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Obama Signs Order to Take Away Your Antibiotics

by LeesaClinton Posted on September 19, 2014

Mother Jones

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Here’s the latest from the White House:

The Obama administration on Thursday announced measures to tackle the growing threat of antibiotic resistance, outlining a national strategy that includes incentives for the development of new drugs, tighter stewardship of existing ones, and improvements in tracking the use of antibiotics and the microbes that are resistant to them.

….John P. Holdren, the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, told reporters that the new strategy — established by an executive order that President Obama signed on Thursday — was intended to jolt the federal government into action to combat a health crisis that many experts say it has been slow to recognize.

I guess we can all see where this is going, right? It’ll start with Alex Jones, maybe, and then Glenn Beck will catch the infection. Drudge will get it next, then Limbaugh, and finally the entire crew of Fox News will come down with it. The tyrant Obama is taking our amoxicillin away from us! Think of the children and their earaches!

Sadly, there’s no treatment for this airborne virus. We just have to let it burn itself out. Maybe someday scientists will find a cure for vox bardus.

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Obama Signs Order to Take Away Your Antibiotics

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Apple Gives Its Middle Finger to the NSA

by HildredCouncil Posted on September 18, 2014

Mother Jones

I’m a little late getting started this morning, even though I actually woke up much earlier than usual. What happened is that I wrote a post; then lost it by hitting the wrong key and blowing away my browser window; then recreated it; and then decided not to publish it after all. I’m still not sure if this is because the post was genuinely ill-conceived, or because I’m just too cowardly to put it up. Questions, questions….

In any case, I’m fascinated to see this tidbit among all the boring recent Apple iPhone news (bigger screen, thinner profile, yawn):

Apple said Wednesday night that it is making it impossible for the company to turn over data from most iPhones or iPads to police — even when they have a search warrant — taking a hard new line as tech companies attempt to blunt allegations that they have too readily participated in government efforts to collect user information.

….The key is the encryption that Apple mobile devices automatically put in place when a user selects a passcode, making it difficult for anyone who lacks that passcode to access the information within, including photos, e-mails and recordings. Apple once maintained the ability to unlock some content on devices for legally binding police requests but will no longer do so for iOS 8, it said in the new privacy policy.

I’m not sure how universally this kind of technical fix can be applied elsewhere. I have a feeling that in practice, it’s probably a limited solution. But it would certainly be a bit of poetic justice if the NSA’s overreach and the government’s unwillingness to rein them in led to a sea change in private security that simply makes it impossible to respond to mass requests for customer data.

Of course, this might not be the end of things. For the time being, actual traditional governments with police forces and courts are still more powerful than even the highest of high-tech corporations. If Congress passes a law requiring Apple to maintain unlock codes, then they’ll have to do it whether they like it or not. I wonder how this is all going to play out?

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Apple Gives Its Middle Finger to the NSA

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Polling Cage Fight Heats Up Today

by LynneZoqnipucg Posted on September 17, 2014

Mother Jones

Nate Silver today:

I don’t like to call out other forecasters by name unless I have something positive to say about them….

But he wants to make an exception for one guy: Sam Wang. The guy is so preposterously deluded that something just has to be said:

That model is wrong — not necessarily because it shows Democrats ahead (ours barely shows any Republican advantage), but because it substantially underestimates the uncertainty associated with polling averages….In 2010, for example, Wang’s model made Sharron Angle the favorite in Nevada against Harry Reid; it estimated she was 2 points ahead in the polls, but with a standard error of just 0.5 points. If we drew a graphic based on Wang’s forecast like the ones we drew above,it would have Angle winning the race 99.997 percent of the time, meaning that Reid’s victory was about a 30,000-to-1 long shot. To be clear, the FiveThirtyEight model had Angle favored also, but it provided for much more uncertainty. Reid’s win came as a 5-to-1 underdog in our model instead of a 30,000-to-1 underdog in Wang’s; those are very different forecasts….If you want a “polls only” model that estimates the uncertainty more rigorously, I’d recommend The Huffington Post’s or Drew Linzer’s.

I’m not quite sure how it happened, but Silver has managed to become truly torqued off about Wang. If Wang’s prediction of this year’s Senate race turns out to be more accurate than Silver’s, I almost hate to think what might happen. Silver’s head is going to explode or something. In any case, this is far more fun than you normally get from a couple of geeky poll aggregators.

By the way, Wang is now projecting that Democrats have an 81 percent chance of controlling the Senate after the election. Not by much, mind you: he figures they’re likely to hold exactly 50 seats, which would make Joe Biden the tiebreaker and give Democrats a bare majority. We’ll see.

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Polling Cage Fight Heats Up Today

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Poverty Keeps Getting Worse and Worse for Working-Age Adults

by AltaG65eacunv Posted on September 17, 2014

Mother Jones

The Census Bureau released its annual poverty report today, and the headline number shows that the official poverty rate declined from 15.0 percent to 14.5 percent. This decline was driven entirely by a drop in the number of children living in poverty.

This gives me an excuse to make a point that doesn’t get made often enough. You’ll often see charts showing that the overall poverty rate has remained roughly the same since the late 60s, and that’s true. But this is largely due to more generous Social Security benefits, which have reduced elderly poverty from over 30 percent to under 10 percent.

There’s been no such reduction among working age adults. In fact, just the opposite. The low point for working-age poverty was about 9 percent, reached in 1968, and since then it’s steadily increased. There are small variations from year to year, but basically it went up to about 10-11 percent in the 80s and then increased to 13.6 percent during the Great Recession. It’s stayed there ever since.

The safety net has helped most of these folks tread water, but it doesn’t change the fact that the market economy has gotten steadily bleaker for the poor over the past 40 years. It’s great that we’ve made such significant inroads against elderly poverty, but aggregates can fool you about the rest of the country. Among everyone else, poverty has only gotten worse and worse.

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Poverty Keeps Getting Worse and Worse for Working-Age Adults

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How Should the NFL Handle Domestic Violence Cases in the Future?

by XMSEfrenxt Posted on September 14, 2014

Mother Jones

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I was browsing the paper this morning and came across an op-ed by sports writer Jeff Benedict about Ray Rice and the NFL’s problem with domestic violence. After the usual review of the league’s egregious mishandling of the Rice incident over the past few months, we get this:

So this nagging truth remains: It should not take a graphic video to get the NFL to do the right thing. For too long the NFL has had an antiquated playbook when it comes to players who commit domestic violence.

….NFL players aren’t like men in the general population, especially in the eyes of children. Rather, NFL players are seen as action heroes who epitomize strength, athleticism and toughness. That’s why so many kids emulate them. And that’s why one instance of a celebrated player using his muscle to harm a woman is too many.

Etc.

I read to the end, but that was about it. And it occurred to me that this piece was representative of nearly everything I’ve read about the Rice affair. There was lots of moral outrage, of course. That’s a pretty cheap commodity when you have stomach-turning video of a pro football player battering a woman unconscious in an elevator. But somehow, at the end, there was nothing. No recommendation about what the NFL’s rule on domestic violence should be.

So I’m curious: what should it be? Forget Rice for a moment, since we need a rule that applies to everyone. What should be the league’s response to a player who commits an act of domestic violence? Should it be a one-strike rule, or should it matter if you have no prior history of violence? Should it depend on a criminal conviction, or merely on credible evidence against the player? Should it matter how severe the violence is? (Plenty of domestic violence cases are much more brutal than Rice’s.) Or should there be zero tolerance no matter what the circumstances? How about acts of violence that aren’t domestic? Should they be held to the same standard, or treated differently? And finally, is Benedict right that NFL players should be sanctioned more heavily than ordinary folks because they act as role models for millions of kids? Or should we stick to a standard that says we punish everyone equally, regardless of their occupation?

Last month the NFL rushed out new punishment guidelines regarding domestic violence after enduring a tsunami of criticism for the way it handled Rice’s suspension. Details here. Are these guidelines reasonable? Laughable? Too punitive? I think we’ve discussed the bill of particulars of the Ray Rice case to exhaustion at this point, so how about if we talk about something more concrete?

Given the circumstances and the evidence it had in hand, how should the NFL have handled the Ray Rice case? And more importantly, how should they handle domestic violence cases in general? I’d be interested in hearing some specific proposals.

Continued here – 

How Should the NFL Handle Domestic Violence Cases in the Future?

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Chip-and-PIN Credit Cards Coming in 2015?

by SophiaGalvez Posted on June 4, 2014

Mother Jones

Sam’s Club has announced that it will soon be issuing a chip-based credit card. Hooray! However, it’s a chip-and-signature card, not one of the more secure, more logical, and more universal chip-and-PIN cards. But wait:

The other major security technology widely used on credit cards elsewhere i.e., every country on the planet except ours is PIN codes, which are more difficult to fake than a scribbled signature. The Sam’s Club cards will be PIN enabled but will primarily verify users by signature. The next generation of the cards, however, will primarily require PIN verification when they are issued next year.

Hold on. When did this happen? A few months ago, America’s credit card issuers were insisting that chip-and-signature was the way to go. The transition plans were all in place and it was what everyone had agreed to. Retailers didn’t have the technology for chip-and-PIN and consumers didn’t want it, because we were all too stupid to get used to using a PIN code with our credit cards.

Now, suddenly, chip-and-PIN is right around the corner? What’s going on?

UPDATE: I guess I haven’t been paying attention. In December Wells Fargo announced that it would offer chip-based cards on request. “Technically speaking, they are chip-and-signature,” says a Wells Fargo spox, “though the chip does have a PIN and can accommodate a PIN-based transaction if the situation required it (e.g. an unattended or offline kiosk.)” And JPMorgan Chase says it will be offering chip-and-PIN cards later this year. I guess the chip-and-PIN bandwagon is starting to gain momentum.

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Chip-and-PIN Credit Cards Coming in 2015?

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Obama’s EPA Regs Reward Republican Obstructionism

by KiraRosales Posted on June 4, 2014

Mother Jones

Jamelle Bouie thinks Republicans are shooting themselves in the feet with their mindless obstructionism:

If Republicans are outraged by the announcement, they only have themselves to blame….In 2009, President Obama threw his support behind climate legislation in the House, and the following year, a group of Senate Democrats—including Kerry—began work with Republicans to craft a bipartisan climate bill. The process fell apart, a victim of bad management from the White House, election year politics, an embattled and fearful Sen. Lindsay Graham—the South Carolina senator at the center of the negotiations—and the growing tide of Republican anti-Obama sentiment, which would culminate that fall with a huge GOP victory in the House of Representatives.

….With a little cooperation, Republicans could have won a better outcome for their priorities. They could have exempted coal from more stringent spectrum of regulations, enriched their constituencies with new subsidies and benefits, and diluted a key Democratic priority. Instead, they’ll now pay a steep substantive price for their obstruction, in the form of rules that are tougher—and more liberal—than anything that could have passed Congress.

I think this misreads Republican priorities. Sure, they care about the details of the regulations. And sure, they knew perfectly well that Obama had threatened to act via the EPA if Congress failed to pass a bill. But neither of those were things they cared all that much about.

Note the bolded sentence above. What Republicans really care about is winning elections.1 They were pretty sure that cooperating on a cap-and-trade bill would hurt them in the 2010 midterms, and they were probably right about that. It wasn’t a popular bill, and they would have been forced to take partial credit for it if it had passed. Instead, they were able to run a clean, rage-filled campaign against Obummercare, cap-and-tax, and the pork-ocrat “stimulus” bill. As I recall, that worked out pretty well for them.

And what price did they pay? Well, now the EPA is proposing regs that are….maybe slightly worse than the original cap-and-trade bill, but not all that much, really. Policy-wise, then, they’ve lost at most a smidgen but no more.2 And guess what? There’s another midterm coming up! This is all perfectly timed from the Republican point of view. They get to run hard against yet another lawless-Obama-job-killing-socialist-war-on-coal-executive-tyranny program. What’s not to like?

1Democrats too, in case you’re keeping score at home. Libertarians not so much.

2It’s worth noting that they have Obama’s relentless technocratic pragmatism to thank for this. If Obama had really wanted to punish Republican constituencies for opposing the cap-and-trade bill, he could have proposed a bunch of command-and-control mandates that would have hit red states and the coal industry in the gut. If Obama were truly the business-hating socialist tyrant of their fever dreams, that’s what he would have done. Instead, he proposed regulations that were as flexible and efficient as possible within the restrictions of the Clean Air Act. That’s why, in the end, Republican obstructionism didn’t really hurt them that much.

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Obama’s EPA Regs Reward Republican Obstructionism

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Good News for August

by Cesar2853jg Posted on June 3, 2014

Mother Jones

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Hey! Rick Perlstein’s final (?) volume in his account of the rise of the modern conservative movement, The Invisible Bridge, is coming out on August 5. How did I not know this until now?

In any case, this is good news. I’ll have something good to read in August. And so will you.

UPDATE: I just got an email from Rick:

not final….

Just signed contract to write fourth and final volume taking story through 1980 election.

Hmmm. This is sounding very Game-of-Thrones-ish. It keeps expanding. When volume 4 is released, will we learn that Rick decided the 1980 election really deserved a book 5 all of its own?

In any case, I’ve long felt that that the 70s are one of the most underrated decades. An awful lot of what’s happened since was germinated in the froth of the 70s. It was a decade in which a lot of things—political, cultural, and economic—were in flux; and whether we knew it or not, we were making choices that determined which direction we were going to take over the next few decades. I’m looking forward to Rick’s take on this.

Originally posted here – 

Good News for August

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Yep, Republicans Are Even Outraged Over the Release of a POW

by stevenjakoby Posted on June 2, 2014

Mother Jones

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Republicans are upset over the release of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl. They have several complaints: the president “negotiated with terrorists”; the president broke a law requiring 30-day notice before prisoners are transferred out of Guantanamo; and among a few fringe types, a belief that perhaps Bergdahl was actually a deserter not worth rescuing.

Is there anything to any of this? Probably not. But it’s pretty much impossible to tell for sure. Republicans these days are so hellbent on finding reasons to be outraged over everything President Obama does, there’s no longer any way to tell whether their outrage over any specific incident is real or manufactured. And in this case, it’s probably not worth trying to find out.

As a rough rule of thumb, I figure that if there’s anything to these Republican complaints, there will be at least one or two Democrats from red states who join in. So far I don’t think there have been any, which is probably a good sign that this is just random partisan fulminating, not genuine outrage.

UPDATE: On a historical note, I guess it’s worth pointing out that prisoner exchanges—and the issues surrounding them—at the ends of wars have often been contentious, leading to partisan sniping. This is a tiny prisoner exchange, so maybe it’s normal that it’s leading to a tiny amount of partisan sniping.

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Yep, Republicans Are Even Outraged Over the Release of a POW

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Chris Wallace Demands Answers to Yet More Benghazi Questions That Have Already Been Answered Dozens of Times

by JeannetteHuddle Posted on June 1, 2014

Mother Jones

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I was channel surfing this morning and happened to catch a few minutes of Chris Wallace talking to Claire McCaskill. The subject, yet again, was Benghazi. Why did Susan Rice blame the video? Also: Two sources said they knew it was a terrorist attack immediately, so why didn’t Rice say that? We need these questions answered!

I know, I know. It’s my fault for watching TV. But Jesus. Chris Wallace knows the answers to these questions. He has to know. But just in case he still doesn’t, here they are:

Why did Susan Rice blame the video?

On Chris Wallace’s own show aired four days after the Benghazi attack, here’s what Susan Rice said:

Well, first of all, Chris, we are obviously investigating this very closely. The FBI has a lead in this investigation. The information, the best information and the best assessment we have today is that in fact this was not a preplanned, premeditated attack. That what happened initially was that it was a spontaneous reaction to what had just transpired in Cairo as a consequence of the video. People gathered outside the embassy and then it grew very violent and those with extremist ties joined the fray and came with heavy weapons, which unfortunately are quite common in post-revolutionary Libya and that then spun out of control.

But we don’t see at this point signs this was a coordinated plan, premeditated attack. Obviously, we will wait for the results of the investigation and we don’t want to jump to conclusions before then. But I do think it’s important for the American people to know our best current assessment.

Rice was very clear that she was providing a preliminary judgment. She was very clear about the role of the video: It had inspired protests in Cairo earlier in the week. She was very clear that we believed the Cairo protests sparked protests in Benghazi. She was very clear that we believed this provided extremist groups with a chance to launch an opportunistic attack.

In the end, almost all of this turned out to be true. The video did spark protests in Cairo. Some of the Benghazi attackers were motivated by the video. The attack wasn’t premeditated: it was planned no more than a few hours previously. The only part Rice got wrong was that there were, in fact, no initial protests in Benghazi. That was the best reporting we had at the time, but it turned out to be incorrect.

A couple of sources said they reported immediately that it was a preplanned terrorist attack. Why didn’t Rice and the rest of the Obama administration say that?

Because the intelligence community had multiple sources of reporting about Benghazi, and they conflicted. How hard can it be to understand this? Besides, the best evidence we have today is that it wasn’t a preplanned attack. It was an opportunistic attack organized in less than a day. What’s more, the groups that led the attack had only the most tenuous ties to Al Qaeda.

Aside from that, there’s this continuing weird totem around the word “terrorist.” What’s the point of this? Hillary Clinton called the attackers a “small and savage group.” Susan Rice called them extremists. Others used different words. It’s hard to understand why this matters. The attack was carried out by mostly local militant groups with mostly local grievances and no serious ties to Al Qaeda. The precise word you use to describe these folks can’t possibly be that important, can it?

And an aside….

Critics have focused heavily on the fact that the Obama administration blamed the “Innocence of Muslims” video for the violence that had erupted around the Middle East and then, indirectly, provoked the attacks in Benghazi. But I think everyone needs a trip down memory lane here. That video was a very, very big deal at the time. Maybe everyone has now forgotten this, but it did spark riots all over the region and it was the subject of nearly constant coverage in the local media both before and after the Benghazi attacks. The notion that it was responsible for regional violence at the time and at least partially responsible for what happened in Benghazi was hardly some bizarre flight of fancy.

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Chris Wallace Demands Answers to Yet More Benghazi Questions That Have Already Been Answered Dozens of Times

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