Tag Archives: depression

It Turns Out That Those "Full and Unedited" Planned Parenthood Videos…. Aren’t

by WillKulaciowg Posted on August 28, 2015

Mother Jones

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I gave up on the Planned Parenthood sting videos a long time ago. It’s pretty obvious there was no criminal behavior unmasked, or even any unethical behavior.1 The claims of the producers never matched the reality of the videos, so I stopped watching when new ones came out.

But Sarah Kliff soldiered on! She not only watched them all, she watched the full, unedited versions. And she discovered something after reading a forensic analysis of the videos from Planned Parenthood: they aren’t actually full and unedited. The folks who ran the sting claim that they did nothing more than edit out bathroom breaks, but Kliff isn’t buying it:

Take the first example I wrote about here, the meeting with the Texas Planned Parenthood clinic where the tape appears to jump forward a half-hour. In that case, nobody suggests a bathroom break. There’s no change in meeting; when the video jumps forward, they’re still sitting in the exact same seats.

Meanwhile, the longer videos show lots of small-talk footage that isn’t especially relevant to the argument over fetal body parts. I know because I watched all of it. There are moments in a car, where directions are being given and all the camera footage is totally blurry, where people stand around in hallways, where they talk about the relationship between caffeine and headaches. Those moments weren’t cut from the tape — and it’s hard to know what would make those different from the bathroom breaks and other moments deemed irrelevant to the audience.

I guess we need a chant for this. Release the video! We demand to see the bathroom breaks! Explain the timestamps! Or something. As far as I’m concerned, Planned Parenthood has long since been exonerated in this episode, so I don’t really need to see anything. But I am curious about just what they decided to leave out.

1Standard caveat: If you think abortion is murder, then everything on the video is unethical and immoral.

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It Turns Out That Those "Full and Unedited" Planned Parenthood Videos…. Aren’t

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When Is a Tax Not a Tax? When It’s a Fee to Keep the Highway Trust Fund From Going Broke Next Month.

by AngelinMurdoch Posted on July 22, 2015

Mother Jones

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Good news! The Senate has come up with a compromise 6-year highway funding bill. It’s 1,030 pages long, so no one really knows what’s in it, and it only specifies funding sources for three years. But let’s not be picky. It’s a bill. So where’s the money coming from?

Under the Senate agreement, Congress would raise $47.1 billion to cover three years’ worth of spending through a combination of spending cuts and tax increases. Lawmakers came up with $9 billion of the total by agreeing to sell 101 million barrels of oil from the nation’s emergency stockpile over a seven-year period through fiscal 2025. Another $16 billion would come from lowering to 1.5% from 6% the dividend paid to all but the smallest banks that are members of the Federal Reserve system.

Seriously? Tax increases? Mitch McConnell agreed to this? Maybe it’s in the $22 billion that’s mysteriously absent from the Wall Street Journal’s report. Let’s see if The Hill has more:

“The bill is fully offset with spending reductions or changes to federal programs,” three Senate sponsors said. “It does not increase the deficit or raise taxes.”

….The proposal calls for generating $16.3 billion from interest rate changes, $9 billion from sales of reserved oil, $4 billion from customs fees, $3.5 billion from the TSA fees and $1.9 billion from extending guarantees on mortgage-backed securities that had been scheduled to start declining in 2021. Other funding sources in the measure include approximately $7.7 billion in tax compliance measures.

Hmmm. I guess “fees” don’t count as taxes? And apparently neither do “tax compliance measures”—though I’ve certainly heard Republicans claim in the past that efforts to get rich people to actually pay their taxes were little more than a stealth tax increase.

Tomayto, tomahto. Best not to be too fastidious about these things. For example, “tax compliance measures” seems to include a provision that blocks Social Security payments to individuals with felony warrants. That’s a tax compliance measure? Sure, I guess. Whatever.

Amusingly, the money from customs fees comes from indexing them for inflation. And that’s OK with Mitch McConnell. But indexing the gasoline tax to inflation? That’s a tax increase. Absolutely out of the question.

Anyway, the House has its own highway bill, which only runs for six months but would supposedly give them time to come up with a real, honest-to-goodness, fully-funded 6-year bill. That’s very optimistic, considering that Congress has been haggling over this for seven years now and has never been able to do more than pass a quick fix that kicks the can down the road for a few more months. And that might happen again. McConnell and the other sponsors of the Senate legislation want their bill voted on quickly and then approved by the House before the August recess, since that’s when the Highway Trust Fund literally goes broke. But plenty of senators aren’t on board yet, and House leaders are skeptical too. If we end up with yet another 90-day fix, don’t be too surprised.

Originally posted here – 

When Is a Tax Not a Tax? When It’s a Fee to Keep the Highway Trust Fund From Going Broke Next Month.

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AFFH: What You Need to Know to Keep Up With the Latest Right-Wing Outrage

by VirgilioWjd Posted on July 21, 2015

Mother Jones

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Conservatives have a whole laundry list of stuff they’re outraged about: Benghazi, Fast & Furious, Agenda 21, Obamaphones, etc. etc. So what’s the latest from the right wing? Stanley Kurtz tells us:

Conservative opinion has been alive with outrage over AFFH for a month now.

Huh. Never heard of it. But a few minutes of Googling will get me up to speed. Hold on a bit.

OK. So it turns out that the Fair Housing Act of 1968 outlaws most of the obvious forms of housing discrimination, and has done a relatively good job of enforcing discrimination rules since then. However, it also requires the Department of Housing and Urban Development to run its programs in a way that affirmatively furthers fair housing. That is, if a local community is heavily segregated, it has to affirmatively try to reduce that segregation in order to qualify for HUD funds.

It turns out that HUD hasn’t done much of anything about this particular aspect of the law, and President Obama would like them to start. So a couple of years ago HUD started developing guidelines called, uncreatively, “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing.” Last year they released a tool for assessing segregation and fair housing choice that can be used by community planners, and a few days ago they released the final 377-page rule.

That’s the basics. It’s surprisingly hard to get more because Google returns almost exclusively either (a) evaluations of AFFH by civil rights and fair housing groups, or (b) outraged rants from conservative outlets. Ordinary newspapers seem to have little interest (or, as Kurtz puts it, “The mainstream press has been straining to avoid AFFH”).

Obviously I’m not going to pretend to be an instant expert now that I’ve read half a dozen pieces about AFFH, but basically the concrete goals seem to be (1) providing communities with data regarding the racial, ethnic and income distribution of housing in their towns; (2) encouraging and funding affordable housing in prosperous areas; and (3) pressing communities to change zoning rules that promote segregation.

Will it work? Hard to say. HUD’s only tool for enforcing its guidelines is to withhold money for HUD programs if communities don’t comply. However, prosperous communities don’t get much HUD funding in the first place, which means HUD has little leverage in high-income suburbs. They’ll probably be able to almost entirely avoid the long arm of HUD tyranny.

Anyway, that’s that. Mostly I just wanted to let everyone know that this thing called AFFH is the latest outrage among the conservative base. It fits in perfectly with their hysteria over Agenda 21 and their general belief that Obama wants to round up every well-off white person in the country and pack them like sardines into high-rise buildings in big cities. Now you know.

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AFFH: What You Need to Know to Keep Up With the Latest Right-Wing Outrage

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Trump Takes Big GOP Lead, But Plummets After McCain Remarks

by Renaldo98Y Posted on July 20, 2015

Mother Jones

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Today brings the latest presidential poll from the fine folks at ABC News and the Washington Post. The big news is that Hillary Clinton has maintained her 63-14 percent lead over Bernie Sanders.

Just kidding! I know you don’t care about that. You want to know what’s going on over in GOP-ville. Your answer is in the chart on the right. Walker and Bush have both gained slightly over the last month, but nearly every other candidate has lost support. And where has that support gone? To Donald Trump, of course. But then there’s this:

How long the Trump surge lasts is an open question; this poll was conducted Thursday through Sunday, mostly before his controversial criticism Saturday of Sen. John McCain’s status as a war hero. And Trump’s support was conspicuously lower Sunday than in the three previous days.

In a hypothetical three-way matchup between Clinton, Bush, and Trump, Trump’s support was 21 percent from Thursday to Saturday, vs. 13 percent in Sunday interviews.

There’s no telling how this plays out. If Trump implodes—and he will eventually, even if his McCain comments don’t do the trick—it’s likely that his supporters will shift to tea-party conservatives: Huckabee, Cruz, Perry, maybe Rubio, and probably Walker. But not Bush.

Or….well, who knows? ABC News tells us that Trump’s support dropped in Sunday interviews, but they don’t tell us who that support shifted to. We’ll have to wait and see. Maybe Bush will come out of this better than I think.

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Trump Takes Big GOP Lead, But Plummets After McCain Remarks

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Big Banks Get Their New Marching Orders From the Fed

by Latarsha14 Posted on July 20, 2015

Mother Jones

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Seven years after the great banking meltdown of 2008, and five years after the passage of Dodd-Frank, the Fed has finally announced new capital requirements for large, systemically important banks that could devastate the financial system if they failed. These new requirements can be met only with common equity, the safest form of capital, and are in addition to the 7 percent common equity level already required of all banks:

J.P. Morgan would face a capital “surcharge” of 4.5% of its risk-weighted assets under the final rule. The other seven firms must maintain an additional capital buffer of between 1% and 3.5%….The size of each bank’s additional capital requirement is tailored to the firm’s relative riskiness, as measured by a formula created by international regulators and the Fed. A bank’s surcharge can grow or shrink depending on changes such as size, complexity and entanglements with other big firms.

….“A key purpose of the capital surcharge is to require the firms themselves to bear the costs that their failure would impose on others,” Fed Chairwoman Janet Yellen said in a written statement prepared for this afternoon’s open meeting. “They must either hold substantially more capital, reducing the likelihood that they will fail, or else they must shrink their systemic footprint, reducing the harm that their failure would do to our financial system.”

Leverage, leverage, leverage. That’s the big lesson we should have learned from the Great Meltdown. And the cleanest and easiest way to reduce leverage is to increase capital requirements. This is a good move in the right direction, though it probably doesn’t go far enough.

It also applies only to ordinary banks, not to the shadow banking sector—which, in retrospect, appears to have been at least as big a contributor to the financial collapse as conventional banks. But that’s a tougher nut to crack. It will probably be a while before we see how the Fed plans to handle that.

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Big Banks Get Their New Marching Orders From the Fed

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Uber vs. Taxis: Who Does Better in Low-Income Neighborhoods?

by NikiDriver Posted on July 20, 2015

Mother Jones

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Does Uber routinely pick up riders in good neighborhoods but avoid those who call in from poor neighborhoods? A new study suggests it doesn’t. Mark Kleiman, who played a small role in the study, explains what it found:

The design could hardly have been simpler; we sent pairs of riders to call for taxi service or use an app to summon UberX for travel along pre-planned routes. The riders recorded how long it took….After each ride, the riders switched off; whoever took a taxi last time took an Uber next time. Our riders didn’t know that Uber had paid for the study.

The answer was clear-cut, and consistent across neighborhoods and days: summoning an UberX took less than half as long as calling for a taxi, and the trip cost less than half as much. UberX was also more reliable, with no very long wait times.

Even though Uber had no control over our data analysis or interpretation, the fact that Uber paid for the study makes some skepticism about our results natural and proper. We will happily share our data and methods with other research teams for re-analysis and replication.

It was not possible for a single study in a single city to answer all the relevant questions about ridesharing. Would the same relationship hold in other cities? Would it hold in the small number of very-high-crime neighborhoods we excluded in order to protect our riders? Would it hold after dark?….So this study ought to be the beginning of the scientific effort rather than the end.

This is tentatively good news for Uber. As Mark says, it’s a beginning, not the final word in how Uber compares to taxis. They didn’t test in high-crime neighborhoods, and obviously Uber’s requirement for a smartphone and a credit card automatically precludes the very poor from using their service at all.

Still, an interesting first cut, and it’s basically fairly cheap research to carry out. The full report is here.

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Uber vs. Taxis: Who Does Better in Low-Income Neighborhoods?

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Louisiana Republicans Now Wish They’d Never Heard of Grover Norquist

by HassanE54kqinqhe Posted on June 9, 2015

Mother Jones

It’s hardly surprising when Democrats criticize Grover Norquist, the godfather of the anti-tax movement. But following like sheep behind Norquist’s demands to lower taxes always and everywhere has gotten states in so much trouble that even some Republicans are now begging him to be a little less obstinate. Sadly for Louisiana, Norquist is having none of it:

A group of self-described “conservative” Republican state representatives took their complaints to Norquist himself, asking him to give them some wiggle room on raising taxes and to shoot down some Jindal-backed legislation that they say would set a “dangerous precedent” in how government could mask revenue hikes.

….Sunday’s letter — signed by Louisiana House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Joel Robideaux (R) and 10 other state Republican representatives — asked Norquist to take into account the previous tax cuts Louisiana has passed in recent years and the effect they will have in the future when assessing whether the state is in compliance with the no tax pledge….Furthermore it asked Norquist to weigh in on the so-called SAVE proposal, which they said would allow governments in the future to raise billions of dollars in revenue in the guise of a revenue-neutral budget.

….However, Norquist refused to take the bait. While declining to come out for or against the tax credit proposal, he said it qualified as an offset and asked the lawmakers, “If you don’t like the SAVE Act, why not find other offsetting tax cuts that are more to your liking? “Norquist also scoffed at the Republicans’ plea that their past tax cuts be taken into account, writing “under that logic, President Obama could argue he didn’t raise taxes.”

In other words, go pound sand. But then, what did they expect? Norquist has one and only one thing going for him—thou shalt never raise taxes, no how, no way—and Bobby Jindal is still delusional enough to think he’s running for president. So no taxes are going to be raised in the Pelican State. And if that causes massive pain and dislocation? Well, that’s just tough, isn’t it?

Source – 

Louisiana Republicans Now Wish They’d Never Heard of Grover Norquist

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Is Campaign Finance Reform Really the Key to Winning the White Working Class?

by ShielaKater Posted on June 2, 2015

Mother Jones

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Stan Greenberg says that white working-class voters aren’t lost to the Democratic Party. In fact, most of them strongly support a progressive agenda in the mold of Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders. The problem is that they don’t trust the system, and they want to see reform first, before they’re willing to vote for Democratic candidates with expansive social welfare programs:

Three-quarters of voters in the twelve most competitive Senate battleground states in 2014—states flooded with campaign money—support a constitutional amendment to overturn the Citizens United ruling. Three in five of those voters support “a plan to overhaul campaign spending by getting rid of big donations and allowing only small donations to candidates, matched by taxpayer funds.”

….Yet most important for our purposes are the results for white unmarried women and working-class women. These groups both put a “streamline government” initiative ahead of everything except protecting Social Security and Medicare. They want to “streamline government and reduce waste and bureaucracy to make sure every dollar spent is a dollar spent serving people, not serving government.” They gave even greater importance than white working-class men to streamlining government. For these women, being on the edge means feeling more strongly that government should pinch pennies and start working for them.

….What really strengthens and empowers the progressive economic narrative, however, is a commitment to reform politics and government. That may seem ironic or contradictory, since the narrative calls for a period of government activism. But, of course, it does make sense: Why would you expect government to act on behalf of the ordinary citizen when it is clearly dominated by special interests? Why would you expect people who are financially on the edge, earning flat or falling wages and paying a fair amount of taxes and fees, not to be upset about tax money being wasted or channeled to individuals and corporations vastly more wealthy and powerful than themselves?

I’ll admit to some skepticism here. Are working-class voters, white or otherwise, really pining away for campaign finance reform? The evidence of the past 40 years sure doesn’t seem to suggest this is a big winner. Still, times have changed, and the influence of big money has become far more obvious and far more insidious than in the past. Maybe this really is a winner.

As for streamlining government, my only question is: where’s the beef? That is, what kind of concrete plan are we talking about here? “Streamlining” seems a little too fuzzy to capture many votes.

In any case, read the whole thing if this is the sort of thing you enjoy arguing about. It’s food for thought at the very least. As for me, I’m off to see my doctor. I’ll be back sooner or later depending on how streamlined his office is.

Excerpt from: 

Is Campaign Finance Reform Really the Key to Winning the White Working Class?

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Judges Are Just Extensions of Political Parties These Days

by OliviaMonahan Posted on May 26, 2015

Mother Jones

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From a post by Dara Lind about a court ruling on President Obama’s immigration plan:

The two Republican-appointed judges hearing the case sided against the administration, while the Democratic-appointed judge on the panel sided with the White House.

How many times have we read sentences exactly like this? It’s a wonder that anyone in the country still believes that federal judges are honest brokers these days.

Link: 

Judges Are Just Extensions of Political Parties These Days

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For the First Time Ever, Social Conservatives No Longer Outnumber Social Liberals in America

by BoyceTindale Posted on May 22, 2015

Mother Jones

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Via Ed Kilgore, here’s an interesting chart from the good folks at Gallup:

What’s interesting about this is that the change is due almost entirely to Democrats and Democratic leaners. Since 1999, that group has gone from 35 percent socially liberal to 53 percent, and from 20 percent socially conservative to 14 percent conservative.

Republicans and Republican leaners, by contrast, have barely budged. In the 2015 polling there’s a slight dip in conservative ID and a slight spike in moderate ID, but it’s probably just noise. Generally speaking, the lines are pretty flat over the past couple of decades.

So why have Democrats changed so much? Perhaps it’s the impact of Millennials. Perhaps it’s the impact of gay marriage, which Democrats have been far more willing to accept than Republicans. Maybe MSNBC and liberal blogs have had a bigger impact than I would have guessed. I’m not sure. But the increase has been steady enough that it can’t be blamed on any specific event, like the Bush presidency or the financial crisis.

In any case, this really is a milestone. For a long time, one of the rocks of political analysis in America has been the simple fact that conservatives outnumber liberals. That’s been true since at least the 60s, and probably for the entire postwar period—and it’s been a perpetual millstone around Democratic necks. They couldn’t win national elections just by getting the liberal vote and a little bit of the center-right vote. They had to get a lot of the center-right vote.

But it now looks like that era is coming to an end. With social issues increasingly defining politics, a social liberal is, for all practical purposes, just a plain old liberal—and the trend of increasing liberal ID is already underway. It’s still got a ways to go, but the liberal-conservative gap is definitely closing. This probably goes a long way toward explaining why Hillary Clinton and other Democrats seem much more willing to move left than in the past. It’s because they no longer think they have to capture a huge chunk of the moderate vote to win. They still need some moderates in their camp, but they no longer need to capture two-thirds or more of them. Like Republicans, they can make do with half or even a bit less.

UPDATE: The headline initially just said “liberal” and “conservative” without mentioning that it was about social liberals and conservatives. Too much shorthand. Sorry about that. I’ve changed the headline and a few words of the text to make everything clear.

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For the First Time Ever, Social Conservatives No Longer Outnumber Social Liberals in America

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