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Justice

93-Year-Old Tennessee Woman Who Cleaned State Capitol For 30 Years Denied Voter ID

By Marie Diamond on Dec 26, 2011 at 3:20 pm

Tennessee's Capitol building in Nashville.

A 93-year-old Tennessee woman who cleaned the state Capitol for 30 years, including the governor’s office, says she won’t be able to vote for the first time in decades after being told this week that her old state ID failed to meet new voter ID regulations.

Thelma Mitchell was even accused of being an undocumented immigrant because she couldn’t produce a birth certificate:

Mitchell, who was delivered by a midwife in Alabama in 1918, has never had a birth certificate. But when she told that to a drivers’ license clerk, he suggested she might be an illegal immigrant.

Thelma Mitchell told WSMV-TV that she went to a state drivers’ license center last week after being told that her old state ID from her cleaning job would not meet new regulations for voter identification.

A spokesman for the House Republican Caucus insisted that Mitchell was given bad information and should’ve been allowed to vote, even with an expired state ID. But even if that’s the case, her ordeal illustrates the inevitable disenfranchisements that result when confusing voting laws enable state officials to apply the law inconsistently.

The incident is the just latest in a series of reports of senior citizens being denied their constitutional right to vote under restrictive new voter ID laws pushed by Republican governors and legislatures. These laws are a transparent attempt to target Democrat constituencies who are less likely to have photo ID’s, and disproportionately affect seniors, college students, the poor and minorities.

As ThinkProgress reported, one 96-year-old Tennessee woman was denied a voter ID because she didn’t have her marriage license. Another senior citizen in Tennessee, 91-year-old Virginia Lasater, couldn’t get the ID she needed to vote because she wasn’t able to stand in a long line at the DMV. A Tennessee agency even told a 86-year-old World War II veteran that he had to pay an unconstitutional poll tax if he wanted to obtain an ID.

Alyssa

Lawrence v. Texas and the Purpose of Biopics

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Dec 26, 2011 at 2:52 pm

I was unexpectedly sad two days before Christmas to learn that John Lawrence, the plaintiff Lawrence v. Texas, which overturned sodomy laws in the United States, had died in late November virtually unnoticed by the country he helped change, and to learn from that obituary that Tyron Garner, with whom he was arrested for having sex (though both men said they were never intimate) had died in 2006. The news touched me not just because I was volunteering for Freedom to Marry Massachusetts the summer the Lawrence decision came down, and so felt it as a victory in a battle I was engaged in, but because it made me think about what happens to people after they do their part to make history and memory and its failures.

Biopics of very famous people have become an extremely reliable way for acclaimed actors to finally claim the hardware that has eluded them for other parts, or to claim more hardware and a confirmation of their greatness. But we don’t really need a biopic about Margaret Thatcher, whose life and legacy seem sufficiently understood. Even a figure like Ronald Reagan, whose life and legacy are distorted almost continually, doesn’t seem particularly needy: the myths and corrections are issued quickly and forcefully. There will be no authoritative version of his life in film or otherwise—partisans on both sides are sure they have the truth already. Sometimes, a biopic does the interesting thing of illuminating a very great and famous person through someone who played a pivotal role in their life. The King’s Speech may have seemed to some people an unworthy trifle to bring in such a haul earlier this year, but it has the virtues of being a fine film about class and medicine in addition to an illumination of a king.

But how about the people who were the real sparks to history themselves—after all, if there hadn’t been Lionel Logue, there would have been someone else, and more importantly, there still would have been the speech—but are forgotten. We’ve done a better job of remembering the Little Rock Nine than we have James Lawrence and Tyron Garner, even though they’re further in the distance, but even then, we see them as elements in a collective image. We don’t know very much about what makes them decide to integrate a school. And we don’t know very much about what made a Texas medical technician decide he could carry forth as the representative of a difficult cause, and how it came to be that one of his lawyers didn’t even know he’d died after their great victory. Good biopics should do more than affirm the greatness of the great. They should tell us something about history, particularly when it fails us and fails us quickly.

Economy

Van Hollen: Republican Drug Tests For Unemployment Insurance Are ‘Insulting’

By Zack Ford on Dec 26, 2011 at 1:55 pm

Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) rebuked House Republicans yesterday for suggesting the government require drug tests of individuals seeking unemployment insurance, calling such proposals “insulting” and a “red herring” in the unemployment crisis:

VAN HOLLEN: I think the drug testing thing is a red herring. The reality is that people are not out of work because they have substance abuse problems, people are out of work because there are four people looking for every job that’s available in America.

We’re willing to look at reforms, but the Republican rhetoric has been insulting to a whole lot of working Americans who lost their jobs through no fault of their own… I have to say, this Republican effort to kind of blame people who lost jobs through no fault of their own shows a total insensitivity to the stories that we’re hearing from districts around the country. Frankly I think the American people are hearing that tone and they’re not very appreciative, because they know that everybody, but for the grace of God, could also be in that position.

Watch it:

Republican presidential candidates such as Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry have also endorsed drug testing for recipients of federal aid, but this is an invented problem that does not need a solution. Van Hollen was correct that there are four unemployed job seekers for every available job, suggesting the real reason unemployment benefits are needed is unemployment, not some fabricated reality where government benefits are supporting drug dependencies. Mandatory drug testing could create complications for employers and additional delays for job seekers but would do little to put more Americans back to work.

Climate Progress

NASA: Climate Change May Flip 40% of Earth’s Major Ecosystems This Century

By Climate Guest Blogger on Dec 26, 2011 at 1:00 pm

by Rolf Schuttenhelm, cross-posted from Bits of Science

The results of studies that try to quantify the effects of climate change on biodiversity loss — which include damage to the micro scale level of subspecies and genetic variation — are perhaps most shocking.

When, however, you focus on the response to climate change at the macro level, the ecosystem level, you get a better understanding of what is one of the major drivers of that biodiversity loss: forced migrations. And even here, the numbers may be larger than one would expect, as a new assessment by NASA and Caltech published in the journal Climatic Change shows that by 2100 some 40 percent of “major ecological community types” – that is biomes like forest, grassland, tundra – will have switched to a different such state.

According to the same study most of the land on Earth that is not currently desert or under an icecap will undergo at least a 30 percent change in vegetation cover.

Ecological damage is the real climate problem

Based on IPCC temperature projections for 2100 [which are probably on the conservative side] of 2-4 degrees Celsius warming scientists of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the California Institute of Technology ran special computer models to calculate the most probable ecosystem responses across the planet. This average temperature rise is of similar magnitude to the warming that occurred between the Last Glacial Maximum and the onset of the (milder) Holocene – with the big exception that the current warming is happening about 100 times faster – and for ecology that makes a huge difference, the authors stress.

Read more

Climate Progress

The Debunking Handbook Part 1: The First Myth About Debunking

By Climate Guest Blogger on Dec 26, 2011 at 12:00 pm

The Debunking Handbook is a guide to debunking myths, by John Cook and Stephan Lewandowsky. Although there is a great deal of psychological research on misinformation, unfortunately there is no summary of the literature that offers practical guidelines on the most effective ways of reducing the influence of misinformation. This Handbook boils down the research into a short, simple summary, intended as a guide for communicators in all areas (not just climate) who encounter misinformation

This is part one in a five-part series by John Cook originally published at Skeptical Science.

Introduction

Debunking myths is problematic. Unless great care is taken, any effort to debunk misinformation can inadvertently reinforce the very myths one seeks to correct. To avoid these “backfire effects”, an effective debunking requires three major elements. First, the refutation must focus on core facts rather than the myth to avoid the misinformation becoming more familiar. Second, any mention of a myth should be preceded by explicit warnings to notify the reader that the upcoming information is false. Finally, the refutation should include an alternative explanation that accounts for important qualities in the original misinformation.

Read more

Economy

Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder Forces Unemployed Workers Off Unemployment Insurance While Giving Corporations A Tax Cut

By Tanya Somanader on Dec 26, 2011 at 11:55 am

In the last few weeks of 2011, Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder (R) rounded out his concerted campaign against Michigan workers with a few final laws. In a prejudicial move against the LGBT community, Snyder signed a measure prohibiting all public employees from providing benefits for their unmarried partners. In considering his state’s 10.6 percent unemployment rate, Snyder also signed a law forcing some of Michigan’s over 400,000 unemployed workers to take low-wage jobs after 10 weeks of benefits, even if those jobs pay less than they were making before:

The measures require some unemployed workers to take new jobs after 10 weeks of benefits even if the available work is outside their previous experience or pays lower wages than they were making before. They also make it harder for someone to collect jobless benefits if they’re fired for cause or leave a job voluntarily.[...]

Snyder disagreed with critics who say requiring jobless workers to take a job paying 120 percent of their weekly benefit could trap them in a low-wage position by leaving them little time to look for work in their area of expertise.

“It’s to encourage people to work. It’s not to have them go backward,” Snyder said of the legislation. “It’s easiest to find a job when you’ve gotten a job.”

This new requirement comes in addition to Snyder’s decision to cut the availability of unemployment insurance from 26 weeks to 20 weeks starting in 2012. The measure also encapsulates Snyder’s priorities over his first year in office — placing the burden on the most vulnerable for the sake of the state’s bottom line. In 2011, he “shaved billions of dollars off future health care and retirement commitments,” proposed ending the state’s Earned Income Tax Credit, cut funding for school districts by eight to ten percent, cut aid for 11,000 low-income families and nearly 30,000 children, and enacted a regressive increase in personal taxes — all in the name of the deficit.

Naturally, not all Michiganders were asked to share in such sacrifices — namely, corporations. While more than 1.5 million of his constituents faced poverty, Snyder enacted a $1.7 billion tax cut for corporations, or about “$30 in corporate tax cuts for every dollar saved in welfare benefit cuts.” Indeed, Snyder pushed to cut the state’s business taxes by nearly $2 billion, or 86 percent.

In enacting such preferential treatment for those who need it least, Snyder did earn an impressive recognition in 2011. For his first year in office, Snyder ranked as one of the most unpopular governors in the country.

LGBT

Cardinal Faces Pushback For Comparing Gay Rights Movement To The KKK

By Jeff Spross on Dec 26, 2011 at 11:01 am

Change.org has released a petition calling for the resignation of Catholic Cardinal Francis George of Chicago, following comments the Cardinal made to FOX Chicago Sunday comparing the gay rights movement to the Klu Klux Klan’s anti-Catholicism. Equally Blessed, an umbrella group of pro-LGBT rights Catholic organizations, has reinforced the pushback by releasing a statement declaring in part that George, “has demeaned and demonized LGBT people in a manner unworthy of his office. In suggesting that the Catholic hierarchy has reason to fear LGBT people in the same way that blacks, Jews, Catholics and other minorities had reason to fear the murderous nightriders of the Ku Klux Klan, he has insulted the memory of the victims of the Klan’s violence and brutality.” The petition has already garnered well over half the 2,500 signatures the organization was aiming for.

Chicago’s upcoming gay pride parade had been rerouted past Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church, raising concerns it would logistically interfere with that Sunday’s services — sparking Cardinal George’s incendiary comments:

CARDINAL GEORGE: Well, I go with the pastor. I mean, he’s telling us that they won’t be able to have Church services on Sunday, if that’s the case. You don’t want the gay liberation movement to morph into something like the Ku Klux Klan, demonstrating in the streets against Catholicism. So, I think if that’s what’s happening, and I don’t know that it is, but I would respect the local pastor’s, you know, position on that. Then I think that’s a matter of concern for all of us.

Watch it:

Meanwhile, Chicago’s LGBT community could give Cardinal George a lesson in graciousness: They met with representatives from Our Lady of Mount Carmel last week, and have agreed to a noon start time for the parade to accommodate parishioners moving to and from Sunday services.

Update

Cardinal George has attempted to walk back his comments, claiming he was comparing the impact of the KKK and gay pride parades, not the people in the two different groups:

Obviously, it’s absurd to say the gay and lesbian community are the Ku Klux Klan, but if you organize a parade that looks like parades that we’ve had in our past because it stops us from worshipping God, well then that’s the comparison, but it’s not with people and people — it’s parade-parade.

NEWS FLASH

Police Block Protesters From Bringing Food To Zuccotti Park For Christmas Celebration | Occupy Wall Street protesters convened for a Christmas celebration at their old campsite in Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan yesterday, but when volunteers showed up with bags of cookies and food for a planned afternoon potluck, New York Police Dept. officers prevented them from entering the square, Manhattan news site DNAinfo.com reports. An NYPD spokesperson offered no comment on why the volunteers, who instead distributed the food along the sidewalk outside the park, were not allowed in. The protesters, meanwhile, celebrated the holiday by taking communion and singing Christmas carols. Here’s a picture of five-year-old Aidan Ortiz playing his plastic trumpet to celebrate the holidays in Zuccotti, courtesy of DNAinfo.com:

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