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Climate Change Bird Atlas

Julia Whitty — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 20:41:24 +0000

American goldfinch: Mdf via Wikimedia Commons.

There's an interesting database online through the US Forest Service called the Climate Change Bird Atlas. It's based on another database, the Climate Change Tree Atlas (both are forecasts for eastern forests and birds). One leads to the other, since the fate of forests will affect the future of many species of birds. From the USDA/Forest Service site:

Changing forests mean changing habitat for the wildlife species that depends on them. The current and modelled distribution of 150 bird species is presented in the accompanying Climate Change Bird Atlas.

The database is interactive and reasonably easy to figure out. Here you can see one potential future for the American goldfinch, the iconic state bird of three widely separated states—New Jersey, Iowa, and Washington. The goldfinch is a truly common bird that's benefited greatly from living alongside us, thriving at weedy roadsides and backyard bird feeders.
American goldfinch abundance change map: USDA/Forest Service. From: Matthews, S.N., L. R. Iverson, A.M. Prasad, A. M., and M.P. Peters. 2007-ongoing. A Climate Change Atlas for 147 Bird Species of the Eastern United States [database]. But parsed against three climate change scenarios and two emissions scenarios, the future of the American goldfinch gets sketchy. The map on the left shows current abundance of the American goldfinch in the Eastern US, with pink being the most abundant.

The map on the right shows a forecast decline in abundance based on high climate change/emissions scenarios... Looks like the "Canadian goldfinch" could be set to become the iconic provincial bird of Quebec, New Brunswick, and Ontario.

If you visit the Climate Change Bird Atlas you can play around with the outcomes for many eastern birds, compare projections, and run basic animations.

Credit: Dori via Wikimedia Commons.The atlas is derived from a paper in the science journal Ecography. Here's an excerpt:

Mounting evidence shows that organisms have already begun to respond to global climate change... We therefore developed statistical models of 147 bird species distributions in the eastern United States, using climate, elevation, and the distributions of 39 tree species to predict contemporary bird distributions... These models were then projected onto three models of climate change under high and low emission scenarios for both climate and the projected change in suitable habitat for the 39 tree species.

The paper is open access if you want to read more about the authors' modeling methods and the climate change/emissions scenarios they worked with. Their overall findings:

Breeding habitat will decrease by at least 10% for 6,179 species.
Breeding habitat will increase by at least 10% for 3,852 species in the eastern United States.

Most interesting about this paper was how it expanded the envelope beyond the usual climate/elevation-only models to include the effects of changing forests/vegetation. In some cases, refugia of forests may keep birds in places we are accustomed to seeing them, even when most of their kind have moved away or dwindled away.

The paper:

Matthews, S. N., Iverson, L. R., Prasad, A. M. and Peters, M. P. 2011. Changes in potential habitat of 147 North American breeding bird species in response to redistribution of trees and climate following predicted climate change. Ecography, 34: no. DOI:10.1111/j.1600-0587.2010.06803.x

Friday Cat Blogging - 10 February 2012

Kevin Drum — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 20:01:33 +0000

Today, both cats grace the same frame, one looking in and the other looking out. In this photo, the cats are a metaphor for Man's ineluctable failure to appreciate his place in the world. One's nature wants to be in, the other's nature wants to be out. In five minutes, their roles will reverse, world without end. As always, the ISO 9000-approved windowpane prevents true understanding. It is the human tragedy given feline expression.

Alternatively, the cats just want me to open the door, and this picture is merely a representation of the fact that cats don't have opposable thumbs. For which we can all be thankful.

In other cat news, your cat may be turning you into an introvert. Or an extrovert. It depends. Details here.

And with that, I can get back to obsessing over hotel accommodations in Rome later this year. My needs are modest. I'm looking for a place with big, lovely rooms; modern, well-equipped bathrooms; situated in a quiet neighborhood in the center of town; providing all modern amenities; with a friendly and helpful staff; and all for a low price. Oddly enough, I'm having trouble meeting all these modest requirements. What's going on?

Your Daily Newt: The Case of the "Pouting Sex Kitten"

Tim Murphy — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 19:05:45 +0000

As a service to our readers, every day we are delivering a classic moment from the political life of Newt Gingrich—until he either clinches the nomination or bows out.

Gingrich's 1994 novel, 1945, presents a provocative alternative history in which Hitler invaded eastern Tennessee at the end of World War II. Most news accounts of the book didn't get that far, though. Instead, they focused on the sex scene in the novel's opening pages. But as Charlie Homans reports, that's really not Newt's fault; blame one of his co-authors, Jim Baen:

Baen's eagerness to secure a large audience for 1945, [Gingrich friend David] Drake believes, was to blame for the Nazi Sex Kitten Incident. Dissatisfied with the first draft that Gingrich’s new co-author, William Forstchen, turned in, Baen began rewriting much of the novel himself—including an opening scene in which a Nazi spy, posing as a Swedish journalist, seduces the American president's chief of staff in an effort to pry loose nuclear secrets. "Suddenly, the pouting sex kitten gave way to Diana the Huntress," he wrote. “She rolled onto him and somehow was sitting athwart his chest, her knees pinning his shoulders. 'Tell me, or I will make you do terrible things.'" Convinced the scene was the book’s strongest selling-point, Baen circulated an excerpt to political reporters and Hollywood producers.

The book, unsurprisingly, was a flop. As Homans notes, "When the speaker appeared at the Chicago Book Fair to promote To Renew America, Baen was reduced to handing out free copies of the novel to anti-Gingrich protesters outside, who tore the books to pieces on television."

Angels Are Now Waltzing on the Edge of a Healthcare Plan

Kevin Drum — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 18:11:06 +0000

Well, we now have the details of the "accommodation" that President Obama has made over the contraception issue. Institutions affiliated with the Catholic church will be able to opt out of contraceptive coverage completely, so the bishops are said to be completely satisfied. The LA Times explains the rest:

The change essentially shifts the responsibility for providing and discussing contraception from the religious employer to the insurers. Any employer who has a religious objections to providing contraception will not have to provide that service to employees, but in those cases the insurer will be required to reach out directly to the employee and offer contraceptive care free of charge.

I've been laughing about this over email with a friend, who writes:

Further according to them, "Policy experts within the administration believe that there is effectively no cost to providing contraception, because use of it prevents much more expensive care they would otherwise have to provide."

Catholic bishops are reportedly thrilled. Insurance companies not heard from yet.

You think these things don't turn on the number of angels on the head of a pin? Apparently, they really do.

Not clear to me why they think there's "effectively no cost" and the insurance companies won't object, since if that were the case, they would have been offering this from the beginning of time.

If this gets everyone to sing Kumbaya, who am I to object? But really, this is just idiocy. If insurance companies are required to provide contraceptive coverage "free of charge," they will, of course, simply raise rates elsewhere to cover all these "free" contraceptives. And Catholic hospitals and universities will all pay these slightly higher rates, which means they're paying exactly as much for contraceptive coverage indirectly as they would be if their healthcare plans covered it directly. Just as Catholic bishops who pay income taxes already pay indirectly for contraceptive care subsidized by tax dollars. (Which they do. That's life in a pluralistic democracy. We all pay for stuff we disapprove of.)

Still, I guess this accommodation means the bishops can convince themselves their money isn't going toward paying for the evils of contraception. Kumbaya!

POSTSCRIPT: I just want to add that it's possible that this is a cunningly brilliant move. Obama gets to show — again! — that he's always willing to meet his critics halfway, and if the insurance companies play along with the "free of charge" charade then the critics really don't have a leg left to stand on. If they continue to object, then they're exposed as simply opposed to birth control, not merely standing up for religious liberty.

On a broader note, I don't think there's a single person in the world who has a consistent opinion on the fungibility of money. And you know what? As silly as that is from a purely technical point of view, it's probably not a bad thing. We all need ways to fool ourselves into making compromises we otherwise wouldn't make, and in the grand scheme of things, inconsistency over the fungibility of money is a small price to pay for a better lubricated society.

Grand George Soros—Fox News Alliance Exposed at CPAC

Tim Murphy — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 18:06:19 +0000

Photo by Tim MurphyShona Darress has it on good information that George Soros, liberal financier, scourge of the right, quarterback of the no-huddle offensive against all that makes America great and holy—the Sultan of Slant, the Maharishi of Misinformation, the Big Bopper of Bias—is secretly controlling the flow of information at Fox News. This might come as a surprise to some of you, given Fox News' fairly unambiguous vendetta against Soros and the progressive causes he helps support. But it is apparently the reality we must deal with, and Darress has the charts to prove it.

When I approach her booth (sponsored by the group "America's Survival") deep in the bowels of the Conservative Political Action Conference, and ask how she possibly came to the conclusion hinted at by her display, she quickly points to a smiling face on a poster a few feet behind her. "This, here: Sally Kohn. She's Soros-funded." Darress points to the next face, right below. "Jehmu Greene. She's Soros-funded." Although Sally Kohn is, according to Darress' literature, "the new face of Fox News," I've never heard of her; Green's role at Fox is as the token liberal on Sean Hannity's nightly program, a position that seems to exist solely to give Hannity and his panelists someone to yell at. "They're publicly owned," she says when I ask how Soros came to control the country's leading outlet for conservative news. "It's not that they went to Fox News and said we want to buy your stock—they just did it." The pamphlet she hands me spells it out more clearly: "Most likely Fox knuckled under to blackmail. Soros went after Murdoch's Empire with the hacking investigation against News of the World using the left-wing Guardian newspaper."

All of which explains why she'a hawking the bumper stickers that drew me in to begin with—red ones with "Bring Back Beck" in big white letters. "Glenn got shoved out because of Soros. He was outing everybody, wasn't he? He wasn't shutting up about George Soros! Soros didn't really like that." As for Beck, "He'll stay undercover a little bit longer. But the news is out."

Spread the word.

Update: Sally Kohn tweets: "I am NOT nor ever have been funded by Soros, despite Right wing assertions to contrary."

Obama Didn't Cave on Birth Control

Nick Baumann — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 17:56:50 +0000

So did Barack Obama fold?

On Friday, after taking heavy criticism from Catholic groups and the political right over a regulation that would have required religiously-affiliated hospitals and universities (not churches) to offer their employees health insurance that covers birth control (with no copays), President Barack Obama went on live television to announce a shift. Now, insurance companies will have to offer employees of religious organizations the birth control coverage directly, without charging extra for it. (The details of the new birth control coverage plan are here.)

Some media outlets will no doubt call this a surrender by the president. But it's not. Here's why:

Everyone who was going to get birth control coverage before will still have access to it. Employees of Catholic schools and hospitals aren't always Catholic, and most sexually active women who aren't trying to get pregnant use birth control. The new rule will not allow the religious views of the leadership of religiously-affiliated organizations to dictate whether birth control is provided to their employees. The intent of the first version of the rule was to make birth control easier to get. The new rule will achieve that goal. "No woman's health should depend on who she is, where she works, or how much money she makes," Obama said in his statement. This policy ensures that.
The coverage will still feature no copayments. The insurance companies that are being required to offer birth control coverage directly to the employees of religious organizations will have to offer it for free. There will be no difference in cost between the plan that covers birth control and the plan that doesn't. The Obama administration justifies this by noting that studies suggest that covering birth control is cost-neutral or even saves money for health insurers because it's cheaper than pregnancy; it spaces out pregnancies, leading to healthier kids, and has other beneficial health effects.
The policy change still won't satisfy the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, which opposed the birth control provision from the start. It's not a cave if your opponents aren't getting what they actually want. What the bishops desire is for the entire birth control rule to be repealed. They believe that no employer—religious affiliation or not—should be required to offer birth control coverage. UPDATE, Friday 3:45 EST: The bishops have released a statement on the policy change that says they're "studying" it and it's a "first step in the right direction." It's unclear whether they'll ultimately retreat from their original position or simply say this attempt is a good step but not sufficient.
The most important reproductive rights groups—Planned Parenthood, NARAL Pro-Choice America, the American Civil Liberties Union, and so on—all support the policy shift. You can bet that these politically savvy groups would be hollering to high heaven if they thought that women had been betrayed.
This whole scuffle was an intriguing policy dilemma, pitting women's health advocates versus faith leaders waving the banner of religious freedom. But with this move, Obama has demonstrated that it's possible to sidestep the red-hot politics of the dispute and work out a reasonable policy outcome that's backed by reproductive rights groups and the Catholic Health Association. It's not likely, though, that the social conservatives who have bashed Obama as an implacable foe of religious freedom will give it a rest.

The Employment Picture Remains Murky and Hard to Parse

Kevin Drum — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 17:50:14 +0000

Paul Krugman says that although the employment picture is looking up, it still has a ways to go. To illustrate this, he displays a chart showing the employment-population ratio for prime age workers age 25-54:

I agree that this is a telling statistic. It really does indicate that we haven't made up much of the ground we've lost since 2007, so I don't have any argument with Krugman using it. At the same time, you get a different picture if you pull back and disaggregate the data a bit. Here's another view:

I don't want to make too much of this, especially since I'm not sure exactly what we should make of it. But the employment-population ratio among men has been declining steadily for over half a century, and right now we're only a point or two below the trendline for men. Conversely, participation among women plateaued starting in the mid-90s, which suggests that we're still a good four points or so below the trendline for women.

Maybe. The question is what the long-term trend really is. I'm not sure what to say about that, but it's been niggling at me for a very long time. Basically, I just want to caution everyone not to treat 2007 as a magic year. There's no question that employment is still in the doldrums, but the question of where the employment-population ratio "should" be is not easy to pinpoint.

Details of the White House "Accommodation" on Birth Control Rule

Nick Baumann — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 16:25:51 +0000

The White House will change its policy requiring employers to offer health insurance coverage to their employees that covers birth control at no cost. Previously, religiously affiliated employers other than churches—such as Catholic universities and hospitals—would have been required to offer the insurance to their employees. Now, according to senior White House officials, if a religious employer has a religious objection to providing birth control coverage, insurance companies will be required to offer the insurance featuring free birth control directly to the employees.

Planned Parenthood and NARAL Pro-Choice America, the two most important reproductive rights organizations in the US, both support the White House's compromise, which ensures that women who work for religious organizations other than churches will have access to birth control without a copay. Sister Carol Keehan, the head of the Catholic Health Association, the main Catholic hospitals group, also supports the deal. Keehan and the CHA were key supporters of Obama's health care reform legislation, which the US Conference of Catholic Bishops opposed as written.

Obama's plan is unlikely to win the support of the bishops. In September 2010, when the policy was first being developed, the USCCB wrote a letter opposing requiring any employer—not just religious ones—to offer birth control coverage. Anthony Picarello, the USCCB general counsel who signed the letter, told USA Today on Wednesday that the bishops still oppose the entire policy.

Picarello told USA Today the bishops are worried about the problems the law creates for "good Catholic business people who can't in good conscience cooperate with this," and noted that if he opened a Taco Bell, he'd be forced to offer birth control to his employees. Only something like Sen. Marco Rubio's (R-Fla.) "Religious Freedom Restoration Act"—which would allow any employer, not just religious ones, to cite a religious objection and thereby avoid covering birth control—is likely to satisfy the bishops on this front.

Here's the full text of the White House's fact sheet on its decision:

Continue Reading »

Drone Attacks Are Popular Because They're Better Than the Alternative

Kevin Drum — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 15:44:46 +0000

As you may recall, I think one of the most important questions you should ask yourself when you ponder public policy is, "Compared to what?" Michael O'Hare asks this question regarding drone attacks:

I think our emotional reaction to stuff like this depends a lot on what alternatives we instinctively compare it to. Is the drone a cowardly analog to lying in wait for a bad guy and bushwacking him, a pusillanimous substitute for standing up and ‘fighting like a man’, putting your safety at immediate risk? Or is it just like launching a bullet from far away, or dropping a bomb from high in the air, or planting a mine that goes off when you’re in another county, except better because it’s more accurate and selective, can be called off right up to the last second, and even safer for the pilot/operator?

Here's a related point, prompted by the news that even a majority of liberals approve of drone attacks. Again, the key question is, "Compared to what?"

When you think of drone attacks, are you mentally comparing them to the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq? If so, they'll seem like superior alternatives: more focused, less deadly, less costly, and less likely to spiral out of control.
Or, are you mentally comparing them to no war at all? If so, they'll obviously seem more deadly, more costly, and, as Mike points out, maybe even cowardly and pusillanimous too.

If liberals are implicitly choosing the first option, that might explain why so many approve of drone attacks: because they want us to withdraw troops from Afghanistan, and they think of drone attacks as a way of allowing that to happen. They may or may not approve of the attacks in a vacuum, but if that's what it takes to provide cover for a drawdown, then it's an acceptable compromise.

I'm not sure how you get inside people's heads to see if this is the lens they're using. But I suspect that something like this explains what's going on, just as "Compared to what?" explains a lot of other things that otherwise seem a little mysterious at first glance.

Compromise Due on Contraception?

Kevin Drum — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 14:58:06 +0000

I see that the Obama administration is expected to offer up a compromise on contraceptive coverage later this morning. Greg Sargent wisely tweets, "I see no reason not to wait for final proposal. The world won't be worse off if we yell 'cave' in an hour, instead of right now."

Fine. I'll wait. Politically, though, it sounds like a disaster no matter what the compromise is. All the folks who have had Obama's back on this are going to be wildly furious, and the Catholic bishops, having smelled blood already, will not be appeased. Not even slightly. They won't accept any compromise other than an absolute, ironclad exemption for any institution that's associated in any way with the church, putting a clear end to all the nonsense about this really being an issue of copays or some other secondary issue.

This has not been well played.

White House Seeking "Compromise" On Birth Control

Adam Serwer — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 14:05:00 +0000

The White House is looking to "compromise" on broadening the religious exemption to its mandate that employers must offer insurance plans that include contraception coverage, following a week of harsh criticism from Republicans and religious organizations.

ABC News' Jake Tapper reports that the White House's compromise could be premised on Hawaii's law, which mandates contraception coverage but contains a mechanism for ensuring that employees are covered while not making religious employers directly pay for that coverage. Here's how it works, according to a report from the Guttmacher Institute:

The Hawaii law specifies that when an employer is exempted from the contraceptive coverage requirement on religious grounds, its employees are entitled to purchase coverage directly from the plan. The cost to the employee must be no more than the price the employee would have paid had the employer not been exempted. The law requires an exempted employer to notify its employees of this option.

Here's the thing: The US Conference of Catholic Bishops has already said that this is unacceptable to them, because according to the National Catholic Register, this would still mean that religious employers "must directly send women to drugs and devices that are morally wrong and can do harm to them." (Millions of women use contraception, including the vast, vast majority of Catholic women, many of them for health reasons rather than preventing pregnancy.) It's also not clear the Hawaii plan is workeable at the federal level, as one administration source told CNN that "the federal government cannot compel insurers to provide a side-contraception plan."

The unacknowledged background to this fight is that, as my colleague Nick Baumann reported earlier this week, federal law has required employers to offer health insurance for more than a decade—which is why DePaul University, the largest Catholic university in America, already offers birth control coverage to its employees. Far from being an unprecedented "assault on religious freedom," the narrow religious exception here has ample legal precedent. As Michelle Goldberg has written, contraception mandates are in effect in 28 states in various forms, and the courts have ruled against challenges brought to those state laws. And in a 1990 opinion, Justice Antonin Scalia found that laws "neutral toward religion and generally applicable" don't hamper inviduals' constitutional rights, so the administration seems to be on firm legal ground.

Firm legal ground however, isn't the same as being politically popular, and despite the pre-decision polls showing that mandating contraception coverage would be broadly accepted, there's probably a reason the White House is looking for middle ground now. But that's the same reason that their critics seems unlikely to meet them in the middle on this issue: Republicans think that they have a winning political issue here, too. There's a political angle for the White House here too of course: In offering a compromise, they may not be hoping for reconcilation as much as an opportunity to make their critics look unreasonable.

The Best Swag at CPAC

Tim Murphy — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 11:30:00 +0000

Forget everything you've heard about shrinking government, icing the welfare state, and giving poor children the maintenance tools to pull themselves by their bootstraps—at the Conservative Political Action Conference, everyone's just looking for a handout.

That, at least, was my conclusion after talking to the good folks at Procinctu, a firm that "works to arm you with the knowledge and tools necessary to attain self-sustainment, empowerment, and security." That entails a number of things—warning you against the evils of Monsanto, promoting the purchase of gold and silver, encouraging exercise. And purchasing, for $10, this t-shirt:

If that's tough to read, let me spell it out for you: It's a t-shirt celebrating corpse desecration (a response to this). No one's buying, though; mostly people just come by, snap a photo, and keep on walking when they find out it's not free.

Maybe that's because everything else at CPAC is free. Here's a very incomplete sampling:

The plot of this book—free, if you promise to tell three friends about it—is that Einstein was wrong, time-travel is possible, and our 16th president has done exactly that in an attempt to steer America back on course.

Redecorating your office? Looking for something for that special someone this Valentine's day? Enter to win a free portrait of your favorite GOP presidential candidate:

Of course, if you load up on hand-drawn portraits of GOP presidential candidates, you'll probably need a car to help you bring them home with you. And if you're going to have a car, you'll want a bumper sticker to go with it:

And if you're going to get rear-ended by the driver who took your bumper sticker the wrong way, you'll want same sustenance while you recover. Like a cake replicating the board for the "Tea Party board game." Its creator told me it was like a combination of Trivial Pursuit and Monopoly. They offered me a slice. I told them I always have someone taste my food first. No one laughed.

In addition to handing out Chuck Norris t-shirts, our friends at birther hub WorldNetDaily are shilling for a presidential candidate of their own. But do they know he was born in the Philippines?

This is....interesting:

Pasha Roberts, the creator of the animated film Silver Circle, explained it to me this way: "Basically the plot of the movie is there is a severe economic collapse in 2018. There's a group of rebels who are fighting the Federal Reserve, and the way they fight is by making alternative currency out silver." Think Children of Men meets the Ron Paul Revolution. When I tell him I work for Mother Jones, he adds one more detail: one of the heroines of the flick is a "pot-smoking lesbian":

This isn't free, but I had to share it anyway. It's just a few feet away from a display of Ron Paul books. As I thumbed through this defense of colonialism, a Mitt Romney supporter next to me picked up a copy of End the Fed and held court with his friends: "This is what his freakish followers read. When they protest Romney events, they have a megaphone and they just read the book. It's disgusting!"

Runaway Slave: Run From Tyranny to Liberty, celebrates the exploits of African-Americans who have...embraced the Republican party. As the tag line puts it, the film "lays bare the truth about blacks and the progressive agenda. Get on board the new underground railroad!"

Book Review: Beautiful Souls

Hannah Levintova — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 11:00:00 +0000

Beautiful Souls: Saying No, Breaking Ranks, and Heeding the Voice of Conscience in Dark Times

By Eyal Press

FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX

What compels people to resist, even when confronted with the risks of bucking authority? Eyal Press examines the cases of four dissenters—an Israeli soldier who refused to serve in occupied territories, a Swiss deputy who aided World War II Jews, a bigotry-defying Serb who saved Croats, and a corporate whistleblower who outed the second-largest Ponzi scheme in US history—and invokes the work of psychologists and neuroscientists to help us ponder the ways we respond to ethical challenges. Proving time and again that the boldest renegades are just regular people with independent minds—rather than dyed-in-the-wool radicals—Beautiful Souls underscores dissent's populist potential. Acts of conscience, as Press puts it, "have a way of reverberating."

Denzel Washington Shackled in "Safe House" of Clichés

Asawin Suebsaeng — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 11:00:00 +0000

Safe House
Universal Pictures
115 minutes

Let me start by saying how relieved I am to see a Denzel Washington action film that has nothing to do with imperiled trains and wasn't directed by Tony Scott. It was also nice to see Washington play another charismatic, streetwise ass-kicker who gets his jollies up bullying a white-boy rookie—a formula Washington hasn't worked so well since 2001's Training Day.

That said, Safe House is a glut of miserably squandered opportunities.

Washington stars as Tobin Frost, a former high-ranking CIA official now wanted on four continents for selling agency secrets to Iran, China, Russia, and so forth. Just how badass is this character? We learn early on that he "literally rewrote the book" on CIA interrogation and personally convinced a top Hezbollah leader to become an informant during the Lebanese Civil War. Anyway, after finally falling into US custody, Frost is rushed to a black site in Cape Town, where relative newbie Matt Weston (Ryan Reynolds) is waiting as a CIA "housesitter"—a job marked by long hours, crushing idleness, and, as one minor character puts it, "appalling remuneration."

Shortly after Weston's superiors begin waterboarding Frost, a gang of nameless thugs flourishing automatic weapons bust into the safe house, presumably to extract the high-value detainee alive. Suddenly, Weston and Frost are off on a mad dash to the next secure location, racing through the busy streets and shanty towns of South Africa in a blitz of gunfire, civilian casualties, and crashed getaway cars.

Continue Reading »

Why I'm Feeling So Hard-Nosed Over the Contraception Affair

Kevin Drum — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 11:00:00 +0000

Over the past week I've written a few posts expressing support for the Obama administration's decision to require health care plans to cover contraception, as well as for its decision to permit only a very narrow exemption for religious organizations. I haven't really laid out the whole case, though, and today I want to do that in telegraphic form. Then I want to tell you the real reason that my reaction to this has been stronger than you might have guessed it would be, especially considering that this isn't a subject I wade into frequently. But that won't come until the end of the post. First, the bullet point warm-up:

In any case like this, you have to look at two separate issues: (1) How important is the secular public purpose of the policy? And (2) how deeply held is the religious objection to it?
On the first issue, I'd say that the public purpose here is pretty strong. Health care in general is very clearly a matter of broad public concern; treating women's health care on a level playing field with men's is, today, a deep and widely-accepted principle; and contraception is quite clearly critical to women's health. Making it widely and easily available is a legitimate issue of public policy.
On the second issue, I simply don't believe that the religious objection here is nearly as strong as critics are making it out to be. As I've mentioned before, even the vast majority of Catholics don't believe that contraception is immoral. Only the formal church hierarchy does. What's more, as my colleague Nick Baumann points out, federal regulations have required religious hospitals and universities to offer health care plans that cover contraception for over a decade. (The fact that some such employers don't cover birth control is mostly the result of lax enforcement.) It's true that the Obama regulation tightens this requirement, but only modestly: it covers organizations with fewer than 15 employees and it bans copays. Dozens of states already have similar rules on the books. So when Kirsten Powers says, "One thing we can be sure of: the Catholic Church will shut down before it violates its faith," that's just wrong. They've been working under similar rules for a long time without turning it into Armageddon.
Some matters of conscience are worth respecting and some aren't. If, say, Catholic doctrine forbade white doctors from treating black patients, nobody would be defending them. The principle of racial nondiscrimination is simply too important to American culture and we'd insist that the church respect this. I think the same is true today of the principle of nondiscrimination against women, as well as the principle that women should have control of their own reproduction. Like racial discrimination laws, churches that operate major institutions in the public square have to respect this whether they like it or not.
This new policy doesn't apply to churches themselves or their devotional arms. It applies only to nominally religious enterprises like hospitals and universities that serve secular purposes, take taxpayer dollars, employ thousands of non-Catholic women, and are already required to obey a wide variety of secular regulations. At organizations like these, the money that pays for employee health care doesn't come from the church, it comes out of the income stream they get from their customers and clients.
What's more, this is hardly a unique matter of conscience. Anyone who pays taxes, including Catholic bishops, ends up financially supporting things they disapprove of. Public regulations often involve financial commitments too, and this one is no different. It's also pretty minuscule. This is an issue that's very clearly being blown up for partisan political reasons far beyond its actual impact on religious organizations or religious conscience.

Now, having said all that, it's also true that I'm normally fairly sympathetic to granting religious exemptions to public policy. You can make a case—not a great one, but a case—that allowing an exemption to the new contraceptive policy wouldn't actually work a huge hardship on the women affected. And the Catholic Church's objection to contraception, wrongheaded though I think it is, is plainly of long standing. This is no made-up issue.

So why am I really feeling so hard-nosed about this? The answer goes back a few years, to the controversy over pharmacists who refused to fill prescriptions for the morning-after pill. I was appalled: If you're a pharmacist, then you fill people's prescriptions. That's the job, full stop. If you object to filling prescriptions, then you need to find another occupation.

But of course, the entire right-wing outrage machine went into high gear over this. And it was at that point that my position shifted: if this was the direction things were going, then it was obvious that there would be no end to religious exemption arguments. The whole affair was, I thought, way over the top, and yet it got the the full-throated support of virtually every conservative pundit and talking head anyway. This was, in plain terms, simply a war on contraception.

So I changed my mind. Instead of believing as a default that we should take religious exemptions seriously and put the burden of proof on the rest of us to explain why they shouldn't be allowed, I now believe that neutral public policy comes first and the burden of proof is now up to churches to provide convincing arguments that (a) An important matter of conscience is being violated, and (b) The public policy in question isn't important enough to be applied across the board. On the matter of contraception, I don't think they've made a convincing case for either one.

We're Still at War: Photo of the Day for February 10, 2012

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 10:57:00 +0000

Officers with the 82nd Airborne Division's 1st Brigade Combat Team complete a team obstacle course on February 3, 2012, at Fort Bragg, N.C., during a Prop Blast, a traditional rite-of-passage for officers new to the division. During this phase of the event, teams must move the tire and a simulated casualty down a muddy slope, across a muddy slough, and up the other side. (US Army photo by Sgt. Michael J. MacLeod)

Contraceptives and Copays

Kevin Drum — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 01:29:24 +0000

I'm curious about something. Chris Matthews has been insisting for days now that the real issue in the Obama administration's new contraceptive rules is copays. That is, the problem isn't that the rules require Catholic hospitals and universities to provide healthcare coverage that includes contraceptives, it's that they're required to provide healthcare coverage that includes contraceptives with no copay.

Is there anything to this? I haven't heard a single critic of the new rules highlight this. Quite the contrary. Every one of them appears to believe that requiring contraceptive coverage from Catholic institutions is just flat-out wrong. Allowing copays wouldn't change this at all.

So where is this copay argument coming from? Does anyone know?

On a related topic, why was there (to my knowledge) no outburst last August, when these rules were first announced? The Catholic hierarchy certainly objected to them at the time, but aside from a few brief mentions it barely got any news coverage at all. My cynical view is that the only difference between then and now is that the Republican presidential primary is in high gear, but maybe there's more to this. Again, does anyone know?

UPDATE: In comments, Frank Parnell offers an answer to my second question:

According to NPR, the bishops were upset when the when the rules were announced in August, met with the White House, and (wink, wink, say no more) thought they received assurances from Obama that they would receive a broad exemption. Either someone badly misinterpreted the discussion, or someone is being less than truthful, or a bit of both.

And here's New York Times religion correspondent Laurie Goodstein a few days ago on NPR:

Well, I think part of the reason the bishops are so outraged is that they feel that they were given a signal by the administration and directly by President Obama. Archbishop Dolan met with President Obama. They talked about the work that the Catholic Church does, that the Catholic Church is not just parishes, but is also hospitals, is universities, charities and that all these institutions have a right to express their religious freedom and religious conscience.

So, Archbishop Dolan thought that he had gotten through to President Obama and thought he had a signal that this decision would go their way. So, when it didn't, they felt greatly betrayed by the president.

So there you go.

The Mystery of Exploding Pig Poop

Tom Philpott — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 23:00:45 +0000

A specter haunts the Midwest's factory-scale hog farms: the specter of explosive "manure foam." From the Minnesota Daily:

A few years ago, hog farmers throughout the Midwest noticed foam building on top of their manure pits. Soon after, barns began exploding, killing thousands of hogs while farmers lost millions of dollars.

And you thought Santorum was gross.

But seriously, what gives? First, it helps to have an idea of how manure is handled at industrial hog facilities. In his classic 2005 Rolling Stone exposé of the industrial pork giant Smithfield, Jeff Tietz provided a vivid description:

The floors are slatted to allow excrement to fall into a catchment pit under the pens, but many things besides excrement can wind up in the pits: afterbirths, piglets accidentally crushed by their mothers, old batteries, broken bottles of insecticide, antibiotic syringes, stillborn pigs—anything small enough to fit through the foot-wide pipes that drain the pits. The pipes remain closed until enough sewage accumulates in the pits to create good expulsion pressure; then the pipes are opened and everything bursts out into a large holding pond.

The manure itself is pretty nasty, too. Pigs on factory farms are given daily doses of antibiotics and growth-promoting additives like ractopamine, much of which ends up in their waste. So what you get in those cesspools, the ones now exploding in the Midwest, is kind of a stew of bacteria, antibacterial agents, and novel antibiotic-resistant bacteria strains, all mixed with the random detritus described by Tietz.

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The $25 Billion Foreclosure Settlement: Breakthrough or Raw Deal?

Andy Kroll — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 21:06:54 +0000

On Thursday, after months of closed-door negotiations, plenty of hand wringing, and too many leaks to the media to count, 49 state attorneys general, the Justice Department, and five mega-banks announced they'd reached a legal settlement over fraud in the mortgage servicing and foreclosure processes.

The settlement is worth an estimated $25 billion, according to the Justice Department. The banks involved—Ally Financial, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Citigroup, and JPMorgan Chase—agreed to reduce principal home loan debt for a million homeowners while paying $2,000 to 750,000 more households that had lost their home to foreclosure. Crucially, the settlement doesn't entirely absolve banks of alleged wrongdoing, leaving the door open for AGs like New York's Eric Schneiderman to proceed with foreclosure fraud lawsuits of their own. Depending on whom you ask, the terms of settlement are a key breakthrough, a first step toward righting the foreclosure abuses of the past decade, or a total sham.

Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) called the deal "an important victory for homeowners and communities devastated by the housing crisis." Michael Calhoun, president of the Center for Responsible Lending, said in a statement that the deal "will help build a stronger housing market while keeping more people in their homes. But while a significant step toward fixing the foreclosure crisis, this settlement was never intended or able to provide a comprehensive remedy. Much more work is required."

Some experts and observers, however, were plainly dismissive of the deal. Yves Smith, who runs the blog Naked Capitalism, rattled off 12 reasons why "you should hate" the foreclosure settlement, including the deal's overall price tag, the paltry $2,000 payout for homeowners, and her belief that the deal papers over deeper problems with property titles and the foreclosure process itself. "As we've said before," she wrote, "this settlement is yet another raw demonstration of who wields power in America, and it isn't you and me."

Then again, the AGs' foreclosure settlement was never going to fully address the myriad problems with the foreclosure process. Consider MERS, the industry-backed electronic mortgage registry that greased the foreclosure pipeline and enabled many of the dubious practices that led to the housing crisis. MERS has been in use since 1995; it's an entrenched part of the housing market. It will take much more than a nationwide settlement to tackle the many problems MERS has wrought.

There's also the problem of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and their role in the foreclosure crisis. As myself and others have reported, the two government housing giants spawned foreclosure mills, the assembly-line-like law firms that skirted the law as they kicked people out of their homes. They also reportedly squashed a plan to write down the debt of homeowners who owed more than their houses were worth. There's no remedying the foreclosure crisis without reforming Fannie and Freddie.

The settlement, in other words, is far from a cure-all. Best-case scenario, consumer advocates say, the deal is just the beginning of a reckoning for the fraud and abuse that ran rampant. "Today’s announcement of the mortgage foreclosure settlement represents a step toward righting the wrongs committed by the banks," said Phil Angelides, the chair of the now-defunct Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, "but there are still miles to go. "

Marines Sport Nazi SS Flag in Afghanistan

Adam Weinstein — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 20:37:09 +0000

Marine unit's SS flag in Afghanistan: Tayler Jerome

The Marine Corps' scout snipers in Afghanistan could probably use a safety stand-down. Just weeks after news broke that one elite unit of the forward-deployed Marines urinated on the corpses of dead Afghans, a photo has surfaced of another unit posing proudly beside a flag of the Nazi's killer SS troops. The Marine Corps Times reports:

The stylized "SS" logo appeared in a photograph of the platoon taken in September 2010 in Sangin district, Afghanistan, a hotly contested area in Helmand province. The Marines were with 1st Reconnaissance Battalion, out of Camp Pendleton, Calif.

The I Marine Expeditionary Force inspector general based at Pendleton was made aware of the "SS" flag photo in November of last year, said Capt. Gregory Wolf, a spokesman at Marine Corps headquarters. The issue has been addressed with the Marines involved, Wolf said. He did not say what specific action was taken beyond ordering Marines to stop using the logo.

The photo in question is not the only one documenting usage of the logo: A second image (embedded below) shows the SS logo emblazoned on a Marine's rifle. The Marines' story is that the unit used the flag "to identify the Marines as scout snipers, not Nazis." The symbolic appropriation may indeed be unwitting, but witlessness is no more desirable a trait in downrange warriors than malice is.

Why is this making news now? Several Marines who were concerned about the photos contacted Mikey Weinstein (no relation), president of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, a nonprofit that watchdogs religious intolerance in the armed services. Their behavior, Weinstein told me, "eviscerates good order, morale, and discipline," in addition to angering non-Americans and alienating survivors of the Nazis' atrocities. He published the photos on the foundation's website and sent a letter to Gen. John Amos, the Marine Corps commandant, demanding punishment for the Marines involved. "That flag symbolizes the vile ideology of Hitlerian fascism and sends a menacing signal to religious minorities within the United States armed forces," Weinstein said.

Walter Plywaski, a survivor of the Lodz ghetto and Auschwitz concentration camp in World War II who later became a US citizen and Air Force veteran, expressed disgust at the Marines' behavior. "The photographs below roil my intestines and break my heart beyond words to express," he wrote in an email to Weinstein. "I wish I could really believe that these sniper teams innocently combined the view of the United States flag with the central symbol of the murderous SS!"

The Corps says the matter has already been handled internally. "Certainly, the use of the 'SS runes' is not acceptable and Scout Snipers have been addressed concerning this issue," Marine Capt. Brian Block told Politico in a statement today.

But that's not good enough for Weinstein. "We're hearing that they may have moved Marines from one unit to another, they may have reprimanded them, they may have given them nonjudicial punishment," he said, referring to the military's most lenient administrative form of punishment. "That's unacceptable. If this is not a court-martial offense, there are no court-martial offenses."

A Marine sniper's rifle-stock sporting the Nazi SS symbol: Military Religious Freedom Foundation

Mind-Blowing Charts From the Senate's Income Inequality Hearing

Josh Harkinson — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 20:35:20 +0000

In another sign that Democrats have embraced income inequality as a cause célèbre, the Senate Budget Committee held a hearing on the subject today. The committee's ranking Republican, Jeff Sessions of Alabama, managed to look concerned during two hours of testimony about the kneecapping of the Middle Class—not that it should have been all that difficult. Here are some of the hearing's most striking charts:

Mother Jones readers have seen this one: The Philippe Dauman chart:

The 1 percent hasn't controlled such a large share of the economy since the eve of the Great Depression:

But as the rich have earned a larger share, they've paid a smaller and smaller share in taxes:

A major source of inequality in the tax code comes from how it treats investment income. Just ask Mitt Romney, who paid 13.9 percent of his income in taxes in 2010. Most of his earnings came from capital gains, which only get taxed at 15 percent. Proponents of the loophole argue that it helps spur investment, but it also disproportionately helps the rich:

Though America's wealthy are supposed to pay a higher tax rate than the poor (what's known as a "progressive tax code"), they now benefit from so many loopholes that the tax code has, in practice, become increasingly regressive (the Gini Index is a common measure of income inequality):

Survey Says 24% of Kids Have Moved Back In With Their Parents

Kevin Drum — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 20:13:29 +0000

Pew Research has a new survey out about the effect of the lousy economy on young people, and it's chock full of interesting things. Go read it! But I think I was most surprised by this:

It's not all that surprising that lots of young people are taking crappy jobs or going back to school or even postponing having a baby. But a full quarter of them have moved back in with their parents? Yikes. I'm not sure how much this has changed over time, but it's a helluva lot regardless.

EPA to Cruise and Cargo Ships: No More Dumping on California's Coasts

Jaeah Lee — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 20:13:19 +0000

Great news, Golden State: Federal regulators have ruled that, starting next month, no more sewage shall be dumped on your coasts. Or at least not without consequence. Yesterday, the Environmental Protection Agency designated California's 1,624-mile coastline (stretching from Mexico to Oregon) a federal no-discharge zone, banning large vessels like cruise (PDF) and cargo ships from unloading sewage and other types of pollution into the state's coastal waters. (Of course, oil leaks and spills and their aftereffects will continue to be a problem.)

"California's coastal waters will no longer serve as a sewage pond for big ships," said state EPA Secretary Matthew Rodriguez in an agency press release. "For too long, pollution from these vessels has endangered our marine environment, jeopardized public health, and threatened the coastal communities that rely on recreation and tourism dollars." The EPA estimates that the no-discharge zone will prohibit more than 22 million of the 25 million gallons of treated sewage dumped by vessels in California waters each year. A small boater flushing untreated sewage into the water produces as much bacterial pollution as that of treated sewage produced by 10,000 people, according to a 2003 study by the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission. The marine conservation group Oceana estimates (PDF) that an average cruise ship generates 30,000 gallons of human waste every day. Untreated sewage, chemical, and oil runoff from marine vessels can contaminate water with toxins, coliform bacteria (the family of bacteria that includes E. coli), and invasive species, all of which can disrupt marine ecosystems.

The new sewage ban, which creates the nation's largest no-discharge zone to date, will apply to some 2,000 cargo ships that traverse the state's ports each year. It could also effect the nearly 77 percent of Californians who live on or near the coast, as well as marine and other wildlife. The state coastline is home to four national marine sanctuaries, portions of six national parks and recreation areas, and more than 200 other marine reserves and protected areas, according to the EPA.

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Quote of the Day: Ray LaHood Does Not Like the House Transportation Bill

Kevin Drum — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 19:00:26 +0000

From Ray LaHood, Secretary of Transportation and former Republican congressman, on the mind-bending stew of tea party crankery being stuffed into the transportation legislation currently being jammed through the House by its Republican leadership:

This is the most partisan transportation bill that I have ever seen. And it also is the most anti-safety bill I have ever seen. It hollows out our No. 1 priority, which is safety, and frankly, it hollows out the guts of the transportation efforts that we’ve been about for the last three years. It’s the worst transportation bill I’ve ever seen during 35 years of public service.

But other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?

Energy Reboot

Julia Whitty — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 18:36:08 +0000

A cute British appeal to get off dirty energy and dump their big six energy companies. (Although here in the US—for me at least—the video also evokes memories of other falling towers.)