Corporate Front Group Spreads Nonsense Research Against Paid Sick Days

By Guest Blogger on Feb 7, 2013 at 4:30 pm

Connecticut’s paid sick days law — which requires businesses in the service sector with more than 50 employees to allow their workers to accrue at least one hour of paid sick leave for every 40 hours they work — went into effect in January 2012. This week, the Employment Policies Institute released new “research” on the implementation of the law, arguing that it’s hurt the state.

But it is difficult to refer to this as “research” with a straight face, since the group is a shell corporation for big business interests and the report repeatedly asserts that the data is “not representative.” The Employment Policies Institute has released similarly dubious reports arguing against raising the minimum wage, and against the Affordable Care Act. Its founder Rick Berman, was a lobbyist for the food, alcoholic beverage and tobacco industries, and has been publically accused of using his non-profit shell organizations to benefit the for-profit clients for which he lobbies.

Amongst the report’s problems, data collection began in April 2012, four months after the implementation of the law and, due to the requirements of the legislation, before most full-time workers could have used any of the sick days earned. The initial survey was sent to businesses identified as “most likely to be impacted by the law” but nearly half (45 percent) of respondents did not have to change their policies in order to comply with the law — yet they still were included in the results saying negative things about the effects of the legislation.

The report claims that businesses are laying off workers and limiting expansion, but rigorously collected data from the Connecticut Department of Labor shows employment growth in the Leisure and Hospitality and Education and Health Services sectors since the law went into effect — two sectors that had the largest numbers of workers without paid sick days prior to passage of the law.

Our guest blogger is Sarah Jane Glynn, an economic policy analyst at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

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Justice

Reagan-Appointed Judge On Race: ‘Eleanor Roosevelt Said Staffs Of One Color Always Work Better’

By Ian Millhiser on Feb 7, 2013 at 4:10 pm

A Texas civil rights group filed a complaint against Judge Lynn N. Hughes, a Ronald Reagan-appointee to a federal district court in Texas, criticizing his “outlandish racial comments” in a case brought by a South Asian man alleging employment discrimination:

At one point, during a hearing in a racial discrimination case, Hughes reportedly said, “Eleanor Roosevelt said staffs of one color always work better.”

During the same hearing, Hughes also reportedly questioned the role of diversity programs.

“Why don’t they just hire people and let diversity take care of itself?” Hughes asked, according to the group’s complaint. “And what does the diversity director do? Go around and painting (sic) students different colors so that they would think they were mixed?”

Judge Hughes also claimed in the hearing that South Asians are “Causcausian” and that this explains “why Adolph Hitler used the swastika.”

This is the second time in just the past month that Hughes has come under attack for his questionable views on race. Last month, the severely conservative U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit criticized Hughes for concluding that the statement “[i]f President Obama’s elected, they’re going to have to take the Statute of Liberty and put a piece of fried chicken in his [sic] hand” had nothing to do with race. According to Hughes, “no black individually and no blacks collectively owns [sic] the sensitivity rights to fried chicken or anything else.”

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Health

Michigan House Speaker Shuts Down Transvaginal Ultrasound Bill

By Tara Culp-Ressler on Feb 7, 2013 at 4:05 pm

Transvaginal probe inserted into a women's vagina during an invasive ultrasound

Michigan’s House Speaker has ruled out a forced ultrasound bill that would mandate transvaginal probes for women seeking abortions. Speaker Jase Bolger (R) confirmed in a statement that “this House of Representatives will not pass a bill mandating transvaginal ultrasounds.”

“While I want to be sure women have access to the best technology available, I have absolutely no interest in forcing a woman to have a transvaginal ultrasound,” Bolger explained.

But if that’s something the Republican lawmaker is committed to, he might also want to condemn forced ultrasound bills as a whole — since even when that type of GOP-backed legislation doesn’t explicitly mandate a transvaginal probe, that’s often the end result. For the majority of women seeking an abortion within the first trimester of pregnancy, it’s too early for an abdominal ultrasound to be effective, so a doctor will have no choice but to use a transvaginal probe to fulfill the law.

And, of course, any measure that requires women to undergo an unwanted medical procedure — ultrasounds aren’t considered medically necessary for first trimester abortions — has nothing to do with ensuring women’s safety, health, or access to technology, regardless of the type of ultrasound equipment that is required.

(HT: TPM)

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Climate Progress

Carbon Pollution Data Put Power Plants Front And Center

By Climate Guest Blogger on Feb 7, 2013 at 3:50 pm

by David Doniger, via NRDC’s Switchboard

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency today released plant-by-plant data on 2011 emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping air pollutants. The data show once again that power plants are the number one source of the carbon pollution that drives climate change, churning out more than 2.2 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere in 2011.

The new data confirm that cleaning up the nation’s fleet of power plants should be the centerpiece of President Obama’s actions to reduce the threat of climate change.

In his inaugural address two weeks ago, the president vowed: “We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations.”

Power plants are far and away the number one source of carbon pollution, responsible for two-thirds of the 3.3 billion metric tons reported by all large industrial facilities, and for 40 percent of the nation’s overall CO2 emissions. (Overall U.S. emissions of CO2 and other heat-trapping pollutants total about 6.8 billion metric tons, including those from transportation, other industries, and smaller sources.)

Total power plant CO2 emissions in 2011 were down about 4.5 percent from 2010, reflecting the shift towards burning more natural gas and less coal (a trend that continued in 2012 — see here, p.87 — and will show up in the plant-by-plant pollution reports EPA publishes next year). Renewables and efficiency are growing fast – renewable investments increased by 23 percent from 2010 to 2011 according to the Energy Information Administration, and electric efficiency program budgets, for example, rose from $2.7 billion to $6.8 billion between 2007 and 2011.

NRDC issued an innovative plan in December showing how the president can use the Clean Air Act to cut the dangerous carbon pollution from the nation’s existing power plants, slowing climate change, saving lives, creating jobs, and growing the economy.

Our plan achieves huge health and climate benefits at surprisingly low cost, is fair and flexible for each state and power company, holds power bills down, and triggers huge job-creating clean energy investments that can’t be outsourced.

The NRDC plan cuts overall power sector carbon emissions 26 percent in 2020 and 35 percent in 2025, from 2005 levels. Because of its fair and flexible design features, our plan achieves enormous climate protection and public health benefits worth $26-60 billion in 2020, at a reasonable cost of $4 billion.

You can check out which of the nation’s 1,594 power plants is in your backyard, and how much carbon pollution it puts out, using EPA’s handy map-based emission data website, which includes data from about 8,000 large facilities in nine industrial sectors.

LGBT

How The ‘Scouts’ Safety’ Argument Reveals Conservatives’ Complete Anti-Gay Agenda

By Zack Ford on Feb 7, 2013 at 3:32 pm

Ever since the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) announced last summer that it would not be changing its policy prohibiting gay Scouts and Scout leaders, conservatives have rallied to defend the organizations “core value” of anti-gay discrimination. This effort seemed to explode over the past week, with social conservative talking heads desperately pleading with BSA to hold fast to that policy, lest it create a not-so-ambiguous safety concern for Scouts. Perhaps more than any other recent issue impact gays and lesbians — repealing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” marriage equality, or the Chick-fil-A controversy, how social conservatives’ discuss the BSA policy reveals the depth of their anti-gay animus and the foundation of lies they perpetuate in their agenda against LGBT equality.

Though BSA refused to share any of the details of the two-year review that resulted in keeping the policy, plenty of conservatives voices have attempted to make the case on behalf of the organization, including Mike Huckabee, Bill O’Reilly, Rick Perry, the Family Research Council, the Liberty Counsel, the American Family Association, the National Organization for Marriage, and the Southern Baptist Convention, to name a few. While some have made weak appeals to “traditional values,” the overwhelming argument against changing the policy has been a claim that Scouts will be more vulnerable to abuse if gays are allowed to participate in the organization, an argument that doesn’t even address the question of gay Scouts. Here is a sampling of the underlying assumptions about gay people that inform this point of view:

The LGBT community is viewed entirely as adult gay men.
The only aspect of a person that defines a gay identity is participation in same-sex sexual behavior.
Nothing is apparently more important to gay men than having as much sex as possible and talking about it at all times.
For gay men, there is no difference between being attracted to other adult gay men and being attracted to underage boys.
Gay men are so obsessed with having sex that consent means nothing to them.
Even though the men most commonly found abusing boys identify as heterosexual, the fact that their victims were boys means that they must be secretly gay, as opposed to just being pedophiles.
It’s impossible for a child to learn that gay people even exist without becoming “sexualized” and somehow put at risk.
So long as homosexuality is prohibited, all Boy Scouts will remain totally chaste and never think, learn about, or talk about the existence of sex.

This line of thinking proves that conservatives have learned nothing about gays and lesbians in decades. Any of these assumptions can and have been debunked not only by social science but by simply the mainstream visibility of the gay community. Nevertheless, conservatives continue to see gays as mentally ill, sex-obsessed, child-abusing sinners who do not deserve an equal place in society. This is what they believe when they argue against marriage equality (e.g. gays are too sex-obsessed to commit to monogamy), same-sex adoption (e.g. children fare worse with same-sex parents), or military service (e.g. straight soldiers won’t serve as effectively if gay troops are hitting on them). And though these issues mostly impact people who are gay, lesbian, and bisexual, many of the same negative stereotypes are similarly applied to transgender people, such as the claim that allowing them to use the same bathroom with which they identity would endanger children.

As GLAAD’s Commentator Accountability Project has revealed, conservative talking heads often sugarcoat their anti-gay messaging when speaking to mainstream media, but the BSA policy has been the exception. Under the guise of arguments defending “religious freedom,” it’s clear that social conservatives maintain a warped view of the gay community and are intent on promulgating that view. It is an agenda that has nothing to do with protecting children, families, or “values,” but that is designed specifically to defame and stigmatize the gay community, encouraging people to doubt and fear them through the guise of religious faith. Fortunately, people across the country are learning to see through this hateful charade and support the full inclusion of their LGBT friends and family in every aspect of society.

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Economy

Eight Programs That Have Already Faced Devastating Budget Cuts (And Could Be In For More)

By Travis Waldron on Feb 7, 2013 at 3:20 pm

Even without the spending cuts included in the so-called “sequester,” America’s domestic spending levels are scheduled to hit historic lows in the coming years. That’s because the Budget Control Act, signed into law as part of the plan to raise the debt ceiling in August 2011, capped future spending levels.

Those caps will ultimately reduce spending to its lowest level as a percent of the economy since the 1970s, according to a report from Democrats on the House Appropriations Committee:

Already, many programs on which Americans depend have faced significant cuts. Here are eight examples from the report:

Education: 44 federal education programs have been totally eliminated, saving $1.1 billion, since 2010. Title I, which funds schools in low-income areas, has not faced cuts, but it has not received scheduled funding increases. As a result, it has absorbed 1.2 million more students with no additional funds, meaning districts now have $140 less per student in those schools. The capped spending levels will also result in a significant shortfall in the Pell Grants program.

Food safety: The Food and Drug Administration nearly doubled its inspection of food imports between 2007 and 2011, but such inspections would be reduced by 24 percent under scheduled spending caps. Food imports are skyrocketing, but the FDA inspects only 2.3 percent of them. In addition, budget cuts have jeopardized implementation of major food safety reforms.

Women, Infants, and Children programs: The WIC program helps low-income women who are pregnant or have infant children up to age five. “If the same rate of growth that the discretionary budget caps permit through 2022 had been used to determine WIC funding over the last eight years, some 970,000 women, infants, and children would not have been able to receive much-needed supplemental foods this year,” according to the report.

Housing: A program to help house low-income seniors was cut in half from 2010 to 2012, resulting in the construction of no new housing, even as there are 10 seniors on waiting lists for each existing unit. Another program to build low-income housing was cut from $1.8 billion in 2010 to just $1 billion in 2012, resulting in the construction of fewer homes and the creation of 8,000 fewer jobs. And a program that helps heat low-income homes in the winter was cut by a third, resulting in assistance for a million fewer homes last year and cuts for those who still receive assistance, even as energy prices have risen by 31 percent in that time.

Read more

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Health

Health Officials Worry That Whooping Cough Is Growing Resistant To Antibiotics

By Tara Culp-Ressler on Feb 7, 2013 at 3:15 pm

This past year, the United States experienced the worst whooping cough outbreak in decades. Public health officials warn that the unusually high number of pertussis cases is partly due to the fact that “unacceptably low” numbers of Americans are getting their shots — but it could also be because whooping cough is becoming resistant to the vaccines currently used against it.

Researchers have discovered the first drug-resistant strain of whooping cough in the Philadelphia area. They’re currently looking into it further to try to determine whether those cases — which seem to be similar to a bug that’s also popped up in Japan, France, and Finland — are indicative of a larger problem, and a potential source of the recent elevated levels of whooping cough across the country:

“It’s quite intriguing. It’s the first time we’ve seen this here,” said Dr. Tom Clark of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. [...]

Whooping cough is a highly contagious disease that can strike people of any age but is most dangerous to children. It was once common, but cases in the U.S. dropped after a vaccine was introduced in the 1940s.

An increase in illnesses in recent years has been partially blamed on a version of the vaccine used since the 1990s, which doesn’t last as long. Last year, the CDC received reports of 41,880 cases, according to a preliminary count. That included 18 deaths.

The new study suggests that the new whooping cough strain may be why more people have been getting sick. Experts don’t think it’s more deadly, but the shots may not work as well against it.

Drug-resistant diseases are becoming a serious public health threat, as antibiotics are gradually losing their effectiveness against the bacteria they’re intended to treat. Global health officials warn that, unless the scientific community and pharmaceutical industry both invest in developing more effective drugs, an impending “antibiotic apocalypse” will eventually make common infections incurable.

Whooping cough is just the latest in a long list of common diseases that are showing signs of outpacing antibiotic treatments. Drug-resistant strains of tuberculosis and gonorrhea also have public health officials concerned. Even though the World Health Organization has called for a global effort to focus on developing new vaccines, the production of new types of antibiotics has lagged behind over the past decade — largely because testing and marketing new drugs isn’t as profitable for the pharmaceutical industry.

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Alyssa

What Marco Rubio Doesn’t Understand About Hip-Hop

By Guest Blogger on Feb 7, 2013 at 3:04 pm

Senator and 2016 GOP presidential hopeful Marco Rubio is a “hiphop connoisseur,” or so the National Journal’s social media person would have us believe. The last time Rubio cashed in some rap cred was in a November interview with GQ, and that interview appears to have a decent shelf life with the DC media. It’s the sole source for the lead section of the National Journal listicle that argues the Florida senator’s “eclectic taste in music” is a key to his appeal as the next face of a political party that’s not so much reinventing itself as taking sandpaper to its rough edges. Rubio’s hip. He’s with it. He knows the name of hiphop pioneer Afrika Bambaataa. He knows Tupac was from New York. He knows Eminem is “the only guy that speaks at any sort of depth.” He– wait, what?

GQ: Your three favorite rap songs?
Marco Rubio: “Straight Outta Compton” by N.W.A. “Killuminati” by Tupac. Eminem’s “Lose Yourself.”…I’m not like an athlete. The only guy that speaks at any sort of depth is, in my mind, Eminem. He’s a guy that does music that talks about the struggles of addiction and before that violence, with growing up in a broken family, not being a good enough father. So, you know that’s what I enjoy about it. It’s harder to listen to than ever before because I have a bunch of kids and you just can’t put it on.

If you think “the only guy that speaks at any sort of depth” is Eminem, you do not listen to enough hiphop. If “Lose Yourself” is your favorite Eminem song, you don’t listen to enough Eminem. And if you’re milking hiphop for credibility while marginalizing its challenges to the kinds of policies and narratives that Republicans run on, you might need to test your listening comprehension, period.

But there’s something worse than poseur bombast afoot if you tell a national men’s magazine that Em’s the only deep or even sort of deep emcee, during a conversation predicated on how cool and rooted and atypical-Republican you are as a person. You’re counting on that magazine being so enthralled by the notion of a Republican who has a passing knowledge of rap that they don’t notice how ignorant and shallow a statement you just made. You’re trusting that your interviewer won’t come back with a question about the potential subtexts of claiming that the only current rapper with rich and abiding lyrical value is the white one. Most of all, you’re manufacturing an image of a conservative capable of communing with the youths, giving future profile writers a ready-made clickbait depiction of you as “Not Your Grandfather’s Republican.” (Those reporters will even give you credit for understanding “how early ’90s rappers in California were like journalists who reported on the conditions in their communities,” as the Journal’s Elahe Izadi did, despite the fact that Rubio doesn’t express that (accurate) notion in the GQ interview she linked.)
Read more

My guest blogger is Alan Pyke, a writer and commentator on film, television, fiction, music, and politics, with a particular fascination for hiphop. He reviews movies and concerts for BrightestYoungThings.

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Justice

Ignore The Political Rhetoric: Women Support Gun Safety Laws

By Annie-Rose Strasser on Feb 7, 2013 at 2:30 pm

Last week, at a hearing on gun safety legislation, a witness from an anti-feminist group was brought forth to argue that the US’s current gun laws are a boon to women’s rights. Women, witness Gayle Trotter said, need AR-15s because, “They have good handling. They’re light. They’re easy for women to hold… And the peace of mind that a woman has as she’s facing three, four, five violent attackers, intruders in her home, with her children screaming in the background, the peace of mind that she has knowing that she has a scary-looking gun gives her more courage when she’s fighting hardened, violent criminals.”

It turns out that Trotter couldn’t be more wrong.

Women don’t have peace of mind when it comes to guns in the home. In fact, a recent poll commissioned by the Women’s Donor Network shows the opposite. Sixty four percent of women think that tighter gun laws will help lower the overall level of violence in the United States.

But perhaps Trotter was only looking at the concerns of Republican women, who have the lowest levels of support for tighter gun restrictions. Only 44 percent of them believe that gun laws would make the US safer. On the other hand, low-income women and women of color are the most likely to support tighter restrictions on firearms. A full 86 percent of African American women think gun laws could reduce violence, and 77 percent of Hispanic women agree.

Women, in actuality, face heightened concerns of domestic violence with a gun in the home, since a woman is 12 times more likely to die in a domestic dispute if a gun is involved. They also tend to be the primary caretakers of children, and fear for their children’s safety.

Whether or not a gun is easy to carry and looks nice might not be the right question for Trotter to think about when she considers a woman’s support of gun laws. Rather, she might want to ask: When there is relatively little regulation of firearms, is there a real, increased threat of violence for women?

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Climate Progress

Poll: Westerners Agree Protected Public Lands Create Jobs, Oppose Turning Them Over To States And Private Companies

By Public Lands Team on Feb 7, 2013 at 2:18 pm

By Jessica Goad

A poll released today by Colorado College’s State of the Rockies Project reveals important insight into westerners’ attitudes towards conservation, energy development, and public lands.

A majority of those surveyed believe that protecting public lands is economically significant and are wary of the impacts of oil and gas drilling:

- 91% say “our national parks, forests, monuments, and wildlife areas are an essential part of (my state’s) economy”

- 74% agree that “our national parks, forests, monuments, and wildlife areas help to attract high quality employers and good jobs to (my state)”

- 59% believe “the impact of oil and gas drilling on our land, air and water” is a serious problem

The poll was conducted in six western states (Arizona, Colorado, Montana, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming) among registered voters.

This year, voters were also asked to respond to claims that there is “too much public land” and proposals to turn lands over to the states or private companies. While this proposition is dubious constitutionally, it hasn’t stopped legislatures in Arizona, Idaho, New Mexico and Utah from introducing or considering such bills. But they may want to reconsider after these results:

- Only 30% of respondents believe that “too much public land” is a serious problem

- When asked whether they “support or oppose the sale of public lands,” 67% oppose while 27% support

- 79% believe that public lands support the economy while 15% believe they “take land off the tax rolls, cost government to maintain them, and prevent opportunities for logging and oil and gas production that could provide jobs”

The release of this information comes at a very important moment for conservation policy. Yesterday, President Obama announced he would nominate Sally Jewell, the CEO of outdoor giant REI, to be his new Secretary of the Interior following the departure of current Secretary Ken Salazar. As President Obama put it, Jewell:

…knows the link between conservation and good jobs. She knows that there’s no contradiction between being good stewards of the land and our economic progress, that, in fact, those two things need to go hand in hand.

Additionally, earlier this week Secretary Bruce Babbitt called on the Obama administration to put energy development and conservation on equal ground by protecting one acre of public land for every one leased. He noted that the Obama administration leased more than 6 million acres of public lands over the last four years, while only permanently protecting 2.6 million acres.

There is some indication that the administration is already hearing this message. For example, the Colorado Bureau of Land Management yesterday threw out a number of controversial oil and gas leases that would have impacted organic farming and outdoor recreation near Paonia, Colorado.

Jessica is the Manager of Research and Outreach for the Public Lands Project at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.