It is worth noting that just two years ago, the Washington Post’s Editorial Page Editor wrote “The GOPs climate-change denial may be its most harmful delusion.” Apparently it is a delusion the WashPost is happy to spread.

Integrity of Climate Science

Smith opened with a general appeal for a clear discussion of the facts: “Climate change is an issue that needs to be discussed thoughtfully and objectively. Unfortunately, claims that distort the facts hinder the legitimate evaluation of policy options.”

However, with a look at his record, Rep. Smith did not have such a clear discussion in mind. After he became chair of the science committee, his first move was to schedule a hearing that aimed to take issue with the science of climate change. He has criticized “the idea of human-made global warming.” More dangerously, he has made headlines for authoring legislation that would politicize research conducted by the National Science Foundation. Of course, there is strong, 97%-grade consensus on human-caused climate change in the scientific literature, as a recent study confirmed.

Keystone Claims

With the House set to vote on Wednesday to force the approval of the Keystone tar sands pipeline, Rep. Smith argued that opposition to the Keystone tar sands pipeline hurts the economy and would not decrease carbon emissions. He said the “State Department has found that the pipeline will have minimal impact on the surrounding environment and no significant effect on the climate,” and would create “more than 40,000 U.S. jobs.”

This just isn’t true. The Environmental Protection Agency submitted a public comment on the State Department’s Draft Environmental Impact Statement, finding that, among other things, State needs to make revisions on the true impact of the project’s carbon emissions and about how dirty tar sands oil truly is. Additionally, tar sands oil extraction is not inevitable because transporting it by rail is not feasible — the pipeline is really their only option. Smith’s claims about 40,000 jobs are also quite inflated. The project would create just 35 permanent jobs, along with 51 coal plants’ worth of carbon dioxide each year.

U.S. Emissions

Smith went on to argue “that U.S. emissions contribute very little to global concentrations of greenhouse gas.”

In fact, annual U.S. carbon emissions rank just behind China’s, despite having only a quarter of China’s population. The U.S. is by far the world’s biggest contributor to global concentrations of CO2, the main greenhouse gas, since that depends on cumulative emissions.

Despite advances in energy efficiency and renewable energy, the United States remains a significant part of overall global carbon emissions. Domestic coal use is on the rise again in the U.S., and coal exports reached a record high last year, beating the record set in 1981. America is also the world’s number one fossil fuel subsidizer.

Recent Warming

Rep. Smith made the case that “global temperatures have held steady over the past 15 years, despite rising greenhouse gas emissions.”

This is simply not the case. The overall trend line shows continued warming. 2010 was the hottest year on record. Every year of the decades of the 2000′s was warmer than the average temperature in the ’90s.

Superstorm Sandy

The Chair of the House Science Committee called out “unscientific and often hyperbolic claims” about the impacts of a warming climate. He cited experts that ostensibly claimed that Superstorm Sandy had nothing to do with climate change.

However, experts in the field explain that climate change makes hurricanes and Nor’Easters like Superstorm Sandy more powerful and more destructive. The experts that Rep. Smith tried to cite mainly focused on research saying that climate change has not increased the frequency of hurricanes. Climate scientists pointed to the link between climate change and the increased strength and intensity of storms.

It is not just the increased ocean and atmospheric temperatures that can make storms more intense, however. A recent article in Oceanography Journal found that the melting and receding Arctic ice also amplifies storms like Sandy.

Fixing the Problem

Smith said that the EPA “proposed emissions standards that virtually prohibit new coal-fired power plants.” He goes on to say that regulating carbon emissions from power plants will “raise both electricity rates and gas prices — costing jobs and hurting the economy.”

The Environmental Protection Agency is required to regulate carbon because the Supreme Court ruled that carbon dioxide is a pollutant. EPA regulations actually help the economy and create jobs. Every $1 invested in the economy yields $10 in benefits.

The U.S. can do much more than it currently is to reduce carbon emissions, and doing so will actually be a boon to the economy. The EPA could help cut carbon emissions 17 percent by the end of the decade by regulating carbon dioxide under the Clean Air Act.

Slowing Down Progress

Smith concludes that we are “pursuing heavy-handed regulations” on climate change and urges everyone to “take a step back from the unfounded claims of impending catastrophe and think critically about the challenge before us.”

There have been thousands of experts thinking critically about the reality of climate change, and their overwhelming conclusion is that emissions need to be reined in. Not eventually, but right now.

A 2012 World Bank climate report concluded: “A 4°C [7°F] world can, and must, be avoided” to avert “devastating” impacts. The IMF chief warned in February: “Unless We Take Action On Climate Change, Future Generations Will Be Roasted, Toasted, Fried And Grilled”

Continuing to kick the can down the road could be dangerous in the extreme. Millions displaced. Drastically warmer weather. Tropical diseases. Extreme drought that leads to wildfire conditions.

Smith may benefit from protecting the biggest carbon emitters — he has accepted more than half a million dollars from the oil and gas industry — but the rest of the country, and the world, cannot afford to wait.

A recent report gave over half the states in the U.S. a grade of “F” when it comes to price transparency. And after the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services recently provided a huge data dump on what hospitals charge government health care programs for common procedures, they found a staggering amount of variation across the country with no discernible justifications on economic or quality-of-care grounds. But the prices charged to private insurers still remain secret.

So in the wake of mounting pressure following the government’s data release, Steve Sonenreich — the chief executive of Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami Beach — promised on a radio show on Monday that his hospital will reveal the contractual rates that it charges private insurers:

“We will post our prices relative to Blue Cross, and Aetna, our contractual prices, and we’ll challenge Baptist and the other systems in the community to do the same,” said Sonenreich, who made his pledge during a studio interview on WLRN 91.3-FM with host Tom Hudson.

Also in the radio studio was Brian Keeley, chief executive of Baptist Health South Florida, which manages seven hospitals in the region. Keeley declined to accept Sonenreich’s challenge for price transparency, but acknowledged “That’s where the whole industry is going, undoubtedly.”

It remains to be seen whether other hospitals will follow Sonenreich’s lead. But the inability of consumers, doctors, and even many insurers themselves to compare different rates and charges openly is one of the key factors hamstringing the American health care market. With greater price transparency, it’s possible health care could begin behaving a bit more like markets are traditionally supposed to behave, and drive down prices through open competition.

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA)

Grassley defended his amendment by asking, “what does country of origin have anything to do with profiling?” In response, Gang Of Eight member Sen. Dick Durbin (D-ILL) tore down Grassley’s definition of racial profiling, explaining that the language in the bill is a necessary protection and even the same practice embraced by Bush administration officials:

DURBIN: Senator Grassley, let me say two or three things about this. First, there is no mention of country of origin in the language of this bill. We specifically do not mention country of origin and that was the basis of your argument. And so I’d ask you and your staff to take another look at it. We do not raise that issue. Number two, the language –
[...]

GRASSLEY: Why then don’t you mention it as — so that it’s –

DURBIN: Because what we’ve done is specify that you cannot use race or ethnicity. Now, how did we come up with race or ethnicity? This was the standard established –

GRASSLEY: I’m not arguing that point I think you’re right by including that in the bill. But what does country of origin have anything to do with profiling?

DURBIN: It’s not mentioned nor religion. Why did we pick race and ethnicity? Those were the standards were established by Attorney General John Ashcroft in 2003. We took the Ashcroft profiling guidance, issued by this Department of Justice, and embodied it in this. It is not a radical departure from past practice. In fact, it embodies the practice of former conservative Republican attorney general under a Republican president.

Durbin went on to recount examples of African-American and Hispanic women facing strip searches at airports far more often than white passengers. “The GAO did a finding on it, an investigation: African-Americans were twice as likely — pardon me, nine times as likely, Hispanic Americans were nearly four times as likely, as white passengers to be strip searched,” Durbin said. “And there were no — there was no evidence of contraband in those groups that were being strip searched. This was clearly a waste of effort and embarrassing and insulting exercise of authority.”

Grassley’s amendment, which was slammed by immigration advocates, was defeated by a voice vote.

Credit: Greg Basta

Frustration with the failed execution of various weakly-constructed legal settlements stemming from widespread foreclosure fraud bubbled over today into a protest at Justice Department headquarters that culminated in homeowners being arrested.

Using tactics and rhetoric familiar from 2011’s Occupy Wall Street demonstration, a group of activists and foreclosed homeowners marched on the Justice building in downtown Washington, D.C. According to tweets and photographs from activists on the scene, protesters moved past a police barricade and attempted to establish a sit-in, at which point police began arresting homeowners and activists.

Why the renewed fervor? Despite agreeing to various settlements since 2008 requiring a total of $5.7 billion in payments to homeowners, “banks have paid less than half” that amount to date, according to the Washington Post:

Critics point to the 2011 agreement the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) and the Fed struck with more than a dozen mortgage servicers as a prime example of the dysfunction. […]

After 12 months, no homeowners had received a dime. But the eight consultants managing the process on behalf of the banks were paid nearly $2 billion. […]

Problems are also emerging in the largest mortgage settlement — a $25 billion deal between state and federal authorities and five banks accused of using forged paperwork to quickly foreclose on struggling homeowners.

The banks agreed to pay $1.5 billion directly to borrowers. No checks have been sent, though the first are likely to go out later this month.

While banks have been slow to fulfill the meager direct payments provisions of the settlements, they’ve spent much more heavily to get properties empty and ready for resale.

These settlements are very small in relation to the problem they’re meant to ameliorate and the allegations they’re meant to justly resolve. Even if the banks had complied with alacrity, the $5.7 billion total direct payments to homeowners tallied by the Post pales in comparison to the total harm caused by “robo-signing” and other forms of mortgage origination and foreclosure fraud.

New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, a primary negotiator of the 2012 settlement, has announced he will sue Wells Fargo and Bank of America for failure to comply with the terms of that $25 billion package. But just $1.5 billion of that settlement was ever intended to come as direct compensation to “robo-signing” victims and other wrongfully foreclosed homeowners.

The total value of underwater mortgages in the market when that settlement was finalized – three years after the financial crisis – was estimated at $700 billion. The 2012 settlement was divisive at the time, with critics arguing it was insufficient and designed in such a way that banks could abuse its terms. Subsequent settlements have been similarly afflicted and ineffective.

Today, there are five justices on the Supreme Court who would trade a system that has served us so well for one that has served others so poorly. And they just announced that they will hear a case that gives them the opportunity to make this swap a reality.

O’Connor was the Court’s leading supporter of the view that government cannot endorse a particularly religious belief or take action that might convey such a “message of endorsement to the reasonable observer,” and this view put her at odds with the four other members of the Rehnquist Court’s conservative bloc. When she left the Court, she was replaced by staunchly conservative Justice Samuel Alito, and most Court observers expected decades of precedent protecting against government endorsements of religion to fall in very short order.

Instead, the Roberts Court’s majority has thus far been content to chip away at the wall between church and state a piece at a time. In Hein v. Freedom From Religion Foundation, the Court immunized many Executive Branch actions from suits claiming they violate the Constitution’s ban on “law[s] respecting an establishment of religion.” And in Arizona Christian School v. Winn, they empowered government to subsidize religion so long as those subsidies are structured as tax benefits and not as direct spending. But the core question of whether the government can “demonstrate . . . allegiance to a particular sect or creed” likely still must be answered in the negative.

The case the Court agreed to hear today, Town of Greece v. Galloway, is likely to change that. The ostensible issue before the Court is whether a municipal legislature violated the Constitution’s ban on separation of church and state when it began its meetings with overtly Christian prayers roughly two-thirds of the time. Yet the case also explicitly tees up the question of whether a government “endorsement” of religion of the kind rejected by O’Connor is permitted under the Constitution. If you’re placing bets, the odds are overwhelming that five conservative justices will say that such an endorsement is permitted.

With O’Connor gone, the much more conservative Justice Anthony Kennedy becomes the swing vote on questions of church/state separation. Kennedy has held that “government may not coerce anyone to support or participate in religion or its exercise,” but it is not clear that he would forbid much else under the Constitution’s ban on government establishment of religion. By the end of the next Supreme Court term, however, it is very likely that his views will carry the day.

The death—or diffusion—of the television water cooler has been much ballyhooed. But NPR’s Elizabeth Blair did a great segment on how word of mouth still helps build television, where the conversations about episodes have migrated, be it Twitter or the AMC’s post-episode chat show The Talking Dead, and was kind enough to have me on to talk about Scandal and how the labor law episode of The Good Wife got people who I hadn’t seen discussing the show dissecting it on social media for the first time:

She mentions something else that’s worth remembering, which is that some shows like NCIS, which get huge ratings, don’t really show up on social media at all. But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a word of mouth discussion of the show, it’s just taking place in arenas where it isn’t necessarily visible and quantifiable. It’s fascinating how we assumed the existence of the water cooler for so long without being able to see it on a more than experiential level, and as soon as something more tangible came along, it became easy to reduce the physical water cooler conversation to the ephemeral thing it always was. But the simultaneous success of a show like Scandal, which made itself essential viewing in the time slot in part by making the ability to participate in the real-time social media conversation about it, and the longevity of something like NCIS provides a useful rule of thumb for talking about the television business right now. The old ways are far from dead, and the shiny new ones are far from triumphant, so it’s not a matter of choosing between them—instead, we have to keep an eye on both.

The letter to Congress sent by Crane and NCISC president Kenneth Palinkas detail the dissatisfaction of deportation officials with what they perceive to be a rushed demand to approve legal status of applicants. In breaking with pro-immigration reform AFL-CIO, parent company of NCISC, Palinkas said that his officers were “pressured to rubber stamp applications instead of conducting diligent case review and investigation.”

Crane wrote, “U.S taxpayers are currently tasked with absorbing…the strain put on our Social Security system that has been depleted by an onslaught of refugees receiving SSI benefits as soon as their feet touch U.S. soil.” Mainstream economists have disparaged the characterization that immigrants are moochers, and instead have noted that immigrants are keeping the Social Security Trust Fund solvent.

He also wrote, “Currently, USCIS reports a 99.5 percent approval rating for all illegal alien applications for legal status filed under the Obama Administration’s new Deferred Action For Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policies.” However, as of the latest April statistics, DACA approval rating operated at 57 percent.

Crane has worked with or appeared alongside nativist groups and immigration restrictionists, including Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach and the Heritage Foundation, which is embroiled in a racism scandal. At a mid-May Tea Party sponsored tele-town hall conference with Heritage VP Derrick Morgan, Crane called the immigration reform bill “blanket amnesty” which would “provide a path to citizenship for the most criminal street gang…. all they have to do is make a claim that they’re going to renounce their gang affiliation. We know that all of these members are going to renounce their affiliation and continue their gang activity.”

According to a Modern Healthcare analysis of federal records, more than 5,400 of the 51,729 people on the government health entitlement blacklist were placed on it after failing to pay an HHS-backed medical student loan. Given a still-shaky economy, some in the health care sector expect that trend to continue:

[Government data] show that one of the most common reasons for getting barred is failure to repay HHS-backed student loans: 5,417 people are currently kicked out of Medicare for that.

The number of annual exclusions related to student loans has grown steadily in the past decade, peaking at 517 in 2011 before declining again. “That is tied to the economy, and I would expect that to continue to rise,” [said Lynn Gordon, a Chicago-area hospital group partner].

The increasing frequency of default-related blacklisting could prove problematic as the Obama Administration tries to entice more medical students to become primary care and family doctors. Primary care providers and nurse practitioners will be crucial to effective Obamacare implementation, since the health law is expected to drive up demand for medical services as millions of previously uninsured Americans gain coverage.

But the ballooning cost of a medical education could end up being a major barrier to the Administration’s recruitment efforts. According to the Association of American Medical Colleges’ (AAMC) 2012 report on medical school debt, “86 percent of medical school graduates had education debt, with a median amount of $162,000″ in 2011 — a number that has been rising steadily over the years:

AAMC estimates that a borrower with the median $162,000 debt “would have monthly payments ranging from $1,500 to $2,100 after residency.”

That disproportionately affects the very primary care doctors that are integral to health care reform and the U.S. medical system at large. In a 2012 report, consulting firm Merritt Hawkins & Associates found that family practitioners, pediatricians, and psychiatrists are the lowest-paid physician groups in the U.S. with a base pay of $189,000.

While that’s still a lavish salary compared to average U.S. compensation, it pales in comparison to specialist pay — and as the entitlement blacklist numbers underscore, that contributes to a system in which care providers are banned from treating certain patients for purely financial, rather than medical or criminal, reasons.

Rising student debt isn’t just restricted to the medical field. The first three months of 2013 were the worst on record for student debt defaults, with $3.5 billion in government and private student debt going bad between January and March. That reflects the increasingly unaffordable cost of a college education, which has sextupled over the last three decades.

Although President Obama’s student loan policy bypassing third-party private lenders has eased student borrowing costs and reaped a stunning $51 billion profit, the president has argued the need for further action. Obama called for tying federal college aid to higher educational institutions’ “affordability and value” during his latest State of the Union address to Congress, asserting that colleges “must do their part to keep costs down, and it’s our job to make sure that they do.”

On Sunday, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) proposed her own legislation to address student debt. Gillibrand’s bill would allow student debt holders to refinance their loans into lower fixed rates and save “nearly 37 million borrowers billions of dollars in annual interest payments.”

Legalization could substantially reduce the criminal justice costs of enforcement of prohibitions, which has dominated estimates of total spending on drug control in countries as different as the United States and the Netherlands. The costs of crime itself, generated primarily by illegal status and enforcement, dominate estimates of the social costs of drugs. Enforcement costs, however, would not disappear entirely. Ensuring that sellers comply with regulatory restrictions, for example of not selling to youth, requires law enforcement efforts, though these costs are likely to be smaller than amounts currently spent in many countries on drug enforcement.

Morbidity and mortality could also decline for legalized drugs. The illegal status of the drugs is a primary cause of overdoses, both because it creates uncertainty about the purity of what is being purchased and because it encourages use of adulterants that can themselves have dangerous effects. In a regulated legal regime, the drugs sold would be of known purity and ingredients would be listed on the label. HIV, long associated with heroin injecting, might be substantially reduced if heroin users no longer had to conceal their habits and share needles. Increased use and dependence would cut into these gains, as these drugs still present health risks even when purity is known and use does not have to be clandestine.

Additional consequences of legalization could include reductions in market-related disorder and criminal violence, as well as reductions in corruption of the criminal justice system and of political authority more generally. This assumes that countries are capable of putting into place and implementing effective regulatory regimes that do not result in a large parallel black market for drugs, an assumption that is somewhat doubtful in light of Chapters 6 and 8 of this Report, which note the linkage of violence in many countries in the region to weak institutions subject to penetration by drug trafficking organizations. […]

Negative consequences must also be taken into consideration. It is impossible to know with certainty how much drug use and dependence would increase in a legalized regime, but it is reasonable to assume that greater availability, under conditions of legality and especially if commercialized, would lead more people to use drugs.

The report goes on to explain why legalization is likely to lead to increased experimentation and possibly drug dependency. These issues, however, could be separately addressed through public health policies that would better address drug dependency whether or not a legalization regime is in place.

The group makes explicit that the report is not intended to be conclusory, but only to present information and options. But the objective tone makes all-the-more compelling the report’s identification of numerous potential benefits and significantly fewer costs. As Drug Policy Alliance Executive Director Ethan Nadlemann points out, “it would have been inconceivable just two years ago that the OAS – or any multilateral organization – would publish a document that considers legalization, decriminalization and other alternatives to prohibitionist policies on an equal footing with status quo policies.” He cites evolving U.S. views, as well as strong calls from Latin American leaders to end the drug war that prompted plans for a United Nations summit, as key to this shift, and predicts that the report “is sure to have legs in a way that few reports by multilateral institutions ever do.” The report has already been endorsed by Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos and will be presented to the 35 member states in June.

“Lesbian, gay and bisexual individuals who lived in the states that banned same sex marriage experienced a significant increase in psychiatric disorders,” Hatzenbuehler says.

“There was a 37 percent increase in mood disorders,” he says, “a 42 percent increase in alcohol-use disorders, and — I think really strikingly — a 248 percent increase in generalized anxiety disorders.”

To put those numbers in perspective, although Hatzenbuehler did find more than a doubling in the rate of anxiety disorders in states that eventually banned gay marriage, in absolute numbers he found that anxiety disorders went from being reported among 2.7 percent to 9.4 percent of gay, lesbian and bisexual people.

The effect was unique to members of the gay community and unique to those states, not occurring among LGB people in states that didn’t have ballot measures that year. Hatzenbuehler attributes the psychological stress to negative media portrayals, anti-gay graffiti, a general loss of safety, and a feeling of directly targeted for discrimination.

Conservatives regularly claim that there are “health consequences” associated with being gay, but they rarely admit that it’s their rhetoric and tactics that are responsible.

That means Murphy will be eating on a few dollars per day, as his colleagues debate a measure that would cut $4 billion from the SNAP budget over the next decade. Murphy is using the $3 per day allowance FRAC and allies recommended in 2007 guidelines for lawmakers interested in the challenge, although government data shows the program averaged about $4.40/day nationwide in fiscal year 2012.

But if anything, the SNAP Challenge understates the hardships actual SNAP recipients face, both today and in the near future.

Those Americans must make it a full month on SNAP, and statistics show that about 80 percent of a given recipient’s monthly allotment gets spent in the first two weeks of the month:

Additionally, there is already a major cut scheduled for fall of 2013:

It’s harder to quantify another facet of life on SNAP that Murphy’s attempt to raise awareness of the program won’t require him to face: social stigma. The senator won’t have to worry about a cashier loudly asking him to run his Electronic Benefits Transfer card again while other customers wait behind him. He probably won’t experience the judgment of peers described here by Tiffani Stacy of Columbus, TX.

Murphy’s experience of life on SNAP, however muted, ought to help draw attention to the program’s inability to absorb the further cuts Congress has proposed.

Kanye West’s debuted a new song, “New Slaves,” for a mass audience on Saturday Night Live this weekend, and as an art project last Friday, projecting a video for the song on buildings in London, Chicago, New York, and Sydney. Among those locations was the Prada store Fifth Avenue:

It’s a fitting choice of venue, given that “New Slaves” is a complex discussion of unpaid, bonded labor, and American consumer culture. At Salon, Natasha Lennard has a great discussion of the facts behind a central section of West’s lyrics in which he raps about the rise of private prison companies that pay prisoners far below minimum wage that’s in part become successful because of the demand for incarceration created by the War on Drugs:

Yeah they confuse us with bullshit
Like the New World Order
Meanwhile the DEA
Teamed up with the CCA
They tryna lock niggas up
They tryna make new slaves
See that’s that private-owned prison
Get your piece today

But where the track gets both more psychologically perceptive and less comfortable is in West’s look at the way African-Americans are treated in the luxury consumer market, and what it means to join a class dominated by people who do things like put black men in prison for profit. At the beginning of the song, West teases out an important dichotomy that explains how racism changes, but doesn’t dissipate, as African-Americans acquire wealth and the social capital that often accompanies it:

You see its broke nigga racism
That’s that “don’t touch anything in the store”
And there’s rich nigga racism
That’s that “come in and buy more”
What you want a Bentley, fur coat and diamond chain?
All you blacks want all the same things
Used to only be niggas
Now everybody play me
Spending everything on that Alexander Wang

Having money makes you valuable, but that’s a very different thing from being considered respectable, or even an individual. But while the insight is unique, Kanye’s lyrical solution to it is…not so much. Instead of targeting, say, Corrections Corporation of America founders Tom Beasley, T. Don Hutto and Doctor Robert Crants, or the private prison company’s current board chairman, John Ferguson, or its president and CEO Damon Hininger for their corporate decision-making, or Drug Enforcement Administrator Michele Leonhart for her policy-making, “New Slaves” ends with a cheap, nasty fantasy of sexual revenge. “They prolly all in the Hamptons / Braggin’ ’bout they maid,” West reflects of the DEA and CCA. “Fuck you and your Hampton house / I’ll fuck your Hampton spouse / Came on her Hampton blouse / And in her Hampton mouth.”

Even if you think it’s important to prioritize the analysis of racism in “New Slaves” over the song’s dip into misogyny, it’s hard to deny how useless it is to turn away from the real structural targets of West’s critique to a dream of shaming powerful men by sexually dominating their wives, or how much that fantasy plays into the demonization of black male sexuality. Even if the lyrical supply chain West is constructing here between slave-picked cotton and his own consumption of Alexander McQueen clothes is striking, particularly when offered on this scale, the idea of seducing and sexually dominating your rival’s partner is one of the oldest, stalest threats in the book. And for a song that starts with memories of West’s mother generation and the historical experiences of black women, there’s something oddly amnesiac about fantasizing about exerting control over your enemies through sexual control of their wives.

In the wake of Superstorm Sandy, New York City’s flagship public television station, WNET, has dropped the richest man in New York, carbon pollution billionaire David Koch, from its board of trustees. Days before the monthly board meeting on May 16, Koch’s name was removed from the WNET website. Koch had been a board member since 2006. Koch has been funding WNET since 1986.

The severance of Koch’s longstanding relationship with WNET — which not only serves the New York City area but also produces national programs such as Charlie Rose, Nature, and Great Performances — comes at a time of increasing tension between Koch’s anti-regulatory, climate-polluting industrial empire and the educational mission of public television.

The inherent conflict between Koch’s conspiratorial, anti-science ideology and the public interest with has come under attention in recent months. After Superstorm Sandy struck, WNET’s Charlie Rose and Bill Moyers ran shows on the tragic consequences and threat of greenhouse pollution for the New York region. More recently, reports of Koch Industries’ interest in the newspaper holdings of the Tribune Company have spurred nationwide protests.

Koch also was featured in the November 2012 PBS documentary Park Avenue, which contrasted the extreme wealth of Koch’s residence at 740 Park Avenue with the stark poverty less than a mile north in East Harlem. In the documentary, a former doorman noted that Koch, with a net worth of about $45 billion, gives only $50 holiday tips.

On May 16, the evening after Koch left the WNET board, the station ran a major live town hall on Superstorm Sandy. Broadcasting from New Jersey and New York City, the NY/NJ/Long Island affiliates under WNET management broadcast a two-hour show that talked repeatedly about the major threat posed by climate change in rising sea levels and more frequent storms of increased intensity — threats which Koch’s Cato Institute denies.

In anticipation of today’s piece on the Kochs in The New Yorker by Jane Mayer, Koch Industries issued a conspiratorial rant accusing her of running a “left-leaning” “smear” campaign, in coordination with “MSNBC, ThinkProgress, The New York Times, NPR, The Nation, Mother Jones, Huffington Post and more”:

Jane Mayer’s Agenda

As campaigns and attacks against Koch Industries and its shareholders go, the one led by Jane Mayer of The New Yorker has been consistent, if nothing else – consistent in its left-leaning bias, baseless accusations, and numerous inaccuracies.
Since lobbing her opening salvo against us in an August 2010 article that was riddled with biases and inaccuracies and based on research by a ThinkProgress blogger, Mayer has authored nearly a dozen screeds attacking Koch Industries, Charles Koch and David Koch. Her latest submission, soon to be published, will be another attempt to smear us while advancing her partisan agenda. We don’t precisely know the content of her story. However, based on her questions to us, we believe it will be an attempt to promote a fleeting PBS show that aired six months ago – one on which she collaborated and in which she appeared. The show attacked David Koch and Charles Koch, with Mayer making an appearance as an interviewee.
We also believe Mayer will work hard to make the case that should Koch purchase the Tribune newspapers, as is rumored, we would use those papers to advance a particular agenda. This assertion, of course, is made with no basis in fact or history to support such a claim.
Mayer’s tale about us will likely be promoted in all the usual places – MSNBC, ThinkProgress, The New York Times, NPR, The Nation, Mother Jones, Huffington Post and more.
Once we see it, we will fact check it and set the record straight here on KochFacts.

Koch is still on the board of trustees of WGBH, the prominent Boston-based PBS affiliate which produces major series such as Masterpiece, Antiques Roadshow, and the science show NOVA.

Note: Forecast the Facts members are participating in the campaign to discourage the Tribune Company from selling its papers to the Koch brothers.

Update: “Mr. Koch resigned from our Board of Trustees as of Thursday, May 16th to concentrate on his other obligations,” WNET communications director Kellie Castruita Specter informed Forecast the Facts in an email response.

(Credit: Fox News)

The mental health issues that affect children include attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), autism, mood and anxiety disorders, behavioral disorders, substance abuse, and Tourette Syndrome. The CDC found that ADHD was the most commonly reported mental disorder, affecting about 4.2 million children between the ages of 3 and 17. About 1.2 million children in that age group are battling depression, and about 678,000 fall somewhere on the autism spectrum. And an estimated 40 percent of children who have been diagnosed with a disorder actually suffer from multiple different mental health issues.

The CDC estimates that treating those mental health issues costs the U.S. about $247 billion each year. But that actually represents just a fraction of what the nation should be spending, since less than a quarter of the children living with mental disorders are receiving the treatment they need:

Although the prevalence, early onset and effect on society make childhood mental problems a major public health issue, only 21 percent of affected children get treatment because of a shortage of pediatric sub-specialists and child and adolescent psychiatrists, according to the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry.

“Our current health care system does not meet the needs of these children,” Martin J. Drell, the group’s president, said last week in a statement about the problem.

Making matters worse, fewer medical students are opting for careers in children’s mental health, while the current crop of professionals is aging out of the workforce. The dearth of providers means troubled youngsters in underserved rural and urban areas are less likely to get timely care.

“Children with serious medical conditions should not have where they live determine what kind of health care services they receive,” said Thomas K. McInerny, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics.

Researchers say their new report represents the first comprehensive look at mental health issues among children. “This report is a reflection of what’s happening in the nation as a whole,” one of the report’s authors, Dr. Ruth Perou, told the Daily Beast. “We’re finally opening a dialogue on mental health.”

After a series of recent mass shootings, there has been renewed interest in these kind of national discussions regarding mental health issues. Indeed, the U.S. has a long way to go in this area. Half of mentally ill Americans are currently skipping out on treatment because they can’t afford it, partly because mental health care providers don’t always accept private insurance. This problem was exacerbated by the recent economic downturn, which led many states to slash billions of dollars in funding from their mental health programs. Predictably, as those mental health services have disappeared, the prison population has skyrocketed. A recent survey of Texas’ juvenile detention facilities found that the rate of mental illness exceeds the rate of gang membership among teen prisoners there.

Fortunately, there has been some legislative movement in this area. At the beginning of this year, Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) held a series of hearings on the dire state of youth’s mental health services, and introduced a measure to strengthen school’s resources for identifying and treating kids’ mental disorders.

Bishop E.W. Jackson (R)

Objecting to the way members of the all-Democratic Congressional Black Congress has been “conflating the black struggle for civil rights with the demands of radical homosexuals for marriage and other special rights,” Jackson announced the STAND America PAC in April, 2010. He vowed to “demand that representatives of the black community start respecting the values of the people who elect them,” noting that the PAC would make sure that happens.

Since its formation, the PAC has reported raising about $130,000, all from individual donors. Of this, just $2,750 went to conservative African American candidates — about two percent of total spending. $1,000 of that went to Michel Faulkner (R), who unsuccessfully challenged Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY) in 2010. The remaining $1,750 went to Jackson’s own unsuccessful 2012 campaign for U.S. Senate in Virginia. The committee also made a $1,000 donation to the 2012 re-election campaign of House Republican Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA), who is white. While one solicitation asked for contributions to help defeat then-Attorney General Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) in his Senate campaign, the committee reported no contributions to his Republican opponent nor any apparent independent efforts in that race.

The vast majority of the PAC’s funds went to overhead — fundraising, strategic consulting, and overhead. More than $20,000 of the PAC’s spending, over 15 percent, was paid in “consulting – management” fees to Jackson himself. While using a PAC for personal inurement is not illegal, it is hardly the purpose for which the contributions are apparently solicited.

Other spending went to travel and meals (about $7,500), other consultants (more than $53,000), and bank fees (more than $700, including four account “overdraft” charges). The PAC also made donations to 912 First Landing Patriots and the Hampton Roads Tea Party (two Virginia Tea Party groups) and the Christian Coalition and Vision America (two Christian conservative organizations).

While new PACs do face significant upfront costs, the percentage spent on political activity is unusually low and the group appears to spending little on the group’s stated mission. Campaign finance expert Paul S. Ryan of the Campaign Legal Center frequently warns — when donating to political action committees it is really “donor beware.”

Neither STAND America PAC nor the Jackson for Lt. Governor campaign responded immediately to a request for comment.

Last week, the bipartisan immigration reform bill survived its second week of Senate Judiciary Committee markups largely intact and faithful to the “Gang of 8’s” core principals, which would provide a pathway to earned citizenship for the 11 million undocumented immigrants in America.  Today, the Committee will debate proposed amendments to Title III of the bill, which will address interior enforcement of immigration laws, including asylum procedures, indefinite detention, and solitary confinement.  Here’s a rundown of what some upcoming amendments mean for LGBT immigrants:

Asylum

Homosexuality is currently a crime in 78 countries around the world.  The right to seek asylum from persecution is a core right necessary to protect LGBT people around the world from persecution.  Unfortunately, a major obstacle to LGBT immigrants availing themselves of asylum in the United States is a bureaucratic one.   Under the current law, asylum seekers are required to file an asylum application within one year of entering the U.S.  Currently, under the one-year filing deadline, refugees with credible claims are denied asylum simply because of a bureaucratic technicality.  The elimination of the one-year filing deadline is particularly important for LGBT asylum seekers, who often miss the one-year deadline because they either do not know that sexual orientation or gender-based persecution are grounds for seeking asylum or do not feel safe disclosing their LGBT status to U.S. government officials within a year of arriving in the United States.

The Bill currently would end the one-year filing deadline, but Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) has proposed two amendments that would compromise this improvement:

• Grassley’s amendment 27 would completely remove the language ending the one-year filing deadline.
• Grassley’s amendment 52 would substantially delay the elimination of the one-year filing deadline for asylum applications.

Indefinite Detention and Solitary Confinement

Immigrants in detention, including asylum seekers, are locked up in jail-like facilities, separated from their families and communities.   LGBT detainees often experience increased rates of discrimination, mistreatment and abuse both at the hands of fellow detainees and by guards.  Furthermore, a New York Times story this spring found that prolonged solitary confinement has been used on LGBT detainees under the guise of protecting them.  Some upcoming amendments improve the situation of LGBT immigrants in detention facilities, while others place them at greater risk of harm:

• Sen. Richard Blumenthal’s (D-CT) amendment 2 would prohibit the use of solitary confinement based on sexual orientation and gender identity and stop ICE from using solitary confinement for “protection” of detainees.
• Despite Constitutional precedent prohibiting the indefinite detention of immigrants, Grassley amendment 53 requiring the indefinite detention of immigrants who cannot be deported, without even the basic protection of a bond hearing to determine if they should be detained in the first place.  His amendment would also require the prolonged detention of arriving asylum seekers, including people seeking protection in the US from persecution on account of their sexual or gender identity.
• Grassley 51 would eliminate the bill’s expansion of alternatives to detention.  Alternatives to detention seek to make detention less restrictive and less costly for immigrants who have no criminal background and do not pose a flight risk.  For LGBT detainees, who have historically faced unsafe conditions in traditional detention facilities, alternatives offer a way to remain in their support communities while awaiting the outcome of their cases.
• Senator Jeff Session’s (R-AL) amendment 5 would impose a mandatory 60-day sentence of imprisonment for any immigrant who overstays his or her visa unless the person can be removed within 90 days.  Not only would the amendment require incarceration with no determination of an immigrant’s actual risk to public safety, it would also subject some asylum seekers and Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals to mandatory imprisonment.

Hofstra student Andrea Rebello. Credit: Facebook

But the initial assumption — that Rebello was murdered by the suspected robber Dalton Smith during a shoot-out with police — now appears to be wrong. Nassau County police officials confirmed over the weekend that the victim was accidentally shot and killed by a responding police officer at the scene:

The Nassau County officer, a 12-year veteran whose identity was withheld, fired eight rounds. Seven struck Smith and one hit Andrea Rebello, 21, in the head. Rebello, of Tarrytown, shared the off-campus rental home with three other Hofstra students, including her identical twin sister, Jessica.

Rebello’s tragic death underscores the absurdity and danger of the NRA’s push for more vigilantism on city streets and inside classrooms — “the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” in NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre’s words. Police officers in Nassau County are subjected to a battery of weapons trainings when they join the force, and yet even a 12-year veteran can make a mistake that ends with the loss of an innocent life.

And these kinds of incidents are far from anomalies either. Last summer, police officers in New York City opened fire on a gunman outside of the Empire State Building in midtown Manhattan, accidentally shooting nine bystanders caught in the crossfire.

Sequestration will reduce the $1.2 billion these schools normally receive by more than $60 million. According to analysis by the Center for American Progress, there are nearly 150 schools in the country relying on more than $1 million in aid. Some could see cuts in the millions of dollars.

The National Association of Federally Impacted Schools, which works closely with these communities, is conducting a survey of school districts grappling with this reduction in funding. While the full results won’t be ready for another month, the preliminary report, shared with ThinkProgress, shows that many are already facing drastic choices. One school warned that “we may have to close schools” and another cautioned that “closure is always a possibility.” Six of the nine schools it talked to will have to consider closing schools if sequestration continues past next year.

• The Window Rock Unified School District in Arizona gets just under 60 percent of its funding from federal aid. This year it eliminated about 65 staff positions through attrition and cut down its buildings from seven to four. If sequestration continues, it will have to close schools, many of which are in areas of high unemployment and poverty.
• The Harlem Elementary School District didn’t rehire for some positions and asked 100 employees to cut $100 from their operational budgets to deal with a 47 percent cut to the budget this year. It also canceled Kindergarten for a day, but one five-year-old still came to school because he was hungry and needed his state-subsidized breakfast. Next year it will have to dip into reserves or hold fundraisers. After that it will have to cut staff, go over the state class size limit, and look at closing schools.
• Heart Butte in Montana, which gets over half of its funding from the federal government, cuts have forced the district to hold off on all repairs this school year. That means that there are leaks, no hot water, roofs that need patching, buses in neglect, and a playground that doesn’t comply with regulations. The school needs to install new doors and safety gates, but that is also on hold. If things don’t improve it may have to lay off teachers.
• The Hays/Lodge Pole school district in Montana, which is losing more than half of its budget, is unable to fill a counseling spot even as youth suicides are on the rise. It also had to cut paraprofessionals, all secretaries but one, and cooks’ helpers. After next year, school officials say there will be nothing left to cut.
• The McLaughlin Independent School District in South Dakota, which gets two-thirds of its budget from federal funding, has already implemented changes for the current school year: reducing staff to one teacher per classroom for grades three through five and cuts to the music program, P.E., and administrative positions. If Congress doesn’t end sequestration, it will have to close schools.

(Credit: Robert F. Bukaty, AP)

Fishing is a profession often passed down from one generation to the next. Many lobstermen in Maine fish the same bottom their fathers and grandfathers fished, and the same holds true of fishermen father offshore as well. Yet increasingly, anecdotal evidence has suggested that the old faithful fishing spots are no longer quite so reliable.

In northern regions these shifts could lead to conflicts over fishing rights and access to traditional fishing grounds. In the tropics, the problem could be more dire. As our oceans warm, species may not be able to adapt at all, leaving tropical oceans with severely depleted fish stocks and some of the most vulnerable human populations with a distinct shortage of a vital protein source.

Much of this scarcity of native species can be attributed to overfishing, a practice now largely halted in U.S. waters thanks to strict new science-based management tactics implemented as a result of a 2006 reauthorization of the law that governs our fisheries. But increasingly, both scientists and fishermen have been eying climate change as a reason some fish are showing up in new places and the catch fishermen are accustomed to finding have been surprisingly slow to rebuild.

A new study published this week in the journal Nature puts some peer-reviewed punch behind what up until now was a common-sense theory. Most fish have a preference for a certain water temperature range, and because they are mobile creatures, as water warms due to climate change, fish populations are on the move toward the poles. The study found:

Except in the tropics, catch composition in most ecosystems 
slowly changed to include more warm-water species and fewer cool-water species. In the tropics, the catch followed a similar pattern from 1970 to 1980 and then stabilized, likely because there are no species with high enough temperature preferences to replace those that declined. Statistical models showed that the increase in warm-water species was significantly related to increasing ocean temperatures.

This latest research builds on the authors’ 2009 study that stated:

…climate change may lead to large-scale redistribution of global catch potential, with an average of 30–70% increase in high-latitude regions and a drop of up to 40% in the tropics.

This trend could have dire implications for both fishermen and fish.

As U.S. fishermen are increasingly operating under management systems that set the total amount of fish they can catch based on their historic landings, this kind of habitat shift can lead to complex management conundrums. If a fisherman from Massachusetts is suddenly catching more summer flounder (which prefer warmer water) and less winter flounder (which prefer colder water) but his catch allocation was set based on his history of catching winter flounder, his business will not last.

Meanwhile the New Jersey fisherman’s boat may not be equipped to catch the species that will replace summer flounder in his waters so he will either have to move with the fish into an area where he may not be permitted to fish, or invest in new gear and face the possibility of learning a new fishing method entirely. Neither is an attractive option.

In tropical regions, particularly in less-developed countries, the results could be much worse. Fish is the primary source of protein for more than three billion people on the planet, many of them in less-developed tropical countries. But in their case, the fish that migrate out of their waters won’t be replaced by anything. This is not a question of parsing out a different mix of fish. It will result in a complete loss of a major food source.

And if it’s bad for the people who depend on the fish for protein, it’s worse for the fish themselves. As Daniel Pauly, one of the new study’s authors put it in an interview with NPR on Wednesday, “imagine a reef fish that is driven by temperature into North Carolina or the Delaware coast. That reef fish will not find reefs. It’s like you having to move, but you cannot take your furniture with you, or your house.”

The challenge of rebuilding today’s depleted fish populations is already a herculean one for fishery managers to address. Unfortunately, it now appears they’re going to have add the complexity of tomorrow’s warming and acidifying oceans to the equation.

One of the reasons Yahoo bought Tumblr is simple: it was available. Facebook bought photo-editing-and-sharing app Instagram last year, a move that made sense given Facebook’s focus on social distribution of information, particularly of images. The bulletin-board service Pinterest pulled in a $200 million round of funding in February, but it’s not clear that the company would be open to a sale, or even if it were, that Yahoo would have been interested in the business model, given the uncertain path from getting revenue out of Pinterest. Various estimates seem to be putting Twitter’s value between $9 and $10 billion, and the company seems more likely to opt for an initial public offering than to sell out to another social media or internet company. Facebook’s IPO is a year old. Of the large social media companies examined by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, that left Tumblr as the property available to Yahoo if it wanted to buy another popular service.

But even if there had been another appealing property on the block—and speculation continues to swirl about whether another company will buy Hulu—Tumblr would still have been appealing for two reasons, one a hard figure, one a perception. The first is that 13 percent of internet users aged 18-29 told Pew that they use Tumblr, a figure that suggests that an enormous number of Tumblr users could be coming online in coming years. The second is the perception that Tumblr is a female-driven service. That isn’t quite accurate. That same Pew study found that 6 percent of both male and female internet users report that they’re on Tumblr, though the sample Pew used is slightly weighted towards women, surveying 956 women out of 1,802 total respondents. But whatever the actual numbers, the perception is that Tumblr has a female-heavy user base (as well as a strong LGBTQ one).

So when Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer talks, as she did this morning on the call that announced the deal, about the fact that “Tumblr views itself as a home for brands,” like movies, or suggests that Tumblr and Yahoo could work together the way Google and Blogger did, with Yahoo serving ads on Tumblrs whose users would like to have ad placement, she’s talking about getting ads in front of young users, and monetizing content by young people. And whether it’s true or not, the perception will be that Mayer specifically means getting ads in front of monetizing content created by female and non-straight young people.

Whether that means that the oft-mocked confessionals and .GIFs of Tumblr will come to be seen as respectable because they’re something Yahoo is going to try to make money off of is a different question entirely. Yahoo’s perception that young people will help it shore up its aging brand, and that they’ll be valuable to advertisers isn’t actually much different that the insight that young women be shopping. Sometimes, the very fact that young people, particularly young women, have money to spend is the thing that makes them seem ridiculous to the very people who would like to extract that money from them. Trendhopping that necessitates regular consumption and deep engagement on things that other people have deemed frivolous are traits that make consumers or users valuable to advertisers. But the assignment of financial value to those behaviors has never meant that we pass along any more deference to young people’s tastes as part of a larger bargain.

Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ)

The Arizona congressmember announced his decision to expand his bill on Friday. In a statement, Franks compared Gosnell — who has been convicted of killing of three infants that were born alive following botched illegal, unsanitary abortion procedures — to all late-term abortion procedures. “Had Kermit Gosnell dismembered these babies before they had traveled down the birth canal only moments earlier, he would have, in many places nationwide, been performing an entirely legal procedure,” Franks said.

However, that’s a gross mischaracterization of the state of legal abortion services throughout the country. Abortion opponents have repeatedly attempted to twist the facts surrounding Gosnell’s high-profile murder trial to make it appear as if his crimes are rampant throughout legal abortion clinics. But that’s simply not the case. The Philadelphia-area abortion doctor was guilty of much more than simply breaking Pennsylvania’s law that criminalizes abortion after 24 weeks of pregnancy; he was also able to offer discounted prices for his services because he didn’t employ medical professionals or adhere to safety standards. Gosnell’s “house of horrors” isn’t analogous to the way that legal, sanitary late-term abortion clinics provide care to the women who need it.

Furthermore, it’s misleading to pretend that Franks’ quest to cut off legal abortion care at just 20 weeks represents a push to ban late-term abortions. In fact, 20-week abortion bans are a direct challenge to Roe v. Wade‘s guarantee of legal abortion rights until the point of viability, which is generally accepted to occur around 24 weeks of pregnancy. That’s why, after a handful of states recently enacted 20-week bans, several of them landed in court.

DC Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton (D) has fought against Franks’ 20-week abortion ban every time he’s proposed it. She maintains that imposing abortion bans on the District of Columbia is a “stealth way” for abortion opponents to discreetly challenge Roe, since DC doesn’t have any representation in Congress. Now that the bill will apply to the rest of the nation, she remains committed to working to defeat it. “With the help of women nationwide, we defeated the D.C. abortion ban bill on the House floor last Congress. Now that the Franks bill will expressly target all U.S. women, we can expect an even stronger national response to this attack on women’s health,” Holmes Norton said in a statement.

Ironically, pushing to restrict women’s access to abortion isn’t actually an effective policy solution to prevent future Kermit Gosnells. If Franks and his anti-choice colleagues wanted to ensure that desperate women in other states don’t have to resort to illegal providers like Gosnell, they should actually be working to make abortion services more affordable and accessible to low-income women.

President Obama delivered the commencement speech this weekend at Morehouse College, an historically black all-male liberal arts school in Georgia. His remarks were remarkably gay-inclusive, challenging the graduates to be the best husband they can be even if their partner isn’t female, and to recognize the kind of oppression other groups experience, including gays and lesbians:

OBAMA: And that’s what I’m asking all of you to do:  Keep setting an example for what it means to be a man.  Be the best husband to your wife, or your boyfriend, or your partner.  Be the best father you can be to your children.  Because nothing is more important. [...]

As Morehouse Men, many of you know what it’s like to be an outsider; know what it’s like to be marginalized; know what it’s like to feel the sting of discrimination.  And that’s an experience that a lot of Americans share.  Hispanic Americans know that feeling when somebody asks them where they come from or tell them to go back.  Gay and lesbian Americans feel it when a stranger passes judgment on their parenting skills or the love that they share.  Muslim Americans feel it when they’re stared at with suspicion because of their faith.  Any woman who knows the injustice of earning less pay for doing the same work — she knows what it’s like to be on the outside looking in.

So your experiences give you special insight that today’s leaders need.  If you tap into that experience, it should endow you with empathy — the understanding of what it’s like to walk in somebody else’s shoes, to see through their eyes, to know what it’s like when you’re not born on 3rd base, thinking you hit a triple.  It should give you the ability to connect.  It should give you a sense of compassion and what it means to overcome barriers.

Watch the full address (HT: Towleroad):

In 2009, Morehouse College was the subject of controversy for instituting a dress code that seemed to specifically target gay men who occasionally cross-dressed. More recently, the university established a scholarship in the name of gay civil rights activist Bayard Rustin and also began offering its first Black LGBT History course.

(Credit: NetChoice.org)

NetChoice, a “trade association of eCommerce businesses and online consumers” representing big tech names including Facebook, Yahoo, eBay, NewsCorp, Reed Elsevier, LivingSocial, and Aol, released a list of what it considers to be “the worst internet laws in America” — but many of the bills it targets would be good for consumers.

NetChoice’s May 2013 iAWFUL (“Internet Advocate’s Watchlist for Ugly Laws”) list rattles off eight types of proposals opposed by the group, many of which appear to be targeted because they may threaten the profit margins of the group’s constituent companies.

Here are three specific instances where the most recent iAWFUL list puts corporate interests before consumer rights or protections:

1. Accuses California privacy bills of being an “assault on the internet”: While NetChoice points out that some state-level privacy proposals in California have been conflicting, such as one that requires simplified, 100-word privacy policies versus another that requires privacy policies to be more detailed, the group also attacks a bill that merely gives consumers the ability to request what data about them has been given to which third parties and another that updates privacy requirements for mobile apps.
2. Claims state level data breach notification proposals would lead to “over-notification“: NetChoice opposes a number of state-level data breach notification laws that would require companies collecting personal or private information to notify consumers in a timely manner if their information has been accessed without authorization or breached, arguing they would place consumers at “greater privacy risk” because consumers become desensitized to data breach notifications.
3. Opposes Open Access initiatives that would give the public access to research: NetChoice takes aim at Open Access proposals, including the White House’s, saying they “could logically extend to assert state copyright over other content coming out of the state’s colleges and universities.” But what Open Access initiatives actually do is provide an remedy for freeing research funded by the public from a broken for-profit academic publishing system where all too often academics do research, pay for the privilege of being published in a journal, get edited by other academics pro-bono, and then the research is licensed back to academic institutions at a very high mark up. NetChoice member Reed Elsevier has actively lobbied against these type of proposals in the past, likely because its subsidiary Elsevier is the largest of the for profit academic publishers — reportedly earned over $1 billion in profits in 2011 with a profit margin around 35 percent and 71 percent of their revenue coming from academic customers like university libraries.

Tumblr announced on Monday it was being bought by tech giant Yahoo! for $1.1 billion in one of the largest social media buyouts in years, but while the purchase will make Tumblr’s founders rich, it may bode poorly for the privacy protections of Tumblr users.

In a recent report card from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), comparing which tech companies protect user’s data from government snooping, Yahoo received one of the lowest scores with only one out of five stars. Tumblr performed significantly better, receiving three stars for requiring a warrant for content, fighting for users’ privacy rights in Congress, and publishing law enforcement guidelines.

A Yahoo spokesperson told reporters in January that the company was requiring warrants for email content data on fourth amendment grounds, joining Google others tech giants. It’s not yet clear how Yahoo will integrate Tumblr into the company, although Yahoo has promised “not to screw it up” in a press statement and said Tumblr will be independently operated as a separate business with David Karp remaining as CEO.

Online privacy law has lagged significantly behind technology advancements. Under the statute governing law enforcement access to digital communications — including private messages over Tumblr’s Fanmail and Yahoo email — the Electronic Privacy Communications Act (ECPA) of 1986, content data over 180 days old stored remotely only requires an administrative subpoena to access, which has a lower threshold of proof than a probable cause warrant.

There are a number of current legislative proposals to update ECPA, one of which was approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee in late April. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit ruled email providers cannot be compelled to turn over the content of messages without a probable cause warrant no matter how long the information has been stored in the cloud in United States v. Warshak. That ruling only applies to the four states in the court’s jurisdiction.

(Credit: Getty Images)

Sadly, Mary’s story echoed other reports that have been coming out of Pibor over the last days and weeks. And they all speak to the growing humanitarian crisis in this war-torn part of the world.

For several weeks, residents of Pibor have been terrorized by the government forces known as the SPLA (Sudan People’s Liberation Army). We’ve heard reports of shops and homes being looted, civilians being killed, and dwellings being burned (sometimes with people still inside of them). Thousands of people sought shelter in the bush, making forays into town to get whatever food was still available in the local market.

The breaking point for many came a couple of weeks ago, when a woman was killed along with her teenage daughter and infant child, while a toddler was left barely alive after being stabbed multiple times. After this, the idea of even short trips into Pibor became untenable for some. We heard of two separate incidents of people who had stepped on landmines but chose to stay in the bush rather than seek medical help for fear of being attacked.

Compounding the problem has been the activities of a local rebel leader named David Yau Yau, who launched an uprising in Jonglei after failing to win a local election in 2010. He recently captured the town of Boma, not far from Pibor. As he threatened to march on Pibor, the last of the civilians fled the town, along with the few remaining humanitarian agencies. The SPLA took advantage of the departures by looting those agencies’ compounds.

Now there are thousands of people hiding in the bush, with no food, shelter, or access to medical services. And it is May, which means the beginning of the rainy season. In a few weeks, their pathetic “refuge” will be underwater. With Pibor and the rest of the county basically cut-off for the next eight months, aid workers fear that a humanitarian catastrophe is about to unfold. Although the situation in Pibor is extreme, it is not isolated. There are reports of SPLA abuses throughout Jonglei state. Time and again, humanitarian actors working in the state have told us that the biggest threat to civilians is the SPLA. There is a U.N. peacekeeping mission operating in the state with a mandate to protect civilians. But after one of its helicopters was shot down last December, the mission has been forced to rely on the SPLA to grant it access to many areas — permission that is often denied.

The SPLA is also blocking humanitarian workers’ access to entire sections of Pibor County, leaving a population of almost 140,000 with no services.

It needs to be made clear to the government of South Sudan that this cannot continue. Not only is the government not living up to its obligations to protect its own citizens, but its forces are actively preventing others from making any attempt to do so. Most people in Pibor County have been displaced multiple times because of the activities of the SPLA. Nothing is being done to stop this.

The international community is not blameless either. Donor nations need to take responsibility and push for humanitarian access in Jonglei state. The United States is the biggest bilateral donor to security sector reform in South Sudan. It should use the influence that comes with this to demand a crackdown on SPLA abuses and a reinforced chain-of-command that would help end this culture of impunity.

For the people of Pibor, time is running out.