Author Archives: DannielFrantz

The Hillary Clinton Email Saga: Still No There There

by DannielFrantz Posted on August 12, 2015

Mother Jones

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Is Hillary Clinton starting to get into serious trouble over the personal email account she maintained as Secretary of State? Hard to say. So far there’s no evidence that she did anything wrong, just a beef between State and CIA over whether some of the emails she sent and received were classified properly at the time. That may change, but for now that’s all we’ve got.

So why is this getting so much attention? As Steve Benen points out, Clinton isn’t the first Secretary of State to use a personal email account:

Politico published this report in March: “Like Hillary Clinton, former Secretary of State Colin Powell also used a personal email account during his tenure at the State Department, an aide confirmed in a statement.”….MSNBC’s Alex Seitz-Wald added at the time: “….Powell, who served from 2001-2005, apparently did not keep a record of personal emails, unlike Clinton.”

As best as I can tell, no one ever cared about the Republican secretary of state using a personal email account. It was, to borrow a phrase, a non-story.

Jeb Bush also used a personal account when he was governor of Florida. And he held onto those emails for seven years before he finally made them public. What’s more, it’s clear that, like Clinton, he decided which emails to release and which to hold back. “Gov. Bush does not have a plan to release his personal e-mails not related to state business,” an aide said in March. That sounds awfully similar to what Clinton has said about her email archive.

I’m not trying to be faux naive here. Nobody cares about Powell because he’s not running for president. Nobody cares about Jeb Bush because….actually, I’m not sure why nobody cares about Bush. The governor of Florida doesn’t handle classified intel, but if that were the big difference then Powell would be under scrutiny too.

It may turn out at some point that Clinton did something wrong. So far, her only real sin is looking guilty—and I’ll confess I don’t understand why she’s acting that way. All it does is give Republicans ammunition and give the press corps an excuse to treat her the way they used to in the 90s. But as near as I can tell, there’s just nothing here, which is why I haven’t bothered writing about it. Aside from the obvious political motivations (for Republicans) and personal animus (among the press), is there any reason this is getting such big play? What am I missing?

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The Hillary Clinton Email Saga: Still No There There

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Millennials Living In Their Parents’ Home Is Finally Starting to Taper Off

by DannielFrantz Posted on July 29, 2015

Mother Jones

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Pew has a new report out showing that even five years after the recession ended, more young adults are living with their parents than before the recession. This is despite the fact that unemployment among 20-somethings has dropped dramatically. What’s more, this trend is pretty widespread:

The decline in independent living since the recovery began is apparent among both better-educated young adults and their less-educated counterparts….This suggests that trends in young adult living arrangements are not being driven by labor market fortunes, as college-educated young adults have experienced a stronger labor market recovery than less-educated young adults.

Trends in living arrangements also show no significant gender differences during the recovery. However, in 2015, 63% of Millennial men lived independently of family, compared with 72% of Millennial women. But a similar gender difference existed during the Great Recession, and both young men and young women are less likely to live independently today than they were five years ago.

But the news might not be quite as bleak as Pew suggests. Take a look at the arrows in the chart on the right. The upward trend in living at home continued to rise through 2013, but it finally began to drop a couple of years ago. That’s not surprising since it’s pretty likely that there’s a certain amount hysteresis in this phenomenon; that is, a lag between the economy improving and kids moving into their own places. This might be because wages remained low for several years after the technical end of the recession. It might be because higher debt levels took a while to pay down. It might be that it simply took a few years for recession-induced fear to end. Why move out if you’re not sure the economy is really on a long-term roll?

There’s not much question that 20-somethings of this generation have it worse than my generation, which in turn had it worse than the previous generation. That means the recession hit them especially hard. But if these trends are right, it looks like optimism about work and income is finally starting to slowly improve. It’s not great news, but it’s good news.

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Millennials Living In Their Parents’ Home Is Finally Starting to Taper Off

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Vladimir Putin’s Russia: Criticize the Government and Your Family Will Be Locked Up in a Penal Colony

by DannielFrantz Posted on December 30, 2014

Mother Jones

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The show trial of one of Vladimir Putin’s chief political critics ended today. He was convicted and banned from political office for ten years, but the sentence was suspended and he immediately joined a protest march upon his release. So what happened next?

The police in Moscow briefly detained the anticorruption crusader and political opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny on Tuesday as he tried to join an unauthorized, antigovernment rally, just hours after a Moscow court had given him a suspended sentence on criminal fraud charges. Yet, in a sign of how unwilling the authorities are to make a martyr of Mr. Navalny, they said later that the police were merely escorting him back to his home, Interfax reported.

Well, that’s not so bad. Maybe Putin is lightening up a bit. Except for one little thing:

His brother Oleg was jailed for three and a half years for the same offence….Navalny’s supporters said the Kremlin was returning to the sinister Soviet-era practice of punishing the relatives of those it disliked. Upon hearing the verdict, mumbled quietly by the judge, Yelena Korobchenko, Alexei Navalny rolled his eyes and looked at his brother.

….Oleg Navalny is the father of two small children and a former executive of the state-owned postal service. Unlike his better known brother, he has never played a role in the Russian opposition movement. His imprisonment in a penal colony seems to echo the Soviet-era practice of arresting the relatives of “inconvenient” people.

So they let Aleksei go free in order to keep him from being a martyr, but tossed his brother into prison as a hostage to his good behavior. Charming. A spokesman admitted that Putin “had been aware of the Navalny case, but that Tuesday’s ruling ‘isn’t important enough to merit a special report’ to the president.” I actually believe this. For Putin, it’s just another day at the office.

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Vladimir Putin’s Russia: Criticize the Government and Your Family Will Be Locked Up in a Penal Colony

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5 Natural Stovetop Simmers To Make Your House Smell Amazing

by DannielFrantz Posted on December 21, 2014

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5 Natural Stovetop Simmers To Make Your House Smell Amazing

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Here Are Some of the Worst Conservative Reactions to the CIA Torture Report

by DannielFrantz Posted on December 9, 2014

Mother Jones

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On Tuesday morning, the Senate intelligence committee released the 525-page executive summary of its 6,700-page report on CIA torture. The report laid bare the torture CIA interrogators used in (often futile) attempts to elicit information from detainees. Although tactics that included “rectal rehydration” and sensory deprivation offended some people, others chose to celebrate the CIA today:

Former Republican congressman Joe Walsh:

Conservative blogger RB Pundit:

Liz Cheney and her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney:

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), a potential candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016:

And of course the fine folks over at Fox News (via Raw Story):

Fox News host Eric Bolling (via Media Matters):

Fox News’ Sean Hannity (also via Media Matters):

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Here Are Some of the Worst Conservative Reactions to the CIA Torture Report

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