Readout of the President's National Security Council Meeting Today

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For Immediate Release April 22, 2013 Readout of the President's National Security Council Meeting Today

President Obama convened the National Security Council in the Situation Room today from 11:30 to 1:00 to review the events in Boston. The President was updated by Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism Monaco, National Security Advisor Donilon, Attorney General Holder, FBI Director Mueller, and Secretary of Homeland Security Napolitano on the apprehension of Dzhokar Tsarnaev, and the related investigation. He was also briefed by the leadership of the intelligence community, including DNI Clapper and Director Brennan, about our ongoing efforts to combat terrorism and protect the American people. The President commended the work that was done to pursue justice in the Boston Marathon bombing, and underscored the need to continue gathering intelligence to answer the remaining questions about this terrorist attack going forward. As he did last night, the President also expressed appreciation for the efforts made by state and local officials, and law enforcement, in Boston and Massachusetts. Vice-President Biden joined the meeting via video-conference.

A photo of the meeting is available here: http://bit.ly/ZFYn6Y

Blog posts on this issue April 22, 2013 6:34 PM EDTCelebrate National Park Week!

National Park Week celebrates and gives back to our country’s great natural and cultural landscapes.

April 22, 2013 5:57 PM EDTYoung Scientists and Innovators Amaze President Obama at the White House Science Fair

100 students from more than 40 states were at the White House for an all-day, hands-on celebration of the power and potential of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education.

April 20, 2013 1:10 PM EDTWatch Live: 2013 White House Science Fair

President Obama hosts the 3rd Annual White House Science Fair and celebrate the student winners of a broad range of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) competitions from across the country.

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NYPD Poised To Make Its 5 Millionth Stop-And-Frisk Today

The New York Police Department is on track to make its 5 millionth stop-and-frisk today, according to the New York Civil Liberties Union. The controversial program, which directs police to stop suspicious-looking people on the street and frisk them for weapons or drugs, has come under fire for disproportionately targeting minorities, while showing little discernible impact on crime.

Since Mayor Michael Bloomberg took office in 2002, NYPD officers have stopped 4.4 million innocent people, the vast majority of whom were black or Latino:

About 4.4 million of the stop-and-frisk encounters, or 88 percent, were of innocent people as they did not result in an arrest or summons. More than 86 percent of people stopped were black or Latino.

At 5 million, the NYPD has stopped more than the combined populations of Baltimore, Boston, Denver, Detroit, Pittsburgh, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington DC. The racial bias is glaringly obvious; in 2011, the police stopped young black men more times than the total number of young black men in New York City.

The NYPD’s relationship with minority communities has become especially strained by the program’s overzealous targeting of young black and Latino men, culminating in the death of a 16-year-old boy, Kimani Gray, last weekend. Gray. Police stopped Gray for suspiciously adjusting his belt. Gray then allegedly pulled a gun on the officers, forcing them to shoot him multiple times. However, the autopsy found several bullets hit Gray from behind, and eyewitnesses claim Gray was unarmed.

Stop-and-frisk is not only harming New Yorkers’ trust in the police — it’s also using their money. Stop-and-frisk cost New York City taxpayers $22 million in civil rights lawsuits last year.

On Monday, a federal district judge will hear the broadest legal challenge to stop-and-frisk yet, and could decide to do away with the program entirely.

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President Clinton: Some Disenfranchisement Efforts Today Are ‘Even More Determined’ Than 48 Years Ago

In the wake of conservative Justice Antonin Scalia’s claim that a key provision of the Voting Rights Act amounts to a “perpetuation of racial entitlement,” former President Bill Clinton offered a very different vision of the law in an exclusive statement emailed to ThinkProgress today:

The Voting Rights Act is one of the most powerful tools Americans have to fight injustice, and its protection is fundamental to our democracy. Since the Act’s enactment in 1965, disciplined, systematic efforts to undermine its safeguards by disenfranchising younger, poorer, minority, and disabled voters—some even more determined today than they were 48 years ago—are reminding us of the fragility of this very precious right. As America becomes younger, more diverse, and more vibrant, our response must be to embrace our common humanity, to widen the circle of opportunity, and to build a country where every American has a voice in the future—a voice that our vote provides and our government must protect. This is not the time to weaken those protections, but rather an opportunity to redouble our efforts to affirm them.

President Clinton previously described efforts by Republican governors and lawmakers to undermine voting rights the most determined effort to restrict the franchise ” since we got rid of the poll tax and all the other Jim Crow burdens on voting.”

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USA Today teams up with Pew for public opinion polling

The Pew Research Center will replace Gallup as USA Today’s polling partner, the newspaper announced on Tuesday.

The first USA Today-Pew poll will be released this week and will gauge “attitudes toward the agenda facing Congress and the priorities outlined by President Obama in his State of the Union address.”

In January, Gallup and USA Today split up after a 20 year polling relationship.

?According to the Gallup statement, posted on CEO Frank Newport’s blog, the “evolving” worlds of journalism and opinion research provoked the two to reevaluate their relationship.?

The developments come on the heels of a tumultuous year in the world of polling.??

The 2012 election was marked by cries of bias from first one political party and then the other, provoking furious debate over the reliability of data proffered by various polling outlets.?? Republicans said the surveys relied on voter sample sizes that gave too much weight to high Democratic turnout. Even Mitt Romney’s campaign got in the act, arguing pollsters relying on the 2008 turnout to determine the makeup of the 2012 electorate were mistaken. ??Turnout in 2012 ended up similar to 2008, sending President Obama to an easy victory over Romney.??

However, the Obama campaign at one point attacked a Gallup poll that showed Romney holding a 4-percentage-point lead in the swing states over the incumbent. ??Democratic pollster Joel Benenson argued Gallup’s likely-voter screening method “created a bias against groups inclined to support Obama,” and was the reason the candidates were tied among women, traditionally an Obama stronghold.

Gallup was also criticized in mid-October when Obama’s job approval rating spiked, according to its daily tracking survey. The jump seemed to be the result of a shift in the polling outlet’s methodology, in which it increased the proportion of cellphones it surveyed.??

“It’s common,” Newport told The Hill at the time, referring to criticism of polling techniques. “The campaigns have a war room-type mentality, and both campaigns feel the need to quickly jump on any news of any type that could be viewed as negative for their candidate.”?

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How One 75-Year-Old Soybean Farmer Could Deal A Blow To Monsanto’s Empire Today

On Tuesday, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear a 75-year-old soybean farmer’s appeal against biotech giant Monsanto, in a case that could permanently reshape the genetically modified (GM) crop industry. Victor “Hugh” Bowman has been battling the corporation since 2007, when Monsanto sued him for violating their patent protection by purchasing second-generation GM seeds from a grain elevator. An appeals court ruled in favor of Monsanto, and despite the Obama administration’s urging to let the decision stand, the nine justices will hear Bowman make his case today.

Monsanto is notorious among farmers for the company’s aggressive investigations and pursuit of farmers they believe have infringed on Monsanto’s patents. In the past 13 years, Monsanto has sued 410 farmers and 56 small farm businesses, almost always settling out of court (the few farmers that can afford to go to trial are always defeated). These farmers were usually sued for saving second-generation seeds for the next harvest — a basic farming practice rendered illegal because seeds generated by GM crops contain Monsanto’s patented genes.

Monsanto’s winning streak hinges on a controversial Supreme Court decision from 1981, which ruled on a 5-4 split that living organisms could be patented as private property. As a result of that decision, every new generation of GM seeds — and their self-replicating technology — is considered Monsanto’s property.

Unfortunately, second- and third-generation seeds are very hard to track, which may explain why Monsanto devotes $10 million a year and 75 staffers to investigating farmers for possible patent violations. Seeds are easily carried by birds or blown by the wind into fields of non-GM seeds, exposing farmers who have never bought seeds from Monsanto to lawsuits. Organic and conventional seeds are fast becoming extinct — 93 percent of soybeans, 88 percent of cotton, and 86 percent of corn in the US are grown from Monsanto’s patented seeds. A recent study discovered that at least half of the organic seeds in the US are contaminated with some genetically modified material.

Bowman’s appeal gives the Supreme Court an opportunity to determine whether or not Monsanto is using patent enforcement to control their monopoly on a vital resource. As GM seeds become more ubiquitous, farmers who want to avoid Monsanto’s strict patents have few alternatives. As a recently released Center for Food Safety report notes, the concentration of market power among Monsanto and a handful of other companies has led to skyrocketing seed prices and less innovation by smaller firms:

USDA data show that since the introduction of GE seed, the average cost of soybean seed to plant one acre has risen by a dramatic 325 percent, from $13.32 to $56.58. Similar trends exist for corn and cotton seeds: cotton seeds spiked 516 percent from 1995-2011 and corn seed costs rose 259 percent over the same period.
[...] USDA economists have found that seed industry consolidation has reduced research and likely resulted in fewer crop varieties on offer: “Those companies that survived seed industry consolidation appear to be sponsoring less research relative to the size of their individual markets than when more companies were involved… Also, fewer companies developing crops and marketing seeds may translate into fewer varieties offered.”

Furthermore, emerging evidence indicates that Monsanto has hardly perfected the technology. A core argument for GM seeds in the 1990s claimed they would reduce chemical pesticide use because the plants themselves would repel pests and weeds. But studies have confirmed the spread of so-called “superweeds” that have developed a resistance to Monsanto’s gene, leading farmers to deploy even heavier doses of herbicides like Monsanto’s own product, Roundup. Another new report debunked the company’s argument that GM seeds would have higher yields; in fact, two of Monsanto’s most popular genes caused yields to drop.

Despite the mounting evidence against their products, the biotech industry enjoys a cozy relationship with government regulators. In December, the Justice Department abruptly dropped their investigation into anti-competitive practices in the industry without so much as a press release. The stalled Farm Bill also contains generous provisions that would allow these companies to put their products on the market with cursory or no review by the USDA.

Today’s oral argument is a study in these intertwined interests: the Obama administration is presenting their own defense of Monsanto, and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was once a Monsanto lawyer (but will not recuse himself from Bowman’s case). Still, the same high court that enabled the current state of American agriculture in 1981 now finds itself in a position to check Monsanto’s power — or help them tighten their hold on the industry.

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USA Today On Keystone XL Rally: ‘Tens Of Thousands Demand Action On Climate Change’

So that was a heck of a rally. I welcome readers who attended to share their thoughts and pics.

If you missed it, you can get details from USA Today‘s story “Tens of thousands demand action on climate change.” Or from the Sierra Club news release, “More Than 35,000 Strong March on Washington for Climate Action.”

And then there’s always the Climate Progress twitter feed — my first mass tweeting from an iPhone.

I loved the combination of passion and knowledge that was driving the day. I had the chance to talk to a bunch of the speakers and was impressed by the strength of their commitment on climate in general and Keystone XL in particular.

Van Jones made clear that all of President Obama’s other accomplishments would be wiped away if he approves Keystone, since future generations are going to judge all of us on the basis of the actions we take on climate.

I was very impressed with the celebrities who came, that they had substance to go with the style. How great to have Rosario Dawson explain that it is called “tar sands” and not “oil sands.” And in chatting with her afterwards, it’s clear she also understands the spectrum of clean energy solutions.

And Evangeline Lilly (aka Kate Austen from Lost) was there as a Canadian to apologize to all the Americans in the audience for her country’s ceaseless efforts to send the dirtiest of fuels our way. I have seen every episode of Lost but lost my nerve to tell her how much I enjoyed her show except for the last five minutes, that is. It’s not like she was one of the writers…. But I digress.

I had a long talk with Tom Steyer, the billionaire hedge-fund manager who helped lead the “No on Prop 23? campaign to save California’s climate law in 2010. He is also on the board of CAP. He is full throttle that we have to act — and act now — if we are to avert catastrophe. He said to the crowd that he has spent a lot of time reviewing investments and Keystone is a bad investment for this country.

It is good to see a movement with passion from the top all the way down to the roots.

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Study: Global Warming Causes Most Monthly Heat Records Today

by Dana Nuccitelli, via Skeptical Science

A new paper published in Climatic Change by Coumou, Robinson, and Rahmstorf (CRR13) examines the increased frequency of record-breaking monthly temperature records over the past 130 years, finding that these records are now five times more likely to occur due to global warming, with much more to come.

“…worldwide, the number of local record-breaking monthly temperature extremes is now on average five times larger than expected in a climate with no long-term warming. This implies that on average there is an 80% chance that a new monthly heat record is due to climatic change … Under a medium global warming scenario, by the 2040s we predict the number of monthly heat records globally to be more than 12 times as high as in a climate with no long-term warming.”

Figure 1: Observed record ratio (the increase in the number of heat records compared to those expected in a world without global warming) for monthly heat records as it changes over time (thin red line is annual data, thick red line smoothed with half-width 5 years). This is compared with predictions from a simple stochastic model based only on the global mean temperature evolution (blue line with uncertainty band directly comparable to the smoothed red curve)

CRR13 considers the formula for the probability of a record-breaking extreme in a Gaussian (bell curve) time series with a linear long-term warming trend, compared to the much more simplified version of the same formula when there is no warming trend.  The paper then examines the ratio of those two equations – the increased frequency of record-breaking extreme heat events in a warming world.

The study uses global surface temperature data provided by the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) for 1880–2010, in 2° by 2° grids across the globe, excluding polar regions above 70° latitude due to the sparse temperature station coverage there  They examine the temperature data for each calendar month of the year.

CRR13 finds that the number of observed heat records is much larger than one would have expected in a climate with no long term warming, and many monthly heat records have been broken over the past decade.

In Figure 2 below, the increase in observed monthly heat records in the past decade over the most recent 40-year period of data (left column) are compared to the modeled results (right column) for northern hemisphere summer (top row), winter (middle row), and the whole year (bottom row).

Figure 2: Global maps of the observed record ratio (the increase in the number of heat records compared to those expected in a world without global warming) as observed (left panels) and estimated by the model (right panels) using the 1971–2010 dataset. a and b show boreal summer results (June-July-August), c and d austral summer results (December-January-February) and e and f results for all months.

Figure 3 looks at the increase in heat records over the past decade as compared to the full 131-year dataset. The similarity between Figures 2 and 3 shows that over the past decade, the monthly records in the past decade as compared to the past 40 years are usually also records as compared to the past 131 years.

The bottom right panel (d) also shows the probability that a monthly heat record in a given location is due to global warming, with blue indicating 0% probability and red indicating 100%.

Figure 3: Global maps of the observed record ratio over the past decade (the increase in the number of heat records compared to those expected in a world without global warming) over the 1880–2010 dataset, for a boreal summers (June-July-August), b austral summers (December-January-February) and c all months. d Risk map showing the probability that a record-breaking event in the last decade is due to climatic change.

In Figure 1 above, CRR13 extends the model forward assuming global warming based on a moderate emissions scenario, Representative Concentrations Pathway (RCP) 4.5, in which human greenhouse gas emissions peak around the year 2040, ultimately causing a radiative forcing (global energy imbalance) of 4.5 Watts per square meter in 2100 (a doubling of atmospheric CO2 would cause a forcing of about 3.7 Watts per square meter).  This scenario would ultimately lead to about 3.6°C global surface warming above pre-industrial levels, which is a very dangerous and possibly catastrophic amount of global warming, but certainly not a worst case scenario.  It essentially represents a scenario where we take too-slow and gradual action to reduce human greenhouse gas emissions, and at the moment seems fairly realistic.

In this scenario, CRR13 finds that by 2040, monthly heat records will have become approximately 12 times more likely to occur than in a non-warming world,

“…approximately 80% of the recent monthly heat records would not have occurred without human influence on climate. Under a medium future global warming scenario this share will increase to more than 90% by 2040.”

As lead author Coumou noted, this is even worse than it sounds, because breaking a heat record in 2040 will require much higher temperatures than breaking a record today.

“Now this doesn’t mean there will be 12 times more hot summers in Europe than today – it actually is worse.  To count as new records, they actually have to beat heat records set in the 2020s and 2030s, which will already be hotter than anything we have experienced to date.  And this is just the global average – in some continental regions, the increase in new records will be even greater.”

The results of this research are consistent with those of Hansen et al. (2012), which found that global warming is shifting the temperature distribution to make extreme heat waves more likely to occur, similar to the findings of several other studies such as Donat and Alexander (2012) and Meehl et al. (2009).

Source: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center GISS and Scientific Visualization Studio

To sum up the results of this study,

Record-breaking monthly temperature records are already occurring five times more often than they would in the absence of human-caused global warming.There is an 80% chance that any monthly heat record today is due to human-caused global warming.Unless we take steps to significantly reduce human greenhouse gas emissions and global warming, by 2040 the frequency of monthly heat records will become 12 times the rate in a non-warming world, and we will be able to blame more than 90% of heat records on global warming.

This would of course be bad news.  For example, as shown by Hawkins et al. (2012), crops tend not to respond well to extreme heat, so these findings could pose a significant problem for global food production, as well as increasing heat fatalities, requiring costly adaptive measures to prepare people for more frequent extreme heat waves.  In January of 2013, Australia has been trying to cope with this sort of extreme heat, which has resulted in devastating wildfires and other nasty consequences.

CRR13 presents a reality which we should try very hard to reverse, and a possible future we need to do our best to avoid.

– This piece was originally published at Skeptical Science and was re-printed with permission.

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50 Years Ago Today, JFK Called For Closing A Giant Tax Loophole…But It Still Exists

Our guest blogger is Seth Hanlon, Director of Fiscal Reform at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

On January 24, 1963, exactly half a century ago, President John F. Kennedy called on Congress to enact a broad overhaul of the tax code. One of JFK’s boldest proposals was to close a giant tax loophole that allows wealthy people to escape taxes on capital gains — the appreciation in value of stocks, businesses, or other investments — by holding onto assets until death and passing them onto heirs.

Though JFK’s successor, Lyndon Johnson, pushed through much of the Kennedy tax program in 1964, the tax break on inherited capital gains survived. It exists to this day as one of the largest loopholes in the tax code.

The provision is sometimes called the “angel of death loophole” or, in tax-speak, the “stepup in basis at death.” Here is how it works: Let’s say an investor buys stock for $1,000 and over time it shoots up in value to $100,000. If the investor sells that stock, he’ll owe capital gains taxes on the amount it has gone up.

But if the investor holds onto the stock his whole life and bequeaths it to his heirs, the $99,000 of gain is never subject to capital gains tax. The heirs inherit the stock with what’s called a “stepped-up basis,” which means that if they sell the stock at some point, they’ll only owe capital gains tax on any gain above $100,000.

The inherited capital gains loophole has major effects on the budget, on the economy, and on tax fairness. It results in about half of all capital gains going permanently untaxed. It costs the U.S. Treasury an estimated $50 billion per year (perhaps more). It encourages people to hold onto assets even when they would otherwise want to sell them. And since capital gains are highly concentrated at the top end of the income scale, it undermines progressivity.

One of the arguments for maintaining the inherited capital gains tax break is that the estate tax provides a backstop, ensuring that large inheritances are taxed. But that argument holds less water now that the estate tax has been largely eviscerated.

In submitting his tax reform proposal to Congress, Kennedy emphasized that eliminating “the ability to avoid all capital gains taxed on assets held until death” would mean that more investors would choose “the most desirable investment[s],” not the most tax-favored ones. JFK’s proposal included a number of exceptions to address practical issues, including exempting the vast majority of people with only modest amounts of capital gains. Unfortunately, however, Congress left the loophole untouched, and subsequent efforts to address it have also come up short.

Fifty years later, Congress is again discussing tax reform, and though the inherited capital gains loophole is one of the largest tax breaks, it is rarely debated. But if Congress is committed to a balanced approach to our fiscal challenges, and serious about “base broadening” tax reform, it should revisit a half-century-old proposal that is more relevant than ever.

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Obama’s first lose-lose Obamacare-related argument today.

The first round of the US Supreme Court’s attempts to settle the problem that is Obamacare takes place today, and from the Obama administration’s purely partisan (and particularly puerile) perspective, there’s no winning scenario available. Essentially, what’s happening today is the courts are hearing arguments about whether or not Obamacare’s individual mandate qualifies as a tax. If it does qualify as a tax, then under the provisions of the Tax Anti-Injunction Act (TAIA) the mandate cannot actually be challenged in courts until it’s actually been collected; more plainly, you can’t sue for relief from an onerous tax before they take it from you.

The merits of the case are one thing – the above link from Heritage goes into the whole issue, in some detail – but the partisan implications are another. There’s no good result for the Obama administration: if the Supreme Court decides that the individual mandate is not a tax then a large portion of the administration’s existing arguments goes away, thus increasing the likelihood of a humiliating disposal (at least in part) of the one thing that Obama has managed to do domestically in four years. But if the mandate is a tax, then Obama gets to face a plethora of attack ads in the fall which will be (accurately) portraying him as a shameless serial liar who used the looming Obamacare legislation to sneak in a stealth tax on the American middle class.

:shrug: I can work with either scenario.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

PS: There is nothing deeply, deeply ironic about the fact that the President opposed the mandate as a candidate. Or, as American Majority put it:

Contrary to popular belief, a fundamental inability to live up to the job is neither particularly ironic nor particularly not ironic. It simply is.

PPS: If you’re wondering why either side got involved in this argument in the first place, well… neither one brought it up in the first place (the states don’t want to wait to destroy Obamacare, obviously). The court had to assign somebody to argue that TAIA applied in this case.

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