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The July Surprise

by Donnie6686 Posted on July 7, 2015

Mother Jones

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Ed Kilgore surveys the Republican primary landscape and throws out a few thoughts about the upcoming first debate on Fox:

Fox will allow only ten participants, chosen by the results of five national polls taken in the week or so before August 4.
Right now, Donald Trump is sucking up all the media oxygen, making it hard for marginal candidates to move up in the polls and avoid being forced into the kiddie debate.
This makes the end of July a critical period for all the C-list candidates.

Here’s Kilgore:

It’s increasingly clear the polling spike marginal candidates need to make the cut needs to happen in late July—not earlier, not later….John Kasich’s scheduled July 21st campaign launch probably couldn’t be timed much better; if he gets a post-announcement bounce, it could bounce him right up into the top ten. For those in the danger zone who have already announced—Perry, Jindal, Santorum, Graham, Fiorina, Pataki and maybe even Christie—the only way to get this sort of bounce is to force one’s way into the news.

So for these candidates, the big strategic question is whether throwing a bomb or three in late July to make the Fox debate cut is worth the long-term risk of self-marginalization. The alternative is to accept a place at the kiddie table “forum” earlier on August 6 and hope media, activists, donors and party elites don’t mentally strike one’s name from the insanely long list of contenders. I’m guessing most of these birds will not want to take that chance. Get ready for some serious gyring and gimbling in late July.

Sounds like fun! I hope they all take Kilgore’s advice. But what kind of bombshell could they drop that would make social media go wild? Discuss in comments, please.

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The July Surprise

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Friday Cat Blogging – 29 August 2014

by AmberSuttor Posted on August 29, 2014

Mother Jones

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It’s the return of quilt blogging! Sort of. In any case, there’s a quilt in the background because that happens to be where Domino was posing this week. I think she’s auditioning to be the model for a new pair of sculptures outside the New York Public Library.

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Friday Cat Blogging – 29 August 2014

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Chart of the Day: When Women Fail, They Pay a Bigger Price Than Men

by AlissaQdkhqo Posted on August 29, 2014

Mother Jones

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The chart below is not part of a study that examines a statistically random set of data. It’s quite informal, and probably suffers from some inherent sampling biases. Nonetheless, it’s pretty astonishing:

Here’s the background: Kieran Snyder asked men and women working in the tech industry to share their performance reviews with her. Virtually all of them were high performers who got generally strong reviews. But it wasn’t all positive:

In the 177 reviews where people receive critical feedback, men and women receive different kinds. The critical feedback men receive is heavily geared towards suggestions for additional skills to develop….The women’s reviews include another, sharper element that is absent from the men’s:

“You can come across as abrasive sometimes. I know you don’t mean to, but you need to pay attention to your tone.”

Etc.

This kind of negative personality criticism—watch your tone! step back! stop being so judgmental!—shows up twice in the 83 critical reviews received by men. It shows up in 71 of the 94 critical reviews received by women.

This comes via Shane Ferro, who concludes that there’s probably good reason for women to be more cautious than men in their professional lives. It’s easy to tell women they shouldn’t be afraid to fail. “But we as a society (men and women), need to stop judging women so harshly for their flaws. For them to be equally good, it has to be okay that they are equally bad sometimes.”

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Chart of the Day: When Women Fail, They Pay a Bigger Price Than Men

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BREAKING: Economy Continues to Stagnate

by Dominic58J Posted on August 29, 2014

Mother Jones

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If, despite my warnings, you allowed yesterday’s upward GDP revision to kindle a tiny spark of excitement about the economy, today’s news should bring you right back down to earth:

Household spending fell in July, a sign that cautious consumers could hold back economic growth in the second half of the year….Personal income, reflecting income from wages, investment, and government aid, rose 0.2% in July—the smallest monthly increase of the year….Meanwhile, the report showed a key measure of inflation—the personal consumption expenditures price index—rose 1.6% in July from a year earlier. That matched the prior month’s annual gain, and is below the Federal Reserve’s 2% long-run target for the 27th straight month.

Spending is down, which is no surprise since personal income is pretty much flat. This suggests that perhaps we could tolerate a wee bit higher inflation as a way of getting the economy moving, but of course we can’t do that. Sure, inflation has been below its target for 27 months, but you never know. The 28th month might be different! And even the prospect of a single month of moderate inflation runs the risk of turning us into Zimbabwe.

So instead we just sit and stagnate.

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BREAKING: Economy Continues to Stagnate

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In the Restaurant Biz, It Pays To Be a Man

by BrendanMauger Posted on August 28, 2014

Mother Jones

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Via Wonkblog, here’s a chart showing the pay gap between men and women in the restaurant industry. It comes from a recently released EPI report, and as you can see, not only are men better paid in virtually every category, but the premium goes up for the highest paying jobs. Bussers and cashiers are paid nearly the same regardless of gender. But when you move up to cooks, bartenders, and managers, the premium ranges from 10-20 percent.

This data isn’t conclusive. There are other reasons besides gender for pay gaps, and the EPI report lists several of them. Whites make more than blacks. High school grads make more than dropouts. Older workers make more than younger ones. You’d need to control for all this and more to get a more accurate picture of the gender gap.

But in a way, that misses the point. There are lots of reasons for the gender gap in pay. Some is just plain discrimination. Some is because women take off more time to raise children. Some is because women are encouraged to take different kinds of jobs. But all of these are symptoms of the same thing. In a myriad of ways, women still don’t get a fair shake.

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In the Restaurant Biz, It Pays To Be a Man

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Quote of the Day: Let’s Just Drop a Few Bombs and See What Happens

by LettieOdum Posted on August 27, 2014

Mother Jones

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From Bill Kristol, during an appearance on conservative radio host Laura Ingraham’s show, bringing his megawatt analytic powers to bear on the problem of ISIS in Iraq:

What’s the harm of bombing them at least for a few weeks and seeing what happens? I don’t think there’s much in the way of unanticipated side effects that are going to be bad there.

You can’t make this stuff up. We liberals often accuse folks like Kristol of mindlessly advocating military action all the time, no matter what. But we’re exaggerating, aren’t we? Nobody literally wants to unleash an air campaign just to see what happens. Nobody just casually ignores the possible drawbacks. That’s ridiculous! Why do we insist on juvenile caricatures like this?

I don’t know. Why do we?

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Quote of the Day: Let’s Just Drop a Few Bombs and See What Happens

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Nothing Left to Steal?

by JohnnieR41 Posted on July 14, 2014

Mother Jones

Megan McArdle points out that cars are a lot harder to steal than they used to be:

Other forms of crime are also getting less lucrative. “Small-time marijuana dealer” is no longer a viable career option in several states. Robbery is also getting tougher. As credit card transactions have come to dominate cash, the potential return from mugging someone, or knocking over a gas station, has fallen dramatically. Even burglars are facing some challenges: Expensive televisions are now too big to carry unless you bring a dolly and a truck, home theater systems are often wired into the wall, and at least in my circles, women don’t wear as much fancy jewelry or mink as they used to. For a while, small electronics made up the cash gap for burglars, muggers, and purse snatchers, but cell phone manufacturers are putting in “kill switches” starting in 2015, which will torpedo that market.

Well, perhaps in years to come thieves will turn to technology to improve their productivity. I don’t know how, but then again, we rarely predict technological revolutions in advance, do we? Maybe new smartphone apps will allow thieves to target more lucrative mugging victims? Or geolocation apps will predict which homes are likely to contain the most easily fencible items? Or maybe sophisticated data mining operations will produce new and innovative opportunities for blackmail. Beats me. But somehow offense and defense always seem to keep up with each other, don’t they?

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Nothing Left to Steal?

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Quote of the Day: Bizarro John Boehner Joins Twitter

by Maddiso5893 Posted on July 8, 2014

Mother Jones

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Steve Benen points me to the latest foray into social networking from Speaker John Boehner:

Democrats like to say they want to fix #ObamaCare, but where’s their plan? They don’t have one.

It’s not worth belaboring the fact that this is epically dumb. What I’m curious about is what Boehner thinks this will accomplish. Who is it supposed to appeal to? To the tea party true believers, it’s too weak to be effective. They want read meat. To liberals it’s just laughable. To folks in the middle it’s incomprehensible. To the media—which knows perfectly well that Dems have plenty of ideas and Republicans are hopelessly fractured over health care—it’s idiotic.

So who’s the audience for this?

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Quote of the Day: Bizarro John Boehner Joins Twitter

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Does America Finally Have World Cup Fever?

by EddieStreeton Posted on July 2, 2014

Mother Jones

I’ve been reading a lot of articles about how this year’s World Cup is a lot more popular in America than any previous World Cup. I’ve also read several backlash pieces debunking the idea that we’re all about to go soccer mad. I’m not sure which to believe.

But there really does seem to be something different this year. I’ve personally watched all or most of the World Cup games so far, and I’m pretty sure that in past years I’ve hardly watched any. Why? Beats me. I’m not really any more interested in soccer than I’ve ever been.

Or am I? As kind of a joke, I started rooting for Manchester United back in 2008 because they were sponsored by AIG. After the US government basically took over AIG, I figured that meant Man U was America’s team. But joke though it may have been, over the last few years I have indeed found myself checking the Premier League standings periodically and even watching the odd match when it appears on American TV. Perhaps that’s primed me to look forward to the World Cup.

Or maybe it’s just time zones. This is the first World Cup since 1994 that Americans could watch live at a reasonable hour. And we all know that being able to watch live is critical to sports viewership.1 So maybe that’s all it is.

How about you? Have you been watching more World Cup than usual this year? Why? Is it because you care more about soccer than you used to? Or something else?

1Except for the Olympics, for some reason.

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Does America Finally Have World Cup Fever?

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Obama Fights Back on Highways

by CharliCYLL Posted on July 2, 2014

Mother Jones

President Obama needled Republicans yesterday about not passing a highway bill. “I mean, they’re not doing anything,” he said, “Why don’t they do this?” Today Paul Waldman told him:

Well, the reason they don’t do it isn’t hard to figure out: It costs money, and that means raising taxes to pay for it, which Republicans don’t like to do. We could also pay for it with deficit spending, but they don’t like that, either. And while the jokes are certainly good for a laugh from a friendly crowd, I’m not sure whether Obama thinks that’s actually going to make Republicans more inclined to work with him on this.

That’s Obama’s eternal problem, isn’t it? Early in his presidency he bent over backwards to play nice with Republicans, and got savaged for it by lefties. “Get tough!” they said. But he played nice because he had no choice. He needed two or three Republican votes to pass anything, and if he’d played hardball he wouldn’t have gotten them.

Now, having given up on Republican cooperation, he’s playing hardball and….getting criticism that this kind of thing isn’t likely to make Republicans any more inclined to work with him. Damned if he does, damned if he doesn’t.

Oh well. That’s life in the White House. The reality, of course, is even worse than Waldman paints it. Republicans don’t actually have to raise gasoline taxes at all. All they have to do is vote to keep them constant when you adjust for inflation. But keeping taxes constant still makes them higher than allowing them to decline automatically every year, so in Republican theology this counts as a tax hike. And that means no highways for you. Republicans would rather let them crumble into dust than approve so much as a penny in additional gasoline taxes.

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Obama Fights Back on Highways

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