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Russia Decides It’s Time to Declare Victory and Get Out of Syria

by BennieBriscoe Posted on March 15, 2016

Mother Jones

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Vladimir Putin announced today that he would begin withdrawing most of his forces from Syria. The move came as a complete surprise—sort of:

But U.S. officials also said that there had been evidence over the last several months that appeared to suggest that Moscow didn’t have plans for a long-term stay at the bases it used in Syria.

For instance, the Russian military didn’t appear to be rotating its equipment—tanks, aircraft and artillery—among bases throughout the country in a way that would be consistent with a military’s plans for a sustained presence. Equipment wasn’t being withdrawn for maintenance, for example, and Russian forces weren’t being rotated in and out, according to U.S. officials.

It’s unlikely that Putin ever really intended to stay for a long time in the first place. His goal wasn’t to help Assad win his civil war, but merely to prevent him from losing—just as there’s a reasonable case to be made that this is basically our goal too on the other side of the fight. It’s realpolitik at its nastiest and most cynical. And while the recently convened peace talks in Geneva provided Putin with a convenient pretext to get out, there was more to the timing than just that:

Russia is also facing deepening economic problems caused by the collapse in global oil prices, and the announcement may reflect Mr. Putin’s desire to declare victory and extricate his country from a costly military venture….There have been growing signs of differences between Russia and the Syrian government over the Geneva talks, which Moscow has pressed hard for, along with Washington. And for Mr. Assad, the prospect of Russia’s leaving him to fend for himself is sure to focus his mind on following its lead — advice that Russian officials have publicly offered him in recent days.

In the end, Putin managed to prop up Assad for a little while longer and reassert control over Russia’s only military base outside of its own territory. He also earned a place at the negotiating table and, perhaps, kept Iran’s influence over Syria at bay. In terms of pure military achievement, however, it was a modest affair. The maps below, from ISW, show what’s happened over the past six months. Syrian forces have made progress toward retaking Aleppo, which is significant but hardly tide turning. And that’s about it. What’s more, with Russian air support gone and Kurdish forces also advancing on Aleppo, it’s unclear if Assad can hold this ground in the long term. Stay tuned.

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Russia Decides It’s Time to Declare Victory and Get Out of Syria

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Here’s How Donald Trump Treats the Little People

by RamiroRestrepo9 Posted on March 14, 2016

Mother Jones

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It’s pretty common knowledge that Donald Trump lies routinely about his wealth and his businesses. He can get away with this because he runs a private company and isn’t required to open his books to the public.

But there was one period in his life when he ran a public company. Here’s the backstory: During the ’80s, Trump invested heavily in Atlantic City casinos. He ended up owning three of them, culminating in the Trump Taj Mahal, a billion-dollar monstrosity that was ill conceived and poorly run, hemorrhaging money from the day it opened. Trump had borrowed heavily during this period, guaranteeing many of the loans personally, and this was the last straw. His company was bankrupt.

He would have been personally bankrupt, too, but his creditors decided to put him on a leash and let him try to work his way out. He made steady progress, but the casinos continued to be a millstone around his neck. By the mid-’90s, however, the stock market was getting hot and lots of small investors, then as now, were mesmerized by the Trump name. So Trump decided that as long as there were lots of rubes who still thought he was a great businessman, he might as well take advantage of them. Timothy O’Brien tells the story in TrumpNation:

In a masterstroke of financial maneuvering, and in a tribute to the sucker-born-every-minute theorem, Trump managed to take two of the Trump casinos—the Plaza and the Taj Mahal—public in 1995 and 1996, at a time when Donald was unable to make his bank payments and was heading toward personal bankruptcy. The stock sales allowed Donald to buy the casinos back from the banks and unload huge amounts of debt. The offering yanked Donald out of the financial graveyard and left him with a 25 percent stake in a company he once owned entirely.

…In one fell swoop someone else became responsible for the debts that almost sank Donald…Exactly what investors thought they might get for their Trump Hotels investment wasn’t entirely clear. Donald had already demonstrated that casinos weren’t his forte, and investors were buying stock in a company that was immediately larded with debts that made it difficult, if not impossible, to upgrade the operations.

…Allan Sloan, the financial writer who had opined with great accuracy on many things Trump, offered a fair warning to Trump Hotels’ investors: “Shareholders and bondholders have to be total fools ever to think that Donald Trump will put their interests ahead of his own.”…Donald spent several years proving Sloan correct.

…Just a few months after Trump Hotels absorbed the Taj, Donald sold his last Atlantic City casino, the Castle, to the public company. That is, Donald sold his own casino, with all of its heavy debts, to a public company he controlled. The $490 million price tag for the Castle was about $100 million more than analysts thought it was worth…sending the company’s stock into a nosedive from which it never recovered.

…Although Trump Hotels’ shares were sinking and there were no earnings to be seen, Donald paid himself $7 million for his handiwork at the company in 1996…Jerry Useem at Fortune took note in 2000 of Donald’s “disquieting” tendency to “use the casino company as his own personal piggy bank.” In addition to the multimillion-dollar bonuses Donald was lifting out of Trump Hotels, Useem pointed out that “the pilots of his personal 727 are on the casino company’s payroll” and that in 1998 Donald “had the already cash-strapped company lend him $26 million to pay off a personal loan.”

Trump’s fans were conned into buying up his debt-laden properties and turning them into a public company. Trump, who plainly had no interest in running a casino and had demonstrated no corporate management skills during the prior decade, paid himself millions of dollars from the company’s coffers for doing essentially nothing. He then unloaded his third casino onto the public company at an inflated price.

The public company didn’t show a profit during a single year of its existence. In 2004 the stock was delisted and the company forced into Chapter 11 reorganization. It was renamed Trump Entertainment Resorts, but with Trump still at the helm it continued to pile up losses and amassed debts of nearly $2 billion. In 2008, after missing a $53 million bond payment, it declared bankruptcy yet again and Trump resigned as the company’s chairman. Its investors lost all their money.

In case you’re curious, this is how Trump treats the little people. Some of the investors in his casinos were big guns who should have known better. But plenty of them were moms and pops who believed Trump when he insisted he was the greatest businessman the world had ever known. Trump didn’t care: He figured he could fleece them, and he did. That’s what happens to people who trust Donald Trump.

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Here’s How Donald Trump Treats the Little People

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Republicans want to open up millions of acres of public lands to logging and mining

by AustinToRot405 Posted on February 25, 2016

Republicans want to open up millions of acres of public lands to logging and mining

By on 25 Feb 2016commentsShare

Federal lands management has been in the news ever since a group of outlaws decided to occupy a wildlife refuge in Oregon weeks ago. Well, even though the armed standoff came to a (relatively) peaceful end earlier this month and the militiamen and women have take their rightful place in federal custody, Republicans in Congress taken up their cause.

Two bills proposed Thursday by House Committee on Natural Resources Republicans Don Young of Alaska and Raúl Labrador of Idaho would allow state governors to lease millions of acres of national forests for logging. Labrador’s bill would also let industry bypass federal restrictions that protect air, water, and endangered species.

You’d think the Committee on Natural Resources would be in favor of saving those natural resources, but no.

“The natural resources committee is pretty radicalized at this point,” Bobby McEnaney, senior lands analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council, told The Guardian. “The fact that they would react to what’s happened in Oregon to advance an agenda to take land from the federal government is seriously tone deaf. Most of this committee didn’t condemn the actions at Malheur, so this is not completely unexpected. The agenda here is being driven by oil, gas and timber industries. The Republicans are interested in a deregulation race to zero.”

There is, however, one Republican who is actually to the left of the establishment on public lands: Donald Trump.

Now, before you reconsider your vote, Trump isn’t some kind of closet environmentalist — the man is a climate-change denier after all. But Trump does seem to have a soft spot in his cold, dark heart for America’s public lands. Why? Because they’re great. “We have to be great stewards of this land,” Trump said at the Las Vegas Shooting, Hunting, and Outdoor Trade Show in January. “This is magnificent land. And we have to be great stewards of this land.”

Lord, help us: We actually agree with Donald Trump.

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Republicans want to open up millions of acres of public lands to logging and mining

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The New Jason Bourne Trailer Just Premiered During the Super Bowl. Here It Is.

by BorisCritchfield Posted on February 8, 2016

Mother Jones

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The new Jason Bourne movie stars Matt Damon again. Will Hunting took a break from the series a few years ago and the last one starred Jeremy Renner, but he’s back now because money can be exchanged for goods and services. This one looks pretty good! It comes out this summer.

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The New Jason Bourne Trailer Just Premiered During the Super Bowl. Here It Is.

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Raw Data: How #White Are the Oscars, Anyway?

by Aleida4328 Posted on January 24, 2016

Mother Jones

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The chart on the right shows the trend of black nominees in the four acting categories by decade. In the most recent decade—including the past two years, in which no blacks were nominated—there were 18 black nominees, which amounts to 9 percent of the total acting field. Here’s a comparison (for Americans only) with top positions in other fields:

4-star military officers: 13 percent
Members of Congress: 10 percent
University presidents: ~3 percent
Senators: 2 percent
Nobel Prize winners: 1.1 percent
Fortune 500 CEOs: 0.8 percent
Billionaires: 0.2 percent
Governors: 0

POSTSCRIPT: Most of the #OscarsSoWhite backlash has come in the acting categories, which is why I made this chart. The odd things about this is that the acting categories are a gaudy aurora borealis compared to the paleness of the rest of the awards. With the exception of songwriting, a grand total of eight black artists have been nominated in every single other category over the past decade. Here are the percentages:

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Raw Data: How #White Are the Oscars, Anyway?

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Let’s Have a Contest For Best Alternate "Against Trump" Cover

by Daisy09Jmt Posted on January 23, 2016

Mother Jones

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Just keep in mind: this is a cover that’s supposed to persuade conservatives to turn against Trump.

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Let’s Have a Contest For Best Alternate "Against Trump" Cover

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Theoretical vs. Experimental Physics: Quien Es Mas Macho?

by FrankieMarx Posted on January 23, 2016

Mother Jones

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Warning! I have not followed Deflategate except in passing.1 I don’t have the kind of grassy knoll knowledge of what happened that lots of people seem to. The naive question that I’m about to pose may inspire jeers in those of you who have immersed yourselves in it.

Anyway: the first thing that I and thousands of other geeky types thought of when Deflategate first burst onto the scene was the Ideal Gas Law. I didn’t actually try to calculate anything, but I remember vaguely thinking that the temperature probably dropped about 5 percent between the locker room and the field, so the pressure in the footballs might plausibly have dropped about 5 percent too. Then again, maybe the volume of the footballs changed slightly. Hmmm. Then I got sick and didn’t care anymore—about Deflategate or anything else. Joe Nocera writes about this today:

John Leonard is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology….When the Deflategate story broke after last year’s A.F.C. championship game between the New England Patriots and the Indianapolis Colts in January, he found himself fixated on it….“Of course, I thought of the Ideal Gas Law right away,” Leonard says, “but there was no data to test it.”

….In May, the data arrived….Numbers in hand, Leonard went to work. He bought the same gauges the N.F.L. used to measure p.s.i. levels. He bought N.F.L.-quality footballs. He replicated the temperatures of the locker room, and the colder field. And so on….The drop in the Patriots’ footballs’ p.s.i was consistent with the Ideal Gas Law.

By early November, he had a PowerPoint presentation with more than 140 slides….A viewer who watched the lengthy lecture edited it down to a crisp 15 minutes….It is utterly convincing.

This is what’s always puzzled me. You don’t need to be an MIT professor of Measurement and Instrumentation to get a good sense of what happened, and you don’t need to spend a year pondering the minutiae of the Ideal Gas Law and writing 140 slides about it. Get a bag of footballs, inflate them to 12.5 psi, and take them outside on a 50-degree day. Wait an hour and measure them again. Maybe do this a few times under different conditions (wet vs. dry, different gauges, etc.). It would take a day or two at most.2 The league office could have instructed the referees to do this quick test just to see if 11.3 psi footballs were plausibly legal, and that might have been the end of it. Why didn’t that happen? Why didn’t lots of people try this? Even if you only have one football to your name, it wouldn’t be hard to at least get a rough idea. Inflate it, put it in your refrigerator for an hour, and then remeasure it.

Since I wasn’t paying attention, it’s quite possible that lots of people did this. Did they? Did the league? What happened here?

1Yuk yuk.

2Because I’m an optimistic guy, I’m just going to assume that this would be done in at least a minimally rigorous way. Nothing that would be necessary for publication in Nature. Just good enough to satisfy Mr. Lantz, my high school physics teacher.

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Theoretical vs. Experimental Physics: Quien Es Mas Macho?

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I Review NR’s "Against Trump" Issue

by MaryjoTrout Posted on January 22, 2016

Mother Jones

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Everybody is writing today about National Review’s big “Against Trump” issue. I did that last night, so today I want to review their effort. I give it a D+.

This isn’t my usual liberal carping at NR. Normally I carp because I disagree with them, but this time we are joined in a mutual bond of disgust. Virtually every single thing that everyone said in their anti-Trump symposium was true. I applaud what they did.

But why was it so damn lazy? Every editor in the world knows that the easiest way to fill pages is to corral a bunch of writers from the ol’ office Rolodex and ask them each to write 300 words on some topic. Every editor also knows that unless there’s some serious adult supervision, these “symposiums” are usually flaccid and unpersuasive. Lots of contributors will repeat what others have said. They mostly just bang something out instead of working on tight pieces that make crisp points. Some of them just toss out a few bromides and email it off.

That’s what happened this time too, and it’s yet another example of what I was complaining about yesterday: no one seems willing to really attack Trump. Obviously I don’t expect NR to produce the written equivalent of a Willie Horton ad, but despite all my past (and future) kvetching about them, I have no doubt that NR’s stable of writers can produce very persuasive, very well-written agit-prop1 when they put their minds to it. I’ve seen it before, and it’s not always easy to respond to.

What NR should have done is simple: Figure out half a dozen of Trump’s weakest points—points that even Trump supporters might find troubling—and assign a writer to dive into each one. Give each one the time to really do some research and produce a tight, fact-checked piece that tears Trump a new asshole. Put them all together and you’d have the definitive anti-Trump manifesto. Something like this would have an impact beyond the mere fact of NR doing it.

I don’t know why this didn’t happen. Lack of time? Lack of staff enthusiasm? It’s a mystery.

1I don’t mean this in a derogatory way. (Not this time, anyway.) This is what political magazines do. It can be done well or poorly, subtly or noisily, but our mission in life is to persuade people and provoke change.

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I Review NR’s "Against Trump" Issue

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When Will It Become Illegal to Drive a Car in the United States?

by CortezTrujillo Posted on January 22, 2016

Mother Jones

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When will driverless cars become a reality? That is, real driverless cars, where you just tell it where you want to go and then sit back and enjoy the ride?

My guess is seven or eight years. Maybe you think five. Or ten. Or fifteen.

But here’s a more interesting question: after driverless cars become widely available, how long will it be until human-driven cars are made illegal? I say ten years. It will vary state to state, of course, and there will likely be exceptions of various kinds (specific types of commercial vehicles, ATVs meant for fun, etc.). Still, without a special license they’ll become broadly illegal on streets in fairly short order. The proximate cause will be a chart something like the one on the right.

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When Will It Become Illegal to Drive a Car in the United States?

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Bernie Sanders Releases Outline of Universal Health Care Plan—And It’s Pretty Good

by DamonJobeo Posted on January 18, 2016

Mother Jones

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With only moments to go before tonight’s Democratic debate, Bernie Sanders has finally dropped his universal health care plan. Exciting! I imagine that Team Clinton is poring over it pretty carefully right about now. Here’s what he says it does:

Bernie’s plan will cover the entire continuum of health care, from inpatient to outpatient care; preventive to emergency care; primary care to specialty care, including long-term and palliative care; vision, hearing and oral health care; mental health and substance abuse services; as well as prescription medications, medical equipment, supplies, diagnostics and treatments….As a patient, all you need to do is go to the doctor and show your insurance card. Bernie’s plan means no more copays, no more deductibles and no more fighting with insurance companies when they fail to pay for charges.

….Under this plan, a family of four earning $50,000 would pay just $466 per year to the single-payer program, amounting to a savings of over $5,800 for that family each year.

Well, that sure sounds good. And I’m all in favor of universal health care. But I’m also curious about how he’s going to provide comprehensive care like this with no payment by patients at all and at such a low cost. Here are his basic claims:

He will raise $630 billion by increasing the employer part of the payroll tax by 6.2 percent.
He will raise $220 billion via a 2.2 percent progressive income tax on everyone (he calls it a “premium”).
He will raise $548 billion in various taxes on the rich along with the end of current tax breaks that subsidize health care
That’s a total of $1.4 trillion
Current public spending on health care (mostly Medicare and Medicaid) runs around $1.2 trillion.
This means that Sanders is figuring that under his plan total national health care spending will be about $2.6 trillion.

This is considerably less than the $3 trillion we spend now, and Sanders also says that his plan will keep spending growth down. This accounts for his claim that his plan will reduce total national spending on health care by $6 trillion over ten years.

So is this credible? It’s close. His taxes will probably raise about what he says. I’m not sure that he can reduce spending as dramatically as he hopes, but he can probably reduce it some. In other words, his sums might not add up perfectly, but they’re pretty close.

If there’s anything to criticize, it’s his statement that the average family of four will pay only $466 per year. The problem here is that while his payroll tax might come from employers, it will end up being paid for by workers—just as existing employer health plans are ultimately paid for by workers. That would cost his family of four about $3,100, putting their total at around $3,600. And if you figure that Sanders is being optimistic about cost savings and will probably need to raise taxes more than he says, our family’s total bill probably clocks in at around $4,000.

That’s still not bad. An average family pays a whole lot more than that right now via employer health coverage and copays. There’s a wee bit of smoke and mirrors here—counting employer plans when he talks about savings but not counting employer taxes when he talks about costs—but that’s a small thing. Overall, his numbers are pretty honest.

As for the details of exactly how the plan would work, I don’t know. The document on Sanders’ website doesn’t say much about that. I assume there’s another document somewhere, or maybe more to come. Stay tuned.

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Bernie Sanders Releases Outline of Universal Health Care Plan—And It’s Pretty Good

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