(Source: Yahoo)

“I’m a big supporter of that campaign,” Michelle Kinsey Bruns, the online manager of Women’s Media Center and the creator of the ad, told ThinkProgress in a telephone interview on Saturday morning. The ad linked to a page on the National Cancer Institute website reassuring women that “having an abortion or miscarriage does not increase a woman’s subsequent risk of developing breast cancer.”

The rejected ad via Kinsey Bruns’ Twitter handle @ClinicEscort:

Kinsey Bruns said she expected Facebook to disapprove of the ad, but submitted it anyway to highlight what she described as “the absolute inconsistency that Facebook is willing to apply to a woman’s body as an object of violence, but a woman’s body as a medical object is too scandalous to be approved.”

Indeed, the company has come under criticism for removing images of “mastectomies, breastfeeding mothers, and other non-sexualized depictions of women’s bodies” and labeling them as “pornographic,” while allowing photographs and forums that make light of abusing and raping women. That content often falls under the “humor” section of Facebook’s content guidelines. Activists are encouraging companies that advertise with Facebook to boycott the company until they can be assured their ads will not appear next to content that promotes sexual violence and abuse.

Kinsey Bruns submitted a similar breast cancer ad last year, with an illustration of a woman touching her breast, but it too was rejected. She says she plans to experiment more with the company’s guidelines, posting ads with celebrities like Nicki Minaj in outrageous clothing or showing “sideboob” to test the boundaries and inconsistencies of the media giant’s standards.

Facebook’s Advertising Guidelines state, “Ads may not promote the sale or use of adult products or services, including but not limited to toys, videos, publications, live shows, or sexual enhancement products. Ads for family planning and contraception are allowed provided they follow the appropriate targeting requirements.”

While the overall warming is about 0.16°C per decade, there are three ten-year periods where there was a hiatus in warming, as the graph above shows, from 1977 to 1986, from 1987 to 1996, and from 2001 to 2012. But at each end of these periods there were big jumps. We find exactly the same sort of flat periods in climate model projections, lasting easily up to 15 years in length.

by Kevin Trenberth via The Conversation

Has global warming stalled? This question is increasingly being asked because the local weather seems cool and wet, or because the global mean temperature is not increasing at its earlier rate or the long-term rate expected from climate model projections.

The answer depends a lot on what one means by “global warming.” For some it is equated to the “global mean temperature.” That keeps going up but also has ups and downs from year to year. More on that shortly.

Why should it go up? Well, because the planet is warming as a result of human activities. With increasing carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, there is an imbalance in energy flows in and out of the top of the atmosphere: the greenhouse gases increasingly trap more radiation and hence create warming. “Warming” really means heating, and this can exhibit itself in many ways.

Rising surface temperatures are just one manifestation. Melting Arctic sea ice is another. So is melting of glaciers and other land ice that contribute to rising sea levels. Increasing the water cycle and invigorating storms is yet another. But most (more than 90%) of the energy imbalance goes into the ocean, and several analyses have now shown this. But even there, how much warms the upper layers of the ocean, as opposed to how much penetrates deeper into the ocean where it may not have much immediate influence, is a key issue.

The ups and downs of global temperature

My colleagues and I have just published a new analysis showing that in the past decade about 30% of the heat has been dumped at levels below 700m, where most previous analyses stop.

The first point is that this is fairly new; it is not there throughout the record. The cause of the shift is a particular change in winds, especially in the Pacific Ocean where the subtropical trade winds have become noticeably stronger, changing ocean currents and providing a mechanism for heat to be carried down into the ocean. This is associated with weather patterns in the Pacific, which are in turn related to the La Niña phase of the El Niño phenomenon.

The second point is that we have found distinctive variations in global warming with El Niño. A mini global warming, in the sense of a global temperature increase, occurs in the latter stages of an El Niño event, as heat comes out of the ocean and warms the atmosphere. The ocean’s temperature is also affected by volcanic eruptions, which also affect the perceptions of global warming.

Normal weather also interferes by generating clouds that reflect the sunshine, and there are fluctuations in the global energy imbalance from month to month. But these average out over a year or so.

Another prominent source of natural variability in the Earth’s energy imbalance is changes in the sun itself, seen most clearly as the sunspot cycle. From 2005 to 2010 the sun went into a quiet phase and the warming energy imbalance is estimated to have dropped by about 10 to 15%.

Some of the penetration of heat into the depths of the ocean is reversible, as it comes back in the next El Niño. But a lot is not; instead it contributes to the overall warming of the deep ocean. This means less short-term warming at the surface, but at the expense of greater long-term warming, and faster sea level rise. So this has consequences.

Global warming is here to stay

Coming back to the global temperature record, one thing is clear. The past decade is by far the warmest on record. Human induced global warming really kicked in during the 1970s, and warming has been pretty steady since then….

Focusing on the wiggles and ignoring the bigger picture of unabated warming is foolhardy, but an approach promoted by climate change deniers. Global sea level keeps marching up at a rate of more than 30cm per century since 1992 (when global measurements via altimetry on satellites were made possible), and that is perhaps a better indicator that global warming continues unabated. Sea level rise comes from both the melting of land ice, thus adding more water to the ocean, plus the warming and thus expanding ocean itself.

Global warming is manifested in a number of ways, and there is a continuing radiative imbalance at the top of atmosphere. The current hiatus in surface warming is temporary, and global warming has not gone away.

–  Kevin Trenberth is Distinguished Senior Scientist at University Corporation for Atmospheric Research. Reposted with permission from the author.

Related Post:

• In Hot Water: Global Warming Has Accelerated In Past 15 Years, New Study Of Oceans Confirms

(Credit: First Response)

The average British woman bears her first child at age 30, 5 years later than American women. In the name of “provok[ing] a debate about how old is too old to have a baby,” First Response Get Britain Fertile had make-up artists transform 45-year-old British TV presenter Kate Garraway into a cartoonishly ancient-looking pregnant woman.

Yet even as First Response claims there is a lack of awareness about the female biological clock, they tout a survey by YouGov finding 70 percent of British women believe having a baby in her 40s would be too old. Women were also quite clear about their motives to wait: two-fifths said they would delay having a child until they have financial stability, while over a third said the cost of childcare is a deterrent. Another third said they would wait until they found the right partner.

Nevertheless, First Response has decided the solution to the trend of women waiting longer to have children is to criticize them, prey on their fears of aging, and exploit social disgust for even moderately sexual old women.

Get Britain Fertile ambassadors Garraway and Zita West insist that they are not trying to push women into a panic over their ticking fertility clocks. Yet the campaign, which officially launches June 3, would do well to extend beyond the caricature of the old woman. Thus far, First Response has not suggested they will explore ways to bridge the vast disparity between the average cost of raising a child — roughly half a million dollars in the US, not including college tuition — and the employment prospects of the average 25-year-old couple. In the US, the average college-educated 20-something earns $45,000 a year, while their unemployment rate is far higher than their older counterparts. Highly-educated young people are also increasingly finding it difficult to find jobs that match their very expensive education. In the UK, two-fifths of all unemployed people are younger than 25. Nor does the campaign touch on the UK’s childcare costs, which are the second highest in the world.

Rather than address these real fiscal issues young women explicitly say are keeping them from having children earlier, Garraway writes that women are simply being too picky about settling down with the right partner: “I’m not suggesting for a minute that you settle for the first half-decent man who comes along – every woman has the right to hold out for Mr Right – but you may find that really addressing your feelings about having a family means the man you thought was Mr Right comes in a different form. I suppose the word for it is mindfulness.”

This advice ignores the far higher divorce rates among people who married younger than 30. In the UK, the divorce rate hit a 40-year low last year as couples delay marriage til age 30 or later.

It is true that pregnancy is riskier for women in their 40s, and studies suggest that the risk of autism rises if either parent is over 35. But the Get Britain Fertile campaign launch coincides with a “fertility breakthrough” that would make women undergoing in vitro fertilization 3 times more likely to have a baby. While the current average success rate is around 25 percent in Britain, new time-lapse imaging could raise it to 78 percent.

As technology allows women to have more and more control over their reproductive decisions, efforts to dictate the correct time and methods women should use to get pregnant are growing more common. A recent Singaporean ad campaign took a similar approach with a series of patronizing leaflets using fairy tales to depict women’s waning fertility. Jezebel compiled the lengthy laundry list of things pregnant women are often told they must or must not do in order to successfully bear a healthy child.

First Response’s and other fertility campaigns will probably have little impact on the birth rate. But they will perpetuate the insidious notion that women, and women alone, are to blame for any reproductive troubles they may have.

Via cartoonist Stephanie McMillan

The common argument against providing health care to undocumented immigrants is that, since they’ve broken the law, they should be punished. A part of that punishment involves denying them health care services through public entitlement programs or federal subsidies that are dependent on Americans’ tax dollars. “We must value the contribution of immigrants to our country. In doing so, we must protect our borders, we must protect our workers, and we must protect the taxpayer,” said House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) on Thursday.

But the taxpayer already foots the bill for undocumented immigrants’ care — just in an incredibly inefficient and half-baked way. Under the auspices of the Reagan-era Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA), hospital emergency rooms can’t turn away patients based on their citizenship or insurance status. That doesn’t mean that their care magically becomes free — undocumented men and women who use the emergency room are still slapped with a hefty hospital bill.

However, if they are unable to pay that bill — which is fairly likely considering that they probably don’t have any insurance — then a combination of the federal government, state governments, hospitals, and other American consumers of U.S. health care are forced to absorb the cost. In turn, that raises prices for medical services, since hospitals want to recoup some of their losses. Some studies have estimated the price of subsidizing undocumented immigrants’ health care at about $10.7 billion per year.

The federal government has long been aware of this problem. In fact, soon after EMTALA’s passage, lawmakers authorized a special Medicaid fund that mostly goes towards subsidizing emergency treatments for undocumented immigrants. The program costs about $2 billion per year, and most of that money is used on delivering babies for pregnant, undocumented women who go to the emergency room.

Unfortunately, that’s about all the money is good for. Medicaid doesn’t cover the preventative treatments that might have prevented the need for an emergency room visit in the first place, nor does it provide for the prenatal services that would ensure the health and safety of both mother and child. And in health care, any system that promotes after-the-fact medical consumption — i.e., “sick care” — is one that undermines the general public health and drives up everybody’s health care costs.

The lack of access to preventative and primary care services is a particularly pressing problem given that low-income undocumented immigrants tend to have specialized and chronic health care needs, since poverty and social exclusion perpetuate unhealthy living habits that can cause and exacerbate costly diseases such as diabetes and obesity. And studies have shown that those who pursue quality preventative care services early on in their lives consume less care in their twilight years, which is when most health spending occurs.

But the immigration reform proposals being considered right now would leave undocumented immigrants on provisional status anywhere from 13 to 15 years. Consequently, these immigrants would be banned from accessing any preventative or primary care services for that long. And chances are, by the time they do enter the “officially” subsidized health care market through Obamacare or Medicaid, their health will be considerably worse. So by denying undocumented immigrants Medicaid, Obamacare subsidies, CHIP, and Medicare, lawmakers are essentially eschewing relatively small preventative and primary health care spending now in favor of considerably more public health care spending in the future.

Congress’s insistence on punishing undocumented immigrants by restricting their health care access also runs afoul of public opinion. By a 63 to 33 percent margin, Americans believe that undocumented immigrants who achieve provisional status should have access to Medicaid, and 59 percent believe they should have access to Obamacare’s insurance subsidies. That includes over 40 percent of Republicans on both counts.

Those numbers reflect the fact that Americans favor immigrants’ rights to a far greater extent than Congress. For instance, 64 percent of Americans support a five-year path to citizenship, rather than the 13-year timeline the Senate is considering. And younger Americans are even more likely to view immigrants positively, with only 38 percent of 18 to 25-year-olds agreeing with the notion that immigrants are burdens on society that abuse government resources. In all of these cases, Congress is considering much harsher — and even counterproductive — measures against undocumented immigrants compared to what the public wants.

(Credit: Shutterstock)

As New York City considers whether to expand the franchise to non-citizens, it’s instructive to look the experience other municipalities, like Takoma Park, Maryland, have had with non-citizen voting.

ThinkProgress spoke with two experts on non-citizen voting: Montgomery County (MD) Council member George Leventhal and Maryland State Sen. Jamie Raskin (D). Both individuals helped initiate Takoma Park’s non-citizen voting policy in 1991.

Here are the main issues and concerns with expanding voting rights to non-citizens:

Why is non-citizen voting important? After the 1990 census, Takoma Park went about redistricting its wards to reflect the new population numbers. The wards were drawn to include equal numbers of residents, but, as Raskin, who sat on the commission, noticed, some wards had twice the number of voters. The reason: some wards had high numbers of non-citizen voters. As a result, voters in wards without many non-citizen residents found their vote worth half as much as those elsewhere. Ignoring non-citizens when drawing the boundary lines in an attempt to circumvent this problem is prohibited by the Supreme Court. As a result, the commission proposed a city-wide referendum to allow non-citizens to vote in local elections, which passed in February 1992.

Non-citizens can only vote in local elections. Perhaps the most important part of non-citizen voting is that non-citizens are only allowed to vote in local elections. There are valid reasons to want federal elections, which have a big impact on our nation’s foreign policy, decided only by American citizens. But, as Leventhal explained to ThinkProgress, “If you live in a town, you’re interested in getting your garbage picked up and your property taxes.” In other words, parochial matters like city services and local taxes impact both citizen and non-citizen residents alike.

There is a long history of non-citizen voting in the United States. Non-citizen voting may feel weird. It shouldn’t. For most of American history, non-citizens were permitted to vote in 22 states and federal territories. It wasn’t until the 1920s that, amidst anti-immigrant hysteria, lawmakers began to bar non-citizens from voting.

What impact has non-citizen voting had on local policies? “Very little,” according to Leventhal. He noted that critics of the proposal argued in 1991 that if Takoma Park legalized non-citizen voting, the city would soon become a “welfare magnet” where non-citizens would supposedly vote for massive new benefits that would attract more non-citizens, creating a cycle. But in the past 20 years, Leventhal notes, non-citizen voting has “had virtually no effect on the policies of the cities.” Raskin agreed: “it hasn’t been a transforming event in the life of the city.”

Does it cost a lot? No. Because non-citizens can only vote in local Takoma Park elections which take place in odd-numbered years, there’s no need to print separate ballots. Non-citizens register and vote on the same ballot as everyone else, rendering the cost trivial.

Will it lead to non-citizens fraudulently voting in federal elections? No. Like New York City, Takoma Park elections are held in odd-numbered years and don’t coincide with state or national elections.

Would it work in a city the size of New York? Non-citizens make up more than one-third of New York’s population, meaning a massive chunk of the city’s taxpayers are currently disenfranchised. Raskin doubts that New York’s experience would be much different from Takoma Park’s, for a few reasons. First, the non-citizen population tends to be fairly transient. Second, they tend to be disproportionately poor, a contributing factor in their low turnout rates in other municipalities.

How do non-citizens feel about the initiative? Like citizen voters, turnout among non-citizens is abysmally low. For example, in 2009, 436 non-citizens were registered to vote in Takoma Park, but just 32 cast a ballot. That’s even lower than the already-low turnout rate of 16 percent among citizens of Takoma Park. On the other hand, Raskin notes that those non-citizens who do cast a ballot are very grateful for the opportunity. Many are foreign businesspeople, or diplomatic personnel, or employees at the World Bank. “It makes them feel like they’re part of the community,” Raskin said, noting that local citizens also want to embrace foreigners in the area because “there’s a neighborly dimension to this.”

Many other countries allow non-citizens to vote. At least 20 countries give non-citizens the right to vote. They include a broad range of nations, from Denmark to Chile to New Zealand.

Bob FitzSimmonds and Ken Cuccinelli II

FitzSimmonds — who was Cuccinelli’s legislative director during his time in the Virginia Senate, as well as a multiple-time state senate candidate himself — is the former executive director of what is now the Care Net Pregnancy Help Center and the former chair of the Virginia Crisis Pregnancy Center Directors Association. Crisis Pregnancy Centers are faith-based operations that seek to discourage pregnant women from considering abortion. He created an abstinence-only curriculum for area schools called the “Keep It Simple Say NO abstinence program“.

At last weekend’s state party convention, Tribbett asked FitzSimmon whether he supported the distribution of emergency contraception on college campuses. “I’m not a big fan of contraception, frankly,” the Republican Party official explained. “I think there are some issues, we’re giving morning-after pills to 12-year-olds, and pretty soon I guess we’ll hand them out to babies, I don’t know.”

Watch the video:

FitzSimmonds also told Tribbett that sex education has caused the spread of sexually transmitted diseases: “I believe that we don’t recognize the causal effect between the type of sex education that we’ve been giving and the spread of STDs. We focus on things like abortion, cause it’s a big pressure thing. I go into schools 15-20 times a year, I run a non-profit that goes into schools and talks to kids about sex. They’re all abortion and HIV. HIV’s kind of hard to catch. Abortion happens if you get pregnant. But we’re on the track for 50 percent of the American people to have Herpes by the time these kids are my age. And that is a profound — not only health but sociological crisis facing this country.”

FitzSimmonds posted on his Facebook page shortly after last November’s election, “When Obama is 90 years old and he dies and goes to Hell, he is going to say ‘This is all Bush’s fault.’”

(HT: BlueVirginia)

The oil industry uses high prices to make big profits, spends them to keep their tax breaks, and then pushes for more dirty, unconventional oil like Canadian tar sands — which will not have any impact on gasoline prices.

The Washington Post reported earlier this week that Chinese hackers gained access to Google’s surveillance database –- potentially obtaining years worth of data related to search warrants and Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) orders — in a counterintelligence operation several years ago known as Operation Aurora. While this recent revelation is troubling in and of itself, the fact that this sensitive, and presumably well-secured, information was breached may also serve to validate concerns about the security risks of a proposed update to a wiretapping law.

According to the Post, Google discovered the surveillance database had been compromised in the course of investigating the 2009 Aurora hackings and the company alerted the FBI. Although Google publicly disclosed a breach and identified China as the source of the assault in 2010, it was identified then as an attempt to spy on Chinese human rights activists.

The new revelations suggest Aurora was a Chinese counterintelligence operation, similar to the one exposed in a report from cybersecurity firm Mandiant earlier this year, and one of its goals was to discover which Chinese agents were under surveillance by U.S. law enforcement. Aurora reportedly targeted at least 34 companies, including other major tech companies that likely maintain similar databases such as Yahoo. A Microsoft official speaking at a conference this April suggested they were facing attacks in the same time period, and identified the Chinese as “trolling” for information about surveillance orders.

Michael M. DuBose, former chief of the Justice Department’s Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section, declined to comment on either the Microsoft or Google cases to the Washington Post, but said these type of intrusions should serve as “a wake-up call for the government that the overall security and effectiveness of lawful interception and undercover operations is dependent in large part on security standards in the private sector” which “clearly need strengthening.” But despite those concerns, the government continues to pursue policies that put a great deal of responsibility in the the hands of private sector actors.

For instance, proposed updates to the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) would charge companies like Google with the creation and security of secret backdoor access points in communications software. CALEA is a wiretapping law that requires telecommunications companies to provide a way for law enforcement to snoop on communications as it happens. It was originally passed in 1994 to ensure that law enforcement maintained access to wiretapping capabilities as the telephone infrastructure went digital, and has since been expanded to include VoIP and broadband internet traffic. But the law currently doesn’t apply to third party non-telecom companies, like Google and Facebook. Officials say that when those companies started using end-to-end encryption (ironically, after Google’s systems were compromised during Operation Aurora) it became prohibitively difficult to carry out real-time snooping on some targets. That’s because end-to-end encryption basically creates a protected tunnel information can flow through without being directly accessed by the telecom companies that are required to have intercept capabilities.

While the details of a proposed legislative update to CALEA have not yet been disclosed publicly, the Washington Post reported the update would extend the expectation of intercept capabilities to end-to-end communication software and pressure companies to enable law enforcement officials to intercept online communications as they happen by levying hefty fines for non-compliance. The only way to do that would be to essentially build backdoors into software and networks, something experts say would leave digital communication channels even less secure than they currently are — and potentially lead to more digital snooping by malicious actors like, say, Chinese military hackers.

A report from twenty computer scientists about the risks of building the backdoors that would be required to comply released by the Center for Democracy and Technology last week noted:

All networks, software, and communication tools that support “lawful intercept” include features that are designed to breach the confidentiality of communications without detection by any party involved in the communication. When parties communicate using services with such features, there is an increased likelihood that an unauthorized and/or malicious adversary with the right technical knowledge and access to the system could capture communications contents without detection. The general nature of CALEA-style mandates and the necessarily clandestine nature of intercept mechanisms increase security risks further.

Of course, the lawful interception tools already used by telecommunications companies have suffered from their own set of security concerns, as evidenced by a peer-reviewed examination of CISCO’s lawful interception technology that uncovered several possible vulnerabilities. But the revelation that Google, one of the best resourced tech outfits in the world, was unable to secure sensitive national security information left in their care gives credence to the argument that asking tech companies to build in vulnerabilities to their code is only going to make everyone who relies on digital communication channels less secure.

Photo by John Montgomery

Three-plus years after the U.S. Supreme Court’s corporate money in politics decision in Citizens United v. FEC, the movement to overturn some of its central holdings has not abated. On Tuesday, Los Angeles passed a ballot measure to endorse state and federal amendments overturning the decision, with an overwhelming 76.6 percent in favor of the resolution. The nation’s second-largest city now joins 400 other jurisdictions, including 175 cities and 13 states, in rejecting the notion that corporations are people, and the Supreme Court’s holding that corporate spending will not lead to corruption.

The Los Angeles measure calls on state legislators and regional members of Congress to both propose and support any amendments that would limit parts of both Citizens United v. FEC and an earlier decision striking down campaign finance limits, Buckley v. Valeo. The resolution, Proposition C, asserts that “corporations do not have the constitutional rights of human beings,” “corporations do not engage in constitutionally protected speech when spending corporate money to influence the electoral process,” and limits on political spending that ensure all Americans have an opportunity to be heard are permissible. Meanwhile, the U.S. Supreme Court is scheduled to hear another case that could make it even easier for the wealthy to buy elections.

Our client is a courageous teenager who is choosing not to accept the current plea offer by the State of Florida.

This is a situation of two teenagers who happen to be of the same sex involved in a relationship. If this case involved a boy and girl, there would be no media attention to this case. [...]

If this incident occurred 108 days earlier when she was 17, we wouldn’t even be here. [...]

Along with Kaitlyn and her family, we are going to fight to have the law changed so no other teenager finds themselves in this same position created by the State of Florida and prosecuted unfairly.

Kaitlyn’s father, Steven Hunt Jr.,  explained this week that the charges seem to stem entirely from the parents of her girlfriend, who knew of the relationship, but waited until Kaitlyn turned 18 to object. According to Hunt, “Kate has offered to permanently cease contact and leave the state if charges are dropped, but that offer has been rejected by the prosecutor and the girlfriend’s parents.”

Over 270,000 people have signed a Change.org petition started by Hunt calling on Assistant State Attorney Brian Workman to stop Kaitlyn’s prosecution. The ACLU of Florida has condemned the prosecution, pointing out that it’s “a life sentence for behavior by teenagers that is all too common” and that “one cannot seriously maintain that Kaitlyn’s behavior was predatory.”

Etienne Syldor (Credit: WFTV)

As local station WFTV reported, “Last year, Wells Fargo offered him mortgage modification, and he was told if he made four monthly payments during a trial period, the modification would be permanent.” Court records show that he went beyond making the payments on time to pay early and more than was required. At times he says he has worked multiple jobs to make sure he can make mortgage payments.

But Wells Fargo recently stopped taking his payments and sent him a letter telling him that it was starting foreclosure proceedings.

Banks have been accused of similar shenanigans in the past, as many have lost track of paperwork, illegally foreclosed on military members, and refused to work with borrowers who scrounge up money on modifications. Major banks have been widely reported to use a process known as “dual tracking” in which they work with a borrower on a modification while also pursuing foreclosure. Some instructed borrowers to stop making payments to help enter the modification process only to foreclose on them anyway.

But banks were ordered to end dual tracking and other abusive practices as part of the $25 billion fraud settlement. They dragged their feet on ending this practice as homeowners continued to face foreclosure. Banks were also ordered to modify mortgages as part of the settlement but some have been slow to dole out the relief.

Frustration about the weak agreement, coupled with the slow trickle of settlement money, sparked a protest at the Department of Justice on Monday, where activists and foreclosed homeowners marched and some were arrested.

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer (R)

Gov. Jan Brewer (R-AZ) has a message for her party: expand Medicaid — or else.

The combative GOP governor is sticking by a threat she made to veto all legislation until lawmakers resolve the 2014 state budget and pass Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion. On Thursday, Brewer proved that wasn’t just talk, vetoing five bills sent to her desk in quick succession.

“I warned that I would not sign additional measures into law until we see resolution of the two most pressing issues facing us: adoption of a fiscal 2014 state budget and plan for Medicaid,” wrote Brewer in her veto message. “It is disappointing I must demonstrate the moratorium was not an idle threat.”

Arizona officials only have five weeks before reaching the constitutional deadline for passing a budget. Last Thursday, six Republican state senators joined a unified Democratic caucus to pass a Medicaid expansion bill — but efforts have been gummed up in the state House since then.

Brewer isn’t letting the issue slide. She has been touring the Grand Canyon State to shore up support for the expansion and put pressure on reticent lawmakers in her own party.

Some Republicans opposed to the expansion have warned of dire political consequences for lawmakers who buck the traditional conservative opposition to Medicaid. In a letter to Republican legislators, the chairman of the Maricopa County Republican Committee wrote of the state senators who voted for expansion, “Their egregious actions will have serious consequences. Their political careers are all but over and their days numbered.” He referred to Brewer as a “rogue governor” in the same statement.

But Brewer appears to be sticking by her convictions. At the beginning of the year, she became the third Republican governor to embrace expansion, asserting that it would provide health coverage to 50,000 low-income Arizonans. While promoting the expansion in March, Brewer attested to the dire consequences of failing to expand Medicaid. “The human cost of this tragedy can’t be calculated,” said Brewer, flanked by public health officials, doctors, and advocates for the poor. “Remember, there is no Plan B.”

The Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) estimates that expanding Medicaid would cut Arizona’s uninsurance rate by nearly a third.

Fleet Composite Squadron 6 conducts boat operations off coast of Naval Station Norfolk, VA. (Credit: U.S. Navy)

Yesterday Terry McAuliffe, Virginia’s Democratic gubernatorial candidate, revealed newfound support for oil and gas exploration off the Commonwealth’s coast. The Washington Post reported that he now backs legislation sponsored by Virginia’s Democratic U.S. Senators Mark Warner and Tim Kaine that would open offshore areas to oil and gas exploration.

Offshore oil drilling is viewed by Virginia politicians on both sides of the aisle as a budgetary panacea, in part because of the economic activity drilling would create, but perhaps more so because the Warner-Kaine bill would direct a portion of drilling royalties back into the commonwealth’s coffers. But the bottom line is that any development carries with it massive risk to the state’s environment and the current economic drivers that rely on healthy and accessible oceans and coasts.

A recent PricewaterhouseCoopers analysis of Virginia’s tourism industry reported that the sector supports more than 200,000 jobs, yielding an economic impact of more than $20 billion in 2011, and that Virginia’s beaches alone attracted nearly 10 percent of the state’s tourists. Virginia’s coast and ocean also support thriving fisheries; in 2011 fishermen landed 247,000 tons of seafood in Virginia, worth more than $191 million, ranking it the third largest seafood producer in the country by weight.

As Gulf Coast states painfully learned in 2010’s Deepwater Horizon disaster, offshore drilling accidents can devastate robust tourism industries, the health of marine ecosystems, and both the productivity and the reputation of the marine fisheries supported by those ecosystems. Unfortunately, Congress has so far failed to pass any reforms to reduce the risk of spills or blowouts, meaning the few regulatory reforms made by the Department of the Interior to improve offshore drilling safety in the aftermath of the Gulf spill could be rolled back by a future administration.

Drilling offshore Virginia would also be incompatible with another vital activity carried out along the state’s coast — keeping our nation safe. Naval Station Norfolk, the largest naval complex in the world, is one of the state’s primary economic engines, supporting more than 71,000 military and civilian employees. Overall the Navy was responsible for more nearly $15 billion in economic impact in Virginia in fiscal year 2009.

In 2010 the US Department of Defense determined that 74 percent of the areas eyed for oil and gas leasing offshore Virginia would directly interfere with the extensive military activities that are carried out in the region, including ordnance training and aircraft carrier operations. As Virginia Representative James Moran put it, “When you come down to it, the Navy’s operations are much more important to the Virginia economy, let alone national security, than … drilling operations.”

Furthermore, most of the areas where the Navy did not find potential conflicts are either in major shipping lanes or off the northern part of the coast where Virginia’s desire to drill would come into conflict with their neighbors in Maryland where the sentiment is distinctly anti-drilling. After watching the oil gush in the Gulf of Mexico unchecked for more than a month, Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley took an unequivocal stance, saying “I would be opposed to any drilling off the Chesapeake Bay.”

Virginia can still look to the ocean to shape its energy future, but rather than drilling for oil, the Commonwealth should be pursuing offshore wind energy development. McAuliffe’s campaign website notes that Virginia’s offshore wind resource could generate up to 3,200 megawatts of electricity “in just the 25 most promising offshore parcels” — development that would support as many as 11,600 jobs. Furthermore, the Department of the Interior’s “Smart from the Start” program has already identified sites for wind turbines off Virginia’s coast that would not conflict with either military operations or the shipping industry. As CAP has reported, offshore wind holds vast promise for producing clean energy at modest prices that will be stable over the long term — much more than can be said for oil or natural gas.

Rather than looking to the industries of the past and falling victim to another black gold rush that would compromise Virginia’s robust blue economy, Virginia’s leaders should instead look to a proven source of homegrown energy development that will create new jobs without jeopardizing current ones or contributing to our nation’s unsustainable thirst for climate-altering fossil fuels. Prioritizing development and protection of the state’s existing coastal-dependent industries like tourism, and fishing, and its world class military emplacements, while boosting support for renewable energy development is a common-sense approach to moving one of America’s most historic states toward a brighter economic future.

On Tuesday, ThinkProgress ran a story by Zack Beauchamp on Dr. Jason Richwine’s graduate dissertation on Hispanic IQ and immigration titled “The Inside Story Of The Harvard Dissertation That Became Too Racist For Heritage.” Thursday night, Dr. Richwine reached out to provide his side of the story. What follows is Richwine’s letter and Beauchamp’s response.

Jason Richwine writes:

This may disappoint some people, but there is no fascinating inside story of how I was awarded a PhD. The simple, boring explanation is that my dissertation is a solid piece of research. The “errors and omissions” that Zack Beauchamp claims to have uncovered exist only in a caricature of my dissertation. He knocks down a lot of straw men, but he doesn’t land any blows on my actual work.

Two factual corrections: First, my wife is not an immigrant. Second, I took the normal five years to complete my degree, not four, so readers can forget all that innuendo about sacrificing quality and depth for the sake of rushing.

Now for the substantive critiques. The extent to which self-identified Hispanics share a common genetic heritage is not important to my argument. As I explain on pages 76 and 77, the average IQ difference between Hispanics and non-Hispanic whites should be of concern because it is persistent over generations. Whether that persistence is due to genetics, environment, culture, or some other factor does not change the fact that the difference exists. It would be necessary to explore the biological basis for Hispanic identity only if my argument depended on a genetic transmission of IQ differences. It doesn’t.

I understand that Professor von Vacano has written extensively on the topic of Hispanic identity. And I also understand that scholars have a tendency to think their own specialty is hugely relevant to what everyone else studies. But, in reality, a long discussion of Professor von Vacano’s research interest would add little value to my dissertation.

I’m a bit bewildered by the rest of the critiques because they aren’t really critiques at all. The environment’s role in shaping IQ, the limits of IQ as a predictor of individual success, and the importance of non-cognitive abilities are all mentioned in my dissertation, sometimes in considerable detail. It’s difficult not to conclude that Beauchamp has intentionally ignored or downplayed my coverage of these issues in order to falsely portray my work as “sloppy.”

Take, for example, my conclusion regarding attempts to raise IQ. Beauchamp eventually acknowledges that I’m correct—that is, it is very difficult and perhaps impossible to permanently and substantially raise IQ through intervention programs. However, in what is supposed to be a devastating rebuttal of me, Beauchamp says these programs may still provide non-cognitive benefits. Strange—that sounds a lot like me! Page 70, footnote 20 of my dissertation:

This is not to say that Head Start or any other intervention inherently lacks value. Some programs may help children make non-cognitive gains in educational achievement and reduce their chances of committing crimes. These programs should be evaluated, using proper cost-benefit analysis, with all their strengths in mind, even if IQ enhancement is not one of them.

Or how about page 84:

When comparing individuals, the effect of IQ differences is often small. A large number of personality attributes, many of which are unrelated to IQ, affect a person’s ability to succeed in life. For that reason, an individual’s IQ score is merely a probability of future success, not a prediction from a crystal ball. For example, a person’s IQ affects his likelihood of completing college, but some college graduates are not very smart. Betting that an individual person with an IQ of 100 will complete more years of schooling than a person with an IQ of 95 is a risky gamble. The less intelligent person may be a very hard worker, while the smarter person could be lazy and unmotivated.

Does this look like the writing of, in Beauchamp’s words, an “IQ fundamentalist” who thinks IQ is “an almost-perfect guide to someone’s prospects for success in life”?

IQ is not the only important human trait—not by a long shot. Nevertheless, it remains an important predictor, on average, of many socioeconomic outcomes we care about. There can be no denying this. I continue:

However, if presented with two groups of 100 random Americans, one group with average IQ 95, the other group at 100, it is a virtual certainty that the smarter group will have higher educational attainment. In this way, IQ scores can be thought of as individual probabilities that aggregate into certainties in large groups.

That’s the crux of the issue.

The general claim that I ignored contrary evidence simply can’t be supported by a fair reading of the text. For example, much is made of my prominent citation of Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve. But I also discussed two major critiques of that book. On pages 82 and 83 of the dissertation, I even draw this conclusion: “It appears that Herrnstein and Murray’s critics have succeeded in establishing a larger role for the environment, without proving a lesser role for [IQ].” Is that something that a blind follower of Charles Murray would write?

Beauchamp seems to have decided a priori that my dissertation is one-sided, then viewed the entire work through that mental filter. He says I was “forced to concede” that environmental deprivation can adversely affect IQ. I did include environmental influences in my long discussion of what factors impact IQ differences, as any careful scholar would. Why Beauchamp characterizes this as a forced concession is not clear.

Regarding the quality of the datasets, that’s discussed in depth in chapter 2. The samples vary in size, but they all yield results pointing in the same direction. Furthermore, Beauchamp seems to think I haven’t noticed the critiques of Lynn and Vanhanen’s national IQ data. See pages 27 and 28 for a full discussion, in which I cite eight different academic references on that topic.

I could go on, but I’m already getting repetitive. Beauchamp ignores what’s actually in my dissertation so that he can say it’s full of omissions.

Substantive issues aside, another disappointing element in the article is the treatment of the quote from Christopher Jencks, who was my third committee member. The article uses the quote to imply that I ignored important parts of Jencks’ critique of my dissertation.

That never happened. In reality, my interaction with Professor Jencks was as normal as the rest of the process I followed in producing my dissertation. Like my other advisors, he gave me extensive written comments and suggestions. I revised the dissertation accordingly. I then sent Professor Jencks a 33-page document that detailed exactly how I revised the text in response to every single concern that he had expressed. In no case did I ignore a comment or fail to make revisions as I thought appropriate.

In response, Professor Jencks wrote to me in an email: “I think you have done a thorough and conscientious job of dealing with my comments, criticisms, and suggestions, and I am happy to approve it as it stands.” This didn’t mean he agreed with everything. He went on to say that he continued to be concerned with my use of ethnic categories like “Asian” and “Hispanic,” which he believes are inappropriately broad when talking about culture, and he felt that I left too little room for the differential effects of IQ on culture within ethnic groups. “That said,” he concluded, “I’m not asking for more revisions, just making suggestions for you to think about in the future.”

May I suggest that this is a completely normal situation in PhD programs? It would be a rare committee indeed if every member agreed with every data interpretation and policy judgment in the dissertation that they approved. My interactions with all my dissertation advisors, including Professor Jencks as the third reader, followed normal protocol from beginning to end.

Here is the truth about my dissertation: It’s a careful empirical analysis, firmly grounded in the mainstream of psychological science, vetted by a team of respected scholars, well researched, fully sourced, and a valuable contribution to policy discussions. I know, I know—what a boring reason to be awarded a PhD!

Beauchamp responds:

My thanks to Dr. Richwine for the factual clarifications. If only his treatment of my article, and his own dissertation, had been so forthright.

On the issue of his incomplete definition of the term “Hispanic,” Richwine suggests the only thing that matters is that the persistence of low Hispanic IQ on tests over generations. As it happens, I addressed this potential rebuttal at length in my original piece. The reason the definition matters, even if some pattern can be shown inside a group, is that it’s impossible to identify what that pattern means about the group and whether that pattern will continue unless you know what makes that group unique. As I put it:

Why do definitions matter if Richwine succeeds in showing a deep, persistent difference between so-called “Hispanics” and “whites?” Aside from the fact that it makes it impossible to figure out the scope of the dissertation (are Mexicans of largely European descent likely to have low IQs? What about African-descendent Brazilians?)…Without a proper definition of what he means when he says Hispanic, we have no way of evaluating the role that immigrants’ “Hispanicness” — whether that means shared genes, culture, or national background — plays in determining their IQ. Put differently, in order to know whether and how being Hispanic matters for IQ, we need to know what it means to be Hispanic. That, in turn, makes it impossible to evaluate how meaningful Richwine’s conclusions about the persistence of the IQ gap are or how they apply to any particular group of immigrants.

The purportedly exculpatory email from Professor Jencks he provides makes this point for me. In Richwine’s own summary, Jencks “continued to be concerned with my use of ethnic categories like ‘Asian’ and ‘Hispanic,’ which he believes are inappropriately broad when talking about culture.” This inappropriate broadness is precisely the point — they are so broad, I argue, as to make generalization about them meaningless without ample defense of why such a generalization is appropriate in this case. Richwine provides none, choosing to ignore the overwhelming literature on the social construction of race.

Similarly, Richwine misses my point on early childhood interventions and non-cognitive skills. The argument does not depend on whether Richwine mentions these factors occasionally in his dissertation — as Richwine points out above, I address his arguments on interventions specifically. Rather, my point was that he ignores the way in which such factors fatally frustrate his attempt to make broad predictions about immigrants based on their IQ. As I put it, “there’s simply no reason to think IQ matters enough to provide the juice for sweeping theories about the life prospects of entire groups of immigrants.” The proof of IQ fundamentalism is in the pudding.

For instance, on the issue of early childhood interventions, he does not attempt to explain whether or not the non-IQ related gains they produce (gains he consigns to a footnote) might be able to make up for any of the costs he associates with low-IQ immigration. For instance, on page 93, he argues that “Hispanics become less willing to play by the rules of the middle class when their low average IQ prevents them from joining it,” thus explaining why Hispanic immigration will produce more “underclass” behavior like dropping out of school and criminality. However, early childhood interventions can improve educational attainment and reduce criminality down the line — as he notes in his own footnote! Richwine pays lip service to factors other than IQ scores being important, yet edits them out of his substantive analysis.

This pattern repeats itself on the broader issue of non-cognitive traits. Richwine argues that (p. 100) “IQ has been linked to possessing middle class values, having a future time orientation, and cooperating in competitive games” in order to make his argument that Hispanic immigration will further lower social capital and “trust” inside the United States. These qualities bear intimate resemblance to non-cognitive traits like Conscientiousness or Agreeableness that either aren’t all that closely linked to IQ or, on some accounts, actually explain certain levels of performance on IQ tests. Yet Richwine never attempts to explore the connection between social trust and non-cognitive traits, or even establish that Hispanics lack the relevant non-cognitive qualities.

Essentially, Richwine suggests the supposedly lower Hispanic IQ will predict bad behavior without bothering to establish whether the immigrant populations might have or be able (with education) to get to higher levels of other traits that would counterbalance any IQ deficit. That sounds pretty “one-sided” to me.

I could go point-by-point on the other, lesser charges — for instance, his discussion of the flaws in the Lynn and Vanhanen data is hardly “full,” and he doesn’t consider criticisms of The Bell Curve in each case where it might be warranted. But, in Richwine’s words, “I’m already getting repetitive.”

BROWN: Today is a sad day for the Boy Scouts of America. They have succumbed to political pressure and abandoned their historic roots in what will prove to be a failed attempt to appease gay activists and corporate donors. Unfortunately, what they have done is said to the world that their oath no longer means much. Their decision to admit openly gay scouts will end up sexualizing the organization.

I am certain that having changed their policy on homosexuality, it’s only a matter of time before courts order them to admit homosexual scout leaders. Meanwhile, countless thousands of churches will very likely pull their sponsorship rather than endorse homosexuality, and the entire organization will begin to collapse. All of this is happening not because of a true grassroots demand of gay youth to be part of the organization but by an orchestrated political effort by gay activists who want to punish any group or organization that does not embrace homosexuality. It’s the beginning of the end for what once was one of America’s noblest organizations.

The Boy Scouts’ former policy, which remains in place for adult leaders, was such that Scouts were kicked out not for engaging in sexual activity with the same sex, but for even admitting that they are gay. NOM’s claim that ending this discrimination will “end up sexualizing the organization” reinforces the narrow views that being gay is only defined by sexual behavior and that gay men are, in fact, obsessed with sex.

Furthermore, the implication that “thousands of churches” will pull their sponsorship of Boy Scout troops suggests that those churches only supported the organization because it was anti-gay. It reduces Christianity to a one-belief religion, and that beliefs, “No gays allowed.” Such preposterous predictions are an insult to all churches who work with the Scouts, whether they supported the discriminatory policy or not, and ignores the other noncontroversial values the Scouts espouse.

NOM’s decision to engage in an issue outside their mission merely because involved the inclusion of the gay community further reflects how the group works against LGBT people, not for marriage.

Fast food workers strike in New York (Credit: Salon)

A new Tumblr that started on May 14 called “fast food crime wave” depicts workers holding handwritten signs with messages about employer abuses. Common complaints include having to pay when the register is short, being denied overtime pay or working off the clock, and not being allowed to take any breaks. One woman pointed out that she doesn’t get a break even though she’s pregnant:

A man who appears to work at Domino’s says he’s only paid $5.65 an hour, below minimum wage:

Another says he has to pay for any food if he gets robbed:

Their stories match up with a new report that 84 percent of New York City fast food workers say they have been victims of wage theft or work hour abuse on the job. A larger study in 2009 found that of nearly 4,500 low-wage workers surveyed, two-thirds experienced at least one pay-related violation in the week before.

Wage and hour lawsuits against these kinds of abuses have also been on the rise for five years, increasing 10 percent this year.

China and Iran have shared a position as cyber-bogeymen over the past year, but a new report from the Wall Street Journal about Iranian infiltration of U.S. energy firms shows why their cyber-assaults could pose a greater immediate threat to U.S. national security.

While China pursues aggressive cyber-espionage campaigns against major U.S. companies and news sources, Iranian-backed hackers are more overtly hostile — targeting critical infrastructure vulnerable to sabotage or engaging in disruptive economic actions, like when Iranian-backed hackers leveraged data centers to wage a massive distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack against financial institutions.

From a strategic standpoint, the differences between the Chinese and Iranian strategies make sense. The Chinese government is interested in the long game and is a key player in the global market, while as Tom Kellerman, Vice President of cybersecurity firm Trend Micro, told the Wall Street Journal, “Iran has been successfully ostracized from global economics” so destructive cyber attacks serve “not only empower themselves but to signal to the Western world they are capable in cyberspace.” Proving that capability may be especially important to Iran because its nuclear program was the target of Stuxnet malware, reportedly jointly developed by U.S. and Israeli cyber-forces.

The more recent Iranian-backed attacks go a step further than outside disruptions like the DDoS attacks according to U.S. officials, showing that hackers penetrated the computer networks running energy companies and gained access to the software controlling oil and gas pipelines. With access to that control-system software, hackers could potentially manipulate the flow of fuel, possibly even trigger power outages — something that could have truly devastating national security implications, especially considering that about 85 percent of the energy infrastructure the Department of Defense depends on is commercially owned.

In a March worldwide threat assessment statement to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the Director of National Intelligence identified cybersecurity threats as the top threat facing the United States, specifically noting while “advanced cyber actors” like Russia or China were unlikely to launch a devastating attack on our power grid, but “less advanced but highly motivated actors could access some poorly protected U.S. networks that control core functions, such as power generation, during the next two years.”

A report on the vulnerability of the electric grid released by the offices of Congressman Edward Markey (D-MA) and Henry Waxman (D-CA) last week suggests a substantial number of those networks are poorly protected, with many only implementing mandatory cybersecurity measures from the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) that are often several years behind the current cyber-threat landscape.

Right to Life of Michigan is currently pushing to prohibit the state’s insurance providers from covering elective abortion services, which would force women to pay additional money to purchase a separate insurance rider to terminate a pregnancy. If the group collects enough signatures, the issue will appear on the 2014 state ballot. This week, when reporters asked Right to Life president Barbara Listing why the proposed insurance ban doesn’t include an exception for rape or incest, she compared those sexual crimes to car accidents and floods.

“It’s simply, like, nobody plans to have an accident in a car accident, nobody plans to have their homes flooded. You have to buy extra insurance for those,” Listing explained.

Jessica Tramontana, a spokesperson for the liberal activist group Progress Michigan, called Listing’s comments “appalling” and pointed out that rape can’t be compared to those catastrophic events because sexual assault isn’t actually an accident. “Nobody can anticipate being the victim of a crime,” Tramontana said.

Ultimately, requiring women who become pregnant from rape to negotiate additional red tape to terminate that pregnancy forces them to bear an even greater burden for the crime perpetrated against them. Women should not have to plan ahead for rape and buy a second insurance plan in advance, just as they should not have to carefully select the clothing they wear to prevent being sexually assaulted.

Preventing insurance plans from covering abortion is a popular anti-choice tactic — and represents just one of many ways that anti-choice politicians successfully drive up the cost of women’s reproductive rights — but Michigan’s stringent version of the policy is out of step with the national standard. The federal government, 32 states, and the District of Columbia all offer exceptions in the cases of rape and incest in their bans on public funding for abortion. Americans also overwhelmingly support ensuring that victims of rape and incest have access to abortion services.

This isn’t the first time that abortion opponents have suggested that sexual assault is somehow analogous to car trouble. In 2011, when Kansas was considering the time type of insurance ban, a state lawmaker suggested that women could plan ahead for rape just like drivers plan ahead by bringing a spare tire.

Over the course of three weeks, WUSA 9 anchors examined almost 100 taxis on Saturday night between 6:00 pm and 2:00 am. Anchors followed several black customers, both actors and real people, as they tried to hail a cab around DC. Of those passengers who were picked up, the investigation revealed that white customers got a cab in as little as 15 seconds, while black passengers sometimes waited for almost 15 minutes.

In a few cases, black passengers were ejected from the cab in favor of white passengers, or because the cab wouldn’t go to the black person’s destination.

Watch it:

(HT: Huffington Post)

The insurance company initially sued to keep the Anna Louise from using a windfall of tax credits to renovate the home. The federal low-income housing credits required the Anna Louise to use the funds over 30 years, finally giving the struggling house security in the neighborhood. As Cincinnati City Beat reported at the time, Western & Southern’s PAC and the CEO’s family donated heavily to one city council member who changed his vote last minute in an attempt to sabotage the Anna Louise’s development agreement. When it cleared anyway, Western & Southern sued as a stalling mechanism — as long as there was legal action, the Anna Louise would be banned from claiming the much-needed funds. With the credits set to expire at the end of the year, Cincinnati Union Bethel, the nonprofit that runs the Anna Louise, faced the choice of either giving up the house or the funds that could help them set up elsewhere.

Cincinnati Union Bethel told the Associated Press they gave in to the sale because they couldn’t afford to sustain a legal fight with the insurance giant. One woman who took shelter at the house for two years after leaving an abusive relationship explained, “Western & Southern had the money to fight and the Anna Louise Inn didn’t. When you have that much money and you want something, eventually you’re going to get it.”

The two-year legal fight devolved rapidly into nasty attacks on the women at the house. John Barrett, The CEO of Western & Southern, accused the Anna Louise of taking “a bailout” from taxpayers in order to prop up “a homeless shelter and prostitution recovery center.” A key tactic in the company’s crusade against the safe house was to vilify its residents as degenerates who did not belong in the fast-developing neighborhood.

Western & Southern has already bought up a sizable portion of Cincinnati’s historic Lytle Park neighborhood, where the house is located. The company developed Cincinnati’s tallest building in 2011 and plans to turn the Anna Louise into a boutique hotel as it has done with other historic properties in the area. When asked about the public relations cost to his company over the past two years, Barrett told the Cincinnati Enquirer, “If you believe in something, you believe in it. That’s what this company’s always done: stood up for its rights.”

The Yale survey, “Public Support for Climate and Energy Policies in April 2013,” dates back to 2008 and is an important barometer for public opinion on clean energy and climate issues.

In general, the year’s survey finds that support for prioritizing clean energy remains high, albeit with a recent dip, due in part to the increasing polarization of the American electorate.

Still, strong majorities support renewable energy and regulation carbon dioxide as a pollutant.

Here is more from what’s in the report, by the numbers:

• 87 percent say President Obama and Congress should make developing sources of clean energy a priority.

While there are some programs at the federal level that have aided the development of clean energy and transportation, such overwhelming support shows that the government could and should do more. After all, fossil fuel extractors make bad neighbors. Some states are getting the message and clean energy development creates jobs. Colorado recently moved to strengthen its Clean Energy Standard. Other states’ clean energy sectors face threats. North Carolina has been fighting off efforts to repeal its clean energy standard this year (that fortunately failed).

• 70 percent say global warming should be a priority for the President and Congress.

There are billions of reasons to make it one. President Obama has more than three years left to make it a big one.

• 59 percent think the U.S. should cut greenhouse gas emissions on its own — even if other countries do not.

33 countries and 18 sub-national jurisdictions will price carbon in 2013. This comprises 850 million people and nearly a third of the global economy. China has a pilot carbon trading program in 7 cities and provinces, and is seriously considering an absolute cap on its carbon emissions. The EU has had one for years. The ball is in America’s court, and there are some easy solutions to pursue.

• 70 percent think industry should be doing more to address global warming, and 52 percent think the President should.

So does Steven Chu, the last Energy Secretary.

• 68 percent want to regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant.

Putting a price on carbon finds support in unexpected quarters, such as conservative economists, prominent Republicans, and large corporations.

• 61 percent want to regulate it through a carbon tax on fossil fuel companies that pays down the debt.

Other polls have found similar support for putting a price on carbon as a way of paying down the debt — yet even larger majorities support making clean energy a priority. The Congressional Budget Office recently released a report making the budgetary case that doing nothing about climate change will cost more than spending money now to regulate carbon.

• 59 percent want to eliminate all fossil fuel subsidies.

Which is important, as the U.S. is the world’s largest fossil fuel subsidizer. It would help the budgetary situation, not to mention help level the playing field for new renewable industries.

• 55 percent support requiring utilities to produce more than 20 percent renewable power, even if it costs more.

The legislation is there — whether Congress will act is another story.

• 50 percent have not heard of the Keystone XL pipeline.

Evidently more reporting is required.

Were your opinions reflected in the poll?

Desperation to reunite with family often drives immigrants to risk death and attempt border crossings. The sobering reality of why illegal re-entry continues can be summarized by one migrant deported to Mexico who said, “My heart is there. My body is here.” From the time of Operation Streamline — an effort in which federal officials expedited the process of sentencing 40 to 80 immigrants at a time in a mass-deportation trial — criminal prosecutions and imprisonment were required for immigrants who were unlawfully present. In these processes, immigrants who often times do not understand the extent of their criminal charges and are rushed by lawyers to sign a paper announcing their guilt, are charged with a misdemeanor offense after the first conviction and then with a felony charge if they are caught again with illegal re-entry.

Although international human rights law suggests prosecuting undocumented immigrants with civil, not criminal charges, there are no explicit prohibitions for the use of criminal sanctions against illegal re-entrants. As a result, an immigrant are still be treated as a criminal despite not being a public safety threat.

Federal prosecutions of immigration-related offenses have made illegal re-entries the top criminal charge for undocumented immigrants who are caught coming into the U.S. In 2010, “twenty percent of defendants charged with illegal re-entry had prior felony convictions for violent offenses,” yet criminal convictions have skyrocketed by 227 percent in a ten-year period. Many of these immigrants are seeking to reunite with their loved ones, so an immigration bill should frame its priority on not criminalizing family reunification.

A House immigration reform bill has not come out yet, but GOP members have been focused on approaching immigration through a piecemeal process that eliminates the naturalization process. Without a path to citizenship however, important sticking points like family reunification would be made more difficult because of the long wait times that immigrants have to go through in order to see their relatives.

Although Sen. Grassley (R-IA) had sought to maximize penalties for people charged with illegal entry and reentry through his failed amendment, the current Senate immigration bill still would include harsh consequences. The House bill, while unknown, would likely take a similar penalizing attitude as hinted by more senior ranking Republican committee members who dispenses with a family reunification concept in lieu of a chain migration effect.

The twin goals of this strategy were to drain the U.S. of resources by baiting it into expensive, open-ended military interventions like those in Iraq and Afghanistan, with the resulting anger over those interventions causing more people to join Al Qaeda’s cause.

I was reminded of that by these specific remarks from President Obama’s speech on counterterrorism yesterday:

The AUMF is now nearly twelve years old. The Afghan War is coming to an end. Core al Qaeda is a shell of its former self. Groups like AQAP [Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula] must be dealt with, but in the years to come, not every collection of thugs that labels themselves al Qaeda will pose a credible threat to the United States. Unless we discipline our thinking and our actions, we may be drawn into more wars we don’t need to fight, or continue to grant Presidents unbound powers more suited for traditional armed conflicts between nation states. So I look forward to engaging Congress and the American people in efforts to refine, and ultimately repeal, the AUMF’s mandate. And I will not sign laws designed to expand this mandate further. Our systematic effort to dismantle terrorist organizations must continue. But this war, like all wars, must end. That’s what history advises. That’s what our democracy demands.

There was a lot to chew on in the president’s speech, and obviously we’ll have to wait and see how much weight the president actually puts behind some of the reforms he suggested, but I think this core passage represents another important shift away from the rhetorical construct of a “Global War on Terror.”

Meanwhile, on the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, four of the Senate’s leading hawks — Republican Senators John McCain (AZ), Lindsey Graham (SC), Saxby Chambliss (GA) and Kelly Ayotte (NH) — responded as you might expect to the prospect of the loss of that rhetorical construct, which has proven extremely politically beneficial to hawks over the last decade.

“I believe we are still in a long, drawn-out conflict with Al Qaeda. to somehow argue that Al Qaeda is ‘on the run’ comes from a degree of unreality that, to me, is really incredible,” said McCain, adding: “Al Qaeda’s ‘on the run’ is expanding all over the Middle East from Mali to Yemen and all places in between and to somehow think that we can bring the authorization of the use of military force to a complete closure contradicts the reality of the facts on the ground. Al Qaeda will be with us for a long time.”

“The President’s speech today will be viewed by terrorists as a victory,” Chambliss declared.

Graham took the chance to ding the president on Iraq: “Iraq is a country that went through hell, was inside the 10-yard line, the surge did work and it’s falling apart because the president chose not to leave any American soldiers behind when 10,000 or 12,000 would have made a difference.”

Leaving aside why Graham thinks 10,000 or 12,000 U.S. troops would have made a difference in Iraq when over 100,000 couldn’t stop it from descending into civil war in 2006 (not to mention the tension between claiming to support democracy in Iraq while bashing the president for not working harder to circumvent democracy in Iraq in order to keep U.S. troops there), it’s remarkable that these Congressional leaders essentially want America to keep playing into Al Qaeda’s “bleed until bankruptcy” strategy.