Ellen and Michelle Obama have an "Uptown Funk" dance off

President Obama reads mean tweets

The most entitled generation is not millennials

ITU/Rowan Farrell

For the first time in America’s history, an entire generation of her citizens are poorer, more indebted, and less employed than the preceding generations.

That generation is the millennials – our generation.

The culprit, say some social commenters, are millennials themselves. In this telling, we are a lazy cohort of entitled and narcissistic brats — the proverbial Generation Me. But this is a classic case of blaming the victim.

The true cause of this unfortunate situation is clear: It’s the economy. The Great Recession stymied economic growth, halted job creation, kept older Americans in the workforce longer, and encouraged younger Americans to continue debt-financed schooling.

Moreover, the Great Recession was not merely a one-off calamity — it was a symptom of economic ills long perpetuated and ignored. And the criticism and labels that have been heaped upon millennials bear much more resemblance to the type of intergenerational stereotyping that has always existed (“darn kids these days”) than to any measurable reality.

The truth: The economic tragedy of the Millennial generation was written before many of us had even learned to read — Baby Boomer parents and grandparents who, at once, genuinely love and care for us, but have also created or perpetuated institutions, policies, and economic realities that have now hobbled us.

Our generation has been called “entitled.” We beg to differ. If any generation is entitled, it’s our parents’ and grandparents’ generation: the baby boomers.

True entitlement is tripling the national debt since the 1980s and using the proceeds to spend lavishly on tax cuts and government programs that primarily provided short-term economic boosts, while refusing to raise the Social Security age of retirement or to reduce benefits, even as the gluttonous program careens toward unsustainability.

True entitlement is allowing the reasonable minimum wage that Baby Boomers enjoyed when they were our age to deteriorate while opting to cut taxes on the gains from stocks and bonds that they accrued during periods of debt-driven economic and stock-market surges — creating an economy where wage earners at all income levels, as of 2012, receive a smaller portion of economic output at any time since 1929.

True entitlement is, for decades, enjoying the benefits of the lowest energy costs in the world while refusing to price-in the external costs of carbon emissions, exacerbating the real changes to our planet that pose profound risks to the environment and economy for which millennials will soon be the primary stewards.

These grave consequences were entirely foreseeable — but they happened. Young Americans have been fleeced in order to fund the transient excesses of the old — and yet millennials are labeled “entitled” because we were given “participation trophies” and “personal tutors” before we were old enough to vote ... ?

Give us a break. Millennials are not entitled. But we are frustrated.

We’re frustrated, because the same baby-boomer bloc that created or tacitly perpetuated the policies that have hamstrung millennials now makes up almost a third of the American voting-aged population and holds nearly two-thirds of the seats of the US House of Representatives and Senate. This, during a decade-long span when incumbent House and Senate members are richly rewarded for being the most unproductive legislators in US history, respectively winning reelection 94% and 87% of the time.

Granted, many members of our generation need to learn how to vote every two years, not just every four. And we need to begin to fulfill the civic-minded label — “The Next Great Generation” — which social scientists have bestowed upon us. When we do begin to regularly share our opinions in the voting booth, not just on Twitter, you can be assured that we’ll act to keep this country great. We’ll make the “hard” choices the baby boomers have refused to make.

Already, we’ve learned how to be fiscally responsible — with the most student debt of any generation in history, we’ve had to. More than any other generation, we eschew expensive possessions like cars and large houses, opting instead for bikes and shared living spaces. Sure, we would like to own all that fancy stuff someday, but we realize that we can’t have everything we want.

We know that our government would be better off spending more of our tax dollars on jobs and education, and not just on Social Security and defense. We overwhelmingly recognize that the war on drugs has been an embarrassing waste of money and lives, and that anyone should be able to marry whomever they love.

Perhaps we millennials are entitled: We seemed to think that baby-boomer politicians would enact much-needed changes while we fiddled with our smartphones. We were definitely wrong on that one.

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Why police reform makes policing better

Allyson Joyce/Getty Images

On social media and other forums, there’s a vast gulf—and a lot of shouting—between critics of police departments (“Black Lives Matter”) and police defenders (“Blue Lives Matter”). But this ideological divide belies the fears and worries they have in common.

“They don’t go out every day saying, ‘I’m going to take a life today,’ ” said Mary Jo Graves, referring to police officers after she organized a pro-police march in Cleveland last month. “They go out saying, ‘I want to come home.’ They want to come home to their families.”

This sympathy—police officers just want to do their work without fear of death—isn’t too different from what police critics have to say about their friends and family. “I am tired of being scared that my son is not going to make it home from work,” said Dinetta Gilmore, who participated in the Justice for All march in Washington in December. “It’s time that this stops,” she said. “When are we going to be able to stop marching?”

All of this fear is understandable—but it’s not equal. High-profile cases aside, policing has never been safer. The rate of officer assaults has been on the decline since the 1990s, and the rate of officer deaths is at its lowest point in a century. “You’re more likely to be murdered simply by living in about half of the largest cities in America than you are while working as a police officer,” writes journalist Radley Balko.

And while black Americans are at greater risk of criminal victimization than they are police violence, it is also true that compared with other Americans, they are more likely to be shot or killed by police, regardless of circumstances. There’s also the fact of power. Police officers are empowered by the state to use lethal force, and when that doesn’t come with accountability—and in the case of wrongdoing, punishment—it appears arbitrary and frightening. Put differently, most Americans who kill other Americans—including blacks who kill blacks—will face justice. Most cops who kill will not.

With that said, fear isn’t always a bad thing. In the case of the “black lives matter” protests, it’s been constructive, prompting new calls for police reform and other efforts to improve minority communities. The problem is on the other side, the police side, where fear is an impediment to embracing beneficial reform. In New York City, mild criticism from Mayor Bill de Blasio—following the Eric Garner grand jury decision—sparked a bona fide police rebellion with work stoppages and aggressive, inflammatory rhetoric. At funerals for slain officers—killed by a criminal who claimed Garner and Michael Brown as a cause to commit violence—cops turned their backs on the mayor, shunning his leadership and the city he represents. The problem, besides the illiberalism inherent in the rejection of civil authority, is that de Blasio is on their side. The goal of police reform isn’t to punish cops; it’s to better connect them to the communities they serve, which makes it easier to fight crime and more likely they’ll come home at the end of each day.

Police reform doesn’t harm policing; it makes it better.

The best example of this is Los Angeles, which completed a major experiment in police reform a few years ago. If the 1992 Los Angeles riots revealed deep tensions and anger toward the LAPD, then the 1999 Rampart scandal—named so after the division in question—unveiled the astounding amount of corruption in the department. An investigation uncovered countless acts of police misconduct involving dozens of officers, from beatings and unprovoked shootings to stealing, drug dealing, evidence planting, and bank robbery. In 2000, the Department of Justice announced it had enough evidence to sue the LAPD for pervasive misconduct, and later that year, the city government entered into a “consent decree,” where it agreed to reform the department under supervision from federal courts.

This was a huge task. As researchers for Harvard University note in a study of the LAPD reforms, “The fact of federal oversight itself … can erode morale in a police department, sapping the confidence and spirit that effective policing requires.” In the first years of the consent decree, officials resisted any changes to their approach. But the result wasn’t a more confident police department; it was higher crime and lower morale.

This changed after Los Angeles brought in new leadership—including current NYPD Police Commissioner Bill Bratton—who embraced the decree. Over the next decade, the LAPD would work to comply with the decree while also reducing crime and improving morale. It was a success. Not only did crime decline over the period of the consent decree, but officer morale rose. The Harvard researchers, for instance, found a marked drop in crime and a decrease in the number of officers who were afraid of being “punished for an honest mistake” or having their career “negatively affected by civilian complaints.”

What’s important is that this improvement happened under a policing regime that discouraged the use of force, even as it ramped up enforcement. Under the consent decree, “The total number of … force incidents declined by almost 30 percent.” By 2009, there were fewer officer-involved shootings, chokeholds, head strikes, and suspect hospitalizations than at any point in the previous decade. And while minorities still experience police force out of proportion to their numbers, fewer blacks and Latinos have been subject to force than ever before.

Other, less flashy changes have also been essential to the LAPD’s effectiveness. Supervisors and senior officials have been tasked with devising stronger oversight procedures to increase accountability. And critically, there’s greater engagement with minority communities, through forums; active recruitment of black, Latino, and Asian officers; and regular activities with schools and other community institutions. The result is a marked increase in the number of Los Angeles residents who say that the police “treat all racial and ethnic groups fairly,” from under 40 percent in 2005 to roughly 50 percent in 2009.

The LAPD is not perfect, but it has improved, and that has made policing better for ordinary citizens and safer for officers themselves. Indeed, for a sense of what happens when police neglect communities, you only have to look east from L.A. to Missouri.

One of the reasons Ferguson was such a flashpoint was the pre-existing relationship between residents and police. For decades, the citizens of Ferguson and nearby towns were subject to unfair treatment, from targeted stops—used to collect revenue for individual municipalities—to unjustified violence. In 2000, for example, two unarmed men were killed by plainclothes detectives, who later escaped indictment by a grand jury.

That mistrust doesn’t dissipate—it builds. And when an event like the Michael Brown shooting occurs, it can explode into anger and disorder. It almost doesn’t matter that the details of Brown’s shooting were murky or that key parts of the early narrative were incomplete, impossible to verify, or false—Brown’s death was traumatic enough to prompt a huge response from Ferguson residents. At a time when local police needed the trust of the community, they didn’t have it.

The NYPD and so many other police departments are gripped by a fear of criticism and what could happen if it has to bend to change. But there’s no reason for fear; reform improved the NYPD in the 1990s, it turned around the LAPD in the 2000s, and it could strengthen New York cops for the next decade. Greater accountability and community contact doesn’t harm policing; it makes it better.

If you’re skeptical, consider this: At the same time that Los Angeles burned amid the Rodney King riots, San Diego—just a few hours away—was calm. It’s not that there weren’t racial tensions or episodes of police brutality, but that for several years—in the wake of San Diego’s own King-esque event and the killing of an officer—police had worked with city and community leaders to build bridges and improve policing. When turmoil came, notes Balko, “those goodwill gestures and the relationships they built paid off,” and police officials “could build a strategy around empathy, not antagonism.”

The NYPD can continue its strike, and its allies can continue their attacks on reformers. But they’re only hurting themselves and the city they serve.

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Federal Appeals Court appears poised to strike down three Southern states' same-sex marriage bans

Chris Geidner

After three hours of arguments, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals appeared poised to strike down bans on same-sex couples’ marriages in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas — joining all but one of the other appellate courts to consider the issue.

If the court upholds the lower court decisions striking down the Mississippi and Texas bans and reverses the trial court decision upholding Louisiana’s ban, it could have the effect of bringing marriage equality to three Deep South states — and it could come before the Supreme Court acts on pending marriage cases.

More than halfway through the morning’s arguments, an exasperated Justin Matheny, the assistant attorney general in Mississippi charged with defending the state’s ban, tried to change his tune during his rebuttal arguments.

When it became clear that the three-judge panel was leaning against upholding the bans, Matheny acknowledged that the “trajectory” for marriage rights for same-sex couples is “undeniable” — but added his new argument: “it’s not there yet.”

Judge Patrick Higginbotham, born in Alabama almost eight decades ago and appointed to the appeals court by President Reagan more than three decades ago, spoke up. And though the older judge was hard to hear at times, he spoke loudly and clearly when he responded to Matheny: “Those words, ‘Will Mississippi change its mind?’ have resonated in these halls before.”

Throughout the arguments, in fact, ghosts of court hearings past and court hearings future were a constant presence in the discussion.

Shortly into the arguments came the first mention of the fact that the Supreme Court was meeting at the same time as the 5th Circuit arguments in a private session to discuss, among other cases, whether to hear one or more appeals of five challenges to states’ marriage bans.

Although the Supreme Court took no action on the pending requests on Friday, most court observers expect the court to take an appeal of at least one of the petitions pending for review in the coming weeks. The matter was complicated further by the fact that one of the parties before the 5th Circuit on Friday — the Louisiana case plaintiffs — already has asked the Supreme Court to review their case before the 5th Circuit even rules on the intermediate appeal.

Along with that future, the South’s history with regards to federal court intervention to help enforce civil rights laws appeared to weigh heavily, particularly on Higginbotham.

At another point, when talking with the lawyer challenging Texas’ ban about the timing of marriage cases, Higginbotham asked, rhetorically, “When do you challenge Plessy?” — a reference to the 1896 Supreme Court decision upholding the constitutionality of “separate but equal.”

Higginbotham, along with Judge James Graves Jr., grew increasingly skeptical of the three states’ arguments as the morning wore on, with Judge Jerry Smith at times interjecting to slow down one of his colleagues’ lines of questioning in the courtroom.

More than 150 observers cycled through the courtroom between the three cases, with many same-sex couples traveling from each of the states involved. There were about 120 people in the room at any time, a number that included about 20 reporters and as many as 30 or 40 lawyers and court staff in the front portion of the courtroom beyond the public seating.

When the arguments began a little after 9 a.m. Central Time, Camilla Taylor, the Lambda Legal lawyer representing the Louisiana same-sex couples, went for several minutes at a time with no interruption from the judges. It was a marked contrast from other appellate marriage hearings — where questions began almost immediately and continued throughout the allotted time.

Roberta Kaplan, the Paul Weiss lawyer representing the Mississippi couples, and David McNeel Lane, the Akin Gump lawyer representing the Texas couples, faced similar extended periods where they spoke without interruption from the bench.

The states’ lawyers, on the other hand, faced a nearly constant stream of skeptical questioning from Higginbotham and Graves. Even Smith, who mostly served as a counterpoint to his colleagues, occasionally raised skeptical questions.

By the time outgoing Texas Solicitor General Jonathan Mitchell took to the podium at about 11:30 a.m. Central Time, the states’ central argument — that they should only need to prove that the bans advance a legitimate state interest and that these bans meet that “rational basis” test — was hitting a brick wall from Higginbotham and Graves.

When Mitchell argued that marriage is, effectively, a subsidy given to opposite-sex couples because they could have children and the state wants parents raising their natural children to be married, Graves asked whether that “justif[ies] a wholesale withholding of the right” from same-sex couples.

When Mitchell argued in support of the states’ other interest — couched as a “wait-and-see” approach or allowing the “democratic process” to play out — Graves asked how long the wait should be and Higginbotham drilled down further, asking, “What is the concern that we’re waiting to see?”

For his part, Smith pressed two main points, both countered repeatedly by his colleagues on the bench. First, he argued that the 1972 Supreme Court summary dismissal in Baker v. Nelson, where the court said a marriage claim brought by a same-sex couple lacked “a substantial federal question,” was still binding on the appeals court. The time since that decision included a “sea change” in courts’ interpretation of equal protection law, Higginbotham said at one point by way of response.

“All this talk about Baker and the ’70s is making me nostalgic for my Afro and my 8-track tapes,” Graves, sporting a bald-headed look these days, quipped near the end of the morning’s arguments.

Second, Smith referenced a 2008 Supreme Court decision for the fact that, under rational basis review, a law can have an “imperfect fit” between the state’s interest and the means of addressing that interest. Higginbotham countered that while an “imperfect fit” is OK, a law or policy with “no fit” between the interest and the law or policy would not be allowed — which is precisely what lawyers for the same-sex couples argued on Friday.

There is no set timeline for when the 5th Circuit would need to rule on the three states’ bans, and it is not immediately clear whether the 5th Circuit will issue a ruling on the appeals should the Supreme Court decide to review one or more of the pending petitions before it.

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How Facebook will influence the next election

At some point in the next two years, the pollsters and ad makers who steer American presidential campaigns will be stumped: The nightly tracking polls are showing a dramatic swing in the opinions of the electorate, but neither of two typical factors — huge news or a major advertising buy — can explain it. They will, eventually, realize that the viral, mass conversation about politics on Facebook and other platforms has finally emerged as a third force in the core business of politics, mass persuasion.

Facebook is on the cusp — and I suspect 2016 will be the year this becomes clear — of replacing television advertising as the place where American elections are fought and won. The vast new network of some 185 million Americans opens the possibility, for instance, of a congressional candidate gaining traction without the expense of television, and of an inexpensive new viral populism. The way people share will shape the outcome of the presidential election. Even during the 2014 midterms, which most Americans ignored, Facebook says it saw 43 million unique individuals engage in the political conversation. Now a rawly powerful video may reach far more voters in a few hours than a multimillion-dollar ad buy; and it will reach them from trusted sources — their friends — not via suspect, one-way channels.

And so we at BuzzFeed News are deeply excited to have nearly exclusive access (it’s shared with a broadcast partner, ABC News) to a powerful new window into the largest political conversation in America. This data will be drawn from a Facebook project working in the tricky field of “sentiment analysis,” the attempt to analyze people’s feelings based on what they write, which we think may be the most important new source of political data in the 2016 elections. This project will allow BuzzFeed News reporters to ask Facebook for data on, for instance, how Iowans feel about Hillary Clinton, or which Republican candidate appears to be best liked by women.

The field of sentiment analysis is as famous for its pitfalls as for any successes. Sentiment analysis has been bad at detecting sarcasm, for instance. But there’s good reason to think that if anyone can pull this off, it will be Facebook. First, it has access to a far, far larger sample of natural language than any other social network. What’s more, that carries with it contextual data that can serve as a point of departure for sentiment analysis — the field, in particular, that allows people to include how they’re feeling or what they’re doing when they post status updates. And third, Facebook quite simply has some of the best data scientists in the world, and has built a company on a deep and comprehensive understanding of user data. We’re also comfortable with Facebook’s approach to its users’ privacy with this data, which is anonymous and aggregate, with no data available for groups of interactions under 1,000.

The Facebook sentiment data BuzzFeed News will have access to is a new window into not just what Americans are talking about, but which way their sentiment is moving.

Some details from the first simple cut of sentiment data we got, spanning Oct. 26 to Nov. 5: Clinton, the most discussed Democrat on Facebook, and Warren have almost identical sentiment ratings — 57% positive and 40% negative for Clinton; 56% positive and 40% negative for Warren.

Fascinatingly, Joe Biden, though subject of just a quarter Clinton’s volume of conversation, is also viewed in a warmer light, with 67% of the conversation about him positive — a hint of the sort of politician, raw and authentic and occasionally stumbling, who thrives in this new medium.

On the Republican side, Chris Christie is the most discussed figure, but the results are far more mixed: 47% of the sentiment is positive, 45% negative. The twist: The conversation about Christie is far more negative inside his home state of New Jersey than outside it — just 33% positive in the state, but 52% positive outside it. The most warmly viewed Republicans are Condoleezza Rice and Paul Ryan. Sentiment about Jeb Bush, meanwhile, is underwater.

BuzzFeed News’ staff, led on this project by political editor Katherine Miller and data editor Jeremy Singer-Vine and their teams, will be diving deep into this data over the next two years. We anticipate bringing our readers and the broader web both daily updates and more complex news and analyses, always treating the data with analytical rigor, and comparing it with public polling and other sources of information. The data will be granular enough to see trends among and between states, between men and women inside states, and among age groups.

The Facebook sentiment data isn’t a substitute for polling, in part because the huge sample of Americans on Facebook still isn’t co-extensive with the electorate, but the sentiment data has the potential to be an important and telling complement to it.

We are devoting resources to this sentiment data set because of its place in the broad and evolving shift in American politics toward the social web.

This shift is not just about Facebook. First, starting about 10 years ago, political organizing and small-dollar fundraising moved to email, a good channel for politicians to communicate directly with their most loyal supporters. Then the inside conversation moved to the social web first, with the abrupt shift from the political blogosphere to Twitter in 2009 and 2010.
Candidates, however, have struggled to take the third and most vital element of politics — mass persuasion — to the web, and remain reliant on the dusty 30-second television ad, blasted out to voters in the least targeted way imaginable.

Buzzfeed

What is beginning to dawn on campaigns is that persuasion works differently when it relies on sharing. It is a political truism that people are most likely to believe what their friends and neighbors tell them, a truth that explains everything from sophisticated and earnest door-knocking efforts to malign email-forward whispering campaigns. And the social conversation favors things that generations of politicians have been trained to avoid: spontaneity, surprise, authenticity, humor, raw edge, the occasional human stumble. (Joe Biden!) As mobile becomes increasingly central to the social web, I suspect that more voters in 2016 will be persuaded by a video in their Facebook mobile browsers than by any other medium.

This isn’t a change in how the same politicians and campaigns distribute the same old media. It’s a deeper change in which politicians will thrive. Platforms have always shaped presidential politics — think of John F. Kennedy’s native grasp of television — and the 2016 election has the potential to be another turning point.

A few modern politicians appear to have a real feel for the raw emotion and, sometimes, (apparent) spontaneity that people will want to share. Elizabeth Warren’s blunt and casual economic 2011 tirade and Ted Cruz’s theatrical confrontations (and even his own low-production-value cell phone videos) are the beginnings of that viral populism for which the social web has opened a real space.

BuzzFeed News’ new project with Facebook sentiment data will tell us and our readers how this new viral politics affects the Americans it reaches. And the stakes, the presidency, are as high as they get.

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New LSE report slams the War on Drugs

The ‘singular approach’ to fighting drug abuse isn’t working—and it’s time for a change, says a new report produced by the London School of Economics. What they suggest, in five steps.

In an 81-page report released Monday evening, the best and brightest minds in the economic drug policy world send the United Nations a loaded message about the drug war: Enough.

The individual analyses of the economists and drug policy experts, signed by five Nobel Prize winners in economics, expose the collateral damage of the drug war and offer suggestions on how the policies can—and should—change.

“Academics and economists have great insight into this issue—and for so long, they’ve been ignored,” said John Collins, the International Drug Policy Project Coordinator at the London School of Economics, which produced the report. “Evidenced-based data about the war on drugs has been lacking for too long. It’s time that something changes.”

Collins noted that the report, titled “Ending the Drug Wars,” is nowhere near a simple fix. “There is no single way to solve this issue,” he said. “It’s an extraordinarily complex issue. We’ve tried to fix it with a singular approach—the drug war—and that hasn’t worked.”

The LSE’s report joins a chorus of voices speaking out against the war on drugs in recent years. “We’re not saying, ‘In 30 years, this is what our drug policy landscape should look like,’” Collins said. “We’re saying, ‘This isn’t working. We need to start moving in a different direction.’”

Here, in five steps, is a summation of the LSE report’s road map:

1. A “drug-free world” is not plausible.
In the opening chapter, written by Collins, the economist argues that believing we’ll live in a world free from drugs one day is not only deluded, it’s counterproductive. Collins blames prohibitionist forces in 1961 for perpetuating this fantasy—which he says still exists. In a seemingly heroic attempt to make this fantasy come true, he argues, we’ve assumed that the illicit market can be tamed through enforcement. “A global system which predominantly encourages policies that transfer the costs of prohibition onto poorer producer and transit countries, as the current system does, is an ineffective and unsustainable way to control drugs in the long term.” Collins argues for the decriminalization of drugs, which he calls a “far more effective tool.”
“People are afraid of drugs—rightly so, these substances can destroy people’s lives. But their lack of knowledge results in vitriolic reactions, overreactions.”

2. Realize that prohibition isn’t necessarily the problem.
In the third chapter, “Effects of Prohibition, Enforcement and Interdiction on Drug Use,” Jonathan P. Caulkins, the H. Guyford Stever Professor of Operations Research and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon, argues that there are benefits to prohibition—such as reduced dependence. Caulkins suggests that the current failures of prohibition are “overstated” and that the benefits may outweigh the costs. One example he offers to support his point is a group of friends who want to get stoned and listen to jazz but instead decide to go to a movie. “How much they actually enjoyed going to the movies is a loss whose value should be charged to prohibition,” he writes.

3. But prohibition isn’t the answer, either.
The fourth chapter, “Why Is Strict Prohibition Collapsing?,” written by Daniel Mejia, an associate economics professor in Colombia, and Pascual Restrepo, a Ph.D. candidate at MIT, shows the dark side of Caulkins’s argument. Classifying prohibition as a system based on “ideological positions,” the two elaborate on the violence and corruption that can result from banning drugs. Statistics to support it are staggering. Since 2007, 220,000 people have abandoned Ciudad Juárez as a result of the war on drugs, according to the London School of Economics. The war on drugs in Colombia has led to the second-largest internally displaced population in the world.

4. Stop sacrificing basic human rights.
Alejandro Madrazo Lajous, a professor in the Legal Studies Division of the Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económica (CIDE) in Mexico, argues that on top of the monetary costs of the war on drugs are the constitutional costs of “enforcing” what he views as an ideological war. “Creating an ‘exceptional’ regime of diminished fundamental rights goes against the logic of fundamental rights: that they can be universal,” he writes. “The structural design of constitutional government should not be adjusted in function of specific, purportedly transitory policies.”

5. Put an end to mass imprisonment of drug offenders.
On the heels of Madrazo’s claim, Ernest Drucker, adjunct professor of epidemiology at Columbia University, dives into one of the most costly, counterproductive byproducts of the war on drugs in America: mass imprisonment. Drucker details the grisly measures used to punish inmates brought in on drug charges in the U.S.—citing discipline that includes hard labor, severe mental and physical privations, isolation, body mutilation, and execution. The collateral effects, Drucker argues, show how imprisonment, human rights, and public health are related.

6. Make mistakes—then learn from them.
In the final chapter, UCLA drug policy expert Mark Kleiman and Jeremy Ziskind, a crime and drug policy analyst with BOTEC Analysis, dive into the early stages of cannabis legalization in the United States. In their chapter, the two stress the importance of allowing both Colorado and Washington the freedom to pursue their marijuana initiatives with “regulatory experimentation” to—put simply—figure out what works and what doesn’t. “The places that legalize cannabis first will provide—at some risk their own populations—an external benefit to the rest of the world in the form of knowledge, however the experiments turn out,” the two write. Most important, the two stress how vital the conversation surrounding these policies is. “Both sides of the legalization debate should acknowledge that the question is complex and the range of uncertainties wide.”

***

While Collins says he hopes the information in the LSE report will lead member states to back it publicly—so far, only Guatemala has formally done so—his main focus is on putting an end to the misinformation that has perpetuated the war on drugs. “People are afraid of drugs—rightly so, these substances can destroy people’s lives,” he said. “But their lack of knowledge results in vitriolic reactions, overreactions. At this point, they’re doing more harm than the drugs themselves.”

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Rwandan women have helped the nation thrive

Rwanda has the highest percentage of women appointed to government in the world. Women account for 64 percent of its parliament. (In comparison, America ranks 83rd with 18 percent.)

This is the same country that 20 years ago was in the throes of a genocide that consumed its population at a speed unparalleled in modern history. In 1994, Rwanda experienced 100 days of bloodshed that left some 800,000 people dead.

In the aftermath, the country was shattered. As the liberating rebel army moved in, it pushed the genocidal militias, along with hundreds of thousands of Rwandan refugees, into neighboring countries. While the world focused on the refugees, the Rwandans who remained in their own country were left to fend for themselves in a decimated nation. The population that stayed behind in the ruins was about 70 percent female.

The traditionally patriarchal society thrust its women into the role of rebuilding the country. They formed local councils, headed judicial proceedings, tilled the land, and rose through the ranks of government. Amazingly, against a backdrop of near total ruin, they ushered in a level of peace and reconciliation that whipped the country into the model of development and gender equality it is today.

One of those rebuilding was Eugenie Mukeshimana. In 1994, she was 22 years old and 8 months pregnant when war broke out and her husband was killed. Pursued for being a Tutsi, she took refuge with three different families, who hid her in the capital of Kigali. She gave birth in the outhouse of one of those families. The next day, she was taken to be killed, but, thanks to muddled instructions, her life was spared and she was subsequently liberated by the rebel Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) army.

It took months, she said, for any semblance of normality to take root. The abnormal “became normal,” Mukeshimana remembers: On the weekends, they would dig up human remains from outdoor latrines and wash and rebury bones.

Finances were another burden. “Under normal circumstances, family would help if I lost my husband. After the genocide, there was no such luxury,” she says. She remembers her female friends discovering that they had homes to pay off, their husband’s businesses to run, or legal obstacles blocking inheritance money to overcome. They—and she—felt, “that either way you have to go out and earn a living. You could not stay at home when you have kids dependent on you.”

Mukeshimana, who had a high school education, got a job as an office manager for a construction company. She would visit the building sites and observed the women coming to apply for jobs. “The men were ridiculing them, but not only were the women faster, they were much better then the guys. But they had to prove they could do it,” she remembers.

“It was women really simply saying, ‘I’ve been a housewife and now instead of taking care of a house I need to build a house, so someone show me how to make bricks,’” says Swanee Hunt, founder and chair of the Institute for Inclusive Security. Hunt, who has been working in Rwandasince 2000, remembers an early meeting she had with President Paul Kagame. She asked him if there was a difference in how men and women responded in the aftermath? “Women stepped out and rolled up their sleeves when men were destroyed emotionally and psychologically,” he told her.

The women discovered they could convey the needs of communities: they knew about issues of health, education, and family life. Before the genocide, men made the moneymaking decisions. Now, with women at the helm, the income was being invested in families and households. On a national level, leaders of both genders were seeing the obstacles facing their female relatives and friends and channeling them into policy reform.

The reversal didn’t have the markings of a textbook feminist revolution: there was no picketing, there were no marches and no political pleas. “We don’t talk too much, but we get things done,” says Mukeshimana. “Before men knew it—or women themselves—they’d built something incredible that cannot be taken away.”

Leadership started on the community level, where six women would compose a local women’s council. “A decade earlier in society for a woman to speak in a meeting with men, it was not just socially uncommon, it was impossible,” says Hunt. She remembers Kagame once telling her that he decided at an early age that there would be no exclusions in his work. “If I’m working on people’s rights, how do I exclude women?” he thought. The movement of Rwandan women through government was made permanent by a 30 percent quota prescribed by the new government’s constitution, which also established a gender monitoring office.

“After 1994 genocide [the RPF was] encouraging all groups of communities to take part in rebuilding the country. For us it was an open involvement for anyone who was ready to work for their country,” says Oda Gasinzigwa, minister of Gender and Family Promotion. “There’s no way you can ignore a part of your community if you want it really to develop.”

Gasinzigwa was one of the many Rwandan refugees who returned home to rebuild their decimated country in the war’s aftermath, and she found a force of women leaders in place motivating the younger ones to join their ranks.

In 2001, after working to coordinate empowerment programs for the National Women’s Council, she was also elected to the council at the grassroots level by her village.

This was a story repeated many times over: women holding community council seats rose through the regional levels to the national council. The secret to “how they broke every record,” Hunt says, was that women on the lower councils ran for the set-aside national seats to fill the government quota and women on the national council ran against men.

These groups of female leaders became a model for reconciliation. “Women whose families had been slaughtered [were] sitting next to another woman going every day to deliver food to a husband in prison because he was genocidaire—and they’re forming a women’s caucus in the parliament,” Hunt says. Meanwhile, the Rwandan Gacaca courts—community-run justice systems that tried some two million genocide perpetrators—had strong female leadership.

“The chaos can either set you back 100 years or crack open the culture,” says Hunt. “Things are never going back to where they were before and if you are adept enough as women, you can slip into those places where there are cracks and vacuums and fill them.”

In December, Hunt says she asked Louise Mushikiwabo, minister of foreign affairs and cooperation, what would ensure a woman’s place in Rwanda when there was a new administration. “She said, ‘It’s no longer a question of quota insuring anything in the culture, it is the culture now.’”

Hunt, who is compiling interviews with the country’s female leaders in a forthcoming book called Rwandan Women Rising, has been bringing a contingency of the country’s top women to a program she runs out of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, where she serves as the Eleanor Roosevelt Lecturer in Public Policy. The program unites female leaders of former or current conflict zones, from Kosovo, to Colombia, to Afghanistan.

Now other countries look to Rwanda as an example of women’s impact on government and the peace process. Recently, Hunt says, Rwandan women told their counterparts in Syria, “Look, we have been through what you’re going through… we have been through it and look at us.”

The Rwandan success story was not without a price, and for some the scars were slow to heal, when they healed at all. After seven and a half years in Rwanda after the war, Mukeshimana moved to the United States on a student visa, and later was granted asylum. “I could not see myself living next door to people who have victimized me and family,” she says.

Today, she lives in Newark, N.J., and runs the Genocide Survivors Support Network, which she founded in 2010 to help victims and asylum seekers resettle in the United States. The legal and social hoops are taxing for immigrant survivors, who are forced to repeat their stories over and over in a process that can be traumatizing.

For mothers of the genocide, personal histories can be hard to pass on to the next generation. “It’s hard to be a parent and also to be a survivor: to talk to your kid as if you are like everybody else, but you know you’re not,” says Mukeshimana, whose daughter is “almost 20 and I don’t know when to have this conversation.” For advice, she has sought the counsel of Holocaust survivors, whose wisdom resonated across the half-century separating the two genocides.

Meanwhile, in Rwanda, a generation the same age as Mukeshimana’s daughter has grown up without memories of the genocide—or the patriarchal society that preceded it. They’re getting educated, with 98 percent of girls enrolled in primary school, and they have plenty of role models to emulate.

This generation of young women is “doing things that in my time at their age I wasn’t thinking about because society spelled it out to me that there were those limitations,” Mukeshimana says.

“I am amazed, I’m proud—but at the same time, it shouldn’t take a conflict as big as genocide for these changes to take place. There should be a better way to make the transition to gender equality without having conflict as a backdrop.”

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Why millennials are less religious

It's no secret that young Americans aren't as religious as their elders. A survey released Wednesday by the Public Religion Research Institute suggests that part of that rift may be attributed to a perceived anti-gay bias in organized religion.

Among those who have abandoned their childhood religion and are now religiously unaffiliated, one quarter say anti-gay teachings factored into their decision to go faithless. Among Millennials in the religious turned irreligious camp, almost one third said the same.

At first blush, that would appear to suggest clear causation: stuffy old anti-gay religious dogma is spooking all the hip youngsters. But while there is certainly a link between the two, it is an overly simplistic analysis that glosses over a host of reasons that Americans — and particularly younger ones — are losing their religion.

Let's start by digging a little deeper into PRRI's survey results. While 31 percent of Millennial religion-droppers said anti-gay teachings were a factor in their decision, only 14 percent called it a "very important" reason they went faithless. And fully two thirds of Millennials who abandoned religion said their decision had very little or nothing at all to do with religion's position on homosexuals.

So what else is at play here?

Americans have been growing less religious for some time now. About one fifth of the nation is either atheist, agnostic, or religiously unaffiliated, according to a 2012 Pew survey, which categorizes that demographic as the "nones." Young adults are less devout than any other age bracket; nearly a third of them are religiously unaffiliated. Notably, they are also less religious than previous generations were at this point in their lives.

As Pew pointed out, that generational divide isn't the result of just one or even a few factors. Rather, it coincides with a general "softening of religious commitment" in the nation as a whole, with religious institutions holding much less influence in Americans' daily lives.

Americans attend church less, are more likely to doubt the existence of God, and are less likely to take the Bible literally than ever before. What that means for Millennials is that they're growing up in less religious households, and are thus less liable to embrace religion themselves.

At the same time, atheism and agnosticism have gradually become more commonplace and acceptable. Only 18 percent of Americans said they would vote for an atheist presidential candidate in 1958; a majority now say they would do just that. There are promotional atheism billboards all over the country, including one that went up near the site of the Super Bowl this year. There's even a hotline to help people "recover" from religion.

On another front, religion has become increasingly politicized in recent years; its perceived anti-gay bias is just one manifestation of that trend. As political scientists Robert Putnam and David Campbell tell it in their book, American Grace, the religious right secured a foothold in modern American politics by railing against abortion, contraception, premarital sex, and other supposedly sinful things including, yes, homosexuality. (The PRRI survey lumps all religions together, but given Christianity's predominance it's worth spotlighting.) That politicization, they argue, then turned nonreligious voters off of the GOP and religion in general. Indeed, religiously unaffiliated voters have been trending more Democratic for the past 30 years, with a spike in the past decade.

"While the Republican base has become ever more committed to mixing religion and politics," Putnam and Campbell wrote, "the rest of the country has been moving in the opposite direction."

Returning to Millennials, the religious positions mentioned above are also largely anathema to their prevailing beliefs. Furthermore, the outright hostility to science from some on the right — on global warming, evolution, and even something as seemingly benign as vaccines — only further impugns religion's credibility with younger voters. It should be no surprise then that solid majorities of Millennials describe Christianity as "hypocritical" and "judgmental."

To be sure, organized religion's perceived views on and treatment of homosexuals are undoubtedly pushing away some Millennials, who as a group are more supportive of gay marriage than the general public. But that's only a small piece of a much bigger picture.

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Seth Rogan's opening statement about Alzhemier's disease

Thank the pill for the drop in abortion rate

Paul J. Richards/Getty

Today, the Guttmacher Institute reported that the abortion rate in the United States reached its lowest level since 1973, the year that the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade. But to the extent that either side can claim any victory in this landmark, credit should go to reproductive rights groups, not anti-abortion activists. In fact, foes of abortion have opposed most every single public policy that contributes to lowering the abortion rate in America.


Of course, the best example is contraception. Conservatives have been apoplectic about a requirement under Obamacare that private insurance companies must provide affordable access to contraception. It would be one thing if the contraception outrage were merely manufactured as an excuse to undermine Obamacare as a whole—the “War on Women” simply as pretext for the “War on Obamacare.” But the puritanical conservative fervor against contraception seems far more genuine, for instance when Former Republican governor and presidential candidate Mike Huckabee recently suggested that women need contraception because “they cannot control their libido.” Another Republican presidential candidate, Sen. Rick Santorum, thinks contraception is “not okay” and that the Supreme Court decision guaranteeing contraception access to married couples should be overturned. And House Republicans have pushed measure after measure to restrict contraception access, including such threats as a component of the Republican shutdown of government last fall.

It probably goes without saying, but just in case ... contraception reduces unintended pregnancies, which in turn reduces the need for abortions. That probably doesn’t need further explanation, but just in case … Fox News reportedon a study that found: “Free birth control led to dramatically lower rates of abortions and teen births.”

So why aren’t supposedly anti-abortion conservatives championing affordable access to contraception, rather than condemning it? Prior to Obamacare, the high cost of contraception was prohibitive for many women. Many reported trying to save money by irregularly taking the pill or changing to a less effective method of contraception. Now, thanks to Obamacare, at least 27 million women have affordable access to effective birth control. Which means fewer abortions. Shouldn’t conservatives be cheering that development, not trying to attack it?

Then there’s sex education. According to the National Survey of Family Growth, teens who received comprehensive sex education were 50 percent less likely to experience pregnancy than those who received abstinence-only education. And yet conservatives have been pushing abstinence-only education for a generation, prioritized—and funded—by the federal government under President George W. Bush. Why? Out of some puritanical idealism that if you tell teens not to have sex, they won’t—instead of basing policy on the reality that teens will have sex either way, and so better to equip them with information to be safe and healthy. Oh, and if we don’t want teen pregnancies, better to teach teens how not to get pregnant. Doy. But conservatives continue to press for abstinence-only education nationwide.

Then there are things that would make it easier for women who get pregnant to have and raise children that conservatives also oppose. For instance, raising the minimum wage. Women are disproportionately paid the minimum wage—currently just $7.25 an hour federally, which hasn’t been raised since 2007. Meanwhile, women with family incomes below the federal poverty level account for more than 40 percent of all abortions and have a higher abortion rate compared with women in other income groups. It’s not surprising that women who can barely make ends meet as is would not feel they can have a child, let alone afford the medical costs and lost wages of carrying a pregnancy to term. Conservatives oppose public spending to ease the hardship of poor women, cutting funds for food stamps and housing assistance.

Conservatives also oppose access to contraception and abortion for poor women as well. Andconservatives don’t even want Medicaid to pay for poor women’s maternity care. So what’s left? Oh, right—abstinence. The same policy that isn’t working with teenagers, only even more patronizing when applied to grown women.

Four in 10 unintended pregnancies in America lead to abortion. In Texas, newly enacted restrictions on abortion access have apparently not led to a drop in abortions but rather a surge inself-abortion disasters suggesting that women who feel they need abortions will take desperate measures if safe and legal options are not available. So if we truly want to reduce the number of abortions in America, we need to lower the rates of unintended pregnancies—with access to contraception and comprehensive sex education—and/or make it more possible for women to have and raise children if they choose, by increasing wage and income supports, especially for low-income women. That is a simple formula. Why are conservatives doing everything they can to oppose these policies—and to drive up the abortion rate in America?

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New program will offer scholarships to undocumented students

Three high-profile participants in the immigration reform movement announced a scholarship program on Tuesday that will give millions of dollars in scholarships to Dreamers, undocumented young people who came to the U.S. as children. The new program, called TheDream.US, will allow many to attend college when they otherwise wouldn't be able to afford it.

Donald Graham, CEO of the Graham Holdings Company; activist Henry Muñoz; and former Secretary of Commerce Carlos Gutierrez launched TheDream.US. The group has raised $25 million to offer scholarships to Dreamers who were granted the ability to remain in the U.S. under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, often called DACA. A dozen colleges across the country have already signed on.

"Absent the passage of the Dream Act or other breakthroughs in immigration policy, thousands of eager young people will be unable to achieve their academic dreams," Gutierrez said in a statement. "We are not waiting for Washington to solve these challenges."

It can be tough to afford college as an undocumented immigrant, particularly in states where the student must pay out-of-state tuition even if he or she attended high school there. Some members of Congress are trying to change that through a bill that would encourage states to grant Dreamers in-state tuition or financial aid at public colleges.

The effort from TheDream.US will provide scholarships for a variety of schools, including private ones, that have work-related programs and good support systems to help Dreamers stay in. The program will pay up to 100 percent of tuition, or around $25,000 over four years, based on need.

Only Dreamers who have been granted deferred action under President Barack Obama's DACA policy will be eligible. Although that leaves out some Dreamers, it would apply to the more than 455,000 undocumented young people who, as of mid-September 2013, had received relief under DACA.

Applicants would also need to have graduated from a U.S. high school with a grade point average of at least 2.5, or have received a GED with a score equivalent to that GPA. They must also plan for an associate's or bachelor's degree that is career-focused at one of the schools partnering with TheDream.US. Recipients must maintain a GPA of at least 3.0 while working toward their degree.

The program has already begun to help 39 Dreamers who received their scholarships in December 2013, before it was officially announced. One of them, Araceli Mendez, attends Borough of Manhattan Community College, part of the City University of New York. She came to the U.S. from Mexico when she was 7 years old, and didn't attend college immediately after high school because she couldn't afford the tuition.

"This scholarship means everything to me," she said at an event announcing the program, according to prepared remarks. "It means the opportunity to live my dreams, the chance of getting closer to my goals as I take each course. This scholarship has also taken away the burden of trying to scramble to find tuition money. Now I can focus on the most important thing to me, which is my education."

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Three things that could negatively impact the U.S. economy this year

Ruben Sprich/Reuters

Regulation, the unemployment rate, and global competition are among the major concerns that could impede the performance of the U.S. economy this year.

That’s according to some of the assembled financial minds at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last week.

“The biggest concern is regulatory antagonism by the government that would affect the most successful economic growth in recent years,” said Kenneth Hersh, Chief Executive of oil-focused private equity firm NGP Energy Capital Management. “Things like targeted tax increases would choke the economic engine of our country.”

Bill Browder, Chief Executive of the hedge fund Hermitage Capital Management, expressed concern about Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing policy. “Every asset price is being artificially inflated by policy makers. With interest rates around zero, the moment that stops, valuations will rise. The Federal Reserve has no idea what they’re going to do. When this artificial thing gets taken away, everything will drop.”

For others, such as Joe Echevarria, Chief Executive of accounting powerhouse Deloitte, the most pressing concern was having our growth outpaced by other nations, in turn, hindering our ability to compete on the world economic stage.

“Most pressing is foreign policy,” Echevarria said. “It always has the ability to take things off track. We make it harder on ourselves because the rest of the world is trying to be larger. The U.S. is the most productive economy, but this hinders our ability to compete. We should recognize that we need to compete globally.”

Ibrahim Abdulaziz Al-Assaf, Saudi Arabia’s minister of finance, said: “The challenge is the growth and raising the employment by reshaping and retraining people. The unemployment is decreasing, but it’s because people are leaving the workforce and the view from outside the U.S. is that people need to be trained in new kinds of
industries.”

From a markets perspective, the U.S. government needs to get a handle on issues of national security, particularly data breaches, said Scott Cutler, head of global listings at the New York Stock Exchange. Cutler specifically cited “the Snowden event,” to use his words, and its subsequent impact on U.S. companies to conduct business in overseas markets.

“For any multi-nationals doing business abroad, the idea of data safety and security is a huge issue, and that issue is coming up in purchasing decisions and investments,” he said.

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Gov. Rick Perry supports the decriminalization of marijuana

Jessica Hill/AP

Gov. Rick Perry signaled Thursday that he's for the decriminalization of marijuana use — not legalization, but the softening of punishment for pot users in the border state.

“As governor, I have begun to implement policies that start us toward a decriminalization” by introducing alternative “drug courts” that provide treatment and softer penalties for minor offenses, Perry said during an international panel on drug legalization at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

It's the first time the governor, who's voiced support for drug courts in the past, took a position on decriminalization in Texas.

His spokeswoman confirmed that Perry is staunchly opposed to legalization of marijuana because of the dangers that have been associated with the drug but is committed to policies that would lower the punishment for its use to keep smokers out of jail.

“Legalization is no penalty at all, whereas decriminalization doesn't necessarily mean jail time (for minor possession offenses). It means more of a fine or counseling or some sort of program where you don't end up in jail but in a rehabilitative program,” said Lucy Nashed, a spokeswoman for Perry.

“The goal is to keep people out of jails and reduce recidivism, that kind of thing,” she said, adding that decriminalization would exclude violent offenders and dealers.

In Texas, an offender with less than 2 ounces of marijuana can be sentenced to up to 180 days in jail and a fine of up to $2,000. An offender with more than 5 pounds faces up to two years in jail.

Drug courts, which provide supervision and intense rehabilitation for some convicted drug users in lieu of jail time, were passed in Texas in 2001 by a group of Democrat lawmakers.

Bills have been introduced in the state Legislature to reduce penalties and allow the sale of medicinal marijuana over the past six years but have not made it out of committee.

In the past, Perry has discussed his opposition to legalization of marijuana but voiced his support for the 10th amendment and state's rights to legalize the drug, which he highlighted at the forum Thursday.

Perry did not address medicinal use of marijuana during the event.

Nashed said Perry has discussed support of drug courts in the past; however, the governor specifically has not gone as far as supporting decriminalization in public comments.

“I am shocked,” said Ana Yañez-Correa, executive director of the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition, adding that Perry killed a drug treatment bill the organization supported in 2007. “I am very happy to hear the governor supports a more rehabilitative approach.”

More than 15,000 people are imprisoned in Texas correctional facilities for possession of drugs, Yañez-Correa said.

Perry, who sought the Republican nomination to the office in 2012, announced in 2013 that he would not seek re-election to his office. He has not confirmed whether he will run for president again.

When asked whether Perry thinks it's a good idea to decriminalize small amounts of marijuana in Texas, Nashed said, “He has long supported diversionary programs like drug courts in Texas that have had remarkable results.”

Perry made the comments on a panel that included former United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan and Colombian President Juan Manuel.

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Virginia to fight same-sex marriage ban

Mark Herring

Virginia Attorney General Mark R. Herring will announce Thursday that he believes the state’s ban on same-sex marriage is unconstitutional and that Virginia will join two same-sex couples in asking a federal court to strike it down, according to an official close to the attorney general with knowledge about the decision.

The action will mark a stunning reversal in the state’s legal position on same-sex marriage and is a result of November elections in which Democrats swept the state’s top offices. Herring’s predecessor, Republican Ken Cuccinelli II, adamantly opposes gay marriage and had vowed to defend Virginia’s constitutional amendment banning such unions, which was passed in 2006 with the support of 57 percent of voters.

Herring, too, had voted against same-sex marriage eight years ago, when he was a state senator. But he has said that his views have changed since then and that on Thursday he will file a supportive brief in a lawsuit in Norfolk that challenges the state’s ban, said two people familiar with his plans.

Herring will say that Virginia has been on the “wrong side” of landmark legal battles involving school desegregation, interracial marriage and single-sex education at the Virginia Military Institute, one official said. He will make the case that the commonwealth should be on the “right side of the law and history” in the battle over same-sex marriage.

He has not informed Republicans in Richmond about his plans; an uproar is likely. GOP lawmakers have worried that Herring would change the state’s position — such decisions are up to the attorney general — and have contemplated legislation that would allow them to defend the law in court.

The attorney general thinks that is unnecessary, the official said. The clerks of the circuit court in Norfolk and Prince William County are defendants in the suit, and both are represented by independent counsel.

Janet Rainey, the state registrar of vital records, is also a defendant. Although she and Herring will urge the court to strike down the ban, she will continue to enforce it until the courts act.

The move in Virginia is part of a quickly changing legal landscape reshaped by the Supreme Court’s rulings in two cases on same-sex marriage in June.

In one, U.S. v. Windsor, the court voted 5 to 4 to find unconstitutional a key part of the Defense of Marriage Act, which withheld federal recognition of same-sex marriages performed where they are legal and denied federal benefits to those in such unions.

In the other, it allowed to stand a federal judge’s opinion that California’s Proposition 8, which bans same-sex marriage, was unconstitutional. The court ruled that the case was not before it in a way that allowed a ruling on the merits.

The justices sidestepped a critical question: whether state bans on same-sex marriage violate the Constitution’s guarantees of equal protection and due process.

But federal judges in Utah and Oklahoma have said that the reasoning used by the court majority meant that constitutional amendments in those states banning same-sex unions cannot stand. Gay marriages took place in Utah, but both decisions are now stayed pending appeal.

The highest courts in New Jersey and New Mexico have held that gay couples have the right to be married there. The District of Columbia and 17 states — including Maryland but not counting Utah and Oklahoma — now allow such unions.

The Obama administration took a position similar to Herring’s when it announced it would not defend DOMA, which Congress passed in 1996 and President Bill Clinton signed into law. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. joined the legal challenge against the key part of the law, and House Republicans hired a lawyer in an unsuccessful bid to save it.

Similarly, Democratic attorneys general in other states have said they think their bans are unconstitutional. Democrats in California refused to defend Proposition 8. And last summer, Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen Kane bowed out of challenges to her state’s law.

Herring, whose race against Republican Mark D. Obenshain was so close it was not decided until Dec. 18, has been in office just two weeks. But he faced a tight deadline in deciding whether to change the state’s legal position.

U.S. District Judge Arenda L. Wright Allen has scheduled oral arguments for Jan. 30 in the Norfolk case. It received a jolt of attention last fall when lawyers Theodore B. Olson and David Boies, who brought the federal challenge of Proposition 8, announced that they were joining the plaintiffs’ side.

In addition, the American Civil Liberties Union is challenging the Virginia ban in a federal suit in Harrisonburg. That case is not as far along.

Virginia has been a particularly appealing place for a challenge by supporters of gay rights because of the Supreme Court’s 1967 decision in Loving v. Virginia, which struck down laws against interracial marriage. Those who support same-sex unions often draw a parallel.

Herring will make the same point, according to a person who has seen the brief he will file. The state will say that Loving upheld the fundamental right to marriage, not the right to interracial marriage. The question at stake now, the brief states, is not a right to same-sex marriage but whether the fundamental right to marriage can be denied to “loving couples based solely on their sexual orientation.”

Democrats are sensitive to charges that it is Herring’s duty to defend Virginia’s law regardless of whether he agrees with it. They point out that Cuccinelli refused to defend one of then-Gov. Robert F. McDonnell’s education reforms in court, saying he believed that the legislation (for state takeovers of failing schools) was unconstitutional.

Herring also will say that the state’s law will be defended in the Norfolk challenge. Norfolk clerk George E. Schaefer is represented by a private lawyer paid by the state’s Department of Risk Management. Prince William clerk Michèle B. McQuigg, who asked to intervene in the case, is represented by the conservative legal group Alliance Defending Freedom.

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America is becoming more liberal

Reuters

Not too long ago, everyone was declaring American politics a lost cause for progressives. The religious right supposedly had a stranglehold on elections. Then it was the tea party that had the political establishment — initially Democrats and Republicans — quaking. The media and the general public took hold of a narrative parroted by conservative candidates and opinion leaders: The United States was a “center-right” nation.

But after two consecutive elections in which the Democratic candidate for president garnered more than 50 percent of the vote — a one-two punch last achieved by Franklin Roosevelt — it is worth questioning that assumption. The country is getting more diverse, and as the proportion of white voters shrinks, so, too, does the conservative base. As demographics shift, so do political preferences — in this case, toward the left. A close examination of U.S. attitudes in the past decade-plus reveals that the United States is steadily becoming more progressive.

It’s been well publicized how America has “evolved” on marriage equality. Washington Post/ABC News polling last year found that, by a margin of 58 percent to 36 percent , people believe their fellow Americans should be able to marry whomever they choose — something that would have been unthinkable less than a decade ago.

This progressive trend isn’t isolated to this issue. Over the past 10 or so years, national polls have shown that the general public is becoming more liberal on:

● Immigration. The last time the nation considered immigration reform, in 2006, 52 percent of respondents told Gallup that the priority should be halting the flow of illegal immigration. Just 43 percent preferred to deal with the undocumented immigrants already here. When Gallup asked the same question last July, the numbers had flipped: 55 percent thought the focus should be on immigrants already here, while 41 percent said the priority should be strengthening U.S. borders.

● Marijuana. In 2000, just 31 percent of Americans believed marijuana should be legalized, Gallup found, and 64 percent were opposed. The pro-legalization number has since tracked steadily upward. In October Gallup polling, 58 percent of respondents favored legalization and just 39 percent were opposed.

● Big business. Americans have grown more mistrustful of big business since 2002, when 50 percent of respondents told Gallup they were “very or somewhat satisfied” with the influence of major corporations. This number bottomed out at 29 percent in 2011 and 30 percent in 2012.

Attitudes are shifting in the states as well. In recent elections, states that were once reliably Republican red in presidential elections — including Colorado, North Carolina and Nevada— have become competitive or even solid Democratic blue.

In the November election in Virginia, issues well to the left of the “Old Virginia” (read: conservative) mainstream not only failed to hurt Democrats but might even have helped them. Gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe (D) was vocal about his support forexpanding Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, while Republican Ken Cuccinelli harped on Obamacare to curry favor with voters unhappy with the law. In the end, of course, McAuliffe won, and there was little evidence that health care hurt him or helped Cuccinelli’s final numbers. In the attorney general’s race, Democrat Mark Herring defied long-standing conventional wisdom and played up his position on gun safety. Herring defeated his opponent by pointing out Republican Mark Obenshain’s weak record on common-sense gun legislation such as comprehensive background checks and closing the gun-show loophole.

In the swing state of Iowa, recent extreme weather has convinced more people that the science behind climate change is real. In an Iowa State University annual poll of farmers — a traditionally conservative set — the share who believed in climate change last year was 74.3 percent, a significant jump from 67.7 percent in 2011, when the question was first asked.

It is more than an interesting observation that America now leans left. This should be a guiding light for politicians. With the knowledge that most Americans are, in fact, behind them, Democrats no longer need to fear running on their beliefs. They should stop letting special interests on the right hold ideas and ideals hostage and start listening to voters.

And what are the American people saying? That they’re fed up with political obstructionism and conservative policies that have left the country at a standstill. They want a new direction.

Progressives have an opportunity not only to come into the mainstream but also to lead — and shape public opinion. President Obama began to do just that last month with a speech decrying income inequality. To feed the vacuum of economic discontent, Democrats ought to argue for populist solutions such as raising the minimum wage, raising taxes on millionaires and corporations, rebuilding infrastructure, investing in education and instituting paid sick leave. Americans crave solutions, and they are moving to the left to find them. Smart politicians ought to get ahead of them.

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Bruce Springsteen and Jimmy Fallon mock Gov. Christie

Legalizing marijuana gets unlikely conservative supporter

The growing campaign for legalizing marijuana has what would appear to be an unlikely supporter: the National Review.

The conservative magazine published an editorial on Monday applauding Colorado for becoming the first state to make the "prudent choice" of legalizing recreational marijuana, "thus dispensing with the charade of medical restrictions and recognizing the fact that, while some people smoke marijuana to counter the effects of chemotherapy, most people smoke marijuana to get high.

The prohibition of marijuana, its editors argue, has led to "billions in enforcement costs, and hundreds of thousands of arrests each year, in a fruitless attempt to control a mostly benign drug."

"We make a lot of criminals while preventing very little crime," the National Review writes, "and do a great deal of harm in the course of trying to prevent an activity that presents little if any harm in and of itself."

The editorial comes less than a week after the world's first legal recreational marijuana sales began in Colorado, with pot stores seeing long lines and retailers reporting supply shortages, pushing prices as high as $400 an ounce.

Pot stores in the state of Washington, which also voted to legalize recreational marijuana, are expected to open later this year. And marijuana activists hope to help pass similar laws in 13 more states by 2017.

"Marijuana is a drug, as abusable as any intoxicant is, and its long-term use is in some people associated with undesirable effects," the National Review continues. "But its effects are relatively mild, and while nearly half of American adults have smoked marijuana, few develop habits, much less habits that are lifelong. ... Compared to binge drinking or alcohol addiction, marijuana use is a minor public-health concern. All that being the case, the price of prohibition is relatively high, whether measured in police and penal expenses or in liberty lost. The popularity of marijuana may not be the most admirable social trend of our time, but it simply is not worth suppressing."

Legalization, the National Review says, is "a sign that Americans still recognize some limitations" on the reach of government.

"It is perhaps a little dispiriting that of all the abusive overreaches of government to choose from, it is weed that has the nation’s attention," the National Review concludes, "but it is a victory nonetheless."

It's not the first time the National Review has weighed in on the legalization debate. In 1996, the magazine published an editorial that also favored legalization.

"It is our judgment that the war on drugs has failed, that it is diverting intelligent energy away from how to deal with the problem of addiction, that it is wasting our resources, and that it is encouraging civil, judicial, and penal procedures associated with police states," the editors wrote in letter to readers in February of that year. "We all agree on movement toward legalization, even though we may differ on just how far."

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