Shots were fired inside an office building that houses Concordia University in Grand Prairie, Texas on Tuesday afternoon and police have “ordered those inside to lock their doors and stay where they are.” At least one person was “removed from the building and taken by ambulance to a hospital.”
Police are now looking for the suspect who opened fire.
On Tuesday, President Obama unveiled a comprehensive plan for immigration reform based on four tenets: continuing to strengthen border security, cracking down on employers hiring undocumented workers, creating pathways to earned citizenship, and streamlining legal immigration.
Speaking in Nevada, Obama said that the bi-partisan enthusiasm in the Senate is “very encouraging,” and offered a plan that closely resembles the framework outlined by a bipartisan group of eight senators. ”So at this moment, it looks like there’s a genuine desire to get this done soon,” Obama said. “The ideas I’m proposing have traditionally been supported by both Democrats like Ted Kennedy and Republicans like President George W. Bush.”
Obama’s proposal shares common ground with the bipartisan framework, but also goes further, specifically permitting binational same-sex couples to apply for legal residency. From the administration’s fact sheet:
The proposal seeks to eliminate existing backlogs in the family-sponsored immigration system by recapturing unused visas and temporarily increasing annual visa numbers. The proposal also raises existing annual country caps from 7 percent to 15 percent for the family-sponsored immigration system. It also treats same-sex families as families by giving U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents the ability to seek a visa on the basis of a permanent relationship with a same-sex partner. The proposal also revises current unlawful presence bars and provides broader discretion to waive bars in cases of hardship.
Under current law, the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) prevents the government from recognizing the marriage of same-sex couples in which one partner is a U.S. citizen and the other is not. As a result, couples cannot petition for citizenship and are often separated by deportation, at great costs both emotionally and financially to their families.
Republican senators who are considering immigration reform generally oppose the amendment, however. Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) has said that protecting same-sex families is “not of paramount importance” and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) called their inclusion a mistake, adding, “Why don’t we just put legalized abortion in there and round it all out.”
McCain offered the following statement in response to Obama’s speech: “I appreciate the President’s support for our bipartisan effort on comprehensive immigration reform. While there are some differences in our approaches to this issue, we share the belief that any reform must recognize America as a nation of laws and a nation of immigrants. We should all agree that border security and enforcement is particularly important in order to ensure that we don’t repeat the mistakes of the 1986 immigration reform.”
At a dinner I attended last night, glaciologist Jason Box explained why he believes Greenland’s disintegration is likely to keep outpacing Antarctica’s for the foreseeable future. He has a detailed explanation at his blog, Meltfactor, reposted below. See also Chris Mooney’s interview of Box here and “Greenland Ice Melt Up Nearly Five-Fold Since Mid-1990s“ – JR.
Changes in global sea level due to ice sheet melting since 1992. Credit: ESA/NASA/Planetary Visions via NBC.
by Jason Box, Ph.D.
Dahl-Jensen et al. (2013)[i] suggest that the Greenland ice sheet was more stable than previously thought[ii], enduring ~6k years of temperatures 5-8 C above the most recent 1000 years during the Eemian interglacial 118-126k years before present, its loss at the time contributing an estimated 2 m (6.6 ft) of global sea level compared to a total of 4-8 m (13-26 ft)[iii], implying Antarctica was and will become the dominant source of sea level change. Consequently, environmental journalist Andrew Revkin writes: “The dramatic surface melting [in Greenland], while important to track and understand has little policy significance.”
Given the non-trivial complexity of the issue and that Greenland has been contributing more than 2:1 that of Antarctica to global sea level in the recent 19 years (1992-2010)[iv], let’s not consider Greenland of neglible policy relevance until that ratio is 1:1 if not reversed, say, 0.5:1. Greenland, currently the leading contender with surface melting dominating its mass budget[v], the positive feedback with surface melting and ice reflectivity doubling Greenland’s surface melt since year 2000[vi]. Professor Richard Alley weighs in again: “We have high confidence that warming will shrink Greenland, by enough to matter a lot to coastal planners.”
That’s not to say that Antarctica couldn’t take over from Greenland the position of number 1 global sea level contributor in the foreseeable future. Nor should one be surprised if it did, given that Antarctica contains a factor of 10 more ice than Greenland[vii],[viii]. And it is probable that the planetary energy imbalance[ix] caused by elevated greenhouse gasses, expressed primarily through massive oceanic heat uptake[x], is delivering enough erosive power to destabilize the 3.3 m of sea level[xi] in the marine-based West Antarctic ice sheet. Yet, for today, consider also that climate change if increasing Antarctic precipitation a few percent can tip its mass balance toward the positive, lessening its sea level contribution[xii] even while its glaciers retreat.
Irrespective of sea level forcing, through its ice mass budget Greenland plays an important role to North Atlantic climate through ocean thermohaline circulation, even being suggested as the Achilles heel of the global climate system[xiii]. I wouldn’t tell our European friends Greenland’s hardly policy-relevant when climate change offers higher amplitude extremes in precipitation if not also temperature, as North Atlantic climate shifts in partial response to changes in neighboring Greenland.
Key differences between the modern Anthropocene and the Eemian interglacial suggest anthropogenic climate change may drive a different cryosphere response than during the Eemian…
Last week, Louisiana’s poor and terminally ill residents won a surprising victory when Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) announced that his state would not stop providing hospice care to its Medicaid beneficiaries. Unfortunately, that’s about the only piece of good news for low-income Louisianans’ health coverage, as the state is still set to implement massive cuts for Medicaid programs that “provide behavioral health services for at-risk children, offer case management visits for low-income HIV patients and pay for at-home visits by nurses who teach poor, first-time mothers how to care for their newborns” this Friday.
While Jindal administration officials argue that the cuts could be mitigated by Medicare and private managed care programs, the reality is that many of these specialty services are simply unavailable — or unaffordable — outside of Medicaid:
Health and Hospitals Secretary Bruce Greenstein said he targeted programs that were duplicative, costly and optional under the state’s participation in the state-federal Medicaid program.
Greenstein said in many instances, people can get the care they’re losing through other government-funded programs. But he acknowledged that won’t happen in every case, meaning some people will simply lose the services or receive reduced services. [...]
Jan Moller heads the Louisiana Budget Project, which advocates for low- to moderate-income families. Moller said he’s most distressed by the cut to the Nurse-Family Partnership Program.
The health department is eliminating the portion of the program that offers at-home visits to low-income women who are pregnant with their first child. Registered nurses visit the women early in their pregnancy and until their children’s second birthday, offering advice on preventive health care, diet and nutrition, smoking cessation and other child developmental issues. [...]
“What the Nurse-Family Partnership does goes above and beyond what a good obstetrician does,” Moller said. “It’s really about teaching life-skills to at-risk moms to make them better parents and make them better able to care for their children, and it’s been proven to work.”
Speech therapy programs for low-income children are also on the chopping block. The cuts — as well as Jindal’s proposals to raise taxes on the poor while slashing public education and other health care funding — are meant to plug a midyear budget deficit. But they are more likely to raise health care costs and poverty levels in a state that already ranks among America’s least-insured and poorest locales by pushing people poor people into finding services that they will no longer be able to afford.
While Jindal has spoken at length on the Republican Party’s existential need to stop being “the stupid party,” the “austerity” policies that he has pursued for his state are some of the most regressive in the entire country.
Rep. Ed Royce (R-CA) Photo: AP
China has been engaged in territorial disputes with several of its neighbors — including Japan, Taiwan and Vietnam — over ownership of several small island chains and their potential natural resources for years now. The Obama administration has been seeking to broker a diplomatic solution to the conflict, urging negotiation through various forums.
Taking that advice to heart, the Philippines has filed an arbitration claim against China at International Tribunal of the Law of the Sea, in an effort to gain a binding decision on the matter. Congressman Royce, currently traveling as part of a delegation to the Philippines, added his voice to the plea that China participate in the proceedings:
“It is best that China joins the process so that we can move forward under international law,” the California Republican told The Associated Press after meeting Philippine Foreign Secretary Albert del Rosario and other diplomats in Manila.
“We want to calm the tensions,” Royce said. “We want this approached from the standpoint of diplomacy, and that is what we are conveying because in that way we don’t create crisis which roils the markets or creates uncertainty.”
Royce’s position is perfectly sensible and speaks to the importance of the role that arbitration plays in solving international disputes before they reach the point of violence. The United States, however, would be unable to avail itself of the Tribunal’s arbitration to get itself out of similar maritime quarrels. The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), which forms the authority of the Tribunal, has yet to be ratified by the U.S. Senate, despite being signed in 1994.
UNCLOS came closer than it ever has to acheiving the two-thirds vote necessary to come into effect during the last Congress. Support for treaty poured in from almost all sides — including in testimony from representatives of big business such as the American Petroleum Institute and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, members of the military, and five former Republican Secretaries of States — urging ratification.
The treaty still died at the hands of Republicans in the Senate, who seemed to take the word of conspiracy theorists over American interests. It may eventually come that the U.S. will require aid similar to the Philippines in working with China, aid that UNCLOS won’t be able to provide.
The late psychoanalyst Joyce McDougall believed homosexuality was a perversion.
Joseph Nicolosi, founder of ex-gay group NARTH and trainer of many other ex-gay therapists, is back with another brief article attempting to explain his perspective on the nature of homosexuality. Earlier this month, he explained that his patients can get over their supposed “addiction” to gay porn by simply making friends with more men. This week, he offers a convoluted description of homosexual behavior as an addiction to acting out a fantasy that compensates for a wounded gender identity:
Joyce McDougall has investigated the central role of “theatre and role-playing” in non-typical forms of sexual activity, including homosexuality. She is among the few contemporary psychoanalysts willing to study such forms of sexuality. McDougall understands “sexual theatre” as an acting-out of intrapsychic sexual forces in a symbolic attempt to resolve an identity conflict. In this regard she confirms the classic psychoanalytic understanding of “perverse” (as the term was used in previous years) sexual activity as being rooted in identity confusion. Noting the repetitive-compulsive nature of these role enactments, McDougall found that while her patients complain about the constrained structure of these “erotic theatre pieces,” they could not abstain from their enactments: “…and have to do it again and again and again” (McDougall, 2000, p.182).
What Nicolosi is trying to suggest is that gay people (and “the extreme case of transsexuals”) were somehow sent the wrong messages by their parents about how they are supposed to understand their own gender. This leads to a sense of inner conflict that they then address through compulsively trying to fulfill that “false” identity. Essentially, he thinks that gay people are just actors cast in the wrong role who don’t know how escape the performance because they believe they are trying to fix some kind of “past trauma” by acting it out.
Stepping back from that gobbledygook, it’s actually easy to make sense of how these perpetrators of fraud arrive at such nonsense. The obvious explanation for why there are gay people who don’t want to be gay is because they exist in a society that condemns homosexuality; they are taught from a young age that being gay is wrong and something to be ashamed of. Mainstream social science recognizes this reality, which is why the recommended professional practice is to affirm same-sex orientations to help resolve the inner conflict.
Ex-gay therapists take the opposite approach. They assume same-sex attractions are a defect by default. Thus, they need to invent other explanations for why people feel conflicted about having them. And like most aspects of ex-gay therapy, the easy solution is to blame the patient. Nicolosi’s gibberish is a means of doing just that. It’s a gay person’s fault he’s gay, it’s a gay person’s fault he feels bad about being gay, and only by accepting that shame and blame can that gay person attempt to find recovery. That’s the insidious message behind ex-gay therapy.
A bipartisan duo of senators sent a letter to the Department of Justice today to press Attorney General Eric Holder on the lack of prosecutions for employees and executives of the nation’s largest banks in the wake of financial crisis. The letter from Sens. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) and Chuck Grassley (R-IA) questioned Holder about “whether the ‘too big to fail’ status of certain Wall Street megabanks undermines the ability of the federal government to prosecute wrongdoing and impose appropriate penalties.”
“Wall Street megabanks aren’t just too big to fail, they’re increasingly too big to jail,” Brown said in a release. “Already, the nation’s six largest megabanks enjoy what amounts to taxpayer-funded guarantee by virtue of their size, making it harder for regional and community banks to compete. Now, these megabanks may also enjoy some impunity when they violate the law by laundering money or illegally foreclosing on homeowners. Wall Street should pay the full price of its wrongdoing, not pass the costs along to taxpayers.”
“Unfortunately, we’ve seen little willingness to charge these individuals criminally,” Grassley added. “The public deserves an explanation of how the Justice Department arrives at these decisions.”
Last month, Grassley criticized the “get out of jail free card” that has been given to the nation’s largest financial institutions, which have largely avoided serious prosecution since the financial crisis. Prosecutions for financial fraud hit a 20-year low in 2011. Many of the fines the banks have paid are tax-deductible, a problem Brown is currently seeking to remedy.
“Unfortunately, many of the settlements between large financial institutions and the federal government involve penalties that are disproportionately low, both in relation to the profits which resulted from those wrongful actions as well as in relation to the costs imposed upon consumers, investors, and the market,” Grassley and Brown wrote in the letter, adding that the perception that large banks are too big to face real prosecution “undermines the public’s confidence in our institutions and in the principal that the law is applied equally in all cases.”
A Republican plan to rig the next presidential race by changing the way electoral votes are allocated in several key blue states appears to be dead in Ohio — although it could still advance in other Republican-controlled states such as Michigan, Pennsylvania or Wisconsin. Several of the senior-most Republican officials in Ohio told the Cleveland Plain Dealer that they do not intend to push the GOP election-rigging plan:
Spokesmen for Gov. John Kasich, State Senate President Keith Faber and House Speaker William G. Batchelder told The Plain Dealer this week that they are not pursuing plans to award electoral votes proportionally by congressional district.
Batchelder went a step further, saying through his communications director that he “is not supportive of such a move.” And Republican Secretary of State Jon Husted, the state’s chief elections administrator, emphasized that he does not favor the plan either, despite Democratic suspicions based on reported comments that he said were taken out of context.
“Nobody in Ohio is advocating this,” Husted said in a telephone interview.
Although the death of this election-rigging plan in Ohio is an important victory for the principle that Americans choose their own leaders — and do not have them chosen for them by partisans in state capitols — there is still very real danger Republicans could push this plan in other states. Michigan House Speaker Jase Bolger (R) indicated he is open to the election-rigging plan late last week, and Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett (R) and state Senate Majority Leader Dominic Pileggi (R) both support rigging the Electoral College.
The Miami New Times published a bombshell investigative piece this morning that tied multiple Major League Baseball players, including New York Yankees star Alex Rodriguez, to a Miami drug company that was supplying them with anabolic steroids, human growth hormone, and other performance enhancing drugs. The story of Biogenesis, the drug firm, and Rodriguez, who admitted to steroid use before, brought back an ugly issue baseball thought it had largely put behind it when it instituted strong drug testing and harsh penalties in 2004.
The response, of course, has been an immediate call for more testing and harsher penalties. But here’s a question few seem to be asking: do drug tests and harsh penalties deter drug use? And if they don’t, how will more drug tests and even harsher penalties do any better?
In baseball, that’s impossible to know definitively, since there are no before-and-after testing numbers. But academic research suggests that random drug testing probably doesn’t prevent drug use. Dr. Linn Goldberg testified during a House Oversight Committee last month that his two-year testing of high school athletes had no deterrent effect. Other academic research has found that “testing alone is not a sufficient deterrent to eliminate drug use among college athletes.” Research into random testing for drugs like marijuana, meanwhile, has found little proof that such testing prevents use.
If Rodriguez, who had already admitted to steroid use once, indeed used performance enhancing drugs again, drug testing and the threat of penalties and public shame obviously failed as a deterrent. Random tests and the threat of rescinded titles, a lifetime ban, and federal punishment didn’t stop Lance Armstrong, and harsh rules and penalties in professional cycling and the Olympics haven’t prevented numerous athletes from using performance enhancers.
It’s easy to suggest that drug testing acts as a deterrent and that more of it would prevent even more use, but it’s hard to find proof of how effective drug tests are at actually preventing use. I’m not sure what the solution to sports’ drug problem is. I’m not even sure there is one, especially if the technology and funding that goes into producing performance enhancing drugs continues to outpace the technology and funding that goes into testing for them. But before we rush to the intuitive “more testing, harsher penalties” solution, shouldn’t we first figure out if the testing that is being conducted now does any good?
Nineteenth Century nullificationist Senator John C. Calhoun
Responding to President Obama’s plan to issue 23 executive orders on gun violence prevention, radical lawmakers in a number of states have re-upped their efforts to exempt their state from federal gun laws through the insidious and unconstitutional practice of nullification. Now, Tea Partiers in Mississippi want to institutionalize the nullification process, with a proposal to create a permanent committee devoted to nullifying all kinds of federal laws. The Dispatch reports:
The committee, composed of 14 state elected officials, would determine what is and isn’t within the federal government’s power when dealing with the state’s constitutional rights. … The bill, which is listed with the state as an “active bill” and will be taken up by the Constitution Committee, provides measures to “prohibit the infringement of the Constitutionally protected rights of the State of Mississippi, or its people, by means of federal statute, mandate, executive order, judicial decision or other action deemed by the State to be unconstitutional.”
“This was a bill that was requested for me to bring up,” Chism said. “It’s to solidify the 10th Amendment to the Constitution.”
Chism said the bill was drafted in response to 23 executive orders issued by President Barack Obama on gun control and weeks before the state is scheduled to begin implementing a national health system commonly known as “Obamacare.”
Having failed in their court challenges to the Affordable Care Act, state lawmakers started introducing nullification bills to purportedly eliminate that law.
The problem with the practice of nullification, once used to defend Jim Crow segregation, is that it rejects both the constitutional tenets that validly enacted federal laws are supreme over state laws, and that it is judges, and not state legislators, who determine whether those laws are valid or not in our system of checks and balances. Right-wing lawmakers revived the discredited tactic as a last-ditch means of fighting federal legislation they could not defeat in court. But a law that authorizes state legislators to review all federal legislation as a matter of course would open the door to a much broader swath of radical and defiant action, which is why James Madison warned that nullification would “speedily put an end to the Union itself” because it would allow the states to simply ignore any law they want.
Fortunately, the Mississippi bill was immediately greeted with hostility, and even Chism himself admitted the bill likely would not make it out of committee. But bills pending in several other states by “tenthers” go so far as to propose that enforcing federal gun law would be penalized as a felony.
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