Tag Archives: privacy-policy

There’s Not Much Point in Pretending to Care About the New Republican Health Care Plan

by FernandoMerrill Posted on January 31, 2014

Mother Jones

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I have been derelict in my duty. A team of Republicans introduced a genuine alternative to Obamacare earlier this week, and I haven’t blogged about it. I’ll be honest: I just couldn’t work up the energy for several reasons.

Even on fleeting inspection, it’s obviously a feeble plan. It would cover very few people; most of the people it does cover couldn’t come close to affording it; and its policies would offer benefits so meager as to be almost useless.
The small amount of good it does is funded by reducing the tax deduction for employer health care. This is a joke. It would meet with massive resistance from virtually every Republican constituency. In particular, Grover Norquist would score it as a tax hike (which it is) and that means it would be DOA in the Republican caucus.
Even without the tax hike, this bill is going nowhere. I’ll give props to Tom Coburn and his friends for at least taking a semi-serious shot at health care reform, but no one seriously thinks it would have any chance of garnering even majority Republican support, let alone passing Congress.

As Dylan Scott reports, the sponsors of this bill have already watered down the tax hike. It barely took them a day. The new wording is a little vague, but it most likely eliminates the new funding entirely. And without funding, the bill is even more of a joke than it was to begin with.

It’s really kind of pointless to pretend that this is a real plan with real prospects of getting Republican support, but if you want to read all the details plan anyway, Jonathan Cohn has you covered here. As always, Cohn is very gentlemanly about the whole thing, but his bottom line is accurate: “The authors of the Patient CARE Act and many of their allies are acting as if conservatives have some magic elixir for health care problems—a way to provide the same kind of security that the Affordable Care Act will, but with a lot less interference in the market and a lot less taxpayer money. It’s all the goodies of liberal health care reform, they imply, but without the unpleasant parts. They’re wrong.”

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There’s Not Much Point in Pretending to Care About the New Republican Health Care Plan

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We’re Still at War: Photo of the Day for January 31, 2014

by VetaLauqcdwznhk Posted on January 31, 2014

Mother Jones

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U.S. Army Spc. Steven Hitchcock assigned to 55th Signal Company (Combat Camera), takes photographs during a mission on Fort Hunter Liggett, Calif., Jan. 22, 2014. Hitchcock’s mission was to document Task Force Training conducted by Rangers from 2nd Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment. (U.S. Army photo by Pfc. Rashene Mincy/ Released)

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We’re Still at War: Photo of the Day for January 31, 2014

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Monarch Butterflies Can Survive the World’s Most Amazing Migration—But GMOs Are Wiping Them Out

by Michalak876 Posted on January 30, 2014

Mother Jones

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The monarch butterfly is a magnificent and unique beast—the globe’s only butterfly species that embarks on an annual round-trip migration spanning thousands of miles, from the northern US and Canada to central Mexico. And monarchs aren’t just a gorgeous bug; they’re also pollinators, meaning they help keep land-based ecosystems humming. Their populations have been plunging for years, and the number of them hibernating in Mexico last year hit an all-time low, reports University of Minnesota ecologist Karen Oberhauser. Why? Here’s Oberhauser:

Tragically, much of their breeding habitat in this region the US and Canada has been lost to changing agricultural practices, primarily the exploding adoption of genetically modified, herbicide-tolerant crops in the late 20th and early 21st centuries … These crops allow post-emergence treatment with herbicides, and have resulted in the extermination of milkweed from agricultural habitats.

In a 2012 post, I teased out how crops engineered for herbicide tolerance wipe out milkweed, the monarch’s main source of food, and lead to the charismatic specie’s decline. And here’s the peer-reviewed paper, co-authored by Oberhauser, that documents the trend.

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Monarch Butterflies Can Survive the World’s Most Amazing Migration—But GMOs Are Wiping Them Out

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Milk Doesn’t Do a Body So Good After All

by ild4sho Posted on January 29, 2014

Mother Jones

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When I was a teenager, I drank a lot of milk. That made my bones strong, which is why I’ve been able to avoid fracturing my hip now that I’m over 50. Hooray for milk!

Except wait. Science™ has intruded on this idyllic marketing fantasy:

Researchers followed people for 22 years to see if drinking milk as a teenager affected the rate of hip fractures during the study period. What did they find? There were more than 1200 hip fractures in women and almost 500 hip fractures in men in the follow-up period. But it turns out that each additional glass of milk per day as teenagers was associated with a 9% HIGHER risk of hip fractures in men later in life. Drinking more milk had no effect in women.

In other words, regardless of what the ads say, as a teen there’s no protective effect of your “bones getting stronger” in terms of preventing hip fractures later in life by drinking milk. In fact, the evidence shows that it may make it more likely that males will develop hip fractures.

That’s a helluva thing, isn’t it? That Aaron Carroll is a real killjoy.

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Milk Doesn’t Do a Body So Good After All

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Apparently the Denver Broncos Have Lots of Dumb Fans

by TerenceBuchholz Posted on January 28, 2014

Mother Jones

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The other day I noticed that the Broncos were favored to win the Super Bowl, and I was puzzled. I thought the Seahawks were favored. But I don’t pay a lot of attention to this stuff, so I figured I just misread something somewhere.

But no! Apparently the betting line has changed substantially over the past week or so. The New York Times explains why:

The oddsmakers know things. They know there are two kinds of money: the sharp dough of professional gamblers and the square dollars of the public. They know that betting lines are meant to be moved….They know that square money is enthralled by favorites and falls hard for teams that have done a lot for them lately. The Broncos, for instance, not only covered against New England, but looked good doing it. It’s part of the reason Denver is currently the 2 ½-point favorite even though oddsmakers opened with the Seahawks — a team they believe is better — as a 2- to 2 ½-point favorite.

That’s a big swing. Apparently the dumb money is falling hard for the Broncos. If that’s the case, the smart guys ought to make a killing. We’ll see about that.

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Apparently the Denver Broncos Have Lots of Dumb Fans

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Fox News Just Can’t Get Americans to Buy Into Benghazi Conspiracy Theories

by SuzanneBl Posted on January 24, 2014

Mother Jones

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Steve Benen alerts me today to this hilariously loaded question in a recent Fox News poll:

Do you know what’s most hilarious about this? Even with question wording that practically demanded the answer they wanted, only 49 percent of respondents played along.

Give it up, guys. If you’re looking for evidence that the American public just doesn’t buy the cover-up conspiracy, this is it.

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Fox News Just Can’t Get Americans to Buy Into Benghazi Conspiracy Theories

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Raw Data: It’s Elites Who Drive Polarization, Not the Working Class

by JoanSanderz Posted on January 23, 2014

Mother Jones

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Who’s responsible for increasing political polarization? Andrew Gelman suggests that one of the “cleanest pieces of evidence” is public attitudes toward abortion. If you look at the polling data, what you see is that attitudes between Democrats and Republicans start to diverge markedly around 1990. If you dig a little deeper, you find that the change is almost entirely among whites. If you dig a little deeper among whites, you get this:

The biggest change in party polarization on abortion appears among those with mid to high incomes; those with college degrees; and those who are heavily tuned into politics. Among the fabled blue-collar whites, party ID doesn’t really predict attitudes on abortion very well at all.

Gelman avoids drawing any broad conclusions from this, and so will I. But it’s interesting, especially since we’ve seen lots of evidence like this before. It’s elites who have largely turned our major parties into polarized war zones, not the heartland.

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Raw Data: It’s Elites Who Drive Polarization, Not the Working Class

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We Already Have a Lower Minimum Wage for Teenagers

by Katherined5a Posted on January 22, 2014

Mother Jones

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Responding to yesterday’s set of posts about the effect of the minimum wage on teen employment, Matt Yglesias is puzzled. Do we even want higher teen employment? It doesn’t really seem like it:

After all, policymakers from both parties are pushing longer school days and shorter summer vacations. We’ve done a lot to encourage more people to go to college. We seem to be pushing more extracurricular activities on high schoolers….Now perhaps this is a huge mistake. But if it’s a huge mistake, it’s much bigger than the minimum wage. And actually the minimum-wage angle could be patched pretty quickly. Jordan Weissmann recently wrote about Australia where the minimum wage is higher than in the United States, but there’s a special low teenage minimum wage.

That reminds me. A few days ago I ran across the following footnote on a Labor Department web page:

5A subminimum wage — $4.25 an hour — is established for employees under 20 years of age during their first 90 consecutive calendar days of employment with an employer.

Am I the only person in America who didn’t know this? Sure, it’s only for 90 days, but it still makes a difference. Summer jobs could certainly all be offered to teens at $4.25. And it significantly reduces the risk of hiring a teen, since they don’t cost very much during the period when you’re still deciding whether they’re any good.

In any case, this went into effect in 1997 and it hasn’t changed since. Surely this is germane to any discussion of the minimum wage and teen employment?

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We Already Have a Lower Minimum Wage for Teenagers

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Chris Christie is Losing the Invisible Primary

by 07ld5ksl Posted on January 21, 2014

Mother Jones

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How is Chris Christie doing in the latest presidential polling for 2016? It’s hard to care much. It’s way too early for these polls to mean anything.

However, the invisible primary for the Republican nomination will be starting in earnest within a year, and even now GOP power brokers are starting to make decisions about who to support. So it probably is worth asking how Christie is doing among Republicans. Dave Weigel answers:

Worse and worse. In the last Quinnipiac poll, 64 percent of Republicans said Christie would be a “good president.” Only 18 percent disagreed. That’s shrunk to 50 and 22 percent, respectively—a mere 4-point increase in the hard-no number, but a 12-point move from “good president” to “ask me something else.” Conservatives, more skeptical in general of Christie, had given him a 54–26 advantage on the “good president” question. That’s down to 37–24. Again, not huge movement to “no,” just a lot of sliding toward undecided.

Since I officially think Christie never had much of a chance in 2016 to begin with, I suppose these numbers shouldn’t mean much to me. But Bridgegate really does seem to be moving Christie from the “slim chance” column to the “no chance” column. You need to have a good reason to gamble on someone with Christie’s obvious downsides, and that good reason has always been his appeal to blue-collar America as an honest guy who doesn’t pull his punches. When that morphs into a reputation as a guy with control issues who revels in petty reprisals against his political foes, the jig is up. He’s got nothing left. The folks with money who are looking for a winner are going to start looking elsewhere.

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Chris Christie is Losing the Invisible Primary

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The Longer Chris Christie Stonewalls on Hobokengate, the Worse It Is For Him

by CharoletteCambe Posted on January 21, 2014

Mother Jones

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Did Chris Christie’s lieutenant governor deliver a message last year to Dawn Zimmer, the mayor of Hoboken, telling her that if she wanted her share of Hurricane Sandy relief funds she needed to get moving on a redevelopment project that Christie was eager to have approved? Everyone in Christie’s office is denying it, of course, and today we get this from the New York Times:

Another state official, Marc Ferzan, weighed in on Monday to counter the idea that Hoboken had been shortchanged on its share of hurricane aid. Mr. Ferzan, executive director of the governor’s Office of Recovery and Rebuilding, said, “We’ve tried to have an objective process, we have tried to design programs with application criteria that are objective, that prioritize the communities most in need, with the least financial resources.”

Ms. Zimmer has complained that Hoboken received just two grants worth $342,000 out of $290 million the state had to pass along to municipalities for mitigating flooding and other storm damage. She pointed out that 80 percent of Hoboken, a densely packed city that encompasses only about a square mile, was underwater after the storm.

There’s something fishy going on here. If Christie wants to discredit this allegation, there are two simple things he can do:

Have Ferzan release documents showing that Hoboken has, in fact, gotten a fair share of that $290 million.

or

If Hoboken hasn’t gotten a lot of Sandy aid, have Ferzan explain credibly why this was reasonable based on where the damage was greatest.

If I understand things correctly, the governor’s office has explained that there are two pots of money, flood mitigation and Sandy relief funds—and they say Hoboken has gotten $70 million in relief funds, mainly paid out directly to local residents and businesses. But that’s not what Zimmer is complaining about. She’s charging that Christie held up Hoboken’s share of the $290 million flood mitigation fund. So far, though, all that Christie’s office has said in its defense is that “Hoboken has not been denied on a single grant application for recovery efforts under the current programs for which they are eligible.”

This shouldn’t be hard. These numbers ought to be easily accessible, and it’s in Christie’s interest to get them out in public view as soon as possible, before this story metastasizes. If Hoboken has gotten more mitigation funding than Zimmer says, Ferzan should say so. If it hasn’t, he should explain why, and he should do it in mind-numbing detail. What’s the holdup?

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The Longer Chris Christie Stonewalls on Hobokengate, the Worse It Is For Him

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