Yesterday, CBS’s 60 Minutes ran a segment about the coal industry, interviewing Duke Energy CEO Jim Rogers. Duke is one of the largest electricity companies in the country, and it owns dozens of coal plants nationwide. Last month, the company announced plans for a new 800-megawatt coal-fired plant in North Carolina, and it plans to continue building coal plants.

CBS’s Scott Pelley asked Rogers how he feels about global warming given that his coal plants continue to billow approximately 112 million tons of greenhouse gases. “We need to go to work on it now,” Rogers said. “It is critical that we start to act in this country.” Rogers’ solution? “We have to find a way to clean [coal] and use it,” he insisted. Yet Rogers actual plans to fight global warming are essentially non-existent:

Q: How much has Duke Energy invested in carbon sequestration technology so far?

ROGERS: We have not invested any dollars in the technology, per se. We have spent a lot of time and money reviewing and analyzing the various technologies. … While we haven’t spent the money on sequestration technology, we spent the time and energy and we’re going to co-invest with the government when this technology evolves.

“Our goal line is to substantially to reduce our carbon footprint, to decarbonize our business by 2050,” Rogers said. Pelley observed that “not even the industry that warns of the end of our way of life is paying for it.” Watch it:

“Clean coal,” of course, is a myth. Moreover, the pace of Rogers’ plans for “decarbonizing” his plants is pathetically slow. “2050 is too late, we would have guaranteed disasters,” NASA scientist Jim Hansen told Pelley. “We are going to have to phase out emissions from coal in the next 20 years.” “If there’s no action before 2012, that’s too late,” said IPCC Chairman Rajendra Pauchauri.

So how is Big Coal investing its money? ACCCE – a group of 48 big coal and utility companies, including Duke — has a communications budget for 2009 of $40 million, higher than last year. In 2008, the group spent $10.5 million to lobby Congress and roughly 40 percent of ACCCE’s spending that year was on ads trumpeting “clean coal.” Joe Lucas, spokesman for ACCCE, said last month that he “doesn’t know” if coal fuels global warming. In the meantime, Rogers is busy lobbying against President Obama’s green economy plan, which actually would spur carbon sequestration by pricing pollution.

“We know clean coal is not around the corner,” former senator John Warner, who represented the coal-producing state Virginia, told Congress last week. Indeed.

Today, the Washington Post ran an article entitled “Small Businesses Brace for Tax Battle: Under Obama Plan, Some Entrepreneurs’ Bills Would Soar.” The article tells the story of Gail Johnson, who runs a chain of pre-schools and after-school programs and is supposedly going to be so hard-hit by President Barack Obama’s proposed tax increases that she will “consider scaling back operations.”

The Post proceeds to quote Bruce Josten of the Chamber of Commerce and Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA), who both claimed that Obama’s tax increases are going to cripple business. But in a story with 29 paragraphs — which appeared on the front page of the paper, above the fold — only one paragraph was dedicated to pointing out that the overwhelming majority of small business owners will see their taxes reduced under Obama’s plan. As Dean Baker wrote:

The piece centers on an extremely atypical small business owner who claims that her taxes would increase by more than 19 percent under President Obama’s tax proposals. This person’s situation would describe that of less than 1 percent of all small business owners so it is difficult to understand why such a person would be prominently featured in an article on President Obama’s tax plans.

The Post also dismisses its own lone mention of how few businesses will be affected by stating “whatever the figure, Republicans argue that those who fall into the upper brackets tend to be firms with the greatest capacity for job creation.” The Post fails to note that Republicans who argue this are incorrect.

Here’s the real story. Obama has proposed raising the tax rate on the top two income tax brackets back to the level at which they were under President Clinton, and as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities pointed out, “only 1.9 percent of filers with any small-business income are projected to face either of the top two income tax rates in 2009.” In fact, of people who file most of their income from their own business, “more than half have income below $30,000 and 80 percent make less than $100,000.”

Meanwhile, in a typical year the businesswoman portrayed in the article, along with her husband, makes more than half a million dollars. This places them in the 0.7 percent of households that file in the top two income tax brackets. While no one likes paying higher taxes, this is not a household that is barely scraping by, assuming that the half million is in net income (since that, and not business revenue, is what gets taxed).

So as Matthew Yglesias pointed out, “any small businessman who’s earning a middle class income isn’t paying in the top two brackets, just as any salaried employee who’s earning a middle class income isn’t paying in the top two brackets.” Someone should remind the Washington Post of that fact.

In light of the spread of swine flu — of which there are now 20 confirmed cases in the U.S. — the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has issued guidelines for staying healthy and preventing further proliferation of the disease. According to the guidelines:

Influenza is thought to spread mainly person-to-person through coughing or sneezing of infected people. If you get sick, CDC recommends that you stay home from work or school and limit contact with others to keep from infecting them.

That seems like incredibly prudent advice. Unfortunately, staying home due to illness is simply not possible for a large number of Americans.

Currently, nearly 50 percent of private-sector workers have no paid sick days. For low-income workers, the number jumps to 76 percent, and climbs to 86 percent for food service workers. These workers have to decide between the health of themselves and their co-workers, and the wages that they lose by staying home.

Clearly, sick employees going to work contributes to the spread of diseases like swine flu. But there is also an economic cost to ill employees going to work under any circumstances. According to the National Partnership for Women and Families, “when sick workers are on the job, it costs our national economy $180 billion annually in lost productivity. For employers, this costs an average of $255 per employee per year and exceeds the cost of absenteeism and medical and disability benefits.”

As Yelizavetta Kofman pointed out at the Huffington Post, “of the top 20 economies in the world, the United States is the only one that does not have a national standard for paid sick days.” This could be remedied by the Healthy Families Act, which Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA) and Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) plan to reintroduce in Congress next month. The bill would “guarantee workers up to seven paid sick days a year to recover from an illness or care for a sick family member.” And if it helps prevent the spread of illnesses like swine flu, even better.