Tag Archives: political

Let Us Now Praise Obama’s Economic Policies

by ChristoSlama Posted on December 23, 2014

Mother Jones

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Steve Benen evaluates recent economic news by the standards of Republican promises from two years ago:

The Romney Standard: Mitt Romney said during the 2012 campaign that if Americans elect him, he’d get the unemployment rate down to 6% by 2016. Obama won anyway and the unemployment rate dropped below 6% two years faster.
The Gingrich Standard: Newt Gingrich said during the 2012 campaign that if Americans re-elected the president, gas prices would reach $10 per gallon, while Gingrich would push gas down to $2.50 a gallon. As of this morning, the national average at the pump is a little under $2.38.
The Pawlenty Standard: Tim Pawlenty said trillions of dollars in tax breaks would boost economic growth to 5% GDP. Obama actually raised taxes on the wealthy and GDP growth reached 5% anyway.

Is this fair? Meh. Maybe, maybe not. But there’s not likely to be a whole lot of news to blog about today, so why not poke holes in some Republican balloons instead? As Benen says, “By the party’s own standards, Obama is succeeding beautifully. They established the GOP benchmarks and now the Democratic president is the one meeting, and in some cases exceeding, the Republicans’ goals.”

The downside of all this is that in the past Democrats haven’t promoted their own economic policies plainly enough to get credit now that the economy has finally turned around. Republicans, by contrast, simply cut taxes and then loudly and relentlessly repeat their promise that the economy will improve. Eventually it does, of course. Maybe not a lot, and maybe not for long, but economies always improve eventually. If Kansas ever manages a quarter or two of decent growth, for example, you can be sure that Gov. Sam Brownback will be crowing about it for the rest of his political career.

To some extent, of course, Democrats were stymied in their economic policy, which gave them less to brag about back in 2009. And five years is a long time to wait for a recovery. Still, Dems did pass a stimulus; enact a payroll tax holiday; extend unemployment benefits; pass Obamacare; reform Wall Street; raise taxes on the rich; and pass several jobs bills. It’s true that this laundry list doesn’t quite have the simple oomph of “Tax cuts will bring the economy roaring back to life!” But it is an economic program, and eventually it got us to where we are today: a pretty good recovery, and one that looks like it might be sustainable since it’s not built on the sandy foundations of tax cuts and deficits. Democrats should be louder about demanding more credit for all of this.

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Let Us Now Praise Obama’s Economic Policies

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Thanks to New Media, We All Have Box Seats at the Sausage Factory

by BradyT03jjkzycx Posted on December 12, 2014

Mother Jones

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Brian Beutler writes today about the enormous amount of attention we’ve paid to the cromnibus spending bill this week:

Until the country came to be governed by serial brinksmanship, the writing and passage of annual spending bills weren’t huge stories in American politics, and you had to be unusually attuned to both the content and the process to understand the political currents underlying both. When problems arose, there was always the palliative of earmarks to smooth things over.

But the narrow passage Thursday night of a big spending bill in the House of Representatives brought everything to the surface, even though the risk of a government shutdown was near zero.

I think that’s only part of the story. It’s true that as recently as a decade ago, spending bills didn’t have a big audience. Genuine insiders—aides, lobbyists, single-issue activists—paid attention to the minutiae, but most of us didn’t. More to the point, most of us couldn’t. Even if you were the kind of person who read TNR and National Review and Roll Call religiously, you just weren’t going to be exposed to that much coverage.

This wasn’t because budgets were more boring back then. Or because the political shenanigans were less egregious. It’s because print publications didn’t devote very much space to them. You’d get the basics, but that was it. And given the limitations of print production schedules, the drama of watching deals rise and fall on a daily or hourly basis simply wasn’t possible in real time.

But the often maligned rise of blogs and Twitter, along with their new media offshoots, has created a whole new world. Over at Vox, for example, they ran nine pieces about the spending bill just yesterday. If you follow the right people, Twitter will keep you literally up to minute on even the smallest issues. Dozens of blogs will explain the policy implications of obscure provisions. Politico will flood the zone with pieces about conflicts and personalities as the fight unfolds.

By normal standards, the spending bill the House passed yesterday was fairly routine. But digital media turned it into High Noon and we all played along. We pretended that this was something uniquely shameless, when it wasn’t. The sausage has always been made this way. The only difference is that now we all have box seats on the factory floor.

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Thanks to New Media, We All Have Box Seats at the Sausage Factory

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Climate deniers don’t deserve to be called “skeptics,” scientists say

by MillaRubbo Posted on December 11, 2014

Climate deniers don’t deserve to be called “skeptics,” scientists say

By on 11 Dec 2014commentsShare

There’s a difference between those who are “skeptical” about climate change and those who outright deny that it is happening, and a group of scientists and science communicators is calling on the media to acknowledge it.

“Please stop using the word ‘skeptic’ to describe deniers,” 48 fellows of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, a science advocacy group, ask in a statement. Among the prominent people to sign the letter are Bill Nye, Cosmos co-writer and producer Ann Druyan, and Nobel prize-winning chemist Sir Harold Kroto.

The signees cast the media’s treatment of Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe (R) as exhibit A to illustrate the difference between a “skeptic” and a “denier.” Inhofe, who smugly believes climate change is a “hoax” that he and wise others have seen through, is a “denier.” NPR recently identified him as such, yet, around the same time, The New York Times identified him as a “skeptic.” Confusing.

From the letter:

As Fellows of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, we are concerned that the words “skeptic” and “denier” have been conflated by the popular media. Proper skepticism promotes scientific inquiry, critical investigation, and the use of reason in examining controversial and extraordinary claims. It is foundational to the scientific method. Denial, on the other hand, is the a priori rejection of ideas without objective consideration.

Real skepticism is summed up by a quote popularized by Carl Sagan, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” Inhofe’s belief that global warming is “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people” is an extraordinary claim indeed. He has never been able to provide evidence for this vast alleged conspiracy. That alone should disqualify him from using the title “skeptic.”

As scientific skeptics, we are well aware of political efforts to undermine climate science by those who deny reality but do not engage in scientific research or consider evidence that their deeply held opinions are wrong. The most appropriate word to describe the behavior of those individuals is “denial.” Not all individuals who call themselves climate change skeptics are deniers. But virtually all deniers have falsely branded themselves as skeptics. By perpetrating this misnomer, journalists have granted undeserved credibility to those who reject science and scientific inquiry.

Unfortunately, the distinction between skeptic and denier is one the media will need to be making more and more frequently, as greater numbers of both are moving into positions of power in Congress.

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Climate deniers don’t deserve to be called “skeptics,” scientists say

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What a shrimp treadmill can teach us about science funding

by MargaretteFAOC Posted on November 17, 2014

Shrimpercise

What a shrimp treadmill can teach us about science funding

By

17 Nov 2014 5:15 PM

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What a shrimp treadmill can teach us about science funding

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When you picture the extravagancies of government spending, what do you see? If your answer is “a tiny marine crustacean jogging in place,” then your memory is a weird place — in 2011, Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn (Republican, duh) made some fuss about science grants awarded by the NSF to various projects, deemed by him to be “wasteful.”

Among those Coburn singled out, including the entirety of the search for extraterrestrial life and a robot that can fold laundry, was a project at the Grice Marine Laboratory at the College of Charleston, South Carolina. Coburn complained that the lab had received 12 separate grants from the National Science Foundation, for a total of $3 million … though, to be fair, this was over 10 YEARS of work.

Last week, David Scholnick, a biologist from Pacific University, slowly jogged back with his rejoinder — we can only assume with his legs and arms and miscellaneous appendages flailing. It may have taken three years, but it was worth the wait: “My name is David, and I am the marine biologist who put a shrimp on a treadmill — a burden I will forever carry.”

A burden we all must carry, Dave! Scholnick points out that reports — including a gibe from Forbes and a commercial from the AARP — of the $3 million treadmill price tag are just flat-out wrong. While it’s not chump change, a couple of million is reasonable for a decade worth of lab expenses — but the treadmill itself, he estimates, cost about $47 in spare parts. And he paid for those himself.

What’s more, the shrimp weren’t just experiencing the benefits of cardiovascular exercise for the heck of it, says Scholnick:

S[hr]imply put, my colleagues and I were studying how recent changes in the oceans could potentially affect the ability of marine organisms to fight infections — an important question, given that the amount of bacteria a shrimp is able remove from its body is directly related to how much bacteria could potentially end up on seafood-filled plates. And since shrimp are active animals in nature, it was logical to study the immune response of shrimp during activity.

In an era of public skepticism about the basic tenets of the scientific method, Scholnick’s defense of his shrimpy research stands as a defense of science in general:

In science, it is often necessary to develop creative solutions to complex problems. How do you get active marine animals to move naturally in a laboratory setting? How do marine animals fight off the glut of pathogens they are exposed to in the harsh environments where they live? These are not simple questions, there are no easy solutions, and they require an enormous amount of time and effort to answer.

With such symbolic weight to carry, this little shrimp deserves a more dignified anthem — here’s the Grist remix:

Source:
How a $47 Shrimp Treadmill Became a $3-Million Political Plaything

, Chronicle of Higher Education.

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What a shrimp treadmill can teach us about science funding

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Is the US-China Climate Pact as Big a Deal as It Seems?

by NicholeWooldrid Posted on November 12, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story originally appeared in The Atlantic and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

I’ve been offline for many hours and am just now seeing the announcements from Beijing. The United States and China have apparently agreed to do what anyone who has thought seriously about climate has been hoping for, for years. As the No. 1 (now China) and No. 2 carbon emitters in the world, and as the No. 1 (still the US) and No. 2 economies, they’ve agreed to new carbon-reduction targets that are more ambitious than most people would have expected.

More coverage of the historic US-China climate deal.


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Is the US-China Climate Pact as Big a Deal as It Seems?


Obama’s Deal With China Is a Big Win for Solar, Nuclear, and Clean Coal


Awkward: Watch a Supercut of Republicans Using China As an Excuse to Do Nothing About Climate Change


Deep Inside the Wild World of China’s Fracking Boom


Here Comes the Sun: America’s Solar Boom, in Charts

We’ll wait to see the details—including how an American president can make good on commitments for 2025, when that is two and possibly three presidencies into the future, and when in the here-and-now he faces congressional majorities that seem dead-set against recognizing this issue. It’s quaint to think back on an America that could set ambitious long-term goals—creating Land-Grant universities, developing the Interstate Highway System, going to the moon—even though the president who proposed them realized that they could not be completed on his watch. But let’s not waste time on nostalgia.

Before we have all the details, here is the simple guide to why this could be very important.

1) To have spent any time in China is to recognize that environmental damage of all kinds is the greatest threat to its sustainability—even more than the political corruption and repression to which its pollution problems are related. (I’ll say more about the link some other time, but you could think of last week’s reports that visiting groups of senior Chinese officials have bought so much illegal ivory in Tanzania that they’ve driven the black market price to new highs.)

You can go on for quite a while with a political system like China’s, as it keeps demonstrating now in its 65th year. But when children are developing lung cancer, when people in the capital city are on average dying five years too early because of air pollution, when water and agricultural soil and food supplies are increasingly poisoned, a system just won’t last. The Chinese Communist Party itself has recognized this, in shifting in the past three years from pollution denialism to a “we’re on your side to clean things up!” official stance.

Analytically these pollution emergencies are distinct from carbon-emission issues. But in practical terms pro-environmental steps by China are likely to help with both.

2) To have looked at either the numbers or the politics of global climate issues is to recognize that unless China and the US cooperate, there is no hope for anyone else. Numbers: These are far and away the two biggest sources of carbon emissions, and China is the fastest-growing. As John Kerry points out in an op-ed in tomorrow’s NYT, reductions either of them made on its own could just be wiped out unless the other cooperates. Politics: As the collapse of the Copenhagen climate talks five years ago showed, the rest of the world is likely to say, “To hell with it” if the two countries at the heart of this problem can’t be bothered to do anything.

We see our own domestic version of this response when people say, “Why go through the hassle of a carbon tax, when the Chinese are just going to smoke us to death anyway?” This new agreement does not mean that next year’s global climate negotiations in Paris will succeed. But it means they are no longer guaranteed to fail.

3) China is a big, diverse, churning, and contradictory place, as anyone who’s been there can detail for hours. But for the past year-plus, the news out of China has been consistent, and bad.

Many people thought, hoped, or dreamt that Xi Jinping would be some kind of reformer. Two years into his watch, his has been a time of cracking down rather than loosening up. Political enemies and advocates of civil society are in jail or in trouble. Reporters from the rest of the world have problems even getting into China, and reporters from China itself face even worse repression than before. The gratuitous recent showdown with Hong Kong exemplifies the new “No More Mr. Nice Guy” approach.

A nationalistic, spoiling-for-a-fight tone has spilled over into China’s “diplomatic” dealings too. So to have this leader of China making an important deal with an American president at this stage of his political fortune is the first news that even seems positive in a long while.

We’ll wait to see the details. But at face value, this is better news—about China, about China and America, and about the globe—than we’ve gotten for a while.

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Is the US-China Climate Pact as Big a Deal as It Seems?

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A Federal Appeals Court Just Ruled Against Gay Marriage. This Judge Just Issued An Epic Dissent.

by BeauBlakeley Posted on November 6, 2014

Mother Jones

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On Thursday, a federal appeals court upheld bans on gay marriage in Ohio, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Michigan. In a 2-1 vote, the 6th Circuit reversed lower courts’ rulings which had found the bans unconstitutional and sets up a likely Supreme Court showdown. Judge Martha Craig Daughtrey issued a scathing dissent. Here are her five best lines.

1. “The author of the majority opinion has drafted what would make an engrossing TED Talk or, possibly, an introductory lecture in Political Philosophy.”

2. “For although my colleagues in the majority pay lip service to marriage as an institution conceived for the purpose of providing a stable family unit ‘within which children may flourish,’ they ignore the destabilizing effect of its absence in the homes of tens of thousands of same-sex parents throughout the four states of the Sixth Circuit.”

3. “Because the correct result is so obvious, one is tempted to speculate that the majority has purposefully taken the contrary position to create the circuit split regarding the legality of same-sex marriage that could prompt a grant of certiorari by the Supreme Court and an end to the uncertainty of status and the interstate chaos that the current discrepancy in state laws threatens.”

4. “Even more damning to the defendants’ position, however, is the fact that the State of Michigan allows heterosexual couples to marry even if the couple does not wish to have children, even if the couple does not have sufficient resources or education to care for children, even if the parents are pedophiles or child abusers, and even if the parents are drug addicts.”

5. “…they are committed same-sex couples, many of them heading up de facto families, who want to achieve equal status—de jure status, if you will—with their married neighbors, friends, and coworkers, to be accepted as contributing members of their social and religious communities, and to be welcomed as fully legitimate parents at their children’s schools.”

It’s important to note the author of the majority opinion was Judge Jeffrey Sutton, who was appointed by former president George W. Bush. Thursday’s development demonstrates yet another example of Bush’s conservative legacy carrying on in federal courts long after his presidency ended.

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A Federal Appeals Court Just Ruled Against Gay Marriage. This Judge Just Issued An Epic Dissent.

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Bill Clinton Is Right: Storyline Reporting Has Poisoned the Political Press

by rakil23 Posted on September 25, 2014

Mother Jones

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Today brings a remarkable column from the Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza. It’s about the Clinton family’s adversarial relationship with the press:

Put simply: Neither Hillary nor Bill Clinton likes the media or, increasingly, sees any positive use for them.

“If a policymaker is a political leader and is covered primarily by the political press, there is a craving that borders on addictive to have a storyline,” Bill Clinton said in a speech at Georgetown University back in April. “And then once people settle on the storyline, there is a craving that borders on blindness to shoehorn every fact, every development, every thing that happens into the story line, even if it’s not the story.”

That’s an interesting comment from Bill Clinton. Is it true? Well, check this out from the start of Cillizza’s column:

Amy Chozick is the reporter tasked with covering the Clintons — and the runup to the now-almost-inevitable Hillary Clinton presidential bid — for the New York Times. Sounds like a plum gig, right? Until, that is, a press aide for the Clinton Global Initiative follows you into the bathroom.

Chozick describes a “friendly 20-something press aide who the Clinton Global Initiative tasked with escorting me to the restroom,” adding: “She waited outside the stall in the ladies’ room at the Sheraton Hotel, where the conference is held each year.”

Yes, this may be an extreme example. And, yes, the press strictures at the Clinton Global Initiative are the stuff of legend. But, the episode also reflects the dark and, frankly, paranoid view the Clintons have toward the national media. Put simply: Neither Hillary nor Bill Clinton likes the media or, increasingly, sees any positive use for them.

Here’s what makes this fascinating. If you click the link and read Chozick’s piece, you’ll learn that every reporter at the CGI is “cloistered in a basement at the Sheraton” and that an escort is required wherever they go, “lest one of us with our yellow press badges wind up somewhere where attendants with an esteemed blue badge are milling around.” It’s entirely fair to argue that this is absurdly restrictive. It’s not fair to imply that this is special treatment that Chozick got because she’s the beat reporter covering the Clintons. Every other reporter at the event got the same treatment.

But that’s what Cillizza did. In other words, he had already settled on a storyline, so he shoehorned the Chozick anecdote into his column to support that storyline. Which was exactly Clinton’s complaint in the first place.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t actually have any doubt that the Clintons do, in fact, have a pretty tortured relationship with the press. After the way the press treated them in the 90s, it would be remarkable if they didn’t. It might even be “dark and paranoid.” That wouldn’t surprise me too much either.

Nonetheless, I wish Cillizza would at least try to analyze his own tribe’s behavior with the same care that he analyzes the Clintons’. In any fair reading, the press has legitimate grievances about its treatment by the Clintons, but the Clintons have some legitimate grievances about the obsessive shiny-toy-feeding-frenzy nature of modern political press coverage too. Unfortunately, all Cillizza manages to say about the hostile atmosphere of Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign is that reporters weren’t “entirely innocent in the whole thing.”

Nobody should take this as a defense of the Clintons. High-profile politicians have always gotten klieg-light treatment, and they have to be able to handle it. At the same time, there ought to be at least a few mainstream reporters who also recognize some of the pathologies on their own side—those specific to the Clintons as well as those that affect presidential candidates of all stripes. How about an honest appraisal—complete with biting anecdotes—of how the political press has evolved over the past few decades and how storyline reporting has poisoned practically everything they do?

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Bill Clinton Is Right: Storyline Reporting Has Poisoned the Political Press

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Bobby Jindal: “I’m Not an Evolutionary Biologist”

by CarriNDQ Posted on September 16, 2014

Mother Jones

At a breakfast event today, a journalist reportedly questioned Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal about whether he believes in evolution. This is pretty pertinent. Several years ago Jindal signed into law the so-called Louisiana Science Education Act. The law, according to the National Center for Science Education, “invites lessons in creationism and climate change denial.” Jindal himself has said in the past that he has “no problem” if school boards want to teach creationism or intelligent design.

Jindal’s response to today’s question (as reported by TPM) was all too familiar. “The reality is I’m not an evolutionary biologist,” he said. Jindal went on to say that while “as a father, I want my kids to be taught about evolution in their schools,” he also believes that “local school districts should make decisions about what should be taught in their classroom.”

The reply brings to mind numerous other Republicans saying “I’m not a scientist” (or Marco Rubio’s “I’m not a scientist, man“) to dodge uncomfortable questions about scientific topics like evolution and climate change. It looks an awful lot like somebody wrote a memo, doesn’t it?

Here’s why this “I’m not a scientist” patter represents such an indefensible dodge. Nobody expects our politicians to be scientists. With a few exceptions, like Rush Holt, we know they won’t be. But it is precisely because they are not experts that we expect them to heed the consensus of experts in, er, areas in which they are not experts.

When politicians fail to do this, claiming a lack of scientific expertise is no excuse. Rather, it’s the opposite: A condemnation.

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Bobby Jindal: “I’m Not an Evolutionary Biologist”

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Will Democrats Keep Control of the Senate This Year?

by AugustTCKaxuwc Posted on August 29, 2014

Mother Jones

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Sam Wang of the Princeton Election Consortium thinks that Democrats currently have a 72 percent chance of retaining control of the Senate this year. Most other forecasting outfits think Republicans have a 60-70 percent chance of winning control. Why the difference?

In most cases, added assumptions (i.e. special sauce) have led the media organizations to different win probabilities — which I currently believe are wrong….The major media organizations (NYT, WaPo, 538)…all use prior conditions like incumbency, candidate experience, funding, and the generic Congressional ballot to influence their win probabilities — and opinion polls.

….Longtime readers of PEC will not be surprised to know that I think the media organizations are making a mistake. It is nearly Labor Day. By now, we have tons of polling data. Even the stalest poll is a more direct measurement of opinion than an indirect fundamentals-based measure. I demonstrated this point in 2012, when I used polls only to forecast the Presidency and all close Senate races. That year I made no errors in Senate seats, including Montana (Jon Tester) and North Dakota (Heidi Heitkamp), which FiveThirtyEight got wrong.

I’d sure like to believe this. PEC is my go-to political polling site, after all. But it sure doesn’t feel like Democrats are in the driver’s seat right now, does it? All of my political instincts scream that Wang’s forecast is wrong.

That’s probably because I’m a pessimist by nature. But you either believe in poll aggregation or you don’t. I do, and PEC has performed well in every election for the past decade. So just as I wouldn’t “deskew” bad poll results I didn’t like, I guess I won’t try to second guess good poll results that don’t seem quite right. If Wang thinks Democrats are currently favored to keep control of the Senate, then so do I.

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Will Democrats Keep Control of the Senate This Year?

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GOP Congressional Candidate Apologizes for Calling Female Senators "Undeserving Bimbos"

by Cristin7160 Posted on August 25, 2014

Mother Jones

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On Friday, we reported on Minnesota Republican congressional candidate Jim Hagedorn’s history of incendiary comments about women, American Indians, gays, people he suspected of being gay, and President Obama’s family. Two days later, Hagedorn took to Facebook to issue an apology…of sorts:

Over the years I have written political satire and commentary, most of which defended conservative ideals and took aim at national politicians I felt were failing the American people and hurting our country.

Even though most of my writings were composed more than 10 years ago, national and DFL liberals are determined to attack me personally, mostly by exhibiting snippets of out-dated, misunderstood or out-of-context material and calling me derogatory names.

In this case, the rather worn and tired Democrat tactic of personal destruction and demonization is designed to deflect attention from the serious problems confronting our nation and the failed big government record of President Barack Obama and devoted liberal followers like incumbent DFL Congressman Tim Walz.

Of course, these same politically correct liberals remain undeterred by the offensive writings authored in the past by Al Franken. In spite of this hypocrisy, I do acknowledge that some of my hard-hitting and tongue-in-cheek commentary was less than artfully constructed or included language that could lead to hurt feelings. I offer a sincere and heartfelt apology.

Rather than dwell in the rigged game of political correctness, my campaign will forge ahead and continue to engage with the people of southern Minnesota and address the issues that will decide our country’s future during these critical times.

A better way to avoid the “rigged game of political correctness,” would be to not disparage all American Indians as “thankless” welfare recipients. You can read more about Hagedorn’s past comments here.

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GOP Congressional Candidate Apologizes for Calling Female Senators "Undeserving Bimbos"

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