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WATCH: The Adventures of Blasty the Drone [Fiore Cartoon]

Mark Fiore — Fri, 25 May 2012 00:06:14 +0000

Mark Fiore is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist and animator whose work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Examiner, and dozens of other publications. He is an active member of the American Association of Editorial Cartoonists, and has a website featuring his work.

Meet Larry Smith, Texas' Wannabe Anti-Shariah Sheriff

Adam Serwer — Thu, 24 May 2012 10:00:00 +0000

Larry Smith, a former Drug Enforcement Administration agent running for sheriff in Smith County, Texas, has a unique plank in his platform: He has pledged to protect this deep-red border county from the creeping menace of Islamic religious law, or Shariah.

Outside of science fiction, this Texas county—which voted for John McCain at a 70 percent clip—doesn't seem the most likely place for an Islamist takeover. After all, creeping Shariah is mostly a myth. The issue might come up in civil cases if both parties to a contract have accepted an agreement based on religious law, but the Constitution bars religious law from superseding civil law.

Despite his out-there Shariah stance, Smith has earned the endorsement of the county's local paper. And local Democrats aren't even fielding a candidate in the sheriff's race. That means next Tuesday's Republican primary—which includes four candidates for the county's top law enforcement post—will likely decide whether Smith County's next sheriff devotes time to worrying about a Shariah takeover.

Two of Smith's rivals say Shariah shouldn't be an issue in the race.

"We hear [about Shariah] on the national media, but here specifically in Smith County, Tyler, in the state of Texas, I'm not seeing that this is going to be a big problem," says Chris Green, a former game warden running in the primary. "I don't think it's gonna occur, especially here; it may in some of the more liberal states."

Another candidate, Bobby Gorman, Smith County's chief sheriff's deputy, suggested Smith was just trying to provoke a controversy over nothing. "Running for sheriff, you always want to get somebody's attention," Gorman says.

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John McCain: The Maverick Returns?

Andy Kroll — Thu, 24 May 2012 10:00:00 +0000

Pete Marovich/ZUMAPRESS

The maverick may be staging a comeback.

For more than two decades, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) carved out a reputation as one of Congress' feistiest reformers, a lawmaker willing to take on corporations, unions, wealthy benefactors, and sometimes the leaders of his own party. For years McCain fought alongside former Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) to ban unregulated, unlimited, undisclosed campaign cash known as soft money. He believed so strongly in campaign finance regulation and tough enforcement of the law that one former Federal Election Commission official recalls McCain telling him, "You're doing God's work."

Yet McCain's 2008 presidential bid disillusioned many of his reformer allies, such the good-government group Public Citizen. They watched with disgust as McCain distanced himself from campaign finance reform and his iconoclastic image. For his part, McCain felt hung out to dry by those allies after they supported Barack Obama despite all the political capital McCain had expended fighting for reform.

Now, however, McCain is starting to resemble his reformer self again. He slams the Supreme Court's 2010 Citizens United decision every chance he gets. He has teamed up with Democrats to demand a rethinking of Citizens United and to craft a new bill that would beef up disclosure of campaign donations and political ads. "He is starting to exert himself, which he had not been doing over the past couple years," says Craig Holman, the top lobbyist for Public Citizen.

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This Third Party Makes a Difference

Josh Harkinson — Thu, 24 May 2012 10:00:00 +0000

In recent years, Oregon state Rep. Mike Schaufler spent some $6,000 from his campaign coffers on more than 90 separate visits to Magoo's Sports Bar in Salem. A five-term Democrat known around the capitol as "Bud Man," Schaufler was tight with Republicans and corporate donors, who helped him raise 60 percent more money than progressive challenger Jeff Reardon in the lead-up to last Tuesday's Democratic primary. So Schaufler must have awoken with an epic hangover on the morning after the election, because he somehow managed to lose his seat.

Reardon, a high school teacher with limited resources and minimal political juice, says he never could have dispatched such a powerful incumbent were it not for the help of a relatively new political force in Oregon: the Working Families Party. Since its founding in New York 14 years ago, the WFP has expanded into four other states and logged a string of high-profile political victories—from reforming New York's drug laws to providing the extra votes needed to clinch the election of Connecticut Gov. Dan Malloy, a liberal leader in a fairly moderate state. Many progressives believe the WFP could eventually become the left's answer to the tea party.

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Can a Pro-Pot-Legalization Texas Dem Beat an Incumbent Drug Warrior?

Tim Murphy — Wed, 23 May 2012 10:00:00 +0000

When a new congressman heads to Washington from Texas' 16th congressional district, he tends to stick around a while. The 16th, a border district that includes the city of El Paso, has been represented by just three men in 48 years; primary challenges are virtually unheard of. So it was noteworthy when, earlier this month, the area's largest newspaper asked its readers to fire eight-term incumbent Rep. Silvestre Reyes.

In Reyes' place, the El Paso Times recommended Beto O'Rourke, a 40-year-old former El Paso councilman who's running neck and neck with the incumbent ahead of Tuesday's Democratic primary. O'Rourke is an outsider in two key respects. He is a white man of Irish decent in a district that's 77 percent Latino. And he is, as the author of a new book proposing the legalization of marijuana, an outspoken critic of federal drug policy. That makes O'Rourke's clash with Reyes more than just a story of an insurgent taking on the machine—in a border district, the contest is partly a referendum on the War on Drugs itself.

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The $1.45 Trillion Fighter Jet—and the Florida Deficit Hawks Who Love It

Adam Weinstein — Wed, 23 May 2012 10:00:00 +0000

The F-35 fighter jet's first missile floated wide. The second found its target, and an explosion brought the bogey down. "Yes! Got him! Woo!" exclaimed the pilot, Jennifer Carroll, a 52-year-old former Navy officer and airplane mechanic.

But it's Carroll's current job—lieutenant governor of Florida—that explains why her simulator flight was being closely watched by about two dozen members of the Florida League of Defense Contractors at an industry gathering in Tallahassee on a drizzly morning in mid-February.

Next, with a technician from Lockheed Martin furiously pointing at indicators and whispering commands over her shoulder, Carroll nosed the simulator down to take on a ground target. "Three, two, one…blam!" she exclaimed, to laughter. "Osama, you're gone!" Virtual mission accomplished.

Carroll's real aim at the gathering was to affirm that she and her boss, Gov. Rick Scott, stood ready to wage battle alongside the assembled business owners, lobbyists, and retired military types to guarantee that Florida's economy will continue to benefit from a steady infusion of defense dollars; one study from 2010 pegged military spending in Florida at $30 billion.

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Our Insanely Big $1 Trillion National Security Budget

Chris Hellman and Mattea Kramer — Wed, 23 May 2012 10:00:00 +0000

This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

Recent months have seen a flurry of headlines about cuts (often called "threats") to the US defense budget. Last week, lawmakers in the House of Representatives even passed a bill that was meant to spare national security spending from future cuts by reducing school-lunch funding and other social programs.

Here, then, is a simple question that, for some curious reason, no one bothers to ask, no less answer: How much are we spending on national security these days? With major wars winding down, has Washington already cut such spending so close to the bone that further reductions would be perilous to our safety?

In fact, with projected cuts added in, the national security budget in fiscal 2013 will be nearly $1 trillion—a staggering enough sum that it's worth taking a walk through the maze of the national security budget to see just where that money's lodged.

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How Rural America Got Fracked

Ellen Cantarow — Wed, 23 May 2012 10:00:00 +0000

If the world can be seen in a grain of sand, watch out. As Wisconsinites are learning, there's money (and misery) in sand—and if you've got the right kind, an oil company may soon be at your doorstep.

March in Wisconsin used to mean snow on the ground, temperatures so cold that farmers worried about their cows freezing to death. But as I traveled around rural townships and villages in early March to interview people about frac-sand mining, a little-known cousin of hydraulic fracturing or "fracking," daytime temperatures soared to nearly 80 degrees—bizarre weather that seemed to be sending a meteorological message.

In this troubling spring, Wisconsin's prairies and farmland fanned out to undulating hills that cradled the land and its people. Within their embrace, the rackety calls of geese echoed from ice-free ponds, bald eagles wheeled in the sky, and deer leaped in the brush. And for the first time in my life, I heard the thrilling warble of sandhill cranes.

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The Tea Party Patriots' Fundraising Fail?

Stephanie Mencimer — Tue, 22 May 2012 10:00:00 +0000

Following the defeat of Sen. Richard Lugar in Indiana's GOP primary, the Tea Party Patriots were quick to claim partial credit for taking down the long-serving moderate. To underscore the group's clout (and push back against chatter about the movement's slow demise), TPP cofounder Jenny Beth Martin revealed to an interviewer that her organization's most recent IRS filing shows that TPP had raised more than $12 million. This impressive figure wasn't exactly proof of TPP's role in dispatching Lugar, but Martin's disclosure did raise a question: Where did all that money go?

The group's full IRS filing, obtained by Mother Jones, offers details on TPP's spending that may make conservative activists wonder about about TPP's fiscal responsibility. It covers the fiscal year ending in May 2011 and shows that TPP spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on high-priced political fundraisers (in one case paying a firm tens of thousands of dollars more than it was able to raise during the reporting period), shelled out more than a half-million dollars in travel expenses, and paid its once-volunteer leaders six-figure salaries.

Complaints about frivolous spending have plagued TPP since the 2010 midterm elections, when some activists accused Martin and fellow TPP co-founder Mark Meckler of hiring expensive consultants and racking up big travel tabs. Since then, local tea party activists have continuiously griped that the national group directs scant funding to its state-based network of grassroots organizations and that it has been poorly managing the contributions it raked in.

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Is Congress Really Authorizing US Propaganda at Home?

Adam Weinstein — Tue, 22 May 2012 10:00:00 +0000

Prepare for an incoming transmission: Flickr/Steven HegerLate last Friday, Buzzfeed reporter and Rolling Stone contributor Michael Hastings broke what looked like a big scoop: Congress was quietly planning to lift a 64-year-old law preventing the US government from using propaganda on its own citizenry. Before the House passed its defense budget bill Friday afternoon, Hastings reported, a bipartisan group of congressmen tacked on an amendment that would "essentially neutralize" a set of time-tested guidelines "that had been passed to protect U.S. audiences from our own government's misinformation campaigns."

Progressive thinkers balked at the news: Mideast expert Juan Cole decried the amendment as "the creeping fascism of American politics…by our representatives, who apparently have never read a book on Germany in the 1930s-1940s or on the Soviet Union in the Stalin period." On civil libertarian Jonathan Turley's site, guest blogger Elaine Magliaro asked: "How about some propaganda for the people paid for by the people being propagandized?"

But the outcry in this case seems misguided. For starters, the proposed law doesn't permit the spread of any information that isn't already available to the American public. Moreover, the amendment could conceivably bring more of the government's overseas information operations into the sunlight, a good thing.

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