Top Romney Foreign Policy Adviser Doesn’t Dispute Validity Of Iran Attack Warnings

By Hamed Aleaziz on Oct 16, 2012 at 5:04 pm

Dan Senor

The Romney campaign’s lead foreign policy adviser Dan Senor in an interview that aired on NPR this morning did not dispute the validity of Defense Secretary Leon Panetta’s warnings about a military attack on Iran. During the interview, Senor, as he has previously, criticized the Obama administration for publicly discussing the potential consequences of an attack on Iran. Pointing to a recent speech Panetta gave delivering those warnings, Senor claimed that such discussion by the administration leads Iran and U.S. allies to think that “we are absolutely not serious, that the credibility of the threat [of military action against Iran] is not there.”

But when pressed about whether or not the Obama administration’s points were true or not, Senor dodged:

SENOR: The president says the military option is on the table but then Defense Secretary Panetta at a security conference, which was widely covered, he walked through all the problems with a military action, that there would be backlash in the region, that it may not be successful, you may not actually be able to wipe up the program, you just might delay it, that there will be economic repercussions.

HOST STEVE INSKEEP: Was he wrong about those things?

SENOR: Secretary Panetta has said that on many occasions. Our only view is, one obviously has to consider these very things he’s talking about. And if you want to talk to our allies about it, you absolutely should, but do it behind closed doors. By broadcasting it in public the way the administration has done, it has sent one message to Tehran, which is that we are absolutely not serious, that the credibility of the threat is not there, and it has sent the exact same message to our allies in Israel and in the Gulf Arab countries that are worried about a nuclear Iran.

INSKEEP: Is Panetta wrong about those concerns that he raised?

SENOR: I mean I would let him explain, you know, the reasoning behind each one of those.

In his December 2011 speech at the Brookings Institution, Panetta said that a potential Israeli strike on Iran “might postpone [Iran] maybe one, possibly two years.” Panetta also laid out other possible complications of an Israeli strike on Iran: Iranians might rally around the government, blame would inevitably be placed on the U.S. and an escalation leading to the loss of “many lives” could follow.

Other experts have echoed Panetta’s comments. Just last month Mike Hayden, former CIA director in the George W. Bush administration, told an Israeli newspaper that an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities would “only set the Iranians back some time and actually push them to do that which it is supposed to prevent, getting nuclear weapons.” In addition, a bipartisan group of military and defense experts, including Brent Scowcroft, President George H.W. Bush’s national security adviser, in a recent report echoed Panetta’s comments, saying that a strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities by Israel would only delay Iran’s nuclear program by two years. It’s not only American officials: Meir Dagan, former head of Israel’s spy agency, has also said that a military strike would only “delay” the Iranian nuclear program.

President Obama has repeatedly said that a military option on Iran’s nuclear program is not a “bluff” and that he is against a “containment” strategy for Iran’s nuclear program. However, the Obama administration, following current intelligence that says Iran has yet to decide whether to build nuclear weapons, is sticking to a diplomatic track for the time being, a move it sees as the “best and most permanent” way to end the nuclear crisis with Iran.

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Health

As Employers Drop Medicare Coverage, Seniors Turn To Insurance Exchanges For Their Care

By Sy Mukherjee on Oct 16, 2012 at 4:52 pm

As employers continue to find ways of cutting their health spending, an increasing number of firms have stopped offering supplemental health benefit plans to retirees on Medicare. Instead, companies are contracting with external insurance marketplaces — exchanges similar to the state-wide models mandated by Obamacare in 2014 — to provide Medicare-eligible retirees with a choice of supplemental plans to cover benefits such as hospital visits and prescription drugs, Kaiser Health News reports.

Companies have been shifting away from providing former workers with supplemental coverage directly, but most still give retirees a monthly contribution through health reimbursement arrangements (HRAs) with which they can buy a plan on the participating exchange. Counselors with the exchanges help Medicare-eligible retirees sift through their coverage options, helping seniors decide whether a Medicare Advantage plan or some other form supplemental coverage would best suit their health needs. According to KHN, this exchange model has the potential to save employers money while also opening up an array of choices for consumers:

In 1993, 40 percent of employers with 500 or more workers offered medical insurance to their Medicare-eligible retirees, according to human resources consultant Mercer’s annual survey of employer health benefits. By 2011, that figure had fallen to 16 percent.

Many employers that contract with exchanges such as Extend Health, which offers 4,000 plans from 80 carriers, fund at least part of the coverage by making deposits for their retirees into accounts called health reimbursement arrangements, or HRAs.

The exchanges can benefit both employers and retirees, experts say.

Employers’ costs are capped and predictable, with fewer administrative hassles, says Bruce Richards, chief actuary and quality leader for Mercer’s health-care business. Meanwhile, because retirees can pick among different plans and rates, “usually most people are better off,” he says.

While the retiree exchanges theoretically hold promise for consumers and employers alike, funding and subsidies for such programs will be a critical issue for retirees seeking to enhance their Medicare coverage. As the KHN article highlights, while a full third of employers currently offering direct retiree benefits may drop this coverage in the next fiver years, “42 percent said they’d do so without providing subsidies to help retirees buy coverage.” That would be disastrous for American seniors who would be forced to finance prescription drug and other supplemental coverage out-of-pocket.

Obamacare is a good deal for consumers because in addition to setting up these types of exchanges and requiring people to have insurance, the health reform law also gives Americans defined federal subsidies based on their financial needs to make sure they can afford their coverage. If employers do not incorporate the same funding into their insurance exchange contracts for Medicare-eligible retirees, they will still be offering seniors an array of coverage options — but not the money to afford any of them.

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NEWS FLASH

Minnesota’s First African-American Woman Justice Sworn In Today | Congratulations to Justice Wilhelmina Wright, who will be sworn in today as the first black woman on Minnesota’s highest court. Unfortunately, Justice Wright traveled an infrequently trodden path to achieve this position. According to 2010 data from the American Bar Association, just 9 percent of all judges on their state’s court of last resort are African-American, 3 percent are Latino and 1 percent are Asian or Pacific Islanders. No Native Americans served on a state’s highest court in 2010.

NEWS FLASH

REPORT: Gay College Athletes Experience More Negative Climate | A study released last week examined the experiences of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and queer-identified college athletes and found that they perceive a more negative climate than their heterosexual peers. For example, LGBQ students reported experiencing harassment twice as much as their heterosexual peers, and they were 28 times more likely to report that their harassment was based on their sexual identity. They are also four times as likely to be pressured to be silent about their identity. LGBQ student-athletes similarly reported that they were three times more likely to experience harassment in on-campus housing than heterosexual student-athletes. The report suggests that athletic personnel find innovative ways to prevent such harassment to ensure academic and athletic success.

Climate Progress

UN Warns Of Food Crisis In 2013 If Extreme Weather Persists

By Climate Guest Blogger on Oct 16, 2012 at 4:00 pm

by Katie Valentine

A severe drop in the world’s grain supply due to this summer’s extreme weather events has driven up food prices and could lead to a major hunger crisis in 2013, UN officials say.

Widespread drought and record-breaking heat waves across the U.S. caused mass soybean and corn crop failures this summer, leading to the worst harvest in more than 50 years. Similar weather is expected to cut grain harvests in Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan – which together supply a quarter of world’s wheat exports – by 27 percent. These production shortages have led to the U.S. consuming more grain than it produces, running grain stocks down to historically low levels.

And the U.S. isn’t alone: worldwide food consumption has surpassed production for the sixth time in 11 years, and countries have reduced reserves from an average 107 days of consumption 10 years ago to less than 74 days in recent years. This drop in food reserves leaves “no room for unexpected events next year,” Abdolreza Abbassian, a senior economist with the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, told the Guardian.

The low crop yields have caused a spike in food prices around the world, with the UN FAO reporting a Food Price Index rise of 1.4 percent in September, following an increase of 6 percent in July. This price increase hurts the world’s poorest countries, where as much as 60 to 80 percent of household budgets are spent on food. Families in these countries eat less often, buy cheaper, less nutritious and less varied food, and must make cuts in other areas in order to feed themselves. Rising food prices are expected to increase the grain import bill for poor countries to $36.5 billion in 2012-2013 – a 3.7 percent jump from last year’s bill.

Increased food prices could also lead to increased instability around the world. One study concluded that riots become more likely when Food Price Index levels surpass 210 points. Currently at 216 points, Food Price Index levels are 22 points away from those that some say helped spark the riots leading to the Arab Spring. They’ve certainly contributed to instability in the past: food price spikes in 2007 and 2008 sparked food riots in countries across the world, which led to the death of five people and the collapse of the government in Haiti.

In the U.S., consumers don’t often take to the streets to protest the rise in food prices, in part because food makes up so little of our household budgets – in 2011, U.S. consumers spent on average about 7 percent of their income on food, compared to 43 percent in Indonesia. Still, food prices aren’t going unnoticed in America. The price of corn increased 60 percent during the summer, causing some restaurants to cut corn from their menus and serve grain-intensive beef less often. The price of chicken, turkey and eggs is up from last year, and menu prices at Olive Garden, McDonalds, Buffalo Wild Wings have increased in response to higher food prices. And farmers are adjusting too: chicken suppliers are growing larger birds so they have fewer mouths to feed, and this fall, farmers are feeding their cows candy as a cheaper alternative to corn.

During the October 16 Committee on World Food Security 39^th session in Rome, the UN focused talks on what can be done to combat the rising price of food. Officials noted that the number of people suffering from hunger has stopped going down over the past several years, and is actually increasing in Africa and the Middle East. During the committee session, which runs from October 15 – 20, the UN is stressing the importance of agricultural cooperatives as key players in ending poverty and hunger.

Katie Valentine is a graduate from the University of Georgia. She currently interns on the international policy team at the Center for American Progress.

Economy

GOP Senator Slams Pro Sports Leagues For Using Non-Profit Status To Avoid Paying Taxes

By Travis Waldron on Oct 16, 2012 at 3:55 pm

Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn (R) is out with the latest edition of an online chronicle of wasteful government spending, and he is taking aim at several of America’s professional sports leagues. Coburn objects to the fact that the leagues are classified as tax-exempt non-profit organizations, even as they rake in millions of dollars in profits.

The National Football League, National Hockey League, and Professional Golfers’ Association, according to Coburn’s report, could be costing taxpayers at least $91 million a year because of their tax-exempt status, even though they generate billions in revenue, millions in profits, and pay their top executives multi-million dollar salaries:

The National Football League (NFL), the National Hockey League (NHL), and the Professional Golfers’ Association (PGA) classify themselves as non-profit organizations to exempt themselves from federal income taxes on earnings. Smaller sports leagues, such as the National Lacrosse League, are also using the tax status. Taxpayers may be losing at least $91 million subsidizing these tax loopholes for professional sports leagues that generate billions of dollars annually in profits. Taxpayers should not be asked to subsidize sports organizations already benefiting widely from willing fans and turning a profit, while claiming to be non-profit organizations.

The NFL raked in $9 billion in revenue last year and has more than $1 billion in assets, and according to Coburn’s report, it paid eight executives a total of $51.5 million in 2010, including $11.6 million to commissioner Roger Goodell. PGA commissioner Tim Finchem made $5.2 million in 2010; NHL commissioner Gary Bettman made $4.3 million and will reportedly earn nearly $8 million this year.

The leagues, in their non-profit filings, claim to be promotion vehicles for their sports (the NHL’s mission, for instance, is “to perpetuate professional hockey in the US and Canada.”). These statements have little justification, Coburn wrote, as “major professional sports leagues are hardly in the business of simply promoting the hockey, football, or golf industry. They are in fact businesses — designed to make money.”

Though they were unmentioned in Coburn’s report, other sports organizations that file as nonprofits have also faced scrutiny. Many of college football’s biggest bowl games, including the Bowl Championship Series, are classified as non-profit charities. After generating $261 million in revenue in 2009, bowl games gave just $4 million to charity. And in 2007, the New Orleans-based Sugar Bowl made $11.6 million in tax-free profits thanks to its non-profit status.

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Alyssa

Ten Actors of Color Who Belonged On Entertainment Weekly’s Signature TV Roles List

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Oct 16, 2012 at 3:48 pm

There are a lot of weird things about this Entertainment Weekly list of actors who have had two or more signature roles on television. It treats a number of minor roles like they’re iconic, like Lisa Kudrow’s turn on her one-season-and-cancelled post-Friends show The Comeback. It doesn’t give equal weight to co-stars on shows who have gone on to do equally impressive work: why should Married With Children‘s Ed O’Neill make the list for Modern Family, but not his TV wife Katey Sagal for Sons of Anarchy? And strangest of all, it’s chock-full of white people. Apparently, there isn’t a single actor of color who’s had two defining roles on television. To give Entertainment Weekly a hand, here are ten actors of color who easily could have earned a spot on this list—who I came up with off the top of my head.

1. Bill Cosby: This is the most obvious, egregious omission. Both shows may bear his name and be knit together by Cosby’s iconic status. But he absolutely deserves separate credit for his work as Cliff Huxtable, Hilton Lucas, Chet Kinkaid, and his work on the Electric Company alone. Cosby didn’t just create great roles for himself—he put his shoulder to the borders of characters available to African-American actors on television and pushed, hard.

2. Andre Braugher: This omission is just as embarrassing. Even if you left out his role as nuclear sub Captain Marcus Chaplin on ABC’s Last Resort, which is still trying to find its place in the ratings, there’s Braugher’s turn as natty, lone-wolf detective Frank Pembleton on Homicide, belittled car dealer Owen Thoreau, Jr. on Men of a Certain Age, and Detective Marcellus Washington on Hack.

3. CCH Pounder: Pounder’s a tremendous actress who plays one of the best female characters of the Golden Age of television, the constantly and inexplicably overlooked Claudette Wyms on The Shield, where she got to be the rare person, much less woman of color, who brings justice to a white anti-hero. And while genre television never gets the credit she deserves, she’s wonderful and enigmatic as Mrs. Frederic, the caretaker of the magical Warehouse 13 in the SyFy show of the same name.

4. Lance Reddick: I could write a whole side rant on the under-appreciation and underemployment of actors from The Wire (when, oh when, will Michael B. Jordan be the absolutely gigantic star of screens of all sizes he deserves to be). But at least Reddick has consistently found work, whether he’s playing supremely menacing in Lost, or now as the head of the titular division on Fringe, a role that’s let him be alternately work-obsessed and movingly self-sacrificing.

5. Margaret Cho: Cho’s career has been erratic. But All-American Girl, which she created, was an important exercise in moving the default for young women on television away from white, and in illustrating the limitations of what American network television is willing to accept on its airwaves. And while women’s television, like genre fiction, tends to get dismissed as unserious, as legal assistant Teri on Drop Dead Diva, Cho gets to have a sexual appetite, to be hypercompetent, and all without being stripped of her Asianness.

6. Rockmond Dunbar: Before Parenthood came on the air, Soul Food, Showtime’s adaptation of the movie of the same name, was one of the best dramas on television that had confidence in its characters to be interesting simply for who they were. As Kenny Chadway, watching a man try to make a small business pay has never been so fascinating in its details. Now, as Sheriff Eli Washington in Sons of Anarchy, it’s fascinating watching him try to impose order on the show’s increasing violent, dissolute band of white bikers. And this isn’t even to mention his work on Prison Break.

7. Lucy Liu: It’s unfortunate that Liu, a warm, versatile actress got stuck playing a Dragon Lady stereotype on Ally McBeal. But it’s been awfully fun to see her play with that image, first as a cop on Southland, and now as the rare woman to get to embody the Watson archetype on CBS’s Sherlock Holmes drama Elementary. The folks who have to put their dignity in hock to open up space for other folks to follow should get to reap the benefits sometimes, too.

8. Dennis Haysbert: Is it really so easy to forget the war hero he played on The Unit? Or the president on 24?

9. Grace Park: As Sharon Valerii in Battlestar Galactica, Park had one of the hardest and most interesting roles in that series—how to play someone who felt, deeply, that she was human, but was forced to reckon with the reality of her identity as a sophisticated robot. She’s doing less interesting work in Hawaii 5-0, but as Kono Kalakaua, she’s one of a number of actors who are defining the relationships between cops we see on television as operating along something other than the black-white binary.

10. Harold Perrineau: There’s Oz, where he plays paralyzed inmate Augustus Hill, through whose eyes we see a notorious prison. Lost, where he plays Michael Dawson, a father trying to raise his son under hugely trying circumstances. The all-too-quickly-cancelled The Unusuals, where he played a hypochrodriac cop partnered with Adam Goldberg. And now he’s highly professional gangster Damon Pope on Sons of Anarchy.

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Election

Conservatives Respond To Clinton’s Libya Comments With Sexist Attacks

By Annie-Rose Strasser on Oct 16, 2012 at 3:30 pm

This morning ThinkProgress reported on the sexist tweet by a Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin in response to Sec. of State Hillary Clinton’s admission of responsibility for the attacks in Libya. Making a reference to Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky, Rubin wrote:

First Bill humiliates her and now Obama does.. Hillary no feminist, more like doormat

— Jennifer Rubin (@JRubinBlogger) October 16, 2012

But she was not alone in making a gendered assessment of Clinton’s decision to take the blame. Other conservatives joined in, either sexualizing the situation, pointing to Clinton’s physical appearance, or citing the fact that she is a woman as a way of mocking her:

So after shoving her aside in 2008, Obama now hides behind Hillary’s pantsuit. #Leadership

— Monica Crowley (@MonicaCrowley) October 16, 2012

Obama throws Hillary under the bus, blames Libya on her. And they say it’s the GOP waging a war on women!

— Bryan Fischer (@BryanJFischer) October 16, 2012

Hillary Clinton is the Democrats’ battered woman.

— Dana Loesch (@DLoesch) October 16, 2012

Hillary has Obama’s manhood in a vise. He fires her, he loses. He doesn’t, her “falling on the sword” means nothing, and he loses.

— benshapiro (@benshapiro) October 16, 2012

Rush Limbaugh, who has perhaps the longest and most sordid history of sexist claims against powerful women, piled on to the gendered criticism of Hillary Clinton, calling her a “doormat.” Listen:

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Justice

Colorado Secretary Of State Finds Scant Voter Fraud Evidence

By Josh Israel on Oct 16, 2012 at 3:20 pm

CO Secretary of State Scott Gessler (R)

Colorado Secretary of State Scott Gessler (R) was elected in 2010 on a platform of fighting “election fraud” — a largely non-existent problem — and of guaranteeing “fair and open elections.” But despite a failed and aborted months-long fishing expedition for potential non-citizen voters, he has found only an infinitesimally amount of evidence of such illegal voting in Colorado.

Denver Westword reports that Gessler’s office claims it has identified hundreds of non-citizens who are or were registered voters. But far fewer of those people ever actually voted:

Gessler’s office says that of 141 registered voters who aren’t citizens according to a federal database, 35 of them have voted in past elections — though some critics dispute how accurate and up-to-date that data might be. Still, of the fourteen voters who were recently removed as a result of that federal check, none actually have vote history, meaning there is no overlap with the 35 voters.

While clearly those 35 voters should not have voted if they were indeed non-citizens, this is not a significant percentage of the Colorado voting population. Indeed out of the 2,401,462 total votes cast in the state in the presidential election, even if all 35 illegally voted in that election, they would have accounted for less than 0.0015 percent of the vote.

Like Gov. Rick Scott’s (R-FL) failed purge effort in Florida, Gessler spent a lot of time, money, and resources to find only a handful of potentially ineligible voters. And while his office focused on this, technical glitches with their online voter registration system caused 779 Coloradans voter registrations to be lost.

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Climate Progress

UpStarts: Can Rare Earth Replacements Spur A Supply Chain Revolution?

By Climate Guest Blogger on Oct 16, 2012 at 3:00 pm

UpStart [uhp-stahrt] n. 1. A company or organization with innovative approaches to energy use, carbon pollution, resource consumption, and/or social equity, 2. A company or organization overcoming market barriers to build the new clean energy economy.

by Adam James

This column has focused largely on market barriers and consumer engagement with clean energy, but less on the supply chain portion of companies’ business models. Along with supplying end-products, the clean energy economy will be populated by many companies who are purely in the business of supplying the materials used in clean technologies. It is important for U.S. competitiveness and industry to ensure that these new companies are fostered right here at home.

A Common Thread: Rare Earth Metals

Rare earth metals are naturally occurring minerals whose properties make them uniquely suited to certain clean technologies, particularly electric vehicles and wind turbines. The components in these clean technologies — including magnets, superconducting wire, batteries, and motors — are made possible through the unique properties these rare earth metals provide.

So what’s the issue? It isn’t that rare earth metals are rare. In fact, they are quite plentiful. The problem is that they are mainly plentiful in China. This puts the America at a competitive disadvantage, subjecting U.S. manufacturing to the kinds of prices that a 95 percent Chinese stake in the market allows.

Even if dominance of the rare earth metal market is temporary, as some have argued, more control over the clean technology supply chain will help tap into two of America’s strongest assets. The first is a manufacturing workforce that is still bouncing back from economic downturn. The second is unlocking the entrepreneurs who are looking to start innovative companies — if they can get costs down far enough to compete.

The United States recognized this problem, and issued $30 million in grants through the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy (ARPA-E) and the Department of Energy (DOE) to develop alternatives to rare earth materials. Not all these projects will succeed, but the ones which do will go a long way toward crafting the necessary inputs for a clean energy economy.

Motors and Wires