Jeb Bush Prepares to Give Traditional Campaigning a Makeover

[ed. Great. Now we get to experience the Supreme Court's Citizen United decision in its fullest and most logical expression. The strategy is called a Chinese Wall, and won't work. Or, maybe it will - at least long enough to install a new president in office, regardless of whatever transgressions are discovered after the fact. Florida 2000, anyone?]

The traditional presidential campaign may be getting a dramatic makeover in Jeb Bush's bid for the White House as he prepares to turn some of a campaign's central functions over to a separate political organization that can raise unlimited amounts of money.

The concept, in development for months as the former Florida governor has raised tens of millions of dollars for his Right to Rise super PAC, would endow that organization not just with advertising on Bush's behalf, but with many of the duties typically conducted by a campaign.

Should Bush move ahead as his team intends, it is possible that for the first time a super PAC created to support a single candidate would spend more than the candidate's campaign itself - at least through the primaries. Some of Bush's donors believe that to be more than likely.

Architects of the plan believe the super PAC's ability to raise unlimited amounts of money legally outweighs its primary disadvantage, that it cannot legally coordinate its actions with Bush or his would-be campaign staff.

"Nothing like this has been done before," said David Keating, president of the Center for Competitive Politics, which opposes limits on campaign finance donations. "It will take a high level of discipline to do it."

The exact design of the strategy remains fluid as Bush approaches an announcement of his intention to run for the Republican nomination in 2016. But at its center is the idea of placing Right to Rise in charge of the brunt of the biggest expense of electing Bush: television advertising and direct mail.

Right to Rise could also break into new areas for a candidate-specific super PAC, such as data gathering, highly individualized online advertising and running phone banks. Also on the table, tasking the super PAC with crucial campaign endgame strategies: the operation to get out the vote and efforts to maximize absentee and early voting on Bush's behalf.

The campaign itself would still handle those things that require Bush's direct involvement, such as candidate travel. It would still pay for advertising, conduct polling and collect voter data. (...)

The strategy aims to take maximum advantage of the new world of campaign finance created by a pair of 2010 Supreme Court decisions and counts on the Federal Election Commission to remain a passive regulator with little willingness to confront those pushing the envelope of the law.

For Bush, the potential benefits are enormous. Campaigns can raise only $2,700 per donor for the primary and $2,700 for the general election. But super PACs are able to raise unlimited cash from individuals, corporations and groups such as labor unions.

The main limitation on super PACs is that they cannot coordinate their activities with a campaign. The risk for Bush is that his super PAC will not have access to the candidate and his senior strategists to make pivotal decisions about how to spend the massive amount of money it will take to win the Republican nomination and, if successful, secure the 270 electoral votes he will need to follow his father and brother into the White House.

by Thomas Beaumont, AP |  Read more:

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4/20 Day

Warren Haynes, the Allman Brothers Band guitarist, routinely plays with the surviving members of the Grateful Dead, touring as The Dead. It's the spring of 2009, he's just finished a Dead show in Washington, D.C., and he gets a pop quiz from The Huffington Post.

Where does "420" come from?

He pauses and thinks, hands on his sides. "I don't know the real origin. I know myths and rumors," he says. "I'm really confused about the first time I heard it. It was like a police code for smoking in progress or something. What's the real story?"

Wavy Gravy is a hippie icon with his own ice cream flavor who has been hanging out with the Dead for decades. HuffPost spots him outside the same concert. Asked about the term 420, he suggests it began "somewhere in the foggy mists of time. What time is it now? I say to you, 'Eternity now.'"

Depending on whom you ask or their state of inebriation, there are as many varieties of answers as strains of medical bud in California. It's the number of active chemicals in marijuana. It's teatime in Holland. It has something to do with Hitler's birthday. It's those numbers in that Bob Dylan song multiplied.

The origin of the term 420, celebrated around the world by pot smokers every April 20, has long been obscured by the clouded memories of the folks who made it a phenomenon.

by Ryan Grim, Huffington Post |  Read more:

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Where Your State Gets Its Money

Vermont and New Hampshire are similar in a lot of ways — they’re both small, heavily rural New England states that root for the Red Sox. But when it comes to taxes, they could hardly be more different. Vermont is one of the nation’s highest-tax states on a per capita basis; New Hampshire is the lowest. Where they get that tax revenue is different, too: Vermont relies heavily on broad-based income and property taxes. New Hampshire gets much of its revenue from targeted taxes on cigarettes, gasoline and other items, as well as taxes on businesses.

Across the country, states vary widely in both the amount and the source of their tax revenue, as new data from the Census Bureau makes clear. States collected an average of about $2,700 per person in tax revenue in 2014. (That’s all taxes — regardless of who paid them — divided by total population, including children.) But there was a huge range, from $1,700 per person in New Hampshire to more than $8,000 per person in North Dakota.1

It might be surprising to see deep-red North Dakota at the top of the list. But that revenue isn’t coming from everyday citizens. It’s coming from oil companies: More than half of North Dakota’s tax revenue comes from so-called severance taxes, the result of the state’s oil boom. It’s a similar story in Alaska, which had the nation’s third-highest per capita tax revenue in 2014 (Vermont was No. 2). Severance taxes account for a whopping 72 percent of Alaska’s tax revenues.

For states that can’t rely on oil booms, there’s tremendous variation in where they get their revenue. Washington, for example, collects no income tax and relies on sales taxes for more than 60 percent of its tax revenue; neighboring Oregon is an almost perfect mirror image. Alaska and New Hampshire are the only states with neither an income nor a sales tax. (New Hampshire does tax dividends and interest.)2

by Ben Casselman and Allsion McCann, FiveThirtyEight |  Read more:

Image: FiveThirtyEight

769 Gallons of Water Were Used To Make This Plate

by Kyle Kim, Jon Schleuss and Priya Krishnakumar, LA Times |  Read more:
Image: Anne Cusack and Kirk McKoy

E. Benyaminson for Hello, I'm Robot! by Stanislav Zigunenko (Russia, 1989)
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Gil Scott-Heron

Solar Power Battle Puts Hawaii at Forefront of Worldwide Changes

Allan Akamine has looked all around the winding, palm tree-lined cul-de-sacs of his suburban neighborhood in Mililani here on Oahu and, with an equal mix of frustration and bemusement, seen roof after roof bearing solar panels.

Mr. Akamine, 61, a manager for a cable company, has wanted nothing more than to lower his $600 to $700 monthly electric bill with a solar system of his own. But for 18 months or so, the state’s biggest utility barred him and thousands of other customers from getting one, citing concerns that power generated by rooftop systems was overwhelming its ability to handle it.

Only under strict orders from state energy officials did the utility, the Hawaiian Electric Company, recently rush to approve the lengthy backlog of solar applications, including Mr. Akamine’s.

It is the latest chapter in a closely watched battle that has put this state at the forefront of a global upheaval in the power business. Rooftop systems now sit atop roughly 12 percent of Hawaii’s homes, according to the federal Energy Information Administration, by far the highest proportion in the nation.

“Hawaii is a postcard from the future,” said Adam Browning, executive director of Vote Solar, a policy and advocacy group based in California.

Other states and countries, including California, Arizona, Japan and Germany, are struggling to adapt to the growing popularity of making electricity at home, which puts new pressures on old infrastructure like circuits and power lines and cuts into electric company revenue.

As a result, many utilities are trying desperately to stem the rise of solar, either by reducing incentives, adding steep fees or effectively pushing home solar companies out of the market. In response, those solar companies are fighting back through regulators, lawmakers and the courts.

The shift in the electric business is no less profound than those that upended the telecommunications and cable industries in recent decades. It is already remaking the relationship between power companies and the public while raising questions about how to pay for maintaining and operating the nation’s grid.

The issue is not merely academic, electrical engineers say.

In solar-rich areas of California and Arizona, as well as in Hawaii, all that solar-generated electricity flowing out of houses and into a power grid designed to carry it in the other direction has caused unanticipated voltage fluctuations that can overload circuits, burn lines and lead to brownouts or blackouts.

“Hawaii’s case is not isolated,” said Massoud Amin, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Minnesota and chairman of the smart grid program at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, a technical association. “When we push year-on-year 30 to 40 percent growth in this market, with the number of installations doubling, quickly — every two years or so — there’s going to be problems.”

by Diane Cardwell, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Kent Nishimura

Forgiving $38,750 in Child Support, for My Kids’ Sake

[ed. See also: Skip Child Support. Go to Jail. Lose Job. Repeat.]

Earlier this year, I spent three hours sitting on a hard, wooden bench in the Queens County Family Court, waiting for a judge to approve my petition to forgive $38,750 in child support arrears from my ex-husband.

The judge said, “Well this is a rare one,” then asked me several times if I was aware of what I was doing and if I had received legal counsel. When I told my single mom friends, they looked at me as if I had committed an act of treason. “Child support is all we have!” one friend exclaimed.

Is it?

This was not a decision for divorce lawyers or court clerks. Or the unofficial single moms club, for that matter. This was about redefining what child support really is, for our family — and it’s a redefinition that other families should consider.

We have too often reduced nonresidential fathers to being weighed and judged by a financial transaction. If you don’t pay, you’re a “dead beat.” End of one story, beginning of a new one, one that can mean suspended drivers’ licenses and professional licenses, seized bank deposits and tax refunds, and the very real risk of jail time. The family of Walter Scott, who was fatally shot in the back following a traffic stop, speculates that a similar narrative led him to flee the police, fearing another lost job and another jail stint. It can also mean some mothers blocking access to children (called “pay per view”) and children becoming pawns in a game that puts their development and psychological well-being on the line.

For many, many reasons, I was determined to ensure that our family story did not include any version of that too-common series of events. Studies prove that school-age children of involved fathers have better academic success, higher grade point averages and go on to have higher levels of economic and educational achievement. We focus on money, when “child support” also means emotional support, academic support and the supportive power of a male influence in a child’s life. Negating that value is dangerous to our children. Regardless of what I think of him, my children love their father and doing my part to keep that feeling alive is priceless to me.

As mothers we would never want our value to be trivialized to a dollar amount. But fathers are often reduced to being an accessory parent — nice to have around, but not essential as long as a good mother stands in. In the seven years since my divorce, my ex-husband (or “wasband” as I like to call him) has always given our children his time, whether he had money or not. He currently makes payments to me directly when he is able.

But his arrears have accumulated during years when he was unemployed or underemployed and either paid less than the monthly payment ($600) granted when we divorced, or nothing at all. So when our children were young, after our separation and early in our divorce, I negotiated new currencies such as additional time when I needed child care, meal preparation, haircuts and even helping with home repairs, instead of acting as if a cash payment was all he had to offer our children. The look on their faces when he came to pick them up was more than worth it.

by Kimberly Seals Allers, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Abigail Gray Swartz

Ignominious Pasquinade

Late last month the word pasquinade popped to the top of the most frequently looked-up word list. The explanation for the flurry of look-ups was the word's appearance in an opinion piece by Charles Cooke lamenting the poor performance of Sarah Palin at a recent political event on Iowa. Cooke ends his column saying that Palin has "collapse[d] into ignominious pasquinade."

We'll admit it. Pasquinade is not part of our working vocabulary, so we had to look it up. Our dictionary defines it as "a lampoon posted in a public place" and as "satirical writing, satire." Fair enough, but it was the etymology that caught our eye:

Middle French, from Italian pasquinata, from Pasquino, name given to a statue in Rome on which lampoons were posted

A statue named Pasquino? This required more digging.

Yes, Pasquino was the popular name for the remains of an ancient Roman statue unearthed in Rome in 1501. The statue was supposedly named after a local shopkeeper whose house or shop was near where the statue was found. And there was a custom that anonymous satirists would attach highly critical political passages to the torso of the statue. These pasquinades, some by important 16th-century writers, such as Pietro Aretino, were then collected and published.

A word about this Pietro Aretino fellow, courtesy of Encyclopaedia Britannica: He was born in the town of Arezzo, in the Republic of Florence, in 1492. He was the son of a shoemaker, but he later pretended to be the natural son of a nobleman and derived his adopted name ("the Aretine") from his native city. He moved to Rome in 1517 and wrote a series of viciously satirical lampoons supporting the candidacy of Giulio de' Medici. Perhaps partially as a result, Giulio became Pope Clement VII in 1523, but despite the support of the pope, Aretino was forced to leave Rome because of his general notoriety and his 1524 collection of Sonetti lussuriosi ("Lewd Sonnets"). From Rome he went to Venice, where he was the object of great adulation, became friends with the painter Titian, for whom he sold many paintings to the King of France, and lived in a grand and dissolute style for the rest of his life.

We're a long way from Iowa at this point, but we can get one more stop on this trip if we ask the question, Can pasquinade also be used as a verb? Yes, it can, at least according to Merriam-Webster Unabridged. It means "to lampoon" or "to satirize." As an example of this use, the Unabridged offers a brief snippet from Edgar Allen Poe's short story "The Murders in the Rue Morgue." Here's the context: The narrator and his companion are walking the streets of Paris and end up discussing an actor named Chantilly. The narrator explains:

Chantilly was a quondam cobbler of the Rue St. Denis, who, becoming stage-mad, had attempted the rôle of Xerxes, in Crébillon's tragedy so called, and been notoriously Pasquinaded for his pains.

Try that one out on your friends.

by Merrium Webster |  Read more:

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Almonds Get Roasted in Debate Over California Water Use

California almonds are becoming one of the world's favorite snacks and creating a multibillion-dollar bonanza for agricultural investors. But the crop extracts a staggering price from the land, consuming more water than all the showering, dish-washing and other indoor household water use of California's 39 million people.

As California enters its fourth year of drought and imposes the first mandatory statewide water cutbacks on cities and towns, the $6.5 billion almond crop is helping drive a sharp debate about water use, agricultural interests and how both affect the state's giant economy.

Almonds have claimed the spotlight as "the poster child of all things bad in water," almond grower Bob Weimer said.

People around the world are eating over 1,000 percent more California almonds than they did just a decade ago, and last year almonds became the top export crop in the nation's top agriculture state. China's booming middle class is driving much of the demand.

That strong Asia market is producing up to 30 percent returns for investors, prompting agri-businesses to expand almond planting in the state by two-thirds in the past decade. The crop has come to be dominated by global corporations and investment funds.

Rows of almond trees now cover nearly 1 million acres in California, many of them on previously virgin hillsides or in pastures or desert with little rain or local water. Since each tiny nut requires a gallon of water, almonds are consuming 1.07 trillion gallons annually in the state, one-fifth more than California families use indoors.

So when Gov. Jerry Brown ordered cities and towns this month to cut their water consumption by 25 percent but exempted farms, almonds got toasted in the public heat that followed.

"Drought villains?" the Los Angeles Times asked this month. A Sacramento TV station referred to "almond-shaming." National Public Radio called almond farms "a rogue's gallery" of water users.

Now almond farmers and investors are on the defensive. (...)

As big a global money-maker as California's agriculture is, though, it's little more than a blip in the state's economy. And that's driving the debate on water use.

In all, agriculture uses 80 percent of the water that Californians draw from groundwater and surface supplies but produces just 1.5 percent of the state's gross domestic product, noted Christopher Thornberg, an economist who has served as an economic adviser to state agencies.

by Ellen Knickmeyer, AP |  Read more:

Image: Rich Pedroncelli

How "One-Plus-Five" is Shaping American Cities

[ed. See also: Nice Downtowns, How Did They Get That Way?]

Nobody would for one minute mistake a car or an airplane from 1955 for one from today. Everything, from technology to style is just too different.

By contrast, enter a new house or an apartment and clues that give away the newness are harder to find: They may be obvious in kitchen and bath, but even that is not certain, since fashionable retro stoves and claw-foot tubs could be deceiving even in those places where technology would be most likely. The new house would probably be more open and bigger, but from light switches to receptacles, from door hardware to double hung windows, things look essentially the same. On second glance, though, things in the new house feel flimsier, thinner and less substantial. Maybe there is a white plastic porch railing masquerading as solid wood or vinyl siding doing the same, maybe the doors are light, hollow and molded instead of being made from actual wood panels. This general impression might deepen when one starts looking "under the hood": copper and cast iron pipes replaced by PVC, true dimension heavy wood joists and posts replaced by engineered trusses, strand board, and quick growth studs light as cigar boxes. Slate has yielded to asphalt shingles, wood floors have become laminate, and porcelain sinks replaced by cultured stone. Brick now comes as a thin cement imitation, cornices are made from Fypon, and flagstone water tables are only paper thin. (...)

The rather recent appearance of the "one-plus-five" formula has moved the debate from the suburbs to the city and from a discussion about components to one about whole buildings and even urban form. What is "one plus five"? It is the wood construction, "stick-built" urban mixed-use building, exactly five stories tall, erected on a concrete podium. The first level capped by the concrete deck is retail, parking, meeting rooms or amenities and the floors above it are apartments, condos, or dormitories erected under the 3A construction type classification of the building model code IBC. (...)

With the stroke of a pen (via IBC 2009) an entire building group, the urban elevator building, moved from being a substantial structure made of concrete, steel or brick to one that is put together with two-by-fours like a single family home. This change amounts to an often overlooked revolution in the construction industry and in urban development. (...)

For centuries the quality of their buildings and a certain permanence set cities apart and allowed decades and centuries of layers to create the textual richness we associate with them. City buildings could be reused in many ways because their structure were still good after 50 or a hundred years or more. Baltimore has a rich tradition in creative reuse of beautiful breweries, factories, mills and warehouses, each with substantial bones and each having been once each a trail blazer of sorts for innovation and skills. It is hard to imagine that fifty years onward folks would get excited about the one-plus-five buildings or contemplate an adaptive re-use. Too flimsy to last even that long, these buildings will probably have to be demolished once they become obsolete, unable to stand as the testimony of our times.

by Klaus Philipsen, Community Architect | Read more:
Image: ArchPlan, Inc.

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Christopher Kane

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[ed. See also: The Sacred Child]

Sally Mann's Exposure (NY Times)

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Leafly: The "Yelp of Weed"

[ed.  More relevant than ever. An indispensable resource.]

One of the trends Seattle-based Leafly has noticed is an almost connoisseur-like approach to bud. Just as there are foodies who read Yelp, there are stoners who consult Leafly, a cannabis database made up of more than 50,000 strain reviews and 20,000 dispensary reviews. Leafly provides a resource for 2.6 million visitors each month. In August, the company launched an editorial site covering all the Mary Jane news a toker needs to know, from ongoing legalization efforts to how-to guides for first-time users.

But Leafly isn't just for recreational pot smokers. Leafly prides itself on building a website and mobile apps with medical marijuana patients in mind—the site's polished look deviates from other marijuana-themed sites where flashing ads often border on the epileptic. Such base aesthetics might have been fine for potheads of another generation, but today's medical marijuana patients are more sophisticated, seeking a safe place to learn about their medicine.

The brainchild of three former Kelly Blue Book employees, Leafly began as a side project in 2010, shortly after cofounder Scott Vickers received a doctor's recommendation to use medical marijuana to help with his insomnia. As a white-collar professional, he wanted to build a site for people like him. That meant no overt pot symbolism, no girls clad in bikinis, no flashing ads. Originally based in Newport Beach, California, he and his cofounders, Cy Scott and Brian Wansolich, met on weekends to design and build the site, eventually quitting their jobs at the end of 2011 to work full-time on Leafly. (...)

Before Privateer's acquisition, Leafly had clocked about 15,000 marijuana strain reviews. Today, it boasts more than 50,000 from 80,000 registered users, bringing in $100,000 in revenue each month. With its new editorial site, the company hopes to see revenue light up, blooming to $1 million a month in the next year. Leafly's Android and iOS apps are also seeing success, with 200,000 new iOS downloads a month and 5,000 Android installs each week.

Much of its success on the web can be attributed to Leafly's SEO dominance for strain queries, making it a high destination for people to learn about their herbal refreshment. In addition to reviews that range from the eloquent to the typo-ridden ("F#$%ING KILLL-ERRRR!!!!" one user wrote), people also rate how effective strains are for treating certain ailments, such as pain, stress, depression, and insomnia—as well as the drugs' effects, including euphoria, creativity, dry mouth, and paranoia. Leafly landing pages highlight which dispensaries in a vicinity carry particular strains—and their going rates. Leafly also has a feature called Cannabis Strain Explorer to aid with reefer discovery, organizing more than 500 types in a periodic table of sorts that users can filter by effects and nearby availability.

by Alice Truong, Fast Company |  Read more:

Image: Leafly

Igor Corzh and Bujidubabi,  Lomography - Diana F+ (Wikipedia)

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