Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan, the House Budget Committee chairman, walks to a GOP meeting Tuesday.
Evan Vucci/AP
Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan, the House Budget Committee chairman, walks to a GOP meeting Tuesday.
Evan Vucci/AP
Day 15 of the government shutdown started with as much promise as any recently: There was a bipartisan proposal by Senate leaders to reopen the government and raise the debt ceiling.
But any hopes were quickly dashed when leaders of the Republican-controlled House said they would offer a competing proposal because of their dissatisfaction with the Senate effort.
The Senate's Bipartisan Proposal
The Senate agreement between Harry Reid, D-Nev., and Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., came after weekend negotiations.
It would reopen the government until Jan. 15, 2014, and extend the debt ceiling until February. Among its provisions, it would require income verification for individuals and families seeking subsidies in health care exchanges through the Affordable Care Act.
The House Responds
That Senate agreement was viewed as weak tea by House Republicans, however, particularly those affiliated with the Tea Party: They wanted more to show for the political hits they've taken in the fiscal fights. Yet it was clear early Tuesday they weren't sure what they wanted.
Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, told reporters: "Our leadership team met with our members today trying to find a way forward in a bipartisan way that would continue to provide fairness to the American people under Obamacare. There are a lot of opinions about what direction to go. There have been no decisions about what exactly we will do."
Eventually, House Republicans coalesced around a proposal to reopen the government and raise the debt limit with some Obamacare-related features to which Democrats hotly objected.
For instance, it would ban members of Congress and the White House staff from receiving the same employer-paid tax subsidies for health insurance received by other U.S. employees. And it would stop a fix in the Senate proposal meant to placate unions whose members must pay a fee under the new health care law.
Perhaps most objectionable to many, and not just Democrats, was a provision in the proposal that would limit the power President Obama and Treasury Secretary Jack Lew would have to take extraordinary measures to prevent a future default. In recent months, the Treasury has taken such financial steps to remain under the debt ceiling.
"Extremist Republicans in the House of Representatives are attempting to torpedo the Senate's bipartisan progress with a bill that can't pass the Senate ... and won't pass the Senate," said Reid.
It wasn't just Democrats who opposed the House proposal. The conservative advocacy organization, the Heritage Action for America, said it would score the proposal as a "key vote," thus dinging the conservative credentials of any Republican who didn't vote "no."
House leadership had scheduled a Tuesday evening vote on its proposal, despite the fact that it had no chance of passing in the Senate. After it became clear it also had no chance of passing in the House following Heritage's grenade, it appeared to be another instance of sound and fury in the House, signifying nothing.
Obama Meets Democratic Leadership
President Obama met with House Democratic leaders at the White House Tuesday afternoon. Following the meeting, Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., the House minority leader, struck an optimistic tone. Vaguely echoing something Winston Churchill once said of Americans, she said: "I have confidence, and I'm optimistic, because I believe that at the end of the day, they will do the right thing even if they have to have a — do contortions to get to that place. That's unfortunate, because it doesn't inspire confidence, but if that's how they have to get there, that's a path."
Wall Street Sounds An Alarm
Pelosi's optimism wasn't universally shared. The Wall Street credit rating service, Fitch Ratings, placed the U.S.'s AAA rating on a negative watch because of the debt ceiling uncertainty.
The Enlightenment gave us many foundational ideas: Gravity! Democracy! Infographics! Wait, what? Yep. One of the age's lesser-known byproducts was the niche field of "graphical statistics," aka data visualization. And it's made more of an impact on our world that you might imagine.
William Playfair was a Scottish inventor and engineer (and reported scoundrel) who would've celebrated his 254th birthday at the end of September. It's hard to imagine, but before Playfair's time, words and drawings were two distinct ways of communicating that rarely converged. But as the burgeoning Enlightenment gave birth to modern science and the first traces of the Industrial Revolution, economists, engineers, and historians found a need for a new language: One that could quantify data visually. Playfair, a voracious writer who roamed in the same circles as many of the day's important thinkers, happened to be in the right place at the right time.
Playfair was often involved with transcribing or interpreting the work of others—which, incidentally, gained him a reputation as a plagiarist. But to convey the data other scientists were publishing, he started to turn to graphics. Beginning in the 1750s, he published a series of charts that represent the first instances of line graphs, bar charts, pie charts, and circle graphs. Below are some of the earliest known data graphics.
The Line Graph
It was Playfair's older brother—who required him to record every day's temperature and record them a la the naturalists of the day—who inspired the line graph. It was simply a matter of tallying up each date's number and connecting the dots.
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This chart shows imports and exports from America during the 18th century—that crux in the middle? That's the Revolutionary War.
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It looks complicated, but this 1824 line graph is actually fairly simple: It compares the price of bread and stocks, as well as national expenditures and debt, against wars fought by England between 1770 and 1824.
The Bar Chart
The provenance of the bar chart is less clear. Many scholars attribute it to the fact that Playfair had seen the work of Joseph Priestly, the creator of the first timeline chart—in this case, the biography of a single person.
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This 1821 bar chart—quoted by many as one of the first—show a simple but powerful thing: How much a quarter of wheat cost over three centuries, show both in shillings and the days' wages of a (good) mechanic. The cost in shillings goes up (presumably due to inflation), but the cost in wages goes down as workers' rights improve.
The Circle Graph and Pie Chart
No one really knows how Playfair dreamt up the pie chart. Some wonder whether it'd always been around—and if Playfair was just the first to actually publish one. "Familiarity has dulled our sense of the importance of Playfair's diagrams and it is easy to underestimate the ingenuity that was required to invent them," argues historian Ian Spence in his concise 2005 paper on Playfair (PDF).
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This is one of Playfair's most well-known charts, though it's tough to find a good scan of it. It shows population size versus land area—all compared to taxation.
A pie chart showing each state in the United States, part of Playfair's translation of A Statistical Account of the United States of America by D. F. Donnant.
To us, pie charts hearken back to bad PowerPoint slides of yore (in fact, even data visualization expertEdward Tuftesays they should never be used). But the pie, along with the bar chart, were revolutionary in Playfair's time.
And they've had a massive impact on ours: Today, these prototypical forms are almost universal, allowing us to perceive meaning (or non-meaning) in a single glance. It also was a precursor to modern UI design, since it provided a common vocabulary for expressing information visually.
Alec Baldwin's first episode of Up Late did not blow anyone out of the water, but it proved a solid start for the incoming MSNBC personality.
Nielsen shows the actor's interview series averaging 654,000 viewers and 172,000 adults 25-54 in its 10 p.m. debut. Viewership, up 53 percent from MSNBC Investigates the week prior, marked an even more considerable 71 percent improvement from the last four weeks. The demo showing, while down 7 percent from the previous week, was still up 18 percent from the hour's monthly average.
The night also marked SeanHannity's first Friday in his new 10 p.m. slot, scoring an expected win with 1.5 million viewers and 338,000 adults 25-54. The series was up in viewers from Greta VanSusteren's last showing in the Friday hour and virtually even in the demo.
CNN seemed to suffer against the new competition. Anderson Cooper shed 52 percent in total viewers, down from 717,000 to 347,000, and 58 percent in the demo to just 111,000 adults 25-54.
Baldwin's ratings watch will prove a bit different from the current barrage of cable news shifts and launches, as MSNBC is taking a stab at destination viewing with the non-nightly program.
The justices, minus Elena Kagan, will be hearing Schutte v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action.
Photo by Tim Sloan/AFP/Getty Images
Lucky Elena Kagan. She gets to sit out this year’s affirmative action case at the Supreme Court, probably because she worked on a related matter when she was solicitor general. Part of me wishes I could skip it, too. This is a case that liberals will lose, and probably deserve to lose.
Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action is not about whether states can continue giving race-based preferences to black and Hispanic applicants to state universities. That was the subject of last term’s Supreme Court challenge Fisher v. University of Texas. In that one, the court allowed affirmative action to continue in the name of promoting diversity (though it also made it harder for schools to do it).
The new case is the upside-down version of the last one: It’s about whether states may ban schools from using affirmative action. That’s what Michigan did by passing a ballot initiative in 2003 called Proposal 2. I wouldn’t have voted for it. But should the Supreme Court say that when voters decide to restrict the use of affirmative action, they have violated the constitution? There is no way that the conservative majority of the Supreme Court will answer yes. And that is probably the correct outcome in terms of policy. To say so deviates from the usual liberal line on affirmative action, laid out today in a New York Times editorial. And yet: The current huge fairness problem in university admissions isn’t race-based. It’s class-based. And it is at the schools of the 10 states across the country that have banned affirmative action where the most interesting socioeconomic alternatives are unfolding. The Supreme Court won’t stand in the way of those experiments. And it shouldn’t.
But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit, the lower court in Schuette, struck down the ballot initiative banning affirmative action, in an 8-7 split. The majority relied on a couple of previous Supreme Court rulings. Neither are about affirmative action. In one of the cases, decided in 1969, the voters of Akron, Ohio, got rid of a fair housing ordinance passed by their city council and amended the city charter to make it harder for any other such ordinance to take effect. The Supreme Court said the change to the political process was discriminatory because the impact fell only on black residents. In the second case, after the Seattle school district announced it would start busing students in 1978, to desegregate the city’s schools, voters passed a ballot initiative to block the busing. The Supreme Court struck down that initiative for “moving the power over bussing for purposes of integration to state control.”
You can see why these older cases appealed to the 6th Circuit as a route to striking down Michigan’s voter ban on affirmative action. Michigan’s voters also messed around with the political process. They also took discretion away from local officials —this time, university administrators.
The problem is that the goal of busing plans and fair-housing laws is to treat everyone equally. So the voter initiatives blocking them in Akron and Seattle flew in the face of equal treatment. Michigan’s Proposal 2, by contrast, involves taking away a means of preferential treatment, based on race. Affirmative action, formally speaking, isn’t about treating all applicants equally. It’s about introducing a different set of standards for some applicants. A more equal society may be the broader long-term goal of affirmative action. But the way you get there is by treating people differently, based on race.
As University of Chicago law professor Richard Epstein points out, it’s not clear what’s wrong with Proposal 2 that wouldn’t also be wrong with other formally colorblind laws that prohibit discrimination on the basis of race (or sex or religion or ethnicity).
Epstein proposes that the real problem with Proposal 2 is the same thing that was wrong with the Defense of Marriage Act. In striking down the key provision of DOMA that prevented the federal government from recognizing the state-approved marriages of gay couples, Justice Anthony Kennedy said for the majority, essentially, that what really motivated Congress was prejudice against gay people. "The federal statute is invalid, for no legitimate purpose overcomes the purpose and effect to disparage and to injure those whom the state, by its marriage laws, sought to protect in personhood and dignity,” Kennedy wrote.
The parallel to the Michigan affirmative action case would be this: There’s no legitimate reason to ban affirmative action. It’s just white voters venting their spleen. You can also weave in, as this brief by the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights in the Schuette case does, an old but dear footnote from a 1938 Supreme Court case called Carolene Products: “prejudice against discrete and insular minorities ... which tends seriously to curtail the operation of those political process ordinarily to be relied upon to protect minorities ... may call for a correspondingly more searching judicial inquiry”
But does it really make sense to say that there’s no legitimate reason for a state to eliminate race-based preferences in admissions? The current reality is that it is all poor students who are terribly, shockingly under-represented in universities. One reason is that they are also shockingly underserved by their K-12 schools. As Richard Kahlenberg of the Century Foundation shows, the cost of socioeconomic disadvantage is an average of 399 SAT points. The SAT gap between African-American and white students of the same socioeconomic status, by comparison, is just 56 points. Yet the economically disadvantaged get no affirmative-action-like admissions help at most schools.
Schools have said for years that they’re doing all they can to attract high-achieving poor students. A well-publicized study last spring proved otherwise. As I wrote then, “the difference is information and your sense of the possible—what you know about, what you learn from the experiences of people around you.” A few selective schools have stepped up recruitment. Plenty of others have not. This is about money: Financial aid costs more if you admit more poor kids. And it’s about incentives: The colleges with shamefully small numbers of low-income students pay no political price. Their all-important U.S. News and World Report numbers don’t suffer. Here are the rankings, for a change, in terms of which schools are better or worse about low-income admissions.
Kahnlenberg has found that in seven of the 10 states with affirmative action bans, the leading public universities figured out how to maintain the previous level of African-American or Hispanic representation in the student body and admit more low-income students. Some of the schools have taken income and wealth and neighborhood into account. Some have plans that admit the top 10 percent of high school graduates statewide. Three have banned legacy preferences.
At the University of Michigan, on the other hand (along with UC-Berkeley and UCLA) minority enrollment has dropped with the affirmative action ban. Maybe that’s because the admissions process doesn’t take into account family wealth or the neighborhood a student comes from. Or maybe it’s because the University of Michigan is the kind of elite school that competes with other national elite schools, which do still deploy affirmative action. Indeed, one concern about the Supreme Court’s general skepticism about affirmative action is that it will turn racial diversity into a luxury only wealthy elite schools can afford.
For the Supreme Court, though, the question is still this: Does the Constitution require every public university to have the option of using race-based preferences in admissions? That’s a stretch for the meaning of equal protection. The conservative majority on the Supreme Court won’t make it. That’s OK, as long as the court encourages states to work on getting more low-income kids of every race into higher education. That’s the fairness we need most.
LONDON – Michael Barker, co-president and co-founder of Sony Pictures Classics, is to deliver this year’s keynote address at the Film London Production Finance Market (PFM).
Opening the seventh PFM in London on Oct. 16, Barker promises to give the 200 plus delegates and industry guests an insight into producing and distributing independent feature films.
With awards season in full swing, Barker will assess the role of Sony Pictures Classics, its objectives, achievements and its role in ensuring indie movies including foreign language films access the North American market.
Taking place over two days (Oct. 16-17) in association with the 57th BFI London Film Festival, this year’s PFM will see 52 producers and 57 financiers from the international marketplace conducting over 800 meetings.
Barker will also be part of a senior financiers panel alongside Doug Hansen (Endgame Entertainment) and Ben Browning (Start Motion Pictures), who will discuss how the emerging online market is changing the shape of film finance, covering digital disruption, social media, SVOD and the changing marketplace in North America and its implications for producers and financiers across the rest of the world.
Adrian Wootton, chief executive of Film London and the British Film Commission described Barker as being "admired throughout the international film industry" and said "he will provide a keen insight into the world of independent film production and distribution. His expertise in successfully selling films to international audiences, as well as underpinning multi-territory finance will ensure a fantastic start to this year’s market."
A video of a McDonald's worker confronting the president of the fast-food behemoth has gone viral this week with the help of a fast-food workers' campaign aimed at raising hourly wages to $15.
In the short clip, the worker, Nancy Salgado, a single mother of two children from Chicago, shouts out to Jeff Stratton, president of McDonald's USA, who was standing at a podium of a hotel ballroom giving a talk.
"It's really hard for me to feed my two kids and struggle day to day. Do you think this is fair, that I have to be making $8.25 when I have worked for McDonald's for 10 years?" Salgado shouts out from the back of the room.
Stratton's response? "I've been there 40 years."
As Salgado called out that she needed a raise, she was escorted out of the room, and in the video you can hear a voice say, "You're going to be arrested." Later, police reportedly issued her a ticket.
In bringing attention to this video, the Workers Organizing Committee of Chicago, which is helping to build the campaign for $15 per hour wages, has circulated a press release highlighting the disparity between McDonald's corporate profits - which the group estimates at $5.5 billion last year — and workers wages. According to WOCC, the median wage of cooks, cashiers and crew is $8.94 an hour.
According to an MIT living wage calculator, an adult with one child needs to make $20.86 an hour working full time in the Chicago area to afford the basics.
There's been suggestion on social media that Stratton's response was curt and insensitive. So we reached out to McDonald's to ask him if he would have responded differently to Nancy Salgado had the circumstances been different — say, if she had not barged into a private event and interrupted him.
"Yes, Jeff Stratton was caught off-guard at this church-based event," a McDonald's spokeswoman told us by email.
And why did Stratton bring up his 40 years at McDonald's? Well, it turns out "his 40-year anniversary was that very week, so it was top of mind for him," the spokeswoman said.
The company points out that Stratton first joined McDonald's back in the '70s as a restaurant crew member and has worked his way up.
McDonald's says its history is full of examples of individuals who worked their first job with the company and went on to have successful careers both within and outside of McDonald's.
As for the push from workers for higher hourly wages, McDonald's says it "does not determine wages set by our more than 3,000 U.S. franchisees," according to the company spokeswoman.
At the restaurants run by McDonald's USA — less than 10 percent of the roughly 14,000 outlets in this country — the spokeswoman explains, "we pay salaries that begin at minimum wage but range up from that figure, depending on the job and employee's experience level."
