last several terms, and we feel confident with our chances,” said Penzone.

He says the 2012 race was closer than it looked because the percentage of the vote Arpaio received was “barely above the median.” He rattles off the problems: Arpaio has cost county taxpayers at least $72 million, and that’s from only one case related to profiling and harassing Latinos; he’s facing a referral from a federal judge for criminal contempt of court related to a racial profiling case filed in 2007; his lawyers hired an investigator to look into the wife of the judge who issued that order. Penzone is announced that he filed a defamation lawsuit against Arpaio after the sheriff ran an ad recycling overstated and exaggerated claims that Penzone assaulted his ex wife in 2003. “It’s all just a complete abuse of his authority,” Penzone says. “The voters are tired of it, and I’m tired of it.”

Chad Willems, Arpaio’s campaign manager, did not respond to several requests for comment. After the contempt referral, Willems told the Associated Press that the exorbitant legal fees were the fault of the American Civil Liberties Union, which brought the case, because the organization refused to settle, costing taxpayers millions in legal fees. “If Penzone wants to side with the ACLU on this issue, he can be our guest,” he said. He told reporters with Cronkite News at Arizona State University that polling casting doubt on Arpaio’s popularity is dead wrong, and that the Arpaio campaign’s internal polling suggests the incumbent will “heavily” defeat Penzone.

But Penzone’s political challenge isn’t Arpaio’s only problem. The sheriff could face criminal charges after US District Court Judge Murray Snow, appointed by George W. Bush, ruled August 19 that Arpaio and another senior sheriff’s deputy ignored court orders, lied to the court, and withheld information in a racial profiling case dating back to 2007. The case, Melendres v. Arpaio, was filed by a group of Latinos in Maricopa County targeted by sheriff’s deputies for illegal-immigration sweeps during traffic stops. In 2011, Snow ordered Arpaio and his deputies to quit detaining suspected undocumented immigrants who had not broken any state laws. In 2013, Snow ruled that Arpaio and his deputies had discriminated against Latinos and also that Arpaio had violated the 2011 order in part to bolster his popularity during the 2012 election.

In May this year, Snow ruled that Arpaio had continued to arbitrarily detain Latinos based solely on immigration suspicions and held him in civil contempt, which left the door open for a criminal contempt referral that took place on August 19. Now the US Department of Justice will determine whether to criminally charge Arpaio with contempt of court, a crime punishable with up to six months in prison. In the middle of all this, Arpaio’s attorneys hired a private investigator to investigate the judge’s wife after a tipster told Arpaio that Snow’s wife said that Snow wanted to get Arpaio out of office.

“This is really almost completely uncharted territory,” says Mel McDonald, a former US attorney who is representing Arpaio privately in the criminal case. McDonald says there isn’t a lot of precedent for Arpaio’s case, and he’s meeting with DOJ officials October 11 to figure out what the next steps will be. He says the DOJ can choose to pursue criminal charges, or it can decline to do so. Snow can then choose to appoint a special prosecutor to pursue the case.

Although Arpaio is paying for his legal defense in the criminal contempt case, the rest falls on the taxpayers of Maricopa County to the tune of $72 million, according to the Arizona Republic, which notes that in all, Arpaio has cost taxpayers $142 million in legal fees, settlements and court awards since 1993. Arpaio does have a massive war chest that dwarfs the approximately $540,000 Penzone has raised thus far. According to filings published by the county on Thursday, Arpaio has raised just more than $12 million, roughly three-fourths of which came from small donors in other states, according to the Associated Press’ August analysis.

Penzone also has support from out of state: Liberal financier George Soros has stepped in to help. Soros has pumped $3 million into local district attorney races in a half-dozen states over the last year with an eye toward reforming the criminal justice system, according to Politico, with millions of dollars going toward radio and television ads. In Arizona he donated $300,000, the total budget of Maricopa Strong, an independent expenditure committee not affiliated with the Penzone campaign, according to records filed with the county. “We’re looking to persuade voters who have some doubts about Arpaio because of his record of wasting taxpayer money on lawsuits and legal fees, and losing sight of his primary mission of enforcing the law and keeping the people of Maricopa County safe,” said a source close to Maricopa Strong.

Despite all this baggage, Arpaio still has a strong chance of extending his 23-year reign over Maricopa County. Berman, the political scientist, says pundits have been predicting a surge of Hispanic voter turnout for years—a prospect that could cripple state Republicans up and down the ballot—only for it to never materialize. He concedes that the marijuana initiative, the minimum-wage question, an organized Democratic effort in the Kirkpatrick race against McCain, and Donald Trump—let alone all of Arpaio’s legal issues and history of racial profiling and harassment—could put Penzone over the top.

But there are still many more Republican voters in Maricopa County than Democrats and independents (737,439 active Republicans, 577,885 Democrats, 743,456 others). Besides, he said, it’s Arpaio’s true believers who have kept him in office this long.

“Arpaio has got the Trump supporter type—he has the same kind of true believer behind him,” says Berman. “If he went to jail, they’d still elect him. He just has this following that thinks he can do no wrong, just like Trump.”

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Donald Trump’s Favorite Anti-Immigrant Sheriff May Finally Lose an Election

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Child Care Is Finally Getting Some Much-Needed Regulation, But It’s Still Expensive As Hell

by DorieHairfiyu Posted on September 30, 2016

Mother Jones

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The Obama administration released a new list of regulations today meant to improve the quality of child care in thousands of centers—from small mom-and-pop shops to large nonprofit and for-profit schools—serving infants and toddlers. Currently, every state has its own safety, health, and learning standards for child care centers, whose quality varies widely. The new federal standards aim to raise the bar for every center that works with any of the 1.4 million low-income children currently receiving a federal subsidy to cover their child care fees.

The new rules require, among other things:

More thorough background checks for all staff working in child care centers;
Unannounced inspection visits of child care centers that will be posted publicly for parents;
Regular mandatory training for child care providers, including safe sleeping practices, preventing infectious diseases and administer CPR, and spotting and reporting child abuse;
More professional development of educators.

“In some states, it is easier to become a child care provider than a hairdresser or a dog walker,” Brigid Shulte, the director of New America’s Better Life Lab, told Mother Jones. The new standards are a very important first step, Shulte added, but the rules cover only a small percentage of the roughly 12 million kids younger than five in the United States.

Shulte is the co-author of the just-released “The Care Report,” which analyzed the quality, cost, and availability of child care in 50 states. Using data from Care.com, New America, and many other recent studies, researchers found:

Child care is very expensive in the United States. The average full-time cost of child care centers for children ages zero to four is $9,589 a year, higher than the average cost of in-state college tuition ($9,410). Infant care is particularly expensive: Full-time care for babies in centers ranges from a low of $6,590 in Arkansas to a high of $16,682 in Massachusetts. In 33 states, one year of infant care in a center is more expensive than a year in public college. And while early care is subsidized in virtually every other advanced country, 60 percent of US child care costs are paid by parents, 39 percent by the government, and only 1 percent by businesses and philanthropy. Another study found that in Sweden, parents spend about 4 percent of their net income on child care; in France, Germany, and Denmark, about 10 percent. “It’s not surprising that our fertility is lowest in history,” Shulte said. “We make it very difficult for parents to have kids.”

Early-learning teachers make poverty wages, which contributes to high turnover and poor quality of care. The median wage of a teacher in this field is $9.77—less than what most janitors and parking garage attendants make. It’s no surprise then that nearly half of the 2 million preschool and child care teachers are enrolled in some kind of public support program, receiving food stamps or welfare assistance.

Percentages of Workers in Public Support Systems (2009-13) Source: Early Childhood Workforce Index 2016. Center for the Study of Child Care Employment, University of California, Berkeley

The quality of child care is low and is the worst for ages zero to three—the most crucial stage for brain development. Only 11 percent of child care centers are accredited by the National Association for the Education of Young Children or the National Association for Family Child Care. The rest operate under state standards and licenses that all have varying—and mostly mediocre—rules and regulations.

Very few poor kids receive help. Only 1 in 5 low-income kids receive federal subsidies to cover child care costs.

Many policymakers still think that taking care of infants and toddlers is “babysitting,” Shulte said. But the research shows otherwise: The first three years of a child’s life are the most important for brain development, and parents or caregivers require specialized knowledge and training to promote important cognitive, social, and emotional skills.

That sort of training costs money, of course, but researchers like Nobel-winning economist James Heckman and others have argued that investments in these early years yield the greatest returns to society. Steven Barnett, a professor of economics and the executive director of the National Institute for Early Childhood Research, calculated that every $1 the government invests in high-quality early education can save more than $7 later on by boosting graduation rates, reducing crime, and increasing tax revenue.

Funding and enrollment for preschool is regaining its momentum since the recession: In 2012, 66 percent of American four-year-olds went to preschool. But despite these gains, the United States still ranks 30th (out of 44) for preschool enrollment among developed nations. And when it comes to child care from birth to age three, the US spends little to nothing: Only 6 percent of total spending goes to this age group, according to Paul Tough, the author of Helping Children Succeed. Compared to other nations, the United States ranks 31st out of 32 developed nations when it comes to government spending on early childhood education.

Getting the United States all the way to high-quality early learning is a long road, the authors of “The Care Report” argue, one that must start with sufficient and sustained funding from the public and private sectors. Other proposed solutions in the report include universal paid family leave, expanding cash assistance programs, and universal pre-K, and providing better training and pay for teachers. “Research tells us that the vast majority of achievement gap you see in high school opens up before kindergarten,” Shulte said. “The work to transform early learning is urgent if we want to reduce these gaps—like other countries with better early childhood policies have done.”

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Child Care Is Finally Getting Some Much-Needed Regulation, But It’s Still Expensive As Hell

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Obama Now Not Tyrannical Enough

by CierraJwrxeqm Posted on September 30, 2016

Mother Jones

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Ladies and gentlemen, your Republican Party:

Do you think Grunwald is exaggerating? Nope. The Wall Street Journal, for example, spent several hundred words acknowledging that Congress’s position on the 9/11 bill was embarrassing, “But not nearly as embarrassing as the junior-varsity effort by the president, who made it easy for Congress to trample him.” Somehow, it’s always Obama’s fault, isn’t it?

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Obama Now Not Tyrannical Enough

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Hillary Clinton Is Finally Feeling the Bern

by JensStocks Posted on September 30, 2016

Mother Jones

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I’ve been a mite hard on Bernie Sanders, and a couple of weeks ago I was eager to put it behind me. Sanders was scheduled to do some weekend campaigning for Hillary Clinton in Ohio, but when I went to the tape on Monday I discovered that his rallies had been poorly attended (possibly not his fault) and that his pitch for Clinton was not notably enthusiastic. So I just said nothing.

Today, however, Ed Kilgore tells me that bygones, apparently, are finally bygones:

Now Sanders is back on the trail not just on Clinton’s behalf but by her side, beginning with an appearance in New Hampshire last night. And his message is significantly more focused on her agenda, and not just as an afterthought….They sounded much more like teammates working together than former antagonists forced to combine forces against a common enemy.

Aside from targeted campaigning, a sharpening of the Sanders message for Clinton, which seemed to be developing in New Hampshire, would be helpful just about everywhere. His new rap about the consequences of a Donald Trump victory, which makes sitting out the election a great moral error, is pretty strong. He might want to add in some reminders of the kind of world Libertarians like Gary Johnson want to build, where, yeah, you can smoke weed, but you’re totally on your own in facing life’s vicissitudes.

In any event, it seems the bad feelings and genuine differences of opinion of the 2016 Democratic primaries are finally fading to the point where Bernie Sanders is an indispensable asset for Clinton. If the race stays close, it could matter a lot.

This is good news for Team Clinton, which needs all the help it can get. Only 40 days to go!

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Hillary Clinton Is Finally Feeling the Bern

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How to Vote for a Third Party—And Still Stay in the Main Game

by JesseZHBnzgzn Posted on September 29, 2016

Mother Jones

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In 2000, Americans learned just how dramatically a third-party vote could swing an election, when Ralph Nader pulled thousands of Florida votes away from Al Gore, handing the narrow victory to George W. Bush.

This year, polls suggest that history could repeat itself. Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are in a dead heat, while Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson polls around 8 percent nationally and Jill Stein, from the Green Party, polls about 2 percent. Two former Bush administration officials and a small group of developers in Silicon Valley—coincidentally all immigrants—want to avoid the possibility of third-party voters ushering in a Trump presidency. They’ve created a smartphone app that allows anti-Trumpers who aren’t Clinton fans to swap a third-party-candidate protest vote with the vote of someone in a safely blue state.

“If you like Gary Johnson and want to vote for Gary Johnson, then you should vote for Gary Johnson,” says John Stubbs, co-founder of R4C16, a grassroots Republicans for Clinton group, which had the idea for a vote-trading app. “If, however, you do not like Donald Trump, and you are voting for Johnson because you also do not like Hillary Clinton, our suggestion is to vote tactically and avoid the worst-case scenario, which is the election of Donald Trump.”

Stubbs, along with his R4C16 co-founder Ricardo Reyes, both worked for the US Trade Representative under the Bush administration and, until this election, had retired from politics. In June, however, the lifelong Republicans launched R4C16 to defeat Trump, who they worry could destroy the Republican Party for good.

“A Libertarian protest vote could toss the election to Trump,” Stubbs wrote in the Washington Post in July. So Stubbs and Reyes came up with the idea for a vote-trading app, after reading about a couple of developers in Silicon Valley who’d made #NeverTrump, an app designed to help people encourage their existing contacts in swing states to vote. They got in touch with Amit Kumar, the brains behind the app and CEO of Trimian, a startup he launched in 2015 that makes mobile apps for communities, and asked if he could update the app to include a vote-trade option.

Kumar was happy to oblige. “Most of the people at our company are immigrants. So we felt like it was a good use of our time to come in and do what we can,” said Kumar, who came to Silicon Valley from India in 2000 and recently became a US citizen. The rest of his US-based employees, he says, come from places like South Africa, the United Kingdom, the Philippines, and China.

Kumar explained that his team of developers had the idea for the first version of the #NeverTrump app a few weeks after this summer’s Republican and Democratic conventions and launched it in mid-September. Instead of knocking on random doors or cold-calling voters in get-out-the vote efforts, they wanted to mobilize voters with technology and within their existing networks. They worked pro-bono to create an app that, with a user’s permission, will sort through the contacts in your smartphone and list them by swing state. Users could then be enabled to send a pre-programmed email encouraging those friends to vote. After Stubbs and Reyes reached out, Kumar and his team quickly programmed in a vote-trading function that appears automatically based on the location and vote preference the user lists when he or she registers.

“We’ve made it very simple. If you happen to be a Clinton supporter in a non-swing state,” Kumar says, or a third-party candidate supporter in a swing state, “you now get a second button, which is ‘trade.'” Then, the pre-programmed message sending contacts a reminder to vote also includes an offer to swap votes.

Stubbs and Reyes wrote a New York Times op-ed earlier this month encouraging anti-Trump voters to consider trading their protest votes. They point out that in 2000, “Nader Trader” websites emerged a couple of weeks before the election but did nothing to change the outcome. Stubbs believes that this time around, however, vote-trading could have a significant impact because the internet is far more developed and ubiquitous, they’ve begun the effort two months in advance and, most importantly, this is no longer a brand new idea.

“In 2000, there’d been no discussion of it ever before,” Stubbs says. “There is an educational process that has to happen for voters.”

Vote trading has also caught on in other countries. In Canada’s 2015 election, a number of vote-swapping efforts emerged, and in the run-up to the election, more than a million citizens ditched their party affiliation with the democratic-socialist National Democratic Party to vote with the Liberal Party, helping to elect Justin Trudeau.

Following the 2000 election, several legal challenges cropped up claiming that Nader Trader websites were engaged in illegal vote-buying. The 9th Circuit ultimately ruled this wasn’t the case: The vote swaps weren’t binding promises, the court found, and constituted a form of First Amendment protected free speech.

The app has also sparked at least a few vote-trading initiatives that are less tech savvy. Mary Cybulski, a photographer in New York, read Stubbs’ op-ed and decided to start an informal vote trade of her own with the help of her daughter, who is in a Ph.D. program in North Carolina, where polls are currently split between Trump and Clinton. “She has a lot of friends who are like, ‘I can’t vote for Clinton, but I don’t want to elect Trump,'” Cybulski says. So her daughter is looking for potential third-party voters in North Carolina while Cybulski connects them to potential swap-ees in New York. “I’m fine with protesting, I just don’t want to take chances, so we can help with that,” Cybulski says. “We can register their protest vote and not elect Trump.” For now, though, they’ve only found a couple of participants.

The #NeverTrump app has seen much wider success. Kumar says the app has had “tens of thousands” of downloads, and he anticipates a pickup in both downloads and trading as the election nears. As long as his investors and team continue to be supportive, he says his company will continue to maintain and update the app, motivated in large part by Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric.

“I’ve been in the Valley since 2000. And the first time I ever heard a racist taunt was a week back,“ Kumar says. “Trump has given society the permission to be racist. As an Indian American—we aren’t Muslims, but we see what he says about Muslims. We’re not Mexicans, but we see what he says about Mexicans. It’s up to us, as subcommunities, to stand up. And the way I think about it is, whichever community you belong to, if you think this is not about you, well guess what? It is going to be.”

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How to Vote for a Third Party—And Still Stay in the Main Game

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California Will Keep Housing Its Detained Immigrants in For-Profit Centers

by FinleyCorser Posted on September 29, 2016

Mother Jones

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Governor Jerry Brown vetoed a bill on Wednesday that would have prevented local governments from contracting with for-profit companies to detain immigrants. Seventy percent of the state’s immigrant detainees are held in for-profit facilities, according to data from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

In his veto message, Brown said that he was “troubled” by recent reports revealing poor conditions in some private detention facilities. But he explained his veto by deferring to the Department of Homeland Security, which manages ICE and is currently examining its use of for-profit companies.

DHS’s choice to review its use of private detention centers came less than two weeks after the Department of Justice announced that it was ending its use of private prisons. A report from DHS’s advisory council is expected back by November 30. “These actions indicate that a more permanent solution to this issue may be at hand,” Brown wrote. “I urge the federal authorities to act swiftly.”

But last Thursday, in a statement interpreted as a bad sign for those pushing to eliminate these for-profit centers, ICE director Sarah Saldaña told the House Judiciary Committee that eliminating private detention centers would “pretty much turn our system upside down.” Around 73 percent of the immigration detainees are held in facilities currently operated by for-profit companies. If the for-profit companies were no longer housing detainees, ICE would have to build more detention centers and hire staff in order to meet its ongoing legal requirement to maintain at least 34,000 immigration detention beds.

The California bill, which passed 25-13 in the state Senate and 51-28 in the House last month, would have eventually closed three of California’s four private immigration detention centers. It also would have required all of California’s immigration detention facilities, public and private, to meet the most recent federal standards for things like medical care, and would have extended extra protections to LGBT inmates, prohibiting them from being forced into segregated housing on the basis of their gender identity or sexual orientation.

Closing the three private detention centers would have affected approximately 40,000 immigrants held there every year, according to Christina Fialho, executive director at Community Initiatives for Visiting Immigrants in Confinement (CIVIC), a nonprofit that helped draft the California bill. With the three facilities closed, ICE would have been forced to send detainees elsewhere—either to publicly run local jails, out-of-state detention centers, other private facilities, or possibly community-based monitoring systems.

Among the facilities that the bill would have closed is Adelanto, a 1,960-bed center run by the for-profit corrections company GEO Group and the subject of a 2015 report from CIVIC. The report pointed to allegations of inhumane conditions and poor access to legal representation. At least one immigrant has died at Adelanto due to “egregious errors” by the center’s medical staff, who did not give him proper medical examinations or help him access timely off-site treatment, according to a letter signed by 29 members of Congress who sought an ICE investigation into health and safety concerns at the facility last summer.

Last November, a group of at least 400 detainees at Adelanto launched a hunger strike to protest what they saw as inhumane conditions. They asked for longer visiting hours with their families, better medical and dental care, cleaner and better-prepared food, daily access to an outdoor yard, and an ICE employee to handle their grievances rather than a GEO staff member. “We are detainees and not prisoners,” they wrote in a letter obtained by Think Progress. GEO Group typically makes $111.92 a day in revenue for each immigrant it incarcerates in Adelanto, according to ICE.

Here’s our coverage of the latest developments:

August 29, 2016: The Department of Homeland Security announces that it will be reexamining its use of private prison companies to hold immigration detainees.
August 18, 2016: The Justice Department declares that it will stop contracting with private prisons, which incarcerate 12 percent of federal inmates.
August 12, 2016: A blockbuster report from the DOJ’s Office of the Inspector General finds that private prisons are less safe and less secure than their publicly run counterparts, and that the Bureau of Prisons does not adequately supervise their operation.
June 23, 2016: Mother Jones publishes reporter Shane Bauer’s account of four months working at a private prison in Louisiana.

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California Will Keep Housing Its Detained Immigrants in For-Profit Centers

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This Conservative Arizona Paper Never Endorsed a Democrat for President. Until Now.

by RobbinBravo Posted on September 28, 2016

Mother Jones

The Arizona Republic, once called the Arizona Republican, is a conservative newspaper that has never endorsed a Democrat in a general election for president. But on Tuesday, the paper broke its 120-year streak of supporting Republicans, giving Hillary Clinton its endorsement.

Trump, the paper said, “is not conservative and he is not qualified.”

The endorsement lauds many of Clinton’s qualities, including her years of public service, her temperament, and her experience, while pointing out that Trump lacks these same qualifications. “Clinton retains her composure under pressure,” the paper wrote. “She’s tough. She doesn’t back down. Trump responds to criticism with the petulance of verbal spit wads.”

The paper contrasted the two candidates on issues from immigration to treatment of women. On the latter, the paper noted Clinton’s focus on gender equality as secretary of state and compared that record to Trump’s view of women. “Trump’s long history of objectifying women and his demeaning comments about women during the campaign are not just good-old-boy gaffes,” the editors wrote. “They are evidence of deep character flaws. They are part of a pattern.”

The paper noted that Clinton made a mistake by using a private email server as secretary of state and said she should have erected a “firewall” between herself and the Clinton Foundation while at the State Department, “though there is no evidence of wrongdoing.” But against Trump’s flaws, the paper concluded, hers “pale in comparison.”

On Wednesday, Grant Woods, the former Republican attorney general of Arizona, also endorsed Clinton, calling her “one of the most qualified nominees to ever run for president” and Trump “the least qualified ever.”

The Arizona Republic is the latest conservative-leaning paper to break this year with its tradition of endorsing Republicans. The Dallas Morning News and the Cincinnati Inquirer both recently endorsed Clinton, while several other conservative papers have opted to endorse the libertarian candidate, Gary Johnson.

Thus far, no major papers have endorsed Trump over Clinton.

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This Conservative Arizona Paper Never Endorsed a Democrat for President. Until Now.

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Trump’s Huge Conflict of Interest With a Big Foreign Bank Keeps Getting Worse

by JaimeLockett Posted on September 28, 2016

Mother Jones

Deutsche Bank is in deep trouble. Its stock price has plummeted in recent days after the Justice Department demanded the gigantic German bank pay $14 billion to settle claims regarding its sale of bad mortgage-backed securities in the the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis. The bank’s shares fell to a new low on Tuesday over reports it might be seeking a bailout from the German government—which Deutsche Bank has denied. The crisis has exposed the fragile state of one of the world’s largest banks, but it also highlights a potential massive conflict of interest for Donald Trump.

In the past few years, Trump obtained $364 million in loans from Deutsche bank via four mortgages on three of his prized properties: Miami’s Doral National golf course, Chicago’s Trump International Hotel and Tower, and the newly opened Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., a few blocks from the White House. A foreign entity holding so much of Trump’s debt—financial leverage that could affect the decision-making of a future commander in chief—has raised alarms among ethics watchdogs. But with Deutsche Bank floundering, the possible conflicts posed by Trump’s loans are compounding.

The financial health of Deutsche Bank is important for Trump’s corporate empire. Because of Trump’s history of failed projects and repeated bankruptcies, many of the world’s top banks have long stopped doing business with him. Deutsche Bank was one of the only major banks—perhaps the only—that would work with him, and their relationship has been rocky. Trump wore out his welcome with Deutsche Bank’s corporate banking arm in 2008, when he attempted to get out of paying $40 million he personally owed the bank after his company failed to make a payment deadline on a larger $640 million loan for his Chicago project. But Trump has maintained his relationship with Deutsche’s so-called “private bank”—an arm of the bank that caters to wealthy people and has more flexibility in its lending standards than the corporate side. The four loans Trump currently has with Deutsche Bank are each from the private bank, a Deutsche Bank official told Mother Jones.

Deutsche Bank has vowed to fight the US government over the hefty fine it is threatening to impose. The bank has said that it is prepared to pay no more than $2 or $3 billion and noted in a statement last week that it has “no intent to settle these potential civil claims anywhere near the number cited.” Settlement negotiations are expected to take months, raising the possibility that Trump might be in the White House when a final decision is made. In an unprecedented face-off between a foreign bank and an administration led by a man deeply in debt to that bank, how would Trump balance the public interest with his private interests? Could American taxpayers be assured that a Trump administration would aggressively seek the maximum penalty against a lender that played a role in tanking the economy in 2008? Or would Deutsche Bank receive special consideration or favorable terms because of its ties to—or leverage over—Trump?

The news media has paid attention to the the debt Trump, via partnerships, owes a Chinese bank. But Trump’s relationship with Deutsche Bank has yet to receive much scrutiny. And if Deutsche Bank continues to falter, there is the possibility that it may need to sell off loans, perhaps including the Trump loans. It’s hard to imagine a more staggering conflict of interest than a potential or sitting president’s debts being placed on the global market. What individuals or financial institutions here or abroad might buy them? Meanwhile, Trump has offered no firm explanation for how he would separate himself from his businesses—or his debts—if elected president.

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Trump’s Huge Conflict of Interest With a Big Foreign Bank Keeps Getting Worse

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This Girl Just Delivered One of the Most Powerful Messages on Police Shootings You Will Ever Hear

by MAQReginavpus Posted on September 28, 2016

Mother Jones

On Monday night, nine-year-old Zianna Oliphant took the stand at a city council meeting in Charlotte, North Carolina following the fatal police shooting of Keith Lamont Scott, to talk about growing up in the city. Her testimony says everything.

Please watch it.

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This Girl Just Delivered One of the Most Powerful Messages on Police Shootings You Will Ever Hear

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