Bill Clinton Takes On Paul Ryan: ‘It Takes Some Brass’

By Annie-Rose Strasser on Sep 5, 2012 at 11:34 pm

Bill Clinton singlehandedly dismantled the Romney-Ryan campaign narrative that President Obama is trying to put an end to Medicare at the Democratic Convention Wednesday night, pointing out that it is in fact the Romney-Ryan proposal for Medicare that would permanently change the program to a depreciating voucher system. “It takes some brass,” Clinton said, “to attack a guy for doing what you did”:

First, Both Governor Romney and Congressman Ryan attacked the President for allegedly robbing medicare of $716 billion. But it is not true.[...]

So, President Obama and the Democrats did not weaken Medicare. They strengthened Medicare. When Congressman Ryan looked into that TV camera and attacked President Obama’s Medicare savings as “the biggest, coldest power play,” I did not know whether to laugh or cry. Key cuts that $716 billion is exactly to the dollar the same amount of medicare savings that he had in his own budget. It takes some brass to attack a guy for doing what you did.

Watch it:

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Politics

Elizabeth Warren Explains: ‘No, Governor Romney, Corporations Are Not People’

By Annie-Rose Strasser on Sep 5, 2012 at 11:01 pm

Elizabeth Warren, the Democratic senate candidate in Massachusetts, drew roaring cheers, applause, and even tears tonght at the Democratic Convention when she laid out the differences between corporations and people. Knocking Romney for his infamous line “corporations are people, my friend,” Warren illustrated the stark divides — “People have hearts,” she said:

After all, Mitt Romney’s the guy who said corporations are people. No, Governor Romney, corporations are not people. People have hearts. They have kids. They get jobs. They get sick. They thrive. They dance. They live. They love. And they die. And that matters. That matters. That matters because we don’t run this country for corporations, we run it for people.

Watch it:

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Election

WATCH: Sandra Fluke Explains The Republican War On Women In 144 Seconds

By Josh Israel on Sep 5, 2012 at 9:40 pm

Sandra Fluke, the Georgetown Law student who was dragged into the national spotlight after Rush Limbaugh referred to her as a slut, said Wednesday it is time to choose between being “a country that honors our foremothers by moving us forward, or one that forces our generation to re-fight the battles they already won.”

In a speech at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, N.C., she warned:

Your new president could be a man who stands by when a public figure tries to silence a private citizen with hateful slurs. Who won’t stand up to the slurs, or to any of the extreme, bigoted voices in his own party. It would be an America in which you have a new vice president who co-sponsored a bill that would allow pregnant women to die preventable deaths in our emergency rooms. An America in which states humiliate women by forcing us to endure invasive ultrasounds that we don’t want and our doctors say we don’t need. An America in which access to birth control is controlled by people who will never use it; an America in which politicians redefine rape so survivors are victimized all over again; in which someone decides which domestic violence victims deserve access to services, and which don’t.

Watch the video:

Fluke contrasted that possibility with the supportive reception she received from a president who reached out to support her, strangers who lifted her up, and a convention that invited her to speak. She encouraged America to choose to be “a country where we mean it when we talk about personal freedom,” rather than “one where that freedom doesn’t apply to our bodies and our voices.”

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Climate Progress

Death Spiral Watch: Experts Warn ‘Near Ice-Free Arctic In Summer’ In A Decade If Volume Trends Continue

By Joe Romm on Sep 5, 2012 at 7:46 pm

The sharp drop in Arctic sea ice area has been matched by a harder-to-see — but equally sharp — drop in sea ice thickness. The combined result has been a collapse in total sea ice volume.

Many experts now say that if recent volume trends continue we will see virtually ice-free conditions sometime in the next ten years. And that may well usher in a permanent change toward extreme, prolonged weather events “Such As Drought, Flooding, Cold Spells And Heat Waves.”

It will also accelerate global warming in the region, which in turn will likely accelerate both the disintegration of the Greenland ice sheet and the release of the vast amounts of carbon currently locked in the permafrost.

The European Space Agency’s CryoSat-2 probe confirms what the Pan-Arctic Ice Ocean Modeling and Assimilation System (PIOMAS) at the Polar Science Center has been saying for years: Arctic sea ice volume has been collapsing faster than sea ice area (or extent) because the ice has been getting thinner and thinner.

In fact, the latest satellite CryoSat-2 data shows the rate of loss of Arctic sea ice is “50% higher than most scenarios outlined by polar scientists and suggests that global warming, triggered by rising greenhouse gas emissions, is beginning to have a major impact on the region,” as the UK Guardian reported last month:

If the current annual loss of around 900 cubic kilometres continues, summer ice coverage could disappear in about a decade in the Arctic.

I have focused on sea ice volume for the past 6 years, since I was fortunate enough to hear Dr. Wieslaw Maslowski of the Oceanography Department at the Naval Postgraduate School in a 2006 American Meteorological Society seminar. He reported that models suggested Arctic ice volume had dropped sharply since the mid 1990s. He then made an alarming forecast:

“If this trend persists for another 10 years–and it has through 2005–we could be ice free in the summer.”

That was in 2006, so he was talking about the possibility of being ice free in 2016.

Looking at volume and thickness helped me avoid the mistake that so many others made in thinking that the sea ice “recovered” after the 2007 minimum in sea ice extent. The scientific literature and actual observations continued to vindicate Maslowski’s projection.

Since Maslowski’s warning appears to now have been vindicated by the CryoSat-2 data, I asked him for a comment. He said he didn’t want to comment on that data specifically until he’s seen the published results — since there are many inherent uncertainties involved. But he then added:

Regardless of all these uncertainties and for the record, if any of these estimates of arctic sea ice volume decline is close to reality, a near ice-free Arctic in summer can happen not in 2100, 2050 or 2037 but much sooner. One of the main reasons I believe it will happen sooner (i.e. the trend of sea ice volume decline will continue) is that with the shrinking sea ice cover in summer the Arctic Ocean increases its net annual heat content through absorption and redistribution, especially in the upper water column, below the surface mixed layer.

This constitutes a positive feedback to sea ice melt in addition to ice-albedo and other feedbacks, mainly because it can affect the sea ice cover year around, including in winter through upward heat entrainment and reduction of ice growth. The warmer Arctic Ocean can also affect air temperatures and circulation, not only during freeze-up but also in winter and spring. Observational evidence (Jackson et al., 2010 and 2011) suggests increasing sub-surface temperatures and over increasing area in the Canada Basin through 2009, which independently of models supports the argument about the increasing upper ocean heat content.

I do realize that the above sounds ‘alarmist’ and I’ve heard such criticism more than once before but I believe it’s my obligation to make sure that this message is heard by the policymakers and general public.

Maslowski did not make a new timing prediction, but instead directed me to a recent article he was lead author on, “The Future of Arctic Sea Ice,” in Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences.

That article estimated a loss of 1,120 cubic kilometres per year from 1996 to 2007, quite close to the recently reported CryoSat-2 measurements. It continued:

Given the estimated trend and the volume estimate for October–November of 2007 at less than 9,000 km³ (Kwok et al. 2009), one can project that at this rate it would take only 9 more years or until 2016 ± 3 years to reach a nearly ice-free Arctic Ocean in summer. Regardless of high uncertainty associated with such an estimate, it does provide a lower bound of the time range for projections of seasonal sea ice cover.

This is the same estimate Maslowski made in 2006, although he has couched it more conservatively here and has explained that he wouldn’t be surprised if some summer ice lingers above Greenland and Eastern Canada into the 2020s. That’s why he uses the term “nearly ice-free.”

What’s interesting is that the volume trend has in fact continued according to PIOMAS and CryoSat-2. Many other experts are warning that we have effectively passed the point of no return and nearly ice-free are imminent. Fen Montaigne, senior editor of Yale e360, reports:

Peter Wadhams, who heads the Polar Ocean Physics Group at the University of Cambridge and who has been measuring Arctic Ocean ice thickness from British Navy submarines, says that earlier calculations about Arctic sea ice loss have grossly underestimated how rapidly the ice is disappearing. He believes that the Arctic is likely to become ice-free before 2020 and possibly as early as 2015 or 2016 — decades ahead of projections made just a few years ago.

Mark Drinkwater, mission scientist for the European Space Agency’s CryoSat satellite and the agency’s senior advisor on polar regions, said he and his colleagues have been taken aback by the swiftness of Arctic sea ice retreat in the last 5 years. “If this rate of melting [in 2012] is sustained in 2013, we are staring down the barrel and looking at a summer Arctic which is potentially free of sea ice within this decade,” Drinkwater said in an e-mail interview.

Wadhams told the BBC how much warming is accelerated by just replacing the reflective white ice with the more absorptive open ocean:

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Economy

How Americans Are Spending $4 Billion Subsidizing Professional Sports Stadiums

By Pat Garofalo on Sep 5, 2012 at 6:35 pm

Cowboys Stadium costs taxpayers millions of dollars each year.

The National Football League season will open tonight in New Jersey’s Metlife stadium, the only NFL stadium that was built without some sort of public support. All of the other NFL venues either received direct subsidies for their construction or benefit from other publicly funded improvements.

And NFL franchises are certainly not the only ones benefiting from taxpayer largesse. According to an analysis by Bloomberg News, taxpayers have spent $4 billion on subsidies for sports structures since 1986 via tax exemptions that come along with the bonds used to finance stadium or arena construction:

Tax exemptions on interest paid by muni bonds that were issued for sports structures cost the U.S. Treasury $146 million a year, based on data compiled by Bloomberg on 2,700 securities. Over the life of the $17 billion of exempt debt issued to build stadiums since 1986, the last of which matures in 2047, taxpayer subsidies to bondholders will total $4 billion, the data show.

Those estimates are based on what the Treasury could have collected on interest from the same amount of taxable bonds sold at the same time to investors in the 25 percent income-tax bracket, the rate many government agencies assume. In fact, more than half the owners of tax-exempt bonds pay top rates of at least 30 percent, according to the Congressional Budget Office. So they save even more on their income taxes, a system that U.S. lawmakers of both parties and President Barack Obama have described as inefficient and unfair.

These bonds raise money to pay for construction and improvements, enabling wealthy franchise owners to avoid paying for their own stadiums or fancy new upgrades. Individuals who invest in the bonds then receive tax exemptions, lowering government revenue; so the subsidy for stadium construction “comes out of the pockets of every American taxpayer.” Using bonds to finance stadium construction is nothing more than a transfer of taxpayer money to wealthy franchise owners whose teams can be worth billions of dollars.

This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the public money thrown at sports franchises. For instance, Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones pays no property taxes on Cowboys Stadium, saving his franchise $17 million per year.

Franchises often use the threat of moving to a new city to extort more expensive facilities and ever bigger heaps of tax exemptions from fans and politicians loathe to see the local team disappear. But states and cities should really question whether new stadiums for already wealthy individuals are the best way to spend often scarce taxpayer dollars.

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Election

After Bucking Federal Judge On Early Voting, Ohio Secretary Of State Ordered To Appear In Court

By Aviva Shen on Sep 5, 2012 at 6:28 pm

Judge Peter Economus has set a hearing for September 13 to address Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted’s refusal to comply with the court’s ruling that the state must allow early voting on the three days leading up to the general election. Economus released a terse order Wednesday afternoon: “The Court ORDERS that Defendant Secretary of State Jon Husted personally attend the hearing.” The Obama campaign filed a motion earlier Wednesday asking the court to make Husted give way.

Husted issued a directive Tuesday stating that he would appeal the decision to restore early voting on those three days, claiming that changing the hours now would “only serve to confuse voters.” The directive “strictly prohibits county boards of elections from determining hours for the Friday, Saturday, Sunday, or Monday before the election.”

Lynn Kinkaid, Director of the Butler County Board of Elections, which originally voted to hold weekend hours before Husted’s directive restricted them, told ThinkProgress the board is powerless to act against the Secretary of State’s directive. “I can’t imagine we would disobey a court order…he must have a good reason for it,” Kinkaid said. “He’s the big boss. I’m not going to second-guess my boss.”

Husted fired two Montgomery County election board members after they defied his directive and voted to hold weekend voting hours. Two other Ohio counties have asked Husted to reevaluate the voting restrictions.

Kinkaid recalled huge turnout in Butler County, which voted for McCain in 2008, on the weekend before the election: “There was a lot of people out there. We had them lined up two people, down the hall, out the door, over into the churchyard a block or two away. People waited for three hours.” By Kinkaid’s estimate, poll workers worked 36 hours of overtime that weekend.

There are several pending lawsuits against Husted’s office, including a recent suit by his Democratic predecessor, Jennifer Brunner, over his directive to limit voting hours. On Tuesday, the two fired board of elections members called for Husted’s resignation over a redistricting ballot issue.

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Justice

After Two Court Orders, Louisiana May Finally Get Its First Black Chief Justice

By Nicole Flatow on Sep 5, 2012 at 5:30 pm

A federal district judge rejected this weekend a racially charged challenge to a Louisiana Supreme Court justice’s seniority that has threatened Justice Bernette Johnson’s path to becoming the court’s first black chief justice.

Johnson, who was appointed to the court as part of a settlement over civil rights violations under the Voting Rights Act, has been serving on the court longer than any other judge, and was prepared under the state’s seniority system to take on the court’s top spot when Chief Justice Catherine Kimball retires. An eighth seat was initially added to the court to address racial disparities. Even today, Johnson is the only black Supreme Court justice in a state in which nearly one third of residents are black. But because the state Constitution capped the number of justices at seven, Johnson was appointed to the appellate court, though she served as a member of the high court for her entire tenure.

When Kimball announced she would retire, some of Johnson’s colleagues alleged that because Johnson was initially appointed as a judge on the state’s appellate court and was only later elected directly to the Supreme Court, her first years serving on the court did not count towards her seniority. But Johnson sued in federal court, seeking enforcement of the initial consent decree. District Judge Susie Morgan sided with Johnson, finding that the consent judgment calls for her six years serving the court as an eighth member “to be credited to her for all purposes under Louisiana law.” Morgan also rejected arguments that the federal court did not have jurisdiction over the issue.

The ruling is subject to appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, should Johnson’s fellow justices choose to escalate their efforts to disqualify Justice Johnson from her court’s center chair.

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NEWS FLASH

Report: Former NFL Players Four Times More Likely To Die Of Brain Diseases | After studying over 3,000 former professional football players, U.S. government researchers found the death rate from Alzheimer’s or Lou Gehrig’s disease among retired NFL players is four times higher than the rate for the general U.S. population. The researchers suspect their findings may illustrate the long-term consequences of the multiple concussions that NFL players sustain throughout their careers in football, but they cannot establish causation without more data. According to the study, the players in the wide receiver, running back, and quarterback positions accounted for most of the deaths from the two brain diseases — which makes sense, the lead researcher explained, because they experience more “high-speed collisions” than players in other positions. Just this morning, the NFL announced its plans to donate $30 million to concussion research amid increasing controversy surrounding the league’s response to the issue of concussions among their players.

NEWS FLASH

Europe Faces ‘Lost Generation’ As Youth Unemployment Soars | More than 5.5 million European young adults are unemployed, according to reports from the European Commission, leading economists to fear that European youth will become a “lost generation.” Eurozone unemployment reached 26 percent this month, but for young people, the picture is even bleaker: in Spain and Greece, the youth unemployment rate tops 50 percent; it is 36 percent in Portugal, 34 percent in Italy, and 23 percent in France, the Washington Post reported. Unemployment is so bad for young people that Spanish college graduates have dubbed themselves Juventud sin Futuro, or “youth without a future.” The youth unemployment rate in the United States, meanwhile, is 15 percent.

Alyssa

En Vogue and Funky Divas: Afro-Futurism

By Mychal Denzel Smith, Guest Blogger on Sep 5, 2012 at 5:02 pm

Phife Dawg from A Tribe Called Quest spoke for a great many of us when he said “I used to have a crush on Dawn from En Vogue.” I actually had a crush on everyone from En Vogue, though. Dawn, Maxine, Cindy, and Terry. They were incredible singers, of course, but good gracious were they fine.

It wasn’t until recently, while watching VH1′s 40 Greatest R&B Songs of the 90s, that I realized how much of my early musical taste was dictated by my prepubescent sex drive. At the age of five, Chilli from TLC was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen, and thus became my first crush, and thus TLC became my favorite group. The sight of Mariah Carey in shorts in the video for “One Sweet Day” was enough for me wear out a song that, today, I wouldn’t take two seconds to listen to. Aaliyah showed me what it meant to be a sly seductress and that’s all I’ve ever wanted since. And Janet Jackson… well, she was Janet Jackson.

It’s terribly shallow, but En Vogue wasn’t any different. I listened to their songs on the radio, but what made me a fan was seeing their videos on MTV. Which is why its taken me this long to truly appreciate their musical contribution.

In the present, we remember the early-mid 90s in black music for the proliferation of hip-hop. The genre was going from novel fad to legitimate pop mainstay. We also remember this time for the national exposure to police brutality in urban neighborhoods, via the Rodney King tape/trial/uprising. Hip-hop had predicted such an incident for years, and now everyone wanted to hear what rappers like Ice Cube, Dr. Dre, and more had to say.

Lost in the current remembrance of the time is that R&B acts were delivering some strong material, particularly the women. Enter En Vogue. They had a big hit with “Hold On” from their 1990 debut album Born to Sing, and went platinum. Their success spawned a cluster of imitators, and over the next few years a number of “girl groups” would appear, including SWV, Xscape, and others. It was like a new sub-genre of R&B music.

Dawn, Maxine, Cindy, and Terry wouldn’t limit themselves. Their follow-up album, 1992′s Funky Divas went triple platinum and in a lot of ways was a precursor to the sonic experimentation of latter day Erykah Badu, Janelle Monae, Nicki Minaj, etc. Funky Divas managed to find the space between funk and in-your-face sexiness of their forebear Betty Davis, the polished sophistication of Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis’ R&B, the aggressiveness in MC Lyte’s emceeing, and a secret desire to be Nirvana. All that, and their voices still managed to sound like they were honed by days, months, and years belting out choir solos in a black Baptist church.

“Free Your Mind” is a hard-rock inspired track of the type we often say we wish pop stars would release more of, one with a message about prejudice (with some nice shots at slut-shaming). “My Lovin’” finds them asserting their worth to would-be suitors that simply are never gonna get it. On “Giving Him Something He Can Feel” they reinterpret the Curtis Mayfield penned, Aretha Franklin performed song from the original Sparkle soundtrack and put their own stamp on it. They delivered the traditional R&B and hip-hop inflected tracks with equal ease and comfort.

They had the misfortune of releasing this album two years before TLC would become the biggest girl group of all-time with their attention-stealing/genre-defining album CrazySexyCool. After that, there was TLC and everyone else. En Vogue primarily became known as the women who sang “Whatta Man” with Salt-N-Pepa.

It’s a discredit to their legacy, as they deserve so much more recognition for the trail they blazed. Their recent re-break-up via Twitter isn’t doing much to help re-imagine that legacy either. It’s unfortunate, but the bright side? Man, they are still fine.

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