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How Do American Kids Do In Math? Pretty Well, It Turns Out.

by JulianaMabry Posted on December 1, 2016

Mother Jones

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Earlier this evening I promised more on the TIMSS math test, and now I’m here to deliver. I could pretty easily just copy the full ranking table and consider it a job well done, but there’s a problem with that: a bunch of Asian tigers are always at the top, light years ahead of everyone else. There’s not much point in comparing ourselves to them. Do we really care that we do worse than countries that goad their kids into studying math until their eyes fall out? Likewise, there are lots of poor countries clustered near the bottom. There’s not much point in comparing ourselves to them either. It might make us feel good, but do we really care that we beat out Malaysia and Oman?

Really, what we want to know is how we compare to peer countries. We also want to know if we’re improving over time. So without further ado, here’s the answer for 8th graders:

Basically, this isn’t bad. We do pretty well among our peers, and our scores have been improving steadily for the past two decades. The full report is here, and it has lots of interesting tidbits.

It’s worth noting that there are two big international math tests: TIMSS and PISA. The United States usually does fairly well on TIMSS and not so well on PISA, which claims to be more about concepts and actual problem solving. If your ideological preference is to show that American kids are doing fine, you’ll focus on TIMSS. If your ideological preference is to show that American education is a cesspool and needs massive reform, you’ll focus on PISA. Take your pick.

One other note. If you really want a takeaway from the latest TIMSS test, it’s the same as the takeaway from every other test ever administered to America schoolkids: we do a terrible job of educating black children. The single biggest thing we could do to improve education in this country is to cut out the half measures and focus serious money and resources on poor, black school districts. But I guess the white working class wouldn’t be very happy about that.

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How Do American Kids Do In Math? Pretty Well, It Turns Out.

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Was Emmett Till’s Father Lynched, Too?

by KrystalThrossell Posted on November 12, 2016

Mother Jones

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The author John Edgar Wideman was 14 years old and living in Pittsburgh when a horrific photo began making the rounds back in 1955. It depicted the mangled corpse of 14-year-old Emmett Till, a black kid from Chicago who was lynched—supposedly for flirting with a white woman—while visiting relatives down in Mississippi. Till was brutally beaten and shot. His partially decomposed body was recovered later from a nearby river, his face half bashed in. Till’s distraught mother famously insisted on an open-casket funeral, “so the world can see what they did to my boy.”

Wideman saw what they did. “It just scared the shit out of me,” he recalls.

Now 75, Wideman is a professor at Brown University. He’s built a distinguished career in academia and literature, with some 20 works of fiction and nonfiction under his belt. Among other honors, Wideman won the Pen/Falkner award in 1987 for the novel Sent for You Yesterday, and again in 1991 for Philadelphia Fire. His 1994 memoir, Fatheralong, was a National Book Award finalist. His trophy case also includes an O. Henry Award (for his short story “Weight”), a James Fenimore Cooper Prize for historical fiction (for his 1997 novel, The Cattle Killing), and a MacArthur Fellowship—a.k.a. “genius grant.”

But the Till photo remained with him all these years. His captivating new book, Writing to Save a Life, tackles the Till family saga—and Wideman’s own—through a lens of history, mystery, memoir, and fiction. In the book, which comes out next week, readers are introduced to different versions of Louis Till, Emmett’s father, who was charged with rape and murder while stationed in Italy during World War II, and then court-martialed and hanged by the US military. Wideman struggles to make sense of old documents from the proceedings (obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request), as well as the parallels between the Till family and his own.

In the process, Wideman revives an incredibly disturbing but largely forgotten detail from the Emmett Till affair. After the white racists accused of killing Till were acquitted of murder in a farcical trial, a grand jury was convened to consider kidnapping charges against the men. That’s when portions of Louis Till’s military file were abruptly declassified and leaked to the local press. The victim’s family was thus sullied, and the kidnapping charges, for whatever reason, never came to pass.

John Edgar Wideman Jean-Christian Bourcart

Mother Jones: I’ll begin with a not-so-serious question. Why don’t you use question marks?

John Edgar Wideman: I’ll give you a serious answer. I don’t like the way they look. They’re really ugly. They look like blots. At some other point in my life, I might have disliked them because I never knew how to properly apply them. Also commas, and whether they were outside the quote or inside the quote—that all seemed like an unnecessary pain in the ass.

I really love James Joyce, Dubliners and other work. And I was interested in the way the dash was used in English topography—in his work particularly—and I realized there was no compulsion to use those ugly dot-dot curlicues all over the place to designate dialogue. I began to look around, and found writers who could make transitions quite clear by the language itself. I’m a bit of a maverick now. I’m always trying to push the medium.

MJ: As a reader, I particularly enjoy the way you get distracted in the telling of one story, and suddenly we’re off in some other direction—it’s Joycean, I suppose, like we’re riding your daydreams. Louis Till’s military file finally comes in the mail, you put it aside, and a few minutes later you start thinking about turkey. Before long, we’re back at your family Thanksgiving table.

JW: Remember that a book is many drafts—mine certainly are. It’s improvisation. It’s as much jazz and the way we talk and the way I heard people preach coming up as it is writing. When you’re at the basketball court watching a game, one person may be talking about a fight he had with his wife, another is talking about the last hard-on he got, someone else is talking about the presidential election. The language and the tone and the voice—I’d love to be able to capture that spontaneity.

MJ: There’s a fine line with the improvisation, though. I mean, there were definitely places I had to work hard to puzzle out who’s talking, or from whose perspective a particular passage is written.

JW: I don’t mind that. As a reader, Mike, I do not like to have everything handed to me. Because after a while it gets formulaic and I’m thinking, “If this is so thought through, then why do I need to read it. It’s done!” It becomes a beach book at a certain point.

MJ: Writing to Save a Life is stylistically unusual. It’s often hard to tell what’s real and what’s made up. Is there a precedent?

JW: There are plenty. I read all the time, and lots of European fiction. Sometimes it’s not a question of reading contemporaries: You read Moby-Dick again, Melville again, and it had those same kinds of issues with style, trying to accommodate this new American language with traditional style. I really dislike it when people talk about “experimental,” because any good writer is experimental. As a writer, you don’t know what the hell you’re doing. You’re just doing it. You hope it works out well. I’ve been experimenting with these things myself in my own books.

MJ: At one point you put yourself and Louis Till in a boat full of slaves and Confederate officers—back in 1861!

JW: You think that’s fiction? Laughs.

MJ: Until I read your book, I was unaware that Emmett Till’s killers had escaped kidnapping charges after details from Louis Till’s military trial were leaked. It made the news back in 1955. But have Americans of your generation buried that part of the Emmett Till story?

JW: I’m almost positive they have. Christopher Hitchens, who died a few years back, and who was a radical journalist in certain ways and kind of a pain in the ass in other ways, was a tremendously well-read guy who liked to be ahead of everybody else. He included an essay I wrote about Till “Fatheralong” in The Best American Essays 2010 and he said he could not believe that he’d never heard this story. I’ve had that response many times from individuals.

MJ: Now, you’d originally planned to write a fictional work about Emmett Till. What happened?

JW: It got put on the back burner. I got very interested in Frantz Fanon and Martinique. And I wanted to write stories about my own family and background. I started to do research in South Carolina on our family history. All that stuff, without my knowing it, kept leading back to Emmett Till. But I had to do something about him, because I never got over seeing that photo.

MJ: Tell me more about your reaction to seeing Emmett Till’s corpse.

JW: It was incomprehensible. I could not understand what had happened to this kid. It was too horrible. I literally could not look at it. I had a young person’s ambitions and dreams. I thought, “Hell, I’m going to play pro basketball. I’m going to maybe be famous. I’m going to write books.” And then this face is looking at me: Here’s another thing that could happen to you, son.

My grandfather had asked me many times whether I’d like to come to South Carolina with him. He wanted to introduce me to our people down there and I didn’t want to go. In those days, the South was still a place where black kids were lynched. Something horrible could happen to you. I’ve had that feeling my whole life. Even in my adult years, when I heard a white person speaking in a Southern accent I was initially suspicious. So I had a deep prejudice against the South. It’s taken me many years to get over that, be more open and thoughtful. The Till stuff brought all that up.

MJ: There’s a parallel to all of this in the book. Mamie Till is nostalgic about the South while her husband, from Missouri, is scornful of the South. I don’t know how much of that is real.

JW: Louis Till’s internal monologues are my invention. But he is based on many people I knew, including my father, who shared that deep ambivalence about the South and their own identity. And this goes along with color. You know, Michael Jordan was a hero of mine. But what nobody ever talked about at the time he was becoming world-famous, and it always struck me, is that in many circles of black people he wouldn’t have been acceptable. He was too dark. He had that Southern look. He was from the Deep South, and even for African Americans in the North, the South still represented something vestigial, something primitive, and Jordan was the wrong color. There were fraternities and sororities where he wouldn’t be all that welcome. Some of us have transitioned out of that kind of stuff, but my grandmother, if Jordan had walked in the door, she wouldn’t have been impolite, but she would have treated him like she treated my other grandfather, whom she always called “Mr. Wideman” and kept her distance from him because he was Deep South and she was very fair-skinned.

MJ: In what ways were your father and Emmett Till’s father alike?

JW: Well, they both liked to box. And they were both survivors. To be a survivor as an African American man—maybe any man—you have to be pretty tough. Or at least that’s what we all understand. You have to be a minor superhero just to get to be a dignified man, and that’s kind of exacerbated for men of color.

My father was also quite patriotic—he rooted for the Yankees when no one else did because they were “America’s team.” He made us stand up when the national anthem was on when there was a ball game on the radio, and later TV—you couldn’t sit! My father was also a loner, like Till. He could be very loving, but he was also capable of looking out for himself, for doing what he wanted to do. He combined many of the elements that were feared in the culture, but also he was a warm figure, a figure we needed. We depended on him to give us a little bit of strength and courage. My mother loved my father. From my view, she let him get away with too much. It broke my heart to see him in an old people’s home and stop being strong and lose his voice. He was a very articulate guy and he told good stories. Much of what I think about in Louis Till I project from my own father.

MJ: Your dad related to you how his own black military regiment in the South would get hauled out on Sunday mornings and made to do hard labor. Yet he remained a patriot?

JW: Oh, yes. That split is inside all Americans. There are contradictions inside all of us about color and race. We’ve learned to cover them up and live with them and pretend that deep cleavage is not there. We all bear that illness.

MJ: The file on Louis Till’s court-martial is a central character in the book, and one with which you have a tortured interaction. When it arrives, you are filled with fear and suspicion. What were you were afraid of?

JW: I’m not a fearful person, but I’m a pretty pessimistic person. So some of my best times are waiting, anticipating. That’s the way it always has been with me, whether anticipating a ball game, anticipating a relationship. Things seem to fall apart inevitably. I get off on anticipating and waiting much more than I get off on the actual event. When I’m writing, I’m thinking, “Well, this might be a book that I’ll always be happy with, and certainly readers will be happy with.” But another part of me knows that when I’m past the stage of writing, the book is gonna have good things about it, bad things about it—probably more bad than good. I just know that. That’s who I am.

MJ: My sense is that you had hoped to find yet another moral outrage in that file, another lynching, but it turned out to be complicated.

JW: I didn’t find an open-and-shut case. I didn’t find one more lynch-law shooting in the street, and villains—good guys, bad guys. Reading the Till file, I hoped, would clarify some of my pessimism about my country, about myself, about my family, about the Tills. But in another way I knew it wouldn’t. So the file sat there as a sort of challenge before I even opened it.

MJ: Like a forensic defense attorney, you interrogated the file from every possible angle: the questions not asked, the abridged statements and translations, the mystery of Louis Till’s silence about his own guilt or innocence.

JW: I started out to solve a puzzle that bothered me very deeply. The file was what I thought might be my means for solving it, but I was asking an awful lot of a bunch of old papers. I found not the solution to a puzzle, but many puzzles. There was the old paper, the file itself, which was a couple hundred pages, but then there were files inside of files inside of files, and the process never ended. It still hasn’t.

MJ: What’s your theory about why Louis Till never gave a statement to his accusers?

JW: Well, he sort of understood the way things worked. He came into the world an orphan, and when you’re an orphan you don’t have a daddy to appeal to. I guess maybe you could become religious and have a Heavenly Father to appeal to, but he had to learn to find the answers to problems and issues on his own. That’s quite a burden.

MJ: You write, “Not even truth is close to truth. So we create fiction.” Talk about that.

JW: Our thoughts, our language, are always at a distance from whatever they’re trying to describe. We have other kinds of languages, like mathematics, like music, like art, but there’s always that gap. We’re dreamers and—since we only have one life, and if we screw up we can get in a world of trouble—we’re very intense dreamers. That’s the beauty and the terror of being human beings: We just have these symbolic languages, these dreams, and that’s all it ever is. There is no American history. There is no French history. There is no John Wideman. There are all these dreams that are floating around. People construct them and fight with them and criticize them, and the world goes on. I don’t think the stars pay much attention.

MJ: I sense that this book was a struggle for you.

JW: Yes, absolutely. To write a story about Louis Till puts me on trial. If I have objections to the way that he was treated, I certainly don’t want the way I treat him, or the way I treat myself in this book, to mirror what I think of as unfair or unjust. I want to give the evidence in a way that is convincing, but I don’t want to cheat. You can say, “Has this guy done a Till story any justice? Has he done America any justice?” You can make your own choice.

MJ: Shame comes up a lot in this book—for making a scene at your first haircut, for being caught spying on your mom in the bath, for your tryst with Latreesha. These little moments from the past still haunt you. Where did this deep propensity for shame come from?

JW: I have continued, throughout my life, to commit the same kinds of transgressions. I’m still vulnerable and still weak. I’m still divided in my principles and what I think is right and what I’m actually able to do, whether talking about writing or being a citizen or being a husband or being a father. And I’m trying to get better. I can’t pretend that I did one really awful thing—I took a bite out of the apple but now I’m never going to sin again. I believe—what did Faulkner say? “The past is not even past.”

JW: I’m really struck by your willingness to put your vulnerabilities on paper, even when they might be embarrassing or politically incorrect. Do you feel any qualms about sharing so much of your internal life?

JW: If I felt too apprehensive, I would declare the Fifth. I don’t tell everything. I want the reader to have the feeling that maybe they know the whole truth, but they don’t.

MJ: In Brothers and Keepers, you wrote of being the academic success while your kid brother went to prison as an accomplice to murder. Today you have a daughter playing pro basketball while your son has been incarcerated for a killing. I don’t quite know how to put this, but the irony of that situation…

JW: I don’t know how to put it either. Maybe that’s why I write books. Books are an attempt to control something that’s uncontrollable. That’s one of the beauties, I think, of African American life. There was this thing called slavery and adjustments were made. It literally destroyed millions, but it didn’t destroy everybody and it didn’t destroy the inner lives of all the people who experienced it. There are still horrible things that go on because of the myth of race, but we don’t have to succumb totally. If I had only a negative side of things to present, I think I would have much less of a drive to do it. Because what would be the point?

MJ: You visited a cemetery plot in Italy where the US military buried in numbered graves the remains of 96 American soldiers executed during World War II—83 of them were black men. Louis Till was number 73. What did you hope to find there?

JW: I wasn’t sure. I was just amazed that this history that had preoccupied me for so many years actually had a kind of physical environment that I could touch and see. That was the attraction.

MJ: The fact that 86 percent of those executed were black, at a time and place where blacks made up less than 10 percent of American soldiers: That alone seems to cast doubt on the fairness of Louis Till’s prosecution.

JW: Well, clearly his prosecution did not begin after the alleged crime of murder and rape. The persecution and prosecution of Till began a long time before that, and I really want the book to point that out. There’s a kind of a puzzle at the end: Well, did he do it or didn’t he? I was more interested in the long view. What is all this? What’s happened to cause this situation? What happened to make this cemetery real?

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Was Emmett Till’s Father Lynched, Too?

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Things We Can Count On In the Next Two Years

by PeggyTabarez Posted on November 10, 2016

Mother Jones

What is Donald Trump going to do in office? Beats me. For the most part, I’d ignore what he said on the campaign trail, since he said so many different things at different times. It’s obvious that (a) he doesn’t know much, and (b) he doesn’t truly care about very many things—and that means he’s going to be willing to negotiate. On that score, I mostly agree with Tyler Cowen, who speculates that “his natural instinct will be to look for some quick symbolic victories to satisfy supporters, and then pursue mass popularity with a lot of government benefits, debt and free-lunch thinking.”

However, this also means Trump is likely to follow the lead of Congress, which is completely in Republican hands and likely to follow the lead of Paul Ryan. Given that, I think there are a few things we can speculate about. Here’s a short list:

The filibuster is toast. Republicans will get rid of it as soon as they need to.

There are three Supreme Court justices who support Roe v. Wade and are getting on in years: Stephen Breyer (78), Anthony Kennedy (80), and Ruth Bader Ginsburg (83). Using standard actuarial tables, there’s a 60 percent chance that at least one of them will die during Trump’s term. That means there’s a 60 percent chance that Roe v. Wade will be overturned.

Repealing Obamacare will be harder than Republicans think, and it’s possible that they’ll shrink from it when they truly have to face up to the consequences. For one thing, it’s impossible to keep the “good parts” (pre-existing conditions, community rating, etc.) and only get rid of the bad parts. In the best case, they’ll pass a bill that repeals Obamacare in name, but leaves most of it in place under a different name. But I doubt that. In the end, I think they’ll rip down the whole thing.

There will be a recession sometime during Trump’s term. I don’t know what this means. But I’ll bet the Republican Congress will be a whole lot more eager to fix it with crude Keynesian pump priming than they were for Obama.

Trump seems to really care about infrastructure, which makes sense since he thinks of himself as a builder. So we might very well get an infrastructure bill passed. I expect that a wall on the southern border will be part of it.

Congress will pass a big tax cut for the rich. Not as big as Trump’s, I think, but plenty big anyway.

Winners from a Trump presidency: rich people; pro-lifers; Paul Ryan, who will now be reelected Speaker easily; China; Wall Street; Vladimir Putin; James Comey; and CNN president Jeff Zucker, who did everything in his power to help elect a guy who could keep his ratings up.

Losers from a Trump presidency: poor people; anyone on Obamacare; illegal immigrants; climate change; the white working class, which fell for Trump’s con but will get virtually nothing from his presidency; anyone who cares about human decency and national dignity; Barack Obama, whose presidency will now be considered a failure; and the Democratic Party, which has lost control of the presidency, the House, the Senate, the Supreme Court, and most of the states.

Since I have the Reconstruction era on my mind right now, it’s hard to avoid the obvious comparison. Reconstruction lasted about eight years, and then was dismantled almost completely. Barack Obama’s presidency lasted eight years and will now be dismantled almost completely. I will withhold my opinion for now on the obvious reason for this similarity.

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Things We Can Count On In the Next Two Years

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Aaron Lee Tasjan Brings His Circus to Nashville

by ChanteGertrude Posted on November 5, 2016

Mother Jones

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Jacob Blickenstaff

At this year’s Americana Music Festival in Nashville, 30-year-old Aaron Lee Tasjan was getting considerable buzz as an artist on the rise, but his path has been long and unlikely. Growing up in the suburbs of Columbus, Ohio, he took to guitar in his preteens and, after turning down a scholarship to Boston’s Berklee College of Music, moved in 2004 to New York City, where he became a founding member of the glam-punk band Semi Precious Weapons. From there, he became a go-to side man playing, among other other projects, with a latter-day New York Dolls. In 2013, he moved to Nashville, where he has concentrated on songwriting and leading his own band within the East Nashville music scene.

Tasjan’s music operates at more of a sly and observational distance than many of the heart-on-sleeve singer songwriters to come out of Nashville recently. His showcase performance at the Cannery Ballroom—bookended by sets from Wynona Judd and Lee Ann Womack—was exemplary of his subversive philosophy: During the performance of a song called “Success,” he was joined by two female impersonators doing Judd and Womack. The intent was not to mock, but more to celebrate weirdness of the moment and break down the pretense celebrity. The message was in the lyrics: “Success ain’t about being better than everyone else, it’s about being better than yourself.”

On his brand new album, Silver Tears, Tasjan employs a kaleidoscopic approach, drawing from influences such as Tom Petty, Electric Light Orchestra, Elliot Smith, The Flying Burrito Brothers, Harry Nilsson, and Roy Orbison—artists who more or less occupied their own musical categories while remaining reverent of their roots.

Mother Jones: Tell me about the East Nashville scene.

Aaron Lee Tasjan: It’s like every other place. There are people that are great, and their hearts are in it and you really root for them. Then there’s people that are putting on the costume of the scene and showing up, doing something that’s a little less thought about. Any scene is gonna have both of those things and most of it will be the second category. But we’re lucky, ’cause there’s a good healthy amount of people more in the first.

MJ: What was it like to come here from New York?

ALT: I mainly moved here because it’s cheaper. I didn’t come here ’cause I knew anything about any of the songwriters, other than the ones everybody knows: Todd Snyder, Elizabeth Cook, people like that. When I got to town, I didn’t want to find my peers. I wanted to find people who are way better than I am and go try to hang out with them and see why they were great, try to understand that and apply it. I love it here, but I don’t know that I’m a huge participant necessarily of the Nashville scene. I’m not a country singer. Most of those guys are country singers, and I celebrate that. I love singing that music, but it’s really not like what my music is.

MJ: On your album, it’s easy to hear your influences. I’ve read that you’ve been self-deprecating about that in the past via an alternate persona, “Captain Folk,” who’d come out in an opening set and make fun of whom you were “ripping off.”

ALT: Everybody’s influenced by something, right, whether consciously or unconsciously. I make fun of it because this is a genre of music that’s clouded in earnestness. Earnestness is great, but not everybody is Jason Isbell. That works for him, because that’s who he really is, and that’s why it’s good. But I see people mimicking that who aren’t really that. And you sort of want to go, “Man, just go up there and be yourself and be a little weirder, and people will probably be more into it.” And that’s our whole circus: When we play shows and have drag queens and all that, we’re encouraging people to go be as true to their real self as they can. Those are the kinds of artists that we need to hear.

Wynona, Aaron Lee, Lee Ann Brady Brock

MJ: “Success” feels like your most direct statement on the album in terms of a personal philosophy. Is that belief central to what you’re doing right now?

ALT: Definitely, but this is where it gets tricky. I don’t really want to get up there and yell at people to do something, or tell them that I think I have some sort of answer for how they should be. With that song in particular, I’m just singing to myself about something that has worked very well for me. There’s that part of you that goes, “Well this person got this gig; why didn’t I get this gig?” or whatever. But I’ve tried really hard. I came to Nashville being a songwriter and a singer and a front man of a band with a very working-man’s attitude, because that’s what I’ve been my entire life—a working musician, playing guitar for whoever I could play for, for 50 bucks a night, or $100, all the way up to gigs that I did with the more well-known bands.

I just plod along at my own speed, and that works for me. That song is more of what was actually driving me to do it, because I use all these lessons to basically try to kill my ego every day, and just say, “This is making me a better person.” And that goes through every aspect of my life, not just music.

MJ: How else do you apply it?

ALT: I have two things that I go by. The first one is, the work will never fail you. You can hire the wrong publicist, sign to the wrong record label, have a bad manager or a booking agent who might be awesome but doesn’t necessarily understand what you do. But I guarantee you this: If you get really good at singing and playing the guitar and writing songs, someone will give you a job to do it somewhere. Always. So I focus on writing songs. And business people in my camp sometimes get mad at me, because I don’t really pay attention to a lot of that other stuff. But at the end of the day I think they know that the product they have to sell is better for it.

Also, I always try to have the feeling that I’m a student. I don’t have any of this figured out. And I really believe that! It’s hilarious to me when people ask me to explain the process. You’re like, “How can I explain something to you that I’m just learning myself?”

MJ: And now you’re getting some attention. Is that an odd place for you to be?

ALT: Yeah, it’s kind of right where I’ve always been, to be honest. I’ve been fired from bands as a guitar player because I got too much attention. This is the God’s honest truth: All I ever wanted to do was be Keith Richards in somebody’s band. And I could never find a singer or a band that was cool enough to let me do it. In Semi Precious Weapons, the singer and me were writing all the songs and coming up with the sound of it all. But when a critic would pick me out it would get on everyone’s nerves. It keeps you in this place of not really ever being able to break through to another level. I can sit and contemplate the whys and the whens and hows of that until the cows come home, but I’d fuckin’ rather just write a song that’s going to make people go, “Holy shit man, did you make that up?” And whether people understand me or not, I can make up a good song. I want to be as good of a songwriter as Guy Clark. I don’t even know if that’s possible; it’s probably not.

MJ: Well, at least one person did it.

ALT: That’s right. Isn’t that cool? Isn’t that cool enough? It is to me.

Jacob Blickenstaff

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Aaron Lee Tasjan Brings His Circus to Nashville

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The Cubs Almost Blew It

by FredricNazario Posted on October 30, 2016

Mother Jones

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I’ve been vaguely rooting for Cleveland in the World Series this year. Mostly this is because Cleveland is sort of a hard-luck city, and two championships in one year seems like a nice thing for them. But mostly it’s because of my deep insight into the true passion of Cubs fans. For example:

If the Cubs won this year, fans would have to give up all this. No more lovable losers. No more humblebragging about how the Cubs always find a way to blow it. No more genuine bragging about not winning a World Series since the fall of the Roman Empire. No more generational bonding over stories about Cub incompetence.

And most important, no more uniqueness, the true source of Cub pride. If the Cubs won, they’d be just another team and next year would be just another year. That’s what happened in Boston. Now, the Red Sox are nothing more than another garden variety moneyball team. Before long they’ll probably move out to a shiny new billion-dollar sports palace in the suburbs. And why not? There’s nothing special about them anymore.

This could have happened to you, Chicago. But it looks like you’ve dodged that bullet. Congratulations!

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The Cubs Almost Blew It

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Emailgate Now a Parody of Itself

by WaylonClemente Posted on October 29, 2016

Mother Jones

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The FBI email story continues to get even more ridiculous. Here is the LA Times:

Investigators came across the emails while investigating whether Weiner violated federal law when exchanging sexually explicit texts with a 15-year-old girl in North Carolina, one official said….The emails were not to or from Clinton, and contained information that appeared to be more of what agents had already uncovered, the official said, but in an abundance of caution, they felt they needed to further scrutinize them.

There is literally nothing here. We have a bunch of emails from Huma Abedin to other people. The FBI has not read them yet and has no idea what they’re about. At first glance—presumably from scanning the subject lines and names of recipients—they appear to be duplicates of stuff we’ve already seen. And it will likely take several weeks before we know anything more.

There. Is. Literally. Nothing. Here.

WTF was Jim Comey thinking when he wrote his suggestive but ambiguous letter about these emails to eight congressional Republicans—each of them practically slavering for Hillary Clinton’s scalp—11 days before an election? And all of it based on absolutely nothing—a fact that he very carefully avoided admitting. Has he gone completely around the bend?

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Emailgate Now a Parody of Itself

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Correction: Obamacare Premiums Are Going Up About 0% For Most People

by JinaGirardi Posted on October 26, 2016

Mother Jones

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Data! You want data! Sure, Obamacare premiums are going up and so are the subsidies. But how much are the subsidies going up? The chart below—which I want everyone to look at because it was a pain in the ass to create—shows this for the 15 states with the highest premium increases:

As you can see, subsidies are increasing more than premiums in every state—and by quite a bit. This comparison data is for a 27-year-old with an income of $25,000, and comes from Tables 6 and 12 here. (Arizona is literally off the chart: premiums increased 116 percent and subsidies increased 428 percent.) Here’s the same chart for the 15 states with the smallest premium increases:

There are plenty of caveats here. Premiums and subsidies will be different for different kinds of households. Upper middle-class families don’t get any subsidies at all. And this doesn’t tell us what the average net increase is, once subsidies are accounted for.

However, it gives us a pretty good idea that for a substantial majority of Obamacare users, the net amount they pay for health insurance in 2017 isn’t going to be much more than it was this year. For many, in fact, it will be the same. For those who shop around, it’s quite likely to be less.

Bottom line: if your income is low enough to qualify for a subsidy, there’s no need to panic over the Obamacare premium news. The higher premiums will help stabilize the market, and the cost will be covered almost entirely by Uncle Sam. Your pocketbook is safe.

See more here:

Correction: Obamacare Premiums Are Going Up About 0% For Most People

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McCabegate Is the Latest Scandal That Will Totally Destroy Hillary Clinton

by stephenagee641 Posted on October 24, 2016

Mother Jones

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Today in the category of…oh, forget it. I don’t have the heart for snark. It’s just so goddamn tiresome. The Wall Street Journal headline on the right describes the latest pseudo-scandal in Hillaryland, and it’s obviously intended to make you think there’s yet more fishiness in the Clinton family. In a nutshell, here’s the story:

In early 2015, Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe recruited Dr. Jill McCabe to run for state Senate.
Various organizations under McAuliffe’s control donated lots of money to her campaign.
She lost.
Several months later, McCabe’s husband was promoted to deputy director of the FBI. Because of that promotion, he “helped oversee the investigation into Mrs. Clinton’s email use.” This was presumably in addition to the hundreds of other things that a deputy director has oversight responsibility for.

There’s literally nothing here. Not “nothing substantial.” Not “nothing that other politicians don’t do.” Literally nothing. There’s not a single bit of this that’s illegal, unethical, or even the tiniest bit wrong. It’s totally above board and perfectly kosher. And even if there were anything wrong, McAuliffe would have needed a time machine to know it.

Honest to God, I’m so tired of this stuff I could scream. I’ve been joking about it lately by appending gate to every dumb little non-scandal that’s tossed in Hillary’s direction, and I guess I’ll keep doing that. But our illustrious press corps needs to pull its collective head out of its ass. If you’ve got real evidence of Hillary being engaged in something fishy, go to town. I won’t complain. But if all you’ve got is a thrice-removed, physics-challenged gewgaw that proves nothing except that you know how to play Six Degrees of Hillary Clinton,1 then give it a rest. It just makes you look like those monomaniacs with thousands of clippings glued to their wall and spider webs of string tying them all together.

Just stop it.

1Here’s how it works:

  1. Make a list of the entire chain of command that had some oversight over the FBI’s investigation of Hillary Clinton’s email server. That’s going to be at least half a dozen people.
  2. Make a list of all their close family and friends. Now you’re up to a hundred people.
  3. Look for a connection between any of those people and the Clintons. Since FBI headquarters is located in Washington DC and the Clintons famously have thousands and thousands of friends, you will find a connection. I guarantee it.
  4. Write a story about it.

See how easy this is? But please don’t try it at home. This is a game for trained professionals only.

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McCabegate Is the Latest Scandal That Will Totally Destroy Hillary Clinton

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Democracy Under Siege In Irvine

by MaricruMusselma Posted on October 23, 2016

Mother Jones

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I went out to get the paper this morning and noticed that my yard sign was gone. Some Trumpkin vandalizing Hillary signs? Nope. All the other signs in my neighborhood were gone too. City council signs, school board signs, Irvine mayor signs—all gone.

So I investigated. I went over to our sister neighborhood on the other side of the tennis courts. No signs. I don’t know what that neighborhood looked like yesterday, but I’ll bet there some signs there.

I went farther afield and finally found some signs. But only about half as many as there used to be. How strange. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason to which signs were left standing. When I went even farther out, signs reappeared in full force. Half a mile from my house everything was normal. Out on the main drag, signs were still piled high, just as they’ve always been.

What’s going on? Did some local busybodies decide that colorful yard signs were polluting our beautiful all-beige neighborhood? Did my local association suddenly decide they didn’t care about the First Amendment anymore? Did a yard sign neutron bomb go off? It’s very mysterious.

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Democracy Under Siege In Irvine

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LAT Poll Finally Makes It Unanimous: Donald Trump Is a Loser

by GeraldSalting0 Posted on October 12, 2016

Mother Jones

In the LA Times poll, Donald Trump has been consistently in the lead for the past month, even as other polls show Hillary Clinton ahead. Today, 27 days before November 8, doomsday has finally been postponed:

There is a 19-year-old black man in Illinois who has no idea of the role he is playing in this election. He is sure he is going to vote for Donald J. Trump….He’s a panelist on the U.S.C. Dornsife/Los Angeles Times Daybreak poll, which has emerged as the biggest polling outlier of the presidential campaign. Despite falling behind by double digits in some national surveys, Mr. Trump has generally led in the U.S.C./LAT poll.

….Our Trump-supporting friend in Illinois is a surprisingly big part of the reason. In some polls, he’s weighted as much as 30 times more than the average respondent, and as much as 300 times more than the least-weighted respondent. Alone, he has been enough to put Mr. Trump in double digits of support among black voters.

….He is also the reason Mrs. Clinton took the lead in the U.S.C./LAT poll for the first time in a month on Wednesday. The poll includes only the last seven days of respondents, and he hasn’t taken the poll since Oct. 4. Mrs. Clinton surged once he was out of the sample for the first time in several weeks.

In some way, I suppose it was worth experimenting with the unusual, panel-based design of the LA Times poll. However, their decision to weight lots of tiny subgroups separately is harder to defend. It’s the reason that one guy in Illinois can have a significant effect on the entire poll.

Nate Cohn’s piece on the LA Times poll is worth a read. It’s a very good introduction to the whole issue of poll weighting and how it works. There’s as much art as science to this stuff sometimes.

From – 

LAT Poll Finally Makes It Unanimous: Donald Trump Is a Loser

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