On Friday, a federal appeals court panel issued a sweeping decision that held the reduced sentencing ratio should apply retroactively to all cases, not just because that was the intent of the 2010 Fair Sentencing Act, but because failure to do so would be unconstitutional. In a powerful statement about the troubling history of drug sentencing, Sixth Circuit Judges Gilbert Merritt and Boyce Martin write:

The old 100-to-1 crack cocaine ratio has led to the mass incarceration of thousands of nonviolent prisoners under a law widely acknowledged as racially discriminatory. There were approximately 30,000 federal prisoners (about 15 percent of all federal prisoners) serving crack cocaine sentences in 2011. Thousands of these prisoners are incarcerated for life or for 20, 10, or 5 years under mandatory minimum crack cocaine sentences imposed prior to the passage of the Fair Sentencing Act. More than 80 percent of federal prisoners serving crack cocaine sentences are black. In fiscal year 2010, before the passage of the Fair Sentencing Act, almost 4,000 defendants, mainly black, received mandatory minimum sentences for crack cocaine. […]

The Fair Sentencing Act was a step forward, but it did not finish the job. The racial discrimination continues by virtue of a web of statutes, sentencing guidelines, and court cases that maintain the harsh provisions for those defendants sentenced before the Fair Sentencing Act. If we continue now with a construction of the statute that perpetuates the discrimination, there is no longer any defense that the discrimination is unintentional. The discriminatory nature of the old sentencing regime is so obvious that it cannot seriously be argued that race does not play a role in the failure to retroactively apply the Fair Sentencing Act. A “disparate impact” case now becomes an intentional subjugation or discriminatory purpose case. Like slavery and Jim Crow laws, the intentional maintenance of discriminatory sentences is a denial of equal protection.

The two-judge majority opinion also suggests the court would be inclined to strike down other deeply discriminatory and draconian sentencing laws for nonviolent drug offenders, which even the Congressional Research Service has flagged as a cause of the United States’ overwhelming prison population. Unfortunately, the dissenting Judge Ronald Lee Gilman’s opinion may better reflect the view of either a full Sixth Circuit panel or the Supreme Court justices who would review this case on appeal. Gilman puts the onus on Congress to make its law explicitly retroactive, and points to the failure of pre-Fair Sentencing Act constitutional challenges to the crack-cocaine sentencing disparity.

At the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists’ recent annual meeting, MedPage Today asked women’s health experts what they thought of the ongoing fight over Plan B. Multiple medical experts went on record to say that they don’t understand why emergency contraception has been such a contentious issue, and they don’t support restricting it for younger teens:

– Owen Montgomery, MD: “I would much rather have a 13- to 14-year-old girl who needs emergency contraception have access to it than come to my office with an unwanted pregnancy… In our clinics in the university, we see lots and lots of teenagers. And many of these young ladies have no access to good parental role models, and they need access to emergency contraception when they need access. And they can’t wait for permission from a judge, or someone else of authority.”

– Alison Edelman, MD, MPH, of Oregon Health & Science University: “Emergency contraception is a really, really important part of our toolkit for contraception. It helps women who have emergencies, i.e., they aren’t using contraception at the time of sexual activity or they had a misstep with their contraception, like a condom break or slip.”

– Barbara S. Levy, MD, ACOG’s vice president for health policy: “There’s failure of other methods. There are rapes. There are other things that occur. Women need to be able to access emergency contraception and have the knowledge and understanding of how to use it, so we can prevent unwanted pregnancies and unintended pregnancies that happen, because life happens.”

– Laurie J. McKenzie, MD, of both the University of Texas and Baylor College of Medicine: “I find it very interesting that there are these concessions that are being made in terms of age limitation … There are more deaths associated with Tylenol overdose than there are with oral contraceptive overdoses or potential overdose with Plan B. There have never, to my knowledge, been any overdoses with hormonal contraception.”

– Eve Espey, MD, MPH, of the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque: “Plan B should be over the counter… All emergency contraceptives should be over the counter with no age restrictions.”

Indeed, there’s no scientific basis for imposing an age limit on Plan B. Multiple medical groups, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, have expressed support for making emergency contraception easily accessible to women of all ages.

“Today, instead of walking miles every day to school, they’re sitting on couches for hours, playing video games, watching TV. Instead of dreaming of being a teacher or a lawyer or a business leader, they’re fantasizing about being a baller or a rapper,” Obama continued. “Right now, one in three African American students are dropping out of high school, only one in five African Americans between the ages of 25 and 29 has gotten a college degree.”

But priorities should change, she said, because “getting an education is as important if not more important than it was back when this university was founded.”

While those statistics are absolutely worrisome, I’m pretty sure that the challenges of preparing a competitive resume, getting equal access to standardized test prep, navigating the admissions process, and managing the cost of financial aid are also relevant issues to this conversation. Some of those barriers have been priorities for her husband’s administration. Mrs. Obama acknowledged the odds that a number of the graduates faced to get to and complete their educations Bowie State, though she focused on the cost of tuition and difficult family situations more than other structural issues that might affect students’ abilities to get access to a college education. And she framed their success as a matter of personal will and determination. I can also see why she might have wanted to continue a conversation of long standing within African-American communities given the setting, and as part of her larger, and important historical lesson about the obstacles that black students have faced to get educated in America.

But this particular talking point, which both Mrs. Obama and the President use relatively frequently, could do more to address the structural elements that prop up a culture that values athletics over academics. Personal motivations may be a problem, but the massive public investment in college athletic facilities, the fact that coaches are some states highest-paid public employees, and the allocation of both scholarship money and admissions spots to athletes who are unlikely to complete their academic degrees before entering professional drafts. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to dismantle “the slander that a black child with a book is trying to act white,” but I’m not sure the fantasy career aspirations of black children are the only, or even the main thing, at issue here.

And if we’re going to talk personal motivations, wanting to be “a baller or a rapper” is not a dream that’s solely the property of African-Americans. America has three major televised singing competitions right now, American Idol, The Voice, and X-Factor, all of which promise that it’s possible to rise from anonymity to remarkable fame and a career in music, and the first of which actually became notorious for airing auditions of people who had neither the skills to realistically pursue their aspirations, nor the self-knowledge to recognize the gap between their abilities and their ambitions. Participation is hardly limited to African-American singers by design or choice. There are plenty of white folks who hope to make it big in the manner of Taylor Swift in the same way African-American boys might be dreaming of growing up to become Jay-Z.

The same is more true for sports than Mrs. Obama’s remarks would suggest. In Division I men’s basketball, 1,443, or 27 percent, of the 5,265 players who participated in the 2011-2012 season were white, while 3,158, or 59 percent were African-American. During that same season, in Division I baseball, the figures were most striking. 8,304, or 82 percent of the 10,093 players, were white that season. Clearly, in the college athletic programs that feed into careers in professional sports, there’s a great deal of white interest and participation, even if it isn’t evenly distributed by sport. Miami Heat star LeBron James may be an argument for skipping college in pursuit of a professional athletic career right out of high school, but so is Washington Nationals left-fielder Bryce Harper, who earned a GED and didn’t even finish high school in a classroom setting, all so he could focus on baseball instead, even though the idea that any ordinary person could emulate either of their paths is equally improbable.

The difference, then, might not be between the wildest dreams African-American and white prospective college students harbor in their hearts, but the risks and costs associated with pursuing them. The black-white wealth gap that has expanded dramatically over the last quarter century means both that there are fewer African-American families who can, as Serena and Venus Williams’ father, and as Bryce Harper’s parents did, did, devote the resources into turning their children into professional athletes—and who have the resources to get their children back on an academic path if those efforts fail. It may be easier to call for African-American students and their families to put aside unrealistic dreams in a commencement address than it would be to address the entire architecture of inequality that makes pursuing such dreams a riskier proposition for African-American families than white ones, just as pursuing a basic education once was. But building what Mrs. Obama called “an even better future for the next generation of graduates from this fine school and for all of the children in this country,” means building the right to dream big, and to fail and to find a new path, not just to walk the straight and narrow one.

Flake used his vote for a watered-down amendment offered by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) to argue that he voted to expand background checks. In reality, the amendment would do little to expand background checks and in fact would weaken gun safety laws. Flake made the comments in response to an ad criticizing his opposition to Manchin-Toomey:

If you are anywhere close to a television set in Arizona in the coming days, you’ll likely see an ad about gun control financed by NYC Mayor Bloomberg.

Contrary to the ad, I did vote to strengthen background checks. I voted for the bipartisan Grassley Amendment, which included language from a bill I helped write which strengthened background checks for those with mental illness. The Grassley amendment also included language to increase prosecution of criminals and fugitives who circumvent the current background check system.

Mayor Bloomberg can spend millions trying to get me to support his view of background checks. That’s his call. But we Arizonans aren’t easily bullied. The legislation that would have done the most to keep guns out of the hands of those who shouldn’t have them was the Grassley Amendment. And that’s the amendment I supported.

Flake has misrepresented his position on gun violence before. He once wrote to the mother of an Aurora shooting victim that “Strengthening background checks is something we agree on.” However, a month later, Flake voted against the Manchin-Toomey amendment to expand background checks.

What Flake voted for was a plan that would weaken gun laws by making it easier to buy and transport across state lines, helping people evade stricter laws. The central solution Flake cites from the Grassley plan — that states would share their mental health records and provides more prosecution of felons who seek guns — is only one step. It still does nothing to prevent people who take advantage of existing holes in the first place, like online sales. The Grassley amendment also would make it easier for some mentally ill people to obtain guns, by exempting patients who are involuntarily committed.

After his vote, Flake saw his approval rating tank. “Nothing like waking up to a poll saying you’re the nation’s least popular senator,” Flake wrote. “Given the public’s dim view of Congress in general, that probably puts me somewhere just below pond scum.” Flake’s colleague Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) is facing similar fire from constituents for her vote with the National Rifle Association.

On Tuesday, Vermont Gov. Peter Shumlin (D) signed an equal pay bill into law. The new law will require employers to prove they have legitimate business reasons for paying workers unequal wages, protect workers who discuss pay with each other, provide protections for employees who request flexible work arrangements, give mothers who need to express breast milk at work protection, and improve the process that ensures state government contracts pay equal wages. It also establishes a study committee to look at instituting a paid family leave law.

New York may soon follow in Vermont’s footsteps. In his 2013 State of the State address, Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) announced a Women’s Equality Agenda that is currently winding its way through the state legislature, and many of the provisions relate to women’s economic opportunities.

One would amend state law to make it explicit that pregnant workers are entitled to reasonable accommodations related to pregnancy and childbirth unless they would create a hardship for the employer. Women are often pushed out of their jobs or fired when they request accommodations like a stool, the ability to drink water on the job, or be given light lifting duties. On a recent conference call about the proposal, Dina Bakst, co-founder and co-president of A Better Balance, recounted the stories of New York women who experienced these responses, including a worker who was pushed out of her job at 17 weeks pregnant because her employer refused to modify a lifting requirement. She ended up in a homeless shelter thanks to the loss of income.

Another provision would prohibit employers from retaliating against employees who share wage information with each other and redefine what exceptions employers can cite for pay differentials so that they can only relate to job performance or business necessity. Yet another would amend New York State’s human rights law to provide explicit protections for workers who have children.

New York goes even further, though, by taking an intersectional approach to women’s equality. While statehouses across the country continue to consider a record number of bills that seek to limit women’s reproductive access, New York’s bill is the only current one that would expand it. The state’s existing laws regulate abortion in the criminal code and only allows for abortion care later in a pregnancy when a women’s life is at risk, not when her health is at risk. If the national precedent of Roe v. Wade were to be struck down, abortion care could be hampered, so the agenda seeks fixes to clarify women’s rights.

While it may seem unrelated to women’s economic opportunities, access to abortion care plays a big financial role in women’s lives. Women who aren’t able to get an abortion when they seek to terminate a pregnancy are three times more likely to fall below the poverty line within two years. Controlling fertility allows women to hold jobs and invest in their education.

New York and Vermont are following other state-level successes for equal pay laws. Texas passed its own Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act to reform the constitution to allow workers more time to file a charge of discriminatory pay. New Mexico passed the Fair Pay For Women Act this year, which also eases the ability to bring cases alleging pay discrimination.

These bills are popular with both the general public as well as the business community. In New York, 84 percent want to enact equal pay legislation and 80 percent want to update the state’s abortion laws. The state’s chamber of commerce has also come out in support. Federal lawmakers may want to take note of the success of these efforts at the state level.

(Credit: Pacific Standard Magazine)

Aside from the ironic fact that teens who receive abstinence-only education are actually more likely to become pregnant than the students who receive accurate sexual health information about prevention methods, the situation in Michigan also illustrates the pervasive negativity that Americans associate with teenage pregnancies. That attitude ultimately creates a environment that punishes, stigmatizes, and shames young mothers — many of whom are subject to much larger structural issues that are out of their control, like the type of sex education they received in school or the level of poverty they were born into.

Unfortunately, the situation in Michigan is hardly the only example of this dynamic in play. Here are five other instances of teen moms being shamed instead of supported:

1. A North Carolina high schooler’s photo won’t appear in her yearbook because she posed with her newborn son. One teen mom in North Carolina can relate all too well to the pregnant students in Michigan. After posing for a photo with her baby son, she was told that the picture wouldn’t be allowed to appear in the yearbook this year. The school claimed that the image would “promote teen pregnancy” and told the student she had two days to submit a different photo without her son. She declined, saying, “If he wasn’t going to be in it with me, I didn’t want be in it at all.”

2. One Louisiana high school banned pregnant teens from attending classes on campus altogether. Last year, a charter school in Louisiana received significant backlash for its policy forbidding pregnant students from remaining on campus. According to the school handbook, pregnant students were required to either switch to another school or begin a home school program — and if the school “suspected” a girl of being pregnant, administrators could force her to take a pregnancy test to find out for sure. After the ACLU stepped in to file a formal discrimination complaint, the Louisiana Department of Education ordered the school to drop its policy.

3. A celebrity-studded national campaign tells teens that being a mother is incompatible with being successful. Public service campaigns that stigmatize young parents are all too common. Teens are often bombarded with negative messages intended to dissuade them from having a baby at a young age — but instead of focusing on effective information about tools to prevent pregnancy, like information about where to access affordable birth control or other family planning support, these ads simply focus on how teen mothers’ lives are ruined. Many of them also have the added effect of dismissing parenthood altogether. A recent campaign from the Candie’s Foundation depicts celebrity’s faces alongside these messages, including Carly Rae Jepson proclaiming that being a mother prevents women from achieving great things:

4. New York City advertisements tell teen moms that they will be poor and their boyfriends will leave them. New York City, which has taken huge steps to lower its rates of unintended teen pregnancies by expanding access to contraception, recently decided its efforts also needed to include an “edgy” ad campaign intended to illustrate “the real cost of teen pregnancy.” The posters in the campaign fall right in line with the typical scare tactics that attempt to frighten teens out of becoming pregnant, displaying children’s faces alongside dire statistics about why teen motherhood is destined for failure. Rather than addressing the deep-seated economic issues at play, this type of advertising chooses instead to simply blame teen mothers — and their children — for creating their own cycle of poverty:

5. An Oregon high schooler faked a pregnancy to experience the stigma firsthand, and even she was surprised at the negative reactions. High school senior Maria Miranda lives in an area that has a high rate of teen pregnancies, especially among Latina youth, and she wanted to investigate the types of stereotyping those young women experience. For six months, she pretended to be pregnant — and lost many friends in the process. Miranda asked four friends to participate in the social experiment and collect the gossip spreading about her. They reported that she was being called “irresponsible” or “stupid.” One of her teachers said, “Oh great, another child having a child.” In later interviews, Miranda said she had never learned more about judgment than she had during those six months.

Ultimately, since teens aren’t “supposed” to be getting pregnant, American society assumes that the ones who do are failures. Those “deviant” teens should never be celebrated; rather, they should be held up as a warning to dissuade other youth from following in their footsteps. But those messages are harmful for the millions of young parents who are living with the reality of caring for a child. Those youth need support, not stigmatization, as they transition into being parents. In fact, studies have shown that robust youth support programs are actually more effective at preventing unintended pregnancies than efforts to shame teens about their sexuality are.

Of course, the United States — which has the highest rate of teen pregnancy in the developed world — should take steps to ensure that youth have the education and the resources they need to decide when they’re ready to become parents. But that public health effort shouldn’t come at the expense of the millions of teenage parents who don’t deserve to be ostracized, especially when there are more effective policy solutions that could better address the root of this issue.

Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D) came out swinging against the repeal of new rules meant to regulate derivatives, the complex financial instruments that were at “the center of the storm” that caused the financial crisis. The rules shouldn’t be weakened or repealed just because big banks want to see them eliminated, Warren argued Thursday, The Hill reports:

“The big banks won some battles and lost some battles during the financial regulatory debate in 2009 and 2010, but their tune never changed and their lobbying never let up,” she said. “It is dangerous for Congress to amend the derivatives provisions of the Dodd-Frank Act without at the same time taking accompanying steps to strengthen reform and maintain the law’s equilibrium.”

One rule the package of legislation advanced by the House committee would eliminate is a “push out” provision that would limit derivatives trading at banks that receive federal backing. Similar to the Volcker Rule, another provision Wall Street largely opposes, it is aimed at making taxpayer-backed banks safer to avoid crises similar to the one that thrust the United States into a recession and led to a bailout of major banks in 2008.

Warren isn’t alone in her opposition to the rollback. The Obama administration has long opposed the repeal of the derivatives rules, and former Federal Deposit Insurance Commission chair Sheila Bair has said the swaps and derivatives rules need to be strengthened rather than weakened. Whether the rules will face a repeal vote in the Senate isn’t clear: the House passed similar legislation in 2012, only to see it die in the Senate without a vote.

And yet, thanks to a Texas judge, Compton could lose custody of her children because she has the audacity to live with the woman she loves.

According to Price, Judge John Roach, a Republican who presides over a state trial court in McKinney, Texas, placed a so-called “morality clause” in Compton’s divorce papers. This clause forbids Compton having a person that she is not related to “by blood or marriage” at her home past 9pm when her children are present. Since Texas will not allow Compton to marry her partner, this means that she effectively cannot live with her partner so long as she retains custody over her children. Invoking the “morality clause,” Judge Roach gave Price 30 days to move out of Compton’s home.

Compton can appeal Price’s decision, but her appeal will be heard by the notoriously conservative Texas court system. Ultimately, the question of whether Compton’s relationship with Price is entitled to the same dignity accorded to any other loving couple could rest with the United States Supreme Court.

CBS News’ Major Garrett confirmed that it was a GOP source who leaked the altered emails.

The miscast quotes affect at least two emails that include a State Department spokesperson and a White House deputy adviser — the two parties GOP lawmakers insist were trying to engage a cover-up on behalf of the Obama administration to protect the president’s chances of re-election.

A leaked email adds new language to State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland’s email, including a specific reference to al-Qaeda:

“The penultimate point is a paragraph talking about all the previous warnings provided by the Agency (CIA) about al-Qaeda’s presence and activities of al-Qaeda.“

The actual email read:

“The penultimate point could be abused by members to beat the State Department for not paying attention to Agency warnings.“

A leaked email written by deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes suggests that he asked for the final draft to remove references to warnings about specific attacks, a demand made by the State Department:

“We must make sure that the talking points reflect all agency equities, including those of the State Department, and we don’t want to undermine the FBI investigation.”

But the actual email did not mention the State Department:

“We need to resolve this in a way that respects all of the relevant equities, particularly the investigation.”

Since the congressional hearings last week, the White House on Wednesday released a hundred pages of emails from after the consulate attack. The full version undermines already-thin accusations that this is a White House scandal.

(Credit: AP)

A top anti-immigration advocate referred to Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) using a homophobic slur during an appearance on the Laura Ingraham radio show on Thursday.

Mark Krikorian, the Executive Director of the Center for Immigration Studies, argued that Rubio is critical to building Republican support for reform, but is either misleading lawmakers about the bill or is unaware of the provisions included in the measure.

“Without Rubio, there is no bill, I mean, it just can’t happen,” Krikorian said, “because Rubio’s job basically was to be the beard for this bill.” The phrase “beard” became popularized in the 1960s to describe a woman helping a man hide his homosexuality.

The Center for Immigration Studies was established by John Tanton, a strict a nativist who once wrote a paper titled “The Case for Passive Eugenics” and has openly professed his preference for white people. CIS has produced reports with racist undertones and Krikorian himself has jokingly suggested that immigrants are responsible for the subprime mortgage meltdown.

In 2007, he accepted an invitation to speak at the Michigan State University chapter of Young Americans for Freedom, a group that had posted “Gays Spread AIDS” fliers across campus.

You may start seeing more people carrying James Bond’s gun around — by law. A new proposed federal law would require that all new guns, and eventually all guns for sale, would be required to have “smart” identification technology that only allows specially authorized users to fire it, something the silver screen saw recently in Skyfall. The law is intended to crack down on gun accidents, thefts, and suicides, but its critics — including a major gun violence prevention group — worry that it might make the problem worse.

Introduced by Rep. John Tierney (D-MA), the Personalized Handgun Safety Act of 2013 would require that all guns manufactured for sale or put up for sale, would have to have some kind of “personalized” technology that limited the ability to fire the gun to its owner and any individuals authorized. Since this technology is not widespread now, these requirements would kick in within two years for manufacturers and three years for sellers. Affected sellers include both federally licensed retailers and private sellers.

The bill is technologically feasible. Several possible ways of building “smart” guns include firearms that only activate when you press a special ring into it, guns that won’t work until you enter a key code, guns that only fire if they detect a specific radio signal, and guns that recognize biometric info like fingerprints. Some smart guns are already available abroad, including one Irish design that automatically disables guns when they’re brought into properly equipped schools.

There’s some reason to believe these measures could be effective in reducing gun violence. Roughly ten to fifteen percent of crime guns are acquired by theft; an average of 232,400 guns are stolen per year. Presumably, a smart gun couldn’t be used by a thief.

So long as parents don’t give their kids biometric “permission” or leave their gun key lying around, then kids also wouldn’t be able to fire the gun. Adam Lanza couldn’t have brought his mother’s guns to Newtown absent her say-so were they smart guns. Some of the 900 kids who died in gun accidents or suicides last year may not have lost their lives.

“Even if smart guns disarmed only our dumbest, laziest criminals and other unauthorized borrowers like kids,” wrote Dave Guston and Ed Finn, two professors at Arizona State University, “the savings in lives could be tremendous.”

But the Violence Policy Center (VPC), a major group supporting stronger gun regulations, is skeptical. A 2013 report on smart guns opposed “the use of any federal tax dollars in support of smart gun research,” though it didn’t take a position on a smart gun mandate of the sort Tierney is proposing. The report noted that most guns criminals use are acquired via personal sales from “straw purchasers” who initially acquired the gun legally, a distribution mechanism that wouldn’t be affected by smart guns. Moreover, the report finds, many children are allowed to use family guns by their parents, and the vast majority of guns in the United States are collected, not for sale, which means that most already-existing guns wouldn’t be covered by legislation like Tierney’s.

The VPC report even worries that smart gun laws might fuel gun sales. “Packaged with a strong sales pitch,” the VPC writes, “the technology could penetrate new markets for a gun industry that is facing long-term declines in household and personal gun ownership.”

The question may be moot. Some conservative commentators have already harshly criticized Tierney’s proposal, and the law can’t pass without GOP support.

(Credit: AP)

The military’s sexual assault crisis has been in the headlines consistently for the past two weeks, leading two members of Congress to call on President Obama to take executive action and fix it.

Sen. John Tester (D-MT) and Rep. Chellie Pingree (D-ME) introduced the Ruth Moore Act of 2013 earlier this year to help the victims of sexual assault receive benefits once they leave the military. At present, the burden of proof for victims of rape and sexual assault to qualify for disability benefits for conditions related to their trauma, including treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder, is shockingly high, leaving many men and women unable to receive the care they need. A scheduled hearing on the bill was meant to take place on Wednesday, but has instead been delayed until June 3.

Rather than waiting for the Ruth Moore Act to pass, the bill’s sponsors sent Obama a letter on Thursday calling on him to use his authority as president to act now:

We commend your willingness to work with Congress to address the prevalence of sexual assault in the military. However, given the increasing rate of these assaults and the dramatic implications they are having on our service members, veterans, and their families, we strongly urge you to take further action to confront this crisis. In particular, you have the ability to provide justice for thousands of survivors of service-related sexual trauma by calling for more fairness in the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) disability claims process, and increasing their ability to access the benefits they desperately need. [...]

Our legislation continues to garner support in Congress and has been endorsed by every major veterans’ service organization. Legislation, however, is not necessary to keep faith with these veterans. In 2010, the VA relaxed evidentiary standards to make it easier for combat veterans suffering from PTSD to get the disability benefits they need. It is past time the VA make a similar regulatory change for MST survivors. And you can direct them to do so.

Sexual assault and rape culture in the military has reached a tipping point in the last two weeks, with multiple stories about officials in positions to prevent assaults being charged or investigated for sexual assault themselves. “We’re losing the confidence of the women who serve that we can solve this problem,” Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey said on Thursday. “That’s a crisis.”

Obama invited Dempsey, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, and several other military officials to the White House on Thursday to discuss the crisis. “The issue of sexual assault in our armed forces undermines that trust,” Obama said following the meeting. “So not only is it a crime, not only is it shameful and disgraceful, but it also is going to make and has made the military less effective than it can be. And as such, it is dangerous to our national security.” However, Obama warned, “there’s no silver bullet to solving this problem.”

Along with the Ruth More Act, several other pieces of legislation meant to address sexual assault in the armed services are pending on the Hill. Members of both parties and from both Houses of Congress signed on to co-sponsor the Military Justice Improvement Act, a bill seeking to revise the convening authority that officers previously used to overturn juries’ sexual assault convictions against their subordinates. The likewise bipartisan Combating Military Sexual Assault (MSA) Act of 2013 would reorganize the military’s support system for sexual assault victims, providing Special Victims Counsel to all victims.

In its most recent report, the Pentagon estimated 26,000 instances of sexual assault occurred against servicemembers last year, a twenty-seven percent increase over the previous year. Several polling experts, however, recently warned that the estimate may be off, as in their view it may be, as Bloomberg reported, “based on scanty response rates, questionable data and broad definitions of what constitutes abuse.”

And while these stories raise serious concerns about money in politics, embassy security, and freedom of the press, they aren’t the only problems impacting the American people. Here are five big stories the media isn’t obsessing about:

1. Carbon pollution reaches historic highs, threatening human existence. The concentration of climate warming carbon dioxide in the atmosphere “has passed the milestone level of 400 parts per million (ppm),” scientists estimate. “At the beginning of industrialisation the concentration of CO2 was just 280ppm,” said Prof Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. “We must hope that the world crossing this milestone will bring about awareness of the scientific reality of climate change and how human society should deal with the challenge.” The last time the Earth saw carbon dioxide levels that high, humans did not exist. The West Antarctic ice sheet also did not exist, and sea levels were as much as 82 feet higher than they are today. During an earlier period when CO2 levels were this high, temperatures were 5° to 10°F warmer globally.

2. The devastating impact of sequestration on kids, cancer patients and first responders. On Tuesday, the Congressional Budget Office reported that the budget deficit will shrink to its smallest level since before the Great Recession in 2013, and it will continue to decrease through 2015. But despite the smaller deficits, Republicans remain focused on spending reductions — even as the most recent round of cuts has kicked children out of preschool, left cancer patients without needed screenings, undermined public health and fire safety, and gutted programs that help low-income Americans in a variety of ways. Those cuts have also threatened to derail the economic recovery, which has sputtered along despite the headwinds created by a consistent focus on deficit reduction.

3. Massive cuts to food stamps for the most vulnerable Americans. The House Agriculture Committee approved a farm bill late Wednesday night that would cut federal food stamps by $20.5 billion — more steeply than any legislation since the welfare reforms of the 1990s. Earlier this week, the Senate Agriculture Committee also agreed to a $4.1 billion reduction. The program keeps hundreds of thousands of vulnerable Americans out of the deepest pits of poverty, and even as the Great Recession swelled SNAP rolls, the program continued to push its erroneous payments rates to record lows.

4. 1100 workers die in garment factory collapse in Bangladesh and most American retailers plan business as usual. Since a factory collapsed in Bangladesh, killing 1,100 clothing industry workers, American retailers have been hesitant to adopt safety plans that could prevent similar tragedies. Abercrombie & Fitch announced it would sign a safety upgrade plan that has been approved by six major European retailers and one other American company, but many other manufacturers — including Walmart and Gap — are holding out. Although some retailers fear the costs of upgrades, they could pass them on entirely to consumers and only raise prices by 10 cents per garment.

5. 4,000 gun deaths due to gun violence since Newtown. A crowdsourced effort to count every person killed by a gun in the United States since the Newtown tragedy is currently being hosted by Slate. As of this writing, the count is 4,150. The Senate rejected gun safety legislation in April and has not yet set a date for reconsidering the measure.

(Credit: Philippe Lissac / GODONG)

Conservative states, business groups, fossil fuel companies, and politicians who deny the science of climate change are petitioning the Supreme Court to reverse Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulations on greenhouse gases and to weaken the Clean Air Act. This would involve the Court either limiting or reversing its own 2007 decision, Massachusetts v. EPA, which found that the EPA is required to regulate carbon pollution as pollution.

Reuters reported that the Court’s decision of whether or not to take up the petitioners’ case will have a significant impact on future efforts to reduce carbon emissions. The appeals to the Supreme Court follow the DC Circuit Court of Appeals’ refusal to reconsider the matter. The Court is expected to decide whether to hear the petitions in October.

The nine petitions, filed over the last few months, seek review of EPA regulations. Petitioners include: states with fossil fuel-friendly governors like Texas, Alaska, and Virginia; industry groups such as the Chamber of Commerce, the American Petroleum Institute, and the National Association of Manufacturers; as well as fossil fuel companies like Peabody Energy (the world’s largest private-sector coal company). The petition led by Texas includes as fellow petitioners Gov.Rick Perry (R), Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli (R), and Reps. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), and Michelle Bachmann (R-MN), who deny the reality of climate science.

Since the Court ruled that CO2 is a pollutant, the EPA found that it was a threat to public health through an endangerment finding:

“Pursuant to CAA section 202(a), the Administrator finds that greenhouse gases in the atmosphere may reasonably be anticipated both to endanger public health and to endanger public welfare.”

In August of 2012, EPA implemented new mileage standards in order to regulate vehicles, and is expected to do the same with stationary sources — primarily power plants. These standards are already reaping benefits for drivers and manufacturers through increased efficiency, lower emissions, and wider inventory selection. Reducing carbon pollution emitted by power plants would slow the dangerous acceleration of climate change, improve air quality, and would be a net economic positive by avoiding “negative health and environmental effects.”

The wide range of petitions present an unusual number of options for the Supreme Court to rein in or overturn Massachusetts v. EPA (there were 5 petitions challenging the Affordable Care Act in 2011). The Court is more likely to take up one of the petitions on narrower grounds, as most experts see broad action as unlikely.

The Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism’s annual survey of how women are represented in the 100 top-grossing movies from the previous year is out, and much has been made of the study’s finding that the percentage of female characters has declined to a five-year low, from 29.9 percent in 2007 to 28.4 percent in 2012. But it’s not just notable that the number of female characters with speaking parts has fallen to a low—after all, there were better years in between 2007 and 2012. The survey says a lot about what kinds of women successful movies include, and what those movies think women are for. My colleague Adam Peck put together a graphic representation of some of the most revealing statistics in the study:

Women are eye-candy, particularly if they’re young. 31.6 percent of the 4,475 characters with speaking parts who appeared in the 100 highest-grossing movies in 2012 who appeared in “sexualized attire.” 56.6 percent of characters aged 13-20 appeared on-screen in such clothing, as did 39.9 percent of characters aged 21 to 39, and that number fell to 16.4 percent for characters aged 40-64. It’s no surprise that Hollywood has a particularly distasteful attitude towards middle-aged women—as Vulture revealed in a startling analysis, leading men tend to get older, but their female love interests stay in a similar age range, shutting middle-aged actresses out of a huge range of parts where they’d be paired against men their own ages. But it is actually remarkable that teenaged characters are actually portrayed more sexually than characters aged 21-39, who might be expected to have more sex and sexual autonomy.

Women are also much less likely to define the fictional world of the movies they’re in via narration. Of films that have narrators, just 27.5 percent of them were women. Those numbers have been higher: 51.5 percent of narrators were female in 2010, and 41.7 percent of them were female in 2009. But they were at a low of 18.5 percent in 2007, and 2010 is the only year in Annenberg’s analysis that women have ever been more than half of narratives. This might seem like a small element to notice, but narration is important: the narrator is generally considered authoritative even when characters themselves are unreliable. Narrators set the tone for the films they’re in, and frame the events they’re describing, and if men dominate those roles, their voices get to be more authoritative more often than those of women.

And women aren’t for interacting with men, either. Hollywood operates in a weirdly sex-segregated world, where in 2012, just 6 percent of the 100 top-grossing movies had casts where between 45 percent and 54.9 percent of speaking characters were female. It’s true that many of us spend some time in sex-segregated settings, having drinks with the girls or playing hoops with the guys. But in the world of Hollywood, it seems like all the women at brunch and all the men are off somewhere else punching each other. A blockbuster like the Fast and Furious franchise, which recognizes that men and women sometimes work together, and have each other as friends as well as enemies, is a relative rarity.

None of this is to suggest that there aren’t filmmakers doing fascinating work down the budget and gross scale. And given the fluctuations in many of the numbers that the Annenberg School is reporting, maybe 2012 was an anomaly—though the better years were obviously anomalies, too, rather than signs of more durable progress for women. But if Shane Black can make a big-budget superhero action movie like Iron Man 3 pass the Bechdel test, it would be nice if more writers and directors in Hollywood viewed their industry’s confusion about how to get women speaking parts in movies and what to do with them once they’re there as a creative challenge, rather than an entirely comfortable state of affairs.

A team of researchers in Washington state collected data from nearly 400,000 adults, evenly split between those who had been treated for cancer and those who were cancer-free. After checking to see which of those adults had filed for bankruptcy between 1995 and 2009, the researchers found that cancer patients were 2.5 times as likely to go bankrupt in that period.

Although the study didn’t specifically look at insurance coverage, previous research has demonstrated that the Americans who cite major health issues as the reason they filed for bankruptcy are actually often insured. One 2006 study found that more than 60 percent of bankruptcies in the United States are due to high medical bills, and in those cases, three-quarters of those Americans had insurance when they got sick. NBC News interviewed one cancer patient who found herself in this situation, even though she was employed and insured when she first got her diagnosis:

That rings true for Janet Literski, 57, who had purchased health insurance as an independent contractor working in sales. When she was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 2008 Literski discovered her insurance covered only part of her surgical costs and none of her diagnostic tests. Then there were co-payments and deductibles. By the time she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer two years later, she was about $150,000 in medical debt.

In 2011, no longer able to work, Literski and her disabled husband filed for bankruptcy. “It was a gut wrenching decision because you feel like a personal failure, and that makes me angry because I had tried to do everything right,” Literski says. “I had health insurance, I was working.”

Literski is now covered by Medicaid and receives disability payments and though she hasn’t been told she’s in remission, she says she is “healthy enough.”

[The study's lead author, Dr. Scott Ramsey,] says cancer centers need to do a better job of assessing each patient’s financial status, offering credit counseling, and managing patient care.

Even bigger disparities emerged when the researchers broke down the cancer patients in their study by different demographics. The younger groups were up to 10 times more likely to go broke than the older patients, and non-white women were the most likely to run out of money.The cancer that is associated with the highest risk of bankruptcy is thyroid cancer — likely because that disease mostly affects younger women. On the other hand, older men with prostate cancer are the least likely to reach financial rock bottom.

Ramsey and his researchers first presented their research in 2011, and their final findings were published in the Health Affairs journal this week. The timing of the study’s release coincides with some recent pressure to help lower the cost of cancer drugs. Last month, a group of over 100 doctors criticized Big Pharma companies for making “life-saving” cancer drugs too expensive for Americans to afford. The doctors asserted that the “unsustainable drug prices” were “causing harm to patients,” and urged reforms in this area to ensure that cancer patients don’t have to go without the treatment they need.

Cancer patients have also been recently caught up in the budget battles resulting from sequestration. At the end of April, cancer clinics blasted Congress for taking legislative action to restore the sequester cuts that were causing airport delays rather than working to address the cuts that are undermining Americans’ chemotherapy treatment. As a result of the automatic budget cuts, some Americans are being forced to delay their chemotherapy, and some cancer clinics may even be forced to close their doors.

Just in the last several days, a Bismarck news anchor mistakenly uttered vulgarity on live television. He’s been heralded by celebrities from New York to California as some sort of pop icon. His bosses have been called goons because they fired him. We learned this week that the Pentagon is vetting its guide on religious tolerance with a group that compared Christian evangelism to rape, and advocated that military personnel and colluding chaplains who proselytize should be court-marshalled.

Forty years ago, the United States Supreme Court sanctioned abortion on demand. And we wonder why our culture sees school shootings so often.

Cramer’s link between recent school shootings and a 40 year-old Supreme Court decision is certainly an unusual take on what causes events to transpire, but his attempt to present abortion as more dangerous to society than weakly regulated access to firearms is far from unique. Indeed, in five states, it is significantly harder to obtain an abortion than it is to purchase a gun.

The congressman’s statement appears to be part of a broader theory about how bad things are happening in the United States because people have turned away from Cramer’s version of Christianity. At another point in the speech, he claims that “[i]nnocent people in New York have airplanes flown into their places of work, and marathoners in Boston are victims of bombs, yet Christianity is singled out as bigotry in our public institutions because politicians and academics lack the courage to speak truth. We’ve normalized perversion and perverted God’s natural law to the point where the only thing not tolerated anymore is a stand for truth.”

Kansas Board of Education member Steve Roberts (R)

Kansas Board of Education member Steve Roberts (R), an elected official representing one-tenth of the state, defended on Tuesday his use of a racial epithet at a previous board meeting to “push the frontiers of political correctness.” After a former Topeka NAACP president advocated for more African American history in state curriculum standards, Roberts had brought up an unrelated non-binding 2007 New York City resolution discouraging the use of the “N-word” and other offensive language.

Roberts, a former math tutor who was first elected to the board last November, had delivered a monologue to the Rev. Ben Scott at the April board meeting during a discussion on history, government, and social studies standards. Roberts complained that New York City had banned the same racial slur that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had used (in quoting racist police forces and other segregationists) in his famous 1963 “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” saying:

We have to push the frontiers of political correctness and do what’s right. And so, if I were to use it clinically, I would almost use a test to see what the effect on Twitter would be. You know, ‘That Roberts guy said nigger at the state school board meeting, and he said it as, it’s probably the ugliest word in our vocabulary.’ It’s an ugly repugnant absolutely horrific word that we should rise above. But I did get it out there and I appreciate the opportunity to do it in a politically correct setting.

Watch the video:

According to Topeka Capital-Journal reports, when Scott and other civil rights leaders expressed their concern about those comments at Tuesday’s board meeting, Roberts stood by his remarks.

“I did my best to say the ‘N-word’ clinically,” he noted, adding “I’m willing to be considered politically incorrect … I don’t think that’s a bad thing.” Roberts then accused those criticizing his comments as only wanting media attention.

SMITH: When you reach the age of a person like myself and you begin to get information from the AARP saying that they will represent you and your values and standards, you’d better be careful. This group is a very, very powerful Washington lobby, and you just may be very surprised and disappointed to see those things that they are promoting and those things they are opposing.

Be very careful that you know what your fees are going for because the AARP is not on your side. If you are a Christian and believe in Biblical values, you can pretty much count on the fact that everything that you are in favor of, the AARP is opposing.

LGBT older adults face many unique challenges, especially in regards to their very economic well-being. Because of discrimination and alienation throughout their lifetime, as well as their inability to claim partner benefits like Social Security, LGBT older adults are much more likely to be living in isolation and poverty. It makes perfect sense that AARP would recognize that a segment of its constituency experiences particularly troubling circumstances and could use additional support. Conservatives, like AFA’s own Bryan Fischer, have long claimed that gay men die early because of HIV and other supposed consequences of “homosexual behavior,” so perhaps Smith thinks AARP should be a straights-only organization because he believes it already is.

If AARP is supporting the “homosexual agenda,” then that agenda is merely survival.

The background here stretches back to a 2010 decision by the Supreme Court holding that the NLRB is powerless to act unless it has a quorum of at least three members. The NLRB has exclusive jurisdiction over what are known as “unfair labor practices,” meaning that it is the only body of government permitted to enforce much of federal labor law. If the NLRB is powerless to act, there will be no one to enforce workers’ rights to join a union without intimidation from their employer. No one to enforce workers’ rights to join together to oppose abusive work conditions. And no one to make an employer actually bargain with a union. Without an NLRB to enforce the law, it may be possible for an employer to round up all of their pro-union workers, fire them, and then replace them with anti-union scabs who will immediately call a vote to decertify the union.

This reality gave Senate Republican filibusters of President Obama’s NLRB nominees a special aura of danger. When the Senate minority filibusters nominees to a powerful court, the other judges on that court can continue to issue decisions (even if those decisions are likely to reflect the ideological preferences of past presidents). If senators filibuster most agency heads, the agency’s remaining staff can maintain its day to day operations. But if a filibuster blocks confirmations to the NLRB, a sweeping array of workers’ rights simply cease to exist.

To ward this off, President Obama recess appointed three people to the NLRB nearly a year and a half ago. A panel of Republican-appointed judges on the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit struck down those recess appointments earlier this year. And, today, two more Republican judges voted to strike down the same appointments (an Obama appointee on the same court voted to uphold them).

While the rationale behind the these two court decisions is somewhat different, it’s not clear how much legal arguments actually matter in a case like this. The bottom line is that every Republican judge to consider the matter has now struck down President Obama’s appointments. There are five Republicans, and only four Democrats on the Supreme Court. That’s probably all you need to know if you’re placing bets on how the justices will resolve the case.

So five Republican justices are likely to uphold the two decisions blocking recess appointments. Without recess appointments most of federal labor law ceases to exist until the seats on the NLRB are filled — indeed, some 1,400 NLRB decisions may be retroactively invalidated. Without federal labor law, nothing prevents employers from engaging in the most ruthless purges of unions seen in this country since before the New Deal. And all that Senate Republicans need to do to maintain this status quo is to keep filibustering President Obama’s nominees.

Recently, several Senate Democrats, including Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) raised the idea of a second round of filibuster reform to ensure that Senate Republicans do not have the power to unilaterally obstruct nominees. If Reid cannot assemble the 51 votes he needs to enact such reforms, then every Democrat who opposes filibuster reform has likely voted to strip workers of their rights.

On Thursday, NBC’s Chuck Todd challenged Sen. Marco Rubio’s (R-FL) claim that the Obama administration has created a “culture of intimidation” in which “everything is about politics and destroying your opponent and dividing the American people for your electoral gain,” pointing out that the Rubio’s own PAC is actively fundraising from the ongoing scandals in Washington.

“Your PAC put out an e-mail raising money on IRS issue and doing a petition,” Todd said. “That’s campaigning. That’s politics too.” Rubio disagreed, saying that his PAC is merely trying to rally the American people against government abuse:

RUBIO: Here’s the point. I’m trying to get a petition of American citizens and Americans who support us in this endeavor to rally people. That’s different to say I’ll put on my website every donor to the Obama campaign and attack that individual, a private citizen by name, and I’m going to try to create this culture where people feel intimidated and oppose me. That’s two different things I’m talking about.

Watch it:

Rubio has also called for the acting IRS commissioner to be fired, introduced legislation creating criminal penalties for IRS officials who engage in political targeting and asked his supporters for money. In the eight days since the story broke, Rubio’s senate office put out seven different press releases about the IRS and he has granted numerous print, radio and TV interviews to discuss the matter.

Rubio’s Reclaim America PAC is running a petition asking supporters to “Stand with Marco and demand an investigation of the IRS” and is fundraising off of the story. “If there was ever a time for conservatives to take a stand against an expanding federal government, it is now,” his PAC’s fundraising pitch reads. “Together we can use this scandal to demonstrate to Americans of all backgrounds just how dangerous the status quo has become in Washington. But we’ll need all hands on deck. You can help by contributing to the Reclaim America PAC today.”

Rubio is widely considered a likely candidate to seek the Republican presidential nomination in 2016.

Credit: The Associated Press

Many other American retailers have yet to sign on, including Walmart and Gap. Gap has voiced concerns that the plan could be used to sue it in American courts and Walmart objected to governance and dispute resolution mechanisms. Walmart announced on Wednesday that it would instead use its own voluntary plan that includes inspecting all of its Bangladesh facilities and providing fire safety training to workers. Gap also sent a letter to employees at its headquarters saying that it has hired a fire inspector to examine factories in Bangladesh and will commit $22 million in loans to factories to make upgrades.

Meanwhile, other retailers are already looking to pull operations in Bangladesh and move them to other countries. The New York Times reports that Western executives are looking into sourcing production in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Indonesia. But pulling operations out of Bangladesh could only harm workers further:

Garment manufacturing makes up a fifth of the economy in Bangladesh and four-fifths of its exports, which means that one of the world’s poorest, most densely populated countries is desperately dependent on continued export orders to stave off soaring unemployment and possibly further political unrest. Some executives say that many multinationals will continue buying from Bangladesh, although some may diversify their orders to more countries.

Executives may also struggle to find safer working conditions elsewhere. A shoe factory in Cambodia collapsed on Thursday morning, killing two workers and injuring seven. An initial investigation showed that the ceiling lacked the materials to support heavy weight.

Rather than pulling operations, some companies are indicating that they will stay and make further investments in the country. In an interview on Wednesday with the Financial Times, H&M CEO Karl-Johan Persson said he supports Bangladesh’s recent announcement that it would raise the minimum wage for garment workers, saying that he wants salaries to be revised yearly. The company has also agreed to pay as much as $500,000 per year toward factory improvements and inspections by signing onto the safety agreement.

Although some retailers fear the costs of upgrades, they could pass them on entirely to consumers and only raise prices by 10 cents per garment.

A new report from the House Appropriation committee Democrats found that the Forest service “will have 500 fewer firefighters, 50-70 fewer fire engines, and two fewer aircraft because of sequestration.” Some of the equipment it does still have is outdated — such as the 50-years-old-on-average tanker planes that have crashed multiple times in the last decade, killing 14 people.

A Fox News radio AM talk show expressed incredulity that President Obama and Agriculture Secretary Vilsack “could not find $115 million of fat in the budget so they cut firefighters.” One of the more harmful aspects of sequestration is that the cuts take place “across-the-board” and do not permit the same flexibility in moving funds around within an agency.

Because last year’s wildfire season was so severe, the USDA Forest Service faced a $400 million shortfall for active firefighting and had to borrow money from fire prevention programs to cover the costs. These programs included paying for brush removal from public lands and protecting against invasive plants, disease, insect infestations, and fires. Eventually Congress reimbursed the Forest Service for the shortfall via the 2013 Continuing Resolution but the delays hurt prevention efforts. Last year’s fire season consisted of 67,700 fires burned 9 million acres.

This year, as of May 3, there have been 13,115 wildfires, burning 153,000 acres. Compounding the restraints posed by the inflexible sequester, agencies foresee a $700 million deficit in direct firefighting activities, so similar programs will be de-funded (such as a hazardous-fuels-reduction program to remove long-burning combustible materials from the path of fires).

Congress calculates wildfire suppression funds by averaging the cost over the last ten years. As climate change worsens drought year after year, this calculation becomes deficient. The wildfire season used to range between June and September, but has now expanded to include May and October.

The Western U.S. faces low mountain snowpack, and the most recent U.S. Seasonal Drought Monitor Outlook finds that “drought is forecast to either develop or persist across the western contiguous U.S. as this region enters its dry season.”

Dry conditions in nearly half the country make hampered fire management budgets and sequestration cuts even more dangerous for residents and will lead to even more shortfalls this season. A recent report found that climate change will double the area burned by wildfires by 2050.

Drought and wildfires, in addition to harming people and property, also have dramatic impacts on insects like monarch butterflies, as well as mammals, birds, reptiles, and nearly every plant in the region.

Local communities are trying to face climate adaptation issues alongside the federal government. Texas is preparing for record drought by creating a “rainy day” infrastructure water fund, though none of the legislators acknowledge that climate change is a primary cause of increasing droughts.

A recent report from the General Accounting Office found that the federal government needs to do a better job helping local governments adapt to climate change and integrate climate impacts into infrastructure planning. The report identified roads, bridges, wastewater systems, and federal facilities as particularly vulnerable. Sequestration makes it nearly impossible for the federal government to help local communities adapt to and prepare for climate change-fueled extreme weather and wildfires.

One of the greatest threats to liberty has been the government taking people’s liberty for things that people are in favor of. The Pew Research Group shows that 52 percent of people do not think marijuana should be illegal. And yet there are people in jail, and your Justice Department is continuing to put people in jail, for sale, and use, on occasion, of marijuana. That’s something the American public has finally caught up with. It was a cultural lag. And it’s been an injustice for 40 years in this country to take people’s liberty for something that was similar to alcohol. You have continued what is allowing the Mexican cartels power, and the power to make money, ruin Mexico, hurt our country by having a Prohibition in the late 20th and 21st century. We saw it didn’t work in this country in the 20s. We remedied it. This is the time to remedy this Prohibition, and I would hope you would do so.

WATCH IT:

In addition to the majority support for decriminalizing marijuana cited by Cohen, an even greater proportion of Americans say they think the United States is losing the so-called “War on Drugs” and that states should be allowed to decide whether marijuana is legal.

Holder said shortly after two states passed ballot initiatives to legalize and regulate recreational marijuana that he would announce a DOJ policy on a federal response. But six months later, his only answer has been that he expects an announcement “relatively soon.” Regional federal officials, meanwhile, have re-upped crackdowns on medical marijuana dispensaries, sending threat letters to dispensaries in several cities in Washington and California. And what started as a Drug Enforcement Administration crackdown has now developed into new DOJ action by regional U.S. attorneys. Just this month, U.S. Attorney Melinda Haag filed federal forfeiture actions to seize the real estate that houses two Bay Area medical marijuana dispensaries seemingly in compliance with state and local laws, including the largest dispensary in Berkeley and another dispensary that serves the Mission region of San Francisco. Haag has filed a similar action against the largest U.S. dispensary with locations in Oakland and San Jose, suggesting a strategy to hamper the industry by targeting the largest players.

Members of Congress have introduced several bills to square state laws with the federal marijuana prohibition.

Journalists commonly cited eight groups with known oil, gas, and coal funding: The American Enterprise Institute, Americans for Prosperity, Cato Institute, Competitive Enterprise Institute, Heartland Institute, Heritage Foundation, Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, and Institute for Energy Research (and its arm American Energy Alliance).

In total, they were cited 357 times, but outlets identified their funding from the Koch brothers, American Petroleum Institute, ExxonMobil, or General Motors a mere one-third of the time:

Based on a Nexus search, UCS’s Elliott Negin found the rate of reporting varies widely across outlets: Politico and the Los Angeles Times, and the Associated Press disclosed funding over 40 percent of the time. The two largest papers in the country, USA Today and Wall Street Journal (owned by Rupert Murdoch), disclosed this information the least. And if Koch Industries succeeds in its bid for the Los Angeles Times, along with seven other major papers, it is possible the average will drop even more.

By not disclosing what exactly fuels myths about climate change science and clean energy, readers are free to take claims from groups at face value. Take an example from Politico on Wednesday, which ran an article on wind turbines and the California condor. Politico quotes the American Energy Alliance at length, but only identifies it as “the political arm of the energy industry-funded Institute for Energy Research,” although the Koch affiliate has pledged to fight wind energy.

One reason for journalists return to fossil fuel talking heads is false balance. Journalists include quotes from climate deniers to present “the other side,” even though on issues like climate, one is overwhelmingly substantiated in the scientific field. Bloomberg News recently did this by giving equal weight to climate science denier Marc Morano’s long-debunked arguments.