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Republicans Coming On Strong in Last Week Before Election

by RicardoEGAG Posted on October 28, 2014

Mother Jones

It’s now seven days until Election Day, and unfortunately things are trending pretty badly for us liberal types. The ABC/Washington Post poll on the right shows that Democrats and Republicans are pretty much all planning to vote for their own party next week, which leaves the election in the hands of independents. That turns out to be grim news. We can argue all day long about whether independents are “really” independent, but at this point it doesn’t matter. They represent about a third of the electorate, and at the moment they favor Republican candidates by nearly 20 percentage points.

There doesn’t seem to be any specific issue driving this. People are just generally unhappy. A huge majority think America is on the wrong track; Obama’s approval rating remains mired only slightly above 40 percent; and far more people blame Democrats than Republicans for the rising dysfunction of the federal government.

That last point is especially galling for Democrats, but it’s a win for Republicans and yet another sign of change in the way Washington is likely to work in the future. Republicans have discovered that a sufficiently united party can obstruct everything and anything but largely escape blame for the resulting gridlock. This lesson has not been lost on Democrats, and it bodes ill for the future regardless of who wins our next few elections. There’s just no reward for getting things done these days, and this probably means that less and less will get done. That’s Political Economy 101 for you.

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Republicans Coming On Strong in Last Week Before Election

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John Boehner Still Hasn’t Sued Obama Over Obamacare. Why Not?

by Florencia4409 Posted on October 27, 2014

Mother Jones

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Three months ago, John Boehner threw a bone to the tea-party faction that was nipping at his heels and demanding action against the lawless tyrant Obama and his executive orders that routinely defied both the Constitution and the duly enacted laws of the land. The bone took the form of a planned lawsuit against the administration because it had delayed certain aspects of the employer and employee mandates under Obamacare.

At the time, I was perfectly OK with Boehner doing this. Why not let courts decide this kind of dispute, after all? That’s what they’re for. What’s more, unlike most of the tea party complaints about lawless behavior, this one seemed at least defensible. And yet, three months later, we still have no lawsuit. Why? Simon Lazarus and Elisabeth Stein suspect that it has to do with Boehner asking for some legal advice from the Congressional Research Service and then quietly getting a report that he wasn’t expecting:

CRS reports such as this one are generated in response to requests by members or committees of Congress, though the CRS does not make public the identity of the requester or requesters. This particular report — of which House Democrats were unaware until it appeared — bears the earmarks of an inquiry, requested by the Speaker or his allies, to give some color of legitimacy to their charges of rampant presidential illegality. Instead, the result validates the lawyers’ maxim not to ask a question when unsure of the likely answer.

The Report offers two conclusions: First, under the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), no rulemaking procedure was necessitated by the Administration’s initial one-year delay in enforcing the employer mandate, past the ACA’s prescribed January 1, 2014 effective date….Second, the Report states that, when, in February 2014, the Administration announced an additional year’s postponement of full enforcement of the mandate, until January 1, 2016, “informal rulemaking procedures” appeared to be required. In fact, as the report’s authors reference, the Administration had engaged in precisely the type of informal rulemaking process that, the report concluded, was called for. The Administration’s action finalized a September 2013 Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, making adjustments in response to comments from interested parties, precisely as prescribed by the APA.

In other words, having been asked whether the Obama administration had crossed all its t’s and dotted its i’s, the CRS’ answer was unequivocal: yes it had. In bland CRS-speak, this seems like a veritable finger in the eye — or perhaps, a blunt warning to the Speaker to drop the lawsuit project.

Oops. This doesn’t mean Boehner can’t still file his lawsuit, of course. It was all pretty much symbolism and bone-tossing in the first place, so it hardly matters if he ends up losing the case a year or two from now. But it could have proven embarrassing, especially if the CRS report became public, which, inevitably, it did. This stuff never stays under wraps forever.

So perhaps Boehner has decided to hold his fire. He has bigger fish to fry right now, and I doubt he was ever all that excited about the lawsuit anyway. For now, it’s become just another shard on the ever-mounting bone pile of tea party outrage about a president doing stuff they don’t happen to approve of.

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John Boehner Still Hasn’t Sued Obama Over Obamacare. Why Not?

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Kobani Still Holding Out — But Is That Good News?

by AlfredoMoffet Posted on October 27, 2014

Mother Jones

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Like Mark Thompson, I’ve been a bit out of circulation for the past couple of weeks—enough to pay only minimal attention to Iraq, anyway—and also like Thompson, I’m a little surprised to come back and discover that Kobani is still holding out against ISIS. This is largely thanks to the US bombing campaign, and Thompson isn’t sure what to think of this success:

While that’s obviously good news in the short term for the city’s 200,000 largely-Kurdish residents, it’s tougher to handicap what it means for the long-term U.S.-led effort to “degrade and destroy” ISIS.

Earlier this month, U.S. military officers were speaking of ISIS’s “momentum,” and how its string of military successes over the past year meant that quickly halting its advance would likely prove difficult if not impossible. Yet, as far as Kobani is concerned, that seems to be what is taking place.

But that raises the stakes for the U.S. and its allies. Having smothered ISIS’s momentum, an eventual ISIS victory in the battle for Kobani would be a more devastating defeat for the U.S. military than an earlier collapse of the town.

There are concerns that the focus on saving Kobani is giving ISIS free reign elsewhere in its self-declared caliphate—that the U.S., in essence, could end up winning the battle while losing the war.

“The U.S. air campaign has turned into an unfocused mess,” Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies wrote Friday. “The U.S. has shifted limited air strike resources to focus on Syria and a militarily meaningless and isolated small Syrian Kurdish enclave at Kobani at the expense of supporting Iraqi forces in Anbar and intensifying the air campaign against other Islamic State targets in Syria.”

The flip side of this is the obvious one: have patience. “Here we are not three months into it and there are critics saying it’s falling apart; it’s failing; the strategy is not sound,” Rear Admiral John Kirby, the Pentagon spokesman, said Friday. “The strategy is sound and it’s working and there’s no plans to deviate it from right now.”

If we’re really engaged in a years-long battle against ISIS, then a few months here or there doesn’t matter much. And saving Kobani isn’t just a moral good, but can also demonstrate to others that ISIS is not some magical, unstoppable force destined to overrun Iraq. It’s just an ordinary group of guerrilla soldiers who can be defeated with determination and patience. Stay tuned.

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Kobani Still Holding Out — But Is That Good News?

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Scientists Dissected the Brains of 79 NFL Players. What They Found Is Disturbing.

by GradyChapdelain Posted on October 1, 2014

Mother Jones

Yesterday, the country’s leading investigators of sports-related brain injuries released what could be their most shocking finding yet: Of the 79 deceased NFL players examined, 76 showed evidence of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE. The researchers at the Boston University CTE Center have examined, in total, the brains of 128 people who played football at all levels—from high school to the pros—and 101 showed evidence of CTE. The numbers buttress a growing body of evidence that suggests that playing football at any level can lead to grave health consequences.

In case you haven’t been following the story, here’s how CTE works: When the brain is subjected to repeated trauma—from the severe (and rare) concussion-causing hits to the repetitive, smaller impacts a lineman might absorb thousands of times in his career—its tissue starts to deteriorate. That causes the buildup of abnormal tau proteins, which interfere with a whole host of critical brain functions. In the short term, it can lead to memory loss and impaired judgment; in the long term, it can lead to severe depression and dementia. Ex-players describe its symptoms as crushing, and in many cases, the pain, unpredictable outbursts of rage, and memory loss becomes too much to bear.

Three images of brain tissue, with tau protein in brown. The left sample is from a nonplayer subject, the middle comes from a football player, and the right belongs to a boxer. Courtesy of the Boston University Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy.

In the past few years, several former NFL players have committed suicide and were later found to have had CTE. On Monday, researchers found that Jovan Belcher—the Kansas City Chiefs linebacker who killed his girlfriend and himself in 2012—also had been suffering from CTE.

Two decades ago, when players began to link their health problems with their football careers, the NFL denied the prevalence and severity of brain injuries. In the 2000s, the league’s (now-defunct, and poorly named) Mild Traumatic Brain Injury Committee frequently stated that not one NFL player suffered from chronic brain damage. In 2009, years after the first player had been diagnosed with CTE, Dr. Ann McKee—a leading Boston University researcher—presented her findings before an NFL committee, which reportedly attacked the scientific rigor of her research. Meanwhile, right-wing media like Breitbart have been downplaying CTE and attacking doctors’ credibility for years, often referring to their work as “junk science.”

Currently, there’s no way to definitively know if a living player has CTE. (Traumatic brain injury, which may lead to CTE, can be identified in living people.) Leading researchers are the first to point out that their sample population is skewed: Brain bank donations come disproportionately from players who suspected they had CTE while alive. CTE sufferers who commit suicide have tended to shoot themselves in the chest; in some cases, they’ve left notes asking that their brains be used for research.

Still, the more CTE researchers study players’ brains, the grimmer the findings get. While they admit the shortcomings of their research, CTE experts overwhelmingly insist that football increases risk of traumatic brain injury. The outcry has pushed the NFL to backpedal on its previous position: It recently opted to settle in a massive class action suit filed by former players suffering from CTE-like symptoms. It will likely pay out hundreds of millions of dollars, if not more. An internal study commissioned by the NFL found that 30 percent of players will develop brain trauma complications sooner, and more frequently, than the general population. (The league didn’t dispute the findings.)

Just how the developing research will affect other levels of football remains to be seen. The hit sustained by University of Michigan quarterback Shane Morris last weekend—and coach Brady Hoke’s decision to let him keep playing—was shocking.

We know the NFL has a brain injury problem. Given the outcry over what happened to Morris—and the $70 million concussion settlement the NCAA reached in July—it’s obvious that college football does too.

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Scientists Dissected the Brains of 79 NFL Players. What They Found Is Disturbing.

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Rand Paul to Appear at Event Featuring Neo-Confederate Aide He Had to Fire

by BillieMcmichael Posted on September 16, 2014

Mother Jones

This week, the Ron Paul-led Campaign for Liberty hosts its fourth annual Liberty Political Action Conference, and the speaking list features a roster of well-known Republican politicians and libertarian activists. The biggest draw of this year’s LPAC will undoubtedly be Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who each day inches closer to a 2016 presidential run. Slated to speak at the same event, though, is Paul’s ex-aide Jack Hunter, who the senator fired after his past as a neo-Confederate advocate was revealed.

Hunter used to be the social media director in Paul’s Senate office, and he co-wrote Paul’s 2010 book, The Tea Party Goes to Washington. But in 2013, the Washington Free Beacon revealed that Hunter, under a different identity, had long been involved with the neo-Confederate and southern secessionist movements. For 13 years, Hunter was a South Carolina talk radio host who called himself the “Southern Avenger.” In public, he wore a luchador mask bearing a Confederate flag. As the Avenger, Hunter made many a provocative remark, including arguably racist comments. He said that John Wilkes Booth’s heart was “in the right place” and that he celebrated Booth’s birthday every year. He claimed that Abraham Lincoln would have been romantically drawn to Adolf Hitler. He called the NAACP a “malicious hate group” on par with the KKK. He contended that a “non-white majority America would simply cease to be America.”

Hunter also chaired an organization called the League of the South, which advocated “the secession and subsequent independence of the Southern States from this forced union and the formation of a Southern republic.” The Free Beacon reported,

“The League of the South is an implicitly racist group in that the idealized version of the South that they promote is one which, to use their ideology, is dominated by ‘Anglo-Celtic’ culture, which is their code word for ‘white,'” said Mark Pitcavage, the director of investigative research at the Anti-Defamation League. The ADL said it does not necessarily classify it as a hate group.

The League of the South maintains that it is not racist and does not discriminate in terms of membership.

“When I was part of it, they were very explicit that’s not what they were about,” Hunter told the Free Beacon. “I was a young person, it was a fairly radical group—the same way a person on the left might be attracted in college to some left-wing radical groups.”

After Hunter was unmasked, Paul said that his Southern Avenger commentaries were “stupid” and canned him. A few months later, Hunter wrote a story titled “Confessions of a Right-Wing Shock Jock” and distanced himself from his old comments. “I said many terrible things,” he wrote. “I disavow them.”

Now, Hunter is back in the fold and back on the speaker’s list in the liberty movement presided over by Ron and Rand Paul. The Campaign for Liberty bills him as “the one and only Jack Hunter.” Hard to argue with that.

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Rand Paul to Appear at Event Featuring Neo-Confederate Aide He Had to Fire

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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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If You Want Good Workers, You Need to Pay Market Wages

by WillieSchulthei Posted on September 12, 2014

Mother Jones

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Today the Wall Street Journal is running yet another article about the inability of manufacturing companies to attract good employees. And Dean Baker is annoyed:

If employers can’t get enough workers then we would expect to see wages rising in manufacturing.

They aren’t. Over the last year the average hourly wage rose by just 2.1 percent, only a little higher than the inflation rate and slightly less than the average for all workers. This follows several years where wages in manufacturing rose less than the economy-wide average….If an employer wants to hire people she can get them away from competitors by offering a higher wage. It seems that employers in the manufacturing sector may need this simple lesson in market economic to solve their skills shortage problem.

The chart on the right shows what Baker is talking about. It’s a slightly different series than the one he uses in his post, but it makes the same point. Manufacturing wages are rising more slowly than in the rest of the economy. If manufacturing companies are really desperate for qualified workers, they have a funny way of showing it.

Now, it’s possible that what they really mean is that they don’t think they can be competitive if they have to pay higher wages. So they want lots of well-qualified employees to work for below-market wages. And who knows? That’s possible. But if that’s really the problem, then apprentice programs and skills training aren’t likely to solve it.

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If You Want Good Workers, You Need to Pay Market Wages

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Not-Quite-Supermoon Blogging – 7 September 2014

by ToddBainerry Posted on September 11, 2014

Mother Jones

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I didn’t actually get around to hauling out my camera for Monday’s supermoon (how many of these things do we get every year, anyway?), but I did snap a few pictures on Sunday. So in the spirit of better late than never, here’s one of them. The clouds and the colors were kind of interesting, even if the picture itself is so-so.

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Not-Quite-Supermoon Blogging – 7 September 2014

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Obama’s Iraq Speech: Light on Substance, and Maybe That’s a Good Thing

by SharronMargarot Posted on September 11, 2014

Mother Jones

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Well, that was pretty anticlimactic. Here is President Obama’s shiny new plan for defeating ISIS:

  1. More airstrikes, including strikes in Syria.
  2. A few hundred advisors to work with Iraqi troops. They will provide training, equipment, and intelligence.
  3. Counterterrorism to prevent ISIS attacks.
  4. Humanitarian aid.

We are, presumably, already engaged in #3 and #4. We’re partially engaged in #1. Basically, then Obama is proposing to (a) expand the air war and (b) provide more aid to the Iraqi army. That’s really not an awful lot—which is fine with me.

Will this work? Airstrikes by themselves are obviously limited in what they can accomplish. They can frustrate ISIS plans in specific areas, but they can’t do a lot more than that. As we’ve known all along, real success depends on the Iraqi military. Unfortunately, given the fact that we spent years training Iraqi forces and ended up with an army that cut and run at the first sight of ISIS forces, I have my doubts that further training will really do that much good. But if it doesn’t, there’s little we can do anyway. So it’s probably our only option.

The big question, of course, is whether our assistance will stay limited. If the Iraqi military fails, as it may, will we start pouring in more troops? Obama was clear on this: “We will not get dragged into another ground war in Iraq.” Still, sometimes events run away with things, and I’m not sure what’s going to prevent a slow accretion of more and more US forces aside from Obama’s personal convictions. This is a thinner reed than I’d like even if I believe that he’s entirely sincere in his desire to avoid escalation. We’ll just have to wait and see.

In any case, that’s really all we got tonight. I’d like to write something longer and more insightful, but there just weren’t enough specifics in the speech to justify that. The last third of the speech was mostly platitudes about partners, chairing a UN meeting, America is great, God bless the troops, etc. There wasn’t an awful lot there.

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Obama’s Iraq Speech: Light on Substance, and Maybe That’s a Good Thing

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Let’s Not Give ISIS Exactly What They Want

by RefugioDurbin Posted on September 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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Yesterday I wrote a post noting that a supposedly war-weary public had suddenly become awfully war happy. “All it took,” I said, “was a carefully stagecrafted beheading video and the usual gang of conservative jingoists to exploit it.” Here’s a Twitter conversation that followed (lightly edited for clarity):

DS: Think of what you wrote: “All it took was…beheading”? I opposed W’s but this is what wars are made from & I think rightly so.

Me: Really? So any group anywhere in the world merely needs to commit an atrocity to draw us into war?

DS: On what other basis should wars be fought if not to stop groups from committing atrocities against Americans?

I’m not trying to pick on anyone in particular here, but it’s pretty discouraging that this kind of attitude is so common. There’s no question that the beheading of American citizens by a gang of vicious thugs is the kind of thing that makes your blood boil. Unless you hail from Vulcan, your gut reaction is that you want to find the barbarians who did this and crush them.

But that shouldn’t be your final reaction. This is not an era of conventional military forces with overwhelming power and no real fear of blowback. It’s an era of stateless terrorists whose ability to commit extremely public atrocities is pretty much unlimited. And while atrocities can have multiple motivations, one of the key reasons for otherwise pointless actions like one-off kidnappings and beheadings is their ability to either provoke overreactions or successfully extort ransoms. Unfortunately, Americans are stupidly addicted to the former and Europeans seem to be stupidly addicted to the latter, and that’s part of what keeps this stuff going.

In any case, a moment’s thought should convince you that we’re being manipulated. We’ve read account after account about ISIS and its remarkably sophisticated command and publicity apparatus. The beheading video is part of that. It’s a very calculated, very deliberate attempt to get us to respond stupidly. It’s not even a very subtle manipulation. It’s just an especially brutal one.

So if we’re smart, we won’t give them what they want. Instead we’ll respond coldly and meticulously. We’ll fight on our terms, not theirs. We’ll intervene if and only if the Iraqi government demonstrates that it can take the lead and hold the ground they take. We’ll forego magical thinking about counterinsurgencies. We won’t commit Western troops in force because we know from experience that this doesn’t work. We’ll avoid pitched battles and instead take advantage of our chances when they arise. Time is on our side.

Above all, we won’t allow a small band of medieval theocrats to manipulate us. We need to stop giving them exactly what they want. We need to stop doing stupid stuff.

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Let’s Not Give ISIS Exactly What They Want

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