Tag Archives: virginia

Democrats Don’t Brag Enough About the Stuff They Do

by BufordDelvalle Posted on May 29, 2017

Mother Jones

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A couple of days ago Paul Krugman wrote about the Trump double-cross:

Let’s talk about West Virginia, which went Trump by more than 40 percentage points, topped only by Wyoming. What did West Virginians think they were voting for?

They are, after all, residents of a poor state that benefits immensely from federal programs: 29 percent of the population is on Medicaid, almost 19 percent on food stamps. The expansion of Medicaid under Obamacare is the main reason the percentage of West Virginians without health insurance has halved since 2013.

….Trumpcare, the budget office tells us, would cause 23 million people to lose health insurance, largely through cuts to Medicaid….Then we need to add in the Trump budget, which calls for further drastic cuts in Medicaid, plus large cuts in food stamps and in disability payments. What would happen to West Virginia if all these Trump policies went into effect? Basically, it would be apocalyptic.

….So many of the people who voted for Donald Trump were the victims of an epic scam by a man who has built his life around scamming. In the case of West Virginians, this scam could end up pretty much destroying their state. Will they ever realize this, and admit it to themselves? More important, will they be prepared to punish him the only way they can — by voting for Democrats?

Since I happened to be chatting about this yesterday, I want to offer an alternative explanation for what’s going on here. More accurately, I guess, it’s a supplementary explanation, since there’s not much question that Donald Trump has indeed pulled a very long con on voters like the ones in West Virginia.

Basically it’s this: what do you expect if Democrats don’t support their own policies? For the past five years, Republicans have battered Obamacare as the most horrific policy ever enacted. Democrats have—what? Hidden under rocks, mostly. Moderates looked at the polls and decided to avoid even talking about Obamacare. Progressives mostly scorned it as a piece of crap and spent their energy explaining why we should all support single-payer instead. So what’s the result? Lots of people think Obamacare is horrific. After all, that’s what one side says, and the other side hardly even fights back.

West Virginians on Medicaid probably have no idea they’re getting it via Obamacare. West Virginians who buy insurance from Healthcare.gov probably have no idea they’re insured via Obamacare. West Virginians who got a payroll tax break early in the Obama years probably have no idea they even got it, let alone that it came from Democrats. West Virginians who got new roads or schools from the stimulus program probably have no idea it came from Democrats. West Virginians who got an increase in the minimum wage in 2007-09 probably have no idea it was passed by Democrats.

On the other hand, they certainly do know that Obamacare is destroying the nation; that Democrats want to take away their guns; that Mexicans took away all their jobs; that Obama wanted to let a flood of ISIS terrorists into the country; and that fanatical leftists want to allow men into their daughters’ bathrooms.

Republicans are going to say what they’re going to say. There’s not much you can do to stop them from lying. What you can do is to loudly and proudly demand credit for the stuff you’ve done. If no one really knows that you subsidized their insurance or provided them with Medicaid or raised their wages or built them new schools, you can hardly expect them to vote for you.

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Democrats Don’t Brag Enough About the Stuff They Do

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Here’s an idea for retired coal mines: Turn them into giant batteries.

by NASBrandie Posted on May 26, 2017

A report on the employment practices of green groups finds that the sector, despite its socially progressive reputation, is still overwhelmingly the bastion of white men.

According to the study, released by Green 2.0, roughly 3 out of 10 people at environmental organizations are people of color, but at the senior staff level, the figure drops closer to 1 out of 10. And at all levels, from full-time employees to board members, men make up three-quarters or more of NGO staffs.

Click to embiggen.Green 2.0

The new report, titled “Beyond Diversity: A Roadmap to Building an Inclusive Organization,” relied on more than 85 interviews of executives and HR reps and recruiters at environmental organizations.

Representatives of NGOs and foundations largely agreed on the benefits of having a more diverse workforce, from the added perspectives in addressing environmental problems to a deeper focus on environmental justice to allowing the movement to engage a wider audience.

The most worrisome finding is that fewer than 40 percent of environmental groups even had diversity plans in place to ensure they’re more inclusive. According to the report, “Research shows that diversity plans increases the odds of black men in management positions significantly.”

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Here’s an idea for retired coal mines: Turn them into giant batteries.

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This Policeman Says He Was Fired for Not Shooting a Man

by SherrilBaskin Posted on May 11, 2017

Mother Jones

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Police reform advocates have demanded in recent years that officers face consequences for using excessive force, especially in shootings. But a new lawsuit alleges that a former Weirton, West Virginia, police officer was disciplined for doing the opposite. During an incident last May, Officer Stephen Mader decided not to shoot an armed suicidal man. Police brass determined he showed poor judgment during the encounter. Soon after, Mader was fired from the town’s police force. Now he is suing the city for wrongful termination.

The lawsuit, filed May 10 against the city of Weirton by Mader’s attorney along with the ACLU of West Virginia, accuses the department of firing Mader to buttress its defense of another officer who did shoot the man. In an emailed statement to Mother Jones, Weirton’s mayor’s office declined to comment on the suit, adding that the “the city hasn’t received a copy of the lawsuit or been made aware of any allegations.”

According to the lawsuit, on the evening of May 6, 2016, Mader responded to a 911 call from a woman who reported that her ex-boyfriend was at her home and had threatened to kill himself. Mader—a veteran of the Marines—was a rookie officer at the time. When he arrived at the scene, he encountered Ronald Williams, a 21-year-old African American man, standing outside the home with his hands behind his back. After initially refusing to show his hands, Williams brought them to his side and revealed that he was holding a handgun. Mader demanded that Williams drop it, but he refused and told Mader to shoot him.

During the encounter, Williams was visibly despondent but not aggressive, the lawsuit says. Mader says he determined that Williams was attempting to commit suicide-by-cop and—believing that he was not a threat—decided not to shoot him. As Mader tried to talk him down, two other officers arrived on the scene. Williams then raised his gun, and one of the officers shot him in the head, killing him. The officers later determined that Williams’ gun was unloaded.

Mader was fired the next month following an investigation into the incident. Weirton’s city manager told local media after Mader’s dismissal that he was fired because of two other incidents that took place earlier in the year. In the termination letter, the Weirton police chief wrote that Mader displayed “difficulties in critical incident reasoning” and had failed “to meet probationary standards of an officer.” The letter does not refer to Mader’s encounter with Williams or other incidents. But in an accompanying memo, a police captain accused Mader of “negligence” during the May 6 incident because he “failed to engage the suspect” and eliminate a threat, forcing another officer to shoot Williams in order to protect his ex-girlfriend, her child, and other officers on the scene. A prosecutor also determined that the officer who shot Williams—and who remains on the force—was justified in doing so.

According to his lawsuit, it was Mader’s responsibility to decide for himself what kind of force to use based on his own assessment of whether Williams posed an imminent threat. Department protocol—and the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution—barred him from using deadly force in any other circumstance. The suit also argues that the department’s decision to fire him encourages other Weirton Police Department officers to use force in incidents where it may not be necessary by sending the message that they could lose their jobs if they don’t. “What I think it shows—and this is a problem I think we have throughout the country—is that because you can use deadly force, you should use deadly force,” Mader’s attorney Tim O’Brien told me. “And what this case is about is that an officer should be entitled to exercise that discretion based on facts known to that officer.” The same can be said of officers who choose to shoot, O’Brien noted, but the same Fourth Amendment standard applies.

General de-escalation training for police and more precise training on dealing with individuals in a mental health crisis have been increasingly adopted by police departments around the country in recent years, but the training is still not widespread. Just 16 states mandate de-escalation training for police officers, according to a recent investigation by AMP Reports. West Virginia is not one of them. Among those states that do require it, some require as little as one hour of training per year.

Mader says he received some de-escalation training in the Weirton police academy, but he mostly drew on his military training during his encounter with Williams. There is little research on whether military veterans—which account for nearly 20 percent of of all police officers nationwide, according to a recent Marshall Project investigation—are more or less likely to use force. A recent Pew Research survey found that cops who were veterans were slightly more likely to say they had used force than their non-veteran peers.

Mader told me he believes Williams might still be alive if he had had more time to talk to him before other officers arrived on the scene. O’Brien agreed, and said that while the case is about a single officer, it has implications for policing nationwide “and the context in which we have arrived in this society where it has become almost second nature to accept the fact that a first option is to shoot and kill a citizen. It’s become much more the norm than perhaps it should be and that’s what we need to evaluate.”

You can read the full lawsuit here.

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This Policeman Says He Was Fired for Not Shooting a Man

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The State of Reproductive Health Legislation in 2017 Is Not Exactly What You Would Expect

by TawannaAraujo Posted on April 17, 2017

Mother Jones

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At the beginning of 2017, reproductive rights advocates feared that the election of President Donald Trump and the Republican sweep in many statehouses would embolden anti-abortion legislators at the state level. By mid-January, four states had already introduced late-term abortion bans, while others—Missouri, for instance—had filed a significant number of anti-abortion-related legislation ahead of this year’s legislative session. As the first quarter of the year comes to a close, a new report released this week by the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive rights research and advocacy think tank, finds that the policies introduced so far this year paint a more complicated picture.

The institute’s report finds that state legislatures across the country have introduced some 1,053 reproductive-health-related provisions since January, and that of those proposed measures, 431 would restrict access to abortion services, while 405 would expand access to reproductive health services—the report does not categorize the remaining measures.

Five states—Kentucky, Wyoming, Arizona, Arkansas, and Utah—have already passed at least one abortion restriction this year—with a total of 10 new restrictions becoming laws. In Kentucky, a ban on abortions 20 weeks post-fertilization was signed by Republican Gov. Matt Bevin after a sprint through the state Legislature. Utah now requires doctors to tell women that medication abortions can be “reversed” after the first dose in the two-dose protocol, a claim that, as with many abortion counseling requirements in other states, is not supported by evidence. Arizona became one of the first states in the country to detail specific requirements for how doctors must work to preserve the life of the fetus after an abortion procedure, a law that some critics have challenged for possibly prolonging the pain of nonviable fetuses.

“There is this competition to the bottom that has been happening with state legislatures and abortion over the past six years,” says Elizabeth Nash, the state issues manager for the Guttmacher Institute and the lead author on the report. But in 2017, she adds “the scale has changed.” She explained that compared with the same period from 2011 to 2016, “we haven’t been seeing as much activity on abortion as we have seen.” Rather than suggesting a diminished interest in abortion restrictions, Nash explains that given the onslaught of new abortion restrictions in the past six years, some states might simply be running out of measures to introduce. But beyond that, health care reform, state budgets, and the opioid crisis might have caused conservative state legislatures to focus their attention elsewhere at the beginning of their legislative sessions, suggesting that anti-abortion activity might pick up later in the year.

As a result of this reduced activity, Nash says, “we have been seeing less in the way of trends” when looking at the types of abortion restrictions introduced in 2017. There are still some commonalities among the various restrictions introduced in the states, particularly concerning “abortion bans” that prohibit abortions being sought for certain reasons—such as a genetic anomaly or the sex of the fetus—or after a specific point in the pregnancy.

In 28 states, legislators have introduced some 88 measures that would either ban abortion completely or prohibit it in specific circumstances. In Arkansas, for example, a law was recently passed that bars doctors from using a common second trimester abortion procedure known as “dilation and evacuation.” Similar restrictions have passed at least one chamber in Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Texas. The “20-week abortion ban” was passed in Kentucky and has cleared at least one legislative chamber in Iowa, Montana, and Pennsylvania. Six-week abortion bans, also known as “heartbeat bills,” are also being introduced in several states, possibly in response to Ohio legislators successfully presenting a version to Gov. John Kasich last year; he vetoed the bill but signed a 20-week abortion ban into law.

Nash notes that some of the legislative support of abortion bans may be motivated by an interest in getting a case before the Supreme Court in the next few years. “They are thinking about being the state that overturns Roe v. Wade and the way to do that is to adopt something like a 6-week abortion ban or a 20-week abortion ban and then send that up through the courts,” she says.

The Guttmacher report notes that abortion restrictions continue to be introduced at a relatively steady, if somewhat lessened, rate, but proactive reproductive health legislation has seen an increase, with 21 states and the District of Columbia considering measures that would expand reproductive health services. “The number of proactive measures grew from 221 in 2015 and 353 in 2016” to 405 in 2017, the report notes. The report suggests that this development is likely “in anticipation of the possible dismantling of the Affordable Care Act and loss of its contraceptive coverage guarantee.” So far Virginia is the only state to enact a proactive measure; the state will now require that insurance plans covering contraceptives allow enrollees to receive a year’s supply at once.

Proactive legislation on the state level is likely to become increasingly important as the Republican-controlled Congress and other conservative-led legislatures continue to use funding to target reproductive services providers such as Planned Parenthood. Last week, Trump signed into law a measure allowing states to withhold public funds used for family planning—also known as Title X funding—marked for contraception and other nonabortion services from groups that also provide abortions. The move nullifies an Obama-era rule protecting Planned Parenthood and other groups from losing federal family-planning funds.

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The State of Reproductive Health Legislation in 2017 Is Not Exactly What You Would Expect

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Uncovering the Plot to Kill Lettuce

by IvaRakanrmmjsk Posted on April 2, 2017

Mother Jones

Glossy, beautifully produced cookbooks tend to focus on scenic vacation magnets like Tuscany, Provence, or Napa Valley. But in Victuals, the veteran cookbook writer Ronni Lundy gives that treatment to a place most known in the popular imagination for economic and environmental dysfunction: the Southern Appalachians.

America often underestimates the Appalachian states of West Virginia, Kentucky, eastern Tennessee, and the western Carolinas—even assuming that the pronunciation of the word “victuals” as “vittles” must be uneducated slang. Not so, reveals Lundy. In fact, the actual accurate pronunciation is “vittles.” “So we’ve been right for all of these years,” Lundy says on a recent episode of the Mother Jones food podcast Bite (interview starts at 14:45). “We’ve been right about the way you pronounce it, we’ve been right about the way you grow them, preserve them, the way you dry them and cure them and eat them, and the way you create community around the table.”

In Lundy’s book, a kind of travelogue with recipes, a different vision of the region comes to life: one of lushly forested mountains and fertile valleys dotted with small farms, blessed with “the most diverse foodshed in North America.” There’s even an ancient tie to the sunny Mediterranean. “What we call the Appalachian Mountains was once part of a larger chain on the ancient super-continent of Pangea,” she writes; and Pangea’s split left today’s Appalachia with “sister peaks” in present-day Morocco.

Lundy and I talked about her own roots in the region, the recent hipsterization of Appalachia, and what a typical dinner table might feature at the height of summer—which I can testify, having once lived in the region for nearly a decade, is a time of great beauty and bounty. And we talked through an irresistible dish called “killed lettuce”—fresh salad greens wilted with warm bacon grease. While the book, like the region’s small farms, teems with fresh produce, the hog and its various products emerge as the hero of Victuals: a reminder of the noble beast’s central place in so many resourceful food traditions across the globe.

Killed Lettuce

serves 4

Ingredients

8 cups torn crisp salad greens (in bite-size pieces)
2 whole green onions, finely chopped
4 bacon slices
1/4 cup apple cider vinegar
salt and freshly ground pepper

Directions

Rinse and thoroughly dry the greens, and then toss them with the green onions in a large bowl.

Fry the bacon in a skillet over medium heat until very crisp, and remove from the skillet to drain. Remove the skillet from the heat. Immediately pour the vinegar over the lettuce and toss, then pour the warm bacon grease over that, tossing again. Add salt and pepper to taste. Crumble the bacon over the greens and serve immediately.

*These basic proportions can be used in many variations: Put a soft-cooked egg on top, which becomes part of the dressing, or warm beans. The defining part of the dish is that the greens are not cooked, but are tossed with vinegar and hot bacon grease to wilt them.

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Uncovering the Plot to Kill Lettuce

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BREAKING: Donald Trump Played Golf This Weekend

by LucieCharley Posted on March 27, 2017

Mother Jones

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The sad thing about this tweet is that it really would be news if Donald Trump was at the White House working this weekend:

But no: Trump played golf at his club in Virginia this weekend, so it’s not clear what Fox was up to here. Perhaps they meant to say that by 5:26 pm on Sunday, Trump was back in the White House.

Normally, I’d suggest that everyone cool it with the golf snark. We’ve now had four consecutive presidents who have taken endless grief every time they hit the links, and it’s pretty stupid. Let ’em golf if they want to. But there are two differences with Trump. First, the guy really does play a ton of golf. You’d think the first few months of a new presidency would be a busy time, but Trump has played 12 rounds of golf, mostly at Mar-a-Lago, in only ten weekends. That’s more than he played before he was president. Second, like an embarrassed drunk, he’s now trying to hide his golf addiction. This weekend marked the second in a row in which his press office tried to pretend that Trump was “meeting with people” at the club, only to have Trump’s golfing exposed, as they must have known it would be, by someone with a cell phone tweeting out pictures. Why do they bother with such flimsy and easily exposed lies?

And while we’re on the subject of Trump, I’d like to note that he’s hit the quadfecta I predicted on Thursday. He has now blamed all four of the following for the failure of Trumpcare:

Paul Ryan, for insisting on doing health care before tax reform and then being unable to shepherd the bill through the House.
The Freedom Caucus, for voting against his bill.
Democrats, for…being the opposition party, I guess.
Obama, for deliberately designing Obamacare to fail in 2017.

Apparently Reince Priebus is also taking some heat from within the White House, because he’s pals with Ryan and was supposed to know about all this congressional hoo ha. But it’s not clear if Trump himself blames Priebus for anything.

Original article – 

BREAKING: Donald Trump Played Golf This Weekend

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Trump Unfamiliar With Both New START and 2013 Immigration Bill

by RobertaRosenbau Posted on February 9, 2017

Mother Jones

The latest tidbit of Trump idiocy making the rounds is this disclosure about his call last week with Vladimir Putin:

When Putin raised the possibility of extending the 2010 treaty, known as New START, Trump paused to ask his aides in an aside what the treaty was, these sources said. Trump then told Putin the treaty was one of several bad deals negotiated by the Obama administration, saying that New START favored Russia. Trump also talked about his own popularity, the sources said.

There are, as usual, several things we can say about this:

Trump’s ignorance is almost boundless.
He nonetheless refuses to be briefed before calls with foreign leaders.
The willingness of his staff to leak unflattering anecdotes about him is both epic and unprecedented.

But the bit that caught my attention was this: “Trump also talked about his own popularity, the sources said.” This is far from the first time we’ve heard this. Trump is apparently nearly incapable of talking with a foreign leader without blathering about how terrific he is, how well loved he is, how epic his victory was, and how gigantic the crowds at his inauguration were.

And as long as we’re on the subject, here’s Trump idiocy #2 for the day. Sen. Joe Manchin passes along the following anecdote about immigration legislation from a White House lunch today:

According to the West Virginia Democrat, when Trump noted that there is no current immigration legislation under consideration on Capitol Hill, another senator in attendance, Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), mentioned the 2013 bill. Alexander also noted that the 2013 bill had passed with 68 votes, Manchin recalled.

“Well, that sounds like something good and you all agreed, 68? What happened to it?” Trump said, according to Manchin.

“I’ll tell you exactly what happened, Mr. President,” Manchin said he told Trump. “It went to the House and Majority Leader Eric Cantor gets defeated. They’re crying ‘Amnesty, amnesty, amnesty’ and House Speaker John Boehner could not bring it back up on the floor and get a vote — that’s exactly what happened.”

At that point, Trump said, “I want to see it,” Manchin said. “So he was very anxious to see it. He says, ‘I know what amnesty is.’ And I said, ‘Sir, I don’t think you’re going to find this is amnesty at all.’”

Sean Spicer later “clarified” that Trump opposes the 2013 bill and considers it to be amnesty. And I suppose he does, now that someone has told him what his opinion is supposed to be.

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Trump Unfamiliar With Both New START and 2013 Immigration Bill

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The Department of Energy has taken a last-minute step to protect scientists from Trump.

by Larue35Xgs Posted on January 12, 2017

Senate confirmation hearings began on Wednesday for Tillerson, former CEO of ExxonMobil and Trump’s nominee for secretary of state. Tillerson was pressed on the issue of climate change by several senators, including Tennessee Republican Bob Corker, who asked Tillerson if he believes that human activity is the cause.

“The increase in greenhouse gas in the atmosphere is having an effect,” Tillerson said, demonstrating that he at least knows more about the issue than our future president. But, Tillerson added, “Our ability to predict that effect is very limited.” This is false.

Tillerson had less to say about allegations that Exxon, his employer for 40 years, knew about the effect of greenhouse gases on the atmosphere back in the ’70s and failed to disclose the risks to the public or shareholders. When asked about it by Virginia Democrat Tim Kaine, Tillerson punted and said he didn’t work there anymore: “You’ll have to ask them.”

The nominee did acknowledge that it’s important for the U.S. to stay involved in international climate negotiations and “maintain its seat at the table in the conversation.” As for what he would do at that table, he’s not saying. If he wanted to do anything constructive, first he’d have to convince his boss.

You can read more about the hearing here.

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The Department of Energy has taken a last-minute step to protect scientists from Trump.

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House Republicans Vote to Rein In Serious Investigation of Republicans

by LindseyKempton Posted on January 3, 2017

Mother Jones

When Republicans control Congress and a Democrat is president, it’s all investigation all the time. It doesn’t matter if any of the stuff they’re investigating is genuinely scandalous or not. They just keep at it, month after endless month.

With a Republican about to take over the White House, we all expected this to come to a halt. But as usual, Republicans aren’t satisfied with just letting their investigatory fever quietly fade away. They have to take it a step further:

House Republicans, defying their top leaders, voted Monday to significantly curtail the power of an independent ethics office set up in 2008 in the aftermath of corruption scandals that sent three members of Congress to jail.

The move to weaken the Office of Congressional Ethics was not public until late Monday, when Representative Robert Goodlatte, Republican of Virginia and chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, announced that the House Republican Conference had approved the change with no advance public notice or debate.

This is all happening at the same time that the most corrupt president in modern history—almost by definition—is about to take office. Donald Trump has made it crystal clear that he doesn’t care about conflict-of-interest allegations and plans to use the presidency to boost his family’s wealth by as much as the traffic will bear. Republicans in Congress have responded by making it clear that this is fine with them, and now the House is making it equally clear that they don’t intend to allow any serious investigations of corruption among their own members. It’s going to be a free-for-all, and nobody with any subpoena power will ever be allowed to touch any Republican.

I didn’t expect them to be quite so obvious about this. But apparently they just don’t care anymore.

UPDATE: BuzzFeed does a good job of summarizing what this change means:

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House Republicans Vote to Rein In Serious Investigation of Republicans

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Leaked Document: Trump Wants to Identify Officials Who Worked on Obama Climate Policies

by MonikaNQAmqd Posted on December 9, 2016

Mother Jones

Donald Trump aides are attempting to identify Department of Energy staffers who played a role in promoting President Barack Obama’s climate policies, according to details of a leaked transition team questionnaire published by Bloomberg Thursday night.

According to Bloomberg:

The transition team has asked the agency to list employees and contractors who attended United Nations climate meetings, along with those who helped develop the Obama administration’s social cost of carbon metrics, used to estimate and justify the climate benefits of new rules. The advisers are also seeking information on agency loan programs, research activities and the basis for its statistics, according to a five-page internal document circulated by the Energy Department on Wednesday. The document lays out 65 questions from the Trump transition team, sources within the agency said.

Bloomberg goes on to say the document was confirmed by two Energy Department employees, who said agency staff were “unsettled” by the request. Someone in Trump’s transition team also confirmed the authenticity of the document to Bloomberg.

Leading Trump’s energy transition team is Tom Pyle, who is currently the president of the American Energy Alliance. Pyle was previously a policy analyst for former Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Texas) before becoming director of federal affairs for Koch Industries.

The president-elect isn’t a fan of climate action: He has promised to end America’s involvement in the Paris climate agreement and cancel financial contributions to UN climate programs, and he has claimed that global warming is a scam invented by the Chinese. (He later suggested he was joking about China’s role, but regardless, he has repeatedly called climate change a “hoax.”) You can read an entire timeline of Trump’s various—and at times contradictory—statements on climate change here.

Trump has also assembled a team of climate change deniers, including Scott Pruitt, the Oklahoma attorney general, who Trump nominated to run the Environmental Protection Agency. Read a full list of the global warming deniers and opponents of climate action who are vying for positions in the Trump administration here.

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Leaked Document: Trump Wants to Identify Officials Who Worked on Obama Climate Policies

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