Tag Archives: people

Here’s what the new Never Trump contender has to say about climate change

by TawannaCordner Posted on June 1, 2016

Here’s what the new Never Trump contender has to say about climate change

By on Jun 1, 2016 3:38 pmShare

After searching for a miracle to save the Republican Party from a nominee straight out of the bowels of reality television, Republicans have one more desperate scheme in mind.

Prominent conservatives, including Mitt Romney and “Never Trump” Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol, have reportedly floated a relatively unknown figure for a third-party run — the National Review writer and constitutional lawyer David French. An Iraq war veteran, French has only teased us on whether he will enter the race. He’s yet to announce anything formally.

We may not have much information about French’s intentions, but we do know where he stands on climate change, based on his writing and Twitter feed:

He’s not convinced climate change is caused by humans. 

“Could humans be causing global warming? Maybe. Is the globe actually warming?  Maybe.  Can we do anything about it? I have no idea. Should we enact sweeping economic and cultural reforms to address a crisis that may or may not exist and that we may or may not be able to influence when those same reforms won’t also be enacted by China, India, or virtually any other emerging economy?”

He thinks America should stop leading by example, and race to the bottom on environmental regulations.

“The Left doesn’t seriously dispute the notion that American regulations aren’t going to save the planet, but they justify the demand for American sacrifice by essentially ascribing a mystical power to our national policies — as if our decision to fall on our own sword will so move India and China and the rest of the developing world (which has a lot of fossil fuels left to burn to lift its people out of poverty) that they’ll essentially have their own “come to Jesus” movement in defiance of national interest and centuries of national political culture. “America leads,” they proclaim.”

He has sharp commentary on SUVs.

For him, climate science advocacy is like screaming about “demon rum.”

“In reality, I respect the wild-eyed rapture-pastors far more than the climate hysterics. They merely ask me to believe, they don’t use the power of government to dictate how I live…. They’re like a drunk preacher screaming about the evils of demon rum.”

He’s a big fan of Titanic.

But hey, let’s look on the bright side — at least he’s not saying China hatched climate change as a hoax.

Share

Get Grist in your inbox

See the article here: 

Here’s what the new Never Trump contender has to say about climate change

Posted in alo, Anchor, Citizen, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, ONA, Paradise, solar, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Here’s what the new Never Trump contender has to say about climate change

Universal Health Care Is Probably No More Popular Now Than It’s Ever Been

by LucilleMickle Posted on May 23, 2016

Mother Jones

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

Harold Pollack says that Bernie Sanders has started a political revolution:

Not enough of one to win the Democratic presidential nomination, but enough to put the dream of single-payer health care back on the national political agenda in a way few would have expected five years ago….Just this week, Gallup released a poll indicating that “58% of U.S. adults favor the idea of replacing the Affordable Care Act with a federally funded healthcare system that provides insurance for all Americans.” Politico Magazine reports that Sanders’s health plan “is the most popular of the three remaining candidates.”

I’d be thrilled about this if it were true, but I have my doubts. The problem is that Americans have a long history of supporting things in the abstract but not so much when they become concrete partisan proposals. Take Obamacare. In 2013, a CNBC poll showed 37 percent unfavorability toward the “Affordable Care Act,” but 46 percent toward “Obamacare.” In 2014, a Morning Consult poll showed 71 percent support for offering Medicaid to all adults under the poverty line, but only 62 percent support for expanding Medicaid “as encouraged under the Affordable Care Act.” A Marist poll in Kentucky showed 57 percent disapproval of Obamacare but only 22 percent disapproval of kynect—Kentucky’s version of Obamacare. And of course, we have years of polling showing that lots of people like nearly all the individual elements of Obamacare, but then turn around and insist that they hate Obamacare itself.

As for universal health care, a Harris poll last September found 63 percent approval. A Kaiser poll in December found 58 percent support for Medicare-for-all. Gallup polls going back 15 years show higher support for government guarantees of health care during the Bush years than they do now.

So color me skeptical that Bernie Sanders has really had much effect on the health care debate. Gallup’s poll last week didn’t so much as breathe the word “taxes,” and if it did, support for the universal health care option would sink like a stone. Americans have long had mixed feeling about universal health care, and those feelings are deeply tied up in partisan attitudes and willingness to pay. Unfortunately, Sanders doesn’t seem to have moved the needle on this at all.

Read the article: 

Universal Health Care Is Probably No More Popular Now Than It’s Ever Been

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Universal Health Care Is Probably No More Popular Now Than It’s Ever Been

There’s More to "Improper Payments" Than Meets the Eye

by TristaBancks59 Posted on May 11, 2016

Mother Jones

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

Here’s an interesting thing. I was browsing over at The Corner and came across a post from Veronique de Rugy, who was unhappy about the federal government’s rate of improper payments, which totaled $137 billion last year. That’s fair enough. Here are the six worst programs:

This is the kind of thing that liberals should care about too—in fact, we should care about it more than conservatives if we want people to trust government to handle their tax dollars competently. Still, it got me curious. What exactly does this mean? $137 billion in waste and fraud last year? As it turns out, no. Here’s one interesting methodological tidbit:

Another prevalent misunderstanding is that all improper payments are a loss to the government, but that is not always the case. For example, although most of the $137 billion in improper payments was caused by overpayments (payments that are higher than they should have been), a significant chunk of that total amount was caused by underpayments (payments that are lower than they should have been). The difference between these two amounts (that is, overpayments minus underpayments) equals the net amount of payments that improperly went out the door.

Huh. So if the feds overpay Joe $10 and underpay Jane $10, that counts as $20 in improper payments. This is a reasonable thing to track, since we’d like all the payments to be correct, but it doesn’t give us much insight into how much money we’re losing to improper payments. My guess based on a bit of googling is that underpayments are a smallish part of the whole number, but for some reason there’s no official tally of this. Roughly speaking, though, you can probably shave 10-20 percent off the top and get pretty close.

What else? There’s this:

Also, many of the overpayments are payments that may have been proper, but were labeled improper due to a lack of documentation confirming payment accuracy. We believe that if agencies had this documentation, it would show that many of these overpayments were actually proper and the amount of improper payments actually lost by the government would be even lower than the estimated net loss discussed above.

An entire payment is labeled improper if complete documentation is not available. This appears to account for somewhere in the neighborhood of 50-60 percent of all improper payments. Most likely, though, once the documentation is in place, the vast majority of these payments turn out to be correct.

Put this all together, and the net value of genuinely improper payments is probably about $50 billion or so. Still high, but not quite as outrageous as it seems at first glance.

Something about this whole exercise seems kind of weird to me, though. We’re only a few months into 2016 and we already have numbers for FY2015. That’s fast work—too fast to be anything but a preliminary cut at flagging payments that might be incorrect. But how many of them really are incorrect? Nobody knows. For that, you’d have to wait a year or two and then re-analyze all the payments in the sample.

I’d be a whole lot more interested in that. $137 billion makes for a fine, scary headline—especially when the headline leaves the vague impression that this is all due to fraud and waste—but why don’t we ever get a follow-up number that tells us how much the feds ended up paying improperly once all the documentation is rounded up and the final audits are done? Wouldn’t that be a better number to care about?

View original:  

There’s More to "Improper Payments" Than Meets the Eye

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on There’s More to "Improper Payments" Than Meets the Eye

Donald Trump’s Negatives Could Go Up…Or Down

by weddinglady9046 Posted on May 11, 2016

Mother Jones

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

Greg Sargent channels the conventional wisdom that Hillary Clinton’s negatives are old and baked into the cake, while Donald Trump’s could get even worse than they are now:

Hillary Clinton has been subjected to intense scrutiny for over two decades. Note that Trump’s attacks on her are largely rehashes: He’s going after Bill Clinton’s affairs and Hillary Clinton’s alleged role in “enabling” them….While it’s possible that a renewed focus on all these things could damage Clinton further, it’s more likely that they will accomplish little, because they don’t represent new information.

By contrast, we simply don’t know yet what is out there in the record on Trump….One Dem opposition researcher has estimated that approximately 80 percent of negative stuff out there on Trump has yet to surface publicly — and they continue to do so. Which means it’s possible that Trump’s negatives have more room to grow (as preposterous as that might seem) than Clinton’s do.

This seems like the right way to bet, but I’m a little less sure. On the Hillary side, negatives that are widely accepted can actually be easier to confirm than new ones. If Trump keeps banging away on “Corrupt Hillary,” a lot of people might start remembering all that old stuff that they’d forgotten about during the past decade. And this could be easier than we think, since there are also a substantial group of Bernie supporters these days who are doing everything they can to help this narrative along.

On the Trump side, yes, his negatives have room to grow. But the opposite is true too. If a lot of people haven’t really been paying attention to the campaign yet, it’s quite possible that they might decide the guy isn’t really as bad as rumors have it. Sure, he’s not entirely PC, but he speaks his mind! He’s going to bring back jobs from China! He’s a man of the people!

Then again, maybe they’ll eventually figure out that he’s just another plutocrat Republican who plans to cut the hell out of tax rates for the rich, something a lot of people apparently don’t believe yet. But that’s not a certainty. For some reason, voters and pundits alike seem to give Republicans a pass on their tax plans, shrugging them off more as totems than as actual intentions.

In other words: I don’t know. This is not a normal year and Trump is not a normal candidate. But there’s one more thing to point out: if Pollster’s algorithms are to be believed, Trump’s negatives are actually about the same as Hillary’s and they’re both trending upward at about the same slow but steady rate. The only real difference is that Trump’s ratings are more variable than Hillary’s. This isn’t necessarily good news for Democrats.

View original article – 

Donald Trump’s Negatives Could Go Up…Or Down

Posted in alo, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Oster, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Donald Trump’s Negatives Could Go Up…Or Down

Oil-rich Alaska has surprising solar power potential

by MelodyMortensen Posted on May 10, 2016

Oil-rich Alaska has surprising solar power potential

By on May 10, 2016Share

In oil-rich Alaska, where there’s little sunlight in the winter, solar power isn’t an obvious option.

But it is a promising one. A recent study from the U.S. Department of Energy looked at the potential of solar in 11 remote Alaskan villages and found that in many areas, it’s cost-competitive with diesel.

Some 175 Alaskan communities rely almost exclusively on petroleum products like diesel for their energy needs — not exactly an optimal situation for energy security in these remote towns, where transporting fuel comes at a high cost. People in these communities pay more for power than anywhere else in the U.S. That’s one big reason these communities could stand to diversify the energy eggs they’re putting in their resilience baskets. Since solar energy isn’t practical during the winter, it’s important that these communities rely on a combination of energy sources (wind is an option some towns have explored).

Overall, thanks to Alaska’s sunny, radiant summers, the solarscape looks more promising than you might expect given those dreary winter months. The DOE study compares the state’s solar potential to that of Germany, the world’s current poster child for all things solar and wind, which isn’t particularly sunny, either. The image below compares how much solar radiation shines down on both regions in terms of kilowatt-hours per square meter per day.

Billy J. Roberts/National Renewable Energy Laboratory

Looks like solar’s not just for sun-drenched California anymore.

Find this article interesting?

Donate now to support our work.

Get Grist in your inbox

Original article:  

Oil-rich Alaska has surprising solar power potential

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, GE, ONA, Oster, solar, solar power, Uncategorized, wind power | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Oil-rich Alaska has surprising solar power potential

Quote of the Day: Donald Trump Doesn’t Need No Stinkin’ Policy Experts

by DeclanHutchins Posted on May 9, 2016

Mother Jones

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

Politico interviewed “nearly five dozen Republicans” recently and heard a consistent message: nobody with even a trace of policy cred wants to work in a Donald Trump administration. “The A-level people, and there are not that many of them to begin with, mostly don’t want to work for Trump,” said a former Bush official. “He will cut the A-level bench of available policy talent at least in half, if not more.”

But not to worry. This is all part of the plan:

A source familiar with Trump’s thinking explained that the billionaire businessman was reluctant to add new layers of policy experts now, feeling it would only muddy his populist message that has been hyperfocused on illegal immigration, trade and fighting Islamic extremists.

“He doesn’t want to waste time on policy and thinks it would make him less effective on the stump,” the Trump source said. “It won’t be until after he is elected but before he’s inaugurated that he will figure out exactly what he is going to do and who he is going to try to hire.”

That’s a confidence booster, isn’t it? We’ll all have to wait until after the election for Trump to tell us what he actually plans to do. In the meantime, he’s just going to keep tossing out anti-Muslim, anti-Mexican, and anti-Chinese bombs because that seems to appeal to his fans. But once he wins, he’ll be the most presidential president in the history of presidenting.

Continue at source: 

Quote of the Day: Donald Trump Doesn’t Need No Stinkin’ Policy Experts

Posted in alternative energy, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Oster, solar, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Quote of the Day: Donald Trump Doesn’t Need No Stinkin’ Policy Experts

Obamacare Continues to Not Be Doomed

by beauwolford Posted on May 9, 2016

Mother Jones

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

Veronique de Rugy predicts disaster for Obamacare once again:

The bottom line is that after slow start, insurance companies find themselves having to increase premiums a fair amount. It seems that while for now subsidies may cover the pain for individuals, they probably won’t be able to after this year, at which point insurance companies will have to stomach the full cost of their losses due to the expiration of the reinsurance and risk-corridor programs. There soon won’t be enough subsidies to offset the premium hikes.

We’ve heard this pretty much every year: insurers are requesting huge premium increases! We’re doomed! Perhaps a bit of perspective would be helpful:

Insurers lowballed their Obamacare prices initially, coming in with premiums that were less costly than CBO projections. Higher prices were always inevitable.
Every year, insurers request big increases. They don’t get them. They get moderate increases.
Whatever happens, this is the free market at work, not some defect in Obamacare. If high premiums are truly what conservatives care about, we can fix that any time we want. Just ask Canada how to do it—or Sweden or Germany or Spain or Japan or pretty much any other advanced country on the planet.

Life isn’t perfect. Obamacare isn’t perfect. Health care is an expensive service, and health care insurance is expensive too. But so far Obamacare has done a pretty good job of keeping costs reasonably well contained. I’d wait until the end of the year before yet again declaring that it’s a failure and yet again being wrong.

Continue reading: 

Obamacare Continues to Not Be Doomed

Posted in alternative energy, FF, GE, LG, ONA, solar, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Obamacare Continues to Not Be Doomed

Pro-Business Reforms Have Very Little Effect on Economic Growth

by EbonyBirdsong1 Posted on May 8, 2016

Mother Jones

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

Are pro-business reforms good for economic growth? You’d think so, but the evidence is actually unclear. So Evan Soltas tried a different approach to the question: taking a look at countries that had big, sustained jumps in the World Bank’s Doing Business Index:

This is, I think, a reasonable way of doing things: Even if you are distrustful of the index, as am I, if the World Bank says that your country is in the top 5 percent of reformers in some year, there’s probably something to that. In my sample, it took at least a 10-point increase in the ease of starting a business to qualify as a “reform” year. That is like going from India to China.

A bit of Greek-letter math later, he has an equation that links per-capita GDP growth with the World Bank index:

What I find is that neither term has a significant coefficient. In fact, I can bound the effect of pro-business reforms quite precisely around zero, with a 95-percent confidence interval for the effect of a 10-point reform on the level of per-capita output of -1.4 percent to 3.5 percent. That is far away from the claim that such a reform could double per-capita output.

Now, this isn’t nothing. The reforms led to an increase in economic growth of about 1 percent. And especially in poor countries, there may be other compelling reasons to adopt pro-business reforms. But if Soltas is right, the economic benefits are modest.

Sadly, Soltas did not put this in colorful chart format, which he needs to do if he expects to meet the expectations of his fans. But the bottom line is simple: the United States is already one of top performers in business friendliness. Incremental improvements are all that’s left to us, and the impact of improvements plateau at high levels anyway. More than likely, pro-business reforms in the US would have little to no effect on economic growth. Here’s Soltas:

Maybe the lesson here is to beware the TED-talk version of development economics. Shortening the time it takes to incorporate a small business is not a substitute for deeper institutional reforms, such as those that support investment in human and physical capital, remove economic barriers that hold back women and ethnic or religious minorities, or improve transportation, power, and sanitation infrastructure. Easy pro-business reforms should not distract countries from pursuing changes that, while harder to make, we know to be richly rewarding in the long run.

Roger that.

Visit site:

Pro-Business Reforms Have Very Little Effect on Economic Growth

Posted in alternative energy, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, solar, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Pro-Business Reforms Have Very Little Effect on Economic Growth

Let Us Now Psychoanalyze Young Ben Rhodes

by DominicTyrell Posted on May 7, 2016

Mother Jones

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

A couple of days ago the New York Times posted a long profile by David Samuels of White House communications guru Ben Rhodes. It turns out that in private Rhodes is pretty contemptuous of the foreign policy establishment, and thanks to the Times profile he’s now contemptuous in public too. He also has some harsh words for the press, and as you might expect, the press has taken this with its usual thick skin. This piece by Carlos Lozada is typical. And here’s a typical headline:

Is that a fair summary? In the Times profile, Rhodes describes how his communications shop tries to spin the news. By itself, this isn’t much of a revelation. That’s what communications people do. But was Rhodes really bragging about how easy it was to con reporters? The relevant excerpt comes after the reporter (not Rhodes) explains the “radical and qualitative” ways the news business has changed recently:

Rhodes singled out a key example to me one day, laced with the brutal contempt that is a hallmark of his private utterances. “All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus,” he said. “Now they don’t. They call us to explain to them what’s happening in Moscow and Cairo. Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”

Is Rhodes displaying arrogance or smugness here? That’s not how I took it when I initially read the piece. To me it scanned as an expression of regret. Rhodes himself is never quoted as being cocky or patronizing about his ability to shape foreign affairs reporting. He’s just describing what he has to deal with, and explaining how that affects the way a modern White House press shop works. More digital, less print. More tutoring of young reporters, fewer tough questions from area experts.

Am I nuts for reading it this way? For those of you who have read the Times piece—And don’t lie! Did you really read it?—what was your takeaway? Is Rhodes arrogant and manipulative? Or unhappy with the state of journalism but realistic about how it affects the way he does his job?

UPDATE: It’s worth being very careful when you read the Times profile. You need to distinguish between what Rhodes says and how Samuels frames the quotes. Rhodes himself is fairly anodyne. In the quote above, for example, Rhodes is merely saying something that lots of reporters say too. It’s Samuels who labels this as “brutal contempt.”

Continue at source:

Let Us Now Psychoanalyze Young Ben Rhodes

Posted in alternative energy, Bragg, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, solar, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Let Us Now Psychoanalyze Young Ben Rhodes

Friday Cat Blogging – 6 May 2016

by RosellaSchmid Posted on May 6, 2016

Mother Jones

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

Yesterday was a tough day: my computer went nuts and wouldn’t let me get any work done. The symptoms were bizarre: I couldn’t open any menus. They’d just flash on the screen and disappear. I couldn’t open apps. I couldn’t close apps. I could highlight text, but I couldn’t copy or paste it. I couldn’t even open the Start menu to reboot the machine. What the hell is going on with Windows 10?

Perhaps you can already figure out how this story ends? It turns out that Windows is fine. I’m sorry for doubting you, Microsoft. The bug turned out to be neither software nor firmware, but catware. Hilbert had his paw hanging out of the pod and was pressing the Escape key. When I removed his paw, everything worked fine again.

Really, the things we cat owners staffers put up with is astounding.

View original: 

Friday Cat Blogging – 6 May 2016

Posted in alternative energy, FF, GE, LG, ONA, solar, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Friday Cat Blogging – 6 May 2016