Clara Jeffery

Editor in Chief

Since taking the editorial helm at Mother Jones in late 2006, Clara and her co-editor, Monika Bauerlein, have won two National Magazine Awards for general excellence, relaunched MotherJones.com, founded an nine-person Washington bureau, given birth, and forgotten what it's like to sleep. It probably doesn't help she's on Twitter so much.

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Clara Jeffery is co-editor of Mother Jones, where, together with Monika Bauerlein, she has spearheaded an era of editorial growth and innovation, marked by the addition of an eight-person Washington bureau, an overhaul of the organization's digital strategy and a corresponding tripling of traffic, and the winning of two National Magazine Awards for general excellence. Before joining the staff of Mother Jones, she was a senior editor of Harper's magazine. Ten pieces that she personally edited have been finalists for National Magazine Awards, in the categories of essay, profile, reporting, public interest, feature, and fiction. Works she edited have also been selected to appear in various editions of Best American Essays, Best American Travel Writing, Best American Sports Writing, and Best American Science Writing. Clara cut her journalistic teeth at Washington City Paper, where she wrote and edited political, investigative, and narrative features, and was a columnist. Jeffery is a graduate of Carleton College and Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism. Born in Baltimore and raised in Arlington, Virginia, she now resides in the Mission District of San Francisco with her partner Chris Baum and their three-year-old son, Milo. Their burrito joint of choice is El Metate.

G.O.P. Seen to Be in Peril of Losing House (NYT Goes Out On a Limb)

—By Clara Jeffery

| Mon Sep. 4, 2006 12:10 PM PDT

"G.O.P. Seen to Be in Peril of Losing House " That's the headline for this NYT story. And bold, isn't it? Not "is" in peril—as the panoply of polls, analysts, and GOP pols say in the body of the piece itself—but "seen to be."

Is or Seen To Be, this is not news. Everybody knows the GOP is in danger of loosing the House. Indeed many political insiders see it as a given, provided the DNC doesn't blow it (and, granted…). The real issue is the Senate. Here, the NYT says:

"A turnover in the Senate, which would require the Democrats to pick up six seats, is considered a longer shot. Democrats' greatest hopes rest with Pennsylvania, Montana, Rhode Island, Ohio and Missouri; the sixth seat is more of a leap of faith. It would require Democrats to carry a state like Tennessee, Arizona or Virginia, where Democratic hopes are buoyed as Senator George Allen, a Republican, deals with the fallout from his using a demeaning term for a young man of Indian descent at a rally last month."

"Using a demeaning term for a young man of Indian descent at a rally last month"—it is so weird hearing that incident described in such white-paper language, isn't it? More on how key the Virginia Senate race to the overall outcome of the midterm eletctions here.

Another sign the GOP is in trouble: its own candidates calling for Donald Rumsfeld's resisgnation, as Thomas H. Kean Jr., a New Jersey state senator who's running for the U.S. Senate, did "just shy of midnight" on Friday. "What compelled him to advocate publicly for a "fresh face" leading the troops, Mr. Kean said (via the NYT), were Mr. Rumsfeld's recent remarks chiding critics of the war for "moral and intellectual confusion," and comparing them to those who advocated appeasing Nazi Germany in the 1930's. "By engaging in that kind of rhetoric," Kean said, "this secretary has stepped over the line." (More on Rumsfeld's Nazi rhetoric here.)

Also the NYT offers some really cool interactive maps and databases to track all the races. You can navigate to them from any of the above NYT links.

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Donald Rumsfeld's Dance With the Nazis (Set Frank Rich Free!)

—By Clara Jeffery

| Sun Sep. 3, 2006 3:31 PM PDT

As he does week in and week out, Frank Rich has knocked one out of the park with his column: "Donald Rumsfeld's Dance With the Nazis."

Last week the man who gave us "stuff happens" and "you go to war with the Army you have" outdid himself. In an instantly infamous address to the American Legion, he likened critics of the Iraq debacle to those who "ridiculed or ignored" the rise of the Nazis in the 1930's and tried to appease Hitler. Such Americans, he said, suffer from a "moral or intellectual confusion" and fail to recognize the "new type of fascism" represented by terrorists. Presumably he was not only describing the usual array of "Defeatocrats" but also the first President Bush, who had already been implicitly tarred as an appeaser by Tony Snow last month for failing to knock out Saddam in 1991.
What made Mr. Rumsfeld's speech noteworthy wasn't its toxic effort to impugn the patriotism of administration critics by conflating dissent on Iraq with cut-and-run surrender and incipient treason. That's old news. No, what made Mr. Rumsfeld's performance special was the preview it offered of the ambitious propaganda campaign planned between now and Election Day. An on-the-ropes White House plans to stop at nothing when rewriting its record of defeat (not to be confused with defeatism) in a war that has now lasted longer than America's fight against the actual Nazis in World War II.

Here's how brazen Mr. Rumsfeld was when he invoked Hitler's appeasers to score his cheap points: Since Hitler was photographed warmly shaking Neville Chamberlain's hand at Munich in 1938, the only image that comes close to matching it in epochal obsequiousness is the December 1983 photograph of Mr. Rumsfeld himself in Baghdad, warmly shaking the hand of Saddam Hussein in full fascist regalia. Is the defense secretary so self-deluded that he thought no one would remember a picture so easily Googled on the Web? Or worse, is he just too shameless to care?

Mr. Rumsfeld didn't go to Baghdad in 1983 to tour the museum. Then a private citizen, he had been dispatched as an emissary by the Reagan administration, which sought to align itself with Iraq in the Iran-Iraq war. Saddam was already a notorious thug. Well before Mr. Rumsfeld's trip, Amnesty International had reported the dictator's use of torture — "beating, burning, sexual abuse and the infliction of electric shocks" — on hundreds of political prisoners. Dozens more had been summarily executed or had "disappeared." American intelligence agencies knew that Saddam had used chemical weapons to gas both Iraqi Kurds and Iranians.

According to declassified State Department memos detailing Mr. Rumsfeld's Baghdad meetings, the American visitor never raised the subject of these crimes with his host. (Mr. Rumsfeld has since claimed otherwise, but that is not supported by the documents, which can be viewed online at George Washington University's National Security Archive.) Within a year of his visit, the American mission was accomplished: Iraq and the United States resumed diplomatic relations for the first time since Iraq had severed them in 1967 in protest of American backing of Israel in the Six-Day War.

In his speech last week, Mr. Rumsfeld paraphrased Winston Churchill: Appeasing tyrants is "a bit like feeding a crocodile, hoping it would eat you last." He can quote Churchill all he wants, but if he wants to self-righteously use that argument to smear others, the record shows that Mr. Rumsfeld cozied up to the crocodile of Baghdad as smarmily as anyone. To borrow the defense secretary's own formulation, he suffers from moral confusion about Saddam.

Mr. Rumsfeld also suffers from intellectual confusion about terrorism. He might not have appeased Al Qaeda but he certainly enabled it. Like Chamberlain, he didn't recognize the severity of the looming threat until it was too late. Had he done so, maybe his boss would not have blown off intelligence about imminent Qaeda attacks while on siesta in Crawford.

The whole column is brilliant, and should be read by as many people as possible. So screw Times Select. Read it after the jump.

[Read more in the MoJo blog]

Senator "Bridge to Nowhere" Stevens Outted For Placing Secret Hold on Bill to Create Government Spending Database Available to P

—By Clara Jeffery

| Sun Sep. 3, 2006 1:38 PM PDT

In a coup for the blogging community, which mounted a "call your Senator" campaign to figure out who was the Pro-Pork Senator blocking the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act (FFATA), the Senator in question has been revealed. It is, as FFATA co-sponsor Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) predicted, Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska)

FFATA, co-sponsored Sen. Barak Obama (D-Ill.), "would require the Office of Management and Budget to create a user-friendly Web site listing details on every grant and contract handed out by the federal government. Information would have to be posted within 30 days of Congress' authorization of the spending." (Via this editorial, which is popping up in a variety of papers)

That would be a problem for Sen. Stevens, probably the reigning king of pork. Now that he's been outted, pressure must be brought to get him to release the bill. FFATA has broad bipartisan support, 29 Senators joined Coburn and Obama in co-sponsoring it, it sailed through the appropriate committees, and it deserves a full "up or down" Senate vote, as the administration is fond of saying.

Ironically, the Senate voted 84-13 in April to ban secret holds. The bill—another bi-partisan effort, this one sponsored by by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa)—would permit Senators to object to legislation, but not secretly. (The Wyden-Grassley amendment, No. 2944, was rolled into the Senate's ethics reform package, which is, but of course, held up in conference committee.) All of the 13 no votes were cast by Republicans—Senators Allard, Bunning, Burr, Coburn, DeMint, Ensign, Frist, Gregg, Kyl, McConnell, Sessions, Sununu, Thune; Democratic Senators Byrd and Rockefeller did not vote, along with Republican Lindsey Graham. (Byrd, another notorious porker, explained his absence as being due to a death in the family.)

So Stevens votes in favor of a bill banning secret holds, but continues to use them. Coburn votes against the ban on secret holds, but rails against Stevens for using them. And this may be a simple case of pay back. It was Coburn, after all, that got Stevens' bridge to nowhere killed.

Ain't Washington fun?

Pulitzer Prize Winner Jailed by Sudan's Government for Darfur Reporting

—By Clara Jeffery

| Fri Sep. 1, 2006 10:18 AM PDT

Two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Paul Salopek sits in a Sudanese jail, charged with espionage and reporting "false news." Basically his crime was sneaking across the border to report on Darfur. (Reporters need to sneak in, because the Sudanese government doesn't want the press to expose how it supports the militias behind the atrocities.)

That he's won the Pulitzer twice speaks to his skill as a reporter and writer. He's also a great guy, as anyone who's ever had even a passing acquaintance with him will tell you. A dozen or so years ago, my dad, then an editor at the National Geographic, hired Paul into a staff writing job, a hire that still makes dad feel like a genius, as he likes to joke. The position in question was mostly a desk job and Paul quickly outgrew it. He went to the Chicago Tribune in 1996 and got into the field. Over the last decade he won his Pulitzers for his Tribune reporting, and has written lyrical, probing features for the Geographic, for whom he was on assignment when arrested by the Sudanese thugs. As his former Tribune colleague Ken Armstrong points out in this moving piece, Paul's known for chasing the tough story, the dangerous story, the story on the downtrodden and ignored:

He's told stories from Africa, Afghanistan, Asia and the Balkans, stories about refugees, rebels and victims of war, about pirates, poachers, gunrunners and killers, about a child in Ethiopia forced to marry at age 7 and a 13-year-old schoolgirl in Angola tortured for being a witch. He's told stories through hardship and will, with datelines like: THE MOUNTAINS OF WESTERN KOSOVO; THE SHOMALI PLAIN, Afghanistan; THE CENTRAL HIGHLANDS OF ETHIOPIA.

The State Department has intervened on Paul's behalf, and I'm sure the Tribune, the Geographic, and the CPJ are doing whatever they can to ensure his release.

Paul didn't let his success go to his head. So I'm sure he'd be the first to point out that his fate is inexorably linked to other journalists doing dangerous work, often without such large, powerful institutions behind them. In reporting on Paul's situation yesterday, NPR noted that while he's been moved to a relatively decent jail, a Slovenian filmmaker who faced the same charges has been sentenced to two years, and is being held in what sounds like an absolute hell hole. Paul's driver and interpreter, both Chadians, have also been arrested. The trial for the three of them is scheduled for September 10th.

Robots Gone Wild! (ABC Uses Science to Scare)

—By Clara Jeffery

| Thu Aug. 31, 2006 12:37 AM PDT

Ok, anything that gets the American public more interested in science is good. And yet, I really have to question the judgment of Neil de Grasse Tyson—the man who first demoted Pluto!; but on that front, people, deal—and other notable scientists for appearing on ABC's pseudo-scientific offering, "Last Days on Earth!"

Now, given that a huge chuck of TV programming on any given night is devoted to the grossly overstated threat from serial killers and pedophiles (more on that in a later post), people are probably relieved to confront threats they cannot hope to protect against. ABC has obliged with a Top Ten list of scary, scary threats to the planet, such as:

No. 8: Gamma radiation from nearby astral implosion. Anyone got the odds on that one?

No. 7: Black hole swallowing earth. What, does it just appear astern, like on the season premiere of "Deep Space Nine"?

No. 6: AI Gone Wild! Yes, indeedy, many Disney-owned film clips were pressed into service.

Number 5: Killer asteroid. Yawn.

Number 4: Still not entirely sure. "Many of our threats come from above. Only one comes from below…" i.e. some kind of geophysical meltdown that, according to ABC, "might" happen under Yellowstone. (You know, it is one thing to rope in media-sophisticated scientists interviewed in some kind of Truthiness studio setting to do your bidding. It is another thing to interview every law-enforcement official and EMT guy in Rapid City, SD, and ask: What could you hope to do if a giant cloud of ash swallowed your city?)

Number 3: Nuclear war. Wait, that's a real threat. Yet, while experts sanely noted the biggest risk still from U.S./U.S.S.R, most of the file footage was about Iran.

Number 2: Plague/Flu. Oddly, since 10 minutes earlier, ABC had made the point that only one threat "comes from below," plague is now shouted out to be the only threat "not sent from above." And wait, plague or flu could be weaponized! One biologist notes: "some people say, thank god that Ted Kaczynski was a mathematician, not a biologist." Snap!

Number 1: Wait for it…yes, it is global warming. And, though sensationalized and overly reliant on Al Gore (yet another indicator he's running, btw.), the segment was relatively smart.

Smart enough that it made me wonder if this whole show wasn't the product of some producers concerned about global warming asking themselves: How do we sell this to network brass/ advertisers? Wait! I know! A Top Ten list!