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Koch-Linked Women's Group Takes Credit for Mark Sanford's Win

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| Wed May. 8, 2013 3:00 PM PDT
Incoming Congressman Mark Sanford.

Soon after Mark Sanford, the former governor of South Carolina who resigned in disgrace in 2009, pulled off an upset win in his congressional race on Tuesday, a conservative group called the Independent Women's Voice boasted of its role in his victory. "Independent Women's Voice was the only outside group supporting Sanford on a significant scale, by educating voters about the facts about the Democratic candidate," IWV president Heather Higgins said in a statement. IWV spent $250,000 on TV and print ads in the last week of the election, helping to power Sanford to victory over Democrat Elizabeth Colbert Busch in a special election in South Carolina's 1st Congressional district.

And if the billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch are encouraged by Sanford's win, they, too, can claim a degree of credit, for IWV has plenty of ties to the Koch political network.

IWV, a nonprofit group that doesn't have to name its funders (and can't make politics the majority of what it does), is the sister organization of the Independent Women's Forum, another nonprofit focused more on policy issues. Higgins, who chairs IWF's board, has staked out a position as a leading critic of Obamacare. She also argues that independent women voters are not destined to vote Democratic and, instead, these women are up for grabs on political and policy matters and can be won over by Republicans—if GOPers get their messaging right.

When IWV applied for tax-exempt status in September 2004, it listed Nancy Pfotenhauer, a former Koch Industries lobbyist, as its president. (She also had a leadership position at Independent Women's Forum.) Pfotenhauer, who is currently a Koch spokeswoman, has filled a number of roles with Koch-linked groups. She was formerly the president of Americans for Prosperity, the Kochs' flagship advocacy organization, and is now a director at AFP. She was a vice president for Citizens for a Sound Economy, the Koch-backed predecessor to AFP. She also advised John McCain's during his 2008 presidential campaign.

IWV does not have to disclose its donors, but the group received $250,000 in 2009 from the Center to Protect Patient Rights, a money conduit for conservative nonprofits run by Koch operative Sean Noble. As the Center for Responsive Politics has reported, the Center to Protect Patient Rights handed out $44 million in 2010 and nearly $15 million in 2011 to an array of nonprofit groups including Grover Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform and the 60 Plus Association, which describes itself as the "conservative alternative" to the AARP. Noble spoke at a 2010 Koch donor retreat (PDF) in Aspen, Colorado. Pfotenhauer spoke at the same retreat, as did Higgins.

Higgins also briefly served on the board of the Center to Protect Patient Rights. There is no public information revealing whether IWV still receives financial support from Koch-linked sources.

There's another curious wrinkle about IWV. In its 2004 application for tax-exempt status, the group said it would not spend "any money" on influencing elections. Yet in later tax filings, IWV changed its tune and told the IRS it spent $772,435 on elections in 2010. There are no tax filings available yet detailing IWV activity in 2012 or 2013.

IWV's six-figure spending on Mark Sanford's behalf was anything but a safe bet. But as it turns out, it was money very well spent.

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Finally, Some Not-Terrible Climate News: Greenland Not Melting Any Faster

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| Wed May. 8, 2013 2:51 PM PDT
A member of Nick's team collects a GPS unit that had been measuring glacier movement over a year. Dirk van As

Back in 2006, scientists in Greenland made an alarming observation: Glaciers were crumbling into the ocean twice as fast. And not in little cocktail-sized cubes, either: Glaciologist Jason Box accurately predicted the spot where a hunk four times the size of Manhattan would later shear off into the sea.

At the same time, the inland top of the ice sheet was thawing at record levels; last summer, for the first time in 150 years, its entire surface was melting. By summer's end, this water alone raised sea levels all over the world by a millimeter.

As Box told our Climate Desk Live audience in January, rising air and water temperatures—driven by greenhouse gas emissions—are to blame. And with more warming on the way, he made a grim prediction: melting from Greenland and the world's other land-based glaciers could ultimately raise global sea levels by 69 feet, Box warns.

But don't start building your flood-proof Ark quite yet: Advanced imaging released in August suggested the ice sheet is capable of quickly reversing its melting habit. And a study out today in Nature finds that the sped-up ice loss on the water's edge, while still a problem, is unlikely to get much worse, even with a big rise in global temperatures. Taken together, these two studies suggest that Greenland's ice melt problem isn't as bad as experts like Box had predicted.

For the Nature study, Faezeh Nick, a researcher at Norway's University Centre in Svalbard, led a team that took the closest-ever look at so-called "outlet glaciers," the 200 or so outermost arms of the ice sheet that flow straight into the sea. Their findings suggest that the increase in melting rate is about to slow down, suggesting that in a medium warming scenario these glaciers will likely contribute just 19-30 millimeters to global sea levels by 2100. That's much less than if the current acceleration of melting were to persist, but still a noteworthy share of the quarter- to half-meter rise projected by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

glacier boat
Scientists on the sailboat Gambo measure water temperature and salinity in front of a Greenland glacier. Faezeh M. Nick

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Yet Another Benghazi Nothingburger Today

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| Wed May. 8, 2013 2:07 PM PDT

Well, the big Benghazi hearings have finished up for the day, and as near I can tell we learned.....nothing. We heard testimony about the following:

  • The Pentagon didn't dispatch fighter jets to patrol Benghazi following the initial attack.
  • A 4-man special ops team was stationed in Tripoli, but wasn't dispatched to Benghazi the morning after the attacks to help with rescue and evacuation.
  • In interviews on the Sunday after the attacks, Susan Rice said things that contradicted Libyan President Mohamed Yusuf al-Magariaf.

None of this is even remotely new. The Pentagon has said before that they believed it was best for the Tripoli team to stay in Tripoli.1 General Carter Ham has testified that he didn't think deploying F-16s over Benghazi would be helpful, and he still doesn't. And Rice's interviews were litigated to death long ago. If you actually review the evidence, it turns out that her language was careful; it was based on CIA talking points; there was (and maybe still is) evidence that the "Innocence of Muslims" video played a role in the attacks; and al-Magariaf was almost certainly wrong about whether the attacks were a long-planned operation. Details here.

All of this stuff is arguable. Maybe the Pentagon was wrong about both the Tripoli team and the fighter jets. Maybe Rice should have said something slightly different on the Sunday shows. Maybe the State Department should have beefed up security in Libya months before the attacks. Maybe the infamous talking points got sanded down a bit too much by the interagency review process. That's all possible.

Was Benghazi mishandled? Maybe. Are there lessons to be learned? Probably. Is there a scandal or a coverup? There's never been any evidence of it, and there still isn't. This is a show that goes on and on without end, but it never delivers a payoff. Issa and his colleagues need to start paying more attention to stuff that actually matters, and give up on the Fox-friendly conspiracy theories that never pan out. Enough's enough.

1Hold on. I might be thinking of something else here. It's not clear if the Pentagon has addressed the deployment of this particular team before. Regardless, this is solely about a tactical decision made after the attacks. A different team from Tripoli was dispatched earlier and arrived in Benghazi shortly before the final mortar attack.

Issa Tweets Story Saying Benghazi Testimony Will Yield No "Major Revelations"

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| Wed May. 8, 2013 1:39 PM PDT
Former deputy chief of mission in Libya Gregory Hicks testifies before the House Oversight Committee.

This week, several top Republicans have claimed that a supposed White House administration cover-up of the September 2012 attack on the US consulate in Benghazi, Libya, would soon bring down the Obama administration, and on Wednesday, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), the chairman of the House oversight committee, held a much-ballyhooed hearing featuring testimony from three witnesses whom he said would "expose the full truth of what happened both before and after the attacks." Yet while the hearing was underway, Issa tweeted a link to a Washington Post story that undercut his own claim.

As he chaired the hearing, Issa sent out this tweet: "MUST READ: breaks down 's hearing" and linked to a Post story filed as the hearing was happening. The article reported what was under way in the hearing room, but it also noted, "the witnesses' prepared testimonies do not include major revelations about the attacks." Major revelations were what the Benghazi critics were breathlessly awaiting.

The Post story did say that the witnesses' "accounts are likely to shed new light on the oversights that made the facilities in Benghazi easy targets"—and to that extent Republicans got what they wanted. The witnesses—State Department officials Gregory Hicks, Eric Nordstrom, and Mark Thompson—presented emotional, long-awaited accounts of the attack and its aftermath. They alleged that requests for additional security before the attack and access to classified State Department documents after the attack fell on deaf ears.

Hicks, the former deputy chief of mission for the US in Libya, echoed the critics' common complaints about the administration's public response to the assault, slamming UN ambassador Susan Rice for initially blaming the attack on an anti-Muslim video that led to protests throughout the region. "I was stunned," he said. "My jaw dropped. I was embarrassed." He also testified that he was told by the State Department not to meet with members of Congress investigating the attack.

Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, another top target of Republican criticism, was not mentioned until an hour into the hearing, when Hicks referred to a 2:00 a.m. phone call he received from her seeking details after the attack and shortly before the Libyan prime minister called to inform him of Stevens' death.

Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), the top Democrat on the committee, disputed allegations that the State Department's response to the attacks had been misleading. He called the idea that relief efforts had been inadequate—a theory that's been promoted by House Republicans—the "most troubling" of "all the irresponsible allegations" about the Benghazi episode.

Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.) sympathized with the witnesses by recalling how she had been shot five times during a fact-finding mission in 1978, while leaving the Jonestown cult settlement in Guyana. She said she had reservations about the level of security provided at that time, when California Democrat Rep. Leo Ryan became the only member of Congress to die in the line of duty in US history.

At his daily briefing, White House press secretary Jay Carney dismissed the Benghazi hearing as an "effort to chase after what isn't the substance here." He defended Hillary Clinton's handling of the consulate attack and said, "This is a subject that has from its beginning been subject to attempts to politicize it by Republicans, while in fact what happened in Benghazi was a tragedy."

Nevertheless, Issa hinted there may be more testimony in the future. "Our committee has been contacted by numerous other individuals who have direct knowledge of the Benghazi terrorist attack, but are not yet prepared to testify," he said in a statement.

Biden Said What About Keystone XL Pipeline?!?

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| Wed May. 8, 2013 11:51 AM PDT

On Tuesday night, Buzzfeed reported that Vice President Joe Biden told an activist in South Carolina that he personally opposed the Keystone XL pipeline, but that he was "in the minority" in the administration on that opinion. The story prompted a press release from at least one anti-Keystone environmental group praising Biden for his "blunt talk." But Biden's office says that the VP's opinion on Keystone hasn't changed since an interview he gave last year: he's still waiting for the State Department to weigh in.

A spokesperson for the VP's office writes to Mother Jones:

The Vice President has made his views known on this issue and his views haven't changed. Any impression to the contrary would be mistaken. For instance, he said of the project in an interview last year, "It’s going to go through the process and the decision will be made on an environmentally sound basis."

The spokesperson also reiterated that "permitting decisions for international oil and gas pipelines are delegated to the State Department."

The Buzzfeed story came from the account of Elaine Cooper, an activist with the Sierra Club, who says Biden told her this during a rope line at a campaign event in South Carolina last Friday. Cooper recounted the encounter in a blog post as well:

I asked him about the administration’s commitment to making progress on climate and whether the president would reject the pipeline. He looked at the Sierra Club hat on my head, and he said “yes, I do – I share your views – but I am in the minority,” and he smiled.

In Cooper's post, she notes that Biden famously broke from the official administration position on gay marriage in an interview back in May 2012. His comment has been described as the "catalyst" for President Obama declaring just a few days later that he had evolved on gay marriage. This was apparently much sooner than the president had planned to make that announcement.

Was the Keystone line another case of Biden speaking out of turn? Who knows. Rope lines are crowded and loud, leaving room for misinterpretation.  Besides, those things are usually more about glad-handing than they are about serious policy issues. But hey! It wouldn't be the first time the VP had staked out a position ahead of the rest of the administration.

How Thinking About Thinking Reduced Crime in Chicago

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| Wed May. 8, 2013 11:13 AM PDT

Harold Pollack draws my attention today to the results of a large-scale study he conducted recently with several other researchers in low-income Chicago schools. The study design was fairly simple: first, they chose several thousand teenage boys with horrible risk profiles. Their group was 70 percent black and 30 percent Hispanic; had an average GPA of 1.7; and had missed 40 out of 170 days of school the previous year. Over a third of them had been arrested at least once prior to the study.

They randomly assigned these boys to a control group or a treatment group. The randomization was done beforehand to avoid choosing a treatment group that differed in some unknown way from the control group. The treatment group was offered a chance to participate in a program called "Becoming a Man," which focused strongly on improving poor judgment and decision making. Here's an example:

At 3pm on Saturday, June 2, 2012, in the South Shore neighborhood just a few miles from the University of Chicago, two groups of teens were arguing in the street about a stolen bicycle. As the groups began to separate, someone pulled out a handgun and fired....Two weeks later, prosecutors filed first-degree murder charges against the alleged shooter, Kalvin Carter — 17 years old.

.... In Chicago, the site of our study, police believe that roughly 70 percent of homicides stem from “altercations,” compared to only about 10 percent from drug-related gang conflicts....At 3pm on June 2 on the south side of Chicago, is Kalvin Carter thinking about 3:01 — or even consciously thinking at all, for that matter? Automatic, intuitive decision-making is also susceptible to systematic biases, partly because the brain’s automatic “system” tends to emphasize explanations that are coherent rather than necessarily correct. Examples of such errors include hostile attribution bias....confirmation bias....or catastrophizing.

The intervention in the study was not really all that intense: the kids all skipped one regular class and attended 27 one-hour weekly sessions during the school year. In addition, some of the kids also attended after-school sessions. The primary purpose of the sessions was to teach cognitive behavioral therapy—"thinking about thinking"—in an effort to get the participants to change the way they interact with the rest of the world. The results were pretty stunning:

We find that participation reduced violent crime arrests by 8.1 arrests per 100 youth....Arrests in our “other” (non-violent, non-property, non-drug) category decreased by 11.5 arrests per 100 youth....Participation also led to lasting gains in an index of schooling outcomes equal to 0.14 standard deviations (sd) in the program year and 0.19sd in the follow-up year....We estimate our schooling impacts could imply gains in graduation rates of 3-10 percentage points (7-22 percent). With a cost of $1,100 per participant, depending on how we monetize the social costs of violent crime, the benefit-cost ratio is up to 30:1 just from effects on crime alone.

All my usual caveats apply here. This is just one study. We don't know how well it would scale. We don't know if the effects will last. But the design of the program is encouraging: it's not expensive, and it doesn't require highly trained coaches. Nor is it designed to help everyone. This quote tells most of the story:

As one juvenile detention staff member told us: “20 percent of our residents are criminals, they just need to be locked up. But the other 80 percent, I always tell them — if I could give them back just ten minutes of their lives, most of them wouldn’t be here.”

This program is designed for those 80 percent whose lives spiral out of control because of one or two dumb mistakes. And it seems to work. More studies like this, please.

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Bills That Would Gut Wall Street Reform Overwhelmingly Pass House Committee

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| Wed May. 8, 2013 9:49 AM PDT

On Tuesday, three bills that would gut the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform bill passed the House Financial Services Committee (HFSC) in decisive fashion, with just six members of the 61-member committee voting against all of them.

The three bills passed over serious objections from the Obama administration. On Monday, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew wrote a letter to Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas), the chairman of the committee, urging "members to oppose these bills and others like [them] that would weaken the important regulatory changes that Wall Street Reform has made to the derivatives market." A year ago, former Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner made a similar statement against a slate of nearly identical bills.

Financial reform advocates say that the three bills would do serious damage to parts of Dodd-Frank that deal with derivatives, which are financial products with values based on underlying numbers, like crop prices or interest rates.

Only six of the 28 Democrats on the committee voted against all three of the bills—Reps. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), the senior Democratic member of the committee; Nydia Velázquez (D-N.Y.); Mike Capuano (D-Mass.); Stephen Lynch (D-Mass.); Al Green (D-Tex.); and Keith Ellison (D-Minn.). Another six Democrats voted against some of the bills. Sixteen Dems voted in favor of all three bills. Thirty-one of the 33 Republicans on the committee voted for all the bills; Reps. Steve Pearce (R-N.M.) and Lynn Westmoreland (R-Ga.) abstained on two of the bills.

House Financial Services Committee members received some $14.8 million in contributions from the financial services and banking sectors during the last election cycle.

One of the offending bills would allow certain derivatives that are traded within a corporation to be exempt from almost all new Dodd-Frank regulations. The second would expand the types of trading risks that banks can take on. The third would allow big US-based multinational banks to escape US regulations by operating through international subsidiaries. Financial reform advocates say it is way too early to start messing with Wall Street reform, especially since key parts of Dodd-Frank have yet to go into effect.

In an opening statement before the vote, Waters listed a series of financial scandals in the wake of the 2007 crisis that she argues make strong financial regulations imperative. "These scandals include, but aren’t limited to, money laundering to drug cartels, Libor [interest rate] manipulation, and the case of the 'London Whale,'" the nick-name for JPMorgan's massive trading loss last year, she said.

The bills will now head to the House floor for consideration, and have a good chance of being taken up in the Senate.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Pick Your Team

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| Wed May. 8, 2013 9:43 AM PDT

I think Paul Krugman has the right take on the fact that South Carolina voters chose a disgraced Republican to represent them in Congress vs. an honest, centrist Democrat:

Look, we have an intensely polarized political system, and in Congress, at least, party affiliation is basically all that matters. When Massachusetts voters chose Scott Brown because he seemed like a nice guy, they were being idiots.

....Maybe, just maybe, you can make a case for choosing the right person for governor, regardless of party. But when you’re sending someone to Congress, all that matters is the R or D after that person’s name. It seems that conservative voters understand that; liberals and moderates should, too.

This wasn't always the case. Today it is. For all practical purposes, we live in a pseudo-parliamentary system of governance, and the only thing that matters in Congress is what party you belong to. If you're a Republican, you're obsessed with Benghazi, Solyndra, Fast & Furious, and debt ceiling hostage taking. If you're a Democrat, you're obsessed with more prosaic topics: passing a budget, keeping social welfare programs from being ripped apart, implementing Obamacare successfully, and asking the rich to help out a wee bit with our long-term budget balancing. Pick your team.

A Couple of Graphical Lessons From the Government's Huge Hospital Chargemaster Data Dump

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| Wed May. 8, 2013 8:53 AM PDT

Today the government released data showing how much different hospitals charge for the same procedure. I've been struggling since last night to figure out what to say about this, since in one way there's no news here. The fact that there are huge disparities has been well known for quite a while. This new data simply lays it out in more mind-numbing detail than usual. For now, then, I'm just going to offer up a couple of good graphical presentations that I've seen. The first is your basic map, courtesy of the New York Times. I zoomed in on Los Angeles here:

Take a look in the hospitals in the middle. There's a disparity of 2-4x in pricing between hospitals that are only a couple of miles apart. Why? Some is probably due to the nature of the cases they take, and the amount of unpaid work they do. But 2-4x? What accounts for this? Part of the answer comes from the chart below, courtesy of the Washington Post:

This doesn't explain everything, but it explains a fair amount. The private sector, we're told, is always more efficient than the public sector. Competition, you understand. But that doesn't seem to be the case in the healthcare industry. I will allow you to draw your own conclusions.

This Is How the NRA Lies to Gun Owners About Obama's Agenda

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| Wed May. 8, 2013 8:29 AM PDT

The National Rifle Association, which thwarted new background check legislation in Congress, recently mailed a "survey" to gun owners with 12 questions related to gun rights, gun laws, and politics. I use scare quotes above because this NRA document (read it here) is a deeply misleading push poll, not an actual survey—and it lies about President Barack Obama's positions on gun control.

The survey, provided to Mother Jones by a reader, claims that "President Obama has supported a national gun registration system allowing federal government officials to keep track of all your firearm purchases." This is an all-too-common NRA talking point. NRA honcho Wayne LaPierre echoed it in January, saying that Obama "wants to put every private, personal transaction under the thumb of the federal government, and he wants to keep all those names in a massive federal registry."

That's not true.

Federal law has long banned a national gun registry. And the recent gun control bill that died in Congress, which was cosponsored by Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Pat Toomey (R-Penn.) and fully supported by Obama, did not create a national gun registry. In fact, the bill expressly prohibited such a registry. Obama emphasized this point repeatedly, and award-winning mainstream media fact-checkers backed him up.

Last January, Time's Michael Scherer pressed the NRA on its repeated accusation that Obama aims to set up a gun registry, and a spokesman for the group referred him to a statement Obama made as a state senator in 2001: "Too many of these guns end up in the hands of criminals even though they were originally purchased by people who did not have a felony. I'll continue to be in favor of handgun law registration requirements and licensing requirements for training." Yet as a presidential candidate, Obama ruled out a gun registration system, and as president, he has never proposed a national gun registry.

The NRA, in its survey, also refers to the "Obama gun-ban agenda." That's wrong, too. Last year, PolitiFact took a look at a similar claim in which the NRA asserted that "Obama admits he's coming for our guns, telling Sarah Brady, 'We are working on (gun control), but under the radar.'" PolitiFact rated that charge "Pants on Fire." As FactCheck.org notes, Obama is not trying to seize guns already owned by Americans. He supports reinstating the 1994 assault weapons ban, but that's a position he's held for many years.

The NRA's survey is riddled with bad information and leading questions designed to make recipients fear the worst. The goal, it seems, is not to gather information but to spread disinformation—and to recruit new members. At the end of the survey, recipients are asked to sign up with the NRA and "tell gun banners in Congress and my state legislature to keep their hands off my guns and my rights!" And there's a nifty form of encouragement for those who do enlist: a free NRA pocketknife.