Tag Archives: washington

The Electoral College Just Made it Official: Donald Trump Will Be President

by FrederickaHawes Posted on December 19, 2016

Mother Jones

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Update, 5:39 p.m. EST: Donald Trump officially secured a majority of the Electoral College votes needed to become the next president of the United States.

As the Electoral College’s 538 members gather across the country on Monday to formally cast their ballots for the next president and vice president of the United States, protesters have flocked to state capitals to urge electors to deny Donald Trump the presidency. The normally staid process has drawn an unusual amount of attention this year, as activists have mounted various efforts to challenge the Electoral College results amid alarm over Trump’s Cabinet picks and conflicts of interest, as well as revelations about Russia’s alleged role in hacking US political targets to aid Trump.

“Shame! You don’t deserve to be an American!” one protester shouted in Wisconsin, as all 10 of the state’s electors voted to officially make Trump president. “You have sold us out!”

Numerous arrests have been made, including in Pennsylvania where 12 immigration activists were cited for disorderly conduct for protesting Trump’s victory in the state.

In Minnesota, a state that Hillary Clinton won, one elector was replaced after refusing to vote for her. A Maine Democratic elector decided to cast his protest vote for Bernie Sanders instead of Clinton. In Washington, three electors voted for Colin Powell instead of Clinton; a fourth elector wrote in “Faith Spotted Eagle.”

The unprecedented effort to upend the Electoral College vote is unlikely to amount to much. As Mother Jones reported last week, it’s highly unlikely that enough electors will change their votes and abandon the party’s nominee. While President Barack Obama called the Electoral College process a “vestige” on Friday, he said voters searching for a “silver bullet” fix to American politics are probably in for a disappointment. The large absence of “faithless” electors revolting against Trump further fuels this notion.

On Sunday, Trump rebuked his opponents and the movement to reject his path to the White House.

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The Electoral College Just Made it Official: Donald Trump Will Be President

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Swamp Watch – 17 December 2016

by JosefF098836806 Posted on December 17, 2016

Mother Jones

Mick Mulvaney, a lunatic budget hawk who entered Congress in the great tea party wave of 2010, will be our new director of the Office of Management and Budget. Most people probably think this is bad because he’s a lunatic budget hawk, but I’m not sure how much that matters. After all, Paul Ryan is already a budget hawk—except for budget-busting tax cuts, of course—and defense spending—and anything else that conservatives happen to like. But anyway, he’s a budget hawk as that term is currently abused. So Mulvaney probably doesn’t add an awful lot to the total weight of budget hawkery that will rule Washington DC next year.

But OMB is important for an entirely different reason: it plays a huge role in the regulatory process. Allow me to quote from the OMB website:

The Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) is a statutory part of the Office of Management and Budget within the Executive Office of the President. OIRA is the United States Government’s central authority for the review of Executive Branch regulations, approval of Government information collections, establishment of Government statistical practices, and coordination of federal privacy policy. The office is comprised of five subject matter branches and is led by the OIRA Administrator, who is appointed by the President and confirmed by the United States Senate.

Mulvaney will be the patron saint of “cost-benefit” analysis of federal regulations—which, in Republican hands, normally means totting up the costs and ignoring the benefits. In particular, it means that environmental regulations, even those with immense benefits, will be scored into oblivion and never see the light of day. Lucky us.

Anyway, we’re almost finished. We have two cabinet positions left—Agriculture and Veterans Affair—and two cabinet-level posts—CEA and trade representative. Tick tick tick.

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Swamp Watch – 17 December 2016

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President Obama to Putin: "We Can Do Stuff to You"

by MelissaJrw Posted on December 16, 2016

Mother Jones

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In response to alleged Russian hacking of US political targets, President Barack Obama said during a press conference on Friday that the US government will “continue to send a message to Russia to not do this to us because we can do stuff to you.”

Obama, in his last press conference of 2016, defended his administration’s response to the hacks, saying that in the “hyperpartisan atmosphere” of the US presidential election “my primary concern was making sure that the integrity of the election process wasn’t damaged.” He told reporters that he wanted to ensure that the election proceeded without the impression that his administration was trying to tip the scales in favor of either candidate. “The truth of the matter is that everybody had the information,” he said. “It was out there, and we handled it the way we should have.”

Now that the election is over, Obama said his administration will fashion a response to the hacking that will send a message to the Russian government. He said some of this response would be public, but that part would play out “in a way they know but not everybody will.”

“At a point in time where we’ve taken certain actions that we can divulge properly, we will do so,” Obama said.

Obama also downplayed the value of an overt response: “The idea that somehow public shaming is going to be effective I think doesn’t read the thought process in Russia very well,” Obama said.

The press conference comes on the heels of numerous media reports, citing unnamed intelligence officials, detailing Russia’s alleged role in hacking US political targets, including the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta. Last week, the Washington Post reported that the CIA had concluded that the Russian government had mounted the hacks in an effort to sway the election in favor of Donald Trump. The New York Times has laid out how the US government thinks the hacks played out. NBC has reported that intelligence officials believe that Vladimir Putin himself oversaw the hacking operation. Just before Obama spoke, the Post reported that the FBI now agrees with the CIA’s assessment that the Russian hacks were designed to help Trump.

Obama said the intelligence community will produce a final assessment on the hacks before he leaves office, and that he doesn’t want to get ahead of the report’s conclusions. But, when pressed, he alluded to Putin’s direct involvement.

“Not much happens in Russia without Vladimir Putin,” he said. “This is a pretty hierarchical operation. Last I checked, there’s not a lot of debate and democratic deliberation, particularly when it comes to policies directed at the United States.”

Trump has consistently downplayed the accusations against Putin and Russia, calling the CIA assessment “ridiculous,” and he has claimed the allegations of Russian political interference in the presidential election are politically driven.

At a dinner with donors on Thursday, Hillary Clinton said Putin directed the hacks “because he had a personal beef against me,” one that originated after she questioned the fairness of parliamentary elections held in Russia in 2011. “Putin publicly blamed me for the outpouring of outrage by his own people,” she said, “and that is a direct line between what he said back then and what he did in this election.” On Thursday night, Podesta published an op-ed in the Washington Post arguing that something is “deeply wrong with the FBI” and calling for an airing of as much evidence as can safely be made public about the hacks, along with a full, independent investigation into the matter.

In an interview with NPR’s Steve Inskeep on Thursday, Obama vowed to retaliate against Russia.

“I think there is no doubt that when any foreign government tries to impact the integrity of our elections, that we need to take action,” he said in the interview. “And we will at a time and place of our own choosing. Some of it may well be explicit and publicized, some of it may not be.” Obama said his administration has “been working hard to make sure that what we do is proportional, that what we do is meaningful.”

It’s unclear what form US retribution could take. Michael Daniel, a special assistant to the president and the White House cybersecurity coordinator, told Cyber Scoop on Friday that “the US government is still pulling together” a response to the hacks.

Discussing the impact of the hacks during his press conference on Friday, Obama said Russia can only weaken the United States if Americans let it happen. “The Russians can’t change us or significantly weaken us,” Obama said. “They are a smaller country, they are a weaker county, their economy doesn’t produce anything that anyone wants to buy except oil, gas, and arms, they don’t innovate. But they can impact us if we lose track of who we are, if we abandon our values.”

This is a developing story.

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President Obama to Putin: "We Can Do Stuff to You"

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Here are three reasons the world didn’t completely suck this week.

by OrenAmaral Posted on December 16, 2016

In his final press conference of 2016, President Obama — in his usual, staid tones — fielded question after question about Russia’s alleged election interference.

But Obama also reminded us that at the heart of Russia’s economic interests and relative power is its backward status as a petrostate.

“They are a smaller country; they are a weaker country; their economy doesn’t produce anything that anyone wants to buy except oil and gas and arms,” he said. “They don’t innovate. But, they can impact us if we lose track of who we are. They can impact us if we abandon our values.”

The Washington Post calls Trump’s relationship with Russia “the most obscure and disturbing aspect of his coming presidency.” Trump’s choice of Exxon’s Rex Tillerson for Secretary of State only underlines this: At Exxon, Tillerson had deals worth billions of dollars with Russia, some of which can only move forward if the U.S. lifts sanctions on the country.

These deals are only worth billions, though, if fossil fuels maintain their value. The idea that there is a “carbon bubble,” and fossil fuel companies are dangerously overvalued, is a threatening proposition to a petrostate. And, most likely, a Trump administration.

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Here are three reasons the world didn’t completely suck this week.

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A St. Louis Suburb Jailed Nearly 2,000 People for Not Paying Fines

by LeighFrayne Posted on December 16, 2016

Mother Jones

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On Wednesday, a federal judge approved a $4.7 million settlement with nearly 2,000 people who were thrown in jail illegally in a St. Louis suburb, a practice legal advocates had likened to a “modern debtors’ prison.”

The plaintiffs in the class action lawsuit alleged that the city of Jennings, Missouri, had jailed people who were unable to pay municipal fines and fees, keeping them in overcrowded, unsanitary cells where they were routinely taunted by jail guards and staff. The settlement, preliminarily approved in July, comes more than a year after the Jennings municipal court signed a separate agreement to eliminate cash bail for nonviolent offenses, dismiss “failure to appear” charges and forgive fees in cases before March 12, 2011, and establish a way to assess a person’s ability to pay. It also agreed to use civil debt collectors to obtain payments from fines instead of issuing warrants and immediately release people on first arrest on bond.

Attorneys for the plaintiffs claimed that Jennings “built a municipal scheme designed to brutalize, to punish, and to profit.” According to the complaint, the city issued more than 2.1 arrest warrants per household in 2014 and nearly 1.4 for every adult, adding that if the rest of the St. Louis area generated revenue at the same rate as Jennings, cities would have made more than $670 million in five years.

In recent years, civil rights groups have taken cities to court to compel changes to their operation of so-called debtors’ prisons, where those who cannot afford to pay fines are jailed until their debts are paid off. The practice was first barred under federal law in 1833. In 1983, the Supreme Court ruled that the act of imprisoning someone unable to settle their debt unconstitutional. Yet lawsuits and a federal investigation into policing and court practices in Ferguson following the death of Michael Brown shed light on how municipal courts locked up poor residents who couldn’t pay off their debts as a way to generate revenue. Beyond Jennings, federal lawsuits are under way against Ferguson and 13 other cities in the St. Louis area over the alleged operation of modern-day debtors’ prisons.

“One thing that has been revealed over and over again in the Ferguson investigation and these lawsuits is that the worst practices tend to arise when courts and other officials perceive a financial necessity in funding their operation through fees and fines,” says Larry Schwartztol, executive director of Harvard University’s Criminal Justice Policy Program. “That creates conflicts of interest and distorts the justice system.” William Maurer, an attorney for the Institute for Justice, told Mother Jones in July that small towns around urban areas “have municipal infrastructure that can’t be supported by the tax base, and so they ticket everything in sight to keep the town functioning.”

Here’s a look at some similar recent cases across the country:

Biloxi, Mississippi: In a complaint filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in last October, attorneys alleged that poor residents in Biloxi who couldn’t take care of their debt were “routinely” arrested and tossed in jail without receiving a court hearing to determine whether they would be able to pay such penalties. The lawsuit alleged that the city relied on the fines and fees for a substantial portion of its budget and enlisted the help of for-profit probation companies to collect the money. In March, the two sides agreed on a settlement and adjusted it in September. The city agreed to stop using private probation companies to collect payments, to adopt a “bench card” for judges as a reminder of how to not send people to jail who are unable to pay, and to provide alternatives to debt repayment, such as payment plans, job training programs, mental-health counseling, and community service. The city, its police chief, and a district judge named in the complaint also admitted no wrongdoing as part of the resolution.

Colorado Springs, Colorado: Hundreds of impoverished people in Colorado Springs who were fined for a minor infringement of the city’s ordinance had a choice: Pay the debt in full, or settle it for time in jail at $50 a day. Last October, the ACLU of Colorado sent a letter to the city’s attorney and a municipal court judge, alleging that the court had ordered the “pay or serve” sentence in more than 800 cases since January 2014. In May, the city agreed to pay $103,000 to 66 impoverished residents, or $125 for each day they were behind bars. Municipal judges and city-contracted attorneys also underwent training on the rights of indigent citizens.

Jackson, Mississippi: For impoverished Jackson residents, the Colorado Springs case sounds familiar. Those arrested for misdemeanor cases were forced to navigate Jackson’s “pay or stay” system, according to complaint filed last October. If someone failed to pay all or a large portion of their debt at the time of their hearing, they were sent to jail in Hinds County. Once behind bars, they “were told they could ‘work off’ their fines at the rate of $58 per day,” according to the complaint. Those who couldn’t work were left to “sit out” their fines at $25 a day. In June, the city of Jackson settled and created an alternative monthly payment of $25 or an hourly credit for community service. The city also eliminated a requirement for people to post a money bail when arrested for a misdemeanor and to instead be released on the condition they appear for a future court appearance.

Benton County, Washington: A woman named Jayne Fuentes was sent to county jail for more than three months to work off $3,229 in “legal financial obligations” from 2010 and 2011. A complaint filed last October by the ACLU alleged that people like Fuentes who couldn’t pay off their debt were either sent to jail or forced to work on the county’s work crew as part of “partial confinement.” In June, the county and ACLU reached a resolution. The county agreed to stop issuing warrants to arrest those who didn’t pay off their debts. Beyond that, district court judges were also required to ask about a person’s ability to pay at hearings, and county public defenders and prosecutors would receive training on the assessment and collection of court-imposed fines.

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A St. Louis Suburb Jailed Nearly 2,000 People for Not Paying Fines

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Will Trump Really Pick Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State?

by SharronHTP Posted on December 10, 2016

Mother Jones

President-elect Donald Trump has reportedly chosen Exxon Mobil president and CEO Rex Tillerson as his secretary of state, according to NBC News.

Tillerson, whose consideration for the role only became public in recent days, has long had a contentious relationship with climate change. His company, for which he has worked for his entire career, has been accused of covering up research and misleading the public about climate change since the 1970s, according to two groundbreaking investigations by InsideClimateNews and the Los Angeles Times. The investigation led several attorney generals to launch a fraud inquiry into the company. Tillerson recently acknowledged that climate change has “real” and “serious” risks but has previously downplayed its effects.

Tillerson also has close ties to Russia: In 2011, he struck a deal with Russia that would have given Exxon Mobil and OAO Rosneft, a Russian state-owned oil company, exclusive access to Arctic resources, according to the Wall Street Journal. In 2012, he was awarded an Order of Friendship decoration by the Russian government. The deal was later blocked by sanctions following Russia’s invasion of Crimea.

NBC’s report comes less than 24 hours after a bombshell report by the Washington Post indicated that the CIA has concluded Russia had intervened in the 2016 election and aided Trump’s win—a finding that Trump has ridiculed. If he were to follow through with this appointment, Tillerson’s close ties to Russia may put Trump at odds with GOP hawks.

As secretary of state, the energy CEO could also face significant potential conflicts of interest. He owns more than $150 million worth of shares in Exxon, according to the Wall Street Journal. He would have to divest from these shares, providing him a huge tax break. His company has operations in more than 50 countries.

Trump’s transition team confirmed to Reuters that Tillerson had met with Trump Saturday morning but said it would not make an official announcement until next week at the earliest.

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Will Trump Really Pick Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State?

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Donald Trump Really, Really Doesn’t Want to Hear About How Russia Got Him Elected

by TrudyBunton Posted on December 10, 2016

Mother Jones

Guess what? It turns out that Vladimir Putin really did think that the best way to cripple America was to get an incompetent buffoon like Donald Trump elected president. Smart man. Here’s the Washington Post: “The CIA has concluded in a secret assessment that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump win the presidency, rather than just to undermine confidence in the U.S. electoral system, according to officials briefed on the matter.”

The New York Times adds this: “They based that conclusion, in part, on another finding — which they say was also reached with high confidence — that the Russians hacked the Republican National Committee’s computer systems in addition to their attacks on Democratic organizations, but did not release whatever information they gleaned from the Republican networks.“

Donald Trump’s transition team thinks the intelligence community is full of crap, and we should ignore them and move on. “The election ended a long time ago,” they said in a statement, “in one of the biggest Electoral College victories in history.”

Oh really? Let’s interrupt our story about the greatest act of ratfucking in history for an aside about how Trump really did:

The good news, I guess, is that Trump has given up on claiming that he won a great victory in the popular vote. The bad news is that he’s simply switched to lying about his Electoral College victory.

Now back to Putin. I’d say that given Trump’s apparent inability to ever utter the truth—along with the odd coincidence that Trump just happens to be pro-Russia on nearly every issue Russia cares about—it might be smart to at least take a peek at what the intelligence folks have to say. Especially since the Post story also says this:

In September, during a secret briefing for congressional leaders, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) voiced doubts about the veracity of the intelligence…and made clear to the administration that he would consider any effort by the White House to challenge the Russians publicly an act of partisan politics.

So McConnell really did Trump a solid, didn’t he? And guess what? It turns out that Trump thinks McConnell’s wife is the best qualified person in the whole country to be his Secretary of Transportation! Just another coincidence, I’m sure.

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Donald Trump Really, Really Doesn’t Want to Hear About How Russia Got Him Elected

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Donald Trump’s Interior Secretary Doesn’t Want to Combat Climate Change

by bfys19 Posted on December 9, 2016

Mother Jones

On Friday the Wall Street Journal reported that Donald Trump has chosen Washington Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, chair of the House Republican Conference, to be his Secretary of Interior. The Interior Department is responsible for three quarters of the nation’s public lands, and includes under its umbrella agencies like the National Parks Service, the US Fish and Wildlife Service, the US Geological Survey, and the Bureau of Land Management, and the Bureau of Reclamation—all which are on the front lines of the fight against climate change.

But if her record in Congress is any indication, don’t expect McMorris Rogers to make climate science or conservation a priority. In 2008, after Al Gore earned a Nobel Peace Prize and an Oscar for An Inconvenient Truth, she dismissed the former vice president’s warnings about global warming. “We believe Al Gore deserves an ‘F’ in science and an ‘A’ in creative writing,” she joked.

One year later, McMorris Rodgers sang a slightly different tune, telling a group of students from her district that “we should be taking steps to reduce our carbon emissions”—but that’s been the extent of her climate awakening. In 2010, she earned plaudits from the Koch Brothers-backed Americans for Prosperity for opposing a cap-and-trade carbon-pricing system aimed at reducing emissions. In 2011 she voted three times against a resolution acknowledging that “climate change is happening and human beings are a major reason for it.” More recently, she co-sponsored the House bill to prohibit the Environmental Protection Agency (which is not part of Interior) from regulating carbon emissions; EPA carbon regulations form the core of President Barack Obama’s climate policy.

McMorris Rodgers has explicitly voted against letting the Interior Secretary consider climate change when setting policy. In 2014, while supporting legislation designed to protect hunters’ access to public lands, she opposed an amendment stipulating that, “Nothing in this Act limits the authority of the Secretary of the Interior to include climate change as a consideration in making decisions related to conservation and recreation on public lands.”

Even the firsthand effects of climate change on her district have done little to spur the congresswoman to action. When forest fires swept through Eastern Washington in August, the state’s Democratic governor, Jay Inslee, argued that the fires, aided by tree-killing bugs and dry conditions, were a problem that would only get worse due to climate change—a position shared by the US Forest Service. McMorris Rodgers declined to make that connection when asked by reporters about Inslee’s comments, instead urging authorities to simply focus on “better forest management.”

McMorris Rogers, who has a four-percent lifetime rating from the League of Conservation Voters, has taken concrete steps to curb the power of the department she’s now set to run. She’s repeatedly backed legislation that would limit the president’s authority to protect public lands under the Antiquities Act, which President Barack Obama and his predecessors have used to create marine sanctuaries and to set aside large chunks of the West as national monuments. (The impetus for the most recent push was Obama’s creation of Basin and Range National Monument, to be run by the Bureau of Land Management, in central Nevada.) She also backed a proposal loosen environmental laws in national parks and wildlife refuges within 100 miles of the US–Mexican border. That’s not a good sign for fragile desert ecosystems—but it might come in handy when construction starts on Trump’s wall.

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Donald Trump’s Interior Secretary Doesn’t Want to Combat Climate Change

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American Media Suffering From Desperate Lack of Pro-Trump Voices

by GustavoE07 Posted on December 9, 2016

Mother Jones

It turns out that a lack of manufacturing jobs is not America’s only problem. There’s also a lack of columnists willing to defend Donald Trump:

As they discovered during the long campaign season, the nation’s newspapers and major digital news sites — the dreaded mainstream media — are facing a shortage of people able, or more likely willing, to write opinion columns supportive of the president-elect. Major newspapers, from The Washington Post to the New York Times, have struggled to find and publish pro-Trump columns for months. So have regional ones, such as the Des Moines Register and Arizona Republic, which have a long history of supporting Republican candidates.

Here’s the problem: these folks are not looking for writers who will defend particular Trump policies from time to time. They want columnists who will regularly defend all Trump policies. And here’s the catch: they want people who are non-insane.

That’s hard. But perhaps it’s a business opportunity for me. I could do this, I think, if I put my mind to it, but for obvious reasons of self-respect and the loss of all friends and family, the pay would have to be very high. So the question is, just how desperate is the media for a seemingly rational pro-Trump voice? Are they willing to pool their efforts to make me a highly-paid syndicated columnist who defends Trump no matter what he does?

Let’s see how serious they are. Show me the money, people.

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American Media Suffering From Desperate Lack of Pro-Trump Voices

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How Many Generals Is Too Many?

by CoryColby7191 Posted on December 8, 2016

Mother Jones

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Over at the Washington Examiner, Jamie McIntyre makes a fair point about Trump’s military-heavy cabinet:

“I am concerned that so many of the President-Elect’s nominees thus far come from the ranks of recently retired military officers,” Rep. Steny Hoyer, D-Md., said in a statement Wednesday evening….Yet when President Obama assembled his Cabinet in 2009, he also ended up with three retired four-stars in his inner circle: Jones as his national security adviser, retired Army Gen. Eric Shinseki as veterans affairs secretary, and retired Navy Adm. Dennis Blair as director of national intelligence. That’s 12 stars to Trump’s 11.

Technically, DNI isn’t a cabinet-level position, but it’s hard to argue that it’s less important than, say, Secretary of the Interior. Of course, Trump still has some positions to fill, including DNI, so we might not be done with the generals yet. Still, if Trump sticks with the three he’s got, it’s not out of the ordinary.

The real issue with Trump seems to be that he’s chosen a retired general to run the Department of Defense. It’s reasonable to object to this, but let’s just object to it, instead of claiming that Trump’s cabinet is unusually heavy with ex-generals.

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How Many Generals Is Too Many?

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