Clinton team sees recount effort as waste of resources
Hillary Clinton‘s aides and supporters are urging dispirited Democrats to channel their frustrations about the election results into political causes — just not into efforts to recount ballots in three battleground states. The former Democratic presidential candidate and her close aides see the recount drive largely as a waste of resources, according to people close to Clinton. The effort is being fueled by Green Party candidate Jill Stein, who’s formed an organization to try to force recounts in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. “Believe me if there was anything I could do to make Hillary Clinton the next president of the United States I would,” said former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, a longtime Clinton supporter. “But this is a big waste of time.” Aides say Clinton is focused on moving past her unexpected defeat and has devoted little attention to the recount or thinking about her political future. She’s been spending time with her grandchildren and going for walks near her Westchester home. Sightings of Clinton hiking with her dogs and shopping at a Rhode Island bookstore went viral on social media. “There have been a few times this past week where all I wanted to do was curl up with a good book and our dogs and never leave the house again,” Clinton said in an emotional speech at a gala for the Children’s Defense Fund, her one public appearance since her loss. Former President Bill Clinton, meanwhile, has been poring over the election results, second-guessing decisions by top campaign aides and intensely trying to figure out how his wife lost the white working-class voters who were the base of his electoral coalition, say people familiar with the campaign. Clinton’s team was aware of possible discrepancies soon after the election, telling top donors on a conference call four days after the election that they were looking into potential problems in the three states. But while many campaign staffers believe Russian hacking influenced the outcome of the election, blaming foreign actors for incursions into campaign and Democratic National Committee emails, they’ve found no evidence of the kind of widespread ballot box tampering that would change the results of the race — or even flip a single state. Still, some dejected Clinton supporters have been unwilling to accept the results. Stein has raised $6.5 million for her recount campaign, according to a count posted on her campaign website on Tuesday. That’s nearly double the roughly $3.5 million she raised during her entire presidential bid. Some former Clinton aides have asked frustrated supporters to donate their dollars to what they view as more constructive causes, like state parties or the Democratic candidate in Louisiana, where a Dec. 10 runoff will be the party’s last chance to pick up a Senate seat this year. “I wouldn’t give a dollar to Jill Stein,” said Adam Parkhomenko, a longtime Clinton aide. “Volunteers, supporters and Democrats, they want to pick themselves up and get back out there. The best vehicle to do that is the Louisiana Senate race.” Clinton’s team conducted an exhaustive investigation into the possibility of outside interference in the vote tally, tasking lawyers, data scientists and political analysts to comb over the results. They contacted outside experts, examined the laws governing recounts and double-checked all the vote tallies. The campaign found no “evidence of manipulation,” wrote Marc Elias, the general counsel for Clinton’s campaign, in an online essay. But, he said, Clinton agreed to minimal participation in Stein’s effort, largely to make sure that her interests are represented. They put out a call for volunteers to monitor the proceedings and are relying on local lawyers to handle filings and other legal matters. Clinton is under pressure to participate from her supporters, some of whom have struggled to accept the election results given her lead in the popular vote, which has grown to more than 2.3 million in the weeks after the Nov. 8 election. “Now that a recount is underway, we believe we have an obligation to the more than 64 million Americans who cast ballots for Hillary Clinton to participate in ongoing proceedings to ensure that an accurate vote count will be reported,” Elias wrote. Clinton’s lawyers filed motions with a Wisconsin judge on Tuesday looking to join Stein’s lawsuit demanding that Wisconsin officials recount ballots by hand. The state elections commission will formally began the recount on Thursday. Stein’s organization has also filed for recounts in six of Pennsylvania’s largest counties and says it plans to file a petition Wednesday demanding a Michigan recount. “It’s election law malpractice to not have your lawyers sitting around the table with Jill Stein’s lawyers,” said Adam Ambrogi, elections program director at the bipartisan Democracy Fund. “It is just due diligence.” Republished with permission of The Associated Press.
Alabama is the ninth-worst state for underprivileged children
Despite its global power and unrivaled prosperity, the U.S. has the ninth-highest rate of child poverty among economically developed nations. To put that in perspective, nearly a fifth, or about 16.1 million, of all children in America live in households with incomes below the poverty line . In fact, in the U.S., a baby is born into poverty every 32 seconds. In Alabama, that translated to 27 percent of the 1,082,408 children in the state in 2014, living in a household with less than 100 percent of the federal poverty level, according to figures from the National Center for Children in Poverty. That’s means a family of four trying to survive on less than $24,008 in annual income, and research suggests that, on average, families need an income of about twice the federal poverty threshold to meet their basic needs. And now, according to a new study released by the personal finance site WalletHub, the numbers aren’t looking any better for underprivileged children living in the Yellowhammer State. Alabama is the ninth-worst state for underprivileged children in the U.S. Throughout most of the metrics used in the study, Alabama ranked among the worst. According to WalletHub, the Yellowhammer State ranks 46th in the percentage of children living in households with below-poverty income, 48th in the percentage of children living with grandparents and no parent in the home, and a whopping 51st in infant mortality rate. Welfare of children in Alabama (1=Best; 25=Avg.): 46th: percentage of children in households with below-poverty income 18th: percentage of maltreated children 48th: child food-insecurity rate 51st: infant mortality rate 46th: percentage of children in single-parent families 31st: ratio of children in renter-occupied to owner-occupied homes 48th: percentage of children living with grandparents and no parent in the home But the state isn’t doomed to the status quo — things have the potential to turn around if the Yellowhammer State refocuses its priorities. “Elected officials need to place their highest priority on our next generation,” said Janet Schneiderman, research associate professor in the Department of Child, Youth and Families, and in the Department of Nursing at the University of Southern California School of Social Work. “Rather than responding to the crisis at hand, elected officials need a longer view and more thoughtful planning. All programmatic responses and funding decisions need to address how best to serve families in poverty to assure that children have the best chance for developing into healthy, productive adults.” Here’s a look at how Alabama compares to the rest of the country: Source: WalletHub The data was collected from the U.S. Census Bureau, the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services — Administration for Children and Families, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Center for Educational Statistics, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Equality of Opportunity Project, Kids Count — Annie E. Casey Foundation, and Feeding America.
Bill would protect children, establish Alabama Child Abuse Hotline
A bill from Rep. Becky Nordgren (R-Gadsden) would create the Alabama Child Abuse Hotline, a toll-free number where child abuse can be reported. The text of HB353 specifies that the Department of Human Resources (ADHR) would be tasked with adopting rules regarding the establishment and management of the hotline, which is to be advertised in a place of prominence in every public and charter school throughout the state. According to numbers available on the Alabama Network of Children’s Advocacy Centers’ website, more than 1,500 children died as a result of child abuse in 2011. Of those, about 75 percent suffered neglect, 15 percent suffered physical abuse and just under 10 percent suffered sexual abuse. Children under the age of one suffered the highest rates of victimization. According to ADHR’s 2014 report, which is the most recent available on the department’s website, more that 32,000 cases of child abuse or neglect were investigated – involving more than 50,000 children. That number has increased every year since 2011. A report by the Children’s Defense Fund puts it this way – in Alabama, a child is abused or neglected every 56 minutes and a child dies before his or her first birthday every 14 hours. Though the legislation currently has no co-sponsors, it is likely to gain wide support in the House and Senate, where Republicans have made families a centerpiece of their 2016 agenda. Nordgren did not respond to a request for comment.
Hillary Clinton releases tax, health records on busy Friday
Hillary Rodham Clinton is in “excellent physical condition and fit to serve as president,” her physician declared Friday, just one in a flood of disclosures about the Democratic presidential candidate released by her campaign on a busy summer day. Within a three-hour period, the State Department made public more than 2,200 pages of emails sent from Clinton’s personal account, her campaign released the information about her health, and she unveiled eight years of tax returns. Meanwhile, Clinton herself was campaigning at the annual meeting of the National Urban League and calling for an end of the nation’s trade embargo of Cuba during a speech in Miami. Friday was also the deadline for super PACs to file their first financial reports of the 2016 campaign with federal regulators, revealing the names of a slew of billionaires and millionaires paying for the early days of the election fight. Campaign aides cast the records dump as part of an effort to compete with Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush on the issue of transparency. Clinton is the first 2016 presidential candidate to release her health records, and aides said she planned to release more details about her finances than Bush, the former Florida governor who has already made public 33 years of his tax returns. The Clintons paid nearly $44 million in federal taxes and made almost $15 million in charitable contributions from the tens of millions the couple earned between 2007 and 2014, according to her campaign. Last year, they paid an overall federal tax rate of 35.7 percent. The couple earlier reported having earned more than $30 million from speeches and book royalties since mid-2013 In a statement, Clinton emphasized that she came into her wealth later in her life — an effort to draw a distinction with Bush, the scion of a rich political family. On the campaign trail, she frequently mentions her middle-class upbringing in a Chicago suburb and the loans she and former President Bill Clinton used to fund their education. “We’ve come a long way from my days going door-to-door for the Children’s Defense Fund and earning $16,450 as a young law professor in Arkansas — and we owe it to the opportunities America provides,” she said. Bush has earned nearly $28 million since leaving the Florida governor’s mansion in 2007 and paid an effective federal income tax rate of about 36 percent in the past three decades, according to tax returns released by his campaign last month. He’s said he paid a higher rate than the Clintons, though he earned less income. Both candidates are in the top 1 percent of taxpayers, who paid an average of 30.2 percent between 1981 and 2011, according to figures from the Congressional Budget Office. The average for middle-income households in that time was 16.6 percent. The financial release came just hours after Dr. Lisa Bardack, an internist and chairman of the Department of Medicine at the Mount Kisco Medical Group near the candidate’s suburban New York home, publicly detailed Clinton’s health in a two-page letter. The report said Clinton, who is 67, has fully recovered from a concussion she sustained in December 2012 after fainting, an episode that Bardack attributed to a stomach virus and dehydration. During the course of her concussion treatment, Clinton was also found to have a blood clot and was given medication to dissolve it. She remains on the medicine as a precaution, Bardack wrote. The blood clot, which was in a vein in the space between the brain and the skull behind the right ear, led Clinton to spend a few days in New York-Presbyterian Hospital and take a month-long absence from the State Department for treatment. Republican strategist Karl Rove later cast the incident as a “serious health episode” that would be an issue if Clinton ran for president, fueling a theory the concussion posed a graver threat to her abilities than Clinton and her team let on. Bardack said testing the following year showed “complete resolution” of the concussion’s effects, including double vision, which Clinton wore glasses with special lenses to address. According to her doctor’s assessment, Clinton’s cholesterol and blood pressure are in normal, healthy ranges, and she has had the major cancer screenings and exams recommended for someone her age. She has a very common thyroid condition and seasonal allergies, and takes a blood thinner — Coumadin — as a precaution since her fall and the blood clot. There was no mention of Clinton’s height or weight. “There’s no red flags there,” said Dr. Mark Creager, director of the Dartmouth-Hitchkock heart and vascular center in Lebanon, N.H., and president of the American Heart Association. The doctor noted that Clinton’s father lived into his 80s and her mother into her 90s. She has two brothers, and one had premature heart disease. Because of that family history, she had full cardiac testing, including an ultrasound exam of arteries in her neck, and all was well. Clinton’s doctor said she exercises regularly — practicing yoga, swimming, walking and weight training — and eats a diet rich in lean proteins, vegetables and fruits. She does not smoke and drinks alcohol “occasionally,” Bardack wrote. Republished with permission of The Associated Press.
