Tag Archives: photo essays

Paul Ryan Does Not Want to Be Your Next President

by SarahBaskervill Posted on April 12, 2016

Mother Jones

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Paul Ryan will apparently be making a Shermanesque statement about an hour from now:

Ryan…has arranged a hastily called 3:15 p.m. press conference inside the Republican National Committee. Advisers say he will insist — in his clearest terms yet — to the GOP’s big donor and lobbyist class that he will not attempt to claim the nomination at the July convention in Cleveland.

“He’s going to rule himself out and put this to rest once and for all,” a Ryan aide said, requesting anonymity to discuss the planned speech.

Stay tuned. Presumably this is good news for Ted Cruz.

UPDATE: And the press conference is now over:

“Let me be clear,” Mr. Ryan said. “I do not want nor will I accept the nomination of our party.” He added that he had a message for convention delegates: “If no candidate has the majority on the first ballot, I believe you should only turn to a person who has participated in the primary. Count me out.”

That seems suitably blunt.

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Paul Ryan Does Not Want to Be Your Next President

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Objectivity in Journalism Has Some Serious Pitfalls

by ReneAyk4899 Posted on April 11, 2016

Mother Jones

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I’ve been a little chart heavy this morning, and now I’ve got one more. This comes from a paper written a few months ago by Jesse Shapiro of Brown University, and it presents a model of how journalism can fail when special interests are involved. The model itself is pretty simple: if journalists present both sides of an argument at face value, then special interests are highly motivated to invent plausible-sounding evidence for their side of the argument—regardless of whether it’s anywhere close to true. As long as they get quoted, the public will be suitably confused even if the journalists themselves know that it’s mostly hogwash.

No surprise there. But this works only if journalists abide by a convention which demands that both sides are treated as equally credible. What happens if that’s not true? The chart below tells an interesting story on climate change:

In the United States, journalists tend to simply present both sides of an argument without taking sides. In other countries, where that norm is less strict, reporters often tell their readers which side has the better argument. When that happens, the public is more likely to believe in climate change.

Now, there are obviously pitfalls to reporters deciding which side has the better argument. You can end up being better informed by this, or you can end up like Fox News. Still, it’s an interesting comment on the American style of journalism.

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Objectivity in Journalism Has Some Serious Pitfalls

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Donald Trump Has No Idea What He Said One Day Ago

by MavisFries43 Posted on April 3, 2016

Mother Jones

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Donald Trump has apparently decided that he’s the master of the long-form interview, so he’s been giving a bunch of them lately. But they raise a question: does Trump really think he’s impressing people in these interviews? Today we got our answer: he does indeed. Here he is in his latest Q&A with Robert Costa and Bob Woodward of the Washington Post:

I do say this: My media coverage is not honest. It really isn’t. And I’m not saying that as a person with some kind of a complex. I’m just saying, I will be saying words that are written totally differently from what I’ve said. And I see it all — in all fairness, the editorial board of The Washington Post. I was killed on that. I left the room, I thought it was fine.

Just as a reminder, this is the interview where his comment on racial disparities in law enforcement was “I’ve read where there are and I’ve read where there aren’t.” On Iran: “We should have gone in and said, ‘release our prisoners,’ they would have said ‘no,’ and we would have said, ‘double up the sanctions.'” On his beef with the Ricketts family: “I’ll start doing ads about their baseball team.” On using nukes against ISIS: “I’ll tell you one thing, this is a very good-looking group of people here.” On his hands: “My hands are fine. You know, my hands are normal. Slightly large, actually. In fact, I buy a slightly smaller than large glove, okay?” On how he’d address racial problems: “I actually think I’d be a great cheerleader for the country.” On taking Iraq’s oil: “For that, I would circle it….I would defend the areas with the oil”—apparently not realizing that the oil is spread throughout nearly the entire country.

That interview was a train wreck. Trump’s ignorance and incoherence was on a Charlie Sheen-esque level—except that Trump didn’t have any pharmaceutical help. But he thought everything went fine. Apparently he can’t read a room quite as well as he thinks.

And he’d better be prepared to get treated badly again. Here he is on the national debt:

DT: We’ve got to get rid of the $19 trillion in debt.

BW: How long would that take?

DT: I think I could do it fairly quickly, because of the fact the numbers….

BW: What’s fairly quickly?

DT: Well, I would say over a period of eight years. And I’ll tell you why.

BW: Would you ever be open to tax increases as part of that, to solve the problem?

DT: I don’t think I’ll need to. The power is trade. Our deals are so bad.

So…Trump is somehow going to start running a budget surplus of $2 trillion per year without raising taxes. How? Something to do with trade.

Is this even fact checkable? Or is it, in Wolfgang Pauli’s famous words, so nonsensical that it’s “not even wrong”? In any case, I promise Trump that every quote in this post is a direct quotation. Nobody is making him say words that are totally different from what he’s said. Honestly, there’s no need.

However, the fact that he thinks he’s being constantly misquoted really does make you wonder if he’s all there. He seems awfully sincere about this. He really and truly talks in such a stream of consciousness that he doesn’t even realize what he’s said half the time.

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Donald Trump Has No Idea What He Said One Day Ago

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It Sure Sounds Like Donald Trump Has Paid for an Abortion or Two in His Life

by DawnBradley74 Posted on April 2, 2016

Mother Jones

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I don’t usually have much use for Maureen Dowd, but credit where it’s due. Today she asked Donald Trump the question all of us have been dying to ask him:

In an MSNBC interview with Chris Matthews, the formerly pro-choice Trump somehow managed to end up to the right of the National Right to Life Committee when he said that for women, but not men, “there has to be some form of punishment” if a President Trump makes abortion illegal.

….Given his draconian comment, sending women back to back alleys, I had to ask: When he was a swinging bachelor in Manhattan, was he ever involved with anyone who had an abortion?

“Such an interesting question,” he said. “So what’s your next question?”

I think we can take that as a yes. I wonder what his evangelical fans will think of this?

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It Sure Sounds Like Donald Trump Has Paid for an Abortion or Two in His Life

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Donald Trump Wants to Punish Women Who Have Abortions

by KrystalChu11 Posted on March 30, 2016

Mother Jones

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Sigh. Yet another news cycle for Donald Trump:

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Donald Trump Wants to Punish Women Who Have Abortions

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Friday Cat Blogging – 25 March 2016

by LashundU23 Posted on March 25, 2016

Mother Jones

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The evil dex will be keeping me up all night tonight, but that’s OK. I actually kind of enjoy it. Unfortunately, every silver lining has a cloud, and in this case the cloud is lots of afternoon crashes over the next few days to make up for the lost sleep.

But then again, every cloud has a silver lining, and in this case the silver lining belongs to Hopper, who gets a great place for her afternoon snooze. Hopper thinks dex is a wonder drug that makes humans more like cats, and who’s to say she’s wrong?

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Friday Cat Blogging – 25 March 2016

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Let’s Spend a Day on the Campaign Trail With Our Presidential Candidates

by HarleyShapcott Posted on March 25, 2016

Mother Jones

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Just for the record, here’s what Hillary Clinton was doing today in the wake of the Brussels bombings: talking about combating terrorism at a roundtable in Los Angeles.

And here’s what our Republican presidential hopefuls were doing: in between panicked demands for surveilling Muslim neighborhoods that even the NYPD rolled its collective eyes at, Donald Trump was lobbing juvenile insults at Ted Cruz’s wife and Cruz was calling Trump a “sniveling coward.”

Remind me again: which party is it that takes national security seriously?

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Let’s Spend a Day on the Campaign Trail With Our Presidential Candidates

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Marriage Is Declining Because Men Are Pigs

by debbiemurch611 Posted on March 24, 2016

Mother Jones

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Over at the Washington Monthly, Anne Kim muses on the spectacular decline in marriage over the past few decades:

The seeming decline of marriage includes one major caveat: educated elites. When it comes to marriage, divorce, and single motherhood, the 1950s never ended for college-educated Americans, and for college-educated women in particular….The share of young college-graduate white women who were married in 2010 was a little over 70 percent—almost exactly the same as it was in 1950.

….It’s also seemingly only Americans with four-year degrees or better who appear immune to the broader cultural and social forces eroding marriage. In 1950, white women with “some college,” such as an associate’s degree, were actually more likely to be married than their better-educated sisters. Today, it’s the opposite. Though women with a high school diploma or less have seen the sharpest drop in marriage rates, the decline has been almost as severe—and ongoing—for women just one short rung down the education ladder, regardless of race.

Why has marriage declined in America? Here’s my dorm room bull theory: it’s because men are pigs.

I know, I know: #NotAllMen blah blah blah. That said, let’s expand this a bit. Basically, an awful lot of men are—and always have been—volatile and unreliable. They drink, they get abusive, and they do stupid stuff. They’re bad with money, they don’t help with the kids, and they don’t help around the house. They demand subservience. They demand sex. And even on the one dimension they’re supposedly good for—being breadwinners—they frequently tend to screw up and get fired.

In other words, marriage has been a bad deal for women pretty much forever. But they’ve been forced into it by cultural mores and economic imperatives, and that’s the only reason it’s been nearly universal in the past.

Nothing has changed much about that. It’s still a bad deal for most women, but cultural mores and economic imperatives have changed, and that means more women can afford to do what’s right for themselves and stay unmarried these days.

But there’s one exception to this: the college educated. Well-educated men are fairly reliable; they have good earning power; they generally aren’t abusive; and they’ve been willing—slowly but steadily—to change their habits and help out with kids and housework. For college-educated women, then, marriage is a relatively good deal. For everyone else, not so much.

And that’s why marriage is declining among all groups except the college educated. For an awful lot of women, it’s just a lousy deal. They’re tired of putting up with all the crap they get from men, and so they’re opting out. They’ll opt back in when men start to pull their own weight. There’s no telling when that’s going to start happening.

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Marriage Is Declining Because Men Are Pigs

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Do We Panic Too Much? (Spoiler: Yes We Do)

by BrockBroadbent9 Posted on March 24, 2016

Mother Jones

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I’m not sure what brought this on—oh, who am I kidding? I know exactly what brought this on. Anyway, I was thinking about recent public panics and started listing a few of them in my mind. This is just off the top of my head:

Crack babies
Super predators
Lehmann/AIG/Countrywide etc.
Mad cow
Deepstar Horizon
Daycare child molesters
Ebola
ISIS/Syrian refugees

I’m not saying that none of these were justified. Big oil spills are no joke. Ebola was certainly a big deal in Africa. The financial collapse of 2008 wasn’t mere panic.

And yet, generally speaking it seems as if public panics are either completely unjustified or else wildly overwrought. Am I missing any recent examples where there was a huge panic and it turned out to be wholly justified? HIV would have been justified in the early 80s, but of course we famously didn’t panic over that—other than to worry about getting AIDS from toilet seats. Help me out here, hive mind.

POSTSCRIPT: I should mention that despite my choice of illustration, I’ve never really blamed anyone for the tulip panic. Personally, I think tulips are worth going crazy over.

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Do We Panic Too Much? (Spoiler: Yes We Do)

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Republican Frontrunners All Favor Treating Muslims Like Drug Gangs

by RevaHendrick Posted on March 23, 2016

Mother Jones

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Ted Cruz took a lot of flak yesterday for his proposal to “patrol and secure” Muslim neighborhoods, so he decided to explain it further last night:

“It is standard law enforcement — it is good law enforcement to focus on where threats are emanating from, and anywhere where there is a locus of radicalization, where there is an expanding presence of radical Islamic terrorism,” Cruz told reporters on Tuesday evening in Manhattan. “We need law enforcement resources directed there, national security resources directed there.”

….Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), compared Cruz’s proposition to “the dark days of the 1930s” in Europe and “the interment of Japanese-Americans” in the 1940s, calling it “a very frightening image.”

Cruz repudiated the comparison at the press conference, saying: “I understand that there are those who seek political advantage and try to raise a scary specter.” He instead compared it to ridding neighborhoods of gang activity and law enforcement’s efforts “to take them off the street.”

And what did Donald Trump think of all this? He supports Cruz’s plan “100 percent.” Naturally.

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Republican Frontrunners All Favor Treating Muslims Like Drug Gangs

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