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Happy 4th of July!

Mother Jones

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And if you’re looking for reasons to be proud of America today, here’s a quickie top ten list. Every country makes plenty of mistakes, and we’ve certainly made our share. But even taking our shortcomings into account, we’ve done an awful lot right:

  1. We have the most dynamic culture of entrepreneurship in the world.
  2. In the postwar era we have consistently supported free trade, often at our own expense.
  3. We were on the right side of history in the fight against fascism.
  4. We were on the right side of history in the fight against communism.
  5. We are on the right side of history in the fight against terrorism.
  6. We have the strongest protections of speech and religious freedoms in the world.
  7. We protect the world’s sea lanes all but single-handedly.
  8. We are the most benign hegemon in world history.
  9. Even today, we accept and incorporate immigrants better than nearly any country in history.
  10. American science is the most vigorous in the world, to the benefit of nearly every person on the globe.

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Happy 4th of July!

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Your City Will Never Get Rich Hosting the Super Bowl

Mother Jones

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Along San Francisco’s Embarcadero, right in front of the restored Ferry Building, a fan village known as Super Bowl City is expected to draw at least a million visitors this week. Super Bowl Host Committee officials project that not only will San Francisco finish in the black after the nine-day event, but that it also could generate anywhere between “a couple hundred million to $800 million” in economic output for the city. What’s more, a PricewaterhouseCoopers study projected that the Bay Area could see at least $220 million in direct revenue from business during the Super Bowl, the most ever.

But where do those numbers come from, and how accurate are they, really? We reached out to two economists who study the impact of mega sporting events, and their assessment was less than rosy. Here are some takeaways:

Every year, the same studies come out. Every year, they’re wrong. When the NFL and its host committee estimate the event’s economic impact, they tend to forget how the city operates before the event, says Andrew Zimbalist, an economics professor at Smith College. For example, San Francisco’s hotel occupancy rate typically has hovered around 90 percent in February. So when Super Bowl fans flood area hotels, they’re likely just filling spots that would have already been filled. Additionally, residents can be reluctant to visit the Super Bowl City area over fear of traffic, congestion, and increased security, displacing typical economic activity and leaking money out of the city. Notably, on Super Bowl City’s opening day, only 7,000 people showed up.

“I’m expecting next year they’re going to come out and say the host city is going to turn into New York City. Not really. It’s silly,” Zimbalist says. “Every year they come out with the same stuff. The studies that they do are based on a false methodology and unrealistic assumptions.”

The host city’s Super Bowl committee usually keeps quiet about the projected economic benefits to the host city or the region. Previous analyses by university researchers, in partnership with the NFL and host committees, have measured the gross economic benefits anywhere between $400 million and $700 million. For instance, researchers at Arizona State University found that last year’s Super Bowl XLIX in Glendale, Arizona, brought $719 million of total economic impact to the state.

ASU would not release the entire study to Mother Jones under an agreement with the NFL and the host committee. But Victor Matheson, an economics professor at the College of Holy Cross who examined the study’s summary findings, told Mother Jones that researchers failed to take into account the region’s typical activity. Matheson argues that the true impact for the host city usually falls between $30 million and $120 million.

San Francisco gave up a lot to get Super Bowl City, and still needs to figure out how to pay for it. This year, Super Bowl City is 45 miles away from the actual big game, which will take place at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara. But San Francisco’s taxpayers are on the hook for at least $4.8 million in city services during Super Bowl week. Why? An independent budget analysis found that San Francisco did not make a formal agreement with the NFL and the Super Bowl Host Committee to receive a reimbursement for those services. Or, as SF Weekly recently put it, “The Super Bowl is here on little more than a handshake deal.”

As Zimbalist notes, $4.8 million is a small number when you consider San Francisco’s $8.96 billion budget. Still, he says, “it’s $5 million not being spent on road repairs and schools.” Or on the city’s roughly 3,500 homeless, some of whom recently relocated from the Super Bowl City area to a growing tent encampment under a highway overpass in the Mission District. San Francisco magazine counted 100 tents in the area, though homeless advocates and officials say the encampment has grown over the course of a few months, even years. A host committee official told Bloomberg News in January that the group would invest $13 million of the $50 million it had already raised in charities addressing homelessness and poverty.

Meanwhile, as part of the Super Bowl bid, San Francisco’s police, fire, and emergency management departments “signed letters of assurance to not seek reimbursement from the NFL” for providing more services during the Super Bowl—an arrangement that Matheson said isn’t unusual. (Last year’s Super Bowl likely cost the city of Glendale at least $579,000 and as much as $1.25 million in security and transportation cost overruns.) Only two departments will earn money back from the host committee—the fire department (a 6.7 percent reimbursement) and parks and recreation (100 percent). Jane Kim, who sits on San Francisco’s board of supervisors and has called the city’s non-agreement “the worst deal ever,” pushed for a last-minute bill to make the city renegotiate with the NFL, less than a week before the events at Super Bowl City were set to start.

The city’s municipal transportation agency and police department will spend a combined $3.8 million for services to Super Bowl 50 events; the transportation department will spend more than $700,000 on additional parking enforcement alone. The city will try to cover this by redirecting funds in different department budgets along with staff time from future projects “to support this extraordinary special event.” For now, some city workers will volunteer their time during Super Bowl week.

All told, it could’ve been worse. Take Super Bowl XLVIII, which left New Jersey residents with a $17.7 million tab. Or last year’s big game, which cost Glendale—a city of 230,000 where more than 40 percent of its debt is set aside to pay off sports facilities—more than $2.1 million to pay for security alone. And while Santa Clara’s taxpayers still have to deal with the public subsidies that helped fund Levi’s Stadium, the city did manage to make a deal to earn back roughly $3.6 million in service costs for the Super Bowl.

“In the big picture,” Matheson says, “this is one of the cheapest for the taxpayers that we’ve seen.”

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Your City Will Never Get Rich Hosting the Super Bowl

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This Was the Most Powerful Moment From Obama’s Tearful Plea for Gun Control

Mother Jones

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Surrounded by victims and family members of those who have suffered from gun violence, President Barack Obama on Tuesday made a passionate plea for Americans to support a new suite of executive actions aimed at curbing gun crime, including expanded background checks on gun sales.

Toward the end of the speech, as he spoke about students around the country who have been killed by guns, the president grew visibly emotional. He paused and then began to tear up. Watch the clip above.

“From high schoolers at Columbine and from first graders at Newtown,” Obama said, wiping away tears. “First graders. And from every family who never imagined that their loved one would be taken from our lives by a bullet from a gun. Every time I think about those kids, it gets me mad. And by the way, it happens on the streets of Chicago every day.”

You can watch the press conference in its entirety here.

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This Was the Most Powerful Moment From Obama’s Tearful Plea for Gun Control

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John Oliver Explains How Wealthy Sports Teams Are Scamming Taxpayers

Mother Jones

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Every year, American cities across the country spend billions of dollar in public money in order to build shiny new sports stadiums we probably don’t need. As John Oliver explained on the latest Last Week Tonight, these stadiums are increasingly designed to look like “coked-up Willy Wonka” coliseums with expensive features like swimming pools and party cabanas.

“We don’t just help teams build stadiums, we let them keep virtually all the revenue those stadiums produce,” Oliver said on Sunday.

The segment goes onto show, stadium financing often hurts the local economy and surrounding businesses, even blocking cities from paying for crucial things like hospitals—all this as wealthy stadium owners only get richer with empty promises of economic growth.

“I’m not saying we shouldn’t have giant aquariums in ballparks full of terrified fish. Of course we should, this is America! If we don’t have them, no one else will! But we should not be using public money to pay for them.”

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John Oliver Explains How Wealthy Sports Teams Are Scamming Taxpayers

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Corporations Want to Follow Your Every Move, Whether You Like It Or Not

Mother Jones

Last year the Commerce Department put together a group to make recommendations for regulating facial recognition technology. The group included nine privacy advocates, but Dan Froomkin reports that it didn’t go well:

At a base minimum, people should be able to walk down a public street without fear that companies they’ve never heard of are tracking their every movement — and identifying them by name — using facial recognition technology,” the privacy advocates wrote in a joint statement. “Unfortunately, we have been unable to obtain agreement even with that basic, specific premise.”

….After a dozen meetings, the most recent of which was last week, all nine privacy advocates who have participated in the entire process concluded that they were totally outgunned. “This should be a wake-up call to Americans: Industry lobbyists are choking off Washington’s ability to protect consumer privacy,” Alvaro Bedoya, executive director of the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown Law, said in a statement.

People simply do not expect companies they’ve never heard of to secretly track them using this powerful technology. Despite all of this, industry associations have pushed for a world where companies can use facial recognition on you whenever they want — no matter what you say. This position is well outside the mainstream.”

I had no idea that anyone was even considering the regulation of facial recognition software, so this is news to me. It’s yet another indication that in the future we will have virtually no privacy left at all. Either that or we’ll all start walking around in tinfoil-shielded space suits whenever we leave our tinfoil-wallpapered houses.

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Corporations Want to Follow Your Every Move, Whether You Like It Or Not

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New Chapter Every Woman’s One Daily 40+ Multivitamin, 72 Tablets

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The DASH Diet for Every Day: 4 Weeks of DASH Diet Recipes & Meal Plans to Lose Weight & Improve Health – Telamon Press

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The DASH Diet for Every Day: 4 Weeks of DASH Diet Recipes & Meal Plans to Lose Weight & Improve Health

Telamon Press

Genre: Health & Fitness

Price: $0.99

Publish Date: January 16, 2014

Publisher: Callisto Media Inc.

Seller: Callisto Media, Inc.


There’s a reason why the DASH Diet is ranked “Best Overall Diet” by U.S. News &amp; World Report year after year. It works. Developed by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute to prevent and reverse high blood pressure, and approved by the Mayo Clinic and American Heart Association, the DASH Diet is a sensible low-sodium diet emphasizing fruits, vegetables and whole grains. The DASH Diet for Every Day will show you how to incorporate the DASH Diet your daily routine to help you get healthy and lose weight. With dozens of simple recipes, and an easy-to-follow meal plan, The DASH Diet for Every Day will guide you through the first month of the DASH Diet so you can see amazing results right away. The DASH Diet for Every Day will help you lower your risk for heart disease and lose weight, with: • More than 60 easy and delicious DASH Diet recipes, including favorites like Blueberry and Oat Pancakes, Chicken Quesadillas, Spaghetti with Meat Sauce, Comforting Mac and Cheese, and Death by Chocolate Cupcakes • 4-week DASH Diet meal plan to successfully guide you through the first month of the DASH diet • DASH Diet cooking techniques, shopping lists, and planning tips that will save you time, money, and stress • A detailed DASH Diet food list and 30 DASH-approved snacks The DASH Diet for Every Day is your step-by-step guide to making sustainable changes for permanent better health.

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The DASH Diet for Every Day: 4 Weeks of DASH Diet Recipes & Meal Plans to Lose Weight & Improve Health – Telamon Press

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The Better World Shopping Guide: Every Dollar Makes a Difference (Better World Shopping Guide: Every Dollar Can Make a Difference)

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Hardy Succulents: Tough Plants for Every Climate

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