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The Tea Party Is Dead. Long Live the Tea Party.

by Adalberto7975 Posted on February 12, 2014

Mother Jones

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Does yesterday’s vote for a clean debt ceiling increase mean that the Republican Party is finally coming to its senses? Ed Kilgore doubts it:

You will forgive me for an enduring skepticism on this latest “proof” that “the fever” (as the president calls radical conservatism) has broken, the Tea Party has been domesticated, the grownups are back in control, and the storms that convulsed our political system in 2009 have finally passed away. We’ve been hearing these assurances metronomically from the moment “the fever” first appeared.

….But it is not all that clear just yet that the GOP back-benchers racing to get out of Washington before a winter storm are satisfied with how the deal went down. Their level of equanimity will not improve after puzzled conservative constituents grill them on this “surrender,” and after they are congratulated by everyone else on the political spectrum for their abandonment of “conservative principles.”

In other words, it’s once again premature to read into this development a sea-change in contemporary conservatism or the GOP. Best I can tell from reading conservative media the last few weeks, the reluctance of GOPers to engineer another high-level fiscal confrontation owed less to the public repudiation of last autumn’s apocalypse than to the belief that Republicans are on the brink of a historic midterm victory accompanied by a decisive negative referendum on Obamacare. If that’s “pragmatism,” it’s of a very narrow sort.

Yes indeedy. For all practical purposes, the tea party is moribund as an independent force, but only because it’s been fully incorporated into the Republican Party itself. Sure, there are still groups out there with “tea party” in their name, but the funding and energy are mostly coming from the Koch brothers, the Club for Growth, ATR, and other right-wing pressure groups that have been around forever.

The difference between previous fluorescences of the nutball right and this one is simple: previous ones either died out in failure or else succeeded only in moving the GOP to the right a bit. The tea party fluorescence has finally captured the party for good. But this doesn’t mean that every single political confrontation is going to turn into a scorched-earth campaign. Even fanatics can tell when a particular tactic has stopped working, and even fanatics like to win elections. But that doesn’t mean they’ve lost their influence. They’ve learned a bit, and perhaps decided to become a bit more sophisticated about their opposition tactics, but they still control the Republican Party. Make no mistake about that.

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The Tea Party Is Dead. Long Live the Tea Party.

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Will Democrats Kill the Filibuster Entirely Next Year?

by AlannahBeaulieu Posted on February 11, 2014

Mother Jones

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After the 2000 election, with the Senate divided 50-50, Democrats demanded a power-sharing agreement in which both parties would have the same number of committee members and the same budget. Even though Dick Cheney provided the tiebreaking vote in favor of Republican control, Democrats got their way by threatening to filibuster the organization of the Senate.

So what if this happens again after the 2014 election? Joe Biden will provide the tiebreaking vote this time, but Republicans will threaten to filibuster unless they get equal representation. Richard Arenberg thinks this could lead to the end of the filibuster:

Here’s the interesting question. Last November the Democratic majority used the so-called “nuclear option” to eliminate the filibuster for presidential nominations (with the exception of the Supreme Court). This established the principle or at least demonstrated the means by which any rule could be changed at any time by a simple majority. In the wake of a hard-fought election to determine control of the Senate, would the temptation to eliminate the filibuster in order to gain clear control using the simple majority (with the vice president’s vote) be irresistible? Would the Democratic base tolerate any less?

I have long argued that the use of the nuclear option would place the Senate on a slippery slope. I believe that the elimination of the filibuster on legislative matter is close to inevitable.

A tied Senate could be the test.

Maybe! But I’m not sure that either party has much motivation to kill the filibuster entirely at this point, regardless of what their bases demand. Let’s examine the two parties separately.

Democrats: Killing the filibuster for presidential nominees made sense because nominations require only Senate approval. But what’s the value of killing the filibuster for legislation? With the House under Republican control, it wouldn’t do them much good. Nor would it be worth it just to avoid power-sharing during the last two years of Obama’s term, when little is likely to be accomplished anyway. That simply isn’t a big enough deal. And as unlikely as it seems, Democrats do need to be concerned with the possibility of complete Republican control after 2016. It’s a slim possibility, but it’s a possibility. If that happens, why hand over the rope to hang themselves?

Republicans: Suppose Republicans win the Senate outright in 2014. A lot of liberals take it as an article of faith that they’ll immediately kill the filibuster completely. But why? With Obama still in office, it wouldn’t do them any good. And they have to be deeply concerned about complete Democratic control after the 2016 election. It’s not just a slim possibility, it’s a very real possibility. If that happens, why hand over the rope to hang themselves?

Bottom line: There’s nothing new about the procedure Harry Reid used to kill the filibuster for nominations. It’s always been available, and everyone has always known it. But it hasn’t been used before because both parties have always been afraid of what the other party would do in a filibuster-less world. That fear would continue to far outweigh the negligible benefits of killing the filibuster while government remains divided.

But what about after 2016? What if one of the parties wins total control of Congress and the presidency? That’s harder to predict. I still think that fear of what the other party could do without a filibuster runs deep, and may well prevent either party from axing it. But I wouldn’t bet on it. Both Republicans and Democrats will be chomping at the bit to break the grinding deadlock of the post-2010 era, and either party might decide to finally take the plunge.

But if it happens, it will be after 2016. The benefit of killing the filibuster after the 2014 election is just too slim to make it worthwhile.

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Will Democrats Kill the Filibuster Entirely Next Year?

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The Hillary Papers: Yet Another Conservative Bombshell That Strikes Out

by Amilianp2t Posted on February 11, 2014

Mother Jones

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Jonah Goldberg watched the NBC Nightly News last night and was unhappy that they didn’t devote more time to Obama’s delay of the employer mandate. There’s a reason for that, of course: it’s not really very important and most people don’t care about it. Sure, all of us partisan junkies care about it, but that’s about it. To everyone else it’s a minor administrative rule change.

But he was also unhappy with another segment:

The highlight of the night was Andrea Mitchell’s “report” on the Washington Free Beacon’s big take-out on the “Hillary Papers.” Her discomfort was palpable. She assured viewers that the “inflammatory excerpts” weren’t necessarily in context (Mitchell the Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent for NBC who spent much of the last year covering Sarah Palin is a great stickler for context and eschews anything inflammatory). Hillary Clinton, the front runner for her party’s presidential nomination was treated like the victim. Thank goodness she didn’t joke about putting traffic cones up on the George Washington bridge!

By chance, I happened to see that segment. What struck me was less Andrea Mitchell’s “discomfort” than the fact that this supposed bombshell seemed like a total nothingburger. When it was over, I sort of shrugged and wondered what the point was. Here’s a bit of the transcript from Mitchell’s report about the Diane Blair papers:

Tonight, the once-private papers of the woman Hillary Clinton has previously described as her closest friend are getting a lot of attention….Thanksgiving, 1996, Blair quotes Clinton saying “I’m a proud woman. I’m not stupid. I know I should do more to suck up to the press. I know it confuses people when I change my hairdos. I know I should pretend not to have any opinions, but I am just not going to. I’m used to winning and I intend to win on my own terms.”

….September 9, 1998, Bill Clinton had finally admitted his relationship with Lewinsky. Blair writes of Hillary, “she is not trying to excuse him; it was a huge personal lapse.” But she says to his credit, he tried to break it off, tried to pull away.” Blair did not survive to provide context for her diary. Now Republicans say her notes are fair game.

Um, OK. Is that supposed to be damaging? The entire Beacon story is here, and I guess there are some outtakes that can be spun as unflattering toward Hillary, but that’s about it. It’s a bit of tittle tattle about who Hillary was annoyed with at various points in time, and not much more. And even that depends for its power on just how accurately Blair represented Hillary’s views.

Maybe I’m demonstrating a lack of imagination here, but I’m having a hard time seeing this as especially damaging or bombshellish. For the most part, it strikes me as confirming that Hillary was pretty much who we thought she was: tough-minded, goal-oriented, sometimes defensive, and not always sure how to handle the tsunami of invective that beset the Clinton presidency. If you’re a Hillary hater, it will be yet more evidence that she’s Satan incarnate, but for the rest of us, I’m not sure what’s really new here.

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The Hillary Papers: Yet Another Conservative Bombshell That Strikes Out

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We Shouldn’t Denigrate the Diginity of Work, Even Accidentally

by FNEVaughnzo Posted on February 11, 2014

Mother Jones

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Paul Krugman writes today about the Republican insistence that when they oppose safety net programs, they’re doing it because they really care about the poor. Paul Ryan, for example, says that Obamacare is bad because it reduces incentives to work: “Inducing a person not to work who is on the low-income scale, not to get on the ladder of life, to begin working, getting the dignity of work, getting more opportunities, rising their income, joining the middle class, this means fewer people will do that.” Here’s Krugman:

Let’s talk, in particular, about dignity.

It’s all very well to talk vaguely about the dignity of work; but the idea that all workers can regard themselves as equal in dignity despite huge disparities in income is just foolish. When you’re in a world where 40 money managers make as much as 300,000 high school teachers, it’s just silly to imagine that there will be any sense, on either side, of equal dignity in work.

….Now, one way to enhance the dignity of ordinary workers is through, yes, entitlements: make it part of their birthright, as American citizens, that they get certain basics such as a minimal income in retirement, support in times of unemployment, and essential health care.

But the Republican position is that none of these things should be provided, and that if somehow they do get provided, they should come only at the price of massive government intrusion into the recipient’s personal lives — making sure that you don’t take advantage of health reform to work less, requiring that you undergo drug tests to receive unemployment benefits or food stamps, and so on.

In short, while conservatives may preach the dignity of work, their actual agenda is to deny lower-income workers as much dignity — and personal freedom — as possible.

There’s so much here that I agree with. Massive levels of inequality are indeed corrosive to both dignity and a basic sense of fair play. Making certain entitlements universal is indeed a way of enhancing dignity. And the endless Republican efforts to shame the poor are simply loathsome.

And yet….I really hate to see liberals disparage the value of work, even if it’s only implicit, as it is here. Even people who hate their jobs take satisfaction in the knowledge that they’re paying their way and providing for their families. People who lose their jobs usually report intense stress and feelings of inadequacy even if money per se isn’t an imminent problem (perhaps because a spouse works, perhaps because they’re drawing an unemployment check). Most people want to work, and most people also want to believe that their fellow citizens are working. It’s part of the social contract. As corrosive as inequality can be, a sense of other people living off the dole can be equally corrosive.

I know, I know: Krugman wasn’t trying to advocate a life of government-supported sloth. I’m not trying to pretend he was. And yet….we should be careful about this stuff. Work is important for dignity, both at a personal level and a broader societal level. We all acknowledge this when we talk about economic policy, making it clear that our goal is to attack high unemployment and create an economy that provides a job for everyone. We should acknowledge it just as much when the talk gets more personal.

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We Shouldn’t Denigrate the Diginity of Work, Even Accidentally

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Study: Health Care Reform Likely to Reduce Bankruptcy and Catastrophic Debt

by CaridadBollinge Posted on February 11, 2014

Mother Jones

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Today’s email brings word of an interesting new paper from Bhashkar Mazumder of the Chicago Fed and Sarah Miller of Notre Dame. They set out to measure the effect of the Massachusetts health care reform on bankruptcy and personal debt, a subject that’s topical for a number of reasons:

The Massachusetts plan is quite similar to Obamacare, so results from this study are suggestive of the impact that Obamacare will eventually have.
One of the primary purposes of universal health insurance is to relieve the financial stress of large unpaid medical bills.
Massachusetts is a good case study because its reform affected everyone, not just those below the poverty line.

The authors take advantage of the fact that health care reform had bigger effects on some groups than others. Most middle-aged people, for example, were already insured, so the Massachusetts reform affected them only modestly. Conversely, young people had relatively low insurance rates, so they were more heavily affected. Ditto for counties, some of which had higher initial rates of uninsurance than others.

The study exploits a very large data set of consumer finance based on reporting from credit bureaus, which provided a sample of nearly 400,000 individuals to look at. Its conclusion is unsurprising:

We find that the reform significantly improved credit scores, reduced the total amount past due, reduced the fraction of debt past due, and reduced the probability of personal bankruptcy. We find particularly pronounced reductions in the probability of having a large delinquency of over $5,000. These effects tend to be larger among individuals whose credit scores were low at the time of the reform, suggesting that the greatest gains in financial security occurred among those who were already struggling financially.

The charts below, excerpted from the study, illustrate the effect of health care reform, which was implemented in the period shown by the yellow bars. Despite the severe recession that followed, the amount of current debt stayed pretty flat while the amount of debt more than $10,000 past due declined sharply. Obamacare is not as universal as the Massachusetts reform, so its effects will probably be less pronounced. Nonetheless, it will not only provide routine health care for millions of Americans who aren’t currently getting it, it will also make their lives far less financially precarious. That sounds like a win to me.

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Study: Health Care Reform Likely to Reduce Bankruptcy and Catastrophic Debt

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Job 1 for GOP: Pretending Not to Be Crazy

by 5b2w3u7o Posted on February 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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Last month, we1 told you about the crackpot congressional candidacy of Virginia’s Dick Black. A week later we told you he had dropped out of the race. That didn’t take long! Black tried to put a heroic spin on his withdrawal (it was to prevent Democrats from gaining a majority in the Virginia state senate), but the truth was more prosaic: everyone was against him. The Chamber of Commerce. The party leadership. Even the Koch Brothers.

In other words, it wasn’t just the Republican “establishment” that was opposed to Black. It was also tea-partyish groups like the Koch-funded American for Prosperity. But why? Dave Weigel explains:

Why did AFP join the blanket party against Black? Because Black was going to make social conservative gaffes. And that element of the party, not a huge problem in office, causes problems during campaigns.

That’s what “stopping the next Todd Akin” means. It doesn’t mean crushing the Tea Party or electing moderates. Akin was not the Tea Party candidate in Missouri’s 2012 primary—national Tea Party groups endorsed either the former state treasurer or a businessman who was making his first ever political run. Akin was a social conservative who went on to bungle his abortion views in an easy interview. And everyone on the right, from the RNC to the pro-life Susan B. Anthony List, has been working to train Republicans to avoid sounding like Akin. Not changing what they stand for.

The Republican Party isn’t trying to move to the center. It’s just trying to prevent abject idiots from running for Congress, especially in red hot media markets like Northern Virginia, which command the attention of every political reporter in the country. When you start babbling about spousal rape in a town hall in West Bumcluck, you might pull it off with no one noticing. But if you do it in NoVa, it won’t just be Mother Jones that notices. Everyone will notice. And let’s face it: Republicans have no greater challenge these days than fooling moderates into thinking that the party isn’t controlled by a flock of raging fanatics. Getting rid of embarrassments like Dick Black is all part of the plan.

1Meaning Mother Jones. It was Molly Redden who reported these stories, not me.

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Job 1 for GOP: Pretending Not to Be Crazy

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New Supermarket, New Eating Habits? Not So Fast….

by Georgina51G Posted on February 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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A team of researchers recently carried out a study of two food deserts in poor Philadelphia neighborhoods. One of the neighborhoods got a new supermarket and the other didn’t. Here’s the good news:

Respondents perceived grocer choice and quality and fruit and vegetable choice and quality to have improved, and the cost of fruit and vegetables was perceived to have decreased.

And here’s the bad news:

Few residents adopted the new supermarket as their main food store, and exposure to the new supermarket had no statistically significant impact on BMI and daily fruit and vegetable intake at six months….At the planning and consultation stages, members of the community indicated their preference for having a new supermarket instead of selling the land for residential development. This suggested their readiness to use the new store and the lowering of barriers to change. However, few residents chose to shop at the store once it was open.

….Our findings suggest that simply building new food retail stores may not be sufficient to promote behavior change related to diet….The development of new food retail stores should be combined with initiatives focused on price and availability that could help bridge the gap between improvements in people’s perceptions of accessibility and behavior change. Such initiatives might be supported by local departments of health, which could provide targeted neighborhood-based health promotion programs in conjunction with supermarket developers to increase their effectiveness.

All the usual caveats apply. This is one study of one store in one neighborhood. And it’s possible that it takes more time to change behavior. A follow-up done six months after the new store opened may simply have been too soon.

Nonetheless, it adds to an increasing set of data suggesting that food deserts per se aren’t the reason for obesity and poor nutrition in low-income neighborhoods. There’s much more going on, and it’s especially discouraging that residents plainly knew about the new supermarket but still didn’t shop there. Even a highly publicized grand opening featuring a visit from Michelle Obama wasn’t enough. It was a struggle just to get local residents to change their shopping habits, which is almost certain to be a lot easier than getting broad-based changes in actual eating habits.

Aaron Carroll has more here. There’s no real way to spin this as anything but fairly bleak news, though.

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New Supermarket, New Eating Habits? Not So Fast….

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Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff and It’s All Small Stuff – Richard Carlson

by Myrna Posted on January 2, 2014

READ GREEN WITH E-BOOKS

Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff and It’s All Small Stuff

Simple Ways to Keep the Little Things from Taking Over Your Life

Richard Carlson

Genre: Self-Improvement

Price: $1.99

Publish Date: January 1, 2002

Publisher: Hyperion

Seller: Hachette Digital, Inc.


Don't Sweat the Small Stuff…and It's All Small Stuff is a book that tells you how to keep from letting the little things in life drive you crazy. In thoughtful and insightful language, author Richard Carlson reveals ways to calm down in the midst of your incredibly hurried, stress-filled life. You can learn to put things into perspective by making the small daily changes Dr. Carlson suggests, including advice such as &quot;Choose your battles wisely&quot;; &quot;Remind yourself that when you die, your 'in' box won't be empty&quot;; and &quot;Make peace with imperfection&quot;. With Don't Sweat the Small Stuff… you'll also learn how to: Live in the present moment Let others have the glory at times Lower your tolerance to stress Trust your intuitions Live each day as it might be your last With gentle, supportive suggestions, Dr. Carlson reveals ways to make your actions more peaceful and caring, with the added benefit of making your life more calm and stress-free.

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Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff and It’s All Small Stuff – Richard Carlson

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Shop for Great Deals on ‘Green Friday’ in NYC

by BroderickDuong Posted on November 26, 2013

Photo: ReuseNYC

If you’d rather not shell out your holiday shopping dollars at the big-box stores this year, why not skip Black Friday and try hunting for great deals on Green Friday instead?

On Nov. 29, nonprofit retail locations throughout New York City will participate in ReuseNYC Green Friday — a community-oriented answer to Black Friday that focuses on supporting those in need and preventing waste through secondhand shopping.

More than 40 retail locations will take part in the event by offering a variety of sales in locations across the five boroughs.

Participating retailers include common names like Goodwill and The Salvation Army, and some you may have never heard of, such as the Arthritis Foundation Gift Shop, Cancer Care Thrift Shop, Lower East Side Ecology Center and more.

Deals range from 10 percent off to 50 percent off storewide — meaning you’ll not only score rock-bottom deals but also rest easy knowing your dollars supported causes you care about.

Click here for a map of all participating locations and more information.

Homepage Image: Flickr/Play Among Friends

earth911

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Shop for Great Deals on ‘Green Friday’ in NYC

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The Quality of American Teachers Seems to be Getting Better

by Bart Jameson Posted on November 19, 2013

Mother Jones

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In the current issue of Education Next, Dan Goldhaber and Joe Walch report that the quality of new teachers has improved over the past decade:

We find that more academically competent individuals are being drawn into the teaching profession….driven mainly by the proportion of teachers with SAT scores that fall in the top quartile of the distribution. This finding of increasing academic competence for newer entrants to the teacher labor market also shows up when we use undergraduate GPA as our indicator of academic competency, though research by Cory Koedel indicates that inconsistent grading standards across academic majors may render this measure less meaningful.

G&W’s research suggests that schools are drawing fewer teachers from the bottom quartile of SAT scores and more teachers from the top quartile. You can see this in the thick red line in the chart on the right (taken from the original paper), which shows the number of teachers from the class of 2008 with different SAT scores: compared to 1993 and 2000, there are fewer from the lower ranks, about the same number from the middle ranks, and more from the higher ranks. Megan McArdle suggests this is mainly due to the Great Recession:

As insecurity in the private-sector labor market increases, the value of public-sector job protections effectively increases, meaning that candidates will be willing to accept lower pay in exchange for the guarantee that it will be nearly impossible to fire them….It’s also possible that a lot of college students suddenly and for no apparent reason decided they wanted to be teachers around the same time that the job market became massively more insecure. But I’m betting it’s no coincidence. Bad news for the graduating seniors, but good news for the nation’s schools.

This is reasonable sounding. However, the most recent data is for teachers hired in 2008, which predates the big spike in unemployment starting in 2009. So I’m not quite convinced. I’d like to see data through 2013 to confirm what’s going on. Given the steep rise in private-sector unemployment and the preciptous decline in private-sector job security over the past five years, we should expect to see schools becoming even more selective about who they’re willing to hire. If the recession story is true, the data should show at least another 5 percentile point increase in the SAT scores of new teachers.

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The Quality of American Teachers Seems to be Getting Better

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