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« January 2018 | Main | March 2018 » February 28, 2018Gun Manufacturers Targeting the "Xbox Generation" Debney credits "savvy marketing" for American Outdoor's success in luring first-time buyers, noting that young consumers have a strong interest in self defense and going to firing ranges that are increasingly opening in urban areas. "Younger people," Debney said, describing the demographics of new customers, "millennials coming through strongly. And then, also, many more women showing an interest in the shooting sports." THE NRA, WHICH is funded by gun manufacturers, has long maintained youth outreach programs. The group sponsors high school gun clubs around the country, including one with the JROTC program attended by Nikolas Cruz, the Parkland shooter. The group sponsors a number of programs for high school-level shooters, including the NRA's Youth Education Summit, which has events all around the country for young gun enthusiasts. ... There are indications that the gun industry is making inroads. In a recent Marist poll, a majority of all age groups supported stricter gun rules. But people between 18 and 39 years old, the youngest grouping surveyed, favored stricter gun rules by a smaller percentage -- 64 percent, versus a national average of 71 percent -- than the other age groups. By min | February 28, 2018, 1:16 PM | Liberal Outrage| Link Shock Doctrine in Puerto Rico Citigroup Global Markets Inc., or Citi, will be the main investment bank consultant in the restructuring and privatization of PREPA, the Washington-appointed Fiscal Control Board -- the body now overseeing Puerto Rico's finances -- announced recently. Puerto Rico Gov. Ricardo Rosselló first announced the move toward privatization last month. By min | February 28, 2018, 1:10 PM | Liberal Outrage| Link Janus and Agency Fees For example, as the brief points out, a recent union recertification election in Iowa revealed that a majority of workers in the bargaining unit voted in favor of continuing to be represented by the union, even though most of them also opted out of paying fair share fees. It's a bit of a long read but maps out how these wealthy corporate groups have been chipping away at unions over the years. By min | February 28, 2018, 12:58 PM | Liberal Outrage| Link Orrin Hatch's Shitty H-1B Bill As the Los Angeles Times recently suggested, there may be an attempt to include a bill from Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) that would triple the number of college-educated temporary migrant workers who are employed in the H-1B visa program--a flawed guestworker program used mainly to outsource jobs in information technology and send high-tech jobs offshore. Hatch's bill is known as I-Squared, and although Hatch is trying to sell it as an increase in "merit-based" immigration, it is primarily an attempt to increase the number of temporary migrant workers the tech industry can hire at low wages. By min | February 28, 2018, 12:49 PM | Liberal Outrage| Link AAPI Wage Gap By min | February 28, 2018, 12:40 PM | Liberal Outrage| Link Today in Desperately Clinging To Power news Eat A Bag Of Dicks, or The Case Of The Mysteriously Growing List Of Delegates. By fnord12 | February 28, 2018, 12:37 PM | Liberal Outrage| Link Today in horrible economic news Corporate America Is Suppressing Wages for Many Workers. Consumers are falling behind on their debts. By fnord12 | February 28, 2018, 12:27 PM | Liberal Outrage| Link
Word Salad from the NYT Op-Editor Ashley Feinberg has a write up of a behind-the-scenes meeting run by the guy in charge of the New York Times editorial page. Additionally, you can read a transcript of the meeting. And one of the questions was why aren't there any voices representing the Bernie wing, and the response is unintelligible and ultimately ends with a cry for help, as if finding such people is an impossibility. Bennet: I think we need, and you know, I'm sorry if I'm going to talk in code a little bit here, but I'm not talking about ideology necessarily. I'm talking about identity, as well. What columnists do, you know, again, highly intellectually honest, highly entertaining, highly interesting writers who have a lot to say -- hard to find those people from the get-go. What a columnist is is a trusted voice in your ear that helps you process, kind of, the world in real time, right? Through a particular lens. And there are a number of lenses we're missing right now, I think. And a lot of those are, it's gender and it's identity, you know, as well as ideology. So where am I looking? I'm asking, I'm asking you guys. You know, send me names, please. You know, if there are people that you're reading that you think belong in The New York Times. You know, please. I always, when I was at The Atlantic, I always kept a list of Atlantic writers who didn't work for The Atlantic, just who felt like -- I was at The Atlantic magazine before I came back to the Times, and there was a particular kind of, not that dissimilar from the kind of people we're looking for now, with voice. And I could see them on other platforms and they just didn't know that they were Atlantic people yet, but they were. And I don't have as good a list now as I did then. It might be my own failing. Earlier I blamed the environment for that. But I'm taking nominations. I've been... if I could, this is what I would be spending 90 percent of my time on. Because hiring in general, and I'm sure you guys feel this, too, is the most important thing that we do. Like, that's the most important editing we do, is picking the people. After that, you know, you ideally cut them loose to do their thing. In reality, I'm spending a small percentage of my time on this. So I would love help. So please send your nominations my way. By the way, this was in December, so if he did get such nominations, he hasn't acted on them yet. By fnord12 | February 27, 2018, 12:53 PM | Liberal Outrage| Link When your opponent is drowning in typos, throw them... an eraser? DDay wonders if the Democrats are going to keep playing Goofus and Gallant when it comes to the Republican's Tax Bill. By fnord12 | February 27, 2018, 12:31 PM | Liberal Outrage| Link Thoughts and prayers When "thoughts and prayers" has become such a running joke that even CNN knows about it, you can bet that it's what the DCCC is sending out to candidates as earnest advice. By fnord12 | February 27, 2018, 12:29 PM | Liberal Outrage| Link
Super Mega Medicare Ultra Extreme III Alright!!!! Four takes on CAP's Medicare "Extra" For All proposal. Some are about the politics of it, some about the actual proposals. By fnord12 | February 26, 2018, 2:35 PM | Liberal Outrage| Link
Cockblocked in Denmark Sweet. Pick-up artists believe that all women are the same: submissive, choosier than men when picking sexual partners, entranced by shiny objects. In the Community, players are self-made; most renowned pick-up artists claim they were socially awkward losers until they learned the tricks of the trade. If a pick-up artist hones his "inner game" (confidence) as well as his "outer game" (appearance), he can control his sexual future. When women come with cheat codes, rejection is not an option; if a play fails, the player tweaks his strategy instead of conceding defeat. What's blocking the pussy flow in Denmark? The country's excellent social welfare services. Really. By min | February 25, 2018, 1:49 PM | Liberal Outrage| Link ICE's Racist "Extreme Vetting Initiative" Having learned nothing from when we targeted Japanese Americans and put them into internment camps... On President's Day this year, we marked the 76th anniversary of Executive Order 9066, which was signed by Roosevelt to forcibly remove over 120,000 Americans of Japanese descent to incarceration sites during WWII. This is an explicit example of how the government used its discretion to decide someone's "ability to contribute to national interests" and because of wartime hysteria and racism, they decided Japanese Americans as a whole failed to do so. Japanese American communities were also long surveilled before being forcibly removed to prison camps. They were treated as the enemy despite citizenship or green card standing. Similar to the implications of social media monitoring, Japanese Americans were also subjected to ideological monitoring based on criteria of whether they'd "contribute to American society". By min | February 25, 2018, 12:43 PM | Liberal Outrage| Link The Bright Side of Janus Relatively speaking. But while most of the media has focused on the fact that the Janus case stands to decimate union coffers - and by extension, Democratic Party coffers - some labor activists and legal scholars have begun sounding the alarm on what they say would be the unintended consequences of the suit, effectively opening up the floodgates for countless lawsuits like the recent ones filed by the International Union of Operating Engineers. If Mark Janus doesn't have to pay his agency fees because collective bargaining is speech he disagrees with, then collective bargaining is speech. And it can't be restricted. Indeed, when some of the lazier advocates of Janus lay out the case, they accidentally argue on behalf of unions' right to free speech. "Because government is both employer and policymaker, collective bargaining by the union is inherently political advocacy and indistinguishable from lobbying," wrote George Will on Sunday, directly implicating the First Amendment. "If the plaintiffs are right that collective bargaining is political speech indistinguishable from lobbying, well, the flip side of that coin is that that protected free speech can't be restricted," said Ed Maher, a spokesperson for the International Union of Operating Engineers. "We don't think this has been thoughtfully considered by the plaintiffs, and it is our belief that a win for Janus will open a tremendous Pandora's box." It's not a great silver lining because in order to sue employers and governments on the grounds that collective bargaining is free speech, unions will need money to pay the legal fees, which they will have less of because of the predicted Janus ruling, but it's something. I also enjoy any time a law pushed by conservatives can be turned around against them, like the Satanists trying to get their Satan statue up in city capitols. By min | February 25, 2018, 12:15 PM | Liberal Outrage| Link
Highland Park sanctuary Anyone who says that the Green party doesn't do enough locally needs to look at Seth Kaper-Dale. That said, i wouldn't have minded if he ran as a Democrat to primary Menendez. (No offense to Michael Starr Hopkins.) By fnord12 | February 21, 2018, 3:01 PM | Liberal Outrage| Link
Excomunicado This is some incredible stuff and i expect we'll be seeing a lot more of it around the country as progressives challenge old guard Dems. By fnord12 | February 15, 2018, 11:31 PM | Liberal Outrage| Link Oh, nothing I don't know what this thing is doing here. It's got no plot purpose, no character development purpose, not even any comic relief purpose exactly. It's just sort of here. By fnord12 | February 15, 2018, 9:32 AM | Star Wars| Link
New Democratic campaign slogan "We've got what we've got for the next 30 years." (This was actually about repealing and replacing the Republican tax bill. Bernie Sanders, Dean Baker, and MMT guy Randy Wray - i.e. the lefties - do have some substantive ideas.) By fnord12 | February 10, 2018, 1:10 PM | Liberal Outrage| Link
As If Kids Weren't Punishment Enough Having kids means having to take time off to take care of them when the little germ factories get sick. And if you don't get paid sick leave, that can be a huge financial problem. So when people start demanding paid sick leave for all jobs, what do we get offered instead? A plan that says you can get some paid sick leave in exchange for losing some of your pension. How exactly is this making things better? DeSanctis insists that because these two penalties are equal in magnitude, there is no punishment involved, but that's a bizarre rhetorical dodge. If normally I punch you, but then decide going forward that I am going to kick you instead, would a normal person say that my new kicking policy does not constitute an attack on you? I don't think so. The People's Policy Project writes about it here and here. I don't agree with Bruenig's argument for cynical support. The cynical case is that, after such a policy was enacted, it would be trivially easy to subsequently kill the part where parents who take the benefits are forced to retire later. In fact, you would have about 25 years of time before the first recipients of the paid leave benefit would be retiring. If the Democrats took control anywhere in that 25 years, they could ensure that nobody who received the paid leave benefit has to delay their retirement for doing so. Indeed, adopting the popular plank of "ending the parent retirement penalty" may even make it easier for them to take power in the future. I think the Democrats have demonstrated time and time again that they have little desire to do much of anything, regardless of who's in charge. I wouldn't rely on them to fix anything no matter how many years they had to get it done. The years the Democrats controlled the House and Senate, they would try for some milquetoast bipartisan crap that the Republicans would easily block. Then when the Republicans gained both houses, the Dems would spend the whole time sitting on their hands while peddling the idea that they are just powerless to effect change at this particular time, but boy are they totally on your side so please vote for them next time. fnord12: Republicans have a "solution" for student loan debt which also includes trading away your social security. Republicans really want you to give up your social security. By min | February 9, 2018, 4:50 PM | Liberal Outrage| Link Recap 82 By min | February 9, 2018, 3:30 PM | D&D| Link Let the negative feedback loop continue "My boss is the 700,000 [constituents] who I represent. That's who I report to," Rep. Cheri Bustos (D-Ill.) said. "I don't report to anybody out here." Indeed, Democrats on both ends of the party's ideological spectrum said that prodding from the left had little bearing on their vote. They brag about ignoring their active base: Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) recalled being pressed two weeks ago to reject a deal to reopen the government. Nonetheless, "I voted yes," he said. I mean, fine, ignore these people. But then spare us the outrage when they don't show up at the polls or vote third party. By fnord12 | February 9, 2018, 2:41 PM | Liberal Outrage| Link Some of those that work forces This Intercept article did not get enough attention. By fnord12 | February 9, 2018, 10:39 AM | Liberal Outrage| Link That'll show em Vox: Led by Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, Democrats threatened to shut down the government if House Speaker Paul Ryan didn't give assurances of a DACA fix vote. In the end, enough Democrats voted for the spending bill to offset the conservatives who didn't vote for it. But they made sure Republicans sweated on the floor, withholding their support until the very last minute. I'm not saying the Democrats have a lot of power at the moment or that forcing a government shutdown over DACA is a good strategy, but the way they keep leading DACA supporters and activists on isn't winning them any favors. Last time they forced a shutdown, got nothing, and relented. This time they threatened a shutdown but didn't (but at least they made the Republican's "sweat", thanks Vox). Democrats keep wavering between saying how they'll fight for DACA and claiming powerlessness. Meanwhile, Rand Paul seems capable of shutting down the government all by himself. It's enough to convince DACA supporters that maybe the Democrats aren't exactly sincere. Again, not sure what the right move here really is. But in terms of messaging and clear tactics, the Democrats don't seem to be doing so good. By fnord12 | February 9, 2018, 10:22 AM | Liberal Outrage| Link
Got them scared? Atrios has abandoned his normal brevity to rant about the astroturf campaign being set up to fight Medicare For All. See here and here. Also relevant is his post on means-testing. Regarding United States of Care, it seems to me like Medicare For All must seem like a realistic threat to them if they feel the need to set up stuff like this. By fnord12 | February 7, 2018, 6:19 PM | Liberal Outrage| Link WHO you gonna believe? NYT: By fnord12 | February 7, 2018, 6:17 PM | Liberal Outrage| Link UBI or Die This article talks about how Facebook (and presumably Twitter) is killing all content producers, largely because people can view the content on Facebook and never go to the producer' sites and generate ad revenue. I don't dispute anything in the article but i think the premise needs to be examined. Relying on ad revenue in the first place seems to be an increasingly dubious prospect on the internet, even if Facebook, Google, etc.. weren't sucking up all of what there is of it. We need a real solution to this problem, but it's not the sort of thing our 80 year old senators - bought by various interests - are equipped to discuss. And until someone comes up with a better idea, i'm going to say that we just need to give everyone a Universal Basic Income so that they can produce awesome stuff on the internet and not be afraid that they're going to starve to death because of Facebook. By fnord12 | February 7, 2018, 11:40 AM | Liberal Outrage| Link
$15 Isn't Even Enough Using MIT's Living Wage Calculator (which breaks it down by county), someone made a map that shows how much 2 adults with 1 child would need to earn just to meet basic needs. Even in Kansas, you'd need $21/hr. In Jersey, you'd need $27/hr just to pay for food and rent and things just to live. But not savings. So, you'll also need to keep making this much up until the day you die. Don't even think about getting sick. The current minimum wage in this state is $8.60. Meanwhile, you've got the State Senate President Stephen Sweeney and others not only making us fight to get $15/hr, they want to exclude people who do shift work or get paid in tips or work on farms. What the fuck? Why don't these guys just go around and tell people to die, because that's basically what they're doing by refusing to give people a living wage. By min | February 5, 2018, 4:46 PM | Liberal Outrage| Link
Unironically noting without comment Here's a weird kind of inside baseball story about Frank Pallone and how people get "picked" to run for Senate in New Jersey that i'm linking to so i don't lose it. By fnord12 | February 3, 2018, 1:01 PM | Liberal Outrage| Link |