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Ted Cruz Shoots Self in Foot, Declares Victory

by Greg3678myvmzjm Posted on December 14, 2014

Mother Jones

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File this under “with friends like this, who needs enemies?”

Republican senators fumed as a strategy developed by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) intended to undercut President Obama’s immigration action seemed to backfire, giving Democrats a chance to move a batch of controversial Obama administration appointments.

….Saturday’s session was required after conservative Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) objected to an effort by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) late Friday to adjourn the Senate for the weekend….He and Cruz had sought to force a vote to strip out funding that would be used to implement Obama’s plan to halt deportations for as many as 5 million immigrants.

Without the ability to leave for the weekend, Reid instead began the process of bringing 20 long-stalled nominations to a vote, including Obama’s nominee for surgeon general, Vivek Murthy, who was a target of groups like the powerful National Rifle Assn. over his advocacy for stricter gun laws. Shortly after noon the Senate began the first of what could be 40 procedural votes that could lead to confirming all the nominees by the end of the week.

The Cruz/Lee proposal was entirely symbolic in not just one, but two separate ways:

It was merely a “point of order” to express opposition to funding President Obama’s executive order on immigration. It would have accomplished nothing.
It had little chance of passing anyway.

So now everyone has to spin their wheels on the Senate floor over the weekend instead of seeing their families or watching the Army-Navy game. By itself, that might deserve only the world’s tiniest violin. But as long they’re there and have some extra time, Harry Reid decided to start the process of approving a whole bunch of Obama nominations that otherwise might have dropped off the calendar later in the week as senators began pressing to start the holiday recess. That meant Obama’s nominees would have had to face a Republican Senate in January, but now, thanks to Cruz and Lee, they’ll all be safely in office by then.

I’m sure the NRA is thrilled. Ditto for all the Republicans who were apoplectic over the nomination of Tony Blinken as deputy secretary of state. And megadittoes—with a megadose of irony—for Cruz, Lee, and all their tea party buddies who objected to confirming Sarah Saldaña to head Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Their objection, of course, was meant as a protest against Obama’s executive order on immigration. Now, thanks to a dumb little stunt that was pathetic even as an empty protest against Obama’s immigration plan, they’re going to lose an actual, substantive protest against an Obama immigration nominee. Nice work, guys.

But I guess it’s a nice big platter of red meat that plays well with the rubes. With Cruz, that’s all that counts.

UPDATE: You gotta love this:

Only the Democrats seemed able to wrest a modicum of enjoyment from the day’s proceedings. Senator Benjamin L. Cardin, Democrat of Maryland, said that it was “inconvenient to be here voting around the clock” but that he was “kind of pleased at how it’s working out.” Mr. Cardin said, “We will get these confirmations done, and we may not have gotten them done otherwise.” And as Senator John Cornyn of Texas, the No. 2 Senate Republican, struggled to explain to a group of reporters just what Mr. Cruz was trying to achieve, Senator Cory Booker, Democrat of New Jersey, loped by and clapped him on the shoulder.

“Let me know if you need backup,” Mr. Booker said with a grin.

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Ted Cruz Shoots Self in Foot, Declares Victory

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James Risen Will Not Be Required to Reveal His Sources for "State of War"

by KatherineUbc Posted on December 13, 2014

Mother Jones

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From the New York Times:

Preet Bharara, the United States attorney in Manhattan wants to force Richard Bonin, a longtime producer for “60 Minutes,” to testify next month at a terrorism trial over bombings by Al Qaeda in 1998. One of the two defendants, Khaled al-Fawwaz, is accused of running Al Qaeda’s media office in London. Prosecutors want Mr. Bonin to discuss his dealings with the group’s media office in an unsuccessful effort to interview Osama bin Laden in 1998, officials and others briefed on the case said.

Wait. What? Al Qaeda had a media office?

In other, better news, Eric Holder has decided not to subpoena New York Times reporter James Risen in an effort to force him to reveal the sources for his book, State of War. “If the government subpoenas Risen to require any of his testimony,” a Justice Department official said, “it would be to confirm that he had an agreement with a confidential source, and that he did write the book.” I don’t know how Risen feels about that, but it’s obviously much less pernicious than threatening jail time for refusing to identify a source.

This comes via Doug Mataconis, who argues persuasively that the arbitrary nature of federal prosecutions against reporters for refusing to reveal a source is exactly why we need to pass some kind of federal shield law for reporters. Even if it turned out to be weaker than many of us would like—pretty much a dead certainty, I’d say—at the very least it would provide some consistent guidance for both judges and media members.

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James Risen Will Not Be Required to Reveal His Sources for "State of War"

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Disneyland Is the Latest Victim of Thin-Skinned 1-Percenters

by SamGresswell Posted on December 13, 2014

Mother Jones

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If you don’t live in Southern California—or if you do, but have a life—you might not be aware of Club 33, a “secret” club at Disneyland coveted by the rich and famous as a hideway from the hoi polloi at the park. (And, not coincidentally, the only place at Disneyland that serves alcoholic beverages.) It’s so coveted, in fact, that there’s no waiting list for membership. Years ago, it got so long that Disneyland just closed it.

Today, the LA Times passes along breaking news that has outraged the 1% who are the primary (only?) denizens of the place:

For access to what is billed as “the most exclusive address in all of Disneyland” — Club 33 — many members pay $11,000 a year….The current uproar has to do with how many extra VIP cards are allotted to platinum members.

The cards allow a lucky few to enjoy many of the benefits of a member, including access to Disney parks and dining at the secretive Club 33 restaurant, tucked away in Disneyland’s New Orleans Square….But last week, platinum members received a letter that said in 2015 only the member and a spouse or domestic partner would have Club 33 benefits, while the price for the platinum level would rise to $12,000….A current platinum VIP cardholder was enraged. “It really has just turned to a money game for them.”

OMG! “It really has just turned to a money game for them.” This is mighty rich coming from someone who is almost certainly wealthy as hell and probably considers himself a rock-jawed supporter of laissez-faire capitalism. But if Disneyland raises the price and changes the terms of a product that obviously has far more demand than supply, why, it’s just an example of a bunch of ruthless money-grubbers taking advantage of the downtrodden. How dare they?

Plus he’s dead wrong anyway. First of all, last I looked Disney was a public corporation widely admired in the business world for its money-making prowess. Of course it’s a money game for them. Second, the waiting list for Club 33 is so long that it’s closed. Quite plainly, they could double or triple the price of a platinum card and keep their membership at the same level. In other words, if they really were just ruthless money-grubbers, they could instantly double or triple their revenues for Club 33 with the stroke of a pen. The fact that they haven’t done this clearly suggests some combination of loyalty to longtime members along with an understandable desire to avoid a PR headache.

Anyway, that’s Orange County for you. Home of conservative Republicans who have an abiding faith in the free market when they’re the ones setting the rules, but get in a snit when they themselves end up on the business end of the not-so-invisible hand. You can file this under the shockingly thin skins of the rich when they aren’t treated with the fawning deference they all think is their birthright.

UPDATE: Here’s a note for aficionados of behavioral economics. As near as I can tell, the outrage here is not over the modest 9 percent price increase. It’s over the loss of a perk. This is an example of people responding far more strongly to loss than to gain. And in this case it’s especially irksome because it’s the loss of a perk that allows a member to very publicly show off their status. “Going to Disneyland? Here, why don’t you take one of my VIP cards and eat at Club 33. It’s great.” This is a chance to do a favor for someone and show off your ownership of a normally invisible status symbol that money can’t buy. But now it’s gone.

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Disneyland Is the Latest Victim of Thin-Skinned 1-Percenters

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Friday Cat Blogging – 12 December 2014

by BrunoSargood Posted on December 12, 2014

Mother Jones

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Last week, Hilbert got catblogging all to himself. This week it’s Hopper’s turn. Marian took this picture of Hopper gazing out the kitchen window with the bird bath in the background—and that’s no coincidence. The bird bath and the hummingbird feeders are objects of endless fascination.

In other news, I have a follow-up from last week. Now that he’s taken its measure, it turns out that Hilbert can jump onto the fireplace mantle with ease. No furious runup necessary. However, it also turns out that having taken its measure, he’s now bored with it. There’s no challenge left, I guess. So the mantle is safe once again. Maybe. Until he gets bored. Welcome to kittenland.

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Friday Cat Blogging – 12 December 2014

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Chart of the Day: The World Has More Oil Than It Needs

by ziarullibertatealocuridemunca Posted on December 12, 2014

Mother Jones

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I don’t have a lot to say about this, but I wanted to pass along this chart from Chris Mooney over at Wonkblog. Basically, it shows that although both supply and demand for oil have been roughly in sync for the past five years, demand abruptly dropped earlier this year and is projected to stay low next year. This is why prices have dropped so far: not because supply has skyrocketed thanks to fracking—the supply trendline is actually fairly smooth—but because the world is using less oil.

This is a short-term blip, and I don’t want to make too much of it. Still, regular readers will remember that one of the biggest problems with oil isn’t high prices per se. The world can actually get along OK with high oil prices. The problem is spikes in oil prices caused by sudden imbalances between supply and demand. Historically this wasn’t a big problem because potential supply was much higher than demand. If demand went up, the Saudis and others just opened up the taps a bit and everything was back in balance.

But that hasn’t been true for a while. There’s very little excess capacity these days, so if oil supply drops due to war or natural disaster, it can result in a very sudden spike in prices. And that can lead to economic chaos. But if demand has fallen significantly below supply, it means we now have excess capacity again. And if we have excess capacity, it means that the price of oil can be managed. It will still go up and down, but it’s less likely to unexpectedly spike upward. And this in turn means that, at least in the near future, oil is unlikely to derail the economic recovery. It’s a small but meaningful piece of good news.

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Chart of the Day: The World Has More Oil Than It Needs

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It’s Only Taken Us 5 Years to Forget the Single Biggest Lesson of the Financial Meltdown

by MakaylaAsher Posted on December 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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Yesterday the Federal Housing Finance Agency issued new underwriting guidelines that allow some home buyers to take out mortgages with down payments as small as 3 percent. Dean Baker brings down the hammer:

The NYT misled readers about the relative risk from low down payment loans in an article on the decision by the government to allow Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to purchase loans with just 3 percent down payments. The piece cited several commentators saying that the risk of defaults would not increase substantially by lowering down payment requirements.

A study by the Center for Responsible Lending found that the default rate for loans with down payments of between 3 to 10 percent was nearly 9 percent. This is more than 80 percent higher than the default rate it found for mortgages with down payments of 10 percent or more.

….It is dubious housing policy to encourage moderate income people to take out mortgages on which they are likely to default….I think it’s great to help low and moderate income people get good housing. But this policy is about helping banks get their bad mortgages insured by taxpayers.

This decision by the FHFA is almost criminally myopic. After all, the go-go years that produced a towering housing bubble and then ended in an epic global financial meltdown are less than a decade in the past. Have we really forgotten so soon the primary lesson of these years?

For the record, here it is: If there was a single primary culprit in the collapse of the global economy, it was excessive leverage. It was embedded in exotic financial instruments. It was encouraged by weak banking regulations. It was exploited by traders and executives who all knew they could make a quick buck as long as the music kept playing. In the end, though, it turned Wall Street into a house of cards that didn’t have the strength to withstand meaningful losses. When those losses finally, inevitably, materialized, the financial system collapsed.

But it’s not just bank leverage that’s a problem. Wall Street’s most dangerous debt all originated with consumers, who had been relentlessly encouraged to take on ever more debt and ever more leverage for nearly a decade—mostly in the form of risky mortgages that were almost designed for failure thanks to down payment requirements that got steadily weaker as the housing bubble steadily inflated. If you make a 20 percent down payment, your leverage is 4:1. That’s fine. If things go south, your house can lose a lot of value and you’re still OK. (And so is your bank.) With a 10 percent down payment, your leverage is 9:1. That’s more dangerous. But a 3 percent down payment? Now we’re talking about leverage of 32:1. That’s crazytown territory. Even a moderate setback can wipe you out completely. Put enough loans like that together and then lash them into leverage-soaked financial derivatives that no one truly understands, and a moderate setback can wipe out the entire financial system.

The FHFA’s justification, of course, is that this 3 percent deal is only being offered to people with strong credit histories. But that’s always how it starts, isn’t it? The question is, where does it end?

Nowhere good. The single biggest lesson of the 2008 meltdown is that a strong financial system is built on a foundation of limited leverage. Limited leverage for everyone. Anything else is a foundation of sand. How can we have forgotten that so soon?

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It’s Only Taken Us 5 Years to Forget the Single Biggest Lesson of the Financial Meltdown

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Facebook Is a Widely Beloved Company

by DonetteCoughlan Posted on December 8, 2014

Mother Jones

Alex Tabarrok mulls the question of whether advertising-supported products are fundamentally less attuned to customer needs than, say, Apple products:

Apple’s market power isn’t a given, it’s a function of the quality of Apple’s products relative to its competitors. Thus, Apple has a significant incentive to increase quality and because it can’t charge each of its customers a different price a large fraction of the quality surplus ends up going to customers and Apple customers love Apple products.

Facebook doesn’t charge its customers so relative to Apple it has a greater interest in increasing the number of customers even if that means degrading the quality. As a result, Facebook has more users than Apple but no one loves Facebook. Facebook is broadcast television and Apple is HBO.

No one loves Facebook? This is a seriously elitist misconception. It’s like saying that Tiffany’s customers all love Tiffany’s but no one loves Walmart.

But that’s flatly not true. Among people with relatively high incomes, no one loves Walmart. Among the working and middle classes, there are tens of millions of people who not only love Walmart, but literally credit them with being able to live what they consider a middle-class lifestyle. They adore Walmart.

Ditto for Facebook. I don’t love Facebook. Maybe Alex doesn’t love Facebook. And certainly Facebook’s fortunes rise and fall over time as other social networking products gain or lose mindshare. But there are loads of people who not only love Facebook, but are practically addicted to it. And why not? Facebook’s advertiser-centric model forces them to give their customers what they want, since happy customers are the only way to increase the number of eyeballs that their advertisers want. Apple, by contrast, was run for years on the whim of Steve Jobs, who famously refused to give his customers what they wanted if it happened to conflict with his own idiosyncratic notion of how a phone/tablet/computer ought to work. In the end, this worked out well because Jobs was an oddball genius—though it was a close-run thing. But how many companies can find success that way? A few, to be sure. But not a lot.

“Quality” is not a one-dimensional attribute—and this is an insight that’s seriously underappreciated. It means different things to different people. As a result, good mass-market companies are every bit as loved as companies that cater to elites. They’re just loved by different people. But the love of the working class is every bit as real as the love of the upper middle class. You forget that at your peril.

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Facebook Is a Widely Beloved Company

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Friday Cat Blogging – 5 December 2014

by HarveyNowakowsk Posted on December 5, 2014

Mother Jones

In today’s episode of Friday catblogging, Hilbert is trying to prove that he’s a size 12. He was unconvincing, despite plenty of squirming to try to fit his entire body into the shoe box. The result was an interestingly blurred face, but not an entire cat in the box.

In other news, we’ve had to clear off the mantle over the fireplace because it turns out that Hopper can shinny up the bricks and start whacking away at whatever is up there. But there’s more to the story. We figured that Hilbert was a bit too gravity-bound to pose any similar danger, so we were blaming Hopper whenever something got knocked over. But on Wednesday night, during the 9 pm play hour, we watched in awe as Hilbert careened across the living room floor, flung himself straight up the brick facing, and grabbed onto the mantle. He barely made it, and had to chin himself up the last few inches, but make it he did. Nothing is safe around here anymore.

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Friday Cat Blogging – 5 December 2014

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Lefties Earn 10% Less Than Righties

by au87rr Posted on December 5, 2014

Mother Jones

Well, this is weird. Danielle Kurtzleben summarizes a new study called “The Wages of Sinistrality”:

In the data, around 11 to 13 percent of the population was left-handed. And when broken down by gender — that is, comparing women to women and men to men — those lefties have annual earnings around 10 to 12 percent lower than those of righties, Goodman writes, which is equal to around a year of schooling. (That gap varied by survey and by gender, however.) Most of this gap can be attributed to “observed differences in cognitive skills and emotional or behavioral problems,” he writes, adding that since lefties tend to do more manual work than right-handers, the gap appears to be due to differences in cognitive abilities, not physical.

Apparently the cognitive differences were already well known (though I didn’t know about them), but this paper is the first to document the earnings gap. It’s surprisingly large. So if you’re a lefty and you’re doing well, congratulations! You’ve beaten the odds.

From: 

Lefties Earn 10% Less Than Righties

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Unlike Diamonds, E-Books Are Not Forever

by ArlieMSZaecq Posted on December 5, 2014

Mother Jones

Microsoft is getting a divorce from Barnes & Noble:

On Thursday, the two companies parted ways, with Barnes & Noble buying out Microsoft for about $125 million. In other words, in just over two years, the value of the Nook business has lost more than half its value.

….And yet despite these grim numbers, Barnes & Noble has reason to look favorably on its relationship with Microsoft. The initial $300 million investment gave the bookseller an infusion of cash when it needed it most….Microsoft, meanwhile, was hoping that the Nook software would bolster its own tablet business, making it a more viable competitor to Apple’s iPad. That didn’t pan out, and Microsoft was left committed to a declining Nook business that was adding little to its own ambitions in the tablet market.

This highlights one of the big problems with e-books: what happens when there’s no software left to read them? I’m a big user of the Nook app on my Windows tablet, but its demise was announced months ago. Microsoft doesn’t care about Nook because it’s not a killer app for Windows 8, and B&N doesn’t care about Windows 8 because Windows tablets have a minuscule market share. So the app died. For now everything is still fine, but it’s inevitable that when upgrades stop, eventually an app stops working for one reason or another. Will I then be able to read my Nook books in some new Microsoft reader? Or will I just be up a creek and forced to switch to an iPad or Android tablet? There’s no telling.

It’s weird. I think I now know how Mac partisans used to feel when Microsoft was eating their lunch. They all believed that Macs were obviously, wildly superior to anything from Redmond, and were only on the edge of extinction thanks to massive infusions of marketing by an industry behemoth. Now I’m in that position. After considerable time spent on both iPad and Android tablets, I find my Windows tablet obviously, wildly superior to either one. It’s not even a close call. But the market disagrees with me. The few drawbacks of Windows 8, which I find entirely trivial, are deal breakers for most users, and as a result app makers have stayed away. This causes yet more users to avoid the Windows platform and more app makers to stay away, rinse and repeat.

What a shame. I guess I can only hope that by the time Windows tablets are consigned to the dustbin of history there will finally be an Android tablet that’s actually usable by adults who want to do more than update their Facebook pages. We’ll see.

POSTSCRIPT: Of course, this wouldn’t be a problem—or not such a big problem, anyway—if Amazon and other e-book vendors allowed third-party apps to display their books. But they don’t, which means Amazon’s monopoly position in e-books also gives them a monopoly position in e-book readers. This is really not a situation that any of us should find acceptable.

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Unlike Diamonds, E-Books Are Not Forever

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