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Opposition to Obamacare Suddenly Spiked in July

by ChantalWills Posted on August 1, 2014

Mother Jones

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Here’s the latest news on Obamacare from the Kaiser Family Foundation: it suddenly became a lot more unpopular in July:

So what happened? I can’t think of any substantive news that was anything but good, so I figure it must have been the Hobby Lobby decision. Did that turn people against Obamacare because they disapproved of the decision? Or because it reminded them that Obamacare pays for contraceptives? Or what? It’s a mystery, all the more so because every single demographic group showed the same spike. Democrats, Republicans, and Independents all spiked negative. The rich and the poor spiked negative. The young and the old spiked negative. Ditto for men, women, whites, blacks, and Hispanics. It’s a little hard to figure out why the Hobby Lobby decision would have affected everyone the same way, but I can’t think of anything else that happened over the past month that could have caused this. It certainly wasn’t John Boehner’s lawsuit, and I very much doubt it was the Halbig decision.

So it’s a bit of a puzzler—though perhaps another chart explains it. It turns out that in conversations with family and friends, people have heard bad things about Obamacare more than good things by a margin of 27-6 percent. Likewise, they’ve seen more negative ads than positive by a margin of 19-7 percent. Roughly speaking, the forces opposed to Obamacare continue to be louder and more passionate than the forces that support it. I don’t think that’s actually changed much recently, so it probably doesn’t explain the sudden spike in July’s polling. But it might explain part of it.

Or, it might just be a statistical blip. Who knows?

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Opposition to Obamacare Suddenly Spiked in July

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Are There Two Different Versions of Environmentalism, One "White," One "Black"?

by SCUMagaret Posted on July 31, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story was originally published on Grist.

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers
The mountains and the endless plain –
All, all the stretch of these great green states –
And make America again!
– Langston Hughes, 1938

I really didn’t want to have to address this. While reading through University of Michigan professor Dorceta Taylor’s latest report, “The State of Diversity in Environmental Organizations,” and thinking about what I would write about it, I had hoped to focus on the solutions. Those solutions—confronting unconscious and subconscious bias and other subtle forms of discrimination—are the parts I had hoped environmentalists would be eager to unpack.

I thought they’d read about the “green ceiling,” where mainstream green NGOs have failed to create a workforce where even two out of 10 of their staffers are people of color, and ask themselves what could they do differently. I thought, naively, that this vast report, complete with reams of data and information on the diversity problem, would actually stir some environmentalists to challenge some of their own assumptions about their black and brown fellow citizens.

I was wrong.

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Are There Two Different Versions of Environmentalism, One "White," One "Black"?

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Yes, the CIA Spied on the Senate

by Jeff Peterson Posted on July 31, 2014

Mother Jones

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Earlier this year, CIA Director John Brennan accused staffers from the Senate Intelligence Committee of removing classified material from the CIA office where they were researching a report on the agency’s use of torture during the Bush administration. This turned out to be very poor tradecraft on Brennan’s part, since it implicitly revealed the fact that the CIA was spying on Senate staffers even though it wasn’t supposed to. Brennan tried to mount a suitably aggressive counterattack to Senate outrage over this, but today it all came crashing down:

CIA employees improperly accessed computers used by the Senate Intelligence Committee to compile a report on the agency’s now defunct detention and interrogation program, an internal CIA investigation has determined.

….The statement represented an admission to charges by the panel’s chairwoman, Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., that the CIA intruded into the computers her staff used to compile the soon-to-be released report on the agency’s use of harsh interrogation methods on suspected terrorists in secret overseas prisons during the Bush administration.

CIA Director John Brennan briefed Feinstein and the committee’s vice chairman, Saxby Chambliss, R-GA, on the CIA inspector general’s findings and apologized to them during a meeting on Capitol Hill on Tuesday, Boyd said.

I find that my reaction remains one of schadenfreude. Dianne Feinstein and the rest of the Intelligence Committee seem to be mostly unconcerned with the omnipresent surveillance apparatus constructed by the US intelligence committee, so it’s hard to feel very sorry for them when they learn that this apparatus is also sometimes directed at Senate staffers. If this affair had persuaded a few senators that maybe our intelligence chiefs are less than totally honest about what they do, it might have done some good. But it doesn’t seem to have done that. With only a few exceptions, they’re outraged when the CIA spies on them, but that’s about it.

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Yes, the CIA Spied on the Senate

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Why American Politics Is Broken In One Sentence

by AundreaLyzht Posted on July 31, 2014

Mother Jones

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Dave Weigel explains modern politics in a single sentence:

Voters are aware of a border crisis, they are aware that Barack Obama is president—they blame him for nothing getting done.

Yep. Republicans can basically do anything they want and never get blamed for it. Most voters don’t even know who’s in control of Congress anyway. When something goes wrong, all they know is (a) something went wrong, and (b) Barack Obama is the president and he should have done something about it.

That being the case, what incentive do Republicans have for making things go right? Pretty much none. This is, roughly speaking, a fairly new insight, and it explains most of what you need to know about American politics in the Obama era.

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Why American Politics Is Broken In One Sentence

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Quote of the Day: Vulture Fund Suing Argentina Is Just a Lonely Defender of the Free Market

by RodgerLundie Posted on July 31, 2014

Mother Jones

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Here is fellow hedge fund manager Daniel Loeb defending Paul Singer, the billionaire owner of the vulture fund that successfully forced Argentina into default because it was insisting on full payment for old Argentine bonds:

He doesn’t get into fights for the sake of fighting. He believes deeply in the rule of law and that free markets and free societies depend on enforcing it.

You betcha. Anytime a Wall Street tycoon is supposedly fighting for deep principles, hold onto your wallet. They don’t become billionaires because of their deep commitment to fair play and the unfettered operation of capital markets. However, there’s also this:

The big question, however, is whether Argentina will ever pay Elliott what it wants. If the firm fails to collect, that would underscore the limits of its legal strategy. There is no international bankruptcy court for sovereign debt that can help resolve the matter. Argentina may use the next few months to try to devise ways to evade the New York court. Debt market experts, however, do not see how any such schemes could avoid using global firms that would not want to fall afoul of Judge Griesa’s ruling.

This is an interesting point. Normally, Argentina would just continue to pay the holders of its “exchange” bonds and refuse to pay the vulture funds that refused to go along with the terms of its bankruptcy and restructuring a decade ago. Elliott and the other vultures would be out of luck. The problem is that Argentina’s payments are funneled through a US bank, and the judge in the case has forced US banks to halt payments.

But in all the articles I’ve read about this, I’ve never really seen an adequate explanation of why it’s so impossible to avoid funneling payments through the US. I get that Argentina can no longer use an American US bank. Also, I assume, they can’t use a big global bank that does business in the US. But surely there are mid-size banks that do no business in the US that could act as payment agents? If dollars were the issue, they could pay off in euros instead. I don’t know what it would take legally for Argentina to switch either payment agents or the denominations of its bonds, but it doesn’t sound impossible. And yet apparently it is. Why?

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Quote of the Day: Vulture Fund Suing Argentina Is Just a Lonely Defender of the Free Market

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Lucy and the Great 10% Myth

by KelleePulido Posted on July 30, 2014

Mother Jones

Andrew Sullivan reminds me of something I was curious about the other day. He quotes Jeffrey Kluger, who writes in Time that he’s annoyed with the movie Lucy because it perpetuates the ridiculous myth that we only use 10 percent of our brains. I sympathize. I was sort of annoyed just by seeing that in the trailer. But it did make me wonder: where did this urban legend come from, anyway? Wikipedia to the rescue:

One possible origin is the reserve energy theories by Harvard psychologists William James and Boris Sidis…William James told audiences that people only meet a fraction of their full mental potential….In 1936, American writer Lowell Thomas summarized this idea….”Professor William James of Harvard used to say that the average man develops only ten percent of his latent mental ability.”

In the 1970s, psychologist and educator Georgi Lozanov, proposed the teaching method of suggestopedia believing “that we might be using only five to ten percent of our mental capacity.”….According to a related origin story, the 10% myth most likely arose from a misunderstanding (or misrepresentation) of neurological research in the late 19th century or early 20th century. For example, the functions of many brain regions (especially in the cerebral cortex) are complex enough that the effects of damage are subtle, leading early neurologists to wonder what these regions did.

Huh. So we don’t really know for sure. That’s disappointing but not surprising. It’s remarkable how often we don’t know where stuff like this comes from.

As for its continuing popular resonance, I have a theory of my own. There are an awful lot of people out there with remarkable—and apparently innate—mental abilities. They can multiply enormous numbers in their heads. They can remember every day of their lives. That kind of thing. And yet, they operate normally in other regards. The fact that they’ve stored, say, distinct memories of the past 15,000 days of their lives doesn’t seem to take up any cerebral space or energy that they needed for anything else. So surely all that storage and retrieval capacity is just sitting around unused in the rest of us?

No, it’s not. But the idea resonates because freakish mental skills seem to be so much further out on the bell curve than freakish physical skills. It makes the whole 10 percent thing seem pretty plausible. And that’s why it sticks around.

POSTSCRIPT: Or does it? I mean, has anyone tried to find out how many people still believe this myth? For all I know, everyone has long been aware that it’s not true. We need a poll!

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Lucy and the Great 10% Myth

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GDP Increases At a Smart 4.0% Rate in Second Quarter

by Sanora5810 Posted on July 30, 2014

Mother Jones

Here’s something that counts as good news: GDP increased in the second quarter at an annual rate of 4.0 percent. At the same time, the first quarter numbers were revised to a slightly less horrible -2.1 percent growth rate. This means, roughly speaking, that the economy has grown about 1.9 percent over the first half of the year.

Now, this is obviously nothing to write home about. A growth rate of 1 percent per quarter is pretty anemic. Still, it’s better than expectations after the terrible Q1 numbers, and the rebound in Q2 suggests there really was some make-up growth. A fair amount of this growth came from inventory build-up, which is normally a reason for caution, but after two previous quarters of inventory decline it’s probably not the warning sign it might otherwise be.

All in all, this is decent news. It’s still not possible to say that the economy is roaring along or anything, but the Q1 number now looks like it really was an anomaly. Slowly and sluggishly, the economy is continuing to recover for the ~95 percent of us who haven’t been unemployed for months or who haven’t given up and exited the labor force entirely. For those people, economic growth is still slow enough to leave them behind. One good quarter is nice, but we still have a lot of work to do.

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GDP Increases At a Smart 4.0% Rate in Second Quarter

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Color Me Skeptical About a Guaranteed Income for All

by HumbertKvy Posted on July 29, 2014

Mother Jones

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Should we have a guaranteed minimum income in the United States? Something nice and simple that would replace nearly our entire current alphabet soup of means-tested welfare programs?1 Dylan Matthews posts about this frequently, and others chime in occasionally as well. It even has some support among conservatives.

I am not so sure, myself. Keith Humphreys makes a couple of good points here, but I want to step back a bit. At a bare minimum, I need answers to four questions:

  1. How big would it be?
  2. Is it a family benefit or a personal benefit?
  3. Is it for adults only, or would children also qualify for a benefit?
  4. How would it phase out with income?

There are many more details to work out, all of them important, but I don’t think you can even begin to talk about this without answers to these four basic questions.

I’m skeptical about the whole thing because I don’t think you can make the details work out. Nor do I think that it’s politically feasible either now or in the future.2 What’s more, I’m always skeptical of ideas like this that haven’t been adopted by any other country, even the ones with far more liberal welfare states than ours. I figure there must be a reason for this.

But I’m happy to be proven wrong. Just give me a policy skeleton to work with. What exactly are we talking about here?

1Proponents usually (but not always) make exceptions for education and health care, which are too variable and too expensive to be handled by a simple minimum income.

2Perhaps it’s feasible in our far-distant robot future. Maybe even necessary. For now, though, let’s stick to the medium-term future.

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Color Me Skeptical About a Guaranteed Income for All

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Friday Cat Blogging – 25 July 2014

by RobertaRosenbau Posted on July 25, 2014

Mother Jones

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Say hello to Mozart, the latest addition to the Drum family menagerie. One of my mother’s neighbors found him wandering around, so naturally he ended up at my mother’s house. He’s a very sociable cat and appears to be very pleased with his choice of home. To celebrate his appearance, today you get two catblogging photos: one that shows his whole body and one that’s a close-up of his face. Enjoy.

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Friday Cat Blogging – 25 July 2014

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Republicans Maybe Not as Inept as We Think

by MarilynColburn Posted on July 25, 2014

Mother Jones

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Paul Waldman thinks Republicans have become a bunch of bumblers and idiots:

Think about it this way: Has there been a single instance in the last few years when you said, “Wow, the Republicans really played that one brilliantly”?

In fact, before you’ll find evidence of the ruthless Republican skillfulness so many of us had come to accept as the norm in a previous era, you’ll need to go back an entire decade to the 2004 election. George W. Bush’s second term was a disaster, Republicans lost both houses of Congress in 2006, they lost the White House in 2008, they decided to oppose health-care reform with everything they had and lost, they lost the 2012 election—and around it all they worked as hard as they could to alienate the fastest growing minority group in the country and make themselves seem utterly unfit to govern.

In fact, in the last ten years they’ve only had one major victory, the 2010 midterm election.

Hmmm. It’s true that the GOP has had a rough decade in a lot of ways. The number of self-IDed Republicans has plummeted since 2004; their standing among the fast-growing Hispanic population has cratered; and their intellectual core is now centered in a wing of the party that believes we should return to the gold standard. This isn’t a promising starting point for a conservative renaissance.

Still, let’s not kid ourselves. If Republicans were really as woefully inept as Waldman says, then Democrats should be kicking some serious ass these days. I haven’t especially noticed this. They won in the sixth year of Bush’s presidency, when out parties always win, and then won in 2008, when an economic collapse pretty much guaranteed a victory for anyone with a D after their name. Then they had a single fairly good year—followed by an epic blunder that lost them a sure seat in Massachusetts, and with it control of the Senate. They got crushed in 2010. They won a squeaker in 2012 against an opponent who made a wedding cake figurine look good by comparison. For the last four years, they’ve basically gotten nothing done at all.

And what about those Republicans? Well, they have a hammerlock on the House, and they might very well control the Senate after the 2014 election. They’ve won several notable Supreme Court victories (Heller, Citizens United, Hobby Lobby, etc.). They control a large majority of the states, and have passed a ton of conservative legislation in areas like voter ID and abortion restrictions. Their “Just Say No” strategy toward President Obama has tied Democrats in knots. They won an all but total victory on spending and deficits.

Nor is it really true that today’s GOP is notably more bumbling than it used to be. The myth of “ruthless Republican skillfulness” in the past is just that: a myth. George H.W. Bush screwed up on Supreme Court picks and tax hikes. Newt Gingrich—ahem—sure didn’t turn out to be the world historical strategic genius everyone thought he was in 1994. George W. Bush—with the eager backing of every Republican in the country—figured that a war in Iraq would be just the ticket to party dominance for a decade. Ditto for Social Security reform. Republicans were just sure that would be a winner. By contrast, their simpleminded Obama-era strategy of obstructing Democrats at all times and on all things has actually worked out pretty well for them given the hand they were dealt.

Make no mistake: It’s not as if Republicans have been strategic geniuses. There’s no question that they have some long-term issues that they’re unable to address thanks to their capitulation to tea party madness. But if they’re really so inept, how is it that in the past 15 years Democrats haven’t managed to cobble together anything more than about 18 months of modest success between 2009-10?

I dunno. Republicans keep getting crazier and crazier and more and more conservative, and liberals keep thinking that this time they’ve finally gone too far. I’ve thought this from time to time myself. And yet, moving steadily to the right has paid off pretty well for them over the past three decades, hasn’t it?

Maybe it will all come to tears in the near future as the lunatic wing of the party becomes even more lunatic, but we liberals have been thinking this for a long time. We haven’t been right yet.

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Republicans Maybe Not as Inept as We Think

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