Tag Archives: wisconsin

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.”

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Tom Steyer Is Taking on the Climate Deniers Running for President

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Feds Say Georgia’s Treatment of Transgender Prisoners Is Unconstitutional

by ErnaKPDfqnkrhes Posted on April 3, 2015

Mother Jones

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For three years, the Georgia Department of Corrections allegedly has denied transgender inmate Ashley Diamond medical treatment for gender dysphoria, causing her such distress that she has attempted on multiple occasions to castrate herself, cut off her penis, and kill herself. In February, Diamond filed a lawsuit against GDC officials, and on Friday the Department of Justice dealt the GDC a major blow, claiming that the state’s failure to adequately treat inmates with gender dysphoria “constitutes cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment.”

The DOJ weighed in on Diamond’s case via a statement of interest, which offers recommendations for how the district court in Georgia should rule in the case. It focused on Georgia’s so-called freeze-frame policy, which prevents inmates from receiving hormone therapy for gender dysphoria if they were not identified as transgender and referred for treatment immediately during the prison intake process. “Freeze-frame policies and other policies that apply blanket prohibitions to such treatment are facially unconstitutional because they fail to provide individualized assessment and treatment of a serious medical need,” DOJ officials wrote, adding that similar policies have been previously struck down in Wisconsin and New York.

Chinyere Ezie, Diamond’s lead attorney, says the defense has until next Friday to submit briefs in response to the complaint, which may include a motion to dismiss the lawsuit. The first hearing for the case is scheduled for April 13. You can read the DOJ’s entire statement below, and check out our earlier coverage of Diamond’s case.

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Diamond Statement of Interest (PDF)

Diamond Statement of Interest (Text)

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Feds Say Georgia’s Treatment of Transgender Prisoners Is Unconstitutional

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Ted Cruz Throws His Hat In General Direction of Presidential Ring

by Anderso7849 Posted on March 23, 2015

Mother Jones

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The big news sweeping my Twitter feed last night was Ted Cruz’s rather sudden decision to announce that he’s running for president. Usually there’s a warmup period of some kind (an “exploratory committee,” etc.) but apparently Cruz decided to dispense with all that and simply throw his hat in the ring posthaste. The motivation for his sudden haste is a little mysterious at this point.

The other thing sweeping my Twitter feed was the fact that the URL tedcruz.com leads to the site on the right. Patrick Caldwell explains this and much more in his brisk overview of potential candidates and their unfortunate lack of attention to the basics of internet campaigning:

Unfortunately for the Texas Republican, long before he ran for Senate in 2012, TedCruz.com had been nabbed by an Arizona attorney who shares his name. Based on a search of the Wayback Machine, an internet archive, the Arizona Cruz’s website dates back to at least early 2008, when it was a normal, if slightly Geocities-tinged, business website. “Putting All Your Real Estate Needs In ‘CRUZ CONTROL,'” the attorney’s tagline said at the time. But sometime within the past year he ditched his law site to instead mock the would-be-president. On a simple black background, in large font, the website screamed: “COMING SOON, Presidential Candidate, I Luv CHRISTIE!!!!!” Attorney Cruz wouldn’t say anything to Mother Jones over email except to acknowledge that he has owned the domain for several years. But he deleted the section about loving Christie shortly thereafter. Given the initial message, though, it seems unlikely that the Arizona attorney will be easily persuaded to relinquish control of the domain to the senator.

That’s bad luck, no? Still, at least Cruz has control of tedcruz.org. It was obviously thrown together pretty quickly, though at least it’s got the basics. But why the slapdash approach? According to the New York Times this morning, Cruz was afraid of being upstaged: “By becoming the first candidate to declare himself officially in the race, Republicans briefed on his strategy said, Mr. Cruz hopes to reclaim the affection and attention of those on the party’s right wing who have begun eyeing other contenders, particularly Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin.”

Cruz’s official announcement, inevitably, will be done at Liberty University, Jerry Falwell’s shrine to the Christian Right. I think we can expect many, many more speeches and announcements from Republican wannabes there. But Cruz will be the first! Take that, Bobby Jindal!

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Ted Cruz Throws His Hat In General Direction of Presidential Ring

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Scott Walker Just Blatantly Pandered to Iowa’s Corn Farmers

by JudeSlater Posted on March 9, 2015

Mother Jones

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As the Republican governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker has resisted the federal government’s support of the biofuel industry. But last weekend, within the borders of corn-rich Iowa—the state upon which Walker appears most intensely focused for his all-but-announced presidential bid—he sang a different tune. Joining other potential candidates at the Iowa Ag Summit, Walker said he was “willing to go forward on continuing the Renewable Fuel Standard,” a federal policy that requires fuel used in the US to contain at least 10 percent “renewable fuel,” usually ethanol and other biofuel.

As the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel noted, this represents a complete about-face for Walker, who made enemies in Wisconsin for his long resistance to robust ethanol subsidies. Corn is Wisconsin’s most important crop, and in 2012, the state was the nation’s second-biggest ethanol exporter. In January 2014, Walker stayed quiet on a federal proposal to cut ethanol use by three billion gallons. That silence angered biofuel producers in the state, according to the Journal-Sentinel, as well as the governors of nearly every other Midwestern state, including Iowa’s Terry Branstad.

Walker’s opposition to the federal ethanol mandate stretches back to 2006, when he was the Milwaukee county executive running for governor. The Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) was a year old, and it was considered a viable way to reduce US use of foreign oil, improve the environment, and help out American farmers. However, Walker said, “it is clear to me that a big government mandate is not the way to support the farmers of this state.” Bruce Pfaff, Walker’s then-campaign manager, told Wisconsin’s Daily Reporter, “How can you justify the mandate when it is not proven whether or not it will help gas prices, the economy or the environment?”

Indeed, studies have found that ethanol is worse for the climate than fossil fuel. Though the mandate has been a boon to corn producers—40 percent of American corn is now used for biofuel—it also caused food prices to rise in the United States and abroad. Beyond that, given the recent increase in fossil fuel production in the US, environmental groups and taxpayer organizations are arguing that continued federal support of ethanol production—once considered an important alternative to foreign oil—is unnecessary.

But in Iowa, which produces nearly a third of US ethanol, the industry is far from unnecessary. The RFS will expire in 2022. This past weekend, Walker said that he’d continue the mandate, but he added that he hoped the United States will eventually not need it.

Walker’s evolution on the issue is already handing his critics and opponents ammunition. The conservative blog Hot Air called Walker’s stance a “big let down.” It praised the lone conservative who opposed RFS last weekend: Texas Sen. Ted Cruz. “I recognize that this is a gathering of a lot of folks where the answer you’d like me to give is ‘I’m for the RFS, darnit.’ That’d be the easy thing to do,” Cruz said. “I’ll tell you, people are pretty fed up, I think, with politicians who run around and tell one group one thing, tell another group another thing.”

Walker’s enemies in the Democratic Party let loose too. DNC spokesman Jason Pitt told the Wisconsin State Journal, “If Scott Walker thinks pandering on ethanol is going to convince people he’s anything but backwards on energy and the environment he can think again.”

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Scott Walker Just Blatantly Pandered to Iowa’s Corn Farmers

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Scott Walker Blows It Again: Asked About ISIS, All He Has Is Bluster

by SoilaAnnunziata Posted on February 27, 2015

Mother Jones

Over at National Review, conservative blogger Jim Geraghty joins the crowd of pundits who are unimpressed with Scott Walker’s recent answers to fairly easy questions:

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker received a lot of completely undeserved grief from the national news media in the past weeks. But he may have made a genuine unforced error in one of his remarks today. Asked about ISIS, Walker responded, “If I can take on 100,000 protesters, I can do the same across the globe.”

That is a terrible response. First, taking on a bunch of protesters is not comparably difficult to taking on a Caliphate with sympathizers and terrorists around the globe, and saying so suggests Walker doesn’t quite understand the complexity of the challenge from ISIS and its allied groups.

Let’s put aside the question of whether Walker deserves any grief for his weasely comments about evolution and President Obama’s love of country. Fair or not, those actually seem like the kinds of questions presidential candidates get asked all the time. If Walker wants to be taken seriously, he should have better responses then he did.

But hey—maybe those really were gotcha questions and Walker should get a pass for answering them badly. ISIS, by contrast, certainly isn’t. It’s one of the preeminent policy challenges we face, and if you’re aiming for the Oval Office you’d better have something substantive to say about it. As Geraghty suggests, generic tough-guy posturing does nothing except show that you’re out of your depth.

At a broader level, the problem is that although Walker’s anti-union victories are a legitimate part of his appeal and a legitimate part of his campaign story, he’s become something of a one-note Johnny about it. His supposed bravery in standing up to union leaders and peaceful middle-class protestors has become his answer to everything. This is going to get old pretty quickly for everyone but a small band of die-hard fans.

Needless to say, it’s early days, and Walker’s stumbles over the past couple of weeks are unlikely to hurt him much. In fact, it’s better to get this stuff out of the way now. It will give Walker an improved sense of what to expect when the campaign really heats up and his answers matter a lot more than they do now.

That said, every candidate for president—Democrat and Republican—should be expected to have a pretty good answer to the ISIS question. No empty posturing. No generic bashing of Obama’s policies. No cute evasions. That stuff is all fine as red meat for the campaign trail, but it’s not a substitute for explaining what you’d actually do if you were president. Ground troops? More drones? Getting our allies to contribute more? Whatever it is, let’s hear it.

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Scott Walker Blows It Again: Asked About ISIS, All He Has Is Bluster

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Scott Walker’s Tax Cuts Are Coming Back to Haunt Him

by Candelaria72B Posted on February 19, 2015

Mother Jones

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Via Ed Kilgore, this might prove to be Scott Walker’s biggest Achilles’ heel:

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, facing a $283 million deficit that needs to be closed by the end of June, will skip more than $100 million in debt payments to balance the books thrown into disarray by his tax cuts.

….“They need some cash,” said Todd Berry, president of the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance, a nonpartisan research group that examines taxes and government spending. “This is kicking the can down the road.”

For the time being, this is probably not a big deal. Walker says he’s just “restructuring” the state’s debt, and that will probably wash for now. But there’s no question that Walker’s tax cut zealotry puts him in a dilemma. If the economy continues to slog along, Wisconsin’s finances will deteriorate and Walker’s presidential chances will suffer. If the economy picks up, Wisconsin will benefit but so will Hillary Clinton. The path to presidential success often turns out to depend on the economy, and for Walker it might end up being a narrow path indeed.

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Scott Walker’s Tax Cuts Are Coming Back to Haunt Him

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Scott Walker Is Still Clearly a Work in Progress

by AnitraSteadham Posted on February 2, 2015

Mother Jones

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I see that Martha Raddatz’s interview with presidential wannabe Scott Walker is making the rounds today. And deservedly so! After listening to Walker blather a bit about America’s need for “big, bold ideas,” Raddatz asks him, “What is your big, bold, fresh idea in Syria?” Walker hems and haws a bit about being tough and aggressive, and then we get this:

RADDATZ: You don’t think 2,000 air strikes is taking it to ISIS in Syria and Iraq?

WALKER: I think we need to have an aggressive strategy anywhere around the world. I think it’s a mistake to —

(CROSSTALK)

RADDATZ: But what does that mean? I don’t know what aggressive strategy means. If we’re bombing and we’ve done 2,000 air strikes, what does an aggressive strategy mean in foreign policy?

WALKER: I think anywhere and everywhere, we have to be — go beyond just aggressive air strikes. We have to look at other surgical methods. And ultimately, we have to be prepared to put boots on the ground if that’s what it takes, because I think, you know —

RADDATZ: Boots on the ground in Syria? U.S. boots on the ground in Syria?

WALKER: I don’t think that is an immediate plan, but I think anywhere in the world —

RADDATZ: But you would not rule that out.

WALKER: I wouldn’t rule anything out. I think when you have the lives of Americans at stake and our freedom loving allies anywhere in the world, we have to be prepared to do things that don’t allow those measures, those attacks, those abuses to come to our shores.

So there you have it. Walker is so unprepared to talk about foreign policy that he gets quickly trapped into suggesting that we put more American troops into Iraq and Syria to fight ISIS. Did he really mean to do that? Or was he just feeling the pressure of a live interview and felt like he had to say something? Hard to say. A more experienced candidate would have tap danced a lot more effectively, probably with some prattle about arming our allies or something—though Raddatz undoubtedly would have pounced on that too.

Michael Tomasky remains pretty unimpressed with Walker, especially after finally listening to his big speech in Iowa from last weekend:

If this was the standout speech, I sure made the right decision in not subjecting myself to the rest of them. It was little more than a series of red-meat appetizers and entrees: Wisconsin defunded Planned Parenthood, said no to Obamacare, passed some kind of law against “frivolous” lawsuits, and moved to crack down on voter “fraud””—all of that besides, of course, his big move, busting the public-employee unions. There wasn’t a single concrete idea about addressing any of the major problems the country faces.

Well, that will come—though it’s unlikely that Walker’s ideas will be any different from the usual Republican boilerplate of the past decade or so. Lower taxes and less corporate regulation will supercharge the economy! Hooray!

Walker still has a ways to go before he’s ready for prime time. But I’ll bet he gets there. He’ll learn from his mistakes, and he’s just about the only Republican candidate who has potential appeal to both tea partiers and mainstream voters. Six months from now minor early stumbles like this will be ancient history, and he’ll have his campaign schtick much more finely honed. He remains a serious contender.

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Scott Walker Is Still Clearly a Work in Progress

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Here’s Some of the Dumb Stuff People Did With Drones Last Year

by Constantinee9g Posted on January 29, 2015

Mother Jones

Thanks to the federal intelligence employee who got buzzed and crashed a remote-controlled quadcopter on the White House grounds earlier this week, there’s a renewed interest on drones’ potential to cause mayhem.

Last November, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) released a list of 193 incidents of “drone misbehavior” (as the New York Times put it) reported to air traffic control officials in 2014. The list didn’t include incidents reported to law enforcement, so it’s not necessarily comprehensive. But it does offer a glimpse of the challenges of incorporating flying robot vehicles into everyday life.

Some highlights from the report (see the full list at the end of this post):

Drones and sports: There were more than a half-dozen incidents of people flying drones near crowded sporting events. Drones were spotted near games at the University of Arizona in Tucson; Neyland Stadium in Knoxville, Tennessee (twice); Camp Randall Stadium in Madison, Wisconsin; the Big House in Ann Arbor during a University of Michigan game; FedEx Field during a Washington REDACTED game; and Citi Field during a Mets game.

Drone strike: Of all the incidents listed in the FAA report, just one involved a drone striking a person. In October, a small drone flying low over the Daytona Beach Municipal Stadium struck “a citizen causing (a) minor abrasion.”

Close calls: One of the obvious concerns is that some yahoo (or even a skilled pilot) will fly drone into a aircraft with actual people on board. The FAA report lists several close calls and near misses in 2014. On September 30, the pilot of an inbound regional jet reported a flying device that almost hit the plane at 4,000 feet, just north of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. In August, a medevac helicopter in Las Vegas reported almost getting hit by a drone at 200 feet as it was trying to leave a hospital. In June, a helicopter pilot in Stockton, California, reported almost hitting two remote controlled gliders at about 750 feet. And in March, a pilot in Tallahassee, Florida, said he almost struck a “remote controlled aircraft” while flying at 2,300 feet. One pilot had to take evasive action in the skies above Oklahoma City in October when a two-foot wide drone came within 10 to 20 feet of his plane at roughly 4,800 feet.

High altitude: There are at least 18 incidents involving drones flying above 4,000 feet, with some as high as 15,000 feet. (Most of the drones available to the general public fall into the FAA’s Model Aircraft category, which means they’re supposed to stay under 400 feet.) In a report from last May, a pilot approaching LaGuardia Airport reported seeing a 10- to 15-foot-wide drone at 5,500 feet above the southern tip of Manhattan.

Grounded: In August, a pilot was arrested after getting stuck in a tree at Freedom Plaza in Washington, DC after climbing up to retrieve a crashed drone.

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Here’s Some of the Dumb Stuff People Did With Drones Last Year

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Ted Cruz Says the GOP Lost in 2012 Because of Two Words: "47 Percent"

by TangelaCso Posted on January 26, 2015

Mother Jones

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On Sunday night, Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) appeared with Rand Paul and Marco Rubio, his Senate colleagues and fellow presidential hopefuls, at the Koch brothers’ winter donor retreat, and he offered a two-word post-mortem for the GOP’s drubbing in the 2012 elections: 47 percent.

Cruz was referring, of course, to Mitt Romney’s infamous remarks, secretly caught on tape during a private campaign fundraiser, in which he dismissed 47 percent of Americans (“who will vote for this president no matter what”) as freeloaders “who are dependent on government” and who refuse to take responsibility for their lives.

According to Cruz, who was one of four presidential aspirants to appear before some 300 well-heeled donors at this weekend’s Koch retreat (Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker was the fourth, though he did not join Sunday’s panel), the GOP’s 47-percent problem is bigger than Romney’s comments. It’s a party-wide problem. But Cruz noted that he had a fix in time for the 2016 election.

Here’s what Cruz told panel moderator Jonathan Karl of ABC News:

Of course we have a problem with income inequality. And I have to say I chuckle every time I hear Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton talk about income inequality. Because it’s increased dramatically under their policies.

Now, if you look at the last election, I think in 2012 the reason Republicans lost can be summed up in two words: 47 percent. And I don’t just mean Mitt Romney’s comment that was caught on tape—that the 47 percent of Americans who are not currently paying taxes, who are in some ways dependent on government, we don’t have to worry about them. I don’t just mean that comment. I think Mitt is a good and decent and honorable man; I think he ran a very hard campaign.

But the central narrative of the last election, what the voters heard, was we don’t have to worry about the 47 percent. And I think Republicans are and should be the party of the 47 percent.

That is, the GOP should be the party of the bottom half.

Cruz did not go into great detail about how the Republicans could assist and appeal to the 47 percent. But he did accuse Obama administration officials of using their clout to get “fat and happy,” slamming Washington as rife with crony capitalism and claiming its denizens are fixated on self-enrichment at the expense of everyone else. “I think we need to move back to a dynamic where you have Schumpeter’s creative destruction, where you have small businesses that are creating opportunities,” he said. Cruz’s reference to Joseph Schumpeter, the Austrian economist beloved by libertarians and conservatives, was sure to delight at least one audience member: Charles Koch, a longtime fan of Schumpeter’s. Cruz added, “We should be fighting for the little guy who has dreams and hopes and desires.”

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Ted Cruz Says the GOP Lost in 2012 Because of Two Words: "47 Percent"

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Frackers can now frack faster on some public lands

by merinenty Posted on December 15, 2014

Frackers can now frack faster on some public lands

By on 15 Dec 2014commentsShare

As Congress moves to wrap up its year, a lot of important, must-pass legislation is moving quickly through the chambers. That creates the opportunity for politicians to sneak their pet projects into massive bills that most members don’t want to hold up or oppose. This year, that’s meant bad news for the environment — first in the federal budget (aka the Cromnibus bill) and now in the Defense Authorization Act of 2015.

The defense bill — which Congress passed last week and President Obama will soon sign  — is full of this kind of pork. Over at DeSmogBlog, Steve Horn digs into how a seemingly non-defense-related plan to expedite fracking on public lands ended up squirreled away inside the 1,616-page legislation.

Buried on page 1,156 of the bill as Section 3021 and subtitled “Bureau of Land Management Permit Processing,” the bill’s passage has won praise from both the American Petroleum Institute (API) and the Independent Petroleum Association of America (IPAA) …

Streamlined permitting means faster turn-around times for the industry’s application process to drill on public lands, bringing with it all of the air, groundwater and climate change issues that encompass the shale production process.

All that needed to happen to clear the way for this faster permitting was a small tweak to how some already-passed legislation was worded. Congress had already enacted a “pilot” program for permitting fracking on public land in the Bakken Shale region; with a few quick word changes in the Defense Authorization Act, that “pilot” program was expanded to all areas that the Bureau of Land Management oversees nationwide.

(Wisconsin Rep. Mark Pocan (D) submitted a bill last week to ban fracking from all federal lands, but in a Congress soon to be controlled by frack-happy Republicans, it doesn’t stand a chance.)

The defense bill contains other unpleasant anti-environmental provisions too. For instance: Michael McAuliff writes at The Huffington Post that Arizona Sens. Jeff Flake (R) and John McCain (R) succeeded in adding approval for a foreign-owned copper mine in their state that would not only be on public land but also stands to destroy a Native American burial ground.

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Frackers can now frack faster on some public lands

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