Tag Archives: alejandro

We Are Being Tested By God. We’re Failing.

by MirandaI21 Posted on December 18, 2015

Mother Jones

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Oh come on, now he’s just trolling us for sure:

Brzezinski: Do you like Vladimir Putin’s comments about you?

Trump: Sure. When people call you brilliant, it’s always good, especially when the person heads up Russia.

Scarborough: Well, I mean, also, it’s a person that kills journalists, political opponents, and invades countries. Obviously, that would be a concern, would it not?

Trump: He’s running his country, and at least he’s a leader, you know, unlike what we have in this country.

Scarborough: Yeah. But, again, he kills journalists that don’t agree with him.

Trump: Well, I think our country does plenty of killing also, Joe, you know.

Scarborough: What do you mean by that?

Trump: There’s a lot of stupidity going on in the world right now, Joe. A lot of killing going on. A lot of stupidity. And that’s the way it is. But you didn’t ask me the question. You asked me a different question. So that’s fine.

“Joseph Kony? Bad guy, no doubt about it. But at least he’s a Christian, unlike what we have now. And a tough guy too, a leader. He knows what he wants and he’s willing to fight for it.”

This is turning into a bad Mel Brooks film.

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We Are Being Tested By God. We’re Failing.

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Quiz of the Day: What Is This Map?

by JuanBoettcher Posted on July 9, 2015

Mother Jones

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This map was released today as part of a 14-page research report. What is it?

Here are your choices:

  1. Donald Trump’s claim of how many states Republicans will win if they nominate him for president.
  2. The creeping spread of socialism in Barack Obama’s America.
  3. Other than white, the predominant color in each state’s flag.
  4. Which states make it easy to look up health care prices.

Yeah, the answer is #4. Red means your state got a letter grade of F. In other words, 45 out of 50 states do exactly nothing to make health care pricing transparent for their residents. Here’s how this plays out in real life:

If any single fact illuminates why reining in health care spending is going to be easier said than done, it might be this: we don’t even really know why a typical, low-risk childbirth costs $1,200 at some hospitals and $12,000 at others.

….In Massachusetts, a state that passed a law in 2012 to make health care costs more transparent but still gets a grade of F anyway. –ed., a research team trying to track down the price of a simple left knee MRI without a contrast dye found themselves transferred to six or seven departments and playing phone tag for days. Among 22 hospitals in a survey by Barbara Anthony, a senior fellow at the Pioneer Institute, a free market public policy think tank, it took anywhere from 10 minutes to nearly a week and a half to get an answer. If it’s that difficult to figure out how much it will cost to get a short scan to look at your knee, good luck trying to pin down the cost of the miracle of life.

Is there any other significant area of life where it’s virtually impossible to find out how much something will cost before you decide to buy it? I sure can’t think of one.

The full report is here, but it warns that “you will find little progress since last year and, in some cases, regression.” Sounds like a fun read.

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Quiz of the Day: What Is This Map?

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Router Failure Grounds Entire United Fleet

by PreciouKKNV Posted on July 8, 2015

Mother Jones

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Greece is in trouble. China is in trouble. Puerto Rico is in trouble. The New York Stock Exchange has been shut down over a “technical issue.” And United Airlines has halted all its flights:

United midday on Wednesday said that the grounding had been caused by a computer-network router that malfunctioned, which disrupted its passenger reservations system. That meant that many passengers couldn’t check in for their flights. The disruption affected some places more than others, but it covered the entire network, which was why United decided to ground its entire mainline and United Express fleet worldwide.

Yikes! The malfunction of a single router torpedoed United’s reservation system for an entire day? That must be a pretty delicate network they’re running there.

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Router Failure Grounds Entire United Fleet

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White Ballot Access, Black Ballot Access

by CarolynMazure Posted on July 7, 2015

Mother Jones

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Greg Sargent draws our attention today to a new report from the left-leaning Center for American Progress on, among other things, ballot access in all 50 states plus DC. They grade each state based on things like availability of preregistration, availability of in-person early voting, voter ID laws, voting wait times, and so forth.

You will be unsurprised by the results. The top map shows ballot access, with the darker colors indicating poor access. The bottom map shows the percentage of the African-American population in each state. Dark colors indicate a higher black population. Kinda funny how similar they look, isn’t it?

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White Ballot Access, Black Ballot Access

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A Republican Lawsuit Against Obama Will Mostly Just Piss Off Democrats

by DelilahRegister Posted on August 13, 2014

Mother Jones

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Here’s an interesting tidbit via Greg Sargent. The latest McClatchy poll asked voters what they think of (a) impeaching Obama and (b) suing Obama. A full 45 percent of Republicans favor impeachment and 57 percent favor suing him. But if John Boehner’s lawsuit goes forward, how will that impact voting in November? The answer is not very comforting for Republican strategists:

The lawsuit, it turns out, acts to motivate Democrats considerably more than Republicans. If Boehner & Co. were hoping to use this as a way of motivating their base to turn out in November, it looks an awful lot like it backfired.

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A Republican Lawsuit Against Obama Will Mostly Just Piss Off Democrats

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Marijuana Legalization Seems to Be Working Out….So Far

by MiloTQBHoozqo Posted on August 8, 2014

Mother Jones

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Here are a few typical headlines I’ve seen recently about Colorado’s legalization of marijuana:

Washington Post: Since marijuana legalization, highway fatalities in Colorado are at near-historic lows

Vox: Marijuana legalization didn’t stop Colorado’s decade-long decline in teen pot use

HuffPo: If Legalizing Marijuana Was Supposed To Cause More Crime, It’s Not Doing A Very Good Job

There’s a phrase missing from all of these: “so far.” I hope that pot legalization turns out great and every other state eventually follows the lead of Colorado and Washington. But honestly folks, it’s early days yet. Legalization almost certainly has long-term dynamics and feedback effects that we simply won’t know about for years. What happens during the first few months is all but meaningless. Even if the stories themselves are more nuanced, this ought to be reflected in the headlines too.

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Marijuana Legalization Seems to Be Working Out….So Far

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Notes Toward a Heuristic of Express Lane Ethics

by KarolinBradbury Posted on August 7, 2014

Mother Jones

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Over at Vox, Andrew Prokop summarizes a new poll about Americans’ ethical views. Here’s one result:

The US public is staunchly opposed to the apparently widespread problem of supermarket express lane abuse, with a clear majority saying they think multiple pieces of the same fruit should count as multiple items. Strangely, though, 20 percent of respondents apparently think there should be different rules for different shoppers.

OK, that is strange. Why should there be different rules for different shoppers? Is the idea here that we should bend the rules for the elderly or the infirm? Or for pregnant women? Or what?

As for fruit, it depends, doesn’t it? Surely a bunch of bananas still counts as one item? Or tomatoes on the vine? (Which I love because I adore the aroma of the vine.) How about two bunches of bananas? Does it make a difference if stuff is in a bag? Five apples in a plastic bag gets weighed as one item, whereas five apples rolling around in your basket have to be placed on the scale individually before the whole bunch of them gets weighed. Does that matter? Help me out here, hive mind.

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Notes Toward a Heuristic of Express Lane Ethics

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Today We Bring You a Nerd’s Eye View of the Olympics

by Aaron Darek Posted on February 21, 2014

Mother Jones

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A couple of days ago I whined about the annoyingly widespread humanization of Olympic athletes. Enough! We all know that what’s really important about sporting events is statistics, and the more obscure the better. So here are my candidates for nerdiest Olympic coverage so far. First up is Ryan Wallerson’s look at the best athletes of the Sochi games. Not by measuring scores or times or anything normal like that, but by measuring which athlete scored the most standard deviations from the mean in their event. The winner is Poland’s Kamil Stoch in ski jumping:

Next up is a look at which countries have done the best. Not by crudely counting medals or per capita medals or any of that nonsense. This chart looks how countries have done so far compared to how many medals they were predicted to win. The big winner, at 183 percent, is the Netherlands, thanks to their kick-ass performance in speed skating. The most dismal performance so far is from South Korea, at 31 percent. But there are still two days left!

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Today We Bring You a Nerd’s Eye View of the Olympics

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Obamacare Signups From the Uninsured Appear to Be Surging

by GonzaloQuiros Posted on February 19, 2014

Mother Jones

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Out of all the Obamacare signups to date, how many are from people who were previously uninsured? Extrapolating from signups in New York, Charles Gaba provides the following estimates:

October, November, December — perhaps 50% of 2.15 million = 1.075 million previously uninsured
January — perhaps 75% of 1.15 million = 863,000 previously uninsured
February — probably 90% out of, say, 700,000 = 630,000 previously uninsured
March — probably at least 95% out of (unknown number, depends on strength of the expected “March surge”…assume 1.0 – 1.5 million?) = perhaps 0.9 – 1.4 million previously uninsured

Unsurprisingly, people who were already insured dominated the early signups. Since the beginning of 2013, however, it’s mostly been people who are getting insurance for the first time. If Gaba is right, by March we’ll have about 4 million workers who are newly insured via private plans, plus several more millions who have newly qualified for Medicaid. It’s a start.

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Obamacare Signups From the Uninsured Appear to Be Surging

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Paul Ryan is the Odds-On Favorite to Win the Republican Nomination in 2016

by siteforme Posted on February 6, 2014

Mother Jones

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There’s been a lot of blathering about who the front runner for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination is, and so far I’ve resisted taking part. But I guess I’m kind of curious: Is there much of a case to be made for anyone other than Paul Ryan?

On the substantive side, Ryan sure seems like he’s setting himself up for a run. There’s his steady series of “unheralded” anti-poverty outreach trips that always manage to be just heralded enough to get sympathetic press coverage. He brokered a budget deal with Patty Murray that was businesslike and low-drama but didn’t alienate the tea party crowd too badly. Today, in a hearing about the CBO’s report on Obamacare, he acknowledged that the report didn’t say that employers would be cutting jobs—points for intellectual honesty!—while also calling Obamacare a “poverty trap”—points for demagoguery! This is all stuff that seems very delicately calculated to stay in the good graces of the tea party base while building up plenty of policy substance cred that will keep him attractive to moderate voters.

On the flip side, who are his big competitors? Chris Christie is toast. Marco Rubio is inexperienced to begin with, and then muffed his chance for statesmanlike glory when he staked his reputation on immigration reform and came up empty. Jeb Bush can’t even get his mother’s endorsement. Scott Walker is getting buzz, but he strikes me as having too much baggage. Rand Paul and Ted Cruz are novelty candidates, not to be taken seriously. And although I used to think Bobby Jindal might have a chance, he’s had a rough past couple of years.

Maybe I’m dismissing all these guys a little too glibly. Walker and Bush are certainly serious possibilities. And I admit that Ryan doesn’t always give off a vibe that says he’s running for president. And of course, we’re still a couple of years away from 2016, anything can happen, blah blah blah.

Still, ol’ blue eyes sure looks like the favorite to me right now. Anyone want to make a case for one of the others?

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Paul Ryan is the Odds-On Favorite to Win the Republican Nomination in 2016

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