Author Archives: MaurineGooding

The Vatican is holding a contest for climate change startups.

by MaurineGooding Posted on December 19, 2017

Donald Trump’s White House is using some alarming tactics to keep people quiet about climate change and other scientific matters. Over the past few days, investigations have brought some of them to light:

No more climate tweets: Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke summoned Joshua Tree National Park’s superintendent to his office last month to reprimand him for tweeting about climate change, The Hill reported on Friday. Zinke made it clear that it was no longer OK for any national park to share climate change facts on official social media accounts.

Joshua Tree’s Twitter account had sent out a thread devoted to climate change:

“Science-based” gets banned: Over the weekend, the Washington Post reported that the Trump administration has forbidden health officials at the Centers for Disease Control and other federal agencies from using words such as “fetus,” “transgender,” and “science-based” in official documents for next year’s budget.

EPA employees targeted: A lawyer with the Republican campaign group America Rising (which helps find damaging info on political opponents) submitted requests for emails written by EPA staffers who had criticized the agency, the New York Times reported on Sunday. The request calls for emails that mention EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt or President Trump, along with any email correspondence with congressional Democrats who had criticized the EPA.

America Rising is affiliated with Definers Public Affairs, a communications company founded by two influential Republicans that promises to help its clients “influence media narratives” and “move public opinion.” The EPA recently signed a $120,000 contract with Definers for media monitoring.

Things are getting pretty Orwellian in here.

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The Vatican is holding a contest for climate change startups.

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Even in a Complex World, There Are Still Plenty of Facts That Can Be Checked

by MaurineGooding Posted on September 26, 2016

Mother Jones

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Over at the Corner, Patrick Brennan suggests that political journalists are lousy at fact checking, and debate moderators shouldn’t try to do it in real time. There’s a case to be made for this, but he sure picks a weird example:

Liberal Twitter was all a-huff about how the debate commissioner cites the unemployment rate as an area where the facts are up for debate — har har, they say, you know there literally is an official unemployment rate the government publishes, right?

Except anyone smart saying this is being remarkably coy: People of good faith and serious economic training debate about whether the “official” unemployment rate is a good representation of the unemployment rate all the time!

How absurd is it to complain about the commissioner’s statement here? Say Trump says something along the lines of “the real unemployment rate is much higher than the government tells you.”

This might well be true — although it all depends on what you mean by the real unemployment rate….The people braying for fact-checking in debates are thus asking for moderators to attempt, in real time, to adjudicate disputes that divide Ph.D. economists and of course, a whole range of other such disputes on which the respective experts — trade economists, classification experts, presidential historians, whatever — often don’t agree.

Brennan suggests this is all a high-minded argument about U3 vs. U6 and the declining labor force participation rate and so forth. Silly liberals! Who are they to say that the unemployment rate is a clear fact when even professional economists argue about it?

And, sure, fair point—if this is what Trump was talking about. He’s not. He’s said on multiple occasions that the unemployment rate is “really” 42 percent or 21 percent or 35 percent. The headline figure from the BLS (currently 4.9 percent) is a “hoax” and a “conspiracy.” In fact, it’s “one of the biggest hoaxes in politics.” This is presumably because Donald Trump doesn’t waste his time with anything other than the very best hoaxes.

This is not an academic argument about what unemployment “really” is. It’s idiocy. It’s a lie. It’s a shameless extension of Trump’s juvenile populism, and Brennan knows it. If he thinks debate moderators shouldn’t even push back on something this rank, he’s showing a contempt for the truth every bit as casual as Trump’s.

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Even in a Complex World, There Are Still Plenty of Facts That Can Be Checked

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Sanders Wants to Make It Cheaper for Families to Visit Inmates

by MaurineGooding Posted on September 18, 2015

Mother Jones

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Americans with a family member behind bars have to pay for a lot more than just a lawyer. Although the FCC recently capped the cost of interstate phone calls from correctional facilities at 21 cents a minute, in-state calls, which are not regulated, can cost five times more than that. And as I explained in a piece for the magazine in February, it can cost as much as a dollar a minute for a 20-minute video visit with an inmate at county jails. (By comparison, the in-person visits that video visitation software has replaced are free.)

Now, Bernie Sanders wants to change that. On Thursday, the independent senator from Vermont, who is seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, introduced a bill (co-sponsored by three progressive congressmen) designed to crack down on private contractors in public prisons. The bill’s biggest-ticket item is a prohibition on federal funding for private prisons altogether. (Currently about 1.6 million federal inmates nationally are at private facilities.)

But the bill—read it here—also takes on video and phone contractors. Specifically, it would put an unspecified cap on the per-minute cost of video and phone conferencing with inmates; it would prohibit or restrict correctional facilities from taking a cut of the revenue from phone and video conferencing fees (which can create an incentive to jack up rates, and cut back on things like in-person visitation); and it would require corrections departments to open up their facilities to multiple phone and video contractors, giving inmates and their families choices over which providers to use.

Sanders has already nudged the Democratic field to the left on economic issues like a $15 minimum wage. Maybe prison justice is next.

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Sanders Wants to Make It Cheaper for Families to Visit Inmates

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