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Mitch McConnell Puts His Finger on the Pulse of the American People

by KCBCorinne Posted on November 7, 2014

Mother Jones

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Mitch McConnell says that repealing Obamacare outright is probably unrealistic, but Republicans will nonetheless try to chip away at it:

But with Mr. Obama sure to block any repeal bill passed in the Senate and Republican-controlled House, Mr. McConnell indicated that Senate Republicans will turn their attention to peeling back “pieces of it that are deeply, deeply unpopular with the American people.” He cited the law’s tax on medical devices, its requirement that big employers provide insurance to all workers clocking 30 hours a week or more or pay a fee, and its mandate that most Americans carry insurance or pay a fee.

Let me get this straight. McConnell thinks a 2.3 percent tax on manufacturers and importers of medical devices is deeply, deeply unpopular? He thinks a requirement that employers provide insurance for anyone who works more than 30 hours a week is deeply, deeply unpopular? He thinks the individual mandate is deeply, deeply unpopular?

OK, I’ll give him the last one. The individual mandate is moderately unpopular. Of course, it’s also crucial to the functioning of the law, and McConnell knows perfectly well that Obama won’t allow it to be repealed. So that leaves the device tax and the 30-hour rule. The former is mostly opposed by medical device lobbyists, while the latter is mostly opposed by medium-sized businesses who want the ability to cancel health coverage for workers merely by reducing their workweek to 39 hours. My wild guess is that neither of these things is deeply, deeply unpopular with the American people.

But they are unpopular with interest groups that Republicans care about. So they’re on the chopping block.

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Mitch McConnell Puts His Finger on the Pulse of the American People

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My Fearless Predictions for the Next 18 Months

by HattieBrifman Posted on November 6, 2014

Mother Jones

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We are, tediously, hearing lots of jabber this week about how maybe this election finally sent a message to Washington that the public wants government to work, dammit. Compromise is the order of the day. Republicans need to show that they can govern. Obama needs to show he can be flexible.

Meh. I don’t see why anyone thinks this. Mitch McConnell has spent six years obstructing everything in sight, and there’s no special reason to think that’s going to change. John Boehner has spent the past four years in a wholly futile attempt to make his tea party crazies see reason, and there’s no reason to think he’s suddenly figured out how to do it. President Obama has spent the past two years convinced that executive action is his only hope of getting anything done, and there’s not much reason to think he’s changed his mind about that. As for the public, they don’t want compromise. They want the other side to give in. Nothing has changed there.

In other words, control of the Senate may have changed hands, but the underlying fundamentals of Washington politics have barely budged. With that in mind, here are my predictions about what does and doesn’t have a chance of happening over the next 18 months:

Tax reform: Forget it. All the usual fault lines are still around. In fact, with the Republican caucus now more conservative and the Democratic caucus more liberal, the usual fault lines are even bigger than ever. This is a nonstarter.

Immigration reform: Forget it. See above.

Keystone XL: This depends on whether Obama actually cares about it. I’ve never been sure about that. But my guess is that he doesn’t care very much, so some kind of budget deal that includes authority to build the pipeline seems fairly likely.

Trade agreements: This actually seems doable. It’s mostly been Democrats who are opposed.

Obamacare repeal: Forget it.

Tweaks to Obamacare: A bit of tinkering around the margins might be possible. The employer mandate, for example, was never a pillar of the law, and it wouldn’t hurt much to get rid of it. Ditto for the medical device tax. But that’s about it.

Repeal of Obama’s environmental regulations. Forget it.

Executive/judicial appointments: This is going to slow to a crawl. It’s a good thing Democrats killed the filibuster when they did.

Iran nuclear treaty: This is actually a tough one to predict, partly because I’m not clear on (a) just how far Obama can go without congressional approval, and (b) whether Iran is serious about a deal in the first place. At a guess, though, Congress might very well decide to throw a spanner in the works that kills any chance of a treaty. A bunch of new Republican senators, combined with the existing strength of the Israel lobby, could be enough to make a real difference here.

So there you go. Those are my predictions. Have I missed anything big?

POSTSCRIPT: Oh, and the 2016 candidates for president will be Hillary Clinton for the Democrats and Scott Walker for the Republicans.

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My Fearless Predictions for the Next 18 Months

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No, Democrats Aren’t a Bunch of Hopeless Wimps

by AleidaXloxni Posted on November 5, 2014

Mother Jones

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Just a quick note about an election meme that’s already driving me crazy: Democrats lost because they’re timid, vacillating milksops who can barely string together a coherent message and are congenitally unwilling to stand up for their own beliefs. No wonder everyone hates them!

Give me a break. Democrats are Democrats, and they act pretty much the same every election cycle. And yet, they won big in 2006, 2008, and 2012. If they’re such gutless milksops, how were those victories possible?

Look: every election cycle features different candidates. Obviously it’s possible that, on average, this year’s crop of Democrats were more milksoppy than usual. But here’s what’s far more likely: 2014 featured a fairly ordinary bunch of candidates, and the party’s leadership was roughly as effective and visionary (or not) as it normally is. Ditto for fundraising and GOTV efforts.

But every election cycle has structural differences. This one featured a bad Senate map for Dems. It was a midterm election. The party leader was a president whose popularity has waned. The economy continues to be listless. Washington is paralyzed by gridlock, which means that Democrats didn’t have many legislative successes to sell. And anyway, a consistent message would have been all but impossible given all the seats they had to defend in conservative states.

Maybe Dems could have done better. Maybe their message this year really was weak and stale. But if your theory of defeat is based on some enduring and egregious flaw that’s inherent in the Democratic Party, you should reconsider. It probably doesn’t explain as much as you think. Structural explanations that take account of varying conditions are almost always better.

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No, Democrats Aren’t a Bunch of Hopeless Wimps

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Bill Clinton Is Right: Storyline Reporting Has Poisoned the Political Press

by rakil23 Posted on September 25, 2014

Mother Jones

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Today brings a remarkable column from the Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza. It’s about the Clinton family’s adversarial relationship with the press:

Put simply: Neither Hillary nor Bill Clinton likes the media or, increasingly, sees any positive use for them.

“If a policymaker is a political leader and is covered primarily by the political press, there is a craving that borders on addictive to have a storyline,” Bill Clinton said in a speech at Georgetown University back in April. “And then once people settle on the storyline, there is a craving that borders on blindness to shoehorn every fact, every development, every thing that happens into the story line, even if it’s not the story.”

That’s an interesting comment from Bill Clinton. Is it true? Well, check this out from the start of Cillizza’s column:

Amy Chozick is the reporter tasked with covering the Clintons — and the runup to the now-almost-inevitable Hillary Clinton presidential bid — for the New York Times. Sounds like a plum gig, right? Until, that is, a press aide for the Clinton Global Initiative follows you into the bathroom.

Chozick describes a “friendly 20-something press aide who the Clinton Global Initiative tasked with escorting me to the restroom,” adding: “She waited outside the stall in the ladies’ room at the Sheraton Hotel, where the conference is held each year.”

Yes, this may be an extreme example. And, yes, the press strictures at the Clinton Global Initiative are the stuff of legend. But, the episode also reflects the dark and, frankly, paranoid view the Clintons have toward the national media. Put simply: Neither Hillary nor Bill Clinton likes the media or, increasingly, sees any positive use for them.

Here’s what makes this fascinating. If you click the link and read Chozick’s piece, you’ll learn that every reporter at the CGI is “cloistered in a basement at the Sheraton” and that an escort is required wherever they go, “lest one of us with our yellow press badges wind up somewhere where attendants with an esteemed blue badge are milling around.” It’s entirely fair to argue that this is absurdly restrictive. It’s not fair to imply that this is special treatment that Chozick got because she’s the beat reporter covering the Clintons. Every other reporter at the event got the same treatment.

But that’s what Cillizza did. In other words, he had already settled on a storyline, so he shoehorned the Chozick anecdote into his column to support that storyline. Which was exactly Clinton’s complaint in the first place.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t actually have any doubt that the Clintons do, in fact, have a pretty tortured relationship with the press. After the way the press treated them in the 90s, it would be remarkable if they didn’t. It might even be “dark and paranoid.” That wouldn’t surprise me too much either.

Nonetheless, I wish Cillizza would at least try to analyze his own tribe’s behavior with the same care that he analyzes the Clintons’. In any fair reading, the press has legitimate grievances about its treatment by the Clintons, but the Clintons have some legitimate grievances about the obsessive shiny-toy-feeding-frenzy nature of modern political press coverage too. Unfortunately, all Cillizza manages to say about the hostile atmosphere of Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign is that reporters weren’t “entirely innocent in the whole thing.”

Nobody should take this as a defense of the Clintons. High-profile politicians have always gotten klieg-light treatment, and they have to be able to handle it. At the same time, there ought to be at least a few mainstream reporters who also recognize some of the pathologies on their own side—those specific to the Clintons as well as those that affect presidential candidates of all stripes. How about an honest appraisal—complete with biting anecdotes—of how the political press has evolved over the past few decades and how storyline reporting has poisoned practically everything they do?

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Bill Clinton Is Right: Storyline Reporting Has Poisoned the Political Press

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Is the 6-Year Itch Spelling Doom for Obama?

by KourtneyLeane Posted on August 11, 2014

Mother Jones

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The theory of the six-year itch is well-known phenomenon: American presidents suffer all too often during their second terms from an onslaught of scandals that hobble their ability to act. Larry Summers thinks this is a good reason to ditch the limit of two four-year terms and instead switch to a single six-year term. Jonathan Bernstein isn’t buying it:

Pete Souza/Flickr

He can point to all sorts of second-term miseries going back to Franklin Roosevelt. But the apparent pattern doesn’t hold up that well. A classic example is Richard Nixon. Yes, Watergate dominated and ruined Nixon’s second term, but the series of abuses of power that cost him the presidency—and the initial cover-up—occurred during his first term. Similarly, George W. Bush’s second term was spoiled to a great extent by the Iraq war (which Summers bizarrely omits from his summary); Iraq, too, was a first-term decision.

Quite right. But I’m not sure this makes the point Bernstein wants it to make. Back in 2004 I predicted that if George Bush were reelected, he’d suffer through a bunch of scandals, and that turned out to be right. I suggested there were three reasons that second terms tended to be overrun by scandal, and this was No. 2:

Second, there’s the problem that second terms are, well, second terms. It takes more than two or three years for a serious scandal to unfold, and problems that start to surface midway through a president’s first term usually reach critical mass midway through his second term…George Bush is especially vulnerable to this since his first term already has several good candidates for scandals waiting to flower. Take your pick: Valerie Plame? The National Guard? Abu Ghraib? Intelligence failures? Or maybe something that hasn’t really crossed anybody’s radar screen yet, sort of like the “third-rate burglary” at the Watergate Hotel that no one took seriously in 1972.

I think Bernstein and I are saying similar things here. In Bush’s case, there were indeed some new problems in his second term: Katrina in 2005 and several assorted scandals that revolved around Jack Abramoff in 2006. The same has happened to Obama. Regardless of whether you think that things like Fast & Furious or Solyndra were genuine scandals (I don’t), they have the same effect. More recently, you can add the IRS and Benghazi. And again, regardless of whether these are real scandals or invented ones, they work the same way. Low-information voters don’t always pay attention to whether a scandal is “real.” They just keep hearing about one thing after another, and eventually conclude that where there’s smoke there’s fire.

As it happens, I’d say that Obama has done a remarkably good job of running a clean administration, and I suspect that scandalmania isn’t actually hurting him much. Despite the best efforts of Republicans to pretend otherwise, there’s just not much there. You can hate his policies or his personality or his competence or his leadership ability, but the truth is that he’s run a pretty clean shop on the scandal front.

Still, if you accept the general proposition that scandals tend to pile up over time, that means you’re likely to have a fairly impotent president by year six. And maybe that means a single six-year term would be for the best.

The problem with this is that there’s not much evidence for it. If six years really is some kind of magic scandal number, then you’d expect to see it at work elsewhere. But do you? How about in Britain, which has indeterminate terms? Or Germany, where Angela Merkel is heading into her ninth year in office? Or in cities and states without term limits? More generally, in other jurisdictions with different terms, how much evidence is there that voters become highly sensitive to mounting scandals by year six?

Not much, I think, though I suspect that voters do just generally get tired of politicians and parties after about six years or so. After all, by then it’s clear that all the stuff they promised won’t happen, so why not give the other guys a shot? Hell, lots of people are complaining these days about Obama failing to bring postpartisan peace and harmony to Washington, DC, as if there were much he could ever have done about that in the face of unprecedentedly unanimous obstruction from Republicans starting on day one. But still: He did say that was one of his goals, and he sure hasn’t delivered it. So let’s throw him out. The next president will be able to do it for sure. Right?

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Is the 6-Year Itch Spelling Doom for Obama?

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Here’s Where Food Trends Come From

by SheldonRawls Posted on May 22, 2014

Mother Jones

What makes a food trend? In his new book, The Tastemakers: Why We’re Crazy for Cupcakes but Fed Up With Fondue, out May 27, journalist David Sax sets out to discover the hidden forces behind our diets. From a cupcake stop on the Sex and the City tour in New York to the board rooms of the McCormick spice company to the apple orchards of Ontario, Sax talks to the people who decide which foods become popular and when. Along the way, he learns that few fads spread on their own. Most are the result of well orchestrated marketing plans—like how the pork industry engineered the bacon trend to help sell less popular pig parts. I spoke to Sax about the Chipotle-fication of Indian food, how Sex and the City made cupcakes sexy, and how the dawn of the HIV/AIDS epidemic hastened the demise of the fondue-party era.

Journalist David Sax, author of The Tastemakers: Why We’re Crazy for Cupcakes but Fed Up With Fondue Photo by Christopher Farber

Mother Jones: Your book opens on a Sex and the City tour bus. Why?

David Sax: The book opens on this Sex and the City hotspots tour, which has been running in New York for ten years or so. They stop at the Plaza Hotel, they go by Tiffany’s, they show clips on the bus. The halfway point of the tour is in the West Village, kitty corner from Magnolia Bakery. Most of the people on the tour went right for Magnolia. It was this edible icon of the show and everything it stood for. That encapsulated so much about the cupcake trend. There were people from Sweden, Australia, Middle America. They all wanted to go to Magnolia because this place was the shrine that symbolized so much more than a little cake.

MJ: So is Sex and the City responsible for the cupcake trend?

DS: That was the tipping point. That imparted the cupcake with something entirely above and beyond. It was no longer just about, this is a delicious thing and you should have it. It was about this is a symbol of femininity, sexually liberalized, capitalist feminism. This is the stiletto, the cosmo, the Rabbit vibrator equivalent. It gave cupcakes a storyline. It changed their identity. This is not a child’s treat anymore. This is, ‘You go girl. You get your cupcake.’ The Virginia Slim of the 21st century.

MJ: So that’s one way a food trend can happen, through pop culture. But the way you tell it, the story of bacon was completely different.

DS: This was an industry-driven trend. It was the result of a concerted effort by the pork industry to revive this cut of meat—pork belly, which is what you make bacon out of—that had been so demonized in the 1980s by the low-fat, low-cholesterol diet trend that was so incredibly popular. They spent money to get pork producers and smokehouses to develop round, pre-cooked slices of bacon that would fit on a hamburger, so then they could go to Burger King and Wendy’s and be like, listen, here is the money to help you to develop new burgers. We really want you to try them with bacon. The fast food companies are always looking for something else to sell. So the bacon trend—unlike most trends, which trickle down because chefs are doing it, or some cool bakery in New York is doing it, and it works its way down through Cheesecake Factory to TGI Fridays and Costco—it started in fast food and worked its way up to something that chefs were tossing with Brussels sprouts. And then it hit its cultural moment.

The coffee trend is another example. There is a Swedish tradition of a coffee break called fika in the afternoon. Maxwell House was looking to increase coffee consumption in the ’30s and ’40s, and they happened upon this thing that they put in their ads and marketing. It became such a big thing that it was in union contracts. And that triggered the growth of coffee consumption.

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Here’s Where Food Trends Come From

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The Whimsical Fascists of Wes Anderson’s "The Grand Budapest Hotel"

by JCNCharole Posted on March 14, 2014

Mother Jones

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Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel is very, very Wes Anderson—which is to say that the colors pop, the quirky humor abounds, and your emotions are sneakily toyed with. Few directors have the kind of total control over the way their actors talk, move, and express quite like Anderson does. Anderson’s singular style and eccentricities make virtually everything in his films (even harrowing elements such as suicide and war) oddly whimsical. And in The Grand Budapest Hotel, a Nazi analog is made into something of a goofy villain.

The comedy is set primarily in the 1930s in Zubrowka, a fictional central-European republic that has endured European totalitarianism and world war (the movie was shot on location in Germany, but the setting, sounds, and visuals were, in Anderson’s words, “a pastiche of the greatest hits of…Eastern Europe”). The core of the narrative (starring Ralph Fiennes, F. Murray Abraham, Tony Revolori, Saoirse Ronan, Harvey Keitel, and several Anderson regulars) is a murder mystery, but the backdrop routinely advances to the fore as the grip of a fascist party grows more and more clenched. “Part of why I feel the impulse to reimagine World War II rather than just do it is because it’s been done so many times before,” Anderson told NPR.

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The Whimsical Fascists of Wes Anderson’s "The Grand Budapest Hotel"

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Photos of San Francisco Before the Silicon Valley Bros Invaded

by I ambit Posted on December 20, 2013

Mother Jones

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San Francisco’s housing market became the nation’s priciest this year, with a median rent of $3,414 across all units. If you’ve been paying attention, you’ve probably come across a media report—or a lament, or a tirade—about what’s been happening in the City by the Bay as it increasingly becomes a bedroom community for Silicon Valley and a tech center in its own right. Namely: a 170 percent increase in Ellis Act evictions, an 8 percent rent hike during a single quarter this year, runaway gentrification, techie elitism, class warfare, and the end of everything artistic and independent as we know it.

South of Market, or SoMa, is one of the neighborhoods most affected by San Francisco’s post-millennial boom. Once a nondescript refuge for working-class families, SoMa has recently transformed into an epicenter for startups, luxury condos, tony restaurants and breweries, boutique shops, and lofts. It’s emblematic of both the city’s encroaching corporatism and America’s ever-widening income inequality. For many native San Franciscans, it’s also a harbinger of worse to come.

Janet Delaney’s new book, South of Market, is a photographic record of SoMa’s first great makeover, which began in the 1960s. That’s when the city announced plans to build a 300,000-square-foot convention center—named for slain San Francisco Mayor George Moscone—in the heart of SoMa. Poor and elderly residents protested, accurately, saying that they’d be displaced; the city nonetheless approved the construction, and by 1981 Moscone Center occupied 10 acres of prime downtown real estate. To make room for this gleaming testament to civic pride, scores of low-income housing units—including several historic residential hotels—were bulldozed. Nearby rents swelled almost 300 percent. A mini-exodus to the picturesque Tenderloin and points west ensued. Once the dust settled, it was clear the neighborhood had permanently changed. No longer affordable, it began its long second act as a playground for entrepreneurs and real-estate salespeople.

Delaney began documenting the neighborhood in 1978. Her book chronicles a city in flux, but it’s not unequivocally bleak. For every photo of a demolished hotel or evicted family, there’s an elegantly composed shot of children skipping rope, business owners posing proudly in their shops, and streetscapes of hushed, now elegiac, beauty. Her interviews with longtime residents reveal outrage at the city’s indifference and anxiety about climbing rents, along with fear of a new soullessness. “There’s a lot of people here that weren’t here yesterday,” says one, and we can see in Delaney’s photos a new architecture of privilege as well. “You’ll find a great deal of the present in the past,” Delaney told me.

Bobby Washington and her daughter Ayana, 28 Langton Street Janet Delaney

Park Hotel, 429 Folsom Street Janet Delaney

Longtime neighbors, Langton at Folsom Street Janet Delaney

Greyhound Bus Depot, 7th Street between Mission and Market Janet Delaney

Flag Makers, Natoma at 3rd Street Janet Delaney

Saturday afternoon, Howard between 3rd and 4th streets Janet Delaney

Langton Park, Langton and Howard streets Janet Delaney

Remains of a five-alarm fire on Hallam Street Janet Delaney

Market at 2nd Street Janet Delaney

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Photos of San Francisco Before the Silicon Valley Bros Invaded

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The Noticer Returns – Andy Andrews

by Myrna Posted on October 1, 2013

READ GREEN WITH E-BOOKS

The Noticer Returns

Sometimes You Find Perspective and Sometimes Perspective Finds You

Andy Andrews

Genre: Self-Improvement

Price: $9.99

Publish Date: October 1, 2013

Publisher: Thomas Nelson

Seller: HarperCollins


Perspective is a powerful thing. Andy Andrews has spent the past five years doing a double take at every white-haired old man he sees, hoping to have just one more conversation with the person to whom he owes his life. Through a chance encounter at a local bookstore, Andy is reunited with the man who changed everything for him – Jones, also known as “The Noticer.” As the story unfolds, Jones uses his unique talent of noticing little things that make a big difference. And these “little things” grant the people of Fairhope, Alabama, a life-changing gift – perspective. Along the way, families will be united, financial opportunities will be created, and readers will be left with powerfully simple solutions to the everyday problems we all face. Through the lens of a parenting class at the Grand Hotel in Point Clear, Alabama, Jones guides a seemingly random group to ask specific questions inspired by his curious advice that “You can’t believe everything you think.” Those questions lead to answers for which people have been searching for centuries: How do we begin to change the culture in which we live? What is the key to creating a life of success and value? What if what we think is the end…is only the beginning? What starts as a story of one person's everyday reality unfolds into the extraordinary principles available to anyone looking to create the life for which they were intended.

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The Noticer Returns – Andy Andrews

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