Tag Archives: photo essays

I Have Found the Perfect VP for Donald Trump

by ZellaRamsden6 Posted on February 15, 2016

Mother Jones

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From the Guardian today:

In further news from the always attractive intersection of Kanye West, Twitter, and money….

This ought to be good. Please go on:

In further news from the always attractive intersection of Kanye West, Twitter, and money, the businessman Martin Shkreli — known for price gouging on Aids drugs and paying $2m for the one copy of Wu-Tang Clan’s Once Upon a Time in Shaolin album — has claimed he was swindled out of $15m when he attempted to buy the exclusive rights to The Life of Pablo. Shkreli tweeted that “someone named Daquan”, claiming to be “Kanye’s boy”, contacted him to follow through on the deal, which he did. “I hope you all enjoy this stupid music SO much, and the fact it has brought me so much pain and suffering. I quit rap,” Shkreli tweeted.

Assuming he really had given $15m to someone named Daquan claiming to be Kanye’s boy, Shkreli was able to secure a happy ending. He later tweeted that the Bitcoin founder Satoshi Nakamoto was going to help him get his money back. “I always win,” he concluded.

Maybe Donald Trump will pick Shkreli as his running mate. It sounds like a match made in heaven.

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I Have Found the Perfect VP for Donald Trump

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Supreme Court Justice Anton Scalia Has Died

by LonnieMarino Posted on February 13, 2016

Mother Jones

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Of “apparently natural” causes during the night. This is going to set up an unbelievable battle in the Senate. I wonder if Republicans will even make a pretense of seriously considering whoever President Obama nominates?

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Supreme Court Justice Anton Scalia Has Died

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Weekend Follow-Up #2: The 1994 Crime Bill and Mass Incarceration

by Candida9950 Posted on February 13, 2016

Mother Jones

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The 1994 crime bill has come in for a lot of attention lately, and even Bill and Hillary Clinton have said they now regret some of its provisions. But which ones?

Generally speaking, liberals still applaud several of its biggest accomplishments: the assault weapon ban, the Violence Against Women Act, and the COPS program that funded additional police and better community training.

But Republicans exacted a price for this. In particular, they wanted an expansion of the death penalty and several provisions that stiffened sentencing of felons. As it turns out, though, Republicans didn’t have a very good idea of what their own favorite policies would actually accomplish. Are you surprised? For example, here’s the death penalty:

The crime bill created lots of new capital crimes, but its actual effect was nil. The death penalty was already losing support by 1994, and has been banned by an increasing number of states ever since. On the federal level, death sentences have always been a tiny fraction of the total (around four or five per year), and that didn’t change after 1994.

So what about sentencing? The crime bill did have an effect here, but it was generally pretty modest. Here are a couple of charts from an unpublished review of the law seven years after it passed:

Why the small effect? In the case of 3-strikes, it simply didn’t affect very many people. It did increase average time served by several months, but that’s about it. And the much-loathed Truth-in-Sentencing provisions had even less effect. This is because more than half the states already had TIS requirements even before the 1994 bill passed, and not many passed new ones as a result of the law. It did push up the trend in incarceration and time served by a few tenths of a percentage point, but that had only a minuscule effect on overall incarceration rates.

The crime bill also included a few other witless measures, like reducing educational opportunities for inmates, and it unquestionably contributed to the crime hysteria that was prevalent at the time. Nonetheless, its most hated features never had a big effect.

Two years later Clinton also signed the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, which had some pretty objectionable changes to habeas corpus. This was arguably worse than anything in the 1994 bill, but it didn’t have a substantial overall effect on incarceration rates.

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Weekend Follow-Up #2: The 1994 Crime Bill and Mass Incarceration

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Weekend Follow-Up #1: Welfare Reform and Deep Poverty

by RogelioUnderwood Posted on February 13, 2016

Mother Jones

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I’d forgotten about this even though I wrote about it two years ago, but here’s yet another chart about “deep poverty”:

In this case, deep poverty is defined as households with income under 50 percent of the poverty line (about $10,000 for a family of three). The calculation is based on more accurate measures of poverty that have since been endorsed by the Census Bureau.

Now, this is a different measure of poverty than the one used by Kathryn Edin and Luke Shaefer that I noted yesterday. Their measure is both tighter (looking at even lower poverty rates) and looser (it counts households that are in extreme poverty even for short times). So it’s not entirely an apples-to-apples comparison. Still, once you look at the historical numbers, it doesn’t look like the 1996 welfare reform act slowed down the growth of welfare spending, nor did it have more than a very small effect on deep poverty.

None of this is especially meant to defend welfare reform. But 20 years later, it doesn’t look like it really had quite the catastrophic impact that a lot of people were afraid of at the time.

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Weekend Follow-Up #1: Welfare Reform and Deep Poverty

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Friday Cat Blogging – 12 February 2016

by AltonMrudqqjhwc Posted on February 12, 2016

Mother Jones

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Just look at our little lovebirds. So adorable. So innocent looking. In reality, of course, they are just furry little batteries, recharging for their next romp around the house. In the meantime, though, Hilbert and Hopper remind you not to forget Valentine’s Day. Buy your loved one some treats this weekend. Treats are good.

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Friday Cat Blogging – 12 February 2016

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Senator Sanders, Why Do You Hate President Obama?

by PhyllisFontenot Posted on February 12, 2016

Mother Jones

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Most of last night’s debate was pretty familiar territory. But toward the end, Hillary Clinton unleashed a brand new attack:

Today Senator Sanders said that President Obama failed the presidential leadership test….In the past he has called him weak. He has called him a disappointment. He wrote a forward for a book that basically argued voters should have buyers’ remorse when it comes to President Obama’s leadership and legacy.

….The kind of criticism that we’ve heard from Senator Sanders about our president I expect from Republicans….What I am concerned about is not disagreement on issues, saying that this is what I would rather do, I don’t agree with the president on that. Calling the president weak, calling him a disappointment, calling several times that he should have a primary opponent when he ran for re-election in 2012, you know, I think that goes further than saying we have our disagreements.

….I understand we can disagree on the path forward. But those kinds of personal assessments and charges are ones that I find particularly troubling.

The problem Sanders has here is that this is a pretty righteous attack. Back in 2011 he really did say, “I think there are millions of Americans who are deeply disappointed in the president…who cannot believe how weak he has been, for whatever reason, in negotiating with Republicans and there’s deep disappointment.” And he really did push the idea of a primary challenger to Obama. And he really did write a blurb for Buyer’s Remorse: How Obama let Progressives Down. So there’s not much he can do about this attack except sound offended and insist that everyone has a right to criticize the president.

But will it work? It was actually the only hit last night that struck me as genuinely effective. Obama still has a lot of fans who are probably surprised to hear that Sanders has been so tough on their guy. If Hillary Clinton keeps up this line, it might be pretty damaging.

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Senator Sanders, Why Do You Hate President Obama?

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Republican Tax Plans Will Be Great for the Ri—zzzzz

by KirkWainwright Posted on February 12, 2016

Mother Jones

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Our good friends at the Tax Policy Center have now analyzed—if that’s the right word—the tax plans of Donald Trump, Jeb Bush, and Marco Rubio. You can get all the details at their site, but if you just want the bottom line, you’ve come to the right place.

The chart on the left shows who benefits the most from each tax plan. Unsurprisingly, they’re all about the same: middle income taxpayers would see their take-home pay go up 3 or 4 percent, while the rich would see it go up a whopping 10-17 percent. On the deficit side of things, everyone’s a budget buster. Rubio and Bush would pile up the red ink by $7 trillion or so (over ten years) while Trump would clock in at about $9 trillion. That compares to a current national debt of $14 trillion.

No one will care, of course, and no one will even bother questioning any of them about this. After all, we already know they’ll just declare that their tax cuts will supercharge the economy and pay for themselves. They can say it in their sleep. Then Trump will say something stupid, or Rubio will break his tooth on a Twix bar, and we’ll move on.

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Republican Tax Plans Will Be Great for the Ri—zzzzz

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Here’s a Chart That Puts the Bernie Bro Phenomenon In a Whole New Light

by OPMDottymr Posted on February 11, 2016

Mother Jones

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Why do millennials love Bernie Sanders? Here’s a weirdly intriguing possibility: because they don’t have enough daughters. According to Michael Tesler, millennial parents with sons overwhelmingly support Sanders. But millennial parents with daughters overwhelmingly support Hillary Clinton. (There’s a similar effect among older voters, but it’s very small.) And although Tesler doesn’t say this, presumably single millennials are big Bernie fans too.

Is this kind of eerie, or is it totally predictable? I could make a case either way. But even if it’s predictable, the size of the effect is eye-popping. Make of it what you will.

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Here’s a Chart That Puts the Bernie Bro Phenomenon In a Whole New Light

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Does Obama Still Have That Old-Time Magic?

by VenettaLiw Posted on February 10, 2016

Mother Jones

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In a few minutes President Obama will be back in Springfield making a speech addressed to his supporters. “You’ve taken on the painstaking work of progress,” he says. “You’ve helped us find that middle ground where real change is won….I hope you’ll tune in today at 2:30 p.m. Eastern.” Andrew Sprung figures this is basically going to be an endorsement of Hillary Clinton:

Obama just sent an email to supporters announcing a speech to be delivered this afternoon. I imagine it will be a message “for” Clinton — both to support her and to model a coherent pitch for incremental change.

….Then there’s “the painstaking work of progress” and the ‘middle ground where real change is won.” Those are memes pointed at this moment, in which the frontrunners in both parties are calling for radical, fundamental change…. Incrementalism is a tough sell, but Obama has made it throughout his career, and he does so more effectively than Clinton. He’s more successful because he’s better at articulating the long-term goal and how the incremental steps move toward them, as well as the historical framework in which those steps fit.

But will it work? Personally, I’ve always viewed Obama as a cautious, pragmatic, mainstream liberal. But his strongest supporters never saw him that way. They really believed he was going to revolutionize Washington DC and end all the bickering. He’d pass universal health care, rein in Wall Street once and for all, and stop climate change in its tracks.

But he didn’t. And the conventional wisdom says that his supporters from 2007—when he first went to Springfield to announce his candidacy—are disappointed in him. He turned out to be just another go-along-get-along guy, and now he wants to foist a go-along-get-along gal on us. Sorry. No sale. We’re feeling the Bern these days.

We’ll see. But I will say this: If Obama really wants to help Hillary Clinton, he can’t afford too much subtlety. Any criticism of radical change will be read by liberals as primarily an attack on Donald Trump unless he makes it crystal clear what he’s talking about. Tune in at 2:30 and find out!

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Does Obama Still Have That Old-Time Magic?

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Marcobot Has Apparently Exceeded Its Rated Mean Time to Failure

by JanelleWeldon2 Posted on February 9, 2016

Mother Jones

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Oh hell, now I’m just starting to feel sorry for Marco Rubio. The whole Marcobot thing has apparently made him so self-conscious that he can barely even recite his stump speech anymore. Here he is delivering a line about values being rammed down our throats right after he’s just said it. There’s an almost poignant moment at 0:26 when Rubio suddenly realizes what he’s just done.

This reminds me of a Star Trek episode where Kirk uses some kind of sophomoric paradox to trick a computer into self destructing. That’s about what Chris Christie seems to have done to Rubio.

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Marcobot Has Apparently Exceeded Its Rated Mean Time to Failure

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