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Quiz of the Day: What Is This Map?

by JuanBoettcher Posted on July 9, 2015

Mother Jones

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This map was released today as part of a 14-page research report. What is it?

Here are your choices:

  1. Donald Trump’s claim of how many states Republicans will win if they nominate him for president.
  2. The creeping spread of socialism in Barack Obama’s America.
  3. Other than white, the predominant color in each state’s flag.
  4. Which states make it easy to look up health care prices.

Yeah, the answer is #4. Red means your state got a letter grade of F. In other words, 45 out of 50 states do exactly nothing to make health care pricing transparent for their residents. Here’s how this plays out in real life:

If any single fact illuminates why reining in health care spending is going to be easier said than done, it might be this: we don’t even really know why a typical, low-risk childbirth costs $1,200 at some hospitals and $12,000 at others.

….In Massachusetts, a state that passed a law in 2012 to make health care costs more transparent but still gets a grade of F anyway. –ed., a research team trying to track down the price of a simple left knee MRI without a contrast dye found themselves transferred to six or seven departments and playing phone tag for days. Among 22 hospitals in a survey by Barbara Anthony, a senior fellow at the Pioneer Institute, a free market public policy think tank, it took anywhere from 10 minutes to nearly a week and a half to get an answer. If it’s that difficult to figure out how much it will cost to get a short scan to look at your knee, good luck trying to pin down the cost of the miracle of life.

Is there any other significant area of life where it’s virtually impossible to find out how much something will cost before you decide to buy it? I sure can’t think of one.

The full report is here, but it warns that “you will find little progress since last year and, in some cases, regression.” Sounds like a fun read.

Continued here:

Quiz of the Day: What Is This Map?

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White Ballot Access, Black Ballot Access

by CarolynMazure Posted on July 7, 2015

Mother Jones

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Greg Sargent draws our attention today to a new report from the left-leaning Center for American Progress on, among other things, ballot access in all 50 states plus DC. They grade each state based on things like availability of preregistration, availability of in-person early voting, voter ID laws, voting wait times, and so forth.

You will be unsurprised by the results. The top map shows ballot access, with the darker colors indicating poor access. The bottom map shows the percentage of the African-American population in each state. Dark colors indicate a higher black population. Kinda funny how similar they look, isn’t it?

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White Ballot Access, Black Ballot Access

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There’s More to Kumbaya Than Just Getting Liberals and Conservatives to Agree

by UlrikeCohn89764 Posted on July 1, 2015

Mother Jones

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Tim Lee lists four pro-growth policy reforms that he thinks liberals and conservatives can agree on:

  1. Let developers in coastal cities build more
  2. Boost high-skilled immigration
  3. Reform copyright and patent laws
  4. Liberalize occupational licensing rules

In theory, I suppose these could be areas of bipartisan agreement. But without throwing too much sand in the gears just to make a nuisance of myself, we should take a look at why all four of these things are so firmly going nowhere even though liberals and conservatives allegedly hold common cause on them. Here we go:

  1. Coastal cities. The problem here is that this is a pretty low priority for both liberals and conservatives. They just don’t care that much, and they certainly don’t care enough to fight the nonpartisan power bloc that unfailingly—and rabidly—opposes this: current residents of coastal cities. This is mainly a local issue, not a state or federal issue, and the fastest way for any local pol in LA or San Francisco to get tossed out of office is to propose lots of new high-rise residential buildings that will (allegedly) bring tons of traffic and crime into the community, and probably drive down current property values. So the game just isn’t worth the candle. Plus, conservatives have to watch out for the tea-party crazies who think high-rises are part of an Agenda 21 plot from the UN to make us all live like rabbits in government-controlled urban warrens. Or something.
  2. High-skill immigration. There are people who oppose this—primarily high-skill citizens who don’t really want lots of new competition—but that’s not the big problem. Mainly this is a political football. Sure, liberals and conservatives agree on this particular part of immigration reform. But liberals don’t want to unilaterally agree to it. They want it to be one of the bargaining chips for broader immigration reform. After all, if they preemptively agree to all the stuff conservatives already support, they have no leverage for eventually negotiating a comprehensive bill that includes some stuff conservatives don’t support. So for the time being, it’s being held hostage and that shows no signs of changing soon.
  3. Copyright and patent. I dunno. For a policy that liberals and conservatives allegedly agree about, we sure haven’t seen much action on it. Quite the contrary, in fact. Most Republicans and about a third of Democrats just approved fast-track status for the TPP treaty, which, among other things, enshrines American-style copyright and patent law on everyone who’s part of the treaty. Once that’s in place, we couldn’t change our laws in any meaningful way even if we wanted to. And frankly, I’ve seen very little evidence that either Republicans or business-oriented Democrats really want to. They’re too interested in currying favor with IP owners to bother with an issue that will win them virtually no votes from anyone on Election Day.
  4. Occupational licensing rules. This one, finally, is a bit of a mystery to me. I agree that it’s not an inherently partisan issue, but in a way, that’s the problem. It’s also not a hot-button issue, which means neither party is really willing to fight back against it. On the other hand, taxidermists, animal trainers, bartenders, funeral attendants, and so forth are willing to fight for it since it restricts entry and raises wages in their profession.

There’s a common theme to all four of these issues: there are special interests who care a lot about them, but no real benefit for working politicians to reach across the aisle and fight back. In theory, they might have similar attitudes on these four items, but why bother doing anything about it? No one is jamming their phone lines about this stuff and no one is voting for or against them based on their positions. If activists want action on this kind of googoo stuff, they have to figure out a way to make the public care. Once they do that, they’ll have at least a fighting chance of getting politicians to care too. Until then, don’t get your hopes up.

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There’s More to Kumbaya Than Just Getting Liberals and Conservatives to Agree

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And Now For Something Completely Different

by Lyle03Xmgl Posted on June 26, 2015

Mother Jones

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A new1 study from Swift, Stone, and Parker has identified the top four components of a successful online fundraising appeal. Here they are:

The end of a quarterly fundraising cycle.
Clear comparisons to the opposition’s fundraising results.
Over the top doomsaying.
Cats.

Lucky for me, I’ve got all those things, so I figured I’d take a crack at it.

Check out National Review’s current fundraising drive. One reader just gave $250! This guy coughed up $100! They’ve even got a wine club to suck in new contributors. And a cruise!

These guys are killing us. Without your help, the heirs of William F. Buckley will dominate the political magazine market for years to come. And you know what that means: More articles about how the only real racism is anti-white racism. More pseudo-science about how the globe is probably cooling, not warming. More hagiographies of Marco Rubio. More whining about how white people can’t use the N-word. More blog posts about Jonah Goldberg’s dog.

Maybe you think this doesn’t matter to you? Think again. This week features “Reagan’s Supply-Side Genius,” and it doesn’t matter if you try to ignore it. Your crazy uncle is going to be regaling you about it for hours this Thanksgiving unless you figure out how to fight back.

This blog is your ticket. We need contributions to help us fight back against the avalanche of right wing babble. Right. Now.

This is our final push. My cats are down to their last bowl of kibble. The fell hordes of NR are already cackling at their imminent victory. Soon we won’t be able to afford the very pixels that make up this blog. I know you don’t want that. So please, make a generous contribution today. The first $10 will go to cat food.2 The rest will go to fighting the dark hordes. And Jonah’s dog.

OK, I’m joking around here. But we really are closing out our fiscal year next week and Mother Jones can use all the help we can get. If you can afford to pitch in, please do—so I never have to write a fundraising appeal like this and actually mean it.

Make a tax-deductible gift by credit card here.

Or via PayPal here.

1: See the Annals of Improbably Convenient Results, v. 83, p. 101.
2: Just kidding. The cats already have a bottomless supply. Your full donation will go towards MoJo’s hard-hitting journalism that gets people talking. Like our groundbreaking package, “The True Costs of Gun Violence in America,” that President Obama alluded to in the wake of Charleston.

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And Now For Something Completely Different

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In a Few Years, Gay Marriage Will Be About as Threatening as Cell Phones

by KirbyFelton Posted on June 26, 2015

Mother Jones

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Jonathan Bernstein gets it right on same-sex marriage:

Perhaps the most amazing thing about the Supreme Court’s decision today in Obergefell, which recognizes marriage as a basic right, is that it’s not going to be very controversial.

….How do I know? Because we’ve seen it in state after state in which marriage equality was enacted. There’s no controversy remaining in Massachusetts; for that matter, there’s little or no controversy remaining in Iowa, which had court-imposed marriage equality in 2009. On a related issue, conflict over gays and lesbians serving in the military ended immediately after “don’t ask don’t tell” was replaced four years ago. In practice, extending full citizenship and human rights to all regardless of sexual orientation and identity is actually not all that controversial — at least not after the fact.

I get the fact that gay marriage seems creepy and unnatural to some people. I don’t like this attitude, and I don’t feel it myself, but I get it.

But you know what? Bernstein is right. For a while it will continue to be a political football, but not for long. Even the opponents will quickly realize that same-sex marriage changes….nothing. Life goes on normally. The gay couples in town still live and hang out together just like they always have, and a few marriage ceremonies didn’t change that. In their own houses, everything stays the same. The actual impact is zero. No one is trying to recruit their kids to the cause. Their churches continue to marry whoever they want to marry. After a few months or a few years, they just forget about it. After all, the lawn needs mowing and the kids have to get ferried to soccer practice and Chinese sounds good for dinner—and that gay couple who run the Jade Palace over on 4th sure make a mean Kung Pao Chicken. And that’s it.

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In a Few Years, Gay Marriage Will Be About as Threatening as Cell Phones

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Obamacare Still Isn’t Safe, and Liberals Better Not Forget It

by ViolaVeale Posted on June 26, 2015

Mother Jones

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Greg Sargent warns Democrats not to get complacent about Obamacare:

House Republicans are still forging ahead with a separate lawsuit against Obama over the law (though it may not be resolved for years). Conservatives like Ted Cruz are still calling for holding spending bills hostage to roll back the ACA. GOP presidential hopefuls Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, Bobby Jindal, and Cruz are all pledging to keep up the fight to repeal Obamacare — “every single word,” as Cruz puts it.

….Democrats should take continued GOP opposition to Obamacare very seriously. It has serious real-world consequences. As long as states hold out against the Medicaid expansion, it could slow the law’s efforts to realize its goal of expanding coverage. One thing this means is that Democrats should redouble their efforts to regain electoral ground on the level of the states, where future decisions about the Medicaid expansion will be made.

When Obama won the 2012 election, I figured Obamacare was finally safe. Except….there was still the Supreme Court. But they mostly upheld Obamacare, and once again I thought it was finally safe. Whew. Still, Republicans kept fighting. And things were still dicey as long as Obamacare was still vaporware. Then it finally went into effect in 2014, and disastrous rollout or not, I figured that was it. Once it’s actually helping millions of people, it’s safe. But wait! Then there was another Supreme Court case. But that dropped this week, and Obamacare was once again upheld.

So now Obamacare is finally safe, right? You’d think so, wouldn’t you? But Republicans are obsessed with Obamacare like no other law that’s been passed in decades. It’s kind of scary, the same way it was scary watching the unhinged Captain Ahab stumping around the Pequod. So no, Obamacare is still not safe. Not unless Democrats win at least the White House, and maybe both the White House and the Senate, in 2016. At that point, Republicans will finally have to give up. They’d have no plausible path to repeal, and by 2020 the law would have been in place for seven years; it would be covering upwards of 25 million people; and the health care industry would be so plugged into Obamacare’s rules that it would literally take years to extricate them if the law was repealed.

It sounds bizarre—not least of all to me, who badly underestimated how long Republicans could stay maniacally fixated on Obamacare—but it won’t truly be safe until and unless Democrats win in 2016. I sure hope Democrats figure this out. If you want to know what we’re up against, use Kevin’s Quick Zeitgeist Test. Type “Obamacare” into Google and then go to image view. Here’s the URL:

https://www.google.com/search?lr=&cr=&safe=images&gws_rd=ssl&um=1&ie=UTF-8&hl=en&tbm=isch&source=og&q=obamacare&sa=N&tab=wi&ei=-HSNVfnbNMLFggSu7YbIAw

Now do a quick count of pro vs. anti Obamacare images in, say, the top 50 results. Not counting neutral photos, I put it at about 10:1 for the haters. These guys aren’t giving up. Those of who support Obamacare had better show a similar level of passion for keeping it around.

Source: 

Obamacare Still Isn’t Safe, and Liberals Better Not Forget It

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It’s Time for Another Obama Apology Tour

by DemetriCzc Posted on June 24, 2015

Mother Jones

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Here’s our latest “crisis”:

French President Francois Hollande held a crisis meeting of the country’s Defense Council on Wednesday after newspapers published WikiLeaks documents showing that the United States eavesdropped on him and two predecessors.

After the meeting, the council issued a statement lambasting U.S. spying as “unacceptable” and declaring that France had demanded two years ago that the National Security Agency stop snooping on its leaders. The latest WikiLeaks revelations, published by the daily newspaper Liberation and the investigative news website Mediapart, claim the NSA eavesdropped on telephone conversations of former Presidents Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy as well as Hollande.

Look, can’t we just assume the NSA has been spying on every world leader around the globe? Clearly, the answer is for President Obama to put this finally to rest by embarking on an apology tour of the entire planet—except for leaders we don’t like and plan to keep spying on. This will accomplish two things: (a) it will take care of the whole spying thing all at once, instead of having it dribble out every month or two, and (b) Obama really would go on an apology tour, which would make Republicans deliriously happy. Finally they’d be able to accuse him of going on an apology tour and they wouldn’t even have to lie about it. How cool is that?

Then, when it’s all over, we can go back to spying on everyone, except more carefully. I mean, you didn’t really think we were going to stop spying on these guys, did you?

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It’s Time for Another Obama Apology Tour

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Waiters Now Have Yet Another Gripe to Contend With

by LaurelBos Posted on June 23, 2015

Mother Jones

Roberto Ferdman writes today about the “most annoying restaurant trend happening today.” But when I got around to reading it, I was a little surprised by how it ended:

Without my permission, restaurants have abandoned, or simply overlooked, a classic tenet of service etiquette….Rather than clear plates once everyone at the table has finished the meal, which has long been the custom, servers instead hover over diners, fingers twitching, until the very instant someone puts down a fork. Like vultures, they then promptly snatch up the silverware — along with everything else in front of the customer. If you’re lucky, they might ask permission before stealing your plate.

….It’s possible that there’s an economic impetus behind it. “The price of land is going up, which pushes up the value of each table,” said Tyler Cowen. “That makes moving people along more important.”

….But maybe waiters are clearing individual plates because they believe that’s what customers want. I have heard as much from servers and restaurateurs.

No excuse, however, should suffice. Publicly, restaurants might argue that they are trying to avoid clutter; privately, they might encourage waiters to speed tables along; but what it amounts to is an uncomfortable dining experience.

Wait. What? “No excuse should suffice”? If Ferdman dislikes this trend, that’s fine. But if, in fact, most diners prefer having their places cleared when they’ve finished eating, that sure seems like a more than sufficient reason for this classic tenet of service etiquette to hit the bricks. It’s not as if it came down on a tablet from Mount Sinai, after all. Surely the most basic tenet of service etiquette is to make customers as comfortable and satisfied as possible. If, in the 21st century, it turns out that this requires waiters to remove place settings quickly, then that’s what they should do, even if a small minority dislikes it.

Now personally, I think the most annoying restaurant trend happening today is that all the restaurants I like have gone out of business. It’s eerie as hell. Almost literally, every restaurant that Marian and I used to eat at regularly has closed, to be replaced by some horrible trendy chain outlet. Our favorite Chinese place is gone. And our favorite Mexican place. Our favorite pizza place. Our favorite Italian place. Our second-favorite pizza place. And probably a few others I’ve forgotten about. There are basically only two of our favorites left, and they don’t seem like they’re about to go out of business, but who knows?

It’s my own fault, of course, for living in Irvine, where the Irvine Company owns all the land and basically prices out of business anything except profitable chain stores. It’s surely no coincidence that of the two restaurants still standing, one is outside Irvine and the other is about a hundred yards from the city limit. I made my bed, now I have to lie in it.

POSTSCRIPT: Back on the original topic, Ferdman’s piece has gotten me curious about something. I don’t go to a lot of high-end restaurants, but I do go to a few now and again. And unless my memory is playing tricks on me (always a possibility), it’s always been the custom to remove plates when diners are finished, not all at once when everyone is finished. Is this a Southern California thing? Is it a matter of how high-end the restaurant is? I eat at expensive places on occasion, but virtually never at the kind of truly pricey places where you have to wait a month for a reservation. Help me out here. Why is it that removing place settings individually strikes me as normal, not a crime against proper etiquette?

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Waiters Now Have Yet Another Gripe to Contend With

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Republicans Oppose Evidence-Based Medical Research Because….Obamacare

by itsmejenny Posted on June 22, 2015

Mother Jones

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Over at the Monkey Cage, Eric Patashnik ponders an oddity: Republicans generally support healthcare research funding, but they’ve turned against the idea of funding evidence-based research. This is despite the fact that Republicans, who normally support ways to spend tax dollars more efficiently, have been firm supporters for more than two decades? What’s going on?

One possible reason is that Republicans oppose taxpayer funding of all scientific research as a matter of principle. Yet the same House Appropriations Committee draft bill that targets health services research also provides a $1.1 billion increase in the budget of the National Institutes of Health.

A second possible reason is that Republicans are uninterested in evidence-based policymaking. But both Democrats and Republicans argue that better information is needed to make government more effective. For example, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and Sen. Patty Murray (R-Wash.) recently introduced the Evidence-Based Policymaking Commission Act of 2015 to evaluate the effectiveness of federal programs.

Hah hah. He’s just kidding. Patashnik actually knows perfectly well why Republicans have decided they hate evidence-based research. Remember death panels? Remember how the federal government was going to decide which treatments were worth giving to grandma and which ones weren’t? Remember how Republicans decided that “comparative effectiveness” research was just a tricky Democratic facade for their effort to take treatment decisions out of the hands of your beloved local doctor and instead put them into the hands of green-eyeshade bureaucrats?

Oh yeah. You remember. Here’s Patashnik on what happened to evidence-based research:

Federal investment in this research (although it predated the 2008 election) became closely tied to the Obama administration’s health-care reform agenda….An increased federal role in comparative effectiveness research, together with payments to physicians for voluntary counseling to Medicare patients about end-of-life options and the creation of the Independent Payment Advisory Board (another agency the GOP wishes to kill) contributed to the “death panels” myth, which Republicans have used to frame health-care reform as “rationing.”

….Although evidence-based medicine might seem likely to have bipartisan support, it has become a partisan issue among voters. In 2010, Alan Gerber, David Doherty, Conor Dowling and I conducted a national survey to gauge public support for government funding of research on the effectiveness of treatments. Among those who reported not voting in 2008, there was not a large difference in support across Democrats and Republicans, but there were significant partisan differences among voters. Republican voters were much less supportive than Democrats. During the debates over the stimulus bill and health-care reform, the two parties took opposing stands on the federal government’s role in this effort, which led to the significant partisan split among politically engaged citizens.

So there you have it. Sarah Palin’s revenge. Common sense commitments to promoting evidence-based medicine became tied up in the Republican jihad against anything associated with Obamacare. So now it’s on the chopping block too. Welcome to the modern GOP.

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Republicans Oppose Evidence-Based Medical Research Because….Obamacare

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Money in Politics Is….Top Concern of Democrats. Republicans Continue Not to Care.

by Stanton2314 Posted on June 22, 2015

Mother Jones

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I went out for my morning walk today—two-thirds of a mile, woo hoo!—and needed to take a ten-minute break when I got home. So I’m listening to Andrea Mitchell tell me the stunning news that in the latest NBC/WSJ poll, a full 33% of Americans say that money in politics is their top concern about the upcoming presidential election. Specifically, 33% chose as their top concern, “Wealthy individuals and corporations will have too much influence over who wins.”

Is that higher than usual? I suppose, though it hardly seems like the makings of a revolution. That’s especially true when you see the partisan breakdown:

Democrats were most likely to cite the influence of corporations and wealthy individuals as the top concern, with roughly half of self-described liberals and Democratic primary voters ranking it as their primary anxiety as the 2016 White House race gears up. Only 21% of core Republican voters said it was their top concern.

So….Democrats are upset about money in politics as usual. Republicans don’t really care much, as usual. I hope nobody minds too much if I find this a bit of a yawn.

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Money in Politics Is….Top Concern of Democrats. Republicans Continue Not to Care.

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