Tag Archives: year

One of the Films on This Year’s Black List is an Alternate History of Stanley Kubrick Faking the Moon Landing

by VirgilioWjd Posted on December 16, 2013

Mother Jones

On Monday, this year’s Black List—the annual list of the best unproduced scripts in Hollywood as voted on by over 250 studio executives—was announced via Twitter. This list features 72 titles, six fewer than last year’s. Previous Black Lists have included what would become three of the last five Best Picture Academy Award winners: Argo, The King’s Speech, and Slumdog Millionaire. Being on the list gives your script roughly a 120 percent higher chance of getting made into a feature film by a studio than if it were an average unproduced script.

One of the screenplays inducted onto this year’s Black List (check out the complete list here) is by self-described “newbie” Stephany Folsom, and is intriguingly titled, 1969: A Space Odyssey or How Kubrick Learned to Stop Worrying and Land on the Moon (an obvious reference to both the title of Stanley Kubrick’s classic black-comedy satire from 1964, and to the director’s 2001: A Space Odyssey from 1968).

Folsom’s 108-page script (a drama) focuses on “Barbara,” a lone wolf working in the publicity department at NASA’s office in Washington, DC, in 1969. The story is an alternate history of how, as the Cold War rages, Barbara reaches out to and convinces acclaimed director Stanley Kubrick to work with NASA to fake the moon and one-up the Soviets.

“Hijinks ensue,” Folsom says.

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One of the Films on This Year’s Black List is an Alternate History of Stanley Kubrick Faking the Moon Landing

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How Bolivia Became Obama’s No. 1 Foreign Policy Screwup of the Year

by sspcc1a Posted on December 16, 2013

Mother Jones

What was President Obama’s biggest foreign policy screw-up of the year? There are several worthy contenders, but Dan Drezner nominates Obama’s decision to block the flight home of Bolivian President Evo Morales due to suspicions that NSA leaker Edward Snowden might be on board:

Now, why was this such a big deal? It was a two-fer. First, in going after Snowden so aggressively, the administration put the lie to its claims that Snowden’s revelations weren’t that big of a deal….Second, and more significantly, the desperate and clumsy attempt to grab Snowden dramatically altered the perception by other governments about their preferences.

….When the U.S. forced Morales’ plane to make an emergency landing, [] Washington signaled that it was equally willing to f**k with the sovereignty franchise. At that point, all bets were off for countries predisposed to not helping the United States. Russia kept Snowden, Latin America kept polishing its resentment against the U.S., the rest of the world kept paying attention to Snowden’s revelations, and the United States lost significant hypocritical capabilities.

Would Snowden be in custody today if Obama hadn’t done this? Drezner figures there’s a good chance. I don’t happen to agree, since I have a hard time imagining a scenario in which Russia would be willing to turn over an American spy, but it’s a plausible guess.

In any case, you can lump this together with the fallout from revelations about spying on foreign leaders and bulk collection of overseas data and documents, and it certainly puts the Snowden leaks in the top two foreign policy events of the year for the United States. I’d still put Iran ahead of it if the current talks produce a breakthrough, but that’s it. If the talks fail, or produce only modest progress, then Snowden will be a clear #1.

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How Bolivia Became Obama’s No. 1 Foreign Policy Screwup of the Year

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Attention Econ Nerds: FRED Has Updated Its Graphing Capability

by Abe Johnson Posted on December 11, 2013

Mother Jones

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There are still a few bugs in the system, and you lose some control over presentation when you directly embed their code, but the fine folks at Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis have added a few snazzy little features to their FRED graphing program. You can see what it looks like in the example below, which shows GDP per capita since 2004—and illustrates just how long it’s taken us merely to get back to the level of 2007. The timeline control at the bottom is new: if you want to see this data for any other decade, or for multiple decades, just drag the year markers. The y-axis gets a little wonky when you do this, but this is just a beta version, so a few bugs are to be expected.

At the moment, unfortunately, the embedding function seems to be working sort of sporadically. If you see “Proxy Error” instead of a graph, click refresh and try again. Then try yet again. Like healthcare.gov, I’m sure it will work reliably soon enough.

This has been your stats nerd update for the day.

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Attention Econ Nerds: FRED Has Updated Its Graphing Capability

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Millions of Women Now Pay Nothing for Birth Control. Thanks Obamacare!

by Jane Adams Posted on December 11, 2013

Mother Jones

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The percentage of privately insured women who didn’t pay a dime for birth control pills almost tripled this year, rising from 15 percent in 2012 to 40 percent in 2013. That’s according to a new study from the Guttmacher Institute, a think tank that backs abortion rights. The study, which was published in the journal Contraception, examined the effects of an Affordable Care Act rule requiring private insurers to cover contraceptive products and counseling with no co-pay.

This same rule has come under sustained, delirious assault by Republicans who paint it as an attack on employers’ religious beliefs. During the debt ceiling crisis this fall, some House Republicans were willing to let the government default if the final financial deal did not include a “conscience clause” allowing employers to sidestep the mandate if it violated their religious beliefs. (The Obama administration has already exempted a narrowly defined set of religious institutions.)

That battle will come to a head this spring, when the Supreme Court will hear arguments in Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. Citing their Christian beliefs, owners of the Hobby Lobby chain of craft stores are refusing to provide their female employees with insurance that covers contraceptive services. A decision in favor of Hobby Lobby could blow a hole in the contraception mandate, allowing any private employer to withold birth control coverage simply by citing their religious beliefs.

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Millions of Women Now Pay Nothing for Birth Control. Thanks Obamacare!

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Iowa Wants Its Poor to Give Up Smoking and Drinking to Qualify for Medicaid

by Adalberto7975 Posted on December 10, 2013

Mother Jones

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The Obama administration gave Iowa a waiver today to expand Medicaid along lines similar to what Arkansas did earlier this year, in which Medicaid dollars will be used to buy insurance in the private marketplace. I’m OK with this as an experiment, and curious to see how it turns out. But there was another wrinkle to Iowa’s waiver application:

Iowa wanted to do something different. Gov. Terry Branstad (R) wanted to charge a small premium for Medicaid enrollees who earn between 50 percent and 133 percent of the poverty line. In the Arkansas plan, there were no premiums at all.

Health and Human Services essentially split the difference with the state here: They’re allowing premiums for those who earn between 100 percent and 133 percent of the federal poverty line, but not for those who earn below that. The premiums are limited at 2 percent of income (for someone at the poverty line, this is about $19 a month), and enrollees have the chance to reduce their payment by participating in a wellness program.

Hmmm. Iowa’s waiver application doesn’t describe this wellness program (a draft protocol will be submitted next March), but it does provide a hint about its goals:

The state shall submit for approval a draft section of the protocol related to year 1 Healthy Behavior Incentives including, at a minimum….the health risk assessment used to identify unhealthy behaviors such as alcohol abuse, substance use disorders, tobacco use, obesity, and deficiencies in immunization status.

A single person at 50 percent of the poverty line makes less than $500 per month. That’s obviously not someone who can afford even a nickel in extra expenses. But that was the income level in Iowa’s initial application, which means that for all practical purposes the original goal of this program was to (a) deny government benefits to poor people who are smokers, drinkers, drug users, or overweight, but (b) provide the benefits if these poor people agree to fairly intrusive government monitoring that ensures they improve these behaviors.

So here’s a question: what’s the liberal party line on this kind of thing? Are we opposed because conservatives are once again trying to deny benefits to the “undeserving” poor? Or are we in favor of this because using incentives to improve destructive lifestyles among the most vulnerable is a worthy effort? Does it matter whether the motivation for these incentives is something we approve of? If a lefty foundation launched a program that helped out poor families via a tough-love style approach that insisted on modifying destructive behavior, would it be OK? How much difference does it make that one is a public program and the other is private?

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Iowa Wants Its Poor to Give Up Smoking and Drinking to Qualify for Medicaid

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Racism Is Over, According to the RNC’s Twitter Account

by DebraI67xd Posted on December 1, 2013

Mother Jones

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Sunday is the 58th anniversary of Rosa Parks’ arrest. The Republican National Committee took to Twitter to celebrate the civil rights icon:

@GOP/Twitter

It’s a weirdly phrased tweet, given that racism is still a huge problem in America, and elsewhere. For the record, the RNC’s actual statement on Rosa Parks is much better and less awkward. The statement acknowledges that earlier this year, a bronze statue of Parks was unveiled in the US Capitol’s National Statuary Hall (which is full of white supremacists).

But if you’re looking for something that is actually terrifying and appalling, just remember that this Supreme Court seems to think that racism in America is over.

UPDATE:

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Racism Is Over, According to the RNC’s Twitter Account

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Friday Cat Blogging – 29 November 2013

by Elyse Corder Posted on November 29, 2013

Mother Jones

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Today is a “Where’s Waldo” edition of Friday catblogging, except that Domino is a lot easier to find than Waldo. Our quilt this week is another double Irish chain. Thanks to poor planning on my part, nearly all of our Irish chain quilts got backloaded into the end of the year, which is why you’re seeing a bunch of them lately. And there’s still one to go. This one is machine pieced and hand quilted.

In other news, I’m reliably told that whatever else you may think of it, the Daily Mail is your go-to destination for pictures of cute cats and other animals. Also, judging from its front page, it’s the place to go for hyperbolic Black Friday News. Here is today’s top headline in the US edition: “Black Friday chaos sweeps America: Man shot for a TV and another is stabbed for a parking space as shoppers turn violent.” You may, if you wish, take this as a data point against my thesis that Black Friday is fading away.

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Friday Cat Blogging – 29 November 2013

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Chicken vs. Turkey Is an Unfair Fight

by DeanaMoeller Posted on November 27, 2013

Mother Jones

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This year, Matt Yglesias’s annual bout of turkey hate takes a quantitative approach:

Consider these striking facts from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Agricultural Statistical Service’s latest report on poultry production (PDF).

It reveals that in the United States in 2012 we produced a staggering 49.5 billion pounds of chicken meat worth an aggregate of $24.8 billion.

By contrast, we raised a paltry 7.3 billion pounds of turkey worth just $5 billion.

If everybody likes turkey so much, then why aren’t you buying any?….Here at Slate we think it’s very important to be clear on what’s a contrarian take and what’s the conventional wisdom. And the conventional wisdom is that turkey is bad and you should eat chicken if you’re interested in some not-very-flavorful poultry. People eat turkey on Thanksgiving because it’s traditional, but people do not enjoy eating turkey.

Unfortunately, there’s a confounding variable that Matt has failed to consider: as the illustration on the right demonstrates scientifically, turkeys are big. One reason that we don’t buy turkeys routinely throughout the year is that your average household of 2.58 members doesn’t want that much of anything. Most of us don’t cook big standing rib roasts very often either, but that’s not because we don’t like beef. It’s because they’re too damn big for everyday consumption. Add to that the fact that roasting a turkey is a pain in the ass, and you just aren’t going to have turkey very often.

Now, that said, it’s hard to escape Matt’s central contention that turkey isn’t really all that tasty. Most of us eat it only alongside forkfuls of cranberry sauce or drenched in gravy, which pretty much gives the game away taste-wise, doesn’t it?

Still, this raises yet another question. Of that 49.5 billion pounds of chicken, I’d guess that a sizeable fraction of it is consumed in the form of chicken nuggets of some variety. So why aren’t there turkey nuggets instead? Once you batter it and toss it in a deep fryer, turkey would taste just fine.1 And that brings up a second reason that we eat more chicken than turkey—one that should be of special interest to a Moneybox columnist: it’s cheaper. According to that Ag Department document above, chicken goes for 50 cents per live-weight pound while turkey sells for 73 cents.

In other words, we don’t really need to get into inherently personal arguments about the relative tastiness of chicken vs. turkey. Chicken is both cheaper and far more convenient than turkey for your average consumer, and that’s enough. It’s no suprise that it’s the world’s poultry of choice.

1Wouldn’t it? I’m no foodie, and anyway, I happen to like nibbling on turkey leftovers from the fridge with nothing more than a little salt as seasoning. But maybe there’s something about turkey meat that makes it poorly suited to the indignities of nugget-dom. Anyone happen to know?

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Chicken vs. Turkey Is an Unfair Fight

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California Bullet Train Might Be Breathing Its Last

by ShaniHMTjxkn Posted on November 26, 2013

Mother Jones

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Sacramento Superior Court Judge Michael Kenny, following up on a ruling earlier this year, might have finally put a stake through the LA-San Francisco bullet train:

Kenny ruled that the state does not have a valid financing plan, which was required under the 2008 bond measure, Proposition 1A. The measure included provisions intended to ensure the state did not start the project if it did not have all of the necessary funds to complete a self-supporting, initial operating segment.

The state rail agency created a funding plan, but it was an estimated $25 billion short of the amount needed to complete a first working section of the line. Kenny ruled that the state must rescind the plan and create a new one, a difficult task because the state High-Speed Rail Authority hasn’t identified sources of additional revenue to allocate to the project.

As near as I can tell, the HSR authority’s plan all along has been to simply ignore the law and spend the bond money on a few initial miles of track. Once that was done, no one would ever have the guts to halt the project because it would already have $9 billion sunk into it. So one way or another, the legislature would keep it on a funding drip.

It’s a time-tested strategy, and it might have worked if not for a meddling judge. But I don’t see how Kenny could have ruled any other way. The bond measure is clear about the financing requirement, and the authority’s flouting of the requirement is equally clear. Not only does it not have a plan to fully fund even a part of the HSR project, there’s no remotely plausible plan they can put forward. The federal government is plainly not going to provide any further money, and the prospect of private funding is laughable. No one in his right mind believes either the authority’s ridership projections or its cost projections anymore.

I’ve been a skeptic of this project from the start. Its numbers never added up, its projections were woefully rose-colored, and it was fanciful to think it would ever provide the performance necessary to compete against air and highway travel. Since then, things have only gotten worse as cost projections have gone up, ridership projections have gone down, and travel time estimates have struggled to stay under three hours.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: this is the kind of project that gives liberals a bad name. It’s time to kill it. For a whole bunch of reasons, LA to San Francisco just isn’t a good choice for high-speed rail.

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California Bullet Train Might Be Breathing Its Last

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The Filibuster Is Dead (Partly)

by q1jurse Posted on November 21, 2013

Mother Jones

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CNN reports that by a vote of 52-48 in the Senate, the filibuster of judicial and executive branch nominees has been eliminated. The nuclear option has been detonated.

UPDATE: I was in the middle of writing a post about this when the vote was taken. Here’s what I was writing:

A few minutes before the vote, Dana Bash was on CNN talking about the Democratic effort to eliminate the filibuster for judicial nominees. “It’s going to make things a lot more tense in the Senate, if you can believe that,” she said. “I imagine it will provoke a lot of anger on the Republican side,” said another anchor. This was followed by some back-and-forth about just how angry Republicans would get and how they’d take advantage of this during next year’s midterms.

This is typical, and telling. Republican anger is always taken as a given, and always treated as genuine. But for some reason Democrats don’t get the same consideration. This despite the fact that Democrats stepped away from this brink several times already earlier this year, and the only reason they’re going forward now is because Republicans have finally pissed them off beyond endurance. Even the moderates have reached the end of their ropes. If things are tenser now in the Senate, Republican need only look in the mirror to find the cause. They’re no longer even pretending that they’ll allow President Obama to perform the normal functions of his office—functions that every other president in history has performed without any serious obstacles.

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The Filibuster Is Dead (Partly)

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