Breaking news from throughout our network. Some highlights from the past two weeks:
- TWI’s Dave Weigel traveled to upstate New York to cover the controversial House race in NY-23. As one of the few national reporters providing up-to-the-minute reports, Weigel was interviewed on the Rachel Maddow Show and NPR’s “Talk of the Nation.” His analysis of the failure of the right wing anti-tax movement on Election Day is important reading.
- A string of reports on important events affecting the LGBT community in Michigan: an anti-discrimination ordinance in Kalamazoo passed, the election of Detroit’s first openly gay city council president, and the Michigan House Speaker’s announcement that she’s introducing legislation to legalize same-sex marriage in state.
- And a victory for freedom from religion: Gwyneth Doland reported that Albuquerque City Councilor Don Harris publicly apologized for attempting to use his opponent’s religion against him in a piece of campaign mail, saying he had “learned a great deal,” from the experience. It was Doland who had first reported on Harris’ mailer in which he labeled opponent Don Barbour as an atheist and attempted to paint him as too radical for office. Doland’s coverage of the tactic was picked up by several national Atheist blogs, whose readers sent a flurry of e-mails to Harris. “I will not bring up Atheism in any future endeavor, as I have learned a great deal from this experience,” Harris said. “I was reminded that the decisions that one makes when running for office and being in office are not simple ones, and they can have unexpected consequences.”
Much more below.
Best,
David
Congressional reporter Mike Lillis reframed the debate over financial safeguards up for debate in the House. Early reports from mainstream papers such as The Washington Post and The New York Times painted Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s proposal as a favor to taxpayers. Lillis, meanwhile, spoke to someone no other outlet did: Rep. Brad Sherman. The liberal California Democrat was an early critic of the lack of oversight in executive pay packages of TARP recipients. Sherman, an accountant, told Lillis that the new safeguards were an incredible expansion of executive power and amounted to “TARP on steroids.” The Huffington Post linked to Lillis’ story twice in a top-billed package on its politics page. The next day, Politico, which had run a story similar to the rest of the mainstream media, ran a new take on the safeguards with a headline quoting Sherman.
Lillis also continued to hammer a scandalously undercovered story: GOP stalling of a bill that would extend unemployment insurance benefits by 13 weeks. As Lillis reported in numerous posts, Senate Republicans sought to lard up the bill with amendments unrelated to unemployment benefits — on ACORN, illegal immigration and TARP — while at least 125,000 Americans lost their benefits since the gridlock began. As a testament to the importance of Lillis’ reporting, TWI’s traffic from Google News spiked each time he published an article on unemployment benefits, presumably due to the volume of people searching the Internet for information about when the bill might pass.
David Weigel traveled to upstate New York to report on the dramatic final days of the special election in New York’s 23rd Congressional District, where a Tea Party activist-backed conservative became the favorite after forcing a moderate Republican to withdraw. On Election Day, Weigel reported from Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman’s campaign headquarters, providing up-to-the-minute accounts as the returns came in. As one of very few national reporters on the ground in NY-23, the media sought out Weigel. He was interviewed by phone on election night by MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow and was a guest on NPR’s “Talk of the Nation” later in the week. Politico cited Weigel’s reporting via Twitter in an article about how the social media platform had supplanted cable news as a source for election night news.
Mike Lillis dove deep into an important story that largely flew under the media radar this week: a Democratic measure in the House health care reform bill that would eliminate the Children’s Health Insurance Plan in 2013, shifting kids to private plans. While the debate raged over whether the bill would allow federal funds to finance abortions, the CHIP provision went untouched and passed in the final bill. As Lillis reported, health advocates warn that the measure will result in many children losing their health insurance.
Katie Redding got Congressman Doug Lamborn on the record as to why he’s the only member of Colorado’s U.S. congressional delegation who doesn’t support legislation to end gender discrimination in the health care insurance marketplace. Currently, 185,000 Colorado women seeking insurance pay 59 percent more than men and are often denied maternity coverage. Although women’s advocates say that gender bias is a critical flaw in the current system, Republican Lamborn told Redding that “the free market, not the federal government, should dictate how private insurance companies determine their policies.”
Joe Boven drove top traffic with his report on Initiative 25, a state ballot measure that if passed would move the initial marker for the beginning of life from “fertilization” to “the beginning of the biological development of a human being.” As Boven reported, the new amendment would freeze the scientific research community in Colorado. Scientists said the measure would essentially halt research into fertility and congenital diseases, while activists pointed out that it would put women at risk. Boven’s story was picked up by The Huffington Post and Jezebel, among many other sites, netting nearly 7,000 readers.
In the wake of the horrific shooting spree at Fort Hood in Texas, right-wing talk radio almost immediately stirred anti-Muslim sentiment. As Joseph Boven reported, KHOW host Peter Boyles proclaimed Islam is at war with America and said that the suspect in the Fort Hood shooting, a U.S. Army officer, had benefited from “political correctness” in his military career and should have been the subject of suspicion for writing that he was of Palestinian descent at his mosque. Abed Ayoub, legal adviser to the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, told Boven that Hasan listed his ethnicity with his mosque the same way that millions of practicing Muslims do in this country. “I list my background as Syrian or Lebanese. It’s like Christians in America attending an Irish Catholic church [because of their Irish heritage],” he said.
Katie Redding tracked internal discontent within the Douglas County Republican Party following the internecine warfare that broke out in advance of the November 3 school board elections. A conservative slate of candidates won office and plan to vote on a GOP-backed charter school plan, but the process has burned other Republicans who did not agree with robocalls and e-mail campaigns tying some GOP candidates to ACORN, President Obama, and organized labor. One GOP district captain told Redding that he would no longer work with the present leadership of the county partly “due to their gross disrespect for all legitimate Republican candidates for office.” Furthermore, a GOP candidate said she’s leaving the party, telling Redding, “I don’t want to be associated with the foul type of behavior that the Douglas County Republicans have displayed.”
Soon after U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) raised eyebrows when he suggested that he would join a Republican-led filibuster of health care reform legislation, Lynda Waddington reported that U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa, a Democrat who chairs the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, said that Lieberman may want to reconsider that idea. In a conference call with reporters, Harkin made subtle reference that Lieberman could be ousted from his chairmanship of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee if he steps out of line. Waddington’s coverage was picked up by Talking Points Memo and ABC’s The Note, among other publications.
Waddington also continued to look at how lackluster health care access is affecting Iowans. In a conference call with reporters, U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and U.S. Sen. Kay Hagan of North Carolina stressed that larger national health care reform is vital for the health of rural areas, where self-employed farmers often have few options when trying to secure private insurance in the open market. Waddington additionally explored how the lack of health care access can have major local economic impacts in Iowa. When health care providers leave a rural area — either by choice or by retirement — the surrounding community loses a significant portion of its tax base, experts told Waddington.
Jason Hancock interviewed Des Moines anti-abortion activist Dave Leach about his disagreement with eBay after the online auction service pulled questionable anti-abortion materials meant to raise money for the defense of Scott Roeder, the man accused of killing Kansas doctor George Tiller. Leach — whose publication fostered Roeder and professes “justifiable homicide” in the killing of abortion doctors —argued with eBay’s assertion that his postings “glorified violence.” He added that he was undeterred by the negative publicity, noting “the ‘bad press’ Jesus got from the Pharisees.”
In the run-up to the U.S. House vote on health care reform, Hancock reported that Rep. Steve King not only helped organize the anti-reform protests at the Capitol but also continued to spread mistruths about how the bill would encourage suicide. Hancock noted that in a video of the Republican congressman walking away from a protest on Saturday, King cherry-picked a section of the bill for the cameras, citing language in the bill that “encourage(s) the promotion of suicide or assisted suicide.” What King failed to include was the preceding sentence, which reads: “Nothing in this section shall …” before listing several provisions that are prohibited, including the “promotion of suicide.” Hancock also noted that King has not ruled out a 2012 presidential bid, saying recently that he wants “to refurbish the pillars of American exceptionalism.”
A week before the November 3 elections, David Alire Garcia pointed out that the forces fighting an Kalamazoo anti-discrimination ordinance on the ballot had been using myths about transgender individuals to generate fear in advance of the vote — saying that the ordinance would open the door to “cross dressing men” attacking women in bathrooms — a tactic that’s been used in similar fights elsewhere. Garcia spoke to a number of transgender individuals who said such misinformation doesn’t define who they are. “If you know me, you can’t demonize me,” one person said.
One Kalamazoo and other gay rights activists got their message across. Voters in Kalamazoo approved the anti-discrimination ordinance that had been targeted by religious conservatives because of employment and housing protections given to the LGBT community. David Alire Garcia reported. At the same time, Detroiters voted for an openly gay African-American man, former Fox 2 journalist Charles Pugh, to be city council president. Todd A. Heywood reported that following those two votes State House Speaker Pro Tem Pam Byrnes introduced legislation aimed at overturning the 2004 state constitutional amendment barring same-sex marriage. In June, Byrnes announced she was planning such legislation and said she was optimistic that the environment in the state was becoming friendlier to such an initiative.
While urban agriculture has been previously proven to be a good way to help urban areas like Detroit get fresh produce to residents in need of more health food options, issues of race may be preventing the movement from realizing its true potential. As Minehaha Forman reported, some African-American residents are wary of embracing newcomers, often white, to the city to set up farming collectives inside the city limits. As a result, the urban agricultural community largely segregates itself, although some organizations are in place to reach out to black communities.
Eartha Jane Melzer reported that the state gives some of its biggest polluters generous tax breaks to ease the burden of compliance. Cash-strapped Michigan has lost millions in the process. Since 1999, state tax breaks have subsidized $211 million in pollution control equipment at a nuclear power plant near Benton Harbor and have steered $21 million in pollution control technology to an Alpena cement company that was named the state’s second-worst mercury polluter in 2007.
Following up on an exclusive about a racist and anti-gay campaign flier circulating in Maplewood, Andy Birkey solicited responses to the incident from mayoral candidate Ken Smart and council candidates Dave Hafner and DelRay Rokke, whose campaign materials were sometimes found attached to the fliers. The three candidates denied any involvement, but only Smart said he didn’t condone the action. Rokke, meanwhile, told his supporters not to distribute unauthorized fliers on his behalf, but he went on to speculate that the flier’s target, Jim Llanas, only stood to benefit from the hate speech. “I guess [Llanas] figures if he can get the vast majority of members of those groups [gays and Hispanics] in a municipal election which will have only about 30 percent of the voters turn out, he has a good chance to win,” he said.
On the media beat, Paul Schmelzer noticed that shortly after the Star Tribune reported that the faith-based Riverview Community Bank had been shut down by the state, the paper’s online version of the story deleted a reference to Mary Kiffmeyer, the former secretary of state and current state representative who has close ties to the bank. Schmelzer asked Strib business reporter Chris Serres to explain the deletion, and Serres said he trimmed out the 18 words referring to Kiffmeyer because the story had to be cut to match the shortened print version — and few people knew about Kiffmeyer’s association with the bank.
The Iowa Independent’s Jason Hancock teamed up with The Minnesota Independent’s Chris Steller to cover the Des Moines appearance last weekend of Gov. Tim Pawlenty. After endorsing the Conservative Party candidate over the Republican in New York’s 23rd Congressional District and then calling Sen. Olympia Snowe “more liberal than most Republicans would like,” Pawlenty struck the unlikely note of party unity, Hancock reported. “We’re going to have our primaries and caucuses … and it should be hard fought,” he said. “But when those decisions are made, as a team we have to come around and support each other.”
The Minnesota team also blanketed the area during the election, in which incumbents held fast in Minneapolis, and Maplewood brought back a previous mayor and elected two new council members, including James Llanas, who had been the target of fliers that attempted to raise questions about his sexuality and ethnicity.
Gwyneth Doland reported that Albuquerque City Councilor Don Harris publicly apologized for attempting to use his opponent’s religion against him in a piece of campaign mail, saying he had “learned a great deal,” from the experience. It was Doland who had first reported on Harris’ mailer in which he labeled opponent Don Barbour as an Atheist and attempted to paint him as too radical for office. Doland’s coverage of the tactic was picked up by several national Atheist blogs, whose readers sent a flurry of e-mails to Harris. “I will not bring up Atheism in any future endeavor, as I have learned a great deal from this experience,” Harris said. “I was reminded that the decisions that one makes when running for office and being in office are not simple ones, and they can have unexpected consequences.”
Heath Haussamen scored key developments in the growing scandal surrounding a pro-business Las Cruces PAC that raised more than $20,000 for the city council election but now says it wants to spend the money on state and other races. The PAC’s treasurer, who is also executive director of the Building Industry Association of Southern New Mexico, had acknowledged this change of tactics to the press, but Haussamen got him to be candid about its strategy. ”Did we use the city election as a gathering ground? Oh hell yes… We used it as a rallying point,” he said. “You do whatever you have to do to raise funds… This is a call for the business community to get up.”
Election season wrapped up with a vote in Las Cruces in which progressives handed a defeat to incumbents and swept all three city council races. Heath Haussamen reported on the significance of the shift, noting that progressive-backed policymakers now hold the mayor’s office and five of six seats on the council. NMI was the first outlet in the state to declare the winners, having obtained polling numbers directly from the precincts. NMI additionally live blogged the night’s developments, where Doña Ana County Commissioner Scott Krahling took part and observed that while the progressive movement is clearly well organized, the reason for its success is its focus on sustainable growth policies.
Heath Haussamen fact-checked a report published by the libertarian New Mexico Watchdog, which claimed “serious questions” surrounded Lt. Gov. Diane Denish’s spending of federal funds in 2003, charging she spent it on items such as chauffeurs, Christmas cards, and undefined polling. Haussamen obtained Denish’s records and found that she spent much of the money on a poll related to children’s issues — one of the primary focuses of her work as lieutenant governor — as well as hiring public relations contractors and a 2004 Holiday Open House for members of the public, including homeless children from La Comunidad De Los Ninos in Santa Fe. When Republican gubernatorial candidate Allen Weh held a news conference about Watchdog’s article, Haussamen asked Weh if he’d read the 2003 act authorizing the funds. He had not. When further asked what specific questions Denish’s spending raised, Weh’s spokesman could not provide an answer.
GOOD NEWS:
Commissioner Jones seeks support for state’s Race to the Top application
Dwight Jones, Colorado’s Commissioner of Education, is on a 14-city race to seek support from local school districts for the state’s Race to the Top application. The $4.3 billion competition, which has been billed as U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s greatest tool for reform, will grant stimulus funds to states. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has also announced that it will open up its offer of financial help with the Race to the Top application to all states. That’s good news for Colorado, which will likely apply for the funds.
Granholm touts ‘blockbuster’ partnership with Kellogg Foundation
Gov. Jennifer Granholm announced that “millions of dollars going to hundreds of fellowships” would soon bolster the ranks of Michigan’s public school math and science teachers courtesy of a $16.7 million grant from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.