Tag Archives: lesser

Republicans May Be Shooting Themselves in the Foot Over Abortion

by Charole1736 Posted on August 10, 2015

Mother Jones

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Here’s an interesting recent poll question:

There’s not much need to tell you I just made this up. If it were real, this bill would get 0 percent support. Everyone who saw it would be immediately appalled at the idea that someone could be casually murdered if they were born as a result of rape or incest.

But if you ask this same question about abortion, this is roughly what you get. Very strong majorities, even among Republicans, support an exception to an abortion ban for rape and incest. Among other things, this is why I don’t believe most people who claim to believe that abortion is murder. If you support a rape or incest exception, it’s pretty obvious you don’t really think of abortion as murder.

So where am I going with this? Right here, with Paul Waldman’s observation that the Republican Party’s move to the extreme right on abortion is getting much more public than in the past:

One moment in the debate that may have struck some as odd occurred when Marco Rubio got a question about him supporting exceptions for rape and incest victims to abortion bans, and he insisted that he supports no such thing. Mike Huckabee declared that “I think the next president ought to invoke the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution now that we clearly know that that baby inside the mother’s womb is a person at the moment of conception.” Scott Walker went even further, stating his opposition to exceptions to save the life of the pregnant woman (“I’ve said many a time that that unborn child can be protected, and there are many other alternatives that can also protect the life of that mother”).

In the past, most Republicans have fudged this issue. The more honest among them admit that it’s mostly for political reasons: in their hearts they don’t support any exceptions to an abortion ban, but they realize the broader public does. So the lesser evil is to do what’s necessary to move public opinion, which is the only way to eventually get to a full-blown ban on abortion.

But that fudging is apparently getting less tenable these days, and it’s forcing Republican candidates to take public positions that they know are very unpopular. If this starts to spread, it could be bad news for the incrementalists, who correctly believe that such an extreme position is likely to lose them a lot of support. I wonder what would happen in the next debate if one of the moderators asked one of those show-your-hands questions to the entire field about whether they support a rape or incest exception to an abortion ban? We know where Rubio and Walker are. But what about the rest of them?

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Republicans May Be Shooting Themselves in the Foot Over Abortion

Posted in Everyone, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged father, kevin drum, lesser, Ona, party, photos, right, rubio, slideshows, venta, walker | Comments Off

China’s Huge Hack of the US Government Is Only Getting Worse

by AaliyahD69 Posted on June 12, 2015

Mother Jones

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Whenever someone wants a security clearance, the US government first asks a seemingly endless series of questions. Some of them are predictable like the applicant’s current address and social security number. Others are far more intimate like histories of drug use or psychiatric treatment. Now China likely has that information.

The AP reported on Friday that hackers believed to be working with China targeted the Office of Personnel Management and stole the forms used to gather information in those background investigations. This personal information could be used by a foreign intelligence service to blackmail someone with access to government secrets. Having that information in the hands of the Chinese government potentially puts some of the nation’s military and intelligence workers at serious risk.

Evan Lesser, the managing director of ClearanceJobs.com, a job site for positions requiring a security clearance, told the AP that “you don’t need these records to blackmail or exploit someone, but it would sure make the job easier.”

While it’s not yet known how many people are affected by the breach, government officials who spoke to the AP put the potential number in the millions:

Nearly all of the millions of security clearance holders, including CIA, National Security Agency and military special operations personnel, are potentially exposed in the security clearance breach, the officials said. More than 2.9 million people had been investigated for a security clearance as of October 2014, according to government records.

This hack is the second major breach into OPM records in the past two weeks. A hack announced last week may have exposed the personnel records and social security numbers of up to 14 million government workers.

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China’s Huge Hack of the US Government Is Only Getting Worse

Posted in alo, Anchor, Casio, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged alo, china, clearance, hack, information, lai, lesser, mojo, office, personal, second | Comments Off

Figure Skating Is Hopelessly Corrupt

by PEACarinzhpby Posted on February 12, 2014

Mother Jones

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Which sport is more corrupt, ski jumping or figure skating? Normally, my rule of thumb is that the higher up the world ladder you go (local vs. national vs. international) the more corrupt a sport becomes. Thus, I would have guessed that a sport in which the international federation chooses judges would be more corrupt than one in which national federations choose judges. But no! Eric Zitzewitz has compared two sports and finds just the opposite:

Ski jumping has its international federation select the judges for competitions like the Olympics, and I find that they select the least biased judges. Figure skating lets its national federations select the judges, and my research showed that they select the most biased judges.

This creates different incentives for judges. Ski jumping judges display less nationalism in lower-level competitions — it appears they keep their nationalism under wraps in less important contests to avoid missing their chance at judging the Olympics. Figure skating judges are actually more biased in the lesser contests; they may actually be more biased than they would like to be due to pressure from their federations.

It turns out that ski jumping judges are biased, but the other judges are mostly biased in the other direction, so everything ends up even. Having an American judge doesn’t help American jumpers. Figure skating is just the opposite. Not only are national judges biased, the other judges all go along. If an American judge is on the panel, American skaters get higher marks from the American judge and also get higher marks from all the other judges:

Of all these results, I am most intrigued by the contrast between the ski jumping judges undoing each other’s biases and the figure skating judges reinforcing them. When we make decisions in a group at work, we often encounter individuals with strong biases — say to hire a particular type of job candidate. When we do, we have a choice. We can act like a ski jumping judge, and resist the bias, in an effort to keep things fair. Or we can act like a figure skating judge and say “hiring this guy really seems important to Joe, I wonder what he’ll give me in return if I go along.” We have probably all seen examples of both in our lives.

There’s a small mountain of other evidence that figure skating is hopelessly corrupt, and has aggressively protected that corruption ever since the judging scandals of 1998 and 2002. Zitzewitz has the evidence if you read his entire post.

But corruption can only go so far. That 15-year-old Russian figure skater, Julia Lipnitskaia, is so good that even I could tell how good she was when she skated in the team competition. All the corruption in the world couldn’t have robbed her of the top score.

Originally posted here:

Figure Skating Is Hopelessly Corrupt

Posted in alo, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged american, lesser, lower, mother, north-dakota, operation, public, world, zitzewitz | Comments Off

Report: Most Tax-Based College Aid Goes to the Least Needy Families

by Merv Carlson Posted on December 10, 2013

Mother Jones

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The federal government helps to make college affordable in a number of ways, from low-interest student loans to grants for low-income students. It also offers a host of lesser known subsidies for higher education through the tax code, by way of such things as 529 tax-free college savings plans and exemptions for loan interest and college expenses—expenditures that don’t show up as a budget line item the same way Pell Grants do. A new report from the Consortium of Higher Education Tax Reform suggests these tax credits aren’t doing much to increase the number of low-income families who send kids to college. Instead, they’re subsidies to the 20 percent of American households making more than $100,000 a year—people who would send their kids to college even without a 529 plan.

The nation spends $34 billion annually on Pell Grants, which allow lower-income kids to go to college and leave without owing major debt. Meanwhile, the US spends $35 billion on higher education tax breaks, most of which go to people who need them the least. Tax credits in general are poorly targeted at those most in need, but some are worse than others. Take the Exemption for Dependent Students, which allows families to reduce their taxable income by up to $3,900 if they have a dependent student between the ages of 19 and 23. More than half of all these exemptions go to people making over $100,000 a year. Also regressive: the deduction for tuition and fees, half of which goes every year to families making over $100,000. The median income of a family with a 529 college savings plan is $120,000.

One reason tax credits don’t benefit lower-income families as much as they should is the fact that they aren’t refundable, so the money generally isn’t available to families when the college bills are due, only when they file their taxes. The consortium also points out that federal tax breaks are still available to colleges and universities that are doing a poor job of enrolling and graduating low-income students, noting that more than 100 institutions getting federal tax breaks have graduation rates under 20 percent—a serious problem that can leave low-income kids both saddled with college debt and without a degree that might help them earn enough to repay it.

Research shows that financial aid can make a huge difference in whether a low-income kid decides to go to college. It has a miniscule impact on the college attendance rate of upper class kids, who are seven times more likely than low-income students to complete a bachelor’s degree by the age of 24. The consortium recommends some big cuts in higher ed tax breaks for the affluent and a shift in focus to directing aid to where it can do the most good. Among its proposals: ending taxation of Pell Grants; allowing people with drug convictions to access the American Opportunity Tax Credit, one of the few refundable higher ed tax credits; and imposing income limits on college savings plans. All of these things seem reasonable and something both parties ought to be able to get behind, but it’s hard to see middle-class families giving up all this aid without a huge fight.

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Report: Most Tax-Based College Aid Goes to the Least Needy Families

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged college, credit, education, king, lesser, major, mojo, policy, research, venta | Comments Off