2011 November 29

Romney Claims George W. Bush Flip-Flopped On Abortion Too

During an interview with Fox News’ Bret Baier this evening, Mitt Romney defended himself from his record of flip-flopping on abortion by arguing that George W. Bush did it, too. “I am pro-life. I did not take that position years ago. And that’s the same change that occurred with Ronald Reagan, with George W. Bush, with some of the leaders in the pro-life movement.” Watch it:

Romney’s claim is surprising. Having researched George W. Bush’s record, we’re not aware of any point at which Bush was pro-choice. In fact, in his memoir Decision Points, Bush says his mother showed him a dead fetus in a jar at a young age, which solidified his pro-life views forever. Romney told Baier tonight that he has read Decision Points.

Perhaps Romney was trying to allude to Bush’s father, George H.W. Bush, who was pro-choice for the early part of his career.

Are Political Relatives Really A Draw For Networks?

Lost in the ongoing kerfuffle over whether Chelsea Clinton is qualified to report human interest segments for NBC News, and whether her hiring represents a conflict of interest for the network, seems to be a quality question: is the very private daughter of the man who was president more than a decade ago actually a draw for anyone? I kind of get the Meghan McCain thing as entertainment, if not as news — she’s got a well-cultivated personality, she’s built a following on social media; at the USA Network-The Moth storytelling event I went to earlier this fall, she comported herself with a winning degree of sophistication and self-deprecation. But I don’t know that anyone tunes in to MSNBC for her.

And it’s even more bewildering to think that people would tune in for Chelsea Clinton. One of the more admirable things the Clintons ever did as parents was to fight hard to protect Chelsea’s privacy, especially at a time when Bill’s behavior was inviting withering media scrutiny. As an adult, she kept to that pattern, working a series of bland private sector jobs and venturing out only to campaign for her mother in 2008. I looked at some of her wedding pictures (Hillary rocked a really awesome caftan in the days beforehand) in a cursory way. But the same preservation of her privacy and stringent avoidance of public life or public service that don’t make her a particularly qualified journalist don’t make her a particularly interesting person either. I have no idea what Chelsea Clinton’s unique lens on the world is, and nothing about the deal with NBC has made it seem like I should really care. I say this not to be callous, but to suggest it’s puzzling that the network would pursue a hire that invites disapproval without a clear upside.

GOP Lawmaker Behind Pennsylvania’s Election Rigging Scheme Is Considering A Run For U.S. Senate

This fall, Pennsylvania Republicans tried their hands at rigging the 2012 election for the GOP by proposing that the state divide up its Electoral College votes according to which candidates carried each Congressional district, essentially guaranteeing as many as 12 of the state’s 20 electoral votes to the Republican presidential candidate “for free.” Now, the man behind that the devious effort — state Senate Majority Leader Dominic Pileggi (R) — is considering a U.S. Senate bid against Sen. Bob Casey (D). Pileggi told PoliticsPA yesterday that he has “been approached by a number of people” and that he has “deep concerns about the direction our nation is taking.” According to PoliticsPA, Pileggi “has already met with national Republicans to discuss a bid, along with party leaders in Harrisburg and southeast Pennsylvania.” While “flattered by the question,” he has “made no decision but will continue to listen on how I can best serve the Commonwealth and the Country.”

No Wonder Obama Is Cool To Climate Action

McKibben: Britain’s Promotion of Canada’s Tar Sands Oil Is Idiotic

A deal to sell tar sands oil in Europe would outweigh any good the UK might do with all its other climate change measures

– by Bill McKibben, first published in the UK Guardian

The EU has provisionally imposed penalties severe enough to make it difficult for Canada to sell tar sands oil in Europe, but Britain is working to undermine that stance. Photograph: Jeff Mcintosh/AP

Rise of the Nature-Inspired Robots (Videos)

Former Israeli Intel. Chief Warns Of Regional War If Israel Strikes Iran

Former Mossad chief Meir Dagan warns that a military strike against alleged Iranian nuclear weapons facilities will lead to a regional war with Iran, Hezbollah and possible Syria. Dagan, who previously described an Israeli air strike on Iran as the “stupidest thing I have ever heard,” pushed back against critics like Defense Minister Ehud Barak. Barak had slammed Dagan for openly criticizing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s hawkish rhetoric toward Tehran. “We are not living in an undemocratic country; in democratic countries, even people like me have the right to express their opinions,” said Dagan in an interview on the Israeli television program “Uvda.”

Sen. Grassley Praises Judge Who Blocked Citigroup Settlement: ‘Judge Rakoff Is Right’

Yesterday, Federal Judge Jed Rakoff formally rejected a deal between Citigroup and the Securities and Exchange Commission that would have allowed the bank to pay $285 million to settle charges that it misled investors in mortgage securities. Rakoff said that there is “an overriding public interest in knowing the truth about the financial markets,” after previously deriding the settlement as “just for show.” Today, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) threw his support to Rakoff, saying in a statement, “Judge Rakoff is right to ask for information. The SEC needs to provide a clear rationale for the enforcement penalties in this case and in others. Otherwise, the public is in the dark about whether the settlements are adequate and the court’s role is reduced to a rubber stamp. A settle and slap-on-the-wrist approach has not and will not deter the defrauding of investors.”

Interior Streamlines Clean Energy Empowerment For Tribal Lands

Highlighting Secretary Ken Salazar’s commitment to clean energy development, the Department of Interior has announced new rules intended to accelerate the construction of wind and solar energy projects on Native American lands. Old regulations for the 56 millions acres held by Interior in trust for Native American tribes required a review for every lease, no matter the size, by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Under the proposed rules, the bureau will have a 30-day time limit on residential leases, and a 60-day limit on solar and business leases, with some activities only requiring tribal review.

Rick Perry’s Memo To The 50 Million Uninsured: ‘Everyone In America Has Access To Health Care’

Gov. Rick Perry (R) — whose home state of Texas has the highest uninsurance rate in the nation — told a crowd in Saint Anselm College this afternoon that “everyone in the state of Texas has access to health care, everyone in America has access to health care,” adding, “from the stand point of all people in this country, our government requires that everyone is covered.” Watch it:

Perry is referring to the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act or (EMTALA), a law Ronald Reagan signed, which requires hospitals that accept Medicare or Medicaid funding to treat patients for emergency medical conditions regardless of legal status or ability to pay. But EMTALA only applies to medical emergencies. “So, yes, if you’re actively giving birth, you can expect to receive care at an emergency room,” Austin Frakt and Aaron Carroll explain. “If you’re actively having a heart attack, you can also get emergency room care. If you’ve been seriously harmed in a car accident, you can go to the emergency room.”

Patients with chronic conditions that don’t require emergency interference, however — the millions of Americans with diabetes who need “regular access to medication to stay alive,” asthma patients, or women diagnosed with breast cancer — would not be able to find needed treatments under the Act and Perry himself would not have received the care or back surgery he needed under the “requirement.” Fortunately, he has benefited from years of tax payer funded health insurance coverage as governor and seems to believe that other Texans have as well.

Obama’s Compromises on the Environment are as Destructive as Bush’s Ignorance

Anti-Heroes And The Stalled Ambitions Of American Television

I’m a bit late to David Haglund’s piece suggesting that ambition is ruining television, but I don’t think he’s entirely right about that. And I don’t think Erik Kain’s suggestion that it’s just a matter of quality writing is quite on the mark either (though no matter what kind of show you’re doing, writing matters).

It’s not that wanting to tell big, sweeping societal stories is a problem. It’s that prestige television has tended to be ambitious in the same way, collectively convinced that the best way to tell those stories and to get us to feel like morally sophisticated consumers is to get us to identify with anti-heroes (and they’re almost all men) and to test our tolerance even when their behavior becomes repulsive and unjustifiable. There are so many cable shows that do this, and it’s been proven so critically and commercially successful that going down that route is no longer really a sign of ambition, but of calculation. I tend to be bored with Boardwalk Empire‘s grand machinations, but I’m fascinated by its side trips into domestic dramas: I’d watch a show re-centered around Angela and Margaret. I’ll get excited when someone lays down a new marker, when they make us identify with a wholly different kind of character. Ambition is as much about innovation and perspective as about size. And venality or outright evil aren’t the only innovative sources of American stories.

North Carolina General Assembly Votes To Repeal Landmark Racial Justice Law

Gov. Bev Perdue (D-NC) signs the Racial Justice Act into law back in August of 2009.

Our guest blogger is Sarah Bufkin, a former intern for ThinkProgress

Acceding to the demands of state prosecutors, the North Carolina Senate passed a bill yesterday by a 27-14 vote that will effectively repeal the Racial Justice Act, jeopardizing what had been heralded as a step forward for the criminal justice system. The act, which a coalition effort passed in a Democrat-controlled legislature back in 2009, allows death row inmates to appeal on the grounds that racism played an operative role in their sentencing. The first defendant to make a case under the act, Marcus Robinson, will present his evidence in January.

For Professor James Coleman, Jr., who runs the Duke Law Center for Criminal Justice and Professional Responsibility, yesterday’s repeal effort is just the latest attempt by state prosecutors to overturn a law that they think poses a threat to their offices:

“This week, after their failed attempt to prevent a senior black Superior Court judge from hearing the Racial Justice Act claims filed by inmate Marcus Robinson, all but one of the state’s district attorneys signed a letter asking the General Assembly to repeal the law, immediately. They want to avoid responding to the mountain of evidence indicating they have used peremptory challenges to deny qualified black jurors their constitutional right to serve on capital juries. Rather than defend their conduct in court, they seek to put it beyond the reach of the law.

The district attorneys opposed the Racial Justice Act in the legislature and lost. The district attorneys tried to obstruct the Racial Justice Act in the courts and lost. The district attorneys tried to recuse a judge they viewed as unfavorable and lost. At every turn, the district attorneys delayed implementation of the act.”

In their letter to the North Carolina General Assembly, the 43 district attorneys expressed their opposition to the measure, arguing that it could release more than 25 criminals back onto the streets and that it will clog up the court system with unnecessary and expensive cases.

But it’s tough to see where these criticisms are coming from. The statute clearly states that inmates can only have their sentences commuted from death to life without the possibility of parole, and only two cases have even been granted hearings. All in all, the total cost of the Racial Justice Act so far has cost much less than the amount the state would spend on another execution, estimates Coleman.

The act itself, which allows inmates to make their case through the use of statistical evidence, promised a new approach to dealing with institutionalized racism by avoiding the issue of the prosecutor’s intent.

Darryl Hunt, a black man who served 19 years in prison for a crime he did not commit, spoke about his experience with the criminal justice system at the NC Senate hearing on the bill yesterday.

“I was one vote away from the death penalty,” he told lawmakers. “One. And I had eleven whites and one black on my jury. If you do not think that race played a factor in my case, in me being arrested, charged, and convicted, then you’re not living here in North Carolina.”

The bill’s fate is now up to Gov. Bev Perdue (D-NC), who praised the Racial Justice Act’s passage back in 2009. She has not given any indication, however, whether or not she plans to veto the legislation. Ken Rose, one of the attorneys representing Marcus Robinson, believes that Perdue’s past support for the law will continue but cautions that the House vote to override the veto will be highly contested.

Given that a defendant in a case with a white victim is more than 2.5 times as likely to receive the death penalty in North Carolina, a veto appears the only just decision.

Minnesota Governor Issues Anti-Bullying Executive Order

Today Minnesota Gov. Mark Dayton (DFL) issued an executive order creating a task force to address bullying in the state’s schools, calling on lawmakers to abandon party lines and imploring Minnesotans to “treat each other with dignity and respect.” Minnesota’s largest school district, Anoka-Hennepin, has had a particularly disturbing spate of suicides and earned much criticism for its faulty “neutrality” policy, which prevents teachers from talking about LGBT issues, even as students are being bullied for being gay. Tammy Aaberg, whose son Justin committed suicide last year after being taunted for being gay, has called for a new law enumerating protections for LGBT students as several other states have done. State Sen. Scott Dibble (DFL) showed his support for such a bill, but said he is “dubious about the opportunity for passage of a bill that’s meaningful in this coming legislative session.”

Anti-Science Zealot Bret Stephens Denies Reality Of Extreme Weather Destruction

Conservatives who attack climate science are becoming increasingly shrill and ideological, as the mountains of evidence that burning fossil fuels is disrupting the climate grow. In Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal, Bret Stephens declares the global warming “religion” to be dead:

So what to make of the U.N.’s latest supposedly authoritative report on extreme weather events, which is tinged with admissions of doubt and uncertainty? Oddly, the report has left climate activists stuttering with rage at what they call its “watered down” predictions. If nothing else, they understand that any belief system, particularly ones as young as global warming, cannot easily survive more than a few ounces of self-doubt.

Meanwhile, the world marches on. On Sunday, 2,232 days will have elapsed since a category 3 hurricane made landfall in the U.S., the longest period in more than a century that the U.S. has been spared a devastating storm. Great religions are wise enough to avoid marking down the exact date when the world comes to an end. Not so for the foolish religions.

Other conservative pundits piled on, loving Stephens’ anti-science rant. “The warm has turned,” adds the Daily Caller’s Sean Medlock, who goes by the pseudonym Jim Treacher. “Buh-bye, global warming. Say hello to the Ptolemaic system for us!” The Daily Mail’s Don Surber, calls climate science “phrenology.” Climate science is a “substitute religion,” argues PJ Media’s Ed Driscoll.

These zealots are not only ignoring the incontrovertible warming of the planet, they are dismissing the catastrophic weather that has caused billions in damage and suffering for millions of Americans in the last six years:

In 2011 alone, there has been the freak Alaska hurricane-strength storm, the freak Snowtober storm, the extremely destructive Hurricane Irene, freak storms in Illinois and Iowa, historic flooding from Tropical Storm Lee, killer storms in Indiana, record rainfall in New York and Montana, and the horrifying tornado outbreak in the Southeast. So far there have been 14 different billion-dollar weather disasters in the United States this year.

Oddly, Stephens did not mention that News Corp, the Wall Street Journal’s owner, is working to fight climate change and reduce its carbon footprint.

Abortion Foes Claim Government Subsidized Birth Control Is Religious Persecution

Conservatives have been up in arms ever since the Obama administration announced that all health insurers will be required to cover birth control and other women’s health services without charging co-pays. GOP Rep. Steve King (IA) warned that free birth control would make America a “dying civilization,” while Fox contributors mused that it was a liberal conspiracy to “eradicate the poor,” and chided women who use it to just “stop having irresponsible sex.”

Now some Republicans and religious groups have adopted a new meme for attacking government subsidized birth control, claiming it’s religious persecution against Christians. The Catholic bishops, “one of this country’s largest and well funded lobby groups,” say that the birth control mandate violates Church teaching, and Fox News has gleefully picked up the argument. Fox hosts Steve Doocy and Neil Cavuto ran segments with titles like “Anti-Catholic Administration? Critics Complain About Admin’s Policies” — disguising conservatives’ assault on women’s rights as a matter of religious freedom.

That’s despite the fact that the administration included a “conscience clause” to the new rule — essentially a caveat allowing “religious institutions that offer insurance to their employees the choice of whether or not to cover contraception services.” The provision mirrors the most common exemption in the 28 states that already require employers to offer contraceptive coverage if they cover other prescription drugs and devices.

It’s a bit hard to follow the logic of religious groups that say non-Church members using birth control somehow infringes on Christians’ rights or to believe that religious organizations are terribly oppressed in more than half of the nation. Providing access to safe, effective contraception is actually the best thing government could do to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies and abortions. But some Christian groups believe that birth control is tantamount to abortion and have been pushing to have it criminalized through “personhood” legislation.

Disappointingly, the Obama administration is considering caving to the demands of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) and other far right religious groups that want him to significantly expand the exemption to include all religiously affiliated entities and potentially deny affordable contraception to the millions of women who are employed by these organizations.

An overwhelming majority of Americans — 78 percent — support government subsidized birth control and almost 99 percent of women rely on it (in fact, just 2 percent of sexually active Catholic women have not used some form of modern contraception). Yet the line of attack conservatives have chosen illustrates their habit of making themselves the victims of the story, instead of the people aggressively trying to impose their religious doctrine onto others and constrain women’s choices.

GOP Willing To Raise Payroll Taxes On 113 Million Households To Spare 345,000 Millionaires From Tiny Surtax

Senate Democrats yesterday introduced legislation — as they’ve been promising to — that would extend a soon-to-expire payroll tax cut, and pay for it by implementing a surtax on income above $1 million. Republicans, of course, are opposing the plan, reviving their false claims that taxing the very wealthiest Americans will hit small businesses and job creators.

In essence, the GOP is saying that it’s willing to allow higher taxes on middle- and lower-income Americans in order to prevent tax increases on the very wealthy. According to an analysis by Citizens for Tax Justice, provided to the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent, the surtax would affect exceedingly few taxpayers, while a payroll tax cut expiration would wallop more than 100 million households:

The surtax would impact around 345,000 taxpayers, roughly 0.2 percent of taxpayers, or one in 500 of them. Those people would pay on average an additional 2.1 percent of their overall income, or just over 1/50th of that overall income, in taxes.

In a majority of states, only one-tenth of one percent, or one in 1,000 taxpayers, would pay this surtax.

And how many people would benefit from the payroll tax cut? According to the group, around 113 million tax filing units — either single workers or families that include more than one worker — would see their payroll tax cut extended. That’s a lot of people — well over 113 million workers, in fact.

Allowing the payroll tax cut to expire at the end of the year would hit middle-class families with a $1,000 tax increase, providing a substantial drag on the economy. In fact, according to Macroeconomic Advisers, allowing the payroll tax cut to lapse “would reduce GDP growth by 0.5 percent and cost the economy 400,000 jobs.” Other estimates are even worse, with Barclays’s estimating that a payroll tax increase could say 1.5 percent off of GDP growth.

The GOP has, time and again, blocked any legislation that would increase taxes by the slightest amount on the ultra-wealthy, even with tax revenue at a 60 year low, taxes on the rich the lowest they’ve been in a generation, and income inequality out of control. Instead, Republicans would prefer to raise taxes on the middle-class, knocking the economy where it can least afford it.

Occupy Birmingham Plans To Protest Against Alabama’s Immigration Law

Occupy Birmingham plans to demonstrate against Alabama’s anti-immigrant law. On Saturday, the group will protest the detention of undocumented immigrants at the Etowah County Detention Center. The Birmingham News reports that organizers will hold an information session about HB 56, Alabama’s extremely harmful immigration law, before picketing outside of the detention center and writing holiday cards to detainees. “We at Occupy Birmingham stand firmly against tax payer dollars funding what is at heart a nativist, if not racist policy that is damaging our economy and communities,” the group wrote about the state’s law in an announcement for the protest.

A Visit To The New Islamic Art Galleries At The Metropolitan Museum

It’s really impossible to say enough good things about the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s revitalized and reopened Galleries for the Art of the Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia and Later South Asia, an astonishingly rich journey through the centuries and a cornucopia of artistic influences and achievements. I spent three hours at the exhibit, a meandering walk around a central courtyard, full of screens and deep chairs that let you better examine gorgeous manuscripts, before Thanksgiving. And I came away from it with a powerful sense not just that I’d seen something beautiful, but that the exhibit provides a striking sense of the long arc of history.

The galleries are a reminder that constraints can be a help, rather than a hindrance, in the production of astonishing art. It’s unfortunate that so much of the contemporary discussion around Islam and art ends up involving things like prohibitions on depictions of the Prophet Muhammad (a trend that some Muslims have exacerbated by reacting to free speech with violence), rather than the alternative ways Muslim artists have found to depict the divine. One of the things that struck me most strongly was the way that artists, in forms ranging from pottery, to weaving, to stone-carving, to competitions to create enormous, tiny, and innovative versions of the Koran, bring language to life. This isn’t just a matter of illuminating manuscripts. The language itself is alive, and stunning. In some pieces, the words literally grow into plant life on the page. In others, they spin off into geometry, languidly circling the rim of a bowl or packed tight into woven patterns. The signature of Suleyman the Magnificent isn’t just some colonial-style assertion of will through flourishes and scale: it’s gilded with the weight of his authority. Taken together, the galleries are a stunning testament to the sense that language carries divine power with it.

The show also provides an astonishing sense of scale — and of impermanence. It’s exciting to see the Chinese influence on Syrian Islamic figurative art, and to get a sense that the world was a more connected place than we imagine it to be in a book of constellations with deities who look more Chinese than Persian or Turkish. Similarly, there are beautiful pieces by Iraqi potters who were mashing up Chinese stoneware traditions and Islamic calligraphy. But as big, and as far-reaching as the Muslim-ruled world was, it didn’t last as a coherent whole: the juxtapositions of influences and assimilated styles are striking precisely because they seem out of such a distant past. The show includes a style of carpet known as Bellini Carpets not because that’s the name of the artist who made them, but because the Venetian painter Giovani Bellini painted his 16th-century Madonnas standing on carpets with their distinctive keyholes: Christianity takes Islam’s place on the world stage even in art history.

But it’s a useful reminder not to assume that any dominant power will persevere. Madonnas striding across Persian carpets may seem like a revelation in a couple of centuries, rather than the norm. As they present old art in a fresh and exciting new way, the revitalized galleries accomplish a rare trifecta, giving us a sense of and context for “what is past, or passing, or to come.”

Gingrich Changes His Position: ‘Waterboarding Is, By Every Technical Rule, Not Torture’

Back in 2009, when the public debate on torture ramped up after President Obama released the Bush-era memos authorizing torture techniques on terror suspects, a Fox News host asked Newt Gingrich if he thought waterboarding is torture. “I can’t tell you,” the former House Speaker said, “I honestly don’t know.”

Now that Gingrich has had some time to think about it (while being influenced by some of his fellow GOP presidential candidates), he seems to made a decision. Today at a town hall event at the College of Charleston in South Carolina, an audience member asked Gingrich where he stood on waterboarding. “Waterboarding is, by every technical rule, not torture,” the former House Speaker said, to which the crowd applauded. Gingrich seemed to justify his position claiming that the technique is legal under international law:

GINGRICH: Waterboarding is by every technical rule not torture. [Applause] Waterboarding is actually something we’ve done with our own pilots in order to get them used to the idea to what interrogation is like. It’s not — I’m not saying it’s not bad, and it’s not difficult, it’s not frightening. I’m just saying that under the normal rules internationally it’s not torture.

I think the right balance is that a prisoner can only be waterboarded at the direction of the president in a circumstance which the information was of such great importance that we thought it was worth the risk of doing it and I do that frankly only out of concern for world opinion. But we do not want to be known as a country that capriciously mistreats human beings.

Watch the clip:

Not only is the so-called “ticking time bomb” scenario Gingrich refers to a red herring, waterboarding actually is illegal under international law because it is considered a torture technique. Last year, the U.N.’s Special Rapporteur on Torture Juan Mendez said waterboarding is “immoral and illegal,” and his predecessor agrees.

The U.S. military doesn’t have much use for waterboarding either, considering the Army Field Manual bans it. And Gingrich, or any other of the Republicans running for president who support waterboarding and other torture techniques, might have a hard time getting it to happen as the CIA said it is unlikely to go down that road again. “When you have years-long investigations into past practices, it’s unlikely that you want to spend a minute engaged in them,” one CIA official said recently.

“Very disappointed by statements at SC GOP debate supporting waterboarding,” Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) tweeted earlier this month. “Waterboarding is torture.”