Tag Archives: mother

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?

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Friday Cat Blogging – 14 March 2014

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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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Tesla Pits Texas vs. the Free Market

by Obeey99 Posted on March 13, 2014

Mother Jones

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Tesla is having a lot of well-publicized problems selling its cars direct to the public. Most states mandate that cars can only be sold through independent dealers, and that’s shut Tesla out of the market in plenty of places, including ultra-free market bastions like Texas. Paul Waldman comments:

You’d think that if conservatives really believed all their rhetoric about the value of unfettered free markets, they would be all over this issue, advocating for Tesla’s side of the controversy and campaigning to break up the anti-free-enterprise car dealer oligopolies. But of course, we’re talking about Tesla, and liberals like electric cars, and therefore conservatives feel obligated to hate electric cars, so that probably won’t happen.

OK, sure, but here’s the thing: Teslas are also really expensive. That means they can only be purchased by rich people, and conservatives really like rich people. So this is a dilemma, no?

Now, I suppose that in Texas they don’t think much of any car that doesn’t run on refined hydrocarbon products, so maybe the cognitive dissonance there is less than I think. But North Carolina doesn’t have any oil. So what’s the deal there?

In any case, I want to know who’s buying these cars, anyway. Last Halloween, Marian and I decided to escape the house and eat out. In order to kill time, we walked around the shopping center we had gone to and I spied a Tesla store there. So I popped in and sat down in a Roadster. I didn’t even come close to fitting, and I’m only an inch or so taller than six feet. Am I just pickier than most tall people? Do tall people who buy Teslas slouch a lot? Or has Tesla simply abandoned the quarter of the market over six feet?

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Tesla Pits Texas vs. the Free Market

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Sorry, the Dog Ate My Homework

by DJFAdamugtikmj Posted on March 13, 2014

Mother Jones

Apologies for the radio silence. I had an adventure-filled afternoon. My first adventure prompted me to call for help, and I discovered that my iPhone’s contact list had mysteriously disappeared. No calling for help for me! Eventually everything got sorted out, and when I finally got home I restored my contacts via iCloud. So no permanent harm done. Still, when my car strands me, I always figure my phone will bail me out. That’s what a phone is for. Right? But what do you do when your phone mysteriously decides to strand you at the same time?

And what did I do to deserve all this, anyway?

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Sorry, the Dog Ate My Homework

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An Endorsement From Barack Obama Might Be the Kiss of Death This Year

by AngelPQKQbialro Posted on March 12, 2014

Mother Jones

A friend just emailed me with a gloomy outlook for Democrats in this year’s midterm elections. I don’t really have an outlook myself yet, though obviously Democrats suffer from a difficult electoral map, the traditional 6-year blues, and their usual problem turning out voters in off-year elections. But as long as we’re being gloomy, here’s something else to add to the bonfire. It’s an extract from a Washington Post poll graphic showing how voters react to congressional candidates being associated with the Obama administration. It’s not a pretty picture.

Now, if you want some good news, all you have to do is take a look at some of the other numbers in the poll, which makes it clear that most people have no idea what really makes them more or less likely to vote for someone. At the very bottom, for example, you’ll see that virtually no one is willing to fess up that they’re more likely to vote for an incumbent, despite mountains of research showing that incumbency is the single most powerful predictor of electoral success there is. So maybe this is all just a bunch of hooey. But I wouldn’t bet on it.

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An Endorsement From Barack Obama Might Be the Kiss of Death This Year

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President Obama Takes on Overtime Rules

by MicaelaL71 Posted on March 12, 2014

Mother Jones

From the New York Times:

President Obama this week will seek to force American businesses to pay more overtime to millions of workers, the latest move by his administration to confront corporations that have had soaring profits even as wages have stagnated….Mr. Obama’s decision to use his executive authority to change the nation’s overtime rules is likely to be seen as a challenge to Republicans in Congress, who have already blocked most of the president’s economic agenda and have said they intend to fight his proposal to raise the federal minimum wage to $10.10 per hour from $7.25.

This is obviously just the latest in Obama’s long series of Constitution-crushing moves that flout the law and turn the president into a despot-in-chief, gleefully kneecapping Congress and — wait. What’s this?

In 2004, business groups persuaded President George W. Bush’s administration to allow them greater latitude on exempting salaried white-collar workers from overtime pay, even as organized labor objected….Mr. Obama’s authority to act comes from his ability as president to revise the rules that carry out the Fair Labor Standards Act, which Congress originally passed in 1938. Mr. Bush and previous presidents used similar tactics at times to work around opponents in Congress.

Oh. So he’s just doing the same stuff that every other president has done. Sorry about that. You may go about your business.

For what it’s worth, this gets to the heart of my impatience with all the right-wing hysteria about how Obama is shredding the Constitution and turning himself into a modern-day Napoleon. I’m not unpersuadable on the general point that Obama’s executive orders sometimes go too far. But so far no one has provided any evidence that Obama has done anything more than any other modern president. They all issue executive orders, and Obama has actually issued fewer than most. They all urge the federal bureaucracy to reinterpret regulations in liberal or conservative directions. They all appoint agency heads with mandates to push the rulemaking process in agreeable directions. And they all get taken to court over this stuff and sometimes get their hats handed to them.

Is Obama opening up whole new vistas in executive overreach? I don’t see it, and I don’t even see anyone making the case seriously. You can’t just run down a laundry list of executive actions you happen to dislike. You need to take a genuinely evenhanded look at the past 30 or 40 years of this stuff and make an argument that Obama is doing something unique. Until you do that, you’re just playing dumb partisan games.

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President Obama Takes on Overtime Rules

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Opposition to Obamacare Remains Under 40 Percent, the Same as Always

by LesterCook Posted on March 11, 2014

Mother Jones

Greg Sargent points us to the latest CNN poll on Obamacare today, one of the few polls that accurately judges public attitudes on the subject. Instead of just asking whether people support or oppose the law, CNN asks if their opposition is because the law is too liberal or not liberal enough. The latter aren’t tea partiers who hate Obamacare, they’re lefties and Democrats who mostly support the concept of Obamacare but want it to go further. Counting them as opponents of Obamacare has always been seriously misleading.

I went ahead and charted CNN’s poll results over time, and they’ve been remarkably stable. Ever since the law passed, about 40 percent of the country has opposed it, while more than 50 percent have either supported it or said they want it to go even further. This goes a long way toward explaining the supposedly mysterious result that lots of people oppose Obamacare but few want to repeal it. The truth is that actual opposition has always been a minority view. Polls routinely show that only about 40 percent of Americans want to repeal Obamacare, and there’s nothing mysterious about that once you understand that this is also the level of actual opposition to the law.

Sargent has more here, including some interesting internals and crosstabs.

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Opposition to Obamacare Remains Under 40 Percent, the Same as Always

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No, University Students Should Not Be Forced to Have Facebook Accounts

by Chana6228ztgwm Posted on March 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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Thoreau attended a teaching conference this weekend. The keynote speaker had some things to say about communicating with the kids these days:

One small observation: The guy was insisting that we need to move all of our digital communication with students away from email and course management systems (Blackboard, Moodle, etc.) and instead communicate with students entirely via Facebook, posting assignment links there. I shall refrain from speculating on what sorts of stocks are in his retirement portfolio. Instead, I will note that while he was standing up there saying “Look, I’m old, you’re old, we’re all old, so we need to get with the times or become obsolete, now move your class to Facebook already!”, the Kids These Days are actually becoming less interested in Facebook. You could say that he proved his own point about faculty being old and out of touch, except he’s an administrator in his day job. So he actually proved that administrators are out of touch.

I am completely out of touch with both kids and universities, plus I’m an old fogey. And if you really want to know the truth, I’m not sure why university professors need to communicate with their students digitally at all. Don’t they still meet a couple of times a week in meatspace, like we used to when I was a lad? Can’t assignments and office hours and so forth be sufficiently communicated during class time?

But fine. I get it. We all communicate digitally these days, so university professors need to do it too. But you know what? University students actually do know how to use email. Sure, they might consider it something that’s mainly used for sending messages to grandma and grandpa, but they all know how to use it. And it has the virtue of being universal, extremely flexible, and supporting embedded links to any old thing you want. Students who plan to find jobs after graduation should probably know how to use it.

But my real point is this: If I were a student, I’d be pissed if I were actually forced to get a Facebook account in order to communicate with a professor. Maybe I don’t like or trust Facebook. And what if my other professors all have different favored ways of communicating? Am I forced to get a Tumblr account and a Pinterest account and a Google+ account and a Twitter account? That would be annoying as hell. Why should any of those things be required merely to be a student? Email is free, easy to use, and isn’t a vehicle for creating more Silicon Valley zillionaires. Any student who can’t be bothered to use it has way bigger problems than having to endure a slightly fogeyish professor.

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No, University Students Should Not Be Forced to Have Facebook Accounts

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Europeans Unhappy Over High American Capital Standards

by Chadwick15O Posted on March 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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The Fed has adopted rules that require foreign banks operating in the US to maintain the same capital standards as US banks. German bankers are unhappy about this:

In comments prepared for a speech in Berlin Monday, Andreas Dombret said that recent U.S. regulatory initiatives, “such as the enhanced standards for bank holding companies and foreign banking organizations, worry me. They seem to contradict the need for international cooperation.”

….The Fed recently approved new rules that force the largest international banks operating in America to establish U.S.-based “intermediate holding companies,” which will be subject to the same capital and liquidity requirements as domestic banks….European bankers have sharply criticized the move. “This is a considerable competitive handicap for European banks, as their U.S. competitors aren’t subject to any equivalent requirements in the EU,” said Michael Kemmer, head of the Association of German Banks last month.

Well, in that case, I recommend that the EU raise its capital standards and then subject American banks to it. Instead, last month they decided to ease leverage standards. I guess they’ve already forgotten what things looked like back in 2010. In case you have too, the chart on the right tells the story.

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Europeans Unhappy Over High American Capital Standards

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Quick Reads: "The Bargain From the Bazaar" by Haroon K. Ullah

by Jatiancecab Posted on March 8, 2014

Mother Jones

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The Bargain From the Bazaar

By Haroon K. Ullah

PUBLICAFFAIRS

Western discussion of Pakistan tends to focus on geopolitics and terrorism. In this refreshing break from the policy stuff, Haroon Ullah, a Pakistani American scholar and diplomat, tells the story of a middle-class family struggling to stay united as violence, political turmoil, and extremism threaten to tear the country apart. The book reads like a novel—whose rich dialogue, colorful characters, and vivid descriptions of Lahore blend seamlessly with historical context to offer glimpses of a Pakistan we rarely see.

This review originally appeared in our March/April 2014 issue of Mother Jones.

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Quick Reads: "The Bargain From the Bazaar" by Haroon K. Ullah

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