We spent Wednesday in the town of Kenmare. Marian made a beeline for the Kenmare Lace and Design Center, which turned out to be about the size of a large living room. It’s dedicated mostly to the lace design of the Poor Clare nuns, who founded a convent in Kenmare in the 19th century and became famous for their lace work. Nora, the proprietor, seemed thrilled to have a visitor who really knew something about this stuff, and was happy to spend hours with Marian talking about it and demonstrating various lacemaking techniques.
The pronunciation of Kenmare is hard to figure out. The locals I talked to seemed to say Ken-mair, but Nora at the lace museum said it was Ken-mahr. However, Marian says that when she answered the phone she seemed to say Ken-mahr-ee, or perhaps Ken-mahr-uh. Personally I think this is all just a way of playing mind games with the tourists. Pronounce it any way you like as long as you pay before leaving.
Kenmare hosts a street market every Wednesday. We didn’t end up buying anything, but these two guys spent a good part of the afternoon watching the shoppers go by.
I’m on vacation and in a different time zone, so it’s hard to stay caught up with everything. Let me see if I have this straight:
EPA chief Scott Pruitt is sucking up ennvironmental investigation resources by demanding a 24/7 security detail This requires 18 agents instead of the usual six.
HHS Secretary Tom Price uses government chartered planes to fly from DC to Philadelphia.
Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin requested a government plane for his honeymoon. This is in addition to his government-funded excursion to view the eclipse from the roof of Fort Knox.
Paul Manafort, former campaign manager for Donald Trump, has been under investigation on Russia-related charges since 2014. The charges are serious enough that the FBI got warrants to tap his phone both before and after Trump’s election.
And according to the New York Times, Robert Mueller’s document requests from the White House indicate that “several aspects of his inquiry are focused squarely on Mr. Trump’s behavior in the White House.”
Do I have this right? Is there anyone in the Trump administration who’s not prima facie corrupt? Maybe Rex Tillerson, but only because he’s already rich and doesn’t seem to actually give a shit about his job anyway.
As part of his executive order banning refugees, Donald Trump ordered HHS to produce a report about the economic impact of refugees. The answer, according to HHS, is that refugees contributed $269 billion in tax revenue and used $206 billion in services, for a net positive impact of $63 billion over the past decade. However, when the final report was released, it presented only half the story:
“In an average year over the 10-year period, per-capita refugee costs for major H.H.S. programs totaled $3,300,” it says. “Per-person costs for the U.S. population were lower, at $2,500, reflecting a greater participation of refugees in H.H.S. programs, especially during their first four years” in the United States.
Why would HHS leave out the tax contribution side of the story? Apparently our old friend Stephen Miller insisted it be removed:
An internal email, dated Sept. 5 and sent among officials from government agencies involved in refugee issues, said that “senior leadership is questioning the assumptions used to produce the report.” A separate email said that Mr. Miller had requested a meeting to discuss the report. The Times was shown the emails on condition that the sender not be identified. Mr. Miller personally intervened in the discussions on the refugee cap to ensure that only the costs — not any fiscal benefit — of the program were considered, according to two people familiar with the talks.
OK, but the Trumpies can’t very well admit that, can they? So what’s the official explanation?
John Graham, the acting assistant secretary for planning and evaluation at the health department, said: “We do not comment on allegedly leaked documents” and that no report had been finalized. He noted that Mr. Trump’s memorandum “seeks an analysis related to the cost of refugee programs. Therefore, the only analysis in the scope of H.H.S.’s response to the memo would be on refugee-related expenditures from data within H.H.S. programs.”
Roger that. It’s an HHS report, so they can only use HHS data. Tax info would come from the Treasury Department, and that’s totally out of bounds. It would be inappropriate for an HHS report to present Treasury information.
Last May, a loud but peaceful group of Kurdish demonstrators gathered outside the home of the Turkish ambassador to protest the visit of Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Erdogan’s bodyguards, apparently at the direction of Erdogan himself, waded into the crowd and started beating people bloody. Nearly everyone in America was appalled, from Congress to the DC mayor to the DC police chief. Nearly everyone:
While Kevin’s on vacation, we’ve invited other Mother Jones writers to contribute posts.
Turns out Americans have too rosy a view of racial equality in the country. In a new paper published Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a group of Yale psychologists has found that people in the US vastly overestimate the progress made in closing the economic disparities between black and white America.
Over the span ofmultiple studies,researchers asked white and black participants from both ends of the income spectrum to estimate the differences between average white and black Americans in health benefits, hourly wages, wealth, and income both presently and historically. For instance, researchers asked questions such as, “For every $100 in wealth accumulated by an average White family, how much wealth has the average Black family accumulated in 1983/2010?” (The answer’s $5.04)
Participants’ responses are particularly startling when it comes to economic progress. On average, the researchers found, all participants, regardless of race and income, overestimate progress by about 25 percent. Wealthy white participants are the most optimistic, but black participants—both wealthy and poor—also overestimate the current state of economic progress (though, when asked about historical progress, black respondents actually underestimate the reality).“Overall, these findings suggest a profound misperception of and unfounded optimism regarding societal race-based economic equality—a misperception that is likely to have any number of important policy implications,” the researchers note.
As Jennifer Richeson, one of the paper’s authors, told the New York Times: “It seems that we’ve convinced ourselves—and by ‘we’ I mean Americans writ large—that racial discrimination is a thing of the past. We’ve literally overcome it, so to speak, despite blatant evidence to the contrary.”
For context, here’s a quick refresher on the reality of the country’s economic divisions. New US Census data released last week show that even as the median household income across the United States reached an all-time high of $59,039 in 2016, the median income for an African-American household in 2016 was $39,490. Though a five percent increase from 2015, that’s still roughly $1,800 less than the income Black households made in 2000, the Washington Postnotes. By comparison, white, Asian, and Hispanic Americans have over time carried the income gains that have boosted topline numbers. White American households, for instance, made just over $65,000 in 2016, up even if slightly from 2000 when they made $63,609.
The picture is even starker when considering wealth rather than income. Over the course of three decades, the racial wealth gap has widened to an alarming extent: While the median household wealth for African-Americans has dipped a shocking 75 percent from $6,800 in 1983 to $1,700 in 2013, and that of Latino households has been slashed in half, white American households saw an increase of 14 percent, from $102,200 in 1983 to $116,800 in 2013, according to the Institute for Policy Studies. As my colleague Dave Gilson and I have pointed out, that means the median wealth of white households is 13 times larger than African-American households and 10 times larger than Latino households.
Today, Texas House Speaker Joe Straus, joined the continuingpush to take down Confederate monuments by calling for the removal of a plaque at the statehouse entitled the “Children of the Confederacy Creed” that asserts the Civil War “was not a rebellion, nor was its underlying cause to sustain slavery.”
In a letter sent to members of the State Preservation Board—of which he is a member along with Gov. Greg Abbot and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick—the Republican lawmaker described the plaque as “not accurate,” and explained, “Texans are not well-served by incorrect information about our history.” (Strauss and Patrick, were engaged in a recent public fight during the legislative session over Patrick’s unsuccessful push to mandate everyone use the bathroom of their sex assigned at birth.) Just last week, a Confederate monument was removed in a Dallas park.
Neither Abbott nor Patrick have responded to the letter. Last month, during a debate following the violent protests against the planned removal of a Charlottesville, Virginia, monument commemorating Robert E. Lee by white nationalists and white supremacists, the Texas governor said removing Confederate monuments “won’t erase our nation’s past, and it doesn’t advance our nation’s future.”Patrick also criticized the overnight removal of a Confederate monument at the University of Texas.
.@SpeakerStraus calling for removal of Children of the Confederacy plaque in the Capitol. He sent this letter to State Preservation Board pic.twitter.com/xg2XTA82hS
The statehouse plaque was erected by the Texas Division of the Children of the Confederacy in 1959. “It most likely reflects something about resistance to Brown v Board of Education and the end of a Jim Crow system,” University of Texas historian Walter Buenger told the CBS station in Austin, Texas.
So far social media reactions are mixed, with some users applauding Straus and others accusing the House Speaker of not knowing his history, arguing that states rights caused the Civil War.One user wrote, “He needs to resign his position as Speaker and go back to school to LEARN HIS HISTORY!”
That’s not a surprise considering what’s taught in Texas public schools. In 2010, a school board member called slavery a “side issue to the Civil War,” when the board adopted new standards mandating that students be taught that the war was caused by “sectionalism, states’ rights and slavery.” Some members of the state board of education have said the standards were prioritized in this way to underscore that slavery was not the central issue leading to the Civil War, despite the fact that historians are overwhelmingly agree that slavery was the cause of the Civil War.
Just before those standards were adopted, I attended a Texas public school and was taught that the Civil War was about states rights and not slavery. Kevin Drum has been asking readers what bad history they’ve had to unlearn about the Civil War—you can share in the comments section here.
Broadly labeled antifa, for “antifascist,” such protesters are part of a loose affiliation of far-left groups and individuals who unite around a willingness to confront, sometimes violently, anyone they perceive to be an agent of racism, anti-Semitism or fascism….The antifa tactics are testing the liberal movement that has galvanized in opposition to Mr. Trump—creating a rift among its leaders, organizers and demonstrators about whether to denounce a radical fringe, some of whose antidiscrimination objectives, if not tactics, they share.
I read the entire piece, which was apparently extensively reported since it includes three bylines. The reporters quote one guy you’ve never heard of who credits antifa for rescuing him from an attack by white supremacists. About a thousand words later they note that “some organizers” of a counter-protest in San Francisco last month declined to explicitly condemn “physical confrontations.” However, those same organizers “took to internet message boards to ask protesters not to initiate any violence.”
That’s it. That’s all they could dig up in the way of lefty sympathy for antifa. Every other person they quoted—including every single Democratic politician—offered straightforward condemnation.
So: has antifa really split the left? If by “split,” you mean that the far left disagrees with the mainstream left, just like it always has, then I guess so. By any other measure, though, there appears to be nothing but unity. The vast majority of the left has no use for antifa and no use for violence on city streets. It’s indefensible to suggest otherwise unless you can deliver some real evidence.
The Skellig Islands are famous for several reasons:
They are beautiful, pristine, world treasures, etc.
There’s a 6th century monastery at the top of Skellig Michael.
Little Skellig hosts gazillions of gannets. Also puffins, but only through August 7, when they depart for Iceland (boo!).
The final scene of Star Wars VII was filmed there. Bird conservationists were unhappy about this, but it has made the Skelligs considerably more famous. References to Star Wars are all over the place in Portmagee, where the boats go in and out.
Here are Skellig Michael (left) and Little Skellig (right) merged into a single silhouette:
If you want to know what Skellig Michael looks like without all the artsy effects, here it is:
Here are the steps on Skellig Michael that Rey had to climb to find Luke Skywalker. There are 618 steps in all. I didn’t even consider climbing them. In fact, we didn’t take a tour that landed on the islands at all, since they are strictly limited and have to be booked well in advance—especially now that the place is so popular with Star Wars fans. The ruins of the 6th century monastery at the top filled in as a Jedi temple in the movie.
Curious about what a gannet looks like? This will save you a trip to Wikipedia:
And here is Jim, the doughty boatman who took us out. We booked the trip at the last minute because Monday was such a gorgeous day, and Jim told us that on a scale of 1 to 10, the seas were a zero that day. This was great news for me, since I’m pretty susceptible to seasickness.
I suppose you have to give Republicans credit for persistence: they’re now trying yet again to repeal Obamacare. The first attempt ended when Paul Ryan couldn’t round up the votes in the House. The second attempt ended when Mitch McConnell couldn’t round up the votes in the Senate. Now we have Graham-Cassidy, which is considerably worse than either of the first two. Literally its only selling point is that it’s not Obamacare.
The plan for passage is similar to Repeal 2.0: do it fast before the CBO can tell us how many people would lose health insurance if it passes. But we don’t really need the official CBO score for that since we already know that Graham-Cassidy would eliminate the individual mandate and slash spending on Medicaid. Those two things account for the vast bulk of CBO’s score, which means that its score of Graham-Cassidy will be very similar: about 23 million people would be tossed off their insurance plans over the next decade.
But could it be even worse? Sure. Graham-Cassidy also eliminates protections for pre-existing conditions, which would make insurance unaffordable for even more people. The CBO score could easily end up at 25 or 26 million.
The clever part of the Republican plan is that the public might not ever see screaming headlines about this. Even though it’s plainly obvious what Graham-Cassidy would do, mainstream news organizations aren’t allowed to just say so. They have to wait for “official” numbers. Those may or may not come before the bill gets a vote.
You can read more of the details about the bill elsewhere, but here are the big takeaways:
Basically turns everything over to the states. It gives each state a chunk of money and allows them to do nearly anything they want with it.
Eliminates protections for pre-existing conditions even though it says otherwise. The trick is that although insurers are required to cover everyone, they can charge anything they like. In practice, this means a pre-existing condition will prevent you from ever getting insurance.¹
Slashes spending on Medicaid and turns it into a block grant.
Slashes federal subsidies and turns them into a block grant too.
Allows states to eliminate Obamacare regulations governing essential medical benefits. This means it’s back to reading the fine print if you buy a medical policy. Maybe it covers doctors’ visits, maybe it doesn’t. It all depends on what your state’s governor decides.
Now, Republicans still have big problems remaining. First, the bill has to be passed within this fiscal year, which ends on September 30. That’s 11 days away. They have to get at least a preliminary CBO score so that they officially know that Graham-Cassidy would reduce the deficit (required under rules for reconciliation bills). And then they have to get the OK from the Senate parliamentarian. This could be a big problem since the parliamentarian is unlikely to agree that the new rules about pre-existing conditions meet reconciliation requirements. And if Graham-Cassidy has to be changed to require coverage of pre-existing conditions for everyone at the same price, it would blow up the bill and rquire a new CBO score.
The odds are against this happening within 11 days. But it’s still possible. Republicans really, really want to stick it to Obamacare no matter what the cost. Liberals better start manning the barricades again.
¹Unless you’re one of the lucky ducks in a blue state that decides to keep Obamacare rules intact. But even that might not matter, since funding in blue states would be cut way back and they probably couldn’t afford to offer Obamacare-style protections.
Here’s some potentially good news on the climate front. The most aggressive climate goal we have is to keep global temperatures from rising more than 1.5°C above their pre-industrial average. The most recent IPCC report suggests that to do this, we need to limit total future carbon emissions to about 250 billion tonnes of CO2 (GtCO2). This is all but impossible.
However, a team that includes some of the world’s leading experts on carbon budgets has published a new paper that resolves some contradictions in the IPCC figures and comes up with a much higher carbon budget: about 900 Gt. The following chart will make you cringe at first sight, but don’t worry. It’s fairly easy to explain.
On the left is the IPCC approach. It starts at 1870 and shows how much carbon is required to reach different temperatures. The intersection of the dotted lines indicates that temperatures will rise 1.5°C from 1870 when cumulative carbon emissions hit 2,150 Gt. Since we’ve already emitted 1,900 Gt, that means we have only about 250 Gt to go.
However, this approach doesn’t really match what we see happening right now, so the authors of the new study took a different approach: they started at 2015 instead. Since temperatures have already risen 0.9°C since 1870, our new target is to keep further increases below 0.6°C.
That’s what the chart on the right shows. The intersection of the dotted lines indicates that temperatures will rise 0.6°C from 2015 when we’ve emitted an additional 900 Gt of carbon. The good news here is that this is achievable. It’s not easily achievable, but it’s certainly not impossible.
For more detail on this, Glen Peters has you covered here. He warns that the real-life carbon budget for staying under 1.5°C is probably lower than the theoretical estimate, and he also has some warnings about the whole concept of carbon budgets in general. This is primarily because multiple studies have come up with vastly different estimates of how much carbon we can afford to emit this century if we want to stay below 1.5°C. It’s better, he argues, to simply say that “we need net-zero emissions by 2050 to 2100, as specified in the Paris Agreement.”
Nonetheless, he also says, “The implications of this paper are breathtaking.” As always, this is only one paper, so don’t take it to the bank yet. But this is serious work by leading experts. If it pans out, it means that we actually have a shot at staying below 1.5°C.
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At Mother Jones we know these aren’t conventional times, and they require unconventional coverage. That’s what deliver every day: fierce, independent journalism you can’t find elsewhere. Perhaps never in the history of our country has that been more necessary than now. But we can’t do it without reader support—your support. Please chip in today.
