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Politics

Top Seven Progressive Policies That Strengthen The National Football League

By Scott Keyes on Sep 10, 2011 at 6:00 pm

As the NFL begins a new season this weekend, America will celebrate the sport not just as a wonderful national pastime, but also as a prime example of progressive policies in action. We’ve cataloged seven unique ways in which the NFL is strengthened by its progressive approach to the sport, including equality, fairness, and diversity:

1. Revenue sharing: Fifty years ago, NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle set the NFL on a strong progressive path by implementing a system of revenue sharing between the teams. In essence, revenue from the league’s massive TV and radio contracts is divided evenly amongst the 32 NFL teams today. As a result, smaller market teams like the Green Bay Packers and Minnesota Vikings are able to stay competitive with big market teams like the Dallas Cowboys and New York Giants.

2. Salary cap: The NFL currently sets a team salary cap at $120 million. This prevents teams with wealthy owners from simply purchasing all the best players in the league, as the New York Yankees have done in Major League Baseball. As a result of the salary cap, the NFL enjoys much more equality, competition, and fairness than it would if owners were permitted to field teams with as high a salary as they pleased.

3. Strong unions: One primary reason there was an extended lockout during the offseason was because NFL players enjoy a strong union that did not back down in the face of new demands from the owners. Indeed, over the past few decades, the National Football League Players Association has used collective bargaining to win such concessions from owners as free agency, pension and health care improvements, and minimum salaries.

4. Affirmative action: Since 2003, the NFL has enforced the Rooney Rule, which requires teams to interview minority candidates for head coaching vacancies. The impact has been undeniable; the percentage of minority coaches increased from 6 percent to 22 percent over the past eight years. Among these new leaders are some of the most successful coaches in the league, including Pittsburgh Steelers coach Mike Tomlin and Chicago Bears coach Lovie Smith, both of whom who have taken their teams to the Super Bowl.

5. Progressive draft system: At the end of every season, the league awards the first pick in next year’s draft to the team with the worst record, followed by the second worst, and so on. By taking a progressive approach to the distribution of draft picks, the NFL fosters competitiveness and parity among the teams. This has allowed teams like the 2008 Atlanta Falcons to make the playoffs under the leadership of a star rookie one year after having the third worst record in the league.

6. Schedule equalizing: Just as the worst-performing teams are given a boost in the draft, so too are the following year’s schedules tweaked to improve equality. In other words, the better a team does in one season, the more difficult their schedule will be the following season. This focus on equality makes the NFL far more exciting than a league dominated by a static group of elite teams.

7. Socialistic Super Bowl champions: Last year’s Super Bowl champions, the Green Bay Packers, are a socialist organization. Rather than being controlled by a single owner like the 31 other teams, the Packers are owned by the community – 112,158 shareholders to be precise. (This is what an owners meeting looks like.) The team is a nonprofit and has rules in place to prevent any individuals from taking control of the franchise. Were the Packers controlled by a single owner, it’s unlikely they would still play in Green Bay, the smallest hometown of any NFL team, particularly while a vacancy in the highly profitable Los Angeles market exists. It’s no stretch to say that socialism saved the Green Bay Packers.

Economy

While McConnell Opposes Infrastructure Investment, Major Kentucky Bridge Shuts Down Over Safety Concerns

By Travis Waldron on Sep 10, 2011 at 2:32 pm

Sherman Minton Bridge in Louisville, KY

Yesterday, ThinkProgress published a report detailing Republican Congressional leadership’s opposition to infrastructure investments even as structural deficiencies in bridges and roadways persist in their home states. Among those is Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, where 34 percent of bridges are considered structurally deficient or functionally obsolete.

The Sherman Minton Bridge, one of three major bridges spanning the Ohio River between Louisville, KY and southern Indiana, was among the Kentucky bridges listed as deficient. And last night, the Sherman Minton Bridge was closed after further deficiencies, including cracks, were found in a load-bearing part of its structure. The Louisville Courier-Journal reports:

The Sherman Minton Bridge was closed late Friday afternoon and will remain shut down indefinitely after officials discovered cracks in the span.

Will Wingfield, a spokesman for the Indiana Department of Transportation, said officials “do not have an estimate” on how long it will take to repair and reopen the bridge, which carries Interstate 64 traffic across the Ohio River.

Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels (R) ordered the closure of the bridge, as the state of Indiana maintains and operates the bridge. But the 49-year-old bridge serves as a major thoroughfare for Louisville, McConnell’s hometown and Kentucky’s largest city, carrying 50,000 people a day into or out of the city, according to Chuck Wolfe, spokesman for the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet. The state of Kentucky assists in maintenance and evaluation of the bridge’s structure. While the Sherman Minton Bridge is closed, much of its regular daily traffic will be re-routed over another bridge that was already slated to be inspected for structural damage Monday.

The closure came just a day after President Obama renewed his call for Congress to invest in infrastructure improvements to stimulate the economy and address the nation’s crumbling bridges and roads, as studies have shown the nation needs $2 trillion in investment just to bring its infrastructure up to date. McConnell criticized Obama’s plan, saying it was “a re-election plan.”

But while McConnell insists that Republicans “agree that we must bring America’s infrastructure up to 21st century standards,” his recent record doesn’t show it. When progressives and Democrats argued that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act should be geared toward infrastructure, the GOP under McConnell’s leadership fought to focus it on tax cuts. The Senate GOP derailed a 2010 jobs plan focused largely on infrastructure investment, and if McConnell’s post-speech rhetoric is to be believed, he will be at the forefront of the Republican Party’s opposition to this plan too.

Climate Progress

Exxon Makes Billion-Dollar Bet Climate Change is Real, Here Now and Going to Get Worse But Keeps Funding Deniers

By Joe Romm and Climate Guest Blogger on Sep 10, 2011 at 1:44 pm

Hard-core deniers assert that the current warming is just part of a natural cycle.  Joe Bastardi, for instance, in a Climate Progress comment, absurdly predicted that “the earth will cool back … to levels we saw in the late 70s, and the [Arctic sea] ice will increase back to those levels in the N hemisphere.“ Not.

The cynical, climate-destroyers at Exxon, however, are placing a massive bet that global warming is real and that the Arctic will keep warming — even as they keep funding deniers to obfuscate the science and block action (after they publicly stated they would stop such funding).

Below is a guest post by Christopher Jones on this subject.  Jones is a Ciriacy-Wantrup fellow at the University of California-Berkeley.

Read more

Security

Terrorism Expert: Since 9/11, Only 33 Deaths From Muslim Terrorism Vs. 150,000 Deaths From Murders

By Faiz Shakir on Sep 10, 2011 at 1:30 pm

Charles Kurzman, a University of North Carolina professor of sociology, is the author of a new book titled The Missing Martyrs: Why There Are So Few Muslim Terrorists. Seeking to “turn down the volume on terrorism debates,” Kurzman argues Al Qaeda and its affiliates have “failed so dismally” because they have been unable to attract large numbers — particularly Muslim American recruits — to their cause.

In an interview with ThinkProgress yesterday, Kurzman told us that “evidence so far over the last decade” is that the threat of terrorism committed by Muslims “has not been growing.” Kurzman’s comprehensive analysis of terrorist plots since 9/11 finds that 186 individuals of the Muslim faith had become radicalized towards violence. Thus, he finds that while “Muslim Americans are participating in terrorist plots at a proportion greater than their proportion to the population,” the overall threat of Muslim terrorism is “very, very low”:

Muslim American terrorist plots have killed since 9/11 — since the 3,000 killed on 9/11 — have killed 33 individuals in the United States since that time. Over that same period of time, there have been more than 150,000 murders in the United States, or 14 or 15,000 murders every year. Muslim American terrorism, then, has been a very small, very low percentage of the overall violence in the United States.

Kurzman explained to us his research finds that the Muslim American community has been central in combatting the low-level threat. Of the terrorist plots where researchers have been able to identify a tip that was responsible for foiling them, about one-third of those tips originated from the Muslim American community. The evidence suggests “that Muslims themselves are working actively to prevent radicalization,” Kurzman said. Watch it:

As CAP’s report “Fear, Inc.: The Roots of the Islamophobia Network In America” details, a small band of so-called “experts” speak at conferences, appear on TV and radio, and write on various websites to “rail against Islam and cast suspicion on American Muslims,” all with the intention of hyping the threats emanating from the Muslim American community.

Reacting to the agenda of the Islamophobia network, Kurzman told us: “I think that our goal should be to increase cooperation with non-radical Muslims — in other words to increase a sense of inclusion, collaboration — rather than to blow up our fears of this small group into suspicion of a much wider group that isn’t involved at all.”

Politics

On Eve Of 9/11 Anniversary, Cantor Insists On Massive Cuts To First Responders In Exchange For Emergency Disaster Aid

By Judd Legum on Sep 10, 2011 at 12:18 pm

Yesterday, President Obama requested $5.1 billion to provide disaster relief to communities struggling to recover from recent hurricanes, floods, earthquakes and wildfires. The request includes $500 million in emergency funds FEMA needs to continue to operate effectively through the end of September.

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, whose home state of Virginia was hit by an earthquake and Hurricane Irene, is demanding more partisan spending cuts in exchange for approving the request. From Politico:

But a spokesperson for House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) signaled late Friday that the GOP is likely to insist on offsets for the $500 million in emergency funds Obama requested for 2011…

“The House has passed $1 billion in disaster relief funds that is fully offset, which we will look to move as quickly as possible.”

The funds referenced by Cantor’s spokesperson are contained in the House Department of Homeland Security Appropriations bill, which is adamantly opposed by Senate Democrats. Why? The “offsets” contained in the bill are actually massive cuts to first responders. Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA) explains:

The House bill slashes funding for grants to equip and train first responders by 40 percent. This is on top of the 19 percent cut in FY 2011. The House defense appropriations bill provides $12.8 billion to train and equip troops and police in Afghanistan — yet the House provides only $2 billion for first responders here at home.

Their proposal also slashes the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s operations by 6 percent at a time when the agency has never been busier. Does it really make sense to pay for response and reconstruction costs from past disasters by reducing our capacity to prepare for future disasters?

In December, Cantor opposed a bipartisan bill “to improve health services and provide financial compensation for 9/11 first responders who were exposed to dangerous toxins and are now sick as a result.” Now, on the eve of the 10th anniversary of 9/11, Cantor is pushing for further cuts to first responders in exchange for disaster relief.

Cantor and his staff continue to insist “There will be no delay in meeting the president’s request and providing people the aid they need.” But they have yet to support any such request absent more partisan spending cuts.

Climate Progress

If You Could Ask a Climate Scientist One Question….

By Joe Romm on Sep 10, 2011 at 9:57 am

… what would it be?  I’ll try to get practicing climate scientists to answer the most popular questions, so as the list of questions grows, please indicate which ones you would also like the answer to.

The Yale Project on Climate Change Communications has actually asked Americans in their “Global Warming’s Six Americas in May 2011” report “If you had the opportunity to talk to an expert on global warming, which of the following questions would you like to ask?”

They divide things up by their six groupings:

Read more

Climate Progress

Murdoch’s NY Post Fabricates Statistic to Vilify Green Jobs

By Climate Guest Blogger on Sep 10, 2011 at 7:45 am

by Jill Fitzsimmons, in a Media Matters repost

In an editorial blasting President Obama’s green jobs initiatives, the New York Post falsely claimed that despite significant investments in clean energy, California’s “environmental sector has actually lost jobs, not gained them”:

[T]he Obama administration’s entire green-jobs initiative has been a massive boondoggle.

As The New York Times reported last month, Obama’s grand plan to create 5 million green jobs over 10 years has turned into an enormous “pipe dream.”

In California, for example, the environmental sector has actually lost jobs, not gained them.

Which raises serious questions about this administration’s ability to come up with any kind of plan that will productively address America’s unemployment crisis.

In fact, those job losses refer only to the San Jose metro area, not to the state of California as a whole, which has gained almost 80,000 green jobs since 2003 — a 4.2% annual increase – and leads the nation in the number of clean energy jobs.

Those numbers come from a recent Brookings Institution report assessing green jobs nationally and regionally, which was the subject of the New York Times/Bay Citizen article cited by the New York Post editorial. The Times article has been criticized for cherry-picking information from the Brookings report to paint a misleadingly negative picture of green job growth.

Contrary to the New York Post‘s dismissal of green jobs programs, Brookings found that Recovery Act investments contributed to a surge of growth in the clean economy, despite the recession:

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