Category:Iranian People

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Report: Ohio Is Illegally Throwing Poor People In Jail For Owing Money

The Americans Civil Liberties Union on Friday revealed that courts in Ohio are illegally throwing poor people in jail for being unable to pay off a debt.

In a report titled, “The Outskirts of Hope,” (PDF) the ACLU shines a light on a harrowing “debtors’ prison” system in Ohio — one that violates both the United States’ and the Ohio constitution. Ohioans are being jailed for “as small as a few hundred dollars,” despite the constitutional violation, and the economic evidence that it costs the state more to pay for their jail sentence than the amount of the debt.

In its report, the ACLU details the stories of several people sent to debtors’ prison. Jack Dawley owed $1,500 in “fines and costs in the Norwalk Municipal Court,” and was behind on child support payments, leading the Ohio courts to send him to prison in Wisconsin for 3 and a half years. He still struggles with trying to repay the fines. Another victim of the system, single mother Tricia Metcalf, was taken to jail each and every time she wasn’t able to make her $50-a-month payments on fines for writing bad checks. Megan Sharp, whose husband is currently in jail on overdue fines, was unable to pay $300 in fines for driving on a suspended license and went to jail for 10 days. When she got out, she owed $200 more on top of the original amount. Both she and her husband are unemployed.

The AP has a round up of the charges that the ACLU levels against Ohio, writ large:

— In the second half of last year, more than one in every five of all bookings in the Huron County jail — originating from Norwalk Municipal Court cases — involved a failure to pay fines.

— In suburban Cleveland, Parma Municipal Court jailed at least 45 defendants for failure to pay fines and costs between July 15 and August 31, 2012.

— During the same period, Sandusky Municipal Court jailed at least 75 people for similar charges.

Court officials have pledged to look into the accusations.

In 2011, ThinkProgress reported on how the deep recession and loss of employment had led to a return of debtor’s prisons. People were reportedly put in jail for something as small as missing a single furniture payment.

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Fox News Resurrects Death Panels: ‘This Is About People Dying As A Result Of Obamacare’

During an appearance on Fox and Friends Friday morning, Fox News contributor and legal analyst Peter Johnson, Jr. claimed that Medicare beneficiaries who are losing access to critical medical services as a result of sequestration “ain’t seen nothing yet,” as Obamacare will kill off far more Americans in the next ten years.

During a segment discussing how the budget sequester’s two percent cut to Medicare is forcing cancer clinics to deny chemotherapy to thousands of beneficiaries, Johnson told host Steve Doocy that elderly Americans should expect a lot more bad news in the coming decade as a direct consequence of the health care law:

DOOCY: This story is going to disturb you. Cancer clinics across this country are turning away thousands of Medicare patients in need of chemotherapy. You can blame the sequester. Is there more to come? Peter Johnson, Jr. has a prescription for truth. Peter, what is this about?

JOHNSON: This is about people dying as a result of Obamacare and as a result of the sequester. What the oncology association is saying is that thousands of chemotherapy patients who should have received their treatments, their benefits under Medicare, will not based on a 2 percent reduction under the sequester. What they fail to understand — and maybe they do and they don’t want to discuss it at this point — is that over the next ten years, 2013 to 2023, under Obamacare, there will be a $716 billion reduction [to Medicare] in Obamacare. We’re talking about a $3 billion reduction in the sequester now and the $3 billion reduction in Obamacare –

DOOCY: This is a preview of coming awful things.

JOHNSON: You haven’t seen anything yet. You ain’t seen nothing yet.

Johnson’s conflation of the sequester’s ham-fisted spending cuts with Obamacare’s Medicare savings demonstrates a complete misunderstanding of the sequester, Obamacare, and how federal budgeting works. Sequestration is causing cancer clinics to turn people away because they can’t afford to keep providing expensive chemotherapy drugs to patients in the face of a two percent cut to Medicare Part B that has to come entirely out of clinics’ overhead funding — making the sequester cut more akin to a double-digit pay cut. Obamacare’s $716 billion in Medicare savings come from reducing historically excessive payments to providers that service private Medicare Advantage plans, meaning that it doesn’t affect benefits. Conservatives have consistently fear-mongered over those savings despite including them in their budgets.

Later on in the program, Johnson also revived the widely debunked claim that Obamacare has “death panels” — a claim that is so patently false that Politifact named it 2009's “Lie of the Year.”

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Why LGBT Undocumented People Need Immigration Reform

Our guest bloggers are Crosby Burns and Ann Garcia, policy analysts at the Center for American Progress.

With over a quarter of a million people in the U.S. who are both LGBT and undocumented, immigration reform that offers a path to earned citizenship to the undocumented would be a monumental achievement in the fight for LGBT equality. Citizenship would mean better wages, greater employment security, and increased access to social services for a population that exists at intersection of two already marginalized populations—the LGBT population and the undocumented population.

A recent analysis by the Williams Institute found that there were at least 267,000 LGBT undocumented people in the United States today.  Today, the Center for American Progress released a video highlighting the human stories behind the 267,000 people in the United States that are both LGBT and undocumented:

Progress is being made on Capitol Hill toward advancing a bipartisan bill that would lift 11.1 million undocumented immigrants out of the shadows. Right now, we need LGBT voices to come out in support for immigration reform to build on this momentum. In advance of next week’s march for immigration reform in Washington, DC on April 10th, LGBT advocates and allies are hoping to gather at least 267,000 supporters — one for every undocumented LGBT adult living in the U.S. A new petition pledge is providing the opportunity for allies to demonstrate their solidarity.

To sign a pledge and come #out4citizenship, visit www.out4citizenship.org and show support for immigration reform that offers citizenship to the undocumented, whether they are LGBT or not.

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Why Rich People Hate Talking About Inequality

Ed. note: This is the third and final post in a TP Ideas symposium on Branko Milanovic’s The Haves and the Have-Nots: A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of Global Inequality. The first installment is here here and the second is here.

The wealthy don’t like it when we talk about it inequality. Mitt Romney famously labeled President Obama’s critique of inequality “class warfare” motivated by “envy,” and proposed instead that debate about economic inequality be confined to “quiet rooms.” It’s fair to say he’s not alone among the super-wealthy in thinking this isn’t a “proper” subject for open, political debate.

At first blush, their motivation here is straightforward: it could cost them money. But given America’s one percent already has so much, and so little redistribution is on the table, they’d have to be exceptionally greedy to have such a strong reaction to even broaching the inequality discussion. Of course that’s possible, but the history of debates around inequality as surveyed in Branko Milanovic’s wonderfully readable book suggests another explanation. The rich don’t like inequality talk because, by its very nature, it involves making moral judgments about the way the rich live their lives into a topic for public discussion.

In the book’s first essay, “Unequal People,” Milanovic runs down the earliest modern economic theories about whether inequality is good for economic growth. The difference between early theories wasn’t, as we think today, whether or not you thought inequality was something that happened as a consequence of a roaring economy: it was whether, essentially, the rich are good people or not.

On the first view, defended to varying degrees by Max Weber and John Maynard Keynes, the rich were virtuous workers, dutiful, acquisitive folk who accumulated but spent no more on indulgences than the poor. Their massive savings were invested back in the marketplace, which, as Keynes put it, “made possible those vast accumulations of fixed wealth and of capital improvements” which redounded “to the advantage of the whole community.” The virtuous rich were uninterested in selfish consumption, serving principally as what Milanovic calls “saving machines” for the broader capitalist society.

Milanovic’s second view paints a dimmer picture of virtues of the rich. It assumes that the rich are selfish, greedy parasites who hold on to massive hoards and spend on themselves without investing in much of anything socially useful. In democracies, this leads the naturally-angry rest of society to impose punitive tax rates that slow economic growth. By being selfish misers, the rich end up taking money away from everyone.

What’s interesting about both sides of this debate is that they assume a public policy problem (“what grows the economy?”) needs to be discussed in terms of the moral character of the rich. This isn’t because economists have a yen for judging people; rather, it’s that when you have the amount of accumulated capital and power that rich do, the way in which one spend one’s money ends up having an extraordinary impact on everyone else in society. Invariably, assessing the desirability of rich people’s consumption choices will take on a moral cast, as what a person chooses to spend their money on says a lot about the person. Especially when they’re rich enough to spend it on anything.

It’s impossible to imagine that this point escapes wealthy people who follow the news. My guess (and I can’t prove this, but statements like Romney’s are certainly suggestive) is that when they hear that the one percent “should pay its fair share,” they hear the public calling the way they choose to live their lives unfair and unjust. No one likes being judged as a bad person, especially by the world’s most powerful politicians and in the pages of the world’s most-read newspapers. The wealthy, then, react negatively to public debates about inequality for the same reason many meat-eaters don’t like debating vegetarianism.

Uncomfortability, of course, isn’t a defense. The power wielded by America’s wealthy means that, like it or not, the rich can’t and shouldn’t be allowed to escape public scrutiny. Moreover, they often bring on themselves: see the pretty nasty things some wealthier folk say about poor and middle class Americans and the lengths to which others go to sing the praises of the “productive class.” But hypocrisy aside, the moral anxiety of the wealthy is both an interesting psychological fact and a neat window into the little, surprising ways in which the personal can’t be detached from the political.

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ABC Journalist Calls Out Karl Rove: ‘Stop Scaring People’ About Background Checks

During a heated debate about gun regulations on Sunday morning, ABC News’ Terry Moran accused Karl Rove of using “Orwellian” language to scare people about background checks, noting that the federal government is not seeking to confiscate guns but rather keep them out of the hands of criminals and people who are mentally ill.

Discussing proposals that would require private sellers to maintain records of the background checks they perform, Rove falsely claimed that the government would maintain a “registry if a grandfather wants to give a treasured shotgun to his grandson or granddaughter” and keep a “national registry of gun sales and gun purchases and gun owners.” Moran hit back at Rove, noting that he was spreading “paranoia” and “fear” in order to build opposition against the measure:

MORAN: Karl — stop scaring people, you’re scaring people with this Orwellian sense, that black helicopters and the government are going to confiscate Americans’ guns. That kind of paranoia fuels…

ROVE: Will all due respect, it’s not paranoia.

MORAN: Who is going to confiscate all of the guns?

ROVE: People have a fear of this. Why do it? Why do you need it? …

MORAN: The result of this is that all the votes that have been taken since Newtown have weakened gun control.

Watch it:

The proposals currently being drafted would require a background check on all gun purchases including those by private sellers while exempting family and temporary transfers. In some of the drafts being circulated, private dealers would have to maintain records for all private sales, while other exempt non-commercial private sales from record keeping. None of the bills would maintain a national gun registry, which is already illegal under current law. But the record keeping provision is important, advocates claim, to ensure that the checks are being properly conducted.

A recent Quinnipiac University poll found that 88 percent of Americans, including 85 percent of gun owners, believe “those purchasing firearms at private sales and gun shows should undergo a background check.”

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What The Supreme Court Will Actually Decide: Do Gay People Exist?

Frank Kameny was a life-long activist for gay rights.

Next week, the Supreme Court will hear the oral arguments on two legal challenges to laws that limit the government’s recognition of same-sex marriage. While there are various legal nuances to how both the Defense of Marriage Act and Proposition 8 cases might be decided, the Justices will actually be weighing a more fundamental question: Do gay people exist?

At the core of conservatives’ argument against marriage equality in both cases is the idea that gay people actually do not exist — only “homosexual behavior” does. In House Republicans’ final reply brief filed this week against DOMA, attorney Paul Clement argued that “sexual orientation is defined by a tendency to engage in a particular kind of conduct.” Proponents of Prop 8 similarly suggested that “sexual orientation is a complex and amorphous phenomenon that defies consistent and uniform definition.” The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops added in its amicus brief that homosexuality is a “voluntary action” just like polygamy. In other words, people are only really gay when they’re having gay sex — otherwise they’re not.

Herein lies greatest challenge for gay and lesbian civil rights: the fact that sexual orientation is an invisible identity. Unlike race or gender, it cannot so easily be superficially assessed. Thus, conservatives are counting on doubt and distrust, urging the Court to dismiss whatever gay people actually say about their lived experiences — discount every individual’s coming out story, ignore decades of gay culture and gay history, and disregard the scientific conclusions of the entire major medical community. In fact, opponents of equality regularly claim that “the gay agenda” is merely a conspiratorial quest to validate sinful behavior — as opposed to an effort to allow millions of people to participate fairly in society.

The Court will have the opportunity to weigh the question of whether gay men and lesbians exist in both a legal and practical sense. The practical case for recognizing gays is simple, yet compelling: gay people exist and more importantly, are already raising children in families. All of the conservatives’ arguments rely on claims about “responsible procreation” and what’s best for children, but not one of them takes into account the millions of children already growing up with same-sex parents. Besides the fact social science research supports same-sex parenting, it’s quite easy to see how those families would benefit from the securities and protections of marriage equality. The Court could simply accept opponents’ arguments about the values and purposes of marriage, but rather than apply them in conservatives’ imaginary gay-free universe, acknowledge that they should apply equally and fairly to gay couples as well.

The magic words to look for if the Supreme Court legally recognizes gay people is “heightened scrutiny,” which is how the Court determines that the government cannot target a specific group for unfair treatment without substantial justification. For example, classifications based on sex are subject to “intermediate scrutiny,” and classifications based on race are subject to the highest level, “strict scrutiny.” When the Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of Edie Windsor’s case against DOMA, it determined that intermediate scrutiny should apply. The Supreme Court, however, has not applied any level of heightened scrutiny for sexual orientation in past cases, even when ruling in favor of gay rights, such as Lawrence v. Texas (overturning sodomy laws) and Romer v. Evans (overturning a Colorado amendment banning LGBT nondiscrimiantion protections).

The Court has traditionally considered four criteria to determine whether laws that target a specific group should be subject to heightened scrutiny:

Has the group been historically discriminated against or subjected to prejudice and hostility?Does the group possess an immutable (unchangeable) or highly visible trait?Does the group lack sufficient power to protect themselves from the political process?Can you group still contribute meaningfully to society despite the distinguishing characteristic?

Undoubtedly, the answer to all four questions when considering sexual orientation is “yes,” but that hasn’t stopped opponents from arguing otherwise. Notably, House Republicans have actually argued that gays and lesbians are politically powerful because they have “attained more legislative victories, political power, and popular favor in less time than virtually any other group in American history.” Of course, the rate of progress is not indicative of the quality of that progress, and the very need for multiple challenges to discriminatory laws like DOMA and Prop 8 disproves the claim on its face.

If any of the Justices determine that the answer to any of these questions is “no,” they would have to deny many facts in the process. They would have to discount the government’s Lavender Scare witch hunts of the 1950s, decades of police persecution and brutality, the ambivalence to research HIV when hundreds of gay men were dying of AIDS, and laws that have specifically targeted gays and lesbians for discrimination, like “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” They would have to set aside the 38 states that have banned same-sex marriage, many by a majority vote in a constitutional referendum. And they’d have to impose their own understandings of identity upon the millions of people who identify as gay, lesbian, or bisexual and cannot change their sexual orientation.

The end result of these cases will determine the legality of same-sex marriage, but for the first time, the Court could actually acknowledge that gay people exist and thus deserve protection under the U.S. Constitution. On both a symbolic and legal level, the latter victory could be much more significant.

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District Of Columbia Prohibits Insurance Companies From Discriminating Against Transgender People

Today, the DC Department of Insurance, Securities, and Banking (DISB) issued a bulletin clarifying key protections for transgender people in the District of Columbia. The bulletin provides a clear directive to insurers that discrimination on the basis of gender identity or expression is not an acceptable business practice in Washington.

The bulletin prohibits insurance companies from some of the most egregious practices that have been used to lock transgender people out of health care coverage, including:

Denying, cancelling, limiting, or refusing to renew an insurance policy.Limiting insurance coverage on the basis of gender identity or expression.Denying coverage for a procedure that is provided for the treatment of other conditions of illness. For example, if a plan covers hormone therapy for some diagnoses, it cannot categorically exclude coverage for hormone therapy related to gender identity disorder or other transition-related diagnosis.

DC joins a growing number of states, municipalities, and employers who recognize that equal access to health coverage is supported by medical science, improves the health of transgender people, and does not significantly increase costs. Ending arbitrary insurance discrimination against transgender people simply supports what expert medical bodies have been saying for years: transition-related health care is medically necessary for many transgender individuals whose health and well-being depends on bringing their physical body into alignment with their gender identity, and determination of what care an individual patient needs properly rests with medical providers, not insurance companies.

Read the full bulletin and the joint announcement from the Mayor’s Office of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender (GLBT) Affairs and the Department of Insurance, Securities, and Banking.

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Family Research Council: Unmarried People Should Be Denied Birth Control And Punished For Having Sex

The right-wing Family Research Council — which uses its advocacy muscle to try to block comprehensive sexual health programs in public schools — is now going a step further, suggesting the young Americans who have premarital sex should be punished because they don’t deserve the right to engage in sexual intercourse.

According to senior FRC fellow Pat Fagan, the Supreme Court’s “first assault on marriage” was a 1972 case that overturned a state law banning unmarried people from purchasing birth control. Fagan claims that court decision effectively sanctioned premarital sex, “brushing aside thousands and thousands of years of wisdom, tradition, [and] culture.” Appearing on a radio show with Tony Perkins, the head of the organization, Fagan asserted that “society never gave young people that right,” and instead has an obligation to stop, punish, and shame that type of sexual behavior:

FAGAN: The court decided that single people have the right to contraceptives. What’s that got to do with marriage? Everything, because what the Supreme Court essentially said is single people have the right to engage in sexual intercourse. Well, societies have always forbidden that, there were laws against it. [...]

It’s not the contraception, everybody thinks it’s about contraception, but what this court case said was young people have the right to engage in sex outside of marriage. Society never gave young people that right, functioning societies don’t do that, they stop it, they punish it, they corral people, they shame people, they do whatever. The institution for the expression of sexuality is marriage and all societies always shepherded young people there, what the Supreme Court said was forget that shepherding, you can’t block that, that’s not to be done.

In fact, a full 80 percent of unmarried evangelical Christians report that they are having sex. Despite the emphasis on abstinence within the evangelical community — a misguided approach to sexuality that typically shames young adults about their bodies, ignores the existence of the LGBT community, and fails to equip adolescents with the resources they need to effectively manage their sexual health — it’s clear that premarital sex is the norm, not something that threatens the very fabric of modern society.

And ignoring the reality that teens are having sex has had serious consequences across the country. The states that push ineffective abstinence-only health classes have higher rates of teen pregnancy, higher rates of STDs, and higher concentrations of HIV infections. Even the evangelical community itself has started to realize that denying teens sexual health resources isn’t working, and has begun to move in the direction of supporting contraception and sex education.

The United States’ teen birth rate has actually recently plunged to a record low — but that wouldn’t be the case if Fagan had his way and unmarried Americans were denied access to birth control. According to the Guttmacher Institute, that decline in unintended teen pregnancies is “almost exclusively” the result of more young people using contraception.

(HT: Right Wing Watch)

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The Good News About Human Nature: Most People Aren’t Jerks

She was wrong.

A broad breakdown in societal trust has undermined the idea of a common good that can be served by the collective disposition of resources. Voters trust neither government nor most individuals in society to fairly pursue the common good. Instead, they see both government and individuals as fundamentally selfish and out for themselves, not others.

This view of human nature has been a consensus until recently. That consensus can be traced back to the 1957 publication of Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand, a 1,200 novel that, in essence, advocated the unfettered pursuit of self-interest as the organizing principle for society. Despite the fact that the book became a best-seller, not many critics and intellectuals took it or its thesis seriously at the time. Who could possibly believe that a society based strictly on selfishness could work?

That skepticism was obliterated in the next several decades. One of the key blows was struck by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, whose 1976 book, The Selfish Gene, argued that the gene is the fundamental unit of natural selection and has only one imperative: successfully reproducing itself in competition with other genes. We (and other animals), as bearers of these “selfish” genes, will therefore carry those traits — and only those traits –that help these genes reproduce. Dawkins implied that was all you needed to know to understand human nature, an idea that quickly led to an explosion of selfish gene-based explanations for every aspect of human behavior.

Then, in 1980, Milton Friedman, with his wife, Rose, published Free to Choose, a no-holds-barred polemic in favor of self-interested individuals making “rational”, unregulated decisions and against anything that interfered with this process, especially government action. So, in a powerful conjunction of economics and evolutionary biology, Ayn Rand’s glorification of selfishness gained the imprimatur of serious science. Being selfish was just human nature and should not be fought. Indeed, any attempt to do so was bound to do more harm than good. Thus was the original reaction to Atlas Shrugged turned on its head. Who could possibly believe that a society based on anything other than selfishness could work?

No doubt Ayn Rand would have been delighted with the progress of her big idea in the subsequent decade. Ronald Reagan was elected US president and Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister of the UK, both practicing a politics best summarized as “government is the problem, not the solution” and both preaching an economic gospel that glorified the individual pursuit of wealth above all else. And her disciple, Alan Greenspan, was appointed head of the Federal Reserve in 1987 and remained there for 19 years, treated reverentially by both Democratic and Republican administrations.

Also in the 1980s, the breakdown of the postwar welfare states became undeniable and, by, the end of the decade, the Soviet Union and other “socialist” countries had ignominiously collapsed. Conservatives argued that all this was real world confirmation of Rand’s core idea: those who interfered with human selfishness would reap the whirlwind.

But right at its moment of greatest success, the conservative case on human nature was being fatally undermined. New thinking and research in evolutionary science showed that the “selfishness is all” camp was completely missing the mark on what makes humanity distinctive. It is not competition for individual reproductive success but rather cooperation for group reproductive success, facilitated by our capacities for symbolic thought (language) and transmission of learned information (culture), that has led to our success as a species.

In short, the key to understanding human nature is not the selfish gene, bur rather the “selfless gene”. The selfless gene allowed our ancestors to think and act as a group, thereby outcompeting other chimp-like species—literally leaving them in the dust. Moreover, our cooperative nature allowed us to build ever more complex ways of interacting with one another, which led to further evolution in the traits that facilitate cooperation (referred to as “gene-culture coevolution”). The end result of this dynamic was civilization and, eventually, the global interconnected society we live in today.

This is who we are. We are defined by our sense of fairness, adherence to group norms, willingness to punish those who violate such norms, willingness to share, and willingness to work for the good of the group, along with the high-level cognitive and cultural traits that enable us to be that way. We are not a species of seven billion selfish individuals, uninterested in anything save our own welfare and willing to cheerfully break any rule and hurt any other individual to secure it. Indeed, we think of such people as sociopaths and if their tendencies actually dominated humanity we would still be back on the savannah with the rest of the chimp-like species.

So the former consensus view on human nature is just plain wrong. It’s not the case that societies must rely exclusively on self-interest or die. In fact, societies have only prospered by transcending self-interest and harnessing the group-oriented instincts that make us human. As E.O. Wilson puts it in his new book, The Social Conquest of Earth, “At the higher level of….biological organization, groups compete with groups, favoring cooperative social traits among members of the same group. At the lower level, members of the same group compete with one another in a manner that leads to self-serving behavior. The opposition between the two levels of natural selection has resulted in a chimeric genotype in each person. It renders each of us part saint and part sinner.” (p. 289)

This makes clear that the center-left can only be successful if it sells its program as one that binds people together as a group, with attendant benefits and responsibilities. Otherwise, the “sinner” side of people will dominate over the “saint” side, reinforcing current levels of distrust and encouraging people to simply look out for themselves. Therefore, instead of shying away from appeals to cooperative instincts and the common good as somehow soft-headed, progressives should think of such appeals as the most realistic, theoretically sound way of building support for their initiatives. This is the profound implication of the new theory of human nature.

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Young people must establish work ethic early in life

Young people need to learn to work. Their parents must not let them be idle all year for, as they say, idle hands are the devil's workshop.

When I was growing up, it was early to bed, early to rise. My family worked hard, every one of us, starting even before the sun rose. Sure, I wanted to rest many times, but my parents wouldn't let me until our work was done. They needed a rest more than anybody. They taught by example and instilled in us a strong work ethic.

Today, many parents fail to provide that example. Now, I am not saying that young children should be put to work. We do not want a return to a time before child labor laws went into effect. Little children need and deserve their playtime. We should not take away their childhood. 

But once they reach a certain age, they must realize that it is time to accept a certain degree of maturity and responsibility, part of which involves going to work. Whether it is flipping burgers at McDonald's, delivering newspapers, washing cars, cutting lawns, or walking dogs, as long as they are working, they stay out of trouble, they learn better how to interact with adults.

Plus, they get to make a little money. The trouble is, many young people today want something for nothing. They don't want to have to work for anything. They expect to be handed everything, and many parents often give in to their demands. 

What those parents should do instead is to force their sons and daughters to see the value of hard work. Being handed everything diminishes the value of everything. The rewards are much greater when you have to work for them. When you work for something you feel a real sense of worth, both in yourself and in the object or goal you are trying to reach.

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At Least 5 People Were Accidentally Shot In A Single Day This Week

Travin Varise, who was accidentally shot and killed last month

While gun accidents make up a comparatively small portion of American firearm deaths (the vast majority are intentional homicides or suicides), accidental firearm injury and death is still shockingly common, underlining the scale of America’s gun problem. Every day, local media report several cases where someone accidentally shoots himself or a friend or family member, sometimes fatally. We counted at least five gun accidents on Wednesday:

1. A 4-year-old girl was shot in the leg by a family member who was putting his gun away.

2. A 3-year-old boy found a handgun under the mattress in his parents’ bendroom and shot a family friend in the head.

3. A member of the Air Force pulled the trigger on his gun, reportedly thinking it was unloaded, and sent a bullet that hit a 14-month-old baby in the hand in a nearby apartment.

4. A woman reportedly spun her handgun around and pointed it at her head. She died of a gunshot wound to the head.

5. A 3-year-old was fatally shot in what police said appeared to be a tragic accident.

Children are especially vulnerable to gun violence, either intentional or accidental. According to the Centers for Disease Control, 129 children between age 1-19 died in gun accidents in 2010 (even more take their own lives using a gun belonging to a parent). A Harvard study linked prevalence of guns to unintentional gun-related deaths, finding that the four states with the highest gun ownership rates had mortality rates seven times higher than the four states with the lowest ownership rates.

There’s no real evidence suggesting that family homes with guns are less likely to be victims of crime than ones without deadly weapons.

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Five Reasons Why Fewer People Trust Fox News Than Ever Before

A poll released Wednesday by Public Policy Polling shows that fewer people than ever trust Fox News as a source for accurate news and reporting. Just 41 percent expressed trust in the network — down from 49 four years ago — while 46 percent said they distrust Fox. There’s an obvious reason why: Fox misrepresents facts and fudges its data to advance the conservative agenda. Indeed, it’s nothing like the “fair and balanced” network it claims to be. And, it seems, voters are catching on.

Here are just five recent examples of how Fox skews the news:

1. They misrepresented the unemployment rate. Fox News ran this chart showing the unemployment rate, but managed to somehow make an unemployment rate of 8.6 percent look higher than 8.9:

2. They misinformed viewers about Benghazi. When Sens. John McCain (R-AZ), Lindsay Graham (R-SC), and Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) were trying their hardest to smear President Obama and former Sec. of State Hillary Clinton over Benghazi, Fox ran an “exclusive” report saying that the CIA had denied a diplomat permission to fend off an attack on the embassy. That never happened, and details later confirmed that the report — and the other conspiracy theories Fox ran alongside it — was totally unfounded.

3. They blamed non-existent ‘massive layoffs’ on Obama. Fox News runs frequent segments covering Obama’s supposed ‘War on Coal’ and the website Fox Nation even ran this glaring headline blaming the election for huge layoffs in the coal industry. But there were not massive layoffs. Just one business owner in Utah laid off employees. Under Obama, the industry on the whole has actually continued to grow tremendously.

4. They got almost all of their climate coverage wrong. An analysis by the Union of Concerned Scientists revealed that a full 93 percent of Fox News coverage on the topic global climate change was ‘misleading.’ Here’s the breakdown of how Fox covered the climate issue:

5. They don’t cover big stories. While the rest of the country discussed senatorial candidate Todd Akin’s ‘legitimate rape’ comments, Fox News hardly covered the controversy. They similarly ignored the conflict surrounding the death of teenager Trayvon Martin, and of New York’s same-sex marriage law’s passage.

The list of areas where Fox falls down on the job is too extensive to enumerate. But what is clear is that Fox’s method of dodging the truth and giving convenient facts won’t keep working, if they can’t gain the public’s trust.

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NRA Head Fearmongers About Background Checks: ‘I Just Don’t Think You Can Trust These People’

National Rifle Association Executive Vice President and CEO Wayne LaPierre offered a litany of excuses for his organization’s opposition to universal background checks on gun sales and purchases this morning, telling Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace that the American Medical Association and other organizations were to blame for thwarting an expanded background check system. He also warned that universal checks could lead to a national registry:

LAPIERRE: I think what they’ll do is they’ll turn this universal check on the law-abiding into a universal registry of law-abiding people, and law-abiding people don’t want that.

WALLACE: Forgive me sir, but you take something that is here, and you take it all the way over there. There is nothing anyone in the administration has said that indicates they’re going to have a universal registry.

LAPIERRE: And Obamacare wasn’t a tax until they needed it to be a tax. I just don’t think you can trust these people.

The NRA has consistently used this as an excuse to oppose expanded background checks, even though federal law prohibits agencies from retaining information on people who pass background checks, making a national gun registry virtually impossible.

The gun lobby backed expanded background checks following the 1999 Columbine High School shooting, but LaPierre reiterated during a hearing in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee this week that the organization no longer supports those checks and told Wallace that the mental health community is also against them. “I have finally become convinced, after fighting to get the mental records computerized for 20 years and watching the mental health lobby, the HIPAA laws, and the AMA oppose it, I don’t think it’s going to happen,” he said. “The mental health lobby won’t let it happen.”

In addition to computerizing mental health records, LaPierre told Wallace that he would “change civil commitment laws” and “interdict” more mental health patients, an approach that would blatantly ignore concerns about patient privacy and the stigmatization of mental health patients, which drove the AMA’s opposition to some elements of universal background checks in the past. President Obama, meanwhile, issued an executive order last month that sought to rework the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) to make it easier for states to report information to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System while addressing concerns about privacy and stigmatization.

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Hagel: ‘I Think It’s Always Wise To Try To Talk To People Before You Go To War’

One of the main themes senators on the Senate Armed Services Committee committed themselves to today during Chuck Hagel’s confirmation hearing to be the next Secretary of Defense was — not wondering whether Hagel fully supports a diplomatic approach to Iran’s nuclear program, as most Americans do — but rather, whether the former Republican senator is willing to take this nation into another war in the Middle East if necessary.

Senator after senator, both Republican and Democrat, repeatedly sought Hagel’s reassurance that he is committed to starting a war with Iran — as if the last 10 years of a disastrous war in Iraq had never happened.

Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) was one of those senators. During one series of questions in which Ayotte wondered if Iran was “responsible” enough to deal with, Hagel explained that his priority is diplomacy. “I think it’s always wise to try to talk to people before you get into war,” he said:

AYOTTE: Because here we have a regime that doesn’t respond to in a responsible or sane behavior as a state-sponsor of terrorism and why that would be an appropriate manner for us to address them?

HAGEL: Well first I said engagement and I think we should talk, we actually are indirectly in the P5 plus one, we have been. I think that’s responsible. I think it’s always responsible to try to talk first. North Korea. I don’t consider North Korea a responsible, sane administration but we’re talking to North Korea. We’ve been talking bilaterally to North Korea. We are talking with the party of six to North Korea. I think that’s wise. I think it’s always wise to try to talk to people before you get into war.

Ayotte continued to badger Hagel about his past support for talks with Iran. “I’ve always thought that that’s smarter and wiser” to push countries into international organizations, Hagel said, adding:

HAGEL: Because when they go in to world bodies they have to comply with some semblance of international behavior it doesn’t mean they always will, they won’t, they cheat. But I think we’re smarter to do that. I’ve never thought engagement is weakness. I’ve never thought it was surrender. I never thought it was appeasement. I think it’s clearly in our interests. If that doesn’t work then I think the President’s position and his strategy has been exactly right. Get the United Nations behind you. Get the international sanctions behind you. Keep military options on the table. If the military option is the only option, it’s the only option.

Watch the clip:

“At Hagel hearing,” the Washington Post’s Rajiv Chandrasekaran observed on Twitter, “136 mentions of Israel and 135 of Iran. Only 27 refs to Afghanistan. 2 for Al Qaida. 1 for Mali.” Indeed, the neocons aren’t dead, yet — at least not in the Senate.

(Photo: Bloomberg via Getty Images)

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Statement by the President Announcing $155 Million in Additional Humanitarian Assistance for the Syrian People

The White House

Office of the Press Secretary

This morning, President Obama released a video announcing $155 million in additional humanitarian assistance for the Syrian people.  Click here to view the video of the President’s statement with Arabic subtitles.

Statement by the President

For nearly two years, the Assad regime has waged a brutal war against the Syrian people—murdering innocent men, women and children, in their homes, in bread lines, and at universities. 

In the face of this barbarism, the United States has joined with nations around the world in calling for an end to the Assad regime and a transition that leads to a peaceful, inclusive and democratic Syria, where the rights of all Syrians are protected.  We’ve worked to isolate Assad and his regime; impose sanctions that starve the regime of funds; recognize the Syrian Opposition Coalition as the legitimate representative of the Syrian people; call for accountability for perpetrators of atrocities; and provide humanitarian relief to Syrians in need.

The relief we send doesn’t say “Made in America,” but make no mistake—our aid reflects the commitment of the American people.  American aid means food and clean water for millions of Syrians. American aid means medicine and treatment for hundreds of thousands of patients in Damascus, Dar’a and Homs.  It means immunizations for one million Syrian children.  American aid means winter supplies for more than half a million people in Aleppo, Homs and Dayr az Zawr.  And we’re working with allies and partners so that this aid reaches those in need.

Today, we’re taking another step.  I’ve approved an additional $155 million in humanitarian aid for people in Syria and refugees fleeing the violence.  Here, I want to speak directly to the people of Syria. This new aid will mean more warm clothing for children and medicine for the elderly; flour and wheat for your families and blankets, boots and stoves for those huddled in damaged buildings.  It will mean health care for victims of sexual violence and field hospitals for the wounded.   Even as we work to end the violence against you, this aid will help address some of the immediate needs you face each day.

This new commitment will bring America’s total humanitarian aid to Syria to $365 million—making us the largest single donor of humanitarian assistance to the Syrian people.  Today, I also call on the international community to do more to help these Syrians in need, and to contribute to the latest UN humanitarian appeal.

We’re under no illusions.  The days ahead will continue to be very difficult.  But what’s clear is that the regime continues to weaken and lose control of territory.  The opposition continues to grow stronger.  More Syrians are standing up for their dignity.  The Assad regime will come to an end.  The Syrian people will have their chance to forge their own future.  And they will continue to find a partner in the United States of America. 

Read the President's message in Arabic (pdf). You can also watch a video of the President's message with Arabic subtitles.

On Thursday, January 31 at 1:00 p.m. ET, Director of the White House Domestic Policy Council Cecilia Muñoz will join the latest "Fireside Hangout" for a conversation about immigration reform.

President Obama speak from Las Vegas about creating a fair and effective immigration system that lives up to our heritage as a nation of laws and a nation of immigrants.

President Obama announced today that he has approved a new round of humanitarian assistance, an additional $155 million to provide for the urgent and pressing needs of civilians in Syria and refugees forced to flee the violence of the Assad regime. This brings America’s contribution to date to $365 million, making the United States the largest single donor of humanitarian assistance to the Syrian people.

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House GOP To Supreme Court: Gay People Are Too Powerful To Get Equal Rights

An African-American leader addresses one of the most influential, best-connected, best-funded, and best organized interest groups of the 1960s.

For nearly two years, House Republicans paid conservative superlawyer Paul Clement $520 an hour to defend the anti-gay Defense of Marriage Act in federal court — and then sent the bill to the American taxpayer. In total Clement has now cost the American people up to $3 million for his efforts on behalf of this unconstitutional law. Last night, we taxpayers finally found out what we were paying for — a 60 page brief explaining why the justices should leave marriage discrimination untouched.

As decades of precedent establish that the Constitution should provide a shield to minority groups when prejudice leaves them without adequate recourse to the political process, Clement includes a section discussing just how very powerful and completely capable of vindicating their rights at the ballot box gay men and lesbians have become. Same-sex marriage is supported by President Obama and Vice President Biden! Less than half of Congress filed a brief agreeing with them! A magazine once wrote an article about how influential the Human Rights Campaign is! For the first time in history, an entire 1 percent of the Senate is openly gay!

After touting the immense political clout of a group that, after 226 years of American democracy, finally managed to elect a single person to the upper house of Congress, Clement then drops this line:

In short, gays and lesbians are one of the most influential, best-connected, best-funded, and best organized interest groups in modern politics, and have attained more legislative victories, political power, and popular favor in less time than virtually any other group in American history. . . . Gays and lesbians not only have the attention of lawmakers, they are winning many legislative battles. And the importance of this factor in the analysis cannot be gainsaid. . . . [G]iven that the ultimate inquiry focuses on whether a group needs the special intervention of the courts or whether issues should be left for the democratic process, the political strength of gays and lesbians in the political process should be outcome determinative here.

One can only wonder what Paul Clement might have written if Virginia had hired him to defend their practice of racial marriage discrimination when it was before the justices in 1967. “Negro leaders meet often with the President and with Congressional leaders, and indeed, President Johnson himself signed two major laws pushed by the Negro lobby. Negro groups not only led a widely attended rally on the National Mall, but they routinely organize well-attended sit-ins, marches and other events that garner press attention and national sympathy. Recently, a Negro march at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Alabama even sparked the President of the United States to give a speech endorsing the Negro lobby’s agenda before a joint session of Congress.”

Because, of course, if the fact that gay people have won a few political battles lately were reason to deny them the equal protection of the laws, then the same would also be true about African-Americans and women. Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act two years before Virginia lost its marriage discrimination case in the Supreme Court. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 promised equal treatment to women in the workplace — a promise still denied to gay men and lesbians — seven years before the justices first recognized that official discrimination against women violates the Constitution. Political victories do not cancel out Americans’ constitutional rights, they augment them, and Clement is simply wrong to suggest otherwise.

Ultimately, the sheer absurdity of Clement’s argument exposes why his claims must not prevail at the Supreme Court. The Constitution of Seneca Falls and Selma is also the Constitution of Stonewall. Clement’s argument would deny all three.

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UPDATED: 5 People Shot At 3 Different Gun Shows On Gun Appreciation Day

If the gun advocates behind this year’s inaugural Gun Appreciation Day had hoped to use the day’s festivities to build support for their anti-regulation platform, they are going to have to wait another year.

Emergency personnel had to be called to the scene of the Dixie Gun and Knife Show in Raleigh, North Carolina after a gun accidentally discharged and shot two people at the show’s safety check-in booth just after 1 pm. Both victims were transported to an area hospital, and the Raleigh Fire Department announced that the show would be closed for the rest of the day.

Gun Appreciation Day is the combined effort of dozens of far-right organizations who have been vocal opponents of gun control advocates’ efforts to reduce the number of dangerous weapons on our streets and prevent them from ending up in the hands of people with criminal backgrounds or a history of mental illness. In response to a renewed push for sensible reforms of gun laws after the tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut, groups like the National Rifle Association and the founders of Gun Appreciation Day have instead advocated for an increase in the number of guns in public places like elementary schools, arguing — falsely — that more guns will mean more protection for individuals.

But today’s unfortunate accident, which took place at a safety check in surrounded by hundreds of people who presumably have at least some training on how to properly handle a dangerous weapon, undermines that case. Earlier this week, an armed security officer at a Michigan charter school accidentally left his gun in a restroom that is regularly used by students as young as five years old.

A representative from Political Media, the group responsible for organizing Gun Appreciation Day, was not immediately available for comment.

Two similar incidents occurred at entirely separate gun shows in the Midwest, one in the Cleveland suburb of Medina, Ohio and the other at the state fairgrounds in Indianapolis, Indiana. In Ohio, the local ABC affiliate reports that one individual was brought to a hospital by EMS, and in Indiana Channel 8 WISH says that an individual shot himself in the hand while trying to reload his gun in the show parking lot. That brings the tally to 4 victims of gun violence so far at three different gun shows during the country’s first Gun Appreciation Day.

CNN is reporting that three people were injured at the gun show in Raleigh, not two as originally reported. All were victims of a shotgun that fired while the owner was removing it from a case.

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White People And Hiphop: Tourists, Expats, Or Colonists?

Chicago rapper Chief Keef’s major-label debut “Finally Rich” has sparked verbal sparring among rap critics about cultural tourism and hiphop. This valuable conversation began with a glowing review by Jordan Sargent, and an angry response from RapRadar’s Brian “B.Dot” Miller. The central controversy is over the responsibilities we have when we talk about hiphop, and who should be allowed access to and influence over those conversations. Sargent is white, and Miller is black. Miller insisted on the New York Times ArtsBeat podcast that his distinction between tourism and legitimate participation in hiphop culture is based upon tenure and not melanin, and the disagreement over Chief Keef does not break along simple racial lines at all. But there is a natural suspicion of white voices in hiphop discourse.

The controversy over Keef is in many ways about the age-old lyrics vs. music wrestling match over how to value hiphop. Craig Jenkins has already eviscerated the “community of gatekeepers” who insist Keef’s lyrical content removes him from serious consideration or threatens to destroy hiphop. I’ll try to add something to the parallel thread about cultural tourism, white privilege, and good intentions.

Suspicion of white folks in conversations about hiphop is natural, and more valid than most acts of cultural gatekeeping. American history makes this inescapable. We’re a superpower built in record time thanks to 400 years of stolen labor and stolen lives, and another 150 of systematic oppression of the descendants of that thievery. (That that oppression is now abstract rather than legislated does not make it disappear.) This makes white appropriation of black cultural output inherently more problematic than, say, a Greenwich-born Bentley-driving 17-year-old who finds her angst validated and channeled in the music of impoverished Appalachia. Or a dentist’s son pouring the pain money can’t treat into an identification with music by blue-collar drug-addicted pop geniuses. The honky-tonk bar crowd might be wary of the rich girl, and the punk club might be angry to learn the mosher among them is going home to financial security and a nuclear family. But class divisions may go unnoticed, and even if they don’t the gap in privilege that financial class breeds is limited, and most of all, impermanent. Progress for the rich is, to borrow a phrase, fragile and reversible.

When it comes to hiphop, the privilege gap between the outsider and the insider is based on hundreds of years of brutality. When suburban white privilege comes to the rap show, it’s crossing a hell of a lot more space, and that space is going to be enforced by society far into the future. (To steadily decreasing effect, inshallah.) Straight, white, and male is the easiest difficulty setting in life. Even the white kids who were dealt a bad socioeconomic hand are holding it at a damn good table. And again, history: However sincerely we participate in hiphop culture, we’re beneficiaries of systematic oppression finding an outlet in the anthems of the systematically oppressed. This is the source of the suspicion that sometimes greets white hiphop heads, and which lingers to some extent even after we succeed in proving our sincerity and depth of knowledge or curiosity about the culture. This is why some people call us tourists even after we’ve stayed awhile and taken up residence in hiphop culture.

There are a lot of us expats, in an ill-defined space between those raised on black music and culture and those just-visiting dilettantes. We think we’ve earned some standing (and some codeswitching). But some folks regard us more as colonists. And that’s not a crazy sentiment, especially as regards white folks’ interest in violent drug rap. Dave Bry’s New Republic piece does a nice job of explaining why:

For me, a white person, a rap fan who does in fact enjoy Chief Keef’s album, for musical reasons, much the same as I enjoy Waka Flocka Flame’s music, even as I find the lyrics banal and deplore much of their message—a person who likes to think that I can compartmentalize various elements of artistic expression, and appreciate music without any agenda—it’s worth giving hard thought to what it means that a black person is saying that she can’t. It’s worth ruminating on how deeply and insidiously white privilege and the black lack thereof infect every aspect of life in America—even something as simple as enjoying a good pop song. […] We want it to be different, us well-meaning white people. Maybe that’s even part of why we listen to rap music, or part of why we started to, anyway, because we want to do our best to make amends, to bridge the divide. We don’t want to be outsiders; we don’t want for there to be such a thing as outsiders. We want it to be different, but it’s not.

We want it to be one way, but it’s the other way. (Quoting “The Wire” sagely is another primary identifier of us would-be expats.) I don’t agree with Bry about Chief Keef on artistic grounds – based on two spins of “Finally Rich” and video evidence of his formulaic plug-and-play vapidity as an emcee, I want badly to side with Keef’s critics – but he’s dead on that it should be impossible to consider the Keefs and Flockas and Gunplays of the world completely outside of moralized critique, no matter how much serious white fans of their music might wish it so. Still, I think Bry missed a spot.

When he says he enjoys thuggish rap “even as I find the lyrics banal and deplore much of their message,” he’s pleading innocent of partaking in ign’ant shit as escapist fantasy. This seems disingenuous. Part of the appeal of everybody from Keef to Nate Dogg is that they give us access to a synthetic blend of toughness, indomitability, and limitless sexual potency that most of us don’t actually enjoy. Those banal lyrics and deplorable messages aren’t just part of the fun– they are the fun. That folks like Bry or myself aren’t enjoying this stuff in a mocking or ironic way does not make it completely above-board. We’re getting sincere enjoyment from something that makes us feel more alive, but as his piece notes so eloquently, we don’t live with the consequences when the music stops. Insofar as we white sojourners praise and download this stuff because it lets us play gangster, we’re taking advantage of the privilege gap Bry discusses.

And that gap puts the lie to the expat aspirations of even the most sincere and versed of white hiphop heads. Jamelle Bouie’s recent piece on his decision not to carry a flatscreen TV to his friend’s house alone, for fear of being taken for a thief, reminded me that my tourist status can’t be erased by my own actions. It’s imposed by the culture around us that assumes the worst about a black face – an attitude with much deeper roots than rap music, but which has been drawing strength from rappers for decades.

But Chief Keef can’t be responsible for that attitude. Neither can any other rapper. Images of black virility, self-determination, and power have scared white folks since long before Ice Cube nailed the motives of white cultural reactionaries in an interlude on his 1992 album “The Predator.” Every white hiphop head should check their privilege almost constantly. That privilege does not oblige us to be silent about our tastes or criticisms– much the opposite, in fact. It obliges us to speak a lot, because it obliges us to speak carefully and inquisitively, and recklessness always takes fewer words than consideration. Just playing good rap for our friends isn’t being down for any cause unless we’re also participating in the conversation about systems of oppression. Hiphop kickstarted that conversation long before we got here, and however much time we’ve put in learning this culture we should always acknowledge that we’re guests.

Otherwise, we’re not just tourists or commuters to hiphop, free to walk unjudged through the streets our musical heroes depict. We’re worse than that. We’re subconsciously preying on that privilege in order to enjoy feeling Like A Bawse in private. We’re colonizing the music of someone else’s struggle.

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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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