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Health

VIEWPOINT: ‘Kindergartners Shouldn’t Be Taught Sex Ed’ — And Other Myths Endangering America’s Youth

By Tara Culp-Ressler on Mar 17, 2013 at 3:30 pm

“In case you missed it, Chicago public schools are set to begin teaching sex-ed to Kindergartners,” Family Research Council head Tony Perkins tweeted earlier this week. Adding his voice to a growing chorus of right-wing fearmongering, Perkins is referring to the fact that the city’s Department of Education approved a new policy requiring public schools to teach age-appropriate, LGBT-inclusive sexual health instruction at each grade level. The youngest students — the primary subjects of the recent concern trolling — will learn about anatomy, reproduction, healthy relationships, and personal safety.

It comes as no surprise that Perkins and his fellow conservatives, who are still stubbornly clinging to failed abstinence-only education policies, would be up in arms about comprehensive sex ed (especially when it acknowledges the existence of the LGBT community). But the thought of the country’s third largest school district teaching, in the school district’s words, “accurate information…[so students can] make healthy choices” still makes a lot of people outside of Tony Perkins’ circles squeamish. Mainstream media outlets were quick to raise alarm about 5-year-olds learning how to identify their genitalia, with headlines like “Chicago Passes Sex-Ed for Kindergartners,” “Sex Ed For Kindergarten Students,” and “What Age Should Kids Start Learning Sex Ed? In Chicago, It’s Kindergarten.” The popular parenting blog Babble quoted a mother who revealed the panic behind these headlines: she “just doesn’t think it’s appropriate.”

The unfounded fear that young children will somehow become “impure” if they learn about a dirty subject like sex is deeply rooted in American culture. Our society assumes that human sexuality is dark, dangerous, and shameful — something we need to protect teens from, rather than teach them about. Teens consistently learn that it’s not okay to talk about sex because it’s supposed to be totally off-limits to them, constrained to the bounds of a traditional marriage. But this attitude has led to disastrous consequences: damaging women and LGBT Americans’ sense of sexual self-worth, fueling the STD epidemic, and creating a moral environment where rape culture has flourished. Americans desperately need to overhaul our outdated approach to sexuality, replacing our puritanism with an open, honest, nonjudgmental, sex-positive attitude that we work to instill in our kids from a young age.

Today’s fights over what’s “appropriate” to teach our children about sex are largely symptoms of the United States’ long history of sexual conservatism, which can be traced back to our Puritan roots. There have been a few more sexually liberated periods in U.S. history, like the Progressive Era at the turn of the 20th century, but attitudes about sex remained largely conservative until the women’s and gay rights movements turned everything upside down. Those movements coincided in the 1970s to challenge preconceived ideas about heterosexuality and gender roles, working to normalize sex outside of marriage, sex outside of procreation, and homosexuality as equally valid human experiences.

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Health

Biggest Loser Trainers Publicly Promote Diet And Exercise, Quietly Endorse Unproven Weight Loss Pills

By Katie Valentine on Mar 17, 2013 at 2:00 pm

www.dietsinreview.com

NBC’s Biggest Loser, which has helped 14 seasons of contestants lose enormous amounts of weight through intensive diet and exercise, will crown this season’s winner on Monday. But though the show itself advocates substance-free weight loss, its most prominent trainers are endorsing unproven — and potentially dangerous — weight-loss supplements.

Bob Harper and Jillian Michaels, two of the three trainers on the show, each have their own line of diet pills, despite their firm public commitment to losing weight through diet and exercise alone. They promote and sell their supplements independently — they aren’t mentioned on NBC.com or sold in the Biggest Loser store or their own personal websites. Both trainers have created standalone sites — jillianweightloss.com and bobharpersupplements.com — to sell their supplements. By taking this under-the-radar path with their diet pills, the trainers are using the fame and trust they’ve gained from their time on the Biggest Loser to market weight loss supplements to a consumer base eager for a quick fix that “really works.”

There is little proof that either pill “really works” at all. Michaels has faced four different lawsuits from consumers claiming her supplements either didn’t work or were dangerous. All four suits were dismissed, and it wasn’t clear whether the ingredients singled out in one lawsuit — Chinese rhubarb, Irish moss powder and uva-ursi — posed a major risk to consumers. But Lynn Willis, professor emeritus of pharmacology at Indiana University, says that Michaels’ Total Body Detox and Cleanse supplement is ineffective:

“This product is an absurdity,” says Willis. “It’s completely bogus that this would detoxify the gut. Someone takes a laxative and they lose two pounds of water weight, but it will come right back.”

Adriane Fugh-Berman, associate professor at Georgetown University, agrees:

“Supplements like this are laxatives and diuretics, and they don’t have any place in a rational weight loss regimen because they can dehydrate people and leave them short of electrolytes,” [she] says. “And supplements have side effects.”

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Justice

Colorado Sheriffs Threaten Not To Enforce Their Own State’s Gun Laws

By Nicole Flatow on Mar 17, 2013 at 12:55 pm

For months, local sheriffs have been objecting to federal efforts to stem gun violence in the wake of the Newtown massacre, claiming they violate “states’ rights.” Now, with a package of gun violence prevention measures awaiting the governor’s signature in a state that has seen some of the most deadly and high-profile mass shootings, several Colorado county sheriffs are threatening not to enforce their own state’s measures to expand criminal background checks and limit ammunition magazines if they are signed into law. The Greeley Tribune reports:

Weld County Sheriff John Cooke said he won’t enforce either gun-control measure waiting to be signed into law by Gov. John Hickenlooper, saying the laws are “unenforceable” and would “give a false sense of security.” […]

“They’re feel-good, knee-jerk reactions that are unenforceable,” he said.

Cooke said the bill requiring a $10 background check to legally transfer a gun would not keep firearms out of the hands of those who use them for violence.

“Criminals are still going to get their guns,” he said.

Cooke said the other bill would also technically ban all magazines because of a provision that outlaws any magazine that can be altered. He said all magazines can be altered to a higher capacity.

Cooke said he, like other county sheriffs, “won’t bother enforcing” the laws because it will be impossible for them to keep track of how the requirements are being met by gun owners. He said he and other sheriffs are considering a lawsuit against the state to block the measures if they are signed into law.

El Paso County Sheriff Terry Maketa also said Thursday that several of the laws are unenforceable and that he would willfully ignore the high-capacity magazine limit. And Cooke’s position appears to have the support of a number of other state sheriffs; during testimony calling the law unenforceable, 20 other county sheriffs stood behind him in solidarity.

Sheriffs’ assertions that the laws are simply too difficult to enforce and/or ineffective is the latest in a string of arguments by a contingent of county sheriffs opposed to any new gun violence prevention measures. Other sheriffs, several of whom are part of a fringe militia group whose members believe that sheriffs are the highest law enforcement authorities and vow to defy any law or order that violates their radical view of the Constitution, have argued that federal regulation violates states’ rights and the Second Amendment.

Conservative legislators are also already committing to repeal the ammunition magazine limit if enacted through a 2014 ballot measure.

Other measures that passed both houses of the Colorado legislature include a requirement that firearm buyers pay for their own background checks, a ban on online certification for concealed-carry permits, and a ban on gun purchases by people convicted of domestic violence crimes.

Climate Progress

The Dangerous Myth That Climate Change Is Reversible

By Joe Romm on Mar 17, 2013 at 12:37 pm

The CMO (Chief Misinformation Officer) of the climate ignorati, Joe Nocera, has a new piece, “A Real Carbon Solution.” The biggest of its many errors comes in this line:

A reduction of carbon emissions from Chinese power plants would do far more to help reverse climate change than — dare I say it? — blocking the Keystone XL oil pipeline.

Memo to Nocera: As a NOAA-led paper explained 4 years ago, climate change is “largely irreversible for 1000 years.”

This notion that we can reverse climate change by cutting emissions is one of the most commonly held myths — and one of the most dangerous, as explained in this 2007 MIT study, “Understanding Public Complacency About Climate Change: Adults’ mental models of climate change violate conservation of matter.”

The fact is that, as RealClimate has explained, we would need “an immediate cut of around 60 to 70% globally and continued further cuts over time” merely to stabilize atmospheric concentrations of CO2 – and that would still leave us with a radiative imbalance that would lead to “an additional 0.3 to 0.8ºC warming over the 21st Century.” And that assumes no major carbon cycle feedbacks kick in, which seems highly unlikely.

We’d have to drop total global emissions to zero now and for the rest of the century just to lower concentrations enough to stop temperatures from rising. Again, even in this implausible scenario, we still aren’t talking about reversing climate change, just stopping it — or, more technically, stopping the temperature rise. The great ice sheets might well continue to disintegrate, albeit slowly.

This doesn’t mean climate change is unstoppable — only that we are stuck with whatever climate change we cause before we get desperate and go all WWII on emissions. That’s why delay is so dangerous and immoral. For instance, if we don’t act quickly, we are likely to be stuck with permanent Dust Bowls in the Southwest and around the globe. I’ll discuss the irreversibility myth further below the jump.

First, though, Nocera’s piece has many other pieces of misinformation. He leaves people with the impression that coal with carbon capture and storage (CCS) is a practical, affordable means of reducing emissions from existing power plants that will be available soon. In fact, most demonstration projects around the world have been shut down, the technology Nocera focuses on would not work on the vast majority of existing coal plants, and CCS is going to be incredibly expensive compared to other low-carbon technologies — see Harvard stunner: “Realistic” first-generation CCS costs a whopping $150 per ton of CO2 (20 cents per kWh)! And that’s in the unlikely event it proves to be practical, permanent, and verifiable (see “Feasibility, Permanence and Safety Issues Remain Unresolved”).

Heck, the guy who debated me on The Economist‘s website conceded things are going very slowly, writing “The idea is that CCS then becomes a commercial reality and begins to make deep cuts in emissions during the 2030s.” And he’s a CCS advocate!!

Of course, we simply don’t have until the 2030s to wait for deep cuts in emissions. No wonder people who misunderstand the irreversible nature of climate change, like Nocera, tend to be far more complacent about emissions reductions than those who understand climate science.

The point of Nocera’s piece seems to be to mock Bill McKibben for opposing the idea of using captured carbon for enhanced oil recovery (EOR): “his answer suggests that his crusade has blinded him to the real problem.”

It is Nocera who has been blinded. He explains in the piece:

Using carbon emissions to recover previously ungettable oil has the potential to unlock vast untapped American reserves. Last year, ExxonMobil reported that enhanced oil recovery would allow it to extend the life of a single oil field in West Texas by 20 years.

McKibben’s effort to stop the Keystone XL pipeline is based on the fact that we have to leave the vast majority of carbon in the ground. Sure, it wouldn’t matter if you built one coal CCS plant and used that for EOR. But we need a staggering amount of CCS, as Vaclav Smil explained in “Energy at the Crossroads“:

“Sequestering a mere 1/10 of today’s global CO2 emissions (less than 3 Gt CO2) would thus call for putting in place an industry that would have to force underground every year the volume of compressed gas larger than or (with higher compression) equal to the volume of crude oil extracted globally by [the] petroleum industry whose infrastructures and capacities have been put in place over a century of development. Needless to say, such a technical feat could not be accomplished within a single generation.”

D’oh! What precisely would be the point of “sequestering” all that CO2 to extract previously “ungettable oil” whose emissions, when burned, would just about equal the CO2 that you supposedly sequestered?

Remember, we have to get total global emissions of CO2 to near zero just to stop temperatures from continuing their inexorable march toward humanity’s self-destruction. And yes, this ain’t easy. But it is impossible if we don’t start slashing emissions soon and stop opening up vast new sources of carbon.

For those who are confused on this point, I recommend reading the entire MIT study, whose lead author is John Sterman. Here is the abstract:

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Election

The Obama Coalition, The White Working Class, And RFK

By John Halpin, Guest Blogger and Ruy Teixeira, Guest Blogger on Mar 17, 2013 at 12:11 pm

This is part 2 of a series on RFK and the Obama coalition.  Part 1 is here.

The potential of the new Obama coalition is truly impressive, given its 2012 performance and how many of its constituent parts are likely to grow in numbers over the course of the decade.  But the word “potential” should be stressed.  There is no guarantee that turnout and support levels will stay as high as they have been going forward.  And there is definitely no guarantee that these constituencies will remain active and involved in the legislative battles that must be fought to turn progressive policies into law.  Thus, implementing a progressive agenda will, to a large extent, be dependent on the mobilization level of the Obama coalition both in future elections and between those elections.

This is a big challenge, but Obama and his team have taken some significant steps to address it.  These steps have been driven by the recognition that the best way to maintain enthusiasm and support is to deliver for the groups that put you in office.  Thus, the administration has been aggressively pushing a number of policy priorities that resonate with the concerns of different groups in the coalition:  immigration reform, curbing gun violence, same sex marriage, climate change and universal pre-K.

This strategy is a good one.  These fights are all substantively important in policy terms and may, with luck, result in some important victories.  And they should indeed pump up enthusiasm levels as different groups in the coalition see how strongly Obama is willing to fight for their priorities.  Nor does it seem likely that a big political price will be paid for touching on issues that have a social dimension; the country has moved rapidly in a progressive direction on most of these issues and these issues lack the power they once had to elicit a backlash.

However, the strategy has to be supplemented by efforts not just to mobilize the Obama coalition but to expand it.    And among the chief targets here is the white working class, just as it was for Bobby Kennedy in 1968.

The white working class was the key force behind the Republican landslide in 2010 — Democrats lost the group by 30 points.  And they were a glaring weakness for Obama in 2012, when he lost them by only a slightly more modest 26 points.  These voters, despite their declining numbers, will be an ever-present threat to progressives in elections and to progressive governance as long as they remain so hostile to progressive principles and policies.

The solution is to bring a significant segment of these voters over to the progressive side.  It does not have to be a majority of these voters.  The Bobby Kennedy coalition can be dominant with a strong minority of the white working class, but one that is committed to progressive policies and large enough to derail the super-majorities among the voters that conservatives rely on.

Such a coalition would make the task of progressive governance far easier by breaking up the mass base for conservative counter-mobilization.  And it should greatly reduce the threat white working class voters pose to progressive fortunes when rising constituencies falter or fail to turn out at high levels.

But how can this be done?  It is no doubt a substantial challenge, but one that can and must be addressed.  At CAP, we are launching a project—the Bobby Kennedy Project—to do just that.  The goal is to figure out how to reach both the white working class and more progressive-leaning demographic groups through unifying values, policies and messages.

Our initial work suggests that a successful approach will require a relentless focus on social opportunity for all people and an economic agenda that puts the interests of working- and middle-class families first.  In particular, the burgeoning research and policy agenda around “equity and growth” provides a good model for policies that can successfully unite a multi-racial, multi-ethnic, cross-class coalition.  The evidence is increasingly strong that rising inequality has inhibited growth and that higher growth in the future is more likely with policies that broadly diffuse opportunity.  These policies are America’s future and also perhaps the glue that can finally join a critical segment of the white working class to America’s rising demographic groups.

The rise of the Obama coalition has already changed American politics.  Expanding this rising coalition into a Bobby Kennedy coalition could transform our politics for a generation.

Economy

Boehner Agrees With Obama: The Debt Crisis Is Not ‘Immediate’

By Jeff Spross on Mar 17, 2013 at 11:31 am

The arrival of budget season has brought debt panic back to the Beltway. But President Obama threw cold water on the matter last week, telling ABC’s George Stephanopoulos that the United States does not face “immediate crisis in terms of debt.” And this morning, House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) essentially told ABC’s Martha Raddatz he agrees with Obama, calling the debt crisis “looming,” but not “immediate.”

“We do not have an immediate debt crisis,” Boehner said on ABC News’s “This Week With George Stephanopoulos.” “But we all know that we have one looming. And we have — one looming — because we have entitlement programs that are not sustainable in their current form. They’re gonna go bankrupt.” [...]

“[President Obama's] point, as he went on to say in that interview, is that we don’t — we don’t really need to do anything at this point. And I would argue that we do need to do something,” said the House speaker.

Debt is already projected to remain at or below its current share of the economy for the next decade, and it’s good that Boehner is standing in agreement with the president on that point.

Unfortunately, the budget the House Republicans just released does not reflect this realization. It cuts all spending that isn’t Medicare, Social Security, or the military down to near-historic lows over the next ten years. America’s economy remains in the doldrums, leaving the unemployment rate at 7.7 percent (it has never been that high for that long since the Great Depression) and all the real-world evidence we have indicates that austerity in depressions cripples economic growth. If everyone agrees the debt crisis is not immediate, then job growth and economic revival should be topping deficit reduction on the country’s list of priorities.

Nor is there a great deal of evidence to back up Boehner’s distinction between an “immediate” and “looming” debt crisis. The long-term projections of mounting debt he and other D.C. lawmakers rely on are in fact riddled with dramatic assumptions and uncertainties about the future behavior of both Congress and the economy.

Climate Progress

Australian Sunshine Illuminates The Path Toward Massive Solar PV Growth

By Ryan Koronowski on Mar 17, 2013 at 11:30 am

Global solar insolation average. Notice bright red oval on lower right. (Credit Mines ParisTech/Armines 2006)

Australia is climate change’s canary in a coal mine. It has been suffering heat waves, floods, and wildfires in a climate-fueled “angry summer” that demonstrates how critical reducing carbon emissions really is.

Australians are finding ways to use the sun’s energy to reduce fossil fuel consumption. According to a new report, Australia’s solar photovoltaic market could reach 10 gigawatts in five years:

The Australian solar PV market could tip the 10,000 mewagatt (10 gigawatt) mark as early as 2017, and could reach the “saturation” levels for owner-occupied houses in many areas in coming years, according to a new report.

The five-year forecast prepared by leading market analysts Sunwiz and Solar Business Services says that the Australian solar PV market – currently at 2.5GW – will likely grow to between 6GW and 10GW by 2017.

The actual outcome will depend on the speed of the growth in the largely untapped commercial sector, the pace of large, utility-scale solar farms, and the industry’s ability to penetrate more challenging parts of the residential sector.

That “saturation rate” has already been achieved in some areas of the owner-occupied residential sector — reaching 90 percent in some localities. Nationally, the average penetration rate is 20 percent. Adding apartment buildings into the mix, this share drops to 10 percent, and it is this rental market that offers the most promise for growth in solar installations.

You can see the prime driver of solar PV installation in Australia here:

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Justice

Guilty Verdict Handed Down In Steubenville Rape Trial

By Tara Culp-Ressler on Mar 17, 2013 at 10:58 am

Trent Mays and Ma'lik Richmond

On Sunday morning, Judge Thomas Lipps delivered a verdict in the much-anticipated Steubenville rape trial, determining the two high school football players charged with raping a young girl at a party are guilty on all three counts against them.

Trent Mays and Ma’lik Richmond, both minors, will likely be sentenced to jail time until they reach the age of 21. They will also be required to register as sex offenders.

The Steubenville trial exploded in the national media after graphic videos surfaced of the alleged assault. Nonetheless, the boys’ lawyers argued that the 16-year-old girl — although she appeared to be unconscious in the footage — had actually given her consent because she “didn’t affirmatively say no.” The prosecutor, on the other hand, argued that the victim “was substantially impaired, and they treated her like a toy.”

The case was tried before a judge rather than a jury — and divided the small town of Steubenville, OH, as some of its estimated 20,000 residents sided with the football stars. After reviewing the evidence, however, the judge called the case “profane and ugly” and sentenced the defendants to a juvenile detention facility.

LGBT

Top Republican Governor Admits Conservatives Have Lost The Battle Against Marriage Equality

By Igor Volsky on Mar 17, 2013 at 10:31 am

Republican Governor Scott Walker (WI) — a likely GOP candidate for president in 2016 — admitted on Sunday that young conservatives support marriage equality for gays and lesbians, suggesting that the Republican party cannot sustain its opposition to same-sex marriage into the future.

Responding to Sen. Rob Portman’s (R-OH) embrace of equal marriage rights during an appearance on Meet The Press, Walker said that the issue of marriage equality did not animate his governor’s race, but admitted to host David Gregory that the next generation of Republicans will expect the party to join the growing popular consensus in favor of full marriage rights and will not be interested in pursuing campaigns against gay people:

GREGORY: Are younger conservatives more apt to see marriage equality as something that is, you know, what they believe, that is basic rather than as a disqualifying issue?

WALKER: I think there’s no doubt about that. But I think that’s all the more reason, when I talk about things, I talk about the economic and fiscal crises in our state and in our country, that’s what people want to resonate about. They don’t want to get focused on those issues.

Walker also questioned why the government sanctions marriage in the first place, noting, “an alternative [would be] to say not have the government sanction it, period, and leave that up to the churches and the synagogues.”

New research released earlier this month found that “while 53 percent of eligible voters support marriage equality, 83 percent believe same-sex marriage will be legal nationwide within five to 10 years.” A majority of Republicans under the age of 30 also said that they “support marriage equality at the state level.”

Economy

GOP Senator: Republicans Are Open To Tax Increases In Grand Bargain

By Josh Israel on Mar 17, 2013 at 10:14 am

Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN)

Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN) believes Senate Republicans would be open to increasing revenue through tax reform as part of a “grand bargain” to reduce the deficit. During an appearance on Fox News Sunday, Corker argued that entitlement reform should be a top priority, but left the door open to reaching bipartisan consensus on deficit reduction in the next few months.

In past negotiations, the GOP leadership has repeatedly walked away from the table due to unwillingness to reach an agreement that included more revenue and, since the fiscal cliff deal, Republican leaders have insisted that the “the discussion about revenue … is over.”

Host Chris Wallace asked whether Corker and his party would be open to a compromise that include tax increases:

CORKER: I think there–by the way–is a chance on a deal. I know the president is saying the right things and we have an opportunity over the next four-to-five months. I think that we’ll know when the president is serious by virtue of a process is setup where he is actually at the table or he has a designee and whether he begins to say publicly to the American people, to all Americans, that he understands that Americans are only paying one-third of the cost of Medicare and that has to change for the program to be here down the road. But look, Chris, I think Republicans — if they saw true entitlement reform — would be glad to look at tax reform that generates additional revenues. And that doesn’t mean increasing rates, that means closing loopholes. That also means arranging our tax system so that we have economic growth. And I think we’ve been saying that from day one.

Sen. Assistant Majority Leader Dick Durbin (D-IL), also on the program, praised Corker’s comments as “honest and constructive,” and noted that the savings need to be done in a way that does not obliterate the system, as would be the case in the “Paul Ryan voucher approach.”

Corker is exaggerating the problems facing the Medicare program. According to the program’s 2012 annual trustee’s report, Medicare’s dedicated revenue fully pays for its costs and will do so until at least 2024. Even then, revenue will cover 87 percent of Medicare costs. At the current pace, by 2086, revenue would only be sufficient to cover 69 percent of costs — but even that 75-year figure would be more than two-thirds of the program’s costs.

The Affordable Care Act both reduced the costs of Medicare by hundreds of billions and improved its coverage for seniors. He has also recommended specific reforms that would save $57 billion annually from Medicare (more even than recommended by the Bowles-Simpson commission) and hundreds of billions in entitlement savings overall.

Update

House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) poured cold water on the idea of increasing taxes during an appearance on Meet The Press, saying, “There are no new tax increases because you don’t need it.”

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