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Chart of the Day: Net New Jobs for December

by Lubao2pzs Posted on January 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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The American economy added 74,000 new jobs in December, but about 90,000 of those jobs were needed just to keep up with population growth, so net job growth clocked in at minus 16,000. There’s no way to sugar coat this: it’s pretty dismal news. Last night was obviously a bad time to predict that the economy might be getting back on track.

The headline unemployment rate dropped to 6.7 percent, but that’s mainly because a huge number of people dropped out of the labor force, causing the labor force participation rate to decline from 63.0 percent to 62.8 percent. At the same time, the number of discouraged workers dropped. This suggests that in addition to the usual exodus of workers due to retirement, a fair number of people simply gave up and quit looking for work, dropping out of the official numbers entirely.

It’s only one month, and it might not mean much. Maybe it was just bad weather. Maybe. But it’s a lousy start to the year.

Taken from – 

Chart of the Day: Net New Jobs for December

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QUIZ: Match the Political Scandal to the Apology

by BryanGraziani Posted on January 9, 2014

Mother Jones

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On Wednesday, at the end of a day dominated by reports that his aides had gleefully shut down a bridge as payback to a political rival, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie took a moment to apologize. Sort of. “What I’ve seen today for the first time is unacceptable,” Christie said in a statement. “I am outraged and deeply saddened to learn that not only was I misled by a member of my staff, but this completely inappropriate and unsanctioned conduct was made without my knowledge.” The political apology (or non-apology, as the case may be), is an art form. But as with other art forms, its intricacies are often lost on the general public.

Below are excerpts from some of the more infamous apologies made by American politicians and Rob Ford. Can you match the apology to the offender?

var quiz = jQuery(‘#quiz_container’).quiz(‘0AuHOPshyxQGGdG9DVDBwdERFLVVNYVpGX1RzQVNCWkE’); //your published spreadsheet key or URL goes here

This article is from:  

QUIZ: Match the Political Scandal to the Apology

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Chris Christie: I Am "Heartbroken" And "Embarrassed" About Bridge Scandal—But Not Guilty

by LaurelBos Posted on January 9, 2014

Mother Jones

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On Thursday, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie fired a top aide who ordered lane closures that caused a weeklong traffic jam on the George Washington Bridge and in nearby Fort Lee. Christie also forced his former campaign manager, Bill Stepien, who was aware of the lane closure plans, to drop out of the running to chair the New Jersey Republican Party, and told Stepien to cancel a lucrative contract with the Republican Governors Association, which Christie chairs.

More MoJo coverage of Chris Christie’s bridge scandal


Chris Christie’s Bridge Scandal, Explained


Chris Christie: I Am “Heartbroken” And “Embarrassed” About Bridge Scandalâ&#128;&#148;But Not Guilty


Christie Administration’s Bridge Lane Closure Slowed Search for Missing 4-Year-Old, Says Official


Here Are the Chris Christie Emails Everyone Is Talking About


9 Times Chris Christie Denied Using a Bridge for Political Revenge


VIDEO: David Corn on What Chris Christie’s Bridge Scandal Means for 2016


5 Unanswered Questions About Chris Christie’s Bridge Scandal


Bridgegate Edges Closer and Closer to Chris Christie Himself

In a press conference Thursday morning, Christie apologized to the people of Fort Lee and New Jersey and to the state Legislature for the lane closures. He said that his deputy chief of staff, Bridget Anne Kelly, “lied to me” about her role in the traffic mess, while insisting that he knew nothing about the decision to cause the traffic jam. “I am heartbroken that someone that I permitted to be in that circle of trust for the last five years betrayed my trust,” Christie said.

Emails and text messages released Tuesday strongly suggest that Kelly, the senior Christie aide, ordered the traffic debacle as political retribution against the Democratic mayor of Fort Lee, who had declined to endorse Christie in his 2013 gubernatorial race. “Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee,” Kelly wrote to David Wildstein, a Port Authority official who resigned in the wake of the traffic jam.

Christie has denied that he personally made the call to close the bridge lanes that caused the traffic jam. “I am outraged and deeply saddened to learn that not only was I misled by a member of my staff, but this completely inappropriate and unsanctioned conduct was made without my knowledge,” he said on Wednesday.

At his press conference, Christie reiterated that he had no role in the bridge debacle and that he first learned about it Wednesday after his morning workout. “I was blindsided yesterday morning,” he said. “I had no knowledge or involvement in this issue, in its planning or its execution, and I am stunned by the abject stupidity that was shown here.” But he added that the responsibility for the scandal is his. “Ultimately, I am responsible for what happens on my watch, the good and the bad, and when mistakes are made, I have to own up to them and take the action that I believe is necessary to remediate them.”

In response to critics who said Christie sent the tone of his administration, he said the bridge scandal was “the exception, not the rule.” He said he would visit the borough of Fort Lee to apologize for the bridge scandal, and he pledged to “work cooperatively” with state and federal investigations into the scandal.

Excerpt from – 

Chris Christie: I Am "Heartbroken" And "Embarrassed" About Bridge Scandal—But Not Guilty

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Shadowy Wisconsin Group That Helped Scott Walker Win His Recall Was Backed by the Koch Network

by DeenaBumg Posted on January 9, 2014

Mother Jones

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Days before Wisconsin GOP Gov. Scott Walker’s June 2012 recall election, two TV ads ran on stations statewide. Paid for by a group called the Coalition for American Values (CAV), the ads attacked the very notion of holding a recall election (even though it’s in the state constitution) and featured supposed Wisconsin citizens speaking out against the recall. “I didn’t vote for Scott Walker, but I’m definitely against the recall,” one man says. In another ad, the narrator says, “Recall isn’t the Wisconsin way…End the recall madness. Vote for Scott Walker June 5th.”

CAV put $400,000 behind those ads, which stoked a sense of unease about the recall among Wisconsin voters. Walker coasted to a seven-point victory. Exit polls strongly suggested that CAV’s ads played a part in the governor’s win. Yet the mystery surrounding the Coalition for American Values persisted. The group never disclosed how much it spent, how much it raised, or who funded it.

Until now. As first reported by the left-leaning Center for Media and Democracy, new tax filings reveal that the main source of CAV’s funding was the Center to Protect Patient Rights, an Arizona nonprofit that gave CAV $510,000 in 2012. CPPR is a linchpin in a network of nonprofit groups Charles and David Koch, the billionaire industrialists, use to shuffle money around the country while keeping donors anonymous. California’s Fair Political Practices Commission identified the group as “the key nonprofit in the Koch Brothers’ dark money network of nonprofit corporations,” and hit the group and a related nonprofit with a $1 million fine for failing to disclose donations made during the 2012 election season. All told, CPPR doled out $156 million in dark money in 2011 and 2012, a sizable chunk of the $407 million moved by the Kochs’ network of nonprofit groups.

Run by a onetime Koch operative named Sean Noble, CPPR is expected to play less of a role in the Koch network going forward. The California investigation—which revealed the identities of hundreds of previously secret donors and private marketing material used by Republican operatives—brought unwanted scrutiny to the Kochs and their conservative and libertarian allies. An October 2012 Huffington Post story reported that Noble, the former “the wizard behind the screen” for the Kochs, had fallen out of favor. “Noble has had his wings clipped,” one Republican operative told HuffPost.

The Center for Media and Democracy says it has filed a formal complaint with Wisconsin’s Government Accountability Board alleging that the Coalition for American Values violated state campaign finance laws by not disclosing its CPPR funding. A message left at the phone number listed on CAV’s website was not returned.

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Shadowy Wisconsin Group That Helped Scott Walker Win His Recall Was Backed by the Koch Network

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VIDEO: David Corn on What Chris Christie’s Bridge Scandal Means for 2016

by snorsenaf Posted on January 9, 2014

Mother Jones

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Mother Jones DC bureau chief David Corn spoke with MSNBC’s Chris Matthews this week about what some traffic problems in Fort Lee could end up meaning for New Jersey governor Chris Christie’s political ambitions. Watch here:

Read article here – 

VIDEO: David Corn on What Chris Christie’s Bridge Scandal Means for 2016

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Brrrr: Incredible Photos of the Polar Vortex

by BernardoWinstea Posted on January 7, 2014

Mother Jones

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UPDATE 4:35pm EST: Scott Harrison gave us the nod to publish his terrific photo of throwing boiling water into minus 14 degree air in the early hours of Monday morning, in Wicker Park, Chicago. If you have polar vortex photos you want to share with us, send us a note on Twitter: @MotherJones.

Scott Harrison/Flickr

The polar vortex sweeping across the country has pulled 187 million Americans into the grips of crazy cold weather, snarled travel, forced an early orange harvest, and heated up the climate debate. It is also producing some amazing photography, from professionals and amateurs alike. Here are a few that have come to our attention in the last two days.

Hank Cain, via Shawn Reynolds/Twitter.

This picture was taken by pilot Hank Cain, over a frozen Chicago, and first tweeted by his friend Shawn Reynolds from the Weather Channel. Chicago reported a low of minus 16 degrees on Monday.

Nancy Stone/MCT/ZUMA

Teresa Wooldridge has her work cut out for her, pictured here trying to clear a path on the Northwest Side of Chicago.

@ChicagosMayor, The Office of Mayor Rahm Emanuel.

The office of the Chicago Mayor tweeted this image of steaming rooftops yesterday morning. Four people reportedly died while shoveling snow in the city across the weekend.

NOAA/NASA GOES Project

NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center tweeted this picture showing the extent of the weather event—”a whirling and persistent large area of low pressure”—over the US. The image was captured by satellite Monday morning.

Ernest Coleman/ZUMA

Warmer temperatures in the Ohio River than the surrounding air created this eerie mist outside downtown Cincinnati on Monday. According to the National Weather Service, the city tied its record-low temperature for that date, at minus 7, set in 1924. Desperate times call for desperate measures: maintenance crews are treating roads with beet juice, apparently, because it can help melt ice at temperatures as low as minus 25; it’s also said to be better for the environment than regular deicers. Factoid of the day!

@TeriMatthewson/Twitter

“I’d rather have my frozen berries in my smoothie, then on my front lawn,” is the caption to this photo taken by Teri Matthewson, from Toronto, of the fruit tree in her front lawn. In Canada, the vortex has earned the nickname “polar pig” in some quarters, for its shape on the metrological map.

And the Chicago Tribune is reporting that 500 passengers were stranded on two trains last night west of the city because of the snow and ice.

Separately, Van Jones, co-host of CNN’s Crossfire, this morning tweeted this pic of what he says is inside an Amtrak train:

Link:  

Brrrr: Incredible Photos of the Polar Vortex

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Why I’m Still Skeptical of GMOs

by Isela Harris Posted on January 7, 2014

Mother Jones

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Over the weekend, listservs, blogs, and Twitter feeds lit up with reactions to Amy Harmon’s New York Times deep dive into the politics behind a partial ban on growing genetically modified crops on Hawaii’s main island. The fuss obscured a much more significant development that occurred with little fanfare (and no Times attention) on Friday, when the US Department of Agriculture took a giant step toward approving a controversial new crop promoted by Dow Agrosciences, that could significantly ramp up the chemical war on weeds being waged in the Midwest’s corn and soybean fields. Since the ’90s, the widespread use of corn and soy crops genetically engineered to withstand the herbicide Roundup has led more weeds to resist that chemical. Farmers have responded by using even more chemicals, as this Food and Water Watch chart shows.

Food and Water Watch

Dow’s new product promises to fix that problem. The company is peddling corn and soy seeds engineered to withstand not just Roundup, but also an older and much more toxic herbicide called 2,4-D. In a Jan. 3 press release, the company noted that “an astonishing 86 percent of corn, soybean and cotton growers in the South have herbicide-resistant or hard-to-control weeds on their farms,” as do more than 61 percent of farms in the Midwest. “Growers need new tools now to address this challenge,” Dow insisted.

Use of 2,4-D—the less toxic half of the infamous Vietnam-era defoliant Agent Orange—had been dwindling for years, but the rise of Roundup-resistant superweeds has revived it.

Food and Water Watch

Farmers have been using it to “burn down” superweed-ridden fields before the spring planting of corn and soybeans. But if Dow gets its way, they’ll be able to resort to it even after the crops emerge. Dow has downplayed the concern that the new products will lead weeds to develop resistance to 2,4-D. But in a 2011 paper (abstract here), weed experts from Penn State—hardly a hotbed of anti-GMO activism—concluded that chances are “actually quite high” that Dow’s new product will unleash a new plague of super-duperweeds that resist both Roundup and 2,4-D. (I laid out the details of their argument in this post.) Here’s their model for how the new product would affect herbicide application rates on soybeans. Note how they project that glyphosate (Roundup) use will hold steady, but that “other herbicides,” mostly 2,4-D, will spike—meaning a windfall for Dow but nothing good for the environment.

From “Navigating a Critical Juncture for Sustainable Weed Management,” by David A. Mortensen, et all, in Bioscience, January 2012.

The USDA, which oversees the introduction of new GMO crops, appeared set to green-light Dow’s new wonderseeds at the end of 2012. But in May of last year, after a firestorm of criticism from environmental groups, the department slowed down the process, announcing in a press release it had decided that release of the novel products “may significantly affect the quality of the human environment,” and that a thorough environmental impact statement (EIS) was necessary before such a decision could be made.

Then on Friday, the USDA reversed itself—it released the draft of the promised EIS, and in it, the department recommended that Dow’s 2,4-D-ready crops be unleashed upon the land. Once the draft is published in the Federal Register on Jan. 10, there will be a 45-day public comment period, after which the USDA will make its final decision. At this point, approval seems imminent—probably in time for the 2015 growing season, as Dow suggested in its press release reacting to the news.

Why did the USDA switch from “may significantly affect the quality of the human environment” to a meek call for deregulation? As the USDA itself admits in its Friday press release, the department ultimately assesses new GMO crops through an extremely narrow lens: whether or not they act as a “pest” to other plants—that is, they’ll withhold approval only if the crops themselves, and not the herbicide tsunami and upsurge in resistant weeds they seem set to bring forth, pose a threat to other plants. And Dow’s new corn and soy crops don’t cross that line, the USDA claims. I explained the tortured history and logic behind the USDA’s “plant pest” test in this 2011 post. Long story short: it’s an antiquated, fictional standard that doesn’t allow for much actual regulation.

US farmers planted about 170 million acres of corn and soy in 2013—a combined land mass roughly equal to the footprint of Texas. Every year, upwards of 80 percent of it is now engineered to resist Monsanto’s Roundup. It’s chilling to imagine that Dow’s 2,4-D-ready products might soon enjoy a similar range.

Given the USDA’s regulatory impotence in the face of such a specter, perhaps the Hawaiian activists who pushed for that ban aren’t quite as daft as The New York Times portrayed them in its recent piece. The big biotech companies don’t operate on the island that imposed the partial ban on GMOs. But as another New York Times piece, this one from 2011, shows, they do operate on other islands within the state—using them as a testing ground for novel crops and a place to grow out GMO seeds, taking advantage of the warm climate that allows several crops per year. According to The Times, GMO seeds are now bigger business in Hawaii than tropical stapes like coffee, sugar cane, and pineapples—and the GMO/agrichemical giants have “have stepped into the leading, and sometimes domineering role, once played by the islands’ sugar barons.” As for Dow, it cops to having field-tested its 2,4-D-ready corn there.

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Why I’m Still Skeptical of GMOs

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Is Graduate School a Racket?

by CathleenZWLM Posted on January 7, 2014

Mother Jones

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Megan McArdle writes about the grim prospects for graduate students:

Last week, I wrote that collectively, faculty need to deal with the terrible market for professorships by producing fewer potential professors: admitting a lot fewer students to graduate school….There are two criticisms I’ve received that seem worth responding to. The first is that I myself work in a profession that looks a lot like a tournament….The second is: Why not unions? Why not unionize the adjuncts and get them paid on par with the tenure-track professors? Better yet, why not convert all those positions to tenure-track lines?

By chance, I was talking to a professor buddy of mine about this just last week. His take was quite different: he thinks that unions love adjuncts and part-timers and have largely abandoned the interests of full-timers. This is because three part-timers produce three times more union dues than one full-time tenured professor. State legislatures love part-timers too, because three part-timers cost less than one full-time tenured professor. As a result, the number of tenure-track positions in his department has gone down from 22 to 8 in the past couple of decades. This is not because they have fewer students. They have more. It’s because the vast majority of classes are now taught by part-timers.

Now, obviously this might differ between teaching universities and research universities and between private and public universities. It also might differ from department to department and from state to state. But I know that a lot of professor types read this blog, which is why I’m throwing it out. Has the ratio of full-timers to part-timers plummeted everywhere? Is there a reason for this beyond pure cost savings? What role do unions play? Educate us in comments.

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Is Graduate School a Racket?

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Chart of the Day: America’s Health Care System Is Killing You

by KatlynEarnhardt Posted on January 7, 2014

Mother Jones

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Is life expectancy a good measure of the quality of a country’s health care system? I’ve always been pretty hesitant to use it as a primary metric because….well, I’ll just let Aaron Carroll describe people like me:

One of my issues with the arguments people muster against life expectancy is that they are all so small. They attack some individual behavior or factor that might affect life expectancy in some minimal way, but nowhere near enough to cause the big differences we see. It’s smoking. It’s drinking. It’s accidents. It’s immigrants. It’s chemicals in the water. It’s stupidity. It’s suicide. It’s freedom.

It doesn’t matter that tons of these arguments are just plain wrong. It doesn’t matter that even after you eliminate them from the equation, our life expectancy still sucks. People hold on to them like crazy because they don’t want to believe that it could be the health care system.

OK, OK, maybe I should take life expectancy more seriously as a metric of health care quality. It’s certainly true that American life expectancy, which largely tracked other rich countries in the years after World War II, diverged rather dramatically starting around 1990. Why? It’s true that there could be a thousand different reasons related to culture and food and violence and so forth, but most of those things existed all along. So what happened around 1990?

One plausible answer is that it’s related to divergences in health care starting around then. That’s a tricky thing to prove, however, unless you dig deeply into the details. Recently a team of authors did just that in JAMA and produced the chart below. It shows Years of Potential Life Lost (YPLL) as multiples of the median for other rich countries. A number greater than one means we’re losing more years than the rest of our peers. Here’s the chart:

The dramatic thing about this chart is that the United States does worse than other rich countries in every single area. Sure, it’s possible that there are 16 different reasons that we’re doing worse in 16 different categories, but it doesn’t seem likely, does it? When something is this widespread, the cause is a lot more likely to be something broadly based, like health care delivery. This isn’t smoking gun proof that our Rube Goldberg health care system is responsible for our lousy life expectancy, but it sure ought to make you sit up and take notice. There’s a pretty good chance that you, your friends, and your family are going to live three or four years less than you should, solely because you live in America.

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Chart of the Day: America’s Health Care System Is Killing You

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Mississippi GOP Senate Candidate Blames Hip-Hop for Gun Violence (AUDIO)

by ValorieRodrigue Posted on January 7, 2014

Mother Jones

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In a promotional segment for his Christian conservative radio program, Right Side Radio, Mississippi Republican Senate candidate Chris McDaniel blamed rising gun violence on a “hip-hop” culture that “values rap and destruction of community values more than it does poetry.”

The comments were featured in a teaser for the program, which McDaniel hosted from 2004 to 2007, and recently flagged by the politics blog Darkhorse Mississippi. McDaniel, a state senator who has the backing of prominent tea party and conservative groups, is challenging Sen. Thad Cochran in June’s Republican primary.

“The reason Canada is breaking out with brand new gun violence has nothing to do with the United States and guns,” McDaniel said in this promotional sampler for his syndicated 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.”

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Mississippi GOP Senate Candidate Blames Hip-Hop for Gun Violence (AUDIO)

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