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Charts: Look At How Badly Obama Lags on Judicial Appointments

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| Thu Apr. 4, 2013 8:02 AM PDT

Last week, President Obama withdrew his judicial nominee for the powerful DC Circuit Court of Appeals—which hasn't had a nominee confirmed since 2006—because Republicans threatened to filibuster her. This high-profile battle is just the tip of the iceberg. Because of Republican obstructionism, the Obama administration's lackadaisical pace of nominations, and problems with the Senate confirmation process, more federal judgeships are staying vacant nationwide under this president than under President Bush, and Obama's nominees are taking longer to get confirmed.

During Obama's first term, the number of appeals court vacancies rose from 14 to 17. During Bush’s first term, by contrast, appeals court vacancies dropped from 27 to 18. Because Obama has been slower to nominate than Bush or Clinton, the average number of days from the opening of a seat to a nomination increased by 44 percent between Bush's and Obama's first terms.

This graph, by the data visualization shop Remapping Debate, shows the average number of vacancies per year, starting in 2001 (scroll to view all years, and hover over for details):

When the president finally does nominate someone, the Senate is generally reluctant to confirm her. Obama has 15 judicial nominees waiting for Senate floor votes right now. Overall, his judicial nominees wait an average of 116 days on the Senate floor for a vote—three times longer than Bush’s average judicial nominee wait time. When the 112th Congress ended in December, the Senate had approved 175 of Obama's judges. By contrast, Bush had 206 judges approved in his first term, and President Clinton had 204.

The figure below, also by Remapping Debate, compares Bush and Obama's first terms, showing the average number of days between vacancy and nomination, and the number of days nominees were pending before the Senate.

Why is the GOP so obstinate on confirmations? Senate Republicans may be giving Democrats a little payback. "Republicans don’t think Bush’s nominees were treated fairly," Russell Wheeler, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, which has tracked the phenomenon, told Bloomberg News on Wednesday.

Confirmation of a nominee to the DC circuit court, which is one step below the Supreme Court, is particularly important for Obama's second term because the court handles all disputes related to regulations and executive actions. "With legislative priorities gridlocked in Congress, the president’s best hope for advancing his agenda is through executive action, and that runs through the D.C. Circuit," Doug Kendall, president of the Constitutional Accountability Center, told the Washington Post Tuesday.

Right now that court is conservative-dominated, with four Republican and three Democratic appointees, and four vacancies (twice as many as any other court of appeals). This configuration didn't work out so well in the Obama's first term. The DC circuit court blocked EPA air pollution rules and put a hold on cases related to workers' rights.

Of the DC circuit confirmation, Kendall says "There are few things more vital on the president’s second-term agenda."

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CHART: Withering Drought Still Plaguing Half of America

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| Thu Apr. 4, 2013 7:00 AM PDT
Click here for a larger version. James West

The $50 billion drought that bedeviled the country last Summer—the worst since the Dust Bowl of the 1930's—still has its fingers around half the country. And if predictions are to be believed, it's only going to get worse for many in the coming months.

Weekly drought figures released Thursday by the US Drought Monitor, a joint project of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the USDA and several other government and academic partners, show the situation has worsened slightly from last week, with nearly 52% of the continental US now suffering from a moderate drought or worse. Below-average winter snow pack and rainfall are keeping much of the country in a holding pattern. No measurable precipitation fell on most of central and northern Illinois, southern Wisconsin, central and northern Iowa, southwestern Minnesota, and the Louisiana Bayou last week. Rain that fell in the West did nothing to alleviate the drought there; in fact, parts of western Oregon and southwestern Washington have reported their driest start to a calendar year on record. The forecast for the next two weeks? Dry and dry again.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's climate prediction center warns today that drought is likely to persist for much of the West and expand across northern California and southern Oregon. Although the numbers are more optimistic across eastern Kansas and Oklahoma, with some rain on the way, drought still has a strong grip on much of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, and Arizona due to low snow-water (around 75% of normal) heading into spring and early summer. That is just the latest in a battery of warning signs that show another brutal summer on its way: California experienced its driest January-February period on record, and average winter temperatures across the contiguous US were 1.9°F above the 20th century average.

These figures come on the back of the spring outlook from NOAA released two weeks ago that point to hotter, drier conditions coming up across much of the US, and with that, flooding.

In many parts of the country, drought in fact never loosened its grip, imperiling the winter wheat crop that sustains much of the US wheat industry.

 

Occupy the Department Of Education Returns to DC

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| Thu Apr. 4, 2013 3:20 AM PDT
Occupy DOEProtesters from Occupy DOE

Most of the Occupy movement has petered out a year and a half after it exploded in New York’s Zuccotti Park. But one small segment of that movement is rallying in DC this week to focus attention on the evils of “corporate education reform.”

Liberal education luminaries including Diane Ravitch, a former assistant education secretary, and Central Park East schools guru Deborah Meier, will be in Washington as part of a four-day “Occupy the Department of Education” event organized by United Optout, a group that came together last year in the flurry of other Occupy Wall Street events. They’ll be part of non-stop speechmaking from teachers, educators, students, and parents, decrying such things as high-stakes testing and the move towards privatizing public education.

The focus on the Department of Education is intentional. Liberal school advocates are deeply unhappy with President Barack Obama’s education reform agenda, which Peggy Robertson, one organizer of this event, calls “No Child Left Behind on steroids.” Robertson, a veteran teacher from Colorado, says that Obama’s education agenda has “opened the door” to the privatization of public education. His Race to the Top initiative is one of the protest’s primary targets.

Robertson says that this initiative, which has created a competition among states for a large pot of new education funding, requires states to accept certain conditions to receive the new money. These conditions include implementing the Common Core standards, a set of new, national guidelines outlining what students should be expected to learn. (The Occupy activists oppose the standards, which they believe deprive teachers of flexibility and creativity in the classroom by dictating what material they need to cover.) Race to the Top grant recipients are also required to allow more charter schools, create a longitudinal database full of student information to track performance, and tie high-stakes testing to teacher evaluations.

All of these things, Robertson contends, create a windfall for big companies seeking a piece of the enormous public education budget and smother creativity in the classroom. (The Occupiers aren’t the only ones obsessed with the Common Core standards. Glenn Beck has been on a tear against them, too, calling them a form of “leftist ideology” that is “dumbing down schools across the country.”)

The Occupiers descending upon the Education Department this week are trying to draw attention to all of this, along with the rash of public school closings going on around the country, most notably in Chicago and Washington. Robertson recognizes that it’s a tough task. “Most of mainstream media ignores everything we say,” she admits. Last year they had only about 100 people at their rally. This year, she’s hoping for at least a thousand, which isn’t much for a DC protest. But Robertson thinks it’s important to try to present an alternative to the sweeping corporate reform effort. “What’s scary," she remarks, "is how fast it’s happening.”

Sen. Roy Blunt: Monsanto's Man in Washington

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| Thu Apr. 4, 2013 3:00 AM PDT
Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.)Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) Christian Gooden/St. Louis Post-Dispatch

As I reported a couple of weeks ago, a recent Senate bill came with a nice bonus for the genetically modified seed industry: a rider, wholly unrelated to the underlying bill, that compels the USDA to ignore federal court decisions that block the agency's approvals of new GM crops. I explained in this post why such a provision, which the industry has been pushing for over a year, is so important to Monsanto and its few peers in the GMO seed industry. (You can also hear my talking about it on NPR's The Takeaway, along with the senator who tried to stop it, Montana's Jon Tester, and see me on Al Jazeera's Inside Story.)

Which senator pushed the rider into the bill? At the time, no one stepped forward to claim credit. But since then, Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) has revealed to Politico's ace reporter David Rogers that he's the responsible party. Blunt even told Rogers that he "worked with" GMO seed giant Monsanto to craft the rider.

The admission shines a light on Blunt's ties to Monsanto, whose office is located in the senator's home state. According to OpenSecrets, Monsanto first started contributing to Blunt back in 2008, when it handed him $10,000. At that point, Blunt was serving in the House of Representatives. In 2010, when Blunt successfully ran for the Senate, Monsanto upped its contribution to $44,250. And in 2012, the GMO seed/pesticide giant enriched Blunt's campaign war chest by $64,250.

[Read more]

Our Math Deficit Doesn't Add Up

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| Wed Apr. 3, 2013 9:52 PM PDT

Here's a story you've probably heard before: General Plastics Manufacturing of Tacoma, Washington, needs factory workers to make foam products. So they give all their applicants a math test that asks them to convert inches to feet, calculate the density of a block of foam, and a few other things:

Basic middle school math, right?

But what troubles General Plastics executive Eric Hahn is that although the company considers only prospective workers who have a high school education, only one in 10 who take the test pass. And that’s not just bad luck at a single factory or in a single industry.

Hahn, vice president of organizational development, said that the poor scores on his company’s math test have been evident for the past six years. He also sits on an aerospace workforce training committee and said that most other Washington state suppliers in his industry have been seeing the same problem.

OK, now look at the chart on the right. It shows results from the NAEP math test—a national assessment that's generally considered highly reliable—for 17-year-olds. And basically, it shows nothing. If you take a look at the 25th and 50th percentiles, which is where most factory workers come from, scores have been pretty flat for the past two decades. If anything, they're up slightly.

So how do we square this with Eric Hahn's contention that General Plastics has had trouble over the past few years finding qualified workers? I can think of a few possibilities:

  1. Hahn is just wrong. He remembers the past as rosier than it was.
  2. Jobs at General Plastics require higher skills than in the past, but they're refusing to pay any more than they used to. So they're not getting suitable applicants.
  3. Ever since the NCLB "test 'em til they drop" era started, kids have been learning rote math that's good for getting high test scores but not so good for solving actual real-world problems.
  4. Scores have fallen off a cliff over the past five years, but we don't see it in the chart because it only goes up to 2008.
  5. Washington is doing worse than other states.

There's evidence that #3 isn't the answer. To the extent that kids are taught to the test, they're taught to state tests, since those are the ones used to measure performance. The NAEP is a federal test that nobody teaches to because (a) it doesn't count for anything, and (b) it's given to only a tiny fraction of students nationwide (less than 1 percent of all K-12 students). What's more, the long-term NAEP, which is what I showed above, has been carefully constructed to stay the same from year to year. It's testing exactly the same thing today that it tested in 1978.

There's also evidence that #4 isn't the answer. We don't have national results for 17-year olds that are more recent than 2008, but we do have results for 8th graders on the main NAEP. Their math scores rose between 2007 and 2011. A sudden and unprecedented collapse between 8th and 12th grades seems unlikely.

There's also evidence that #5 isn't the answer. In fact, Washington has done a bit better than the national average over the past decade.

I might have missed a possibility. For now, though, my money is on #2.

Alabama Bill Could Shut Down All Abortion Clinics in State

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| Wed Apr. 3, 2013 3:24 PM PDT
A pro-choice rally in Mississippi, January 2013. Suzi Altman/ZUMA Press

The Alabama legislature passed a bill on Tuesday that will heavily restrict abortion, potentially shutting down all five of the state's abortion clinics. The state House and Senate passed the bill by votes of 68-21 and 22-10 respectively, and Governor Bentley is expected to sign it soon.

One of the bill's sponsors, Rep. Mary Sue McClurkin, argued in February that this new law was necessary to protect women because "abortion removes the largest organ in a woman's body." 

That comment was neither scientifically accurate nor did it explain what Alabama's Women's Health and Safety Act is designed to do, so here it is: The bill, which copies legislation passed in Mississippi in 2012, mandates that doctors at abortion clinics have admitting privileges at local hospitals. This gives local hospitals the leeway to flat-out deny doctors these privileges. The doctors at Mississippi's last abortion clinic, for instance, were rejected at all seven hospitals they approached for admitting privileges.

One of the bill's sponsors argued the law was necessary to protect women because "abortion removes the largest organ in a woman's body." 

"[The hospitals] were clear that they didn't deal with abortion and they didn't want the internal or the external pressure of dealing with it," Mississippi clinic owner Diane Derzis told the Associated Press in February.

"The reality is the hospital's decisions will be based on ideology and politics" in Alabama, Nikema Williams, vice president of Planned Parenthood Southeast, told Mother Jones. "A lot of boards for public hospitals are appointed by the state."

In Mississippi, litigation filed by the Center for Reproductive Rights has kept the clinic open for now: Last July, a judge blocked the state from penalizing the doctors while they try to secure the new privileges, buying the clinic more time. Williams says she expects women's rights advocates in Alabama will also head to court to try and keep the state's last few clinics open.

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We Don't Need No Stinkin' Democrats on the DC Circuit Court

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| Wed Apr. 3, 2013 2:40 PM PDT

As we all know, Republicans filibustered President Obama's nomination of Caitlin Halligan to the DC Circuit Court last month, so now we're moving on to the second of his nominees to fill one of the court's vacancies: Sri Srinivasan, an attorney who's not just respected by both liberals and conservatives, but even worked in the George W. Bush administration. That didn't do him any good when he was first nominated in 2012, but he's back now, and getting a lot of love from right-wingers. Sahil Kapur reports:

Their support would normally bode well for a key judicial pick by a Democratic president. But Senate Republicans have indicated a desire to maintain the court’s notoriously high vacancy rate — at least as long as Obama’s president. Earlier this year, they filibustered a different, widely respected Obama nominee to the same court. And so the broad ideological consensus behind Srinivasan makes it harder for Republicans to oppose his nomination without appearing as though they’re abusing their advise and consent power for partisan purposes.

Harder? Sure. Impossible? No! A while back I was digging into this subject a little bit, trying to find out what the official objection to Obama's nominees was. The party-line answer, it turned out, was pretty straightforward: The DC Circuit doesn't really have a very heavy caseload, so it doesn't need any more judges. As you can imagine, this is a very handy argument indeed, since it means that Republicans don't really need to cast around for a pretend reason to oppose Srinivasan or any of Obama's other nominees. They can just oppose them all.

Now that David Sentelle has retired and the court has four vacancies, maybe this argument won't fly any longer. Then again, maybe it will. Stay tuned.

The Taliban Are Inadvertently Really Good at Endangered Falcon Conservation

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| Wed Apr. 3, 2013 2:21 PM PDT
former Taliban insurgents with weaponsLovers of falcons?

The Taliban, the violent Islamist movement, is responsible for a lot of bloodshed, many human rights violations, and some really mediocre and chauvinist poetry.

They are also at the forefront of protecting endangered falcons, however unintentional their conservation efforts may be.

Ashfaq Yusufzai has the story:

While the Taliban's military activities continue to plague Pakistan's northern Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), the incessant violence has been a blessing in disguise for one creature: the falcon.

Declared endangered by the [International Union for Conservation of Nature], this bird of prey suffered for years at the hands of poachers and hunters, whose unfettered access to FATA and the adjacent Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province guaranteed the birds a short life span in the wild, with most destined to be trapped, killed or sold.

But "continued militancy has kept the poachers (and hunters) away," Khalid Shah, an official at the KP Wildlife Department, told IPS, adding that the survival rate of falcons and some other migratory birds has "increased tremendously". In 2005 only 2,000 falcons lived in these northern territories, but by 2008 wildlife officials had recorded an increase of up to 8,000 birds.

Experts trace this population growth to the beginning of the insurgency here, which began after the 2001 U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan toppled the government in Kabul and sent scores of Taliban and Al Qaeda members across the border into Pakistan's sprawling mountainous terrain. Being the U.S. 's ally in the so-called "war on terror", the Pakistan army has engaged in a military offensive to root out the insurgents...Under fire from both sides, civilian residents say militancy has made daily activities – among them hunting and poaching — impossible.

On a related note, after the Taliban's rise to power in Afghanistan, the regime made it illegal to own birds in cages. Also, a study conducted by scientists from the New England Aquarium determined that whales greatly benefited from the September 11 Al Qaeda attack on New York's Twin Towers. But Islamist violence is probably not a net positive for local wildlife; during the Taliban's takeover of Afghanistan in the '90s, they ransacked the Kabul zoo, slaughtered animals, maimed a bear, threw a grenade at a lion, and left the other creatures to starve to death.

Accidental falcon conservation aside, the Taliban's treatment of animals often mirrors their treatment of women.

h/t Jon Mooallem

Bush Lying About WMD Is a Conspiracy Theory?!?

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| Wed Apr. 3, 2013 1:34 PM PDT
Yuri Arcurs/Shutterstock

People believe crazy things.The lunar landing was faked; a secret band of "lizard people" controls our society. New survey data from Public Policy Polling released on Tuesday shows notable percentages of Americans embrace a wide variety of conspiracy theories, from Bigfoot to the CIA creating the crack epidemic.

PPP found that:

  • 37 percent of voters believe global warming is a hoax
  • 6 percent of voters don't believe that Osama bin Laden is dead
  • 28 percent of voters believe "secretive power elite with a globalist agenda is conspiring to eventually rule the world through an authoritarian world government, or New World Order"
  • 7 percent of voters think man did not actually walk on the moon
  • 13 percent of voters think President Obama is the anti-Christ
  • 14 percent of voters believe in Bigfoot
  • 44 percent believe George W. Bush intentionally misled the US about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq

Screeeeech. Stop the crazy train. What? Bush did lie about WMD. That's not a wacky conspiracy theory; it is quite well documented at this point. That's a topic for another poll.

The Antichrist Is Always With Us

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| Wed Apr. 3, 2013 11:20 AM PDT

Ed Kilgore comments on the news that 13 percent of voters think Barack Obama is the antichrist:

Extrapolated to the national electorate, it suggests that over 13 million Americans believe the President of the United States is a demonic supernatural being sent into the world to set up an infernal kingdom until it's all washed away by the End of Days.

This reminds me of something that I sort of accidentally got involved in a couple of decades ago. I'll skip the details, but I ended up learning that among at least a subset of evangelical Christians, there's always an antichrist. For a while it was Muammar Qaddafi. Then it was Saddam Hussein. I assume Osama bin Laden took on the role after 9/11. So the fact that some of them now pin that tag on Obama isn't super surprising. The antichrist is out there somewhere, and with the usual suspects now mostly dead, why not Obama?