The Centers for Disease Control released a new report today that found that Mississippi “now has the nation’s highest teen pregnancy rate, displacing Texas and New Mexico for that lamentable title.” The report found that in 2006, the Mississippi teen pregnancy rate was over 60 percent higher than the national average and increased 13 percent since the year before.

While the new report does not explain why the state’s teen pregnancy rate is increasing, one reason may be the poor quality of its sex ed programs. As the Sexuality Information and Education Center explains, Mississippi focuses heavily on abstinence education and teachers are prohibited from demonstrating how to use contraceptives:

Mississippi schools are not required to teach sexuality education or sexually transmitted disease (STD)/HIV education. If schools choose to teach either or both forms of education, they must stress abstinence-until-marriage, including “the likely negative psychological and physical effects of not abstaining.” [...]

If the school board authorizes the teaching of contraception, state law dictates that the failure rates and risks of each contraceptive method must be included and “in no case shall the instruction or program include any demonstration of how condoms or other contraceptives are applied.”

A reporter for ABC News’s Jackson, MS affiliate explained, “The Mississippi Department of Human Services says abstinence is the only birth control that is 100 percent effective. And that’s the only message teens need to hear.” Unfortunately, numerous studies show that abstinence-only education is not effective. As one study found:

Teenagers who pledge to remain virgins until marriage are just as likely to have premarital sex as those who do not promise abstinence and are significantly less likely to use condoms and other forms of birth control when they do, according to a study released today.

Further, a review by the House Oversight Committee found that “80% of the abstinence-only curricula…contain false, misleading, or distorted information about reproductive health.”

Pregnant teens in Mississippi face few options. Access to facilities that provide abortions in that state is extremely limited. Indeed, because of an unusually effective anti-choice campaign in the legislature, only a single abortion clinic remains open in the state.

In an effort to save money, freshman Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) is planning to live in his Capitol Hill office, rather than rent an apartment in Washington, DC. “I’m trying to live the example that it doesn’t take big dollars in order to get where we want to go,” Chaffetz said. “I can save my family $1,500 a month by sleeping on a cot in my office as opposed to getting a fancy place that’s maybe a little bit more comfortable.” ABC News reports that at least 40 members of Congress regularly sleep in their congressional offices.

In an interview with CBS Radio today, Vice President Cheney claimed that he never “exceeded” his role as Vice President over the past eight years. It’s an “urban legend,” he insisted:

Nearing the end of eight years as Vice President, Dick Cheney bluntly dismissed the frequent suggestion that he was the one calling the shots in the White House. “It’s an urban legend,” he said. “It never happened.” […]

“This whole notion that somehow I exceeded my authority here, was usurping his authority, was simply not true.” Cheney said “there was never any question about who was in charge: it was George Bush and that’s how we operated.”

Cheney is, simply put, the most powerful vice president in history. Early in the Bush presidency, Cheney worked out a deal with Bush so he could be active in “whatever area the vice president feels he wants to be active in,” according to Chief of Staff Josh Bolten. “He has been pretty damn good at accumulating power,” remarked former secretary of state James Baker.

Here are just some examples of Cheney abusing his vice presidential powers:

– Argued he was not part of the executive branch but instead a “barnacle” hanging between the legislative and executive branch.

– Cheney’s office failed to provide data on its classification and declassification activities as required by Executive Order 12958. “Cheney’s office provided the information in 2001 and 2002, then stopped.”

– Top Cheney aide David Addington “typed a substitute signature line” for Alberto Gonzales on a memo re-authorizing Bush’s illegal wiretapping program.

– “The Cheney team had…technological supremacy over the National Security Council staff. That is to say, they could read their e-mails,” said former Colin Powell aide Lawrence Wilkerson.

– Documents prepared for the then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice were “routed outside the formal process” to Cheney.

– A Cheney lawyer told the Secret Service in September 2006 “to eliminate data on who visited Cheney at his official residence.”

In addition to his well-documented disregard for the rule of law, Cheney admitted last year that he doesn’t care what the public thinks. It is no wonder he leaves office with 23 percent of Americans saying he is the worst VP ever.

After disgraced Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich appointed Roland Burris to the Senate, Rep. Bobby Rush (D-IL) became Burris’ most vocal defender. He likened Senate Democratic leaders, who said they would not seat a Blagojevich appointment, to George Wallace and Bull Connor and warned Senate Democrats not to “hang or lynch” Burris. Tonight on MSNBC’s “Hardball,” Rush went further, comparing the Senate’s refusal to seat Burris yesterday to one of the most violent chapters of the civil rights movement:

RUSH: It reminded me of the dogs being sicced on children in Birmingham, Alabama. That’s what it reminded me of.

Rush also declared that racism “is as American as apple pie.” Watch it:

“When Rush threw that ‘lynching’ card out there, he didn’t just disgrace himself, he really trivialized, arguably, the most disgraceful eras in American history,” the Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote. Coates has more here.

Over the past few years, the U.S. Army War College has attracted considerable attention for its willingness to criticize the Bush administration’s foreign policy, publishing a paper in 2004 that concluded the global war on terrorism was “unfocused” and war in Iraq “unnecessary.” Today, former Washington Post reporter Thomas Ricks writes that Steven Metz, chairman of a department at the Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute, said that the school eventually had to censor itself because of pressure from the Pentagon:

In fact, he [Metz] explicitly blamed the strained relationship between the Army and its civilian overseers under then-Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. “[A]t the time — with growing sensitivity to criticism by Rumsfeld and the Army’s attempt to make peace with Rumsfeld after Shinseki left — several members of SSI had been verbally flogged after interviews with you [Ricks] when the stories portrayed [sic] as more critical of the administration than we intended. We were worried about what might happen to SSI, even frightened for the organization. Many of us, including me, simply stopped doing interviews. Luckily, the climate eventually changed.”

Metz also said that he regrets what he did and instead should have been “more critical.” Ezra Klein writes that this incident helps make the case for academic tenure.

The Army was forced to apologize today after sending approximately 7,000 letters to family members of soldiers killed in Iraq or Afghanistan which mistakenly addressed them as “John Doe.” The letters were sent late last month to inform survivors about private organizations “that offer gifts, programs and other assistance to families that have lost” soldiers. “Army Chief of Staff Gen. George W. Casey, Jr., was sending a personal letter to all the families who received the improperly addressed letters as the result of a printing error, the Army said.”