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Death Penalty Opponents Lose Two Big Battles

by claudiospeckman Posted on November 9, 2016

Mother Jones

Voters in California and Nebraska on Tuesday rejected efforts to abolish the death penalty in their states. The two states—one deep red and the other deep blue—were seen as significant bellwethers for longtime opponents of capital punishment who had hoped for a different result.

In California, the ballot proposition to repeal the death penalty fell short with about 46 percent of the vote as of Wednesday morning. At the same time, voters narrowly passed a second proposition to speed up the process of executing death row inmates. In Nebraska, voters overwhelmingly chose to keep the death penalty by a margin of 66 percent to 34 percent.

Heading into Tuesday, polls in California showed voters closely divided on the issue; Nebraska’s scant polling showed the pro-death penalty side leading. But overall in the country, support for capital punishment and executions have both waned. In September, a Pew poll found support for the death penalty nationwide had fallen below 50 percent for the first time in nearly 50 years. Some states have been unable to carry out executions due to a shortage of the requisite drugs, including Nebraska, which has not executed anyone since 1997. California has not executed anyone since 2006, also out of concern for its drug protocols.

The results send a signal that voters in both red and blue America are reluctant to part with the death penalty, even as the number of executions around the country has declined in recent years. In Oklahoma, a state that carried out a notoriously botched and brutal execution nearly two years ago because it used the wrong drug, voters passed a ballot initiative to protect the constitutionality of the death penalty, by a margin of 66 percent to 34 percent.

Still, the ballot initiatives in California and Nebraska were a bold effort to push the issue forward, with a deep-blue state questioning the morality of a system that has taken innocent lives and a deep-red state beginning to see the death penalty as a flawed and wasteful government program. “California and Nebraska are such different states that we’re seeing the death penalty being fought on multiple fronts,” said James Clark, an anti-death penalty advocate at Amnesty International, on the eve of the election. “We’re seeing diehard progressives who believe in human rights, who believe this is a violation of human rights, are really on the forefront in states like California. And then also conservatives are on the forefront in both states, saying this is a failed government policy, this is government overreach, it costs so much money.”

The conservative argument played a big role in the death penalty debate in Nebraska. The state’s conservative legislature voted in 2015, over the governor’s veto, to repeal the death penalty. But the issue was forced to a referendum when the governor, Republican Pete Ricketts, spent $300,000 of his own money to try to reinstate it.

Opponents of the death penalty in states across the country, both red and blue, were looking to the outcomes on Tuesday to decide whether to try to repeal the death penalty in their own states. Other countries were watching, too. The United States is the only Western democracy with a death penalty; more than half of the world’s countries have abolished it, and many more countries have stopped using it. “There’s a lot of momentum building around the world to abolish the death penalty, and those countries that continue to use if often point to the United States as the justification for using it,” Clark said.

Even with Tuesday’s defeats, death penalty opponents still believe the momentum is on their side—if for no other reason than the shortage of execution drugs. Clark said the ballot initiatives were “bold risks that could cause setbacks, but I don’t think they will change the overall trend of the death penalty in the United States. I don’t think we’re in jeopardy of that.”

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Death Penalty Opponents Lose Two Big Battles

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The Miami Herald Endorses Hillary Clinton in a Simple, Yet Powerful Editorial

by VallieC63822 Posted on November 8, 2016

Mother Jones

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With Florida up for grabs this Election Day, residents in the key battleground state woke up on Tuesday to a last-minute endorsement from the Miami Herald announcing its choice for the White House. The succinct, five-word editorial below:

For a deeper dive into how Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump campaigned in Florida, head to our report here:

Link: 

The Miami Herald Endorses Hillary Clinton in a Simple, Yet Powerful Editorial

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The Nation’s Best Public School System Is Ground Zero in the Fight Over Charters

by Randell46P Posted on November 8, 2016

Mother Jones

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Massachusetts’ public school system is widely considered to be the best in the country. Its high test scores and minuscule dropout rates are the envy of the nation. But thanks to a hotly contested ballot initiative, the state has become the latest battleground in the nationwide push for charter schools.

The initiative, known as Question 2, asks voters to decide if the state should lift its charter school cap and allow up to 12 new charter schools (or charter school expansions) every year. Schools opening in low-performing districts would get first priority; new charters and charter expansions would be exempt from limits on the number of charter schools and enrolled students, as well as the amount districts could spend on them.

Supporters argue that privately run, publicly financed charters would offer more choices to students in underperforming school districts. A Brookings Institution study released in September showed that children who attend charters in Massachusetts’ urban areas, particularly those from disadvantaged groups and with special needs, saw improvements in test scores. Kids who attended Boston’s charters were also more likely to take an AP exam and to attend a four-year college than those in traditional public schools.

Critics, however, argue that charters can draw money away from traditional public schools, lack oversight, and underserve students with special needs. MIT professor Parag Pathak told the New York Times that the decision “will send shock waves throughout the United States,” regardless of the outcome. “If the voters reject more urban charters here, then it’s not clear what more the charter movement can do to convince opponents and skeptics,” he told the Times.

The initiative has drawn significant financial investment from interest groups in Massachusetts—and beyond. Both sides have combined to spend more than $34 million, more than any other ballot initiative in the state’s history. Supporters ranging from former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the Walton family heirs have invested more than $24 million. Opponents, including state and national teachers unions, have pitched in some $14 million.

Support for the measure generally has fallen along party lines: Republican Gov. Charlie Baker has called the measure a “social justice” issue that would expand choice for children, while Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who has supported school vouchers in the past, told the Boston Globe in September she would vote against Question 2.

“I am very concerned about what this specific proposal means for hundreds of thousands of children across our Commonwealth, especially those living in districts with tight budgets where every dime matters,” Warren said. “Education is about creating opportunity for all our children, not about leaving many behind.”

Originally posted here – 

The Nation’s Best Public School System Is Ground Zero in the Fight Over Charters

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Get-Out-the-Vote Campaigns Use Black Lives Matter Language to Boost Turnout

by SharronMahoney Posted on November 7, 2016

Mother Jones

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With the election one day away, it’s already clear that black voter turnout won’t reach the historic highs it set when Barack Obama was on the ballot. Early voting numbers show that fewer African Americans have cast ballots in key battleground states like North Carolina than in the past two presidential elections. Recent incidents of police violence against African Americans have done little to help, deepening the distrust of the state and disillusionment with political leaders among some supporters of the Black Lives Matter movement. And while Donald Trump has actively alienated black voters with his rhetoric, black activists have also criticized Hillary Clinton for backing the tough-on-crime policies in the 1990s that contributed to mass incarceration.

But several initiatives are trying to get African Americans to the polls by using the very language of this movement—despite its skepticism of politicians—arguing that even if some voters are unenthusiastic about the presidential race, the vote is a necessary part of building black political power and holding elected officials accountable at every level of government.

Taylor Campbell, campaign manager of #WeBuiltThis, a digital get-out-the-vote initiative focused on boosting black millennial turnout, says the campaign has tried to spread the message that voting is “an important part of our toolbox of organizing towards black liberation.” #WeBuiltThis, launched last month, has worked to reach young black voters through social media, visual messaging campaigns, and op-eds written by young black organizers on websites like the Huffington Post and The Root.

“A lot of times when folks want to engage black millennials, the way they engage is around the presidential election,” Campbell says. “We’re not talking about Hillary or Trump. We’re talking about the work that can be done, specifically at the state and local level, to effect change and to improve the material conditions of black life.”

Predicting the voting behavior of black millennials this year has been a challenge. Although Clinton is expected to win the overwhelming majority of the black vote, younger African Americans have been wary of her candidacy. That skepticism has fueled concerns that black turnout will be significantly lower than in 2008 or 2012—perhaps an unfair benchmark, given the enthusiasm Obama engendered. But at the same time, racial justice has moved into the spotlight as Black Lives Matter has created new outlets for black political engagement by sparking a national conversation about the role the government should play in matters of race and policing.

Those are the very issues that #WeBuiltThis and similar campaigns have highlighted, noting that voting is a way to hold politicians accountable on a wide array of issues important to black voters, from criminal justice reform to political negligence in the Flint water crisis. “There may not be excitement about politics and offices, but they understand that they have to be in the streets and the voting booth in numbers,” says Judith Browne Dianis, executive director of the Advancement Project, a civil rights organization that assisted with the development of the #WeBuiltThis campaign.

Black activists have become a particularly powerful force in local politics. Earlier this year, frustration over the delayed indictment of the police officer who shot Laquan McDonald in Chicago led to the activist-driven #ByeAnita campaign, helping to oust Cook County state’s attorney Anita Alvarez. In Cuyahoga County, Ohio, black organizers successfully denied re-election to the district attorney who failed to bring charges against the officer responsible for the death of 12-year-old Tamir Rice.

That’s the type of change Color of Change PAC Director Arisha Hatch wants to see on Election Day. In September, Color of Change PAC, the political arm of a prominent online racial justice group, began organizing Black Battleground Text-a-Thons in cities across the country, culminating in the launch of its #VotingWhileBlack voter mobilization effort last month. “We’re trying to prove that if engaged, black voters will turn out to vote regardless of if Barack Obama is on the ballot, or regardless of whether there is a presidential race,” Hatch says. Volunteers with the initiative have sent more than one million text messages to voters in battleground states. In the final weekend before Election Day, the campaign hopes to reach an additional one million people.

Whereas Color of Change PAC has emphasized the importance of local and state races, the nation’s first black president has focused largely on the presidential contest. During a Thursday speech in Florida, Obama aimed much of his message at young black voters, telling them that by going to the polls they “can bend the arc of history in a better direction.” Older black organizations like the Congressional Black Caucus have framed voting as a necessary responsibility for black youth, often referring to the battle for the vote during the Civil Rights Movement as proof of their obligation.

But that approach might be limited in its effectiveness. “The classic argument that ‘our ancestors fought and died for the right to vote’ isn’t enough and doesn’t wash with millennials,” says Dominique Apollon, research director of RaceForward, a group focused on finding innovative methods of advancing racial justice. He says that older civil rights groups would be wise to acknowledge the disillusionment young black voters feel. After the shootings of many unarmed black men and women, he says, some young people “feel that they are in a state of emergency.” Over the summer, RaceForward conducted focus groups with young black activists in an effort to understand their perspective on voting. They found that while black millennials lacked enthusiasm about the presidential election, they were interested in local races, and it was easier to engage them with local politics.

The activists of the movement surrounding Black Lives Matter have frequently accused politicians of contributing to the recent crises and of being incapable of producing real change. But in the final weeks before the election, several well-known black activists, including DeRay Mckesson and Brittany Packnett of Campaign Zero, issued endorsements of Clinton, arguing that she would be better than Trump in protecting black lives. The get-out-the-vote campaigns have not endorsed a presidential candidate, but they similarly make the case that voting can be a path to achieving the movement’s goals.

“Black voters see the struggle, and we understand what currently is at stake in our lives and our communities,” says Dianis. “We can use the ballot box as the next way to build power.”

See original article here – 

Get-Out-the-Vote Campaigns Use Black Lives Matter Language to Boost Turnout

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One Bold Way to Blow Up the College Debt Nightmare

by SherriAmerson Posted on November 6, 2016

Mother Jones

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In 2008, sociologist Sara Goldrick-Rab began studying a group of 3,000 students as they entered public universities in Wisconsin. For six years, she tracked how financial aid affected their college experiences and whether it would help them graduate. The results were stunning: Even with aid, half the students dropped out of school, often because they couldn’t afford to keep studying. Less than 1 in 5 earned a degree in four years.

A four-year college degree is one of the most important predictors of economic success: Americans who have one earn an average of 98 percent more per hour than those who don’t. But how much should students pay for this piece of paper? In her new book, Paying the Price: College Costs, Financial Aid, and the Betrayal of the American Dream, Goldrick-Rab argues that for most families, it’s become financially unmanageable to send a kid to college. Poorer families are hit the hardest: the poorest quarter of households can spend up to 84 percent of annual income on college bills, with little guarantee of return.

University of Chicago Press

The sociologist from Temple University thinks it’s time to overhaul how we handle financial aid. “The system is broken in so many ways that we need to stop trying to save it,” she tells me. She advocates a “first-degree free” approach, where all students—regardless of their family’s income—can earn at least an associate’s degree without paying a cent of tuition; in her model, financial aid, no longer earmarked for tuition costs, could help students from low-income families cover the additional costs of living while they finish their degree. I caught up with Goldrick-Rab to hear about the biggest surprises of her research, her advice for college students, and her thoughts on Donald Trump’s education plan.

Mother Jones: You followed these students for six years. What stood out to you?

Sara Goldrick-Rab: A lot of people talk about student loans with regard to how things are after you finish college, such as the challenges of repaying debt. But they don’t talk about the fact that people are so worried about debt even while they’re still in college. Watching people go without enough food to eat because they’re afraid to take out a loan, or decide to not go abroad or not hang out with friends because they’re so worried about what will happen—that to me says that we’ve changed what college is.

MJ: How so?

SGR: Well, it’s always been the case that you go to college and you get a fair bit of choice in deciding where you’re going to go, what you’re going to study and how you want to set that up. And the thing that distinguishes one choice from another is your ability—how intelligent you are and how hard you want to work. Increasingly, that’s not true. What distinguishes you and your choices is your income.

MJ: You say in the book that it’s sort of a failure of the American dream.

SGR: Well, it’s a betrayal. We tell people that the way to get ahead in life is through education, but then we only give them educational options that are unaffordable and end up shoving them backward. Imagine going to college and ending up with debt and no degree. That’s a betrayal.

MJ: Half the students in the study dropped out. Was that a surprise?

SGR: It’s aligned with national figures, so on the one hand, it’s not that surprising. But numbers like that still surprise you when you see that students were doing most things right—they were trying to go to class, they were interested in school, they were working and taking on debt and doing all the things that we tell them to do. And they still didn’t get a degree.

MJ: Do you know what happened after they dropped out?

SGR: We stopped collecting data for the most part in 2014. We have enough information to recontact them, but contacting people in a study like this is very expensive. They’re probably around 25 or 26 years old now. What I really want to know is how they view their own education now—whether they think it was worth it, and whether they plan to send their own kids to college.

MJ: They might have so much debt that they won’t.

SGR: Exactly. Or such a bad taste in their mouths.

MJ: So why is college financial aid so broken?

SGR: The first reason is that it tries so hard to figure out who needs what and who doesn’t deserve money. Think about the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA). It introduces all kinds of bureaucracies that alienate people. It also leaves out the constituency that’s needed to make it politically viable: the middle class. It makes it a program for poor people—and programs for poor people are poor programs. It doesn’t have a broad base support, which means it’s perpetually underfunded. The other thing is that, in the FAFSA’s effort to decide who gets what, it uses a bunch of fake numbers that don’t mean much. It produces the “expected family contribution,” a number that doesn’t even consider the family’s debt. The FAFSA also relies on prices for tuition and living costs that are set up by colleges with no assessment of whether they’re accurate. So if a college says it costs $10,000 a year to attend, well, that’s all you can get. If a college says it costs $30,000, you might be encouraged to take loans up to an amount that would be ridiculous to repay. So they overstate and understate the actual cost of college.

MJ: You point out that there’s no federal authority that requires states to make colleges affordable, and since the 1980s states have slowly decreased their funding for public schools, leaving families to take on more costs. College is much more expensive than before, but, as you note, the proportion of state budgets going to higher education is about the same today as it was in 1966.

SGR: Right. The whole federal system is based on the assumption that states would also help out, but they didn’t do anything to encourage states to do that. I don’t know what the federal government was thinking when they put trust in states in the beginning.

Sara Goldrick-Rab Chris Kendig

MJ: So what’s the way out of all this?

SGR: The way out is to build a different type of system. We can do some small things, such as expanding the federal work-study program so students can have more jobs on campus, or making sure that when students file for financial aid, they can get information about other benefits available to them. But we better be working on a system that more effectively lowers the price of college for a lot more people. Doing that requires focusing on the public sector. We need to have a conversation about whether we’re going to continue funding private colleges and universities when we’re underfunding public ones. I wish more people realized every time they see a commercial on TV for the University of Phoenix that they are funding those universities. I don’t think most Americans have a clue how much they’re spending on private education.

MJ: What do you think of Hillary Clinton’s and Donald Trump’s education plans?

SGR: Donald Trump has talked about taking the federal government out of making student loans, and I think it’s very dangerous.* We actually just started making student loans from the federal government about six years ago. If we stopped doing that and let banks do it instead, taxpayers will end up with a lot more wasted money. Note: Though Trump’s policy director has mentioned this plan, Trump has not mentioned it during campaign speeches, calling instead for increased federal and state funding for students to attend either public or private schools.

Hillary Clinton’s plan is a decent step in the right direction. I would like to see it be a little more focused. Debt is not the problem, it’s a symptom of the problem. All the talk right now is about making college debt-free, but I’d rather see a strong, clear message of making college tuition free and putting support in to cover living expenses for those who need it.

MJ: Wasn’t one of the main criticisms of debt-free college that if we make college tuition free for all families with an income under $125,000, it would actually hurt poor students and help more affluent ones?

SGR: This is driving me crazy. In order to make good policy, we need to stop counting who gets what dollars and think in terms of who gets what benefits. Think of it this way: Right now, there are students who don’t go to college because the current financial aid system is so underfunded, so in the current system, they get nothing. That’s Person 1. Person 2 is going to college, and they’re not getting a full Pell Grant, so the tuition is not covered. They’re probably from a middle-income family. If we make college tuition-free, then two things happen. First, the person who’s already going to college is going to see tuition costs eliminated and we will have given them some money for living expenses. Some people think that we shouldn’t give them that money because they already go to college, but they’re missing that these students are not always finishing college—the small subsidies could go a long way to help. Second, the person who doesn’t currently go to college, if he gets money, he comes into the new system—he gets to come to college.

The idea that tuition-free college is going to only benefit the upper-middle class ignores the huge benefits to the lower-middle class. The other thing is that we can count on the wealthy to go to private schools. Hillary Clinton said when she was debating Bernie Sanders that she didn’t want Donald Trump’s kids to benefit from free college…But we really don’t have to worry about it: Donald Trump is not going to suddenly send his kids to public schools.

MJ: You said you were surprised by the study. Did you have an emotional reaction?

SGR: It’s totally distressing. These are actual people to me. I know some of them still. Some of them I’m in regular touch with.

MJ: What would you tell a student who is facing some of these struggles?

SGR: I would tell them that the struggles they’re facing are happening to lots of people. I know it doesn’t solve anything for them, but knowing you’re not alone matters when you’re really struggling financially. Students also…have to let people know this is happening to them. And even though it might be too late for them and their kids to escape these struggles, students have a responsibility to change the future system. They need to make it a voting issue. This is not a private trouble—it is a public problem, and it needs to be treated like one.

Excerpt from – 

One Bold Way to Blow Up the College Debt Nightmare

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The Supreme Court Just Reinstated a Controversial Voting Law in Arizona

by MerissaHague8 Posted on November 4, 2016

Mother Jones

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Update Saturday, Nov. 5: The Supreme Court stayed the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals decision, so the ballot-collection ban will be effect during the election.

The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals blocked Arizona’s law against so-called “ballot harvesting” on Friday, clearing the way for community activists to go door to door collecting completed ballots as part of their get-out-the-vote efforts. The state of Arizona has asked US Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy to issue an immediate stay on the ruling.

The law, Arizona House Bill 2023, made it a felony for people to submit ballots that weren’t theirs. (Election officials, family members, and caregivers were exempt.) State Republicans fought for three years to enact the law, arguing that the practice created an opportunity for people to destroy others’ ballots or tamper with them in some way. Arizona Democrats and community activists said ballot collection was common in the state’s minority areas and that the law was designed to decrease minority voting. In September, a federal judge denied a Democratic challenge to the law, finding that it didn’t disproportionately affect minority voters.

Friday’s ruling opens the door for community activists to collect ballots and turn them in, a factor that could be key in a state with a number of close races, including Democrats’ quest to oust controversial Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio. The presidential race has recently become competitive in Arizona, a state that hasn’t voted for the Democratic presidential nominee since 1996. Clinton spoke to a crowd of more than 10,000 supporters at Arizona State University on Wednesday.

The ruling doesn’t eliminate the law entirely; it just puts it on hold for Tuesday’s election. A full hearing will take place in January, according to the Associated Press.

This story has been updated.

Source – 

The Supreme Court Just Reinstated a Controversial Voting Law in Arizona

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Two Top Democrats Ask Justice Department to Investigate FBI Leaks

by sipid34 Posted on November 4, 2016

Mother Jones

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Two top Democratic lawmakers are asking the Justice Department to investigate the leaks coming from the FBI in recent weeks regarding the probe into Hillary Clinton’s private email server. It’s the first indication of what is likely to be a series of inquiries after the election into the FBI’s willingness to make public comments about its ongoing investigation and its inability to control leaks so close to a presidential election.

On Friday, Reps. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) and John Conyers (D-Mich.) sent a letter to Justice Department inspector general Michael Horowitz asking him to investigate the leaks, including evidence of leaks to Rudy Giuliani, a top adviser to Donald Trump. The letter cites Giuliani’s appearance Friday morning on Fox and Friends, during which he acknowledged receiving inside information from the FBI about Clinton’s investigation before the agency notified Congress of the information. “Did I hear about it?” Giuliani said on air. “You’re darn right I heard about it.” The letter also cites leaks to Fox News host Bret Baier, which resulted in the anchor retracting a story about the FBI’s investigation of the Clinton Foundation.

“These unauthorized and inaccurate leaks from within the FBI, particularly so close to a presidential election, are unprecedented,” the letter says. “For these reasons, we are calling on your office to conduct a thorough investigation to identify the sources of these and other leaks from the FBI and to recommend appropriate action.”

Originally from – 

Two Top Democrats Ask Justice Department to Investigate FBI Leaks

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Want to See What Donald Trump Is Doing to the Republican Party’s Future? Watch This Florida District

by VeldaWeiser Posted on November 4, 2016

Mother Jones

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By 11 a.m. on the second-to-last Sunday before early voting began in Florida, Joe Garcia, a former Democratic congressman who is running to reclaim his old seat in the state’s 26th district, was going to church for the fourth time that day. “You can do one, maybe two sermons, but on the third one, you’re crying,” he said. He pulled his silver Nissan hatchback onto the grass across the street from the Greater Williams Freewill Baptist Church, a small white building amid fields of winter tomatoes in an African American neighborhood of Homestead, 40 minutes south of Miami.

Garcia is 53, with curly gray hair, glasses, and the wry smile of someone who is always on the verge of saying something he shouldn’t. His Republican opponent, Rep. Carlos Curbelo, points out that he often does. In 2013, during Garcia’s one term in Congress, he referred to obstructionist GOP colleagues as “Taliban“; in September, he told supporters that Hillary Clinton, whom he supports, “is under no illusions that you want to have sex with her.” He has run for the same seat four times and lost all but once to three different Republicans. But this fall, he believes Donald Trump will help propel him to victory.

Florida’s 26th district, which stretches from Key West to the edge of Little Havana, may be the swingiest seat in the nation’s swingiest state. The area, which was part of the 25th district before redistricting, has been represented by a different member of Congress every two years since 2008 and has flipped from red to blue to red in the last three elections. The seat is critical to Democrats’ longshot effort to take control of the House, and to Republicans’ plans to keep it. Combined, the two candidates and their allies have spent $14 million trying to break the stalemate. What’s happening in South Florida is emblematic of the drama playing out in jigsawed districts across the country: an embattled Republican incumbent struggling to escape Trump’s shadow, and a Democratic opponent fighting to keep him there.

But the district is an outlier in a few important ways: The majority of its voters are Hispanic, nearly half its residents are foreign-born, and the consequences of global warming are already being felt. Neighborhoods flood at high tide, immigrants arrive every day, and the most divisive political fights in some communities are over the threat posed by Zika, so Florida is on the frontlines of a fight that climate change may only exacerbate. In the 26th district, the future projected by atmospheric models and demographic trends is already here. The politics have evolved accordingly.

Curbelo is a GOP rising star who joined the party leadership’s whip team as a freshman. But as his party careens toward ethno-nationalism, he is waging his own campaign of mitigation and adaptation, condemning Trump’s candidacy and talking up his work as the co-founder of the bipartisan Climate Solutions Caucus in Congress. Whether or not he can survive will say a lot about what kind of future Republicans are building for themselves.

Democrats consider Curbelo’s moderation little more than a deathbed conversion, after a district he won by three points in the midterms was redrawn to become three points more Democratic. This was the message Garcia hammered home to the congregation in Homestead. He clapped along with the choir from the first pew and bounded up to a spot just below the pulpit when he was introduced. “First off, the chorus was on fire!” Garcia said. “They were on fire!”

“We’ve lived through eight years of attacks and abuse that we’ve seen on a national level,” he said. Republicans were to blame. “They have sowed this sick, sick seed. They’ve watered this wicked weed. And now comes time for their hateful harvest, and they’re running. They’re running because they’re now scared of what they did and they don’t want to be Republicans anymore, right? Because they’re scared of what they’ve wrought.” There was little doubt about whom he was referring to.

Former Democratic Rep. Joe Garcia talks to volunteers at his campaign office in Miami’s Sunset neighborhood. Tim Murphy/Mother Jones

Heading into the 2016 election, Miami-Dade County was the hottest place in Republican politics, home to Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio, two bilingual candidates promising a friendlier, more diverse conservatism. They were also responding to a mathematical reality: If the party didn’t become more presentable to Hispanic voters and instead continued on the course pushed by Mitt Romney (of “self-deport” fame), it would be shut out of the White House indefinitely.

They bet on the wrong hand. Trump shredded Bush and Rubio by directly confronting their appeal. He mocked Bush’s Mexican-born wife, questioned whether the son of Cuban immigrants was even eligible for the presidency, and attacked anyone who crossed him as a water-carrier for undocumented immigrants. The party shrank toward its base of white men, and South Florida became home to a large and vocal contingent of Never Trump exiles.

Calling it a “moral decision,” Curbelo promised in March, when the nomination was still up for grabs, that he would not back Trump. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, whose majority-Hispanic district neighbors the 26th, followed suit. So did Miami mayor Tomás Regalado, Miami-Dade mayor Carlos Giménez, George W. Bush’s commerce secretary Carlos Gutierrez, mega-donor Mike Fernandez, talking-head Ana Navarro, and ex-Florida GOP spokesman Wadi Gaitan. Miami-Dade was the only county Trump lost in the primary, and many of those Republican voters who pulled the lever for Rubio never warmed to the nominee; one survey of the county in October showed Trump running 18 points behind Rubio’s re-election campaign in Miami-Dade.

Refusing to support Trump is a useful survival mechanism, but by itself it might not be enough. While Republicans in South Florida have mostly hidden from the presidential race, their opponents won’t stop talking about it. The county has gained 130,000 new Hispanic voters since 2012, and of those new voters, Democrats outnumber Republicans by more than a two-to-one margin. The Clinton campaign is saturating the airwaves and canvassing for Democrats up and down the ballot. One irony of Trump is that the Republicans most likely to take the fall for his politics are the ones who least subscribe to them.

Curbelo is 36, with short black hair and an almost permanent smirk. Like Garcia, he is the son of Cuban immigrants; they attended the same all-boys Catholic school, Belen Jesuit, which was relocated to Miami from Havana after another alum, Fidel Castro, shut it down. Even Garcia admits to having watched his opponent’s ascent with a certain amount of awe. Curbelo spent most of his early years in politics running campaigns for local Republicans, getting elected to the school board, and supplying occasional quotes to national reporters about how the party can win with Hispanics.

He owes his current job to a series of very Florida scandals. The area’s previous Republican congressman, David Rivera, lost to Garcia in 2012 amid an investigation into whether he had tried to rig the Democratic primary by paying a fake “straw” candidate to run against Garcia. (Rivera has not been charged, but an ally was convicted for her role in the scandal.) But not long after he took office, Garcia’s campaign manager Jeffrey Garcia (no relation) was investigated for funding a fake tea party candidate to draw votes from Rivera. Jeffrey Garcia was later convicted for both the straw candidate and for absentee ballot fraud and spent time in prison. The scandals were just enough for Curbelo to squeak past Garcia in a good Republican year.

So when Trump rose to the top of the Republican primary polls last summer, Curbelo’s first response made a certain amount of sense. “I think there’s a small possibility that this gentleman is a phantom candidate,” he said in a Spanish-language radio interview in July 2015. “Mr. Trump has a close friendship with Bill and Hillary Clinton. They were at his last wedding. He has contributed to the Clintons’ foundation. He has contributed to Mrs. Clinton’s Senate campaigns. All of this is very suspicious.”

Curbelo, who first supported Bush and then switched to Rubio, has since sobered up to the reality of Trump. At his first debate with Garcia in early October, in the auditorium of their old high school with their former civics teacher looking on, Curbelo was asked out of the gate about his presidential election vote. His mind hadn’t changed. “I will not be voting for either of these two candidates, because I believe we can do better,” he said.

Garcia pounced. “You know as members of Congress the only thing we do is vote—that’s the only thing we do,” he said. “The question is, what would Mr. Curbelo say to his daughters if the night of the election Donald Trump wins?”

Later, Curbelo was asked if he’d support Trump’s plan to construct a wall on the southern border. Again, Curbelo said no. When he was asked what his immigration plan would be, Curbelo offered up something that sounded a lot like Clinton’s: more money to secure the border, better visa tracking, and a path to citizenship for people who are here already. In explaining his support for that last plank, he told a story that might have gotten him booed out of the Republican National Convention, had he bothered to attend.

“I did something a few months ago, I stayed overnight at the home of someone who is undocumented,” he said. “Her name is Cristina, she has three children, one came with her to this country and two were born here. I slept over at her home and we woke up at four in the morning. I get choked up because this was one heck of an experience for me. We woke up at four in the morning and we went out and picked okra—quingombó, for those of you who speak Spanish. I was only able to do it for about three hours. She would do it for another six hours.”

Curbelo brought up Garcia’s past scandals at every opportunity, tarring, with some success, his opponent as a corrupt buffoon and a broken record. He bragged about working with Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.) on gun control and Rep. Bobby Scott (D-Va.), a former NAACP official, on juvenile justice reform. If you were coming in blind, you might have thought Curbelo was a Democrat.

Garcia’s task has been to remind everyone he isn’t. In just a few days of following the race, I heard a variation of his favored retort a half dozen times. “He’s in the Republican leadership and voted to make women wait 48 hours after they were raped to get an abortion,” Garcia says. “He’s a guy who’s voted or tried to push back Obamacare on nine separate occasions with no replacement. He’s a guy who’s voted to block all the president’s EPA rules on clean water. But suddenly his road to epiphany, his road to Damascus, was the epiphany of the court drawing a more liberal district.”

The most contentious issue on the ballot in Key West this November isn’t control of Congress; it’s mosquitoes. Climate change is making the problem worse. Tim Murphy/Mother Jones

A few days after their first debate, Curbelo and Garcia faced off again at a forum for local candidates in Key West. A hundred or so residents gathered in an auditorium above an art gallery a short walk from Ernest Hemingway’s old home. The outer Keys are Garcia’s turf; he opened a district office there when he was congressman, and the area skews heavily Democratic. But Curbelo needs Democratic votes to win, and he believes he can get them by doing something Republicans are loath to do: talk about the environment.

Just getting to the event offered a glimpse of what the future has in store. The King Tide, an semi-annual event that produces super-tides similar to what regular tides will look like in a few decades, had turned roads and parking lots on both sides of the main highway into small lakes, as if a water main had burst. “I was out for a run with my dog yesterday, and I had to alternate my route because of the deep water in my street,” the Keys’ Republican state representative, Holly Raschein, told me as she gave away bottles of sunscreen before the forum. Raschein, like Curbelo, split with her party’s leaders to push for funding for adaptation.

More than an hour of the candidate forum was devoted to one issue: fighting mosquitoes and the diseases they carry, such as Zika. The most prominent campaign signs in Key West advertised seats on the mosquito control board, and two questions on the ballot in Monroe County will determine whether to allow a British company to release genetically modified mosquitoes. Opponents of the plan wore white badges that read, “I do not consent.”

Adaptation was the word of the night. On stage, Curbelo and Garcia clashed on Trump and Cuba, but Curbelo also went out of his way to talk about his work on water and climate. He boasted of securing $2 billion for Everglades restoration, blocking future flood-insurance hikes, and sponsoring a bill with the bipartisan Climate Solutions Caucus, the working group he co-founded that now boasts 20 members. (The bill does not propose any measures to address climate change, but, in Washington fashion, would create a commission to study and propose measures to address climate change.) “We’re at the tip of the spear,” he said.

Afterward, Curbelo laughed off Garcia’s talk of a politically motivated conversion. He’d been confronted with the science by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration experts and he’d accepted it. So why did most of his colleagues still have their heads in the sand? Curbelo blamed Democrats. “You’ve gotta look at the history of this issue,” he told me. “When Vice President Gore adopted this cause, that resulted in just some natural polarization on the issue, because I think a lot of Republicans wrongly assumed that this was a Democratic issue or a liberal issue. I think hopefully if Mr. Gore could do it all over again, he would find a Republican partner and advocate together, but anyway that didn’t happen.”

He told me he was optimistic that climate change legislation could happen in a Republican House. “I’ve been very happy with the response I’ve been getting from Republicans,” he said. “Remember—no one’s worked on this! Very few people have worked on this on the Republican side, so I thought it was gonna be a lot tougher, but there’s a lot of interest.”

Curbelo was even optimistic, sort of, that climate legislation might pass under a President Trump—someone who has previously said that global warming is a Chinese hoax. “Who knows! I think he’s someone who’s clearly shown that he’s flexible on many issues,” he said, forcing a laugh. “Sometimes too flexible for my view, but who knows, maybe!”

But his sunny optimism about his party’s future speaks to the challenges facing Republicans like him. It isn’t true that Curbelo’s colleagues haven’t worked on climate issues—they have. But their work has been focused on blocking climate action and hounding scientists who are working on it. That level of obstruction has played well in deep-red patches of the country. But in educated, coastal swing districts, and in particular among millennial voters, it has contributed to a rising tide against Republicans. Garcia may be heavy-handed in his criticism, but his efforts to tie Curbelo to his party’s mainstream have a certain resonance; what’s the point of calling something an existential threat if you’re not even willing to pick a presidential candidate who will fight it?

Many House Republicans who have seen the light on climate change, including Illinois’ Bob Dold, Florida’s David Jolly, and New York’s Lee Zeldin, happen to be in similarly dire electoral straits. On Tuesday, thanks to losses and retirements, the number of Republican members of the Climate Solutions Caucus could easily be cut in half.

As Curbelo made small talk with a few constituents, and fended off questions from the mosquito people, a middle-aged man walked up. He was a biology professor at Florida Keys Community College and a Bernie Sanders supporter, but he wanted to thank Curbelo for his work on climate—he was still on the fence about which candidate to back. Next up was Jonathan Van Leer, a professor of physical oceanography at the University of Miami. He lives just outside the district but said he’d vote for Curbelo if he could. After he’d had a few words with the congressman, he told me, “I’ve been teaching climate change for a long time, and it’s the first time I haven’t felt depressed.”

Curbelo had a three-hour drive back to Miami, but he could not leave just yet. A filmmaker had released a new documentary about the effects of climate change on South Florida, and Curbelo, stepping out of campaign mode for a minute, had agreed to say a few words about his climate caucus and the challenges that lay ahead. As he and a few staffers lingered in the emptying theater, someone had turned on the documentary, and on the screen behind them a wave came crashing down.

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Want to See What Donald Trump Is Doing to the Republican Party’s Future? Watch This Florida District

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This Is the Bleakest Poll of the 2016 Election

by al36olu Posted on November 4, 2016

Mother Jones

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Throughout the election season, Hillary Clinton has used Donald Trump’s record of belittling and rating women based on their physical appearances as evidence that the Republican nominee is a bad role model and unfit to be president of the United States. “Our children are watching,” one Clinton ad from July suggested. Another in September featured young women looking in the mirror, while Trump’s own words disparaging women played in the background.

A new poll from the Upshot published on Friday appears to confirm Clinton’s stark warnings, with nearly half of the teenage girls polled saying that Trump’s disparaging remarks have had a negative effect on the way they view their bodies.

“That hits me hard when people like Trump say people who are skinnier than I am are too big,” 15-year-old Morgan Lesh told the Times. “It makes me feel extremely insecure about myself.”

“Especially for girls in high school rating girls on a scale of 1 to 10 does not help because it really does get into your head that they think I’m ugly or I don’t look good,” 14-year-old Jordan Barrett said.

The survey’s results align with other anecdotes showing Trump’s inflammatory remarks resonating with children.

Trump, as he’s done with similar lines of criticism against him, has used Clinton’s negative portrayal of him to suggest that she’s the one who is a bad role model for his 10-year-old son. By next Tuesday, we’ll see who America believes.

Originally posted here: 

This Is the Bleakest Poll of the 2016 Election

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Presenting the Bad Hombre and the Nasty Woman: Cocktails to Get You Through Election Night

by TiffinyHarter Posted on November 4, 2016

Mother Jones

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Bite is Mother Jones‘ new food politics podcast. Listen to all our episodes here, or by subscribing in iTunes or Stitcher or via RSS.

If this year’s presidential race hasn’t made you want to shotgun an IPA at full speed, then you haven’t been paying attention. Even the most reserved of us have probably reached for the bottle more than we’d like to admit. But election night is nearly upon us, and to toast the end of the shit-show as the total counts come in, we’re going to need some drinks. Strong ones. Lots of them.

We commissioned a bartender to mix up some presidential-race-inspired cocktails that turn Donald Trump’s off-color remarks into an excuse to have a stiff drink or two (or seven, we’re not judging). To hear how to make the Bad Hombre and the Nasty Woman, plus an interview with the Obama administration’s chef Sam Kass, listen to our latest episode of Bite below. The cocktail segment begins at 1:00.

Nicky Beyries is the bar manager at Foreign Cinema and Laszlo in San Francisco. When creating these political party favors for us, she cleverly chose spirits made by women and people of color (like Square One vodka and Ilegal mezcal). She also avoided predictable choices, like a cosmo for the Nasty Woman.

“I get really tired as a female bartender who faces a lot of sexism—not only from guests, but from the industry and from liquor companies themselves—of the idea that for it to be womanly it has to be a certain way or a certain color,” Beyries told me. “There’s nothing more feminine about something because it’s dyed pink.”

If you can’t track down the products Beyries recommends, our own Tom Philpott has another take on the Bad Hombre, with ingredients you just might have on hand.

So without further ado, here are the recipes for your election-night imbibing pleasure. Cheers!

Bad Hombre

1 dash chili bitters
2 dashes chocolate bitters
1/4 ounce creme de cacao (Tempus Fugit brand)
3/4 ounce Cocchi di Torino vermouth
2 ounces Ilegal Reposado

Stir well over ice, pour into a cocktail glass, garnish with a small chili de arbol balanced on the rim, and a sprinkling of fresh cinnamon.

Photo courtesy Nicky Beyries

Nasty Woman

3 Thai basil leaves
1/2 ounce simple syrup
3/4 ounce fresh lemon juice
2 ounces Square One Basil Vodka

Shake, double strain into a glass, and top with about 1.5 ounces Fever-Tree bitter lemon soda. Garnish with a spring of Thai Basil.

Don’t have these fancy ingredients at home? Try Tom Philpott’s out-of-the-cabinet Bad Hombre:

4 ounces mezcal
2 ounces dry vermouth
2 splashes Cointreau
2-4 dashes of orange bitters
A pinch of chipotle powder (or smoked hot paprika)
A teaspoon each of salt and chipotle powder (or smoked hot paprika), mixed and laid out on a small plate
Garnish: two quarter orange slices, dusted on both sides with salt and chipotle powder.

Wipe the edges of two coupe glasses with an orange slice to moisten. Dip them into the salt/powder mixture to line the edge.

Combine the mezcal, vermouth, Cointreau, a pinch of chipotle powder, and the bitters in a jar. Add ice cubes, stir vigorously, and strain into the coupes. Garnish with the oranges slices. Serves two.

And just in case you missed the internet frenzy over Trump’s “bad hombre” and “nasty woman” comments, here’s a round up of the best memes.

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Presenting the Bad Hombre and the Nasty Woman: Cocktails to Get You Through Election Night

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