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Donald Trump Holds a Micro Press Conference, Comes Off As an Idiot

by DorotheaLinton Posted on December 29, 2016

Mother Jones

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We’ve had a busy day of Trump news. I know you all want to be on top of things, so here’s the latest. First, Trump was asked what he thought about Sen. Lindsey Graham’s statement that sanctions were due against Russia and Vladimir Putin for their hacking during the election. Check out his reply:

I think that computers have complicated lives very greatly. The whole age of computer has made it where nobody knows exactly what is going on. We have speed, we have a lot of other things, but I’m not sure we have the kind the security we need. But I have not spoken with the senators and I will certainly will be over a period of time.

Later, asked about Israeli settlements on the West Bank, Trump produced another bit of word salad that made it clear he had no idea what a settlement even was. This is probably why Trump hasn’t spoken to the press in such a long time. This kind of callow blather might have been entertaining when it was coming from a buffoon candidate who had no chance of winning,1 but not when it’s coming from the president-elect.

In other news, Politico reports that Trump was irritated by President Obama’s comments at Pearl Harbor yesterday. Obama said, “even when hatred burns hottest, even when the tug of tribalism is at its most primal, we must resist the urge to turn inward. We must resist the urge to demonize those who are different.” Those are fairly boilerplate remarks, but “these felt to Trump like direct criticism of the president-elect, according to two people close to Trump.” Gee, I wonder why?

Finally, Trump announced that Sprint was bringing 5,000 jobs back to America. “I just spoke with the head person,” Trump told Bloomberg. “He said because of me they’re doing 5,000 jobs in this country.” Here’s how it played in the nation’s press:

The skepticism in these headlines turns out to be warranted. Trump did indeed desperately try to take credit for this, and you will be unsurprised to learn that he was lying. First of all, Sprint announced these jobs back in April. Here’s the Kansas City Star: “Sprint Corp. is launching a nationwide service to hand-deliver new phones to customers in their homes. The Direct 2 You service, which first rolled out in a Kansas City pilot, will lead to the hiring of about 5,000 mostly full-time employees as it spreads nationwide.”

Second, the Japanese owner of Sprint, Softbank, announced in October that it was creating a huge tech investment fund.

Third, in December, Softbank’s CEO announced the fund again after a meeting with Trump, and said that one part of the whole package was the creation of 50,000 new jobs. Today, Sprint reluctantly conceded that its 5,000 jobs were part of the previously announced 50,000 jobs.

And finally, these jobs were announced yet again today.

That makes four times these jobs have been announced. Donald Trump was responsible for none of them.

1Actually, it wasn’t entertaining even back then.

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Donald Trump Holds a Micro Press Conference, Comes Off As an Idiot

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Inflationary Pressure Is Yet Again Right Around the Corner

by kandace39y Posted on November 17, 2016

Mother Jones

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Inflation! It’s always sneaking up on us:

U.S. consumer-price gains accelerated in October for the third-straight month largely due to rising energy costs, the latest sign inflation pressures in the economy are firming….The “report provided further confirmation of strong energy base effects boosting headline CPI,” said Barclays economist Blerina Uruçi. “Although core inflation rose less than expected, we still believe that domestic price pressures remain strong.”

Hold on to your britches. Here’s what the various measures of inflation look like through October:

Yes, you read that chart right. Headline CPI (the blue line) soared all the way to…1.6 percent. But of course, the Fed supposedly doesn’t care about that anyway. They care about core inflation (the red line). Core CPI is slightly above 2 percent, but has been flat all year. No acceleration there. But wait. The Fed doesn’t care about core CPI either. They rely on the PCE inflation index, which is…hovering around 1 percent (the green line). Data for October isn’t even available yet. And data for core PCE isn’t available either.

But what about future inflation? Well, the 10-year breakeven skyrocketed from 1.51 percent in September to 1.67 percent in October. In other words, expected inflation bumped upward slightly, but is still well below 2 percent and has been trending downward for the past two years:

And yet, inflation is always right around the corner. Here’s the very last paragraph of the Journal article:

Separately Thursday, data showed workers’ earnings were flat in October from September, when adjusting for inflation. Stronger inflation offset the increase hourly wages, and the average workweek was unchanged.

Yeah, inflationary pressure is really a big threat. The labor market is so tight that wages were completely flat. Sigh.

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Inflationary Pressure Is Yet Again Right Around the Corner

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Hurricane Matthew’s toll continues to climb.

by Robbie4639 Posted on October 10, 2016

The majority of Sunday’s presidential debate involved the candidates trading blows on tax returns, Donald Trump’s so-called “locker room talk” about assaulting women, and Hillary Clinton’s email account. Just when we had given up hope, energy policy got over four minutes of stage time.

Although there was no direct question about climate change, one audience member asked how the candidate’s energy policies would meet the country’s energy needs in a way that doesn’t destroy the environment.

Trump declared affection for “alternative forms of energy, including wind, including solar,” but added “we need much more than wind and solar.” He went on to say: “There is a thing called clean coal … Coal will last for 1,000 years in this country.”

Clinton responded that she has “a comprehensive energy policy, but it really does include fighting climate change, because I do think that’s a serious problem.” She described making the United States a “21st century renewable energy superpower,” while also touting natural gas as a “bridge to alternative fuels.”

This is the third debate in a row (two presidential and one vice presidential) in which environmental issues have been marginalized. The conversation on climate in the first presidential debate amounted to just 82 seconds.

Update: See Grist’s detailed fact check of last night’s energy exchange.

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Hurricane Matthew’s toll continues to climb.

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Trump wants to keep burning coal for 1,000 years.

by DaltonAlngindabu Posted on October 10, 2016

The majority of Sunday’s presidential debate involved the candidates trading blows on tax returns, Donald Trump’s so-called “locker room talk” about assaulting women, and Hillary Clinton’s email account. Just when we had given up hope, energy policy got over four minutes of stage time.

Although there was no direct question about climate change, one audience member asked how the candidate’s energy policies would meet the country’s energy needs in a way that doesn’t destroy the environment.

Trump declared affection for “alternative forms of energy, including wind, including solar,” but added “we need much more than wind and solar.” He went on to say: “There is a thing called clean coal … Coal will last for 1,000 years in this country.”

Clinton responded that she has “a comprehensive energy policy, but it really does include fighting climate change, because I do think that’s a serious problem.” She described making the United States a “21st century renewable energy superpower,” while also touting natural gas as a “bridge to alternative fuels.”

This is the third debate in a row (two presidential and one vice presidential) in which environmental issues have been marginalized. The conversation on climate in the first presidential debate amounted to just 82 seconds.

Update: See Grist’s detailed fact check of last night’s energy exchange.

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Trump wants to keep burning coal for 1,000 years.

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Obamacare’s Latest Problem is Real, But Not Fatal

by VeroniqKimball Posted on August 31, 2016

Mother Jones

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Here’s a funny thing. Conservatives have spent the past five years pointing to a long litany of alleged problems with Obamacare and gleefully predicting that each of them would lead to its downfall. They never did, either because the problems weren’t even problems, or because they were pretty small beer and didn’t really have any effect. Nonetheless, every month or two brought yet another harbinger of doom for Obamacare.

So you’d think they’d be over the moon at the moment, now that Obamacare really does appear to be facing a serious problem. Even liberals are worried about large insurers like Aetna and United Healthcare abandoning the exchanges, leaving some regions with only a single monopoly insurer. But conservatives aren’t really saying much about this. It’s kind of odd.

Maybe it’s because they’re all too freaked out by Donald Trump. I don’t know. Still, there are some who are noticing the problem and predicting the eventual demise of Obamacare. Here’s Megan McArdle:

Unfortunately, while basically everyone in the country thought that the U.S. health care system was as messed up as a party-school group house on graduation day, most people actually liked whatever coverage they had. That created a political bind: No reform could pass if it seemed to shrink any of the existing major markets in any significant way. Expanding everything would cost a boatload of money and make taxpayers freak out, so the architects of Obamacare finessed this problem with a combination of:

Opaque rules.
Disingenuously optimistic promises such as, “If you like your plan you can keep it.”
Weak versions of unpopular measures needed to make the law work, such as paltry penalties for failing to buy health insurance.
Not touching the wildly inefficient profusion of programs.

All that stuff is what has left Obamacare where it is. The dishonesty was exposed. The weak versions of European measures failed to encourage the behavior changes needed to make the system work. And the fact that every other program was left in existence, largely untouched, created new ways for patients and consumers to game the rules to get maximum reimbursements for minimum expenditure.

None of these are actually operational problems with Obamacare except for the third one. But here’s the thing: last year was the first time people actually got hit in the face with the prospect of a penalty for not having insurance. And McArdle is right: it was too small to motivate people to change their behavior—especially all those young healthy folks that insurers want. $325 for a single adult just wasn’t enough.

But this year the penalty was $695. Next year, it will be either $695 (plus a bit for inflation) or 2.5 percent of your income. For someone making, say, $30,000, that’s $750.

Is that enough? Hard to say. If your income is low, it’s more than the cost of insurance, so you might as well just get the insurance. If your income is a little higher, then it’s true that you can save money by just paying the penalty. But the net cost of insurance is probably only about $1,000 more than the penalty. Once this starts to sink in, a lot of young folks are probably going to conclude that for a hundred bucks a month they might as well sign up.

It will be a few years before we know for sure. In the meantime, it’s clear that insurers screwed up pretty badly in their initial estimates of how much it would cost to insure the typical Obamacare pool. They shoulda listened to the CBO. Still, here’s the thing I don’t get: the obvious response to insurers losing money is twofold. First, some insurers will abandon the market. Second, the surviving insurers will probably raise their prices. This is how competitive markets work. It’s messy and inconvenient, but in the end it all settles down.

The only thing that would prevent this is some kind of death spiral, as rising prices cause even more healthy people to stop buying insurance and instead just pay the penalty. This isn’t impossible. But prices won’t rise at all for low-income buyers, and are capped at 9.5 percent of income for most others. So there’s a limit to just how far this can go, even in theory.

Maybe I’m letting partisan views blind me to the scope of this problem. But I think this is a problem that Obamacare will survive. Prices will go up over the next couple of years. My guess is a rise of around 20-25 percent or so. As the penalties sink in, more young people will sign up. The most efficient insurers will remain in the market and become profitable. And yes, there will probably be individual counties here and there that have only one insurer, or even no insurers in a handful of cases.

In other words, it won’t be health care nirvana. But it will work. The end is still not nigh.

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Obamacare’s Latest Problem is Real, But Not Fatal

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How Many Classified Emails Did Hillary Clinton Send and Receive?

by PilarHarvard703 Posted on August 1, 2016

Mother Jones

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I don’t want to make a big point about this, but I want to write it down in order to get comments. Here is my understanding of the results of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s 33,000 emails:

3 were marked classified. Two of these were classified in error. The third was classified correctly but was marked improperly (and was pretty trivial anyway).
110 contained information that wasn’t marked classified, but which Hillary and her aides “should have known” was sensitive. That’s according to FBI Director James Comey. Based on previous reporting, virtually all of these probably related to the drone program in Pakistan, which was classified but had been extensively reported in the press.
About 2,000 emails were retroactively classified as part of the FOIA process.

Is this correct? Or is there some part of this that I continue not to understand?

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How Many Classified Emails Did Hillary Clinton Send and Receive?

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Here’s the Frame-by-Frame Footage of Trump’s Campaign Manager Grabbing Michelle Fields

by PQDCharity Posted on March 29, 2016

Mother Jones

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In case you’re curious, here’s a frame-by-frame breakdown of security camera footage from the Donald Trump rally in Jupiter, Florida, on March 8. It shows Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski grabbing Breitbart reporter Michelle Fields in order to get her away from Trump:

A few things are obvious here. First, Fields didn’t hallucinate anything, as both Lewandowski and Trump have implied. Second, Lewandowski did indeed grab Fields by the arm, just as she says. Third, Trump was already walking away from her at the time. Fourth, it doesn’t really look very serious. Fields is obviously a little nonplussed, but otherwise fairly unscathed.

The whole thing is crazy. It’s a minor incident, and all Lewandowski had to do was give Fields a quick call to apologize for grabbing her in his haste to catch up with his boss. Incident over. But apparently that was out of the question. Team Trump never apologizes. Instead they went on the warpath and publicly accused Fields of being nothing but an attention-seeking fantasist.

Yeah, this is definitely the team we need in the White House.

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Here’s the Frame-by-Frame Footage of Trump’s Campaign Manager Grabbing Michelle Fields

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This Ad by Republicans Against Barry Goldwater Basically Predicted Donald Trump

by LesterMcGrowdie Posted on March 25, 2016

Mother Jones

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“When the head of the Ku Klux Klan, when all these weird groups come out in favor for the candidate of my party, either they’re not Republicans or I’m not,” says the thoughtful-looking man as he stares into the camera.

You wouldn’t be at fault for assuming such a line was used to describe the existential crisis within the Republican party today, as it wrestles with the very real prospect of Donald Trump becoming its presidential nominee. But it’s actually a direct quote from “Confessions of a Republican,” a 1964 television advertisement attacking then–nominee Barry Goldwater. It features an actor playing a lifelong Republican who struggles to come to terms with the Arizona senator’s rise.

The classic campaign ad has resurfaced today because of its eerie parallels to the 2016 election and the increasingly likely chance that Trump will secure the GOP nomination.

“This man scares me,” the man in the ad says. “Now maybe I’m wrong. A friend of mine said to me ‘Listen, just because a man sounds a little irresponsible during a campaign doesn’t mean he’s going to act irresponsibly. You know, that theory that the White House makes the man—I don’t buy that.”

For nearly five minutes the actor ponders the implications of his party’s nominee, regretting that he did not go to the San Francisco convention and oppose him. He concluded by urging Republican support of the Democratic candidate, Lyndon Johnson.

“I think my party made a bad mistake in San Francisco, and I’m going to have to vote against that mistake on the third of November.”

That’s probably where the parallels to today end.

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This Ad by Republicans Against Barry Goldwater Basically Predicted Donald Trump

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Donald Trump Supporters Are Even Scarier Than You Think. These Numbers Prove It.

by SunnyCorin33131 Posted on February 24, 2016

Mother Jones

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In an election season dominated by racist and xenophobic language on the right, Donald Trump distinguishes himself even among his more outspoken Republican challengers. And according to a New York Times analysis of voters, so do his supporters, a majority of whom carry deeply intolerant attitudes toward gay people, Muslims, immigrants, and African Americans.

In fact, the report found 20 percent of Trump’s base disagree with the freeing of slaves after the Civil War, and a staggering 70 percent would still like to see the Confederate flag flying above official grounds in their states.

One-third of Trump’s primary supporters in South Carolina favored “barring gays and lesbians from entering the country.” According to the Times, this is more than twice the support this proposal received by Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio backers.

Another third of his supporters think Japanese internment was an appropriate measure.

The analysis, which used polling data from recent YouGov and Public Policy Polling results, paints a disturbing portrait of the kind of voters with whom Trump’s inflammatory messages are resonating. It could in part explain how the Republican fron-trunner has managed to clear yet another primary victory in Nevada this week.

For more on how Trump successfully tapped into South Carolina’s angry and xenophobic voters, read our deep-dive on how the state became Trump country.

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Donald Trump Supporters Are Even Scarier Than You Think. These Numbers Prove It.

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Updated: Hillary Clinton Wins the Nevada Democratic Caucuses

by DorisMunday Posted on February 20, 2016

Mother Jones

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Hillary Clinton appears to have eked out a win in the Nevada Democratic caucuses on Saturday. With more than half of precincts reporting, the networks called this third contest of the 2016 Democratic primary in Clinton’s favor around 5 p.m. ET.

Bernie Sanders kept it close, but Clinton performed well in Las Vegas’ Clark County, especially among minority voters, helping the former secretary of state hang on for the victory.

Sanders congratulated Clinton on her win, but framed the close results as something of a victory for his campaign, which was far behind in the state until the past week.

And in case you were wondering, there were no coin flips. There were, however, the far more reasonable games of high card.

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Updated: Hillary Clinton Wins the Nevada Democratic Caucuses

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