Category Archives: Vintage

Researchers Who Study Political Temperament Need to Watch the Condescension

Mother Jones

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Chris Mooney writes today about one of his favorite subjects: the hypothesis that underlying personality traits tend to make people either politically liberal or politically conservative. The latest news is that, apparently, virtually everyone who studies this kind of thing now agrees that it’s true:

The occasion of this revelation is a paper by John Hibbing of the University of Nebraska and his colleagues, arguing that political conservatives have a “negativity bias,” meaning that they are physiologically more attuned to negative (threatening, disgusting) stimuli in their environments….The authors go on to speculate that this ultimately reflects an evolutionary imperative. “One possibility,” they write, “is that a strong negativity bias was extremely useful in the Pleistocene,” when it would have been super helpful in preventing you from getting killed.

Well, yes, the Pleistocene. I suppose it would have been useful then. But I wish the researchers who study this stuff could learn to talk about it less condescendingly. After all, this sensitivity to threats might also be useful during, say, World War II. Or on a dark street corner. Or at a city council meeting discussing a zoning variance. If you pretend that it’s primarily just a laughable atavism that a few poor primitives among us still hold onto, is it any wonder that conservatives don’t think much of your research?

Plus, as Mooney points out in a tweet: “People, take note: To explain conservatives psychologically is basically to explain liberals as well.” Yep. The flip side of the threat hypothesis is that liberalism flourishes among people with a naive sense of security.

But this is nothing new. As the old saying goes, a conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged by reality. Liberals and conservatives argue endlessly about just how much security is necessary against outsiders: against the Soviets during the Cold War, against terrorists after 9/11, to protect ourselves against street thugs, etc. The idea that different sensitivities to threat are fundamental to liberalism and conservatism strikes me as something I barely even need research to believe in.

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Researchers Who Study Political Temperament Need to Watch the Condescension

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Happy Birthday, Twitter! Here Are 50 Things the Media Says You’ve Revolutionized.

Mother Jones

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Twitter launched July 15, 2006. Since soon after its inception, the media has been heralding Twitter’s significance. Here is a not-at-all exhaustive list of things the media has credited Twitter with changing forever.

Social media.

The media world.

The world.

The world of Australian political journalism.

UK Political journalism.

Journalism.

“Journalism for an entire generation.”

Washington relationships.

Politics.

Local politics.

The way politicians communicate with voters.

The way people communicate with people.

The way people communicate with God.

The study of language.

Education.

The job hunt.

Small business.

Technology for business.

Corporations.

The corporate world.

The way we pitch ideas in the corporate world.

The culture of Comcast.

Pop culture.

The face of ballet in NYC.

The way we watch TV.

The business of TV.

TV “as we know it”.

The way TV is made.

The way Ed Burns makes movies.

The way Snoop Dogg makes music.

The way people in Los Angeles eat.

The way people in India talk to celebrities.

The way celebrities talk to people.

The way Kanye West apologizes.

The way celebrities endorse things.

Gilbert Godfried.

The literary critic.

The literary world.

The world of professional poker.

Sports.

The relationship between athletes and sports fans.

The ski industry.

The gaming industry.

The Casey Anthony trial.

Children.

Old people.

The way old people interact with children.

The way hotels interact with customers.

Travel.

The way everyone does things.

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Happy Birthday, Twitter! Here Are 50 Things the Media Says You’ve Revolutionized.

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Nobody Is Very Excited About Obama’s Border Plan

Mother Jones

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The latest ABC/Washington Post poll shows vividly just how hard a time President Obama is going to have getting his emergency plan to address the border crisis passed. The good news is that Americans approve of his plan by 53-43 percent. The bad news is that this is a pretty thin margin, and suggests there’s virtually no real passion in favor of it.

But the even worse news comes in a breakdown of the numbers. Among Republicans, disapproval reigns, 35-59 percent. So Boehner & Co. have very little motivation to act. What’s more, Hispanics, who ought to be the core constituency among Democrats for any immigration-related legislation, are only tenuously in favor, 54-43 percent. The reflects sharp divisions within the Democratic Party about the core idea of deporting any of the refugees in any way.

So Democrats are split and Republicans are opposed. This is not fertile ground for any kind of compromise. The only thing Obama has going for him is that what’s happening on the border really is a crisis, and at some point everyone might genuinely feel like they have to do something. But what? Even Obama’s fairly anodyne proposal has already drawn significant opposition from both sides, and any proposal that moves further to the left or the right will draw even more opposition. This could take a while unless, by some miracle, both parties decided they’re better off just getting this off the table before the midterm elections. But what are the odds of that?

For more of Mother Jones reporting on unaccompanied child migrants, see all of our latest coverage here.

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Nobody Is Very Excited About Obama’s Border Plan

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In Defense Of Selfies: Rembrandt

Mother Jones

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Millennials get a lot of heat for the whole “selfie” thing. But what is a selfie? Most of the time the term refers to people taking photos of themselves—arms outstretched—with their phones. But the phone part really isn’t important. I think most good people can agree that a selfie is any picture you take of yourself. But what if you put a camera on a tripod and use a timer? is that a selfie? I would venture, yes. What if we dispense with the camera entirely and talk straight self-portraits?

The truth is the selfie has a noble heritage in high art. Take Rembrandt for instance, who was born July 15, 1606. One of the greatest artists of all time, Rembrandt completed more than 60 self-portraits. (You can check out many of them and more of Rembrandt’s works here.)

So anyway, the next time some stick in the mud tells you that selfies are what’s wrong with America just be all, “What about Rembrandt, man? What about Rembrandt?” Then float away up into the clouds.

Have a nice day.

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In Defense Of Selfies: Rembrandt

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We’re Still At War: Photo of the Day for July 15, 2014

Mother Jones

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A US Marine builds an obstacle course in Belize. (US Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Brett Cote.)

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We’re Still At War: Photo of the Day for July 15, 2014

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This GOP Regulator Questioned Energy Companies—So They Spent Almost $500,000 to Defeat Him

Mother Jones

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Terry Dunn, a top Alabama utility regulator, is an EPA-bashing, fossil-fuel-boosting, dyed-in-the-wool Republican. Or so he thought. But last year, he tried to convince his colleagues on the three-member Alabama Public Service Commission to discuss lowering customer payments to Alabama Power, the state’s largest utility. Now he is the target of an unprecedented half-million dollar campaign, led by Alabama’s powerful coal lobby, to boot him out of office.

“I’ve been a delegate to the last three Republican presidential conventions,” Dunn says. “I’m about as Republican as my opponent—or more so. ‘Environmentalist’—in Alabama, that’s code to damage me. I’ve been fighting Environment Protection Agency regulation since the day I got into office.”

John Archibald, a political commentator for Al.com, agrees with Dunn’s self-assessment: “Dunn’s a good old boy. He asked hard questions, and kind of got punched for it.”

The energy industry’s chosen candidate is Chris “Chip” Beeker, a Republican challenging Dunn in the GOP primary. And there is no mistaking Beeker for an environmentalist: On his campaign website, Beeker claims the planet is cooling, not warming. “The so-called ‘climate change crisis’ is about as real as unicorns and little green men from Mars,” he says.

Beeker’s backers in Tuesday’s race include Drummond Co., a global coal giant headquartered in Birmingham, which has given him $50,000; R.E.M. Directional, a drilling company near Tuscaloosa that donated $20,000; and ENPAC, a political action committee connected to the Alabama Coal Association that gave him $38,000. Two trade groups, the Alabama Coal Association and Manufacture Alabama, have endorsed Beeker, and big-name Republicans, including former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, have hosted fundraisers for him.

Beeker was the leading vote-getter in the first round of the primary, which was held on June 3, taking 39 percent to Dunn’s 33 percent. A runoff, scheduled for Tuesday, will determine the winner, as there is no Democrat running for the seat.

Dunn’s troubles started in January 2013, when he proposed holding a formal meeting to examine Alabama Power’s rates. The utility, which has a monopoly on the Alabama grid, charges customers more and has larger profit margins than utilities in surrounding states.

“From that point on, Dunn was declared an environmental wacko—and there is a concerted effort to paint him that way,” Archibald says. “But he’s not a tree-hugger. Under normal circumstances, you’d consider him far to the right.”

Dunn had antagonized the coal industry before he called for the meeting, by pushing utilities to increase their use of natural gas, a cheaper alternative to coal, in order to bring down energy prices. But proposing talks about rate reductions escalated the dispute. Coal miners filed ethics complaints against Dunn’s staff, and critics slammed him as a Republican in Name Only and environmentalist. Dunn tells Mother Jones that a man who identified himself as a private investigator—Dunn never found out who employed him—followed his car home from a commission meeting and photographed his chief of staff at home.

Dunn’s colleagues issued fiery, public denunciations of his proposal to consider cutting rates. Twinkle Cavanaugh, the commission president, said talking about rate reductions would allow “environmental extremist groups” to “trot out their fancy San Francisco environmental lawyers and junk science hucksters to make what amounts to a legal, judicial case against coal production within our borders.” She said Dunn’s proposal was orchestrated by environmentalists “hiding behind a curtain like the Wizard of Oz.”

The commission eventually held an informal meeting and approved changes to Alabama Power’s rate formula that Dunn denounced as weak.

To call Dunn’s proposal an attack on coal is preposterous, Archibald says—Alabama Power isn’t strictly a coal utility, and it imports a lot of coal from out-of-state. “But it seemed to work in getting the industry riled up,” he says. Utilities, such as Alabama Power, can’t spend money in Public Service Commission races. But energy wholesalers, including the companies lined up against Dunn, face no such restriction.

Dunn tells E & E News that some donors who previously supported him have abandoned him out of fear of industry backlash. He has not exactly made things easy on them: In February, he called for a bill to ban coal, gas, and electricity companies from donating to Public Service Commission candidates in future elections. The bill failed.

Alabama Power did not reply to requests for comment, but a spokesman previously told AL.com that the company had not become involved in the race. Beeker did not reply to messages left with his campaign and Beeker Catfish & Cattle Farms. Twinkle Cavanaugh, Drummond Company, Manufacture Alabama, and the Alabama Coal Association did not reply to requests for comment.

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This GOP Regulator Questioned Energy Companies—So They Spent Almost $500,000 to Defeat Him

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Scientists Are Beginning To Figure Out Why Conservatives Are…Conservative

Mother Jones

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You could be forgiven for not having browsed yet through the latest issue of the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences. If you care about politics, though, you’ll find a punchline therein that is pretty extraordinary.

Behavioral and Brain Sciences employs a rather unique practice called “Open Peer Commentary”: An article of major significance is published, a large number of fellow scholars comment on it, and then the original author responds to all of them. The approach has many virtues, one of which being that it lets you see where a community of scholars and thinkers stand with respect to a controversial or provocative scientific idea. And in the latest issue of the journal, this process reveals the following conclusion: A large body of political scientists and political psychologists now concur that liberals and conservatives disagree about politics in part because they are different people at the level of personality, psychology, and even traits like physiology and genetics.

That’s a big deal. It challenges everything that we thought we knew about politics—upending the idea that we get our beliefs solely from our upbringing, from our friends and families, from our personal economic interests; and calling into question the notion that in politics, we can really change (most of us, anyway).

The occasion of this revelation is a paper by John Hibbing of the University of Nebraska and his colleagues, arguing that political conservatives have a “negativity bias,” meaning that they are physiologically more attuned to negative (threatening, disgusting) stimuli in their environments. In the process, Hibbing et al. marshall a large body of evidence, including their own experiments using eye trackers and other devices to measure the involuntary responses of political partisans to different types of images. One finding? That conservatives respond much more rapidly to threatening and aversive stimuli (for instance, images of “a very large spider on the face of a frightened person, a dazed individual with a bloody face, and an open wound with maggots in it,” as one of their papers put it.)

In other words, the conservative ideology, and especially one of its major facets—centered on a strong military, tough law enforcement, resistance to immigration, widespread availability of guns—would seem well tailored for an underlying, threat-oriented biology.

The authors go on to speculate that this ultimately reflects an evolutionary imperative. “One possibility,” they write, “is that a strong negativity bias was extremely useful in the Pleistocene,” when it would have been super helpful in preventing you from getting killed. (The Pleistocene epoch lasted from roughly 2.5 million years ago until 12 thousand years ago.) We had John Hibbing on the Inquiring Minds podcast earlier this year, where he discussed these ideas in depth; you can listen here:

Hibbing and his colleagues make an intriguing argument in their latest paper, but what’s truly fascinating is what happened next. Twenty-six different scholars or groups of scholars then got an opportunity to tee off on the paper, firing off a variety of responses. But as Hibbing and colleagues note in their final reply, out of those responses, “22 or 23 accept the general idea” of a conservative negativity bias, and simply add commentary to aid in the process of “modifying it, expanding on it, specifying where it does and does not work,” and so on. Only about three scholars or groups of scholars seem to reject the idea entirely.

That’s pretty extraordinary, when you think about it. After all, one of the teams of commenters includes New York University social psychologist John Jost, who drew considerable political ire in 2003 when he and his colleagues published a synthesis of existing psychological studies on ideology, suggesting that conservatives are characterized by traits such as a need for certainty and an intolerance of ambiguity. Now, writing in Behavioral and Brain Sciences in response to Hibbing roughly a decade later, Jost and fellow scholars note that

There is by now evidence from a variety of laboratories around the world using a variety of methodological techniques leading to the virtually inescapable conclusion that the cognitive-motivational styles of leftists and rightists are quite different. This research consistently finds that conservatism is positively associated with heightened epistemic concerns for order, structure, closure, certainty, consistency, simplicity, and familiarity, as well as existential concerns such as perceptions of danger, sensitivity to threat, and death anxiety. Italics added

Back in 2003, Jost and his team were blasted by Ann Coulter, George Will, and National Review for saying this; congressional Republicans began probing into their research grants; and they got lots of hate mail. But what’s clear is that today, they’ve more or less triumphed. They won a field of converts to their view and sparked a wave of new research, including the work of Hibbing and his team.

Granted, there are still many issues yet to be worked out in the science of ideology. Most of the commentaries on the new Hibbing paper are focused on important but non-paradigm shifting side issues, such as the question of how conservatives can have a higher negativity bias, and yet not have neurotic personalities. (Actually, if anything, the research suggests that liberals may be the more neurotic bunch.) Indeed, conservatives tend to have a high degree of happiness and life satisfaction. But Hibbing and colleagues find no contradiction here. Instead, they paraphrase two other scholarly commentators (Matt Motyl of the University of Virginia and Ravi Iyer of the University of Southern California), who note that “successfully monitoring and attending negative features of the environment, as conservatives tend to do, may be just the sort of tractable task…that is more likely to lead to a fulfilling and happy life than is a constant search for new experience after new experience.”

All of this matters, of course, because we still operate in politics and in media as if minds can be changed by the best honed arguments, the most compelling facts. And yet if our political opponents are simply perceiving the world differently, that idea starts to crumble. Out of the rubble just might arise a better way of acting in politics that leads to less dysfunction and less gridlock…thanks to science.

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Scientists Are Beginning To Figure Out Why Conservatives Are…Conservative

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With the World Cup Over, What’s Next for Brazil?

Mother Jones

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The most expensive World Cup ever has come and gone with a German victory and a Brazilian implosion. The hosts suffered an embarrassing two-game skid at the end of the tournament—losing by a combined 10-1 score in the semifinals and third-place game—leaving Seleção fans from Rio de Janeiro to Manaus longing for the days of jogo bonito.

But as Slate‘s Joshua Keating pointed out, they also might be ready for change at the top. During Brazil’s historic 7-1 loss to Germany on Tuesday, fans reportedly started an obscene anti-Dilma Rousseff chant; the president decided to stop attending games after enduring taunts in the national team’s opener against Croatia. Meanwhile, the government crackdown on Cup protests recommenced on Saturday, when some 17 people were arrested in advance of the final.

With all the tensions surrounding the World Cup and the upcoming 2016 Summer Olympics, I reached out to Juliana Barbassa, a former Rio-based Associated Press reporter. Barbassa is now finishing up a book about the upheaval in Brazilian society that led to last year’s national protests and today’s lingering violence. We talked about the country’s growing middle class, soccer’s effect on the national psyche, and the post-World Cup/pre-Olympics political dynamic:

Mother Jones: How did you come to this topic?

Juliana Barbassa: My whole family is from Brazil. I ended up in the US because of my father’s work, and ended up going to college and graduate school and becoming a journalist there. Then I had this chance to come here as the AP’s correspondent in Rio, and I started thinking about this. In 2009-10, Rio had just gotten the Olympics. It already had the hosting of the World Cup up its sleeve, and growth was tremendous. It seemed like Brazil and Rio were on everyone’s radar.

Having known Brazil and Rio in the ’80s and ’90s, post-transition-to-democracy when the economy was in the dumps—hyperinflation, Brazilians leaving Brazil for the first time—I had some real questions about whether what was happening now was addressing these inequalities that had hamstrung the country. So I wanted to spend time with the people who, because of their jobs or where they lived or who they are, were at the nexus of some particular aspect of this change.

Once I started going through the process, I started to feel like the really important change that was happening here was happening in the middle class and the lower middle class. Yes, there are these Brazillionaires who have more money than they’ve ever had before and go on mega shopping sprees in New York. But we’ve always had the hyperrich. It felt like the real shift was happening among the lower socioeconomic classes.

MJ: What’s most notable?

JB: There’s a visible reduction in punch-in-the-gut poverty. People aren’t hungry in the same way that they were. This new middle-class thing is very real, and you see it in things like the number of adults wearing braces. It’s shocking. Also, the number of first-time Brazilian fliers—people who could never afford an air ticket. At the same time, part of what’s interesting is a sense of affluence that’s kind of based on stuff. Some of that’s access to food and basic needs, but also cellphones, credit cards, cars—all those things are selling like they never have before.

But you can have the stuff of the middle class and still lead a life that lacks a lot of the things that the middle class expect, like access to good education, decent transportation, sewage treatment, basic things like that. The rest of the services and rights and expectations haven’t been met yet.

MJ: What role did this group play in the protests we saw last year?

JB: The protests were very heterogeneous: people from all over, all walks of life, a lot of university-educated people, some of this new middle class. But these protests were sparked by a revolt over an increase in the bus fare of 10 cents American—a wealthy person isn’t going protest over that. The other demands they were making I see as generally very middle-class demands: A lot of the signs read things like “I want FIFA-quality schools,” “I want FIFA-quality hospitals,” “If my kid gets sick, I can’t take him to a stadium.”

And also the next step—a government that pays attention to the needs of the population and tries to meet them instead of putting on these big events that people were starting to feel maybe detract attention from the things that are really necessary, a government that’s less corrupt, these kinds of things. These are demands of a growing middle class that’s finding its voice.

MJ: Do people think of the World Cup and Olympics megaprojects as separate phenomena?

JB: I think most Brazilians have been thinking of them as one. Also, because of the way that projects have been hooked onto this event and that event, it isn’t necessarily clear. Here in Rio it doesn’t make sense. For one of the World Cup projects, one of the big deliverables was this transit route that was supposed to go from the airport to the far west. The far west is where we’re going to have a lot of the Olympic installation. There’s nothing related to the World Cup. So why is this rapid transit route part of the World Cup? Who knows. People didn’t really have a sense of what it would cost or what it would mean until we started to get close to the World Cup. I think it will be the same for the Olympics.

MJ: After all of the buildup, what was it like once the World Cup actually got here?

JB: Just before it started there was a lot of tension in the air. There was a poll that said the majority of Brazilians did not think that this was a positive thing for Brazil. There was a bit of grumpiness. There was basically like a holding back that is absolutely not the way that Brazil usually approaches the World Cup. So there were a lot of questions about how people would react when it started. What if Brazil loses? Will there be a big explosion of protests again? But there hasn’t.

I think a lot of people were really turned off by how violent these protests have been: violence by the police, which is heavily armed in these sort of Robocop outfits—full body armor, massive weapons, very ready with the pepper spray and stun grenades and things like that—and then these black blocs: people who use these violent tactics. I don’t think there is sense that it’s all forgotten and over. President Dilma Rousseff’s approval ratings are very low. I just don’t think that it’s manifesting as an anti-World Cup feeling. People are separating those things.

I feel like Brazilians used to identify with soccer. It was Brazil’s face abroad. Our national team, our biggest players, Pele and all that. There’s a Brazilian writer, Nelson Rodriguez, who was a real chronicler of soccer, who once said, “The national team was the nation in cleats.” It was that for a very long time. Ironically, now that the World Cup is here and the world is seeing Brazil and seeing the good and the bad, there is a little bit of a separation there. Brazilians by and large love their soccer, love their national team, but they don’t feel like either of them represents them—or that everything depends on whether Brazil wins or loses on the pitch.

MJ: Do you think the protests will return, and if so, will they be as large as last year? And what role will all of this play at the polls?

JB: It’s very unpredictable. Last year, nobody saw them coming. I do think people are more awake and aware about their rights and what’s owed to them. I don’t know if they’re unhappy enough to change it, but I do think that the country that we’ll have in 2016 is going to depend on how Brazilians process this change and how they see themselves, and the economic moment. We’re definitely post-boom. We haven’t grown since 2010. Jobs are still plentiful. Inflation is rising, but it’s not out of control. If those numbers start to change and people start to feel like they’re going to the supermarket and they can’t get as much as they used to—if it starts hitting people in the areas where it matters—I think that we might see more unrest.

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With the World Cup Over, What’s Next for Brazil?

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You’ll Be Shocked to Learn That Rupert Murdoch Is Wrong About Climate Change

Mother Jones

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This story originally appeared in Huffington Post and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Rupert Murdoch shrugged off the notion that climate change is a big deal in an interview on Sunday.

Speaking to Sky News Australia (which he partially owns), Murdoch dismissed the alarming reports coming from scientists about the devastating impact that climate change is causing to the planet.

“We should approach climate change with great skepticism,” he said. “Climate change has been going on as long as the planet is here. There will always be a little bit of it.”

Murdoch acknowledged that the changing planet could wipe out small countries like the Maldives, but he had a quick fix for that.

“We can’t stop it, we’ve just got to stop building vast houses on seashores,” he added. “The world has been changing for thousands and thousands of years, it’s just a lot more complicated today because we are more advanced.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Murdoch’s Fox News has been found to give its viewers the most inaccurate information on climate change of any American network.

(h/t Guardian)

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You’ll Be Shocked to Learn That Rupert Murdoch Is Wrong About Climate Change

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If Congress Wants to Know Who’s Responsible for the Immigration Crisis, It Should Look in a Mirror

Mother Jones

Why do we have an enormous backlog of immigration cases along our southern border? Well, as far back as 2006 the immigration backlog had already reached 169,000 cases, so the Bush administration asked for more funding for immigration judges. Congress ignored the request. Then, in 2008, we passed a law guaranteeing judicial proceedings for children who arrive from countries other than Canada or Mexico. That increased the backlog further, and when Barack Obama took office he tried to at least fill all the existing judicial vacancies. But as Stephanie Mencimer reports, that wasn’t nearly enough:

Immigration judges can expect to handle 1,500 cases at any given time. By comparison, Article I federal district judges handle about 440 cases, and they get several law clerks to help manage the load. Immigration judges have to share a single clerk with two or three other judges. The lack of staffing creates an irony that seems to be lost on the current Congress: Too few judges means that people with strong cases languish for years waiting for them to get resolved, while people with weak cases who should probably be sent home quickly get to stay in the United States a few years waiting for a decision.

….Today, there are 243 judges—just 13 more than in 2006 and 21 fewer than at the end of 2012—and more than 30 vacancies the government is trying to fill. All this despite the fact that the immigration court backlog has increased nearly 120 percent since 2006. And that was before the kids started coming.

Obama has tried to get funding for more judges as part of the annual budgeting process. No luck. He’s tried to pass comprehensive immigration reform that included funding for more judges. No luck. Now he’s trying to get emergency funding for the border crisis that would include money for more judges. So far, no luck.

There are, obviously, multiple causes of the current border crisis. As usual, though, Congress is one of them—and, in particular, obstructive congressional Republicans who aren’t really much interested in doing something that would fix an ongoing border crisis that provides them with useful political attack ads. If Congress needs someone to point the finger of blame at, all they have to do is look in a mirror.

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If Congress Wants to Know Who’s Responsible for the Immigration Crisis, It Should Look in a Mirror

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