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These 6 California Republicans Have a Snowball’s Chance in Hell of Reaching Congress

by ShannonGarner Posted on September 11, 2014

Mother Jones

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California has 53 congressional districts, but only a handful with competitive midterm races (we’re talking about party-vs-party battles here, not intra-party ones). This means there are plenty of safe districts where a powerful incumbent (usually a Democrat) has to flick away a doomed challenger (usually a Republican or “independent”). Some of these longshots hail from typical pre-Congress fields such as law and business. Others are not quite so orthodox. Here’s a roundup of six of the more interesting Golden State Republicans—and one tea party independent—in the pretty much futile running. Then again: Cantor!

Stephen “Stephanie” Meade: An 88-year-old World War II veteran, Meade claims to be the first-ever transgender candidate for Congress. He is running as a self-described conservative Republican in the 51st, a heavily Democratic district flanking the US-Mexico border. Meade has no campaign website (and no non-copyrighted photos floating around), so what we know comes mostly from scattered local media reports. The San Diego Union-Tribune reports that he has been happily married to his wife for more than four decades, and hasn’t worn men’s clothes since he turned 80. He wants to lower the minimum wage to $5 and also to re-introduce the metric system. Without money, name recognition, or party endorsement, Meade isn’t likely to unseat the popular Democratic incumbent, Rep. Juan Vargas. Yet he did manage to win 31 percent of the primary vote.
Tinfoil hat rating: 4 out of 5. Metric system? This is America, man!

Dale K. Mensing Democracy.com

Dale K. Mensing: Mensing is a grocery clerk who wants to destroy Obamacare and replace fossil fuels with “wave energy.” The 56-year-old Republican and former small-town postmaster is running against Democratic incumbent Jared Huffman in the 2nd District, which stretches from San Francisco to the Oregon border. Mensing told a local TV station, “I saw a variety of attacks on the integrity of the Bill of Rights and I thought, somebody needs to defend the Bill of Rights, someone needs to defend freedom, and that fell upon me.” And then there’s this, from Mensing’s campaign statement: “I will work to prevent Common Core’s One World Order education concepts from dominating our area’s famed independent way of thinking.”
Tinfoil hat rating: 4 out of 5. And we’ll take paper, since plastic is about to be banned in California.

John Wood John Wood for Congress

John Wood: Republican John Wood, a self-described writer, commentator, and musician, is running against longtime Democratic incumbent Maxine Waters in the 43rd District, which covers much of southern Los Angeles. He’s written for the Washington Times on the subject of being black and conservative: “Liberals can call white conservatives racist all day long for promoting policies of economic freedom, but they can’t call us that. Black Dems can try to call us Uncle Tom’s, but for the younger generation of black Republicans, those arrows don’t sting. Our blackness is wrapped up in our fiscal conservatism.”
Tinfoil hat rating: 2 out of 5, but we haven’t heard his music yet.

Adam Nick Facebook

Adam Nick: This GOP candidate is a mystery. He advanced to the general election in the 46th District, a Democratic-leaning section of reliably Republican Orange County, but has no campaign website. His online presence is a Facebook page left over from a Lake Forest, California, city council run in 2012. (That page says he’s a “local small business owner.”) The right-leaning OC Politics Blog smelled something fishy: It accused Nick of being a carpetbagger and suggested that Democrats planted him as a candidate to mess with the Republicans.
Tinfoil hat rating: N/A—too obscure.

Mark Reed Mark Reed for Congress

Mark Reed: This is Reed’s second bid for a seat representing the 30th District, which covers much of the San Fernando Valley. The 57-year-old businessman and “successful actor” has more bold-face endorsements than most lower-profile GOP candidates in California: In addition to the requisite local and state party officials, he’s got the backing of John Bolton, Sharron Angle, and actor Danny Trejo. In a district with a big bloc of Jewish voters, Reed has put forth a hard-line pro-Israel policy and questioned Democratic incumbent Brad Sherman’s support of Israel. He’s a bit off the mark, as Sherman, who is Jewish, is considered one of Israel’s staunchest allies in Congress and has a lengthy pro-Israel record.
Tinfoil hat rating: 2 out of 5. Hey, wait! John Bolton? Sharron Angle? Make that 5 out of 5.

Adam King Adam King

Adam King: Running in the heavily Democratic 37th District (West Los Angeles), King faces an uphill battle against Democratic Rep. Karen Bass. But his campaign website makes the case that if Congress doesn’t work out, he could win the title of “World’s Most Interesting Man.” He’s an entrepreneur and community organizer who runs an Africa-focused education charity. He is fluent in ancient Hebrew, Latin, and Aramaic. He has traveled to “much of the civilized world”—creating ties in “controversial places” such as France and Turkey—and become “a unifier of peoples.” His website claims he cannot be bought: “Money and influence does not sway him from his ideal, which has won him the respect of many of the world’s most formidable leaders.”
Tinfoil hat rating: 2 out of 5. He does, after all, seem kind of interesting.

Ronald Kabat Tea Party Cheer

Ronald Kabat: A longtime tax accountant, Kabat is mounting his second run in the 20th District, which covers Monterey and Santa Cruz on the Central Coast. While officially running as an independent, Kabat has been a tea party member since 2009, according to the website Tea Party Cheer. There isn’t much press on him, and his chances of ousting 21-year incumbent Rep. Sam Farr are, well, zero. He does, however, have an awesome cartoon dog named Wilbur Woof to explain his positions. True to his profession, Kabat’s platform centers around reforming the tax code and lowering the national debt—he pledges to return 15 percent of his congressman’s salary to the Treasury. Tinfoil hat rating: 3 out of 5. Perhaps Woof would make a suitable representative? Woof for Congress!

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These 6 California Republicans Have a Snowball’s Chance in Hell of Reaching Congress

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These 3 Gay Republicans Are Running for Congress

by KristiaDunkel Posted on September 9, 2014

Mother Jones

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In late March, Richard Tisei, a Republican candidate for Congress in Massachusetts, took an unusual step for a politician in a close race: He boycotted his own party’s convention.

The state GOP had added language to its platform opposing same-sex marriage, which has been legal in Massachusetts for a decade. The party’s decision put Tisei in a tricky spot: He’s a married, openly gay man. “I thought it was important for somebody to stand up and say the party is heading in the wrong direction,” Tisei told Mother Jones. “At a time when progress is being made, it wasn’t a good idea for Massachusetts to take a step backwards.”

Tisei, a former state senator, is one of three openly gay Republicans challenging incumbent US House members this year. He’s running unopposed in Tuesday’s GOP primary in Massachusetts’ 6th District. Dan Innis, a former dean of the business school at the University of New Hampshire, is running in New Hampshire’s 1st District; his primary is also Tuesday. And Carl DeMaio, a former member of the San Diego city council, won the Republican primary in California’s 52nd District in June.

Each of the three challengers has a decent chance of becoming the first openly gay Republican to be elected to Congress. The nonpartisan Rothenberg Political Report ranks DeMaio’s race against freshman Democrat Scott Peters as a “pure toss-up.” Innis’ race, against Dem Carol Shea Porter, is listed as “toss-up/tilt Democrat.” So is Tisei’s race—although Tisei’s chances could fall Tuesday if his presumptive opponent, scandal-plagued incumbent John Tierney, loses in the Democratic primary.

There are currently just six LGBT members of the House—all Democrats. Wisconsin Sen. Tammy Baldwin, a Democrat who was elected in 2012, is the first and, so far, only openly gay senator. Arizona Rep. Jim Kolbe—who came out after he’d initially been elected—was the last out GOP member of Congress, but decided not to seek reelection in 2006. “Opinions do evolve,” Tisei says. “What I could do is be a catalyst to help bring about a change within the Republican caucus. Sure, it isn’t going to happen over night, but when you’re working with somebody closely on tax reform or economic issues and you get to know people as colleagues, it changes the dynamic in a lot of ways. Having a gay member of the caucus will open people’s eyes and change their perceptions, and hopefully change their minds on a lot of the issues.”

The three men are the first federal candidates—Democrat or Republican—to feature their same-sex spouses in campaign ads and literature. The Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund, a nonpartisan group that boosts openly gay candidates for office, has endorsed Innis and Tisei. Two endorsements for Republicans seeking federal office marks a new record in the organization’s 23-year history, says Jason Burns, the Victory Fund’s political director. (DeMaio hasn’t applied for the group’s endorsement this cycle, but they turned him down when he ran for mayor in 2012 and he has a shaky history with other LGBT groups.)

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These 3 Gay Republicans Are Running for Congress

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BP convicted of gross negligence in Deepwater Horizon spill, really salty about it

by IssacTenreajbyw Posted on September 4, 2014

BP convicted of gross negligence in Deepwater Horizon spill, really salty about it

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4 Sep 2014 3:46 PM

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Today, U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier of the New Orleans federal court issued a ruling finding BP guilty of gross negligence in the Deepwater Horizon disaster of 2010. Halliburton and Transocean, companies also involved in operating the rig, received lesser smackdowns in the same ruling. BP, of course, will be appealing the decision, because why not drag these legal proceedings out for a few more years!

The ruling has coincidentally come about at the same time as the Society of Environmental Journalists conference — also taking place in New Orleans — where Geoff Morrell, BP’s vice president of U.S. communications, had a lot of crybaby-ish things to say about the media’s handling of BP’s behavior in the aftermath of the crisis.

In that regard, we imagine* that the handing down of this decision may have gone a little like this:

Judge Carl Barbier: So listen … four years ago, y’all fucked up. Big time. You know this!

BP: PROVE IT.

CB: What — ? That’s really not my job. Do you know how the U.S. judicial system works? I’m the judge, you morons — I don’t have to prove shit. But just to review: your Deepwater Horizon rig spilled over 200 million gallons of oil, contaminated 650 miles of coastline and 87,000 square miles of the Gulf, and killed 11 people. Not to mention, you impacted the livelihoods of 20 million people in the United States alone.

Halliburton and Transocean, in unison: Okay, fair, but really not our fault.

CB: I’ll get to you bozos in a minute. Anyway, BP, I’m aware this isn’t your first federal court rodeo. You’ve already pleaded guilty to no fewer than 14 federal charges, including 11 for manslaughter, and also one for deliberately lying about the size of the oil spill. And now we’ve spent the past few months hearing — in detail — how your enormous screw-up­ has been detrimental to the environment, food system, and economy of the Gulf region. Do you have anything to say for yourself?

BP: Thank you for asking. We’ve set aside $46 billion to cover all of the cleanup, legal fees, and penalties that we may or may not be responsible for. That’s a lot of money! It should be more than enough.

CB: It will definitely not be even close to enough, but that’s on you. On that note, I find you guilty of reckless conduct and gross negligence in setting off the Deepwater Horizon disaster, for which you are hereby levied a penalty of $18 billion.

BP: Wow. WOW.

HB: DO YOU WANT SOME ICE FOR THAT BUUUURRRRRNNNNNN??!!

TO: HEY BP CAN YOU LOAN ME A COUPLE BIL?? OH WAIT JUST KIDDING YOU BROKE AS F –

CB: Seriously, you two — I’ll get to you in a minute.

BP: Are you kidding me with that number? I am prepared to offer you exactly $3.5 billion.

CB: Does this look like a goddamn Moroccan marketplace to you, BP? Are you seriously haggling with me right now?

HB and TO: Take that penalty and take a seat!

BP: You both need to shut up.

CB: I’m going to have to break character and agree with BP on this one. Transocean and Halliburton, I find you each guilty of negligent conduct.

BP: HA!

CB: … and you don’t have to pay anything. God damn it.

BP: WHAT.

HB: Already took care of it. (High-fives TO.)

CB: I really do just hate all of you, for the record.

*In case you couldn’t tell (!), this exchange is fictional.

Source:
BP Found Grossly Negligent in 2010 Spill; Fines May Rise

, Bloomberg.

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BP convicted of gross negligence in Deepwater Horizon spill, really salty about it

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Compton to District Security Guards: Go Ahead, Bring Your AR-15s to School

by LeoStoweiqjph Posted on August 22, 2014

Mother Jones

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When students in the Compton Unified School District return to classrooms on Monday, some of them will have new pencils or notebooks. Their teachers will have new textbooks. But this year, the district’s campus police will be getting an upgrade, too: AR-15 assault rifles.

The board of the Los Angeles-area school district approved a measure to allow the campus cops to carry the new guns in July. The district’s police chief, William Wu, told the board that equipping school police with semi-automatic AR-15s is intended to ensure student safety.

“This is our objective—save lives, bottom line,” Wu told the board.

Crime is a serious problem in Compton, an independent jurisdiction south of downtown Los Angeles. In the 12 months preceding July, the city of nearly 100,000 experienced 28 murders, making it the 11th-deadliest neighborhood in the county, according to a data analysis by the Los Angeles Times.

But the choice to make Compton school police the latest local law enforcement agency to adopt military-style weapons was less about dealing with street crime than it was about preventing more exotic incidents like mass shootings. At the board meeting, Wu cited an FBI report released in January that found that 5 percent of “active shooters”— or shooters which are conducting an ongoing assault on a group of people—wore body armor, which can stop most bullets fired from handguns. To make his case, Wu cited a range of examples, including the Mumbai terrorist attacks and the University of Texas shooting in 1966, in which a student killed 16 people from the campus clock tower, out of range of police sidearms. (The student was eventually killed when a group of police climbed the tower and shot him at close range.)

“They will continue until they are stopped,” Wu said, at which point a board member interjected.

“No, they will continue until we stop them,” he said. “Compton Unified School Police…holding it down.”

“These rifles give us greater flexibility in dealing with a person with bad intent who comes onto any of our campuses,” Wu said in a statement. “The officers will keep the rifles in the trunks of their cars, unless they are needed.”

Compton is not the first district in the Southern California to allow AR-15s on its campuses. At the meeting, Wu said that Los Angeles, Baldwin Park, Santa Ana, Fontana, and San Bernardino all allow their officers to use the same weapons.

Compton school police last made news in May 2013, when a group of parents and students filed a suit against the department, alleging a pattern of racial profiling and abuse targeting Latino students. The complaint said that officers beat, pepper-sprayed, and put a chokehold on a bystander who was recording an arrest with his iPod. The group also claimed that Compton school police used excessive force against students and parents who complained that English-as-a-second-language programs were underfunded. (The case is ongoing.)

Wu said at the board meeting that seven officers have already been trained to use the new weapons. He said all officers would be purchasing their own weapons. The guns will be the officers’ personal property, but they could be bringing them to work as early as September.

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Compton to District Security Guards: Go Ahead, Bring Your AR-15s to School

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GOP Rebel Justin Amash Just Beat a Guy Who Called Him “Al Qaeda’s Best Friend”

by botai3dkwu Posted on August 6, 2014

Mother Jones

The GOP’s business establishment talked openly about making conservative hardliners pay for pushing Washington toward a debt ceiling crisis last fall. But that wave of Chamber of Commerce-funded primary challengers to conservative incumbents never materialized. The Chamber settled on trying to take out Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.), a second term congressman and Ron Paul disciple famous for voting on no on pretty much everything—even the Paul Ryan budget—and for cobbling together a bipartisan coalition to rein in the NSA’s domestic surveillance programs. It was the first part that drew the ire of business interests in his district, and the second part that made him the villain in one of the year’s nastiest campaign ads. Amash, challenger Brian Ellis warned, was “Al Qaeda’s best friend” in Congress.

Ellis received a rare primary endorsement from an incumbent member of Amash’s Michigan delegation, GOP Rep. Mike Rogers, an NSA defender. But we’re not in 2002 anymore; it turns out Amash’s civil libertarianism plays pretty well in the western Michigan district that gave America Gerald Ford. Boosted by deep-pocketed donors of his own (including the DeVos family), Amash eased past Ellis, making him a sure-thing to win a third term in November.

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GOP Rebel Justin Amash Just Beat a Guy Who Called Him “Al Qaeda’s Best Friend”

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Supreme Court Broadens Hobby Lobby Ruling to All Forms of Birth Control

by AdolfoZ30nd Posted on July 3, 2014

Mother Jones

Less than a day after the United States Supreme Court issued its divisive ruling on Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, it has already begun to toss aside the supposedly narrow interpretation of the decision. On Tuesday, the Supremes ordered lower courts to rehear any cases where companies had sought to deny coverage for any type of contraception, not just the specific types Hobby Lobby was opposed to.

The Affordable Care Act had listed 20 forms of contraception that had to be covered as preventive services. But Hobby Lobby, a craft supply chain, claimed that Plan B, Ella, and two types of IUD were abortifacients that violated the owners’ religious principles. The science was against Hobby Lobby—these contraceptives do not prevent implantation of a fertilized egg and are not considered abortifacients in the medical world—but the conservative majority bought Hobby Lobby’s argument that it should be exempted from the law.

Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote the the 5-4 opinion, used numerous qualifiers in an attempt to limit its scope, but a series of orders released by the court Tuesday contradict any narrow interpretation of the ruling.

The court vacated two decisions by the US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit—Autocam Corp. v. Burwell and Eden Foods v. Burwell—and commanded the appeals court to rehear the cases in light of the Hobby Lobby decision. In both instances the Sixth Circuit had rejected requests from Catholic-owned businesses that sought to exempt the companies from offering insurance that covered any of the 20 mandated forms of birth control. The Supreme Court also compelled the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia to reopen a similar case, Gilardi v. Department of Health & Human Services. “With Tuesday’s orders,” wrote The Nation‘s Zoë Carpenter, “the conservative majority has effectively endorsed the idea that religious objections to insurance that covers any form of preventative healthcare for women have merit.”

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg predicted this outcome in her dissent, noting that the logic of Alito’s decision went far beyond the limited scope he initially claimed. “The court, I fear, has ventured into a minefield,” Ginsburg wrote.

No matter what Alito and other justices may claim, court decisions set precedent and offer opportunities for lower courts to expand the logic of the initial case. (See Bush v. Gore.) The immediate turnaround to broaden the scope of Hobby Lobby won’t do anything to dispel fears that the case has opened the way for a broad swath of businesses to object to any government regulation they dislike based on the religious whims of corporate owners.

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Supreme Court Broadens Hobby Lobby Ruling to All Forms of Birth Control

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4 Key Takeaways About Scott Walker’s Alleged "Criminal Scheme"

by OTHLeannez Posted on June 20, 2014

Mother Jones

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On Thursday, a federal judge unsealed a batch of documents shedding light on a secret investigation that has dogged Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and some of his conservative allies since the summer of 2012.

Prosecutors are probing whether Walker and two of his aides illegally coordinated with outside groups—including the Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity—to fend off a wave of recall elections in 2011 and 2012. This kind of probe, conducted in secret, is known in Wisconsin as a “John Doe.” It is spearheaded by Francis Schmitz, a former federal prosecutor who was on George W. Bush’s shortlist to be US attorney in Wisconsin’s Eastern District. The investigation was initiated by the Milwaukee County district attorney’s office, which is led by Democrats.

Here are four key takeaways from the newly released documents:

1) Walker and two aides allegedly ran a “criminal scheme”

Prosecutors allege in the documents that Walker, his campaign committee, and two close aides, RJ Johnson and Deborah Jordahl, ran a “criminal scheme” using dark-money nonprofit groups to evade state election laws. Their goal: Defend Walker and a group of state lawmakers facing recall elections in 2011 and ’12.

The documents describe a web of 12 nonprofit groups that closely coordinated their fundraising and spending. Prosecutors say Walker, Johnson, and Jordahl presided over this web of groups. The documents quote a May 2011 email sent by Walker to GOP operative Karl Rove about the coordination plans: “Bottom-line: RJ Johnson helps keep in place a team that is wildly successful in Wisconsin. We are running 9 recall elections and it will be like 9 congressional markets in every market in the state (and Twin Cities).”

In a statement, Walker said: “The accusation of any wrongdoing written in the complaint by the office of a partisan Democrat district attorney by me or by my campaign is categorically false. This is nothing more than a partisan investigation with no basis in state law.”

2) A conservative leader voiced concerns about coordination between outside groups and Walker

The documents show that the Wisconsin Club for Growth acted as a conduit for funneling dark money to pro-Walker and pro-GOP groups. It also ran its own ads defending Walker and his policy agenda, which included a controversial budget-repair bill that limited bargaining rights for public-sector workers.

Wisconsin Club for Growth’s activities had at least one conservative leader worried. “Notably, prior to the 2011 Wisconsin Senate recall elections, the national Club for Growth organization raised concerns about coordination or interaction with Wisconsin Club for Growth and Friends of Scott Walker as early as 2009.”

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The documents cite a comment by the national Club for Growth’s then-director, David Keating, who said he had “legal concerns” about Wisconsin Club for Growth ads that featured Walker.

3) Walker’s alleged coordination scheme was an expansive, all-hands-on-deck effort

A quick bit of history: In early 2011, Walker introduced Act 10, the anti-union bill that curbed workers’ rights. Democrats and labor unions reacted by organizing massive protests, then sought retribution by recalling state lawmakers who’d voted for the bill.

The documents reveal, in the clearest detail yet, the extent to which Walker, Wisconsin Republicans, and a slew of dark-money nonprofit groups rallied to fend off those recall efforts. RJ Johnson, a Walker confidant and a central player in the coordination probe, used the Wisconsin Club for Growth to coordinate with the Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity, the national Club for Growth, the Republican Party of Wisconsin, the Republican State Leadership Committee, and the Republican Governors Association. It was a murder’s row of conservative players who all pitched in to help preserve the GOP majorities in the Wisconsin legislature and to keep Walker, a rising GOP star, in office.

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4) All of this information may be for naught

Something to remember amidst the frenzy surrounding the release of the new documents: The John Doe probe into Walker and his allies is almost dead.

The pushback has been led by Eric O’Keefe, a director with Wisconsin Club for Growth who has fought the probe every step of the way, selectively leaking documents to the Wall Street Journal editorial board and suing in court to halt the investigation. And he’s having success: The probe is temporarily on hold while a federal judge studies his lawsuit. O’Keefe say their activities zeroed in on by prosecutors weren’t illegal because the groups in question coordinated on issue-based activities, not expressly political work. He also argues that the John Doe probe violates his First Amendment rights to free speech.

So far, a state judge and a federal judge have sympathized with O’Keefe’s argument, saying that prosecutors have failed to make the case for illegal coordination. The investigation of Walker and his allies is still alive, but its prospects don’t look good.

Read the documents:

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4 Key Takeaways About Scott Walker’s Alleged "Criminal Scheme"

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Not Everyone Needs to Learn Programming, But Every School Should Offer It

by p9zyztu Posted on April 24, 2014

Mother Jones

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From the Washington Post:

In a world that went digital long ago, computer science is not a staple of U.S. education, and some schools do not even offer the course, including 10 of 27 high schools in Virginia’s Fairfax County and six of 25 in Maryland’s Montgomery County….Across the Washington region’s school systems, fewer than one in 10 high school students took computer science this academic year, according to district data.

That first stat surprises me. My very average suburban high school offered two programming courses way back in 1975 (FORTRAN for beginners, COBOL for the advanced class). Sure, back in the dark ages that meant filling in coding sheets, which were sent to the district office, transcribed onto punch cards, and then run on the district’s mainframe. Turnaround time was about two or three days and then you could start fixing your bugs. Still! It taught us the rudiments of writing code. I’m surprised that 40 years later there’s a high school in the entire country that doesn’t offer a programming class of some kind.

The second stat, however, doesn’t surprise me. Or alarm me. It’s about what I’d expect. Despite some recent hype, computer programming really isn’t the kind of class that everyone needs to take. It’s an advanced elective. I’d guess than no more than 10 percent of all students take physics, or advanced algebra, or art class for that matter. Ten percent doesn’t strike me as a horrible number.

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Not Everyone Needs to Learn Programming, But Every School Should Offer It

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There’s a Reason that Right-Wing Crackpots are More Newsworthy Than Lefty Crackpots

by Amilianp2t Posted on March 21, 2014

Mother Jones

Dave Weigel is tired of the liberal press getting all hot and bothered every time some fringe Republican nutball says something stupid. Fair enough. But today he provides yet another example and then makes a problematic comparison:

To date, nearly 90,000 people have “liked” or “shared” a story tagged “Candidate Who Blames Gay Rights for Tornadoes Scores Big GOP Win.” The candidate is Susanne Atanus, “who believes that God dictates weather patterns and that tornadoes, autism and dementia are God’s punishments for marriage equality.”

What’s missing from the story? Atanus’ status as a fringe candidate. She’s running in Illinois’ 9th District, which covers the liberal northern suburbs of Chicago….Susanne Atanus will never, ever serve in Congress.

….Both parties are going to be cursed with a few idiot candidates this year….In 2012 the declining Tennessee Democratic Party accidentally nominated a conspiracy-minded flooring installer for U.S. Senate. The media did not hustle down to Nashville and Memphis to cover him. No Democrat in another state was asked whether they agreed with this candidate about the NAFTA superhighway or the “Godless new world order.”

Why didn’t the media hustle down to Nashville to interview Mark Clayton? Wikipedia does as good a job as anyone explaining it:

Tennessee’s Democratic Party disavowed the candidate over his active role in the Public Advocate of the United States, which they described as a “known hate group”. They blamed his victory among a slate of little-known candidates on the fact that his name appeared first on the ballot, and said they would do nothing to help his campaign, urging Democrats to vote for “the write-in candidate of their choice” in November.

In the case of Clayton, nobody thought he represented the secret id of the Democratic Party. And the local party went out of its way to make sure Clayton was well and truly shunned as a crackpot they wanted nothing to do with.

Has anything similar happened in Illinois? Has the Republican Party denounced Atanus and urged voters to cast their ballots for someone else? No they haven’t. Actually, yes they have. See update below. Do reporters believe that Atanus does indeed represent a significant segment of the modern Republican base? Yes they do. Is this fair? Well….yes. It kind of is fair, isn’t it?

As it happens, I think that fringey right-wing candidates get less attention than Weigel believes. Sure, HuffPo plays them up, for the same reason they have a whole staff devoted to finding and posting sideboobs. It’s clickbait for the online hordes. But does the rest of the media obsess about the Susanne Atanuses of the world? Not really. Not if you’re a normal, casual news consumer, rather than an omnivore like Weigel and all the rest of us bloggy denizens. And to the extent they do cover the right-wing crackpots more than the lefty variety, the truth is that it’s pretty justified. These folks represent a real constituency, and the mainstream of the Republican Party, far from disowning them, practically falls all over itself to insist that they have nothing but admiration and respect for their willingness to stand up and fight for traditional values without compromise. That makes them worth a story.

UPDATE: Hey, it turns out that the media did write about Mark Clayton. The liberal media, that is. Here is MoJo’s own Tim Murphy writing on the day after the primary.

UPDATE 2: Weigel points out that the chairman of the Illinois GOP did indeed denounce Atanus after her gaffe. Fair point. Still, she’s hardly the first conservative to blame our problems on God’s wrath against liberal hedonism. It’s not unreasonable to think she represents a persistent strain of conservative thought and therefore deserves a bit of attention.

See the article here – 

There’s a Reason that Right-Wing Crackpots are More Newsworthy Than Lefty Crackpots

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Drought-plagued California tries to drink the ocean (hold the salt)

by MargeneBrune Posted on March 4, 2014

Drought-plagued California tries to drink the ocean (hold the salt)

By

Despite the pugnacious storms that had California on the ropes this past weekend, the state is still in the middle of a record-making drought. The snowpack in the Sierra Nevada Mountains is well under half its usual level for this time of year, and there’s almost certainly no way to catch up this late in the season.

Enter the ongoing construction of 17 desalination plants across the state. A $1 billion plant being built in Carlsbad, Calif., expected to be ready by 2016, will pump 50 million gallons of drinkable water out of the ocean daily — making it the largest such facility in the Western Hemisphere. Another project underway near San Francisco (a discount at only $150 million) could supply 20 million of the 750 million gallons of water guzzled daily in the Bay Area by 2020.

Desalination involves sucking up seawater and pushing it at high pressure through a series of very thin membranes, to strip away the salt and ocean gunk. Water purists (ha) know it as reverse osmosis. It’s not an ideal process, since it uses an enormous amount of energy to turn about two gallons of seawater into one gallon of potable water, plus there are the aforementioned ocean gunk leftovers, but it does keep working rain or shine. A spokesperson for the Carlsbad plant describes it as “droughtproof” — a tantalizing prospect that would probably have Californians salivating, if they could spare the spit.

Instead, we can measure excitement by the uptick in investment. Currently there are only three small desalination plants operating in the state, including one that provides all the water to aptly named Sand City since 2010. By “all the water,” we mean “enough for the 334 people who live there.” From the San Francisco Chronicle:

“It’s a miracle how we managed to get this plant,” said Sand City Mayor David Pendergrass. “If we didn’t have it, the whole area would be in trouble. We’re not under any rationing here, but then we’ve been practicing conservation for years already, so we are responsible about our water use.

“I would absolutely recommend desalination for other areas.”

Of course, the miraculous transmutation of Pacific brine to sweet freshwater comes with a price — the literal one, but also a load of energy, carbon emissions, hapless sea creatures siphoned up intake tubes, and extra salt and miscellaneous water treatment chemicals flushed back into the ocean. Some plants in progress have been stalled by these concerns. Many environmentalists and/or spendthrifts argue that it makes more sense promote water conservation and recycling before turning to expensive alchemy, but water officials still aren’t convinced that will be enough. From NPR:

Jeffrey Kightlinger, the general manager of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, says the district has invested in conservation and recycling, and it has helped, but the region still needs more water to meet demand. That’s always been the case in arid California, but it’s even more so now.

“There are two things that are changing the landscape for us,” he says. “One is we’ve grown a lot. We’re doing water for nearly 40 million people statewide. The second thing that really changed is climate change. It’s real. And it’s stressing our system in new ways.”…

“We don’t have time to rehash the same debates over and over and over again. We’re going to have to start investing in things for the future,” Kightlinger says.

Even if cheap, renewable energy sources could theoretically power desalination plants without producing a lot of extra ocean pollution, desalination is not going to solve all the state’s water problems in one fell swoop. Weaning So Cal off water imported from other areas would mean building a Carlsbad-scale plant every four miles along the coast, which adds up to 25 plants just between San Diego and L.A. With so many people and so little water, no solution is going to work without significant cuts in wasted water.

Whether these facilities are a good investment, or at least a bearable compromise, will have a lot to do with what havoc climate change decides to wreak on the coastal state in the coming decades. If this drought is a sign of climates to come, California may not be the only state to run on desal.


Source
The Search For Drinking Water In California Has Led To The Ocean, NPR

Amelia Urry is Grist’s intern. Follow her on Twitter.

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Drought-plagued California tries to drink the ocean (hold the salt)

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