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The state of Colorado is not waiting for Congress to act on gun reform. This week, the Colorado House approved four different gun reform bills that would enact a variety of measures: universal background checks, magazine limits, banning guns on college campuses and public buildings, and require gun purchases to pay for background checks.

Colorado forged ahead despite explicit threats from gun manufacturers themselves. Two different gun manufacturers, Magpul Industries and Alfred Manufacturing, threatened to leave the state if the reforms were signed into law — even though Democrats wrote exemptions for the two companies into the bill.

“Enough is enough. I’m sick and tired of bloodshed,” said Democratic Rep. Rhonda Shields before the bill was passed. Shields represents the district where the Aurora shootings occurred last summer. Her son was fatally shot in 2005.

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A satellite image of Hurricane Sandy

As part of his push to stop gun reforms, NRA president Wayne LaPierre wrote last week that looters “ran wild in South Brooklyn” after Hurricane Sandy and that people needed guns to defend themselves. “And if you wanted to walk several miles to get supplies, you better get back before dark, or you might not get home at all,” he warned.

But there was a problem with LaPierre’s scare-mongering: it wasn’t based in reality. As figures from the New York Police Department showed, crime actually fell by 25 percent after Sandy struck. There was a small spike in burglaries — meaning home invasions with home owners present — but rapes, murders, robberies, assaults, and all other deadly crimes fell after the storm.

In an interview with the local media, freshman congressman Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), who represents a district in Brooklyn, scolded LaPierre for his inaccurate remarks:

JEFFRIES: Comments made by are not constructive, they’re destructive. They’re factually inaccurate, they demean the entire community of South Brooklyn. And we need to get back to a constructive conversation about how to turn things around as they relate to the gun issue in America.

Watch it:

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State senator Kelly Hancock (R-TX)

All states have certain regulators that have oversight of the practices of insurance companies (in some states this involves rate review, a power insurance companies have fought for years).

In Texas, this is called theAi??Office of Public Insurance Counsel (OPIC). OPIC made news recently when it blocked a 20 percent increase in homeowners insurance rates by State Farm. Shortly after OPIC moved to do this, Republican State senator Kelly Hancock last week filed a bill to eliminate the agency.

Texans for Public Justice pulled the numbers and found that insurers made up 8 percent of Kelly’s donors in 2012, with State Farm’s political action committee being the second-largest donor — giving $10,000.

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Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s (D-MA) great performance at the Senate Banking Committee — where she asked if “too big to fail has become too big for trial” — has gone viral, with nearly 750,000 views. Watch it:

Fox News contributor and right-wing activist Erick Erickson has a truly bizarre response to Warren’s video. In an op-ed titled “If Elizabeth Warren wants to lay blame for the financial mess, she can look in the mirror,” heAi??claims that Warren is an advocate of regulations that caused the financial crisis and that she wants to prevent lawsuits against Wall Street banks:

The rich irony of Elizabeth Warren asking her question to these regulators, whose ranks she would have joined but for a Republican effort to block her nomination prior to her Senate run, is that she is an advocate of increasing the very regulations that contributed to the financial meltdown and that prevent suits against Wall Street banks. After all, Wall Street was just complying with Washingtonai??i??s orders. […] If she wants a scalp, she should look in the mirror.

Erickson’s critique is strange given the fact that the financial crisis occurred in 2008, long before Warren became charged with setting of the consumer protection bureau or was elected to the Senate. In the meantime, she has been a long-time advocate of breaking up the banks by calling for a return to Glass-Steagall. She petitioned for this in May of 2012.Ai??Erickson, on the other hand, did write about how it would be good to break up the Big Banks — but that was three months after Warren petitioned her supporters to back such an effort.

Sign our petition to the SEC calling on it to listen to Warren and end “too big for trial.”

President Obama has proposed a universal background check system that would close loopholes and require criminal background checks for all gun purchases.

This proposal is very popular, with 92 percent of Americans supporting it. But how well would it actually work?

Virginia provides a test case. Here’s a report from the local media about how many guns have been stopped from going into the wrong hands thanks to background checks:

Virginia’s background check system has prevented more than 16,000 felons from buying guns since it began in 1989, according to state police records.

The records show a total 54,260 transactions have been denied during the past 24 years. The total also includes drug abusers, the mentally ill and domestic assault offenders.

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Image courtesy of Eastern Iowa’s The Gazette

One of the right-wing myths about the minimum wage is that we don’t need to raise it because it mostly benefits teenagers who work part-time and live at home with their parents.

But the data does not bear this out. Every year, the Bureau of Labor Statistics compiles data on the workforce. Their most recent demographics report is from year 2011. That year, 50.5 percent of Americans who earned minimum wage or less were 25 years or older. Ai??The year before, in 2010, it was 51 percent.

Read our earlier post about how progressives could use ballot initiatives to force congressional Republicans to stop blocking increases in the minimum wage.

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Congressional Republicans have already vowed to obstruct President Obama’s popular call to raise the minimum wage.

But if Republicans in Congress stop a wage hike at the federal level, they may be welcoming a barrage of minimum wage ballot initiatives that not only would allow states to forge ahead on their own, but also would increase voter turnout that could prove politically disastrous for the Republican Party.

Here’s a few examples showing why. In 1998, the state of Washington had a minimum wage ballot initiative that overwhelmingly passed. It received more votes than any other initiative or candidate on the ballot, outpacing even the vote total of Sen. Patty Murray (D). Ai??Polling showed that “when people found out that the minimum wage initiative was on the ballot, the turnout of voters increased by 4%. This was even more pronounced among voters with poor voting histories, who accounted for 52% of the drop-off voters who were moved by this issue.” Many attributed the fact that Democrats won 50 percent of the House contests and narrowly won the Senate back to the minimum wage ballot initiative.

In Missouri, Lake Research Partners found that a 2006 ballot initiative to raise the minimum wage made Democratic voters “twice as likely” to vote for Democrat Claire McCaskill over Republican Jim Talent.

TheAi??Ballot Initiative Strategy Center, whichAi??mobilizes for progressive ballot initiatives, provided us a summary of research that they’ve done on the turnout effects related to wage initiatives. In addition to the statistic on Washington state, here are their major findings:

Turnout is consistently higher in initiativeAi??than non-initiative states, 7-9% higher in mid-term elections.
In 2004 in Nevada, 24% of all voters wereAi??motivated by the minimum wage ballot question,Ai??including 34% of DemocraticAi??voters, 35% of independents, 35% of low income voters, 33%Ai??of …

Defense contractors continue to bilk taxpayers with little oversight.

In 2010, the federal government has enacted a two year freeze on cost of living adjustments for federal employees, an austerity measure championed by President Obama. Now, the Democrats have lifted that freeze and sought small increases for federal workers.

Today, House Republicans voted to extend the pay freeze for another nine months. In doing so, they argue that federal workers should not get pay increases while many Americas in the private sector are not getting them.

But while both Congress and the President have championed pay freezes for federal employees at some point over the past two years, one group has gotten away with earning enormous salaries at taxpayer expense: defense contractors.

Defense contractor pay is currently capped at $763,000, which is almost twice what President Obama’s salary is. Last December, Democratic Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) inserted a measure into the defense authorization bill that would’ve capped these salaries to $230,700 — the salary of the Vice President of the United States.

Unfortunately, this measure did not make it into the final bill, which simply promised to study the contractor pay cap.

Essentially, the House Republicans are saying that hard-working employees at the Environmental Protection Agency or Federal Bureau of Investigation should have their salaries frozen, but if you work for Lockheed Martin or Halliburton, you can continue to fleece American taxpayers.

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The threat of climate change and the lack of quality energy infrastructure are both major problems that face Americans. Sens. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and Bernie Sanders (I-VT) have introduced a pollution tax bill to tackle both.

Their bill would tax carbon and methaneAi??emissions and ask polluters to pay $20 per ton of each substance they emit. The tax would then increase by 5.6 percent each year for the next ten years.

60 percent of the revenue generated by this new tax would Ai??go to monthly rebates to Americans for their energy costs. The rest would be spent on weatherizing American homes, investing in clean energy, and creating a privateAi??investment fund for green technology.

Watch Sanders and Boxer introduce their bill:

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Corporate lobbyists want to pass so-called “right to work” laws nationwide to weaken unions and crush organized labor. In Missouri, Republican lawmakers recently held a strategy session with a number of right-wing special interest groups where they laid out their plan to pass such an anti-union law.

At one point, Ai??Steve Hunter, a former Missouri lawmaker who took up work as a lobbyist after leaving public service, told the Republicans that they would lose donors if they don’t take up a radical anti-union bill:Ai??ai???If you donai??i??t take on the fights, and these guys that are giving money? I mean, this is just all basic 101. Youai??i??re going to start losing donors.ai???

Another speaker promises that if lawmakers push for this bill, “we want to make sure your backs are covered when it comes time for re-election. And thatai??i??s where we come in. To have the groundwork laid for you. So your backs can be covered.”

Progress Missouri captured these remarks and others in an audio recording of the entire meeting. Listen to it:

“Our legislators need to be listening to Missourians and solving Missouri problems, not following the orders of extreme billionaires and their secretive front groups,” said Progress Missouri Executive Director Sean Soendker Nicholson. “These bills are all about limiting the political voices of workers and the middle class on behalf of CEOs and corporations.ai???

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