Tag Archives: slideshows

People in the Northeast Sure Do Love Their Landlines

by EunicePKCI Posted on February 16, 2016

Mother Jones

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At the LA Times, Michael Hiltzik writes:

Although customers have been rapidly abandoning their landline phones for wireless and Internet-based service, more than 18% of California households still relied on landlines for all or most of their phone service as of 2012, according to federal government estimates.

Huh. Only 18 percent? That’s a lot lower than I would have thought. And that got me curious. Which states have the highest percentage of households that have given up on landlines completely? Which states have the lowest percentage? Here’s the answer:

I don’t see much connecting the top ten. I guess they’re a little more rural than average, but that’s about it. The bottom ten, however, are exclusively from the northeast. And more recent surveys confirm this: At the end of 2014, about 30 percent of households in the northeast were wireless-only compared to 50 percent in every other region. That’s a pretty big difference.

This is just idle curiosity, but I wonder what the deal is here? Something regulatory? Why would the entire northeast be so dedicated to their landlines?

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People in the Northeast Sure Do Love Their Landlines

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A Mixed Story on Health Care Spending

by ElliotHarricks6 Posted on February 15, 2016

Mother Jones

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Katherine Hempstead of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation is optimistic about the growth of health care spending:

The quarterly trend in overall health spending growth using the Altarum Health Spending Economic Indicators series shows a clear peak in Q1 2015 at 6.7 percent, with subsequent declines every quarter. Partial data for Q4 (October and November) show a spending growth rate of 5.2 percent. While overall spending growth in 2015 will clearly exceed that of 2014, a reduction appears to be underway.

As near as I can tell, this spending data hasn’t been adjusted for inflation. When you do that you get the chart at the bottom, which tells a different story. There was indeed a peak in the first quarter of 2015 followed by a sharp drop, but spending growth has gone up steadily since then.

In the long term, I’m fairly optimistic about the trajectory of health care spending. As Hempstead says, it makes sense that we saw some large increases when Obamacare was first implemented, since it brought a lot of new people into the health care system. But after the first year or two, that will flatten out and long-term trends should continue to dominate.

That said, you still need to look at this stuff in real terms. And when you do that, we’re not quite seeing the steady downward march that Hempstead suggests.

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A Mixed Story on Health Care Spending

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I Have Found the Perfect VP for Donald Trump

by ZellaRamsden6 Posted on February 15, 2016

Mother Jones

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From the Guardian today:

In further news from the always attractive intersection of Kanye West, Twitter, and money….

This ought to be good. Please go on:

In further news from the always attractive intersection of Kanye West, Twitter, and money, the businessman Martin Shkreli — known for price gouging on Aids drugs and paying $2m for the one copy of Wu-Tang Clan’s Once Upon a Time in Shaolin album — has claimed he was swindled out of $15m when he attempted to buy the exclusive rights to The Life of Pablo. Shkreli tweeted that “someone named Daquan”, claiming to be “Kanye’s boy”, contacted him to follow through on the deal, which he did. “I hope you all enjoy this stupid music SO much, and the fact it has brought me so much pain and suffering. I quit rap,” Shkreli tweeted.

Assuming he really had given $15m to someone named Daquan claiming to be Kanye’s boy, Shkreli was able to secure a happy ending. He later tweeted that the Bitcoin founder Satoshi Nakamoto was going to help him get his money back. “I always win,” he concluded.

Maybe Donald Trump will pick Shkreli as his running mate. It sounds like a match made in heaven.

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I Have Found the Perfect VP for Donald Trump

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There Might Be a Limited Supply of Judges Willing to Make a Supreme Court Kamikaze Run

by PalmaOConnor9 Posted on February 15, 2016

Mother Jones

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Just a quick note about who Obama is going to nominate for the Supreme Court: it has to be someone willing to make a kamikaze run. It’s going to be a grueling experience for nothing, since Republicans will be happy to put the nominee through the wringer but plainly won’t vote to confirm. In fact, it might be for less than nothing. Whoever gets picked probably can’t be renominated if a Democrat wins in November.

Most likely, then, you’re putting yourself through a punishing ordeal in order to ruin your chances of ever getting a Supreme Court seat. That’s the kind of thing a party loyalist might do, but a circuit court judge? What’s the upside?

Anyway, all this is just to say that Obama may have trouble finding someone willing to be nominated. Keep that in mind when you browse through all the lists of potential candidates.

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There Might Be a Limited Supply of Judges Willing to Make a Supreme Court Kamikaze Run

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Supreme Court Justice Anton Scalia Has Died

by LonnieMarino Posted on February 13, 2016

Mother Jones

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Of “apparently natural” causes during the night. This is going to set up an unbelievable battle in the Senate. I wonder if Republicans will even make a pretense of seriously considering whoever President Obama nominates?

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Supreme Court Justice Anton Scalia Has Died

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Things Donald Trump Will Do In His Second Year

by LoisShillito Posted on February 13, 2016

Mother Jones

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A non-exhaustive list:

Make tomatoes great again.
Rename Denali to Mt. Trump.
Forbid stupid homeowner association rules.
Fix Windows once and for all.
Eliminate ex-president Obama’s Secret Service detail.
Annex Cuba.
Build a permanent moon base as favor to Newt Gingrich. Also: lots of new zoos.
Send Atrios to a reeducation camp until his attitude improves.
Build a beautiful new Strategic Petroleum Reserve to handle all the oil he’s going to take from ISIS.
Nationalize Twitter.
Present Sarah Palin with a Kennedy Center Honor for the Performing Arts.
Invent really good artificial sugar and fat substitutes.
Declare war on Denmark, just to piss off Bernie Sanders.

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Things Donald Trump Will Do In His Second Year

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Republican Tax Plans Will Be Great for the Ri—zzzzz

by KirkWainwright Posted on February 12, 2016

Mother Jones

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Our good friends at the Tax Policy Center have now analyzed—if that’s the right word—the tax plans of Donald Trump, Jeb Bush, and Marco Rubio. You can get all the details at their site, but if you just want the bottom line, you’ve come to the right place.

The chart on the left shows who benefits the most from each tax plan. Unsurprisingly, they’re all about the same: middle income taxpayers would see their take-home pay go up 3 or 4 percent, while the rich would see it go up a whopping 10-17 percent. On the deficit side of things, everyone’s a budget buster. Rubio and Bush would pile up the red ink by $7 trillion or so (over ten years) while Trump would clock in at about $9 trillion. That compares to a current national debt of $14 trillion.

No one will care, of course, and no one will even bother questioning any of them about this. After all, we already know they’ll just declare that their tax cuts will supercharge the economy and pay for themselves. They can say it in their sleep. Then Trump will say something stupid, or Rubio will break his tooth on a Twix bar, and we’ll move on.

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Republican Tax Plans Will Be Great for the Ri—zzzzz

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Does Obama Still Have That Old-Time Magic?

by VenettaLiw Posted on February 10, 2016

Mother Jones

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In a few minutes President Obama will be back in Springfield making a speech addressed to his supporters. “You’ve taken on the painstaking work of progress,” he says. “You’ve helped us find that middle ground where real change is won….I hope you’ll tune in today at 2:30 p.m. Eastern.” Andrew Sprung figures this is basically going to be an endorsement of Hillary Clinton:

Obama just sent an email to supporters announcing a speech to be delivered this afternoon. I imagine it will be a message “for” Clinton — both to support her and to model a coherent pitch for incremental change.

….Then there’s “the painstaking work of progress” and the ‘middle ground where real change is won.” Those are memes pointed at this moment, in which the frontrunners in both parties are calling for radical, fundamental change…. Incrementalism is a tough sell, but Obama has made it throughout his career, and he does so more effectively than Clinton. He’s more successful because he’s better at articulating the long-term goal and how the incremental steps move toward them, as well as the historical framework in which those steps fit.

But will it work? Personally, I’ve always viewed Obama as a cautious, pragmatic, mainstream liberal. But his strongest supporters never saw him that way. They really believed he was going to revolutionize Washington DC and end all the bickering. He’d pass universal health care, rein in Wall Street once and for all, and stop climate change in its tracks.

But he didn’t. And the conventional wisdom says that his supporters from 2007—when he first went to Springfield to announce his candidacy—are disappointed in him. He turned out to be just another go-along-get-along guy, and now he wants to foist a go-along-get-along gal on us. Sorry. No sale. We’re feeling the Bern these days.

We’ll see. But I will say this: If Obama really wants to help Hillary Clinton, he can’t afford too much subtlety. Any criticism of radical change will be read by liberals as primarily an attack on Donald Trump unless he makes it crystal clear what he’s talking about. Tune in at 2:30 and find out!

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Does Obama Still Have That Old-Time Magic?

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Heavy Drinking Is Primarily a Women’s Problem

by DanielISJE Posted on February 10, 2016

Mother Jones

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Back in 2005, South Dakota adopted a program called 24/7 Sobriety. It’s pretty simple: if you’re convicted of drunk driving, you have to take a breath test twice a day while you’re on pretrial release or probation. If you fail, you get tossed in jail for a couple of days.

So how has it worked out? According to a new study in Lancet Psychiatry, pretty well. Previous studies had already demonstrated a 12 percent drop in repeat drunk driving, and the new study shows that 24/7 also contributed to a drop of 4.3 percent in all-cause mortality. That’s a lot of lives saved. Mark Kleiman has more of the details here.

So far, none of this is a big surprise. But another result of the study is more interesting: the decline in mortality was largest among women even though men make up the vast majority of drunk driving cases. The chart on the right shows the numbers. All-cause mortality barely budged for men but was down 8.3 percent among women. Even more startling, the decline in mortality was mostly due to fewer deaths from circulatory problems and external injuries.

But why? The authors make a few suggestions:

A well publicised programme such as 24/7 Sobriety…might promote a general deterrent effect. Another potential mechanism is a reduction in drinking-related problem behaviours among participants, which might reduce mortality among non-participants (eg, domestic violence).

With respect to circulatory deaths among women, one might consider reduced stress due to partner’s cessation of heavy drinking. There might also be spillovers due to changes in the drinking behaviour of participants’ family and friends. A husband’s drinking affects his wife’s drinking during the transition into married life and early in the marriage, and transitions in drinking behaviour can have spousal effects even later in life.

This is, obviously, speculative. Still, it confirms our intuition that heavy drinking affects friends and family as much or more than it does the heavy drinker himself. Heavy drinkers are far more likely to assault their wives and girlfriends; are more likely to trigger drinking in others; and just generally cause lots of stress and anxiety in those around them. When you cut out the heavy drinking, all of those things are reduced significantly. And the biggest beneficiaries are women.

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Heavy Drinking Is Primarily a Women’s Problem

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The Republican Field Is Shrinking Rapidly

by Diane1360ajbo Posted on February 3, 2016

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I know how easy it is to lose track of things. So just for the record, we’re now down to seven real candidates on the Republican side of things:

Cruz
Rubio
Bush
Trump
Carson
Christie
Kasich

This doesn’t count the three dead-enders who haven’t officially quit yet: Jim Gilmore, Rick Santorum, and Carly Fiorina. By my figuring, New Hampshire should kill off Bush and Carson and get us down to five real candidates. Maybe even Kasich and Christie, too. For all practical purposes, by next Wednesday we might finally be down to our long-fabled three-man race.

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The Republican Field Is Shrinking Rapidly

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