North Carolina Senate Slashes State Unemployment Insurance Program

By Travis Waldron on Feb 13, 2013 at 4:00 pm

The Republican-controlled North Carolina state senate overwhelmingly approved legislation to slash the state’s unemployment insurance program Tuesday, reducing the amount of aid unemployed workers can receive and also the number of weeks they will be eligible to receive it. The legislation reduces the maximum benefit from $535 a week to $350, while reducing the time workers can receive aid from 26 weeks to 20.

The cuts will also cost unemployed North Carolinians access to the federal unemployment insurance program, which is based on state programs. The change will cost 170,000 North Carolinians a total of $780 million in federal funds, adding to the total they will lose in state funds. North Carolina’s unemployment rate is 9.2 percent, more than a percentage point higher than the national rate, but proponents of the legislation say it will help workers find jobs faster, Reuters reports:

“What this really should be called is a re-employment rather than an unemployment bill,” said Republican state Senator Bob Rucho, a sponsor of the measure. “We’re trying to put North Carolinians back to work.“

The average unemployed worker has been off the job for 35 weeks, meaning North Carolina will now fall far short in helping many of its jobless residents. And Despite Rucho’s assertions, and despite typical Republican concerns that programs like unemployment compensation cause a “culture of dependency,” studies show that workers who receive unemployment insurance look harder for jobs than those who do not. More likely, the bill will simply make the lives of unemployed workers even harder, preventing them from falling back on unemployment aid and cutting America’s already-stingy unemployment program even closer to the bone.

If the bill is approved and signed by Gov. Pat McCrory (R), who has sign he will sign it, North Carolina will become the seventh state to make cuts to unemployment insurance.

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Justice

Second Connecticut Senator Slams NRA For Offensive Newtown Shooting Remarks

By Scott Keyes on Feb 13, 2013 at 4:00 pm

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT)

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) has joined fellow Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) in condemning the National Rifle Association for its Wisconsin lobbyists’ comments downplaying the importance on the Newtown shooting.

This past weekend, Wisconsin NRA lobbyist Bob Welch declared at the group’s annual meeting that they would soon continue weakening the nation’s gun laws, but would have to wait for the “Connecticut effect” to blow over first.

Murphy chastised the NRA for Welch’s remark during an MSNBC interview on Wednesday:

MURPHY: I think we will get a vote and I think we’ll get a vote because Newtown changed everything in this country. There were a lot of people wearing ribbons on the floor of the House of Representatives last night, and they were Republicans and Democrats. The NRA said yesterday they were going to wait for the “Newtown effect” or the “Connecticut effect” to dissipate before they went back to lobbying to weaken gun laws. Well, it’s not going to dissipate. The fact is that this nation has been transformed. I think the president was right to say, listen, republicans can’t hide from this. They need to call a vote on the floor of the Senate and House and tell the American public what side they are on. If Republicans want to be the party of assault weapons, of high-capacity magazine clips, they are on the wrong side of the American public and the wrong side of history.

Watch it:

Two other Nutmeg State lawmakers similarly condemned the NRA for their “Connecticut effect” comments yesterday, Blumenthal and Rep. Elizabeth Esty (D-CT), who represents Newtown in Congress.

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Alyssa

Will Ferrell Endorses Eric Garcetti For Los Angeles Mayor

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Feb 13, 2013 at 3:56 pm

The Campaign, which came out last summer, was a sometimes-quite-funny satire of the emptiness of campaign rhetoric and political positions. Will Ferrell starred in that movie, but his endorsement of Eric Garcetti for Los Angles Mayor is actually a much shorter and funnier version of it:

It’s pretty depressing that most of what politicians promise us has the substance of Tuesday waffles—and they have this same level of commitment to actually making Tuesday waffles happen.

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Security

The United States Should Reduce Its Nuclear Arsenal

By Lawrence Korb, Guest Blogger on Feb 13, 2013 at 3:44 pm

(Photo: AP)

In his State of the Union address last night, President Barack Obama referred to the need to reduce the force structure of our strategic military systems by cutting the number of deployed nuclear weapons. Press reports over the last year have indicated that military and civilian leaders have settled on a plan to reduce the number of deployed nuclear weapons by one-third, to between 1,000 and 1,100, down from 1,700. President Obama should push for such a reduction, which would follow the practice of his predecessors and improve our national security. As the Center for American Progress has argued for the last decade, this move makes sense both strategically and fiscally, and is long overdue.

When President George W. Bush entered the White House in 2001, he moved to cut our stockpile of nuclear weapons—which at that time numbered about 6,000 to the lowest-possible number consistent with our national security. The president offered to make these cuts unilaterally, but Russian President Vladimir Putin wanted the reductions codified in a treaty that would limit deployed nuclear weapons to less than 1,500 warheads for each country. In 2002, under pressure from Russia, President Bush agreed to a legally binding accord the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty, or SORT—which stated that both sides will limit their arsenals to between 1,700 and 2,200 deployed nuclear weapons each.

Subsequently, in 2010 President Obama negotiated a Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or New START, with Russia that calls for reducing each country’s number of deployed nuclear weapons to 1,550 by 2018, but places no limits on the total number of warheads, which now number 5,000. This was an impressive and welcome achievement. But analyses by the Air War College, Gen. James Cartwright, the former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and commander of U.S. Strategic Command; and Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) all argue that these numbers of deployed and reserve nuclear weapons and warheads are far more than the United States needs for the purpose of deterrence in the 21st century.

Analysts at the Air War College argue that the United States can achieve deterrence with a total nuclear force (deployed and reserve) of 300 weapons, while Gen. Cartwright believes a total of 800 (400 deployed and 400 in reserve) would be sufficient.

These reductions would result in substantial savings. The United States currently spends about $55 billion a year to maintain its triad of nuclear-capable bombers, land-based ballistic missiles, and submarine-launched ballistic missiles. Moreover, if the United States wants to refurbish, repair, and modernize its existing nuclear arsenal in its current size, we will have to spend about $600 billion over the next decade. Adapting the Cartwright plan would save approximately $120 billion. Depending on the specifics of its implementation, even President Obama’s more moderate target could save tens of billions over the next decade. Additionally, reducing our nuclear footprint will reduce long-term maintenance costs and reduce the risks of theft or mishandling of nuclear material.

Given the pressure that all government expenditures will face over the next decade due to our fiscal problems, maintaining our current oversized nuclear arsenal is unnecessary, unaffordable, and unwise. The savings from reducing our nuclear arsenal can be used for either more pressing national security priorities or to pay down the national debt. This is why the Center for American Progress has advocated for reductions to our nuclear spending for nearly a decade and why we fully support President Obama’s planned reductions.

Lawrence Korb is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress.

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LGBT

Rep. Huelskamp: Employment Protections ‘Reward Homosexual Behavior’

By Zack Ford on Feb 13, 2013 at 3:41 pm

As momentum for LGBT employment nondiscrimination protections increases, conservatives have begun to retaliate, claiming such policies somehow create special privileges for LGBT people. Rep. Tim Huelskamp (R-KS), one of the most anti-gay members of Congress, made just such a claim on Tony Perkins’ radio show on Tuesday. According to Huelskamp, equal protections under the law for gays and lesbians are “radical ideas” that “selectively reward homosexual behavior”:

HUELSKAMP: The response from the general leadership is: gosh, we can’t talk about social issues. But the President can? Someone has to stand up and defend the seventy percent position that most Americans support traditional marriage, most Americans understand the value of family, they understand it’s under attack and they understand that, they see it, they believe it. So we got to stand up. I’ve always been confused by Republicans that refuse to support a seventy percent position and say, ‘gosh we can’t take our stand there.’ But whether it’s Obamacare, whether it’s these radical DoD [Department of Defense] proposals coming out of the White House or changing all the employment rules to specifically and selectively reward homosexual behavior, those are really radical ideas and most Americans do not accept them.

So we’ll have an opportunity to hear from the President but again don’t forget he is a lame duck President, he’s not running for election again and I think this could be the most radical we’ll hear from him in a long time because it is Obama unleashed. We’re going to hear tonight probably exactly what he would like to do and he promised he’s going to change America and he’s still after that agenda and that goal.

Listen to it (via RightWingWatch):

A “reward” implies something special or extra that other people are not entitled to. The only “reward” of employment protections for gay people is getting to keep their jobs. Granting benefits to the same-sex partners of military servicemembers does not create “a new class of beneficiary” as the Family Research Council claimed on Tuesday; the only reason there is a separate class is because some families are still treated different than others.

It’s clear that opponents of equality would prefer that the LGBT community remain second-class citizens. When they object to basic nondiscrimination protections, the special “reward” they’re afraid of is fairness under the law.

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Election

Meet The Romney Protégé Who Wants To Be Massachusetts’ Next Senator

By Josh Israel on Feb 13, 2013 at 3:41 pm

Massachusetts State Rep. Dan Winslow (R)

Massachusetts State Rep. Dan Winslow (R), who announced last week that he will seek the Republican nomination for Secretary of State John Kerry’s now-vacant U.S. Senate seat, was general legal counsel to Mitt Romney (R) during his time as governor. And while he claims “Massachusetts Republicans are a different kind of breed from the national Republicans,” Winslow’s record is one of a Romney-style national Republican: more interested in fighting for the wealthiest one percent than advancing policies that help the rest of the country.

Perhaps because of successful state services like Romneycare, Winslow does not think Massachusetts is a capitalist state. Though a 2012 CNBC study showed Massachusetts is the state with the highest access to capital in the country, at a 2012 campaign rally, he told Republican activists, “People ask us our plans for jobs, we’ve got this amazing idea, it’s a new concept in Massachusetts: we call it capitalism. We ought to try it sometime.”

To that end, Winslow has supported:

Tax cuts for yacht-buyers. Winslow is chief sponsor of HD1965, a bill to repeal the sales tax on the sale of boats built or rebuilt in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Among the potential beneficiaries of this tax cut: the members of the Pamet Harbor Yacht & Tennis Club, on whose board of directors Winslow recently served.
Radical transportation cuts that could drastically increase motor vehicle deaths. In an effort to save money, Winslow proposed HD 1751, a bill to “prohibit mandates on cities and towns by the Department of Transportation to construct or reconstruct public ways which exceed local speed limits.” He reasoning: state law regulations often “require roadway design speeds that are faster than the posted speeds on the roads.” This, he argues, “results in a huge waste of money since construction costs increase as design speeds increase.” While he claims this change would “result in millions of dollars of savings,” he highway safety experts note it would more likely result in more deaths. Engineer David L. Harkey, director of the Highway Safety Research Center at the University of North Carolina, told ThinkProgress that speed limits are intentionally set lower than the “design speed,” often by 5 to 10 mph, to “provide a safety factor for the roadway.” Shaun Kildare, research director for Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, agreed, nothing that a road’s design speed is the fastest a driver can safely drive under ideal conditions. If Winslow’s idea of limiting design speeds to the legal speed limit, Kildare told ThinkProgress, “everyone that speeds is going to be going off the road.” He notes that that would mean more death for those speeding even slightly — but also passengers in their cars and non-speeders in nearby cars. In a state like Massachusetts which is often hit by winter weather, having the speed limit at the “design speed” would be especially problematic.
Stopping government’s handouts of “free stuff.” Much like his former boss Romney, who lamented that he lost the 2012 election because President Obama gave “big gifts” to minority voters, Winslow thinks the government wastes too much money on giving out “free stuff.” In a 2010 position paper, he proposed a crackdown on “‘poor’ people in the underground economy” who under-report income and cheat on their state tax payments, so they won’t have access to “all that free stuff that Massachusetts hands out (and taxpayers pay for) each year.”
Massive budget cuts that would further hurt local governments. Winslow thinks massive cuts are the solution to economic downturns — and that cutting state spending won’t hurt local governments. He wrote on his campaign website: “State spending is out of control. Instead of tightening its fiscal belt like all families have done, our state government has hiked taxes, depleted the stabilization fund, and shifted hardships to towns by cutting local aid. I will propose to cut taxes by cutting state spending. We can stop waste and fraud, create cost-effective reforms, and encourage entrepreneurial government. The worst thing to do in a recession is to increase tax burdens.”
Union-busting laws. Winslow has proposed Wisconsin-style legislation to strip public workers of collective bargaining rights. The president of the Massachusetts AFL-CIO told the Boston Globe in 2011 that Winslow was labor’s biggest foe in the legislature. The paper reported, “Winslow filed a bill to remove all but wages, hours, and working conditions from the bargaining table for public employees. [The AFL-CIO's Robert J.] Haynes noted Winslow’s close ties with Romney and called him the face of the national Republican Party in Massachusetts, bent on replicating the measure in Wisconsin that stripped public employee unions of collective bargaining rights.” He believes no one would want to go into public service, claiming the “vast majority of Americans don’t go through school hoping that they can become an agency worker.” And he wants to make significant cuts to public workers’ pensions and benefits.
No revenue increases, ever. Winslow promised “never to support an increase in tax burden while I serve as your State Representative.” A similar pledge proved an albatross to then-Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA) and Romney last year, as opponents successfully hammered them for their short-sighted oaths to Grover Norquist.

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Health

Arkansas May Pass The Nation’s Most Restrictive Abortion Ban, Even Without The Governor’s Support

By Tara Culp-Ressler on Feb 13, 2013 at 3:30 pm

After Republicans won big gains in the Arkansas legislature in the 2012 elections, they’ve wasted no time pushing their anti-abortion agenda in the state. Arkansas Gov. Mike Beebe (D) has already signed one new abortion restriction into law already, and he hasn’t specifically confirmed whether or not he’ll sign the other proposed anti-choice legislation in the works — including a radical “fetal heartbeat” bill that would ban abortions as early as 12 weeks of pregnancy.

But as RH Reality Check points out, the heartbeat bill could pass regardless of whether Beebe decides to support it. Under Arkansas law, a simple majority in the legislature can override the governor’s veto — so even if Beebe correctly concludes that the legislation is unconstitutional, the state senators who support the bill could vote again to override him. And, assuming that all of the legislators who have already voted in favor of the bill don’t change their minds, there are enough of them to assure its passage into law.

And the bill’s sponsor, Arkansas Sen. Jason Rapert (R), is already hard at work making the legislation more palpable for his fellow lawmakers. After women’s health advocates pointed out that Rapert’s original bill would mandate invasive probes for all women seeking abortions — since a transvaginal ultrasound is the only way to detect a fetal heartbeat in the first trimester of pregnancy — Rapert pushed back the cut-off to ban abortions after the point when a heartbeat can be detected with an abdominal ultrasound, usually around 12 weeks. The GOP lawmaker is also working to remove criminal penalties for the abortion doctors who perform the procedure after 12 weeks, and include additional exemptions in cases when women discover fetal abnormalities.

Rapert hopes those changes will sufficiently appease his party. “We feel like that we definitely now have a bill that has even broader support than it did a few weeks ago when it came out of the Senate,” he said on Tuesday. But regardless of Rapert’s edits to his heartbeat bill, it still represents the most stringent abortion ban in the nation, going far past the 20-week abortion bans that currently have that distinction. Thanks to Arkansas’ legislative process, however, not even the governor may be able to stop it at this point.

Arkansas isn’t the only state where anti-choice lawmakers could push abortion restrictions past the governor. The legislatures in Alabama, Indiana, Kentucky, and Tennessee may also override vetoes with a simple majority vote.

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Climate Progress

‘Drill, Baby, Drill’ Fails: Why Gasoline Prices Remain High Despite Oil Boom

By Jeff Spross on Feb 13, 2013 at 3:30 pm

On Monday, USA Today reported that the price of gasoline hit $3.60 a gallon for the first time since October — an early start in comparison to the usual price rise seen in the spring. The increase occurred despite world oil production climbing to 88.8 million barrels per day in 2012, about 2 million barrels higher than two years ago according to the Washington Post’s Brad Plumer. And about half of that increased production is due to an oil boom in the United States that’s driven imported oil to its lowest level since 1987.

That increased oil production will bring down gas prices is one of the most reliable Republican canards when it comes to energy, so what gives?

As Plumer points out, “The big thing to remember is that oil prices are a function of both supply and demand. If world demand for oil rises faster than producers can pump the stuff out, prices will go up.” Plumer cites a piece by James Hamilton of UC San Diego, which shows China’s consumption of oil is booming, and that the world economy as a whole is growing apace — and thus demanding more oil — even as fuel efficiency increases.

Technically, the world isn’t even producing enough oil to keep pace with the rise in global incomes. Oil supply has risen by 2.3 percent since 2010. But the world economy has grown by 7.1 percent since then. The only reason that oil prices haven’t soared to record highs, Hamilton points out, is that countries have been undertaking new conservation measures. Americans, for instance, are buying more fuel-efficient cars in droves.

Granted, oil prices would almost certainly be even higher than they are now without the drilling boom over the past two years in places like North Dakota. But at this point, the extra drilling is struggling to keep up with the pace of global economic growth.

Here are the global production and consumption numbers for the last few years from the U.S. Energy Information Agency (note the numbers to the left start at 84,000 thousand barrels per day):

And despite forecasts from BP and the International Energy Agency that domestic and global oil production will continue rising, Plumer notes that high gas prices aren’t going away anytime soon:

The [IEA] recently projected that U.S. oil production would continue rising through 2020 and beyond, as companies extract more “unconventional” oil from shale rock and other sources. But global demand was also expected to rise 35 percent between now and 2035, with China on pace to become the largest oil consumer in the world in the next two decades.

And that’s the optimistic scenario. Raymond T. Pierrehumbert, a geophysical sciences professor at the University of Chicago and a lead author on the third IPCC Assessment Report, recently pointed out in Slate that while going after unconventional oil remains profitable, and thus likely to continue, it requires ever greater effort to retrieve the same amounts of oil:

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Justice

How Right-Wing Donors Funneled $1.2 Million Into The Fight To Kill Voting Rights

By Ian Millhiser on Feb 13, 2013 at 3:00 pm

Ari Berman reports on the secretive, big money donors backing the legal effort to convince the Roberts Court to strike down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act this June. As he explains, most of the wealthy individuals backing this effort have managed to maintain their secrecy by passing their money though a conservative group named Donor’s Trust:

Many of the states and donors who have supported discriminatory voting laws are also backing [anti-Voting Rights Act attorney Ed] Blum. His Project on Fair Representation is exclusively funded by Donors Trust, a consortium of conservative funders that might be the most influential organization you’ve never heard of. Donors Trust doled out $22 million to a Who’s Who of influential conservative groups in 2010, including the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which drafted mock voter ID laws and a raft of controversial state-based legislation; the Americans for Prosperity Foundation, the Koch brothers’ main public policy arm; as well as Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform Foundation. Donors Trust has received seven-figure donations from virtually every top conservative donor, including $5.2 million since 2005 from Charles Koch’s Knowledge and Progress Fund. (The structure of Donors Trust allows wealthy conservative donors like Koch to disguise much of their giving.)

From 2006 to 2011, Blum received $1.2 million from Donors Trust, which allowed him to retain the services of Wiley Rein, the firm that unsuccessfully defended Ohio’s and Florida’s attempts to restrict early voting in federal court last year. As a “special program fund” of the tax-exempt Donors Trust, Blum’s group does not have to disclose which funders of Donors Trust are giving him money, but he has identified two of them: the Bradley Foundation and the Searle Freedom Trust. The Wisconsin-based Bradley Foundation paid for billboards in minority communities in Milwaukee during the 2010 election with the ominous message “Voter Fraud Is a Felony!”, which voting rights groups denounced as voter suppression. Both Bradley and Searle have given six-figure donations to ALEC in recent years, and Bradley funded a think tank in Wisconsin, the MacIver Institute, that hyped discredited claims of voter fraud to justify the state’s voter ID law, currently blocked in state court.

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Politics

Tea Party Senate Hopeful Brags To Donors: ‘I Was The First To Call Obama A Socialist’

By Hayes Brown on Feb 13, 2013 at 2:46 pm

Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA)

Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA) made no secret of his controversial positions on everything from the dangers of science to eliminating the Voters Rights Act in his time as a Tea Party favorite. In preparation for a Senate run, however, Broun has chosen to keep his views to himself — and his potential donors.

Broun is currently the only Republican who has announced a bid to replace Sen. Saxby Chambliss in the Senate upon the latter’s retirement in 2014. In the interest of winning over a state-wide majority of voters, Broun has sought to moderate his positions somewhat, referring to bipartisan efforts in manufacturing jobs in a recent radio interview.

As the Atlanta Journal-Constitution has pointed out, however, his new moderate tone has yet to reach the Congressman’s fundraising efforts. AJC’s Jim Galloway highlighted a few choice paragraphs from one of Broun’s fundraising letters to potential funders:

As a Member of the House of Representatives for the last few years, I have fought tooth-and-nail against President Obama’s agenda at every turn.

I was the first Member of Congress to call him a socialist who embraces Marxist-Leninist policies like government control of health care and redistribution of wealth….

On the Senate side, I’m a staunch ally of now retired Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina — and of course, Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky….

Broun is likely right that he was the first to call Obama a Marxist back in 2008. In the same interview, he also compared President Obama to Adolf Hitler.

The statements in Broun’s fundraising letter sound much more like the four-term Congressman. In his time in the House, particularly on the House Science and Technology Committee, Broun has put forward no shortage of controversial statements. Last year, Broun referred to the Big Bang Theory and evolution as “lies straight from the pit of Hell.” He’s also called for the abolition of the Departments of Energy and Education and promoted lowering the debt ceiling. As recently as January, Broun said that President Obama only upholds the “Soviet Constitution.”

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