A new Public Opinion Strategies poll commissioned by the Retail Association of Nevada finds that a majority of Nevada voters would support repealing the state’s constitutional ban on same-sex marriage. With divides along partisan and generational lines, 54 percent would favor removing the Protection of Marriage provision from the Nevada Constitution, with 43 percent opposed. Only those who identified as deeply conservative had winning support for maintaining the ban — by 76 percent.
When news broke that the highly-publicized death of Notre Dame linebacker Manti Teo’s girlfriend had never actually occurred, and that the girlfriend herself did not actually exist, one of the first things many people asked was about his sexuality. ABC host Katie Couric asked Te’o whether he was gay in his first public interview after the story broke, to which he replied, “No, far from it, far from it.”
But now National Football League teams want to know the same thing of the projected first-round draft pick at the league’s annual scouting combine, according to NBC and Pro Football Talk’s Mike Florio, who told radio host Dan Patrick that the issue of Te’o's sexuality has become “the elephant in the room” for NFL teams interested in drafting him. CBSSports.com’s Mike Freeman has the transcript, part of which is here:
“On the field, you still have to account for what happened in the BCS National Championship Game against Alabama,” Florio told the Dan Patrick Show. “Here’s the elephant in the room for the teams and it shouldn’t matter, but we have to step aside from the rest of reality and walk into the unique industry that is the NFL. Teams want to know whether Manti Te’o is gay. They just want to know. They want to know because in an NFL locker room, it’s a different world. It shouldn’t be that way.” [...]
Patrick interrupted Florio to ask: “You’re telling me that you’re hearing from teams who want to know this, but how do you ask it? Are they trying to find a finesse way to ask that question, or are they going to do investigative work on finding out if Manti Te’o is gay?”
Florio said: “It’s been described to me as the proverbial elephant in the room and I don’t think anyone knows how to solve this dilemma yet. It’s just that they want to know what they’re getting. They want to know what issues they may be dealing with down the road. We just assumed that at some point there would be an openly gay player in an NFL locker room and the team would have to work with the realities and make sure that everything’s fine.”
In 2011, the NFL and the NFL Players Association added sexual orientation to the league’s nondiscrimination statute, effectively barring NFL teams from using sexuality as a factor in employment decisions, so if NFL teams are asking Te’o about his sexuality, they could be in violation of that policy. But even if it isn’t, and even if that statute didn’t exist, NFL teams shouldn’t be asking that question. Though there are no openly gay players in the NFL, multiple former players have opened up about their sexuality after retirement. The teams have no right or reason to know about a player’s private life, especially when it won’t affect the way he plays the game he is being paid to play.
But the NFL teams who asked this question aren’t alone in being wrong. So is Florio. He insisted repeatedly in the interview with Patrick that “it shouldn’t matter” if Te’o is gay, and yet he passed on the fact that Te’o was being judged based in part on his sexuality, openly speculating that Te’o may in fact be gay while hiding behind anonymous sources to do it. Granting anonymity to those sources and their concerns about Te’o's personal life gave the queries an air of legitimacy, even though asking not to be named is a tacit admission that asking about Te’o's sexuality is something these sources would be embarrassed to do in public. In effect, they’ve persuaded Florio to do it for them. But if Florio truly believes “it shouldn’t matter,” he ought to treat it like that by condemning the questions instead of acting as a stalking horse for them. Instead, Florio painted Te’o's situation as a “dilemma” and a “distraction” that he and his future team will have to overcome.
Te’o, like every other player at the combine, should be judged on his performance, both on the field and in his interviews. But invasive questions about his sexuality shouldn’t be a part of that process, both because he has already answered them and because even if he (or any other player) were gay, it is his choice to decide whether, and how, he wants to open up publicly about it. One would hope that when a gay player does talk openly about his sexuality, he would be supported by his teammates, his team, and the league, and treated fairly and responsibly by reporters like Florio. Unfortunately, this episode makes it obvious that the NFL hasn’t yet reached that point.
CNN business correspondent Ali Velshi slammed Gov. Bobby Jindal (R-LA) for likening the federal budget to family spending and suggesting that the Obama administration should not spend more than the government takes in.
“Every family has to balance their budget, isn’t allowed to spend more than they need, every business is more efficient, tighten their belt. The reality is it can be done,” Jindal said in remarks outside of the White House on Monday, following a meeting between the National Governor’s Association and President Obama. He added that the administration can implement the automatic across-the-borad sequestration cuts that are likely to go into effect on March 1 “without jeopardizing the economy” or “critical services” by focusing on “wasteful spending.”
Velshi rejected Jindal’s comparison as “misleading” “nonsense” and pointed out that businesses and families routinely borrow money to invest in their futures, reasoning that an investment made today in college education or a new equipment can lead to greater returns down the road:
VELSHI: It’s 3% of a small part of the federal budget which makes it a very big part of some major agencies. It’s misleading stuff Bobby Jindal is saying, number one. Number two when he says families understand they have to live within their budget. I don’t know a lot of families who buy a house with cash. Buying a house on a mortgage, is that living within your budget or not living within your budget? You would have to be 80 years old to be able to buy a house with cash. We have an understanding in our society, it may be flawed, that we borrow money based on our future earnings potential. All people do that, companies do that and governments do that. There’s a point at which you can say, we’ve gone too far with that or we’re too much of a risk of not paying back so we’ll end up paying a higher interest rate. When you borrow too much money, your personal interest rate goes up, credit cards go up. But to suggest within your means and balanced budget nonsense is just misleading. That is not how families live. It’s not how businesses conduct themselves. It is certainly not since the history of time the way governments run themselves. Bobby Jindal is a smart guy. He runs a state. He needs to not talk like this and it’s become common to hear this stuff coming out in these press conferences.
Watch it:
The federal economy is fundamentally different from household budgets and economic data and history suggest that the government should be spending more, not less given the current economic circumstances. After all, overall government spending has plateaued under Obama after rising sharply under George W. Bush and the resulting fiscal contraction has resulted in a lower recovery.
Republicans have made Planned Parenthood into a top target in their ongoing War on Women, repeatedly attempting to strip funding from the national women’s health organization because some of its affiliates provide abortion services. Despite the fact that the Hyde Amendment already prevents taxpayer dollars from funding abortion — which means that Planned Parenthood’s federal and state funding simply goes toward providing preventative health care for women who often aren’t able to access those services elsewhere — GOP lawmakers still aren’t convinced. They’re still eager to find a reason to defund Planned Parenthood, and they’re willing to waste time and money to search for one.
Nearly 70 Republicans have signed onto a letter asking the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to take a closer look at the way Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers use taxpayer dollars. Even though there’s already a federal law that stipulates exactly how those funds may be used, they still claim the study is “critically needed to shine a bright light on how taxpayer funds are allocated” — but the GOP proponents of the effort admit their real goal is to justify stripping funding from Planned Parenthood:
Those spearheading this effort — Rep. Diane Black (R-Tenn.), Rep. Pete Olson (R-Texas) and Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) — are hoping the study confirms their suspicions that these groups are focusing more on abortion and less on other healthcare services. Black said this finding could be used to justify a reduction in federal funds to abortion providers. [...]
Black added that Planned Parenthood showed in its latest report that they are providing more abortions, and fewer other health services, all while federal funding has increased. “An independent study of the federal funding for abortion providers is necessary to further expose the truth of how these precious taxpayer dollars are truly being used,” Black said.
House Republicans are already tripping over themselves to attempt to defund Planned Parenthood, introducing two identical bills at the beginning of the legislative session that both target the nonprofit organization. They’re unconcerned about their doubled efforts because, as Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) explained to the Huffington Post, “The fact that there are multiple members interested in this issue proves that Planned Parenthood is not going to be let off the hook.”
But that message may not be particularly well-received by the American people. Post-election polling confirmed that women’s issues, including lawmakers’ stance on whether Planned Parenthood should remain fully funded, were decisive factors in the presidential election: 64 percent of all voters said they heard something about Mitt Romney’s intent to defund Planned Parenthood, and 62 percent disagreed with that position.
That’s apparently not enough to dissuade Republicans in Congress, who have a long track record of focusing on the same pointless issues — the 112th Congress unsuccessfully attempted to repeal Obamacare over 30 times, for example — rather than tackling their long to-do list on important polices like disaster relief, job stimulation, deficit deals, and resources for sexual assault victims.
In 2011, a Reagan-appointed federal judge handed down a “Citizens United on steroids” decision, declaring that corporations had the right to give unlimited amounts of money directly to political candidates — rather than simply to outside groups such as super PACs. The decision was eventually reversed by a unanimous panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, and a petition to hear the case was pending before the Supreme Court. Earlier today, the Supreme Court denied that petition, putting the issue to bed for the time being.
The importance of this development should not be overstated. When the Supreme Court decides not to hear a case, that means only that there were not four justices interested in hearing that matter at that particular moment in time. It neither sets a new precedent nor is necessarily a window into how the justices would handle a future case that presents the same issue. Nevertheless, the Court’s decision not to hear this particular lawsuit is a hopeful sign that there is a cap on how far the five conservative justices currently want to push their crusade against campaign finance laws.
Last week, the justices announced that they would hear a similar case challenging the $123,200 cap on total contributions by wealthy individuals to candidates, political party committees and similar organizations during the current election cycle. It should be noted, however, that this case came up to the Court through an unusual process that prevents them from turning away cases they don’t want to hear. The Citizens United on steroids case, by contrast, came up through the normal process and thus would be turned away if less than four justices wanted to hear it.
By Andrew Nikiforuk via The Tyee
Governments and financial analysts who think unconventional fossil fuels such as bitumen, shale gas and shale oil can usher in an era of prosperity and energy plenty are dangerously deluded, concludes a groundbreaking report by one of Canada’s top energy analysts.
In a meticulous 181 page study for the Post Carbon Institute, geologist David Hughes concludes that the U.S. “is highly unlikely to achieve energy independence unless energy consumption declines substantially.”
Exuberant projections by the media and energy pundits that claim that hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling “can provide endless growth heralding a new era of ‘energy independence,’ in which the U.S. will become a substantial net exporter of energy, are entirely unwarranted based on the fundamentals,” adds Hughes in a companion article for the science journal Nature.
Moreover it is unlikely that difficult and challenging hydrocarbons such as shale oil can even replace the rate of depletion for conventional light oil and natural gas.
Since 1990, says Hughes, the number of operating wells in the U.S. has increased by 90 per cent while the average productivity of those wells has declined by 38 per cent.
The latest panaceas championed by industry and media talking heads are too expensive and will deplete too rapidly to provide either energy security or independence for the United States, concludes the 62-year-old geologist who worked for Natural Resources Canada for 32 years as a coal and gas specialist.
To Hughes shale gas and shale oil represent a temporary bubble in production that will soon burst due to rapid depletion rates that have only recently been tallied.
Taken together shale gas and shale oil wells “will require about 8,600 wells per year at a cost of over $48 billion to offset declines.”
“The idea that the United States might be exporting 12 per cent of its natural gas from shale is just a pipe dream,” Hughes, a resident of Cortes Island in British Columbia, told The Tyee.
‘Tough’ energy’s tough downsides
Unconventional fossil fuels all share a host of cruel and limiting traits says Hughes. They offer dramatically fewer energy returns; they consume extreme and endless flows of capital; they provide difficult or volatile rates of supply overtime and have “large environmental impacts in their extraction.”
Most important, bitumen, shale oil and shale gas, by definition, are much lower quality hydrocarbons and therefore can’t fund business as usual. They simply do not provide the same energy returns or the same amount of work as conventional hydrocarbons due to the energy needed to extract or upgrade them, says Hughes.
At the turn of the century it took just one barrel of oil to find and produce 100 more. Now the returns are down to 20. The mining portion of the tar sands offers returns of five to one while the steam plant operations barely manage returns of three to one, says Hughes. “And that’s an extremely conservative estimate.”
“Moving to progressively lower quality energy resources diverts more and more resources to the act of acquisition as opposed to doing useful work.”
A society that progressively spends more and more capital on acquiring energy that does less and less work will either exhaust the global economy or cannibalize national ones as consumers redirect larger portions of their household budgets to energy costs, says Hughes.
“To view them (unconventional hydrocarbons) as ‘game changers’ capable of indefinitely increasing supply of low cost energy which has underpinned the economic growth of the past century is a mistake.”
The exploitation of shale oil and gas (and Hughes reviewed the data for 60,000 wells for the report) may have temporarily reversed declines in conventional resources but they show dramatic limitations often excluded from the mainstream press.
Drilling into a mirage
Nearly three million Americans missed work last month, and many of them did so without having access to paid sick leave. About 40 percent of private sector workers and 80 percent of low-income workers don’t receive a single paid sick day from their employers, forcing them into choosing between their health (or the health of a child or relative) and their paycheck, or even their job.
Democrats have introduced measures to change that, in the process ending America’s tenure as the only developed country that doesn’t require some form of paid leave. But the top Republican on the Senate Labor Committee is having none of it:
Tennessee Sen. Lamar Alexander, the top Republican on the labor committee, contends such a requirement “would only make a bad unemployment problem worse” by increasing hiring costs.
A favorite Republican claim is that any new business requirement will cause job losses. In the case of paid sick leave, though, the research shows nothing of the sort. Study after study has shown that paid sick leave has no effect on job creation. In fact, San Francisco business expansion picked up after the city required employers to provide paid sick days. The same pattern has held true in early evaluations of Connecticut’s new paid sick leave law.
Republicans, business leaders, and the Chamber of Commerce constantly gripe about paid sick day laws. But the evidence hasn’t borne out their warnings, instead showing that fair labor policy is good for both workers and employers.
Former hostages land in the United States in 1981
Former Ambassador Bruce Laigen and former Ambassador John Limbert were among the dozens of U.S. citizens held captive in Tehran from 1979-81, the former serving as Chief of Mission, the latter as a Political Officer in the U.S. Embassy. The two spoke at a press conference Monday, capitalizing on the film Argo‘s Best Picture win Sunday night at the Academy Awards to highlight the need for U.S. diplomacy with Iran moving forward.
“Rather than learning from the lessons of history, the U.S. and Iran continue to be held hostage to it,” Laingen said in his prepared remarks, laying out a theme that would be continued throughout the press conference. Both men also made clear that the mutual interests of the U.S. and Iran are too many to not have continuing dialogue between the states. “The Islamic Republic [of Iran], like it or not, is what it is and we do have things to talk about, even if we do not necessarily talk to them as friends,” Limbert said.
The need for diplomacy with Iran stretches beyond issues surrounding Iran’s nuclear program, according to the former diplomats, with Laigen in particular noting difficulties that come in negotiating absent steady communication:
LAIGEN: It’s difficult because you’re not there, that’s one of the problems. We — Americans are not in Tehran. What the hell, we should be. We should be there representing the United States of America. We should a relationship of have some kind. We have zilch. And that’s not a very good basis on which to have any kind of diplomatic exchange.
The latest round in discussions between Iran and the P5+1 — the United States, United Kingdom, Russian Federation, China, France, and Germany — over Tehran’s nuclear program are set to begin in Kazakhstan on Tuesday. Asked about their expectations for the meetings, the two were muted in their predictions. Laigen confidently asserted that the talks would end with a follow-up meeting next month. “As long as the two sides simply refuse to see the world how the other side sees the world, I don’t know where you’re going to make progress,” Limbert said.
Limbert, in response to a question, took on the concept of the “general feeling” that Iran is aiming to build a nuclear weapon, noting the lack of evidence that tends to come from those making the claim. Limbert characterized the argument from those making the claim by saying, “We know [that Iran is working towards a nuclear weapon] because they are bad people and they do bad things. So when they say their program is entirely peaceful, it must be exactly the opposite.” U.S. and Israeli intelligence officials both currently believe that Iran has not decided to pursue a nuclear weapon.
Limbert also downplayed the threat of Iranian influence in the Middle East, saying he “[doesn't] lose a lot of sleep” over the idea. Noting that Iran is “not in a good place politically and diplomatically,” Limbert pointed out that Iran’s lack of allies in the region makes it difficult for anything resembling a spread of the Iranian revolution to occur. “The threat of Iranian hegemony has been overblown by parties who seek to benefit by continuing the chest-beating,” he concluded.
The Obama administration, by contrast, has said that Iran with a nuclear weapon is a threat to the region and has pledged to use all available tools, including military action, to prevent the Islamic Republican from building one.
A breakthrough in cancer treatment could potentially have a big impact on women who are battling advanced stages of breast cancer. The New York Times reports that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved a new drug that, when used in conjunction with the popular breast cancer treatment drug Herceptin, will more effectively kill cancerous cells and appreciably extend late-stage metastatic breast cancer patients’ life expectancy while possibly alleviating some of the chemotherapy’s more debilitating side-effects:
The main clinical trial leading to approval of Kadcyla involved 991 patients with metastatic breast cancer that was worsening despite treatment with Herceptin and a taxane chemotherapy drug, like paclitaxel. Half the women were given infusions of Kadcyla and the other half took two pills now commonly used for such patients: Tykerb, also known as lapatinib, and Xeloda, also known as capecitabine.
The patients getting Kadcyla lived a median of 30.9 months, compared with 25.1 months for those getting the two pills. The median time before the disease worsened was 9.6 months for those getting Kadcyla, compared with 6.4 months for those getting the other drugs.
While having greater efficacy, Kadcyla also had fewer side effects. About 43 percent of patients on Kadcyla had serious side effects compared with 59 percent of those getting the two pills.
Kadcya is a first-of-its-kind drug for Americans suffering from more advanced and aggressive breast cancers, and holds great potential for increasing patients’ longevity and reducing suffering. But the drug is likely to cause considerable sticker shock, as “it would cost about $9,800 a month, or $94,000 for a typical course of treatment” — twice the amount of money that treating advanced breast cancer with Herceptin alone would cost.
The fact that Kadcya is so expensive underscores the importance of early testing and prevention efforts, hopefully before diseases worsen and health care costs spiral out of control. The exorbitant cost of American medical care — including staggering fees for everything from simple blood work, to drugs, and to more advanced procedures — makes preventative care more important than ever.
But engaging in that sort of forward-thinking and preventative care is particularly difficult in the face of conservative lawmakers’ war on women’s care facilities such as Planned Parenthood, which is one of the main resources for breast and cervical cancer screenings — particularly for low-income women. While Obamacare mandates that mammograms and similar preventative screenings be provided free of charge, American women may have a difficult time finding adequate resources for such services in the absence of adequate facilities providing them.
Aaron Bennett (Credit: Ted Jackson / The Times-Picayune)
Bennett admitted that after making the legal maximum contribution to Scalise’s re-election campaign in 2007, he asked three other people to contribute $2,300 each to the campaign — and reimbursed them for the $6,900 they spent.
According to the Statement of Reasons by the three Democratic FEC appointees (Chair Ellen Weintraub, Cynthia Bauerly, and Steven Walther), there was clear evidence both that Bennett circumvented federal contribution limits and did so knowing full well that doing so was illegal:
According to one of the reimbursed individuals — an employee working for Bennett — Bennett stated “that he was at the maximum individual contribution [limit]” and that “he would reimburse each [individual] for the contribution.” … Based on these statements and the fact that Bennett was an experienced donor, there is reason to believe that Bennett knew that he was subject to a contribution limit and that he made an intentional attempt to evade that limit by making a contribution in another person’s name. Taken together, the facts are more than sufficient for the Commission to have found reason to believe that Bennett both knowingly and willfully made excessive contributions and knowingly and willfully made contributions in the names of other individuals.
Bennett’s political giving goes back at least to 2005, when he gave a $1,000 donation to then-Rep. Bobby Jindal (R-LA).
Despite this evidence, the three Republicans rejected the finding that the violation was “willful.” The Commission then voted, five to one, to accept a conciliation agreement that allowed Bennett to escape with a small fine.
Bennett and his family contracting business, Benetech LLC, also have come under fire for allegedly receiving improper contracts set-aside for disabled veterans and for bribing a sheriff. The New Orleans Times-Pacayune editorial board called Aaron Bennett a “crooked contractor.”
The six-person Federal Election Commission — evenly divided by law — has been largely paralyzed by three Republicans who oppose campaign finance regulation. Since the vote, Democratic Commissioner Bauerly stepped down from the commission, leaving just two Democratic commissioners. Four votes are required for any Commission action.
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