Tag Archives: people

"Anchor Babies" Are the Latest Pawns in the GOP’s Crusade to Sound Tough

by VerleneBozeman8 Posted on August 21, 2015

Mother Jones

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Anchor babies are back! And back with a vengeance. Yesterday, Jeb Bush unveiled Jeb 2.0, a louder, tougher, more outraged version of himself. Overall, it was a pretty woeful performance—he sounded a lot like a shy teenager practicing toughness in front of a mirror—but along the way he suggested that we needed better enforcement at the border in order to reduce the epidemic of anchor babies. A reporter asked why he used a term that’s considered offensive, and Bush looked like a kid who’s just gotten a toy at Christmas, “Do you have a better term? You give me a better term and I’ll use it,” he shot back. Tough! Trumpish!

Ed Kilgore says the worst part of all this is that Republican candidates don’t just use the term, but defend it with “snarling pride.” Well sure. They all want to be Donald Trump. But there’s nothing surprising about this. Republicans ostentatiously use the term “illegals” constantly as a signal that they’re not just conservatives, but conservatives who don’t take any guff from anyone—and certainly not from the PC police.

So no surprises here. But I’m curious about something. Last night I read a longish piece at TNR by Gwyneth Kelly titled “Why ‘Anchor Baby’ Is Offensive.” I was actually sort of curious about that, so I read through it. But all the article did was provide a bit of history about the term and quote a bunch of people saying it was disgusting and dehumanizing. There was no explanation of why it’s offensive.

Don’t everyone pile on me at once. If you don’t ask, you can’t learn, right? So I guess my question is this. Is “anchor baby” offensive because:

It riles up xenophobia over something that doesn’t actually happen very much.
or
There’s something about the term itself that’s obnoxious.

I’m probably going to regret asking this. But I am curious. It’s not obvious from first principles what the problem is here.

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"Anchor Babies" Are the Latest Pawns in the GOP’s Crusade to Sound Tough

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Carly Fiorina Plans to Run America Via Smartphone

by BethanyPreece Posted on August 21, 2015

Mother Jones

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Soon we will all be Trumpists. Trumpets? Trumpettes? Trumpies?

Ahem. Anyway, at a town hall today a veteran told Carly Fiorina that he was having trouble getting a doctor’s appointment through Veterans Affairs:

“Listen to that story,” Fiorina said. “How long has VA been a problem? Decades. How long have politicians been talking about it? Decades.”

Fiorina said she would gather 10 or 12 veterans in a room, including the gentleman from the third row, and ask what they want. Fiorina would then vet this plan via telephone poll, asking Americans to “press one for yes on your smartphone, two for no.”

“You know how to solve these problems,” she said, “so I’m going to ask you.”

Until now, I had been willing cut Fiorina a little bit of slack over running HP into the ground. I figured other people shared some of the blame too.

Now I’m not so sure. Is this the razor-sharp leadership savvy she’s been bragging about? Just ask a bunch of vets what they want? Press one for yes and two for no? That’s how she’s going to whip the VA into shape? Somebody just shoot me now.

POSTSCRIPT: Do you think that Fiorina (a) thought this up on the spur of the moment, or (b) gamed this out with her consultants and was just waiting for the right time to use it? And which is scarier?

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Carly Fiorina Plans to Run America Via Smartphone

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We Are All Fans of Self-Deportation

by MichellQka Posted on August 18, 2015

Mother Jones

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Ezra Klein has read Donald Trump’s immigration plan and finds it even worse than he expected. I didn’t feel that way: it read to me like a pretty standard right-wing take on illegal immigration, with just a few added Trumpisms (Mexico will pay for the wall, we should force companies to hire Americans, etc.). But two things in Klein’s piece struck me enough to want to comment on them:

The plan would be a disaster for immigrants if enacted. But even if it’s not enacted, the plan is a disaster for the Republican Party, which is somehow going to need to co-opt Trump’s appeal to anti-immigration voters, but absolutely cannot afford to be associated, in the minds of Hispanic voters, with this document.

….When Mitt Romney embraced “self-deportation” in 2012, it was considered an awful mistake….But self-deportation is Trump’s plan, too. And Trump’s insight here is that the best way to drive unauthorized immigrants out of the country isn’t to target them. It’s to target their children and families.

On the first point, I think this ship sailed a long time ago. Maybe the Trump publicity juggernaut will aggravate things further, but I honestly don’t see how the Republican Party could appeal to Hispanics much less than it already does. The anti-immigrant rhetoric from leading Republicans has been relentless for years, and Trump is merely adding one more voice to the chorus. Will Trump’s bluster about making Mexico pay for the wall really make things any worse?

The second point is a little trickier. It’s true that Mitt Romney blew it in 2012 with the infelicitous phrase “self-deportation.” But the uproar that followed elided an important point: every immigration plan involves putting pressure on illegal immigrants in order to motivate them to (a) leave or (b) not come in the first place. There’s a sliding scale of pain involved, and liberals tend to want less while conservatives tend to want more. But both sides make use of it.

The easiest way to think of immigration control is like this:

  1. Figure out how many illegal immigrants you’re willing to tolerate.
  2. Ratchet up the the cost of illegal immigration and ratchet down the cost of legal immigration.
  3. Eventually, you’ll figure out the right combination of costs that gets you to your number.

Nobody talks about immigration like this, but it’s the thought process behind every immigration plan. Both Republicans and Democrats support E-Verify, for example, which makes it harder for immigrants who lack legal documents to get jobs. But what is this, other than a way to use economic pressure to persuade illegal immigrants to go back to Mexico? Likewise, both Democrats and Republicans support border security. Republicans may generally want more of it than Democrats, but Democrats are nonetheless willing to use increased security to raise the cost of crossing the border.

In the end, everyone uses this calculus,1 whether consciously or not. The amount of pressure—or cruelty, if you prefer—that you’re willing to employ depends on just how low a number of illegal immigrants you’re willing to tolerate. But no matter what that number is, if you put any pressure at all on illegal immigrants, you’re exploiting the power of self-deportation. Just don’t say it out loud, OK?

1The exception, I suppose, are the people who advocate completely open borders. But they’re a very tiny minority.

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We Are All Fans of Self-Deportation

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Coca-Cola to World: Don’t Stop Swilling Sugary Drinks, Just Exercise!

by BettyTuttle Posted on August 10, 2015

Mother Jones

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Stunningly, one-third of American adults have a condition called metabolic syndrome, defined as “a cluster of major cardiovascular risk factors related to overweight/obesity and insulin resistance.” People with metabolic syndrome are twice as likely to develop heart disease as people without it, and five times as likely to develop full-blown type II diabetes. Meanwhile, a growing body of research links insulin resistance with Alzheimer’s and other forms of cognitive decline.

There’s a solid consensus that two things need to happen to reverse this budding calamity: People need to eat better—less hyper-processed, sugar-laden fare—and exercise more.

Now, if you were in the business of selling sweet beverages—ones that contain about 9 teaspoons of sugar per 12-ounce serving—you’d have an interest in suggesting that maybe diet’s not that big of an issue, after all. Instead of cutting down on soda, why not just take an extra walk around the block?

According to this New York Times exposé, Coca-Cola, the globe’s biggest purveyor of sugary drinks, invested $1.5 million last year to launch the Global Energy Balance Network, which, The Times reports, “promotes the argument that weight-conscious Americans are overly fixated on how much they eat and drink while not paying enough attention to exercise.”

The beverage maker has also invested “close to $4 million in funding for various projects spearheaded by two prominent US health academics who serve on GEBN’s executive committee, The Times adds. One of them, University of South Carolina health professor Steven Blair, is featured in the above video insisting that “most of the focus in the popular media and in the scientific press is, ‘Oh they’re eating too much, eating too much, eating too much’—blaming fast food, blaming sugary drinks, and so on for rising obesity rates… And there’s really virtually no compelling evidence that that, in fact, is the cause.”

Meanwhile, the World Health Organization recommends holding added sugar consumption to about 25 grams (six teaspoons) per day—meaning a single Coke (nine teaspoons of sugar) will take you 50 percent over its daily recommendation. My colleague Maddie Oatman has a great piece on just how easy it is to catapult over the 6 teaspoons limit in the sugar-happy US food environment.

Now, Coke’s high-dollar drumbeating about how sugary drinks don’t matter much may be nefarious, but it’s also sort of desperate. People are wising up—soda sales have fallen for ten straight years.

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Coca-Cola to World: Don’t Stop Swilling Sugary Drinks, Just Exercise!

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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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Watch What It’s Like to Live Amidst Industrial Hog Farms

by BetteKershaw Posted on July 29, 2015

Mother Jones

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As I showed recently, the United States is emerging as the world’s hog farm—the country where massive foreign meat companies like Brazil’s JBS and China’s WH Group (formerly Shuanghui) alight when they want to take advantage of rising global demand for pork. (If JBS’s recent deal to buy Cargill’s US hog operations goes through, JBS and WH Group together will slaughter 45 percent of hogs grown in the United States.)

A recent piece by Lily Kuo in Quartz (companion video above) documents what our status as the world’s source of cheap pork means for the people who live in industrial-hog country. It focuses on Duplin County in eastern North Carolina, which houses “about 530 hog operations with capacity for over 2 million pigs ….one of the highest concentrations of large, tightly-controlled indoor hog operations, also known as CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations) in the world.” In Duplin, “hogs outnumber humans almost 32 to 1,” Kuo reports. And that means living amid lots and lots of pig shit—the county’s hog facilities generate twice the annual waste of the entire population of New York City.

As I’ve shown before, the hog industry doesn’t build wealth in the communities where it operates—the opposite, in fact. “Almost a quarter of the population lives below the poverty line, making Duplin County one of the poorest counties in North Carolina,” Kuo writes. “It is also disproportionately black and Hispanic compared to the rest of the state.”

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This is likely when people started eating chicken

by MichellKen Posted on July 21, 2015

This is likely when people started eating chicken

By on 21 Jul 2015commentsShare

It’s meat month here at Grist, and we’re talking about everything from the sustainability of meat to the morality of meat to the butchering of meat to the future of meat (stay tuned). But have you ever wondered who was the first to gnaw on a juicy chicken leg and declare the inaugural “Tastes like chicken!”?

Well today, NPR reports that those culinary geniuses might have lived sometime between 400 and 200 B.C. in what is now an archaeological site called Maresha. Here’s more from NPR:

“The site is located on a trade route between Jerusalem and Egypt,” says Lee Perry-Gal, a doctoral student in the department of archaeology at the University of Haifa. As a result, it was a meeting place of cultures, “like New York City,” she says.

Not too long ago, the archaeologists unearthed something unusual: a collection of chicken bones.

“This was very, very surprising,” says Perry-Gal.

The surprising thing was not that chickens lived here. There’s evidence that humans have kept chickens around for thousands of years, starting in Southeast Asia and China.

But those older sites contained just a few scattered chicken bones. People were raising those chickens for cockfighting, or for special ceremonies. The birds apparently weren’t considered much of a food.

In Maresha, however, the archaeologists found thousands of well-preserved chicken bones, many of which had knife marks on them, and most of which came from female chickens. All of that, the researchers report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, indicates that these people were raising chickens for food, not cockfighting.

It’s less clear, however, why these people decided to pick up that juicy leg. Here’s more from NPR:

Perry-Gal thinks that part of it must have been a shift in the way people thought about food. “This is a matter of culture,” she says. “You have to decide that you are eating chicken from now on.”

In the history of human cuisine, Maresha may mark a turning point.

Barely a century later, the Romans starting spreading the chicken-eating habit across their empire. “From this point on, we see chicken everywhere in Europe,” Perry-Gal says. “We see a bigger and bigger percent of chicken. It’s like a new cellphone. We see it everywhere.”

Now that we find ourselves buried up to our faces in chicken (and cellphones), perhaps we can take comfort in knowing that such drastic shifts are possible. Perhaps we can just decide that we’re not gonna raise animals in horrific conditions just so we can have our all-you-can-eat buffets and cheap burgers. Perhaps we can just decide that we’ll start eating insects or lab-grown meat or weird veggie-based imitation meat simply because it’s better for the planet. Now, before you call me a dewy-eyed optimist (I’m not — I think we’re pretty much all going to hell in a handbasket), stick around for the end of meat month, when we dive into all of these futuristic meat alternatives and assess their feasibility.

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The Ancient City Where People Decided To Eat Chickens

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The EPA’s Choice Has Never Been Clearer

by Posted on July 17, 2015

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The EPA’s Choice Has Never Been Clearer

Posted 17 July 2015 in

National

When the EPA asked for comments on its proposed rule that would significantly alter the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS), people across the country raised their voices in hearings, at rallies, and online. From governors to farmers, from senators to factory workers, from entrepreneurs to farmers, the message has been resoundingly clear: The RFS is working for Rural America.

On Capitol Hill last week, lawmakers joined with hundreds of renewable fuel supporters to make sure Washington heard the message that’s coming from America’s heartland.

Last month in Kansas City, governors, industry leaders, farmers and students showed up in force to let the EPA know that the RFS is creating jobs and providing opportunities in rural communities.

And online, nearly 200,000 men and women from across the United States have signed our petition to tell the EPA to stand up to Big Oil and get the Renewable Fuel Standard back on track.

The EPA has two choices.

Choosing the oil industry would mean more imported oil from hostile foreign regions, more pollution and spills, and fewer American jobs. It would also mean protecting the oil monopoly on our fuel supply and even higher gas prices.

Choosing America’s rural economies and innovation would mean supporting over 852,000 American jobs, primarily in rural communities that are just getting back on their feet, and creating thousands of new, permanent American jobs. It would mean keeping a promise to investors in advanced biofuels — the world’s cleanest motor fuels — instead of sending that investment to China.

The choice is clear. The people have spoken. EPA, the RFS is working for rural America. Support a strong Renewable Fuel Standard.

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It’s Time to Cool It On "People Need to Work Longer Hours"

by QBIBiancadiktn Posted on July 11, 2015

Mother Jones

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Maybe I’m just being naive here, but I wonder if liberals could give it a rest mocking Jeb Bush for saying “people need to work longer hours”? Yeah, he really did say it, but then again, Obama really did say “You didn’t build that.” Little snippets taken out of context can make anyone sound dumb.

In this case, Bush pretty quickly clarified that he was talking about the underemployed, people who want to work more hours but can’t get them. This didn’t sound to me like some hastily concocted excuse. It probably really was what he meant, and it just didn’t come out quite right. That’s common in a live setting.

Now, after the idiotic way Republicans plastered “You didn’t build that” everywhere short of Mount Rushmore in 2012, maybe they deserve a taste of their own medicine. And sure, politics ain’t beanbag. You get your licks where you can find them. Still, there’s a limit to how hackish we all should be. We’re pretending Bush meant one thing when we all know perfectly well he meant something else. Let’s be better than the Republicans, OK?

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It’s Time to Cool It On "People Need to Work Longer Hours"

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Watch the Exact Moment South Carolina Finally Lowered the Confederate Flag

by EarleneDougherty Posted on July 10, 2015

Mother Jones

In a short, historic ceremony on Friday morning, the Confederate battle flag was finally lowered and removed from South Carolina’s statehouse grounds, three weeks after nine black parishioners were murdered at Charleston’s Emanuel AME Church. The removal comes more than 50 years after the state first raised the battle flag to protest the civil rights movement.

The removal of the flag, which quickly emerged as a national issue following last month’s massacre, was met largely with praise during Friday’s brief ceremony, where chants of “take it down” could be heard, though protestors were also present.

On Thursday, Gov. Nikki Haley signed a bill into law calling for the flag’s removal.

“Twenty-two days ago, I didn’t know that I would ever be able to say this again, but today, I am very proud to say that it is a great day in South Carolina,” she said during the bill’s signing ceremony, where family members of the people killed in Charleston were in attendance.

South Carolina’s House of Representatives voted to take it down on Thursday by a 94-20 vote.

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Watch the Exact Moment South Carolina Finally Lowered the Confederate Flag

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