Tag Archives: photos

Friday Cat Blogging – 6 February 2015

by LawrencdeLargie Posted on February 6, 2015

Mother Jones

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

My sister is the guest curator for catblogging this week, and this was her selection. I always call this “being a lizard cat,” especially when they strike this pose outside on a nice sunny patio.

This is also the aftermath of being a burrito cat. Hopper likes to burrow into the quilt on the sofa and then stretch out, which makes the whole thing look like a cat burrito. A purring burrito. But then, I’ve always thought that burritos could be improved by a bit of purring. Right?

Original article:  

Friday Cat Blogging – 6 February 2015

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, PUR, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Friday Cat Blogging – 6 February 2015

No, Congress Never Intended to Limit Obamacare Subsidies to State Exchanges

by BennyBoyes Posted on January 16, 2015

Mother Jones

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

The Supreme Court will soon hear oral arguments in King v. Burwell, in which conservatives will argue that the text of Obamacare limits federal subsidies only to people who buy insurance from state-run exchanges, not from the federal exchange. Roughly speaking, there are two prongs of the conservative argument:

  1. The law contains text that explicitly limits subsidies to state-run exchanges. Democrats may not have intended this, but they screwed up in the rush to get the bill passed. That’s too bad for them, but the law is the law.
  2. Democrats actually did intend to limit subsidies to state-run exchanges. This was meant as an incentive for states to run their own exchanges rather than punting the job to the feds.

The argument over #1 revolves around textual interpretation of the statute as a whole, as well as previous Supreme Court precedent that provides federal agencies with broad latitude in how they implement regulations. The argument over #2 relies on trying to find evidence that limiting subsidies really was a topic of discussion at some point during the debate over the bill. That’s been tough: virtually no one who covered the debate (including me) remembers so much as a hint of anything like this popping up. The subsidies were always meant to be universal.

But the recollections of journalists aren’t really very germane to a Supreme Court case. The real-time analyses of the Congressional Budget Office, however, might be. This is an agency of Congress, after all, that responds to questions and requests from all members, both Democrats and Republicans. So did CBO ever model any of its cost or budget projections based on the idea that subsidies might not be available in certain states? Today Sarah Kliff points us to Theda Skocpol, who took a look at every single CBO analysis of Obamacare done in 2009 and early 2010. Here’s what she found:

CBO mostly dealt with overall budgetary issues of spending, costs, and deficits — or looked at the specific impact of health reform proposals on Medicare beneficiaries, health care providers, and citizens at various income levels. The record shows that no one from either party asked CBO to analyze or project subsidies available to people in some states but not others. In a June 2009 analysis of a draft proposal from Democrats in the Senate Health, Education, and Labor Committee, CBO treated subsidies as phased in. But even that proposal, which did not survive in further deliberations, stipulated that subsidies would be available in all states from 2014 — and CBO calculated costs accordingly.

After the Affordable Care Act became law in March 2010, members of Congress, especially Republican critics, continued to raise issues. In its responses, CBO continued to model exchange subsidies as available nationwide. No one in either party objected or asked for alternative estimations assuming partial subsidies at any point in the 111th Congress.

It’s unclear whether this is something the Supreme Court will find germane, but it’s certainly closer to being germane than the recollections of a bunch of reporters.

It’s also possible, of course, that the court will focus solely on argument #1 and never even get to questions about the intent of Congress. Nonetheless, this is an interesting review of the CBO record. The conservative case that Democrats actively intended subsidies to be limited to state exchanges has always been remarkably flimsy. Skocpol’s review exposes it as all but nonexistent.

Original post:  

No, Congress Never Intended to Limit Obamacare Subsidies to State Exchanges

Posted in alo, Citizen, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on No, Congress Never Intended to Limit Obamacare Subsidies to State Exchanges

Two Promising Factlets About American Schools

by WDCIsmaeltjydj Posted on January 12, 2015

Mother Jones

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

So how are our schools doing? Here are two factlets that crossed my radar yesterday.

First: Neerav Kingsland says that SAT scores of new teachers are rising and that most of them are staying in teaching for at least five years. He comments: “If I was going to bet on whether American education will improver, flatline, or get worse — I would look very hard at the academic performance of teachers entering the profession, as well as how long these better qualified teachers stayed in the classroom. The aforementioned data makes me more bullish on American education.”

Second: Adam Ozimek says we’re selling charter schools short when we say that on average they do about as well as public schools. That’s true, but there’s more to it:

I would like to propose a better conventional wisdom: “some charter schools appear to do very well, and on average charters do better at educating poor students and black students”. If the same evidence existed for some policy other than charter schools, I believe this would be the conventional wisdom.

….The charter sectors’ ability to do better for poor students and black students is important given that they disproportionately serve them….53% of charter students are in poverty compared 48% for public schools. Charters also serve more minority students than public schools: charters are 29% black, while public schools are 16%. So not only do they serve more poor students and black students, but for this group they relatively consistently outperform public schools.

It’s been a while since I took a dive into the data on charter schools, so I’m passing this along without comment. But it sounds right. I continue to believe that as long as they’re properly regulated, charter schools show substantial promise.

Source:

Two Promising Factlets About American Schools

Posted in alo, FF, G & F, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Two Promising Factlets About American Schools

Watch Almonds Suck California Dry

by BarryWickens Posted on January 12, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>
A worker watches an almond harvesting machine dump nuts near the town of Kerman, California.

Photographer Matt Black remembers the moment in December 2013 when he realized the drought in California had begun. The brown-hills in the horizon stretched into a cloudless blue winter sky. It was quiet. Too quiet.

“It was just this, yawning kind of silence,” Black says. “And that’s when I started working. It was just clear that this was going to be really bad.”

More stories about the almond boom and what it means for California.


Invasion of the Hedge Fund Almonds


Charts: Almonds Suck as Much Water Annually as LA Uses in 3 Years


Photos: The Story Behind California’s Nut Boom


It Takes How Much Water to Grow an Almond?!


Lay Off the Almond Milk, You Ignorant Hipsters

Black has spent the better part of the last year documenting the drought. “For most of it I felt like I was coated in dust—in my eyes, my ears, my cameras—everywhere.” In the summer, the temperature rose well above 100 degrees. “One day I was taking pictures of abandoned fields near I-5. It was a 114 degrees and the dust was blowing and there was not a single bit of green in sight,” he says. “At that moment, it felt like the entire Valley was about to catch fire.”

His photos, which have appeared in The New Yorker, Time, and National Geographic, among other publications, offer a glimpse into the lives and livelihoods of the Central Valley. In black and white, Black, who was recently named Time‘s Instagram Photographer of the Year, aims to capture “the flatness, uniformity and to a certain extent monotony of this way of farming. He adds, “It’s not a land of quaint little farms and pastoral scenes. These are factories, and that’s why they are important—because they feed millions.”

But it is the people who reside in the communities hit hardest that Black hopes to highlight with his work—those who are forced to drink water from bottles, who cannot flush a toilet, or take a shower without the use of a bucket. “Yes, the drought is huge and catastrophic and all those things that everyone by this point is pretty much aware of,” he says. “But what people aren’t aware of is how that filters down to some of these towns. What photos are really best suited for is to try to put a face on the problem—to make it concrete and real.”

All photos by Matt Black.

Near the town of Ducor, California, a newly planted pistachio orchard.

A worker loads crates of almonds at a processing plant near Los Banos, California.

A worker sorts almonds at the processing plant near Los Banos.

A worker drives an almond-harvesting machine in an orchard near the town of Kerman, California.

A pistachio tree in a newly planted orchard near the town of Alpaugh, California.

A worker checks pistachio trees in a newly planted orchard near the town of Alpaugh, California.

Workers repair a well near Alpaugh, California.

Water pumped from wells fills a storage canal in a newly planted orchard near Alpaugh, California.

A home in the town of Alpaugh. Overpumping in nearby orchards has forced the closure of one of the town’s wells, and Alpaugh’s water supply now has high levels of arsenic contamination.

Jorge Cruz collects water from his kitchen sink at his home in Alpaugh.

Jorge Cruz stores drinking water at his home in Alpaugh.

An almond shaker knocks nuts from a tree in an orchard near Firebaugh, California.

View this article: 

Watch Almonds Suck California Dry

Posted in Anchor, Everyone, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Watch Almonds Suck California Dry

Quote of the Day: American Health Care Is the Best in the World, Baby!

by RefugioBathurst Posted on January 12, 2015

Mother Jones

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

From Douglas Coupland, after contracting bronchitis from a chilly hotel room in Atlanta:

Finally, I dragged myself to a local medical clinic, and this is when things got really American.

By “really American,” he means that he ended up being part of a scam that involved deliberately not treating him in order to get him hooked on oxycodone. No worries, though. The socialist Canadian health system eventually saved him.

Continue reading:

Quote of the Day: American Health Care Is the Best in the World, Baby!

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Quote of the Day: American Health Care Is the Best in the World, Baby!

Unemployment Is Low, But It Can Still Go a Lot Lower — And It Should

by XLNCharlidftxdy Posted on January 10, 2015

Mother Jones

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

Justin Wolfers makes a good point today. There’s a concept in economics called NAIRU, which rather awkwardly stands for the Non-Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment1. Basically it means that there’s a “natural” rate of unemployment in the economy2, and if you go below it then inflation will start to accelerate. When that happens, the Fed raises interest rates to slow down growth before inflation gets out of hand.

But what’s the actual value of NAIRU? Based on past experience, most economists think it’s around 5.5 percent or so—which happens to be where we are now. And yet, inflation is still very low, and definitely not accelerating. This could be just a temporary phenomenon as we recover from a huge balance-sheet recession, or it could be something more permanent. For two reasons, my guess is that it’s mostly the latter. First, inflation has been steadily dropping for 30 years in the US, and there’s some reason to think that it’s the 70s that were a high-inflation anomaly, not the rest of the low-inflation 20th century. Second, there’s reason to think that the headline unemployment rate is not measuring quite the same thing as it used to. If you look at long-term unemployment, marginally attached workers, and the decline of the labor force participation ratio—which has been falling for 15 years now—it appears that a headline rate of 5.5 percent probably implies more slack in the economy than it used to. Here’s Wolfers on the natural rate of unemployment:

The problem, though, is that no one really knows what that rate is. Our uncertainty is even greater today than it normally is, because no one knows the extent to which those workers who dropped out of the labor force in response to the financial crisis will return when jobs become plentiful. By this view, today’s most important macroeconomic question is what the natural rate actually is.

The latest jobs report helps answer this question. The unemployment rate has fallen to 5.6 percent, and there are still no signs that wage inflation is rising. Indeed, with wage growth running at only 1.7 percent, the economy is telling us that we still have the ability to bring many more of the jobless back into the fold without setting off inflation.

It is only when nominal wage growth exceeds the sum of inflation (about 2 percent) and productivity growth (about 1.5 percent) that the Fed needs to be concerned that the labor market is generating cost pressures that might raise inflation. So the latest wage growth numbers suggest that we are not yet near the natural rate. And that means the Fed should be content to let the recovery continue to generate more new jobs.

There’s one more thing to add: Even when unemployment falls to around 4 percent, we should remain cautious. We’ve tolerated an inflation rate that’s under the Fed’s 2 percent target for the past five years. There’s no reason we shouldn’t tolerate a catch-up inflation rate that’s a little over the Fed’s target as we begin to recover. If inflation runs at 3-4 percent for the next five years, it’s probably a good thing, not a bad one.

1Obviously economists could have used a branding expert to help them with this. On the other hand, if they’d done that we might have ended up with Xarelxo or JobsMax™. In any case, we’re stuck with it for now.

2The idea here is that even a thriving economy has a certain amount of natural unemployment as people leave their jobs and move to new ones—because new sectors pop up, old companies go out of business, etc. That’s a good thing and a perfectly natural one in a competitive economy that’s producing lots of innovation. Trying to push unemployment lower than the natural rate is basically fruitless.

Read the article:

Unemployment Is Low, But It Can Still Go a Lot Lower — And It Should

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Unemployment Is Low, But It Can Still Go a Lot Lower — And It Should

The Agriculture Department Has Advice In Case You’re Ever Kidnapped

by MillieLogue Posted on January 9, 2015

Mother Jones

In an apparent effort to prove that you can write an explainer about anything, Alex Abad-Santos writes one today about the Taken movies. So how good is Liam Neeson’s advice in those movies to the various family members of his that get abducted? Here is Abad-Santos:

According to the a safety protocol guide on the USDA’s website, it’s recommended that you….

Wait. The USDA? As in the Department of Agriculture? WTF?

Anyway, yes: it turns out the United States Department of Agriculture has a Personnel and Document Security Division, and they have a handy web page called “Kidnapping and Hostage Survival Guidelines.” Sadly, it turns out not to really be a USDA document. It’s part of a security program developed for the Defense Security Service Academy by the Defense Personnel Security Research Center. The security awareness cartoons were provided by the Information and Personnel Security Office, Chief of Naval Operations. From there, the whole package was distributed to other government agencies, including the USDA.

Still, it has a quiz! If you’d like to test your knowledge of proper security procedures for government employees, click here.

Read more: 

The Agriculture Department Has Advice In Case You’re Ever Kidnapped

Posted in FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Agriculture Department Has Advice In Case You’re Ever Kidnapped

Chart of the Day: Net New Jobs in December

by JarrodGwendolen Posted on January 9, 2015

Mother Jones

The American economy added 252,000 new jobs last month, 90,000 of which were needed to keep up with population growth. This means that net job growth clocked in at 162,000 jobs, which is not quite as good as last month but still not bad. Virtually all of this growth was in the private sector, yet another sign that the recovery is finally motoring along at a steady if unspectacular rate.

But the news was not all good. The headline unemployment rate fell from 5.8 percent to 5.6 percent, but this was mostly because of people dropping out of the labor force. Wage growth was also disappointing. Last month’s wage increases, which I was skeptical about, were entirely washed away. Earnings for nonsupervisory workers actually dropped to slightly below their October levels.

Overall, this jobs report is decent news, but hardly great. Until we start to see steady employment growth and steady wage growth, the labor market still has a lot of slack no matter what the headline unemployment rate is. Given this, in addition to possible headwinds in the rest of the world, the Fed needs to continue to keep interest rates low for quite a while longer. It’s not yet time to tighten.

Read original article – 

Chart of the Day: Net New Jobs in December

Posted in alo, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Chart of the Day: Net New Jobs in December

Some Fair and Balanced Race Baiting at Fox News

by HoracioMansell Posted on December 4, 2014

Mother Jones

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

Andrew Sullivan is heartened that even most conservatives seem to be shocked by yesterday’s grand jury decision not to return an indictment in the killing of Eric Garner. But “most” is not quite all:

The exception to all this was Fox News last night. Megyn Kelly’s coverage proved that there is almost no incident in which a black man is killed by cops that Fox cannot excuse or even defend. She bent over backwards to impugn protesters, to change the subject to Ferguson, to elide the crucial fact that the choke-hold was against police procedure, and to imply that Garner was strongly resisting arrest. Readers know I had very mixed feelings about Ferguson. I’m not usually inclined to slam something as overtly racist. But there was no way to interpret Kelly’s coverage as anything but the baldest racism I’ve seen in a while on cable news. Her idea of balance was to interview two, white, bald, bull-necked men to defend the cops, explain away any concerns about police treatment and to minimize the entire thing. Truly, deeply disgusting.

Jeez. A thinly veiled appeal to racist sentiment at Fox News? I am shocked, I tell you, shocked.

Link: 

Some Fair and Balanced Race Baiting at Fox News

Posted in FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Pines, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Some Fair and Balanced Race Baiting at Fox News

April 23rd Is the Saddest Day of the Year

by KennethDiesendo Posted on December 3, 2014

Mother Jones

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

According to Google—sort of—the saddest times of the year are spring and fall. Weird. Click here for the explanations, which seem a bit ad hoc to me. I mean, less light? Then why is winter such a happy time? Not to mention spring. “As it turns out,” the article explains, “lengthening daylight may discombobulate people’s chemical regulatory system.” So….less light is bad. But more light can also be bad. And winter is OK even though it has the least light of all. This might all be true, but it’s sure a bit of a chin scratcher.

And the unhappiest day of the year in 2014 was April 23. WTF? I could understand April 15. But what’s the deal with the 23rd? Anybody got a theory? Am I missing something here?

From: 

April 23rd Is the Saddest Day of the Year

Posted in FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Pines, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on April 23rd Is the Saddest Day of the Year