Tag Archives: John

Swift Boat 2.0 Is Now Underway. Where’s the Press?

by GeriSimos937 Posted on August 22, 2016

Mother Jones

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As we all know, the loathsome Swift boating of John Kerry in 2004 worked a treat. So this year Trump supporters are engaging in Swift boat 2.0: a surprisingly overt campaign claiming that Hillary Clinton is seriously ill but covering it up. Sean Hannity has been the ringleader, talking it up almost nightly on his show. Rudy Giuliani joined the fun this weekend, and Katrina Pierson, the Baghdad Bob of spokespeople, suggested that Hillary has “dysphasia.” Even the candidate himself has gotten into the act:

Trump has followed this up with references to Hillary not having the “mental and physical stamina” to be president—wink-wink-nudge-nudge.

This is all literally built on nothing. There’s a video of Hillary slipping on an icy step outside a church a few months ago. There’s a video of her making a funny face while talking to some supporters. That’s it. Unlike Trump himself, Hillary has released a detailed statement from her doctor, and there’s nothing wrong with her.

I know how tiresome it is to wonder how the press would treat something like this if it came from the other side, but, um, how would the press treat this if it were coming from the Hillary Clinton campaign? My guess: it would be like World War III. They would be demanding proof, writing endlessly about how this “once again” raised trust issues, and just generally raising front-page hell over it. Which would be perfectly fair! But when Trump does it, it’s just another boys-will-be-boys moment. Yawn.

Trump has done so many disgusting things that I know it’s hard to keep track sometimes. But this ranks right up there, and he deserves brutal coverage over it. He’s not really getting it, though. All the usual liberal suspects are on this, but the mainstream press has treated it like yet another occasional A14 blurb. Where’s the outrage, folks?

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Swift Boat 2.0 Is Now Underway. Where’s the Press?

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After GOP Implosion, Paul Ryan Says He’s Willing to Be Speaker of the House

by EvelyneOgles Posted on October 21, 2015

Mother Jones

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After a week of speculation in Washington, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) said for the first time on Tuesday that he would be willing to officially throw his hat in the ring for the position of House speaker, provided that all House Republicans support his candidacy.

The announcement comes less than two weeks after Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), the House majority leader, withdrew his name from consideration for the post. McCarthy’s exit came after a widely publicized gaffe, in which he admitted that the Benghazi committee was in part a smokescreen intended to damage Hillary Clinton’s candidacy for president. Since then, Ryan has been the GOP favorite for the position. However, up until Tuesday he’s insisted that he had no interest in the job.

To win the post, Ryan needs the approval of the House Freedom Caucus, the group of conservative House Republicans that helped force the resignation of John Boehner. Ryan met with the group on Tuesday. According to Politico reporter Jake Sherman, Ryan told the group that he wanted to know by the end of the week whether he would have the full caucus’ support of his candidacy. He also suggested restructuring the position to be more about managing the party’s message and less about fundraising.

Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) and Rep. Daniel Webster (R-Fla.) have also announced their candidacy for the speaker post, but Chaffetz said in a tweet on Tuesday that, should Ryan run, he’ll drop out of the race and throw his support behind Ryan.

Boehner had planned to leave his post at the end of this month but has said he’ll stay on in the job until his successor is named. Adding to the pressure to quickly name a new speaker: Congress must raise the debt ceiling by November 3 or risk a federal government default on the nation’s debt.

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After GOP Implosion, Paul Ryan Says He’s Willing to Be Speaker of the House

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McDonald’s Spams Schools With Infomerical on the Virtues of Fast Food

by Laura Posted on October 13, 2015

Mother Jones

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Robust health requires nothing more than a little exercise and a daily dose or three of fast food. That’s the message of the new 20-minute video 540 Meals: Choices Make the Difference (viewable here, short teaser above), being promoted in high schools and middle schools by McDonald’s and uncovered by the superb school-food blogger Bettina Elias Siegel.

The video focuses on the dietary and exercise regimen of John Cisna, who identifies himself as an “Iowa HS high school Science Teacher who lost over 50 lbs eating only McDonald’s,” who “now travels across the country sharing my message about food choice.” Cisna gained notoriety when he mimicked the self-experiment of documentarian Morgan Spurlock, director/subject of the famed Super-Size Me (2004), and took his meals exclusively at McDonald’s for six months straight. Unlike Spurlock, who saw his weight rise and his health falter, Cisna claims his weight plunged and health improved. One key difference: whereas Spurlock famously assented to any plea by a McDonald’s employee to “super-size” his orders, Cisna stuck rigorously to a limit of 2,000 calories per day.

Apparently still haunted by the specter of Super-Size Me a decade since its release, McDonald’s embraced Cisna, taking him on as a paid “brand ambassador” and now pushing his message to school kids, both through the 540 Meals film and through appearances at schools, documented on Cisna’s Twitter feed. Siegel uncovered this McDonald’s-produced “teachers discussion guide” to 540 Meals. It recommends using the film “as a supplemental video to current food and nutritional curriculum,” particularly in “plans that incorporate Morgan Spurlock’s Super-Size Me.” She also points to this August press release from McDonald’s franchisees in the New York Tri-State Area, flogging 540 Meals to “high school educators looking for information to demonstrate the importance of balanced food choices.”

As Siegel shows in this handy list of quotes from the film, it brims with agit-prop for the famous burger-and-fries purveyor, including such wisdom as “through careful planning and mindful choices, you can still enjoy your favorite McDonald’s items.”

So what’s wrong with pushing Cisna’s message to school kids? Plenty, writes Siegel in her post, which is well worth reading in its entirety. Here’s a sample:

First, neither 540 Meals nor the discussion guide ever offer young viewers the critically important disclaimer that “Your calorie needs may be significantly lower than John Cisna’s,” nor do they even discuss how one might go about calculating one’s daily caloric requirements. Instead, students are left with the vague but reassuring message that “choice and balance,” along with a 45-minute walk (which might burn off about 1/5 of a Big Mac) will allow them to eat whatever they want at McDonald’s on a regular basis.

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McDonald’s Spams Schools With Infomerical on the Virtues of Fast Food

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Document Reveals CIA May Have Violated Its Own Policy Against Human Experimentation

by LonE809565 Posted on June 15, 2015

Mother Jones

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The CIA’s use of waterboarding and other forms of torture in recent years may have violated one of the intelligence agency’s own rules regarding human experimentation, according to a recently declassified CIA document.

Document AR 2-2, titled “Law and policy governing the conduct of intelligence activities,” was obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by the American Civil Liberties Union and published on Monday by the Guardian. Dating back to 1987, but still in effect today, the document prohibits the CIA from conducting research on human subjects without those subjects’ informed consent. Physicians and human-rights experts interviewed by the Guardian said the CIA may have crossed the line into human experimentation by requiring doctors to be present during the so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques” of its torture program, in part to ensure that detainees had the physical resiliency to withstand further abuse. It seems highly unlikely that detainees who were subjected to waterboarding, rectal feeding, and mock executions consented to participate in those procedures.

According to the ACLU, other sections of the document govern CIA activities including surveillance of Americans, contracts with academic institutions, and relations with the media. For a full analysis, check out the Guardian‘s report, or read the document below (see page 18 for details on human experimentation). And if you can’t quite remember the shocking details of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report last December on CIA torture, watch a refresher here, courtesy of John Oliver and Helen Mirren.

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Document Reveals CIA May Have Violated Its Own Policy Against Human Experimentation

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Rand Paul’s Announcement Video Pulled Over Copyright Issues

by Vian Crisanto Posted on April 7, 2015

Mother Jones

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This morning Rand Paul announced that he was running for president. There was a crowded auditorium and they were going wild and then he strode on up to the podium and music was blaring and it was all going great and he gave a speech and the crowd ate it up and they cheered his name and then he finished and they clapped and cheered and the campaign uploaded the video of the speech to YouTube so that the world could clap and cheer and…YouTube bots automatically pulled the video for unlicensed use of copyrighted material.

Womp womp.

Warner Music Group, the official owner of John Rich’s “Shutting Detroit Down,” a song about how much it sucks that rich corporations own things, has now shut Rand down.

Both Billboard and The Washington Post have reached out to get to the bottom of this and neither Warner or YouTube have commented on the situation.

The campaign’s video has been now been deleted from YouTube (C-PSAN’s remains) but you can still enjoy the song in its entirety if you play it through John Rich’s YouTube page, where you can also admire WMG’s copyright claim in plain view:

The lesson, kids, is: if you ever run for president be sure to get permission to use copyrighted material before using it in your announcement speech. Otherwise the dream could end before it ever really begins.

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Rand Paul’s Announcement Video Pulled Over Copyright Issues

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John Coltrane for Experts

by GiselleBatson Posted on March 9, 2015

Mother Jones

The John Coltrane Quintet Featuring Eric Dolphy
So Many Things: The European Tour 1961
Acrobat
So many “things” indeed! This intriguing four-disc collection of concert performances from November 1961 features six different renditions of the standard “My Favorite Things, each running 20 to 29 minutes, along with more compact versions of “Blue Train,” “I Want to Talk About You.” and other Coltrane favorites. These previously bootlegged concerts were taken from radio broadcasts and suffer slightly from thin sound, but are more than listenable. If So Many Things isn’t for beginners, it’s great extra-credit listening: With multi-instrumentalist Eric Dolphy briefly in the lineup, Coltrane was pushing his tenor and soprano sax chops into new territory, leaving behind traditional melodies and song structures in a restless search for fresh ideas and approaches—a quest he would continue until his death in 1967. The harsher extremes of his final years are yet to be reached, and there’s a mesmerizing, meditative quality to the music throughout that’s dreamy, yet subtly urgent.

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John Coltrane for Experts

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Book Bleg Followup

by Myron83Nao Posted on February 7, 2015

Mother Jones

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A few days ago I asked for reading recommendations that wouldn’t tax my brain too much since my chemotherapy regimen has left me more fatigued than usual. Light, multi-part fiction was my primary request. There were loads of ideas, and I figured some readers might appreciate a quick summary. Here are the five that got the most positive comments:

Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files series
Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin series
Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series
James Corey’s Expanse series
Alan Furst’s Night Soldiers series

I probably made this thread harder than it needed to be by not mentioning stuff I’ve read or genres I don’t like that much. Pure genre mystery stories, for example (Christie, Hillerman, Leonard, etc.), have never done much for me. On the flip side, I’ve read lots of 20th century science fiction (Asimov, Heinlein, Willis, etc. etc.), so there’s not a lot new to recommend there. Among specific recommendations that popped up several times:

I’ve read James Clavell’s Asia series and loved it. Maybe I should reread it!
I’ve read Red/Green/Blue Mars. Meh.
I made it halfway through Wolf Hall and finally gave up. That doesn’t happen often.
I’ve read everything by Neal Stephenson. Big fan.
I’ve read lots of John Scalzi, and all of the Old Man’s War series.
I’ve read Roger Zelazny’s Amber series about, oh, a dozen or two times. It begins with maybe the best first chapter ever written. Obviously I’m a big fan.
I’ve tried a couple of Iain Banks’ Culture novels and I’ve just never been able to get into them.
I’ve read most everything by John LeCarre. But it’s not a bad suggestion. I’m sure there are a few I’ve missed.
I’ve read Charlie Stross’s Merchant Princes series but didn’t care for it much. Ditto for the one Laundry book I read. It’s too bad since I like most of his other stuff.

Anyway, thanks for the suggestions, and I hope everyone enjoyed it. I also got some good nonfiction recommendations, including several by email that didn’t end up on the comment thread. Much appreciated.

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Book Bleg Followup

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The Itsy Bitsy Ambitions of John Boehner

by MohamedVirtue Posted on January 6, 2015

Mother Jones

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You can’t accuse John Boehner of starry-eyed idealism:

When I ask him to name his top priority, he lays out not a grand legislative bargain but a seemingly modest managerial goal that has eluded him for much of his time at the top: exercising enough control over his conference to pass spending bills through regular order.

Um, OK. That seems doable. But I’m not so sure about this:

The idea of a Boehner-Obama bargain late in the game is no idle fantasy….Boehner told me “bipartisanship” was in fact one of his top priorities for 2015, and, in private, in the wake of the 2013 shutdown debacle, Boehner told his inner circle that he has no problems passing big legislation “by working directly with the Democrats” if his own conference defies him again.

….That’s the way it worked in December: Two-thirds of Republicans joined about one-third of Democrats to pass a Boehner government-funding plan….When I asked Boehner if he worried Republicans would slam him for dealing with Democrats, he blew a puff of smoke and answered, “I don’t care.”

It’s true that during the recent lame-duck session, Boehner was willing to pass a compromise budget that alienated much of his own caucus and required lots of help from Democrats to pass. But will he be willing to do that when it comes to a “big deal on taxes, entitlements and government spending, trade and immigration”? I have my doubts, no matter how much we hear that Boehner and Obama are really tighter buddies than you’d think. It’s not just that Boehner really, truly has to be willing to defy a big chunk of his caucus, after all. He also has to be willing to take the risk of making genuine compromises in order to get a sizeable chunk of Democrats on board. Outside of budget deals, I’ve simply seen no evidence that Boehner is willing to do that—or, even if he is, that he has the mojo within his own caucus to get most of them to agree to such a deal.

But we’ll see. Maybe Boehner will surprise us. I just wouldn’t bet the farm on it.

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The Itsy Bitsy Ambitions of John Boehner

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Australian floods lowered worldwide sea levels

by Aaron Darek Posted on August 15, 2013

Australian floods lowered worldwide sea levels

By John Upton

Flood-inducing rainfall in Australia in 2010 was so severe that it lowered worldwide sea levels.

Scientists have been puzzled by satellite data that shows sea levels fell in 2011. A paper published this month in the journal Geophysical Research Letters attributes a lot of the surprising sea-level decline to antipodean deluges — record-breaking rainfall that was linked to climate change.

Seas have been rising by about 3 millimeters a year in recent decades. But from mid-2010 until 2011 sea levels dropped by 7 millimeters, as shown in this graph:

CU Sea Level Research Group

Australia is home to geological formations similar to lakes — scientists call them arheic and endorheic basins — that do not flow to the ocean. Instead they empty by gradually evaporating. About 40 percent of precipitation in most continents flows into the ocean, but in dish-shaped Australia, that figure is just 6 percent.

Research led by the National Center for Atmospheric Research using NASA satellite data found that when these Australian basins brimmed with heavy 2010 rains, they held so much water that they contributed to about half of the fall in global sea levels. The basins held the water well into 2012, some of it as surface water and some as groundwater and soil moisture. (A strong La Niña and heavy precipitation over South America and North America also appear to have contributed to the surprise sudden drop in sea levels.)

Seas have recently been rising more rapidly than the 3-millimeter-per-year average — and scientists say that, in turn, could be linked to recent heat waves and droughts in Australia.

“The recent heatwave and accompanying drought very likely depleted soil moisture and perhaps groundwater, so, yes, there is likely a component that is contributing to the current major positive anomaly in global sea level,” said lead researcher John Fasullo. “This is unlikely to be a major contributor to the long term trend, however, as Australia can only dry out so much.”

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Australian floods lowered worldwide sea levels

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Kids (and Teachers) in Peril, From Oklahoma to Oregon

by Myrna Posted on May 21, 2013

Why do communities fail to secure the buildings that house their children against momentous hazards? Continued here: Kids (and Teachers) in Peril, From Oklahoma to Oregon ; ;Related ArticlesDot Earth Blog: A Survival Plan for America’s Tornado Danger ZoneDot Earth Blog: Kids (and Teachers) in Peril, From Oklahoma to OregonA Survival Plan for America’s Tornado Danger Zone ;

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Kids (and Teachers) in Peril, From Oklahoma to Oregon

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