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Ted Cruz’s Daughter Schools Him on Taylor Swift

by ElsieGiltner Posted on April 14, 2016

Mother Jones

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The CNN Town Hall with Ted Cruz and his family on Wednesday night began with host Anderson Cooper talking to the candidate about the usual political subjects, including his thoughts about GOP front-runner Donald Trumps’ vocal opposition to the current system of gathering delegates in advance of the Republican National Convention. Cruz said Trump is acting like a “union boss thug” by threatening delegates and noted that he’s only complaining about the process because recently he has lost several key primaries. “In the last three weeks there have been 11 elections in 4 states. And we have beaten Donald in all of 11 of them,” Cruz said. “He’s unhappy about that.”

When Heidi Cruz joined her husband on stage and audience members came to the mic, the questions moved from the political to the personal: What was their first date? (A dinner when the two were working on the Bush campaign in 2000). What did she think was his “most annoying” quality? (His iPhone). Cruz also told the audience that he loves movies, but his wife isn’t interested in them, and after The Princess Bride, his favorite movies are The Godfather series, including The Godfather Part III.

But the real highlight of the evening came when Cruz’s two young daughters, dressed in identical yellow dresses, were asked who they would first want to invite to visit the White House. Caroline, whose eighth birthday is on Thursday, and five-year-old Catherine, were shy about naming their favorite pop star, but their mother Heidi answered for them: “The girls would love to have their first guest be Taylor Swift,” she said.

The girls may not have had much to say on the Cruz vs. Trump delegate fight, but they weighed in on a different kind of “Bad Blood” (#sorrynotsorry). The whole family exchange was pretty adorable.

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Ted Cruz’s Daughter Schools Him on Taylor Swift

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Reality Is Bearing Down on Paul Ryan

by DeannaColleano Posted on March 31, 2016

Mother Jones

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Lisa Mascaro reports that the honeymoon may be over for Paul Ryan. He only lasted five months:

As Congress is careening toward another budget crisis and the Republican Party is ripping itself apart over Donald Trump’s rise, the man best known as the architect of the GOP’s austere spending blueprint is likely to miss an April 15 deadline to approve a new funding plan for 2017.

He’s been unable to overcome the same resistance from the conservative House Freedom Caucus that doomed his predecessor, and is so far similarly unwilling to use the power of the speaker’s office to force stragglers to fall into line.

….To some, Ryan’s repeated calls for Republicans to “raise our gaze” and his frequent attempts to position himself as the GOP’s deep thinker are starting to give off an air of ivory tower insignificance. Conservatives wonder if he’s still a “young gun” trying to shake up the party. At a Trump rally in Ryan’s Wisconsin hometown of Janesville last week, the crowd booed the mention of his name.

….In many ways, the speaker’s problems are of his own making, the result of a leadership strategy he helped forge to recruit the most conservative candidates to run for office and then, after Republicans won the House majority in the 2010 midterm election, reject almost all of Obama’s initiatives.

Well, it’s still early days. Maybe Ryan is just working slowly and steadily to gain some kind of consensus. More likely, though, the tea partiers aren’t any more willing to compromise under Ryan than they were under Boehner—and that leaves Ryan high and dry. If he can’t convince them to be flexible even during an election year, he obviously doesn’t have much conservative credibility left. Hard to believe.

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Reality Is Bearing Down on Paul Ryan

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Obama Has Granted More Commutations Than the Past 6 Presidents Combined

by BLMWaylon7619 Posted on March 30, 2016

Mother Jones

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President Barack Obama commuted the sentences of 61 drug offenders on Wednesday, as part of his push to ramp up clemencies and reform sentencing laws. That brings his total commutations to 248 since taking office, more than the past six presidents combined.

More than a third of the 61 inmates were serving life sentences on charges related to possession and distribution of drugs including cocaine, methamphetamines, and marijuana. Unlike recent rounds of commutations, however, none of them were serving life sentences for marijuana-only crimes. As Mother Jones has reported in the past, scores of so-called pot lifers remain behind bars.

“Sadly none of my guys are on this list,” says Cheri Sicard, founder of the Marijuana Lifer Project, a nonprofit advocacy group that aims to reverse the life sentences of people charged with marijuana crimes. “That will be a huge disappointment to all of them, especially 81-year-old Antonio Bascaro,” she says, referring to the longest-serving marijuana prisoner in the United States. “He does not have much time left.”

Neil Eggleston, the White House counsel, wrote in a blog post that Obama will continue his relatively aggressive pace of commutations during the remainder of his presidency. But his administration is still far from the goal it announced as part of a clemency initiative in 2011, when former Attorney General Eric Holder said that some 10,000 prisoners “were potentially going to be released.”

More than 10,000 inmates have since applied for relief, but there’s mounting evidence that the Justice Department’s Office of the Pardon Attorney (OPA)—which is responsible for vetting and recommending clemency petitions to the White House—has been hampered by a bureaucratic culture and broken process in which the cases of qualifying applicants often go unheard or are regularly rejected against the OPA’s recommendations.

In January, former Pardon Attorney Deborah Leff resigned from her post after less than two years on the job. Her resignation letter, obtained by USA Today under a Freedom of Information Act request, offers a rare glimpse into a department that is shrouded in secrecy. “Given that the Department has not fulfilled its commitment to provide the resources necessary for my office to make timely and thoughtful recommendations on clemency to the President, given your statement that the needed staff will not be forthcoming, and given that I have been instructed to set aside thousands of petitions for pardon and traditional commutation, I cannot fulfill my responsibilities as Pardon Attorney,” Leff wrote to Deputy Attorney General Sally Quillian Yates, who is responsible for forwarding the OPA’s recommendations to the White House.

Leff criticized Yates for overruling her recommendations and said the president was often not informed of the differences in opinion. “I believe that prior to making the serious and complex decisions underlying clemency, it is important for the President to have a full set of views,” she wrote.

Leff’s letter placed the blame for much dysfunction on the OPA’s supervisors. But in the past, Samuel Morison, a former OPA staff attorney turned whistleblower, has accused the OPA itself of routinely denying petitions “without any real consideration.” Morison noted that once cases do reach the White House, the president often takes the OPA’s advice. “The number of times the president doesn’t do what the pardon attorney suggests is extremely low,” he told me last August.

Under Leff’s leadership, Obama’s clemency numbers slowly rose. Her predecessor, Ronald L. Rodgers, a former military judge and a major prosecutor of drug crimes, was removed from office in April 2014 after failing to accurately share key information with the president in a high-profile clemency case, and during his tenure Obama granted fewer clemencies than any other modern president.

America’s federal prisons hold nearly 200,000 people; some 95,000 of them are incarcerated on nonviolent drug charges. Sicard of the Marijuana Lifer Project believes the marijuana lifers offer low-hanging fruit for an administration that has vowed to reverse “unduly harsh sentences” for drug crimes. Of Wednesday’s commutations, Amy Povah, president of the CAN-DO Foundation, which advocates on behalf of individuals charged with nonviolent drug crimes, says that while she is “thrilled that President Obama has chosen to end the suffering of these deserving applicants,” she remains concerned about others whose long-standing petitions for clemency have not yet been granted. These include Michael Pelletier, who has been in a wheelchair since he was 11 years old and is serving a life sentence for marijuana charges. The way Povah sees it, “we have a long way to go before Obama leaves office.”

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Obama Has Granted More Commutations Than the Past 6 Presidents Combined

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Paul Ryan Says He Regrets Calling the Poor “Takers.” That Isn’t Enough.

by AnnisZus52255331 Posted on March 23, 2016

Mother Jones

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Here is Speaker Paul Ryan today in an address to a group of House interns:

Instead of playing to your anxieties, we can appeal to your aspirations….We don’t resort to scaring you, we dare to inspire you….We question each other’s ideas—vigorously—but we don’t question each other’s motives….People with different ideas are not traitors. They are not our enemies. They are our neighbors, our coworkers, our fellow citizens.

….I’m certainly not going to stand here and tell you I have always met this standard. There was a time when I would talk about a difference between “makers” and “takers” in our country, referring to people who accepted government benefits. But as I spent more time listening, and really learning the root causes of poverty, I realized I was wrong….So I stopped thinking about it that way—and talking about it that way.

The obvious pushback is that while Ryan may have stopped talking about “makers and takers,” his policies are exactly the same as they’ve always been. After all that time spent listening, he changed his rhetoric but apparently none of his substantive views.

Which is true enough. If all Ryan is doing is telling a bunch of interns that they can get more done if they watch their language and hide their true intentions, then there’s nothing much to applaud here. At the same time, it’s still good to say this stuff out loud, regardless of how sincere it is. Not many people do anymore. Now, how about doing it again in front of a more important audience and with a few explicit references to Donald Trump thrown in?

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Paul Ryan Says He Regrets Calling the Poor “Takers.” That Isn’t Enough.

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This New Bill Could Make Trump and Cruz’s Anti-Refugee Dreams a Reality

by JeannetteHuddle Posted on March 23, 2016

Mother Jones

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Following the terrorist attacks at a subway station and airport in Brussels on Tuesday morning, GOP presidential candidates Donald Trump and Ted Cruz renewed their calls for Syrian refugees and other immigrants to be banned from entering the United States.

“We need to immediately halt the president’s ill-advised plan to bring in tens of thousands of Syrian Muslim refugees,” Cruz said during a Tuesday press conference in Washington, DC. “Our vetting programs are woefully insufficient.”

“I would close up our borders,” Trump said on Fox News. “Look at Brussels, look at Paris.”

This time, they may have some backing in Congress. After the terrorist attacks in Paris last November, more than 30 states mounted efforts to ban the resettlement of Syrian refugees in their communities—issuing executive orders, proposing state-level legislation, and even filing lawsuits. These efforts failed because the Constitution mandates that immigration policy be set by the federal government. Now Congress is considering a bill that would tweak federal law to make this sort of refugee obstructionism a whole lot easier.

Last week, the House Judiciary Committee approved the Refugee Program Integrity Restoration Act, paving the way for a vote on the House floor. The bill, co-authored by Rep. Raul Labrador (R-Idaho) and Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), would give state and local governments the opportunity to reject the resettlement of refugees in their communities—as was proposed by more than half of states after Paris—and it would shift the responsibility from the president to Congress of setting an annual ceiling on the number of refugees. The ceiling is currently at 85,000 refugees, after a September 2015 order from President Barack Obama, but Congress could set it as low as 60,000 refugees and block the president from raising it without congressional approval. In September 2015, Obama pledged that the United States would take in at least 10,000 Syrian refugees in 2016.

The measure would also allow “recurrent background security checks” of US refugees, a provision that critics say amounts to “continual surveillance” of refugees. It would also delay how soon refugees can obtain their permanent green cards—changing it from one year after their arrival to three years. The bill also requires that the Department of Homeland Security prioritize claims from refugees who fear persecution based on their religion, as opposed to those who face persecution due to other circumstances, like their race, nationality, or membership in a particular social group. Religious persecution would be an unlikely claim for most Syrian refugees coming to the United States: the vast majority of them are Muslim, and Sunni Muslims are Syria’s religious majority. This is one way the bill “clearly discriminates against Muslims as the intended target,” said the Rev. John McCullough, president of the Church World Service, on a press call with reporters last week.

In advance of the House Judiciary Committee vote last week, 234 organizations—including the US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants and the American Immigration Lawyers Association—sent a letter to Congress opposing the legislation. They noted “the current vetting process for refugees is incredibly rigorous and includes screening by U.S. federal law enforcement and national security agencies.” Giving state and local governments a veto on refugee resettlement, they wrote, wouldn’t enhance security and would instead “codify discrimination against refugees.” They concluded: “It is simply un-American to treat persecuted individuals, who want nothing more than to start a new life in safe and welcoming communities, as criminals.”

The bill’s chief sponsor, Rep. Labrador, a former immigration lawyer, is convinced that current vetting processes aren’t sufficient for screening refugees from Syria. “Compared to countries where US intelligence has strong footing, many current refugees are coming from failed states such as Syria, where there is very little US intelligence presence,” he said when introducing the bill before the House Judiciary Committee last week. “The simple fact is that we do not know who these people truly are.”

If the bill reaches the Senate, it will face an uphill battle. Following the Paris attacks in November 2015, the House passed another piece of legislation that would have effectively halted the admission of Syrian refugees into the United States. In January, the Senate blocked the measure.

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This New Bill Could Make Trump and Cruz’s Anti-Refugee Dreams a Reality

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Oil companies want to get in on the action in Cuba

by Rufus08541345975 Posted on March 21, 2016

Oil companies want to get in on the action in Cuba

By on 21 Mar 2016 4:56 pmcommentsShare

It’s a new day for Cuba and the U.S.

A little more than a year after relations between the two nations officially started to thaw, President Obama on Sunday became the first U.S. president to visit the island nation since Calvin Coolidge. During a two-and-a-half-day visit, Obama is meeting with Cuban President Raúl Castro to discuss lifting the 1962 embargo as well as economic opportunities and human rights abuses, according to the White House. He’ll also attend a baseball game.

Obama isn’t the only one interested in Cuba. Big Business, including the oil industry, is eyeing the island nation as well. One hundred and twenty business leaders converged upon the country to discuss offshore oil development last October. While American companies are still barred from owning oil assets in Cuba, U.S. firms can be involved in drilling and safety operations. Cuba might welcome that, as Bloomberg Government reports:

Cheap oil has forced Venezuela to scale back its support for Cuba, and that’s prodding the officially Communist nation to open up to foreign investment and build on its rapprochement with the U.S., according to a Moody’s report in December. And opening up may mean boosting the 50,000 barrels a day of oil now produced there. The U.S. Geological Survey estimated that 4.6 billion barrels of crude oil are lurking in the North Cuba Basin, with most of it within 50 miles of Cuba’s coast; that’s one-fifth of what USGS estimated to exist in the Arctic seas off Alaska. But this oil — if it’s really there — wouldn’t need to be produced in some of the world’s harshest conditions, and would be just a short barge voyage away from U.S. Gulf-area refineries.

Of course, the prospect of more offshore development in Cuban waters isn’t exactly comforting to environmentalists. Drilling could happen as close as 50 miles off the coast of Florida, so a big oil spill there could certainly reach American shores. Plus there’s the whole climate change thing to worry about. Cuba, a low-lying island, is especially vulnerable to sea-level rise.

An official White House fact sheet about Obama’s trip to Cuba mentions climate change and the two countries’ intentions to work together on fighting and adapting to it — and makes no mention of oil or gas. “The United States and Cuba recognize the threats posed by climate change to both our countries,” it reads, “including worsening impacts such as continued sea-level rise, the alarming acidification of our oceans, and the striking incidence of extreme weather events. Cooperative action to address this challenge is more critical than ever.”

Addressing this challenge may be critical, as both Washington and Havana are aware, but as oil companies show an increased interest in Cuba’s oil reserves, we may, once again, see the triumph of profit over progress. It’s happened everywhere else. Why not Cuba as well?

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Oil companies want to get in on the action in Cuba

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Quote of the Day: The Middle Class Doesn’t Care If We Cut Taxes on the Rich

by NatishaRoney Posted on March 17, 2016

Mother Jones

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From House Speaker Paul Ryan, talking about his view of tax reform:

I do not like the idea of buying into these distributional tables.

“These distributional tables” are the ones that show Republican tax plans giving enormous cuts to the wealthy and nothing much at all to the middle class. Ryan calls them ridiculous because once you account for the economic boom of Republican tax cuts for the rich, everyone is going to be rolling in dough. Besides which, Ryan insists, “I think most people don’t think, ‘John’s success comes at my expense.'” Bottom line: distributional tables are for losers. “Bernie Sanders talks about that stuff. That’s not who we are.”

On a more amusing note, Ryan says he’s not looking at how to fund a border wall. “Remember, we’re not going to pay for that, recall?” So true.

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Quote of the Day: The Middle Class Doesn’t Care If We Cut Taxes on the Rich

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Florida voters care about climate change. Too bad the Republican presidential candidates don’t

by beauwolford Posted on March 15, 2016

Florida voters care about climate change. Too bad the Republican presidential candidates don’t

By on 15 Mar 2016commentsShare

In Florida’s Tuesday presidential primary, 99 Republican delegates are up for grabs. In a state where 81 percent of residents think that climate change is occurring, Republican voters will choose between presidential candidates who don’t.

At last week’s Republican presidential debate, held in Miami, Marco Rubio responded to a question submitted by the city’s Republican mayor, Tomás Regalado, who is concerned about climate change and sea-level rise. Rubio does not share that concern: “There’s never been a time when the climate has not changed,” he said. In a follow-up on CNN, Rubio again dismissed concerns about climate change, arguing, “What there is no consensus on is how much of the changes that are going on are due to human activity.” Ted Cruz and the Frontrunner Who Shall Not Be Named are widely known for their anti-climate-action stances. Even Ohio Gov. John Kasich isn’t as moderate on the issue as he’s made out to be. In a stunning display of his grasp of foreign-policy nuance, Kasich barked at a town hall on Sunday, “I think when [Secretary of State John Kerry] went to Paris [for the U.N. climate conference], he should have gone there to get our allies together to fight ISIS instead.”

But it’s not just the presidential candidates muddying the scientific waters here. Republican Gov. Rick Scott and former Gov. Jeb! Bush push back against (if not flat-out deny) climate science — Scott famously barred state employees from even using the term “climate change” last year — and Republican House members Mario Diaz-Balart, Jeff Miller, and Bill Posey have all expressed denialist views over the past decade.

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The disconnect between Floridian voters and ostrich-esque representatives isn’t a new one, but that doesn’t make it any less curious.

One of Florida’s flagship industries — tourism — is bound to be heavily affected by climate change. The industry contributed $51 billion to state GDP in 2015, and 1.1 million Floridians’ jobs are related to tourism. Over the next 15 years, sea levels in the state are expected to rise by 6–10 inches, when compared to 1992 levels. Rising seas and storm surges also threaten a lot of the state’s real estate and promise to batter the tax base. It’s the kind of recipe that gives rise to climate concern, even if the impetus is largely economic.

So why do Floridians continue to vote for politicians who don’t take climate change seriously?

One explanation is that voters care about climate change, but simply care about it less than issues like the economy, taxation, and immigration. In a statewide poll of the “biggest issue facing the 2016 candidates for president,” released last week, the economy ranked first for 46 percent of self-identifying Republicans and 40 percent of Strong Republicans. Climate change only garnered 1 percent of the vote in each category. (For comparison, Democrats and Strong Democrats ranked climate change in the top position 4 percent and 8 percent of the time, respectively. Democrats, too, put the economy in the top spot.) The issue, then, is not necessarily one of ignorance or denial, but one of priority.

It’s worth noting that this is true of national polls, as well. The climate is never ranked as exceptionally pressing by voters, for all the reasons it’s difficult to deal with climate change in the first place. Climate change is a slow, lagged, and diffuse phenomenon. It’s personally and politically difficult to wrap one’s head around.

But recall that Republican Mayor Regalado was the one who posed the climate question to Rubio last week. Indeed, Regalado was one of 21 mayors who signed on to an open letter demanding a focus on climate change at the Miami presidential debate. Why do Florida voters elect mayors who care about climate change, but federal representatives and governors who don’t? That’s likely a function of cities’ tendencies to house more liberal-leaning residents. Mayors, too, are the ones that often have to answer (read: pay) for the immediate effects of a changing climate, and that can prime them toward climate action.

Of course, for Florida Republican primary voters, there’s not actually a real choice here when it comes to climate change. With all four presidential candidates actively opposing serious climate action, the electorate can’t help but allocate delegates to denialism. Which is a shame, because the seas are still rising.

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Florida voters care about climate change. Too bad the Republican presidential candidates don’t

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Obama and Trudeau take a big step on methane

by latishamedlock7 Posted on March 10, 2016

U.S. President Barack Obama (R) and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau hold a joint press conference in the Rose Garden of the White House. Kevin Lamarque/Reuters

Obama and Trudeau take a big step on methane

By on 10 Mar 2016commentsShare

The remarkable thing about Canada Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and U.S. President Barack Obama standing in front of the White House on Thursday morning was that the two countries were finally on the same side in the fight against climate change. After years of rule under Stephen Harper’s oil-dominated conservative party, Canada is now primed for a comeback as a global climate leader since the Liberal Party took over last fall. Trudeau has embraced the opportunity, joining the U.S. in announcing a series of climate pledges.

The details of the plan are as significant as the symbolism: While both countries promised responsible stewardship of the Arctic, the most notable part is their pledge on methane emissions, a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide and a growing climate problem.

Canada and the U.S. pledged to cut the oil and gas sector’s methane emissions by up to 45 percent by 2025 from a 2012 baseline. Before this visit, the Environmental Protection Agency had already planned on a similar cut for new or modified gas operations, but it overlooked the biggest offender — existing infrastructure. There are hundreds of thousands of sources that are currently leaking methane, sometimes a small amount during the extraction, processing, and transport of natural gas, but other times a disastrous amount, like in the case of Aliso Canyon’s massive gas leak.

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The EPA will now begin developing regulations for these sources and “move as expeditiously as possible to complete this process,” the White House noted in a fact sheet. Now, Canada is getting on board, putting “in place national regulations in collaboration with provinces/territories, Indigenous Peoples and stakeholders. Environment and Climate Change Canada intends to publish an initial phase of proposed regulations by early 2017.”

This is big. So big, in fact, that a similar 45 percent cut to global oil and gas methane emissions would be the equivalent of shutting down one-third of the world’s coal plants, according to Environmental Defense Fund’s Climate and Energy Program Vice President Mark Brownstein.

The U.S. and Canada are the Nos. 2 and 4 worst methane polluters (Russia is No. 1), accounting for 11 and 3.2 percent of global methane from oil and gas, respectively. Brownstein noted in an email reducing oil and gas methane emissions is “the single most immediate, impactful, and cost effective thing we can do to impact the rate of global warming right now.”

The oil lobby American Petroleum Institute is indignant, of course. API accused Obama of bending to the will of “environmental extremists.” Its point is that the industry already has an economic incentive to reduce methane — after all, it’s gas they could sell consumers that’s escaping into the air — and any regulation would be burdensome. Environmentalists point out that with gas prices so cheap regulatory action is an absolute must: The sector has too little incentive to shrink its methane footprint on its own.

Obama will certainly hear more from the oil and gas industry, including legal challenges, but he paid them little mind today.

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Obama and Trudeau take a big step on methane

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Climate hawks endorse Bernie by yuge margin

by WCEKellyld Posted on March 10, 2016

Climate hawks endorse Bernie by yuge margin

By on 10 Mar 2016commentsShare

Climate Hawks Vote, a political action committee dedicated to electing leaders who prioritize action on climate change, has endorsed Bernie Sanders for president.

Sanders earned the Climate Hawks Vote endorsement after he won an overwhelming 92 percent of over 22,000 votes cast in the group’s online survey. This despite a plea from Clinton herself, who wrote in an email to Climate Hawks members:

My plan focuses on using the extensive authorities a President has to tackle this problem using laws already on the books, and on bringing together the diverse range of cities, states, rural communities, universities, businesses, nonprofits, and others who are committed to taking action—including local Republican leaders.

I believe it would be a mistake to assume that Republicans in Congress will get with the program in the near term—because we can’t wait for them to start paying more attention to scientists than they do to Big Oil. Eventually reality will catch up with them—but we can’t wait for that to happen. The next president has to start building on the progress President Obama has made right away because the next decade will be decisive in our ability to meet the climate challenge.

“We’re sincerely grateful to Secretary Hillary Clinton for participating in this process and making it clear how much she values our support,” wrote Climate Hawks Vote founder R.L. Miller in a statement. “We’re so glad that both contenders for the Democratic nomination say they want to stand up for science and fight to end global-warming pollution. But the best candidate for the job, ready to use every tool to fight climate polluters and Republican climate deniers, is Bernie Sanders. We need clean-energy leadership in the White House. We need a climate revolution.”

However, not all green groups have backed Sanders. The League of Conservation Voters went with Clinton, citing her “long history of strong environmental leadership.”

While both Democratic candidates acknowledge that climate change is a grave threat both here and abroad, their platforms are different. For one, Sanders has said he would end all fracking as president, whereas Clinton’s views on fracking are more qualified. Clinton has said that she would put an end to fracking on public lands, but as Secretary of State, her office encouraged natural gas production in developing nations. And she hasn’t always sounded like a climate hawk: In 2014, she said that “With the right safeguards in place, gas is cleaner than coal. And expanding production is creating tens of thousands of new jobs.”

Clinton decries Big Oil, but some environmentalists have bristled at her accepting more than $3.25 million in donations from the fossil fuel industry. In a race where fossil fuels have spent over $100 million on candidates, $3.25 million may be a drop in the golden teacup, but it’s still $3.25 million more than Sanders has taken from dirty energy.

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Climate hawks endorse Bernie by yuge margin

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