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Here is this week’s Flint water report. As usual, I’ve eliminated outlier readings above 2,000 parts per billion, since there are very few of them and they can affect the averages in misleading ways. During the week, DEQ took 905 samples. The average for the past week was 10.63.
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Who gets the most positive campaign coverage? Vox asked Crimson Hexagon, a social media software analytics company, to run the numbers, and the answer is John Kasich. Who gets the most negative coverage? Hillary Clinton.
No surprise there, I suppose. As usual, though, I’d caution against making very much out of this. For starters, there’s not a lot of difference between the candidates. And sometimes there’s just bad news to report. I think that Hillary has been the target of some poor reporting on her email problems, but that doesn’t change the fact that she was bound to get a lot of negative coverage no matter what. That’s life.
The chart on the right shows net coverage (positive minus negative) for all five of the remaining candidates, and the most telling statistic is that campaign coverage is just overwhelmingly negative, full stop. On average, each of the candidates received about 5 percent positive coverage and 35 percent negative coverage. It’s no wonder that everyone thinks they’re treated uniquely badly by the press. They obsess over the fact that they (really and truly) get overwhelmingly bad coverage, without realizing that everyone else does too. Apparently campaign reporters just hate the idea of writing anything positive about anybody.
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At vast expense, I have spent the past few weeks completely renovating my work area. Needless to say, I didn’t do this for me. I did it for you, because you all deserve blog posts written in the most stimulating and technologically advanced surroundings possible.
It all started when I suddenly realized that I had never liked my desk lamp—so I bought a new one. Then it kind of snowballed. You know how it goes. As you can see, the cats are pretty happy with the whole setup. Sometimes they share the birdwatching pod, other times they stretch out in their own private pods. What more can a cat ask for?
Link:
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I don’t usually have much use for Maureen Dowd, but credit where it’s due. Today she asked Donald Trump the question all of us have been dying to ask him:
In an MSNBC interview with Chris Matthews, the formerly pro-choice Trump somehow managed to end up to the right of the National Right to Life Committee when he said that for women, but not men, “there has to be some form of punishment” if a President Trump makes abortion illegal.
….Given his draconian comment, sending women back to back alleys, I had to ask: When he was a swinging bachelor in Manhattan, was he ever involved with anyone who had an abortion?
“Such an interesting question,” he said. “So what’s your next question?”
I think we can take that as a yes. I wonder what his evangelical fans will think of this?
Taken from:
It Sure Sounds Like Donald Trump Has Paid for an Abortion or Two in His Life
Mother Jones
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In the course of a general critique of the US economy over the past few decades, Brad DeLong says this:
The US today spends 8% of GDP on finance. That is twice as much as 40 years ago. Once again, the U.S. gets nothing for it—gets, in fact less than nothing, because the lion’s share of responsibility for the 10% growth shortfall of the past decade rests on the shoulders of the hypertrophied dysfunctional finance system. It is not as though anybody claims that the plutocrats of high finance and of our corporations are doing a materially better job at running their organizations and allocating capital by enough to justify their now even-more outsized compensation packages. It is not as though we can see the impact of paying more to financiers in the tracks of faster economic growth. Rather the reverse.
I know I’m probably revealing more ignorance here than I should, but how did this happen? Finance isn’t a monopoly. In fact, it’s one of the most globalized, fluid, and competitive industries on the planet. Why haven’t its profits long since been reduced to zero, or close to it? I can understand occasional blips as markets change—CDOs and SIVs get hot for a while, so experts in CDOs and SIVs make a killing—but the overall industry? How has it managed to hold onto such outlandish rents for such a sustained period?
Real answers, please, not buzzwords or conspiracy theories. What’s the deal here?
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Phil Price points us today to an intriguing chart from the Department of Health and Human Services. It shows readmission rates within 30 days of a hospital stay for Medicare patients—including both “official” readmissions and short-term “observations”—and it’s pretty stunning. When Obamacare passed, readmission rates started to fall dramatically almost instantly. They fell most sharply for a subset of conditions specifically targeted by Obamacare, and by a smaller amount for other conditions. If this is accurate, it means that hospitals could have done something about readmission rates all along, but they just hadn’t bothered. Only after Obamacare provided an incentive to get their readmission rates down did they do anything about it.
So how should we think about this? I’ll confess to some skepticism because the chart is almost too perfect. For four years the readmission rate is dead stable. Then, in a single month between December 2010 and January 2011 it suddenly drops by a full percentage point, and continues dropping for two years. This decline started about eight months after the passage of Obamacare, and it’s hard to believe that hospitals could react that quickly.
Then, the very instant that penalties begin for high readmission rates, everything stabilizes again. Apparently America’s hospitals unanimously decided that once they’d hit a certain level, that was good enough and they wouldn’t bother trying to improve even more.
Maybe. But even for those of us who believe in incentives, this is the damnedest response to a new incentive I’ve ever seen. I guess my advice is to treat this with cautious optimism. It looks like a great result, but as with most Obamacare outcomes, it’s too early to tell for sure how things are going to work out. When we have five or ten years of experience, we’ll start to be able to draw some concrete conclusions. Until then, we can say how things seem to be going so far, but not much more.
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Sigh. Yet another news cycle for Donald Trump:
NEW Trump to @msnbc: “there has to be some form of punishment” for women who have abortions but he has yet to determine what that should be.
— Ali Vitali (@alivitali)
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A few days ago I suggested that a key question about the protests at Trump rallies was who the public blamed for the violence. Well, Vox conducted a survey recently asking exactly that, and it turns out that Trump is winning that contest too. Overall, respondents thought that protesters were responsible for the violence in Chicago by a margin of 54-28 percent.
That’s a pretty big margin. The crosstabs show that the biggest differences are by partisan leaning and age: Romney voters and senior citizens overwhelming think the protesters were responsible. Obama voters and the young think protesters weren’t responsible—though not by huge margins. Interestingly, responses were about the same between blue-collar and white-collar workers; between all education and income levels; and between workers and the unemployed. There was no regional variation at all, nor was there any difference between tea partiers and mainstream Republicans.
Bottom line: Only committed partisans and (barely) young voters are taking the protesters’ side on this. Seems like maybe they need a new strategy..
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Mother Jones
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Here is this week’s Flint water report. As usual, I’ve eliminated outlier readings above 2,000 parts per billion, since there are very few of them and they can affect the averages in misleading ways. The average for the past week was 10.81.
Link to article:
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