Here is the LA Times describing how the tea party targeting scandal at the IRS got its start: In March 2010, a manager in a Cincinnati determinations unit asked a screener to get a handle on the issue, according to the report from the Treasury Department's inspector general for tax administration. The agent started pulling applications with political-sounding names, such as "tea party" and "patriots." And just who is this screener? Here's the New York Times: For months, the Tea Party cases sat on the desk of a lone specialist, who used “political sounding” criteria — words…
Mother Jones
-
Most Topular Stories
-
Who is the Most Reviled Person in America?
MoJo Blogs and Articles | Mother Jones19 May 2013 | 5:43 pm -
How the IRS's Nonprofit Division Got So Dysfunctional
MoJo Articles | Mother Jones18 May 2013 | 3:00 amThis story first appeared on the ProPublica website. The IRS division responsible for flagging Tea Party groups has long been an agency afterthought, beset by mismanagement, financial constraints and an unwillingness to spell out just what it expects from social welfare nonprofits, former officials and experts say. The controversy that erupted in the past week, leading to the ousting of the acting Internal Revenue Service commissioner, an investigation by the FBI, and congressional hearings that kicked off Friday, comes against a backdrop of dysfunction brewing for years. More MoJo coverage… -
Who is the Most Reviled Person in America?
Kevin Drum Feed | Mother Jones19 May 2013 | 5:43 pmHere is the LA Times describing how the tea party targeting scandal at the IRS got its start: In March 2010, a manager in a Cincinnati determinations unit asked a screener to get a handle on the issue, according to the report from the Treasury Department's inspector general for tax administration. The agent started pulling applications with political-sounding names, such as "tea party" and "patriots." And just who is this screener? Here's the New York Times: For months, the Tea Party cases sat on the desk of a lone specialist, who used “political sounding” criteria — words… -
Elizabeth Warren Slams Wall Street Again
Political Mojo | Mother Jones17 May 2013 | 2:29 pmOn Thursday, bank-basher Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) slammed several bills headed for the House floor that would severely weaken Wall Street reform. The Dodd-Frank Act, the 2010 law aimed at preventing another financial crisis, "put in place a variety of measures that work together as a system to protect consumers, hold big banks accountable, and reduce the risk of future crises," Warren said in a statement. "It is dangerous for Congress to amend the derivatives provisions of the Dodd-Frank Act." (Derivatives are financial products that have values based on underlying numbers, like crop… -
VIDEO: 97 Percent of Climate Scientists Can't Be Wrong
Blue Marble Feed | Mother Jones16 May 2013 | 3:00 amTelling Americans that scientists don't agree is the classic climate denial strategy. It's been over a decade since consultant Frank Luntz famously furnished the GOP with strategies to kill climate action during the Bush years, recommending in a leaked memo [PDF]: "you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue." Oh, yeah, and avoid truth: "A compelling story, even if factually inaccurate, can be more emotionally compelling than a dry recitation of the truth." It seems to have worked: Only a minority of Americans…
-
MoJo Blogs and Articles | Mother Jones
-
Who is the Most Reviled Person in America?
19 May 2013 | 5:43 pmHere is the LA Times describing how the tea party targeting scandal at the IRS got its start: In March 2010, a manager in a Cincinnati determinations unit asked a screener to get a handle on the issue, according to the report from the Treasury Department's inspector general for tax administration. The agent started pulling applications with political-sounding names, such as "tea party" and "patriots." And just who is this screener? Here's the New York Times: For months, the Tea Party cases sat on the desk of a lone specialist, who used “political sounding” criteria — words… -
How the IRS's Nonprofit Division Got So Dysfunctional
18 May 2013 | 3:00 amThis story first appeared on the ProPublica website. The IRS division responsible for flagging Tea Party groups has long been an agency afterthought, beset by mismanagement, financial constraints and an unwillingness to spell out just what it expects from social welfare nonprofits, former officials and experts say. The controversy that erupted in the past week, leading to the ousting of the acting Internal Revenue Service commissioner, an investigation by the FBI, and congressional hearings that kicked off Friday, comes against a backdrop of dysfunction brewing for years. More MoJo coverage… -
Taxpayer Dollars Are Helping Monsanto Sell Seeds Abroad
18 May 2013 | 3:00 amNearly two decades after their mid-'90s debut in US farm fields, GMO seeds are looking less and less promising. Do the industry's products ramp up crop yields? The Union of Concerned Scientists looked at that question in detail for a 2009 study. Short answer: marginally, if at all. Do they lead to reduced pesticide use? No; in fact, the opposite. And why would they, when the handful of companies that dominate GMO seeds—Monsanto, DuPont, Syngenta, Dow—are also among the globe's largest pesticide makers? Monsanto's Roundup Ready seeds have given rise to an upsurge of… -
Elizabeth Warren Slams Wall Street Again
17 May 2013 | 2:29 pmOn Thursday, bank-basher Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) slammed several bills headed for the House floor that would severely weaken Wall Street reform. The Dodd-Frank Act, the 2010 law aimed at preventing another financial crisis, "put in place a variety of measures that work together as a system to protect consumers, hold big banks accountable, and reduce the risk of future crises," Warren said in a statement. "It is dangerous for Congress to amend the derivatives provisions of the Dodd-Frank Act." (Derivatives are financial products that have values based on underlying numbers, like crop… -
Is the Government Spying on Reporters More Often Than We Think?
17 May 2013 | 1:01 pmThe Justice Department's seizure of call logs related to phone lines used by dozens of Associated Press reporters has provoked a flurry of bipartisan criticism, most of which has cast the decision as a disturbing departure from the norm. AP head Gary Pruitt condemned the decision, part of an investigation into leaks of classified information, as a "massive and unprecedented intrusion." Yet there's plenty of circumstantial evidence suggesting the seizure may not be unprecedented—just rarely disclosed. The Justice Department is supposed to follow special rules when it seeks the phone…
-
MoJo Articles | Mother Jones
-
How the IRS's Nonprofit Division Got So Dysfunctional
18 May 2013 | 3:00 amThis story first appeared on the ProPublica website. The IRS division responsible for flagging Tea Party groups has long been an agency afterthought, beset by mismanagement, financial constraints and an unwillingness to spell out just what it expects from social welfare nonprofits, former officials and experts say. The controversy that erupted in the past week, leading to the ousting of the acting Internal Revenue Service commissioner, an investigation by the FBI, and congressional hearings that kicked off Friday, comes against a backdrop of dysfunction brewing for years. More MoJo coverage… -
Is the Government Spying on Reporters More Often Than We Think?
17 May 2013 | 1:01 pmThe Justice Department's seizure of call logs related to phone lines used by dozens of Associated Press reporters has provoked a flurry of bipartisan criticism, most of which has cast the decision as a disturbing departure from the norm. AP head Gary Pruitt condemned the decision, part of an investigation into leaks of classified information, as a "massive and unprecedented intrusion." Yet there's plenty of circumstantial evidence suggesting the seizure may not be unprecedented—just rarely disclosed. The Justice Department is supposed to follow special rules when it seeks the phone… -
WATCH: Snuggly Bear from DOJ Says, "Don't Worry About the AP Scandal" [Fiore Cartoon]
17 May 2013 | 10:21 amMark 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. -
Actually, Tea Party Groups Gave the IRS Lots of Good Reasons to Be Interested
17 May 2013 | 7:02 amVirtually everyone in Washington agrees on at least one thing about the IRS scandal: The tax agency's trolling for tea party groups and giving extra scrutiny to their applications for nonprofit status was an egregious violation. Exactly how and why that conduct took place remains under investigation. But as conservatives in particular decry the IRS failure, it's also worth considering the dubious fiscal history of some tea party groups, including their pursuit of non-profit status. While the IRS had absolutely no business profiling any groups based on political criteria, it is not blaming the… -
How Congress Helped Create the IRS-Tea Party Mess
17 May 2013 | 3:00 amOne of the biggest revelations in the Treasury Department inspector general report on the unfolding IRS-tea party debacle is this: The IRS staffers vetting hundreds of tea party groups and conservative outfits seeking nonprofit status for potential political activity weren't themselves sure what they were looking for. And who bears the ultimate responsibility for this? The very folks who are getting so worked up about the alleged abuses and the dark-money explosion that made them possible: Congress. The IRS-tea party scandal revolves around 501(c)(4) nonprofits, also known as "social welfare"…
-
Kevin Drum Feed | Mother Jones
-
Who is the Most Reviled Person in America?
19 May 2013 | 5:43 pmHere is the LA Times describing how the tea party targeting scandal at the IRS got its start: In March 2010, a manager in a Cincinnati determinations unit asked a screener to get a handle on the issue, according to the report from the Treasury Department's inspector general for tax administration. The agent started pulling applications with political-sounding names, such as "tea party" and "patriots." And just who is this screener? Here's the New York Times: For months, the Tea Party cases sat on the desk of a lone specialist, who used “political sounding” criteria — words… -
Friday Cat Blogging - 17 May 2013
17 May 2013 | 11:37 amOn Tuesday evening, one of my bicep muscles started misfiring. Every minute or so it would vibrate or spasm for a few seconds. But it only happened if I was sitting in a few specific places. Wednesday evening it happened again. Thursday it happened again, except it didn't go away. It just kept vibrating all evening. I got into bed and it started vibrating even more. I think it finally wore itself out around 4 am. So no sleep for me last night. Plus my bicep is still vibrating a bit, and I woke up with a massive headache. If today's blogging seemed a little subpar, that's why. I'm getting… -
Getting By in America
17 May 2013 | 11:18 amThe latest from Gallup: The federal poverty threshold for a family of four is just under $24,000; however, Americans believe such a family unit living in their community needs more than double that — $58,000, on average — just to "get by. Hmmm. By coincidence, that's almost exactly the median income of an American family. It makes you suspect that most people think their own income, by definition, is just barely enough to get by. Turns out that's almost the case: Adults in households earning less than $30,000 think it takes an average of $43,600 to get by. However, the estimate… -
Filibuster Reform in July?
17 May 2013 | 10:23 amGreg Sargent reports that once immigration reform is safely finished (or killed, as the case may be), Harry Reid plans to revisit the topic of filibuster reform: Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is increasingly focused on the month of July as the time to exercise the so-called “nuclear option” and revisit filibuster reform....Reid has privately consulted with President Obama on the need to revisit filibuster reform, and the President has told the Majority Leader that he will support the exercising of the nuclear option if Reid opts for it, the aide says. ....Reid is eyeing a… -
Here's Why the Government Went Ballistic Over the AP Leak
17 May 2013 | 10:01 amThe subpoena of AP phone records over what seems like a fairly routine leak has puzzled me from the start. Why did the administration go so ballistic over this? Today, the LA Times helps me understand what was going on. Apparently the leak compromised the efforts of an al-Qaeda mole who had been recruited by British intelligence and was one of our prized assets: His access led to the U.S. drone strike that killed a senior Al Qaeda leader, Fahd Mohammed Ahmed Quso, on May 6, 2012. U.S. officials say Quso helped direct the terrorist attack that killed 17 sailors aboard the U.S. guided-missile…
-
Political Mojo | Mother Jones
-
Elizabeth Warren Slams Wall Street Again
17 May 2013 | 2:29 pmOn Thursday, bank-basher Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) slammed several bills headed for the House floor that would severely weaken Wall Street reform. The Dodd-Frank Act, the 2010 law aimed at preventing another financial crisis, "put in place a variety of measures that work together as a system to protect consumers, hold big banks accountable, and reduce the risk of future crises," Warren said in a statement. "It is dangerous for Congress to amend the derivatives provisions of the Dodd-Frank Act." (Derivatives are financial products that have values based on underlying numbers, like crop… -
Ad Slams Arizona Sen. Flake for Flaking on Background Checks
17 May 2013 | 12:40 pmLast month, Republican Sen. Jeff Flake broke with his Arizona colleague John McCain to vote against the background check compromise brokered by Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Pat Toomey (R-Pa.). Soon after, Caren Teves, the mother of Aurora mass shooting victim Alex Teves, went public with a note she had received from Flake the week before he, well, flaked. In the note, the junior senator wrote that "strengthening background checks is something we agree on." On Friday, Michael Bloomberg's Mayors Against Illegal Guns (MAIG) released an ad featuring Caren Teves that will air in Phoenix and… -
IRS Speaks Out: We Messed Up, But We Would've Scrutinized Tea Partiers Anyway
17 May 2013 | 11:35 amFinally, the IRS is giving a full accounting of how and why its staffers singled out tea partiers and other conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status. The quick version: We had the right idea but went about it all wrong. On Friday morning, Steven Miller, the acting IRS commissioner set to resign due to the scandal, appeared before the House ways and means committee and testified that several IRS employees made "foolish mistakes" by using catchwords like "tea party" and "patriots" as they picked through hundreds of nonprofit applications from groups that might be involved in politics. -
We're Still at War: Photo of the Day for May 17, 2013
17 May 2013 | 9:38 amLance Cpl. Brandon King, a driver with Delta Company, 1st Tank Battalion, performs maintenance on an M1 Abrams Tank at Forward Operating Base Shir Ghazay, Afghanistan, April 5, 2013. U.S. Marine Corps photo by Sgt. Tammy K. Hineline. -
Corn on Hardball: What's Obama's Next Move On the IRS Scandal?
16 May 2013 | 12:01 pmDid President Obama make the right move when he ousted IRS commissioner Steven T. Miller yesterday? DC bureau chief David Corn joins the Huffington Post's Howard Fineman to discuss Miller's resignation on MSNBC's Hardball: David Corn is Mother Jones' Washington bureau chief. For more of his stories, click here. He's also on Twitter.
-
Blue Marble Feed | Mother Jones
-
VIDEO: 97 Percent of Climate Scientists Can't Be Wrong
16 May 2013 | 3:00 amTelling Americans that scientists don't agree is the classic climate denial strategy. It's been over a decade since consultant Frank Luntz famously furnished the GOP with strategies to kill climate action during the Bush years, recommending in a leaked memo [PDF]: "you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue." Oh, yeah, and avoid truth: "A compelling story, even if factually inaccurate, can be more emotionally compelling than a dry recitation of the truth." It seems to have worked: Only a minority of Americans… -
Which States Use the Most Green Energy?
16 May 2013 | 3:00 amFlorida and Texas might be leading the nation's rollout of solar and wind power, respectively, but Washington, where hydroelectric dams provide over 60 percent of the state's energy, was the country's biggest user of renewable power in 2011, according to new statistics released last week by the federal Energy Information Administration. Hydro continued to be the overwhelmingly dominant source of renewable power consumed nationwide, accounting for 67 percent of the total, followed by wind with 25 percent, geothermal with 4.5 percent, and solar with 3.5 percent. The new EIA data is the latest… -
John Kerry Updates His Climate Change Creds at the Arctic Council
14 May 2013 | 2:13 pmSecretary of State John Kerry is headed to Kiruna, Sweden, tomorrow, 14 May, for a ministerial meeting of the Arctic Council, the only diplomatic forum focused exclusively on the Arctic region. Members represent the eight nations with territory north of the Arctic Circle (Canada, the US, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Russia, and Sweden), plus representatives of Arctic indigenous peoples. The Council's concerns include a broad swath of environmental issues stemming from a wildly changing global climate amplified in the Arctic. The meeting comes 25 years… -
We Just Passed the Climate's "Grim Milestone"
10 May 2013 | 3:01 pmOver the last couple weeks, scientists and environmentalists have been keeping a particularly close eye on the Hawaii-based monitoring station that tracks how much carbon dioxide is in the atmosphere, as the count tiptoed closer to a record-smashing 400 parts per million. Yesterday, we finally got there: The daily mean concentration was higher than at any time in human history, NOAA reported today. Don't worry: The earth is not about to go up in a ball of flame. The 400 ppm mark is only a milestone, 50 ppm over what legendary NASA scientist James Hansen has since 1988 called the safe… -
Arkansans to Kerry on Keystone: "Come to Our State to See the Devastation"
10 May 2013 | 3:05 amTwo residents of Mayflower, Arkansas, the site of the March 29 pipeline spill, traveled to Washington on Thursday to ask Secretary of State John Kerry to reject the Keystone XL pipeline. They came here, Genieve Long said, to ask Kerry to "come to our state to see the devastation and hopefully get the Keystone XL stopped." They are working with All Risk, No Reward, a coalition of local and national groups that oppose the proposed 1,600-mile pipeline that would carry oil from Canada to Texas. Long and her four children—ages 9, 8, 7, and 5—live beside Lake Conway, not far from where…
-
Politics | Mother Jones
-
How the IRS's Nonprofit Division Got So Dysfunctional
18 May 2013 | 3:00 amThis story first appeared on the ProPublica website. The IRS division responsible for flagging Tea Party groups has long been an agency afterthought, beset by mismanagement, financial constraints and an unwillingness to spell out just what it expects from social welfare nonprofits, former officials and experts say. The controversy that erupted in the past week, leading to the ousting of the acting Internal Revenue Service commissioner, an investigation by the FBI, and congressional hearings that kicked off Friday, comes against a backdrop of dysfunction brewing for years. More MoJo coverage… -
Is the Government Spying on Reporters More Often Than We Think?
17 May 2013 | 1:01 pmThe Justice Department's seizure of call logs related to phone lines used by dozens of Associated Press reporters has provoked a flurry of bipartisan criticism, most of which has cast the decision as a disturbing departure from the norm. AP head Gary Pruitt condemned the decision, part of an investigation into leaks of classified information, as a "massive and unprecedented intrusion." Yet there's plenty of circumstantial evidence suggesting the seizure may not be unprecedented—just rarely disclosed. The Justice Department is supposed to follow special rules when it seeks the phone… -
Actually, Tea Party Groups Gave the IRS Lots of Good Reasons to Be Interested
17 May 2013 | 7:02 amVirtually everyone in Washington agrees on at least one thing about the IRS scandal: The tax agency's trolling for tea party groups and giving extra scrutiny to their applications for nonprofit status was an egregious violation. Exactly how and why that conduct took place remains under investigation. But as conservatives in particular decry the IRS failure, it's also worth considering the dubious fiscal history of some tea party groups, including their pursuit of non-profit status. While the IRS had absolutely no business profiling any groups based on political criteria, it is not blaming the… -
How Congress Helped Create the IRS-Tea Party Mess
17 May 2013 | 3:00 amOne of the biggest revelations in the Treasury Department inspector general report on the unfolding IRS-tea party debacle is this: The IRS staffers vetting hundreds of tea party groups and conservative outfits seeking nonprofit status for potential political activity weren't themselves sure what they were looking for. And who bears the ultimate responsibility for this? The very folks who are getting so worked up about the alleged abuses and the dark-money explosion that made them possible: Congress. The IRS-tea party scandal revolves around 501(c)(4) nonprofits, also known as "social welfare"… -
The Next Senator From Georgia Will Probably be Nuts
17 May 2013 | 3:00 amThe race to replace retiring Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) is starting to take shape, and it's looking pretty one-sided. Rep. John Barrow, the Democrats' most-promising statewide candidate, has already announced he isn't running. The Republican field is growing. Former Georgia secretary of state Karen Handel, who gained notoriety last summer for attempting to sever the Susan G. Komen breast cancer foundation's ties to Planned Parenthood, is reportedly considering a run. David Perdue, the cousin of former Gov. Sonny Perdue, launched an exploratory committee on Wednesday. If they both formally…
-
Environment | Mother Jones
-
VIDEO: 97 Percent of Climate Scientists Can't Be Wrong
16 May 2013 | 3:00 amTelling Americans that scientists don't agree is the classic climate denial strategy. It's been over a decade since consultant Frank Luntz famously furnished the GOP with strategies to kill climate action during the Bush years, recommending in a leaked memo [PDF]: "you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue." Oh, yeah, and avoid truth: "A compelling story, even if factually inaccurate, can be more emotionally compelling than a dry recitation of the truth." It seems to have worked: Only a minority of Americans… -
Which States Use the Most Green Energy?
16 May 2013 | 3:00 amFlorida and Texas might be leading the nation's rollout of solar and wind power, respectively, but Washington, where hydroelectric dams provide over 60 percent of the state's energy, was the country's biggest user of renewable power in 2011, according to new statistics released last week by the federal Energy Information Administration. Hydro continued to be the overwhelmingly dominant source of renewable power consumed nationwide, accounting for 67 percent of the total, followed by wind with 25 percent, geothermal with 4.5 percent, and solar with 3.5 percent. The new EIA data is the latest… -
Mysterious Poop Foam Causes Explosions on Hog Farms
15 May 2013 | 3:00 amWhen you hear about foam in the context of food, you might think of molecular gastronomy, the culinary innovations of the Spanish chef Ferran Adrià, who's famous for dishes like apple caviar with banana foam. But this post is about a much less appetizing kind of foam. You see, starting in about 2009, in the pits that capture manure under factory-scale hog farms, a gray, bubbly substance began appearing at the surface of the fecal soup. The problem is menacing: As manure breaks down, it emits toxic gases like hydrogen sulfide and flammable ones like methane, and trapping these noxious… -
12 Animals We Wish We Could De-Extinct
15 May 2013 | 3:00 amDo you miss the mammoth? Dream of dodos? Long for Lycaena dispar dispar? After centuries of driving species after species to extinction, we're now tantalizingly close to bringing some of them back. Using advances in genetic sequencing and molecular biology, scientists across the world are mining extinct animal specimens for ancient DNA to try to resurrect disappeared species. The science is complicated—National Geographic has a great rundown—and so are the ethics involved. But who can resist dreaming up a de-extinction "wish list"? With more species nearing… -
How Michael Pollan Romanticizes Dinner
14 May 2013 | 3:00 am"Is Michael Pollan a sexist pig?" wonders the title of a recent Salon piece by Emily Matchar, which is an excerpt of her just-released book, Homeward Bound: Why Women Are Embracing the New Domesticity. The Salon headline turns out to be mainly a lunge for clicks—the excerpted passage only glancingly concerns Pollan, and it has nothing to say about his new book Cooked, which clearly hadn't come out when Matchar was writing hers. But both Matchar in her essay and Pollan in his new book raise important questions about gender, cooking, and what we might as well follow Matchar in calling the…
-
Culture | Mother Jones
-
WATCH: Snuggly Bear from DOJ Says, "Don't Worry About the AP Scandal" [Fiore Cartoon]
17 May 2013 | 10:21 amMark 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. -
Spock and Awe: How 4 Lucky Post-9/11 War Vets Landed Roles in "Star Trek Into Darkness"
16 May 2013 | 4:05 pmOn April 24, 2005, US Marine Corps lance corporal Adam McCann was on patrol with his fire team, as he had been on many other occasions. His team was inspecting a weapons cache discovered in the city of HÄ«t in Iraq's Al-Anbar province. As they prepared to head back to base, they were met with a hail of mortar fire launched from the other side of street. The entire team was injured, and McCann sustained shrapnel wounds to his neck and both legs. But all escaped with their lives. Eight years later, on May 14, McCann, who is now 27, attended the star-studded Los Angeles… -
A Brief History of Awesome Robots
13 May 2013 | 3:00 amIn Kevin Drum's latest feature, he imagines a bleak future where robots begin taking all of our jobs. Though he predicts this will happen about three decades from now, the concept obviously isn't new. The word "robot" first appeared in a 1920s Czech play (see below), which concludes with human destruction. The plot line started to seem more realistic when robots began performing complex industrial tasks. By 1961, a giant robot arm called Unimate took a welding job on the General Motors factory floor. Throughout the last century, robots—both imaginary and real—have fascinated us… -
Welcome, Robot Overlords. Please Don't Fire Us?
13 May 2013 | 3:00 amThis is a story about the future. Not the unhappy future, the one where climate change turns the planet into a cinder or we all die in a global nuclear war. This is the happy version. It's the one where computers keep getting smarter and smarter, and clever engineers keep building better and better robots. By 2040, computers the size of a softball are as smart as human beings. Smarter, in fact. Plus they're computers: They never get tired, they're never ill-tempered, they never make mistakes, and they have instant access to all of human knowledge. Also read our brief history of awesome… -
Short Takes: Our Nixon
13 May 2013 | 3:00 amOur Nixon DIPPER FILMS One morning in 1972, Nixon chief of staff H.R. "Bob" Haldeman gave press secretary Ron Ziegler some big news: Nixon had just gone to meet with Mao Zedong, head of China's Communist Party, marking the first thaw in a quarter century of US-China relations. In his shock, Ziegler bit into an unpeeled clementine without realizing it. This obscure clip is one of many you'll experience in Our Nixon, a curated collage of 500 Super 8 film reels shot by Haldeman and Nixon aides Dwight Chapin and John Ehrlichman—ambitious men who obsessively documented their lives in the…
