Tag Archives: jones

Final Housekeeping Update

by Alisha3763 Posted on October 24, 2014

Mother Jones

According to my surgeon, yesterday’s kyphoplasty went swimmingly well. I needed to be prepared for normal post-op recovery pain, but once I was through that my back would be in good shape.

Unfortunately, “normal post-op recovery pain” turned out to be hours of excruciating, mind-numbing agony. At one point I was on four separate pain killers and they still weren’t doing the job. I finally got a second dose of the most powerful one, and that made things barely tolerable—though at the medium-term expense of my stomach, I suspect.

But that was yesterday. Today I feel OK, and this morning I got out of bed and hobbled around the room without any significant pain So, success!

This is the last post that can fairly be called “housekeeping,” but not the end of the story. I’ll have more news later.

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Final Housekeeping Update

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Supreme Court To Decide if Judges in 30 States Can Solicit Campaign Cash

by KalaISJPiau Posted on October 6, 2014

Mother Jones

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The US Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case that could overturn 30 states’ bans on judges personally seeking campaign contributions. In Lanell Williams-Yulee v. The Florida Bar, a county-level judicial candidate was publicly reprimanded by the Florida Supreme Court in May and forced to pay $1,860 in court costs for signing a fundraising letter during the 2009 election, according to her petition. The court also rejected her argument that the decision violated her First Amendment rights, saying that the state’s ban is constitutional “because it promotes … the integrity of the judiciary and maintains the public’s confidence in an impartial judiciary.”

As Williams-Yulee notes, this issue is quite common in that there are hundreds of judicial elections each year. In 2011 and 2012 there were high court elections in 35 states that contested 75 open seats, along with an additional 243 intermediate appellate court races in 29 states. These races are becoming increasingly more expensive: During just those two years, state high court, appellate and lower court judicial candidates raised more than $110 million, according to the National Institute On Money In State Politics (state judicial candidates raised just $83 million total in the 1990s). Justice At Stake, a liberal judicial election watchdog group, points out that 20 states have surpassed records for judicial election spending since 2000. Independent spending on judicial elections is also booming, with more than $24 million being spent in the 2011-12 cycle compared to just $2.7 million a decade earlier.

Of the 39 states that hold judicial elections, 30 have some sort of ban, and 22 are blanket bans similar to Florida’s.

Retired US Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor talked with Mother Jones this summer about problems with money pouring into judicial elections. O’Connor opposes judicial elections in general—she’d prefer judges be appointed after being nominated by a commission and then stand for retention elections—because she says increasing amounts of money in the races skews the information voters see about judges that “often comes from misleading and even nasty campaign ads.”

“Campaign contributions impact the extent to which citizens believe that judicial decisions are based on the law rather than other factors, such as to whom a judge might feel beholden,” O’Connor said. “In my mind, judicial campaign support—whether it involves direct contributions or independent spending—automatically creates an appearance of impropriety when supporters are involved in court cases.”

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Supreme Court To Decide if Judges in 30 States Can Solicit Campaign Cash

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Support for Ground War Against ISIS Keeps Growing

by JoshuaCBAwm Posted on October 2, 2014

Mother Jones

“So much for war weariness,” crows Ed Morrissey today, and unfortunately it’s hard to argue with him. Here’s the latest:

This is a Fox poll, so maybe we have to take it with a grain of salt. Question 22, after all, is about whether Barack Obama has been too tough or too soft on radical Muslim extremists, and that probably primes the ol’ military aggression pump a wee bit. Still, these are the highest favorability ratings I’ve seen yet for ground action against ISIS, and they seem to rise with every new poll.

So will these numbers just keep going up, until the whole country is good and lathered up for Iraq War 3.0? Or, after a few months, will Americans get tired of the whole thing and lose interest? The evidence of history can point either way. In the meantime, however, I reserve the right to remain very, very nervous about Obama’s ability to hold out against the tide of war.

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Support for Ground War Against ISIS Keeps Growing

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GOP Donor: Elect a Republican Sheriff in Case Obama Seizes Dictatorial Power

by PollyWillshire Posted on September 26, 2014

Mother Jones

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As DeKalb County, Alabama, prepares to elect its next sheriff, one local Republican has taken it on herself to ask voters a tough question: In the likely scenario that President Obama suspends the 2016 elections and seizes dictatorial power, can the local citizens count on a Democratic sheriff to oppose him?

Betty Mason, a Republican donor who is married to a longtime leader of Alabama’s Republican Party, posed the question in a letter she mailed last week to voters in DeKalb County, which covers a rural community in the northeast corner of the state.

“Obama is determined to be a dictator with the executive orders he signs,” she wrote. “He has left the US Constitution in shreds. If Obama decides to run again (against US law) or declares a National Emergency to suspend elections in 2016, what will our Democrat sheriff do? I am concerned he will go along with this lawless president.”

The county’s current sheriff is Jimmy Harris, a Democrat, who is running for reelection. Mason encouraged voters to support his challenger, Republican Rex Leath, who is the assistant police chief of Collinsville. “Leath has pledged to defend our citizens even against a lawless President,” she declared.

Mother Jones asked Leath if he shares Mason’s concerns about the president’s autocratic aspirations. “Oh, I sure do,” he says. “I would hope every American in the country would…I don’t really know what he is capable of doing at this point. If martial law is declared by the president, he can’t be removed from office.”

Here’s a copy of the letter, which was tweeted by a local resident:

Mother Jones couldn’t reach Mason, but her husband, Frank Mason, confirms that she wrote the letter. He added that the couple helped Leath organize the campaign event referred to at the bottom of the letter.

“Based on what Obama has done, I don’t know what he might do,” Frank Mason says. “I just don’t really know.”

Leath didn’t know in advance that Mason was writing to voters—but he says she’s glad he did. “It was a very sweet letter,” Leath says. “Very well written.”

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GOP Donor: Elect a Republican Sheriff in Case Obama Seizes Dictatorial Power

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Roger Goodell’s Life Just Got a Whole Lot Worse This Weekend

by ChristiStorkey Posted on September 21, 2014

Mother Jones

There’s been a mountain of talk about the Ray Rice domestic violence case, but the evidence about exactly what happened and when it happened has remained stubbornly fuzzy. That changed this weekend. ESPN’s blockbuster piece, like all stories of this nature, relies a lot on unnamed sources and therefore still isn’t quite rock solid. Unnamed sources can have their own agendas, after all. But on the surface, anyway, it seems pretty damn close to rock solid. And it looks very, very bad for Roger Goodell, the Baltimore Ravens, and the NFL. Read it.

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Roger Goodell’s Life Just Got a Whole Lot Worse This Weekend

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When I Was 5, I, Um — What Were We Just Talking About?

by Dick5455uv Posted on September 19, 2014

Mother Jones

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I remember approximately diddly-squat1 about my childhood. But why? Melissa Dahl explains the latest research to me today:

The way parents tend to talk to their sons is different from the way they talk to their daughters. Mothers tend to introduce more snippets of new information in conversations with their young daughters than they do with their young sons, research has shown. And moms tend to ask more questions about girls’ emotions; with boys, on the other hand, they spend more time talking about what they should do with those feelings.

This is at least partially a product of parents acting on gender expectations they may not even realize they have, and the results are potentially long-lasting, explained Azriel Grysman, a psychologist at Hamilton College who studies gender differences and memory. “The message that girls are getting is that talking about your feelings is part of describing an event,” Grysman said….“And it’s quite possible, over time, that those tendencies will help women establish more connections in their brains of different pieces of an event, which will lead to better memory long-term.”

So I can blame my crappy memory on my mother? Cool.

1This is a technical term used by neurologists and memory researchers.

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When I Was 5, I, Um — What Were We Just Talking About?

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Guy Buys First New iPhone, Immediately Drops It On National TV

by pfmufle Posted on September 19, 2014

Mother Jones

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It’s new iPhone day! All around the globe thousands of hungry ducks are lining up to be one of the first few to get their hands on Cupertino’s fresh new phones. In Perth, “a boy called Jack” got the very first one. Naturally, he was swarmed by media, which led to this:

Thankfully, the iPhone was not hurt.

Mother Jones Senior Australian James West was not immediately available for comment.

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Guy Buys First New iPhone, Immediately Drops It On National TV

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Quote of the Day #2: Pick an Issue, Any Issue

by BTZBrittan Posted on September 18, 2014

Mother Jones

From self-declared visionary Newt Gingrich, asked what the Republican agenda should be for this year’s campaign:

I don’t actually care what it is, for the next seven weeks, as long as it exists.

Come on, folks! Just pick anything that sounds good and rally around it. Does Newt have to do all your thinking for you?

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Quote of the Day #2: Pick an Issue, Any Issue

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Republicans Are No Longer Favored To Take Control of the Senate

by HoracioWahl Posted on September 17, 2014

Mother Jones

Speaking of poll aggregators and the Senate race, here’s an interesting infographic from Vox:

I actually haven’t been following the polling super closely, so I didn’t realize that basically no one is still projecting a Republican takeover except for Nate Silver—though things are still close enough that none of this probably means much yet. We’re still six weeks away from Election Day, and a lot can happen in six weeks.

Still, there’s a bottom line here for reporters: Republicans are no longer favored to take control of the Senate. At least, not by the folks who have had the best records for projecting election results over the past decade or so. This should no longer be the default assumption of campaign roundup stories.

There’s much more at the link, including forecasts for individual races.

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Republicans Are No Longer Favored To Take Control of the Senate

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Book Review: My Life As a Foreign Country

by MalindaTyer Posted on September 16, 2014

Mother Jones

My Life As a Foreign Country

By Brian Turner

NORTON

In this moving account of his time as a sergeant in Iraq, Brian Turner, whose poem “The Hurt Locker” was the namesake for the Oscar-winning film, delivers a succession of oddly beautiful, appropriately devastating reflections that drive home the realities of war. Turner takes us from training camp to war zone and home again, where, in bed with his wife, he dreams he’s a drone, flying over countries of wars past.

This review originally appeared in our September/October issue of Mother Jones.

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Book Review: My Life As a Foreign Country

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