Women Who Edit Magazines Make $15,000 Less Than Men

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Sep 27, 2012 at 3:36 pm

The latest numbers from Folio about who makes what in the world of magazine editing reaffirm what we already know: women make less money than men in comparable positions. Male editors-in-chief or editorial directors of magazines make $100,800 to women’s $85,100. For executive editors, men pull down $84,200 to women’s $65,700. And for senior editors, men make $63,600 to the $58,200 women take home in salary. What those numbers don’t tell us is how to start rectifying those pay gaps, which, as Folio editor Bill Mickey told The Atlantic Wire, start to seem inevitable: “We don’t have any further insight into that number, except that the gap has historically been about the same and I believe aligns with national trends across other industries.” We’ve collected data on gender and pay and gender and bylines for a long time. But if we want things to change, we need to start cross-referencing these numbers to see who’s doing worse, who’s doing better, and why.

Folio’s numbers, for example, break out pay not just by gender, but by whether the editors at business-to-business publications, consumer magazines, and trade publications, where they are geographically, by size of publication, and by years in the business. Looking at the numbers by gender alone are discouraging—they make it look like everyone is doing badly. But if we started cross-referencing those numbers, we might be able to see if some kinds of publications do better than others. Are women able to get a leg up in business-to-business magazines? Are the numbers skewed by bigger-than-normal pay gaps in New York, the center of the magazine industry? Are the numbers closer to parity in entry-level positions, indicating that time is doing the work to change a culture of pay inequality that magazines previously haven’t done?

These are the same kinds of questions that it would be useful to apply in film and television as well, where there is much less comprehensive salary data in any case. Knowing if women do better in dramas or comedies, in shows or films produced by different studios or airing on different networks or distributed by different companies would help us figure out who’s doing exceptionally poorly, and who’s made strides.
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Justice

How The Tea Party Hopes To Purge Thousands of Ohio Voters

By Nicole Flatow on Sep 27, 2012 at 3:30 pm

Members of an Ohio tea party group are taking it upon themselves to individually police alleged voter fraud, launching challenges to a targeted list of voters that includes hundreds of college students, trailer park residents, homeless people and African Americans in counties President Obama won in 2008. In all, the group has sought to remove from the voter rolls at least 2,100 registrations in 13 Ohio counties, nine of which Obama won in 2008, according to the Los Angeles Times.

The alleged perpetrators of this voter fraud include Lori Monroe, a 40-year-old recovering from cancer, whose apartment for the past seven years was allegedly listed as a commercial property; and eight members of an African American family, whose four-bedroom home where the family has lived since the 1980s was allegedly listed as a vacant lot. The group has also focused on challenging college students for failure to specify a dorm room number, a claim that every election board has thus far found invalid.

The group behind this crusade has dubbed itself the Ohio Voter Integrity Project, an offshoot of Texas-based True the Vote, which champions voter purges and voter ID laws and has been building a “poll watcher” network, an effort documented by Colorlines’ Brentin Mock:

[True the Vote National Elections Coordinator Bill] Ouren and Americans for Prosperity gathered these recruits in Boca Raton in July to instruct them on how they could become “empowered” vessels for True the Vote’s poll watcher program. True the Vote is most widely known for its advocacy of restrictive photo voter ID laws. But while that might garner headlines, the group’s real focus is on policing the act of voting itself. As Ouren declared during the group’s national summit in April, and repeated again in Boca Raton, his recruits’ job is chiefly to make voters feel like they’re “driving and seeing the police following you.” He aims to recruit one million poll watchers around the country. […]

True the Vote encourages recruits to “build relationships with election administrators” because “they control the access to the vote,” as Ouren told a gathering in Houston. In 2010, the group was able to get a list of voter registration data from Republican Harris County registrar Leo Vasquez, who reportedly refused the same to the Democratic Party, for which the party sued. When the King Street Patriots submitted to him their list of fraudulent actions they claimed to see at the polls, Vasquez accepted them without verification and held a press conference with Engelbrecht asserting Harris County polls were “under a systemic and organized attack.”

Of course, these phony charges of voter fraud – a wildly exaggerated phenomenon — do more than harass legally registered voters; they provide an artificial justification for the real and considerable threats to disfranchisement that come from new restrictive voter suppression laws, such as the move to limit early voting in Ohio, now embroiled in litigation.

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Economy

Explaining Today’s Great Jobs News

By Guest Blogger on Sep 27, 2012 at 3:30 pm

Our guest blogger is Heather Boushey, a senior economist at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

New data released this morning by the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that the private-sector added 450,000 more jobs as of March 2012 than previously thought. This means that the economy has crossed the threshold and more jobs have been created than lost during President Obama’s term.

This is a remarkable accomplishment—and one that would not have happened without the Recovery Act and other policies developed by this administration and passed by the 111th Congress in 2009. When President Obama was sworn in, the economy was losing jobs to the unprecedented tune of over 20,000 per day. Between the beginning of 2008 and February 2010 when the tide began to turn, the economy lost nearly 8.8 million jobs—4.3 million on Obama’s watch and almost 4.5 million under President Bush’s.

In February 2009, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was signed into law and funds began almost immediately moving their way through the economy and the pace of job losses slowed, turning positive a year later. Since February 2010, including the newly revised data, the economy has added 4.4 million total payroll jobs, an average of 135,00 per month.

Even so, today’s data contained another glaring statistic: the economy has lost more than 700,000 public sector jobs since 2009, holding back the overall recovery. Without those losses, our unemployment rate would be at least a full point lower.

The data released today is part of the Bureau of Labor Statistics annual benchmark revisions to the establishment data and the magnitude of the revision is consistent with prior years, about plus or minus 0.3 percent. The establishment data includes all employers who pay into the unemployment insurance system, which is virtually every employer. Most firms file monthly reports for their payroll taxes, but some are late, some firms go out of business, some start up. Thus, once a year, the BLS sits down with the final UI payroll tax data to update the data previously released.

As the following chart shows, the economy has now added private sector jobs for 30 consecutive months:

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Climate Progress

If Obama Wants To Be Re-Elected, He Needs To Break His Climate Silence

By Brad Johnson, Guest Blogger on Sep 27, 2012 at 3:30 pm

by Brad Johnson

Years ago, both Barack Obama and Mitt Romney spoke forcefully about the need for action on global warming:

“We cannot afford more of the same timid politics when the future of our planet is at stake. Global warming is not a someday problem, it is now.” — Barack Obama in 2007

“I concur that climate change is beginning to effect on our natural resources and that now is the time to take action toward climate protection.” — Mitt Romney in 2003

But during this election, they’ve been silent about the key facts of global warming and how they plan to address it. In the past four years, Americans have been struck by a barrage of billion-dollar climate disasters, driven by increasing greenhouse pollution from fossil fuels. From record heat waves to increasingly powerful storms, crushing droughts to unprecedented flooding, the impacts of climate change are now squarely being felt within our borders. Yet, amazingly, the clear and present danger of carbon-poisoned weather remains largely absent from this year’s presidential election.

ClimateSilence.org chronicles this slow, collective descent toward mute acceptance of global calamity. While many in the media have noted the general trend, this site from Forecast the Facts and Friends of the Earth Action lays out in painstaking detail just how far our national conversation has drifted from where it needs to be.

ClimateSilence.org also provides an opportunity for American voters concerned about the climate crisis to speak out and let the candidates know that they want the silence to end, with a petition that states:

I implore you to explain how you will address the growing climate crisis if elected to the nation’s highest office, not only for the Americans being affected right now, but for the sake of future generations, including your children.

In 2008, both political parties nominated presidential candidates — Barack Obama and John McCain — who promised to address the climate crisis with mandatory caps on carbon pollution. Four years later, the arithmetic of climate change has become even more dire. Yet the rhetoric of the 2012 candidates has moved in the opposite direction. For President Obama, climate change has gone from an “urgent” challenge worthy of major speeches and comprehensive legislation, to an afterthought, fleetingly mentioned at occasional campaign events. Mitt Romney, meanwhile, has backpedaled from weak acknowledgement of the basic science to outright mockery of the carbon crisis. While there is clearly a difference between these two positions, neither come anywhere near the honesty and leadership that the problem demands.

The climate constituency is large and growing. Consulting group Breakthrough Strategies recently commissioned a nationwide poll of likely voters, using the same polling firm that assisted President Obama during his 2008 campaign. The poll found that three out of four Americans have noticed a serious shift in extreme weather patterns, are concerned about the problem, and want to hear about solutions. In August, the Center for Climate Change Communication (4C) conducted a national survey of registered voters, and found a solid majority consider a candidates’ stand on global warming when deciding who to support. As Ed Maibach told National Journal:

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NEWS FLASH

Bryan Fischer: DADT Repeal Will Lead To ‘More Instances Of Pedophilia’ | Bryan Fischer, director of Issues Analysis at the American Family Association and right wing radio host, said on his September 26 program that the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” will cause “more instances of pedophilia now in the United States military.” He added that gays have a “proclivity toward the abuse of children.” Despite a complete lack of scientific evidence linking homosexuality to pedophilia, Fischer is not the first conservative to make such claims. Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee used the same argument to promote the Boy Scouts of America ban on gays. Watch Fischer’s remarks (via Right Wing Watch):

– Greg Noth

Health

Colorado Insurance Company Hopes To Provide Better Mental Health Services With Integrated Care

By Sy Mukherjee on Sep 27, 2012 at 3:15 pm

The insurance industry’s manufactured separation of mental health services from more “traditional” medical care in billing codes has long been a source of frustration for health care professionals, creating unnecessary confusion and endangering the health of patients whose illnesses often have both physical and mental components.

But a Colorado-based nonprofit insurance company is striving to change that with a first-of-its-kind integration program aimed at combining the disparate services into a single, coordinated primary care model, as part of a broad effort to shift the U.S. health care industry towards more primary care. Under the pilot program, Rocky Mountain Health Plans will provide so-called “umbrella payments” to three primary care practices to encourage integrated patient care, while giving per-visit fee-for-service reimbursements to three other practices that will serve as control groups for the experiment:

Care could include a traditional office visit with a doctor or a health coach, email exchanges, telephone counseling or a typical counseling session. Patients will get all the care in the familiar setting of their primary care office. [...]

The aim is to prove quickly that patients do better when doctors are paid to keep patients well rather than worrying about seeing as many patients as fast as possible to keep the cash flowing. Rocky Mountain ultimately wants to change the way it pays providers throughout Colorado and spur change around the country.

“This is not an academic exercise,” said Patrick Gordon, director of government programs for Rocky Mountain and executive director the Colorado Beacon Consortium, a coalition of nonprofit health groups that is seeking to boost the quality and efficiency of health care in western Colorado. “This will be a transformative pilot that is being built with the goal of replicating success across the country.”

One of the biggest hurdles to instituting these more efficient, primary care models is adequate financing — that’s why Rocky Mountain will be injecting funds into the Colorado health care system to jump-start reform efforts. “We’re going to take [that hurdle] off the table. Here is the financial support to make this sustainable,” Gordon said.

The stratification of care under the status quo is emblematic of a larger, systemic failure within the health care industry to coordinate care efforts and consequently reduce costs while improving care quality. Rocky Mountain’s mental and physical health service integration program models the way that Obamacare has already encouraged greater coordination between separate elements of the health care industry and an emphasis on primary care.

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Election

Todd Akin Says McCaskill Is Not ‘Ladylike’

By Annie-Rose Strasser on Sep 27, 2012 at 2:36 pm

Senate candidate Todd Akin (R-MO), who is still trying to make it up to women since he suggested that victims of “legitimate rape” cannot become pregnant, blew another hole in his pro-woman persona on Thursday when he said Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO) is not as “ladylike” as she was in 2006.

In an interview with the Kansas City Star, Akin implied that a woman taking an agressive stance in a competitive election is somehow unpalatable, expressing apparent displeasure not with McCaskill’s politics, but with her personality:

“I think we have a very clear path to victory, and apparently Claire McCaskill thinks we do, too, because she was very aggressive at the debate, which was quite different than it was when she ran against Jim Talent,” Akin said. “She had a confidence and was much more ladylike (in 2006), but in the debate on Friday she came out swinging, and I think that’s because she feels threatened.”

Akin’s been trying to get back on track with his female constituency and Republicans alike since he blew past the September 25 deadline to drop out of the election. He just launched a “Women for Akin” group last week.

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NEWS FLASH

Nevada Has The Highest Rate Of Women Murdered By Men | As the Violence Against Women Act flounders between the House and Senate, new chilling statistics have been released about male-on-female murders in the United States. Nevada, for the third year in a row, has topped the list with a rate of 2.62 murders of women by males per 100,000 people. This marks the fifth year of six that Nevada has ranked first. South Carolina came in second with 1.94 per 100,000, then Tennessee, with 1.91; Louisiana with 1.86; Virginia with 1.77; and Texas with 1.75.

Climate Progress

U.S. Oil Production Is At Highest Level Since 1997; Yet Gas Prices Remain ‘Stubbornly High’

By Stephen Lacey on Sep 27, 2012 at 2:25 pm

American crude oil production is at its highest level since 1997, according to government figures reported today. The increase is being driven by innovations in hydraulic fracturing, which have allowed producers to access previously inaccessible oil deposits in shale formations.

This development is likely to be trumpeted by fossil fuel proponents as: a) the key to cheap gasoline prices; and b) a shining example of the free market working when government gets out of the way.

Don’t believe the hype.

Firstly, gas prices are still high, even with all this new crude output. Secondly, these hydraulic fracturing techniques driving the production boom didn’t just magically appear out of the free market — they were pioneered through many decades of government tax credits, loans, R&D programs, and mapping tools.

In other words, the two major talking points pushed by the fossil fuel industry (“cheap energy forever! Just let the free market decide!”) are proving to be vastly overblown.

Here’s the news on domestic production increases from Bloomberg:

Crude output rose by 3.7 percent to 6.509 million barrels a day in the week ended Sept. 21, the Energy Department reported today. America met 83 percent of its energy needs in the first six months of the year, department data show. If the trend continues through 2012, it will be the highest level of self- sufficiency since 1991. Imports have declined 3.2 percent from the same period a year earlier.

A combination of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, has helped reduce America’s reliance on foreign oil. The same technology unleashed a boom in natural gas output from shale that pushed inventories to a record last year.

So domestic oil production is higher than when George W. Bush was ever in office. What has that done to gasoline prices? They’re still hovering at historic highs:

As a recent analysis from the Associated Press showed, there’s simply no correlation between increasing domestic oil production and falling gasoline prices. In March, AP took 36 years of Energy Information Administration production data and matched it with gas prices in the U.S. Here’s what they found:

Economy

GOP Senate Candidate Proposes A ‘Sunset Provision’ For Social Security That Would Jeopardize Its Longterm Future

By Adam Peck on Sep 27, 2012 at 2:15 pm

GOP Senate Candidate Linda McMahon

Linda McMahon, the former CEO of the World Wrestling Federation and current Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in Connecticut, told a Tea Party gathering earlier this year that she would be open to a change in Social Security that would introduce a “sunset provision,” effectively attaching an expiration date to the social program.

The remarks came during a town hall event in April with local Tea Party groups, but went largely ignored until The Huffington Post flagged the comment yesterday.

At the April Tea Party gathering, McMahon said in response to a question about how to “strengthen” Social Security and Medicare that “we cannot continue doing things the way we are doing with Social Security. We’re just simply going to be bankrupt.”

The candidate later continued, “In other words, I believe in sunset provisions when we pass this kind of legislation, so that you take a look at it 10, 15 years down the road to make sure that it’s still going to fund itself. Social Security will run out of money if we continue to do what we’re doing, if we rob the trust fund, if we think that there’s any money there.”

Sunset provisions, like the one attached to the Bush tax cuts that are set to expire at the end of this year, require congressional action by a determined date or else the legislation it is attached to expires. Attaching one to Social Security would place the long-term future of the program in jeopardy.

McMahon has already run into some difficulty convincing voters that she isn’t out of touch with the needs of middle class families. Thanks to the low tax rates on investments made by her and her husband, McMahon paid a tax rate of just 15 percent her $30.6 million income in 2010, the most recent year for which she has released her returns. Like fellow millionaire Mitt Romney, McMahon is campaigning on a promise to oppose any increase on her own taxes.

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