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How About a Constitutional Right to Vote?

by MaricruzLaws Posted on May 21, 2016

Mother Jones

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I have a longstanding belief that a liberal democracy is basically in good shape if it guarantees three rights:

Freedom of speech/press.
The right to a fair and speedy trial.
The right to vote.

I don’t mean to denigrate other important rights. Freedom of religion is important, but plenty of free countries operate just fine with state religions. Freedom of assembly can probably be mandated by law. Warrants for searches are necessary, but again, could probably be mandated by law. A ban on slavery is important, but we already have it, and it’s not really a pressing issue in the 21st century anyway. And lots of democracies take wildly different views on the right to bear arms. The bottom line is that all these things can be in the Constitution, but if they’re not they probably don’t preclude a pretty free society.

The first two rights on my list are already enshrined in the Constitution (speech and press freedom in the First Amendment; fair trials in the Fifth through Eighth Amendments). The third, for generally disgraceful reasons, isn’t. But for some reason, among the dozens of pet amendments that various interest groups propose even though they’re mostly pie in the sky, this one gets almost no attention. Why not?

Don’t worry too much about the precise wording of a voting rights amendment. Here’s a proposal from Reclaim Democracy! that originated with Jesse Jackson:

All citizens of the United States, who are eighteen years of age or older, shall have the right to vote in any public election held in the jurisdiction in which the citizen resides. The right to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States, any State, or any other public or private person or entity, except that the United States or any State may establish regulations narrowly tailored to produce efficient and honest elections.

Reps. Pocan and Ellison have recently proposed a shorter version:

Every citizen of the United States, who is of legal voting age, shall have the fundamental right to vote in any public election held in the jurisdiction in which the citizen resides.

Maybe you’d want to add some further protections: change voting day to voting week; mandate early voting; make changes to redistricting rules to better guarantee that all votes count equally. I’m agnostic about this.

Needless to say, this would open a can of worms. Basically, anyone who shows up to vote is assumed to have the right to vote unless the government has actively put them on a list of non-voters. Possibly some kind of ID would be required: maybe a Social Security card or a national ID card. Perhaps everyone would be required to enroll for voting on their 18th birthday, and would be given a card that identifies them as a voter. They could do it at the same time they enroll with Selective Service (just as soon as women are added to Selective Service requirements).

There would be exceptions. Can prisoners vote? The Supreme Court has already ruled that prisoners have limited access to free speech rights. They obviously have no right to freedom of assembly, and the right to bear arms has been curtailed with extreme prejudice. This would almost certainly be the case with voting rights as well, though it could easily be written into the text of an amendment if it was considered important enough to spell out specifically.

So why not do it? It seems like a pretty populist idea for a Democratic presidential candidate. How about it, Hillary? She already supports automatic voter registration at age 18, and that’s a short jump to a constitutional amendment.

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How About a Constitutional Right to Vote?

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The Great Matt Bruenig-Neera Tanden Kerfuffle Sort of Explained

by RodgerQuinonez Posted on May 21, 2016

Mother Jones

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I spent the afternoon catching up on the latest in the world of liberal scuffles. Here’s the background: Lefty gadfly Matt Bruenig got into a Twitter fight with Joan Walsh yesterday morning over the topic of young people supporting Bernie Sanders. It culminated with this from Bruenig: “I have a daughter too. Your pathetic ageism against young people (remember taunting them as “barely shaven”) is sickening to me.” About then, CAP president Neera Tanden weighed in with a light comment defending Walsh, which prompted this follow-up from Bruenig:

Tanden is—and has been for a long time—a Hillary staffer and ally, so it’s not unreasonable to suspect that she might have supported welfare reform in the 90s. But Tanden denies ever having supported it, which is believable on its face since (a) her family used welfare when she was growing up, and (b) she was in law school at the time welfare reform was being debated.1

In any case, Bruenig’s tweets were nasty, apparently unfounded, and a bit two-faced (charging Walsh with “ageism” followed by insulting Tanden as “geriatric”). So what happened next? I’ll get to that, but perhaps some of you don’t know who Neera Tanden is. You should. To the best of my memory, I’ve never interacted with her and don’t really know anything about her, but a bit of googling turned up this:

Her birthday is a deeply held secret. However, she was born in 1970 and says she’s 45 now, so it must be sometime after May 19.
Her brother attended USC and she attended UCLA. Woot! I approve already. We need less Ivy League and more West Coast in high places.
She uses the word “actually” a lot. Maybe she picked this up at UCLA.
She is the president of CAP, the Center for American Progress. CAP is a high-powered progressive think tank that most people think of as either a very influential mainstream liberal think tank or, if you want to be a little more insidery, as the Clinton family’s personal think tank.2 Being president of CAP is, as Joe Biden might say, a Big Effin Deal. Tanden is the kind of person who gets mentioned frequently as a possible chief-of-staff in a Hillary Clinton White House.
Here’s the Washington Post shortly after she took over CAP: “At 5 feet 2 inches tall, with an infectious laugh and impatience for ineptitude, Tanden brims with a moxie that can shift to sarcasm. Critics and allies alike describe her as an effective molder and messenger of intricate policy, as well as an expert practitioner of in-house politics. Friends say she is remarkably well-rounded: a model wife and mother, ideal company for a glass of wine, a perfect partner for spontaneous office dancing.” Yikes!

OK, so what happened next? Bruenig works for Demos, a lefty think tank (yeah, they’re everywhere), which got wind of his tweets and immediately apologized: “Sincerest apologies for @MattBruenig’s judgment and demeanor. It’s unacceptable and we’re on it. While @MattBruenig blogs with Demos, we do not condone personal attacks. We are dealing with this internally. Thank you for understanding. We value the important work you’ve done and continue to do. @neeratanden @joanwalsh” This afternoon Demos fired him:

Today, we are taking a harder look at how our staff, fellows and independent contractors engage on social media—and unfortunately, we are finding that we have not met our own standards of vigilance to ensure that nobody associated with Demos is crossing an important line. After our tweet apologizing for Matt’s personal attacks including the term “scumbag,” we received emails from multiple individuals who made it clear that we were not aware of the extent to which Matt has been at the center of controversies surrounding online harassment of people with whom he disagrees.

It was evidence of a pattern of behavior that is far out of line with our code of conduct. After multiple conversations, Matt Bruenig and Demos have agreed to disagree on the value of the attack mode on Twitter. We part ways on the effectiveness of these kinds of personalized, online fights and so we are parting ways as colleagues today. And just as we did with Matt three years ago when he first joined our blog, Demos will continue to find and amplify the voices of lesser-known progressive policy commentators to make for a more inclusive public sphere.

As their statement goes on to say, there’s an overlay of Bernie vs. Hillary in all this, and this prompted a flurry of Twitter condemnations of Demos. Glenn Greenwald was fairly typical:

So which was it? Was Bruenig fired for offending the great and good, or was he fired for being a jerk? It’s hard to say, isn’t it? Demos says it got a pile of emails that suggested a longtime pattern of “online harassment.” But the rest of us haven’t seen those emails, so who knows? They also say they had “multiple conversations” with Bruenig, and apparently he declined to just apologize and move on. It also sounds like he declined to rein in his behavior.

If you assume that Demos is telling this straight, it’s hard to see how they could hold onto him. This is the kind of thing that I’d normally call a non-firing offense, but only if the offender agrees there’s a problem and promises to rein it in. The risk of having an employee like this go completely ballistic at some point and write something either libelous or just plain repellent3 is too great. All of these tweets may have been on Bruenig’s private account, but he’s still very publicly associated with Demos—which is explicitly in the influence biz and has to be careful about making lots of random enemies just because one of its employees has a bit of a temper problem.

The whole thing is a damn shame. I hope Bruenig lands on his feet somewhere, but I’ll bet that any future employer will ask for pretty much the same promise about tone and harassment that Demos did. It’s a little hard to imagine any outfit in the think tank trade not caring about this. In the end, I suspect Matt Yglesias has the final word:

1It’s times like this I wish I still had access to Nexis so I could check this out, but I don’t.

2Dammit, is there a synonym for think tank?

3More repellent, anyway. You know what I mean.

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The Great Matt Bruenig-Neera Tanden Kerfuffle Sort of Explained

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Donald Trump Has Another White Power-Loving Delegate

by RoyalEqhaamb Posted on May 20, 2016

Mother Jones

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Donald Trump has another delegate with controversial views on matters of race. Meet Chicago mortgage banker Lori Gayne:

“With all the racism going on today, I’m very proud to be white. Just like black people are proud to be black and now, as white people, whenever we say something critical we’re punished as if we’re racists. I’m tired of it. I’m very proud,” Gayne said.

“I’m so angry I don’t even feel like I live in America. You can call me a racist. Black Lives Matter? Those people are out of control,” she said.

Gayne’s Twitter account, which is only accessible to her followers, is called “whitepride”:

Lori Gayne/Twitter

Gayne isn’t the first Trump delegate to embrace white power. William Johnson, a Trump delegate in California, resigned last week after Mother Jones revealed that he was the leader of the white nationalist American Freedom Party. And the anti-Muslim pastor Guy St-Onge resigned as a Trump delegate after being questioned about his views by the Guardian. The AFP now claims that it has other members who are Trump delegates but has declined to release their names.

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Donald Trump Has Another White Power-Loving Delegate

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When Parole Boards Trump the Supreme Court

by DesireeNMKC Posted on May 19, 2016

Mother Jones

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This story is published in partnership with The Marshall Project.

Almost everyone serving life in prison for crimes they committed as juveniles deserves a shot at going home. That’s the thrust of a series of Supreme Court rulings, the fourth and most recent of which was decided this year. Taken together, the high court’s message in these cases is that children are different than adults when it comes to crime and punishment—less culpable for their actions and more amenable to change. As such, court rulings have determined all but the rarest of juvenile lifers are entitled to “some meaningful opportunity to obtain release based on demonstrated maturity and rehabilitation.”

When He Was 16, This Man Threw One Punch—and Went to Jail for Life Courtesy of Deborah Buchanan

The court left it up to states how to handle this year’s new ruling but suggested parole boards were a good choice. “Allowing those offenders to be considered for parole,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in January, gives states a way to identify “juveniles whose crimes reflected only transient immaturity—and who have since matured.” Most states have taken this option, changing juvenile lifers’ sentences en masse from life without to life with the possibility of parole.

But prisoner’s rights advocates and attorneys have begun to argue that parole boards, as they usually operate, may not be capable of providing a meaningful opportunity for release. A handful of courts have agreed.

Last month, a New York state appeals court judge ruled that the state’s parole board had not “met its constitutional obligation” when it denied parole to a man who had killed his girlfriend when he was 16. Dempsey Hawkins is now 54 and has been denied parole nine times in hearings that, the court said, did not adequately weigh what role his youth and immaturity had played in his crime.

Also last month, a group of juvenile lifers in Maryland filed suit, arguing that not a single juvenile lifer had received parole in that state in the last 20 years. “Rather than affording youth a meaningful and realistic opportunity for release…grants of release are exceptionally rare, are governed by no substantive, enforceable standards, and are masked from view by blanket assertions of executive privilege,” the lawsuit says.

Similar suits are proceeding in Iowa, Michigan, Florida, Virginia and North Carolina, where a judge heard oral arguments last week.

“There are just two relevant kinds of sentences: those that provide a meaningful opportunity for release and those that don’t,” says Sarah French Russell, a Quinnipiac University law professor who studies juvenile justice. “Sentences that are not technically labeled life without parole can deny a meaningful opportunity for release because of the procedures or criteria used by the parole board.”

In almost every state, parole board members are political appointees with little incentive to release prisoners who committed violent crimes, The Marshall Project has reported. Boards operate with wide discretion to make decisions for almost any reason, and in many states, their decisionmaking is shielded from public view and not subject to appeal. A recent analysis by the University of Minnesota law school found that parole release rates in many states remain stuck under 10%, even as the country searches for solutions to mass incarceration. In Ohio, 7% of hearings result in parole being granted. In Florida, the 2014 grant rate was 2%.

One common basis for parole denial is the seriousness of the crime. This may be an allowable metric for adult offenders, these lawsuits argue, but in light of the Supreme Court’s rulings, juvenile lifers must be judged by a different standard.

“No meaningful opportunity to prove rehabilitation can be granted where the only consideration at a parole hearing is the severity of the offense,” wrote attorneys for Blair Greiman, who was sentenced as a teenager in Iowa to life without parole for kidnapping and rape, then re-sentenced after the Supreme Court’s rulings.

At 16, high on horse tranquilizers he had stolen from the veterinary supply at his family’s farm, Greiman raped a woman, stabbed her, and left her for dead. Now 50, Greiman says he has a “simple desire to live a decent life and not be defined by the worst act of my life.” In prison, he has earned a degree, become a master woodworker, participated in counseling and treatment and published a novel, the lawsuit says. Yet, repeatedly denied parole because of the seriousness of his crime, Greiman “is effectively placed in the same situation as he was previously—a juvenile offender serving life sentences without eligibility for parole,” his lawyers argue. Fred Scaletta, assistant director of Iowa’s corrections department, said the board cannot comment on pending litigation. Since Greiman filed suit, the board has approved him for placement in minimum security, a step towards work release, and will review him again next year, Scaletta said.

A handful of states have implemented special parole board procedures for juvenile lifers. Massachusetts and Connecticut provide funding for attorneys to represent juvenile lifers before the board. The Massachusetts Supreme Court also said juvenile lifers were entitled to fees for expert witnesses and to appeal the outcome to a judge—all protections that adult offenders do not enjoy.

“In the case of a juvenile homicide offender—at least at the initial parole hearing—the task is probably far more complex than in the case of an adult offender,” the Massachusetts court wrote. Juvenile lifers must be given the chance to prove that their crime was committed, at least in part, because they were young—immature, impressionable, dependent on adults—but to do that requires gathering educational, medical, and legal paperwork, sometimes decades old, from behind bars. “An unrepresented, indigent juvenile homicide offender will likely lack the skills and resources to gather, analyze, and present this evidence adequately,” the court wrote.

California, Louisiana, West Virginia, and Nebraska have all passed laws providing new rules and procedures for parole boards to follow in cases of juvenile lifers.

In New York, attorneys for Mr. Hawkins are lobbying the governor to widen the scope of the court’s ruling in his case and put protections in place for all juvenile lifers facing the state’s parole board.

Even with special protections, lawyers and advocates say, whether juvenile lifers get parole is still largely dependent on the political atmosphere and whims of the board members. From 2013 until last year, half of juvenile lifers who went before the Massachusetts board were granted parole; that rate dropped to zero when a new board chair took over last September. Lawyers for the last 14 juvenile lifers to go before the board—all of whom were denied parole—say they plan to begin filing lawsuits.

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When Parole Boards Trump the Supreme Court

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Running for President Can Be a Profitable Investment

by ImaCardoza Posted on May 19, 2016

Mother Jones

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The Washington Post has a long piece tonight about Donald Trump’s latest FEC filing, which shows that business has boomed during his presidential campaign. It’s a little hard to make sense of, but apparently Trump claims that revenue from his various businesses rose from $362 million to $557 million. However, about $150 million of that came from one-off sales, so it’s unclear how much his campaign has really boosted things.

You can decide for yourself how seriously to take this, but here’s the most important part of the story:

While Trump’s campaign issued a statement referring to the form as a tally of his personal “income,” it is actually a list of his companies’ gross revenue — a figure that does not factor in the costs of paying employees and running the companies. In addition, the FEC form does not account for debt interest payments, a potentially significant expenditure for Trump, who lists five loans of over $50 million each.

In other words, this is all pretty meaningless, since we have no idea how well run Trump’s company is. Generally speaking, though, a large corporation is doing well if it records pretax earnings of around 10 percent. For a company like Trump’s, maybe the average is more like 15-20 percent. Then again, it could be lower if his debt service is high. Who knows?

That said, a rough guess puts Trump’s income last year somewhere in the range of $40-$100 million. Not bad.

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Running for President Can Be a Profitable Investment

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The Great Trump Peace Tour Is Beginning

by JovitaLarnach Posted on May 19, 2016

Mother Jones

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From Bloomberg:

Donald Trump is looking to break down the political wall between him and a segment of Hispanic voters: Latino evangelicals who tend to vote Republican. Trump aides have told the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference that the presumptive Republican presidential nominee will submit videotaped remarks to be played at their annual conference this weekend in California.

….“It would be the first time that I’m aware of that he’s addressing, even though it’s a videotaped message, a Latino organization,” said Brent Wilkes, the national executive director of the League of United Latin American Citizens. “That’s encouraging, honestly.”

Encouraging! Maybe so—for Trump, anyway. One of the things he seems to have learned in his career is that it’s usually not too hard to kiss and make up. You can treat people as harshly as you want, but once the fight is over all you have to do is announce publicly that these are really great guys and you have nothing but respect for them. It’s life as a football game.

Will it work in a presidential campaign? Can Trump make up with women, blacks, gays, Hispanics, and the disabled? It’s possible. People have short memories, and they’re suckers for praise. If he’s smart enough to rein in the insults and shower conservative-leaning groups with praise, there’s no telling how far he can go.

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The Great Trump Peace Tour Is Beginning

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Why Is the Murder Rate Increasing?

by AllanTrapp Posted on May 18, 2016

Mother Jones

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Over at Vox, Dara Lind has a longish piece about the “Ferguson Effect,” the notion that homicides are up because police are afraid to do their jobs in an era of viral videos and public backlash against police violence:

Just like there’s been a certain reluctance to admit homicide is rising at all among people who don’t want to blame Black Lives Matter protesters for it, there’s been reluctance to attribute any rise in homicides to changes in policing….But the reality is that changes in policing do affect crime rates. Indeed, “proactive” policing — in forms that have officers walking around neighborhoods and building relationships with their residents — is one of the most effective things a city can do to prevent crime. You just have to look at the correct scale: Police departments are local institutions, and they affect things on a local scale.

“Gun violence is very local,” says crime analyst Jeff Asher. “And changes in gun violence patterns probably have local explanations.” So he doesn’t give much credence to Comey’s version of the Ferguson effect theory — that the hypothetical fear of being the subject of a viral video somewhere is changing how cops around the country do their jobs. “There’s little evidence in the places we can measure it,” he says, “that proactivity in, say, Louisville, went down because of events in St. Louis or Baltimore.”

The problem, of course, is that this kind of thing is difficult to measure, which means the Ferguson Effect is all but impossible to verify. Personally I’m skeptical: homicide rates appear to be up a lot more than overall violent crime rates, and that’s hard to square with any kind of policing theory. And it’s important to get this right: If we choose the wrong theory about why murder rates are up, we have almost no chance of getting them back down. Liberals and conservatives alike need to be willing to go wherever the data leads them.

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Why Is the Murder Rate Increasing?

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He Killed Two FBI Agents. Or He Was Framed. After 40 Years, Will Obama Free Leonard Peltier?

by OlaOng861826061 Posted on May 18, 2016

Mother Jones

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Leonard Peltier, a member of the Lakota tribe who was convicted of murdering two FBI agents in 1977, has spent 40 of his 71 years in federal prison. During that time, some have come to view him as an international symbol of the mistreatment of Native Americans by the US criminal justice system; others see him as the murderer of two FBI agents who should continue to pay his debt to society. Recently a group of prominent lawyers—backed by world leaders, civil rights activists, and several members of the US Congress—have renewed efforts to win his freedom by filing a formal appeal for clemency to the Department of Justice and requesting that President Barack Obama intervene on Peltier’s behalf.

In February, Martin Garbus, a well-known New York City trial lawyer and the lead attorney of the group, joined by former US Attorney Cynthia Dunne and attorney Carl S. Nadler, wrote a five-page letter to Obama urging him to grant Peltier clemency. “The time has come for the interests of the law enforcement community to be balanced against principles of fundamental fairness, reconciliation, and healing,” they contended.

They also submitted a 44-page petition for clemency to the Justice Department’s Office of the Pardon Attorney on behalf of Peltier, who suffers from various medical conditions, including diabetes, high blood pressure, and a heart condition. All of this, the petition notes, impairs “his ability to walk, to see, and to conduct normal life activities…He is ill-equipped to cope with life in the maximum security prisons in which he has been jailed for many years.” The petition includes more than two dozen letters from supporters including Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Coretta Scott King, several Native American tribes, and Amnesty International.

“Mr. Peltier has exhausted all appeals and is next eligible to apply for parole in 2024, in the unlikely event that he lives that long,” the letter to Obama states. “The Parole Commission has yielded to the objections of the FBI and DOJ in denying Mr. Peltier’s applications for parole at every turn. Effectively, this Petition represents the last chance in Mr. Peltier’s lifetime for the Government to take curative and/or reconciliatory action.”

Peltier’s case has long been a flash point in the strained relations between federal law enforcement and Native Americans. The killings occurred on the the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, about 18 miles from Wounded Knee, where 300 Sioux were massacred by the US military in 1890.

In 1973, about 200 Sioux, led by members of the American Indian Movement, occupied Wounded Knee for 71 days to protest injustices against Native Americans and what they perceived as the corrupt leadership of the reservation’s president. By the end of the standoff, two Native Americans had been killed, 12 were wounded, and 12 were “missing” but suspected of having been killed by tribal leadership, according to Peltier’s petition.

The three years after the Wounded Knee occupation became known within Native American circles as the “Reign of Terror,” a period during which dozens of Native Americans were murdered and hundreds were assaulted by a private militia that was aligned with Oglala Lakota Souix chairman Dick Wilson and known as the “GOON squad.” Two years after that, with the Reign of Terror fresh on the minds of everyone in the area, the deadly shootout with the FBI agents occurred.

Many of the facts about the deaths of FBI agents Jack Williams and Robert Coler are disputed. The FBI says the agents were on the reservation to arrest a different man wanted for robbery and that they were not looking for Peltier, who was wanted on a separate warrant related to an alleged attempted murder of an off-duty police officer in Milwaukee. When the agents came to the reservation that day, according to the FBI, they encountered a vehicle carrying Peltier and found themselves under fire. Williams and Coler each died as a result of point-blank shots to the head.

Peltier’s version of the story is presented in detail in his petition. He maintains that after the FBI agents came on to the private property, “I heard shooting, grabbed my rifle, and ran towards a residence where there were women and children, but quickly ran in another direction because my presence had attracted additional gunfire to the area.” He says the area was surrounded by more than 100 FBI agents, SWAT team members, Bureau of Indian Affairs police, and members of the GOON squad.

“Along with many other American Indians who were present that day, I fired shots in the direction of men whom I later learned were federal agents,” Peltier notes in the petition. “At the end of extended gunfire, three men lay dead: Special Agents Jack R. Williams and Robert A. Coler, and American Indian Joe Stuntz.”

Peltier says he fled the area, eventually ending up in Canada because he thought he wouldn’t get a fair trial in the United States. Using affidavits from a woman later determined to have been either coerced or incompetent, the US government had Peltier sent back to the United States in February 1976 to stand trial. Two other Native Americans, Robert Robideau and Darrelle Dean Butler, were arrested for the deaths of the two FBI agents, but only Peltier was convicted in a trial that contained a number of irregularities, including sworn affidavits from witnesses who said they’d been coerced by the FBI. While Robideau and Butler were acquitted in 1976, Peltier was sentenced to two consecutive life sentences in June 1977.

Peltier and his supporters have pointed out the many problems with his trial, highlighting the fact that the government eventually admitted it did not know with certainty who had fired the point-blank shots that killed the FBI agents. Nevertheless, the latest petition for clemency flatly states that Peltier is not trying to re-litigate the case: “The finality of my conviction should not be interpreted as an endorsement of the means that were employed by the government to achieve the result” (emphasis in original).

Over the years, prominent figures such as Nelson Mandela, Pete Seeger, Harry Belafonte, and Robert Redford have called for Peltier’s release.

Garbus tells Mother Jones that this is Peltier’s second formal petition for clemency. The first, submitted in 2000 during the Clinton administration, was likely undermined by a protest of 500 active and retired FBI agents who marched in front of the White House after the petition was delivered. Garbus has now reached out to several members of Congress, including Reps. John Lewis and Barbara Lee and Sen. Patrick Leahy, to advance Peltier’s cause.

“This is a different application than the one before Clinton,” says Garbus. “We hope that we will not see the same kind of opposition at this point from these FBI families, given the passage of years, given his sickness, and given his very clear expression of remorse.”

Garbus says he has not heard from any White House officials. A White House spokesperson and the FBI both declined to comment on the petition. The Office of the Pardon Attorney—the office within the Justice Department that handles requests for pardons and clemency—also didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Garbus says he’s trying to help Peltier for one simple reason: “Forty years is enough for a wrongful conviction.”

Read the letter to Obama and Peltier’s latest petition below:

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He Killed Two FBI Agents. Or He Was Framed. After 40 Years, Will Obama Free Leonard Peltier?

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Elizabeth Warren Invokes Taylor Swift, "One of the Great Philosophers of Our Time," to Slam Donald Trump

by NellBower602441 Posted on May 16, 2016

Mother Jones

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Sen. Elizabeth Warren used her commencement speech at Bridgewater State University on Saturday to speak about the importance of fighting for one’s beliefs, no matter the challenges ahead. But before her message resorted to the same tired clichés of most commencement speeches, Warren proceeded to frame her advice in terms that the millennials in the audience would be sure to understand.

“To put it differently, as one of the great philosophers of our time has said—haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate,” Warren said, invoking the lyrics of Taylor Swift. “Knowing who you are helps you ‘shake it off.'”

While Warren didn’t specifically name the presumptive GOP presidential nominee to the graduates of the Massachusetts college on Saturday, her use of Swift’s famous lyric comes as the Massachusetts senator ramp ups her attacks against Donald Trump on social media. She was not the only one. Speaking at Rutgers University the following day, President Barack Obama also indirectly took aim at Trump’s campaign, warning students about the dangers of ignorance and building a border wall at the US-Mexico border.

Originally posted here:

Elizabeth Warren Invokes Taylor Swift, "One of the Great Philosophers of Our Time," to Slam Donald Trump

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Postal Contraceptives Are the Future

by JPVJaime806616 Posted on May 16, 2016

Mother Jones

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When we last met, both the federal government and the Little Sisters of the Poor had submitted their homework assignments to the Supreme Court on the issue of health coverage for contraceptives. Should the Sisters be required to fill out a form saying they declined contraceptive coverage? That would be cooperating with evil. Should they be required to do nothing, with only their insurance company required to provide notification? That has problems too. Still, the briefs had been submitted and the court now had its second chance to do its job and decide the issue for good. Instead we got this:

The court punted the issue back to lower courts, and said its unanimous ruling “expresses no view on the merits of the cases.” In the unsigned opinion, the court emphasized: “In particular, the Court does not decide whether petitioners’ religious exercise has been substantially burdened, whether the Government has a compelling interest, or whether the current regulations are the least restrictive means of serving that interest.”

They have decided nothing. Nothing! Without Anton Scalia around, they’re flailing helplessly. Either they’re hopelessly deadlocked 4-4 and are buying time, or else they really need a foil to inspire them.

I do sort of wonder what’s going on here. I suppose it all has to do with self-insured entities, just like the feds warned. If, say, a Catholic hospital self insures and chooses not to provide contraceptive coverage, then it really doesn’t matter if they fill out a form or not. Who’s going to provide the contraceptives? There’s no separate entity to do it.

I’m curious: how does this work in other countries? They have Catholic hospitals, don’t they? And Catholic charities. And so forth. And health coverage is universal, and I imagine some (most?) countries cover contraceptives in their universal coverage. What’s the Catholic Church’s take on all this? Is the United States the only country they’re mad at?

So what’s my solution? The Post Office. Hear me out. There are lots of fans of postal banking out there. I keep asking why anyone thinks the Post Office is especially well suited to the task of banking, and the usual answer is that they have lots of buildings all over the country. I guess buildings are the main qualification for providing banking services. So why not postal contraceptives too? We could train some postal workers in each Post Office to become specialized contraceptive nurses, and then provide everything free of charge right there. Pills, IUDs, implants, whatever. Are you with me on this?

Originally posted here:

Postal Contraceptives Are the Future

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