Florida Senator Marco Rubio is announcing today that he will run for president in 2016. Also, a parking reform group tapped by the Mayor's office has released a series of recommendations. Then, Pope Francis ignited a diplomatic row with Turkey after he described the massacre of over a million Armenians as “the first genocide of the 20th century.”
GOP 2016: What Rubio’s entrance means to the field
Yet another GOP candidate is tossing his hat into the ring for the 2016 presidential race.
Florida Senator Marco Rubio is planning an announcement for 6 p.m. EST Monday that he will run for president in 2016, capping off months of speculation that the Miami-born lawmaker would be making a run for the presidency. In a conference call Monday morning, Rubio informed his donors of his plans to run.
What is Rubio's path to the nomination, if there is one? What does he have to do in order to win the GOP establishment vote? What about the Latino vote?
Guests:
Michael Grunwald, senior writer for POLITICO magazine. He’s also the author of “The New New Deal: The Hidden Story of Change in the Obama Era.” He co-wrote a piece on Rubio's entrance into the 2016 race for POLITICO today.
Rory Cooper, GOP strategist and managing director at Purple Strategies, a political consulting firm in Washington, D.C. He was also the communications director for former House Majority Leader Eric Cantor.
Pollsters gauge push & pull of Hillary's gender and Marco's heritage
A first-generation immigrant whose parents fled Cuba, Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) could make history as the nation's first Hispanic president [as could Senator Ted Cruz(R-TX)].
However, polling suggests Rubio would have to engage in substantial Latino-specific outreach to motivate those voters. Polling firm Latino Decisions asked 4,200 Latinos who voted in the 2014 midterm about their view of Rubio: 36 percent held an unfavorable opinion of him, 31 percent held a favorable, and the remainder had either no opinion or no knowledge of the presumptive Republican candidate. (Full poll results and analysis).
Official candidate for the Democratic ticket, Hillary Rodham Clinton, kicked off her campaign with a video featuring her strongest supporters: American women. Recent polling by Gallup showed "all major female demographic groups view Clinton more positively than do their male counterparts, including by age, education, race, marital status and partisanship." (Full poll results and analysis).
How will Marco Rubio reach out to Latino Americans? How much will identity politics play into the 2016 presidential campaign?
Guests:
Lynn Vavreck, Professor of Political Science, UCLA
Matt Barreto, Co-Founder of Latino Decisions, a polling company specializing in Latino Americans; Professor of Political Science & Professor of Chicano/a Studies, UCLA
Proposal to cap most LA parking tickets at $23, part of slew of recommendations
A parking reform group tapped by the Mayor's office has released a series of recommendations. One suggestion is to start most parking tickets at $23 and gradually raise the fines on subsequently offenses within a year.
In addition, the proposal also calls for the city to embrace advanced technology -- smart parking meters, the ability for drivers feed meters with their smartphones -- to address parking issues.
The working group is made up of members from business groups, neighborhood councils, and members of Parking Freedom Initiative, which had vowed last year to put the $23 ticket proposal on the ballot.
Guest:
Jay Beeber, co-chair of the Los Angeles Parking Reform Working Group and executive director of Safer Streets Los Angeles blog
Pope’s use of 'genocide' reignites old debate with new significance
Over the weekend, Pope Francis ignited a diplomatic row with Turkey after he described the massacre of over a million Armenians as “the first genocide of the 20th century.”
While his predecessor Pope John Paul II had also identified the mass killing of Armenians during World War I and beyond as a genocide, Pope Francis’s statement caused officials in Turkey to recall their ambassador to the Roman Catholic Church and summon the Vatican envoy. The pope’s remarks were intended to connect the killings of Christians early in the last century with killings of Christians by the self-styled Islamic State in the present.
The topic is fraught with controversy for heads of state and diplomats as Turkey denies allegations that a genocide against the Armenian people had occurred and that Turkey itself had engaged in the genocide. Officially, the United States has yet to recognize the Armenian Genocide.
What geopolitical consequences could ripple out from the pontiff's remarks? Will the United States feel renewed pressure to change its official stance? What is the nature of the connection between killings of Armenian Christians in the early 20th century and Arab Christians in the early 21st?
Guests:
Jason Berry, religion reporter for the GlobalPost and the author of “Render unto Rome: The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church” (Broadway Books, 2012).
Josh Lockman, International Law Professor and expert on U.S. Foreign Policy at the USC Gould School of Law.
Robot taxis could be on the way
Two major trends in automotive transportation could transform the industry in the coming years.
In a recent report to investors, Morgan Stanley auto analyst Adam Jonas wrote that autonomous cars and the sharing economy could soon give rise to robot taxi services. Graphing his research data, Jonas says that people may soon start thinking of cars as a shared assets.
Companies like Uber pioneered the shared economy by allowing people to make money by using their car as a taxi. As autonomous technology advances, however, humans may be squeezed out of the game entirely.
According to Jonas’ research, the average car is only used for about an hour a day. Cars spend the rest of the day sitting in parking lots and garages. Jonas says that we may be ignoring an important industry. “The car, on our estimates, is the world’s most underutilized asset,” Jonas wrote.“ We believe it is the most disreputable business on earth.” When autonomous cars become the norm, cars could make their owners money while they’re at home or at work. Eventually, you might not even need a car.
How do you feel about the “sharing economy?” Would you be comfortable getting picked up by a robot driver?
Guest:
Adam Jonas, lead auto analyst at Morgan Stanley Research and author of the new report, “Shared Autonomy”
Huntington Library curator on the formative relationship between the car and the West
The relationship today between the car and Los Angeles could be described as tortured. Of course, it wasn’t always that way.
The advent of the automobile brought mobility, new experiences and a sense of adventure to the open West. For “Motoring West,” the first of a multi-volume series on the history of the automobile, editor and Huntington Library historian Peter Blodgett has put together a scores of articles, pamphlets and book excerpts to give readers a sense of what it was like to explore this part of the country during the early days of the automobile, when traveling by car was a novelty and not a drag.
Guests:
Peter Blodgett, Editor of “Motoring West Volume 1: Automobile Pioneers, 1900-1909” and Curator of Western American Manuscripts collection at the Huntington Library