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Renewable Fuels: Creating Jobs and Spurring Innovation

by Posted on February 3, 2015

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Renewable Fuels: Creating Jobs and Spurring Innovation

Posted 3 February 2015 in

National

Since its passage in 2005, the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) has sparked innovation and investment in communities across the United States. More than just spurring growth in the traditional ethanol industry though, the RFS has also accelerated and encouraged the development of the next generation of clean, renewable fuel.

As an op-ed in Roll Call notes, at a time when overall foreign direct investment was falling in the United States, projects in the biofuels sector were attracting hundreds of millions of dollars from around the world. These investments were on the verge of launching a whole new era of economic growth for rural communities across the United States when the EPA threatened to change the way it administers the RFS.

Though the EPA has since delayed that decision, the uncertainty has led foreign investors to pause as they wait to see whether the Obama administration will recommit to a strong RFS.

The impact of this uncertainty has been immediate and damaging for this growing industry.

Despite the successful completion of a $500 million production facility in Kansas, Abengoa, a Spanish company, is no longer considering additional investments in cellulosic ethanol in the U.S.
After investing some $500 million in R&D and production in California, Nebraska, and North Carolina, Novozymes, a Danish biotech company, is not planning further investment in the U.S. advanced biofuels market.
After opening a cellulosic plant in Iowa with American partner POET, DSM, a Dutch company, now sees China as the best place to invest.

These projects show the promise and possibility of sustained commitment to cellulosic ethanol in the U.S. Now, more than ever, we need President Obama to stand up for a strong RFS.

It’s not too late to get the final rule right and to make sure the United States is the leader in producing the cleanest fuels in the world.

Read the Roll Call column.

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Gaza in Arizona: How Israeli High-Tech Firms Will Up-Armor the US-Mexico Border

by Billy Zane Posted on January 26, 2015

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

It was October 2012. Roei Elkabetz, a brigadier general for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), was explaining his country’s border policing strategies. In his PowerPoint presentation, a photo of the enclosure wall that isolates the Gaza Strip from Israel clicked onscreen. “We have learned lots from Gaza,” he told the audience. “It’s a great laboratory.”

Elkabetz was speaking at a border technology conference and fair surrounded by a dazzling display of technology—the components of his boundary-building lab. There were surveillance balloons with high-powered cameras floating over a desert-camouflaged armored vehicle made by Lockheed Martin. There were seismic sensor systems used to detect the movement of people and other wonders of the modern border-policing world. Around Elkabetz, you could see vivid examples of where the future of such policing was heading, as imagined not by a dystopian science fiction writer but by some of the top corporate techno-innovators on the planet.

Swimming in a sea of border security, the brigadier general was, however, not surrounded by the Mediterranean but by a parched West Texas landscape. He was in El Paso, a 10-minute walk from the wall that separates the United States from Mexico.

Just a few more minutes on foot and Elkabetz could have watched green-striped US Border Patrol vehicles inching along the trickling Rio Grande in front of Ciudad Juarez, one of Mexico’s largest cities filled with US factories and the dead of that country’s drug wars. The Border Patrol agents whom the general might have spotted were then being up-armored with a lethal combination of surveillance technologies, military hardware, assault rifles, helicopters, and drones. This once-peaceful place was being transformed into what Timothy Dunn, in his book The Militarization of the US Mexico Border, terms a state of “low-intensity warfare.”

The Border Surge

On November 20, 2014, President Obama announced a series of executive actions on immigration reform. Addressing the American people, he referred to bipartisan immigration legislation passed by the Senate in June 2013 that would, among other things, further up-armor the same landscape in what’s been termed—in language adopted from recent US war zones—a “border surge.” The president bemoaned the fact that the bill had been stalled in the House of Representatives, hailing it as a “compromise” that “reflected common sense.” It would, he pointed out, “have doubled the number of Border Patrol agents, while giving undocumented immigrants a pathway to citizenship.”

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Gaza in Arizona: How Israeli High-Tech Firms Will Up-Armor the US-Mexico Border

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Discovery Channel: Now With More Facts, Fewer Snakes Eating Humans

by BrentP59cdnn Posted on January 15, 2015

Mother Jones

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In the first public admission that its reality television shows have strayed into the land of bizarre fakes and fabrications, the new boss at Discovery Channel has pledged to restore the network’s documentary credibility with viewers—saying fake programming has “run its course,” and is “not right for us.”

The move is a major change for Discovery Communications, owner of the Discovery Channel. The group also owns a host of other networks, including Animal Planet and TLC, which have attracted criticism for the mistreatment of animals and for elaborately staging reality programs.

During a recent press conference in Pasadena, California, new president Rich Ross addressed the controversy surrounding a series of outlandishly scripted programs.

Rich Ross, Discovery Channel’s new president, speaking at the Television Critics Association winter press tour on January 8 Discovery Communications

One example: Megalodon: The New Evidence, screened during 2014’s “Shark Week,” which claimed that the largest predatory shark that ever lived is still alive (it’s not—some scientists were portrayed by actors). Another show, Eaten Alive, promised to show a man being swallowed whole by an anaconda (he eventually wasn’t—he called off the eating part in front of the cameras). It was widely slammed by critics for making false claims about the show’s content, and by wildlife advocates for harassing the snake and promoting fear.

At the Pasadena event, Ross was just 72 hours into the job, but he wasted no time in outlining his new priorities: “If there was one word, it would be ‘authentic,'” which would be a filter for “everything we have on the air,” he told reporters last Thursday.

Discussing Discovery programming like Megalodon—and a similar show on Animal Planet that purported to find evidence of real life mermaids—Ross said it was time for his channel to switch gears: “It’s not whether I’m a fan of it. I don’t think it’s actually right for Discovery Channel, and it’s something that I think has, in some ways, run its course,” he said, according to a transcript.

In the question-and-answer session, Ross was challenged to address concerns that Discovery programming has directly misled the public. One journalist asked, “Do you have plans to try to repair relationships with scientists, educators, and other people who felt like those shows were—besides the fact that they were betraying Discovery’s mission, were giving false information to people?”

Ross pointed to his recent appointment of a distinguished 17-year veteran of HBO and multiple Emmy Award-winner, John Hoffman, as executive vice president of documentaries and specials, calling it a commitment to returning to the land of truth-telling documentaries.

And what about Eaten Alive? “I don’t believe you’ll be seeing a person eaten by a snake during my time,” he said, to laughter. Ross also wants to distance the channel from shows like Skyscraper Live With Nik Wallenda, which drew 10.7 million viewers to watch live as a man tightrope-walked between two Chicago skyscrapers. “We can do things that are live, but we don’t have to make it as much of a sideshow type event,” Variety reported him as saying.

Ross declined to be interviewed for this article.

His comments were welcomed by some outspoken critics of Discovery’s scientific programming, including David Shiffman, a marine biologist, who has made a name for himself on social media by campaigning publicly for years to get Discovery to change its ways.

“It’s exciting that they’re finally listening to concerns that have been expressed by so many people,” Shiffman said in a phone interview. “By scientists, by conservationists, by educators who have had to deal with the consequences of the completely made-up documentaries.”

But Shiffman warned there’s still along way to go across the entire organization. “There are lots of other problems with recent Discovery shows,” he said, including “fear-mongering instead of facts” and “a promotion of wildlife harassment.” He said he’ll be watching the lineup for 2015’s Shark Week closely to see if Ross’s promises have been implemented.

Our complete coverage of animal mistreatment behind the scenes at Animal Planet


Drugs, Death, Neglect: Behind the Scenes at Animal Planet


Animal Planet Star Was Warned He Was Breaking the Law


How a Coyote Suffered Behind the Scenes at Animal Planet


Viewers are Furious With Animal Planet for Mistreating Animals on “Reality TV”


Animal Planet’s “Call of the Wildman” Abruptly Canceled in Canada


Animal Planet’s Turtleman Returns to Air Despite Damning Federal Investigation


Ratings of Animal Planet Show Nosedive After MoJo Exposé

The issue of faked and fraudulent shows is not limited to Discovery Channel. For Mother Jones, I’ve written a series of investigative articles about Call of the Wildman on Animal Planet, Discovery Channel’s sister station. My reporting documented evidence of the show’s mistreatment of animals, including the drugging of a zebra, and the deliberate trapping of wildlife for elaborately staged and scripted scenes; the reporting called into question the show’s legality under federal and state animal welfare laws, and has since attracted an ongoing probe by USDA officials. At the time of my reporting into Call of the Wildman, Discovery Communications representatives and production staff fervently defended Animal Planet’s treatment of animals, denying any harm was done.

It will be an uphill battle for reform inside Discovery, both the channel and its parent organization, says Chris Palmer, the director of the Center for Environmental Filmmaking at the American University School of Communication. Ross “will face a lot of internal opposition because the drive for ratings is still there in the culture of the organization,” he said. Previously, Palmer says, “the senior people have defended vigorously what they’ve done and have painstakingly ignored criticism.”

While the channel has “burned a lot of bridges, I am cautiously optimistic for the future,” said Shiffman, the marine biologist. “But they have a lot more that they need to do to earn back our trust and respect.”

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Discovery Channel: Now With More Facts, Fewer Snakes Eating Humans

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Germany’s Anti-Islam Protests Play Into Extremists’ Hands

by HildaYcrekr Posted on January 13, 2015

Mother Jones

For two Mondays in a row, Dresden was the scene of massive protests against the growing number of Muslims living in Germany. The first, attracting about 18,000 supporters, happened two days before the attack in Paris on Charlie Hebdo, and the second was this week. The anti-immigration protesters, who call themselves PEGIDA (Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West), were claiming they had gathered to promote nationalism and call for the protection of German culture.

But waving German flags and brandishing posters that demanded “Homeland Protection Not Islamization,” the demonstrators in Dresden slammed asylum-seekers from Muslim regions for abusing Germany’s welcoming policies toward refugees and for tainting the culture of Germany. Dresden is home to a small percentage of foreigners, but after France, Germany hosts the largest population of Muslims in Western Europe—as many as 4.3 million, according to a 2009 estimate published in Germany’s Federal Republic.

Thousands of counterprotesters have appeared at the demonstrations staged by PEGIDA across Germany in recent months and have advocated tolerance and support for Muslim immigrants. But, prior to this week, PEGIDA supporters have easily outnumbered them; since its founding in October 2014 by Lutz Bachmann, a former petty criminal who now runs a public relations firm, the group has quickly grown in force and number. These anti-immigrant rallies have caused much debate and concern in Germany, but PEGIDA supporters may not realize that their protests have unintended consequences: Radical Islamist groups see their case against the West bolstered and legitimized by PEGIDA and other anti-Muslim protesters. PEGIDA’s actions allow radical Islamists to claim the West is hostile to Muslims—the argument used by radical groups such as ISIS to recruit disenfranchised, angry youths in search of a cause.

National security and terrorism experts point out that even though PEGIDA’s anti-Muslim events may not directly boost the recruitment efforts of ISIS and other jihadist groups, it has fueled a dynamic that undermines the fight against terrorism. “This is truly a vicious cycle,” explains Brian Forst, a professor of justice, law, and criminology at American University. “Anti-immigration sentiments aimed primarily against Muslims in the West breed alienation among Muslims, and alienation breeds extremism and acts of terror, which only aggravate anti-Muslim sentiments and behaviors…Terrorism succeeds when the victim reacts badly.”

National security experts note that PEGIDA’s public demonstrations add to a climate that can be exploited by jihadists seeking recruits. “These protests create a further sense of disenfranchisement on the part of Muslim youth,” says Arie Kruglanski, a University of Maryland psychologist and terrorism expert. “So the result is further polarization of European societies and further rift…a clash of civilizations.”

In a report for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Marc Pierini, an expert on the Middle East and Europe, described the recruitment of Europeans by ISIS: “Of the Islamic State’s European followers, many are born Muslims, while some are converts…Problems of social exclusion, religious tensions, and political frustrations provide fertile ground for recruiting of young people.” Protests like PEGIDA’s only serve to deepen the social divide, providing ISIS and other radical groups vivid images to support their causes.

A 2005 Congressional Research Service report focusing on England, France, Germany, and Spain noted that “social deprivation, discrimination, and a sense of cultural alienation may make some European Muslims—especially those of the second or third generation—more vulnerable to extremist ideologies.”

A spokesman from Germany’s embassy in Washington dismisses these concerns, however, and says PEGIDA is merely a “local phenomenon” and incapable of affecting recruitment efforts for ISIS. “Whoever is ready to join ISIS will join ISIS without a PEGIDA,” he says.

A local gang of protesters can nonetheless have international impact, observes Michael O’Hanlon, a national security expert at the Brookings Institution. “Anger and a sense of rejection can contribute to joining ISIS,” he says. “Heaven knows there have already been lots of European jihadists who have gone to Syria, tragically.”

Following the massacre of 17 people around Paris last week, PEGIDA predicted record numbers would show up Monday night to support its cause. “The Islamists, against whom PEGIDA has been warning over the last 12 weeks, showed in France today that they are not capable of (practicing) democracy but instead see violence and death as the solution,” PEGIDA declared on its Facebook page. Analysts agreed with these predictions, suggesting that the numbers of anti-Islam protesters would swell by the thousands.

The attacks do appear to have bolstered the already strong opposition to PEGIDA, as Germans refuse to let PEGIDA take advantage of the Paris tragedy to point to radicalism in all Muslim communities. According to spectators in Germany on Twitter on Saturday, including journalists and bystanders, more than 30,000 people took to the streets across Germany, from Dresden to Liepzig, to protest PEGIDA. Here are a few tweets from people who say they witnessed the actions.

Nonetheless, Monday’s PEGIDA rallies drew a record number of about 25,000 anti-Islam protesters, who took to the streets in defiance of German politicians asking them to stay home in light of the Paris massacre.

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Tea Party Heartthrob Ben Carson Once Lived the Hobo Life Hopping Freight Trains

by DemetriusBruns Posted on January 6, 2015

Mother Jones

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Before he was a prospective 2016 Republican presidential candidate, Ben Carson was just another disaffected teenager who hopped freight trains in search of thrills.

Carson, a retired neurosurgeon who plans to make a final decision about running for president by the end of May, became a tea party favorite after ripping into President Obama at the National Prayer Breakfast in 2013. Since then, he has staked out far-right positions on issues like gay rights (which he believes are part of a Marxist plot), the AP US History curriculum (which he fears will be an ISIS recruiting tool), and the 2016 election itself (which he believes might be canceled due to a societal breakdown).

Carson’s rags-to-riches story, as a one-time juvenile delinquent raised by a single mom who rose to the top of the medical profession, is at the core of his personal appeal. It has been the subject of a best-selling book and a feature-length movie. His youthful habit of hopping aboard moving freight trains is considerably less well known. But as Carson explained in his 2008 book, Take the Risk, he and his older brother, Curtis, began riding freight trains after moving back to Detroit from Boston for middle school:

We didn’t think twice about it at the time, and Mother certainly didn’t know about the risks we took, but just getting to and from school in our new neighborhood was a dangerous proposition. The fastest and most exciting way to commute was to hop one of the freight trains rolling on the tracks that ran alongside the route Curtis and I took to Wilson Junior High School. Curtis liked the challenge of fast-moving trains, tossing his clarinet onto one flatcar and then jumping to catch the railing on the very last car of the train. He knew if he missed his chance, he risked never seeing his band instrument again. But he never lost that clarinet.

Since I was smaller, I usually waited for slower trains. But we both placed ourselves in great danger we didn’t ever seriously stop to consider. Not only did we have to run, jump, catch the railing, and hold on for dear life to a moving freight train, but we had to avoid the railroad security who were always on the lookout for people hopping their trains.

They never caught us. And we never got seriously injured like one boy we heard of who was maimed for life after falling onto the tracks under a moving train.

As I reported in the January/February issue of Mother Jones, freight-hopping has always attracted a certain brand of (usually male) individualists who are skeptical of centralized authority. Carson’s Bo Keeley phase came to an end, however, after a run-in with a gang of racist youths. “We stopped after an encounter I had with a different threat as I trotted along the railroad tracks on my way to school along one morning,” he wrote. “Near one of the crossings, a gang of bigger boys, all of them white, approached me. One boy, carrying a big stick, yelled, ‘Hey, you! Nigger boy!'”

If elected, Carson wouldn’t be the first president with a hobo past. When Harry Truman was 18, he got a job with the Santa Fe Railroad, which required him to manage the migrant workers who rode the rails to do manual labor for the company. “Some of those hoboes had better educations than the president of Harvard University, and they weren’t stuck up about it either,” he later recalled.

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Tea Party Heartthrob Ben Carson Once Lived the Hobo Life Hopping Freight Trains

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Does America Need More Startups? Fine. How Do We Get Them?

by olikellopas Posted on December 26, 2014

Mother Jones

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Over at Foreign Affairs, Robert Litan has a piece lamenting the decline in entrepreneurship in America. I’m not entirely persuaded that this is a major problem—a fair amount of it is just the result of big national retailers replacing local diners and small shops, which are hardly big engines of economic growth—but I’m still willing to accept that some of it is probably real and deserves attention. The problem is what to do about it. James Pethokoukis, addressing skeptics like me, summarizes Litan’s suggestions:

Of course one can quibble with these numbers and what they mean….But here is the thing: Pretty much all the policy steps you might take to respond to this startup wind-down — and the decline in innovation and good jobs it implies — are pretty smart ideas in their own right. Among Litan’s suggestions:

  1. Attract more immigrant entrepreneurs and keep more foreign students who earn graduate degrees in the STEM fields.
  2. Make it easier to attract investment capital through crowdfunding platforms.
  3. Constantly evaluate regulations to see if they raise entry barriers to new firms or give an edge to incumbents.
  4. Don’t let future changes to Obamacare create a disincentive for workers to leave their firms.
  5. Reform k-12 education to better teach technological literacy — but also don’t skip humanities and the arts.

Well….OK. But how far would this get us? #1 is something we already do better than anyone in the world. I suppose we could improve even further, and I’d be in favor of immigration legislation that does just that. Still, I guess I’m dubious that lack of smart immigrants is really a huge headwind in the US. Ditto for #2. Is lack of access to venture capital really a serious problem in this country? #3 is fine. I don’t know for sure just how hard it really is to start a business in America, but the World Bank ranks us 46th in the world, and I imagine we could do better. #4 is odd: Litan himself says the news here is “mostly good.” Obamacare makes it easier to change your job or start up a new business, and that’s inherent in its very nature. It will stay that way unless it’s completely repealed. Finally, #5 suggests that we do a better job teaching science, humanities, and the arts. Since that’s pretty much everything K-12 education does, this is just a way of saying we should keep trying to improve primary education. I don’t think anyone argues with that.

I don’t mean to come off too cynical here. There are two good ideas here that we could plausibly do something about: Being friendlier to highly-educated immigrants and making it easier to start a business. (A third idea—improving our schools—is also good, but it’s basically like endorsing motherhood and apple pie.) And a good idea is a good idea. But if entrepreneurship really is in decline in America—and if it’s truly a far-reaching problem—I’d be interested in hearing more about root causes and what we might be able to do about them. It seems like it will take a lot more than this list to seriously address it.

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Does America Need More Startups? Fine. How Do We Get Them?

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The Law of Divine Compensation – Marianne Williamson

by Myrna Posted on November 25, 2014

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The Law of Divine Compensation
On Work, Money, and Miracles
Marianne Williamson

Genre: Self-Improvement

Price: $1.99

Publish Date: November 27, 2012

Publisher: HarperOne

Seller: HarperCollins


In The Law of Divine Compensation: On Work, Money, and Miracles the #1 New York Times bestselling author Marianne Williamson provides a unique perspective on our financial condition through the lens of A Course in Miracles. She reveals a path to abundance by way of a powerful spiritual principle called the Law of Divine Compensation. The Law says that when we lack faith in our higher selves and focus on the negative, we create and perpetuate our own negative circumstances; conversely, when we have faith in God and in love and all that can go right in our lives, we open ourselves to receive the miracles the universe is holding for us. While millions have suffered heartbreaking and seemingly intractable financial woes, every one of us possesses the power to believe that something else is possible, that our destinies can change, that a miracle can happen. This simple shift in how we think can have a monumental effect on what happens next. In The Law of Divine Compensation you will discover how the power of your thoughts can attract—or deflect—miraculous breakthroughs in your life. Williamson reveals that the Law is not about hoping, dreaming, or wishing we&apos;d win the lottery; rather it is about faith as a mental and emotional muscle we must exercise in order to benefit from. This powerful spiritual principle will us help us overcome financial stress and unleash the divine power of abundance. If we have faith in God&apos;s promise of prosperity for all, we need never fear the future.

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Obama’s Executive Action Will Protect 5 Million Undocumented Immigrants

by LibbyPritchett Posted on November 21, 2014

Mother Jones

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On Thursday evening, President Barack Obama announced his hotly anticipated executive action on immigration, which will keep nearly 5 million undocumented residents from being deported. Even though the sweeping measure has elicited threats of retaliation from congressional Republicans, Obama said he moved forward because comprehensive immigration reform is unlikely to go anywhere in the GOP-dominated Congress next year.

“I know some of the critics of this action call it amnesty,” the president said in his speech. “Well, it’s not. Amnesty is the immigration system we have today—millions of people who live here without paying their taxes or playing by the rules, while politicians use the issue to scare people and whip up votes at election time. That’s the real amnesty—leaving this broken system the way it is.”

A year and a half ago, a bipartisan immigration bill passed in the Senate but died in the House. The bill likely had enough Republican and Democratic votes to pass in the House, but Speaker John Boehner, catering to his tea partiers, refused to bring the measure to the floor. If signed into law, the legislation would have provided legal status to about 11 million undocumented immigrants. Here’s a look at who benefits most from Obama’s executive action—and who has lost out, thanks in part to GOP obstructionism.

Winners
Undocumented parents of children who are US citizens or permanent residents: “Undocumented immigrants…see little option but to remain in the shadows, or risk their families being torn apart,” the president said. “It’s been this way for decades. And for decades, we haven’t done much about it.” His executive action will offer temporary legal status to the undocumented parents of children who are US citizens or permanent residents and allow them to apply for work permits—as long as they have lived in the United States for at least five years, pass a background check, and pay taxes.

DREAMers: The president’s move will broaden the 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which had temporarily protected from deportation some 1.2 million young people who were brought into the country illegally as children—as long as they entered the country before June 15, 2007. Now, children who came to the United States before January 1, 2010, will be eligible to apply for deferred-action status. The so-called DREAMers (named after the proposed Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act) can apply for employment visas, though there is no direct path for them to lawful permanent residence or citizenship. To the dismay of immigration activists, the executive action does not extend benefits to the hundreds of thousands of parents of DREAMers.

Families: Often US citizens and legal permanent residents are separated for long stretches of time from family members who are awaiting legal permanent resident status. The executive action will expand a waiver program that will reduce the time these families spend apart.

Noncriminal undocumented immigrants: Obama’s executive action shifts all of the Department of Homeland Security’s enforcement resources toward deporting undocumented immigrants who are criminals—instead of deporting undocumented immigrants who pose no such threat. “We’re going to keep focusing enforcement resources on actual threats to our security,” Obama said. “Felons, not families.” The president’s order also guts an existing program called Secure Communities, which requires police to share arrestees’ fingerprints with federal immigration officials, who can use the information to deport suspects who are here illegally, even if they turn out to be innocent. The program will be replaced with another devoted to deporting only those convicted of criminal offenses.

Highly skilled workers: Skilled workers who have had their legal permanent resident application approved often wait years to receive their visas. Obama’s order will allow these people to move and change jobs more easily.

Immigrants with pending cases: As part of the president’s executive action, the Justice Department will implement immigration court reforms to quickly process the massive backlog of cases.

Immigrant victims of crime: Obama is directing the Department of Labor to expand the number of visas available for victims of crimes and human trafficking.

The Border Patrol: Obama’s executive action shifts resources to the border, though it doesn’t specify how much more money will be flowing to Customs and Border Patrol agents and Immigration and Customs Enforcement along the southern border. (The Senate bill would have allotted some $30 billion over 10 years to hiring at least 19,200 extra border patrol agents.)

Entrepreneurs: The executive action will make it easier for foreign entrepreneurs—who show a potential to create jobs in the United States and attract investment—to immigrate to the US, though there was no mention how the administration will achieve this.

Losers
Undocumented immigrants who have been here since 2011: The failed Senate immigration bill would have allowed immigrants without papers—and their children and spouses—to apply for provisional legal status, if they have been in the United States since the end of 2011. These immigrants could have eventually applied for citizenship.

Undocumented agricultural workers: Under the Senate bill, undocumented agricultural workers would have been eligible for legal immigrant status if they had worked at least 100 full days between 2010 and 2012. The bill would have created a path to citizenship for these farmworkers.

Ag workers with papers: The Senate bill would also have created a new temporary work visa called the W visa for farmworkers. The new program would have permitted these laborers to eventually apply for permanent resident status without an employer’s sponsorship. Less-skilled non-farmworkers could have also applied for a W visa.

Other types of legal immigrants: The Senate bill would have set up a new system that would grant visas to up to 250,000 foreigners a year. Foreign nationals would have accumulated points based on their skill level, education, and employment background. The new system would have cleared the current backlog of applicants for family-based or work visas.

Foreigners attending American universities: More foreigners graduating from American universities in the fields of science, math, and technology would have been able to apply for permanent visas.

Immigrant detainees: If the Senate bill had okayed by the House, unaccompanied minors, mentally disabled immigrants, and other vulnerable people going through the detention and deportation process would have been granted free legal representation. The bill would have limited the use of solitary confinement in immigrant detention facilities.

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Obama’s Executive Action Will Protect 5 Million Undocumented Immigrants

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Why Scott Walker Might Be Our Next President

by QuinnHeavener Posted on November 19, 2014

Mother Jones

In 2012, I basically considered Mitt Romney a shoo-in for the Republican nomination. I figured that he’d hoover up most of the moderate votes—and despite all the breathless press accounts, moderates still account for at least half of GOP voters—plus a share of the tea partiers, and that was that. The rest of the field would destroy each other as they fought over their own sliver of the tea party vote, eventually leaving Romney battered and unloved, but triumphant.

Sure enough, that’s what happened. But I don’t see a strong moderate in the field right now. I suppose Jeb Bush and Chris Christie come the closest, but even if they run, they strike me as having some pretty serious problems. Romney was willing to adopt tea party positions across the board, even as he projected a moderate, adult persona, but neither Christie nor Bush will kowtow in quite that way. That’s going to cause them problems, and Christie’s fondness for showy confrontations is going to be an additional millstone around his neck. Either one might win, but neither seems like an especially likely nominee to me.

All this is a long way of explaining why I think Scott Walker is the frontrunner. He has a record of governance. His persona is relatively adult. He doesn’t say crazy stuff. Relatively speaking, he’s attractive to moderates. But at the same time, the tea partiers love him too. The big strike against him, of course, is that he’s lousy on TV. He’s a terrible public speaker. And he’s just boring as hell. However, Ed Kilgore perfectly explains why this doesn’t make him another Tim Pawlenty or John Kasich:

This is why Walker is so very commonly compared to Tim Pawlenty in 2012; the Minnesotan was perfectly positioned to become the most-conservative-electable-candidate nominee in a large but shaky field. And he wound up being the first candidate to drop out, before a single vote (other than in the completely non-official Ames Straw Poll) was cast. His sin was congenital blandness, and the defining moment of his campaign was when he all but repudiated his one great zinger: referring to the Affordable Care Act as “Obamneycare.”

But TPaw’s demise does point up one big difference between these two avatars of the Republican revival in the Upper Midwest: nobody suspects Scott Walker may be too nice for his party. He may be bland, and a bad orator, but his bad intent towards conservatism’s enemies is unmistakable. He’s sorta Death by Vanilla, or a great white shark; boring until he rips you apart. I think Republican elites get that, and it excites them. But how about voters?

Mitt Romney managed to base nearly his entire campaign on hating Barack Obama more than anyone else. It worked. Whenever someone started to score some points against his sometimes liberalish record in Massachusetts, he’d just launch into an over-the-top denunciation of Obama and the crowd would go wild. Walker can do the same thing, but without the artifice. Unlike Romney, he really has been fighting liberals tooth and nail for the past four years, and he has the scars to prove it. This will go a long, long way to make up for a bit of blandness.

Besides, it’s worth remembering that people can improve on the basics of campaigning. Maybe Walker will turn out to be hopeless. You never know until the campaign really gets going. But if he’s serious, he’ll get some media training and start working on developing a better stump speech. A few months of this can do wonders.

Predictions are hard, especially about the future. But if he runs, I rate Walker a favorite right now. If his only real drawback is midwestern blandness—well, Mitt Romney wasn’t Mr. Excitement either. Walker can get better if he’s puts in the work. And if he does, he’ll have most of Romney’s upside with very little of the downside. He could be formidable.

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Why Scott Walker Might Be Our Next President

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2014: The Year of Koch

by BradforLanders Posted on November 6, 2014

Mother Jones

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The 2014 election season acquired its fair share of nicknames: the Nothing Election, the Seinfeld Election, and the Meh Midterms. Here’s another: The Year of Koch.

Big money from outside spenders like the Koch brothers’ political network and the pro-Democratic Senate Majority PAC dominated this year’s elections. In the battleground states, a voter couldn’t watch five minutes of television, listen to the radio, or cue up a YouTube clip without being bombarded by political ads, most of them of the minor-chord, attack-ad variety. Broadcasters in Alaska, North Carolina, Colorado, and other critical states collected money by the fistful. Major candidates galore had a deep-pocketed super-PAC or a political nonprofit in his or her corner.

Here are seven big-money takeaways from the second election since the Supreme Court’s landscape-changing Citizens United decision.

The price tag for 2014 will probably be the highest in American history.
Candidates, parties, PACs, super-PACs, and political nonprofits—those anonymously funded outfits including the Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity and the pro-Democratic Patriot Majority—were on pace to spend $3.67 billion on the 2014 races, according to projections by the Center for Responsive Politics. That would be a new record, surpassing the $3.63 billion spent in 2010.

When all the numbers are tallied, Republicans will likely outspend the Democrats—but not by much. CRP predicts that Republican candidates and their allies will unload $1.75 billion this election, while Democrats and their supporters will spend $1.64 billion. (The remaining dollars, according to CRP, went toward nonpartisan and third-party spending as well as overhead costs.)

Super-PACs and dark money are a bigger deal than ever.
All those attack ads clogging up the commercial breaks during your favorite show? Chances are they were funded not by a candidate but an outside group—a super-PAC, a labor union, or a political nonprofit.

The 2014 elections will be remembered as the cycle when outside groups handled much of the mudslinging, which traditionally was the responsibility of candidates and their campaigns. In Kentucky, for instance, a secretly funded group called Kentucky Opportunity Coalition ran 12,000 TV ads—many of which attacked Democratic Senate candidate Alison Lundergan Grimes, depicting her as an Obama clone. The group’s commercials accounted for one out of every seven ads run during that race, according to the Center for Public Integrity. On paper, Kentucky Opportunity Coalition was independent of the candidate it supported, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. But the group was run by a former McConnell aide and functioned effectively as an offshoot of McConnell’s campaign.

This pattern unfolded across the country, as outside spending ramped up. In all, outside groups pumped $554 million—$301 million from Republican-aligned shops, $225 million from Democratic allies—into 2014 races. And you guessed it: That, too, is a new record for a midterm election.

Koch and Rove: From zeroes to heroes.
Two years ago, the biggest donors and operatives in the Republican money universe—Karl Rove, casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, and the Koch brothers and their donor network—spent hundreds of millions of dollars to defeat President Obama and retake the Senate. They got nothing; it was an embarrassment.

This year, they won big.

Rove’s groups—American Crossroads, a super-PAC; and Crossroads GPS, its dark-money-funded sibling—spent heavily in 10 Senate races. The Republican won in at least six of those elections. If Republican Dan Sullivan defeats Sen. Mark Begich in Alaska (Sullivan was leading the vote count the day after the election) and GOP Rep. Bill Cassidy ousts Sen. Mary Landrieu in Louisiana’s run-off next month, Rove will end up eight for 10. The Sunlight Foundation calculates Crossroads GPS’ return on investment—that is, the success rate of GPS’ spending to elect or defeat candidates—at an impressive 96 percent.

The Koch brothers’ flagship organization, Americans for Prosperity, had an equally stellar Election Day. At least five of the nine AFP-backed Senate candidates won. The Kochs’ Freedom Partners Action Fund recorded an 85 percent ROI, according to the Sunlight Foundation.

By contrast, Senate Majority PAC, the super-PAC aligned with Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) that funded more ads than any other outside group, took a beating. It spent $47 million—the most of any super-PAC—but saw only two of the nine Republican candidates it targeted go down to defeat. Senate Majority PAC’s ROI: 9 percent.

The Democrats’ new George Soros had a bad night.
Tom Steyer, the billionaire investor turned environmental activist, put nearly $73 million of his money into electing candidates who believe in human-caused global warming and who want to do something about it. No single person gave more in 2014 than Steyer, according to CRP. He has become the big-money bogeyman of the right, but he fell short in multiple key races.

The bulk of Steyer’s money funded NextGen Climate, the organization he started to elect more climate-savvy politicians. NextGen’s super-PAC spent at least $20 million and defeated two of the four Republicans running for Senate it targeted. NextGen fared worse in governor’s races: Of the three GOP governors it sought to defeat—Florida’s Rick Scott, Maine’s Paul LePage, and Pennsylvania’s Tom Corbett—only Corbett went down to defeat. And he might have well done so without Steyer’s money in the race.

North Carolina: Our Senate race cost more than yours (and yours, and yours).
The campaign pitting incumbent Sen. Kay Hagan (D-N.C.) against Republican Thom Tillis officially cost more than $100 million. It was the most expensive Senate race in American history.

To better understand that figure, consider this statistic: In the final stretch of the race, the Center for Public Integrity reports, a Senate-themed ad ran on TV somewhere in North Carolina every 50 seconds.

Larry Lessig’s spend-big-money-to-fight-big-money plan flopped.
Larry Lessig, the Harvard law professor revered by the Reddit crowd, launched MayDay PAC to great fanfare in May with a plan to raise and spend millions of dollars to elect candidates who would, once in office, fight to get big money out of politics. “Embrace the irony,” Lessig likes to say.

But in the end, MayDay was more hype than action. It spent $7.5 million and of the eight “anti-corruption candidates” listed on its website, only two MayDay-backed candidates won. There’s little evidence to suggest that either of those candidates—Arizona Democrat Ruben Gallegos and North Carolina Republican Walter Jones—won due to MayDay’s intervention on their behalf.

Every Voice, another anti-super-PAC super-PAC, didn’t fare much better. Only four candidates supported by Every Voice won in the dozen races the group tried to influence.

Judicial elections keep attracting big bucks.
Nearly $14 million was spent on advertising in judicial races this year, an increase from 2010’s $12.2 million, according to Justice at Stake and the Brennan Center for Justice. But the money flowing into those races from business interests and anonymous outside groups seeking to toss out incumbent justices largely failed in Arkansas, Idaho, Illinois, Michigan, Montana, North Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee, and Texas.

The Republican State Leadership Committee, through its new Judicial Fairness Initiative, spent $3.4 million on TV advertising in judicial races in five states. The RSLC has sought to elect more pro-business judges across the country. This year, though, it failed to defeat seven judges it had targeted. Its only success was the reelection of Justice Lloyd Karmeier, who sits on the Illinois supreme court.

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2014: The Year of Koch

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