Tuesday, March 29, 2016

Split Supreme Court Means A Win For Public Sector Unions

Chris Geidner/BuzzFeed

WASHINGTON — A 4-4 split Supreme Court on Tuesday left in place a lower court ruling that allows public unions to collect fees from non-members.

After arguments in January, it had appeared that a 5-4 court was going to strike down so-called "agency fees," but the death of Justice Antonin Scalia in February upended the case.

The decision marks a victory for unions that was completely unexpected when the Supreme Court agreed to hear Rebecca Friedrichs' case this past June, and the strongest sign yet of the changed composition of the court without Scalia.

The Supreme Court had allowed for such fees in a 1977 decision that the unions had argued was now a settled part of the American workplace landscape, but the court in a recent case had signaled that it was open — if not eager — to reconsider that ruling.

In November 2014, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld such fees administered by the California Teachers Association under the 1977 case, Abood v. Detroit Board of Education. Two months later, Friedrichs asked the Supreme Court to reverse Abood and end "agency fees" in public unions.

The case, Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, was considered almost a done deal when the court agreed to hear the case, given the comments from the five-justice conservative majority of the court in 2014 in Harris v. Quinn. The arguments in Friedrichs bore that out, with the five justices appearing poised to end the fees.

Friedrichs argued that the First Amendment bars California from forcing her to pay money to a union with which she disagrees and has chosen not to join. The unions, joined by California and the Obama administration, countered that the 1977 decision was reinforced by other decisions about more lenient speech rules that apply to the government when it acts as an employer.

The change that Scalia's death a month after arguments would bring to the Friedrichs case was one of the most certain effects of his death.

The court, in its unsigned, one-sentence opinion on Tuesday made that clear: "The judgment is affirmed by an equally divided court."

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6:13 PM Author mohaisen CategoryNews No comments Read More

Senate Democrats Call For Vote On Obama's Supreme Court Nominee By Memorial Day

Saul Loeb / AFP / Getty Images

WASHINGTON — Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee urged the Senate's Republican leadership to "reconsider" their position on President Obama's Supreme Court nominee and called for a Senate floor vote on confirmation on May 25.

In a letter sent to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Chuck Grassley, the nine Democrats on the committee lay out a timeline for consideration of Obama's nominee, D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals Chief Judge Merrick Garland, based on "the average confirmation schedule for nominees since 1975."

According to those averages, Democrats state that hearings for Garland should begin April 27, with a vote of the Judiciary Committee on May 12.

McConnell and Grassley, however, have said that there will not be hearings or a vote on Obama's selection.

In the letter, Democrats push back, writing, "Since Committee hearings began in 1916, every pending Supreme Court nominee has received a hearing, except nine nominees who were all confirmed within 11 days."

Read the Democrats' letter:

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2:48 AM Author mohaisen CategoryNews No comments Read More

Sanders Campaign Architects: We Have A Secret List Of Pro-Bernie Superdelegates

Scott Olson / Getty Images

SEATTLE — There is a “significant number” of superdelegates ready and willing to support Bernie Sanders, top officials at the Sanders campaign told reporters on a conference call Monday.

But Sanders’ secret stash of superdelegates will remain nameless for now, campaign manager Jeff Weaver said. They’re not ready to come forward just yet.

Superdelegates are among the most confounding aspects of the Democratic nominating process for Sanders supporters. The group of federal elected officials, party elders, and DNC members total 712 votes in the race for the party’s nomination. They can vote for anyone they want, unlike the non-super — or “pledged” — delegates candidates win in state nominating contests.

A candidate needs 2,383 delegates to win the Democratic nomination. In a tight race, superdelegates can make the difference. And Hillary Clinton has a huge lead among superdelegates.

Politico reported Monday that she has the support of 469 superdelegates — to Sanders’ 30. Clinton also leads Sanders 1,267 to 1,037 among pledged delegates, according to Five Thirty Eight’s tracker. The math isn’t good for Sanders.

That Sanders backers now talk this way about superdelegates — about having and wanting their support — represents a bit of a shift. The line has always been that the superdelegates are really just a reflection of Clinton’s standing with the party establishment, which Sanders supporters have said really just wants Clinton to win.

Now, a big part of Sanders’s strategy to buck the math is to try to flip superdelegates to his side. Senior Sanders adviser Tad Devine has said for weeks that superdelegates could flip to Sanders if the campaign can prove he’s stronger than Clinton in a general election and can expand the party’s base of support in the fall.

After Sanders’ victories in Washington, Alaska, and Hawaii over the weekend, Devine and Weaver again told reporters that the superdelegates could still be convinced Sanders is the way to go. The three wins allowed Sanders to once again claim the momentum in the Democratic primary race, even if they didn’t do much to change math — which still shows the nomination is Clinton’s to lose.

And so, on Monday, the prospect of winning over unpledged superdelegates and flipping superdelegates who support Clinton was raised once again by top Sanders aides.

“We have a number of superdelegates who are not prepared to go public at this point who have indicated that to us that they're supportive, so we believe our superdelegate number is higher than the one that is publicly available,” Weaver told reporters. “I understand that's not worth a lot at this point from you all's perspective. But we do believe we have identified a substantial number of superdelegates above what's publicly out there.”

Weaver noted that there are “a few hundred” unpledged superdelegates who could still go to Sanders. The fact that they exist proved his point that the superdelegates should not be taken for granted, he added.

“It would be very easy for them to be pledged to Hillary Clinton given the media narrative and the establishment support that she has,” he said. “The fact that they have yet to do that I think demonstrates that there is certainly a large number of superdelegates who have some reluctance about Secretary Clinton's campaign."

The Sanders secret stash of superdelegates would have to be pretty big to make a real difference, however. In fact, Sanders needs Clinton superdelegates to flip. Pressed on the real numbers, Devine warned that the superdelegates secretly in Sanders’ corner are not enough to make the difference at the moment.

“We don't have like 300 super delegates ready to endorse Bernie tomorrow,” he said. “But we do have a lot of people, you know, dozens, who have expressed support for Bernie and are going to find the right time to make that support public.”

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2:34 AM Author mohaisen CategoryNews No comments Read More

Trump: I Was Just Joking When I Made Crude Comments About Women

Trump says he was serious about Megyn Kelly though.

USA Today Sports / Reuters

Donald Trump said in an interview on Monday that he was just joking when he made demeaning comments towards women in the past.

Trump's comments — in which he degrades, ranks, and rates women — have been used against him by his opponents, even appearing in an attack ad from an anti-Trump super PAC. Trump has previously said he didn't recognize some of his own past comments and dismissed others as part of being in "show business."

He told a local Wisconsin television station on Monday that he was just joking.

"Well number one, I'm no different than anybody else, and people joke and I joke," Trump said in a phone interview with Wisconsin local FOX11. "And I never knew I was going to be running for office. And you joke, and you kid and say things, but you're not a politician so you never think anybody cares."

"All of a sudden you decide because the country's doing so badly that you're going to run for office, and then they take every single thing that you've ever said over a lifetime," he continued. "Much of that I said in jest, much of that I said — although with the Fox debate, I didn't say that in jest at all. I said that 100% because Megyn Kelly never treated me fairly and everybody knows it. But you say things and I guarantee you I'm no different, if anything I'm far better than the people I'm running against."

You can watch the interview here:

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LINK: Donald Trump Said A Lot Of Gross Things About Women On “Howard Stern”

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1:46 AM Author mohaisen CategoryNews No comments Read More

Monday, March 28, 2016

Mike Lee: "Too Many Unanswered Questions" To Know If I'll Back Trump As Nominee

“I would need to know where he stands on a lot of the issues,” Lee said.

George Frey / Getty Images

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Republican Sen. Mike Lee from Utah says he's hasn't decided whether he will support Donald Trump if the businessman wins the party's nomination.

"I haven't, because there are too many unanswered questions. I would need to know where he stands on a lot of the issues," Lee, who earlier this month endorsed Ted Cruz, told WTMJ's Charlie Sykes Show on Monday when asked if he'd support Trump.

Lee said it wasn't clear where Trump stands on many important issues.

"Again, federalism, separation of powers, the fundamental purpose of government. How he reads the enumerated powers of the federal government," he said. "I haven't heard a whole lot of detail. In fact, I haven't heard any detail from Donald Trump when it comes to any of those questions."

Lee added it was too early to decide if he'd support a third party candidate if Trump became the nominee.

"That's too early to say that, and it's unnecessary because Ted Cruz is going to win this. Donald Trump's not gonna win it, Ted Cruz is. He can get there and I believe he will."

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11:07 PM Author mohaisen CategoryNews No comments Read More

Sports: NASCAR’s Dale Earnhardt Jr. Will Donate Brain for Concussion Research

Sports on TIME.com

NASCAR’s Dale Earnhardt Jr. Will Donate Brain for Concussion Research

“I'm donating everything one way or another"

Published on March 28, 2016 at 08:59PM

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10:21 PM Author mohaisen CategorySport No comments Read More

Donald Trump Is Still Flip-Flopping On Toppling Saddam Hussein

Trump for years said President George H.W. Bush should have “finished the job” by invading Baghdad. He told the New York Times over the weekend Bush did the “right thing.”

Joshua Roberts / Reuters

In an apparent shift in opinion, Donald Trump told the New York Times over the weekend that he believes President George H.W. Bush made the right decision to not invade Baghdad and depose Saddam Hussein at the end of the First Gulf War.

For years, Trump has said Bush should have "finished the job," writing in his 2000 book The America We Deserve: "He wasn't afraid to use American power when he figured out that Saddam Hussein posed a direct threat to American interests in the East. I only wish, however, that he had spent three more days and properly finished the job."

In a long interview with the New York Times on his foreign policy, Trump revealed that he now believes Bush "did the right thing."

"Well he did the right thing, he did the right thing," Trump said, when discussing the Gulf War. "He went in, he knocked the hell out of Iraq and then he let it go, O.K.? He didn't go in. Now I don't know was that Schwarzkopf, was that, was that...or maybe it was him, but he didn't go in, he didn't get into the quicksand, right? He didn't get into the quicksand and I mean, history will show that he was right."

Trump cited Hussein's taunting of Bush in 1992 following the war to show he overplayed his hand.

"And he was taunting to them, he was saying, and even I used to say 'Wow' because I knew that we could've gone further," he said. "We went in for a short period of time and just knocked the hell out of them and then went back, sort of gave them a lesson, but we didn't destroy the country, we didn't destroy the grid, we didn't, you know, there was something left. There was a lot left. And instead of just sort of saying he got lucky and to himself, just going about, he was taunting the Bushes. And Junior said, 'Well I'm not going to take it' and he went in."

Trump's position on how to deal with Hussein has shifted over the past two decades. He has claimed this past year that he was vocally opposed to the Iraq War before the invasion, a claim contradicted by his own words. For years, Trump said Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction were a threat and that Bush 41 should have finished the job.

BuzzFeed News previously reported three times Trump advocated for toppling Hussein.

"Yeah, I guess so," Trump said on Howard Stern when asked if he supported invading Iraq. "I wish the first time it was done correctly."

"He didn't finish the war," Trump said in 1999 in Fox News Sunday. "I wish he'd finished the war."

"We can learn something here from George Bush and see how good a president he was," Trump wrote in his 2000 book The America We Deserve. "He wasn't afraid to use American power when he figured out that Saddam Hussein posed a direct threat to American interests in the East. I only wish, however, that he had spent three more days and properly finished the job. It is this kind of will and determination to use our strength strategically that America needs again in dealing with the North Koreans."

SANGER: So you know Mr. Trump, from listening and enjoying these two conversations we've had today which have been extremely interesting, I've been trying to sort of fit where your worldview and your philosophy here, your doctrine fits in with sort of the previous Republican mainlines of inquiry. And so if you think back to George H. W. Bush, the most recent President Bush's father, he was an internationalist who was in the realist school, he wanted to sort of change the foreign policy of other nations but you didn't see him messing inside those countries and then you had a group of people around —

TRUMP: Well he did the right thing, David, he did the right thing. He went in, he knocked the hell out of Iraq and then he let it go, O.K.? He didn't go in. Now I don't know was that Schwarzkopf, was that, was that —

SANGER: It was George W. Bush himself.

TRUMP: Or maybe it was him, but he didn't go in, he didn't get into the quicksand, right? He didn't get into the quicksand and I mean, history will show that he was right. And with that Saddam Hussein overplayed his card more than any human being I think I've ever seen. Instead of saying "Wow, I got lucky" that they didn't come in and take this all away from me. He should've just relaxed a little bit, O.K.? And instead he taunted Bush Sr. He taunted him. And Bush Jr. loves his father and didn't like what was happening, but I remember very vividly how Saddam Hussein was taunting, absolutely taunting, saying we have beaten the Americans, you know, meaning they didn't come in so he would tell everybody he beat them. Do you remember that, right?

SANGER: I do indeed.

TRUMP: And he was taunting to them, he was saying, and even I used to say "Wow" because I knew that we could've gone further. We went in for a short period of time and just knocked the hell out of them and then went back, sort of gave them a lesson, but we didn't destroy the country, we didn't destroy the grid, we didn't, you know, there was something left. There was a lot left. And instead of just sort of saying he got lucky and to himself, just going about, he was taunting the Bushes. And Junior said, "Well I'm not going to take it" and he went in. And you know, look that was —

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