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How Many Countries Have Direct Access to All Phone Calls?

by RoderickHaswell Posted on June 6, 2014

Mother Jones

Vodafone is one of the largest telecom companies in the world, with a strong presence in Europe, Africa and the Middle East. Here’s what they told us today:

Vodafone said that it had received thousands of requests from 29 countries in the 12 months through March 31. But the report also said that governments in certain countries had direct access to its networks without having to use legal warrants.

In a “small number” of countries, Vodafone said in the report, the company “will not receive any form of demand for communications data access as the relevant agencies and authorities already have permanent access to customer communications via their own direct link.”

Vodafone wouldn’t say which countries have this kind of unrestricted access, but the Guardian takes a guess here.

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How Many Countries Have Direct Access to All Phone Calls?

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Bowe Bergdahl, Then and Now

by GuadaluMcclanah Posted on June 5, 2014

Mother Jones

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Speaking of Bowe Bergdahl, Charlie Savage and Eric Schmitt have a fascinating piece in the New York Times that just went up. They got hold of a detailed report that was written two months after Bergdahl walked off, and what makes it interesting is that it’s based on extensive contemporaneous interviews. This allows us to compare what people are saying now with what they were saying back then. For example, there’s this:

A classified military report detailing the Army’s investigation into the disappearance of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl in June 2009 says that he had wandered away from assigned areas before — both at a training range in California and at his remote outpost in Afghanistan — and then returned, according to people briefed on it.

….Whether Sergeant Bergdahl was a deserter who never intended to come back, or simply slipped away for a short adventure amid an environment of lax security and discipline and then was captured is one of many unanswered questions about his disappearance. The issue is murky, the report said, in light of Sergeant Bergdahl’s previous episodes of walking off.

And this:

The report is said to contain no mention of Sergeant Bergdahl having left behind a letter in his tent that explicitly said he was deserting and explaining his disillusionment, as a retired senior military official briefed on the investigation at the time told The New York Times this week. Asked about what appeared to be a disconnect, the retired officer insisted that he remembered reading a field report discussing the existence of such a letter in the early days of the search and was unable to explain why it is not mentioned in the final investigative report.

And this:

Its portrayal of him as a soldier is said to be positive, with quotes from both commanders and squadmates — apparently including some of the men now criticizing him — describing him as punctual, always in the correct uniform and asking good questions. It quotes colleagues as saying that he expressed some boredom and frustration that they were not “kicking down doors” more to go after insurgents who were destroying schools.

And this:

The report is also said to contain no mention of any alleged intercepts of radio or cellphone traffic indicating that Sergeant Bergdahl was asking villagers if anyone spoke English and trying to get in touch with the Taliban, as two former squadmates told CNN this week in separate interviews that they remembered hearing about from a translator who received the report.

The moral of this story is simple: memories can change, and once you’ve taken sides you’re likely to embellish things considerably. The stuff that Bergdahl’s critics are saying today may be accurate, or it may be a product of anger growing out of control over the passage of time. We really need to wait before rushing to judgment.

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Bowe Bergdahl, Then and Now

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Five Quick Things to Know About Bowe Bergdahl

by NoeBoltbnhui Posted on June 5, 2014

Mother Jones

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It’s an open question whether the White House handled the recovery of Bowe Bergdahl well. Probably not, and it’s a legitimate topic for speculation. But on the substantive question of the prisoner exchange itself, here are five things you should keep firmly in mind:

  1. We don’t know if Bergdahl is a deserter. We’ll only know that after the military legal process has run its course and rendered a verdict. Obviously nothing is going to shut up the hotheads and Fox News blowhards, but the rest of us on both left and right would be wise to reserve judgment until that happens.
  2. Either way, we still should have gotten Bergdahl back. We don’t leave prisoners behind to face justice from the enemy. We dish it out ourselves.
  3. The evidence suggests that, in fact, probably nobody died searching for Bergdahl after he left the base.
  4. When wars end, you exchange prisoners. This is always distasteful and contentious: the issue of POWs was so fraught at the end of the Korean War that it actually extended the fighting for more than a year. But eventually you agree to an exchange, and the Afghanistan war is no different. Foreign policy hawks might not like it, but America’s longest war is finally coming to an end, which means our Taliban prisoners would have been exchanged fairly soon no matter what. We didn’t actually give up much in this deal.
  5. As Michael Hastings reported two years ago, Bergdahl didn’t think much of his unit, and his unit didn’t think much of him. Given the rancor between them, it’s not surprising that his teammates have plenty of lurid things to say about him now. They never liked him much in the first place. For the time being, you should take everything they say with a big grain of salt.

Practically everything you’re hearing right now about Bowe Bergdahl is being driven by extreme partisans with a huge ax to grind. You should view the entire feeding frenzy with intense skepticism until we learn more about what actually happened.

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Five Quick Things to Know About Bowe Bergdahl

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America Sucks at Eating Vegetables

by munrhexaa Posted on June 5, 2014

Mother Jones

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Hold on a second. Kelsey McKinney draws my attention this morning to the latest USDA report on the kinds of foods we eat, and the chart on the right shows what it has to say about vegetables.

Is this for real? Since when are potatoes vegetables? I mean, I’m delighted by this news since it means my mother has been wrong all these years when she badgers me about not eating enough vegetables. Hell, it turns out that the bag of potato chips in my pantry apparently counts too. I’ll be sure to have some with my lunch today.

Still, I suspect that mom is right, which makes this a pretty depressing chart. Regardless of how the USDA classifies them, I’ll continue to put potatoes (and corn) into the starch food group. Aside from that, it appears that we eat plenty of salad (head lettuce, Romaine lettuce, tomatoes) but not much of anything else. All the things we traditionally think of as vegetables (broccoli, peas, beans, etc.) are consumed in such tiny quantities they don’t even show up.

That’s terrible. Eat your vegetables, America!

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America Sucks at Eating Vegetables

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Watch: Freaked out NRA Scrambles From “Weird and Scary” to “We’re Sorry”

by KennithFregoso Posted on June 4, 2014

Mother Jones

In an extraordinary move last Friday first reported by Mother Jones, the National Rifle Association laid into a group of open-carry gun activists in Texas for acting “downright weird” and “scary”—but less than 24 hours after our report, with the enraged activists cutting up their NRA membership cards, the gun lobby beat a quick retreat, insisting that Friday’s lengthy statement was all just a big “mistake.” What’s going on here? Mother Jones senior editor Mark Follman explains:

For more of Mother Jones’ award-winning investigative reporting on guns in America, see all of our latest coverage here, and our special reports.

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Watch: Freaked out NRA Scrambles From “Weird and Scary” to “We’re Sorry”

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“All of the Above” Is a Perfectly Fine Republican Midterm Strategy

by AprilSouza Posted on June 4, 2014

Mother Jones

Just a quick note to my fellow liberals. I occasionally see a bit of crowing over the fact that Republicans can’t agree on a coherent midterm story. Is it going to be Benghazi? The economy? Obamacare? Bowe Bergdahl? The EPA? Vladimir Putin? Or what? Republicans are in disarray!

I wouldn’t count on that. Not all of these things will have the legs to carry them all the way to November, but that doesn’t matter. They all reflect badly on Obama, and as this stuff piles up, low-information centrists and leaners all start to think that there must really be something wrong with Obama and his fellow Democrats, even if they don’t quite know what. Where there’s smoke, there’s fire, right?

An “all of the above” strategy will probably work just fine for Republicans. I doubt that the outrage over Bowe Bergdahl will last long, for example, but the weak White House response to it just adds to the perception that Obama is a weak manager and maybe Republicans are right about him. In November, even if nobody remembers Bergdahl, plenty of people will retain a vague memory that something wasn’t quite right about that whole Afghanistan thing. And because of that, they’ll pull the lever for their local Republican.

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“All of the Above” Is a Perfectly Fine Republican Midterm Strategy

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Neo-Confederate Ally Chris McDaniel Moves One Step Closer to Winning Mississippi’s Senate Race

by PhilomenaRawson Posted on June 4, 2014

Mother Jones

For months, conservatives have thrown their money and might behind Mississippi state Senator Chris McDaniel in an effort to defeat longtime Sen. Thad Cochran in the state’s GOP Senate primary. Tea party activists swooned over McDaniel as the candidate who, in a year of failed challenges from the right, could succeed in knocking off a GOP incumbent. Mississippians went to the polls on Tuesday and gave McDaniel a slight edge over Cochran. A run-off is likely. With a fired-up base behind him, McDaniel is in a solid position to defeat the six-term senator.

As Mother Jones has reported, McDaniel is a southern conservative with a controversial track record. Last summer, he delivered the keynote address at an event hosted by a chapter of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, a neo-Confederate group that, as my colleague Tim Murphy wrote, “promotes the work of present-day secessionists and contends the wrong side won the ‘war of southern independence.'” McDaniel spoke at past Sons of Confederate Veterans-affiliated events, according to a spokesman for the group.

From 2004 to 2007, McDaniel hosted a syndicated Christian conservative radio program, Right Side Radio. Once, McDaniel weighed in on gun violence in America by blaming “hip-hop” culture. “The reason Canada is breaking out with brand new gun violence has nothing to do with the United States and guns,” he said in a promotional sampler for the radio show. “It has everything to do with a culture that is morally bankrupt. What kind of culture is that? It’s called hip-hop.” He went on:

Name a redeeming quality of hip-hop. I want to know anything about hip-hop that has been good for this country. And it’s not—before you get carried away—this has nothing to do with race. Because there are just as many hip-hopping white kids and Asian kids as there are hip-hopping black kids. It’s a problem of a culture that values prison more than college; a culture that values rap and destruction of community values more than it does poetry; a culture that can’t stand education. It’s that culture that can’t get control of itself.

McDaniel also used his radio show to defend the efficacy—despite reams of evidence saying otherwise—of torture as a way to gather intelligence.

In April, McDaniel raised eyebrows when he appeared on a different radio show, “Focal Point,” hosted by the Bryan Fischer, an top official at the rabidly anti-gay American Family Association. Here’s a brief rundown of Fischer’s penchant for bomb throwing:

In March, Fischer told his listeners that while he didn’t think President Obama is the antichrist, “the spirit of the Antichrist is at work” in the Oval Office. He has said that people turn to homosexuality (which he’d like criminalized) when the Devil takes over their brains. He once called for a Sea World Orca whale to be Biblically stoned after it killed its trainer. He said the secretarial job in his office is “reserved for a woman because of the unique things that God has built into women.” Even some Republicans have distanced themselves from Fischer—at the 2011 Values Voters Summit in Washington, DC, Mitt Romney condemned Fischer’s “poisonous language.”

Mark your calendars: A McDaniel-Cochran run-off would take place on June 24.

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Neo-Confederate Ally Chris McDaniel Moves One Step Closer to Winning Mississippi’s Senate Race

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Rich Doctors Like Republicans; Sorta Rich Doctors Like Democrats

by ElizaTSK Posted on June 4, 2014

Mother Jones

We jabber a lot these days about how the real action in income inequality lies in the 1 percent. That is, the big increases haven’t really been between the earnings of, say, teachers and computer programmers, but between computer programmers and Wall Street traders. And rising inequality is even more apparent within the 1 percent: The super rich in the top 0.1 percent are pulling away from the merely rich in the top 1 percent at an astonishing rate.

Today, Sarah Kliff points us to a kinda sorta related chart that’s pretty eye-opening. As high earners, you’d think that doctors would be more likely to contribute money to Republicans than Democrats. But it turns out that isn’t true. A new analysis in JAMA Internal Medicine shows that merely well-off doctors—your allergists, your pediatricians, your pulmonologists—favor Democrats. It’s only when you get into the territory of medical royalty—your surgeons, your urologists, your radiologists—that political contributions start to heavily favor Republicans. Even within one of the best paid professions in the country, there’s a class divide, with the haves favoring Republicans and the have-nots favoring Democrats. That’s fairly remarkable.

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Rich Doctors Like Republicans; Sorta Rich Doctors Like Democrats

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Courts Should Be More Willing to Weigh in on "Political" Disputes

by CeceliaEllery Posted on June 3, 2014

Mother Jones

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Does the Bowe Bergdahl outrage on the right have legs? Yesterday I didn’t think so. Today I’m not so sure. We’ll see.

I want to steer clear of the fever swamp stuff for now,1 but one aspect of all this prompts me to finally get around to writing something that’s been on my mind for a while. One of the questions surrounding the Bergdahl prisoner swap is whether President Obama broke the law by releasing five Taliban prisoners from Guantanamo without giving Congress its required 30-day notice. Republicans says it’s a clear violation of the law. Obama says the law is an unconstitutional infringement of his Article II authority as commander-in-chief. Who’s right?

Here’s the thing: these kinds of disputes happen all the time in various contexts. Federal and state agencies take various actions and then go to court to defend them. Sometimes they win, sometimes they lose. It’s pretty routine stuff.

And that’s what should happen here. Congressional Republicans should challenge Obama in court and get a ruling. This would be useful for a couple of reasons. First, it would be a sign of whether Republican outrage is serious. If it is, they’ll file suit. If they don’t file, then we’ll all know that it’s just partisan preening. Second, we’d get a ruling. The scope of the president’s authority would become clear. (Or at least clearer.)

But this doesn’t happen very often. Sometime problems with standing are at issue, but not usually. Congress has standing to challenge this. No, the more usual reason is that it’s hopeless. Courts traditionally treat disputes between the president and Congress as political, and decline to weigh in.

This is fine if a dispute truly is political. But this, like many other so-called political disputes, isn’t. It’s a clear question of how far the president’s commander-in-chief authority extends and what authority Congress has to limit it. If Republicans truly believe Obama violated the law, they should be willing to go to court to prove it. And courts should be willing to hand down a ruling. It’s a mistake to simply wash their hands of these kinds of things.

1Speaking of which, you should have seen my Twitter feed after yesterday’s Bergdahl post. Hoo boy.

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Courts Should Be More Willing to Weigh in on "Political" Disputes

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Low Interest Rates May Be the New Normal

by CallieEomyavt Posted on June 2, 2014

Mother Jones

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Paul Krugman says that low interest rates are likely to be with us for a long time:

Structural change is happening fast — just not the kind of structural change people like to talk about. Never mind the stuff about skill mismatches and all that. What’s really happening fast is the demographic transition i.e., an aging population, with Europe very quickly turning Japanese. And the US, although growing faster, also turning down sharply.

Add to this the fact that what we thought was normal actually depended on ever-growing household debt, and it becomes clear that historical expectations about normal interest rates are likely to be way off. You don’t have to believe in secular stagnation (although you should take it very seriously) to accept that low rates are very likely the new normal.

If this is true, is it another reason to think that Thomas Piketty might be wrong about returns to capital staying high over the next century even as economic growth slows down?

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Low Interest Rates May Be the New Normal

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