Tag Archives: hillary-clinton

The Lesson of 2016: Rabid Congressional Investigations Work

by EdwinRKZmcqbanlt Posted on December 31, 2016

Mother Jones

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So what did we learn this year? That America is more susceptible to authoritarian populism than we thought? Not really. Trump’s victory was a fluke, driven by Russian hacking, James Comey, and some bad polls in a few states.

That racism is on the rise? There’s really no evidence of that.

That Democrats need to pay more attention to the white working class? Maybe, but no matter how many times people say otherwise, that really wasn’t a root cause of Hillary Clinton’s defeat.

I could go on, but instead I want to suggest something the 2016 election does teach us: persistent, obsessive investigations pay off. In the 90s, Republicans started investigating Whitewater. Even Ken Starr knew there was nothing to this after a couple of years, but he was put under pressure to keep at it, and eventually he hit some fluke paydirt: Monica Lewinsky. This had nothing to do with Whitewater, but who cares? Scandal is scandal, and it rubbed off enough on Al Gore that Republicans took back the presidency in 2000.

Fast forward to 2012. Hillary Clinton did nothing wrong related to Benghazi. That was clear pretty quickly, but Republicans kept at it. I laughed at them at the time, but they had the last laugh when they once again hit a fluke bit of paydirt: Clinton’s private email server. Clinton didn’t really do anything seriously wrong here either, but it didn’t matter. Republicans kept at it for the next year and a half, and that was enough to convince a lot of people that Clinton was, somehow, corrupt and untrustworthy. That allowed Republicans to retake the presidency.

There was lots of other stuff going on too, but this is now twice that maniacal dedication to an investigation has paid off for Republicans. It’s basically a way of hacking the media, which feels like it has no choice but to cover congressional investigations on a daily basis. It’s news, after all, no matter how you define news.

So that’s a lesson for sure. I’m just not sure what the solution is.

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The Lesson of 2016: Rabid Congressional Investigations Work

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Trump would be giving up a big presidential power if he abolished new national monuments.

by LelaMeares23691 Posted on December 29, 2016

The crisis of affordable housing (after climate change, natch).

It’s not for lack of local media coverage. Follow the news from New York City to Seattle, and you can’t avoid stories about skyrocketing home prices and rent along with record rates of homelessness. The bestseller Evicted followed low-income residents in Milwaukee who were tossed out of their homes for missing a rent payment.

Add up each local crisis, city by city, and it’s clear that the country has a national crisis that requires a national response. Yet affordable housing passed without much notice in the 2016 election. Interviewers and debate moderators never asked about housing. Republican presidential candidates, including President-elect Donald Trump, a high-end real estate developer, ignored it altogether.

To be sure, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders issued modest proposals on housing policy. But they gave housing little attention on the campaign trail.

So will 2017 be the year that our political system wakes up to the housing crisis? The signs aren’t promising. Trump and congressional Republicans want to cut housing aid, which has already been squeezed by cuts from the Budget Control Act of 2011.

But maybe it’s the year that progressives in Congress propose a national strategy to provide high-quality, affordable housing to all Americans. It’s a political cause in dire need of a champion.

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Trump would be giving up a big presidential power if he abolished new national monuments.

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Wisconsin’s Department of Natural Resources is now pretending not to know about climate change.

by Carissa50X Posted on December 29, 2016

The crisis of affordable housing (after climate change, natch).

It’s not for lack of local media coverage. Follow the news from New York City to Seattle, and you can’t avoid stories about skyrocketing home prices and rent along with record rates of homelessness. The bestseller Evicted followed low-income residents in Milwaukee who were tossed out of their homes for missing a rent payment.

Add up each local crisis, city by city, and it’s clear that the country has a national crisis that requires a national response. Yet affordable housing passed without much notice in the 2016 election. Interviewers and debate moderators never asked about housing. Republican presidential candidates, including President-elect Donald Trump, a high-end real estate developer, ignored it altogether.

To be sure, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders issued modest proposals on housing policy. But they gave housing little attention on the campaign trail.

So will 2017 be the year that our political system wakes up to the housing crisis? The signs aren’t promising. Trump and congressional Republicans want to cut housing aid, which has already been squeezed by cuts from the Budget Control Act of 2011.

But maybe it’s the year that progressives in Congress propose a national strategy to provide high-quality, affordable housing to all Americans. It’s a political cause in dire need of a champion.

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Wisconsin’s Department of Natural Resources is now pretending not to know about climate change.

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Fracking causes noise pollution that could be harmful to your health.

by ZDXKathlee Posted on December 29, 2016

The crisis of affordable housing (after climate change, natch).

It’s not for lack of local media coverage. Follow the news from New York City to Seattle, and you can’t avoid stories about skyrocketing home prices and rent along with record rates of homelessness. The bestseller Evicted followed low-income residents in Milwaukee who were tossed out of their homes for missing a rent payment.

Add up each local crisis, city by city, and it’s clear that the country has a national crisis that requires a national response. Yet affordable housing passed without much notice in the 2016 election. Interviewers and debate moderators never asked about housing. Republican presidential candidates, including President-elect Donald Trump, a high-end real estate developer, ignored it altogether.

To be sure, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders issued modest proposals on housing policy. But they gave housing little attention on the campaign trail.

So will 2017 be the year that our political system wakes up to the housing crisis? The signs aren’t promising. Trump and congressional Republicans want to cut housing aid, which has already been squeezed by cuts from the Budget Control Act of 2011.

But maybe it’s the year that progressives in Congress propose a national strategy to provide high-quality, affordable housing to all Americans. It’s a political cause in dire need of a champion.

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Fracking causes noise pollution that could be harmful to your health.

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Vladimir Putin Is a Happy Camper These Days

by FrankieKpg Posted on December 23, 2016

Mother Jones

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In his annual press conference, Vladimir Putin took a victory lap:

“Democrats are losing on every front and looking for people to blame everywhere,” Putin said in answer to a Russian TV host, one of 1,400 journalists accredited to the marathon session. “They need to learn to lose with dignity.”

….“Trump understood the mood of the people and kept going until the end, when nobody believed in him,” Putin said, adding with a grin. “Except for you and me.”

Putin has repeatedly denied involvement despite the accusations coming from the White House, and the Kremlin has repeatedly questioned the evidence for the U.S. claims. On Friday he borrowed from Trump’s dismissal of the accusations, remarking “maybe it was someone lying on the couch who did it.”

“And it’s not important who did the hacking, it’s important that the information that was revealed was true, that is important,” Putin said, referring to the emails that showed that party leaders had favored Hillary Clinton.

That last line is almost word-for-word what Republican apologists say. As near as I can tell, Putin is basically just admitting that Russia was behind the hacks and then smirking about it. He must be having a good old time these days. I wonder how Republicans are going to feel about this when Putin decides it’s time to get rid of Trump and help the other side?

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Vladimir Putin Is a Happy Camper These Days

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American Coal Is Dying, and There’s Nothing Donald Trump Can Do About It

by Fausto99T761 Posted on November 28, 2016

Mother Jones

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Will Donald Trump rescue the coal industry? Nah. Brad Plumer explains:

If you want to see a good example of why Trump will struggle to bring back coal, just look at Michigan.

Last weekend, the CEO of Michigan’s largest electric utility reiterated that his company is still planning to retire all eight of its remaining coal plants by 2030 — whether or not Trump tries to repeal President Obama’s climate policies. “All of those retirements are going to happen regardless of what Trump may or may not do with the Clean Power Plan,” DTE Energy’s Gerry Anderson told MLive.com’s Emily Lawler.

….In Michigan, a new coal plant costs $133 per megawatt hour. A natural gas plant costs half that. Even wind contracts cost about $74.52 per megawatt hour. “I don’t know anybody in the country who would build another coal plant,” Anderson said.

If you want this in chart form—and who wouldn’t?—here is US coal production in the 21st century:

And that’s not the half of it. Coal production has dropped 31 percent from its peak, but coal employment has dropped 41 percent:

Coal executives don’t want to employ more miners. They want to automate as much as possible to squeeze the last few profits out of a dying industry. This has nothing to do with Obama’s Clean Power Plan, and there’s nothing Donald Trump can do about it. Coal is a buggy whip in an automobile era.

Hillary Clinton warned the coal community about this, just like Walter Mondale warned everyone that Reagan would increase their taxes. They were both right, but no one wanted to hear it. They preferred grand promises from charlatans instead.

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American Coal Is Dying, and There’s Nothing Donald Trump Can Do About It

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Hillary Clinton’s Three Big Mistakes

by Fbvisitsmy Posted on November 27, 2016

Mother Jones

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I’ve written a post or two about the main reasons Hillary Clinton lost the election, and I always nod to the fact that there are other, smaller reasons too. One of these smaller reasons is that Clinton herself made mistakes, something that Harold Pollack noted a few days ago. So I asked him what he thought the campaign’s three biggest miscues were. He wrote a long post about this, which you should read since it contains a lot of discussion and nuance. In normal bloggy fashion, however, I’m going to ignore all that. Instead, here are Pollack’s answers, along with my comments:

Creating the email and speech problems, and being brittle and defensive about cleaning them up. No argument here. We both agree that these problems were wildly overblown by the press, but nonetheless they were problems that Clinton brought on herself. It’s all part of her greatest character deficit: pushing rules to the boundaries and then being defensive and secretive about it when her actions come to light. The former is a bad habit, and the latter just makes the press even more ravenous than they’d ordinarily be. It’s a toxic combination.

Final Polls on November 7

ABC/Post
NBC/WSJ
NBC/Survey Monkey
UPI/CVOTER
CBS/Times
IBD/TIPP
Fox
Monmouth
Bloomberg/Selzer

Clinton +4
Clinton +5
Clinton +7
Clinton +3
Clinton +4
Clinton +1
Clinton +4
Clinton +6
Clinton +3

Overconfidence and complacency across the political spectrum. In retrospect, this is obviously true. But even now, this hardly strikes me as a campaign problem per se. Clinton and her fellow Dems were confident because every poll showed them well ahead. I assume that all her internal polling showed the same thing. In the end, though, that polling was apparently off by about 3 points, and more than that in the famous trio of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. That’s a big miss.

So what happened to the polls? Did Clinton’s internal polling show her way ahead? If so, how did it fail so badly? That’s what I’d like to know. I think anybody would have been overconfident if their polling showed them winning in a walk.

Signaling to older rural white voters that we didn’t want them, and indeed would leave them behind. This is hard to assess. There’s no question that Democrats have steadily lost the support of the white working class over the past two decades. This is something that goes far beyond Hillary Clinton. But did the white working class leave because they thought Republicans were likely to bring their jobs back and make their lives better? That hardly seems likely, given that during this entire period Republicans have campaigned on a steady diet of corporate deregulation and tax cuts for the rich.

But if that’s the case, we’re back to optics and race—and Trump appealed explicitly to both. He loudly and persistently pretended to care about the white working class while offering nothing much that would actually affect them. And he was pretty plainly pro-white, which obviously appealed to at least some of them. Clinton’s problem is that she isn’t cynical enough to do the former and not loathsome enough to do the latter.

Could she still have done more? Of course. Politicians routinely use symbols to demonstrate respect for groups even if their platforms don’t offer an awful lot of help at a concrete level. Clinton didn’t do that, and it turned out to be a mistake. I can’t bring myself to blame her too much for this, since it’s all hindsight, but it was still a mistake—and an especially big one since she clearly failed to understand what was happening in three states that were so critical to her that they were called the “blue firewall.”

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Hillary Clinton’s Three Big Mistakes

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In First Public Appearance Since Her Defeat, Clinton Urges Supporters to "Stay Engaged"

by ModestaMoberg Posted on November 17, 2016

Mother Jones

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In her first public appearance since conceding to Donald Trump last week, Hillary Clinton delivered an emotional speech and urged her supporters to remain committed to fighting for progressive ideals despite her unexpected election defeat.

“I know many of you are deeply disappointed about the results of the election—I am too, more than I can ever express,” Clinton said, speaking to guests at a gala Wednesday for the Children’s Defense Fund, the child’s advocacy organization where she started her career after law school.

“I know that over the past week a lot of people have asked themselves whether America was the country we thought it was,” she said holding back tears. “The divisions laid bare by this election run deep, but please listen to me when I say this: America is worth it. Our children are worth it.”

As the crowd interrupted her remarks with applause and cheers, Clinton also acknowledged that coming to speak at the Washington, DC, event was not easy for her, but her sense of the importance of this work for children and families outweighed the difficulty.

“Stay engaged on every level,” she said forcefully. “We need you, America needs you—your energy, your ambition, your talent. That’s how we get through this.”

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In First Public Appearance Since Her Defeat, Clinton Urges Supporters to "Stay Engaged"

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Donald Trump thinks climate change is a Chinese hoax. China begs to differ.

by RosemarLoflin Posted on November 16, 2016

And it’s just in the nick of time, since President-elect Trump has promised to repeal all of President Obama’s climate regulations.

This rule, which will be gradually phased in, requires drilling operators to halve the natural gas that is flared off from new and existing wells, limit venting from storage tanks, inspect for leaks, and so on. DOI projects that the rule should cut methane emissions up to 35 percent.

Methane is an extremely powerful heat-trapping gas. With the the increase in natural gas and oil drilling that is the fracking boom, methane leakage from wells and pipelines has also skyrocketed. A crackdown on these leaks was part of President Obama’s Climate Action Plan.

The new rule doesn’t govern private land, where most drilling takes place. The Environmental Protection Agency developed rules limiting methane leakage from new wells on private land. Hillary Clinton proposed to follow up on that with a rule for existing wells on private land.

Trump will not do that. But, now that the public lands rule is finalized, undoing it would require a new rule-making process, subject to legal challenge.

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Donald Trump thinks climate change is a Chinese hoax. China begs to differ.

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Trump’s win is a deadly threat to stopping climate change.

by MackenzieTarr9 Posted on November 9, 2016

A President Clinton would have faced a divided Congress, limiting what she could accomplish in terms of advancing climate action. But with both houses in GOP hands, Donald Trump has no such limitations in what he could do to reverse it.

Most of President Obama’s efforts on the clean energy front were made using his executive powers — powers that will now allow Trump to fulfill many of his promises to completely defund climate action and gut environmental protection.

He’s pledged to pull the United States from the Paris climate agreement. He’s vowed to cut all federal climate spending. He is going to appoint a known climate denier, the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Myron Ebell, to head the Environmental Protection Agency’s transition team.

Under Trump’s appointees, the EPA’s powers will be rolled back, with weaker enforcement of regulations mandated by the Clean Air Act and upheld by the Supreme Court. Of course, Trump will have his pick on the Supreme Court, too — which could soon decide the fate of Obama’s central climate accomplishment, the Clean Power Plan.

All of this could set the world back another decade or more on tackling climate change. Democrats can filibuster some. Environmentalists, in full defense mode in the courts, might be able to limit the damage. But limiting is the best we can hope for now.

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Trump’s win is a deadly threat to stopping climate change.

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