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Source of 47 Percent Video To Go Public

by MalenMajure469 Posted on March 13, 2013

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On September 17, Mother Jones‘ David Corn broke a story that became a decisive moment in the presidential campaign, revealing video of GOP candidate Mitt Romney speaking candidly to donors at a $50,000-a-plate campaign fundraiser. In the video, Romney said that 47 percent of Americans

More MoJo coverage of Mitt Romney’s “47 percent” remarks:


SECRET VIDEO: Romney Tells Millionaire Donors What He REALLY Thinks of Obama Voters


Romney “47 Percent” Fundraiser Host: Hedge Fund Manager Who Likes Sex Parties


Full Transcript of the Mitt Romney Secret Video


Obama Strikes Backâ&#128;&#148;With “47 Percent”


Who Was at Romney’s “47 Percent” Fundraiser?

“…will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them…These are people who pay no income tax.”

The story went global instantly, appearing at the top of news sites and TV broadcasts around the world, with millions of people ultimately watching the video. But amid much speculation about the source of the recording, Corn did not reveal the name of the the person who shot the video, honoring a pledge to protect his identity. Now the source himself has decided to go public: He will tell his story Wednesday night on MSNBC’s The Ed Show. We’ll have more information then, but for now, we will continue to honor our commitment not to divulge details. You can watch the The Ed Show preview here.

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Source of 47 Percent Video To Go Public

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U.S. nuclear companies fight new safety measures

by MalenMajure469 Posted on March 4, 2013

U.S. nuclear companies fight new safety measures

By John Upton

Constellation Energy Group

Nine Mile Point Nuclear Station in New York could use a couple radiation filters.

How much should a nuclear power plant operator spend to prevent radiation from spewing into the air during an accident, à la Fukushima and Chernobyl?

The answer, according to staff of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, is $20 million per reactor. That’s the price tag for a filter that could be fitted to a reactor’s vent to capture radiation during an accident.

Many reasonable people might think that $20 million is a reasonable price to pay to prevent the potential contamination of the air and land with deadly radiation. Germans apparently think so: Such filters are installed at all nine of that country’s nuclear reactors. Japan gets it: After the Fukushima meltdown, the nation is requiring radiation filters to be installed on all reactors. All quite reasonable.

But the executives running America’s nuclear power plants don’t seem to be so reasonable. As NRC commissioners prepare to vote as soon as this week to adopt or reject their staff’s recommendation that they mandate the use of such filters in some of the nation’s oldest reactors, industry is lobbying in opposition. The problem? Companies don’t want to spend the money. From Bloomberg:

A proposed requirement that U.S. nuclear-power plants add $20 million devices to prevent radiation leaks, one of the costliest recommendations stemming from meltdowns in Japan two years ago, has attracted a flurry of last-minute lobbying.

The U.S. nuclear industry opposes the rule, which would require almost a third of the nation’s reactors to install a special filter on vents designed to prevent an explosive buildup of gases. Exelon Corp., which owns more U.S. reactors than any other company, estimates each filter would cost $20 million, meaning the Chicago-based company could end up paying $220 million to equip its units. …

The industry prefers a plant-by-plant approach to the question of whether filters are necessary.

Needless to say, not everybody thinks that power plant operators should be allowed to save money at the potential expense of human health and lives. From the same article:

Supporters of the measure say it is overdue and consistent with what the rest of the world is doing. Japan announced last year that filtered vents will be required on its reactors. Other nations that use or are considering filtered venting systems on their reactors include Taiwan, Spain, Switzerland, Finland, Sweden, France and the Netherlands, according to the NRC.

“The tens of millions of Americans who live near the affected reactors located in 15 states should not face additional delays,” a dozen Democratic senators led by Barbara Boxer of California and Ron Wyden of Oregon wrote in a Feb. 20 letter [PDF] to NRC Chairman Allison Macfarlane.

So stay tuned to find out whether the NRC, under the new leadership of Macfarlane, will prioritize energy-company penny pinching or protection of humanity.

John Upton is a science aficionado and green news junkie who

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U.S. nuclear companies fight new safety measures

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The Budding Rand Paul–Bob McDonnell Flame War

by MalenMajure469 Posted on February 28, 2013

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On Saturday, Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell (R) signed into law a sweeping transportation funding bill that lowers the state gas tax, raises the sales tax, and ultimately aims to bring in $1 billion a year in new funding. It was, as Politico‘s Alex Burns wrote, just the kind of signature accomplishment McDonnell had been looking for as he prepares to leave office next January.

But for allies of Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, McDonnell’s possible 2016 presidential rival, the transportation bill is something else entirely: disqualifying. Here’s a fundraising email blasted out on Monday by the Campaign for Liberty, the organization chaired by former Rep. Ron Paul (Rand’s father) and actively supported by the senator:

As the Chairman of the Republican Governors Association, Bob “Tax Hike” McDonnell’s sellout has ramifications for EVERY man, woman and child in America.

It’s no secret Bob McDonnell has ambitions to run for President.

Needless to say, after this massive tax hike on Virginia citizens – and cave in on ObamaCare – a dog catcher with a record like this is the last thing we need, let alone a President.

And here’s a piece Campaign for Liberty president John Tate published at Business Insider on Wednesday:

Business Insider

The good news for McDonnell, anyway, is that he’s finally being associated with something other than transvaginal ultrasounds.

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The Budding Rand Paul–Bob McDonnell Flame War

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Firing Bad Teachers Has Surprisingly Meager Effects

by MalenMajure469 Posted on February 24, 2013

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Dylan Matthews has an interview with Thomas Kane today about ways in which we can measure teacher performance in the classroom. This comes at the very end:

Dylan Matthews: Now, the three components you measure predict future performance on achievement tests. But a lot of people dismiss that, even though there’s growing evidence that achievement test scores are correlated with all kinds of important real-life outcomes. Why do these scores matter?

Thomas Kane: So I’m really heartened — even asking that question means you’re aware of that Chetty/Friedman/Rockoff study….What they found was that the teachers who appeared to have high value-added while the students were in their classrooms, their value-added was predictive of students’ income later. I’m optimistic about it but based largely on Raj’s study.

I remember reading this study when it first came out, and I had a very different reaction. Basically, the researchers looked at data on teachers and test scores starting around 1990, and linked it up with the incomes of students later in life. They had a big dataset and they did all the usual controls. Then they estimated the gains to income from firing a terrible teacher (one in the bottom 5 percent) and replacing him with an average teacher. Long story short, once you account for real-world frictions (namely that we can’t perfectly identify the terrible teachers), they estimate that making this change in a single grade level produces an income gain among students of slightly more than 1 percent at age 28.

Now, the first thing to say about this is that a result this small, even if it’s statistically significant, should be treated with extreme caution. There are just a ton of confounding variables that could be at play here, and even a small missing factor could swamp this study’s findings.

But it’s worse than that. Even if you assume these results are correct, they struck me not as optimistic, but as shockingly low. We’re not talking about a small change in teacher quality here. We’re talking about a huge change: an entire year spent with a perfectly acceptable teacher instead of one who’s the worst of the worst. And even at that, it only made a difference of 1 percent in future income. That’s it?

Now, you could argue that the effect would be bigger if we got rid of bad teachers in all the grades. Wouldn’t that make a bigger difference? Sure, except that about half of all students never get any bottom-5-percent teachers in the first place; a little less than half get a bottom-five-percent teacher once in their school careers; and only a handful of the very unluckiest students get one for more than one year. So you’re stuck with the basic result: averaged across all students, the value of firing all the terrible teachers will probably be a future income increase of less than 1 percent. For an average person, that’s a few hundred dollars per year.

Am I the only one who finds that surprisingly meager? I’m all for getting rid of horrible teachers, but if anything, this study makes me put a lower priority on this than I used to—especially considering how difficult it would be to carry out a policy like this. I was surprised that this study got such a euphoric reception when it was published, and I still am.

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Firing Bad Teachers Has Surprisingly Meager Effects

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Telling the Truth About Education—and About Ed Reform

by MalenMajure469 Posted on February 21, 2013

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In a recent column about the limitations of data, David Brooks wrote this about the debate over how effective economic stimulus has been: “As far as I know not a single major player in this debate has been persuaded by data to switch sides.” This got Bob Somerby’s attention. Had he ever changed his mind based on data? He says yes: the first time he actually looked for himself at NAEP testing data on schoolchildren and discovered what it actually showed:

We were stunned by what we saw there. We saw that, according to this gold standard program, black kids had been making large progress in reading and math down through the years. (Hispanic kids too.)

Like everyone else who reads newspapers, we had never heard this. Like everyone else who reads newspapers, we had endlessly heard that our schools were awful and getting worse—that absolutely nothing was working.

….That progress, if real, is astounding. But thanks to the mountain of liberal indifference, the public has never been told. Very few people have ever heard that our low-income and minority kids seem to be doing much better in school.

This is one of the reasons why Obama will face great odds if he tries to sell universal preschool. To this day, the public is constantly told that nothing works. Why would they want to pay for universal preschool if nothing else ever has worked?

I guess I sort of plead guilty to this. Like Bob, I was also surprised the first time I really started to dig into test score data: it showed pretty clearly that we’ve made consistent progress over the past three decades, especially at the elementary school level. It turns out that American schools aren’t in terminal decline. At the same time, years of dipping into the ed reform literature has made me very cynical about faddish interventions. Virtually none of them really seem to hold up when you test them with bigger sample sizes, longer time series, or better studies.

I feel differently about pre-K interventions for a couple of reasons. First, we aren’t talking about marginal improvements to an existing system. In many cases, we’re talking about replacing nothing with something. The returns are much more likely to be large when you’re starting from zero.

Second, the evidence in favor of pre-K seems to be stronger, even though it suffers from some of the same limitations of K-12 programs. It’s true that we won’t know for sure what (if anything) works until we perform rigorous testing on large-scale programs that have been run for years, but the evidence we have so far suggests to me that we’re likely to see measurable benefits. It also, frankly, just seems like the right thing to do. Rich and middle-class parents already provide this kind of thing for their kids, and in a country as wealthy as ours, I see no excuse for not giving poorer parents at least the same opportunities for their kids.

So yes: I suppose that cynicism about K-12 interventions doesn’t help to gain public support for pre-K programs. Mea culpa. But the answer isn’t to lower our evidentiary standards. The answer is to make sure we do rigorous analysis of K-12 and pre-K programs. In the end, the public will never be willing to consistently fund these programs unless we do.

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Telling the Truth About Education—and About Ed Reform

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BP to Government: $21 Billion Fine is ‘Excessive’

by MalenMajure469 Posted on February 20, 2013

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This story first appeared in The Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

A former Illinois congressional candidate and a government watchdog organization have teamed up to sue the Internal Revenue Service, claiming the agency should bar dark money groups from funding political ads.

The lawsuit, filed on Tuesday by David Gill, his campaign committee and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW, is the first to challenge how the IRS regulates political spending by social welfare nonprofits, campaign-finance experts say.

As ProPublica has reported, these nonprofits, often called dark money groups because they don’t have to identify their donors, have increasingly become major players in politics since the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling in early 2010.

BP has already accepted criminal responsibility for the disaster, pleading guilty last November to manslaughter and lying to Congress and paying $4.5 billion in fines. It reached a separate $7.8 billion settlement earlier last year with thousands of local individuals that suffered economic damages because of the oil disaster.

But Bondy indicated the company had become stuck trying to reach a deal on the big ticket item: up to $21 billion in fines for environmental damage arising from the oil disaster.

The fines, which would be levied under the Clean Water Act, would go directly for coastal restoration in Louisiana, Mississippi, and other Gulf states. More than 40 lawyers for federal and state governments are expected to be in court on Monday.

At issue are BP’s efforts to stop the doomed Macondo well, which gushed for three months before it was finally sealed off by company engineers.

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BP to Government: $21 Billion Fine is ‘Excessive’

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BP thinks people are still kind of overreacting to the Gulf oil spill

by MalenMajure469 Posted on February 19, 2013

BP thinks people are still kind of overreacting to the Gulf oil spill

By Philip Bump

Not that big a deal, really.There is an attorney who works for BP (and almost certainly makes good money doing so) who is charged with making the following argument: You’re blowing the deadly Deepwater Horizon thing way out of proportion.

From the New Orleans Times-Picayune:

With the start of the civil trial against global oil giant BP only a week away, the company’s senior trial lawyer said Monday that he doesn’t expect his client to be declared grossly negligent for the 2010 Gulf oil spill, a finding that would result in a four-fold increase in the fines BP would have to pay.

Rupert Bondy, BP’s general counsel, also said he’s confident the company will pay much less than the maximum $5 billion to $22 billion in Clean Water Act fines often cited by the media.

Why not? In part because Halliburton and Transocean fucked up, too.

The key is understanding the narrow legal definition of gross negligence that must be considered by Barbier, he said. “There is a very high bar for gross negligence,” he said, and in the case of the Deepwater Horizon accident “there were multiple causes involving multiple parties, including Transocean and Halliburton.”

Indeed, a joint memo Transocean filed with Justice Department lawyers supporting the company’s plea deal labels its actions as negligent, but not grossly negligent, and not as negligent as BP’s actions. …

The memo also points out that Transocean officials followed BP’s recommendations to ignore the readings, instead of refusing to comply with orders from BP officials.

A key component of the government’s claim of negligence is that BP’s errors didn’t stop after the explosion. A large part of its $4 billion criminal judgment against the company stemmed from the amount of oil spilled and BP’s efforts to cover up the actual amount. To which BP has this clever response:

“[W]e went to pretty extraordinary lengths and efforts to seal the well” and limit the amount of oil reaching the surface, [Bondy] said. “At one point, we had 48,000 people working on the response,” with so many ships and airplanes involved that the fleets were larger than many nations’ armed forces.

Yes, it took months to fix, but BP sure had a lot of people not fixing it!

BP could see damages under the Clean Water Act in excess of $20 billion, calculated on a per-spilled-barrel basis — one reason the company is disputing how much was spilled. The actual levied civil fine will probably be more in the range of $5 billion — or just under half of what BP earned in profits last year.

But then, we’re probably blowing those profits out of proportion, too.

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.

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BP thinks people are still kind of overreacting to the Gulf oil spill

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Georgia Legislators Propose Ending Direct Election of Senators—Why Not Just Get Rid of the Senate?

by MalenMajure469 Posted on February 15, 2013

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It is a matter of public record that the United States Senate is a terrible place where serious policy issues are ignored; routine votes are occasionally delayed over concerns about non-existent terrorist groups; and proverbial cans are proverbially kicked down the proverbial road of sadness, gridlock, and despair.

What’s less clear is why the Senate is such a congress of louts. Is it the endless pressure to raise money? The never-ending campaign? The fact that Americans hold lots of substantive disagreements on important things and are themselves—it’s been said—somewhat dysfunctional?

Actually, according to Georgia state Rep. Buzz Brockaway, the biggest problem with the Senate is that it’s democratically elected. Brockaway, a Republican, has introduced a bill in the state legislature to repeal the 17th Amendment, which provides for the direct election of senators, and instead restore the responsibility of choosing members to state legislatures (as was the process until 1913).

The bill, HR 273, laments that “the Seventeenth Amendment has resulted in a large federal government with power and control that cannot be checked by the states,” and suggests that “the original purpose of the United States Senate was to protect the sovereignty of the states from the federal government and to give each individual state government representation in the federal legislative branch of government.”

If the bill passed, Georgia would be the first state to endorse repealing the 17th Amendment, but the idea has gained traction among conservatives over the last few decades. Texas Gov. Rick Perry supports it; so do GOP Sens. Mike Lee of Utah and Jeff Flake of Arizona. (Republican Indiana Sen. candidate Richard Mourdock endorsed the idea during his campaign last year, before, in an ironic twist, losing the popular vote.) As Salon’s Alex Seitz-Wald noted in 2012, conservatives blame the 17th Amendment for trampling over the rights of states by changing the constituency to which senators are accountable.

Of course, introducing a bill is the easy part. Getting voters to agree to give up their right to vote will probably be a tough sell.

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Georgia Legislators Propose Ending Direct Election of Senators—Why Not Just Get Rid of the Senate?

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Obama’s Jobs Council Fail

by MalenMajure469 Posted on January 30, 2013

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President Barack Obama’s jobs council, a panel formed in January 2011 to gather outside expertise on job creation, is set to expire Thursday. It appears unlikely that the president will renew it for another term, but experts say that the council has been such a loser that its death might actually be a good thing.

The jobs panel, officially called the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, is made up of 26 important people from industry, labor, and academia, and was “created to provide non-partisan advice to the President…on ways to create jobs, opportunity, and prosperity for the American people,” according to its website. But the panel failed to accomplish much over its two-year life span, and a lot of what it did turn out was more friendly to business than to regular people.

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Obama’s Jobs Council Fail

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The Senate Immigration Plan Isn’t Terrible—It’s Just Unworkable

by MalenMajure469 Posted on January 28, 2013

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The bipartisan Senate “Gang of Eight” released their framework for comprehensive immigration reform today. As expected, the plan includes increased enforcement and a path to citizenship for unauthorized immigrants already in the US. It also contains several tripwires that, if triggered, could destroy the entire effort. The “Gang of Eight” includes Senators Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), John McCain (R-Ariz.), Richard Durbin (D-Ill.), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), Michael Bennet (D-Colo.), and Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.).

Citizenship

The plan includes a path to citizenship, which excludes those with criminal backgrounds and those who have committed crimes since entering the US. Undocumented immigrants would have to register with the government and go through a background check, and would be allowed to stay under “probationary legal status,” after which they would have to “go to the back of the line” before eventually qualifying for citizenship. They will not be eligible for federal benefits during their “probationary legal status.”

Interestingly, the plan makes the “path to citizenship” easier for two groups of immigrants: Those eligibile for the DREAM Act, which means they were brought to the US as children prepared to go to college or join the military, and agricultural workers. A cynical person might point out that in doing so, the plan goes out of its way to help the most sympathetic immigrants, and those most essential to powerful business interests. Or as the plan puts it, workers who “who commit to the long term stability of our nation’s agricultural industries.” The plan also states that immigrants who have “received a PhD or Master’s degree in science, technology, engineering, or math from an American university” will automatically get a green card, but doesn’t state whether that applies even if the individual is undocumented.

Enforcement

The framework makes reform contingent on things that can’t happen until the immigration system is reformed. While perhaps politically necessary, the plan throws more personnel and flying robots at the border, despite the fact that the US already spends more on immigration forcement than on all other aspects of federal law enforcement combined. The plan implies that undocumented immigrants can only be legalized after a commission “comprised of governors, attorneys general, and community leaders living along the Southwest border” certify that the measures have worked, which puts final legalization of the country’s 11 million undocumented immigrants in the hands of Republican officials like Arizona Governor Jan Brewer who don’t want it to happen.

Beyond that however, the fact is that enforcement can only do so much to deter illegal immigration, because those seeking a better life will brave ever more dangerous obstacles to get here. What’s needed is an immigration system that allows enough people in to work so that people think they have a decent enough chance to get here that risking their life to do so isn’t worth it. The framework is incredibly vague on this point, hinting at a “guest worker program” but never using the phrase, and simply stating that the plan will “provide businesses with the ability to hire lower-skilled workers in a timely manner when Americans are unavailable or unwilling to fill those jobs.” This, not more drones at the border, is arguably the most important aspect of deterring illegal immigration, and the plan gives it short shrift.

Bottom Line

The Gang of Eight’s framework isn’t all terrible, it’s just unworkable. It places conditions it’s unlikely to meet, and then further compounds the problem by putting a veto in the hands of people who are likely to oppose the plan even if those conditions were met. Immigration reform advocates will be wary of the employment verification requirements, (particularly given the error-prone nature of the current system) while the immigration restrictionist right will be completely opposed to any plan that offers undocumented immigrants a path to citizenship rather than “self-deportation.”

Politically, the immediate question is whether the presence of Senators like Rubio and Flake can limit the backlash on the right, since any immigration reform bill still has to get through the Republican controlled-House of Representatives. But even if the entire plan were written, passed and signed by the president tomorrow, much of it—legalization in particular—could be prevented from ever happening.

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The Senate Immigration Plan Isn’t Terrible—It’s Just Unworkable

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