Tag Archives: early

Today’s Cliffhanger: Will Rick Perry Make It To the Main Debate Stage?

by TrinidaUdv Posted on August 4, 2015

Mother Jones

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Vox’s Andrew Prokop takes a look at the polls released today and gives us his projection of who’s going to make the cut for the main stage in Thursday’s Fox News Republican debate:

Fox has said it will average the last five national polls before 5 pm today, and New York magazine’s Gabriel Sherman has reported that the network will use only live interview polls. If that’s the case, polls by NBC/WSJ, Monmouth, CBS News, Bloomberg Politics, and Fox News itself will be averaged….The candidates excluded from the primetime debate appear to be Rick Perry, Rick Santorum, Bobby Jindal, Carly Fiorina, Lindsey Graham, George Pataki, and Jim Gilmore.

That’s kind of too bad about Perry. He’s been saying the occasional interesting thing lately, and while he’s unlikely to win, he seems more likely to me than Carson or Huckabee or Cruz.

My guess is that no one has any problem with the other six who didn’t make it. Their support is minuscule and they don’t seem even remotely likely to improve much. But Perry? His formal qualifications are good—12 years as governor, ran once before in 2012—and you never know about all that Texas money sloshing around. And there’s really no downside. His famous “oops” from last time around was the most memorable moment of the debate cycle. If he does something as dumb this time, at least we’d get some good entertainment value out of it.

Anyway, we’ll get the official word on all this from Fox in a couple of hours. I know you’re all waiting on the edges of your seats. As for me, it’s lunchtime in California. So I’m going to go get some lunch.

UPDATE: Yep, this is how it turned out. Official Fox News announcement here.

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Today’s Cliffhanger: Will Rick Perry Make It To the Main Debate Stage?

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Abortion Is Not Murder

by LizzieAppel Posted on August 3, 2015

Mother Jones

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Ramesh Ponnuru comments on Planned Parenthood’s sale of fetal tissue from the abortions it performs:

A recent Sarah Silverman tweet distilled one argument many liberals are making about the Planned Parenthood videos into a few characters: ”Abortion is still legal in the great U.S of A. It would be insane not to use fetal tissue 4 science & education in such cases. #StandwithPP.”

The death penalty is also still legal in our great country. Should we employ methods of execution so as to yield the highest number of usable organs?….

Whenever I write about abortion, I usually get a bunch of tweets or emails asking if I even understand the conservative position. Answer: of course I do. Most conservatives say that abortion is murder. Given that premise, their opposition to funding abortion, legalizing abortion, using some day-after pills, selling fetal tissue, and so forth, makes sense.

So I’m going to ask the mirror image question here: does Ponnuru understand the liberal position on abortion? Most of us don’t think of fetuses as persons, which means abortion doesn’t involve killing a human being in any meaningful sense. Given that premise, our support of funding abortion, legalizing abortion, promoting day-after pills, selling fetal tissue, and so forth, makes sense.

To us lefties, the death penalty involves killing a human being. Abortion doesn’t. So it’s perfectly reasonable to have different views about how the remains are treated in each case.

POSTSCRIPT: There are, of course, nuances in these positions regarding abortion on both sides. We’re all familiar enough with them that it seems unnecessary to repeat them here. That said, at its most basic, liberals don’t generally consider aborting a fetus to involve killing a human being. Obviously the rest of our views follow from that.

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Abortion Is Not Murder

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One Pollster Has Stopped Polling the Republican Primary. Will Others Follow?

by ShannonKortig Posted on August 3, 2015

Mother Jones

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I’ve been wondering for a while who the first pollster would be to stop polling the Republican primary. Today I got my answer:

As candidates jostle to make the cut for the first GOP presidential debate this week, the McClatchy-Marist Poll has temporarily suspended polling on primary voter choices out of concern that public polls are being misused to decide who will be in and who will be excluded.

….“It’s a problem when it’s shaping who gets to sit at the table,” said Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist Institute….“It’s making candidates change their behavior. Kasich is trying to get a big bounce. Rand Paul has a video with a chain saw. Lindsay Graham is hitting cell phones with golf clubs,” Miringoff said. “Now the public polls are affecting the process they’re supposed to be measuring.”

Miringoff is also concerned that candidates may be excluded from the debate due to differences between 10th and 11th place that are so close they’re within the margin of error. I think those concerns are overblown, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t real. There’s clearly a certain amount of arbitrariness at work here.

I doubt that very many outfits will pull out of primary polling. But a few more might, and of course that also affects which candidates will make the cut. In the end, then, McClatchy might be kidding itself here. There’s just no way for news organizations that make editorial and placement judgments to avoid affecting the events they report on. It might be best to accept that and deal with it openly instead of pretending they can make it go away.

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One Pollster Has Stopped Polling the Republican Primary. Will Others Follow?

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Friday Cat Blogging – 31 July 2015

by Ewan45J515680712 Posted on July 31, 2015

Mother Jones

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Hopper (left) and Hilbert are so entranced by something or other that even my sister wants to know what they’re looking at. My guess: a dust mote in the cat dimension.

Speaking of my sister, she is promising some guest cat blogging for next week. Will she come through? Tune in next Friday to find out!

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Friday Cat Blogging – 31 July 2015

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It’s Republicans, Not Obama, Who Want to Bust the Sequestration Deal

by IrisCTTDnruhenv Posted on July 31, 2015

Mother Jones

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The LA Times reports today that we might be headed for another government shutdown. Big surprise. But these paragraphs are very peculiar:

President Obama has signaled his intention to bust, once and for all, the severe 2011 spending caps known as sequestration. He’s vowed to reject any GOP-backed appropriation bills that increase government funding for the military without also boosting domestic programs important to Democrats such as Head Start for preschoolers.

The Republican-controlled Congress is also digging in. Since taking control in January, GOP leaders had promised to run Congress responsibly and prevent another shutdown like the one in 2013, but their spending proposals are defying the president’s veto threat by bolstering defense accounts and leaving social-welfare programs to be slashed.

It’s true that Obama has proposed doing away with the sequestration caps. But his budgets have routinely been described as DOA by Republican leaders, so his plans have never gotten so much as a hearing. What’s happening right now is entirely different. Republicans are claiming they want to keep the sequestration deal, but they don’t like the fact that back in 2011 they agreed it would cut domestic and military spending equally. Instead, Republicans now want to increase military spending and decrease domestic spending. They’re doing this by putting the additional defense money into an “emergency war-spending account,” which technically allows them to get around the sequester caps. Unsurprisingly, Obama’s not buying it.

So how does this count as Obama planning to “bust” the sequestration caps? I don’t get it. It sounds like Obama is willing to stick to the original deal if he has to, but he’s quite naturally insisting that this means sticking to the entire deal. It’s Republicans who are trying to renege. What am I missing here?

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It’s Republicans, Not Obama, Who Want to Bust the Sequestration Deal

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California Really Doesn’t Need to Worry About Losing Jobs to Texas

by VirginiHoltze Posted on July 31, 2015

Mother Jones

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Is California losing jobs to Texas, thanks to California’s stringent anti-business regulations vs. Texas’s wide-open business-friendly environment? It’s a question I have only a modest interest in, since there are lots of reasons for states to gain or lose business. California has nice weather. Texas has cheap housing. Recessions hit different states at different times and with different intensities. Business regulations might be part of the mix, but it’s all but impossible to say how much.

But now I care even less. Lyman Stone ran some numbers and confirmed that, in fact, California has been losing jobs and Texas has been gaining jobs over the past couple of decades. But by itself that isn’t very interesting. The real question is, how many jobs? Here is Stone’s chart:

Stone comments: “Net migration isn’t 1% or 2%. It’s plus or minus 0.05% in most cases. Even as a share of total change in employment, migration is massively overwhelmed by employment changes due to local startups and closures, and local expansions and contractions. The truth is, net employment changes due to firm migration are within the rounding error of total employment. Over time they may matter, but overall they’re pretty miniscule.”

What’s more, these numbers are for migration to and from every state in the union. They’re far smaller if you look solely at California-Texas migration.

Bottom line: An almost invisible number of workers are migrating from California to Texas each year, probably less than .02 percent. The share of that due to business regulation is even less, probably no more than .01 percent. That’s so small it belongs in the “Other” category of any employment analysis. No matter how you look at it, this is just not a big deal.

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California Really Doesn’t Need to Worry About Losing Jobs to Texas

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Will the Tea Party Shoot Itself in the Foot Yet Again?

by JoyPostbtocen Posted on July 30, 2015

Mother Jones

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Paul Waldman notes today that although Jeb Bush is substantively pretty conservative, his tone on the campaign trail has remained resolutely moderate and affable. Waldman explains how this leads to Bush winning the nomination:

If you’re Bush, your path to victory looks like this: Trump soaks up all the attention for a while, but eventually gets bored (and hasn’t bothered to mount an actual campaign that can deliver votes), and either fades or just packs it in. Meanwhile, the conservative vote is split. Once the voting starts, the failing candidates will begin to fall away one by one. But by the time most of them are gone and their supporters have coalesced around a single candidate like Scott Walker, it’s too late — Jeb has built his lead and is piling up delegates, has all the money in the world, and can vanquish that last opponent on his way to the convention in Cleveland.

In other words, a repeat of 2012, when all the hard-core conservatives split the tea party vote ten ways while Mitt Romney quietly vacuumed up the entire moderate vote. By the time Rick Santorum was the last tea partier standing, it was too late. Romney coasted to victory.

This is the great conundrum of the tea-party wing of the Republican Party. What they should do is coalesce immediately around Scott Walker. He’s the most plausible winner among the tea partiers, and if the race was basically between him and Bush from the start, there’s a pretty good chance he could win. On the other hand, if he has to fight off a dozen challengers for months on end, it’ll just be rerun of 2012. He’ll get a share of the tea party vote, but it won’t be nearly enough to fend off Bush, who will have his own share of the tea partiers plus the vast majority of the wing of the GOP that’s disgusted that their party has been taken over by loons. And there are still quite a few of those folks around.

I guess this is where a smoke-filled room would come in handy. This is a classic collective action problem, but without party bosses who can step in and take charge, there’s really no answer to it. The tea-party candidates keep thinking that they can run and win because there are so many tea partiers among the Republican primary electorate. Unfortunately, there are too many of them who think so. The end result is that they tear each other to shreds and end up with John McCain, Mitt Romney, and Jeb Bush. And then they whine and complain about how “the party” has betrayed the conservative cause yet again.

This isn’t inevitable, of course. It’s possible that Walker or one of the other mean-boy candidates will break out and become the de facto tea party standard bearer. It’s just not as likely as it should be. It’s a shame the tea partiers can’t get their act together, isn’t it?

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Will the Tea Party Shoot Itself in the Foot Yet Again?

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Chart of the Day: The Economy Continues to Plod Along

by Aaron Duff Posted on July 30, 2015

Mother Jones

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GDP was up in the second quarter, but our economy is still not exactly a house afire. Preliminary results indicate an increase of 2.3 percent:

The BEA explains where last quarter’s growth came from:

The acceleration in real GDP growth in the second quarter reflected an upturn in exports, an acceleration in PCE, a deceleration in imports, and an upturn in state and local government spending that were partly offset by downturns in private inventory investment, in nonresidential fixed investment, and in federal government spending and a deceleration in residential fixed investment….Real personal consumption expenditures increased 2.9 percent in the second quarter, compared with an increase of 1.8 percent in the first.

Really, the chart tells the whole story. As you can see, 2.3 percent growth is about….average since the recession ended. Not great, not horrible. Every time we manage to get into third gear for a little while, we hit a bump and end up back in second. It’s now been eight years since the economy imploded, and we’re still just muddling along. It’s not clear what it will take to improve things.

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Chart of the Day: The Economy Continues to Plod Along

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Millennials Living In Their Parents’ Home Is Finally Starting to Taper Off

by DannielFrantz Posted on July 29, 2015

Mother Jones

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Pew has a new report out showing that even five years after the recession ended, more young adults are living with their parents than before the recession. This is despite the fact that unemployment among 20-somethings has dropped dramatically. What’s more, this trend is pretty widespread:

The decline in independent living since the recovery began is apparent among both better-educated young adults and their less-educated counterparts….This suggests that trends in young adult living arrangements are not being driven by labor market fortunes, as college-educated young adults have experienced a stronger labor market recovery than less-educated young adults.

Trends in living arrangements also show no significant gender differences during the recovery. However, in 2015, 63% of Millennial men lived independently of family, compared with 72% of Millennial women. But a similar gender difference existed during the Great Recession, and both young men and young women are less likely to live independently today than they were five years ago.

But the news might not be quite as bleak as Pew suggests. Take a look at the arrows in the chart on the right. The upward trend in living at home continued to rise through 2013, but it finally began to drop a couple of years ago. That’s not surprising since it’s pretty likely that there’s a certain amount hysteresis in this phenomenon; that is, a lag between the economy improving and kids moving into their own places. This might be because wages remained low for several years after the technical end of the recession. It might be because higher debt levels took a while to pay down. It might be that it simply took a few years for recession-induced fear to end. Why move out if you’re not sure the economy is really on a long-term roll?

There’s not much question that 20-somethings of this generation have it worse than my generation, which in turn had it worse than the previous generation. That means the recession hit them especially hard. But if these trends are right, it looks like optimism about work and income is finally starting to slowly improve. It’s not great news, but it’s good news.

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Millennials Living In Their Parents’ Home Is Finally Starting to Taper Off

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"Arming Our Allies" a Fiasco Yet Again in Yemen

by CeciliaPud Posted on March 17, 2015

Mother Jones

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No surprise here:

The Pentagon is unable to account for more than $500 million in U.S. military aid given to Yemen amid fears that the weaponry, aircraft and equipment is at risk of being seized by Iranian-backed rebels or al-Qaeda, according to U.S. officials.

….“We have to assume it’s completely compromised and gone,” said a legislative aide on Capitol Hill, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter.

“Arming our allies” works sometimes, but just as often it ends up like this. If we’d done this in Syria two years ago, those arms would most likely be in the hands of ISIS or Iranian militias by now.

There just aren’t very many good middle grounds between staying out of a fight and getting fully engaged in it. Iraq is our latest stab at this middle ground, and so far it’s too early to say how it’s going. But recent history is not kind to the idea.

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"Arming Our Allies" a Fiasco Yet Again in Yemen

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