NEWS FLASH

Gay Marching Band Will Lead San Francisco’s Veterans Day Parade | In recognition of the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, the Gay Freedom Day Marching Band will lead San Francisco’s 92nd annual Veterans Day Parade this Friday. The band was founded in 1978 to counter Anita Bryant’s anti-gay campaigns and was the first openly gay musical group in the world.

Shakespeare, Global Warming, Sunset and You: ABC News’ Blakemore Launches Nature’s Edge Notebook

By Climate Guest Blogger on Nov 7, 2011 at 5:01 pm

JR: ABC News is starting to build out their climate website, which was started by Bill Blakemore 4 years ago. He just launched “Nature’s Edge Notebook,” a weekly column on climate change. ABC News has given me permission to repost the whole piece. So be sure to bookmark the site or like the new Facebook page. Also, there is a great video interview of climatologist Richard Somerville below.

by Bill Blakemore, in an ABC News cross-post

Imagine you’re reading Shakespeare on an unseasonably warm evening while sitting on a dune looking west across the sea at sunset.

Who really wrote that poetry, what caused that extra heat, and what’s really happening out on the horizon?

You’ll need experts for all that.

On sunset, scientists now have news this reporter finds it hard to keep a grip on.

You watch the reddening sun move down toward the horizon until the bottom edge of the bright disc drops behind the rim of the sea. The still visible portion of the sun morphs into various shapes as it moves inexorably down until it’s just a tiny point of light. Then, as you can plainly see, it is suddenly gone as the sun travels even further below the horizon.

Experts now tell us none of that is true. The sun isn’t moving down at all!

Instead, the earth beneath you is rolling backwards so that its rounded bulk is slowly rising up between you and the sun.

Incredible. You don’t sense this motion. The earth seems to be the steady one.

Of course, experts have long told us this — ever since Galileo’s trial in 1633 for concurring with astronomer Copernicus on the matter. And we believe them.

And yet, I still need to remind myself each time (if I think of it at all) when watching the sun set that it doesn’t.

You too?

Economy

New Census Data Shows Safety Net Programs Keep Millions Out Of Poverty

By Guest Blogger on Nov 7, 2011 at 5:00 pm

Our guest blogger is Desmond Brown, a consultant for the Half in Ten campaign at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

The U.S. Census Bureau today released new data that provided a more detailed picture of poverty and hardship in the United States. For the first time, the Bureau released 2010 poverty statistics under a new Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM).

The SPM includes a more comprehensive list of items in determining the number of Americans who are poor. It reflects items such as work related expenses, out of pocket medical costs, and child care expenses. At the same time, the SPM factors in tax and transfer programs such as SNAP/food stamps, the earned income tax credit, and housing subsidizes in determining those who are poor.

As a result of this more detailed analysis, the SPM offers a slightly different picture of poverty than the official poverty measure, which was released earlier this year for 2010. Overall, the SPM presented a higher rate of poverty than the official measure, showing 16 percent of Americans living in poverty, as opposed to 15.2 percent.

One of the major improvements of this new analysis is that it provides a better picture of the impact of government programs such as the Earned Income Tax Credit and school lunch. These safety net programs were tremendously effective in 2010 in keeping vulnerable Americans out of poverty. Below is an illustration if their impact:

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Justice

Rep. Steve King Says Asking Hospital Patients Their Immigration Status Would Not Be Going ‘Too Far’

By Scott Keyes on Nov 7, 2011 at 5:00 pm

ThinkProgress filed this report from the Values Voters bus tour in Waukee, Iowa.

Portions of the nation’s most harmful immigration law went into effect last month in Alabama, causing widespread fear and panic among the state’s Latino population. It requires school officials to verify students’ immigration status, prompting thousands of frightened Latino students not to show up for school. The new law even makes it a felony for utility companies to provide water in undocumented immigrants’ homes.

ThinkProgress spoke with one of the leading anti-immigration voices in the House GOP, Rep. Steve King (R-IA), yesterday in Iowa to get his take on Alabama’s law. King brushed aside concern that the law may go too far, arguing instead that police officers ought to “see somebody on the street and say, ‘Why are you here? What are you doing? Who are you? I don’t know who you are.’” When we asked whether forcing hospital patients to prove their immigration status would cross the line, King disagreed, stating, “I don’t know why that would be too far.”

KEYES: Do you think that Alabama went too far in terms of asking schoolchildren their immigration status or having utility companies be able to shut off water to families if they don’t provide their immigration status?

KING: [...] Going too far to ask someone about their status? Whether they can be legally or illegally in the United States? Not in the world I grew up in. In the world I grew up in, a police officer would see somebody on the street and say, “Why are you here? What are you doing? Who are you? I don’t know who you are.” [...]

KEYES: Is there anything you think that could be too far, like asking people in the hospital about their immigration status?

KING: I don’t know why that would be too far. It depends on who is doing the asking. But I have walked through the hospitals down along the border, and I know what goes on. Tucson University Hospital, for example, is the most southerly trauma center in Arizona. The reason for that is all the rest of them had to close because they’ve been required to provide free medical care to people who are in the United States illegally.

Watch it:

In his eight years in Congress, King has amassed a long record of castigating immigrants and Latinos in general. Last year, he declared that Rep. Raúl Grijalva’s (D-AZ) southern Arizona district may have been “ceded…to Mexico.” Prior to that, King called immigration a “slow-motion Holocaust.” And while discussing a border fence on the House floor in 2006, King proposed electrifying it, noting that “we do this with livestock all the time.”

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Security

NRA Won’t Back Down From Supporting Law That Increases Military Suicides

By Marie Diamond on Nov 7, 2011 at 4:40 pm

In 2010, for the second year in a row, the U.S. military lost more troops to suicide than in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan. Half took place with personally owned weapons. Yet military commanders who want to intervene have their hands tied by an NRA-backed law that bars them from discussing gun ownership with at-risk troops.

A new report recommends that Congress repeal this rule, setting the stage for a fight between the National Rifle Association and troop advocates trying to stop the suicide epidemic:

America is losing the battle against service member and veteran suicides, a new report warned Monday, which could set up a political showdown between two perhaps unlikely opponents: Troop advocates and the national gun-rights lobby.

The report, issued by the Center for a New American Security, recommends that Congress repeal a provision in last year’s National Defense Authorization Act that bars military commanders from talking with troops about troops’ personally owned firearms — a factor in nearly half of soldier suicides last year. [...]

The National Rifle Association pushed for the ban on personal gun restrictions earlier this year after learning these kinds of rules were being put in place locally at posts around the U.S. Chris Cox, director of the NRA’s lobbying arm, said in a message to members earlier this year that it was “preposterous” that commanders at Fort Riley, Kan., wanted troops to register privately owned weapons kept on and off base.

More than 462 troops took their own lives in 2010, and suicide rates have only gotten worse: July 2011 marked the highest monthly total on record. The report estimates that “from 2005 to 2010, service members took their own lives at a rate of approximately one every 36 hours,” while Veterans Affairs says that a veteran dies by suicide every 80 minutes. According to the CNAS report, 48 percent of military suicides in 2010 took place with personally owned weapons.

“Multiple studies indicate that preventing easy access to lethal means, such as firearms, is an effective form of suicide prevention,” the authors note. Rescinding the provision would allow military commanders to have open discussions with soldiers so they can “suggest to service members exhibiting high-risk behavior, acting erratically or struggling with depression that they use gunlocks or store their guns temporarily at the unit armory.”

Media Matters notes that Gen. Peter Chiarelli, the Army’s second-highest-ranking officer, agrees that the law stops commanders from having important gun safety discussions with troops, putting them at increased risk of suicide. “If you can separate the individual from the weapon, you can lower the incidences of suicide,” he said.

Congress could use this year’s defense bill to repeal the measure, but the NRA had made it clear that they will fight any change tooth and nail. In fact, they collaborated with Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) to insert language into the defense bill that would prohibit the Defense Department from “issuing any requirement, or collecting or recording any information relating to the otherwise lawful acquisition, possession, ownership, carrying, or other use of a privately owned firearm.”

The NRA has also backed legislation that prohibits pediatricians from inquiring about guns in homes with young children, once again illustrating that it will always prioritize unbridled gun ownership over public safety and the lives of service members.

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Health

Republican Governor To Super Committee: Reductions In Medicaid Will ‘Force Us To Make Dramatic Education Cuts’

By Igor Volsky on Nov 7, 2011 at 4:25 pm

Nebraska Gov. Dave Heineman (R) called on the super committee to avoid making further cuts to the Medicaid program during an appearance on Bloomberg TV this morning, saying that while states can swallow small cuts, larger reductions would result in a “cost-shift to the states”:

HEINEMAN: We know there is going to be a reduction in the Medicaid program. If it’s a small reduction, states are prepared to share in that, we will do our part. If it is a dramatic reduction, then it is significantly going to have an adverse impact on state budgets. And when you look at state budgets, there are three big items: Medicaid, the funding we do for the education of our children in K-12 and higher education. So if you dramatically cut Medicaid, you’re going to force us to make dramatic education cuts for our children, that’s not where we ant to go.

Watch it:

Republican governors penned a letter to the super committee last month arguing that states would accept additional cuts if the federal government extended “new flexibility” that would give governors greater control over Medicaid program and loosen federal restrictions. However many of those reforms — like block granting Medicaid, for instance — would result in significant reductions in federal spending, the very same reductions that Heineman is now trying to avoid.

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Climate Progress

Corporate Welfare For Energy Companies Means We Paid $24 Billion In Taxes To Them

By Brad Johnson on Nov 7, 2011 at 4:20 pm

Tax breaks and subsidies for energy companies have gotten so extreme that dozens of top companies have made billions in profits while having negative taxes, actually receiving taxpayer welfare instead of paying anything to the federal treasury. An analysis by Citizens for Tax Justice and the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy found dozens of companies that had a negative tax balance between 2008 and 2010, while making billions in profits. Because of tax breaks and questionable tax dodging, these companies reported higher post-tax profits than pretax profits, often actually getting checks from the Internal Revenue Service.

During these years of negative taxation, 32 companies in the fossil-fuel industry — from Exxon Mobil and Peabody Energy to ConEd and PG&E — transformed a tax responsibility of $17.3 billion on $49.4 billion in pretax profits into tax benefits of $6.5 billion, a $24 billion windfall:

The official corporate tax rate in the United States is 35 percent, but subsidies and dodges make that figure meaningless. The overall tax rate for top utility companies from 2008 to 2010 was 3.7 percent, the report found. Companies in the oil, gas, and pipelines sector paid 15.7 percent. The report’s authors comment:

It seems rather odd, not to mention highly wasteful, that the industries with the largest subsidies (driven in part by their large share of total profits) are ones that would seem to need them least.

Regulated utilities, for example, make investment decisions in concert with their regulators based on the needs of the communities they serve. Oil and gas companies are so profitable that even President George W. Bush said they did not need tax breaks.

DC-area utility Pepco had the highest negative tax rate of the 280 companies surveyed in the report, with negative taxes of $508 billion on $882 pretax profits, a whopping -57 percent effective tax rate. Pepco chairman, president, and CEO Joe Rigby made $3.6 million in 2010.

The 99 percent is subsidizing welfare for the 1 percent. First the corporations profit from the utility bills and gas prices that take a disproportionate chunk of working families’ budgets, then they get another cut from a corporate-friendly tax code. The lion’s share of the profits are kept for the benefit of overpaid executives and superwealthy shareholders. Furthermore, these corporations are profiting from the extraction and burning of fossil fuels, giving them the triple subsidy of the long-term costs of pollution being paid primarily by children and the elderly.
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Yglesias

La Coeur De Léon Gambetta

By Matthew Yglesias on Nov 7, 2011 at 4:15 pm

They may not have saved Hitler’s brain, but they did save Léon Gambetta’s heart:

I now want to write a long pretentious essay about something called “The Heart of Léon Gambetta.” But I’m trying in vain to come up with some connection to the current Eurodoom. I did, however, also get to stop by Jean Monnet’s grave:

As expected, he was rolling over.

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Alyssa

‘The Walking Dead’ Open Thread: Rules

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Nov 7, 2011 at 4:07 pm

This post contains spoilers through the Nov. 6 episode of The Walking Dead.

I haven’t felt exceptionally engaged by this season of The Walking Dead, but tonight’s episode raised two big questions for me. First, related to the actual events of the show, what’s really going on at Hershel’s farm? And second, at what point the show’s grossness disgusting for the sake of disgustingness?

Given that most American popular culture doesn’t take belief particularly seriously or delve into theology, I’m glad to see the show reveal Hershel’s faith slowly and to set up a genuine religious conflict between him and Rick who, as he puts it, is trying to stay out of the Almighty’s way. There’s an interesting symmetry to the episode, beginning with Hershel’s eulogy for Otis — who Shane killed to save his own life — in which he calls children like Carl “now, more than ever, our most precious asset,” and the end, in which it’s revealed that Lori is pregnant. Have Rick and company stumbled on a theocracy? Will Lori’s pregnancy be the subject of a tussle that brings their uneasy arrangement down? Hershel’s initially reluctant to let them stay, but after Rick appeals to his religious beliefs, telling him, “If you saw how it is out there, you wouldn’t ask,” he relents, on a trial basis, warning Rick that “If you and your people respect my rules, no promises, but I will consider it.”

And that raises an interesting, and perhaps corollary question: why is it that Hershel and his people have been able to remain unmolested? There’s a road that lead to their place. It’s not fortified. There are a lot of humans concentrated there. So what’s going on? What rules could possibly keep zombies out, except for the one living in Well 2? And how did he get there in the first place?

All of these questions are, to me, vastly more interesting than the site of yet another intensely grisly zombie death. When the bloated, shambling corpse breaks in half while they’re trying to haul it out of the well, it’s just disgusting, serving no other purpose other than to illustrate the futility of their effort. And then the show compounds the sickening nature of the scene by having T-Dog bash the zombie’s head to a pulp, a sequence that’s shot in typical detail, rather than a merciful dispatch to the head. I’ve worked hard to get myself used to violence, but I still tend to think that there ought to be some justification for extreme instances of it. And I can’t really see the point: this is pulping someone who was once human just because the outer parameters of the show permit it. I miss the moments from the first season of the show when the actors playing the zombies had a chance to impart a real pathos to their characters, to suggest a strange fragment of humanity remained beneath necrotizing flesh. Those kinds of scene lent a sense of horror, and of choice, to the violence the characters had to admit. Absent that sense of conflict — or a sense that poisoning this one well will have real consequences — scenes like this are just disgusting. They don’t actually mean anything about the dead, or the people forced to dispatch them a second time.

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LGBT

Bachmann Accuses Romney Of ‘Signing 189 Same-Sex Marriage Licenses’ As Governor Of Massachusetts

By Igor Volsky on Nov 7, 2011 at 4:00 pm

Michele Bachmann went after Mitt Romney’s record on same-sex marriage during an appearance on the Steve Deace radio show last week, accusing the former Massachusetts governor — whose state began issuing same-sex licenses in May of 2004 — of signing “189 same-sex marriage license.” Without referring to Romney by name Bachmann asked, “If a candiate has signed those same-sex marriage licenses, how likely will they be to fight against same-sex marriage?” Listen:

Bachmann is regurgitating a popular misconception put forward by right-wing groups that conflates the state’s One Day Marriage Designation with actual marriage licenses. As the Massachusetts state website explains, “[t]he One-Day Marriage Designation is not a marriage license,” but rather a certificate the governor can issue to “designate non-clergy individuals to solemnize a marriage.” Once same-sex marriage became legal in Massachusetts, the Romney administration granted designation applications to same and opposite sex couples.

While Romney walked a more moderate line on LGBT equality as governor than he he now does as a candidate for the GOP presidential nomination, he has opposed same-sex marriage and took steps toward blocking town clerks from issuing licenses to out-of-state gay couples.

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