*By Carlo Versano*
Cynthia Nixon is sticking by her controversial bagel order.
The progressive Democrat challenging incumbent Andrew Cuomo in New York State's upcoming gubernatorial primary shared a cinnamon raisin bagel topped with lox and cream cheese with Cheddar on Tuesday. The unconventional medley ignited a [firestorm](https://nypost.com/2018/09/10/cynthia-nixons-bagel-order-is-horrifying/) on Twitter over the weekend, but Nixon has bigger fish to fry.
She wants the two-term Cuomo, who has long been thought to have presidential ambitions, to re-establish his liberal bona fides for voters calling for change. Cuomo maintains a 40 point lead over his challenger, according to the [latest polling] (https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2018/governor/ny/new_york_governor_democratic_primary-6526.html). But Nixon pointed to a slew of recent upsets ー Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Andrew Gillum, and Ayanna Pressley ー that have fueled her optimism for Thursday's primary.
"The polls across the board are just not capturing the progressive moment we're in," she said, adding that hundreds of thousands of new Democrats have registered to vote across New York State following Donald Trump's election.
Nixon's platform is built on issues of housing affordability, universal healthcare, and criminal justice reform. The latter has garnered her perhaps the most traction.
In a debate last month, Nixon pointedly called the legalization of marijuana a "racial-justice issue."
"Using marijuana is something that's effectively been legal for white people for a long time," she said during her interview on Cheddar. "It's time to make it legal for everybody else."
Part of that reform includes paroling and expunging the records of New Yorkers who were convicted of smoking or selling pot and using tax revenues from a nascent (decriminalized) weed industry to invest in communities that have been ravaged by the decades-long war on drugs.
Nixon's position on pot was viral enough to cause rapper T.I. to [gush](https://thegrio.com/2018/09/11/ti-cynthia-nixon-marijuana-vote/) over her on Twitter, though he admitted he doesn't know who the candidate is.
Cuomo, for his part, rejected what he called "reparations" during the debate, but struck a more cautious, pro-legalization position ー a leftward policy change that may have developed only at Nixon's prodding.
But the actress-turned-activist isn't running to liberalize Cuomo ー she's running to replace him.
"To be informed about Andrew Cuomo is to want a change," she said.
The former "Sex and the City" star said she has been encouraged by support upstate and in the suburbs, though New York City remains her core base. To that end, she has run aggressively on a campaign to fix the subway, pinning the decrepit state of the system on her opponent.
In New York, the subways are theoretically controlled by the governor, who oversees the MTA. Nixon has pledged to pass congestion pricing and a tax on the wealthy to pay for much-needed repairs to an aging infrastructure. She said Cuomo has not aggressively fought for the funding in Albany.
With two days to go until New York Democrats head to the polls, Nixon, who has refused corporate donations, knows she's the underdog against a well-known, well-funded, powerful incumbent. But there's no denying the country's progressive wave. The question remains whether that wave will be enough to carry Nixon to victory.
For full interview, [click here](https://cheddar.com/videos/cynthia-nixon-optimistic-despite-trailing-gov-andrew-cuomo-in-latest-polls).
Young Americans face a double burden from crushing student debt and the ballooned federal deficit that is the result of President Trump's tax cut, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told Cheddar's J.D. Durkin in an interview that aired Wednesday. Pelosi called the economic position many millennials find themselves in, even as the economy remains strong, "unconscionable." "Republicans foisted onto future generations [an] economy that is unfair, that is not really lending itself to growth in a strong, predictable, confident, certain way," Pelosi said.
The newly appointed vice chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Tex.), said he is "absolutely" concerned that Chinese telecommunication giant Huawei poses a threat to national security in an interview on Cheddar Tuesday.
Democratic Rep. Earl Blumenauer of Oregon is pushing forward for marijuana reform, introducing the aptly named House Resolution 420 to regulate marijuana much like alcohol was regulated post-Prohibition. "Ultimately we're going to be moving in that direction, allowing the states to be able to set up a regulatory system that meets their needs ー have their own approach in terms of taxation and distribution, just like alcohol," Blumenauer told Cheddar Tuesday. "
The cannabis business is budding across the United States, and one company is hoping to take hemp mainstream. Socati just announced a new $33 million round of funding. The company's CEO Josh Epstein talked to Cheddar about how that investment will help Socati expand is business.
President Trump's "Make America Great Again" cap is more than just a hat, it's a "symbol of us vs. them," Washington Post fashion editor Robin Givhan told Cheddar. Givhan penned a column last week about what the hat has come to mean in the years since it burst on the scene as a campaign accessory for Trump's 2016 presidential bid. The hat, she wrote, has become "a symbol of us vs. them, of exclusion and suspicion, of garrulous narcissism, of white male privilege, of violence and hate."
Between changes in the tax code and the government shutdown, H&R Block knows this year's tax season is likely to be stressful for many. That's why the company's introducing a slate of tools, some artificial intelligence-enabled, to help make it easier and more transparent to file. "This year we are introducing upfront, transparent pricing, so every single consumer will know what's it going to cost before I start," H&R Block CEO Jeff Jones told Cheddar.
These are the headlines you Need 2 Know for Tuesday, Jan. 29, 2019.
The battle of the billionaires may be heating up ahead of the 2020 presidential race, as former mayor and media mogul Michael Bloomberg took a swipe at ex-Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz after he announced a potential run for president as an independent during an interview on "60 Minutes" Sunday. The two billionaires are looking in part to capitalize on their corporate success to gain an edge against President Trump, who leveraged his business career to gain the presidency. "Anything is really possible at this point, and you don't want to ignore a white billionaire announcing a candidacy for president," Julia Manchester, reporter at The Hill, told Cheddar Monday. "We saw it happen in 2015 and \[Trump]\ won."
The U.S. Treasury on Monday announced sanctions against Venezuela's state-owned oil firm in an effort to undermine incumbent president Nicolás Maduro and reinforce support for interim president Juan Guaidó. Brett Bruen, a former diplomat and director of global engagement under President Obama, called the administration's decision a "rare bright spot" in Trump's foreign policy. "The Trump administration is holding firm to defend democracy, they are standing up for human rights, they are standing up for the rule of law," Bruen told Cheddar Monday.
Trump's political calculus to appeal to his base ー an older, whiter, more conservative demographic ー is coming at the expense of his popularity among millennials, said Kristen Soltis Anderson, a Republican pollster and author of "The Selfie Vote: Where Millennials Are Leading America." That poses a problem for the GOP as it seeks to broaden its tent in anticipation of a future when Donald Trump is not on the ballot.
