Excerpts from the January issue of the Harper’s Index:
Factor by which women are more likely than men to develop P.T.S.D. over the course of their lives: 2.5
Average penalty, in lost vacation days, for N.Y.P.D. officers the department finds to have committed domestic violence: 30
For officers the department finds to have been discourteous to a supervisor: 60
Percentage of U.S. schools that have at least one police officer stationed inside a school building: 40
Minimum number of states that use artificial intelligence to grade student essays: 21
Minimum number of polling places that states in the South have closed since 2012: 1,327
Portion of those that were in Texas: 1/2
Percentage of Republicans who regard the Democratic party as “too extreme”: 76
Of Democrats who regard the Republican party as such: 76
Average effective tax rate, as a percentage of income, paid by the richest 400 households in the United States in 2018: 23
By the poorest half of American households: 24
Percentage of white Americans who say they follow local news very closely: 28
Of black Americans: 46
Number of states expected to lose the majority of their summer state-bird populations by 2050: 7
TOP COMMENTS
QUOTATION
“Nonexistent sex differences in language lateralization, mediated by nonexistent sex differences in corpus callosum structure, are widely believed to explain nonexistent sex differences in language skills.”
~~Cordelia Fine, Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference (2010)
TWEET OF THE DAY
BLAST FROM THE PAST
At Daily Kos on this date in 2009—Reid Caves: Medicare Buy-in, Public Option Pulled from Senate Bill:
With Tom Harkin pre-capitulating, telling TMPDC that "There's enough good in this bill that even without those two, we gotta move," even before the Dem caucus met to decide the way forward, the writing was on the wall. Add Rockefeller, who says he'll vote for the bill even without Medicare buy-in, and it's gone.
A number of sources are reporting that the majority capitulated to Lieberman, who was in attendance in the meeting, cuz, you know, he's with us on everything but the war.
Senators emerging from the special Democratic caucus confirm that the Medicare buy-in proposal will have to be stripped from the Senate bill in order to achieve 60 votes.
So what's out next at Lieberman's demand? The 90% medical loss ratio is destined to be a goner, now that the CBO has concluded that requiring insurance companies to pay 90% of money collected through premiums out in direct medical care would--and this I don't get at all--"make such insurance an essentially governmental program," that's gonna be out.
What's Lieberman's next demand going to be? My guess is Medicaid subsidies have to be removed.