President Obama made another call to Congress yesterday to pass immigration reform. Will Obama's proposed piecemeal approach finally do the trick? Then, should businesses be allowed to opt out of providing birth control as a part of the ACA on religious grounds? And we'll talk about the latest push to market girls' toys that "disrupt the pink aisles." Later, we'll talk about new research that finds most Americans want aggressive end-of-life treatments. Do those treatments just prolong suffering? Then, we'll talk about the White House's attempts to control its image and find out how texting is changing the meaning of punctuation marks.
How political pressures could deliver immigration reform, little by little
Despite a new call by the president for immigration reform, all signs are pointing to a strategic shift by the White House on the divisive issue. After lengthy stalls by the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, President Obama has essentially endorsed a piecemeal approach to achieving comprehensive immigration overhaul -- something that Democrats had long considered an all-or-nothing issue.
“It they want to chop that thing up into five pieces, as long as all five pieces get done, I don’t care what it looks like,” the president said. Still, Mr. Obama reassured a San Francisco audience yesterday that the country’s immigration system would eventually be “fixed.”
Does the president’s change in approach suggest a shift in benchmarks for immigration reform? How will Democrats and Republicans handle the issue in light of impending election years?
Guests:
Alan Gomez, Immigration reporter, USA Today
Manu Raju, Senior Congressional Reporter for POLITICO
Supreme Court to hear challenge to ACA’s birth-control rule
The Supreme Court today agreed to hear two legal challenges to the Affordable Care Act dealing with whether companies can refuse to pay for coverage of contraceptive drugs that violate the religious beliefs of the companies’ owners.
In taking on Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby Stores and Conestoga Wood Specialties v. Sebelius, the Court will weigh if corporations have the same First Amendment rights and religious liberties as individual citizens.
The Affordable Care Act mandates that most employers pay for a range of contraceptives—including the so-called morning-after-pill, which some consider “abortion-inducing.” Most religious organizations were exempted from this requirement after Catholic bishops objected, but that exemption does not cover private, for-profit companies with religious owners.
Oral arguments will be held in March, and a decision is expected in June.
Should companies have the right to operate according to religious convictions? Or should they be required to provide a full range of coverage to employees? Does this challenge to the Affordable Care Act present even more problems for President Obama’s beleaguered health care law?
Guest:
Greg Stohr, Supreme Court reporter, Bloomberg News
GoldieBlox aims to build a new generation of girl engineers
Walk down just about any toy aisle and you’ll see two colors – blue for boys and pink for girls. The boy’s side has the building blocks, erector sets and tool belts. The girl’s section is dominated by ponies and princesses. Now, there’s a new toy company on the horizon that aims to “disrupt the pink aisles.”
GoldieBlox is a startup that makes and markets toys that aim to introduce girls to the joy of engineering at a young age. The Oakland-based company started on KickStarter, with an initial goal of $150,000, which they raised in less than five days.
A new commercial advertising their wares seems to have struck a chord. It was posted to YouTube on November 17 and already has over 8 million views. It’s set to the Beastie Boys' 1987 hit "Girls," with new lyrics, and features three enterprising girls engineering a Rube Goldberg-type contraption.
The company’s founder, Debbie Sterling, is an engineer herself. But she says she didn’t discover her passion until high school and points out that a mere 11 percent of engineers in the United States are women – something she wants to change.
Can one, small company make a difference in the way toys are marketed to boys and girls? Why is the pink aisle so very pink? Have toys become increasingly gendered in recent decades? Could this represent a tipping point? Are companies giving kids what they want or reinforcing gender stereotypes and biases?
Guests:
Andrew Rohm, Associate Professor of Marketing at Loyola Marymount University. Director of M-School at LMU (Modern Marketing Program)
Lisa Wade, Ph.D, Professor of Sociology at Occidental College and author of the blog Sociological Images
More Americans want aggressive end-of-life medical treatment
How to deal with a late-stage illness is a sensitive topics for most patients and families. Deciding whether to pursue aggressive treatment or stop treatment in favor of pain management and palliative care is a very personal decision that is fraught with emotion.
According to new data from the Pew Research Center, a growing number of Americans are choosing to be far more aggressive in treating end-of-life illnesses. The percentage of Americans who say a physician should always do everything possible to save a life has more than doubled between 1990 and 2013, from 15% to 31%. One third of adults, 35%, said they would tell their doctors to do everything possible to keep them alive - even if they had a disease with no hope of improvement and were in a great deal of pain.
Because of the internet, patients now have access to more information than ever and they're more willing to ask doctors for specific treatments and courses of care.
But does that lead to unnecessary treatments that prolong suffering? Should doctors perform aggressive end-of-life treatments at a patient's request even if the doctor feels the patient won't recover? How do doctors decide which patients should get aggressive end-of-life care and which should not?
Guests:
Cary Funk, senior researcher with the Pew Research Center's Religion & Public Life Project and lead researcher for the “Views on End-of-Life Medical Treatments” study
Dr. Paul Schneider, MD, president of the Southern California Bioethics Committee Consortium
White House press corps revolts against image control
Yesterday, USA Today became the latest major media outlet to boycott photos officially issued by the White House. The paper joins the White House Correspondents Association (WHCA) and 37 other media outlets, including The Associated Press, Reuters, The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, ABC, CBS, and Fox News, in protest.
In a letter sent to White House Press Secretary Jay Carney last Thursday, the WHCA board decried the Obama Administration’s policy of banning photographers from covering the president at certain events, only to have official White House photos of those very same events released later.
The letter continues, “As surely as if they were placing a hand over a journalist’s camera lens, officials in this administration are blocking the public from having an independent view of important functions of the Executive Branch of government.”
It’s not uncommon for the White House to bar photojournalists from covering the president, but the WHCA claims that previous administrations have have granted greater access than the current administration.
Is the Obama Administration’s approach to image control overly restrictive? Can the photo ban actually amount to a policy change by the White House? Do you care to see photographs of the president other than those issued officially?
Guest:
Jeremy Mayer, Associate Professor of Public Policy at George Mason University
How texting is changing the meaning of punctuation marks
An American University study found in 2007 that college students use sentence-ending punctuation marks only 39 percent of the time in texts and 45 percent of the time during instant messaging.
That was six years ago and the safe bet is that our punctuation-skipping habits have only become more ingrained over time. This gradual disappearance, some linguists and language observers argue, has changed the meaning of certain punctuation points.
A story editor at The New Republic, for instance, has recently written about how the commonplace period at the end of a text message now communicates anger or dismay, as opposed to just the end of a thought.
Others have called for (though in jest) new punctuation to be invented to help better communicate emotions, or sarcasm. At issue is how to retain the nuance and complexity of language when we are communicating through a new technological medium.
Guest:
Geoffrey Nunberg, Linguist and Professor in the School of Information at UC Berkeley; Author of numerous books including “Ascent of the A-Word” (PublicAffairs 2013) and “The Linguistics of Punctuation”