Stephanie Mencimer

Reporter

Stephanie works in Mother Jones' Washington bureau. A Utah native and graduate of a crappy public university not worth mentioning, she has spent the last year hanging out with angry white people who occasionally don tricorne hats and come to lunch meetings heavily armed.

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Stephanie covers legal affairs and domestic policy in Mother Jones' Washington bureau. She is the author of Blocking the Courthouse Door: How the Republican Party and Its Corporate Allies Are Taking Away Your Right to Sue. A contributing editor of the Washington Monthly, a former investigative reporter at the Washington Post, and a senior writer at the Washington City Paper, she was nominated for a National Magazine Award in 2004 for a Washington Monthly article about myths surrounding the medical malpractice system. In 2000, she won the Harry Chapin Media award for reporting on poverty and hunger, and her 2010 story in Mother Jones of the collapse of the welfare system in Georgia and elsewhere won a Casey Medal for Meritorious Journalism.

Study: Siri Doesn't Make Texting While Driving Any Safer

—By Stephanie Mencimer

| Tue Apr. 23, 2013 11:11 AM PDT

April is Distracted Driving Awareness Month, a time when safety and transportation experts beg, plead and cajole Americans to put down their phones while driving, lest they become a murderer behind the wheel. It's a thankless job, as American drivers suffer from some serious delusions about their abilities to pilot a car safely while texting their girlfriends, shopping on eBay, or dialing in to Rush Limbaugh. Despite the fact that a quarter of all motor vehicle crashes today involve cellphone use, Americans still think it's only other drivers who are the problem. More than 90 percent of drivers think other drivers texting or using cellphones behind the wheel are a threat to their personal safety, yet two in three of them do it anyway, according to the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety.

Elected officials have been reluctant to address the problem, passing legislation that reinforces drivers' delusions—like the law here in DC that allows people to drive and talk on the phone so long as they use a hands-free device, even though there's no evidence that talking on a Bluetooth is any safer than just holding up the old phone. (Spend some time in DC cabs to get a sense of how well this law is working out.)

Phone companies have been trying to come up with technical solutions that might head off further attempts by lawmakers to curb cellphone use while driving. The latest of these has been the suggestion that Siri can help. The idea is that simply talking to your phone to send a text rather than punching in the message would somehow allow people to keep their eyes on the road and drive safely while texting. As it turns out, the notion that an app will save lives is as faulty as the promise that the Bluetooth would.

A new study out from the Texas A&M Transportation Institute this month found that:

Driver response time was terrible regardless of whether the driver was manually texting or using Siri.
Texting drivers of any sort took twice as long to react to roadway hazards than when they were off the phone.
Texting drivers spent a lot of time not looking at the road, regardless of whether they were using a voice-to-text app.
Manual texting was actually quicker than using a voice app, but driving performance was equally bad in both cases.

The new study also found a new form of distracted driving delusions: Drivers felt less safe when they were texting, but they felt safer using a voice app than texting manually, even though their performance on the road was equally dangerous.

Moral of the story: When you get behind the wheel of a motor vehicle, just put down the damn phone! And just as a chilling reminder of why this is important, watch this video:

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Here's Why You Shouldn't Take Antibiotics for a Sinus Infection

Not only is it almost always useless—it puts everyone else in jeopardy.

—By Stephanie Mencimer

| Tue Apr. 23, 2013 3:00 AM PDT

Sinus infections are nasty beasts. They leave you exhausted, drowning in green snot, seeing double from face pain, and ready to beg your doctor for antibiotics. Roughly 20 percent of all adult antibiotic prescriptions in the United States, it turns out, are written to treat sinusitis. In fact, I got one of those prescriptions just a few weeks ago, even though antibiotics are almost entirely useless for the condition, and may be causing more harm than good.

Antibiotics only kill bacteria, but a whopping 90 percent of sinus infections are caused by viruses, according to the Infectious Diseases Society of America. What's more, new research over the past year has proven definitively that antibiotics won't change the course of most sinus infections.

More MoJo coverage of bacteria and health:

Are Happy Gut Bacteria Key to Weight Loss?

This Is Your Body on Microbes

Should You Take a Probiotic?

Poop Therapy: More Than You Probably Wanted to Know About Fecal Transplants

Can Antibiotics Make You Fat?

Antibiotics As Key to Curing Starvation

Why You Shouldn't Take Antibiotics for a Sinus Infection

The rampant misuse of antibiotics to treat conditions they can't possibly cure is one major reason for the alarming rise in the number of "superbug" outbreaks—infections by deadly bacteria that have evolved the ability to survive most antibiotics. (The other reason has to do with overuse of antibiotics by factory farms.) The more antibiotics you take, the more likely that you'll develop a drug-resistant infection. That's because, while the drugs kill most of the bacteria, the most naturally resistant ones are most likely to survive—and multiply.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has spent a decade trying to convince doctors to stop dispensing antibiotics for viral conditions in order to preserve the effectiveness of these crucial lifesaving drugs. Meanwhile, a host of medical specialty groups have launched a new "Choosing Wisely" campaign designed to educate patients about unnecessary treatments. The program specifically emphasizes avoiding antibiotics for sinusitis.

[Read the full article]

Big Corporations Won't Be Sweating the IRS This Year

—By Stephanie Mencimer

| Wed Apr. 17, 2013 3:00 AM PDT

Jason Stitt/Shutterstock

Lots of average Americans who filed their tax returns this week will soon face the unpleasant prospect of having those returns audited. But corporations with at least $10 million in assets (or far more) have much less to fear from the tax man. Behemoths such as Microsoft and General Electric have taken a beating in the press lately because of how little in US taxes they pay, thanks to extremely complicated and aggressive use of offshore tax havens. The criticism doesn't seem to have affected how corporations are treated by the IRS, though. According to a new report by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, in the current fiscal year, the IRS plans to devote 18 percent less effort to auditing companies with more than $10 million in assets than it did just two years ago. The agency has seen a $1 billion budget cut in the past year, and all of this comes before the effect of the sequester, which will slash $600 million from its budget this year. The IRS also projects that the amount of time available for specialized agents to conduct these audits will drop 14 percent as well, thanks to staffing cuts.

The IRS measures employee budgeted time in staff years, whose decline is shown in this chart:

Large Business and International Division Direct Examination Staff Years Transactional Records Access Clearing House

While the amount of staff time devoted to auditing the average Joe has gone up 62 percent since 2011, it's fallen nearly 30 percent for corporations. The IRS's workforce today is 23 percent smaller than it was in 1992, even though the number of returns filed has gone up 27 percent over the same period, according to TRAC. The acting IRS commissioner testified before Congress on April 9 that the agency is down 10,000 employees compared to what it had during the 2010 tax season. And the agency is being asked to do even more work. It's responsible for implementing key sections of the Affordable Care Act (better known as Obamacare) and it is grappling with a significant number of cases of identity theft that are projected to cost the country billions in fraudulent refunds if not addressed promptly.

Yet thanks to the forced, across-the-board budget cuts imposed by Congress, the IRS is going to have to close up shop for seven days in 2013, when work will essentially grind to a halt. All of these cuts seem shortsighted, given that the IRS collects 93 percent of all government revenue. Failing to collect what all taxpayers owe leaves the federal budget short about $400 billion per year. More robust funding of the IRS that would allow it to go after more of corporate America's bigger players might help reduce the need for some of the sequester cuts.

Mormon Church Abandons Its Crusade Against Gay Marriage

Prop. 8 backlash has led the Latter Day Saints to soften their treatment of LGBT church members.

—By Stephanie Mencimer

| Fri Apr. 12, 2013 3:00 AM PDT

Photoillustration by Dave Gilson/MoJo. Shutterstock photos by photo.ua (temple) and zzveillust (rainbow)

Last month, hundreds of boisterous protesters converged in Washington, DC, as the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Hollingsworth v. Perry, the lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of California's anti-gay marriage initiative, Proposition 8. Faith-based groups were on prominent display: the Methodists supporting marriage equality, the Westboro Baptists suggesting (per usual) that "God hates fags," the Catholics both for and against gay marriage, clergy of all stripes. But one group that wasn't there in any official capacity was the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—a.k.a. the Mormons—which perhaps more than any other religious group was responsible for getting Prop. 8 passed in the first place.

In the five years since the LDS church sent busloads of the faithful to California to canvass neighborhoods, and contributed more than $20 million via its members to support the initiative, it has all but dropped the rope in the public policy tug of war over marriage equality. The change stems from an even more remarkable if somewhat invisible transformation happening within the church, prompted by the ugly fight over Prop. 8 and the ensuing backlash from the flock.

Although the LDS's prophet hasn't described a holy revelation directing a revision in church doctrine on same-sex marriage or gay rights in general, the church has shown a rare capacity for introspection and humane cultural change unusual for a large conservative religious organization.

[Read the full article]

CHART: Welfare Benefits Far Smaller Than Scorn Heaped On Them

—By Stephanie Mencimer

| Tue Apr. 9, 2013 8:25 AM PDT

Center on Budget and Policy Priorities

Welfare recipients have always been easy targets. President Ronald Reagan reviled them as "welfare queens" who supposedly drove Cadillacs and lived large on the government dole (a story that was entirely apocryphal). Heaping abuse on the recipients of the federal welfare program, since renamed Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), continues to be a popular staple of conservative rhetoric. A Missouri legislator recently introduced legislation, dubbed the "don't get sick" bill, to punish poor families by taking away their TANF benefits if a child misses more than three weeks of school. Last week, a Tennessee legislative committee passed a bill that would slash TANF benefits to families whose children get bad grades. And Florida Gov. Rick Scott is still trying to force that state's TANF beneficiaries to undergo drug tests that two federal courts have deemed unconstitutional. Scott isn't alone. To date, 16 states have tried to force TANF recipients to undergo drug testing, despite little evidence of widespread drug abuse among the single moms in the program.

The focus on TANF recipients is vastly out of proportion with the size of the program, which has been steadily shrinking since it was "reformed" in 1996 by President Bill Clinton and turned over to the states to administer. A new report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities shows that the cash benefits doled out under TANF are now so meager that they barely make a dent in the fortunes of the recipients. In Tennessee, where legislators were so eager to use TANF as a "stick" to get poor kids to do well in school, the maximum monthly benefit for a family of three is $185—barely enough to lift a poor family above 10 percent of the federal poverty line. Missouri's benefits clock in at $292 a month, literally the same amount offered in 1996. Thanks to inflation, the real value of those benefits has fallen more than 30 percent, leaving recipients at barely 18 percent of the poverty line.

Nationally, the picture is equally grim. In 37 states, according to CBPP, the purchasing power of TANF benefits is now at least 20 percent less than it was in 1996, when welfare reform kicked in. This is a big deal. At one time, welfare benefits at least might cover the rent for a poor family. Now, there's not a single state in the country where monthly TANF benefits for a mom with two kids will cover the fair market rent of a two-bedroom apartment. Welfare moms are clearly not living large in the program, despite what state legislators seem to think. If they want their threats to cut TANF benefits over bad grades or missed school days to carry any weight, they're probably going to have to raise benefits first.