How Access To Food Stamps Leads To Better Health And Economic Outcomes

By Travis Waldron on Nov 28, 2012 at 6:15 pm

Children who have access to the federal food stamp program — now known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) — in the earliest years of their lives have better health and economic outcomes later in life depending on their gender, according to a new academic study of the government safety net by professors Hilary Hoynes, Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach, and Douglas Almond.

Across genders, children whose mothers had access to food stamps during pregnancy and in their earliest years were less likely to have long-term health problems like diabetes, obesity, and high blood pressure in adulthood. Women who had similar access, meanwhile, are more likely to become economically self-sufficient as adults, the study found:

We find that access to food stamps in utero and in early childhood leads to significant reductions in metabolic syndrome conditions (obesity, high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes) in adulthood and, for women, increases in economic self-sufficiency (increases in educational attainment, earnings, income, and decreases in welfare participation).

Because nutrition is especially important for long-term development early in life, the positive effects of food stamps are especially strong for children who benefit from the program before birth and up to the age of five. The long-term developmental effects begin to subside after that age, though there are still obvious positive nutritional effects for children who remain on the program after that.

The food stamp program is especially vital in times of economic downturn or famine, the researchers wrote, since children can be exposed to lower food levels that jeopardize future development. Food stamp enrollment in the United States grew to 15 million households in 2011, according to government figures released Wednesday. The program’s growth during and after the Great Recession has come under the scrutiny of budget-cutters in Congress, even as it helps keep millions of Americans out of poverty each year.

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NEWS FLASH

Former Israeli Prime Minister Endorses Palestinian U.N. Bid | Israel’s former leader, Ehud Olmert, today endorsed the Palestinian campaign for being recognized as a “non-member observer state” by the United Nations General Assembly. Olmert told Bernard Avishai, an Israeli writer and contributor to the Daily Beast’s Open Zion blog, that “I believe that the Palestinian request from the United Nations is congruent with the basic concept of the two-state solution…It is time to give a hand to, and encourage, the moderate forces amongst the Palestinians. Abu-Mazen and Salam Fayyad [Palestinian National Authority President and Prime Minister, respectively] need our help. It’s time to give it.”

Health

Mounting Evidence Shows Possible Link Between Air Pollution And Autism

By Rebecca Leber on Nov 28, 2012 at 5:30 pm

A new study from University of Southern California researchers finds that children exposed to more air pollution had higher rates of autism. Though there is no conclusive answer about whether pollution can cause autism, the lead author says “it may be a risk factor for autism. Autism is a complex disorder and it’s likely there are many factors contributing.”

Studying 500 children California cities, the researchers found those likely exposed to the most pollution — estimated based on traffic, vehicle emissions, wind patterns, and regional data — are two to three times more likely to be diagnosed with the disorder. Some children may be more susceptible because of genetics.

TIME describes the growing body of research that links autism to pollution:

Even so, the latest study findings suggest that air pollution may be one of the best characterized environmental risk factors for autism. In an earlier study published in 2010, Volk and colleagues showed that kids with autism were much more likely than kids without the disorder to have been born to mothers living within 1,000 feet of a freeway. Other researchers have shown that kids with autism are also unusually likely to have exposure to high levels of diesel exhaust particles and metals (mercury, cadmium, and nickel) and to other air-pollutant chemicals, such as those used to make rubber, plastics, and dyes.

These associations continued to remain strong even after researchers adjusted for other characteristics, like poverty, that may also be connected to pollution. Unlike asthma, for example, autism rates are not consistently higher among lower income populations. In Volk’s study, the links between air pollution and autism risk were virtually unchanged after accounting for parents’ race and ethnicity, educational attainment, and smoking status, as well as for the area’s population density.

Some questions do remain, such as why autism diagnoses have increased since 2006 to 1 in 88 children without any major changes in pollution. Although scientists need to further examine that link, outdoor pollutants are already a known trigger in asthma, which has also become more common in recent years.

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NEWS FLASH

Teacher Reprimanded After Writing ‘You Can’t Be A Democrat & Go To Heaven’ On Chalkboard | Karen Baker, a Kentucky high school teacher, apologized to her class after being reprimanded by the school district for writing, “You can’t be a Democrat & go to Heaven,” on a board in her classroom a week after voters re-elected President Obama. The district superindent said Baker wrote the statement after hearing a student say it. Mary Gilbert, whose 17-year-old daughter was in Baker’s class, filed a complaint against Baker with the state Education Professional Standards Board; she said the written comment came after Baker had also spoken against marriage equality and Obama.

LGBT

Current TV Hosts Apologize For Supporting Salvation Army

By Zack Ford on Nov 28, 2012 at 4:37 pm

Yesterday, Current TV host Stephanie Miller allowed Salvation Army Major George Hood to claim his church organization is not anti-gay, though its record clearly demonstrates otherwise. Miller and Current TV colleague Bill Press had also launched a competition to raise money for the Salvation Army over the holiday season. In a written statement as well as on her show today, she has apologized for not thoroughly researching the organization’s anti-gay record and also ended the fundraiser, donating matching funds for what had already been collected to The Trevor Project:

Where I screwed up was in not doing more research about the Salvation Army’s long and checkered history involving LGBTQ people and our issues. I sincerely apologize for that.

When I returned from the Thanksgiving holiday, I learned a lot more — much of of it from friends like John Aravosis at America Blog and Michelangelo Signorile at Sirius OutQ — and I decided that, effective immediately, Talking Liberally and The Stephanie Miller Show would no longer be a part of the Salvation Army’s Online Red Kettle Campaign.

Please understand that I do believe the Salvation Army does much good work in the world and I also believe in redemption. I sincerely hope they will change their mission statement and policies regarding the LGBTQ community and I am very willing to continue that dialogue with them.

Through yesterday, your generosity has raised $1,150 for the Salvation Army in the Stephanie Miller Red Kettle.

I am now going to personally match that amount with a donation to the Trevor Project, whose work and mission I can endorse without any reservation. The Trevor Project provides crisis intervention and suicide prevention services to LGBTQ youth.

Listen to the clip from today’s show in which Miller explains that Hood was not telling the truth Tuesday:

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Justice

Federal Court: Tobacco Companies ‘Deliberately Deceived the American Public’ About The Dangers Of Smoking

By Ian Millhiser on Nov 28, 2012 at 4:20 pm

Six years ago, a federal district court determined that tobacco companies “‘knew there was a consensus in the scientific community that smoking caused lung cancer and other diseases’ by at least January 1964,” and that they nonetheless engaged in a campaign to “mislead the public about the health consequences of smoking.” In that 2006 order, the court indicated that the tobacco industry would be required to publish several “corrective statements” explaining the truth to the public.

Half a dozen years and three trips to the court of appeals later, the district court finally issued an order yesterday laying out the corrective statements the tobacco companies are required to publish. The statements consist of five sets of bullet points, each presaged by a statement that “A Federal Court has ruled that the Defendant tobacco companies deliberately deceived the American public . . . and has ordered those companies to make this statement. Here is the truth[.]” The bullet points include a long list of statements outlining dangers of smoking that, for years, the tobacco industry tried to cover up:

Smoking kills, on average, 1200 Americans. Every day.
Secondhand smoke kills over 3,000 Americans each year.
More people die every year from smoking than from murder, AIDS, suicide, drugs, car crashes, and alcohol, combined.
Smoking causes heart disease, emphysema, acute myeloid leukemia, and cancer of the mouth, esophagus, larynx, lung, stomach, kidney, bladder, and pancreas.
Smoking also causes reduced fertility, low birth weight in newborns, and cancer of the cervix and uterus.
Defendant tobacco companies intentionally designed cigarettes to make them more addictive.
Cigarette companies control the impact and delivery of nicotine in many ways, including designing filters and selecting cigarette paper to maximize the ingestion of nicotine, adding ammonia to make the cigarette taste less harsh, and controlling the physical and chemical make-up of the tobacco blend.
When you smoke, the nicotine actually changes the brain – that’s why quitting is so hard.

Under the court’s order, these statements will be “published in newspapers and disseminated ‘through television, advertisements, onserts, in retail displays, and on [tobacco companies'] corporate websites.’” The order will appeal to the severely conservative United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, a court that includes two judges that recently suggested all labor, business or Wall Street regulation is constitutionally suspect, so there is no small amount of risk that the tobacco companies will escape having to comply with yesterday’s order. The court of appeals previously affirmed the district court’s approach to this case, however, so a tobacco industry victory is less likely than the D.C. Circuit’s pro-corporate record might suggest.

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Economy

GOP Senator’s Crazy Reasoning: Raising Taxes On The Rich Would Hit The Poor ‘The Hardest’

By Scott Keyes on Nov 28, 2012 at 4:15 pm

Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT)

Cloaking his predilection for the rich as concern for the less fortunate, Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) argued Wednesday that raising taxes on the wealthy would primarily hurt the poor. Lee’s comments came on former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee’s (R) radio show as the two discussed the looming fiscal showdown in Congress.

“The reason we worry about raising taxes on anyone – even raising taxes on the rich,” Lee argued, is “that will hit the poorest among us the hardest.” Lest listeners get the wrong idea, the Utah Senator insisted, “it’s not that we’re looking out for the rich.”

LEE: People need to understand that the reason we worry about raising taxes on anyone – even raising taxes on the rich – it’s not that we’re looking out for the rich, it’s not that we’re concerned that the rich won’t be able to fend for themselves, because they will. It’s because we worry about the consequences that will inevitably result from that action and that will hit the poorest among us the hardest.

This prospect, frequently repeated by conservatives, that raising taxes on the wealthy will decimate the economy and destroy job creation (and thus hurt the poor) is simply not supported by empirical evidence. As these three graphs show, the nation’s best GDP growth and job creation rate in the last 60 years actually occurred when the top marginal income tax rate was between 75 and 80 percent. The worst period for both measurements occurred when the top rate was 35 percent, as it stands today. In fact, job growth and gross domestic product has little, if any, correlation to the tax rate on wealthy Americans.

Of course, Lee’s compassion for the poor does not extend to the actual government services that provide a safety net for those less fortunate. He voted for the House Republican budget that slashes low-income programs in order to finance the very tax breaks he supports. Lee also authored the Cut, Cap, and Balance constitutional amendment, a proposal so extreme that not even the GOP budget would go far enough in its cuts to be considered legal.

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Health

Mississippi’s Only Abortion Clinic Could Be Forced To Close In January

By Amanda Peterson Beadle on Nov 28, 2012 at 4:15 pm

Mississippi's Jackson Women's Health Organization

Jackson Women’s Health Organization — the only abortion clinic in the entire state of Mississippi — has been fighting to remain open after Republican legislators, aiming to force the clinic to close, passed a restrictive regulation requiring its doctors to secure hospital admitting privileges. A Bush-appointed federal judge temporarily blocked the measure in July to give the clinic’s doctors more time to apply for privileges at area hospitals, but that order expires in early January. And so far, all seven hospitals in the area have denied privileges to the doctors.

The Center for Reproductive Rights filed a motion Wednesday asking a judge to stop the law from being implemented — and forcing the clinic to stop providing abortion care — before January 6, 2013. If it closes, women in Mississippi will no longer have access to abortion in the state:

“This unconstitutional law has essentially handed over the fate of Mississippi women’s reproductive health care to hospital administrators,” said Michelle Movahed, staff attorney at the Center [for Reproductive Rights].

Betty Thompson, a spokesperson for the Jackson Women’s Health Organization, told The Huffington Post that the clinic’s staffers are “on pins and needles” waiting for the court’s decision. She said the clinic served about 2,000 patients in 2011 and that the majority of its clients are low-income and teenage women. The next nearest clinic for Mississippi residents is approximately three hours away and over the state line, and most neighboring states require women to make a second visit to the abortion clinic after a 24-hour waiting period in order to receive services.

“Mississippi women have the same constitutional rights as any other women in the United States,” said Nancy Northup, president and CEO at the Center for Reproductive Rights. “They deserve far better than to be forced to travel hundreds of miles to another state to get a safe, legal medical procedure.”

Hospitals reportedly denied privileges to clinic doctors because the fact that they provide abortion services “is inconsistent with this Hospital’s policies and practices as concerns abortion and, in particular, elective abortions.” Mississippi has the highest teen pregnancy rate in the nation, as well as the lowest abortion rate.

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Climate Progress

Study: Sea Levels Rising 60% Faster Than Projected, Planet Keeps Warming As Expected

By Joe Romm on Nov 28, 2012 at 4:14 pm

A new study, “Comparing climate projections to observations up to 2011,” confirms that climate change is happening as fast — and in some cases faster — than climate models had projected. The news release explains:

The rate of sea-level rise in the past decades is greater than projected by the latest assessments of the IPCC, while global temperature increases in good agreement with its best estimates. This is shown by a study now published in the journal Environmental Research Letters. Stefan Rahmstorf from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) and his colleagues compare climate projections to actual observations from 1990 up to 2011. That sea level is rising faster than expected could mean that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) sea-level rise projections for the future may be biased low as well, their results suggest.

As Dr. Rahmstorf notes, “the new findings highlight that the IPCC is far from being alarmist and in fact in some cases rather underestimates possible risks.”

The oceans are rising 60 per cent faster than the IPCC’s latest best estimates, according to the new research. The researchers compared those estimates to satellite data of observed sea-level rise. ” Satellites have a much better coverage of the globe than tide gauges and are able to measure much more accurately by using radar waves and their reflection from the sea surface,” explains Anny Cazenave from LEGOS. While the IPCC projected sea-level rise to be at a rate of 2 mm per year, satellite data recorded a rate of 3.2 mm per year.

Figure: Sea level measured by satellite altimeter (red with linear trend line) … and reconstructed from tide gauges (orange, monthly data from Church and White (2011))…. The scenarios of the IPCC are shown in blue (third assessment) and green (fourth assessment); the former have been published starting in the year 1990 and the latter from 2000.

The release notes, “The increased rate of sea-level rise is unlikely to be caused by a temporary episode of ice discharge from the ice sheets in Greenland or Antarctica or other internal variabilities in the climate system, according to the study, because it correlates very well with the increase in global temperature.”

As sea level rises, storm surges worsen, coastal populations are put at risk, and salt water infiltrates rich deltas. For more on likely future sea level rise, see “New Studies on Sea Level Rise Make Clear We Must Act Now” and “JPL bombshell: Polar ice sheet mass loss is speeding up, on pace for 1 foot sea level rise by 2050.”

On the subject of global warming, the release explains:

“Global temperature continues to rise at the rate that was projected in the last two IPCC Reports. This shows again that global warming has not slowed down or is lagging behind the projections,” Rahmstorf says. Five global land and ocean temperature series were averaged and compared to IPCC projections by the scientists from Potsdam, the Laboratoire d’Etudes en Géophysique et Océanographie Spatiales (LEGOS) in France and the US based Tempo Analytics. To allow for a more accurate comparison with projections, the scientists accounted for short-term temperature variations due to El Niño events, solar variability and volcanic eruptions. The results confirm that global warming, which was predicted by scientists in the 1960s and 1970s as a consequence of increasing greenhouse concentrations, continues unabated at a rate of 0.16 °C per decade and follows IPCC projections closely.

Figure. Observed annual global temperature, unadjusted (pink) and adjusted for short-term variations due to solar variability, volcanoes and ENSO (red) as in Foster and Rahmstorf (2011). 12-months running averages are shown as well as linear trend lines, and compared to the scenarios of the IPCC (blue range and lines from the third assessment, green from the fourth assessment report). Projections are aligned in the graph so that they start (in 1990 and 2000, respectively) on the linear trend line of the (adjusted) observational data.

For more on the 2011 study, see “Study of ‘True Global Warming Signal’ Finds ‘Remarkably Steady’ Rate of Manmade Warming Since 1979.

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Climate Progress

Faith In Values: Are We Finally Nearing The Tipping Point On Climate Change?

By Climate Guest Blogger on Nov 28, 2012 at 4:07 pm

James Balog/AP

by Sally Steenland

For several years now, increased pollution from greenhouse gases in the atmosphere has been fueling extreme weather across the globe. Droughts, floods, wildfires, hurricanes, tornadoes, blizzards, and heat waves: Our planet’s weather report is starting to sound like the biblical plagues.

Last month was the 331st month in a row where temperatures rose above the 20th century average. Just this year, the United States suffered “two record heat waves, a record drought, [and] an above-average fire season.”

Then, just before Halloween this year, Hurricane Sandy roared up the East Coast and battered parts of the Midwest. With its ferocious winds and hammering rains, Sandy knocked out power, flooded homes and businesses, triggered fires, tore down trees, and devastated neighborhoods. More than 100 people died. Sandy is estimated to cost around $50 billion in damages Just one week after Sandy hit, another storm ravaged the East Coast—only this time it was a blizzard that inflicted even more damage on the communities ravaged by the hurricane and further hampered efforts to restore power and rebuild homes and businesses.

Concerns about climate change and global warming used to be a bipartisan affair. Republican Sens. John McCain (R-AZ) and Lindsay Graham (R-SC) previously supported a tax on greenhouse gases—known as cap and trade—as did many Democratic lawmakers. Even 2012 Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney took global warming seriously and supported cap-and-trade policies when he was governor of Massachusetts.

So what happened?

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