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Here’s a Preview of How Donald Trump Could Use Hurricane Matthew to Attack Hillary Clinton

by KathleneRoten Posted on October 6, 2016

Mother Jones

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Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have announced they are pausing their campaign events while they wait to see if Hurricane Matthew, the Category 4 storm now barreling through the Caribbean, makes landfall in the United States Thursday evening. That doesn’t mean either presidential candidate is expected to remain idle as the storm continues to intensify. In fact, both campaigns are reportedly trying to figure out how to effectively demonstrate strength, without appearing to exploit a potential catastrophe for political points.

Clinton is already taking some heat, after it was revealed her campaign purchased television spots on the Weather Channel ahead of the storm. Trump has so far restricted himself to sending best wishes to residents, urging them to remain safe. But a glimpse of his past remarks during times of disaster offer a preview of how he could respond should Matthew hit land. In the past, he has used hurricanes and other natural disasters as opportunities to attack President Barack Obama and re-up his favorite conspiracy theories:

While it remains to be seen if Trump will stick to his current restraint, if this year has taught us anything, it’s that Trump’s inflammatory statements and his self-congratulations are his most predictable trait. And then, of course, there’s his generosity.

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Here’s a Preview of How Donald Trump Could Use Hurricane Matthew to Attack Hillary Clinton

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Hillary Clinton Wants to Raise Taxes on Wealthy Heirs

by Jim Thorpe Posted on September 23, 2016

Mother Jones

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Hillary Clinton has proposed an increase in the estate tax:

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton would levy a 65% tax on the largest estates….generate $260 billion over the next decade, enough to pay for her plans to simplify small business taxes and expand the child tax credit….The Clinton campaign changed its previous plan—which called for a 45% top rate—by adding three new tax brackets and adopting the structure proposed by Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont during the Democratic primaries. She would impose a 50% rate that would apply to estates over $10 million a person, a 55% rate that starts at $50 million a person, and the top rate of 65%, which would affect only those with assets exceeding $500 million for a single person and $1 billion for married couples.

But but but, capital formation! Where will the American economy manage to dredge up any capital if we raise taxes on billion-dollar estates? Plus, as the straight shooters at the Wall Street Journal editorial page point out, there’s inflation. Using current dollars, a decade from now that top rate of 65 percent will apply to married couples with a mere $900 million in taxable assets. Surely we can’t be serious about this?

And how many people does this affect? Well, in 2014 there were a grand total of 223 estates worth $50 million or more. Given the power-curve nature of income, this suggests that there were maybe, oh, five estates worth $500 million. That’s something on the order of a thousand rich kids who will have to pay 15 percent more than the current top rate and maybe a dozen or so who would pay 25 percent more. Those dozen or so would inherit a mere $350 million instead of $600 million. That’s a grim fate, to be sure, but I suppose they’ll manage to soldier on.

As for all those farmers and family businesses who will be devastated? Forget it. There aren’t any—unless you consider the Trump Organization to be a small family business.

As with most policy proposals in this campaign, this is more for show than anything else. A Republican Congress won’t take up the estate tax again. Still, it’s designed to show whose side Hillary Clinton is on, and it does a pretty good job of that.

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Hillary Clinton Wants to Raise Taxes on Wealthy Heirs

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What Happens to Merrick Garland if Hillary Clinton Wins?

by HarryXny261 Posted on August 13, 2016

Mother Jones

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David Atkins is unhappy about a Politico story suggesting that “top Senate Democrats” are pushing Hillary Clinton to stick with Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland if she wins in November, rather than replacing him with someone more liberal:

It seems increasingly likely that Clinton’s hands will be tied by the Obama Administration’s decision to nominate a centrist in Merrick Garland in the hopes of compromise with the current GOP. Democratic Senators are already pushing for Clinton not to displace Garland with a more liberal choice in the interest of “preserving political capital.”

….“Top Senate Democrats” never seem to learn their lesson about political capital and negotiating with Republicans in Congress. There is no amount of compromising or bending over backwards that will please Senate Republicans or even make them more willing to negotiate with Democrats over other key items. One of the more glaring falsehoods of the Democratic primary campaign was that Clinton would be able to make more effective deals and compromises with the opposition, enabling Clinton to get things done that Sanders could not.

The reality is that Congressional Republicans won’t compromise with Clinton any more than they would have with Sanders. And they won’t be more inclined to deal in good faith with her if she nominates Garland than if she were to pull his nomination and select someone else.

With a caveat or two, I agree with this. And yet, I can’t help think that something more is going on with Garland. Think about it. For starters, why did Obama nominate Garland? Not in hopes of compromise with Republicans, I think. He’s not an idiot. Rather, he did it as a campaign ploy: a way of making Republicans look so extreme that they weren’t even willing to confirm a moderate jurist that most of them had praised earlier in his career.

But now think about this from the other side. Why would anyone have agreed to be Obama’s accomplice in this? It was obvious from the start that Republicans were going to block confirmation no matter who it was. Why go through all the trouble and paperwork and so forth for nothing more than being able to help the president make his opponents look bad?

My guess is that Garland received a promise—probably implied rather than explicit—that Democrats would stick with him if they won in November. Obama would work to get him confirmed during the lame duck session, and would recommend to Hillary Clinton that she renominate him in 2017 if necessary.

Roughly speaking, Garland is being a team player in hopes that the team will stick with him even if someone better comes along. The question, then, isn’t whether Clinton should try to appease Republicans. It’s whether she ought to reward loyalty in a guy who agreed to play a difficult and thankless role.

So should she? And if I’m right, how should Republicans play this game?

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What Happens to Merrick Garland if Hillary Clinton Wins?

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Don’t Worry About the Polls. Nothing Much Really Happened Today.

by KatheriKSJL Posted on July 14, 2016

Mother Jones

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Hillary Clinton has had a couple of poor showings in the polls recently, but I mostly shrugged them off. It was inevitable that she’d take a hit from the conclusion of the FBI email probe, but those kinds of things are almost always temporary. And it’s only July, anyway. Polls won’t start to mean too much until the middle of August.

That’s just my two cents, but Greg Sargent reports that it’s pretty much the opinion of the pros too:

I spent some time talking to senior Democrats today, and the basic feeling among them is this: Yes, it’s very possible Clinton did take a real hit from the FBI news. But if so, they see this as more of a temporary dip than anything else. They see the polling right now as mostly useless, since we will know a lot more about the race once both candidates choose their vice presidential running mates and the conventions take place later this month.

….One senior Democrat with access to a lot of private polling tells me that some surveys in states and districts where Clinton should be leading are showing her tied or slightly behind. But this senior Dem thinks the data probably reflects a momentary dip due to bad coverage of the FBI mess….Top Dem pollster Mark Mellman, for instance, conceded that Clinton may have taken a real hit. But he noted that the current polls, if anything, still show her up after a very tough stretch, leading into a period that could prove more favorable to her.

The fact that a man like Donald Trump is even within shouting distance of becoming president is reason enough to be nervous. But small blips in the polls don’t really add anything to that. If you’re the jittery type, stay away from the poll madness until next month.

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Don’t Worry About the Polls. Nothing Much Really Happened Today.

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Republicans in Congress passed a law giving EPA more power

by LadonnaCuriel Posted on June 22, 2016

The Chemical Bothers

Republicans in Congress passed a law giving EPA more power

By on Jun 22, 2016 11:27 amShare

Congress has done something that’s practically unheard of. It handed the Environmental Protection Agency broad new powers. On Wednesday, President Barack Obama is signing the legislation into law.

In early June, the Senate passed a sweeping bill that revamps how federal regulators handle chemical safety, after Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) lifted a last-minute hold on a vote. Because the House already passed the same reconciled version, the bill is headed to President Obama’s desk, where he is expected sign it into law.

Which means a Republican-controlled Congress managed to do something that no Congress since 1976 had been able to do: Overhaul the Toxic Substances Control Act, a flawed, unenforceable law that gave the EPA just 90 days to study whether a new chemical was dangerous. It didn’t even allow the EPA to regulate asbestos-containing products, the U.S. Court of Appeals ruled in 1989.

The new bill means the EPA can finally evaluate cancer-linked substances like BPA and styrene used in plastics and formaldehyde found in fabrics and cars. It establishes uniform standards for evaluating about 20 chemicals at a time, and means more funding can be directed toward studying high-priority problem chemicals, especially those used near drinking water.

In extreme cases, the law might lead to a ban on certain chemicals. In others, it might mean more warning labels or limited use.

For a little perspective on just how great a task the EPA now has ahead, there are some 64,000 unregulated chemicals on the market.

No law, much less one coming from a conservative Congress, is perfect. And the industry won at least one key fight: States won’t be able to restrict or ban chemicals if they’re under review by the EPA. That’s why the Environmental Working Group opposed the bill, and why New York’s attorney general said he was disappointed in it. But most health and green groups accepted the compromise bill as an overall win.

This was a rare instance in which the manufacturers and chemical industries were on the same side as environmental and public health advocates: Everyone knew the current system was broken and needed to be fixed, and still it took many years to reach a compromise. Even the Senate’s resident science denier James Inhofe (R-Okla.) endorsed the bill.

But don’t expect to see this kind of cooperation on other public health issues, from lead-poisoned water to any of the threats posed by climate change. For that, we’ll need a very different Congress — and we can’t afford to wait another 40 years to get it.

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One Side In the Ad-Blocker Wars Is Doomed

by GuillerIpu Posted on June 20, 2016

Mother Jones

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MoJo editor Clara Jeffrey points me to this today:

Ad blocking has become a hot-button media issue as consumers push back on perceived ad overload and tracking mechanisms across the internet. Research firm Ovum estimates that publishers lost $24 billion in revenue globally last year due to ad blocking.

Hmmm. $24 billion. I wonder how research firm Ovum came up with that number? Let’s hop over and—oh, hold on. Just wait a few years and we’re headed toward Armageddon:

Players in the digital publishing industry can’t stop talking about ad blocking. And they shouldn’t — according to Ovum’s new Ad-Blocking Forecast, the phenomenon will result in a 26% loss in Internet advertising revenues in 2020, which equates to $78.2bn globally. However, if publishers act now, that percentage could be as little as 6%, or $16.9bn. The question is: How can publishers make that much of a difference?

Yikes! I’ve put this forecast into handy chart form since numbers always look more official when you do that. But I still don’t know how Ovum came up with these figures, since I’m not a client and don’t have access to their reports. Which is fair enough. Nonetheless, I’m intrigued by this:

To take back control, publishers need to show consumers why advertising is needed and that it can be a positive addition to content.

….Publishers also need to work with advertisers to improve the consumer experience. The quality of the adverts is a major issue for many consumers. There are not enough examples of web-delivered adverts that enhance the experience for the reader….Forcing adverts on consumers through ad reinsertion or by blocking users of ad blockers from accessing content will have a negative long-term effect….Ovum predicts that the ad blockers — with input from a network of unpaid developers — will win the battle and ad blockers will remain more advanced than the anti-ad blockers in the long term.

Not only will websites that try to force the issue risk annoying consumers further but these websites also risk driving readers toward their competitors who don’t require ad blockers to be switched off or who provide an alternate means of paying for content.

I’d like to make fun of this, but it’s actually decent advice. The current hysteria over ad blockers reminds me of the hysteria over TiVo when it first arrived in 1999—which itself was just an updated version of the hysteria over VCRs back in the 80s. If people can record shows, they’ll skip the ads! We’re doomed!

But no. TV ad revenue has been surprisingly stable since 1999 despite a decline in viewership. The big problem, it turns out, isn’t the ad skippers, it’s the number of people watching TV in the first place. I suspect the same is true of online journalism. Ad blockers aren’t the problem, readership is. Provide a well-targeted audience and advertisers will pay for it. The folks who skip the ads probably weren’t very good sales prospects anyway.

In any case, it doesn’t matter: Ovum is almost certainly correct that ad-blockers will win the war against ad-blocker-blockers, which means that online sites are waging a losing battle that does nothing but piss off their customers. So cut down on the quantity of ads and target them better instead. That may or may not work, but it’s likely to work a lot better than continuing to fight the ad-blocker wars.

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One Side In the Ad-Blocker Wars Is Doomed

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Stop Staring at Your Backup Camera!

by RodgerQuinonez Posted on June 20, 2016

Mother Jones

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Jacob Bogage tells us that backup cameras in cars aren’t really helping that much:

Backup cameras have been around longer than other car safety tech, so the federal government has years of data on their effect. Between 2008 and 2011 — the most recent years for which data was made available by NHTSA — backup cameras more than doubled from 32% to 68% of all new cars sold. But injuries fell less than 8%, from about 13,000 down to 12,000. The improvement in safety has been very gradual from year to year.

The fatality rate has improved somewhat, dropping 31% over the same period. But the sample size is small — deaths from cars moving in reverse are relatively rare. NHTSA’s research shows deaths declined from 274 to 189 between 2008 and 2011, and the number was volatile year to year.

My current car is the first I’ve driven that has a backup camera, and this story doesn’t surprise me. As near as I can tell, using a backup camera requires you to change your driving habits, and it took me a while to figure that out. The most basic problem is that backup cameras—like most video screens—beg for your attention, and if you give in to that temptation you might very well be driving less safely than without a camera. The problems are pretty obvious:

If your attention is focused on the camera, you aren’t checking the traffic in front of you. But when you back out of a parking spot, for example, cross traffic is coming at you in both directions.
Backup cameras have an extreme wide-angle view, which is obviously useful. However, it also makes any object more than a few yards away look tiny. Even cars can be easy to miss sometimes, and smaller objects like children, dogs, and so forth can be all but invisible.
Despite their wide angle, sometimes cars don’t enter the camera’s sightlines until they’re quite close.
Most backup cameras just aren’t very good. Their imaging starts out mediocre just by virtue of using tiny lenses and sensors. And it only gets worse from there. Their imaging is poor at night. Their imaging is poor when the camera faces the sun. Their imaging is poor in bad weather. Their imaging is poor when the background is busy. Their imaging is poor when the lens gets dirty.

So how should you drive with a backup camera? Ironically, you need to change your driving habits back to what they were before you got a backup camera. That is, you should treat it as simply another window. Don’t obsess over it. Crane your neck and check all your windows and your rearview mirror and your backup camera. In other words, drive just like you used to except with one additional window. Too many people treat backup cameras as a substitute for all their other windows, instead of an addition to them.

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Stop Staring at Your Backup Camera!

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Watch global warming spiral out of control

by DorotheaSeibt Posted on June 1, 2016

Spirograph

Watch global warming spiral out of control

By on May 31, 2016

Cross-posted from

Climate CentralShare

The temperature spiral that took the world by storm has an update. If you think the heat is on in our current climate, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

To recap, University of Reading climate scientist Ed Hawkins wrecked the internet a few weeks ago with a revolutionary new way to look at global temperatures. Using a circular graph of every year’s monthly temperatures and animating it, Hawkins’ image showed planetary heat spiraling closer to the 2 degrees C threshold in a way no bar or line graph could do.

An update to the famous temperature spiral using future climate projections.Jay Alder/USGS

His tweet with the original graphic has been shared 15,000 times, and it’s been dubbed the most compelling climate visualization ever made (sorry, landmarked Keeling Curve). The spiral’s popularity can be attributed in part to its hypnotic nature and the visceral way it shows the present predicament of climate change.

Hawkins’ graphic hints at the temperature spiral to come, but now a new addition brings what the future holds into stark relief.

“Like a lot of people, I found Ed Hawkins’ temperature animation very compelling because it details observed warming from 1850 to present in a novel way,” U.S. Geological Survey scientist Jay Alder said. “His graphic sets the context for looking at projections from climate models.”

So Alder used climate projections and stretched the spiral to its logical conclusion in 2100 when most climate model projections end. Using our current carbon emissions trends, it shows that things could get out of hand pretty quickly.

The world has been on the edge of the 1.5 degrees C threshold — the amount of warming above preindustrial levels that could sink many small island states permanently — this winter and early spring thanks to climate change and a strong El Niño. If the world continues on its current carbon emissions trend, it could essentially pass that threshold permanently in about a decade.

The 2 degrees C threshold — a planetary “safe” threshold enshrined in the Paris Agreement — will likely be in the rearview mirror by the early 2040s as temperatures spiral ever higher. By 2100, every month is projected to be 5 degrees C (9 degrees F) warmer than it was compared to preindustrial levels.

It’d be a world vastly different than today with sea levels up to three feet higher (and possibly more if Antarctica’s ice goes into meltdown), rapidly shrinking glaciers, and highly acidic oceans. Those changes would have very real consequences for coastal cities, water resources, and ecosystems across the planet.

Of course, Alder’s super spiral is only one possible future for the planet. Last year’s Paris Agreement could be a turning point where nations start to rein in their carbon pollution. While temperatures would likely still spiral higher because of warming that’s already locked in, cutting carbon emissions now will at least make the spiral more manageable.

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Hillary Clinton Remains the Most Likely 45th President of the United States

by IsabellaOgle0 Posted on May 31, 2016

Mother Jones

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Greg Sargent is a little tired of the current conventional wisdom about a Trump-Clinton general election:

Democrats should not underestimate Trump or imagine that defeating him will be easy….Democrats should obviously be prepared for any manner of attack that Trump will throw at Hillary Clinton, and they’ll need to figure out how to create a more positive narrative around her.

Rather, the point is that we should stop over-inflating impressions of Trump’s strength. We should stop ascribing magical political powers to Trump based on the questionable notion that his “unconventional” and “unpredictable” campaign makes him a more formidable foe than anyone expected. Trump will be difficult to beat, but that might be mainly because these elections are always hard.

I’ll go a little further: chill out, people. Trump is likely to get at least 45 percent of the vote. That’s just the way our country works at the moment. Ditto for Hillary. There’s probably not much more than 10 percent of the electorate that’s really, truly undecided.

This means that at any given moment, all it takes is a tiny bump based on some outside event, combined with a little bit of normal poll error, to make either candidate look like a winner. Especially this early in the campaign, this stuff is meaningless. For what it’s worth, though, the very least you should do is rely on poll aggregations, not single polls. Sam Wang has personally investigated 2 quadrillion outcomes—and boy are his eyes tired—and figures that Hillary is currently likely to win the electoral college by 336-202. Likewise, Pollster puts Hillary ahead in the popular vote by 44-40 percent. This will flutter around, and there will be times when panic seems like the best response, but it’s probably not. It’s just life in 50-50 America.

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Hillary Clinton Remains the Most Likely 45th President of the United States

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Quote of the Day: The Conservative Fight to Become First Gnat

by XEYJanette Posted on May 23, 2016

Mother Jones

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From conservative Jim Geraghty on the ongoing spat between right-wingers about who’s selling out to whom in the great Facebook War of 2016:

I’m pretty darn sure that throwing around accusations of gutlessness and useful idiocy are far more about deciding who should be deemed First Gnat than they are about actually changing behavior in Silicon Valley.

The ostensible subject of this war is whether Facebook is deliberately suppressing conservative stories in its Trending Topics feed. A bunch of conservatives met with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg about this, and when it was all over Glenn Beck praised Zuckerberg for listening while Tucker Carlson insisted that Beck was a Zuckerberg toady. It went downhill from there.

But here’s what gets me. Unless I’ve missed something, this entire squabble is based on the claims of one (1) anonymous former member of the team responsible for Trending Topics. That’s it. Am I wrong about this? Has there been any other serious evidence one way or the other about Facebook’s alleged bias? Are conservatives really rending their garments over something so thin?

Of course, we liberals are going through the same thing on a larger scale in the current war between Hillarybots and Berniebros (or whatever we call them these days). But at least that’s tediously normal, since it happens every time Democrats are competing for the White House. I recommend that conservatives go back to fighting over Donald Trump. At least that matters.

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Quote of the Day: The Conservative Fight to Become First Gnat

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