Blogs | Mother Jones Mother Jones logo en One Man's True Experience With the Naked Web <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" ""> <html><body> <p>One thing led to another this weekend, and yesterday I found myself playing around with Internet Explorer on Windows 8.1. It had probably been 20 years since I'd last used it. It turned out to be surprisingly nice once I got everything set up, so then I got curious and set up the tile version too. (That's the Windows RT version, aka the Metro version, aka the Modern UI version, aka whatever Microsoft is calling it this month.) It was actually fairly nice too. I have a few UI quibbles here and there, but that's true of every app. Generally speaking, it was pretty good.</p> <p>But. It turns out that the MUI version of IE doesn't support add-ons. Don't ask me why. That means I couldn't install AdBlock. And holy cow: during the hour or so that I spent checking things out I felt like I was under assault. My browser was deluged with gigantic banner ads, flash ads, auto-play video ads, animated GIF ads, ads that danced across my screen, and a relentless series of popup ads that apparently have figured out how to foil the built-in popup blocker.</p> <p>I've spent the last ten years or so browsing with ad blocking of some kind enabled. This was the first time in a long while that I had been forced to spend time on the naked web, so to speak. Have I just lost my tolerance for this kind of thing? Or has advertising on the web really gotten an order of magnitude worse since the early aughts? This is an academic question, since needless to say I won't be using the MUI version of IE anytime soon, but I'm still curious. What say you, commenters?</p> </body></html> Kevin Drum Tech Sun, 16 Mar 2014 15:42:26 +0000 Kevin Drum 247586 at US Announces Plan to Give Up Control Over Internet Plumbing <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" ""> <html><body> <p><a href="" target="_blank">Well, this is interesting:</a></p> <blockquote> <p>U.S. officials announced plans Friday to relinquish federal government control over the administration of the Internet, a move likely to please international critics but alarm many business leaders and others who rely on smooth functioning of the Web.</p> <p>Pressure to let go of the final vestiges of U.S. authority over the system of Web addresses and domain names that organize the Internet has been building for more than a decade and was supercharged by the backlash to revelations about National Security Agency surveillance last year.</p> </blockquote> <p>I won't pretend I'm thrilled about this, even if it was probably inevitable at some point. Whatever else you can say about the United States and the leverage its intelligence community gets from control over internet plumbing, it's also true that the US has been a pretty competent and reliable administrator of the most revolutionary and potentially subversive network ever invented. Conversely, global organizations don't have a great track record at technocratic management, and world politics&mdash;corrosive at best, illiberal and venal at worst&mdash;could kill the goose that laid the golden egg. I certainly understand why the rest of the world chafes at American control, but I nonetheless suspect that it might be the best of a bad bunch of options.</p> <p>Then again, maybe not. There are also plenty of global standards-setting organizations that do a perfectly good job. Slowly and bureaucratically, maybe, but that's to be expected. Maybe ICANN will go the same way. We'll see.</p> <p>In any case, I think we can expect Republicans to go ballistic over this.</p> </body></html> Kevin Drum International Tech Fri, 14 Mar 2014 22:01:18 +0000 Kevin Drum 247571 at Friday Cat Blogging - 14 March 2014 <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" ""> <html><body> <p>The sun has been back for two weeks now and Domino has decided it's probably safe to come outside. Not very far outside, mind you, but she does adore the stiffly-bristled welcome mat we have outside our front door. It's a great place to scratch an itch, and when you're done, it catches the afternoon sun and provides a lovely napping spot.</p> <p>In other news, <a href="" target="_blank">click here</a> and decide if you think I look like a badass. I think perhaps the headline writer was engaging in a wee flight of fancy. However, I commend to my editors the reporter's deadpan note about how I feel about blogging: "For him, it's 'the perfect job,' noting he rarely hears from his bosses at <em>Mother Jones</em>." That, um, didn't quite turn out right, did it?</p> <p><img align="middle" alt="" class="image image-_original" src="/files/blog_domino_2014_03_14.jpg" style="border: 1px solid black; margin: 15px 0px 5px 40px;"></p> </body></html> Kevin Drum Fri, 14 Mar 2014 18:57:10 +0000 Kevin Drum 247561 at The United States Is a Data Wonk's Dream <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" ""> <html><body> <p><a href="" target="_blank">Via Emily Badger,</a> here's an interesting chart showing which countries are most open with national data. Obviously rich countries do best at this kind of statistical recordkeeping, but some rich countries do better than others, and the US is one of the best. In fact, it would be <em>the</em> best if not for the fact that corporate registration is a state function, and the US therefore scores approximately zero for its lack of a national corporate registry database. Full data for all countries is <a href="" target="_blank">here.</a> Enjoy.</p> <p><img align="middle" alt="" class="image image-_original" src="/files/blog_open_data_chart.jpg" style="border: 1px solid black; margin: 15px 0px 5px 11px;"></p> </body></html> Kevin Drum International Tech Fri, 14 Mar 2014 18:24:52 +0000 Kevin Drum 247556 at If Crimea Really is Important, Tell Us What Obama Ought to Do About It <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" ""> <html><body> <p>Fareed Zakaria has a piece in the <em>Washington Post</em> about Ukraine. <a href="" target="_blank">Here's the headline:</a></p> <blockquote> <p><strong>Why (this time) Obama must lead</strong></p> </blockquote> <p>So I clicked. Plenty of sensible stuff. The EU dithered. Ukraine blew up. Putin responded stupidly. "Let&rsquo;s not persist in believing that Moscow&rsquo;s moves have been strategically brilliant," Zakaria says. His invasion of Crimea has turned the rest of Ukraine irretrievably pro-Western; triggered lots of anti-Russian sentiment on his borders; soured relations with Poland and Hungary; and sparked Western sanctions that are going to hurt.</p> <p>And Zakaria says this is important stuff. "The crisis in Ukraine is the most significant geopolitical problem since the Cold War....And it involves a great global principle: whether national boundaries can be changed by brute force. If it becomes acceptable to do so, what will happen in Asia, where there are dozens of contested boundaries &mdash; and several great powers that want to remake them?"</p> <p>OK, fine. So what should Obama do? Here it is:</p> <blockquote> <p>Obama must rally the world, push the Europeans and negotiate with the Russians.</p> </blockquote> <p>Go ahead and click the link if you don't believe me. This is, literally, the sum total of Zakaria's advice. So what's the point? Obviously Obama is already doing this. Is he doing it badly? Is he pressing for the wrong sanctions? Is he working too much behind the scenes and not enough publicly? Should he be threatening a military response? Should he ask Zach Galifianakis to tape an episode of "Between Two Ferns" with Vladimir Putin? Or what?</p> <p>Maybe I'm more frustrated than usual with this because I tend to like Zakaria. Sure, he's sometimes a little bit too weather-vaney for my taste, but he's smart and practical and tends to understand the big picture pretty well. So why not tell us what he thinks the US response should be? We could use some judicious advice to make up for the tsunami of idiocy emanating from the crackpot wing of the foreign policy community right now.</p> </body></html> Kevin Drum Foreign Policy International Fri, 14 Mar 2014 17:20:27 +0000 Kevin Drum 247551 at The Whimsical Fascists of Wes Anderson's "The Grand Budapest Hotel" <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" ""> <html><body> <p>Wes Anderson's <em>The Grand Budapest Hotel</em> is very, very <a href="" target="_blank">Wes</a> <a href="" target="_blank">Anderson</a>&mdash;which is to say that the colors pop, the quirky humor abounds, and your emotions are sneakily toyed with. Few directors have the kind of total control over the way their actors talk, move, and express quite like Anderson does. Anderson's singular <a href="" target="_blank">style</a> and eccentricities make virtually everything in his <a href="" target="_blank">films</a> (even harrowing elements such as <a href="" target="_blank">suicide</a> and war) oddly whimsical. And in <em>The Grand Budapest Hotel</em>, a Nazi analog is made into something of a goofy villain.</p> <p>The comedy is set primarily in the 1930s in&nbsp;Zubrowka, a fictional central-European republic that has endured European totalitarianism and world war (the movie was shot on location <a href="" target="_blank">in Germany</a>, but the setting, sounds, and visuals were, in Anderson's <a href="" target="_blank">words</a>, "a pastiche of the greatest hits of...Eastern Europe"). The core of the narrative (starring&nbsp;Ralph Fiennes,&nbsp;F. Murray Abraham,&nbsp;<a href="" target="_blank">Tony Revolori</a>, <a href="" target="_blank">Saoirse Ronan</a>, Harvey Keitel, and several <a href="" target="_blank">Anderson regulars</a>) is a <a href="" target="_blank">murder mystery</a>, but the backdrop routinely advances to the fore as the grip of a fascist party grows more and more clenched. "Part of why I feel the impulse to reimagine [World War II] rather than just do it is because it's been done so many times before," Anderson <a href="" target="_blank">told NPR</a>.</p> </body></html> <p style="font-size: 1.083em;"><a href="/mixed-media/2014/03/grand-budapest-hotel-wes-anderson-whimsical-fascists-nazis"><strong><em>Continue Reading &raquo;</em></strong></a></p> Mixed Media Film and TV Top Stories Fri, 14 Mar 2014 17:20:14 +0000 Asawin Suebsaeng 247526 at Hostage Taking Is Back! <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" ""> <html><body> <p><a href="" target="_blank">Last month</a> I passed along the news that, in a break with recent tradition, Congress might actually do something useful and pass a permanent fix to Medicare's Sustainable Growth Rate, a well-meaning policy that turned out not to be sustainable at all when its formula started calling for actual cuts in payments to doctors. Every year Congress addresses this by passing a one-year "doc fix," but recently a bipartisan effort finally came together to pass a permanent modification. Hooray!</p> <p>But now it turns out that congressional Republicans enjoy the tradition of dysfunctional government too much to give it up. <a href="" target="_blank">Sahil Kapur reports that hostage-taking is back:</a></p> <blockquote> <p>House Republicans expect to vote this Friday on legislation that would risk steep, destabilizing Medicare cuts at the end of the month unless Democrats agree to a five-year delay of Obamacare's individual mandate.</p> <p>It mirrors some of the brinkmanship in the government shutdown fight last fall in that the GOP is using a must-pass bill as a vehicle to chop the Affordable Care Act. Democratic leaders have repeatedly rejected proposals to tinker with the mandate to buy insurance and have warned Republicans not to tie a physician payment fix to their partisan quest to unravel Obamacare.</p> </blockquote> <p>Insurance companies oppose this. Doctors oppose this. The CBO says it would be a disaster. It obviously has no chance of passing. But it looks like Republicans are going right up to the brink once again. I guess that once you've tasted the thrill of threatening to shoot a hostage, nothing else quite compares.</p> <p>Besides, there's a midterm election coming up. Have I mentioned that before?</p> </body></html> Kevin Drum Congress Health Care Fri, 14 Mar 2014 16:06:22 +0000 Kevin Drum 247546 at Chart of the Day: China's Debt Bubble Continues to Swell <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" ""> <html><body> <p><a href="" target="_blank">Via Paul Krugman,</a> Atif Mian and Amir Sufi give us the chart below today to chew over. It shows China's declining trade surplus over the past decade, which authorities have effectively offset by a dramatic increase in private credit in order to boost domestic demand. The authors <a href="" target="_blank">explain how this happened:</a></p> <blockquote> <p>China got a break starting 2003....The rest of the world&nbsp;&mdash; and in particular the United States&nbsp;&mdash; was willing to borrow hundreds of billions of dollars every year to purchase Chinese goods (among other things)....The result was reduced pressure on domestic debt creation, and domestic debt went down from 125% of GDP in 2003 to almost 100% of GDP in 2008.</p> <p>....The continued borrowing by western countries was not sustainable and by 2008 global demand for Chinese goods collapsed....How could China create new demand for its productive capacity? The answer once again came in the form of a rapid rise in domestic private debt. The Chinese state-owned banks with explicit prodding from the government opened their spigots. The country has seen an explosive growth in domestic private debt since 2008.</p> </blockquote> <p>Is this sustainable? Probably not. It's yet another reason to be concerned about the continued fragility of the global economy. We're probably not strong enough to withstand a major shock from China.</p> <p><img align="middle" alt="" class="image image-_original" src="/files/blog_china_debt_3.jpg" style="margin: 15px 0px 5px 0px;"></p> </body></html> Kevin Drum China Economy Fri, 14 Mar 2014 15:26:25 +0000 Kevin Drum 247541 at Justice Department Bad Boys: More Than 650 Cases of Misconduct Documented in 12-Year Period <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" ""> <html><body> <p>Federal prosecutors, judges, and other officials at the Justice Department committed over 650 acts of professional misconduct in a recent 12-year period, according to a<a href="" target="_blank"> new report</a>&nbsp;published by a DC-based watchdog group, the<span style="font-family: Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 24px;">&nbsp;Project On Government Oversight (POGO). POGO investigators&nbsp;</span>came up with the number after reviewing documents put out by the <a href="" target="_blank">Department of Justice's Office of Professional Responsibility</a> (OPR). According to one<a href="" target="_blank"> little-noticed</a> OPR document published last year,&nbsp;a DOJ attorney failed to disclose a "close personal relationship" with the&nbsp;defendant in a case he was prosecuting, where he negotiated a plea agreement to release the defendant on bond. An<span style="font-family: Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 24px;">&nbsp;immigration judge also made "disparaging remarks" about foreign nationals. POGO contends</span><span style="font-family: Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 2em;">&nbsp;that this number is only the tip of the iceberg&nbsp;and </span>OPR<span style="font-family: Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 2em;">&nbsp;needs to release more information about this misconduct&nbsp;to the public. &nbsp;</span></p> <p><span style="font-family: Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 2em;">"The bottom line is we just don't know how well the Justice Department investigates and disciplines its own attorneys for misconduct when it occurs," says Nick </span>Schwellenbach<span style="font-family: Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 2em;">, a contributor to POGO." The amount and types of misconduct DOJ's own investigators conclude has happened suggests more [information] should be public than is already, including naming names of offending prosecutors that commit serious misconduct."</span></p> <p><span style="font-family: Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 2em;">OPR&nbsp;is responsible for investigating ethics complaints at the Justice Department, but the office reports directly&nbsp;to the attorney general.&nbsp;POGO</span><span style="line-height: 2em;">&nbsp;<a href="" target="_blank">argues</a> that this insular system might not be sufficient to provide effective oversight of prosecutor wrongdoing.&nbsp;</span><span style="line-height: 2em;">Last year, for example, two federal judges issued&nbsp;court orders complaining that DOJ attorneys had misled them about the full scale of the&nbsp;NSA's&nbsp;surveillance activities&mdash;but&nbsp;OPR&nbsp;was never aware of the complaints and didn't investigate them even though a former OPR&nbsp;attorney said that they should have triggered an inquiry, according to&nbsp;<a href="" target="_blank"><em>USA Today.&nbsp;</em></a></span></p> <p><span style="font-family: Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 2em;">Between FY2002 and FY2013, of the more than 650 documented cases&nbsp;of DOJ employee misconduct,&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 2em;">400&nbsp;were characterized as</span><span style="font-family: Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 2em;">&nbsp;"reckless" or "intentional" by OPR.&nbsp;In OPR's <a href="" target="_blank">latest report</a>, from&nbsp;</span>FY2012<span style="font-family: Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 2em;">, </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 2em;">the office</span><span style="font-family: Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 2em;">&nbsp;received over 1,000 complaints and other correspondence about Justice Department employees (over half of these complaints came from incarcerated individuals) and</span><span style="font-family: Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 2em;">&nbsp;opened 123 inquiries and investigations.&nbsp;</span></p> <p>In one case from 2012, a Justice Department attorney falsely told a court that the government didn't have evidence that a key witness suffered from an ongoing mental health disorder&mdash;when the prosecutor did have that evidence,&nbsp;<a href="" target="_blank">according to OPR</a>. The attorney was suspended for two weeks and the state bar was notified.&nbsp;In another case, an immigration judge presiding over a case where a father and his daughter were fighting removal from the United States, was found by OPR&nbsp;to have "engaged in professional misconduct by acting in reckless disregard of his obligation to appear to be fair and impartial" and to have made biased statements against immigrants.&nbsp;The judge was<a href="" target="_blank">&nbsp;suspended for 30 days</a>.&nbsp;</p> <p>OPR isn't responsible for disciplining employees; that's up to others in the Justice Department. OPR&nbsp;also no longer publicly names Justice Department employees found to be conducting misconduct, although it did so for a <a href="" target="_blank">brief period</a> during the Clinton presidency. In 2010, the American Bar Association passed a resolution asking the Obama administration to <a href="" target="_blank">release more information about Justice Department investigations</a>, potentially including names, but so far, not much has changed.&nbsp;</p> <p>&ldquo;The department takes all allegations of attorney misconduct seriously, and that is why the Office of Professional Responsibility thoroughly reviews each case and refers its findings of misconduct to relevant state bar associations when the rules of the state bar are implicated," says a Justice Department spokeswoman. "OPR also regularly provides detailed information on the resolution of complaints to the defense attorneys, judges, and others who send allegations of misconduct to the department.&rdquo;</p> <p><span style="font-family: Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 2em;">A bill&nbsp;</span><a href="" style="line-height: 2em;" target="_blank">proposed</a><span style="font-family: Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 2em;">&nbsp;on Thursday by Senators&nbsp;Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Jon Tester (D-Mont.) would overhaul how misconduct is investigated at the Justice Department. Right now, only OPR is allowed to look into ethics complaints, instead of the Justice Department's Office of Inspector General, which is widely <a href="" target="_blank">considered to be more independent.</a> The senators' bill would move that authority to the IG's office.</span><span style="font-family: Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 2em;">&nbsp;Senator Lisa&nbsp;</span>Murkowski<span style="font-family: Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 2em;"> (R-Alaska)</span><span style="font-family: Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 2em;">, who supports the bill, says:</span><span style="font-family: Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 2em;">&nbsp;"When Americans pledge to abide by &rsquo;liberty and justice for all,&rsquo; that does not mean that those pursuing justice can creatively apply different standards or break the rules to get convictions &ndash; it means that in America everyone is held equally accountable."&nbsp;</span></p> <p>&nbsp;</p> </body></html> MoJo Courts Crime and Justice Fri, 14 Mar 2014 15:24:14 +0000 Dana Liebelson 247461 at We're Still at War: Photo of the Day for March 14, 2014 <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" ""> <html><body> <div class="inline inline-left" style="display: table; width: 1%"><img alt="" class="image" src="/files/0314-630x354.jpg"></div> <p class="rtecenter"><em>MAINZ, Germany - Soldiers from U.S. Army Europe assist with the loading of rail cars during USAREUR&rsquo;s Contingency Command Post (CCP) deployment operations for Saber Guardian 2014. The CCP, established as a rapidly deploying, forward command and control element in support of missions directed by USAREUR, is currently preparing for Saber Guardian 2014. The training, held in the Republic of Bulgaria, is a USAREUR-led multinational exercise designed to strengthen international government agencies and military partnering. The exercise will further strengthen interoperability between NATO and partner nations involved in foreign consequence management operations with U.S. forces and foster trust between regional partner military forces. Personnel from Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belgium, Bulgaria, Georgia, Moldova, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Ukraine, Turkey and the U.S., as well as representatives from NATO, will participate in the exercise. (<a href="" target="_blank">U.S. Army Europe photo</a> by Spc. Joshua Leonard)</em></p> </body></html> MoJo Fri, 14 Mar 2014 14:12:57 +0000 247536 at WATCH: Rand Paul's Big Flip-Flop on Russia <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" ""> <html><body> <p>Earlier this week, Sen.&nbsp;Rand Paul (R-Ky.) <a href="" target="_blank">slammed</a> President Barack Obama for not doing enough in response to Russian President Vladimir Putin's incursion into Crimea. In a&nbsp;<em>Time</em>&nbsp;op-ed, Paul huffed:</p> <blockquote> <p>It is our role as a global leader to be the strongest nation in opposing Russia's latest aggression.</p> <p>Putin must be punished for violating the Budapest Memorandum, and Russia must learn that the U.S. will isolate it if it insists on acting like a rogue nation.</p> <p>This does not and should not require military action. No one in the U.S. is calling for this. But it will require other actions and leadership, both of which President Obama unfortunately lacks.</p> </blockquote> <p>Paul went on to outline a number of steps he would take, were he president, including imposing economic sanctions and visa bans (which Obama has already implemented), kicking Russia out of the G-8, and building the Keystone XL pipeline. (He did not explain how helping a Canadian firm export tar sands oil would intimidate Putin.) He added, "I would reinstitute the missile-defense shields President Obama abandoned in 2009 in Poland and the Czech Republic." He griped, "The real problem is that Russia's President is not currently fearful or threatened in any way by America's President, despite his country's blatant aggression."</p> <p>With this article, Paul was eagerly joining the GOP chorus that in recent days has been blasting Obama for being weak and feckless regarding Putin and the Ukraine. That was not surprising. As a politician pondering a run for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016, Paul has had to contend with complaints from the GOP's overlapping neocon and establishment wings that he is an isolationist "wacko bird," as Sen. John McCain indelicately <a href="" target="_blank">put it</a>. Here was a chance to join his party's mainstream in denouncing Obama. Yet to become a member in good standing of the GOP's Get-Obama Brigade, Foreign Policy Division, Paul had to flip-flop.</p> <p>In April 2009, Paul, on the cusp of launching his Senate campaign, gave <a href=";list=PL0AA18ACF362A80DB" target="_blank">a talk</a>&nbsp;to&nbsp;the College Republicans group at Western Kentucky University. He was asked about the large number of US troops stationed overseas by an audience member who said it was "ridiculous" for the United States to maintain permanent military bases in Europe and elsewhere around the world. Paul responded sympathetically: "We're now 60 years in Germany, 60 years in Japan, 50 years in Korea." He defended his father, Ron Paul, for having noted during the 2008 presidential race that there were foreign policy causes for 9/11: "We have to understand there is blowback from our foreign policy."</p> <p>Arguing for a restrained foreign policy (and smaller military establishment), Paul immediately turned to the subject of Russia's invasion of Georgia the previous year (which these days has often been cited as analogous to the Ukraine crisis).</p> <blockquote> <p>For example, we&nbsp;have&nbsp;to ask ourselves, "Who needs to be part of&nbsp;NATO? What does NATO need to be at this point?" One of the big things [for] the neocons&mdash;the people in the Republican Party sort of on the other side&nbsp;from&nbsp;where I come from&mdash;is they want Georgia to be part of NATO. Well,&nbsp;Georgia&nbsp;sits right on the border of&nbsp;Russia. Do you think that might be provocative to put them in NATO? NATO's treaty actually says that if they're attacked, we will defend them. So, if the&nbsp;treaty&nbsp;means something, that means all of a sudden we're at war with Russia. If&nbsp;Georgia&nbsp;would had become,&nbsp;Bush wanted&nbsp;Georgia&nbsp;to become part of NATO, had they been part of NATO, we'd be at war with&nbsp;Russia&nbsp;right now. That's kinda a scary thing. We have to decide&nbsp;whether&nbsp;putting missiles in&nbsp;Poland&nbsp;is gonna provoke the Russians. Maybe not to war, but whether it's worth provoking them, or whether we have the money to do it.</p> </blockquote> <p>Here's the video:</p> <p><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="354" src="//" width="630"></iframe></p> <p><span style="font-family: Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 2em;">So when Russia sent troops into Georgia (on George W. Bush's watch), Paul didn't want to provoke Russia by placing missiles in Poland. Yet today, when Russia moves into Ukraine (on Obama's watch), he's all for dispatching missiles to Poland to send a message to Putin. Does Paul care more about Crimea than Georgia? Or does he care more about keeping a foot on the GOP's anti-Obama bandwagon?</span> Paul's office did not respond to a request for comment.</p> <p><span style="font-family: Verdana,Arial,sans-serif; line-height: 2em;">It appears that Paul, an isolationist who doesn't want to be isolated within the GOP, spotted the opportunity to develop some Obama-bashing hawk </span>cred<span style="font-family: Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 2em;"> as the presidential campaign nears. "I stand with the people of Ukraine," Paul declares now, though that was not what he said about Georgians. What's changed in the past six years: geopolitics or Paul's own political calculations?</span></p> </body></html> MoJo Foreign Policy International Obama Top Stories Fri, 14 Mar 2014 11:59:30 +0000 David Corn 247471 at Wall Street Investors Take Aim at Farmland <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" ""> <html><body> <p>In a couple of posts last fall (<a href="">here</a> and <a href="">here</a>), I showed that corporations don't do much actual farming in the United States. True, agrichemical companies like Monsanto and Syngenta mint fortunes by selling seeds and chemicals to farmers, and grain processors like Archer Daniels Midland and Cargill reap billions from buying crops cheap and turning them into pricey stuff like livestock feed, sweetener, cooking oil, and ethanol. But the great bulk of US farms&mdash;enterprises that generally have razor-thin profit margins&mdash;are run by independent operators.</p> <p>That may be on the verge of changing. A recent <a href="">report</a> by the Oakland Institute documents a fledgling, little-studied trend: Corporations are starting to buy up US farmland, especially in areas dominated by industrial-scale agriculture, like Iowa and California's Central Valley. But the land-grabbing companies aren't agribusinesses like Monsanto and Cargill. Instead, they're financial firms: investment arms of insurance companies, banks, pension funds, and the like. In short, Wall Street spies gold in those fields of greens and grains.</p> </body></html> <p style="font-size: 1.083em;"><a href="/tom-philpott/2014/03/land-grabs-not-just-africa-anymore"><strong><em>Continue Reading &raquo;</em></strong></a></p> Tom Philpott Food and Ag Top Stories Fri, 14 Mar 2014 10:00:14 +0000 Tom Philpott 247381 at WATCH: The Religious Right has Spread the "Good News of Homophobia" Around the World [Fiore Cartoon] <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" ""> <html><body> <p></p> <div align="center"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="281" mozallowfullscreen="" src="//;byline=0&amp;portrait=0&amp;color=c96134" webkitallowfullscreen="" width="500"></iframe></div> <p>Mark Fiore is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist and animator whose work has appeared in the <em>Washington Post, </em>the <em>Los Angeles Times, </em>the <em>San Francisco Examiner, </em>and dozens of other publications. He is an active member of the American Association of Editorial Cartoonists, and has a <a href="" target="_newWindow">website</a> featuring his work.</p> </body></html> Mixed Media Cartoons Video Gay Rights International Religion The Right Thu, 13 Mar 2014 23:57:58 +0000 Mark Fiore 247521 at If Reagan Were President, He Would…Do Nothing Much About Ukraine <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" ""> <html><body> <p>On the Senate floor today, John McCain <a href="" target="_blank">blistered</a> his fellow Republicans over their holdup of an aid bill to Ukraine. "Don't call yourself Reagan Republicans," he said. "Reagan would never tolerate this." Dan Drezner provides the history lesson via Twitter:</p> <p><img align="middle" alt="" class="image image-_original" src="/files/blog_drezner_tweet_reagan.jpg" style="border: 1px solid black; margin: 15px 0px 5px 25px;"></p> </body></html> Kevin Drum International Thu, 13 Mar 2014 22:52:52 +0000 Kevin Drum 247516 at Sleeping In Ignites Teenager's Passion <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" ""> <html><body> <p>The <em>New York Times</em> tells the story of Jilly Dos Santos, a Missouri student who took an AP world history class that <a href="" target="_blank">"explores the role of leadership":</a></p> <blockquote> <p>Students were urged to find a contemporary topic that ignited their passion. One morning, the teachers mentioned that a school board committee had recommended an earlier start time to solve logistical problems in scheduling bus routes. The issue would be discussed at a school board hearing in five days. If you do not like it, the teachers said, do something.</p> <p>Jilly did the ugly math: A first bell at 7:20 a.m. meant she would have to wake up at 6 a.m.</p> <p>She had found her passion.</p> </blockquote> <p>Jilly is my hero. The kids these days are all right in my book.</p> </body></html> Kevin Drum Health Thu, 13 Mar 2014 22:22:52 +0000 Kevin Drum 247501 at McDonald's Accused of Stealing Wages From Already Underpaid Workers <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" ""> <html><body> <p>Fast food workers make very little money. How little money? Very little money! So little in fact that a single parent of one living in New York City would have to work 144 hours a week "to make a secure yet modest living." But apparently, those wages are not low enough, a group of McDonald's workers&nbsp;<a href="" target="_blank">allege</a>, to stop the company from also stealing from them.</p> <p>Wage-theft suits brought against McDonald's this week in Michigan, California, and New York accuse the chain of refusing to pay overtime, ordering people to work off the clock, and straight up erasing hours from timecards. If these allegations are true, <em>and maybe they're not, </em>but maybe they are, then the company has been illegally screwing people who are already being legally screwed.</p> <p>This is the most recent development in a <a href="" target="_blank">months-long campaign</a> by fast-food workers pushing for a $15/hour starting wage.</p> <p>You shouldn't eat fast food because fast food is bad for you but if you do eat fast food (and you will eat fast food at least once in a while because nobody can be perfect all the time), be nice to the people who serve you. They have to fight tooth and nail to make ends meet.</p> <p>Could you make it on fast food wages? Here's a depressing calculator. (Spoiler: Probably not!)<br> &nbsp;</p> <div><img alt="" class="image" id="fast-food-banner" src="/files/big-mac-02_2.png"></div> <div id="fast-food-calculator"> <form id="calculate_this"> <label for="household">How many people are in your household?</label> <select id="selected_household" name="household"><option value="1P0C">One Adult No Children</option> <option value="1P1C">One Adult One Child</option> <option value="1P2C">One Adult Two Children</option> <option value="1P3C">One Adult Three Children</option> <option value="2P0C">Two Adults No Children</option> <option value="2P1C">Two Adults One Child</option> <option value="2P2C">Two Adults Two Children</option> <option value="2P3C">Two Adults Three Children</option></select><label for="state">Which state do you live in?</label> <select id="selected_state" name="state"></select><label for="locale">Which area do you live in? (Area data not available for households without children.)</label><select id="selected_locale" name="locale"></select><label for="salary">How much do you make in a year?</label> $<input id="input_salary" name="salary" type="number" value="26000"><input id="calculate" type="submit" value="Submit">&nbsp;</form> <div id="calculated" style="display:none;"> <p>In order to make $<span id="salary">___</span> a year, the typical fast-food worker has to work <span id="salary_hours_per_week">__</span> hours a week.</p> <p>A household like yours in <span id="fast_food_calculator_locale">___,</span> <span id="fast_food_calculator_state">___</span> needs to earn <strong>$<span id="fast_food_calculator_living_wage_annual">__</span></strong> annually to make a secure yet modest living. A fast-food worker working full time would have to earn $<span id="living_wage_hourly">__</span> an hour to make that much.</p> <p>The average fast-food employee works less than <strong>25</strong> hours a week. To make a living wage in <span id="fast_food_calculator_locale2">___,</span> <span id="fast_food_calculator_state2">___</span> at current median wages, s/he would have to work <span id="living_hours_per_week">__</span> hours a week.</p> <p>In <span id="living_hours_per_week2">__</span> hours, McDonald's serves <span id="mc_d_customers_served">__</span> customers and makes <strong>$</strong><span id="mc_d_money_earned">__</span>. That's about <span id="big_mac_count">__</span> Big Macs.</p> </div> </div> <!-- data is in here --><script src=""></script><script> var median_fast_food_worker_wage = 8.94; // Source: National Employment Law Project, July 2013; var work_weeks_per_year = 52; var months_per_year = 12; var average_fast_food_worker_hours_per_week = 24.4; var average_weeks_in_a_month = 4.348; var hours_worked_at_full_time = 40; var days_in_2012 = 366; //leap year var McDonalds_customers_per_day_in_2012 = 69000000; // Source: McDonalds 2012 Annual Report var hours_in_day = 24; var mcD_systemwide_restaurants = 34480; var mcD_served_per_hour = McDonalds_customers_per_day_in_2012 / hours_in_day; var mcD_earnings_in_2012 = 27567000000; // Source: McDonalds 2012 Annual Report var mcD_earned_per_hour = Math.round(mcD_earnings_in_2012 / days_in_2012 / hours_in_day); var cost_of_big_mac = 4; var first_state = 'AK'; var first_locale = 'Anchorage, AK HUD Metro FMR Area'; var state_abbr = { 'AL' : 'Alabama', 'AK' : 'Alaska', 'AS' : 'America Samoa', 'AZ' : 'Arizona', 'AR' : 'Arkansas', 'CA' : 'California', 'CO' : 'Colorado', 'CT' : 'Connecticut', 'DE' : 'Delaware', 'DC' : 'District of Columbia', 'FM' : 'Micronesia1', 'FL' : 'Florida', 'GA' : 'Georgia', 'GU' : 'Guam', 'HI' : 'Hawaii', 'ID' : 'Idaho', 'IL' : 'Illinois', 'IN' : 'Indiana', 'IA' : 'Iowa', 'KS' : 'Kansas', 'KY' : 'Kentucky', 'LA' : 'Louisiana', 'ME' : 'Maine', 'MH' : 'Islands1', 'MD' : 'Maryland', 'MA' : 'Massachusetts', 'MI' : 'Michigan', 'MN' : 'Minnesota', 'MS' : 'Mississippi', 'MO' : 'Missouri', 'MT' : 'Montana', 'NE' : 'Nebraska', 'NV' : 'Nevada', 'NH' : 'New Hampshire', 'NJ' : 'New Jersey', 'NM' : 'New Mexico', 'NY' : 'New York', 'NC' : 'North Carolina', 'ND' : 'North Dakota', 'OH' : 'Ohio', 'OK' : 'Oklahoma', 'OR' : 'Oregon', 'PW' : 'Palau', 'PA' : 'Pennsylvania', 'PR' : 'Puerto Rico', 'RI' : 'Rhode Island', 'SC' : 'South Carolina', 'SD' : 'South Dakota', 'TN' : 'Tennessee', 'TX' : 'Texas', 'UT' : 'Utah', 'VT' : 'Vermont', 'VI' : 'Virgin Island', 'VA' : 'Virginia', 'WA' : 'Washington', 'WV' : 'West Virginia', 'WI' : 'Wisconsin', 'WY' : 'Wyoming' } var selected_state = jQuery("#selected_state"); var selected_locale = jQuery("#selected_locale"); var selected_household = jQuery("#selected_household"); for (var state in bfjo) { var option = jQuery('<option value="' + state + '">' + state_abbr[state] + ''); selected_state.append(option); } var fill_locale_selector = function(state_object) { selected_locale.html(""); for (var locale in state_object) { var option = jQuery('<option value="' + locale + '">' + locale.replace(/,.*$/, '') + ''); selected_locale.append(option); } } fill_locale_selector(bfjo[first_state]) selected_state.bind("change", function() { var state = $("#selected_state option:selected").val(); var state_object = bfjo[state]; fill_locale_selector(state_object); } ) /* var fill_household_selector = function(locale_object) { var selected_household = jQuery("#selected_household"); selected_household.html(""); for (var household in locale_object) { var option = jQuery('<option value="' + household + '">' + household + ''); selected_household.append(option); } } fill_household_selector(bfjo[first_state][first_locale]) */ selected_locale.bind("change", function() { var state = $("#selected_state option:selected").val(); var locale = $("#selected_locale option:selected").val(); var locale_object = bfjo[state][locale]; //fill_household_selector(locale_object); } ) enable_disable_locale = function() { var household = $("#selected_household option:selected").val(); if (household === '1P0C' || household === '2P0C') { selected_locale.attr('disabled', 'disabled'); } else { selected_locale.attr('disabled', ''); } } selected_household.bind("change", function() { enable_disable_locale(); } ); enable_disable_locale(); jQuery("#calculate_this").bind("submit", function() { var state = $("#selected_state option:selected").val(); var locale = $("#selected_locale option:selected").val(); var household = $("#selected_household option:selected").val(); var salary = parseInt($("#input_salary").val()); var annual_living_wage = bfjo[state][locale][household]; console.log(state); console.log(locale); console.log(household); console.log(annual_living_wage); var hourly_for_living = annual_living_wage / months_per_year / average_weeks_in_a_month / hours_worked_at_full_time; var hours_to_live_per_month = annual_living_wage / months_per_year / median_fast_food_worker_wage; var weeks_to_live_per_month = hours_to_live_per_month / hours_worked_at_full_time; var salary_monthly = salary / months_per_year; var hours_to_salary_monthly = salary_monthly / median_fast_food_worker_wage; var weeks_to_salary_monthly = hours_to_salary_monthly / hours_worked_at_full_time; var hours_living_a_week = hours_to_live_per_month / average_weeks_in_a_month; var hours_salary_a_week = hours_to_salary_monthly / average_weeks_in_a_month; var commify = function(number) { while (/(\d+)(\d{3})/.test(number.toString())){ number = number.toString().replace(/(\d+)(\d{3})/, '$1'+','+'$2'); } return number; } var salary_string = commify(salary); var yearly_living_wage_string = commify(annual_living_wage); /* while (/(\d+)(\d{3})/.test(salary_string.toString())){ salary_string = salary_string.toString().replace(/(\d+)(\d{3})/, '$1'+','+'$2'); } while (/(\d+)(\d{3})/.test(yearly_living_wage_string.toString())){ yearly_living_wage_string = yearly_living_wage_string.toString().replace(/(\d+)(\d{3})/, '$1'+','+'$2'); } */ jQuery("#calculated").show(); jQuery("#fast_food_calculator_hours").text(Math.round(hours_to_live_per_month)); jQuery("#fast_food_calculator_state").text(state_abbr[state]); jQuery("#fast_food_calculator_state2").text(state_abbr[state]); if (household === "1P0C" || household === "2P0C") { jQuery("#fast_food_calculator_locale").text(''); jQuery("#fast_food_calculator_locale2").text(''); } else { jQuery("#fast_food_calculator_locale").text(locale.replace(/,.*$/, '') + ','); jQuery("#fast_food_calculator_locale2").text(locale.replace(/,.*$/, '') + ','); } jQuery("#salary").text(salary_string); jQuery("#fast_food_calculator_time").text(Math.round(hours_to_salary_monthly)); jQuery("#living_hours_per_week").text(Math.round(hours_living_a_week)); jQuery("#living_hours_per_week2").text(Math.round(hours_living_a_week)); jQuery("#salary_hours_per_week").text(Math.round(hours_salary_a_week)); jQuery("#fast_food_calculator_living_wage_annual").text(yearly_living_wage_string); jQuery("#mc_d_customers_served").text( commify( Math.round( Math.round(hours_living_a_week) * mcD_served_per_hour ) ) ); jQuery("#mc_d_money_earned").text( commify(Math.round(Math.round(hours_living_a_week) * mcD_earned_per_hour)) ); jQuery("#big_mac_count").text( commify( Math.round( Math.round(hours_living_a_week) * mcD_earned_per_hour / cost_of_big_mac ) ) ); console.log(hourly_for_living); var hourly_for_living_clean = Math.round(hourly_for_living * 100) .toString().replace(/(\d+)(\d{2})/, '$1'+'.'+'$2'); jQuery("#living_wage_hourly").text(hourly_for_living_clean); return false; } ) </script> </body></html> MoJo Food and Ag Labor Thu, 13 Mar 2014 20:23:30 +0000 Ben Dreyfuss 247466 at Tesla Pits Texas vs. the Free Market <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" ""> <html><body> <p>Tesla is having a lot of well-publicized problems selling its cars direct to the public. Most states mandate that cars can only be sold through independent dealers, and that's shut Tesla out of <img align="right" alt="" class="image image-_original" src="/files/blog_tesla_roadster.jpg" style="border: 1px solid black; margin: 20px 20px 15px 30px;">the market in plenty of places, including ultra-free market bastions like Texas. <a href="" target="_blank">Paul Waldman comments:</a></p> <blockquote> <p>You'd think that if conservatives really believed all their rhetoric about the value of unfettered free markets, they would be all over this issue, advocating for Tesla's side of the controversy and campaigning to break up the anti-free-enterprise car dealer oligopolies. But of course, we're talking about Tesla, and liberals like electric cars, and therefore conservatives feel obligated to hate electric cars, so that probably won't happen.</p> </blockquote> <p>OK, sure, but here's the thing: Teslas are also really expensive. That means they can only be purchased by rich people, and conservatives really like rich people. So this is a dilemma, no?</p> <p>Now, I suppose that in Texas they don't think much of any car that doesn't run on refined hydrocarbon products, so maybe the cognitive dissonance there is less than I think. But North Carolina doesn't have any oil. So what's the deal there?</p> <p>In any case, I want to know who's buying these cars, anyway. Last Halloween, Marian and I decided to escape the house and eat out. In order to kill time, we walked around the shopping center we had gone to and I spied a Tesla store there. So I popped in and sat down in a Roadster. I didn't even come close to fitting, and I'm only an inch or so taller than six feet. Am I just pickier than most tall people? Do tall people who buy Teslas slouch a lot? Or has Tesla simply abandoned the quarter of the market over six feet?</p> </body></html> Kevin Drum Climate Change Thu, 13 Mar 2014 19:04:42 +0000 Kevin Drum 247476 at California Just Had Its Warmest Winter on Record <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" ""> <html><body> <div class="inline inline-center" style="display: table; width: 1%"> <img alt="temperature map" class="image" src="/files/201312-201402_0.png"><div class="caption">NOAA</div> </div> <p>This winter has been a tale of two Americas: The Midwest is just beginning to thaw out from a battery of epic cold snaps, while Californians might feel that they pretty much skipped winter altogether. In fact, <a href="" target="_blank">new NOAA data</a> reveal that California's winter (December through February) was the warmest in the <a href=";parameter=tmp&amp;state=4&amp;div=0&amp;year=2014&amp;month=2#ranks-form" target="_blank">119-year record</a>, 4.4 degrees Fahrenheit above the 20th century average.</p> <p>The map above ranks every state's winter temperature average relative to its own historical record low (in other words, relative to itself and not to other states). Low numbers indicate that the state was unusually cold; higher numbers mean it was exceptionally warm. As you can see, the Midwest was much colder than average, while the West was hotter than average (despite a season-long kerfluffle about polar vortexes, the East Coast wasn't exceptionally cold, after all).</p> <p>As we've reported, there's currently a scientific debate over whether climate change in the Arcitc is making the <a href="" target="_blank">jet stream "drunk,"</a> and thereby increasing the likelihood of extreme cold spells; the exact role of climate change in California's record heat is <a href="" target="_blank">still unclear</a>.</p> <p>As anyone working in <a href="" target="_blank">California's farming industry</a> could confirm, the state also had an exceptionally dry winter, the third-lowest precipitation on record. Other interesting facts from the NOAA report:</p> <ul> <li>At the beginning of March, 91 percent of the Great Lakes remained frozen, the second-largest ice cover since record keeping began in 1973.</li> <li>With reservoirs in central and northern California at 36 to 74 percent of their historical average levels, these regions would need 18 inches of rain over the next three months to end the drought, much more than the state normally gets in that time period.</li> <li>Alaska's winter was the eighth-warmest on record, 6.2 degrees F over the 1971-2000 average.</li> </ul> </body></html> Blue Marble Maps Climate Change Climate Desk Science Thu, 13 Mar 2014 18:26:04 +0000 Tim McDonnell 247441 at It's Time to Release the Torture Report, Mr. President <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" ""> <html><body> <p><a href="" target="_blank">From President Obama,</a> commenting on the Senate's investigation of Bush-era torture tactics:</p> <blockquote> <p>I am absolutely committed to declassifying that report as soon as the report is completed. In fact, I would urge them to go ahead and complete the report, send it to us. We will declassify those findings so that the American people can understand what happened in the past, and that can help guide us as we move forward.</p> </blockquote> <p>Say what? Last I heard, the report was completed in 2012. The CIA responded last June. Dianne Feinstein has been pushing for declassification of at least the report's executive summary ever since. So if Feinstein wants to release the report, and Obama wants to release the report, what's the holdup?</p> </body></html> Kevin Drum Civil Liberties Congress Obama Thu, 13 Mar 2014 17:14:44 +0000 Kevin Drum 247456 at NSA: Foreign Leaders Often in the Dark About Spying Activities <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" ""> <html><body> <p>Glenn Greenwald publishes a fascinating little extract from an NSA document today. The unnamed author is explaining why cooperation with foreign countries doesn't change much depending on <a href="" target="_blank">which party wins national elections:</a></p> <blockquote> <p><em><strong>Are our foreign intelligence relationships usually insulated from short-term political ups and downs, or not?</strong></em></p> <p>(S//SI//REL) For a variety of reasons, our intelligence relationships are rarely disrupted by foreign political perturbations, international or domestic. First, we are helping our partners address critical intelligence shortfalls, just as they are assisting us. Second, in many of our foreign partners&rsquo; capitals, few senior officials outside of their defense-intelligence apparatuses are witting to any SIGINT connection to the U.S./NSA.</p> </blockquote> <p>In other words, you might be the prime minister, but that doesn't mean you have any idea what your intelligence apparatus is up to.</p> <p>Now, this is worth taking with a grain of salt, since we don't know who wrote this, or whether he really knew what he was talking about. I've been skeptical all along of the "shocked, shocked" reaction of many foreign leaders to the Snowden leaks, and I remain skeptical that they didn't know at least the broad outlines of what the NSA and their own intelligence services were up to. Nonetheless, this provides a useful window into the NSA's thinking: the less their political masters know, the better off they are.</p> </body></html> Kevin Drum Civil Liberties Thu, 13 Mar 2014 16:21:47 +0000 Kevin Drum 247446 at The Fed Was Supposed to Rein In Its Bailout Powers. Instead It Did This. <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" ""> <html><body> <p>Between 2007 and 2009, the Federal Reserve&mdash;the US central bank tasked with regulating unemployment and inflation&mdash;handed out <a href="" target="_blank">an unprecedented $20 trillion in super-low interest loans</a> to failing Wall Street banks. The 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform law required&nbsp;the Fed to restrict its emergency lending powers so that too-big-to-fail banks don't expect the central bank to dole out easy money again in the event of another financial crisis. The Fed <a href="" target="_blank">waited over</a> <a href="" target="_blank">three years</a> to craft regulations to comply with the Dodd-Frank provision, and now it&nbsp;has finally drafted rules&nbsp;to limit its bailout powers, financial reform advocates say the restrictions are far too weak.</p> <p>Dodd-Frank says that any future emergency lending by the Fed <a href="" target="_blank">can't be used to bail out insolvent firms, has to be backed by good collateral,</a> and <a href="" target="_blank">can't go to a single institution</a>. The law also imposes time limits on the Fed's emergency loans to banks. The <a href="" target="_blank">draft rule that the Federal Reserve released in late December</a> (before current Fed chair Janet Yellen was confirmed) misses the mark on all these requirements, Marcus Stanley, the policy director for the advocacy group Americans for Financial Reform (AFR) <a href="" target="_blank">said in a letter to the Fed this week</a>, adding that though the rule "complies with the letter of the law, it does not fulfill the spirit of the Congressional mandate," which intended to significantly restrict the Fed's bailout abilities.</p> <p>"The rule mostly reiterates the language of [Dodd-Frank]," Stanley says. "And the drafters take advantage of every opportunity to interpret the statute in ways that minimize limits on emergency lending authority."</p> <p>Instead of limiting the Fed's emergency lending powers to temporary cash assistance as it is supposed to, the draft rule imposes no clear time limit on how long a big bank may remain dependent on Fed largesse. And the draft regulation defines "solvency" with far too broad a brush, according to AFR. The proposed rule does not require the Fed to assess if a potential borrower's liabilities exceed the value of its assets.</p> <p>While the emergency lending rule would ban loans to a single institution, it would still allow the creation of loan programs that lend to, say, three or four of the largest banks, while allowing smaller banks to flounder.</p> <p>The Fed's draft emergency lending rule does not even set an interest rate at which loans will be extended, a provision that would help to limit the "moral hazard" of easy money, AFR notes. And the rule is unclear as to how it would value borrowers' collateral.</p> <p>The Fed declined to comment. But last year, former Fed chairman Ben Bernanke dismissed concerns that the central bank had not yet drafted a&nbsp;rule limiting its emergency lending powers, insisting that the language in the Dodd-Frank law was sufficient. "I think that [Dodd-Frank] is very clear about what we can and cannot do. And I don't think that the absence of a formal rule would allow us to do something which the law prohibits," including bailing out an individual firm, or lending to an insolvent bank, he said at a House hearing in July.</p> <p>The Fed is currently accepting public comment on its emergency lending rule, so it is possible that reformers may win some victories before a final rule is put in place. Though the lobbying clout of the financial industry <a href="" target="_blank">vastly outweighs</a> that of pro-reform groups.</p> <p>Before the Fed finally drafted its emergency lending rules, financial reformers said the central bank was likely dragging its feet because it didn't want to cede&nbsp;some of its authority over the financial world. This latest lukewarm effort to rein in its bailout abilities makes it seem like that may be the case.</p> <p>"There are two ways to keep the economy on an even keel," AFR's Stanley <a href="" target="_blank">told me last July.</a> "Through clear, transparent rules that treat everyone the same&mdash;which is pretty challenging, and involves taking on a lot of interests." Or, he says, "you get to create a whole bunch of money out of nothing and you can hand it out wherever the problem is&hellip; It's easier to have this magic power."</p> </body></html> MoJo Economy Regulatory Affairs Thu, 13 Mar 2014 16:05:55 +0000 Erika Eichelberger 247421 at Can the Koch Brothers Force Voters to Take Republicans Seriously? <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" ""> <html><body> <p>Greg Sargent takes a look at the Democratic strategy of <a href="" target="_blank">linking Republican senatorial candidates to the Koch brothers:</a></p> <blockquote> <p>As I noted the other day, this is all about creating a framework within which voters can be made to understand the actual policy agenda Republicans are campaigning on. This is what the Bain attacks on Mitt Romney were all about: <strong>Dem focus groups showed voters simply didn&rsquo;t believe Romney <img align="right" alt="" class="image image-_original" src="/files/blog_koch_brothers.jpg" style="border: 1px solid black; margin: 20px 20px 15px 30px;">would cut entitlements (per the Paul Ryan plan) while cutting taxes on the rich.</strong> The Bain narrative made Romney&rsquo;s actual priorities more comprehensible.</p> <p>The Koch attacks are designed to do something similar. They aren&rsquo;t really about the Kochs. They are a proxy for the one percent, a means through which to tap into a general sense that the economy remains rigged in favor of the very wealthy. Placed into this frame, GOP policies &mdash; opposition to raising the minimum wage; the Paul Ryan fiscal blueprint, which would redistribute wealth upwards; opposition to the Medicaid expansion, which AFP is fighting in multiple states&nbsp;&mdash;&nbsp; become more comprehensible as part of a broader storyline. In that narrative, Republican candidates are trying to maintain or even exacerbate an economic status quo that&rsquo;s stacked against ordinary Americans, while Dems are offering solutions to boost economic mobility and reduce inequality, which are increasingly pressing public concerns.</p> </blockquote> <p>Plus it's always good to have a bogeyman, isn't it?</p> <p>But I agree with Sargent, and this is something that relates back to my posts earlier this week about the fact that middle-class voters don't perceive a big difference between the economic policies of Democrats and Republicans. I argued that one reason for this is that Democrats haven't offered the middle class very much over the past few decades. But several critics pounced on this: even if it's true, they said, the <em>policy agendas</em> of the two parties are like night and day. Republicans want to privatize Social Security. They want to shred the safety net. They want to let the minimum wage erode to nothing. They want to eliminate capital gains taxes. They want to gut the EPA. Etc.</p> <p>But one of the mysteries of modern politics is that a lot of voters don't take this seriously. Partly it's because Republicans have never had the unified power to pass this agenda. Partly it's because they chickened out on a lot of it even when they came close to having that power during the Bush era. As a result, when Republicans engage in one of their periodic anti-government jeremiads it strikes a lot of people as just a sort of meaningless chant, words that Republican candidates have to mouth in order to prove they're part of the team, but not something they're really serious about.</p> <p>This frustrates Democrats no end, and they'd love to find a way to truly pin this stuff on the backs of Republican candidates. If Sargent is right, the Koch brothers are a way to do this.</p> </body></html> Kevin Drum Elections Money in Politics The Right Thu, 13 Mar 2014 15:14:37 +0000 Kevin Drum 247436 at Mitch Albom Becomes an Issue in Michigan House Primary <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" ""> <html><body> <p>According to a conservative PAC, Republican House candidate David Trott is one of the five people you meet in Hell. Trott, who is <a href="" target="_blank">challenging</a> first-term GOP Rep. Kerry Bentivolio in the GOP primary for Michigan's 11th district, runs a law firm that specializes in mortgage foreclosures. In a new ad, a Virginia-based group called Freedom's Defense Fund highlights a foreclosure Trott's firm processed in 2011 that left a 101-year-old homeowner, Texana Hollis, out on the street:</p> <object height="354" width="630"><param name="movie" value="//;version=3"> <param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"> <param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"> <embed allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" height="354" src="//;version=3" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="630"></embed></object> <p>The eviction highlighted in the ad came about after the woman's son fell behind on his property tax payments and ignored repeated warnings. But there was a happy ending: <em>Detroit Free-Press</em> columnist and <a href="" target="_blank">airport bookstore king</a> Mitch Albom bought the house and transferred it back to Hollis.</p> <p>As I reported in January, Trott has a hand in every step of the foreclosure process&mdash;he even owns the newspaper where foreclosure notices are required to be posted. But while the ad itself is brutal, it probably won't do much damage, because Freedom's Defense Fund is only spending $15,000 to run it on local cable channels. That's consistent with a group that spends much of the money it raises paying Washington-area direct-mail outfits. Of the $1.6 million FDF spent in 2013, just $120,000 went toward candidates or independent expenditures. As <em>Think Progress</em> <a href="" target="_blank">notes</a>, $1.2 million went to fundraising services, which means the PAC is spending most of the money it raises on raising more money.</p> </body></html> MoJo Elections Thu, 13 Mar 2014 14:59:19 +0000 Tim Murphy 247431 at We're Still at War: Photo of the Day for March 13, 2014 <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" ""> <html><body> <div class="inline inline-left" style="display: table; width: 1%"><img alt="" class="image" src="/files/0313-630.jpg"></div> <p class="rtecenter"><em>Lance Cpl. Steven T. Peterson, a machine gunner with Weapons Company, 3rd Battalion, 8th Marine Regiment, 2nd Marine Division and part of Black Sea Rotational Force 14, subdues a simulated enemy during a mechanical arm control holds course after being exposed to oleoresin capsicum spray on Mihail Kogalniceanu Air Base, Romania, March 5, 2014. The Marines were directly exposed to the OC spray, then instructed to complete a course with different stations which required them to execute different take down techniques on a simulated enemy combatant. Black Sea Rotational Force 14 is a contingent of Marines to maintain positive relations with partner nations, regional stability and increase interoperability while providing the capability for rapid crisis response, as directed by U.S. European Command, in the Black Sea, Balkan and Caucus regions of Eastern Europe. (<a href="" target="_blank">U.S. Marine Corps photo</a> by Lance Cpl. Scott W. Whiting/Released)</em></p> </body></html> MoJo Thu, 13 Mar 2014 14:05:15 +0000 247426 at Guns May Soon Be Everywhere in Georgia <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" ""> <html><body> <p>Soon gun owners in the state of Georgia may be allowed to pack heat almost anywhere&mdash;including K-12 schools, bars, churches, government buildings, and airports. The "Safe Carry Protection Act" (HB 875) would also expand Georgia's Stand Your Ground statute, the controversial law <a href="" target="_blank">made famous by the Trayvon Martin killing</a>, which allows armed citizens to defend themselves with deadly force if they believe they are faced with serious physical harm.</p> <p>The bill could pass as soon as next week, before the current legislative session ends March 20. It is the latest effort in the battle over gun laws that continues to rage <a href="" target="_blank">in statehouses around the country</a>. It is perhaps also the most extreme yet. "Of all the bills pending right now in state legislatures, this is the most sweeping and most dangerous," Laura Cutiletta, a staff attorney with the <a href="" target="_blank">Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence</a>, <a href="">told <em>PolitiFact</em></a>. Americans for Responsible Solutions, the gun reform advocacy group founded by former congresswoman Gabby Giffords after she was shot in the head,&nbsp;<a href=";">has deemed it</a>&nbsp;the "guns everywhere" bill. For its part, the National Rifle Association <a href="">recently called</a> HB 875 "the most comprehensive pro-gun reform legislation introduced in recent state history."</p> <p>In addition to overturning current state laws and dramatically rolling back concealed-carry restrictions, HB 875 <a href="">would loosen other</a> gun regulations in the state. <a href="" target="_blank">The law</a> would:</p> <ul> <li>Remove the fingerprinting requirement for gun license renewals</li> <li>Prohibit the state from keeping a gun license database</li> <li>Tighten the state's preemption statute, which restricts local governments from passing gun laws that conflict with state laws</li> <li>Repeal the state licensing requirement for firearms dealers (requiring only a federal firearms license)</li> <li>Expand gun owner rights in a declared state of emergency by prohibiting government authorities from seizing, registering, or otherwise limiting the carrying of guns in any way permitted by law&nbsp;before the emergency was declared</li> <li>Limit the governor's emergency powers by repealing the ability to regulate the sale of firearms during a declared&nbsp;state of emergency</li> <li>Lower the age to obtain a concealed-carry license from 21 to 18 for active-duty military and honorably discharged veterans who've completed basic training</li> <li>Prohibit detaining someone for the sole purpose of checking whether they have a gun license</li> </ul> <p>The sweeping bill would also expand the state's Stand your Ground law into an "absolute" defense for the use of deadly force in self-protection. "Defense of self or others," the bills reads "shall be an absolute defense to any violation under this part." In its current wording, the bill would even allow individuals who possess a gun illegally&mdash;convicted felons, for example&mdash;to still claim a Stand Your Ground defense.</p> </body></html> <p style="font-size: 1.083em;"><a href="/mojo/2014/03/georgia-guns-concealed-carry-stand-your-ground"><strong><em>Continue Reading &raquo;</em></strong></a></p> MoJo Crime and Justice Guns Top Stories Thu, 13 Mar 2014 10:00:09 +0000 Hannah Levintova 247396 at