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Paul Krugman Is Annoying

by LonLaboureyas Posted on April 8, 2016

Mother Jones

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Paul Krugman doesn’t think much of Bernie Sanders. Krugman being Krugman, that means he’s been flooding the zone with anti-Bernie columns and blog posts. This hasn’t gone over well with many of his erstwhile fans:

Greg Sargent gets this right. These days, nobody is allowed to be anti-Bernie or anti-Hillary simply because they disagree with them. There has to be some hidden, crypto-conservative agenda involved. In reality, though, this is just Krugman being his usual self. It’s what he does. Lefties are now learning why conservatives find him so annoying.

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Paul Krugman Is Annoying

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CEO Pay Down in 2015, But Still Higher Than Its Bubble Heights

by bibw6a Posted on April 8, 2016

Mother Jones

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Sad news today from the Wall Street Journal. Among CEOs of big companies, stock-based pay was up 7 percent last year and cash pay was up 2 percent. But thanks to slower growth of CEO pensions, overall compensation was down 4 percent.

But perhaps CEOs will be mollified by the broader picture, which you can see in the chart on the right. CEO pay is up about 44 percent since 2007 in nominal terms, and up about 38 percent when you account for inflation. For ordinary workers, pay has decreased 5 percent since 2007 when you account for inflation.

For anyone wondering why Bernie Sanders has struck such a chord with the electorate, this pretty much tells the story. The Great Recession sure didn’t affect everyone equally, did it? Ordinary schlubs paid a high price, but the folks with the most lavish pay to begin with just shrugged it off like it never happened. If the rich wonder why calls to tax high incomes at 90 percent sound pretty good to a lot of people, this should clue them in.

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CEO Pay Down in 2015, But Still Higher Than Its Bubble Heights

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Environmentalists Get Bit By California’s Premier Environmental Law

by AnnetteCathcart Posted on April 7, 2016

Mother Jones

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I’m a pretty committed environmentalist, but it’s still hard not to feel a bit of schadenfreude over the problems that California’s premier environmental law has had on the construction of bike lanes:

The California Environmental Quality Act, known as CEQA, has stymied bike lanes up and down the state for more than a decade….“The environmental law is hugely frustrating,” said Dave Campbell, advocacy director for Bike East Bay, which has pushed for the Fulton Street bike lane. “It’s a law that allows you to say no. It’s not a law that lets you say yes.”

….The issue has festered for a long time. A decade ago, a lawsuit against San Francisco’s citywide bike plan stalled the city’s plans to add more than 30 miles of bike lanes for several years….Even without the threat of litigation, the environmental law can stop bike lanes in their tracks. When city of Oakland officials wanted to narrow a wide road near a major transit station and add two bike lanes, they realized it would be difficult to comply with the environmental law’s rules and didn’t proceed, said Jason Patton, Oakland’s bike program manager. About a decade later, the road remains a six-lane highway.

“CEQA is an incredible burden to doing work in urban areas,” Patton said. “And I say that as a committed environmentalist.”

The environmental law requires proponents of new projects — including bike lanes — to measure the effect the project would have on car congestion. When a traffic lane is taken out in favor of a bike lane, more congestion could result along that road. That result can put proposed bike lanes in peril. And traffic studies to show whether installing a bike lane would lead to greater congestion can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Oftentimes, cities won’t bother with the effort.

Needless to say, this is the same complaint that developers have long had with CEQA: It allows NIMBYs to hold up construction of new projects endlessly with faux environmental objections. Go ahead and just try to build a dense development in LA. Plenty of folks would love to do it. But you’d better be prepared for years or more of grinding lawsuits from every nearby resident who doesn’t want more traffic.

I’m no expert on CEQA, so I won’t try to offer any detailed criticism here. Generally speaking, though, I’d like to see the law reformed so that genuine environmental concerns get the hearings they deserve, but no more. There needs to be some kind of stopping point or reasonableness test in there. A $100,000 bike lane shouldn’t require $200,000 in environmental impact reports and another $200,000 defending lawsuits from bike lane haters. Likewise, a proposed apartment building should be required to acknowledge genuine environmental impacts—on traffic, on sewage, on air quality—but there needs to be a limit to how detailed this needs to be. Bike lanes are great, but so are apartment buildings.

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Environmentalists Get Bit By California’s Premier Environmental Law

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Deadly mining blast gets coal exec Don Blankenship a maximum prison sentence: One year

by LoriRea327034841 Posted on April 6, 2016

Former Massey Energy Chief Executive Don Blankenship smiles outside the Robert C. Byrd U.S. Courthouse just moments after the verdict was handed down to him in Charleston, West Virginia December 3, 2015. REUTERS/Chris Tilley – RTX1X2SN

Deadly mining blast gets coal exec Don Blankenship a maximum prison sentence: One year

By on 6 Apr 2016 3:17 pmcommentsShare

Six years and one day after an explosion in Massey Energy’s Upper Big Branch (UBB) mine killed 29 coal workers, a federal judge in West Virginia handed the company’s former Chief Executive Officer Donald Blankenship the maximum sentence for conspiracy to commit federal safety violations: one year in prison.

At Wednesday’s sentencing in Charleston, Blankenship received an additional year of supervised release and a quarter-million dollar fine. While families of UBB victims were not permitted to speak in the courtroom during sentencing, Blankenship did. “My main point is wanting to express sorrow to the families and everyone for what happened,” Blankenship told to the court, adding the qualification to his apology, “I am not guilty of a crime.” Betty Harrah, the sister of a victim of the explosion, told a local TV station on Wednesday the disaster delivered “a lifetime sentencing” to victim’s families who “didn’t do anything wrong.”

The UBB explosion was the deadliest U.S. mining accident in four decades, and prompted a federal investigation into the coal giant’s safety practices. The investigation eventually led the Justice Department to the top of Massey’s chain of command: to Blankenship, who federal prosecutors accused last fall of creating “an unspoken conspiracy that company employees were to ignore safety standards and practices if they threatened profits,” according to The New York Times. As Mother Jones’ Tim Murphy reported in November, UBB averaged one safety violation per day; miners worked in hazardous conditions, like floods and collapsing ceilings; the company used secret codes and radios to foil federal inspectors; and Blankenship himself sent out threatening messages to managers who were concerned about safety.

Blankenship — a native of coal country who enjoyed a 18-year reign as CEO of Massey — was charged with the misdemeanor in December. It was considered a landmark in a region where King Coal has ruled for more than a century. The U.S. attorneys, reports the Times, “said it was the first time such a high-ranking corporate executive had been found guilty of a workplace safety crime.” Nonetheless, Blankenship’s jury of peers cleared him of three felony charges that could’ve put him away for 30 years instead of one.

For many, 30 years would’ve sat a lot better:

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Deadly mining blast gets coal exec Don Blankenship a maximum prison sentence: One year

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White Teachers Think Pretty Poorly of Their Black Students

by NatalieHilton6 Posted on April 5, 2016

Mother Jones

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Bob Somerby draws my attention to a new study about the effect of race on teacher evaluations of students. The authors took advantage of a large dataset that included evaluations of students from two teachers each. They then compared the teacher evaluations of each student based on differences in the teachers’ races.

The chart on the right tells the story. White students didn’t suffer from having a teacher of another race. Expectations of dropping out were the same and expectations of getting a college degree were actually higher. Hispanic students were modestly affected. Teachers of other races thought Hispanic students had a slightly higher chance of dropping out and the same chance of completing college.

But black students were enormously affected. Compared to black teachers, teachers of other races thought their black students had a far higher chance of dropping out and a far lower chance of completing college. Since the baseline expectation of dropping out was 31 percent for black students, a change of 12 percentage points represents a whopping 39 percent increase. Likewise, the baseline expectation of a college degree was 37 percent for black students, so a change of 9 percentage points represents 24 percent decrease.

The authors conclude with this:

The general finding of systematic biases in teachers’ expectations for student attainment indicates that the topic of teacher expectations is ripe for future research. Particularly policy relevant areas for future inquiry include how teachers form expectations, what types of interventions can eliminate biases from teacher expectations, and how teacher expectations affect the long-run student outcomes of ultimate import. To the extent that teacher expectations affect student outcomes, the results presented in the current study provide additional support for the hiring of a more diverse and representative teaching force, as nonwhite teachers are underrepresented in U.S. public schools.

Let’s ask all our presidential candidate what, if anything, they think we should do about this.

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White Teachers Think Pretty Poorly of Their Black Students

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Donald Trump’s Position on Abortion Changes Yet Again

by KathariOrsini Posted on April 2, 2016

Mother Jones

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So what is Donald Trump’s position on abortion? Let us count the ways:

Wednesday:

MATTHEWS: Do you believe in punishment for abortion, yes or no as a principle?

TRUMP: The answer is that there has to be some form of punishment.

MATTHEWS: For the woman?

TRUMP: Yes, there has to be some form.

A few hours later:

Campaign statement: This issue is unclear and should be put back into the states for determination.

A few hours after that:

Campaign statement: The doctor or any other person performing this illegal act upon a woman would be held legally responsible, not the woman….My position has not changed.

Thursday:

“It could be that I misspoke but this was a long, convoluted subject….This was a long discussion…which frankly they don’t run on television because it’s too long.”

(Ed note: This is a lie. Trump’s answer was televised in its entirety.)

Friday morning:

“A question was asked to me. And it was asked in a very hypothetical. And it was said, ‘Illegal, illegal’….But I was asked as a hypothetical, hypothetically. The laws are set now on abortion and that’s the way they’re going to remain until they’re changed….I think it would’ve been better if it were up to the states. But right now, the laws are set….And I think we have to leave it that way.”

A few hours later:

Campaign statement: Mr. Trump gave an accurate account of the law as it is today and made clear it must stay that way now—until he is President. Then he will change the law through his judicial appointments and allow the states to protect the unborn. There is nothing new or different here.

The best part of all this is that when the Trump campaign issues a statement cleaning up after their boss, they always insist that nothing has changed.

No, wait: the best part is when John Dickerson asked Trump if he thought abortion was murder and Trump refused to answer. “I do have my opinions on it. I just don’t think it’s an appropriate forum.” Really? Face the Nation is not an appropriate forum for discussing one of the key political issues of our time? What is?

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Donald Trump’s Position on Abortion Changes Yet Again

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Reality Is Bearing Down on Paul Ryan

by DeannaColleano Posted on March 31, 2016

Mother Jones

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Lisa Mascaro reports that the honeymoon may be over for Paul Ryan. He only lasted five months:

As Congress is careening toward another budget crisis and the Republican Party is ripping itself apart over Donald Trump’s rise, the man best known as the architect of the GOP’s austere spending blueprint is likely to miss an April 15 deadline to approve a new funding plan for 2017.

He’s been unable to overcome the same resistance from the conservative House Freedom Caucus that doomed his predecessor, and is so far similarly unwilling to use the power of the speaker’s office to force stragglers to fall into line.

….To some, Ryan’s repeated calls for Republicans to “raise our gaze” and his frequent attempts to position himself as the GOP’s deep thinker are starting to give off an air of ivory tower insignificance. Conservatives wonder if he’s still a “young gun” trying to shake up the party. At a Trump rally in Ryan’s Wisconsin hometown of Janesville last week, the crowd booed the mention of his name.

….In many ways, the speaker’s problems are of his own making, the result of a leadership strategy he helped forge to recruit the most conservative candidates to run for office and then, after Republicans won the House majority in the 2010 midterm election, reject almost all of Obama’s initiatives.

Well, it’s still early days. Maybe Ryan is just working slowly and steadily to gain some kind of consensus. More likely, though, the tea partiers aren’t any more willing to compromise under Ryan than they were under Boehner—and that leaves Ryan high and dry. If he can’t convince them to be flexible even during an election year, he obviously doesn’t have much conservative credibility left. Hard to believe.

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Reality Is Bearing Down on Paul Ryan

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Is This the Most Astonishing Obamacare Result Ever?

by DonnieDeLaConda Posted on March 31, 2016

Mother Jones

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Phil Price points us today to an intriguing chart from the Department of Health and Human Services. It shows readmission rates within 30 days of a hospital stay for Medicare patients—including both “official” readmissions and short-term “observations”—and it’s pretty stunning. When Obamacare passed, readmission rates started to fall dramatically almost instantly. They fell most sharply for a subset of conditions specifically targeted by Obamacare, and by a smaller amount for other conditions. If this is accurate, it means that hospitals could have done something about readmission rates all along, but they just hadn’t bothered. Only after Obamacare provided an incentive to get their readmission rates down did they do anything about it.

So how should we think about this? I’ll confess to some skepticism because the chart is almost too perfect. For four years the readmission rate is dead stable. Then, in a single month between December 2010 and January 2011 it suddenly drops by a full percentage point, and continues dropping for two years. This decline started about eight months after the passage of Obamacare, and it’s hard to believe that hospitals could react that quickly.

Then, the very instant that penalties begin for high readmission rates, everything stabilizes again. Apparently America’s hospitals unanimously decided that once they’d hit a certain level, that was good enough and they wouldn’t bother trying to improve even more.

Maybe. But even for those of us who believe in incentives, this is the damnedest response to a new incentive I’ve ever seen. I guess my advice is to treat this with cautious optimism. It looks like a great result, but as with most Obamacare outcomes, it’s too early to tell for sure how things are going to work out. When we have five or ten years of experience, we’ll start to be able to draw some concrete conclusions. Until then, we can say how things seem to be going so far, but not much more.

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Is This the Most Astonishing Obamacare Result Ever?

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Here’s the Frame-by-Frame Footage of Trump’s Campaign Manager Grabbing Michelle Fields

by PQDCharity Posted on March 29, 2016

Mother Jones

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In case you’re curious, here’s a frame-by-frame breakdown of security camera footage from the Donald Trump rally in Jupiter, Florida, on March 8. It shows Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski grabbing Breitbart reporter Michelle Fields in order to get her away from Trump:

A few things are obvious here. First, Fields didn’t hallucinate anything, as both Lewandowski and Trump have implied. Second, Lewandowski did indeed grab Fields by the arm, just as she says. Third, Trump was already walking away from her at the time. Fourth, it doesn’t really look very serious. Fields is obviously a little nonplussed, but otherwise fairly unscathed.

The whole thing is crazy. It’s a minor incident, and all Lewandowski had to do was give Fields a quick call to apologize for grabbing her in his haste to catch up with his boss. Incident over. But apparently that was out of the question. Team Trump never apologizes. Instead they went on the warpath and publicly accused Fields of being nothing but an attention-seeking fantasist.

Yeah, this is definitely the team we need in the White House.

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Here’s the Frame-by-Frame Footage of Trump’s Campaign Manager Grabbing Michelle Fields

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Hillary Clinton Is Fundamentally Honest and Trustworthy.

by Sherri0253 Posted on March 28, 2016

Mother Jones

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As we all know, millennials don’t care much for Hillary Clinton. That’s OK. I’m on the other side of that particular fence, but there’s plenty of room for honest differences about her views and whether they’re right for the country—differences that I don’t think are fundamentally rooted in age.

But there’s one issue where I suspect that age really does trip up millennials: the widespread belief that Hillary isn’t trustworthy. It’s easy to understand why they might think this. After all, Hillary has been surrounded by a miasma of scandal for decades—and even if you vaguely know that a lot of the allegations against her weren’t fair, well, where there’s smoke there’s fire. So if you’re familiar with the buzzwords—Whitewater, Travelgate, Vince Foster, the Rose law firm, Troopergate, Ken Starr, Benghazi, Emailgate—but not much else, it’s only human to figure that maybe there really is something fishy in Hillary’s past.

But many of us who lived through this stuff have exactly the opposite view. Not only do we know there’s almost literally nothing to any of these “scandals,” we also know exactly how they were deliberately and cynically manufactured at every step along the way. We were there, watching it happen in real time. So not only do we believe Hillary is basically honest, but the buzzwords actively piss us off. Every time we hear a young progressive kinda sorta suggest that Hillary can’t be trusted, we want to strangle someone. It’s the ultimate proof of how the right wing’s big lie about the Clintons has successfully poisoned not just the electorate in general, but even the progressive movement itself.

I bring this up because I had to blink twice to make sure my eyes weren’t fooling me this morning. Jill Abramson has followed Bill and Hillary Clinton for more than two decades, first in the Washington bureau of the Wall Street Journal, then at the New York Times, where she eventually became Washington bureau chief (and even later, executive editor). Her perch gave her an unrivaled view into Hillary’s actions. Here’s what she had to say today in the Guardian:

I would be “dead rich”, to adapt an infamous Clinton phrase, if I could bill for all the hours I’ve spent covering just about every “scandal” that has enveloped the Clintons. As an editor I’ve launched investigations into her business dealings, her fundraising, her foundation and her marriage. As a reporter my stories stretch back to Whitewater. I’m not a favorite in Hillaryland. That makes what I want to say next surprising.

Hillary Clinton is fundamentally honest and trustworthy.

….Many investigative articles about Clinton end up “raising serious questions” about “potential” conflicts of interest or lapses in her judgment. Of course, she should be held accountable. It was bad judgment, as she has said, to use a private email server. It was colossally stupid to take those hefty speaking fees, but not corrupt. There are no instances I know of where Clinton was doing the bidding of a donor or benefactor.

….I can see why so many voters believe Clinton is hiding something because her instinct is to withhold….Clinton distrusts the press more than any politician I have covered. In her view, journalists breach the perimeter and echo scurrilous claims about her circulated by unreliable rightwing foes.

As Abramson suggests, there are times when Hillary is her own worst enemy. The decades of attacks have made her insular and distrustful, and this often produces a lawyerly demeanor that makes her sound guilty even when she isn’t. As a result, the belief in Hillary’s slipperiness is now such conventional wisdom that it’s almost impossible to dislodge. I just checked Memeorandum to see if anyone was discussing Abramson’s piece, and I was unsurprised to find that it’s gone almost entirely unnoticed.

But the truth is that regardless of how she sometimes sounds, her record is pretty clear: Hillary Clinton really is fundamentally honest and trustworthy. Don’t let the conservative noise machine persuade you otherwise.

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Hillary Clinton Is Fundamentally Honest and Trustworthy.

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