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Republicans All Seem to Like Obama’s Strategy to Defeat ISIS

by OuidaLindstrom Posted on December 8, 2015

Mother Jones

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Do any of the Republican candidates have a plan for defeating ISIS? As near as I can tell, most of them have offered up variations on this:

Bomb ISIS, just like Obama, but better.
Use Iraqi ground troops, just like Obama, but better.
Put together a coalition of local allies, just like Obama, but better.

Am I missing anything? Aside from being more bellicose (the sand will glow, we’ll bomb the shit out of them, etc.), all of the candidates are saying that Obama’s strategy is basically sound, but they’d tweak it a bit here and there. They’d stop worrying about civilian deaths so they could drop more bombs. They’d somehow train Iraqi forces better than the Army is doing right now. And they’d put together a real coalition, though it’s never really clear what they mean by that or how they’d accomplish it.

Anything else?

Continued – 

Republicans All Seem to Like Obama’s Strategy to Defeat ISIS

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President Obama’s Air Campaign Against ISIS

by Kali73Ukpvrtfio Posted on November 16, 2015

Mother Jones

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By popular demand, here is a chart version of last night’s post about the French airstrike on Sunday vs. the ongoing coalition air campaign. Note that we’ve dropped a total of about 28,000 bombs and missiles over the past year, and so far the effect has been real but modest. There’s just a limit to what air power can do, especially in a region like northern Iraq.

Link:

President Obama’s Air Campaign Against ISIS

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Jeffrey Lacker Says Real Wages are Going Up. Is He Right?

by Daniela75Q Posted on November 12, 2015

Mother Jones

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Binyamin Applebaum asks inflation hawk Jeffrey Lacker why inflation hasn’t risen if labor markets are tight, as he believes:

….There’s this confusion about real and nominal that I think infects the discussion, particularly of wages and slack. Real wages have accelerated over the last year because inflation has fallen and the rate of gain in nominal wages hasn’t changed much. The wage pressures we’ve been hearing about, they show up in the macro data as real wage pressures.

And the historical evidence suggests that there’s some lag before things accelerate as you reduce slack significantly. In 1966-67, we had unemployment at 5 percent, we pushed it to 4, and it was 1967 and 1968 when inflation took off. So there was a significant lag in the way that relationship seems to have worked in the past.

That got me curious: have real wages risen over the past couple of years? My preferred measure is production and nonsupervisory wages, and it looks like Lacker is right. Compared to CPI, the general trend is upward. It doesn’t look to me like it’s accelerating, but it does seem to be going up.

Continued – 

Jeffrey Lacker Says Real Wages are Going Up. Is He Right?

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Friday Cat Blogging – 10 July 2015

by ChanteOakley6 Posted on July 10, 2015

Mother Jones

Hopper was up in her usual spot on my stomach, but when I crossed my legs she sort of slid on down into the crook between my knees. She seemed pretty happy with it, though in this picture I think she’s telling me impatiently to hold still and stop shifting my legs around. So I did. A few minutes later she was snoozing away, saving up energy for her next round of mayhem and destruction. Someday she’s going to catch that laser pointer!

From – 

Friday Cat Blogging – 10 July 2015

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Friday Cat Blogging – 19 June 2015

by KristalSilvey Posted on June 19, 2015

Mother Jones

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This is our latest horror story. For reasons unknown (and they’re always unknown, aren’t they?) Hopper has decided that it’s great fun to jump up on the second-story bannister and walk around. We can’t think of any way to stop her from doing this, but one of these days she’s going to set a paw wrong and go flying off the wrong side. Being a cat, maybe it won’t hurt her. But it’s a twelve-foot drop, and some of it is onto a hardwood floor. We have visions of splat going through our heads.

What do we do? Put up a net, like those ones they have on the Golden Gate Bridge to catch jumpers? Get rid of the quilts and install razor wire? Put cat-size exercise weights on Hopper’s feet so she can’t jump so high? There’s got to be an answer.

This article: 

Friday Cat Blogging – 19 June 2015

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Jeb Bush Doesn’t Want to Repeal Obamacare. Maybe.

by LawrencB82 Posted on June 16, 2015

Mother Jones

This is interesting from Sarah Kliff:

Jeb Bush laid out his top policies Monday in a speech announcing his run for the 2016 Republican nomination. But he left out one big Republican priority: repealing Obamacare….This reflects the changing politics of Obamacare. As Obamacare becomes more and more entrenched, it builds a constituency. As more people sign up for Obamacare, it becomes increasingly difficult to take away both practically and politically. So Republicans, who once ran and won calling for its end, are beginning to abandon the line.

Jeb has been fuzzy on Obamacare for a while, to the point where it’s been hard to know where he actually stands. It’s clear enough that he doesn’t like Obamacare—it’s a “monstrosity” and the “greatest job suppressor of the recovery”—but he never goes much beyond this kind of pro forma denunciation. So it’s not surprising that he didn’t give it a lot of attention in his announcement speech.

Still, it’s something to watch. Will he be gung ho for repeal once he’s on a debate stage with all the other candidates? Or will he stay soft and get pilloried? And if he does, how will this affect him with Republican voters?

Have any of the other ten GOP candidates who have announced so far gone soft on Obamacare repeal? This should be a research project for someone other than me. Inquiring minds want to know.

Taken from: 

Jeb Bush Doesn’t Want to Repeal Obamacare. Maybe.

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No, We Won’t Leave You Alone

by HenrietTKQ Posted on June 13, 2015

Mother Jones

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In response (I assume) to my nasty post about libertarians a few days ago, Cameron Belt tweets:

leaving people alone, what a radical idea!

This is pretty standard libertarian stuff, and on a personal level I’m sympathetic. I’m not quite a hermit, but I really do like to be left alone most of the time.

But for some reason it got me thinking. I wonder if the people who repeat this bromide understand just how radical an idea it actually is. Humans are, and always have been, social, hierarchical creatures. In every society since civilization began,1 it’s been all but impossible to be left alone. It’s such an unusual thing, in fact, that those who manage to spend a lot of time in solitude are often spoken of with reverence and awe. Spending even a few days in solitude is powerful enough that it’s been a rite of passage in a surprising number of cultures.

But for the other 99.9 percent of us, the norm is to be among, dependent, and answerable to other people. Family members, priests, bosses, governments, neighbors, police, creditors, merchants, and hundreds of others. In any society with more than about two people this is, and always has been, how humans organize themselves. We are gossipy and we are bossy. We are busybodies, we are rulemakers, we are rebels, we are moral scolds, and we are friends. (And enemies.)

So yes: leaving people alone really is a radical idea. Probably unworkable too, but that’s secondary. We are all merely hairless primates and we just aren’t going to mind our own business. Best get used to it.

1Yes, yes, I’m sure there’s an exception somewhere. Spare me.

Link to original: 

No, We Won’t Leave You Alone

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