Tag Archives: woman

Chart of the Day: Thanks to Obamacare, Medical Debt Is Down

by Franche0713 Posted on January 15, 2015

Mother Jones

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A new survey from the Commonwealth Fund brings us good news and bad news. The good news is that, thanks to Obamacare, the number of people with serious medical debt issues has dropped from 41 percent to 35 percent. Hooray!

And the bad news? This barely gets us back to where we were a decade ago. We still have a long way to go.

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Chart of the Day: Thanks to Obamacare, Medical Debt Is Down

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Watch: Maggie Gyllenhaal Just Gave a Perfect Golden Globes Speech

by PenelopO37 Posted on January 12, 2015

Mother Jones

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Maggie Gyllenhaal is great. She just won the Best Actress in a Miniseries or TV Movie Golden Globe for “The Honourable Woman.” Her speech was perfect.

“I’ve noticed a lot of people talking about the wealth of roles for powerful women in television lately. And when I look around the room at the women who are here and I think about the performances that I’ve watched this year what I see actually are women who are sometimes powerful and sometimes not, sometimes sexy, sometimes not, sometimes honorable, sometimes not, and what I think is new is the wealth of roles for actual women in television and in film. That’s what I think is revolutionary and evolutionary and it’s what’s turning me on.”

Watch, watch, watch:

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Watch: Maggie Gyllenhaal Just Gave a Perfect Golden Globes Speech

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Thanksgiving Films, Ranked

by PearleneKfe Posted on November 26, 2014

Mother Jones

Ho ho ho and merry Thanksgiving! Here is a ranking of twenty Thanksgiving films. What is a “Thanksgiving film”? For the purposes of this post it is a film that is both a) on Wikipedia’s list, and b) one I, Ben Dreyfuss, immediately recall seeing and have an opinion about.

1. Hannah and Her Sisters

2. Rocky

3. Scent of a Woman

4. Rocky II

5. Planes, Trains, and Automobiles

6. Home for the Holidays

7. Avalon

8. The Ice Storm

9. The Morning After

10. For Your Consideration

11. Grumpy Old Men

12. Addams Family Values

13. Funny People

14. Spider-Man

15. The Object of My affection

16. The Other Sister

17. Bean

18. Son in Law

18. Tower Heist

19. Unknown

20. Jack and Jill

Disclosure: I haven’t actually seen Jack and Jill but I’m pretty confident it’s the worst. Also, The Last Waltz was not included in this ranking because though it is on the Wikipedia list of Thanksgiving films, it shouldn’t be. Still pretty good though!

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Thanksgiving Films, Ranked

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NYPD Officer Allegedly Caught On Video Throwing Pregnant Woman To the Ground

by GloriaBurdine Posted on September 24, 2014

Mother Jones

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Yet another video has surfaced capturing what appears to be a violent arrest conducted by an officer of the New York Police Department.

In the video caught by a bystander over the weekend, a visibly pregnant Sandra Amezquita and her husband Ronel Lemos say they were attempting to intervene while officers arrested Amezquita’s son, seen sitting on the ground.

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The arresting officer suddenly slams Amezquita to the ground, right before he forcefully shoves another woman out of the way.

“What we saw in that gruesome video is a woman who’s trying to protect her son, who is being stopped and frisked by police, and she herself became a victim, slammed onto the floor,” said Dennis Flores, from local blog El Grito de Sunset Park, the site that first posted the video.

“The first thing I thought was they killed by baby and they’re going to kill my wife,” Lemos said.

Amezquita says she suffered vaginal bleeding and bruises to her stomach. She was given a summons for disorderly conduct; Lemos was arrested for hitting an officer.

The disturbing incident comes just less than a week after another officer, from the same Brooklyn precinct, was suspended after being caught on video kicking a street vendor in the head.

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The NYPD is reportedly investigating the latest video.

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NYPD Officer Allegedly Caught On Video Throwing Pregnant Woman To the Ground

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Bank Robber Adds New Dimension to Old Definition of Chutzpah

by JaysonCJAP Posted on August 12, 2014

Mother Jones

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Woman helps rob bank in elaborate scheme, then files workers comp claim for PTSD. She’s now facing charges of insurance fraud in addition to the nine years in a federal penitentiary she’s already earned. Welcome to California.

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Bank Robber Adds New Dimension to Old Definition of Chutzpah

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Happy Tuesday! Here Is a Video of Thousands of Noisy, Rampaging Ducks

by IleneAugustin Posted on June 17, 2014

Mother Jones

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Enjoy.

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Happy Tuesday! Here Is a Video of Thousands of Noisy, Rampaging Ducks

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Ruby Dee Was a Badass

by ArchieBirnie Posted on June 12, 2014

Mother Jones

On Wednesday, actress Ruby Dee passed away at the age of 91. Her long career brought her much acclaim and many honors, including an Academy Award nomination for her work in Ridley Scott’s American Gangster. She, along with her late husband and fellow actor Ossie Davis, was also famous for her civil rights activism, which dated back to the 1950s.

Dee began attending protests as a child, joining picket lines to campaign against hiring discrimination. She and Davis emceed the 1963 March on Washington where Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his landmark “I Have a Dream” speech. They rallied against apartheid in South Africa. In 1999, they were arrested while protesting the death of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed immigrant from Guinea, who was gunned down by four NYPD officers. And the list goes on.

“I never remember, like, saying, ‘I’m gonna join the civil rights movement’—that’s all I knew all my life, some aspect of it, even before it was called the civil rights movement,” Dee once told an interviewer from the Archive of American Television. “When I first, years ago, saw my first picture of black men hanging from trees, well, I could scarcely know the meaning of things. Or, I remember things that stuck in my head, this family strung up and the woman was pregnant and they opened the belly up, the baby had fallen out…So I can’t say that I joined the civil rights movement; I was born into it. Racism is a disease of democracy. Our country could be one of the greatest countries that god ever imagined, were it not for this thing of racism…This grand experiment that is America is tainted by racism and bigotry, and these kinds of hatreds…This ridiculous thing of racism.”

Via New York’s PIX11 News, here is footage of Dee in 1969 reading the names of young black men killed by police officers:

“Ruby Dee was…a woman who believed deeply in fairness, a conviction that motivated her lifelong efforts to advance civil rights,” SAG-AFTRA president Ken Howard said in a statement. “The acting community—and the world—is a poorer place for her loss.”

Via Google News Archive

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Ruby Dee Was a Badass

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Republicans Would Rather Blow Up the Budget Than Admit That Global Warming Is Real

by Fay4232lippdzs Posted on May 19, 2014

Mother Jones

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It seems like every year we have lots of wildfires out west, and every year there’s not enough money to fight them. How come? Brad Plumer provides the nickel explanation:

The first key fact to note here is that US wildfires have gotten much bigger over the past three decades. There’s some variation from year to year, but the overall trend is upward. One recent study in Geophysical Research Letters found that wildfires in the western United States grew at a rate of 90,000 acres per year between 1984 and 2011. What’s more, the authors found, the increase was statistically unlikely to be due to random chance.

….Put it all together, and many experts and politicians have argued that the way Congress plans for wildfires has become obsolete and counterproductive. Right now, Congress gives agencies like the US Forest Service a budget for fire suppression that’s based on the average cost of wildfires over the previous 10 years. Of course, if wildfires are getting bigger over time, that’s going to create constant shortfalls.

The problem should be pretty obvious. If you take a look at the chart above (to which I’ve added the handy trend line), you can see that the average of the past ten years is going to be where the line was around 2008. That’s roughly 5 million acres. But the trend line keeps going up, and in 2014 you can figure that it’s likely to be around 6 million acres.

Obviously there’s a large amount of variability, and even if you plan rationally you’re still going to fall short some years. Still, at least you’d come closer. So why not do it?

I’ll take a guess: Aside from the fact that members of Congress always prefer rosy forecasts so they can pretend their budgets are more balanced than they really are, there are the reasons that wildfires keep getting bigger and deadlier. One culprit is poor forestry practices. There are invasive species. And there’s global warming.

Oh yeah: global warming. That’s the big one. If Republicans in Congress acknowledged that wildfires were getting steadily bigger over time, it would be tantamount to admitting that global warming is real. And we can’t have that, can we?

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Republicans Would Rather Blow Up the Budget Than Admit That Global Warming Is Real

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Raw Data: America Is Still Producing Lots of Inventive Young Companies

by JanessaChubb Posted on May 15, 2014

Mother Jones

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Here’s a quick follow-up to my post last week about the decline in new business startups over the past few decades. Does this suggest that America is getting less entrepreneurial? In one way, yes: some of it is probably due to big national chains making it harder to start small family businesses, and some of it is probably due to an aging population. Economically, however, the triumph of gigantic chain stores isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and the aging of the baby boomers should be thought of as a separate demographic issue, not a business startup issue.

Still, economists all agree that the key to a healthy economy is young, growing companies (not small businesses pe se). So how are we doing on that score? Over at Slate, Jordan Weissman points to a study by Paul Kedrosky that tries to quantify the number of startups that grow to $100 million or more in a fairly short period. The chart on the right shows his results. There’s a spike during the dotcom boom of the late 90s, and a dropoff during the Great Recession—a period too recent to have yet produced very many $100 million companies anyway—but there’s basically no secular decline at all. Roughly speaking, America has been producing about 150 small, fast-growing companies per year for the past three decades.

This is just a single data point, and Kedrosky warns that his data is necessarily pretty rough. But it does suggest that although America might be producing fewer new coffee shops and boutique clothing stores, it’s not necessarily losing its inventive edge.

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Raw Data: America Is Still Producing Lots of Inventive Young Companies

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Maybe Cable Bundling Is OK, But We Should Unbundle Sports

by CarolNXGmes Posted on May 15, 2014

Mother Jones

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Josh Barro makes the case today that unbundling cable channels and offering them a la carte wouldn’t really benefit consumers. This point has now been made so many times that I don’t think it counts as counterintuitive anymore, but Barro makes one additional point that represents my real gripe with channel bundling:

Not everyone would lose out. For example, if you never watch sports, you might be better off not having to pay for ESPN, which charges the highest carriage fee of any basic cable channel. But Mr. Byzalov estimates that sports channel carriage fees would more than triple under unbundling, as most subscribers opt out and only die-hard sports fans buy in. Consumers who don’t care about sports at all would be better off, but casual sports fans would be worse off: They wouldn’t find it worth paying $37 for an unbundled cluster of sports channels, even if they would have paid the roughly $9 that it costs to get those channels as part of a bundled package.

Most people don’t know just how much sports channels cost them, but they can account for nearly half of your average cable bill in some areas. Not everywhere, mind you, but the explosion of sports channels (Fox Sports 1, the NFL channel, the Golf channel, the NBC Sports Channel, etc.) and rise of dedicated team channels (the Lakers channel, the Dodgers channel, the Pac-12 channel, etc.) have steadily pushed the price of sports skyward in big media markets like Southern California. You don’t pay $9 for that collection. Carriage fees are a closely guarded secret, so it’s hard to say how much you do pay, but it’s probably something like $25 or more.

This doesn’t hurt me, since I watch enough sports to (mostly) make this worthwhile. And the fact that all you non-sports watchers have to pay for this stuff basically subsidizes my habit. So thanks! But honestly, I don’t think you should have to. When Time Warner demands that the Dodgers channel be part of basic cable—my latest hobbyhorse—it basically amounts to a Dodgers tax on every family in the LA area. But I’m afraid I don’t really see why Time Warner should be allowed to levy a tax on every family in the LA area.

So go ahead and keep bundling. Maybe it’s more efficient in the end, and doesn’t really cost most of us very much money. But unbundle sports. It’s a big expense, and those of us who are sports junkies ought to be the ones paying it. Plus there’s this: if we all paid the true cost, instead of forcing everyone to subsidize the rest of us, it might finally provoke some serious pushback—and maybe the astronomical and absurd upward spiral of sports rights would finally abate. If this means the Dodgers are worth only $1.7 billion instead of $2 billion, that’s OK with me.

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Maybe Cable Bundling Is OK, But We Should Unbundle Sports

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