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Inside the Never Trump Movement’s Last Stand

by HenriettaMacGil Posted on July 18, 2016

Mother Jones

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On Monday afternoon, after the Republican National Convention officially opened, a series of speeches and pre-recorded videos by popular GOP politicians publicly conveyed a unified front for the GOP. But that lasted a short while. Within hours, a last-ditch effort to defeat Donald Trump exploded into shouting and protests on the convention floor—with the Never Trump movement ultimately failing to block Trump’s path to the Republican nomination.

The final stand by Never Trump delegates focused on an effort to block the convention from adopting rules that would force anti-Trump delegates to vote for the real estate tycoon. Many delegates are required to vote for Trump because the rules of their state parties compel them to follow the will of the voters in the state. If the delegates were freed to vote their conscience, then it was possible that Trump would fail to garner the 1,237 votes needed for the nomination. In this Hail Mary scenario, delegates would have then held a series of votes until a nominee was chosen.

In order to free up convention delegates, the Never Trump movement hoped to reject the convention rules package on the floor. First, the anti-Trump delegates had to force the party to hold a roll-call vote, instead of a voice vote, on the rules. This required Never Trumpers to obtain the signatures of the majority of delegates from at least seven states. After that, anti-Trump delegates would have needed a majority of all the delegates to reject the rules package. It was unclear whether the anti-Trump forces could have bagged a majority of all the delegates. But Carl Bearden, a Missouri delegate and a member of the Never Trump movement, believes that had his side forced a roll-call vote and won, the convention would have reverted to a previous version of the rules, under which delegates bound to Trump could instead vote their conscience.

This was all a bit complicated. But what wasn’t was the emotion and passions expressed as Never Trump delegates huddled in the halls and back rooms of Cleveland’s Quicken Loans Arena to put their plan in motion.

Their scheme had come together on the fly. Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, who became a vocal Never Trump advocate last week, met throughout the afternoon with a small group of conspirators, including former Virginia attorney general Ken Cuccinelli and Colorado delegate Kendal Unruh, at the back of the convention floor. They eventually rounded up the support of eight states—Washington, Iowa, Virginia, Colorado, Utah, Minnesota, Wyoming, and Maine—plus Washington, DC, two more than necessary. They handed off their petitions to Gordon Humphrey, a former US senator from New Hampshire, to deliver them to the convention secretary, Susie Hudson.

But Humphrey and his co-conspirators couldn’t find her. The Never Trump delegates scoured the convention hall for her, and they texted around a photo with a small headshot of Hudson. They feared that she had gone into hiding to avoid receiving the petitions. (At one point, the Never Trump effort circulated a photo that purported to show Hudson hiding behind a curtain.) When Eric Minor, who led the Never Trump faction of the Washington state delegation, learned, secondhand, that Humphrey had finally handed the petitions to a Hudson emissary, he gleefully relayed the news to his colleagues. But he was only cautiously optimistic about their efforts. Would it work? “Who knows?” he said. “I don’t know. Nobody knows.”

It didn’t work. Trump operatives, fearing an insurrection, pushed hard to peel off support from the anti-Trump crowd. Rick Dearborn, chief of staff to Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, warned delegates that backing a roll-call vote for transparency purposes would undermine the convention by turning the attention of the network newscasts to the fracas. (Cuccinelli told reporters that Trump backers had threatened political retribution against Virginia delegates who supported a roll-call vote.)

Chaos ensued when the rules were ultimately brought up for a voice vote, as delegates from Virginia and a handful of other states chanted “shame!” and “I object!” and “no!” A frustrated Cuccinelli—in an apparent dig at Trump’s complaints during the primary process—said, “Disenfranchised! I seem to remember hearing something about this.” He took off his credentials and tossed the badges to the floor, appearing to concede defeat. Yet he was quickly persuaded to fight on, and he began waving the Virginia placard back and forth as if it were a flag.

Delegates from two states, Iowa and Colorado, walked out in protest. The roll-call backers who stayed behind struggled to get Rep. Steve Womack of Arkansas, who was overseeing the process, to acknowledge their objections. One Virginia delegate proposed throwing something on stage to get the chair’s attention. (He elected not to.) The chants for recognition from the anti-Trump delegates were drowned out by a shouts of “We want Trump!” in the risers behind them. And the unamended rules were approved.

On the floor, anti-Trump delegates were furious. “That was so egregiously bad,” Minor told a group of reporters huddled around him. “They do not want Trump to be embarrassed and they want to ramrod him through as the nominee.”

Minor contended that the Republican National Committee and the Trump campaign had not operated in good faith regarding the petition for the roll-call vote: “They have operated completely dishonestly from the get-go here.”

Minor couldn’t say whether the anti-Trump delegates would try to hold a walk-out or other form of protest later. (They had not yet had time to convene and discuss other options.) He wasn’t even sure if he would remain a delegate. “I wouldn’t be surprised based on this display right now if they try to yank my credentials, and I could not care one bit about it,” he said. “There’s no party unity for me.”

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Inside the Never Trump Movement’s Last Stand

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This Is How Crazy and Bizarre the Trump Convention Is

by JuanaA940633085 Posted on July 18, 2016

Mother Jones

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This has never happened at a national party convention: At a rally for the party’s presidential nominee, an adviser to that nominee claims that the nominee of the other party broke the law by moving a dead body in order to mount a cover-up. And this has never happened at a national party convention: At a rally for the party’s nominee, a rousing speech in favor of the nominee is given by a man who believes the last president from that party killed thousands of Americans to start a war. That is, until this week’s Republican convention in Cleveland.

On Monday afternoon, several hundred supporters of Donald Trump, many wearing “Hillary for Prison 2016” T-shirts, gathered by the Cuyahoga River to cheer on the reality-television mogul. A parade of tea party speakers hailed Trump and blasted Hillary Clinton, President Barack Obama, the US government, and the mainstream media, and the mostly older and white crowd applauded. The group Bikers for Trump provided the security for the stage, as Trumpers celebrated the downfall of the Republican establishment. The event captured the profound bizarreness of the Trump enterprise.

The headline speaker was Roger Stone, the veteran political hit man who has long been an adviser to Trump. He now says he has no official connection to the Trump campaign, but he was a chief organizer of this rally, which was originally planned when Stone and other Trumpsters feared the #NeverTrump movement might find a way to stop Trump at the convention. The always-dapper Stone—this day decked out in a beige double-breasted suit—took to the stage in front of a distinctly non-dapper crowd, and he apologized for being late. He said he had just been in meetings with Trump’s staff. Then Stone, a proud conspiracy theorist (who believes LBJ killed JFK) and author of a book excoriating the Clintons, launched into a tirade against Hillary and Bill.

The Hillary Clinton seen in public, he insisted, is not the real Hillary Clinton. She is, he exclaimed, “a short-tempered, foul-mouthed, bipolar, mentally unbalanced criminal.” (“And a reptile!” a member of the audience shouted.) One problem, Stone noted, is that the public doesn’t know about Vince Foster. He was referring to the senior White House aide who committed suicide during the Clinton presidency. Stone went on to revive the Foster conspiracy theory that was once a mainstay of the Clinton-hating right. Foster’s body was discovered in a Virginia park outside Washington, DC. But, Stone asserted, no mud or dirt was found on Foster’s shoes. However, he added, there were carpet fibers. This means, he claimed, that Foster was rolled up in a carpet and removed from the White House, and, he said, Hillary Clinton had ordered this cover-up. Her goal? To make sure that Foster’s office—which contained papers proving her illegal deeds—did not become a crime scene.

Of course, the official investigations of Foster’s tragic suicide concluded he killed himself at the park. But here was a Trump operative, fresh from huddling with Trump’s lieutenants, promoting an unfounded notion. The crowd lapped it up. (In May, Trump himself said there had been something “very fishy” about Foster’s death.)

Stone continued, maintaining that Bill Clinton had raped several women and Hillary had protected him. He asserted that the Clintons had taken money from the Chinese, the Russians, and the Saudis “for treason.” He exclaimed, “We demand the prosecution of Bill and Hillary Clinton for their crimes.” He even assailed Chelsea Clinton for being “nasty, greedy, foul-mouthed, corrupt.”

It was quite the performance, and Stone was received like a celebrity. This was no surprise, since many in the crowd were fans of Alex Jones, the nation’s No. 1 conspiracy theorist and a Trump fan. Jones was there, too.

Before Stone spoke, Jones, a sponsor of the rally and perhaps the most prominent 9/11 truther, jumped on the stage. His followers in the crowd went wild and rushed down the hill toward the stage. Throughout the event, they shouted statements demonstrating they were devotees of Infowars.com, Jones’ conspiracy-mongering website. “Go ahead and do a false flag, Obama, we’ve been waiting for you,” one attendee yelled at the sky. Jones fanned those flames, claiming Hillary Clinton is a “foreign agent of the communist Chinese, the Saudi Arabians, and others; no news carried that because it was absolute truth and would destroy her.”

Jones is a peddler of a variety of tin-foil-hat conspiracy theories. He has suggested that 9/11 was an inside job pulled off by the Bush administration, that the Sandy Hook massacre was orchestrated by the US government, and that Obama has plotted to round up dissenters in FEMA camps. Yet Trump hasn’t shied away from associating with Jones, appearing for an interview on Jones’ radio show last December. At this rally, Jones gave a full-throated endorsement of Trump. “Once the general public understands the paradigm, it’s game over!” he shouted to cheers. “Worldwide, globalism and the New World Order are in trouble.”

“The establishment, George Soros, and others have done everything they can to shut down our free speech,” Jones bellowed.

Jones was interrupted midway through his speech by comedian Eric André, apparently filming a bit for his Cartoon Network show. André had been asking questions of attendees near the stage, and Jones invited him up. Jones accused André of being from The Daily Show (perhaps confusing him for another African American comedian). “Oh no,” Jones said sarcastically, “the Democrats are never violent, like at the Black Lives Matter events.”

André went into a weird comedy route, handing Jones a key to his hotel room and asking him to have sex with his wife. He goaded Jones: “Who put the bombs in Tower 7?” Jones replied, “Well, I’ve exposed that.” Yes, an event promoting Trump for president briefly turned into a showcase for 9/11 trutherism.

Once he got André offstage, Jones warned the crowd about the master plans of the shadowy forces of globalization, noting these evildoers will try to swipe the election from Trump. “But even if they’re able to steal the election,” he said, “it doesn’t matter, because the public is waking up to their tricks, and at the state and local level people are understanding that globalism is making us poor, globalism is about controlling us, globalism is about us not being able to have our own destiny, and all over the United States and all over the world, people are saying, why can’t I have guns to protect myself?” In Jones’ view, either Trump will be elected or the New World Order globalists will succeed with their dark plots. With many members of the crowd echoing his words, Jones shouted one of his catchphrases: “The answer to 1984 is 1776!”

Jones and Stone are not outliers in Trump’s world. Stone has been tight with the mogul for decades, and he indicated he’s advising him this week. Trump, when he appeared on Jones’ radio show, praised him, saying, “Your reputation is amazing.” The fact that Jones and Stone were the heart and soul of the main pro-Trump rally of the week shows how far Trump has pulled the GOP and the Cleveland convention into the fever swamps of the right.

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This Is How Crazy and Bizarre the Trump Convention Is

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Don’t Let Individual Polls Fool You. Donald Trump Is Still Well Behind Hillary Clinton.

by ChelseyJenkin Posted on July 17, 2016

Mother Jones

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I get asked frequently whether I’m worried about this election. Of course I am. It’s a blot on our country that a man like Donald Trump has even won a major-party nomination, and it’s possible he could even win the presidency. Who wouldn’t be worried about that?

But am I especially worried because the national polls are within four or five points and sometimes even moving in Trump’s direction? Nope. This is an election with no incumbent running. There have been six of these in the postwar era, and the average margin of victory is about 4 percentage points. That’s just the way they go, and we shouldn’t be surprised that this one is running about the same. The fact that Trump is even closer in some polls is also entirely normal. If he’s truly four points behind, you’d expect a range of about 0-8 percentage points in different polls. And the fact that he’s sometimes closer and sometimes farther behind is also normal. External events will affect these things. Put this all together, and you’d expect individual polls to range anywhere from Trump ahead by two points to behind by ten points.

And that’s pretty much what we’re seeing right now. Trump could win, and that’s hardly cause for cheer. But he’s been steadily behind Hillary Clinton by 4-6 points for the past month, and the fact that individual polls sometimes show the race closer is nothing to get extra jittery about. Ordinary jitters are quite enough.

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Don’t Let Individual Polls Fool You. Donald Trump Is Still Well Behind Hillary Clinton.

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Obama: An Attack on Law Enforcement Is an Attack on All of Us

by DanutaEarnshaw Posted on July 17, 2016

Mother Jones

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After an ambush on police in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, that left at least three officers dead and three others wounded Sunday morning, President Barack Obama spoke at the White House today, saying it is up to “all of us” to create a united front against violence.

“We as a nation have to be loud and clear that nothing justifies violence against law enforcement. An attack against law enforcement is an attack against all of us and the rule of law that makes society possible,” said Obama. “This has happened far too often.”

Obama expressed his condolences to the families of the officers killed in Baton Rouge and called on Americans to “temper our words and open our hearts” ahead of the upcoming conventions. This is the 16th time Obama has addressed the nation after a shooting.

“We have to make sure that our best selves are reflected across America, not our worst. That is up to us,” said Obama. “Only we can prove, in our own actions and words, that we will not be divided, even if we have to do it again and again and again. That’s how this country gets united. That’s how we bring this country together.”

The shooting in Baton Rouge comes just 10 days after a deadly shooting in Dallas that killed five police officers and injured seven others. Baton Rouge has been the site of several protests since the fatal shooting of Alton Sterling, a 37-year-old black man who was selling CDs outside a convenience store when he was shot by the police. On July 13, the ACLU of Louisiana along with other community groups filed a lawsuit against the Baton Rouge Police Department, alleging that police officers used excessive force against protesters.

Watch Obama’s full statement below:

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Obama: An Attack on Law Enforcement Is an Attack on All of Us

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Donald Trump’s Announcement of Mike Pence in 18 Tweets

by Melodee5461 Posted on July 16, 2016

Mother Jones

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Did you miss Donald Trump’s speech “announcing” Mike Pence as his running mate? No worries. The Twitter version is always more fun anyway:

UPDATE: Here’s the whole thing in all its glory:

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Donald Trump’s Announcement of Mike Pence in 18 Tweets

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What Fools Have Never Heard of Cynthia Ozick?

by FrederiHanes Posted on July 16, 2016

Mother Jones

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Mention Cynthia Ozick to a group of friends and you’ll likely get a sprawling array of responses. For some, she’s an icon—this camp included the late David Foster Wallace, who famously asserted that she, Cormac McCarthy, and Don DeLillo were America’s premier living fiction writers. Others might give you a blank look. Irrespective of her place in the American canon, Ozick has a distinctive and notable voice. Including her 1966 debut novel, Trust, the lifetime New Yorker has put out 18 books that include poetry, fiction, and criticism, and grapple with capital “t” Themes—Jewish identity, the divine, art’s role in our culture—packaged in some of the most arresting and unforgettable sentences of the past half-century.

Her latest work, Critics, Monsters, Fanatics, and Other Literary Essays, is a powerful collection that laments the downward spiral of the once-exalted literary form. I caught up by email with the 88-year-old Ozick, who still lets no one off easy.

Mother Jones: Does one type of writing hold your heart above all others?

Cynthia Ozick: Yes. The type that I can no longer do. In my 20s and early 30s I was driven to write poetry. In 1992, Epodes, a boxed collection, was published by the Logan Elm Press and Paper Mill, a part of Ohio State University Press, and illustrated by Sidney Chafetz. The paper was hand-milled. My introduction spoke of “the bruises and thwartings and insatiable wantings of the young woman who once wrote these poems in the fever of her desire.” The boxes were crafted by a local dentist. But nowadays, between stories and essays, it is story that claims the fever of my desire.

MJ: After your first novel, it seems as though you gained increased recognition steadily—maybe it felt more like “slowly”—over the years. How might this delayed success have contoured your relationship to acclaim and positive feedback, now that you have 18 books to your name?

CO: How can these words—”recognition,” “positive feedback,” and especially “acclaim” and “success”—stand beside what I’ve so often encountered, which is the seriously diminishing “I never heard of her before”? Certainly your coming into view at this moment counts as highly welcome “positive feedback,” but how many decades have passed in the absence of print interviews such as this one? I offer this not as whine or grievance, which I would furiously deplore, but as simple fact. As for “acclaim” and “success,” they rightly characterize writers with abundant and active international readerships—Alice Munro, for instance, honored by her Nobel, and Philip Roth, long a significant household name. But recognition is something else. Every writer aspires to it, and it comes entirely privately, without public fanfare, each time a piece of work is judged worthy of publication.

Eighteen books? Slim pickin’s. There ought to have been more. Seven years dedicated to the ephemera of theater? Even with the privilege of Sidney Lumet as director? Admittedly an exciting interval. But finally: Ah, waste.

MJ: Back in 1999, David Foster Wallace called you one of the nation’s foremost living writers of fiction. What did that feel like?

CO: I learned of it about a year ago, having stumbled on a photocopy (on the internet) of the flyleaf of, I think, The Puttermesser Papers, on which Wallace had listed a long column of words, apparently new to him, culled from its pages. I was stunned and touched and puzzled. (How could this be?) It put me in mind of similar studious vocabulary lists in Kafka’s notebooks when he was learning Hebrew: Hebrew words laboriously translated into German.

MJ: My impression is that you are disenchanted with the current state of fiction. Can you speak to that? What has gone wrong? Is it a reflection on the literary project itself, the writers, the readers? Who bears the blame?

CO: I can’t claim to be disenchanted “with the current state of fiction” because I read so little of it. My reading is mostly drawn to history—I’ve just finished East West Street, by Phillipe Sands, a study of the origin of the term “genocide” and its influence since—and older novels and stories. Recently I’ve been immersed in the brilliantly rich work of W.D. Howells, and wondered at his neglect, and his dismissal as a minor writer. What’s impossible not to notice, though—it’s all around us—is the diminution of American prose: How pedestrian it has become. Pick up any short story and listen to its voice, the tedious easy vernacular that mistakes transcription for realism. This would display an understandable pragmatism if it were a pandering to common-denominator readers; but it is, in fact, a kind of hifalultin literary ideology, the less-is-more Hemingway legacy put through an up-to-the-minute industrial blender. Also, if ideas are what feed serious literature and arresting language, who today is writing a novel of ideas (which can often mean comedy)? I think of Joshua Cohen. Who else?

MJ: What do you think of literature’s place between the poles of the academy and the reading public? Do you intend to identify with one group over the other?

CO: Much of the academy on the humanities side, English departments in particular, no longer write what can pass for normal English. Judith Butler, for example, has been awarded first prize in the celebrated Bad Writing Contest for a sentence so clotted with incomprehensible barbarisms that it might be taken for the ravings of a fake preacher speaking in tongues. Is it possible that those fellow academics who pretend to have understood her are lying sycophants?

MJ: In the Amazon era, everyone is equally capable of rating a book by clicking between 1 and 5 stars, and books that have the largest median fan base become the most celebrated. Do you think this has changed literature and criticism? Or has it discouraged writers from big, creative risk taking?

CO: Always respecting the exceptions among them, one notes that too many of these consumer reviewers misunderstand the inmost nature of what literature means. It does not mean “liking.” Novels are routinely denigrated when characters are not found to be likable. Is Raskolnikov likable? Is King Lear? The plethora of such naive readers testifies to a failure of imagination—the capacity to see into unfamiliar lives, motives, feelings—and this failure must, at least in part, be the failure of the teaching of literature in the schools. Writers who witness these lame “reviews” may sigh, but no seriously aspiring writer will be discouraged. Somewhere there lives the ideal reader.

MJ: Do you think the infusion of technology writ large has contributed to the fading star of literature and imagination? As in, do you think there has been a value shift from the high-minded literary intellectualism of decades past toward mere entertainment?

CO: Advances in technology neither impede nor augment literature. Would Shakespeare on a computer keyboard surpass his quill’s eloquence? Both Milton and George Eliot were obliged to dip their pens repeatedly, frequently several times within the same sentence. It isn’t the instrument that influences High-Minded or Low-Minded; it’s the quality of Mind itself.

MJ: Do you think potential young writers are being shepherded into the creation of digital products and tech startups because they’re being told that that is the new avenue of creation expression?

CO: I have no answer for this. It’s true that the young who now flock to script writing, or producing and directing, to fulfill the demands of these new devices would, in an earlier period, have been submitting to magazines and working on their first novels. But even in the midst of all these “digital products,” the wonder of it is that there are still so many young writers who continue to believe in the venerable print novel as the corridor to fame and fortune.

MJ: What do you think of reality TV?

CO: Clueless. I’ve never seen it.

MJ: With young writers especially, there’s a fierce sense of disavowal of one’s previous self; something written a year prior feels as if it came from an entirely different person, often one whose work is excruciating even to consider. At your age, do you feel any sense of alienation from your previous selves?

CO: In certain pragmatic choices as a writer, yes, I look back on them as mistakes and wish I had done things differently. I wish I had gone into the Great World to pursue literary journalism, rather than hole up for too many years with an overly ambitious never-to-be-finished novel. I wish I hadn’t been faint-heartedly loyal for more than four decades to an agent whose professionalism was wanting. But all this is external to the writing itself. What I felt then I feel now: the inexorable, unchanging interior hum of doubt and hope.

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What Fools Have Never Heard of Cynthia Ozick?

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Friday Kitten Blogging – 15 July 2016

by EdisonNeild7936 Posted on July 15, 2016

Mother Jones

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A friend of mine was visiting this week and got a new kitten while he was here. Why? Because the breeder happened to be nearby, so it was more convenient than making a special trip later just to pick her up. As a result, our house endured a kitten invasion for several days. She has no name yet, but she’s a calico Siberian with all the exuberance of kittenhood—which means that most of the time she looked about like this:

However, she occasionally slowed down enough for my camera’s shutter to catch a better view:

Isn’t she adorable? Unfortunately, that view was not shared by everybody. We mostly kept her isolated in her own room, but we took her out to play periodically and occasionally she squirmed away, as kittens will. Here’s her first—and only—meeting with Hilbert:

Poor Hilbert. He lasted about five seconds under her gimlet eye. Then he turned tail and ran under the bed. Courage is not his strong point.

Anyway, she’s a tiny fluffball who is going to grow up into a great big fluffball. That’s the way of Siberians. And I have a note for scientists: she currently weighs nothing. I suspect that her fur has antigrav properties, which someone should probably look into. Could be useful.

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Friday Kitten Blogging – 15 July 2016

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How Do You Stop an Attack Like the One in Nice? You Can’t.

by TukeEasterling Posted on July 15, 2016

Mother Jones

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One day after a terrorist attack killed at least 84 people in Nice, France, French authorities announced that the man who carried out the attacks had never been suspected of terrorist sympathies. So do intelligence agencies have any effective way to stop such isolated acts of terrorism?

“No,” says Seamus Hughes, the deputy director of the Program on Extremism at George Washington University’s Center for Cyber and Homeland Security. “I wish there was a better answer than that, but there frankly isn’t.”

Prosecutors in Nice told the media on Friday that Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, the 31-year-old French citizen originally from Tunisia who carried out the attack, was “completely unknown to both France’s domestic and foreign intelligence officials.” That bucked the trend of recent terrorist strikes in Europe, including the Paris attacks last year and the Brussels bombings in March. The perpetrators of those attacks were connected to known jihadist networks, and intelligence officials were criticized in those cases for failing to pursue leads or carry out surveillance that may have caught the attackers before they struck.

But in the case of isolated individuals, Hughes says there’s little to be done. “At the end of the day, this really comes down to human intelligence,” he says. “You try to understand the group of people that are drawn to this and then you try to infiltrate as best you can.” If there isn’t anywhere to infiltrate, or the attacker has no previous signs of radicalization to alert authorities, attackers can simply pop up at any point with little warning.

The only real way to slow down such attacks may be to target propaganda from ISIS and other jihadi groups. ISIS is notoriously adept at churning out propaganda videos and flooding social media with sympathizers and recruiters. “Is that actually an important effect on would-be recruits?” Hughes asks. “Are they more likely to go mobilize to action than they have been in the past?”

He believes the answer is yes. “If you’re constantly being told to do what you can where you are, you’re constantly told in three different platforms on a daily, almost minute-by-minute basis, it’s going to have some level of effect on individuals who are already drawn to this,” he says. The more propaganda that’s available, he argues, the more people like Lahouaiej-Bouhlel may carry out “ISIS-inspired” attacks, deciding in the spur of the moment to act on their private thoughts.

That’s not only potentially harder to stop, but also psychologically harmful. Freelance attackers may use whatever methods or targets are at hand, and that seeming randomness, Hughes says, “shocks the system. We’re not just talking about airports. We’re also not just talking about small arms, which means you get more media coverage, which means inspiring the next individuals who want be copycats or who want to do more.”

The US government has made attempts to cut down on the flow of jihadi propaganda online. National security officials met with tech industry executives in January, and the White House held a summit in Washington a month later to try to generate cooperation between tech companies and security agencies. But efforts so far haven’t yielded much—one State Department anti-extremism program on Twitter called “Think Again, Turn Away” is a notorious punchline among terrorism experts—especially given ongoing tension between the two sides over encryption and other privacy issues. “It’s like you’ve been asked to partner up and dance with the bully at school who keeps trying to trip you in the hallways,” one of the White House summit participants told BuzzFeed.

Hughes is certain about one thing: Aggressive anti-Muslim responses only increase the likelihood of more attacks. Other terrorism analysts agree. “Unfortunately, the most likely reaction after the Nice attack is also the worst one: more vitriol and hostility toward French and European Muslims,” wrote Georgetown professor Daniel Byman for Slate on Friday. “That makes it harder for European security services to gain the cooperation of local communities and easier for ISIS to gain recruits and score victories.”

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How Do You Stop an Attack Like the One in Nice? You Can’t.

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Four Ways Research Has Reframed the Abortion Debate

by TrinidadMcCourt Posted on July 14, 2016

Mother Jones

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There has been little or no publicly funded research on abortion in the United States, so for years basic information about abortion was lacking—from how often patients have complications to what happens to women who want the procedure but can’t obtain it. Many of the new abortion restrictions were justified by assertions that often had no scientific basis—for example that clinics were teeming with incompetent and unscrupulous doctors, that abandoned patients were flooding emergency rooms, or that the psychological damage caused by grief and regret after abortions often persist for years and ruin women’s lives. The research initiative became more urgent after the high court held in 2007 that in cases of “medical and scientific uncertainty,” legislatures could have “wide discretion” to pass laws restricting abortion. Since then, a primary objective of abortion rights supporters has been to establish a high level of medical certainty—both about the safety of the procedure and about what happens when a woman’s reproductive options are drastically curtailed or eliminated. Over the last 15 years, a number of academic institutions and private organizations have received funding for abortion research, and here are four areas where their work has changed the conversation:

Mental health

Since the 1990s, abortion opponents have worked to advance the idea that abortion causes long-lasting psychological damage based on a combination of personal stories and (widely disputed) statistical analyses showing a correlation between abortion and mental health problems. “Emotional harm” has been cited by legislators in passing parental consent, mandatory ultrasound viewing, and waiting-period laws.

In 2008, Diana Greene Foster, a demographer and associate professor at the University of California-San Francisco, launched the Turnaway Study to examine what happens, emotionally and economically, to women who have had abortions and also to those who wanted abortions but couldn’t have them. Nearly 1,000 women seeking abortions in their first and second trimesters were recruited from 30 facilities in 21 states. About a quarter had been turned away because they just missed their clinic’s gestational limit (10 to 24 weeks). Researchers followed up every six months for five years. The key findings: Most women had abortions because they didn’t think they could afford another child, and they often turned out to be right. Of those who did have the procedure, 95 percent said it was the right decision, and their feelings—positive or negative—faded over time. Having an abortion did not lead to depression, PTSD, or other mental health problems, the project found. But being denied an abortion did seem to keep women tethered to abusive partners.

Complications

In justifying Targeted Regulation of Abortion Provider laws, or TRAP laws, abortion opponents have often argued that complication rates are high—up to 10 percent—and that clinics and doctors need to be held to especially rigorous standards. Two large-scale studies from California, though, appear to counter those claims.

One study looked at whether abortions could be performed safely by health care professionals without medical degrees. Nurse practitioners, certified midwives, and physician assistants received training, then were allowed to do first-trimester vacuum-aspiration abortions at 22 sites. After monitoring more than 11,000 procedures over four years, the researchers found little difference in the rate of complications between doctors and non-doctors, which was low for both groups—0.9 percent for physicians and 1.8 percent for non-physicians. In 2013, California legislators voted to let non-doctors perform the procedure.

In a more recent study, UCSF researchers analyzed billing data for 55,000 abortions and follow-up care covered by California’s Medicaid program, known as Medi-Cal. (California is one of 17 states that covers abortion and aftercare for Medicaid recipients.) The data showed that 6.4 percent of women who had abortions visited an emergency room within the following six weeks, but fewer than 1 percent of those visits were related to the abortion. Major complications, defined as hospitalizations, surgeries, and transfusions, occurred in fewer than one-quarter of 1 percent of all abortions.

Medication abortion

Abortion foes have watched with alarm as medication abortions have risen to nearly a quarter of all pregnancy terminations in the United States. Lawmakers have advanced measures that clamp down on how clinics prescribe the drugs and counsel patients.

One type of law has required doctors to follow outdated FDA guidelines from the 1990s for the abortion drugs mifepristone and misoprostol. Much research—some produced by the nonprofit Gynuity Health Projects, which is funded by the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation—has shown that the drugs should be taken in lower doses and could be used later in the first trimester than those guidelines indicated. Over conservatives’ vociferous objections, the FDA revised the label in March.

Meanwhile, after Planned Parenthood in Iowa began using videoconferencing to counsel rural patients on how to use abortion drugs, the state tried to prohibit the practice. In June 2015, the Iowa Supreme Court rejected that ban. A key piece of evidence was a study of 450 Iowa women by the Buffett-funded Ibis Reproductive Health that found no statistical difference in complication rates for telemed patients versus women who met with doctors in person.

Other abortion restrictions

Beyond TRAP laws, researchers are studying the effect on women that other types of state laws that restrict abortion are having.

Many of these efforts are ongoing, but a new study of Utah’s 72-hour waiting-period law, which legislators said would give abortion seekers a chance to change their minds, found that it increased costs and logistical hassles but did not persuade most women. Of 300 patients surveyed, only 8 percent decided not to terminate their pregnancies, and most had been leaning in that direction anyway. Meanwhile, the average amount of time the surveyed women had to wait to have abortions wasn’t 72 hours, but eight days.

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Four Ways Research Has Reframed the Abortion Debate

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Baton Rogue Police Sued Over Rough Protest Response

by TereseLittler2 Posted on July 13, 2016

Mother Jones

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The ACLU of Louisiana, along with the state chapter of the National Lawyers Guild and several Baton Rouge community groups that have been protesting last week’s police shooting death of Alton Sterling, have sued the Baton Rouge Police Department over its militarized response to the protesters.

The lawsuit alleges that officers used excessive force, verbally abused demonstrators, and wrongfully arrested law-abiding protesters, legal observers, and journalists. The filing also claims the officers’ actions were an unconstitutional impediment to marchers’ First Amendment rights, and violated their constitutional right to protection from unreasonable searches and seizures.

Dozens were arrested in Baton Rogue over the weekend, including prominent Black Lives Matter activist Deray McKesson. Videos posted to social media showed Baton Rogue officers in full riot gear, armed with assault weapons. In one incident, officers stormed the front yard of a homeowner and arrested protesters assembled there, even though the homeowner had given them permission to take refuge on her property. Protests also erupted in St. Paul, Minnesota, and numerous big cities coast to coast, in response to last week’s highly publicized police shooting of Philando Castile in a Minnesota suburb. Read the full lawsuit below.

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Baton Rogue Police Sued Over Rough Protest Response

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