Tag Archives: japanese

Jeb Bush Opposed to Manipulating People’s Fears Over Syrian Refugees

by CedricSolander Posted on November 20, 2015

Mother Jones

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Jeb Bush comments on Donald Trump’s plan to create a Muslim registry in the United States:

Trump’s solutions are “just wrong,” Jeb Bush said Friday….”It’s not a question of toughness. It’s manipulating people’s angst and their fears. That’s not strength. That’s weakness,” Bush said in an interview on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”

Good for Bush, though it’s a low bar to oppose a national registry for everyone of a specific religion. I don’t think Bush will be the only one to choke on that notion. Still, he was clear about his opposition, and clear about why it’s wrong.

It’s too bad he’s taken this long. He could have been a voice for sanity from the start and set himself apart from the crowd. At this point, though, it would just make him look tentative and indecisive. He lost a chance to do the right thing and possibly get a big payoff from it.

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Jeb Bush Opposed to Manipulating People’s Fears Over Syrian Refugees

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Here Is Today’s Case Study in Right-Wing Media Virtue and Rectitude

by AugustiXxj Posted on November 20, 2015

Mother Jones

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A friend of mine watches Fox News so I don’t have to,1 and he says they’ve been practically wetting their pants over the story of Hillary Clinton’s campaign calling the founder of the Laugh Factory and threatening to sue him if he didn’t take down a short video compilation of Hillary jokes.

What’s that? This already sounds really unlikely? I guess so. It sure doesn’t seem very smart for a highly visible presidential candidate, does it? Still, Judicial Watch says it happened, and Fox and Rush and Sean are all over it too. So I guess it must be true. They wouldn’t just make stuff up, would they?

Well, sure they would. What happened, according to Jamie Masada, founder of the Laugh Factory, is that a few days ago he got a comically threatening phone call from someone named “John.” And that’s it. John never said he was with the Clinton campaign. John never called back. Masada never told Judicial Watch about it. In other words, there’s almost literally nothing there.

But apparently some Laugh Factory employee heard about the call, and somehow it went from there to Judicial Watch. Or something. Who knows, really? What we do know is that apparently no one bothered calling Masada to check up on this story—that would have run the risk of ruining it, after all—and now it’s all over conservative media. Michelle Goldberg comments:

What we have here is a small-scale demonstration of how the Hillary smear sausage gets made. It starts with a claim that’s ambiguous at best, fabricated at worst, and then interpreted in the most invidious possible light. The claim is reported in one outlet and amplified on Twitter. Other outlets then report on the report, repeating the claim over and over again. Talk radio picks it up. Maybe Fox News follows. Eventually the story achieves a sort of ubiquity in the right-wing media ecosystem, which makes it seem like it’s been confirmed. Soon it becomes received truth among conservatives, and sometimes it even crosses into the mainstream media. If you watched the way the Clintons were covered in the 1990s, you know the basics of this process. If you didn’t, you’re going to spend the next year—and maybe the next nine years—learning all about it.

And there you have it. This is where Mena airport and Vince Foster and Whitewater and the Clinton death list and all the other charming inventions of the Clinton smear squad came from. Seems like only yesterday.

1Not really. Believe it or not, it’s part of his job.

Source – 

Here Is Today’s Case Study in Right-Wing Media Virtue and Rectitude

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When Will Republicans at Last Get Serious About National Security?

by JohnettBloodswo Posted on November 19, 2015

Mother Jones

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Today the Wall Street Journal editorial page sings the praises of French President François Hollande:

French security forces Wednesday conducted hundreds of antiterror raids and placed more than 100 suspects under house arrest….Security forces found a weapons cache in the city of Lyon that included Kalashnikov rifles and a rocket launcher….France has some 11,500 names on government watch lists. Many are likely to be detained under the three-month state of emergency that Mr. Hollande declared after Friday’s attacks.

….Mr. Hollande has been right to declare war on Islamic State and order French bombing raids on its capital in eastern Syria. France is still a militarily capable nation, as it proved when it turned back an al Qaeda offensive in Mali in 2013. It can do significant damage to ISIS if it increases the tempo of its current bombing or deploys its Foreign Legion to liberate the city of Raqqa.

….Until America gets a new Commander in Chief, Mr. Hollande is the best antiterror leader the West has.

Hmmm. It’s certainly true that Hollande has been among the most hawkish of European leaders. It’s also true that France was one of the first to join the US air campaign against ISIS—though their military efforts so far have been little more than pinpricks. But let’s roll the tape back to June 2014, when President Obama was first trying to put together a coalition. He and Hollande issued a joint communique with all the right promises, but as France 24 reported, “Behind that facade of unity, there are significant disagreements between the two countries about how best to respond to the recent bloody territorial surge by ISIS.”

Why France is reluctant to act against ISIS in Iraq

On June 18, a meeting was held in the Elysee with the French Ministers of Defence and Foreign Affairs….For the moment, however, no military measures are planned….Moreover, “No one has asked for it”, added the same source. Requests for military assistance from Baghdad have so far been addressed to the international community or Washington, but “not specifically to France”, as a foreign affairs spokesman pointed out on June 17.

….The lack of French enthusiasm for an armed intervention in Iraq, whether it be air strikes or sending military advisers to Baghdad, is due partly to fear that any intervention would be ineffective if it were not accompanied by a real commitment by the Iraqi government to act on sectarian tensions.

That’s the best anti-terror leader the West has, according to the Journal. Nobody had “specifically” asked France, so Hollande decided to hang tight and see which way the wind was blowing.

This is the kind of thing that makes it so hard to talk about ISIS and terrorism. It’s not as if this has been Obama’s finest hour, after all, and it would be silly to suggest otherwise. But the opposition has generally been much worse. Obama waffled over Syria’s use of chemical weapons, but then Congress bungled things further by refusing to approve Obama’s call for retaliatory strikes—with both Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio joining in. Obama may have been late to recognize the threat from ISIS, but he’s still the guy who put together the coalition. France has been a good partner in the fight against ISIS, but that happened only after Obama spent some time cajoling them into action.

And Republicans simply can’t be bothered to take any of this seriously. They blather about Obama being weak, but when you ask them for their plans you just get nonsense. They demand “leadership”; they bask in cheap applause lines about a bigger military; they all chime in like puppets to agree on a no-fly zone; they suggest we stop worrying about civilian casualties; they propose more arms for the Kurds; they want to team up with Sunni tribal leaders without saying how they’d accomplish it; and they vaguely imply that we should bomb ISIS differently….or more….or with greater determination….or something.

None of this is remotely serious. A bigger military wouldn’t affect ISIS. A no-fly zone wouldn’t affect ISIS. Killing civilians would actively help ISIS. The Kurds aren’t going to fight ISIS in Sunni territory. Sunni leaders aren’t going to be reliable allies until they trust Baghdad to treat them equitably. And sure, we could bomb more, but there’s not much point until we have the ground troops to back it up. But Republicans have been unanimously opposed to American troops all along, and Iraqi ground troops flatly aren’t yet willing or able to do the job.

I hardly want to be in the position of pretending that Obama’s ISIS strategy has been golden. But Republicans make him look like Alexander the Great. They treat the whole subject like a plaything, a useful cudgel during a presidential campaign. Refugees! Kurds! Radical Islam! We need to be tougher!

That isn’t leadership. It barely even counts as coherent thought. It’s just playground jeering. But right now, that’s all we’re getting from them.

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When Will Republicans at Last Get Serious About National Security?

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Friday Cat Blogging – 30 October 2015

by TresaTietjen5 Posted on October 30, 2015

Mother Jones

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Hopper has been hogging the catblogging show lately, so today you get a double dose of her brother: Hilbert and his shadow. That shadow looks very Halloween-y, doesn’t it? Of course, that means lots of firecrackers tomorrow, which probably means lots of time spent hiding under the bed. On the bright side, we also set our clocks back, so everyone gets to sleep in an extra hour to make up for it. That sounds like a pretty good trade to me. I’m not sure what the cats think of it.

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Friday Cat Blogging – 30 October 2015

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Head Witch Hunter Now Wants Fewer Witch Hunts

by ErwinX26bghrinc Posted on October 30, 2015

Mother Jones

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Today’s Charles Krauthammer column cracks me up:

Skip the investigations, win the election

I’m all for demonstrating malfeasance. But the GOP House has given a five-year display of its inability to successfully demonstrate anything…. Operation Fast and Furious….IRS….Planned Parenthood….Benghazi.

….In each of these cases, Republicans had the facts and the argument. And yet in every one, they failed. What makes them think that they will fare any better in the next iteration, the impeachment of a minor official in an expiring administration?

Krauthammer is a hardcore conservative, but he’s also a very high-IQ conservative. So this makes me wonder: does he really believe this? Or does he know it’s baloney but figures he needs some kind of acceptable cover to get Republicans off their Ahab-like zeal for investigating nothingburgers?

As I’m sure Krauthammer knows, the problem Republicans have with their mania for investigations is that what turned out to be scandalous wasn’t high-ranking, and what was high-ranking wasn’t scandalous. Fast & Furious was scandalous, but it was a local botch. The IRS was slightly scandalous, but never went beyond middle management. Planned Parenthood did nothing wrong at all. And Benghazi—well, that reached the very highest levels, but there’s just no scandal to be uncovered. There may have been some bad security decisions, but the evidence of malfeasance by anyone in the Obama administration is all but nonexistent.

Anyway, it probably doesn’t matter. All through the Clinton administration and now the Obama administration, Republicans have been fixated on uncovering the scandals they just know have to be out there. But the plain truth is that Obama has run perhaps the cleanest administration in modern history. It’s actually sort of remarkable. There’s plenty of stuff you can legitimately disagree about with him, but there’s been virtually no scandal of the conventional sort.

Either way, though, Krauthammer is probably right. The latest obsession in the House is to impeach the head of the IRS. It’s idiotic because he did nothing wrong, and it’s doubly idiotic because it would never pass in the Senate. It devalues the whole notion of impeachment and makes Republicans look like crackpots.

Then again, PPP recently polled Republicans in North Carolina, and 66 percent supported the idea of impeaching Hillary Clinton “the day she takes office.” This is the conservative movement people like Krauthammer have built. It can hardly come as a surprise to him that their primary mode of governance now consists mostly of an endless quest for malevolent phantoms that Krauthammer and his buddies have been assuring them all along are out there.

Continued – 

Head Witch Hunter Now Wants Fewer Witch Hunts

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Are We Allowed to Say That Marco Rubio Is Lying About His Tax Plan?

by WillN98zldly Posted on October 30, 2015

Mother Jones

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I’ve written a couple of posts about Marco Rubio’s debate tiff with John Harwood, which revolves around the question of how the poor and the middle class fare under Rubio’s tax plan. Harwood wanted to know why it was so much better for the rich than the middle class, and Rubio responded by saying his plan would help the very poor a lot.

In other words, Rubio declined to answer the question and instead answered a different one. But today Dylan Matthews digs into this a bit and concludes (surprise!) that Rubio’s plan probably doesn’t even help the poor all that much:

How is Rubio helping the poor so much? Well, Rubio’s plan would replace the standard deduction and personal exemption with a $2,000 credit ($4,000 for couples)….But Rubio’s proposal, as originally laid out, is not a plain old credit. It’s a fully refundable credit. Think about that for a second. Rubio’s original proposal would give any household in America $2,000 or $4,000, no questions asked. It was a basic income. It was a massive increase in the welfare state of a kind that no Democratic candidate, including Bernie Sanders, is proposing.

So it’s perhaps no surprise that when I asked his team about this, they insisted that this was a mistake, and the credit was in fact much more limited. “Rules would be tailored to ensure that our reforms would not create payments for new, non-working filers,” a Rubio aide told me in April.

It’s unclear what exactly that means….Here’s the problem, though: The Tax Foundation assumed that Rubio had proposed a basic income….Given that Rubio will not, in fact, create a massive new welfare program, this finding is pretty dubious.

How about that? Rubio misled the Tax Foundation into concluding that his plan would help the poor, and for some reason he’s never gotten around to correcting the error. In fact, he’s been aggressively touting the Tax Foundation analysis to “prove” that his plan helps the poor. He even accused John Harwood of misrepresenting his plan on national TV even though he knew perfectly well that he was the one misrepresenting his plan. If I were the Tax Foundation, I’d be pissed.

Still, I’m sure this was all an honest mistake on Rubio’s part, and he’ll rush to give the Tax Foundation updated information now that he realizes what he’s done. Right? He’s an honest young man, after all.

Right?

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Are We Allowed to Say That Marco Rubio Is Lying About His Tax Plan?

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A Few Unanswered Questions From Last Night’s Debate

by JinaByles825 Posted on October 29, 2015

Mother Jones

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After reviewing the transcript of last night’s debate I realized I had a few leftover questions. Nothing hard. Just some simple, easy-peasy stuff:

Carly Fiorina: You say you want to reduce the tax code to three pages using normal 11-point type. I’m tired of paying our CPA every year to prepare our tax returns, so this sounds terrific. It also sounds short enough that you can produce draft legislation for us pretty quickly. How hard can three pages be? When do we get to see it?

Mike Huckabee: You say we can save Medicare by focusing on cures for four big diseases that apparently we’ve been ignoring: cancer, Alzheimer’s, diabetes, and heart disease. Since I happen to have bone cancer, this sounds like a great idea to me. In fact, I’d be OK with pauperizing the whole country in order to speed up cures for multiple myeloma. So what’s the plan? I checked out your website, but the only mention of cancer I could find was a blog post comparing Iran to cancer. This makes me concerned about how serious you are. Do you have some ideas about research priorities? How much money will you spend on this? Inquiring minds want to know.

Donald Trump: Some of your luxury resorts have policies that ban guests from carrying guns. You said you’d change this, and since you’re the boss I assume you can do it with the stroke of a pen. When are you going to do this?

Marco Rubio: You might have been confused about John Harwood’s tax question last night. I think he agrees that your tax plan is generous to the very poor. But now that we have that straight, why does your plan increase middle-class income by only 15 percent compared to 28 percent for the top earners? As he said, that really does seem kind of backward for a guy who’s so dedicated to average workers like your parents.

Ben Carson: Last night you said that our economy is doing poorly because it’s “tethered down right now with so many regulations.” But then you failed to make the obvious blimp joke. What’s up with that?

Ted Cruz: Carl Quintanilla rudely refused to let you talk about the debt ceiling even though that was what he asked you about. But it sure seemed like you had something you wanted to get off your chest about that. So: what do you think about the debt ceiling? And one other thing: are you serious about returning to the gold standard? Really?

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A Few Unanswered Questions From Last Night’s Debate

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It’s Time to Change Up the Debate Rules

by CarenRubensohn Posted on October 29, 2015

Mother Jones

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Question for those of you who watched last night’s debate: what did you think of the questions the moderators asked?

It was an odd display. The wording of the questions often veered close to outright rudeness. For example:

Is this a comic book version of a presidential campaign?
You’re skipping more votes than any senator to run for president. Why not slow down, get a few more things done first or least finish what you start?
In terms of all of that, it raises the question whether you have the maturity and wisdom to lead this $17 trillion economy.

At the same time, if you take a look an inch below the surface, most of the questions the CNBC crew asked were actually very substantive. The candidates generally didn’t feel like engaging with anything other than their plans to cut taxes and slash regulations, but that’s not the fault of the moderators. That’s because it’s a Republican debate, and these are pretty much the only economic issues Republican candidates like to talk about.

This year’s debates have all followed a similar pattern, with the moderators asking each candidate at least one “tough” question near the beginning of the show. Fox did it too, and Anderson Cooper did it to the Democrats, so it’s not a liberal media conspiracy. Mostly it seems to be some kind of alpha chimp display to demonstrate that the moderators are real live journalists, not just pretty faces letting the candidates make stump speeches.

I didn’t really mind this the first time or two, but I’m starting to find it annoying. Fine: you folks are real journalists. Now let’s move on and ask questions that are really tough. Dig a little more deeply into policy and then follow up. Maybe switch up the rules and get rid of the “anyone who’s named gets 30 second to respond” nitwittery. Give the moderators a couple of minutes for each question, and make it a real back-and-forth. Less mud wrestling and more policy depth.

It probably wouldn’t work. I’m not sure there’s any power on earth that can get the candidates off their rehearsed talking points. But it might be worth a try.

POSTSCRIPT: And on the candidate side, how about giving the attacks on the media a rest? I know it’s a great applause line, but honestly, who cares? It’s just pandering. Find something new to get applause for.

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It’s Time to Change Up the Debate Rules

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Stop Blaming Suburbia for Killing Off Friendships

by PhilippHampden Posted on October 28, 2015

Mother Jones

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Dave Roberts is unhappy with the fact that we struggle to make new friends after college:

I read a study many years ago that I have thought about many times since, though hours of effort have failed to track it down. The gist was this: The key ingredient for the formation of friendships is repeated spontaneous contact. That’s why we make friends in college: because we are, by virtue of where we live and our daily activities, forced into regular contact with the same people. It is the natural soil out of which friendship grows.

….But when we marry and start a family, we are pushed, by custom, policy, and expectation, to move into our own houses. And when we have kids, we find ourselves tied to those houses. Many if not most neighborhoods these days are not safe for unsupervised kid frolicking. In lower-income areas there are no sidewalks; in higher-income areas there are wide streets abutted by large garages. In both cases, the neighborhoods are made for cars, not kids. So kids stay inside playing Xbox, and families don’t leave except to drive somewhere.

This is a common critique, but I don’t think it holds water. For starters, read The Organization Man. As William Whyte reports, spontaneous new friendships were quite common in 1950s suburbia—which was architecturally quite similar to today’s suburbia. This was certainly true of my stucco tract house neighborhood when I was growing up. Second, New Urbanists have been trying for a long time to create communities that encourage spontaneous friendships, and they routinely fail. Build houses with stoops, and everyone stays inside anyway.

Or take my current suburban neighborhood. It’s pretty typical. Everyone is friendly, and we know our near neighbors. Some close friendships have developed, but that’s about it. Across the street there’s a nearly identical neighborhood, but this one is far more close-knit, throwing Halloween parties and July 4th bashes and just generally socializing in a way that mine doesn’t. Why?

I’m not entirely convinced that the nature of friendships has actually changed all that much during the past few centuries of civilization. Some people are sociable and some aren’t. But if I’m wrong, I still don’t think it’s primarily because of changes in the built environment. Maybe it’s due to the fact that women don’t routinely stay home during the day and socialize with neighbors. Maybe it’s because of air conditioning and TV. Maybe we all figured out that picking friends by random location (i.e., living next door) didn’t make much sense once we had other options. Or maybe it’s just that smart verbal types tend to be a little introverted, and we hear from them more often than anyone else.

And stop blaming graduation from college! Half the country never went to college, but I’ll bet they have as many (or more) friends than the rest of us. How do they manage that if they skipped college and live in the same kinds of places as us overeducated types?

Anyway, consider this is a challenge. Do modern Americans really have fewer close friends than in the past? Establish that before you go any further. If it turns out to be true, why? I don’t think the evidence really supports the idea that it’s mostly due to the nature of suburban living. (Do apartment dwellers have more friends than homeowners?) This becomes a much more interesting question when we get over our obsession with the evils of suburbia.

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Stop Blaming Suburbia for Killing Off Friendships

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Saving the forest for the beers

by Myrna Posted on October 22, 2015

Beer relies on healthy, functioning forests. Without those forests, it’s difficult to find clean water. And without clean water: no beer. Source:  Saving the forest for the beers ; ; ;

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Saving the forest for the beers

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