The Tea Party is five years old this election season, which means it’s done teething and spitting up on itself, but still prone to temper tantrums, irrational outbursts and threats to take its toys and storm off if it doesn’t get its way.
As a movement, it is down to a couple of former talk-radio hosts running for office in two states of the old Confederacy, Texas and Mississippi. And in the latter, the Senate candidate, Chris McDaniel, has given a keynote to a group that considers Abraham Lincoln a war criminal. It’s not hard to make the case that the Tea Party has been distilled down to it logical essence.
“They don’t want to go to the moon,” said the comedian Bill Maher. “They want to howl at it.” Still, the Tea Party has also been around long enough to have a record, of sorts. Let’s look at the legacy:
Maybe it’s me, but the predictable right-wing cries of outrage over the Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed rules on carbon seem oddly muted and unfocused. I mean, these are the people who managed to create national outrage over nonexistent death panels. Now the Obama administration is doing something that really will impose at least some pain on some people. Where are the eye-catching fake horror stories?
For what it’s worth, however, the attacks on the new rules mainly involve the three C’s: conspiracy, cost and China. That is, right-wingers claim that there isn’t any global warming, that it’s all a hoax promulgated by thousands of scientists around the world; that taking action to limit greenhouse gas emissions would devastate the economy; and that, anyway, U.S. policy can’t accomplish anything because China will just go on spewing stuff into the atmosphere.
I don’t want to say much about the conspiracy theorizing, except to point out that any attempt to make sense of current American politics must take into account this particular indicator of the Republican Party’s descent into madness. There is, however, a lot to say about both the cost and China issues.
I’m all for protecting the environment, whether it is the particles that are sent up into the air we breathe, the methane emissions into our air from the waste of millions of animals, the coal sludge stuff that careless companies allow to seep into our waters or chemicals that are released in various ways near population centers.
Does the environment merit yet another op-ed, Professor? In normal times, I would enthusiastically say yes! Today, however, is far from normal and while the air we breathe is still important in the here and now and the future, what comes first for me is making sure that there is a safety net and work for those millions among us who can’t meet their most basic obligations.
Imagine, instead of being forced to resort to “Forest Green” for the grass in your next masterpiece, you could take Photoshop’s “eyedropper” tool to extract the color from a single, blade of grass and turn that color into ink.
Scribble is a new device that lets you do just that. The pen matches hues from the world around you and transfers them onto paper or a mobile device. For the latter, the tool works in conjunction with a stylus and a mobile app to sync the colors that attract you onto your phone or tablet. Pretty cool.
The pen is armed with a 16-bit RGB color sensor that stores the colors you tell it to. Hold the device up to your friend’s gorgeous blonde hair, a vibrant flower or the pizza crust on your plate and Scribble will analyze the color and reproduce it with ink from its refillable cartridges.
When he was convicted of three drug charges in Washington state and sentenced to prison, he owed $1,800 in court fees — $600 for each charge. Shaw told HuffPost Live on Wednesday that the judge had stated those charges could be paid after he became a free man once again.
Upon his release from prison 14 years later, however, that number had skyrocketed to $21,000 — about a 1,066 percent increase. Shaw had been told during his 10th year behind bars that while he was serving the rules had changed — those charges had been collecting interest at Washington’s staggering rate of 12 percent.
“When I go to apply for a job, when I go to try to get a vehicle, or when I try to do anything where I need to run credit, they see I owe $21,000, and that makes it hard,” Shaw said, also noting he frequently has to choose between basic everyday purchases, like food and gas, or paying off his legal financial obligations (LFOs).
The last few years have been tough for Rachel Jeantel. After the death of her friend, Trayvon Martin, she not only had to serve as a witness at his shooter’s trial, but she was also subjected to public criticism and ridicule. But the young woman refused to be held down, keeping a promise she made to Martin and continuing to achieve success.
They say it takes a village to raise a child, and Jeantel’s story is a perfect example of how true that is. The 20-year-old graduated from high school with the help of a team of individuals who offered their mentorship, advice and support, The Washington Post reports.
Yesterday’s productivity report for 2014q1 was predictably negative—we already knew that real GDP fell in the quarter while employment grew apace—but I don’t read much into the noisy quarterly changes.
But then there’s this: year-over-year, productivity growth was up 1% last year and has averaged 0.8% since 2011. The figure below plots the yearly changes, which are themselves pretty noisy. What’s more instructive is the smooth trend through the numbers.
The trend suggests that the pace of productivity growth has decelerated since the first half of the 2000s and this begs an important question. There’s considerable speculation that the pace at which machines are displacing workers has accelerated. I keep hearing about “the end of work” based on the assumption that the pace of labor-saving technology—robots, AI—has accelerated.
It’s high school graduation season, which means that young adults across the country will spend the next few months in anticipatory angst over their impending college departure. But some will travel farther than others.
In a new analysis based on user data, education analytics company Niche Ink examines the profile of college-bound students. More than half — 58 percent — of high school graduates go to college within 100 miles of home, they found from their analysis of 350,000 Niche users between 2012 and 2014 who they were able to associate with both a high school and a college. Here are a few of the most interesting takeaways:
But that doesn’t mean they’re necessarily undesirable places. As Niche Ink points out in its analysis, that could be due to income levels, the quality of the K-12 education students receive, college cost and quality, and how close graduates are to nearby colleges. The states in the Northeast are far smaller than the states in the South and West, so leaving is a lot easier. Students across the North of the country also tend to score highly on standardized tests, one criteria colleges use in the acceptance process. (Therefore, more high-scoring students may have more college choices and opportunity to leave.)
Rene Lima-Marin robbed two video stores 15 years ago, when he was just 19. He walked into the stores with an unloaded rifle and demanded money. He admitted to the crime and was sentenced to what he and his lawyer believed was a 16-year-sentence. After 10 years of serving time, Lima-Marin was set free. He got married, fathered two children and purchased a home. He swore he would never do anything to jeopardize the new life he had created.
Then, earlier this year, the life he had built came crumbling down when a judge, citing a clerical error, sent him back to prison to finish a 98-year sentence.
State legislators who support voter ID laws are motivated in no small part by racial bias, according to a new study from the University of Southern California. The study finds strong evidence that “discriminatory intent underlies legislative support for voter identification laws.”
The findings raise questions about the constitutionality of voter ID laws, which the Supreme Court affirmed in 2007 on the basis that Indiana’s strict law represented a “generally applicable, nondiscriminatory voting regulation.” For quick background, these laws require registered voters to show some sort of government-issued ID before they vote — supporters say they’re necessary to prevent voter fraud, while opponents counter that they disproportionately affect elderly, minority and low-income groups. For more, see ProPublica’s excellent backgrounder on the topic.
New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd on Thursday addressed the reactions to her column about a bad marijuana edibles trip she experienced in Colorado, saying she was focused “more on the fun than the risks” and calling her experiment “ill-advised.”
“I wrote in the column that I take responsibility for not knowing enough about what I was doing,” Dowd wrote in a statement obtained by The Cannabist, a marijuana news site operated by the Denver Post. “I was focused more on the fun than the risks. In that sense, I’m probably like many other people descending on Denver.”
