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Don’t Just Do Something, Stand There!

by AnneSASMfvyq Posted on November 5, 2014

Mother Jones

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National Review has an editorial today that’s headlined—deep breath, folks:

The Governing Trap

No, that’s not the Onion. That’s for real. NR is earnestly begging Republicans not to try to actually govern the country:

The desire to prove Republicans can govern also makes them hostage to their opponents in the Democratic party and the media. It empowers Senator Harry Reid, whose dethroning was in large measure the point of the election. If Republicans proclaim that they have to govern now that they run Congress, they maximize the incentive for the Democrats to filibuster everything they can — and for President Obama to veto the remainder. Then the Democrats will explain that the Republicans are too extreme to get anything done.

I wonder if NR’s editors have enough of a sense of humor left to be embarrassed by this? After all, this is precisely what Republicans have been doing to Democrats for six years: obstructing everything imaginable and then snickering as Dems helplessly try to explain to voters that Washington gridlock isn’t their fault, it’s the fault of that mean Mitch McConnell. Clearly NR understands how well this worked and wants to protect Republicans from having their own playbook used against them.

Beyond that, NR is afraid that trying to govern will just upset one faction or another in the GOP’s delicately balanced coalition, and that makes no sense. Who needs a bunch of crazy tea partiers stirring up trouble again? There’s no reasoning with those folks! Better to just lie low.

As cynical political strategy, it’s hard to argue with the logic here. Republicans probably are better off doing nothing for the next two years except mocking President Obama and throwing out occasional symbolic bits of red meat to keep the rubes at bay. Usually, though, this is the kind of thing you talk about quietly behind closed doors. It’s a little surprising that we’ve gotten to the point where apparently this level of cynicism is so routine that no one thinks twice about spelling it out in public in explicit detail. Welcome to modern politics.

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Don’t Just Do Something, Stand There!

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No, Democrats Aren’t a Bunch of Hopeless Wimps

by AleidaXloxni Posted on November 5, 2014

Mother Jones

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Just a quick note about an election meme that’s already driving me crazy: Democrats lost because they’re timid, vacillating milksops who can barely string together a coherent message and are congenitally unwilling to stand up for their own beliefs. No wonder everyone hates them!

Give me a break. Democrats are Democrats, and they act pretty much the same every election cycle. And yet, they won big in 2006, 2008, and 2012. If they’re such gutless milksops, how were those victories possible?

Look: every election cycle features different candidates. Obviously it’s possible that, on average, this year’s crop of Democrats were more milksoppy than usual. But here’s what’s far more likely: 2014 featured a fairly ordinary bunch of candidates, and the party’s leadership was roughly as effective and visionary (or not) as it normally is. Ditto for fundraising and GOTV efforts.

But every election cycle has structural differences. This one featured a bad Senate map for Dems. It was a midterm election. The party leader was a president whose popularity has waned. The economy continues to be listless. Washington is paralyzed by gridlock, which means that Democrats didn’t have many legislative successes to sell. And anyway, a consistent message would have been all but impossible given all the seats they had to defend in conservative states.

Maybe Dems could have done better. Maybe their message this year really was weak and stale. But if your theory of defeat is based on some enduring and egregious flaw that’s inherent in the Democratic Party, you should reconsider. It probably doesn’t explain as much as you think. Structural explanations that take account of varying conditions are almost always better.

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No, Democrats Aren’t a Bunch of Hopeless Wimps

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The Filibuster Isn’t Going Away, It’s Just Changing Parties

by ROWDarcisvg Posted on November 5, 2014

Mother Jones

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Danny Vinik says that with Democrats soon to be the minority party in the Senate, Harry Reid will employ the filibuster just as much as Mitch McConnell ever did:

Reid has a history of supporting the filibuster when in the minority and criticizing it when in the majority. There’s no reason to expect that to change with McConnell as majority leader.

And that’s a good thing. If Republicans are going to reap the political benefits of indiscriminate filibustering, then Democrats should do so as well. The advantage of filibustering is that it allows a party to block progress without taking all of the blame for it, for the simple reason that most of the public—and, surprisingly, most of the media—don’t realize that filibusters are basically thwarting majority rule. Presidential vetoes, on the other hand, are easy for the public and media to understand and easy to appropriate blame. If Democrats relinquished the tool now, they’d give up a chance to make the same sort of gains. It’d be the equivalent of unilateral disarmament.

Agreed. In fact, it never even occurred to me that Democrats might use the filibuster any less than Republicans have over the past six years. The GOP has taught a master class in the virtues of obstruction, and there’s no reason to think that Democrats haven’t learned the lesson well. The only question is whether Reid will be able to hold his caucus together as well as McConnell held together his.

Actually, I take that back. That’s not the only question. Here’s the one I’m really curious about: will the media treat Democratic filibusters the same way they treated Republican filibusters? To put this more bluntly, will they treat Dem filibusters as routine yawners barely worth mentioning? Or, alternatively, will they treat them not as expressions of sincere dissent against an agenda they loathe, but as nakedly cynical ploys employed by vengeful and bitter Democrats for no purpose other than exacting retribution against Mitch McConnell? Just asking.

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The Filibuster Isn’t Going Away, It’s Just Changing Parties

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Democrats Like It When Forecasts Show Democrats Winning

by RobertDeGillern Posted on October 31, 2014

Mother Jones

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Justin Wolfers shows us an intriguing example of confirmation bias today. It turns out that Leo, the New York Times election forecasting model, bases its forecasts on running hundreds of simulations and then taking an average. But readers who want to play around can go ahead and toss the dice themselves, generating their own random simulations. So what do readers do?

This is where confirmation bias comes in. If you’re convinced that the Republicans are going to win but your first two spins suggest a Democratic victory, you may feel deflated; perhaps you’ll spin again, in the hopes that you’ll finally get to see what a Republican victory looks like….85 percent of the time that your first two spins show a Democratic victory, you’ll keep spinning, perhaps hoping to see a Republican victory.

The same logic says that those who see the Democrats as likely to win are more likely to spin again after seeing the Republicans win in their first two spins, and once again, 85 percent of you do so.

Presumably readers are smart enough to know that these really are just random rolls of the dice that don’t mean anything. Only the average of hundreds of simulations are meaningful. And yet, many of us do it anyway. Why?

Properly speaking, I’m not sure this is actually confirmation bias. I suspect that partisans just want to avoid a feeling of hopelessness. Sure, the official results will tell them that, say, Democrats have a 34 percent chance of holding the Senate, and that should be enough. But it’s not. Democratic partisans want to see the concrete possibility of a Democratic win. Rather than confirmation bias, this shows a human preference for examples vs. statistical forecasts.

Now, I’d expect that Democrats would do this more than Republicans. After all, if Leo says Republicans have a 66 percent chance of winning, that should make Republicans pretty happy. Why bother running even a single simulation that might spoil the good news? Unfortunately, Leo’s data doesn’t tell us if this happens, because it doesn’t know who’s a Democrat and who’s a Republican. But I’ll bet I’m right.

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Democrats Like It When Forecasts Show Democrats Winning

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Chris Christie Needs to Rehearse His Lines Better

by CQZRaymonr Posted on October 30, 2014

Mother Jones

Paul Waldman comments on Chris Christie’s latest outburst against a heckler:

My favorite part is how Christie keeps calling him “buddy” (reminded me of this). Now try to imagine what would happen if Barack Obama shouted “Sit down and shut up!” at a citizen. Or almost any other prominent politician, for that matter; commentators would immediately start questioning his mental health. But even though it’s been a while, shouting at people was how Chris Christie became a national figure talked about as a potential presidential candidate in the first place….If you standup at a town meeting and ask him an impertinent question about something like the state budget, he’ll shout you down (to the cheers of his supporters).

Here are a few ways to explain this pattern of behavior:

  1. This is a calculated way of showing that he’s a Tough Guy, which Christie knows Republicans love
  2. This is just who Christie is, and if nobody was around he’d still be picking fights with people
  3. Both 1 and 2

I lean toward number 3. It isn’t just play-acting, because Christie obviously gets sincerely pissed off when he’s challenged by people he thinks are beneath him. At the same time, he’s a smart enough politician to know that the cameras are on, and there’s some benefit to reinforcing the persona he has created.

I admit that this is mostly just curiosity on my part, since Christie’s act long ago got nearly as stale as Sarah Palin’s. But take a look at the video. Unlike Waldman, I vote for No. 1. To me, Christie appears entirely under control. I don’t doubt that there’s some real annoyance there (even a Vulcan would get annoyed at your average heckler), but overall Christie’s response gives the impression of being practically scripted. There are even a couple of instances where Christie seems like he forgot his lines and hurriedly tosses them in before heckler guy goes away and ruins his chance to get off his best zingers.

So vote in comments. Is it real anger, or has it just become a well-rehearsed schtick by now? In this case, at least, I vote for schtick.

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Chris Christie Needs to Rehearse His Lines Better

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In NSA Bills, the Devil Is in the Details

by ReginalJobe Posted on October 29, 2014

Mother Jones

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Sen. Patrick Leahy says that his USA FREEDOM bill will stop the NSA’s bulk collection of phone data. H.L. Pohlman says it’s not quite that easy:

In Presidential Policy Directive (PPD-28) issued in January 2014, the Obama administration defined “bulk collection” as the acquisition “of large quantities of signals intelligence data which . . . is acquired without the use of discriminants (e.g., specific identifiers, selection terms, etc.).” Thus, as long as the government uses a “discriminant,” a selection term, no matter how broad that term might be, the government is not engaged in a “bulk collection” program.

….The USA FREEDOM Act does not guarantee, then, that the government’s database of telephone metadata will be smaller than it is now. It all depends on the generality of the selection terms that the government will use to obtain metadata from the telephone companies. And we don’t know what those terms will be.

This is a longstanding issue that’s been brought up by lots of people lots of times. It’s not some minor subtlety. If the government decides to look for “all calls from the 213 area code,” that’s not necessarily bulk collection even though it would amass millions of records. It would be up to a judge to decide.

If and when we get close to Congress actually considering bills to rein in the NSA—about which I’m only modestly optimistic in the first place—this is going to be a key thing to keep an eye on. As the ACLU and the EFF and others keep reminding us, reining in the NSA isn’t a simple matter of “ending” their bulk collection program. The devil is truly in the details, and tiny changes in wording can literally mean the difference between something that works and something that’s useless. Or maybe even worse than useless. As Pohlman points out, if you choose the right words, the NSA could end up having a freer hand than they do today. This is something to pay close attention to.

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In NSA Bills, the Devil Is in the Details

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This Congressional Race Is a Battle for the Heart and Soul of Silicon Valley

by Mohamme6022 Posted on October 27, 2014

Mother Jones

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California’s most competitive and closely watched political race this year is a battle for the hearts and minds of Silicon Valley. It pits US Rep. Mike Honda, a 73-year-old, seven-term progressive backed by organized labor, against fellow Democrat Ro Khanna, a young patent attorney who has never held elected office but is bankrolled by the Valley’s tech elite.

“Honda and I basically share the same values,” Khanna told me—but they differ in their willingness to work across the aisle: “I can articulate a progressive vision that appeals to independent and Republican voters and helps broaden the appeal of the Democratic Party,” he says. “Ultimately, I think I will be a more effective messenger for Democratic values than Congressman Honda.”

Why wasn’t this fight decided in the June primary, as it would have been in almost any other state? After all, Khanna finished more than 20 points behind Honda in that contest. But California’s new nonpartisan primary system, which went into effect two years ago, allows the top two vote-winners, regardless of party, to face each other in the general election. A lot has changed since June too. According to a poll released last week, the race is now a dead heat, with Honda at 37 percent of likely votes to Khanna’s 35 percent—a difference less than the poll’s margin of error.

The race has national significance for what it says about the rising political power of the tech industry. Honda is a progressive icon who grew up in a Japanese American internment camp and spent 20 years as a schoolteacher and high school principal. But in a district that includes Apple, Cisco, Intel, and Yahoo, he is viewed by some as out of touch with the demands of the innovation economy.

Khanna is a “young, dynamic, hard-driving candidate who understands the unique issues facing Silicon Valley right now,” Napster founder and early Facebook investor Sean Parker said at a Khanna fundraiser in San Francisco that drew Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer and a slew of other prominent tech execs and venture capitalists.

Khanna often portrays his campaign as the equivalent of a tech startup—a nimble, bare-bones outfit bent on disrupting the status quo. “It’s a fair comparison in the sense that the odds of a startup succeeding are a few percent and the odds of displacing an incumbent are a few percent,” he says.

And like many startups, Khanna seems to have attracted tech donors based more on his educational pedigree and the force of his ideas than his actual accomplishments. “Politics is not a business,” Khanna concedes when I press him on the analogy. “Your job is to care about a community, to be in touch with a community, to express empathy, to care about people who haven’t necessarily had the same opportunities. Politics is much more nuanced and values-based.”

Though caricatured by the Honda campaign as “Republican lite,” Khanna certainly isn’t conservative by national standards. He supports increasing overall taxes on the rich, supports paid maternity leave and child care tax credits, and creating an Internet Bill of Rights that would outlaw mass surveillance and allow people to know how tech companies use their data. He has been endorsed by the San Francisco Chronicle and San Jose Mercury News, which wrote that Khanna “is ready for the Congress of tomorrow, while Honda is a politician of the past.”

That critique isn’t entirely fair, however, and may partly reflect Silicon Valley’s notorious ageism. Far from being out of step, Honda has cosponsored legislation that would double the number of H-1B visas. (Tech companies have long agitated for more H-1Bs.) He also pushed for a national “Entrepreneur in Residence” and passed a bill authorizing $3.7 billion for nanotechnology research.

Khanna, though, has clearly done more to court business interests. He won the endorsement of the Silicon Valley Chamber of Commerce, which Honda would not meet with. And he has made an economic agenda based upon government-backed education and scientific research the centerpiece of his campaign. Those differences wouldn’t matter much in a typical Bay Area race between a Democrat and Republican, but they may prove important in a Dem vs. Dem contest in which independents and Republicans will provide the swing vote.

The most meaningful policy difference between Honda and Khanna is their approach to taxes. Both say the rich should pay a larger share, but Honda wants to go further to raise taxes on capital gains. Taxing profits from investments at the same rate as regular income, as he proposes, favors salaried workers over high-level executives, big investors, and employees at pre-IPO startups who take much of their compensation in stock or options.

“We need to make sure that everyone is paying their fair share in taxes, including millionaires and billionaires,” Honda said in a statement provided by his staff. “Warren Buffett has said that it’s wrong for him to be taxed at a lower rate than his secretary, and I agree. That’s why I was for full repeal of the Bush tax cuts which favor the most wealthy, and for taxing capital gains as regular income. I also support raising the minimum wage and increasing Social Security benefits, two policies that are crucial to reducing income inequality.”

Khanna readily admits that he’s less interested in taking from the rich to help the poor. “While there may be a disagreement in DC on redistributive government spending, there shouldn’t be a disagreement on productive government spending”—i.e., investments to spur the economy, he says. “I think Silicon Valley can help make that case, that there are areas of government spending on basic science and research that help make America an economic superpower. It is better to have a message that can get Republicans and independents to support a strong agenda, instead of just talking to your own group.”

I asked Khanna if he’d ever heard of the Jungle, a San Jose homeless encampment that is by some accounts the largest in the country. He hadn’t. “I should know about it, candidly,” he said. “I don’t think the tech community and those who have done well are sufficiently empathetic to that.” He talked up using public-private partnerships to build affordable housing, adding: “We don’t just live in communities with computer scientists.”

But there are clearly more of them in the Valley than there used to be, which is one reason Khanna may have a crack at going to Washington.

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This Congressional Race Is a Battle for the Heart and Soul of Silicon Valley

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You Thought California’s Drought Couldn’t Get Any Worse? Enter Fracking.

by QBIBiancadiktn Posted on October 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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I have a great idea. Let’s take one of the globe’s most important agricultural regions, one with severe water constraints and a fast-dropping water table. And let’s set up shop there with a highly water-intensive form of fossil fuel extraction, one that throws off copious amounts of toxic wastewater. Nothing could possibly go wrong … right? Well…

Almost 3 billion gallons of oil industry wastewater have been illegally dumped into central California aquifers that supply drinking water and farming irrigation, according to state documents obtained by the Center for Biological Diversity. The wastewater entered the aquifers through at least nine injection disposal wells used by the oil industry to dispose of waste contaminated with fracking fluids and other pollutants.

The documents also reveal that Central Valley Water Board testing found high levels of arsenic, thallium and nitrates—contaminants sometimes found in oil industry wastewater—in water-supply wells near these waste-disposal operations.

That’s from the Center for Biological Diversity. Hat tip DeSmogBlog.

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You Thought California’s Drought Couldn’t Get Any Worse? Enter Fracking.

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Now Your Food Has Fake DNA in It

by HRYRachell Posted on August 20, 2014

Mother Jones

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Like many novel technologies in this age of TED Talks and Silicon Valley triumphalism, synthetic biology—synbio for short—floats on a sea of hype. One of its founding scientists, Boston University biomedical engineer James Collins, has called it “genetic engineering on steroids.” Whereas garden-variety genetic engineers busy themselves moving genes from one organism into another—to create tomatoes that don’t bruise easily, for example—synthetic biologists generate new DNA sequences the way programmers write code, creating new life-forms.

It may sound like science fiction, but synbio companies have already performed modest miracles. The California-based firm Amyris, for example, has harnessed the technology to make a malaria drug that now comes from a tropical plant. In order to do this, company scientists leveraged the well-known transformative powers of yeast, which humans have used for millennia to turn, say, the sugar in grape juice into alcohol: They figured out how the wormwood tree generates artemisinic acid—the compound that makes up the globe’s last consistently effective anti-malarial treatment—and programmed a yeast strain to do the same thing.

And there could be more innovations on the horizon. In 2011, Craig Venter, the scientist/entrepreneur who spearheaded the mapping of the human genome, vowed to synthesize an algae that would use sunlight to unlock the energy in carbon dioxide. If successful, this attempt to replicate photosynthesis could transform CO2 from climate-heating scourge into a limitless source of energy. Synthetic biologists also aim to conjure up self-growing buildings, streetlight-replacing glowing trees, and medicines tailored to your body’s needs. No wonder the market for synbio is expected to reach $13.4 billion by 2019.

So how soon can you expect glowing trees to light up your block? Well, no one knows. That’s because thus far it has been much easier to create novel life-forms than to control how they function. Venter, for example, hasn’t yet figured out how to cheaply grow enough of his synbio algae to make it competitive with fossil fuels. And malaria is rapidly developing resistance to artemisin drugs, which could eventually render the synbio replicant as useless as the real deal.

But while synbio likely won’t sort out our climate and health woes anytime soon, it just might transform our…ice cream. By creating yeasts that produce high-end flavorings, a Swiss company called Evolva has created synbio vanillin, the main flavor compound in the vanilla bean—and it insists its product tastes much better than the petroleum-derived synthetic vanillin that now comprises virtually all of the vanilla market. Evolva is also preparing to release a synbio version of resveratrol, a compound with antioxidant properties naturally found in grapes and cocoa beans. Next up: a better-tasting version of stevia, a natural, low-calorie sweetener that the soda industry hopes can replace synthetic chemicals in diet sodas. After that, Evolva hopes to make a dizzying variety of lab-grown analogues, including musk, truffle flavoring, and even breast milk.

What could possibly go wrong with vanilla flavoring brewed by DNA-manipulated yeast? Well, like genetic engineering, synbio falls into a regulatory void that often allows products to go from lab to grocery store with little or no oversight. Evolva’s vanillin and resveratrol will likely sail through the Food and Drug Administration’s approval process—and end up in your food without any special labeling—because they are versions of already-existing compounds and thus have “generally recognized as safe” status. The Environmental Protection Agency—which is supposed to evaluate the environmental implications of new products—requires companies to file a report on novel microbes but doesn’t always mandate testing.

And what happens to farmers when their jobs are taken over by designer yeasts? Jim Thomas, the research program manager for the Canada-based technology watchdog ETC Group, points out that synbio companies are so far targeting stuff grown in the Global South, which could have devastating economic consequences for the poor farmers who produce the natural versions. In addition to vanilla (grown in Madagascar, Indonesia, and Mexico) and stevia (China, Paraguay, and Kenya), Evolva’s projected roster of products includes saffron (Iran), turmeric (India), and ginseng (China).

Evolva CEO Neil Goldsmith says that Thomas raises a “legitimate question” but doesn’t think farmers will ultimately be harmed. He argues that synthetic vanillin has existed for decades without taking business away from natural vanilla producers. But that could be because consumers are willing to pay more for the real version. If Evolva is allowed to market its vanillin as a “natural” flavoring rather than a synthetic one, then it could compete directly with vanilla farmers—and it looks like Evolva is aiming to do just that: A recent press release called the product “natural vanillin for global food and flavor markets.”

Indeed, Goldsmith claims that his process is “as natural as bread.” Yeasts used in commercial bakeries have been carefully selected and cultivated. Now, you may consider creating new DNA to be an entirely different matter, but whether you find it creepy or cool ultimately doesn’t matter: Because synbio foods won’t have to be labeled as such, you’ll likely soon be eating them—without even knowing it.

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Now Your Food Has Fake DNA in It

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Twitter Releases Its Diversity Stats. And Boy, Are They Embarrassing.

by RafaelClopton Posted on July 23, 2014

Mother Jones

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Twitter today followed in the footsteps of Google, Yahoo, LinkedIn, and Facebook by releasing statistics on the race and gender of its workforce. The company certainly deserves credit for voluntarily making its diversity stats public, unlike, say, Apple. “Like our peers, we have a lot of work to do,” Janet Van Huysse, its VP of diversity and inclusion, admits on the company blog. But perhaps that’s an understatement; Twitter actually lags far behind its peers on some key measures. For instance, only 1 out of every 10 Twitter tech employees is a woman:

Twitter

In case you’re wondering, other large tech companies have significantly better gender diversity (though it’s still abysmal compared to professions such as law or medicine). At Facebook and Yahoo, 15 percent of tech workers are women. At Google and LinkedIn, it’s 17 percent. In 2010, Mike Swift of the San Jose Mercury News found that women held 24 percent of computer and mathematics jobs in Silicon Valley and 27 percent of those jobs nationally (though those categories may be broader than how they’re defined by leading tech companies, as Tasneem Raja explores in this great piece on America’s growing gap in tech literacy).

More MoJo coverage of diversity in tech.


Silicon Valley Firms Are Even Whiter and More Male Than You Thought


Is Coding the New Literacy?


Charts: Tech’s Pipeline Problem


Silicon Valley’s Awful Race and Gender Problem in 3 Mind-Blowing Charts


Twitter Releases Its Diversity Stats. And Boy, Are They Embarrassing.

Unlike its peers, Twitter can’t entirely blame its dearth of female coders on the talent pipeline: About 18 percent of computer science graduates are women. Instead, Van Huysse points to a slew of efforts to “move the needle” at Twitter, such as supporting the groups Girls Who Code and sf.girls and hosting “Girl Geek Dinners.”

As other reporters have noted, major tech firms started releasing their workforce data shortly after I obtained a batch of Silicon Valley diversity figures from the Labor Department and began asking them for comment. But pressure to release the stats has also come from a campaign by Color of Change and Rev. Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Push Coalition, which have demanded the stats during a string of private meetings with Valley execs, and last week launched a Twitter-based campaign to urge Twitter to make its diversity numbers public. Strikingly, only 1 percent of Twitter’s tech workforce and 2 percent of its overall workforce is African-American:

Jackson argues that improving Twitter’s diversity isn’t just the right thing to do; it’s also a good business decision. It turns out that “Black Twitter” isn’t just a meme. According to a recent Pew survey, 22 percent of African-American internet users are on Twitter, while only 16 percent of White internet users tweet. Meanwhile, usage of Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+ is roughly the same between Blacks and Whites.

In short, Twitter might make more money by hiring more people who reflect its audience. “There is no talent deficit, there’s an opportunity deficit,” Jackson said in a press release responding to Twitter’s data. “When everyone is ‘in,’ everyone wins.”

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Twitter Releases Its Diversity Stats. And Boy, Are They Embarrassing.

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