Author Archives: Onopriyll7

The most accurate picture of the Dakota Access showdown might be on social media.

by Onopriyll7 Posted on October 28, 2016

The New York State Supreme Court is requiring the oil giant and its accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers to turn over documents subpoenaed by state Attorney General Eric Schneiderman. He’s conducting a fraud investigation into the company, spurred by a report from InsideClimate News last year that revealed Exxon knew fossil fuel burning was heating up the atmosphere back in the 1970s and deliberately misled the public about it.

Earlier this month, Exxon attempted to halt the investigation by suing Schneiderman, as well as Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey, and arguing that their investigations are politically motivated.

Exxon has also been arguing, under a Texas statute, that documents held by PricewaterhouseCoopers are privileged. But yesterday, the New York court ruled against the company on that point. The court, as the Washington Post reports, determined that New York law, not Texas law, governs the dispute, and ordered the company to comply with Schneiderman’s subpoena.

Schneiderman was pleased with the ruling, of course. He said he looks forward to “moving full-steam ahead with our fraud investigation” and called on Exxon to “cooperate with, rather than resist,” the probe.

ExxonMobil has no such intention. The company said it will appeal the ruling.

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The most accurate picture of the Dakota Access showdown might be on social media.

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The Top 5 Moments From the Republican Debate

by Onopriyll7 Posted on February 14, 2016

Mother Jones

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A week before the crucial GOP primary in South Carolina, the Republican presidential candidates met for another debate Saturday night. Gone were Gov. Chris Christie and Carly Fiorina, who each dropped out following the New Hampshire contest. The debate, hosted by CBS, began with a moment of silence to mark the death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. Then the candidates, in a series of fiery exchanges, returned to the familiar conflicts that have dominated their previous encounters.

Here are the highlights:

Ted Cruz gets his facts wrong…and the crowd boos the moderator for correcting him.

At the start of the debate, moderator John Dickerson, the Face the Nation host, asked each candidate if he thought President Barack Obama should name a replacement for Justice Scalia during his final year in office. Predictably, several of the candidates pushed the new conservative meme: the GOP-controlled Senate should block Obama from appointing a successor to Scalia. “We have 80 years of precedent of not confirming Supreme Court justices in an election year,” Ted Cruz claimed. Not so, said Dickerson, pointing to Justice Anthony Kennedy, who was confirmed in February 1988. Cruz tried to argue that Kennedy got his seat in 1987—which was when he was nominated. But when Dickerson tried to make sure viewers were aware of the facts, the South Carolina crowd booed.

Donald Trump invokes Iraq War and 9/11 to attack Jeb Bush.

In 2008, Donald Trump said that George W. Bush should have been impeached over the Iraq War. When Dickerson asked Trump if he still holds this view, an inflamed Trump called the Iraq War “a big fat mistake” that cost the US trillions of dollars and thousands of lives.

A heated exchange followed: Jeb Bush fired back at Trump, calling out the business mogul for his continued attacks on the Bush family. “While Donald Trump was building a reality TV show, my brother was building a security apparatus to keep us safe,” Bush said. The back-and-forth grew hotter when Trump interrupted Bush and declared that the Twin Towers came down when George Bush was president.

Rubio disagreed, asserting that September 11 was Bill Clinton’s fault because Clinton failed to kill Osama Bin Laden in the 1990s. Rubio added, “I thank God that it was Bush in the White House on 9/11 and not Al Gore.” In response, Trump again invoked the 9/11 attack: “I lost hundreds of friends, the World Trade Center came down during the reign of George Bush.” He was met by a roar of boos from the audience.

Ted Cruz gets booed over immigration.

It wouldn’t be a GOP debate without a fight between Cruz and Rubio over immigration. But this tussle came with the added twist of a debate crowd that turned on Cruz, booing him when he attacked Rubio’s support for immigration reform. And when Cruz accused Rubio of once supporting amnesty during an appearance on Univision, Rubio fired back: “I don’t know how he knows what I said on Univision, because he doesn’t speak Spanish.” Cruz immediately shot back at Rubio in rapid, but grammatically incorrect, Spanish.

Donald Trump calls Ted Cruz the biggest liar.

When Trump said he considers himself “a common-sense conservative,” Cruz protested. Cruz contended that the billionaire has been “very, very liberal” throughout his career, though also “an amazing entertainer.” Trump then accused Cruz of putting out robocalls criticizing Trump. He said that Cruz was a “nasty guy” who “will say anything.” Trump continued, “You are the single biggest liar.”

A few minutes later, while Cruz was trying to respond to another attack from Trump (regarding Cruz’s support for the confirmation of Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts), Trump began shouting over Cruz: “Why do you lie? Why do you lie?”

“Donald, adults learn not to interrupt each other,” Cruz responded. “Yeah, yeah, I know, you’re an adult,” Trump replied.

Trump says Planned Parenthood does “wonderful things” for women’s health, other than abortion.

Cruz accused Trump of supporting taxpayer funding for Planned Parenthood, hitting Trump for having said, “Planned Parenthood does wonderful things and we should not defund it.” Trump responded by saying that he does believe the organization does “wonderful things” having to do with women’s health “but not when it comes to abortion.” Cruz used Trump’s answer to again accuse the tycoon of being a liberal and claimed that Trump would appoint progressive judges to the Supreme Court.

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The Top 5 Moments From the Republican Debate

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"How Often We’re Blind to Our Own Talent": RIP Joan Mondale, Arts Champion

by Onopriyll7 Posted on February 4, 2014

Mother Jones

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Joan Mondale, author and former Second Lady, died on Monday in Minneapolis at the age of 83. During the late 1970s, when her husband Walter Mondale was vice-president, she became famous for being one of the fiercest advocates of the arts on the national political scene. She was an avid potter and patron, earning herself the nickname “Joan of Art.” For instance, she worked with the Department of Transportation to transform railroad stations into art galleries and raised money for Democratic candidates by auctioning works of art. As honorary chairwoman of the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities, she was President Carter’s de facto arts adviser.

“Not since Jacqueline Kennedy has fine arts had an ally so close to the White House,” the Sarasota Herald-Tribune wrote in 1977.

Here’s Mondale (via the Christian Science Monitor in 1977) discussing the importance of art in American life, often in the frame of politics both local and national:

What I feel that I can do is help people become aware of how pervasive and extensive the arts are, how they affect each one of us in our daily lives—what kind of builds we live in, what kind of clothes we wear, what we see with our eyes. We are often blind to the beautiful things around us.

What I’m mostly concerned about is how often we’re blind to our own talent. I think that within each human being there is a creative spirit, and some of us have been fortunate enough to have good teachers and parents who’ve brought this out and encouraged it, but others haven’t.

“Both politics and art seek to tell us about the good and the bad around us,” Mondale stressed. “The artist often dramatizes the same mood for change and improvement for which the politician is seeking answers.”

Here’s a photo of Mondale playing drums after a press conference at the National Museum of African Art in Washington, DC, in 1978:

Richard K. Hofmeister/Smithsonian Institution (via Wikimedia Commons)

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"How Often We’re Blind to Our Own Talent": RIP Joan Mondale, Arts Champion

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Dems Say Boehner Blocking Farm Bill, Wants More Food Stamp Cuts

by Onopriyll7 Posted on November 27, 2013

Mother Jones

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Over the past month, the House and Senate have been working to come up with a compromise farm bill—the five-year piece of legislation that funds agriculture and nutrition programs. The main sticking point is the level of cuts to the food stamp program. House Republicans want to cut $40 billion from the program, while the Senate wants to trim $4 billion. Last week, the talks fell apart, and the two sides are fighting over why.

A Democratic aide tells Mother Jones that House Speaker John Boehner shot down several informal compromise farm bill proposals because the food stamps cuts were not deep enough. Boehner’s spokesman denies this.

The Democratic aide says the joint House-Senate panel that is trying to work out a deal presented Boehner with a few proposals that contained food stamps levels close to what the Senate wants. Even though Rep. Frank Lucas (R-Okla.)—the chairman of the House agriculture committee and a top member of the compromise panel—was willing to give a lot of ground to the Senate on food stamps, he says, Boehner rejected the proposals. “Boehner is playing spoiler,” he adds. “That’s why negotiations fell apart.”

Another source familiar with the negotiations echoes the Dem aide’s claim, saying that the House leadership has Lucas on a tight leash. Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), who is on the compromise committee, told Congressional Quarterly the same thing last week. “I’m hearing that the speaker still keeps inserting his people into the process,” and that House members on the farm bill compromise panel “have to go and check with the speaker’s people who say they want this and this and this. I hear that’s one of our major problems.”

But a spokesman for Boehner says the assertion that Boehner shot down the food stamps proposals “is absurd.” He adds that “the Speaker has full confidence” in Lucas and the rest of the House GOP team that is working out a compromise farm bill. On Friday, Lucas said negotiations stalled because of differences over the crop subsidy provisions in the legislation.

If Boehner did reject the compromise committee’s food-stamp proposals, he adhered to something called the Hastert rule—an informal measure used to limit the power of the minority—which says that a “majority of the majority” party must support a bill before it is brought up for a vote. It was first used by former House speaker Dennis Hastert in the mid-90s.

Boehner may not use the Hastert rule on the farm bill, but time is running out to reach an agreement. The two sides were supposed to have a final compromise bill on the House floor by December 13. A Senate agriculture committee aide says that negotiations are technically still ongoing, but the deadline may be pushed into next year. The farm bill is already more than a year behind schedule.

If fruitless negotiations end up delaying a farm bill for another year, Democrats may be the unlikley winners. Some Dems have been considering voting against any compromise farm bill in order to kill the bill. If that happens, food stamps would continue to be funded at current levels.

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Dems Say Boehner Blocking Farm Bill, Wants More Food Stamp Cuts

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The Case For Layaway

by Onopriyll7 Posted on October 24, 2013

Mother Jones

Alex Tabarrok writes today that layaway plans don’t make sense. He’s right. As a matter of pure economics, you’ll almost certainly be better off saving the money, earning interest on it, and then using it to buy the stuff you want after you’ve saved enough. So why do people do it?

The answer isn’t really that complicated. Erik Loomis explains:

Like so many ultimately well-meaning articles about the poor I read on the internet, it’s seems to me that Tabarrok doesn’t understand layaway because he’s never been poor (although I don’t actually know). Let’s imagine a situation for layaway. You are 11 years old. It’s July. Your family doesn’t have much money. Getting new school clothes is a big deal because you don’t get very many new clothes in a year and you want to wear them on the first day of school. Your parents are really worried about this. They want to buy you the new clothes. They also know that they will have a really hard time actually saving the money to purchase them all at once. So they put them on layaway at the Target or Walmart and make the payments, hoping to have them all paid off before school starts.

How would I come up with this scenario? Because I was that 10 or 11 year old and my parents used layaway to get me those new clothes I wanted….In a so-called rational economic world, layaway might not make sense. In the real world that actually people live and operate in it makes a ton of sense, even if it is bad economics. People can’t save money easily. It’s actually a more secure investment to pay some of it up front, which commits the individual to buying the product and makes acquiring it probable, but also gives the buyer some leeway if disaster strikes.

I’ve never been poor, but I dealt with plenty of layaway customers back when I ran a Radio Shack store in the early 80s. My customers probably weren’t all that poor either, but neither were they especially well off, and they understood themselves well enough to realize that they needed some kind of prod to stick to a savings plan. Layaway provided it. Economically it didn’t make sense, but on a purely human level it made a ton of sense.

It’s also worth noting that the economic case against layaway is thinner than it seems. Suppose you put a $300 item on layaway for four months. What’s the opportunity cost? Roughly speaking, it’s the interest you could have earned on that money, which for most of us is around 2 percent or less these days.1 That’s a grand total of one dollar over the course of four months. Frankly, if layaway really does provide a psychological prod to make the payments, it’s not a bad deal at all.

1For some low-income families who don’t have enough money to even qualify for a no-fee savings account, it might actually be more like zero percent in practice.

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The Case For Layaway

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