Tag Archives: republican

Why Do So Many Obvious Losers Think They Can Be President?

by Ngan6856mpkysje Posted on June 3, 2015

Mother Jones

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My body is continuing its revolt against all things good and true, so my mental acuity is scattered at best. But here’s something I’ve wanted to get out of my brain and onto pixels for a while. It’s based on nothing at all except my personal opinion. It’s not based on polls, nor anything the candidates have said, nor any detailed analysis of which blocs of voters each one will appeal to. It’s just my gut feeling. So here it is: my ranking of the 2016 Republican presidential field:

Vanity candidates: 0 percent chance of winning

Rand Paul
Ben Carson
Carly Fiorina
Mike Huckabee
Rick Santorum
George Pataki
Lindsey Graham
John Kasich

Not quite 0 percent, could maybe catch on if something really lucky happens

Bobby Jindal
Ted Cruz
Marco Rubio
Chris Christie
Rick Perry

Legitimate candidates with a real shot at the nomination

Jeb Bush
Scott Walker

Right off the bat, I know there are at least two people on my list who will generate some dissent: Rand Paul and Marco Rubio. But Rand Paul has no chance. Sorry. He has nearly Sarah Palin’s instincts at working the press and getting his base excited, but his views are just flatly too far out of the tea party mainstream to win the Republican nomination. As for Rubio, I just don’t see it. I know most people would put him down with Bush and Walker as having a legitimate shot, but…..really? The guy kinda reminds me of Pete Campbell on Mad Men. He’s got some talent, but no one really likes him that much. And he’s kind of an idiot, really. Still, he’s young, good looking, and appeals to older tea party types. To me, that means he’s an ideal running mate, but has no chance at the brass ring.

The thing that strikes me whenever I actually type up this list is how few legitimate contenders I find. But maybe I shouldn’t be surprised. In 2012, I thought from the very start that Romney was the only legitimate contender, and there are twice as many in 2016. Maybe that’s fairly normal, actually.

So here’s my question. You might disagree with my ranking, but probably not by a whole lot. There just aren’t very many candidates who have a serious chance at winning the nomination. So why are so many running? When guys like Dennis Kucinich or Ron Paul ran, I understood why. They just wanted a chance to present their views to a national audience. But that can’t be what’s motivating everyone on this list. So what is it? What is it that’s somehow convinced so many obvious losers that they actually have a shot at becoming the next president of the United States?

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Why Do So Many Obvious Losers Think They Can Be President?

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Nebraska Becomes First Conservative State in 40 Years to Repeal the Death Penalty

by DottyClaudio12 Posted on May 27, 2015

Mother Jones

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Nebraska legislators on Wednesday overrode the Republican governor’s veto to repeal the state’s death penalty, a major victory for a small but growing conservative movement to end executions. The push to end capital punishment divided Nebraska conservatives, with 18 conservatives joining the legislature’s liberals to provide the 30 to 19 vote to override Gov. Pete Ricketts’ veto—barely reaching the 30 votes necessary for repeal.

Today’s vote makes Nebraska “the first predominantly Republican state to abolish the death penalty in more than 40 years,” said Robert Dunham, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, in a statement shortly after the vote. Dunham’s statement singled out conservatives for rallying against the death penalty and said their work in Nebraska is “part of an emerging trend in the Republican Party.” (Nebraska has a unicameral, nonpartisan legislature, so lawmakers do not have official party affiliations.)

For conservative opponents of the death penalty, Wednesday’s vote represents a breakthrough. A month ago, overcoming the governor’s veto still looked like a long-shot. Conservatives make a number of arguments against the death penalty, including the high costs and a religion-inspired argument about taking life. “I may be old-fashioned, but I believe God should be the only one who decides when it is time to call a person home,” Nebraska state Sen. Tommy Garrett, a conservative Republican who opposes the death penalty, said last month.

“I think this will become more common,” Marc Hyden, national coordinator of Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty, said in a statement following the repeal vote. “Conservatives have sponsored repeal bills in Kansas, Montana, Wyoming, South Dakota, Missouri, and Kentucky in recent years.”

But conservative opponents of the death penalty have a tough slog ahead. Though support for the death penalty has reached its lowest point in 40 years, according to the latest Pew Research Center survey, 77 percent of Republicans still support it.

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Nebraska Becomes First Conservative State in 40 Years to Repeal the Death Penalty

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For the First Time Ever, Social Conservatives No Longer Outnumber Social Liberals in America

by BoyceTindale Posted on May 22, 2015

Mother Jones

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Via Ed Kilgore, here’s an interesting chart from the good folks at Gallup:

What’s interesting about this is that the change is due almost entirely to Democrats and Democratic leaners. Since 1999, that group has gone from 35 percent socially liberal to 53 percent, and from 20 percent socially conservative to 14 percent conservative.

Republicans and Republican leaners, by contrast, have barely budged. In the 2015 polling there’s a slight dip in conservative ID and a slight spike in moderate ID, but it’s probably just noise. Generally speaking, the lines are pretty flat over the past couple of decades.

So why have Democrats changed so much? Perhaps it’s the impact of Millennials. Perhaps it’s the impact of gay marriage, which Democrats have been far more willing to accept than Republicans. Maybe MSNBC and liberal blogs have had a bigger impact than I would have guessed. I’m not sure. But the increase has been steady enough that it can’t be blamed on any specific event, like the Bush presidency or the financial crisis.

In any case, this really is a milestone. For a long time, one of the rocks of political analysis in America has been the simple fact that conservatives outnumber liberals. That’s been true since at least the 60s, and probably for the entire postwar period—and it’s been a perpetual millstone around Democratic necks. They couldn’t win national elections just by getting the liberal vote and a little bit of the center-right vote. They had to get a lot of the center-right vote.

But it now looks like that era is coming to an end. With social issues increasingly defining politics, a social liberal is, for all practical purposes, just a plain old liberal—and the trend of increasing liberal ID is already underway. It’s still got a ways to go, but the liberal-conservative gap is definitely closing. This probably goes a long way toward explaining why Hillary Clinton and other Democrats seem much more willing to move left than in the past. It’s because they no longer think they have to capture a huge chunk of the moderate vote to win. They still need some moderates in their camp, but they no longer need to capture two-thirds or more of them. Like Republicans, they can make do with half or even a bit less.

UPDATE: The headline initially just said “liberal” and “conservative” without mentioning that it was about social liberals and conservatives. Too much shorthand. Sorry about that. I’ve changed the headline and a few words of the text to make everything clear.

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For the First Time Ever, Social Conservatives No Longer Outnumber Social Liberals in America

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CNN Plans to Feature Peanut Gallery Debate as Warmup for Main Event

by CecilaCardell Posted on May 21, 2015

Mother Jones

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CNN will be hosting the second Republican debate, and they’ve come up with a….unique way of dealing with the fact that there are just too damn many candidates. To handle the crowd, they’re going to have two separate debates:

“The first 10 candidates — ranked from highest to lowest in polling order from an average of all qualifying polls released between July 16 and September 10 who satisfy the criteria requirements … will be invited to participate in ‘Segment B’ of the September 16, 2015 Republican Presidential Primary Debate,” the network states in its candidate criteria. “Candidates who satisfy the criteria and achieve an average of at least 1 percent in three national polls, but are not ranked in the top 10 of polling order will be invited to participate in ‘Segment A’ of the September 16, 2015 Republican Presidential Primary Debate.”

Did you get that? All the yokels—Carly Fiorina, Bobby Jindal, Rick Santorum, etc.—will go on first. They’ll be sort of the warm-up act. Then they’ll get shuffled off the stage and the big guns will have prime time all to themselves. This is pretty humiliating for the also-rans, but presumably if they play by the rules they’ll have a chance to move up, just like in English Premier League soccer. Perhaps Rick Perry will stumble and get relegated to the minor leagues for the next debate, while Jindal will knock everyone’s socks off and get promoted to the show. I don’t know if I’d quite call this “fun,” but it would certainly make for some interesting office pools.

The first debate, which is hosted by Fox, will feature none of this nonsense. The top ten candidates will be invited to the debate, and that’s that. If you’re outside the top ten, you can watch the debate on your big-screen TV at home. Or, if Fox is feeling generous, perhaps the sad sacks polling at the 1% level will be allowed to while away their time in the spin room, where they can try to buttonhole reporters and explain why they really should have been up on the stage. Perhaps the saddest story will win a prize.

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CNN Plans to Feature Peanut Gallery Debate as Warmup for Main Event

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The Truth About How Obama Has Handled the Pacific Trade Deal

by ScarletJoy Posted on May 20, 2015

Mother Jones

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While Kevin Drum is focused on getting better, we’ve invited some of the remarkable writers and thinkers who have traded links and ideas with him from Blogosphere 1.0 to this day to contribute posts and keep the conversation going. Today we’re honored to present a post from Daniel Drezner.

One of the enduring memes of the Obama administration has been the notion that the president is a lousy politician. One of the things that Bill Clinton and George W. Bush had in common is that they knew how to schmooze. Obama, on the other hand, does not have any close friendships on the international stage, nor is he particularly tight with Republican or Democrat members of Congress. Indeed, this has been a sufficiently common lament for someone to write “A Brief History of President Obama Not Having Any Friends” last year.

So let’s stipulate that the president is a cold fish. What remains contested is whether this matters in terms of getting things done. There are DC insiders who argue that personal relationships and one-on-one politicking really do matter. These are the pundits who tend to bemoan presidential passivity and write “Why won’t Obama lead?” ledes and ask why Barack Obama doesn’t drink more whiskey with Mitch McConnell or play more golf with John Boehner. And then there are structuralists who argue that what really matters are the separation of powers written into the Constitution and the incentive of opposition parties to, you know, oppose the president’s policies.

Last week’s machinations over trade promotion authority (TPA) regarding the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) will not definitively settle this debate, but they did offer a few data points that suggest the relative merits of each side of this debate.

First, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell gave a delightfully blunt interview to the New York Times‘ John Harwood. On TPA/TPP, McConnell and most of the Senate Republicans are working with Obama, which puts him in strange territory. To explain this to Harwood, McConnell flatly debunked the notion that Obama would have accomplished more in the GOP-controlled Congress if only he’d been more sociable with Republican members of Congress:

In the caricature of how Washington works, Mr. McConnell and other congressional Republicans were supposed to bond with Mr. Obama at a so-called bourbon summit meeting, as though a soothing, generous pour would bring them together.

It has never happened—which, as far as Mr. McConnell is concerned, counts for exactly zero.

“It’s all good stuff for you all to write, but it has no effect on policy,” Mr. McConnell said. He dismissed “press talk” that social outreach could bridge the deep ideological and partisan divisions of 21st-century American politics.

“It wouldn’t make any difference,” he concluded. “Look, it’s a business.” (emphasis added)

And that sound you just heard was the combined egos of the “why can’t Obama lead” crowd visibly deflating.

McConnell’s Hyman Roth-like answer would seem to validate the structuralist position of the president’s ability to get legislation passed—at least when it comes to dealing with the opposition party.

When it comes to dealing with his own party, however, I’m not sure that the structuralists can claim victory. One could argue that Democrats are just as constrained on trade as Republicans because of their base’s public opinion, but I don’t think it’s really that simple.

There were a lot of things going on in last Tuesday’s initial failure of TPA to pass the Senate, including genuine policy differences between Obama and elements of the progressive movement. But as Reuters noted, at least part of it was Obama’s alienation of Senate Democrats:

As for Obama, he may have hurt his chances with Democrats by minimizing concerns about trade’s impact on labor, the environment and regulations, and his explicit criticism of the anti-trade stance of leading liberal Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren.

“The president was disrespectful to her,” Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown told reporters. “When he said that a number of us, not just Senator Warren, don’t know what we’re talking about…he shouldn’t have.” Brown opposes the fast-track bill.

Indeed, there has been a lot of Democrat grumbling about Obama’s rhetorical jabs at Warren and other anti-TPP Democrats, to the point where Sherrod Brown accused Obama of sexism.

Of course, twenty-four hours later, a deal had been struck for a vote on TPA in the Senate. If Edward Isaac-Dovere and Burgess Everett’s Politico recap is accurate, then Presidential Leadership (TM) played a pivotal role in the process:

The White House named names. And not 24 hours later, President Barack Obama and his aides had a deal to get fast-track back on track…

Obama aides strategically put out word to reporters of the meeting, even before senators had arrived at the White House. Shortly after the meeting ended, they released the list: the seven Democrats who’d voted for fast-track in committee, plus Sens. Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.), Patty Murray (D-Wash.) and Tim Kaine (D-Va.). A few hours before, every Senate Democrat except Tom Carper of Delaware had publicly rebuked his trade effort. Now the White House put on the spot the other nine who had either publicly or privately indicated they would support the underlying fast-track and Trade Adjustment Assistance package, but who voted against opening debate.

In other words, the president had more than enough votes just in the room to get the trade bill moving. According to senators who were there, the president took his time, spending 90 minutes to explain why they needed to get their act together.

Now this does sound like some Old Time-y Presidential leadership, and so maybe, when it comes to managing his own party, there is something to the “Why can’t Obama lead?” meme.

But not a lot. My colleague Greg Sargent’s take suggests that last Tuesday’s vote was more about Reid/McConnell dynamics than anything to do with Obama. And even the close of Politico‘s story:

Then again, some Senate Democrats said this all would have been resolved even without Obama—though maybe not in time for the House to take up the bill in June, keeping it on track to help Obama seal the Trans-Pacific Partnership with 12 Pacific Rim countries.

“This was going to end up there anyway,” Nelson said. “But I would say the meeting with the president accelerated the discussion.”

So, to sum up: Most of the time, the structuralists are mostly right when it comes to presidents exercising leadership in pushing legislation through Congress. But they’re not completely right. On the margins, when dealing with one’s own party, maybe presidential leadership matters just a wee bit.

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The Truth About How Obama Has Handled the Pacific Trade Deal

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Marco Rubio Is a Moron

by AdelaidaH Posted on May 18, 2015

Mother Jones

Here’s the latest from Florida wunderkind Marco Rubio:

Marco Rubio Struggles With Question on Iraq War

Under a barrage of questions from Chris Wallace of Fox News, Mr. Rubio repeatedly said “it was not a mistake” for President George W. Bush to order the invasion based on the intelligence he had at the time. But Mr. Rubio grew defensive as Mr. Wallace pressed him to say flatly whether he now believed the war was a mistake. Mr. Rubio chose instead to criticize the questions themselves, saying that in “the real world” presidents have to make decisions based on evidence presented to them at the time.

“It’s not a mistake — I still say it was not a mistake because the president was presented with intelligence that said Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, it was governed by a man who had committed atrocities in the past with weapons of mass destruction,” Mr. Rubio said on “Fox News Sunday.”

A moment later, as Mr. Wallace tried to pin him down on his view, Mr. Rubio began to reply, “Based on what we know now, I think everyone agrees — ” but Mr. Wallace cut him off before he finished the thought.

“So was it a mistake now?” Mr. Wallace asked.

“I don’t understand the question you’re asking,” Mr. Rubio said.

The truth is that I don’t care about Rubio’s actual position on the Iraq War. The guy’s trying to run on a platform of more-hawkish-than-thou, and that’s pretty much all I need to know. Most of the time he sounds like a ten-year-old trying to sound tough in front of the older kids.

But I’m seriously beginning to wonder if he has a 3-digit IQ. After Jeb Bush’s weeklong debacle trying to answer this question, every Republican candidate ought to have their own answer figured out. And not just figured out: by now their answers ought to poll-tested, cut down into nice little soundbites, and so smoothly delivered you’d never even know this was a tricky issue in the first place.

But no. Rubio sounded like this question came as a total surprise. Seriously, Marco? This guy does not sound like he’s ready for prime time.

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Marco Rubio Is a Moron

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Marco Rubio’s Cold War Approach to Cuba Is Losing Him Voters

by MarianPoston Posted on May 13, 2015

Mother Jones

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Presidential candidate Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) probably thought that his hawkish, Cold War foreign policy would endear him to Cuban Americans—but he may be in for an unwelcome surprise. Cuba policy is close to Rubio’s heart—his parents fled the country in 1956—and he has denounced the Obama administration’s détente with the Castro regime as “disgraceful” and “willfully ignorant.” Historically, this kind of rhetoric has earned Republicans support among Cuban Americans. But polls suggest that things have changed, and that Rubio’s strident Cuba outlook could damage his standing among a constituency that has buoyed his political career.

Every year since 1991, Florida International University has surveyed Cuban Americans’ attitudes on US-Cuba policy. The most recent poll, taken in 2014, reveals that those who took to Miami’s streets in December 2014 to protest the US restoring relations with Cuba are in the minority: 52 percent of poll respondents oppose continuing the embargo, and 68 percent favor the reestablishment of diplomatic relations. More than 70 percent say the embargo has worked poorly. How Cuban Americans of different ages responded reveals a stark generational split: A majority of those aged 65 and older still favor the embargo, but two-thirds of those aged 18 to 29 oppose it. Nearly 90 percent of millennial Cuban Americans favor reestablishing ties too.

For the 43-year-old Rubio, who is trying to brand himself as a new generation of Republican, this could be a problem. According to Guillermo Grenier, a Cuban studies expert at FIU, Rubio’s Cuba policy “doesn’t have legs” for the future. “People are changing. Rubio’s position will resonate among a certain percentage of the population—a shrinking percentage.” The younger generation, Grenier says, “say things like, ‘How can Rubio be against the embargo—doesn’t he know it hurts Cubans on the island?'”

Not long ago, candidates of both parties had to reassure Cuban Americans of their anti-Castro bona fides. Obama, as a candidate in 2008, addressed an audience of Cuban Americans and promised to maintain the embargo unless several conditions were met. Now, Grenier says, those days are drawing to a close. Politicians such as Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.), who built a decades-long career out of antagonizing the regime, did not challenge Obama’s decision to take Cuba off the official list of state sponsors of terror earlier this year. And even though Cuba remains far from being a free democracy, most Cuban Americans believe that US policy has made things worse.

As Cuba continues to play a larger role in foreign policy debates, Rubio may have to tread lightly—strategically “not emphasizing his views” in some situations, Grenier says. But it will be hard to downplay a career of fiery anti-communist Cuba rhetoric. On Fox News, Rubio called the December 2014 prisoner swap that began the recent diplomatic warming “absurd.” He went on to describe it as “part of a long record of coddling dictators and tyrants that this administration has established.” And Rubio is likely to mention recent Cuba developments during his major policy address today at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.

But Rubio is unlikely to moderate his position. In December, he said defiantly: “I don’t care if the polls show that 99 percent of people believe we should normalize relations in Cuba.”

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Marco Rubio’s Cold War Approach to Cuba Is Losing Him Voters

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Multimillionaire Carly Fiorina Took 4 Years to Pay Staffers From Her Last Campaign

by ShellyTurpin Posted on May 12, 2015

Mother Jones

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Carly Fiorina, the Republican presidential candidate and former Hewlett-Packard CEO, is marketing herself as a pragmatic, fiscally responsible businesswoman—the only GOP candidate who knows, as she says, “how the economy actually works.” Yet during her unsuccessful US Senate bid in 2010, her opponents slammed her record at HP. When she led the firm, it laid off 18,000 workers, and its stock declined by 41 percent. Eventually, she was forced out of the company but departed with a $21 million golden parachute. Now she may need to answer for another managerial blunder. For more than four years, she was a deadbeat and didn’t pay the bills she owed for her Senate campaign. She only settled these outstanding debts just before she jumped into the 2016 race.

Until late last year, Fiorina was close to $500,000 in debt from her 2010 run, nearly all of it in unpaid compensation to campaign staffers and outside consultants, according to Federal Election Commission filings. In 2013, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that Fiorina owed serious cash to former campaign operatives, several of whom were unsure about when they would be paid for their work. And they complained they were not getting clear information from Fiorina about when she would get them their money. At that time, she owed $60,000 to her 2010 campaign manager, Marty Wilson; $20,500 to Beth Miller, a consultant and former aide to California Gov. Pete Wilson; and $30,000 to the firm of veteran GOP political consultant Joe Shumate.

Shumate, who also worked for former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, died suddenly during Fiorina’s Senate race. John Allan Peschong, another adviser whom the campaign owed money, told the Chronicle, “I would hope that Carly Fiorina would pay his widow the money that was owed him at the time of his death.” Wilson, Fiorina’s campaign manager, said in 2013 that he didn’t recall if he “got that granular” with Fiorina regarding the campaign’s mounting debt near the finish line. Earlier this year, the Washington Post reported that the compensation delay had left her former staffers bitter.

Postcampaign debt is not uncommon, particularly in close and expensive contests. Carly for America press secretary Leslie Shedd, in a statement to Mother Jones, points out that Hillary Clinton owed a substantial amount of money after her 2008 defeat. “There was some leftover debt with Carly Fiorina’s Senate campaign in 2010,” Shedd notes. “However, this issue has been resolved and the campaign debt has been paid off in full.”

But the matter wasn’t settled until Fiorina, who lost her Senate race by 10 points to incumbent Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer, was on the cusp of a new political endeavor. In January, Fiorina—whose own wealth is estimated up to $120 million—personally donated $487,000 to her Senate campaign, and then she made good on the back pay, including the money owed to Shumate’s family, according to a February 2015 Federal Election Commission filing. Two months later, she officially entered the presidential race.

The question remains: Why did it take this multimillionaire so long to pay her staffers?

But for Wilson, it’s now water under the bridge. “I’m glad Carly satisfied the debt,” he says. “We’re happy campers.”

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Multimillionaire Carly Fiorina Took 4 Years to Pay Staffers From Her Last Campaign

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Death for Drug Dealers and Quarantines for AIDS Victims: The Mike Huckabee You May Not Remember

by EdmundHinson Posted on May 6, 2015

Mother Jones

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On Tuesday, Mike Huckabee made it official. The former Republican Arkansas governor and Fox News host launched his second bid for the White House in his hometown of Hope, Arkansas, vowing to stop the “slaughter” of abortion and calling for the protection of the “laws of nature” from the “the false God of judicial supremacy.”

Huckabee is joining a GOP field that’s bigger and more competitive than the one he out-hustled to win the Iowa caucuses seven years ago. The Christian conservatives who flocked to the former Baptist preacher in 2008 can now turn toward other evangelical-minded candidates in the GOP presidential race. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz is already in the hunt; former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum and and ex-Texas Gov. Rick Perry are mulling bids. But Huckabee of today is also a far different candidate than the affable ex-gov who once rocked a bass guitar while stumping with Chuck Norris (although Walker, Texas Ranger is officially on board for this campaign, too). Since dropping out of the 2008 race, he’s flaunted a more combative, occasionally conspiratorial brand of politics—flirting with birtherism, advising prospective enlistees to avoid joining the armed forces until President Barack Obama has left office, and, just last month, warning social conservatives that the United States is “moving rapidly toward the criminalization of Christianity.”

By the standards of his political career, 2008 was in many ways an aberration. As he mounts a second run for the nomination, Huckabee is staying true to the kinds of red-meat issues he first entered politics to promote, in a long-shot 1992 bid for Senate against Democratic incumbent Dale Bumpers.

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Death for Drug Dealers and Quarantines for AIDS Victims: The Mike Huckabee You May Not Remember

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Just like you, NASA wants to send your kids to Mars — but for different reasons

by y32nmet Posted on May 5, 2015

Just like you, NASA wants to send your kids to Mars — but for different reasons

By on 5 May 2015commentsShare

Fear not, humanity — NASA says it’s on track to put humans on Mars sometime in the 2030s, which is roughly when we should know whether we’ve totally screwed this planet, or only kinda.

“This plan is clear, this plan is affordable and this plan is sustainable […]. I’ve spent my entire life being 20 to 30 years away from going to Mars, and I think we’re incredibly closer today.”

That’s NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, giving his opening remarks at the Humans to Mars Summit happening today through Friday in Washington D.C. Bolden is so confident, in fact, that he tried to pressure a little girl into saying that she’d go to Mars, according to Forbes: “Please say yes, I promise we’re gonna bring you back … Have faith, we’re gonna get there.” (Yikes. You’ve got a little of that creepy man-in-the-white-van vibe going there, Bolden.)

Last month, at a hearing of the U.S. House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, Bolden explained why studying Mars was important for understanding Earth (he also totally owned Ted Cruz when the republican senator accused NASA of spending too much time on climate change research, but that’s a whole ‘nother story). Here’s Forbes again:

“We need to understand Mars and what happened to it to understand what might happen to Earth,” Bolden said, referring to scientists’ understanding that perhaps Mars once harbored a large water ocean in the past and may have even been habitable, but at some point the red planet stopped generating its own magnetic field, causing its atmosphere and much of its water to be lost to space.

[…]

“Mars is the planet that is most like earth,” Bolden added, explaining how earlier conditions there may have once sustained life long ago, and perhaps still today in some form. “And it will sustain life when humans get there in the 2030s.”

If you want to check out what’s going on at the summit, you can tune in to the live stream below. Speakers will be talking about everything from the affordability of sending humans to Mars (gotta be cheaper than sending them to Manhattan, amirite?) to the tech required for such a mission to the possibility of finding Martian life. There will also be a bunch of sci-fi writers there on Friday to talk about — oh, I don’t know — maybe how cool it is that their life’s work is becoming a reality.

Oh, and Buzz Aldrin will be there, too, because if you don’t invite Buzz Aldrin to your humans-in-space event, NASA will send you to Mars.

Source:
Here’s NASA’s plan to send a few of today’s schoolchildren to Mars

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Just like you, NASA wants to send your kids to Mars — but for different reasons

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