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3 Hurricanes Are Hitting the Pacific at the Same Time, and the View From Space Is Amazing

by CQYAidanaxaaivp Posted on September 2, 2015

Mother Jones

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Astronauts aboard the International Space Station are marveling at a particularly awesome view from orbit right now. This week marks the first time that three major hurricanes—dubbed Kilo, Ignacio, and Jimena—have been captured simultaneously churning across the Pacific Ocean, according to the United Kingdom’s Met Office. (The National Hurricane Center agrees.)

The storms are being fueled by warmer waters caused by this year’s El Niño, the global climate event that occurs every five to seven years, bringing drought to places like Australia, while heaping rain on the Western United States. The Met Office says temperature anomalies in this part of the world are currently at their highest since 1997-98.

According to the Met Office: “Hurricanes Kilo, Ignacio and Jimena were all at category 4 simultaneously in the Pacific east of the International Dateline—the first time three major hurricanes have been recorded at the same time in this region.” The Met Office says tropical cyclone activity across the northern hemisphere this year is about 200 percent above normal. Six hurricanes have crossed the central Pacific, more than in any other year on record, the agency says.

The view from space is incredible:

The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says manmade global warming is likely to drive up the number of intense hurricanes like these around the world—despite a predicted overall drop in all types of weaker, tropical storms. By the end of the century, hurricanes will likely produce substantially higher rainfall—up to 20 percent more—than present-day hurricanes.

So far, Hawaii appears to be safe, and no humans are in the paths of destruction, allowing us to enjoy the spectacular view.

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3 Hurricanes Are Hitting the Pacific at the Same Time, and the View From Space Is Amazing

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Intelligence Community Inspector General Is Done With Clinton’s Emails—But the FBI Isn’t

by ShellieMfm Posted on August 18, 2015

Mother Jones

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On Monday, the ongoing political and legal problems swirling around Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email system during her time as secretary of state got simpler and more complicated. A spokeswoman with the office of the inspector general for the intelligence community told Mother Jones that it had finished reviewing Clinton’s emails and was not taking further action. But the matter was still being investigated by the FBI. And on the same day, a lawyer from the State Department told a federal judge that more than 300 of her emails needed further review by intelligence agencies to determine if they contained classified material. Last week, it was reported that a small sample of Clinton’s emails contained classified material, which Clinton and her team have denied since the March New York Times story revealing the existence of her private email. (Sen. Dianne Feinstein did say last week that none of the emails that Clinton wrote contained classified info.)

Clinton’s problems began in December 2014, when the State Department asked recent former secretaries of state to hand over documents that would help bolster its record keeping. Clinton turned in more than 55,000 pages of emails containing roughly 30,000 emails. (She deleted another 30,000 that she said were private.) A federal judge has since ruled that the 30,000 emails turned over to the State Department must be made public by January 2016, and the department has been releasing them in batches since May.

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Intelligence Community Inspector General Is Done With Clinton’s Emails—But the FBI Isn’t

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Can Republicans Get Millennials to Hate Hillary Clinton?

by CarlosFunderbur Posted on August 13, 2015

Mother Jones

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The LA Times reports today on what millennials know about Hillary Clinton. Answer: they know her as a senator and secretary of state, but have no recollection of the Clinton scandals of the 90s:

The youngest eligible voters of 2016 were toddlers when America’s most prominent political power couple left the White House, and what Americans know about Clinton is increasingly defined by what stage of her career she was in when they first tuned in.

….For some who lived through the battles of Clinton’s first years on the national stage, the culture wars and personal controversies of the 1990s are integral to understanding who she is….Young people, though, are more likely to know of then-White House intern Lewinsky as a vague childhood memory and pop-culture fixture — refracted through Beyonce lyrics, “Saturday Night Live” skits and Lewinsky’s Vanity Fair cover last year — rather than a trust-shattering national scandal that originated in the Oval Office.

This strikes me as both a challenge and an opportunity for Republicans. The challenge, obviously, is that young voters have a pretty positive view of Hillary, unburdened by blue dresses and impeachment proceedings. But there’s also an opportunity.

For people my age, all the stuff from the 90s was litigated long ago and our minds made up. Either we think it was all calculated hogwash and continue to support Hillary, or we think it was all God’s own truth and consider her a lying, scheming hustler. Nothing is likely to change our minds at this point. But younger voters? It’s entirely possible that if you run ads about Whitewater or Travelgate or whatnot, it would come as something of a surprise. And it might change some minds.

We’ll probably find out before too much longer. With hundreds of millions of dollars of super PAC money sloshing around out there, someone is bound to give it a try and see if it has any effect. I’m sure we’re all looking forward to this, aren’t we?

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Can Republicans Get Millennials to Hate Hillary Clinton?

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Fox News Is Breaking Up With Donald Trump. Now He’s Freaking Out on Twitter

by HwaEFOgdcmesgn Posted on August 7, 2015

Mother Jones

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We may have Fox News to thank for the meteoric start to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, but could we soon credit the network for its impending doom? Judging by the thorny questions posed by Fox’s moderators during the first Republican primary debate last night, it looks as if the news outlet is initiating the breakup—and Trump is fighting back.

Soon after facing a barrage of pointed questions, the petulant GOP front-runner took to Twitter to slam the news outlet’s moderators with his reliable brand of petty insults:

Republican political consultant Frank Luntz was not the only recipient of his ire. Megyn Kelly called out Trump’s history of insulting women. “You’ve called women you don’t like ‘fat pigs, dogs, slobs, and disgusting animals,'” Kelly said. “Only Rosie O’Donnell,” Trump responded, prompting applause. He then took aim at the Fox News host:

The distancing of Fox News from Trump on Thursday could signal Fox chairman Roger Ailes is finally taking heed of Rupert Murdoch’s attempts to stop Fox from offering an uncritical platform for Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric. And without the support of Fox News, maybe Trump’s presidential ambitions will lose some momentum.

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Fox News Is Breaking Up With Donald Trump. Now He’s Freaking Out on Twitter

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Millennials Living In Their Parents’ Home Is Finally Starting to Taper Off

by DannielFrantz Posted on July 29, 2015

Mother Jones

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Pew has a new report out showing that even five years after the recession ended, more young adults are living with their parents than before the recession. This is despite the fact that unemployment among 20-somethings has dropped dramatically. What’s more, this trend is pretty widespread:

The decline in independent living since the recovery began is apparent among both better-educated young adults and their less-educated counterparts….This suggests that trends in young adult living arrangements are not being driven by labor market fortunes, as college-educated young adults have experienced a stronger labor market recovery than less-educated young adults.

Trends in living arrangements also show no significant gender differences during the recovery. However, in 2015, 63% of Millennial men lived independently of family, compared with 72% of Millennial women. But a similar gender difference existed during the Great Recession, and both young men and young women are less likely to live independently today than they were five years ago.

But the news might not be quite as bleak as Pew suggests. Take a look at the arrows in the chart on the right. The upward trend in living at home continued to rise through 2013, but it finally began to drop a couple of years ago. That’s not surprising since it’s pretty likely that there’s a certain amount hysteresis in this phenomenon; that is, a lag between the economy improving and kids moving into their own places. This might be because wages remained low for several years after the technical end of the recession. It might be because higher debt levels took a while to pay down. It might be that it simply took a few years for recession-induced fear to end. Why move out if you’re not sure the economy is really on a long-term roll?

There’s not much question that 20-somethings of this generation have it worse than my generation, which in turn had it worse than the previous generation. That means the recession hit them especially hard. But if these trends are right, it looks like optimism about work and income is finally starting to slowly improve. It’s not great news, but it’s good news.

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Millennials Living In Their Parents’ Home Is Finally Starting to Taper Off

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Health Care Spending Growth Will Rise a Bit Over the Next Decade, But Only a Bit

by silvermega-1959 Posted on July 29, 2015

Mother Jones

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By coincidence, a new article in Health Affairs confirms an offhand guess I made a few days ago. I wrote, “I happen to think the slowdown in medical costs is real, and will continue for some time (though not at the extremely low rates of the past few years).” The Health Affairs researchers write: “Recent historically low growth rates in the use of medical goods and services, as well as medical prices, are expected to gradually increase. However, in part because of the impact of continued cost-sharing increases that are anticipated among health plans, the acceleration of these growth rates is expected to be modest.”

As the Wall Street Journal notes, this is is similar to what Medicare actuaries have been saying for a while:

The actuaries again Tuesday pointed to the stronger economy and aging population as the main factors in shaping Medicare’s future spending.

Prescription-drug spending, long a target of warnings from the insurance industry, drew particular attention from the actuaries, who pointed to a big rise in spending growth there as costly new specialty drugs such as Sovaldi, for hepatitis C, came on the market in 2014. Spending growth on pharmaceutical products jumped by 12.6% in 2014, up from 2.5% in 2013….In all, health care will comprise about a fifth of the U.S. economy by 2024, and the growth rate will exceed the expected average growth in gross domestic product by 1.1 percentage points.

So: good news or bad news? The bad news is that health care spending keeps increasing steadily. It’s currently about 17 percent of GDP and will increase to about 20 percent of GDP over the next decade. The good news is that this is slow growth: only about 1.1 percent higher than overall economic growth. Any other time in the past 30 years we would have killed for a growth rate that low.

There’s probably no way to avoid health care costs growing at least a little faster than the rest of the economy. We keep making advances, and our revealed preferences are pretty clear on at least one point: we value health care highly and are willing to pay more for it even at the expense of other items. That probably won’t be true forever, but it’s true for now.

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Health Care Spending Growth Will Rise a Bit Over the Next Decade, But Only a Bit

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Boehner Planning to Pick Up His Ball and Go Home

by GregoriLira Posted on July 28, 2015

Mother Jones

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Is it just me, or is this trick getting a little old?

Mr. Boehner said the three-month highway bill could come up for a House vote on Wednesday. If the bill passes, the House would adjourn for an August recess Wednesday, a day earlier than previously planned, a House GOP aide said. That would leave the Senate to accept one of the two House highway bills or to immediately cut off federal reimbursements to states for transportation projects. The Senate will have a hard time completing its highway bill before Thursday.

I need some scholarly help here. Has it been common in the past for one house to pass a bill and then immediately adjourn, leaving the other house with the option of either passing their bill or shutting down a chunk of government? Or is this something new that modern Republicans have discovered? Historians of Congress, please chime in.

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Boehner Planning to Pick Up His Ball and Go Home

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Unlike Dad, Rand Paul Is More Interested in Winning Than in His Principles

by RegenaWeldon Posted on July 28, 2015

Mother Jones

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Harry Enten tells us that Rand Paul isn’t doing too well:

Something is awry at the Rand Paul campaign. The main super PAC supporting his presidential bid raised just $3.1 million in the first half of 2015….On Sunday, a new NBC News/Marist poll showed support for the Kentucky Republican declining to just 4 percent in New Hampshire (compared with 14 percent in February).

….The more worrying problem for Paul is his favorability numbers: They’re also dropping….Over the first five weeks of 2015, Paul’s favorable rating averaged 62 percent among Republicans. Just 14 percent had an unfavorable view of him. Over the five most recent weeks, though, Paul’s favorable rating has averaged 52 percent, with an unfavorable rating of 27 percent. His net favorability rating (favorable minus unfavorable) has dropped by nearly half, from +48 percentage points to +25 percentage points.

Enten’s question: “What’s Wrong With Rand Paul’s Campaign?” I think we all know the answer.

Rand’s father, Ron Paul, always attracted a fair amount of money and a fair amount of steady support. Not huge amounts, but respectable. The reason was that he was never seriously running for president. He just liked having a stage for his ideas, and since he wasn’t trying to win, he could stay as true to his libertarian beliefs as he wanted. He had no need to waffle.

But son Rand has bigger plans. He is seriously running for president, and that means he has to pay attention to the aspects of his political views that just aren’t going to play well with important blocs of Republican voters. From the start he was never quite as pure a libertarian as dad, but now he’s discovering that he can’t even be as pure a libertarian as he’s been in the past. So he waffles. He changes his views. He spends time looking at polls. He worries about saying things that will piss off the white evangelicals, or the elderly, or the pragmatic business set. The result is that the folks who admired him for his principled libertarianism are dropping him, while the rest of the Republican Party has yet to warm up to him. After all, he is the guy who said the ongoing chaos in Iraq was the fault of the Republican president who started the Iraq War, not Barack Obama. He’s also the guy who wanted to eliminate aid to Israel. And he’s the guy who wanted to gut Medicare for everyone—even the folks currently receiving it.

He’s kinda sorta changed his mind on all these things, but that makes him look like a sellout to the libertarian crowd and a opportunistic panderer to the tea party crowd. Is it any wonder his poll numbers have tanked?

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Unlike Dad, Rand Paul Is More Interested in Winning Than in His Principles

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Congress Just Can’t Help But Fall In Love With a Nuclear Physicist

by WilmaDomingo Posted on July 28, 2015

Mother Jones

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Maybe you could call this the revenge of the nerds?

He’s blinding them with science.

Or intellectually charming them anyway. That’s how Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz seems to be winning fans in the difficult fight to sell the Iran deal on Capitol Hill….Moniz, a nuclear physicist with mad-scientist hair, has already been credited as the administration’s secret weapon in the lengthy negotiations to secure an Iran deal that will prevent the rogue country from securing a nuclear weapon.

….Moniz can certainly lapse into the technical talk with aplomb — and when he gets to talking about the half-lives of isotopes and the detection technologies that will be deployed to survey Iran’s suspected nuclear activities, he can leave his audience in the dust.

But in the two years since Moniz became Energy Secretary, lawmakers have far more often noted and applauded the former professor’s natural ability to translate complex scientific concepts into digestible terms.

It’s funny, in a way. Plenty of highly-qualified scientists have testified before Congress, and mostly they get treated as if they were balky university freshmen. But nuclear physics! That still has cachet. Start talking about the half-lives of isotopes and legislators swoon with admiration.

Except for dumbest among them, of course, who can’t tell the difference between an MIT-trained physics PhD and Dr. Phil. That, of course, would be Wisconsin’s favorite son, Ron Johnson. He just wanted to talk about the danger of electromagnetic pulses. Nice work, Senator.

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Congress Just Can’t Help But Fall In Love With a Nuclear Physicist

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Obamacare Rates In California Will Rise Only 4% in 2016

by NicholeAuricht Posted on July 28, 2015

Mother Jones

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Obamacare’s moment of truth is coming. By now we’ve heard all the scare stories about a few health insurers in a few states requesting gigantic rate hikes for next year. But over the next few weeks, states are going to start publishing the actual average rate increases that consumers will see in 2016. California released its report today. It’s still marked preliminary, but you can expect that the final numbers will be very close to these:

I’ve highlighted two numbers. First, the overall average rate increase is 4.0 percent. That’s way lower than you’ve seen in the scary headlines. And this is for a state that makes up more than a tenth of the country all by itself.

Second, the price of the second-lowest-price silver plan has gone up 1.8 percent. This is the figure used to calculate subsidy levels, so it’s an important one. In fact, here’s an interesting consequence of that number: because subsidies will be going up roughly 1.8 percent, and the cost of the lowest-price silver plan is going up only 1.5 percent, the net cost (including subsidies) of buying the cheapest silver plan is actually going down. As you can see in the bottom row, if you shop for the lowest-priced plan, your premiums are likely to decrease about 4.5 percent.

I have a feeling this number is not going to be widely reported on Fox News.

Now, California isn’t necessarily a bellwether for all the other states. Because it’s the biggest state in the union, it has lots of competition that helps drive down prices. A big population also means less variability from year to year. Also: California’s program is pretty well run, and the California insurance market is fairly tightly regulated. All this adds up to a good deal for consumers.

In any case, the headline number here is a very reasonable 4 percent increase in overall premiums, and a 4.5 percent decrease for consumers shopping for the cheapest plans. These are real statewide numbers, not cherry-picked bits and pieces designed to encourage hysteria. Once again, it looks like Obamacare is working pretty well.

This all comes via Andrew Sprung, who has much more detail here.

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Obamacare Rates In California Will Rise Only 4% in 2016

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