The Georgia Board of Pardons and Parole has denied clemency for death-row inmate Troy Davis.
Davis was convicted of the 1989 killing of Savannah, Georgia, police officer Mark MacPhail.
Davis is scheduled to be executed by lethal injection at 7 p.m. Wednesday at a state prison in Jackson, Georgia.
"Monday September 19, 2011, the State Board of Pardons and Paroles met to consider a clemency request from attorneys representing condemned inmate Troy Anthony Davis. After considering the request, the Board has voted to deny clemency," the board said in a statement Tuesday morning.
The five-member parole board votes in a secret ballot.
Davis has gained international support for his long-standing claim that he did not kill MacPhail. International figures including Pope Benedict XVI, Desmond Tutu, and former President Jimmy Carter, entertainers such as Susan Sarandon, Harry Belafonte, and the Indigo Girls, and others have joined with Amnesty International, the NAACP and other groups in supporting Davis' efforts to be exonerated.
He has been scheduled to die three times before, most recently in October 2008, when the U.S. Supreme Court granted a stay two hours before he was to be executed.
Since Davis' conviction in 1991, seven of the nine witnesses against him have recanted or contradicted their testimony. There also have been questions about the physical evidence - and, according to some, the lack thereof - linking Davis to the killing.
Amnesty International reacted angrily to the clemency denial on Tuesday.
"It is unconscionable that the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles has denied relief to Troy Davis. Allowing a man to be sent to death under an enormous cloud of doubt about his guilt is an outrageous affront to justice," Amnesty International said in a statement Tuesday.
"Should Troy Davis be executed, Georgia may well have executed an innocent man and in so doing discredited the justice system," the statement said.
But the victim's mother, Anne MacPhail, said she's satisfied that Davis will be executed.
"Well, justice is done, that's the way we look at it. That's what we wanted," the mother told CNN. "I am very convinced that he is guilty."
She said she would not attend Davis' execution but family members would be there.
Anne MacPhail said she has not forgiven the convicted of killing her son.
"Not yet, maybe sometime," she said.
The NAACP and Georgians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty had joined Amnesty International in organizing support for Davis, setting up about 300 rallies, vigils and events worldwide in the past week or so. In addition, they said that more than 1 million people have signed a petition in support of Davis' bid to be exonerated.
In a 2008 statement, then-Chatham County District Attorney Spencer Lawton described how Davis was at a pool party in Savannah when he shot another man, Michael Cooper, wounding him in the face. Davis was then driven to a nearby convenience store, where he pistol-whipped a homeless man, Larry Young, who'd just bought a beer.
Soon thereafter, prosecutors said, MacPhail - who was working in uniform, off-duty, at a nearby bus station and restaurant - arrived. It was then, the jury determined, that Davis shot the officer three times, including once in the face as he stood over him.
Davis' lawyers, in a federal court filing, insisted that there is "no physical evidence linking" Davis to MacPhail's murder. They point, too, to "the unremarkable conclusion" of a ballistics expert who testified that he could not find definitively that the bullets that wounded Cooper and killed MacPhail were the same.
Georgia's attorney general, in an online statement, claimed that the expert said the bullets came from the same gun type and noted that casings at the pool party shooting matched - thus came from the same firearm as - those found at MacPhail's murder scene.
Two decades ago, a jury convicted Davis on two counts of aggravated assault and one each of possessing a firearm during a crime, obstructing a law enforcement officer and murder. The latter charge led, soon thereafter, to his death sentence.
While reviewing Davis' claims of innocence last year, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Georgia found that Davis "vastly overstates the value of his evidence of innocence."
"Some of the evidence is not credible and would be disregarded by a reasonable juror," Judge William T. Moore wrote in a 172-page opinion. "Other evidence that Mr. Davis brought forward is too general to provide anything more than smoke and mirrors."
The parole board denied had denied Davis clemency once before. The board has never changed its mind on any case in the past 33 years.
Keep Manu Raju’s Politico article of Democrats Whining About Obama's Jobs Act in mind the next time you hear that a bit more rhetorical magic would have produced wondrously different legislative results in the 111th Congress:
“Terrible,” Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.) told POLITICO when asked about the president’s ideas for how to pay for the $450 billion price tag. “We shouldn’t increase taxes on ordinary income. … There are other ways to get there.”
“That offset is not going to fly, and he should know that,” said Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu from the energy-producing Louisiana, referring to Obama’s elimination of oil and gas subsidies. “Maybe it’s just for his election, which I hope isn’t the case.”
“I think the best jobs bill that can be passed is a comprehensive long-term deficit-reduction plan,” said Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.), discussing proposals to slash the debt by $4 trillion by overhauling entitlement programs and raising revenue through tax reforms. “That’s better than everything else the president is talking about — combined.”
A few things to note about this, which speak to the depth of the structural issue here. One is that Delaware is not a conservative state. Nor is it a swing state. The Democratic presidential candidate won there in 1992, 1996, 2000, 2004, and 2008. President Obama got 62 percent of the vote there. And even so, Carper is attacking the president’s jobs agenda from the right.
What’s more, I think the most plausible possible account of this is that Carper genuinely believes that the best jobs bill that can be passed is a comprehensive long-term deficit-reduction plan because if he’s not expressing a sincerely held belief, it’s a bit hard to see the political angle here. Now on to Webb and Landrieu, what strikes me about their remarks is that they’re being mean. Webb isn’t respectfully disagreeing with the administration’s proposed offsets, he’s calling them “terrible.” Landrieu is calling the sincerity of the president’s motives into question.
For me, it’s difficult to imagine parallel behavior on the other side. Conservative states sometimes elect wishy-washy moderate Democratic senators, but when North Dakota or Alabama sends a Republican to Washington, they send a solid conservative. And while your Scott Browns and Olympia Snowes sometimes don’t vote with the party leadership, they rarely attack the leadership in quasi-personal terms. They don’t suggest that Mitch McConnell has “terrible” ideas that he’s pursuing for low political reasons.
In other words, it’s still the case that there are huge barriers to progressive change in Congress that people have to find ways of dealing with.
CBS's Bob Schieffer spoke with former President Bill Clinton on President Obama's proposed plan to increase taxes on millionaires, how to put the unemployed back to work and how his Clinton Global Initiative will help create jobs.
L’Oréal heiress Liliane Bettencourt has joined a group of wealthy French citizens calling for a 'special contribution' tax on the richest of the rich.
Mark Zuckerberg and President Obama have something in common: both want to pay more in federal taxes. The Facebook founder told the president during a town hall-style meeting this week that he would favor an increase in the federal tax rate for the wealthiest Americans.
Although in December Obama and Congress renewed the Bush tax cuts, which offer the greatest tax-rate relief for families earning more than $1 million, the start of the election cycle has reignited the conversation. The cuts will expire in 2012.
Aside from Zuckerberg, several other prominent billionaires and wealthy Americans have spoken out in favor of greater taxation, characterizing their support as a democratic responsibility and a duty of the successful. No one has been more outspoken than Warren Buffett. “I think that people at the high end, people like myself, should be paying a lot more in taxes. We have it better than we’ve ever had it,” Buffett has said.
Texas Governor Rick Perry likes to brag that his state is an economic powerhouse.
But don't tell that to the nearly one in five Texans who are living below the poverty line.
While it's true that Texas is responsible for 40% of the jobs added in the U.S. over the past two years, its poverty rate also grew faster than the national average in 2010.
Texas ranks 6th in terms of people living in poverty. Some 18.4% of Texans were impoverished in 2010, up from 17.3% a year earlier, according to Census Bureau data released this week. The national average is 15.1%.
And being poor in Texas isn't easy. The state has one of the lowest rates of spending on its citizens per capita and the highest share of those lacking health insurance. It doesn't provide a lot of support services to those in need: Relatively few collect food stamps and qualifying for cash assistance is particularly tough.
"There are two tiers in Texas," said Miguel Ferguson, associate professor of social work at University of Texas at Austin. "There are parts of Texas that are doing well. And there is a tremendous number of Texans, more than Perry has ever wanted to acknowledge, that are doing very, very poorly."
Perry, for his part, believes that creating jobs is the best way to help every Texan. The state is doing "everything we can to ensure that every Texan who wants a job has one," a spokeswoman for the governor said.
Poor in the Lone Star State
A combination of demographic and economic factors contribute to the high poverty rate in Texas, where many families, particularly in the southern swath, live in ramshackle housing with no utilities or indoor plumbing.
More than half the state are minorities, many of them Hispanic. This population often has lower levels of education, making it harder for them to escape poverty, said Steve Murdock, sociology professor at Rice University. And the state's population is younger and the families there larger, on average, which also puts them at greater risk of being poor.
Meanwhile, the Great Recession has driven a new crop of Texans into poverty's grip: the formerly middle class.
Texas Neighborhood Services started seeing a crush of new people seeking help last year, said Bradley Manning, executive director of the Weatherford-based agency. Many of them were unemployed and couldn't find new positions, even after going through job training.
"The middle class are losing their jobs and are not able to replace them fast enough," Manning said. "That's driving them straight into poverty."
Even those lucky enough to get one of the new jobs created in Texas may still find themselves struggling to make ends meet. Many of the positions that have been created are on the lower end of the pay scale.
Some 550,000 workers last year were paid at or below the federal minimum wage of $7.25, more than double the number making those wages in 2008, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. For someone working full-time, that's just over $15,000 a year before taxes, which is under the poverty line for a single parent with two children.
Some 9.5% of Texas' hourly workforce are minimum-wage workers, the highest percentage in the nation -- a dubious title it shares with Mississippi.
Little help for Texans in need
For residents living in poverty, the state doesn't offer many services or even make federally-funded benefits easily accessible.
For instance, it has one of the tightest income limits -- less than 12% of the poverty level -- to qualify for federal cash assistance payments and one of the most meager benefits, a maximum of about $260 a month for a family of three, said Celia Cole, senior research analyst at the Center for Public Policy Priorities, which advocates for low-income residents. The program serves less than 6% of poor children in the state.
Texas' Medicaid program covers few non-disabled adults, instead providing health insurance mainly for children and senior citizens. And only an estimated 55% of those eligible for food stamps had signed up for the program in 2008, among the lowest participation rates in the country.
Enrollment has since improved after the state legislature allocated more money for administering the system after coming under pressure from the federal government and being hit with a class action lawsuit. However, Cole says, need has greatly increased as well.
Experts chalk up the minimal services and take-up rates to Texas' anti-welfare attitude. In the Lone Star State, you are expected to pull yourself up by your bootstraps.
"The Texas mentality is you don't ask for help," Ferguson said.
Perry, a Republican candidate for president, echoes this view. Asked about the high poverty rate, a governor's spokeswoman said Perry is focusing on creating jobs so Texans can sustain themselves and their families. She pointed out that 95% of the state's jobs are above the minimum wage.
"We're trying to create a culture of independence rather than dependence," said Lucy Nashed, noting the state provides an adequate safety net for children, seniors, the disabled and pregnant mothers.
But advocates say more needs to be done to help people rise or return to self-sufficiency. The state should invest more in public education, job training, health programs and work assistance, such as child care subsidies. Also, it should focus on creating jobs with higher wages and decent benefits.
"We don't have the support system in place to provide economic support or economic opportunity to help families lift themselves out of poverty," said Frances Deviney, senior research associate at the center.
Republicans on Capitol Hill pounced on President Barack Obama’s deficit-reduction plan on Monday, swiftly dismissing the president’s proposal as an unserious attempt at taming the nation’s finances.
House Speaker John Boehner, whom Obama singled out in his Rose Garden address for what he called a “my-way-or-the-highway” approach on new taxes, quickly struck back and accused the president of fostering a divisive political environment.
“Pitting one group of Americans against another is not leadership,” Boehner said.
In a statement, the Ohio Republican also said Obama’s plan wasn’t a “serious contribution” to the work of the deficit-slashing supercommittee that’s charged with finding at least $1.2 trillion in deficit cuts by Thanksgiving.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell also scoffed at Obama’s plan.
“Veto threats, a massive tax hike, phantom savings, and punting on entitlement reform is not a recipe for economic or job growth — or even meaningful deficit reduction,” the Kentucky Republican said. “The good news is that the Joint Committee is taking this issue far more seriously than the White House.”
One of the members of the supercommittee itself, Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.), sounded a more measured and receptive tone to Obama’s ideas. Toomey, a freshman senator, said the panel would consider the president’s proposals, among the many others being floated to the powerful 12-member panel.
But Toomey had his problems with Obama’s speech, too.
“I am concerned that his deficit reduction strategy sometimes seems more defined by political posturing, such as recycling tax hikes that even lawmakers in his own party have publicly opposed,” Toomey said in a statement. “With the Select Committee’s deadline looming, we do not have time to waste on political games and pushing big tax increases that will only make our economy weaker for all Americans.
Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), the Senate’s messaging chief, insisted to reporters on a conference call Monday that the public would ultimately go with Democrats in that fight.
“Chances are slim if we had a vote today,” Schumer said. “But many of us believe that if the president takes this to the people … the poll numbers show the American people [are] on his side.”
Though Schumer acknowledged that there would be disagreements over some specifics in Obama’s plan, such as raising $410 billion by limiting tax deductions for families earning more than $250,000 a year, he said there would be “broad agreement” on the overall proposal.
America's poverty rate is now the worst since 1993, according to a shocking report last week from the U.S. Census Bureau.
Over 46 million people are living in poverty, 2.6 million more than in 2009 and the poverty rate has reached 15.1 percent.
The outlook is grim. The recession has compounded decades of growing economic inequality, structural poverty, and urban decay. With the projections that unemployment will remain high for several years, these numbers are not likely to improve.
Making matters worse, as Ron Haskings at the Brookings Institution noted, "Safety net programs run by the federal and state governments are helping millions of families avoid poverty, but the programs could be subject to cuts at the federal and state level because of continuing deficit and debt problems."
Despite the enormity of this social problem, American politicians in either party rarely discuss the subject. Since the poor don't tend to vote in high rates or contribute much in campaign funds, they don't get a place at the table in Washington, D.C. Yet with the U.S. poverty rate being the highest in the developed world according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, this statistic marks a terrible failure for the nation as a whole.
Most Republicans have tended to avoid the question of poverty because they reject the notion that government can do anything to solve it. For decades, conservatives have railed against welfare programs for creating a cycle of dependency.
Republicans and conservative Democrats ultimately believe that the only way to reduce poverty is to grow the economy. But poverty has been a problem in good times and bad.
Democrats avoid tackling the problem because they fear the political consequences of being tagged as big government liberals. In 1996, when President Clinton signed the welfare reform act that ended Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), he effectively took poverty off his party's agenda.
Those who support government programs for the poor have been haunted by the political backlash against the War on Poverty.
It was during the 1960s, an era of unprecedented economic growth, that President Lyndon Johnson and allied Democrats decided to tackle the problem of poverty in this wealthy nation.
President Kennedy had started to explore an anti-poverty program in 1963 under the guidance of Walter Heller, the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors, but Kennedy was assassinated before he could take action.
When Johnson heard about the program shortly after taking office, he said it was the kind of initiative he could support. Johnson, who had been inspired by the New Deal and grew up amid poverty in Texas, sympathized with the plight of the poor and believed that the government could and should so something about it: "That's my kind of program. I'll find money for it one way or another. If I have to, I'll take away money from things to get money for people."
To build a legislative coalition in favor of the War on Poverty in 1964, Johnson enlisted the support of liberals in Congress as well as the conservative Democrat Phil Landrum of Georgia, who won over the votes of many in the party who usually opposed new federal programs. Landrum, and other conservatives in the party, had constituencies who struggled with economic hardship.
In his address to Congress in March 1964, Johnson said: "What you are being asked to consider is not a simple or an easy program. But poverty is not a simple or an easy enemy. It cannot be driven from the land by a single attack on a single front.
Were this so, we would have conquered poverty long ago. Nor can it be conquered by government alone. For decades American labor and American business, private institutions and private individuals have been engaged in strengthening our economy and offering new opportunity to those in need. We need their help, their support, and their full participation.
Through this program we offer new incentives and new opportunities for cooperation, so that all the energy of our nation, not merely the efforts of government, can be brought to bear on our common enemy."
The War on Poverty claimed some notable accomplishments. According to the historian Michael Katz, "Between 1965 and 1972, the government transfer programs lifted about half the poor over the poverty line." Many programs, such as Head Start, became popular across the nation and perceived as integral to the well being of struggling Americans.
Even as the policies were making great strides, Republicans attacked the War on Poverty as a waste of federal money that only helped elected officials.
Many Democratic urban machine politicians lambasted the Community Action Program—a part of the war on poverty that put money into the hands of local organizations to shape anti-poverty initiatives--because they felt the dollars were winding up in the hands of left-wing organizations who then opposed them. Many groups representing the poor felt the War on Poverty did not go far enough.
For decades afterward, attempts to reduce levels of poverty through government action were unpopular. Indeed, AFDC, a product of the New Deal commonly known as welfare, became the focus of conservatives who called for eliminating the program and younger Democrats who felt it needed to be reformed. Reforming welfare gained more attention than the problem the program was originally meant to solve.
Today's silence about poverty is striking. Very few presidential candidates ever bring up the issue. There have been a few in each party, such as John Edwards for the Democrats and Rick Santorum for the Republicans, but in general this is the cause that has no champion.
The new data from the Census Bureau, comes at a crucial time, with government programs on the chopping block as Washington focuses on cutting the budget deficit.
Candidates running for office in 2012 should be forced to confront this issue and explain what they intend to do about it.
Proposals such as public jobs, education reform, and tax incentives to rebuild blighted areas must be discussed. There must also be strong consideration given to protecting -- and even expanding --state and local services for the poor despite the current obsession with budget cuts.
Unless voters and the media help to make this an issue in the campaign, the problem will likely only become worse.
Should members of Congress cut their salaries or raise the age at which they can draw a congressional pension when many Americans are making personal sacrifices during the country's prolonged economic crisis?
Sen. Sherrod Brown thinks so.
In April, the Ohio Democrat introduced the Shared Retirement Sacrifice Act of 2011, which would require lawmakers to wait until the age of 66 to collect their pensions. Currently, lawmakers can retire as early as 50 with a full pension depending on how long they served.
"The reason I introduced my bill ... on this shared sacrifice in terms of retirement age is I hear lots of members of Congress, especially, particularly conservative members of Congress, say we should raise the retirement age for Social Security," Brown said on CNN's "American Morning."
Read more about the bill
Brown points to the fact that a member of Congress who gets elected at 35 and retires at 55 can draw a pretty good pension then while other Americans can't draw Social Security benefits until they reach 66.
"So, my thought there was that members of Congress should not be able to get their pension, no matter how many years of service they had; they should get no pension until any earlier than a Social Security beneficiary should get theirs," he said.
In 2009, there were 455 retired members of Congress drawing a federal pension based fully or in part on their congressional service in 2009, according to a Congressional Research Service report released in January.
Of that number, 275 were in office before 1984 and did not pay into Social Security nor can they collect benefits. They received an average yearly pension of $69,012 in 2009.
Amendments to the Social Security Act in 1983 required members of Congress to pay into Social Security after January 1, 1984. The other 180 retired members are covered by both the old and new pension plans and collected an annual pension of $40,140 in 2009.
Under both systems, members of Congress are eligible for a pension at age 62 if they have completed at least five years of service, according to the Congressional Research Service report. Members are eligible for a pension at 50 if they have 20 years under their belt, or at any age after completing 25 years of service, the report added.
Brown said it's important that lawmakers "sort of align as much as possible their lives with the people who we represent, so we understand things better and, you know, we still make more money than most people, of course."
"But, at least, we ought to share some of the sacrifice better than we do," he added.
On Thursday, a group of five taxpayer advocacy organizations sent a letter to the 12 members of the deficit-reduction super committee charged with a long-term debt reduction plan, calling for a 10% pay cut for members of Congress, which it said would save $100 million over 10 years.
"This action is especially important at a time when many Americans have seen their wages flatten out or decline, and a large number are unemployed," the groups wrote in a letter.
The five groups were Taxpayers Protection Alliance, National Taxpayers Union, Center for Fiscal Accountability, Our Generation and Americans for Tax Reform.
Brown acknowledges the challenges in getting such a bill passed.
"I don't think that members of Congress will vote to pass that. I don't think that probably will happen here any more than my idea to raise the retirement age for members of Congress will pass," he said.
During the showdown over a possible government shutdown earlier this year, the Senate passed a bill by unanimous consent that would withhold pay from Congress and the president if the shutdown occurred.
Members of Congress and the president fall under mandatory spending, meaning they would get their paychecks during a shutdown while federal workers who weren't considered mandatory would not.
Democratic Sens. Bob Casey of Pennsylvania and Barbara Boxer of California introduced the bill in February, arguing that if a government shutdown occurs, politicians should "feel the pain," too.
On April 5, Boxer and Casey called on House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, to pass a standalone bill in the House of Representatives that would do the same, but it failed to gain traction.
Other efforts at enacting pay cuts for Congress, which hasn't taken such action since the depths of the Great Depression in 1933, have failed to get out of committee.
Rep. Morgan Griffith, R-Virginia, sponsored legislation in January that would cut members' pay by 10%, beginning in 2013. Griffith's legislation is awaiting action after being sent to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.
Rep. Joe Wilson, R-South Carolina, also introduced a bill the same month that would end automatic salary adjustments for members of Congress. The bill was referred to the House Rules Committee, where it has yet to move.
So how much do members of Congress make?
According to Mark Tratos, deputy chief of staff in the Office of Secretary of the Senate, senators make $174,000 a year. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell both make $193,400.
Over in the House, representatives make $174,000 a year, and the speaker pulls in $223,500.
That may not be enough for one freshman tea party-backed Republican, who said he's finding it hard to get by on his salary.
Rep. Sean Duffy, R-Wisconsin, known for his stint on MTV's "The Real World," told a constituent at a town hall meeting in Amery, Wisconsin, in March that while he is making that high salary, he is "not living off the hog."
The constituent, who described his own money woes, asked Duffy if he were willing to take a pay cut. Duffy defended his salary, sharing his own money problems.
"I guarantee that I have more debt than all of you. With six kids. I still pay off my student loans. I still pay my mortgage. I generally use a minivan. ... I've got one paycheck. So I struggle to meet my bills right now," the lawmaker responded.
According to the Census Bureau, the median income for Wisconsin residents in 2009 was $49,994 -- well below Duffy's salary.
Duffy spokesman Daniel Son said in a statement to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel that "our nation faces a real fiscal crisis and Congressman Duffy is committed to working with his colleagues in the House to face these challenges head on, not score cheap political points."
Lawmakers, however, do have expenses many average Americans don't such as maintaining a residence in their home district and affording a place to stay while in Washington, a city with hefty housing prices. Many, including Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, have found a way around that: sleeping in their Capitol Hill offices.
Others such as Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-New York, share a house with other members of Congress.
As the debate over Texas Gov. Rick Perry mandating the HPV vaccine continues between Republican presidential candidates, a woman whose endorsement is coveted by all them, South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, has her own complicated history on the issue.
In 2007, shortly before Perry issued an executive order requiring that schoolgirls be vaccinated against the sexually transmitted human papillomavirus, or HPV, that causes most cervical cancers, Haley was throwing her support behind a similar bill in South Carolina. At the time she was in her second term as a state representative.
State Rep. Joan Brady introduced the Cervical Cancer Prevention Act in South Carolina, and the Republican corralled more than 60 legislators, including Haley, to sponsor the bill. Unlike the executive order for which Perry is taking heat, this legislative mandate did not include a provision for parents to opt out of inoculating their daughters.
Within months, fierce opposition mounted, and legislative records back up accounts from sources who recall sponsors "dropping like flies" before a unanimous vote killed the bill on April 18, 2007.
More than a dozen legislators formally requested to be removed as sponsors from the bill, but the future governor of South Carolina was not one of them.
State Rep. Kris Crawford, a physician who led the debate to discredit the policy resulting in the bill's demise, said even though Haley voted against the bill like everybody else he wondered why she didn't remove herself as a bill sponsor if she opposed the mandate.
"If you're a co-sponsor of a bill and it's a bad bill, take your name off of it," Crawford said.
Haley's office declined to comment and pointed CNN to information about the vote on her campaign website.
Palmetto Family Council President Oran Smith was among the conservative activists actively lobbying legislators to oppose the bill.
"When we finally got to them and explained the full story, they were very quick to pull their names off," Smith recalls. "Sure we wish (Haley) had done that as well, but ultimately when it came up on the big board, she voted the way we wanted her to vote twice."
On her campaign website, Haley acknowledges her initial support for the bill but said in a statement, "Through the legislative process, it became clear to me that an opt-out provision was not going to be included in the bill and it sought to mandate that middle-school girls obtain a vaccine -- and strip parents of the right to make the choice for their daughter. In light of that turn of events, I voted to kill the bill."
Haley voted against the opt-out provision she says in her statement would have made the bill palatable.
Smith said that was likely part of legislative strategy by Haley and other conservative Republicans in the state House to vote against the opt-out provision so the bill with a straight mandate wouldn't have a chance of passing.
Crawford, a Republican, said he is not so sure.
"There are exactly two groups of people who can claim they were against this giant overreaching of government -- those who never sponsored the bill and those who were sponsors but subsequently removed their names from the bill when it was explained to be a boondoggle mandating vaccination of little 12-year-old girls against a sexually transmitted disease," Crawford said. "Everyone else was either for the bill or riding the fence trying to claim victory regardless of outcome."
Smith said, "In our view, the opt-out (amendment) did not remove the mandate; it just purported to remove the mandate. That was a position that then-Rep. Haley accepted, and she ultimately voted with other conservatives to not fall for that amendment."
Sheri Few, president of South Carolina Parents Involved in Education and an adviser to Haley's 2010 gubernatorial campaign, said many of the bill's co-sponsors were "misled" by those pushing it.
"Nikki was not the only one misled -- more than a third of Republicans in the House co-sponsored the bill," Few wrote in a statement on Haley's website. "When the facts came to light, even the primary sponsor moved to kill her own bill and it was defeated -- an action that included (Rep.) Haley's vote against it."
Perry's 2007 executive order was repealed two months later by the Texas Legislature, but the issue has been dogging the governor on the presidential campaign trail.
Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota has criticized her opponent in the GOP presidential race for being politically motivated by Merck & Co. Merck, the first company to offer a Food and Drug Administration-approved HPV vaccine, engaged in a well-documented campaign in 2007 to lobby legislators to pass laws that would add the vaccine to the list of required immunizations before attending public school.
The Texas governor denies those allegations, saying his decision to protect females against cancer-causing HPV resulted after meeting a young woman who later died from cervical cancer.
But Perry has admitted that bypassing the Texas Legislature and employing an executive order was a mistake. On Wednesday, speaking to reporters in Virginia, Perry acknowledged the order "should have had an opt-in instead of an opt-out."
The debate over Perry's executive order reminds Smith of the legislative fight in South Carolina more than four years ago. He said he empathized with Perry when the candidate was asked about his 2007 decision in recent debates.
"It was how I felt in 2007 and 2008. We didn't want cervical cancer to take the lives of women, but at the same time, we were militantly opposed to weakening parental rights," Smith said.
Smith, who advocates an "educate but not mandate" approach to the HPV vaccine, said he believes Perry will need to convince voters motivated by social issues that his HPV vaccine decision is an anomaly in his 10-year tenure as governor.
VAERS data cannot be used to prove a causal association between the vaccine and the adverse event. The only association between the adverse event and vaccination is temporal, meaning that the adverse event occurred sometime after vaccination. Therefore, the adverse event may be coincidental or it may have been caused by vaccination, however we cannot make any conclusions that the events reported to VAERS were caused by the vaccine.
HPV Vaccine Safety
There are two licensed HPV vaccines, Gardasil® and Cervarix®, available to protect against the types of HPV infection that cause most cervical cancers. Gardasil® was licensed for use in females, age 9-26 years in June 2006 and for males age 9-26 years in Oct 2009. Cervarix® was licensed for use in females age 10-25 in October 2009.
The safety of HPV vaccines was studied in clinical trials worldwide before licensure. For Gardasil® , over 29,000 males and females participated in these trials. For Cervarix®, over 30,000 females participated in several clinical trials.
Since licensure, CDC and FDA have been closely monitoring the safety of HPV vaccines. There are 3 systems used to monitor the safety of vaccines after they are licensed and used in the U.S. These systems can monitor adverse events already known to be caused by vaccines, as well as detect rare adverse events that were not identified during pre-licensure clinical trials. The 3 systems are:
The Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS)–a useful early warning public health system that helps CDC and FDA detect possible side effects or adverse events following vaccination.
The Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD) Project–a collaboration between CDC and 10 health care organizations which monitors and evaluates adverse events following vaccination.
The Clinical Immunization Safety Assessment (CISA) Network– a collaboration between6 academic centers in the U.S. which conduct research on adverse events that might be caused by vaccines.
Reports to VAERS Following Gardasil®
As of June 22, 2011, approximately 35 million doses of Gardasil® were distributed in the U.S. and VAERS received a total of 18,727 reports of adverse events following Gardasil® vaccination: 17,958 reports among females and 346 reports for males, of which 285 reports were received after the vaccine was licensed for males in October 2009. VAERS received 423 reports of unknown gender. Of the total number of VAERS reports following Gardasil®, 92% were considered to be non-serious, and 8% were considered serious.
Non-serious adverse event reports
VAERS defines non-serious adverse events as those other than hospitalization, death, permanent disability, or life-threatening illness.
The vast majority (92%) of the adverse events reports following Gardasil® vaccination have included fainting, pain, and swelling at the injection site (the arm), headache, nausea, and fever. Syncope (fainting) is common after injections and vaccinations, especially in adolescents. Falls after fainting may sometimes cause serious injuries, such as head injuries, which can be prevented by closely observing the person for 15 minutes after vaccination.
Serious adverse event reports
Any VAERS report that indicated hospitalization, permanent disability, life-threatening illness, congenital anomaly or death is classified as serious. As with all VAERS reports, serious events may or may not have been caused by the vaccine.
Guillain-Barré Syndrome (GBS)
Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS) has been reported after vaccination with Gardasil® . GBS is a rare neurologic disorder that causes muscle weakness. It occurs in 1-2 out of every 100,000 people in their teens. A number of infections have been associated with GBS. There has been no indication that Gardasil® increases the rate of GBS above the rate expected in the general population, whether or not they were vaccinated.
Blood Clots
There have been some reports of blood clots in females after receiving Gardasil®. These clots have occurred in the heart, lungs, and legs. Most of these people had a risk of getting blood clots, such as taking oral contraceptives (the birth control pill), smoking, obesity, and other risk factors.
Deaths
As of June 22, 2011 there have been a total 68 VAERS reports of death among those who have received Gardasil® . There were 54 reports among females, 3 were among males, and 11 were reports of unknown gender. Thirty two of the total death reports have been confirmed and 36 remain unconfirmed due to no identifiable patient information in the report such as a name and contact information to confirm the report. A death report is confirmed (verified) after a medical doctor reviews the report and any associated records. In the 32 reports confirmed, there was no unusual pattern or clustering to the deaths that would suggest that they were caused by the vaccine and some reports indicated a cause of death unrelated to vaccination.
VAERS Reports Following Cervarix®
Since licensed in October 2009, uptake of Cervarix® vaccination in the U.S. has been low. As of June 2011, there have been 39 VAERS reports of adverse events following Cervarix® vaccination in the U.S. The majority of these reports (97%) were considered to be non-serious.
Cervarix® has also been in use in other countries such as England and Europe prior to licensing from the FDA.
Summary
Based on all of the information we have today, CDC recommends HPV vaccination for the prevention of most types of cervical cancer. As with all approved vaccines, CDC and FDA will continue to closely monitor the safety of HPV vaccines. Any problems detected with these vaccines will be reported to health officials, healthcare providers, and the public and needed action will be taken to ensure the public's health and safety.
LOUIS SAVARESE, the son and grandson of butchers, was raised to know the difference between a rib-eye roast and a cross-rib roast, but he is the first in his family to appreciate the finer points of cow hooves and chicken feet.
The Savarese family has run Michael’s Prime Meats on Nostrand Avenue in Flatbush, Brooklyn, since 1931. As the neighborhood changed from a mix of Irish, Jewish and Italian families to a solidly Caribbean enclave, the fare has changed as well.
“Forty years ago, we wouldn’t have a cow foot,” Mr. Savarese said, pointing to a bucket of them. Goat meat, oxtail, Jamaican curry powder — these are the gradual changes that have allowed Michael’s to stay open as so many of its neighbors have closed to make way for wig stores and West Indian bakeries. “We’re the last one,” Mr. Savarese said, slicing into a side of beef.
In a city where Jewish neighborhoods turn Puerto Rican, then African and then something else, Mr. Savarese belongs to the sparse ranks of holdouts who have held firm amid the city’s churn, even as newcomers have remade the streets around them. They dig in for many reasons: love of place, loyalty, optimism or sheer stubbornness. Nostalgia grounds some; inertia others. But all of them can still imagine, as they look out on their reshaped blocks, the neighbors and businesses that left decades ago.
At Michael’s, a woman carrying two shopping bags pushed open the door on a recent afternoon and asked, in a Caribbean lilt, for the price of the oxtail. It was $6.29 a pound, she was told. “Lord have mercy,” she said, backing out the door.
Mr. Savarese’s disparate tribe of holdouts includes an Irish bar owner in Brooklyn’s version of Chinatown, an artist hanging on in a zone of shoppers and tourists, and a drum maker who still creates them by hand. Taken together, they offer a twist on New York’s famous promise of reinvention. Theirs are stories of staying put.
“I call it the diehard effect,” said Joseph J. Salvo, the director of the population division of the Department of City Planning. “There are people who will not leave. Irrespective of the change that is occurring, they regard that as their home.”
“The smaller the number gets,” Mr. Salvo added, “the stronger the diehard effect.”
ONCE upon a time — actually, about 40 years ago — two brothers from Ireland bought two popular bars in Brooklyn, where longshoremen and firefighters played darts and bought their friends round after round. The families still own the bars, and the brothers, if they were still alive, would recognize much about them: shamrock posters, weathered dartboards, old men nursing morning beers.
But thanks to New York’s fickle demographic tides, the two bars have found themselves in very different worlds, with very different fortunes.
The Soccer Tavern, in Sunset Park, has flourished, adopted by the Chinese community around it. Meanwhile, the Lief Erickson in Bay Ridge — its name a vestige of the Norwegians who settled in the neighborhood — is languishing amid a growing population of Arabs who frown on alcohol.
“Chinese people drink,” said Julie Walsh, owner of the Lief Erickson, which sat nearly empty on a recent afternoon. “If every Middle Easterner around here would be spending money, the place would be booming.”
Over in Sunset Park, the changes are impossible to miss. Census data show that the area’s Irish population fell by half, to about 1,347, from 1980 to 2009, while the number of Chinese grew more than tenfold, to over 26,000.
But even more striking evidence can be found among the dart trophies that line the back wall opposite Jimmy Gillick, daytime bartender and keeper of the house corned-beef-hash recipe. A scratched plaque from the NYC Dart League lists the champions for 1998-99: Farley, Luno, O’Sullivan, Connolly, Hennessy, Price.
The winter 2009 trophy: Mei, Chan, Zhu, Manczuk, Farley.
“When we walk into other bars, they say, ‘Here comes the Chirish team,’ ” Brendan Farley, the bar’s owner, said in a thick brogue.
Other changes have crept in. A Chinese calendar hangs on the wall. Chinese New Year is one of the bar’s biggest nights. On Christmas, the tavern hosts an international pot luck dinner; the Chinese regulars bring in a whole roasted pig, and Mr. Gillick cooks up his hash.
Irish or Chinese, his customers speak a common language of tipped glasses and back slaps. In their own dive-bar way, they have broadened one another’s worlds.
“I didn’t even know what bok choy was,” said John Bleszcz, a retired city sanitation worker, sitting at the bar the other morning.
“It’s a mild cabbage,” answered Steve Constantin, a few stools down. “Or a mild radish.”
About a mile away, Mr. Farley’s cousin, Ms. Walsh, waited for customers, who rarely trickle in from the nearby mosques, halal butchers and hookah shops.
“We got them, and they don’t drink and they put people like me out of business,” she said. “That’s what happens.”
WHEN Ivy Brown moved into a fourth-floor loft in the meatpacking district of Manhattan in 1985, the blocks around her building were a desolate precinct of transvestite prostitutes, sex clubs and slaughterhouses.
“Nobody lived here,” Ms. Brown, 49, said. “It was nasty. It was gritty. It was gross.”
Friends and family were afraid to visit her apartment, on Hudson Street near 14th Street. Her electricity was spotty. But over the years, this self-described “nice Jewish girl” grew to love her adopted neighborhood, where she cycled through 17 roommates and was free to make art and, eventually, open a gallery that she still operates in her living room.
She gave her old dresses to the prostitutes, who made sure she got home safe. She befriended the bouncers and stopped eating meat, even if she grew to almost like the smell of animal blood. She was home.
But Ms. Brown, a birdlike woman with a pixie haircut, stylish glasses and always-moving hands, has spent the past decade watching her neighborhood slowly vanish. “Things start to disappear,” she said. “We lost the laundromat and the shoemaker and the hardware store.”
What was once the Locker Room, a sex club where patrons checked their clothes at the door, is now a cosmopolitan bar with pressed-tin ceilings. J’s Hangout, a gay club in her building into which men used to vanish for days, is now a splashy Mexican restaurant with blaring dance music and tacos that cost $18. Stretch Hummers and off-duty bankers have replaced the meat trucks and swingers. The Whitney Museum of American Art is moving nearby.
Ms. Brown said she used to feel as if she were living in a surreal movie. From her window, she could see butchers “in white coats covered in blood, warming their hands over fires in oil cans as pig carcasses are flying by.”
Now she has a view of the Apple store, where lines wind around the block whenever a new gadget is released. “I’m used to seeing some things outside,” she said, “but not white people in sleeping bags.”
She has become something of a hero to stalwarts; a blog dedicated to “Vanishing New York” has cataloged her memories. She has thought about moving, but not seriously; her rent-stabilized apartment and its 18 windows would be impossible to match.
Ms. Brown pines for the old days — “I cannot believe I miss that stench!” — but she understands the futility of New York nostalgia. “If you embrace this city, you have to embrace the fact that it’s not going to stay the same,” she said.
Instead, she is waiting for the neighborhood to change again. “Somewhere else is going to be the area, and everyone will go there,” she said.
And until then, she added, “I’m still holding on.”
AT this year’s Miss Norway competition in Bay Ridge, only 2 of the 13 contestants were from Brooklyn. They both lost.
A generation ago, not only would the entire slate have hailed from the borough, but most would probably have been from the Bay Ridge neighborhood, the hub for Norwegians in New York, said Arlene Rutuelo, a pageant organizer who doubles as the neighborhood’s de facto cultural ambassador.
Ms. Rutuelo and her mother, Helene Bakke, run Nordic Delicacies, a business that has become much more than just a shop for cod liver oil and lingonberry jam.
As the neighborhood’s Norwegian-American population plummeted, to 1,135 from a high of tens of thousands around World War II, according to the most recent census estimates, and nearly every other Norwegian business in Bay Ridge closed, Nordic Delicacies became a Scandinavian clearinghouse. People call requesting recipes for dishes their grandmothers used to make. They ask for the date of the annual parade, and for the phone number of the Swedish Consulate. So many people asked for souvenirs that Ms. Rutuelo set aside a counter, next to the cold cuts, for miniature flags and traditional Scandinavian troll dolls.
“We’re the official Norwegian information center,” she said.
When the store opened in 1987, the plan was for Ms. Bakke to cook the head cheese and salted lamb rib, using recipes from her childhood in Kvinesdal, Norway, and for Ms. Rutuelo to run the business. Bay Ridge “was a Norwegian village,” Ms. Rutuelo recalled. “Every business you could think of had a Norwegian.”
Today, her neighbors include a falafel shop, a sushi bar, two Polish diners, a Russian bodega, a Mexican grocery and an Indian restaurant.
On a recent afternoon, a customer walked into Nordic Delicacies and eyed the pickled herring, next to the fish balls in brine, before settling on the pea soup.
“I wouldn’t have thought 25 years ago that we would be the last one left,” Ms. Bakke said. “I never would have imagined.”
IN Cali Rivera’s workshop in the South Bronx, layers of smoke and grime that are older than his grandchildren cover the heaps of jumbled tools he has used to make countless drums of every pitch and size for more than 40 years.
His business, J. C. R. Percussion, has stayed open year after year despite pressure from all sides. Development around the new Yankee Stadium threatened to push him out, but he stayed firm — and rooted for the Mets. When rents rose and old neighbors left, he dug in even deeper.
But his lifelong battle extends beyond the borders of Highbridge, a neighborhood of bodegas and fried-plantain shops, to the economy of cookie-cutter factories, outsourced labor and even modernity itself. In an era when youngsters play the drums on iPhone apps and pop music is made on laptops, Mr. Rivera, hunched over a welder’s flame in a smoke-filled closet, is a holdout against time.
“Everything you see here, I put it together,” he said, surrounded by cowbells, bongos and faded photographs tacked to the wall. “It was created by me!”
Most of his competitors have their drums made in factories overseas, but Mr. Rivera’s instruments are made in his basement workshop, where his assistant clatters and bangs to a blaring salsa soundtrack.
“If you don’t do it by hand, it doesn’t go coo-coo,” Mr. Rivera said, smacking a cowbell he made that morning. “It goes blegh-blegh.”
The neighborhood has changed as many Puerto Ricans have left, to be replaced by Dominicans, Mexicans and Africans. But new neighbors have made for new customers. Downstairs, Mr. Rivera’s assistant worked one day on a set of Ashiko drums for an African musician.
“I’m not going to be rich, never,” Mr. Rivera, 61, said. “But it satisfies me.”
His spit-and-sweat operation seems galaxies away from 21st-century New York. His drumheads, stored in a bathroom, are the stretched skins of mules and goats from Venezuela. To loosen them up, he soaks the skins in a bucket in another bathroom, beneath the urinal.
Mr. Rivera starts most sentences with a curse word and ends them with a wheezy laugh. His stoop serves as a local clubhouse where men drink beer and tell jokes in Spanish.
Mr. Rivera was born in Puerto Rico and came to Highbridge in the late 1950s. He began making cowbells in his apartment, then switched to a studio on Ogden Avenue. He took over his current space, once an Irish bar, about two decades ago.
Business has been slow lately, and his daughter has been nagging him to give up the shop. But orders still come in, and customers still stop by to play the timbales and discuss salsa.
“This is the only place I got,” Mr. Rivera said. “This is what made me happy. We’ll keep banging.”
People often ask me what advice I would give the White House about various things. Today I was mulling over election results from New York and Nevada while thinking about that very question. What should the White House do now? One word came to mind: Panic.
We are far past sending out talking points. Do not attempt to dumb it down. We cannot stand any more explanations. Have you talked to any Democratic senators lately? I have. It's pretty damn clear they are not happy campers.
This is what I would say to President Barack Obama: The time has come to demand a plan of action that requires a complete change from the direction you are headed.
I don't know how else to break this down. Simply put:
1.) Fire somebody. No -- fire a lot of people. This may be news to you but this is not going well. For precedent, see Russian Army 64th division at Stalingrad. There were enough deaths at Stalingrad to make the entire tea party collectively orgasm.
Mr. President, your hinge of fate must turn. Bill Clinton fired many people in 1994 and took a lot of heat for it. Reagan fired most of his campaign staff in 1980. Republicans historically fired their own speaker, Newt Gingrich. Bush fired Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. For God's sake, why are we still looking at the same political and economic advisers that got us into this mess? It's not working.
Furthermore, it's not going to work with the same team, the same strategy and the same excuses. I know economic analysts are smart -- some work 17-hour days. It's time to show them the exit. Wake up -- show us you are doing something.
2.) Indict people. There are certain people in American finance who haven't been held responsible for utterly ruining the economic fabric of our country. Demand from the attorney general a clear status of the state of investigation concerning these extraordinary injustices imposed upon the American people. I know Attorney General Eric Holder is a close friend of yours, but if his explanations aren't good, fire him too. Demand answers to why no one has been indicted.
Mr. President, people are livid. Tell people that you, too, are angry and sickened by the irresponsible actions on Wall Street that caused so much suffering. Do not accept excuses. Demand action now.
3.) Make a case like a Democrat. While we are going along with the Republican austerity garbage, who is making the case against it? It's not the Democrats!
We are allowing the over-educated, over-explanatory bureaucrat by the name of (Congresssional Budget Office director Douglas) Elmendorf do all the talking. Do not let him make your case. Let us make your case. Is it any wonder that we were doing better in the middle of the stimulus-spending period than we are doing with the austerity program?
4.) Hold fast to an explanation. Stick to your rationale for what has happened and what is going to happen under your leadership. You must carry this through until the election (never say that things are improving because evidently they are not).
As I watch the Republican debates, I realize that we are on the brink of a crazy person running our nation. I sit in front of the television and shudder at the thought of one of these creationism-loving, global-warming-denying, immigration-bashing, Social-Security-cutting, clean-air-hating, mortality-fascinated, Wall-Street-protecting Republicans running my country.
The course we are on is not working. The hour is late, and the need is great. Fire. Indict. Fight.
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