Category Archives: Vintage

785 of This Year’s Unaccompanied Migrants Were Under 6 Years Old

by nowy24login12 Posted on July 22, 2014

Mother Jones

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Pew Research Center

Little kids, including a troubling number of children age five or younger, make up the fastest-growing group of unaccompanied minors apprehended at the US border in fiscal year 2014. So far this year, nearly 7,500 kids under 13 have been caught without a legal guardian—and 785 of them were younger than six.


70,000 Kids Will Show Up Alone at Our Border This Year. What Happens to Them?


Map: These Are the Places Central American Child Migrants Are Fleeing


Why Our Immigration Courts Can’t Handle the Child Migrant Crisis


Are the Kids Showing Up at the Border Really Refugees?


Child Migrants Have Been Coming to America Alone Since Ellis Island

See MoJo‘s full coverage of the surge of unaccompanied child migrants from Central America.

It’s still mostly teens who travel solo to the United States from countries like El Salvador and Honduras, as the Pew Research Center revealed today in a new analysis of US Customs and Border Protection data. But compared to 2013, Border Patrol apprehensions of kids 12 or younger already have increased 117 percent, while those of teens have jumped only 12 percent. Apprehensions of the youngest group of kids, those under six, have nearly tripled.

These new stats reveal a trend made all the more startling as details of the journey continue to emerge. In his feature story about this influx of child migrants, for instance, MoJo‘s Ian Gordon tells of Adrián, a Guatemalan kid who dodged attackers armed with machetes, walked barefoot for miles through Mexico, and resorted to prostitution to reach sanctuary in America. And Adrián was 17. For the increasing number of kids under 13 making this harrowing trek without parents, the vulnerability to exploitation is only magnified, the potential for trauma and even death only amplified.

That so many young kids feel compelled to leave home, or that their parents feel compelled to send them, sends a grim message about the state of their home countries. As El Salvadoran newspaper editor Carlos Dada told On the Media‘s Bob Garfield last week, quoting a Mexican priest who runs a shelter in Oaxaca, Mexico: “If these migrants are willing to take this road, knowing everything they are risking, even their lives, I don’t even want to imagine what they are running away from.”

Here’s another Pew age breakdown, this time by country of origin:

Pew Research Center

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785 of This Year’s Unaccompanied Migrants Were Under 6 Years Old

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Be Still, My Heart: Beyoncé As Rosie the Riveter

by AngelitaGabriel Posted on July 22, 2014

Mother Jones

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On Tuesday, Beyoncé, a whisper of perfection in an otherwise cruel and inhumane world, posted this photo of her as Rosie the Riveter to Instagram.

Beyoncé has become somewhat of a feminist hero recently, putting overtly feminist lyrics into her songs, and making genuinely heartfelt public statements about women’s rights. In January, she wrote an essay about income inequality. On the other side of the pop star aisle there is Lana del Rey who is more interested in Tesla and “intergalactic possibilities.”

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Be Still, My Heart: Beyoncé As Rosie the Riveter

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Study Finds Kids Prefer Healthier Lunches. School Food Lobby Refuses to Believe It.

by CarltonLenehan Posted on July 22, 2014

Mother Jones

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From all of the commotion around the new federal school lunch standards, you’d think they were really Draconian. Republican legislators have railed against them. Districts have threatened to opt out. The School Nutrition Association (SNA), the industry group that represents the nation’s 55,000 school food employees, has officially opposed some of them—and doubled its lobbying in the months leading up to July 1, when some of the new rules took effect.

Here’s who doesn’t mind the new standards: kids. For a study just published in the peer-reviewed journal Childhood Obesity, researchers asked administrators and food service staff at 537 public elementary schools how their students were liking the meals that conformed to the new standards. Half of those surveyed said that the students “complained about the meals at first,” but 70 percent said that the students now like the new lunches. Rural districts were the least enthusiastic about the new meals—there, some respondents reported that purchasing was down and that students were eating less of their meals. But respondents from schools with a high percentage of poor students—those with at least two-thirds eligible for free or reduced-price meals—were especially positive about the new standards: They found that “more students were buying lunch and that students were eating more of the meal than in the previous year.”

“Kids who really need good nutrition most at school are getting it,” says Lindsey Turner, the Childhood Obesity study’s lead author and a research scientist at the University of Illinois-Chicago. “That’s really good news.”

SNA’s response? To issue a statement declaring that “these reported perceptions about school meals do not reflect reality.” The group cites USDA data that participation in school meals has declined by 1.4 million since the new rules went into effect in 2012. But Turner, the Childhood Obesity study’s lead author, notes that this is only about a 3 percent drop. She also points to a Government Accountability Office study that found that most of the drop-off was among students who pay full price for lunch.

What makes SNA’s stance on the new rules even stranger is that they actually are not all that strict. For example: Foods served must be whole grain rich, but as I learned from my trip to SNA’s annual conference last week, that includes whole-grain Pop Tarts, Cheetos, and Rice Krispies Treats. Students are required to take a half cup of a fruit or vegetable—but Italian ice—in flavors like Hip Hoppin’ Jelly Bean—are fair game.

Not all members of SNA consider the task of tempting kids with healthy foods onerous. As I reported last week, Jessica Shelly, food director of Cincinnati’s diverse public schools, has shown that all it takes is a little creativity.

HT The Lunch Tray.

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Study Finds Kids Prefer Healthier Lunches. School Food Lobby Refuses to Believe It.

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What Happens If Obama Loses the Halbig Case?

by wqds234der Posted on July 22, 2014

Mother Jones

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So let’s suppose the Halbig case goes up to the Supreme Court and they rule for the plaintiffs: in a stroke, everyone enrolled in Obamacare through a federal exchange is no longer eligible for subsidies. What happens then? Is Obamacare doomed?

Not at all. What happens is that people in blue states like California and New York, which operate their own exchanges, continue getting their federal subsidies. People in red states, which punted the job to the feds, will suddenly have their subsidies yanked away. Half the country will have access to a generous entitlement and the other half won’t.

How many people will this affect? The earliest we’ll get a Supreme Court ruling on this is mid-2015, and mid-2016 is more likely. At a guess, maybe 12 million people will have exchange coverage by 2015 and about 20 million by 2016. Let’s split the difference and call it 15 million. About 80 percent of them qualify for subsidies, which brings the number to about 12 million. Roughly half of them are in states that would be affected by Halbig.

So that means about 6 million people who are currently getting subsidies would suddenly have them yanked away. It’s even possible they’d have to pay back any tax credits they’d received previously.

So what’s the political reaction? The key point here is that people respond much more strongly to losing things than they do to not getting them in the first place. For example, there are lots of poor people in red states who currently aren’t receiving Medicaid benefits thanks to their states’ refusal to participate in Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion. This hasn’t caused a revolt because nothing was taken away. They just never got Medicaid in the first place.

The subsidies would be a different story. You’d have roughly 6 million people who would suddenly lose a benefit that they’ve come to value highly. This would cause a huge backlash. It’s hard to say if this would be enough to move Congress to action, but I think this is nonetheless the basic lay of the land. Obamacare wouldn’t be destroyed, it would merely be taken away from a lot of people who are currently benefiting from it. They’d fight to get it back, and that changes the political calculus.

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What Happens If Obama Loses the Halbig Case?

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An Extreme Court Decision Threatens Obamacare

by BlairMullah Posted on July 22, 2014

Mother Jones

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Talk about a David and Goliath case. On Monday, a guy from West Virginia who doesn’t want to pay $21 a year for health insurance scored a victory over the Obama administration in a lawsuit that could deprive nearly 5 million Americans of their newly won health care.

In a 2-1 decision, the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit sided with plaintiff David Klemencic and gutted a key provision of the Affordable Care Act that provides premium subsidies to millions of low-income Americans. The decision in Halbig v Burwell, a case spearheaded by a battery of conservative groups who backed Klemencic and his co-plaintiffs (many of whom are GOP political operatives), is based on what is essentially a typo in the ACA. The opinion is a symptom of what happens when a dysfunctional Congress can’t manage to do even the simplest part of its job, such as correcting routine drafting errors in legislation.

Hours later, though, a federal appeals court in Richmond, Virginia, issued a diametrically opposed decision affirming Obamacare and perhaps setting up a future battle before the Supreme Court.

Here’s the backstory, as I reported last winter:

When Congress wrote the ACA, it said that premium subsidies would be available for certain qualifying citizens who were “enrolled through an Exchange established by the State.” (Emphasis added.) The law doesn’t say that those subsidies are available to people in the 34 states that declined to set up exchanges, where residents must utilize the now-infamously buggy Healthcare.gov, the federal exchange.

That’s where Obamacare opponents see a fatal flaw in the law. The plaintiffs in Halbig claim that they won’t be eligible for tax credits because their states didn’t start an exchange, so they won’t be able to afford insurance. As a result, they argue that they’ll be subject to the fine for not buying insurance, or to avoid the fine, they’ll have to pay a lot for insurance they don’t want. They want the court to block the IRS from implementing the law…

The Obama administration argues that the language Halbig’s case is premised on is merely a drafting error common in legislation and routinely reconciled after passage. (Indeed, if Congress were functioning normally, such copy mistake would have been corrected by now, but given the level of polarization in that body, it’s been impossible to make such fixes that were once routine.) An amicus brief in the case filed by Families USA, a nonprofit health care advocacy group helping the administration combat some of the bad PR surrounding Obamacare, argues that the plaintiffs are disregarding the vast body of evidence showing that Congress intended for all low-income Americans to be eligible for tax subsidies, regardless of which exchange they used to purchase insurance.

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An Extreme Court Decision Threatens Obamacare

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A 70-Year-Old Reflects On the So-Called "American Century"

by LashundU23 Posted on July 22, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

* Seventy-three years ago, on February 17, 1941, as a second devastating global war approached, Henry Luce, the publisher of Time and Life magazines, called on his countrymen to “create the first great American Century.” Luce died in 1967 at age 69. Life, the pictorial magazine no home would have been without in my 1950s childhood, ceased to exist as a weekly in 1972 and as a monthly in 2000; Time, which launched his career as a media mogul, is still wobbling on, a shadow of its former self. No one today could claim that this is Time‘s century, or the American Century, or perhaps anyone else’s. Even the greatest empires now seem to have shortened lifespans. The Soviet Century, after all, barely lasted seven decades. Of course, only the rarest among us live to be 100, which means that at 70, like Time, I’m undoubtedly beginning to wobble, too.

* The other day I sat down with an old friend, a law professor who started telling me about his students. What he said aged me instantly. They’re so young, he pointed out, that their parents didn’t even come of age during the Vietnam War. For them, he added, that war is what World War I was to us. He might as well have mentioned the Mongol conquests or the War of the Roses. We’re talking about the white-haired guys riding in the open cars in Veteran’s Day parades when I was a boy. And now, it seems, I’m them.

* In March 1976, accompanied by two friends, my wife and I got married at City Hall in San Francisco, and then adjourned to a Chinese restaurant for a dim sum lunch. If, while I was settling our bill of perhaps $30, you had told me that, almost half a century in the future, marriage would be an annual $40 billion dollar business, that official couplings would be preceded by elaborate bachelor and bachelorette parties, and that there would be such a thing as destination weddings, I would have assumed you were clueless about the future. On that score at least, the nature of the world to come was self-evident and elaborate weddings of any sort weren’t going to be part of it.

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A 70-Year-Old Reflects On the So-Called "American Century"

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The (Possibly) Frightening Implications of the Halbig Case

by BobbieWhinham Posted on July 22, 2014

Mother Jones

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In the Halbig case that struck down subsidies on federal Obamacare exchanges earlier today, one of the key issues was deference to agency interpretation of the law. Longstanding precedent holds that courts should generally defer to agency interpretations as long as they’re plausible. They don’t have to be perfect. They don’t even have to be the best possible interpretations. They merely have to make sense.

The DC circuit court decided that there really wasn’t any serious ambiguity in the law, and therefore no deference was due to the IRS’s interpretation that state and federal exchanges were meant to be treated the same. The dissent was scathing about this, since the record pretty clearly showed tons of ambiguity. So if and when this case makes it up to the Supreme Court, what’s going to happen? A lawyer buddy of mine is pessimistic:

Sadly, I think the Supreme Court will eagerly uphold the challenge because it gets to an issue that conservatives have generally despised: deference to administrative agencies’ interpretation of statutes.

It’s long been a fundamental principle in administrative law that an agency’s interpretation of a federal statute that they are charged with enforcing is entitled to judicial deference, unless such deference is unreasonable. Conservatives would prefer that courts not defer to the government because #biggovernment. Thus, they want to weaken the deference standard and Halbig gives them basically a two-fer. Or a three-fer since the agency interpreting the statute is the IRS: Take out Obamacare, knock back the deference standard, and punch the IRS. This invariably will help advance the conservatives’ legal goals because with a lower deference standard, their eccentric theories (such as on tax issues) have a better chance of surviving.

In normal times, the deference standard would likely be left intact because weakening it raises serious issues with government enforcement across all agencies, and courts are loath to send the country into a tailspin. But those days are apparently long past. Truly frightening times.

So what’s next? In breaking news, the Fourth Circuit court has just upheld the federal subsidies in Obamacare, ruling squarely on deference grounds—and disagreeing completely with the DC circuit opinion, which held that the legislative language in Obamacare was clear and plain. In fact, said the Fourth Circuit, the statute is ambiguous, and therefore the court owes deference to the IRS interpretation. This is good news for Obamacare, especially if today’s DC circuit decision by a three-judge panel is overturned by the full court, thus giving the government two appellate court wins. If that happens, it’s even possible that the Supreme Court would decline to hear an appeal and simply leave the lower court opinions in place.

But I’d say an eventual Supreme Court date still seems likely. There’s no telling if my friend’s read of the politico-legal climate among the Supreme Court’s conservative majority is correct, but I thought it was worth sharing.

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The (Possibly) Frightening Implications of the Halbig Case

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The Way We Live Now

by Chasity3240 Posted on July 22, 2014

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Methinks someone on the EPA’s social team is logged into the department’s brand account on their iPhone…

If someone gets fired over this harmless mistake I will be genuinely outraged but I think it’s ok for all of us to have a harmless chuckle.

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The Way We Live Now

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Obama Planning to Retire to Rancho Mirage?

by KristofPatteson Posted on July 22, 2014

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Let the speculation begin!

President Obama and his wife, Michelle, could be the owners of a home in Rancho Mirage listed at $4.25 million before the month is out. The First Family is believed to be in escrow on a contemporary home in a gated community where entertainers Frank Sinatra, Bob Hope and Bing Crosby once maintained estates.

The White House said rumors regarding a home in Rancho Mirage are not true.

….The 8,232-square-foot compound in question sits adjacent to a bighorn sheep preserve on a 3.29-acre hilltop with panoramic views. The custom-built main house, constructed in 1993 and designed for entertaining, includes a gym, four bedrooms and 4.5 bathrooms. A 2,000-square-foot casita has three bedrooms and three bathrooms. Over-the-top exterior features include a pool with a 20-foot waterfall, a rock lagoon, two spas, a misting system and a putting green with a sand trap.

I have to say that the Obamas don’t really strike me as Rancho Mirage kind of people, but who knows? Maybe I’ve misjudged them.

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Obama Planning to Retire to Rancho Mirage?

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Wage Stagnation Is No Illusion

by CeliaZeller Posted on July 21, 2014

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Bloomberg has a long article today wondering whether wage stagnation is mainly due to demographic shifts:

25- to 34-year-olds will make up 22.5 percent of the workforce by 2022, compared with 21.6 percent in 2012….Meanwhile, the share of 45- to 54-year-olds in their best earning years will drop by 3.3 percentage points in the decade ending 2022.

….Hollowing out the middle-aged working population could cut median earnings because such employees bring home the biggest paychecks. The median 45- to 54-year-old household earns $66,400 a year, compared with $51,400 for 25- to 34-year-old households.

Well, sure. Compared to 30 years ago, the theory goes, we have more young workers bringing down the average and fewer prime age workers raising the average. As a result, the average is declining. But all that means is that baby boomers are aging out of the workforce, not that wages are necessarily in bad shape.

That makes sense. At least, it would make sense if it were true. The thing is, in an article more than a thousand words long, we never learn that we can look at this directly. The chart on the right shows the median wages of just 25-34 year olds, and as you can see, they’ve been declining for more than a decade. This has nothing to do with demographics because it’s measuring wages for the same age group the entire time.

Now, these figures don’t include health insurance, and they only go through 2012. So they aren’t of much help if, say, the Fed is trying to gauge the tightness of the labor market in the second quarter of 2014. Nonetheless, they certainly show a long-term trend of wage stagnation that plainly has nothing to do with demographics. This makes it vanishingly unlikely that wage stagnation over the past six months is merely due to demographic shifts.

It’s a nice fairy tale to pretend that wage stagnation might just be an artifact of boomers retiring, but easily available data quite clearly shows otherwise. It’s real.

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Wage Stagnation Is No Illusion

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