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Confirmation Of Climate Hawk Kerry As Secretary Of State May Doom Dirty Keystone XL Pipeline

By Joe Romm on Jan 29, 2013 at 7:46 pm

The Senate confirmed John Kerry as a Secretary of State by a vote of 94 to 3. I believe this is a turning point in the fight to stop the Keystone XL pipeline.

Once again, I do not think that a man who had dedicated his Senate career to fighting catastrophic climate change would start his term as Secretary approving the expansion of one of the dirtiest sources of fossil fuels in the world.

Keystone is a gateway to a huge pool of carbon-intensive fuel most of which must be left in the ground — along with most of the world’s coal and unconventional oil and gas – if humanity is to avoid multiple devastating impacts that may be beyond adaptation.

How precisely could Kerry lobby other countries to join an international climate treaty — perhaps his primary goal as Secretary — after enabling the accelerated exploitation of the tar sands? Yes, you can say that the United States already has no standing to cajole other countries into climate commitments when we’ve expanded oil and gas drilling as well as coal exports. But none of those were Kerry’s decision, whereas Keystone is.

Kerry starts as Secretary of State with a clean slate. But approving Keystone would be like dipping that slate into the dirtiest, stickiest tar imaginable — it could never be cleaned again. Certainly the three Senators from Big Oil who voted against him – Ted Cruz (R-TX), John Cornyn (R-TX), and James Inhofe (R-OK) — must think he isn’t going to be the friend to Texas Tea.

Here is what Kerry said on the subject of climate change in his confirmation hearing:

The solution to climate change is energy policy. And, the opportunities of energy policy so vastly outweigh the downsides that you’re expressing concerns about … You want to do business and do it well in America, you have to get into the energy race … I would respectfully say to you that climate change is not something to be feared in response to—the steps to respond to—it’s to be feared if we don’t … I will be a passionate advocate on this not based on ideology but based on facts and science, and I hope to sit with all of you and convince you that this $6 trillion market is worth millions of American jobs and we better go after it.

I simply don’t think this climate hawk will recommend that Keystone be approved.

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Justice

Justice Scalia: The Constitution Is ‘Dead, Dead, Dead’

By Nicole Flatow on Jan 29, 2013 at 5:50 pm

Justice Antonin Scalia

Justice Antonin Scalia

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia is well known for ardently opposing the view that the Constitution is a “living document,” meaning its text should be interpreted in light of modern societal conditions. Reinforcing the extremity of his own view, Scalia accurately identified just what the opposite of a living document is during remarks at Southern Methodist University, disparaging children who come to the court and refer to the Constitution as “living”:

It’s not a living document. It’s dead, dead, dead.

Scalia has made similar comments before. In 2006, he said “you would have to be an idiot” to believe the Constitution is alive, and in 2008, he told NPR, “Let’s cut it out. Let’s go back to the good old dead Constitution.” In fact, given reports of similar comments just this past December at Princeton, his “the Constitution is dead” refrain seems to now be a standard part of his book tour. While there are reasonable interpretations of the Constitution that are defined as something other than “living,” Scalia’s extreme suggestion that the Constitution is “dead” reflects how ill-equipped his own brand of originalism is to address problems that are quite alive and well. But on this occasion, Scalia seemed to have realized the absurdity of his own claim, backtracking later in the event to say that “dead” was not a good description after all. “It’s an enduring document, not a dead one,” he said.

Economy

How Big American Corporations Dodge Taxes By Claiming Huge Profits In Tiny Countries

By Travis Waldron on Jan 29, 2013 at 5:35 pm

American corporations avoid millions of dollars in taxes each year by reporting that large shares of their income are earned in five popular tax havens, even though small segments of their workforce and investment take place in those countries, according to data from the Congressional Research Service.

The report analyzed five countries — Switzerland, Ireland, the Netherlands, Bermuda, and Luxembourg — that serve as popular tax havens, compared with five countries — Canada, Germany, the United Kingdom, Australia and Mexico — where American companies typically do large shares of their business. What it found, as Citizens for Tax Justice highlighted, is that even though large shares of their workforces and investment concentrated in the “traditional economies,” large shares of their profits were reported in the five tax havens:

In 2008, American multinational companies reported earning 43 percent of their $940 billion in overseas profits in the five little tax-haven countries, even though only four percent of their foreign workforce and seven percent of their foreign investments were in these countries.

In contrast, the five “traditional economies,” where American companies had 40 percent of their foreign workers and 34 percent of their foreign investments, accounted for only 14 percent of American multinationals’ reported overseas’ profits.

American companies have become experts at routing profits overseas, with companies like Apple and Microsoft avoiding billions of dollars in taxes each year. The problem has gotten particularly bad in the last decade, as this chart from the report shows:

At the same time, many business leaders are advocating for a particular corporate tax reform, known as the territorial tax system, that would make it even easier to route profits overseas and avoid American taxes.

Health

South Dakota Bill Would Exclude Weekends And Holidays From 72-Hour Abortion Waiting Period

By Tara Culp-Ressler on Jan 29, 2013 at 5:30 pm

South Dakota Republicans aren’t satisfied with imposing one of the nation’s longest waiting periods for women seeking abortions. As RH Reality Check reports, the state legislature will also consider a bill that would adopt a “business hours only” definition for its waiting period: while women wait the state-mandated three days before getting an abortion, weekends and holidays won’t count toward fulfilling that quota.

South Dakota’s extreme waiting period was enacted in 2011 and has been tied up in court for the past year — but since Planned Parenthood recently decided to drop the case in order to focus their resources on more pressing attacks to women’s health in the region, it may soon take effect. But on top of the restrictive law itself, RH Reality Check points out that a new bill seeks to further clarify the strict parameters of the 72-hour waiting period:

No surgical or medical abortion may be scheduled except by a licensed physician and only after the physician physically and personally meets with the pregnant mother, consults with her, and performs an assessment of her medical and personal circumstances. [...] No Saturday, Sunday, federal holiday, or state holiday may be included or counted in the calculation of the seventy-two hour minimum time period between the initial physician consultation and assessment and the time of the scheduled abortion procedure. No physician may have the pregnant mother sign a consent for the abortion on the day of this initial consultation.

Mandatory counseling sessions and waiting periods are simply methods of limiting women’s reproductive rights, and they don’t actually help women decide whether or not to have an abortion. Women can make up their own minds, and studies show that nearly 90 percent of the women seeking an abortion already feel very confident about their decision when they first approach their doctors. Unnecessary roadblocks that attempt to shame them out of having the voluntary medical procedure don’t actually work, and simply end up creating outsized barriers for low-income women who may not be able to make multiple trips to a health clinic.

Excluding weekends and holidays from South Dakota’s unnecessary waiting period puts an even bigger burden on women seeking reproductive care, and there’s no good justification for it. RH Reality Check notes that no other state with this restrictive policy defines their waiting period in this way.

Justice

Michigan Governor Backs Off ‘Unfair’ Electoral Rigging Plan: ‘I Don’t Think This Is The Right Time’

By Scott Keyes on Jan 29, 2013 at 5:10 pm

Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder (R)

The prospects of a proposal to rig Michigan’s electoral votes in favor of Republicans took a nosedive on Tuesday as Gov. Rick Snyder (R) came out against the plan this year.

Snyder had previously been considering the plan to shift Michigan’s presidential system from a winner-take-all system to divvying electoral votes by congressional district.

However, in an interview with Bloomberg, Snyder backed off, saying he was “very skeptical” of the idea, noting it would “change the playing field so it’s an unfair advantage.” He finished by saying, “I don’t think this is the appropriate time to look at it.”

HUNT: There is a move in your state by some Republican legislators to change the presidential electoral system from a winner-take-all to doing it by congressional districts. If that happened last November, Barack Obama–who carried this state by a huge margin, almost double-digits–would have won only 4 of the 14 congressional districts. It would tilt the tables tremendously in the Republicans’ favor. You have said you wanted to look at it, let’s see what it is. Gov. McDonnell of Virginia, Haley Barbour and others have said it’s a bad idea. Are you still neutral or are you becoming convinced it’s a bad idea?

SNYDER: I’m very skeptical of the idea and the timeframe that would be done, because I really view it as a question of you don’t want to change the playing field so it’s an unfair advantage to someone. A lot of ways, we want to make sure we’re reflecting the vote of the people, and this could challenge that. So in many respects, the right time to do it is if people are looking as, we should do it before census is taken and before redistricting takes place and it should be a bipartisan effort.

HUNT: So if you do it, you do it much later.

SNYDER: Yeah. I don’t think this is the appropriate time to look at it.

Watch it:

State Senate Majority Leader Randy Richardville (R) also cast doubt on the proposal Tuesday, saying of the current system, “I don’t know that it’s broken, so I don’t know that I want to fix it.” The state’s House Speaker, Jase Bolger (R), supports the plan.

This is potentially a major victory for opponents of the electoral rigging plan. In addition to holding the governorship, Republicans currently enjoy an 8-seat majority in the State House and a 15-seat majority in the State Senate.

Justice

BREAKING: Virginia Senate Committee Overwhelmingly Kills Electoral Vote Rigging Scheme

By Josh Israel on Jan 29, 2013 at 4:52 pm

Virginia State Senator Charles "Bill" Carrico Sr. (R)

Virginia State Senator Charles "Bill" Carrico Sr. (R)

ProgressVirginia reported Tuesday afternoon that the Virginia Senate’s Privileges and Elections Committee killed Sen. Charles “Bill” Carrico Sr.’s electoral college-rigging bill, despite an offer by Carrico to amend the bill to award electors in proportion to the state’s popular vote. The vote was 11-4 against the bill, although it will not be official until the close of the committee meeting.

The bill, as written, would have awarded 11 of Virginia’s 13 electoral votes to the winner of each of the state’s 11 heavily gerrymandered Congressional Districts. The remaining two electors would have been awarded to whoever won the majority of Congressional Districts. Under this scheme, Mitt Romney would have received 9 Virginia electors to Obama’s 4, even though Barack Obama won the state by four points.

Update

All seven committee Democrats voted to “pass by indefinitely” (kill the bill) as did Republican Senators Mark Obenshain, Ralph Smith, Jill Holtzman Vogel, and Jeff McWaters. Four Republicans (Sens. Stephen Martin, Bryce Reeves, Tom Garrett, and the patron Bill Carrico) supported the scheme.

Alyssa

Why Television Can’t Let The National Football League Die

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Jan 29, 2013 at 4:46 pm

Yesterday, Travis reported on Baltimore Ravens safety Bernard Pollard’s prediction that in 30 years, the National Football League will die because making necessary changes to improve the safety of the game will produce a sport that no one wants to watch. I think both that scenario and the one that Travis himself lays out are not unrealistic. But it’s also worth remembering that the NFL’s life or death won’t happen in a closed surgical theater. There are people other than the players and owners, and in college, the athletics programs and fundraising departments, with a vested interest in keeping football alive and immensely popular.

Significant among those interests? Broadcast television and ESPN. In the week leading up to the Super Bowl, the League is touting the performance of football on television. 55 percent of the television broadcasts since September 1, 2010, that averaged at least 20 million viewers were of NFL football games, or 135 out of 247 broadcasts. The next-closest program? American Idol, with 39 broadcasts, followed by the London Olympics, with 18. The first scripted program on the list is NCIS, with 11 broadcasts that hit 20 million. There’s no wonder broadcast nets pay big for the games they air: Sunday Night Football is part of what’s helped NBC rebound from fourth place to first in the ratings.

Some of that’s an indication of the increasing weakness of broadcast television, which has had a tremendously difficult time launching scripted programming that finds an audience anywhere near that large, and which has seen the numbers on big reality programs, like Idol and Dancing With The Stars decline. But that weakness means the value of football is two-fold. Football broadcasts prop up television’s advertising revenue model. And they provide a potential launching platform for new programming. That’s one of the reasons the Super Bowl rotates from network to network every year: it’s such a critically important platform for showcasing existing programming to one of the largest audiences that assembles in front of the television anymore.

And that’s just on broadcast: football’s even more important to both cable networks and the cable business model. People who oppose cable bundling frequently complain about the price of sports channels, but access to lots and lots of football is one of the reasons sports make cable seem like a good deal for the more than 100 million American households who subscribe to it. The death of football through formal dismantlement or a rising disinterest and distaste would make bundled cable television seem less valuable.

Television, in other words, badly needs the NFL to stay healthy. What that means the industry can, and will, do remains an open question. But football and television’s futures are deeply intertwined, and at a time when the content television is creating for itself is having trouble finding an audience, those ties are tighter than ever.

LGBT

POLL: Majority In Hawaii Support Marriage Equality

By Zack Ford on Jan 29, 2013 at 4:39 pm

A new poll from Equality Hawai’i shows that a majority of Hawai’i voters favor marriage equality, with 55 percent in support and only 37 percent opposed. Among voters under 35 years of age, support soars to 64-32, though even voters over the age of 50 support the change 53-38. Marriage equality bills were introduced in both chamber’s of Hawai’i's legislature last week.

Security

Senate Approves John Kerry As Secretary of State

By Hayes Brown on Jan 29, 2013 at 4:29 pm

The Senate this afternoon overwhelmingly voted in favor of approving John Kerry’s nomination to become Secretary of State, with only three Senators — Ted Cruz (R-TX), John Cornyn (R-TX), and James Inhofe (R-OK) — voting against their colleague. Earlier today, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee moved forward Kerry to the full Senate unanimously, reflecting the relative ease that Kerry has had in ascending to Obama’s second term cabinet.

Kerry has spent the last twenty-eight years in the Senate representing Massachusetts, all of them serving on the Foreign Relations committee, the last four as Chairman. The closeness in foreign policy vision that he shares with the Obama administration made Kerry one of the most likely choices to take the reins of State for the next four years. The ties between the two during Kerry’s chairman ship was close enough that former Sen. Gary Hart once called Kerry effectively “the congressional secretary of state.”

Kerry is the first of the President’s nominees to be confirmed following his inaugural. Kerry and current Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have been speaking “almost daily” to prepare him to move into the 7th floor office in Foggy Bottom. Secretary Clinton will be stepping down following her last day on the job, Friday, Feb. 1.

Starting then, Kerry will have a full diplomatic plate, including pending negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program, managing a rising China, limiting fallout from the Arab Spring in the Middle East, and advancing international action on climate change. In meeting these challenges, Kerry will find himself working closely with his replacement as Chairman on the Foreign Relations Committee, Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ).

Kerry’s pending resignation of his Senate seat will prompt a decision among the people of Massachusetts regarding his successor. Retired Congressman Barney Frank (D-MA) has made no secret of his desire to be named as interim Senator by Gov. Deval Patrick (D). No matter who temporarily fills the seat, a special election will be held in June, following an April primary. Former Sen. Scott Brown is thought to be the most likely Republican candidate, while Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) has received the support of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and other key Massachusetts Democrats.

Education

Average Student Debt Has Ballooned 58 Percent In The Last Seven Years

By Pat Garofalo on Jan 29, 2013 at 4:20 pm

A new report from the analysis firm Fair Isaac Corp. provides one more piece of evidence confirming that student debt is out of control. According to the report, average student debt grew 58 percent between 2005 and 2012, leaving students buried under more than $27,000 each. Delinquencies, of course, rose along with the debt load:

The delinquency rate today on student loans that were originated from 2005-2007 is 12.4 percent. The comparable figure for student loans that were originated from 2010-2012 is 15.1 percent, representing an increase in the delinquency rate by nearly 22 percent.

While the delinquency rate is climbing, the average amount of student loan debt is increasing even faster. In 2005, the average U.S. student loan debt was $17,233. By 2012, it had ballooned to more than $27,253 – an increase of 58 percent in seven years. By contrast, the average credit card balance and the average balance on car loans owed by U.S. consumers actually decreased during the same period.

“This situation is simply unsustainable and we’re already suffering the consequences,” said Andrew Jennings, chief analytics officer of Fair Issac. “When wage growth is slow and jobs are not as plentiful as they once were, it is impossible for individuals to continue taking out ever-larger student loans without greatly increasing the risk of default.” This chart shows how student loan debt has outpaced other forms of debt:

“Our evaluation of credit risk patterns also reveals that high levels of student loan debt are now riskier than before,” the report said. (HT: Zero Hedge)

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