Weekly Pulse: Uncovered Abortions, Toxic Mani-Pedis, and Kagan’s a Go

by Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium blogger

Last week, the Obama administration preemptively caved to the anti-choice lobby by declaring that new high-risk insurance pools, a byproduct of recent health care legislation, will not cover abortions, even if states or patients pay for that coverage with their own money. Under health care reform, states must create high-risk insurance pools for people with preexisting conditions. These pools will be phased out in 2014 when the new insurance exchange comes online.

by Annie Shields, Media Consortium blogger

It looks as if election-year strategies are trumping any actual problem-solving by Republican lawmakers. In the midst of one of the worst unemployment crises in U.S. history, Senate Republicans killed a jobs bill last Thursday by a 56-40 vote.

On Monday, President Barack Obama nominated solicitor general Elena Kagan to replace retiring Justice John Paul Stevens on the Supreme Court. Kagan’s nomination has raised eyebrows among progressives. Despite a long career in legal academia, Kagan has published very little. She seems to have studiously avoided taking a stand on almost any controversial issue. Ruth Coniff of the Progressive calls the Kagan pick “a triumph of the bland.”

Anti-immigrant fervor could be more costly than Arizona lawmakers expected. Thanks to SB 1070, a new law that requires immigrants to carry papers at all times to prove their legal status, the state has become the focal point of the national immigration debate. The bill and the buzz surrounding it illustrates a desperate need for a federal fix to the broken immigration system.

By Erin Rosa, Media Consortium blogger

While immigrant rights groups pressure the federal government via high-profile marches and rallies, anti-immigration forces are pushing punitive laws on the state and local levels. Thousands of immigration reform proponents rallied last week to push federal lawmakers to pass reform this year, but the Arizona House of Representatives passed one of the toughest immigration laws in the country, which enables racial profiling of Latinos.

By Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium blogger

Massey Energy’s Disregard for Safety

A massive explosion ripped through the Big Branch coal mine in West Virginia on Monday, killing 25 miners and leaving 6 others missing and presumed dead. The mine had an egregious record of health and safety violations.

By Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium blogger

Yesterday, President Obama signed health care reform into law. As Mike Lillis explains in the Washington Independent, the bill now proceeds to the Senate for reconciliation. The whole process could be complete by the end of the week. Republicans and their allies have already moved to challenge reform in court.

By Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium blogger

Former Rep. Eric Massa (D-NY) punked conservative talk show host Glenn Beck yesterday by recanting his earlier allegations that House Democrats forced him out of office because he refused to vote for health care reform. Massa resigned on Monday amidst allegations that he sexually harassed one or more male staffers.

One of the pillars of my philosophy is that there are no simple solutions to complex problems. It is true if you focus on one aspect of a problem, then it can often appear that there is a ten word or less solution to it. The reality is that while you might alleviate this narrowly defined problem, you are really just pushing it down stream in the process. Nowhere is this clearer than in the need to create jobs.

Right now the nation has a enormous jobs deficit. If we define full employment as 4% and the take the U3 rate (unemployed workers plus the so-called discouraged workers) gives us a unemployment rate of 16.5 % or 25 million people looking for work. This means we need roughly 18 million jobs to get to full employment or back to where we were in mid-2007. There is also the need to create between 150,000 and 170,000 jobs a month to keep up with our population growth, as younger workers enter the workforce.

Robert Pollin has a good article in the Nation this month laying out how this number of jobs could be created in the next three years. While that sounds very steep the article points out that it has been done before:

Even with a successful coordination of large-scale expansions of private and public spending, is it realistic to expect that the economy, which has been so trampled down for the past three years, could possibly create 18 million jobs over the next three years? It is an ambitious but realistic goal. This is basically the rate at which employment grew under Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter coming out of the 1974-75 recession. The Carter years are widely derided through the lens of his 1979 "malaise" speech. Yet the first three years under Carter generated the fastest expansion of job opportunities of any comparable period since, including any three-year stretch under Reagan or Clinton.

Mr. Pollin’s idea is two fold, he wants to create a structure where the banks use the nearly 800 billion they are keeping on their books as a cushion to invest in green businesses. This would require some new supports and programs from the Federal government to make the investment attractive and relatively safe. One of the programs is a Federal work share program that would provide support for workers who are not working full time,. This measure would keep the economy from further deterioration while job creating programs came on line.

The four young men arrested last week for allegedly attempting to tamper with the phones at the office of Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA) have ties to Republican politicians, conservative think tanks, radical campus activists, and even the intelligence community.