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Republican Candidates Demand Opening and Closing Statements at Next Debate

by AXDDorothy Posted on October 15, 2015

Mother Jones

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From Alex Isenstadt’s Politico account of a leaked RNC conference call that ended in chaos:

Ken McKay, Chris Christie’s campaign manager, expressed worry about stating his position on an open conference call line, saying that it could expose his campaign to leaks.

I would expect the Christie campaign to understand the need for operational secrecy pretty well, and sure enough, they were apparently the only ones to think about this. And they were right: the entire conversation was immediately leaked.

But here’s the best part: the chaos was over the pressing question of whether candidates would be allowed to give opening and closing statements at the next Republican debate. Seriously. CNBC wants to ditch them, for obvious reasons I think. But the candidates are fuming over this brazen display of disrespect toward their God-given right to give mini-stump speeches on national TV. Rand Paul’s representative put it the most pungently: “If we don’t have opening and closing statements, CNBC can go fuck themselves.”

Trump and Carson later sent a letter to CNBC promising to boycott the debate unless opening and closing statements were allowed.1 The others didn’t go that far, but in a display of their shaky grasp of what what the TV-watching public wants, they did all agree on the crucial need for the viewing audience to hear 30 minutes of tedious speechifying from their own silver tongues. However, that doesn’t mean there was a completely united front on this issue:

Christian Ferry, a representative for Lindsey Graham, who’s been relegated to undercard debates, chimed in. If any of the top-polling candidates didn’t want to participate in the Colorado debate, Graham would gladly take their place.

Atta boy, Lindsey!

1They also want assurances that the debate won’t go longer than two hours. This just goes to show that Trump and Carson can occasionally be right about something.

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Republican Candidates Demand Opening and Closing Statements at Next Debate

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Putin’s War in Syria Not Going Well So Far

by SusanneWPA Posted on October 15, 2015

Mother Jones

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The New York Times reports that Russian jets in Syria are “conducting nearly as many strikes in a typical day against rebel troops opposing the government of President Bashar al-Assad as the American-led coalition targeting the Islamic State has been carrying out each month this year.”

Got that? As many in a day as we do in a month. So how’s that working out? Zack Beauchamp points me to an analysis of the first week of the Russian campaign from the Institute for the Study of War:

The offensive reportedly included reinforcements in the form of “hundreds” of Iranian troops….Quds Force commander Maj. Gen. Qassem Suleimani personally oversaw operations….Direct assistance from Russia in the form of airstrikes “synchronized” with the ground operations.

….Nonetheless, the Syrian regime and its allies have thus far failed to achieve significant gains…. Confirmed reports indicate that pro-regime fighters have seized only six villages and towns…. At the same time, regime forces suffered heavy losses in manpower and materiel in the face of heavy rebel resistance. Free Syrian Army (FSA)-affiliated rebels forces claimed to destroy at least twenty tanks and armored vehicles as well as a helicopter gunship in a “tank massacre” on the first day of the offensive.

….Operations against the Syrian opposition will likely prove harder and slower than anticipated by either Russia or Iran….The foreign allies of the Syrian regime may be forced to expend further financial and military resources in order to preserve their initial gains.

We’ll see how this goes. But both Russia and Syria are all-in on this campaign. Russia is maintaining a sky-high operational tempo along the border between regime territory and rebel territory, and the Iranians are helping out too. Nonetheless, it’s rough going and the Syrians are apparently taking heavy losses. How long can Putin keep this up before his glorious nose-thumbing at the West turns into an exhausting quagmire?

Hard to say. Maybe the rebels are at the end of their rope, and Syrian regime troops will soon break through. I wouldn’t count on that, though.

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Putin’s War in Syria Not Going Well So Far

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New Study Says Sitting a Lot Won’t Kill You After All

by LoriZVJtsn Posted on October 14, 2015

Mother Jones

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Did you buy a standing desk because you heard that sitting too much would kill you? Or because you wanted to be like Don Rumsfeld? It doesn’t matter: a new study says sitting isn’t especially hazardous, and Rumsfeld shouldn’t be a role model for anything. The chart on the right shows the basic association between more sitting and more dying: none. Nor did it matter when the authors controlled for age, gender, employment grade, ethnicity, smoking status, alcohol consumption, fruit and vegetable consumption, BMI, physical functioning, or daily walking time. “There were no associations between any of the five sitting indicators at Phase 5 and all-cause mortality risk over the follow-up period in either model 1 or 2.”

The authors say that their sample is fairly physically active, and “it is therefore possible that the higher than average energy expenditure in the current study may offer a degree of protection from any deleterious effects of high volumes of sitting.” In other words, don’t worry about sitting too much. Just get enough exercise, period. You’ll be OK.

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New Study Says Sitting a Lot Won’t Kill You After All

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Needed: Better Debate Moderators

by CortezKiddle197 Posted on October 14, 2015

Mother Jones

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Ed Kilgore notes this morning that “the media appetite for naming a clear winner has fed a post-debate trend towards labeling HRC as a gigantic, titanic, overwhelming cham-peen.” True enough, and you can blame that on a sort of self-feeding bandwagon loop among the campaign press. Still, in this case I think it’s probably justified. Sure, O’Malley did OK, and so did Sanders, but let’s face it: Nobody cares much about O’Malley, and Sanders probably didn’t change the dynamics of the race in his favor despite a decent performance. What’s more, my own personal reaction is that Sanders made it even clearer than ever that he doesn’t really want to be president. He just wants to move the race to the left.

But the fact that Hillary did well really does matter. She showed Democrats why they’ve always liked her in the past. She showed off her debating skills. She put to rest all the Benghazi/email nonsense. She almost certainly halted her slide in the polls. She basically made herself the inevitable winner yet again. Plus this:

And that leads to the aspect of the debate that struck me apparently more than most observers: the exceptional hostility of the questioning from moderator Anderson Cooper, who seemed to be trying to defy expectations that he’d be less savage than Jake Tapper was in CNN’s GOP debate. Pretty quickly, Cooper became a stand-in for all the media folk trying to make the Democratic contest about emails and Benghazi! and “socialism,” and you got the sense the candidates and the immediate audience united in disdain for the superficiality of where the hosts wanted the discussion to go. The feral roar that greeted Bernie Sanders’ statement that Americans were tired of “hearing about Clinton’s damn emails”—followed by HRC shaking Bernie’s hand—was the signature moment of the night. And this wasn’t just some “gift” from Sanders to Clinton, as it was called by several talking heads last night. It was a party-wide rebuke to the MSM for how they are covering this campaign.

I didn’t get the sense that Cooper was especially hostile. But Kilgore is right that debate moderators generally try to focus on superficial “toughness” instead of asking either genuinely tough questions or genuinely interesting policy questions. In a way, this is justified: you don’t want candidates to get away with just making stump speeches. You want to challenge them. You want to see how they perform under pressure. Unfortunately, when you take this too far it becomes obvious that you’re just desperately trying to gin up controversy for its own sake. Debate moderators need to understand that the show isn’t about them. It’s about genuinely digging out answers from candidates on subjects they might prefer to fudge. That’s genuine toughness. But that takes a deep knowledge of policy and the willingness to engage with it. That’s too often missing from these events.

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Needed: Better Debate Moderators

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Jeb’s Health Care Plan: More Detail, But It Probably Wouldn’t Accomplish Much

by MinnaChowne Posted on October 13, 2015

Mother Jones

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The standard-issue conservative “replacement” for Obamacare is a familiar hodgepodge of tax credits, health savings accounts, high-risk pools, block granting of Medicaid, tort reform, and interstate purchase of health plans. Today, Jeb Bush has broken the rules and offered up a plan that only includes the first four.

If you’re grading on a curve, that’s a promising start, and Jeb makes things even more interesting by actually offering up a fairly detailed set of alternatives to Obamacare. I’m not sure any Republican candidate has gone anywhere near as far as he has. A few highlights:

He wants to “promote innovation” by speeding up FDA approvals, increasing funding for the NIH, establishing national standards for electronic health records (but, oddly, removing any incentive to abide by them), and conducting a “regulatory spring cleaning.” Some of this is standard conservative stuff, but not all of it.
His plan provides a tax credit that can be used to buy private health insurance for anyone who doesn’t get health insurance through their employer. However, it sounds like the credit would be pretty small, probably on the order of a few thousand dollars.
He wants to broaden the use of health savings accounts.
He wants to get rid of Obamacare’s “Cadillac tax,” but he would replace it with something that sounds to me like it’s basically identical. Maybe I’m missing something here.
“States would be held accountable to ensure access for individuals with pre-existing conditions.” There’s a fair amount of gibberish here, and even Jeb doesn’t seem especially confident that it will work. However, it’s meaningless anyway since insurance companies wouldn’t be required to offer policies at the same rate to everyone (aka “community rating”). “States would report on access to care,” but that’s it. It appears that there’s nothing in Jeb’s plan that prevents insurance companies from simply charging sky-high prices to anyone with a pre-existing condition.
There is, of course, no mandate to buy insurance. This would be catastrophic for insurance companies, except for the fact that Jeb’s plan doesn’t require them to cover patients with pre-existing conditions in the first place.
Jeb almost fooled me by not mentioning block-granting of Medicaid. But of course that’s in there. He calls it “capped allotments” and pairs it up with a proposal to essentially deregulate state Medicaid plans completely but still “hold states accountable for outcomes”—though there’s not a single word about exactly what this means. Jeb’s allotment would grow at the rate of inflation, which means they’d get smaller every year since medical costs typically grow faster than inflation.

Just about every serious health care plan that truly wants to expand coverage relies on a three-legged stool: mandates, community rating, and federal subsidies. Jeb’s plan doesn’t include the first two and offers only a stingy version of the third. It’s much more detailed than your average Republican plan, but in the end it would probably expand coverage hardly at all.

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Jeb’s Health Care Plan: More Detail, But It Probably Wouldn’t Accomplish Much

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It Looks Like We’re Stuck With Low Inflation

by HannahLombardo Posted on October 13, 2015

Mother Jones

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Back in August I agreed with Brad DeLong that 4 percent inflation would be a good thing right now, but I was skeptical that the Fed could engineer this given current conditions. So I asked him what it would take. Today, I apparently made it to the top of the question pile:

I think the answer is: We don’t know whether it is in fact possible for a central bank today to hit a 4%/year average inflation target via conventional ordinary quantitative easing. It might well require other tools. For example:

  1. Miles Kimball’s negative interest rates.
  2. Helicopter drops–that is, allowing everyone with a Social Security number to incorporate as a bank, join the Federal Reserve system, and borrow at the discount window, with the loan discharged by the individual’s death.
  3. The Federal Reserve as infrastructure bank–an extra $500 billion/year of quantitative easing buying not government or mortgage bonds but directly-financing public investments.
  4. Extraordinary quantitative easing–buying not the close substitutes for money that are government bonds but rather the not-so-close substitutes that are equities.

I say: If we could win the argument about what the goal is, we could then begin the discussion about what policies would be needed to get us there.

That’s pretty discouraging. Of these, #2 and #3 are almost certainly illegal, and undesirable in any case. I may not like what Congress is doing, but disbursing money is certainly under their purview—and should be. I don’t want the Fed mailing out checks or contracting for new roads and bridges.

I don’t know if #4 is illegal. Probably not. But I’m not crazy about this either. The Fed shouldn’t be in the business of directly propping up the stock market, and certainly shouldn’t be in the business of directly propping up specific stocks.

So that leaves only #1. This one is perfectly OK, and a few European countries have adopted negative rates recently. But there’s probably a limit to how negative these rates can be. Individuals could avoid negative rates by deciding to hold physical cash, which pays zero percent, but banks and corporations almost certainly couldn’t. I’m not sure how long it’s sustainable to essentially have two different interest rates like that.

This is why DeLong mentions “Miles Kimball’s” negative interest rates. Kimball’s version depends on making the e-dollar into the unit of account, and this would allow negative rates of any level for any period of time. However, it would also require many years to make this transition. It’s not an option in the short term.

So if I’m reading DeLong right, it’s not clear that the Fed could engineer 4 percent inflation at all right now. Maybe Scott Sumner has a bright idea about how we could do this.

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It Looks Like We’re Stuck With Low Inflation

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Let These Awesome Transgender Kids Show You What Their Lives Are Really Like

by FaustoKleeman29 Posted on October 8, 2015

Mother Jones

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Despite the strides made by the transgender community in recent years, the lives of transgender people remain largely out of sight, even taboo, for most people.

With all the misinformation, and often hateful noise, still present in society over the issue, one British documentary series is telling the real life stories of transgender youth in hopes to shed an empathetic light on what life is actually like for people making the incredibly challenging, but brave journey.

Take the story of 7-year-old Paddy from Leicester, England and her father, also named Paddy. The two engage in a simple, remarkable conversation about Paddy’s decision to transition into a girl. Watch below:

But as told by Paddy’s mother, Lorna, the transition hasn’t exactly been easy for many family members. No matter how supportive of their children’s decision, the experience for everyone involved can still be a difficult one. In the clip below, Lorna reads aloud a poem to Paddy describing a caterpillar’s choice to become a butterfly to help describe her complex feelings,

“I loved and supported still wondering why, till the day my boy said goodbye,” she reads. “Sometimes I miss my caterpillar boy, but my butterfly girl fills my heart with joy.”

“My Transgender Kid” is a part of Channel 4 in Britain’s “Born in the Wrong Body” series, which will continue in the coming weeks with different personal stories. Next up is “Girls to Men” and it will feature 21-year-old Jamie Raines’ stunning, three-year photo project in which he took a selfie everyday of his transition. That video has already catapulted to the number one viewed video on YouTube.

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Let These Awesome Transgender Kids Show You What Their Lives Are Really Like

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E-Cigarettes May or May Not Be a Gateway Drug. (But Probably Not.)

by Juliann48Z Posted on August 18, 2015

Mother Jones

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Are e-cigarettes a gateway drug to traditional cigarettes? There’s a new study out that suggests they might be:

The study focused on ninth-graders at 10 public schools in Los Angeles who had tried e-cigarettes before the fall of 2013. Researchers surveyed those students in the spring of 2014 and fall of 2014, and discovered that they were about 2½ times as likely as their peers to have smoked traditional cigarettes.

This is a classic case of correlation which may or may not also be causation (something the authors acknowledge). Did more of the e-cigarette kids take up smoking because e-cigarattes gave them a taste for it? Or do the kids who are most likely to take up smoking in the first place simply start with e-cigarettes? There’s no way to tell just from this study.

That’s not to say it’s worthless, though. If the study found no correlation, then you could be pretty sure that e-cigarettes don’t lead to cigarette smoking. That would be worth knowing. But since it did find a correlation, we need more research to know if there’s causation here.

One way to get a tentative read on this is to look at total cigarette smoking among teens. If it’s up, then e-cigarettes might be leading more kids to cigarettes. If it’s not up, then e-cigarettes are probably just temporarily replacing cigarettes for kids who were going to take up smoking anyway. So which is it?

As it happens, we know the answer to this: cigarette smoking has plunged among teenagers over the past four years. On the other hand, total cigarette use among teens (cigarettes + e-cigarettes) has gone up. The cigarette plunge makes it unlikely that e-cigarettes are a gateway to traditional cigarettes. But the increase in total cigarette use suggests that e-cigarettes really are creating a new market. It’s complicated.

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E-Cigarettes May or May Not Be a Gateway Drug. (But Probably Not.)

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We Are All Fans of Self-Deportation

by MichellQka Posted on August 18, 2015

Mother Jones

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Ezra Klein has read Donald Trump’s immigration plan and finds it even worse than he expected. I didn’t feel that way: it read to me like a pretty standard right-wing take on illegal immigration, with just a few added Trumpisms (Mexico will pay for the wall, we should force companies to hire Americans, etc.). But two things in Klein’s piece struck me enough to want to comment on them:

The plan would be a disaster for immigrants if enacted. But even if it’s not enacted, the plan is a disaster for the Republican Party, which is somehow going to need to co-opt Trump’s appeal to anti-immigration voters, but absolutely cannot afford to be associated, in the minds of Hispanic voters, with this document.

….When Mitt Romney embraced “self-deportation” in 2012, it was considered an awful mistake….But self-deportation is Trump’s plan, too. And Trump’s insight here is that the best way to drive unauthorized immigrants out of the country isn’t to target them. It’s to target their children and families.

On the first point, I think this ship sailed a long time ago. Maybe the Trump publicity juggernaut will aggravate things further, but I honestly don’t see how the Republican Party could appeal to Hispanics much less than it already does. The anti-immigrant rhetoric from leading Republicans has been relentless for years, and Trump is merely adding one more voice to the chorus. Will Trump’s bluster about making Mexico pay for the wall really make things any worse?

The second point is a little trickier. It’s true that Mitt Romney blew it in 2012 with the infelicitous phrase “self-deportation.” But the uproar that followed elided an important point: every immigration plan involves putting pressure on illegal immigrants in order to motivate them to (a) leave or (b) not come in the first place. There’s a sliding scale of pain involved, and liberals tend to want less while conservatives tend to want more. But both sides make use of it.

The easiest way to think of immigration control is like this:

  1. Figure out how many illegal immigrants you’re willing to tolerate.
  2. Ratchet up the the cost of illegal immigration and ratchet down the cost of legal immigration.
  3. Eventually, you’ll figure out the right combination of costs that gets you to your number.

Nobody talks about immigration like this, but it’s the thought process behind every immigration plan. Both Republicans and Democrats support E-Verify, for example, which makes it harder for immigrants who lack legal documents to get jobs. But what is this, other than a way to use economic pressure to persuade illegal immigrants to go back to Mexico? Likewise, both Democrats and Republicans support border security. Republicans may generally want more of it than Democrats, but Democrats are nonetheless willing to use increased security to raise the cost of crossing the border.

In the end, everyone uses this calculus,1 whether consciously or not. The amount of pressure—or cruelty, if you prefer—that you’re willing to employ depends on just how low a number of illegal immigrants you’re willing to tolerate. But no matter what that number is, if you put any pressure at all on illegal immigrants, you’re exploiting the power of self-deportation. Just don’t say it out loud, OK?

1The exception, I suppose, are the people who advocate completely open borders. But they’re a very tiny minority.

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We Are All Fans of Self-Deportation

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Social Security Is More Important Than a Lot of People Realize

by Charlie Carin Posted on August 17, 2015

Mother Jones

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The 2015 Retirement Confidence Survey from the Employee Benefit Research Institute is out, and it shows the usual: hardly anyone thinks that Social Security benefits will remain stable in the future. They expect cuts, cuts, and more cuts.

This may be part of the explanation for the two charts on the right. If you ask current workers, only a third think that Social Security will be a major source of retirement income. But if you ask current retirees for a reality check, two-thirds report that Social Security is a major source of their retirement income.

Why the big difference? If workers think Social Security benefits are likely to be cut, that’s probably a part of the explanation. But a bigger part is almost certainly just invincible optimism. Current workers are sure they’re going to save enough, or get a big enough return on their 401(k), or get a big enough inheritance, or something—and this will see them through their retirement. Social Security? It’ll just be a little bit of extra pin money for fun and games.

But in reality, that’s not how it works. For most people, it turns out they don’t save nearly as much as they think, which in turn means that their little Social Security check is what keeps them solvent. If more people understood this, public acceptance of conservative plans to cut Social Security benefits would probably be a lot lower.

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Social Security Is More Important Than a Lot of People Realize

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