Category Archives: Vintage

Bonus Homecoming Cat Blogging – 30 May 2015

by toplaptopsforcollege Posted on May 30, 2015

Mother Jones

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Everyone is back home. It took Hilbert about a minute to settle in and recognize everything. Hopper took a little more convincing. She spent several hours sniffing everything in sight before she finally decided things were OK.

In the top photo, Hilbert has taken possession of his favorite teal chair. It’s as if he never left. Below, Hopper finally hopped into my lap after lunch and purred herself to sleep, which surely means she’s now settled in too. If you look closely, you’ll also see that my hair is starting to grow back. But you have to look pretty closely.

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Bonus Homecoming Cat Blogging – 30 May 2015

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Martin O’Malley Is Running for President. Here’s What You Need to Know

by SUOWinston Posted on May 30, 2015

Mother Jones

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The wait is over. Martin O’Malley is running for president. The former Maryland governor formally kicked off his quest for the Democratic presidential nomination on Saturday in Baltimore, the city he served as mayor for six years. O’Malley, who has been publicly weighing a bid for years, is aiming to present himself as a solidly progressive alternative to former secretary of state Hillary Clinton. But it’s going to be an uphill slog—in the most recent Quinnipiac poll, he received just 1 percent—56 points behind Clinton, and 14 points behind Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who was an independent until he entered the 2016 Democratic contest.

Here are five things you should read about O’Malley right now:

He’s the “best manager in government today,” according to a 2013 profile by Haley Sweetland Edwards at the Washington Monthly:

The truth is, what makes O’Malley stand out is not his experience, his gravitas, nor his familiarity to voters (Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden crush him in those regards). Nor is it exactly his policies or speeches (New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper, both rumored presidential aspirants, have cultivated similar CVs). Nor is it that he plays in a band. Nor is it even the Atlantic‘s breathless claim last year that he has “the best abs” in politics. (Beneath a photo of the fit governor participating in the Maryland Special Olympics’ annual Polar Bear Plunge, the author gushed, “What are they putting in the water in Maryland?”) Instead, what makes O’Malley unique as a politician is precisely the skill that was on display in that windowless conference room in downtown Annapolis: he is arguably the best manager working in government today.

That may not seem like a very flashy title—at first blush, “Best Manager” sounds more like a booby prize than a claim a politician might ride to the White House. But in an era where the very idea of government is under assault, a politician’s capacity to deliver on his or her promises, to actually make the bureaucracy work, is an underappreciated skill.

He pursued a tough-on-crime policing strategy as mayor of Baltimore, according to a recent Washington Post article:

It was as a crime-busting mayor some 15 years ago that O’Malley first gained national attention. Although he is positioning himself as a progressive alternative to Hillary Clinton, O’Malley also touts a police crackdown during his time as mayor that led to a stark reduction in drug violence and homicides as one of his major achievements.

Yet some civic leaders and community activists in Baltimore portray O’Malley’s policing policies in troubling terms. The say the “zero-tolerance” approach mistreated young black men even as it helped dramatically reduce crime, fueling a deep mistrust of law enforcement that flared anew last week when Freddie Gray died after suffering a spinal injury while in police custody.

He’s obsessed with the War of 1812 and discussed said obsession in an interview with the Daily Beast‘s Ben Jacobs last September, after dressing up in an 1812-vintage uniform and mounting a horse:

Win, lose, or draw, O’Malley said he is enthusiastic about the bicentennial and has read up on past commemorations to prepare. He recalled for The Daily Beast a 100-year-old Baltimore Sun editorial about the centennial in 1914 and searched excitedly through his iPad for it. PBS will broadcast the event nationwide on Saturday night, and it will feature what is planned to be the largest ever mass singing of the “Star-Spangled Banner” and an outdoor concert in Baltimore that will include a rock opera about the War of 1812, and O’Malley’s own band, which he referred to simply as “a small little warm-up band of Irish extraction.”

Though he was the model for the character of Baltimore Mayor Tommy Carcetti on the HBO series The Wire, he is not a huge fan of the show or its creator, David Simon, who described an awkward encounter with the governor last year on an Acela train:

This fellow was at the four-top table immediately behind me. I clocked him as we left New York, but as he is a busy man, and as most of our previous encounters have been a little edgy, I told myself to let well enough alone. I answered a few more emails, looked at some casting tapes on the laptop, checked the headlines. And still, with all of that done, we were only just south of Philadelphia.

I texted my son: “On the southbound Acela. Marty O’Malley sitting just behind me,” then joking, “Do I set it off?”

A moment later, a 20-year-old diplomatic prodigy fired back a reply: “Buy him a beer.”

…I stood up, noticed that Mr. O’Malley was sipping a Corona, and I walked to the cafe car to get another just like it. I came back, put it on the table next to its mate, and said, simply, “You’ve had a tough week.” My reference, of course, was to the governor’s dustup with the White House over the housing of juvenile immigrants in Maryland, which became something of a spitting contest by midweek.

Mr. O’Malley smiled, said thanks, and I went back to my seat to inform my son that the whole of the State Department could do no better than he. Several minutes later, the governor of my state called me out and smacked the seat next to him.

“Come on, Dave,” he said, “we’re getting to be old men at this point. Sit, talk.”

Writing for the Atlantic in December, Molly Ball dubbed O’Malley, “the most ignored candidate of 2016.” Another takeaway from the piece, which chronicled his trip to an Annapolis homeless-prevention center that provides job training, might be that he tries too hard:

“I love kale,” O’Malley told the chef, Linda Vogler, a middle-aged woman with blond bangs peeking out from a paper toque who was teaching a cooking class. “Kale’s the new superfood!”

“We’re learning quinoa next,” Vogler said.

“You’re going to teach what? Keen-wa?,” O’Malley asked, genuinely puzzled. “What’s keen-wa?”

“It looks like birdseed,” she replied, hurrying on with the lesson. As the class counted off the seconds it took to boil a tomato, O’Malley changed their “One Mississippi” chant to “One Maryland! Two Maryland!”

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Martin O’Malley Is Running for President. Here’s What You Need to Know

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Hastert on Hastert: "What You See Is What You Get"

by Lenore3891 Posted on May 29, 2015

Mother Jones

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In 2003, The New Yorker dispatched acclaimed novelist Jonathan Franzen to write a mega-profile of Denny Hastert, who four years earlier had improbably become House speaker following Newt Gingrich’s implosion during the Clinton impeachment scandal. (During the Clinton mess, Hastert was an advocate of impeachment, at one point castigating the president for his “inability to abide by the law.”) With the developing news that Hastert has been indicted for allegedly violating banking laws while paying $3.5 million in hush money, apparently to conceal sexual abuse involving a male student at an Illinois high school where Hastert once taught and coached wrestling, Franzen’s lengthy take serves up useful insights (and what now appear to be a few wrong notes) about a man who was often described as a rather forgettable politician.

Below are several snippets (subscribers to the magazine can find the full article here):

“Hastert’s public persona, to the extent that he has one, is the Coach.”
“When I asked him if he had gay friends, he replied that he has friends who are single. ‘They’re really good people,’ he said. ‘And I’ve never asked.’ Does he care? ‘If I cared,’ he said, ‘I’d probably ask.’ (He is uncomfortable with Senator Frist’s advocacy of a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. ‘I think the courts should decide that,’ he said.)”
“‘With me, what you see is what you get,’ Hastert told me the first time we met, in June. ‘There’s not a lot of nuances here.'”
“Later in the speech, Hastert describes the Speaker’s office in the Capitol. ‘It has a great big chandelier in it,’ he says. ‘Yeah-oh, I was a high-school wrestling coach. I never thought I’d have an office with a chandelier.”
“As a coach in Yorkville Illinois, Hastert was famously impassive during matches. While opposing coaches paced at the edge of the mats and shouted at their wrestlers (‘Stand up!’ ‘Grab the wrist!’ ‘Head up!’), he sat silently, with his arms crossed over a clipboard.”
“For Hastert, though power seems always to have been more about service than about the advancement of his own ends or vision. He became a born-again Christian in high school, and much of his time at Wheaton College, an evangelical institution, was devoted to religious study… He comes from a religious college that provided instruction in service and submission, rather than in partying and doubt.”
“What you see there—a Speaker who delivers the Republican goods—really is what you get. It doesn’t matter, in the public realm, what kind of person Hastert is. It matters only privately that, to do the brutal work in Washington, he requires psychic ballast back in Illinois.”

Franzen wasn’t the only one who promoted the Coach Hastert theme. When Hastert wrote his own autobiography 10 years later, he titled it, Speaker: Lessons from Forty Years in Coaching and Politics.

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Hastert on Hastert: "What You See Is What You Get"

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5 Chilling Pages From the Aurora Mass Shooter’s Diary Debunk a Favorite NRA Talking Point

by KristiPulsford Posted on May 29, 2015

Mother Jones

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It’s an argument we hear frequently from gun rights activists and conservative lawmakers: Mass shooters select places to attack where citizens are banned from carrying firearms—so-called “gun-free zones.” All the available data shows that this claim is just plain wrong. As I reported in an investigation into nearly 70 mass shootings in the United States over three decades, there has never been any known evidence of gun laws influencing a mass shooter’s strategic thinking. In fact, the vast majority of the perpetrators have indicated other specific motivations for striking their targets, such as employment grievances or their connection to a school.

Most recently, the marquee villain used to decry gun-free zones is James Holmes, who is currently on trial for the July 2012 massacre in Aurora, Colorado. “Out of all the movie theaters within 20 minutes of his apartment showing the new Batman movie that night, it was the only one where guns were banned,” Fox News pundit John Lott wrote not long after the attack. “So why would a mass shooter pick a place that bans guns? The answer should be obvious, though it apparently is not clear to the media—disarming law-abiding citizens leaves them as sitting ducks.”

Now, with the release this week of a detailed handwritten diary that Holmes kept before the attack, we know that there is no evidence to support Lott’s widely parroted claim.

The diary includes five pages in which Holmes laid out his strategy for attacking the Cinemark theater complex. Under the header “Case the Place,” he drew maps and diagrams accompanied by many tactical notes regarding where victims would be located and how they would potentially react. “South side of theater optimal,” he wrote, noting its “15 screens.” He zeroed in on theaters 10 and 12 as the “best targets in complex” and marked the “best parking spot” for his car. Among his lists of “pros” and “cons,” he observed that theater 10 would have “many initial persons packed in single area.” He assessed the many doors and hallways through which people would try to escape.

Nowhere in any of this extensive planning did Holmes make reference to gun regulations at the theater or the potential for moviegoers to be armed. Moreover, he had every expectation that he would not get away with his crime. In one sketch, he drew two other locations not far from the theater: the Aurora Police Department and a Colorado National Guard facility. “ETA response approximately 3 mins,” he noted. In his list of possible methods of attack, where he checked off mass murder using firearms as his choice, he also wrote “being caught 99% certain.”

Additional evidence from the trial underscores that Holmes clearly was not planning to avoid getting shot, killed, or apprehended. On an AdultFriendFinder.com profile he filled out shortly before the shooting, he wrote: “Will you visit me in prison?”

Here are the five diary pages filled with Holmes’ plans, followed by the full document:

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View note

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dc.embed.loadNote(‘//www.documentcloud.org/documents/2089833-james-holmes-notebook/annotations/220839.js’);

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Full diary:

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James Holmes Notebook (PDF)

James Holmes Notebook (Text)

From: 

5 Chilling Pages From the Aurora Mass Shooter’s Diary Debunk a Favorite NRA Talking Point

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Literally the Only Good FIFA News You’ll Hear This Week

by DanutaSievwrigh Posted on May 29, 2015

Mother Jones

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Electronic Arts, the gaming company that makes the popular FIFA video game franchise, is bringing women to the virtual pitch, adding 12 women’s national teams to FIFA 16 this September.

From the Wall Street Journal:

EA announced Thursday that a dozen women’s international soccer teams will be included in the coming FIFA 16 game scheduled for release in September. EA didn’t say in its announcement why it took so long to mend the gender gap or whether the petition played a role. In an email, EA said it had been considering adding women for years and that it had made the necessary advancements to more accurately represent how the characters run and sprint, for example. The game’s motion capturing tracked four members of the U.S. Women’s National Team: Sydney Leroux, Abby Wambach, Alex Morgan, and Megan Rapinoe.

EA’s decision came three years after an online petition called for inclusion—and right before this year’s Women’s World Cup starts next week in Canada. (It also came a day before Sepp Blatter won his fifth term as FIFA president, with the governing body embroiled in the ongoing corruption crisis.)

Last fall, a group of women’s soccer stars, including US forward Abby Wambach, filed a gender discrimination lawsuit claim against FIFA and the Canadian Soccer Association over the organization’s decision to play this year’s World Cup games on artificial turf, even though the men’s games are played on grass. The group later withdrew the suit. And in an interview with Time, star US forward Alex Morgan, who will be featured in the new game, said that Blatter didn’t recognize her at the 2012 FIFA Player of the Year event—even though she’d just been named one of the three best women’s players in the world.

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Literally the Only Good FIFA News You’ll Hear This Week

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Mayor: 6 Months Is "an Unacceptably Long Period of Time" to Investigate a Police Shooting

by JesseAunger Posted on May 29, 2015

Mother Jones

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When police officers shoot or kill unarmed civilians, it can take months, even years, for the incidents to be officially investigated and publicly explained. As Mother Jones recently reported, the cop who shot 12-year-old Tamir Rice in Cleveland had yet to be interviewed by investigators, more than six months since Rice’s death. The family of 37-year-old Tanisha Anderson, who died after being restrained by police last November, also in Cleveland, is still waiting for answers.

The case of Jerame Reid has gotten far less attention. Reid was a passenger in a car that was pulled over on December 30, 2014, in Bridgeton, New Jersey. As recorded by the police car’s dashboard camera, two officers approached the car and allegedly found a gun in the glove box. When the 36-year-old Reid tried to get out of the car with his hands apparently up and in front of his chest, the officers opened fire, and Reid died. The officers in the case—Roger Worley and Braheme Days—were placed on paid administrative leave pending the outcome of an investigation.

Nearly six months later, Reid’s family and his community are still waiting for answers. It’s not clear exactly where the investigation stands. Last weekend, a report in the New Jersey Star-Ledger suggested the case had been passed from the Cumberland County Prosecutor’s Office to the New Jersey Attorney General’s Office. A spokesman for the New Jersey AG told Mother Jones that the Cumberland County Prosecutor’s Office is still the lead agency in the investigation and declined further comment. A message sent to the Cumberland County Prosecutor’s Office wasn’t answered.

The wait has been too long, according to Bridgeton Mayor Albert Kelly. In an op-ed published earlier this week, Kelly lays out exactly why the wait in these cases is such a problem:

Six months may not seem like a long time if you’re in the Cumberland County Prosecutor’s Office handling multiple cases, nor would it seem a long time if your view is one taken from the perch of the Office of the Attorney General.

But it is an eternity if you’re the grieving widow and part of a grieving family wanting some sense of closure. It’s also a stunningly long time if you and your family are waiting around day after day to find out your fate and what the balance of the rest of your life might look like.

Beyond that, it may well be an unacceptably long period of time for an entire community waiting to find out what exactly happened to one of its own, for better or for ill, on a cold December night a few days after Christmas, at what began as a routine traffic stop.

The time involved, just like the questions involved, is no small thing because for anyone who cares—for anyone who knows how quickly things can go from zero to sixty in the blink of an eye at what was essentially a routine interaction between a police officer and a citizen—it’s about knowing where the lines are drawn and maybe where they got crossed.

Mayor Kelly’s letter expresses the growing impatience with the slow official responses to police killings that have long been the norm. As David Harris, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh, explained to Mother Jones reporter Jaeah Lee, recent events have changed the way Americans look at these investigations. “One year ago, we probably did not take a lot of notice,” he says. “It’s only since Ferguson, and especially since North Charleston and Baltimore, that we are seeing cases being evaluated and moved more rapidly.”

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Mayor: 6 Months Is "an Unacceptably Long Period of Time" to Investigate a Police Shooting

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Friday Cat Blogging – 29 May 2015

by GustavoMorice Posted on May 29, 2015

Mother Jones

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For the past two weeks, Hopper and Hilbert have apparently been fighting a rearguard battle over their latest acquisition: a cardboard box. Hilbert took possession first, but Hopper got into the act pretty quickly. Her expression is clearly a declaration that this is her box now, and other cats better stay away. I’m reliably informed that she backed this up with some fancy paw action and sent Hilbert scampering away.

And with that, let’s all give three cheers for my sister, who has taken such good care of Hilbert and Hopper that we’re not sure they’ll even recognize us when they come home. I should add that her six weeks of catsitting was an even bigger favor than you might think, given H&H’s penchant for destruction of anything left lying around accidentally. But tomorrow they come home. Marian has been catproofing our house for the past week, and on Saturday Karen will deliver the furballs back to us. I’m sure they’ll show us very quickly if there are any catproofing spots we missed.

From: 

Friday Cat Blogging – 29 May 2015

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News Flash: Bill Clinton Has a Pretty High Speaking Fee

by y32nmet Posted on May 29, 2015

Mother Jones

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Over in the New York Times today, Deborah Sontag has a 2,000-word piece about a charity called the Happy Hearts Fund. There seem to be two big takeaways: (a) celebrities use their fame to promote their charities, and (b) Bill Clinton usually won’t appear at your event for free. His speaking fee is a donation to the Clinton Foundation. In this particular case, Happy Hearts donated $500,000 to the Clinton Foundation, and in return Clinton appeared at their event to receive a lifetime achievement award.

I’m racking my brain here. I know I’m partisan about this and would just as soon not attribute dark motives to Clinton. But even putting that aside, what’s the story here? Celebrities use their fame to promote their pet causes? Bill Clinton commands a high speaking fee? Is there something that’s even unsavory about this, let alone scandalous? Is there something that’s out of the ordinary or not already common knowledge? If the story featured, say, George W. Bush instead of Clinton, would I be more outraged? What am I missing?

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News Flash: Bill Clinton Has a Pretty High Speaking Fee

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A New Poll Has Good News for Pro-Choicers

by JaxonAshcraft Posted on May 29, 2015

Mother Jones

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After seven years on the outs, choice is back. For the first time since 2008, significantly more Americans identify as pro-choice (50 percent) than pro-life (44 percent), according to a Gallup poll released Friday.

“This is the first time since 2008 that the pro-choice position has had a statistically significant lead in Americans’ abortion views,” the survey notes. In the intervening years, Americans were split fairly evenly on the issue of abortion—except in 2012, when pro-life sentiment outpaced pro-choice views 50 percent to 41 percent.

The poll found that in the past three years, women have become more pro-choice (54 percent) than men (46 percent). Since 2012, Democrats, Republicans and independents have all become increasingly pro-choice. But Democrats show the biggest long-term jump in pro-choice views, from 55 percent in 2001 to 68 percent today. By contrast, 30 percent of Republicans were pro-choice in 2001 and 31 percent identify as pro-choice today—a statistically insignificant change.

The years since the last pro-choice peak in 2008 have been rough for abortion rights advocates. Republican legislatures across the country have sought to roll back access to abortions—banning the procedure after 20 weeks (and even earlier in some cases), requiring additional doctor visits and ultrasounds, and placing onerous regulations on clinics that forced many to shut their doors. Gallup didn’t touch on these issues, simply noting that “the momentum for the pro-life position that began when Barack Obama took office has yielded to a pro-choice rebound.”

Gallup raised the possibility that abortion views are riding on the coattails of a “broader liberal shift in Americans’ ideology of late” that “could mean the recent pro-choice expansion has some staying power.”

Originally posted here:

A New Poll Has Good News for Pro-Choicers

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If You Want to Be Part of the Top 1 Percent, You’d Better Be Working For a Top 1 Percent Firm

by FinlayKellaway Posted on May 29, 2015

Mother Jones

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What has caused the explosive growth of income inequality over the past three decades? Is it the fact the CEO pay has skyrocketed, leaving everyone else behind? Maybe. But according to a new paper, that’s not quite the right story.

Basically a group of researchers at NBER have concluded that inequality between firms has skyrocketed, and employees of those firms all go along for the ride. A small number of “super firms” have become enormously successful, and within these super firms inequality between the CEO and the worker bees hasn’t changed much at all. They pay all their employees more than the average firm, from the CEO down.

The chart on the right tells the story. Ignore the green line for the moment and just look at the blue and red lines. The red line shows that the top tenth of firms have far outperformed everyone else. The blue line shows that workers follow the same pattern. The ones who work for the top firms get paid a lot more than the folks who work for average firms.

As it turns out, some industries have more super firms than others and thus contribute more to growing income inequality. The FIRE sector—Finance, Insurance, Real Estate—is the most obvious example. Both firm revenue and individual compensation has gone up far more than in any sector. But other sectors have their superstars too, and individuals at those firms get paid a lot more than a similar worker at a firm that’s not doing so well.

So in addition to talking about the top 1% of individuals, we should be talking about the top 1% of firms. But what does that mean? Things get a little hazy at this point:

Instead of top incomes rising within firms, top-paying firms are now paying even higher wages. This may tend to make inequality more invisible, as individuals do not see rising inequality among their peers. More research needs to be done to understand why inequality between firms has increased so much more than inequality within them. But this fact of stable inequality within firms should inform our understanding of the great increase in inequality within the United States over the last three decades.

Matt O’Brien suggests that this means nearly every industry is now part of the winner-take-all economy. In the same way that modern technology allows a tiny subset of superstar singers or actors to earn huge audiences (and huge paychecks), perhaps it also enables modern firms to do the same. And it could be self-reinforcing. The super firms can afford to hire the best workers, and that in turn drives even more unequal growth.

In any case, if the authors are right, it matters a lot which firm you work for. If you pick the right one, you might ride the income inequality gravy train right to the top. In not, you probably won’t.

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If You Want to Be Part of the Top 1 Percent, You’d Better Be Working For a Top 1 Percent Firm

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