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Obama Just Vetoed the GOP’s Keystone Bill, and This Democratic Presidential Hopeful Is Pissed

by pawel Posted on February 25, 2015

Mother Jones

Jim Webb is sounding increasingly serious about running for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016. Last week, National Journal‘s Bob Moser wrote a cover story wondering whether the former Virginia senator could “spark an anti-Hillary uprising,” in which Webb explained that his absence from the campaign trail this winter was, in part, the result of major knee surgery to fix problems leftover from his days in the Vietnam War.

Webb struck his first blow against his fellow Democrats on Wednesday. But rather than targeting Clinton, his likely presidential opposition, he struck out against the party’s incumbent, President Barack Obama. In a series of tweets, Webb lashed out at the president for vetoing a bill that would have approved construction on the Keystone XL Pipeline.

Webb’s tweetstorm doesn’t tell the whole story. A letter from the EPA released earlier this month argued that, thanks to recent drops in oil prices, Keystone XL could prove disastrous for carbon emissions.

As I detailed in December, Jim Webb had an atrocious record on climate change and environmental issues while he served in the Senate. Standing up for Virginia’s roots as a coal state, Webb tried to thwart Obama’s efforts to regulate greenhouse gasses through EPA regulation, and he helped block Democratic attempts to pass a cap-and-trade law.

Clinton, for her part, has regularly sidestepped addressing whether she wants to see the pipeline constructed, though she has generally been supportive of other environmental efforts made by the Obama administration.

While Webb objected to Obama’s decision to veto this specific bill, it’s still unclear whether the two Democrats disagree on the underlying issue. Obama has strenuously rejected attempts by congressional Republicans to force immediate approval of the pipeline, but his administration has not yet said definitely if it intends to let the project go forward eventually.

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Obama Just Vetoed the GOP’s Keystone Bill, and This Democratic Presidential Hopeful Is Pissed

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New Retirement Regs Might Pose a Campaign Problem for Republicans

by KeiraPhifer Posted on February 23, 2015

Mother Jones

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Congress is now controlled by Republicans, and it’s unlikely they’re going to pass any of the items on President Obama’s agenda. But what about executive actions? Are there any more of those left in Obama’s toolkit?

Jared Bernstein says yes. Forty years ago, when rules were set regarding retirement programs, most retirement funds were managed by corporations or unions, and it was assumed that the fund managers were financially sophisticated. This meant the rules could be fairly light. But that’s obviously changed: most pensions these days are IRA and 401(k) accounts that are managed by individuals who often have a hard time telling good advice from bad:

The result was a lot of people without a lot of investment acumen trying to wade through thickets of annuities, bonds, securities, and index funds, often guided by advisors and brokers who they assumed were wholly on their side.

Many were — but research shows that many were, and are — not always acting in their clients’ best interest, generating unnecessary fees and charges that erode retirement savings. The newly proposed rule, which does not require Congressional approval, meaning it could actually come to fruition, realigns incentives in the interest of individual investors by requiring retirement financial advisers to follow an established standard (a “fudiciary standard”) to act in their clients’ interest.

….The new fiduciary standard should block what honest brokers call “over-managing:” unnecessary rollovers, churning (over-active buying and selling that generates brokers’ fees at the expense of returns), and the pushing of expensive and risky products like variable annuities.

All of which turns out to be extremely costly to retirees….Conflicted advice reduces returns by about 1 percent per year, such that a poorly advised saver might end up with a 5 percent vs. a 6 percent return. They multiply that 1 percent by the $1.7 trillion of IRA assets “invested in products that generally provide payments that generate conflicts of interest” and conclude that the “the aggregate annual cost of conflicted advice is about $17 billion each year.”

According to Bernstein, a White House study suggests that this difference between 5 and 6 percent returns can amount to five years of retirement savings under plausible assumptions. That’s a lot.

Needless to say, the financial industry is strongly opposed to this rule change, and I think we can safely assume that this means Fox News will be raising the alarums too. Their argument, apparently, is that if they’re prohibited from giving small clients bad advice, it just won’t be worth it to bother with small clients at all. Maybe so. But as Bernstein says, if that’s really the case then “maybe there’s a hitch in your business model.”

This has the potential to be an interesting campaign issue. Most Democrats, even those with close ties to the financial industry (*cough* Hillary *cough*) should have no trouble supporting this rule change. That’s a slam dunk winner with retirees and most of the middle class. Republicans will have a harder time. After all, this represents regulation, and Republicans oppose regulation. They especially oppose financial regulation, as they’ve proven by their relentless efforts to roll back even the modest Dodd-Frank regulation adopted after the financial crash.

So what will they do? Stick to their principles and oppose the new regs? That will sure provide Democrats with an easy sound bite. Jeb Bush opposes a rule that prevents brokers from deliberately giving you bad retirement advice. I don’t think I’d like to be the candidate who has to answer for that.

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New Retirement Regs Might Pose a Campaign Problem for Republicans

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How Coal-Loving States Are Waging War on Obama’s New Climate Rules

by JacintoHahn Posted on February 20, 2015

Mother Jones

This week, representatives from the state-level agencies that manage electric grids met in Washington, DC, for a collective freak-out about President Barack Obama’s flagship climate policy. The Clean Power Plan, as it’s called, aims to slash the nation’s carbon footprint 30 percent by 2030. It would require every state to reduce the carbon “intensity” of its power sector—that is, how much greenhouse gas is emitted for every unit of electricity produced.

There’s a unique reduction target for every state, and a likewise diverse array of things for state regulators to hate: They argue the plan is a gross overreach of federal authority; that it will bankrupt utility companies, drive up monthly bills for ratepayers, and lead to power shortages; that states won’t be adequately credited for clean-energy steps they’ve already taken; and that the deadlines for compliance are just downright impossible to meet. And coal companies are justifiably worried that the plan could kill their business.

More than a dozen states (mostly coal-dependent states in the South, which could be hit hardest by the rules) are already raising hell in what’s shaping up to be the environmental version of state-level challenges to Obamacare. As our friend David Roberts at Grist highlighted this week, a number of states have joined a lawsuit challenging the EPA’s legal authority to regulate carbon dioxide emissions. And across the country in those states and others, bills are cropping up that could make it hard or impossible for individual states to meet their mandated carbon targets. The idea is effectively to stonewall the EPA and hope the regulations get killed in court.

The most recent battle is playing out this week in Virginia, where a state representative with ties to the coal industry wants to make it more difficult for the state’s Department of Environmental Quality to comply with the president’s climate goals.

First, a little background: The nation’s first anti-EPA bill came early last year in Kentucky, before the Clean Power Plan was even released. The proposed EPA rule would require Kentucky to cut its power-sector carbon emissions roughly 35 percent by 2030. That’s bad news for the coal industry, which supplies more than nine-tenths of the state’s power. So using a model bill developed by the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council (which has deep ties to the coal industry), Kentucky legislators passed a law that essentially prevents the state from complying with the Clean Power Plan. The new law bars the state from adopting any implementation plan that includes renewable energy or energy efficiency, or that encourages power plants to switch from coal to natural gas. With those restrictions, the EPA goal does indeed seem unreasonable; the state’s top climate official recently told Inside Climate News that he has no idea how to meet the EPA’s demands and stay within state law.

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How Coal-Loving States Are Waging War on Obama’s New Climate Rules

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Giuliani’s Anti-Obama Rant Is a Big Opportunity for Jeb Bush

by MammieBvyicahzo Posted on February 19, 2015

Mother Jones

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Here is Rudy Giuliani telling us how he really feels about President Obama during a private group dinner last night featuring Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker:

I do not believe that the president loves America. He doesn’t love you. And he doesn’t love me. He wasn’t brought up the way you were brought up and I was brought up through love of this country.

Classy, as always. But I bring it up to make a particular point. It’s unlikely, I think, that Walker will repudiate Giuliani’s comments. But Jeb Bush could—and if he’s smart, he will.

Here’s why. It would cost him some support among the tea party set, but he’s not going to get a lot of support there anyway. What’s more, he doesn’t really need it. All Jeb has to do to win is follow the Romney strategy: sweep up all the votes of the Republican moderates while everyone else fights over scraps of the tea party vote. Taking a public stand against Giuliani would cement his position as the adult in the Republican field, a position that Mitt Romney rode to the GOP nomination in 2012.

But the Romney strategy only works if Jeb is the sole adult running. Walker is trying to straddle the line between mainstream and tea party, and if he can pull it off he’ll win. Jeb’s team has to make sure he can’t do that, and the best way to accomplish this is to take a few high-profile stands—like denouncing Giuliani’s views—that Walker isn’t willing to emulate. If Jeb can force Walker to make some moves early on that paint him as a pure tea party creature, that could permanently hurt him. And with Romney out and Chris Christie looking weak, Jeb could then have the centrist Republican vote all to himself. That could put him in the White House.

But he has to go big and go fast. Denounce Giuliani in terms strong enough to get some attention, and in a way that’s likely to push Walker into making a mistake. The race is on.

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Giuliani’s Anti-Obama Rant Is a Big Opportunity for Jeb Bush

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How Does a City Count Its Homeless? I Tagged Along to Find Out

by XiomaraElisha Posted on February 17, 2015

Mother Jones

More Coverage of Homelessness


The Shockingly Simple, Surprisingly Cost-Effective Way to End Homelessness


Heartbreaking Photos and Tragic Tales of San Francisco’s Homeless


How Does a City Count Its Homeless? I Tagged Along to Find Out


This Massive Project Is Great News for Homeless Vets in Los Angeles


Here’s What It’s Like to Be a Homeless Techie in Silicon Valley


Hanging Out With the Tech Have-Nots at a Silicon Valley Shantytown

Early in the evening on January 29, hundreds of people filed into a small assembly room at the San Francisco Health Department, psyched for the night’s adventure: They were volunteers for the city’s annual “point in time” homeless count, which was taking place simultaneously in cities across the United States.

Cities are required to participate in the count, which is based on criteria provided by the Department of Housing and Urban Development. The data is used by legislators, government agencies, city officials, nonprofits—anyone who is interested, really—to evaluate strategies intended to curb homelessness. With deadlines approaching for the Obama Administration’s goal of ending chronic and veteran homelessness by the end of 2015—this year’s results would be particularly important.

The administration even dispatched officials to rally the troops—San Francisco got White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough. “Tonight in Orlando, Tucson, Los Angeles—everybody is going out to do exactly the same thing you are,” he told the volunteers. “It is a huge service to the country because you are going to give us the data that policymakers, academics, the president, and the first lady are going to use to hold us to account.”

McDonough chose San Francisco, he said, in part because it has embraced the president’s initiatives and done a good job at reducing its chronic, child, and veteran homeless populations. It would be up to this crowd to find out how much work was still needed.

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How Does a City Count Its Homeless? I Tagged Along to Find Out

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Score one for ALEC: West Virginia is first state to repeal a renewable energy standard

by LynnePilkington Posted on February 5, 2015

Score one for ALEC: West Virginia is first state to repeal a renewable energy standard

By on 5 Feb 2015commentsShare

This week, West Virginia Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin (D) signed a bill repealing the state’s renewable energy standard, which would have required major utilities to get at least 25 percent of their energy from renewable sources by 2025.

It’s a clear win for right-wing activists, led by the corporate-backed American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). They’ve been campaigning for years to roll back state-level renewable standards, mostly without success. But last year, they managed to freeze Ohio’s renewable standard at a less-than-ambitious level. And now they’ve had their first total success — a complete rollback of a renewable portfolio standard.

Ironically, it was under Tomblin’s tenure as Senate president that the standard was first passed. The West Virginia Coal Association, an industry trade group, also supported the legislation back in 2009 — and even helped write it — but has since turned against it, citing increased regulation of the coal industry. “We understand economic drivers and factors change over time, and the Act as it was passed in 2009 is no longer beneficial for our state,” Tomblin said. (Politics also change: West Virginia, once a blue state, is becoming increasingly Republican, and environmental regulation has, since 2009, become even more anathema to the GOP. In the state legislature, Republicans have put bolstering the state’s coal industry’s high on their 2015 agenda.)

Clean energy is also under attack in Colorado, where this week the Republican-controlled state Senate advanced a bill to weaken that state’s renewable energy standard, though its chances in the Democratic-controlled House are not so hot. Legislators in Kansas, Ohio, and Oklahoma are considering cutting back their renewable energy standards too.

Meanwhile, ALEC et al. are trying to roll back state net-metering policies, which make it more affordable for homeowners to have rooftop solar arrays. A bill being considered in Indiana “would slash net metering credits and add fixed charges to the bills of solar customers,” Greentech Media reports. But in this case, solar fans have some right-wing backers of their own, led by Tea Party activist and solar advocate Debbie Dooley: “Indiana Republicans should be championing free-market choice — not government-created utility monopolies,” says Dooley. “This is a deliberate attempt to kill solar and protect monopolies from competition, and this is going on in other states.”

This year, you can expect state-level clean energy battles to just keep getting more heated.

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Score one for ALEC: West Virginia is first state to repeal a renewable energy standard

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The Strict Abortion Ban that Abortion Foes Fear

by TarahFreeland Posted on February 2, 2015

Mother Jones

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Last month, a Kansas Republican promised that his state House committee would consider a bill banning abortions after the fetus has a detectable heartbeat—around the sixth week of development. The legislator, Steve Brunk, said he is confident the measure will pass in the GOP-controlled legislature. And Gov. Sam Brownback (R) has never vetoed an abortion bill.

Many anti-abortion activists are cheering Brunk on. But one voice is noticeably absent: that of Kansans For Life, the state’s most influential anti-abortion group. When asked, last week, if Kansas For Life supports the so-called heartbeat bill, the group’s legislative director hung up the phone.

Like a bill introduced in Oklahoma and another coming soon in Alabama, the Kansas bill would ban abortion far earlier than is constitutional. (In fact, it would prohibit abortion before most women even know they are pregnant.) Supporters say, that’s the point. The bans are meant to challenge Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that established a right to abortion. But the National Right to Life Committee, the nation’s most prominent anti-abortion group and the parent group of Kansans For Life, has spent years trying to convince anti-abortion lawmakers that heartbeat bills could actually lead to a Supreme Court decision expanding abortion rights.

“The Supreme Court, as it is constituted right now, may not be ready to overturn Roe,” says James Bopp, the chief counsel for the National Right to Life Committee. Provoking such a direct confrontation, Bopp tells Mother Jones, could end in a decision that puts the right to abortion on firmer legal ground than Roe. And that “would be a powerful weapon in the hands of pro-abortion lawyers that would jeopardize all current laws on abortion,” Bopp has warned.

Heartbeat bill supporters are unfazed. “There are ten things that God carved into stone,” says Janet Folger Porter, an anti-abortion activist who wrote the first heartbeat bill, which was introduced in Ohio in 2011. “And one of them was not, ‘Thou shalt be erudite about not killing babies.'”

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The Strict Abortion Ban that Abortion Foes Fear

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Step Aside, Steve King: Meet the Right’s Most Powerful Immigration Foe

by MeriAknehcznc Posted on January 29, 2015

Mother Jones

It wasn’t long ago that Sen. Jeff Sessions was waging a lonely battle against comprehensive immigration reform. ABC News called the Alabama Republican a “lone wolf” in his dogged quest to kill the Senate’s immigration reform bill, which passed the upper chamber in June 2013 on a 68-32 bipartisan vote. At one point, Sessions introduced an amendment to slash the number of immigrants allowed to enter the country legally—not even Texas firebrand Ted Cruz voted for it.

But Sessions’ days of fighting immigration reform from the sidelines are over. Last week, he became chair of the Senate judiciary subcommittee on immigration. The new face of Republican immigration policy has yet to make headlines like his anti-reform ally in the House, Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), whose inflammatory rhetoric about undocumented immigrants (“deportables“) has made him a household name within the Latino community. But Sessions is just as hardline as King. And now his party has place him in a high profile position in the nation’s ongoing and contentious immigration debate.

“By choosing Sessions, Senate Republicans are handing over the agenda and a megaphone to their leading anti-immigrant voice,” America’s Voice, a pro-immigration-reform group, said in a seven-page memo circulated to reporters that enumerated Sessions’ anti-immigration track record.

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Step Aside, Steve King: Meet the Right’s Most Powerful Immigration Foe

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John Boehner Faces a Revolt of the Moderates

by GiaMcAuley Posted on January 23, 2015

Mother Jones

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Having awakened from my slumber, I see that John Boehner has a whole new problem on his hands. Apparently the rump moderate wing of the the Republican Party is starting to feel itchy:

Female lawmakers pushed the party to drop Thursday’s planned vote on legislation that would ban abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy, forcing leaders to abruptly switch course and pass a different antiabortion bill.

Last week, a surprisingly large group of 26 House Republicans refused to support an amendment that called for ending deportation deferrals of young immigrants brought to the U.S. illegally as children. Those dissenters came within one vote of tanking the measure aimed at so-called Dreamers.

This comes from LA Times reporter Lisa Mascaro, who tells us these folks “bristle” at being called moderates. The prefer to be called pragmatists. Tomayto, tomahto, says me, though it’s telling that “moderate” is still a dirty word in GOP land. It’s also telling that all this fuss is over bills that everyone agrees are nothing more than the usual symbolic flotsam and jetsam that Republicans pass every year with no actual hope of any of them becoming law. This year, though, they’re having trouble even doing that.

Why? Is it because the bills are slightly less symbolic than in the past? There is, after all, just a bare chance that some of them could get through the Senate if sponsors line up a few Democrats to join in. They’d still get vetoed, but they’d nonetheless be a little less symbolic in the public’s mind. Or is it simply the fact that as Republican ranks grow, the party’s victories increasingly come in more moderate districts? As Democrats lose ground in moderate districts and become more solidly liberal, perhaps it’s inevitable that Republicans will become more like the Democrats of old.

In any case, John Boehner has his work cut out for him. He’s got tea partiers on one side, moderates on the other, and a president who has been very effectively throwing sand in the gears of Republican priorities ever since November. Boehner’s leadership skills, always a bit on the iffy side, are going to be sorely tested this year.

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John Boehner Faces a Revolt of the Moderates

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The Problem With Obama’s Bold SOTU

by CyrilApplegate Posted on January 21, 2015

Mother Jones

Barack Obama is very good at getting elected president (two for two!) and pretty darn good at policy (Obamacare, the stimulus, the auto industry rescue, Wall Street reform, ending Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell, Cuba, immigration reform executive action, dumping DOMA, middle-class tax cuts, new EPA limits on emissions that cause climate change, banning torture, downsizing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and killing Osama bin Laden). But there’s one key piece of the job description where he’s fallen short: shaping the ongoing political narrative of the nation.

The president is the country’s storyteller-in-chief. And despite his inspiring powers of oratory (see Campaign 2008) and his savvy understanding of the importance of values in political salesmanship (see Campaign 2012), Obama, as his aides concede, has not effectively sold the nation on his own accomplishments, and, simultaneously, he has failed to establish an overarching public plot line that explains the gridlock in Washington as the result of GOP obstructionists blocking him on important issues where public opinion is in his favor. With his State of the Union speech Tuesday night, Obama had one last chance to take a swing at forging this narrative. Though he did adopt a muscular stance in presenting a forceful and vigorous vision—going on offense in the fourth quarter of his presidency, as his advisers have put it—the president let the Republicans off easy.

Throughout his presidency, as the GOP has consistently sought to block him, Obama has responded inconsistently. He often has pleaded for reason and looked to craft a deal—frequently (and justifiably) to prevent a hit to the economy. (This was the adult-in-the-room strategy.) At times, he has praised House Speaker John Boehner, while pointing to Boehner’s tea party wing as the cause of the partisan paralysis. And then he has occasionally—but not too often—flashed anger and slammed Republicans for being irresponsible and reckless (the debt ceiling scuffle, the assorted government shutdown showdowns). He has not presented a steady and stark tale in which he stars as the fighter for the middle- and lower income Americans who are stymied repeatedly by always-say-no Republicans aligned with plutocrats, the gun lobby, corporate polluters, and other foes of progress. Consequently, he has often borne blame for the sluggish economy and the mess in Washington, with the Democratic Party paying the price for the dips in his approval rating.

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The Problem With Obama’s Bold SOTU

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