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Here’s Why I Never Warmed Up to Bernie Sanders

by SarahMarquardt Posted on April 29, 2016

Mother Jones

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With the Democratic primary basically over, I want to step back a bit and explain the big-picture reason that I never warmed up to Bernie Sanders. It’s not so much that he’s all that far to my left, nor that he’s been pretty skimpy on details about all the programs he proposes. That’s hardly uncommon in presidential campaigns. Rather, it’s the fact that I think he’s basically running a con, and one with the potential to cause distinct damage to the progressive cause.

I mean this as a provocation—but I also mean it. So if you’re provoked, mission accomplished! Here’s my argument.

Bernie’s explanation for everything he wants to do—his theory of change, or theory of governing, take your pick—is that we need a revolution in this country. The rich own everything. Income inequality is skyrocketing. The middle class is stagnating. The finance industry is out of control. Washington DC is paralyzed.

But as Bill Scher points out, the revolution that Bernie called for didn’t show up. In fact, it’s worse than that: we were never going to get a revolution, and Bernie knew it all along. Think about it: has there ever been an economic revolution in the United States? Stretching things a bit, I can think of two:

The destruction of the Southern slave economy following the Civil War.
The New Deal.

The first of these was 50+ years in the making and, in the end, required a bloody, four-year war to bring to a conclusion. The second happened only after an utter collapse of the economy, with banks closing, businesses failing, wages plummeting, and unemployment at 25 percent. That’s what it takes to bring about a revolution, or even something close to it.

We’re light years away from that right now. Unemployment? Yes, two or three percent of the working-age population has dropped out of the labor force, but the headline unemployment rate is 5 percent. Wages? They’ve been stagnant since the turn of the century, but the average family still makes close to $70,000, more than nearly any other country in the world. Health care? Our system is a mess, but 90 percent of the country has insurance coverage. Dissatisfaction with the system? According to Gallup, even among those with incomes under $30,000, only 27 percent are dissatisfied with their personal lives.

Like it or not, you don’t build a revolution on top of an economy like this. Period. If you want to get anything done, you’re going to have to do it the old-fashioned way: through the slow boring of hard wood.

Why do I care about this? Because if you want to make a difference in this country, you need to be prepared for a very long, very frustrating slog. You have to buy off interest groups, compromise your ideals, and settle for half loaves—all the things that Bernie disdains as part of the corrupt mainstream establishment. In place of this he promises his followers we can get everything we want via a revolution that’s never going to happen. And when that revolution inevitably fails, where do all his impressionable young followers go? Do they join up with the corrupt establishment and commit themselves to the slow boring of hard wood? Or do they give up?

I don’t know, but my fear is that some of them will do the latter. And that’s a damn shame. They’ve been conned by a guy who should know better, the same way dieters get conned by late-night miracle diets. When it doesn’t work, they throw in the towel.

Most likely Bernie will have no lasting effect, and his followers will scatter in the usual way, with some doubling down on practical politics and others leaving for different callings. But there’s a decent chance that Bernie’s failure will result in a net increase of cynicism about politics, and that’s the last thing we need. I hate the idea that we might lose even a few talented future leaders because they fell for Bernie’s spiel and then got discouraged when it didn’t pan out.

I’ll grant that my pitch—and Hillary’s and Barack Obama’s—isn’t very inspiring. Work your fingers to the bone for 30 years and you might get one or two significant pieces of legislation passed. Obviously you need inspiration too. But if you don’t want your followers to give up in disgust, your inspiration needs to be in the service of goals that are at least attainable. By offering a chimera instead, Bernie has done the progressive movement no favors.

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Here’s Why I Never Warmed Up to Bernie Sanders

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Identity Trumps Ideology in Maryland Senate Race

by WilmerGalvez Posted on April 26, 2016

Mother Jones

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At first glance, the Democratic primary for a US Senate seat in Maryland looks eerily similar to the party’s national contest between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. On one side, there’s an establishment candidate, Rep. Chris Van Hollen, who has been in politics since the early 1990s, defines progressivism by legislation passed rather than promises made, and touts wonky policy papers and bills on the campaign trail. On the other, there’s a challenger from the left, Rep. Donna Edwards, who appeals to a national progressive audience with big-picture rhetoric rather than nitty-gritty deal-making.

But this contest doesn’t align neatly with the narrative of the Clinton-Sanders face-off. Rather than a clash of ideologies, the Maryland race has become partly a battle of identity politics. Van Hollen is a white guy, and Edwards is an African American woman. And if Van Hollen wins, the takeaway might be that this element of the race trumped the ideological component.

The contest has been close, although Van Hollen seems to have built a lead in the final stretch, according to polls. If Tuesday’s vote bears out those surveys, it will fulfill the long-expected script for the race. Throughout most of the campaign, the 57-year-old Van Hollen has been the front-runner. He was the first to enter the race last March and quickly locked up the support of most Democratic Party leaders in the state, much as Clinton did on a national level.

The son of a former ambassador, Van Hollen started his career as a US Senate staffer, won a seat in the Maryland legislature in 1990, and was elected to Congress in 2002. With a penchant for handling complicated policy questions, such as budget fights, he soon became part of the party’s leadership circles, serving as an assistant to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. In many of the budget and debt ceiling battles pitting the White House against the tea party Republicans during the Obama years, he has been a key player for the Democrats. He also helmed the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the party’s campaign arm for House races, and he built connections in the national donor class. In the Senate campaign, Van Hollen has raised more than $8 million, compared with just $3.3 million Edwards has gathered.

On the campaign trail, Van Hollen has echoed Clinton. At a debate in Silver Spring two weeks ago, when asked how he would define progressivism, he said, “I believe that being progressive is about more than just saying the right things. It’s about being in the trenches and delivering progressive results.” Compare that to Clinton’s frequent line that she’s a “progressive who gets things done.”

During a phone interview last week, Van Hollen repeatedly directed the conversation to the various policy papers he’s introduced over the years, on subjects ranging from Wall Street reform to local projects in his Maryland district. “I’ve always been in the view that it’s not enough to simply cast a vote,” he said. “You can have people in Congress who push the green button for ‘yes’ and the red button for ‘no,’ they can talk about the issues, but there’s a big difference between that and actually rolling up your sleeves and legislating.”

As a congressman, Van Hollen has shown a talent for wading into the policy minutia on a number of topics. In recent years, he’s proposed a financial transaction tax to pay for tax breaks for middle-class and low-income Americans and a cap-and-dividend bill to address climate change. It’s easy to see why he’s become a liberal favorite in the world of Washington think tanks and advocacy groups.

Still, Edwards has mounted a formidable challenge. She’s built a national following of progressive friends who have boosted her campaign. Groups like the Progressive Change Campaign Committee and Democracy for America instantly joined her campaign. EMILY’s List, the national group dedicated to electing pro-choice female candidates, has helped Edwards cut into Van Hollen’s fundraising edge, with the group’s super-PAC spending more than $2.4 million to boost Edwards.

Edwards also has a long resume in politics, though mostly from an outsider’s vantage. She started her career at Lockheed Martin as a technical writer for the company’s space program and eventually became a systems engineer for Spacelab, a laboratory designed to fit into the bay of a NASA space shuttle. But when the national appetite for space exploration waned following the Challenger explosion, she went to law school. She subsequently served as a lobbyist at the Ralph Nader-founded Public Citizen and as executive director of two progressive organizations, the Center for a New Democracy and the Arca Foundation. In the early 1990s, she co-founded the National Network to End Domestic Violence and helped push the Violence Against Women Act through Congress.

In 2006, Edwards challenged an incumbent, moderate Democratic congressman named Albert Wynn in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, DC, claiming he was in the pocket of special interests. She lost that race, but defeated Wynn in 2008. She entered the House in an uncomfortable fashion. “It starts out as a much more complicated relationship when you challenge the conventional party structure—both in your state and, by extension, coming into Congress, it’s a different relationship,” Edwards said in a recent interview with Mother Jones. Over the past six years, Edwards has slowly integrated herself into the party apparatus. She chairs the House’s subcommittee on space policy and has taken an active role in the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. But she remains something of an outsider, championing the party’s left flank as Sanders does in the Senate.

Edwards has depicted herself as a more relatable alternative to the polished politician she’s challenging. She frequently points to the fact that she was a working single mother for many years. Like Sanders, she’s proved adept at attracting media coverage, particularly in outlets with a younger audience. When the hosts of a popular podcast, Call Your Girlfriend, sold out a synagogue in DC earlier this month, Edwards stopped by for a brief, lighthearted interview. She’s been featured in the Lena Dunham-founded Lenny Letter and in Essence. Earlier this month, her byline appeared in Glamour, where she wrote about the need for equal pay.

Edwards sounds a lot like Sanders when she goes on the attack against Van Hollen. “I don’t take money from Wall Street banks, even though my opponent did,” she said in her first TV ad, released earlier this month. Throughout the campaign, she has needled Van Hollen for any hint of a deviance from liberal orthodoxy, sometimes stretching the truth about her opponent’s record to cast him as a sellout ready to cut any deal with Republicans. She’s criticized him for backing free trade (even though he opposes the Trans-Pacific Partnership deal) and for granting an exception to the National Rifle Association in a bill that would have required the disclosure of campaign contributions. (The bill, with the exception, had wide support from Democrats and the backing of President Barack Obama.) She’s consistently accused Van Hollen of being willing to cut Social Security benefits thanks to his past endorsement of using a compromise budget proposal as a basis for reaching a budget deal with Republicans.

That last attack clearly hit a nerve. When I asked Van Hollen about those claims and whether he regrets any of his past statements, he got defensive. “I’m not going to answer a question that could be misinterpreted in a way that could be used for misleading purposes,” he said, emphasizing that his public stance has always been that Social Security benefits should not be cut.

When discussing politics, Van Hollen and Edwards seem to disagree in the same way that Clinton and Sanders do. Van Hollen tends to be open to compromise in the interest of implementing progressive priorities. Edwards prefers to focus on defining a liberal agenda to ignite passion among voters. “If you’re always trying to shave part off to accommodate the right or the center-right, then you run the risk that people won’t know what you stand for,” she says.

Van Hollen is running even with Edwards or better among Sanders supporters.* The explanation may be that race and gender play as much of a role as ideology, if not a greater one. In the presidential race, Sanders has performed well among men and white voters. In this statewide contest, Van Hollen has held a large lead among white voters in public polls that break down the contest by race. In a recent Monmouth University poll, he led Edwards by a 57-point margin among white Marylanders and by 34 points among men. Edwards is running about even with Van Hollen among women, and she leads among black voters, 62-26 percent.

If Edwards wins, she would be only the second black woman to serve in the Senate, after former Sen. Carol Moseley Braun of Illinois. The Maryland Senate seat is open because incumbent Democrat Barbara Mikulski, the longest-serving female senator in history, is retiring. That’s one of the reasons EMILY’s List—one of the Clinton campaign’s closest allies—is investing so heavily in Edwards’ campaign. And Edwards’ supporters do point to her gender and race as selling points, noting the Senate could use more diversity. Some Democrats in the state have grumbled that Edwards has not been an effective member of Congress and has failed to provide good constituent services—charges the Edwards camp disputes as the grousing coming from those who don’t like the challenge she poses to the Democratic status quo. “It boggles my mind,” Edwards said, “that we could think that it’s appropriate for my voice to be absent from that conversation on behalf of people who share the same concerns that I do.”

But this is a contest that is chock-full of the various currents within Democratic circles: establishment versus insurgency, compromise versus idealism, and experience versus inspiration—and then throw race and gender into the mix. In some ways, it is a more complicated test than the Clinton-Sanders duel. No doubt, the result will fuel a variety of interpretations about the present and future of the Democratic Party.

This article has been updated to clarify Van Hollen’s standing among Sanders supporters.

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Identity Trumps Ideology in Maryland Senate Race

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Trump, Clinton Remain Way Ahead in New York Primary

by JaydenOconner Posted on April 19, 2016

Mother Jones

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I’m not sure how reliable primary polling has been this year, but the Pollster aggregates are pretty clear for Tuesday’s primary in New York. Donald Trump retains a commanding lead on the Republican side, even though New Yorkers should know better, and Hillary Clinton is ahead of Bernie Sanders by 15 points in the Democratic primary. Both Trump and Clinton have increased their leads slightly since the beginning of the month.

Sam Wang forecasts that a big win in New York puts Donald Trump on track to win the Republican nomination outright with 1265 delegates by the end of primary season. His probability of getting 1237 or above is 64 percent. Hillary Clinton, of course, has basically already won the Democratic nomination thanks to her current lead in pledged delegates and her overwhelming lead in superdelegates. The Democratic primary has been little more than shadow boxing for at least the past month.

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Trump, Clinton Remain Way Ahead in New York Primary

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Who Supported the 1994 Crime Bill?

by Zella53Ssnlil Posted on April 18, 2016

Mother Jones

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Farah Stockman reports that the generation gap between Hillary supporters and Bernie supporters extends to African-Americans too. And the 1994 crime bill is part of it:

Caryl Brock said she had been a social worker in charge of the removal of children from dangerous homes in the South Bronx and Spanish Harlem in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when crack tore a path of destruction through those neighborhoods….She said she was relieved when the crime bill passed. In addition to providing more money for prisons and the police, the law banned assault weapons and offered funding for drug courts and rehabilitation. “Because of the crime bill,” she said, “anybody that wanted rehabilitation, we could process them and get them a detox bed in a hospital.”

Ms. Brock’s comments underscore a sometimes overlooked reality in today’s re-examination of the crime bill: The legislation was broadly embraced by nonwhite voters, more enthusiastically even than by white voters. About 58 percent of nonwhites supported it in 1994, according to a Gallup poll, compared with 49 percent of white voters.

Mr. Clinton has seemed rattled at times as he tries to defend the measure to younger African-Americans in an era in which concerns about mistreatment by the police and mass incarceration have eclipsed the fear of crime in many black communities.

And among these younger voters, the Clintons lack the deep admiration that they enjoy from previous generations of African-Americans. In the Democratic primary contests so far, 92 percent of black voters 65 and older cast ballots for Mrs. Clinton, compared with 45 percent of black voters under age 25, according to exit polls conducted by Edison Research.

Obviously everyone should vote for whoever they want. But this piece highlights one thing that continues to eat at me: judging the past by the standards of the present. The 1994 crime bill was hardly supported unanimously, and there was plenty of criticism of it at the time. It’s fine to take note of that. But the plain fact is that 1994 was a different time: crime was rampant and people were scared—including black people—and most of them supported the crime bill, warts and all. Were they wrong to do so? Maybe. But you need to seriously engage with what the world was like in 1994 and what they could reasonably have known about it before you condemn them.

A world where violent crime is no longer an obsession, replaced instead by DWB and Ferguson-style police shootings, calls for different responses. No one would propose anything like the 1994 crime bill anymore. But in 1994 things looked a lot different. You need to understand that deep in your gut before you lash out at the folks who supported it.

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Who Supported the 1994 Crime Bill?

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American Independent Party Voters in California Mostly Just Screwed Up When They Registered

by MohamedVirtue Posted on April 17, 2016

Mother Jones

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I suppose I shouldn’t laugh at this, but the LA Times reports today that the American Independent Party has grown to about 500 thousand members in California since it started up in 1968. Why? A survey suggests that about three-quarters of AIP members thought they were registering as lower-case independents—that is, voters with no party preference. Now that’s a low-information voter.

None of this has anything to do with Bernie Sanders. As you can see, voters declaring no party preference have been on the rise for well over a decade. But it still makes a difference: if you’re independent, you can vote for Bernie in the California primary. If you’re AIP, you can’t. So it’s likely there are upwards of 400 thousand registered voters in California who may be leaning toward Bernie but won’t be able to vote for him. They better re-register quick if they want to feel the Bern.

They won’t, of course. Anyone who made a mistake like this isn’t likely to care enough about Democratic Party politics to bother. Still, it makes you wonder if someone could siphon off, say, Republican votes by starting up the Independent Voters of the Republic Party or something. Worth a try!

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American Independent Party Voters in California Mostly Just Screwed Up When They Registered

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We pass the popcorn for the greatest climate hits of the Bernie-Hillary smackdown

by Addie04W39252 Posted on April 15, 2016

We pass the popcorn for the greatest climate hits of the Bernie-Hillary smackdown

By on 15 Apr 2016commentsShare

What do Gristers do after the two remaining Democratic candidates for president spend a substantial chunk of time debating climate and energy issues? Pour a drink and obsess over the whole thing in an online chat, of course. The following transcript has been lightly edited.

Scott Dodd (executive editor): Wow, nine Democratic debates in and we got a whole — what, 15 minutes devoted to the most important issues affecting the future of human civilization? Was anybody surprised we got even that much?

Ben Adler (politics reporter): I was optimistic that they would ask some questions about climate change because it’s been a hot issue recently.

Scott: “Hot!” Ba dum ching.

Ben: Then I got pessimistic as they asked about the most unimportant campaign trivia during the first segment. So I was sort of half surprised when it finally happened.

Rebecca Leber (news editor): The funny thing is it didn’t even kick off with a particularly insightful question. Just Wolf Blitzer asking Clinton about Sanders’ attacks, and then “What are his lies?” But it got better. I felt like the moderators just let the candidates go at each other, only pushing back occasionally. By far the best moderation on climate we’ve seen in any of the debates.

Scott: Yeah, it often seems like the moderators focus on things only the political press really cares about, as opposed to the real issues. But I guess that’s a good question: We in the Grist offices were glued to our screens for the climate and energy stuff, but do voters care?

Clayton Aldern (senior fellow): I think this is something that Ben has touched on a good amount — that climate tends to rank reasonably low on the priority list across both parties, albeit more highly on the Democratic side of things. My understanding is that climate tends to be one of the issues that people love to harp on, but not one with which they vote.

Ben: Most voters form an opinion of which candidate they prefer based on broader themes and find proof in the issues to support them. It’s not what you say about the issues, it’s what the issues say about you. And climate doesn’t rank in the first tier.

Scott: Sanders compared them to 9/11 and WWII in terms of importance.

Ben: I appreciated that analogy. In general, it feels like your average liberal, and increasingly your average moderate and sometimes even conservative, realizes that climate change is a terrifying long-term threat. They support a transition to clean energy, but have no sense of immediate urgency. Sanders is trying to convey the urgency with which it should be treated.

Clayton: I think this is the first time we’ve seen anyone deploy that kind of rhetoric — the “enemy” rhetoric — for the security threat argument.

Rebecca: There are so many ways climate change can fit into the broader discussion, and not as a niche issue the political press usually treats it as. Sanders’ comments on combating an “enemy” got at that larger framework we’re usually missing.

Scott: So for those of us who do really care about climate, did we hear anything new last night from the candidates?

Rebecca: We got a sense of two different philosophies: Clinton pushing what Obama has already accomplished and how to expand on that, and Sanders wanting to go much further, condemning the status quo, by banning fracking and whatnot. I don’t think voters have heard much that would give them a sense of the candidates’ two visions before last night. Probably because previous debates mostly ignored it.

Scott: Ben, going back to Wolf’s first question to Clinton about her campaign donations from fossil fuel interests, which you wrote about this past week: Is that the kind of trivial stuff that just gets the candidates yelling at each other, or does it matter?

Ben: I think that to a certain segment of Sanders supporters, the fossil fuel dollars become one of those points that they glom onto because it reinforces their sense of Clinton as in hock to corporate interests. But I doubt any voters who were undecided between the candidates would choose Sanders when they find out Clinton has a handful of lobbyist donors who have fossil fuel corporations as clients. If you weren’t already a Sanders voter, why would that push you over? And that connects to my critique of that whole issue, which is that an enviro voter deciding between Clinton and Sanders should — and probably does — care more about their policy stances than their donors.

Scott: So then Rebecca, to your point about different philosophies, how much daylight is there really between Clinton and Sanders on climate and energy issues — and where are those major differences, if any?

Rebecca: Well, there were some surprising and not surprising differences highlighted yesterday — for one, Clinton repeating that natural gas is a “bridge fuel” and we “want to cross that bridge as quickly as possible.” Sanders certainly doesn’t agree it’s a bridge fuel. Also, Clinton not quite answering whether she supports a carbon tax and Sanders not quite answering how to make up for nuclear energy (which he wants to phase out) were easy-to-miss but important nuances. But on the basic point — do they think climate change is a problem that needs solving? — they agree.

Clayton: Clinton’s comment about natural gas as a bridge fuel — and bear in mind, she largely made the argument with respect to Europe, by which I assume she’s referring to Eastern Europe — is remarkably similar to the World Bank’s position on gas. If you’re looking for anything that epitomizes the “establishment” (read: incrementalist) approach to energy policy, it’s probably that.

Rebecca: True, Sanders and Clinton have different audiences in mind.

Ben: Yeah, Clinton is concerned about the general election and swing voters, Sanders isn’t. My strong suspicion is that Clinton doesn’t want to back a carbon tax because she fears being attacked for it in the fall. “Clinton would raise your electricity bills. You’d pay more to fill up your car,” etc.

Rebecca: Yes. I was confused at first (“baffled” was the word I used on Twitter) why Clinton didn’t come out and say she supports a carbon tax. A bunch of journalists on Twitter had a lot of smart things to say, basically that she has her eye on the general and doesn’t want to feature in an attack ad saying the word “tax” on endless loop. I think the same audiences apply for fracking — Clinton is thinking about the general; Sanders is thinking about his base.

Ben: I asked her campaign chair, John Podesta, about this in the spin room after the debate, and Jen Palmieri, a Clinton spokeswoman. They both said, essentially, that Clinton doesn’t support a carbon tax because she has other means of getting us to, in Podesta’s words, “deep decarbonization.” So they deny that it’s a political calculation, but I think it is — why open herself up to attacks with a policy proposal that won’t pass anyway?

Clayton: Clinton is all about the realm of political possibility — what can get through Congress, what offers the path of least resistance, etc. The bridge fuel argument says, “Let’s at least do better than coal.” Sanders doesn’t buy that argument, and says we need drastic change if we actually want to solve the climate crisis. (This is, of course, largely representative of their approaches to their campaigns more generally.)

Ben: Yeah, Sanders doesn’t care about any of that. He just endorses the optimal policy because he’s got to win a bunch more Dems to win the nomination, and that’s how he could do it.

Scott: So that seems to bring us to the place where Sanders struggled the most on energy last night, when the moderators challenged him on his all-out opposition to fracking, and whether that means we’d just have to go back to relying more on coal and nuclear. How do you think he came out there?

Rebecca: Oof, not good, though I don’t think it will matter to his supporters. He basically didn’t answer, only pointed to his 10 million rooftop solar initiative. This was as much a non-answer as Clinton’s was on a carbon tax.

Clayton: I mean, we have him saying, “We have got to lead the world in transforming our energy system, not tomorrow, but yesterday.” He’s right about that, but he also needs to deliver concrete policy solutions.

Scott: It was interesting how much Clinton tied herself to the Obama climate legacy — a legacy that, just a few years ago, many enviros considered a mixed bag at best. Is that a sign of how far the president has come on climate?

Rebecca: Well, this has been a broader strategy for her. She’s been tying herself to Obama’s legacy left and right. So I think it’s because he’s just very popular among Democrats, at about 87 percent approval rating. But maybe how far he’s come on climate is one of the reasons he’s so popular among Dems.

Clayton: I dunno. Clinton name-dropped Obama a lot, but she also softened the language she used on that front a bit. Compare last night’s “I worked with President Obama to bring China and India to the table for the very first time” to October’s “literally hunting for the Chinese.”

Ben: I agree with Rebecca. The other thing is that Clinton is trying to hint at is political feasibility. She’s trying to point out to Dem voters that they aren’t the whole electorate, that Republicans are suing to stop Obama’s Clean Power Plan, for instance, and that just protecting Obama’s progress will be enough of a challenge, and that more aggressive policies might run into legal challenges, or cost Democrats elections in swing states. But she doesn’t spell all that out, and I’m not sure why. It makes her sound timid instead of pragmatic.

Scott: This takes us beyond last night’s debate and looking ahead toward the general election: Do you think we’ve just hit the high-water mark for discussion of these issues?

Clayton: Well the nominee sure as hell isn’t going to have a more substantive conversation about energy policy with Trump.

Rebecca: I think this is the last engaging debate on climate we’ll see. Once we get to the general, whoever the Democratic nominee is will just have to highlight climate denial, not get into policy details of the what and how.

Scott: That’s depressing, isn’t it?

Rebecca: If you care about this issue, you get used to it.

Clayton: She said, depressed.

Ben: I actually think it’s possible general election debate moderators will ask about climate change because they like issues where the candidates disagree. They never ask about abortion in the Democratic primary debates, for example, because the candidates are both pro-choice. But I don’t think it will be nearly as serious a conversation about climate policy.

Scott: So let’s try to end on a high note: Anything last night that made you LOL — like you couldn’t believe that was coming out of a candidate’s mouth?

Ben: Nothing funny, but I was excited to see Sanders ask Clinton directly about a carbon tax. I wish debates were more direct interaction between candidates rather than each offering canned answers filled with irrelevant talking points to the moderators. They’re usually more like simultaneous interviews than actual debates.

Rebecca: Clinton burned Sanders pretty hard: “I don’t take a back seat to your legislation that you’ve introduced that you haven’t been able to get passed.”

Clayton: Re: Sanders not releasing his tax returns, she also said, “Well, you know, there are a lot of copy machines around.” Which was worth a small handful of lulz.

Scott: I was convinced Wolf was going to end the climate conversation after the first question, just like the moderators have in so many previous debates this election cycle. So the fact that it went on as long as it did and we got so much from the candidates on the issue made me smile.

Ben: I loved how rowdy the audience was. That was NY representing.

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We pass the popcorn for the greatest climate hits of the Bernie-Hillary smackdown

Posted in alo, Anchor, Casio, FF, G & F, GE, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, solar, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on We pass the popcorn for the greatest climate hits of the Bernie-Hillary smackdown

This was the climate debate we’ve been waiting for

by JuliannSimon Posted on April 15, 2016

This was the climate debate we’ve been waiting for

By on 15 Apr 2016 12:49 amcommentsShare

Savor it, climate hawks. Global warming had its short and sweet 15 minutes of fame in the ninth — and likely final — Democratic primary debate on Thursday night.

Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton had an intense exchange at the CNN/NY1 debate that got to the heart of the two candidates’ different philosophies on climate action. Not only did they scuffle over a topic that has been in the headlines recently — Clinton’s donations from fossil fuel interests — but they also got into it over Clinton’s support for fracking as secretary of state, the merits of a carbon tax, the Paris climate agreement, and the role of nuclear energy.

Here are the highlights:

They agree climate change is a problem: Clinton’s first point on the topic was, “we should talk about it in terms of the extraordinary threats that climate change poses to our country and our world.” And Sanders said: “You know, if we, God forbid, were attacked tomorrow, the whole country would rise up and say we got an enemy out there and we got to do something about it. That was what 9/11 was about. We have an enemy out there, and that enemy is going to cause drought and floods and extreme weather disturbances.”

But they have different philosophies about how to address it: Clinton’s bottom line was that she’ll stay the course set by the Obama administration, particularly on the Paris climate agreement and power plant regulations. “President Obama moved forward on gas mileage; he moved forward on the Clean Power Plan,” she said. “He has moved forward on so many of the fronts that he could given the executive actions that he was able to take.”

These accomplishments deserve support, she argued, particularly as they’ve come in the face of hostility from a GOP-controlled Congress. She added, “It’s easy to diagnose the problem. It’s harder to do something about the problem.”

But Sanders wants to think bigger when it comes to climate politics. “This is a difference between understanding that we have a crisis of historical consequence here,” he said. “Incrementalism and those little steps are not enough. Not right now. Not on climate change.”

On a carbon tax: Sanders, who has cosponsored a carbon tax bill and called for it as part of his platform, kept pressing Clinton on whether she supports such a tax. His opponent never exactly answered. She pointed to her clean energy proposals to build on the Clean Power Plan, saying, “I don’t take a back seat to your legislation that you’ve introduced that you haven’t been able to get passed. I want to do what we can do to actually make progress in dealing with the crisis.”

On fossil fuel contributions: Moderator Wolf Blitzer asked Clinton about Sanders’ charge that she’s in the pocket of the fossil fuel industry. She responded, “we both have relatively small amounts of contributions from people who work for fossil fuel companies … But, that is not being supported by Big Oil, and I think it’s important to distinguish that.”

On fracking: Sanders opposes fracking, and called attention to Clinton’s record in the State Department of pushing fracking abroad and promoting natural gas as a climate change solution. Clinton called natural gas “one of the bridge fuels” to cleaner energy — a comment that’s sure to make fracking opponents cringe. “For both economic and environmental and strategic reasons, it was American policy to try to help countries get out from under the constant use of coal, building coal plants all the time, also to get out from under, especially if they were in Europe, the pressure from Russia, which has been incredibly intense,” she said. “So we did say natural gas is a bridge. We want to cross that bridge as quickly as possible, because in order to deal with climate change, we have got to move as rapidly as we can.”

On nuclear: Moderator Errol Louis asked Sanders how he expects to address climate change if he supports phasing out both natural gas and nuclear energy, considering that the latter provides 20 percent of U.S. power. Sanders admitted, “you certainly don’t phase nuclear out tomorrow,” and pointed to his 10 million solar roofs program.

This is probably the only time we’ll see climate change get so much attention in a presidential debate this year. Too bad it didn’t happen earlier in the campaign season, but better late than never.

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This was the climate debate we’ve been waiting for

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No new lead crises in 5 years? Clinton has a plan

by VeroniqCollier Posted on April 13, 2016

Hillary Clinton addresses the National Action Network’s 25th Annual Convention in New York City. REUTERS/Mike Segar

No new lead crises in 5 years? Clinton has a plan

By on 13 Apr 2016commentsShare

The day before a Democratic presidential debate in New York, Hillary Clinton rolled out an environmental justice plan that calls for eliminating lead as a major public health threat within five years.

She would have her work cut out for her, as Flint, Mich.’s lead-poisoning crisis has shown. As Clinton reminded her audience today in a speech on racial justice at Al Sharpton’s National Action Network conference: “There are a lot of Flints across our country where children are exposed to polluted air, unhealthy water and chemicals that can increase cancer risk.”

Studies show that some 500,000 U.S. children under the age of 5, who are predominantly black and Latino, have high levels of lead in their bloodstreams. This is primarily because of lead-based paint in old buildings, but also stems from contaminated soil and drinking water. When it comes to water contamination, we don’t even know where most of the problematic pipes are concentrated; best guesses range from 3 to 10 million lead service lines in America. Nor do we have consistent reporting on concentrated areas of lead paint in homes.

Despite the myriad challenges, Clinton insisted Wednesday: “If we put our minds to it, it can be done.”

Her plan calls for:

A Presidential Commission on Childhood Lead Exposure and a task force charged with finding and fixing 50 other Flints around the country.
Directing all federal agencies to develop plans on environmental justice and ensure that the Justice Department prosecutes environmental crimes as heavily as other crimes.
More funding — specifically, up to $5 billion in federal dollars — to replace lead paint in homes and contaminated soils in school yards.
Federal incentives through her Clean Energy Challenge (something Clinton proposed previously) so that states have a reason to exceed federal standards for lead reduction and other types of pollution.
Funds to replenish the Superfund budget to clean up over 450,000 polluted sites around the U.S.
An update the Lead Disclosure Rule and Safe Water Drinking Act to improve lead inspections, and the need for more infrastructure spending to fix water and transportation-related pollution.

A number of these proposals would require Congress to cough up more funding for infrastructure and transportation, as well as for Congress to amend laws. And a few of them overlap with proposals from Bernie Sanders, who has also called for more funds for Superfund sites and would direct agencies to develop clear priorities on environmental justice. Sanders, too, has highlighted the “unequal exposure of people of color to harmful chemicals, pesticides and other toxins in homes, schools, neighborhoods and workplaces” on his campaign website.

Flint has featured heavily in the Democratic primary and was the site of a Clinton-Sanders debate in March. With a week to go before New Yorkers vote, environmental justice is back in the national spotlight. But the intertwined problems of pollution, poverty, and racism won’t be fixed in just a handful of debates.

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No new lead crises in 5 years? Clinton has a plan

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Kansas Voters Have 21 Days to Register if They Speak English, or 15 if They Speak Spanish

by TheoRolleston Posted on April 12, 2016

Mother Jones

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Prospective voters in Kansas were given different instructions for how and when to register to vote depending on whether they received the English- or Spanish-language voter guide issued by the Kansas secretary of state’s office.

The English-language version correctly informed voters that they could register up to 21 days before an election. But the Spanish-language version told voters that they had only 15 days to register, according to the Kansas City Star. Passports were listed as a valid proof of citizenship in the English version; in the Spanish version, they were not.

Craig McCullah, who oversees publications in the secretary of state’s office, apologized in the Star for the “administrative error” and said he was “diligently working to fix” the issue. He said the online versions were corrected within a day and the physical versions were sent to a translating service to eliminate discrepancies.

It’s unclear exactly when the errors were introduced or whether the erroneous voter guides had an effect on registration for the state’s presidential caucuses on March 5.

The botched voter guides, first flagged by a Democratic consultant in Daily Kos, have sparked the latest in a series of controversies over strict voter registration policies in Kansas under Secretary of State Kris Kobach.

A former Justice Department counsel in the George W. Bush administration and law professor at the University of Missouri at Kansas City, Kobach was known for helping craft anti-immigration laws in Arizona, Alabama, and Georgia and for pushing the idea of self-deportation. Since becoming secretary of state in 2010, he has restricted access to the polls in Kansas and pursued criminal prosecutions for alleged instances of voter fraud, despite its rare occurrence. In 2013, even as the Supreme Court struck down a law requiring proof of citizenship for federal elections in Arizona, the state established a two-tier voter system that required Kansas residents to provide proof of citizenship to vote in state and local elections.

Kansas is one of several Republican-controlled states that imposed tighter voter restrictions after the 2010 midterm election. Those policies have prompted legal challenges from civil rights advocates, who argue that such restrictions affect young, minority, Democratic-leaning voters. In January, a Kansas district court judge, Franklin Theis, struck down the state’s two-tier system, noting that Kobach, as secretary of state, “is not empowered to determine or declare the method of registration or create a method of ‘partial registration’ only.” Kobach plans to appeal the ruling.

In February, the American Civil Liberties Union again challenged the state’s voting policies, claiming the proof of citizenship requirement would keep at least 30,000 people, or 14 percent of Kansans who tried to register, off the voter rolls. The lawsuit is also seeking to prevent the state from tossing out more than 350,000 registration applications that are considered incomplete because prospective voters did not provide proof of citizenship.

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Kansas Voters Have 21 Days to Register if They Speak English, or 15 if They Speak Spanish

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Friday Fundraising and Catblogging – 8 April 2016

by JeramyGfylqg Posted on April 8, 2016

Mother Jones

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April is an important fundraising month here at Mother Jones, and my colleague David Corn—you may remember him as the guy responsible for Valerie Plame and Mitt Romney’s 47 percent snafu—wrote a pitch called “Trump, the Media, and You,” explaining how our model of reader-supported journalism allows MoJo to report on substantive issues (like actual policy proposals and digging into candidates’ pasts!) that are largely missing from this year’s election coverage. Here’s David:

IN A WORLD OF RATINGS AND CLICKS, financially pressed media outlets frequently zero in on the shining objects of the here and now. Merely covering Trump’s outrageous remarks—did you see his latest tweet?!—has become its own beat. Even the best reporting that does happen can become lost in the never-ending flood of blogs, tweets, Facebook posts, and stories that appear in increasingly shorter news cycles.

At Mother Jones, we try each day to sort out what to cover—and where to concentrate our reporting in order to make a difference. Yes, we need to follow the daily twists and turns. But we recognize it’s important for journalists to get off the spinning hamster wheel and dig where others do not.

Hmmm. It kinda sounds like I’m MoJo’s resident hamster. It’s a tough job, but I guess someone has to do it. After all, with me on the hamster wheel, David and the rest of our reporters can focus their work on the in-depth, investigative journalism that might not make us rich in advertising dollars, but that voters and our democratic process desperately need.

If you’re reading this, I’d bet that you like both—coverage of the circus, and smart, probing journalism. They both matter. If you agree, I hope you’ll pitch in a couple bucks during our fundraising drive—and since we’re a nonprofit, your contributions are tax-deductible. You can give by credit card, or PayPal.

Still, hamster though I may be, we all know that Friday afternoon is reserved for cats. And I know what you’re thinking: That pod I bought last week looks lovely and comfy, but it only has room for one cat. What’s up with that?

Pshaw. There is always room for another cat. It’s the magic of cat physics, far more astounding than black holes or quantum mechanics. No matter how many cats you have, somehow you can always squeeze in one more.

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Friday Fundraising and Catblogging – 8 April 2016

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