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Sex, Drugs, and Oscar: The Mother Jones 2014 Academy Awards Live Blog

by Chauncey43M Posted on March 2, 2014

Mother Jones

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Good news, everyone! You’ve arrived at the Mother Jones Oscars Live Blog, 2014. We’ll start around 8:30 p.m. EST tonight when the 86th Academy Awards ceremony gets underway on ABC, so sit tight. (We will not be blogging the red carpet broadcast, which starts at 7 p.m.)

First off, here are some lists you might find useful:

The 2014 Oscar nominees.

The evening’s performers and presenters.
The 5 biggest controversies of this Oscar season.

Mother Jones movie guy Asawin Suebsaeng’s picks for the very best (and very worst) movies of 2013.

Our Oscar facts and live blogging from last year.

We’ll be updating this throughout the night here:

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Sex, Drugs, and Oscar: The Mother Jones 2014 Academy Awards Live Blog

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No, Vladimir Putin Is Not a Cunning Geopolitical Chess Player

by ZeldaMoritz Posted on March 2, 2014

Mother Jones

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From House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers:

Putin is playing chess and I think we are playing marbles, and I don’t think it’s even close. They’ve been running circles around us.

This kind of knee-jerk reaction is unsurprising, but it’s also nuts. Has Rogers even been following events in Ukraine lately? The reason Putin has sent troops into Crimea is because everything he’s done over the past year has blown up in his face. This was a last-ditch effort to avoid a fool’s mate, not some deeply-calculated bit of geopolitical strategery.

Make no mistake. All the sanctions and NATO meetings and condemnations from foreign offices in the West won’t have much material effect on Putin’s immediate conduct. But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t care about this stuff: he does, and he’s been bullying and blustering for a long time in a frantic effort to avoid it. Now, however, having failed utterly thanks to ham-handed tactics on his part, he’s finally decided on one last desperation move. Not because the West is helpless to retaliate, but because he’s simply decided he’s willing to bear the cost.1 It’s a sign of weakness, not a show of strength. It’s the price he’s paying for his inability to control events.

1This is why a strong response from the West is a good idea even though it won’t have much immediate effect. Having decided that he’s willing to pay the price for his action, Putin now has to be sent the bill. It will pay dividends down the road.

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No, Vladimir Putin Is Not a Cunning Geopolitical Chess Player

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A Wee Prediction About Ukraine

by ChasityPrater Posted on March 1, 2014

Mother Jones

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Following up on the previous post, if you do want to fret about Ukraine, I have just the thing for you. I’m going to tell you how this will all unfold:

  1. Vladimir Putin will do something belligerent. (Already done.)
  2. Republicans will demand that we show strength in the face of Putin’s provocation. Whatever it is that we’re doing, we should do more.
  3. President Obama will denounce whatever it is that Putin does. But regardless of how unequivocal his condemnation is, Bill Kristol will insist that he’s failing to support the democratic aspirations of the Ukrainian people.
  4. Journalists will write a variety of thumbsuckers pointing out that our options are extremely limited, what with Ukraine being 5,000 miles away and all.
  5. John McCain will appear on a bunch of Sunday chat shows to bemoan the fact that Obama is weak and no one fears America anymore.
  6. Having written all the “options are limited” thumbsuckers, journalists and columnists will follow McCain’s lead and start declaring that the crisis in Ukraine is the greatest foreign policy test of Obama’s presidency. It will thus supplant Afghanistan, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Iran, and North Korea for this honor.
  7. In spite of all the trees felled and words spoken about this, nobody will have any good ideas about what kind of action might actually make a difference. There will be scattered calls to impose a few sanctions here and there, introduce a ban on Russian vodka imports, convene NATO, demand a UN Security Council vote, etc. None of this will have any material effect.
  8. Obama will continue to denounce Putin. Perhaps he will convene NATO. For their part, Republicans will continue to insist that he’s showing weakness and needs to get serious.
  9. This will all continue for a while.
  10. In the end, it will all settle down into a stalemate, with Russia having thrown its weight around in its near abroad—just like it always has—and the West not having the leverage to do much about it.
  11. Ukraine will….

Actually, there’s no telling about #11. Maybe Ukraine will choose (or have foisted on them) a pro-Russian leader that Putin is happy with. Maybe east and west will split apart. Maybe a nominally pro-Western leader will emerge. Who knows? What we do know is that (a) the United States will play only a modest role in all this, and (b) conservative hawks will continue to think that if only we’d done just a little bit more, Putin would have blinked and Ukraine would be free.

You may now go about your regular weekend business.

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A Wee Prediction About Ukraine

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Here Are Two Sentences to Ponder Over Instead of Fretting About Ukraine

by ShavonneHain Posted on March 1, 2014

Mother Jones

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I happen to have read two things that struck me in the past hour. The first is from a back-cover blurb for a book that arrived in the mail:

Mettler powerfully and convincingly demonstrates how partisan polarization and plutocratic biases have shaped _________ policy in recent years and why reform is so urgent.

I’m convinced already. Does it even matter what this book is about? You could write this sentence about practically anything these days. For the record, though, the book is Degrees of Inequality. The author is Suzanne Mettler and the second blank is “higher education.” Then there’s this:

There is one great advantage to being an academic economist in France: here, economists are not highly respected in the academic and intellectual world or by political and financial elites. Hence they must set aside their contempt for other disciplines and their absurd claim to great scientific legitimacy, despite the fact that they know almost nothing about anything.

Bracing! This is from the introduction to Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century. Only 544 pages to go.

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Here Are Two Sentences to Ponder Over Instead of Fretting About Ukraine

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Here’s Who the Money Men Are Backing So Far in the Republican Field

by fuirpycf Posted on February 28, 2014

Mother Jones

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Wesley Lowery takes a look today at who all of Mitt Romney’s donors are supporting these days. As Lowery says, this shouldn’t really be taken as a look at “Romney money.” It’s more a look at who’s getting some love from wealthy mainstream Republicans. The answer, it turns out, is unsurprising:

  1. Jeb Bush
  2. Scott Walker
  3. Paul Ryan

This makes sense to me. If I had to pick a top three, this would be it, with the order depending a lot on who decides to get serious about running. I think Paul Ryan would be very formidable, with strong appeal to both tea party types and mainstream types, but it’s unclear if he has any interest in 2016. Jeb Bush is a classic candidate who, again, has some appeal in both camps, but has to decide if he thinks he can overcome the obvious baggage of being a Bush. Scott Walker has to win reelection this year—and show that he can do it handily—before he takes any further steps.

As for the rest of the field, I continue to think that (a) Chris Christie is toast, (b) Rand Paul is a vanity candidate, and (c) the rest of them are going to tear each other limb from limb fighting for the title of king of the wingnuts. Naturally I reserve the right to change my mind later and pretend that I never wrote this.

STANDARD CAVEAT: Yes, it’s ridiculous to be talking about this so far ahead of the election. I apologize. But my excuse is that this is invisible primary stuff, and that really does matter this far out. Besides, talking about the “invisible primary” marks you as a sophisticate, and I wanted an opportunity to do that.

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Here’s Who the Money Men Are Backing So Far in the Republican Field

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Poli Sci Profs Say Poli Sci Wizardry Didn’t Help Obama In 2012 After All

by KrystalMckenney Posted on February 28, 2014

Mother Jones

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Ryan Enos and Anthony Fowler have a new paper out that tries to figure out if the Obama campaign’s widely reported techno-wizardry in the 2012 election really produced a big get-out-the-vote advantage over Mitt Romney. Apparently not:

The Obama campaign of 2012 has been championed as the most technologically-sophisticated, evidence-based campaign in history while the Romney campaign was more traditional. Does this difference manifest itself in the data? Did the technological sophistication of the Obama campaign lead their GOTV efforts to be significantly more effective than Romney’s?

…. Our analysis, while admittedly crude, allows us to roughly compare the effectiveness of the Obama and Romney campaigns in mobilizing their respective supporters. Despite the technological sophistication of the Obama campaign and its devotion to a data-driven, evidence-based campaign, we see similar mobilization effects on both sides of Figure 2. It appears that the two campaigns were roughly comparable in their ability to turn out supporters.

Logic and conventional wisdom suggest that you should concentrate your GOTV effort on strong partisans, since these are the people most likely to vote for you. These are the voters Enos and Fowler analyze, and they conclude that both campaigns mobilized strong partisans about as well. Strongly organized precincts showed a 7 percent improvement in turnout on both sides.

Now, it could well be that the Obama campaign spent more money on GOTV and was thus able to influence more voters. It’s also possible that Obama was able to perform sophisticated targeting that went beyond just the most rabid partisans. So take this with a grain of salt. But if Enos and Fowler are right, the poli-sci-driven rocket science of the Obama campaign didn’t actually make much difference. The core GOTV efforts of both campaigns were about equally effective.

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Poli Sci Profs Say Poli Sci Wizardry Didn’t Help Obama In 2012 After All

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Quote of the Day: People Sure Use Their Webcams for a Lot of Kinky Stuff

by KarissaRamaciot Posted on February 27, 2014

Mother Jones

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From Britain’s GCHQ, lamenting the images they got when they tapped into Yahoo webcam chats:

It would appear that a surprising number of people use webcam conversations to show intimate parts of their body to the other person.

Imagine that. On a more serious note, GCHQ was tapping into Yahoo webcam chats:

Britain’s surveillance agency GCHQ, with aid from the US National Security Agency, intercepted and stored the webcam images of millions of internet users not suspected of wrongdoing, secret documents reveal.

GCHQ files dating between 2008 and 2010 explicitly state that a surveillance program codenamed Optic Nerve collected still images of Yahoo webcam chats in bulk and saved them to agency databases, regardless of whether individual users were an intelligence target or not.

In one six-month period in 2008 alone, the agency collected webcam imagery — including substantial quantities of sexually explicit communications — from more than 1.8 million Yahoo user accounts globally.

Unsurprisingly, Yahoo was not amused when it learned about this.

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Quote of the Day: People Sure Use Their Webcams for a Lot of Kinky Stuff

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Do People Really Dislike Jeopardy Champ Arthur Chu Because He Hits the Buzzer Too Hard?

by Bikor11 Posted on February 27, 2014

Mother Jones

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Let’s talk about something completely trivial for a bit: Arthur Chu, the polarizing Jeopardy! champion currently on a 7-game winning streak. Caitlin Dewey explains why so many people don’t like him:

Since time immemorial — read: September 1984 — “Jeopardy!” has followed a simple pattern: Contestants pick a category; they progress through the category from top to bottom; they earn winnings when they, through their hard-earned and admirable intellect, get the questions right.

Chu has turned that protocol upside down … and shaken the change out of its pockets. For one thing, he sometimes plays to tie, not win, thereby guaranteeing he brings a lesser competitor to challenge him the next day. He skips around the board looking for Daily Doubles, gobbling them up before competitors find them, in the process monopolizing all the high-value questions. Most unforgivably to many, Chu tries to squeeze in the most questions per round by pounding the bejesus out of his buzzer and interrupting Alex Trebek.

It’s the bolded comment I’m curious about. I understand why people could be annoyed by Chu skipping around the board so aggressively. Aside from a sense that he might be taking unfair advantage of his experience vs. a pair of newbies, it makes it a little harder to follow the game at home. I also get why some people might not like the idea of playing to tie. Both of these complaints may be overstated—Chu isn’t the first guy to go searching for Daily Doubles, and playing to tie only affects a few seconds of game play—but I understand them.

That said, what’s up with the complaint that he tries to ring in aggressively? That doesn’t even make sense. Everyone tries to ring in aggressively. Being fast on the buzzer is one of the cornerstones of the game. It might even be more important than knowing lots of answers. (Pretty much everyone who makes it onto the show knows lots of answers.)

So where does this come from? Am I missing something?

POSTSCRIPT: I myself initially found Chu a little annoying, though mostly for his affect more than his actual game play. But I’ve warmed to him just because he’s so damn good. He’s a serious buzzsaw at the game, and it’s hard not to admire that. I noticed last night, though, that the other contestants were starting to mimic his strategy. I wonder if that will be his undoing before long?

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Do People Really Dislike Jeopardy Champ Arthur Chu Because He Hits the Buzzer Too Hard?

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CBO Gives Flunking Grade to Republican Plan on Obamacare Mandate

by AlisonEnticknap Posted on February 26, 2014

Mother Jones

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“Ouchy ouchy,” says Ed Kilgore today. “No conservative love for CBO this week, I suspect.”

There was plenty of conservative love for the CBO last week, of course, because they estimated that an increase in the minimum wage might reduce employment. This week, however, the subject is a conservative plan to eliminate the Obamacare requirement that employers with health plans cover everyone working more than 30 hours a week. Republicans have been bellyaching forever that this is going to cause employers to reduce hours in order to get workers just under the 30-hour minimum, thus causing enormous pain to hardworking real Americans throughout the country. There’s not much evidence that this is actually happening, but whatever. They want to get rid of the 30-hour mandate anyway.

Sadly, the CBO’s opinion of a Republican bill to do this was not good. The bill would reduce the number of workers covered by employer healthcare by about a million people; increase use of Medicaid and CHIP; and increase the budget deficit by about $74 billion over ten years.

That’s some bill. I think Kilgore is right that Republicans aren’t going to be giving the CBO a lot of love this week.

UPDATE: And while we’re on the subject, Republican attacks on Obamacare just generally don’t seem to be doing well lately. In the latest Kaiser survey asking Americans if they want to keep Obamacare or repeal it, the keepers are ahead by a margin of 56-31 percent. That’s up from last year, when they were up by only 47-37 percent. Greg Sargent has the deets here.

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CBO Gives Flunking Grade to Republican Plan on Obamacare Mandate

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Obesity Drop Among 2-5-Year-Olds Is Even More Baffling Than I Thought

by AmparoQmoipxlt Posted on February 26, 2014

Mother Jones

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Last night I wrote about a new CDC study showing a 43 percent drop in obesity rates among 2-5 year-olds. It seemed inexplicably large to me, especially because no other age group showed any decline at all. Today, Zachary Goldfarb helpfully publishes a bit more of the data, and I’ve extracted two lines from his chart. This only deepens the mystery.

As you can see, there’s a fair amount of noise in the chart, and it’s possible that this explains the whole thing. But if we take the data seriously, you can see something even more dramatic than a 43 percent drop over a decade. Between 2003-04 and 2005-06, there’s a 25 percent drop. That’s a gigantic decline over the space of two years.

But there’s more. If there’s anything real going on here, you’d expect to see some kind of correlation between 2-5 year-olds and 6-11 year-olds with a time lag of a few years. But I don’t see anything. The 2005-06 cohort of 2-5 year-olds is noticeably less obese, but the 2007-12 cohort of 6-11 year-olds shows barely any change at all.

So this whole thing is very strange. As I said, it’s possible that noise is responsible for a lot of this. But even if there really is something going on, it doesn’t seem to be having any impact at all once children get a few years older. That’s both strange and disappointing. I wouldn’t expect miracles, but the whole point of obesity interventions in small children is that it prevents a lifetime of bad habits. As the New York Times put it, “New evidence has shown that obesity takes hold young: Children who are overweight or obese at 3 to 5 years old are five times as likely to be overweight or obese as adults.” But if that’s true, it sure isn’t showing up in the data. As near as I can tell, reducing obesity among 2-5 year-olds has precisely zero effect on obesity later in childhood.

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Obesity Drop Among 2-5-Year-Olds Is Even More Baffling Than I Thought

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