How Country Music Stars Are Gaming The Tax Code In Tennessee

By Pat Garofalo on Oct 19, 2012 at 6:00 pm

Billy Ray Cyrus

According to an investigation by The Knoxville News Sentinel, wealthy individuals — including corporate CEOs and country music stars — are taking advantage of a loophole in Tennessee law to claims huge tax breaks on their property. This tax provision is meant to help farmers, but instead is helping members of the 1 percent save tens of thousands of dollars on their property taxes every year:

An investigation by The Knoxville News Sentinel and The Commercial Appeal found…an impressive roster of wealthy Tennesseans who make their millions elsewhere but use the farmland protection law to escape much of their local property tax bills — from Fortune 500 executives to country music stars. [...]
In Williamson County, the local assessor has enrolled well-known country music stars such as Billy Ray Cyrus, and Naomi and Wynonna Judd in the program, yet public records reveal little about those operations.

Cyrus, for example, receives a $29,000-a-year tax break on a 467-acre, $6.5 million spread with a tree-topped hill near Thompson Station, Tenn., where the “Achy Breaky Heart” star owns a 7,850-square-foot home. Williamson County records show Cyrus, who’s also lived at times in Los Angeles, holds separate farming greenbelts on six of seven parcels that comprise the 467-acre tract. By law, applications for greenbelt are supposed to be filed with the local Register of Deeds. Yet a check of records there revealed applications for just two of the six farming greenbelts, both from 1994, when the singer disclosed that he intended to raise corn, horses and cattle.

Sadly, this is not a phenomenon confined to the Volunteer State. Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL) took advantage of lax Florida tax laws and some cows to lower his property tax bill. Tom Cruise pulled the same trick with sheep in Colorado, as did Bon Jovi with beehives in New Jersey. Some corporate campuses even qualify as “farms” because they let a few cows graze on the land.

States can ill-afford to let revenue slip away, as they’re still combating the effects of the Great Recession. Eliminating a loophole that allows the wealthiest citizens to avoid paying property taxes seems like a no-brainer. (HT: Citizens for Tax Justice)

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Justice

Continued Misinformation About Pennsylvania Photo ID Law Prompts Request For Court Intervention

By Nicole Flatow on Oct 19, 2012 at 5:50 pm

Advocacy groups who won a suspension of Pennsylvania’s voter ID requirement earlier this month have filed a motion seeking to curb Pennsylvania’s dissemination of misinformation about the photo ID law.

The motion alleges that in the wake of the court ruling that photo ID would not be required to vote Nov. 6, the state failed to inform voters of the change and instead delayed correcting information in existing ads and other materials, sent out mailings with the false indication that photo ID was required to vote, and issued new and misleading ads, such as the one below, which features an image of a photo ID with the tiny words “This election day, if you have it,” followed by the huge and capitalized phrase “Show it”:

The motion laments that the “sum total of the Commonwealth’s educational efforts to alert people that the onslaught of pre-injunction news telling voters they need ID to vote is no longer true” is to add the small lettering “if you have it” to the “Show it” campaign that was in effect before the court order.

In contrast, the state’s public information campaign prior to the court ruling was extensive, including the issuance of 11 press releases, several mailers indicating residents would not be able to vote without an ID, and regular public appearances and media commentary by public officials.

Bolstering this confusion is a mailing by the state’s largest utility to 1.3 million customers containing the outdated voter ID information. But while the mailing may have been a mistake, PECO’s spokesperson said the utility plans to continue distribution of the mailer through October 28.

The plaintiffs ask that Pennsylvania take affirmative steps to ensure voters are not deterred from going to the polls, by launching a campaign as aggressive as the one before the court ruling that includes sending corrective notices to those who received misinformation, issuing new press releases, re-wording scheduled robocalls, and immediately pulling any misleading ads.

h/t Alliance for Justice

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Health

Eating Disorder Patients Lack Sufficient Health Coverage

By Sy Mukherjee on Oct 19, 2012 at 5:45 pm

Americans who suffer from an eating disorder face enormous physical, emotional, and mental hurdles — and with spotty insurance coverage, they face the added burden of significant financial hurdles as they try to cope with their disease.

As Kaiser Health News reports, the complex, often wide-ranging nature of eating disorder treatments often leads insurers to skimp on benefits, and state and federal consumer protections do not go far enough in ensuring sufficient coverage for Americans with anorexia, bulimia, and other eating disorders:

According to the Eating Disorders Coalition, a lobbying and advocacy group based in Washington, D.C., 14 million people are affected with anorexia, bulimia and binge eating disorder. And for many of these patients, getting a full range of insurance coverage can be difficult. Mental health coverage is often less generous than coverage for physical ills. In addition, helping eating disorder patients is complicated because it involves medical care, mental health services and nutritional therapy, requiring a team of specialists – often a primary care doctor, a therapist, a psychiatrist and a dietician. Patients argue that insurers don’t adequately cover all those services.

The coalition tried unsuccessfully to get eating disorders included in the “essential health benefits” the health overhaul law requires insurers to provide beginning in 2014. “Exclusion of eating disorders is all too common on the part of insurers seeking to limit interventions deemed non-essential,” the group wrote to federal officials in a in a January letter. “Despite being biologically based mental illnesses with potentially severe physical health ramifications, including death, eating disorders are all too often found on lists of benefit exclusions.”

The group noted that a survey of more than 100 eating disorder specialists found that “96.7% believe their patients with anorexia nervosa are put in life threatening situations” because treatments often are cut short when coverage is denied.

In an age of advertising campaigns that are increasingly leading to unhealthy body image issues in young girls — 80 percent of 10-year-old girls say they have been on a diet — these lapses in adequate insurance coverage for eating disorders should not be taken lightly. And although some states provide comprehensive coverage for mental as well as physical health problems, most have stratified levels of care depending on predefined categories of “mental health problems” — a system that, by some estimates, leads to only one in ten eating disorder patients receiving treatment.

Obamacare mandates that any coverage plan offered under the health law’s new statewide insurance exchanges in 2014 must meet federal benchmarks across ten benefit categories, including essential expansions to prescription drug, maternity care, and mental health services. Unfortunately, eating disorders are a particularly complex medical issue, and Obamacare largely leaves the definition of a required “mental health service” to the discretion of the states and insurance companies.

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NEWS FLASH

Former Prop 8 Advocate Defends Marriage Equality In New Ad | David Blankenhorn of the Institute for American Values was supposed to be the star witness to defend California’s Proposition 8 when it was challenged in court in 2010. Though his intention was to obstruct marriage equality, he admitted on the witness stand that the children of same-sex couples would benefit from their parents marrying. This foreshadowed the change of heart he eventually had earlier this year when he proclaimed that legally recognizing same-sex couples is a “victory for basic fairness.” Now, he has recorded an ad opposing Minnesota’s proposed constitutional ban on same-sex marriage because “there are powerful reasons to believe that we will be a better society if we include gay and lesbian people and their relationships as full and equal parts of society. Watch it:

Climate Progress

Debunking David Brooks’ Sad Green Fairy Tale

By Joe Romm on Oct 19, 2012 at 5:10 pm

In this post, I’ll debunk David Brooks’ error-riddled op-ed, “A Sad Green Story.” His piece is so myth-filled, it would be better termed a fairy tale.

Brooks, of course, is the conservative who wants to be loved by progressives. But for every seemingly mavericky thing he says – “I totally accept the scientific authorities who say that global warming is real and that it is manmade” — is another filled with errors, such as his “Flip-Flop on Green Jobs.”

Today’s piece is so bad, it’s hypocrisy has already been skewered by the Washington Post‘s Ezra Klein, and its litany of false statements have been debunked by the Center for Economic and Policy Research and Media Matters — which I’ll excerpt below.

First though, like every fairy tale, this one begins once upon a time in a land far, far away:

The period around 2003 was the golden spring of green technology. John McCain and Joe Lieberman introduced a bipartisan bill to curb global warming. I got my first ride in a Prius from a conservative foreign policy hawk who said that these new technologies were going to help us end our dependence on Middle Eastern despots. You’d go to Silicon Valley and all the venture capitalists, it seemed, were rushing into clean tech.

Yes, it was a happy time in the Bizarro world, Htrae. But soon, a darkness fell over the land:

From that date on the story begins to get a little sadder.

Al Gore released his movie “An Inconvenient Truth” in 2006. The global warming issue became associated with the highly partisan former vice president. Gore mobilized liberals, but, once he became the global warming spokesman, no Republican could stand shoulder to shoulder with him and survive. Any slim chance of building a bipartisan national consensus was gone.

Then, in 2008, Barack Obama seized upon green technology and decided to make it the centerpiece of his jobs program. During his presidential campaign he promised to create five million green tech jobs. Renewable energy has many virtues, but it is not a jobs program….

This is a story of overreach, misjudgments and disappointment.

You’re crying? I’m so sorry. But don’t worry, kids, this story never happened. It’s just make believe. Look, here, I have the real story. Sure, it also has an unhappy ending, but at least it has the advantage of being true.

You see, there was this couch, and, in an effort sponsored by Al Gore himself, the former Republican Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich sat on it with his Democratic counterpart, Nancy Pelosi, and they both endorsed climate action. You’re crying, again? Oh, I see, yes, he is a giant newt, but his bark is much, much — googolplex much — worse than his bite. Where was I?

Yes, take a look at this chart, it’ll make you feel much, much better … for a while, anyway.

Percent of Americans Who Believe the Effects of Global Warming Have Already Begun to Happen, by Political Ideology, from McCright and Dunlap

Political polarization on climate jumped in 2009 — long after Gore’s 2006 movie.

Many, many Republicans embraced cap-and-trade after the movie and didn’t flip flop on climate until 2009, suggesting again it was something other than Gore’s advocacy to blaim (see Tim Pawlenty: “Every one of us” running for president has flip-flopped on climate change).

Let’s remember that the GOP presidential nominee in 2008 ran on a platform of climate action and cap-and-trade — even his conservative VP, Sarah Palin, endorsed it. That’s a key reason again that you see in the top chart that the liberal-conservative polarization did not accelerate until 2009, when a certain person got elected with overwhelming majorities and the prospect of an actual climate bill became quite real.

Extensive polling data and analysis simply doesn’t support this myth that Gore polarized the debate. Indeed, on the basis of his 2012 peer-reviewed analysis, Dr. Robert Brulle told me,

“I think this should close down forever the idea that Al Gore caused the partisan polarization over climate change.”

I’ve asked many other leading experts on social science and public opinion — including McCright and Dunlap, authors of “The politicization of climate change and polarization in the American public’s views of global warming, 2001–2010″ — and they all agree the data don’t support this myth. Stanford’s Jon Krosnick also agrees there is no data to support it.

It is a fairy tale, and one that people as intermittently smart as David Brooks should stop telling.

Ezra Klein notes that “pricing carbon” is “an idea Brooks supported then and supports now,” and then he skewers Brooks:

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Alyssa

Female Cosplayer Gets Harassed At New York Comic Con By So-Called Journalists

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Oct 19, 2012 at 5:05 pm

Question I'd really like to ask Mandy Caruso: how does she get that demi-mask to stay on?

I had a nice time at New York Comic Con this year, but Mandy Caruso, an illustrator and (clearly very talented) costume designer who was cosplaying as Black Cat at the convention….did not. She’s described some of the unattractive, but still, sadly routine gawking and requests to pose for photographs she experienced. But things apparently got really bad when she was asked by what appeared to be a legitimate media outlet for an interview. This is what happened:

Him: Damn, alright! Well let me ask you an important question then…what is your cup size?
Me: (big talk show smile) That is actually none of your fucking business.
Him: Oh! I think that means to say she’s a C.
Me: I actually have no breasts at all, what you see is just all of the fat from my midsection pulled up to my chest and carefully held in place with this corset. It’s really uncomfortable, I don’t know why I do it.
Him: (to the male crowd) Aw, come on what do you guys think? C cup?
—a few males start to shout out cup sizes as I stand there looking at this guy like this has to be a fucking joke, then look at the crowd and see that no amount of witty banter or fiestiness will stop making this whole thing fucking dumb. It was clearly a ploy to single out cosplaying women to get them to talk sexual innuendos and flirt with this asshole and let him talk down to them simply because they were in costume and were attractive. Whether I’m in a skintight catsuit or not, I’m a fucking professional in everything I do and I don’t need to play nice for this idiot.
Me: This is not an interview, this is degrading. I’m done. (I walk away)
Him: (clearly dumbfounded and surprised) ..Come on, it’s all in good fun!
Me: Being degraded is fun? That was unprofessional and I hope that isn’t your day job because you can’t interview for shit, my man.

Caruso has declined to name the news organization whose staffer did this. But I wish she would. It’s going to take a very long time to shift the culture of fan communities. But at minimum, no respectable conference or event should ever credential this staffer, and the organization that would have seen fit to publish an interview like this. The whole point of a credentials process is to weed out people who intend to provide serious coverage of an event and people who are just abusing a shot at getting free admission to a place where they can ogle women.

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Justice

Voter Registration Firm Employee Working For The Virginia GOP Arrested For Dumping Registrations

By Aviva Shen on Oct 19, 2012 at 4:50 pm

Pennsylvania resident Colin Small was arrested Thursday after he was caught illegally destroying voter registration forms in Virginia. Smalls worked for a firm hired by the Republican Party of Virginia to register voters, but was spotted throwing away 8 voter registration forms in a dumpster on Monday, the deadline for registering to vote in Virginia.

The 31-year-old man was charged with four counts of destruction of voter registration applications, eight counts of failing to disclose voter registration applications and one count of obstruction of justice. Small was spotted by the owner of a store in Harrisonburg, Virginia, who became suspicious when he saw Small’s Pennsylvania license plate.

The Los Angeles Times has the details of the discarded forms:

Three of the voters turned out to be already registered, according to Donald Palmer, secretary of the Virginia State Board of Elections. The other five were not registered, and have since been added to the voter roll. Registration closed on Monday.

In Virginia, and other states, it’s a crime to accept a voter registration form and not turn it in. Small is charged with destroying voter registration applications and obstruction of justice.

“There is no indication this activity was widespread in our jurisdiction,” said a statement from the Rockingham County Sheriff’s Office. The investigation is continuing, the sheriff’s office said.

Small worked for Strategic Allied Consulting, a registration firm now being investigated for submitting fraudulent registration forms in Florida. The Republican National Committee paid more than $3 million to SAC but quickly cut ties once the fraud came to light. As for Small, Virginia Republican Chairman Pat Mullins said he was fired as soon as the allegations surfaced. RNC spokesman Sean Spicer said Small had “made a mistake” and that the RNC “fully supports” the charges against him.

Though this is now the second criminal investigation against voter registration employees hired by the Republican Party, it hasn’t halted the shady registration practices still operating in at least ten states.

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Economy

After Attending Stimulus Funded Ribbon-Cutting Ceremony, Tea Party Rep. Dismisses Stimulus Money

By Scott Keyes on Oct 19, 2012 at 4:45 pm

Rep. Frank Guinta (R-NH)

CONWAY, New Hampshire — Less than a year after attending a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a new stimulus funded infrastructure project in New Hampshire, Rep. Frank Guinta (R-NH) derided the Recovery Act, telling constituents at a debate to ask “if that stimulus helped them.”

The freshman congressman attended and spoke at a dedication of a new airport access road in Manchester last November, despite campaigning against the recovery package in his 2010 congressional campaign. Watch the video here.

However, when Guinta was asked at a debate Thursday how he could oppose the stimulus when it saved the country from a repeat of the Great Depression, he was flippant: “Ask our small business owners right here in the Conway area if the stimulus bill has provided more predictability for them or if it has been more challenging for them”:

MODERATOR: Wouldn’t we have been gambling with a great collapse as occurred during the 30s if we had not passed the stimulus bill?

GUINTA: The 30s and this economy are very, very different, number one. [...] For 43 consecutive months, we have had unemployment in this country over 8 percent. Try talking to somebody in the middle class who’s been looking for a job for more than 6 months, who’s struggling to pay their bills, and ask them if that stimulus helped them. Ask our small business owners right here in the Conway area if the stimulus bill has provided more predictability for them or if it has been more challenging for them.

Watch it:

The Conway area alone received more than $2.2 million in the stimulus, with money going to projects ranging from construction and infrastructure to local school districts. New Hampshire as a whole received more than $986 million to fund more than 1,400 projects.

Guinta has a history of stimulus hypocrisy, decrying the recovery package while at the same time attending ribbon-cutting ceremonies. He was even called a “grandstander” by Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) after he complained as mayor of Manchester that stimulus funds weren’t arriving quickly enough.

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Health

Abortion-Related Election Ads Spiked In October

By Rebecca Leber on Oct 19, 2012 at 4:30 pm

Campaign ads on abortion, contraception, and Planned Parenthood have spiked in the last month, from abortion-related ads running in just 14 races in September to more than 1,500 mentions of abortion in 50 races in the last week, according to data from Kantar Media CMAG. Eleven new ads on abortion aired in House and governor races on Wednesday alone.

The chart from CMAG shows how much ads containing mentions of abortion, contraception, and Planned Parenthood have proliferated recently:

Independent groups are running a number of ads targeting abortion issues as well. A ThinkProgress analysis of CMAG data found that conservative groups — such as Women Speak Out, Susan B. Anthony’s List, CatholicVote.org, and Campaign for American Values — dropped at least $300,000 on anti-abortion ads between October 9 and October 15.

Susan B. Anthony List’s new super PAC Women Speak Out ran at least $129,000 worth of misleading ads since October 9 that feature an alleged “abortion survivor” and singles out health care reform. Other ads revive the criticism that the Affordable Care Act’s birth control provision violates Americans’ religious freedom, even though the law provides accommodations for religious organizations. The Hyde Amendment also significantly limits when federal funds can be used to pay for abortion services, and health care reform maintained the existing restrictions.

According to a recent USA Today/Gallup poll, abortion is the most salient election issue for almost 40 percent of women.

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LGBT

Anti-Gay Strategist Admits Same-Sex Couples ‘Having Children, By Itself, Is Not A Reason To Redefine Marriage’

By Zack Ford on Oct 19, 2012 at 4:26 pm

Frank Schubert

Frank Schubert is the media guru behind all four anti-marriage equality campaigns currently underway, and despite the myths his ads regularly reinforce, he doesn’t believe he’s causing that much harm. In an interview with Michelangelo Signorile, he proved that he can’t even justify that arguments that he makes in his ads, demonstrating that he is motivated more by anti-gay animus and heterosexual supremacy than any real concern for “marriage.”

Toward the end of the segment, Signorile cornered Schubert about why he isn’t campaigning against same-sex adoption instead of marriage. Since the most prominent theme of his efforts are the supposed threat posed to children by same-sex marriage (like in the infamous Proposition 8 “Princess” ad), it doesn’t make sense that he would be opposing marriage in Maine, for example, instead of Maine’s two-parent adoption laws. The exchange (abridged below) shows how little substance anti-equality arguments actually have:

SCHUBERT: I will say that the issue here is not about adoption or whether gay couples love their children or should be able to have children. They have that right. I’m not objecting to it. What I’m objecting to is redefining marriage to accommodate that desire. [...]

SIGNORILE: You keep arguing that children do best in a heterosexual marriage…

SCHUBERT: This is not a controversial statement… I’m saying children do better with a mother and a father…

SIGNORILE: But you have a sister with children — who is a lesbian — and you should be trying to stop her from having children then.

SCHUBERT: I’m not! That’s ridiculous. You’re making a silly argument. Having children, by itself, is not a reason to redefine marriage. It’s just that simple.

Listen to Signorile’s full interview with Schubert:

Reflecting on the interview, Signorile observes that Schubert’s motivation doesn’t seem to be the issue of marriage itself:

But why isn’t he on that crusade if he truly believes that children do better in heterosexual households, as his campaign rhetoric claims? The only answer is that his money is coming from the folks trying to ban gay marriage, not from those trying to ban gay adoption. And that’s what it seems to be all about for Schubert: money.

In fact, a report released today from the Human Rights Campaign shows that Schubert has netted nearly $3 million for his work with the National Organization for Marriage on the campaigns in Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, and Washington, plus almost another $1 million for his work in North Carolina earlier this year. He seems prepared to polish whatever message will keep the money flowing, but it’s clear from this interview that there’s no weight to the foreboding threats made in the ads he produces.

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