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The Hack Gap Lives!

by NeilR53gqo Posted on March 6, 2015

Mother Jones

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I’ve been following the news a little vaguely over the past few days, but I noticed an interesting confirmation of the hack gap in the treatment of Hillary Clinton’s email affair. Perhaps you noticed too? There was, obviously, a difference in the way liberals and conservatives treated the news that Hillary had used a private email address for all her correspondence while she was Secretary of State. But it was a matter of degree, not attitude.

On the liberal side, I saw a lots of people seriously questioning what had happened. And not just here in the pages of MoJo. I saw it on MSNBC. I saw it in newspaper columns. I saw it in blog posts. Lots of liberals treated this as a legitimate issue and suggested that Hillary had some serious questions to answer. This didn’t just come from a few iconoclasts, either. It came from all over the place, and was generally viewed, at the least, as an example of questionable judgment, if not proof that Hillary is the antichrist we’ve always known she was.

I know the counterfactual game can get a little tiresome sometimes, but still: it’s hard to imagine the same thing happening if a heavy Republican frontrunner had done something like this. The hack gap lives.

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The Hack Gap Lives!

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Health Note

by FloridaBirchell Posted on March 5, 2015

Mother Jones

I suppose the lack of content makes it obvious, but today has been a very bad day. I haven’t been able to sleep more than a few hours for the past few days, despite plenty of sleep meds. I’m completely exhausted, and not just because of the lack of sleep. That’s just making things worse. I can walk about 50 feet before I need to rest. My big accomplishment of the day was to turn on the TV around noon.

I assume this is all just part of the chemo withdrawal symptoms, but I don’t really know. Tomorrow I have an appointment with an oncology nurse, so perhaps I’ll learn more then.

If there’s a silver lining to this, I suppose it’s the possibility that this is the bottom of the post-chemo symptoms, and now I’ll start getting better. We’ll see.

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Health Note

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Ferguson Is Even More Polarizing Than Polls Suggest

by MandyWMFom Posted on December 1, 2014

Mother Jones

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Georgia expat Ed Kilgore reports on a recent visit to his home state:

I’ve just spent nearly a week back home in exurban Atlanta, and I regret to report that the events in and in reaction to Ferguson have brought back (at least in some of the older white folks I talked with) nasty and openly racist attitudes I haven’t heard expressed in so unguarded a manner since the 1970s. The polling we’ve all seen about divergent perceptions of Ferguson doesn’t even begin to reflect the intensity of the hostility I heard towards “the blacks” (an inhibition against free use of the n-word, at least in semi-public, seems to be the only post-civil-rights taboo left), who have the outrageous temerity to protest an obvious act of self-defense by a police officer.

I’m not sure there’s really anything useful I can say about this. I just thought it was worth passing along.

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Ferguson Is Even More Polarizing Than Polls Suggest

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Could Immigration Sink Obamacare at the Supreme Court?

by Mark Q Manning Posted on December 1, 2014

Mother Jones

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David Savage writes today that President Obama’s executive order on immigration could have an unintended consequence: convincing Chief Justice John Roberts that Obama really is riding roughshod over the rule of law and needs to be reined in. And perhaps the latest challenge to Obamacare is just the place to start:

Two years ago, the chief justice surprised many by joining liberals on the court to uphold the constitutionality of Obama’s Affordable Care Act. And he probably holds the deciding vote in a second legal challenge to the healthcare law — one that seeks to eliminate government insurance subsidies to low- and middle-income enrollees in two-thirds of the nation.

But Roberts, an appointee of President George W. Bush, has shown an increasing skepticism toward what conservatives call Obama’s tendency to overreach….The question now is whether the president’s immigration action will influence the thinking of the justices, and particularly of Roberts, as they consider in the upcoming healthcare case whether the president exceeded his authority.

….Critics are appealing to Roberts and the court’s conservatives, arguing the president and his advisors have no power to unilaterally change a law passed by Congress. Their argument echoes the criticism voiced over Obama’s immigration directive, accusing the president of trying to fix a broken system by acting on his own rather than waiting for Congress.

Experts say that legally the healthcare case is a close call. If so, the outcome may turn on whether the justices are inclined to give the president the benefit of the doubt, or whether they believe it’s time to rein him in.

Granted, Savage is just speculating here. He really has no evidence for this at all and quotes nobody aside from a single legal expert from the Cato Institute. Still, you have to assume that perhaps Savage has been hearing rumors that prompted him to write this. And it certainly fits into speculation that Roberts may be hunting around for an excuse to atone for his apostasy two years ago when he upheld Obamacare in the first place.

It’s kind of unnerving to even suspect that Supreme Court justices might really think this way. But it’s hardly inconceivable. The law itself, along with the real-world consequences of the court’s actions, don’t seem to occupy a large share of the justices’ minds these days. These are becoming bleak times in Supreme Court land.

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Could Immigration Sink Obamacare at the Supreme Court?

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Good News from the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report

by VeraLNVsjwvas Posted on November 28, 2014

Mother Jones

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Everyone’s favorite CDC publication, the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, passes along some great news today: cigarette smoking is down. Among Americans 18 and older, only 17.8 percent now smoke cigarettes, down from 20.9 percent in 2005. What’s more, the proportion of daily smokers declined from 16.9 percent to 13.7 percent, and among daily smokers the number of cigarettes smoked also declined. By region, the highest level of smoking is found in the Midwest, followed by the South, the Northeast, and the West. Poor people smoke more than non-poor, and generally speaking, those with less education smoke more than those with more education.

In case you’re unpersuaded by all this, I’ve appended a trivial chart on the right showing the overall prevalence of smoking. It’s down. Are you persuaded now?

In any case, you’re probably not surprised by this news. So here’s something a little more interesting: it turns out the prevalence of smoking is considerably higher among the gay population than the straight population (26 percent vs. 17 percent). Is this common knowledge? Maybe, but I didn’t know it, and I sure wouldn’t have guessed it. Of course, all the gay people I know are well-educated West Coast folks, who probably have a very low rate of smoking regardless of sexual orientation. So I suppose I’m just too cloistered to have any clue about this.

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Good News from the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report

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After a Year Off, the Triumphant Return of My Annual Black Friday Post

by oraglobcvz Posted on November 28, 2014

Mother Jones

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According to the retail industry, “Black Friday” is the day when retail profits for the year go from red to black. Are you skeptical that this is really the origin of the term? You should be. After all, the term Black ___day, in other contexts, has always signified something terrible, like a stock market crash or the start of the Blitz. Is it reasonable to think that retailers deliberately chose this phrase to memorialize their biggest day of the year?

Not really. But to get the real story, we’ll have to trace its origins back in time. Here’s a 1985 article from the Philadelphia Inquirer:

Irwin Greenberg, a 30-year veteran of the retail trade, says it is a Philadelphia expression. “It surely can’t be a merchant’s expression,” he said. A spot check of retailers from across the country suggests that Greenberg might be on to something.

“I’ve never heard it before,” laughed Carol Sanger, a spokeswoman for Federated Department Stores in Cincinnati…”I have no idea what it means,” said Bill Dombrowski, director of media relations for Carter Hawley Hale Stores Inc. in Los Angeles…From the National Retail Merchants Association, the industry’s trade association in New York, came this terse statement: “Black Friday is not an accepted term in the retail industry…”

Hmm. So as recently as 1985 it wasn’t in common use nationwide. It was only in common use in Philadelphia. But why? If we go back to 1975, the New York Times informs us that it has something to do with the Army-Navy game. The gist of the story is that crowds used to pour into Philadelphia on the Friday after Thanksgiving to shop, they’d stay over to watch the game on Saturday, and then go home. It was the huge crowds that gave the day its bleak name.

But how old is the expression? When did it start? If we go back yet another decade we can find a Philly reference as early as 1966. An advertisement that year in the American Philatelist from a stamp shop in Philadelphia starts out: “‘Black Friday’ is the name which the Philadelphia Police Department has given to the Friday following Thanksgiving Day. It is not a term of endearment to them. ‘Black Friday’ officially opens the Christmas shopping season in center city, and it usually brings massive traffic jams and over-crowded sidewalks as the downtown stores are mobbed from opening to closing.”

But it goes back further than that. A couple of years ago I got an email from a Philadelphia reader who recalled the warnings he got from the older women at Wanamaker’s department store when he worked there in 1971:

They warned me to be prepared for the hoards of obnoxious brats and their demanding parents that would alight from the banks of elevators onto the eighth floor toy department, all racing to see the latest toys on their way to visit Santa. The feeling of impending doom sticks with me to this day. The experienced old ladies that had worked there for years called it “Black Friday.”

“For years.” But how many years? Ben Zimmer collects some evidence that the term was already in common use by 1961 (common enough that Philly merchants were trying to change the term to “Big Friday”), and passes along an interview with Joseph Barrett, who recounted his role in popularizing the expression when he worked as a reporter in Philadelphia:

In 1959, the old Evening Bulletin assigned me to police administration, working out of City Hall. Nathan Kleger was the police reporter who covered Center City for the Bulletin. In the early 1960s, Kleger and I put together a front-page story for Thanksgiving and we appropriated the police term “Black Friday” to describe the terrible traffic conditions. Center City merchants complained loudly to Police Commissioner Albert N. Brown that drawing attention to traffic deterred customers from coming downtown. I was worried that maybe Kleger and I had made a mistake in using such a term, so I went to Chief Inspector Albert Trimmer to get him to verify it.

So all the evidence points in one direction. The term originated in Philadelphia, probably sometime in the 50s, and wasn’t in common use in the rest of the country until decades later. And it did indeed refer to something unpleasant: the gigantic Army-Navy-post-Thanksgiving day crowds and traffic jams, which both retail workers and police officers dreaded. The retail industry originally loathed the term, and the whole “red to black” fairy tale was tacked on sometime in the 80s by an overcaffeinated flack trying to put lipstick on a pig that had gotten a little too embarrassing for America’s shopkeepers. The first reference that I’ve found to this usage was in 1982, and by the early 90s it had become the official story.

And today everyone believes it, which is a pretty good demonstration of the power of corporate PR. But now you know the real story behind Black Friday.

UPDATE: And what’s the future of Black Friday? Global domination! According to the redoubtable folks at eDigitalResearch, three-quarters of UK consumers have now heard of Black Friday. And they’re treating it with the same respect we do. From Marketing magazine today: “Black Friday is living up to its ominous name, with police being called to supermarkets across the UK, websites crashing and at least two arrests being made for violent behaviour, as bargain-hungry shoppers vie for the best deals.” Boo-yah!

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After a Year Off, the Triumphant Return of My Annual Black Friday Post

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GOP Takes Revenge Over Immigration Order in Tax Bill. Obama Tells Them to Pound Sand.

by EPEElvapbisqwzl Posted on November 26, 2014

Mother Jones

Danny Vinik describes the tax extender package currently wending its way through Congress:

Imagine somebody asked you to imagine the worst possible deal on taxes. It’d probably have the following qualities:

It would be bad for the environment.

It would be bad for the deficit.

It would give short shrift to the working poor.

And it would be a bonanza for corporations.

Unfortunately, you don’t have to conjure up such a package. Congressional Republicans already have. And for some unfathomable reason, Senate Democrats including Harry Reid seem inclined to go along—although the White House has vowed to veto such a deal if Congress goes ahead and passes it.

Actually, there’s nothing all that unfathomable about what’s going on. The tax extender bill may be a dog’s breakfast of legitimate tax provisions running interference for a long laundry list of indefensible giveaways and corporate welfare, but it’s always been supported by both parties and it would have passed long ago if not for an outbreak of routine sniping over amendments and 60-vote thresholds last spring. That aside, the whole thing is a perfect bipartisan lovefest. Republicans and Democrats alike want to make sure that corporations continue to get all their favorite tax breaks.

In fact, the only thing that’s really new here is the nature of Obama’s veto threat. He’s made the threat before, but primarily because the extenders weren’t being paid for and would add to the deficit. The fact that middle-class tax breaks might not also be extended was sort of an afterthought. Now, however, that’s front and center:

The emerging tax legislation would make permanent 10 provisions, including an expanded research and development tax credit….a measure allowing small businesses to deduct virtually any investment; the deduction for state and local sales taxes….tax breaks for car-racing tracks….benefits for racehorse owners.

….Left off were the two tax breaks valued most by liberal Democrats: a permanently expanded earned-income credit and a child tax credit for the working poor. Friday night, Republican negotiators announced they would exclude those measures as payback for the president’s executive order on immigration, saying a surge of newly legalized workers would claim the credit, tax aides from both parties said.

So there you have it. This bill is the first victim of Republican frothing over Obama’s immigration order. As revenge, they left out Democratic tax priorities, and Obama is having none of it.

This is all part of the new Obama we’ve seen since the midterm election, which seems to have had an oddly liberating effect on him. Over the course of just a few weeks he’s been throwing sand in Republican faces will gleeful abandon: cutting climate change deals with the Chinese; demanding full net neutrality regulations from the FCC; issuing an executive order on immigration; and now threatening to veto a Republican-crafted bill unless they include expanded EITC and child tax credits. It’s as though he’s tired of their endless threats to go nuclear over every little thing and just doesn’t care anymore. Go ahead, he’s telling them. Make my day.

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GOP Takes Revenge Over Immigration Order in Tax Bill. Obama Tells Them to Pound Sand.

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Are Term Limits a Good Idea?

by Remona20Ax Posted on November 24, 2014

Mother Jones

Jim Newton, a longtime local politics reporter in Los Angeles, wrote his final column for the LA Times today. In it, he offered up “a handful of changes that might make a big difference,” and the one that resonates with me is his suggestion that both LA and California do away with term limits:

Elected officials who were popular with their constituents once held their seats for decades, building up experience and knowledge; now, with term limits in place, they’re barely seated before they start searching for the next office. That’s brought new faces but at great cost. Power has shifted from those we elect to those we don’t, to the permanent bureaucracy and to lobbyists. Problems get kicked down the road in favor of attention-grabbing short-term initiatives that may have long-term consequences.

Case in point: Why do so many public employees enjoy budget-breaking pensions? Because term-limited officials realize it is easier to promise a future benefit than to give raises now. The reckoning comes later; by then they’re gone.

Term limits locally were the work of Richard Riordan, who bankrolled the initiative and later became mayor. I asked him recently about them, and he startled me with his response: It was, he said, “the worst mistake of my life.”

Term limits always sound good. The problem with the idea is that being a council member or a legislator is like any other job: you get better with experience. If your legislature is populated solely by people with, at most, a term or two of experience, it’s inevitable that (a) they’ll have an almost pathologically short-term focus, and (b) more and more power will flow to lobbyists and bureaucrats who stay around forever and understand the levers of power better.

For what it’s worth, I’d recommend a middle ground. I understand the problem people have with politicians who win office and essentially occupy sinecures for the rest of their lives. It’s often a recipe for becoming insulated and out of touch with the real-world needs of constituents. But short term limits don’t solve the problem of unaccountable power, they simply shift the power to other places. The answer, I think, is moderate term limits. Something between, say, ten and twenty years. That’s long enough to build up genuine expertise and a genuine power base, while still preventing an office from becoming a lifetime of guaranteed employment.

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Are Term Limits a Good Idea?

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Obama’s Immigration Order: Lots of Sound and Fury, But Not Much Precedent

by RCXModesto Posted on November 24, 2014

Mother Jones

In the New Republic this weekend, Eric Posner warns that President Obama’s recent executive action on immigration may come back to haunt liberals. Obama’s order was perfectly legal, he says, but “it may modify political norms that control what the president can do.” And since most of the regulatory apparatus of the government is fundamentally liberal in nature, a political norm that allows presidents to suspend enforcement of rules they don’t like benefits conservatives a lot more than it does liberals.

This is not something to be taken lightly, and Posner makes his point pretty reasonably—unlike a lot of conservatives who have been busily writing gleeful, half-witted columns about suspending the estate tax or dismantling the EPA. Political norms matter, as Republicans know very well, since they’ve smashed so many of them in recent years. Still, there are a couple of reasons that there’s probably less here than meets the eye, and Posner acknowledges them himself.

First, although the core of Obama’s authority to modify immigration law lies in his inherent power to practice prosecutorial discretion—which is rooted in the Constitution—the specific actions he took are justified by statutory language and congressional budgeting priorities that are unique to immigration law. As conservative lawyer Margaret Stock reminds us, “The Immigration and Nationality Act and other laws are chock-full of huge grants of statutory authority to the president.” And Posner himself agrees. “The president’s authority over this arena is even greater than his authority over other areas of the law.” He reiterates this in his TNR piece, explaining that immigration law “falls uniquely under executive authority, as a matter of history and tradition.”

So Obama’s actions may be unusually broad, but that’s largely because immigration law is written to give the president considerable latitude. That’s much less the case for things like the tax code or the Clean Air Act. So even though it’s true, as Posner says, that most regulatory statutes “contain pockets of vagueness,” there’s less precedent here than it seems, and less breaking of political norms than Posner imagines.

But there’s a second reason that Obama isn’t seriously breaking any political norms: they were already broken years ago. Posner himself tells the story:

In 1981, Ronald Reagan entered the presidency vowing to deregulate the economy. But because the House was controlled by Democrats, Reagan could not persuade Congress to repeal as many regulatory statutes as he wanted to.

So Reagan sought to undermine the regulatory system itself. He forced agencies to show proposed regulations to the Office of Management and Budget, a White House agency, and empowered the OMB to block or delay regulations that did not satisfy a cost-benefit test. Although OMB was told to obey the law, liberals howled that the effect of the cost-benefit test was to undercut regulation since no such test existed in the statutes under which agencies issued regulations. And when the Reagan administration could not change or repeal the rules, it cut back on enforcement. The Justice Department famously reduced enforcement of the antitrust and civil rights laws. More howls ensued.

But the Reagan administration exhausted itself fighting against political distrust of an imperial executive and overreached by trying to deregulate in areas—like the environment—that people cared about. Republican successors—the two Bushes—did not pursue deregulation through non-enforcement with such zeal. Obama’s deferral actions, by further normalizing non-enforcement, may reinvigorate the Reagan-era push for deregulation through the executive branch.

It’s become traditional that when a new president takes office he immediately suspends any of his predecessor’s executive actions that have been recently implemented. At the same time, his own team begins beavering away on regulatory changes that are part of his campaign agenda. At a different level, orders are written that make it either easier or harder for agencies to implement new rules and enforce old ones. And while Reagan may not have gotten all the deregulation he wanted, the OMB has become a permanent part of the regulatory landscape, which is yet another avenue for presidents to affect the enforcement of rules. It may not get a lot of attention, but when you fiddle with the cost-benefit parameters that OMB uses, the ripple effect can be surprisingly extensive.

In other words, agency regulations and executive orders are already major battlegrounds of public policy that are aggressively managed by the White House, regardless of which party is in power. Has Obama expanded this battleground? Perhaps. But I don’t think the change is nearly as great as some people are making it out to be. Immigration law is fairly unique in its grant of power to the executive, so we don’t really have to worry about President Rand Paul rewriting the tax code from the Oval Office. We do need to worry about all the other executive actions he might take, but for the most part, I don’t think that’s changed much. The kinds of things he can do are about the same now as they were a week ago.

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Obama’s Immigration Order: Lots of Sound and Fury, But Not Much Precedent

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Finland Starting to Think Hard About Joining NATO

by AlanKunkle Posted on November 24, 2014

Mother Jones

Behold the results of Vladimir Putin’s brilliant strategy of scaring the hell out of every single country within bomber range of Russia:

As Russian-backed separatists have eviscerated another non-NATO neighbor this year — Ukraine — Finnish leaders have watched with growing alarm. They are increasingly questioning whether the nonaligned path they navigated through the Cold War can keep them safe as Europe heads toward another period of dangerous standoffs between West and East.

….The palpable anxiety in this country that many in the West consider a model of progressive and stable democratic governance reflects how unsettled Europe has become since Russia’s annexation of Crimea in March. Many in Helsinki are convinced that Russia will not remain deterred for long and say Finland needs to fundamentally rethink elements of its security policy that have been bedrock principles for decades.

….“It’s going in a terrifying direction,” said Elisabeth Rehn, a former Finnish defense minister who favors NATO membership. “It’s only been 100 years since we gained our independence from Russia. Crimea was a part of Russia, too. Will they try to take back what belonged to them 100 years ago?”

Rehn said she doubts Russia would go that far but said the fear of Russian military aggression is real.

Will Finland join NATO? Probably not anytime soon. But just think about what Putin has accomplished here. Finland stayed out of NATO for the entire four decades of the Cold War, but is now so unnerved by Russia’s actions that it’s seriously thinking about joining up. If Putin is truly afraid of Russia being fully surrounded by the West, his worst fears are about to come true thanks to his own actions. No one wants to be the next eastern Ukraine, and right now NATO membership is probably looking mighty appealing to a lot of people who were OK with the status quo a few years ago.

Putin’s bellicose nationalism may play well at home, but it sure isn’t doing him any favors anywhere else.

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Finland Starting to Think Hard About Joining NATO

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