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We Talked to Hope Solo About Why the US Women’s Soccer Team Skipped a Game in Protest

by NickiSpeegle Posted on December 11, 2015

Mother Jones

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On Saturday, Hope Solo and the US women’s national soccer team were getting ready for practice at Honolulu’s Aloha Stadium, where they were scheduled to play Trinidad and Tobago on Sunday in the seventh game of their World Cup Victory Tour. As the goalkeeper surveyed the artificial-turf field, she noticed the hardened white paint on the football yardage markings near her goal and the rocky surface that made practicing her footwork all the more difficult. Solo even reached down and pulled up the turf:

Megan Rapinoe, the team’s star midfielder, was on the players’ minds—just a day earlier, she’d torn the ACL in her right knee while training at the grassy practice field without contact. On top of that, there was the months-long fight with FIFA and the Canadian Soccer Association over the use of artificial turf at women’s soccer venues.

And so the team decided not to play Sunday, laying out its decision in an open letter on the Players’ Tribune. On Tuesday, US Soccer president Sunil Gulati apologized, noting that the federation had “screwed up” and had failed to make sure field conditions were adequate for the Trinidad and Tobago match. In Gulati’s apology, Solo says that she saw the federation pushing for change. Gulati said that all US games leading up to the Olympics would be played on grass.

In the run-up to tonight’s game against Trinidad and Tobago at San Antonio’s Alamodome—on another artificial-turf pitch—we spoke to Solo about the team’s decision to not play and the larger issue of inequality between men’s and women’s sports.

Mother Jones: How do the field conditions at the Alamodome compare to that of Aloha Stadium?

Hope Solo: Laughs. They are night and day. I mean, it’s playable. That’s a huge difference in itself. But it’s still turf, and one day I just hope we could move away from turf. Maybe not completely, but maybe 80 percent of the time, I think I might be okay with that. I can speak for myself and the players: Nobody likes to play on turf.

MJ: Why do players prefer natural grass to turf?

HS: We’ve been fighting this battle for quite some time. Soccer, to be honest, is not meant to be played on turf. The ball rolls differently. There are dead spots on every turf field that you play on. It’s a lot harder on the joints, on the body, on the shoulders, on the knees. It’s a just a different playing game. With that said, you don’t see the men ever playing on turf. You don’t see any World Cups being played on turf—even when the major club teams come to America to play on a turf stadium, they lay sod.

MJ: I saw some stats that showed that 100 percent of men’s national games in the United States were played on grass since 2014, whereas 70 percent of your team’s games were played on grass. What do you make of that disparity?

HS: It’s not just the field conditions. There are major disparities between men’s and women’s sports across the board, but the playing conditions are a major one for us. The field that we stepped out on in Hawaii, that wasn’t just turf versus grass. That had to do with player safety. We knew we couldn’t risk ourselves with the Olympic Games being around the corner. We have careers to protect, and we knew that in Hawaii, we absolutely had to take a stand. We lost Megan Rapinoe to a subpar practice field, although it was grass. It was pretty magnified what was at stake for us, and it was time to be vocal about it.

MJ: Who on the team was the person who said “enough was enough”?

HS: Megan Rapinoe hurt herself a day before. There was this weird feeling at practice of “What the hell is going on?” We knew the drainage grates was way to close too the line. Our fields were bumpy. We weren’t sure if Rapinoe stepped on the grate or in the hole beside it, but it was a noncontact injury. It was really scary. The players were upset. The coaches were upset. The staff was upset. And right then, I started taking pictures of the practice field. You know, there were rumblings amongst the players.

We go to the stadium field. We start looking a little bit more at the field and bending over and picking up the little rocks. We see the huge bumps in the line, and the field turf actually pulls up. The media’s behind the goal, and they start seeing us looking at the field. And then we see our coach yelling at somebody, and our general manager starts thinking, “This isn’t okay.” We still practiced, because the fans were right there. I remember saying, “I’m not going to practice in that goal.” The far end was worse than the near end, so we moved everything to one end. But I told my goalkeeper coach, “I will not go into that goal.” I think I just had visions of another knee injury. We shortened the practice, and then right when we got on the bus, it was kind of like, “Hey guys, what are we doing?” We all discussed it right there on the bus, and right there we were just like, “We can’t do this.”

MJ: And like you said before, it’s not just the field conditions that are troublesome.

HS: It’s a number of different things. You look at the marketing money put into the men’s team vs. the women’s team. You really have to kind of tip your hat to the women’s team for selling out stadiums, because oftentimes you do that with less marketing dollars. We did a side by side analysis of the men’s contract and the women’s contract, and it’s very unbalanced, just the way that US Soccer’s money is invested from year to year. It’s just completely unbalanced. The argument is, well, women should not get paid as much as men, because they don’t bring in as much revenue. We hear it all the time. Our argument back is that we have the best ratings between the men’s team and the women’s team, and had we gotten more marketing dollars, we would have more ticket revenue. When we push for equality, we don’t want the exact same thing. We just want it more balanced.

When you look at the salaries for the men versus the women, when you look at the bonuses, and particularly for the men’s World Cup versus the women’s World Cup, we got a $1.8 million dollar bonus for winning the World Cup, and we had to disburse it among the 23 players. And then we piece out some bonuses for our support staff who don’t get paid a whole bunch. The men, for losing, got $8 million to share among the players, and they also received millions of dollars for every point that they received in the World Cup. We got paid nothing per point in group play. We got paid nothing for making it into the knockout round. We basically didn’t get a bonus until we won the entire thing, which is incredibly difficult thing to do, and that bonus was quite a bit less than what the men got.

MJ: What has the federation done to address that since the World Cup ended?

HS: We were able to take the side-by-side analysis, and we were able to say to US Soccer, “These are the facts. It is unbalanced. What are we going to do about it? Because you guys are a progressive federation, and you value the women’s team. Well, show us that you value us. Don’t just tell us. Show us.” We are able to have more meaningful conversations.

It’s a great starting point that they are willing to have these conversations. Before, we’ve tried to have these conversations, and the door had been shut. But I think right now, it has to do with the players being unified, but I also think it’s the times that we live in. We have some of these incredible female role models who are standing up and feeling unapologetic about it. And I think it’s empowered us to do the same.

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We Talked to Hope Solo About Why the US Women’s Soccer Team Skipped a Game in Protest

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Donald Trump’s Worst Idea Isn’t Even Original

by HiramTeelnle Posted on December 8, 2015

Mother Jones

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On Monday, Donald Trump unveiled a plan to block Muslims from entering the United States. On Tuesday, he suggested he might have been okay with the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.

Almost immediately, critics looked for historical parallels. The Philadelphia Daily News put him on its front page with the headline “The New Furor,” while the New York Daily News‘ Shaun King wrote that Trump has gone “full-blown Nazi.” Even Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling got in on the game, calling Trump worse than Voldemort.

Comparing Trump to Hitler doesn’t really do justice to what made Hitler Hitler, but it also lets the country off the hook. Trump isn’t introducing the idea of discriminatory immigration bans and internment camps to an innocent nation. These are American ideas, with a long dark history of being used in American elections by politicians we now hold in high esteem. As one of Trump’s New Hampshire co-chairs, state Rep. Al Baldasaro, put it, improbably in defense of Trump, “What he’s saying is no different than the situation during World War II, when we put the Japanese in camps.”

It’s a history worth grappling with, because as Richard Reeves’ 2015 history, Infamy, makes clear, Franklin Roosevelt’s Civilian Exclusion Orders were deeply influenced by the pressures of electoral politics. It was a governor’s race in California that brought the issue to the fore in 1942. Two years later, it was a looming presidential election that compelled Roosevelt to keep the camps open long past the time the government knew they were unnecessary.

White California politicians had for years used the presence of people of Japanese descent as a political wedge, but the matter blew up after Pearl Harbor. Ironically, Reeves explains, the push for internment started with a man who would one day become a liberal icon as a Supreme Court justice, then-California Attorney General Earl Warren:

The first public call for all American Japanese, aliens and citizens, men, women, and children, to be moved into “concentration camps” was on January 14, 1942, in the Placerville Times, the newspaper in a small town forty miles east of Sacramento. Two weeks later, on January 29, California’s attorney general, Warren, who had been an important voice for moderation essentially switched sides, issuing a press release that read, “I have come to the conclusion that the Japanese situation as it exists in this state today, may well be the Achilles Heel of the entire civil defense effort. Unless something is done it may bring about a repetition of Pearl Harbor.”

Governor Olson, a Democrat who expected that Warren, a Republican and a member of the whites-only Native Sons of the Golden West, would be his opponent in the election of November of 1942, did the same thing, testifying before a congressional hearing a week later, saying: “Because of the extreme difficulty in distinguishing between loyal Japanese-Americans, and there are many who are loyal to this country, and those other Japanese whose loyalty is to the Mikado, I believe in the wholesale evacuation of the Japanese people from coastal California.” Then he gave gave a statewide radio address, saying, “It is known that there are Japanese residents of California who have sought to aid the Japanese enemy by way of communicating information or have shown indications of preparation for Fifth Column activities.”

Other elected officials were happy to inflame Californians’ fears of the Japanese other. One congressman proposed sterilization; another called the conflict with Japan a “race war.” Advocates for internment didn’t just defend it as an extraordinary circumstance—they described it as wholly consistent with American ideals. Per Reeves:

In Los Angeles, Mayor Fletcher Bowron, after dismissing all employees of Japanese lineage, declared, “Right here in our own city are those who may spring to action at an appointed time in accordance with a prearranged plan wherein each of our little Japanese friends will know his part in the event of any possible attempted invasion or air raid…We cannot run the risk of another Pearl Harbor episode in Southern California.” He later added, “There isn’t a shadow of a doubt but that Lincoln, the mild-mannered man whose memory we regard with almost saint-like reverence, would make short work of rounding up the Japanese and putting them where they could do no harm.”

Not unlike Trump’s false claim of seeing “thousands” of Muslims in New Jersey celebrating the 9/11 attacks from rooftops, the hysteria over the Japanese-Americans was fueled by a number of false reports over their activities, including allegations from coastal residents who swore they’d heard their Japanese neighbors sending radio signals to the enemy. And it wasn’t just California politicians feeling the electoral pressure to put Americans in camps. As Reeves tells it, Roosevelt knew as early as May 1944 that the Japanese Exclusion Orders were unnecessary, and that it would be okay to shut down the camps. Interior Secretary Harold Ickes told him that keeping the camps open would be a “blot upon the history of this country.” But FDR had the voters to consider:

Two weeks later Roosevelt refined his thoughts in a memo to Secretary of State Edward Stettinius and Ickes: “The more I think of this problem of suddenly ending the orders excluding Japanese Americans from the West Coast the more I think it would be a mistake to do anything drastic or sudden. As I said at Cabinet, I think the whole problem for the sake of internal quiet, should be handled gradually.” Ickes and the others knew what he meant: after the elections.

It was easy for politicians to invoke internment as a logical solution to fears of a Japanese “fifth column,” in part because the nation already had a long and proud history of wholesale discrimination against people of Asian descent. Just 18 years earlier, Calvin Coolidge had signed the National Origins Act, which effectively barred immigration from East Asia and the Middle East, on top of the existing prohibition of Chinese immigration that had by that point been on the books for four decades. Trump is successful not because he’s mastered the German formula, but because he’s tapping into something that has proven successful before in American history.

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Donald Trump’s Worst Idea Isn’t Even Original

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Ted Cruz Explains the Great Recession

by BennettR89 Posted on December 4, 2015

Mother Jones

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Jim Pethokoukis draws my attention to Ted Cruz’s theory of why the Great Recession was so great. Here is Joseph Lawler describing Cruz’s questioning of Fed chairman Janet Yellen yesterday:

Cruz began a round of questioning by stating that, in the summer of 2008, “the Federal Reserve told markets that it was shifting to a tighter monetary policy. This, in turn, set off a scramble for cash, which caused the dollar to soar, asset prices to collapse and the consumer price index to fall below zero, which set the stage for the financial crisis.”

….Yellen, although used to obscure or hostile questions from members of Congress, seemed taken off-guard. “I think the Fed responded pretty promptly in easing monetary policy to the pressures that were emerging,” she responded, saying that she wouldn’t blame the financial crisis on the Fed failing to lower rates during the meeting. She also noted that the Fed had lowered its target rate to zero by December.

I think you can argue that the Fed should have responded sooner and more forcefully to the events of 2008, but the problem with Cruz’s theory is that it just doesn’t make sense. Take a look at the chart on the right, which shows the Fed Funds target rate during the period in question. In April 2008, the Fed lowered its target rate to 2 percent. Then it waited until October to lower it again.

So the idea here is that if the Fed had acted, say, three months earlier, that would have saved the world. This ascribes super powers to Fed open market policy that I don’t think even Scott Sumner would buy. Monetary policy should certainly have been looser in 2008, but holding US rates steady for a few months too long just isn’t enough to turn an ordinary recession into the biggest global financial meltdown in nearly a century.

Cruz would like to blame the Fed, but they bear only a modest responsibility. Better culprits include underregulation of shadow banking; a housing bubble fueled partly by fraud and partly by Wall Street irresponsibility; excess systemic leverage; and Republican unwillingness to fight the recession with fiscal policy. Unfortunately, none of those fit Cruz’s agenda. So the Fed it is.

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Ted Cruz Explains the Great Recession

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Why Are University Professors Such Schlubs?

by NapoleoZZM Posted on December 4, 2015

Mother Jones

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For no reason whatsoever, I am reproducing below the results of a decade-old bit of research that uses student scores from RateMyProfessor.com to construct average hotness scores for different academic disciplines. The authors used a scale from -1 to 1, which is entirely nonstandard in the field, so I’ve renormed the scores to the more generally accepted scale of 1 to 10. I assume professorial hotness is, in fact, average, which means the various disciplines should probably range from about 3 to 7. But not a single one even breaks 5.

What does this mean? University professors are slobs? 18-year-old students have really high standards? Movies and television have conditioned us to think of really hot actors as average, thus making us all disappointed with real life? I dunno. What’s your guess?

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Why Are University Professors Such Schlubs?

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Donald Trump’s Destruction Test of the Republican Party Continues Apace

by MelisaBlaubaum Posted on December 3, 2015

Mother Jones

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A few days ago, like an evil mastermind on 24, Donald Trump declared that if we wanted to fight terrorists we needed to target their families for death. Today he gave a speech to the Republican Jewish Coalition and told the crowd, “You’re not going to support me because I don’t want your money.” Ha ha. Stupid money-grubbing Jews. As Judd Legum pointed out, this means that Trump has now insulted blacks, refugees, immigrants, Muslims, the disabled, and Jews.

I’m now going to double down on my belief that Trump is running the world’s greatest reality show here. I think he got bored one day and came up with an idea that tickled him: “I wonder just how deranged you can get and still retain the support of the tea party wingnuts?” So he made a $1 bet with some of his Democratic friends and performed a test run in 2012 with his maniacal birther stuff. But all that did was show the depth of his challenge. He’d have to do a lot more than that in 2016. He started off slow with wild claims about immigrant Mexican rapists, knowing it would draw in the rubes. Then he laughably claimed that he’d get Mexico to pay for a border wall. Nothing happened. He insulted John McCain for being a POW. Nothing happened. He started telling obvious lies. Nothing. He lied on national TV and was called on it a few minutes later. Nothing. He all but admitted that he knows diddly about the Bible. Nothing. He called evangelical darling Ben Carson a nutcase liar. Nothing. He claimed that thousands of Muslims in Jersey City celebrated 9/11. Nothing. He mocked a disabled reporter in front of the cameras. Nothing. He suggested taking out terrorist families. Nothing. He appeared on the radio show of a crackpot conspiracy theorist. Nothing. Now he’s insulted an audience of conservative Jews.

Trump is probably frustrated. He’s basically dialed it up to 11 already, and the crowds are still swooning. What does he have to do? Tell a story about how he was abducted by aliens back in the 90s? Promise to nuke Tehran if he’s elected president? Suggest the world would be a better place if we’d never invented any HIV treatments?

Even Trump must be scratching his head wondering what to do next. There’s gotta be something that finally goes too far. Right?

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Donald Trump’s Destruction Test of the Republican Party Continues Apace

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The Fossil Fuel Industry Is Bankrolling the Paris Climate Talks

by JoanFranz5073065 Posted on December 2, 2015

Mother Jones

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You might not expect fossil fuel companies to pay for a conference designed to shrink their industry. But in Paris, that’s precisely what’s happening.

This week and next, roughly 40,000 diplomats, activists, policy experts, and journalists are gathering in the French capital for a round of high-stakes negotiations aimed at slowing climate change. They’re packed into a regional airport that, as described by our Climate Desk partners at the New Republic, has been converted to resemble a cross between the United Nations headquarters building, Disney World’s Epcot Center, and a natural history museum.

For two weeks, all these people need to be fed, housed, transported, entertained, and equipped with space to work. Unsurprisingly, it’s an expensive undertaking—budgeted by the French government at nearly $200 million, according to EurActiv France. About one-fifth of that tab is being picked up by private corporations.

Big international conferences frequently have corporate sponsors, but given the basic aim of the Paris talks—to dramatically reduce man-made greenhouse gas emissions—some of the event’s sponsors are drawing criticism for their close ties to the fossil fuel industry. In other words, some of the companies paying to keep the lights on and the coffee flowing at the vital climate summit may have a vested interest in limiting the scope of the international agreement.

The event (known as COP21, short for 21st Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change) has more than 50 corporate sponsors. They include the likes of Google, 3M, Puma, and IKEA. In exchange for providing the conference organizers an undisclosed sum of money, corporate sponsors get their logo splashed across high-profile surfaces—from billboards to banners to handouts—and priority access to spaces to hold branded events. Corporate participants can also get direct access to top-tier diplomats. At last year’s COP in Peru, for example, a lobbying group representing a handful of fossil fuel companies—including Shell and Chevron—hosted more than a dozen events, including one featuring UN climate chief Christiana Figueres.

According to a new report from the advocacy group Corporate Accountability International, several of the Paris COP’s corporate sponsors have direct ties to the fossil fuel industry, and, the group argues, a conflict of interest when it comes to the purported goals of the summit.

“It’s greenwashing,” CAI spokesperson Jesse Bragg said. “Those corporations are able to say they’re part of the solution just because they write a check.”

In particular, CAI’s report calls out three COP21 sponsors: Engie, a European electric utility company that is the continent’s largest importer of natural gas; EDF, a French electric utility that operates several major coal-fired power plants; and BNP Paribas, a multinational bank with billions of dollars invested in coal mines and coal-fired power plants. All three have massive greenhouse gas footprints, according to the report. CAI also points out that the utility companies have participated in lobbying organizations that promote the use of fossil fuels. Meanwhile, another activist group has taken aim at corporate greenwashing with a slate of billboard ads across Paris mocking energy and transportation companies that purport to be progressive, while continuing to pollute:

Courtesy Brandalism

Beyond greenwashing, Bragg said it’s unlikely that these companies will be able to have a direct impact on the policy outcome of this COP, given how many of the nuts and bolts were worked out by diplomats in advance. But he cautioned that the creeping influence of corporations over the last two decades of climate negotiations has made diplomats overly sensitive to business-friendly solutions.

“We need to make sure these policies are created with the environment as the primary concern,” he said. “With corporations involved, you move further and further from that target.”

Spokespeople for EDF and Engie dismissed Bragg’s assertions. EDF said that its electricity portfolio contains more renewable energy than any other European utility and that it plows hundreds of millions of euros each year into clean energy R&D. Axelle Lima, a spokesperson for Engie, pointed out that the company has recently committed to stop any new investments in coal and has publicly campaigned for a price on carbon emissions.

“We have to think of solutions with governments to replace coal with another kind of energy,” Lima said. “And together we want to find a climate solution.”

Lima said it was “natural” for Engie to be a partner at the COP, given its role in the energy sector that is being reformed. She declined to specify how much money Engie had donated. BNP Paribas did not return a request for comment.

Erik Conway, a science historian who co-authored a recent book on the fossil fuel industry’s climate science subterfuge with Naomi Oreskes, said that corporate infiltration of climate summits is less important than the lobbying that goes on behind the scenes back home.

“Of course corporate sponsorship is a conflict of interest, just as it is a conflict of interest to have fossil fuel producing nations participating in the COP,” he said. But “I don’t think the presence of fossil-fuel producing corporations at COP meetings has had much to do with their failure to achieve meaningful agreements. It’s their economic sway with individual governments that’s the actual problem.”

To that end, Bragg thinks the UN’s climate organization could take a cue from the World Health Organization’s efforts to block tobacco lobbyists from influencing regulation of that industry. The WHO, in its international agreement on tobacco control, adopted specific protocols that require signatory countries to insulate their public health laws from tobacco industry “interference.” The climate agreement currently being hammered out in Paris could include similar language, Bragg suggested.

“The first step is the official recognition, in text, of this conflict of interest,” he said. “Then we figure out how we can mitigate that.”

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The Fossil Fuel Industry Is Bankrolling the Paris Climate Talks

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Congress Has Agreed On a Highway Bill!

by ArthurAEOG Posted on December 2, 2015

Mother Jones

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Maybe Paul Ryan really is getting a handle on this whole governing thing:

Congressional negotiators have agreed to a $305 billion measure to fund highways and mass-transit projects for five years, the longest in almost two decades—and an unexpected show of agreement after years of clamoring by state transportation officials for money for infrastructure projects.

….The agreement was made possible when lawmakers identified a collection of strategies to offset the costs. Among other things, the measure would raise revenue by selling oil from the nation’s emergency stockpile and taking money from a Federal Reserve surplus account that works as a sort of cushion to help the bank pay for potential losses.

The “strategies” here are necessary because the gas tax has declined over the past two decades, and unlike in past eras, inflationary erosion is no longer being offset by a rapid increase in miles driven. As a result, the highway trust fund doesn’t have enough money to pay for all the stuff Congress wants to do. This is being fixed by funding highways partly by gas taxes and partly by other revenue sources, which destroys the principle that “people who use federal transportation systems should pay for the projects.”

Of course, this is a dumb principle anyway. Lots of people benefit from transportation infrastructure who don’t pay gas taxes. We should just ditch this principle for good and instead fund the government like this:

  1. Collect tax money from various sources.
  2. Put it all in the general fund.
  3. Spend the money as Congress directs.

See? Easy peasy. We still have the problem of matching revenue and spending, of course, but at least we get rid of all the nonsense about funding specific programs from specific sources and worrying about trust funds “going broke.” Nothing is going broke. We’re just raising money and spending money. If we’re worried about a balanced budget, then we have to raise taxes or reduce spending, and it doesn’t really matter which taxes or which spending we target. It’s all just money.

So I’m perfectly happy that Congress is ignoring the “principle” of funding transportation projects only via gas tax money. On the other hand, the revenue sources they’re tapping in order to pass this bill are probably pretty ill considered. Both are in the nature of emergency funds, and both are one-time deals that can’t be repeated. But in a world in which taxes not only can’t be raised, but can’t even be kept the same, I guess there’s little choice.

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Congress Has Agreed On a Highway Bill!

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Mark Zuckerberg Just Announced He’s Pledging a Massive Portion of His Wealth to Charity

by LawannaStallwor Posted on December 1, 2015

Mother Jones

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In a Facebook post announcing the birth of their first child, Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan revealed on Tuesday the couple will be giving away 99 percent of their Facebook shares—a current estimate of $45 billion—to a wide range of charities to “join many others in improving this world for the next generation.”

Here is a portion of the Facebook post that they addressed to their newborn daughter Max:

We will give 99% of our Facebook shares — currently about $45 billion — during our lives to advance this mission. We know this is a small contribution compared to all the resources and talents of those already working on these issues. But we want to do what we can, working alongside many others.

We’ll share more details in the coming months once we settle into our new family rhythm and return from our maternity and paternity leaves. We understand you’ll have many questions about why and how we’re doing this.

This contribution is much larger than any of the previous charitable pledges the Facebook CEO and his wife have made in the past. In June, the couple donated $5 million to helping undocumented teenagers receive higher education. Last year, the Facebook CEO donated $25 million to fighting Ebola.

Read Zuckerberg’s post in its entirety here. And Mazel Tov to the new parents!

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Mark Zuckerberg Just Announced He’s Pledging a Massive Portion of His Wealth to Charity

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Meet the "Harlem Hate Pastor" Who Just Met With Donald Trump

by GloriaRickman0 Posted on December 1, 2015

Mother Jones

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On Monday, Republican front-runner Donald Trump met with a group of African American pastors in Manhattan, after some confusion over whether all the participants would be endorsing him. Some black pastors who weren’t there were critical of the meeting—one referred to it as a “get-played moment”—but Trump insisted (of course) that the session went well. He also claimed that some of the participants did agree to endorse him.

Trump, who has made some unsavory statements about the black community, may not be a likely candidate for such endorsements. So who might these Trump-friendly pastors be? Meet Pastor James David Manning of the ATLAH World Missionary Church in Harlem.

Manning, who was at Trump’s summit, has a long record of outlandish, hateful, and nutty statements. His church once accused President Barack Obama of releasing “the homo demons on the black man.” He has vowed to die if that’s what it takes to expose Obama as the devil. He has asserted that Starbucks injects semen from gay men into its coffee. (Yes, really.) He chanted “oh faggots, oh faggots, please come out tonight” during a protest at his church last week.

As a bonus, here’s a video on Manning’s Facebook page of a man who claims that Planned Parenthood, and not Robert Dear (who is accused of killing three people at a Planned Parenthood clinic), practices terrorism every day.

On this Facebook page, Manning (proudly?) posted a news story reporting that “Harlem Hate Pastor James David Manning” was at the Trump meeting. It’s unclear whether Manning was one of the pastors whom Trump says has agreed to endorse him. But there is evidence that Manning, who’s no stranger to extreme rhetoric, sure likes the GOP candidate who Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) recently called “a xenophobic, race-baiting, religious bigot.”

Link:

Meet the "Harlem Hate Pastor" Who Just Met With Donald Trump

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Syrian Refugee Camps: "Really Quite Nice" or Brutal Hellhole? Ben Carson Explains.

by LillieHuber Posted on December 1, 2015

Mother Jones

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I don’t think I’d bother with this if I had something better to write about, but when life hands you lemons, you write a blog post with them anyway. Here is Ben Carson this morning:

Carson last week visited Jordan to tour Syrian refugee camps in an effort to bolster his foreign affairs credentials, something he has been criticized for lacking. Carson called the camps “really quite nice” and suggested they should serve as a long-term solution. On TODAY, he called the Jordanians “very generous people” who have set up camps and hospitals “that work very well” but just lack to the resources to support the efforts.

And here is Carson writing about Syrian refugees on the same day:

Many are now housed in refugee camps, such as the one I visited, the Azraq refugee camp. The Azraq camp is located in a bleak and deserted stretch of desert that was built to house Iraqis and Kuwaiti Gulf war refugees.

….Here is a picture of life in Azraq: The camp is a bleak expanse of row after row of white sheet metal shelters. There is no electricity or air conditioning or heat against the scalding desert summer temperatures or cold winds of winter. Lack of electricity adds further hardship, as people are forced to choose between having light to see their way to the bathroom at night (six shelters share one bathroom) and charging their cellphones, which connects them to family and the outside world.

Seriously, WTF? There was never any question that Carson’s photo-op trip to Jordan might provide him with some actual insight that would change his perspective. He’s obviously a guy who doesn’t do that once he’s made up his mind. But can he really not get his story any straighter than this? Which is it, Ben? Are these camps really quite nice or are they a bleak hellhole of freezing desert? Inquiring minds want to know.

Link:

Syrian Refugee Camps: "Really Quite Nice" or Brutal Hellhole? Ben Carson Explains.

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