Tag Archives: story

When Will Benjamin Netanyahu Finally Go Too Far?

by MilfordMnh Posted on January 25, 2015

Mother Jones

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

I keep wondering if it’s ever possible for Benjamin Netanyahu to go too far. He’s treated President Obama with truly astonishing levels of contempt and disdain for nearly his entire tenure, and he’s done it in the apparent belief that his political support in the US is so strong and so bipartisan that he’ll never be held to account for it. And so far he hasn’t been.

But what about his latest stunt? The fact that John Boehner invited him to address Congress is hardly surprising. Boehner needed to poke Obama in the eye to demonstrate his conservative bona fides, and this was a perfect opportunity since he knew Netanyahu would deliver plenty of trash talk about Obama’s Iran policy. But the fact that Netanyahu kept the invitation a secret from the administration and failed to even notify them he was planning a visit—well, that’s a whole different story. As former US ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk put it, “Netanyahu is using the Republican Congress for a photo-op for his election campaign….Unfortunately, the US relationship will take the hit. It would be far wiser for us to stay out of their politics and for them to stay out of ours.”

And it turns out that even two Fox News hosts agree. Max Fisher relays the story:

Two prominent Fox News hosts, Chris Wallace and Shepherd Smith, harshly criticized Boehner and Netanyahu on Friday for secretly arranging a Netanyahu speech to Congress that is transparently aimed at undermining President Obama, and set up without the White House’s knowledge.

….”I agree 100 percent,” Wallace said when Smith read a quote from Indyk criticizing the Boehner-Netanyahu maneuver. Wallace went on:

And to make you get a sense of really how, forgive me, wicked, this whole thing is, the Secretary of State John Kerry met with the Israeli Ambassador to the United States for two hours on Tuesday, Ron Dermer. The ambassador, never mentioned the fact that Netanyahu was in negotiations and finally agreed to come to Washington, not to see the president, but to go to Capitol Hill, speak to a joint session of congress and criticize the president’s policy. I have to say I’m shocked.

Smith said, “it seems like Netanyahu’s government thinks we don’t pay attention and that we’re just a bunch of complete morons, the United States citizens, as if we wouldn’t pick up on what’s happening here.”

Shep Smith goes off the Fox reservation all the time, so perhaps his comments aren’t too much of a surprise. But although Wallace is no Sean Hannity, he’s fairly reliably conservative and even he was shocked.

So has Netanyahu finally gone over the line? So far I haven’t heard much criticism from sitting US politicians, so I’d have to say not. Not yet, anyway. But it sure seems like the day is going to come. No matter how close an ally Israel is, there’s only so much contempt their leaders can show for a sitting American president and his policies. Eventually the American public is going to lose patience, even the folks who aren’t huge Obama fans themselves.

It hasn’t happened yet. Maybe it never will. But it sure seems as if Benjamin Netanyahu is hellbent on pushing the line until he finally rings a bell he can’t unring. The only question now is whether he stays in office long enough to make that final, fatal mistake.

Link to original:

When Will Benjamin Netanyahu Finally Go Too Far?

Posted in alo, Citizen, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on When Will Benjamin Netanyahu Finally Go Too Far?

Friday Cat Blogging – 23 January 2015

by UTQAlexand Posted on January 23, 2015

Mother Jones

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

I wrote this morning’s short post and then spent the rest of the morning napping. This is ridiculous, and I don’t know what’s going on. I’m a thousand percent better than I was Tuesday and Wednesday, but still dog tired. One possibility is that this is due to a change in my chemo schedule. Instead of getting all three meds on Friday, I got two of them on Friday and then the third as a standalone on Monday. The next day I was wiped out. Anyway, I hope that’s the reason, since this was a one-time thing. I’ll ask about it today, though I have little hope of getting any satisfactory answers.

In any case, it’s finally Friday, so how about some catblogging? This week features a brand new addition to the extended family of Drum cats. My friend Professor Marc sends along this photo of Ivan Davidoff, his new Siberian. His report: “Seems to like being around people, but is not a cuddle-kitty. He likes being petted, will frequently come see if I’m still in the home office if I’m working there, sometimes jumps onto the desk to be next to me, but is not a lap cat. Maybe that will come as he gets more comfortable. Has woken us up in the middle of the night to get affection, but is not pushy about it.” He is certainly a handsome critter, no?

Jump to original: 

Friday Cat Blogging – 23 January 2015

Posted in alo, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Friday Cat Blogging – 23 January 2015

Why Ruth Bader Ginsburg Thinks Citizens United Is the Supreme Court’s Worst Ruling

by WZYTammyvq Posted on January 21, 2015

Mother Jones

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

This story originally appeared at BillMoyers.com.

In an interview with the New Republic, 81-year-old Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said that the current Court’s worst ruling — and the one she would most like to overrule—was Citizens United.

That decision is the one responsible, in large part, for making this midterm election a record breaker in terms of outside spending. And that’s before the really heavy spending comes into play, in the weeks leading up to Election Day.

The 2010 Citizens United v. FEC decision struck down the limits on how much money corporations and unions can spend in federal elections. Ginsburg, who dissented in the case, explains here why Citizens United is top of her list and tackles the two runners-up.

I think the notion that we have all the democracy that money can buy strays so far from what our democracy is supposed to be. So that’s number one on my list. Number two would be the part of the health care decision that concerns the commerce clause. Since 1937, the Court has allowed Congress a very free hand in enacting social and economic legislation. I thought that the attempt of the Court to intrude on Congress’s domain in that area had stopped by the end of the 1930s. Of course health care involves commerce. Perhaps number three would be Shelby County, involving essentially the destruction of the Voting Rights Act. That act had a voluminous legislative history. The bill extending the Voting Rights Act was passed overwhelmingly by both houses, Republicans and Democrats, everyone was on board. The Court’s interference with that decision of the political branches seemed to me out of order. The Court should have respected the legislative judgment. Legislators know much more about elections than the Court does. And the same was true of Citizens United. I think members of the legislature, people who have to run for office, know the connection between money and influence on what laws get passed.

In her wide-ranging interview, she goes on to discuss her concerns for women’s reproductive rights, why she’s not going to step down, despite some calls from the left for her to do so, her scathing dissent on the Hobby Lobby ruling and life as “Notorious R.B.G.”

Read the full interview at The New Republic.

Credit – 

Why Ruth Bader Ginsburg Thinks Citizens United Is the Supreme Court’s Worst Ruling

Posted in alo, Anchor, Citizen, Everyone, FF, GE, LAI, Landmark, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Why Ruth Bader Ginsburg Thinks Citizens United Is the Supreme Court’s Worst Ruling

West Virginia Wanted to Teach Students Anti-Science Nonsense. Teachers Fought Back—and Won.

by Torri9025sicg Posted on January 15, 2015

Mother Jones

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

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

For a little while there, it looked like West Virginia was getting ready to teach its students to doubt the overwhelming majority of scientists who say climate change is a real thing. Now, maybe not. Yesterday, after an outcry from science education advocates, the state school board reversed course.

To start from the beginning: The state’s school board voted in December to adopt the Next Generation Science Standards, a framework that 26 states, including West Virginia, helped develop for nationwide use. The standards require students to look at and analyze evidence that humans are causing global warming. But one climate skeptic on the board feels this aspect of the curriculum is misleading; it “presupposes that global temperatures have risen over the past century, and, of course, there’s debate about that,” he told The Charleston Gazette. Hmm.

So, at his urging, the school board revised the standards to sow doubt about whether things are getting warmer (there is no scientific debate about this—they are) and whether humans are causing it (there is almost no scientific debate about this either—we almost certainly are). Students were to learn about Milankovitch cycles—changes in Earth’s orbit around the sun, one explanation for global warming popular among the mostly non-scientist community that doesn’t believe humans are responsible. (In fact, instead of explaining warming, Milankovitch cycles actually suggest that the earth’s temperatures should, at the moment, be stable or cooling.)

When the news broke that the standards had been quietly altered, it was met with a general outcry from educators inside and outside of the state, as well as parents. West Virginia University’s faculty senate voted unanimously to request that the school board reverse the changes. Many of those who spoke up were particularly upset that the public, including the teachers who would be discussing climate change in their classrooms, didn’t have a chance to weigh in.

“The West Virginia School Board made these final changes unilaterally,” said Elizabeth Strong, the president of the West Virginia Science Teachers Association. “The science was compromised by these modifications to the standards, specifically by casting doubt on the credibility of the evidence-based climate models and misrepresentation of trends in science when analyzing graphs dealing with temperature changes over time.”

National education groups were also not impressed. “They are taking the standards, they are calling it the next-generation science standards, and they are changing the composition of the science to match their own personal views,” Minda Berbeco of the National Center for Science Education told The New York Times. “That defeats the purpose of having standards developed by scientific advisory boards.”

The outcry, apparently, had the desired effect. After a public comment period on Wednesday, the school board reversed course and went back to the original, unaltered standards. Ryan Quinn, who has great coverage of the whole saga at The Charleston Gazette, reports that the state school board president “said she didn’t want to go against the work that West Virginia teachers did in vetting the standards and called the controversy a learning opportunity.”

Now the standards will be opened up for a 30-day public comment period and the board will take a final vote on the matter in March. Whatever the board settles on will go into effect during the 2016-2017 school year—and right now, signs indicate that they’ll stick with this latest decision to not muddy science in the science classroom.

Read this article: 

West Virginia Wanted to Teach Students Anti-Science Nonsense. Teachers Fought Back—and Won.

Posted in alo, Anchor, Citizen, Everyone, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on West Virginia Wanted to Teach Students Anti-Science Nonsense. Teachers Fought Back—and Won.

UAB Faculty Senate Considers Vote Against All That Annoying Faculty Stuff

by LatashaBuckingh Posted on December 31, 2014

Mother Jones

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

Earlier this month, Ray Watts, the president of the University of Alabama at Birmingham, announced that UAB would be dropping its Division I football program, the first university to do so in 20 years. I haven’t paid much attention to the fallout, but today the LA Times summarizes the swift reaction:

Watts said the decision was strictly financial: After spending $20 million each year subsidizing an unsuccessful team, it was time for UAB to cut its losses and put academics before athletics.

….These are fighting words in Alabama. After announcing his decision Dec. 2, Watts needed police officers to escort him through a crowd of angry fans outside Legion Field, the school’s outdated off-campus stadium, where he met with Blazer players and coaches.

….All of a sudden, almost everyone is a football cheerleader: The City Council passed a motion in support of UAB football; the university’s Faculty Senate drafted a resolution of no confidence in Watts.

Look, I get that the football players are angry. I even get that all the boosters who hadn’t stepped up before are now swearing that they would have donated millions of dollars to keep the program alive if only Watts had asked them. But the Faculty Senate? At a bare minimum, shouldn’t they have had the back of a president who wanted to stop draining money from academics into football, even if no one else did? Yeesh.

Anyway, the gist of the story is that without a consistently losing football program to rally around, UAB is now certain to wither away and die. Why would anyone want to be be a student there, after all? What’s left? A bunch of hoity toity classes and labs and stuff? What a waste of some perfectly nice property in the middle of town.

UPDATE: Apparently my reading comprehension is weak today. As the Times story says, the Faculty Senate is considering a no-confidence motion in Watts, but hasn’t actually voted on it yet. That won’t happen until January 15.

View original: 

UAB Faculty Senate Considers Vote Against All That Annoying Faculty Stuff

Posted in Everyone, FF, G & F, GE, LG, ONA, Oster, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on UAB Faculty Senate Considers Vote Against All That Annoying Faculty Stuff

More Good News For Obamacare: Employer Health Coverage Hasn’t Crashed

by JasmineClancy Posted on December 19, 2014

Mother Jones

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

The share of the population with employer health insurance has been slowly eroding for years. The chart on the right tells the story: total coverage rates have dropped from 70 percent to 62 percent since 2001. The trend is pretty clear: the number of workers covered by employer insurance has been dropping about half a percentage point per year for more than a decade.

So has Obamacare accelerated this trend? There have long been fears that it might: once the exchanges were up and running, employers might decide that it was cheaper to ditch their own insurance and just pay their workers extra to buy coverage on the open market. But a new study says that hasn’t happened:

We found essentially no change in offer rates throughout the study period. Overall, the rates stayed steady, at around 82 percent. Offer rates in small firms also held steady, at around 61 percent….We found no change in take-up rates overall, or by income or firm size, between June 2013 and September 2014.

….As with offer and take-up rates of employer-sponsored insurance, there were no significant differences in coverage rates for the insurance overall or for any subgroup. The rates stayed roughly constant at about 71 percent across all workers, about 50 percent among workers in small firms, and about 82 percent among workers in large firms. The rates also remained constant among low- and high-income workers in either small or large firms.

Note that the percentages themselves differ between the Kaiser numbers and the study numbers thanks to differences in methodology. And there are, of course, plenty of reasons we might see only small changes in employer coverage. The economy has improved. Inertia might be keeping things in check for a while. Perhaps as Obamacare becomes settled law and its benefits become more widely known, more employers will drop their own coverage.

Those are all possibilities. For now, though, it looks as though fears of employers dumping health coverage were unfounded. It’s yet more good news for Obamacare.

See the original post: 

More Good News For Obamacare: Employer Health Coverage Hasn’t Crashed

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on More Good News For Obamacare: Employer Health Coverage Hasn’t Crashed

James Risen Will Not Be Required to Reveal His Sources for "State of War"

by KatherineUbc Posted on December 13, 2014

Mother Jones

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

From the New York Times:

Preet Bharara, the United States attorney in Manhattan wants to force Richard Bonin, a longtime producer for “60 Minutes,” to testify next month at a terrorism trial over bombings by Al Qaeda in 1998. One of the two defendants, Khaled al-Fawwaz, is accused of running Al Qaeda’s media office in London. Prosecutors want Mr. Bonin to discuss his dealings with the group’s media office in an unsuccessful effort to interview Osama bin Laden in 1998, officials and others briefed on the case said.

Wait. What? Al Qaeda had a media office?

In other, better news, Eric Holder has decided not to subpoena New York Times reporter James Risen in an effort to force him to reveal the sources for his book, State of War. “If the government subpoenas Risen to require any of his testimony,” a Justice Department official said, “it would be to confirm that he had an agreement with a confidential source, and that he did write the book.” I don’t know how Risen feels about that, but it’s obviously much less pernicious than threatening jail time for refusing to identify a source.

This comes via Doug Mataconis, who argues persuasively that the arbitrary nature of federal prosecutions against reporters for refusing to reveal a source is exactly why we need to pass some kind of federal shield law for reporters. Even if it turned out to be weaker than many of us would like—pretty much a dead certainty, I’d say—at the very least it would provide some consistent guidance for both judges and media members.

Original article:  

James Risen Will Not Be Required to Reveal His Sources for "State of War"

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on James Risen Will Not Be Required to Reveal His Sources for "State of War"

Friday Cat Blogging – 12 December 2014

by BrunoSargood Posted on December 12, 2014

Mother Jones

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

Last week, Hilbert got catblogging all to himself. This week it’s Hopper’s turn. Marian took this picture of Hopper gazing out the kitchen window with the bird bath in the background—and that’s no coincidence. The bird bath and the hummingbird feeders are objects of endless fascination.

In other news, I have a follow-up from last week. Now that he’s taken its measure, it turns out that Hilbert can jump onto the fireplace mantle with ease. No furious runup necessary. However, it also turns out that having taken its measure, he’s now bored with it. There’s no challenge left, I guess. So the mantle is safe once again. Maybe. Until he gets bored. Welcome to kittenland.

See the original article here – 

Friday Cat Blogging – 12 December 2014

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Friday Cat Blogging – 12 December 2014

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

by BradyT03jjkzycx Posted on December 12, 2014

Mother Jones

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

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.

See the article here: 

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

Posted in alo, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Thanks to New Media, We All Have Box Seats at the Sausage Factory

Chart of the Day: The World Has More Oil Than It Needs

by ziarullibertatealocuridemunca Posted on December 12, 2014

Mother Jones

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

I don’t have a lot to say about this, but I wanted to pass along this chart from Chris Mooney over at Wonkblog. Basically, it shows that although both supply and demand for oil have been roughly in sync for the past five years, demand abruptly dropped earlier this year and is projected to stay low next year. This is why prices have dropped so far: not because supply has skyrocketed thanks to fracking—the supply trendline is actually fairly smooth—but because the world is using less oil.

This is a short-term blip, and I don’t want to make too much of it. Still, regular readers will remember that one of the biggest problems with oil isn’t high prices per se. The world can actually get along OK with high oil prices. The problem is spikes in oil prices caused by sudden imbalances between supply and demand. Historically this wasn’t a big problem because potential supply was much higher than demand. If demand went up, the Saudis and others just opened up the taps a bit and everything was back in balance.

But that hasn’t been true for a while. There’s very little excess capacity these days, so if oil supply drops due to war or natural disaster, it can result in a very sudden spike in prices. And that can lead to economic chaos. But if demand has fallen significantly below supply, it means we now have excess capacity again. And if we have excess capacity, it means that the price of oil can be managed. It will still go up and down, but it’s less likely to unexpectedly spike upward. And this in turn means that, at least in the near future, oil is unlikely to derail the economic recovery. It’s a small but meaningful piece of good news.

View original post here – 

Chart of the Day: The World Has More Oil Than It Needs

Posted in alo, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Chart of the Day: The World Has More Oil Than It Needs