US Politics Mega-thread - Page 2254

In Washington state, fire covers nearly 500 square miles, and smoke is in the air as far east as Chicago. On Aug. 19, Washington Governor Jay Inslee asked for a federal disaster declaration, which he got two days later. There are so many blazes all across the Western U.S. that there aren’t enough firefighters to fight them. The National Guard has been called up, as have active-duty soldiers trained in 24 hours for the fire line. Canada has sent firefighters to help. So have Australia and New Zealand, and still there aren’t enough. An unprecedented 32,000 men and women are struggling to control the flames, yet it’s possible to walk for miles over burning ridges and down smoke-choked drainages without seeing a single firefighter. “Fire activity is off the charts,” says Shawna Legarza, the Forest Service’s fire director for California. As bad as Washington state is, California has been burning since early July, and there are 42 large fires active now. By mid-August, fires have consumed 7.2 million acres nationwide, mostly in Alaska.

Accounting for insurance costs, damages to businesses and infrastructure, and the flash floods and mudslides caused by denuded slopes, this year’s fires will likely cost taxpayers $25 billion—and that’s if a whole town or city doesn’t burn, which is a distinct possibility. If that happens, according to a report by the Natural Resources Defense Council, the costs could double or triple: One hundred forty million Americans live in fire-prone regions, and $237 billion in property sits in those high-risk areas.

The Forest Service, the country’s largest wildland firefighting agency, has spent $800 million trying to control the flames this year, and it’s only August. As such, 2015 is on track to become the 15th year in a row the agency has laid out roughly $1 billion on firefighting alone. Expenses in some areas are equal to or greater than the value of the threatened property—$200,000 to $400,000 per home, according to Bozeman (Mont.)-based Headwaters Economics. Yet the Forest Service doesn’t have much choice: It can’t just let communities burn. So the service and its partner agencies keep putting out the flames, even though years of study have shown that doing so only leads to even hotter, more devastating fires later.

Three top Jeb Bush fundraisers abruptly parted ways with his presidential campaign on Friday, amid internal personality conflicts and questions about the strength of his candidacy, POLITICO has learned.

There are different versions of what transpired. The Florida-based fundraising consultants — Kris Money, Trey McCarley and Debbie Aleksander — have said that they voluntarily quit the campaign and were still working with Bush's super PAC, Right to Rise Super PAC. Others said the three, who worked under the same contract, were let go because they were no longer needed for the current phase of the campaign.

None of the three responded to requests for comment. Bush spokesman Tim Miller would only say that “Governor Bush has the widest and deepest fundraising operation of any candidate in the field. Ann Herberger — a longtime aide with more than two decades of experience in state and national politics — will continue to lead the operation in Florida with our team in Miami.”

The departures came at a time of uncertainty for Bush. While he has had massive success raising money for his super PAC, he is overseeing an official campaign that has many more staffers but far less money. Earlier this week, The New York Times revealed that the campaign had taken steps to rein in some of its spending and had gone so far as to cut some employee salaries. And POLITICO reported that one Bush fundraiser expressed concerns about the slowing pace of the campaign’s fundraising after Bush’s shaky debate performance.

The Bush campaign wasted no time seeking a replacement for the three fundraising consultants and has reached out to Meredith O’Rourke — a top Florida Republican fundraiser who briefly worked for Chris Christie’s campaign in May but left it in July. O’Rourke, who wouldn’t comment, helped Gov. Rick Scott raise about $100 million for his 2014 reelection campaign and also works for Florida Agriculture Commissioner Adam Putnam, who’s likely to run for governor in 2018.

One source attributed the departures to personality conflicts in the campaign. Some identified Bush's finance director, Heather Larrison, as a shouter with whom it’s difficult to work. She wouldn’t comment. Others singled out Money as a problem due to what they describe as haughtiness and a heavy-handed donate-or-else attitude with potential contributors.

“They were glad to go. This wasn’t a shock to anybody,” said one campaign source. “There were just some personality problems. It happens when you have a big organization like this, a big campaign. Some of the national people are tough to work for.”

Another campaign source, though, said the three fundraising consultants — who worked on contract and were not staffers — were let go because they weren’t raising enough money relative to how much they had been raising during the past financial quarter.

"We appreciated their work, but we are entering a new phase of the campaign post-Labor Day, and we needed to move in a different direction,” the source said.

But another source disputed that: “They raised a lot of money out of Florida. A lot. So if anyone says they didn’t quit, it’s not true. They’re still working for the super PAC as well. This is not about them. … This is about the campaign.”

Front-runner Donald Trump seized on the POLITICO report Saturday morning and took a shot at his rival on Twitter: “Wow, Jeb Bush just lost three of his top fundraisers — they quit!”

Aleksander, Money and McCarley have deep and longstanding ties to Florida’s GOP power structure. Aleksander has been a member in good standing of Bush’s operation since he was governor. Money is close with former House Speaker Will Weatherford; McCarley’s part of Putnam’s political team, along with O’Rourke.

Donors last week told POLITICO that they still felt good about Bush’s chances and that they weren’t worried about Bush’s recent slip from second to third place in averages of national polls. As the son and brother of former presidents, the former governor of the third-most populous state in the nation has a broad, deep-pocketed and savvy donor base. Some said they’re less concerned with the campaign than with Jeb’s candidacy, which has so far failed to ignite Republicans.

But Bush’s fundraising pace has slowed in the late summer months. Still, he’s likely to remain the GOP campaign’s top fundraiser, but Bush is also spending more than other candidates because he has a mammoth operation.

“Jeb has a big army, and that army needs to be fed,” said one campaign consultant familiar with the campaign’s internal numbers. “Jeb might not have a fundraiser problem. He might have a spending problem.”

On August 31 2015 10:12 WolfintheSheep wrote:
Unsurprisingly, a lot of politicians support policy that is entirely contrary to their supposed ideology.

I don't know why you'd expected a person to be encapsulated completely by a single word descriptor.

On August 31 2015 10:12 WolfintheSheep wrote:
Unsurprisingly, a lot of politicians support policy that is entirely contrary to their supposed ideology.

I don't know why you'd expected a person to be encapsulated completely by a single word descriptor.

On September 01 2015 00:36 Plansix wrote:
It is completely possible that Snowden made the US aware of the NSA while also committing crimes that warrant him going to prison for a period of time. I don't think he should go to jail for life, but I also don't think he is completely exonerated stealing a lot of state secrets and then using them to gain safe harbor with the Russia.

Weirdly enough, issues like this one are complex and don't boil down to simple solutions.

On September 01 2015 00:48 KwarK wrote:

He didn't use the secrets to buy entry to Russia. Russia just let him in because it let them claim that they care about justice and it makes the United States look dumb. Snowden was far too much of a patriot to risk anything he took falling into Russian hands, it was all handed to journalists before he left Hong Kong.

The only reason he's in Russia is because Russia was one of the few nations willing to stand up to the United States in the name of justice, reason and personal liberty. Those were in name only, Russia doesn't really give a shit about any of them, but still, no other fucker was willing to do it.

On September 01 2015 00:58 Plansix wrote:

We don't really know what deal he worked out with Russia to gain safe harbor. I'm willing entertain the idea that Snowden is a complete patriot. But it could easily be the other way and he give the Russians something for asylum. And the truth of this likely will never come out either way.

WASHINGTON, Aug 30 (Reuters) - President Barack Obama on Monday will officially restore Denali as the name of North America's tallest mountain, siding with the state of Alaska in ending a 40-year battle over what to call a peak that has been known as Mount McKinley.

The historic change, coming at the beginning of a three-day presidential trip to Alaska, is a sign of how hard the White House will push during Obama's remaining 16 months as president to ensure his fight to address climate change is part of his legacy.

Renaming the mountain, which has an elevation of more than 20,000 feet (6,100 meters), makes headlines for his climate quest while also creating goodwill in a state that has not been broadly supportive to the Democratic president.

Obama is slated to tour a receding glacier and meet people in remote Arctic communities whose way of life is affected by rising ocean levels, creating images designed to build support for regulations to curb carbon emissions.

The peak was named Mount McKinley in 1896 after a gold prospector exploring the region heard that Ohioan William McKinley, a champion of the gold standard, had won the Republican nomination for president.

But Alaska natives had long before called the mountain Denali, meaning "the High One." In 1975, the state of Alaska officially designated the mountain as Denali, and has since been pressing the federal government to do the same.

At the start of her campaign, Clinton was seen as the inevitable candidate of the Democrats. But she has spent much of the summer fending off questions about her private email account during her time as secretary of state. Bernie Sanders is gaining on her in the polls. And there's a looming possible challenge from sitting vice president Joe Biden.

But Clinton tried to make her case for why she should be the Democratic nominee before the very people who would be choosing that nominee — not voters, but the party establishment, who are supposed to be her base: members of the Democratic National Committee.

"I have been fighting for families and underdogs my entire life, and I'm not going to stop now," Clinton said at the summer meeting of the DNC in Minneapolis Friday. "In fact, I'm just getting warmed up." She vowed that she is "not taking a single primary voter or caucus-goer for granted."

But party leaders are growing concerned that Clinton has not wrested control of the storyline of those emails. It's made many bite their nails, and it's given the other four candidates currently in the race some hope that there's an opening for someone else.

Sanders, an independent from Vermont who caucuses with Democrats in the Senate, got a boost Saturday night from an Iowa poll showing him gaining on Clinton, just 7 points behind the front-runner.

He underlined — in a not-so-veiled shot at Clinton — that "politics as usual" and "same old, same old" is not going to work in firing up Democratic voters to get out to the polls.

Making a parallel argument to the one conservatives make on the Republican side, Sanders blamed the party, in part, for major losses in the 2014 midterm elections, because liberal base voters didn't have something to vote for.

"We lost because voter turnout was abysmally, embarrassingly low, and millions of working people, young people, and people of color gave up on politics as usual and they stayed home," Sanders said.

On September 01 2015 01:20 zlefin wrote:
djpazj -> do you have a link to the source for that being Paul's position? because otherwise, since you said you read it on the dumb parts of the internet, I'd just assume its idiots claiming stupid things. Also the source would give more info on why Paul is saying that.

On September 01 2015 00:48 KwarK wrote:

He didn't use the secrets to buy entry to Russia. Russia just let him in because it let them claim that they care about justice and it makes the United States look dumb. Snowden was far too much of a patriot to risk anything he took falling into Russian hands, it was all handed to journalists before he left Hong Kong.

The only reason he's in Russia is because Russia was one of the few nations willing to stand up to the United States in the name of justice, reason and personal liberty. Those were in name only, Russia doesn't really give a shit about any of them, but still, no other fucker was willing to do it.

On September 01 2015 01:12 KwarK wrote:
...Snowden's actions, motivations and priorities are as well documented as could be by a large number of impartial third parties. The man did everything he did out of patriotism.

On September 01 2015 02:12 Acrofales wrote:

The only mention of Snowden in that entire article is as the whistleblower on the mass data collection by the NSA.

It doesn't say anywhere that Rand Paul would want to throw Snowden in jail.