Alabama Law Makes It More Difficult For State’s Legal Immigrants To Work

By Amanda Peterson Beadle on Oct 19, 2012 at 3:50 pm

Under Alabama’s harmful immigration law, applicants for professional licenses have to prove that they are either a citizen or living in the U.S. legally. In order to verify a person’s status, non-U.S. residents have to be cleared through the federal Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database. State officials have asked the federal government to let the state use SAVE more widely, but federal officials have not responded and only a few of the professional licensing boards are even close to being able to use the system.

As a result, nurses and other professionals who must be licensed have to prove that they are legal residents are stuck in limbo:

Nursing board director Genell Lee said she applied for SAVE approval in October 2011, and got a letter earlier this month saying the board had been approved to use the system.

She said there’s still some paperwork to be done before the state can use the system. While she waits, Lee said, she’s been holding on to foreign nurses’ license applications.

“I’ve got a couple of applications from nurses who aren’t citizens,” she said. “I’m not permitted by law to determine whether they’re legal, so I’m waiting for SAVE.”

She said those nurses are working in other states now.

“But they want to work here,” she said.

In Georgia, applicants for professional licenses are trapped in a paperwork nightmare as well. The state’s immigration law has a similar provision to Alabama’s anti-immigrant measure that requires that anyone in Georgia who is applying for or renewing a professional license to prove they are in the U.S. legally. As a result, applications are delayed for weeks or months instead of days.

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Alyssa

What Obama And Romney’s Al Smith Dinner Speeches Tell Us About The Election

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Oct 19, 2012 at 3:34 pm

It’s a great coup for the Alfred E. Smith Foundation, named for the Progressive, wet politician and first Catholic presidential candidate, that its annual fundraising dinner has become a mandatory stop on the presidential campaign trail. And it’s good for us for reasons of politics, if not of comedy, that we get to see President Obama and Mitt Romney show off what they think they need to lock down in the final weeks of the presidential campaign.

First, there’s President Obama, who chose to focus his jokes for the evening on the most ridiculous news stories of the campaign cycle in an implicit critique of the media and a funny, likable act of self-deprecation:

Perhaps most importantly, Obama went confidently after his performance in the first debate. “I felt well-rested after the nice long nap I had in the first debate,” he joked. And he went on to “apologize to Chris Matthews. Four years ago I gave him a thrill up his leg. This time, I gave him a stroke.” He made the crack that a lot of other people made that evening, telling the crowd that “I learned there are worse things that can happen to you on your anniversary than forgetting to buy a gift.” It was a comprehensively self-aware dissection of his own performance, one that was aimed at dispelling lingering doubts about where his head was in the first debate, and reassuring the audience that he was fired up for the final debate before the election.

Obama’s other jokes were a sly tour through the campaign’s most frivolous moments. “I went shopping at some stores in Midtown,” he said of how he spent his day in New York. “I understand Governor Romney went shopping for some stores in midtown,” a riff of Romney’s explanations about his friends who were NFL and NASCAR owners. Obama explained that he stopped by “The House That Ruth Built, though he really did not build that. I hope everybody’s aware of that.” He explained that though the campaign season felt endless, “Paul Ryan assured me we’ve only been running for two hours and 57 minutes.” The closest he came to an attempt to score substantive points was a riff about the economy. “I don’t have a joke here,” he said in a hanging punchline. “I just thought it would be useful to remind everybody that the unemployment rate’s at the lowest level since I took office.”

Romney, by contrast, spent more time on attempts to land hits on Obama:

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Economy

How The Model Tax Plan Romney Cited Could Raise One Middle-Class Woman’s Taxes By $6,000

By Guest Blogger on Oct 19, 2012 at 3:30 pm

Our guest blogger is Seth Hanlon, Director of Fiscal Reform at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Throughout the campaign, Mitt Romney has refused to give details when asked how he plans to pay for his nearly $4.8 trillion in tax cuts. In Tuesday night’s debate, audience member Mary Follano asked Romney how his plan could affect her personal taxes. She specifically asked how his plan would affect tax benefits like education credits, which she said are “important to me because I have children in college.”

Romney didn’t answer her question, offering only a vague proposal on limiting certain deductions that wouldn’t come close to paying for his total tax plan. But on Thursday, to bolster its claims that a “Romney-style tax plan” could be made to add up, the Romney campaign pointed to a tax plan presented in a 2006 report from Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT). As ThinkProgress reported earlier, the tax plan Romney is holding up as a model would eliminate nearly all middle-class tax breaks:

Under the proposal, all personal exemptions, itemized deductions, personal credits except for the earned income credit, and all above-the-line adjustments to income except for retirement savings deductions and the deduction for self employment taxes would be repealed. The largest categories of deductions repealed are present-law deductions for home mortgage interest expenses, State and local taxes, and charitable contributions. In addition, the exclusions for certain employee fringe benefits, such as employer contributions for health and life insurance, would be repealed. The standard deduction would remain.

As the study found, such a plan would cause a “redistribution of individual income tax liability from high wage earners to low wage earners.” In other words, according to former congressional tax counsel John Buckley, it “would reduce taxes on high income individuals and finance that tax reduction by increasing taxes on everyone else.”

Let’s look at how such a plan could affect middle-class taxpayers in finer detail. Consider Ms. Follano — the woman who asked Romney for specific answers on his tax plan. We don’t know enough about Follano to calculate her taxes with precision, but we can use what we do know about her to gauge the potential impact of the “Romney-style tax plan” on someone in her shoes.

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Health

Proposed Legislation Would Help Utah Parents Teach Sex Ed At Home

By Tara Culp-Ressler on Oct 19, 2012 at 3:00 pm

In 2011, Utah’s Republican-controlled House and Senate passed a bill that would have enshrined abstinence-only education across the state and banned any instruction of birth control, condoms, or LGBT issues in student health classes. Utah Gov. Gary Herbert (R) vetoed the measure to prevent it from taking effect — and now that sexual education courses are mandatory in schools, one Utah lawmaker is proposing additional legislation to expand sexual health resources to parents.

State Sen. Stuart Reid (R) is proposing a bill that would require Utah’s Office of Education to prepare and distribute materials on sexual health to parents, as well as provide seminars to give parents in-person training about talking to their kids about sexual education topics. Reid told the Deseret News that many parents “don’t feel entirely comfortable” talking about sexual topics with their kids and need resources to help them learn how. “There’s reluctance to do that and what’s happened is we’ve turned it over to educators to take that responsibility on what is the most intimate topic in the lives of our children,” Reid said.

Fortunately, Reid’s bill does not seek to roll back the sexual education standards that are currently in place for Utah’s public schools. Health classes will still be required to teach students about physiology and prevention methods for pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections, although parents can choose to opt their children out of the courses. But Reid says he believes sex education should take place in the home, not in the classroom, and his bill is a reflection of that fact. Opponents to his measure, on the other hand, think it’s unnecessary to train parents to effectively communicate about sexual health:

The bill is only in draft form, but still managed to elicit debate and skepticism from members of the Education Interim Committee on Wednesday. Rep. Jim Nielson, R-Bountiful, expressed concerns about drawing educational resources away from academic core subjects, like reading, writing and arithmetic. Rep. Johnny Anderson, R-Taylorsville, suggested there is already ample resources available online for parents wishing to have a dialogue about sex with their kids.

“There’s a tremendous amount of information for parents who want to broach this with their children,” Anderson said. “This seems to me to be a government solution for a problem that really isn’t ours to own.”

Anderson is correct in his assertion that there are some excellent online resources about sexual health, but he misses the mark when he suggests that sex ed is less critical to youths’ education than “core subjects” like reading and math. In fact, comprehensive sexual education is essential to equip young adults with the resources they need to prevent pregnancy and STIs, understand their own reproductive systems, and develop healthy relationship skills that are centered on consensual experiences. And parents certainly need additional training, since they may not be prepared to effectively teach their children everything they need to know on those topics, just as many parents are not prepared to teach a high school English or math course.

While Reid’s bill could help further educate parents about an important topic they need to talk about with their children, parents’ guidance is not a replacement for comprehensive sex ed in the classroom. Sexual health needs to be talked about at home, but it also shouldn’t be confined to the home. Fortunately for Utah teens, however, the legislation in their state could allow them to have both.

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Justice

Number Of Gun Dealers Increased By 3000 Under Obama

By Ian Millhiser on Oct 19, 2012 at 2:50 pm

The moment President Obama took office, the NRA’s primary product became paranoid theories about how Obama plans to seize gun owners’ guns. Even after Obama served as president for nearly three full years without signing a single new gun regulation — his primary contribution to gun law is a minor bill allowing gun owners to bring loaded guns into national parks — NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre claimed that Obama’s lack of interest in guns is actually a “massive Obama conspiracy to deceive voters and hide his true intentions to destroy the Second Amendment in our country.”

As it turns out, all this paranoia has been great for gun sales:

An analysis by The Associated Press of data tracking the health of the gun industry shows that sales are on the rise, so much so that some gun manufacturers can’t make enough weapons fast enough. Major gun company stock prices are up. The number of federally licensed, retail gun dealers is increasing for the first time in nearly 20 years. . . . The poor economy, fear of crime and military veterans returning from war who want to keep their shooting skills sharp also may be driving some gun sales. But the general view of analysts and those in the industry is that Obama is the main catalyst.

“The driver is President Obama. He’s the best thing that ever happened to the firearm industry,” said Jim Barrett, an industry analyst at C.L. King & Associates Inc. in New York. . . . For the first time since 1993, the number of federally licensed retail gun dealers in the U.S. increased slightly in 2010 and 2011, as the country added 1,167 more licensed retail gun dealers, according to Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives records. After the assault weapons ban in 1994, the number of gun dealerships dropped annually until 2010. As of October 2012, there were 50,812 retail gun dealers – that’s 3,303 more than in 2009.

The NRA endorsed Mitt Romney for president, despite the fact that Romney signed a permanent ban on assault rifles as governor. If they were serious about boosting gun sales, however, they’d be eager to keep the target of their paranoia campaign in the White House.

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Climate Progress

Portrait Of A Drought: Finding Water Where It Ain’t

By Climate Guest Blogger on Oct 19, 2012 at 2:44 pm

Photo: Texas Parks and Wildlife Department

by Peyton Fleming

I’m on a bus driving across West Texas and all appears well. Miles and miles of white-speckled cotton fields line both sides of the road. Splotches of green grassland are a welcome sign from last year’s devastating drought. Dozens of giant wind turbines churn away far off in the distance.

But appearances are deceiving.

West Texas is on the front lines of a changing climate, and scarce water is the most obvious symptom. Everyone – ranchers, farmers, water engineers – is talking about it.

A cyclone of hotter temperatures, more people, water-sapping cotton farming and a devastating 2011 drought have crippled groundwater supplies. And, though the drought has lifted, West Texans are being forced to change their ways like never before.

“It’s quite emotional today,” said Jim Conkwright, general manager of the High Plains Underground Conservation Water District #1, headquartered in Lubbock.

Conkwright is referring to parched conditions across much of the vast Ogallala Aquifer, which have forced first-ever limits on how much water farmers can pump from their wells. This year’s limit is 21 inches per acre per year; in 2014, it drops to 18 inches.

Adding salt to the wound, farmers are being required to install water meters to ensure they don’t exceed their limits. “These are dirty words,” Conkwright said, of the new rules. “This is a very very hot topic. It may result in board members being unseated.”

Farmers aren’t the only ones being affected by the new norm of drier, hotter weather in this historically arid region.

Ranchers at Koch Industries’ Matador Ranch – owned by climate contrarians the Koch Brothers – cut their cattle herd in half and are using a new more resilient grass seed – instead of native grass – on several thousand acres of the 130,000-acre ranch. Ranch managers attribute the changes more to the vicissitudes of changing weather, not to a warming planet.

The City of Lubbock saw one of its key water reservoirs dry up. “Lake Meredith is dead,” said City Engineer Wood Franklin, where customers have been living for many months under Stage Two drought conditions which limit lawn watering to once a week.

The stringent restrictions were lifted in August only after the city activated a new reservoir, Lake Alan Henry, that took several decades to build at a cost of $220 million.

Investors smell opportunity too – in the form of lucrative water rights.

Last year, T. Boone Pickens and his Mesa Water Inc. sold the water rights beneath 211,000 acres – atop the Ogallala Aquifer – for over $100 million to the Canadian River Municipal Water Authority, which serves 11 communities, including Amarillo and Lubbock. Pickens tried selling to Dallas for a higher price, but the $3 billion pipeline was too costly.

“Just as soon as it rained, you couldn’t get ‘em on the phone,” Pickens told the Associated Press, of his negotiations last June with Dallas. “You were always waiting for another drought to start negotiations again.”

The fact that the drought has abated is putting the region’s handling of the water crisis at a crossroads.

Many, like Lubbock’s water engineers, argue for keeping the pedal down on tough water conservation measures. Lubbock’s Water Resources Director Aubrey Spear expressed disappointment that the Stage Two drought restrictions, which helped cut water use by about 25 percent, were lifted so quickly.

“Water conservation is something we’ll want to stress continuously, not just during droughts,” Spear said.

Conkwright expressed similar disappointment that a two-year moratorium is in place for assessing civil penalties against farmers who don’t install water meters and report their water use. “It sends the wrong signal,” he said.

As for West Texas farming in the future, he says, “dry-land farming.”

Peyton Fleming, Strategic Communications Director at Ceres, is attending the Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ) annual conference in Lubbock, Texas. This piece was originally published at Ceres and was reprinted with permission.

NEWS FLASH

NHL Extends Lockout, Cancels Games Through November 1 | The National Hockey League canceled all games through November 1 today, adding another week to the two weeks of games it had already canceled due to its lockout of players. The cancellations don’t remove the possibility of a full 82-game schedule, which NHL commissioner Gary Bettman said could be saved if the NHL Players Association accepted the deal owners offered earlier this week. Another round of cancellations, though, would shorten the season, a scenario that seems likely after the NHL rejected the players’ counteroffer yesterday. “It’s clear we’re not speaking the same language,” Bettman said about the league’s second lockout since 2005, when the entire season was lost. No new talks have been scheduled. “To hear those words kind of shuts it down pretty quickly,” Pittsburgh Penguins star Sidney Crosby, a leading player in the negotiations, said. “In a nutshell, it doesn’t look good.’’

LGBT

Anti-Bullying Advocate Receives Canned Rejection Letter For Anti-Bullying Task Force

By Zack Ford on Oct 19, 2012 at 2:30 pm

Tammy Aaberg hugging a gay graduate of Blaine High School (Photo: Richard Marshall/Pioneer Press.)

Since the suicide of her son, Justin, Tammy Aaberg has been an outspoken advocate against bullying in his school district, Minnesota’s Anoka-Hennepin School District, and the surrounding communities. She started an ever-growing organization in his name, Justin’s Gift, to provide safe spaces and resources for LGBT teens. Given her direct involvement and awareness on the issues, it would make perfect sense for her to be a part of the district’s new anti-bullying task force, as mandated by the Department of Justice. Instead, a member of the anti-LGBT hate group was appointed, and Aaberg received a canned rejection letter, which she shared with Truth Wins Out.

The canned letter does not reference the loss of her son that was largely influenced by the school’s toxic climate, nor her work advocating to improve that environment over the past two years:

Unfortunately, we could not appoint everyone who applied. We reviewed the applications thoroughly and worked hard to select committee members who would represent a broad cross-section of the community, being especially mindful of protected classes, gender balance, and religious affiliation.

We will keep your name on file as a person interested in this topic. If at some point in their work the task force wishes to seek additional input, we will invite comment from you and the other applicants who were not appointed to the group. We will also send you a link to the final report when it is posted online.

How committed can the district be to improving the safety of its school when it so coldly rejects one of its community’s biggest advocates? The faculty advisor for the local gay-straight alliance was also rejected. But the task force does want to hear from an advocate of ex-gay therapy who wants children to learn that homosexuality directly causes AIDS. For a school mandated by the government to do better by its students, its priorities certainly seem misplaced.

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Election

Immigration Groups Ask Romney Campaign To Take Down Misleading Spanish-Language Ad

By Amanda Peterson Beadle on Oct 19, 2012 at 2:25 pm

As Mitt Romney tries to moderate his immigration stances in order to win over Latino voters, his campaign released a new ad in Spanish touting the GOP candidate’s promise to fix the nation’s immigration system and to find a “permanent solution” for young undocumented immigrants. But immigrant rights groups are calling for Romney to take down the misleading ad.

Watch the ad in Spanish here:

Frank Sharry, executive director of pro-immigration reform group America’s Voice, told Huffington Post that the Romney’s new immigration ad is a fraud. “The only permanent solution we know Romney will advocate is ‘self-deportation,’ which is code for a purge of millions of hardworking Latino immigrant families,” he said. And Mitzi Castro, an undocumented immigrant from Arizona, took offense with Romney’s use of the term “illegal immigrant.” “How can one stomach that and feel completely safe and trust someone who calls us that?” Castro said.

Romney’s tone on immigration has softened since the GOP primary, when he staked out the most extreme immigration positions of all the candidates and supported the idea of “self-deportation” for his policy. But while he says he will support a “permanent solution” to help young undocumented immigrants, Romney has promised to veto the DREAM Act, and he opposes amnesty.

The new ad’s message echoes Romney’s comments from earlier this month when he tossed a bone to DREAMers and said that he would he would not take away temporary work permits from those who had already received them under President Obama’s deferred action plan. But, Romney clarified, no additional work permits would be issued under his administration. None of them would be needed once the two-year temporary permits expired because he said “we will have the full immigration reform plan that I’ve proposed” by then — without providing any details about that plan.

Most of the Romney campaign’s Spanish-language ads mention that President Obama did not enact comprehensive immigration reform in his first term — without mentioning the fact that Republicans blocked the DREAM Act in the Senate — but, other than backing policies to make life so difficult for undocumented immigrants that they leave the country, it’s not clear what type of reform Romney wants anyway.

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Economy

On The Daily Show, Obama Finally Faces A Question About Housing

By Pat Garofalo on Oct 19, 2012 at 2:15 pm

Through two presidential debates and one vice-presidential debate, the candidates have faced exactly zero questions about the U.S. housing market, despite the fact that housing has been a weight on the economic recovery. As ThinkProgress noted before the debates, there are several pertinent questions that both candidates should be asked about housing policy.

But the only media figure who seems interested in talking about this subject is The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart, who last night asked President Obama about the underwhelming Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP), which has fallen far short of its goals:

OBAMA: On housing, right now we could make sure that families whose homes are underwater, where they owe more than their house is worth, if they refinance, typically they’d get $3,000 bucks in their pockets a year. That’s $3,000 they’re spending or $3,000 that they’re putting back into equity in their home. The housing market would helped, employment would be helped. Even Governor Romney’s own adviser says this is a good idea, and yet Governor Romney opposes it.

STEWART: But don’t you have the HAMP program? Wasn’t $50 billion set aside for HAMP and only $5.5 billion of it has been used?

OBAMA: Actually, what’s happened is we’ve got 5 million homes that we’ve seen foreclosure prevented, we’ve got a settlement with the banks that provides another $25 billion to help the housing market.

Watch it (at 7:15):

HAMP was supposed to help three to four million homeowners, but has so far resulted in just 825,000 permanent mortgage modifications. One million borrowers, meanwhile, have started the program but been booted out before getting their mortgage permanently modified. Stewart is correct that just a fraction of the money dedicated to HAMP has been spent.

President Obama’s Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), under acting director Edward DeMarco, has also prevented homeowners from receiving more help. States, meanwhile, have been siphoning off funds from the $25 billion foreclosure fraud settlement and using them for non-housing related purposes.

Romney, meanwhile, has released a housing plan that has no details about the sort of policies he would pursue. The one time Romney addressed housing during the debates, he gave a bizarre diatribe about a regulation defining so-called “qualified mortgages.”

It surely says something about the media landscape and the focus of the debates that it took a comedian to raise this important issue with one of the candidates. (HT: David Dayen)

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