What Happened To Rand Paul?

If there's one silver lining to the rise of Donald Trump's toxic brand of overtly racist, protectionist populism, it's that it buried Rand Paul's toxic brand of more subtly racist, protectionist glibertarian nonsense and that Paul's aspirations for higher office are quite dead. Salon's Conor Lynch:

Trump has taken advantage of the fears and insecurities of a significant portion of white Americans, who see the influx of non-white immigrants — Hispanic, Asian, Muslim — as a threat to their way of life. In their view, Muslims are terrorists (i.e., Syrian refugees are members of ISIS — even though half are children), Mexicans are rapists and job-stealers, foreigners are cheaters, black people are lazy, and so on. They also distrust intellectuals and experts. Consider, for example, the denial of scientific realities like climate change and evolution. Even though the vast majority of scientists agree that human beings are warming the planet with their carbon output, most Republican supporters simply refuse to believe. Overall, the Tea Party movement appears to be a combination of white-identity politics and anti-intellectualism. Even Glenn Beck, the former patron saint of the Tea Party, has called Trump’s Tea Party supporters racists. (I guess he never interacted with supporters at those rallies of his.)

What does all this say about a great percentage of Republican voters? First of all, it reveals that many are ideologically inconsistent (except when it comes to their social views) and politically ignorant. After all, Trump is no small government conservative, and as former congressman Ron Paul said recently, he sounds increasingly authoritarian. It also reveals that most GOP voters are not libertarian like Rand Paul, and that his honesty on certain issues, especially when he speaks out against war, advocates diplomacy, and criticizes the government spying on its own citizens, hurts his standing in the Grand Old Party.

In closing, Jerry Taylor writes about issues that libertarians have been successful with over the past few years: 

Libertarians… can take heart from the fact that political sentiment is moving their way in some areas. Gay rights, drug decriminalization, increasing outrage over heavy-handed police tactics, growing concern over an unjust legal system, disgust over crony capitalism, and opposition to military deployments abroad all suggest that libertarian arguments can have political force.

The thing is, these issues are all areas where libertarians and those on the left agree. Indeed, liberals and libertarians tend to see eye to eye on somewhere around half of the issues (typically relating to civil rights), while they disagree on other things like the free market and income inequality. These issues — war, civil rights, criminal justice reform — are what make Paul an outsider in the Republican Party.

Whether you agreed with him or not during the last two debates, Paul did bring substance to otherwise fruitless events. But it seems that most GOP voters do not care about substance, and prefer entertaining and pompous loudmouths who embrace their irrational fears, insecurities and prejudices. One can disagree with a political opponent and still have great respect for him or her, but only when real substance and debate is involved. How can one have respect for an opponent like Trump, who makes outlandish claims without any evidence and popularizes untrue and dangerous generalizations about entire segments of the population? How can one respect someone who operates in fear-mongering and embraces some of the darkest qualities of human beings, like racism, to get ahead in the polls?

Unfortunately, the GOP is headed in this ugly direction, and the fall of Rand Paul, who is one of the few Republicans with a consistent and discernible philosophy — wrong as it may be — reveals this crude drift towards a political movement that will inevitably leave many victims in its wake.

And when the Trump boil bursts, it's going to be truly ugly, infectious, and sickening.  But at least the guy got rid of Rand Paul's snotty version of "Well, actually" racist libertarianism.  It just replaced it with something far worse.

StupidiNews!

• This year's Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to the Tunisian National Dialogue Quarter Group for its work in preventing the country from breaking up into civil war.
• The family of Walter Scott, killed when shot in the back by a white police officer in North Charleston in April, will receive a $6.5 million settlement from the city.
• A new four-year contract between the United Auto Workers and Fiat Chrysler will eliminate the current two-tier pay structure and appears to have headed off a strike set for this week.
• Netflix is raising its streaming service price to $9.99 for new customers immediately and for existing customers by 2016 as the company expands into Japan and New Zealand this year.
• A federal appeals court ruled Thursday that hot yoga creator Bikram Choudry's yoga postures cannot be copyrighted.

Last Call For Fortresses Of Learning

The focus in Indiana on dealing with mass shooting events is not guns, but public building themselves.  One high school is now a test case for turning schools into bunkers, and the industry that this is spawning could cost taxpayers billions on "hardening schools" rather than teaching kids.

“I know it sounds politically crass,” said Mason Wooldridge, the co-founder of Our Kids Deserve It, a group that works to promote what many might consider aggressive school safety standards. “But if Sandy Hook Elementary or the college in Oregon had what Indiana is promoting in their schools, nobody would have died.” 

The safety standards Wooldridge is working to implement in Indiana schools are no ordinary measures. 

They’ve already been implemented at Southwestern High School, a small school in rural Shelbyville. There, not only do children perform “active shooter drills” alongside fire drills, teachers wear special key fobs that alert police faster than a 911 call. Classrooms have “hardened doors” that lock automatically and “hardened exterior glass” windows to deflect both bullets and brute force. Cameras in the school have “shooter detection technology” — tools created for the military — to help law enforcement more quickly locate suspects. And if the suspect is trapped in the hallway, smoke cannisters can be detonated to slow down the shooter.

Wooldridge thinks these measures could have prevented the deadly outcomes of shootings like Sandy Hook and last week’s incident at Umpqua Community College in Oregon.

Selling schools as bunkers is the next frontier, folks.  You thought charter schools were profitable? How about spending millions per school to retrofit them with bulletproof glass, reinforced doors, security cameras, electronic locks, security gates and fences, and panic rooms?  And of course you love your kids, so as a parent you're not going to say no to protecting your kids from being slaughtered at school, right?

In the months following Sandy Hook, President Obama signed numerous executive orders to develop model emergency response plans for schools and provide $30 million in grants for schools to develop their own plans, among other things. But there has been no effort to create a nationwide standard for public learning institutions when it comes to active shooter response. 

“Nationally, there’s nothing being done to create standards of safety,” Wooldridge said. “But in Indiana, they are doing all those things.” 

It’s likely that the idea would receive pushback from conservative groups, which generally advocate a state or local approach. In comments to the conservative Daily Signal, for example, the Heritage Foundation’s education fellow Lindsey Burke said initiatives like Indiana’s shouldn’t be handled by the federal government. 

If national standards aren’t acquired, however, it will be up to school districts themselves to decide whether to invest in these measures — and with the high costs, it’s likely that they would be implemented mostly in predominantly-white suburban schools. Indeed, the small Southwestern High School is 97 percent white, and the median income level is above the state’s average.

Oh, I see how this works.  After all, there's no point in protecting schools for poor black inner-city kids.  Hell, we're closing those schools entirely.  We'll need to get the money to protect white suburban schools from somewhere in the budget, you know.

Sounds like the next great school scam to me.  And it's the schools that need the most help that won't see a dime.

Worst Kasich Scenario, Con't

John Kasich continues to show his moderate credentials because he's a moderate guy, and not at all crazy like the rest of the GOP presidential lineup.

In Washington, D.C. on Tuesday, the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce (USHCC) grilled presidential candidate John Kasich about his views on immigration, gun control, the wars in the Middle East, and economic inequality — particularly between men and women. 

USHCC President Javier Palomarez challenged the Ohio governor on the fact that women in his state working full time are getting paid roughly 78 percent of what men make — according to figures released by the U.S. Census Bureau. For Latina women across the U.S., the gap is even greater: just 54 percent of what men made in 2014. 

Palomarez pointed out that Kasich has daughters of his own, and asked how he explains this disparity to them. 

“Well, a lot of it is based on experience,” Kasich replied. “A lot of different factors go into it. It’s all tied up in skills. Do you not have the skills to be able to compete?” 

Seeming somewhat shocked at this response, Palomarez asked, “Are you saying women workers are less skilled than men?” 

“No, no, of course not,” Kasich said. “I mean, a woman is now running my campaign, and she’s doing a fantastic job. The head of our welfare reform office is a woman. I understand that if you exclude women, you’re not as effective.” 

He added that he has worked to increase spending on education in Ohio so that both men and women can gain the skills they need to earn a decent living.

It's weird, when you try to ask Republicans to give an answer as to why the gender pay gap exists and it's nearly 2 to 1 among women of color compared to white men for the same positions, they don't have an explanation other than "Women take lower paying jobs" which is hysterical if you again compare similar jobs or like Kasich they give some variation on "women aren't as good" but they don't really say it.

Then Kasich talks about education making a difference when the worst gender pay gap instances occur with women with degrees.

One statistic that both surprises and depresses me: While more women than men enroll in college today, when you look at education levels, the greatest wage gap comes among people with the most schooling under their belts. Women with graduate degrees earn just 69.1% of what men with graduate degrees earn and those with bachelor’s earn 71.4 % of men’s salaries. “These data indicate that women need more educational qualifications than men do to secure jobs that pay well,” says the report.

Education only makes this stuff worse.  And again, there's not only a massive gender pay gap in this country but a racial one, and combined, women of color get utterly screwed in the workplace.

Kasich doesn't have any answers and he doesn't care.  He's a Republican.

Don't be fooled.  None of them do.

BREAKING: McCarthy Drops Out Of House Speaker Race

GOP Rep. Kevin McCarthy of Californi, the current House majority leader and number two to outgoing House Speaker Orange Julius (R-Orange) didn't have the votes to replace ol' John Boehner and has dropped out of the running for the job,

Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) has dropped out of the race for House Speaker, shocking Capitol Hill and raising questions about who will lead the House Republican Conference.

Republicans were to meet Thursday at noon to elect a new Speaker. Instead, they received the surprising news from McCarthy.

"I think I shocked some of you," McCarthy joked to reporters after his bombshell. 

He said he would stay on as majority leader, but believed Republicans needed to unify around a "new face." 

"I feel good about the decision. I think we're only going to be stronger," he said.

McCarthy suggested it was unclear whether he could have won the 218 votes on the floor needed to be elected Speaker.

"I don't want to go to the floor and win with 220 votes," said McCarthy, who cast his decision as putting his conference first. "I think best think for our party is to win with 247 votes." 

McCarthy told his colleagues of his decision as they were preparing to cast ballots for Speaker. The election was immediately postponed.

If anyone somehow still needed proof that Republicans are incapable of governance, well there you go.  They can't even pick a leader in the House.

It would be sad if it wasn't directly the fault of voters in 2010 and 2014 for giving the House to Republicans in the first place.  These guys are idiots, folks.  We can change that in 2016, ya know.

Bush, Whacked? Con't

Daily Beast columnist Will Rahn doesn't pull any punches as he tells Jeb Bush to pack it in and drop out of the race for the good of the GOP.

The conventional wisdom a few months ago was that your brother’s catastrophic presidency would be your bid’s biggest hurdle. Now, in a fit of desperation, it looks like you’re about to draft him to stump for you. Putting aside that George W. is still despised by a not-insignificant swath of the Republican electorate, how is that going to play in the general should you somehow win the nomination? You’re making the Democrats’ job easy, Jeb. They’ll be more than happy to attach you to his legacy, and you’re doing that for them.

Speaking of the Democrats, we know what will happen if you drag this out through next spring. The going thinking right now is that the guys really low in the polls—your Rand Pauls and George Patakis—should be next to drop out. But what damage do they do to the GOP by staying in? You Bushes, meanwhile, for all your patrician aloofness, are some of the dirtiest campaigners out there, and every jab you get in at your fellow establishmentarians like Marco Rubio is going to be used against them by the left. It’s one thing to toughen up a nominee in a primary fight—it’s another to make them damaged goods, unready to lead. If you’ve got some golden piece of oppo that will take Rubio or John Kasich out of consideration, by all means use it now. Otherwise, time to step aside.

Electability has always been the central rationale of your candidacy. We’re reminded it’s been more than 30 years since a Republican outside the Bush family won the presidency. In 2000, your brother was able to make the case that he was the strongest candidate to take on the Democrats, particularly after he dragged John McCain’s name through the mud.

But your brother was an able campaigner, and you are not. The polls showed he had a particularly good chance of winning back the White House; the same can’t really be said of you. And again, he was a disaster as president. You were doing a decent job of shedding all that baggage, but now that’s he’s joining you on the campaign trail, you’re going to be shouldering all of it. And not for nothing, but your principal strategist, Mike Murphy, does have the distinction of being the only 2016 guru to have already run against Hillary and lost.

And even if your brother wasn’t a nincompoop, Jeb, you’re doing a fine job of messing this up on your own. You’ve already had more than your fair share of flubs. That “stuff happens” quote may have initially been taken out of context by the media, but guess what: Running for president, particularly when you’re a Republican, means dealing with a hostile press. You will not always be treated fairly, you will rarely be given the benefit of the doubt. Contrast your statement with Rubio’s nearly perfect response to a question about Black Lives Matter that was making the rounds on Twitter last week, and you see why Republicans worry about you leading the party through 2016.

I have to admit, in whatever alternate universe where the evil version of me is a Republican political blogger, I'd be giving the Bush camp the same advice.  The longer he stays in, the longet he becomes the punch line of the attacks on the GOP. "Just like his brother, only incompetent and stupid" is not exactly the best image the GOP wants to project if they want to win.

Granted, it's hard not to project that image given the people running.  But at this point, there's no way Jeb becomes the nominee.  The problem is, the Republicans have already committed millions to his campaign, so he can keep going as long as he wants to.

And keep doing damage the whole time.  Stay in Jeb, please!

StupidiNews!

• Russian Navy ships launched cruise missiles into Syria as Moscow stepped up its military strikes on Islamist rebels, despite continuing protests from the Pentagon.
• Volkswagen's US division chief is expected to testify to Congress today that he knew the company was rigging diesel emissions tests in 2014.
• Hillary Clinton says that she does not back the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal in its current form, marking another major break with the Obama Administration.
• FIFA President Sepp Blatter has been suspended for 90 days by the organization as several international investigations into corruption continue.
• Members of SAG-AFTRA's voice actors union have overwhelmingly voted to authorize a strike, which could greatly affect a number of video game projects in negotiation.

Last Call For Soulless Lumps Of Basalt

Whenever I think to myself "Boy, Republican politicians really can't get any worse" invariably somebody proves me wrong within minutes. Charles Johnson:

Republican presidential candidates are competing to see who can say the most heartless, reprehensible things today about the gun massacre at Oregon’s Umpqua Community College. 

First, Ben Carson blamed the victims for not defending themselves. 

Yeah, Ben Carson is a bit of a douchebag.

He'd also be your next President if America voted today, too.  Keep that in mind.  Meanwhile, Bobby Jindal is on the rise from 0% in the polls too.

And now, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal (a creationist like Ben Carson), has issued a statement at his website that actually goes a step further into awfulness: We Fill Our Culture With Garbage, and We Reap the Result.

And Jindal just goes off the rails and careens into the wall here.

Now, let’s get really politically incorrect here and talk specifically about this horror in Oregon. This killer’s father is now lecturing us on the need for gun control and he says he has no idea how or where his son got the guns. 

Of course he doesn’t know. You know why he doesn’t know? Because he is not, and has never been in his son’s life. He’s a complete failure as a father, he should be embarrassed to even show his face in public. He’s the problem here. 

He brags that he has never held a gun in his life and that he had no idea that his son had any guns. Why didn’t he know? Because he failed to raise his son. He should be ashamed of himself, and he owes us all an apology.

Now however you feel about the killer in Oregon, the fact of the matter remains is a father has outlived his son, one of the great tragedies that can occur, and yes, the son murdered nine people and then took his own life.  But for Jindal, a man running for President, to say something so heartlessly callous just for the shock value of scoring publicity while his presidential and political aspects wither like his soul?

I've thought some terrible things about Republicans, but never that they were just unfit to be in human society.

Jindal needs to resign from this planet, let alone the office of Governor of Louisiana.

The Great Jobs Debate In Kentucky

Republican cockfighting enthusiast Matt Bevin squared off against Democratic AG Jack Conway in the second of three debates ahead of next month's gubernatorial election here in Kentucky, and things got ugly, fast.

During the debate, Bevin accused Conway of not doing his duty last year when he chose not to appeal a ruling by late U.S. District Judge John Heyburn overturning Kentucky’s gay marriage ban, all the while calling for Rowan County Clerk to issue marriage licenses as a federal judge has ordered. 

“It’s easy for you to sit here and say that indeed, she should follow the law … but frankly, you did not follow the law when you cried before the cameras and refused to uphold the constitution of this state,” Bevin said. 

Conway defended his decision saying that it was his duty under the law to decide whether to appeal based upon the chances of winning the appeal. “I did my job, Matt,” he said. “You may not have liked the way I did, but I did my job.” 

Bevin claimed the state has lost 71,000 jobs since Conway became attorney general, and he laid that at Conway’s feet.

Bevin of course is full of nonsense.  Even if employment was somehow the domain of a state's attorney general to worry about, five minutes on Google and I come up with this chart:

Jack Conway took office in January 2008, Kentucky at that point had 1,860,600 people employed. Kentucky certainly lost more than a 100,000 jobs two years later.  But since then, the state has not only added those jobs back, it caught up to that January 2008 number in July of last year.  The preliminary August jobs number in Kentucky is 1,895,700 jobs.

Which means Kentucky has actually added 35,100 jobs since Jack Conway took over as Attorney General.

Bevin can't even lie correctly.  Idiot.

No Sporting Chance

We've all seen those TV and online ads for internet daily fantasy sports leagues where people can win millions of dollars, but mostly end up throwing away good money after bad.  Turns out whenever you have that kind of money involved, somebody, somewhere is going to rig the game.

A major scandal is erupting in the multibillion-dollar industry of fantasy sports, the online and unregulated business in which players assemble their fantasy teams with real athletes. On Monday, the two major fantasy companies were forced to release statements defending their businesses’ integrity after what amounted to allegations of insider trading, that employees were placing bets using information not generally available to the public.

The statements were released after an employee at DraftKings, one of the two major companies, admitted last week to inadvertently releasing data before the start of the third week of N.F.L. games. The employee, a midlevel content manager, won $350,000 at a rival site, FanDuel, that same week.

“It is absolutely akin to insider trading,” said Daniel Wallach, a sports and gambling lawyer at Becker & Poliakoff in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. “It gives that person a distinct edge in a contest.”

The episode has raised questions about who at daily fantasy companies has access to valuable data, such as which players a majority of the money is being bet on; how it is protected; and whether the industry can — or wants — to police itself. 

And when it's this easy to cheat and win, of course people are going to do it.

The leagues have been swelling in popularity, their advertisements blanketing football game broadcasts.

The industry has its roots in informal fantasy games that began years ago with groups of fans playing against one another for fun over the course of a season. They assembled hypothetical teams and scored points based on how players did in actual games.

But in recent years, companies, led by DraftKings and FanDuel, have set up online daily and weekly games based on a similar concept in which fans pay an entry fee to a website — from 25 cents to $1,000 — to play dozens if not hundreds of opponents, with prize pools that can pay $2 million to the winner. Critics have complained that the setup is hardly different from Las Vegas-style gambling that is normally banned in the sports world.

On Monday, DraftKings and FanDuel released a joint statement that said “nothing is more important” than the “integrity of the games we offer,” but offered few specifics about how they keep contests on the level.

The only surprising thing about this story is that it took this long for people to get caught.

StupidiNews!

• The Nobel Prize in Chemistry has gone to a team of three scientists from Turkey, Sweden, and the US for their work on mapping out how cells protect and repair DNA.
• New analysis finds that the 500 largest companies in the US are keeping some $2.1 trillion offshore in order to avoid paying $620 billion in corporate taxes yearly.
• Doctors Without Borders is calling for an independent international investigation of the bombing of their hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, calling the incident a war crime.
• US and Russian military forces are trying to work out coordinated joint airstrikes against ISIS militants in Syria in talks starting today.
• Time Warner Cable is openly apologizing to customers after years of the lowest-ranked customer service in the industry, promising to not act "like a cable company" in the future.

Last Call For Courting Disaster

The Supreme Court's fall term begins this week, and after several big victories for Team Liberal last June, WaPo's Paul Waldman reminds us that this conservative SCOTUS could turn around within nine months all but put an end to affirmative action, the availability of abortion, voting rights, public sector unions, and oh yeah, Obamacare as the courts get back their normal actions of siding with Republicans.

And while they’ve had a couple of recent high-profile defeats at the Court, conservatives have enjoyed a conservative majority for a couple of decades now. Yes, Anthony Kennedy sometimes joins with liberals, as he did in the case legalizing same-sex marriage. But just in the last few years, they’ve seen the doors of campaign finance thrown open to unlimited spending by corporations and billionaires; the Voting Rights Act gutted; affirmative action all but outlawed; an individual right to own guns created for the first time in American history; corporations granted religious rights to exempt themselves from laws they don’t like and sectarian prayer allowed at government meetings; unions undermined and employment discrimination suits made more difficult; and a whole series of less well-known decisions that enhance the power of the powerful, whether it’s the government or corporations. 

Nevertheless, when you hear conservatives talk about the Court, they don’t say, “We need to make sure we get more conservative justices to keep winning.” Instead, they say, “We’ve been betrayed!” So what’s going on? 

There are a couple of answers. The first is that they’re demanding not just a record of wins, but absolute perfection. They want not justices who will bring a conservative philosophy to the Court, but justices who will never stray from whatever it is the Republican Party wants at a particular time. The recent decision in King v. Burwell is a perfect example: the lawsuit itself was a joke, based on a series of claims about the Affordable Care Act that ran from the clearly false to the laughably ridiculous. When John Roberts sided with the majority to dismiss it — despite a long record of being on the “right” side of all the cases I mentioned above, plus many more — they declared him to be an irredeemable traitor. 

The second reason is that narratives of betrayal are central to how conservatives understand history. Whenever events don’t turn out as they would like, whether it’s a foreign war or a lost election or a societal evolution, the story is always the same: We were betrayed, either by our opponents or by the people we thought were our allies. Was the Iraq War a terrible idea? No, we had it won — until Barack Obama betrayed us by pulling out. Why was George W. Bush so unpopular? Because he betrayed conservative principles by not cutting spending more, just like his father betrayed us by raising taxes (while the younger Bush was still president, longtime conservative activist Richard Viguerie wrote a book entitled “Conservatives Betrayed: How George W. Bush and Other Big-Government Republicans Hijacked the Conservative Cause).” As Digby memorably wrote, “Conservatism cannot fail, it can only be failed. (And a conservative can only fail because he is too liberal.)” And it goes back as far as you want. Why did the Soviet Union come to dominate Eastern Europe? Because FDR betrayed us at Yalta. 

It isn’t that there’s never any truth in this story, particularly when it comes to the Court. David Souter, for instance, turned out to be a genuine liberal, not at all what Republicans expected when he was appointed by George H. W. Bush. But they’ve gotten so used to the betrayal narrative that they place even a single setback into it. Which may explain why conservative opinions of the Court have changed so dramatically in recent years. According to Pew polls, in 2008, 80 percent of Republicans approved of the Supreme Court, compared to 64 percent of Democrats. By 2015, the views of Democrats hadn’t changed — their approval was at 62 percent. But Republican approval had fallen to 33 percent, despite all they had won at the Court over that time. A full 68 percent of conservative Republicans call the Court “liberal,” an idea that is absurd by any objective measure, but one that is regularly fed by conservative media and Republican politicians.

We'll see what happens, but let's be honest that the Roberts Court has been an utter disaster for the country, and there's little reason to think that the 2015-2016 term will be any different.

Obama's Marine Scene

Dubya certainly didn't bother with any, but President Obama has named two new federal marine sanctuaries to protect America's waters as the world's attention turns to the Our Ocean Conference in Chile this week.

In a video message to conference attendees, President Obama announced plans for two new marine sanctuaries, one off the coast of Maryland, and the other in Lake Michigan. They’ll be the first new national marine sanctuaries designated by the federal government in the past 15 years. 

One of these sanctuaries will be an 875-square mile section of Lake Michigan off the shore of Wisconsin, which is recognized for its collection of nearly 40 known shipwrecks, some of which are listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The other sanctuary is a 14-square mile area of the Potomac River, which includes Maryland’s Mallows Bay — an area known for its ecological significance, according to the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, and home to bald eagles, herons, beavers, river otters and numerous species of fish. 

“The United States is committed to working with our international partners to protect our oceans and protect our planet,” says Obama in the video. “Because I refuse to leave our children a planet that’s beyond their capacity to repair.” 

The two areas were nominated for sanctuary status last year after the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reopened the public nomination process for the first time in 20 years. Since the process was opened, seven nominations were submitted from around the country, and the two announced today were the ones so far approved by NOAA for consideration as national marine sanctuaries. At least one other nomination is still currently under review by NOAA. 

These plans come on the heels of other recent action by the Obama administration to expand protection for marine areas in the United States. Last year, President Obama made Alaska’s Bristol Bay off limits to oil and gas development, while still allowing for commercial fishing in the area. He also expanded the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument, which was originally established in 2009. 

Marine national monuments differ from marine sanctuaries in that they can be established by presidential proclamation, whereas sanctuaries are designated by NOAA and require extensive public input — however, they can offer similar protections and human use restrictions over marine ecosystems. 

The United States is also announcing several other plans aimed at protecting marine resources. In Chile for the conference, Secretary of State John F. Kerry announced the launch of Sea Scout, a global initiative targeting illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing by uniting world leaders, expanding technology and information-sharing and identifying illegal fishing hot spots. NOAA also has plans to expand the development of a technology known as the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite, which detects boats and may help alert nations to illegal fishing activities. The technology will be implemented in several nations in 2016, including Indonesia and the Philippines.

Raise your hand if you think any additional marine sanctuaries would be approved or even reviewed by NOAA under a Republican president.  Hell, if the GOP keeps control of Congress and gets the White House, I'd expect a law preventing marine sanctuaries from being created, if not reversing the sanctuary status of existing parks for drilling and coastal land development for new McMansions for rick bankers.

Maybe after seven years people will start realizing that President Obama has been serious about the environment since day one.

Slow Bern In A Red State

WaPo's Dave Weigel discovers that Nobama Country in the Appalachians isn't interested in Hillary Clinton either, but is somehow mysteriously fertile ground for Feeling The Bern.

Shelley Brannon, 62, can sum up the Obama presidency with three words. Well, three words and an exclamation. 

“He screwed us,” said Brannon, a coal miner from Wise County, Va., as he sat outside a rally for the United Mine Workers of America. “Man, he screwed us.” 

He shook his head under a camouflage hat that matched his camouflage UMWA T-shirt, and he described his fantasy of dumping nuclear waste in the yards of environmentalists, “if they think coal’s so bad.” He mulled over the mistake UMWA had made in 2008, when it endorsed Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton. Then he explained why he would probably be voting for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) in the next Democratic primary. 

“For one thing, he knows what union is, and he respects it,” said Brannon. “That’s all we need is respect. He’s just a likeable fella, trustworthy. I don’t think she has the same respect for the union, and she really shot herself in the foot over, you know, all that secretive stuff.” 

West Virginia has rejected the Obama-era Democratic Party more dramatically than any state outside the South, with Appalachian counties that voted for Mike Dukakis and Walter Mondale turning blood red over the past eight years. But if you think it’s in places like this that the insurgent Sanders campaign faces its most formidable test, here’s what he thinks: It is also one of his greatest opportunities. 

The Vermont socialist thinks that white, working-class voters, the sort of people Obama once self-defeatingly said “cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them,” are just one honest argument away from coming back. 

“We have millions of working-class people who are voting for Republican candidates whose views are diametrically opposite to what voters want,” said Sanders in an interview. “How many think it’s a great idea that we have trade policies that lead to plants in West Virginia being shut down? How many think there should be massive cuts in Pell grants, or in Social Security? In my opinion, not too many people.”

Now this is truly weird, given Bernie's position on climate change in Coal Country is essentially the same as President Obama's and Hillary Clinton's.

The United States must lead the world in tackling climate change, if we are to make certain that this planet is habitable for our children and grandchildren. We must transform our energy system away from polluting fossil fuels, and towards energy efficiency and sustainability. Millions of homes and buildings need to be weatherized, and we need to greatly accelerate technological progress in wind and solar power generation. 

Unless we take bold action to address climate change, our children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren are going to look back on this period in history and ask a very simple question: Where were they? Why didn’t the United States of America, the most powerful nation on earth, lead the international community in cutting greenhouse gas emissions and preventing the devastating damage that the scientific community told us would surely come?

So yeah, Bernie Sanders straight up says on his website that he wants to continue to take America away from fossil fuels, but coal miners are suddenly lining up to say how awesome Bernie Sanders is going to be.

Why, it's almost like these coal miners oppose Barack Obama over something other than his environmental policy.  Weigel:

Sanders’ campaign theory of 2016 may be that there’s a larger electorate hiding in plain sight. Over the summer, as he gained in polls, Sanders was criticized for bringing seemingly every issue back to the sediment of economics and class. Black Lives Matter activist Marissa Johnson dubbed it “class reductionism.” Clinton allies had trouble seeing how Sanders’s support could grow beyond white liberals.

But they may be missing the weight of Sanders’s cardinal argument — for greater economic fairness — and the willingness of voters to look past other issues, notably the environment and gay marriage, where they disagree. 

Sanders won elections in Vermont, a white, rural and gun-owning state, as a socialist. The social issue “distractions” bemoaned by red state Democrats seemed to bounce right off his armor. (He also has taken mixed positions on gun control, supporting a ban on assault rifles, for instance, but opposing the Brady Bill). In the end, is the white guy who voted for him in Vermont any different than the white guy in West Virginia or Kentucky or Ohio who was told to blame liberals for his problems?

In my experience, the answer is not really.  A lot of working-class white voters left the Democrats when 2008 came down to Hillary versus Obama.  Now that Bernie is in this (and possibly Biden) hey, all of a sudden it's about working-class white values again.

I've got some bad news for folks though.  Bernie's got about as much chance of winning West Virginia or Kentucky as I do, and from an electoral standpoint, why does it matter?  Sure. Bernie will help with Wisconsin, Ohio, Minnesota, etc. but how much nationally?

Do we want white voters who abandoned the Dems over a black president to come back to the party at all?

StupidiNews!

• Flooding rivers and breached dams in South Carolina have raised the death toll from last weekend's record rains to 12, and more rain could be on the way.
• President Obama will meet Friday with families of victims of last week's deadly shooting in Roseburg, Oregon.
• This year's Nobel Prize in Physics has gone to two scientists for discovering that neutrinos have mass, and can change type while moving.
• The world's largest brewery merger may get skunked as SABMiller is initially rejecting rival AB InBev's bid for the company as too low.
• California Gov. Jerry Brown has vetoed a package of bills designed to regulate commercial and hobbyist drone flights, saying he didn't want to create a new class of crimes.