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Uprising’s guest expert Arun Gupta, Independent Journalist and regular contributor to the Guardian, In These Times, The Progressive, and Truthout, and co-founder of the Occupied Wall Street Journal and the Indypendent, analyzes today’s news headlines:

A new study shows climate denialism is on the decline – among Red state residents no less. Defying conventional wisdom, a new Stanford University study has found that a large majority of residents of traditionally Republican states now accept that global warming is a reality – for example, 87% of Oklahoma residents and 84% of Texas residents. In fact there is not a single state where skepticism over climate change is a majority. This contrasts strongly with Republican lawmakers’ positions. The House Science, Space, and Technology Committee which today will hold a hearing on transparency at the Environmental Protection Agency, has 17 out of 22 Republicans identifying as climate deniers. Click here for a Guardian newspaper article about the story.

The Obama Administration released highly anticipated statistics on the Affordable Care Act yesterday. It turns out that across the country only 106,000 people had signed up for insurance plans through the health insurance exchanges that went online on October 1st. Of that number just under 27,000 had signed up through the federal exchange, healthcare.gov – a site plagued by technical problems. The Obama administration had estimated that half a million people would have signed up by now. Also, Obama just announced that insurers who’s plans did not meet Obamacare standards could now continue to sell them. Click here for a Washington Post article about the story.

A joint hearing by the California Senate and Assembly yesterday tackled the problem of low wages in the fast food industry. The hearing focused on the effective subsidies that the industry receives from tax payers in the form of safety-net programs that its workers are forced to rely on. The hearing comes in the wake of widespread union-backed protests by fast food workers around the country who are demanding higher wages. Click here for an LA Times article about the hearing. Click here for Arun Gupta’s article in In These Times.