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NEWS FLASH

Alabama Gov. Bentley Caves, Signs Bill Doubling Down On Anti-Immigrant Policies | On Wednesday, the Alabama legislature passed a bill preserving most of the harshest provisions of that state’s anti-immigrant law, including the provision that unconstitutionally drove many Latino students from attending schools. Yesterday, Gov. Robert Bentley (R-AL) objected to this bill, noting in particular that the schools provision should be removed or substantially changed. Today, he caved, signing the bill into law.

Economy

Billion Dollar ‘The Avengers’ Received Millions In Subsidies From New Mexico

By Pat Garofalo on May 18, 2012 at 5:50 pm

The box office smash The Avengers has officially made more than $1 billion worldwide, after setting the record for largest opening in film history. This revenue dwarfs the film’s $220 million budget, and makes one wonder why the state of New Mexico felt the need to subsidize the movie to the tune of $22 million:

Marvel’s The Avengers has already raked in $1 billion worldwide, but News 13 has learned the state shelled out some serious cash to shoot the movie in New Mexico.

According to the Taxation and Revenue Department, the state paid $22,413,469 in credits to Marvel Worldwide, Inc., the company that produced The Avengers.

“This was spent on a movie production project that is now gone. It was here temporarily,” said New Mexico state Rep. Dennis Kintigh (R). “We could have spent that $22 million on all kinds of things like education for our children, we could have spent it on roads.”

New Mexico is far from the only state that provides film and television subsidies, but as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found, they are wasteful and ineffective, subsidizing activity that would have happened anyway:

State film subsidies are a wasteful, ineffective, and unfair instrument of economic development. While they appear to be a “quick fix” that provides jobs and business to state residents with only a short lag, in reality they benefit mostly non-residents, especially well-paid non-resident film and TV professionals. Some residents benefit from these subsidies, but most end up paying for them in the form of fewer services — such as education, healthcare, and police and fire protection — or higher taxes elsewhere. The benefits to the few are highly visible; the costs to the majority are hidden because they are spread so widely and detached from the subsidies.

43 states currently subsidize film and television production, to the tune of $1.5 billion in fiscal year 2010. Meanwhile, “the revenue generated by economic activity induced by film subsidies falls far short of the subsidies’ direct costs to the state.”

NEWS FLASH

Teacher Who Wrote Anti-Gay Comments On Facebook Considers Retiring To Avoid Penalties | New Jersey special education teacher Viki Knox should have been in tenure proceedings this week over comments she put on her Facebook profile that said homosexuality is a “perverted sin” that “breeds like cancer.” Instead, the Newark Star-Ledger reports, “Knox filed a motion earlier this month asking that it be delayed while she seeks a disability pension due to both a back injury and ‘psychological grounds.’” In court documents, Knox has indicated that, “If I can retire then there is no need for me to go through this unpleasant experience.” Essentially, Knox is trying to avoid her tenure trial by simply dropping off the map. A a spokesman for the NJ Treasury Department has said the trial will go on anyway, but there is no indication of when it will now begin.

Health

Oklahoma Students Shown A Movie Comparing Abortion To The Holocaust

By Amanda Peterson Beadle on May 18, 2012 at 5:10 pm

Scene from the movie, "180"

Students at a public Oklahoma high school were given copies of a movie that compares abortion to the Holocaust after a local family asked the principal if they could distribute the DVDs to students, according to a local TV station. The movie begins with images of Hitler and concentration camps before making a comparison between the Holocaust and abortion.

The principal agreed to hand out the anti-abortion film, titled 180, if students obtained parental consent first, but the copies were handed out before parents were notified. One parent told Fox 23 heard about it from her stepdaughter:

“She said that she had seen a DVD in school that basically said that if you have an abortion then you are no better than the Nazis and you will go to hell,” says concerned parent, Marty Angus.

Angus was furious after his stepdaughter came home and told him she had seen it in class.

“She said well, we went to our lockers on break and there was a note that said come pick up your free DVD,” says Angus.

Officials confiscated the movies after realizing how graphic the movie was, but two classrooms saw it first. “I thought it was graphic and a clear violation between church and state and it was just awful to be shown to a high school student,” Marty Angus, whose stepdaughter saw the movie in class, told Fox 23.

The Christian ministry Living Waters produced the movie. When it was released in 2011, the Anti-Defamation League called the fillm “one of the most offensive and outrageous abuses of the memory of the Holocaust we have seen in years.”

Justice

Reid Fires Back In Senate GOP’s War On Smart Judges Monday

By Ian Millhiser on May 18, 2012 at 5:00 pm

Ninth Circuit Nominee Paul Watford

In 2020, someone will be elected president, and they will likely need to appoint a Supreme Court justice during their time in the White House. Senate Republicans have wielded every power at their disposal, however, to ensure that that this future president will have no experienced federal judges to nominate if they are a Democrat. When President Obama nominated Goodwin Liu, a young, brilliant legal scholar and former Supreme Court law clerk to a seat on the Ninth Circuit, the Republican caucus filibustered Liu until he was forced to withdraw his nomination (Liu is now a justice on the California Supreme Court). When Obama nominated Caitlin Halligan, another relatively young, brilliant attorney and former Supreme Court law clerk, she suffered a similar fate.

The cases against these two nominees were flimsy at best, even from a conservative perspective. Liu’s enjoyed the support of conservative icons like Clinton-inquistor Ken Starr and torture advocate John Yoo. Senators opposing his nomination offered little more than misrepresentation of his scholarship or hyperbolic claims that he wanted to turn America into “communist-run China.” The case against Halligan was even weaker, and largely boiled down to the fact that she once represented a client — the State of New York — that disagreed with the NRA.

On Monday, the Senate will try to break yet another filibuster — this time on Ninth Circuit nominee Paul Watford. And, once again, it’s tough to imagine a good reason to support this filibuster. Watford is a leading young attorney and a former Supreme Court clerk. He has a small army of conservative supporters, including nearly every single person who clerked for a Supreme Court justice at the time Watford worked on the Court. And his opponents have barely even managed to articulate a reason to oppose him. The best they’ve come up with is that, in a legal career that stretches twenty years, he represented two clients that Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) doesn’t like.

Unfortunately for Watford, however, he is guilty of being the kind of exceptionally talented attorney who could be on the Supreme Court some day. If past is prologue, that will be reason enough for conservatives to filibuster him.

Security

Pew Poll Promotes False Tradeoff Between Military Action And Permitting Iran To Acquire A Nuclear Weapon

By Eli Clifton on May 18, 2012 at 4:57 pm

A new poll conducted by the Pew Global Attitudes Project finds that 63 percent of respondents in the U.S. “would turn to military force to prevent Iran from going nuclear.” But the pollsters questions contain unproven assumptions about the effectiveness of military strikes and suggest that failure to act militarily may hasten an Iranian nuclear weapon.

Respondents were asked to choose [PDF, page 27] between “preventing Iran from developing nuclear weapons, even if it means taking military action,” or “avoiding a military conflict with Iran, even if means Iran may develop nuclear weapons.” Built into these questions is the assumption that military action can prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons or, conversely, that the lack of military action may ensure an Iranian nuclear weapon. Policy experts in Israel and the U.S. have consistently challenged this understanding of the Iranian nuclear showdown.

Last month, former Israeli internal security chief Yuval Diskin warned that :

[Israel's leadership] presents a false view to the public on the Iranian bomb, as though acting against Iran would prevent a nuclear bomb. But attacking Iran will encourage them to develop a bomb all the faster.

Indeed, the pollsters at Pew could take some lessons from Diskin about avoiding false trade-offs between bombing Iran and preventing an Iranian nuclear weapon. They could also have listened to Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Dan Meridor who observed that “an attack on Iran wouldn’t add anything to our security.” Or they could have watched former Israeli spy chief Meir Dagan’s warnings on 60 Minutes that an attack on Iran would “ignite regional war” and “there’s no military attack that can halt the Iranian nuclear project. It could only delay it.”

In the U.S., Secretary of State Hillary Clinton emphasized that “giving diplomacy a chance” is the best “way forward,” and former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. (appointed by George H.W. Bush) Thomas Pickering warned that “[A military strike] has a very high propensity, in my view, of driving Iran in the direction of openly declaring and deciding [...] to make a nuclear weapon.”

Finally, and from perhaps the least political source, the Congressional Research Service (CRS) found that “an attack could have considerable regional and global security, political, and economic repercussions” but “it is unclear what the ultimate effect of a strike would be on the likelihood of Iran acquiring nuclear weapons.”

This uncertainty was nowhere to be found in Pew’s questions which posed a clear tradeoff between taking military action to destroy Iran’s nuclear program and “avoiding a military conflict” at the expense of Iran acquiring a nuclear weapon. This tradeoff presented to poll respondents fails to take into account the overwhelming evidence that no such trade-off exists. President Obama has committed to “preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon” and said it was “unacceptable for Iran to have a nuclear weapon.” But the willingness of politicians and pollsters to portray a tradeoff between military action and Iran’s acquisition of a nuclear weapon promotes an inaccurate set of policy choices which, ultimately, may undermine efforts to resolve the Iranian nuclear crisis.

LGBT

Mississippi State Rep Condemns Gays To Death, Claims They Spread Disease

By Zack Ford on May 18, 2012 at 4:47 pm

Mississippi state Rep. Andy Gipson (R) has attacked gays on his Facebook wall, calling homosexuality a sin and citing Leviticus 20:13, which calls for people who are gay to be put to death. In a follow-up post, he defended his remarks, adding claims that homosexuality is “unnatural behavior which results in disease,” harms children, and undermines marriage:

Been a lot of press on Obama’s opinion on “homosexual marriage.” The only opinion that counts is God’s: see Romans 1:26-28 and Leviticus 20:13. Anyway you slice it, it is sin. Not to mention horrific social policy.

Sorry I’ve been busy and not had a chance to reply. David, in addition to the basic principal that it is morally wrong, here are three social reasons it’s horrific social policy: 1) Unnatural behavior which results in disease, not the least of which is its high association with the development and spread of HIV/AIDS; 2) Confusing behavior which is harmful to children who have a deep need to understand the proper role of men and women in society and the important differences between men and women, and fathers and mothers; and 3) Undermines the longstanding definition of marriage as between one man and one woman, a definition which has been key to all aspects of social order and prosperity. Anytime that definition is weakened our culture is also weakened. And yes, that is also true for other conduct which weakens marriage’s importance in society.

Gipson’s comments seem to suggest that he believes disease is actually the by-product of gay sex, as if even two monogamous gay men without STDs who have sex will still end up with an ailment or HIV. Not only are these remarks wholly offensive and ill-informed, but they contribute to the harmful stigma against gay men and lesbians and their families.

NEWS FLASH

Facebook Will Avoid Paying $16 Billion In Taxes After Going Public | As ThinkProgress has noted, Facebook’s initial public offering will help both CEO Mark Zuckerberg and the company itself avoid billions of dollars in taxes. With Facebook’s offering now in the books, as Bloomberg’s Paula Dwyer wrote, the company is set to officially save $16 billion in taxes by deducting the cost of stock options granted to owners and employees. “The tax windfall will be the largest ever claimed by a company for stock option awards,” Dwyer wrote. “Facebook is an American success story. Its ability to use a stock option loophole to zero out its U.S. tax bill, despite ample profits, makes no sense. It also isn’t fair to the rest of American taxpayers who will have to pay more because Facebook pays nothing,” said Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI).

NEWS FLASH

Pepperdine University Recognizes LGBT Legal Society | The Pepperdine University School of Law has officially recognized the LGBT Legal Society, according to Thomas J. Stipanowich, the Academic Director of the school’s Straus Institute for Dispute Resolution. Pepperdine, which is affiliated with the Churches of Christ, had previously refused to recognize a campus LGBT support group, Reach OUT, citing the school handbook’s prohibition on “conduct or lifestyles inconsistent with biblical teaching.” A petition asking the school to reconsider received 4,000 signatures by last January, but Pepperdine has not recognized that group. Stipanowich confirmed that the legal society would begin operation when classes resumed in August.

-Zachary Bernstein

By Guest Blogger on May 18, 2012 at 4:05 pm

Health

Massachusetts Senate Passes Bill To Reduce Health Spending By $150 Billion

By Guest Blogger on May 18, 2012 at 3:43 pm

One major goal of the Affordable Care Act is to slow the growth in health care spending without compromising on the quality of care. So far, it seems to have done that, bringing projected Medicare costs down by nearly $70 billion, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Now, spurred on by Gov. Deval Patrick (D-MA), the state that created the blueprint for Obamacare is following its lead.

Last night, the Massachusetts Senate passed a bill projected to trim $150 billion off state medical costs over 15 years. As the Boston Herald reported, health care spending currently consumes about 40 percent of the state budget and is expected to double by 2020. This legislation, passed by an overwhelming 35-2 vote, aims to reduce that burden by changing the way medical professionals care for patients and taking steps to keep Massachusetts residents healthier:

The bill, which was debated over two days in the Senate and required the consideration of 265 amendments, would seek to limit health care cost growth to a level at or slightly above overall state economic growth.

It aims to achieve that goal by encouraging hospitals and doctors to adopt new care delivery and payment models focused on patient outcomes rather than quantity of care provided, and would transition state-funded health care programs away from fee-for-service to alternative payment systems by 2014.

The Senate has also proposed to invest $100 million over the next five years in a transition to electronic medical records, and another $100 million in wellness and prevention programs paid for with an assessment on insurers.

Celebrating the vote, Senate President Therese Murray said Massachusetts “[o]nce again” leads the U.S. on health care. Moving medical records to an electronic format is expected to reduce administrative expenses, while prevention initiatives could cut health care costs by potentially billions of dollars, reducing the burden on taxpayers without negatively impacting care. A study released last year, meanwhile, found that doctors will improve the quality of care if their performance is tracked.

Leaders in the Massachusetts House have their own version of this bill that differs from the Senate version, including a luxury tax on some high-cost hospitals featured in the House version, which Murray said she would not support. An architect of the bill, Sen. Richard Moore (D), said he hoped “the bulk” of the bill would ultimately become law.

-Zachary Bernstein

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