Tag Archives: story

Weekly Flint Water Report: April 2-7

by EldonXLCNwqut Posted on April 12, 2016

Mother Jones

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I got tired of waiting for Michigan’s DEQ to post Friday’s water testing result, so here is this week’s Flint water report through Thursday. As usual, I’ve eliminated outlier readings above 2,000 parts per billion, since there are very few of them and they can affect the averages in misleading ways. During the week, DEQ took 368 samples. The average for the past week was 10.07.

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Weekly Flint Water Report: April 2-7

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Yet Another Feinstein-Burr Bill Has Been Leaked

by KarolynTrenerry Posted on April 12, 2016

Mother Jones

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Senators Dianne Feinstein and Richard Burr apparently have very unreliable staffs. Yet another discussion draft of a national security bill they’re jointly sponsoring has been leaked to the press. They really need to tighten up their operation.

Source:  

Yet Another Feinstein-Burr Bill Has Been Leaked

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Donald Trump, Skinflint

by LydiaHeiman205 Posted on April 11, 2016

Mother Jones

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While I was busy over the weekend renovating the hub of my blogging empire, Donald Trump made his first-ever visit to the September 11 Memorial Museum in New York City. While there, he donated $100,000 to the museum:

Reporters who were invited late on Friday to join Mr. Trump for the museum visit, which was not on his schedule, were kept in a media van as he entered the museum. An aide said he would speak with reporters afterward, but Mr. Trump then decided against it. His aides sent out a photo of the Trumps inside the museum about 90 minutes later, along with a statement saying that the rebuilding of ground zero was “what ‘New York values’ are really about.”

The donation check was from Mr. Trump’s foundation, not from him personally. He had been approached over the years by people trying to raise money for the museum, but he never did, until Saturday.

Goodness. When did Trump become so media shy? Maybe it was because he knew the Washington Post was going to drop a story the next day about his repeated claim that he’s given over $100 million to charity in the past five years:

To back up that claim, Trump’s campaign compiled a list of his contributions—4,844 of them, filling 93 pages. But, in that massive list, one thing was missing. Not a single one of those donations was actually a personal gift of Trump’s own money.

Instead, according to a Washington Post analysis, many of the gifts that Trump cited to prove his generosity were free rounds of golf, given away by his courses for charity auctions and raffles.

…Many of the gifts on the list came from the charity that bears his name, the Donald J. Trump Foundation, which didn’t receive a personal check from Trump from 2009 through 2014, according to the most recent public tax filings. Its work is largely funded by others, although Trump decides where the gifts go.

…The most expensive charitable contributions on Trump’s list, by contrast, dealt with transactions related to real estate.
For one, Trump counted $63.8 million of unspecified “conservation easements.”…In California, for example, Trump agreed to an easement that prevented him from building homes on a plot of land near a golf course.

Generally speaking, I’m not keen on judging politicians by how much of their income they devote to charity. But Trump is in a different class. He claims to be worth $10 billion, and he claims to be an extremely generous guy. In fact, he’s a skinflint. His company’s CFO—who seems to double as Trump’s personal financial advisor—says that Trump really has made a lot of personal charitable contributions, but “we want to keep them quiet. He doesn’t want other charities to see it. Then it becomes like a feeding frenzy.”

Uh huh. I will leave the credibility of that statement as an exercise for the reader. Speaking for myself, I think it’s no coincidence that Trump’s two primary residences are near the Brooklyn Bridge and the Florida swamps.

Link – 

Donald Trump, Skinflint

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Chart of the Day: The Rich Live a Lot Longer Than the Poor

by AntwanGrinder Posted on April 11, 2016

Mother Jones

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This really is the chart of the day. It seems like it’s been making the rounds on about half the blogs I read:

It comes from the Health Inequality Project, and it will come as no surprise to regular readers of this blog. Still, these findings are even more dramatic than usual. The difference in life expectancy between the poorest and richest is a full 15 years for men and 10 years for women. But this chart, based on HIP’s data, is important too:

In the largest coastal cities, life expectancy is four or five years longer than it is in smaller, Midwestern cities. If you take a look at the map in HIP’s report, there’s a broad swath running diagonally from Texas up through the rust belt that has the lowest life expectancies in the nation. Why? Perhaps because of this:

Much of the variation in life expectancy across areas is explained by differences in health behaviors, such as smoking and exercise. Differences in life expectancy among the poor are not strongly associated with differences in access to health care or levels of income inequality. Instead, the poor live longest in affluent cities with highly educated populations and high levels of local government expenditures, such as New York and San Francisco.

If you’re looking for policy conclusions, I can toss out two off the top of my head. First, effective public health campaigns matter. Reducing smoking and encouraging better eating and exercise can make a big difference. Second, increasing the retirement age is the worst possible way to fix Social Security’s funding problems. It’s already 67 for everyone under the age of 55. This means that among the rich, a two year increase reduces their retirement life by about two years out of 20—roughly 10 percent. But among the poor, it takes two years out of ten—roughly 20 percent. There’s no need to balance the Social Security trust fund on the backs of the poor. We have plenty of better alternatives.

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Chart of the Day: The Rich Live a Lot Longer Than the Poor

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CEO Pay Down in 2015, But Still Higher Than Its Bubble Heights

by bibw6a Posted on April 8, 2016

Mother Jones

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Sad news today from the Wall Street Journal. Among CEOs of big companies, stock-based pay was up 7 percent last year and cash pay was up 2 percent. But thanks to slower growth of CEO pensions, overall compensation was down 4 percent.

But perhaps CEOs will be mollified by the broader picture, which you can see in the chart on the right. CEO pay is up about 44 percent since 2007 in nominal terms, and up about 38 percent when you account for inflation. For ordinary workers, pay has decreased 5 percent since 2007 when you account for inflation.

For anyone wondering why Bernie Sanders has struck such a chord with the electorate, this pretty much tells the story. The Great Recession sure didn’t affect everyone equally, did it? Ordinary schlubs paid a high price, but the folks with the most lavish pay to begin with just shrugged it off like it never happened. If the rich wonder why calls to tax high incomes at 90 percent sound pretty good to a lot of people, this should clue them in.

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CEO Pay Down in 2015, But Still Higher Than Its Bubble Heights

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White Teachers Think Pretty Poorly of Their Black Students

by NatalieHilton6 Posted on April 5, 2016

Mother Jones

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Bob Somerby draws my attention to a new study about the effect of race on teacher evaluations of students. The authors took advantage of a large dataset that included evaluations of students from two teachers each. They then compared the teacher evaluations of each student based on differences in the teachers’ races.

The chart on the right tells the story. White students didn’t suffer from having a teacher of another race. Expectations of dropping out were the same and expectations of getting a college degree were actually higher. Hispanic students were modestly affected. Teachers of other races thought Hispanic students had a slightly higher chance of dropping out and the same chance of completing college.

But black students were enormously affected. Compared to black teachers, teachers of other races thought their black students had a far higher chance of dropping out and a far lower chance of completing college. Since the baseline expectation of dropping out was 31 percent for black students, a change of 12 percentage points represents a whopping 39 percent increase. Likewise, the baseline expectation of a college degree was 37 percent for black students, so a change of 9 percentage points represents 24 percent decrease.

The authors conclude with this:

The general finding of systematic biases in teachers’ expectations for student attainment indicates that the topic of teacher expectations is ripe for future research. Particularly policy relevant areas for future inquiry include how teachers form expectations, what types of interventions can eliminate biases from teacher expectations, and how teacher expectations affect the long-run student outcomes of ultimate import. To the extent that teacher expectations affect student outcomes, the results presented in the current study provide additional support for the hiring of a more diverse and representative teaching force, as nonwhite teachers are underrepresented in U.S. public schools.

Let’s ask all our presidential candidate what, if anything, they think we should do about this.

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White Teachers Think Pretty Poorly of Their Black Students

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Alarm clock appeals to your good nature to break your snoozing habit. We have a better idea

by SherriMcLean9 Posted on March 28, 2016

Alarm clock appeals to your good nature to break your snoozing habit. We have a better idea

By on 28 Mar 2016commentsShare

You awake to the roar of an African lion. Bleary-eyed, you grab your phone and hit snooze to silence the feline’s growls — and in doing so, donate $1 to a conservation fund.

That’s the premise of an app called Zooster, the world’s first “charitable alarm clock.” After the howl of a grey wolf or the squeak of a dolphin wakes you from your beauty sleep, you can either dismiss the alarm or hit snooze. If you do the latter, the app automatically donates your money to a charity that supports the animal whose wake-up call you ignored.

Sure, you might not be prepared to make informed monetary decisions in your state of morning grogginess — but at least it’s for a good cause, right? This leads us to the crucial problem with Zooster: Wouldn’t donating to a terrible cause get you up faster?

Introducing Eschewster: the app that will help you abstain from hitting snooze and donating a dollar. We brainstormed some ideas for the world’s second charitable alarm clock that’ll get you out from under those covers in a hurry:

Get up now or $1 goes to the NRA
Get up now or $1 goes to the travel budget of that dentist who killed Cecil
Get up now or $1 goes to the Rachel Dolezal Center For Diversity
Get up now or $1 goes to expanding George W. Bush’s personal Texas ranch
Get up now or $1 goes to a climate denial group of your choice
Get up now or $1 goes to developing toilet paper even thinner than one-ply
Get up now or $1 goes to Kanye West’s debt reduction fund
Get up now or $1 goes to the making of Paul Blart: Mall Cop 3
Get up now or $1 goes to the initiative to build an even bigger proposed pipeline, Keystone XXL

App developers, take note! Until Zooster’s official launch this fall, we could use some extra incentive to get up in the mornings. It’s not exactly the cock-a-doodle-do that served as the alarm for your agrarian ancestors, but the moral of the story is the same: If you snooze, you lose.

(That is, unless you end up snoozing and donating to Grist.)

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Alarm clock appeals to your good nature to break your snoozing habit. We have a better idea

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Hillary Email Scandal Continue To Be Dumb But Non-Scandalous

by CEEVerna673 Posted on March 27, 2016

Mother Jones

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Over at the Washington Post, Robert O’Harrow Jr. has a deep dive into the roots of Hillary Clinton’s email troubles. As near as I can tell, once you cut through the weeds it’s the story of a senior official who’s technically illiterate and didn’t want to change her email habits. Both Clinton and her inner circle of advisers were “dedicated BlackBerry addicts,” but apparently neither the NSA nor anyone else was willing to help them make their BlackBerries safe. So, like millions of us who have tried to stay under the radar of our IT departments, Hillary just kept on using hers, hoping that eventually everyone would forget the whole thing. In the meantime, she grudgingly obeyed rules that required her to leave her phone behind when she entered her 7th floor office, but used it everywhere else.

That remains inexplicably dumb, but hardly scandalous. Nonetheless, we have this:

The FBI is now trying to determine whether a crime was committed in the handling of that classified material. It is also examining whether the server was hacked. One hundred forty-seven FBI agents have been deployed to run down leads, according to a lawmaker briefed by FBI Director James B. Comey. The FBI has accelerated the investigation because officials want to avoid the possibility of announcing any action too close to the election.

147 agents! To track down leads on one email server whose location and purpose have been known for two years. That’s crazy. It’s gotta be time for the FBI to either bring some charges or shut this thing down. Enough’s enough.

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Hillary Email Scandal Continue To Be Dumb But Non-Scandalous

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Bernie Sanders Runs the Table

by Adalberto1522 Posted on March 26, 2016

Mother Jones

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Update 2, 7:32 a.m. EST: Sanders notched another big win, crushing Clinton in Hawaii’s caucuses to go three for three on Saturday. With 88 percent of precincts reporting, Sanders had more than 70 percent of the vote.

Update, 6:28 p.m. EST: Bernie Sanders won Saturday’s Democratic presidential caucuses in Washington. With 31 percent of precincts reporting, the Associated Press and other news agencies projected that Sanders would be the winner. Sanders had 76 percent of the vote to Clinton’s 24 percent. Washington is the largest prize of the day, with 101 delegates, and delegates will be awarded proportionally. (Many of the Republican contests allot delegates on a winner-take-all basis.)

In a rally on Saturday in Madison, Wis., where Sanders is campaigning ahead of the April 5 primary, the candidate reveled in the back-to-back wins.
“I think it’s hard for anybody to deny that our campaign has the momentum,” he said.

Bernie Sanders won the Democratic presidential caucuses in Alaska on Saturday. With 38 percent of precincts reporting, the Associated Press and NBC called the race for Sanders at 2:30 p.m. PST. Sanders had 78 percent of the vote and Clinton had 21 percent.

Results will come in later today for the Democratic caucuses in Washington state and Hawaii. Sanders is expected to win big in Saturday’s Washington caucuses, where 101 delegates are up for grabs.

Clinton started the day with a substantial lead in pledged delegates: 1,223 for Clinton to 920 for Sanders. That doesn’t include the unpledged “superdelegates,” among whom Clinton also holds an overwhelming lead.

We’ll update this story when more results are available.

Source article:  

Bernie Sanders Runs the Table

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Trump Insists He Had Nothing to Do With the Latest Attack on "Lyin’ Ted Cruz"

by CarlNadelc Posted on March 25, 2016

Mother Jones

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Donald Trump denied any involvement on Friday in a National Enquirer story alleging that Ted Cruz has had affairs with five different women, but he couldn’t help inserting himself into the melee. In a statement posted on Facebook, Trump said he hoped the allegations against “Lyin’ Ted Cruz” were not true, but hinted that they well might be.

I have no idea whether or not the cover story about Ted Cruz in this week’s issue of the National Enquirer is true or not, but I had absolutely nothing to do with it, did not know about it, and have not, as yet, read it.

Likewise, I have nothing to do with the National Enquirer and unlike Lyin’ Ted Cruz I do not surround myself with political hacks and henchman and then pretend total innocence. Ted Cruz’s problem with the National Enquirer is his and his alone, and while they were right about O.J. Simpson, John Edwards, and many others, I certainly hope they are not right about Lyin’ Ted Cruz.

I look forward to spending the week in Wisconsin, winning the Republican nomination and ultimately the Presidency in order to Make America Great Again.

– Donald J. Trump

On Friday afternoon, Cruz called the Enquirer‘s report “garbage” and accused “Donald Trump and his henchmen” of planting the story. Not to be outdone, Trump claimed in his response that it was Cruz who had surrounded himself with “political hacks and henchmen.”

Excerpt from – 

Trump Insists He Had Nothing to Do With the Latest Attack on "Lyin’ Ted Cruz"

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