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No, Vladimir Putin Is Not a Cunning Geopolitical Chess Player

by ZeldaMoritz Posted on March 2, 2014

Mother Jones

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From House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers:

Putin is playing chess and I think we are playing marbles, and I don’t think it’s even close. They’ve been running circles around us.

This kind of knee-jerk reaction is unsurprising, but it’s also nuts. Has Rogers even been following events in Ukraine lately? The reason Putin has sent troops into Crimea is because everything he’s done over the past year has blown up in his face. This was a last-ditch effort to avoid a fool’s mate, not some deeply-calculated bit of geopolitical strategery.

Make no mistake. All the sanctions and NATO meetings and condemnations from foreign offices in the West won’t have much material effect on Putin’s immediate conduct. But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t care about this stuff: he does, and he’s been bullying and blustering for a long time in a frantic effort to avoid it. Now, however, having failed utterly thanks to ham-handed tactics on his part, he’s finally decided on one last desperation move. Not because the West is helpless to retaliate, but because he’s simply decided he’s willing to bear the cost.1 It’s a sign of weakness, not a show of strength. It’s the price he’s paying for his inability to control events.

1This is why a strong response from the West is a good idea even though it won’t have much immediate effect. Having decided that he’s willing to pay the price for his action, Putin now has to be sent the bill. It will pay dividends down the road.

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No, Vladimir Putin Is Not a Cunning Geopolitical Chess Player

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A Wee Prediction About Ukraine

by ChasityPrater Posted on March 1, 2014

Mother Jones

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Following up on the previous post, if you do want to fret about Ukraine, I have just the thing for you. I’m going to tell you how this will all unfold:

  1. Vladimir Putin will do something belligerent. (Already done.)
  2. Republicans will demand that we show strength in the face of Putin’s provocation. Whatever it is that we’re doing, we should do more.
  3. President Obama will denounce whatever it is that Putin does. But regardless of how unequivocal his condemnation is, Bill Kristol will insist that he’s failing to support the democratic aspirations of the Ukrainian people.
  4. Journalists will write a variety of thumbsuckers pointing out that our options are extremely limited, what with Ukraine being 5,000 miles away and all.
  5. John McCain will appear on a bunch of Sunday chat shows to bemoan the fact that Obama is weak and no one fears America anymore.
  6. Having written all the “options are limited” thumbsuckers, journalists and columnists will follow McCain’s lead and start declaring that the crisis in Ukraine is the greatest foreign policy test of Obama’s presidency. It will thus supplant Afghanistan, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Iran, and North Korea for this honor.
  7. In spite of all the trees felled and words spoken about this, nobody will have any good ideas about what kind of action might actually make a difference. There will be scattered calls to impose a few sanctions here and there, introduce a ban on Russian vodka imports, convene NATO, demand a UN Security Council vote, etc. None of this will have any material effect.
  8. Obama will continue to denounce Putin. Perhaps he will convene NATO. For their part, Republicans will continue to insist that he’s showing weakness and needs to get serious.
  9. This will all continue for a while.
  10. In the end, it will all settle down into a stalemate, with Russia having thrown its weight around in its near abroad—just like it always has—and the West not having the leverage to do much about it.
  11. Ukraine will….

Actually, there’s no telling about #11. Maybe Ukraine will choose (or have foisted on them) a pro-Russian leader that Putin is happy with. Maybe east and west will split apart. Maybe a nominally pro-Western leader will emerge. Who knows? What we do know is that (a) the United States will play only a modest role in all this, and (b) conservative hawks will continue to think that if only we’d done just a little bit more, Putin would have blinked and Ukraine would be free.

You may now go about your regular weekend business.

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A Wee Prediction About Ukraine

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Here Are Two Sentences to Ponder Over Instead of Fretting About Ukraine

by ShavonneHain Posted on March 1, 2014

Mother Jones

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I happen to have read two things that struck me in the past hour. The first is from a back-cover blurb for a book that arrived in the mail:

Mettler powerfully and convincingly demonstrates how partisan polarization and plutocratic biases have shaped _________ policy in recent years and why reform is so urgent.

I’m convinced already. Does it even matter what this book is about? You could write this sentence about practically anything these days. For the record, though, the book is Degrees of Inequality. The author is Suzanne Mettler and the second blank is “higher education.” Then there’s this:

There is one great advantage to being an academic economist in France: here, economists are not highly respected in the academic and intellectual world or by political and financial elites. Hence they must set aside their contempt for other disciplines and their absurd claim to great scientific legitimacy, despite the fact that they know almost nothing about anything.

Bracing! This is from the introduction to Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century. Only 544 pages to go.

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Here Are Two Sentences to Ponder Over Instead of Fretting About Ukraine

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Friday Cat Blogging – 28 February 2014

by DeborahESSM Posted on February 28, 2014

Mother Jones

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Quelle horreur! After two weeks of lovely weather, suddenly Southern California is in the middle of a monsoon. Domino is not happy about this state of affairs and blames me personally. In this, she takes after Petronius the Arbiter: “Pete had worked out a simple philosophy. I was in charge of quarters, rations, and weather; he was in charge of everything else. But he held me especially responsible for the weather.”

And please do not bore Domino with your petty human concerns over “drought” and “reservoir levels.” Here she is looking disdainfully through a rain-soaked window into a rain-soaked backyard that just yesterday was all sunny and beautiful. It is simply a nightmare.

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Friday Cat Blogging – 28 February 2014

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Poli Sci Profs Say Poli Sci Wizardry Didn’t Help Obama In 2012 After All

by KrystalMckenney Posted on February 28, 2014

Mother Jones

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Ryan Enos and Anthony Fowler have a new paper out that tries to figure out if the Obama campaign’s widely reported techno-wizardry in the 2012 election really produced a big get-out-the-vote advantage over Mitt Romney. Apparently not:

The Obama campaign of 2012 has been championed as the most technologically-sophisticated, evidence-based campaign in history while the Romney campaign was more traditional. Does this difference manifest itself in the data? Did the technological sophistication of the Obama campaign lead their GOTV efforts to be significantly more effective than Romney’s?

…. Our analysis, while admittedly crude, allows us to roughly compare the effectiveness of the Obama and Romney campaigns in mobilizing their respective supporters. Despite the technological sophistication of the Obama campaign and its devotion to a data-driven, evidence-based campaign, we see similar mobilization effects on both sides of Figure 2. It appears that the two campaigns were roughly comparable in their ability to turn out supporters.

Logic and conventional wisdom suggest that you should concentrate your GOTV effort on strong partisans, since these are the people most likely to vote for you. These are the voters Enos and Fowler analyze, and they conclude that both campaigns mobilized strong partisans about as well. Strongly organized precincts showed a 7 percent improvement in turnout on both sides.

Now, it could well be that the Obama campaign spent more money on GOTV and was thus able to influence more voters. It’s also possible that Obama was able to perform sophisticated targeting that went beyond just the most rabid partisans. So take this with a grain of salt. But if Enos and Fowler are right, the poli-sci-driven rocket science of the Obama campaign didn’t actually make much difference. The core GOTV efforts of both campaigns were about equally effective.

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Poli Sci Profs Say Poli Sci Wizardry Didn’t Help Obama In 2012 After All

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Chris Christie’s Aides Sure Did Joke About Traffic Jams a Lot

by MandyLienhop Posted on February 27, 2014

Mother Jones

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I haven’t written about Bridgegate lately, figuring that MSNBC’s saturation coverage is probably plenty for anyone who’s truly interested in every last jot and tittle of speculation about what happened. Today, though, the New York Times adds something concrete to the story: yet another exchange between two of the people at the center of the scandal. For some obscure reason, they appear to have gotten annoyed with Rabbi Mendy Carlebach of South Brunswick Township, which prompted this exchange:

“We cannot cause traffic problems in front of his house, can we?” wrote Bridget Anne Kelly, then a deputy chief of staff for Mr. Christie.

David Wildstein, a Christie ally at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, suggested that they should think bigger. “Flights to Tel Aviv all mysteriously delayed,” Mr. Wildstein wrote. (Again, he appeared to be kidding.)

This came a few days after Kelly’s infamous email to Wildstein that gleefully declared, “Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee.” Apparently these two were pretty pleased with their little traffic jam idea and joked about it repeatedly. This adds to the evidence that they considered traffic jams a form of political retaliation, and that this was what motivated the lane closures at Fort Lee.

There’s still no evidence that Christie knew what they were doing, but Kelly and Wildstein sure seemed to think they were working in an environment in which this kind of thing was just another day at the office. It probably was.

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Chris Christie’s Aides Sure Did Joke About Traffic Jams a Lot

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Second Look: Tax Reform Act of 2014 Turns Out to Be a Pretty Good Effort

by StefanWillison Posted on February 27, 2014

Mother Jones

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Credit where it’s due department: I was pretty skeptical of Dave Camp’s tax reform proposal last night, figuring that it would just be the usual Republican mush of lower tax rates on the rich combined with some handwaving about elimination of tax breaks that would theoretically make it revenue neutral.

But I was wrong. It turns out that Camp’s plan specifies the tax breaks he wants to close in considerable detail. And according to the analysis of the Joint Committee on Taxation, which is usually fairly reliable, it would be both revenue neutral and distributionally pretty neutral too. Over ten years it would raise about $3 billion more than present law, and the chart on the right shows how tax rates would be affected. Generally speaking, effective tax rates would go down for the poor and the middle class, and would go up slightly for the affluent. (These are estimates for 2015. They change slightly in subsequent years.)

Needless to say, this all depends on his plan being passed as is, which isn’t likely. In fact, it seems unlikely to pass at all. Nonetheless, Camp’s plan isn’t just a Trojan Horse to cut taxes on the rich. There are, unsurprisingly, aspects of it I don’t like, but it seems to be a tolerably serious effort at tax reform that both parties could live with. It’s certainly a lot better than I expected.

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Second Look: Tax Reform Act of 2014 Turns Out to Be a Pretty Good Effort

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CBO Gives Flunking Grade to Republican Plan on Obamacare Mandate

by AlisonEnticknap Posted on February 26, 2014

Mother Jones

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“Ouchy ouchy,” says Ed Kilgore today. “No conservative love for CBO this week, I suspect.”

There was plenty of conservative love for the CBO last week, of course, because they estimated that an increase in the minimum wage might reduce employment. This week, however, the subject is a conservative plan to eliminate the Obamacare requirement that employers with health plans cover everyone working more than 30 hours a week. Republicans have been bellyaching forever that this is going to cause employers to reduce hours in order to get workers just under the 30-hour minimum, thus causing enormous pain to hardworking real Americans throughout the country. There’s not much evidence that this is actually happening, but whatever. They want to get rid of the 30-hour mandate anyway.

Sadly, the CBO’s opinion of a Republican bill to do this was not good. The bill would reduce the number of workers covered by employer healthcare by about a million people; increase use of Medicaid and CHIP; and increase the budget deficit by about $74 billion over ten years.

That’s some bill. I think Kilgore is right that Republicans aren’t going to be giving the CBO a lot of love this week.

UPDATE: And while we’re on the subject, Republican attacks on Obamacare just generally don’t seem to be doing well lately. In the latest Kaiser survey asking Americans if they want to keep Obamacare or repeal it, the keepers are ahead by a margin of 56-31 percent. That’s up from last year, when they were up by only 47-37 percent. Greg Sargent has the deets here.

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CBO Gives Flunking Grade to Republican Plan on Obamacare Mandate

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Obesity Drop Among 2-5-Year-Olds Is Even More Baffling Than I Thought

by AmparoQmoipxlt Posted on February 26, 2014

Mother Jones

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Last night I wrote about a new CDC study showing a 43 percent drop in obesity rates among 2-5 year-olds. It seemed inexplicably large to me, especially because no other age group showed any decline at all. Today, Zachary Goldfarb helpfully publishes a bit more of the data, and I’ve extracted two lines from his chart. This only deepens the mystery.

As you can see, there’s a fair amount of noise in the chart, and it’s possible that this explains the whole thing. But if we take the data seriously, you can see something even more dramatic than a 43 percent drop over a decade. Between 2003-04 and 2005-06, there’s a 25 percent drop. That’s a gigantic decline over the space of two years.

But there’s more. If there’s anything real going on here, you’d expect to see some kind of correlation between 2-5 year-olds and 6-11 year-olds with a time lag of a few years. But I don’t see anything. The 2005-06 cohort of 2-5 year-olds is noticeably less obese, but the 2007-12 cohort of 6-11 year-olds shows barely any change at all.

So this whole thing is very strange. As I said, it’s possible that noise is responsible for a lot of this. But even if there really is something going on, it doesn’t seem to be having any impact at all once children get a few years older. That’s both strange and disappointing. I wouldn’t expect miracles, but the whole point of obesity interventions in small children is that it prevents a lifetime of bad habits. As the New York Times put it, “New evidence has shown that obesity takes hold young: Children who are overweight or obese at 3 to 5 years old are five times as likely to be overweight or obese as adults.” But if that’s true, it sure isn’t showing up in the data. As near as I can tell, reducing obesity among 2-5 year-olds has precisely zero effect on obesity later in childhood.

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Obesity Drop Among 2-5-Year-Olds Is Even More Baffling Than I Thought

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Last Weekend, a 10-Second Airport Delay Went Viral

by LupitaRiegel Posted on February 26, 2014

Mother Jones

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Today the Washington Post brings us the perfect tale of modern viral hysteria. Apparently Ashley Brandt had a problem with her DC driver’s license at the Phoenix airport, and social media went wild after her boyfriend tweeted about it. Here is the entire story:

According to Brandt, an agent with the Transportation Security Administration took a look at her D.C. license and began to shake her head. “I don’t know if we can accept these,” Brandt recalled the agent saying. “Do you have a U.S. passport?’

Brandt was dumbfounded, and quickly grew a little scared….Brandt says the agent yelled out to a supervisor, working in adjacent security line. Are D.C. licenses valid identification?

Brandt says she could hear the response, “Yeah, we accept those.”

And that was it. A TSA agent was unsure about something, and then cleared it up in a few seconds. And the twitterverse went crazy.

I get it: we all hate TSA, and TSA agents sometimes do dumb things. And social media encourages mob reactions based on 140-character rants. But honestly, folks. Chill. Not every minor inconvenience in the world deserves to go viral.

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Last Weekend, a 10-Second Airport Delay Went Viral

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