Tag Archives: mother

A Defense of Becky Quick

by lepsacazare Posted on October 31, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

CNBC’s Becky Quick has come in for some criticism for being unprepared during Wednesday’s debate. To refresh your memory, here’s what happened during an exchange with Donald Trump:

QUICK: You had talked a little bit about Marco Rubio. I think you called him “Mark Zuckerberg’s personal senator” because he was in favor of the H1B.

TRUMP: I never said that. I never said that.

….QUICK: My apologies. I’m sorry.

In fact, Trump had said that in his own immigration plan. Why didn’t Quick know this?

I think we all know what happened here. Someone on Quick’s staff prepared some notes that included the quote, but didn’t specify where it came from. So when Trump denied saying it, Quick was stuck.

Now, sure, the staffwork here was bad, and Quick should have been better prepared. But that’s not the real problem here. The real problem is that Quick was unprepared for bald-faced lying. She expected Trump to spin or tap dance or try to explain away what he said. She didn’t expect him to just flatly deny ever saying it. That’s the only circumstance that would require her to know exactly where the quote came from.

This was a real epidemic on Wednesday night. Candidates have apparently figured out that they don’t need to tap dance. They can just baldly lie. Trump did it. Rubio did it. Carson did it. Fiorina did it. They know that time is short and they probably won’t get called on it. The worst that will happen is that fact checkers will correct them in the morning, but only a tiny fraction of the viewing audience will ever see it. So what’s the downside of lying?

Future moderators are going to have to be aware of this sea change. Modern candidates understand that they don’t need to bother with spin and exaggeration any more. They can just lie, and etiquette limits how much debate moderators can push back. I don’t think debate etiquette is going to change, so this probably means that moderators are going to have to learn to ask questions a little differently. We live in a new era.

Original article – 

A Defense of Becky Quick

Posted in FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on A Defense of Becky Quick

A Billionaire Sued Us. We Won. But We Still Have Big Legal Bills to Pay.

by HomerSevttp Posted on October 30, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

By now, you’ve probably read about Mother Jones‘ landmark legal win against Frank VanderSloot, a billionaire political donor. If you haven’t, you can read the full backstory here (it’s riveting). Or, if you’re feeling lazy, here’s the TL;DR version:

After the Citizens United decision allowed wealthy political donors to drastically increase their spending, we wrote a piece about one such donor: Frank VanderSloot. He and his company were among the biggest donors to Romney’s super-PAC. It was a straightforward bit of investigative reporting: letting readers know who was funding the campaign.

VanderSloot saw it differently. His lawyers sent us letters complaining about the piece. We didn’t retract our story, and in 2013 he sued us for defamation. Earlier this month, shortly before the case was set to go to trial, an Idaho judge dismissed the lawsuit, finding that our reporting was accurate and that the article was protected under the First Amendment.

It was a huge victory. We were up against a powerful billionaire and we won. But it came at a great cost: at least $2.5 million for us and our insurer, and $650,000 in out-of-pocket expenses for Mother Jones, to be precise. Everyone’s been asking whether we can recoup our attorney’s fees from VanderSloot, but unfortunately the answer is no.

The win means a lot to me, personally, too. As someone who writes about rich and powerful people, it’s good to know that the First Amendment is alive and well. And it makes me beyond proud to write for Mother Jones: Not too many other shops would have had the guts to fight back, but we knew you’d expect us to, and that you’d have our back if we took a stand.

If you haven’t already, can you pitch in to help us pay our legal bills? If you can, your donation will be doubled by First Look Media’s Press Freedom Litigation Fund—they’re matching up to $74,999 in donations (the same amount VanderSloot sued us for). You can give by credit card or PayPal.

See more here:

A Billionaire Sued Us. We Won. But We Still Have Big Legal Bills to Pay.

Posted in Citizen, Everyone, FF, GE, LAI, Landmark, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on A Billionaire Sued Us. We Won. But We Still Have Big Legal Bills to Pay.

We Should Stop Helping the Silver Scammers

by ArielMathew9449 Posted on October 30, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

We’ve all seen ads like this a million times, but for some reason this one finally caught my attention. It’s the usual pitch: there’s a limited supply of silver bars, and California residents can get them cheap if they act fast! “For the next 2 days residents who find their state listed on the Distribution List above in bold are getting individual State Silver Bars at just the state minimum of $57 set by the Federated Mint.” And if you order ten bars, shipping and handling are free!

The current fixing for an ounce of silver is about $15. So if you pay $1,140 for $150 worth of silver, they’ll throw in shipping gratis. What a deal.

Anyway, I know this is all legal because the fine print says yada yada yada, and there’s no law that prevents selling goods for an astronomical price. But really: are we all so desperate for advertising dollars that we have to sell space to folks like this? I guess the answer is yes, but maybe that ought to change. We all know who gets taken in by these kinds of ads, and it doesn’t speak well of any publication that continues to be complicit in this.

Source article:

We Should Stop Helping the Silver Scammers

Posted in Citizen, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on We Should Stop Helping the Silver Scammers

Are We Allowed to Say That Marco Rubio Is Lying About His Tax Plan?

by WillN98zldly Posted on October 30, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

I’ve written a couple of posts about Marco Rubio’s debate tiff with John Harwood, which revolves around the question of how the poor and the middle class fare under Rubio’s tax plan. Harwood wanted to know why it was so much better for the rich than the middle class, and Rubio responded by saying his plan would help the very poor a lot.

In other words, Rubio declined to answer the question and instead answered a different one. But today Dylan Matthews digs into this a bit and concludes (surprise!) that Rubio’s plan probably doesn’t even help the poor all that much:

How is Rubio helping the poor so much? Well, Rubio’s plan would replace the standard deduction and personal exemption with a $2,000 credit ($4,000 for couples)….But Rubio’s proposal, as originally laid out, is not a plain old credit. It’s a fully refundable credit. Think about that for a second. Rubio’s original proposal would give any household in America $2,000 or $4,000, no questions asked. It was a basic income. It was a massive increase in the welfare state of a kind that no Democratic candidate, including Bernie Sanders, is proposing.

So it’s perhaps no surprise that when I asked his team about this, they insisted that this was a mistake, and the credit was in fact much more limited. “Rules would be tailored to ensure that our reforms would not create payments for new, non-working filers,” a Rubio aide told me in April.

It’s unclear what exactly that means….Here’s the problem, though: The Tax Foundation assumed that Rubio had proposed a basic income….Given that Rubio will not, in fact, create a massive new welfare program, this finding is pretty dubious.

How about that? Rubio misled the Tax Foundation into concluding that his plan would help the poor, and for some reason he’s never gotten around to correcting the error. In fact, he’s been aggressively touting the Tax Foundation analysis to “prove” that his plan helps the poor. He even accused John Harwood of misrepresenting his plan on national TV even though he knew perfectly well that he was the one misrepresenting his plan. If I were the Tax Foundation, I’d be pissed.

Still, I’m sure this was all an honest mistake on Rubio’s part, and he’ll rush to give the Tax Foundation updated information now that he realizes what he’s done. Right? He’s an honest young man, after all.

Right?

Jump to original – 

Are We Allowed to Say That Marco Rubio Is Lying About His Tax Plan?

Posted in Citizen, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Are We Allowed to Say That Marco Rubio Is Lying About His Tax Plan?

Debate Liveblogging Tonight!

by AllenSturdivant Posted on October 28, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Will I be liveblogging the Republican debate tonight? Yes. Yes I will. I’ll probably grow hair on my palms as a result, but I’m doing it anyway.

The debate is on CNBC and allegedly starts at 8 pm Eastern, but I imagine the actual debating probably doesn’t begin until 8:30 or thereabouts. So if you want to be part of history, come on by between 8 and 8:30 and join the snarkfest.

Continued here: 

Debate Liveblogging Tonight!

Posted in Citizen, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta, Vintage | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Debate Liveblogging Tonight!

Everyone Hated Sequestration, But Its Effect Was Never All That Huge

by ChristaU73 Posted on October 28, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Kevin Williamson doesn’t like the new budget deal. That’s no surprise: the reason Boehner is trying to pass this while he’s a lame duck is that he knows no one will like it. But that doesn’t matter to him anymore, so he’s willing to shrug and just get it done.

So what is Williamson’s specific gripe? That the deal basically does away with sequestration:

Democrats hated sequestration. Republicans hated sequestration.

Why?

Sequestration worked.

Sequestration is the reason why in recent years we’ve reduced federal spending substantially in GDP terms, from about 25 percent to about 20 percent. It is the main reason that we have reduced the federal deficit in GDP terms. Democrat-supporting welfare entrepreneurs hated it, and Republican-supporting military contractors hated it. Ordinary Americans did not have much in the way of strong views on the matter, which often is the case when a policy actually does what it is supposed to. Effective government rarely is dramatic government.

No argument with the first sentence. Sequestration was specifically designed to be so unlikable that neither party would ever support it. The fact that it took effect anyway is a testament to the dysfunction of the federal government, not to the budget-capping wonders of sequestration.

But let’s review that last paragraph. Is sequestration really the “main” reason we’ve reduced federal spending from 25 percent of GDP to 20 percent? Hmmm:

Spending hit 24.4 percent of GDP during the recession year of 2009. It was already down to 21.9 percent of GDP by 2012 and hit 21 percent in 2015.
Sequestration started in 2013, so at most it could be responsible for 0.9 out of 3.4 points of that reduced spending.
Was it? It theoretically reduced spending by $200 billion or so.
That’s about 1 percent of GDP.
In reality, CBO estimates that adjustments—primarily to fund overseas wars—ate into half of that. This means that sequestration lowered actual spending by about 0.5 percent of GDP.
The rest of the decline from 21.9 percent to 21 percent comes from the fact that GDP recovered.
So: of the spending reduction Williamson cites, about 0.5 percentage points was due to sequestration.

Now, I suppose that any kind of spending cut is a good cut to a conservative. But sequestration is responsible for only about a seventh of the spending reduction since 2009. The rest is due to (a) the end of stimulus spending, (b) reduced safety net spending as the recession eased, (c) the 2011 budget deal, and (d) the recovery of GDP growth, which automatically reduces spending as a percent of GDP.

See the article here:  

Everyone Hated Sequestration, But Its Effect Was Never All That Huge

Posted in Citizen, Everyone, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta, Vintage | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Everyone Hated Sequestration, But Its Effect Was Never All That Huge

Here’s Our Exclusive Recap of Tonight’s Republican Debate

by charlenedean Posted on October 28, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Editor’s note: Mother Jones reporter Tim Murphy recently acquired a time machine. But he didn’t go back into the past and kill baby Hitler. Instead, he traveled forward in time to Boulder, Colorado, to watch Wednesday night’s Republican presidential debate. Here’s his report.

No one ever accused Donald Trump of bringing a knife to a gun fight. Wednesday’s showdown in Boulder was the first debate in which billionaire real-estate mogul Trump was not the Republican front-runner. Though he still holds double-digit leads in New Hampshire and South Carolina, Trump recently dropped into second place in Iowa, and on Tuesday, after leading the GOP pack for 100 days, he trailed Ben Carson in a national poll.

But if Trump had an intention of moderating his style, it didn’t show. He stayed on the offensive throughout the night. When CNBC moderator John Harwood asked Trump if he believed Congress should raise the debt ceiling, he pivoted to attack Carson for his Seventh-day Adventist beliefs (“China has eight days”). And he raised a childhood incident in which the former pediatric neurosurgeon tried to stab a friend with a knife. Carson’s blade became caught in his friend’s belt buckle—no harm was done—and Carson has long credited the lucky break with turning his life around.

“When I stab someone, I stab them in the belly, where the flesh is softest,” Trump said. “That is how you do it. That way you can get right to their organs, and do a really tremendous amount of damage, very serious bleeding. This guy was a surgeon?”

Continue Reading »

See original article:  

Here’s Our Exclusive Recap of Tonight’s Republican Debate

Posted in alo, Anchor, Citizen, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta, Vintage | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Here’s Our Exclusive Recap of Tonight’s Republican Debate

Disturbing Video Shows School Cop Body Slam and Drag a Black Female Student

by gerdi Posted on October 26, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Authorities in Richland County, South Carolina, are investigating a video that surfaced Monday showing a uniformed officer aggressively confronting a high school student. Local station WIS-TV reports that county sheriff’s deputies are investigating the incident, which took place on Monday at Spring Valley High School, according to school officials. The video, which appears to have been recorded on a cellphone by a classmate, shows a white male officer standing over a black female student sitting at her desk; moments later he grabs the student and flips her on her back. After dragging her across the floor, the officer says, “Hands behind your back—give me your hands.” The video has no additional context as to what led to or followed the altercation.

“Parents are heartbroken as this is just another example of the intolerance that continues to be of issue in Richland County School District Two, particularly with families and children of color,” a local black parents group wrote in a statement responding to the video.

Also: Chokeholds, Brain Injuries, Beatings: When School Cops Go Bad

Richland County Sheriff Leon Lott told WIS-TV that the school resource officer (SRO) was responding to a student who was refusing to leave class. “The student was told she was under arrest for disturbing school and given instructions, which she again refused,” Lott said. “The video then shows the student resisting and being arrested by the SRO.”

The video is the latest in a series of disturbingly violent altercations involving school cops. As Mother Jones first reported in July, there have been at least 29 incidents in the United States since 2010 in which school-based police officers used questionable force against students in K-12 schools, many of which caused serious injuries, and in one case death. Data on use of force by school cops is lacking even as the number of officers on campus has ballooned over the past two decades, with little training or oversight.

Update, 6:15 p.m. EDT: Here is a statement released by the school district, via local TV reporter Megan Rivers:

Credit: 

Disturbing Video Shows School Cop Body Slam and Drag a Black Female Student

Posted in Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta, Vintage | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Disturbing Video Shows School Cop Body Slam and Drag a Black Female Student

The Great 1998 Chart Swindle Is Now Officially Over

by JanisUnaipon Posted on October 26, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

One of the favorite topics in the climate change denial community is the “global warming pause.” It’s based on the fact that 1998 was an unusually warm year, so if you begin a climate chart in 1998 it will look as if nothing much has happened since. I made fun of this last week, but it occurs to me that we might genuinely have seen the last of that famous chart.

Why? Because it’s no good anymore. David Roberts tells me today that Republicans are incensed over a recent NOAA paper that suggests the “pause” is due to mismeasurements of ocean temperatures, but who even needs that anymore? Just look at the basic numbers in the chart below. Even if you start in 1998, you can see obvious evidence of warming.

Bottom line: Even the famously deceptive 1998 chart doesn’t work anymore. I suspect that we’re going to see a sudden lack of interest in 1998 charts from the denialists. They’ll have to move on to swindling the rubes with something else.

And if you’re curious, here’s an honest, plain-Jane chart of the past 50 years. The 1998 outlier is pretty obvious here, and the evidence of steady warming is pretty obvious too.

Taken from:

The Great 1998 Chart Swindle Is Now Officially Over

Posted in FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta, Vintage | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Great 1998 Chart Swindle Is Now Officially Over

Stop It

by bestleanmusclesupplementwix Posted on October 26, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Now you guys are just messing with me. On Saturday I wrote a short post complaining that another short (and insignificant) post had become my most widely-liked post of all time. Now Saturday’s little gripe has 12,000 Facebook likes.

I hate you all.

This article – 

Stop It

Posted in FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta, Vintage | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Stop It