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Scott Walker Is Starting to Look Like a Loser

by Selma4889gkgw Posted on July 16, 2015

Mother Jones

It seems that Scott Walker may be having problems. First, there’s this from our own Russ Choma about Walker’s fundraising woes in Texas, home to America’s biggest treasure trove of conservative zillionaires:

The union-busting Wisconsin governor may be a conservative darling, but he’s way behind the curve when it comes to courting Texas’ biggest money men. Bill Miller, a top Texas lobbyist who regularly advises megadonors on their contributions, says he’s heard almost no buzz from the donor class about Walker….”No one is asking about him,” Miller says. “None of our clients. We have a huge client base. It’s oddly quiet for a guy that’s supposedly top three among the potential nominees.”

….Walker campaign aides say he has been to Austin, Houston, and San Antonio as well, and the response has been “enthusiastic.” Future trips to Texas are planned, they say. But if there’s an on-the-ground fundraising operation for Walker, Miller isn’t the only one who has missed it.

….”Scott Walker has no visible organization in my part of the state. He really doesn’t come up,” says Gaylord Hughey, a lawyer who’s known as the “don of East Texas” by Republican operatives. Hughey has worked as a bundler for the campaigns of George W. Bush and John McCain, and he’s currently signed up to raise money for Jeb Bush. “Among the sort of really hard R Republicans, Scott Walker is probably big,” he notes, “but to the business donor group, he has not really resonated.”

Hmmm. Maybe Walker isn’t mean enough for Texas? That’s probably not it. In fact, Paul Waldman thinks the guy is so mean it’s turning into a problem of its own for Walker. Exhibit A: Walker is hell-bent on demanding drug tests for all welfare recipients:

This is why Scott Walker is never going to be president of the United States.

First, some context. The drug testing programs for welfare recipients are usually justified by saying they’ll save money by rooting out all the junkies on the dole, but in practice they’ve been almost comically ineffective. In state after state, testing programs have found that welfare recipients use drugs at lower rates than the general population, finding only a tiny number of welfare recipients who test positive.

But this hasn’t discouraged politicians like Walker….The test is the point, not the result. Walker isn’t trying to solve a practical problem here. He wants to test food stamp recipients as a way of expressing moral condemnation. You can get this benefit, he’s saying, but we want to give you a little humiliation so you know that because you sought the government’s help, we think you’re a rotten person.

….What does this have to do with Walker’s chances of winning a general election? What George W. Bush understood is that the Republican Party is generally considered to be somewhat, well, mean….So when Bush campaigned as a “compassionate conservative”…he was sending a message to moderate voters, one that said: See, I’m different. I’m a nice guy.

….And Scott Walker’s attitude is nothing like George W. Bush’s. He practically oozes malice, for anyone and everyone who might oppose him, or just be the wrong kind of person.

So money in Texas-sized chunks is looking like a problem for Walker in the primaries, and his Cruella de Vil-sized malice is likely to be a problem in the general election.

The conventional wisdom about Walker—which I’ve agreed with in the past—is that he’s the candidate best suited to appeal to both the Republican base, thanks to his hardcore meanspiritedness, and to business-class Republicans, thanks to his executive experience and relatively mild demeanor. The problem is that it’s a tricky act to make both of these personas work at the same time, and so far Walker doesn’t even seem to be trying. He’s just sticking with the Mr. Mean persona, and it’s not clear if that’s even enough to win the primaries, let alone get him into the White House. He’s going to need to change his tune if he ever wants to hear the Marine band playing “Hail to the Chief” for him.

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Scott Walker Is Starting to Look Like a Loser

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Yeah, Scott Walker Is Boring. But It’s Not Like He’s the Only One.

by RosariaA51 Posted on July 13, 2015

Mother Jones

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This is officially Scott Walker day, since today he’s officially announcing his candidacy. So what can we say about him that’s new and interesting? Nothing, really, and Brian Beutler thinks that’s still his most serious problem:

Walker’s biggest liability may be this: He is incredibly dull. Not just plodding-speaker dull, though he’s often that, too, but an actually boring person. Mitt Romney is nobody’s caricature of a party animal, but he could legitimately boast of being an industrial titan, a fixer, and a man of the world. Hillary Clinton isn’t particularly charismatic, but her life story is filled with dramatic tension, and nobody who masterminded #Benghazi can be credibly dismissed as boring.

Walker, by contrast, is painfully boring. His boringness is evidenced by this sequence of 37 tweets, which go back more than four years.

Walker abbrevi8es like a tween. His life turns on snow, dairy, hot ham, Kohls, haircuts, Packers, Badgers, and watching American Idol while eating chili. His critics err when they mock him for lacking a college diploma, but they could be forgiven for observing that his intellectual incuriousness is symptomatic of lacking ambition outside politics.

Oh, snap! He abbrevi8es like a tween! But give the guy a break. His two kids are 20 and 21, and Walker probably learned to tweet from them back when they were tweens. Now he’s stuck in a time warp.

As for those 37 tweets, I guess we’ll find out soon enough if America finds Kohls and hot ham boring and unpresidential, or heartwarmingly ordinary and in touch with the common man. Or if, more likely, they don’t read his tweets at all.

Anyway, yes, Scott Walker is boring. Maybe he’ll get better with practice. Or maybe boring goes over surprisingly well with voters. Oddly enough, most world leaders aren’t really very charismatic. I’ve never quite figured out why that is. And in any case, if Walker wins he’ll be going up against Hillary Clinton, who’s never going to win any awards for charisma either.

And there’s more! In the first debate later this month, the big guns he’ll be going up against are Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio, who are only slightly more interesting than Walker. And all of them will have Donald Trump on the stage, who’s going to make boring look really, really good by comparison. Should be a fun show.

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Yeah, Scott Walker Is Boring. But It’s Not Like He’s the Only One.

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Scott Walker’s Office Was Part of a Sneaky Effort to Keep His Records Private

by Danielzhg Posted on July 7, 2015

Mother Jones

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Update (7/7/15): Gov. Scott Walker’s office has confirmed in a statement that it was involved with the measure to change Wisconsin’s open-records law to block access to many currently available government documents. The statement was released after Wisconsin Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald (R) acknowledged that Walker’s office took part in discussions to slip the changes into a last-minute budget bill. Fitzgerald said the governor’s office had specifically cited the volume of requests it receives as one reason for the measure. Another Wisconsin Republican lawmaker, Rep. Dale Kooyenga, the vice-chairman of the legislative committee that included the provision, apologized for his role in allowing it into the budget bill. According to Kooyenga, he had been led to believe the change would put Wisconsin’s public records law in line with the rest of the country and federal law; since voting for the measure, he learned that it was actually much harsher.

Late on Thursday night, before the start of the holiday weekend, Republican state legislators in Wisconsin slipped wording into a bill authorizing Gov. Scott Walker’s proposed budget that would have blocked access to many public records. This includes records the Walker administration is currently fighting to keep secret, which concern a controversial proposal to rewrite key parts of the Wisconsin University system’s charter. Reporters and the governor’s Democratic critics immediately suspected this legislative maneuver was an attempt to shield Walker, who is about to announce his presidential bid next week, from greater scrutiny.

On Friday, as the controversy over the provision escalated, Walker at first avoided discussing it. But soon Republican lawmakers who had not been part of the committee that approved the language joined the chorus of critics. Knowing that he didn’t even have the support of fellow Republicans, Walker issued a joint statement with top GOP lawmakers Saturday morning stating that the language would be pulled from the budget, at least for now.

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Scott Walker’s Office Was Part of a Sneaky Effort to Keep His Records Private

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Even Wisconsin’s Republicans Are Getting Tired of Scott Walker

by BeauDrewvd Posted on June 23, 2015

Mother Jones

Our story so far in America’s laboratories of democracy: Over the past few years, Republican governors have been eagerly implementing big tax cuts, insisting that they will supercharge their states’ economies and increase revenue instead of reducing it. Kansas was the poster child for this experiment, and it failed miserably. Louisiana has been a disaster too. Now comes Wisconsin, where fellow Republicans are getting a little tired of Governor Scott Walker’s denial of reality:

Leaders of Mr. Walker’s party, which controls the Legislature, are balking at his demands for the state’s budget. Critics say the governor’s spending blueprint is aimed more at appealing to conservatives in early-voting states like Iowa than doing what is best for Wisconsin.

Lawmakers are stymied over how to pay for road and bridge repairs without raising taxes or fees, which Mr. Walker has ruled out. The governor’s fellow Republicans rejected his proposal to borrow $1.3 billion for the roadwork, arguing that adding to the state’s debt is irresponsible.

Oh man. Been there, done that. This was also Arnold Schwarzenegger’s solution to a budget hole created by his own tax cuts, and it didn’t work out so well. It turns out that spending is spending, whether you pay for it now or later.

As in so many other states, even Republican legislators are starting to glom onto the fact that if you cut taxes, you’re pretty likely to create a big budget hole. Unfortunately for them, they’re learning that there’s only so far you can go in crapping on the poor to close the hole.1 At some point, you have to start cutting back on stuff you approve of too, like roads and bridges. But Walker doesn’t care. He’s got a presidential run coming up, and he wants to be able to say he didn’t raise taxes. If that means playing “let’s pretend” and borrowing the money instead, he’s OK with that.

On the bright side, at least it’s better than the childishness that Bobby Jindal came up with. And borrowing costs are low right now. So I guess things could be worse.

1Though in Wisconsin’s case, Walker’s signature move for crapping on the poor has been to refuse Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion. This will cost Wisconsin $345 million over the next two years, making their budget hole even worse. That’s how much Walker wants to crap on the poor.

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Even Wisconsin’s Republicans Are Getting Tired of Scott Walker

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The Slow-Mo Scandal That Could Crush Scott Walker’s Presidential Hopes

by JeannieEades Posted on May 20, 2015

Mother Jones

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In 2010, Scott Walker was the young, hyperambitious executive of Milwaukee County and one of three candidates angling for the Wisconsin Republican gubernatorial nomination. Part of his official duties included overseeing Operation Freedom, a charity event that raised money for veterans and their families. When Walker’s chief of staff caught wind that $11,000 of the nonprofit’s money had gone missing, Walker had his office ask the local district attorney to investigate. Now that he’s seeking the Republican presidential nomination, he probably wishes it hadn’t.

The prosecutors caught the scent of more than just missing funds, coming to suspect that members of Walker’s staff had blurred the lines between official business and politicking. When Walker balked at handing over more documents, the DA asked a judge to open a so-called John Doe investigation. Unique to Wisconsin, a John Doe is a wide-ranging secret inquiry similar to a federal grand jury probe. For nearly three years—during which time Walker was elected governor, won a showdown with public-sector unions, and survived a recall attempt—prosecutors collected thousands of documents, interviewed dozens of witnesses, and even raided homes and offices in search of evidence. Eventually, they filed criminal charges against six people connected to Walker.

The fallout from the probe isn’t the only legal drama Walker must contend with as he inches toward a 2016 presidential run: A second investigation has been following the money behind his campaign to defeat the 2012 recall effort. Walker has called the whole ordeal a “political witch hunt,” and his allies say he will emerge not only unscathed, but reenergized. Yet the ongoing controversy has cast a pall over the rising Republican star and has exposed the inner workings of a political machine that allegedly flouted election laws and wooed anonymous dark-money donors, teetering between campaigning and corruption.

Is your judge for sale? Read how dark money is taking over judicial elections.

The initial John Doe investigation centered on the discovery that members of Walker’s county staff had routinely engaged in political activity on official time, working to bolster his political fortunes and those of the state GOP. Their transgressions ranged from minor oversights to flagrant violations of the fundamental premise that taxpayer money and government resources cannot be used for political ends. For example, Walker’s constituent services coordinator, Darlene Wink, devoted hours of work time to posting pseudonymous pro-Walker comments on local news sites. She also worked on county time planning fundraisers for Walker. According to documents collected by the prosecutors, Wink knew her activities skirted the line. Once, after asking a colleague how to erase chat messages, she wrote, “I just am afraid of going to jail—ha! ha!“

Prosecutors also found that Walker’s deputy chief of staff, Kelly Rindfleisch, spent much of her time at her county job actually working on behalf of Walker’s campaign and that of his ally running for lieutenant governor. To keep her communications from becoming public, Rindfleisch used a private email account while exchanging more than 1,000 messages with Walker’s campaign staff. These messages illustrate how Walker’s office and his gubernatorial campaign were at times indistinguishable, with the county staff trying to cover their tracks. In an email discussing how to plant damaging stories about Walker’s 2010 primary opponent, Rindfleisch wrote, “This needs to be done covertly so it’s not tied to Scott or the campaign in any way.”

Just how deeply had politics pervaded Walker’s supposedly apolitical office? In court, prosecutors highlighted one particularly troubling example. In July 2010, a concrete slab fell from a county parking garage, killing a 15-year-old boy. Knowing that journalists would file public records requests about the accident, Walker’s campaign sprang into action. Hours after the boy’s death, Walker’s campaign manager ordered Rindfleisch to “make sure there is not a paper anywhere that details a problem at all.”

The probe led to six convictions. Rindfleisch was sentenced to six months in jail. Wink pleaded guilty to two misdemeanors. A Walker aide and an appointee both received two-year prison sentences after admitting to embezzling more than $70,000 from Operation Freedom. And a railroad executive who’d donated to Walker’s campaigns admitted to an illegal scheme in which he pressed his employees to donate to Walker and reimbursed them for it; he received two years of probation.

Walker, though, insisted he had no knowledge of any of the abuses going on under his nose. (Rindfleisch’s desk was 25 feet from his office.) As his former employees and associates were sentenced, he catapulted to national stardom as a conservative governor in a blue state who took on organized labor and survived. But he wasn’t in the clear yet.

In October 2013, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel revealed the second John Doe investigation. This time, the targets were bigger, including Walker’s anti-recall campaign, two top gubernatorial aides, and some of Wisconsin’s most prominent conservative advocacy groups. What came to be known as John Doe II focused on whether Walker’s campaign had illegally coordinated with big donors and conservative groups to defeat the recall. In other words, the investigation went to the core of the post-Citizens United era, in which deep-pocketed outside groups may not officially coordinate with candidates’ campaigns even as they raise unlimited funds for them.

In the summer of 2014, a federal judge unsealed documents detailing the prosecutors’ contention that Walker, his campaign, and aides had illegally funneled money to a network of 12 supposedly independent conservative groups and directed their spending to fight the recall. At the center of the probe was the Wisconsin Club for Growth, a dark-money group that was run by RJ Johnson, who was also an adviser to Walker. Court filings accidentally published online revealed that a mining company had donated $700,000 to the Club; soon after, Walker signed a mining bill that the company had lobbied for. In one email, one of Walker’s campaign consultants suggested ideas for raising cash for the Club, including “Take Koch’s money” and “Get on a plane to Vegas and sit down with Sheldon Adelson. Ask for $1m now.”

The Doe II investigation is currently on hold after pingponging among judges—some of whom have allowed it to proceed while others ordered it shut down. Its fate now rests with the Wisconsin Supreme Court, which has agreed to hear three separate challenges to the investigation. Four of the court’s seven members are conservatives whose most recent election bids were supported by $10 million from the Wisconsin Club for Growth and Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce, the state’s main business lobby. Prosecutors have petitioned at least one of those justices to step aside, but to no avail. The Wisconsin Supreme Court is expected to rule on Doe II as soon as this summer.

Walker, who is also expected to officially announce his candidacy this summer, has sought to turn the probe to his advantage, characterizing it as terrifying government overreach. In April, he told an Iowa radio station that “even if you’re a liberal Democrat, you should look at the investigation and be frightened to think that if the government can do that against people of one political persuasion, they can do it against anybody, and more often than not we need protection against the government itself.”

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The Slow-Mo Scandal That Could Crush Scott Walker’s Presidential Hopes

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Even If Walter Scott’s Family Wins in Court, the Cop Won’t Pay a Dime

by glasulmaramuresuluianunturi Posted on April 10, 2015

Mother Jones

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The family of Walter Scott, the man who died on Saturday after being shot eight times by North Charleston police officer Michael Slager, has decided to sue Slager, the city of North Charleston, and its police department. The civil lawsuit, which will seek damages for wrongful death and civil rights violations, follows murder charges already filed against the now-dismised officer.

Scott’s family is hardly the first to seek civil damages after a police killing. In recent months, relatives of Mike Brown, Tamir Rice, and Eric Garner have all pursued civil court claims, where success isn’t contingent on a criminal ruling against any police officer. But in the event that the Scott family wins a settlement, it’s highly unlikely that Slager himself will have to pay. As I reported in January:

Instead, taxpayers will shoulder the cost. Between 2006 and 2011, New York City paid out $348 million in settlements or judgments in cases pertaining to civil rights violations by police, according to a UCLA study published in June 2014. Those nearly 7,000 misconduct cases included allegations of excessive use of force, sexual assault, unreasonable searches, and false arrests. More than 99 percent of the payouts came from the city’s municipal budget, which has a line item dedicated to settlements and judgments each year. (The city did require police to pay a tiny fraction of the total damages, with officers personally contributing in less than 1 percent of the cases for a total of $114,000.)

This scenario is typical of police departments across the country, says the study’s author Joanna Schwartz, who analyzed records from 81 law enforcement agencies employing 20 percent of the nation’s approximately 765,000 police officers. (The NYPD, which is responsible for three-quarters of the cases in the study, employs just over 36,000 officers.) Out of the more than $735 million paid out by cities and counties for police misconduct between 2006 and 2011, government budgets paid more than 99 percent. Local laws indemnifying officers from responsibility for such damages vary, but “there is little variation in the outcome,” Schwartz wrote. “Officers almost never pay.”

Schwartz’s study did not include North Charleston or any other law enforcement agency in South Carolina. But if other jurisdictions serve as any indication, Slager likely won’t pay a dime, even if a jury finds him guilty of murdering Scott. Out of the 7,000 cases of police misconduct Schwartz studied, only 700 officers were convicted of a criminal charge. And only 40 officers ever contributed to a civil settlement out of their own pocket.

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Even If Walter Scott’s Family Wins in Court, the Cop Won’t Pay a Dime

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White Police Officer Is South Carolina’s Third Charged in Past Year for Killing an Unarmed Black Man

by DelbertHaskell Posted on April 8, 2015

Mother Jones

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Michael Slager, the North Charleston police officer who on Tuesday was charged with the murder of 50-year-old Walter Scott, is one of at least three white officers in South Carolina over the past year to be charged in the shooting death of an unarmed black man. The South Carolina cases, all of which are ongoing, seem to stand in contrast to proceedings around recent high-profile killings by police in Ferguson, Missouri, New York City, and Cleveland, including the swift reaction by authorities in North Charleston to harrowing footage of Scott’s killing that surfaced Tuesday. “I have watched the video and I was sickened by what I saw,” police chief Eddie Driggers told reporters at a press conference on Wednesday, not long after the city’s mayor announced Slager’s firing.

More MoJo coverage on police shootings:


Exactly How Often Do Police Shoot Unarmed Black Men?


The Cop Who Choked Eric Garner to Death Won’t Have to Pay a Dime in Damages


Philadelphia Cops Shoot and Kill People at 6 Times the Rate of the NYPD


Here’s What Happens to Police Officers Who Shoot Unarmed Black Men


Congress Is Finally Going to Make Local Law Enforcement Report How Many People They Kill


Hereâ&#128;&#153;s the Data That Shows Cops Kill Black People at a Higher Rate Than White People

But data shows that the response to Slager’s case is a rare exception. Between 2010 and 2014, according to Columbia, South Carolina’s the State newspaper, at least 209 suspects were shot at by police in South Carolina, including 79 people who died. In only three of the 209 cases were officers investigated for misuse of force, and none have been convicted. Among the suspects killed, 34 were black and 41 were white (in four cases the suspect’s race is unclear), and about half of all suspects shot were black, according to the data gathered by the State.

This mirrors what we know about the national landscape, although data on officer-involved shootings is far from comprehensive and broad patterns are difficult to discern. As Mother Jones has reported previously, officer-involved killings seldom lead to a charge, let alone a conviction. L. Chris Stewart, an attorney representing the Scott family, told the Los Angeles Times he believed that the video was the only reason Slager is facing charges.

There are key differences between the eyewitness video from Scott’s case in North Charleston and the one that captured Eric Garner’s death in New York, says Delores Jones-Brown, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. The video of Scott’s shooting “makes it almost impossible to claim that the victim was resisting arrest with violence,” she says, or to suggest that the victim’s general state of physical health caused his death, as police did in Garner’s case. The video makes clear that Scott was running away when he was gunned down, she says. “So, where is the threat that would justify such a violent police response?”

Here are the two other recent cases in South Carolina:

In what appears to be a coincidence of timing, on Tuesday a grand jury in North Augusta charged police officer Justin Craven for the February 2014 shooting of Earnest Satterwhite Sr., a 68-year-old black man who’d driven away after Craven tried to stop him for a traffic violation. A prosecutor had sought to charge Craven with voluntary manslaughter, but the grand jury reduced the charge to a misdemeanor: firing a gun at an occupied vehicle. According to a report from the Associated Press, Satterwhite had been arrested and convicted multiple times for traffic violations, including DUIs, but he had no record of violence nor physical altercations with police on his criminal record.

In December 2014, a grand jury indicted former Eutawville police chief Richard Combs for murder in the May 2011 shooting death of 54-year-old Bernard Bailey. Combs had issued Bailey’s daughter a traffic ticket, and when Bailey went to the town hall to contest it, he and Combs got into a physical altercation. Combs shot Bailey twice in the chest. The US Justice Department cleared Combs of criminal wrongdoing in 2013, but last August, after Eutawville agreed to pay a $400,000 wrongful-death settlement to Bailey’s family, a local prosecutor brought the murder case to the grand jury.

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White Police Officer Is South Carolina’s Third Charged in Past Year for Killing an Unarmed Black Man

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Another State Agency Just Banned the Words "Climate Change"

by CareySargent Posted on April 8, 2015

Mother Jones

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The climate change language police just struck again.

Last month it was in Florida, where former staffers with the state’s Department of Environmental Protection alleged that senior officials, under the direction of Gov. Rick Scott (R), had instituted an unwritten ban on using the phrases “climate change” and “global warming.” Scott denied the claim.

This week’s incident is much less ambiguous. Yesterday, the three-person commission that oversees a public land trust in Wisconsin voted 2-1 to block the trust’s dozen public employees “from engaging in global warming or climate change work while on BCPL time.”

In proposing and voting on the ban, the commission “spent 19 minutes and 29 seconds talking about talking about climate change,” according to Bloomberg:

The move to ban an issue leaves staff at the Board of Commissioners of Public Lands in the unusual position of not being able to speak about how climate change might affect lands it oversees…

The Midwest warmed about 1.5F on average from 1895 to 2012. Pine, maple, birch, spruce, fir, aspen, and beech forests, which are common in the region, are likely to decline as the century progresses, according to the latest US National Climate Assessment.

The ban was proposed by newly elected State Treasurer Matt Adamczyk, a Republican who ran on the unusual campaign promise to swiftly eliminate his own job. At a public meeting on Tuesday, according to Bloomberg, Adamczyk said he was disturbed to learn that the agency’s director, Tia Nelson, had spent some time co-chairing a global warming task force in 2007-08 at the request of former governor Jim Doyle (D). Dealing with climate issues—even responding to emails on the subject—isn’t in the agency’s wheelhouse, he said. Adamczyk didn’t immediately return our request for comment.

Adamczyk was joined in voting for the ban by State Attorney General Brad Schimel (R), also newly-elected. Schimel is handling Gov. Scott Walker’s lawsuit against the Environmental Protection Agency over President Barack Obama’s new climate regulations. The ban was opposed by the commission’s third member, Secretary of State Bob La Follette, a Democrat.

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Another State Agency Just Banned the Words "Climate Change"

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Tom Steyer Is Taking on the Climate Deniers Running for President

by IvoryT33yv Posted on April 7, 2015

Mother Jones

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This story originally appeared on the Huffington Post and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Tom Steyer’s climate-focused political group is already gearing up for the 2016 presidential race, announcing on Monday a new effort that will focus on putting Republican candidates on the defense when it comes to global warming.

NextGen Climate’s chief strategist, Chris Lehane, said in a call with reporters that the group’s mission heading into 2016 is to “disqualify” candidates who deny that climate change is real or caused by human activity by proving that “they don’t have what it takes to be president.” The effort will be called Hot Seat, and NextGen Climate says it will involve media and on-the-ground campaigns in key electoral states aimed at linking Republican deniers to the Koch brothers and other interests that seek to undermine climate science.

The idea, NextGen says, is to force Republican candidates who are skeptical of climate change to defend their views right out of the gate.

“If you’re in a position that is different from 97 percent of scientists, that does raise basic competency questions in terms of whether people are going to want to give you the keys to the White House,” said Lehane.

Their first target, Lehane said, is Rand Paul, who is expected to announce his candidacy Tuesday in Louisville, Kentucky. The group is planning to hit Paul with a stunt involving a “lie detector test” to force him to go on the record about his views on climate change, and will also follow the candidate to Iowa. Paul has previously questioned the consensus view among scientists that greenhouse gas emissions are warming the climate, but has also tried to moderate his stance somewhat in recent months.

The group intends to portray Republican candidates who deny climate change as being subservient to the will of major donors like the Koch brothers, the conservative fossil-fuel billionaires. “The Kochs have acquired the Republican Party and purposed it,” said Lehane. “Now they have these various Republican candidates saying they don’t believe in the science.”

Through his NextGen Climate project, billionaire investor Steyer spent more than $74 million trying to make climate change a central issue in the 2014 midterm election. The group’s effort had decidedly mixed results: Of the seven races it targeted, NextGen’s endorsed candidates won in only three. But the group has maintained that 2014 was a success, since Republican candidates were forced to go on the record about their views on climate change.

“Climate really is playing a significant role in the national election and in battleground states,” said Lehane. He noted that 2014 was the “first time that climate had really been elevated to that level in the election, where folks who believe the science were able to use it offensively, and deniers were on defense.”

In 2014, NextGen’s efforts included major television and online ad buys, as well as in-state spectacles such as following Republican Senate candidate Scott Brown’s campaign around New Hampshire in a truck loaded with oil barrels and rolling a replica of Noah’s Ark into Florida to confront Republican Gov. Rick Scott.

The group thinks that 2016 will be an even bigger year for climate, given the higher turnouts in presidential election years and the role young voters will play in the debate. Polls have found that 80 percent of voters under the age of 35 support the actions the Obama administration has taken to address climate change, and even 52 percent of young Republican voters said they were more inclined to back a candidate who supported those climate efforts.

Lehane was coy about how much Steyer intends to spend this time around, stating only that “he’s made pretty clear he will spend what it takes.” It was strongly implied that the dollar figure would be higher than it was in 2014, as the group believes that 2016 is “the defining election of our time.”

Hot Seat will include an “aggressive, state-of-the-art social media” element as well as “highly targeted” radio, television and online advertising, Lehane said. The group also plans to have a strong presence on college campuses and to engage in targeted outreach to young voters. The effort will be run from a “high-tech war room” in San Francisco.

NextGen is already planning to follow Scott Walker, the Republican governor of Wisconsin and a potential 2016 candidate, as he travels to Europe later this month. Lehane didn’t elaborate on the group’s intentions for Walker’s trip, but said, “I can at the minimum guarantee it will be highly entertaining.”

Originally posted here: 

Tom Steyer Is Taking on the Climate Deniers Running for President

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Yes, Jeb Bush and Scott Walker Are Different Kinds of Conservatives

by MurrayMeredith Posted on March 30, 2015

Mother Jones

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Jeb Bush may project a warmer, fuzzier, less hardnosed conservatism than Scott Walker, but is there really much difference between them? Greg Sargent isn’t so sure:

Here’s what I’ll be watching: How will this basic underlying difference, if it is real, manifest itself in actual policy terms? On immigration…both support eventual legalization only after the border is secured. Will their very real tonal difference show up in real policy differences?

On inequality, Walker may employ harsher rhetoric about the safety net than Bush does, but the evidence suggests that both are animated by the underlying worldview that one of the primary problems in American life is that we have too much government-engineered downward redistribution of wealth….Will Walker and Bush differentiate themselves from one another in economic policy terms in the least?

Ed Kilgore agrees:

The important thing is not assuming Bush and Walker represent anything new or different from each other just because they offer different theories of electability and different ways of talking to swing and base voters. Much of what has characterized all the recent intra-party “fights” within the GOP has reflected arguments over strategy and tactics rather than ideology and goals. I’d say there is a rebuttable presumption that will continue into the 2016 presidential contest.

You’d think that the way to get a grip on this question would be to look at the 2000 election. Jeb’s brother, George W. Bush, ran as a “compassionate conservative,” and during the campaign he even made good on that. Remember his criticism of a Republican proposal regarding the EITC: “I don’t think they ought to be balancing their budget on the backs of the poor”? Compassionate!

So how did that work out? Well, that’s the funny thing: it’s hard to say. Liberals tend to see Bush as a hardline conservative, but that’s mainly because of the Iraq War and Karl Rove’s hardball electoral tactics, which drove us crazy. Conservatives, by contrast, don’t believe he was really all that conservative at all. And I think they have a point. In fact, I made that case myself way back in 2006 in a review of Bruce Bartlett’s Imposter:

Bush may be a Republican—boy howdy, is he a Republican—but he’s not the fire-breathing ideologue of liberal legend.

Don’t believe it? Consider Bartlett’s review of Bush’s major domestic legislative accomplishments. He teamed up with Ted Kennedy to pass the No Child Left Behind Act, which increased education spending by over $20 billion and legislated a massive new federal intrusion into local schools. He co-opted Joe Lieberman’s proposal to create a gigantic new federal bureaucracy, the Department of Homeland Security. He has mostly abandoned free trade in favor of a hodgepodge of interest-group-pleasing tariffs. And after initially opposing it, Bush signed the Sarbanes-Oxley bill with almost pathetic eagerness in the wake of the Enron debacle, putting in place a phonebook-sized stack of new business regulations.

Want more? He signed the McCain-Feingold campaign finance bill, a bête noir of conservatives for years. His Medicare prescription-drug bill was the biggest new entitlement program since the Great Society. He initially put a hold on a wide range of last-minute executive orders from the Clinton administration, but after a few months of “study” allowed nearly all of them to stand. And he has increased domestic discretionary spending at a higher rate than any president since LBJ.

Obviously there’s more to Bush’s record than this—tax cuts, judicial appointments, the Iraq War, etc.—and he certainly counts as a conservative when you look at his entire tenure in office. The question is whether there’s a difference between his brand of conservatism and, say, Scott Walker’s or Ted Cruz’s. I’d say there is, and that there’s probably also a difference between Jeb Bush’s brand of conservatism and the harder-line folks represented by Walker, Cruz, Santorum, and others. Tonal shifts and tactical choices often turn into real differences in who gets appointed to various cabinet positions and which priorities a new president will set. Jeb Bush is obviously no liberal. But would he govern differently than Scott Walker? My guess is that he would.

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Yes, Jeb Bush and Scott Walker Are Different Kinds of Conservatives

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