Tag Archives: social

Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail 2015

by Lucile70Wh Posted on December 22, 2015

Mother Jones

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

I’ve wanted to use this headline1 for a long time, and now I have. I guess I could just end this post right there, or maybe ramble on about how Hunter S. Thompson’s 1972 collection of campaign reporting was one of the books that got me interested in politics in the first place. Me and a million others, I suppose.

But no. I actually have a point to make, and I will get around to making it, I promise. First, though, I’m turning over the mic2 to my great-grandblogger3 Martin Longman. He was bemused by blogger Tom Maguire’s casual acceptance that fear is a perfectly reasonable emotion to exploit in a political campaign:

At first, I was offended. Then I realized that we’re both probably correct in our own way, but with limitations.

I’m sure if I challenged him, Maguire would recite countless examples of Democratic politicians exploiting the fears of the electorate. These would be fears about the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, or fears about NSA surveillance, or fears about grandma losing her Medicare or Social Security….I think this is different in kind, though, than using fear itself as a political tool….What’s really bad, in my opinion, is to deliberately increase people’s sense of insecurity not primarily so that they will demand policies to keep them safe but to make them more inclined to vote for you and your political party. Making people afraid for political gain is cynical and almost cruel.

As Longman suggests, this is a mighty thin line to draw, and I’m not sure it’s the right line anyway. Here’s the thing that liberals tend not to want to accept: different people evaluate threats in far different ways. This is not right or wrong. It’s just human nature.

I tend to be almost absurdly non-fearful, for example. This is not because I’m brave in the usual sense: I run from fights at the first opportunity and I have no idea if I’d rescue a drowning child from a watery maelstrom. I’m talking about more abstract fears. Should you be afraid of being mugged? Afraid of terror attacks? Afraid of earthquakes?6 In my case, I never even bother getting out of bed if I feel an earthquake. I just roll over and wait for it to stop.

This is, by almost any measure, stupid. Sure, most earthquakes around here are fairly small. But not all of them. Wouldn’t it make sense to at least hop out of bed and get ready in case my house starts to collapse? Yes it would. I’m putting my life in danger by underplaying the threat.

So who has the more correct view of national security threats, liberals or conservatives? As it happens, liberals tend to feel less threatened than conservatives by danger from others, something that we paid a big political price for when we ignored the huge rise in violent crime in the 60s and 70s. Conservatives tend to respond more strongly to threats from others, something that they paid a political price for in the aftermath of the Iraq War. In the first case, conservatives understood the reality better. In the second case, liberals did.

This is not because conservatives were smarter the first time and we were smarter the second time. It’s because, at a very deep level, we react to threats differently. There’s no purely objective way to decide who’s right and who’s wrong in any particular case, but I think you can reasonably say that sometimes conservatives are closer to right and sometimes liberals are closer to right.

So what’s the right response to terrorist attacks? I can’t even imagine being personally afraid of one. The odds of being targeted by some insane jihadist are astronomical. But a vast number of people feel very, very differently.7 At a gut level, they’re afraid that what happened in Paris and San Bernardino could happen to them—and they want something done about it. Are they right? Or am I right? Who can say?

But that’s why conservatives are exploiting this fear. Conservatives consider terror attacks a serious and alarming threat. Liberals tend not to, which is why our politicians mostly adopt a pretty even tone about them. In both cases, this response is politically useful. Mainly, though, it’s genuinely how they feel. Conservatives really do feel threatened. Liberals really don’t.

Keep this in mind. It’s not a sham. It’s not just cynicism. I happen to think conservatives are wrong about this, and I think their campaign-trail exploitation of terrorist fear has gone far beyond anything even remotely reasonable. But at its core, this is a real disagreement. How safe are we and what should we do to increase our safety? When you cut through the bombast, there’s a very hard, very bright, very deep, and very human core of division here. And there’s no guarantee that you or your tribe has the right take on it.

1Yes, I know I’ve punctuated it differently than the book.

2Even though I’m officially an old person, I am adopting the Washington Post dictum that mike is no longer acceptable shorthand for microphone in modern America. It lives on in the NATO alphabet, though.

3Longman4 is my third successor as blogger at the Washington Monthly.

4Or “Phil’s brother,” as his closest friends call him.5

5That’s just a joke. Martin is Phil Longman’s brother.

6Needless to say, this depends a lot on circumstances. Women in dangerous neighborhoods are quite legitimately more afraid of being mugged than men in the suburbs. People living in Beirut are more afraid of terror attacks than people in Atlanta. People in Tokyo are more afraid of earthquakes than people in London. Still, we can reasonably talk about averages here.

7This is clear both anecdotally and via polling. I know personally plenty of people who are afraid of a terrorist attack. And recent polls are quite clear that a large majority of Americans are concerned about further attacks.

Original link: 

Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail 2015

Posted in ALPHA, FF, GE, LG, ONA, PUR, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail 2015

The Shocking New Numbers on HIV in America

by JordynSweat Posted on December 8, 2015

Mother Jones

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

On the surface, the news about HIV in the United States sounds good. According to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the diagnosis rate dropped 19 percent from 2005 to 2014—a dramatic decline. Among heterosexuals, new HIV diagnoses fell by 35 percent; among people who inject drugs, 63 percent; among women, 40 percent. And the CDC estimates that 87 percent of people with HIV know their status, representing a modest gain in testing and awareness.

Yet the trend toward steady diagnosis rates masks large disparities among men who have sex with men (MSM), who account for 67 percent of HIV-positive Americans. For black men in this group, already disproportionately affected by HIV/AIDS, diagnoses rose 22 percent; for Latino men, they’ve increased almost a quarter, an increase likely attributable to more infections, not better testing, the CDC told The Verge.

The steepest increases in HIV diagnoses have occurred among black and Latino gay youth between the ages of 13 and 24: 5,540 teens received the diagnosis in 2014, a rise of 87 percent since 2005.

Diagnosis stats tell only part of the story: More than two-thirds of transmissions come from people who know that they are HIV positive but are not receiving care. Just 39 percent of people with HIV are being treated for it; only 30 percent have a reduced viral load.

Last Tuesday, CDC director Thomas Frienden published an essay with Jonathan Mermin, the government’s HIV/AIDS prevention chief, warning that the United States may still lose the fight against AIDS. “Hundreds of thousands of people with diagnosed HIV infection are not receiving care,” they wrote. “These people account for most new HIV transmissions in the United States.”

In July, the government released a list of targets for 2020 to measure progress in the fight against HIV/AIDS. They included reducing new diagnoses by at least 25 percent, boosting the percentage of HIV-positive people receiving medical care to 90 percent, and increasing the percentage with suppressed viral loads to 80 percent.

The techniques to fight those battles exist. One promising preventative therapy involves treating uninfected but at-risk people with a combination of anti-HIV drugs known as Truvada. And in May, the CDC halted a study on the effects of early treatment because its benefits were so obvious.

But just because the drugs exist doesn’t mean that people can access them. Last year, CDC researchers highlighted how difficult it can be for some minority communities to receive health care and supportive services for HIV, and they called for better outreach from state and local health departments, community-based organizations, and individual health care providers.

“Faster progress depends on our collective ability to take full advantage of these tools in every community and every region of the country,” wrote the CDC researchers in the latest report. “We need to boldly address stigma, discrimination, and other social, economic, and structural issues that increase vulnerability to HIV and come between people and the care they need.”

Link:  

The Shocking New Numbers on HIV in America

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, Landmark, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Shocking New Numbers on HIV in America

John Kasich Wants to Slash Everything Except the Pentagon

by LutherDetwiler Posted on November 11, 2015

Mother Jones

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

How would John Kasich cut spending? Answer: his father was a mail carrier blah blah blah. OK, but did you want to name any specific steps, sir? Why certainly:

We would move the Medicare system from a 7 percent growth down to about a 5 percent growth. And I have a whole series of ways to do that. In Ohio, we reduced Medicaid funding for the poor from 10 percent to 2.5 percent, didn’t cut one benefit or didn’t take anybody off the rolls. Why? Because we’re innovators. I’ve been an innovator my entire career. And I really don’t care what special interests or lobbyists have to say. I have a job to do when I take over a public office. Now, we freeze non-defense discretionary for eight years. We also put an increase in defense spending. Our tax cuts balance out. And at the end of the day, we will get to a balanced budget.

So here is Kasich’s plan: cut Medicare, cut Medicaid, cut domestic discretionary spending, and increase defense spending. And we already know he wants to cut Social Security. So his plan is to cut every single aspect of domestic spending and increase defense spending. And this guy is the moderate in the field.

View original article: 

John Kasich Wants to Slash Everything Except the Pentagon

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on John Kasich Wants to Slash Everything Except the Pentagon

University of Missouri Police Name Suspect Accused of Social Media Threats Against Black Students

by MarceloMalley Posted on November 11, 2015

Mother Jones

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

After a night of confusion and fear on the Columbia campus of the University of Missouri, police announced on Wednesday morning that they had arrested a suspect, Hunter M. Park, for “making a terrorist threat” against black students and faculty on the anonymous social media platform, Yik Yak:

Police said the person was not on or near university grounds when the threats were first published online.

The uptick in campus-wide concern came just a day after University System President Tim Wolfe and Chancellor R. Bowen Loftin announced they would step down amid pressure from students, a hunger strike, and a boycott from the Missouri football team in response to a flurry of racially charged incidents that have plagued the campus in recent weeks.

Shortly before 8 p.m. on Tuesday, a notice was sent out on the university alert system noting that authorities were “aware of social media threats” and that officials were beefing up security. At 10 p.m., MUPD announced the threats were under investigation. MUPD Maj. Brian Weimer told the Maneater, a student newspaper: “We’re aware of it and we’re looking and trying to identify who it is.”

The posts in question were widely shared on social media Tuesday night, and sparked panic on campus. “Some of you are alright,” one message read. “Don’t go to campus tomorrow.”

While representatives from the university’s student government urged administrators to cancel classes on Wednesday “due to the nature of threats on campus,” an alert sent late Tuesday by the university cautioned against spreading rumors and added that there was “no immediate threat to campus.” University Provost Garnett Stokes told reporters a decision on class cancelation would be made in the early morning on Wednesday.

As of Wednesday morning, most classes were scheduled to take place as normal.

This isn’t the first time university police had to deal with threats on the anonymous social network. Last December, in the wake of student demonstrations over racial tensions on campus, commenters took to Yik Yak to post a flurry of racist and insensitive anonymous notes. One yak noted: “Lets burn down the black culture center & give them a taste of their own medicine.”

Source:  

University of Missouri Police Name Suspect Accused of Social Media Threats Against Black Students

Posted in Anchor, Everyone, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on University of Missouri Police Name Suspect Accused of Social Media Threats Against Black Students

Reports of Entitlements’ Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated

by RaymundHuggins Posted on October 27, 2015

Mother Jones

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

When news of a bipartisan budget deal began to emerge Monday night, progressives immediately worried that President Obama and the Democrats in Congress would allow cuts to entitlement programs in order to strike a deal with Republicans. “The White House, every Democrat running for president, and every Democrat in Congress should make clear that any deal that cuts Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid benefits would be unacceptable policy—and politically, would be wildly unpopular with voters,” the Progressive Change Campaign Committee said in a statement. House Speaker John Boehner didn’t do much to allay their fears, saying on Tuesday that the deal “is the first significant reform to Social Security since 1983.”

But budget experts say these concerns are unfounded. In fact, the deal actually shores up the finances of an important entitlement program without hurting people who have already earned their benefits.

Released Monday night, the 144-page budget deal would fund the government and raise the debt ceiling for two years, punting any showdown to 2017, after Obama has left the White House. The bill also lifts the tight federal spending caps imposed by the 2011 sequestration law.

Even though the deal saves money by making small cuts to Medicare and Social Security disability insurance (the main part of the program beyond the standard retirement benefits), the budget mostly tinkers around the edges. “The agreement doesn’t have any changes in disability eligibility standards,” says Paul Van de Water, a senior fellow at the progressive Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. “It doesn’t change the level of benefits. The small amount of savings are achieved through program integrity measures, which are just efforts to make sure the Social Security Administration is doing the best possible job of who’s actually eligible for benefits.” These sorts of technocratic tinkers are simple measures to ensure the integrity of the programs’ goals, something pushed by both conservatives and progressives.

Primarily, the deal shuts down a pilot program that allows 20 states to dish out benefits without requiring a prior medical sign-off. “To a very small degree, that would reduce the number of people awarded benefits, well less than a percent of the number of people getting benefits,” Van de Water says. “This is designed to produce better decisions, not to make the program more restrictive or less generous.” By awarding benefits slightly less frequently, the deal lengthens the solvency of the disability benefits program.

For Medicare, the deal cuts costs by reducing the amount the government spends on payment rates for providers. When it comes to recipients, the deal stabilizes premiums for a group of seniors who were due for a large rate spike in 2016. Because Social Security isn’t scheduled to get a cost-of-living bump this year, premium rates won’t rise for most people who receive Medicare. For the 30 percent of Medicare Part B recipients for whom rates would have jumped 52 percent next year, the budget deal keeps the current rates in place. But everything evens out for beneficiaries in the end, as the people who benefit this year will have to pay higher premiums down the road. “It’s a good way of spreading out the costs and meaning people aren’t hit by a huge increase this year, and they can budget for it,” Van der Water says. “But it’s not a net benefit over time. It’s simply smoothing things out.”

Original article – 

Reports of Entitlements’ Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta, Vintage | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Reports of Entitlements’ Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated

Obamacare Can Help Keep People Off Disability

by HelaineCopley Posted on October 23, 2015

Mother Jones

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

Lydia DePillis tells us today about Paul Khouri, who has a rare and expensive medical condition. After steadily losing hours at his job, he finally lost his health insurance:

So instead of going out and trying to support himself with another job, Khouri took the safer option: Applying for Social Security disability insurance and Medicaid. It was a long process, requiring visits to doctor after doctor. Finally getting approved brought some relief — until he realized that returning to work would bring new complications. If he earned more than about $1,000 every month, he would quickly lose the medical assistance he desperately needed.

“It’s really scary when you’re worried about how much money you can make, because you don’t want to make too much,” Khouri says. “But at the same time, the benefits aren’t enough.” The average federal disability check is about $1,200 a month, which puts people right around the poverty line; Khouri is staying in his parents’ house to save on rent.

The prospect of falling over the “cash cliff,” as the sudden dropoff in disability insurance is known, is part of what’s keeping people with disabilities out of the workforce, despite many programs put in place over the years to reduce that disincentive.

DePillis spins this out as a way of explaining some problems with the Social Security disability program, but this is a little unclear. Khouri was apparently able to get a new job that paid $30,000 per year, but couldn’t accept the full salary because he wanted to stay eligible for Medicaid benefits. But he can’t be turned down for Obamacare, so why not sign up for that? With an expensive condition, Khouri would likely pay the full $2,000 annual premium plus the $6,600 out-of-pocket max every year, but that would still leave him with $21,400. Even after taxes, this is more than he gets from disability payments, and he wouldn’t have to limit his future promotions.

Maybe I’m missing something. It’s true that Medicaid is more reliable, since you can’t lose it regardless of whether you have any income. More generally, this stuff can be tricky and there are sometimes details that aren’t obvious from the outside. Still, while a better, more universal health care system would certainly help here, even Obamacare seems like it would help a lot.

See more here:  

Obamacare Can Help Keep People Off Disability

Posted in FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Safer, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Obamacare Can Help Keep People Off Disability

It Looks Like We’re Stuck With Low Inflation

by HannahLombardo Posted on October 13, 2015

Mother Jones

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

Back in August I agreed with Brad DeLong that 4 percent inflation would be a good thing right now, but I was skeptical that the Fed could engineer this given current conditions. So I asked him what it would take. Today, I apparently made it to the top of the question pile:

I think the answer is: We don’t know whether it is in fact possible for a central bank today to hit a 4%/year average inflation target via conventional ordinary quantitative easing. It might well require other tools. For example:

  1. Miles Kimball’s negative interest rates.
  2. Helicopter drops–that is, allowing everyone with a Social Security number to incorporate as a bank, join the Federal Reserve system, and borrow at the discount window, with the loan discharged by the individual’s death.
  3. The Federal Reserve as infrastructure bank–an extra $500 billion/year of quantitative easing buying not government or mortgage bonds but directly-financing public investments.
  4. Extraordinary quantitative easing–buying not the close substitutes for money that are government bonds but rather the not-so-close substitutes that are equities.

I say: If we could win the argument about what the goal is, we could then begin the discussion about what policies would be needed to get us there.

That’s pretty discouraging. Of these, #2 and #3 are almost certainly illegal, and undesirable in any case. I may not like what Congress is doing, but disbursing money is certainly under their purview—and should be. I don’t want the Fed mailing out checks or contracting for new roads and bridges.

I don’t know if #4 is illegal. Probably not. But I’m not crazy about this either. The Fed shouldn’t be in the business of directly propping up the stock market, and certainly shouldn’t be in the business of directly propping up specific stocks.

So that leaves only #1. This one is perfectly OK, and a few European countries have adopted negative rates recently. But there’s probably a limit to how negative these rates can be. Individuals could avoid negative rates by deciding to hold physical cash, which pays zero percent, but banks and corporations almost certainly couldn’t. I’m not sure how long it’s sustainable to essentially have two different interest rates like that.

This is why DeLong mentions “Miles Kimball’s” negative interest rates. Kimball’s version depends on making the e-dollar into the unit of account, and this would allow negative rates of any level for any period of time. However, it would also require many years to make this transition. It’s not an option in the short term.

So if I’m reading DeLong right, it’s not clear that the Fed could engineer 4 percent inflation at all right now. Maybe Scott Sumner has a bright idea about how we could do this.

View the original here – 

It Looks Like We’re Stuck With Low Inflation

Posted in Everyone, FF, GE, LG, ONA, PUR, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on It Looks Like We’re Stuck With Low Inflation

Let’s Experiment With Universal Preschool

by GabrielWithrow Posted on September 24, 2015

Mother Jones

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

I’m a considerable fan of early childhood education. Megan McArdle says she’s tentatively in favor too, but “I am opposed to blind boosterism of such programs, the kind that confidently predicts marvelous results from thin empirical evidence, and briskly proceeds to demand huge sums be spent accordingly.” I’m tempted to say this is a straw-man argument, but maybe not. There are a lot of cheerleaders out there. In any case, she offers a useful corrective for anyone who thinks the evidence in favor of universal preschool is open and shut. So what should we do?

I would like to see us experiment more with these programs. But the key word here is “experiment.” Which is to say we should: Try more programs….Take the programs that seem to work and scale them up to a larger group….Rinse and repeat until we figure out what, if anything, works. That would be the sane, sensible way to go about constructing policy in an important area.

But politically, how insane! Voters don’t want to hear about a decade or two of carefully planned research to help shape solid policy choices; they want to hear promises of immediate solutions to an immediate problem. That’s not a great way to make policy. But it’s a pretty good way to get elected.

I don’t think these are mutually exclusive options. The 1988 Family Support Act might be a useful model here. Following a series of welfare reform experiments in the early 80s, it authorized additional research on a larger scale. Why not do the same thing with preschool? Offer substantial funding to states willing to participate in rigorous testing of preschool programs, with the goal of producing useful results in six or seven years.

This could be a substantial program, not just a few small-scale tests, which would certainly count toward any campaign promises made about universal pre-K. And the money would go to the states most eager to participate, which would be politically savvy. At the same time, it wouldn’t cost as much as a nationwide program, which would make it easier to get through Congress. And finally, the promise of larger-scale testing would satisfy the demands of social scientists, who rightly point out that small-scale experiments don’t always scale successfully into bigger programs.

I’m tempted to say that if Democrats and Republicans could agree on this approach for testing welfare reform in 1988, they should be able to agree on doing the same thing for preschool in 2017. That’s not necessarily true, of course. Still, it seems like this kind of program would, at a minimum, be more likely to pass a divided Congress than full-blown universal pre-K legislation. Why not give it a try?

Link:  

Let’s Experiment With Universal Preschool

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Oster, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Let’s Experiment With Universal Preschool

Donald Trump Talked to Twitter Today and It Wasn’t Insane. His Campaign May Be Doomed.

by RollandMacansh Posted on September 21, 2015

Mother Jones

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

In an attempt to showcase a bit of social media savvy—which thus far has been astonishingly lacking—Donald Trump’s campaign stopped by Twitter today to give voters an opportunity to freely query the Republican front-runner using the hashtag #AskTrump.

While the resulting responses didn’t exactly match Trump’s usual penchant for offensive, unfiltered candor, the poorly lit videos did provide a closer glimpse at what a Trump White House and its policies could look like. Take a look at what your future with President Trump may have in store:

But don’t let these videos fool you—#AskTrump was roundly ridiculed by the internet. Here are some of the best takes:

Overall, the chat was remarkably unremarkable. Does this newly tame Trump signal that his momentum is finally dwindling? Stay tuned.

Continued:  

Donald Trump Talked to Twitter Today and It Wasn’t Insane. His Campaign May Be Doomed.

Posted in Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Donald Trump Talked to Twitter Today and It Wasn’t Insane. His Campaign May Be Doomed.

The 11 Best Moments From CNN’s GOP Debate

by VeroniqCollier Posted on September 17, 2015

Mother Jones

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

CNN’s primetime debate between the 11 leading candidates for the Republican presidential nomination had no shortage of memorable and combative moments. This was thanks in large part to moderator Jake Tapper’s efforts to pit the candidates against each other by asking them to respond to something another candidate (usually Trump) had said about them. Here are the highlights.

Continue Reading »

View post – 

The 11 Best Moments From CNN’s GOP Debate

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The 11 Best Moments From CNN’s GOP Debate