Tag Archives: jobs

Wide Receiver Turned Foreign Policy Wonk? Donté Stallworth’s Second Act

by JosetteOneil Posted on January 31, 2014

Mother Jones

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Even if you don’t like football, you’ve probably heard of Donte’ Stallworth. Back in March 2009, the then-Cleveland Browns wide receiver made news when, driving drunk the morning after a night of partying with friends, he struck and killed a pedestrian crossing a Miami street.

Stallworth ended up serving just 30 days in jail. He also reached a financial settlement with the victim’s family and was suspended by the NFL for the entire 2009 season, but he couldn’t dodge being seen as just another celebrity escaping justice by virtue of being rich and famous. After his return to football in 2010, Stallworth never again was quite the same. He was a free agent for the entire 2013 season, and after 10 years in the league, his time in football might be over.

For most, that’d be the end of life in the limelight. But Stallworth has gotten a jump on an unusual second act: On the strength of his social-media savvy and his passion for foreign-policy wonkery, he has built a Twitter following of some 143,000 users, who check in with @DonteStallworth to get his take on everything from the latest blown call to the last Snowden revelation. And along with Chris Kluwe and Richard Sherman, he’s pushing back against the dumb-jock stereotype, one tweet at a time.

I recently caught up with Stallworth to talk about his future in the NFL, football and concussions, and how he uses Twitter to interact with the world.

Mother Jones: First of all, given that you last played for Washington, what’s your take on the controversy over the team’s name?

Donte’ Stallworth: I’ve heard both sides of the argument. I don’t know. I mean for one, I do feel like the name itself is obviously—it’s a derogatory term toward a certain racial and ethnic group. However, at the same time, I do know that there have been many Native people—I don’t like to call them “Native Americans,” I guess, definitely not “Indians”—I’ve seen and read a lot about there’s a big number of Natives that don’t mind the Redskins name and they actually embrace it. Although there are a number of groups as well that are opposed to it.

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Wide Receiver Turned Foreign Policy Wonk? Donté Stallworth’s Second Act

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Chart of the Day: An Awful Lot of People Think Obamacare is Hurting Them

by Dave Max Posted on January 30, 2014

Mother Jones

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Kaiser has released its monthly tracking poll on Obamacare, and there’s really no way to put lip gloss on this pig. Public perception of the law has been worsening for the past nine months, and it gapped out sharply after the rollout debacle in October. There’s now a 16-point delta between unfavorable and favorable views of the law, 50-34 percent. With the exception of one or two monthly anomolies that are probably polling artifacts, this is by far the worst it’s been since the law was passed.

You can see the effect this has in the chart on the right: 27 percent now say that Obamacare has “negatively affected” someone in their family. That’s crazy. Even if you subtract the baseline of 18-19 percent who have been saying this all along, that’s an increase of nearly ten points over the course of 2013. Unless you take an absurdly expansive view of “affected,” this is all but impossible. Obamacare simply doesn’t have that kind of reach.

But we’ve been though a recent period in which every co-pay increase, every premium increase, and every narrowing of benefits has been blamed on Obamacare. These things have happened every year like clockwork for the past couple of decades, but this year it was convenient to blame them on Obamacare. Combine that with the PR disaster from the website rollout, and a whole lot of people now believe that Obamacare is hurting them.

Unfortunately, this is fertile ground for Republicans. If they really have the discipline to avoid shooting themselves in the foot this year over idiotic confrontations with the president, running their midterm campaign solely on opposition to Obamacare might be a winner.

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Chart of the Day: An Awful Lot of People Think Obamacare is Hurting Them

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Therapist to the 1 Percent Weighs in on the Psychological Hardship of Being Rich

by MichelineConte Posted on January 30, 2014

Mother Jones

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Last week, billionaire investor Tom Perkins of the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers sent a letter to the editor of The Wall Street Journal likening criticism of the 1 percent to Nazi attacks on the Jews. He’s not an outlier. As Paul Krugman pointed out on Sunday, the rich have been lamenting the “demonizing” and “vilifying” of the 1 percent for years. “I…suspect that today’s Masters of the Universe are insecure about the nature of their success,” Krugman wrote. But the wealthy are not just afraid of losing their money to an angry middle class. Class warfare also makes the rich uncomfortable because they worry the non-rich are judging their character and personality by how much money they have, according to therapists who counsel the rich.

“I think that with Occupy Wall Street there was a sense of the heat getting turned up and a feeling of vilification and potential danger,” Jamie Traeger-Muney, a psychologist who counsels people who earn tens of millions of dollars a year, told Politico on Thursday. “There is a worry among our clients that they are being judged and people are making assumptions about who they are based on their wealth.”

In 2012, Mother Jones reported on how banks, including Wells Fargo and Morgan Stanley, are increasingly hiring psychotherapists like Traeger-Muney to help their extremely wealthy clients deal with the complications that come with being extremely wealthy. Here’s a bit more of what wealth therapists can tell us about how the rich may be feeling right now:

Although wealth counseling has existed for years, the 2008 financial crisis really sent the aristocracy sprinting for the therapist’s chair. The 2010 Capgemini/Merrill Lynch World Wealth Report, a survey that takes the pulse of zillionaires around the world, found that after the crisis, spooked clients were demanding “specialized advice.” Financial advisers must “truly understand the emotional aspects of client behavior,” the report warned…

“Any time there’s an outside focus on wealth,” it’s not fun for the wealthy, Traeger-Muney says. Heirs, she adds, have it the worst: “They feel like they’re in this 1 percent position. They get bad press from people who make fun of them. It feels like their worst nightmare coming true: the idea that they’re now responsible for other people’s unhappiness and lack of wealth, when they didn’t ask for their millions.”

Ultimately, having lots of money shouldn’t be cause for alarm. “There’s a difference between money causing problems and a lack of ability to explore feelings around money,” Traeger-Muney says. “That’s what leads to psychological issues.” She just tries to get her clients to acknowledge the fact that they’re rolling in dough and learn how to enjoy it. “What would life be like if they didn’t have any restraints and could really create what they wanted?”

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Therapist to the 1 Percent Weighs in on the Psychological Hardship of Being Rich

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Milk Doesn’t Do a Body So Good After All

by ild4sho Posted on January 29, 2014

Mother Jones

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When I was a teenager, I drank a lot of milk. That made my bones strong, which is why I’ve been able to avoid fracturing my hip now that I’m over 50. Hooray for milk!

Except wait. Science™ has intruded on this idyllic marketing fantasy:

Researchers followed people for 22 years to see if drinking milk as a teenager affected the rate of hip fractures during the study period. What did they find? There were more than 1200 hip fractures in women and almost 500 hip fractures in men in the follow-up period. But it turns out that each additional glass of milk per day as teenagers was associated with a 9% HIGHER risk of hip fractures in men later in life. Drinking more milk had no effect in women.

In other words, regardless of what the ads say, as a teen there’s no protective effect of your “bones getting stronger” in terms of preventing hip fractures later in life by drinking milk. In fact, the evidence shows that it may make it more likely that males will develop hip fractures.

That’s a helluva thing, isn’t it? That Aaron Carroll is a real killjoy.

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Milk Doesn’t Do a Body So Good After All

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No, the Decline of Cinderella Marriages Probably Hasn’t Played a Big Role in Rising Income Inequality

by arielbangkok Posted on January 27, 2014

Mother Jones

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Tyler Cowen points me to a paper today about the rise in assortative mating. Basically, this means that we increasingly marry people who are similar to ourselves. High school grads tend to marry other high school grads, and college grads tend to marry other college grads. The authors of the paper conclude that this has implications for rising income inequality:

If matching in 2005 between husbands and wives had been random, instead of the pattern observed in the data, then the Gini coefficient would have fallen from the observed 0.43 to 0.34, so that income inequality would be smaller. Thus, assortative mating is important for income inequality. The high level of married female labor-force participation in 2005 is important for this result.

The table on the right is a standardized contingency table that compares 1960 to 2005. The diagonal numbers show the percentage of each educational class who are married to others of the same educational class, and in every case the numbers are higher in 2005. This does indeed suggest that assortative mating has contributed to increasing income inequality. However, I’d offer a few caveats:

Comparing observed GINI with a hypothetical world in which marriage patterns are completely random is a bit misleading. Marriage patterns weren’t random in 1960 either, and the past popularity of “Cinderella marriages” is more myth than reality. In fact, if you look at the red diagonals, you’ll notice that assortative mating has actually increased only modestly since 1960.
So why bother with a comparison to a random counterfactual? That’s a little complicated, but the authors mainly use it to figure out why 1960 is so different from 2005. As it turns out, they conclude that rising income inequality isn’t really due to a rise in assortative mating per se. It’s mostly due to the simple fact that more women work outside the home today. After all, who a man marries doesn’t affect his household income much if his wife doesn’t have an outside job. But when women with college degrees all start working, it causes a big increase in upper class household incomes regardless of whether assortative mating has increased.
This can get to sound like a broken record, but whenever you think about rising income inequality, you always need to keep in mind that over the past three decades it’s mostly been a phenomenon of the top one percent. It’s unlikely that either assortative mating or the rise of working women has had a huge impact at those income levels, and therefore it probably hasn’t had a huge impact on increasing income inequality either. (However, that’s an empirical question. I might be wrong about it.)

This is interesting data, which is why I’m presenting it here. And it almost certainly has an impact on changes of income distribution between, say, the top fifth and the middle fifth. But the real drivers of rising income inequality, which have driven up the incomes of the top one percent so stratospherically, almost certainly lie elsewhere.

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No, the Decline of Cinderella Marriages Probably Hasn’t Played a Big Role in Rising Income Inequality

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The No-Fly List Takes Another Hit

by LilianW64evhn Posted on January 27, 2014

Mother Jones

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Two federal judges have recently ruled that the government’s no-fly list has some serious constitutional problems:

This follows on a federal court decision in August that travelling internationally by air involves “a constitutionally protected liberty interest.” While that case still has a way to go before it reaches a conclusion, the implications of a constitutionally protected right are that any limits on it must involve due process. Simply slapping names on a list because they’re allegedly suspected of the definition-of-terrorism-of-the-week and leaving people stranded won’t cut it.

The more recent decisions would seem to follow on that logic, recognizing that arbitrary limits on travel really do impair people’s ability to exercise their rights and such limits—especially when they involve official screw-ups—have to be fixable through some formal process.

It’s taken more than a dozen years to get to this point, and that’s a disgrace. The federal government certainly has the right to prevent foreigners from entering the country, and it doesn’t owe them due process when it makes those decisions. But preventing citizens and legal residents from flying overseas—or, even worse, allowing them to fly but not allowing them to return home—is police state territory. Ditto for the steady conversion of the Immigration Service into an extraconstitutional agency to harass and search citizens who can’t be legally harassed or searched by ordinary law enforcement.

The federal government simply doesn’t—or shouldn’t—have the right to unilaterally hound and persecute people based on the mere suspicion of a bureaucrat. Arbitrarily constraining travel is a favorite tactic of oppressive regimes, and it has no place in the United States. The faster this stuff is ended, and the faster that due process once again becomes more than just a nice idea, the better.

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The No-Fly List Takes Another Hit

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Rand Paul: There’s No GOP War on Women, But Remember the Lewinsky Scandal?

by Shelby Morris Posted on January 27, 2014

Mother Jones

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In 2011, after Republicans in Congress introduced a bill that would ban taxpayer funding for abortions except in cases of “forcible rape,” Democrats adopted a new line of attack: the GOP was waging a “war on women.” Instead of changing their policies, Republicans changed the subject, arguing that the sexual behavior of individual Democratic politicians—such as Anthony Weiner—proves the GOP “war on women” is a fiction.

On Sunday, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) became the latest GOPer to adopt this strategy, arguing on Meet the Press that former President Bill Clinton’s affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky means Democrats are in no place to cry foul about the Republican party platform.

Paul made the comments after host David Gregory highlighted a moment in a September Vogue profile of Paul in which Kelley Paul, the senator’s wife, said, “Bill Clinton’s relationship with Monica Lewinsky should complicate his return to the White House, even as first spouse. I would say his behavior was predatory, offensive to women.”

Gregory asked Paul if Bill Clinton’s sexual behavior in the White House would be fair game in a 2016 race involving Hillary Clinton. Here’s Paul’s response:

I mean, the Democrats, one of their big issues is they have concocted and said Republicans are committing a war on women. One of the workplace laws and rules that I think are good is that bosses shouldn’t prey on young interns in their office.

And I think really the media seems to have given President Clinton a pass on this. He took advantage of a girl that was 20 years old and an intern in his office. There is no excuse for that, and that is predatory behavior, and it should be something we shouldn’t want to associate with people who would take advantage of a young girl in his office.

This isn’t having an affair. I mean, this isn’t me saying, “Oh, he’s had an affair, we shouldn’t talk to him.” Someone who takes advantage of a young girl in their office? I mean, really. And then they have the gall to stand up and say, “Republicans are having a war on women”?

When Democrats say there’s a “war on women,” they are not criticizing the personal conduct of GOP lawmakers. They’re talking about Republican policymakers’ sustained attacks on women’s reproductive rights. It’s hard to see what Bill Clinton’s sexual conduct tells us about today’s battles over reproductive rights policy—especially when he hasn’t held elected office for nearly fourteen years.

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Rand Paul: There’s No GOP War on Women, But Remember the Lewinsky Scandal?

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We’re Still at War: Photo of the Day for January 27, 2014

by BennieEsparza Posted on January 27, 2014

Mother Jones

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U.S. Marines with Alpha Company, 2nd Assault Amphibious Battalion, 2nd Marine Division, stage Assault Amphibious Vehicle P7A1’s before conducting another splash entry during a training exercise at Onslow Beach aboard Camp Lejeune, N.C., Jan. 9, 2014. The training exercise was conducted to practice beach raids for future ship to shore operations. (U.S. Marine Corps photo by Lance Cpl. Christopher Mendoza/Released)

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We’re Still at War: Photo of the Day for January 27, 2014

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Jimmy Fallon Makes Sex Jokes With Mitt Romney as They "Slow Jam the News"

by ManuelMaurer Posted on January 25, 2014

Mother Jones

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On Friday, Mitt Romney joined Jimmy Fallon and the Roots on NBC’s Late Night to “slow jam the news.” The main topic of the segment was President Obama’s upcoming State of the Union address. Highlights include Fallon making a 47-percent quip, a once-you-go-black-you-never-go-back joke (regarding Romney’s loss to President Obama in the 2012 election), and other sex jokes, all while Romney sat behind him.

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“President Obama looked the American people up and down and said, ‘I’d tap that,'” Fallon says, on the subject of NSA surveillance.

Fallon and the Roots have previously slow-jammed the news with New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Obama (Breitbart.com even accused NBC of violating campaign finance law by having the president on to slow-jam the news, a claim that was of course nonsense). Romney’s appearance on Friday answers CBS News’ nearly two-year-old question, “Will we ever see…Mitt Romney follow in President Obama’s footsteps and slow jam the news?”

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Jimmy Fallon Makes Sex Jokes With Mitt Romney as They "Slow Jam the News"

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Friday Cat Blogging – 24 January 2014

by AntonyNeuman Posted on January 24, 2014

Mother Jones

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Friday Cat Blogging – 24 January 2014

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