Tag Archives: fighting

Florida Governor Refuses to Admit That His Own Investigators Have Cleared Planned Parenthood

by Eve6nx7b Posted on September 3, 2015

Mother Jones

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Good news! Florida regulators have finished their investigation of Planned Parenthood and concluded that there were no problems with their handling of fetal tissue. But you might not know that if you read their press release about the investigation. It turns out that Florida governor Rick Scott preferred to keep this under wraps:

Emails between the governor’s office and AHCA, obtained by POLITICO Florida through a public records request, show the agency prepared a press release that same day noting that “there is no evidence of the mishandling of fetal remains at any of the 16 clinics we investigated across the state.”

Scott’s office revised the release to exclude that sentence, an email sent by Scott’s communications director, Jackie Schutz, shows. Additionally, the revised release noted the AHCA would refer physicians who worked at the clinics to the Board of Medicine for possible disciplinary action.

Kinda reminds you of a half-bright middle schooler who thinks he has a genius idea, doesn’t it?

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Florida Governor Refuses to Admit That His Own Investigators Have Cleared Planned Parenthood

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Tell Us What You Really Think About Donald Trump

by AOZSilkepxfuwi Posted on August 1, 2015

Mother Jones

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I’ve sort of promised myself not to write about Donald Trump, but (a) it’s a weekend, and (b) David Fahrenthold has a pretty entertaining piece about Trump in the Washington Post today. Here’s a brief excerpt of some of the reactions Fahrenthold got to a variety of Trump’s blatherings:

Mark Krikorian, a foe of illegal immigration, on Trump’s immigration ideas: “Trump is like your Uncle George at Thanksgiving dinner, saying he knows how to solve all the problems. It’s not that he’s always wrong. It’s just that he’s an auto mechanic, not a policy guy.”

David Goldwyn, a former State Department official in the Obama administration, on Trump’s plan to fight ISIS by simply bombing them and then taking all their oil: “That is sheer lunacy on so many counts, it’s hard to start.”

Some anonymous sources on the same idea: “Oil-industry experts expressed skepticism about this plan. Skepticism, in fact, may not be a strong-enough word.”

Michael Tanner of Cato, on Trump’s endless vision of new building projects combined with his insistence on lowering taxes: “You can’t spend more and collect less. That’s kind of basic math. You can argue about how the math adds up in the other people’s plans. But there’s math there. This, there’s just no math.”

Gary Hufbauer of the Peterson Institute on Trump’s plan to jack up tariffs on countries he doesn’t like: “If you thought this had a ghost of a chance — which it doesn’t — you would sell all your stocks,” because of the damage that a trade war would do to the U.S. economy.

You know, when Mark Krikorian is critical of your anti-immigration ideas; Michael Tanner is skeptical of your tax-cutting ideas; and oil companies want no part of your oil-stealing ideas, you just know there’s something wrong.

Anyway, Fahrenthold’s piece is worth a weekend click. And you might as well do it while you can. We won’t have Trump to kick around forever.

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Tell Us What You Really Think About Donald Trump

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Our Anti-ISIS Program in Syria Is a Bad Joke

by HollyA59bq Posted on August 1, 2015

Mother Jones

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So how are we doing in our efforts to train moderate Syrian allies to help us in the fight against ISIS? Here’s the New York Times two days ago:

A Pentagon program to train moderate Syrian insurgents to fight the Islamic State has been vexed by problems of recruitment, screening, dismissals and desertions that have left only a tiny band of fighters ready to do battle.

Those fighters — 54 in all — suffered perhaps their most embarrassing setback yet on Thursday. One of their leaders, a Syrian Army defector who recruited them, was abducted in Syria near the Turkish border, along with his deputy who commands the trainees….Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter has acknowledged the shortfalls, citing strict screening standards, which have created a backlog of 7,000 recruits waiting to be vetted. Mr. Carter has insisted the numbers will increase.

Okay, I guess 54 is a….start. So how good are they? Here’s the New York Times today:

A Syrian insurgent group at the heart of the Pentagon’s effort to fight the Islamic State came under intense attack on Friday….The American-led coalition responded with airstrikes to help the American-aligned unit, known as Division 30, in fighting off the assault….The attack on Friday was mounted by the Nusra Front, which is affiliated with Al Qaeda. It came a day after the Nusra Front captured two leaders and at least six fighters of Division 30, which supplied the first trainees to graduate from the Pentagon’s anti-Islamic State training program.

….“This wasn’t supposed to happen like this,” said one former senior American official, who was working closely on Syria issues until recently, and who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss confidential intelligence assessments….Division 30 said in a statement that five of its fighters were killed in the firefight on Friday, 18 were wounded and 20 were captured by the Nusra Front. It was not clear whether the 20 captives included the six fighters and two commanders captured a day earlier.

Let’s see, that adds up to either 43 or 51 depending on how you count. Starting with 54, then, it looks like Division 30 has either 11 or 3 fighters left, and no commanders. But apparently that’s not so bad!

A spokesman for the American military, Col. Patrick S. Ryder, wrote in an email statement that “we are confident that this attack will not deter Syrians from joining the program to fight for Syria,” and added that the program “is making progress.”

….A senior defense official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence reports, described what he called “silver linings” to the attack on Friday: that the trainees had fought effectively in the battle, and that coalition warplanes responded quickly with airstrikes to support them.

The trainees fought effectively? There are no more than a dozen still able to fight. That’s not the same definition of “effective” that most of us have. As for the US Air Force responding quickly, that’s great. But the quality of the US Air Force has never really been in question.

This is starting to make Vietnam look like a well-oiled machine. Stay tuned.

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Our Anti-ISIS Program in Syria Is a Bad Joke

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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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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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Fox’s Poll Cutoff for the Republican Debate Works Better Than Rachel Maddow Suggested Last Night

by Laura Brown Posted on July 28, 2015

Mother Jones

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Last night Rachel Maddow invited Lee Miringoff, polling director for the Marist Institute for Public Opinion, to discuss the way Fox News is using polls to cut the Republican debate field down to ten candidates. Basically, both Maddow and Miringoff agreed that the whole thing was ridiculous because so many of the candidates on the right-hand tail were so close to each other. Is it really fair for a guy who polls at 3.2 percent to be on stage while a guy with 2.7 percent is kicked to the corner? After all, the margin of error is 3 percentage points. There might not really be any difference between the two.

For some reason, Miringoff didn’t push back on this. But he should have. There are two key bits of arithmetic they left out:

A typical poll has a 3 percent margin of error. But Fox News is averaging five polls. I don’t know precisely what the margin of error is in this case, but it’s probably somewhere around 1.5 percent.
The margin of error goes down as you go farther out on the tails. If you have two candidates polling 51-49, you can use the standard margin of error. But for candidates polling at 2 or 3 percent? It’s roughly half the midpoint margin of error.

Put these two together, and the true margin of error for all the also-rans is something like 0.7 percentage points. This doesn’t entirely negate Maddow’s point, since the difference between 10th and 11th place might still be less than that. But it does mean the results are a lot less random than she suggested. Assuming Fox does its poll averaging correctly, there’s actually a pretty good chance that the top ten really are the top ten.

That said, I wouldn’t do the debate this way either. I’d rank all the candidates using the polling average, and then have one debate with all the even-numbered candidates and a second debate with all the odd-numbered candidates. Make it a 3-hour show with 90 minutes given to each group. What’s so hard about that?

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Fox’s Poll Cutoff for the Republican Debate Works Better Than Rachel Maddow Suggested Last Night

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Congress Just Can’t Help But Fall In Love With a Nuclear Physicist

by WilmaDomingo Posted on July 28, 2015

Mother Jones

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Maybe you could call this the revenge of the nerds?

He’s blinding them with science.

Or intellectually charming them anyway. That’s how Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz seems to be winning fans in the difficult fight to sell the Iran deal on Capitol Hill….Moniz, a nuclear physicist with mad-scientist hair, has already been credited as the administration’s secret weapon in the lengthy negotiations to secure an Iran deal that will prevent the rogue country from securing a nuclear weapon.

….Moniz can certainly lapse into the technical talk with aplomb — and when he gets to talking about the half-lives of isotopes and the detection technologies that will be deployed to survey Iran’s suspected nuclear activities, he can leave his audience in the dust.

But in the two years since Moniz became Energy Secretary, lawmakers have far more often noted and applauded the former professor’s natural ability to translate complex scientific concepts into digestible terms.

It’s funny, in a way. Plenty of highly-qualified scientists have testified before Congress, and mostly they get treated as if they were balky university freshmen. But nuclear physics! That still has cachet. Start talking about the half-lives of isotopes and legislators swoon with admiration.

Except for dumbest among them, of course, who can’t tell the difference between an MIT-trained physics PhD and Dr. Phil. That, of course, would be Wisconsin’s favorite son, Ron Johnson. He just wanted to talk about the danger of electromagnetic pulses. Nice work, Senator.

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Congress Just Can’t Help But Fall In Love With a Nuclear Physicist

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Sorry Donald, Most Republicans Don’t Actually Care That Much About Illegal Immigration

by AllanThurston Posted on July 27, 2015

Mother Jones

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Greg Sargent has an item today noting that by a 63-34 percent margin in a new CNN poll, Republicans believe the main focus of immigration policy should be stopping the flow of immigration and deporting the ones who are already here. No big surprise there. But when I clicked over to the poll itself I found a couple of things related to immigration that were kind of interesting.

First, CNN asked “Just your best guess, do you think the number of immigrants coming to the United States illegally has increased or decreased in the last few years?” Among Republicans, 83 percent thought it had increased. Granted, asking about the “last few years” is a little ambiguous, but if you assume at a minimum that it means less than a decade, then 83 percent of Republicans are woefully misinformed. As you can see from the Pew data on the right, the illegal immigrant population dropped considerably in 2008 and 2009 and has been basically flat ever since.

(By the way, among Democrats 61 percent think immigration has increased. That’s a little better, but still not exactly a proud moment in voter awareness. It isn’t just Fox News that’s keeping us all misinformed.)

The second interesting question was one that asked about which issues were most important. This kind of thing always has to be taken with a grain of salt, but even so it’s a little surprising how little Republicans actually care about immigration. For all the attention it’s gotten from Donald Trump, only 9 percent said it was their most important issue, the lowest showing of any of the issues CNN asked about. The economy and terrorism/foreign policy were far and away the biggest worries among Republicans. Also surprisingly, health care didn’t register very high either. The tea party may be yelling endlessly about the need to repeal the worst law since the Fugitive Slave Act, but among all Republicans, only a few rate it as a critical issue.

So….immigration and Obamacare probably aren’t going to be gigantic issues this year among Republicans—or in the general election. As usual, the economy will be #1, and #2 will probably be terrorism and foreign policy in general.

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Sorry Donald, Most Republicans Don’t Actually Care That Much About Illegal Immigration

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Added Sugar Is Your Enemy, Not Aspartame

by CharlieRodgers Posted on July 27, 2015

Mother Jones

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Why does anyone still choose sugared sodas over artificially-sweetened sodas? One reason is taste. If you don’t like the taste of aspartame or saccharin, then that’s that. Another reason might be a rare medical condition that makes you allergic (or worse) to certain artificial sweeteners.

But that probably accounts for only a small fraction of the people who continue to drink sugared sodas. The rest are most likely convinced that artificial sweeteners are bad for you. But they’re wrong. It’s sugar that’s bad for you. Aaron Carroll brings the research:

One of the oldest artificial sweeteners is saccharin. Starting in the 1980s, Congress mandated that any product containing it be accompanied by the following: “Use of this product may be hazardous to your health. This product contains saccharin, which has been determined to cause cancer in laboratory animals.”….There was a problem, though. This link has never been confirmed in humans….Based on these newer studies, saccharin was removed from the carcinogen list in 2000. But by that time, opinions were set. It did little to make anyone feel safe.

….Aspartame was introduced in the United States around the time that saccharin began taking a beating….But in 1996, a study was published in The Journal of Neuropathology and Experimental Neurology titled “Increasing Brain Tumor Rates: Is There a Link to Aspartame?” Most people ignored the question mark….There were any number of problems with this logic….Because aspartame was approved in 1981, blaming it for a rise in tumors in the 1970s seems impossible. Finally, much more comprehensive studies couldn’t find links….A safety review from 2007, published in Critical Reviews in Toxicology, found that aspartame had been studied extensively and that the evidence showed that it was safe.

….But what about sugar?….Epidemiologic studies have found that even after controlling for other factors, one’s intake of added sugars is associated with the development of type 2 diabetes, with a 1.1 percent increase in prevalence for each can of sugar-sweetened soda. A study following people for an average of more than 14 years published last year in JAMA Internal Medicine found that those in the highest quintile of added sugar consumption had more than twice the risk of dying from cardiovascular disease than those in the lowest quintile, even after controlling for many other factors.

Anyway, that’s what science says. Unfortunately, science also says that presenting facts to people almost never changes their minds. In fact, it can do just the opposite as people respond defensively to the notion that they’ve been wrong for a long time. So I suppose no one reading this is actually going to switch to diet sodas. Instead they’ll cherry-pick studies that support their previous point of view. Or claim that all the studies exonerating artificial sweeteners are funded by big business and not to be trusted. Or perhaps make an outré claim about how aspartame interacts with gluten and animal fat to produce….something or other.

That’s life, I guess. However, I suggest that you swamp Professor Carroll’s inbox with all these insights instead of bothering me with them. He’s the expert after all. Or, just switch to water. Then you won’t have to worry about it.

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Added Sugar Is Your Enemy, Not Aspartame

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