Author Archives: RNZEarnest

Is Donald Trump Really Worth Some Tax Cuts?

by RNZEarnest Posted on March 6, 2017

Mother Jones

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Our story so far: President Trump got good reviews for his speech to Congress on Tuesday, and that made him happy. Then it all blew up thanks to revelations the next day that Attorney General Jeff Sessions had met twice with the Russian ambassador during the campaign. On Friday, Sessions recused himself from the investigation of ties between Trump and Russia, and Trump had a temper tantrum. He had finally been presidential, and now it was all down the drain. Everyone was talking about Russia again.

The next morning, still in a lather, he went to his usual playbook: hit back. But he needed something big, so he decided to accuse President Obama of wiretapping him. This took everyone by surprise, including his own staff. But it sort of worked: nobody cares all that much about Sessions anymore.

So then: did Obama order a wiretap on Trump Tower? Needless to say, Obama’s spokesman says no. How about the CIA? Here is Obama’s Director of National Intelligence on Meet the Press this morning:

CHUCK TODD: Let me start with the President’s tweets yesterday, this idea that maybe President Obama ordered an illegal wiretap of his offices. If something like that happened, would this be something you would be aware of?

JAMES CLAPPER: ….I can’t speak officially anymore. But I will say that, for the part of the national security apparatus that I oversaw as DNI, there was no such wiretap activity mounted against the president elect at the time, or as a candidate, or against his campaign. I can’t speak for other Title Three authorized entities in the government or a state or local entity.

CHUCK TODD: Yeah, I was just going to say, if the F.B.I., for instance, had a FISA court order of some sort for a surveillance, would that be information you would know or not know?

JAMES CLAPPER: ….I would know that.

CHUCK TODD: If there was a FISA court order on something like this…

JAMES CLAPPER: Something like this, absolutely.

CHUCK TODD: And at this point, you can’t confirm or deny whether that exists?

JAMES CLAPPER: I can deny it.

CHUCK TODD: There is no FISA court order?

JAMES CLAPPER: Not to know my knowledge.

CHUCK TODD: Of anything at Trump Tower?

JAMES CLAPPER: No.

OK, but does the FBI agree? Here’s the New York Times:

The F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, asked the Justice Department this weekend to publicly reject President Trump’s assertion that President Barack Obama ordered the tapping of Mr. Trump’s phones, senior American officials said on Sunday….Mr. Comey’s request is a remarkable rebuke of a sitting president, putting the nation’s top law enforcement official in the position of questioning Mr. Trump’s truthfulness.

….It is not clear why Mr. Comey did not issue the statement himself. He is the most senior law enforcement official who was kept on the job as the Obama administration gave way to the Trump administration. And while the Justice Department applies for intelligence-gathering warrants, the F.B.I. keeps its own set of records and is in position to know whether Mr. Trump’s claims are true. While intelligence officials do not normally discuss the existence or nonexistence of surveillance warrants, no law prevents Mr. Comey from issuing the statement.

Assuming Clapper and Comey are telling the truth, we can say that (a) there was no FISA warrant and (b) President Obama didn’t order Trump’s phone to be tapped. That still leaves open the possibility that the FBI got an ordinary wiretap warrant as part of a criminal investigation, which neither Obama nor Clapper would know about.

This whole thing is completely, batshit crazy. Everyone knows that Trump is just making stuff up: He saw an article in Breitbart and decided to throw some chum in the water. The White House has even confirmed this. But the press has to report it anyway because the president said it, and Republicans in Congress will allow the craziness to continue because they don’t care. They just want to repeal Obamacare and get their tax cut passed. So Trump can do anything he wants and get endless publicity for it, with no pushback except from Democrats. And nobody cares what Democrats say.

The Trump presidency gets loonier by the day. It’s like one of those TV shows where they have to keep upping the ante to keep viewers interested. Trump started his presidency with his childish temper tantrum about crowds at his inauguration, but that seems like small beer now. To get any attention these days, he needs way more. So how about a childish temper tantrum that accuses the former president of ordering his phone tapped?

How far can this go? I’m stumped. Every time Trump is in a bad mood, something like this happens. And since Trump is in a bad mood whenever he isn’t being universally praised, this stuff is going to keep happening forever. Are tax cuts and Obamacare really worth so much to Republicans that they’re OK with having this ignorant, short-tempered child in the White House for the next four years? I mean, maybe nothing serious will happen during that time, and we’ll be more-or-less OK. But what about the chance that something serious does happen and Trump does some serious damage to the United States or to the world?

Is it really worth it taking that chance? Just for some tax cuts?

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Is Donald Trump Really Worth Some Tax Cuts?

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Does Anyone Know a Doctor? Because Ben Carson’s Campaign Is Hemorrhaging Supporters.

by RNZEarnest Posted on January 11, 2016

Mother Jones

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All five paid staffers in the New Hampshire office of a pro-Ben Carson super-PAC have quit their jobs to volunteer for rival presidential candidate Ted Cruz, a state television station reported Monday.

“We think it is important that our party…get behind a single conservative who can win, and we strongly believe that candidate is Ted Cruz,” former super-PAC staffer Jerry Sickles told station WMUR. He added that his colleagues had been frustrated by the fact that Carson spent very little time campaigning in New Hampshire. Oddly, Carson appeared in Staten Island earlier this month.

The five former staffers had worked at the 2016 Committee, a super-PAC founded in 2013 to convince the retired neurosurgeon to run for president. Their decision to leave the Carson super-PAC comes less than two weeks after three of Carson’s highest-ranking staffers, among them campaign manager Barry Bennett, stepped down from the campaign. Carson said in a statement that he had initiated the shake-up, but Bennett told the Hill that he left over frustration with the direction the campaign had taken.

The former head of the 2016 Committee, Sam Pimm, on Monday told Politico that he too is now backing Cruz. When asked if the recent shake-ups in Carson’s campaign had anything to do with his decision, he replied, “Yes.”

Carson’s presidential run has sputtered after an unexpected surge of popularity that saw him briefly polling at the head of the pack in early November. On Monday he trailed behind Donald Trump, Cruz, and Marco Rubio, and he polled at 9.5 percent, according to the RealClearPolitics poll average.

The former Carson supporters’ revolt comes at a good time for Cruz, who is planning an exhaustive tour of New Hampshire beginning January 17. The New Hampshire primary will be on Tuesday, February 9.

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Does Anyone Know a Doctor? Because Ben Carson’s Campaign Is Hemorrhaging Supporters.

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Pre-K Can Make You Healthier and More Talkative

by RNZEarnest Posted on March 28, 2014

Mother Jones

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I’m a fan of pre-K and early childhood interventions in general. For the most part, this isn’t because these programs boost IQ or increase academic performance. They may do a bit of that, but the evidence so far suggests that direct academic effects are modest. Rather, the benefits are mostly indirect: fewer behavioral problems; less teenage drug use; better impulse control; lower arrest rates; and so forth. Today, Aaron Carroll suggests yet another benefit: these programs produce healthier adults. That’s the conclusion of a long-term follow-up in the Carolina Abecedarian Project (ABC):

Males who were randomized to the ABC program had significantly lower blood pressure (systolic 143 vs 126). That’s a massive difference. They had significantly lower levels of hypertension. They had lower levels of metabolic syndrome and lower Framingham risk scores. To get a sense of the magnitude of the difference, one in 4 males in the control group had metabolic syndrome; none in the ABC group did. Women also had improvements, although not as dramatic.

Males in the intervention group were significantly more likely to have health insurance at age 30, and to have bought it. They were more likely to get care when they were sick at age 30, too. They were at lower risk for overweight throughout their childhood. Women in the intervention group were less likely to start drinking alcohol before age 17. They were more likely to be active and to eat more healthily.

The cost of this program was about $16,000 per child in 2010 dollars.

This isn’t a smoking gun. The sample size is small and the program was run a long time ago. But as Carroll says, that’s inevitable in long-term longitudinal studies: “Anytime you do a follow-up of 30+ years, by definition the intervention will be old by the time you get results. There’s no other way to do it. It’s such a silly attack.”

Along similar lines, Bob Somerby lavishes rare praise on a New York Times report by Motoko Rich about a program in Providence, RI, that intervenes with kids even before pre-K. The goal is a simple one. Researchers just want to get parents to talk to their children:

Recent research shows that brain development is buoyed by continuous interaction with parents and caregivers from birth, and that even before age 2, the children of the wealthy know more words than do those of the poor….Educators say that many parents, especially among the poor and immigrants, do not know that talking, as well as reading, singing and playing with their young children, is important. “I’ve had young moms say, ‘I didn’t know I was supposed to talk to my baby until they could say words and talk to me,’ ” said Susan Landry, director of the Children’s Learning Institute at the University of Texas in Houston, which has developed a home visiting program similar to the one here in Providence.

….As in Providence, several groups around the country — some of longstanding tenure — are building home visiting programs and workshops to help parents learn not only that they should talk, but how to do so.

“Every parent can talk,” said Dr. Dana Suskind, a pediatric surgeon at the University of Chicago who founded the Thirty Million Words Initiative, which oversees home visiting programs and public information campaigns. “It’s the most empowering thing,” said Dr. Suskind, who is securing funding for a randomized trial of a home-based curriculum intended to teach parents how they should talk with their children and why.

One of the most frustrating things about the education gap between rich and poor is that it shows up so early, and vocabulary appears to be one of the reasons. Even by the time they’re two or three, children of middle-class parents have vocabularies that are substantially larger than those of poor children. Even if poor kids get into a good-quality pre-K program, they’re behind from the beginning and they never catch up.

And plonking kids in front of the TV doesn’t do the trick. Vocabulary isn’t built by listening, but by interacting. It requires parents who talk to their children continuously. It barely even matters what they’re talking about.

The goal of programs like the one in Providence is to make sure that low-income parents know this. They may not have the time or money to do all the things for their kids that better-off parents can do, but they can talk to them. Doing that on a regular basis, starting very early in life, may turn out to be a critical component of any pre-K intervention program. Hopefully Suskind’s RCT will get funded and we’ll have firmer knowledge about this in the future.

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Pre-K Can Make You Healthier and More Talkative

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