Civil Rights Blog

Branstad: Immigrants should have to prove status

Thu, 15 Jul 2010 00:46:00 -0400

Branstad: Immigrants should have to prove status

CLARINDA, Iowa (AP) -- Republican gubernatorial candidate Terry Branstad says people in Iowa stopped on traffic violations should have to prove their citizenship status.

Branstad made the assertion during a visit Wednesday to Clarinda. He said if a person is pulled over for a traffic or criminal violation and they cannot show they are legally in the United State, they ought be detained and turned over to the federal government for deportation.

However, Branstad added he didn't want Iowa taxpayers to be left paying the bill for the process.

Immigration and deportation has traditionally been left to the federal government.

Branstad expressed frustration about the state's limited ability to enforce immigration law. He says if elected governor, he will join other states in pushing the federal government to take action.

Prevent crimes by the mentally ill with a federal Ed Thomas Act, Bruce Braley says

Wed, 14 Jul 2010 00:42:00 -0400

Prevent crimes by the mentally ill with a federal Ed Thomas Act, Bruce Braley says

Federal lawmakers should pass a version of Iowa’s “Ed Thomas Act,” which gives law enforcement officials new ways to ensure they’ll be informed when mental health facilities release patients who face criminal charges. Today, shortly after the one-year anniversary of Thomas’s murder, U.S. Rep. Bruce Braley (D-Iowa) introduced legislation he believes would help ensure the safety of families and communities across the United States.

Thomas, the popular and nationally-known football coach at Aplington-Parkersburg High School, was murdered in June 2009 in the high school’s weight-lifting room by a former student who suffers from schizophrenia. Four days before the murder, law enforcement officials delivered Thomas’s killer, Mark Becker, to a mental health facility after he allegedly vandalized a house then led officers on a high-speed chase. The law enforcement officials knew he had a history of psychiatric troubles, and intended to arrest him after he received emergency mental health treatment. But hospital officials didn’t inform law enforcement officials when they released Becker. The next morning, he shot and killed Thomas.

An image of Parkersburg football coach Ed Thomas plays on a screen at the bill signing for Iowa legislation. A federal version was introduced today. Thomas’s wife, Jan Thomas, has said she believes the Iowa law will prevent future mix-ups in communication between police and mental health facilities. Braley said in the statement: “Those who knew Ed Thomas knew his compassion, his leadership and his dedication to the entire Parkersburg community. I am proud and humbled to introduce this legislation to the Unites States Congress. It is my hope that we can continue to honor the memory and legacy of Ed Thomas by passing the Ed Thomas Act, helping to ensure the future safety of schools and communities not just here in Iowa, but across America.”

The federal bill seeks to clarify “existing HIPAA privacy requirements to allow law enforcement agencies and medical providers to communicate more effectively when patients pose an inherent risk to the community,” Braley statement says. Iowa’s legislation helps law enforcement officers to prevent tragedies like Thomas’s death but still protects the rights of America’s medical patients, Braley said.

Braley’s proposesd federal legislation would allow hospitals to notify law enforcement under these specific conditions:

- an individual is admitted to a medical facility while accompanied by a law enforcement official

- and law enforcement makes a request for patient information in writing

- and that request is made at any point between the time the patient is admitted, and 24 hours after discharge.

- Then the medical facility could provide medical information, including date of discharge, to the law enforcement agency.

Blog post by Jennifer Jacobs • jejacobs@dmreg.com • July 14, 2010

Iowa billboard linking Obama, Hitler removed

Tue, 13 Jul 2010 00:36:00 -0400

Iowa billboard linking Obama, Hitler removed

An Iowa tea party group on Wednesday replaced a billboard comparing President Barack Obama to Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Lenin, calling the sign a bad decision that reflected poorly on the organization. Workers papered over the sign in downtown Mason City at the request of the North Iowa Tea Party. "We got it covered up first thing this morning," said Kent Beatty, the general manager of the company that owns the billboard.

The roughly 200-member tea party group had the original sign put up last week. It showed photographs of Obama, Nazi leader Hitler and communist leader Lenin beneath the labels "Democrat Socialism," "National Socialism," and "Marxist Socialism." After the billboard drew sharp criticism by other state and national tea party leaders, members of the local group sought the change.

North Iowa Tea Party co-founder Bob Johnson said he and other leaders agreed with critics that the image of Obama between Hitler and Lenin was offensive. He said the images overwhelmed the intended message of anti-socialism."They are absolutely right in their criticism because the image of Hitler just totally wiped everything else and it misrepresents the tea party movement," Johnson said. "They were right from the standpoint that the image was not a positive reflection on the tea people."

Johnson said Hitler images are usually not allowed at North Iowa Tea Party gatherings.

Removal of the sign was welcomed by the American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors and their Descendants, a New York-based group. The North Iowa Tea Party "acted properly in removing the grotesquely offensive sign which should never have been put up in the first place. Had they not acted to remove it they would have severely damaged the credibility of legitimate political causes they espouse," the group said in a statement. "We ask that political groups do not trivialize our suffering in the future by making false analogies with Hitler's horrendous crimes."

For now, the sign has been plastered over with one urging people to notify officials before digging.

But Johnson said the North Iowa Tea Party plans to put up a new sign soon. That sign will feature a quote that some attribute to Thomas Jefferson that reads, "My reading of history convinces me that most bad government results from too much government." Others argue Jefferson never wrote the statement.

Listed below, in smaller print, will read, "The North Iowa Tea Party stands for individual responsibility, freedom, liberty, less spending, smaller government." "It's going to be little more bland," Johnson said. 'We paid for a month, so we don't want to waste the money."

Associated Press | Posted: Wednesday, July 14, 2010 12:35 pm

Workforce Development releases survey on unemployed

Thu, 01 Jul 2010 00:51:00 -0400

Workforce Development Releases Survey on Unemployed

by Dar Danielson on July 1, 2010 in Business & Economy, Politics & Government (Radio Iowa)

A survey of unemployed Iowans by the state agency in charge of helping them find new jobs finds many have been out of a job for longer then average. Iowa Workforce Development spokesperson, Kerry Koonce, says they sent surveys to 2,000 unemployed across the state and got responses back from about 30%.

“Seventy-six-percent of the people (who) responded had been unemployed for over half a year,” Koonce says, “And Iowa typically is one of the states that gets people off of unemployment quickly. We have an average — not in a recession time, in a good time — of about 10 weeks, which is very low compared to a lot of states.” Koonce says the long time without a job is really impacting people and taking its tool in “stress and financially and things like that.”

Koonce says the federal extensions of unemployment payments have allowed some to collect for 73 weeks, which she says has helped. But Koonce says the unemployment hasn’t filled all the need. Koonce says 72% of the people in their survey had to use savings or retirement funds to make ends meet.

”And of course that hurts your long-term stability when you have to do that,” Koonce says. She says the people have had to put off things they would normally have done and made “significant adjustments” to their budgets. While the recession is believed to be over, Koonce says the impact of the time spent without a job will last for some time.

Koonce says a lot of people don’t see their finances getting better in the near future, even if they get a new job, they will need time to rebuild some of what they have lost. Koonce says their survey found that some of the people are looking at different options in trying to find another job.

Koonce says over 23% of the people said they had taken a class or training course to get new skills or change careers. She says that is important as the manufacturing industry was the hardest hit during the recession, with many businesses closing, so their employees will have to retrain and “re-skill” for new jobs. Koonce says during the height of the recession, over 8,000individuals were filing initial claims for unemployment benefits, more than double of typical filings.

To see the full survey visit the “Announcement Section” at:www.iowaworkforce.org.

Obama Offers Plan for Major Shift for No Child Left Behind

Sat, 13 Mar 2010 17:24:00 -0500

Obama Proposes Overhaul in Education Law

By Sam Dillon

Published: March 13, 2010, New York Times

The Obama administration on Saturday called for a broad overhaul of the Bush administration’s No Child Left Behind law, proposing to eliminate divisive provisions, including those that have encouraged instructors to teach to tests, crowded out subjects other than math and reading, and labeled one in every three American public schools as failing. The proposals, if approved by Congress, would replace the current law’s pass-fail school grading system with one that would measure schools not only with test scores but also with indicators like pupil attendance and the learning climate in classrooms. And while the proposals call for vigorous interventions in failing schools, they would also reward top performers and lessen federal interference in tens of thousands of reasonably well-run schools in the middle.

President Obama’s plan would replace the No Child law’s requirement that every American child reach proficiency in reading and math, which administration officials have called utopian, with a new national target that may be even harder to achieve: that all students should graduate from high school prepared for college and a career. “Under these guidelines, schools that achieve excellence or show real progress will be rewarded,” he said in his weekly radio address, “and local districts will be encouraged to commit to change in schools that are clearly letting their students down.”

Administration officials said their plan would urge the states to achieve the college-ready goal by 2020.

The No Child law, passed in 2002 by bipartisan majorities, focused the nation’s attention on closing achievement gaps between minority and white students, but included many provisions that created what Education Secretary Arne Duncan on Friday called “perverse incentives.” In their effort to meet the law’s requirements for passing grades, many states began dumbing down standards and teachers began focusing on test preparation rather than engaging class work. “We’ve got to get accountability right this time,” Mr. Duncan told reporters. “For the mass of schools, we want to get rid of prescriptive interventions. We’ll leave it up to them to figure out how make progress.”

The administration’s turn toward education signaled that the president hopes to get beyond health care and broaden the agenda before the midterm elections make progress on legislative issues more difficult. Mr. Duncan has been working behind the scenes on rewriting the No Child law with a bipartisan group of senior lawmakers in both chambers, and administration officials say they hope to complete work on a new bill by August, when the elections will dominate the Congressional agenda. Many skeptics question that timetable. The proposals made clear that the administration hopes to thoroughly rework dozens of the law’s most problematic passages, even while retaining some key features of the Bush-era law, including its requirements that states test students in reading and math every year in grades three through eight and once in high school.

But while leading Democrats on the education committees praised the plan, one of the nation’s major teachers unions did not. “Right now this doesn’t make sense, so we’re surprised,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. “From everything that we’ve seen, this blueprint places 100 percent of the responsibility on teachers, and gives them zero percent of the authority.” Representative John Kline, a top Republican on the House education committee, was also skeptical. “From 30,000 feet the blueprint seems to set a lot of right goals,” Mr. Kline said. “Yet when we drill down to the details, we are looking at a heavier federal hand than many of us wish to see.”

Administration officials laid out their far-reaching proposals for the No Child revisions in briefings on Friday and Saturday with governors, lawmakers, education organizations and journalists, but did not release their proposals in writing with all the fine print. Officials said they intended to leave the legislative language up to Congress.

Mr. Duncan was scheduled to tour Iowa schools on Sunday with Senator Tom Harkin, the Iowa Democrat who is the new chairman of the Senate education committee. “We have an opportunity to fix the problems with the No Child Left Behind Act,” Mr. Harkin said in a statement. “President Obama has taken the lead by laying out a bold vision.” Representative George Miller, Democrat of California and chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, said, “This blueprint lays the right markers to help us reset the bar for our students and the nation.” The new proposals would require states to use annual tests, along with other indicators, to divide the nation’s nearly 100,000 public schools into three groups: some 10,000 to 15,000 high-performing schools that would receive rewards or recognition, some 5,000 chronically failing schools requiring vigorous state intervention, and 80,000 or so schools in the middle that would be encouraged to figure out on their own how to improve.

Under the current law, testing focuses on measuring the number of students who are proficient at each grade level. The Obama administration would like instead to measure each student’s academic growth regardless of the performance level at which they start. Under the administration’s proposals, schools would also be judged on whether they are closing achievement gaps between poor and affluent students. No sanctions exist now for schools that fail in this area. Under the administration’s new proposals, states would be required to intervene even in seemingly high-performing schools in affluent school districts where test scores and other indicators identify groups of students that are languishing, administration officials said.

New provisions would also require states to develop teacher evaluation procedures to distinguish effective instructors, partly based on whether their students are learning. These would replace the law’s current emphasis on certifying that all teachers have valid credentials, which has produced little except red tape for state officials, officials said. The current law, signed by President George W. Bush in 2002, required states to adopt ”challenging academic standards” to receive federal money for poor students under the section of the law known as Title I. But the law left it to states to define “challenging,” and many set standards at mediocre levels.

Last month, President Obama said that his No Child blueprint would require states to adopt “college- and career-ready standards” to qualify for $14 billion Title I program, and that new sources of federal money would be provided to states as competitive grants, rather than through per-pupil formulas. “This’ll be controversial,” said Bob Wise, a former West Virginia governor who leads the Alliance for Excellent Education, a nonprofit group. “They’re trying to change about 40 years of established formula funding, and to change an accountability system that a lot of people are wedded to because it’s forced us to come to grips with the achievement gap.”

Three Charged for Hate Crimes Against Gays in San Francisco

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 20:16:00 -0500

SF police probe more hate crime BB-gun shootings

By Terry Collins, Associated Press Writer

Published March 12, 2010

SAN FRANCISCO -- Prosecutors who have charged three cousins with a hate crime for shooting a San Francisco man with a BB gun because they thought he was gay said Friday they're considering charging the suspects in 11 similar shootings.A video recording recovered by police from a car belonging to Mohammad Habibzada, 24, and Shafiq Hashemi and Sayed Bassam, both 21, show the cousins shooting at the other victims, Assistant District Attorney Brian Buckelew said.No serious injuries have been reported from the 11 additional shootings. "We're looking to talk to others who may have been victimized," Buckelew said.

The cousins from Hayward, Calif., are accused of shooting a 27-year-old man in the cheek as he was smoking outside a bar in San Francisco's Mission district on Feb. 26.The victim called police and said he'd been shot by a passing car. Police pulled the suspects over as the cousins drove by the bar a second time as officers were interviewing the victim.Police allegedly found a "rifle-style" BB gun and a video camera inside the car. Investigators later discovered a recording of the shooting on the camera, police said."They basically stated to officers that they came to San Francisco to target gay people," police spokesman Samson Chan said.

The cousins have been charged with assault with a deadly weapon with a hate crime enhancement discharge of a firearm with gross negligence, and attempted mayhem for the initial shooting.

They are in custody after a judge granted prosecutors' request Friday to raise the suspects' bail to $450,000 each, pending the new charges, which are expected to be filed in the next couple weeks.

Education Blog: Boys Falling Behind in Education

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 20:11:00 -0500

Whitmire: New data on how far boys are falling behind

Blog Entry by Valerie Strauss of the Washington Post

Published March 12, 2010

By Richard Whitmire, former president of the National Education Writers Association, who writes the Eduation Week blog, "Why Boys Fail."

Ask anyone about President Obama’s track record and you’ll hear the same: Not much movement on global warming, the domestic economy or health care. But there is one area in which Obama has already begun to move long-dormant mountains: education reform. He has steered billions of dollars into education, which Education Secretary Arne Duncan has doled out in a carrot-and-stick approach that has forced states to promise reforms that were long thought impossible. For example, several state legislatures were “persuaded” — okay, legally bribed — into peeling back excessive teacher-protection laws.

Ultimately, however, Obama will be measured by his bottom line goal: for the United States to have the world’s highest proportion of college graduates by the year 2020. Translated, that means jumping from the middle of the rankings of developed nations to the top in just 10 years. Unfortunately, that’s extremely unlikely to happen. What’s interesting is why. Usually, our failure to meet education goals is attributed to race, poverty, poor teaching and low academic standards. This time, those are lesser players. The culprit instead is politics.

In a report to be released next week the nonpartisan Center on Education Policy took a look at who is and isn’t passing state tests, and identified the nation’s biggest problem: males. The survey shows that girls tie with boys in math skills, which will come as a surprise to those who still cling to the stereotype that boys excel in math. The reading differences, meanwhile, are profound, with boys a full 10 percentage points behind girls. Boys are even farther behind in writing abilities. The twinned abilities to read accurately and write clearly are the currency of college success, regardless of the subject matter.

So what does this say about Obama’s 2020 goal? Already, women make up 62 percent of those earning two-year degrees in the United States. Women are doing their part; increasing those numbers would be difficult. Clearly, the only way to force the United States back into the global education competition is to buck up the boys. Unfortunately, at a time when the world has become more verbal — some standardized math tests give as much weight to a written explanation of how the answer was attained as to the answer itself — boys are faring badly at both reading and writing. Given those deficits, it appears unlikely substantially more males will enter the college pipeline or succeed once there.

Based on my book research, the biggest culprits behind the gender gaps are education reforms that wisely ramped up verbal skills in the earliest grades but unwisely failed to adjust reading and writing instruction for boys, who have always gotten a late start on those skills. The reform-minded governors intended to boost college readiness, but with boys, their good intentions backfired. Up until about 20 years ago, when students got a slower start on verbal skills, boys caught up by fourth or fifth grade. These days, many boys never quite catch up. They conclude that school is for girls and seek satisfaction in outlets such as video games, which in turn get blamed unfairly for causing the problem.

There is a solution here: Re-engineer how reading is taught in the very early grades so that boys don’t get left behind. I’ve seen schools radically revamp their approach to teaching reading so that boys don’t miss out, and girls emerge as strong as before. Seems like a straightforward task for the federal Department of Education to take on by conducting research to guide local school districts. Doing that, however, would bring objections from a group of women’s advocacy groups that fear school interventions designed to help boys could shift the agenda away from their priorities. They resist pro-boy initiatives by insisting that gender gaps are really racial gaps (a curious argument, considering that in major cities there are three times as many college-educated black women as men).

A fundamental political calculus is at play here. Eight million more women than men voted for Obama, which gives these groups considerable political leverage at a time when the President’s popularity is waning. That may explain why the administration has yet to address the one factor — boys lagging in school — that could make or break his 2020 goal. But the math is clear: If Obama doesn’t take that political risk and intervene on behalf of boys, his 2020 goal will never be met.

Cost of Caring for Elderly Parents with Health Problems

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 20:05:00 -0500

Deciding on Care for Elderly Parents in Declining Health

By Lesley Alderman

Published: March 12, 2010, New York Times

TWO years ago my father, then 83, became very ill. Until then, he had been living alone in a pleasant one-bedroom apartment on the Hudson River, an hour’s drive from my home in Brooklyn. After a couple of months in the hospital it became clear that my dad, Harvey Alderman, could not return to solo living. He was fragile and forgetful, and there was no way he could keep track of the 14 or so pills he had to take each day. But where would he go — and how would we pay for it? Could he stay in his apartment if he had regular visits from an aide? Or should he go to an assisted-living facility where there would be more services available for him? So began my family’s crash course in caring for an aging parent in declining health.

If you’re in this predicament, you know already there is no simple answer. Older people each have unique medical and emotional needs. And finances often dictate how far you can go in creating the ideal situation for them. That is what Linda Chase, a lawyer in Reston, Va., realized after running the numbers on what it would cost for home care for her mother, who has dementia and needs round-the-clock attention. “We couldn’t afford private home-health care, so the only option for us was assisted living in a facility with dementia care,” Ms. Chase said.

Below, I offer guidelines and considerations that can help you make an informed — if not always easy — decision about what type of housing will support your parent’s needs, without bankrupting the family in the process. And note: While the following discussion refers to a single parent who lives alone, many of the considerations would also apply to an elderly couple who are each in declining health.

IS HOME STILL SAFE? If your parent is living at home, he or she probably wants to stay there. If that’s the case, hire an expert, like a geriatric care manager, who can assess whether your parent will be able to manage at home and what kind of support will be needed. A geriatric care manager, who charges $50 to $200 an hour, will look at how your parent functions in the space — able to cook? able to manage medications?— and may suggest modifications. These may include adding grab bars and removing throw rugs, to make the home safer. If your parent will be in a wheelchair, the care manager can figure out whether doorways need to be widened or a stair lift should be added.

In a column last fall, I offered fuller advice on how to find a geriatric care manager, but here are a few basics: Ask friends for references or contact the National Association of Professional Geriatric Care Managers (www.caremanager.org). If money is tight, call the local federally funded office on aging or plug your ZIP code in at www.eldercare.gov to find the nearest one. “The office should be able to send a case manager to your parent’s home to do a home assessment at no charge,” says Chris Stone, a registered nurse and clinical liaison for LifeQuest Nursing Center, in Quakertown, Pa.

Next, determine what kind of day-to-day care your parent requires. A care manager or your parent’s doctor should be able to help you figure this out. Some older people can manage surprisingly well with minimal help. But parents with dementia or a chronic medical condition may require a full-time aide, and the cost of that can add up quickly. According to a survey by Genworth Financial, an insurance company that sells long-term care policies, the median hourly rate for a licensed caregiver ranges from $18 to $46 an hour, depending on the qualifications of the aide. The cost runs on the higher side if the aide works for a Medicare-certified agency. To learn about rates in your area, call a local home health care agency, said Vanessa Bishop, president of Elder Care Consultants (www.eldercc.com), in Reston, Va. If you do opt for in-home care, be sure to use an agency that is licensed, bonded and insured, Ms. Bishop says, and one that conducts thorough background checks on its employees.

THE ASSISTED-LIVING OPTION Even if parents insist on remaining in the home, doing so may not be in their best interests. A parent in failing health or somehow impaired is not the only one in jeopardy; other family members may be under a lot of stress, too. It can also be lonely and isolating for a parent to stay at home. Assisted-living residences, which have proliferated in recent years, have small apartments that residents can furnish with their own belongings, along with a common dining room where meals are served, a nurse’s office where prescription drugs are dispensed and activity rooms for socializing. The great advantage of such places is that you can ramp up the level of care as your parent needs it, adding services like help with dressing and bathing. Many have special wings or floors for people with Alzheimer’s. My sisters and I ultimately decided to move our dad to an assisted-living facility in Ardsley, N.Y., just across the river from his previous home. He wasn’t keen on the idea at first, but the move turned out well for him and for us. He has his own studio apartment, but he doesn’t have to cook, clean, do his laundry or think about which pill to take when. And he has a built-in social network of other residents and the bustling staff. (In fact, he often prefers the young staff to the residents.) We all have less to worry about.

WHAT CAN YOU AFFORD? Ultimately, it may all come down to money. Find out how much your parent has and whether he or she bought long-term care insurance. If the assets are plentiful, you may need to see a financial planner for advice on how to stretch the funds over time. We were able to pay for my dad’s rather steep assisted-living bill through a combination of his annual income and the proceeds from the sale of his apartment. It might also be wise to speak with an elder-law lawyer, who can explain when your parent might qualify for government programs like Medicaid. Medicaid does not cover the costs of assisted living, but it does cover care provided in nursing homes. “Everyone thinks Medicaid is only for the poor, and that you have to impoverish yourself to be eligible,” says Robert S. Bullock, a lawyer in Washington and a senior partner of the Elder Law & Disability Law Center, “But it’s not.”

COMPARE COSTS Add up the costs that would be involved in keeping your parent at home, including home upgrades, caregivers, rent, mortgage payments and taxes. Factor in what long-term care insurance will cover, if there is any. If your parent is a military veteran, find out if he or she is eligible for the Aid and Attendance Pension benefit, which provides a monthly stipend of up to $1,632 (or $1,949 for couples), to veterans who need help with basic daily tasks, like eating and dressing. Once you have an idea of what it would cost to keep your parent at home, the decision might be made for you. The Genworth survey found that the median cost for an assisted-living facility was $34,000 a year, which translates into about 30 hours a week of home care at $20 an hour. But in major urban areas the cost for assisted living can be twice or even three times that amount.

Even so, assisted living sometimes works out to be a better deal, as Ms. Chase, the lawyer in Virginia, learned. When she did her research, Ms. Chase found it would cost around $150,000 a year to hire full-time home caregivers for her mother, Jeanette Chase. “It was a horrendous amount of money,” Ms. Chase said. A nearby assisted-living facility, on the other hand, charged $80,000 a year for a room on a secure floor intended for memory-impaired patients. And her mother’s long-term care insurance, which did not cover in-home care, covered 40 percent of the bill for assisted living.

Even assisted living “was expensive — but worth it,” Ms. Chase said. “I was able to continue working and she was safe and nearby.”

Movement Seem within Obama's Loan Modification Program To Combat Foreclosures

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 20:01:00 -0500

Loan Modification Program Starts to Get Some Traction

By David Streitfeld

Published: March 12, 2010, New York Times

After a dismal start, the Obama administration’s antiforeclosure efforts are finally gaining some traction. But the results are still paltry when set against the vast sea of homeowners in trouble.

The Treasury Department said on Friday that more than 168,000 households had received permanent new mortgages under its year-old modification program, up from 117,000 in January and 67,000 in December. An additional 92,000 permanent modifications are pending. Borrowers with permanent modifications save a median of $500 a month, the government says.

The homeowner rescue effort, started with much fanfare a year ago, is one of the administration’s biggest initiatives to help the housing market and indirectly the larger economy. But it has been widely criticized for overpromising and underdelivering. Critics saw little in the February report to change their minds. “It’s a little bit of a help, but it’s not a big help, considering six million people are behind on their payments and at risk of foreclosure,” said Sherry Cooper, global economic strategist for BMO Financial Group.

Of the lenders participating, Bank of America has by far the largest number of eligible delinquent borrowers, nearly 1.1 million. Only 21,000 loans have been permanently modified; 22,000 more are pending. Many more are in trial modifications with an uncertain fate. When the program was introduced, it was described as a stability initiative that would lower payments for as many as four million homeowners. But the number of trial modifications, which last three to five months, has barely surpassed a million, and the growth is slowing. In February, the number of trial modifications increased by 73,000, about half the number that signed up during the fall months.

The likeliest explanation is that the pool of borrowers who are both willing to seek and eligible for a modification is drying up. The Treasury puts the maximum number of potential modifications at 1.8 million, though it may be smaller. Some borrowers who got a temporary modification but did not qualify for a permanent one have said they ended up worse off financially. Alan M. White, an assistant professor at Valparaiso University School of Law who has studied the modification program, said too many applicants “have been sold a bill of goods.” “Although 66 percent of them have made all their payments, fewer than 25 percent have been converted to permanent modifications,” Mr. White wrote in an e-mail message. “They are making payments but remaining in limbo or, worse, having their modifications canceled for lack of paperwork.”

A Treasury Department spokeswoman said the percentage of trial modifications converting to permanent status would rise over the next few months. The Treasury is being accused of moving the goalposts a bit. It now says its intention was merely to offer help to those four million borrowers, not to make sure they actually got it. By this standard, the February report says the program is from 34 percent to 45 percent toward the goal.

Vaccines Not Tied to Autism According to Three Rulings

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 19:54:00 -0500

3 Ruling Find No Link to Vaccines and Autism

By Donald G. McNeils, Jr.

Published: March 12, 2010, New York Times

In a further blow to the antivaccine movement, three judges ruled Friday in three separate cases that thimerosal, a mercury preservative, does not cause autism. The three rulings are the second step in the Omnibus Autism Proceeding begun in 2002 in the United States Court of Federal Claims. The proceeding combines the cases of 5,000 families with autistic children seeking compensation from the federal vaccine-injury fund, which comes from a 75-cent tax on every dose of vaccine.

Families of children hurt by vaccines — for example, who suffer fatal allergic reactions — are paid from it but unable to sue the vaccine company. The fund has never accepted that vaccines cause autism; the omnibus proceeding, with nine test cases based on three different theories, was begun in 2002. The antivaccine groups also lost the first three cases, which were decided in February 2009 by the same three judges, known as special masters. All three rulings were upheld on their first appeals.

Defenders of vaccines said they were pleased by Friday’s decision, while opponents were dismissive, saying they will never get a fair ruling from the omnibus arrangement. In the three cases brought against the government by the parents of Jordan King, Colin R. Dwyer and William Mead, all three special masters used strong language in dismissing the expert evidence from the families’ lawyers. The master in the King ruling emphasized that it was “not a close case” and “extremely unlikely” that Jordan’s autism was connected to his vaccines. The master in the Dwyer case wrote that many parents “relied upon practitioners and researchers who peddled hope, not opinions grounded in science and medicine.”

Patricia Campbell-Smith, the master in the Mead case, also dismissed two subarguments made by a few opponents of vaccines, saying they “have not shown either that certain children are genetically hypersusceptible to mercury or that certain children are predisposed to have difficulty excreting mercury.” She also echoed a common contention by vaccine defenders that a shot is safer than a tuna sandwich. “A normal fish-eating diet by pregnant mothers” is more likely to deposit mercury in the brain than vaccines are, she wrote.

In a telephone press conference after the rulings, Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and the inventor of a rotavirus vaccine from which he receives royalties, praised the decisions, saying: “This hypothesis has already had its day in scientific court, but in America we like to have our day in literal court. Fortunately, we now have these rulings.” Fears of thimerosal emerged more than a decade ago and have cast a pall over vaccines ever since, causing some parents to avoid them and making outbreaks of diseases like measles and whooping cough more likely. Even with this decision, Dr. Offit said, “it’s very hard to unscare people after you’ve scared them.”

The Coalition for Vaccine Safety, an alliance of organizations that believe vaccines cause autism, which claims to represent 75,000 families, dismissed the rulings. “The deck is stacked against families in vaccine court,” said Rebecca Estepp, who is on the coalition’s steering committee. “Government attorneys defend a government program using government-funded science before government judges. Where’s the justice in that?”

Amy Carson, the founder of Moms Against Mercury, who has a son with brain damage, said she was “disappointed but not shocked,” and called the vaccine court arrangement “like the mice overseeing the cheese.” The vaccine-injury fund and the court overseeing it were created in 1988 after judgments in state court lawsuits over vaccines became so inconsistent and so expensive that vaccine companies started quitting the American market.

The third theory, that measles vaccine causes autism, is still to be ruled on by the special masters. But Lisa Randall, a lawyer with the Immunization Action Coalition, which defends vaccines, said she believed some of the test cases had been “abandoned” by the families that brought them after the 2009 decisions dismissed a variant of the same theory.