Tag Archives: transgender

Donald Trump’s Hatemongering Moves on to African-Americans

by Sheena25Szik Posted on November 22, 2015

Mother Jones

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Having already played the hate card against Mexicans and Muslims—and getting crackerjack results—Donald Trump has apparently decided to move on to African-Americans. I don’t know what the “Crime Statistics Bureau” in San Francisco is, and I don’t think I want to know, but one of the most well-established facts about murder in the United States is that it’s pretty racially segregated. Whites kill whites, blacks kill blacks, etc. But today Trump decided to tweet the CSB graphic on the right, for no readily apparent reason. And wouldn’t you know it: it contains a wee racial error. It claims that most whites are killed by blacks, but in 2014, which is the latest full-year homicide data available from the FBI, 82 percent of whites were killed by other whites and only 15 percent were killed by blacks.

Trump’s tweeted graphic swaps the the numbers for the offender’s race—but only for white victims. For black victims, the numbers in the graphic are roughly correct. This makes it look like blacks kill everyone. And just in case these numbers are too subtle for you, it includes a stereotypical black thug to make sure you get the picture. Donald Trump has found his audience, and he knows what they want. So he’s giving it to them.

UPDATE: Come on, folks. This graphic is not “controversial” and it’s not “questionable.” It’s wrong. Period. The numbers for white victims are swapped in a grossly obvious way intended to make a racist point. FFS.

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Donald Trump’s Hatemongering Moves on to African-Americans

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How Good a Dealmaker Is Donald Trump, Anyway?

by HildredRMXD Posted on November 22, 2015

Mother Jones

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Here is Donald Trump on who he listens to regarding economic issues:

Honestly, I feel that I have such a vast feeling for it that I really—you know, Milton Friedman was good—but I don’t really listen to anybody. I just put it in and I have a feeling for, it’s almost common sense, it’s a business instinct.

Translation: Milton Friedman is the only conservative economist he can think of. And he probably wouldn’t listen to the guy if he were still alive anyway. Why mess with his killer instincts?

Which raises two questions. First: How good a developer is Donald Trump? Seriously. My sense is that he’s about a 5 on a scale of 1-10. He’s had some successes, he’s had some failures, and he seems to have found a decent—but hardly dazzling—niche in golf resorts. Overall, he started with a lot of money and has since grown his business at roughly the rate of the economy. Not bad, but nothing to crow about.

And second: why is it that we seem to have heard nothing about Trump from other developers? They’d have the best read on how good he really is, after all. If he were truly brilliant, I figure he would have been soliciting testimonials all over the place. I haven’t seen any. But if he’s a second-rater with a big mouth, I figure we would have heard that too. But I haven’t. I haven’t really heard anything. Do developers not like to talk smack about each other because they never know where their next deal might come from? Do they just generally shun publicity? Do they genuinely not know much about Trump because he doesn’t really do much business these days aside from golf courses, branding deals, and TV shows?

What’s the deal here? Trump must have a reputation within the New York developer community. So what is it?

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How Good a Dealmaker Is Donald Trump, Anyway?

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How Big a Deal is the SAFE Act?

by HollisDjfrzp Posted on November 21, 2015

Mother Jones

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Dante Atkins on the SAFE Act:

The bill requires the specific signatures of three high-ranking officials to personally approve refugees into the United States, a burden that both Republicans and the White House believe would all but cease the flow of refugees into the United States because it is believed that said officials would be too fearful of the career implications should one of the detainees turn out to become even a mere criminal, much less a terrorist.

I have to say, this bill has me confused. After looking into it, I wrote a post a couple of days ago suggesting that it was mostly symbolic. The vetting process didn’t change, it just needed to be documented and “certified” by the White House. Beyond that, some top officials would get half a dozen refugee approvals every day for their autopen to sign. Big deal. The only real effect would be a short pause while the certification was drafted and signed off.

Since then, though, every single story I’ve read about this bill describes it on a spectrum from “tightening” requirements to virtually shutting down the flow of refugees from Syria entirely. None of them ever provide any details, though. They talk about background checks, but the FBI already does background checks on refugees from Syria and Iraq. They talk about tougher procedures, but there are no new procedures in the bill. The actual vetting process itself is left up to the executive branch.

And yet, the White House is dead set against this bill, which it probably wouldn’t be if it was mostly just symbolic. So I remain puzzled. What’s the real deal with this bill? Is it really likely that, say, the Director of National Intelligence would simply refuse to ever sign off on a refugee approval? Hell, the DNI already signs off on hundreds of things with more potential for blowback than that.

I dunno. It’s all very strange.

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How Big a Deal is the SAFE Act?

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Friday Cat Blogging – 20 November 2015

by DanielaKenneall Posted on November 20, 2015

Mother Jones

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This has sure been a crappy week, and Hilbert and Hopper agree. As you can see, they decided to flee upstairs to the bedroom and adopt disapproving looks. Those are for Donald Trump. They are hoping that us human types can do more than just glower, so let’s get to it.

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Friday Cat Blogging – 20 November 2015

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John Roberts Now Officially the Fourth Conservative Sellout on the Supreme Court

by LorrieThomson Posted on June 25, 2015

Mother Jones

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From Quin Hillyer at National Review:

With today’s Obamacare decision, John Roberts confirms that he has completely jettisoned all pretense of textualism. He is a results-oriented judge, period, ruling on big cases based on what he thinks the policy result should be or what the political stakes are for the court itself. He is a disgrace. That is all.

So there you have it. Roberts has now joined a long line of conservative sellouts, from Harry Blackmun to John Paul Stevens to David Souter. After Souter, Republicans swore this would never happen again and insisted on nominating only hardline conservatives with a long paper trail: Clarence Thomas, John Roberts, and Sam Alito. But now Roberts has let them down. It turns out that the ability to hold onto conservative principles while serving under Ronald Reagan is insignificant next to the power of the Washington DC cocktail party circuit.

Still, at least Republicans can now end their embarrassing charade of pretending to have a plan to fix things up if the court had ended Obamacare subsidies in states without their own exchanges. I think it’s pretty safe to say that even the pretense of “working on” a plan to replace Obamacare will now be dumped quietly on the ash heap of history—until Republicans have a presidential nominee in hand, at which point the charade will have to start all over. But I think we already know what their bold new plan it will contain. There are few surprises in the land of conservative ideas.

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John Roberts Now Officially the Fourth Conservative Sellout on the Supreme Court

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The Wit and Wisdom of Antonin Scalia, the Supreme Court’s Lovable Curmudgeon

by KatherineUbc Posted on June 25, 2015

Mother Jones

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Here is Antonin Scalia’s dissent in the Obamacare case. Although Scalia would not approve, I have arranged the excerpts out of order so they make more sense and are more amusing. I have also eliminated all the legal arguments and other boring parts. You can always read the full opinion here if you want. For now, though, tell us what you really think, Mr Scalia:

Words no longer have meaning if an Exchange that is not established by a State is “established by the State.”

Yet the opinion continues, with no semblance of shame, that “it is also possible that the phrase refers to all Exchanges—both State and Federal.”

But normal rules of interpretation seem always to yield to the overriding principle of the present Court: The Affordable Care Act must be saved. Scalia makes it clear throughout that he’s still really pissed about losing the original Obamacare case in 2012. –ed.

Contrivance, thy name is an opinion on the Affordable Care Act!

Faced with overwhelming confirmation that “Exchange established by the State” means what it looks like it means, the Court comes up with argument after feeble argument to support its contrary interpretation.

The Court’s next bit of interpretive jiggery-pokery involves other parts of the Act that purportedly presuppose the availability of tax credits on both federal and state Exchanges….Pure applesauce.

The somersaults of statutory interpretation they have performed…will be cited by litigants endlessly, to the confusion of honest jurisprudence. And the cases will publish forever the discouraging truth that the Supreme Court of the United States favors some laws over others, and is prepared to do whatever it takes to uphold and assist its favorites.

We should start calling this law SCOTUScare.

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The Wit and Wisdom of Antonin Scalia, the Supreme Court’s Lovable Curmudgeon

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It’s Time for Another Obama Apology Tour

by DemetriCzc Posted on June 24, 2015

Mother Jones

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Here’s our latest “crisis”:

French President Francois Hollande held a crisis meeting of the country’s Defense Council on Wednesday after newspapers published WikiLeaks documents showing that the United States eavesdropped on him and two predecessors.

After the meeting, the council issued a statement lambasting U.S. spying as “unacceptable” and declaring that France had demanded two years ago that the National Security Agency stop snooping on its leaders. The latest WikiLeaks revelations, published by the daily newspaper Liberation and the investigative news website Mediapart, claim the NSA eavesdropped on telephone conversations of former Presidents Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy as well as Hollande.

Look, can’t we just assume the NSA has been spying on every world leader around the globe? Clearly, the answer is for President Obama to put this finally to rest by embarking on an apology tour of the entire planet—except for leaders we don’t like and plan to keep spying on. This will accomplish two things: (a) it will take care of the whole spying thing all at once, instead of having it dribble out every month or two, and (b) Obama really would go on an apology tour, which would make Republicans deliriously happy. Finally they’d be able to accuse him of going on an apology tour and they wouldn’t even have to lie about it. How cool is that?

Then, when it’s all over, we can go back to spying on everyone, except more carefully. I mean, you didn’t really think we were going to stop spying on these guys, did you?

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It’s Time for Another Obama Apology Tour

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Home Weatherization Not As Good a Deal As We Thought

by DemetriBon Posted on June 24, 2015

Mother Jones

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Brad Plumer passes along some bad news on the effectiveness of residential energy efficiency upgrades. A massive controlled test in Michigan showed that it doesn’t pay for itself:

The researchers found that the upfront cost of efficiency upgrades came to about $5,000 per house, on average. But their central estimate of the benefits only amounted to about $2,400 per household, on average, over the lifetime of the upgrades. Yes, the households were using 10 to 20 percent less energy for electricity and heating than before — but that was only half the savings that had been expected ahead of time. And households weren’t saving nearly enough on their utility bills to justify the upfront investment.

The culprit appears to be the real world. Engineering studies suggest that residential upgrades should pay for themselves in lower energy costs within a few years, but in real life the quality of the upgrades is never as good as the engineering studies assume:

These engineering studies may not always capture the messiness of the real world. It’s easy to generate ideal conditions in a lab. But outside the lab, homes are irregularly shaped, insulation isn’t always installed by highly skilled workers, and there are all sorts of human behaviors that might reduce the efficacy of efficiency investments.

….In this particular study, the economists found that the federal home weatherization program was not a particularly cheap way to reduce CO2 emissions. Although energy use (and hence carbon pollution) from the homes studied did go down, it came at a cost of about $329 per ton of carbon. That’s much higher than the $38-per-ton value of the social cost of carbon that the US federal government uses to evaluate cost-effective climate policies.

Back to the drawing board.

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Home Weatherization Not As Good a Deal As We Thought

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Fabulous Health News

by RickOuellette Posted on April 6, 2015

Mother Jones

I am blogging direct from the Apheresis Center at the City of Hope in Duarte, California. There’s a large machine to my left that makes ticking noises and—hopefully—is drawing blood from one of the catheters in my Hickman Port. The stem cells are then removed and the remaining blood is returned through the other catheter in the Hickman Port.

There was some question about whether this would happen today. You see, my daily Neupogen injections are supposed to stimulate my white blood cell production and therefore my plasma stem cell production. The goal is for my stem cell production to be above 10, and if it’s lower than that, there’s no point in doing the collection.

So earlier this morning they drew some blood to test my CD34 level. It was….

102.00.

This is superheroic performance, though the nurse declined to tell me if I had set a new world record. In any case, this is great news for two reasons. First, it means no more Neupogen shots. Second, it means that I’m likely to be finished here in two or three days. Yippee!

And this surely demands a treat for everyone. So here’s some bonus catblogging. As you can see, Hilbert has cleverly used staircase access to perch himself on the top of Karen’s bookcase, where he is lord of all he surveys. As usual.

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Fabulous Health News

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Health Interlude

by StephanCCCG Posted on April 5, 2015

Mother Jones

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“Flu-like symptoms” my ass.

The last couple of days have been a horror story. On Thursday afternoon, out of the blue, I started having intense lower back pain. Then it got worse. By late evening it was bad enough that I took some morphine, which had very little effect. It got worse through my sleepless night. More morphine at 2 am, then more again at 7 am on Friday morning. At that point, the pain was so excruciating that I wanted to head over to our local ER, but unfortunately Friday was the day we were scheduled to go to LA to have my Hickman port installed for the stem cell transplant. Marian, thank God, insisted on us doing the right thing: driving to LA regardless and getting help there. (On the bright side, Good Friday traffic was light.)

I was practically writhing on the floor for the hour after we got there. Eventually I was taken back to prep, and the doctor tried IV morphine. It had only a minor effect. Then he gave me several IV infusions of Dilaudid, and that did the trick. I was still in pain, but it was tolerable.

Unfortunately, our timing was bad. The Dilaudid was wearing off just as the surgery to install the port began, and they could give me only a limited additional amount until it was over. So the surgery was a horror story too, even though the placement of the port is basically pretty painless.

Long story short, all of this might have been the result of my Neupogen injections, which make my bones work overtime. But my doctors all agreed that although back pain is a common effect of Neupogen, pain of my level was very unusual. Alternatively, all of this could have been due to a pathological fracture in my lower back. A CAT scan ruled that out, thank goodness. So we still don’t know for sure what was going on. But after a very bad day and night, apparently the Dilaudid was the right painkiller, and I woke up in the hospital Saturday morning feeling surprisingly good. I would have given long odds against that Friday night.

So….very mysterious. And for me personally, a whole new definition of pain. Hopefully it won’t return.

Need a silver lining? As bad as it all was, it was apparently a sign that the Neupogen is working. Routine bloodwork shows that my white cell count is high and getting higher. Hooray! That’s what we’re hoping for.

On Monday we start putting the Hickman port to use. I will be up at City of Hope for 2-5 days while they extract stem cells and then process them and freeze them. If I’m producing lots of stem cells, they’ll finish up in a couple of days. If I’m producing a weak stream of stem cells, it may take as long as five days. Cross your fingers.

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Health Interlude

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