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Co-author of racist “low Latino IQ” report resigns from the Heritage Foundation as Hispanic college enrollment tops white enrollment

tweet heritage racist resignsLink

damage control

This news alert just showed up in my inbox:

The Heritage Foundation announced the resignation Friday of senior policy analyst Jason Richwine, co-author of a controversial report critical of the Senate’s immigration reform bill. After Heritage issued the report this week, news articles pointed out that Richwine had argued in his Harvard dissertation that there was a long-standing difference between the IQ of white Americans and immigrants. Friday afternoon’s announcement was part of an urgent damage control effort by the giant conservative think tank, which has come under unaccustomed criticism for the immigration report.

For more information… http://www.politico.com

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Rachel Maddow:

This is where the white supremacist problem comes in.

So, yesterday, it was Dillon Matthews at “The Washington Post” who looked up the credentials of the people who wrote the anti-immigration reform study for Heritage and they found out that one of the co-authors for the big Heritage study on this issue, did his doctoral dissertation on American immigration policy and specifically on the question of how we should shape our immigration policy to account for the fact that Latinos are so dumb as a race. I`m only barely paraphrasing.

The dissertation describes Latino immigrants as generally having an IQ that is, quote, “substantially lower than that of the white native population.” Quote, “Immigrants living in the U.S. today do not have the same level of cognitive ability as natives.” Quote, “No one knows whether Hispanics will ever reach IQ parity with whites, but the prediction that new Hispanic immigrants will have low IQ children and grandchildren is difficult to argue against.”

So, not only are Latinos intellectually inferior to whites, but, of course, they breed. Echh. Disgusting, right?

After that was reported the Heritage Foundation, which is now run by former Republican Senator Republican Jim DeMint, the Heritage Foundation tried to distance themselves from this guy who they had write their immigration report.

They lamented that people were focusing on this guy`s dissertation instead of on this new study from him. They said that the dissertation was, quote, “not a work product of the Heritage Foundation. Its findings do not reflect the positions of the Heritage Foundation or the conclusions of our study.”

They further dismissed the guy who wrote the Latino’s equal dumb thing by saying, quote, “he did not shape the methodology or the policy recommendations in the Heritage policy paper, semicolon, he provided quantitative support for the lead author.” So, basically, “the guy was just a temp. He was good with a calculator. That`s all we hired him for.”

Think Progress demonstrates that not only is timing everything, but also, irony is not dead:

A Pew Research Center report released Thursday notes that Hispanic college enrollment reached a record high for the class of 2012, surpassing the rate of white enrollment for the first time. [...]

This should catch the attention of Heritage Foundation’s Jason Richwine, who coauthored a debunked immigration study that argues reform is too costly. Richwine argued in his dissertation that immigrants naturally possess a lower IQ, a pseudoscience point linked to anti-immigration groups actively working against reform.

graph hispanic education rises

U.S. budget surplus biggest in 5 years; federal deficit is down 32% so far this fiscal year

chart budget deficit shrinks 4 year low Steve Benen Maddow Blog Oct 2012

If Fox Biz says it, it must be true. Via an email alert:

The U.S. federal budget surplus came in at $112.9 billion in April, up from $59 billion in the same month in 2012. The government is running a $488 billion deficit for fiscal 2013, down from $720 billion in a comparable period in fiscal 2012.

And via Market Watch:

It was the first monthly surplus since January and the biggest monthly surplus since the $159 billion budget surplus of April 2008.

Tax receipts were $407 billion, up 28% versus April 2012 [...]

Some see the government’s improving finances as affecting a potential debt deal between President Barack Obama and Republicans. “With the deficit plunging, support for entitlement reform — which looked so promising in early April — has clearly faded,” wrote Greg Valliere, chief political strategist at Potomac Research Group in a note on Friday.

Gee, taxes were raised, unemployment is down, and the world didn’t end.

bikini graph May 2013 private sector

Everybody say it with me now: Blame Obama.

blame obama Bush's fault

Bikini Graph time! Jobs added, unemployment rate down to 7.5%, lowest in 4/12 years

bikini itsy bitsy

It’s time to bring back the Bikini Graph! As always, red columns point to monthly job totals under the Bush administration, while blue columns point to job totals under the Obama administration:

bikini graph May 2013 overallbikini graph May 2013 private sector

Paddy gave us the quickie version here, but as always, the wonderful Steve Benen at The Maddow Blog has provided the Bikini Graphs and more, including more details you can find at the links here and here. A couple of excerpts from both links:

For most of President Obama’s first term, one of the more common Republican talking points focused on the overall unemployment rate: it was stuck above 8%, a fact they blamed on the president who inherited a global economic crisis.

You may have noticed that this GOP talking point has since vanished.

As of today, the unemployment rate is down to 7.5%, which is not only the lowest point of the Obama presidency, but also the lowest since late 2008. It’s dropped a full point in the last year and a half, a 2.5 points since its October 2010 high.

It’s also one of the fastest improvements in the jobless rate in the last 30 years

He goes on to say that, since President Obama took office, the net jobs gain is over 1.5 million overall and over 2.2 million in the private sector.

And:

As is usually the case, there was a gap between the two major sectors — America’s private sector added 176,000 jobs last month, while spending cuts caused the public sector lose 11,000 jobs.Of course, these are preliminary totals that will be updated in the coming months, and therein lies the key importance to this new jobs report: the revisions… Also note, the February job totals, the best in eight years, came after January’s tax hikes, but before the sequester. [...]

[W]ere it not for Congress and sequestration cuts, the nation’s economic recovery would likely be quite strong right now. Were it not for the lawmakers Americans elect to represent our interests, and their ongoing efforts to take capital out the economy and slash public investments, job growth would probably be very robust.

graph benen Maddow blog unemployment under ObamaOh, and there’s this via a Fox Biz email alert:

The blue-chip average topped the 15000 mark for the first time ever as traders cheer a round of strong data on the U.S. labor market. The broader S&P 500 also hit a milestone, surpassing the 1600 threshold for the first time. The two market barometers are up more than 1% on the day and 13% for the year.

Jobless Claims Fall to Lowest Level Since January 2008 #BlameObama

blame obamablame obama Bush's fault

This news comes via an email alert from fair and balanced Fox Biz:

New claims for unemployment benefits fell to 324,000 last week from an upwardly revised 342,000 the week prior. Claims were expected to fall to 345,000 from an initially reported 339,000.

Employers announced plans to cut 38,121 jobs in April, representing a 23% drop from March, and a 6% decline from the year prior, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

And there’s this from Steve Benen at The Maddow Blog:

graph maddow blog unemployment 2007-2013 lowest in 5 years

Above you’ll find the chart showing weekly, initial unemployment claims going back to the beginning of 2007. (Remember, unlike the monthly jobs chart, a lower number is good news.) For context, I’ve added an arrow to show the point at which President Obama’s Recovery Act began spending money.

Social Security belongs to all of us. Don’t let them cut it.

social security no cuts obamaPetition here

chained cpi food purchase cutschart graph chained cpi reduced paymentsSocial Security belongs to all of us. Don’t let them cut it!

August 2012: V.P. Biden “flat guarantees” no changes in Social Security, which “effectively takes Social Security off the table.”

So much for that “guarantee.”

Via Strengthen Social Security:

Some politicians in Washington are preparing to cut your Social Security COLA for good–even after two years without getting a COLA. This COLA cut has an obscure name: chained-CPI. But it would do real damage by changing the formula used to calculate the COLA. Here’s what you need to know about it:

  • It’s a benefit cut. It’s not some minor technical change to the COLA. It’s a real cut to the benefits you have earned every year into the future.

  • It cuts benefits more with every passing year. After 10 years, your benefits would be cut by about $500 a year for the average retiree. After 20 years, your benefits would be cut by about $1,000 a year.

  • It hits today’s Social Security beneficiaries. Politicians like to say that their cuts to Social Security will not affect those getting benefits today. Wrong! Switching to the chained-CPI would hit all current beneficiaries.

  • We need a higher COLA, not a lower one. The current COLA is not large enough–it does not adequately account for large health care cost increases faced by seniors and people with disabilities.

Please go to Strengthen Social Security for more. And here’s more about what “chained CPI” would do (scroll).

VIDEO: The last safety “inspection of the West fertilizer plant happened in– 1985.”

chart deaths terrorists v workplace v firearms guns

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Chris Hayes:

Records from the Federal Occupational Safety Administration shows the last agency’s inspection of the West Fertilizer plant happened in– 1985. For a few violations OSHA considered serious, the company was fined, wait for it. $30.

If twenty-eight years seems like a very long time between OSHA inspections for an inherently risky workplace, keep this in mind: According to the New York Times, while the number of inspectors has grown under the Obama administration, OSHA still just has 2400 responsible for overseeing roughly 8 million work sites. Roughly one inspector per 60,000 workers, a ratio that hasn’t changed since 1970

We talked last night about fatalities from terrorism and gun deaths. There’s a category we didn’t mention, which is workplace fatalities. From 2000-2010  3,033 Americans died from terror attacks. During that same time. 335,000 Americans died from the hands of a gun while there were over 60,000 workplace deaths.

Then Rachel Maddow covered it this way:

fertilizer explosion texas

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Bikini Graph time! Job added, but totals stumble; unemployment rate to 7.6%, lowest since December 2008

bikini itsy bitsy

It’s time to bring back the Bikini Graph! As always, red columns point to monthly job totals under the Bush administration, while blue columns point to job totals under the Obama administration:

bikini graph April 2013 overall bikini graph April 2013 private sector

At least the blue bars still are still pointing UP.

Via Steve Benen at The Maddow Blog, where there’s more:

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported this morning that the U.S. economy created just 88,000 jobs in March, the worst in the last 10 months. As is usually the case, there was a gap between the two major sectors — America’s private sector added 95,000 jobs last month, the public sector lost 7,000 jobs, though most of those totals were driven by Post Office layoffs.

The news is awful, but there was a silver lining: totals from January were revised up to 148,000 jobs (from 119,000), while February was revised up to 268,000 (from +236,000). The additional 61,000 jobs helped push the unemployment rate to 7.6%, its lowest point since December 2008.