June 27, 2018

In Oklahoma, Republicans Paid For Voting Down Teacher Raises

Source: Talking Points Memo/AP



By Associated Press | June 27, 2018 6:48 am

WASHINGTON (AP) — It was a mixed bag for teachers running for political office in Oklahoma but a bad night for incumbent Republicans who voted against a tax package earlier this year to fund a teacher pay raise.

Several GOP incumbents who voted against the tax hikes were either ousted from office or pulled into a runoff against a fellow GOP opponent, a signal some teacher candidates say bodes well for them in November.

Of the 10 “no” voters in the House who were running for re-election, two were defeated outright on Tuesday night — Reps. Chuck Strohm of Jenks and Scott McEachin of Tulsa. Seven others were pulled into an Aug. 28 primary runoff against fellow Republicans.

Four other Republican incumbents lost on Tuesday, including one who lost to a teacher.

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Read more: https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/in-oklahoma-republicans-pay-for-voting-down-teacher-raises

June 27, 2018

McConnell: Blocking Garland Was 'Most Consequential Decision I Ever Made'

Source: Talking Points Memo




By Kate Riga | June 27, 2018 9:41 am

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell took a victory lap during a Politco Playbook interview on Wednesday, calling his decision to block President Barack Obama from filling the vacant Supreme Court seat during his tenure as the “single most consequential decision I ever made.”

“I felt very confident that if the shoe was on the other foot, a Democratic Senate would not have confirmed a Republican president’s nominee during an election,” he said. “I was confident that the complaints would be rank hypocrisy knowing full well that they would do the same thing in the middle of an election.”

McConnell touted getting Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch on the bench, along with his record rate of getting circuit judges appointed, as one of his most significant accomplishments in the time of Trump.

Overall, he said that this has been “the best year and a half” for those wanting America taken in a “right of center” direction.

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Read more: https://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/mcconnell-gloats-over-blocking-garland

June 27, 2018

Helsinki As US-Russia Summit Locale Would Let Putin Get Back For World Cup

By Kate Riga | June 27, 2018 10:04 am

The White House has set aside three days at the end of President Donald Trump’s upcoming trip to Brussels and the UK for a potential summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin, the location of which is rumored to be neutral, historical and convenient Helsinki.

According to a Tuesday Politico report, the Finnish capital is a sufficiently neutral backdrop, as well as one suffused with historical significance: former President Gerald Ford signed the Helsinki Accords with the Soviet Union there, and former President George H. W. Bush met Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev there in the 1990s.

And perhaps most importantly, it’s close enough to get Putin back to Russia in time for the final match of the World Cup.

Per Politico, National Security Adviser John Bolton will be in Moscow this week to talk logistics for the meeting.

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https://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/helsinki-for-us-russia-summit-would-let-putin-get-back-for-world-cup-match

June 27, 2018

Biden: Trump's Foreign Policy Makes Me 'Guilty' That I Don't Want To Run In 2020

By Kate Riga | June 27, 2018 8:09 am

Former Vice President Joe Biden admitted that President Donald Trump’s contentious and oftentimes baffling treatment of American allies makes him feel “guilty” that he doesn’t want to run for President in 2020, according to a Tuesday Washington Post report.

“It makes me feel guilty about not wanting to [run for President],” he told the Post. “But it doesn’t make me want to. I’m not looking to live in the White House, I’ve seen it up close.”

He then walked back his comments. “But all kidding aside, I don’t know what I’m going to do,” he added.

Despite his reluctance to reenter the political fray, Biden has serious concerns about Trump’s treatments of our European allies.

“The things that are the most debilitating from the perspective of most of the Europeans is the way he conducts himself when he is with allies,” Biden said. “Several of them have said to me the degree of disrespect shown is debilitating.”

more
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/biden-trump-foreign-policy-makes-me-guilty-i-dont-want-to-run-for-president

June 27, 2018

Former Twitter executive: Trump is in denial over social media threat to midterms

Source: Yahoo News


David Knowles,Yahoo News•June 27, 2018

SAN FRANCISCO — President Trump often complains about “fake news,” but with the 2018 midterm elections fast approaching, his administration has done little to try to combat those who would use it to subvert American democracy.

“I think that the biggest problem with 2018 is the fact that the administration still won’t really acknowledge that there is a problem,” Adam Sharp, Twitter’s former head of news, government and elections told Grant Burningham, host of the new Yahoo News podcast “Bots & Ballots.”

“To the extent that there is any effort to make sure that our systems and public debate around the election are not manipulated by foreign powers,” he continued, “that effort is being led entirely by the private sector, by Twitter and Facebook and Google, each working independently to try to do the right thing, but in their own ways, on their own, with their own duties to their shareholders.”

Sharp, who left Twitter just before the 2016 presidential election, says Americans using social media remain vulnerable to foreign election interference and blames the federal government.

Read more: https://www.yahoo.com/news/former-twitter-executive-trump-denial-social-media-threat-midterms-090008041.html

June 27, 2018

Ocasio-Cortez: I would support Trump impeachment

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http://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/394362-ocasio-cortez-i-would-support-trump-impeachment

June 27, 2018

McConnell: Votes aren't there to nix filibuster

BY JORDAIN CARNEY - 06/27/18 09:40 AM EDT

Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on Wednesday said that the Senate will not be nixing the 60-vote legislative filibuster despite a renewed call by President Trump to do so.

McConnell, speaking at a Politico Playbook event, said the support wasn't there in the Senate for getting rid of the filibuster, which has sparked frustration among House conservatives and the White House.

"With the regard to the filibuster rule, as I've told him repeatedly, the votes aren't there to change it. They just aren't there," McConnell said later adding, "I simply disagree with the president about the harm that [the filibuster] does."

McConnell has joined the majority of senators in repeatedly defending the filibuster despite pressure from the White House and conservatives to get rid of the higher vote threshold, which can be used to block GOP priorities from passing the Senate because it requires Democratic support for most legislation.

"I always say, 'Well we're just more important than you are.' Not really," McConnell quipped about how he responds to House members complaining about the Senate rules.

more
http://thehill.com/homenews/senate/394364-mcconnell-votes-arent-there-to-nix-filibuster

June 27, 2018

Nazi Sympathizers Pushing to Take Over Europe's Spy Agencies

Far-right politicians have taken over the security apparatus in Austria and Italy. Next on their list: the intelligence agencies.

CHRISTOPHER DICKEY
JOSEPHINE HUETLIN
BETHANY ALLEN-EBRAHIMIAN

06.26.18 9:00 PM ET

A slow-simmering scandal in Austria has brought into public view potentially disastrous divisions among Western intelligence agencies. As far-right politicians have joined coalition governments in Austria and Italy and taken ministerial positions in charge of security and law enforcement, concerns have grown among intelligence professionals that they will ignore or even encourage the threat of violent ultra-right extremists.

The extreme right is now in charge of the interior ministries in both Vienna and Rome, putting conspicuous pressure on the intelligence services. In Austria, there have even been police raids on the homes and offices of top intelligence service staffers.

Already, at least some intelligence sharing between Germany and Austria appears to have been curtailed, and the relationship between Italy’s extreme-right-wing interior minister Matteo Salvini and other major European countries is severely, publicly strained. French President Emmanuel Macron last week likened the rise of such populists to “leprosy all across Europe.”

At the same time, these far-right politicians’ open friendliness toward Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, the KGB veteran who may have helped some of them get elected, raises grave security issues for the NATO alliance. And the fact that right-wing U.S. President Donald Trump appears to be playing a similar game—trying to discredit U.S. intelligence professionals while flirting with Putin—greatly heightens the sense of alarm.

more
https://www.thedailybeast.com/nazi-sympathizers-want-to-run-europes-spy-agencies?ref=home

June 27, 2018

The Racism Isn't Surprising Anymore - by Joe Conason

June 26, 2018 2:40 pm

Can we stop pretending to be shocked when a member of the Trump administration — or one of its prominent supporters — emits a squib of stinking racism?

In the latest episode, which should have surprised exactly nobody, former Donald Trump deputy campaign manager David Bossie shouted at an African-American guest on a Fox News show: “You’re out of your cotton-pickin’ mind.” The guest naturally took exception, noting that his family members had picked cotton as slaves. Fox News officially scolded Bossie, an employee of the network, with a two-week “suspension” — and he tweeted a dutiful apology.

But while everyone noted the apology and moved on, the underlying problem remains. The political culture embodied by Fox News, Donald Trump, and David Bossie is steeped in racial antagonism as both strategy and ideology. And to anyone who knows the history of these people and institutions, their outbursts of bigotry are numbingly routine.

Look more closely at Bossie, a figure whose history on the Republican right dates back to the Reagan era, when he dropped out of college to work on political campaigns. He soon joined up with Floyd Brown, the Citizens United impresario responsible for the infamous “Willie Horton” ad that helped to bring down Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis in 1988. That ad featured a mug shot of Horton, a convicted murderer, with a frightening scowl and a bushy Afro. This race-baiting classic was so offensively divisive that George H.W. Bush sought to avoid any association with it — although there was plenty of evidence that his campaign consultant Roger Ailes had been involved in its production. At Citizens United, where Brown worked closely with Bossie, they were proud to claim credit for the Horton ad.

That Bossie was attracted to the vilest of racists became even clearer four years later, when he and Brown showed up in Arkansas to bring down Bill Clinton. They latched onto “Justice Jim” Johnson, a vintage segregationist politician whose corrosive hatred and ancient prejudices were a parody of extremism. He had run for governor as the candidate of the White Citizens Councils, a marginally more respectable version of the Ku Klux Klan. He had whipped up the mobs that assaulted black students during the historic 1957 confrontation at Little Rock’s Central High School. He even lived on a farm that he named “White Haven,” where he plotted against Clinton with Bossie and Brown.

When the pair published a ludicrous anti-Clinton booklet titled Slick Willie, which accused the Arkansas governor of a long list of offenses that included promoting socialism and witchcraft (as well as coddling the state’s black citizens), its acknowledgments included a “special thanks” to Johnson.

Flash forward to 2018, and here is Bossie, a top political lieutenant of an openly racist president, appearing on the cable network that Ailes created, where he blurts a stupid racial epithet. Bossie is an appalling character with a long rap sheet, but he is really nothing special on today’s Trumpist right — where ambitious hustlers like him have long been eager to promote prejudice, against any vulnerable minority, if that advances their candidate or party.

Does Bossie hate people of color, or Mexican-Americans, or the little immigrant children this administration is victimizing? Did Roger Ailes? Does Trump? It is impossible to know their hearts. But by their poison fruits, we already know them. These “conservatives” have spent decades doing what they still do every day, which is to weaken our country by dividing its people against each other by race and ethnicity for personal gain. More and more, they are assisted by a hostile foreign power in that effort.

We all can see where this is leading, as we watch the victimization of disfavored people, the abrogation of their human rights, and the building of camps to imprison them. Don’t act surprised when we get there.

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http://www.nationalmemo.com/racism-isnt-surprising-anymore/

Full column posted with the permission of the author -- Don

June 27, 2018

A Children's Gitmo On The Border

Karen Greenberg

June 27, 2018 4:30 am

By the time Donald J. Trump threw in the towel, who among us hadn’t seen or heard the chilling videos in which U.S. border officials shamelessly grabbed uncomprehending children and toddlers from their pleading mothers and fathers? Some were told they were being taken to bathe or shower by people with little sense of the resonances of history. They were, of course, creating scenes that couldn’t help but bring to mind those moments when Jews, brought to Nazi concentration camps, were told that they were being sent to take “showers,” only to be murdered en masse in the gas chambers. Some of those children didn’t even realize that they had missed the chance to say goodbye to their mothers or fathers. Those weeping toddlers, breast-deprived infants, and distressed teens were just the most recent signs of the Trump administration’s war against decency, compassion, and justice.

Because the victims were children, however, it was easy to ignore one reality: new as all this may have seemed, it actually wasn’t. Dehumanized, traumatized, and scared, those children — their predicament — shocked many Americans who insisted, along with former First Lady Laura Bush, that this was truly un-American. As she wrote in the Washington Post:

“Americans pride ourselves on being a moral nation, on being the nation that sends humanitarian relief to places devastated by natural disasters or famine or war. We pride ourselves on believing that people should be seen for the content of their character, not the color of their skin. We pride ourselves on acceptance. If we are truly that country, then it is our obligation to reunite these detained children with their parents — and to stop separating parents and children in the first place.”

Her essay essentially asked one question: Who have we become? Former CIA Director Michael Hayden, tweeting out a picture of the Birkenau concentration camp over the words “Other governments have separated women and children,” suggested an answer: we were planting the seeds that could make us the new Nazi Germany.

But let me assure you, much of what we saw in these last weeks with those children had its origins in policies and “laws” so much closer to home than Germany three-quarters of a century ago. If you wanted to see where their ravaging really began, you needed to look elsewhere (which, surprisingly enough, no one has) — specifically, to those who created the Guantánamo Bay Detention Facility. From its inception beyond the reach of American courts or, in any normal sense, justice, this prison camp set the stage structurally, institutionally, and legally for what we’ve just been witnessing at the border.

more
http://www.nationalmemo.com/a-childrens-gitmo-on-the-border/