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John Kasich Drops Out of Presidential Race

by DianTrivett Posted on May 4, 2016

Mother Jones

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John Kasich announced Wednesday evening that he was dropping out of the presidential race, leaving Donald Trump as the sole Republican contender and almost-certain nominee. Kasich’s announcement comes less than 24 hours after Trump’s sweeping Indiana primary victory sent shock waves through the political world and prompted Ted Cruz to abandon the race. Following Cruz’s announcement, GOP chairman Reince Priebus called Trump the presumptive nominee on Twitter and encouraged Republicans to rally behind the real estate mogul.

Unlike Cruz, Kasich never had much of a shot at becoming the GOP’s nominee. On the campaign trail, he touted positions—expanding Medicaid, supporting a path to legalization for undocumented immigrants, and more—that seemed removed from the typical attitudes of the GOP electorate. The Ohio governor won only one state primary: his own. But with Cruz out of the race, Kasich represented the GOP’s last, long-shot hope for somehow stopping Trump from winning the 1,237 delegates needed to secure the nomination.

Shortly after Cruz dropped out Tuesday night, Kasich’s campaign assured voters he would be staying in the game. “It’s up to us to stop Trump and unify our party in time to defeat Hillary Clinton,” Kasich’s campaign manager, Ben Hansen, wrote in an email to supporters.

But Wednesday evening, during a speech in Columbus, Ohio, Kasich changed course. He opened by thanking his family, his wife, and his campaign staff and volunteers. He recounted some of the interactions with voters he had on the campaign trail: “The people of our country changed me with the stories of their lives,” Kasich said. He ended on a somber note: “As I suspend my campaign today, I have renewed faith, deeper faith, that the Lord will show me the way forward and fulfill the purpose of my life.”

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John Kasich Drops Out of Presidential Race

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This Voting Rights Battle Could Determine the Election

by DeneenConley6 Posted on May 2, 2016

Mother Jones

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House and Senate Republicans in Virginia announced Monday that the GOP would sue to block Gov. Terry McAuliffe’s restoration of voting rights for more than 200,000 felons in time for the November election.

McAuliffe, a Democrat and longtime friend of and fundraiser for Bill and Hillary Clinton, used an executive action on April 22 to restore voting rights for felons who had served their sentences and completed their parole or probation as of that date. “There’s no question that we’ve had a horrible history in voting rights as it relates to African Americans—we should remedy it,” the governor told the New York Times when he announced the decision. The paper noted that the decision would have a major impact in a potential swing state this November, as many of the felons are African Americans who are “a core constituency of Democrats.”

The governor estimated his actions would apply to 206,000 people and said he instructed state officials to prepare similar monthly orders that would apply to felons who would qualify to vote after the original April 22 cutoff date. In a statement issued Monday, Brian Coy, McAuliffe’s communications director, said the governor was acting on his “constitutional authority” when he issued his executive order.

“The Governor is disappointed that Republicans would go to such lengths to continue locking people who have served their time out of their democracy,” Coy said in the statement provided to Mother Jones. “While Republicans may have found a Washington lawyer for their political lawsuit, they still have yet to articulate any specific constitutional objections … These Virginians are qualified to vote and they deserve a voice, not more partisan schemes to disenfranchise them.”

Republicans in the state legislature said Monday they will not use taxpayer money to fund the lawsuit they say is necessary to fight McAuliffe’s executive order.

“Governor McAuliffe’s flagrant disregard for the Constitution of Virginia and the rule of law must not go unchecked,” Virginia Senate Majority Leader Thomas K. Norment, Jr. said in a statement. “His predecessors and previous attorneys general examined this issue and consistently concluded Virginia’s governor does not have the power to issue blanket restorations. By doing so now with the acknowledged goal of affecting the November election, he has overstepped the bounds of his authority and the constitutional limits on executive powers.”

The Times noted in a separate piece that the impact of McAuliffe’s decision could be pivotal in a close election—President Barack Obama won the state by 149,000 votes in 2012—but not as significant as one might imagine. “Ex-felons are disproportionately young and less educated, the two most powerful demographic predictors of low voter turnout in the United States,” the paper wrote.

Nearly every state—with the exception of Maine and Vermont—has restrictions on the voting rights of felons. Virginia’s restrictions have been in place since after the Civil War, when the state’s constitution permanently barred former felons from being able to vote.

This piece has been updated to include a statement from McAuliffe’s office.

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This Voting Rights Battle Could Determine the Election

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Watch Donald Trump Blast the GOP’s "Crooked System" in His NY Victory Speech

by TabathaThatcher Posted on April 20, 2016

Mother Jones

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Speaking from Trump Tower in Manhattan on Tuesday, Donald Trump celebrated his resounding victory in New York’s Republican primary. The GOP front-runner took the opportunity to dismiss his challengers, Ted Cruz and John Kasich, and to declare the race essentially over.

“Senator Cruz is just about mathematically eliminated,” Trump told a crowd of supporters. “We’ve won another state. As you know we have won a million more votes than Senator Cruz. Millions and millions of more votes than Governor Kasich.”

“We’re really, really rocking,” he added.

The real estate magnate closed out his victory speech by once again criticizing the Republican party, describing its presidential nomination system as “rigged.” At one point, Trump even referenced the battle that Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders are currently waging for the support of Democratic superdelegates.

“Nobody should take delegates and claim victory unless they get those delegates with voters and voting,” he said. “And that’s what’s going to happen, and you watch, because the people aren’t going to stand for it. It’s a crooked system.”

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Watch Donald Trump Blast the GOP’s "Crooked System" in His NY Victory Speech

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Christie’s Broke Campaign Sells Its Old Furniture for an Enormous Profit

by Clarice4515 Posted on April 15, 2016

Mother Jones

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At the end of February, Chris Christie’s failed presidential campaign was nearly broke. After blowing through $8.1 million, it had just $286,000 left to wind down the remnants of Christie’s presidential bid. When most campaigns call it quits, there are still invoices coming in and old bills to pay, but campaigns don’t usually have much in the way of assets to help them cover lingering costs. That’s why it’s not uncommon for campaigns to leave some laid-off staffers or vendors unpaid and out of luck. But Christie’s campaign found a way to spin gold out of what may have been the only hard asset it had left: office furniture.

Although office furniture isn’t usually a great investment, Christie may have picked up some tips on dealmaking when he backed the Donald Trump campaign. Christie’s campaign managed to unload its used office furniture for nearly 2.5 times the price it had originally paid for it. The campaign may have also violated campaign finance rules when it turned this impressive profit.

According to disclosures made with the Federal Election Commission on Friday, the campaign sold its used office furniture to a group called Leadership Matters for America PAC on March 9, for $22,769.85. That group is no disinterested party: It’s the leadership PAC set up by Christie before he launched his presidential campaign—a political committee that is allowed to finance Christie’s political interests generally, but is limited to providing just $5,000 worth of assistance to any actual campaign for public office that Christie might make.

And that’s where the problem may lie.

According to its own filings, the Christie presidential campaign bought just $6,889 worth of office furniture last July when it kicked off, giving the campaign a profit of more than $15,880. (It rented another $401 worth in October.) That’s a yuuugely successful furniture sale, as Christie’s new mentor might say.

The FEC has dealt with this issue before. Campaigns may legally sell old assets (usually office furniture) but can’t sell them for more than they are worth.

“Unless they already made a gift, the leadership PAC could pay the campaign up to $5,000 above the normal value of the furniture—$5,000 being the limit on PAC contributions to a candidate, per election,” says Sheila Krumholz, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics (where I used to work). “So unless the campaign has receipts showing that they paid more or evidence that they got a great deal on furniture that’s actually worth more, the leadership PAC has likely exceeded the contribution limit.”

The leadership PAC had already made a $5,000 gift to the campaign in early February, so it could not have bought the furniture for more than it was worth without making an improper gift. Office furniture does not usually appreciate in value, meaning that unless the campaign bought the furniture for a real bargain in the first place, the improper gift could be even bigger than $15,900. Splitwise, a website and app that calculates fair values, estimates that $6,800 of furniture purchased new less than a year ago would now be worth around $5,800 if it’s in nearly new condition. And if most campaign offices are any indication, it probably isn’t.

So how did Christie turn this brilliant deal? His spokesman in the governor’s office referred requests for comment to Bill Palatucci, the lawyer who worked for both the campaign and the leadership PAC. Palatucci said he was trying to track down the treasurer (again for both the campaign and the leadership PAC) but had no immediate answer.

Update: Palatucci said that the sale of equipment to the leadership PAC included items other than just simple office furniture. Although both organizations had the same treasurer, he said he was not sure why the campaign might have had a more narrow definition of what constituted office furniture when it reported its purchases, but he said the campaign had records to show the equipment sold was worth the amount it charged the leadership PAC.

“There was lots of very expensive sound and lighting equipment and other office equipment, that is fully accounted for, and inventoried, so to insinuate that somehow there was a report was anything but accurate would be false,” Palatucci told Mother Jones.

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Christie’s Broke Campaign Sells Its Old Furniture for an Enormous Profit

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The Little-Known Movers Behind North Carolina’s Anti-Gay Law: Ted Cruz’s Advisers

by PhilippASV Posted on April 13, 2016

Mother Jones

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As he worked to rally evangelical voters a week before North Carolina’s March 15 primary, Ted Cruz gave a speech at a church in the Charlotte suburb of Kannapolis, where he was joined by a trio of prominent local social conservative supporters: Charlotte pastor and congressional candidate Mark Harris and the Benham brothers, the telegenic real estate entrepreneurs whose house-flipping show on HGTV was canceled in 2014 when their history of anti-gay activism came to light. At the event, Cruz thanked Harris for “calling the nation to revival,” and called David and Jason Benham “an extraordinary voice for the Christian faith.”

For years, Harris and the Benhams have been at the forefront of every battle to oppose gay rights in North Carolina. This past February, they were at it again, this time against a nondiscrimination ordinance proposed in Charlotte that, among other things, allowed transgender people to use public restrooms based on their gender identity and protected LGBT people from discrimination by public institutions. The advocacy of these top Cruz supporters against the Charlotte ordinance eventually led the North Carolina legislature to push through one of the most sweeping anti-LGBT measures in the country, a law that has caused a national outcry and caused many companies, including PayPal, to scrap plans to invest in the state. The law, the Public Facilities Privacy and Security Act, strikes down all existing and future LGBT nondiscrimination statutes in North Carolina and requires that transgender people use bathrooms based on their sex at birth.

Harris’ and the Benhams’ state activism is significant because, if Cruz wins the presidential race, the considerable influence of these three religious activists could extend far beyond North Carolina. In February, Cruz appointed them to his campaign’s advisory council for religious liberty, along with 16 other conservative Christian leaders. The GOP candidate has promised that this group will “guide his policies to protect religious liberty”—policies that could look very much like the anti-LGBT bill in North Carolina. The group is filled with key players in the anti-LGBT world, including Tony Perkins, the head of the Family Research Council (which is classified as an anti-LGBT hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center); it has already recommended that Cruz, if elected president, should stop federal employment discrimination protections for LGBT people, direct federal agencies to change their interpretation of “sex” to exclude sexual orientation and gender identity, cancel the mandate that employers provide contraceptive coverage, and much more. Cruz has surrounded himself with this group of anti-LGBT heavyweights, and the work of Harris and the Benhams in North Carolina provides a glimpse into what this group can accomplish when it comes to rolling back LGBT protections in the name of religious freedom.

Harris and the Benhams first rose to prominence in 2012, when they helped organize the movement to pass a North Carolina constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriages and civil unions. The Benhams—who are sons of an evangelical minister, and who had previously worked to quash local pride parades and organize anti-abortion protests—testified in favor of the measure and at one point equated the battle against marriage equality with fighting Nazis. Harris has been a well-known Baptist minister in Charlotte since 2005 and his church contributed more than $50,000 to the campaign to ban same-sex marriage. (The amendment passed but was invalidated in 2014 after a Supreme Court ruling.)

Their temporarily successful work against same-sex marriage illustrated the growing power and influence of the state’s social conservatives. Fueled by millions of campaign dollars from a few conservative megadonors, Republicans took over both chambers of the state legislature in the 2010 election, fueled by voters’ economic dissatisfaction. Once in power, legislating social issues was a logical next step for this group of newly elected conservatives, says Steven Greene, a political-science professor at North Caroline State University. By 2012, the General Assembly made one of its first moves in this direction by voting to put the ban on same-sex unions onto that year’s ballot. “Before 2010, we were largely under Democratic control,” Greene says. “All the social-issue stuff was bottled up with no outlet. But once you had the Republican legislature, you could just go wild.”

In 2014, when HGTV pulled the Benhams’ show after journalists revealed their anti-gay activism, the brothers became social conservative heroes. They then wrote their first book, Whatever the Cost, about their sacrifice for their faith. Soon after, in February 2015, Charlotte introduced its anti-discrimination ordinance and Harris and the Benhams snapped into action. Faith Matters NC, a grassroots religious liberty group vice chaired by Harris, took out a radio ad on a conservative talk radio station in Charlotte. “I’d be really scared if a man shared a bathroom with my daughter,” says a woman in the ad, of the bill’s provision allowing public-restroom use based on gender identity. “This nightmare could become a reality right here in Charlotte if we don’t speak up quickly,” she continues, encouraging listeners to contact their city council members and demand that they vote down the “bathroom bill.”

The Benham brothers, meanwhile, headlined a rally to promote biblical values at Charlotte City Hall. And on a conservative radio show David Benham called the bill part of “the radical gay agenda’s plan to change America.” He also penned an op-ed for the Charlotte Observer opposing the bill: “Clearly, this ordinance isn’t really about non-discrimination,” he wrote. “It’s about forcing the acceptance of behavior.” With his father, Flip, a well-known anti-gay street preacher in Charlotte, David addressed the city council on the day they voted on the ordinance. During the meeting, a transgender woman collapsed after giving her testimony. Flip Benham reportedly laughed and poked fun at her gender while she lay on the floor awaiting medical attention. He also allegedly confronted a transgender girl as she walked out of the bathroom, calling her a “pervert” and “young man.”

The bill failed in 2015 but was reintroduced the following year. Once again, Harris and the Benhams led the opposition: Harris, for instance, held meetings at his church for the Don’t Do It Charlotte campaign, and all three headlined a rally opposing the measure. Despite their efforts, the ordinance passed in February 2016. Several weeks later, on March 18, opponents of the measure held a press conference in front of a city government building to urge state lawmakers to override the ordinance. David Benham was the opening speaker: “We sure hope the governor and General Assembly will do what is right,” he said. Harris gave the closing speech: “Governor McCrory and the General Assembly must act now to protect women and children all across North Carolina,” he said. He urged the governor to call for a special session to undo the Charlotte ordinance.

Five days later, that’s exactly what happened. In a hastily convened special session, legislators in the Republican-controlled assembly introduced, debated, and passed HB 2, the Public Facilities Privacy and Security Act, in less than 12 hours. Lawmakers had five minutes to read the bill, and Democratic legislators walked out of the assembly in protest. The rushed passage of HB 2 and the law’s broad scope gained national attention, in part because the bill’s language invalidates all local nondiscrimination statutes in the state, not just those tied to protecting the LGBT community. “Make no mistake: While LGBT folks were clearly the political target, everybody lost rights,” Democratic state Sen. Jeff Jackson told Charlotte TV station WCNC. The bill also prohibits a locality from setting a minimum wage standard for private employers, and it limits how citizens can file claims of discrimination based on factors like race, religion, nationality, biological sex, and more.

When asked about their involvement in pushing for HB 2’s passage, the Benham brothers, in an email to Mother Jones, wrote: “Before the bill was passed we had already been notified by the Governor that legislative action was certain, so we simply encouraged our elected officials to listen to the voice of the people.” They continued, “It’s common sense not to allow men in women’s restrooms. It’s also common sense not to force business owners to participate in expressive events that are against their religious beliefs.”

For Cruz, who has staked his campaign on winning over evangelical voters, Harris and the Benhams made natural allies. And as Cruz plotted his presidential bid, he sought to woo these influential social conservatives. In 2014, Cruz headlined a religious rally at Harris’ Charlotte church. That same year, Cruz reached out to the Benhams to express his support after HGTV dropped their show. Then last November, the Benhams emceed a Cruz rally for religious liberty in South Carolina, and in January 2016 they formally endorsed Cruz for president. The following month, Harris endorsed him as well. “Mark’s commitment to be a guiding light in the cultural and political arenas has impacted Christians in North Carolina and across the nation,” Cruz said in a press release trumpeting the endorsement.

Supporting Cruz may bring political benefits for Harris, too. Two days after the HB 2 victory, Harris announced he would be running for Congress to protect “liberty, faith, and family.”

Mark Knoop, the campaign’s spokesman, said that since starting his own campaign, Harris “is entirely focused on his own campaign,” and has put his role as a religious liberty adviser to Cruz “on the backburner.”

The impact of the work of Harris and the Benham brothers in North Carolina has caused national backlash. As word spread of the state’s new law, more than 120 major corporations, including Apple, American Airlines, and PayPal, urged the governor to repeal the bill or to face dire business consequences. In response, the Benham brothers wrote an op-ed for conservative website World Net Daily defending the governor: “Once the media started reporting, you would’ve thought the governor had joined ISIS!” wrote the brothers. “They’ve crafted the narrative in the media that North Carolina’s HB2 is against LGBT individuals, yet nothing could be further from the truth.” (On Tuesday, the state’s Gov. Pat McCrory responded to the backlash with an executive order granting LGBT protections only to state employees.)

Harris’ campaign makes a similar point. “Its not like North Carolina is persecuting the LGBT community,” says Knoop. “The whole point is that people going to a bathroom are going to the right bathroom.” When asked to elaborate on Harris’ stance on portions of HB 2 unrelated to bathroom use, including the part that invalidates the state’s LGBT nondiscrimination ordinances, Knoop declined to comment.

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The Little-Known Movers Behind North Carolina’s Anti-Gay Law: Ted Cruz’s Advisers

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Woman Publicly Shames Florida Gov. Rick Scott at Starbucks for Anti-Abortion Bill and Medicaid Cut

by Robin66977532909 Posted on April 6, 2016

Mother Jones

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Florida Gov. Rick Scott was served quite the verbal beatdown on Tuesday after a woman publicly shamed the Republican governor for a laundry list of GOP-supported issues—and it all unfolded on camera at a local Gainesville Starbucks.

“You cut Medicaid so I couldn’t get Obamacare,” Cara Jennings told the visibly shaken governor as he waited to pay for his coffee. “You’re an asshole. You don’t care about the working people. You should be ashamed to show your face around here.”

When Scott attempted to placate Jennings with the defense that his governorship created a million jobs, Jennings refused to back down and continued with her stunning reproach.

“A million jobs?” Jennings responded. “Who here has a great job or is looking forward to finishing school? Do you really feel like you have a job coming up?”

“You strip women of access to public health care. Shame on you, Rick Scott!”

Afterwards, Jennings told a local news station that several people thanked her for taking a stand against the governor. The incident, however, proved too much for Scott, who slunk out of the Starbucks empty-handed.

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Woman Publicly Shames Florida Gov. Rick Scott at Starbucks for Anti-Abortion Bill and Medicaid Cut

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Over Dinner, Clinton and Sanders Bash Wisconsin’s Scott Walker

by LethaStover Posted on April 3, 2016

Mother Jones

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With just a few days left before the Wisconsin primary, both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders are trying their best to convince Democrats in the state that they’re the real anti-Scott Walker.

On Saturday night, Wisconsin’s Democratic elite gathered at a convention center in downtown Milwaukee to listen to a string of Democratic politicians—including both Sanders and Clinton—offer speeches at the party’s annual Founders Day Gala. The crowd was swank, well-connected: Tickets for the gala started at $150 and ran up to $5,000 for a “prime table,” and based on cheers and stickers, the party insiders heavily favored Clinton. But attendees were united in shouting support for any denunciation of their governor, first when Sanders spoke and then again when Clinton took the stage later in the evening (the presidential candidates swept quickly through the convention hall just for their slotted speaking times, so unfortunately there was no public crossing of paths).

“It is terrible to see the damage Gov. Walker and his allies in the legislature have done in just five years,” Clinton said.

“Think about all of the things Gov. Walker does, and I will do exactly the opposite,” Sanders promised for how he’d govern in the White House.

Polls released over the past week have generally shown Sanders holding a narrow lead over Clinton in Wisconsin, including the well-respected Marquette Law School poll that had Sanders ahead by 4 percent earlier this week. Meanwhile, Walker’s approval numbers in the state have sunk since he won reelection in 2014 and then turned his attention to his failed presidential run. Voters in the state now give him a net negative 10 percent favorability. Running by bashing Walker is a reliable way to inspire passion among Wisconsin Democrats.

Clinton tied a host of her regular campaign issues into a referendum against Walker. “We believe that a governor that attacks teachers, nurses, and firefighters, it doesn’t make him a leader, it makes him a bully,” she said. She warned that Ted Cruz and the other Republican presidential candidates would export Walker-style policies nationally, and that the result would be cataclysmic for the country.

In a not-so-subtle jab at Sanders, who has been hesitant to throw his weight behind down-ballot Democrats, Clinton promised to do everything in her power to get Walker out of office and get Democrats back in control of the Wisconsin legislature. “In 2018, we will defeat Scott Walker,” Clinton guaranteed.

She trained her harshest criticism on Rebecca Bradley, a state Supreme Court justice appointed by Walker and who is up for election on Tuesday. During the campaign, liberals in Wisconsin have highlighted Bradley’s past writings, which included a 2006 column in which the judge likens use of birth control to murder. “I had to read this three times, she has actually said birth control is morally abhorrent and doctors who provided it, namely birth control, and women who use it, namely birth control, are party to murder,” Clinton said, her voice full of astonishment.

“There is no place,” she said, “on any Supreme Court, or any court in this country, no place at all for Rebecca Bradley’s decades-long track record of dangerous rhetoric against women, survivors of sexual assault, and the LGBT community.”

Half an hour before Clinton took the mic at the center of the room, Sanders had ripped into Walker for pushing laws to restrict voting access. “I have contempt, absolute contempt, for those Republican governors who do not have the guts to support free, open, and fair elections,” Sanders said. Thanks to Walker, Wisconsin has new strict photo ID law that has made it difficult for some groups—that just happen to skew Democratic—from being able to cast a vote. “I say to Gov. Walker, and all of the other Republican governors who are trying to make it harder to vote for poor people and old people and people of color and young people—trying to make it harder for them to participate in the political process,” Sanders said, “I say to them, if you don’t have to guts to participate in a free and fair election, get out of politics and get another job.”

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Over Dinner, Clinton and Sanders Bash Wisconsin’s Scott Walker

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California Dives Into the Unknown With $15 Minimum Wage

by NellEUHzum Posted on March 28, 2016

Mother Jones

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San Francisco and Los Angeles have already passed laws raising their minimum wages to $15 per hour. Now, in a victory for labor activists who were getting ready to put a $15 minimum wage on the ballot, the state is getting ready to follow suit:

According to a document obtained by The Times, the negotiated deal would boost California’s statewide minimum wage from $10 an hour to $10.50 on Jan. 1, 2017, with a 50-cent increase in 2018 and then $1-per-year increases through 2022. Businesses with fewer than 25 employees would have an extra year to comply, delaying their workers receiving a $15 hourly wage until 2023.

Future statewide minimum wage increases would be linked to inflation, but a governor would have the power to temporarily block some of the initial increases in the event of an economic downturn.

This would genuinely be terra incognita. The chart on the right shows the California minimum wage over the past 40 years, adjusted for inflation. An increase to $11 per hour in 2018 would return the state to slightly above its historical high point. Beyond that, however, the minimum wage goes far higher than it’s ever been.

What effect will that have, especially in lower-wage areas outside the big cities? There’s no telling. It won’t be Armageddon, but it might not be entirely benign either. Small increases in the minimum wage seem to have little or no effect on employment, but this increase isn’t small, and it unquestionably gets us beyond merely catching up with past erosion in the minimum wage. A statewide minimum of $15 would be a brand new thing.

Kansas recently tried out full-bore right-wing economics, and it’s pretty much been a disaster. Now liberals are getting their chance in California. Come back in a decade and we’ll find out if left-wing economics does any better.

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California Dives Into the Unknown With $15 Minimum Wage

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Mitt Romney Announces He’s Voting for Ted Cruz

by AnnettOlmstead Posted on March 18, 2016

Mother Jones

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After condemning Donald Trump in a speech earlier this month, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney took an all-of-the-above approach to stopping the Republican front-runner from picking up the 1,237 delegates needed to secure the nomination. He campaigned for John Kasich in Ohio last week and offered to do the same for Sen. Marco Rubio in Florida.

But although Kasich did win his home state, Romney is now jumping ship. On Friday, ahead of the potentially winner-take-all Utah caucuses, the favorite son is going all-in for Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas.

In a statement on his Facebook page, Romney, the party’s 2012 presidential nominee, announced he would be supporting Cruz not just in Utah, but in all future contests as well. Lest there be any confusion, Romney offered praise for Kasich but indicated the time had come to pick just one candidate to stop Trump. Here’s the statement:

This week, in the Utah nominating caucus, I will vote for Senator Ted Cruz.

Today, there is a contest between Trumpism and Republicanism. Through the calculated statements of its leader, Trumpism has become associated with racism, misogyny, bigotry, xenophobia, vulgarity and, most recently, threats and violence. I am repulsed by each and every one of these.

The only path that remains to nominate a Republican rather than Mr. Trump is to have an open convention. At this stage, the only way we can reach an open convention is for Senator Cruz to be successful in as many of the remaining nominating elections as possible.

I like Governor John Kasich. I have campaigned with him. He has a solid record as governor. I would have voted for him in Ohio. But a vote for Governor Kasich in future contests makes it extremely likely that Trumpism would prevail.

I will vote for Senator Cruz and I encourage others to do so as well, so that we can have an open convention and nominate a Republican.

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Mitt Romney Announces He’s Voting for Ted Cruz

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John Kasich is no better than Donald Trump on climate change

by StephaiValazque Posted on March 16, 2016

John Kasich is no better than Donald Trump on climate change

By on 15 Mar 2016commentsShare

Ohio Gov. John Kasich won his home state in the GOP presidential primary on Tuesday night, and as Ohio is a winner-take-all state, that means he’s put enough delegates out of Donald Trump’s reach to stall the frontrunner’s march to the nomination, for now. The Kasich campaign hopes this momentum will be enough to help him win a few more states and then force a contested convention, with the full backing of the establishment behind him.

Kasich, then, is the GOP establishment’s last and only choice, now that Marco Rubio has bowed out. He isn’t just a favorite among top party officials. In recent weeks, he’s earned a slew of endorsements from newspapers around the country. A few of these papers have pointed to Kasich as the only moderate Republican, mentioning his views on climate change as one of the things that makes him more mainstream than his opponents.

The Detroit Free Press, for instance, wrote: “Kasich accepts the reality of climate change […] Yet climate change denial is de rigeur among most Republican politicians, a shameful dodge that will pile suffering on our children and grandchildren. Although Kasich favors robust state regulation to control climate change over U.S. Environmental Protection Agency standards, this is a more significant step than his GOP cohorts are willing to take.” The South Florida Sun Sentinel, meanwhile, said, “On the subject of climate change, to which Florida is especially vulnerable, only Kasich called for policies to reduce carbon emissions.” The Illinois Journal Star noted that by choosing Kasich, Republicans would “get an intelligent man who doesn’t deny the science behind climate change, though he’d prefer private-sector solutions to government ones.”

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Yet the governor is no climate ally; he’s just a bit better than Trump at hiding his brand of denialism. He falls under the “do-nothing” category of politicians who will accept at least some of the science but want to, well, do nothing about it.

Take what Kasich said in the last debate as an example: After Marco Rubio fumbled through an answer on sea-level rise, Kasich’s speech was almost a relief. “I do believe we contribute to climate change,” he began. I say almost a relief, because Kasich in the same answer also spoke in the familiar climate-denier code: “Now, it doesn’t mean because you pursue a policy of being sensitive to the environment, because we don’t know how much humans actually contribute.”

Kasich has repeated that line in campaign stops, including saying at a Vermont event last month that he didn’t know “how much individuals affect the climate.”

His acknowledgement that the climate might be changing does make him seem reasonable compared to the likes of Trump or Ted Cruz. But what matters more are his views on climate policy, and here the governor has shown no more interest in taking action than his competitors. Kasich says he supports renewables but equally alongside coal, natural gas, and oil. He opposes most policies that curb carbon pollution and that encourage wind and solar over dirtier sources. He’s promised to “freeze all federal regulations for one year except for health and safety” — and considers the Environmental Protection Agency’s climate and health regulations as the first that need to go. And he’s criticized the international climate deal the world reached last December, insisting the thousands of climate policy experts that were in Paris for a climate conference should have been there for ISIS: “I think when [Secretary of State John Kerry] went to Paris, he should have gone there to get our allies together to fight ISIS instead.”

In the end, it doesn’t matter much if Kasich manages a “yes” to a question on the science. He is still dangerous. The New York Times, which also endorsed Kasich in January, put it best: “Kasich is no moderate.” They weren’t talking about climate change, but they might as well have been.

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John Kasich is no better than Donald Trump on climate change

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