You know how Rick Santorum doesn't want to help "blaaah" people by giving them other (white) people's money? Well, he's figured out why Barack Obama is doling out all the white people's money to blaaah people. Because he's a government "Blaah"... I mean, a "government nig...ah." See for yourself.



But of course, Santorum's campaign is not even going to dignify that with a response. Because nothing beats the dignity of referring to the President of the United States with a racial slur.

Question: What does it take to be fired from two eight-figure gigs in the space of roughly 14 months? Answer: Evidently, it takes being Keith Olbermann.

In January of 2011, Olbermann was fired from his blowhard gig at MSNBC. News is now breaking that Olbermann has been fired from his $10 million a year job on Current TV. Apparently, Al Gore did not like having a loudmouth rude self-deluded fool as an employee as much as Keith liked having him as his boss. In their message to viewers about Olbermann's firing, Gore and Joel Hyatt, the founders of Current, wrote:

We created Current to give voice to those Americans who refuse to rely on corporate-controlled media and are seeking an authentic progressive outlet.  We are more committed to those goals today than ever before.

Current was also founded on the values of respect, openness, collegiality, and loyalty to our viewers. Unfortunately these values are no longer reflected in our relationship with Keith Olbermann and we have ended it.

The conventional wisdom has been that the high gas prices are hurting economic growth in a fledgling recovery, and that the American people, largely unhappy with the prices at the pump, are going to take it out on the President. Both of these are proving to be wrong as of now, however.

The economy isn't exactly showing signs of dying. We all know about the stellar jobs numbers in the past few months, capping off a total of 4 million private sector jobs created in the last 23 months. The Commerce Department reported today that consumer spending grew in February at the fastest pace in seven months, driven by the strong jobs growth of late. New orders for durable goods grew to $212 billion in February, an increase of 2.2% over the previous month. Yesterday, the Labor Department reported that initial jobless claims fell to 359,000, a 4-year low. Economists believe that initials claims below 400,000 represent an economy returning to health. Here is how the jobless claims data has looked over the Great Recession and the ensuing Obama Recovery (Credit: CS Monitor).

Criminal InJustice^† is a weekly series devoted to taking action against inequities in the U.S. criminal justice system. Nancy A. Heitzeg, Professor of Sociology and Race/Ethnicity, is the Editor of CI. Criminal InJustice is published every Wednesday at 6 pm CST.

After Trayvon Martin
by Kay Whitlock with Nancy A. Heitzeg

Tonight, Criminal Injustice (CI) is remembering Trayvon Martin in historical context, calling the names of at least a few of those who, over the centuries as well as today, perished alongside of him. We can’t list all of the names – they go into the millions. But we can invoke both the humanity of those whose deaths result from structural racism and inhumanity of those who do and permit the killing with a few images.

Ponder the images. Read the links – not all at once, but over time. Reflect on what you encounter.


Emmet Till

Medgar Evers

Fred Hampton and Mark Clark

Oscar Grant, Troy Davis, Amadou Diallou

Duanna Johnson, James Byrd Jr

Susan Bartholomew, Jose Holmes, James Barset, Ronald Madison

Donnell Herrington, Marcel Alexander, Chris Collins, Willie Lawrence, Henry Glover

Anthony Scott

In a new CNN poll, President Obama captures a 51% approval rating, up from the last couple of months. It seems like the Republicans' desperate attempt to tar and feather this president with gas prices is not working. President Obama beats Mitt Romney 54% to 43% among registered voters, and 56% to 40% among all adults. But real devil, as they say, is in the details. When you look at the details, you find out where the Republican party has ended up: almost exclusively a party of white males, and they are having trouble holding on to either of those categories while Democrats and President Obama are racking up huge advantages among minorities and women.

I don't think I have to reiterate the war on women. I'm going to give you a look in charts on the race and gender gaps.

Race

President Obama's approval, while 51% among the total population, is a whopping 78% among non-whites, and only 40% among white voters.

Yesterday, the Supreme Court heard arguments on two things: whether, if the individual mandate was struck down as unconstitutional (I discussed why I don't think that is going to happen), any part of the rest of the law could stand. In arguing that it couldn't, the opponents conceded that the mandate was in fact Constitutional, right out of the gate and in almost so many words. Paul Clement, arguing for Florida on the side of the challengers, opened with the following:

If the individual mandate is unconstitutional, then the rest of the Act cannot stand. As Congress found and the Federal Government concedes, the community rating and guaranteed-issue provisions of the Act cannot stand without the individual mandate. Congress found that the individual mandate was essential to their operation. And not only can guaranteed-issue and community-rating not stand, not operate in the manner that Congress intended, they would actually counteract Congress's basic goal of providing patient protection but also affordable care.

I also discussed yesterday that a large part of how the court will decide the case will depend on whether or not they defer to Congress' finding that the individual responsibility provision was 'necessary and proper' in order to effectuate the insurance regulations that is opponents agree are within the authority of Congress - namely the provisions that guarantee acceptance (guaranteed issue) and prohibit health status based discrimination (community rating). The Constitution allows Congress to do what is necessary and proper in order to institute a legitimate exercise of its powers. And I think that the opponents, in that opening statement, just spilled the beans that it is indeed necessary and proper.

If you watched or read "mainstream" media coverage of the Supreme Court's hearing yesterday on the Affordable Care Act's individual responsibility provision, you know that "the mandate" is in "big trouble." NBC's Justice Correspondent Pete Williams said he doesn't see five votes for the law to survive. CNN's Jeffrey Toobin had a positive meltdown. Huffpo's article on the administration's response to the media freakout started with Sam Stein's own special freakout.

Was any of that even remotely justified? Not if you didn't go into yesterday's hearing looking for an excuse to find high drama at high noon. I listened to the entire two-hour session of he Court, and the case for the individual mandate was far stronger inside the courtroom than you heard from the media firebreathers. Here is what the entire media circus is missing: the actual questions before the court. The actual questions, addressing the mandate, are two-fold: (a) whether Congress has the authority to compel individuals, with some exceptions, to purchase health insurance as the primary means to pay for health care, which everyone will use to an unknown cost at some point and (b) how Congress was enforcing this requirement. There is, after all, no actual mandate if Congress says you must do something but there is no consequence of not doing it.

The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.

—Hannah Arendt

Deaniac highlighted a particularly egregious exchange between Justice Antonin Scalia and Solicitor General Donald Verrilli during Tuesday's ACA hearing before the Supreme Court. Just to refresh our memories, I quote it here.

GENERAL VERRILLI: No. It's because you're going -- in the health care market, you're going into the market without the ability to pay for what you get, getting the health care service anyway as a result of the social norms that allow -- that -- to which we've obligated ourselves so that people get health care.

JUSTICE SCALIA: Well, don't obligate yourself to that. Why -- you know?

GENERAL VERRILLI: Well, I can't imagine that that -- that the Commerce Clause would --would forbid Congress from taking into account this deeply embedded social norm.

JUSTICE SCALIA: You -- you could do it.

What? Too obscene? Something is obscene, but the words I used in the title of this article pale in comparison to the obscenity of the strategy that is being pursued by the bigoted anti-gay evangelists - lead by the National Organization for Marriage. The Human Rights Campaign reports on NOM documents released through the investigation being conducted by the Maine Board of elections. And this is what NOM says in their own update to their own Board of Directors about their own strategy:

The strategic goal of this project is to drive a wedge between gays and blacks—two key Democratic constituencies. Find, equip, energize and connect African American spokespeople for marriage, develop a media campaign around their objections to gay marriage as a civil right; provoke the gay marriage base into responding by denouncing these spokesmen and women as bigots… Fanning the hostility raised in the wake of Prop 8 is key to raising the costs of pushing gay marriage to its advocates...

Of course, African Americans aren't the only ones they would like to divide and turn against gay people. Latinos are in their sights too.

The Latino vote in America is a key swing vote, and will be even more so in the future... We must interrupt this process of assimilation by making support for marriage a key badge of Latino identity - a symbol of resistance to inappropriate assimilation.

Now I feel left out. What, are Asians chopped liver?

Maybe you missed it, but Justice Scalia today said that letting the uninsured die is a better idea than making it an individual responsibility for those who can afford it to buy health insurance.

Solicitor General Donald Verrilli was explaining to Justice Scalia that the individual responsibility provision (aka "the mandate") is justified given the fact that the uninsured can show up in emergency rooms and get care regardless of ability (or willingness) to pay, shifting the cost to other participants of the market in the form of higher insurance premiums. Scalia, undeterred, dropped the GOP baseline:

GENERAL VERRILLI: No. It's because you're going -- in the health care market, you're going into the market without the ability to pay for what you get, getting the health care service anyway as a result of the social norms that allow -- that -- to which we've obligated ourselves so that people get health care.

JUSTICE SCALIA: Well, don't obligate yourself to that. Why -- you know?

GENERAL VERRILLI: Well, I can't imagine that that -- that the Commerce Clause would --would forbid Congress from taking into account this deeply embedded social norm.

JUSTICE SCALIA: You -- you could do it.

Ever wonder why pollsters don't ask questions like "Providing health care for uninsured people costs you, on average, $1,100 a year on your health insurance premiums. Do you think it's a good idea to require everyone who can afford it to buy health insurance?" If they did, or if our news media did its job, perhaps we wouldn't see insanity like the following:

These are the numbers came out of the same poll - CBS - from the same exact sample. Either the American people are completely out of their wits to knowingly want to oppose a law that they also, err, support, or there is something that is not connecting the individual reforms contained in the law with the broader picture. What is it? Here is another chart that may help explain that stunning contradiction.

The big story last week, on the political front, has been the Supreme Court's scheduling of oral arguments on the legal challenges to the health care reform law the President signed two years ago. It's an unnerving case, to be sure, as people across the political pages try to read tea-leaves to surmise the fate of this incredible reform. The far Right is aware that ObamaCare, should all elements of it be allowed to go into effect in 2014, it will be as popular as Medicare and any attempt to screw with it will result in the reddest Congressional districts turning blue. They have spent not only time to challenge the law in the courts, but they have also outspent supporters on a 3:1 basis on spreading propaganda trashing the law.

I am not a lawyer. But for what it's worth, I do think there is something to be taken from the precise cases that the Supreme Court is hearing this week. The Washington Post has a helpful graphic showing the cases SCOTUS is actually deciding in order to determine the fate of health reform.

For all the Republican primary woes, a very strong current of positive news is coming out of the Democratic primaries this year - the Democratic Congressional primaries, specifically. Whenever ideological warriors on the Left flank of politics aim to beat down common sense pragmatism, our base is sending a message: we want good results, not just "good fights." Early this month, in Ohio, the least valuable Democrat in Congress, Dennis Kucinich, went down in flames in his Democratic primary. True to style, he chose to exit the stage as his usual bitter self. And last Tuesday, in Illinois' 10th Congressional District, the Professional Left's wonder kid, Ilya Sheyman, lost by a near double digit margin to progressive businessman Brad Schneider. To listen to the Internet's Lefty keyboard warriors, Sheyman's loss was a big tragedy for the progressives, and well, it's all the polling's fault.

Sheyman is the former Mobilization Director for MoveOn.org, and organizing manager at TrueMajority.org. Big names on the "netroot" Left - the PCCC (I find it amazing that people keep associating with them despite their open racism), MoveOn (duh) and Democracy for America all got behind Sheyman for a big push. If there is a personification of "netroots," - aka the keyboard warriors - Sheyman is it. The computer commandos attacked Schneider as a "Republican", based on the fact that over the past two decades, he'd donated to four Republicans, totaling less than 10% of his political donations. Local Democratic leaders condemned the tactics of these groups for reprehensible half-truths about a fellow Democrat.

When election night rolled around, Sheyman lost. Big. He lost big despite the support of these groups, and despite outspending his chief opponent hugely.

It's not good enough that Chief of Police for Sanford, FL Bill Lee has "temporarily" stepped down. The way he and his police department have handled the shooting of Trayvon Martin has been nothing less than scandalous. They had the 911 tapes. They heard the utter fear in Trayvon's voice as he was gunned down in cold blood. Just based on the taped evidence it was clear that the shooting had nothing to do with self-defense. It was vigilante "justice" meted out by a man who had already had run-ins with the police and should not have had any access to a weapon, and certainly not the right to carry it on his person concealed.

It's not good enough that now, in the wake of the murder, politicians like Gov. Rick Scott are "open" to revisiting the law. According to Gov. Scott:

"If there’s something wrong with the law that’s in place, I think it’s important we address it," Scott said Tuesday. "If what’s happening is it’s being abused, that’s not right."

No, Mr. Scott. The time to have addressed this law was when it was introduced in the Florida Legislature, handed to it in a pretty bow by ALEC and the NRA. The time to have addressed it was when it was being debated and sped through, to sit on Jeb Bush's desk. The time to have addressed it was when Jeb Bush signed the bill into law. The time to have addressed it was before it became law, when it was obvious to anyone with an ounce of reason that it was a bill to legalize vigilantism. The time to have addressed it was when conservative lawmakers ceded their responsibility of crafting legislation that does the most good for the most people to outside groups like ALEC, whose agenda has nothing to do with helping people and all to do with stoking resentment and maintaining control.

Criminal InJustice^† is a weekly series devoted to taking action against inequities in the U.S. criminal justice system. Nancy A. Heitzeg, Professor of Sociology and Race/Ethnicity, is the Editor of CI. Criminal InJustice is published every Wednesday at 6 pm CST.

Look
by nancy a. heitzeg

Prisons are ubiquitous, yet ironically invisible in our Incarceration Nation. They permeate our literal and figurative landscapes -- both physical and psychic. The prison industrial complex represents a source of jobs and corporate profit, an economic growth sector, the "law and order" back-bone of political careers and the subject of reality shows and news accounts and True Crime stories.

We love to look.

But the prison industrial complex also represents 2.5 million interrupted lives -- those of real human beings with families and stories and histories. And in addition to the pains associated with loss of liberty, the conditions of confinement for many, are increasingly tantamount to torture.

And where there are prisons, there is torture: brutal beatings, grave humiliations, perverse censorship – and even murders – all under a legal system that is as blind as that statue of a woman holding aloft a scale, her eyes covered by a frigid fold of cloth...

And then, we turn away.

Drawing: Kevin “Rashid” Johnson Kevin “Rashid” Johnson, held in solitary confinement in Virginia for the past 18 years, created this visual essay for National Occupy Day in Support of Prisoners and was especially eager for the Bay View to publish it. Since he drew what became the icon of the California hunger strikes (see below) nearly a year ago, retaliation has been brutal, and last week, with no warning or explanation, he was driven across the country to a prison in Oregon. Mail is critical not only to encourage Rashid as he adjusts to his new “home” but to notify the Oregon prison authorities that his many supporters demand he be treated with respect. Write to Kevin Johnson, 70384537, Coffee Creek Correctional Facility, 24499 SW Grahams Ferry Rd, Wilsonville OR 97070"

For the past couple of days, I have been following the conversation about the Ryan budget, its breathtaking Path to Poverty agenda, and of course its active plan to end Medicare, masquerading as "reform." Some have argued that Ryan's new plan on Medicare is markedly improved from the one last year, and it "preserves" a Medicare guarantee by letting seniors choose to stay in the traditional Medicare program. But the fact, hiding in plain sight, is that the only difference between his last year's plan and this year's is that this year's plan kills Medicare by starving and choking it off as opposed to last year's plan simply decapitating it. Paul Ryan hasn't ended his adventure to kill Medicare, he has simply changed his method from the electric chair to lethal injection. He does this by turning the Medicare system over to an wild insurance market deregulated by the repeal of the Affordable Care Act.

Here's Ryan's plan, as described by Paul Ryan:

• Repeal the Affordable Care Act. [And with it, all the patient protections and insurance reforms.]
• Gradually increase Medicare eligibility age to 67 by 2034.
• In a "Medicare exchange," those now 55 and younger will be able to choose the traditional Medicare plan or a private plan with "premium support" when they reach Medicare eligibility.
• Private plans would have to provide at least the actuarial value of traditional Medicare. Growth is limited to GDP (adjusted for inflation and population growth) plus 0.5%.
• The "premium support" would be risk adjusted - meaning that there would be some mechanism would be in place to discourage adverse selection. [But risk adjustment without guaranteed issue and community rating is essentially meaningless.]

I will provide for you and I'll stand by your side
You'll need a good companion now for this part of the ride
Yeah, leave behind your sorrows, let this day be the last
Well, tomorrow there'll be sunshine and all this darkness past
...
Well, this train carries saints and sinners
This train carries losers and winners
This train carries whores and gamblers
This train carries lost souls
...
I said, this train carries broken-hearted
This train, thieves and sweet souls departed
This train carries fools and kings thrown
This train, all aboard

I said, this train, dreams will not be thwarted
This train, faith will be rewarded
This train, hear the steel wheels singing
This train, bells of freedom ringing
                                                                                 —Bruce Springsteen

When I think of the stark choices that face us this November, I will admit that I can't help but be a bit overawed. The forces arrayed against justice and fairness are vast, well-funded, and desperate. To paraphrase Yeats, a new America is slouching towards Bethlehem, and what shape it will take—rough beast or something nobler—is still very much up in the air, to be decided by what we do here, now, in this moment.

Now that President Obama's economic policies are bearing fruit, Republicans are in disarray, latching onto everything that moves, it seems, to try to claw the president's ratings down. But Republicans aren't the only ones. Barely a weekend had gone by after my warning to the Left on account of the demise of the Tea Party when Jonathan Chait of New York Magazine - I guess his new employer's colors are all over him now - dug up a new reason to beat up on President Obama from a nearly-year-old fight over the debt ceiling. Chait follows - actually, he mutilates, mangles and lies about - a Washington Post narrative on the behind-the-scenes of the debt ceiling negotiations between the President and Speaker Boehner to affirm the dumbest theory in history: that President Obama tried to sell out liberalism.

Chait's theory, and his... well, anal-ysis revolves around a  few central, mind-numbingly he-thinks-his-readers-are-dumber-than-Sarah-Palin tenets: taking GOP account of the debt limit fight as unassailable, cherrypicking "facts" he likes from the Washington Post account, even when the account itself disputes it, and the logical fallacy of assuming A to prove A. Or in Chait's case, to prove the thesis that Obama is a sell-out, you begin with the assumption that Obama is a sellout.

From a psychological standpoint the difference between Pragmatic Progressives and the rank and file Far Left is very similar to the difference between the way men and women view home remodeling. Picture a typical room in a typical house in America. Imagine that room still has white walls. A thirty-something heterosexual couple decide they are going to paint the room blue. The woman looks at the room and sees that the furniture needs to be moved out of the room, the pictures taken down, drapes removed, drop cloths spread on the floor, the holes in the walls need to be patched, painter’s tape put on the molding and then paint, primer, brushes and rollers have to be purchased before a drop of color can be applied to the walls. The man looks at the room and in his eyes the room is already blue. This example describes the fundamental difference in outlook between the pragmatic approach and the way the Far Left regard policy change. The pragmatist sees all the steps between idea and implementation. The leftie only sees the desired outcome and ignores the ‘trivial details’ that must be accomplished along the way. In their eyes, the room is already blue. Then, once the room actually is blue, they’ll say, “You missed a spot.”

The other day a friend on Facebook posted the Faces of Change video about how the ACA has helped save the life and future of a former critic of health care reform.

When the Republicans stormed the US House of Representatives in 2010, the Tea Party's popularity was at its peak. Exit polls showed voters in that election favoring the Tea Party by a 41% to 31% margin. It seemed like a win for extremism, for (right wing) ideological purity 'grassroots,' and against compromise in governing. Republicans had stood against everything the President and the Democrats accomplished in the first two years of Barack Obama's term: economic stimulus, health care reform, Wall Street reform, credit card reform, student loan reform, and even equal pay for women. As Republicans in government were doing everything they could to stop these reforms, wingnut activists and media figures filled up the national landscape with racist slurs, gun-touting, and violence.

And their base - as well as voters - rewarded them for it. In 2010, they ushered in in a red tide of over 60 switches in House seats, and a massive wave of blood-red governors and state legislators. Voters, we were told, agreed with the Tea Party that austerity is the only way to go. Voters did agree, to a degree. Especially to the degree that the 2010 electorate was smaller, older and far more conservative than the electorate that elected President Obama and big Democratic majorities in 2008.

This is when the Tea Party's mirror opposite on the Left side of the political spectrum - ideological sticklers of our very own - beat their chests, stomped their feet, gleefully pointed to the defeat of the Democrats and told us, "See, if Obama had only listened to us, compromised on nothing [thus getting nothing done], bully pulpitted more, demanded the nationalization of the banks and pushed the public option harder, this disaster wouldn't have happened." They contended that the President's party lost not because of a still-severely distressed economy or because of loads of Democratic voters not showing up, but because President Obama was too timid, too weak, too compromising.

If he was wrong, his whole Presidency was over. Done.
                                                --Vice President Joe Biden

The above quote by Joe Biden refers to the decision the President took to eliminate Osama bin Laden.  It was one momentous decision among many Barack Obama has taken since winning the Presidency; but it crystallizes the singular character of the man.  The odds were at best 50/50 that bin Laden was in his compound; the US was sending troops into a "friendly" country without clearance; if things went wrong, it would be Jimmy Carter's failed hostage rescue, but even worse.  Yes, his presidency would be all but over, and the Republicans would just have to sit back and coronate Mitt Romney for 2012.

Criminal InJustice^† is a weekly series devoted to taking action against inequities in the U.S. criminal justice system. Nancy A. Heitzeg, Professor of Sociology and Race/Ethnicity, is the Editor of CI. Criminal InJustice is published every Wednesday at 6 pm CST.


Schoolhouse/Jailhouse
by nancy a. heitzeg

Earlier today, i had the honor of being listed amongst presenters at the fifth annual symposium hosted by a local law school; the topic, How Are The Children Part V: From the Classroom to the Courtroom, Exploring a Child's Journey through the Justice System.

The short answer -- Not Good. Not good that is if you are a student of color in an under-resourced, over-policed inner city school.

For more than ten years now, scholars, activists, educators, juvenile justice personnel and parents have been discussing the so-called School to Prison Pipeline All this discussion has not produced meaningful policy changes that result in the lessening of the flow of youth of color from schools into legal systems.

As a recent report from the Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights indicates, the pipeline is alive and gushing an increasing number of youth of color out of school and into jail:

Although black students made up only 18 percent of those enrolled in the schools sampled, they accounted for 35 percent of those suspended once, 46 percent of those suspended more than once and 39 percent of all expulsions..

One in five black boys and more than one in 10 black girls received an out-of-school suspension. Over all, black students were three and a half times as likely to be suspended or expelled than their white peers.

And in districts that reported expulsions under zero-tolerance policies, Hispanic and black students represent 45 percent of the student body, but 56 percent of those expelled under such policies.

When will this be considered a national emergency??

Close your eyes...

Is it that nice Peter Gabriel song? Wait, it's close your eyes, not in your eyes. Hmm, what could it be? Is it a mom comforting a sick baby? No, it's Pennsylvania's whackjob GOP governor Tom Corbett reiterating his support for possibly state-mandated rape, and definitely state-mandated medical procedures on women seeking an abortion. But you see, women don't have to look at the state-mandated ultrasound. They could just... close their eyes.

The first time you saw them, you knew they were peas in a pod. Sarah Palin and Samuel "Joe" Wurzelbacher, aka "Joe the Plumber." He's running for Congress now, and all these "gotcha" questions are being thrown at the poor thing. Gotcha questions like, reading his own words back to him...

In the past two days, I have taken on polling with severely right-skewed samples showing that the president has lost significant ground, with the media driving the narrative that he did so thanks to Americans' anger at rising prices at the pump. Even though Nate Silver, usually an objective statistician, felt compelled to defend his employer by claiming "random variance", the New York Times/CBS News sample was so bad that their polling showed a 41 point drop in public support for contraceptive coverage in employer sponsored health insurance. But then, you would get that if your sample has triple the share of wingnuts as the broader population.

Since then several other polls have been released that confirm my contention that the ABC and NYT polls were based on bogus samples. When some of the other recently released polls are compared to the ABC and NYT polls, this is what it looks like in terms of the president's approval rating.

One can look at this season's GOP primary and despair for the future of the Republic.

We have three men vying for the GOP nomination to the Presidency of the United States.  (I would include Ron Paul, but no one else does, so I'm just falling in with the cool kids.)

One, Willard Mitt Romney, is, not to put too fine a point on it, a man of no convictions.  He is a cypher, willing to do or say anything to attain the shiny object of his dreams, the Presidency.  A scion of wealth, he believes that his class prerogatives demand that he be given the Presidency as a birth-right.

At one point Willard Mitt Romney was what one used to call a "moderate Republican".  I mean, he passed Romneycare while governor of Massachusetts, which, as we all know, was the model for Obamacare.  ("For Pete's sake", as Mr. Romney might say.)  When he ran against Ted Kennedy for Senate in 1994, he bragged that he would be to the left of the esteemed Senator as far as women's rights were concerned.

Last November, the SEIU made a courageous move and endorsed the president early for re-election this November. Today, the AFL-CIO took the same step. President Obama has been a tremendous advocate for working people in the White House and has rigorously protected the rights of workers from the overreach of corporate greed. Richard Trumka, the president of AFL-CIO, noted that in his statement following the endorsement.

Organized workers see the President as a major asset and recognize the stakes in 2012, and are ready to spend $400 million in this year's federal, state and local elections. But that won't be all. The Citizens United ruling from the US Supreme Court - while an astoundingly bad decision - left this saving grace for our democracy: it freed up unions to organize ground campaigns to talk to non-union voters and not just their members, something labor was not able to do prior to Citizens United. And after victories in Wisconsin and Ohio, labor is strong and ready to put nearly half a million footsoldiers to knock on doors.

The same Supreme Court ruling in 2010 that set the stage for these political action committees to accept unlimited donations also allowed unions to send their foot soldiers to visit not just union members at home, but also voters who do not belong to unions — a move expected to increase labor’s political clout significantly in this year’s elections.

Unions first used their expanded ability in a big way in Ohio last November to educate and mobilize both union and nonunion voters in a battle to repeal a law that curbed bargaining rights for Ohio’s teachers, firefighters and other public employees. Spurred by 17,000 union volunteers, labor won in a blowout, with Ohioans voting 62 percent to 38 percent to repeal a law that the Republican-dominated Legislature had enacted seven months earlier.

After Washington Post/ABC News put out their poll drastically over-representing GOP and Republican leaning voters, New York Times and CBS News have come up with brand new blunders of their own on their poll released late afternoon yesterday, showing the president at an approval rating of "all time low" 41%. This poll has the most glaring, dumbfounding proof that its sample is rigged staring at you in the very front page of the poll's crosstabs.

In the polling sample, Republican primary voters are 29.8% of all those polled (301 of 1009 total polled). But luckily, we don't have to look at the Times or CBS News to know what the actual turnout of GOP primary voters are as a percentage of the voting age population is, what with actual primaries going on right now and stuff. The actual percentage of voters turning out in GOP primaries as a percentage of the voting age population? 11.5%. So the pollsters nearly triple the representation of GOP primary voters over what the actual voting numbers are.

Because you don’t live in New York City.  You don’t live in Los Angeles.  You live like most Americans in between those two cities, and you know the values you believe in.

—Rick Santorum

According to Rick Santorum, I'm doubly un-American.  I was born in New York City and lived there until I was 16, at which time my family moved to Los Angeles, where I've lived ever since.  According to Rick Santorum, I have no values.  I don't know the worth of an honest day's work.  I don't know the benefits of charity (in which he engages very sparingly).  I don't know the duties of good citizenship.  My vote shouldn't count, because as both a New Yorker and an Angeleno, I was never exposed to rock-ribbed, middle American values.  I'm an other.  And everyone who lives in my two cities are similarly lacking in American moral fiber. 

Let me tell you a bit about my America.

In the midst of a concentrated conservative attack on voting rights, the DOJ is doing the right thing and going after the modern day poll tax in the form of voter ID laws that require much more than just an ID. Today, the DOJ blocked Texas' voter ID law, citing its disproportionately adverse effect on Latino voters.

In a letter to the Texas state government, Thomas E. Perez, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, said the state had failed to meet its requirement, under the Voting Rights Act, to show that the measure would not disproportionately disenfranchise registered minority voters.

“Even using the data most favorable to the state, Hispanics disproportionately lack either a driver’s license or a personal identification card,” Mr. Perez wrote, “and that disparity is statistically significant.”

Texas has roughly 12.8 million registered voters, of whom about 2.8 million are Hispanic. The state had supplied two sets of data comparing its voter rolls to a list of people who had valid state-issued photo identification cards — one for September and the other in January — showing that Hispanic voters were 46.5 percent to 120 percent more likely to lack such identification.

If you watch any of the morning news shows on TV, or read the news first thing with your morning coffee, you know today's poll narrative in the media: In the midst of rising gas prices, Obama's approval ratings dip. That is the headline from the ABC News/Washington Post poll released today, showing President Obama's approval rating at 46% and disapproval at 50%, a reversal of fortunes from early February. Hell, it even shows Romney beating Obama by a point. The explanation offered by pundits and headlines? Gas prices, which 66% of Americans are very concerned about, the poll finds.

But what's behind the headlines? What's beyond the pundits and the pontifications? Why did President Obama's approval numbers really go down? Or did it even actually go down? What really accounts for the reversal from last month? The real answer: they polled more Republicans this time than last. Ta-da! I decided to compare the party ID numbers attached to this poll vs. the ones attached to the last poll. Look what I found:

In the Roman Forum once stood the Temple of Janus.  Janus is the two-faced god—one facing forwards, one backwards—from which we get the word "January".  This temple was central to the ideology of the Roman Empire.  During times of war, the doors to the temple stood open; during times of peace, they were shut.  From the time of the semi-legendary King Numa, who built the temple, until the reign of Augustus, Rome's first emperor, the doors to the temple were shut only twice.  The Roman state was in a condition of perpetual war.  From the time of Augustus until the adoption of Christianity and the abeyance of the ritual, the gates of Janus were shut only a handful of times more.  Almost-constant war was the natural state of the empire.

I recall this almost-forgotten part of Roman history as our 11-year-long Afghan War claims more innocent victims.  In the class of "victim" I include the accused soldier. The investigation will provide more information, but we have to wonder how many tours of duty he's served, how long he'd been close to the breaking point, and what finally drove him over the edge into psychosis and murder.  Every soldier who returns wounded, mentally as well as physically, is a victim of our own version of perpetual war.

We all know by now about the "radical hug" between Harvard Law Review President Barack Obama and the only contemporary tenured black professor at Harvard, Derrick Bell. The big "bombshell" moment is that two black intellectuals (didn't that just make a chill go down your spine?) embraced. Student Obama introduced a professor who was protesting the lack of ethnic diversity on campus.

The Right's "OMG Obama is a black radical" meme that's being fed here has two parts in this particular incarnation: first, portraying Professor Bell as a black radical, and second, intimating that Barack Obama too is a black radical - guilty by association with Prof. Bell. Neither of these narratives is true, of course. As Prof. Melissa Harris Perry pointed out on her segment on this subject on MSNBC yesterday, President Obama is being convicted in the court of conservative thought of the unforgivable crime of hugging a black man.

The GOP has a new enemy in their fight to stop jobs from being created: the weather! After news that the economy is escaping GOP's death grip with momentum on the side of jobs thanks to the leadership of President Obama, the RNC held a conference call for reporters. They spun the good news every which way possible to make it look like bad news, but this has to take the cake:

In a conference call with reporters hosted by the RNC, economist Douglas Holtz Eakin said the current rate of growth was not strong enough to provide work for previously discouraged job seekers now returning to the labor force more optimistic about finding employment. He also expressed concern that the jobs numbers were being inflated by an unusually warm winter, which allows more construction work and encourages more shopping.

Oh noes! The weather is helping Obama!!!! I say we need to legislate the weather right away. In fact, I say mother nature - conveniently a woman - must submit to a vaginal probe before she can decide to be the wrong temperature.

February was another month in the wilderness for Republicans, and another great month for the economic recovery. February's strong jobs numbers - 233,000 jobs created in the private sector and 227,000 net - continue the strong jobs recovery as a result of President Obama's policies. And finally, after 24 full months of continuous private sector job creation - with 4 million jobs created in that time - economists say that the pace of the job creation represents the economy starting to roar, coming out of the ditch Republicans put us in. It's reaching, they say, escape velocity.

[E]conomists greeted the report with almost unequivocal optimism. “There is no real cloud in the silver lining of this morning’s jobs report,” wrote Steven Blitz, chief economist of ITG investment research.

Patrick O’Keefe, director of economic research at J. H. Cohn, an accounting and consulting firm, said the recent run of gains was approaching “escape velocity,” adding, “The jobs recovery will finally have achieved the momentum that is necessary.”

Criminal InJustice^† is a weekly series devoted to taking action against inequities in the U.S. criminal justice system. Nancy A. Heitzeg, Professor of Sociology and Race/Ethnicity, is the Editor of CI. Criminal InJustice is published every Wednesday at 6 pm CST.

Criminalizing Voters, Criminalizing Us
by nancy a heitzeg

In the year 2012, Criminal InJustice is focused on the Vote of Our Lives -- efforts to get it out, get it counted, and certainly efforts to resist both the overt and covert attempts to suppress voter turnout.

A consistent theme throughout all these CI pieces is the role of criminalizing narratives in appealing to public fears through racialized imagery. Most of these narratives are directed towards Criminalizing President Obama. But these themes, of course. are used to criminalize his supporters as well, and contribute to on-going efforts to suppress voters on the left.

Voter ID Legislation

Late last month, all these themes collided in a not-so-perfect storm in Minnesota. The Minnesota Majority -- drawing on sadly familiar Dead Breitbart lies about ACORN -- exhibited this banner on a companion site devoted to pushing a yes vote on a Minnesota Voter ID Ballot measure. (Promoted by the Republican - dominated MN legislature, this ballot measure is an attempt to force Voter ID requirements after Governor Mark Dayton vetoed similar legislation last term. It would make Minnesota the eighth state to pass Voter ID legislation since the 2010 midterms. Currently, 20 states have some sort of Voter Id Requirement.)

Just a little fun for you guys from a friend of mine on Facebook (click to enlarge):

Obama for America, President Obama's reelection campaign, released a trailer this morning for a new 17-minute documentary on the president's first term. The film, "The Road We’ve Traveled", is directed by Davis Guggenheim, the creator of the multi-award-winning film "An Inconvenient Truth", and narrated by Tom Hanks.
Here's the trailer:

Rush Limbaugh's loss of 40 or so advertisers has come at a bad time for his employer Clear Channel. Clear Channel puts mostly far right wing radio hosts on the dial, because that's what the market wants, they say. For example, that must be why it's axing progressive talk radio in San Francisco -because San Francisco audiences really want more Glenn Beck. Even though Clear Channel really knows what the market wants, since Bain Capital and T.H. Lee Capital took the company over, it has run into serious debt problems. 

Bain and Thomas H. Lee paid $17.9 billion to buy media-and-entertainment company Clear Channel Communications just before the economy headed south and radio advertising deteriorated. Today, Clear Channel's actively traded debt is rated at the lower end of the "junk"-bond universe, even though revenue and operating income rose last year. The company has more than $12 billion in debt due in 2016 and default is a "real possibility," said Melissa Link, an analyst at Fitch Ratings, in an interview. Clear Channel declined to comment on Ms. Link's analysis. WSJ

Whoops! However, Clear Channel Communications owns controlling interest in some subsidiaries with money. One of these is Clear Channel Outdoors which is the billboard renting company. So Clear Channel Outdoors is borrowing $2.2 billion and using the money to pay a dividend.  About 40% of that dividend goes to Clear Channel Communications and about 60% goes directly to - T.H. Lee and Bain! But wait, that's not all.

This is admittedly a story that kind of fell through the cracks while we were focusing on the GOP's insistence on a government small enough to insert itself into a woman's vagina. But it's an important story if you do any banking. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is going after bank overdraft fees. Yes, President Obama's credit card reform already limited banks to charging overdraft fees to those who opt-in (for others, transactions would be denied), but the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau - the first federal agency in history with a sole mission to protect consumers - is now probing the banks' actual practices on charging and advertising overdraft fees and how it affects consumers who do sign up for overdraft protection in exchange for a fee.

Along with outlines of the inquiry into fees, the CFPB released a sample "penalty fee box" that they may institute for banks to tell customers just how much they are paying in overdraft fees and how they could lower or eliminate those payments.

So what are the specific areas under scrutiny by the bureau? Bank tricks to reorder your transactions so they can charge you the most overdraft fees possible, confusing the hell out of you with lengthy and legalese fine print, misleading marketing material, and the victimization of low-income and young consumers.

From Andrew Sullivan's blog:

Israeli officials say they won't warn the U.S. if they decide to launch a pre-emptive strike against Iranian nuclear facilities, according to one U.S. intelligence official familiar with the discussions. The pronouncement, delivered in a series of private, top-level conversations, sets a tense tone ahead of meetings in the coming days at the White House and Capitol Hill.

What it amounts to is a formal declaration that, if the US attempts at any point to differ seriously with Israel's far right, the alliance is over. That's after the most serious sanctions ever imposed on Iran, a covert war, and greater isolation for the Tehran regime both at home and abroad than at any point since 1979.

And from Russell Burgos' blog:

Senator Joseph Lieberman and 31 other United States Senators have introduced a resolution expressing the "sense of the Senate" that containment is no longer a viable strategy for the U.S.-Iran strategic interaction. In the press release on Lieberman's website, we are told that "by rejecting any policy that would rely on containment of a nuclear-weapons capable Iran, this bipartisan resolution sends a clear message to Iran's rulers that the United States will stop them from acquiring nuclear weapons capability."

No, actually, it doesn't. Nor is it intended to.

What this resolution is intended to do is send a "clear message" to the White House.

That message states that the Senate will block any attempt to use diplomatic ends to resolve the on-going confrontation between the United States and Israel -- something the White House clearly recognizes, since the administration has already announced it will resist this transparent effort to push the United States to accepting, as the default foreign policy, the preferences of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Ohio update 9:32 pm Pacific: NBC News just called Ohio for Romney. The numbers are essentially a draw. But this definitely keeps the race from being wrapped up for Romney; good news for Democrats.

Ohio update 8:32 pm Pacific - possible recount?: With 91% of precincts reporting, Romney leads 37.6% to 37.2% for Santorum. This is very close to the automatic recount threshold in Ohio.

Well, well. It sure is shaping up to be a close fight between Santorum and Romney in Ohio right now, isn't it? At the time of this writing, 8:17 pm Pacific, Romney is ahead by about 4000 votes. I am hoping against hope that Santorum pulls this out. Nothing will give political comics more fodder and the Republicans a longer primary.

Thus far here are the wins tonight:

• Romney: OH, MA, ID, VT and VA (where only he and Ron Paul were on the ballot)
• Santorum: OK, TN, ND
• Gingrich: GA
• Ongoing: AK

Attorney General Eric Holder gave a speech at Northwestern University yesterday on national security, the rule of law, and the Obama Administration's drive for justice in a world with a changed landscape of threats (transcript, video). He spoke with astounding clarity on the law and national security. He reminded all of us why this administration is the only group of adults in Washington, DC. He took on the cowards on the political Right who are now driving at a dangerous policy goal of taking away the civilian court system as an option to prosecute terrorism suspects. But he also annihilated a couple of falsehoods nurtured carefully Ron Paul-"Left" (yes, I'm looking at you, Glenn Greenwald): that targeting terrorist leaders abroad is "assassination," and that an American passport gives one free rein to attack the United States. With one cleansing moment of clarity, AG Holder took apart the fiction created by Glenn Greenwald and the like:

Furthermore, it is entirely lawful – under both United States law and applicable law of war principles – to target specific senior operational leaders of al Qaeda and associated forces.   This is not a novel concept.   In fact, during World War II, the United States tracked the plane flying Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto – the commander of Japanese forces in the attack on Pearl Harbor and the Battle of Midway – and shot it down specifically because he was on board.   As I explained to the Senate Judiciary Committee following the operation that killed Osama bin Laden, the same rules apply today.

Some have called such operations “assassinations.”   They are not, and the use of that loaded term is misplaced.   Assassinations are unlawful killings.   Here, for the reasons I have given, the U.S. government’s use of lethal force in self defense against a leader of al Qaeda or an associated force who presents an imminent threat of violent attack would not be unlawful — and therefore would not violate the Executive Order banning assassination or criminal statutes.

When the freedom-loving people march; when the farmers have an opportunity to buy land at reasonable prices and to sell the produce of their land through their own organizations, when workers have the opportunity to form unions and bargain through them collectively, and when the children of all the people have an opportunity to attend schools which teach them truths of the real world in which they live — when these opportunities are open to everyone, then the world moves straight ahead.

—Henry A. Wallace, Century of the Common Man

The past few days have seen a small uprising.  An odious public figure who has used his megaphone to defame and denigrate anyone who disagrees with him has been taken to task.  He's been knocked back on his heels, bewildered, not knowing how what has worked for him over and over has now been overturned.  Sponsors are abandoning him, one after another, in a constant drip of advertiser water torture.  His vitriol has finally led to a possibly terminal comeuppance, a slashing of the outsized power he holds over an entire political faction in this country.  By the end of all this, Rush Limbaugh may wish that he had never uttered the word "slut", nor demanded sex tapes from sexually active women as the price for "government funded" contraception.

And who has brought such a torrent down on Mr. Limbaugh's head?  No one special, on the face of it.  Sandra Fluke is a law student at Georgetown University.  She's been heavily involved in issues of women's health and rights; that's no surprise; she's a law student, and law students by nature are involved in various causes, on the Left and the Right.  In part, such involvement informs why they choose to pursue a career in law, in order to have more of an effect on the causes they hold dear.

I don’t even remember why, in 2010, I decided to learn about the person running against Dave Reichert in the WA-08; I didn’t live anywhere near the 8th Congressional District. Whatever it was that compelled me to visit the Suzan DelBene for Congress website, I’m glad I did. At the time her website had been up longer and there were videos about Suzan and her family and experience. My first and enduring response was that I wished I lived near the 8th CD so I could volunteer for her campaign. I was that impressed. I still am.

The District

Well as the Redistricting Gods would have it, Medina, WA, where Suzan lives, has now become part of the new WA-01 Congressional District. It’s a huge district geographically, and bears only a surface resemblance to the current 8th. It’s the large blue-shaded district in this map that extends up to the Canadian border. I have to hand it to the redistricting commission. They got all ten districts within 10 people of having the exact same population. To accomplish this in the 1st CD, they created a true swing district, which is one of the most evenly divided districts in the country. Do I live in this district? No, but I can literally see it from my house. I’m spittin’ distance from the boundary. That means I get to volunteer for Suzan DelBene’s campaign!

Rush Limbaugh thinks - and Republicans pray - that a statement of non-apology apology posted on his website for calling law student and women's rights advocate Sandra Fluke a 'slut' will make things blow over. Rush "apologized" for his "word choice" in calling Ms. Fluke a 'slut.' Well, Rush, your 'word choice' is the least of the problems. The real issue? Let's start with the tendency of conservative white men to tell women what kind of health care they can receive under their health insurance plan. Let's continue with the insistence of conservative religious zealots to usurp the religious and conscientious freedom of women and supplant it with the moral code of her employer. Let's finally consider the blatant attack on the separation of Church and State and the conservative battle to replace state with Church.

Apologize for those attitudes. Apologize for advocating against women's rights; apologize for prioritizing the dictates of a Church over the religious and conscientious freedom of individual American women. Apologize for the Right's war on women. Apologize for rooting for America to fail. Maybe then your apologies will start to mean something.

Limbaugh, of course, didn't do any of that. In fact, even in his statement of apology, he fanned the flames of the Right's war on women. He issued his "apology," while perpetuating one all-important myth that his attack was based on - that somehow the regulation requiring contraception to be covered without a copay or a deductible is the same as taxpayers paying for "sexual recreational activities" of women. Way to call Ms. Fluke a 'slut' within the very statement of apology for calling her a 'slut.'

Romney, Santorum and Obama all vow to fight for U.S. manufacturing. It's not just a lost cause; it's the wrong one [..]

Even if we didn’t have to compete with lower-wage workers overseas, we’d still have fewer factory jobs because the old assembly line has been replaced by numerically-controlled machine tools and robotics. Manufacturing is going high-tech.[...]

The fundamental problem isn’t the decline of American manufacturing, and reviving manufacturing won’t solve it. The problem is the declining power of American workers to share in the gains of the American economy. Robert Reich in Salon Feb 2012

The three foundations of "progressive" liberalism are exhibited here: conservative economics,  eagerness to help discredit the Democratic President, and empty populist rhetoric. The whole complex legal system of "free trade" from GATT to NAFTA, the tax favors for businesses that move production outside the USA, the high dollar policy that favors finance and the special tax favors to finance and oil companies, the laws that limit labor union activity (like boycotts) and regulations that force companies and cities to go through Wall Street for their financing are taboo topics in conservative economics. According to conservative economists, whether they call themselves Keynesians or not, the basic structure and evolution of the economy is because of  "laws" of economics (and technology) not because, for example, people like Robert Reich helped change the rules to benefit companies that import manufactured products. And the populism is just slogans not connected to any concrete plan to reverse the declining power of American worker - in fact it is used to discredit people who are helping improve the bargaining position of American workers.  You won't learn about President Obama's National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) assistance for the machinists union at Boeing from Reich or about how Labor Secretary Hilda Solis has been enforcing labor rights and occupational safety laws ( in marked contrast to the Department of Labor under  Robert Reich). What you will get is disingenuous stuff like this:

the president has not promised that if reelected he’d push for the Employee Free Choice Act, which would make it easier for workers to organize a union. He had supported it in the 2008 election but never moved the legislation once elected.

"Never moved" is a nice euphemism for "Congress didn't support it". And speaking of "didn't support", let's not forget Reich's attacks on President Obama during the rescue of the auto industry and Americas largest industrial union.

I think sexual ecstasy is overrated.

                              —Monty Python

Right wing men, I would venture, are like most men. They like sex. They like having it on a regular basis. Some will go to ridiculous lengths to obtain sex, licit or illicit. The sex drive is hardwired into our DNA, and political ideology does nothing to tamp it down.

Jimmy Swaggart railed against the perils of fornication.  He then went and paid for prostitutes.  (But hey, at least he wasn't gay.)

Ted Haggard railed against homosexuality.  He then went and paid for rent boys.  (Which was eleventy million times worse than what Jimmy Swaggart did.)

And Rush Limbaugh?  Well, when you're caught in a Third World country known for sex tourism with a bag-full of Viagra, I don't think one has to stretch one's imagination much to create a plausible story for the reason behind Limbaugh's visit.

Criminal InJustice^† is a weekly series devoted to taking action against inequities in the U.S. criminal justice system. Nancy A. Heitzeg, Professor of Sociology and Race/Ethnicity, is the Editor of CI. Criminal InJustice is published every Wednesday at 6 pm CST.

Another Shame of the Nation ~ Juvenile Life Without Parole
by nancy a heitzeg

On March 20, 2012, The Supreme Court of the United States will hear Oral Arguments in the cases of Miller v. Alabama and Jackson v. Hobbs. Both cases, argued on Eighth Amendment grounds by Equal Justice Initiative, involve 14 year old boys - sentenced to die in prison for their involvement in homicides. Miller had a documented history of abuse, and Jackson, an accessory but not the gunman, was charged in a felony murder case, an Arkansas store robbery gone wrong.



But, as always, much more than the fate of these two rests on this case. At stake is the fate of more than 2500 persons serving Life without Parole for crimes committed while under the age of 18, some, all future redemption denied, when they were as young as 11 years old. 73 of these 2500 were under the age of 14 at the time of the commitment offense.

One might also argue that our status as a "civilized" nation rests, at least in part, on the Court's judgment here. The U.S. is the only country in the world that practices JLWOP, and remains, with Somalia, one of two nations in the world which has refused to ratify the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, a document which expressly forbids this very practice.

And, as in the 5-4 Roper v. Simmons (2005) and Sullivan v. Florida/Graham v. Florida (2010) which finally finally finally abolished the death penalty and Juvenile Life Without Parole (JLWOP) for non-homicide offenses respectively, the fate of these youth and the moral compass of the nation will rest on the whims of one Justice Anthony Kennedy.

Too much responsibility for Just One Man....

What the hell are these Democrats doing?

Republicans are poised to advance repeal Wednesday of a critical provision in the health care reform law designed to preserve traditional Medicare — and they’ve enlisted a number of key House Democrats for the cause. [...]

At issue is the Independent Payment Advisory Board, set up by the Affordable Care Act. The IPAB would comprise of 15 experts who are presidential appointees (subject to Senate confirmation). The mandate on the IPAB is that they must contain cost without cutting benefits. So naturally, Republicans want to repeal it. The surprise is the Democrats serving up willing assistance in this right wing effort.

The House GOP’s IPAB repeal bill, set to clear the Energy & Commerce health committee today, has 17 Democratic signatories as of this writing, including some key players.

The Democratic cosponsors are Reps. Allyson Schwartz (D-PA), Barney Frank (MA), Joe Baca (CA), John Barrow (GA), Shelley Berkley (NV), Timothy Bishop (NY), Michael Capuano (MA), Kathy Castor (FL), Joe Courtney (CT), Chaka Fattah (PA), Eddie Johnson (TX), Larry Kissell (NC), Jim Matheson (UT), Bill Pascrell (NJ), Loretta Sanchez (CA), Linda Sanchez (CA) and Del. Donna Christensen (VI).

Pascrell, a member of the influential Ways & Means Committee, signed on Monday. Rep. Frank Pallone (NJ), the top Dem on the E&C health subcommittee, has not cosponsored the bill but says he’ll vote for it, according to CQ HealthBeat. Schwartz, who runs recruitment at the DCCC, is an outspoken IPAB opponent.