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South Carolina Law Would Make Kids Study Second Amendment for 3 Weeks Every Year

by GwendolY49 Posted on January 14, 2015

Mother Jones

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In August of last year, a 16-year-old high-schooler in Summerville, South Carolina, turned in a creative writing assignment about shooting his neighbor’s pet dinosaur. The school’s “zero tolerance” policy for guns prompted a search of the student’s belongings that turned up no weapons. Nonetheless, he was arrested and suspended for what he said was a joke, if one in questionable taste.

South Carolina state Rep. Alan Clemmons hopes to use that incident to force public schools to dedicate three weeks each year to teaching a gun-focused curriculum developed or recommended by the National Rifle Association. Traditionally, zero tolerance policies have applied to students bringing weapons to school or simulating their use with toys or hand gestures—not to academic discussion of guns. Still, in the bill Clemmons filed in the state legislature last month he states that these NRA-approved lessons are needed to combat an “intolerance for any discussion of guns or depiction of guns in writing or in assignments in public schools, which is an affront to First Amendment rights and harshly inhibits creative expression and academic freedom.”

“If anything comes up in a school setting that has to do with firearms, then it’s a suspendable offense and criminal charges could ensue,” Clemmons told WMBF News. “The second amendment should be freely debated in schools and instead the second amendment is being squelched in our schools.”

If passed, the Second Amendment Education Act would require that three consecutive weeks of each year in elementary, middle, and high school be spent studying the second amendment. As Ian Millhiser at Think Progress points out, that’s an enormous chunk of the school year, especially given that some South Carolina schools devote just two weeks to slavery and a week and a half to World War II.

The law would also require that every December 15—the day after the anniversary of the mass shooting at Sandy Hook school in Newtown—be designated “Second Amendment Awareness Day.” To celebrate the occasion, schools will be required to hold mandatory poster or essay contests at every grade level, with the theme “The Right To Bear Arms; One American Right Protecting All Others.” The South Carolina Legislative Sportsmen’s Caucus will be in charge of choosing first, second, and third place winners in both contests.

Both chambers of South Carolina’s legislature are Republican-controlled, and Gov. Nikki Halley has an A+ rating from the NRA. Still, this bill may be too extreme to pass:

“Even amongst a conservative constituency in South Carolina, I think they can rate that they have more abiding problems than this,” says Dr. Dave Woodard, a political science professor at Clemson University who’s long served as a political consultant to Republican candidates in South Carolina.

“Most people are more concerned with math and science, and the fact that historically, South Carolina’s rankings in education have been abysmal. Nobody, I think, would say ‘The best way to improve education is to have a three-week segment on the Second Amendment. Boy, that’ll move us up in the national rankings!'” says Woodard.

The bill includes a list of gun-related topics that must be worked into the curriculum. Several—including the individual right to bear arms—are straight out of the revisionist interpretation of the Second Amendment that the NRA and its supporters have helped popularize since the 1970s.

The curriculum would require students from first grade and up to get into the weeds of constitutional scholarship on the Second Amendment. Students will be asked to study Supreme Court cases “including the United States v. Cruikshank, the United States v. Miller, the District of Columbia v. Heller, and McDonald v. Chicago.” (The majority arguments in Heller and McDonald grew out of the push by pro-gun researchers to redefine the Second Amendment.) The bill also mandates that students learn about “the constitutionality of gun control laws,” the causes of mass shootings, and “the impact of legislative reactions to gun violence on Constitutional rights and the impact on reducing gun violence, if any.”

Clemmons identifies as a Second Amendment advocate. He has repeatedly received an A rating from the NRA, and has taken part in events with the group in his state. In 2013, he was featured on the NRA’s website after taking a trip to Connecticut to convince gun manufacturers, put off by tightening gun control legislation in the state post-Newtown, to move their operations to South Carolina.

It’s unclear if Rep. Clemmons or his cosponsors have hashed out the logistics of the NRA’s involvement in developing or approving a curriculum: Jennifer Baker, a spokeswoman for the NRA, tells Mother Jones that the NRA has not made any recommendations on the syllabus envisioned by the bill, nor have South Carolina legislators made plans with the NRA about the group’s future role. Attempts by Mother Jones to contact Rep. Clemmons have not been answered, but we will update this story if we receive a response.

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South Carolina Law Would Make Kids Study Second Amendment for 3 Weeks Every Year

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Two Promising Factlets About American Schools

by WDCIsmaeltjydj Posted on January 12, 2015

Mother Jones

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So how are our schools doing? Here are two factlets that crossed my radar yesterday.

First: Neerav Kingsland says that SAT scores of new teachers are rising and that most of them are staying in teaching for at least five years. He comments: “If I was going to bet on whether American education will improver, flatline, or get worse — I would look very hard at the academic performance of teachers entering the profession, as well as how long these better qualified teachers stayed in the classroom. The aforementioned data makes me more bullish on American education.”

Second: Adam Ozimek says we’re selling charter schools short when we say that on average they do about as well as public schools. That’s true, but there’s more to it:

I would like to propose a better conventional wisdom: “some charter schools appear to do very well, and on average charters do better at educating poor students and black students”. If the same evidence existed for some policy other than charter schools, I believe this would be the conventional wisdom.

….The charter sectors’ ability to do better for poor students and black students is important given that they disproportionately serve them….53% of charter students are in poverty compared 48% for public schools. Charters also serve more minority students than public schools: charters are 29% black, while public schools are 16%. So not only do they serve more poor students and black students, but for this group they relatively consistently outperform public schools.

It’s been a while since I took a dive into the data on charter schools, so I’m passing this along without comment. But it sounds right. I continue to believe that as long as they’re properly regulated, charter schools show substantial promise.

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Two Promising Factlets About American Schools

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Chart of the Day: Vaccinate Your Kids!

by LatonyaLRT Posted on January 10, 2015

Mother Jones

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Via the LA Times from a few months ago, here’s the rise in “personal belief” exemptions from state-mandated vaccinations among kindergartners in California:

And here’s where it’s happening:

In Los Angeles County, the rise in personal belief exemptions is most prominent in wealthy coastal and mountain communities, The Times analysis shows. The more than 150 schools with exemption rates of 8% or higher for at least one vaccine were located in census tracts where the incomes averaged $94,500 — nearly 60% higher than the county median.

….At Santa Cruz Montessori in the small coastal community of Aptos, about 7% of kindergartners in 2007 got belief exemptions. Last fall, that rate was 22.6%. Principal Kathy Rideout said the school has tried different approaches to encourage parents to immunize children. They asked a doctor to talk with fellow parents. They produced handouts emphasizing the importance of immunizations and asked parents seeking belief exemptions to get counseling from a healthcare practitioner. A state law that went into effect this year makes this a requirement. But none of it made much difference, Rideout said.

….“We have schools in California where the percent of children who exercise the personal belief exemption is well above 50%,” said Dr. Gil Chavez, deputy director of the California Department of Public Health’s Center for Infectious Diseases. “That’s going to be a challenge for any disease that is vaccine preventable.”

There are times when it’s appropriate to be skeptical of authority. This really isn’t one of them. “Big Vaccine” is not an issue in American life. Childhood vaccination is just a matter of public health that no one has any real motivation to lie about. Please don’t get sucked into this maelstrom. Get your kids vaccinated.

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Chart of the Day: Vaccinate Your Kids!

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Unemployment Is Low, But It Can Still Go a Lot Lower — And It Should

by XLNCharlidftxdy Posted on January 10, 2015

Mother Jones

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Justin Wolfers makes a good point today. There’s a concept in economics called NAIRU, which rather awkwardly stands for the Non-Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment1. Basically it means that there’s a “natural” rate of unemployment in the economy2, and if you go below it then inflation will start to accelerate. When that happens, the Fed raises interest rates to slow down growth before inflation gets out of hand.

But what’s the actual value of NAIRU? Based on past experience, most economists think it’s around 5.5 percent or so—which happens to be where we are now. And yet, inflation is still very low, and definitely not accelerating. This could be just a temporary phenomenon as we recover from a huge balance-sheet recession, or it could be something more permanent. For two reasons, my guess is that it’s mostly the latter. First, inflation has been steadily dropping for 30 years in the US, and there’s some reason to think that it’s the 70s that were a high-inflation anomaly, not the rest of the low-inflation 20th century. Second, there’s reason to think that the headline unemployment rate is not measuring quite the same thing as it used to. If you look at long-term unemployment, marginally attached workers, and the decline of the labor force participation ratio—which has been falling for 15 years now—it appears that a headline rate of 5.5 percent probably implies more slack in the economy than it used to. Here’s Wolfers on the natural rate of unemployment:

The problem, though, is that no one really knows what that rate is. Our uncertainty is even greater today than it normally is, because no one knows the extent to which those workers who dropped out of the labor force in response to the financial crisis will return when jobs become plentiful. By this view, today’s most important macroeconomic question is what the natural rate actually is.

The latest jobs report helps answer this question. The unemployment rate has fallen to 5.6 percent, and there are still no signs that wage inflation is rising. Indeed, with wage growth running at only 1.7 percent, the economy is telling us that we still have the ability to bring many more of the jobless back into the fold without setting off inflation.

It is only when nominal wage growth exceeds the sum of inflation (about 2 percent) and productivity growth (about 1.5 percent) that the Fed needs to be concerned that the labor market is generating cost pressures that might raise inflation. So the latest wage growth numbers suggest that we are not yet near the natural rate. And that means the Fed should be content to let the recovery continue to generate more new jobs.

There’s one more thing to add: Even when unemployment falls to around 4 percent, we should remain cautious. We’ve tolerated an inflation rate that’s under the Fed’s 2 percent target for the past five years. There’s no reason we shouldn’t tolerate a catch-up inflation rate that’s a little over the Fed’s target as we begin to recover. If inflation runs at 3-4 percent for the next five years, it’s probably a good thing, not a bad one.

1Obviously economists could have used a branding expert to help them with this. On the other hand, if they’d done that we might have ended up with Xarelxo or JobsMax™. In any case, we’re stuck with it for now.

2The idea here is that even a thriving economy has a certain amount of natural unemployment as people leave their jobs and move to new ones—because new sectors pop up, old companies go out of business, etc. That’s a good thing and a perfectly natural one in a competitive economy that’s producing lots of innovation. Trying to push unemployment lower than the natural rate is basically fruitless.

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Unemployment Is Low, But It Can Still Go a Lot Lower — And It Should

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Friday Cat Blogging – 9 January 2015

by PedroFljuqey Posted on January 9, 2015

Mother Jones

Here’s Hopper in the sewing room, surrounded by sewing paraphernalia. That look in her eye suggests either that her brother was somewhere nearby or that she was just about to gallop across all of Marian’s stuff and make a huge mess. Or maybe both. Making a mess is a favorite pastime around here these days.

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Friday Cat Blogging – 9 January 2015

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President Obama Starts to Focus on the Middle Class

by JacobHaralson Posted on January 9, 2015

Mother Jones

One of the hot topics of conversation in progressive circles these days is the middle class. Democrats support plenty of programs that provide benefits to the poor (Medicaid, minimum wage, SNAP, etc.), but what about programs that benefit the middle class? What do Democrats do for them?

By coincidence, this week provides a couple of examples of programs that are targeted more at the middle class than the poor. First up is President Obama’s proposal to fund two years of free community college for everyone. As Libby Nelson explains, Pell Grants already make community college free for most low-income students:

The most radical part of Obama’s free community college proposal isn’t that it’s free — it’s that it’s universal….So the best way to look at the Obama free college plan is as a promise to the middle class. Families who earn too much for federal financial aid but aren’t wealthy enough to afford thousands of dollars of college bills are rightly feeling squeezed as tuition prices rise.

This might not be the most effective way to spend federal money. But it’s politically smart. To see why, look at pre-K. Most of the research on pre-kindergarten effectiveness is about whether it helps poor children catch up to their peers from wealthier families. But in 1995, Georgia decided to use lottery winnings to make free pre-K available not just to the poor, but to any family who wanted to join.

Two decades later, Georgia’s universal pre-K program is very popular, championed by liberals and conservatives alike. And the reason it’s managed to stay relatively apolitical and noncontroversial is that it’s universal, Fawn Johnson wrote in National Journal last year. A program just for the poor “would be about class warfare,” one Georgia Republican told her.

Elsewhere, Greg Sargent notes that new rules governing overtime wages could benefit middle-class workers:

Obama will soon announce a rules change that governs which salaried workers will get time-and-a-half over 40 hours under the Fair Labor Standards Act….“The spotlight is now on raising wages,” AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka told me. “Raising wages is the key unifying progressive value that ties all the pieces of economic and social justice together. We think the president has a great opportunity to show that he is behind that agenda by increasing the overtime regulations to a minimum threshold of $51,168. That’s the marker.”

….A lower threshold could exclude millions. In raising his voice, Trumka joins Sherrod Brown, Elizabeth Warren, and other progressive Senators who have urged a threshold of $54,000, and billionaire Nick Hanauer, who is urging $69,000. The Economic Policy Institute estimates that raising the threshold to a sum approximating what the liberal Senators want could mean higher overtime pay for at least 2.6 million more people than raising it to $42,000. EPI says setting it at over $50,000 could mean over six million people, or 54 percent of salaried workers, are now covered.

Both of these proposals would primarily benefit middle-class workers which makes it unlikely that either of them will get any support from Republicans or from the business community. But they’re worth pursuing anyway. At least they let everyone know whose side each party is on.

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President Obama Starts to Focus on the Middle Class

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I’ve Never Gotten an Annual Physical. How About You?

by RomeoEletzcdv Posted on January 9, 2015

Mother Jones

Ezekiel Emanuel passes along the results of research about the value of getting an annual physical exam:

The unequivocal conclusion: the appointments are unlikely to be beneficial. Regardless of which screenings and tests were administered, studies of annual health exams dating from 1963 to 1999 show that the annual physicals did not reduce mortality overall or for specific causes of death from cancer or heart disease. And the checkups consume billions, although no one is sure exactly how many billions because of the challenge of measuring the additional screenings and follow-up tests.

How can this be? There have been stories and studies in the past few years questioning the value of the physical, but neither patients nor doctors seem to want to hear the message. Part of the reason is psychological; the exam provides an opportunity to talk and reaffirm the physician-patient relationship even if there is no specific complaint. There is also habit. It’s hard to change something that’s been recommended by physicians and medical organizations for more than 100 years. And then there is skepticism about the research. Almost everyone thinks they know someone whose annual exam detected a minor symptom that led to the early diagnosis and treatment of cancer, or some similar lifesaving story.

This is a funny thing. I’ve never had an annual physical. This isn’t for any specific reason. It just never occurred to me, and none of my doctors has ever recommended it. I’ve probably had half a dozen different primary care physicians over my adult life, and not one of them has ever suggested I should be getting an annual physical.

I’m not sure what this means. Is the annual physical something that doctors only do if their patients ask? Or have I just had an unusual bunch of doctors over the years? What’s your experience with this?

And as long as I’m noodling about stuff like this, here’s a thought that passed through my brain the other day. I was thinking about the fact that one of the indicators of the multiple myeloma that I was diagnosed with comes from blood tests. So why not test routinely for the markers of multiple myeloma? The answer is obvious: you’d be performing millions of blood tests every year with a vanishingly small chance of finding anything. What’s more, there are lots of different cancers. Are you going to draw a few pints of blood every year and test for all of them at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars? That makes no sense in otherwise healthy people.

But this got me thinking about that new blood testing technique I wrote about a few months ago. In a nutshell, it requires only a tiny amount of blood, and the tests themselves are super cheap. If this works as advertised—and presumably gets even cheaper with time—does it open up new possibilities for an annual physical that actually makes sense? Would it be possible to draw no more than a standard vial of blood once a year, and then perform a huge variety of tests at a cost of a few hundred dollars? The odds of finding anything would still be small, but it might nonetheless be worth it if the cost both in time and money was also small.

Of course, there are still problems with false positives and so forth, even if the cost of this regimen was small. So maybe it would be a lousy idea regardless of its feasibility. I really have no idea. But it’s an intriguing possibility.

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I’ve Never Gotten an Annual Physical. How About You?

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Republicans Take Aim at Obama, Shoot Workers in the Foot

by GretchenBamford Posted on January 7, 2015

Mother Jones

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President Obama announced yesterday that, yes, he would veto a bill to approve the Keystone XL pipeline. This is hardly news, since he’s already said this before, but it was nonetheless reported as yet another shot across the bow of congressional Republicans. The GOP wants to be reasonable and bipartisan—honest!—but it’s tough when Obama keeps deliberately baiting them like this.

So what’s the GOP doing as a show of good faith? Trying to blow a hole in Obamacare, of course. But that’s not all! They’ve actually picked a specific plan that’s something of a trifecta. Here’s what it does:

Cripples a part of Obamacare.
Costs the federal government money.
Increases corporate profits.

Don’t you love the smell of napalm in the morning? The proposal in question would change the definition of full-time worker from 30 hours to 40 hours. As a result, employers would be required to offer health insurance only to employees working 40 hours or more, not those working 30 hours or more. It’s hard to truly capture the cynicism motivating this proposal, but Matt Yglesias does a pretty good job this morning. I’ll turn over the mike to him:

It turns out that the authors of the ACA weren’t idiots….Sherry Glied and Claudia Solis-Rosman have shown that while working slightly more than 40 hours is common, working slightly more than 30 hours is rare. In other words, few workers are at risk of having hours slashed from 31 per week to 29, but many could be cut back from 41 to 39.

….While a shift from a 30-hour definition to a 40-hour definition would exacerbate the problem of hour cuts, it would help solve one very serious problem — the problem of rich businessmen who would like to see higher profits rather than lower profits. Lifting the hours threshold would automatically cause millions of workers to fall below the limit, saving their employers money in insurance premiums and fees to the government. And lifting the hours threshold would also make it easier for employers to monkey with workers’ schedules to get them redefined as part-time.

At a time when corporate profits as a share of the economy are abnormally high, boosting profits at the expense of workers’ health insurance coverage isn’t necessarily a great political slogan. But it’s still something that business owners and managers care passionately about, and business priorities tend to get a thorough airing on the Hill.

There’s always going to be some threshold that defines “full-time” workers. And no matter what that threshold is, some employers will game the system by reducing the hours of some employees from barely above to barely below the threshold. There’s just no way around that. But you can certainly try to minimize the problem by picking a threshold that’s hard to game. One way to do that is to set the threshold at a level that affects very few workers. Democrats did that when they passed Obamacare in 2009, and that was good for employees, good for Obamacare, and good for the budget since it meant fewer workers receiving federal subsidies.

But not so good for anyone who wanted to game the system and toss lots of vulnerable employees onto the federal dime. Apparently that’s the GOP’s core constituency, though. Are you surprised?

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Republicans Take Aim at Obama, Shoot Workers in the Foot

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Los Angeles Prepares To Be Played Yet Again By the NFL

by MattDowning Posted on January 7, 2015

Mother Jones

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Here’s your sports factlet of the day:

More than half of the NFL’s 32 teams have used moving to L.A. as leverage since the Raiders and Rams pulled up stakes, playing their last games here on Christmas Eve 1994.

It’s like Lucy and the football. Los Angeles is Charlie Brown, and we keep thinking that this time she won’t pull it away. But she always does. And why not?

The tactic works. Since the last pro game here, 27 NFL stadiums have been built or undergone at least $400 million in renovations. “There’s no question that’s part of the game,” said R.D. Hubbard, who in the mid-1990s fronted an effort to build an NFL stadium at Hollywood Park.

“You always want one guy on the outside and you use him,” said former Fox Sports President Ed Goren. “It’s just good business.”

It’s happening again, of course, with the recently floated suggestion that the St. Louis Rams might move to a new stadium at Hollywood Park. For the properly pessimistic take on all this, I recommend reading Michael Hiltzik here. I find it comforting that no matter how skeptical I am about the NFL and Los Angeles, there’s always at least one person who’s even more cynical on the subject than me.

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Los Angeles Prepares To Be Played Yet Again By the NFL

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Republicans Are Facing a Mighty Big Headwind in 2016

by AnnmariK86 Posted on January 7, 2015

Mother Jones

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Democrats do better in elections when the minority population grows. Everyone knows that. And the minority population is, in fact, growing. Everyone knows that, too. So does that mean Democrats are sure winners in future presidential contests?

Hardly. But it does put Republicans in a bind, since it means they need to increase their voting share among minorities. This is going to be tough, since they’ve done nothing much to appeal to non-white voters over the past decade or so. Still, in 2016 at least Barack Obama won’t be on the ballot. So maybe, just maybe, Republicans have a chance to recover the level of minority support they enjoyed in 2004, back when two white guys were running against each other.

But it turns out that even here the news is bad. Patrick Oakford of the Center for American Progress ran the numbers to see how Republicans would do if their minority support in 2016 rose back to 2004 levels. Here are the results in two big swing states:

Republicans would still win Florida—barely—but would lose Ohio badly. This is a state that Bush won handily in 2004, and one that Republicans can’t do without. By 2016, however, voters of color will make up such a large share of the Ohio electorate that even 2004 levels of support won’t win the state for Republicans. They’ll have to do even better than that, and the same is true in several other key swing states. Here’s Oakford:

This analysis shows—through a variety of election simulations—that as people of color become a larger share of states’ electorates, it will be crucial for both Republicans and Democrats to secure the support of this vital voter cohort….For Republicans, simply repeating the history of 2004—obtaining significant support among voters of color—will not necessarily mean a win in many swing states, including Ohio and Nevada.

The GOP has a tough presidential row to hoe in 2016. They aren’t sure losers by any stretch, but to win they’re going to have to do a lot better among minority voters than they’ve done anytime recently. It’s not clear what their plan is to do that.

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Republicans Are Facing a Mighty Big Headwind in 2016

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