Tag Archives: chemical

Can We Please Kill Off the Kabuki in the Press Room?

by QuinnHeavener Posted on December 4, 2014

Mother Jones

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Things are a bit slow this morning, so I want to replay for you a Twitter conversation with CNN’s Jake Tapper. The subject is Jonathan Karl of ABC News, who harassed press secretary Josh Earnest earlier this week over President Obama’s picks as ambassadors to Argentina and Hungary. Neither one has any special diplomatic experience, and one of them is a former producer for a soap opera:

Jake Tapper: meant to give props to @jonkarl for his Bold and Beautiful ambassador questions to @PressSec the other day

Kevin Drum: Why? Is anything really gained by this daily kabuki in the press room?

JT: why what? why is it worth challenging people in power about questionable decisions?

KD: It’s kabuki. Everyone knows the answer. It’s happened forever. Earnest wasn’t going to answer. Why waste the time?

JT: i guess i dont think trying to hold those in power accountable is a “waste of time.” have a great day

Tapper’s point is pretty easy to understand, and my colleague Nick Baumann agrees with him. There’s a long tradition of rewarding big campaign contributors with cushy ambassadorial posts in spite their fairly visible lack of qualification. There’s not much excuse for this, so why not demand to know why Obama is doing it?

But here’s my point. This is yet another example of a bad habit that the White House press corps engages in constantly: faux confrontation over trivia that gets them camera time and kudos from late-night comedians, but is, in reality, completely pointless. Jonathan Karl knows perfectly well why these two folks were appointed. They raised lots of money for Obama. Josh Earnest knows it too. This stuff has been going on forever. But Karl knows something else: Earnest is a spokesman. He’s flatly not allowed to fess up to political stuff like this, and he’s just going to dance around it.

This is why I called it kabuki. If this were actually an important topic where there was some uncertainty about the answer, then confrontation would be great. I’d like to see more of it for truly important stuff. But is Karl’s investigative reputation really enhanced by an inane kindergarten round of “let’s pretend” with whatever poor schmoe happens to be at the press room podium? Is this truly an example of “holding those in power accountable”?

I really don’t see it. Then again, maybe Karl is working on a whole segment about the ridiculous practice of rewarding supporters with cushy diplomatic posts in fashionable countries. Or maybe even a segment asking why countries even bother having ambassadors in high-profile capitals where they serve precious little purpose anymore. If that’s the case, then maybe the questions made sense.

But purely as confrontation? Please. Dignifying this silliness as “challenging people in power” is like calling a mud fort an infrastructure project. It really doesn’t deserve any props.

UPDATE: Hmmm. Apparently Tapper and some others interpreted my initial tweet as referring to the entire concept of the press briefing. So to some extent, this is a misunderstanding. Obviously I don’t object to the general practice of holding briefings (though I wish reporters would boycott all the “background” briefings). I just object to the habit of peppering White House flacks with questions about trivial topics that everyone knows the answer to. It seems more designed to get YouTube kudos than to truly challenge anyone in power.

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Can We Please Kill Off the Kabuki in the Press Room?

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Quote of the Day: What Mysterious Force is Preventing Passage of a Roads Bill?

by PollyGandy Posted on December 4, 2014

Mother Jones

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From Fred Smith, CEO of FedEx, at a meeting of the Business Roundtable with President Obama:

Why not, before the Congress goes home for December, just pass a bill that takes the two bipartisan bills that I just mentioned, up, and solves the problem?

Smith is referring to a couple of bills that would restore the gasoline tax to its old level and increase funding for transportation projects. He raises a good question. I suppose there could be several reasons it’s hard to pass either of these bills:

Democrats are in thrall to labor unions, who are opposed to funding more infrastructure projects.
All our roads and bridges are in pretty good shape and we don’t really need more money for them.
As a socialist, President Obama opposes these bills because they would increase the profits of billionaire construction company CEOs.
Vladimir Putin has threatened to invade Nova Scotia if we pass these bills.
Santa Claus is coming to town and we’re all hoping we’ve been good enough to get the bridge repairs we asked him for.

Or, of course, it could be because Republicans are less afraid of letting our roads crumble into dust than they are of Grover Norquist saying mean things about them if they were to maintain the gasoline tax at historical levels. Because, you know, taxes.

Nah. That’s ridiculous. It’s probably the Putin thing.

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Quote of the Day: What Mysterious Force is Preventing Passage of a Roads Bill?

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April 23rd Is the Saddest Day of the Year

by KennethDiesendo Posted on December 3, 2014

Mother Jones

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According to Google—sort of—the saddest times of the year are spring and fall. Weird. Click here for the explanations, which seem a bit ad hoc to me. I mean, less light? Then why is winter such a happy time? Not to mention spring. “As it turns out,” the article explains, “lengthening daylight may discombobulate people’s chemical regulatory system.” So….less light is bad. But more light can also be bad. And winter is OK even though it has the least light of all. This might all be true, but it’s sure a bit of a chin scratcher.

And the unhappiest day of the year in 2014 was April 23. WTF? I could understand April 15. But what’s the deal with the 23rd? Anybody got a theory? Am I missing something here?

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April 23rd Is the Saddest Day of the Year

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Tell Me, Chuck: What Should Dems Do To Win Back the Middle Class?

by EltonUfdutqsxc Posted on December 3, 2014

Mother Jones

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A longtime reader writes: “Hope you’ll weigh in on Edsall on Schumer and the Dems ‘destroying’ the party over Obamacare.”

Well, OK. But I don’t have an awful lot to say. Basically, Sen. Chuck Schumer thinks it was a mistake to focus on Obamacare in 2009. Instead, Democrats should have focused like a laser on the economy, and in particular, on helping the working and middle classes. Instead, Dems passed yet another social welfare program that mostly helps the poor, demonstrating yet again that they don’t really care much about the middle class.

Yesterday, Tom Edsall weighed in on this. He didn’t really take a political position of his own, but he did present a bunch of evidence that Schumer was substantively correct. That is, Obamacare really does help mainly the poor, and Democrats really have done very little for the middle class lately.

So what’s my view? Well, I’ve written about this before, and I’d say that on a technical level Edsall is exactly right. Obamacare does help the working and middle classes a bit, partly because its subsidies are available even to those with relatively high incomes and partly because of its other provisions. For example, its guarantee that you can get affordable coverage even if you have a preexisting condition is something that helps everyone. If you’re middle class and you lose your job, that provision of Obamacare might be a lifesaver.

Still, there’s no question that Obamacare helps the middle classes only at the margins. Most of them already have employer health coverage, and the ones that end up buying coverage through the exchanges get only small subsidies. I happen to think that Obamacare will eventually be the foundation for a program of universal health care that genuinely appeals to everyone, the same way that Social Security does, but that’s in the future. It doesn’t really help Democrats now.

So I agree with Edsall about the technical distribution of Obamacare benefits. And I also agree with Schumer that Democrats need to do more to appeal to the working and middle classes. So that means I agree with their basic critique. Right?

Nope. Not even slightly. You see, the core of the critique isn’t merely that Democrats should do more for the middle class. It’s specifically that Democrats should have done more in 2009 for the middle class. But this is the point at which everything suddenly gets hazy. What should Obama have done in lieu of Obamacare? Paul Krugman has it exactly right:

When people say that Obama should have “focused” on the economy, what, specifically, are they saying he should have done?….What do they mean? Obama should have gone around squinting and saying “I’m focused on the economy”? What would that have done?

Look, governing is not just theater. For sure the weakness of the recovery has hurt Democrats. But “focusing”, whatever that means, wouldn’t have delivered more job growth. What should Obama have done that he actually could have done in the face of scorched-earth Republican opposition? And how, if at all, did health reform stand in the way of doing whatever it is you’re saying he should have done?

In broad terms, I agree with Schumer’s critique. Democrats need to do more to appeal the working and middle classes, not just the poor. But Schumer is maddeningly vague about just what that means. And as it relates to 2009, in particular, he’s full of hot air. In the first few months of the year, Obama passed a big stimulus. He rescued the auto industry. He cut everyone’s payroll taxes.

Should Obama have done more? Oh my, yes. His pivot to the deficit in mid-2009 was dumb. And by far the biggest smoking gun of unfinished business was something to rescue underwater homeowners. But let’s be serious: even if Obama had supported a broad rescue effort, it wouldn’t have mattered. Congress wasn’t on board, and I doubt very much that anything could have gotten them on board. The politics was just too toxic. Never forget that the mere prospect of maybe rescuing underwater homeowners was the issue that set off Rick Santelli’s famous CNBC rant and led to the formation of the tea party movement. I wish things were otherwise, but bailing out underwater homeowners was simply never in the cards.

Beyond that, Democrats have a much bigger problem than even Schumer acknowledges. It’s this: what can they do? That is, what big ticket items are left that would buy the loyalty of the middle class for another generation? We already have Social Security and Medicare. We have Obamacare. We have the mortgage interest deduction. What’s left?

There are smallish things. Sometime people point to college loans. Or universal pre-K. I’m in favor of those things. But college loans are a stopgap, and the truth is that the rising price of college for the middle class is mainly a state issue, not a federal one. And universal pre-K simply doesn’t yet have enough political support. (It’s also something that would most likely benefit the poor much more than the middle class, but leave that aside for the moment.)

So I’ll ask the same question I’ve asked before. I’m all in favor of using the power of government to help the middle classes. But what does that mean in terms of concrete political programs that (a) the middle class will associate with Democrats and help win them loyalty and votes, and (b) have even a snowball’s chance of getting passed by Congress? Expansion of Social Security? Expansion of Medicare? Bigger subsidies for Obamacare? Universal pre-K? A massive infrastructure program? Let’s get specific, and let’s not nibble around the edges. Little programs here and there aren’t going to make much difference to the Democrats’s political fortunes. Nor will heroic but vague formulations about rescuing unions or raising taxes on the wealthy by a few points.

So tell me. What should they have done in 2009 that was actually feasible? What should they do now? Let’s hear it.

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Tell Me, Chuck: What Should Dems Do To Win Back the Middle Class?

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Good News From the ER: Hospital Mistakes Are on the Decline

by JacelynBoland Posted on December 2, 2014

Mother Jones

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Let’s continue our good news theme this morning. For the past few years, via several different programs, the federal government has been working hard to get hospitals to adopt practices that rein in the curse of “hospital acquired conditions”—also known as HACs. These are things like prescription mistakes, central line infections, slips and falls, and so forth. Today, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality released a report showing that HACs have been declining since these programs began in 2010.

The chart on the right tells the basic story. HACs declined a bit in 2011, and then fell even further in 2012 and 2013. By now, they’ve declined by a cumulative total of 17 percent. The AHRQ reports estimates that this represents 1.3 million HACs that have been prevented and 50,000 lives that have been saved. It’s also reduced health care costs by about $12 billion.

Much of this has been due to a laundry list of reforms introduced by Obamacare. So not only has Obamacare provided affordable health coverage for millions, but it’s reduced hospital errors by one out of every six and saved tens of thousands of lives in the process. Not bad.

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Good News From the ER: Hospital Mistakes Are on the Decline

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Good News From Iraq: Baghdad Finally Cuts a Deal With the Kurds

by GeorgiannaChewi Posted on December 2, 2014

Mother Jones

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Politically, the primary challenge facing Iraq’s new Shiite leaders is forging a government that includes significant participation from the Sunni minority and slowly regains their trust in a unified state. It’s been Job 1 from the start. That said, building a political accommodation with the northern Kurds is a close second, and today brought some good news on that front:

In a far-reaching deal with the potential to unite Iraq in the face of a Sunni insurgency, the government of Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi agreed on Tuesday to a long-term pact with the autonomous Kurdish region over how to divide the country’s oil wealth and cooperate on fighting Islamic State extremists.

The deal unites Baghdad and Erbil, the Kurdish capital in the north, over the issue of oil revenues and budget payments, and is likely to halt a drive — at least in the short term — by the Kurds for an independent state. It includes payments from the central government for the salaries of Kurdish security forces, known as the pesh merga, and also will allow the flow of weapons to the Kurds from the United States, with the government in Baghdad as intermediary.

….The reconciliation between Baghdad and the Kurdish region also appeared to validate one element of President Obama’s strategy in confronting the Islamic State: pushing for a new, more inclusive leader of Iraq. When the extremists swept into Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, in June, Mr. Obama decided that Mr. Maliki had to go before the United States would ramp up its military efforts against the Islamic State.

A deal with the Kurds was always going to be easier than regaining the participation of the Sunnis. Kurdistan has long had de facto autonomy from Baghdad, and negotiating over oil wealth is a fairly straightforward bit of dealmaking. An accommodation has been possible all along whenever Baghdad was willing to compromise—and the ISIS threat gave the new government there plenty of motivation to do just that.

The same can’t be said of accommodation with the Sunnis. The Sunni-Shia divide in the Arab regions of Iraq is deeper and more fundamental, and there’s no single, well-defined Sunni region with established leadership and relatively clear demands that can be negotiated with cleanly. There are just years—or decades or centuries, depending on how you want to count—of mistrust and bad blood. Combine that with nearly a decade of rampant corruption and tribal jingoism under Nouri al-Maliki’s Shiite government and you don’t have a problem that can be solved either quickly or easily.

Still, the Kurdish deal suggests that Haider al-Abadi may be genuinely willing to do the work necessary to rein in tensions and provide the Sunni minority with the representation and influence it wants. Maybe. As always, it’s not wise to read too much into this. But it’s a good sign.

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Good News From Iraq: Baghdad Finally Cuts a Deal With the Kurds

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Need a fracking supporter? Hire a homeless person.

by LashawnJudy Posted on September 16, 2014

That’s fracked up!

Need a fracking supporter? Hire a homeless person.

By

16 Sep 2014 5:32 PM

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In bizarre energy industry news of the day, the North Carolina Energy Coalition seems to have brought in some homeless men to stand in as fracking supporters at a state hearing on developing fracking operations in the state.

The men were bussed 200 miles from Winston-Salem to Cullowhee, N.C., where the hearing took place, for the day.

From Asheville’s Citizen-Times:

“They were clueless,” said Bettie “Betsy” Ashby, a member of the Jackson County Coalition Against Fracking. “At least two of them I met definitely came from a homeless shelter. One of them even apologized to me and said, ‘I didn’t know they were trying to do this to me.’ One said, ‘I did it for the…’ and then he rubbed his fingers together like ‘for the money.’”

Several of the men were wearing turquoise shirts or hats that said “Shale Yes” on the front and “Energy Creates Jobs” and “N.C. Energy Coalition.com” on the back.

It’s not a new tactic: If you can’t find people who actually support your cause, just pay uninformed members of underprivileged groups to fake it!

What is the mission of the N.C. Energy Coalition, exactly? From the group’s website:

Our website will provide the facts about the offshore and onshore production processes, environmental issues and economic impacts with no political spin. The Coalition will not advocate on issues but instead, provide the facts to let the public, business community and elected officials decide for themselves.

The organization is also sponsored by the American Petroleum Institute.

Just this June, North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory (R) signed off on the legalization of fracking in the state. At the same time, the state also passed a bill that makes the disclosure of the ingredients in the chemical cocktail used in fracking punishable as a misdemeanor. (For what it’s worth, the originally proposed version of that bill would have made said disclosure a felony.)

I’d be interested, at the very least, to know if the N.C. Energy Coalition will help its paid protestors to get actual jobs at the state’s new fracking wells. Because that’s supposed to be the huge benefit of this “energy boom,” right? I guess a few bucks an hour and a bus ride to Cullowhee is a good place to start!

Source:
Did energy group bus homeless in to support fracking?

, Citizen-Times.

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Need a fracking supporter? Hire a homeless person.

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A Question About Botched Executions

by CandiceKuefer Posted on July 24, 2014

Mother Jones

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I’m reluctant to ask a question that may strike some people as too cavalier for a subject that deserves only serious treatment. But after yesterday’s botched execution in Arizona—the latest of several—I continue to wonder: why is it so damn hard to execute people?

For starters, there are plenty of time-tested approaches: guillotines, firing squads, hanging, electrocution, gas chambers, etc. Did those really fall out of favor because people found them too grisly? Personally, I find the sterile, Mengele-like method of lethal injection considerably more disturbing than any of the others. And anyway, if you’re bound and determined to kill people, maybe you ought to face up to a little bit of grisly.

Beyond that, is it really so hard to find a lethal injection that works? Obviously I’m not a doctor, but I do know that there are plenty of meds that will very reliably knock you unconscious. And once you’ve done that, surely there are plenty of poisons to choose from? Or even asphyxiation: place a helium mask over the unconscious prisoner and he’ll be painlessly dead in about ten minutes or less.

Can anyone point me to a readable but fairly comprehensive history of executions over the past few decades? When and why did lethal injection become the method of choice? Why does there seem to be only one particular cocktail that works effectively? Lots of people have asked the same questions I’m asking, but nothing I’ve ever read really seems to explain it adequately.

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A Question About Botched Executions

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Nobody Knows What Makes a Good CEO

by WinnieKinsela Posted on July 23, 2014

Mother Jones

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Bloomberg has done a bit of charting of CEO pay vs. performance, and their results are on the right. Bottom line: there’s essentially no link whatsoever between how well CEOs perform and how well they’re paid:

An analysis of compensation data publicly released by Equilar shows little correlation between CEO pay and company performance. Equilar ranked the salaries of 200 highly paid CEOs. When compared to metrics such as revenue, profitability, and stock return, the scattering of data looks pretty random, as though performance doesn’t matter. The comparison makes it look as if there is zero relationship between pay and performance.

There are plenty of conclusions you can draw from this, but one of the key ones is that it demonstrates that corporate boards are almost completely unable to predict how well CEO candidates will do on the job. They insist endlessly that they’re looking for only the very top candidates—with pay packages to match—and I don’t doubt that they sincerely think this is what they’re doing. In fact, though, they don’t have a clue who will do better. They could be hiring much cheaper leaders and would probably get about the same performance.

One reason that CEO pay has skyrocketed is that boards compete with each other for candidates who seem to be the best, but don’t realize that it’s all a chimera. They have no idea.

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Nobody Knows What Makes a Good CEO

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Wage Stagnation Is No Illusion

by CeliaZeller Posted on July 21, 2014

Mother Jones

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Bloomberg has a long article today wondering whether wage stagnation is mainly due to demographic shifts:

25- to 34-year-olds will make up 22.5 percent of the workforce by 2022, compared with 21.6 percent in 2012….Meanwhile, the share of 45- to 54-year-olds in their best earning years will drop by 3.3 percentage points in the decade ending 2022.

….Hollowing out the middle-aged working population could cut median earnings because such employees bring home the biggest paychecks. The median 45- to 54-year-old household earns $66,400 a year, compared with $51,400 for 25- to 34-year-old households.

Well, sure. Compared to 30 years ago, the theory goes, we have more young workers bringing down the average and fewer prime age workers raising the average. As a result, the average is declining. But all that means is that baby boomers are aging out of the workforce, not that wages are necessarily in bad shape.

That makes sense. At least, it would make sense if it were true. The thing is, in an article more than a thousand words long, we never learn that we can look at this directly. The chart on the right shows the median wages of just 25-34 year olds, and as you can see, they’ve been declining for more than a decade. This has nothing to do with demographics because it’s measuring wages for the same age group the entire time.

Now, these figures don’t include health insurance, and they only go through 2012. So they aren’t of much help if, say, the Fed is trying to gauge the tightness of the labor market in the second quarter of 2014. Nonetheless, they certainly show a long-term trend of wage stagnation that plainly has nothing to do with demographics. This makes it vanishingly unlikely that wage stagnation over the past six months is merely due to demographic shifts.

It’s a nice fairy tale to pretend that wage stagnation might just be an artifact of boomers retiring, but easily available data quite clearly shows otherwise. It’s real.

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Wage Stagnation Is No Illusion

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