ThinkProgress Logo

NEWS FLASH

Senate Republicans Filibuster DISCLOSE Act | Two years after filibustering the DISCLOSE Act of 2010 to death and blocking any disclosure for who is funding the the independent expenditures enabled by the Supreme Court’s 5-4 Citizens United ruling, Republicans have again blocked transparency. While the 2010 version included other campaign finance reforms, the DISCLOSE Act of 2012 was pared down to only require disclosure of the funders of $10,000-and-larger independent political expenditures. But Republicans, led by former disclosure advocate Sen. Mitch McConnell (KY) still blocked the measure, incredibly calling it “nothing less than an effort by the government itself to expose its critics to harassment and intimidation.” The Senate vote failed on a party-lines 51-44, falling 9 votes short of the needed 60, though Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) voted “no” for procedural reasons.

NEWS FLASH

New Yorkers Cut Trans Fat Consumption Under Fast Food Regulations | A new report confirms that New York City’s ban on trans fat in restaurant food did help decrease city residents’ consumption of the artery-clogging substance, as opposed to concerns that consumers would simply replace trans fat with a different kind of fatty substance. New York City’s artificial trans fat restriction was the first of its kind, forcing restaurants to alter recipes so that their food contained no more than 0.5 grams of trans fat per serving. The New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene surveyed customers about their lunchtime purchases at fast-food chains around the city in 2007 and 2009 — before and after the ban was in place — and found that the amount of trans fat in each lunch sold dropped an average of 2.4 grams after the ban went into effect. Hamburger chains saw the biggest drop in trans fat. New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg (I) also passed an unprecedented ban on large soda sizes earlier this year.

Media

VICTORY: Olympic Weightlifter Sarah Robles Gets A Sponsor

By Aviva Shen on Jul 16, 2012 at 6:19 pm

On July 9, ThinkProgress launched a petition to get Olympic-bound weightlifter Sarah Robles a sponsorship. One week later, Solve Media, an Internet advertising company, has risen to the challenge, announcing their new partnership with Robles today.

Solve Media CEO Ari Jacoby was inspired by the ThinkProgress campaign to sponsor the 23-year-old weightlifter.

“It wasn’t the first time I had heard of her, but for me it was the first time I understood her sacrifice and what she was doing to achieve her dreams,” Jacoby said in a phone interview. “It really hit home for me. The article caused me to reach out to her.”

Robles, the highest ranked weightlifter in the U.S., has been living on just $400 a month from U.S.A. Weightlifting. Her sport has never attracted many commercial sponsorships; as Robles astutely pointed out, “You can get that sponsorship if you’re a super-built guy or a girl who looks good in a bikini. But not if you’re a girl who’s built like a guy.”

Robles’ dedication to her sport at whatever cost deeply impressed Jacoby. “It pained me to see someone at the top of her game working for what amounts to a few hundred dollars a month,” he said. “She’s the very best of the best, poised to end a 12-year medal drought in her sport. And she’s living this way because it’s her ultimate dream to represent her country and achieve greatness in the sport that she loves.”

Solve Media also decided to sponsor archer Brady Ellison after speaking with Robles. They will do videos, in person meet and greets, and other multimedia projects once they return from London. Robles, already a prolific blogger, will be getting a new Solve Media-designed blog.

Jacoby emphasized that he feels a responsibility to set an example for other companies:

It’s our responsibility in the advertising tech community to get the word out that we can all do well in business by doing the right thing. Solve works with hundreds of companies in the Fortune 1000, and we want to be able to do things for others. This is certainly not charity of any sort. It’s the kind of partnership that we think makes a difference.

Robles leaves for the London Games on Wednesday.

Climate Progress

Glacial Change Ain’t What It Used To Be: Petermann Calves Another Huge Chunk of Greenland Ice

By Climate Guest Blogger on Jul 16, 2012 at 6:14 pm

Petermann Glacier has calved another gigantic ice island, larger than twice the size of Manhattan, not quite as large as the calving of two years ago. A study this month found that the melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet is nearing a critical “tipping point.”

by Neven, via the Arctic Sea Ice Blog

This second big calving (spotted this time by Arcticicelost80) is another spectacular event on Greenland, after retreats of the Jakobshavn Glacier and lowest reflectivity of the Greenland ice sheet on record (see blog post), leading to unprecedented flooding in the southwest of Greenland.

From the Icy Seas blog:

This morning Petermann Glacier lost another ice island….

The break-off point has been visible for at least 8 years in MODIS imagery propagating at speeds of 1 km/year towards Nares Strait. The fracture also extended further across the floating ice sheet from the northern towards its southern side.

This event is still evolving, Trudy Wohleben of the Canadian Ice Service noticed it first (as in 2010) after reviewing MODIS imagery. Several people in several countries are monitoring and assessing the situation, but a first estimate of its size is 200 km^2 (3 Manhattans), I will revise this figure as soon as I got my hands on the raw data.

Read more here.

Two years ago Patrick Lockerby was the first to tell the world about the big calving that occurred at Petermann Glacier. The Arctic Sea Ice blog followed suit shortly afterwards. The whole event garnered a lot of attention, popularizing the island of Manhattan as an area measurement tool (metre, kilometre, Manhattan). This second big calving in as many years doesn’t come as a surprise, as attested by this article on the New York Times blog from August last year:

Read more

NEWS FLASH

Advocacy Groups Call On Insurance Companies To Disclose Political Spending | Along with a coalition of other advocacy groups, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) is calling on the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC), the organization that regulates the insurance industry, to require insurance companies to more transparently disclose their politically-affiliated donations. “Americans should not have to find out insurance companies’ hidden agendas by accident. The NAIC should give these corporations the extra push by requiring disclosure of political spending,” CREW’s executive director said in a press release. Aetna shareholders, who recently expressed their “dismay” upon learning that their insurance company had donated to anti-Obamacare political campaigns, would be exactly the type of group to benefit from CREW’s increased transparency initiatives.

Related Posts

Economy

How Public Sector Layoffs Killed 750,000 Private Sector Jobs

By Pat Garofalo on Jul 16, 2012 at 6:00 pm

As ThinkProgress has noted time and again, the unemployment rate would be up to a percentage point lower if all levels of government hadn’t engaged in severe austerity, shedding hundreds of thousands of jobs. The last three years have been the worst for public employment on record.

As a recent study by the Economic Policy Institute showed, these job cuts ripple through the economy, also harming private sector job creation. In fact, EPI estimates that public sector job cuts have likely cost the private sector 750,000 jobs:

The economic “multiplier” of state and local spending (not including transfer payments) is large – around 1.24. This means that for every dollar cut in salary and supplies of public-sector workers, another $0.24 is lost in purchasing power throughout the rest of the economy. Teachers and firefighters stop going to restaurants and buying cars if they’re laid off, which reduces demand for waitstaff and autoworkers and so on. Add these two influences together (supplier jobs and jobs supported by this multiplier impact) and roughly 0.67 private sector jobs are lost for every public sector job cut. This means that the public sector being down 1.1 million jobs has likely cost the private sector 751,000 jobs.

For comparison’s sake, here is the level of public sector employment during the three most recent recessions:

As former White House economist Jared Bernstein wrote, “It’s obviously nuts to maintain, as some do, that the government doesn’t create jobs. It creates millions of them, and we very much need them if we’re going to educate kids, drink water, put out fires, have public safety, etc. But public sector jobs also create private sector jobs upstream and downstream. It’s all connected, man.” Republicans, meanwhile, continue to cheer on public sector layoffs, which disproportionately hurt women and minorities in the workforce.

LGBT

Black Pastor ‘Coalition’ Becomes Star Of NOM’s ‘Race-Wedging’ Strategy

By Zack Ford on Jul 16, 2012 at 5:44 pm

Rev. Bill Owens

In March, confidential memos detailed the National Organization for Marriage’s strategy to drive a wedge between the gay and black communities (and nullify the existence of people who are both black and gay in the process). Unfazed by the backlash, NOM doubled down on the strategy, following through on it in North Carolina and refusing to apologize, even after internal emails showed how particular the group was about highlighting black religious leaders at events.

Now, NOM has redoubled its effort to “fan the hostility” by propping up the overstated Coalition of African-American Pastors and its founder (and NOM’s new spokesperson), Rev. Bill Owens, who likes to compare homosexuality to bestiality. The organization has released a new video, featuring Owens, the vitriolic Bishop Harry Jackson, Pastor Ericka McCrutcheon (who says gays “sodomize each other and practice other deviant behaviors in society), and others, criticizing the NAACP for “pandering to the President” and joining him in supporting marriage equality. Here are a few of the talking points taken right out of NOM’s race-wedging playbook:

JERRY MARTIN: The NAACP is wrong to label same-sex marriage as a civil right.

JOHN MCCRUTCHEON: To use homosexual marriages and civil rights in the same sentence is an oxymoron… Homosexuality is not a civil right.

OWENS: Many African-Americans are struggling because of peer pressure. They don’t know what a person would feel if they speak out against President Obama and the NAACP because they’re black.

Watch it:

While technically CAAP is a coalition of black pastors, it’s not actually representative of anybody except the few radicals who’ve joined it. When CAAP had the gall to demand a meeting with the President two weeks ago, it admitted that it does not speak for any denomination, including the African Methodist Episcopal Church and Church of God in Christ. The group’s only purpose since its founding has been to attack marriage equality, and only since partnering with NOM has its anti-gay tantrums received any legitimate media attention. Unsurprisingly, in the vein of all of NOM’s failed online campaigns, CAAP’s 100000 Signatures 4 Marriage campaign has garnered a full 46 Likes on Facebook.

NOM’s media effort has been to paint CAAP as being some huge conglomeration of black pastors, when in fact it seems to have at best tens of active members (despite Owens’ claim of 1,300 members), and they clearly do not speak on behalf of their community. National polls have shown that a majority of African-American voters support marriage equality, even at higher rates than the national average. Even in Maryland, where Harry Jackson is quite present, a majority of African-American voters are prepared to uphold the state’s same-sex marriage law. NOM is clearly failing and trying to follow through on its plan to sow divisions, but there’s nothing quite as desperate as encouraging black voters to abandon their largest civil rights organization, top civil rights leaders, and the first black president over an issue on which they already largely agree.

Security

Relying On Conspiracy Theories, GOPers Say They’ll Block Critical Sea Treaty

By Zack Beauchamp on Jul 16, 2012 at 5:30 pm

Ratifying the Law of the Sea Treaty (LOST) seems like a no-brainer. The treaty’s central provisions divvy up maritime territory among countries for the purposes of natural resource development. More than 160 countries have acceded to it, including the whole of the developed world. Iran, Syria, and North Korea oppose it while the Obama administration, five former Republican Secretaries of State, the U.S. military, and major affected industries all support ratification.

But today, according to a blog post by Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC), enough Senate Republicans have signed on to block the Treaty so that it will not pass in the coming year: “4 additional senators have joined in opposition to LOST, including Mike Johanns (R-NE), Kelly Ayotte (R-NH), Rob Portman (R-OH) and Johnny Isakson (R-GA). With 34 senators against the misguided treaty, LOST will not be ratified by the Senate this year.” DeMint’s complaints against the treaty, listed in the same post, aren’t remotely based in reality:

  • Demint claims LOST would sneak in a cap and trade law for greenhouse gasses. In reality, a State Department legal analysis found that “it contains no obligation to implement any particular climate change policies.”
  • DeMint claims the U.S. would have to pay “trillions in royalties” to state sponsors of terrorism. But according to John Norton Moore, a U.S. ambassador for the Law of the Sea in the Nixon, Ford and Reagan administrations, “the treaty grants the U.S. the only permanent veto as to how the modest royalties, collected in return for secure property rights, are to be distributed to state parties” and would allow “U.S. access to strategic minerals of copper, nickel, cobalt, manganese and rare earths worth about $1 trillion.“
  • DeMint claims it would strengthen China against the United States. Actually, it would give the U.S. a leg up on Beijing in several major areas.

So why are 34 Republicans opposing it? Because, as Dave Weigel reported for Foreign Policy, conspiracy theories about the U.N. have “moved from the fringes of the GOP into its mainstream.” Republicans, Weigel discovered, have been swayed by a fringe theory that claims LOST is facilitating the U.N.’s takeover of American sovereignty:

“[I've] heard we should not join this convention because, quote, ‘It’s a U.N. treaty,’” said [Secretary] Clinton, “and of course that means the black helicopters are on their way.” Opposition to the treaty, she said, is “unfortunate because it’s opposition based in ideology and mythology, not in facts.”

Republicans were unconvinced. “Most wars we’ve fought have been fought over ideology and philosophy,” said Idaho’s Sen. Jim Risch, who’s been winning elections in his state since 1970. “If we give up one scintilla of sovereignty that this country has fought, has bled for, and have given up our treasure and the best that America has, I can’t vote for it.”

Of course, when military leaders pointed out that the treaty would actually strengthen America’s position in the world, Risch yelled at them. The most influential advocate for the “sovereignty” concern that Risch was peddling, according to Weigel, is Frank Gaffney, a well-documented source of Islamophobic conspiracy theories.

Update

Senator John Kerry’s office postponed this year’s ratification vote until after the election, predicting industry pressure means “it’s a matter of ‘when’ not ‘if’ for the Law of the Sea.”

Alyssa

Why Are Dramas An Hour Long and Comedies a Half Hour?

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Jul 16, 2012 at 5:07 pm

Ryan McGee has a great post up in defense of comedies that don’t have traditional jokes, like Louie and Girls, and that end up confounding audience expectations as a result. He writes:

We don’t expect our dramas to be comedy-free. In fact, we’d lambaste such programs for having an enormous stick up an enormous orifice. “Mad Men” or “Breaking Bad” quite often is the funniest show on television on the week a particular episode airs. And we don’t ding them critically for making us laugh. If anything, the ability to make us laugh AND cry is seen as a bonus. Why do hour-longs get the benefit of the doubt while the 30-minute shows are greeted with widespread befuddlement when attempting the same magic trick?…Shows like “Modern Family” thrive because people understand what they will be getting. The ability to repeat that type of content is admirable, and certainly serves a purpose that television has provided as a genre for decades. But it’s time to also point out the shows that constantly have fans wondering what type of show they will be watching that particular week as well.

I’d actually go a step further than this—there’s something odd about assigning comedies thirty-minute slots and dramas to full hours. I understand that it may be more difficult to keep jokes coming over 42 minutes of programming as opposed to 22, and that some dramas require 42 minutes (or on premium cable) an hour to unspiral whatever problem’s been set up for the characters in any given week. But something like Louie’s “Duckling,” a predominantly funny episode of television with some documentary qualities, filled an hour easily last year and to great acclaim (and the next two episodes of the show could easily form an hour whole). And a show like Law & Order, which split episodes fairly evenly between cops and lawyers, shows a model for how you could make half-hour dramas—I feel like a half-hour drama about public defenders catching cases or cops working smaller crimes could work well. In any case, it’s a funny restriction, and it would be interesting to see people experiment around it.

NEWS FLASH

Google’s Marissa Mayer To Become CEO Of Yahoo | Marissa Mayer, a woman who has been at Google since its earliest days, was today named the new Chief Executive Officer at Yahoo. In the heavily-male Silicon Valley, Mayer, 37, will be one of few women in charge: The New York Times has reported that “On average, fewer than one in 28 of the highest-paid tech executives is a woman.” Mayer is used to being surrounded by men, though; she was also Google’s first female engineer when she began there.

Older

Switch to Mobile
ThinkProgress Signup Overlay Skip and Continue to ThinkProgress Skip and Continue to ThinkProgress

Sign Up