Portland, Oregon Becomes Fourth American City To Adopt Paid Sick Day Law

By Jane Farrell, Guest Blogger on Mar 13, 2013 at 6:30 pm

Our guest blogger is Jane Farrell, a Research Assistant for economic policy at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Portland became the fourth American city to approve a paid sick days law Wednesday, an important step forward today that will help the city’s workers, employers, and residents. Portland joined three other cities – San Francisco, Washington DC, and Seattle – and one state, Connecticut, in modernizing its workplace policies and acknowledging an important reality: everybody gets sick but no one should be at risk of losing a job, infecting coworkers or customers, or missing a day’s pay because of an illness.

While the economic and social benefits of paid sick days are numerous, Portland City Councilmembers nevertheless weighed the evidence in favor of and against paid sick leave carefully. Ultimately, they unanimously decided that this policy would help make Portland a stronger city and community. Worker-friendly policies like paid sick leave help reduce turnover, saving businesses time and money they might have spent on training, hiring, and replacing employees. It also strengthens worker loyalty and increases worker productivity.

Paid sick leave also helps lower health care costs by reducing the number of costly emergency room visits Portland hospitals will have to finance or subsidize. While 40 percent of private sector workers across the US lack even one paid sick day, Portland residents who previously lacked this protection can now rest easy – and work even more diligently – knowing they are safe and covered.

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Climate Progress

Advice For The Woman Who Wrote Salon Worried She Can’t Protect Her Children From Global Warming

By Joe Romm on Mar 13, 2013 at 6:16 pm

Advice columnists are like financial analysts. The overwhelming majority can’t beat the market — which, for the analyst, is an S&P index fund and, for the columnist, is your typical friend or relative.

And like your friend or relative, sometimes the advice is very good, and sometimes … not so much. As an instance of the latter, we have the ‘advice’ of Salon’s Cary Tennis in a column titled “How to protect my children?”

The letter writer, “Mom of Three,” is “a happily married woman in my mid-40s, with three children ranging in age from 8 to 15.” She has a good job and her life is great. She says, “I’m not sure what advice you can offer me, but I feel compelled to write”:

I love my family dearly, and my children bring me great joy. So what’s the problem then? I worry that I’ve brought them into a world whose future holds overpopulation (for which I myself feel a bit responsible) and global warming. My children have such bright futures ahead, which may be completely devastated by these global crises.

I feel guilt at having brought them into the world, and yet I can’t imagine not having them in my world. I feel so hopeless that I am unable to make the world a better place for them. My happiness in the present is marred by my heartache thinking of their future.

How do I cope with these feelings?

Fair enough question. And similar to questions I’ve thought a lot about both as a father and as someone who spends a lot of time speaking with college students.

The full response by Mr. Tennis is too long to repost, but you’ll get the painful gist of it here:

Dear Mom of Three,

Your heartache is the heartache of all parents. Let this heartache be with you and do not be unkind to yourself because of it. It is not only the heartache of all parents. It is the heartache of all humans.

All humans feel this same heartache as we see that those we love we cannot protect and that everything we know and love will one day be gone. We are all filled with occasional sorrow when we stop to glimpse the fact that all that is familiar and safe, all that is beautiful, all will be gone as we also will be gone and those we love will be gone, and all the torments also, all the things we are catching up on and taking care of, all the things we are dreading and disapproving of and wishing we didn’t have to deal with, all those things, too, will be gone, and all the evils we despair of and all the tragedies whose lessons we use as guideposts, all that will be gone, the lessons of politics and philosophy, the works of art, the music, the novels, everything will be gone. Everything. Nothing can outlast the ceaseless churning of idea and matter and time. And because everything will be gone none of this will matter, either, none of what I say or you say or what we feel, and that is the farther assumption, the one we often do not get to, that since we will die and everyone we know will die, none of this worrying will matter in the least, and so, if we accept that all this will be gone, we can accept that all our worrying is just the fretting away of precious moments, a vain and fruitless mental activity over which, indeed — and this is the important part — we have some measurable, demonstrable control!

… You will be forgotten. I will be forgotten. This whole thing will be gone. Yet I think that our consciousness will remain. This I have experienced firsthand. So I am not worried. Nor am I as crazy as I used to be. I am merely more certain that I can do nothing about anything….

… Meditate on these things. Just meditate. Just sit and let these things enter your consciousness, and if there is strife and conflict in your relationships with your husband and your kids, see what you can do to lower the conflict. Let them be. They are going to go. They are beyond your control already. You are just a passenger now.

I know what you’re thinking, “Dude, chill out!” Or, maybe, “Dude, you’ve chilled out so damn much you’re frozen.” Either way, you’re probably thinking he may not be cut out to be an advice columnist and indeed that he needs an advice columnist more than she does. But I digress.

For me, what’s of interest is that he completely missed the point of the question, treated her specific concern as if it were existential angst, and gave a not terribly germane reply.

But what if we actually tried to answer her question? What is a mother to do who feels certain responsibility, guilt, and heartache for bringing her children into a world that may be devastated by overpopulation and global warming, who feels hopeless about her ability to make the world a better place?

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Security

New Pope Spotlights Questions About Church’s Relationship With Military Dictatorship

By Hayes Brown on Mar 13, 2013 at 5:49 pm

Pope Francis I

The election of Jorge Mario Cardinal Bergoglio as Pope Francis I has sparked new interest in the atrocities performed during Argentina’s period of military rule from 1976-1983.

Francis is the first pope to have been elected from the Americas, which will more accurately reflect the primacy of the Roman Catholic Church in Latin America. That primacy, however, during the Cold War led to many dioceses throughout the region turning a blind eye to the atrocities of military governments. These right-wing governments, often taking power via coup, were supported by the United States and the church alike for their stand against Communism.

Particularly devastating was the period known in Argentina as as “The Dirty War.” Beginning as a crackdown on armed left-wing guerrilla groups following a military coup in 1976, the regime soon expanded its focus, imprisoning and torturing anyone thought to hold leftist views or criticize the government. Women who were pregnant at the time of their incarceration were allowed to bring their children to term, before being “transferred” — a euphemism used by the junta for execution — drugged and tossed from airplanes into the ocean. All-told, an estimated 30,000 civilians were “disappeared” by the government.

Years later, one priest told a panel of judges that the church at the time was “scandalously close to the dictatorship” in turning a blind eye, “to such an extent that I would say it was of a sinful degree.” Former Argentine dictator Jorge Videla claimed in an interview years removed from power that the Church was definitely “consulted” throughout the crackdown. That included offering their good offices and discouraging families from searching for relatives who had “disappeared.” That link was much stronger in Argentina than in neighboring dictatorships in Brazil and Chile:

“Patriotism came to be associated with Catholicism,” said Kenneth P. Serbin, a history professor at the University of San Diego who has written about the Roman Catholic Church in South America. “So it was almost natural for the Argentine clergy to come to the defense of the authoritarian regime.”

That tie has been a stain on Catholicism in Argentina ever since. The Argentine Catholic Church issued a document in 1996 admitting they had made “insufficient efforts” to prevent atrocities. When Pope John Paul II issued a blanket apology for church abuses throughout the ages in 2000, Bergoglio — by then the archbishop of Buenos Aires — insisted that Argentine Catholic officials wear garments symbolizing penance for sins committed by the clergy during the military dictatorship.

Bergoglio’s precise role during the Dirty War is still clouded. In 2005, when he was first considered as a possible replacement for John Paul II, a human rights activist accused Bergoglio of aiding in the military’s kidnapping of two Jesuits, filing criminal charges in a Buenos Aires court. That case has since not moved forward, though claims exist that he actively prevented human rights groups from finding political prisoners. However, at least one woman, former Buenos Aires Ombudsman Alicia de Olivia, has come forward to say that Bergoglio hid her from the military government during the crackdown.

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Justice

Study Explores Why Wrongful Convictions Happen

By Nicole Flatow on Mar 13, 2013 at 5:30 pm

In the almost 25 years since post-conviction DNA evidence has been used to establish criminal innocence, public perception has been transformed by the realization that completely erroneous convictions are not uncommon, even in cases that land defendants on death row or in prison for life. A new exhaustive social science analysis of many of these exonerations since 1989 has identified ten primary factors that, together, have led to the convictions we now know were wrong.

The study by American University’s School of Public Affairs concludes that it is a confluence of circumstances – and the ultimate failure of prosecutors and/or defense attorneys to mitigate those circumstances – that makes the difference between a “near-miss” in which a person is indicted but never found guilty, and a wrongful conviction.

Some of the worst wrongful conviction cases have been linked to what is known as “tunnel vision,” in which a prosecutor who hones in one suspect has a tendency to reinforce beliefs of that suspect’s guilt, even when the evidence suggests otherwise. In fact, the American University study finds that, surprisingly, it is in cases with the weakest evidence that “tunnel vision” is most likely to be a problem. The scholars explain:

As more resources—money, time, and emotions—are placed into a narrative involving a suspect, the actors involved are less willing or able to process negative feedback that refutes their conclusions. Instead, actors want to devote additional resources in order to recoup their original investment. As a result, evidence that points away from a suspect is ignored or devalued, and latent errors are overlooked. At this point, the police are working to rule in rather than rule out the suspect, and prosecutors have moved from “inspection” mode to “selling” mode. Escalation of commitment contributes and facilitates system breakdown because it dismantles the rigorous testing of evidence that makes the adversarial process function effectively.

To a large extent, the panelists attributed tunnel vision in our cases to a police and prosecutorial culture in which questioning and independent thinking were not valued, procedures were not designed to probe already gathered evidence, and little or no concern was given to learning from past errors. Even if safeguards, such as those mentioned above, are in place, they cannot be used effectively when the officials in the system are blinded by tunnel vision.

The study points out that defense attorneys can also suffer from “tunnel vision” when they fail to question the prevailing narrative. The ten factors that may lead to “tunnel vision” and other iterations of what they call the “perfect storm” are: weak evidence by the prosecution, weak defense (including the use of family witnesses), the prosecution withholding exculpatory evidence, forensic error, inadvertent misidentification of a witness, lying by a non-witness, youth of a defendant, any criminal history by the defendant and the punitiveness of the state. This last factor is particularly noteworthy because it is not at all contingent on flaws in individual cases and thus probably the easiest to address through reform and public education. The study explains:

In a punitive legal culture, police and prosecutors may be more interested in obtaining a conviction at all costs (leading to greater Brady violations, etc.) and community pressure may encourage overly swift resolutions to cases involving serious crimes like rape and murder. Additionally, state punitiveness could contribute to more state actors assuming the defendant’s guilt. This culture eventually works against the defendant, as state agents overlook or under-value evidence that contradicts the assumption of guilt.

While the study, the result of three years of research, provides new social science data that focuses exclusively on what happens to an individual once indicted (a wrongful indictment can be caused by false confessions, eyewitness identifications and other factors), its conclusions and recommendations are not dissimilar from those of many wrongful conviction experts and commissions – that “tunnel vision” is a primary concern, and that formal “checklists,” along with a mechanism for routinely reviewing causes of wrongful convictions, are crucial for reform.

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Health

Each Stick Of Wrigley’s Newest Gum Will Have As Much Caffeine As Half A Cup Of Coffee

By Sy Mukherjee on Mar 13, 2013 at 5:30 pm

Wrigley, the corporation behind popular brands like Juicy Fruit and Spearmint, has decided to get into the ever-expanding and controversial energy product market with its next gum. Each stick of “Alert Energy” will contain 40 milligrams of caffeine — about the same as a half a cup of coffee.

According to CBS News, Wrigley has been quick to clarify that the new gum will be catered exclusively to adults and will be produced in a way that prevents children from accidentally eating it:

An eight-piece pack of Alert will retail for $2.99, according to the Journal. Wrigley told the paper the gum will have a bitter, medicinal taste to deter children from consuming it, a concern for many energy products.

“The taste expectations are different for someone who wants to chew gum for energy than for someone who chews gum for flavor. If you come at this as a piece of gum that you chew for enjoyment it’s not going to deliver on that,” Casey Keller, president of the North America division of Wrigley, told the Wall Street Journal. “What we found from energy [drink] consumers is that they’re used to this taste. It’s symbolic of efficacy.” He added that kids won’t like the taste and, “We’ve taken great pains to make this different than traditional gum.”

Other companies have recently gotten attention for their caffeinated products potentially getting into children’s hands. Last November, the advocacy group the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) wrote a letter to the Food and Drug Administration to urge action against Frito-Lay’s Cracker Jack’D, a caffeinated version of the 105-year-old popular snack. The organization argued that putting caffeine into “improbable drinks and snacks” could put children and unsuspecting pregnancy women at risk. Frito-Lay said at the time the product line was specifically developed for adult consumers and will not be marketed to kids.

While Wrigley’s asserts that it is doing everything it can to tailor the gum around a very targeted set of consumers, the “bitter, medicinal taste” of Alert Energy won’t do anything to deter accidental ingestion by adults — including groups that could be adversely affected by the product, like pregnant mothers — considering that individual sticks of gum don’t come with nutritional facts or warning labels. There are several other energy gums already available on the market, but only from distributors known specifically for their other energy products, such as Amp and Jolt!.

Energy products have been receiving more and more attention from public health advocates and lawmakers, particularly after the number of ER visits spurred by energy drinks doubled between 2007 and 2011. Monster, one of the most popular energy drinks on the market, recently chose to re-classify itself as an actual “drink” rather than a “dietary supplement” — a particularly interesting development considering that, while the change might force them to drop taurine and other little-known ingredients that are “not generally recognized as safe” by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), it also relieves the company from having to conduct follow-up research to see if its products have adverse public health consequences. Public health advocates have called on the FDA to conduct this research themselves.

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LGBT

Bill O’Reilly Finally Admits ‘Homosexuality Has Nothing To Do With The Crime Of Pedophilia’

By Zack Ford on Mar 13, 2013 at 5:26 pm

Bill O’Reilly has been campaigning against Colorado House Speaker Mark Ferrandino (D) because he won’t allow a vote on a bill to “Jessica’s Law.” Jessica’s Law imposes excessive penalties on individuals who commit sexual abuse against children, and O’Reilly has repeatedly inferred a connection between the fact Ferrandino is openly gay and not “protecting the kids.” Earlier this week, he responded to criticism over this comparison by doubling down on it. On Tuesday’s broadcast, he finally admitted the connection doesn’t exist, but took no accountability for reinforcing it:

O’REILLY: I have to report the truth here. First truism, homosexuality has nothing to do with the crime of pedophilia. Second, everyone we report on is defined and that guy is proud of his circumstance and promotes it, so we reported it.

Watch it (via Equality Matters):

A “truism” is something so obviously true that it isn’t worth mentioning, and the supposed link between homosexuality and pedophilia hardly fits that description. It’s true that there’s no connection, but it has been made or inferred for decades. More importantly, O’Reilly brazenly made it himself without any subtlety to hide behind just seven months ago. He can’t just shrug it off like everybody knows better when he has a history of miseducating his viewers on the issue.

His admission is also compromised by his description of Ferrandino as having a “circumstance” that he “promotes.” Being gay is not a condition, nor can homosexuality be reinforced in anyone. Under the premise of a campaign to “protect the children,” O’Reilly is only continuing to reinforce stigma against gay people with this kind of rhetoric. If he actually supports civil unions as he claims, he has no grounds for demonizing others for doing the same.

Tonight, Denver Post Opinion Editor Curtis Hubbard, who criticized O’Reilly for his smear campaign against Ferrandino, will appear on his show to confront him in person. Maybe fourth time’s the charm for O’Reilly figuring out how to respect the inherent dignity of an elected official.

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Economy

Senate Democratic Budget Reduces Deficit By $1.85 Trillion, Half From Revenue

By Travis Waldron on Mar 13, 2013 at 5:15 pm

Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA)

A day after House Republicans outlined their budget proposal for fiscal year 2014, Senate Democrats unveiled a broad outline of their budget, which Senate Budget Committee Chair Patty Murray (D-WA) said will reduce the deficit to less than three percent of gross domestic product while bringing total deficit reduction to $4.2 trillion over the last four years.

The Democratic budget would replace the automatic budget cuts, known as sequestration, that took effect on March 1 with a different set of cuts that will achieve $1.95 trillion in total cuts and revenues. Here are the main provisions of the Democratic budget as outlined by Murray:

$1.85 trillion in total deficit reduction: The Senate budget achieves $1.85 trillion in total deficit reduction split evenly between spending cuts and new revenues and bringing total deficit reduction since President Obama took office to more than $4 trillion once combined with past spending cuts and tax increases. It includes $493 billion in domestic spending cuts, $275 billion of which would come from health savings determined by the Senate Finance Committee. The other $240 billion would come from defense and the end of the war in Afghanistan, and the budget would save $242 billion in interest savings.

$975 billion in new revenues: The budget would achieve half of its deficit reduction from new revenue increases derived from the elimination of tax expenditures and loopholes, though it does not include specifics on which would be eliminated. That would be left to the Senate Finance Committee as part of a broader tax reform bill. A report from the Center for American Progress found that there were more than $1 trillion in tax expenditures that could be eliminated. Those include subsidies for oil and gas companies, a loophole that benefits hedge fund managers, ending tax breaks for corporations that move jobs overseas, and limits on deductions for wealthy taxpayers.

$100 billion in stimulus spending: The budget also includes $100 billion for programs meant to boost the economic recovery, including $50 billion for infrastructure projects. The rest would go toward worker training programs and other forms of stimulus spending, according to Murray.

The Democratic budget would not achieve balance over the 10-year budget window, a point the Budget Committee’s Republicans repeated throughout the markup today. The House GOP budget, by contrast, claims to balance in 10 years, though those claims are built almost entirely on unrealistic revenue projections.

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Climate Progress

No, Obama Didn’t Tell Republicans He Would Approve The Keystone XL Pipeline

By Rebecca Leber on Mar 13, 2013 at 4:54 pm

BuzzFeed reports that House Republicans came out of their lunch meeting with President Obama confident he will say yes to the controversial Keystone XL pipeline. Rep. John Carter (R-La.) said Obama “indicated” he will support the pipeline.

The truth is the Keystone XL pipeline decision is still months away. There is no indication of how the State Department will decide, and it will happen as early as this summer. Administration officials and reporters confirm the report is false:

.@arthurdelaneyhp says Freshmen GOP Rep at lunch meeting said Obama fielded Keystone pipeline Q but never said he’d approve

— Sam Stein (@samsteinhp) March 13, 2013

Additional reports of the meeting indicate Obama only said he will make a decision on Keystone XL soon. It is worth noting BuzzFeed’s own story now carries the rebuttal from the White House stating that the future of the tar sands pipeline has not been determined.

Keystone XL supporters might be optimistic based on a State Department’s draft report that surprisingly concluded the project is environmentally “sound.” There are tens of thousands of activists who disagree.

Of course, Republicans aren’t content to leave the decision to the State Department. Polluter-backed House Republicans have repeatedly tried to force its approval, with their most recent attempt just last week.

Justice

STUDY: Voter ID Laws Affect Young Minorities Most

By Josh Israel on Mar 13, 2013 at 4:20 pm

A new study by professors at the University of Chicago and Washington University in St. Louis shows that the strict voter ID laws being pushed by Republican state legislators around the country most impact young people, especially young minorities. And given that the people pushing those measures admitted they were intended to help GOP candidates win, the analysis would suggest that the efforts are having their intended effect.

Politico reported Tuesday that the study, co-authored by Cathy J. Cohen of the University of Chicago and Jon C. Rogowski of Washington University in St. Louis, found that even in states without photo ID laws, “65.5 percent of black youth were asked to show ID at the polls, compared with 55.3 percent of Latino youth and 42.8 percent of white youth.”

Worse, the study finds, many minority young voters — including 17.3 percent of young African Americans — did not even try to vote because they lacked the required identification.
The authors noted that their findings show the problem with these suppression laws — and show the continued need for the Voting Rights Act:

“The effort to protect the vote doesn’t make sense and it’s largely discriminatory, impacting we know, young people in particular, young people of color, the poor and the elderly,” Cohen said. … Rogowski said the study will help underscore the importance of keeping Section 5 fully in place. “It’s important that we still have the ability to keep a watchful eye on these kinds of states,” Rogowski said.

Last June, Pennsylvania House Republican Leader Mike Turzai boasted that the voter ID law he helped pass would “allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania.” In December, Republican strategist Scott Tranter acknowledged that “a lot of us are campaign professionals and we want to do everything we can to help our sides. Sometimes we think that’s voter ID, sometimes we think that’s longer lines, whatever it may be.”

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Health

South Carolina Republican Suggests GOP Opposes Medicaid Expansion Because Obama Is Black

By Zack Beauchamp on Mar 13, 2013 at 4:10 pm

Confederate flag flying on grounds of South Carolina's state capitol

On Tuesday, the South Carolina House rejected extra Obamacare funding for the state’s Medicaid program. One Republican legislator offered a novel reason for the Republican majority’s decision: the President’s race.

State Rep. Kris Crawford’s comments came during the early stages of the state Medicaid debate in late January. Crawford suggested that it was politically beneficial for Republicans (who run a Statehouse that flew the Confederate flag in front of it as recently as December 2011) to oppose any political initiatives spearheaded by a black man:

Rep. Kris Crawford, a Republican from Florence and also an emergency room doctor, supports the expansion but expects the Republican caucus to vote as a block against the Medicaid expansion.

“The politics are going to overwhelm the policy. It is good politics to oppose the black guy in the White House right now, especially for the Republican Party,” Crawford said.

South Carolina’s voter ID law was blocked last year by the Department of Justice on grounds that it violated the Voting Rights Act. The author of the law admitted to receiving, and responding positively to, racist emails in support of the law.

Governor Nikki Haley’s (R) steadfast opposition to the Medicaid expansion is becoming increasingly lonely; a wave of Republican governors have recently accepted federal assistance in providing health care for their poor citizens. South Carolina hospitals, who strongly support the expansion, have gone so far as to ask that their taxes be raised to pay for it.

(HT: David Graham.)

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