Public support for liberalizing marijuana laws is at an all-time high, and as of the November election, 18 states have legalized the drug, either for medical or recreational purposes. Law enforcement, however, seems unmoved by the legalization movement. According to a new FBI report, police arrested more people for marijuana possession than for violent crime in 2011.

The Huffington Post reports:

In 2011, marijuana possession arrests totaled 663,032 — more than arrests for all violent crimes combined. Possession arrests have nearly doubled since 1980, according to an FBI report, while teen marijuana use recently reached a 30-year high.

President Obama and his Attorney General, Eric Holder, have stressed on numerous occasions that the federal government would not waste resources on prosecuting marijuana users who comply with their state laws. Yet Obama’s Justice Department continue to crack down on medical marijuana distributors at a rate far higher than his predecessors.

Drug possession convictions comprise almost half of the nation’s exploding prison population. These arrests are dramatically skewed against people of color; 31 percent of those arrested for marijuana possession are black, even though African Americans make up just 14 percent of marijuana users.

Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) became one of the most notorious figures of the 2012 election after he slashed the period for early voting and enacted a number of other vote suppressing election laws. As a result of these laws, Florida voters were forced to wait in lines for up to 6 hours and as late as 1 am. After the election, several top Republicans admitted these election laws were designed to keep Democrats and minority voters away from the polls.

As his public image sinks, the governor has tried to distance himself from his own laws, blaming the Legislature and even denying to a group of black lawmakers Tuesday that the early voting law was his. On Thursday, Scott went even further and endorsed major election reforms–including a reversal of his early voting restrictions.

Scott now supports increasing the number of early voting days, reducing ballot length, and widening the range of polling places:

The proposal calls for extending early voting once again to a maximum of 14 days from 8, including adding back the Sunday before Election Day, a popular day among black voters; increasing voting hours to 168 hours from 96; allowing votes to be cast at locations beyond election offices, city halls and libraries; and making sure that ballots are kept short. Any change in the law must be approved by the Legislature, which convenes for its one-month session in March.

Mr. Scott’s endorsement comes on the same day as the release of a new report concluding that black and Latino voters were most affected by the 2011 changes. Of the more than 1.17 million ballots cast by black voters, nearly half were during early voting.

If early voting days are restored, the state could avoid a repeat of the 2012 fiasco, in which thousands of Floridians were disenfranchised.

The Virginia Senate’s Courts of Justice Committee defeated several proposals for gun violence prevention, on party-line votes at an unscheduled meeting on Friday. And while one bill initially passed the committee — a proposal to prevent unlicensed vendors who don’t run background checks from selling firearms at gun shows — the committee rescinded its initial 8-6 vote an hour later and delayed reconsideration until Monday after a Republican Senator changed his mind.

On eight-to-six votes, the committee’s Republican majority defeated proposals to require universal background checks, ban guns in Richmond’s Capitol Square, and to allow local governments to establish firearm ordinances for their own property. One Republican crossed the aisle to back a proposal to ban high-capacity magazines, but that measure too failed on a 7-7 tie.

A separate bill, which would allow only federally licensed vendors who perform background checks to sell guns at Virginia gun shows initially passed with two Republicans voting in support. When one of those Republicans became concerned about the language, a hastily called informal meeting of the committee was held at the chairman’s desk at which the bill was reconsidered and postponed until Monday.

Sen. Adam Ebbin (D), author of several of the defeated bills, told ThinkProgress, “It was really sad to see committee Republicans searching for any pretense to defeat bills that would require all gun buyers to go through the same commonsense background check that most buyers already go through. We don’t need to have loopholes the size of Texas. People who want to buy guns in VA and don’t want to go through the background check can easily work their and that’s deadly wrong.”

Ebbin, along with Del. Patrick Hope (D), recently recorded an undercover video at a gunshow and was told since he didn’t look like a felon or a bank-robber, as long as he had a Virginia driver’s license everything would be fine. He was able to purchase guns and high-capacity magazines without any background check.

Watch their video:

A gun was left in the bathroom of a Michigan public school by an armed guard paid to protect it, according to the school’s director. The Chatfield School, a charter school that teaches K-8 students, hired a retired police weapons instructor to provide armed protection after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary. The result wasn’t exactly what they intended:

The security officer “made a breach in security protocol” and left an unloaded weapon in a restroom “for a few moments,” said Chatfield School Director Matt Young.

Young said the school has been in contact with local authorities about the matter and wouldn’t discuss any possible repercussion for the officer, calling it “a personnel matter.” Young also declined to name the security officer.

Experts on gun violence believe that armed guards are unlikely to deter or head off school shootings. Guards also have a track record of abusing students, often in a racially discriminatory fashion.

House Republicans are backing away from their threat to plunge the United States into a catastrophic budget default and will instead pursue the somewhat less reckless strategy of passing a three-month increase in the debt limit. According to House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA), the bill will also contain a provision cutting off congressional pay unless both houses meet a particular milestone: “If the Senate or House fails to pass a budget in that time, members of Congress will not be paid by the American people for failing to do their job. No budget, no pay.”

Before Cantor gets too excited about this plan, however, he may want to familiarize himself with the Twenty-Seventh Amendment to the Constitution:

No law, varying the compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives, shall take effect, until an election of Representatives shall have intervened.

There is no election between now and three-months from now, so no law that would cut off congressional pay can take effect then. The Constitution is very clear on this point. Indeed, Republicans should have discovered this fact when House members read the Constitution aloud on the House floor last Tuesday.

To be sure, it is good news that House Republicans appear to be realizing that they can no longer hold the fate of the entire world economy hostage to their narrow agenda. But they aren’t allowed to violate the Constitution either.

This week, Republican National Committee Chair Reince Priebus endorsed a Republican Party plan to rig future presidential elections by changing the way electoral votes are assigned. Under the Republican plan, GOP lawmakers in several states that supported the Democratic candidate for president in recent elections would stop awarding all of their electoral votes to the winner of the state as a whole, and instead award most of them one-by-one to the winners of individual congressional districts. In part because of widespread Republican gerrymandering, if Republicans had implemented this election rigging plan in six key states where they currently control the state government — Florida, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Wisconsin — Mitt Romney would have won the Electoral College despite losing the popular vote by nearly four points.

Efforts are already underway in several of these six key states to enact this election rigging plan and all but ensure that the next President of the United States is a Republican — regardless of how the American people cast their votes in 2016. Seven Pennsylvania state house members introduced a bill implementing the GOP election rigging plan this week, and the plan already enjoys the support of Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett (R) and state Senate Majority Leader Dominic Pileggi (R). A bill backed by Virginia State Senator Charles “Bill” Carrico Sr. (R) would implement the election rigging plan in Virginia. And Wisconsin Republican state Rep. Dan LeMahieu is behind an election rigging bill in his state. Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted (R) expressed support for the Republican election rigging plan, but he later backed off that support following significant criticism.

Now, the election-rigging plan is being considered in another one of the six key states, Michigan:

[Republican] Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder told The Associated Press on Tuesday that he “could go either way” on the change and doesn’t plan to push it. But he said it’s a reasonable issue to debate and that he prefers that leaders discuss it well before the next presidential election.

“It could be done in a thoughtful (way) over the next couple years and people can have a thoughtful discussion,” Snyder said.

Republican leaders in the Michigan Statehouse have yet to decide whether to embrace the change there. But state Rep. Peter Lund, a Republican who introduced a bill to change the allocation system two years ago, said some Republicans might be more receptive to his bill this year following the election.

Michigan is a blue state. It supported the Democratic candidate for president in every single election for the last two decades. President Obama won the state by nearly 10 points last November. And yet, if the Republican election-rigging plan had been in effect last year, Romney would have likely won a majority of the state’s electoral votes.

A recent Department of Justice lawsuit that called the criminalization of school disciplinary offenses as minor as dress code violations so arbitrary and severe as to “shock the conscience” publicized some of the most egregious punishment at Meridian, Mississippi’s schools. But perpetuation of what is known as the school-to-prison pipeline is not limited to that one city or county, and it’s nothing new, according to a new report by several civil rights organizations. Stories highlighted by the report reveal that school punishment in other Mississippi counties is as bad, if not worse, and exemplify the severity and scope of the problem:

In 2000, what began with a few students playfully throwing peanuts at one another on a school bus ended in five Black male high school students being arrested for felony assault, which carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison. When one of the peanuts accidentally hit the white female bus driver, the bus driver immediately pulled over to call the police, who diverted the bus to the courthouse where the students were questioned.

The Sheriff commented to one newspaper, “[T]his time it was peanuts, but if we don’t get a handle on it, the next time it could be bodies.”

More recently, in 2009 in Southaven, DeSoto County, armed police officers responded to an argument between three students on a school bus by reportedly arresting a half dozen Black students, choking and tackling one Black female student, and threatening to shoot the other students on the bus between their eyes.

In 2010, in Jackson Public School District, until a lawsuit was filed, staff at one school regularly handcuffed students to metal railings in the school gymnasium and left them there for hours if they were caught not wearing a belt, among other minor infractions. For example, one 14-year-old boy was reportedly handcuffed to the railing when he wore a stocking cap to class, threw his papers on the ground, and refused to do his school work.

Mississippi is among 19 states that still permit paddling in school, and has the highest percentage of students beaten by educators. Severe over-punishment is imposed in a discriminatory and arbitrary manner, with three times as many black students receiving out-of-school suspensions as white students.

In Meridian, Miss., the problem of criminalizing school infractions is perpetuated by a policy of school officials calling police to discipline students. This raises serious concerns about the push to place more officers in schools in the wake of the Newtown, Ct. mass shooting, as putting more armed guards in schools has already been linked to an uptick in arrests.

A juvenile judge in Georgia testified about this phenomenon during a recent Senate Judiciary Committee hearing:

When I took the bench in 1999, I was shocked to find that approximately one-third of the cases in my courtroom were school-related, of which most were low risk misdemeanor offenses. Upon reviewing our data, the increase in school arrests did not begin until after police were placed on our middle and high school campuses in 1996—well before the horrific shootings at Columbine High School. The year before campus police, my court received only 49 school referrals. By 2004, the referrals increased over 1,000 percent to 1,400 referrals, of which 92% were misdemeanors mostly involving school fights, disorderly conduct, and disrupting public school.

Despite the many arrests, school safety did not improve. The number of serious weapons brought to campus increased during this period of police arrests including guns, knives, box cutter knives, and straight edge razors. Of equal concern was the decrease in the graduation rates during this same period—it reached an all-time low in 2003 of 58%. It should come to no one’s surprise that the more students we arrested, suspended, and expelled from our school system, the juvenile crime rate in the community significantly increased. These kids lost one of the greatest protective buffers against delinquency—school connectedness.

Earlier this week, ThinkProgress noted that a leading anti-abortion group plans to offer a training program to teach Republican candidates and lawmakers how to avoid toxic comments about rape. Yet, at a retreat this week for House Republicans in Williamsburg, Virginia, the GOP caucus received much more concise advice on how not to sound like Todd Akin: if you’re about to talk about rape, don’t:

[GOP Pollster] Kellyanne Conway dispensed the stern advice as part of a polling presentation she made alongside fellow GOP pollsters David Winston — an adviser to House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) — and Dave Sackett. The comment was described by several sources in the room.

Conway said rape is a “four-letter word,” and Republicans simply need to stop talking about it in their races for office.

Simply ignoring the existence of rape is probably a smarter political strategy than describing it as “legitimate” or claiming that pregnancies resulting from rape are a “gift from God,” but an even better strategy would be to stop treating some rape victims as less worthy than others.

It is bad when Todd Akin attaches unacceptable adjectives to the word “rape,” but it is far worse when Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) partners with Akin to strip rape victims of Medicaid funds unless they are victims of “forcible rape.” Similarly, it is bad when Rep. Phil Gingrey tries to defend Akin’s reprehensible statement, but far worse when House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) blocks the Violence Against Women Act’s reauthorization because he thinks it does too much to protect Native American women from being raped. The way for Republicans to prove they can be trusted to set national policy regarding violence against women is not to pretend rape does not exist, it is to take seriously their obligation not to exacerbate the trauma felt by rape survivors and support legislation that will prevent rape in the future.