Author Archives: RefugioDurbin

Ted Cruz’s College Roommate Can’t Stop Talking Smack About Him

by RefugioDurbin Posted on February 2, 2016

Mother Jones

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Craig Mazin is on a Twitter roll.

His antipathy for his former Princeton roommate, Ted Cruz, has made him a public sounding board for Cruz haters and fun seekers, and a target for the senator’s supporters. “I would rather have anybody else be the president of the United States,” Mazin told the Daily Beast. “Anyone. I would rather pick somebody from the phone book.”

Plenty of Cruz fans tweet at Mazin to disagree with his mini-diatribes or, since yesterday, to gloat over their candidate’s victory in Iowa. But Mazin politely gives as good as he gets. Here are his relevant exchanges from the past 48 hours or so. (Click the links for more context.)

Originally posted here – 

Ted Cruz’s College Roommate Can’t Stop Talking Smack About Him

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Shit Is About to Get Real in California, El Niño Report Predicts

by RefugioDurbin Posted on December 11, 2015

Mother Jones

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After four years of drought, Californians are bracing for another potentially destructive weather event: El Niño. Earlier this week, FEMA released a disaster plan including what to expect from the upcoming rainy season. Here are the key takeaways:

This may be the strongest El Niño on record. Weather reports indicate that this year will be warm and wet—perhaps even more so than the winter of 1997-1998, which is currently the strongest recorded El Niño. That year, California evacuated 100,000 people.
The dry conditions mean more flooding. The lack of soil moisture has made the soil “harden and act like cement,” making it, paradoxically, less likely to soak up the rain. The chance of flooding is far higher than usual, especially in the productive farm country of Central Valley and the surrounding area—including America’s the state’s capital. “The primary risk areas are in populated areas mostly notably in Sacramento,” the report reads—and because of that, “a major flood situation would have significant impact on the economic, cultural, and political life of California.” Additionally, a catastrophic levee failure in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta would jeopardize a major source of water for 60 percent of California homes and for a portion of the state’s agricultural industry.” One in five Californians lives in a flood zone.
Wildfires in the summer mean more landslides in the winter. The wildfire season this year was devastating in California, scorching more than 300,000 acres. Mudslides are common in these scorched areas, called “burn scars,” because water quickly runs off and there aren’t trees to keep the soil, rocks, and other debris in place. Southern Californians got a little taste of what this might look like when rain led to severe landslides in October.
King Tides, El Niño, and the Blob mean higher sea levels and more potential damage. Sea levels typically rise a few inches during El Niño, but this winter, scientists predict that the giant swath of warm water off the West Coast dubbed the Blob will lead to a rise of between 8 and 11 inches. State officials are particularly concerned about the potential damage caused by storms towards the end of both December and January, when the highest tides of the winter, called King Tides, are expected.
The rains may ease the drought, but won’t solve it. All this water will certainly ease the drought and raise levels in the state’s depleted reservoirs. But because the state is so behind on precipitation, it’s very unlikely that it will make up for the state’s now four-year water deficit.

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Shit Is About to Get Real in California, El Niño Report Predicts

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Marco Rubio Has the Hots for Uber

by RefugioDurbin Posted on January 15, 2015

Mother Jones

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Sen. Marco Rubio’s (R-Fla.) obligatory presidential aspirant book, American Dreams: Restoring Economic Opportunity for Everyone, is out this week. National Review has published an excerpt in which Rubio draws on his experience as a part-time college professor teaching political science at Florida International University to make the case that the car service app Uber is America’s best argument for deregulation. He writes:

The students in my class were genuinely intrigued by this innovative service and wondered why they didn’t have it in Miami…Politicians, I said, had passed rules to stifle competition that might threaten their constituents and supporters in the existing taxi and sedan-service industry…As my progressive young students listened to me explain why government was preventing them from using their cell phones to get home from the bars on Saturday night, I could see their minds change.

Rubio, realizing that he’d converted “a bunch of 20- and 21-year-old anti-regulatory activists,” goes on to claim that government regulation too often stifles innovative “little guys” like Uber—”little guy” being a relative term, in this case, when referring to a company that worth a reported $40 billion.

Other Republicans, including Newt Gingrich, have voiced support for Uber, but Rubio has been the GOP’s most vocal and prominent Uber advocate. Last spring, Rubio gushed praise for the company while touring its DC offices. Following the senator’s lead, the Republican National Committee released a petition last August asking people to support “innovative companies like Uber” against bullies in the government and taxi unions. “I can’t overstress the importance of finding a real-life example for us to contrast what we believe in with what the other party believes in,” RNC spokeswoman Kirsten Kukowski told Townhall about the petition effort. The implication was clear: Democrats want to choke the life out of the sharing economy by overregulating services like Uber and Airbnb, while Republicans want to see them thrive.

Republicans certainly have an incentive to align themselves as the official party of the sharing economy. They see it as a chance to win back the tech-savvy young voters who’ve spurned much of the GOP platform in the past. Democrats, unsurprisingly, see it as “pandering.”

The strategy ignores some Uber realities. Without tougher regulations on driver background checks, for example, the already lengthy list of violent and abusive behavior by Uber drivers could grow longer. Some low points from the past two years: An Uber driver with a prior felony conviction was charged with battery of a passenger, another one took a Los Angeles woman 20 miles out of the way to an abandoned parking lot, and another driver beat a passenger in San Francisco—with a hammer. In response to concerns over safety, former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick pushed for more thorough background checks for drivers—a dreaded regulation for Uber that might be popular among some of Rubio’s former students.

But even if Uber remains a symbol of free enterprise and entrepreneurship, it’s close to becoming seen as an enemy of free speech and the press. Last November, Uber senior vice president Emil Michael suggested digging up dirt—“your personal lives, your families”—on journalists who produced coverage critical of the company. Some argued the issue was overblown, but ultimately the incident earned Uber a few enemies within the press. The company made a sharp U-turn after it was criticized, saying later that it was not going after journalists, but rather against its opponents in the taxi business.

Uber’s rapid expansion from tech upstart to indisputable giant could present a catch-22 for Rubio. In its quest to stave off regulation, Uber has hired a legion of lobbyists—including former Obama campaign manager David Plouffe—to achieve its goals. “More often than not, big business co-opts big government—and vice versa—and they work together,” Rubio writes in his book. He’s referring to how regulations help entrenched interests, but his argument can apply to Uber’s push for deregulation too. “After all,” he writes, “big corporations can afford to influence government, and the little guys can’t.”

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Marco Rubio Has the Hots for Uber

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Let’s Not Give ISIS Exactly What They Want

by RefugioDurbin Posted on September 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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Yesterday I wrote a post noting that a supposedly war-weary public had suddenly become awfully war happy. “All it took,” I said, “was a carefully stagecrafted beheading video and the usual gang of conservative jingoists to exploit it.” Here’s a Twitter conversation that followed (lightly edited for clarity):

DS: Think of what you wrote: “All it took was…beheading”? I opposed W’s but this is what wars are made from & I think rightly so.

Me: Really? So any group anywhere in the world merely needs to commit an atrocity to draw us into war?

DS: On what other basis should wars be fought if not to stop groups from committing atrocities against Americans?

I’m not trying to pick on anyone in particular here, but it’s pretty discouraging that this kind of attitude is so common. There’s no question that the beheading of American citizens by a gang of vicious thugs is the kind of thing that makes your blood boil. Unless you hail from Vulcan, your gut reaction is that you want to find the barbarians who did this and crush them.

But that shouldn’t be your final reaction. This is not an era of conventional military forces with overwhelming power and no real fear of blowback. It’s an era of stateless terrorists whose ability to commit extremely public atrocities is pretty much unlimited. And while atrocities can have multiple motivations, one of the key reasons for otherwise pointless actions like one-off kidnappings and beheadings is their ability to either provoke overreactions or successfully extort ransoms. Unfortunately, Americans are stupidly addicted to the former and Europeans seem to be stupidly addicted to the latter, and that’s part of what keeps this stuff going.

In any case, a moment’s thought should convince you that we’re being manipulated. We’ve read account after account about ISIS and its remarkably sophisticated command and publicity apparatus. The beheading video is part of that. It’s a very calculated, very deliberate attempt to get us to respond stupidly. It’s not even a very subtle manipulation. It’s just an especially brutal one.

So if we’re smart, we won’t give them what they want. Instead we’ll respond coldly and meticulously. We’ll fight on our terms, not theirs. We’ll intervene if and only if the Iraqi government demonstrates that it can take the lead and hold the ground they take. We’ll forego magical thinking about counterinsurgencies. We won’t commit Western troops in force because we know from experience that this doesn’t work. We’ll avoid pitched battles and instead take advantage of our chances when they arise. Time is on our side.

Above all, we won’t allow a small band of medieval theocrats to manipulate us. We need to stop giving them exactly what they want. We need to stop doing stupid stuff.

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Let’s Not Give ISIS Exactly What They Want

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