Statement by the Press Secretary on S. 2318

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For Immediate Release January 15, 2013 Statement by the Press Secretary on S. 2318

On Tuesday, January 15, 2013, the President signed into law:

S. 2318, the "Department of State Rewards Program Update and Technical Corrections Act of 2012," which authorizes the Secretary of State to pay rewards for information leading to the disruption of transnational organized crime activities, the arrest of persons involved in such activities, or the arrest of foreign nationals wanted by international criminal tribunals.

Blog posts on this issue January 17, 2013 1:45 PM ESTWatch: Four Kids Who Want President Obama to Do Something About Gun Violence

Watch Hinna, Taejah, Julia and Grant read the letters they wrote to President Obama, asking him to do something about gun violence.

January 17, 2013 1:24 PM ESTRegional Round Up: Now is the Time

Editorial pages across the country today are lauding the President’s broad approach to address curbing gun violence in our nation

January 17, 2013 11:39 AM ESTCountdown to Affordable Health Insurance

Learn more about the new Health Insurance Marketplace, which will kick in come October and mark the beginning of new health insurance and tax credits for millions of Americans.

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Obama gathering online support for gun violence plan

By Alicia M. Cohn - 01/17/13 12:33 PM ET

President Obama on Thursday is promoting a new page for Americans to express their support of the president’s plan to reduce gun violence.

Stand with the President to reduce gun violence: OFA.BO/STKzAr, twitter.com/BarackObama/st…

— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) Jan. 17, 2013

The page, which asks signers to give their email address and name if they agree with the plan that Obama announced on Wednesday, is hosted on Obama’s campaign website and is part of a full-court press by the administration to publicize the plan and drum up public support. According to a tweet from Jim Messina, the campaign manager for Obama's reelection campaign, “thousands” have already signed.

Messina also sent out an email to Obama’s still-robust campaign list on Thursday directing them to the petition, according to CNN.

Obama is looking to the public for support in his aggressive plan to tackle gun violence this year, building on momentum of the public outcry following the particularly brutal mass shooting in a Newtown, Conn., elementary school that left 20 children dead. Petitions have become a popular way for the public to express opinions on the issue.

A petition asking Obama to "immediately address the issue of gun control through the introduction of legislation in Congress" was the fastest petition ever to reach the required signature threshold for an official White House response on the White House’s petition site "We the People" last month. According to the White House, gun violence quickly became one of the most popular petition issues since the launch of the site, where anyone can start a petition in hopes of reaching the ears of the president.

Obama, in his response to the petitions, urged the public to stay motivated and keep pushing for action against gun violence. He made similar comments in his presentation of a comprehensive plan on Wednesday, looking for the public to help amp up the pressure on Congress to act on a series of legislative requests.

"This will not happen unless the American people demand it," Obama said Wednesday.

"I will put everything I've got into this, and so will Joe," Obama said, referring to Vice President Biden, whom Obama appointed to lead a task force on gun control. 

"But I tell you, the only way we can change is if the American people demand it. And by the way, that doesn’t just mean from certain parts of the country. We're going to need voices in those areas, in those congressional districts, where the tradition of gun ownership is strong to speak up and to say this is important.”

The page asking for email addresses and zip codes will likely serve a two-fold purpose to bolster Obama’s argument that a majority of Americans representing a wide swath of the country agree with his plan -- which includes legislation and 23 “executive actions” addressing guns, mental healthcare and violence in media -- and replenish his mailing list with known supporters. 

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With ‘Legit,’ FX Tackles Disability, Independent Living, And Sex—And Makes It All Very Funny

Over at The New Republic earlier this week, I wrote about how FX’s new comedy Legit, which premieres tonight at 10:30, encapsulates an underlying theme that animates all of the network’s programming: what does it mean to be a legitimate and successful American man? While not ever FX watcher is loyal to the network’s entire lineup, if you drop in on its comedies and dramas, you’ll find men dealing with everything from how to be better fathers to their children than their own were, coping with the consequences of sexual double-standards, and grappling with downward mobility or weaker economic positions than their partners. Legit, an enormously agreeable show that’s simultaneously sweeter and tarter than many of FX’s offerings, fits in that formula and expands it in some exciting new directions.

Legit has a relatively simple premise: a stand-up comic, Jim (stand-up comedian Jim Jeffries), who lives with his divorced friend Steve (Second City alumn Dan Bakkedahl), who he met when Jim came to live with Steve’s family as an exchange student (Steve tells his mother, who hates Jim, at one point that “I wanted a Swedish female!”), decides to become more “legitimate,” with a vague sense of what that might mean. But he finds some purpose when Steve encourages Jim to reconnect with Steve’s younger brother Billy (DJ Qualls), who has muscular dystrophy, and who is confined to an assisted-living facility. Deciding that Billy, who is 31, has been overly coddled and needs to experience more of life, Jim first takes it upon himself to break Billy out of the facility for occasional adventure, and then decides to move Billy in with him and Steve and begin caring for him. The show, run by Peter O’Fallon, starts off a bit rough around the edges. But it grows quickly in its first couple of episodes, and Legit‘s portrayal of both life with disability and the friendships among maturing men has the potential to be something special.

To start with, it’s very funny. Many of the stories are drawn directly from Jeffries’ experiences with his friend with muscular dystrophy or O’Fallon’s helping to care for his father, who died of ALS. Much of the punch of Jim’s stories comes from his character’s utter lack of social awareness. Sometimes, he’s hilariously entitled, spinning out a fantasy about having a child with a terminally ill woman who will die once their child is old enough to get him beers from the fridge, saving him from having to be a good husband, and guaranteeing that his child will always be grateful. And in other moments, that lack of respect for social norms mean Jim’s capable of caring for Billy without inhibition, whether he’s helping the other man urinate because he’s decided the bottle Billy uses is a genius invention, or helping him through the awkwardnesses of Skpye dates and cybersex. Jim may believe that Billy’s going to be the perfect wing man, and that taking him out and helping him develop a social life may mean that he’s “going to get so much pussy.” But despite his frattish inclinations, Jim spends a lot more time hanging out with Billy at home than taking him out and making use of him. If selfishness set Jim on his quest to become legitimate, it seems that once he’s started visiting Billy again, Jim finds himself in it for the pure enjoyment of Billy’s company—and the joy of tweaking Billy’s mother, Janice.

Steve is an appealing straight man to Jim’s wildness, and an ongoing illustration of the limitations of Jim’s approach to life, and the practical realities of caring for someone with muscular dystrophy. When the two men take Billy on an exuberant road trip to a Nevada brothel so he can lose his virginity, they deposit him in a room with a cheerful prostitute (and Jeffries real-life girlfriend), only for Steve to realize that he’s forgotten to undress his brother. After Jim hands out dating tips to Steve and Billy, Steve initially finds success with an attractive woman from his office by complimenting her eyes, only to end up stuck with variations on that theme after he finds he doesn’t have anything else to talk to her about. Good intentions and low inhibitions aren’t enough, as it turns out, to navigate every situation or to negotiate a truly fulfilling life.

While it might have been preferable to have an actor with muscular dystrophy playing Billy, Qualls turns in a very funny, physically astute performance that’s enriched rather than inhibited by Billy’s limited mobility. And Legit‘s done better in other areas. Nick Daley, who has Prader-Willi Syndrome, as Billy’s roommate Rodney, who does an impressive Donald Trump impersonation and is a genius at Wii bowling, skills that help him fit in just fine during a rager at Jim and Steve’s house, and the morning after, when he, Steve, Jim, and Ramona, a nurse from the long-term care facility marathon Dance Moms. And Daley isn’t the only one, though I’ll avoid discussing those other performances until the episodes have aired. As the world of the show expands, Legit has the potential to become a showcase for actors with disabilities, an important service for viewers at home, and a key niche in the Hollywood economy, where work for actors with disabilities is often highly episodic. That its only real competition is Glee says a great deal about the state of Hollywood’s representations and employment of actors with either physical or intellectual disabilities.

I hope to see Legit do better on its female characters, who initially are sorted into buzzkill and saint categories, though subsequent episodes show signs of improvement and warmth. But it’s exciting to see Legit get better with each of the three episodes sent to critics in advance of the premiere. And it’s even better to see a show do the right thing in giving work to actors with disabilities and putting issues like sexuality, independent living, and nursing care on television, and to do it with charm, love, and wicked humor, rather than the taste of spinach or the condescension of a Very Special Episode.

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Defense Secretary: ‘I Don’t Know Why The Hell People Have To Have Assault Weapons’

President Obama’s new set of proposals on gun violence prevention are enjoying broad support within his administration — including the support of Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta. The Secretary not only heads up the armed forces but is himself a veteran and hunter, making his recent comments in favor of the initiative salient to the heated debate of how gun owners will receive the proposals.

Speaking in front of troops, Panetta’s comments came after a soldier critiqued that Obama was “tearing apart our Second Amendment.” In a (fairly foul-mouthed) defense, Panetta pointed out exactly how they relate to the military:

“Who the hell needs armor-piercing bullets except you guys in battle?” Panetta told the soldiers at the U.S. Army Garrison Vicenza in northern Italy. “For the life of me, I don’t know why the hell people have to have assault weapons.”

Panetta, who said he believes in the Second Amendment and has been a longtime duck hunter, was asked about the issue by a soldier who wanted to know what steps the Obama administration was going to take to deal with attacks in schools that “don’t have to do with tearing apart our Second Amendment.”

The Secretary is not the only military man to lend his voice to Obama’s cause. Retired Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the former Commander of US and ISAF forces in Afghanistan, voiced his own support for Obama’s initiative yesterday.

Law enforcement officials have also lent their weight to the call for stronger gun safety laws. Former New York City Police Commissioner Howard Safir called for more responsible gun laws in an op-ed yesterday — and his opinion has been widely echoed by local law enforcement who daily witness the dangers of firearms.

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Majority Of Americans Believe Food Workers Need Paid Sick Days

Illustration by Chris Ware, Lexington Herald-Leader

79 percent of workers in the food industry and a whopping 90 percent of restaurant workers report having no paid sick days, despite the obvious hazard posed by food workers coming to their jobs while sick. According to a new survey commissioned by the National Consumer League, Americans believe that should chang.

57 percent of respondents said it is “very important or important that the restaurant they frequent provide workers with paid sick days.” (In a slight disconnect, fully 92 percent of those polled said “it’s very important or important that the servers and cooks in the restaurants they frequent do not cook or serve while sick.”)

“Without having the benefit of paid sick days, restaurant workers can’t afford to be sick and are forced to come to work — and handle consumers’ food — when they should be at home resting,” said NCL’s Michell McIntyre. “Providing paid sick days is very clearly in the interest of consumers and the workers who handle their food.”

But lack of paid sick days is a problem that extends beyond the food industry. Overall, 40 percent of private sector workers and 80 percent of low-income workers do not have a single paid sick day. 20 percent of workers report either losing their job or being threatened with dismissal for wanting to take time off while sick.

The U.S. is currently experiencing the worst flu season in a decade, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that workers exhibiting flu-like symptoms stay home from work. But for a huge number of workers — including those handling the food that untold numbers of Americans will eat — staying home simply isn’t a possibility. (HT: Joe Satran)

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How to Get High School Dropouts Into 'Recovery'? Ideas Bloom Across US

Six classes shy of the credits she needed, she thought that she could skip getting a diploma and still find a college that would train her to be a medical assistant.

"I've been doing nothin' for a whole year," Ms. Quinones says. Actually, she's been running into walls – spending hundreds of dollars on in-person and online programs that made false promises to get her a high school credential. Meanwhile, her friends graduated and went on to college, including her boyfriend. This fall, she says he told her, " 'I can't have a girlfriend that didn't do nothin' in life.' " So she decided, "OK ... I have to do it for myself and for everybody else.... I have to get my diploma."

Nationally, about 600,000 students drop out of high school in a given year. And more than 5.8 million 16-to-24-year-olds are "disconnected" – not in school and not working. In 2011, governmental support (such as food stamps) and lost tax revenues associated with disconnected youths cost taxpayers more than $93.7 billion, according to Measure of America, an initiative of the Social Science Research Council, a nonprofit based in New York.

"Education has become so key to getting into the labor market [that] we call dropping out 'committing economic suicide' at this point," says Kathy Hamilton, youth transitions director for the Boston Private Industry Council, which partners with the school district to run the Boston Re-Engagement Center (REC), a hub for helping dropouts like Quinones complete their education.

Dropout prevention has been in the spotlight in recent years. But increasingly, school districts are also realizing that they can do more to bring young adults back into the fold.

It's called "dropout recovery," with districts deploying a host of strategies – from door-to-door searches for dropouts to alternative schools where people earn free college credits while taking their final high school courses. The efforts are taking place in dozens of cities ranging from Camden, N.J., to Alamo, Texas.

(Read More: Education Nation: Rural Arkansas Town Rethinks High School)

America has "long had a forgiving education system, where people can come back at any time to complete a diploma or finish a degree, but we haven't been structured to reach out and reengage youth who have dropped out," says Elizabeth Grant, chief of staff in the US Office of Elementary and Secondary Education. "As educators across the country saw more-accurate graduation and dropout numbers and recognized the size of the challenge, our school systems started to get more responsive."

The US Department of Education launched the High School Graduation Initiative in 2010 to support school districts doing dropout prevention and recovery work. Competitive grants were given out to 27 districts and two states, for a total of just under $50 million.

A Personalized Approach

At least 15 cities have organized stand-alone reengagement centers. They offer a one-stop, personalized case-management approach – bringing together schools, private businesses, workforce-development experts, and other partners to try to reconnect young adults with a promising future.

Since 2008, New York City's centers have reenrolled about 17,000 students, and the centers in Newark, N.J., have brought back 3,900, according to the National League of Cities.

Staff members at Boston's REC listen to each student's story, share struggles from their own school days, help them find the right school or alternative program to fit their needs, and stay in touch once they've reenrolled.

That's what won the trust of Quinones. In November she started coming every weekday to take online credit recovery courses at the REC, a bare-bones set of offices and computer labs with inspirational posters.

In just a month – keeping normal school hours, though that's not required – Quinones finished four courses and is on track to earn her diploma in February. Although she feels "stuck" in geometry, a teacher is on hand to guide her.

"In high school, teachers never really sat with me.... Having teachers take out their time ... to go through one problem for four hours, that means a lot," she says.

(Read More: Economy Adds 155,000 New Jobs; Rate Holds at 7.8%)

The REC "has expertly directed students toward options that are best suited to their needs, rather than falling into the habit of putting them back in the school where they were previously unsuccessful," says Chad d'Entremont, executive director of the Rennie Center for Education Research & Policy in Cambridge, Mass.

Since 2010, the REC has re-enrolled more than 1,300 students. About 7 out of 10 persist for at least a year. The tracking system for the total number of graduates is still being developed, but at least 160 earned their diploma within about a year, Ms. Hamilton says, and she predicts many more will do so over a longer time frame.

Dropouts are a diverse and difficult group to get across the finish line. About 1 in 5 says he or she lacks parental support, and another fifth are parents themselves, according to the 2012 High School Dropouts in America survey by Harris Interactive. Other reasons for dropping out include mental illness, the need to work, too many school absences, and uninteresting classes. Some dropouts have spent time in prison or on the streets.

Settings that offer flexible schedules and sustained personal attention are often required to help them master the skills they need.

"I'm always very honest with them: 'It's going to be tough, but it doesn't mean it's going to be impossible. And I'm going to help you envision yourself with a cap and gown a year from today, or two years from today,' " says Carolina Garcia, a dropout recovery specialist at Boston's REC.

An 'Early College' Approach

In Texas, an "early college" approach to dropout recovery is gaining national attention.

At least 10 districts are motivating dropouts to come back not just to finish high school, but also to take community-college courses free of charge – sometimes enough to earn an associate's degree or a training certificate.

The most notable is the Pharr-San Juan-Alamo district (PSJA), where 90 percent of the population is Hispanic and about a third is low income.

When Daniel King became superintendent there in 2007, he faced a dropout rate of about 18 percent. Nearly half the dropouts that year were seniors – 237 of them. "I felt I needed to immediately do something ... [because] the more time that went by, the harder it would be to find them and reengage them," he says.

In a matter of weeks, he had teamed up with South Texas College to launch the College, Career, & Technology Academy (CCTA) for 18-to-26-year-olds – in leased space in a former Wal-Mart.

(Read More: Taco Bell Responds to Teen's Request for a Custom Speedo)

He put up banners around town with the message: "You didn't finish high school. Start college today." That, combined with a door-to-door search for students who had dropped out, resulted in 223 of those seniors coming back to school.

By May 2008, about 130 had earned their diplomas. To date, more than 1,000 students have graduated from CCTA, more than half of them with college credits.

Along with core academic courses, former dropouts start with a college-success course that solidifies their study skills. Then they move on to career and technical-education courses such as welding or medical terminology.

The state allows both the school district and the community college to receive per-pupil funding, so the education at CCTA is free to students. Texas is also unique in funding high school students up to age 26. (Most states stop at around 21.)

"Before I came to this school, I had zero drive in me," says CCTA student Edgar Rodriguez. He was out of school for a semester and a summer while being "reckless" and "irresponsible," he says.

At CCTA, teachers tutored him for exams that had previously stumped him. The college-success class, taught by his former English teacher, inspired him to want to pursue teaching.

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Study Links Oil And Gas Extraction To Ozone Chemicals

By Tom Kenworthy

Oil and gas development in an area of Colorado that is in the midst of a huge drilling boom is contributing more than half of the chemical pollution that contributes to the formation of ozone, a new study by University of Colorado scientists has found.

The research by scientists at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) at the University of Colorado may have important implications for the shale oil and shale gas revolution underway in many parts of the U.S. It may have particular relevance to other rural areas of the West – in the Uinta Basin of northeastern Utah and Sublette County, Wyoming south of Jackson — that have been plagued by high ozone alerts in recent winters, sometimes higher than the Los Angeles basin.

Both the Utah and Wyoming regions have intensive oil and gas development and the ozone alerts in those areas have often been described as a puzzle with possibly many contributing factors. A $5 million study is underway in the Uinta Basin to ferret out the likely causes of the region’s ozone problem.  Ozone pollution is a factor in a range of health problems including respiratory illnesses and asthma.

In the Colorado study, published online in the journal Environmental Science and Technology, researchers determined that 55 percent of the airborne volatile organic compounds that contribute to ozone in the town of Erie were coming from oil and gas operations. The scientists were able to make that precise determination using a recently discovered chemical signature that can differentiate between oil and gas emissions and those coming from vehicles and other sources.

“We had a very strong signature from the raw natural gas,” said Jessica Gilman the CIRES study lead author in an interview with the Boulder Daily Camera newspaper.

The town of Erie is located in Weld County, a 4,000 square mile county northeast of Boulder and east of Fort Collins. That county, which overlays a hot new oil and gas play in the Niobrara Formation, has nearly 20,000 oil and gas wells, though it had about 15,000 during the study period.

Recent intensive development of oil and gas that is creeping into urban and suburban areas has prompted widespread concern in some Weld County communities about health and social impacts, with residents complaining about ill effects ranging from nosebleeds and headaches to asthma attacks.  The town has imposed a six-month moratorium on new drilling permits, and another community to the north, Longmont, has voted to exclude drilling within city limits, prompting a suit by the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission that regulates drilling.

Tom Kenworthy is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

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“One Size Fits Some” Health Policy

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