Today, a Federal District Court in Boston ruled that Section 3 of Defense of Marriage Act (“DOMA”) — the section of the 1996 law which denies federal benefits to legally married same sex couples — is unconstitutional, stating that it interferes with the traditional state right to define marriage and forces the state to “violate the equal protection rights of its citizens.” [Read the decision HERE.]
The decision is composed of two separate challenges, one brought by the state of Massachusetts and the other by Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders (GLAD) “on behalf of eight married couples and three surviving spouses from Massachusetts” who have been denied federal benefits available to heterosexual married couples.
In his decision, U.S. district court Judge Joseph Tauro concluded that “there is a historically entrenched tradition of federal reliance on state marital status determination,” and found that DOMA not only violates the tenth amendment but also “induces the Commonwealth to violate the equal protection rights of its citizens” embodied in the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment.
“DOMA plainly conditions the receipt of federal funding on the denial of marriage-based benefits to same-sex married couples, though the same benefits are provided to similarly-situated heterosexual couples,” the Court ruled:
As irrational prejudice plainly never constitutes a legitimate government interest, this court must hold Section 3 of DOMA as applied to Plaintiffs violates the equal protection principles embodied in the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
The decision is a milestone, but is expected to be appealed by the Justice Department. In the case, the federal government maintained that it “has the right to set eligibility requirements for federal benefits — including requiring that those benefits only go to couples in marriages between a man and a woman.”
“The next step in the case is for the federal government to decide whether it will appeal Judge Tauro’s ruling to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. That decision should come within the next 60 days,” GLAD said in a press release.
Cross-posted on The Wonk Room.
In her campaign to capture the Nevada Senate seat from Harry Reid (D), Tea Party maven Sharron Angle (R) has maintained a hardline view on abortion. Earlier this year, Angle insisted that women should not have control over their reproductive rights in cases of rape or incest, because it would “interfere with God’s ‘plan’ for them.” In a more recent interview obtained by the Huffington Post’s Sam Stein, Angle refused to back down from her “pro-life sensibilities” and offered a more jarring take on rape victims. On the right-wing Alan Stock Show in June, Angle suggested that “a young girl raped by her father” deal with the “horrific situation” by making lemons into lemonade:
STOCK: What do you say then to a young girl, I am going to place it as he said it, when a young girl is raped by her father, let’s say, and she is pregnant. How do you explain this to her in terms of wanting her to go through the process of having the baby?
ANGLE: I think that two wrongs don’t make a right. And I have been in the situation of counseling young girls, not 13 but 15, who have had very at risk, difficult pregnancies. And my counsel was to look for some alternatives, which they did. And they found that they had made what was really a lemon situation into lemonade. Well one girl in particular moved in with the adoptive parents of her child, and they both were adopted. Both of them grew up, one graduated from high school, the other had parents that loved her and she also graduated from high school. And I’ll tell you the little girl who was born from that very poor situation came to me when she was 13 and said ‘I know what you did thank you for saving my life.’ So it is meaningful to me to err on the side of life.
Angle is not shy in making glib remarks about Nevadans enduring hardship. In another interview last month, Angle determined that those without jobs are “spoiled” and that she is “not in the business of creating jobs.” Incidentally, June was also the month Nevada became “the new no.1” in the U.S. for unemployment.
With the country facing unsustainable long-term structural deficits in the coming years, more and more lawmakers have been willing to broach the once untouchable subject of cutting defense spending to save money. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD) said a few weeks ago that “any conversation about the deficit that leaves out defense spending is seriously flawed before it begins.” Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) added that “there are billions of dollars of waste you can get out of the Pentagon, lots of procurement waste. We’re buying some weapons systems I would argue you don’t need anymore.”
Sen. Johnny Isakson (R-GA) tried to sing the right notes yesterday, saying with regard to defense spending that “there are savings everywhere. We should be looking, as a Congress, toward finding savings.” However, Isakson that bristled at the notion that a program the Pentagon has repeatedly said it doesn’t want should be cut:
One expenditure, the second engine for the F-35 program, did receive Isakson’s support. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has recommended President Obama veto any defense spending bill that includes funding of the second engine. “The second engine makes sense from a standpoint of having a redundant system to protect the aircraft,” he said.
Gates has called the second engine “costly and unnecessary,” while U.S. Air Force Secretary Michael Donley has referred to it as “another rock” on top of the F-35 program.
Isakson is hardly alone in paying lip service to cutting defense spending while opposing actual cuts in weapons systems that no one wants. Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN) has said “if we are going to put our fiscal house in order, everything has to be on the table. We have to be willing to look at domestic spending, we have to be able to look at entitlements, and we have to look at defense.” But Pence also supports the second engine.
And then there is conservative darling Sarah Palin, who said in a speech last month that “no government agency should be immune from budget scrutiny,” but then proceeded to say that we absolutely must purchase all the weapons Gates says we don’t need. “[Gates] said we have to ask whether the nation can really afford a Navy that relies on $3 [billion] to $6 billion destroyers, $7 billion submarines and $11 billion carriers,” Palin said. “Well, my answer is pretty simple: Yes, we can and yes, we do.”
In the last 10 years, the defense budget has almost doubled to $549 billion, and in real terms baseline defense spending “is now higher than at the height of the Reagan buildup, and total defense spending now exceeds what we spent any time since World War II.” As Ryan has said, “you know the current Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, he’s going a pretty good job of identifying obsolete weapons systems that are costing tens of billions of dollars that aren’t needed.” Now if only he could get Congress to go along.
Last week, ThinkProgress reported that Rep. Steve King’s (R-IA) effort to sign up members to his discharge petition — a legislative maneuver to force a vote on repealing health reform — appeared to be gaining steam. Many right-wing House Republicans quickly signed the petition, followed by more moderate members, like Rep. Charles Djou (R-HI).
But King’s petition seems to have lost momentum. No new members have signed onto the petition in the last week, and members who have wavered on repeal, like Rep. Dave Reichert (R-WA), still have yet to sign on. At a town hall in Mayville, Wisconsin on Tuesday, Rep. Tom Petri (R-WI) told ThinkProgress that he would not be interested in joining King’s repeal crusade, preferring rather to make changes to the law later:
TP: Do you support the proposals floated by people like Steve King who say, ‘we’ve got to repeal health reform.’ He has a discharge petition but he says he’ll file another piece of legislation after the midterms as well. Would you support that type of effort?
PETRI: I think we need to redo health reform and change a lot of it. I’m not in favor of repealing every last thing in it. I’m sure out of those two thousand pages, there are one or two things that make a lot of sense. I thought, frankly, the effort to try to help people who did not have health reform coverage because of preexisting coverage and the like was worth making.
Watch it:
While Petri at least values some aspects of health reform, King and his cohorts have explicitly said they want to repeal every last part of the law, including the ban on preexisting coverage discrimination. King has repeatedly called out his fellow Republicans who only want to repeal “the most egregious” parts of health reform, arguing that true conservatives should favor a “100% repeal.”
While many conservatives have called for tax cuts aimed at benefiting corporations and multimillionaires, economist Arthur Laffer — a former member of President Reagan’s Economic Policy Advisory Board — went a step further today. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Laffer argued that the best way to stimulate the economy is to have “no federal taxes at all.” Here is what Laffer proposed to eliminate:
No income tax, no corporate profits tax, no capital gains tax, no estate tax, no payroll tax (FICA) either employee or employer, no Medicare or Medicaid taxes, no federal excise taxes, no tariffs, no federal taxes at all, which would have reduced federal revenues by $2.4 trillion annually. Can you imagine where employment would be today? How does a 2.5% unemployment rate sound?
For over a month, Republican-led filibusters have successfully blocked unemployment benefits legislation because it would add $33 billion to the deficit. Laffer’s $2.4 trillion revenue cut would increase the deficit by nearly 100 times that amount. After Laffer suspends all federal taxes, only $1.2 trillion would remain, the equivalent of what would be needed to pay for Social Security and Medicare. But because Laffer is eliminating the FICA tax, Social Security and Medicare would be cut. Funds would be greatly restricted for anything else, from national defense to veterans’ benefits to crime-fighting and prevention. But not to worry, says Laffer, defunding the government would magically cause unemployment to plummet to 2.5 percent.
Yesterday, Hawaii Gov. Linda Lingle (R) vetoed legislation extending civil unions to both same- and opposite-sex couples. In her announcement, she said that civil rights should be subjected to the “collective wisdom” of majority rule. As Igor Volsky pointed out, Lingle conflated civil unions with same-sex marriage. “Unlike marriage, civil unions are only recognized in the state in which they are performed and couples do not carry the benefits of civil unions across state lines,” he wrote.
In her first radio appearance after her veto, Good As You noted that Lingle continued to pretend that the legislation would undermine traditional marriage. She also claimed that if people believe marriage equality for same-sex couples is a “civil rights issue,” they should also be concerned that close relatives can’t marry either:
LINGLE: For those people who want to makes this into a civil rights issue, and of course those in favor of the bill, they see it as a civil rights issue. And I understand them drawing that conclusion. But people on the other side would point out, well, we don’t allow other people to marry even — it’s not a civil right for them. First cousins couldn’t marry, or a brother and a sister and that sort of thing. So there are restrictions, not to put it in the exact same category. But the bottom line is, it really can’t be a civil right if we are restricting it in other cases, and it’s been found to be legal in those other cases, that the restrictions.
Later in the segment, “Joe from Silver Spring, Maryland” called in and pointed out that in Hawaii, first cousins actually can get married. Lingle said that she had no idea whether or not that was true in the state she governs:
JOE: And the second point is, Gov. Lingle, you talked about restrictions on marriage. I have a first cousin named Kate, and I’m looking on the Department of Health website for Hawaii, and I could marry my cousin Kate in Hawaii, but I cannot marry the love of my life in Hawaii, so — or in terms of a civil union with him. So, I hope you will take that into consideration. [...]
LINGLE: Whether or not a first cousin can marry in Hawaii, I’ll have to go back and check. I don’t know that that’s untrue, but let me go back and check on that.
Lingle also claimed that “almost everyone I know” has friends who are “gay and involved in committed relationships,” but she stressed that same-sex marriage and civil unions are “not about a decision for individual couples. It’s about the impact that it has on society.” Listen here:
Lingle’s argument is popular with conservatives. Recently, former Arkansas governor and current Fox News personality Mike Huckabee said that legalizing marriage equality would “be like saying, well, there are a lot of people who like to use drugs, so let’s go ahead and accommodate those who want who use drugs. There are some people who believe in incest, so we should accommodate them. There are people who believe in polygamy, so we should accommodate them.”
However, these statements are just a “dodge” to “distract people from the injustice of denying same-sex couples the same opportunity to marry that different-sex couples want to preserve for themselves,” as Jon Davidson of Lambda Legal has written:
The problem with “slippery slope” arguments…is that they assume that society and the law can’t make distinctions between situations that are different from one another. But we can tell apples from oranges. For example, that women got the right to vote does not mean that infants are next.
Davidson also notes that while there may be “compelling reasons to ban incestuous and polygamous marriages, including genetic concerns about the children of incestuous marriages, the importance of preventing coercion and abuse within families, and concerns about how young girls and women have fared under polygamy,” there are no such reasons to ban same-sex marriage.
Transcript: More »
Ernest J. Pagels Jr. is a long shot contender for the Wisconsin GOP Senate primary, vying for the opportunity to run against Sen. Russ Feingold (D) this September. And perhaps there’s a reason. Pagels recently ran an ad on a local Milwaukee television station outlining what he plans fight for as one of Wisconsin’s two U.S. senators:
PAGELS: Hi my name is Ernest J. Pagels Jr., I’m a born again Christian, a U.S. veteran and a very conservative Republican. I’m running for U.S. Senate from the state of Wisconsin and if elected I will initiate a bill to outlaw homosexuality, abortion, and all forms of pornography. I think these are three ills that are plaguing our nation and bringing it down. And if elected, I will also initiate a bill for a Constitutional amendment which prohibits Congress and the President from spending more money than they bring in. My name is Ernest J. Pagels, Jr. and I hope you vote for me on September 14.
Watch it:
Wonkette notes that Pagels tried to sue some people because their children allegedly vandalized his car.
The Bush tax cuts are scheduled to expire in January. President Obama has expressed a desire to preserve the cuts for the middle class while letting tax rates for the wealthy reset to where they were during the Clinton administration. Conservative lawmakers and pundits have been fearmongering that allowing the tax cuts for the wealthy to expire will kill job creation and small businesses (despite the fact that fewer than 2 percent of small business owners will be affected). Last night on CNBC, Wall Street Journal editorial board member Stephen Moore went so far as to say that he can’t “see the sense” of allowing cuts for the rich to expire, and then advocated that taxes be raised on the poorest Americans in order to finance more tax cuts for the rich:
I just don’t see the sense of this. In fact, if I could have my ‘druthers, I’d raise the ten percent tax rate to fifteen percent and lower the [top] rates.
Watch it:
Adopting such a plan would only exacerbate income inequality that is already the worst it has been since the 1920’s. According to the latest data, “the gaps in after-tax income between the richest 1 percent of Americans and the middle and poorest fifths of the country more than tripled between 1979 and 2007.” The top 1 percent of families now receive nearly 25 percent of the country’s income, after earning less than 10 percent in the 1970s. This year the Bush tax cuts will give millionaires more in tax breaks than 90 percent of Americans will make in total income.
Many conservatives have been criticizing the Obama administration for what they regard as a harsh treatment of BP in the wake of its Gulf oil spill. Kentucky GOP Senate candidate Rand Paul called the White House pressure on BP “un-American.” Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX) apologized to BP (and later apologized and then unapologized for the apology) for what he called a White House “shakedown” of the oil giant after BP agreed to create a $20 billion escrow account to compensate claims resulting from the spill.
Greg Sargent reports that yesterday on a local Nevada radio show, the state’s GOP Senate candidate Sharron Angle joined in, calling the BP escrow account a “slush-fund”:
CALLER I wanted to know what she thought of the $20 billion slush fund and whether or not government should be able to do that to a private company.
ANGLE: Well, the short answer is no, government shouldn’t be doing that to a private company. And, I think you named it clearly, it’s a slush fund. … But everyone in the petroleum industry shouldn’t be penalized for one bad person’s actions. It would be like throwing us all in prison because one person committed murder. And that’s exactly what’s going on here is it’s an overreaction by government for not the right reasons.
Angle contends that the White House is following “Saul Alinky’s rule for radicals. They are using this crisis now to get in cap-and-trade and every fine and penalty and slush fund.” Listen here:
As Sargent noted, Angle’s comments are particularly egregious “since such funds imply corruption and are often illegal.” Of course, the escrow is not a “slush fund” considering there is no bribery involved, and BP’s money is allotted for a specific purpose: helping victims of the disastrous oil spill which resulted from BP’s negligence. Moreover, BP agreed to set it up and in comments after BP made the deal to set up the account, CEO Tony Hayward took full responsibility and called the escrow account “the right thing“:
“From the outset we have said that we fully accepted our obligations as a responsible party. This agreement reaffirms our commitment to do the right thing. The President made it clear and we agree that our top priority is to contain the spill, clean up the oil and mitigate the damage to the Gulf coast community. We will not rest until the job is done.”
Having had some time to think about it, the caller and I shouldn't have used the term "slush fund"; that was incorrect." My position is that the creation of this fund to compensate victims was an important first step-- BP caused this disaster and they should pay for it. But there are multiple parties at fault here and there should be a thorough investigation. We need to look into the actions, (or inactions) of the Administration and why the regulatory agency in charge of oversight was asleep at the wheel while BP was cutting corners. Every party involved should be held fully accountable.
Last month, Judge Martin Feldman, a federal trial judge in Louisiana, handed down a poorly-reasoned opinion lifting the Obama Administration’s temportary moratorium on new oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. Judge Feldman’s most recent financial disclosure form indicates that he is heavily invested in oil companies.
Today in New Orleans, a three-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit will consider whether to stay Feldman’s decision. According to a new report by the Alliance for Justice, however, it is unlikely that these Fifth Circuit judges will approach the case without the perception of bias.
Judges Jerry Smith and Eugene Davis, both of whom are assigned to today’s panel, attended expense-paid “junkets for judges” sponsored by an oil-industry front group:
[Judge Smith] attended a seminar hosted by the Foundation for Research on Economics & the Environment (FREE) in Big Sky, Montana, for which he was reimbursed transportation, lodging, and meal expenses. FREE is a think-tank that promotes free-market environmentalism rather than environmental regulation and is funded largely by corporations like ExxonMobil and conservative foundations. FREE hosts industry-funded seminars for judges, often including leisure activities such as golf and horseback riding, to “explain why ecological values are not the only important ones.” The year that Judge Smith attended the seminar, FREE received $70,000 from ExxonMobil, of which $20,000 was for “Federal Judicial Seminars,” $30,000 was for “General Operating Support,” and $20,000 was for a “Climate Seminar.” . . .
Additionally, in 2004, 2006, 2007, and 2008, Judge Davis attended the same seminar as Judge Smith run by the FREE Foundation, the free market environmentalism group described above, and sought corresponding reimbursement for transportation, food, and housing. Judge Davis has attended another of other judicial seminars, and in fact, was ranked tenth in the country on a list of judges who accept free trips.
Both men also worked as oil-industry litigators before their appointments to the federal bench, and Judge Davis owns as much as $30,000 in oil investments. The third judge on the panel, Judge James Dennis, has not received any free trips from the oil industry, but he is heavily invested in oil stocks with investments that may total as much as $305,000.
Should this oil-soaked panel nonetheless decide to reinstate the drilling moratorium, the industry may appeal that decision to the full Fifth Circuit. Of the sixteen active judges eligible to hear such an appeal, ten of them have oil investments, including the court’s Chief Judge. In addition to owning as much as $330,000 in oil investments, Chief Judge Edith Jones ranked fourth of a list of judges who have attended junkets.
A full list of the Fifth Circuit’s judges and the extent of their financial holdings in oil companies is copied below: More »
Last year, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) responded to news that AIG executives — who were bailed out with tens of billions of dollars from American taxpayers — were due to receive $165 million in bonuses by saying that they should “follow the Japanese example and come before the American people and take that deep bow and say I’m sorry and then either do one of two things: resign or go commit suicide.”
While committing ritual suicide is a rather extreme “example” to be learned from Japanese society, a more appropriate lesson is how the Japanese structure their pay incentives for corporate executives. Last week, Japanese securities regulators began “requiring Japanese companies to disclose pay for executives making more than 100 million yen ($1.1 million).” BusinessWeek reports that the disclosures reveal that the average compensation of a Japanese CEO is less than one-sixth that of their American counterpart and 16 times more than the average Japanese worker:
Japan is the land of the bargain-basement CEO. On June 30 securities regulators began requiring Japanese companies to disclose pay for executives making more than 100 million yen ($1.1 million). While the headlines went to the top earners—foreigners Carlos Ghosn of Nissan Motor (NSANY) and Sony’s (SNE) Howard Stringer—the big surprise was how few Japanese business leaders take home super-size paychecks.
Although pay for Japanese executives has more than doubled in the past decade, the government says, fewer than 300 people at Japan’s 3,813 public companies earned enough in 2009 to require disclosure, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers. Companies listed on Japan’s stock exchanges paid their chief executives an average of $580,000 in salary and other compensation last fiscal year, PWC estimates, about 16 times more than the typical Japanese worker. Average CEO pay at the 3,000 largest U.S. companies is $3.5 million, including stock options and bonuses, according to the Corporate Library, a research group.
While Japan maintains a relatively low CEO-to-worker pay ratio, the average American CEO now earns 319 times as much as the average American worker. Conservatives often argue that the high level of compensation American executives receive is due to a high level of performance, but this often isn’t the case. For example, Japan-based Nintendo’s CEO Satoru Iwata, who runs the world’s most successful gaming company, received an annual salary last year of only $2.1 million. Meanwhile, U.S.-based Activision CEO Bobby Kotick, took in a $3.1 million salary and $40 million more in stock options, despite running a company with only a fraction of Nintendo’s earnings.
In fact, a study released late last year by researchers Raghavendra Rau and Huseyin Gulen of Purdue University and Michael J. Cooper of the University of Utah that surveyed the performance of 1,500 companies between 1994 and 2006 found that “lavish CEO compensation may in fact undermine shareholder wealth.” The researchers concluded that “the 10 percent of companies with the most highly paid CEOs earned unusually low returns in both the near- and long-term.”
As, “Yukio Sakamoto, CEO of Elpida Memory, Japan’s largest semiconductor maker, whose pay was under the reporting threshold” told BusinessWeek, “My house is small, but I’m happy. I commute by train every day and have never had a problem.” Considering Grassley’s strong words last year, is he willing follow the “Japanese example” by considering legislation that would promote reining in excess executive compensation in the United States?
A few months ago, House Republicans launched an effort called Americans Speaking Out, which purports to give average Americans the ability to offer their input on what Congress should do. It became quickly apparent that the enterprise was little more than a taxpayer-funded PR gimmick to help Republicans market their agenda for this fall’s elections, even as they ignored any ideas they didn’t already support.
Now, under the banner of Americans Speaking Out, House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) has summoned advice from those who he truly seems interested in listening to: lobbyists. Roll Call reports that Boehner has invited “senior Republican lobbyists and top officials from several large trade groups” to a meeting at Boehner’s office to discuss “their suggestions for a new GOP agenda”:
The meeting is part of the House leaders’ initiative called America Speaking Out, which is intended to draw broad input to create a new policy agenda for the party to launch in the fall.
An e-mail invitation sent to more than 20 trade representatives and obtained by Roll Call summoned guests to Boehner’s second-floor office on July 16 “to discuss House Republican efforts to produce a new policy agenda with a small group of trade association leaders.”
Invitees included Dan Danner, head of the National Federation of Independent Business; Bruce Josten, top lobbyist at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce; Jay Timmons of the National Association of Manufacturers; and Joe Stanton of the National Association of Home Builders.
A spokesperson for Americans Speaking Out defended the meeting, saying it was important to meet with large employers. But this is hardly the first time Boehner and his colleagues have run to lobbyists for help coming up with ideas.
As the Wonk Room’s Pat Garofalo has documented, congressional Republicans have “organized a pow-wow with lobbyists in order to devise a strategy” for nearly every piece of major legislation over the past year, from health care reform, to Wall Street reform, to climate change, to a jobs bill.
Three people suspected of having links to al Qaeda were arrested in Norway and Germany today. “They are suspected of committing terrorist crimes, period,” said Janne Kristiansen, the head of Norway’s Police Security Service. The suspects — a Uighur from China, an Iraqi, and an Uzbek — are said to “be linked to bomb plots in the US and UK.”
The Congressional Budget Office has found that the Senate’s climate change legislation would reduce the deficit by $19 billion over the next decade if enacted. “There is no more room for excuses; this must be our year to pass comprehensive climate and energy legislation and begin to send a price signal on carbon,” said the legislation’s authors, Sens. John Kerry (D-MA) and Joe Lieberman (I-CT).
Former White House green jobs adviser Van Jones spoke at the Campus Progress National Conference yesterday and encouraged students to be patient with Obama. “We’re trying to build a pro-democracy movement in a country that at least for eight years was run by straight-up authoritarians, and it’s not going to be easy,” he said. Jones added that despite his “rough exit,” the whole experience was “worth it.”
BP is pushing to have relief wells complete by July 27 on its runaway Gulf well, “weeks before the deadline the company is discussing publicly” of mid-August. At the behest of the federal government, BP is also “readying a series of backup plans in case its current operations go awry.” The moves are seen as a bid to reassure investors.
International Monetary Fund’s latest assessment of the global economy, released today, predicted “the world economy will grow faster than expected this year,” but that the “recovery remains overshadowed by major risks, and the pace of growth is likely to slow next year.”
The New York Times reported today that Walmart is spending millions of dollars and thousands of man-hours fighting a $7,000 fine assessed by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) after a Walmart employee was trampled to death by a crowd at a store on Long Island. Though the company has taken steps to address the problems that led to the unfortunate incident, it is continuing to resist the fine because it feels that “the government is improperly trying to define ‘crowd trampling’ as an occupational hazard that retailers must take action to prevent”:
In contesting the penalty, Wal-Mart has filed 20 motions and responses totaling nearly 400 pages and has spent at least $2 million on legal fees, according to OSHA’s calculations. The dispute has become so heated — and Wal-Mart’s defense so vigorous — that officials at OSHA, an arm of the Labor Department, complain that they have had to devote huge numbers of staff time to the case, including 4,725 hours of work by employees in the legal office.
Walmart’s resistance to OSHA is part and parcel of a Big Business culture that abhors common sense safety regulations. For instance, Massey Energy, which owns the Upper Big Branch mine that exploded in April, killing dozens of miners, was part of “a surge in the number of challenges to mine safety citations [that] has clogged a federal appeals process, allowing 32 coal mines to avoid tougher enforcement measures.” And BP, the company that had a well explode and kill 11 workers, “spent years battling federal regulators over how many layers of safeguards would be needed” at such wells.
The Wonk Room has more.
Army veteran Hector Maldonado is launching an underdog bid for the Republican Senate nomination in Missouri, explaining that, like the tea party movement, he’s frustrated with status-quo politics. Rep. Roy Blunt (R-MO) is the front-runner and expected nominee, but as Fired Up Missouri noted, “Maldonado made a strong move this weekend to shore up the birther vote in the August primary.”
During an interview Saturday, Maldonado — who is a Mexican-born naturalized citizen — repeatedly expressed doubts about President Obama’s citizenship, saying Obama “got away” with running without proving his citizenship, and that the president’s votes should “taken back”:
MALDONALDO: [Secretary of State Robin Carnahan] sent me a letter, and I ignored, it said, you have to prove you’re a citizen. I ignored it. You know, Obama got away with it, so I figured I could get away with it too. … I brought all this documentation…and I asked, is that a public record, now? … And they said, oh yes, absolutely, anyone who wants proof, we have it. I said, okay, can you do me a favor then, I’m sure Ms. Carnahan requested the same of Barack Obama when he petitioned to get on the Missiouri’s ballot to become president. They had no response, nothing.
I was going to picket when Mr. Obama coming into town to raise money for Ms. Carnahan. And I was going to…put up a big sign, telepromter, ‘read here Mr. Obama, Ms. Carnahan, where’s his proof of U.S. citizenship?‘ But I decided something different. I’m actually considering suing Ms. Robin Carnahan, because she discriminated against me. And she actually has said her job is to protect Missouri against fraud and corruption, but the fraud that she created is if she did not make Mr. Obama show proof of citizenship when he petitioned to get on the Missouri ballot. So therefore, the votes that he got from Missouri…should be taken back. And hopefully, other states do the same thing and sue Ms. Carnahan and their other secretaries of states, and sooner or later he’s going to have to prove, based on our demand, that he is in fact a U.S. born citizen.
Watch it:
Fired Up Missouri also noted that Blunt has himself flirted with fringe “birther” conspiracy theory, saying last year, “What I don’t know is why the president can’t produce a birth certificate?” “And I think that that’s a legitimate question,” Blunt added. Eventually, when informed that Obama had indeed produced a birth certificate, Blunt relented.
On Sunday, Octavia Nasr — CNN’s Senior Editor of Mideast Affairs — acknowledged the death of Lebanon’s Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah by tweeting:
Sad to hear of the passing of Sayyed Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah.. One of Hezbollah’s giants I respect a lot..
Fadlallah was well known for a number of relatively liberal views, such as his support for women’s rights and fatwas against the brutal practices of female circumcision and honor killings. But Nasr’s comment was enough to spark fierce outrage from the various precincts of the neocon blog/twittersphere, who went after Nasr for her egregious failure to reduce Fadlallah to an anti-Israel, anti-American terrorist bogeyman.
Responding to the uproar, Nasr wrote, “It was an error of judgment for me to write such a simplistic comment and I’m sorry because it conveyed that I supported Fadlallah’s life’s work. That’s not the case at all”:
Here’s what I should have conveyed more fully:
I used the words “respect” and “sad” because to me as a Middle Eastern woman, Fadlallah took a contrarian and pioneering stand among Shia clerics on woman’s rights. He called for the abolition of the tribal system of “honor killing.” He called the practice primitive and non-productive. He warned Muslim men that abuse of women was against Islam. [...]
Sayyed Fadlallah. Revered across borders yet designated a terrorist. Not the kind of life to be commenting about in a brief tweet. It’s something I deeply regret.
A good clarification, but almost certainly not enough to silence the sanctimonious neoconservative whining.
Mediate now reports that, based on an internal CNN memo, Nasr will be leaving CNN. “[A]t this point,” writes CNN Senior VP Parisa Khosravi, “we believe that her credibility in her position as senior editor for Middle Eastern affairs has been compromised going forward.”
And so, once again, the neocons have managed to help make us all a little bit dumber. The punchline here is that Sayyed Fadlallah was the religious guide, or marja’ al-taqlid, to numerous members of Iraq’s ruling Da’wa Party, including Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. This means that they looked to Fadlallah as a source of religious authority on matters relating to correct Islamic life and practice, and committed to following his edicts on those matters.
So here’s the neocon logic: When a reporter acknowledges the passing of a revered, if controversial figure in a way that doesn’t sufficiently convey what a completely evil terrorist neocons think that figure was — that’s unacceptable. But when the United States spends nearly a trillion dollars, loses over 4,000 of its own troops and over 100,000 Iraqis to establish a new government largely dominated by that same “terrorist’s” avowed acolytes — that’s victory.
One of the worst abuses of the private health insurance industry is the practice of denying claims to pay for necessary care or revoking the coverage of policyholders for frivolous reasons. The Colorado Springs Gazette reports that a leukemia patient — a single mother of two teenage boys — had her coverage revoked after her penny-pinching insurance company, Discover Benefits, claimed that she had underpaid her premium:
La Rosa Carrington has more than enough to worry about. She’s a single mother with two teenage daughters, she’s fighting a type of leukemia that requires five days of chemo a month for four months, and she lost her job in May. So the last thing she needed was news that her health insurance benefits would be terminated because she hadn’t paid her premium in full. The shortfall? One penny. [...]
Under the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, those who meet the eligibility requirements pay just 35 percent of the full COBRA premium. Because Carrington had not yet received a bill showing what her payment would be with the discount, she whipped out a calculator, figured out that she owed $165.15 a month and sent a check for that amount to Discovery Benefits.
But Discovery Benefits determined she owed $165.16, and last week, she received a letter from the company telling her she was short on her premium and her coverage could not be continued. The letter, however, did not tell her how much she owed. She called Discovery Benefits and was aghast when she heard the amount. “I said, ‘Are you kidding?’ How am I going to pay you a penny’”?
After Carrington threatened to go the media, Discover Benefits reviewed their records and determined that she had, in fact, paid the correct dollar amount for her premiums, and decided to reinstate her coverage. June Harryman, a supervisory benefits adviser for the federal Employee Benefits Security Administration regional office in Kansas City, told the paper that the practice of companies revoking coverage after customers allegedly underpaid their premiums by a penny is not uncommon. “We’ve seen it before,” she said. “It’s not the first, and it won’t be the last.”
During an interview with Al Jazeera last month, NASA administrator Charles Bolden noted that President Obama wants to improve U.S. relations with Muslim countries throughout the world and asked Bolden to “find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science … and math and engineering.”
Media Matters’ Julie Millican noted the right-wing freak out that ensued, adding that none mentioned “a single reason why working with Muslim countries to ‘get more people to contribute’ to advancements in science and technology is a bad thing.” And last night on Fox News, host Sean Hannity joined the fray, wondering why Muslims don’t express more gratitude towards America:
HANNITY: I have a hard time with the President’s, quote, “outreach” to the Muslim community in this way. When he spoke to the Muslim world, he didn’t talk about America’s contributions to Kuwait. He didn’t talk about America’s contributions to Kosovo. He didn’t talk about America’s contributions to Indonesia or Iraq. … I don’t hear America being praised enough by the Muslim world. Does the Muslim world give America the credit it’s due?
Watch it:
It isn’t difficult to understand why Muslims around the world aren’t more appreciative of the United States, especially those in Iraq, where President Bush’s 2003 invasion led to the deaths of an estimated 100,000 Iraqis, a bloody two year sectarian civil war, and caused millions more to flee the country or become internally displaced — not to mention the costs of infrastructure damage due to the war.
And apparently to people like Hannity, it’s unclear why Muslims in Afghanistan and Pakistan aren’t thanking U.S.-led NATO forces for such things as predator drone strikes that routinely kill innocent civilians.
Or maybe Muslims around the world don’t appreciate it when American conservatives regularly berate and vilify Islam. Whether it’s such things as wanting a war with their religion, calling them “psychotics,” linking the entire religion to extremism, or advocating the destruction of mosques, it isn’t all that surprising that Muslims around the world don’t praise America more often. In fact, Hannity himself has participated in Muslim-bashing, once likening the Quran to the “Nazi bible” Mein Kempf.
Bush failed to grasp this simple concept as well, saying in 2007, “We liberated that country from a tyrant. I think the Iraqi people owe the American people a huge debt of gratitude.”
On Fox News’ The O’Reilly Factor last night, host Bill O’Reilly hosted Charles Krauthammer to criticize the four Supreme Court justices who dissented from the court’s recent gun rights ruling in McDonald v. Chicago. Though she only joined the dissent written by Justice Steven Breyer, O’Reilly focused his attack on Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, claiming that she “doesn’t care about the Constitution“:
O’REILLY: But my contention is that Ruth Bader Ginsburg in particular — and I’m trying to convince Megyn Kelly of this — doesn’t care about the Constitution. That all of her rulings are based upon her personal belief system about what is good and bad for American society. [...]
You don’t like it? Get a constitutional amendment and overthrow the Second Amendment. Two thirds of the states got to do it. Go ahead and put it on the ballot.
But Ginsburg doesn’t want to do that. She wants to be the end-all dictator here about her ideology. Do I read her wrong?
Watch it:
It’s not surprising to hear O’Reilly’s claim that Ginsburg doesn’t respect the Constitution, since he’s made that charge before. But it is more than a bit ironic, considering his past lack of concern with what the foundational document says. In Nov. 2009, he declared, “I don’t care about the Constitution!” when Fox News’ top legal analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano told him that the Constitution supported Attorney General Eric Holder’s push to try five Guantanamo Bay detainees — including Khalid Sheikh Mohammad — in New York City.
Yesterday, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) signed a bill into law that will allow people to bring concealed weapons into houses of worship. The Times-Picayune reports on the bill:
[State Rep. Henry] Burns’ bill would authorize persons who qualified to carry concealed weapons having passed the training and background checks to bring them to churches, mosques, synagogues or other houses of worship as part of a security force.
The pastor or head of the religious institution must announce verbally or in weekly newsletters or bulletins that there will be individuals armed on the property as members of he security force. Those chosen have to undergo eight hours of tactical training each year. [...]
The bill also allows a house of worship to hire off-duty police or security guards to protect congregants.
Burns said that he proposed the bill so that religious institutions in “declining neighborhoods” can have extra protection against crime. “I was born and raised with Mayberry, riding my bicycle any time of the day or night,” said Burns. “But we live in different times.” To be clear, however, houses of worship can authorize any person to receive a concealed handgun permit after eight hours of training — whether or not the purpose is to help them fight crime.
Last year, Ken Pagano, pastor of the New Bethel Church in Louisville, KY, invited his congregation to bring their firearms to church. “God and guns were part of the foundation of this country,” said Pagano, adding, “I don’t see any contradiction in this. Not every Christian denomination is pacifist.”
Last year, state Rep. Ernest Wooten’s (R) bill allowing concealed weapons on college campuses failed to make it through the legislature. “It is not a gun bill, it is a rights bill,” said Wooten at the time.
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