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Health

States With The Highest Teen Pregnancy Rates Lack Adequate Sex Ed Requirements

By Rebecca Leber and Adam Peck on Mar 1, 2013 at 5:00 pm

Teen pregnancies have fallen to record lows. But according to a new report from Guttmacher Institute that breaks out data by each state, the decline is uneven across the country. New Mexico had the highest teen pregnancy rate in the nation in 2008 (the latest available data), followed by Mississippi, Texas, Nevada, Arkansas, and Arizona:

These states have something in common: They have poor sexual education in schools, and consequently tend to have lower rate of contraception use among teens.

New Mexico, the state that tops the list, has sex and HIV education in public schools. However, the sexual health information is not required to be medically accurate, according to the Guttmacher Institute. Wonkblog’s Sarah Kliff points out that contraceptive use is lower for New Mexico high school students too, at 60.5 percent compared to 75 percent nationally. Other states with higher teen pregnancy — Arizona, Texas, and Arkansas — do not require sex ed at all, and if it is taught, schools are required to stress abstinence:

The decline in teen pregnancy is “almost exclusively” a result of more contraceptive use, according to Guttmacher. Birth control use is up to 47 percent of sexually active teens, while teens’ use of both condoms and hormonal contraception rose from 16 percent to 23 percent in recent years.

But nationally, one in four teens have received abstinence-only education, with no instruction on birth control. Far more states still emphasize abstinence-only sex education over contraception, when they do teach teens about their own bodies at all.

Climate Progress

For Climate Hawks, The Five Stages Of Grief Are Reversed

By Joe Romm on Mar 1, 2013 at 5:00 pm

The five stages of grief describes “a process by which people allegedly deal with grief and tragedy, especially when diagnosed with a terminal illness or catastrophic loss.” As Wikipedia puts it:

1. Denial
2. Anger
3. Bargaining
4. Depression
5. Acceptance

A few years ago, I heard a very brilliant physicist, Saul Griffiths, use this piece of pop psychology to describe climate science activists (a.k.a. climate hawks), and I realized that he had it backwards. This is an updated post.

THE FIVE STAGES IN REVERSE

Climate hawks begin with accepting the science. What else can one do? Science is the reason so many of us survived childbirth and childhood, science has fed the world, science is the reason computers and the blogosphere exist at all. And yes, science gave us our fossil-fueled wealth. I’m a scientist by training, but I just don’t see how anyone can pick and choose what science you’re going to believe and what not. The scientific method may not be always be perfect in single studies — since it is used by imperfect humans — but it is the best thing we have for objectively determining what has happened, what is happening, and what will happen. It is testable and self-correcting, unlike all other approaches.

Once climate hawks accept the science, many quite naturally get depressed. See “Dealing with climate trauma and global warming burnout.”  The situation is beyond dire, and we aren’t doing bloody much about it, in large part because of the successful efforts of the deniers and delayers. Climate science offers a very grim prognosis if we stay anywhere near our current emissions path.

After depression comes a serious effort at bargaining. Climate hawks try to figure out what they can do to stop the catastrophe. Taking actions and making bargains at a personal level and a political level — depending on their level of activism.

Then comes anger. Once you’ve been at this for a while, you get very very frustrated by how little is happening — by the status quo media, the many anti-science politicians, and especially the deniers, the professional disinformers.

Finally, you end up in a kind of denial. It just becomes impossible to believe that the human race is going to be so stupid. Indeed, my rational side finds it hard to believe that we’re going to avoid catastrophic global warming, as any regular CP reader knows. But my heart, in denial, is certain that we will — see “How the world can (and will) stabilize at 350 to 450 ppm: The full global warming solution (updated).”

The great New Yorker write Elizabeth Kolbert perhaps best summed up this form of denial. Her three-part series, “The Climate of Man,” which became the terrific book, Field Notes from a Catastrophe, famously ends:

It may seem impossible to imagine that a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what we are now in the process of doing.

It is impossible to believe. I myself can’t believe it.

Justice

How An Anti-Choice Group Is Trying To Buy Virginia’s Governor’s Mansion

By Ian Millhiser on Mar 1, 2013 at 5:00 pm


Virginia’s gubernatorial election, is eight months away, but a leading anti-choice group is already spending big money to buy the governor’s mansion for Tea Party Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli (R-VA). Susan B. Anthony List — an anti-abortion group that launched a program early this year to teach Republican candidates how to talk about rape without using words like “legitimate” or “gift from God” — pledged at least $1.5 million to Cuccinelli’s campaign, an amount that approaches the entirety of its spending on federal races in 2012.

Cuccinelli has not been captured on film expressing the kind of career-ending gaffe about rape that kept candidates Todd Akin (R-MO) and Richard Mourdock (R-IN) out of the United States Senate last year, but his stance regarding the rights of women who are raped is more or less identical to Akin and Mourdock’s. In his first campaign for elected office, Cuccinelli said that he “opposes abortions that are not for the purpose of saving the mother’s life.” So women who are pregnant because of rape or incest are out of luck.

Rape survivors aren’t the only people who face a bleak future in Ken Cuccinelli’s vision for America. In a book he published last month, he endorsed the view that Medicare is “despicable, dishonest, and worthy of condemnation.” He claimed that Social Security, Medicaid and Food Stamps are attacks on people’s freedom. And he suggested that we should stop spending money on these programs because “[y]our government will never love you.”

Economy

GOP Leaders Insist Debate On Taxes ‘Is Over’

By Pat Garofalo on Mar 1, 2013 at 5:00 pm

Congressional leaders went to the White House on Friday in a last-ditch effort to avert the automatic “sequester” budget cuts that will soon go into effect. After the meeting, Republican leaders Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and John Boehner (R-OH) emerged to reemphasize that the GOP will not consider any new revenues in a deal to avert the sequester.

Boehner said, “the discussion about revenue, in my view, is over.” And McConnell added, “I want to make clear that any solutions will be done through the regular order, with input from both sides of the aisle in public debate…I will not be part of any back-room deal and I will absolutely not agree to increase taxes.”

As the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent noted, this position is absurd, and akin to Democrats demanding that 100 percent of future deficit reduction be achieved through tax hikes. As this chart shows, nearly three-quarters of deficit reduction that has been achieved since 2011 has been through spending cuts:

Republicans have a habit of dismissing the $1.5 trillion in spending cuts that President Obama has signed into law, while bringing up the $600 billion of revenue he signed constantly, as highlighted in this video. In fact, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) explicitly said that spending cuts adopted by the last Congress shouldn’t be taken into account when discussing how to reduce the deficit, but revenue increases adopted by that same Congress should.

And at the end of the day, all of the deficit reduction talk ignores the fact that the problem with government spending at the moment is that it is too low, not too high.

Alyssa

From ‘Argo’ to ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ What Is Hollywood’s Foreign Policy?

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Mar 1, 2013 at 4:15 pm

In Foreign Policy, Joshua E. Keating asked an interesting, and I think important, question: does Hollywood have a foreign policy? Based on the movies of the last half-century, he argues that Hollywood’s deeply skeptical of the rest of the world and very ready to acknowledge security threats to the United States, but deeply skeptical of the United States’ response to everything from the rise of Communism to terrorism:

But it’s fair to say that the kind of prestige films that get nominated for Oscars tend to come from one side of the political spectrum. From Vietnam-era dramas like Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket to the growing number of Iraq movies like Green Zone and 2009 Best Picture winner The Hurt Locker, the most celebrated movies have tended to take a critical look at America’s wars, often questioning the motives of senior officials and examining the psychological effects on the men who fight them. From Jack Nicholson’s sneering colonel in A Few Good Men to the cynical incompetence of the officers in Three Kings, the military tends not to get too positive a portrayal when the movie is about an actual war, rather than an alien invasion. (World War II movies are a possible exception, but even films like Saving Private Ryan are more about how the war affected individuals than military achievement.)

Not that the civilians fare much better. Whether they’re colluding with the communists (The Manchurian Candidate), whacking their own people (The Parallax View), concocting a war to cover up a president’s improprieties (Wag the Dog) or standing idly and incompetently by in the midst of a genocide (The Killing Fields), Hollywood has taken a dim view of U.S. policymakers and diplomats. (Steven Soderbergh’s virus thriller Contagion, entirely ignored by the Academy, is a notable exception.) They get off easy compared to global corporations, invariably the villains in films like Syriana and The Constant Gardener.

This skepticism has carried over into the depictions of terrorism in post-9/11 films. Steven Spielberg’s Munich, for instance, certainly can’t be accused of sympathy for jihadists, but took a tone of ambivalence about the ethics of counterterrorism that led critics like the New Republic’s Leon Weiseltier to accuse it of “the sin of equivalence” between the Israeli spies and the Palestinian terrorists they were hunting. Questions of accuracy and the torture debate aside, Zero Dark Thirty probably belongs in the same category: a movie with no hesitation about the evil of terrorism that also asks what a society loses by bending its own moral code to prevent it.

It’s worth noting that Hollywood’s vision of foreign policy is entirely conflict-oriented. Movies are all over wars, or the lead-up to wars. There are plenty of portrayals of soldiers on the way to a battlefield, at said battlefield, or recovering from the effects of their time in a war zone, though the latter normally focus more on soldiers’ personal reactions than any of the institutions set up to support them or the failure of those institutions. If we’re not talking about wars, movies are often exploring the lead-ups to them, particularly in the form of espionage. Argo was the rare movie that portrayed diplomats as well as members of the Central Intelligence Agency. There’s very little conversation about trade, or cultural exchange—The Sapphires, about Australian singers who perform in USO tours during Vietnam, is a rare exception—banking, immigration (except in documentaries), technology, or trans-state actors like the United Nations. The fact that Game of Thrones takes on so many of these soft-power issues, at least in the novels, is one of the reasons it’s so unusual. This focus on the military and on security issues makes a certain amount of sense: war is among the highest stakes that any set of characters can face, and ticking time bomb scenarios or climactic battles make for strong three-act structures. But focusing on those issues alone means that Hollywood is leaving lots of kinds of stories on the table, and picking ones that are more likely to present other countries as dangerous, inhospitable places.

And that’s a bias that runs contrary to Hollywood’s own interests. Beyond what it shows on its screens, the biggest factor driving Hollywood’s actual foreign policy as an industry is trade barriers, whether it’s China’s limits on the number of movies produced by other countries that can air legally on Chinese screens in a given year, or the need to accomodate content restrictions in countries with state-run ratings and censorship systems. Keating mentions China’s leverage to get movies cut to meet its standards before they air in the United States, but it’s an issue worth exploring further, especially on issues like Middle Eastern funders’ comfort with higher levels of violence than sexuality. Hollywood’s foreign policy might have initially been driven by the preferences and contradictions of American audiences’ feelings about our country’s foreign entanglements. But other audiences’ preferences, and the preferences of their governments, will matter more and more as the international audiences account for more and more of box office receipts.

Climate Progress

State Department Report: Keystone XL Is Environmentally Sound

By Jeff Spross on Mar 1, 2013 at 4:03 pm

The State Department released an environmental impact assessment on the Keystone XL pipeline Friday afternoon, concluding that the project is environmentally sound and “is unlikely to have a substantial impact on the rate of development in the oil sands, or on the amount of heavy crude oil refined in the Gulf Coast area.” A 45-day comment period will now begin for the public to weigh in on the project. The State Department will respond to the comments, before finalizing the environmental impact statement, and “conduct a separate analysis of whether the project is in the national interest, a question on which eight other agencies will offer input over 90 days.” Obama is unlikely to make a final decision until “mid-summer at the earliest.”

From the report:

Based on information and analysis about the North American crude transport infrastructure (particularly the proven ability of rail to transport substantial quantities of crude oil profitably under current market conditions, and to add capacity relatively rapidly) and the global crude oil market, the draft Supplemental EIS concludes that approval or denial of the proposed Project is unlikely to have a substantial impact on the rate of development in the oil sands, or on the amount of heavy crude oil refined in the Gulf Coast area. [...] Spills associated with the proposed Project that enter the environment are expected to be rare and relatively small.

The study found that “The annual CO2e emissions from the proposed Project is equivalent to CO2e emissions from approximately 626,000 passenger vehicles operating for one year or 398,000 homes using electricity for one year.” It also suggests that “America can meet its energy needs over the next decade without” the project by relying on the “growth in rail transport of oil from western Canada and the Bakken Formation on the Great Plains and other pipelines.”

The proposed pipeline would transport tar sands oil — one of the dirtiest and most carbon-intensive of the fossil fuels — all the way from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. Industry officials have themselves admitted that without the pipeline, vast amounts of tar sands will stay in the ground. Were the project to go online, the pipeline would constitute a “carbon bomb,” further enabling the ongoing glut of carbon emissions into the atmosphere that threaten to drive global warming to catastrophic levels.
Read more

Justice

Kansas Bill To Drug Test Welfare Recipients Passes Senate With Amendment To Test Lawmakers, Too

By Nicole Flatow on Mar 1, 2013 at 4:00 pm

A Kansas bill to drug test recipients of welfare and unemployment benefits is advancing, but not without an attempt to equalize the burden the invasive tests impose. Although Democrats were unable to stop a drug-testing measure that supporters say is aimed at preventing state dollars from being used to buy illegal drugs, they were able to insert an amendment in the version that passed the state Senate Thursday intended to better achieve that goal: drug-test lawmakers, also. The Kansas City Star reports:

The proposal calls for drug tests whenever state officials have reasonable suspicion that someone receiving or applying for welfare or unemployment benefits is using drugs.

Suspicion could be raised during addiction screening by the Department for Children and Families or by missed meetings or criminal records. A proposal pushed by Democrats to also test any lawmaker suspected of drug use was added to the bill.

Suspicion of drug use by lawmakers could be identified by the Department of Administration based on criminal records or other complaints.

Benefit recipients who fail the test would lose state assistance until they complete drug treatment and job skills programs. Lawmakers who fail would also have to enter treatment and job skills training.

Of course, there are several gaping differences between the requirements for welfare recipients and lawmakers, including the circumstances that will trigger a drug test, and the fact that lawmakers who fail a test don’t lose their state funding — their salary – while they complete drug treatment. But the intent, as Democratic Sen. Oletha Faust-Goudeau said, is to assert that “What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.” Holding lawmakers to the same standard is not something a proponent of Florida’s drug-testing law was willing to do.

The federal appeals court decision blocking Florida’s mandatory drug-testing law made clear that blanket testing of public assistance applicants is likely unconstitutional. In fact, blanket testing of legislative candidates has also been deemed unconstitutional, as is most suspicionless drug testing, absent significant public safety concerns. But the Kansas bill, like legislation passed in several other states over the last two years, is somewhat more selective. It requires “reasonable suspicion” – the required constitutional standard for performing a police “stop” under the Fourth Amendment – before a drug test can be performed.

A drug test, however, is considered a “search” under the Fourth Amendment — not a stop — and typically is only allowed “pursuant to a judicial warrant issued upon probable cause.” While the Supreme Court has made some exceptions to this rule for public safety and the protection of children while in public school, two federal courts reviewing these laws have found that neither of these exceptions apply. What’s more, factors constituting “reasonable suspicion” under the Kansas bill, such as missed appointments and previous employment in an industry that requires drug screening, seem to have no connection whatsoever to drug use or abuse. The bill will now be considered by the House, and Gov. Sam Brownback hasn’t said whether he would sign the measure.

LGBT

Spa Company Refuses To Serve LGBT People Because Of Their ‘Abnormal Sexual Behaviors’

By Annie-Rose Strasser on Mar 1, 2013 at 3:50 pm

A Virginia-based Korean spa facility is in hot water after a letter was made public in which it said that LGBT people are not permitted in its establishment because they have “abnormal sexual behaviors and orientation” and are a threat to children.

The Better Business Bureau opened up an investigation into the company, Spa World, after an LGBT customer complained that she was asked to leave the establishment because of her gender identity or sexual orientation. Spa World has nude single-gender bathing pools, and Riya Suisin recounts, “They told me that I was not welcome there and to leave because I looked a little different.”

A representative for the company responded to the Better Business Bureau investigation in a letter that demonstrated staggering homophobia and anti-trans sentiments:

The Better Business Bureau opened an investigation, and on Jan. 28, Spa World representative Sang Lee responded to the BBB in writing by stating “It is our policy to not accept any kinds of abnormal sexual oriented customers to our facility such as homosexuals, or transgender(s).”

The Spa World written reply goes on to say that the spa stands by this policy for the sake of young children who utilize the facility. “Also, for the safety and the comfort of young children at Spa World, we strongly forbid any abnormal sexual behaviors and orientation in our facility. Despite the controversial issue of homosexuality and transgender, it is our policy to not accept them,” Lee wrote. Lee did not return calls seeking further comment.

When she received it, Suising said she could not believe the response.

Suising won’t see any retribution for the hateful language Spa World uses to refer to LGBT people, though: Unfortunately, Virginia has no anti-discrimination protections for LGBT people. The county in which Spa World is located, Fairfax, actually wants to pass a non-discrimination ordinance, but is not allowed to under the state’s “Dillon Rule,” which prevents localities from acting without permission from the state government. Virginia legislators have proposed changing the rule, but have not been able to do so.

Update

Spa World has issued a clarification about the company’s policy on LGBT customers, blaming earlier reports of discriminatory practices on a miscommunication. In an interview with Washington City Paper, Spa World manager James Lee also attempted to clairfy the incident involving Suising:

But according to James Lee, Sang Lee meant to write only that sexual activity, either gay or straight, is not allowed at Spa World. “The Korean-English barrier just made a small miscommunication,” James Lee says.

Suising wasn’t engaged in sexual activity when Spa World employees asked her to leave. “There was a woman inside of the woman’s sauna, and we had many complaints about that particular person, stating there was a man inside of the woman’s locker room,” James Lee. Although a transgender woman using Spa World’s nude areas doesn’t violate the bathhouse’s policy as Lee describes it, “It caught us all off-guard,” he says.

According to Lee, Spa World’s policy is to allow customers of any sexual orientation or gender identity. As for any future complaints regarding transgender customers, Lee says they won’t be asked to leave again.

Economy

How Welfare Reform Failed During The Great Recession

By Travis Waldron on Mar 1, 2013 at 3:50 pm

Bill Clinton signs welfare reform.

Republicans often tout the 1996 welfare reform law as one of the great bipartisan victories Congress has achieved. Welfare reform, however, has a checkered past, as it has resulted in a failure to get aid to the families and children who need it most.

According to a new analysis from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) didn’t come close to keeping up with the substantial rise in unemployment that occurred during the Great Recession. In fact, according to CBPP, it took TANF seven months after the recession began to show any growth in caseloads.

When its growth peaked in December 2010, the program had grown by just 16 percent even as unemployment swelled by 88 percent in the same time period:

The rate of families with children in poverty that received TANF benefits fell in 35 states from 2007 to 2011. It rose in just five. The block granting of benefits to states, a change made in the 1996 reform at the request of Republicans, largely caused the negative change, since crunched budgets led many states to make their programs stingier than they were before the recession.

Social safety net programs should swell during economic downturns as they work to mitigate the effects of high unemployment and keep millions of Americans out of poverty. Indeed, several of America’s safety net programs, like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, did just that. But TANF failed to keep up, making the recession worse for millions of families it could and should have kept out of poverty.

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