Tag Archives: fighting

Donald Trump Explained in Four Words

by WadeMccollum Posted on July 26, 2015

Mother Jones

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If you want to understand Donald Trump—and I wouldn’t blame you if you don’t—this paragraph from the Post should do it:

“Finally, I can attack!” Trump said at a packed rally at Oskaloosa High School. “Wisconsin’s doing terribly. It’s in turmoil. The roads are a disaster because they don’t have any money to rebuild them. They’re borrowing money like crazy. They projected a $1 billion surplus, and it turns out to be a deficit of $2.2 billion. The schools are a disaster. The hospitals and education was a disaster. And he was totally in favor of Common Core!”

In a private email, Walker supporter Gregory Slayton wrote, “As you’ve seen Gov Walker is now well ahead of everyone not named DumbDumb (aka Trump) in the national polls.” The Wall Street Journal made the email public, and that was that. Finally, Trump could attack.

This is what he lives for. But only if he can pretend that the other guy started it. John McCain called his supporters crazies. Lindsey Graham called Trump a jackass. And now a Walker fundraiser called him DumbDumb. Finally! It must have been killing Trump to hold back on Walker until he had the appropriate casus belli.

That’s Trump. He lives for the fight. And despite being worth $10 billion (or whatever) he always manages to feel like he’s the aggrieved party. If this reminds you of any particular bloc of voters, now you know why he’s doing so well in the polls.

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Donald Trump Explained in Four Words

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China Adopts an Unusual Approach to Fighting a Stock Market Crash

by JerilynFremont Posted on July 2, 2015

Mother Jones

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Hum de hum hum. Greece is in trouble. Puerto Rico too. And don’t forget China:

Chinese shares plunged Thursday, even as Beijing grasps for solutions to stem the selling, including relaxing rules on the use of borrowed funds to invest in stocks….The Shanghai Composite closed down 3.5% while the smaller Shenzhen market was down 5.6%. The ChiNext board, composed of small-cap stocks, sank 4%. Even after losing nearly a quarter of its value from a mid-June high, China’s main stock market has almost doubled in value over the past year.

….In a rare move late Wednesday, Chinese regulators set in motion draft proposals to ease restrictions on margin lending earlier than scheduled….Regulators’ sudden shift in attitude about margin trading comes after vocal warnings about its risks in recent months. In April, regulators took various steps to rein in the practice, which had allowed investors to borrow several times their investment money.

Inscrutable, those Chinese. Their stock market is crashing so they’re promoting an increase in margin trading. That’s sort of like lighting a tree on fire when it gets dark outside and all your flashlights are dead. It’ll work. For a while. But it’s really not considered best practice.

Then again, maybe there’s something I don’t understand here. All I know is that panicky measures to halt a panic don’t usually work. And the Chinese stock market still has a long way to fall. I sure hope they figure something out.

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China Adopts an Unusual Approach to Fighting a Stock Market Crash

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ISIS Just Captured One of Syria’s Most Magnificent Ancient Cities

by JulianneMilner3 Posted on May 20, 2015

Mother Jones

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On Wednesday, militants from the so-called Islamic State captured the ancient Syrian city of Palmyra. After nearly a week of fighting, government forces reportedly fled the city, according to the British monitoring group Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. Palmyra, a desert outpost of 50,000 people, sits on a strategic highway and is close to several gas fields that ISIS has repeatedly attacked. It’s also a magnificent UNESCO World Heritage site known for its 2,000-year-old, Roman-era tombs, temple, colonnades, and artifacts, as well as a storied mythology.

As ISIS has taken more territory, it has damaged or destroyed many cultural heritage sites and priceless artifacts. Condemning much ancient art as idolatry, its fighters have chiseled the face off of a 3,000-year-old Assyrian winged bull and broken apart statues of the kings of Hatra. And, as I’ve reported, what ISIS doesn’t destroy, it loots and sells on the international black market to fund its activities.

When ISIS reached the gates of Palmyra late last week, fears arose that the World Heritage site would face the same kind of destruction seen elsewhere. Amr Al-Azm, an archeologist who works with a secret network of activists trying to safeguard Syria’s cultural heritage, told me, “If they get their hands on a World Heritage site, the looting itself could be bad, plus they have a ready made site for cultural heritage atrocities that they’re very likely to commit. Palmyra is full of Roman tombs and carvings. They’ll smash up what they want and steal what they want. It’s an iconoclast’s heaven.”

As of this evening, ISIS militants had seized the city, and the ruins were left “unguarded.” Syria’s antiquities director Maamoun Abdulkarim has claimed that hundreds of statues have been moved to safety. But nothing can be done for the remaining structures at the ancient site. Before ISIS took the town, AbdulKarim told the Guardian, “If ISIS enters Palmyra, it will spell its destruction. If the ancient city falls, it will be an international catastrophe.”

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ISIS Just Captured One of Syria’s Most Magnificent Ancient Cities

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Middle East War Suddenly Getting a Lot More Warlike

by Kristin98I Posted on March 26, 2015

Mother Jones

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I’m a little behind on the news right now, but it sure looks like things are getting a whole lot hotter in the Middle East. Here are a few headlines:

Saudi Jets Strike Yemen in Bid to Halt Houthis

Tikrit airstrikes draw U.S. into battle between militants and Iraqi forces

Obama Says He Will Delay Withdrawal of U.S. Troops from Afghanistan

Iran-backed rebels loot Yemen files about U.S. spy operations

U.S. Role in Middle East Revamped Amid Chaos

That last headline comes from the Wall Street Journal, and seems to sum things up pretty well. The story includes this:

Kenneth Pollack, the former CIA analyst, said the military campaign in Yemen is unlikely to have a positive effect on the country’s fractured dynamics.

“The idea that this is going to produce some kind of a peaceful settlement is ridiculous,” Mr. Pollack said. “The more likely outcome is it just prolongs the stalemate.” The Persian Gulf countries could consider the use of ground troops to make progress, which should be a concern for the U.S., he said.

What could go wrong?

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Middle East War Suddenly Getting a Lot More Warlike

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Three Cheers For the California Miracle!

by ad Posted on March 23, 2015

Mother Jones

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Oh dear. Here’s some bad news for Ted Cruz on his very first day as an official presidential candidate:

For years, business lobbyists complained about what they derided as “job killer” laws that drive employers out of California. Rival state governors, notably former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, made highly publicized visits to the Golden State in hopes of poaching jobs.

But new numbers from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics tell a different story. Total jobs created in the 12 months ending Jan. 31 show California leading other states. California gained 498,000 new jobs, almost 30% more than the Lone Star State’s total of 392,900 for the same period.

Them’s the breaks. There’s no more “Texas Miracle” for either Cruz or Rick Perry. We’re in the middle of a California Miracle right now.

So how is Sodom on the Pacific pulling this off? Actually, that’s pretty easy to answer. California was hit hard by the housing bubble, while Texas wasn’t. So California’s economy took a big hit during the recession and the slow recovery, while Texas did pretty well—aided and abetted by a rise in oil prices.

Now everything has turned around. California is rebounding strongly from the housing crisis while Texas is suffering from the global collapse in oil prices. There is, frankly, nothing very miraculous about either story. It’s just the business cycle at work in a fairly normal and predictable way.

In fact, you may recall that there was never much of a Texas Miracle in the first place. It was mostly just PR bluster, as the chart on the right shows. The thick green line shows the unemployment rate in Texas compared to its neighboring states, and Texas is right smack in the middle—and it always has been. It’s better than half a dozen nearby states and worse than another half dozen. It is, sad to say, entirely average. That’s not something Texans are likely to take kindly to, but numbers don’t lie.

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Three Cheers For the California Miracle!

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Ted Cruz Throws His Hat In General Direction of Presidential Ring

by Anderso7849 Posted on March 23, 2015

Mother Jones

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The big news sweeping my Twitter feed last night was Ted Cruz’s rather sudden decision to announce that he’s running for president. Usually there’s a warmup period of some kind (an “exploratory committee,” etc.) but apparently Cruz decided to dispense with all that and simply throw his hat in the ring posthaste. The motivation for his sudden haste is a little mysterious at this point.

The other thing sweeping my Twitter feed was the fact that the URL tedcruz.com leads to the site on the right. Patrick Caldwell explains this and much more in his brisk overview of potential candidates and their unfortunate lack of attention to the basics of internet campaigning:

Unfortunately for the Texas Republican, long before he ran for Senate in 2012, TedCruz.com had been nabbed by an Arizona attorney who shares his name. Based on a search of the Wayback Machine, an internet archive, the Arizona Cruz’s website dates back to at least early 2008, when it was a normal, if slightly Geocities-tinged, business website. “Putting All Your Real Estate Needs In ‘CRUZ CONTROL,'” the attorney’s tagline said at the time. But sometime within the past year he ditched his law site to instead mock the would-be-president. On a simple black background, in large font, the website screamed: “COMING SOON, Presidential Candidate, I Luv CHRISTIE!!!!!” Attorney Cruz wouldn’t say anything to Mother Jones over email except to acknowledge that he has owned the domain for several years. But he deleted the section about loving Christie shortly thereafter. Given the initial message, though, it seems unlikely that the Arizona attorney will be easily persuaded to relinquish control of the domain to the senator.

That’s bad luck, no? Still, at least Cruz has control of tedcruz.org. It was obviously thrown together pretty quickly, though at least it’s got the basics. But why the slapdash approach? According to the New York Times this morning, Cruz was afraid of being upstaged: “By becoming the first candidate to declare himself officially in the race, Republicans briefed on his strategy said, Mr. Cruz hopes to reclaim the affection and attention of those on the party’s right wing who have begun eyeing other contenders, particularly Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin.”

Cruz’s official announcement, inevitably, will be done at Liberty University, Jerry Falwell’s shrine to the Christian Right. I think we can expect many, many more speeches and announcements from Republican wannabes there. But Cruz will be the first! Take that, Bobby Jindal!

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Ted Cruz Throws His Hat In General Direction of Presidential Ring

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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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Republicans Are Making Obama Popular Again

by RebeccaEanes Posted on March 16, 2015

Mother Jones

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This isn’t exactly Oprah levels of adulation or anything, but President Obama’s Gallup approval ratings have been rising steadily ever since Republicans won the midterm elections last year. He’s been bouncing around positive territory ever since the start of 2015, and today he clocks in at 48-47 percent approval.

Is this because the economy is picking up and people are just generally happier? Is it because his executive actions have made a favorable impression on the public? Is it because Republican incompetence makes him look good by comparison? Hard to say, but it certainly suggests that Democrats are pretty happy with him. As Ed Kilgore says:

Among Democrats, who are supposedly on the brink of a “struggle for the soul of the party,” and ideologically riven between Elizabeth Warren “populists” and Obama/Clinton “centrists,” Obama’s approval rating stands at 81%. And looking deeper, he’s at 86% among self-identified “liberal Democrats,” 78% among “moderate Democrats,” and yes, 67% among “conservative Democrats,” such as they are….This is another example of isolated data being somewhat limited in value, but worth a couple of dozen Politico columns.

Yep. And I’ll bet that once things get going, Hillary Clinton will poll about the same way.

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Republicans Are Making Obama Popular Again

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Factlet of the Day: Mutual Funds Suck

by MonserrDalgarno Posted on March 15, 2015

Mother Jones

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Jeff Sommer summarizes the results of actively managed mutual funds over the past five years:

If all of the managers of the 2,862 funds hadn’t bothered to try to pick stocks at all — if they had merely flipped coins — they would, as a group, probably have produced better numbers.

I am not an investment advisor, so do whatever you want to do. But if you’re smart, you’ll invest in a few low-fee index funds and then just leave them alone. That is the path of wisdom.

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Factlet of the Day: Mutual Funds Suck

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Ides of March Catblogging – 15 March 2015

by DanieleMcGowen Posted on March 15, 2015

Mother Jones

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Et tu, Hopper? A few days ago I featured Hilbert draped over my sister, so I figured that turnabout is fair play: here’s Hopper draped over me to make up for the lack of normal Friday catblogging. Hopper is a Daddy’s girl, and will sit on no one’s lap but mine. Nor will she even do that very often. But once or twice a day she suddenly gets in the mood and plonks herself into the crook of my arm for an hour or so, purring loudly the whole time. Unlike the tubby Hilbert, Hopper weighs a svelte 11 pounds (up from nine when we first got her), so she’s no trouble at all to handle. A relaxing time is had by all.

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Ides of March Catblogging – 15 March 2015

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