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Hillary Clinton Is Focusing on the Middle Class—And That’s a Good Thing

by RLABrandie Posted on April 10, 2015

Mother Jones

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Matt Yglesias takes a look at an economic blueprint from the Center or American Progress and suggests it’s a useful proxy for Hillary Clinton’s upcoming presidential campaign:

In some ways, it defies stereotypes of the Clintons as standard-bearers for neoliberal centrism by endorsing fiscal stimulus and a strong pro-labor union agenda while downplaying the strong education-reform streak of the Obama administration. But it’s also notable for the Obama-era liberal ambitions it pushes aside. In the main recommendations for the United States, there’s no cap-and-trade or carbon tax in here, no public option for health care, and no effort to break up or shrink the largest banks. Nor is there an ambitious agenda to tackle poverty.

Instead, you get a multi-pronged push to boost middle-class incomes. After an extended period in which Democratic Party politics has been dominated by health care for the poor, environmental regulation, and internecine fights about Wall Street, Hillarynomics looks like back-to-basics middle-class populism. It should in many ways further infuriate Clinton’s left-wing intellectual critics — and then further infuriate them by turning out to be an agenda that makes the party’s voting base perfectly happy.

….The report is especially striking for its endorsement of labor market regulations not normally associated with the Summers wing of Democratic thinking….On the non-wage front, inclusive growth calls for paid (gender-neutral) parental leave, expanded Family and Medical Leave Act eligibility, and universal paid sick days and paid vacation days — all loosely under the banner of increasing women’s labor force participation. Clinton has, in the past, field-tested feminist frames as a means of selling big government.

None of this should come as a surprise. The Great Recession spawned a great deal of government help to the poor from the Obama administration but not a lot for the middle class, and politically the biggest problem Democrats now face is offering concrete programs for the middle class to compete with yet another round of tax cut proposals from the Republican field.

But the truth is that this helps the poor too, in the long run. Middle-class workers with stagnant incomes have become less and less willing to support more spending on the poor. That’s just human nature. But if Hillary can successfully get the economy into a higher gear and funnel some of that money to the middle class, eventually things will ease up and it will become easier to win support for higher benefits to the poor.

I don’t know if Hillary’s proposals will go far enough, but they’re the right thing to do. For the time being at least, Washington needs to focus on the middle class for a while.

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Hillary Clinton Is Focusing on the Middle Class—And That’s a Good Thing

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Finally, a Candidate for People Who Think Jeb Bush Isn’t WASPy Enough

by TabathaMcVicars Posted on April 9, 2015

Mother Jones

Last week it was Ted Cruz. On Wednesday it was Rand Paul. And now, meet your newest presidential candidate: former Rhode Island Republican senator turned former Rhode Island Democratic governor Lincoln Chafee! Bet you didn’t see that one coming.

Rhode Island Public Radio reported the news this morning:

Chafee said the launch of his exploratory committee will be made via videos posted on his website, Chafee2016.com.

“Throughout my career, I exercised good judgment on a wide range of high-pressure decisions, decisions that require level-headedness and careful foresight,” said Chafee. “Often these decisions came in the face of political adversity. During the next weeks and months I look forward to sharing with you my thoughts about the future of our great country.”

Lincoln Chafee, of the Rhode Island Chafees, won’t be the next president, although he does enter the Democratic primary with strong name recognition among people who use “summer” as a verb. Chafee’s father, great-great grandfather, and great-great uncle all previously served as governor of the state. Lincoln ran for the family seat only after losing his spot in the Senate in 2006 to Sheldon Whitehouse (of the Rhode Island Whitehouses), whose father had roomed with Chafee’s father at some college in New Haven before entering the diplomatic corps (like his father before him).

But there is something worth highlighting in his announcement interview:

Chafee said his focus will be on building a strong middle class coupled with environmental stewardship. Chafee, who voted against former President George W. Bush’s Iraq War, noted that Mrs. Clinton voted for it. He said he aims to send a clear message that “unilateral military intervention has damaged American interests around the world.”

Did you catch that? It’s easy to forget now that she’s the email-destroying, dictator-courting villain of Benghazi, but there was a time when Hillary Clinton’s biggest weakness was something else entirely: Iraq. Clinton’s support for that war (and her inability to assuage its opponents) was the fuel for Sen. Barack Obama’s rise in the polls in 2007. Eight years later, the issue has been all but erased from the political debate.

Don’t bet on Chafee being the man who brings it back.

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Finally, a Candidate for People Who Think Jeb Bush Isn’t WASPy Enough

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The GOP’s Campaign to Make You Hate The IRS Is Kind of Genius

by ChristaWrigley Posted on April 8, 2015

Mother Jones

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People hate the IRS. Of course they do! When Pew Research asked people earlier this year how they feel about various parts of the government, every agency received positive marks—except the IRS. And last month, Rasmussen found that a scant 31 percent of voters trust the tax agency to fairly enforce the law. Let’s face it: the agency tasked with taking money out of paychecks is never going to be popular.

But people have even more reason to despise encounters with the agency these days, thanks to a concerted effort by Republicans in Congress to slash the tax collector’s budget. From the front page of today’s Washington Post:

Since 2010, Republicans on Capitol Hill have slashed the IRS budget by $1.2 billion, or about 17 percent, adjusting for inflation. Just this fiscal year, $346 million was cut.

By contrast, cuts across the rest of the government have been far more modest and concentrated. Between 2012 and 2014, automatic spending reductions shrank non-defense spending, as adjusted for inflation, by 1.3 percent, while IRS spending was chopped 5.6 percent, according to Scott Lilly, a budget expert at the Center for American Progress.

Those budget cuts have made dealing with the IRS this tax season a true pain in the ass. As the Washington Post details, just four in ten callers to the IRS’s help line are actually able to get assistance from a real human, while the number of unintentional hang-ups from an overworked phone system have ballooned. And the cuts are actually costing the government: thanks to a 5,000-person reduction in the agency’s staff over the past four years, tax cheats can more easily skate by.

Attacking the IRS is one of the simplest lines a politician can roll out. It’s a favorite rhetorical turn for presidential candidate and senator Ted Cruz, who’s said he’d like to “abolish the IRS, take all 125,000 IRS agents and put them on our southern border,” to applause at this year’s CPAC.

Meanwhile, Democrats are wary about offering an equally vocal defense of the IRS, hesitant to be tarred as just typical tax-and-spenders. Sure, President Obama has included increases for the agency in his congressional budget requests, but it’s never been a major issue that he’d consider wielding his veto pen over. But without a more robust defense, the IRS could wither away and replace the DMV as a punch line for why government doesn’t work.

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The GOP’s Campaign to Make You Hate The IRS Is Kind of Genius

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The Feds Are Investigating 106 Colleges for Mishandling Sexual Assault. Is Yours One of Them?

by BrianneJessep Posted on April 8, 2015

Mother Jones

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Last May, the Department of Education released a list of 55 colleges and universities under investigation for possible Title IX violations for mishandling sexual-assault cases. As of April 1, the number has grown to 106 institutions, according to new data requested by Mother Jones.

The DOE provided the updated list Monday, a day after the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism published its report on the widely discredited Rolling Stone article about sexual assault at the University of Virginia. The controversy around the piece has served as a reminder of the ongoing national debate about how colleges and universities should handle sexual-assault allegations. Recent research shows that 1 in 5 women in undergraduate programs experience sexual assault, even though just 1 percent of assailants are punished.

UVA has been on the federal radar since June 2011, joining five other Virginia area schools under investigation. Meanwhile, several schools have agreed to make changes in how they handle sexual-misconduct complaints following the federal probes:

In 2011, before the DOE made its list of institutions public, the Office for Civil Rights looked into complaints of a sexually hostile environment at Yale, in part due to an October 2010 incident in which fraternity pledges chanted “sexually aggressive comments” outside the campus’ Women’s Center. Yale agreed to alter its policies in June 2012.
Both the Department of Justice and the DOE investigated procedures at the University of Montana-Missoula, once described as the nation’s “rape capital.” (Between January 2008 and May 2012, Missoula police received more than 350 sexual-assault reports.) The university agreed to make changes in May 2013.
Last May, the DOE’s Office for Civil Rights found that at the Virginia Military Institute, “female cadets were exposed to a sexually hostile environment” and that the institute violated Title IX for requiring pregnant and parenting cadets to leave the school.
The DOE’s Office for Civil Rights found that Harvard Law School failed to “appropriately respond” to two sexual-assault complaints, including one complaint that was dismissed more than a year after the university took up the case. The law school agreed to make changes in December 2014 as part of a university-wide overhaul of its policy for handling sexual-assault and harassment cases. A group of Harvard law professors objected to the tougher policy in a Boston Globe op-ed, noting that the procedures for deciding cases were “overwhelmingly stacked against the accused.”

Here’s the most recent list of schools under federal investigation:

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106 Universities, Colleges Title IX Investigation Department of Education (PDF)

106 Universities, Colleges Title IX Investigation Department of Education (Text)

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The Feds Are Investigating 106 Colleges for Mishandling Sexual Assault. Is Yours One of Them?

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More Fabulous Health News

by Russel47Otaug Posted on April 7, 2015

Mother Jones

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I continue to be a star patient. Final results from yesterday clocked in at 5.2 million stem cells. Apparently I only need two million for the transplant, but they like to get a double sample in case I need another transplant a few years down the road. So four million is the goal.

So why am I still here? Good question. I don’t really have a good answer, though. Just in case? More is always better? This is actually a SPECTRE front and they use excess stem cells to breed an undefeatable clone army that will take over the world?

Not sure. In any case, stem cell collection has gone swimmingly and I’ll soon be out of here. Now there’s only one step left: the actual second round chemo itself followed by transplanting my stem cells back into my body. That begins on April 20.

BY THE WAY: The folks here, who have much more experience with cancer meds than your standard ER facility, are quite certain that my excruciating back pain on Friday was a side effect of the Neupogen. So that’s that. Today was my last shot of Neupogen, which means I can get off the pain meds in the next day or two.

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More Fabulous Health News

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Answer Key for Friday’s Flowers

by AureliaHMDJ Posted on April 5, 2015

Mother Jones

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Wondering what all those flowers were that I posted photos of on Friday? Here’s the official answer key, starting with the top row:

  1. Calla lily
  2. “Easy Does It” rose
  3. Variegated climbing rose (no tag)
  4. “Julia Child” rose
  5. White floribunda rose
  6. Nasturtium
  7. Daisy
  8. “Cecile Brunner” climbing rose

If you got them all right, congratulations! You’re a master botanist

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Answer Key for Friday’s Flowers

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Health Interlude

by StephanCCCG Posted on April 5, 2015

Mother Jones

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“Flu-like symptoms” my ass.

The last couple of days have been a horror story. On Thursday afternoon, out of the blue, I started having intense lower back pain. Then it got worse. By late evening it was bad enough that I took some morphine, which had very little effect. It got worse through my sleepless night. More morphine at 2 am, then more again at 7 am on Friday morning. At that point, the pain was so excruciating that I wanted to head over to our local ER, but unfortunately Friday was the day we were scheduled to go to LA to have my Hickman port installed for the stem cell transplant. Marian, thank God, insisted on us doing the right thing: driving to LA regardless and getting help there. (On the bright side, Good Friday traffic was light.)

I was practically writhing on the floor for the hour after we got there. Eventually I was taken back to prep, and the doctor tried IV morphine. It had only a minor effect. Then he gave me several IV infusions of Dilaudid, and that did the trick. I was still in pain, but it was tolerable.

Unfortunately, our timing was bad. The Dilaudid was wearing off just as the surgery to install the port began, and they could give me only a limited additional amount until it was over. So the surgery was a horror story too, even though the placement of the port is basically pretty painless.

Long story short, all of this might have been the result of my Neupogen injections, which make my bones work overtime. But my doctors all agreed that although back pain is a common effect of Neupogen, pain of my level was very unusual. Alternatively, all of this could have been due to a pathological fracture in my lower back. A CAT scan ruled that out, thank goodness. So we still don’t know for sure what was going on. But after a very bad day and night, apparently the Dilaudid was the right painkiller, and I woke up in the hospital Saturday morning feeling surprisingly good. I would have given long odds against that Friday night.

So….very mysterious. And for me personally, a whole new definition of pain. Hopefully it won’t return.

Need a silver lining? As bad as it all was, it was apparently a sign that the Neupogen is working. Routine bloodwork shows that my white cell count is high and getting higher. Hooray! That’s what we’re hoping for.

On Monday we start putting the Hickman port to use. I will be up at City of Hope for 2-5 days while they extract stem cells and then process them and freeze them. If I’m producing lots of stem cells, they’ll finish up in a couple of days. If I’m producing a weak stream of stem cells, it may take as long as five days. Cross your fingers.

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Health Interlude

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Mike Judge Prepares to Heap Fresh Ridicule on "Silicon Valley"

by BerylThielen Posted on April 3, 2015

Mother Jones

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Judge and the Pied Piper crew talk “tip to tip efficiency.” Kyle Platts

Mike Judge is dog tired. It’s 7:30 p.m. in Los Angeles, and he’s headed home after a 13-hour shift directing the second season of his delightfully snide HBO comedy Silicon Valley. He knows the turf well enough. After earning a physics degree from the University of California-San Diego in 1985, Judge, now 52, worked a few tech jobs himself, including a miserable gig as a test engineer for a Silicon Valley hardware maker.

But Judge loved to draw and tinker. On a whim, in 1989, he bought a vintage Bolex camera and used it to make Office Space, an animated short that got picked up by Comedy Central. A subsequent short, Frog Baseball, introduced the world to a pair of depraved young losers, and the rest is history: Beavis and Butt-head became an MTV staple and Judge went on to create, among other hits, King of the Hill and the 1999 feature film Office Space, now a cult classic. Silicon Valley, whose second season premieres Sunday, April 12, follows a crew of misfit hackers whose file-compression algorithm, Pied Piper, sparks a bidding war. The series, packed with hilarious dialogue, makes a mockery of the tech world’s hippie-capitalist hubris, smarmy lawyers, eccentric CEOs, and glaring deficit of X chromosomes.

Check out the original trailer, and then we’ll chat with the director:

Mother Jones: With apps like Titstare, protesters vomiting on Yahoo buses, and tech-libertarian island havens, a satirist hardly needs to exaggerate. Silicon Valley must seem like one big fat target.

Mike Judge: It’s definitely a wealth of material. Titstare actually happened after we had written and shot the Nip Alert episode, but hadn’t aired yet, so sometimes things almost happen simultaneously.

MJ: You make fun of how these companies all claim to be making the world a better place. Do you think they actually believe that?

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Mike Judge Prepares to Heap Fresh Ridicule on "Silicon Valley"

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Against All Odds, We Have a Tentative Nuclear Deal With Iran

by Johnathan Black Posted on April 2, 2015

Mother Jones

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Well, I’ll be damned. As President Obama just said, the details of the newly announced nuclear deal with Iran matter, and the deal isn’t done until those details are fully worked out. Still, I figured the odds of getting even a framework agreement at about 70-30 against. This time, at least, it looks like John Kerry’s tenacity has paid off.

The question of precisely when sanctions on Iran will be lifted seems to have been carefully avoided in the press conferences I’ve seen so far, but presumably that will get worked out. That aside, the framework seems pretty reasonable. I’ll be fascinated to learn what tack Republicans take to justify their inevitable opposition.

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Against All Odds, We Have a Tentative Nuclear Deal With Iran

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Ex-State Supreme Court Justice: Judicial Elections Are Like "Legalized Extortion"

by AnnelieseHXW Posted on April 2, 2015

Mother Jones

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Though they usually don’t get much attention, judicial elections have become just as cutthroat and cash-driven as other political races. To win a judgeship, many candidates must slime their opponents and win the financial backing of often unaccountable interests that may have business before them in court. (Read more in this Mother Jones investigation.)

The amount of money flowing into these races is staggering: State judicial candidates raised $83 million in the 1990s. Yet during the two years 2012 election cycle, they raised more than $110 million—and that doesn’t include outside spending. Altogether, more than $250 million has been spent on judicial races since 2000.

Judges themselves often hate the process of fundraising and mudslinging, but view it as a necessary evil. Sue Bell Cobb, a career judge and the former chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, just wrote about her experience for Politico. Her story is worth a full read, but here’s a taste:

While I was proud of the work I did for the next 4 1/2 years, I never quite got over the feeling of being trapped inside a system whose very structure left me feeling disgusted. I assure you: I’ve never made a decision in a case in which I sided with a party because of a campaign donation. But those of us seeking judicial office sometimes find ourselves doing things that feel awfully unsavory.

…

When a judge asks a lawyer who appears in his or her court for a campaign check, it’s about as close as you can get to legalized extortion. Lawyers who appear in your court, whose cases are in your hands, are the ones most interested in giving. It’s human nature: Who would want to risk offending the judge presiding over your case by refusing to donate to her campaign? They almost never say no—even when they can’t afford it.

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Ex-State Supreme Court Justice: Judicial Elections Are Like "Legalized Extortion"

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