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Health

Arizona Congressman Wants To Expand His DC Abortion Ban To Restrict Reproductive Rights Nationwide

By Tara Culp-Ressler on May 20, 2013 at 1:36 pm

Not content with attempting to impose his anti-abortion agenda upon the women who live in the nation’s capital, Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ) now intends to push for a nationwide bill to criminalize abortions after 20 weeks. Franks, who invoked the illegal abortion provider Kermit Gosnell to justify his decision to re-introduce a 20-week abortion ban in DC, now says that Gosnell’s crimes have compelled him to amend his bill so it applies to women across the country.

The Arizona congressmember announced his decision to expand his bill on Friday. In a statement, Franks compared Gosnell — who has been convicted of killing of three infants that were born alive following botched illegal, unsanitary abortion procedures — to all late-term abortion procedures. “Had Kermit Gosnell dismembered these babies before they had traveled down the birth canal only moments earlier, he would have, in many places nationwide, been performing an entirely legal procedure,” Franks said.

However, that’s a gross mischaracterization of the state of legal abortion services throughout the country. Abortion opponents have repeatedly attempted to twist the facts surrounding Gosnell’s high-profile murder trial to make it appear as if his crimes are rampant throughout legal abortion clinics. But that’s simply not the case. The Philadelphia-area abortion doctor was guilty of much more than simply breaking Pennsylvania’s law that criminalizes abortion after 24 weeks of pregnancy; he was also able to offer discounted prices for his services because he didn’t employ medical professionals or adhere to safety standards. Gosnell’s “house of horrors” isn’t analogous to the way that legal, sanitary late-term abortion clinics provide care to the women who need it.

Furthermore, it’s misleading to pretend that Franks’ quest to cut off legal abortion care at just 20 weeks represents a push to ban late-term abortions. In fact, 20-week abortion bans are a direct challenge to Roe v. Wade‘s guarantee of legal abortion rights until the point of viability, which is generally accepted to occur around 24 weeks of pregnancy. That’s why, after a handful of states recently enacted 20-week bans, several of them landed in court.

DC Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton (D) has fought against Franks’ 20-week abortion ban every time he’s proposed it. She maintains that imposing abortion bans on the District of Columbia is a “stealth way” for abortion opponents to discreetly challenge Roe, since DC doesn’t have any representation in Congress. Now that the bill will apply to the rest of the nation, she remains committed to working to defeat it. “With the help of women nationwide, we defeated the D.C. abortion ban bill on the House floor last Congress. Now that the Franks bill will expressly target all U.S. women, we can expect an even stronger national response to this attack on women’s health,” Holmes Norton said in a statement.

Ironically, pushing to restrict women’s access to abortion isn’t actually an effective policy solution to prevent future Kermit Gosnells. If Franks and his anti-choice colleagues wanted to ensure that desperate women in other states don’t have to resort to illegal providers like Gosnell, they should actually be working to make abortion services more affordable and accessible to low-income women.

LGBT

Obama To Morehouse Grads: ‘Be The Best Husband To Your Wife, Or Your Boyfriend, Or Your Partner’

By Zack Ford on May 20, 2013 at 1:35 pm

President Obama delivered the commencement speech this weekend at Morehouse College, an historically black all-male liberal arts school in Georgia. His remarks were remarkably gay-inclusive, challenging the graduates to be the best husband they can be even if their partner isn’t female, and to recognize the kind of oppression other groups experience, including gays and lesbians:

OBAMA: And that’s what I’m asking all of you to do:  Keep setting an example for what it means to be a man.  Be the best husband to your wife, or your boyfriend, or your partner.  Be the best father you can be to your children.  Because nothing is more important. [...]

As Morehouse Men, many of you know what it’s like to be an outsider; know what it’s like to be marginalized; know what it’s like to feel the sting of discrimination.  And that’s an experience that a lot of Americans share.  Hispanic Americans know that feeling when somebody asks them where they come from or tell them to go back.  Gay and lesbian Americans feel it when a stranger passes judgment on their parenting skills or the love that they share.  Muslim Americans feel it when they’re stared at with suspicion because of their faith.  Any woman who knows the injustice of earning less pay for doing the same work — she knows what it’s like to be on the outside looking in.

So your experiences give you special insight that today’s leaders need.  If you tap into that experience, it should endow you with empathy — the understanding of what it’s like to walk in somebody else’s shoes, to see through their eyes, to know what it’s like when you’re not born on 3rd base, thinking you hit a triple.  It should give you the ability to connect.  It should give you a sense of compassion and what it means to overcome barriers.

Watch the full address (HT: Towleroad):

In 2009, Morehouse College was the subject of controversy for instituting a dress code that seemed to specifically target gay men who occasionally cross-dressed. More recently, the university established a scholarship in the name of gay civil rights activist Bayard Rustin and also began offering its first Black LGBT History course.

Economy

E-Commerce Trade Association Opposes Slew of Pro-Consumer Proposals

By Andrea Peterson on May 20, 2013 at 1:15 pm

(Credit: NetChoice.org)

NetChoice, a “trade association of eCommerce businesses and online consumers” representing big tech names including Facebook, Yahoo, eBay, NewsCorp, Reed Elsevier, LivingSocial, and Aol, released a list of what it considers to be “the worst internet laws in America” — but many of the bills it targets would be good for consumers.

NetChoice’s May 2013 iAWFUL (“Internet Advocate’s Watchlist for Ugly Laws”) list rattles off eight types of proposals opposed by the group, many of which appear to be targeted because they may threaten the profit margins of the group’s constituent companies.

Here are three specific instances where the most recent iAWFUL list puts corporate interests before consumer rights or protections:

  1. Accuses California privacy bills of being an “assault on the internet”: While NetChoice points out that some state-level privacy proposals in California have been conflicting, such as one that requires simplified, 100-word privacy policies versus another that requires privacy policies to be more detailed, the group also attacks a bill that merely gives consumers the ability to request what data about them has been given to which third parties and another that updates privacy requirements for mobile apps.
  2. Claims state level data breach notification proposals would lead to “over-notification“: NetChoice opposes a number of state-level data breach notification laws that would require companies collecting personal or private information to notify consumers in a timely manner if their information has been accessed without authorization or breached, arguing they would place consumers at “greater privacy risk” because consumers become desensitized to data breach notifications.
  3. Opposes Open Access initiatives that would give the public access to research: NetChoice takes aim at Open Access proposals, including the White House’s, saying they “could logically extend to assert state copyright over other content coming out of the state’s colleges and universities.” But what Open Access initiatives actually do is provide an remedy for freeing research funded by the public from a broken for-profit academic publishing system where all too often academics do research, pay for the privilege of being published in a journal, get edited by other academics pro-bono, and then the research is licensed back to academic institutions at a very high mark up. NetChoice member Reed Elsevier has actively lobbied against these type of proposals in the past, likely because its subsidiary Elsevier is the largest of the for profit academic publishers — reportedly earned over $1 billion in profits in 2011 with a profit margin around 35 percent and 71 percent of their revenue coming from academic customers like university libraries.

Justice

Will Yahoo Buying Tumblr Mean Less Privacy for Users?

By Andrea Peterson on May 20, 2013 at 1:11 pm

Tumblr announced on Monday it was being bought by tech giant Yahoo! for $1.1 billion in one of the largest social media buyouts in years, but while the purchase will make Tumblr’s founders rich, it may bode poorly for the privacy protections of Tumblr users.

In a recent report card from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), comparing which tech companies protect user’s data from government snooping, Yahoo received one of the lowest scores with only one out of five stars. Tumblr performed significantly better, receiving three stars for requiring a warrant for content, fighting for users’ privacy rights in Congress, and publishing law enforcement guidelines.

A Yahoo spokesperson told reporters in January that the company was requiring warrants for email content data on fourth amendment grounds, joining Google others tech giants. It’s not yet clear how Yahoo will integrate Tumblr into the company, although Yahoo has promised “not to screw it up” in a press statement and said Tumblr will be independently operated as a separate business with David Karp remaining as CEO.

Online privacy law has lagged significantly behind technology advancements. Under the statute governing law enforcement access to digital communications — including private messages over Tumblr’s Fanmail and Yahoo email — the Electronic Privacy Communications Act (ECPA) of 1986, content data over 180 days old stored remotely only requires an administrative subpoena to access, which has a lower threshold of proof than a probable cause warrant.

There are a number of current legislative proposals to update ECPA, one of which was approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee in late April. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit ruled email providers cannot be compelled to turn over the content of messages without a probable cause warrant no matter how long the information has been stored in the cloud in United States v. Warshak. That ruling only applies to the four states in the court’s jurisdiction.

Security

Refugee Crisis Brewing In South Sudan

By Dara McLeod, Guest Blogger on May 20, 2013 at 1:00 pm

(Credit: Getty Images)

JUBA, SOUTH SUDAN — It was early evening in South Sudan, and my colleagues and I had made our way to the compound of a Member of Parliament in the country’s troubled Jonglei state. We were there to meet with several people who had sought refuge from violence in the town of Pibor. People like Mary, who had arrived with five members of her family in tow. The stories that Mary told us were disturbing. She spoke of government forces shooting civilians, burning houses, and looting homes and the local market.

Sadly, Mary’s story echoed other reports that have been coming out of Pibor over the last days and weeks. And they all speak to the growing humanitarian crisis in this war-torn part of the world.

For several weeks, residents of Pibor have been terrorized by the government forces known as the SPLA (Sudan People’s Liberation Army). We’ve heard reports of shops and homes being looted, civilians being killed, and dwellings being burned (sometimes with people still inside of them). Thousands of people sought shelter in the bush, making forays into town to get whatever food was still available in the local market.

The breaking point for many came a couple of weeks ago, when a woman was killed along with her teenage daughter and infant child, while a toddler was left barely alive after being stabbed multiple times. After this, the idea of even short trips into Pibor became untenable for some. We heard of two separate incidents of people who had stepped on landmines but chose to stay in the bush rather than seek medical help for fear of being attacked.

Compounding the problem has been the activities of a local rebel leader named David Yau Yau, who launched an uprising in Jonglei after failing to win a local election in 2010. He recently captured the town of Boma, not far from Pibor. As he threatened to march on Pibor, the last of the civilians fled the town, along with the few remaining humanitarian agencies. The SPLA took advantage of the departures by looting those agencies’ compounds.

Read more

Dara McLeod is the Director of Communications for Refugees International, a non-profit organization that seeks to end displacement and statelessness crises worldwide and accepts no government or UN funding.

LGBT

Virginia Republicans Nominate Rabidly Anti-LGBT Ticket

By Josh Israel on May 20, 2013 at 12:40 pm

At its nominating convention Saturday, the Republican Party of Virginia selected three candidates for the November 2013 statewide elections. Their selections — Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli II for governor, Bishop E.W. Jackson for lieutenant governor, and State Senator Mark Obenshain for attorney general — represent three of the most vocally anti-LGBT figures in the history Virginia politics.

Ken Cuccinelli

Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli (R)Over his seven-and-a-half years as a state senator and his four year as attorney general, Cuccinelli earned a reputation as Virginia’s Todd Akin. He opposes even the most basic legal protections for LGBT people because he believes same-sex relationships are immoral — previously explaining, “My view is that homosexual acts, not homosexuality, but homosexual acts are wrong. They’re intrinsically wrong. And I think in a natural law based country it’s appropriate to have policies that reflect that.” Even after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in its 2003 Lawrence v. Texas case that such bans were unconstitutional, he helped defeat an effort to repeal the state law making consensual sodomy a felony. This maneuver came back to haunt him earlier this year, when prosecutors tried to make use of the law to prosecute a statutory rape case and courts rejected the case on constitutional grounds.

He has actively pushed for state and federal constitutional amendments to prevent any legal recognition of what he terms, “what they’d like to refer to as ‘homosexual families,’” authoring a resolution calling for a federal amendment to invalidate any same-sex marriage, civil union, domestic partnership, or “other relationship analogous to marriage.” He has opined that “giving public sanction to homosexual marriage ends up redefining marriage and it’s certain to harm children.” He even opposed a state bill that allowed private companies to voluntarily provide health insurance benefits to employees’ domestic partners, warning it might “encourage this type of behavior.” His advisory opinion that Virginia’s public colleges and universities should rescind their nondiscrimination policies was called “reprehensible” by a former Republican state legislator. As recently as February, he reaffirmed his fealty to Virginia’s marriage inequality amendment, saying, “Virginians decided this in 2006 that we were going to respect traditional marriage… I don’t see that changing anytime soon.”

After unsuccessfully attempting to block a non-binding resolution honoring a Richmond-based LGBT charitable group, Cuccinelli explained, “When you look at the homosexual agenda, I cannot support something that I believe brings nothing but self-destruction, not only physically but of their soul.”

E.W. Jackson

Bishop E.W. Jackson (R)As a pastor and unsuccessful 2012 Senate candidate, Jackson has never been shy about expressing his strong opposition to LGBT people. He believes gays and lesbians are “very sick people, psychologically and emotionally” whose minds are perverted. He has also said, “Homosexuality is a horrible sin, it poisons culture, it destroys families, it destroys societies; it brings the judgment of God unlike very few things that we can think of.” Read more

Climate Progress

‘We Would All Like Climate Sensitivity To Be Lower But It Isn’t’ Says Lead Scientist Of New Study

By Joe Romm on May 20, 2013 at 12:35 pm

It would be good news if the climate’s sensitivity to carbon pollution were on the low side. No, that wouldn’t save us from catastrophic global warming — 7°F warming or higher — if we stay anywhere near our current emissions path (as I explain here).

But a low sensitivity would mean that aggressive action to reduce CO2 emissions starting now would have a modestly higher chance of keeping total warming below 4°F and averting the worst impacts. That’s the point of New Scientist‘s article, “A second chance to save the climate” on a new sensitivity study in Nature Geoscience:

“If we are lucky and the climate sensitivity is at the low end, and we have a strong agreement in 2015, then I think we stand a chance to limit climate change to 2 °C,” says Corinne Le Quéré of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research in Norwich, UK. “But there’s a lot of ifs.”

If this new study is accurate, then near-term surface warming might be less than expected. But as the lead author Oxford’s Dr. Alexander Otto told the BBC, “We would all like climate sensitivity to be lower but it isn’t.”

The researchers say the difference between the lower short-term estimate and the more consistent long-term picture can be explained by the fact that the heat from the last decade has been absorbed into and is being stored by the world’s oceans.

Recent studies make clear the ocean is warming quite fast, as (see “Global Warming Has Accelerated In Past 15 Years, New Study Of Oceans Confirms” and here). If, as many climatologists believe, some of that ocean heat is released to the surface in the next decade or two, that would reverse the recent slowdown in the rate of surface warming.

Also, many other recent studies find that the climate is more sensitive than we expected:

Indeed, the new study does little to eliminate the confusion about sensitivity. The media continue to conflate and confuse climate sensitivity with how much warming will we subject our children and countless future generations to (see here and below).

Another related source of confusion is conflating “climate sensitivity” — which generally refers to the change in the global surface temperatures (absent major feedbacks) — with how sensitive the climate itself is to changes in temperature.

For instance, our climate models wildly underestimate what’s happening in the Arctic right now:

Read more

Alyssa

What PBS’s Treatment of Two Movies About The Kochs Says About Which Money Counts In Public Television

By Alyssa Rosenberg on May 20, 2013 at 12:23 pm

In this week’s New Yorker, Jane Mayer, who has covered the industrialists Charles and David Koch extensively, chronicles the fate of two documentaries produced for PBS, Alex Gibney’s Park Avenue, which explored the lives of both wealthy residents of a single building on one end of the street and poorer New Yorkers at the other, and Citizen Koch, which examined the consequences of the Citizens United decision. Both movies ran into trouble for the same reason: fear of offending David Koch, who has been a major public television donor, and was until recently on the board of New York public television affiliate WNET. While Park Avenue eventually made it to air on PBS, albeit with a recut introduction and a discussion afterwards that excluded Gibney, Citizen Koch, which was initially supposed to be part of the Independent Lens series, ended up off the lineup. Whether or not David Koch was involved, Mayer’s story would still be interesting as an illustration of what happens when two different philanthropic models bump up against each other.

On one side are the foundations. Gibney’s documentary, Mayer reported, “had been produced independently, in part with support from the Gates Foundation.” And both Park Avenue and Citizen Koch were projects of the Independent Television Service, “the small arm of public television that funds and distributes independent films…ITVS, which is based in San Francisco and was founded some twenty years ago by independent filmmakers, prides itself on its resistance to outside pressure. Its mandate is to showcase opinionated filmmakers who ‘take creative risks, advance issues and represent points of view not usually seen on public or commercial television.’” These foundations represent a mission rather than a personal interest, and that mission is to create space and provide support for a range of ideas, rather than to advance particular arguments or worldviews. It’s a critically important role to fill, but it also means that those organizations have some disadvantages when they come up against the other funding model at stake here, in this case, the support of private donors.

As Mayer explains, in addition to his donations to Lincoln Center—where the David H. Koch Theater, home of the New York City Ballet, bears his name—” In the nineteen-eighties, he began expanding his charitable contributions to the media, donating twenty-three million dollars to public television over the years. In 1997, he began serving as a trustee of Boston’s public-broadcasting operation, WGBH, and in 2006 he joined the board of New York’s public-television outlet, WNET.” Unlike ITVS, for example, which is designed specifically to produce content for public television, there are a lot of places David Koch can spend his money. And unlike ITVS, which has an ongoing mission of making sure that new points of view make it onto public television, a setup that means it’s going to have to expend political capital on behalf of its filmmakers on a regular basis, private donors like Koch are more likely to concentrate their leverage on a few issues, or a few pieces of content. If Koch can make a “seven-figure donation,” which Mayer reported he had planned to give to WNET before he resigned from the board, contingent on two hours of programming, while ITVS has to fight for many films—PBS has already aired 15 movies through ITVS’ Independent Lens program in 2013—ITVS is understandably going to be at a disadvantage, as is the Gates Foundation, which may be all too happy to fund a single film, but doesn’t necessarily want to be in the postion to cover a multi-million dollar hole.
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Immigration

Nearly 300,000 DREAMers Have Been Granted Legal Status Since Last June

By Esther Yu-Hsi Lee on May 20, 2013 at 12:12 pm

(Credit: Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

Since President Obama announced that his administration would stop the deportation proceedings of young immigrants between the ages of 16 and 31 through Deferred Action for Childhood Beneficiaries (DACA) in June 2012, nearly 300,000 applicants have been granted deferred action. Considered to be a “Dream Act lite,” DACA would grant a two-year work authorization to young immigrants, but unlike the Dream Act, DACA does not grant a pathway to citizenship.

On Friday, United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) released the latest DACA statistics for April 2013. Overall, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has granted deferred action to 57 percent or 291,859 applicants of the 515,922 applications, which can be seen in the adapted chart:

(Credit: USCIS, adapted)

In the month of April alone, an additional 23,498 applicants have been approved for work authorization, up from March 2013. Applicants from Mexico still lead the top number of individuals applying for DACA, with Central American countries and South Korea trailing behind.

In recent letters sent to Congress, president of the ICE union Chris Crane stated that 99.5 percent of all DACA applications have been approved. In fact, 96 percent or 497,960 requests of applications have been accepted to move on to the “lockbox” stage in which applications are screened, processed, and decided upon. But these are separate from applicants who have been accepted and granted work authorization.

The economic benefits of legal status have been intensely studied by numerous bipartisan groups, most recently by Robert Lynch and Patrick Oakford of the Center of American Progress, which issued a report on the state-by-state breakdown of the positive economic benefits of 24 states in which 88 percent of undocumented immigrants reside.

The number of DACA applicants closely parallel the states that stand to gain the most from granting legal status to undocumented immigrants. Of the estimated 2.5 million undocumented immigrants in California, over 87,000 DACA applicants have been approved for work authorization and are presumably on their way to contributing to the $68 billion that all Californian state residents seeks to gain from legalization over a ten-year period. This deferral will allow young immigrants to boost their standard of living and also increase their tax contributions. If passed, the Senate immigration bill would allow the 2.1 million so-called DREAMers to contribute $329 billion to the economy, which includes the creation of 1.4 million jobs.

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