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Republicans Find New $1.7 Billion Iran Chew Toy

by MelbaSeale Posted on January 22, 2016

Mother Jones

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Here’s the latest appeasement of Iran from the capitulator-in-chief:

A deal that sent $1.7 billion in U.S. funds to Iran, announced alongside the freeing of five Americans from Iranian jails, has emerged as a new flashpoint amid a claim in Tehran that the transaction amounted to a ransom payment.

The U.S. Treasury Department wired the money to Iran around the same time its theocratic government allowed three American prisoners to fly out of Tehran on Sunday aboard a Dassault Falcon jet owned by the Swiss air force.

….Republican lawmakers are calling for an inquiry….“There’s no way the recent events occurred randomly,” said Rep. Mike Pompeo (R. Kan.), who wrote Secretary of State John Kerry this week to ask about the payment. “We will do our best to find out if this was in our interest.”

You know, I could almost believe that this was just a coincidence. If it were really a direct payoff, both sides would have taken more care to conceal it. At least, that’s how these things usually go.

But I suppose it probably was a payoff. We would have been forced to pay out the money eventually anyway, but I guess the Iranians wanted to feel like they got the better of the Great Satan or something. And now the Republicans have something new to hold an endless series of hearings about. Everybody wins!

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Republicans Find New $1.7 Billion Iran Chew Toy

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Why Is Flint’s Water Still Unsafe? Or Is It?

by BethEverett Posted on January 21, 2016

Mother Jones

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Can someone help me out? Flint reconnected to the Detroit water system in October, and it was supposed to take a few weeks after that to clean out the pipes. So what happened? I keep seeing pallets of bottled water being delivered to Flint, but shouldn’t the tap water be safe by now? Has it been tested for lead levels in the past month or two? I’ve been trying to check this out, but I can’t seem to find anything definitive.

I feel like I must have missed something. I don’t know how hard a thorough round of testing is, but it sure seems like that would have been a top priority starting in early November. Is it being done?

UPDATE: Here’s the answer:

Over time, the lead pipes in Flint built up a protective mineral coating—or scale—that prevented lead from getting into the water.
During the 17 months it was used, acidic water from the Flint River corroded away the scale, exposing fresh metal.
Even if the water is now good, it’s going to take a while before the scale rebuilds. In the meantime, lead can still leach into the water.

Back in December, the Flint Utilities Director announced that they planned to boost the level of phosphates in the water to aid in rebuilding the scale. They also hired a firm to begin testing of high-risk homes. Normally it can take up to five years for scale to rebuild, but presumably the additional phosphates will reduce this time. Still, it might be quite a while before the water is safe again, which explains the continuing pallets of bottled water.

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Why Is Flint’s Water Still Unsafe? Or Is It?

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Scientists Discover "Most Planet-y" Planet in the Solar System

by AlejandMacfarla Posted on January 20, 2016

Mother Jones

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Oh FFS. We just demoted Pluto because it was too small and didn’t do a real planet’s job of taking out the orbital trash, but now the boffins at Caltech are claiming we have a ninth planet after all. It’s a gazillion miles away, but apparently it’s big enough to “clear the neighborhood” and thus qualify as a real planet.

If it’s real, that is. So far its existence has merely been inferred from gravitational anomalies in Kuiper Belt objects:

The object, which the researchers have nicknamed Planet Nine ed note: clever!, has a mass about 10 times that of Earth and orbits about 20 times farther from the sun on average than does Neptune….”This would be a real ninth planet,” says Mike Brown, the Richard and Barbara Rosenberg Professor of Planetary Astronomy….Brown notes that the putative ninth planet—at 5,000 times the mass of Pluto—is sufficiently large that there should be no debate about whether it is a true planet….In fact, it dominates a region larger than any of the other known planets—a fact that Brown says makes it “the most planet-y of the planets in the whole solar system.“

Ooh. The “most planet-y” object in the solar system! And how do they infer its existence? With sciencey stuff like this:

Well, I’ll believe it when I see it. Or, rather, when I see a digitally enhanced CCD image that’s been fed into the maw of a supercomputer, thus allowing scientists to assure me at a 5-sigma level that a certain gray pixel has met rigorous statistical tests and really is Planet Nine. After all, seeing is believing.

By the way, if we ever mount an expedition to Planet Nine, it should be pretty interesting. Here’s what I expect we’ll find:

Taken from: 

Scientists Discover "Most Planet-y" Planet in the Solar System

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Global Warming Went On a Rampage in 2015

by RaymonGillen Posted on January 20, 2016

Mother Jones

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Remember that old chestnut, the climate chart that starts in 1998 and makes it look like climate change has been on a “pause” ever since? It was always nonsense produced by cherry picking an unusually high starting point, but it was still effective propaganda. But those days are gone for good. Last year was already considerably warmer than 1998, and this year has now blown away everything in the record books:

The globally averaged temperature over land and ocean surfaces for 2015 was the highest among all years since record keeping began in 1880. During the final month, the December combined global land and ocean average surface temperature was the highest on record for any month in the 136-year record.

During 2015, the average temperature across global land and ocean surfaces was 1.62°F (0.90°C) above the 20th century average….This is also the largest margin by which the annual global temperature record has been broken. Ten months had record high temperatures for their respective months during the year. The five highest monthly departures from average for any month on record all occurred during 2015.

George Will is now going to have to find some other way to lie about global warming. I don’t doubt that he’s up to it, but at least he’ll have to work a little harder.

This article:  

Global Warming Went On a Rampage in 2015

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The Real Republican Problem Is an Appallingly Shallow Bench

by ErwinHanson Posted on January 19, 2016

Mother Jones

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For what it’s worth, I want to toss out a theory of what’s happening in this year’s GOP primary. Basically, there’s no Mitt Romney or John McCain.

Here’s what I mean. In the past two cycles, Republicans have offered us Snow White and the Seven Loons. In 2008 the loons were Mike Huckabee, Ron Paul, Fred Thomson, Rudy Giuliani, Alan Keyes, and some other also-rans. In 2012 it was Michele Bachman, Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich, Rick Perry, Herman Cain, and a few others. Both of these primaries were clown shows, but in both cases there was one savior: John McCain in 2008 and Mitt Romney in 2012.

This year the saviors were Jeb Bush and Scott Walker, but both have turned out to be horrible candidates. Rubio is a little better on the campaign trail, but he doesn’t have the gravitas to unite the middle of the party behind him. So that leaves us with the loons. Donald Trump is currently leading the loon pack, but honestly, it could have been anyone. Ben Carson, Ted Cruz, Carly Fiorina, Rand Paul, Chris Christie. They all have loon appeal, but not quite as much as Trump (so far, anyway).

It just goes to show that Mitt Romney was a better candidate than we gave him credit for. He was too stiff and too rich, but he had presidential credibility; he was able to subdue the loon pack; he chose a non-loon as running mate; and he ran a fairly decent non-loon campaign against Obama. He didn’t win, but just imagine how much worse any of the others would have done.

So the big story isn’t so much Trump as it is the failure of the Republican Party to field even a single decent mainstream candidate. The Democrats aren’t much better, but at least they have one. The truth is that both parties seem to have an appallingly shallow bench. I don’t quite know why, but to me that’s a bigger story than Trump. He’s just the latest clown in a party full of them.

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The Real Republican Problem Is an Appallingly Shallow Bench

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Southern White Women Are Apparently in Pretty Bad Shape These Days

by DanialLeverett Posted on January 19, 2016

Mother Jones

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Since I happened to mention the famous Case/Deaton mortality study in the previous post, here’s the latest from Andrew Gelman. As you may recall, Case and Deaton concluded that mortality among middle-aged whites from suicide, alcohol, and drug poisoning had skyrocketed over the past two decades. This set pundits afire with theories about what was going on, but Gelman has done some age adjustment to the cohorts that Case and Deaton used, and then broken up the data by gender, and then by geographic area. Here’s what he gets:

After 2005, there’s no effect on middle-aged men at all. It’s all women. And if you break it down further, nearly the entire effect is concentrated among women in the South. But why? Gelman punts:

I don’t have any explanations for this. As I told a reporter the other day, I believe in the division of labor: I try to figure out what’s happening, and I’ll let other people explain why.

I think that’s wise. For one thing, if you slice the data in a different way, you might get a different result. What’s more, as I’ve mentioned several times, the increased mortality affects the young too, not just the middle aged. So if you spun some brilliant theories about why middle-aged whites are so damn depressed these days, you might want to rethink things. Your new theory needs to explain why the young and the middle-aged are dying in greater numbers, and you also need to explain why it’s affecting primarily women in the South. Good luck.

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Southern White Women Are Apparently in Pretty Bad Shape These Days

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New Study Suggests That ADA Works Pretty Well In Job Market

by QuinnHilderbran Posted on November 2, 2015

Mother Jones

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If you’re a hiring manage and you’ve been getting a lot of resumes lately, this might not have anything to do with an improving economy. It might instead be due to the blizzard of academic research that’s conducted by sending out thousands of resumes with tiny differences in order to figure out how hiring managers respond to race/college/political party/hobbies/etc. The latest experiment is to see how hiring managers respond to disabilities, and the results are more interesting than you might think. Here are the basic results:

No surprise here. If you indicate that you have any kind of disability, there’s less interest in hiring you, and these results are consistent across all sizes of companies—though they’re more pronounced in small companies—and across both private-sector and public-sector employers. But now take a look at this:

When it comes to getting an actual callback, small companies are far less likely to respond if you have a disability. But larger companies show little discrimination at all. In fact, many of them are more likely to call you back if you have a disability. The most dramatic difference is among government hiring managers: if you don’t have a disability, no callback. If you do have a disability, the rate of callbacks is the highest in the study. The authors provide the most obvious explanation:

Given that small employers are not subject to the ADA, this result suggests that small employers are engaging in discrimination while the ADA is constraining discriminatory behavior of medium and large employers. The story is complicated, however, by the lack of clear changes in employer responses at the ADA employment threshold…and by consideration of state DDL’s….This latter result may be due to a lack of knowledge of state laws among small employers, while the federal ADA is much better known. Large employers are more likely to have formal HR departments that will be aware of both the ADA and state requirements, and may be more likely to have prior experience in hiring people with disabilities so they are more comfortable in considering applicants with disabilities.

So the picture is complicated, but the most likely interpretation is that ADA has been fairly successful in the job market. If you pass a law that forbids discrimination, and then enforce it, you get results. It’s yet another example of big government working pretty well.

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New Study Suggests That ADA Works Pretty Well In Job Market

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Republican Candidates Agree on List of Debate Demands

by RusselProby Posted on November 2, 2015

Mother Jones

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After last week’s CNBC fiasco, Republican candidates for president are meeting tonight to discuss their conditions for participating in future debates. A source with one of the campaigns has been texting me from inside the meeting with a list of their demands:

  1. There will be no “gotcha” questions about math.
  2. All graphics that appear beside candidates must be approved by the campaign.
  3. There will be a ten-minute break halfway through the debate.
  4. Each candidate will be allowed to phone a friend for one question.
  5. All 14 candidates will be allowed on the main stage. At the end of each 15-minute period, candidates will vote one participant out of the debate. In the final round, the seven remaining candidates will get to ask the moderators questions.
  6. No non-English speaking networks will be allowed to participate.
  7. Each podium will include the candidate’s website address in a minimum of 3-inch type.
  8. Male moderators must wear red ties.
  9. Each campaign will be allowed to veto a maximum of two moderators each.
  10. Fox News will be exempt from all these rules.
  11. Candidates can “steal” a question from another candidate once per debate.
  12. Frank Luntz “dial” responses will be run across the screen in real time.

Three of these are real and have been seriously discussed. Can you guess which ones? Answer here.

Link:

Republican Candidates Agree on List of Debate Demands

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Want a Safer City? Keep Daylight Savings Time Year Round!

by EleanoreTenney4 Posted on October 31, 2015

Mother Jones

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Tonight we bid sadly adieu to daylight savings time. That means this is also the time of year for a spate of stories about whether daylight savings time makes sense. Sure, you get more daylight, which cuts down on lighting bills, but it’s colder in the morning, which increases heating bills. But wait! There’s more time for golf, and that helps the economy. Etc. Economists have conducted ever more sophisticated natural experiments about this, and the ultimate answer is….meh. Maybe it’s a tiny economic benefit, maybe it’s a tiny economic loss. Who knows?

But now we have a new study. The authors ditch the whole economic benefit argument and instead justify DST based on lower crime rates:

They found that “when DST begins in the spring, robbery rates for the entire day fall an average of 7 percent, with a much larger 27 percent drop during the evening hour that gained some extra sunlight.” The mechanism that might cause this drop is fairly simple: “Most street crime occurs in the evening around common commuting hours of 5 to 8 PM,” the authors write, “and more ambient light during typical high-crime hours makes it easier for victims and passers-by to see potential threats and later identify wrongdoers.”

Moreover, according to the paper, the drop in crime during evening hours wasn’t accompanied by a rise in crime during the morning hours. Criminals aren’t morning people, as it turns out. In addition to the decrease in robbery rates, the researchers found “suggestive evidence” of a decrease in the incidence of rape during the evening hours, as well.

The authors do provide an estimate of the economic benefit of this reduction in crime, and they peg it at several billion dollars per year. They’re economists, after all, so I guess they feel obligated.

But forget that. The DST haters will just come up with some reason why making kids wait for the school bus in the dark costs several billion dollars. Nobody will ever win this game. Instead, just focus on the crime. Everybody wants less crime, and the anti-DST forces are never going to come up with an answer to this. What kind of crime could possible go up because of daylight savings time? White collar theft?

So we win! Assuming “we” are all the righteous lovers of year-round DST. More daylight savings time, less crime. It’s a winner.

Continued:  

Want a Safer City? Keep Daylight Savings Time Year Round!

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Republicans Very Upset At How Bad They Looked on Wednesday

by JungDellinger Posted on October 30, 2015

Mother Jones

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I guess this was inevitable:

The Republican National Committee has pulled out of a planned Feb. 26 debate with NBC News after widespread criticism of this week’s CNBC debate from both the party and campaigns. “CNBC network is one of your media properties, and its handling of the debate was conducted in bad faith,” RNC Chairman Reince Priebus wrote in a letter to NBC News Chairman Andrew Lack.

CNBC did screw up, but mostly by failing to keep the toddlers on stage under control and being poorly prepared to deal with brazen lies delivered with a straight face. For what it’s worth, I’d also agree that a few of the questions they asked were stupid and/or churlish. Not much more than any other debate, though.

But conservative grievance culture is once again demanding someone’s head on a platter. After all, if conservatives look bad on television it’s gotta be someone else’s fault, right? So it’s off with NBC’s head.

Jeebus. And these guys claim that they’re the steely-eyed folks who can take down Putin and the ayatollah? What a bunch of crybabies.

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Republicans Very Upset At How Bad They Looked on Wednesday

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