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Senate Gone Wild: Vote To Approve Keystone Passes, Decision Still Lies With White House

By Ryan Koronowski and Tiffany Germain, Guest Blogger on Mar 22, 2013 at 7:33 pm

Tonight, 62 Senators voted for an amendment to the Fiscal 2014 Budget Resolution that attempts to give Congress the power to approve the Keystone pipeline. This is despite the fact that the pipeline would do nothing to make the country more energy independent, and would create far fewer jobs than its supporters claim.

While some conservatives may claim the pipeline would create “more than 20,000 direct jobs,” the most recent State Department impact assessment found that the pipeline would directly create only “3,900″ temporary construction jobs. After construction is complete, the operation of the pipeline would only support 35 permanent and 15 temporary jobs, with “negligible socioeconomic impacts.” Moreover, only 10 percent of the total workforce would be hired locally. For perspective, our country had 3.4 million green energy jobs in 2011 and it was the fastest-growing industry in the country.

The State Department’s report also made clear that at least some of the Keystone oil will be refined and then exported, in response “to lower domestic gasoline demand and continued higher demand and prices in overseas markets.” This means the pipeline adds nothing to U.S. energy security, a key talking point used by proponents. It also means that the pipeline is a way for the industry to get access to steeper oil prices in foreign markets. So why the intense push in the U.S. Senate to get this project approved?

Perhaps it has something to do with campaign contributions from the oil industry. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, the 10 co-sponsors received $561,539 on average in contributions from the oil industry compared to the other 89 voting senators who received $224,777.

The budget is unlikely to make its way into law. CREDO Political Director Becky Bond said “the only thing today’s nonbinding, symbolic vote underscores on Keystone XL is the fact that this is President Obama’s decision alone and his alone.” LCV President Gene Karpinski said “Big Oil may have bought themselves this meaningless vote, but the decision on the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline remains where it’s been all along — with Secretary Kerry and President Obama.”

Health

Deadly Meningitis Has Spread To All Five New York City Boroughs

By Sy Mukherjee on Mar 22, 2013 at 6:15 pm

ABC News reports that a recent outbreak of deadly bacterial meningitis has now infected men in all five boroughs of New York, apparently spurred by anonymous sexual encounters facilitated by social mobile apps and Internet sites. 22 New Yorkers have been infected to date, and another seven have died from the disease.

The outbreak has prompted swift responses from city public health officials, who are urging men who have had intimate contact with other men to get vaccinated against meningitis as a precautionary measure:

“Vaccination is the best defense,” City health commissioner Dr. Thomas Farley said in a statement. “I urge all men who meet these criteria – regardless of whether they identify as gay – to get vaccinated now and protect themselves from this disease before it is too late.” [...]

The disease is spread by “prolonged close contact with nose or throat discharges from an infected person,” the health department said in a September 2012 statement after the death of a patient. While vaccination can help prevent new infections, “people that have been in prolonged close contact with infected people need to see their health-care provider immediately to receive preventive antibiotics,” the department added. [...]

“I strongly recommend all men who have intimate contact with other men get vaccinated,” Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz said in a statement. “This disease is both potentially fatal and extremely contagious, so increasing the public’s awareness to this growing issue and encouraging vaccination are of the utmost importance.”

Particularly concerning is the fact that half of the recently-infected men are also HIV-positive. That raises the stakes considerably seeing as bacterial meningitis — which is already an extremely contagious and rapidly progressing disease — would be even deadlier for HIV-positive men with compromised immune systems.

While HIV transmission rates have steadily stabilized since 1980, men who have sex with men (MSM) remain particularly vulnerable to it, accounting for over 65 percent of all new infections in 2010. That trend is also reflected in New York City, which — despite its robust public school sex education requirements and plummeting teen pregnancy rates — has seen a troubling rise in syphilis and HIV transmission among MSM. Given that reality, vaccination truly is a crucial preventative measure for men in the city while the outbreak spreads.

LGBT

Mark Regnerus Confirms He’s Simply An Anti-Equality Talking Head

By Zack Ford on Mar 22, 2013 at 5:20 pm

Mark Regnerus

Mark Regnerus has long claimed that his study suggesting gay parents are inferior was not politically manipulated by anti-equality groups. In a comment posted on the National Review Thursday, however, he proved that he shares those groups’ bias against gay parenting, even though he has admitted his study didn’t actually address that question. Regnerus was not impressed by the American Academy of Pediatrics endorsement of marriage equality — not surprising considering the endorsement debunked his research:

I’m neither surprised at the statement by the American Academy of Pediatrics endorsing gay marriage nor at its timing. Whether the statement adequately captures the consensus of pediatricians across the country is, of course, unknown. The report points out the strengths and weaknesses of the social science in this area, and notes correctly that causal arguments here are very difficult to make.

The science on same-sex parenting remains comparatively new, unable to keep up with political and legal developments. But those few population-based studies that exist — that map what’s going on across the country — seem to foster skepticism about moving quickly or universally to deny children their right to a mom and a dad. It’s not a popular position, of course.

In the end, we all want children to thrive. Many organizations and scholars assert that same-sex marriage is a step toward that end, ensuring household stability. Others remain skeptical, and wonder whether this isn’t more about parents’ wishes than those of children.

Regnerus of course ignores the impact of marriage on same-sex couples who are already raising children. Combined with his intention to speak at a National Organization for Marriage conference, he has officially confirmed that he’s a tool of the anti-equality research, not an independent researcher.

Health

90 Percent Of The U.S. Kids Who Died From The Flu This Year Didn’t Get Their Vaccinations

By Tara Culp-Ressler on Mar 22, 2013 at 5:20 pm

This year’s particularly severe flu season is finally winding down. Fortunately — despite the fact that hospital emergency rooms overflowed with unusually high numbers of sick patients, several cities declared a state of public health emergency, and the CDC officially declared it an epidemic — the fatality rates weren’t significantly higher than usual. The CDC reports that 105 children died from the flu this winter, an average toll.

But the agency also noted that, even though all but four of the children who passed away were old enough to get a flu shot, 90 percent of them did not get vaccinated. CDC officials recommend that all children over 6 months old get a flu shot, but Americans still aren’t necessarily following that advice. This past winter, less than half of Americans got their flu shots.

In fact, more broadly, Americans aren’t getting all of the vaccinations that the CDC recommends. The federal agency recently reported that “unacceptably low” numbers of adult Americans are getting their shots for infectious diseases. That could partly be because some lingering stigma surrounding vaccines has perpetrated myths, like the false idea that getting the flu shot will lead to contracting influenza — or the misguided right-wing fearmongering that vaccines lead to autism or mental retardation.

Justice

Court Cites Newly Enacted Louisiana Amendment To Strike Down Ban On Felon Gun Possession

By Nicole Flatow on Mar 22, 2013 at 5:10 pm

In the wake of an amendment to the Louisiana Constitution that arguably makes state protection of gun rights even greater than under the Second Amendment, a trial judge has invalidated a statute prohibiting those convicted of “crimes of violence” from possessing guns.

The NRA-backed amendment, passed by ballot initiative in November, established that the right to bear arms is a “fundamental right” and any infringement of that right is subject to “strict scrutiny,” the highest level of skepticism courts apply to legislation. The U.S. Supreme Court has never established a level of scrutiny for the Second Amendment — a failure that has led to disparate interpretations and confusion among lower courts. However, as law professor Adam Winkler notes, “challenged gun laws almost always survive.”

Even Justice Antonin Scalia wrote for the U.S. Supreme Court in 2008 that the Second Amendment does not impede “longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.”

Not so in Louisiana, where Orleans Parish Criminal District Court Judge Darryl Derbigny held Thursday:

After applying the strict scrutiny standard to LA. R.S. 14.95.1, this court concludes that the statute is not narrowly tailored to achieve the government’s interest. LA R.S.14.95.1 applies without discretion to nearly every felony crime enumerated in the Louisiana Criminal Code. As such, the statute, ‘as-is’, is unconstitutional in its entirety. This court will not engage in a “judicial line item veto”, by deciding what predicate felony convictions should be included in LA R.S. 14:95.1.

Before the passage of the ballot initiative, many prominent figures including the Orleans Parish District Attorney warned that several laws crucial to public safety, including a requirement that 18 to 20-year-olds carry concealed permits, campus bans, and the law at issue here, could be subject to invalidation under the new amendment. Nonetheless, the amendment passed with an overwhelming 74 percent support.

The public defenders in the case had argued that, while a possession ban for violent felons could be justified even under the “strict scrutiny” standard by the compelling state interest in public safety, no such justification could be applied to less violent felons such as Glen Draughter, who had previously pleaded guilty to attempted simple burglary.

There are no doubt crimes considered felonies, such as possession of drugs, consumption of pornography or white collar crime, that have little relationship at all to gun possession. But the Louisiana statute explicitly limited its prohibition to “crimes of violence,” and there is every reason to believe that someone who burgles would be eminently more dangerous if they were carrying a gun.

As conservative blogger and law professor Eugene Volokh points out, the federal ban on gun possession by felons is still in effect, and federal officials could still prosecute Louisiana felons for carrying guns under their own law. But the feds alone would have to significantly reallocate their resources and are not equipped to fill local public safety demands.

Economy

JP Morgan Wins ‘Crisis Management’ Award For London Whale Scandal That Cost It $6 Billion

By Travis Waldron on Mar 22, 2013 at 5:00 pm

JP Morgan Chase accepted a “crisis management” award at an event Thursday night that rewarded the bank for the way it handled the London Whale trading crisis that cost the bank at least $6 billion. The trade set the financial world ablaze when the firm’s chief executive, Jamie Dimon, announced it, considering JP Morgan had been the strongest megabank throughout the financial crisis and Dimon often bragged of its “fortress balance sheet.”

But the firm handled the crisis with flying colors, at least according to award presenters, the Wall Street Journal reports:

“J.P. Morgan Chase is winning for its handling of the $6.2 billion trading loss by the London Whale last year,” the event’s host, CNN anchor Ali Velshi, said. “I would say that’s what you call making lemonade out of lemons.”

Kathy Hu, an executive director in J.P. Morgan’s investor relations department, accepted the award and quipped: “Can I just say, ‘Crisis? What crisis?’”

The United States Senate took a slightly different view. In a bipartisan report from the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations issued last week, senators blasted the bank for misleading regulators and sidestepping regulations that should have banned the type of trades that kept the loss from occurring.

JP Morgan has been among the fiercest lobbyists against regulations like the Volcker Rule, which was meant to keep financial institutions that have the backing of taxpayers from engaging in risky forms of trading that result in large losses that could pose a risk to the overall economy. As U.S. News and World Report’s Pat Garofalo explained, this should have been a lesson in why the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act and the rules it contains should be strengthened. Instead, it won JP Morgan an award.

Health

On World Water Day, A Reminder About What You’re Really Drinking

By Rebecca Leber on Mar 22, 2013 at 4:30 pm

Friday is the 20th anniversary of World Water Day. Ten years from now, by 2030, the U.S. State Department expects the demand for fresh water to outrun supply by 40 percent. Around the world, over 780 million people lack access to clean drinking water. Water and sanitation could prevent 9.1 percent of diseases and 6.3 percent of deaths. This lack of access is the main reason why 3,000 children under age 5 die every day from water-related illnesses.

For the drinkable water — which stands at just 1 percent of the world water supply — human activity poses its own threats:

Hormone-disrupting chemicals: More than 800 manmade chemicals can be found in household cleaners, makeup, electronics, canned food, and clothing, particularly BPA and phthalates that are widely used in plastics. They can leach into water, contributing to a “a global threat that needs to be resolved,” according to the latest report from the World Health Organization and United Nations Environment Program. Research links these hormone-disrupting chemicals to a host of medical problems.

Hydraulic fracturing: The Environmental Protection Agency has linked hydrofracking to water well contamination. The process itself uses 3 million to 9 million gallons of water per fracture. Groundwater used in fracking can shrink aquifers and cause wells to go dry. And as much of the country battles severe drought, farmers have been outbid by frackers for water supply.

Climate change: Drought fueled by climate change is widening the gap between demand and supply, by drying up important U.S. reservoirs. Environmental Science and Technology found that by 2050 one-third of U.S. counties could face major risk of water shortage, and the International Energy Agency determined that if current policies remain in place, fresh water use by the energy industry could more than double by 2035.

Alyssa

‘Veronica Mars’ Television Club: Race, Class, Sexism And The Outsiders

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Mar 22, 2013 at 4:27 pm

Welcome to the Veronica Mars television club! As I’ve written here before, I grew up as a devoted reader of Rob Thomas’s young adult novels, particularly the exemplary Rats Saw God and Slave Day, but not as a television watcher. By the time I had television and a cable subscription for the first time, Veronica Mars was off the air, and when I began remedying the gaps in my television education, I prioritized shows that were still running, like Mad Men, or whose creators were currently working on projects that I’d need to review, like The Wire and Deadwood. But now that the Kickstarter to fund a Veronica Mars movie has been so successful, and has opened up such interesting questions about funding models for cult hits and the role of fans as investors, I’m pleased to have a chance to catch up. As I mentioned when I announced this project, we’ll be doing two episodes on Mondays and Fridays. So let’s start with the pilot and the second episode of the first season. Be cool, Soda-Pop…

“This is my school,” Veronica explains at the beginning of the pilot. “If you go here, either your parents are millionaires, or your parents work for millionaires. Neptune, California. A town without a middle class.” It’s a phenomenal thesis statement for a show, even without the murder mystery and private eye schtick that follows, given the class homogeneity of most shows about teenagers, whether it’s the overwhelming wealth of the kids on Gossip Girl, the kooky security of the families on Suburgatory, or even the cookie-cutter comfort of The Neighbors. And there are other intriguing details that Veronica offers up. “The day the company went public, Jake Kane made a billion dollars,” she explains of her ex-boyfriend’s family. “Everyone who worked for him, down to the secretaries, became millionaires.” The sudden transformation of working people into the extremely wealthy is a major change for a community to go through, particularly one with such sharp inequality.

But through the first few episodes, that’s a bit more thesis than a paper that’s ready to turn in. Veronica’s dad may joke that they can eat steak like “the lower-middle class to which we aspire,” but Neptune is a town where even poor teenagers have cars or motorcycles. Veronica tells us that her mother left after her father lost his recall election because “The loss of status, the loss of income, was too much for her,” though the show doesn’t really have time to show us what their lives were like before and after the election, and it’s hard to imagine that the sheriff’s job actually lifted the family up into the upper-class, given that we’re told that a respectable middle class doesn’t exist. Rich kids may use a code* to set up their parties to avoid infiltration by people outsider their clique, but they end up drinking on a beach in Eli’s neighborhood rather than doing something that would be genuinely inaccessible to the teenagers they want to exclude. Rich people in Neptune may have captured the sheriff’s department, but through the first two episodes, given the ease with which Veronica and Wallace subvert the sheriff’s department, the show’s set up a fairly equal contest. It’s not clear what inequality actually means for life in Neptune yet.
Read more

LGBT

Internal Survey Shows Many Boy Scouts And Parents Believe Discriminatory Policy Harms Organization

By Josh Israel on Mar 22, 2013 at 4:25 pm

Scouts for Equality founder Zach Wahls

Scouts for Equality founder Zach Wahls

Despite significant declines in membership and United Way funding, the Boy Scouts of America doubled down on their outright ban on LGBT Scouts and leaders last July, claiming its “leadership agrees this is the best policy for the organization.” But a newly obtained internal survey shows that of those commenting on the issue, 97 percent of Boy Scouts and their parents said that reaffirmation “negatively impacted their loyalty.”

Scouts for Equality, the Scout alumni association dedicated to ending the ban on gay members and leaders founded by Eagle Scout Zach Wahls, obtained a copy of the BSA’s 2012 Voice of the Scout internal poll results. The documents show that loyalty to the organization dropped 11 percent over last year, driven by widespread opposition to the organization’s “membership standards policy.” In a press release, Scouts for Equality noted:

  • Of the 5,800 survey respondents who commented on the policy, 95 percent said the “reaffirmation of the membership policy negatively impacted their loyalty.” For Boy scouts and their parents, that number jumped to 97 percent.
  • BSA noted that “conservative estimates assign a 15:1 ratio of negative to positive comments about the existing membership standards policy” that prohibits gay scouts or scoutmasters.

Deron Smith, a spokesman for BSA, told ThinkProgress that the survey asked 68,441 respondents an open-ended question about why they provided the rating they did to the BSA: “Of the respondents, 91 percent did not raise membership standards as an issue or concern, and approximately 9 percent cited it as an issue or concern that impacts their loyalty to the organization. Of the 9 percent who mentioned this issue, 97 percent of Boy Scout parents and 95 percent of Cub Scout parents had negative views toward the current policy. Using an open-ended format like this indicates the membership standards policy is a factor, but it doesn’t tell you to what extent the issue impacted loyalty to the BSA, nor does it represent the beliefs of the 91 percent of respondents who did not comment on the issue. Also, this level of feedback is not unusual. Throughout the years, people involved in Scouting and others who are not related to the program have expressed their disagreement with this single policy in a variety of ways.”

The Boy Scouts of America’s National Council will decide at its May national meeting whether to change the policy. BSA is again surveying Scout families on the subject prior to the May vote. It seems clear that the survival of the organization as a national movement depends on standing with the these Scout families and lifting the ban.

Update

This post has been updated to clarify that the 97 percent figure represents only those who volunteered an opinion, not of all Scout families surveyed.

Economy

For Second Straight Year, Florida Senate Committee Approves Bill To Speed Up Foreclosure Process

By Travis Waldron on Mar 22, 2013 at 3:45 pm

Florida’s Senate Banking and Insurance Committee this week approved legislation that would speed up the state’s foreclosure process, a move that would remove some protections for homeowners and could increase the likelihood of bank fraud. The committee, which passed the bill 8-2, passed similar legislation in 2012 that did not advance farther.

The bill is an effort to clear Florida’s backlog of foreclosures that piled up as a result of the financial crisis, but as we pointed out when it was introduced in February, it is likely to have unintended consequences that make it easier for banks to deceive homeowners or process unlawful foreclosures. Banks’ past efforts to speed up the process led to fraudulent techniques like robo-signing, and banks foreclosed on homes they didn’t own, homeowners that were seeking to modify their loans, or because of minor clerical errors the banks themselves had made.

While Florida does have a lengthy backlog of foreclosures, its process is not atypically long. The average Florida foreclosure takes more than 600 days to process, about the same length of time it takes the average home nationally to enter foreclosure.

Consumer advocates have pointed out many problems with the foreclosure bill. In addition to potentially inviting fraud, the bill would remove homeowners’ right to reclaim their property after an improper foreclosure. Instead, they would only be eligible for compensation.

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