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The Price Is Right for Bernie Sanders in Nevada

by DianDossett269 Posted on February 18, 2016

Mother Jones

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The Price Is Right is one of the most overtly capitalist shows on TV, a prolonged infomercial that rewards contestants for their knowledge of the prices of various name-brand consumer goods. But Marco Antonio Regil, the former longtime host of the show’s Mexican counterpart Atínale Al Precio, is doing all he can to support Bernie Sanders, a socialist who rails against capitalist greed at every opportunity.

On Wednesday, Regil stopped by a small Sanders phone-banking operation to reach Spanish-speaking voters in Las Vegas. The phone bank was as much a photo-op for the media as it was a full-scale get-out-the-vote drive. Volunteers barely outnumbered reporters—hailing from the New York Times, NPR, CNN, and others—who piled into the house of Jackie Ramos, an enthusiastic Sanders supporter. While volunteers worked through their call sheets, state communications director Emilia Pablo teased them before Regil’s arrival. “I know the ladies are waiting for him,” she said of the handsome TV star, who has also hosted Spanish-language versions of Family Feud and Dancing With the Stars and the Miss Mexico pageant .

When Regil arrived, he huddled for photos with the fangirl volunteers, and then offered a brief speech detailing why Sanders was his candidate of choice. He described his childhood in Tijuana, when he revered the middle class in the United States that he saw lacking in Latin America. “The class divides in Latin America were one of the saddest thing I grew up experiencing,” he said. But that’s slipping away, he said, hence the need for Sanders. “I know what happens when income inequality and the classes start dividing, and the gap becomes so big: Poor people start struggling, they cannot survive, and they start getting violent. They start mugging other people.”

But he was quick to caution that the socialism that Sanders offers isn’t the same as the Latin America version put forward by politicians like Hugo Chavez or Fidel Castro. “He calls it Democratic socialism,” he said. “I don’t like using that word, I prefer using conscious capitalism.”

“And I want Elizabeth Warren to be vice president,” he shouted to the reporters who followed him out.

On Saturday, Nevadans will pick their candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in the state’s caucuses. In the surprisingly tight race, the Latino vote will be critical. Latinos make up 27.8 percent of the state’s population, despite the Hillary Clinton campaign’s attempts to downplay expectations for the state by describing it as dominated by white voters, who have tended to support Sanders.

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The Price Is Right for Bernie Sanders in Nevada

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The Trump Town Hall Was a Big Fat Waste

by FeliciaRwi Posted on February 18, 2016

Mother Jones

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Tonight’s Trump Town Hall, hosted by MSNBC, may indicate that Trump has finally stunned the nation into silence. Or at least mild tolerance, like the way we don’t challenge our drunk uncle at Thanksgiving.

Trump—who has called for a ban on Muslim immigrants, has retweeted posts from white supremacists, and has remarked that Mexican immigrants are “rapists”—wasn’t asked about any of these assertions. He was asked about poll numbers, if Apple is wrong for refusing to unlock the iPhone of one of the San Bernadino shooters, and if he can play nice with Congress if elected to office. In an hour-long question-and-answer session in Charleston, S.C., moderators Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough occasionally pushed Trump on specificity, but couldn’t garner substantial answers. As Isaac Chotiner points out at Slate, “He wasn’t pressed hard for any policy details, nor challenged about his well-catalouged dislike of the truth.” Instead, he was asked the kind of medium-range questions that, well, other candidates get.

Or maybe Trump has conquered the Overton Window theory—the range of ideas the public will accept—faster than anyone in history. Could it be that his talking points have become so commonplace, no one even questions them anymore? Rather, we ask him questions like the one from an audience member tonight: “Why do you want to be president?”

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The Trump Town Hall Was a Big Fat Waste

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The Secret of El Chapo’s Success: Diversification

by AngelikFosbery Posted on January 12, 2016

Mother Jones

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By some estimates, the just-nabbed billionaire drug kingpin Joaquín Guzmán Loera, a.k.a. El Chapo, supplies more than half the cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine, and marijuana that comes into the United States. But not all of those drugs were created equal in his eyes. While pot undoubtedly helped El Chapo get his start, it’s no longer the key to his dominion.

Guzmán, who was arrested by the Mexican police on Friday, grew up in the 1960s in Sinaloa, the remote, rugged, West Coast state still known as Mexico’s marijuana heartland. As a boy, he earned money working in marijuana fields before a friend’s father—one of the first Sinaloan farmers to traffic pot in bulk—brought him into what later became the Sinaloa Cartel. And although pot was the cartel’s bread and butter for years, El Chapo’s syndicate long ago branched into other drugs.

It was a prescient move. Since 2011, competition from high-quality pot grown legally and quasi-legally north of the border has cut the wholesale price for Sinaloan marijuana by 70 percent. Mexico now supplies only about one-third of America’s pot, down from two-thirds as recently as 2008. “It’s a big difference,” a Sinaloan farmer told NPR. “If the US continues to legalize pot, they will run us into the ground.”

Like any good businessman, El Chapo understood the importance of a diverse portfolio. In the late 1970s, Mexican traffickers began moving cocaine for producers in Colombia and Central America, first by air and boat to Central America and Mexico, and then by land into the United States. Sinaloa now controls an estimated 35 percent of Colombian cocaine shipments.

Unique among Mexican cartels, Sinaloa is both horizontally and vertically integrated. It produces its own marijuana and heroin, and starting in the 1990s it expanded into methamphetamine. After regulations made it more difficult to manufacture large quantities of meth in the United States, Sinaloa ordered precursor chemicals by the boatload from India and China to supply its own Mexican superlabs.

More recently, El Chapo has cashed in on America’s growing appetite for heroin. Since 2009, domestic seizures have increased by more than two-thirds. Almost all heroin consumed here is now smuggled across the US-Mexico border. An increasing share of the opium used to make it is grown in Mexico—mainly in Chihuahua, Durango, and Sinaloa’s “Golden Triangle” region.

DEA 2015 National Drug Threat Assessment

Even the heroin that isn’t grown by the Sinaloa Cartel is likely being smuggled by it. The orange areas in this map show the cartel’s sphere of influence in the United States:

DEA

The cartel’s evolution shows how the legalization of pot has taken business away from criminal syndicates. But it also suggests that the cartels will continue to thrive amid the prohibition of other popular drugs. “It’s a reality that drugs destroy,” Guzmán told actor Sean Penn shortly before his capture. “Unfortunately, as I said, where I grew up, there was no other way and there still isn’t a way to survive, no way to work in our economy to be able to make a living.”

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The Secret of El Chapo’s Success: Diversification

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Was New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez Drunk at Rowdy Hotel Party?

by RogelioGorsuch Posted on December 23, 2015

Mother Jones

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A new audio recording released by Santa Fe police on Tuesday suggests that New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez, once a rising star within the Republican party, appeared to be “inebriated” inside a hotel room where a party for her friends and staff was taking place. Hotel employees were forced to call police during the evening of December 14th, after guests complained about loud noises and bottles being thrown from the room’s balcony.

In the recording, a security guard at the Eldorado Hotel can be heard talking to Sgt. Anthony Tapia about the disturbance. A segment of the audio, recorded on Tapia’s police belt, below:

“I never expected the first time it would be the governor,” the guard said. “I can tell she is…”

“Inebriated,” Tapia said.

“Yes.”

Martinez could also be heard saying:

“Five hours ago, there was somebody that we said, ‘Get out of the room, do not be doing what you’re doing.’ There were bottles being thrown over. We said, ‘Get the hell out and stop.'”

The audio sharply contrasts to a previous statement made by Martinez’s spokesman last week, claiming that snowballs, not bottles, were thrown off the balcony. In a statement apologizing for the incident on Friday, Martinez also returned to the snowball version of the story.

“There was apparently a party in a hotel room earlier in the night that was disruptive,” Martinez said. “Someone was also throwing snowballs from a balcony. None of that should have happened and I was not aware of the extent of the behavior, until recently. And that behavior is not acceptable.”

During a public appearance on Tuesday, the Santa Fe New Mexican reports Martinez refused to answer questions about the recording.

The recording’s release comes at a particularly inopportune time for Martinez, who is reportedly being investigated by the FBI for alleged fundraising violations during her first run for governor in 2009.

Her landslide reelection victory last year brought her national attention and she has been raised as a strong contender for vice president in 2016. But Martinez’s latest gaffe and unflattering comparisons to Sarah Palin are likely to have dampened such enthusiasm.

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Was New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez Drunk at Rowdy Hotel Party?

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Donald Trump’s Destruction Test of the Republican Party Continues Apace

by MelisaBlaubaum Posted on December 3, 2015

Mother Jones

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A few days ago, like an evil mastermind on 24, Donald Trump declared that if we wanted to fight terrorists we needed to target their families for death. Today he gave a speech to the Republican Jewish Coalition and told the crowd, “You’re not going to support me because I don’t want your money.” Ha ha. Stupid money-grubbing Jews. As Judd Legum pointed out, this means that Trump has now insulted blacks, refugees, immigrants, Muslims, the disabled, and Jews.

I’m now going to double down on my belief that Trump is running the world’s greatest reality show here. I think he got bored one day and came up with an idea that tickled him: “I wonder just how deranged you can get and still retain the support of the tea party wingnuts?” So he made a $1 bet with some of his Democratic friends and performed a test run in 2012 with his maniacal birther stuff. But all that did was show the depth of his challenge. He’d have to do a lot more than that in 2016. He started off slow with wild claims about immigrant Mexican rapists, knowing it would draw in the rubes. Then he laughably claimed that he’d get Mexico to pay for a border wall. Nothing happened. He insulted John McCain for being a POW. Nothing happened. He started telling obvious lies. Nothing. He lied on national TV and was called on it a few minutes later. Nothing. He all but admitted that he knows diddly about the Bible. Nothing. He called evangelical darling Ben Carson a nutcase liar. Nothing. He claimed that thousands of Muslims in Jersey City celebrated 9/11. Nothing. He mocked a disabled reporter in front of the cameras. Nothing. He suggested taking out terrorist families. Nothing. He appeared on the radio show of a crackpot conspiracy theorist. Nothing. Now he’s insulted an audience of conservative Jews.

Trump is probably frustrated. He’s basically dialed it up to 11 already, and the crowds are still swooning. What does he have to do? Tell a story about how he was abducted by aliens back in the 90s? Promise to nuke Tehran if he’s elected president? Suggest the world would be a better place if we’d never invented any HIV treatments?

Even Trump must be scratching his head wondering what to do next. There’s gotta be something that finally goes too far. Right?

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Donald Trump’s Destruction Test of the Republican Party Continues Apace

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Yes, Donald Trump Agreed That We Should Have a National Registry of Muslims

by Eddy7270gg Posted on November 21, 2015

Mother Jones

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I was arguing on Twitter with Mickey Kaus last night about the Trump Muslim registry story, and today he’s touting a Byron York piece about how the “Trump database story was built on a foundation of nothing.” But that’s not fair. The whole thing started when Yahoo’s Hunter Walker asked Trump about Syrian refugees. York asked Walker for audio of the interview, which he provided. Here’s the relevant excerpt:

WALKER: France declared this state of emergency where they closed the borders and they established some degree of warrantless searches. I know how you feel about the borders, but do you think there is some kind of state of emergency here, and do we need warrantless searches of Muslims?

TRUMP: Well, we’re going to have to do things that we never did before. Blah blah blah But we have to err on the side of security for our people and our nation.

WALKER: And in terms of doing this, to pull off the kind of tracking we need, do you think we might need to register Muslims in some type of database, or note their religion on their ID?

TRUMP: Well, we’re going to have to look at a lot of things very closely….

When I first read Walker’s story, I concluded that he had been on a fishing expedition. I still think that, but this transcript actually softens my objections. The first question is reasonably motivated by the French response to the Paris attacks, and Trump makes it clear that he’s willing to go pretty far to deal with the ISIS threat. So Walker takes the bait and goes further. Trump then tap dances and never really addresses the question about registries.

So far, though, the most you can do is criticize Trump for not immediately denouncing the registry proposal. But he’s now on notice. Headlines began appearing about this, and it was a big topic of discussion on Thursday. After the Yahoo story hit, Trump could no longer pretend to be taken by surprise if someone asked again about registering Muslims. And sure enough, MSNBC’s Vaughn Hillyard did. Here’s the transcript:

Hillyard: Should there be a database or system that tracks Muslims in this country?

Trump: There should be a lot of systems. Beyond databases. I mean, we should have a lot of systems. And today you can do it.

Some talk about Trump’s wall on the Mexican border ensues.

Trump: We have to stop people from coming in to our country illegally.

Hillyard: But specifically, how do you actually get them registered into a database?

Trump: It would be just good management….

Hillyard: Do you go to mosques and sign these people up?

Trump: Different places. You sign ‘em up at different, but it’s all about management. Our country has no management.

Hillyard: Would they have to legally be in this database, would they be–

Trump: They have to be — they have to be — let me just tell you: People can come to the country, but they have to come legally. Thank you very much.

This is pretty plain. Sure, Trump is at a ropeline and he’s distracted. But he knows the registry issue is a live question, and Hillyard is very clear about what he’s asking. There’s some confusion in the middle about whether Trump is talking about a Muslim registry or a wall on the Mexican border, but there’s no confusion at all when Hillyard asks “Do you go to mosques and sign people up?” And York himself agrees:

Trump’s offhand decision to tell MSNBC he would implement a database was an enormously stupid thing to do. And by Friday afternoon, Trump tweeted, “I didn’t suggest a database — a reporter did. We must defeat Islamic terrorism & have surveillance, including a watch list, to protect America.”

But the damage had been done. In the end, the responsibility is always the candidate’s to be on guard for attempts, by journalists or rival campaign operatives, to entice him into saying damaging things.

So was the Muslim registry story built on a foundation of nothing? Sure, in a way. But reporters ask hypothetical questions all the time. This is hardly a startling new technique. What’s more, Trump has built his entire campaign on saying things outrageous enough to get lots of media attention. But now he’s complaining that a reporter gave him a chance to say something outrageous and it generated a lot of media attention? Give me a break.

As York says, Trump has since backtracked on Twitter: “I didn’t suggest a database-a reporter did.” True enough. But Trump pretty obviously agreed. This wasn’t a gotcha or a cleverly loaded question. It was obvious what both reporters were talking about. The first time he tap danced. The second time he agreed. Trump is a grown man who’s accustomed to dealing with the press. There was nothing unfair about this. He may have backtracked now, but he thought it sounded like a fine idea until the blowback became a little too intense.

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Yes, Donald Trump Agreed That We Should Have a National Registry of Muslims

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Hurricane Patricia Could Devastate Mexico for Decades

by ClaudioStrom Posted on October 23, 2015

Mother Jones

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I’m neither a weather blogger nor a natural disaster blogger, but holy cow: Hurricane Patricia is set to absolutely devastate Mexico in a few hours. Brad Plumer provides the basics:

The storm’s current size is shocking. Just 30 hours ago, Patricia was an ordinary hurricane with maximum winds of 60 miles per hour. Since then, Patricia has grown into a monster Category 5 hurricane, with maximum sustained winds nearing 200 miles per hour. The current storm appears to be unprecedented in the historical record.

Naturally, Drudge is going nuts, and with good reason. Plumer directs us to a study of long-term hurricane damage to a region’s economy, and Patricia could be unbelievably destructive:

According to the table on the left, a big hurricane can decrease income by 14.9 percent 20 years later. But there’s also this: “The largest event in our sample (78.3 m/s) is estimated to have reduced long-run GDP by 29.8%.” Patricia is currently running at about 90 meters per second. If it stays this powerful, the chart on the right suggests it could kill thousands and reduce the GDP of the Mexican coast west of Mexico City by 30-40 percent for decades.

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Hurricane Patricia Could Devastate Mexico for Decades

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Los Lobos Comes Back With Scorching Boogie and Psychedelia

by MoniqueSupple91 Posted on September 28, 2015

Mother Jones

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Los Lobos
Gates of Gold
429 Records

Is there a more versatile outfit in rock? Since the ’70s, the LA quintet Los Lobos has displayed a staggering stylistic range beyond the reach of most other great bands, and done everything with soulful verve. On its first album of new material in five years, the group shows its age in the best possible way, segueing effortlessly from scorching boogie to wistful psychedelia to tender Mexican folk, never straining for effect. As always, David Hidalgo tends to sing the romantic songs, while César Rosas tackles the rowdier ones, but either way, Los Lobos runs like the musical equivalent of an impeccably maintained classic car. Long may they roll.

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Los Lobos Comes Back With Scorching Boogie and Psychedelia

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Trump Talks Policy!

by BudHockaday Posted on August 13, 2015

Mother Jones

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A “friend” of mine forced me to read the transcript of Sean Hannity’s interview with Donald Trump earlier this week, and it was fascinating in a train wreck kind of way. After a few minutes, Hannity said it was time to get serious and talk policy. Trump says great, let’s do it. So Hannity then tries manfully to get Trump to explain how Mexico is going to pay for a wall on the border. No dice:

HANNITY: You talked about Mexico. How quickly could you build the wall? How do you make them pay for the wall, as you said?

TRUMP: So easy. Will a politician be able to do it? Absolutely not….

HANNITY: Is it a tariff?

TRUMP: In China — listen to this. In China, the great China wall — I mean, you want to talk about a wall, that’s a serious wall, OK….

HANNITY: Sure.

TRUMP: So let’s say you’re talking about 1,000 miles versus 13,000. And then they say you can’t do it. It’s peanuts. It’s peanuts….

HANNITY: So through a tariff?

TRUMP: We’re not paying for it. Of course.

HANNITY: You want to do business, you’re going to help us with this.

TRUMP: Do you know how easy that is? They’ll probably just give us the money….And I’m saying, that’s like 100 percent. That’s not like 98 percent. Sean, it’s 100 percent they’re going to pay. And if they don’t pay, we’ll charge them a little tariff. It’ll be paid.

Trump gets five chances to explain his plan, and all we get is endless bluster. It’s easy! Hell, the Great Wall of China cost more! We’re not paying for it! The closest Trump comes to an answer—after prompting from Hannity—is some kind of tariff on Mexican goods, which of course is illegal under NAFTA. Trump would have to abrogate the treaty and get Congress to agree. In other words, maybe just a wee bit harder than he thinks.

(Oh, and Mexico’s president says the entire idea is a fantasy. “Of course it’s false,” a spokesman told Bloomberg News. “It reflects an enormous ignorance for what Mexico represents, and also the irresponsibility of the candidate who’s saying it.”)

The whole interview with Hannity is like this. The fascinating part is Trump’s ADHD. He just flatly can’t stay on topic, and I don’t think it’s fake. He constantly veers off into side topics: how far ahead he is in the polls; how everyone says he won the debate; how good a student he was at Wharton; how he’d send Carl Icahn to China; etc.

And then there’s the Hannity/Trump math. In Texas, there have been 642,000 crimes by illegal immigrants since 2008. Obamacare premiums are up more than 40 percent this year. Unemployment is at 40 percent. The whole 5.4 percent thing is just a government lie.

I don’t even really have a comment on this stuff. On a lot of subjects—his replacement for Obamacare, for example—it’s obvious he’s just making up his policy on the spot. Um, health accounts! And, um, no more state lines! And catastrophic insurance, sure! And preexisting conditions! You bet. And then….an ADHD segue into Obama playing golf, and Hannity finally gives up and switches topics.

I understand that the second part of the interview is even better. If I’m bored enough, I’ll take a look at it when the transcript goes up. Like I said, kind of fascinating if you’re the sort of person who likes to gawk at car wrecks on the side of the road.

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Trump Talks Policy!

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Here’s Another Vital Conversation That Donald Trump Is Ruining

by GonzaloTen93 Posted on August 11, 2015

Mother Jones

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Albert H. Teich/Shutterstock

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Over at Vox, David Roberts investigates Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump’s views on climate change and finds that they are thoughtful, nuanced, and carefully grounded in science.

Kidding, kidding. Trump’s proclamations on climate change are as sweeping, bombastic, and asinine as his shocking claim that Mexican immigrants are a bunch of rapists. Here are a couple of typical tweets:

Trump thinks cold weather in the US in winter disproves the demonstrable fact that global average temperatures have been steadily rising since the Industrial Revolution. Roberts’ pithy conclusion is that Trump’s opinions are wrong, but, “They are, for the most part, mainstream Republican positions.” That depends on how you look at it. Rejecting climate science is the norm among Republican politicians. (Republican voters are more evenly split between climate science acceptance and denial.) But Trump’s specific approach to climate change represents a more rare and particularly disturbing species of climate science denialism.

Most other Republican presidential candidates do not actually deny that the Earth is getting warmer. Rather, they hem and haw about whether humans and greenhouse gas emissions are the cause of it, and to what extent. Here are some examples:

Jeb Bush: “I think global warming may be real…It is not unanimous among scientists that it is disproportionately manmade.”

And Rick Perry: “I don’t believe man-made global warming is settled in science enough.”

And just yesterday, John Kasich: “I think that man absolutely affects the environment, but as to whether, what the impact is…the overall impact—I think that’s a legitimate debate.”

They argue that the science of human-induced climate change is incomplete, but they accept that warming is measured by data and that NASA’s temperature readings are accurate.

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Scott Walker Is the Worst Candidate for the Environment


How Hillary Clinton’s State Department Sold Fracking to the World


Jim Webb Is Awful on Climate Change


Martin O’Malley Is a Real Climate Hawk


Is Bernie Sanders the Best Candidate on Climate Change?

Some more extreme conservatives, like Ted Cruz, question whether the data actually even shows the Earth is warming. The more mainstream way of doing this, which Cruz did in his appearance at the Koch brothers’ recent confab in California, is to selectively and misleadingly present very specific facts in order to create a false impression. The more fringey, conspiracist approach, which Cruz also engaged in at that event, is to claim that the temperature measurements are being manufactured by scientists with an agenda. Cruz said, “If you look at satellite data for the last 18 years, there’s been zero recorded warming…They’re cooking the books. They’re actually adjusting the numbers.”

That’s pretty out there, but less so still than Trump because Cruz does accept that one would establish warming by measuring the temperature, and by doing so not just on one day in one place, but all over the Earth for years. Trump doesn’t selectively present the data or assert that it’s been rigged, he just ignores it. If it’s cold outside in New York in the winter, Trump says, then there is no global warming. His problem is twofold: He does not understand the difference between weather (still often cold in New York in the winter) and climate (gradually warming on average over the entire Earth), and he does not respect the difference between data and anecdote. Trump is hardly unique in this regard—remember Senate Environment Committee Chair James Inhofe (R-Okla.) and his snowball—but Trump is the only top-tier Republican presidential candidate who subscribes to it.

So the fact that Trump is in first place in the GOP presidential polls, with more than twice as high a percentage as his nearest competitor, Jeb Bush, reveals some alarming things about a large segment of the Republican voter base (not smart) and the prospects for reaching consensus on the need for climate action (not good).

Trump isn’t merely another extremist who rejects climate science. Trump isn’t really a conservative at all. He’s a reactionary populist who has elevated ignorance to a political philosophy. Call it ignorantism.

Even if Trump hadn’t said anything about climate change in particular, his dismissiveness toward objective fact-finding processes would bode ill for the environment. Government policies—economic, public health, environmental—require an accurate measurement of data to inform policymakers who write laws and regulators who enforce them. And a plurality of the Republican electorate currently supports a presidential candidate who does not accept that data, rather than personal anecdote, is how one measures empirical fact.

Despite the widespread opinion that Trump performed poorly in the first Republican debate last week, the only poll to come out since shows him still in the lead with 23 percent of Republican voters. The same poll shows 29 percent of respondents saying Trump did worst in the debate. But a lot of Republicans find his buffoonery and belligerent ignorance compelling.

Even though Trump will not be the GOP nominee, whoever it is will need to keep Trump’s supporters on board. And all those climate hawks hoping the GOP will stop being “the party of stupid” will be disappointed.

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Here’s Another Vital Conversation That Donald Trump Is Ruining

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