Blogs

Judge: Obama Admin.'s Emergency Contraception Argument Is "Something Out of an Alternate Reality"

—By

| Fri May. 10, 2013 10:56 AM PDT

On Friday, US District Court Judge Edward Korman went all Dikembe Mutombo on the Obama administration's request to delay implementation of his ruling that emergency contraception be made available over the counter to everyone within 30 days. The Department of Justice announced last week that it is appealing Korman's April 5 decision.

Korman's latest order rejecting the request of a stay is, to put it nicely, highly critical of the Obama administration, calling the DOJ's appeal "frivolous" and an "administrative agency filibuster."

In its appeal, the DOJ claimed that Korman's April 5 decision "undermines the regulatory procedures governing FDA's drug approval process." But Korman calls this argument "something out of an alternate reality," given that the FDA's scientists approved it for use over the counter when Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius overruled their decision in December 2011, implementing an age limit of 17. Sebelius, he writes, "completely lacks" the scientific expertise to decide whether a drug is safe and effective.

Korman also accuses the administration of "sugarcoating" its effort to block access by lowering the age for one brand of emergency contraception, Plan B One-Step, on the day before they filed the appeal. The administration has suggested a three-tiered system that Korman explains as:

  • (1) women 15 years of age or older with adequate proof of age will be permitted to purchase Plan B One-Step, which will only be available on the shelves in stores with on-site pharmacies;
  • (2) other levonorgestrel-based products will remain behind the counter, but will be available without a prescription to women over 17 years of age who have government issued proof of age; and,
  • (3) women who lack adequate proof of age or are under the age of 15 will not have access to Plan B One-Step and must obtain a prescription for another levonorgestrel-based contraceptive product.

Korman calls this proposal "convoluted" and "nonsensical."

Further, he notes, the Obama administration's plan still harms all women seeking access to emergency contraception, because they will need to a government-issued identification to prove their age. This is a particular burden on young women, poor women, and minorities, who are less likely to have that ID.

It would, however, benefit Teva, the company that makes Plan B One-Step, Korman writes:

The benefits the proposal would confer on Teva were not insignificant. Because, as the Assistant United States Attorney observed, 99% of Plan B One-Step consumers are aged 15 and above, Teva would lose next to nothing in the way of revenue by limiting sales to those women. On the other hand, Teva’s proposal would enable it to have its product, and its product alone, displayed on the shelves in the family planning area of stores with an on-site pharmacy. Thus, a consumer looking for an emergency contraceptive would only find Plan B One-Step on the shelves, and if she came in after the pharmacy counter was closed, her only option would be Plan B One-Step. If she were under the age of 15, she would have no option, because she could only obtain levonorgestrel-based emergency contraceptives with a prescription.
Moreover, because the FDA claimed that one of the studies conducted by Teva—the so-called "actual use" study—was essential to the approval of Teva’s proposal, Teva enjoys three years of marketing exclusivity to the 15 and 16 year old consumers. The pharmaceutical companies that sell "brand X" versions of Plan B One-Step as well as the two-pill package of the drug could not display their products on the shelf because the old marketing regime remains in effect for them, and their products can only be sold from behind the pharmacy counter. Anyone under the age of 17 needs a prescription to obtain these products, and anyone over the age of 17 can only obtain them from the pharmacy by showing proof-of-age identification.
While this proposal was a boon to Teva, it did little to eliminate the practical obstructions in obtaining emergency contraception to women of child-bearing age whether over or under age 15. On the contrary, Teva will use its privileged marketing status and exclusivity to increase the cost of the drug. The price of Plan B One-Step under the new marketing regime is expected to be $60, significantly more than the one- or two-pill generic version, and could conceivably go higher, if only to accommodate the more expensive packing, age-verification tags, and anti-theft technology that the new marketing arrangement would require. The cost of all emergency contraception, particularly Plan B One-Step, which is the most expensive, is already an impediment to access for many women and adolescents.

The DOJ has until noon on Monday, May 13 to try to appeal to the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals for a stay.

Advertise on MotherJones.com

Chart of the Day: Student Loan Debt Crowding Out Mortgages

—By

| Fri May. 10, 2013 10:37 AM PDT

A new report from the New York Fed describes a disturbing trend: student loan debt has increased so much that it's crowding out the ability of college graduates to buy homes. As the chart on the right shows, young workers with student loan debt—most of whom are college grads—used to take on mortgage debt at a higher rate than the rest of the population. This made sense, since they generally had higher incomes and better career prospects.

But that's been changing over the past few years. In 2012, for the first time, those without student loan debt actually took out mortgages at a higher rate than those with student loan debt. Annie Lowrey writes about this in the New York Times today:

“It is a new thing, a big social experiment that we’ve accidentally decided to engage in,” said Kevin Carey, the director of the Education Policy Program at the New America Foundation, a research group based in Washington. “Let’s send a whole class of people out into their professional lives with a negative net worth. Not starting at zero, but starting at a minus that is often measured in the tens of thousands of dollars. Those minus signs have psychological impact, I suspect. They might have a dollars-and-cents impact in what you can afford, too.”

Obviously there are other things going on here too. The housing crash may have had more of an impact on college grads, who decided to stay out of the market until it hit bottom. They also might have internalized the lessons of high debt levels better.

But spiraling loan debt probably plays a role too. This is one of those issues that continues to bedevil me, since I think there's a good case to be made that college is something individuals should pay for. It's going to reward them with lots of extra income, after all, so why should anyone else help subsidize it?

But as reasonable as that sounds, it's self-defeating in the end. Yeah, a college education is a boon for the person getting the education. But it's even more of a boon for society overall to have a big pool of college-educated workers. And it's a boon to have college-educated workers who don't spend the first decade of their working lives in a defensive crouch. This is an accidental experiment that's gone too far. The problem is, I'm not sure what we should do about it. Returning to the era in which state universities provided good quality, low-cost educations would sure be a start, though.

Finally, a Real Scandal for Conservatives to Chew On

—By

| Fri May. 10, 2013 9:40 AM PDT
IRS audit

Hey, guess what? Conservatives now have a real scandal to tout! They've been complaining for a while that the IRS singled out tea party groups for audits, and it turns out they were right. Today, the IRS fessed up:

Organizations were singled out because they included the words "tea party" or "patriot" in their applications for tax-exempt status, said Lois Lerner, who heads the IRS division that oversees tax-exempt groups…"That was wrong. That was absolutely incorrect, it was insensitive and it was inappropriate. That's not how we go about selecting cases for further review," Lerner said at a conference sponsored by the American Bar Association.

"The IRS would like to apologize for that," she added.

Lerner said the practice was initiated by low-level workers in Cincinnati and was not motivated by political bias. After her talk, she told The AP that no high level IRS officials knew about the practice. She did not say when they found out. About 75 groups were inappropriately targeted. None had their tax-exempt status revoked, Lerner said.

In this case, conservatives will undoubtedly demand more information about how this happened, who was involved, and when top officials found out about it. And this time, they'll be right to.

ABC News Reveals Drafts of Benghazi Talking Points

—By

| Fri May. 10, 2013 9:11 AM PDT

Do I have to write about the latest on Benghazi? I guess so. In for a penny, in for a pound.

ABC News now has a complete set of drafts of the infamous "talking points" that were prepared a few days following the Benghazi attacks. The drafts don't tell us much that we didn't already know, but here's a nickel summary:

  • From the very start, the talking points say that the attacks were "spontaneously inspired by the protests at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo" and then "evolved" into the assaults on the two compounds in Benghazi.
  • The first draft included references to "Islamic extremists with ties to al-Qa'ida." This was eventually sanded down to "extremists" after the State Department pointed out that they had been deliberately withholding this information because "we don’t want to prejudice the investigation." This is the same thing that David Petraeus told Congress last November.
  • The third draft included an ass-covering paragraph from the CIA making sure everyone knew they had produced "numerous pieces" on possible threats to Benghazi in the previous few months, with the obvious implication that the State Department had ignored them. Unsurprisingly, the State Department's spokesman, Victoria Nuland, objected to this gratuitous display of bureaucratic point scoring. It was removed in the final draft.

So....nothing much, really. The third bullet point is the only one that's even tenuously problematic, and it's not much more than a disclosure of internal backbiting. In any case, it was ultimately removed at a Deputies Committee meeting on Saturday morning that Nuland didn't attend.

I'm really, really trying to find anything scandalous here. I know I'm biased. But on a scale of 1 to 10, this is about a 1.5. It's a little bit of unseemly bureaucratic squabbling combined with the usual mushiness that you get when an interagency process produces a series of drafts of sensitive information for public consumption. But I'm sure it calls for impeachment hearings to begin anyway.

Controlling Medicare Costs is Now Un-American

—By

| Fri May. 10, 2013 8:09 AM PDT

Yesterday, John Boehner and Mitch McConnell announced that Republicans would not be naming any members to IPAB, the board empowered by Obamacare with making recommendations for ways to cut the cost of Medicare. Wesley Smith is really, really excited:

Way to go! The next step is to use Senate confirmation hearings to educate the American people about why the IPAB is un-American and shatters representative democracy. Pound it, pound it, pound it! Then, Republicans and commonsense Democrats in the Senate should refuse to confirm any nominated members to the board, using a filibuster if necessary. After that, defunding and eventual repeal. 

Really, this is amazing. It's now un-American for a government agency to be tasked with controlling costs in a government program. Is this because controlling costs is un-American? Because appointed commissions are un-American? Smith doesn't say. But apparently it's now conservative dogma that the only patriotic way Medicare costs can be reined in is by voucherizing the program.1 Nothing else is tolerable.

Of course, as a number of people have pointed out, this move doesn't prevent IPAB from working. If the Senate doesn't confirm anyone to the board, it just means that the HHS secretary has to make cost-cutting proposals on her own if Medicare grows faster than allowed. So what's the point? Pretty obviously, it's to make sure that if Medicare is cut in any way, Republicans can blame it solely and completely on Democrats.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is your fiscally responsible Republican Party. Keep all this in mind the next time you hear them yammering on about how critical entitlement reform is and how our spiraling deficits are imperiling the country.

1This is the gospel according to St. Paul. But it's worth noting (yet again) that even Paul Ryan has never fessed up about what he'd do if his voucher plan fails to meet his own growth control targets. He'd have to do something, and it's hard to see how he could avoid something un-American.

Arkansans to Kerry on Keystone: "Come to Our State to See the Devastation"

—By

| Fri May. 10, 2013 3:05 AM PDT
Genieve Long holds a photo of her son at a rally outside the State Department on Thursday.

Two residents of Mayflower, Arkansas, the site of the March 29 pipeline spill, traveled to Washington on Thursday to ask Secretary of State John Kerry to reject the Keystone XL pipeline.

They came here, Genieve Long said, to ask Kerry to "come to our state to see the devastation and hopefully get the Keystone XL stopped." They are working with All Risk, No Reward, a coalition of local and national groups that oppose the proposed 1,600-mile pipeline that would carry oil from Canada to Texas.

"I'm just a concerned single daddy who happens to have 400 feet of this pipeline running through his property."

Long and her four children—ages 9, 8, 7, and 5—live beside Lake Conway, not far from where Exxon's Pegasus pipeline spilled at least 210,000 gallons of crude oil from Canada's tar sands into a subdivision. Exxon has said that while there is oil in a cove on the lake, clean up crews haven't seen oil in the main body of water. But Sierra Club has said that an independent contractor the group hired found evidence of oil in the lake. Long thumbed through photos on her phone on Thursday morning, showing me images of oily sheen and what appeared to be black residue along the shores.

She says that Exxon has not been responsive to the complaints of people who live outside the area where the oil originally spilled. "I've asked them to just relocate us due to the smells," she said, noting that several of her children have asthma. "They told us the air quality was fine and they wouldn't relocate us." She's maintaining a Google Map that catalogs where people have reported seeing or smelling oil or experiencing negative health effects, as well as photos and video. She's also maintaining a Facebook page on the spill.

Reported oil sheen on Palarm Creek, off of Lake Conway. Genieve Long.

The oil is bad, but so is the cleanup, she says. "It's horrible. They have roads blocked down to one lane, constant police, constant traffic."

She was joined in Washington by fellow Mayflower resident Damien Byers, whose house is about a half a mile from the spill site and sits atop another portion of the Pegasus pipeline. He worries about the air quality in the area, especially when his 15-month-old son is staying with him. "I'm not an environmentalist, I'm not a treehugger," says Byers. "I'm just a concerned single daddy who happens to have 400 feet of this pipeline running through his property."

The pair delivered a letter to the State Department from a group of 21 residents of the town who have organized as the "Remember Mayflower Coalition." The letter asks Secretary Kerry to reject the Keystone pipeline—particularly in light of the Arkansas spill:

There is still so much we don’t know about tar sands—about the economic risks of them spilling in communities, about how they impact important water sources, and about how they effect our health. We don’t know enough to say "yes" to a massive tar sands pipeline through the country’s heartland.
Before you issue your final evaluation of Keystone XL, we ask that you and your staff come to Mayflower to see what happens when a tar sands pipeline ruptures in your backyard. We ask that you observe the remnants of black tar, smell the toxic chemicals that are polluting our air, and ask yourselves whether you can in good conscience inflict this same devastation on families along Keystone XL’s route.

"If this can happen to Mayflower," Long said, "with this Keystone pipeline, it can happen to anybody else also. We're trying to keep that from happening."

Advertise on MotherJones.com

A Political History of the Cicadas

—By

| Fri May. 10, 2013 3:00 AM PDT
Cicada:xpixel/Shutterstock; Capitol:J Main/Shutterstock.

The "Great East Coast Cicada Sex Invasion of 2013" is upon us.

After 17 years of feeding and living under the earth's surface, billions of "Brood II" cicadas will emerge this summer between Connecticut and Georgia, swarming in thick, forbidding billows of shed exoskeletons and raucous insect lovemaking. (To get an idea of what the cicada mating call sounds like, click here for audio.)

For all their physical creepiness and loud public sex orgies, the (actually completely harmless) bugs have a rich cultural history in the United States. Bob Dylan wrote a song about the cicadas, for instance. But cicadas also have a rich political history in this country. Here are their greatest hits:

1. Ronald Reagan name-checks the cicada: In June 1987, Greatest President in American History Ronald Reagan delivered one of his weekly radio addresses on the budget plan for fiscal year 1988. In his prepared statement, he used the cicada in a simile to bash Democratic budget proposals:

Like the cicadas, the big spenders are hatching out again and threatening to overrun Congress.

President Reagan then asked the American people to get behind a balanced budget amendment and the line item veto to "make the cicadas in Congress go back underground."

The subsequent UPI headline read:

Ronald Reagan cicadas democrats
UPI

2. John Kerry and the cicada-morphing attack ad: Reagan wasn't the only Republican (or politician, for that matter) to invoke cicadas in a political attack. During the 2004 presidential campaign, the Republican National Committee launched a 1:15-long web ad comparing Democratic candidate John Kerry to the "Brood X" cicada. The attack ad includes an up-close shot of a cicada's face morphing into a picture of a confused-looking John Kerry:

The video, which (naturally) painted Kerry as a serial flip-flopper, was emailed to approximately 700,000 supporters of President George W. Bush: "Every 17 years, cicadas emerge, morph out of their shell, and change their appearance," the narrator observes. "Like a cicada, Sen. Kerry would like to shed his Senate career and morph into a fiscal conservative, a centrist Democrat opposed to taxes, strong on defense."

The Kerry campaign and the Democratic National Committee responded to the ad by saying they were "not bugging out" over it.

John Kerry would go on to lose to George W. Bush in the November election by about 3 million votes.

3. Teddy Roosevelt vs. the anti-imperialist cicadas: In 1902, President Theodore Roosevelt gave a Memorial Day speech at Arlington National Cemetery. During that speech, he passionately defended American imperialism in the Philippines and his administration's policy of imposing "orderly freedom" on the Filipino people.

[Read more]

5 Directors Who Should Have Directed "The Great Gatsby" Instead of Baz Luhrmann

—By

| Fri May. 10, 2013 3:00 AM PDT
The Great Gatsby 2013 Warner Bros. Pictures

The Great Gatsby
Warner Bros. Pictures
142 minutes

The new adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's American classic/required high school reading The Great Gatsby is exactly how I remember the book: With a hip-hop-tinged drunken pillow fight in 3-D starring sweaty Tobey Maguire.

As an elevator pitch, there is absolutely nothing wrong with Baz Luhrmann's ultra-modern take on The Great Gatsby. His thoroughly modern update of Shakespeare—which, like Gatsby, stars Leonardo DiCaprio—is a joy. Plus, the timelessness of the 1925 novel makes any playful anachronisms (rap and rock music in the soundtrack, grinding dancing, and so forth) all the less suspicious.

But the result is almost unforgivably terrible, gratingly earnest in a way that the novel never was. When classic lines of narration from the beloved book start floating directly at your face as a 3-D special effects gimmick, it's a challenge not to groan audibly in your seat.

[Read more]

Music Review: "Nightlight" by Dungeonesse

—By

| Fri May. 10, 2013 3:00 AM PDT
album cover

TRACK 5

"Nightlight"

From Dungeonesse's Dungeonesse

SECRETLY CANADIAN

Liner notes: Joined by White Life's Jon Ehrens, Jenn Wasner reinvents herself as a dance floor diva, with creamy keyboards, yearning voices, and pumping beats evoking a neon mirage of ecstatic rapture.

Behind the music: Besides singing alt-folk in the duo Wye Oak, the versatile Wasner also performs solo as the poppier Flock of Dimes, while her venture with fellow Baltimorean Ehrens harks back to '90s R&B.

Check it out if you like: The latest from Cat Power and Tegan and Sara, other indie faves who underwent a musical facelift.

The Groundbreaking Isaac Newton Invention You've Never Heard Of

—By

| Thu May. 9, 2013 10:51 PM PDT

I feel the need to write about something that's as far removed from Benghazi as humanly possible. How about Isaac Newton? As we all know, he invented calculus, the theory of gravity, and Newtonian mechanics, as well as conducting pioneering work in optics. But I'm reading a book called Newton and the Origin of Civilization right now,1 and I've learned to my surprise that he invented something else that was similarly groundbreaking. Read on for more.

Observational science was as important in the 17th century as it is today, and Newton has long had a reputation as a master of precise observation. But one way or another, observations of that era all depended on the human eye. Some were unaided, while others depended on instruments, but in the end, their accuracy was still no better than that of the observer, and scientists of the day—very much including Newton—were well aware that human observation was imperfect. The usual way of handling this was to make a series of observations and then pick out the one that seemed most accurate. Newton, however, invented a revolutionary new method in 1671 while he was measuring the differences in the diameters of the rings produced when a spherical lens is pressed against a plate of glass—the phenomenon later termed "Newton's rings":

Newton did something unusual, and even, as Alan Shapiro notes, "almost [we would say entirely] unprecedented in the 17th century": he averaged all of the differences....None of this reached print....Newton certainly avoided hinting in print that his law of arithmetical progression was adduced by anything other than the most skillful and precise of measurements.

....Newton's "mean"—the average—was the weapon with which he slew the invevitable dragons of sensual errors. It was a most paradoxical weapon for the times, because it amounted to a method by which error seems to be reduced by committing it repeatedly. No such method appears elsewhere at the time, and it would certainly have seemed odd, to say the least, to most practitioners of the period.

....We have no contemporary record of the reasoning by which he justified this unusual method....Yet Newton used averages early on; he used them frequently and, it seems, consistently....Why did Molyneux and Flamsteed, a decade or two later, do so as well?....Is there some evidence as to what underpinned the average, decades before statistical notions became widespread?

Apparently the answer to that last question is no. The authors produce a bit of evidence that Newton thought of the average as akin to measuring a center of gravity, but that's about it. It appears that Newton never explained himself, but just quietly went ahead with his use of  averages several decades before anyone else. It was the secret behind his famously accurate observations.

So how about that? Newton invented the now-standard method for reducing noise in measurements, and did it apparently by pure intuition, long before anyone (including Newton) suspected there was a rigorous mathematical basis for doing so. Also—and this is par for the course—he kept it a secret. So chalk up another amazing discovery for old Isaac.

1Actually, reading might be too strong a word. It's a long, dense monograph about Newton's obsession with ancient chronology, which joins alchemy, numerology, and Biblical exegesis among his somewhat less successful endeavors. So I'm sort of dipping into the book here and there, not really giving it a thorough read.