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Alyssa

Oliver Stone Tells Gavin Newsom Of New Drug War Movie ‘Savages’: “We’re A War Country. It Hasn’t Worked.”

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Jun 7, 2012 at 10:33 pm

It looks like Gavin Newsom’s Current TV interview with director Oliver Stone at 11 PM tomorrow about Stone’s new movie Savages is going to be a doozy. Stone, explaining both the movie’s plot and his opposition to the drug war starts out with the genesis of the film: “We have the best weed inthe world—I’m telling you that from my own experience for 40 years,” he tells California’s Lt. Governor. “We started on Vietnamese weed, Thai weed, Jamaican weed, Sudanese weed and it was all great stuff. But now, actually, because Americans are so technically-minded and mad chemists—they have really taken the Afghan seeds from the Afghan war—that’s the hypothesis of our movie—and brought them to California, rededicated themselves and made the finest seeds in the world, the finest grass you could smoke.” Current gave me an exclusive first look at the interview:

It is, of course, an illustration of the disparities of the drug war that a prominent white director can talk so extensively about his drug use without fear of prosecution. But I’m more intrigued by Savages, which apparently is about border violence and the rise of drug cartels as well as Blake Lively living in a threesome with two drug-dealing brothers, than I was before I saw this interview. The more the drug war and the militarized culture it enables loses cultural credibility, the happier I am.

Climate Progress

Winning On Climate: Framing The Debate Means Being Both For And Against Things

By Stephen Lacey on Jun 7, 2012 at 6:33 pm

There’s an age-old debate playing out among climate hawks today: Do you win environmental battles by fighting against something or fighting for something?

Grist’s David Roberts had a thought-provoking piece on the issue yesterday, lamenting the oppositional tactics of enviros:

And as a substantive matter, oppositionalism is a woefully insufficient approach to climate change mitigation and/or adaptation. Most of what’s needed to respond to climate change involves building sh*t — new power systems, new transportation systems, new sustainable communities, new models of finance and ownership. If it ever happens, it will be a “third industrial revolution.” You don’t get one of those by stopping things.

Roberts raises some good points. And as someone who’s tried to fall on the side of positive messaging when writing about these issues, I agree with the basic premise.

But there’s a major issue that he leaves out: Enviros and other supporters of action already tried the strategy of “let’s build shit” to solve climate change – and it hasn’t worked out terribly well politically in the U.S. (see “Can you solve global warming without talking about global warming?“)

Admittedly, that is likely a result of failed tactics, not the strategy itself.

In the few years leading up to the climate bill in Congress, the environmental community switched gears, linking up with business to tell a positive story about the economic potential for clean energy and combating climate change.

However, as Congress developed a climate bill in 2008 and 2009, there was remarkably little mention about climate – with advocates instead choosing to talk exclusively about green jobs and economic competitiveness. That worked. Until it didn’t.

Three years after the climate bill imploded, we are further away from taking action on climate change than ever. One of the reasons is that fossil fuel proponents have shifted the narrative on jobs and competitiveness due to the boom in unconventional oil and gas.

You want to build shit? Why not build a bunch of shale oil rigs, fracking wells, and tar sands pipelines?

Read more

NEWS FLASH

Study Finds That Major American Financial Firms Would Need $500 Billion To Weather Another Economic Crisis | According to a study by Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Engle, America’s biggest financial institutions would need more than $500 billion in fresh capital to survive another economic downturn. That’s nearly equal to the amount the six firms — JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and the insurance giant AIG — needed to weather the 2008 financial crisis. As Marketplace’s Heidi Moore put it, “What that tells us is very sobering. Systemic risk is alive and kicking.”

Alyssa

With ‘The Following’ and ‘Hannibal,’ Is Network TV About to Get More Violent?

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Jun 7, 2012 at 5:07 pm

I’m very fond of Mads Mikkelsen, the Danish actor who set a new standard for Bond villains in Casino Royale. So I was initially pleased to hear that he’d been cast as Hannibal Lecter in NBC’s drama adaptation of the classic serial killer story, a procedural that will follow Hannibal as he develops a productive working relationship with an FBI agent. But after watching The Following, I have some mixed feelings. I’m not normally a prude, but I wonder if this fall will be the season when network television steps over my personal line and starts depicting violence I find uncomfortable to the point of unwatchability.

It’s not as if network television isn’t quite violent, often in a way that’s desensitizing. Law & Order: Criminal Intent has always reveled in retelling baroque and frightening murders, while Special Victims Unit‘s churning out episode after episode of sex crimes. I love Bones, Fox’s procedural about forensic anthropologists, but the show tackles cases where things happen to people that are so dreadful that they turn from people into abstractions—they’re barely bodies anymore, but cuts of meat.

Even those shows, though, generally shy away from showing the commission of the gruesome violence they explore. If Bones is chasing a serial killer who dissects human bodies, we see the clean bones he leaves behind, not the dissecting process. The Law & Order franchise will show the moments leading up to a crime, but shies away from the actual commission, returning to the discovery of a body by civilians or its initial examinations by detectives. These shows may not always successfully grapple with victims as human, but they don’t aestheticize the acts that rob the humanity from our bodies.

Obviously the pilot may change before it gets on the air, but I found The Following, Fox’s midseason drama about an FBI agent and a serial killer, starring Kevin Bacon, jarring in its depiction of disturbing violence committed by individuals against individuals not as part of a conflict up close, and I say this as someone who watches Game of Thrones. But where in that show, violence is an organic part of the plot, in The Following, violence is the point and the plot.

And for the show to work, we need to at least respect the cleverness of the serial killer. In Hannibal, the serial killer in question will be half of a crime-solving partnership. Maybe this is the logical extension of our decade in the company of anti-heroes. But I’m not sure it’s a place I’m interested in going.

Politics

PROTECT THE VOTE: Help ThinkProgress Expand Our Coverage Of Voter Suppression

By ThinkProgress on Jun 7, 2012 at 5:02 pm

It doesn’t take a Ph.D. to figure out that Florida could be deciding factor in this November’s election.

That’s why it caught ThinkProgress’ attention when Florida Governor Rick Scott, a close ally of Mitt Romney, started a massive purge of registered voters from the rolls a few weeks ago.

Although the national media virtually ignored it, ThinkProgress broke the story that hundreds of fully eligible U.S. citizens — mostly Democrats and Latinos — were being improperly targeted. We even identified two 91-year-old WWII vets who were about to have their voting rights stripped.

And it’s not just happening in Florida. Voting rights are also under attack in critical swing states like Ohio, Colorado, and Virginia — and ThinkProgress needs to raise $30,000 by Monday to expand our coverage in those places.

Please chip in $5 — or whatever you can — right now so we can get to work before it’s too late. The outcome of November’s election could very well hang in the balance.

After ThinkProgress took the lead in Florida, the national media started paying attention. Our reporting was cited extensively on cable news networks like MSNBC and precipitated a powerful editorial in The New York Times.

Late last week, following extensive reporting by ThinkProgress, the Justice Department sent Rick Scott a letter declaring the purge illegal and demanding he put a stop to it. Scott announced yesterday that he would defy the Justice Department but the 67 county election officials, who are the only ones who can ultimately remove a voter from the rolls, are now refusing to play along.

We are making a difference, but we can’t stop with Florida. This election, and our democracy, are just too important. ThinkProgress needs researchers and reporters on the ground right now to continue reporting these stories.

Chip in $5 right now so ThinkProgress can investigate and expose voter suppression across the country.

Health

Los Angeles High School Partners With Planned Parenthood To Offer Access To Contraception

By Amanda Peterson Beadle on Jun 7, 2012 at 5:00 pm

California’s teen birth rate has been dropping for several years, decreasing from 37 per 1,000 in 2005 to 29 in 1,000 in 2010. But it remains disproportionately high in some areas, like the heavily Latino and low-income area around Roosevelt High School in Los Angeles.

To help students prevent pregnancy, Roosevelt High School partnered with Planned Parenthood to offer contraception and counseling at an on-campus health clinic separate from the school nurse’s office. The program began in 1997 as a collaboration with a local hospital, but it ended in 2006 — and after the clinic’s nurse saw 32 positive pregnancy tests between March 1 and June 1 of 2008, she reached out to Planned Parenthood.

Now, the women’s health organization provides a nurse assistant, free contraception, and pregnancy and STD testing to students. A California program that provides family planning to low-income and uninsured residents pays for the services, and students do not have to have their parents’ permission to visit the health clinic. But officials say they do not face strong opposition from parents:

Nurse practitioner Sherry Medrano, who runs the Roosevelt health clinic, said teenagers rarely go outside their comfort zone for family planning. By law, students can go to Medrano and her staff without the permission of their parents. “They feel much safer and much more comfortable coming to a school-based health clinic,” she said. [...]

Planned Parenthood’s Los Angeles executive director, Sue Dunlap, said Latino families generally want access to information and care. “We really don’t experience the traditional narrative of angry parents not wanting access to reproductive care in the schools,” she said. “It’s really the opposite.”

The teen pregnancy rate has dropped to the lowest level in 40 years, which researchers contribute to better contraception use by teenagers. Giving students the information they need as well as increased access to contraception, as Roosevelt High School has done, will help them to prevent unintended pregnancies and actively protect their own health.

LGBT

EXCLUSIVE: Zach Wahls On The Boy Scouts’ Decision To Reconsider Anti-Gay Discrimination Policy

By Zack Ford and Josh Israel on Jun 7, 2012 at 4:57 pm

Today, ThinkProgress caught up with Zach Wahls, who has been advocating for the Boy Scouts of America to change their policy discriminating against LGBT scouts and scout leaders. Last week, he delivered over 275,000 petition signatures from individuals opposed to the policy, a response to the ousting of Ohio mom Jen Tyrrell as a den leader because she is a lesbian. BSA announced today that it will reconsider allowing gay scouts and scouters next year, and Wahls is hopeful that the prospect of change is legitimate, not just a public relations ploy:

WAHLS: It’s not a smokescreen. This proposal was made after Jen Tyrrell’s pettion on Change.org. So even though this has been brought up in the past, it’s never gotten nearly the level of attention that it has today. And as another departure from the past, there’s never been a group — which I actually launched in coordination with a number of other Eagle Scouts today called Scouts For Equality — and we’re going to be working with a number of different groups to really build a community of scouts — Eagle scouts, former scout leaders, that sort of thing — we’re really going to work toward making this policy change.

Watch the full exclusive interview:

NEWS FLASH

U.N. Team Blocked From Visiting New Alleged Massacre Site In Syria | Syrian activists said government forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad killed dozens of people, including women and children, near Hama this week. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the attack as “simply unconscionable.” Today the United Nations said a team of observers was blocked from reaching the site of the alleged massacre and was even shot at. Maj. Gen. Robert Mood of Norway, head of the U.N. observer mission in Syria, said his team “is concerned about the restriction imposed on its movement as it will impede our ability to monitor, observe and report.” The latest violence “comes on the heels of a horrific massacre in late May in Houla, a cluster of villages in the central Homs province, which left over 100 dead including many children and women gunned down in their homes.”

Climate Progress

Darrell Issa Again Shows Deep Disdain For Green Jobs, Even With 338,000 Of Them In His State

By Climate Guest Blogger on Jun 7, 2012 at 4:44 pm

Darrell Issa really, really dislikes green jobs.

by Adam James

Republican Congressman Darrell Issa is continuing his witch hunt against American jobs. Why? Because they are classified as green.

It may seem like an odd tactic for a politician to go after these kinds of jobs and isolate so much of his own constituency, since 338,000 of the green jobs he is belittling — representing 2.3 percent of total employment in 2010 — came from his home state.

But we’ll have to leave that to California voters.

At yesterday’s Oversight Committee hearing on Department of Labor reporting of green jobs, Rep. Issa pinpointed a few positions and asked if they were considered green. In particular, Issa was very troubled that retail workers in secondhand stores were counted as green because of their role in recycling/conservation.

His rhetorical point is to illustrate that green jobs numbers are inflated. So let’s finish the math for Rep. Issa.

Based on analysis from the Brookings Institution, of the 2.7 million clean energy jobs in the U.S., 25.7 percent are in manufacturing (687,000 jobs), 21.5 percent are in public administration (575,000 jobs), and 12.7 are in transportation and warehousing (341,000 jobs). 10.4 percent are professional, scientific, and technical services (279,000 jobs) and 11.2 percent are waste management (299,000 jobs).

How many are retail? 0.6 percent. Here’s a graph to illustrate that breakdown:

Interestingly, at least 42 percent of oil and gas jobs are in gas stations, offering a median hourly wage of $8.68. Green jobs have a median salary of $46,343 – roughly $7,700 more than median wages across the broader economy. They are widely distributed, creating more jobs for every million invested in every employment category of low, mid, and high credentialed jobs.

Read more

Alyssa

#NN12: Amanda Marcotte and Me on Liberals and Culture, ‘Mad Men,’ and ‘Game of Thrones’

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Jun 7, 2012 at 4:06 pm

If you’re not at Netroots, never fear! My ThinkProgress colleagues and I are leading a series of conversations with the conference’s speakers and elected officials, which we kicked off with Amanda Marcotte this afternoon. The two of us discussed why liberals are dismissive of mainstream culture, whether Peggy Olson is actually one of Mad Men‘s main characters, and the awesome women of Game of Thrones:

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