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Politics

BREAKING: Romney Stands By Controversial Comments, Claims He Says The Same Thing In Public

By Judd Legum on Sep 17, 2012 at 10:12 pm

At a hastily arranged press conference on Monday night, Romney stood by controversial comments he made at a private fundraiser in May, saying that his remarks were “not elegantly stated” and spoken “off the cuff.” “This is something I talk about a good deal in rallies and speeches and so forth,” Romney claimed, adding “The president’s approach is attractive to people who are not paying taxes.”

In May, Romney told wealth donors that “There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims… [M]y job is is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives”

The former Massachusetts governor took just three questions, walking away when asked if his claims that almost half of Americans see themselves as “victims” represent his “core convictions” and what he believes. From reporter Holly Bailey, who was on the scene:

Watch it:

Romney said that the comments were indicative of his campaign’s effort to “focus on the people in the middle” and, “I hope the person who has the video will put out the full material.” Mother Jones’ David Corn — who first reported on the video — has said that he will release more video from the May fundraiser on Tuesday.

Romney made the original comments at the “Boca Raton home of private-equity executive Marc Leder on May 17.” Leder, is the co-CEO of the private equity firm Sun Capital, which has a reputation for bankrupting companies in the pursuit of profit. “Since 2008, some 25 of its companies — roughly one of every five it owns — have filed for bankruptcy.” Not only that, but the company was accused by the federal Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC) just a few months ago of intentionally pushing a company into bankruptcy in order to avoid paying workers’ pensions.

Corn explained on MSNBC Monday evening, “The fact that Mitt Romney has not challenged a word here shows you that this is what he said, this is what he said behind closed doors with a bunch of other millionaires he felt quite comfortable with.”

Climate Progress

False Balance Lives: In Worst Climate Story Of The Year, PBS Channels Fox News

By Joe Romm on Sep 17, 2012 at 8:58 pm

If you happened to be watching the PBS News Hour tonight, you probably thought the show had been hijacked by Fox News. At first, their climate segment seemed to be about Koch-funded former “skeptic” Richard Muller and his conversion to scientific reality.

But then PBS decided that the way to “balance” a former skeptic who merely confirmed what climate scientists have demonstrated repeatedly for decades was by quoting nonsense from Sen. James Inhofe and then giving an extended interview to former TV weatherman and current A-list disinformer Anthony Watts.

UPDATE: For the video (and transcript) of the show, click here. It should forever kill the absurd notion that false balance is dead — or that the News Hour has some sort of liberal bias. Not that this is news — see the CP post from May, “False Balance On Climate Change at PBS NewsHour.”

Even worse is PBS’s completely unbalanced, extended interview online with the long-debunked Watts, headlined “Climate Change Skeptic Says Global Warming Crowd Oversells Its Message.”

The URL for that interview is even worse: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2012/09/why-the-global-warming-crowd-oversells-its-message.html. Seriously!

You can write the PBS ombudsman here.

UPDATE 2: PBS defends itself here, sort of. They do promise this: “Spencer will have another blog post today offering the views of other scientists in the broadcast concerned about the threats of climate change.” Uhh, “other scientists”? Now Watts is a scientist?

Again, the actual “news” in the on-air segment was about how a Koch-funded skeptic, Muller, had in fact demonstrated that the global warming crowd has been underselling its message.

Given the staggering laziness of PBS’s “journalism” in this segment, it’s worth quoting what Muller actually wrote in the NY Times:

Our results show that the average temperature of the earth’s land has risen by two and a half degrees Fahrenheit over the past 250 years, including an increase of one and a half degrees over the most recent 50 years. Moreover, it appears likely that essentially all of this increase results from the human emission of greenhouse gases.

These findings are stronger than those of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations group that defines the scientific and diplomatic consensus on global warming.

In short, a Koch-funded study has found that the IPCC “consensus” underestimated both the rate of surface warming and how much could be attributed to human emissions!

Now this underselling could have been the basis of an interesting story, but PBS decided to turn this into a pure he-said/she-said between “skeptics” and “believers,” as they label the two “sides” —  destroying any possible chance of delivering actual scientific information to its audience.

Here is the video of the truly head-exploding interview with Watts:

Read more

Economy

Paul Ryan Wants The Federal Reserve To Stop Fighting Unemployment

By Jeff Spross on Sep 17, 2012 at 7:10 pm

Last week, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke announced his institution would launch a third round of quantitative easing — the monetary stimulus the Fed has used intermittently to boost the economy since 2008 — in an effort to finally fulfill the “reduce unemployment” half of the Fed’s dual mandate. In response, Vice Presidential Candidate Paul Ryan denounced the move as “sugar high economics” and repeated to the Christian Broadcasting Network his assertion that “the costs outweigh the benefits” of QE:

I’m not a fan of QE3. I wasn’t a fan of QE2 either. I think in the long run it will do more harm than good. But what this is is it’s the Federal Reserve and the monetary policy trying to bail out the fact that we have terrible leadership on fiscal policy from President Obama…

I fear that it undermines the ultimate credibility of our currency, of our money and you need to have sound money. It’s a necessary pre-condition for economic growth. We have loose money already so it’s not a question of having too tight of a monetary policy. We have exceptionally loose monetary policy… This kind of easing hurts savers, questions the credibility of our currency, and I think ultimately the costs outweigh the benefits.

Watch it:

ThinkProgress already reported on the problems in Paul Ryan’s cost/benefit analysis: Inflation remains at a near-historic low of 2 percent — far below the 12 percent inflation of the 1970s — while unemployment is still at 8 percent. The Fed’s interest rates have nowhere to go but up, meaning inflation could be easily reined in if it began to dangerously rise.

Bernanke himself has already estimated the initial rounds of QE created as many as 2 million jobs. And the “savers” that Ryan says could be hurt are in fact a very narrow group, according to Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research: “Realistically there are not a lot of people who both have substantial savings (enough that the interest makes up a big share of their income) and who kept it exclusively in short-term assets… The winners from a policy to boost growth through lower interest rates vastly outnumber the losers.”

Ryan’s claim that monetary policy is already “exceptionally loose” is also questionable. Milton Friedman, the 20th century economist beloved by many conservatives, argued that interest rates are actually poor indicators of monetary policy. Better indicators are inflation and nominal GDP growth, a view with which Bernanke has concurred. Both the inflation and NGDP growth trends suggest monetary policy is actually too tight.

Ryan is certainly right that monetary stimulus is a second-best option for boosting the economy after better fiscal policy. But the international and domestic evidence shows that Ryan’s preferred fiscal policy would drive the economy further into the ground. Meanwhile, the Republicans’ control of the House and their filibuster in the Senate have enabled them to torpedo fiscal policy that would actually help.

NEWS FLASH

Romney Stands By Claim That 47% Of Americans Are ‘Dependent’ On Government | Responding to an undercover video showing Mitt Romney claiming that President Obama’s voters — 47% of Americans — are “dependent upon government” and “believe they are victims,” the GOP presidential candidate’s campaign stood by the former governor’s claim. “As the governor has made clear all year, he is concerned about the growing number of people who are dependent on the federal government, including the record number of people who are on food stamps, nearly one in six Americans in poverty, and the 23 million Americans who are struggling to find work,” Romney spokesperson Gail Gitcho said in a statement. RNC Chairman Reince Preibus agreed, telling CNN, “No, I don’t think the candidate’s off message at all.”

NEWS FLASH

Health Care Is The Most Shared Policy Issue In Battleground States | According to an analysis by social data sharing company ShareThis and CNN, voters living in swing states have shared more articles about health care on social media sites than any other policy issue. Of the 12 swing states considered in the report,  including Florida, Ohio, Virginia, and North Carolina, an average of 16.1% of total shared articles were about health care. The three states with the highest percentage of shared health care articles were New Mexico at 45%, New Hampshire at 20%, and Wisconsin at 19%.

Education

Republican Congressman Pushes For Unlimited Calorie School Lunches

By Annie-Rose Strasser on Sep 17, 2012 at 6:05 pm

Last week, Rep. Steve King (R-IA) called calorie caps on school lunches “the nanny state personified.” This week, he is moving to eliminate the caps with his pleasantly-titled “No Hungry Kids Act,” H.R. 6418.

King’s bill is a direct response to the the Let’s Move! campaign, an initiative from First Lady Michelle Obama. Her effort prompted the Healthy and Hunger Free Kids Act, which set such calorie limits on school meals and opened up funding for physical fitness programs. But while some might see the move as a way to combat childhood obesity, King believes that it is denying kids sustenance:

“For the first time in history, the USDA has set a calorie limit on school lunches,” King said last week. “The goal of the school lunch program was — and is — to insure students receive enough nutrition to be healthy and to learn.

“The misguided nanny state, as advanced by Michelle Obama’s ‘Healthy and Hunger Free Kids Act,’ was interpreted by Secretary [Tom] Vilsack to be a directive that, because some kids are overweight, he would put every child on a diet. Parents know that their kids deserve all of the healthy and nutritious food they want.“

The Congressman may believe that an unlimited amount of “healthy” foods may be beneficial to a kid, but he’s got his facts wrong. One can have too much of a good thing.

Perhaps King’s motivation in this area stems from his financial backing by “Big Food,” which has a vested interest in selling more school lunch supplies. King has not been similarly vocal in favor of nutrition assistance programs for low-income kids.

The exact wording of the original legislation limits lunch calorie counts for K-5 students to 650, while 6-8 grad students get 700 calories, and high school student’s meals can be up to 850 calories. Those numbers follow the suggestions of the Mayo Clinic.

Climate Progress

Mann Power: Court Rules Deniers Have No Right To The Emails Of UVA Climate Scientists

By Joe Romm on Sep 17, 2012 at 6:00 pm

Today a Virginia judge ruled that the University of Virginia (UVA) doesn’t have to release the emails of climate scientists like Michael Mann to the anti-science American Tradition Institute (ATI).

The anti-science crowd knows that they can’t win on the science. Indeed they seem to have written off smart people entirely. But like someone addicted to cigarettes, they have been trying to reproduce the high from the massive Climategate exercise in smoke blowing.

To do that, the deniers need fresh emails to razzle dazzle the gullible so they won’t see the climate change that is all around them.

The good news is that ATI doesn’t get to read climate scientists’ emails. Here is what climatologist Mann, author of The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars, wrote on his Facebook page:

Breaking: A victory for science! ATI loses ATI/UVa FOIA case. Judge issues final order. Affirms the university’s right to withhold scholarly communications and finds that the documents & personal emails of mine demanded by ATI were indeed protected as the university had contended.

I am gratified for the hard work and vigorous defense provided by the university to protect scholarly communications and raw materials of scholarship. Fortunately Virginia has a strong exemption in the public records act that protects research and scholarly endeavors. The judge ruled that the exemption under Virginia’s public records protecting information in furtherance of research on scientific and scholarly issues applies to faculty communications in furtherance of their work.

This finding is a potentially important precedent, as ATI and other industry-backed front groups continue to press their attacks on climate scientists through the abuse of public records and FOIA laws and the issuing of frivolous and vexatious demands for internal scholarly deliberations and personal correspondences.

How extreme is ATI? Last year they were singled out for criticism by the traditionally staid American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

The AAAS Board issued a statement on “Personal Attacks on Climate Scientists”:

Read more

Health

New Study Mischaracterizes ‘Sexting’ As A Public Health Concern

By Tara Culp-Ressler on Sep 17, 2012 at 5:36 pm

A study published in the Pediatrics journal today seeks to examine the connection between teenagers who send and receive sexually explicit messages on their cell phones — “sexting” — and teenagers who engage in sexually risky behavior, such as not using condoms. The study concludes that sexting is correlated with sexually risky behavior, and encourages parents and health officials to talk to teens to discourage the behavior:

Sexting, rather than functioning as an alternative to “real world” sexual risk behavior, appears to be part of a cluster of risky sexual behaviors among adolescents. We recommend that clinicians discuss sexting as an adolescent-friendly way of engaging patients in conversations about sexual activity, prevention of sexually transmitted infections, and unwanted pregnancy. We further recommend that discussion about sexting and its associated risk behavior be included in school-based sexual health curricula.

Providing teenagers with accurate information about preventing pregnancy and STIs is certainly an important component of comprehensive sexual education, but concerns about the dangers of sexting are misplaced. Sexting itself is no more inherently dangerous for teens than any other type of sexual expression. Teens who report engaging in sexting are simply more likely to be sexually active than teens who have never sent or received an explicit message — an earlier study on the same subject found that about 86 percent of the teen respondents who sexted reported that they were sexually active, a full 30 percentage points higher than the rate of sexual activity among the non-sexters — and those increased rates of sexual activity lead to an increased potential for unsafe sexual behavior.

Lumping sexting in with actually risky physical behaviors — such as being uninformed about where to find and how to use a range of effective birth control methods — does a disservice to teenagers’ sexuality. While teenagers absolutely need to hear accurate information about practicing safe sex from parents, health officials, and educators, the failures of abstinence education programs demonstrate that stigmatizing sexual expression is not an effective way to ensure healthy behaviors in young adults. Teenagers’ use of technology isn’t directly encouraging them to make risky sexual decisions. Neglecting to adequately address sexual health in the classroom is.

Justice

BREAKING: Board Denies Clemency To Death-Row Inmate Experts Say Was Sexually Abused By The Men He Killed

By Nicole Flatow on Sep 17, 2012 at 5:20 pm

The Pennsylvania Board of Pardons denied clemency today to the Pennsylvania inmate who faces execution Oct. 3 for killing two men that he alleges sexually abused him.

Three out of the five board members voted to spare Terrance “Terry” Williams from a sentence of death, but a unanimous vote was required. Reports the Philadelphia Inquirer:

With Williams’ state and federal appeals exhausted all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, the 46-year-old former Germantown High School quarterback’s last hope of escaping becoming the first person executed in Pennsylvania in 13 years lies in a hearing Thursday before Philadelphia Common Pleas M. Teresa Sarmina.

The court agreed to hear testimony from two witnesses whom Williams’ lawyers argue covered up evidence of Williams’ sexual abuse.

The clemency petition filed on behalf of Williams was supported by 22 former prosecutors and judges, 34 law professors, 40 mental health professionals and more than 36 religious leaders, and urged the board to spare from execution a man with an extensive childhood history of abuse that was never revealed to the jury. Even the widow of one of the victims submitted a letter asking that his life be spared. It was accompanied by a letter from 26 child advocates and sexual abuse experts, which stated: “The evidence of abuse in this case is clear. There can be no doubt that Terry was repeatedly and violently abused and exploited as a child and teenager by manipulative older men. Terry’s acts of violence have, alas, an explanation of the worst sort: enveloped by anger and self-hatred, Terry lashed out and killed two of the men who sexually abused him and caused him so much pain.”

The clemency petition explained:

At the time of the killing, Terry was only three and a half months past his eighteenth birthday, the minimum age for the imposition of the death penalty. On that tragic day, Terry and another 18-year-old, Marc Draper, beat Mr. Norwood to death in a cemetery in the Mt. Airy neighborhood of Philadelphia.

At trial, the jury was informed that Terry had prior convictions for a 1982 armed robbery and the 1984 killing of Herbert Hamilton, which Terry committed at ages 16 and 17, respectively. The jury never learned, however, that both Herbert Hamilton and Amos Norwood had sexually abused Terry, or that both killings directly related to Terry’s history of sexual abuse by these and older males, which began when Terry was only six years old. In fact, jurors heard very little about Terry’s childhood, which was marked not only by over a decade of sexual abuse, but by years of physical and emotional abuse, neglect and abandonment by those who were supposed to love and care for him. The unrelenting abuse and neglect made Terry an easy target for sexual predators. […]

Five of the jurors from Terry’s capital trial agree that Terry’s life should be spared. In recent sworn statements, they have explained that if they had known the truth about Terry’s childhood, the fact that he was exploited and sexually assaulted by the men he killed, as well as the fact that a life sentence meant life without parole, they never would have sentenced Terry to death.

NEWS FLASH

CHART: By 2020, Two-thirds Of American Jobs Will Require Some Higher Education | According to a new report from the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce, by 2020, two-thirds of American jobs will require at least some higher education, while 24 percent will require a high school diploma and just 12 percent will require less than a high school education. By comparison, “in 1973, nearly three out of four jobs required only a high school education or less.” (HT: Kay Steiger)

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