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Economy

Nearly 80 Percent Of Workers Drive To Work Alone

By Pat Garofalo on Mar 5, 2013 at 4:30 pm

According to new data from the Census Bureau, 600,000 Americans have commutes to work that are longer than 90 minutes and 50 miles. But those workers with longer commutes are far more likely than other workers to either use public transit or carpool. In fact, nearly 4 in 5 workers who work outside of the home drive to work alone:

According to Out-of-State and Long Commutes: 2011, 23.0 percent of workers with long commutes (60 minutes or more) use public transit, compared with 5.3 percent for all workers. Only 61.1 percent of workers with long commutes drove to work alone, compared with 79.9 percent for all workers who worked outside the home.

“The average travel time for workers who commute by public transportation is higher than that of workers who use other modes. For some workers, using transit is a necessity, but others simply choose a longer travel time over sitting in traffic,” said Brian McKenzie, a Census Bureau statistician and author of the brief.

Rail travel accounted for 11.8 percent of workers with long commutes, and other forms of public transportation accounted for 11.2 percent.

As a report from Texas A&M noted, workers in America sat in traffic for a collective 5.5 billion hours in 2011. And congestion in major cities has gotten significantly worse in recent decades, as this chart shows:

Public transit use has increased steadily in recent years, but investment in it has not. Instead, it has plateaued, leaving transit agencies to handle more riders with no new resources:

Republicans want to make this problem worse by diverting funding meant for mass transit to highway construction. But that would simply exacerbate the already existing incentives to drive to work alone, rather than adopting a different mode of transport.

Security

CIA Director Nominee Moves Forward After White House Releases Memos

By Hayes Brown on Mar 5, 2013 at 4:21 pm

CIA Director nominee John Brennan

The White House cleared a huge hurdle for John Brennan’s path to becoming CIA Director on Tuesday, agreeing to provide Congress with classified memos on the administration’s targeted killing program.

Brennan received approval to move forward to the full Senate this afternoon in a closed session of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in the aftermath of the White House decision. The Obama administration had previously provided an unclassified white paper summarizing the classified Department of Justice memos that laid out the legal justification for the targeted killing of an American citizen, while only allowing access to briefly view some of the memos themselves. The white paper leaked to the press several weeks ago, kicking off debate about the extent to which the administration viewed its powers to execute suspected terrorists without trial.

That withholding of full access to the classified memos had been a major snag in Brennan’s confirmation process. Today’s agreement between the White House and Senate allowed for Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), chair of the Intelligence Committee, to bring Brennan’s nomination to a vote. The memos released to Congress are only those memos related to the killing of Americans. Other legal opinions related to the use of drone strikes and other methods to target suspected terrorists for killing were not provided. Likewise, only one member of each committee member’s staff will be granted access to view the memos provided along with the Senators themselves.

Sens. Ron Wyden (D-OR), Mark Udall (D-CO) and Susan Collins (R-ME) in a joint statement praised the administration for releasing the memos and agreeing to provide unclassified answers on when the President can use “lethal authorities” within the United States. “In our view, the appropriate next step should be to bring the American people into this debate and for Congress to consider ways to ensure that the President’s sweeping authorities are subject to appropriate limitations, oversight, and safeguards,” the statement said, reflecting Wyden’s commitment to further declassification of the drone program.

Despite clearing the Intelligence Committee by a vote of 12-3, several Senate Republicans still are insisting that they may tie up Brennan’s nomination further. Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) believes that the administration has yet to clearly answer his question on whether the Executive Branch can launch a strike against a U.S. citizen on U.S. soil, citing discrepancies in letters from Brennan and Attorney-General Eric Holder. Sens. Lindsay Graham (R-SC) and John McCain (R-AZ), meanwhile, have been using the Brennan nomination as a platform to receive more information about the Sept. 2012 attack on a U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi.

LGBT

NOM Proudly Partners With Pastor Who Prayed For President’s Passing

By Zack Ford on Mar 5, 2013 at 3:45 pm

Pastor Wiley Drake

The National Organization for Marriage is trying its best to rally support for its “March for Marriage” on March 26, which will have a full slate of religious anti-gay speakers. The group is even trying to pretend that inviting people is the same as having people attend to make it look like they have more support. But now it seems that NOM has a particularly despicable partner for the March, Southern Baptist pastor Wiley Drake, who regularly prays for people’s death, including President Obama.

Jeremy Hooper noticed not only that Drake is promoting the march, but that he shared an email exchange coordinating his support with the march organizers. In fact, he committed to bringing his Congressional Prayer Conference broadcast to the march, and the event coordinator seemed all too grateful for his support.

This is the company NOM seems all too happy to keep: religious leaders who are so opposed to liberal positions that they pray for the President’s death. Here’s an audio recording of Drake doubling down on such “imprecatory prayer” in a radio interview with Alan Colmes:

COLMES: You say you are praying for the death of somebody using imprecatory prayer…. I asked for whom else are you praying in that fashion and you said, President Obama. Are you praying for his death?

DRAKE: Yes.

COLMES: So you’re praying for the death of the President of the United States.

DRAKE: Yes. [...]

COLMES: You would like the President of the United States to die.

DRAKE: If he does not turn to God and does not turn his life around, I am asking God to enforce imprecatory prayers that are throughout the scripture that would cause him death. That’s correct.

Listen to it:

It’s likely the candlelight vigils being held by people who support marriage equality will have a different tone.

Health

House Republicans Propose Rolling Back Access To Birth Control To Avert Government Shutdown

By Tara Culp-Ressler on Mar 5, 2013 at 3:30 pm

In order to avert a government shutdown later this month, Congress and the Obama administration must negotiate a continuing resolution to maintain federal funding — and a group of House Republicans is suggesting that deal should also roll back Obamacare’s effort to expand women’s access to affordable contraception.

The automatic spending cuts that will take effect under sequestration will already compromise programs that disproportionately impact women, including slashing $86 million from critical family planning and reproductive health services. But that’s not enough for Republican lawmakers, who want to use the upcoming budget negotiations as yet another opportunity to keep attacking women’s health:

GOP lawmakers reintroduced a bill Tuesday to repeal the contraception mandate. They also pressed their party’s leaders to roll back the provision as part of a continuing resolution later this month to keep the federal government operating.

“This attack on religious freedom demands immediate congressional action,” the 14 lawmakers wrote. “Nothing short of a full exemption for both nonprofit and for-profit entities will satisfy the demands of the Constitution and common sense.”

The continuing resolution that House appropriators released Monday would not cut off funding for the Affordable Care Act, despite years of conservative pressure to defund the healthcare law. But Tuesday’s letter, led by Rep. Diane Black (R-Tenn.), indicates that fights over the health law could still roil the funding debate.

Obamacare’s birth control provision, which went into effect on August 1, helped eliminate the gender-based disparity in health costs by eliminating co-pays for women’s contraceptive services. Studies have proven that increasing access to cost-free birth control lowers the rates of unintended pregnancy and abortion, as well as provides women with greater economic autonomy to achieve their personal financial goals. Nevertheless, right-wing Obamacare opponents misconstrue the law as a threat to religious freedom, despite the fact that it already contains an exemption for faith-based organizations that oppose covering contraception.

Despite Republicans’ insistence that Obamacare is an affront to religious liberty, most Americans don’t agree. A diverse coalition in support of the health reform law’s expanded access to contraception — including religious groups like Catholics for Choice, Jewish Women International, the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice, the United Methodist Church, and the Unitarian Universalist Association — is already urging the U.S. House Committee on Appropriations to reject a deal that would restrict women’s access to birth control.

Unfortunately, Rep. Black is no stranger to targeting women’s health. So far this session, she has also introduced a measure to defund Planned Parenthood, as well as called for an unnecessary government study to justify her continued effort to strip funding from the women’s health organization.

Alyssa

‘Red Widow’ Creator Melissa Rosenberg On Sex Scenes, Plastic Surgery, And Women’s Ambitions In Hollywood

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Mar 5, 2013 at 3:25 pm

Red Widow, which follows Radha Mitchell as Marta Walraven, a woman who grew up in the Russian Mob in Marin County, only to find herself pulled back into the world of crime she tried to leave behind after the murder of her husband, premiered on ABC last Sunday. At the Television Critics Association press tour in January, I spoke with Melissa Rosenberg, who created Red Widow fresh off her stints writing the Twilight franchise, about what mothers are allowed to do on television, what parts of sex can and can’t get past Standards and Practices, and what it’s going to take for women to succeed in Hollywood. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

How did you decide that Red Widow was going to be about the Russian mob?

Well my first decision was where I was going to set it. The original is set just outside Amsterdam, and had this sort of suburban community versus in-town, so I was looking for that. And because I’m from Marin County, in NOrthern California, that was a natural place. You’ve got Marin County and you cross the bridge into San Francisco, which has become emblematic of the bridging of two worlds. And so I began to look at what was the organized crime situation in San Francisco. While the Russian mob isn’t the largest group in San Francisco, it’s one of the top three. So then we were fortunate enough to find the former head of the FBI organized crime branch for the Russian mob in San Francisco and he became our technical consultant…So everything we do is checked with him. We do a lot of research on the internet obviously and everywhere we can. But we’re always conferring with him as well.

In terms of that sort of mob tradition, one of the things I’m curious about in that context is how the mob culture interacts with the way that Marta and Evan are raising their children? I thought that sequence in the pilot where Evan tells their son to kick his brother, he gives his daughter the money for the paints, he’s very sort of emotional and undisciplined and she wants to set boundaries. I was curious how that interacts with the larger mob story and the larger mob culture.

What’s interesting is, you know, having come from Marin County, and we all have these experiences growing up. You think you are raised in, you think that is everyone’s reality. And when you finally leave that nest, you realize, oh, the Marin County way of thinking and being is completely different from the rest of the country. It’s a sort of rude awakening. But there’s part of it that’s always living with you. Things that seem very odd to the rest of the world are just the norm to me. I mean, I htink that’s very much the case with Marta. A lot of people would think that having your husband exporting pot, it would be “Are you frickin’ kidding me?” But for her, it’s in the realm of “I don’t love this, I’d rather you didn’t do this.” But it’s not this huge moral violation in the way it would be for anyone else in the world who had a different background than her. So it’s always exploring the line for her, it’s an unclear line, and it’s different from what a lot of other people’s experiences might have been.

I wonder if we’ve had so many of these anti-heroes who are fathers because of TV tropes about men as bumbling dads, they’re not really involved, so their betrayal of responsibility to their kids doesn’t hit as hard?

There is definitely a much higher standard for characters who are mothers. There are a couple of things you don’t do. You don’t kill a dog. You don’t have a mother betray her children. You’ve lost your audience on either of those two fronts. And it’s just something embedded in our culture that we are less forgiving. And that’s always the line we’re going to be riding with her. She’s never intentionally betraying them. She’s never intentionally putting them in danger. She’s doing the very, very best she can. As we all are!

I love the sex scene in the pilot, and I am consistently cranky about sex on television. This looked like people who were having intercourse like real people. Can you talk a little bit about the process of writing that scene—and was there anything Standards and Practices wanted you to cut or change?

There’s always a few grinds and pumping, I can’t remember the word—

Thrusts?

You can’t thrust! When we shot that scene, it was one of the most intense shooting days of our pilot, because those two have amazing chemistry. You really felt that you were stepping into a very intimate relationship. We had a very closed set. These two actors, both of them, have a lack of vanity, and will just fling themselves into something. There’s a lot of footage that will never be scene, 95 percent of it, because it’s just so outrageous in an incredibly fantastic way. What it got pared down to, you still get, it’s a very sexy scene, it’s not pretend, it’s not “And now we’re doing this for the cameras because it looks really hot.” It’s two actors as directed by Mark Pellington, who’s a very real director, who basically let the room disappear for them and immersed themselves in this moment.
Read more

Economy

GOP Senator Suggests New Way For Republicans To Gum Up Wall Street Reform

By Travis Waldron on Mar 5, 2013 at 3:15 pm

Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL)

Republicans have spent the past two years trying to delay and water down regulations included in the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act, the landmark regulatory law passed in the wake of the financial crisis that sparked the Great Recession. Alabama Sen. Richard Shelby (R), who served as the ranking member on the Senate Banking Committee in the previous Congress, is now renewing that fight, as he plans to introduce legislation that would require regulators to perform a cost-benefit analysis on all new financial regulations before they are finalized.

Under Shelby’s legislation, any new rule for which costs outweigh benefits would be prohibited from final implementation, The Hill reports:

“If a regulation’s costs outweigh its benefits, it should be thrown out,” Shelby said. “By providing a clear, rigorous and consistent process for regulators in making that determination, this legislation will eliminate unnecessary burdens on our economy.”

Shelby’s past efforts to ensure that cost-benefit analyses are performed on new regulations has drawn harsh rebukes from regulators and the Obama administration. “[W]e are seeing a determined effort to slow and weaken reforms that are critical to our ability to protect Americans from another crisis,” former Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner said of such a change in 2011.

Such a proposal may seem benign, but “quantifying costs and benefits objectively is notoriously difficult,” Reuters’ John Kemp wrote in 2012, and “the result tends to depend on who is doing the measuring.” Those analyses would likely throw out many regulations that could protect the nation from future financial crises or from incidences like the rate-rigging scandal that embroiled the financial industry last year. Independent studies have shown that the financial crisis cost the U.S. $22 trillion, including nearly $13 trillion in lost economic output.

And while they have support from the Chamber of Commerce and other financial industry interest groups who have challenged new regulations in court, the analyses are meant not to ensure smart regulations but to slow down or block the regulatory process. “The standard they seek to enforce,” Kemp observed, “would be impossible to meet.”

Justice

Republicans Won’t Say If Voting Rights Act Is Constitutional

By Josh Israel on Mar 5, 2013 at 3:00 pm

As the Supreme Court considers the constitutionality of a key provision in the Voting Rights Act, many on both sides of the aisle are speaking out in defense of the law. But just seven years after joining in the Senate’s 98-0 vote to reauthorize the law, two Senate Republicans are refusing to say whether they think the law they voted for passes constitutional muster.

On Tuesday, Talking Points Memo’s Sahil Kapur asked Senators Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Jim Inhofe (R-OK) whether they think the Supreme Court should uphold the Voting Rights Act — which both voted to reauthorize in July 2006. Graham reportedly responded, “Uhh.. [long pause] I haven’t even thought about it.” Inhofe, according to Kapur, responded: “Oh, I don’t know. I’ll let someone else answer that.”

There are many reasons why 48 years after its original passage, the Voting Rights Act is still needed. But the case was perhaps best made by Graham himself in a 2006 press release:

South Carolina has come a long way in the past few decades and we have a lot to be proud of. But just like every other part of the country, we still have a ways to go. I hope twenty-five years from now it can be said that there will be no need for a Voting Rights Act because things have continued to change for the better. If we continue making progress like we have in the past twenty-five years, we can make it happen.

All Senators take an oath that they will “support and defend the Constitution.” The 15th Amendment to that Constitution expressly gives Congress the power to ensure that citizens’ “right to vote shall not be denied or abridged” based on race or color. By voting for the 2006 legislation, Graham and Inhofe already put themselves on record as believing this was constitutional.

Update

Kapur notes a wide array of other GOP Senators also refused to say whether the Voting Right Act is constitutional. The list includes 2006 supporters Lamar Alexander (R-TN), Roy Blunt (R-MO), John Boozman (R-AR), and John McCain (R-AZ).

Climate Progress

VIDEO: The Intergenerational Evil Of Climate Change

By Climate Guest Blogger on Mar 5, 2013 at 2:45 pm

Cross-posted from Huffington Post

The following video is a compact and emotionally moving overview of the problem and solutions to climate change. It’s designed to be a quick and compelling way to get up to speed on the issue and help others do the same.

In 2012 the dangers of human-caused climate disturbance became undeniable, making this the fundamental moral issue of our time. The following features clips from the world’s most respected climate scientist, NASA’s James Hansen, and two key advocates for systemic change: Bill McKibben and David Roberts.

This 49-minute video teaches the basic science and explains key climate dynamics of lag time and tipping points in ways that all age groups can grasp. Richly illustrated with images of this year’s unprecedented retreat of Arctic sea ice and the near-total surface layer melt of the Greenland ice cap, this video also includes footage of the Colorado Springs wildfire, the midwestern drought, the mile-high Arizona dust-storm, Hurricane Sandy, and other climate turning points frighteningly evident in 2012.

The call-to-action excerpts by Hansen and McKibben are overlaid with compelling images of civil resistance (including Hansen’s three arrests) and enthusiastic public participation in 350.org events. The latter included worldwide rallies to voice support for reducing CO2 in the atmosphere back down to 350 parts per million, and McKibben’s autumn 2012 “Do the Math Tour,” which spread the news that there’s five times more carbon in already discovered fossil fuel reserves than could be burned without exceeding the 2 degree Celsius threshold of additional warming that’s widely regarded as the maximum “safe” limit.

My wife, science writer Connie Barlow, and I introduce each of the clips and share our experience of “waking up” in December 2012 to the terrifying prospect of climate catastrophe, which is happening faster than scientists had projected only a few years ago. (I refer to it as my “climate change come-to-Jesus moment”.)

Our extemporaneous storytelling of which aspects of the 2012 climate-change news and statistics rocked us out of complacency is an invitation for viewers to likewise make a shift in outlook and priorities.

Among the most emotionally moving footage is the the portion of James Hansen’s 2012 TED Talk, “Why I Must Speak Out about Climate Change,” where he explains that his love for his grandchildren, coupled with his formidable knowledge of the science, compelled him to speak out against, what he perceives as, “intergenerational injustice.”

We produced this video mix for precisely the same reason. As members of the generational cohort now in power, we exhort fellow “boomers” to awaken to the “generational evil” that will become our sad legacy if we continue with business as usual, focusing irresponsibly on our own comfort and security while expecting future generations to deal with the horrendous conditions that our own complacency will produce.

– Rev. Michael Dowd is a religious naturalist, evidential mystic, big history evangelist, and author of ‘Thank God for Evolution.’

LGBT

REPORT: Voting For Marriage Equality Does Not Endanger Re-election

By Zack Ford on Mar 5, 2013 at 2:37 pm

A new report from Third Way finds that voters largely do not punish lawmakers for voting for marriage equality, regardless of political party. The study analyzed lawmakers in Washington and New York, the only two states where elected officials have faced re-election after addressing the issue of same-sex marriage. Of those who supported the freedom to marry, 97 percent of them who ran again won re-election. Two of the five who lost were under investigation for corruption or misuse of tax dollars, and one lived in a Washington district that voted to approve the marriage equality referendum, so it’s not likely her loss had much to do with the question of marriage.

The last two lawmakers on the list who ran for re-election and lost after supporting marriage equality were Republican New York Senators Stephen Saland and Roy McDonald. The National Organization for Marriage waged an expensive vengeance campaign against them, and while it had some impact, the net result as not in NOM’s favor. McDonald lost to his more conservative primary challenger, but he also raised less money than she did. Saland lost to an equality-supporting Democrat because he split his votes with a conservative challenger who stayed in the race after the primary election. NOM has claimed there are consequences for voting against marriage equality, but the only evidence that this is true is created by NOM spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in retaliation.

Supporting marriage equality does not have to be a political decision for lawmakers. Only NOM’s commitment to political bullying tactics stands in their way of continuing to win the support of their constituents.

 

Security

Number Of Radical Anti-Government Groups ‘Reached An All-Time High’ In 2012, Report Finds

By Ben Armbruster on Mar 5, 2013 at 1:58 pm

The Souther Poverty Law Center released a new report on Tuesday finding that “the number of conspiracy-minded antigovernment ‘Patriot’ groups reached an all-time high of 1,360 in 2012″ and that the number of hate groups has remained at “near record levels” of more than 1,000. The group is calling on the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security to increase the amount of resources devoted to tracking and combatting domestic radical anti-government groups.

The SPLC says the number of “Patriot” groups (of which, 321 are militia groups) is up 7 percent from 2011 and up an incredible 813 percent since 2009. (The SPLC defines Patriot groups being comprised of conspiracy theory-minded individuals who believe the federal government is run by secret “globalists” aimed at taking away American freedoms and establishing a global world order based on socialist principles; and defines a Militia group as a paramilitary wing of the former.)

“These numbers far exceed the movement’s peak in the 1990s, when militias were inflamed by the 1993 Brady Bill and the 1994 assault rifle ban,” an SPLC press release states.

SPLC Senior Fellow and lead author of the report Mark Potok said there are two main reasons why the numbers of Patriot and militia groups have skyrocketed since 2009: the election of the nation’s first black president, Barack Obama (which includes the coinciding nation-wide demographic changes) and fears compounded by the economic crisis and the mainstreaming of conspiracy theories. Adding fuel to the fire, Potok said in a press call on Tuesday, is Obama’s reelection and the debate on gun regulation after the shooting massacre in Newtown, CT in January.

“This is the fourth straight year of really explosive growth of Patriot and militia groups,” Potok said. “We’ve never seen this kind of growth in any group that we cover.”

SPLC President J. Richard Cohen sent a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano asking that their departments increase resources to combat the problem.

“In January,” the letter says, “a former Tennessee police chief who conducts weapons training for law enforcement threatened in a video posted on YouTube to ‘start killing people’ if President Obama uses his executive power to enact gun control measures.” Cohen adds that “the resources devoted to countering domestic hate and radical antigovernment groups and those they may inspire do not appear commensurate with the threat.”

Indeed, DHS stripped down its domestic terrorism unit after Napolitano ordered a 2009 report on domestic right-wing extremism withdrawn because of significant political backlash from mainstream conservatives.

Daryl Johnson, the 2009 DHS report’s lead author who subsequently wrote a book chronicling his experience at DHS and its lack of focus on domestic extremists, said on Tuesday in light of SPLC’s new report that he “can’t imagine what it will take for DHS to recognize this growing and dangerous threat within the homeland,” adding that the report “should raise a red flag and cause concern.”

“As in the period before the Oklahoma City bombing, we now are seeing ominous threats from those who believe that the government is poised to take their guns,” Cohen said in the SPLC’s press release, which adds: “In October 1994, the SPLC wrote to then-Attorney General Janet Reno about the growing threat of domestic extremism; the Okla- homa City federal building was bombed six months later in the country’s deadliest act of domestic terrorism.”

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