Tag Archives: photos

Good Stuff on the Intertubes Today

by KindraPVLC Posted on August 24, 2015

Mother Jones

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

Everyone is writing about my pet topics today!

Aaron Carroll busts the myth that you should drink eight glasses of water every day.
Kiera Butler sings the praises of food irradiation.
Dylan Matthews writes that Intuit and H&R Block continue to oppose any effort to make taxes easier to file.
Larry Summers makes the case for continued low interest rates because “the global economy has difficulty generating demand for all that can be produced.”

Go read them all.

Source:  

Good Stuff on the Intertubes Today

Posted in Everyone, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Good Stuff on the Intertubes Today

Fragile Global Economy Is Starting to Crack Up

by JoellenHepler Posted on August 24, 2015

Mother Jones

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

I woke up a little late this morning, but maybe that turned out to be a good thing. The Dow Jones plunged a thousand points within minutes of opening, but by the time I saw the news it had already recouped about half of that loss:

You can probably guess what triggered this:

The stock drop was fueled by what China’s state media is already calling “Black Monday,” in which markets there recorded their biggest one-day plunge in eight years amid growing fears over an economic slowdown.

On Friday, China reported its worst manufacturing results since the global financial crisis, a new sign of woe for the world’s second-largest economy, which surprised investors earlier this month by announcing it would devalue its currency. China’s benchmark Shanghai Composite index has fallen by nearly 40 percent since June, after soaring more than 140 percent last year.

Markets around the world are crashing, and as usual that means seeking safety in the good old US of A:

Investors stampeded into relatively safe assets such as U.S. government bonds, the Swiss franc and the yen. The yield on the 10-year Treasury note dropped below 2% during Asian trading and recently was 1.976%, the lowest level since April.

….“A lot of markets abroad have seen a low amount of liquidity so investors are turning to the U.S. market to hedge,” said Jeffrey Yu, head of single-stock derivatives trading at UBS AG….While the selloff began as an emerging markets story, with China’s stock market offering very little liquidity to investors due in part to technical stock-trading halts, investors have had to turn to the most liquid market to sell, which is the U.S., Mr. Yu said.

Now can we finally get a statement from the Fed saying that they no longer have any immediate plans to raise interest rates? Please?

See the article here – 

Fragile Global Economy Is Starting to Crack Up

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Fragile Global Economy Is Starting to Crack Up

I Read Scott Walker’s Health Care Plan So You Don’t Have To

by RobynKirwin Posted on August 18, 2015

Mother Jones

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

It’s health care day for Scott Walker. Today he released “The Day One Patient Freedom Plan,” a title that’s apparently designed to give the impression that his plan would start on Day One of his presidency. Yuval Levin comments that Walker’s proposal “will be familiar to health wonks,” and it’s true. It’s the usual conservative mish-mash of HSAs, high-risk pools, tax credits, interstate insurance sales, tort reform, and block-granting of Medicaid.

Oh, and Walker’s plan won’t require any tax revenue. This is….a little hard to believe since a quick swag suggests that the gross cost of Walker’s tax credits will run about $200 billion per year. I figure the net cost, once you account for the end of Obamacare subsidies and other current outlays, is still in the neighborhood of $100 billion or so.1 That’s a lot, so I assume Walker explains pretty carefully how he’s going to pull this off without any new taxes.

Indeed he does. Here’s the answer: “We would simplify and reform how the federal government helps people access health insurance.” Gee, I wonder why no one’s thought of that before?

So far, there’s nothing very interesting here. Every Republican candidate is going to release a plan very similar to this. But there is one other thing I was curious about. It turns out that protecting people with pre-existing conditions is really popular, and this means that Republicans all feel like they have to support the idea. But how? Apologies for the long excerpt, but I want to make sure you see Walker’s whole answer:

No individual should fear being denied coverage, or face huge premium spikes when they get sick and then try to change jobs or insurance plans. My plan would address these concerns. It would make additional reforms to insurance coverage laws to ensure individuals with pre-existing conditions would be protected, not only when moving from employer-based plans to the individual market, but also when switching between plans. This would make insurance coverage more portable, permitting individuals to own their coverage, regardless of how or where they purchase it.

Provided individuals maintain continuous, creditable coverage, no one would see their premiums jump because of a health issue or be shut out of access to affordable health insurance because of a new diagnosis or a pre-existing medical condition. Newborns, as well as young adults leaving their parents’ insurance plans and buying their own, would have these same protections. Unlike the ObamaCare approach, my plan would protect those with pre-existing conditions without using costly mandates. By relying on incentives rather than penalties, individuals would be free to choose.

This is literally a non-answer. We do know a couple of things: (a) if you let your insurance lapse, you’re screwed, and (b) Walker will somehow prevent insurance companies from raising your rates if you maintain continuous coverage. He provides no clue just what kind of insurance regulation would accomplish this, and for a good reason: I doubt there is one. Obamacare accomplishes it via community rating, which requires insurance companies to cover all comers at the same price, but Walker surely rejects this approach. What he replaces it with remains a mystery.

One other thing worth noting: Walker’s tax credits would, at best, pay only for catastrophic coverage. Maybe not even that. Nor will his plan cover everyone. Nor is it likely to cost nothing. Nor does it have any concrete proposals to reduce the cost of health care. If you think that’s OK, then Walker is your guy. If you think everyone should be able to receive affordable routine health care, and you’re willing to pay for it honestly, you might want to stick with Obamacare.

1Don’t worry about the numbers. They’re just illustrative guesses on my part. I’m sure experts will weigh in eventually with better estimates.

Read the article – 

I Read Scott Walker’s Health Care Plan So You Don’t Have To

Posted in Everyone, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on I Read Scott Walker’s Health Care Plan So You Don’t Have To

First Amendment Law is Facing Some Very Big Changes

by JanSpinksg Posted on August 17, 2015

Mother Jones

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

Adam Liptak says that Reed v. Town of Gilbert is the sleeper Supreme Court case of the past year. It unanimously struck down an ordinance that discriminated against signs announcing church service times, but only three justices ruled on the basis of existing law. The other six signed an opinion that went further, ruling that many other speech regulations are now subject to “strict scrutiny.” How far will this go?

Strict scrutiny requires the government to prove that the challenged law is “narrowly tailored to serve compelling state interests.” You can stare at those words as long as you like, but here is what you need to know: Strict scrutiny, like a Civil War stomach wound, is generally fatal.

“When a court applies strict scrutiny in determining whether a law is consistent with the First Amendment,” said Mr. Abrams, who has represented The New York Times, “only the rarest statute survives the examination.”

Laws based on the content of speech, the Supreme Court has long held, must face such scrutiny. The key move in Justice Thomas’s opinion was the vast expansion of what counts as content-based. The court used to say laws were content-based if they were adopted to suppress speech with which the government disagreed.

Justice Thomas took a different approach. Any law that singles out a topic for regulation, he said, discriminates based on content and is therefore presumptively unconstitutional.

Securities regulation is a topic. Drug labeling is a topic. Consumer protection is a topic.

This is obviously not news to people who follow this stuff carefully, but it was news to me. Apparently the reach of Reed is pretty spectacular: three laws have been struck down by lower courts in just the past two months based on the reasoning in the case. Any law that treats, say, medical records or political robocalls or commercial speech differently from any other kind of speech is in danger—and there are a lot of laws like this.

They say that hard cases make bad law. But Reed was an easy case. It failed “the laugh test” said Elena Kagan. And yet, it seems likely to have provided an excuse for an astonishingly broad change in how speech is regulated. So far it’s stayed mostly under the radar, but eventually something bigger than panhandling or ballot selfies will get struck down, and suddenly everyone will notice what happened. What then?

Professor Robert Post said the majority opinion, read literally, would so destabilize First Amendment law that courts might have to start looking for alternative approaches. Perhaps courts will rethink what counts as speech, he said, or perhaps they will water down the potency of strict scrutiny.

“One or the other will have to give,” he said, “or else the scope of Reed’s application would have to be limited.”

Stay tuned.

More: 

First Amendment Law is Facing Some Very Big Changes

Posted in Abrams, Everyone, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on First Amendment Law is Facing Some Very Big Changes

Social Security Is More Important Than a Lot of People Realize

by Charlie Carin Posted on August 17, 2015

Mother Jones

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

The 2015 Retirement Confidence Survey from the Employee Benefit Research Institute is out, and it shows the usual: hardly anyone thinks that Social Security benefits will remain stable in the future. They expect cuts, cuts, and more cuts.

This may be part of the explanation for the two charts on the right. If you ask current workers, only a third think that Social Security will be a major source of retirement income. But if you ask current retirees for a reality check, two-thirds report that Social Security is a major source of their retirement income.

Why the big difference? If workers think Social Security benefits are likely to be cut, that’s probably a part of the explanation. But a bigger part is almost certainly just invincible optimism. Current workers are sure they’re going to save enough, or get a big enough return on their 401(k), or get a big enough inheritance, or something—and this will see them through their retirement. Social Security? It’ll just be a little bit of extra pin money for fun and games.

But in reality, that’s not how it works. For most people, it turns out they don’t save nearly as much as they think, which in turn means that their little Social Security check is what keeps them solvent. If more people understood this, public acceptance of conservative plans to cut Social Security benefits would probably be a lot lower.

Original article: 

Social Security Is More Important Than a Lot of People Realize

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Social Security Is More Important Than a Lot of People Realize

Here’s How to Talk Like Donald Trump

by CarriBlaxland35 Posted on August 16, 2015

Mother Jones

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

Back in 1996, Newt Gingrich wrote a memo that explained how to talk like Newt Gingrich. “That takes years of practice,” he conceded up front, but he revealed that you could come close just by studying a list of his favorite words. Unfortunately, that was two decades ago and Gingrich is now a has-been. So what if you want to speak like Donald Trump? Well, that takes years of practice too. Still, you can come close just by studying a list of his go-to talking points.

So here’s the list. Study it. And remember: it doesn’t really matter what question you’re asked. Whatever it is, just say a few words and then switch to any of these topics at random. There’s no need to be subtle, either. Just switch gears. And don’t worry if you’ve already said it. Just say it again. Telling people you’re leading in the polls never gets old!

  1. Our national debt is $19 trillion. We’re going to be Greece on steroids! I want to get rid of this deficit.
  2. I’d send Carl Icahn to China. He’s a great negotiator.
  3. I’ll build a huge wall, the greatest wall ever, and Mexico will pay for it.
  4. The Mexicans/Chinese/South Koreans are killing us. They’re taking away all our jobs. Our leaders are so stupid.
  5. I get along very well with Mexicans/Chinese/Putin/foreign leaders.
  6. I’m leading in all the polls. All of them.
  7. I cherish women. I have such respect for women.
  8. We have to kick the hell out of ISIS and take all their oil.
  9. Iran is getting $150 billion. That’s ridiculous. Also: 24 days is ridiculous too.
  10. I want a simpler tax plan. I want to make it great for the middle class.
  11. Saudi Arabia makes a billion dollars a day.
  12. We have to treat our vets better.
  13. I would be so tough. You wouldn’t believe how tough I would be.
  14. I give money to everyone. And then they owe me favors. All the politicians are like that. It’s a totally corrupt system.
  15. We don’t have time for political correctness.

Here’s an example: What do you think about Planned Parenthood?

Well, I hate abortion. And….you know, I cherish women. I have such respect for women. But if you really want to see poor treatment of women, just go to Iraq. They’re beheading women! We have to kick the hell out of ISIS and take all their oil. It’s the only way. You know, Saudi Arabia makes a billion dollars a day. They should be helping us fight ISIS. We can’t afford to do it by ourselves. Our national debt is $19 trillion. We’re going to be Greece on steroids! I want to get rid of this deficit.

The sad thing is that this isn’t really a joke. It looks like one, I know. But if you read actual Trump answers to actual Trump questions, this is pretty much what they’re like.

In any case, this is not an exhaustive list. And if you can’t find something you think you can use, don’t panic. Just attack. It doesn’t really matter who. Megyn Kelly, Hillary Clinton, Jeb Bush, Barack Obama, whatever. The more outrageous the better. Alternatively, do just the opposite: say that you love the people/organization in question and will support them totally. You’ll be great to them!

Now you can talk like Donald Trump. You’re welcome.

Visit link:

Here’s How to Talk Like Donald Trump

Posted in alo, Everyone, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Here’s How to Talk Like Donald Trump

Maryland Official: Lead Poisoning Is the Royal Road to Riches

by TanjaMarston Posted on August 16, 2015

Mother Jones

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

Technically this has nothing to do with lead and crime, but since I’m Mother Jones’ senior lead correspondent it’s up to me to put up this outlandish little item from Maryland:

Gov. Larry Hogan’s top housing official said Friday that he wants to look at loosening state lead paint poisoning laws, saying they could motivate a mother to deliberately poison her child to obtain free housing.

Kenneth C. Holt, secretary of Housing, Community and Development, told an audience at the Maryland Association of Counties summer convention here that a mother could just put a lead fishing weight in her child’s mouth, then take the child in for testing and a landlord would be liable for providing the child with housing until the age of 18.

Pressed afterward, Holt said he had no evidence of this happening but said a developer had told him it was possible. “This is an anecdotal story that was described to me as something that could possibly happen,” Holt said.

I’m pretty sure this wouldn’t actually work, but that hardly matters. It’s just another example of the peculiar Republican penchant for governance via anecdote. They’re all convinced that someone, somewhere, is trying to rip them off, but they can never find quite enough real examples of this. So instead we get Reaganesque fables about stuff they heard from some guy who heard it from some other guy who said, you know, it could happen.

By the way, if you’re tempted to do this, please don’t. Licking a lead fishing weight once probably won’t actually cause a detectable rise in blood lead levels, but it’s still a really bad idea.

Continue reading: 

Maryland Official: Lead Poisoning Is the Royal Road to Riches

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Maryland Official: Lead Poisoning Is the Royal Road to Riches

Does Donald Trump Have ADHD?

by LenardPagan Posted on August 13, 2015

Mother Jones

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

Ah, what the hell. The second half of Sean Hannity’s interview with Donald Trump is up, and it’s….hard to describe. But the ADHD is on full display. Here is Hannity asking him about his tax plan. After being taken aback that Trump doesn’t favor a flat tax, Hannity wants to know how high Trump would set the top rate:

TRUMP: I actually believe that people, as they make more and more money, can pay a higher percentage, OK?

HANNITY: How high?….What’s the cap?

TRUMP: We will set the cap. I want to have a cap so we have a lot of business, a lot more activity. I want to get rid of all this deficit. We’ll make it — we’re losing $600 billion, $700 billion! We’re going to be losing. And by the way, when ObamaCare kicks in, we’re going to be losing a $1.3 trillion, $1.4 trillion a year. We can’t do that. We’re going to be a Greece on steroids!

Here’s what I want to do. I want to simplify the tax cut. I want to cut taxes. But I want to simplify the tax code. I want to make it great for the middle class. The middle class is being killed.

I want to put H&R Block — it’s an ambition of mine to put H&R Block out of business. When a person has a simple tax return, they have a job, and they can’t even figure out when they look at this complicated form — they can’t figure out what to pay.

And you know what? I have guys that are friends of mine, they make a fortune. They’re hedge fund guys. They move around — paper. Look, at least I build things. I put people to — these guys move around paper. And half the time, it’s luck more than talent, OK?

They pay peanuts, OK? I want to make it so the middle class — I want to lower taxes, but I want to make it so the middle class benefits.

And there you have it: Donald Trump talking policy. Hannity has a simple question: what should be the highest tax rate? 23 percent? 28 percent? 35 percent? Trump just bulldozes by and starts free associating about the deficit and the middle class and simplified returns and hedge fund guys and—something else. I’m not sure who the “They pay peanuts” comment is aimed at. Hedge fund managers? By the time he’s done flitting around, even Hannity, one of our nation’s foremost blowhards, just gives up and moves on to something else.

I’m not just cherry picking, either. The entire interview is like this. The conversation about Iran is, if anything, even more surreal. Hannity actually tried asking about the nuclear deal multiple times instead of just giving up, and as near as I can tell Trump knows only two things about the agreement: (a) Iran will get $150 billion1 and (b) something about 24 days for inspections. That’s it.

I know I said this already, but I’m honestly not sure Trump is deliberately evading questions. Maybe he is. It’s certainly the case that he hasn’t bothered to learn even the first thing about either tax policy or the Iran deal. At the same time, he genuinely sounds like an ADHD kid whose mind is in such chaos that he simply can’t string together more than two coherent sentences at a time. And yet, as he keeps reminding us, he is really rich. Can someone with the attention span of a kitten on crack get that rich?

1Just for the record, the net value of the impounded money that Iran would get access to is somewhere between $30 and $150 billion. Nobody really knows the exact figure.

Source article: 

Does Donald Trump Have ADHD?

Posted in FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Does Donald Trump Have ADHD?

Can Republicans Get Millennials to Hate Hillary Clinton?

by CarlosFunderbur Posted on August 13, 2015

Mother Jones

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

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?

From: 

Can Republicans Get Millennials to Hate Hillary Clinton?

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Can Republicans Get Millennials to Hate Hillary Clinton?

Three Studies Confirm: Obamacare Isn’t a Job Killer

by DiannaSpooner Posted on August 12, 2015

Mother Jones

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

Among the many (many, many) catastrophes predicted by opponents of Obamacare was that a lot of workers would find their hours reduced against their wishes. Why? Because Obamacare requires firms to provide health insurance only to employees who work 30 hours or more. So lots of companies would do their best to reduce worker hours to 29 or less in order to avoid having to pay for health coverage.

Unlike a lot of the gloomy scenarios tossed out by Obamacare opponents, this one wasn’t entirely ridiculous. Any employer mandate is going to have a cutoff somewhere, and there really is an incentive for companies to drop as many workers as possible below that cutoff. So it’s something that can only be settled by actual research. The question is: was there an increase between 2013 and 2014 of workers just under the 30-hour threshold? Max Ehrenfreund surveys a few recent studies and says the answer is no:

Analysts at ADP studied the payrolls of the firms’ clients, about 75,000 U.S. firms and organizations. They expected that as businesses prepared for the mandate to take effect, they would adjust their employees’ schedules, limiting them to no more than 30 hours a week. Yet ADP found no overall change in employees’ weekly schedules between 2013 and last year.

According to ADP’s analysis, shifts in scheduling were trivial in every sector of the economy, even in industries that rely heavily on part-time work, such as leisure and hospitality.

….ADP’s findings were confirmed in another study by Aparna Mathur and Sita Nataraj Slavov of George Mason University and Michael Strain of the conservative American Enterprise Institute.

Their paper, published this month in the journal Applied Economics Letters, uses data from the federal Current Population Survey and finds no statistically significant change in the proportion of part-time workers in the sectors most likely to be affected by Obamacare, such as janitorial and restaurant work.

A third study confirmed these findings, and also found that eligibility for Medicaid didn’t discourage people from holding down a job (since they no longer needed a job in order to get health insurance). The study found no difference between states that expanded Medicaid and those that didn’t.

Why does it turn out that employers didn’t cut their workers’ hours? One possibility is that a year isn’t long enough for a study like this. Maybe over the next few years, as the cost of the mandate becomes clearer, companies will start getting more aggressive about cutting worker hours.

But I’d offer another possibility: the mandate didn’t have a big effect because most companies already do something like this on their own. They offer health insurance as a standard benefit only to full-time workers, and the cutoff for full-time status is usually somewhere between 25 and 35 hours. So when the mandate came along, it just didn’t change anything for most employers.

This is why two of the studies looked specifically at things like hospitality and restaurant work. These are sectors where employers (a) already maintain highly variable schedules and (b) mostly didn’t offer health insurance at all prior to Obamacare. When the mandate came along, these folks were faced with a sudden additional cost, but one that they could reduce pretty easily reduce by limiting schedules to less than 30 hours. And yet, even there the researchers found no change—or at least, no change large enough to measure.

This is not the final word, but it’s the best we have right now. Three research teams, including one not especially sympathetic to Obamacare, have all found the same thing: Obamacare isn’t a job killer. Nor is it even a schedule killer. Life goes on normally, except for the fact that millions of people now have health insurance who didn’t before.

Jump to original:

Three Studies Confirm: Obamacare Isn’t a Job Killer

Posted in alo, FF, G & F, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Three Studies Confirm: Obamacare Isn’t a Job Killer