Lobbyist iNsite

The State of Obama’s Facts

2012-01-25T05:28:00.000-08:00

Virginia lawmaker: Children with disabilities are God’s punishment to women who previously had abortions.

2012-01-16T14:57:00.000-08:00

Virginia lawmaker: Children with disabilities are God’s punishment to women who previously had abortions.: pOn Thursday, Virginia State Delegate Bob Marshall (R) spoke at a press conference against state funding for Planned Parenthood. He blasted the organization for supporting a women’s right to choose, saying that God punishes women who have had abortions by giving them disabled children: “The number of children who are born subsequent to a first [...]/p

2011-12-12T09:07:00.001-08:00

Could the desert sun power the world? http://gu.com/p/3429g

Artistic Bookbinder Thrives at GPO : Roll Call Around the Hill

2011-12-12T06:12:00.000-08:00

Artistic Bookbinder Thrives at GPO : Roll Call Around the Hill

Virginia Business - News: Alpha Natural Resources to pay $210 million in Upper Big Branch settlement

2011-12-07T20:28:00.000-08:00

Virginia Business - News: Alpha Natural Resources to pay $210 million in Upper Big Branch settlement

Virginia Business - News: Federal investigation blames Massey Energy for Upper Big Branch mine disaster

2011-12-07T20:27:00.000-08:00

Virginia Business - News: Federal investigation blames Massey Energy for Upper Big Branch mine disaster

Sterilization victims compensation could start at $20,000 | CharlotteObserver.com & The Charlotte Observer Newspaper

2011-12-07T06:47:00.000-08:00

Sterilization victims compensation could start at $20,000 | CharlotteObserver.com & The Charlotte Observer Newspaper

Rigell on the Record: Drawing Experience From A Lifetime of Creating Jobs

2011-11-22T14:18:00.000-08:00

Virginia Business - News: Poll finds Virginians optimistic about their financial condition

2011-11-22T06:47:00.000-08:00

Virginia Business - News: Poll finds Virginians optimistic about their financial condition

2011-11-16T10:59:00.000-08:00

Chesterfield could be in line for $1 billion power plant

GOP retakes Senate, recount looms

2011-11-09T06:00:00.000-08:00

GOP retakes Senate, recount looms

Uranium firm, environmentalists donate to Senate candidates

2011-11-07T15:00:00.000-08:00

Uranium firm, environmentalists donate to Senate candidates

Accessible Virginia Travel - Virginia Is For Lovers

2011-11-06T19:12:00.000-08:00

Accessible Virginia Travel - Virginia Is For Lovers

http://www.iLoveMountains.org

2011-11-04T11:30:00.000-07:00

http://www.iLoveMountains.org

Fredericksburg.com - Uranium mining debate revs up

2011-11-04T05:54:00.000-07:00

Fredericksburg.com - Uranium mining debate revs up

Virginia Business - News: Alpha Natural Resources Inc. says profit doubled in the third quarter

2011-11-04T05:51:00.000-07:00

Virginia Business - News: Alpha Natural Resources Inc. says profit doubled in the third quarter

Virginia Business - News: AES facility combines wind generation and energy storage

2011-10-28T19:08:00.000-07:00

Virginia Business - News: AES facility combines wind generation and energy storage

Tell the EPA: Protect Virginia from Mountaintop Removal!

2011-10-28T13:28:00.000-07:00

Tell the EPA: Protect Virginia from Mountaintop Removal!

State vets online claims program on hold

2011-10-24T05:57:00.000-07:00

State vets online claims program on hold

2011-10-12T14:40:00.003-07:00

2011-10-12T14:40:00.001-07:00

2011-08-29T10:14:00.001-07:00

Community Rallies Against Mountaintop Removal Mining - ABC News

2011-07-31T08:37:00.000-07:00

Community Rallies Against Mountaintop Removal Mining - ABC News

2011-07-21T08:27:00.001-07:00

Monterey, TN News

2011-07-19T08:32:00.000-07:00

Follow on Buzz

Gang of Six Plan Gains Momentum : Roll Call News

2011-07-19T08:26:00.000-07:00

Gang of Six Plan Gains Momentum : Roll Call News

Uncle Jay Explains: Mar. 21, 2011

2011-03-30T16:19:00.000-07:00

Rep Don Young Urges Producing American Energy & Opening ANWR

2011-03-27T15:21:00.000-07:00

Feel the LOVE on Your Next Virginia Vacation - Virginia Is For Lovers

2011-03-14T12:30:00.000-07:00

Feel the LOVE on Your Next Virginia Vacation - Virginia Is For Lovers

Illinois schools wonder how state budget will affect special-ed programs - chicagotribune.com

2011-03-09T12:23:00.000-08:00

Illinois schools wonder how state budget will affect special-ed programs - chicagotribune.com

New 9/11 Video Surfaces

2011-03-07T09:20:00.000-08:00

New 9/11 Video Surfaces

Cunningham on TBD’s “Capital Insider”

2011-03-03T17:04:00.000-08:00

Cunningham on TBD’s “Capital Insider”

The History of Correspondence to Capitol Hill

2011-02-21T06:57:00.000-08:00

http://www.iLoveMountains.org

2011-02-16T06:50:00.000-08:00

http://www.iLoveMountains.org

Obama vows in State of the Union to veto any bill with earmarks - TheHill.com

2011-01-25T19:35:00.000-08:00

Obama vows in State of the Union to veto any bill with earmarks - TheHill.com

New debt has lawmakers confused

2011-01-04T06:45:00.000-08:00

New debt has lawmakers confused

How DADT Was Repealed

2010-12-19T09:07:00.000-08:00

How DADT Was Repealed

State in black, weak economy triggers cautious budget

2010-12-18T09:06:00.000-08:00

State in black, weak economy triggers cautious budget

The Rap On Lobbyists (song) - LobbyingJobs.com

2010-12-01T07:08:00.000-08:00

What is lobbying and why is it important?

2010-11-30T20:12:00.000-08:00

Major Events Last Week

2010-11-16T13:39:00.000-08:00

Major Events Last Week

Congress - Election Results to Date

The elections for the 112th Congress remain incomplete as the Alaska Senate seat write in count continues and five House seats are still not finalized. There will be at least 95 new Representatives (86 Republicans and 9 Democrats). At least 12 new Republican Senators will take office, along with 3 new Democratic Senators.

Congress - Deal on House Democratic leadership

House Democrats appear to have resolved its leadership positions as the minority party in the 112th Congress. Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) will shift from Speaker to Minority Leader. Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-MD) will become Minority Whip. Rep. James Clyburn (D-SC), the current Majority Whip, assumes a new post, as yet unnamed, to remain the third ranking Democrat. Rep. John Larson (D-CT) will retain his role as Chairman of the Democratic Caucus.

Congress - Senate Leadership Unchanged

No major changes are anticipated in Democratic or Republican leadership.

Medicaid - States Considering Opting Out

Republicans in the Texas state legislature have floated a proposal to opt out of the federal-state Medicaid program citing their belief that they could provide more cost-effective and efficient care by giving up federal funds entirely or by getting federal waivers to provide health care on their own terms. The federal government currently covers 60 percent of the Texas $45 billion biennial Medicaid budget. About a dozen states, including Alabama, Mississippi, Washington, and Wyoming, apparently are also considering redesigning their Medicaid programs. Some are considering eliminating federal financing to give states maximum control while others are considering seeking federal waivers to allow states to change parts of their Medicaid programs. Some conservatives are claiming that if states dropped Medicaid, many low income people would instead receive federal subsidies to buy private insurance coverage through the state health insurance exchanges created by the Affordable Care Act. States would then become totally responsible for Medicaid beneficiaries who require long term care. Health care experts are trying to determine how serious the states are about these plans and whether their plans are even possible.

Fiscal Commission - Draft Proposal includes Significant Cuts to Social Security and Long Term Services and Supports

The Co-Chairmen of the bipartisan National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform released their draft proposal on November 10. The proposal contains a number of profound reductions in entitlement, discretionary, and defense spending. Of greatest concern to the disability community are: 1) Social Security - increasing the age of retirement to age 69 which would disproportionately affect people with health problems as well as persons who receive Disabled Adult Children (DAC) benefits; and 2) Medicaid - capping spending on long term services and supports by creating a block grant. If 14 of the 18 Commission members agree on the recommendations, they will be voted on by the Congress. The sudden release of the draft proposal due to the Co-chairmen's fears of a leak, however, indicates a lack of consensus among its members. The Commission is slated to release its full report on December 1. Whether or not the Commission's recommendations get the support of at least 14 members and proceed to floor votes in the House and Senate, they are likely to influence the legislative agenda of the incoming Congress. See the draft proposal at:
http://www.fiscalcommission.gov/sites/fiscalcommission.gov/files/documents/CoChair_Draft.pdf

Restraint and Seclusion - Bill Not Moving Forward this Congress

DPC staff and representatives of other national disability organizations met with staff of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) committee and learned that S.3895, The Keeping All Kids Safe Act, will not move forward in this session of Congress. It is possible that new legislation could be introduced in the next session of Congress. Senator Burr (R-NC) indicated his continuing interest in addressing restraint and seclusion in schools. Advocates will be looking for a Democratic sponsor given the retirement of Senator Dodd (D-CT) from the Senate.

Medicare - Durable Medical Equipment Competitive Bidding Program Beginning in Select Cities

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) began mailing out letters to beneficiaries in nine communities who may be affected by the new competitive bidding program for durable medical equipment (DME). This program is expected to save Medicare $28 billion over 10 years. The program goes into effect on January 1, 2011 for beneficiaries in the Charlotte, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Dallas, Kansas City, Miami, Orlando, Pittsburgh and Riverside areas. Under this program, Medicare beneficiaries will need to order their equipment from a Medicare contract provider in order for Medicare to pay for it. The DME program includes oxygen supplies and equipment as well as power wheelchairs, scooters and related accessories. For more information about the program visit:
http://www.cms.gov/DMEPOSCompetitiveBid/01_overview.asp

ADA/Public Accommodations - Settlement Agreement with Hilton

The Department of Justice (DOJ) entered into an agreement with Hilton Worldwide Inc to settle an Americans with Disabilities Act Title III complaint. Under the agreement, Hilton agreed to provide accessible hotel rooms and to allow people with disabilities to make reservations for accessible rooms over the phone or internet. The agreement applies to all Hilton hotels as well as Hilton-owned brands including Conrad Hotels & Resorts, Doubletree, Embassy Suites, Hampton Inn, Hilton Garden Inn, Hilton Grand Vacations, Homewood Suites, the Waldorf Astoria and Home2Suites. This is the first time DOJ has required a franchisor to certify that all franchised or managed hotels comply with the ADA. It also is the first time DOJ has required a hotel chain to make its online reservations system accessible and to provide on its website current data about accessible features in guest rooms throughout the chain.

Civil Rights - Department of Justice Meeting

Disability Policy Collaboration staff participated in a meeting of disability advocates with the leadership of the Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division. Assistant Attorney General Tom Perez and his senior staff led a lengthy discussion of key issues being worked on by the Civil Rights Division. The DOJ officials reaped high praise from the disability community in relationship to their work on ADA and Olmstead implementation and enforcement. The participants also discussed other issues related to disability rights.

Developmental Disabilities - ADD Summit in Florida

Disability Policy Collaboration staff participated in a two day Administration on Developmental Disabilities (ADD) Regional Summit held in Orlando. One of five planned regional summits, these meetings are intended to solicit stakeholder views on future priority directions for the ADD. ADD Commissioner Sharon Lewis led the Summit. There will be two more summits in this series - Detroit (December 2) and Denver (December 6). For more information, see:
http://www.envision2010.net/index.php

Victimization - Three Indicted in Hate Crime

A federal grand jury indicted three men in Albuquerque, N.M., on federal hate crime charges related to a racially-motivated assault of a 22-year-old man of Navajo descent who has a significant cognitive impairment. The three men have been charged with one count of conspiracy and one count of violating the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act that was enacted in October, 2009. The indictment includes a charge that the defendants took advantage of the victim's developmental disability to induce him to make a cell phone video in which he purportedly consents to have his skin burned with a heated metal hanger. To read more see:
http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/2010/November/10-crt-1291.html

Major Events Ahead

Congress - Lame Duck Session Begins

They are back! The 111th Congress returns to work this week after a five week recess during which the elections were held. It is anticipated that the "lame duck" session will not last more than three weeks. Facing a huge "to do" list, most pending bills on this list will be postponed for action until the new 112th Congress convenes next year. Bills most likely to be dealt with include extending the Continuing Resolution that keeps the federal government operating without the enactment of FY 2012 Appropriations bills, extending the tax cuts enacted in 2001 and 2003 which would expire in December 31, extending unemployment insurance coverage and child nutrition legislation. Action on these measures will substantially rest on the tactics of each party as Democrats see the lame duck session as the last chance to pass certain laws while many Republicans are expected to stall all but the most urgent bills since they will constitute the majority in the House and have a larger minority in the Senate in the next Congress.

The House will spend most of this week dealing with internal issues such as leadership elections and forming steering committees for the next Congress. The Senate will vote on a bill promoting energy-efficient vehicles and also hold leadership elections.

FY 2011 Appropriations - Another Continuing Resolution Likely

The lame duck session may or may not settle FY 2011 discretionary spending. The current FY 2011 Continuing Resolution (CR) that level funds most federal programs expires on December 3. It is likely that a short CR will be needed before the Congress makes further spending decisions. There are several options available. One would be to pass a FY 2011 omnibus appropriations bill that would finalize all funding throughout the fiscal year. That scenario is the least likely since the Congress has not passed any of the 12 appropriations bills and most House and Senate Republicans would prefer to wait until the next Congress where they will be a much stronger party. The more likely scenario will be the passage of another CR that will expire a couple of months after the 112th Congress convenes. The new Congress would then decide on whether to pass FY 2011 appropriations bills or possibly extend the CR for the entire year.

Health Care - Hearing on Medicare and Medicaid

Senator Max Baucus (D-MT), Chair of the Senate Finance Committee, is holding a hearing on Wednesday, November 16 entitled "Strengthening Medicare and Medicaid: Taking Steps to Modernize America's Health Care System." CMS Administrator Donald M. Berwick will be testifying and is likely to receive many questions about implementation of the Affordable Care Act. For more information see:
http://finance.senate.gov/hearings/hearing/?id=280ebc81-5056-a032-5254-1010c1e9b945

The GOP landslide: World reactions - The Week

2010-11-04T11:54:00.000-07:00

The GOP landslide: World reactions - The Week

7 Concession Speech Dos and Don'ts

2010-11-03T13:09:00.000-07:00

7 Concession Speech Dos and Don'ts

Fightin’ ninth could be an early indicator on election night

2010-10-29T06:14:00.000-07:00

Fightin’ ninth could be an early indicator on election night

Jon Stewart, President Obama debate on ‘The Daily Show’ | The Daily Caller - Breaking News, Opinion, Research, and Entertainment

2010-10-28T12:43:00.000-07:00

Jon Stewart, President Obama debate on ‘The Daily Show’ | The Daily Caller - Breaking News, Opinion, Research, and Entertainment

Virginians considering constitutional change on ballots

2010-10-26T08:59:00.000-07:00

Virginians considering constitutional change on ballots

Legislature likely to cut deep to meet possible $25 billion budget gap | News for Dallas, Texas | Dallas Morning News | Texas Politics | The Dallas Morning News

2010-10-25T08:13:00.000-07:00

Legislature likely to cut deep to meet possible $25 billion budget gap | News for Dallas, Texas | Dallas Morning News | Texas Politics | The Dallas Morning News

Real Economic Impact

2010-10-22T06:06:00.000-07:00

Real Economic Impact

The art of the insult | The Daily Caller - Breaking News, Opinion, Research, and Entertainment

2010-10-20T05:38:00.000-07:00

The art of the insult | The Daily Caller - Breaking News, Opinion, Research, and Entertainment

National debt up $3 trillion on Obama’s watch | The Daily Caller - Breaking News, Opinion, Research, and Entertainment

2010-10-20T03:58:00.000-07:00

National debt up $3 trillion on Obama’s watch | The Daily Caller - Breaking News, Opinion, Research, and Entertainment

More than a dozen House Democrats now want Pelosi out as Speaker | The Daily Caller - Breaking News, Opinion, Research, and Entertainment

2010-10-20T03:57:00.000-07:00

More than a dozen House Democrats now want Pelosi out as Speaker | The Daily Caller - Breaking News, Opinion, Research, and Entertainment

Design Within Reach - Magazine - The Atlantic

2010-10-19T13:28:00.000-07:00

Design Within Reach - Magazine - The Atlantic

Maryland: Deaf woman follows dream to become certified physician assistant

2010-10-19T13:26:00.000-07:00

Maryland: Deaf woman follows dream to become certified physician assistant

Cracking the Facebook Code

2010-10-19T05:32:00.000-07:00

Cracking the Facebook Code

In Tightest House Races, Democrats Maintain Financial Advantage Heading into Campaign's Final Weeks - OpenSecrets Blog | OpenSecrets

2010-10-18T14:15:00.000-07:00

In Tightest House Races, Democrats Maintain Financial Advantage Heading into Campaign's Final Weeks - OpenSecrets Blog | OpenSecrets

Major Events Last Week in the U.S. Congress

2010-10-04T12:23:00.000-07:00

Major Events Last Week

U.S. Congress

Both Houses of Congress adjourned until a lame duck session scheduled to begin on November 15.

FY 2011 Appropriations/Tax Policy

After failing to pass any of the twelve FY 2011 appropriations bills, the Congress passed a simple FY 2011 Continuing Resolution (CR) that keeps the federal government operating at current levels until December 3. This deadline will force the Congress to return for a lame duck session after the election. Passage of the CR came after Republican attempts to cut 5% of current spending and to have the CR in place until the new 112th Congress start up next year.

The Congress took no action on extending all or some of the tax cuts adopted under the George W. Bush Administration. Those tax cuts are set expire at the end of this year. This is another key policy decision that will need to be addressed in the lame duck session.

Health

On September 29th, the House of Representatives passed several bills related to specific health conditions such as heart disease, arthritis, scleroderma, bone marrow failure and concussion treatment. Two bills of particular interest are:
• H.R. 3421, “Medical Debt Relief Act” which excludes from consumer credit reports medical debt that had been characterized as delinquent, charged off, or debt in collection for credit reporting purposes and has been fully paid or settled. People with serious medical conditions and disabilities requiring expensive medical treatments can easily accumulate medical debt. Medical debt collection issues affect both insured and uninsured consumers.
• H.R. 758, “Pediatric Research Consortia Establishment Act” provides funding for planning and establishing up to 20 national pediatric research consortia to conduct basic, clinical, behavioral, social, and translational research and conduct training and demonstration of advanced diagnostic and treatment methods relating to pediatrics.

Housing

The Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee passed S. 1481, the Frank Melville Supportive Housing Investment Act. This bill makes changes to Section 811 program in the Cranston-Gonsalves Affordable Housing Act. The bill establishes new standards for leases to tenants with disabilities and would require HUD to provide housing assistance through local housing authorities. The bill also directs the HUD Secretary to fund technical support to public housing agencies to administer the housing voucher program for people with disabilities. If local housing authorities fail to meet HUD guidelines, HUD could assume control of the administrative functions. The Arc and UCP strongly support this bill and have worked aggressively towards its passage since it was first introduced.

ADA/Title III/Olmstead

A major Olmstead case was settled against the state of Illinois on behalf of a class of 4,300 people with mental disabilities living in large, private state-funded institutions for mental diseases (IMDs). Illinois has agreed to develop individualized plans and make services available over the next five years, including housing, for all of the class members who are interested in moving out of institutions and living in the community. Anyone who wishes to stay in the IMD may do so. Illinois had used 100% state dollars to fund the IMDs and may now use federal Medicaid dollars for medications and health care services class members receive in the community. To read more, see:
http://www.accessliving.org/index.php?tray=release&tid=top683&cid=2al137

ADA/ State and Local Government

The Department of Justice entered into settlement agreements over complaints under Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act with the cities of Cheyenne, Wyoming and Muskegon, Michigan. Cheyenne agreed to make the Taco John’s Event Center, which is used for sporting and entertainment events, accessible by providing adequate parking spaces for people with disabilities, accessible restrooms, wheelchair and companion seating dispersed throughout the arena, and accessible elevators. Muskegon, Michigan agreed to make polling places, its website and curbs and sidewalks accessible. The city also agreed to modify its facilities, including city hall, the police station, the central fire station/9-1-1 call center, the L.C. Walker Arena and numerous parks, community centers and other recreational facilities so that parking, routes into the buildings, entrances, public telephones, restrooms, service counters, and drinking fountains are accessible to people with disabilities. To read more about the settlement agreements, go to:
http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/2010/September/10-crt-1095.html

Under Project Civic Access, DOJ reached agreements with Fort Myers, Florida and Newport, Rhode Island that ensure access for people with disabilities to local government facilities and programs. DOJ has reached agreements with 185 cities, towns, and counties throughout the country under the project guaranteeing access to public facilities and programs for four million people with disabilities. The agreements call for the cities to ensure that all new construction or alterations to government buildings comply with accessibility standards, the cities’ websites are accessible, emergency management information and services are accessible, and city employees are trained about ADA requirements. To read more about the agreements, see:
http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/2010/September/10-crt-1106.html

ADA / Transportation

The Department of Justice fined the Tornado Bus Company of Dallas, Texas $55,000 for violating the ADA. An investigation by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration in the Department of Transportation found that the company had only one accessible bus in service. The company agreed to upgrade its fleet so that at least 50% of the busses were accessible by February 2011, train its staff, and ensure that a wheelchair lift maintenance program is in place. To read DOJ’s press release, go to:
http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/2010/September/10-crt-1083.html

Technology

Congress passed and sent to the President for his signature the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act, S. 3304. The bill requires smart phones, TV programs, the internet, menus on DVD players, program guides on cable TV, and other modern communications technologies to be accessible to people with hearing and vision disabilities. It also requires that emergency broadcast information be accessible to people with visual and cognitive disabilities. The bill was passed with bipartisan support in both chambers of Congress.

Restraint and Seclusion

Senator Christopher Dodd (D-CT) introduced The Keeping All Kids Safe Act, S 3895, an updated version of his earlier bill (S. 2860). Senator Richard Burr (R-NC) is a co-sponsor of S. 3895. The updated version of the bill would allow school districts to include restraint and seclusion in individual education programs (IEPs) only if students had a two-year history of dangerous behaviors that could result in serious bodily injury and a functional behavioral assessment and behavioral intervention plan were developed and implemented by professionals. The bill would prohibit all chemical and mechanical restraints and restraints that restrict breathing. The bill was referred to the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.

Major Events Ahead

U.S. Congress

All is quiet on Capitol Hill as Congress has begun its pre-election recess. Congress will reconvene on November 15th.

Announcements

Autism Resource Center

The Administration on Developmental Disabilities (ADD) in the Department of Health and Human Services awarded a $1.8 million grant to The Arc to establish Autism NOW: The National Autism Resource and Information Center. Autism NOW will help people connect with services and interventions in their own communities. The Arc will work in collaboration with the Autism Self Advocacy Network and Self-advocates becoming empowered (SABE). Self-advocates will be integral in forming and operating Autism NOW. For more information, go to:
http://www.thearc.org/page.aspx?pid=1910

Community Living Services and Supports (CLASS) Web Site

Advance CLASS, the newly formed non-profit organization created to ensure the successful implementation CLASS Act, recently launched its web site. Advance CLASS will address the need for long-term services and supports across the lifespan through education and outreach activities aimed at the federal government as well as the general public. It will provide a strong voice in assuring that the CLASS Act which was passed as part of the health care reform is implemented correctly and provides the greatest benefit to people with disabilities, older adults and their caregivers. The Arc and UCP are charter members of Advance CLASS and the DPC’s Marty Ford is on the board of directors. See:
http://www.advanceclass.org/

Housing Funding

U.S. Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Shaun Donovan announced that thousands of non-elderly Americans with disabilities will receive housing assistance to enable them to access affordable housing. Public housing authorities across the U.S. will distribute approximately 4,300 rental assistance vouchers to this population. HUD is awarding nearly $33 million to fund these vouchers through its Rental Assistance for Non-Elderly Persons with Disabilities Program. The grants are part of the $40 million HUD made available last April to help public housing authorities across the country fund rental vouchers for non-elderly persons with disabilities For more information, see:
http://portal.hud.gov/portal/page/portal/HUD/press/press_releases_media
_advisories/2010/HUDNo.10-214

Health Care Reform Video

The Kaiser Family Foundation has made available a video to help the American public understand the new health care reform law. This short animated movie -- featuring the "YouToons" -- explains the problems with the current health care system, the changes that are happening now, and the big changes coming in 2014. Click on the image to view the video.

Medicaid, Medicare, and CHIP Fraud Prevention Resources

The Affordable Care Act provides new tools to help prevent fraud, waste, and abuse in Medicare, Medicaid, and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP). The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) recently made available a number of new materials relating to fraud and abuse.
http://www.healthcare.gov/news/factsheets/new_tools_to_fight_fraud.html
http://www.healthcare.gov/news/factsheets/tools_to_fight_fraud.html

CMS is also running print ads in Parade Magazine and other publications informing Medicare beneficiaries of ways to protect their identity and personal information from fraud. These ads, and additional resources and materials on protecting against fraud, can be found at:
http://www.stopmedicarefraud.gov/

Medicaid Spending Report

The Kaiser Family Foundation released reports that found states expecting 7.4 percent growth in Medicaid spending in fiscal year 2011 as the recession’s lingering effects drive up enrollment. Due to the nation’s deep recession, states experienced rapid growth in their Medicaid enrollment and spending last year and expect additional growth, though at a slower pace, in fiscal year 2011, according to a survey of state Medicaid officials in all 50 states. States reported an average increase in Medicaid spending of 8.8 percent across all states in fiscal year 2010, the highest rate of growth in eight years and well above their original projections of 6.3 percent growth. Medicaid directors attributed the unexpected jump to higher-than-expected increases in eligible families due to the recession, which pushed the national unemployment rate above 10 percent and even higher rates in some states. Read more at:
http://www.kff.org/medicaid/enrollmentreports.cfm

Disability Employment Month

On October 1st, President Obama issued a proclamation marking October 2010 as National Disability Employment Awareness Month. To celebrate this year’s commemorative month, the Office of Disability Employment Policy (ODEP) released a series of downloadable posters in honor of National Disability Employment Awareness Month (NDEAM) of October. The 2010 NDEAM theme is Talent Has No Boundaries: Workforce Diversity Includes Workers with Disabilities. Posters are available in several languages now at:
NDEAM 2010 Posters

Employment Grants

Today the Employment and Training Administration (ETA) of the U.S. Department of Labor announced the availability of funding for YouthBuild Grants. There is approximately $130 million available for public or private non-profit agencies or a consortium of agencies to assist eligible enrollees, which include members of a low-income family and/or youth with disabilities. Grant funds will be used to provide disadvantaged youth with the education and employment skills necessary to achieve economic self sufficiency. See the announcement at:
http://www.doleta.gov/grants/pdf/SGA-DFA-PY-10-02.pdf

HOW TO: Identify a Job’s Big Deliverables Before You Apply

2010-10-01T07:01:00.000-07:00

HOW TO: Identify a Job’s Big Deliverables Before You Apply

Controversial Ison Rock Ridge mining permit granted | TriCities

2010-05-15T07:58:00.000-07:00

Controversial Ison Rock Ridge mining permit granted | TriCities

2010-03-28T09:15:00.001-07:00

VDOT lays off 678 workers, closes 15 offices | Richmond Times-Dispatch

2010-01-04T13:21:00.000-08:00

VDOT lays off 678 workers, closes 15 offices | Richmond Times-Dispatch

Use of potentially harmful chemicals kept secret under law - washingtonpost.com

2010-01-04T11:07:00.000-08:00

Use of potentially harmful chemicals kept secret under law - washingtonpost.com

An ‘extraordinary’ year in politics - TheHill.com

2009-12-31T07:15:00.000-08:00

An ‘extraordinary’ year in politics - TheHill.com

TN lawmakers seek action to thwart federal health-care bill | tennessean.com | The Tennessean

2009-12-22T06:49:00.000-08:00

TN lawmakers seek action to thwart federal health-care bill | tennessean.com | The Tennessean

More accessible cabs hit cities - USATODAY.com

2009-12-21T07:22:00.000-08:00

More accessible cabs hit cities - USATODAY.com

Virginia governor proposes an income tax increase - washingtonpost.com

2009-12-21T07:09:00.000-08:00

Virginia governor proposes an income tax increase - washingtonpost.com

bathrooms / 21 - Inside Higher Ed

2009-12-21T05:17:00.000-08:00

bathrooms / 21 - Inside Higher Ed

2009-11-04T19:26:00.001-08:00

Legislative Year in Review 2009

2009-08-17T09:33:00.000-07:00

Legislative Year in Review 2009

Details of Kennedy Health Bill Beginning to Emerge

2009-06-05T17:37:00.000-07:00

Details of Kennedy Health Bill Beginning to Emerge
By David M. Drucker
Roll Call Staff
June 5, 2009, 6:40 p.m.
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* Details of Kennedy Health Bill Beginning to Emerge

After months of confidential negotiations on health care reform, details of what the overhaul might look like leaked out late Friday in the form of a draft of part of the bill being written in the Senate by the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.

The draft, which is now making the rounds of Washington, D.C., insiders who are closely following the health care reform negotiations on Capitol Hill and was obtained by Roll Call, concerns the issue of “coverage.”

The document reads as bill language. But Anthony Coley, a spokesman for HELP Chairman Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.), characterized the leaked material as “a draft of a draft.”

“HELP Democrats are still discussing options among themselves and their Republican colleagues,” Coley said Friday evening.

Kennedy’s bill is scheduled to be merged with similar legislation being written by Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.). Both chairmen and their respective staffs have been tight-lipped about the details of their legislation in advance of this month’s scheduled bill markups.

The portion of Kennedy’s bill that emerged Friday was in the form of a 167-page document that began: “Title I — Quality, Affordable Health Care For All Americans.” The HELP Committee’s bill is expected to be more liberal than the legislation being written by Finance.

The HELP bill’s title appears to be “The American Health Choices Act.” Among the mandates the bill would legislate, according to this draft:

• Insurance companies would be prohibited from denying coverage based on a pre-existing medical condition.

• Rates charged would be allowed to vary according to “family structure, community rating area, the actuarial value of the benefit and age.”

However, rates cannot vary based on “health-status related factors, gender, class of business, claims experience, or any other factor not described in the previous [sentence].”

President Barack Obama has demanded approval of major health care reform by year’s end. Democratic leaders in the House and Senate are pushing to pass bills out of their respective chambers by August.

Republicans have been expressing increasing resistance to the kind of reform favored by Obama and most Democrats, but their votes are not necessarily needed to approve the legislation given the Democrats’ healthy majorities in the House and Senate.

Read sections of the HELP draft:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7
Part 8
Part 9

GOVERNOR KAINE ANNOUNCES $185 MILLION INVESTMENT IN CHESAPEAKE BAY CLEAN-UP BY VIRGINIA RESOURCES AUTHORITY

2009-05-08T08:50:00.001-07:00

COMMONWEALTH OF VIRGINIA
Office of the Governor
Timothy M. Kaine FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Governor May 08, 2009
Contact: Gordon Hickey
Phone: (804) 225-4260
Cell Phone: (804) 291-8977
Internet: www.governor.virginia.gov
Rod Davis, Program Manager Liz Bryant
VRA The Alliance Group
(804)644-3100 (804)225-5829
www.virginiaresources.org

GOVERNOR KAINE ANNOUNCES $185 MILLION INVESTMENT IN CHESAPEAKE BAY CLEAN-UP BY VIRGINIA RESOURCES AUTHORITY
~ From 2007-2009, investments total more than $810 million ~

RICHMOND – Governor Timothy M. Kaine today applauded the Virginia Resources Authority’s (VRA) issuance of Clean Water Revolving Loan Fund Bonds to finance $186,186,610 in wastewater treatment and sewer system infrastructure and upgrades statewide. VRA's total investment in nutrient removal for the Chesapeake Bay for FY 2007-09 in all programs now exceeds $810 million.

“The Commonwealth has dedicated more than $1 billion to cleaning up the Chesapeake Bay since the start of my term, and we have made fighting pollution one of our core concerns,” Governor Kaine said. “By issuing these bonds, the VRA continues to be our close partner in all of our efforts.”

The Series 2009 bonds will support improvements to 13 wastewater treatment plants and associated infrastructure owned and operated by Arlington County, the Alexandria Sanitation Authority, the City of Falls Church, the Augusta County Service Authority, the Hampton Roads Sanitation District, the Town of Lovettsville, the City of Newport News, the Rivanna Water & Sewer Authority, Stafford county, the City of Salem, and the Frederick-Winchester Service Authority. The majority of the projects will provide system upgrades to reduce nutrient pollution being discharged into the tributaries that feed the Chesapeake Bay. Ultimately, the upgrades will enhance marine life and the overall health of the Bay.

"These VRA investments are integral to the work we are doing to restore the health of the Bay," said Virginia Secretary of Natural Resources L. Preston Bryant, Jr. "VRA represents the third and critical leg of our sewage treatment plant funding strategies, rounding out what the state provides localities in out-right grants and other low-interest loan programs."

Virginia, along with Maryland, Pennsylvania, the District of Columbia, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, are all signatories to the Chesapeake 2000 Agreement, which calls for each state to reduce by 40% the level of nutrients going into the Chesapeake Bay by 2010.

“Virginians have a very strong emotional connection to our water resources and these bond-supported projects will make the Chesapeake Bay and Virginia’s rivers cleaner,” said Sheryl Bailey, Executive Director of the Virginia Resources Authority. “A cleaner Chesapeake Bay and cleaner rivers will enhance the quality of life where Virginians live, work and play.”

Virginia Resources Authority partners with the Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) to provide below-market rate loans for eligible local government projects.

“Despite the difficulties of providing funds during the current economic concerns for state budgets, the availability of this money maintains Virginia’s momentum toward improving the health of the Bay,” DEQ Director David K. Paylor said. “Thanks to the invaluable assistance of VRA, we are resolving our most pressing water quality challenges.”

High credit quality and exceptional financial management contributed to the bonds’ Natural AAA ratings by Moody’s, Standard and Poor’s and Fitch. Investor demand for the bonds was twice the actual supply – a fact which contributed significantly to the price advantage for VRA. Furthermore, VRA’s use of an array of marketing tools including radio spots, newspaper ads, an internet road show and the www.BuyVRABonds.com website facilitated investor awareness and interest.

For more information on the Virginia Resources Authority, visit their website at www.virginiaresources.org. Specifics on the projects follow, including contact information for media interviews for localization of the story.

Virginia Clean Water State Revolving Fund Revenue Bonds
Subordinate Series 2009 Project Descriptions

Arlington County – This is the fifth loan installment in the CWRLF for upgrades at the Arlington County Water Pollution Control Plant to meet the Commonwealth’s 2010 Chesapeake Bay regulations. The project will minimize the frequency and volume of external bypasses, improve treatment capabilities, address aging infrastructure, increase redundancy and reliability, and meet projected flow requirements.

Contacts:
Larry Slattery, Water Pollution Control Bureau Chief
703-228-6877

lslattery@arlingtonva.us
Phil Loar, Community Relations Specialist
703-228-6867
ploar@arlingtonva.us

Shannon Whalen McDaniel, Communications Manager
703-228-3685
smcdaniel@arlingtonva.us

Mylissa Kennedy, Communications Manager
703-228-3152
mkennedy@arlingtonva.us

Alexandria Sanitation Authority – The loan will fund the Authority’s portion of upgrades to meet the Commonwealth’s 2010 Chesapeake Bay regulations at the Arlington County Water Pollution Control Plant.

Contact:
Karen Pallansch, General Manager
703-549-3381
karen.pallansch@alexsan.com

City of Falls Church – The loan will fund the City’s portion of upgrades to meet the Commonwealth’s 2010 Chesapeake Bay regulations at the Arlington County Water Pollution Control Plant.

Contact:
John Tuohy, CFO/General Manager
703-248-5092
JTuohy@fallschurchva.gov

Augusta County Service Authority – The loan will fund upgrades to Stuarts Draft Wastewater Treatment Plant which will provide nutrient removal to meet the Commonwealth’s 2010 Chesapeake Bay regulations.

Contact:
Debbie White, Director of Finance
540-245-5670
dwhite@co.augusta.va.us.

Hampton Roads Sanitation District – (three projects) --
(1) The loan will fund upgrades at Nansemond Treatment Plant which will provide nutrient removal to meet the Commonwealth’s 2010 Chesapeake Bay regulations. This project is expected to receive funding from the Water Quality Improvement Fund and FY 2009 CWRLF funds.
(2) The loan will also fund upgrades at James River Treatment Plant which will provide nutrient removal to meet the Commonwealth’s 2010 Chesapeake Bay regulations. This is an innovative treatment process, one of the first of its kind in the state.
(3) And finally, the loan will provide for the design and installation of flow meters and pressure sensors at sites throughout Hampton Roads. This is part of the regional consent order to reduce sanitary sewer overflows.

Contact:
Bruce W. Husselbee, PE, Director of Engineering
757-460-7012
bhusselbee@hrsd.com

Town of Lovettsville – The loan will provide for upgrades to address inflow and infiltration and improvements to the wastewater collection system.

Contact:
Keith Markel, Town Manager
540-822-5788
kmarkel@lovettsvilleva.gov

City of Newport News – The loan will provide for sanitary sewer upgrades and rehabilitation, as well as pump station renovation.

Contact:
Steve Williams, Senior Engineer
757-269-2493
swilliams@nngov.com

Rivanna Water & Sewer Authority – The loan will fund upgrades to Moores Creek Advanced Wastewater Treatment plant which will provide nutrient removal to meet the Commonwealth’s 2010 Chesapeake Bay regulations.

Contact:
Tom Frederick, Executive Director
434-977-2970, ext. 103
tfrederick@rivanna.org

Stafford County – The loan will fund nutrient removal enhancements at the Aquia Wastewater Treatment Plant to meet the Commonwealth’s 2010 Chesapeake Bay regulations.

Contact:
Cathy Riddle, Public Information Administrator
540-658-4894
criddle@co.stafford.va.us

City of Salem – The loan will fund upgrades to the city’s collection system to address sanitary sewer overflows and bypasses at the treatment plant.

Contact:
Mike Stevens, Communications Director
540-375-4112
mstevens@salemva.gov

Frederick-Winchester Service Authority – The loan will provide for upgrades to the Opequon Water Reclamation Facility to provide nutrient removal to meet the Commonwealth’s 2010 Chesapeake Bay regulations.

Contact:
Jesse Moffett, Executive Director
540-722-3579
jmoffett@fredwin.com

About the Virginia Resources Authority:

VRA provides cost-effective financial solutions to local governments and other public bodies for projects that improve the quality of life of Virginians. Created by the General Assembly in 1984, VRA is a self-financed state authority that supports community investments in the areas of public safety, transportation, wastewater, flood prevention and dam safety, solid waste, water, federal facility development, brownfield remediation and redevelopment, airports, land conservation and preservation, broadband, parks and recreation, local government buildings, and energy. Effective July 1, 2009, VRA will also service loans in support of site acquisition and site development and administrative and operational systems for local government buildings.

Since its inception, VRA has funded more than 800 critical projects across the Commonwealth representing more than $3.75 billion of investment in Virginia’s communities. VRA’s cost-effective and custom-tailored financing solutions are often what make local and regional projects possible. These financing solutions draw on VRA’s unique ability to issue bonds backed by the moral obligation of the Commonwealth and to provide revolving fund loans to localities at below-market interest rates. The VRA staff offers extensive experience and expertise in a variety of financing techniques and the staff provides ongoing assistance and oversight to localities and their public projects.

This ability to maximize value for local communities with cost-effective and innovative financing options has made VRA a major strategic partner for Virginia communities.

# # #

ADAPT Protesters Chained to White House Gates

2009-05-05T18:41:00.001-07:00

ADAPT Protesters Chained to White House Gates
Approximately 100 ADAPT activists were arrested recently after being fired up by a disappointing meeting with White House officials. At the meeting with the ADAPT activists were Jeff Crowley, Valerie Jarrett, Nancy DeParle and Henry Claypoole (his first day on the job).
Their message was consistent "CCA will not be included in this year's Health Care Reform" and "You'll have to live with the institutional bias." Tell that to those who are dying in institutions! ADAPT activists give Obama a "D" in disability issues for his first 100 days for "Dissing the Disability Community" like this. To read a report from Justice For All.
They're here from all over the country -- Texas, Montana, New York, Pennsylvania -- to protest what they see as President Obama not sufficiently supporting the Community Choice Act, a bill that would amend the Social Security Act to provide those with disabilities and older Americans the ability to use federal funding for community-based attendant services instead of just for nursing homes. To read an ABC News report.
To see a video of Senator Harkin addressing Adapt protesters (Flash video).

Middle Tennessee OP/ED

2009-05-04T20:09:00.000-07:00

With all masks, how can you tell who the good guys are?
Bob McMillan
Herald-Citizen Staff
Friday, May 01, 2009
Some people are getting hot under the collar over the stack of gun bills being batted about by our state lawmakers, but not me. I'm just confused.

With everybody else packing, lord knows I want to take my piece with me wherever I go too. These days, you never know when you'll have to blast a bear or crook and anybody else who steps out of line. It just makes good sense having it and several banana clips of ammo with me at all times.

I just want to do it legally. So, hats off to our lawmakers. They've been busy. Sure, only six percent of Tennesseans have permits to carry handguns and state legislators have spent the bulk of their time this session debating gun rights. Count your blessings. Think of what else they might pass if they had idle time weighing on their hands.

Gun bills are nothing new. Nearly every year they're floated up with much fanfare and... quietly shuffled under the table to die in the dark. Not this year. Tennessee's legislature has been shaken up and energized with fresh ideas. Fresh ideas like...lots of gun bills.

This session has seen bills to snap Tennesseans out of their fog and remind us that we have a right to hunt and fish. In this economy, that could come in handy. Lock and load.

Another would issue hunting and fishing permits to the disabled for free and a third would allow hunters to carry a sidearm when hunting deer with bows. After all, we're not all Robin Hood. Nobody wants to face an angry Bambi with a stick.

Another bill would let judges tote handguns wherever police can. It just makes sense. If anything makes it through a bunch of cops, a judge had better have a loaded handgun within easy reach.

You may not have heard of those bills, or the bill that would allow anyone who's had voluntary inpatient mental health care to apply for a handgun permit as long as the hospital stay was five years ago or more and they have a doctor's statement saying they pose no immediate harm. Sounds prudent to me.

Or, the bill that says if you have a gun permit and martial rule is declared in Tennessee, the authorities can't seize your gun. You may be under water, blown away, overrun by foreign forces, locusts or swine flu but you'll have the comfort of cold steel strapped to your side. They can't take that away from you. Not if that bill passes.

Other Tennessee gun bills would allow you to carry loaded firearms in your car or pickup, allow you to use deadly force in protecting your property and prohibit confiscated firearms from being destroyed. They'd instead have to be put up for public auction, with proceeds going to local law enforcement agencies, which are of course swamped dealing with thieves and bad guys with guns.

Still another bill would allow the service weapon of any lawman killed in the line of duty to be given to their spouse or children.

Clearly, everybody's going to have a handgun, one way or another. And if you should decide to register it, who's going to know? Another bill closes public access to handgun permit data. Why would it be any of your business if I've registered my Smith & Wesson, Uzi or autocannon?

Sure, only one of those is technically a handgun. The other two are just backup. In case you use the permit data to find where I live and try to steal my handgun. That's what proponents of the access closure argue. If you're a crook, you're combing public records and the Internet looking for the homes of people with guns to break into. After all, people with guns have the best stuff. And amateurs are probably miserable shots.

If you haven't heard of those bills, you've likely heard the one about the lawmakers who want to let permit holders take guns in bars and on college campuses, two spots known for clear thinking and ample self control.

Think about it. You've got a legal permit and, naturally, you're carrying your gun. Suddenly, you're thirsty and there's the Red Dawg Saloon and Sports Bar dead ahead. Do you really want to take your gun all the way home before popping a cold one? You can't leave it in your car. Well, buck up. Legislators feel your pain.

On the down side, they've tacked on a couple of amendments to pass the thing. Under the current version, it looks like you'll be able to take your handgun into that bar or restaurant serving alcohol. They just won't let you drink. And at 11 p.m., you and your gun have to leave. You'd think we'd have moved past the days of Wyatt Earp and all his silly rules.

Meanwhile, you've got a kid about to go to college? What better gift could prepare him or her for higher education than a handgun? They need protection from all those professors and their ideas, right? So, why not get them something nice with rapid reload features and maybe a place to hang their iPod?

Going to a state park? Yet another bill would mean that while you're out wetting a line or enjoying the scenic wonders of the wildflowers and the waterfalls, protection will be just a quick-draw away.

All these bills, they just confuse me. Which ones will pass? And which version? When and where can I go armed?

I just think it'd be a lot simpler to let us all have guns all the time, anywhere we want. Think of the paperwork we could avoid.

These are, after all, troubled times. Pretty soon, swine flu will have us all wearing masks. When you can't tell the good guys from the bad guys, I don't know about you but cold steel and cordite sure make me feel like a calmer, better member of society.

Bob McMillan is lead paginator and section editor for the Herald-Citizen.

A New Era for Accessibility

2009-04-12T07:37:00.001-07:00

A New Era for Accessibility

By Paul Harris

An impressive wave of computer-based technologies will soon help millions of people with disabilities communicate, learn, and become more productive workers. Learning professionals are invited to catch this global tide.

Individuals who are blind or visually impaired can now listen to content as fresh as their morning newspaper in the world’s most widely used “talking book” format. The new capability will soon benefit millions of people with visual impairments by enhancing their ability to read and learn.

Thanks to a recent add-on to Microsoft Word, any Word document can be converted with a single click into the globally accepted DAISY Standard for reading and publishing multimedia content, where it can be instantly enjoyed, even on a portable MP3 player.

The application, upgraded in January, was created through an open source project with Microsoft, Sonata Software Ltd, and the Digital Accessible Information SYstem (DAISY) Consortium. It joins a rapidly evolving landscape of accessible technologies that have profound implications for learners and the learning profession.

“The Save-as-DAISY plug-in is an exciting advance for disabled individuals,” says Deborah Kaplan, director of the Accessible Technology Initiative at California State University. Kaplan foresees a day when the electronic environment is designed and built to accommodate individuals with all sorts of physical and mental limitations, and when providing a fully accessible workplace is a priority for every employer.

That day may be closer than we think. Activities underway throughout the accessibility universe are improving the quality of life for every person with a physical or learning-related disability. A dizzying array of innovations is aimed at ensuring maximum access to the Internet and other communication tools for those who face barriers in their ability to use them.

That marketplace pull is being matched by a policy push that has caught the attention of employers, Internet marketers, and others. It includes legal and regulatory initiatives that are increasing the worldwide urgency for design and adoption of new assistive technologies.

In short, accessibility is becoming the new green.

One important driver for these advances is California State University itself, where vision, expertise, and muscle are being applied to the challenge. Using the clout of its 23 campuses, CSU’s Accessible Technology Initiative pursues every opportunity to impact learning, from requiring technology vendors to meet accessibility compliance requirements to pioneering approaches for students to receive and perceive learning in the classroom. It is also promoting universal design in all future-learning-related products.

For example, the following recent accessible technology advances have been introduced with input from CSU’s initiative:

* Virtual classroom. Learning provider Elluminate Inc. offers a web conferencing platform called Elluminate Live! that features closed captioning functionality for learners who are hearing impared as well as enlarged, easier-to-see video and other accessibility features.
* Blackboard’s Version 9. The latest upgrade of Blackboard’s online learning platform, called Blackboard Learn, provides a full range of accessibility features such as embedded text to accompany graphics.
* Apple and Google. Apple Inc. has added accessibility features to its iTunes U, a dedicated area of the iTunes Store for content provided by colleges and universities. Apple also promises to ensure full accessibility of iTunes software and the rest of the iTunes Store to people with blindness using both Mac and Windows operating systems by June 30, 2009. Similarly, Google has added accessibility features in its Google Documents and Calendar.

Another example of product conversion, unaffiliated with CSU, is a Braille printer offered by Oregon-based ViewPlus Technologies that embosses Braille along with a printed page from HP Inkjet cartridges. Called the Emprint, the product is produced under a partnership between ViewPlus and HP.

When it comes to promoting accessible technologies (AT), Kaplan and her staff think big. “We’re trying to institutionalize AT so it becomes part of everybody’s job,” she says. “After all, it’s as big an issue as security, and it should be implemented on an equally broad scale.”

Her message to employers is that when they purchase enterprise software or a learning management system, all of their employees must interact with it. “It simply has to be accessible. You’re losing out on talent when it’s not.”

Benchmarks are achieved in her opinion when an innovation first described as an assistive technology moves seamlessly into the mainstream. Examples include DragonDictate, the original speech recognition application from Dragon Systems.

(It should be noted that in the parlance of the profession, accessibility results from the adoption of assistive technologies, such as a wheelchair ramp to a building. An AT is useful to a wide range of people with and without difficulties and impairments.)

One of the school’s campuses, CSU Northridge, even hosts the world’s largest annual conference for experts to share the latest AT research, best practices, and products. Its 24th CSUN gathering drew more than 4,000 attendees and exhibitors (www.csun.edu/cod/conf). Another popular conference is held annually by the Assistive Technology Industry Association (www.atia.org).

“When discussing the AT field, it’s important to include the large population of individuals with learning disabilities,” says Sam Ogami, an AT expert in Kaplan’s office. “It’s often not apparent when people have such disabilities, and they won’t necessarily tell anyone.” New technologies such as DAISY greatly benefit people with hidden disabilities such as dyslexia, Ogami says.

By adopting technologies that address the specific reading and communication needs of workers, employers increase workforce productivity in ways they may never specifically know about, according to Ogami.

Official motivation

As noted earlier, other drivers of the AT bandwagon are political and legal in nature. Here are five important initiatives certain to impact the adoption of accessibility technologies:

* White House leadership. President Barack Obama has promised to make employment of people with disabilities a priority. First, he is expected to restore the budget and leadership of the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission, which was seriously constrained under President Bush. One obvious focus: the dramatic disparity in employment and salaries between individuals with and without disabilities.
* New teeth to the ADA. A handy club for the EEOC to wield is a new amendment to the Americans with Disabilities Act. Effective Jan. 1, the provision clarifies and strengthens the protection of anyone who faces discrimination on the basis of a disability. That includes workers whose employers discriminate based on a perception that a worker is impaired, regardless of whether the worker has a disability.
* 508 Refresh.’ Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act requires federal agencies to ensure that employees and others with disabilities have the same access to information and data as those who don’t.
It means that federal agencies must procure the most accessible product on the market, a clear business incentive for suppliers that has spawned a spirit of collaboration by the European Union and other governments. A proposed revision of the section, dubbed “508 Refresh,” has prompted a drive for consistency of AT rules around the globe.
* The United Nations. An international push is coming from the United Nations Convention on Rights of People with Disabilities. The initiative is expected to produce an ADA-type policy on a global scale to advance the rights and protect the dignity of people with disabilities.
* Accessible websites. In a closely watched lawsuit with implications for businesses, Target Brands has settled litigation by the National Federation of the Blind for maintaining an inaccessible website. After losing in federal court, Target agreed to pay $30 million and meet specific requirements regarding web accessibility. The suit, filed under the ADA, marked the first test of the statute for relevance to an Internet-based business.

IBM steps up

While such inducements are certain to force-feed the AT marketplace, AT advocates say it’s time for product and learning content developers—and their customers—to embrace accessibility for the right reasons.

“We need to change the mindset of courseware designers, authoring tool developers, and others so that full accessibility becomes second nature,” says Heather Hasner, global accessibility lead for IBM’s Center for Learning and Development. For example, voice recognition software now creates accurate captions and transcripts of spoken learning content, and it should be part of everyday learning tools, she insists.

That will only happen when content developers view people with disabilities as a vital new audience, and when accessibility guidelines are established for authoring tools, Hasner says.

IBM is helping to pave the way with a mindboggling array of activities aimed at making technology and information easily accessible to people with visual, cognitive, hearing, and motor disabilities. Leading those efforts is IBM’s Human Ability and Accessibility Center, an entity that has evolved from its 20-year-old Special Needs Group, which pioneered advances including the Home Page Reader self-voicing web browser.

With the center’s help, Big Blue aggressively integrates accessibility into its product development process, conducts vital research and development, and participates in numerous outreach activities. They range from building accessibility into Web 2.0 technologies, such as standards and tool kits for widgets, to IBM’s Easy Web Browsing tool that improves webpage readability for people with limited vision.

IBM’s software advances include WebAdapt2Me, a tool that enables people with vision, cognitive, or hand limitations to customize the way webpages are presented. Accessibility features are also included in popular software programs including its Lotus Symphony desktop application and Lotus Learning Management System.

To help broaden the reach of ATs, IBM contributes its Accessibility Tools Framework to the Eclipse Foundation—an open source community focused on developing a universal platform of frameworks and tools for the creation of software. It enables developers to build and use various types of tools such as those for accessibility compliance validation and alternative interfaces for people with disabilities.

Other research and development activities at IBM include development of a Web-based tool for the blind to access virtual worlds such as Second Life. A prototype technology provides an interface with virtual worlds that enables people who are blind to navigate, interact with, and understand the objects in the virtual world.

The project, dubbed the Virtual Worlds Interface for the Blind, also relies on a social network of sighted users who add the descriptive information to objects and places in Second Life. The project has been released as a trial on IBM’s alphaWorks.

As with most AT initiatives, the benefits from the project will be broad, predicts Phill Jenkins, a business executive at IBM Research. “Just as curbs designed for wheelchairs benefit others in the real world, we’re creating ‘electronic curbs’ within virtual worlds that assist learners of all sorts, including second-language learners,” he states. When people can see and hear information at the same time during a virtual 3D learning session, better learning is achieved, Jenkins says.

Infrastructure challenges

Meanwhile, a coalition of information and accessibility technology companies is laying the groundwork for the next generation of accessible web-based products. Called the Accessibility Interoperability Alliance (AIA), the global society promotes collaboration of the design and delivery of solutions to longstanding compatibility challenges confronting the AT marketplace.

“We recognized that there were good pockets of activity but little collaboration across the industry,” says Rob Sinclair, Microsoft’s director of accessibility and a charter member of the AIA. He says collaboration is required to solve many problems, especially the standardization of certain application program interfaces (APIs) so products can interoperate seamlessly.

For example, it’s important that any assistive technology, such as a screen reader for the blind, be able to collect information from an application and share it with customers. Solving such user interface problems is the assignment of one of AIA’s four working groups.

Another group promotes the consistency of keyboard shortcuts for AT products used with web browsers, especially for Web 2.0 applications. Yet another seeks to align the leading accessibility APIs used in the industry today, such as Microsoft’s UI Automation and IBM’s IAccessible2, so that they can interoperate. This alignment will enable the mapping of information among these accessibility models.

As part of that activity, Microsoft and Novell Inc. have partnered to help software developers create and deliver accessible products for Windows and Linux platforms. Sinclair says the project will dramatically improve computer access to the next generation of software applications for people with disabilities, especially those who are blind.

Microsoft pledges not to assert any patents necessary to implement its UIA specification, regardless of platform, in the open source and proprietary software communities. Novell’s compatibility efforts also will be open source and will make the UIA framework cross-platform.

Microsoft has for years incorporated the latest accessibility features within its operating systems, of course. The backbone of that effort is its Microsoft Active Accessibility technology, which is designed to improve the way accessibility aids work with applications running on Windows. Along with screen readers, those aids include visual indicators for people with hearing loss and software to compensate for motion disabilities.

Microsoft maintains AT vendor partnerships with some 200 companies. “We divide the AT industry into IT providers, applications developers, and specialized assistive technology vendors,” says Sinclair. “They control both ends of the customer experience: the application for them to use, and the assistive technologies that transform that application into a different experience for people with unique requirements.”

Another important player is the Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C), an international organization that develops specifications, guidelines, software, and tools to help the Internet reach full potential. Its Web Content Accessibility Initiative (WAI) is a forum for industry, the disability community, researchers, and governments to develop solutions under the W3C Process.

High on the Initiative’s agenda is the Accessible Rich Internet Applications Suite (ARIA), a specification to make Web applications and content fully accessible. ARIA addresses challenges confronting developers such as defining new ways to provide functionality to assistive technology.

It all amounts to an impressive campaign to improve the lives of people with disabilities. Yet as usual, the actual beneficiaries clearly extend beyond the target audience. One major focus is certain to be the needs and whims of aging baby boomers, predicts IBM’s Phill Jenkins, who says that as boomers age, they will fully expect to continue using computers and other familiar devices.

“We will end up with a large population demanding accessible interface,” Jenkins says. “The real profit for developers will come in when boomers begin driving the market.”t+d

Opening Doors for Virginia's Veterans

2009-04-03T08:23:00.000-07:00

Opening Doors for Virginia's Veterans

Petersburg, VA - The state's first Veterans Information and Resource Center opens its doors today. The center will serve more than 50,000 veterans in the Tri-Cities area and is just the beginning, as centers are planned statewide.

The effort is sponsored by the nonprofit Association for Wounded Veterans Changing Lifestyle. Tammi Nichols is a community organizer with the Virginia Organizing Project, a supporter of the centers. She's also a U.S. Army veteran who served as part of a combat stress-control unit in Iraq. She says the centers will work hand-in-hand with Virginia's Department of Veterans' Affairs to help bridge the gap between services and veterans.

"A lot of times we come back and we transition right into our lives - our daily lives - but we've been affected. Combat changes anybody and everybody, so when you go to a different environment altogether, it's going to have an effect on you."

Nichols says that while many services exist for veterans, what's often missing is coordination of those efforts.

"What happens is, we have services, but they're not so easy to get to. If they come back to these rural communities, they really don't know what's out there for them. In addition, they must be able to have the particular type of service they need - that service must be available."

In the coming months, Nichols says, similar information centers will open across the state to care for Virginia's more than 807,000 veterans. Nchols adds that the centers also will provide support to the veteran's family and loved ones - all in an effort to ease the transition back home.

How the Economic Stimulus Plan Affects Individuals with Disabilities

2009-02-19T10:38:00.000-08:00

This is an excellent summary of the provisions in the recently signed
stimulus package that will effect individuals with disabilities. Give it a
read when you have the opportunity.

ECONOMIC STIMULUS PASSES CONGRESS & SIGNED INTO LAW

17 February 2009

How the Economic Stimulus Plan Affects Individuals with Disabilities

The $789 billion U.S. economic stimulus package, which was signed into law February 17th by President Barack Obama, contains numerous tax provisions including

$282 billion in tax cuts. Several of the major tax provisions incorporated in the final bill include

[i]

:

• MAKING WORK PAY TAX CREDIT: Creates a "Making Work Pay" tax
credit of $400 or 6.2% of earned income (whichever is less) per individual and $800

for a couple in 2009 and 2010. It is phased out for individuals with adjusted incomes over $75,000 and couples with incomes over $150,000. This credit

is not included in income for purposes of any federal means-tested benefit program. It is included in resources but only after two months. The best and

quickest way to benefit from this credit is to make sure that your employer decreases your withholding to reflect it.

• ONE-TIME PAYMENT FOR SS BENEFICIARIES, VETERANS & RR RETIREES:
Provides a one-time payment of $250 to Social Security beneficiaries, railroad

retirees and veterans receiving benefits from the Veterans Affairs department. This is in addition to the Making Work Pay Tax Credit, and there is no tax

return filing requirement to access this benefit. Beneficiaries will receive an electronic payment within 120 days of the Secretary of Treasury initiating

the benefit. Payment will NOT count as a resource or income for SSI beneficiaries, thus making all beneficiaries eligible for the one-time payment.

• STATE GOVERNMENT RETIREES ALSO ELIGIBLE FOR ONE-TIME PAYMENT:
State government retirees not eligible for Social Security would also get the $250

payment. Also, Sec. 2202 provides for a $250 tax credit (refundable) to those federal and state retirees who worked at a time when their wages were not

subject to Social Security payroll tax. They will have to file a return and this credit will reduce the amount they may qualify for under the Making Work

Pay Credit, if the filers are still working. This group did not qualify for ESP payments last year based on their retirement pensions, which were not considered

qualifying income(although they could have qualified based on income tax liability or other qualifying income).

• EARNED INCOME TAX CREDIT INCREASE: Increases the earned income
tax credit for low-income workers with three or more children.

• EXPANSION OF CHILD TAX CREDIT: Expands eligibility for the $1000
refundable child tax credit to more low-income workers families that don't make

enough money to pay income taxes, reducing the income floor to $3,000 in
2009 and 2010 from the current floor of $8,500.

• EDUCATIONAL EXPENSES: Provides a new $2,500 tax credit for
college education expenses. The credit phases out for individuals earning more than

$80,000 and couples with incomes over $160,000.

• FIRST-TIME HOMEBUYERS: Provides an $8,000 tax credit for
first-time home buyers for homes purchased between Jan. 1 and Dec. 1, 2009.
The tax

credit phases out for individuals earning more than $75,000 and couples earning more than $150,000.

• ALTERNATIVE MINIMUM TAX: Provides temporary relief from the
alternative minimum tax for millions of middle-class taxpayers.

• FOR BUSINESSES

o Allows small businesses with gross receipts of up to $15 million to
write off 2008 losses against five previous tax years. Current law allows

a two-year carry-back of losses.

o Businesses will also be allowed to immediately write off more of
their investments in computers and other equipment.

o Gives a tax break on capital gains from the sale of stock held in a
small business for more than five years.

• FOR STATE AND LOCAL GOVERNMENTS

o Creates a new category of tax-preferred bonds for investment in
economic recovery zones for job training, education and economic development.

o Creates a new category of tax-preferred bonds for the construction,
and repair of public schools and the purchase of land for schools.

o Creates a federal subsidy for state and local governments offering
bonds that give investors credits against their federal taxes in place of interest

payments.

Additionally, the stimulus package included several additional forms of assistance beyond tax relief, including the following provisions

[ii]

:

• AGING SERVICES TECHNOLOGY STUDY & REPORT

o Provides funding to the Secretary of Health & Human Services to
support a study of the use of innovative technologies to assist the elderly, individuals

with disabilities and their caregivers throughout the aging process.

• DIGITAL-TO-ANALOG CONVERTER BOX PROGRAM

o Specifies that $90 million of the $650 million must be used for
education and outreach, including grants to organizations for programs to educate

vulnerable populations, including senior citizens, minority communities, people with disabilities, low-income individuals, and people living in rural areas.

The funds can also be used to provide one-on-one assistance for installing the digital-to-analog converter boxes for these populations.

• EDUCATION EMERGENCY REPAIR & INFRASTRUCTURE GRANTS

o Criterion includes consideration of whether or not current
infrastructure is inaccessible to people with disabilities.

• HEALTH INSURANCE:

o For individuals who have lost their jobs from 1 September 2008 thru
the end of 2009 and qualify to extend their health insurance benefits under

COBRA, the government will cover 65% of the total cost of the employer premium for the first 9 months. Those who didn't elect COBRA coverage at the time

will have 60 days to enroll should they choose. However, COBRA is not available for people whose companies go out of business or drop the insurance.

o $87 billion to support state Medicaid programs.

• HUD PROVISIONS

o Gives the Secretary of Housing & Urban Development broad authority
to waive legal requirements in the administration of housing programs under

the Act, but prohibits the Secretary from waiving requirements related to fair housing, non-discrimination, labor standards, and the environment.

o Ensures that recipients of HUD assistance via the economic stimulus
package must honor Section 8 leases and cannot refuse to rent to Section 8

subpopulations.

• INFRASTRUCTURE DEVELOPMENT GRANTS

o All grantees must ensure that all infrastructure building projects
are in compliance with Section 504 of Title 4 of the Workforce Investment Act

of 1998.

• SMALL BUSINESSES:

o Clarifies definition of "individuals with disabilities and business
owned by individuals with disabilities" within Small Business Act to confirm

the rights of disabled business owners to benefit from the tax credits afforded to small businesses (see above).

• SPECIAL EDUCATION:

o $12.2 billion, of which

§ $11.3 billion reserved for Section 611 of the IDEA

§ $400 million reserved for Section 619 of the IDEA

§ $500 million reserved for Part C of the IDEA

• UNEMPLOYMENT ASSISTANCE:

o Individuals shall not be disqualified from regular unemployment
compensation for separating from employment if that separation is for any compelling

family reason, including the illness or disability of a member of the individual's immediate family (as defined by the Secretary of Labor)

o Those receiving unemployment benefits this year will not have to
pay federal income taxes on the first $2400 they receive.

• VOCATIONAL REHABILITATION

o $680 million

§ $540 million for part B of Title I of the Rehabilitation Act

§ $140 million for parts Band C of Chapter 1 & 2 of Title VII of the
Rehab act

• $18.2 for state grants

• $87.5 for independent living centers

• $34.3 for services for older blind individuals

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[i]

In addition to reviewing the actual text from Division A & B of H.R. 1, The American Recovery & Reinvestment Act, recent information on tax provisions

included in the legislation was further verified using the following
sources: Reuters (13 February 2009); U.S. House of Representatives Appropriations

Committee Executive Summary & Detailed Summaries ( www.house.gov/appropriations

)
; and the Joint Statement on Division B, U.S. House of Representatives Rules Committee ( www.house.gov/rules).

[ii]

All programmatic assistance sections were verified upon review of the 12 February text of H.R. 1, The American Recovery & Reinvestment Act.

Bureau of Labor Statistics Unemployment Rate May Be Dangerously Misleading

2009-02-10T10:52:00.000-08:00

Bureau of Labor Statistics Unemployment Rate May Be Dangerously Misleading

On February 6, for the first time ever, the Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) officially reported the Current Population Survey (CPS), employment data about people with disabilities. These data have been gathered since June, 2008 when six questions about disability were permanently added to the CPS, a monthly survey the federal government uses to estimate the unemployment level and rate.

Having people with disabilities included in the official count can provide important information about who is currently looking for work; how people with disabilities, who are looking for work, compare to other populations, and; of particular employment trends over time. However, this data source does not provide insight into people who are out of the labor force or working very little, which is a significant portion of the disability community and of significant concern to the disability community.

Accounting for People with Disabilities Not in the Labor Force

The Bureau of Labor Statistics unemployment rate only takes in account people who are jobless, looking for jobs, and available for work. The BLS unemployment rate does not take into account people with disabilities who are unemployed and not looking for work. It should not be assumed that if an individual with a disability is ready to work but not looking for work that the individual is not interested in employment, but this is the case with the BLS classification system. The vast majority of the people with disabilities who are unemployed are identified by the BLS as "not in the labor force" instead of being identified, perhaps and seemingly much more appropriately, as unemployed.

How People with Disabilities Were Identified

A secondary issue in using the monthly employment statistic is the definition of disability. The BLS has been clear that the Current Population Survey was not designed to measure disability. The questions currently used are broad in scope, including both health and disability. It relies on the individual to define whether their condition prevents them from working. Someone who is employed may answer very differently from someone who is unemployed or classified as "not in the labor force" but has a similar disability.

People with vision loss were identified by the CPS if they reported that they or someone in their household is blind or has serious difficulty seeing when wearing glasses. This definition was similar to that of the definition used in the most recently implemented National Health Interview Survey (NHIS). Numbers of people with disabilities indicated by the most recently implemented NHIS are significantly larger than numbers of people with disabilities indicated by the CPS. This big difference in the total number of people with disabilities in the U.S. population is another aspect of the BLS employment data that is challenging disability data analysts upon first review of the employment data.

The Numbers

Having mentioned all this concerning information, it becomes even more obvious how the January 2009 labor force statistics that pertain to people with disabilities can be very misleading at first glance.

The January 2009 BLS data showed that of the approximately 27 million people with disabilities, there were approximately 5 million people with disabilities that were employed, 800,000 people with disabilities that were unemployed, and 21 million people with disabilities "not in the labor force." Thus, of the 27 million people identified with disabilities, approximately 21 million people identified with disabilities were accounted for as "not in the labor force". More focus needs to be put on this number of people with disabilities that are unemployed and classified as "not in the labor force" than on the BLS unemployment rate. The BLS unemployment rate overlooks all those with disabilities that are unemployed and not looking for work.

For your additional information, of the 27 million people with disabilities reported by the CPS in January 2009, only 6 million of them were classified as part of the civilian labor force. To calculate the unemployment rate, the BLS divided the 800,000 unemployed people with disabilities into the 6 million people with disabilities classified in the civilian labor force to derive an unemployment rate of 13.2%. It is important to note too that the unemployment rate refers to the rate of unemployment only among those that were identified with disabilities and classified as part of the civilian labor force.

Lastly, investigators may be looking for an employment rate to complement the unemployment rate provided by this data source. An employment rate is not provided. An employment-population ratio is provided. The employment-population ration divides the 5 million people with disabilities that were employed into the 27 million people identified with disabilities to show that the employment-population ratio for people with disabilities was 20% as of January 2009. Investigators should be careful to note that 20% is not the employment rate, but that 20% is the employment-population ratio for people with disabilities as of January 2009 according to the Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Another Update Coming Soon

AFB will be attending the US Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Office of Disability Employment Policy (ODEP) briefing on this labor force data later this week in Washington, DC. Please stand by and look for another update soon as AFB continues to work on this issue.

GOVERNOR KAINE LAUNCHES WEBSITE FOR STIMULUS PROJECTS

2009-02-10T10:44:00.000-08:00

COMMONWEALTH OF VIRGINIA
Office of the Governor
Timothy M. Kaine FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Governor February 10, 2009
Contact: Gordon Hickey
Phone: (804) 225-4260
Cell Phone: (804) 291-8977
Internet: www.governor.virginia.gov
GOVERNOR KAINE LAUNCHES WEBSITE FOR STIMULUS PROJECTS
~ Innovative web portal will allow all Virginians to submit projects for consideration ~

RICHMOND – Governor Timothy M. Kaine today launched Stimulus.Virginia.Gov, a unique web portal to gather project ideas for potential funding from the federal stimulus package. Stimulus.Virginia.Gov will allow localities and citizens to contribute to the decision- making process for the distribution of any federal funds that Virginia receives.

“While we wait to learn what conditions will be placed on the federal stimulus monies received by the states, we want to start collecting ideas from all over the Commonwealth to ensure the money is spent in a timely and effective manner,” Governor Kaine said. “Stimulus.Virginia.Gov will give everyone in the Commonwealth a forum to submit and exchange project ideas. Every locality and citizen has a stake in our economic recovery and should have a voice in deciding how this money is spent.”

Stimulus.Virginia.Gov will be the central portal and repository for citizens, groups and localities to submit proposals. Citizens will be able to view proposals in a web table updated daily.

After the package becomes law, projects from Stimulus.Virginia.Gov will be identified that may qualify for funding. Projects will be evaluated and selected through a process similar to the way Virginia develops its biennial budget. In some cases, the information will be sent to localities and other appropriate governmental entities because they will be responsible for prioritizing projects.

The Commonwealth will be accepting proposals submitted through the web site beginning today with an end date to be determined and announced when conditions and stipulations of the final economic stimulus package are known.

# # #

Coal Companies Spend Staggering Revenue on Advertising, Not Cleaner Technology or Safety

2009-01-14T08:16:00.000-08:00

Coal Companies Spend Staggering Revenue on Advertising, Not Cleaner Technology or Safety
By Josh Dorner, Sierra Club
Posted on January 13, 2009, Printed on January 14, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/http://www.sierraclub.org//119516/

If there was any remaining doubt that coal is about the farthest possible thing from clean, it was dispelled by the disastrous coal sludge spill in Tennessee that happened over the holidays. The spill destroyed houses and has covered a swath of rural Tennessee in over a billion gallons of toxic coal sludge. It has not only exposed the oft-hidden dangers of the coal industry, but also the lax government oversight of one of our country’s dirtiest industries.

A new Center for American Progress report showed that the coal industry's infamous front group, the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, spent a staggering $45 million last year on its deceptive "America's Power" campaign touting the benefits of so-called "clean coal." In addition, the coal and electric utility industries spent a jaw-dropping $125 million in the first 9 months of last year lobbying against federal legislation promoting clean energy and a cap on global warming pollution.

While it has plenty to spend on ads touting so-called "clean coal," King Coal refuses to puts its money where its mouth is. Even as it spends millions to run ads implying that carbon capture and storage (CCS) is here or just around the corner, the industry refuses to spend much of anything to turn its overheated rhetoric into reality. And it's not for lack of funds. The 48 companies that make up the ACCCE front group pulled down a combined $57 billion in profits in 2007 alone, yet over a period of several years they have invested just $3.5 billion in research into CCS.

And what did the famously loquacious industry mouthpiece have to say about the sludge spill? Not a single word.

Deception over the airwaves is one thing, but deception on the ground that puts the public health at risk is far worse. Despite initial assurances by government officials that the toxic coal sludge posed no danger, it later became clear that the
sludge was contaminating vast areas with a toxic brew of arsenic

, mercury, selenium, and other highly dangerous substances.

It also turns out that the Tennessee Valley Authority is trying to do business on the cheap. After ignoring problems with the now-breached impoundment that could've been fixed for just $25 million, the utility's ratepayers will now foot the bill for a cleanup that could cost hundreds of millions of dollars. For example, a 2005 coal sludge spill in Pennsylvania that was 63 times smaller than the Tennessee spill cost $37 million to clean up.

Oh, and in case you were wondering, there's a mere 1300 other unregulated, unmonitored coal ash impoundments across the country.

Josh Dorner is a writer for the Sierra Club.
© 2009 Sierra Club All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/http://www.sierraclub.org//119516/

Environmentalists want EPA to regulate coal waste

2009-01-14T07:37:00.000-08:00

Environmentalists want EPA to regulate coal waste
By Katherine McIntire Peters kpeters@govexec.com January 8, 2009

As the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee hears testimony on Thursday about the massive coal ash spill at a Tennessee Valley Authority power plant in December, advocacy groups are calling for the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate the disposal of coal ash produced by electric power plants.

On Dec. 22, 2008, a dike broke at a 40-acre waste-retention pond near the Kingston, Tenn., facility, sending more than 1 billion gallons of toxic fly ash sludge into nearby homes and waterways and covering nearly 300 acres. It was the largest such spill in the United States.

Eric Schaeffer, director of the Environmental Integrity Project, said there are nearly 100 similar surface impoundment ponds at power plants nationwide. An analysis of industry-reported data collected by EPA shows that many of those "wet dumps" are larger, older and contain significantly higher levels of toxic metals than the one in Kingston, Schaeffer said.

"We don't mean to diminish the Kingston spill at all," Schaeffer said, but the data suggest it might be only a warning of greater problems to come, he said during a Tuesday teleconference with reporters and representatives of other environmental groups.

"Many other communities are also at risk, whether from sudden spills or the slow leaching of toxic pollutants from coal ash into the surrounding environment," he said.

Surface impoundment ponds for the waste generated by coal-fired power plants are largely unregulated. Lisa Evans, an attorney with the nonprofit public interest law firm EarthJustice, said federal regulation was imperative to prevent future breaches. "Nothing less will solve this serious problem and stop the ongoing damage to our health and environment," she said.

In 2000, under the Clinton administration, EPA determined that coal combustion waste should be managed as "contingent hazardous waste," but the agency reversed course that same year in a final regulatory decision after what Evans characterized as pressure from the electric power industry. A commitment by the agency to develop regulations for surface impoundment ponds was shelved after the Bush administration took office in 2001, she said.

"We can only hope that the latest disaster" convinces the incoming Obama administration to act on the issue, she said. Some states, such as Alabama, don't regulate coal waste at all, and many states allow electric utilities to store the waste in unlined ponds, she said.

The Environmental Integrity Project tracked the levels of arsenic, chromium, lead, nickel, selenium and thallium reported by industry at facilities with waste storage sites similar to the one in Tennessee. The group's findings showed many sites had far higher concentrations of those metals than the Kingston site.

Green carpet won’t quite cover Inaugural footprint

2009-01-14T07:33:00.000-08:00

Green carpet won’t quite cover Inaugural footprint
By Jordy Yager
Posted: 01/13/09 08:00 PM [ET]

The carbon footprint of Barack Obama’s presidential inauguration is likely to be huge as millions of people travel to see it — but at least the new president will know that his own footprints will be on a “green” recycled carpet.

However, with an estimated 4 million people descending on Washington, some express doubt that the steps Inaugural planners are taking, including recycling the manure from horses walking in the parade, will be enough.

“Everybody wants to be part of history, but as a result you’re going to have people flying in on their private jets, limousines and SUVs cruising around Washington, D.C. keeping everybody warm, and that’s going to have a big carbon footprint,” said Brian Darling, director of U.S. Senate Relations at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.

“For people to make believe that somehow they’re making this a carbon-friendly Inauguration is really just a joke. If they really care that much about the environment, they would not have these millions of people coming to Washington, D.C.”

But the Presidential Inaugural Committee (PIC) is trying to be as green as possible, including a plan to scoop up all of the manure from the horses in the parade and sell it to a nearby farm.

“We’re committed to holding an Inauguration that isn’t just the most open and accessible in modern history, but also as environmentally friendly and sustainable as possible,” said Kevin Griffis, a spokesman for the PIC.

The PIC has planned to have 6,000 volunteers pick up recycling along the National Mall and the parade route after the day’s events.

And for the first time in history, the next American president is set to take the oath of office on a recycled, solid-blue carpet.

Obama will also walk from the bottom of the U.S. Capitol’s Rotunda steps to the West Front podium on an environmentally friendly carpet runner.

The recyclable carpet on the platform was installed Tuesday along with the runner, which has a blue center and red borders. They will extend about 725 square yards and were made by employees of the Chief Administrative Office (CAO).

Few previous presidential inaugurations have attempted to take such environmentally friendly steps. But the Chief Administrative Officer, who is appointed by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), has been working to reduce the Capitol’s carbon emissions as part of the “Green the Capitol” project for the past year.

But unlike the House initiative, no one is keeping close enough tabs on the Inauguration’s environmentally friendly steps to quantify how much pollution it is curbing.

“Honestly, it’d be something very hard to measure and it would take a lot of resources to measure,” Darling said.

About 80 drapes, cascades and pleated panels were also made by CAO employees using 1,500 yards of water-resistant red, white and blue fabric. The upholstery, carpets and runners used for President Bush’s second Inauguration in 2005 were ruined by the week of snow and sleet surrounding the swearing-in ceremony.

“Many people will be surprised to know how much goes on in the background,” said CAO Dan Beard.

“We’re thrilled to contribute to this historic event.”

But not everyone sees the “green” efforts as having a far-reaching effect beyond making Obama and Congress look good in the public eye for their environmental concern.

“The recycled carpet and all of that probably makes everybody feel better and they can feel like they have a green Inaugural ceremony, but in reality it’s not,” Darling said.

“This is something that’s going to consume massive amounts of energy. If you believe that global warming is man-made, then the Obama Inaugural ceremony will do more to add to man-made global warming than any other political event in Washington, D.C. this year.”

One of the only presidents to hold an environmentally friendly Inauguration was Jimmy Carter, according to Jim Bendat, an Inauguration historian.

“Jimmy Carter was into the recycled paper stuff,” Bendat said. “The official programs — and I’m not sure but I think the congressional programs and the tickets may have been on recycled paper as well. But Jimmy Carter would be probably the only previous president who was thinking about those types of issues.”

The Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies (JCCIC) said it is not certain if the tickets were printed on recycled materials. But the programs and more than 1 million invitations to the Inauguration were printed on Forest Stewardship Council-certified paper — ensuring that the trees used for the paper did not come from old-growth forests.

A spokeswoman for the JCCIC pointed to the fact that it is distributing several thousand programs and that, compared to the millions of people coming to the event, that number was relatively small.

“We don’t have that level of production and waste that one would see at your average football game,” said spokeswoman Carole Florman, adding that she was taking “green” steps herself.

“I’m not printing the hundreds of copies of media guides,” she said. “I’m sending them out as PDFs. It seemed incredibly wasteful, both monetarily and otherwise [to print them].”

The Human Impact: What TVA Isn't Saying about the Coal Spill Disaster

2009-01-14T07:16:00.000-08:00

The Human Impact: What TVA Isn't Saying about the Coal Spill Disaster
By Erin Brockovich and Robin Greenwald, Huffington Post
Posted on January 13, 2009, Printed on January 14, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/119542/

As a result of a 1.1 billion gallon spill of contaminated fly ash, there has been discussion, press reportage and blogging about the environmental disaster in eastern Tennessee. Most of us have seen the pictures -- a 300+ acre area strewn with black and brown muck as far as the eye can see. Houses lifted off their foundations and thrown across the road, yards filled so high with ash that people can't leave their homes without stepping in it, roadways littered with the ash from trucks going to and from the site, and an eerie still where active life once existed. While this story continues to unfold -- as more samples are taken that delineate the true toxicity of this mess, as TVA makes plans to contain and abate the disaster -- there is a story that has not been told. It is a story that must be told. And that story is the lives of innocent bystanders that have been turned upside down by this avoidable disaster.

I learned of this disaster on the news just as we all did. Usually I receive an email from someone in the community where there has been an environmental problem. At first, it was all quiet. About 10 days after the tragedy I got the first email, then another one and another one and another one, and they kept coming. I also started receiving anonymous tips. It occurred to me that maybe more was going on than what I could gather from the news. With an invitation from the community, I decided to make the trip.

Let's be honest. Usually when I am called into an environmental disaster, I anticipate that industry isn't going to step up to the plate and do what's right by the people. Lawsuits almost always ensue; it would be foolish for me to walk into a situation like this without an attorney. Besides, I consult with two law firms in the United States: Girardi & Keese in Los Angeles and Weitz & Luxenberg in New York. I traveled to the area with an attorney, Robin Greenwald from Weitz and Luxenberg, along with some experts. In many instances such as this disaster, government agencies are absent due to lack of funds and can only rely on the information that industry gives them; and industry generally operates under concealment.

When I first arrived on the site, I was pretty quiet. It took a while to absorb what I was looking at. I knew there was a lake but an entire area was gone. I kept wondering "Where did the water go?" I couldn't decide if it looked more like a tornado had gone through, a mudslide, landslide, maybe a volcano erupted or a tidal wave. It is now a "moonscape." The landscape has completely changed. It is almost unidentifiable.

Watching TV never gives you an idea of the extent of damage. It's only when you stand there that you can actually feel the magnitude.

It struck me that I had an unusual taste on my lips and in my mouth. I asked others if they noticed that, and they did. Some experienced scratchy throats, respiratory problems, itchy and burning eyes and tasted what one expert believed to be sulfuric acid. If we were experiencing this much discomfort after a few minutes, what on earth are the people who live here feeling?

The other thing that stood out in my mind was how fortunate it was that this event took place when it did.

What would it have been like had this occurred in the summer during the middle of the day? Hundreds of people boat on this lake. Children swim and play in these waters. I was struck by the number of deaths that might have occurred but didn't.

This corner of Roane County Tennessee is off the beaten path. It is remote, distant from any main street and city noise. It is easy to see the beauty of rolling mountains, lakes, rivers, comfortable family homes. It is serene, a piece of heaven on earth. This was a safe place to raise kids, to teach them to fish and swim, to enjoy family and have barbecues or sit quietly to watch the sunset on warm summer nights. I could see why people live there. Over the past couple of weeks we have had the opportunity to speak with people about life both before December 22. Life in the Kingston/Harriman area was idyllic. It was a place people chose as their home. It was a place that, even if jobs took people away in their youth, they awaited the day they could return and did so as soon as possible. It is a beautiful place, with water bodies everywhere. There are green meadows laced among the waters. These shared memories come to life in the "before" photographs that residents showed us. The pictures show children diving from docks into the lake, people canoeing along the rivers, families tubing in the hot summer sun and children and their dogs walking along the shore. A favorite scene of many residents is the sunset over the water, with the soft nighttime colors glistening on the lake. It went from pristine to profaned overnight.

The "after" picture is nothing but a sludge-filled lake, dead fish and miles and miles of contamination flowing out of control. And what cannot be captured by photographs is the human toll of this disaster. The child who wakes up nightly with nightmares; the woman whose cough is so severe she can hardly speak and has been diagnosed with acute asthma from the ash spill; the tri-athlete who can no longer train in his environs; the families scared to death to go outside for fear they breathe in the toxic ash in the air; people realizing that TVA's recommendation to boil their water before drinking it in the wake of the disaster was a false comfort and bottled water, at their own expense, is the only solution for drinking; and the couple who lives downwind of the disaster who, following walking their dog on a hilltop on a windy night, suffered severe nose bleeds. This is a very frightening time for the people of this community. This community is incredibly brave, but it is also rightfully fearful -- they love their community, their homes, their environment and they don't want to leave, but they also don't want to stay at the risk of their health. They want answers and they can't get them. Many people have the same tale: they call the TVA hotline for answers and help but no one answers or returns their calls. Why does this happen? What did they do to deserve such treatment? I can only imagine the sadness of the families. The whole area looks like a wound on the land. To heal it, it's going to take more than a band-aid and a squirt of Bactine.

The next day of my visit we did a fly over of the site, which showed the big picture. Extending for at least 5 to 6 miles downstream, we could see a plume of this toxic ash floating down the river, resting on the banks. We saw the remaining refrigerator and patch of roof where the now demolished house once stood. We saw a child's trampoline, once in someone's backyard, now buried in TVA's toxic sludge. We saw miles of ash, still traveling down river, contaminating riverbanks along the way. In truth, there are no words to describe the scenes of devastation from this disaster. The pictures are powerful, but they simply cannot capture the panorama of devastation. This was a sludge tsunami -- but one caused by corporate neglect, not natural occurrences. And what it left behind from this tsunami are mounds of toxic rubble where a lake once existed, where rivers flow and where children used to play.

We all wonder what will happen to the ecosystem: the fish and wildlife. The human life. How far reaching is this event? What does the future hold for the public health and safety? Overnight a whole community's lifestyle is gone.

It is bad enough that TVA mismanaged this 50+ year old waste pile of coal ash. But to put salt in the wounds of its neighbors by failing to provide critically important answers and aid is incomprehensible. TVA should have mobilized hundreds of medical experts to go to peoples' homes and answer their questions. They need to be honest and transparent about their knowledge of the make-up of the sludge, what they plan to do with it and how they intend to return life to what it used to be, if that is even possible. TVA should have a hotline that is manned sufficiently so that no one is ever put on hold or, worse yet, not answered at all. The residents of this community deserve to be treated with honesty and respect, and that is not happening. Even local elected officials are letting residents down, spending their time telling residents not to work with attorneys instead of camping outside TVA's doors demanding honest and fast answers to critically important health questions. As you know, we work on the legal side. While we cannot fully appreciate the pain and fear of those who are living the fall out of this disaster on a daily basis, we saw and heard enough to understand that our presence and our voice is critically important to ensure that this community is treated fairly and provided the truth about the present situation and their future. We will continue to aid this community as it struggles through the haze that TVA has created and continues to fuel.

So many questions come to mind but there aren't any answers. My motto has become "Prevention rather than Rescue."

Hindsight always shows how these tragedies could have been prevented. If history teaches us anything, it shows us that yesterday is our "crystal ball." In the now famous case, Pacific Gas and Electric knew that their contamination was affecting innocent people yet did nothing but try to convince people that the poison was good for them.

If TVA knew of leaks years before this disaster and sat and waited, is "oops" we're sorry" going to be enough?

The infrastructure handling coal fly ash in the U.S. is old and needs to be replaced. Can we worry about the cost of replacing the old with the new when health and safety and the environment depends on it? We can see that contamination moves through air, land and water. Can we sit back and wait for communities to get sick when we can prevent it now?

Science usually lags behind the law. But in this case, law lags behind science because coal fly ash handling is not regulated as it should be. And we have a pretty good grasp on the fact that Coal Fly Ash is not healthy.

A poison is a poison. It certainly can't be good for you. Does anyone believe that the arsenic in the fly ash along with other heavy metals won't leech into the groundwater? 5.4 million cubic yards of toxic compounds unleashed into the garden. We don't need a crystal ball to see the rough road ahead.

© 2009 Huffington Post All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/119542/

Virginia Department of Emergency Management

2008-12-30T11:33:00.000-08:00

Virginia Department of Emergency Management
10501 Trade Court, Richmond, VA 23236
CONTACT:
Laura Southard (804) 897-6510

FOR RELEASE AT WILL - Dec. 18, 2008
Resolve to be Ready … Take Time to Make a Plan
RICHMOND, VA -- For a New Year's resolution that's free and easy to do, consider this: take time to make sure your family has a plan in case of an emergency.
"Making a plan can make a big difference in how your family survives a disaster," said Michael Cline, state coordinator for the Virginia Department of Emergency Management. "Resolutions are sometimes hard to keep, but making this decision could save the lives of your family members and protect your property."
Because families may not be together when an emergency happens, it is important to decide ahead of time how family members will get in touch with each other and where they will go and what they will do. People with written emergency plans are better prepared to handle emergencies and recover successfully from them.
Here’s what to do to make a family emergency plan:
• Talk with your family about the hazards and likely threats for your area and what your family would do during an actual emergency.
• Decide on a meeting place if your family cannot return home. Choose a neighborhood meeting place and another meeting place if you cannot get to your neighborhood. Also, if you have pets, choose a destination that accepts pets if you ever need to evacuate your home for any length of time.
• Choose an out-of town friend or relative as an emergency point of contact. This is important because it may be easier to make a long distance phone call than to call across town. An out-of-town contact can help communicate among separated family members. Be sure everyone in your family has this person’s phone number.
• If you are a parent, ask your schools and daycare providers how they will communicate with families during a crisis. Ask if they are prepared to "shelter in place" if needed and where they plan to go if they must leave.
• Write down your family emergency plan. Get printable worksheets to make a plan at www.ReadyVirginia.gov.
Ready Virginia is a statewide public outreach program to help residents learn what to do before and during emergencies. Visit www.ReadyVirginia.gov for information on how to get a kit, make a plan and stay informed for all types of emergencies, including natural and human-caused disasters.
In addition to a family plan, every Virginia family should put together an emergency supply kit with essential items to last at least three days. This includes – at a minimum – water, prepackaged and canned food, a working battery-powered radio and extra batteries, flashlights, and a first aid kit and medications, if needed.
A companion Web site, www.ListoVirginia.gov, is available for those who speak Spanish.
During an emergency, you will be better prepared to safely reunite your family and loved ones if you have a family plan. In 2009, resolve to be ready … make a plan now.

Governor's Commission on Climate Change

2008-12-18T19:23:00.000-08:00

Governor Timothy M. Kaine established the Governor's Commission on Climate Change in December 2007. The commission will prepare a plan for Virginia that identifies ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

During the development of the plan, the commission will take the following steps:

* Inventory the amount of and contributors to Virginia’s greenhouse gas emissions, including emissions projections through 2025
o GHG inventory - final draft
* Evaluate the expected impacts of climate change on Virginia’s citizens, natural resources and economy

* Identify climate change approaches being pursued by other states, regions and the federal government

* Identify what Virginia needs to do to prepare for the likely consequences of climate change

* Identify any actions (beyond those identified in the Virginia Energy Plan) that need to be taken to achieve the 30 percent greenhouse gas reduction goal

The Virginia Energy Plan, released in September 2007, set a goal for the Commonwealth to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 30 percent by 2025. The reduction in emissions will be partially achieved through energy conservation and renewable energy actions listed in the energy plan.

The Governor's Commission on Climate Change will identify additional steps that need to be taken to achieve the emissions reduction goal in a report scheduled to be issued by Dec.15, 2008.

Our Disinformed Electorate

2008-12-18T19:19:00.001-08:00

Our Disinformed Electorate
December 12, 2008

by Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Brooks Jackson

We saw more aggressive fact-checking by journalists in this election than ever before. Unfortunately, as a post-election Annenberg Public Policy Center poll confirms, millions of voters were bamboozled anyway.
• More than half of U.S. adults (52 percent) said the claim that Sen. Barack Obama’s tax plan would raise taxes on most small businesses is truthful, when in fact only a small percentage would see any increase.
• More than two in five (42.3 percent) found truth in the claim that Sen. John McCain planned to "cut more than 800 billion dollars in Medicare payments and cut benefits," even though McCain made clear he had no intent to cut benefits.
The first falsehood was peddled to voters by McCain throughout his campaign, and the second was made in a pair of ads run heavily in the final weeks of the campaign by Obama.

These aren’t isolated examples. One in four (25.6 percent) of those who earned too little to have seen any tax increase under Obama's plan nevertheless believed that he intended to "increase your own federal income taxes," accepting McCain's repeated claims that "painful" tax hikes were being proposed on "families." Nearly two in five (39.8 percent) thought McCain had said he would keep troops in combat in Iraq for up to 100 years, though he’d actually spoken of a peacetime presence such as that in Japan or South Korea. Close to one in three (31 percent) believed widely disseminated claims that Obama would give Social Security or health care benefits to illegal immigrants, when in fact he would do neither.

We’re not surprised. As we wrote in "unSpun: finding facts in a world of disinformation," the same thing happened in 2004 when majorities of voters believed untrue things that had been fed to them by the Bush and Kerry campaigns.

One reason is obvious: Political ads run thousands of times and reach far more people than articles on FactCheck.org. On our best day, we were read by 462,678 visitors. By contrast, the Obama campaign aired two ads claiming that McCain planned to cut Medicare benefits a total of 17,614 times at a cost estimated to be more than $7 million – which is several times more than FactCheck.org's entire annual budget.

There are deeper reasons as well. We humans all have a basic disposition to embrace our side's arguments and reject or ignore those offered by an opponent. Our polling reflects that. After taking differences in age, race, gender and education into account, Republicans were still 4.4 times more likely than Democrats to believe that Obama would raise taxes on most small businesses, and Democrats were 3.2 times more likely than Republicans to believe that McCain would cut Medicare benefits. Simply put, partisanship trumps evidence.

This also helps explain why so many people accept the most preposterous claims circulated by chain e-mail messages and ignorant or irresponsible bloggers. Our poll found nearly one in five (19 percent) falsely think Obama is a Muslim, and even more (22 percent) find truth in the claim that he’s nearly half Arab. Republicans were 2.8 times more likely than Democrats to buy the Muslim claim, and just over twice as likely to swallow the half-Arab notion.

This is "group think" in action. We humans tend to marry, date, befriend and talk with people who already agree with us, and hence are less likely to say, "Wait a minute – that’s just not true."

Consultants also dupe us by exploiting our partisan preconceptions. People tend to believe Democrats are more likely than Republicans to raise taxes, so McCain was pushing on an open door when he repeatedly claimed Obama would raise taxes on ordinary voters, and not just the most affluent. By the same token, Obama found it easy to sell his bogus claim that McCain planned to cut Medicare benefits by 22 percent, because Republicans have a reputation as opponents of social programs.

Voters aren’t highly knowledgeable about government to begin with. Our poll shows that nearly one in three (31 percent) think Congress or the president, not the Supreme Court, have the final call on whether laws are constitutional. Nearly one in 10 (9.9 percent) think Republicans still control the House of Representatives, even though they’ve had two years to catch up on results of the 2006 elections.

And voters, once deceived, tend to stay that way despite all evidence. Nearly half in our poll (46 percent) agreed that Saddam Hussein played a role in the attacks of September 11, even though no solid evidence has ever emerged to support this notion.

None of this bodes well for the future, in our view. Spending hundreds of millions of dollars on campaigns that systematically disinform the public can only make the task of governing harder for the eventual winner. But are we discouraged that our efforts didn’t prevent this? Not at all. If we hadn’t tried, it might have been worse.

Kathleen Hall Jamieson is director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center. Brooks Jackson is director of the APPC project FactCheck.org. They are co-authors of "unSpun, finding facts in a world of disinformation."

The Annenberg post-election poll was conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates International, which interviewed 3,008 adults in the continental United States by telephone from Nov. 5 through Nov. 18, 2008. The margin of sampling error for the complete set of weighted data is ±2.3 percent.

Recession’s Bite Hits Americans With Disabilities Extra Hard They "tend to be the last hired and first fired," says one advocate

2008-12-10T05:16:00.001-08:00

Recession’s Bite Hits Americans With Disabilities Extra Hard
They "tend to be the last hired and first fired," says one advocate

By Amanda Ruggeri
Posted December 5, 2008

The recession's crunch on jobs, wallets, and egos is hitting one group of Americans—those with disabilities—particularly hard.
"People with disabilities tend to be the last hired and the first fired," says Rick Diamond, director of employment services at Disability Network/Lakeshore, a disability rights nonprofit based in Holland, Mich.

Advocates nationwide say they've seen a sharp increase in the number of their clients who have been laid off. And if data from 2007—as well as from previous recessions—holds true for this year, people with disabilities will be cut from their jobs at a rate disproportionate to that of nondisabled workers.
Nationwide belt-tightening has other implications, too. Government funding cuts, decreased revenue in the private sector, and smaller family budgets mean that programs and projects that help people with disabilities are at risk.

The disparity in employment between people with and without disabilities has already been growing. In 2007, according to last month's Disability Status Report, only 36.9 percent of working-age individuals with disabilities were employed. The year before, it was 37.7 percent. But the employment rate of people without disabilities, at 79.7 percent, didn't change.

If past recessions are any sign, that disparity between those with and without disabilities will increase. From 1989 to 1992, working-age men without disabilities saw a 1.4 percentage point drop in employment; for men with disabilities, the decline was 5.5 percentage points. For women, the disparity was more than twice the size, at 9.6 percentage points.

Advocates are seeing that gap firsthand. About half of the people that Disability Network/Lakeshore helped place in jobs over the past two years have been laid off in the past two months. When asked what that would have been three years ago, Diamond stops to think. "I'd say maybe one in—maybe one in—oh gosh, maybe one in 10," he says.

One poster child of this is a client of PRIDE Industries, a company in the Sacramento, Calif., area that employs people with disabilities and helps place others in private companies. The man had worked for eight years as a fork lift driver. Then the building industry downturn hit. "He's the first person out the door," says Mike Ziegler, the president and CEO of PRIDE, which ended up hiring the man.

Losing a job is difficult for anyone. But for workers with disabilities, the effects can be particularly acute. In 2007, nearly one in 4 working-age individuals with disabilities were below the poverty line. But fewer than one in 10 people without disabilities were.

But as people with disabilities tend to work more often than other Americans in jobs that are part time or lower paid, a job is not necessarily enough to stave off poverty. Diamond says that one of his coworkers has noted that of her 70 client cases, 15 of them are both employed and homeless. "Three years ago, I would have said I'm not aware of anyone in those circumstances," Diamond says.

But even the groups that work to help people with disabilities are struggling. Already-tightened state and federal budgets are expected to force cuts next year. And, as in other recessions, some organizations are finding private donations down from past years.

For nonprofit Teri, Inc., which provides 10 residential facilities, three schools, in-home care, and other services to 600 people with learning and developmental disabilities in the San Diego area, fiscal issues almost closed them down.

Federal money accounts for 90 percent of its funding, says Laura White, director of development for Teri. This year, it has decreased by 6 percent; a further 3 percent cut is expected next year. Legacy gifts—the private, typically large donations from trusts, wills, and other sources—are down 25 percent.
And so, when the California budget was stymied for nearly three months this fall, halting a key source of funding, the nonprofit was in trouble. To ensure that clients could still get healthcare and staff their average wage of $11.50 an hour, Teri took out a $500,000 loan. Although the state is responsible for it, Teri has to pay $9,000 in interest.

But at least they could stay open.

"We got down to the point where we had to actually send out notices to our clients, to our families, that said, if that budget doesn't get signed by a particular Friday—it was a Friday in October—we will be closing our doors on Monday. We do not have the funds to go beyond this week," White says. "The governor wound up signing that Friday."

Meanwhile, for companies whose primary goal is simply to stay in the black, projects aimed to help people with disabilities may get left behind. One convenience store the Disability Network/Lakeshore was working with to make its building more accessible, for example, planned to install an automatic door opener. But with sales down 50 percent, they've had to put it off.
All of those hurdles are leading to another trend that worries Diamond.
"I can't think of a person now with a physical disability, literally today, that I'm working with, who isn't also struggling with depression," he says.

Bill Howell, Speaker of the Virginia House of Delegates, will Chair American Legislative Exchange Council

2008-12-09T12:08:00.000-08:00

Bill Howell, Speaker of the Virginia House of Delegates,
will Chair American Legislative Exchange Council

(Washington, D.C.) — William J. Howell, Speaker of the Virginia House of Delegates, was named as the 2009 National Chairman of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) during its annual States & Nation Policy Summit in Washington, D.C. held December 4-6, 2008. ALEC represents a network of 2,000 state legislators who are committed to the fundamental Jeffersonian principles of limited government, free enterprise, federalism, and individual liberty.

“I am honored by the confidence that the bipartisan members of ALEC have placed in me to lead this outstanding organization in 2009,” said Speaker Howell. “Exploring and learning from what other states are doing and recognizing the need to change, adapt, innovate and improve lie at the very heart of what ALEC is all about. It’s what has made ALEC such a powerful force against the status quo and for a more free and prosperous future. I look forward not only to building upon but strengthening ALEC’s reputation as a leader championing new ideas and practical solutions that deliver real results for the benefit of people, taxpayers and businesses across America.”

William J. Howell is the 54th Speaker of the Virginia House of Delegates and has led the 100-member chamber since 2003. First elected a delegate in 1987, he represents the 28th House District, which includes parts of Stafford County and the City of Fredericksburg. Under Howell’s leadership, Virginia has adopted fiscally responsible state budgets with forward-looking investments in K-12 and higher education, public safety, mental health and other core services while avoiding costly new programs. In 2007, Howell took the unprecedented step for a Virginia House Speaker of sponsoring and successfully enacting a comprehensive transportation plan with significant institutional reforms, historic land use changes and over $3 billion in statewide and regional funding for roads, rail and transit. He has championed improving health care access and the Medicaid program through greater choice, better quality and cost savings. A strong supporter of restoring the Chesapeake Bay, he also led the effort to enact Virginia’s national model program for open-spaces land preservation using free-market principles. Howell has been a member of ALEC’s Board of Directors since 2003. ALEC honored Howell as State Legislator of the Year in 2001.

During ALEC’s 2008 States & Nation Policy Summit, hundreds of state legislators from across the United States gathered for three days of intensive discussions on the critical issues facing the states and nation, to share their knowledge and experiences with each other, and to hear from national leaders.

ALEC is renowned for developing cutting edge legislative policy and garnering top policy speakers. This year’s speakers included: Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels; former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Newt Gingrich; syndicated columnist Amity Shlaes, author of The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression; U.S. Rep. Mary Fallin (OK); and U.S. Rep. Tom Price (GA).

###

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is the nation's largest nonpartisan, individual membership organization of state legislators, with over 2,000 legislator members from all fifty states, and 85 former members serving in the U.S. Congress. www.alec.org

Va. GOP Leader's Tenure at Crossroad

2008-12-05T07:11:00.000-08:00

Va. GOP Leader's Tenure at Crossroad
Election Losses, Missteps Too Much For Some Activists

By Anita Kumar
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, December 5, 2008; B01

RICHMOND, Dec. 4 -- Several prominent Republican activists want to remove the state chairman after a series of missteps, internal disagreements and the party's worst losses in Virginia in a generation.

Del. Jeffrey M. Frederick (R-Prince William) campaigned for the job of chairman six months ago as a young, energetic leader who blamed his predecessor for failures at the polls. But many now consider his short tenure a failure.

The state party's governing body might try to remove Frederick at its meeting at the Homestead Resort in Hot Springs, Va., on Friday or at an unscheduled emergency meeting in the next couple of months, several party sources said.

"He's not the right face for our party," said James Rich, chairman of the 10th Congressional District Republican Committee and a member of the State Central Committee. "There's no credibility there. He's a joke, like something you would see on Jay Leno."

Last month, Republicans lost a U.S. Senate seat, three U.S. House seats and their 44-year-old hold on Virginia's 13 presidential electoral votes. Frederick's critics said his lackluster fundraising, his disputes with Sen. John McCain's campaign team and his ill-timed remark comparing Sen. Barack Obama to Osama bin Laden did nothing to help.

Longtime Northern Virginia GOP strategist J. Kenneth Klinge, who has been helping elect Republicans in Virginia for more than four decades, sent an e-mail to thousands of activists blaming Frederick for the outcome and calling on him to resign.

"I know a bad chairman when I see one," wrote Klinge, who has also donated to Democrats. "Frederick ranks as the worst state chairman in the history of the Republican Party of Virginia."

Frederick, one of the House's most conservative members, acknowledged that he has been unable to meet all his goals because of the time spent preparing for the Nov. 4 election. But he said he plans to focus on those priorities now instead of worrying about keeping his job.

"Many of the things are on track, and I'm excited by the opportunity we have," he said. "I can't spend a bunch of time looking behind. I have to focus on what we need to do to win in 2009."

Still, Frederick has been trying to calm concerns by calling State Central Committee members and elected leaders, including Attorney General Robert F. McDonnell, Lt. Gov. Bill Bolling, House Speaker William J. Howell (Stafford) and Senate Minority Leader Thomas K. Norment Jr. (James City).

Although frustrated, some Republican activists have said that Frederick has allayed their concerns and that they intend to give him more time. "He's working hard to bring about organizational changes, and I think we need to give him a chance to do that,'' Bolling said. "We need to give him a chance to succeed."

Frederick does have a small circle of defenders who credit him with increasing the party's ranks.

"I do not blame individual leaders for the historic loss. I certainly do not hold Jeff Frederick personally responsible," said Gary Byler, chairman of the 2nd Congressional District Republican Committee and a member of the State Central Committee. But, he added, "My view is not universally held."

State Central Committee members who were interviewed said it is unlikely that Frederick will be removed Friday when hundreds of activists gather at the posh mountain resort for the annual GOP Advance. The committee did not put a discussion of Frederick's future on its agenda. If 75 percent of members agree to waive the rules, they say, they could add it.

"The Advance is his chance to explain to State Central Committee why he is the one to lead," said Jerry Kilgore, former attorney general and the Republican nominee for governor in 2005.

The 86-member committee that controls Frederick's fate includes the influential chairman of the state's 11 congressional districts.

Frederick, 33, stunned Republican leaders in May when a coalition of social and anti-tax conservatives helped him defeat party elder John H. Hager, a moderate former lieutenant governor, for the top job. Frederick announced a 100-day plan, pledging to shake up the staff and change operations by boosting technology.

But some have complained that Frederick failed as a fundraiser and delayed improvements, including updating the party's Web site. Frederick fought with McCain's campaign team over strategy and resources. In mid-October, tensions between the two camps worsened when Frederick compared Obama to bin Laden, saying "both have friends that bombed the Pentagon." The remark generated hate mail, national media attention and a public rebuke from McCain.

"The comment didn't need to be said," Frederick said this week. "It wasn't wrong. It wasn't false. But was it worth everything? No."

The party has swapped leaders four times in as many years, and some Republicans say it would be detrimental to change again. Next year, Virginians will elect a governor, lieutenant governor and attorney general as well as all 100 members of the House of Delegates.

McDonnell, the likely Republican nominee for governor, would not say this week whether Frederick should stay. He said the "party apparatus" would decide the future of the chairman's job and that "effective candidates," not a chairman, are the most important factor in next year's elections.

Class Action Suit Against the Social Security Administration

2008-12-02T10:14:00.000-08:00

Class Action Suit Against the Social Security Administration

October 2008
Notice of Class Action

This notice contains important information for you:

IF: You apply for or receive retirement, survivors, or disability insurance benefits or Supplemental Social Security Income (SSI) payments from Social Security;

OR IF: You are the representative payee for an individual who receives Social Security benefits or SSI;

AND: You have a visual impairment that substantially limits your ability to see, so that you require materials to be in an accessible format in order to participate in these programs.

A federal court has authorized a class action lawsuit against the Social Security Administration (SSA) on behalf of people with visual impairments who require communications from SSA to be in an accessible format in order to participate in the Social Security or SSI programs. The court has authorized two classes: If you have a visual impairment that substantially limits the major life activity of seeing and you (1) apply for or are receiving Social Security or SSI benefits, or (2) are the representative payee for a Social Security beneficiary or SSI recipient, then you are a member of at least one of the two classes. This means that the court's decision in this case may affect your rights. The case, called American Council of the Blind v. Astrue, No. C05-04696, is pending in the Federal district court in San Francisco, California.

The plaintiffs are asking the court to find that SSA has violated a federal law called the Rehabilitation Act. The Rehabilitation Act says disabled individuals cannot be denied meaningful access to Federal programs and benefits. Plaintiffs, who include the American Council of the Blind, are asking the court to order SSA to provide communications in alternative formats such as Braille, large print, electronic mail, computer disk, and audio recording to make sure that people with visual impairments have meaningful access to SSA's programs. This case does not include any claims for money damages.

This notice tells you about your right to intervene in this case, submit comments, and how to contact plaintiffs' class counsel. You do not have to intervene or take any action in response to this notice in order to be included in the class or affected by the outcome of the case. If you want to intervene or have questions about this case, you should contact class counsel listed below at either the toll-free 800 number or the email provided at the end of this notice by December 31, 2008.

The court would like maximum input from the class members. The same number and email may be used to provide class counsel with suggestions about how SSA can effectively communicate with people who have visual impairments. You should give class counsel your comments by December 31, 2008.

Please do not telephone the court, the court clerk's office, or SSA for information about this case. If you require this notice in an alternative format such as Braille, large font print, audio recording or computer disk, please leave your name, request and delivery address at the number or email listed below.

Arlene B. Mayerson
Silvia Yee
Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund, Inc. (DREDF)
1-800-348-4232
ssaclassaction@dredf.org

Proving a disability is about to get much easier

2008-12-02T06:22:00.000-08:00

Effective Jan. 1, the Americans With Disabilities Act will be amended to make important changes in the definition of the word "disability."

The amendments retain the basic definition of disability as: (1) an impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities; (2) a record of such an impairment; or (3) being regarded as having such an impairment.
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But the amendments change the way these statutory terms will be interpreted in some significant ways.

Beginning with a U.S. Supreme Court case in 1999, courts have held that workers who had an impairment that substantially limited a major life activity, but whose impairment could be corrected by eyeglasses, medication or other measures, were not disabled.

This led to the anomalous result that companies could refuse to hire a person because he or she was epileptic or diabetic, but the applicant couldn't sue under the ADA if the condition was controlled by medication because he or she didn't meet the definition of disabled.

Under the amendments, other than ordinary eyeglasses or contact lenses, mitigating measures can't be considered in assessing whether a person is disabled.
'Disability' redefined

The amendments expand the definition of "major life activities" by providing two nonexhaustive lists:

The first list includes many activities that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has recognized, such as walking, as well as activities that the EEOC hadn't recognized, such as reading, bending and communicating.

The second list includes major body functions, such as functions of the immune system, normal cell growth, digestive, bowel, bladder, neurological, brain, respiratory, circulatory, endocrine and reproductive functions.

The amendments lower the bar for ADA coverage and instruct the EEOC to issue regulations that redefine the term "disability" more broadly.

The amendments clarify that impairments that are episodic or in remission are disabilities if they would substantially limit major life activities when active.

The legislation also clarifies that a person can be regarded as disabled if he can show that he was discriminated against because of a perceived impairment, unless the impairment is transitory or minor.

Changing prior court holdings, the amendments make it clear that a worker does not have to show that the perceived impairment would have substantially limited a major life activity.

Finally the new legislation emphasizes that "disability" is to be broadly, and not narrowly, construed.

Barbara Moss is an attorney with the law firm of Stites & Harbison who concentrates her practice on workplace issues. Moss writes a column for The Tennessean on small-business practices and the law. Contact her at barbara.moss@stites.com.

Why Republicans are losing their hold on suburban America.

2008-12-01T06:07:00.000-08:00

Blueburbs
October 2008 By ALAN GREENBLATT

Why Republicans are losing their hold on suburban America.

Jeanne Kirkton was out canvassing a few weeks ago along Lilac Avenue in Webster Groves, an old rail-line suburb 5 miles west of St. Louis. Lilac is a street of modest ranch houses and fine old trees, where lots of longtime residents — some well into their 80s — live next door to homes where yappy dogs pose a threat to the slumber of newborns. Kirkton is a Democrat running for the Missouri House. The first voter she encounters on the 600 block of Lilac is an older woman who promptly declares herself a Republican. Kirkton asks her whether she supports stem-cell research. When the woman says she does, Kirkton agrees, and informs her that "that's an issue where I differ with my opponent."
October cover

Kirkton has gotten used to running on "reverse wedge issues," trying to turn policy decisions that have profited Missouri Republicans against them in an affluent suburban area where public opinions are shifting. There are signs that the strategy is working. No Democrat has won in this district since its creation in 1966. But four years ago, Kirkton nearly unseated Mike Gibbons, now the state Senate president pro tem, by making an issue of his decisive vote to allow gun owners to carry concealed weapons. Kirkton actually beat Gibbons within the House district where she's now running. Today, area Republicans concede that she is well positioned to win a seat the GOP never had to worry about in the past.

For the past 32 years, Webster Groves has been represented in the Missouri House by Republican women with moderate to liberal positions on abortion and other social issues. They were able to attract independents and even some Democratic voters, while maintaining the loyalty of Republicans drawn to the party primarily by its anti-tax stance. In the primary this August, however, GOP voters rejected a moderate female candidate in favor of Randy Jotte, a man who takes a hard line against abortion and favors school vouchers. "I would think Kirkton's road is a little easier than Randy's, in terms of the perspective of the voters," says Laura Arnold, a political scientist at Webster University.

Republicans already have lost their majority status in St. Louis County, a collection of suburbs that fan out west from the St. Louis city line. There was a time not too long ago when the GOP assumed it could win statewide by carrying the county. Now it has to find its margins elsewhere, because St. Louis County has grown reliably Democratic over the past dozen years or so. That's in part due to demographic changes, such as the increasing presence of African Americans, who made up 14 percent of the population in 1990 but comprise 22 percent today. But it's also due to what Terry Jones, a University of Missouri-St. Louis political scientist, calls the "rejection of the social conservatism of the Republican Party by more urbanized and suburban voters. The Republican Party has set its course by appealing to rural and exurban issues in Missouri," Jones says. "That's turned off some suburban voters."

What's happening in St. Louis County is taking place in most of metropolitan America. Suburban voters, who will cast the majority of the votes in this year's election, are starting to tilt away from the GOP. Suburban newcomers, including minorities and immigrants who no longer cluster in core cities — are leaning Democratic. Since 2004, Democratic takeovers of the Minnesota House, the Virginia Senate and both chambers of the Colorado legislature all have been the result of Republicans losing their hold on suburban territory.

This year, Ohio Democrats are pinning their hopes of winning the state House on four districts in suburban Franklin County, outside Columbus. Democratic dreams of ending the GOP's decades-old majority in the New York Senate also come down to suburban seats, both around New York City and Upstate. Last year, Democrats won their first Senate seat on Long Island in more than two decades. Control of the Pennsylvania House will turn on the question of whether Democrats can maintain or even expand on their recent strength in the suburbs around Philadelphia. "The so-called inner-ring suburbs are now almost as dense and almost as politically Democratic as the central cities," says Lawrence Levy, director of the Center for Suburban Studies, at Long Island's Hofstra University.
Republican suburban vote

The result is that in some of the larger states, including Pennsylvania, New York and Illinois, Democrats have put statewide offices nearly out of reach for most Republicans. "The expectation used to be that the Republican vote in the suburbs would offset our loss in the city," says John Hancock, lead consultant to Missouri's Republican gubernatorial nominee, Kenny Hulshof. "Now their circle has gotten bigger to take in suburban areas and even some of the exurban areas."

The urbanization and Democratic "bluing" of the suburbs isn't happening everywhere. Suburbs in the nation's South and Southwest remain very much available to the GOP. In Georgia, Republicans owe their legislative majorities to suburban districts breaking for them over the past decade. Even outside the Sun Belt, less populated outer-ring or "fringe" suburbs continue to favor Republicans. President Bush carried 97 of the nation's 100 fastest-growing counties in 2004, a reflection of continuing Republican strength in lands of big houses on sprawling lots.

But in Missouri, as the Democratic core vote continues to extend outward from the central city of St. Louis, Republicans are left with less room with which to work. Although they have dominated state politics in recent years, they must turn out voters en masse in dozens of sparsely populated rural and exurban counties in order to offset not just the big cities but also their losses in the suburbs. "Running statewide for a Republican is a harder challenge," says Gibbons, the GOP state Senator who now is running for attorney general. "You have to gain a substantial margin in the smaller counties. That means you have to travel all over the state, and you also have to compete in suburban areas to hold them close."
“De Facto Blunt”

Missouri is a classic bellwether, having voted for the winning presidential candidate in every election but one over the past century. It is part Midwestern and part Southern. Large sections of the state maintained Civil War-era electoral patterns into the 1990s, when conservative rural voters finally broke their historic allegiance to the Democrats and began supporting the GOP. After half a century out of power in Jefferson City, Republicans took control of the state Senate in 2001 and the House a year later.

Conditions this year nevertheless favor Jay Nixon, the state attorney general running for governor on the Democratic ticket, in large part because of the unpopularity of the state's departing Republican governor, Matt Blunt. Nixon has enjoyed advantages in polls, name recognition and fundraising all year. He has been careful to position himself as a moderate Democrat, opposing gay marriage and supporting the death penalty. But his campaign has been based largely on portraying Republican Hulshof as a de facto Blunt, blaming the congressman for the perceived failures of the outgoing administration. Blunt severely cut Medicaid and sold off assets of the state's student loan operation to pay for construction projects. Those moves were received so poorly that Blunt would almost certainly have lost a bid for a second term, had he tried for it.

For his part, Hulshof has sought to position himself as an outsider, despite his dozen years in Congress, by noting that he has never held state office. He has blasted Nixon for promoting a health care expansion that he argues the state can't afford. His main task, though, has been in rebuilding the Republican coalition after a close primary. He's almost certain to win over the rural areas that broke strongly for his primary opponent, state Treasurer Sarah Steelman. But he faces a formidable obstacle in the suburbs. In order to counter Democratic strength in St. Louis, Kansas City and now St. Louis County, says political scientist Terry Jones, "a Republican needs to get over 55 percent in the major exurban counties — Platte and Clay, outside of Kansas City, and St. Charles and Jefferson, in the St. Louis area."

That will be difficult. Democrat Nixon hails from Jefferson County himself, and may even carry it this year. But Nixon doesn't need to carry Jefferson or St. Charles — he just needs to keep them close. "It's not that statewide Democrats or Barack Obama are going to win St. Charles County," says Tommy Roberts, a county councilman and the Democrats' local chair, "but if we get 47 percent of the vote, we're going to win statewide."
Invading St. Charles

The idea of running competitively in the St. Louis exurbs has suddenly become a central element in the Democratic playbook, thanks to a seemingly risky strategy in 2006 by Claire McCaskill, the Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate. McCaskill declared victory on election night while she was still 70,000 votes down in the statewide count. The reason she was confident she'd ultimately prevail was that she had seen the returns from St. Charles County. She lost the county — but she had cut her opponent's margin there sufficiently from her loss to Blunt in the 2004 gubernatorial race that she knew she'd win statewide. This turned out, indeed, to be the case, and was the culmination of her decision to compete in areas usually ignored by other Democrats. "What McCaskill did is, she showed us we have to campaign in every county," says Sam Page, the Democratic nominee for lieutenant governor. "You look at every part of your state and improve your margin."

Democrats need to gain 11 seats statewide to take over the Missouri House next year. They are hoping to gain at least two of them in St. Charles County. The odds are long against their taking control this year, but the fact that there are three competitive elections for the House in St. Charles represents a startling turnaround.

Republicans have ruled the county, northwest of St. Louis, for the past 30 years. Over that time, St. Charles became one of the two richest sources of votes for statewide GOP candidates, and it has not elected a Democrat in any of its nine House districts in six years. Given those odds, Democrats frequently haven't even bothered running candidates in several of the districts. "We were in power 30 years ago," says Kristy Manning, a Democratic House candidate in the city of St. Peters. "But then Republicans started taking over and I think people got comfortable not doing anything."

Lately, though, the southeastern part of the county has become friendlier to Democrats, largely due to in-migration from north St. Louis County. All the precincts along St. Charles' southeastern border between the Missouri River and the Lewis and Clark Trail in the city of St. Charles supported John Kerry for president in 2004. In a couple of recent state House contests, Democrats came up just a few hundred votes short. As Manning walks along the cul-de-sacs that curve off Jungermann Road in St. Peters, she finds herself receiving thumbs up signs from many residents — not in response to her pledges to bring down college costs or expand access to health care, but when she shares with them the simple fact that she's a Democrat. "The Democratic population is going up slightly," concedes her opponent, GOP state Representative Mark Parkinson. "But if you're right on the issues, you can win."

Parkinson won his seat in a special election this February by 315 votes. He jokes that his short time in office means he's "half of an incumbent," but he makes the most out of the name recognition and record he's achieved thus far, hailing his endorsement from Missouri Right to Life. Walking door to door through a subdivision near Laurel Park in St. Peters, Parkinson wears a U.S. Border Patrol ballcap and notes his co-sponsorship of Missouri's new law that steps up penalties on illegal immigrants. "In my opinion, it doesn't go far enough," he says. "I would make it a felony for an employer who knowingly hires or harbors illegals."

If Parkinson is aggressive about touting his conservative credentials, Manning makes a softer pitch. She tells voters that, as an aide to Democratic state Senator Joan Bray, she's had to "work across the aisle" to overcome the partisanship in Jefferson City and get things done. Bray, however, hails from a more liberal district in St. Louis County, and Democrats worry that Bray's policy stances might be used against Manning. Passing a car whose bumper sticker advertises that it's "insured by Smith & Wesson," Manning says, "I don't have a problem with the Second Amendment, but my boss does, so I may get stigmatized."
A New Democratic Breed?

Many of the newcomers to St. Charles County are union members, and most are Catholics. They bear a striking resemblance to the blue-collar "Reagan Democrats" whom Democrats alienated in the 1970s, and whose loyalties Barack Obama is struggling to regain this year. They tend to be bread-and-butter liberals on economic issues but strongly in favor of gun owners' rights and opposed to abortion.

Their votes this year, in both presidential and state balloting, will be crucial in many places besides suburban St. Louis. In Macomb County, Michigan, the place where the term Reagan Democrat was born in the 1980s, recent polling has shown support for John McCain over Obama, with white working-class voters expressing concerns about the Democratic nominee's experience and values.

Next door in suburban Oakland County, however, Obama holds the lead in a jurisdiction that has historically provided Michigan Republicans with a rich vein of votes. Five years ago, Democrats held only six of the 25 Oakland County commission seats; this year they are poised to win the 13th seat they need to take control for the first time since the commission was created in the mid-1960s. Oakland is an affluent, well-educated county with some of the best-funded school districts in the state. The fact that it's becoming more Democratic even as Macomb is flirting with Republicans is one small illustration of the current complexities of suburban allegiance. "Basically, the more prosperous suburbs seem to be more open to the Democratic appeals than the working-class suburbs," says political analyst Rhodes Cook, "which is really a change from a decade ago."

It's these sorts of upscale, highly educated voters that Jeanne Kirkton is targeting in her Webster Groves House campaign. Stem-cell research is an issue that's lost salience in most places, but Kirkton may be right in guessing it can bring local voters over to her side. Missouri voted only narrowly to approve a 2006 ballot measure to allow stem-cell research. But the measure passed overwhelmingly within the Webster Groves district, garnering 61 percent of the vote, and since then, voters there have expressed some resentment at the reluctance of the Republican legislature to fund it. Guns also remain a concern: Webster Groves cast the largest vote in the state against a concealed-carry proposition in 1999.

In 2004, President Bush carried the Webster Groves House district by 49 votes out of nearly 10,000 cast. Claire McCaskill collected 53 percent in her bid for governor. Two years later, McCaskill was up to 55 percent in her campaign for the U.S. Senate. "We were traditionally called a major Republican district," says Webster Groves Mayor Gerry Welch. "People will give us that label. I don't think that's the case anymore."

Randy Jotte, the Republican running against Kirkton, prefers to avoid party labels. He ran as an independent for an Ohio state Senate seat in 2000, taking just 4 percent of the vote. He says that experience taught him that people depend on party affiliation "to have a sense of who you may be," but he says that Webster Groves voters consistently demonstrate their political independence, "looking at individual candidates, digging in deeper." He points out that they have not been shy about going to the ballot to overturn city council decisions, as with a recent vote to block a redevelopment plan for a large plot of land across from City Hall. Passing by the light-rail line that bisects the county, Jotte calls it "the frontline of the frontlines. St. Louis is Democratic and from here west it's all Republicans."

In order to hold on to their majority in the legislature, Jotte believes, the GOP has to keep winning in traditionally Republican districts such as this one, even as party leaders come to recognize that such suburban areas pose greater challenges. "This race will be a good test case of whether it's really moved over to the Democratic side," says political scientist Laura Arnold.

Arnold is as struck by the changes in the local political culture as anyone. She grew up in Webster Groves, returning at the start of this decade after many years away. "That's when it really struck me," she says, "that this wasn't the little Republican suburb I grew up in anymore."

Va. board certifies Perriello win

2008-11-24T09:03:00.000-08:00

Va. board certifies Perriello win

uppercase;">From Wire Reports
Published: November 24, 2008

RICHMOND, Va. (AP) _ The State Board of Elections has certified challenger Tom Perriello as the winner over Republican Congressman Virgil Goode.

The board on Monday certified Perriello as the winner by 745 votes in the 5th District congressional race. Goode is entitled to a recount if he chooses.

Perriello’s apparent victory gives Democrats a 6-5 majority in Virginia’s congressional delegation.

The board also certified the rest of the election results, including victories by Democrats Barack Obama for president and Mark Warner for U.S. Senate.

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2008-11-10T12:33:00.001-08:00

Up Close and Personal

2008-10-31T09:02:00.001-07:00

If you haven’t had an “up close and personal” moment with either political candidate, there are just a few days left and I’m sure one of them will be in a town near you. In this election cycle, the four candidates have traveled more miles and made more stops in more towns than anyone I can remember. Soon it will all be over and our TV’s will go back to advertising every drug in the world.

The “season” has started for my company with many organizations wanting advocacy training. Clients are putting together their “wish list” and I am waiting to see how many new friends I will have in state houses and congress. If your group, organization or company would like legislative training contact us as soon as possible, dates are filling up and time is short.

Asking you to Vote...

2008-10-11T13:38:00.000-07:00

If you’re like me, your email and snail mail has been inundated with political material designed to get you to believe one candidate is more honest, trustworthy, able to shake the economic pitfall, lead the country and put a chicken in every pot (sorry vegans). In my position I have to stay in the middle of the road, I work with all elected officials, that’s why my web site provides links to sources that will give the visitor honest reports…you don’t have to verify anything on my site with SNOPES.
Four months ago I was in D.C. for a conference sponsored by one of my clients, we discussed their current issues and also the political climate at the time. I felt that the presidency was Obamas for the taking, all he had to do was reach for the crown. Other Lobbyist determined that 40 seats in the House of Representatives would change from Republican to Democrat, in the Senate 15 Republicans were vulnerable. I thought those numbers were out of line, my figures were (still are) 25 seats in the House would change and possibly 8 Senate seats would change. As the elections get closer the Republicans have started to gain popularity, I see the closest election in my lifetime.
This blog will not endorse any party or candidate, it will do one thing: I’m asking you to vote.

People are always asking for my opinion

2008-10-02T08:22:00.000-07:00

People are always asking for my opinion concerning the upcoming elections. Even though I try to explain that a Lobbyist is not a political pundit, it’s sometimes difficult to avoid answering such a leading question. Here’s my best attempt:

I like all candidates and elected officials, no matter what party is represented or philosophy is brought forth. I say this for two reasons, one…I have to work with them (the most obvious reason!), and two…I have a lot of respect for anyone willing to put themselves, their families and personal life along with their politics on display for all citizens to judge. Let’s face it, we voters do make judgment calls when we vote.

Once elected, there is a short but sharp learning curve and freshmen legislators have to hit the ground running, not only do they have to establish and staff an office (usually more than one), they also need to establish friendships on the party, cross party and assigned committee levels, not to mention dealing with continuing legislation as well as sponsoring their own bills. Schedules are filled with breakfast meetings, office meetings, sessions, committee meetings, receptions, phone calls and somewhere in all this, Lobbyist get the time to educate the legislator or their staff about upcoming issues. Yes, I have a lot of respect for these people.