NFL Refuses To Discipline Cleveland Browns Player For ‘Faggot’ Tweets

By Zack Ford on Nov 29, 2012 at 4:40 pm

Tank Carder

The National Football League has set a disappointing standard by refusing to implement its conduct policy when a player blatantly engages in public displays of homophobia. Cleveland Browns linebacker Tank Carder recently used Twitter to call a fan a “faggot” and further explain that, “I don’t agree with being gay or lesbian at all, but saying faggot doesn’t make me a homophobe.”

The Browns responded by saying they do not condone such comments and that they “have spoken with Tank and have made this very clear to him.” In his “apology,” he explained that he is “sorry if you were offended.” He also tried to explain that he thought the person he called a faggot “was bashing team sports. big misunderstanding.” Carder has done nothing else to rectify his offensive remarks, and now the NFL is not doing anything about it either.

The NFL said it had “addressed it with the player” and “made clear to the player that it was unacceptable,” pointing out that he had apologized. But that’s it, in stark contrast to impressive steps that other professional sports organizations have taken in similar situation. Reporting on the Carder controversy, OutSports’ Cyd Zeigler Jr. pointed out the disparities:

Last year, when Los Angeles Lakers star Kobe Bryant called a referee a “fucking fag,” the NBA fined him $100,000.
In September, when Toronto Blue Jays shortstop Yunel Escobar wore the words “tu ere maricon” (“you are a faggot”) in his eye black, his team suspended him for three games and donated his salary from those games to GLAAD and the You Can Play Project for LGBT athletes.
When Braves pitching coach Roger McDowell heckled fans with homophobic taunts last year, MLB suspended him for two weeks, levied an unspecified fine, and required him to undergo sensitivity training.
When Seattle Sounder Marc Burch called an opponent a gay slur earlier this month, Major League Soccer suspended him for three games, levied an unspecified fine, and required him to undergo sensitivity training.
MLS also recently ended its partnership with the Boy Scouts of America over the group’s anti-gay discriminatory policies.

The distinction is galling. Apparently, the NFL is only concerned about its public image when criminal charges are involved. As one of the most prominent sports in the country, the NFL should hold itself and its players to a higher standard. Punishments for such behavior send a message, and sensitivity training helps minimize the likelihood of future anti-gay outbursts.

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Alyssa

‘The Hour’ And Women’s Culture v. Hard News

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Nov 29, 2012 at 4:39 pm

I wrote earlier this year that The Hour, the BBC’s period drama about the producers, reporters, and anchor on a show of the same title trying to break through the BBC’s strictures and the stifling social environment of the late 1950s, was the show that Aaron Sorkin wanted his HBO drama The Newsroom to be. It was attuned to the actual rhythms and difficulties of reporting, the stories are legitimately revealing rather than pontificating, and the characters face genuine obstacles to getting those stories on the air. And in the second season of the show, which began its run on BBC America last night, I think that’s become even more true, particularly in the way that The Hour is handling the rise of a phenomenon that The Newsroom tried to critique decades later: the rise of commercial television programming aimed at women.

I talked to Abi Morgan, The Hour‘s creator, about the show’s approach to gender in general, and about the kind of programming aimed at women like Marnie (Oona Chaplin), the upper-class wife of The Hour anchor Hector (Dominic West), who begins exploring a career as the host of a cooking show. She explained:

I think if you look at the women, the on-screen talent at that time, on the whole they were either singing along to a puppet, or they were presenting the kind of soft magazine programs that were just starting to come up through the ’50s. I liked the idea of Marnie almost becoming quite literally this professional housewife. She’s this Fanny Cradock-esque character. It also felt like a kind of brilliant, brittle metaphor for this kind of life Marnie finds herself encased in. You’ll see that marriage really is tested through the course of the series….

The mainstay of commercials of that time was the great British housewife. Marnie is very much the consumer of her time. On the wider level, the show is about the birth of capitalism in the ’50s and into the ’60s. The warmongers were finding a way of making money out of nuclear paranoia, [and there was a] global desire to be part of the arms and space race. This parallels what’s going on with Marnie. She’s someone who aspires to a bigger life. When you write a drama set in this era, you have a whole period where if your characters have any gumption or charisma, they have to break away from this suppressive ’50s world.

Where The Newsroom could be viciously dismissive of mass culture aimed at women—Will McAvoy ran himself into trouble in part by insulting a gossip columnist for covering the Real Housewives, and declaring that he’d fix another woman whose primary flaw included consuming that kind of show—The Hour doesn’t try to make judgements about whether it’s bad or not that programming aimed by women exists. Instead, it tries to reckon with what it means that this kind of programming speaks powerfully to the ennui of post-war women like Marnie, who aren’t working, and how their power as consumers affects the entire media landscape. When Bel debates whether or not to run a segment about Christian Dior, she’s also trying to figure out where fashion fits in the hierarchy of news and human interest.

And the show never presents Marnie as stupid for being entranced by a commercial, or seeking out a career using the skills that she has, even if they’re feminine ones. Of course she’s bored! She was bred for a specific role, to be a good wife to a man like Hector, who was expected to play a corresponding part, but instead cheats on her, pursues entertainment in nightclubs where she is not invited, and treats her as if she couldn’t possibly be interested in his career. Marnie is an intelligent, capable woman, but no one asks anything of her, not even that she be available for sex and housekeeping. Even if she’s only valuable to television as a consumer, at least it’s a form of being valued.

The thing that Will McAvoy, and that by extension The Newsroom, never seemed to get, is that consuming frivolous things doesn’t make you a frivolous person. Everyone I know who watches Real Housewives does so because they recognize the show as a social critique folded into a trainwreck like a pill into applesauce. It’s possible to even consume things that you know are bad for you, or that have no redeeming social value whatsoever, to recognize them as such, and to enjoy them anyway. The question is not whether or not someone is a good person for watching certain things. It’s what need they speak to, what itch they scratch.

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Health

Missouri Gov.: Implementing Obamacare Is ‘The Smart Thing And The Right Thing’

By Tara Culp-Ressler on Nov 29, 2012 at 4:20 pm

Gov. Jay Nixon (D-MO)

Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon (D) announced today that his state will participate in the optional expansion of the Medicaid program under Obamacare, one of the crucial methods that the health care reform law uses to extend coverage to previously uninsured Americans. An estimated 33,000 Missouri residents will be able to access health insurance thanks to Nixon’s decision to expand Medicaid.

“As Chief Executive for the state, I take my financial responsibilities very seriously,” Nixon said in the statement. “I trust that as others scrutinize the numbers, as I have, they will come to the same conclusion: that we can do the smart thing and the right thing for the people of Missouri.”

Republican governors across the country have been digging in their heels against implementing Obamacare in their states, claiming that covering more of their low-income residents under Medicaid would impose too much of a strain on their budgets — despite significant evidence to the contrary. But a statement from Nixon’s office noted that expanding Medicaid represents a “fiscally responsible move” for his state because the federal government will contribute 100 percent of the costs of expansion for the first three years, and 90 percent or more in the years after that. And on top of that, a report from earlier this week found that the additional funding from the federal government will help spur the local economy by creating 24,000 new jobs in the state in 2014 alone.

Nixon’s decision will help move his state toward implementing the Affordable Care Act after the state’s Republican-controlled legislature has repeatedly attempted to block Obamacare’s implementation altogether. In September, Missouri lawmakers voted to give employers the right to deny their employees coverage for contraceptive services — a method of circumventing Obamacare’s contraception mandate, which requires employer-based insurance plans to cover birth control without a co-pay. And on November 6, Missouri voters passed a meaningless anti-Obamacare ballot initiative to prevent their governor from moving forward with a state-based health exchange, another one of the health law’s tactics for lowering the uninsurance rate. Instead of preventing Obamacare’s implementation in Missouri, that vote actually left Nixon with no choice but to cede to the federal government, which will now step in and set up a health exchange for the state.

The news that Missouri will move forward with expanding Medicaid is especially good news for the state’s hospitals, which stood to lose about $400 million in funding without the Medicaid expansion. Some estimates projected that, if Missouri decided against expanding Medicaid, as many as 40 to 50 percent of rural hospitals in the state could have been forced to close.

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Justice

Obama Administration Opposes House Immigration Bill That Would Limit Legal Immigration

By Amanda Peterson Beadle on Nov 29, 2012 at 4:15 pm

The Obama administration announced its opposition on Wednesday to a GOP immigration proposal that would add visas for highly skilled workers while actually reducing legal immigration. The House will vote Friday on the bill, which Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-TX) introduced. The measure failed in September when the House voted on it under a suspension of the rules, requiring a two-thirds vote.

Under the guise of trying to expand the number of visas available to international students who earn masters and doctorates in STEM fields — science, technology, engineering, mathematics — at U.S. universities, Smith’s bill would cut the Diversity Visa program, which is intended for immigrants from countries that do not already send large numbers of immigrants to the U.S. And any unused STEM visas would disappear, shrinking overall legal immigration into the U.S.

In the White House’s statement of administrative policy against the bill, the administration emphasized its commitment to an immigration reform plan that creates a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants in the U.S.:

As a part of immigration reform, the Administration strongly supports legislation to attract and retain foreign students who graduate with advanced STEM degrees, to establish a start-up visa for foreign-born entrepreneurs to start businesses and create jobs, and to reform the employment-based immigration system to better meet the needs of the U.S. economy. However, the Administration does not support narrowly tailored proposals that do not meet the President’s long-term objectives with respect to comprehensive immigration reform. [...]

Such an approach must provide for attracting and retaining highly skilled immigrants and uniting Americans with their family members more quickly, as well as other important priorities such as establishing a pathway for undocumented individuals to earn their citizenship, holding employers accountable for breaking the law, and continuing efforts to strengthen the Nation’s robust enforcement system.

In addition to President Obama’s support for comprehensive immigration reform — he said he expects to begin working on a reform bill “very soon after my inauguration” — the Congressional Hispanic Caucus outlined nine principles for a reform bill on Wednesday, including protecting families.

But while Democrats are discussing plans to address what voters say should be included in immigration reform, Republicans are pushing bills that roll back the clock on immigration. Smith’s STEM visa proposal treats immigrants as one-to-one competitors with native workers, and earlier this week, retiring GOP Sens. Jon Kyl (AZ) and Kay Bailey Hutchison (TX) introduced the ACHIEVE Act that fails to provide a clear path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. If Republicans truly wanted to do something about immigration reform during the lame duck session, they would have worked together with Democrats. But their commitment to ideology doomed the effort from the start.

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Climate Progress

Scientific American: ‘Loss of Ice, Melting Of Permafrost And Other Climate Effects Are Occurring At An Alarming Pace’

By Joe Romm on Nov 29, 2012 at 4:02 pm

Another day, another (accurate) apocalyptic review of climate science. Joining recent articles in the New York Times and New Scientist is a terrific piece in Scientific American by science writer John Carey.

Carey has collected an assortment of epic quotes and nightmare scenarios from leading climatologists. As he explains (behind a paywall):

The latest data from across the globe show that the planet is changing faster than expected. More sea ice around the Arctic Ocean is disappearing than had been forecast. Regions of permafrost across Alaska and Siberia are spewing out more methane, the potent greenhouse gas, than models had predicted. Ice shelves in West Antarctica are breaking up more quickly than once thought possible, and the glaciers they held back on adjacent land are sliding faster into the sea. Extreme weather events, such as floods and the heat wave that gripped much of the U.S. in the summer of 2012 are on the rise, too. The conclusion? “As scientists, we cannot say that if we stay below two degrees of warming everything will be fine,” says Stefan Rahmstorf, a professor of physics of the oceans at the University of Potsdam in Germany.

Looks like the 350 ppm crowd was right all along!

The X factors that may be pushing the earth into an era of rapid climate change are long-hypothesized feedback loops that may be starting to kick in. Less sea ice, for example, allows the sun to warm the ocean water more, which melts even more sea ice. Greater permafrost melting puts more CO2 and methane into the atmosphere, which in turn causes further permafrost melting, and so on.

The potential for faster feedbacks has turned some scientists into vocal Cassandras.

Well, let’s hope faster feedbacks haven’t turned climatologists into Cassandras. That would mean we are doomed to be seduced by the Trojan horse of fossil fuels with the civilization-destroying carbon pollution hiding inside, to extend the metaphor (see “Will Sandy Be Short For Cassandra, Another Warning We Ignore?“).

This isn’t the only blunt climate article in Scientific American. They just published:

Climate Change Threatens to Create a Second Dust Bowl

Rising temperatures, persistent drought, and depleted aquifers on the southern Great Plains could set the stage for a disaster similar to the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, scientists say

Anyone who saw the grim, gripping Ken Burns documentary on the original Dust Bowl knows how disastrous that would be (see also “My Nature Piece On Dust-Bowlification And the Grave Threat It Poses to Food Security“).

Carey’s piece lays out one of the main reasons climate scientists are concerned about abrupt, catastrophic change driven by greenhouse gases — it has happened in the past:

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NEWS FLASH

UK Sees Highest Gay And Bi HIV Infection Spike Ever | A new study finds that in the United Kingdom, more gay and bi men were diagnosed with HIV in 2011 than in any year since record-keeping began. It is the first time that the number has surpassed heterosexual diagnoses since 1999. According to the Health Protection Agency, 3,010 gay and bi men tested positive in 2011, and over a fifth of them were also diagnosed with an acute STI like chlamydia and gonorrhea. The National AIDS Trust saw a “worryingly” high proportion of new infections taking place over the past six months.

Economy

CBO’s Changing Predictions Show The Economy Won’t Just Heal Itself

By Jeff Spross on Nov 29, 2012 at 3:35 pm

One effect of the Great Recession was to massively widen the gap between the amount of wealth the economy could be producing and what it actually was producing. GDP production dropped almost $1 trillion from its pre-recession trend line, and between 2008 and 2011 the United States lost around $3.6 trillion.

CBO’s “current law” baseline, which assumes the nation goes over the so-called “fiscal cliff,” does not show a return to potential GDP until 2018. However, as the Economic Policy Institute noted yesterday, CBO’s predictions over the last three years have repeatedly pushed back the date of the recovery, suggesting there’s no guarantee it actually happens:

CBO’s most recent forecast shows recovery rapidly accelerating starting in late 2013, with real GDP growth averaging 4.5 percent over 2014—2016 (more than twice trend growth since recovery began); this spurt of growth exceeding potential GDP growth would close the output gap.

Should we bank on this recovery? Probably not, even though it seems that most of the deficit reducing industrial complex in D.C. is banking on it.

As an empirical matter, the CBO projections have consistently issued premature dates for when full recovery will occur; the 2014 recovery expected back in CBO’s Jan. 2010 forecast is now projected for 2018. And so on.

Part of the problem is that economies can get into negative as well as positive feedback loops. If unemployment is high and the bargaining power of employees is low, that can weigh down wage and price growth. If those grow slowly, it takes much longer for households to pay down their debt, further delaying the recovery.

But a deeper problem is that CBO’s projections of an approaching recovery don’t just build in assumptions about how the economy will behave. It builds in assumptions about how policymakers will behave as well. It assumes that the Federal Reserve responds to a recession by opening the spigot and loosening monetary policy. It assumes that safety net spending automatically increases to meet the needs of more Americans thrown into hardship.

But those policies are choices, influenced by the culture and ideology and worldview of policymakers. They are not inevitabilities, as the Republican Party has repeatedly demonstrated with its determination to rein in the Fed and impose austerity. Zooming out to the international scene, Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff’s finding that systemic financial collapses lead to much slower recoveries is driven to no small degree by policymakers’ tendency to react to recessions with self-destructive choices. Conversely, if countries can buck the conventional wisdom that government must “tighten its belt” when individual families are tightening theirs, real good can be achieved.

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Alyssa

U.S. Soccer Announces Formation Of New Women’s Professional Soccer League

By Travis Waldron on Nov 29, 2012 at 3:16 pm

Women’s professional soccer will return to the United States in 2013, as U.S. Soccer president Sunil Gulati announced last week the formation of a new league that will feature teams based in some of the nation’s biggest soccer hotbeds. The new league, the third attempt at forming a successful top-notch women’s soccer league in the U.S., will have eight teams based in Boston, Chicago, Kansas City, Western New York, New Jersey, Portland, Seattle, and Washington, D.C.

As I wrote in August, when the U.S. Women’s National Team was on its way to its second consecutive Olympic gold medal, making a women’s league successful won’t be easy. But the focus for U.S. Soccer president Sunil Gulati, who made a women’s league a priority when WPS folded, is now on sustainability, and that is already evident in the early formation of the new league.

U.S. Soccer has promised to pay the salaries of 24 players — three per team — who are on its full-time roster. The Canadian and Mexican soccer federations announced this week that they too will fund salaries of players who join the league from their national teams. The backing of those three foundations will give the new league a financial crutch WPS and WUSA never had, a significant break for a league that will need help attaining financial viability.

Regardless of the challenges the league faces, this is a positive step for the women’s game. The absence of a professional league made it impossible for the game to take advantage of the enthusiasm brought on by the 2011 World Cup and 2012 Olympics, particularly in the United States, where players like Abby Wambach, Hope Solo, and Alex Morgan blossomed into full-fledged stars outside the small world of women’s soccer fans. It also left those players with no top-level professional league to return to, making it harder both for the U.S. to sustain its dominance of the women’s game and harder for the game to grow.

That growth is important. There are now more than 337,000 girls playing soccer on 10,500 teams at the high school level, and another 700 teams play collegiate soccer. The growth of the women’s game internationally has followed the growth of the women’s game in the United States, one of the few countries where women enjoy equal access and funding to the world’s most popular game. But without a pro league, continued growth and the continued expansion of women’s access is no guarantee.

There are plenty of challenges facing the league, but there was once a mountain of challenges facing the now-thriving men’s league, Major League Soccer, and unlike an American women’s league, it can’t claim that it has the world’s best players or top competition. That doesn’t mean that the women’s league will become a similar success story. That Gulati and the league’s investors are committed to making a women’s league viable and sustainable, though, is a good sign for the future of the women’s game and it’s biggest stars.

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Justice

Fewer Judges Confirmed Under President Obama Than Any First Term President Since Kennedy

By Ian Millhiser on Nov 29, 2012 at 3:15 pm

According to data from the Federal Judicial Center, the rate of judicial confirmations under President Obama is slower than the rate during any president’s first term since the term begun by President John F. Kennedy in 1961. The chart below includes all Article III federal judicial confirmations during a president’s first term. As the purpose of the chart is to compare President Obama’s first term to the same period in prior presidencies, it does not include President Gerald Ford because Ford’s presidency completed what began as President Richard Nixon’s second term. The chart does include the entire four year term that began under Kennedy and ended under President Lyndon Johnson:

Although the chart indicates that more judges were confirmed under President Obama than during the Kennedy/Johnson term and that Obama’s confirmation rate is only slightly lower than President Ronald Reagan’s, these numbers are deceptive. Today the federal bench includes 870 authorized active judgeships, including the nine justices of the Supreme Court. This is more than twice the 407 judgeships authorized under President Kennedy and significantly more than the 757 judgeships authorized at the end of President Reagan’s first term. So the Senate confirmed fewer judges under President Obama despite the fact that Obama had more judgeships to fill.

To be sure, President Obama has not been as aggressive as he should have been in naming new judges and throwing his political support behind his existing nominees. But the single biggest obstacle to judicial confirmations under Obama is the record intransigence shown by Senate Republicans. Nearly one quarter of all attempts to break a filibuster on a presidential nominee during the first 221 years of the American republic involved Senate Republican filibusters of President Obama’s nominees.

It is not too late, however, for the Senate to back away from its lowest judicial confirmation rate since the Johnson Administration. Nineteen judicial nominees await confirmation votes on the Senate floor, most of whom are completely uncontroversial.

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Health

New Yorkers Still Face ‘Significant Risk Of Serious Illness And Death’ In Wake Of Hurricane Sandy Damage

By Tara Culp-Ressler on Nov 29, 2012 at 3:00 pm

Hurricane Sandy victims struggle to keep warm after losing heat in their home

Superstorm Sandy tore through the East Coast at the end of October, leaving significant damage and serious public threats in its wake — and now, a month and a presidential election later, some Americans still aren’t completely out of danger even though the news cycle has largely moved on.

The New York City Health Department is warning medical providers that although power has been restored in the city, thousands of New Yorkers are still living without heat in their homes, resulting in a soaring number of recent hypothermia cases. In the weeks after Sandy hit, cold exposure sent three times as many people to the emergency room compared to the same period in November between 2008 and 2011. And public health officials are worried that the problem will worsen in the upcoming winter months:

The department warned health care providers that residents living in unheated homes faced “a significant risk of serious illness and death from multiple causes.” [...]
And as temperatures dip, health officials said the cold could lead to other health problems, including a worsening of heart and lung diseases and an increase in anxiety and depression.

“My bigger concern is what happens in the future as we get closer to winter in the next four weeks,” Dr. Thomas A. Farley, the city’s health commissioner, said in an interview. “There are probably about 12,000 people living in unheated apartments right now.”

Some people still living without heat are turning to ovens or gas-fueled space heaters, but public health officials advise against those temporary solutions because of the increased risk of fire and carbon monoxide poisoning. Without proper ventilation, back-up generators can cause unsafe levels of carbon monoxide in the air — and sure enough, in the week after Sandy, the number of cases of potentially fatal carbon monoxide exposure was more than 10 times higher than average, and 6 times as high the following week. The city’s health department also reported that calls to New York City’s poison center have increased over the past month.

New Yorkers’ increased risk of health dangers is especially problematic because the city’s hospital system is not yet operating at full capacity after the superstorm seriously damaged several medical facilities, forcing some hospitals that flooded and lost power to evacuate their patients to different locations. The director of trauma at Bellevue Hospital — New York’s flagship public hospital, which had to spread its staff and patients across other buildings after Sandy devastated its own facilities — told ProPublica that even though hospital staff has been holding it together so far to continue caring for their patients, the “current status of care in Manhattan is not sustainable for any length of time.”

Nevertheless, health care workers have been vigilant in working overtime to care for their patients, even in the compromised conditions brought about by Hurricane Sandy. With the fall months fading into winter, their work may not be done quite yet.

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