Tag Archives: military

Are Young Women Complacent About Abortion Rights?

by DaleneX56466 Posted on January 6, 2016

Mother Jones

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Here is DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz:

Do you notice a difference between young women and women our age in their excitement about Hillary Clinton? Is there a generational divide?

Here’s what I see: a complacency among the generation of young women whose entire lives have been lived after Roe v. Wade was decided.

I won’t even pretend that I understand this answer. Complacency about what? Abortion? Politics in general? And what does this have to do with Hillary Clinton?

Beats me. But it doesn’t really matter. Everyone assumes that DWS was talking about complacency toward abortion rights, and young feminists aren’t happy about her sweeping criticism of an entire generation. Generally speaking, though, the response has been that there are plenty of young women who work hard on abortion rights these days, which is certainly true. But DWS isn’t denying that. What she’s saying is that there are fewer young women today working hard on abortion rights. Or perhaps that they don’t have as much passion as they used to have.

That got me curious. Is this true? Is there any evidence for it? Unfortunately, I couldn’t really figure out how you might measure it. I doubt there’s any historical data on the number of abortion activists broken up by age and gender. There’s plenty of poll data on attitudes toward abortion, but that doesn’t help—and attitudes haven’t changed a lot anyway. Is there any kind of survey data (broken up by age and gender) that shows how strongly people feel about abortion rights? Or how often it’s a significant factor in voting? Not that I could find.

This isn’t really very important, and I suppose someone could just ask Wasserman Schultz to explain what she meant. But I’m still curious: is there any data at all that might point in one direction or another when it comes to generational attitudes toward abortion activism? Anyone have any ideas?

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Are Young Women Complacent About Abortion Rights?

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What Makes a Killer a Terrorist? We Asked the Nation’s Top News Outlets

by ModestoBrickhou Posted on December 3, 2015

Mother Jones

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In the aftermath of the recent scourge of mass shootings—from San Bernardino to Colorado Springs to Charleston—as well as attacks aimed at Black Lives Matter protesters, many have asked why the media and public officials have been hesitant to call the suspects “terrorists.”

In a press conference on Wednesday, San Bernardino Police Chief Jarrod Berguan said, “We have no information at this point to indicate that this is terrorist-related, in the traditional sense that people may be thinking. Obviously, at a minimum, we have a domestic terrorist-type situation that occurred here.”

By definition, a terrorist is a person who uses violent acts to achieve political ends. So do major news outlets have protocols on when to use the words “terrorism” and “terrorist”? And does the media use them in a biased way? We reached out to the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Associated Press, and NPR to hear how they approach the issue. Here are shortened versions of what they said:

New York Times‘ Standards Editor Phil Corbett:

The Times doesn’t have any “official” definition of terrorism. Unlike the U.S. government, we don’t have some kind of formal process of labeling terrorists, and I don’t think we need one. It’s probably not surprising that “terrorism” and related terms are likely to be used more often for attacks connected to well-known, long-standing, recognized terrorist organizations like ISIS or Al Qaeda—events like the Paris attacks, for instance. But in fact The Times has often used “terrorism” in connection with white supremacist attacks and other cases of domestic extremism, going back to Timothy McVeigh and beyond. A quick check shows that we used it in several stories in the Charleston coverage. The main point is, we try to report the facts accurately and fairly, in language that is clear to our readers. We are not working with predetermined categories or official terms or definitions. (When I’m in doubt, I generally turn to the dictionary).

The Washington Post‘s Executive Editor Marty Baron:

We don’t have a rigid protocol. Given the range of potential circumstances, we make judgments on a case by case basis. We’ve used “terrorism” and “terrorist” for both domestic and international acts of violence. For U.S. incidents, we have used the phrase “domestic terrorist” or “domestic terrorism.”

The Associated Press’ Vice President of Media Relations Paul Colford:

We generally avoid the terms because we prefer to describe more specifically what the individuals in question have done.

NPR’s Standard and Practices Editor Mark Memmott:

In each case, there are talks about the right ways to describe what has happened. That may change in the first few hours or days as more information comes in. “Murder” or “terror” or “hate crime”—all those words start percolating in the back of your mind, but it’s always best to stick to the facts and stick to the action words as information is still coming in before trying to apply labels. Now, there comes a point where it’s clear one way or the other in many of these cases. It became clear pretty quickly in Paris that this was something more than “simple” crimes. You had a lot of eye witness reporting about what was said by the attackers, how they operated, and the coordinated nature of the attacks. The targets were civilians—often an important consideration when deciding whether something is or is not terrorism.

Some of the threshold questions you have to start looking at and trying to answer: Is there evidence that it was a political motive? Is there evidence or indication that one of the motives was to strike terror in some sort of an attempt to force change, either in government or policy?

…Regarding the shooting in Charleston I don’t think newsrooms have settled on that one yet. Did he have political motives or was it a hate crime—a racially motivated crime? We’ll find out when the trial gets going whether he really did think he was going to start a race war.

Part of the media’s job is to lay out the facts. Labels are interesting but they sometimes aren’t helpful and they can get in the way.

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What Makes a Killer a Terrorist? We Asked the Nation’s Top News Outlets

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Military Opens All Combat Jobs to Women

by RudolphMott Posted on December 3, 2015

Mother Jones

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Defense Secretary Ash Carter announced on Thursday that the military will open all of its combat jobs, including those in special operations, to women for the first time.

Those combat jobs, including in infantry, artillery, tanks, and other front-line roles, will be open to women after a 30-day waiting period, Carter announced at a press conference. “Today I’m announcing my decision…to proceed with opening all these remaining occupations and positions to women,” he said. “There will be no exceptions.”

Carter cast the decision as a vital tool in recruiting talent and keeping up the military’s capabilities. “Our force of the future must continue to benefit from the best people America has to offer,” he said. “In the 21st century, that includes drawing strength from the broadest possible pool of talent.”

The military opened some indirect combat jobs to women in 1993, including flying combat aircraft and serving on Navy fighting ships, but kept front-line roles closed to female service members. That translated to about 220,000 positions across the military in 2015, Carter said. The change began in 2013, when the Obama administration said the military would have three years to study the role of women in combat and provide any reasons why they should still be barred from jobs such as infantry, artillery, and other direct combat roles. In that time, the military conducted studies and tests in which women participated in grueling combat schools, including Marine infantry officer training and the Army’s Ranger School, which three female officers passed this year. Carter said all the services except the Marine Corps recommended full integration. That includes Special Operations Command, which oversees elite forces like the Navy SEALs and the Army’s Delta Force.

Carter said he was confident that the inclusion of women would not reduce combat effectiveness, and that physical and performance standards would not be altered for women. Some military standards, including the scores on mandatory physical fitness tests, are scaled differently for men and women. “Women will be subject to the same standards and rules that men will,” he said. “Combat effectiveness is why we’re here.”

Carter acknowledged that the transition may be rocky. “While at the end of the day this will make us a better and stronger force, there still will be problems to fix and challenges to overcome,” he said. “We shouldn’t diminish that.” he said.

The Marine Corps was the service most vehemently opposed to integration. It released a study this year saying mixed-gender units performed worse in combat than all-male units, a conclusion that some analysts rejected. Carter said that study, which he called “not definitive,” and other data provided by the Marines were ultimately not enough to convince him that the service should get its own exemption from integrating combat unit. “We are a joint force, and I have decided to make a decision that applies to the entire force,” Carter said, noting that Marine Gen. Joe Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had made the same recommendation. Dunford, however, did not attend the press conference, and reporters pointed out that in his previous job as the Marine Corps’ top general, he opposed full gender integration for the Marines.

Carter said Dunford will work with him as the military integrates all its units, but he seemed to dodge a question about whether Dunford supported the move. “You’ll have to speak to him about that, but he understands what my decision is, and my decision is my decision,” Carter said.

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Military Opens All Combat Jobs to Women

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Here’s Why You Shouldn’t Call Burma a Democracy Just Yet

by hongNgocBaoTram Posted on November 13, 2015

Mother Jones

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President Obama and other world leaders are sending their congratulations to Burma, whose biggest pro-democracy party, led by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, won a landslide victory in a historic general election—the first time in nearly half a century that citizens had a hand in picking their rulers. Suu Kyi’s party, the National League for Democracy, clinched enough seats in the national parliament to form the next government and choose the next president. It’s a moment for celebration, but the fight for democracy isn’t over yet. Here are three challenges Suu Kyi’s party now faces:

Forming a government: In 1990, the last time Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) won a general election, the results were annulled by the then-ruling military dictatorship, which subsequently threw many of the party’s candidates in prison. Fortunately, the dictatorship ended four years ago, and leaders in Burma’s current government—dominated by former military generals—have congratulated Suu Kyi on her win this week and pledged to respect the results of the vote.

But the new parliament will not sit until early next year, and the new president likely won’t be inaugurated until March. That’s a lot of time for something to go wrong. “Nowhere else in the world is there such a gap between the end of the election and the forming of the new administration, and certainly it’s something about which we should all be concerned,” Suu Kyi told reporters last week at her lakeside residence in Rangoon.

Picking a president: Suu Kyi is Burma’s most popular politician, but she can’t become president. Before the dictatorship ended, the country’s military leaders wrote a constitution with a clause that makes Suu Kyi ineligible for the job because her late husband was British and her two sons hold foreign citizenship. Suu Kyi has vowed to get around this constitutional ban. Last week, she told reporters that she would lead the government in a position “above the president.” This week, she elaborated in an interview that the NLD would pick a president with “no authority” who would “act in accordance with the positions of the party.”

Dealing with the military: The NLD won a majority of contested parliamentary seats, but not all parliamentary seats were up for grabs. In fact, thanks to the constitution, 25 percent of seats are reserved for unelected military representatives who hold veto power over constitutional amendments and have no interest in allowing Suu Kyi to become president. Asked about the military bloc in parliament during a press conference last week, Suu Kyi replied, “I don’t believe in unbreakable blocks, especially human ones.”

The constitution also gives the military control over the defense, border affairs, and home affairs ministries. And in a state of emergency, it allows a special military-led body to assume sweeping state powers. What’s more, the military continues to wage civil wars against ethnic minority groups in the countryside, and Suu Kyi will likely have little control to end these conflicts. “Burma will get democracy,” Aung Thein, a member of the NLD’s campaign committee, told me. “But we will have to work for many years.”

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Here’s Why You Shouldn’t Call Burma a Democracy Just Yet

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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.

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

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A Defense of Becky Quick

by lepsacazare Posted on October 31, 2015

Mother Jones

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CNBC’s Becky Quick has come in for some criticism for being unprepared during Wednesday’s debate. To refresh your memory, here’s what happened during an exchange with Donald Trump:

QUICK: You had talked a little bit about Marco Rubio. I think you called him “Mark Zuckerberg’s personal senator” because he was in favor of the H1B.

TRUMP: I never said that. I never said that.

….QUICK: My apologies. I’m sorry.

In fact, Trump had said that in his own immigration plan. Why didn’t Quick know this?

I think we all know what happened here. Someone on Quick’s staff prepared some notes that included the quote, but didn’t specify where it came from. So when Trump denied saying it, Quick was stuck.

Now, sure, the staffwork here was bad, and Quick should have been better prepared. But that’s not the real problem here. The real problem is that Quick was unprepared for bald-faced lying. She expected Trump to spin or tap dance or try to explain away what he said. She didn’t expect him to just flatly deny ever saying it. That’s the only circumstance that would require her to know exactly where the quote came from.

This was a real epidemic on Wednesday night. Candidates have apparently figured out that they don’t need to tap dance. They can just baldly lie. Trump did it. Rubio did it. Carson did it. Fiorina did it. They know that time is short and they probably won’t get called on it. The worst that will happen is that fact checkers will correct them in the morning, but only a tiny fraction of the viewing audience will ever see it. So what’s the downside of lying?

Future moderators are going to have to be aware of this sea change. Modern candidates understand that they don’t need to bother with spin and exaggeration any more. They can just lie, and etiquette limits how much debate moderators can push back. I don’t think debate etiquette is going to change, so this probably means that moderators are going to have to learn to ask questions a little differently. We live in a new era.

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A Defense of Becky Quick

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A Billionaire Sued Us. We Won. But We Still Have Big Legal Bills to Pay.

by HomerSevttp Posted on October 30, 2015

Mother Jones

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By now, you’ve probably read about Mother Jones‘ landmark legal win against Frank VanderSloot, a billionaire political donor. If you haven’t, you can read the full backstory here (it’s riveting). Or, if you’re feeling lazy, here’s the TL;DR version:

After the Citizens United decision allowed wealthy political donors to drastically increase their spending, we wrote a piece about one such donor: Frank VanderSloot. He and his company were among the biggest donors to Romney’s super-PAC. It was a straightforward bit of investigative reporting: letting readers know who was funding the campaign.

VanderSloot saw it differently. His lawyers sent us letters complaining about the piece. We didn’t retract our story, and in 2013 he sued us for defamation. Earlier this month, shortly before the case was set to go to trial, an Idaho judge dismissed the lawsuit, finding that our reporting was accurate and that the article was protected under the First Amendment.

It was a huge victory. We were up against a powerful billionaire and we won. But it came at a great cost: at least $2.5 million for us and our insurer, and $650,000 in out-of-pocket expenses for Mother Jones, to be precise. Everyone’s been asking whether we can recoup our attorney’s fees from VanderSloot, but unfortunately the answer is no.

The win means a lot to me, personally, too. As someone who writes about rich and powerful people, it’s good to know that the First Amendment is alive and well. And it makes me beyond proud to write for Mother Jones: Not too many other shops would have had the guts to fight back, but we knew you’d expect us to, and that you’d have our back if we took a stand.

If you haven’t already, can you pitch in to help us pay our legal bills? If you can, your donation will be doubled by First Look Media’s Press Freedom Litigation Fund—they’re matching up to $74,999 in donations (the same amount VanderSloot sued us for). You can give by credit card or PayPal.

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A Billionaire Sued Us. We Won. But We Still Have Big Legal Bills to Pay.

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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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Are We Allowed to Say That Marco Rubio Is Lying About His Tax Plan?

by WillN98zldly Posted on October 30, 2015

Mother Jones

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I’ve written a couple of posts about Marco Rubio’s debate tiff with John Harwood, which revolves around the question of how the poor and the middle class fare under Rubio’s tax plan. Harwood wanted to know why it was so much better for the rich than the middle class, and Rubio responded by saying his plan would help the very poor a lot.

In other words, Rubio declined to answer the question and instead answered a different one. But today Dylan Matthews digs into this a bit and concludes (surprise!) that Rubio’s plan probably doesn’t even help the poor all that much:

How is Rubio helping the poor so much? Well, Rubio’s plan would replace the standard deduction and personal exemption with a $2,000 credit ($4,000 for couples)….But Rubio’s proposal, as originally laid out, is not a plain old credit. It’s a fully refundable credit. Think about that for a second. Rubio’s original proposal would give any household in America $2,000 or $4,000, no questions asked. It was a basic income. It was a massive increase in the welfare state of a kind that no Democratic candidate, including Bernie Sanders, is proposing.

So it’s perhaps no surprise that when I asked his team about this, they insisted that this was a mistake, and the credit was in fact much more limited. “Rules would be tailored to ensure that our reforms would not create payments for new, non-working filers,” a Rubio aide told me in April.

It’s unclear what exactly that means….Here’s the problem, though: The Tax Foundation assumed that Rubio had proposed a basic income….Given that Rubio will not, in fact, create a massive new welfare program, this finding is pretty dubious.

How about that? Rubio misled the Tax Foundation into concluding that his plan would help the poor, and for some reason he’s never gotten around to correcting the error. In fact, he’s been aggressively touting the Tax Foundation analysis to “prove” that his plan helps the poor. He even accused John Harwood of misrepresenting his plan on national TV even though he knew perfectly well that he was the one misrepresenting his plan. If I were the Tax Foundation, I’d be pissed.

Still, I’m sure this was all an honest mistake on Rubio’s part, and he’ll rush to give the Tax Foundation updated information now that he realizes what he’s done. Right? He’s an honest young man, after all.

Right?

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Are We Allowed to Say That Marco Rubio Is Lying About His Tax Plan?

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Here Are the Ridiculous Post-Debate Overnight Online Polls

by KristieE36 Posted on October 29, 2015

Mother Jones

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Is it worth reporting the results of the overnight online polls following the debate? Sure. Why not? We all know that online polls are mostly garbage, but we also know that if you aggregate them we can turn dross into gold. So let’s do it! The chart on the right shows you the average of three online polls from Drudge, Time, and CNBC.

Let’s also check out Betfair. Unfortunately, I’ve never been quite sure I know how to interpret their trend charts, but if I did it right this time it looks like Cruz is up, Trump is even, and Rubio, Carson, and Bush are down. Since this is probably all meaningless, I suppose it doesn’t matter much if I’m interpreting the betting results right. Still, one of these days I guess I should figure it out for real.

If this stuff has any legitimacy at all, I’d say that (a) Cruz did well, (b) Rubio might have helped his cause, (c) Carson is ebbing, (d) Jeb is toast, and (e) nobody else changed their standing much. I’m ignoring the huge number of people who thought Trump won the debate because I refuse to believe it.

From:

Here Are the Ridiculous Post-Debate Overnight Online Polls

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