Tag Archives: mississippi

Sorry, But Childhood Obesity Hasn’t Budged in the Past Ten Years

by EstelaPalfreyma Posted on March 19, 2014

Mother Jones

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Remember that CDC study showing a dramatic drop in obesity among 2-5 year olds that I wrote about last month? I was skeptical that it was real, and today Sharon Begley of Reuters follows up. Her conclusion? The whole thing is almost certainly bogus:

The latest study is based a well-respected data set taken from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, or NHANES….The 2011-2012 version of the survey included 9,120 people; 871 of them were 2 to 5 years old….”In small samples like this, you are going to have chance fluctuations,” said epidemiologist Geoffrey Kabat of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City.

….A study of preschoolers in the federal WIC (Women, Infants and Children) program, which provides food vouchers, nutrition classes and counseling to low-income families, found virtually no change in obesity rates….”We agree there is a slight downward trend in obesity among 2-to-5-year olds,” said Shannon Whaley, a co-author of the WIC study. “But a 43 percent drop is absolutely not what we’re seeing.” The WIC study included more than 200,000 children

….Other studies also raise questions about the 40 percent claim. An earlier CDC study, reported in JAMA in December 2012, found that the prevalence of obesity among 2-to-4-year olds in low-income families fell to 14.9 percent in 2010 from 15.2 percent in 2003. That represents an improvement of less than 2 percent.

….For obesity rates to drop, researchers reckon, young children have to eat differently and become more active. But research shows little sign of such changes among 2-to-5-year olds, casting more doubt on the 43 percent claim….In 2010 Whaley and her colleagues examined the effectiveness of WIC classes and counseling to encourage healthy eating and activities for women and children in the program. Their findings were discouraging: Television watching and consumption of sweet or salty snacks actually rose, while fruit and vegetable consumption fell — changes that could lead to weight gain. One positive was a rise in physical activity.

To recap: the CDC study was small and had large error bars; other, larger studies find only slight drops in obesity; and there’s no indication of any behavioral changes that might have produced a dramatic weight loss. I’d add to that the fact that the CDC data showed no correlation between lower weight at ages 2-5 and lower weight a few years later at ages 6-11.

Bottom line: I hate to be such a buzzkill, but the CDC result seems highly likely to be nothing more than statistical noise. Childhood obesity has barely budged in the last decade.

Continued: 

Sorry, But Childhood Obesity Hasn’t Budged in the Past Ten Years

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The Strange, Suicidal Odyssey of Dave Camp’s Tax Reform Plan

by CorneliusDowse Posted on March 17, 2014

Mother Jones

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A couple of weeks ago I wrote about Dave Camp’s tax reform proposal, and I was predictably dismissive. It was decent effort, I said, but it was DOA before Camp even officially announced it. Still, “I’ll be interested in following the reaction as everyone figures out just whose ox would be gored by his various bullet points. Should be fun.”

In reality, I just forgot about it entirely. But it turns out that the biggest ox being gored by Camp’s plan was Wall Street, which was very much not amused by his proposal to levy a small tax on large banks. They threatened to cancel all GOP fundraisers as long as the bank tax was on the table, and this was enough to bury Camp’s proposal once and for all.

So far, so boring. Camp’s proposal never stood a chance, and the fact that Wall Street happened to put the final nail in the coffin is basically just a footnote. Jon Chait, however, gets at something more interesting:

The whole point of the push-back from Wall Street, which has reinforced a wildly unenthusiastic reception within the GOP, is not only to prevent Republicans from striking a deal with Democrats…. It’s to murder his plan in a public way so as to prevent it from becoming the baseline for any future Republican agenda. That effort seems to be meeting with predictable, depressing success.

It leaves unanswered the basic mystery of why Camp thought he could write a plan like this in the first place. Sources I’ve asked believe Camp was playing a kind of double game, an interpretation that closely fits all the public reporting. He promised Republicans he could produce a tax reform that would lower the top rate to 25 percent, a holy grail of GOP policymaking, and which would produce a massive windfall for the rich. He had also given lip service to make sure his reform did not decrease tax revenue or increase the tax burden on the poor and middle class.

Meeting all these goals was arithmetically impossible. But Republican fiscal proposals usually come face-to-face with arithmetic impossibility. It is their oldest and most bitter foe. Usually they step around with some kind of evasion or chicanery. Camp actually gave in and acceded to his other, un-emphasized goals of revenue and distributional neutrality (that is, ensuring his plan raised the same amount of tax dollars and didn’t shift the burden downward). Nobody outside of Camp and a handful of allies seems to have realized this until the plan was already out in the open.

Unfortunately, this still leaves the basic mystery unanswered. It’s true, as Chait says, that the usual Republican promise—we can lower top rates to 25 percent and make up for it by closing tax breaks—is plainly impossible and everyone knows it. It’s a nice applause line, but it only works as long as the tax breaks are never spelled out, something that requires even more than the usual amount of smoke and mirrors we expect from politicians.

But here’s the thing: obviously Camp knew this. Just as obviously, he knew that making the math work out would produce a plan that Republicans and their interest groups would hate. In the end, he could reduce the top rate only to 35 percent, and only at the cost of killing or reducing some very specific tax breaks that rich people didn’t want killed or reduced.

Camp has been in Congress for more than two decades. He’s hardly an ivory tower naif, and he must have known perfectly well that his plan would do little except to expose Republican hypocrisy on taxes. So why did he do it?

Taken from: 

The Strange, Suicidal Odyssey of Dave Camp’s Tax Reform Plan

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GOP Offers Up a New Health Care Propo….z z z z z….al

by MeiAllardyce Posted on March 17, 2014

Mother Jones

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I hear that House Republicans have a shiny new health care plan they plan to introduce sometime soon. Before I read past the headlines, let me take a guess at what’s in it:

Tort reform
Health savings accounts
Interstate purchase of health plans
High-risk pools

OK, now let’s take a look. Here is Robert Costa in the Washington Post:

The plan includes an expansion of high-risk insurance pools, promotion of health savings accounts and inducements for small businesses to purchase coverage together. The tenets of the plan — which could expand to include the ability to buy insurance across state lines, guaranteed renewability of policies and changes to medical-malpractice regulations — are ideas that various conservatives have for a long time backed as part of broader bills.

Hmmm. It looks like I missed a couple of things: “inducements” for small businesses and “guaranteed renewability” of policies. Still, I nailed the main points. That’s a pretty amazing feat of crystal ball gazing, isn’t it?

No, of course not. It’s like predicting that a Republican tax plan will include lower rates on the rich. They might package it in different wrapping paper, but it’s always the same old stuff. And it’s worth keeping in mind that guaranteed renewability of policies has been the law for a long time, so it’s unlikely the GOP plan actually offers anything substantive on that point. Ditto for the small business “inducements,” which will probably just turn out to be tax cuts of some kind.

Basically, Republican health care proposals are always, always, always a repackaging of the four tired old points above. Nobody seriously thinks that any of them will expand access to health care in any serious way, but that doesn’t matter. These are the only things Republicans can all agree on, so that’s what they always propose. Whether it works or not isn’t really the point.

If you want more detail about all this, rather than just my exasperated Cliff Notes version, check out Jonathan Cohn here. He has it all covered.

Original article: 

GOP Offers Up a New Health Care Propo….z z z z z….al

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Obamacare is Probably Safe, But It’s Not a Slam Dunk

by Prokippxv Posted on March 17, 2014

Mother Jones

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I was chatting with a friend this weekend about what Republicans will do if they manage to win total control of the government in 2016. Will they abolish the filibuster and repeal Obamacare? I think the odds are low. At a guess, I’d put the chances of winning total control at p=20%, the conditional odds of abolishing the filibuster at p=50%, and the conditional odds of then repealing Obamacare at p=50%. (Why so low for repeal? Because by 2017 there are going to be a lot of people benefiting from parts of Obamacare; at least a few Republicans will recognize that you really can’t repeal just the unpopular bits; and the health care industry will have spent billions of dollars committing itself to operating within the framework of the law.) So that’s about a 5% chance that Obamacare dies in 2017. Not zero, but not very significant either.

But what about 2015? What if Republicans win the Senate later this year? Paul Waldman surveys the landscape and notes that House and Senate Republicans are offering very different campaign visions of what to do about Obamacare:

See the difference? The senators accept that the ACA is law and are thinking about how they’d like to change it. The House members are coming up with another way to make a futile, symbolic shaking of their fists in the general direction of the White House. And this may offer a clue to how legislating would proceed in a Republican Congress. The House, still dominated by extremely conservative Republicans for whom any hint of compromise is considered the highest treason, could continue to pass one doomed bill after another, while the Senate tries to write bills that have at least some chance of ever becoming law.

And that would be just fine with Barack Obama. If he’s faced with both houses controlled by the opposition, there’s nothing he’d rather see than them fighting with each other and passing only unrealistic bills that he can veto without worrying about any backlash from the public.

Allow me to be a bit more pessimistic. Even if they lose the Senate, Democrats will still have the filibuster available to them, and they’ll use it. And as Waldman says, Obama can veto anything he doesn’t like.

But there are two wild cards here. First, the usual way that you get difficult provisions passed is by tacking them onto must-pass legislation. Pentagon appropriations bills are the traditional favorites. Depending on the provision, this might require monkeying around with the reconciliation rules, but Republicans have few scruples about that. So the odds are that we’ll end up with yet another series of showdowns. Maybe not huge debt-ceiling style showdowns, but big fund-the-military type showdowns. And the question is who wins.

And that brings up the second wild card: will Democrats stay united in defense of Obamacare? After watching Dems scatter like frightened children over the nomination of Debo Adegbile to lead the Justice Department’s civil rights division, and then scatter again when the NRA started mau-mauing them over Vivek Murthy’s nomination as Surgeon General—well, you have to wonder, don’t you? Add in the fact that Democrats have been running away from Obamacare for months, and it’s hardly unrealistic to think that they might be less than adamantine when it comes to a showdown over protecting Obamacare while Fox News is pillorying them nightly as playing politics with our brave troops in order to save a failed health care policy.

As it happens, I’d say the odds of caving in are fairly low. Even if Republicans win the Senate, they’d need eight or nine Democrats to defect in order to break a filibuster. And Obama isn’t running for anything. He can afford to hold out.

Still, it’s not a slam dunk. Republicans won’t be able to repeal Obamacare if they win the Senate later this year, but there’s a chance they could do it some damage. It all depends on how willing Democrats are to defend their principles. Unfortunately, that’s always a thin reed.

Taken from:

Obamacare is Probably Safe, But It’s Not a Slam Dunk

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Friday Cat Blogging – 14 March 2014

by LazaroWorley Posted on March 14, 2014

Mother Jones

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The sun has been back for two weeks now and Domino has decided it’s probably safe to come outside. Not very far outside, mind you, but she does adore the stiffly-bristled welcome mat we have outside our front door. It’s a great place to scratch an itch, and when you’re done, it catches the afternoon sun and provides a lovely napping spot.

In other news, click here and decide if you think I look like a badass. I think perhaps the headline writer was engaging in a wee flight of fancy. However, I commend to my editors the reporter’s deadpan note about how I feel about blogging: “For him, it’s ‘the perfect job,’ noting he rarely hears from his bosses at Mother Jones.” That, um, didn’t quite turn out right, did it?

Original article – 

Friday Cat Blogging – 14 March 2014

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If Crimea Really is Important, Tell Us What Obama Ought to Do About It

by turystycznypbs700 Posted on March 14, 2014

Mother Jones

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Fareed Zakaria has a piece in the Washington Post about Ukraine. Here’s the headline:

Why (this time) Obama must lead

So I clicked. Plenty of sensible stuff. The EU dithered. Ukraine blew up. Putin responded stupidly. “Let’s not persist in believing that Moscow’s moves have been strategically brilliant,” Zakaria says. His invasion of Crimea has turned the rest of Ukraine irretrievably pro-Western; triggered lots of anti-Russian sentiment on his borders; soured relations with Poland and Hungary; and sparked Western sanctions that are going to hurt.

And Zakaria says this is important stuff. “The crisis in Ukraine is the most significant geopolitical problem since the Cold War….And it involves a great global principle: whether national boundaries can be changed by brute force. If it becomes acceptable to do so, what will happen in Asia, where there are dozens of contested boundaries — and several great powers that want to remake them?”

OK, fine. So what should Obama do? Here it is:

Obama must rally the world, push the Europeans and negotiate with the Russians.

Go ahead and click the link if you don’t believe me. This is, literally, the sum total of Zakaria’s advice. So what’s the point? Obviously Obama is already doing this. Is he doing it badly? Is he pressing for the wrong sanctions? Is he working too much behind the scenes and not enough publicly? Should he be threatening a military response? Should he ask Zach Galifianakis to tape an episode of “Between Two Ferns” with Vladimir Putin? Or what?

Maybe I’m more frustrated than usual with this because I tend to like Zakaria. Sure, he’s sometimes a little bit too weather-vaney for my taste, but he’s smart and practical and tends to understand the big picture pretty well. So why not tell us what he thinks the US response should be? We could use some judicious advice to make up for the tsunami of idiocy emanating from the crackpot wing of the foreign policy community right now.

Excerpt from – 

If Crimea Really is Important, Tell Us What Obama Ought to Do About It

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Hostage Taking Is Back!

by AntonVaughan Posted on March 14, 2014

Mother Jones

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Last month I passed along the news that, in a break with recent tradition, Congress might actually do something useful and pass a permanent fix to Medicare’s Sustainable Growth Rate, a well-meaning policy that turned out not to be sustainable at all when its formula started calling for actual cuts in payments to doctors. Every year Congress addresses this by passing a one-year “doc fix,” but recently a bipartisan effort finally came together to pass a permanent modification. Hooray!

But now it turns out that congressional Republicans enjoy the tradition of dysfunctional government too much to give it up. Sahil Kapur reports that hostage-taking is back:

House Republicans expect to vote this Friday on legislation that would risk steep, destabilizing Medicare cuts at the end of the month unless Democrats agree to a five-year delay of Obamacare’s individual mandate.

It mirrors some of the brinkmanship in the government shutdown fight last fall in that the GOP is using a must-pass bill as a vehicle to chop the Affordable Care Act. Democratic leaders have repeatedly rejected proposals to tinker with the mandate to buy insurance and have warned Republicans not to tie a physician payment fix to their partisan quest to unravel Obamacare.

Insurance companies oppose this. Doctors oppose this. The CBO says it would be a disaster. It obviously has no chance of passing. But it looks like Republicans are going right up to the brink once again. I guess that once you’ve tasted the thrill of threatening to shoot a hostage, nothing else quite compares.

Besides, there’s a midterm election coming up. Have I mentioned that before?

Source: 

Hostage Taking Is Back!

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If Reagan Were President, He Would…Do Nothing Much About Ukraine

by japildakar3 Posted on March 13, 2014

Mother Jones

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On the Senate floor today, John McCain blistered his fellow Republicans over their holdup of an aid bill to Ukraine. “Don’t call yourself Reagan Republicans,” he said. “Reagan would never tolerate this.” Dan Drezner provides the history lesson via Twitter:

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If Reagan Were President, He Would…Do Nothing Much About Ukraine

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McDonald’s Accused of Stealing Wages From Already Underpaid Workers

by AnnetteLorenzo Posted on March 13, 2014

Mother Jones

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Fast food workers make very little money. How little money? Very little money! So little in fact that a single parent of one living in New York City would have to work 144 hours a week “to make a secure yet modest living.” But apparently, those wages are not low enough, a group of McDonald’s workers allege, to stop the company from also stealing from them.

Wage-theft suits brought against McDonald’s this week in Michigan, California, and New York accuse the chain of refusing to pay overtime, ordering people to work off the clock, and straight up erasing hours from timecards. If these allegations are true, and maybe they’re not, but maybe they are, then the company has been illegally screwing people who are already being legally screwed.

This is the most recent development in a months-long campaign by fast-food workers pushing for a $15/hour starting wage.

You shouldn’t eat fast food because fast food is bad for you but if you do eat fast food (and you will eat fast food at least once in a while because nobody can be perfect all the time), be nice to the people who serve you. They have to fight tooth and nail to make ends meet.

Could you make it on fast food wages? Here’s a depressing calculator. (Spoiler: Probably not!)

How many people are in your household? One Adult No Children
One Adult One Child
One Adult Two Children
One Adult Three Children
Two Adults No Children
Two Adults One Child
Two Adults Two Children
Two Adults Three ChildrenWhich state do you live in? Which area do you live in? (Area data not available for households without children.)How much do you make in a year? $

In order to make $___ a year, the typical fast-food worker has to work __ hours a week.

A household like yours in ___, ___ needs to earn $__ annually to make a secure yet modest living. A fast-food worker working full time would have to earn $__ an hour to make that much.

The average fast-food employee works less than 25 hours a week. To make a living wage in ___, ___ at current median wages, s/he would have to work __ hours a week.

In __ hours, McDonald’s serves __ customers and makes $__. That’s about __ Big Macs.

var median_fast_food_worker_wage = 8.94; // Source: National Employment Law Project, July 2013; http://nelp.3cdn.net/84a67b124db45841d4_o0m6bq42h.pdf
var work_weeks_per_year = 52;
var months_per_year = 12;
var average_fast_food_worker_hours_per_week = 24.4;
var average_weeks_in_a_month = 4.348;
var hours_worked_at_full_time = 40;

var days_in_2012 = 366; //leap year
var McDonalds_customers_per_day_in_2012 = 69000000; // Source: McDonalds 2012 Annual Report
var hours_in_day = 24;
var mcD_systemwide_restaurants = 34480;
var mcD_served_per_hour = McDonalds_customers_per_day_in_2012 / hours_in_day;

var mcD_earnings_in_2012 = 27567000000; // Source: McDonalds 2012 Annual Report http://www.aboutmcdonalds.com/content/dam/AboutMcDonalds/Investors/Investor%202013/2012%20Annual%20Report%20Final.pdf
var mcD_earned_per_hour = Math.round(mcD_earnings_in_2012 / days_in_2012 / hours_in_day);

var cost_of_big_mac = 4;

var first_state = ‘AK’;
var first_locale = ‘Anchorage, AK HUD Metro FMR Area’;
var state_abbr =
‘AL’ : ‘Alabama’,
‘AK’ : ‘Alaska’,
‘AS’ : ‘America Samoa’,
‘AZ’ : ‘Arizona’,
‘AR’ : ‘Arkansas’,
‘CA’ : ‘California’,
‘CO’ : ‘Colorado’,
‘CT’ : ‘Connecticut’,
‘DE’ : ‘Delaware’,
‘DC’ : ‘District of Columbia’,
‘FM’ : ‘Micronesia1’,
‘FL’ : ‘Florida’,
‘GA’ : ‘Georgia’,
‘GU’ : ‘Guam’,
‘HI’ : ‘Hawaii’,
‘ID’ : ‘Idaho’,
‘IL’ : ‘Illinois’,
‘IN’ : ‘Indiana’,
‘IA’ : ‘Iowa’,
‘KS’ : ‘Kansas’,
‘KY’ : ‘Kentucky’,
‘LA’ : ‘Louisiana’,
‘ME’ : ‘Maine’,
‘MH’ : ‘Islands1’,
‘MD’ : ‘Maryland’,
‘MA’ : ‘Massachusetts’,
‘MI’ : ‘Michigan’,
‘MN’ : ‘Minnesota’,
‘MS’ : ‘Mississippi’,
‘MO’ : ‘Missouri’,
‘MT’ : ‘Montana’,
‘NE’ : ‘Nebraska’,
‘NV’ : ‘Nevada’,
‘NH’ : ‘New Hampshire’,
‘NJ’ : ‘New Jersey’,
‘NM’ : ‘New Mexico’,
‘NY’ : ‘New York’,
‘NC’ : ‘North Carolina’,
‘ND’ : ‘North Dakota’,
‘OH’ : ‘Ohio’,
‘OK’ : ‘Oklahoma’,
‘OR’ : ‘Oregon’,
‘PW’ : ‘Palau’,
‘PA’ : ‘Pennsylvania’,
‘PR’ : ‘Puerto Rico’,
‘RI’ : ‘Rhode Island’,
‘SC’ : ‘South Carolina’,
‘SD’ : ‘South Dakota’,
‘TN’ : ‘Tennessee’,
‘TX’ : ‘Texas’,
‘UT’ : ‘Utah’,
‘VT’ : ‘Vermont’,
‘VI’ : ‘Virgin Island’,
‘VA’ : ‘Virginia’,
‘WA’ : ‘Washington’,
‘WV’ : ‘West Virginia’,
‘WI’ : ‘Wisconsin’,
‘WY’ : ‘Wyoming’

var selected_state = jQuery(“#selected_state”);
var selected_locale = jQuery(“#selected_locale”);
var selected_household = jQuery(“#selected_household”);

for (var state in bfjo)
var option = jQuery(” + state_abbrstate + ”);
selected_state.append(option);

var fill_locale_selector = function(state_object)

selected_locale.html(“”);

for (var locale in state_object)
var option = jQuery(” + locale.replace(/,.*$/, ”) + ”);
selected_locale.append(option);

}

fill_locale_selector(bfjofirst_state)

selected_state.bind(“change”,
function()
var state = $(“#selected_state option:selected”).val();
var state_object = bfjostate;

fill_locale_selector(state_object);

)

/*
var fill_household_selector = function(locale_object)
var selected_household = jQuery(“#selected_household”);

selected_household.html(“”);

for (var household in locale_object)
var option = jQuery(” + household + ”);
selected_household.append(option);

}

fill_household_selector(bfjofirst_statefirst_locale)
*/

selected_locale.bind(“change”,
function()
var state = $(“#selected_state option:selected”).val();
var locale = $(“#selected_locale option:selected”).val();
var locale_object = bfjostatelocale;

//fill_household_selector(locale_object);

)

enable_disable_locale = function()
var household = $(“#selected_household option:selected”).val();
if (household === ‘1P0C’ else
selected_locale.attr(‘disabled’, ”);

}
selected_household.bind(“change”,
function()
enable_disable_locale();

);
enable_disable_locale();

jQuery(“#calculate_this”).bind(“submit”,
function()

var state = $(“#selected_state option:selected”).val();
var locale = $(“#selected_locale option:selected”).val();
var household = $(“#selected_household option:selected”).val();
var salary = parseInt($(“#input_salary”).val());

var annual_living_wage = bfjostatelocalehousehold;
console.log(state);
console.log(locale);
console.log(household);
console.log(annual_living_wage);
var hourly_for_living = annual_living_wage / months_per_year
/ average_weeks_in_a_month / hours_worked_at_full_time;

var hours_to_live_per_month = annual_living_wage / months_per_year / median_fast_food_worker_wage;
var weeks_to_live_per_month = hours_to_live_per_month / hours_worked_at_full_time;

var salary_monthly = salary / months_per_year;
var hours_to_salary_monthly = salary_monthly / median_fast_food_worker_wage;
var weeks_to_salary_monthly = hours_to_salary_monthly / hours_worked_at_full_time;

var hours_living_a_week = hours_to_live_per_month / average_weeks_in_a_month;
var hours_salary_a_week = hours_to_salary_monthly / average_weeks_in_a_month;

var commify = function(number)
while (/(d+)(d3)/.test(number.toString()))
number = number.toString().replace(/(d+)(d3)/, ‘$1’+’,’+’$2′);
}
return number;
}

var salary_string = commify(salary);
var yearly_living_wage_string = commify(annual_living_wage);
/*
while (/(d+)(d3)/.test(salary_string.toString()))
salary_string = salary_string.toString().replace(/(d+)(d3)/, ‘$1’+’,’+’$2′);

while (/(d+)(d3)/.test(yearly_living_wage_string.toString()))
yearly_living_wage_string = yearly_living_wage_string.toString().replace(/(d+)(d3)/, ‘$1’+’,’+’$2′);

*/

jQuery(“#calculated”).show();
jQuery(“#fast_food_calculator_hours”).text(Math.round(hours_to_live_per_month));
jQuery(“#fast_food_calculator_state”).text(state_abbrstate);
jQuery(“#fast_food_calculator_state2”).text(state_abbrstate);
if (household === “1P0C” || household === “2P0C”)
jQuery(“#fast_food_calculator_locale”).text(”);
jQuery(“#fast_food_calculator_locale2″).text(”);
else
jQuery(“#fast_food_calculator_locale”).text(locale.replace(/,.*$/, ”) + ‘,’);
jQuery(“#fast_food_calculator_locale2″).text(locale.replace(/,.*$/, ”) + ‘,’);

jQuery(“#salary”).text(salary_string);
jQuery(“#fast_food_calculator_time”).text(Math.round(hours_to_salary_monthly));

jQuery(“#living_hours_per_week”).text(Math.round(hours_living_a_week));
jQuery(“#living_hours_per_week2”).text(Math.round(hours_living_a_week));

jQuery(“#salary_hours_per_week”).text(Math.round(hours_salary_a_week));
jQuery(“#fast_food_calculator_living_wage_annual”).text(yearly_living_wage_string);

jQuery(“#mc_d_customers_served”).text(
commify(
Math.round(
Math.round(hours_living_a_week) * mcD_served_per_hour
)
)
);
jQuery(“#mc_d_money_earned”).text(
commify(Math.round(Math.round(hours_living_a_week) * mcD_earned_per_hour))
);

jQuery(“#big_mac_count”).text(
commify(
Math.round(
Math.round(hours_living_a_week)
* mcD_earned_per_hour
/ cost_of_big_mac
)
)
);

console.log(hourly_for_living);
var hourly_for_living_clean = Math.round(hourly_for_living * 100)
.toString().replace(/(d+)(d2)/, ‘$1’+’.’+’$2′);
jQuery(“#living_wage_hourly”).text(hourly_for_living_clean);

return false;

}

)

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Marco Rubio Wants to Save the Internet From Foreigners

by ErnestoCTL Posted on March 13, 2014

Mother Jones

Sen. Marco Rubio, still engaged in his campaign to reconnect with his tea party roots after blowing it on immigration reform, announced today that he plans to introduce a bill that would “prevent a ‘takeover’ of the Internet by the United Nations or another government regime.” Steve Benen is puzzled:

To be sure, there are foreign governments that censor their citizens’ access to online content, but it’s not at all clear why Rubio sees this as a domestic threat here in the U.S. As best as I can tell, there is no effort to empower the United Nations or anyone else to regulate the Internet on a global scale. Such a policy would certainly be scary, and would require opposition, but at present, it’s also non-existent.

For the most part, Rubio is probably just glomming onto a random bit of jingoism that he thinks will rile up his base. Still, there’s actually a kernel of substance to this. Right now, the US Department of Commerce exercises ultimate control over the DNS root zone, and ICANN, a nonprofit that administers the DNS naming system, does so under contract to the Commerce Department. And while ICANN has a global governance structure, it’s based in Los Angeles and has historically had a heavy American management presence.

But that could change. Last year, in response to some of Edward Snowden’s spying revelations, ICANN’s board of directors issued a statement that called for “accelerating the globalization of ICANN and IANA functions, towards an environment in which all stakeholders, including all governments, participate on an equal footing.” Last month the European Commission joined in, releasing a statement that lamented a “continued loss of confidence in the Internet and its current governance” and proposing new governance that would “identify how to globalise the IANA functions” and “establish a clear timeline for the globalisation of ICANN.” A week later, rumors surfaced that ICANN might try to move its headquarters to Geneva.

Now, this kind of squabbling has gone on forever, and the politics behind these statements is usually pretty murky. There’s no telling if it will ever amount to anything, and in any case it certainly has nothing to do with UN control over the internet. Nonetheless, other countries have long chafed under effective American control of the internet’s plumbing, and the Snowden leaks have given new momentum to calls for that control to end. It’s possible that this is what Rubio is thinking of.

Original link: 

Marco Rubio Wants to Save the Internet From Foreigners

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