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.

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.)

The 20 point gender gap in the 2012 election was the largest since Gallup poll began tracking in 1952 — the Obama-Biden ticket beat the Romney-Ryan ticket by a large margin with women, driven largely by women of color turning out at high rates for the President.

That loss was predictable based on polling that asked women questions about specific proposals in Paul Ryan’s previous budgets, which showed that women highly disapprove of cutting Medicaid, Medicare, and other vital programs that meet their health care needs. But the budget Ryan released this week suggests he learned nothing from women’s responses at the voting booth.

Ryan has never been a friend to women’s health, and has repeatedly taken action to limit women’s rights and access to health care — and his new budget is just more of the same. It would dismantle the advancements made through the Affordable Care Act and institute dramatic reductions in the services available through key programs, on top of the cuts women’s health services are already facing as a result of the sequester.

Here are the top four ways the new Ryan Budget (which is just the same as the old Ryan budget) guts key programs for women’s health:

1. Repeals crucial reforms in the Affordable Care Act.

Millions of women would lose the consumer protections and access to affordable health coverage that they gained under the health law. These reforms are critical for both women’s health and economic security.

The Ryan budget would eliminate the ban on discrimination against those with preexisting conditions, including breast cancer, Cesarean sections, rape, and health needs related to domestic violence; provisions that allow young women to stay on their parents health insurance plans until age 26; premium tax credits that help individuals and small businesses purchase health insurance; Obamacare’s expansion of Medicaid; and a slew of other benefits that the law provides for women’s health.

By repealing protections in Obamacare, the Ryan budget would preserve an individual health insurance market that routinely discriminates against women. Insurance companies in the individual market charge women $1 billion more in premiums than men each year for the same set of benefits. Under the health reform law, insurers will also be required to cover maternity care — only 12 percent of plans on the individual market currently do.

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Our guest blogger is Lindsay Rosenthal, a Research Assistant for Health Policy and Women’s Health and Rights at the Center for American Progress.

The right-wing Family Research Council — which uses its advocacy muscle to try to block comprehensive sexual health programs in public schools — is now going a step further, suggesting the young Americans who have premarital sex should be punished because they don’t deserve the right to engage in sexual intercourse.

According to senior FRC fellow Pat Fagan, the Supreme Court’s “first assault on marriage” was a 1972 case that overturned a state law banning unmarried people from purchasing birth control. Fagan claims that court decision effectively sanctioned premarital sex, “brushing aside thousands and thousands of years of wisdom, tradition, [and] culture.” Appearing on a radio show with Tony Perkins, the head of the organization, Fagan asserted that “society never gave young people that right,” and instead has an obligation to stop, punish, and shame that type of sexual behavior:

FAGAN: The court decided that single people have the right to contraceptives. What’s that got to do with marriage? Everything, because what the Supreme Court essentially said is single people have the right to engage in sexual intercourse. Well, societies have always forbidden that, there were laws against it. [...]

It’s not the contraception, everybody thinks it’s about contraception, but what this court case said was young people have the right to engage in sex outside of marriage. Society never gave young people that right, functioning societies don’t do that, they stop it, they punish it, they corral people, they shame people, they do whatever. The institution for the expression of sexuality is marriage and all societies always shepherded young people there, what the Supreme Court said was forget that shepherding, you can’t block that, that’s not to be done.

In fact, a full 80 percent of unmarried evangelical Christians report that they are having sex. Despite the emphasis on abstinence within the evangelical community — a misguided approach to sexuality that typically shames young adults about their bodies, ignores the existence of the LGBT community, and fails to equip adolescents with the resources they need to effectively manage their sexual health — it’s clear that premarital sex is the norm, not something that threatens the very fabric of modern society.

And ignoring the reality that teens are having sex has had serious consequences across the country. The states that push ineffective abstinence-only health classes have higher rates of teen pregnancy, higher rates of STDs, and higher concentrations of HIV infections. Even the evangelical community itself has started to realize that denying teens sexual health resources isn’t working, and has begun to move in the direction of supporting contraception and sex education.

The United States’ teen birth rate has actually recently plunged to a record low — but that wouldn’t be the case if Fagan had his way and unmarried Americans were denied access to birth control. According to the Guttmacher Institute, that decline in unintended teen pregnancies is “almost exclusively” the result of more young people using contraception.

(HT: Right Wing Watch)

North Dakota lawmakers, who have pushed a stringently anti-choice agenda since the new legislative session began, are set to consider a package of abortion restrictions this week that would tighten the state’s laws even further. But one Fargo-area doctor is warning lawmakers that advancing those measures would have disastrous effects on women’s health — rolling back the clock to a time before Roe v. Wade, when women often resorted to dangerous measures in the absence of safe, legal abortion services.

North Dakota lawmakers are moving closer toward shutting down the state’s last remaining abortion clinic, as well as considering the same two abortion restrictions that Arkansas Republicans recently forced into law — a “fetal pain” ban to outlaw abortion after 20 weeks, and a much more stringent “fetal heartbeat” ban that would outlaw all abortion services just six weeks into pregnancy. Piling on those abortion restrictions would prevent many women in the state from accessing the critical health care they need, retired pediatrician Ted Kleiman explained to lawmakers on Tuesday.

Kleiman has firsthand experience with the consequences of denying women access to reproductive resources. When he was working in a New York hospital before Roe v. Wade legalized abortion services in 1973, he saw at least one woman die from the complications from a botched illegal abortion. “The thought of returning to those days is really beyond imagination,” Kleiman told state senators, urging them not to close North Dakota’s only abortion clinic.

But unfortunately for the women whose state lawmakers are hostile to abortion rights, being forced to return to the days before Roe v. Wade isn’t a distant possibility. It’s dangerously close to becoming their reality. States across the country are successfully chipping away at women’s constitutionally-protected reproductive rights, threatening to return to an era when an estimated 1.2 million women — typically, those who lacked socioeconomic and racial privilege — were forced to resort to illegal, unsafe abortion procedures each year.

Around the world, unsafe abortions contribute to an annual 47,000 preventable deaths. Unlike access to contraception, the legality of abortion has absolutely no correlation to abortion rates around the world, since women seek to terminate pregnancies regardless of the law. If anti-choice lawmakers in states like North Dakota have their way, women in this country could certainly be forced into that type of “backroom” procedure as well — even while Roe v. Wade technically still stands.

On Wednesday, the trial will begin for two high school boys charged with raping a young girl at a party. Their story — and the story of their town, Steubenville, OH — has captured national attention, bringing a focus onto football culture, social media, and the issue of consent.

The alleged victim isn’t from Steubenville. She’s from a town in West Virginia, across the Ohio river. But she was at a Steubenville party one night in August of 2012, where the attack is said to have occurred. Reports, and a rather incriminating video, indicate that the two boys sexually assaulted the girl over several hours, in the back of a moving car and, later, in a basement. The assault allegedly included anal and vaginal penetration and urination.

As the trial begins, here’s what you should know about the boys, the victim, and the town of Steubenville:

The alleged attackers are football stars. Seventeen-year-old Trent Mays and 16-year-old Ma’lik Richmond are both on Steubenville High School’s football team — a trait that is widely revered in Steubenville. People in the town have apparently taken sides in the case, and by most accounts the vast majority side with the boys. The alleged victim, they say, got herself into trouble by being too drunk. A New York Times story on the case paints the almost 20,000 person town of Steubenville as small place where, as a local judge put it, “Everybody knows everybody.”

They were originally charged with rape and kidnapping. Details are obviously murky about what happened on the night of the alleged assault, but original charges brought against the two young men included kidnapping, since they brought the girl to several parties without her consent. Those charges were dropped, but Maysis charged with “the illegal use of a minor in nudity-oriented material” because of pictures he took that night.

Social media played a big role in the case. The girl who was assaulted apparently didn’t know about the attack until she found out on social media. Indeed, some of the strongest evidence against the two boys came from their friends and classmates. Videos of the alleged assault were uploaded on YouTube. One 12-minute video leaked by hacker group Anonymous captures another sports player in the town making jokes about the assault, including that the girl “is so raped right now” and “deader” than Trayvon Martin. Images of the alleged assault were also posted on Instagram, including the one below, which was retrieved by a former Steubenville resident from a deleted file.

Richmond described the above photo as a joke in which the girl was a “willing participant.”

The boys’ lawyers plan to argue that silence is consent. Attorneys for Mays tried to get the charges dropped entirely because two of his friends were denied the chance to serve as witnesses. When that failed, the defense came up with a different strategy: They plan to argue that, “[s]he didn’t affirmatively say no,” and thus gave her consent. This ignores Ohio’s law, much like laws in the rest of the country, that agreeing to go out with someone does not mean you have given consent to sex. The lawyers’ argument is perhaps most disturbing, because it actually echoes one of the jokes captured in the uploaded Anonymous video: “It isn’t really rape because you don’t know if she wanted to or not.”

There is a clear media narrative at work now: That two boys, just trying to get by on the love of football, are facing the trials of a public court, and that they might be denied the chance to play again. But that line bumps up against a broader conversation that is just beginning to crack the surface of the mainstream: That women’s bodies shouldn’t be seen as commodities, and that our culture needs to stop teaching women not to get raped and start teaching men not to rape in the first place.

Despite the fact that women voted en masse to reject Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) budget plan in the November election, this week’s unveiling of the latest House Republican budget shows that Rep. Ryan still doesn’t get it when it comes to standing with women and promoting the economic security of their families.

The latest Ryan budget puts a tight cap on the area of the budget that funds vital supports for low-income girls and young adults, like nutrition assistance for expectant mothers and their children, child development, childcare, and education assistance. Adult women struggling to feed their families would see their food stamp (or SNAP) benefits cut. Changes to Medicaid would jeopardize women’s access to affordable health care and long-term care — making matters worse for women doing their best to care for themselves, their children, and their aging parents — and turning Medicare into a voucher program would shift costs onto senior women, jeopardizing their future economic security.

Unfortunately, just as in past years, the former vice presidential candidate has put forth a budget that rewards the rich with a huge tax break while cutting off opportunity and pathways out of poverty for women at every critical juncture in their lives:

Our guest blogger is Katie Wright, a Policy Analyst at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

As part of President Obama’s Affordable Care Act, Congress passed a national menu labeling law in 2010 that would require restaurant chains with more than 20 locations post calorie counts for each standard menu item. Three years later, the Food and Drug Administration is still deliberating on the “extremely thorny” issue of how to accommodate various special interests in executing the law. The latest delay concerns clashing interests in the restaurant and grocery lobbies, which believe they should be exempt from the labeling rules:

While the restaurant industry has signed on to the idea and helped to write the new regulations, supermarkets, convenience stores and other retailers that sell prepared food say they want to no part of it.

“There are very, very strong opinions and powerful voices both on the consumer and public health side and on the industry side, and we have worked very hard to sort of figure out what really makes sense and also what is implementable,” FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg said in a recent interview with The Associated Press.

Hamburg said menu labeling has turned out to be one of the FDA’s most challenging issues, and while requiring calorie counts in some establishments might make sense on paper, “in practice it really would be very hard.” She did not say what specific types of establishments she was referring to.

If the FDA could set aside these competing business interests, a national labeling rule should be fairly straightforward — in fact, many chains already post calorie counts on their menus in compliance with local laws. But the FDA is not accustomed to writing mandatory rules for the food industry. The agency typically offers optional guidelines and allows businesses to self-regulate, even though voluntary industry standards tend to be far more lenient than actual regulation. One such set of voluntary guidelines, concerning antibiotic overuse in livestock, was rejected by a federal judge unimpressed by the FDA’s insistence that simply asking companies to reduce antibiotics would be more effective and less costly than enforcing a ban. Only after the judge ordered the agency to come up with a new rule did they restart a stalled review process initiated in 1977. Later, internal memos showed the FDA doubted the effectiveness of its own voluntary strategy.

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Days after top House Republicans asked President Obama to expand a provision in the Affordable Care Act, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) admitted on Wednesday that the ACA incorporates provisions that Republicans “have always been talking about,” including solutions he himself proposed in 2009.

During an appearance on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Ryan singled out state-based exchanges and high-risk insurance pools, both of which Democrats included in the final law after months of negotiations with Republicans on the Senate Finance Committee. The exchanges or new regulated marketplaces for insurance will go online by 2014, while the temporary high risk pool program for individuals and families with pre-existing conditions has enrolled more than 100,000 people, but stopped accepting new applicants in February.

The House Budget Chairman — who on Tuesday introduced a measure that would repeal most of the health care law — claimed that the administration “screwed” the Republican-backed proposals and “destroyed” them, pointing to a 2009 bill he offered with Sens. Tom Coburn (R-OK) and Richard Burr (R-NC) as a plan to fix the broken health care system:

RYAN: Look, exchanges at the state level is something we have always been talking about. Tom Coburn and I had a bill. I think they have kind of messed up the idea of exchanges but the idea from conservative standpoint is a revived idea that can work. The other thing is high risk pools. They screwed the high risk pools and didn’t work in Obamacare but a way of making them work from our minds to make sure that people with preexisting conditions can get considerable health insurance. We think some in that law were destroyed but revive those things in an effort to replacing the law.

Ryan introduced the Patient Choice Act as an alternative to President Obama’s health care proposal on May 20, 2009. And while the bill taxed the full value of employer health benefits, issued refundable tax credits, and expanded the use of Health Savings Accounts, it had some similarities to what ultimately became the ACA.

For instance, the measure encouraged states to “establish rational and reasonable consumer protections” by forming State Health Insurance Exchanges to give Americans a choice of “different” private “health insurance policies” and issue standard benefits, offering “coverage to any individual regardless of age or health.” The bill even included “non-profit, independent board” to penalize insurance companies “that cherry pick health patients and reward insurers that cover patients with pre-existing conditions.” It described the board as “a model that works in several European countries.”

The high-risk insurance pools that are included in the ACA were advanced by the GOP during Sen. John McCain’s (R-AZ) presidential bid in 2008. The measure is designed as a bridge to the exchanges for families and individuals who don’t have an offer of coverage from an employer and cannot find insurance in the individual market.