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Republicans Take Game Playing to New Heights With Latest Budget

by EmiliaMackey Posted on March 18, 2015

Mother Jones

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I would like to nominate this for least surprising headline of the year:

And it gets even better. This is unusually straightforward reporting:

House Republicans called it streamlining, empowering states or “achieving sustainability.” They couched deep spending reductions in any number of gauzy euphemisms.

What they would not do on Tuesday was call their budget plan, which slashes spending by $5.5 trillion over 10 years, a “cut.” The 10-year blueprint for taxes and spending they formally unveiled would balance the federal budget, even promising a surplus by 2024, but only with the sort of sleights of hand that Republicans have so often derided.

I get that budget documents are often as much aspirational as anything else, but surely they should have at least some grounding in reality? Here’s the best part:

The plan contains more than $1 trillion in savings from unspecified cuts to programs like food stamps and welfare. To make matters more complicated, the budget demands the full repeal of the Affordable Care Act, including the tax increases that finance the health care law. But the plan assumes the same level of federal revenue over the next 10 years that the Congressional Budget Office foresees with those tax increases in place — essentially counting $1 trillion of taxes that the same budget swears to forgo.

House Republicans sure don’t make it easy to take them seriously, do they?

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Republicans Take Game Playing to New Heights With Latest Budget

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I Have Great Lungs

by DenisIqiummiqml Posted on March 18, 2015

Mother Jones

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In addition to the whole multiple myeloma thing, regular readers may recall that about a year ago I suddenly developed breathing difficulties. Things have improved since then, but I still have regular spells of shortness of breath. In fact, I’m going through one right now, which is likely contributing to all my other woes.

I mention this because today was the last of my pre-stem-cell-transplant workups, which happened to be a lung test. And just as always, I passed with flying colors. It even included a blood draw directly from an artery, which confirmed that my hemoglobin count is outstanding and the oxygen content of the blood in my extremities is normal or even a little above normal. And my lung volume? Better than 100 percent, whatever that means.

So the mystery continues. My lungs are getting plenty of air; they’re producing plenty of oxygen; my heart is pumping perfectly; and the oxygen content of my blood is just peachy. Almost by definition, it sounds like there can’t be anything wrong. Except that there is. Go figure.

In any case, all my tests are complete, and as far as I know there were no red flags. Next Wednesday I spend the day at City of Hope getting oriented. On Friday I get a nice big bonus round of chemotherapy, after which I spend a week injecting myself with a drug that stimulates white cell production. Then I get a Hickman port installed in my shoulder. Following that, I spend three or four days at City of Hope, where they draw blood through the port, centrifuge it, keep the stem cells, and send the rest back. When they have enough stem cells, they process and freeze them and send me home for a week of rest.

Then comes the stem cell transplant itself. I get a gigantic blast of chemotherapy that kills everything in its path—which includes all the remaining cancerous cells in my bone marrow but also all my non-cancerous plasma stem cells. That would kill me too, so the next day they unfreeze my stem cells and pump them into my body. Then I spend several weeks recuperating.

That’s the short version. More later. Despite everything, it appears that all systems are go.

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I Have Great Lungs

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"Arming Our Allies" a Fiasco Yet Again in Yemen

by CeciliaPud Posted on March 17, 2015

Mother Jones

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No surprise here:

The Pentagon is unable to account for more than $500 million in U.S. military aid given to Yemen amid fears that the weaponry, aircraft and equipment is at risk of being seized by Iranian-backed rebels or al-Qaeda, according to U.S. officials.

….“We have to assume it’s completely compromised and gone,” said a legislative aide on Capitol Hill, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter.

“Arming our allies” works sometimes, but just as often it ends up like this. If we’d done this in Syria two years ago, those arms would most likely be in the hands of ISIS or Iranian militias by now.

There just aren’t very many good middle grounds between staying out of a fight and getting fully engaged in it. Iraq is our latest stab at this middle ground, and so far it’s too early to say how it’s going. But recent history is not kind to the idea.

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"Arming Our Allies" a Fiasco Yet Again in Yemen

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Republicans Are Making Obama Popular Again

by RebeccaEanes Posted on March 16, 2015

Mother Jones

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This isn’t exactly Oprah levels of adulation or anything, but President Obama’s Gallup approval ratings have been rising steadily ever since Republicans won the midterm elections last year. He’s been bouncing around positive territory ever since the start of 2015, and today he clocks in at 48-47 percent approval.

Is this because the economy is picking up and people are just generally happier? Is it because his executive actions have made a favorable impression on the public? Is it because Republican incompetence makes him look good by comparison? Hard to say, but it certainly suggests that Democrats are pretty happy with him. As Ed Kilgore says:

Among Democrats, who are supposedly on the brink of a “struggle for the soul of the party,” and ideologically riven between Elizabeth Warren “populists” and Obama/Clinton “centrists,” Obama’s approval rating stands at 81%. And looking deeper, he’s at 86% among self-identified “liberal Democrats,” 78% among “moderate Democrats,” and yes, 67% among “conservative Democrats,” such as they are….This is another example of isolated data being somewhat limited in value, but worth a couple of dozen Politico columns.

Yep. And I’ll bet that once things get going, Hillary Clinton will poll about the same way.

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Republicans Are Making Obama Popular Again

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Ides of March Catblogging – 15 March 2015

by DanieleMcGowen Posted on March 15, 2015

Mother Jones

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Et tu, Hopper? A few days ago I featured Hilbert draped over my sister, so I figured that turnabout is fair play: here’s Hopper draped over me to make up for the lack of normal Friday catblogging. Hopper is a Daddy’s girl, and will sit on no one’s lap but mine. Nor will she even do that very often. But once or twice a day she suddenly gets in the mood and plonks herself into the crook of my arm for an hour or so, purring loudly the whole time. Unlike the tubby Hilbert, Hopper weighs a svelte 11 pounds (up from nine when we first got her), so she’s no trouble at all to handle. A relaxing time is had by all.

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Ides of March Catblogging – 15 March 2015

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Chart of the Day: Even the Rich Think the Middle Class Is Getting Screwed

by RethaThurgood Posted on March 15, 2015

Mother Jones

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A couple of weeks ago Pew did a poll about government policies during the recession, but I’ve been too sick to blog about it. However, it’s stayed safely in my Saved Stuff folder awaiting my recovery, so here it is today. It’s really two charts. Here’s the first one:

Nothing too surprising about this. Generally speaking, people think the government did a lot to help out banks (bingo!), large corporations, and the wealthy. The poor and the middle class pretty much got nada. Since any poll like this is going to be dominated by the sheer number of poor and middle class respondents compared to wealthy respondents, this is about what you’d expect.

But now take a look at this table:

That’s amazing. Even those with high incomes agree that wealthy people benefited the most from government policies and that the poor and middle class got bupkis. Even Republicans largely agree that this has been the case.

This is Stockholm Syndrome writ large. Everyone—rich, poor, Republican, Democrat—agrees that in the wake of the greatest financial disaster since the Great Depression, the government mostly turned its largesse on banks, big corporations and the wealthy. Nonetheless, Republicans—the longtime party of banks, big corporations and the wealthy—have done increasingly well over the past six years. For an explanation, take your pick:

Most voters don’t understand Republican economic priorities.
Most voters don’t think Democrats would do any better.
Most voters think this is just the way the world works and there’s no point voting based on economic promises in the first place.

Whatever the reason, only about 20 percent of middle-class voters think government policies benefit the middle class. The first party to figure this out and embrace it wholeheartedly has a huge electoral opportunity ahead of it. But first, they’re going to have to ditch the rich. Can either of them ever do that?

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Chart of the Day: Even the Rich Think the Middle Class Is Getting Screwed

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Erotic Poetry and $300 Board Games: The Trial Exposing Silicon Valley’s Secrets

by Milo48Vosatxzaw Posted on March 5, 2015

Mother Jones

Former venture capitalist Ellen Pao says the big-name VC firm she worked for, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, failed to promote her because she’s a woman. She says she was pressured into an affair with a coworker and was fired when she complained, and she’s suing the firm for $16 million on charges of gender discrimination and retaliation. Kleiner claims the affair was consensual, and says Pao—now the interim chief executive of Reddit—didn’t thrive at the firm because she “lacked the ability to lead others, build consensus and be a team player.”

The trial kicked off last week in San Francisco and is expected to last five weeks. It’s offered a rare glimpse into the nutty and secretive world of the Silicon Valley elite, where cases of this rank usually settle rather than go public. A few of the details we’ve learned so far:

Silicon Valley jargon is weird and complicated: Judges aren’t always the most savvy bunch when it comes to tech lingo. But it’s hard to fault Judge Harold Kahn for cutting off a former Kleiner partner’s testimony to ask what exactly she meant by “thought leadership.” The confusion didn’t end there: The next day, a juror raised his hand and asked another former partner the same question. His explanation—”It’s being recognized as an expert in a specific area”—seems to have satisfied the court.
Meanwhile, the odd grammar of startup names proved challenging for the court recorder. “With a C?” she asked a witness about the spelling of Klout, the social media analytics tool. “Tumblr,” “Zuora,” and “Y Combinator” also required clarification.

Venture capitalist gift-giving rituals are strange: For Valentine’s Day one year, senior partner Randy Komisar presented Pao with Leonard Cohen’s Book of Longing, which combines steamy poetry with drawings of naked women. Komisar’s defense is that his wife bought it. But it seems as though the weird gift-giving was mutual: Pao gave Komisar a $300 board game that teaches that the key to wealth is optimism.

Venture capitalist salaries are insane: As a junior partner in 2011, Pao made about $500,000. Had Pao been promoted to senior partner, as were three of her male coworkers, she could have expected to earn as much as $2.6 million annually.

It’s important to sit in “the power corridor”: Kleiner’s trial brief dismisses some of Pao’s complaints: “Many of the alleged discriminatory acts involve such minutiae as…Pao’s office not being in ‘the power corridor’ (whatever that means).” Sounds silly, right? But based on managing partner Ted Schlein’s testimony, it seems seating arrangements at Kleiner do say a lot about status: Asked why he didn’t sit in the back of a conference room to make space at the front table for Pao and other junior partners, he responded, “That’s not how the meetings work.”

Women don’t like sharing: At least, that was Kleiner senior partner Chi-Hua Chien’s rationale for not inviting any of them on the company’s 2012 ski trip to Vail. “The issue is that we are staying in condos, and I was thinking that gents wouldn’t mind sharing, but gals might,” he wrote in an email to someone who asked if a female entrepreneur from a company Kleiner had invested in could join the trip. “Why don’t we punt on her and find 2 guys who are awesome. We can add 4-8 women next year.” There was no ski trip the next year.

“Cocky” and “confident” mean very different things: When it comes to venture capitalists, Schlein explained, “cocky” means that “by the time you’re done talking with somebody, they don’t like you.” Confidence involves a similar level of swagger, “but by the end of the conversation the person feels they have connected with you and they think you truly know whence you come.”

Discussing the Playboy Mansion while on a private jet is business as usual: As evidence of Kleiner’s boys’ club culture, Pao described a 2011 private jet ride on which tech exec Dan Rosensweig regaled Kleiner staff with tales of meeting Christie Hefner, Hugh Hefner’s daughter, at the Playboy Mansion. Senior partners allegedly did nothing to change the subject.
On the witness stand, Schlein confirmed that that conversation happened. But he denied Pao’s other allegations about inappropriate things said on that flight: There was no discussion about porn, Victoria’s Secret, or “the breasts of Eastern European women.” Rosensweig did bring up the attractiveness of European waitresses at a club he frequented—but Schlein clarified that it wasn’t a strip club.

How VC firms pick their investments: Pao’s legal team dug up this rather unfortunate 2008 quote from John Doerr, the man who hired her: “If you look at Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, or Netscape founder Marc Andreessen, Yahoo cofounder David Filo, the founders of Google, they all seem to be white, male nerds who’ve dropped out of Harvard or Stanford and they absolutely have no social life. So when I see that pattern coming in—which was true of Google—it was very easy to decide to invest.”

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Erotic Poetry and $300 Board Games: The Trial Exposing Silicon Valley’s Secrets

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More Racist Things Ferguson Officials Did

by Romaine08V Posted on March 4, 2015

Mother Jones

Today the Justice Department released its scathing 105-page report on Ferguson’s pervasive discrimination against black residents. The report included references to blatantly racist emails from local officials: One said Obama wouldn’t last in office because he’s black; another attached a photo of bare-chested group of women, apparently in Africa, captioned “Michelle Obama’s High School Reunion.” The DOJ found plenty of other evidence of racial bias; below are a few examples. (We’re making our way through the report and will add to the list.)

One black Ferguson resident told Justice Department officials about his interaction with a Ferguson police officer, in which the officer told him “N*****, I can find something to lock you up on”:

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Ferguson city officials and police interviewed by the DOJ “nearly uniformly” said that it was due to a lack of “personal responsibility,” not the failure of the law, that African-American members of the Ferguson community were disproportionately targeted by law enforcement:

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The DOJ found that Ferguson officials commonly dismissed tickets for friends, showing a “double standard grounded in racial stereotyping”:

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Ferguson police routinely used Tasers “where less force—or no force at all—would do.” Almost 90 percent of the time cops used force, it was against African Americans, and often they used unnecessary force against people with mental health disabilities:

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All of the police canine attacks reviewed by the DOJ targeted black residents, including a 14-year-old boy who was hiding in a storage closet. The dog bit his arm, causing puncture wounds:

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The DOJ called out the following emails sent by Ferguson officials as “illustrative” of racial bias:

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More Racist Things Ferguson Officials Did

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What Do America’s Most Admired Men and Women Say About America?

by ChristiCharlesw Posted on February 7, 2015

Mother Jones

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This is a month old, but Tyler Cowen happened to highlight it today so I thought I’d pass it along. Here are America’s most admired men and women at the end of 2014:

I suppose there are no huge surprises here. Presidents and first ladies always do well. People in the news often do well. And while I was alarmed when I saw Vladimir Putin on the list in Cowen’s post, I’m a little less alarmed now. He’s at the very bottom of the 1 percenters, which likely means he was named by something like 0.6 percent of Americans and then rounded up. This comes to a grand total of about five people in the survey group, which I suppose is nothing to get too stirred up about.

Not a single dead person continues to make the list, which explains why Ronald Reagan, John Paul II, and Margaret Thatcher are off the list. Queen Elizabeth II is a perennial favorite and she’s still alive, but after the excitement of her Diamond Jubilee faded, I guess she did too.

What’s the biggest surprise on the list? I’d say Condoleezza Rice. She’s remarkably high on the list for someone associated with an unpopular war and not much recent news coverage. She’s at the very top of the list among Republicans, though, so there must be more going on here than I realize. Rice has been rising in popularity over the last couple of years, and surely that’s not just because she was part of college football’s playoff selection committee last year, was it? Nor do I feel like I see her on Fox News a lot. So what’s going on?

Completely missing from the list are: sports stars, military figures, authors and artists not already famous for something else, and liberal pundits of any kind. Almost missing are politicians aside from ex-presidents and first ladies (Elizabeth Warren is the exception—barely); Republican presidential wannabes (Ben Carson is the exception); and scientists (Stephen Hawking is the exception, almost certainly based solely on the recent biopic). Overall, conservative men do much better than conservative women.

As Cowen asks, “Given who is on the list, what should we infer about America as a nation? About human nature?”

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What Do America’s Most Admired Men and Women Say About America?

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Melinda Gates Shames Anti-Vaxxers "Who Have Forgotten What Measles Death Looks Like"

by LorrieWolford Posted on January 23, 2015

Mother Jones

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On the heels of an increasingly widening measles outbreak at Disneyland in California, where at least 28 of the people infected were reportedly unvaccinated, Melinda Gates is urging parents to take advantage of healthcare resources in the United States and get their children vaccinated.

“We take vaccines so for granted in the United States,” Gates explained during an appearance on HuffPost Live Thursday. “Women in the developing world know the power of vaccines. They will walk 10 kilometers in the heat with their child and line up to get a vaccine because they have seen death.

In detailing the struggle parents in the developing world endure to have their children vaccinated, Gates said Americans have simply “forgotten what measles death looks like.”

Through her philanthropy work with husband Bill Gates, Melinda has long worked to help people in developing countries obtain basic healthcare treatment, including vaccine deliveries.

“I’d say to the people of the United States: We’re incredibly lucky to have that technology and we ought to take advantage of it,” she added.

In the United States, the highly contagious disease has reemerged in recent years thanks to the anti-vaccination movement and personal belief exemptions. Use of the controversial waivers is particularly prominent in California.

The recent outbreak at Disneyland has heightened the debate. According to the Associated Press, those infected range from just seven months to 70-years-old, including five park employees.

Dr. James Cherry, a specialist in pediatric infectious diseases at the University of California-Los Angeles, told the New York Times the current outbreak is “100 percent connected” to the anti-immunization movement.

“It wouldn’t have happened otherwise—it wouldn’t have gone anywhere. There are some pretty dumb people out there.”

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Melinda Gates Shames Anti-Vaxxers "Who Have Forgotten What Measles Death Looks Like"

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