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California Democrats are raising the bar on climate action

by JosefGolden Posted on March 1, 2016

California Democrats are raising the bar on climate action

By on 29 Feb 2016commentsShare

In a presidential election season that has already managed to run the gamut from mildly infuriating to unequivocally bonkers, it’s easy to forget that run-of-the-mill state politics both a) exists and b) matters. California Democrats proved both of those points on Sunday with the adoption of a reinvigorated platform, bundled into which is an aggressive energy and environment plan. It’s a case study in an aggressive environmental agenda filing its already sharp teeth.

While a previous energy and environment plank called for “reduced reliance on dirty forms of energy such as coal,” the new platform calls for its total end. Language in the new plan opposes all investment in “new fossil fuel infrastructure projects” — the blanket nature of which covers everything from coal export terminals to natural gas plants. It also calls for the expansion of decentralized energy generation (think plenty of rooftop solar panels), especially in disadvantaged communities.

“Our platform is very forward-thinking,” said Eric C. Bauman, vice chair of the California Democratic Party. “It reflects the best values of Democrats and progressives, and it sets a standard against which candidates, elected officials, and activists all across the country look to measure themselves.”

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California’s government is blue across the board. With a Democratic governor, Democrats in control of both state houses, and no real prospect of electoral upsets, the state party’s platform promises to appeal to voters who are ready to usher in real action to fight climate change.

Last September, the California state legislature’s passage of Senate Bill 350 offered a mixed bag for environmentalists. While the law requires utilities to generate 50 percent of their electricity from renewable sources by 2030, it fails to rein in the state’s heavy gasoline consumption, thanks to pressure from the oil lobby. The new energy and environment platform revives the goal of cutting fuel use in half by 2030 and pushes the state to generate a whopping 100 percent of its electricity from “renewable and sustainable energy sources” by the same year. This is a platform that “gives hope to people that their political party and its elected officials, candidates, activists, and leaders will actually consider what makes life better for everybody,” said Bauman.

California often shines as a beacon of climate action in the United States, and the release of the Democrats’ environmental plan just turned up the wattage. As the state faces the 2018 election of a new governor to replace climate champion Jerry Brown, it will be enshrined values like these that will ensure the expansion of his already substantial environmental legacy.

In the wake of a Supreme Court stay on the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan, local initiatives like these take on even greater importance. The Paris Agreement — discussions around which were broadly led by the United States — requires buy-in from all its signatories if it’s to succeed. In other encouraging news, Maryland’s state Senate passed a bill last week on a 38-to-8 vote to cut greenhouse gas emissions 40 percent by 2030, compared to 2006 levels. That, too, is the kind of state effort that lends itself to the kind of international credibility the United States needs to maintain as the U.N. agreement enters its implementation phase.

Raising the bar at the state level is always good news on the climate front, especially when federal action gets stuck in gridlock. Bauman argues that California Democrats can do so because they don’t have to use “the same kind of coded language” that he suggests crops up in national platforms. “We don’t have to do that. We get to give voice to the issues we believe in and we get to do it in an authentic way.” Here’s to hoping, as usual, that other states can follow California’s lead.

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California Democrats are raising the bar on climate action

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Coal use is down in the U.S. and China — and it’s not a blip

by DarrylSkurrie Posted on February 29, 2016

People wear protective masks near the Bund during a polluted day in Shanghai. Reuters/Aly Song

Coal use is down in the U.S. and China — and it’s not a blip

By on 29 Feb 2016commentsShare

China and the U.S. — the world’s two largest economies — are finally breaking up with coal.

China’s National Bureau of Statistics reports that coal consumption dropped in 2015, for the second time in two years, by 3.7 percent. That’s even faster than coal’s decline the year before, when consumption fell 2.9 percent. China’s carbon pollution has also declined by 1 to 2 percent since 2014, due in part to a slowing economy and the decline in cement and steel production.

Put another way, the “fall in coal use over past two years was equal to Japan’s total yearly coal consumption,” says Greenpeace (Japan is heavily reliant on coal itself).

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This likely isn’t a two-year blip: China plans to close more than 1,000 coal mines in 2016 and has halted approval for new coal mines for the next three years as part of its new front in the battle with air pollution. Its renewable energy industry, meanwhile, is expanding at an astounding rate. The country’s wind and solar capacity increased 34 and 74 percent respectively, which met the country’s growing electricity demand.

Before you get too excited about this rare good news for climate change, there’s one big disclaimer: We know that China’s reporting of emissions data isn’t always accurate; last November, we learned that Chinese officials had underreported 2012 emissions data.

But if these numbers are indeed accurate, it’s no small feat for fighting climate change. China is responsible for half of the world’s coal consumption. Meanwhile, the U.S. is also cutting coal in the power sector much faster than expected.

According to a February report from the Business Council on Sustainable Energy, coal accounted for just over a third of U.S. electricity sources in 2015, at 34 percent. At it’s peak in 2005, the industry accounted for 50 percent of the electricity sector. The precipitous drop in coal use — which hit a 35-year monthly low last November — puts the U.S. halfway to the Obama administration’s goal of cutting carbon emissions from the power sector by one-third over 2005 levels.

Even if coal is on the way out — an outcome most of the world agreed is necessary when it adopted the United Nations Paris climate agreement in December — the question is whether it’s happening fast enough. China promised to reach peak carbon emissions around 2030, but signs suggest that date may come much earlier.

“Nowadays people are talking about, ‘Wait a second, maybe the coal peak already happened in 2013,’” Director of the Brookings-Tsinghua Center for Public Policy Qi Ye told Foreign Policy last year. Last fall, Goldman Sachs promised that, on the global scale, “Peak coal is coming sooner than expected.”

That said, most breakups have some bumps along the way — coal included. There have been been mixed developments on coal and greenhouse gas emissions around the world since the Paris summit: European Union now looks like it may overshoot its earlier emissions targets, while Australia’s carbon emissions are back on the rise after the repeal of its carbon tax.

The road to coal’s demise will certainly be long and fraught, but at least we have an idea now that it’s headed in the right direction.

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Coal use is down in the U.S. and China — and it’s not a blip

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Hollywood’s Lack of Diversity Is Costing It Millions. Here’s Why.

by KayleigDalgarno Posted on February 28, 2016

Mother Jones

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The movie industry’s glaring whiteness may be costing Hollywood millions of dollars. A new report from the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at the University of California-Los Angeles, found that films with more diverse casts have higher global box-office sales and a better return on investment than their less-diverse counterparts.

The researchers examined 163 films released in 2014, and found that the films with truly diverse casts (there were only eight) also had the highest median global revenues and returns on investment. The median film among the 55 with mostly lily-white casts grossed less than half as much—and barely broke even:

This isn’t happenstance. The diverse films did better because they attracted diverse audiences. Using data from RenTrak—a company that surveys moviegoers—the Bunche Center estimated that nonwhite audiences accounted for 58 percent of ticket sales for the eight most diverse films, and nearly half of all movie tickets sold in the United States. More than a quarter of the total tickets were bought by people of Hispanic origin.

Diversity is good for domestic TV ratings, too, the study found. The most-watched broadcast TV shows—not just in minority households, but also within one of the most coveted age demographics—had majority nonwhite casts. Even the most-watched shows in white households had casts that were 41 to 50 percent nonwhite. And since people of color make up 38 percent of the population, the study points out, it stands to reason that shows reflective of that fact would perform better.

Hollywood, alas, have yet to embrace this reality. For another recent study, researchers at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism analyzed 109 films from 2014 along with 305 broadcast, cable, and digital (Amazon, Netflix, etc.) TV series across 31 networks from the 2014-15 season. Only 28 percent of all the speaking roles, they found, went to people of color. And then there’s this:

The studios, in short, are leaving a ton of money on the table. “The conventional wisdom has been, you can’t have a film with a minority lead because it’s not going to travel well overseas—and films make most of their money overseas,” says Darnell Hunt, director of the Bunche Center. “What our study is suggesting is that that logic is false.” The same goes for TV, he says: “People want to see themselves reflected in media. You relate better to characters who kind of look like you, who have experiences that resonate with your own.”

The Bunche Center calculated that just 17 percent of broadcast TV shows in the 2013-14 season roughly mirrored America’s population (31 to 40 percent nonwhite). Hunt points to shows like Scandal and How to Get Away With Murder—both created by Shonda Rhimes, who is black—as examples of shows that perform well in part because their casts are diverse. “You have a little bit of something for everybody,” Hunt explains. “And over the long haul, you’re going to make a lot more money if you do that, as opposed to where there may be one token person of color and you’re hoping that’s going to be enough to get the rest of the audience interested.”

So why does Hollywood keep using the same old formula? The biggest reason, Hunt says, is that the creative pipeline is dominated by white guys: “They’re making projects they know how to make, projects that they think are good, with people whom they’re familiar with and whom they think will sell, and so we tend to get more of the same year in, year out—the same types of leads, the same types of stories.”

There’s another behind-the scenes-culprit, too, Hunt notes:

The talent agencies (the “gatekeepers,” Hunt calls them) pitch most of the projects to the networks and film studios—complete with writers, directors, and leads. The top three—Creative Artists Agency, William Morris Endeavor, and United Talent Agency—represented a majority of the credited writers, directors, and actors on 2014 film projects. They also repped the majority of broadcast TV show creators and lead actors for the 2013-2014 season. But minorities make up only around 2 percent of the credited show creators on their rosters, and 6 percent of the credited lead actors. Which means the deal makers have few minority clients to pitch.

Why are the talent rosters so white? Maybe because the agents are. According to the Bunche Center, the agents of the Big Three were 90 percent Caucasian and 68 percent male—hello Ari Gold! The agency partners—who develop business strategy and share in the profits—are amost entirely white and 71 percent male. This lack of diversity, unwittingly or not, dictates the kinds of stories that end up in production, and who we see on the screen. “The question is, how many people of color are involved in the earliest stages?” Hunt says.

The makers of at least one would-be blockbuster hope to break the old mold. We recently talked with the scriptwriter of Marvel’s Black Panther, the forthcoming film about an African superhero, about that studio’s efforts to get more diversity in the pipeline.

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Hollywood’s Lack of Diversity Is Costing It Millions. Here’s Why.

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This GOP Congressman’s Crusade Against Scientists Just Got Even More Insane

by BrockCecil Posted on February 26, 2016

Mother Jones

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Congressman Lamar Smith’s crusade against the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration keeps getting weirder.

Smith (R-Texas), who chairs the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, suspects that NOAA scientists may have “changed” climate research data to make it appear as though a possible slowdown in global warming over the last decade-and-a-half didn’t really happen. In other words, the congressman seems to believe that government scientists somehow manipulated the facts in order to support President Barack Obama’s climate agenda.

It turns out that the scientific debate over the extent to which climate change took a so-called “hiatus” is far from settled and extends far beyond NOAA’s research. Chris Mooney at the Washington Post has a detailed rundown of the latest research on this surprisingly difficult question here. Of course, the basic existence of man-made global warming is not in dispute by scientists, Smith’s opinion notwithstanding.

But in any case, Smith is determined to get to the bottom of what he sees as an insidious plot by NOAA to falsify research. His original subpoena for internal communications, issued last October, has been followed by a series of letters to Obama administration officials in NOAA and other agencies demanding information and expressing frustration that NOAA has not been sufficiently forthcoming. In December, for example, he wrote to Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker complaining that NOAA showed a “pattern of failing to act in good faith.” (NOAA is part of the Commerce Department.)

Now, a new letter gives some insight as to his specific grievances: Smith claims that NOAA’s internal search for documents responsive to the subpoena has been “unnecessarily narrow,” limited only to documents containing the terms “hiatus,” “haitus,” “global temperature,” and “climate study.” A NOAA spokesperson confirmed that those were the only search terms the agency used to find the relevant documents. On Monday, Smith asked NOAA to expand that field to include the words below (“Karl” presumably refers to Thomas Karl, the NOAA scientist behind the research Smith is interested in):

In Smith’s defense, NOAA’s four terms (three, really, since one is just a misspelling of another) are incredibly narrow and, if there really was any scientific malfeasance, would quite possibly miss it. At the same time, the new list further illuminates what Smith is really after: Some evidence of a nefarious political conspiracy involving Obama, the United Nations, the Paris climate agreement, and temperature buoys.

Sure, NOAA should be transparent about its activities. But the whole thing seems more and more like a wild goose chase by Smith—I’m not holding my breath for any bombshell revelations.

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This GOP Congressman’s Crusade Against Scientists Just Got Even More Insane

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WTO swats down India’s massive solar initiative

by RacheleODowd Posted on February 25, 2016

WTO swats down India’s massive solar initiative

By on 24 Feb 2016commentsShare

The World Trade Organization delivered a blow to India’s ambitious solar power program on Wednesday at the behest of the United States. So much for all that nice chatter about international climate cooperation back in December.

Responding to a U.S. complaint, a WTO dispute panel ruled that several provisions of India’s National Solar Mission were “inconsistent” with international trade norms. The point of contention? India’s solar plan, which seeks to install 100 gigawatts of solar capacity by 2022, requires a certain percentage of cells and panels to be manufactured locally.

These types of provisions, called domestic content requirements, are prohibited under most international trade agreements. Want to be part of the WTO? You gotta be open to trade — every time — or you’re guilty of the dreaded protectionism.

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An estimated 300 million Indians don’t have access to electricity. The country’s solar plan, launched in 2010, aims to change that — while simultaneously combating poverty via job creation. And while India has indeed made strides in adding solar capacity, the U.S. argues that the Solar Mission’s domestic content requirements have led to a 90 percent decrease in its solar exports to India since 2011. The export losses led the U.S. to file a WTO complaint, which has been staunchly opposed by several U.S. environmental groups. In August of last year, the WTO panel released a preliminary ruling against the Indian domestic content requirements, and Wednesday’s ruling finalized that decision.

U.S. solar industry leaders praised the WTO panel ruling. (Recall that they stand to make more money by selling their equipment in India.) “This decision helps us bring clean energy to the people of India, as that nation’s demand for electricity rapidly grows,” Dan Whitten, vice president of communications for the Solar Energy Industries Association, told PV-Tech. This, of course, ignores the fact that domestic content requirements allow a country like India to provide themselves with clean energy. (And to potentially do so with fewer emissions, as domestically produced solar panels don’t have to be shipped in from overseas — but this story isn’t exactly about what’s right for the environment.)

The ruling is a particularly harsh kick in the gut to climate cooperation, coming so soon after the (quasi-)promising results reached in Paris last December. “The ink is barely dry on the U.N. Paris Climate Agreement, but clearly trade still trumps real action on climate change,” said Sam Cossar-Gilbert, a program coordinator at Friends of the Earth International, in a statement.

You might be tempted to call the U.S. a hypocrite at this point: On the one hand, it led the Paris climate talks in all but name, while on the other hand, it pressed ahead with its WTO complaint against India. But this isn’t so much a demonstration of American inconsistency on the issue as it is of the disconnect between trade policy and climate policy more generally. If there’s hypocrisy to be found anywhere, it’s in U.S. trade policy itself: The United States supports some degree of subsidies for local renewables in nearly half of all states. India could likely file a WTO complaint against the U.S. if it wanted.

This isn’t the first time that trade agreements have cast a shadow over a domestic solar initiative. In 2012, for example, in response to a complaint filed on behalf of Japan and the E.U., the WTO ruled against the government of Ontario’s green energy program, which incentivized renewable producers to source goods and services from inside the province. As the free-trade logic goes, these types of local content requirements discriminate against foreign manufacturers.

Wednesday’s decision comes at a time of rampant coal and waste burning for India. In Delhi, air quality is now worse than in Beijing. While India will now consider an appeal to the WTO Appellate Body, it’s worth noting that when Canada appealed the Ontario WTO ruling, it lost.

Said Cossar-Gilbert: “Trade policies are preventing a sustainable future.”

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Ted Cruz Tells Nevadans Only He Can Preserve Scalia’s Legacy

by DemetriHmi Posted on February 22, 2016

Mother Jones

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After a disappointing third-place finish in Saturday’s South Carolina Republican primary, Ted Cruz is looking to a new ally to boost his performance in the Nevada caucuses on Tuesday: the ghost of the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

Cruz seems to have settled on the idea that President Barack Obama won’t get a Supreme Court justice confirmed to replace Scalia. During a stump speech Monday afternoon in Las Vegas, Cruz said one of his first actions as president would be to name a “strong principled constitutionalist” as Scalia’s successor.

Cruz has begun to emphasize his legal career on the campaign trail in order to paint himself as the lone Republican candidate who can defend Scalia’s legacy. It’s a two-step dance to take down his rivals: heighten the stakes of the election to minimize Donald Trump as an unserious candidate, and push the idea that Marco Rubio isn’t conservative enough to be entrusted with picking Supreme Court nominees.

“As Ronald Reagan was to the presidency, so too was Justice Scalia to the Supreme Court,” Cruz said. “And his passing underscores the stakes of this election. It’s not one branch of government, but two that hang in the balance.”

Cruz laid out a conservative’s dystopian vision of the Supreme Court, where the law of the land would flip to a liberal interpretation should Scalia’s seat go to a Democratic appointee. “We are one liberal justice away from the Supreme Court mandating unlimited abortion on demand all across this country with no restrictions whatsoever,” Cruz said. “We are one liberal justice away from the Supreme Court reading the Second Amendment out of the Bill of Rights.” Cruz warned that a 5-4 liberal majority would also mean the dismantling of statues based on the Ten Commandments, “or the Supreme Court concluding that the United Nations and the World Court can bind our justice system…and subjecting us to international law and taking away sovereignty.”

Amid this doom and gloom, Cruz made sure to remind the crowd of Nevadans that he is a former lawyer who has argued before the Supreme Court, so he knows how the institution operates. At the same time, he repeatedly hammered the point that he wouldn’t waffle, vowing that he was the only Republican candidate the voters should trust to appoint truly conservative judges.

“I think Justice Scalia’s passing,” Cruz said, taking a veiled jab at Trump’s gutter politics, “has elevated the assessment of the men and women of Nevada.”

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Ted Cruz Tells Nevadans Only He Can Preserve Scalia’s Legacy

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Donald Trump Trots Out Tale Of Muslims, Pig Blood, and Bullets

by LouzConstant Posted on February 20, 2016

Mother Jones

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Donald Trump ended his final campaign rally of the South Carolina primary Friday night with a story about a four-star general, Muslim insurgents, and bullets dunked in pig blood. Forty minutes into his address at a not-quite-full convention center in North Charleston, after mocking Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s lack of enthusiasm for waterboarding, the Republican presidential frontrunner told the crowd he wanted to share an anecdote he’d heard about General John Pershing.

“General Pershing was a rough guy,” Trump said. He explained that during the early 1900s, the general was battling Muslim insurgents in the US-controlled Philippines, he decided to make a point:

He caught 50 terrorists who did tremendous damage…and he took the 50 terrorists and he took 50 men and dipped 50 bullets in pig’s blood. You heard about that? He took 50 bullets and dipped them in pig’s blood which is considered haram. And he has his men load up their rifles and he lined up the 50 people and they shot 49 of those people. And the 50th person, he said, you go back to your people and you tell them what happened. And for 25 years there wasn’t a problem.

“We’ve got to start getting tough and we’ve got to start being vigilant and we’ve got to start using our heads or we’re not gonna have a country, folks,” he concluded.

Snopes, the online mythbuster, classifies the Pershing tale—which is popular on the right—as a “legend.” “We haven’t eliminated the possibility… but so far all we’ve turned up are several different accounts with nothing that documents Pershing’s involvement,” it explains.

But a lack of evidence has never stopped Trump, especially when it comes to the anti-Islam invective that has helped keep him atop the polls in South Carolina. His proposal to ban Muslims from entering the United States is hugely popular among Republicans; a recent survey of his supporters found that just 44 percent believed Islam should even be legal. So with his candidacy on the line, he’s sticking with what got him to this point.

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Donald Trump Trots Out Tale Of Muslims, Pig Blood, and Bullets

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How Nevada’s Solar Showdown Could Play Into the Caucuses

by HenryMarasco Posted on February 19, 2016

Mother Jones

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Last month, solar power suffered a major blow in Nevada. Under pressure from the state’s largest electric utility, NV Energy, state regulators agreed to drastically roll back a key financial incentive for rooftop solar installations. The move, which applied both to new solar users and to homes already equipped with panels, could leave existing customers on the hook for thousands of dollars in higher electricity costs. It also obliterated the economic case for prospective solar buyers. And it prompted a mass exodus of solar contractors in the state with the most solar jobs per capita. SolarCity, the country’s largest solar installer, fired 550 workers; two of its main competitors, Vivant and Sunrun, plan to shut down their Nevada operations.

Now, the fight over solar could become an important issue in the presidential election.

The controversial public utility commission decision relates to net metering, the policy that allows homeowners to sell the excess electricity from their solar panels back to the utility at set prices. Most states have adopted some form of net metering. It enables solar customers to defray their upfront costs and has been widely credited as a major driver of America’s solar boom. But the policy is generally loathed by utilities, who not only lose a customer but have to pay that lost customer for their power. In response, utilities and their allies in conservative think tanks such as the American Legislative Exchange Council have waged a nationwide battle against net metering, particularly in sunny states like Arizona and Florida. The Nevada decision is one of the utilities’ biggest victories yet: It allows them to raise the flat monthly fee on solar customers threefold by 2020, from $12.75 to $38.51. It also reduces the net metering credit by 18 percent. This is especially harmful to customers who made big investments in solar under the expectation that it would generate big savings into the foreseeable future.

Since the decision, solar has been one of the top headlines in Nevada. The change has been decried by local solar contractors, their customers, and environmentalists. Two homeowners have filed a class-action lawsuit against NV Energy (owned by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway), and a coalition of solar companies known as the No Solar Tax PAC is pushing a ballot measure that would reverse the regulators’ decision.

The Nevada caucuses are just around the corner, Saturday for Democrats and this coming Tuesday for Republicans. Solar enjoys widespread support from Nevada voters in both parties: A poll last month from Colorado College found that 75 percent of voters in the state support tax incentives for solar, while a solar-industry-commissioned poll last year found that 69 percent of Nevada Republicans and 80 percent of Nevada Democrats wouldn’t vote for a candidate who doesn’t support pro-solar policies.

“The fallout from the solar decision has been so severe on both sides of the aisle,” said Barbara Boyle, a Sierra Club staffer in Nevada. “I think there’s going to be a lot of activity in the caucuses related to the issue.”

On Tuesday, the Alliance for Solar Choice, a lobbying group backed by SolarCity and Sunrun, emailed a memo to thousands of solar supporters in Nevada urging them to “make sure the presidential candidates can’t avoid this issue.” Democrats Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders have already charged into the fight. Last week, Clinton issued a statement expressing her support for federal legislation that would limit states’ ability to raise fees for existing solar users, as was done in Nevada:

On Monday, Sanders met face to face with a group of solar workers in Reno, where he called the regulators’ decision “incomprehensible” and encouraged solar supporters to petition Buffett to back down.

Eli Smith, who operates a small solar installer in Reno called Black Rock Solar, attended the meeting with Sanders. He said that although no presidential candidate can offer much of an immediate remedy to the state’s solar woes, he plans to support Sanders in the caucus because he has “the kind of commitment I personally look for” on clean energy issues.

Smith added that he was surprised that thus far, the Republican candidates “aren’t even acknowledging the issue,” given solar’s bipartisan appeal in Nevada.

Indeed, none of the GOP contenders have weighed in on the controversy yet, and they didn’t respond to requests for comment for this story. A few have come close: In New Hampshire, John Kasich said it’s “not acceptable” to slow the development of solar, and Marco Rubio said the United States should be “number one” in solar (although his proposed energy plan focuses on promoting fossil fuel extraction and ignores renewables). In South Carolina on Tuesday, Donald Trump suggested that because his campaign is self-funded, he wouldn’t be held captive to the interests of utilities, as some environmentalists have suggested Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval (R) is:

Avoiding this issue would be a big missed opportunity for Republicans in Nevada, said Debbie Dooley, whose Green Tea Party group organizes conservative support for solar because it represents “energy choice” and freedom from monopolistic utilities. Dooley is in Nevada this week working to promote the No Solar Tax PAC’s ballot measure. She said she expects Republicans to take up the issue once they make it past the South Carolina primary on Saturday.

“If I were a presidential candidate, I would certainly come out and start talking about energy freedom and energy choice,” she said. “I think the person that does grab hold of it will gain votes.”

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How Nevada’s Solar Showdown Could Play Into the Caucuses

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Even Ted Cruz’s Best Friend in the Senate Is Campaigning for Rubio

by GailWatters Posted on February 18, 2016

Mother Jones

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Ted Cruz has many enemies in the United States Senate, and only one pretty good friend: Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, who, like Cruz, is a tea party darling. So it must have been welcome news in the Cruz camp when Lee came to South Carolina this week to hit the campaign trail with Cruz. (Remember, Donald Trump has been knocking Cruz as an unlikable, nasty guy, and pointing out that not one of his Senate colleagues has endorsed him.)

There was just one catch: Lee was campaigning with Cruz, but he wasn’t endorsing him. In fact, hours before Lee gave a speech introducing and praising Cruz at a barbecue joint in Easley, South Carolina, Lee hailed Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida at a CrossFit gym in nearby Greenville, where he told an audience of conservatives, “I don’t know anyone in Washington who knows the Bible quite as well as Marco Rubio does.”

For now, Lee is undecided about whom to support in the Republican presidential primary and apparently playing the field. (He told reporters in Easley that he would endorse someone, sometime.) That has put him in an awkward position as a supporter of two competing candidates currently locked in a fight about who is or isn’t a scoundrel. Even more awkward was that Lee delivered essentially the same speech for both Rubio and Cruz: a historical allegory about the lessons of the Boston Tea Party and the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia.

As Cruz tries to maintain second place in the South’s first primary state, he has brought in a few reinforcements. Reps. Steve King of Iowa and Louie Gohmert of Texas (known for coining the term “terror babies“) joined him to talk up Cruz’s anti-immigration bona fides. But Rubio, who is fiercely challenging Cruz for second—both trail Trump in the polls—has greater local support and is traveling the state with the “cavalry.” That’s what Republican Sen. Tim Scott calls the South Carolina lawmakers in Rubio’s corner: Gov. Nikki Haley, Rep. Trey Gowdy (of Benghazi committee fame), and Scott himself. Scott and Gowdy, who each display a half-decent comedic repartee at Rubio campaign events, teamed up for a radio ad on Rubio’s behalf.

In a street fight like this, Cruz could use more prominent allies. But he couldn’t even get his buddy Lee to go all the way with an endorsement.

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Even Ted Cruz’s Best Friend in the Senate Is Campaigning for Rubio

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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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