Category Archives: Everyone

Conservatives Aren’t Yet Sure How to React to the CBO Health Care Report

by Evelyne61U Posted on March 14, 2017

Mother Jones

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What do people think about the new CBO report on RepubliCare? I don’t mean us bleeding heart liberals. Naturally we think it’s great since it confirms that the Republican bill will decimate health care in America. But what do conservatives think?

HHS Secretary Tom Price says the CBO report is ridiculous. It “defies logic,” he says:

But over on Capitol Hill, Paul Ryan says he finds the CBO’s report “encouraging.” It exceeded his expectations and “gives us even more room to work on good, fine-tuning finishing touches.” Hoo boy. Even Fox News isn’t buying this:

This is some serious happy talk. Ryan must be taking lessons from Trump. In a statement, Ryan says the report confirms that the Republican bill will “lower premiums and improve access to quality, affordable care”—which is, um, a pretty creative reading of the report. More to the point, Ryan is thrilled that the CBO confirms that the bill will provide “massive tax relief.” This is true—though the tax relief is all for the rich—and it’s telling that Ryan doesn’t need to provide any spin on this point.

But what about all those people who will lose coverage? Ryan says, “I recognize and appreciate concerns about making sure people have access to coverage.” He doesn’t say he plans to do anything about this, but at least he appreciates the concerns. You know who else appreciates those concerns? Breitbart News:

The Drudge Report is pretty much ignoring the whole thing for the moment, as if they’re waiting for some kind of conservative consensus to form before they wade in. National Review is pretty silent too, though Dan McLaughlin writes that “The projections of who will and won’t be insured don’t actually mean anything.” The Weekly Standard’s Chris Deaton has a carefully neutral post up that says millions of Americans “would opt out of purchasing coverage once the federal government stops penalizing them for doing so.” That’s not quite what CBO says, though I admit you have to read the report carefully to recognize this.1

Basically, no one outside of Congress or the White House really wants to defend the Republican bill. There are a few half-hearted gibes at the CBO, but nothing more. I’ll be curious to see if tribal defenses kick in more strongly by tomorrow, once everyone has had a chance to suffer through all the liberal jeers and taunts.

1CBO says that subsidies after 2020 would be “significantly smaller” than they are now and that “some people would forgo insurance in response to higher premiums.” However, they are oddly cagey about exactly how big an effect this would have compared to the elimination of the individual and corporate mandates. I’m not sure what the reason for this is.

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Conservatives Aren’t Yet Sure How to React to the CBO Health Care Report

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Republicans Unveil Their Health Care Plan. It’s a Bloodbath.

by ElizabethDeboer Posted on March 7, 2017

Mother Jones

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Republicans have finally released their shiny new health care plan. It’s pretty much the same as the discussion draft that leaked a couple of weeks ago, and includes the following basic features:

Subsidies (in the form of advanceable tax credits) are age-based, starting at $2,000 for young people and going up to $4,000 for older folks.
The subsidies begin to phase out above incomes of $75,000 ($150,000 for households). This will affect about 10 percent of the population and probably reduces the cost of the bill by about 5 percent.
Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion is frozen in 2020 and then gradually phased out.
The bill allocates about $10 billion per year for high-risk pools run by states. This is far too little to work effectively.
The tax meant to pay for everything was removed.
Insurers are required to cover everyone who applies, even if they have pre-existing conditions. However, if you have a coverage gap longer than two months, insurers can impose a premium surcharge of 30 percent for one year. This “continuous coverage” provision is designed to motivate people to buy insurance, since the bill repeals the individual mandate.
The funding formula for Medicaid is changed to a “per-capita allotment,” which is a fancy way of saying it gets cut.
All the Obamacare taxes on the rich are repealed.

Oh, and the bill includes a one-year ban on funding for Planned Parenthood. Conservatives love this, but it’s also likely to generate some sure no votes in the Senate. Remember that Republicans can only afford two defections in the Senate. Any more than that and their bill fails.

Needless to say, there’s not yet an analysis from the Congressional Budget Office about how much the GOP plan will cost or how many people it will cover. It’s safe to say that on the cost side, it will be a lot cheaper than Obamacare. In fact, since the tax credits are so stingy, it’s likely that very few people in the bottom third of the income spectrum will use them. They leave insurance too expensive for most poor people to afford.

Because of this, my horseback guess is that the Republican plan will be used by about 3 million people, compared to 10 million for Obamacare. The Medicaid expansion will be unchanged for a while, continuing to cover about 10 million people. Total cost for subsidies + high-risk pools + Medicaid expansion will run about $25 billion per year, compared to $100 billion for Obamacare.

Three million is far too small a pool for any kind of successful program, and the pre-existing conditions clause ensures that the pool will be not just small, but very, very heavily weighted toward the very sick. It’s a disaster for insurance companies, who will almost surely refuse to participate.

That’s my guess, anyway. It’s a bloodbath. More detailed analysis from think tankers will be available soon, and the CBO will weigh in eventually too. It’s not going to be pretty.

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Republicans Unveil Their Health Care Plan. It’s a Bloodbath.

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Immigration and Crime: A Mini Data Dive

by ThorsteDailey Posted on March 6, 2017

Mother Jones

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This post is longish and doesn’t really have much payoff at the end. It’s just something that turned into a bit of snark hunt, so I figured I’d document it. You have been warned.

It starts with a column by Mona Chalabi, the Guardian’s “data editor,” which claims to outline her research on the question of whether illegal immigrants commit more crimes than native-born Americans. It’s faintly ridiculous and I’m a little annoyed by it, but then I come to this:

I find a study by Bianca E Bersani. I look her up — she’s a associate professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Using numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, her study finds that about 17% of all first-generation immigrants who are age 16 have committed a crime in the past 12 months….But wait. Is that number high or low? I decide to find out how often native-born people in the US commit crimes. Luckily, her study has that too. It’s higher: about 25% of all native-born people in the US who are 16 have committed a crime in the past 12 months.

That seems kind of high, doesn’t it? Then again, “committed a crime” could encompass things like smoking a joint or stealing a box of paper clips from school, so who knows? The data comes from a paper called “A Game of Catch-Up? The Offending Experience of Second-Generation Immigrants,” so I check it out. But there’s nothing there. The paper has nothing whatsoever to say about either 16-year-olds or first-generation immigrants. What’s going on? Here’s the chart Chalabi presents:

This is a little odd. It suggests that 25 percent of 16-year-olds have committed a crime in the past year, but only 20% of 17-year-olds. That doesn’t jibe with what I know about crime rates. And the source is Pew Research. So let’s go look at the Pew article. It’s a lengthy description of Bersani’s article, and it includes this chart:

This is odd again. It’s the same chart, all right, and the author spends a lot of time describing “A Game of Catch-Up?” But as I mentioned above, that article contains nothing like this at all. What’s more, it appeared in Crime and Delinquency, but the chart is sourced to Justice Quarterly.

So now it’s off to Justice Quarterly. It turns out that everyone is describing the wrong article. I wonder if any of them actually read it? The correct article is “An Examination of First and Second Generation Immigrant Offending Trajectories,” also by Bianca Bersani. Fine. What does that article say? Here is Bersani’s chart, colorized for your viewing enjoyment:

It appears that everyone has been copying the chart properly. For what it’s worth, though, I’d make a few comments:

This data is for all immigrants. Donald Trump’s focus is solely on illegal immigrant crime.

Bersani’s data is from 1997-2005. That’s pretty old. Crime and arrest rates of juveniles have gone down more than 50 percent since then, and the population of illegal immigrants has gone up more than 50 percent since then. I don’t know if that changes the relative values in this chart, but it would certainly change the absolute values.

The data comes from the 1997 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, which uses a very large oversample of Hispanic and black youth. Bersani appears to be using the full sample, and since Hispanic and black adolescents commit crimes at higher rates than whites, it means the numbers for native-born Americans are exaggerated. At a guess, the real figures are 2-3 percentage points lower.

The NLSY97 data includes six types of crime that were included in Bersani’s study: (1) damaging property, (2 and 3) stealing less or more than $50, (4) other property crimes, (5) assault/serious fighting, and (6) selling drugs. By far the biggest contributors were property damage and petty theft, with fighting in third place and the others far behind. Auto theft and using a gun to steal (not included in Bersani’s study) were minuscule:
Since the vast majority of the crimes in this study are minor—and we can assume that serious violent crime is even less prevalent—it’s not clear how much this tells us. I don’t think anyone cares much whether immigrant teenagers steal six packs of beer at a greater rate than native-born Americans. We mainly care about more serious violent crimes: robbery, rape, murder, and aggravated assault. Those aren’t addressed at all.

I’d add that Bersani didn’t just add up all the crimes committed by various groups. Her methodology is pretty impenetrable to anyone who’s not an expert:

I use group-based trajectory modeling…identifies clusters of individuals who display similar behavioral trajectories over a period of time…Nagin and Land’s (1993) semiparametric group-based modeling approach…estimated using a zero-inflated Poisson form of a group-based trajectory model:

where ln(kjit) is the natural logarithm of the number of total crimes for persons i in group j at each age t. The equation specified above follows a quadratic function of age (age and age2)….

I have no idea what this means or whether it’s appropriate, but I’m a little skeptical about a model that suggests that 17- and 18-year-olds commit crimes at lower rates than 16-year-olds. Most crime data I’ve seen shows the opposite. Then again, most crime data doesn’t include extremely minor crimes like shoplifting and property destruction. It’s possible that adolescents age out of that stuff pretty early.

Long story short, I wouldn’t draw too many conclusions from this study. The data is old; it’s not limited to illegal immigrants; it looks only at adolescents; the crimes under consideration are pretty minor; and the methodology is probably OK, but who knows? Put it all together, and I’d say it doesn’t tell us too much one way or the other about the serious crime rate of illegal immigrants as a whole.

I have yet to see a study that persuasively suggests a higher crime rate for immigrants than for anyone else. Let’s face it: if there’s anything we native-born Americans excel at, it’s crime. That said, the Guardian’s data editor should have known better. There are tons of studies out there that try to estimate the relative crime rates of native-born Americans compared to undocumented immigrants, and cherry picking this particular one makes no sense. It does provide a rough data point suggesting that crime rates of immigrants aren’t any different from the rest of the population, but it’s nowhere near the best study out there. Citing this one and calling it a day is a real disservice.

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Immigration and Crime: A Mini Data Dive

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Proposed NOAA cuts would make predicting extreme weather even harder.

by FreemanUZNB Posted on March 6, 2017

The Trump administration reportedly plans to make deep cuts to the budget of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, a key provider of information about the climate and weather.

All told, the proposed cuts amount to a full 17 percent of the agency’s budget, according to various reports. But the deepest would slash money for NOAA’s National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service, which operates a squad of satellites monitoring the environment. These satellites tell scientists about climate variability, weather, oceans, and much else.

Roughly 90 percent of weather data in the United States comes from NOAA. So the cuts would stymie efforts by scientists and meteorologists to measure and predict not just everyday weather patterns, but also tornadoes, hurricanes, and severe thunderstorms.

Predicting hurricanes is already challenging enough, but it’s increasingly important as climate change adds fuel to big storms.

The administration would also scrap federal money for NOAA’s Sea Grant, a program that supports university research to assess the vitality of coastlines and their ecosystems.

Over the weekend, scientists and climate realists took to Twitter to vent their outrage.

Apart from accurate climate data, there’s another thing we’ll certainly miss if satellites wind up on the chopping block:

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Proposed NOAA cuts would make predicting extreme weather even harder.

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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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Just One Small Problem With This Major Report on GMO Safety

by ChangIPKkidtt Posted on March 5, 2017

Mother Jones

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About a year ago, the prestigious National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine produced a 584-page report assessing the health, environmental, and agronomic impact of genetically modified crops. The conclusion: GMOs have so far proved to be neither a disaster nor a triumph. They haven’t been shown to pose a threat to human health, as some critics have argued they do; but they also haven’t discernibly raised crop yields, as some boosters insist they have.

Not surprisingly, the report did little to “end the highly polarized dispute over biotech crops,” concluded New York Times reporter Andrew Martin in an article just after the report’s release. He added that both sides of the debate “pointed approvingly to findings that buttressed their viewpoint and criticized those that did not.”

And a new paper, published in the peer-reviewed journal PLOS-One, ups the temperature of that long-simmering debate. The authors—Sheldon Krimsky, a professor in the Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts, and Tim Schwab, a researcher at Food & Water Watch—found that 6 of the 20 scientists who contribute to NASEM’s GMO report had ties to the ag-biotech industry that weren’t disclosed in the paper. Five of them “had patents or industry research funding” while they served on the committee, and another one “reported receiving industry research funding” a few years before.

As Krimsky and Schwab note, the NASEM paper states that the GMO assessment, launched only after face-to-face conversations, “determined that no one with an avoidable conflict of interest is serving on the committee.”

They also uncovered another undisclosed potential conflict: The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, a nonprofit institution, has had substantial funding from the very companies whose products were assessed in the report: “The organization’s annual financial reports do not give exact figures but note that three leading agricultural biotechnology companies (Monsanto, DuPont, and Dow) have given up to $5 million dollars each to the NASEM.” The National Academies even hosted a 2015 workshop on communicating the science of GMO crops to the public, funded in part by Monsanto and DuPont.

The PLOS-One findings do not invalidate the findings of the GMO assessment, of course. Having a financial interest in an industry does not automatically make a scientist incapable of commenting honestly on that industry’s products. Fred Gould, professor of entomology at North Carolina State University and the chair of the committee that wrote the report, defended it in an email. “The one implicit rule on our committee was that if you wanted something to go into the report, you had to back it up with evidence that was acceptable to everyone on the committee,” he wrote. “No one person could steer the committee with an opinion. I welcome people to scrutinize the accuracy of our report.” (Gould was not one of the six committee members found by the PlOS authors to have industry ties.)

In a statement, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine denied that members of the committee violated conflict-of-interest disclosure norms. NASEM maintains a “stringent, well-defined, and transparent conflict-of-interest policy, with which all members of this study committee complied,” the statement reads. “It is unfair and disingenuous for the authors of the PLOS article to apply their own perception of conflict of interest to our committee in place of our tested and trusted conflict-of-interest policies.”

However, NASEM’s published policy on the topic mentions “patents, copyrights, and other intellectual property” and “research funding and other forms of research support” as potential conflicts of interest. William Kearney, deputy executive director and director of media relations for NASEM, said the group sees such relationships as conflicts only when they’re worth at least $10,000. By NASEM’s reckoning, none of the committee members violated the group’s disclosure policy.

All of that said, the undisclosed relationships uncovered by Krimsky and Schwab raise questions about the NASEM’s ability to fulfill its mission of providing “nonpartisan, objective guidance for decision makers on pressing issues.” And as Krimsky and Schwab also note, the National Academies’ problem with conflicts of interest is long-standing. Back in 2006, the Center for Science in the Public Interest issued a report finding that nearly a fifth of the scientists appointed to one of the group’s panels over a three-year period had “direct financial ties to companies or industry groups with a direct stake in the outcome of that study.”

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Just One Small Problem With This Major Report on GMO Safety

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The Making of Rock and Roll’s First Trans Superstar

by LidaGilruth4397 Posted on March 5, 2017

Mother Jones

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Governors Ball, New York City, June 2016. Jordan Uhl/Flickr Creative Commons

Laura Jane Grace, the 36-year-old frontwoman of the punk band Against Me!, is no longer surprised by the secrets her fans reveal to her. Whether it’s the transgender girls at shows confiding that they had planned to kill themselves until they discovered her music, or the men who resent her for “deceiving” them when she came out in 2012, one of the strangest parts of life as rock and roll’s first trans superstar—the band just kicked off a national tour with Green Day—is the way Grace has become not just a role model but a therapist to many of the thousands of people who buy her albums.

Sometimes she’s a target. “I think you’re an amazing person,” one grammatically challenged man wrote to her on Facebook this past July:

But you’re sending a horrible message to younger generations…I wanted to do porn my whole life, but my dick wasn’t big enough. You can’t run from who you are. You can change your physical appearance. But when you’re dead the autopsy report wont lie. You can call me an asshole, say I don’t get it. I’ve come…to terms with being a short white dude with an average penis-size.

Grace showed me this message on her iPhone at Kinfolk, a cafe in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, as we sipped Ethiopian coffees and chatted over the percussive drub of jazzy trip-hop. Grace has long sleeves of tattoos, waist-length auburn hair, and a wide, easy grin that spreads across her face whether she’s talking about the harassment she’s received, her discomfort about being a role model, or why she doesn’t want her mother to read her recent memoir, Tranny: Confessions of Punk Rock’s Most Infamous Anarchist Sellout, co-written with music journalist Dan Ozzi. “It’s not because I’m trans,” she says, flashing that charming grin. “My mom has been the most supportive person in the world. It’s because of all the booze and weed and drugs.”

Tranny is indeed a messy account of sex, brawls, and bad decisions, with enough cocaine in its pages to make Keith Richards blanche. But what saves these foibles from being mere rock clichés is that, as Grace tells it, for nearly half of her 36 years on Earth—15 of them as the singer of Against Me!—she’s relied on these vices to hide her gender dysphoria and her depression from the world and from herself.

Grace is hardly the most famous person to come out as trans in recent years. She joins a growing group of women including Laverne Cox, Caitlyn Jenner, and Hari Nef who have carved out a space in the American cultural imagination as trans role models. But at a time when the rights of transgender people are under attack by the Trump administration, Grace’s refusal to conform to conservative or liberal clichés about her experience has cemented her role as a uniquely complex—and sympathetic—figure.

Her willingness to detail her transition process without hedging or hiding its complications has earned her a loyal fan base among young people hungry for a hero who is tough enough to push back against right-wing antipathy but honest enough to reveal the suffering that has accompanied her journey. “I felt terrible getting up on stage—like, This is embarrassing,” Grace recalls of her first solo tour as a woman back in 2013. “Meanwhile, I was going back to my hotel room every night and trying to kill myself with Ambien and vodka.”

While navigating her gender identity has sometimes put her through hell, it has also added pathos to her art. “You want them to notice / The ragged ends of your summer dress,” Grace sings on “Transgendered Dysphoria Blues,” from her 2014 album of the same name. “You want them to see you/Like they see every other girl./They just see a faggot.”

Grace’s handling of shame and rejection in her songs is delicate, but when she talks about politics—especially Trump’s politics—she’s unforgiving. “There’s something…evil about an administration actively going out and trying to take away rights,” she told Rolling Stone recently. “There’s just something that much more fucked up about going out of your way to be like, ‘We’re taking that protection away from you.'”

Grace’s birth certificate still reads “Thomas James Gabel.” She asked her mom to mail it to her last May, after North Carolina legislators passed House Bill 2, the so-called “bathroom bill,” which also stripped the state’s workers of anti-discrimination protections. (Similar bills have been proposed in New Hampshire, Colorado, and Texas since the election.) Onstage in Durham a week later, she took out a yellow Bic lighter and torched the document, gleefully shouting, “Goodbye, gender!”

Grace grew up mostly in south Florida, the wild child of a military man and, after he left the family, an indulgent single mother who called her ill-behaved boy “Tom Tom Atom Bomb.” After her dad remarried a much younger woman, Tom Tom Atom Bomb’s antics exploded into full-grown juvenile delinquency. She would skip school and spend days alone at home wearing her mom’s clothes, sipping Kahlua, getting high or tripping, and listening to Madonna and Guns ‘N’ Roses. “When I smoked weed or dropped acid,” she says, “what seemed like a fantasy became more real.”

At the age of 13, in a modern twist on the myth of Robert Johnson and the devil at the crossroads, Grace donned her mom’s wedding dress, and while swigging Miller High Life and messing around on her guitar in her basement, she half-jokingly beckoned to Satan: “Please, please let me wake up a woman.” Satan paid no heed, but her jam sessions brought about the first iteration of Against Me!, consisting of Grace on acoustic guitar and vocals and a childhood friend, Kevin Mahon, whacking on a plastic bucket.

With protest songs that sounded like a deranged fusion of Anal Cunt and Woody Guthrie, they became an unlikely hit on the East Coast DIY punk circuit, touring relentlessly in a Ford Econoline van. But when Against Me! signed with Fat Wreck Chords, a small but profitable San Francisco indie label, punk rock purists turned on the duo for supposedly cashing in—the zine Maximum RocknRoll even urged its readers to sabotage their shows.

“People tried to take the instruments out of our hands while we were playing,” Grace writes in Tranny. “They threw stink bombs at us on stage, they poured bleach all over our merch, our van became a traveling canvas for their graffiti.” The puritanical demand for some vague sort of authenticity foreshadowed similar demands from her future transphobic fans—and Grace’s willingness to fight back. At a café venue in Tallahassee, Grace assaulted a man who’d defaced an Against Me! flyer by scribbling “sell out” over her face. As the police escorted her to jail, she saw that staffers had changed the marquis to read: “Tallahassee Punks: 1, Against Me: 0.”

When Grace came out as transgender in a 2012 Rolling Stone profile, it wasn’t just the fulfillment of her deal with the devil; it also provided a fresh opportunity to find a new fan base. “There was a very real emotional block on my side that was always there,” she recalls. Coming out “meant the ending of a lot of relationships, but as far as being in a band and being happy in a band, it worked.”

Yet coming out also brought a new set of problems. Heather Gabel, Grace’s second wife, walked out on her in 2014 because they had grown apart and she was “attracted to men, not women,” Grace told Rolling Stone. The couple’s daughter, then five, pleaded with Grace, “Will you go back to being my daddy?” Onstage, Grace felt pushed to “demonstrate some kind of physical change” to her audiences—”even though I’d been on hormones for a month.” All the pressures culminated in those late-night Ambien and vodka binges. “I found myself feeling like I went from this box, and now I’m in this box and it’s just as suffocating,” Grace tells me. “If I wanted to make a decision like plastic surgery, I should do it because I want to do it, not because I want to please someone.”

“When I look in the mirror, I still feel extreme dysphoria,” Grace adds. “Before I went to bed last night I wrote in my journal, ‘I look like a corpse.’ Not a good-looking corpse either.”

Amid Grace’s depression, in February 2016, at a show at Brooklyn’s Silent Barn, a 15-year-old trans boy named Lee walked up and handed Grace a letter. “Hello Laura,” it began, “if you’re reading this, thank you so much. I’m sorry I’m so anxious, but can you please help me tell my dad I’m not a girl?”

Standing alongside Lee—who has feathery dyed-pink bangs and thick glasses—was his father, Joe, who’d accompanied him to the show. Joe, a former police officer, had no idea his biological daughter identified as a transgender boy. After reading the note, Grace, who hadn’t spoken to her own dad in three years, turned to Joe and delivered the news. Lee stood there in awe of his hero. Joe looked stunned. “Let’s all go in for a hug,” Grace said, extending her arms.

“This culture is still foreign to me,” Joe tells me seven months later. We’re at Rough Trade Records in Brooklyn, a cavernous boutique just two blocks from the café where Grace and I had coffee. Joe and Lee are here to see Against Me! for the fifth time in the past year and a half. It’s a daytime record-release bash for Shape Shift With Me, the band’s latest. Lee has already memorized the lyrics after hearing an early release on NPR. He and Joe listened to it together that morning on the train from Poughkeepsie. “That’s all she’s been doing, listening to that album,” Joe says.

“Daaad!” Lee says, rolling his blue eyes and slapping a hand to his forehead.

“That’s all he’s been doing,” Joe corrects himself, matter-of-factly.

Lee and Joe walk together into a dank back room containing a stage, a bar housed in a shipping container (earplugs: $10), and about 100 fans—many of them young androgynous kids with septum piercings, rainbow hair, black hoodies. “I’m Dante,” one 15-year-old tells me, “but soon I’ll be Zoe. Laura Jane Grace really helped me come out as trans to my family.”

Several other tweens offer variations on the message. Onstage, an amplifier case still bears the faded stencil of Grace’s birth name: GABEL. “What the heck?” I hear another fan say. “I don’t like that.”

Then the band appears. Against Me! is a four-piece now, but for these kids it may as well be a solo act. Clad in Doc Martens, black skinny jeans, and a black sleeveless T-shirt, Grace shoulders her tutone Rickenbacker and steps into a moonbeam of pink fluorescent light. Her hair flies skyward with a head toss. “Let’s play some mid-afternoon rock and roll,” she says into the mic.

The scene is a nice reminder that, for all the attention paid to her trans status, Grace’s most important transformation is from citizen to performer. Wasn’t it on stages like this one, after all, that gender-bending rebels from David Bowie and Boy George to the New York Dolls and Jayne County paved the way for the straight world to get over its hang-ups? And might it also be on stages like this where queer and trans folks find the strength to weather whatever storms may lie ahead? “The only place I’ve ever felt comfortable,” Grace put it to me before the show, “is onstage.”

Cymbals explode, guitars squall, bass rumbles, and the room erupts into dance as Against Me! launches into its first song. Lee is up front, at Laura’s feet, mouthing along to all the lyrics. His pink bangs bounce in 4/4 time and his friend, a trans girl named Zero, hugs him. Joe looks at Lee, then up at Grace, then back to his son, and he grins proudly.

“I just want everyone to feel comfortable,” Grace tells the audience after finishing “Boyfriend,” a song on the new album. “Whatever your gender identity, your sexual orientation, whatever, I just want everyone to feel at home here.” She then breaks into her anthem, “True Trans Soul Rebel,” howling: “Yet to be born, you’re already dead/You sleep with a gun beside you in bed/You follow it through to the obvious end/Slit your veins wide open.”

The room is in a frenzy, oblivious to the darkness of her message, or perhaps buoyed by its unabashed expression. And that’s when the power, and the poignancy, of Grace’s talent hits me: She’s uniquely adept at making others feel good about who they are, and yet she hasn’t figured out how to do the same for herself.

“Who’s gonna take you home tonight?” Grace sings finally, her auburn hair obscuring that gentle grin before she walks off the stage and into the New York City afternoon. “Who’s gonna take you home?”

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The Making of Rock and Roll’s First Trans Superstar

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Stop Being Shocked That Teen Girls Give a Shit About Politics

by DNDHeikewgp Posted on March 5, 2017

Mother Jones

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Over the last few months, Teen Vogue‘s clear-eyed, accessible coverage of the Trump administration has caught the collective attention of the internet. A major force behind Teen Vogue‘s recent work is Lauren Duca, the magazine’s weekend editor. Her piece on Donald Trump’s gaslighting of the American people went viral back in December, as did her powerful response to Fox News host Tucker Carlson, after he suggested on air that instead of writing about politics, she should “stick to the thigh-high boots.” Cringe.

But Carlson’s comment was actually less annoying to Duca than the fawning masses who seem so surprised that a magazine for teenagers can also produce great news commentary. I talked to Duca, whose new column launched last week, about her role in shaping Teen Vogue‘s work—and why the magazine’s political coverage reaches far beyond its target demographic.

Lauren Duca

Mother Jones: How did you start writing politically opinionated pieces for Teen Vogue?

Lauren Duca: Their mode of coverage has been really rigorous and committed to informing their audience since I started in January 2016, and also earlier. I was on the weekend that the Pulse shooting happened. It was really a high level of support editorially for taking these things on in a way that was unflinching and honest. So it was honestly kind of an organic segue into becoming more political as things took on more urgency. My job on the weekends was just to be deciding what the coverage was for the weekend. So that meant everything from Selena Gomez has a new Pantene ad to Donald Trump is lying to the American public. That was the scope of possibilities.

I think the reason they hired me, too—it wasn’t just a random thing. I had a culture column called Middlebrow at HuffPost and a reporting background. But weekend editor is typically a more starting-level position, and they took someone who they knew did a lot of cultural analysis. And when I say “they,” I mean specifically Phil Picardi, the editorial director. So hiring me was a very deliberate choice. It was kind of like, these are the ethically driven people with skills that are already in place. And this was kind of the work that Teen Vogue was already doing. So people being shocked is a little annoying.

MJ: It seems like just since Trump was elected, Teen Vogue has really ratcheted up the coverage. Was there a particular moment that you felt a real shift at the magazine?

LD: When I came on, it was already the kind of place that was doing that kind of thing. The wellness stuff, for example, is political in a nontraditional way. LGBTQ work and mental health work and being frank about sexuality—all those kinds of areas where they’ve been “woke” for a long time. It’s just taking on that mode of informing young women, and just a natural segue into traditional politics.

MJ: So it’s annoying that everyone is kind of fawning and surprised that Teen Vogue is showing up with political coverage.

LD: Yeah, there’s a spectrum of those responses. There’s definitely a mode of stealthy condescension sometimes, where I’m almost relieved by the Tucker Carlson comment in a way. Because the sort of “stick to the thigh-high boots” denial of access to a political conversation is such an explicit version of what I was already kind of itching over with the response. Other versions of the Tucker Carlson comment: “Her last post was about Selena Gomez’s makeup.” And it’s like, yes, it’s possible to do both those things, especially because I was on weekends. That’s part of why I didn’t have a specific beat. But the moment we’re living in right now, a politically active voice is required of everyone, and they’re still allowed to have nonserious interests. And I don’t see why that’s not true for young women.

MJ: Right, it’s just sort of baffling, the idea that teens aren’t political.

LD: It’s so frustrating. Especially because there’s so much political potential for young people. Millennials are now as big of a segment of the population as baby boomers. If we can actually can get everyone to show up and vote and be active, there’s a potential to shape elections for the next 35 years based on those statistics. I think young people absolutely care. They care in different ways. That generational divide, how it shows up in political discussions is especially ugly. It’s all, “Ugh, millennials and selfishness and narcissism, and oh my god, they’re taking selfies.” It’s like, “No, this is how we’re interacting with our world, and it’s different from the way you interact with your world, and by the way, thanks for the mountains of debt.”

MJ: So when you write, are you writing for millennials or teenagers?

LD: The audience for Teen Vogue is young women specifically. I think the reason the Trump gaslighting article did so well was that it wasn’t like, “Hey, teen girls.” It was like, “hey everybody.” I think the idea of political coverage that’s accessible to young women, the reason it took off so much is because so much of political coverage—people feel alienated from it, they don’t necessarily have the news literacy to make sense of everything. Everything is legitimately confusing. I think that things that are accessible to more people are just going to empower more people with information. And I think there are more people reading Teen Vogue now. I certainly get a lot of letters like, “I’m a 64-year-old man, and I certainly never would have read Teen Vogue before.” It’s like, relax. In the column I’m starting, I’m hoping it can be breaking things down and providing resources on what to read and what to prioritize in thinking about all the drain clogging and disinformation from this administration. I would love if that went beyond the typical readership.

MJ: What are you hearing from the actual teen readers of Teen Vogue?

LD: I’m hearing some really cool stuff. I have people doing school projects on me, which is insanely amazing. Yesterday I got an email from a high school junior who was doing a speech on me and my work, and do I have a message for her audience. I was like, this is insane, this is incredible. So yes, it’s reaching the people it’s meant to reach, too.

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Stop Being Shocked That Teen Girls Give a Shit About Politics

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Trump Finally Admits He Has No Health Care Plan

by Maryjo97I0205 Posted on March 4, 2017

Mother Jones

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President Trump has been promising a health care plan for months now. But when will we have it? Let’s roll the tape:

January 15: “It’s very much formulated down to the final strokes. We haven’t put it in quite yet but we’re going to be doing it soon.”

February 5: “I would like to say by the end of the year at least the rudiments but we should have something within the year and the following year.”

February 16: “We’re doing Obamacare, we’re in the final stages. So, we will be submitting sometime in early March, mid-March.“

February 27: “We have come up with a solution that’s really, really, I think, very good.”

So we’ve gone from immediately to 2018 to mid-March to all done. Today, however, Politico reports that in reality, Trump has no plan at all: “His team has signaled to House Speaker Paul Ryan that they will embrace his health care bill next week, and aides hoped to get a marked-up bill ready.”

Since the House bill is apparently what we’re going to get, it’s worth repeating something I wrote a few months ago. After describing both Obamacare and Ryancare in broad strokes, I noted that their foundations were basically the same:

If you haven’t yet noticed what this all means, let me spell it out. The key parts of Obamacare and Ryan’s plan are the same. They both (a) rely on private insurance, (b) require insurance companies to cover people with preexisting conditions, (c) encourage people to buy insurance continuously by penalizing them if they don’t, (d) provide billions of dollars in federal subsidies to make insurance affordable for low-income households, and (e) rely on Medicaid for the very poorest.

As liberals have been pointing out forever, any kind of health care plan has to have three parts:

Protection for pre-existing conditions at a reasonable price, so everyone has access to insurance.
Some kind of incentive for everyone to buy insurance, so insurance companies have plenty of healthy people to balance out the sick people.
Subsidies so that poor people can afford coverage.

Sure enough, Ryancare has all those things, just like Obamacare. There are differences in the details, but those don’t matter very much. What does matter is the difference in cost. Obamacare provides subsidies of about $100 billion per year, while Ryancare provides…something much less. We don’t know exactly how much less yet, but certainly less than half of Obamacare, maybe as little as a quarter. This is what makes Ryancare useless, not its overall structure, which is fairly workable. The working poor and the working class can only barely afford insurance even with Obamacare’s subsidies. They won’t come close with Ryancare’s.

But the rich will get a big tax cut, and the middle class will get a nice break on their health insurance. In short order, however, interstate deregulation will almost certainly lead to individual insurance becoming all but useless, and the individual insurance market will probably collapse fairly soon after that. Alternatively, it might collapse even before Ryancare goes into effect, as insurers bail out on Obamacare (why bother with it if it’s just going away soon?) and conclude that they can’t make money on Ryancare either.

See? It’s not so complicated after all. I imagine this is what Paul Ryan has wanted all along.

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Trump Finally Admits He Has No Health Care Plan

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5 Reasons Why People Don’t Recycle and 5 Reasons They Should

by juliosly165492 Posted on March 4, 2017

My last post, I Dont Recycle seems to have struck a chord with many. Leave it to the Care2 community to enlighten, elevate and express their opinions on why people do and do not recycle.

Most of us believe that recycling is ethically the right thing to do. From the comments on the post, it was evident that sadly, we all seem to have friends, family and acquaintances that do not recycle. Below are some of the reasons why people do not recycle and why they should:

 5 Reasons Why People Do Not Recycle

1. Recycling is inconvenient.
This seems to be the number one reason why people dont recyclethey dont want to put in the extra effort. Some places have no pick-up. Some people say that they just cant be bothered. Is that a good enough reason?

2. I do not have enough space in my home to recycle.
The lack of space is an issue for many. People dont want to see garbage cans with a little storage space for recycling bins on the side; the extra trash is an eyesore. Is that a good enough reason?

3. If they paid me, Id recycle.
Some countries fine people for not recycling. Some regions pay for just bottle recycling (we know that works). Some areas have no penalties or incentives for recycling. Is that a good enough reason?

4. Recycling doesnt make a difference. So why do it?
Misinformation about overflowing landfills, depleted resources and climate change has convinced some people that recycling doesnt make a difference. They believe there is no problem. Is that a good enough reason?

5. It is just to hard to do.
Since there are so many facets to recycling bottle, plastic and paper, its hard to decipher which kinds go where. Is that a good enough reason?

Related: 5 Things You Should Never, Ever Put in Your Recycling Bin


5 Reasons Why People Should Recycle

1. Recycling saves energy.
Recycling saves energy because the manufacturer doesn’t have to produce something new from raw natural resources. By using recycled materials we save on energy consumption, which keeps production costs down.

2. Recycling reduces landfills.
Recycling reduces the need for more landfills. No one wants to live next to a landfill.

3. Recycling preserves our resources and protects wildlife.
By recycling, we reduce the need to destroy habitats for animals. Paper recycling alone saves millions of trees.

4. Recycling is good for the economy.
Recycling and purchasing recycled products creates a greater demand for more recycled goods. Goods made from recycled materials use less water, creates less pollution and uses less energy.

5. Recycling helps our climate problems.
Recycling produces considerably less carbon, which reduces the amount of unhealthy greenhouse gas omissions.

Related: Top 10 Most Important Items to Recycle

Add some more reasons why you do or do not recycle.

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may not reflect those of Care2, Inc., its employees or advertisers.

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5 Reasons Why People Don’t Recycle and 5 Reasons They Should

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