September 4, 2016

Detroit’s mayor blasts Trump as phony candidate without solutions

Duggan questions whether Trump is simply using Detroiters as props for an image makeover.

As Donald Trump prepared this morning to visit a Detroit church in a move to appeal to black voters, the city’s mayor questioned whether Trump was simply using Detroiters as props for an image makeover.

"This is the most phony major party nominee that I’ve seen in my lifetime, and that’s why we’re skeptical," Mayor Mike Duggan said at a news conference with Congresswoman Brenda Lawrence, D-Southfield "I feel like I'm watching the next season of The Apprentice."

Duggan, a Democrat, spoke mostly to television cameras and a handful of activists gathered on the north side of Grand River across the street from Greater Faith Ministries International, where Trump is scheduled to visit this morning. Detroit Police have Grand River barricaded for about two blocks in front of the church in northwest Detroit, diverting traffic to other roads.

The department's bomb squad truck was parked nearby and Secret Service officers shooed people off the sidewalks in front of the church and told them they'd have to go elsewhere.

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http://www.freep.com/story/news/2016/09/03/duggan-blasts-trump-phony-candidate-without-solutions/89768286/

September 4, 2016

Where did Donald Trump get his racialized rhetoric? From libertarians.

The intersection of white nationalism, the alt-right and Ron Paul

By Matthew Sheffield September 2

Matthew Sheffield?is the editor of Praxis, an online journal of politics, technology and media.

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According to Clinton — and many conservative intellectuals who oppose Trump — the conspiratorial, winking-at-racists campaign he has been running represents a novel departure from Republican politics.

That’s not quite true, though. Trump’s style and positions — endorsing and consorting with 9/11 truthers, promoting online racists, using fake statistics — draw on a now-obscure political strategy called “paleolibertarianism,” which was once quite popular among some Republicans, especially former presidential candidate Ron Paul.

Formally, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) may be his father’s political heir. But there’s no question that the paranoid and semi-racialist mien frequently favored by Trump originates in the fevered swamps that the elder Paul dwelled in for decades. Most people who back Trump don’t do so for racist reasons, but it’s incredible how many of the same white nationalists and conspiracy theorists to whom Ron Paul once catered are now ardent Trump supporters. It’s because Trump and Paul speak the same language.

Mainstream libertarians have been agonizing over this legacy among themselves for some time, hoping that either the elder or younger Paul would definitively denounce the movement’s racialist past, but no such speech has ever come. Instead, the paleolibertarian strategy concocted decades ago as a way to push for minimal government threatens to replace right-wing libertarianism with white nationalism.

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/09/02/where-did-donald-trump-get-his-racialized-rhetoric-from-libertarians/?utm_term=.fe60e9cab2d3&wpisrc=nl_headlines&wpmm=1

September 4, 2016

Indiana Gov. Mike Pence will release his tax returns ‘in the next week’

Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, said Saturday that he would release his tax returns “in the next week,” but he was less clear about the timeline for his running mate, Donald Trump.

“Donald Trump and I are both going to release our tax returns. I’ll release mine in the next week,” Pence said in an interview taped for NBC’s “Meet the Pres But Pence maintained, as Trump has for months, that a federal audit is responsible for delaying the release of the businessman’s documents.

“Donald Trump will be releasing his tax returns at the completion of an audit,” he said.

When pressed by moderator Chuck Todd, Pence would not specify whether Trump would share his statements with the public before the election. “Well, we’ll see,” Pence said.

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/indiana-gov-mike-pence-will-release-his-tax-returns-in-the-next-week/2016/09/03/f454fae6-7216-11e6-b786-19d0cb1ed06c_story.html?wpisrc=nl_headlines&wpmm=1

September 4, 2016

Right seeks to kill the lame duck

Conservative lawmakers and advocacy groups are fighting to prevent a lame-duck session after the elections, arguing that members of Congress who have been booted from office shouldn't be responsible for major policy decisions.

Opponents of a post-election session are primarily wary of lawmakers passing another catchall omnibus government spending package that would likely include a slew of policy riders.

“It’s the least accountable time for Congress,” Rep. Mick Mulvaney (R-S.C.), a member of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, told The Hill. “We let people who have either quit or been fired or retired vote on spending billions and billions of taxpayer dollars after their period of accountability has ended.”

“This is something that is supposed to be Republican orthodoxy. That the least accountable government is the worst government,” he said. The last two lame-duck sessions in 2014 and 2012 featured difficult negotiations over an omnibus spending package and expired tax breaks.

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http://thehill.com/homenews/house/294361-right-seeks-to-kill-the-lame-duck

September 3, 2016

Trump Adviser Michele Bachmann Warns That ‘This Is The Last Election’

Former congresswoman and regular predictor of the impending apocalypse Michele Bachmann said in a Friday interview that the 2016 presidential race would be the country’s “last election.”

“I don't want to be melodramatic but I do want to be truthful,” the evangelical Christian said in an interview on the Christian Broadcasting Network’s “Brody File.” “I believe without a shadow of a doubt this is the last election. This is it. This is the last election.”

Bachmann, who advises Donald Trump on religious issues and foreign policy, explained that demographic change in the United States posed a disadvantage to Republican candidates since the country’s growing share of minority voters were more inclined to vote for Democrats.

“It's a math problem of demographics and a changing United States,” she said. “If you look at the numbers of people who vote and who lives in the country and who Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton want to bring in to the country, this is the last election when we even have a chance to vote for somebody who will stand up for godly moral principles. This is it.”

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http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/michele-bachmann-2016-last-election-demographic-change

September 3, 2016

WaPo Editorial Board: America has accepted 10,000 Syrian refugees. That’s still too few.

IN THE face of the most calamitous refugee crisis since World War II, the United States has finally begun granting refuge to displaced Syrians on a pace that, while still unequal to the problem’s scale and the United States’ capacity, at least starts to acknowledge that a crisis exists.

In an announcement Monday, the White House said the administration had met its goal of granting asylum to 10,000 Syrians in the current fiscal year, which ends in a month. Officials said they expect to continue accepting asylum applications in coming weeks and months.

The modesty of the numerical goal is incommensurate with the weight of the challenge posed by some 5 million Syrian refugees, including roughly 1.1 million already in Europe. Measured against resettlement programs on behalf of refugees by Germany, France, Britain and other Western countries, to say nothing of those by Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan, America’s own efforts are meager. Canada, with a population barely a tenth the size of the United States’, has resettled three times more Syrian refugees since last fall. And Washington’s goal for the next fiscal year, starting Oct. 1, is no greater than its goal for the current year.

National security adviser Susan Rice heralded the arrival of the 10,000th refugee by releasing a statement lauding the “important message” President Obama had sent. Given the craven resistance to any resettlement, especially among some Republican governors, the self-congratulation was understandable. Yet the United States could do much more.

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/america-has-accepted-10000-syrian-refugees-thats-still-too-few/2016/09/02/470446e2-6fc0-11e6-8533-6b0b0ded0253_story.html?utm_term=.0889e6bc80a0&wpisrc=nl_headlines&wpmm=1

September 2, 2016

Fox News Has the Worst Human Resources Standards in Human History (WOW!!!!)

By Ben Mathis-Lilley

Ace New York magazine reporter Gabriel Sherman has a big piece up Friday about the downfall of Fox News' Roger Ailes. Sherman is extremely well-connected at Fox, and the story is packed with details about media/political intrigue, some of which, such as Megyn Kelly suspecting Donald Trump may have had her poisoned, involve this year's election. But it's also a mind-boggling portrayal of unfathomably inappropriate workplace behavior that actually starts before Ailes got to Fox, when he was at CNBC:



Sounds like the kind of guy you'd want to put in charge of an office, right? Rupert Murdoch thought so. This reportedly paid off for him in the form of Ailes installing cameras so he could make jokes about Murdoch's son being gay:



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http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2016/09/02/fox_news_is_a_bad_workplace.html?sid=5388f1c6dd52b8e4110003de&wpsrc=newsletter_slatest

September 2, 2016

Green Party's Jill Stein Flies To Wrong Ohio City For Rally

Source: Talking Points Memo

Talk about a detour!

Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein ended up in the wrong Ohio city Friday for an unknown reason, delaying a speech she was supposed give at a university, The Columbus Dispatch reported.

Stein was slated to speak at noon at Capital University, a school in Bexley, OH, near Columbus. But there seemed to some miscommunication because the Capital University Greens Student Organization told The Dispatch that Stein flew into Cincinnati, which is about 2 hours away by car.

The paper reported that there were about 100 attendees waiting at the rally site for Stein and that pizzas are being ordered for those who waited while Stein made that drive. It was unclear who was providing the pizzas.

Read more: http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/green-party-s-jill-stein-flies-to-wrong-ohio-city-for-rally

September 2, 2016

FBI releases Hillary Clinton email investigation documents

Source: The Washington Post

The FBI on Friday released a detailed report on its investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while she was secretary of state, as well as what appears to be a summary of her interview with agents, providing the most thorough look yet at the probe that has dogged the campaign of the Democratic presidential nominee.

The documents released total 58 pages, though large portions and sometimes entire pages are redacted.

FBI Director James B. Comey announced in July that his agency would not recommend criminal charges against Clinton for her use of a private email server. Comey said that Clinton and her staffers were “extremely careless” in how they treated classified information, but investigators did not find they intended to mishandle such material. Nor did investigators uncover exacerbating factors — like efforts to obstruct justice — that often lead to charges in similar cases, Comey said.

The FBI turned over to several Congressional committees documents related to the probe and required they only be viewed by those with appropriate security clearances, even though not all of the material was classified, legislators and their staffers have said.

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Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/fbi-releases-hillary-clinton-email-investigation-documents/2016/09/02/21bd3682-704c-11e6-8365-b19e428a975e_story.html

September 2, 2016

BlueCross BlueShield urges Congress to protect ObamaCare insurer fund

Source: The Hill

Blue Cross Blue Shield is lobbying Congress this summer to protect an ObamaCare insurer fund that Republicans have called a “bailout” for companies.

The corporation — which insures more than 100 million people nationwide — is distributing a memo to lawmakers warning against some GOP attempts to block the money from going to insurers this fall.

“Recently, some are proposing to stop the scheduled 2016 reinsurance payments to health plans, claiming these payments are a ‘bailout,’ ” the company wrote in the memo, obtained by The Hill. “This would result in higher premiums and less choice for consumers,” it reads.
Blue Cross Blue Shield did not return multiple requests for comment.

The reinsurance program was created under ObamaCare as a form of life support for insurers like Blue Cross Blue Shield that saw an influx of "high-risk" patients after the massive shake-up of the marketplace.

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Read more: http://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/294288-bluecross-blueshield-urges-congress-to-protect-obamacare-insurer-fund