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Voter Fraud Literally Less Likely Than Being Hit By Lightning

by Eve6nx7b Posted on August 6, 2014

Mother Jones

Justin Levitt has been tracking allegations of voter fraud for years. “To be clear,” he says, “I’m not just talking about prosecutions. I track any specific, credible allegation that someone may have pretended to be someone else at the polls, in any way that an ID law could fix.” So far, he’s found 31 cases representing around 200 individuals. If every one of them turns out be a genuine case of fraud, that’s a fraud rate of:

Of course, Levitt might be off by an order of magnitude. Or maybe even two or three orders of magnitude. That would put the fraud rate at 0.02 percent. On the other hand, these are just allegations. If past performance holds true, nearly all of them will turn out to be clerical mistakes, which means we’re back to 0.00002 percent. This compares to many thousands of voters who have been turned away from the polls for lack of ID in just the past few years.

Also worth noting: every single one of these cases involves just one or a few people. There’s not a single credible case in the past 15 years of any kind of organized voter impersonation scam of the kind that might actually affect the outcome of an election. There’s just no there there.

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Voter Fraud Literally Less Likely Than Being Hit By Lightning

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Lotus Watching in LA

by CESKatheri Posted on August 4, 2014

Mother Jones

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I spent the afternoon up in LA with my mother, and she wanted to go over and check out the new, rejuvenated Echo Park along with its new, rejuvenated lotus plants. It’s a little late in the season to see them in all their glory, but they’re still blooming. See here for the rather remarkable backstory about how the lotuses, once thought dead and gone forever, were brought back to life.

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Lotus Watching in LA

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Yes, the CIA Spied on the Senate

by Jeff Peterson Posted on July 31, 2014

Mother Jones

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Earlier this year, CIA Director John Brennan accused staffers from the Senate Intelligence Committee of removing classified material from the CIA office where they were researching a report on the agency’s use of torture during the Bush administration. This turned out to be very poor tradecraft on Brennan’s part, since it implicitly revealed the fact that the CIA was spying on Senate staffers even though it wasn’t supposed to. Brennan tried to mount a suitably aggressive counterattack to Senate outrage over this, but today it all came crashing down:

CIA employees improperly accessed computers used by the Senate Intelligence Committee to compile a report on the agency’s now defunct detention and interrogation program, an internal CIA investigation has determined.

….The statement represented an admission to charges by the panel’s chairwoman, Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., that the CIA intruded into the computers her staff used to compile the soon-to-be released report on the agency’s use of harsh interrogation methods on suspected terrorists in secret overseas prisons during the Bush administration.

CIA Director John Brennan briefed Feinstein and the committee’s vice chairman, Saxby Chambliss, R-GA, on the CIA inspector general’s findings and apologized to them during a meeting on Capitol Hill on Tuesday, Boyd said.

I find that my reaction remains one of schadenfreude. Dianne Feinstein and the rest of the Intelligence Committee seem to be mostly unconcerned with the omnipresent surveillance apparatus constructed by the US intelligence committee, so it’s hard to feel very sorry for them when they learn that this apparatus is also sometimes directed at Senate staffers. If this affair had persuaded a few senators that maybe our intelligence chiefs are less than totally honest about what they do, it might have done some good. But it doesn’t seem to have done that. With only a few exceptions, they’re outraged when the CIA spies on them, but that’s about it.

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Yes, the CIA Spied on the Senate

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This Is the Lamest Defense of GMO Foods Ever

by OtiliaCroft Posted on July 31, 2014

Mother Jones

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Over on our environment blog, Chris Mooney posts an excerpt from an interview in which Neil deGrasse Tyson defends GMO foods:

“Practically every food you buy in a store for consumption by humans is genetically modified food,” asserts Tyson. “There are no wild, seedless watermelons. There’s no wild cows…You list all the fruit, and all the vegetables, and ask yourself, is there a wild counterpart to this? If there is, it’s not as large, it’s not as sweet, it’s not as juicy, and it has way more seeds in it. We have systematically genetically modified all the foods, the vegetables and animals that we have eaten ever since we cultivated them. It’s called artificial selection.”

This is a very common defense of GMO foods, but I’ve always found it to be the weakest, least compelling argument possible. It’s so weak, in fact, that I always wonder if people who make it are even operating in good faith.

It’s true that we’ve been breeding new and better strains of plants and animals forever. But this isn’t a defense of GMO. On the contrary, it’s precisely the point that GMO critics make. We have about 10,000 years of evidence that traditional breeding methods are basically safe. That’s why anyone can do it and it remains virtually unregulated. We have no such guarantee with artificial methods of recombinant DNA. Both the technique itself and its possible risks are completely different, and Tyson surely knows this. If he truly believed what he said, he’d be in favor of removing all regulation of GMO foods and allowing anyone to experiment with it. Why not, after all, if it’s really as safe as Gregor Mendel cross-breeding pea plants?

As it happens, I mostly agree with Tyson’s main point. Although I have issues surrounding the way GMO seeds are distributed and legally protected, the question of whether GMO foods are safe for human consumption seems reasonably well settled. The technology is new enough, and our testing is still short-term enough, that I would continue to err on the side of caution when it comes to approving GMO foods. Still, GMO breeds created under our current regulatory regime are basically safe to eat, and I think that lefty critics of GMO foods should stop cherry picking the evidence to scare people into thinking otherwise.

(Please send all hate mail to Tom Philpott. He can select just the juiciest ones to send along to me.)

But even with that said, we shouldn’t pretend that millennia of creating enhanced and hybrid breeds tells us anything very useful about the safety of cutting-edge laboratory DNA splicing techniques. It really doesn’t.

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This Is the Lamest Defense of GMO Foods Ever

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These Gun Owners Oppose the NRA’s Efforts to Allow Stalkers and Abusers to Keep Their Weapons

by FannieCrabtree Posted on July 30, 2014

Mother Jones

On Wednesday, the Senate Judiciary Committee is holding its first-ever hearing on domestic violence and guns, in light of several bills that aim to strengthen federal gun restrictions against abusers. Federal law bans felons, people subject to permanent domestic-violence protective orders, and certain people convicted of domestic-violence misdemeanors from owning guns. But it does nothing to keep firearms out of the hands of a wide range of potentially dangerous abusers, including convicted stalkers, dating partners convicted of domestic violence misdemeanors, and people under temporary restraining orders. State laws largely don’t address these categories, either, and according to a Mother Jones analysis, the data suggests that states with fewer measures barring domestic abusers from possessing guns have more gun-related, intimate-partner homicides.

Several Democrat-backed bills that aim to strengthen federal law when it comes to gun ownership and domestic abuse are languishing in Congress, including one introduced in July 2013 by Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) that would bar convicted stalkers and abusive dating partners from possessing guns. The gun lobby has fought back against Klobuchar’s bill, with the Huffington Post reporting last month that the NRA sent a letter to lawmakers blasting the measure as a backdoor attempt to limit gun ownership. The legislation “manipulates emotionally compelling issues such as ‘domestic violence’ and ‘stalking’ simply to cast as wide a net as possible for federal firearm prohibitions,” the NRA told lawmakers. The powerful pro-gun-rights group has in the past fought to allow domestic violence offenders to possess guns, unless they’re convicted felons.

But not all gun-owners are siding with the NRA to fight these stricter gun controls. “I am a gun owner. I was shot and left for dead by my own gun,” says Christy Martin, a former championship boxer whose ex-husband was sentenced in 2012 to 25 years in prison for attempting to murder her with a firearm. Martin flew to Washington, DC this week to attend Wednesday’s hearing, at the invitation of Everytown for Gun Safety, a gun control group backed by former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. “I consider myself a physically fit, somewhat strong woman, mentally strong, emotionally strong, but it didn’t matter,” she says, noting that her ex-husband had a history of stalking behavior prior to the attack, and that she’d like to “close up some of those loopholes for stalkers.”

Elvin Daniel is a gun-owner and self-described NRA member who is testifying at the hearing in support of efforts to curb gun ownership for stalkers and abusers. He accuses the NRA of employing “a scare tactic” to prevent Klobuchar’s bill from advancing. “I absolutely do not agree with them,” he says. Daniel’s sister, Zina Haughton, was shot and killed by her estranged husband in October 2012. “I know that Senator Klobuchar’s bill will keep guns out of the hands of dangerous people,” he says, “not law-abiding gun owners.”

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These Gun Owners Oppose the NRA’s Efforts to Allow Stalkers and Abusers to Keep Their Weapons

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Should Doctors Ask You About Your Guns?

by MargareKorth Posted on July 29, 2014

Mother Jones

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In Florida, it’s illegal for a physician to ask you if you own a gun. Pediatrician Aaron Carroll thinks this is ridiculous:

When pediatricians ask you about using car seats, they’re trying to prevent injuries. When they ask you about how your baby sleeps, they’re trying to prevent injuries. When they ask you about using bike helmets, they’re trying to prevent injuries. And when they ask you about guns, they’re trying to prevent injuries, too.

….When I ask patients and parents whether they own guns, if they tell me they do, I immediately follow up with questions about how they are stored. I want to make sure they’re kept apart from ammunition. I want to make sure they’re in a locked box, preferably in a place out of reach of children. Doing so minimizes the risks to children. That’s my goal.

When we, as physicians, ask you if you drink or smoke, it’s not so that we can judge you. It’s so we can discuss health risks with you. When we ask you about domestic violence, it’s not to act like police detectives. It’s so that we can help you make better choices for your health. When we ask you about what you eat or whether you exercise, it’s so we can help you live better and longer. We’re doctors; it’s our job.

I don’t often disagree with Carroll, but I think I might here. Not about Florida’s law: that really is ridiculous. The state may have an interest in making sure doctors don’t give demonstrably bad advice, but it certainly doesn’t have a legitimate interest in preventing them from asking simple, fact-oriented question. This represents prior restraint on non-commercial speech, and as such it’s beyond the pale.

That said, should physicians ask about gun ownership? I’m not so sure. Carroll says he only wants to discuss “health risks,” and that’s appropriate. Doctors have expertise in the area of human health: that is, the biology and physiology of the human body. But that’s not the same thing as the safety of the human body.

Not only do doctors have no special professional expertise in this area, but it’s simply too wide open. Does your car have air bags? Do you ever jaywalk? Have you checked your electrical outlets lately? Is your house built to withstand an earthquake? Do you know how to work safely on your roof? Do you make sure to watch your kids in the pool? Are you planning any trips to eastern Ukraine?

I could go on forever in this vein. These are things unrelated to human physiology. If you define them all as health risks, you’re simply defining every aspect of life as a health risk, and therefore your doctor’s concern. That goes too far, and I don’t blame people for sometimes reacting badly to it. There are certainly gray areas here, but generally speaking, if I want advice about my health, I’ll see a doctor. If I want advice about gun safety, I’ll talk to a gun pro. I think it might be best to leave it this way.

FULL DISCLOSURE: My view is almost certainly colored by the fact that I’m all but phobic about doctors. I hate visiting them, I hate talking to them, and I hate the fact that they never seem to really, truly respond to what I tell them. I would be very annoyed if a doctor suddenly veered off and started quizzing me about general safety issues.

I’m keenly aware that this is an obvious overreaction on my part, and I do my best to restrain it when I’m actually talking to a doctor. Nonetheless, it’s there.

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Should Doctors Ask You About Your Guns?

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Big Oil’s New Pitch: Fracking Means Never Having to Fear Putin

by Myrna Posted on July 29, 2014

Oil and gas companies want Washington to believe that fracking can save Ukraine from Russia. It can’t. A worker passes by natural gas compressing equipment near the village of Kovalivka, Ukraine. Iren Moroz/AP As Ukraine sinks deeper into crisis, the oil and gas industry is pressing the United States to deploy its abundant natural gas supply as a weapon against Russia—and lawmakers of both parties are lining up behind the proposal. “We have this natural-gas boom,” Rep. Pat Tiberi (R-Ohio) said last week, after the downing of a Malaysia Airlines jet, allegedly by pro-Russian rebels. “We can use this newfound energy as a diplomatic tool to give the European leaders some backbone in standing up to the Russians.” Their enthusiasm is understandable: Roughly half the natural gas Russia ships to Europe flows through Ukraine. During past disputes, Russia has clamped down on the nation’s gas supply, creating turmoil in European energy markets. Many US politicians fear this dynamic could dampen Europe’s response to the Ukraine crisis and have begun looking to the bounty of natural gas from the domestic fracking boom to counter Russia’s energy dominance. As House Speaker John Boehner put it in a March Wall Street Journal Op-Ed, ”The ability to turn the tables and put the Russian leader in check lies right beneath our feet, in the form of vast supplies of natural energy.” Washington has also seen a flurry of proposals to speed up natural gas exports. Last month, following a lobbying blitz by oil and gas companies, including ExxonMobil, Koch Industries, Halliburton, and Chevron, the House passed a billrequiring the Department of Energy (DOE) to rule on proposed natural gas export terminals within 90 days. The Senate has weighed similar bills and amendments. While they haven’t managed to bypass the prevailing Senate gridlock, these measures have considerable bipartisan support, and backers are determined to push them through. The fight over expediting natural gas exports helped derail the popular Shaheen-Portman energy efficiency bill and bogged down negotiations over an aid package for Ukraine. As Congress prepares to adjourn for its August recess, opponents of expanding exports are bracing for a new onslaught. “We are on the lookout, particularly for amendments being slipped into must-pass funding bills,” says one senior Senate staffer. Read the rest at Mother Jones. Original article: Big Oil’s New Pitch: Fracking Means Never Having to Fear Putin Related ArticlesObama’s Coal-Leasing Program Is Costing Taxpayers More Than $50 BillionWhite House: Delaying Climate Action Will Carry Heavy Economic CostThis Huge Corporation Is Tackling Climate Change—Because It’s a Threat to the Bottom Line

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Big Oil’s New Pitch: Fracking Means Never Having to Fear Putin

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House Republicans Pass Bill to Lower Taxes on the Rich and Raise Taxes on the Poor

by Adam Stossel Posted on July 28, 2014

Mother Jones

So what are Republicans in the House of Representatives up to these days? According to Danny Vinik, they just passed a bill that would reduce taxes on the rich and raise them on the poor.

I know, I know: you’re shocked. But in a way, I think this whole episode is even worse than Vinik makes it sound.

Here’s the background: The child tax credit reduces your income tax by $1,000 for each child you have. It phases out for upper middle-income folks, but—and this is the key point—it phases out differently for singles and couples. The way the numbers sort out, it treats singles better than couples. This is the dreaded “marriage penalty,” which is bad because we want to encourage people to get married, not discourage them.

So what did House Republicans do? Naturally, they raised the phase-out threshold for married couples so that well-off couples would get a higher benefit. They didn’t have to do this, of course. They could have lowered the benefit for singles instead. Or they could have jiggled the numbers so that everyone got equal benefits but the overall result was revenue neutral.

But they didn’t. They chose the path that would increase the benefit—and thus lower taxes—for married couples making high incomes. The bill also indexes the credit to inflation, which helps only those with incomes high enough to claim the full credit. And it does nothing to make permanent a reduction in the earnings threshold that benefits poor working families. Here’s the net result:

If the House legislation became law, the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities estimated that a couple making $160,000 a year would receive a new tax cut of $2,200. On the other hand, the expiring provisions of the CTC would cause a single mother with two kids making $14,500 to lose her full CTC, worth $1,725.

So inflation indexing, which is verboten when the subject is the minimum wage, is A-OK when it comes to high-income taxpayers. And eliminating the marriage penalty is also a good idea—but again, only for high-income couples. Which is crazy. I don’t really have a firm opinion on whether the government should be in the business of encouraging marriage, but if it is, surely it should focus its attention on the people who need encouragement in the first place. And that is very decidedly not the upper middle class, which continues to get married at the same rate as ever.

So we have a deficit-busting tax cut. It’s a cut only for the upper middle class. It’s indexed for inflation, even though we’re not allowed to index things like the minimum wage. And the poor are still scheduled for a tax increase in 2017 because this bill does nothing to stop it. It’s a real quad-fecta. I wonder what Paul Ryan thinks of all this?

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House Republicans Pass Bill to Lower Taxes on the Rich and Raise Taxes on the Poor

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Why on Earth Are Argentine Bonds So Hot Right Now?

by CoyHargrove Posted on July 28, 2014

Mother Jones

What’s the hottest ticket in the global bond market right now? That’s right: Argentine bonds. They’re on a tear. But why? Didn’t Argentina just lose—once and for all—its court case against vulture funds who own old Argentine bonds and are refusing to accept partial payment of the kind that everyone else accepted after Argentina’s default a decade ago?

Why yes, they did lose. Argentina now has to pay the vulture funds—which is politically unthinkable for any Argentine politician who wants to avoid being tarred and feathered—or else it has to default on all its bonds, including the restructured “exchange” bonds that it issued in 2005. So why are these exchange bonds becoming more valuable? Argentina has always been willing to pay those bonds, so it’s not as if the court ruling has made default less likely. The risk of default was already close to nil. So what’s up?

Felix Salmon, having gotten tired of financial journalists offering up bizarre theories to explain this, tells us today that it’s probably all simpler than it seems. In fact, the odds of default have gotten higher, just as logic dictates, but this might actually be a good thing for bondholders. Normally, he points out, there’s no upside to bonds: you get the coupon payment, but you never get anything more. In Argentina’s case, however, that might not be true.

First off, there’s something called a RUFO clause. This means that if Argentina does eventually settle with the vulture funds, it has to offer the same deal to all the other bondholders.

Obviously, Argentina doesn’t have the money to pay out the exchange bondholders in full according to that clause. But if Argentina is paying out billions of dollars to vultures who deserve much less than they’re getting, and if those payments create a massive parallel legal obligation to the bondholders who cooperated with the country and did everything they asked, then it’s not unreasonable to expect that Argentina might end up paying something to the exchange bondholders, if doing so would wipe out any RUFO obligations.

Then there are interest payments:

The second way that exchange bondholders could get more than 100 cents on the dollar is, paradoxically, if there is a default. The minute that Argentina goes into arrears on its coupon payments, the clock starts ticking. From that day onwards — and actually, that day has been and gone already — bondholders are owed not only those coupon payments but interest on those coupon payments. And the interest accrues at the standard statutory rate of 8% — a massive number, these days.

So there you have it: a paradoxical case in which bonds might be viewed as more valuable if the odds of default are higher. Salmon admits that he’s just speculating here, since no one knows for sure why the market is so hot for Argentine bonds in the wake of Argentina losing its court case. But this is at least a reasonable guess. And a fascinating one.

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Why on Earth Are Argentine Bonds So Hot Right Now?

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Help Us Solve the Rotisserie Chicken Mystery

by SalvatoYkv Posted on July 24, 2014

Mother Jones

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Megan McArdle alerts me today to a story from a local TV station that answers a question I’ve vaguely wondered about for a while: Why is it cheaper to buy a cooked and seasoned rotisserie chicken than a raw chicken? Cat Vesko provides the straight dope:

Right now, an uncooked chicken at Ralphs runs you $9.87, but a rotisserie chicken is $6.99; at Gelson’s, you’ll pay $8.99 for a cooked chicken or $12.67 for the raw version; and at that beloved emporium of insanity Whole Foods, a rotisserie chicken is $8.99, while a whole chicken from the butcher counter is $12.79 … per pound.

….In most cases, preparing meals from scratch is significantly cheaper than buying them pre-made. What makes rotisserie chickens the exception? The answer lies in the curious economics of the full-service supermarket….Much like hunters who strive to use every part of the animal, grocery stores attempt to sell every modicum of fresh food they stock. Produce past its prime is chopped up for the salad bar; meat that’s overdue for sale is cooked up and sold hot. Some mega-grocers like Costco have dedicated rotisserie chicken programs, but employees report that standard supermarkets routinely pop unsold chickens from the butcher into the ol’ rotisserie oven.

This is a curiously roundabout explanation, but it boils down to this: whole chickens that are about to reach their sell-by date—and be thrown out—are instead taken to the deli to be cooked up. The grocery store doesn’t make as much money as it would selling the chicken fresh, but it makes more money than it would by throwing it out.

I guess this makes sense. Except for one thing: the number of rotisserie chickens in your average supermarket is huge. As near as I can tell, the number being roasted in any single hour is greater than the total number of raw whole chickens in the entire poultry section. In other words, there’s just no way that supermarkets toss out (or come close to tossing out) enough whole raw chickens to account for the vast pile of rotisserie chickens on offer. An awful lot of these chickens must have been purchased explicitly for the rotisserie. At least, that’s what my informal eyeball estimate tells me.

What’s more, the availability of all those cheap rotisserie chickens is a conspicuous incentive to stop buying whole raw chickens in the first place, and supermarkets obviously know this. This is one of the reasons most supermarkets stock so few whole chickens these days.1 So selling rotisserie chickens cheaply is just cutting their own throats. Why would they do that and lose money on the chicken?

So there must be something else going on. I’m not sure what, but I suspect there’s more to the story than just using up chickens that are approaching their sell-by date. Do I have any readers who work in supermarkets and can enlighten us?

1Not the only reason, or even the main reason, of course. The main reason is that most of us just don’t want to bother cooking a whole chicken these days.

UPDATE: The most popular guess in comments is that rotisserie chickens are a loss leader. Sure, you lose a dollar or two on each one, but you make up for it with the cole slaw and 2-liter sodas and so forth that everyone buys to go with them.

This is the most obvious explanation, and I’m totally willing to buy it. I just want to know if it’s true. Not a guess, but a confirmation from someone who actually knows if this is what’s going on. Anyone?

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Help Us Solve the Rotisserie Chicken Mystery

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