Democratic Sen. Landrieu Walks A Fine Line In Red Louisiana

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hide captionSen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., has won some conservative supporters in her state, but her support for Obamacare is putting her re-election at risk.

Evan Vucci/AP

Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., has won some conservative supporters in her state, but her support for Obamacare is putting her re-election at risk.

Evan Vucci/AP

If Democrats are going to keep their majority in the Senate, they'll need to hang on to a few critical seats they hold in conservative states.

Mary Landrieu of Louisiana has one of those, and like some of her colleagues up for re-election, her support of the Affordable Care Act could be the mountain to overcome this fall.

The question for Landrieu is: Will Louisiana voters define her by Obamacare, or judge her on the entire record she's built over nearly two decades as a senator?

For Some, Obamacare's A Dealbreaker

There's a sprawling, twisty live oak in Galliano, La. It's right across the street from Bayou LaFourche in Lafourche Parish.

The Cajuns in the neighborhood call the old tree "Chene au Cowan," and nearly every day, from sun-up to sundown, a group of retired Cajun men sit on swings beneath the branches, talking about life and politics. They say they've been gathering there about 50 years.

One of the men sitting under the tree one particular afternoon is Beau Broussard. He's not Cajun, but they let him hang out here anyway. Broussard says for years, people running for political office have visited this oak tree.

"They don't run without coming here, because that's good luck, here," Broussard says.

Old campaign signs are still hanging all over the tree trunk. Broussard fondly remembers the last candidate who stopped by.

"He brought some white bean," he says. "They were delicious. Ooooo! I'd vote for him just for them white bean."

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It will take a lot more than a pot of white beans to get Broussard to vote for one particular candidate this November: Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu. The dealbreaker for him was when she voted for the Affordable Care Act.

Broussard has all kinds of problems with the law itself — that it's wrong to force people to buy insurance, that it will make businesses hire less. But there's something else that bothers him: The law is the signature achievement of a man Broussard never wanted to see become president.

"I don't vote for black people, lady," he says. "No, ma'am. I don't vote for black people. They got their place, I got my place. That's the way I was raised."

Broussard says Landrieu votes too much in line with the president's agenda -– he calls her "Obama Lady." But he insists that he might still have voted for her this November if she hadn't supported the Affordable Care Act, because he acknowledges Landrieu has helped the people of her state tremendously since she became a senator in 1997.

Can She Deliver For Louisiana?

A lot of voters agree Landrieu has done a lot for Louisiana, but she's associated with two things many people here resent: the health care law and the president behind it. So the challenge now for Landrieu is whether she can persuade those voters to forgive her, convincing them she'll deliver for her home state in other ways.

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hide captionHarvey Robichaux, an oil worker, says he'll vote for Sen. Mary Landrieu because she has the influence to promote the oil and gas industry in Louisiana.

Ailsa Chang/NPR

Harvey Robichaux, an oil worker, says he'll vote for Sen. Mary Landrieu because she has the influence to promote the oil and gas industry in Louisiana.

Ailsa Chang/NPR

One industry Landrieu's worked hard to win over is oil and gas. It's the largest industry in the state. Many oil workers who aren't fans of Obama or Obamacare say Landrieu's still got their vote, as long as she keeps helping their industry.

"If I like who's running, that's how I vote," says Chad Plaisance, who was having lunch in a restaurant at Port Fourchon, on the Gulf of Mexico, where Louisiana's offshore oil and gas industry is concentrated. "If they're gonna do something good for south Louisiana, the oil field and the shrimping industry, it don't matter what I'm registered as."

Plaisance, a diesel mechanic who services boats for the oil companies, says he's willing to overlook Obamacare, as much as he hates it, because of all the ways Landrieu has helped his industry. She's pushing to increase Louisiana's royalties from offshore oil revenues, and he remembers how fiercely she opposed the moratorium on offshore drilling right after the BP oil spill. He was really grateful for that.

"Yes ma'am, because we work on the supply boats," Plaisance says. "If the supply boats don't run, then we don't have a job. So it's kind of, oil field don't work, we don't work."

A Senator With Seniority

Landrieu also become chair of the Senate Energy Committee this month, a position that will give her even more influence over the industry. That's a detail Harvey Robichaux says will earn his vote. He services oil companies by laying foundations for the heavy equipment.

"She has done a lot of good and she has a lot of seniority," Robichaux says. "So I would be willing to vote Democrat because of that seniority. And I wouldn't want to give it up."

But that seniority will not prove as helpful with other Louisiana industries, like shrimping.

Up the road a bit is a marina in Leeville, where many shrimpers load up on ice before they head out into the Gulf.

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hide captionParish Williams is a fifth-generation shrimper. He says Sen. Mary Landrieu hasn't done enough to protect shrimpers from unfair competition.

Ailsa Chang/NPR

Parish Williams is a fifth-generation shrimper. He says Sen. Mary Landrieu hasn't done enough to protect shrimpers from unfair competition.

Ailsa Chang/NPR

Parish Williams runs Chackbay Lady, a 62-foot shrimp boat. His family has been shrimping for five generations. He says they've seen the business go through some really tough times, and that Landrieu hasn't done enough to help them.

The stress really started to build in 2000, he says, when shrimp imports shot up.

"It drove the price of the shrimp down to hardly nothing, where we could barely make a living for quite awhile," Williams says. "This year's the first year we started to get a decent price."

Williams says that good fortune had nothing to do with Landrieu. A strain of bacteria ended up killing off loads of foreign shrimp, so his business rebounded. But once the bacteria problem's solved, he says shrimpers will suffer again.

Landrieu's office points out that she has protected shrimpers: She successfully pushed for import duties on shrimp coming from parts of Asia. But Williams says it didn't help much, and it certainly wasn't enough to make up for her support of Obamacare.

"I think she's been there too long," he says. "I think she's too comfortable. I think it's time for her to go."

Accused Of 'Crawfishing'

When Landrieu became one of the most vocal critics of the botched rollout of the health care law, Williams says he thought that Landrieu was just trying to save her political skin in true Louisiana form — "crawfishing," he calls it.

"It means backing up. It's what it means — backing up," Williams.

This far from Election Day, it's not clear how much backing up Landrieu can do, or even needs to do. She's already a three-term senator from a prominent political family. Obamacare came along just four years ago. Mary Landrieu's political history with the state goes back nearly nine times as far.

Push To Repeal Calif. Transgender Student Rights Law Fails

Opponents of a new California law that provides transgender students certain rights in public schools have failed to gather enough voter signatures to place a referendum to repeal the law on the November ballot.

At least 504,760 signatures were required to force a public vote on the statute approved by the California Legislature and signed by Gov. Jerry Brown last year. The law's opponents submitted 619,387, but county election officers determined that just 487,484 of them were valid, according to a final count posted on the secretary of state's website Monday.

The law took effect Jan. 1. It guarantees students in grades K-12 the right to use the school restrooms and to participate in the sex-segregated activities that correspond with their expressed genders instead of their school records.

The coalition of religious conservative groups behind the repeal effort said it violates the privacy of youngsters who may be uncomfortable sharing facilities with classmates of the opposite biological sex. The law's supporters said it is needed to provide statewide consistency and to improve the school experiences of young people who decide to live by a gender different from the one they had at birth.

If the referendum had made the ballot, the law would have been put on hold until after the election as its supporters and opponents mounted a campaign that promised to be as bitterly fought as the one over Proposition 8, the 2008 constitutional amendment that banned same-sex marriage in California until last year.

Karen England of the Privacy for All Students coalition said the proposed referendum's backers are not conceding defeat yet. They plan to review the disqualified signatures and, depending what they find, go to court to try to get enough of them added to the final tally so the measure would have to go before voters.

"We are preparing for the next stage of the battle," England said in a statement. "After months of waiting, we now get to see why so many signatures were thrown out. Certainly some signers were not registered to vote or had moved without changing their address. But it is also certain that many of those signatures were rejected based on reasons that will not survive a legal challenge."

California is the first state to detail the rights of transgender students in schools by statute. Some school districts around California, as well as the education departments in Massachusetts and Connecticut, have implemented similar policies by regulation.

Although the law's opponents have focused on potential abuses and awkward encounters in bathrooms and locker rooms, school districts have taken it as a mandate to evaluate yearbook photo dress codes, sleeping arrangements for overnight field trips, and activities such as choirs and recreational sports where girls and boys are often separated. Some have also given students who object to using restrooms or locker rooms with transgender classmates the option of using staff restrooms.

"This law gives schools the guidelines and flexibility to create an environment where all kids have the opportunity to learn. We need to focus on creating an environment where every student is able to do well and graduate. This law is about doing what's best for all students," said Masen Davis, executive director of the Transgender Law Center in Oakland.

The California Interscholastic Federation, which governs competitive high school sports, adopted a detailed process in 2012 that students must follow if they want to play on a team that is not consistent with their gender at birth.

Car of bombing suspect’s father torched in s. Lebanon

SIDON, Lebanon: A car belonging to the father of a suspect in the suicide attack that targeted the Iranian Cultural Center outside Beirut earlier this month was torched early Tuesday morning in south Lebanon, security sources said.

Unknown assailants set fire to the car of Marwan Hamadeh’s father, Youssef Hamadeh, around 3:00 a.m. in the southern village of Bisarieh, the sources said.

Hamadeh is suspected to have helped carried out the Feb. 15 twin suicide bombings in Bir Hasan that killed eleven people and wounded over 120. Nidal al-Mghayer, a 22-year-old Palestinian, was confirmed as the first bomber by DNA evidence.

Mghayer, a resident of Bisarieh, had fought the Lebanese Army alongside fugitive Sheikh Ahmad al-Assir during last June’s battle in Abra, a suburb of Sidon. Assir, a staunch critic of Hezbollah, remains at large.

Hamadeh, a friend of Mghayer, was also reportedly among Assir’s fighters in Abra.

Two cars belonging to Mghayer’s family and their house were torched when his name was made public in connection with the attack.

Website of Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox offline

TOKYO -- The website of major Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox is offline amid reports it suffered a debilitating theft of the virtual currency.

The URL of the Tokyo-based outfit returns a blank page Tuesday.

Separately, several Bitcoin exchanges released a joint statement saying they are working to reassure customers that funds under their control are held securely.

The statement says Mt. Gox should not be considered a reflection of the value of Bitcoin or the digital currency industry.

A "crisis strategy" report shared widely online that purports to be an internal Mt. Gox document says more than 740,000 Bitcoins are missing from the exchange, which froze withdrawals earlier this month.

The virtual currency had been inching toward broader acceptance despite wild swings in value.

Trial begins in suit over Broomfield fracking ban

BROOMFIELD, Colo. -- A lawsuit challenging an election in which voters narrowly approved a five-year ban on fracking in Broomfield County went to trial on Monday, with witnesses testifying about how ballots were handled, sorted and stored.

State and local officials and an election monitor were called as witnesses before District Judge Chris Melonakis. Closing arguments were expected Tuesday, the Boulder Daily Camera reported (http://tinyurl.com/n5o2znd ).

Even if Melonakis invalidates the results, it wasn't clear whether he could order another election. Attorneys on both sides have said it's uncertain if the law gives the courts that authority.

Unofficial results on the night of the Nov. 5 election indicated the ban failed by 13 votes, but a recount showed it passed by 20 votes out of more than 20,000 cast.

Questions were raised about possibly ineligible voters and uncounted ballots, and election monitors complained they weren't given adequate access to the counting process. The Broomfield Balanced Energy Coalition and a member of It's Our Broomfield, Too — groups that oppose the ban — filed the lawsuit.

Stephanie Mann of the Colorado Secretary of State's Office testified about a critical report on the election released by the office.

It said the county counted an unspecified number of ballots from ineligible voters and rejected ballots from legitimate voters. It also said officials wrongly discounted ballots that were delivered to clerks in other counties.

Other witnesses testified about a box discovered after the election that included ballots that had been returned as undeliverable or marked as spoiled. Broomfield officials later said the box contained no ballots that should have been counted.

Fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, uses water, sand and chemicals under high pressure to loosen formations deep underground and release oil and natural gas. Critics say the chemicals and fumes could pollute water and air. The energy industry maintains the practice is safe.

News Summary: Late auto-loan payments rose in 4Q

DELINQUENCY RATE: Credit reporting company TransUnion says that the rate of U.S. auto-loan payments at least 60 days overdue grew to 1.14 percent in the final quarter of 2013. That's up from 1.04 percent in the previous quarter and ahead of the 1.09 percent rate in the fourth quarter of 2012.

SUBPRIME BORROWERS: The late-payment rate among subprime borrowers, or those with less-than-sterling credit, rose to 6.1 percent from 5.7 percent in the prior-year period.

BIGGER BALANCES: Auto loan debt per borrower grew 4.4 percent in the fourth quarter from a year earlier to $16,769.

Group wants heart attack warning on testosterone

WASHINGTON -- A consumer advocacy group is calling on the Food and Drug Administration to add a bold warning label to popular testosterone drugs for men in light of growing evidence that the hormone treatments can increase the risk of heart attack.

The group Public Citizen says the agency should immediately add a "black box" warning — the most serious type — to all testosterone medications and require manufacturers to warn physicians about a higher risk of heart attack, stroke and death with the treatments.

The FDA announced last month that it was reviewing the safety of drugs like the blockbuster testosterone gel, AndroGel, in light of two recent studies that showed higher rates of cardiovascular problems in men. The agency said its review was first prompted by a U.S. Veterans Affairs study published in November 2013 that showed a 30 percent increase in stroke, heart attack and death among older men taking testosterone.

In January, a federally funded study of 45,000 men suggested testosterone therapy could double the risk of heart attacks in men 65 and older.

But Public Citizen says studies published as early as 2010 should have prompted FDA action.

"It is quite clear that testosterone treatment increases the risks of cardiovascular diseases, including heart attacks," said Dr. Sidney Wolfe, of Public Citizen's health group.

In his petition to the FDA, Wolfe points to an analysis of 27 testosterone trials published last April. The researchers found that while 13 studies funded by drug companies did not show an increase in heart problems, 14 non-industry funded trials showed a two-fold increase in risk in heart problems.

In addition to the boxed warning, Public Citizen wants the agency to delay an approval decision on an experimental, long-acting testosterone injection called Aveed. The agency is scheduled to make a decision on the Endo Pharmaceuticals drug by Feb. 28.

Public Citizen's petition comes amid a marketing blitz for testosterone gels, patches and injections targeting men who report fatigue, low sex drive or other symptoms commonly associated with aging.

U.S. prescriptions for testosterone therapies have increased more than five-fold in recent years, with sales over $1.6 billion.

FDA labeling on the drugs indicates they are only to be used for men who have abnormally low testosterone caused by a medical condition.

But the latest advertising push by drugmakers is for easy-to-use gels and patches that are aimed at a much broader population of otherwise healthy older men with low levels of testosterone, the male hormone that begins to decline in the body after age 40.

Drugmakers and many doctors claim testosterone therapy can reverse some unpleasant side effects of aging — ranging from insomnia to erectile dysfunction. Those claims are mostly based on short-term studies.

The top-selling product in the field is Abbvie's Androgel, which is applied to the shoulders and arms. Watson Pharmaceuticals markets the Androderm patch, which slowly releases testosterone into the bloodstream. Fortesta is another testosterone gel from Endo Pharmaceuticals, and Eli Lilly's Axiron is an underarm gel that rolls on like deodorant.