NEWS FLASH

Same-Sex Couples Pay Thousands Extra In Taxes | A new CNNMoney study found that married same-sex couples pay as much as $6,000 extra every year in taxes because the Defense of Marriage Act prevents the federal government from legally recognizing their unions. Because they cannot file jointly, they cannot combine their incomes and deductions or qualify for various tax breaks that are not available for single-filers. Same-sex couples also don’t qualify for marital exemptions for gift and inheritance taxes.

Yes, Conservatives Are Hipsters, Too

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Dec 27, 2011 at 2:53 pm

There’s something a bit odd about this GOOD piece about two Christian hipsters who make influential conspiracy-theory oriented viral videos promoting everything from birtherism to Uganda’s anti-gay laws, and have what sounds like a wildly inflammatory anti-abortion movie coming out in February that they’re hoping will catch on because it has a majority-black cast:

Jason “Molotov” Mitchell and his wife, Patricia “DJ Dolce” Mitchell, look like hipsters. She wears a stylish dress and nose stud, her dark hair angled sharply around her face. Jason, who goes by Molotov both socially and professionally, sports a landscaped beard and a tattoo on his forearm that reads “zealot.” They are in tip-top physical condition, they say, because they teach krav maga, an Israeli Defense Force-perfected form of martial arts.

They are charismatic and engaging…I struggle to reconcile this information with the pleasant people I just met…Despite the violent rhetoric, the Mitchells are the friendliest—and some of the savviest—people I have ever interviewed. Avid followers of popular culture, they are not Quiverfull-style Christians who isolate themselves from outside influences. They want to emulate the Biblical mandate to “be in the world but not of it.” So they laugh at The Daily Show and mention that they would enjoy hanging out with Jon Stewart, whom they consider a political foe. Molotov says he wants to emulate Jesus, who, he says, spoke harshly before crowds but showed compassion when people approached him one-on-one.

After all, Christian hipsters have been getting the anthropological treatment at least since Jeff Sharlet wrote about the “New Virgin Army” in Rolling Stone in 2005, the same year the New York Times profiled Jay Bakker. Earlier this year, the paper looked at a hipster-tinged Lower East Side evangelical church. In other words, it’s not really news that people who have tattoos, piercings, good haircuts and cool clothes believe that Christ is their savior and adopt hipster aesthetics to reach their target audiences. Thinking like this is one of the reasons I think progressives need not to get lazy about culture: it’s not enough to assume that our aesthetics and narrative power are just going to keep automatically bringing people over to support good policies and progressive worldviews.

And these things that we think are alluring and convincing, like humor, and storytelling, and multiethnic casting, and chunky glasses, and tattoos, or whatever? We are not alone, and we are not the only people who will figure out how to deploy them. It’s time to stop staring in wonder at the possibility that Cool Kids could think that Obama wasn’t born in the United States or that they’re not having sex until marriage and figure out how to make our own viral videos tighter, our own feature films more compelling to audiences who aren’t getting served by mainstream movies, and our novels more convincing.

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Justice

Half Of North Carolina Concealed Carry Permit Holders With Felony Convictions Keep Their Permit

By Ian Millhiser on Dec 27, 2011 at 12:00 pm

North Carolina is one of the few states in the country with public records of who has a permit to carry a concealed firearm, so it provides a rare window into how such permits are handled once their holder’s criminal record proves them unfit to carry a hidden gun. The results are not pretty:

More than 2,400 permit holders were convicted of felonies or misdemeanors, excluding traffic-related crimes, over the five-year period, The Times found when it compared databases of recent criminal court cases and licensees. While the figure represents a small percentage of those with permits, more than 200 were convicted of felonies, including at least 10 who committed murder or manslaughter. All but two of the killers used a gun. [...]

The review also raises concerns about how well government officials police the permit process. In about half of the felony convictions, the authorities failed to revoke or suspend the holder’s permit, including for cases of murder, rape and kidnapping. The apparent oversights are especially worrisome in North Carolina, one of about 20 states where anyone with a valid concealed handgun permit can buy firearms without the federally mandated criminal background check. (Under federal law, felons lose the right to own guns.)

Violent criminals who were allowed to keep their concealed carry permits include Ricky Wills, who “terroriz[ed] his estranged wife and their daughter with a pair of guns and then sho[t] at their house while they, along with a sheriff’s deputy who had responded to a 911 call, were inside,” and Charles Dowdle, who “was convicted of multiple felonies in 2006 for threatening to kill his girlfriend and chasing her to her sister’s house, where he fired a shotgun round through a closed door.” Indeed, violent individuals convicted of domestic violence-related crimes are the most likely to be allowed to keep their concealed carry permits. Nearly two-thirds of individuals convicted of “assault on a female” in the state of North Carolina did not have their concealed carry permits suspended.

The state’s failures to suspend these licenses appears to be a series of oversights, not a deliberate effort to place concealed firearms in the hands of violent criminals — indeed, Mr. Willis’ permit was revoked after New York Times reporters informed the state that he still had it. Nevertheless, these oversights could soon have consequences for the safety of Americans in all fifty states. The National Right To Carry Reciprocity Act, which recently passed the House of Representatives, would give holders of concealed carry permits from any one state the ability to carry a concealed weapon while than were visiting any other state — even if the state they were visiting banned concealed carry or would not allow them to obtain a carry permit.

In other words, should this bill become law, it would mean that a violent felon from North Carolina could keep his permit solely because of an oversight, and then travel to any state he chooses with a concealed gun tucked under his jacket.

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Climate Progress

Turbocharging Energy Efficiency 1: Utility Efficiency Program Budgets Double to $5.4 Billion

By Climate Guest Blogger on Dec 27, 2011 at 11:41 am

by Matthias Bell, RMI, and Dylan Sullivan of NRDC, cross-posted from the Rocky Mountain Institute

This is part one in a three part series published at RMI on turbocharging energy efficiency programs.

The utilities in Ohio will tell you that they’re nothing like the energy efficiency leaders in California, Oregon, Vermont, or Massachusetts. Their systems are different and so are the regulations they must follow. But none of that has prevented them from investing in energy efficiency with their customers.

In 2008, recognizing that energy efficiency is the cheapest way to meet energy needs, Ohio’s Legislature passed a law that requires electric utilities to help their customers save energy. Since then, American Electric Power, Duke Energy, and Dayton Power and Light have stepped up those efforts and saved almost twice the amount of energy required by law (.3% and .5% of load in 2009 and 2010, respectively). AEP went from saving almost no energy in 2005 to saving a cumulative 554,000 MWh from its 2009 and 2010 energy efficiency programs, enough energy to power 55,000 Ohio homes for one year.

Utilities in Ohio aren’t the only ones making these changes. They’re part of a national trend. From 2007 to 2010, electric utility efficiency program budgets have gone from $2.7 billion to $5.4 billion. In other words, utilities have doubled the amount they are spending on efficiency in just the past three years. These numbers will only continue to rise. By 2020, program budgets are expected to reach $10.9 billion.

Politics

FACT CHECK: Ron Paul Personally Defended Racist Newsletters

By Judd Legum on Dec 27, 2011 at 11:20 am

Recently, Ron Paul has been subject to intense criticism over controversial newsletters written under his name in the 80s and 90s that frequently included racism, bigotry, and conspiracy theories. Over the last few days, Paul has responded that he did not write the newsletters and disavowed their contents, claiming this has been his consistent position for 20 years. Here’s what Paul told CNN on December 21:

PAUL: I never read that stuff. I never — I would never — I came — I was probably aware of it 10 years after it was written… Well, you know, we talked about [the newsletters] twice yesterday at CNN. Why don’t you go back and look at what I said yesterday on CNN, and what I’ve said for 20-some years. It was 22 years ago. I didn’t write them. I disavow them and that’s it.

Paul’s denials, however, are not supported by the public record. When the newsletters first arose as an issue in 1996, Paul didn’t deny authorship. Instead, Paul personally repeated and defended some of the most incendiary racial claims in the newsletters.

In May 1996, Paul was confronted in an interview by the Dallas Morning News about a line that appeared in a 1992 newsletter, under the headline “Terrorist Update”: “If you have ever been robbed by a black teenaged male, you know how unbelievably fleet of foot they can be.” His response:

Dr. Paul denied suggestions that he was a racist and said he was not evoking stereotypes when he wrote the columns. He said they should be read and quoted in their entirety to avoid misrepresentation…

In the interview, he did not deny he made the statement about the swiftness of black men.

“If you try to catch someone that has stolen a purse from you, there is no chance to catch them,” Dr. Paul said.

Paul also defended his claim, made in the same 1992 newsletter that “we can safely assume that 95 percent of the black males in [Washington, DC] are semi-criminal or entirely criminal” Paul told the Dallas Morning News the statistic was an “assumption” you can gather from published studies.

Paul’s failure to deny authorship was not an oversight. He was repeatedly confronted about the newsletters during his 1996 campaign and consistently defended them as his own. A few examples:

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Alyssa

Is HBO’s ‘Game Change’ Telling the Wrong Story?

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Dec 27, 2011 at 11:07 am

There’s a lot of talk about the quality of Julianne Moore’s Sarah Palin impersonation in the trailer for Game Change, the adaptation of the juicy-if-thinly-sourced 2008 campaign chronicle (my take: she’s fine, if no Tina Fey). But I think the real question is whether HBO’S is telling the right story in focusing on Palin:

Ultimately, McCain’s selection of Palin only changed the game in that it made McCain look like a gambler. The selection didn’t actually chane the dynamic of the race, and Palin has essentially retreated into the small-town Alaska from whence she came in the years since. The selection of her didn’t even stem from particularly novel thinking, unless playing women and people of color off against each other counts. Not to go all Slim Charles on it, but the game was the same–it just got more fierce.

The story I’d really like to see out of that book, actually, is the one about John and Elizabeth Edwards, Rielle Hunter, and the fact that he went ahead with the 2008 campaign despite the mess in his personal life. Hubris and denial aren’t emotions that can be fit into rationality, which makes them particularly interesting. What happened behind the scenes in Palin’s brief, dizzying ascent has been done to death. The Edwards’ follies and tragedies are still somewhat inexplicable. And in a country where we’ve only ever had one divorced President, the idea that you could totally escape the expectations Americans have for the private lives of presidential candidates (Clinton, at least, only ever had Chelsea with Hillary) is a kind of magical thinking.

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NEWS FLASH

U.S. Receives Record Demand For Its Bonds Under Obama, Helping The Deficit | Bloomberg News reports that the U.S. government received record demand for its bonds in 2011, “pushing longer-maturity treasuries to their best performance since 1995 in a sign that President Obama may have little difficulty” financing the budget deficit. The European debt crisis is driving investors to buy U.S. assets, allowing the government to get an “all-time high bid-to-cover ratio of 9.07 for $30 billion of four-week bills it auctioned on Dec. 20 even though they pay zero interest.” Despite the GOP’s factually-challenged fear-mongering about the deficit, the high demand for U.S. bonds are “helping to contain borrowing costs and making it cheaper as a percentage of gross domestic product to finance deficits than when the nation last had budget surpluses.”

Climate Progress

Big Environmental NGOs: The End of Incrementalism in 2012?

By Climate Guest Blogger on Dec 27, 2011 at 10:00 am

by Toby Webb, cross-posted from the Smarter Business blog

US environmental NGOs, along with other, more globally minded ‘green’ and conservation-minded NGOs, have been poorly led in recent years.

They’ve blown a series of chances to help businesses change using a nuanced approach. Their approach been too cut and dried, too ‘with you not against you’ in ideology. It was never as simple as that.

That’s fairly clear to most people I know. I’m condensing quite a few other opinions here.

Now a new generation of green group leaders is emerging.

This new set of leaders may have learned from Greenpeace’s brilliant ‘stick and carrot’ approach that has proven so effective with business.

That’s if this New York Times article is correct:

“Roger Ballentine, a climate adviser to the Clinton White House who now advises businesses on green strategies, suggests that the movement has grown impatient with coaxing incremental change by engaging with policy makers and corporations.

The old way was the Sierra Club putting its seal on “green” Clorox products; the new way is suggested by a Greenpeace Internet campaign that wrung a promise from Facebook last week to use less coal for its data centers.

“The failure to address climate is catastrophic, and young people are justifiably outraged,” Mr. Ballentine said, pointing to the next generation in the movement. “What we have now is an antagonized grass roots calling for a radicalized approach.”

This could mean that in 2012 the big, well-funded US green NGOs may begin to copy Greenpeace’s tactics.
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Health

The GOP’s 10 Most Extreme Attacks On A Woman’s Right To Choose An Abortion

By Tanya Somanader on Dec 27, 2011 at 9:25 am

2011 marked a banner year in the Republican war on woman’s health. Close to 1,000 anti-abortion bills sped through state legislatures as the GOP-led House led a “comprehensive and radical assault” on a federal level. But in surveying their arsenal this year, 10 bills stood out as particularly perturbing and far-reaching efforts to stymie women’s access to abortion services, birth control, and vital health services like breast cancer screenings. Here are ThinkProgress’s nominations for the most extreme attacks on a woman’s right to choose:

– Redefining Rape: Last May, every House Republican and 16 anti-choice Democrats passed H.R. 3, the No Taxpayer Funding For Abortion Act. Anti-choice activists Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ) tried to narrow the definition of rape to “forcible rape,” which meant that women who say no but do not physically fight off the assault; women who are drugged or verbally threatened and raped; and minors impregnated by adults would not qualify for the rape and incest exception in the Hyde Amendment. Smith promised to remove the language but used “a sly legislative maneuver” that essentially informs the courts that statutory rape cases will not be covered by Medicaid should the law pass and be challenged in court.

– Abortion Audits: The No Taxpayer Funding For Abortion Act also bans using tax credits or deductions to pay for abortions or insurance. Thus, a woman who used such a benefit would have to prove, if audited, that her abortion “fell under the rape/incest/life-of-the-mother exception, or that the health insurance she had purchased did not cover abortions.” This requirement turns the Internal Revenue Service into “abortion cops” who, agents noted, would have to force women to give “contemporaneous written documentation” that it was “incest, or rape, or [her] life was in danger” which made an abortion necessary.

– Let Women Die: This October, House Republicans also passed the “Protect Life Act”, known by women’s health advocates as the “Let Women Die” bill. The measure allows hospitals that receive federal funds to reject any woman in need of an abortion procedure, even if it is necessary to save her life. Though federal law already prohibits federal funding of abortions, the GOP insisted that the health care law “contains a loophole that allows those receiving federal subsidies to use the money to enroll in health care plans that allow abortion services.”

– Personhood: Mississippi entertained the idea of passing a “personhood” amendment to its constitution this year, one that defines a person as “every human being from the moment of fertilization, cloning, or the functional equivalent thereof.” The measure’s “profoundly ambiguous” language regarding the definition of fertilization not only would ban all abortions, it could potentially outlaw birth control, stem cell research, and in vitro fertilization for couples struggling to conceive. Mississippians rejected the amendment but personhood activists are making headway with versions for other states and GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich is championing a national personhood amendment.

– Race/Sex Abortions: Taking their queue from Arizona, House Republicans introduced the Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act (PRENDA) — a so-called “civil rights” bill that bans physicians from performing abortions based on the fetus’s race or sex. The problem of selective abortion is virtually non-existent, as not one state official or independent research offered any evidence of race-based abortions. Only 5 percent of abortions occur after the point when a fetus’s sex can be determined. Arizona’s measure, now law, sends doctors and clinicians to jail for three years if they knowingly provide such abortions. The federal bill PRENDA allows for civil suits against the physicians.

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Justice

GOP-Appointed California Chief Justice Says Death Penalty Is ‘Not Effective’

By Ian Millhiser on Dec 27, 2011 at 9:20 am

Shortly before leaving her chambers for the holidays, California Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye, a former prosecutor who was appointed to her state’s highest court by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R-CA), became the latest high-ranking official to question whether her state should continue to impose a death penalty:

“I don’t think it is working,” said Cantil-Sakauye, elevated from the Court of Appeal in Sacramento to the California Supreme Court by former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. “It’s not effective. We know that.”

California’s death penalty requires “structural change, and we don’t have the money to create the kind of change that is needed,” she said. “Everyone is laboring under a staggering load.” . . .

“I don’t know if the question is whether you believe in it anymore. I think the greater question is its effectiveness and given the choices we face in California, should we have a merit-based discussion on its effectiveness and costs?”

Chief Justice Cantil-Sakauye’s comments are just the latest sign that our national consensus is moving away from state-sponsored executions. Although most Americans continue to support the practice, a recent poll found support for the death penalty at a 39 year low and the number of death sentences declined below 100 this year for the first time in over three decades. Illinois recently abolished its death penalty and Oregon Gov. John Kitzhaber (D) declared a moratorium on executions while he is in office.

Californians will soon have the opportunity to follow Illinois’ lead. Petition signatures are currently being collected for a ballot initiative which will abolish the death penalty in that state as well.

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