Month: August 2017

Friday Night Soother

by digby

Because you need some corgies running on the beach to take your mind off the end of the world.

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In the Thoughtful, Non-Ideological Spirit of Messrs. James Damore and David Brooks 

by tristero

David Brooks says that James Damore, in his now-famous Google memo about the genetics of gender,  just wanted to have a thoughtful intellectual discussion about science rather than an ideological one about gender. I, for one, am in complete agreement with all such thoughtful initiatives. Complicated problems require thoughtfulness. I too seek to rise above ideology especially when science is involved.

So, Messrs Brooks and Damore, please join me in pondering – thoughtfully, non-ideologically – a problem even more intractable than gender diversity in Silicon Valley.

Let start by saying that truly, I have nothing against individual members of the ethnic/social group I will discuss and in fact, have many friends among them. I also am speaking solely in the aggregate, purely on average. There are, to be sure, many individuals within the group who do not behave the way the average group member does. However, in the spirit of dispassionate, thoughtful scientific inquiry, we are compelled to the following observations and conclusions:

One – It is empirically true that over the course of the long bloody history of homo sapiens, white males who are heterosexual have slaughtered more human beings than those of any other race, gender, or sexual orientation.

Two- There is every indication – which includes real live empirically valid evidence  thoughtfully gathered and cited by men like James Damore, David Brooks, and Charles Murray – that straight white males are genetically quite different than those who are not white, not male, and not straight.


Three – There is no indication that straight white males will mitigate their mass-violence propensities any time soon. They alone are responsible for the original design and deployment of modern weapons of mass destruction. And to date, no other race, no other gender, and no other sexual orientation has actually used them. Only white men who are straight have dropped atomic bombs on fellow humans.

To be quite clear: We are all at serious risk of dying at the hands of straight white males. This is simply an indisputable fact. And it will require thoughtful, non-ideological, James Damore-style approaches across the political spectrum to find ways to do something about this global problem.

Both sides have something to contribute to solving the straight white male problem. Conservatives, as they have in the past for other ethnic groups, will surely propose sterilizing straight white males in order to eliminate them within a generation or two. Liberals might be in favor of extending the right to an equal vote in the world’s affairs to all human beings in the hopes that a truly fair vote would remove from power many of the most violently insane straight white males.

To be sure, other human groups have their problems and many different cohorts have engaged in mass slaughter. So don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying other groups are perfect! And again, I’m not talking about any particular individual white man who like women. Some are quite non-violent. I’m just talking about the group as a whole.

So, straight white men, you are being both unthoughtful and ideological if you take this personally, as if it’s about you. It’s not.

Trust me.

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Adding: Because the right has so corrupted the public discourse, I feel it is important for you to know that that the above is, in fact, not serious. It is satire. It is intended solely to call attention to the fact that Damore’s awful memo, and Brooks’s awful column about the memo, are highly ideological rightwing propaganda masquerading as a kind of high-handed reasonableness. In fact, neither is in any way an honest attempt to open up a reasonable dialogue on how to address gender discrimination at Google. By cherrypicking studies and ripping them out of context, Damore adopts a pretense of objectivity so that he can push extreme right sexist memes. And Brooks is, to be frank, too dumb to recognize when he’s been had.

In another context, Damore’s opinions, while odious bullshit, would be protected speech. In this specific context, they were clearly intended to mislead people, intimidate them, and to personally offend. They are wildly inappropriate and he clearly deserved firing.

Actual analysis of empirical evidence and actual social policy proposals informed by such analyses read very, very differently than Damore’s absurdities. For example, I suggest reading this superb analysis of the adult hearing healthcare field by the National Academy of Sciences. It is clear, dispassionate, tightly argued, and offers many specific data-driven recommendations. It is, also, to anyone not involved in the issue (as I am), more detailed than they need to know. But this is what a truly thoughtful in-depth discussion looks like. (By the way, it has sparked an extensive and intensive re-examination of the hearing healthcare industry in America – and substsantive changes.)

By contrast, what Damore was up to was not serious.  His ideas were not being suppressed because he had no real ones to suppress or, for that matter, to engage with. He was just trying to piss people off – and he succeeded. But pissing people off is not thoughtful discussion and no one, especially NY Times columnists, should fall for this kind of con.

In short, if conservatives want to be taken seriously on the basis of their ideas, they need to present those ideas in a serious fashion. And more importantly, they need to have serious ideas to begin with, not bigoted opinions and biases bought and paid for by wealthy masters.

Refreshingly candid

by digby

 He’s just saying what many of them think:

Roy Moore, one of the Republicans vying to replace Attorney General Jeff Session as an Alabama senator, said in a recent interview that “you could say that” America today is evil.

When The Guardian’s Paul Lewis, who was probing the rising popularity of Russian President Vladimir Putin among U.S. conservatives, told Moore that former President Reagan called Russia “the focus of evil in the modern world,” Moore said it wasn’t the only one.

“You could say that very well about America, couldn’t you?” Moore responded in the interview published Wednesday.

“We promote a lot of bad things,” added the former chief justice of Alabama’s Supreme Court, specifically citing same-sex marriage.

“That’s the very argument that Vladimir Putin makes,” Lewis pointed out.

“Well, then maybe Putin is right,” Moore said. “Maybe he’s more akin to me than I know.”

Yes, yes he is.

He’s actually a little bit late to the party. The American right came to this a while back — just about the same time that the United States decided to elect an African American as president. Coincidence, I’m sure.

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Doin’ it for themselves

by digby

Read this piece by Joan Walsh at The Nation, especially if you’re feeling a little bit down or anxious about where we’re going right now. It will brighten your day:

Carolyn Fiddler likes to call it “the Trump effect”—the sudden surge of new candidates, most of them women, who said to themselves: If that fucking schlub can be president, I can run for office. Fiddler, an expert on Virginia politics, is partly kidding—but partly not. For a host of reasons, the election of the pussy-grabbing, utterly incompetent, nationally embarrassing Donald Trump has inspired a stunning wave of female newcomers to electoral politics. Since November, an astonishing 16,000 women have contacted Emily’s List, which works to elect pro-choice Democratic women, to say they want to run. In the 2015–16 election cycle, only 920 women did that.

In answer to the first woman on a national ticket America elected the most overtly misogynist, incompetent cretin to ever sit in the Oval Office. It’s infuriating. But some women are reacting to that insult by running for office and good for them.

Read the whole thing, it’s great.

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Health Care wishes, Donald Trump dreams

by digby

The Kaiser Family Health Foundation has conducted a new poll on the health care situation:

The August Kaiser Health Tracking Poll finds that the majority of the public (60 percent) say it is a “good thing” that the Senate did not pass the bill that would have repealed and replaced the ACA. Since then, President Trump has suggested Congress not take on other issues, like tax reform, until it passes a replacement plan for the ACA, but six in ten Americans (62 percent) disagree with this approach, while one-third (34 percent) agree with it.

A majority of the public (57 percent) want to see Republicans in Congress work with Democrats to make improvements to the 2010 health care law, while smaller shares say they want to see Republicans in Congress continue working on their own plan to repeal and replace the ACA (21 percent) or move on from health care to work on other priorities (21 percent). However, about half of Republicans and Trump supporters would like to see Republicans in Congress keep working on a plan to repeal the ACA.

A large share of Americans (78 percent) think President Trump and his administration should do what they can to make the current health care law work while few (17 percent) say they should do what they can to make the law fail so they can replace it later. About half of Republicans and supporters of President Trump say the Trump administration should do what they can to make the law work (52 percent and 51 percent, respectively) while about four in ten say they should do what they can to make the law fail (40 percent and 39 percent, respectively). Moving forward, a majority of the public (60 percent) says President Trump and Republicans in Congress are responsible for any problems with the ACA.

Since Congress began debating repeal and replace legislation, there has been news about instability in the ACA marketplaces. The majority of the public are unaware that health insurance companies choosing not to sell insurance plans in certain marketplaces or health insurance companies charging higher premiums in certain marketplaces only affect those who purchase their own insurance on these marketplaces (67 percent and 80 percent, respectively). In fact, the majority of Americans think that health insurance companies charging higher premiums in certain marketplaces will have a negative impact on them and their family, while fewer (31 percent) say it will have no impact.

A majority of the public disapprove of stopping outreach efforts for the ACA marketplaces so fewer people sign up for insurance (80 percent) and disapprove of the Trump administration no longer enforcing the individual mandate (65 percent). While most Republicans and Trump supporters disapprove of stopping outreach efforts, a majority of Republicans (66 percent) and Trump supporters (65 percent) approve of the Trump administration no longer enforcing the individual mandate.

The majority of Americans (63 percent) do not think President Trump should use negotiating tactics that could disrupt insurance markets and cause people who buy their own insurance to lose health coverage, while three in ten (31 percent) support using whatever tactics necessary to encourage Democrats to start negotiating on a replacement plan. The majority of Republicans (58 percent) and President Trump supporters (59 percent) support these negotiating tactics while most Democrats, independents, and those who disapprove of President Trump do not (81 percent, 65 percent, 81 percent).

This month’s survey continues to find that more of the public holds a favorable view of the ACA than an unfavorable one (52 percent vs. 39 percent). This marks an overall increase in favorability of nine percentage points since the 2016 presidential election as well as an increase of favorability among Democrats, independents, and Republicans.

I think most people are now being practical and recognizing that going back to the way things were is a very bad idea and that the Republicans will likely make things even worse.

Trump has telegraphed that he thinks the best politics are to sabotage the health care system, let people suffer and die and then blame Obama for it. (Blame is his only political strategy.) It appears that most of the public is on to him.

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Kerning experts go digital

by digby

Old time readers of mine will recognize the “kerning” reference to the horde of online-experts who weighed in on the George W. Bush documents to allegedly de-bunk them because they used fonts (kerning) that were not in use during the period. (It turned out that they were, but it caused quite a frenzy at the time.)

Anyway, there’s a modern version of this going around and now it’s landed on the left, unfortunately. The Nation has published an incomprehensible conspiracy theory about the DNC hack that absolves our Russian friends of any involvement.

This piece in NY Magazine takes on the details which is more than I can bear at the moment. The intro explains:

Yesterday, The Nation published an article by journalist Patrick Lawrence purporting to demonstrate that last summer’s pivotal DNC hack was, in fact, an inside job. Maybe unsurprisingly, it’s proven especially popular among people who hold it as an article of political faith that the Russian government and intelligence services played no role in the theft and publication of a cache of emails from DNC staffers:

Conclusive proof, or even strong evidence, that the DNC emails were leaked by an insider and not by Russian-sponsored hackers would indeed be a huge story — among other things, it would contradict the near-unanimous opinion of U.S. intelligence agencies, and raise some very serious questions about their objectivity and neutrality.

But this article is neither conclusive proof nor strong evidence. It’s the extremely long-winded product of a crank, and it’s been getting attention only because it appears in a respected left-wing publication like The Nation. Anyone hoping to read it for careful reporting and clear explanation is going to come away disappointed, however.

If you want to get to the actual claims being made, you’ll have to skip the first 1,000 or so words, which mostly consist of breathtakingly elaborate throat-clearing. (“[H]ouses built on sand and made of cards are bound to collapse, and there can be no surprise that the one resting atop the ‘hack theory,’ as we can call the prevailing wisdom on the DNC events, appears to be in the process of doing so.”) About halfway through, you get to the crux of the article: A report, made by an anonymous analyst calling himself “Forensicator,” on the “metadata” of “locked files” leaked by the hacker Guccifer 2.0.

Read on for why this is not exactly a believable theory.

Also, it doesn’t explain the Podesta hack or the DCCC hack or all the other hacks of elections systems, but the reaction of right wingers suggests that this is supposed to put this silly Russian business to rest once and for all so we can go back to celebrating Trump’s awesome populism and isolationism. If that’s your thing, enjoy. I think I’ll rely on the obvious until proven otherwise.

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Why should anyone listen?
by Tom Sullivan

It is no secret that one of the president’s favorite phrases is “a lot of people.” He uses it to impart some factoid he heard five minutes earlier. Steve Benen:

It’s reminiscent of remarks Trump delivered in March when he said, in reference to Abraham Lincoln, “Most people don’t even know he was a Republican. Right? Does anyone know? A lot of people don’t know that.”

Referring to the president as “Captain Obvious,” the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank noted soon after just how frequently Trump reflects on what he assumes others don’t know.

That Bill Clinton signed NAFTA: “A lot of people don’t know that.”

What a value-added tax is: “A lot of people don’t know what that means.”

That we have a trade deficit with Mexico: “People don’t know that.”

That Iraq has large oil reserves: “People don’t know this about Iraq.”

That war is expensive: “People don’t realize it is a very, very expensive process.”

Whether he thinks “people” are incredibly uninformed, or whether he’s simply oblivious himself, will remain a subject of some debate.

But another way Trump invokes “a lot of people” is to suggest there is popular support behind the smoke he is about to blow. After the Orlando nightclub shooting last year, for example, candidate Trump told reporters,

… President Obama either does not understand radicalized Muslim terrorists or “he gets it better than anybody understands.”

“Well,” Trump said on the “Today Show” Monday morning, “there are a lot of people that think maybe he doesn’t want to get it. A lot of people think maybe he doesn’t want to know about it. I happen to think that he just doesn’t know what he’s doing, but there are many people that think maybe he doesn’t want to get it. He doesn’t want to see what’s really happening. And that could be.”

This is Trump’s idea of subtle.

Responding to criticism of his statements on Korea, Trump doubled down. He told reporters:

“Frankly, the people who were questioning that statement, was it too tough? Maybe it wasn’t tough enough,” he told reporters at his golf club in Bedminster, N.J. “They’ve been doing this to our country for a long time, for many years, and it’s about time that somebody stuck up for the people of this country and for the people of other countries. So if anything, maybe that statement wasn’t tough enough.”

No doubt a lot of people are saying that.

It’s just that, given that “a lot of people” don’t seem to know what for the rest of us is common knowledge (like France being our first ally), why does Trump think we should take seriously what a lot of people who know so little are saying?< Much less him?br />

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Request a copy of For The Win, my county-level election mechanics primer, at tom.bluecentury at gmail.

QOTY: Trump



by digby

This is just a little reminder of one of the more astonishing events of this astonishing time.

“I just fired the head of the F.B.I. He was crazy, a real nut job,” Trump told the Russian foreign minister and U.S. ambassador on May 10 during an Oval Office meeting, according to a transcript of the meeting read to The Times by a U.S. official. “I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off.”

And then he added, “tell Vlad we’re in the clear…” 

Remember, this happened the day after he fired Comey. And they kept the meeting a secret only Russian photographers and press were allowed in. And they stabbed Trump in the back when they released the pictures on the internet and late withdrew them:

All that happened. Just saying.

Update: Brian Beutler takes a look at Mike Pence’s deep involvement in these events.

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Trump’s alma mater has bad news for him

by digby

You know how he loves to brag about his degree from Wharton. (He didn’t get a graduate degree, by the way, so it’s not exactly as he portrays it.)

Anyway:

In a report published Thursday, the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School said the immigration plan, dubbed the RAISE Act, would result in 4.6 million lost jobs by the year 2040. It also found that the U.S. economy would be 2% smaller than it would be under the current immigration policy during that time.

Last week, Trump threw his support behind the RAISE Act, a bill crafted by Republican Senators David Perdue and Tom Cotton. The proposal seeks to cut legal immigration to the U.S. by 50% within a decade.

“If you have fewer workers, we will have less economic growth,” said Kimberly Burham, a managing director at the Penn Wharton Budget Model, a nonpartisan research team at UPenn.

Related: Trump immigration policy poses risk to job market
Economists say the U.S. economy depends on foreign workers to grow the labor force and maintain growth. Since 2000, Baby Boomers have been retiring at a much faster pace than the U.S. job market has been growing, according to data from the Atlanta Federal Reserve and Labor Department.

There were 27 million foreign-born workers in the United States last year, government figures show.

“Immigrants, especially new immigrants, are highly productive and if we decrease that number, that will harm economic growth in the short and long run,” said Burham.

The White House has not yet responded to CNNMoney’s request for comment on the study.

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Well, this is comforting

by digby

About a quarter of the American people are members of a cult:

Critics of President Trump have repeatedly warned of his potential to undermine American democracy. Among the concerns are his repeated assertions that he would have won the popular vote had 3 to 5 million “illegals” not voted in the 2016 election, a claim echoed by the head of a White House advisory committee on voter fraud.

Claims of large-scale voter fraud are nottrue, but that has not stopped a substantial number of Republicans from believing them. But how far would Republicans be willing to follow the president to stop what they perceive as rampant fraud? Our recent survey suggests that the answer is quite far: About half of Republicans say they would support postponing the 2020 presidential election until the country can fix this problem.

Here’s how we did our research:

The survey interviewed a sample of 1,325 Americans from June 5 through 20. Respondents were recruited from the Qualtrics online panel who had previously reported identifying with or leaning toward one of the two major parties. We focus on the 650 respondents who identify with or lean toward the Republican Party. The sample has been weighted to match the population in terms of sex, age, race and education.

After a series of initial questions, respondents were asked whether Trump won the popular vote, whether millions of illegal immigrants voted, and how often voter fraud occurs. These questions evoke arguments frequently made by Trump and others about the integrity of the 2016 election.

Then the survey asked two questions about postponing the 2020 election. 

If Donald Trump were to say that the 2020 presidential election should be postponed until the country can make sure that only eligible American citizens can vote, would you support or oppose postponing the election?
What if both Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress were to say that the 2020 presidential election should be postponed until the country can make sure that only eligible American citizens can vote? Would you support or oppose postponing the election?

Roughly half of Republicans believe Trump won the popular vote — and would support postponing the 2020 election.

Nearly half of Republicans (47 percent) believe that Trump won the popular vote, which is similar to this finding. Larger fractions believe that millions of illegal immigrants voted (68 percent) and that voter fraud happens somewhat or very often (73 percent). Again, this is similar to previous polls.

Moreover, 52 percent said that they would support postponing the 2020 election, and 56 percent said they would do so if both Trump and Republicans in Congress were behind this.

Not surprisingly, beliefs about the 2016 election and voter fraud were correlated with support for postponement. People who believed that Trump won the popular vote, that there were millions of illegal votes in 2016, or that voter fraud is not rare were more likely to support postponing the election. This support was also more prevalent among Republicans who were younger, were less educated, had less factual knowledge of politics and strongly identified with the party.