Latest Polling Finds Strong Support For Clean Energy And Stricter Carbon Pollution Standards

By Jeff Spross on Feb 21, 2013 at 3:56 pm

Evidence of a striking shift in public opinion has begun to crystalize over the last few months: Poll after poll is finding staunch majorities of Americans view global warming as a “serious problem” and that human activity is a major driving cause.

In defiance of received Beltway wisdom, voters even told a recent Yale poll that a candidate’s views on global warming will affect their vote, and that the issue should be a top priority for the President and the Congress. Majorities have even stated that when it comes to deficit reduction, they prefer a tax on carbon emissions to cuts in education, Social Security, Medicare, or environmental protection.

Yesterday, Pew Research released new poll research that re-confirms the trend. When asked to choose between developing “alternative sources such as wind, solar and hydrogen” and expanding “exploration and production of oil, coal and natural” gas as their preferred priority for addressing America’s energy needs, 54 percent of Americans went with alternative energy. Only 34 percent chose continued prioritization of fossil fuels. That’s a drop from the 63 percent high in 2011, but an uptick over the 52 percent response last year.

Furthermore, Independents and Democrats were largely in concert, preferring alternative energy sources by 64 and 59 percent, respectively. Only 33 percent of Republicans went with solar and wind, in contrast to the 54 percent who preferred expanded fossil fuel use. But the distance between the two positions within the Republican group was smaller than the distance in the other two collections of voters.

And that wasn’t all. 62 percent of overall voters favored “setting stricter emission limits on power plants to address climate change,” with Democrats once again taking that position by a wide margin of 72 percent, and Independents coming in at a lower-but-still-impressive 64 percent. Republicans opposed the stricter standards by a 48 percent majority, but were again much more evenly split — the minority of GOP voters who favored the emissions limits close at the majority’s heels with 42 percent.

The age divide also stood out: Voters 18 to 29 supported alternative energy by a whopping 71 percent, and it wasn’t until voters crossed the age 65 that majorities flipped in favor of coal, oil and natural gas expansion.

And if the recent behavior and pronouncements of top lawmakers are any indication, this shift in the national mood is being felt. Newly minted Secretary of State John Kerry, who will shortly decide the fate of the Keystone XL pipeline, declared in his first big speech since his confirmation that, “We as a nation must have the foresight and courage to make the investments necessary to safeguard the most sacred trust we keep for our children and grandchildren: an environment not ravaged by rising seas, deadly superstorms, devastating droughts, and the other hallmarks of a dramatically changing climate.” President Obama came out swinging on the issue of climate change in both his Second Inaugural address and the State of the Union speech calling for new renewable electricity and energy efficiency targets, and warming that “if Congress won’t act soon to protect future generations [from climate change] I will.”

The latest signs from the White House are that Obama may very well use his executive authority to limit the carbon existing power plants may emit, on top of the regulations the Environmental Protection Agency is finalizing for new power plants.

Education

CFPB Announces New Push To Alleviate Mounting Student Loan Debt

By Adam Peck on Feb 21, 2013 at 3:46 pm

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau on Thursday unveiled a new initiative to help the nation’s 37 million former college students who are struggling to pay off a combined $1 trillion in student loans.

In a press release, CFPB Director Richard Cordray said he is instructing his agency to begin drafting possible proposals aimed at lowering monthly loan payments through refinancing and income-based payment models. As the cost of attending college has risen steadily over the last few decades, student loan payments have grown just as fast, surpassing credit card payments as the nation’s largest single contributor to household debt.

The CFPB’s new campaign on student loan payments comes less than two weeks after President Obama expressed concern over the issue during his State of the Union address. “Today, skyrocketing costs price way too many young people out of a higher education, or saddle them with unsustainable debt,” he said at the time.

A recent campaign launched by Campus Progress, (which, like ThinkProgress, is a project of the Center for American Progress) calls for Congress to pass legislation giving student borrows the ability to refinance their outstanding student debt in much the same way homeowners can refinance their mortgage payments or drivers refinance car payments. Doing so, says Campus Progress and the CFPB, would increase the likelihood of borrowers repaying their loans:

The CFPB has found that private student loan borrowers who wish to pay their loans, but face high payments, lack alternative repayment and refinance options.

“Too many private student loan borrowers are struggling with unwieldy debt that prevents them from climbing the economic ladder,” said CFPB Director Richard Cordray. “We will be analyzing plans for policymakers to consider that might help avoid a repeat of the mortgage meltdown for today’s student loan borrowers.”

Currently, the federal government backs roughly 85 percent of all student loans. The existing 6.4 percent interest rate levied against most borrowers is far higher than the typical rates for a 30-year mortgage, and higher still than the cost incurred by the federal government as well. As Time Magazine explains:

In other words, the government—standing behind these loans anyway—could refinance them at a lower rate without losing money on the loans. That doesn’t mean there wouldn’t be a cost. The government will show a profit this year of nearly $34 billion on these loans, the Center reports. This is a tough budget environment to ask Congress to kiss off a cash cow.

Refinancing typical interest rates down by less than 2 percentage points — to 5 percent from 6.8 percent — would save borrowers a cumulative total of $14 billion and inject more than $20 billion into the economy, Campus Progress estimated in its report.

()

Health

Three Problems Contributing To Americans’ Sky High Medical Bills — And Three Ways To Fix Them

By Sy Mukherjee on Feb 21, 2013 at 3:32 pm

This week’s issue of Time Magazine takes a deep dive into Americans’ medical bills and the roots of the U.S. health care industry’s rampant inflation — costs that force one in four American seniors into bankruptcy and over one in three Americans to forgo care.

The investigative piece highlights the exorbitant costs of the most commonplace procedures and medications, and how insurance coverage often falls through for Americans who encounter unaffordable out-of-pocket costs due to the rising price of health care technology and services. Furthermore, it is often impossible for patients to ascertain why they are being charged what they are for care — a pricing opacity that is truly unique to the service-centered health care industry. Here are the three biggest takeaways from the Time exposé on the unsustainable foundations of American health care costs — and some ideas for shifting the U.S. medical landscape towards a more equitable system:

COST PROBLEM	HOW TO FIX IT
The indefensible costs of medical testing, technology, and drugs. Much of the report focuses on the costs of receiving basic care and testing, such as diabetes tests, drawing blood samples, or even taking plain old Tylenol — which one hospital in the report marked up to $1.50 per pill, approximately 100 times its general market price, for a cancer patient. Hospitals are largely able to get away with this because they are, as the article puts it, “sellers in what is the ultimate seller’s market,” so device manufacturers, pharmaceutical companies, and hospital chains — even technically “nonprofit” ones — are free to run up the tabs on Americans’ care.	Use market competition and price negotiations to lower costs. In its Senior Protection Plan, the Center for American Progress (CAP) advocates tying relatively low Medicare drug rebates to more generous Medicaid drug rebates, and enforcing competitive bidding for all health care products in both the public and private sectors, as well as intrastate price negotiations in the private medical sector that constrains annual spending to a predesignated cap. All told, such reforms would reduce American health care spending by at least $180 billion.
People usually don’t know why they get charged what they do for care. It’s a common mantra among health care reform advocates — America doesn’t have a health care system, it has a sick care system. Services are charged after the fact, often in the form a hefty, inscrutable bill that tells patients very little about why they are being asked to pay tens of thousands of dollars in order to receive care that can mean the difference between life and death. This opacity allows providers to get away with jacking up the price of services even as medical technology makes huge strides — which should theoretically lower costs. One GAO report states that “the lack of price transparency and the substantial variation in amounts hospitals pay for some IMD [implantable medical devices] raise questions about whether hospitals are achieving the best prices possible.”	Make hospitals issue easily understandable receipts for all health care services.This is a relatively simple fix that would help facilitate further cost reductions by rooting price negotiations in easily-available, verifiable, and uniform data. As the CAP health policy team’s Topher Spiro states in an email to ThinkProgress, “We propose full price transparency—so it wouldn’t take a seven month investigation by a reporter to find out what prices are being charged.” The best possible outcome would be for hospitals and insurers to provide a comprehensive list of services to all patients and beneficiaries that let Americans know exactly how much a particular disease treatment or procedure will cost them.
Americans get care at expensive hospital chains that don’t necessarily provide the best service. As Time’s article points out, national and multi-national hospital chains rule the American medical industry — but that doesn’t mean they provide the cheapest, highest quality, or most efficient care. For instance, at the Texas giant MD Anderson, hospital administrators charged Sean Recchi over ten times as much for a chest x-ray as they would have been reimbursed by Medicare, which is required by law to approximate the price of services rendered. Why? Because Sean Recchi had subpar private insurance, and MD Anderson could get away with it.	Encourage patients to visit high-performing hospitals with insurance incentives. Americans might believe that such hospitals are their only recourse — but that doesn’t have to be true. One approach to encouraging providers to provide more efficient, quality, and affordable care would be the creation of tiered insurance plans that reward patients — through lower premiums and deductibles — who use low-cost, high-quality hospitals for their care instead of the highest-cost brand name hospitals.

()

Justice

Virginia Lawmakers Approve Strict Measure Requiring Voters To Show Photo ID

By Aviva Shen on Feb 21, 2013 at 3:00 pm

After President Obama won the state in November, Virginia Attorney General and gubernatorial candidate Ken Cuccinelli (R) called for stricter photo ID requirements because Obama “can’t win a state where photo ID is required.” On Wednesday, Virginia lawmakers proved they were listening to Cuccinelli, voting to adopt a photo ID requirement among the strictest in the country.

During the 2012 election cycle, voter ID laws were a huge hit with Republican-controlled state legislatures — but somewhat less popular with the courts. Judges struck down a number of voter ID laws due to the disproportionate impact they would have for minorities, seniors, and low-income voters. Virginia’s voter ID law was one of the few that survived review by the Justice Department, as its list of acceptable ID was flexible enough that it would not harm minority voting rights.

If Gov. Bob McDonnell (R-VA) signs these new requirements into law, voters will have to present a government-issued card bearing their photo, such as a drivers license or a passport. If they do not have a photo ID, they will have to fill out a provisional ballot that will be discarded if they cannot produce the required ID by the Friday after an election:

On a 65-34 vote, the House completed legislative action on a strict photo identification bill that would require all voters to present identification such as a drivers license or passport bearing a photo of the holder to cast a regular ballot. Those without it would have to vote a provisional ballot that would count only if the voter could provide local election officials with the required identification by noon on the Friday after the election. Only one Democrat supported the measure.

An almost identical measure was blocked in Texas under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which requires certain regions with a history of discrimination to “pre-clear” any election law changes with the DOJ. An appeals court determined Texas’ law would clearly hurt minority and low-income communities, who are much less likely to have the requisite identification. Under Section 5, Virginia’s new requirements would almost certainly be blocked by the DOJ. However, the US Supreme Court will hear arguments next week on the validity of this section of the VRA. If the court strikes down Section 5, minority voters will be left vulnerable in Virginia, Texas, and other states that targeted minority voting power during the Jim Crow era.

Earlier this month, Virginians endured colossal lines on Election Day, with some voters still waiting hours after polls officially closed. Still, lawmakers seem convinced that voting is too easy in Virginia. On Wednesday, the House also passed a bill to purge any non-citizens on Virginia’s voter rolls by accessing a federal immigration database. Florida and Colorado fought costly legal battles for access to this same database, but failed to find almost any confirmed non-citizen voters.

()

Health

90 Unnecessary Tests And Procedures That Patients Should Discuss With Doctors

By Aviva Shen on Feb 21, 2013 at 2:45 pm

The American Academy of Family Physicians and 16 other medical groups released a list today of 90 common tests and procedures that are frequently ordered unnecessarily and can even inflict more damage on a patient.

Unnecessary procedures include using feeding tubes for dementia patients, C-section deliveries for healthy women before 39 weeks of pregnancy, ultrasound tests for ovarian cysts, and CT scans for minor headaches. The list builds on a project initiated last year by the Choosing Wisely campaign, which seeks to trigger informed conversations about treatment between doctors and patients. Choosing Wisely asked each specialty group to come up with a list of 5 tests and procedures they feel were overused. Twelve other medical societies are expected to release more lists of questionable procedures later this year.

The list released today includes:

• Routinely performing annual PAP tests for women 30 to 65 years old.

• Prescribing antipsychotic medication as a first choice to treat behavioral and psychological symptoms of dementia.

• Prescribing testosterone in men with erectile dysfunction and normal testosterone levels.

• Screening healthy people — with no symptoms — for cancer using a PET/CT scan.

• Treating an elevated PSA in men with antibiotics when no other symptoms are present.

• Prescribing Xanax, Valium, Ativan, and other drugs known as benzodiazepines in older patients as a first choice for insomnia, agitation or delirium.

Alerting patients and doctors to dubious procedures not only helps fine-tune patient care, but could also go a long way toward trimming America’s intimidating health care costs. Even though Americans spend more on health care than any other developed nation ($2.7 trillion each year), the quality of care they receive often falls short. A recent analysis indicated that hospitals that spend more money on their patients are not necessarily giving them better treatment. As Dr. Christine Cassel, President of the American Board of Internal Medicine Foundation, observes, roughly one third of health care costs are wasted on unnecessary tests and procedures.

Furthermore, doctors are traditionally not trained to consider the financial costs of the tests they order, and usually omit financial factors when discussing treatment options with patients. Patients who actively seek out a procedure’s cost estimate have been stymied by wildly ranging prices, from $10,000 to $125,000 for a hip surgery, or $500 to $5,000 for an MRI.

The full list will be updated on Choosing Wisely’s website.

()

Immigration

Five Unlikely Supporters Of Comprehensive Immigration Reform

By Rebecca Leber on Feb 21, 2013 at 2:42 pm

Most Americans back a path to citizenship for the nation’s 11 million undocumented immigrants, which is a key component in both the Senate bipartisan framework and the president’s plan.

But an earned path to citizenship has drawn support from unexpected sources, too. A number of Tea Party lawmakers, evangelicals, and conservative leaders are part of the growing momentum calling for comprehensive immigration reform to include citizenship:

1. Rand Paul
In his response to the State of the Union, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) said the Tea Party, “must be the party that says, ‘If you want to work, if you want to become an American, we welcome you.”‘ Paul first embraced an “eventual path” to citizenship for undocumented immigrants after the 2012 election, though his past positions include wanting to deny citizenship to the children of immigrants. Marco Rubio, another Tea Party favorite, also endorses citizenship.

2. Grover Norquist
Grover Norquist has led the right’s anti-tax fights on the fiscal cliff and sequester, but he is a supporter of comprehensive immigration reform. “Texas is a voice on making sure the center-right movement — conservatives, Republicans, Americans — are seen properly on this issue,” Norquist said earlier in February. “We’re getting past this sense that conservatives are supposed to be anti-immigrant.”

3. Fox News Chief Roger Ailes
In an interview with The New Republic Fox News chief Roger Ailes said, “I think the word ‘illegal immigration’ is a false name. We should all defend sovereignty, then take a Judeo-Christian approach to immigration. I don’t have any problem with a path to citizenship.” Though Ailes’ motives are unclear — he said in the same interview Latinos are a “tremendous business opportunity” for the network — Fox News personalities have considerably softened their commentary on immigration reform, notably Sean Hannity. “You create a pathway for those people that are here — you don’t say you’ve got to go home,” Hannity said in November. “And that is a position that I’ve evolved on.”

4. Conservative evangelicals
Focus on the Family joined other conservative evangelicals, traditionally the least supportive of comprehensive reform, to campaign for “compassionate and just treatment of immigrants.” In November, the Evangelical Immigration Table sent an open letter to Congress requesting citizenship or legalization for undocumented immigrants. According to a 2010 Public Religion Research Institute poll, evangelicals support reform with citizenship by a margin of 2-1. Six years ago, Pew found a majority of white evangelicals viewed immigration as a threat. Now, evangelical leaders cite a new understanding of the Bible as the reason for the shift.

5. Border State Republicans
Republicans from the state with the nation’s fifth-highest Latino population became the first state GOP party to endorse comprehensive immigration with a clear path to citizenship. Party officials said the GOP’s hard line on immigration reform conflicts with the “party’s historic commitment to civil rights.” Though many Texas Republicans have yet to officially come forward, there is a Democratic-sponsored resolution in the House urging Congress to “swiftly enact and fund comprehensive immigration reform that creates a road map to citizenship.”

()

Security

Oscar-Nominated Palestinian Filmmaker Detained At Customs

By Hayes Brown on Feb 21, 2013 at 2:34 pm

Palestinian filmmaker Emad Burnat

Emad Burnat — the director of the Oscar-nominated documentary “5 Broken Cameras” — landed in Los Angeles yesterday ahead of Sunday’s awards ceremony to a less than pleasant welcome. Rather than the easy transit he had experienced during his previous five visits to the U.S., customs officials detained him, his wife, and six-year old son in a small room in Los Angeles International Airport and couldn’t believe that he was in town to attend the prestigious event.

According to Burnat, customs agents wouldn’t accept the scanned versions of the official documents that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences sends its nominees. Burnat then texted documentarian Michael Moore to let him know that he was being threatened with being sent back to Turkey without more proof that he was attending the Academy Awards. Moore described what happened more fully in a post on his blog yesterday:

I told Emad to give the Homeland Security people my name and cell number and to have them call me ASAP so I could explain who he was and why they should let him go.

After being held for somewhere between one and two hours, with repeated suggestions that the U.S. may not let him into the country – saying that they may send him back home – the authorities relented and released Emad and his family.

Moore also documented the events in a series of tweets to his 1.4 million followers, not hiding his beliefs about the motives behind Burnat’s threatened deportation:

Apparently the Immigration & Customs officers couldn’t understand how a Palestinian could be an Oscar nominee. Emad texted me for help.

— Michael Moore (@MMFlint) February 20, 2013

The holding of Burnat, director of the first Palestinian film to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary, remains puzzling as he would have had to go through the visa process before entering the U.S. on his previous visits and likely did so again. Burnat was also detained for six hours by Israeli security when trying to cross the border into Jordan to catch his flight to the U.S.

When asked about the situation during today’s press brief, State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland deflected the question to the Department of Homeland Security. Immigration and Customs Enforcement — which is a part of DHS — did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the detention of Burnat. “Travelers may be referred for further inspection for a variety of reasons to include identity verification, intent of travel, and confirmation of admissibility,” U.S. Customs and Border Protection said in a statement to Reuters. “The United States has been, and continues to be, a welcoming nation.”

()

Economy

Big Banks Still Exploiting The Foreclosure Fraud Settlement

By Travis Waldron on Feb 21, 2013 at 2:30 pm

The banks involved in last year’s foreclosure abuse settlement are spending more money to get bad loans off of their books than they are on directly reducing the amount homeowners owe on their mortgages, according to a new report from the settlement’s overseer released Thursday.

Five large banks reached a $25 billion settlement with the federal government and state attorneys general in 2012, and though their efforts to help homeowners improved at the end of 2012, much of the money they have spent has been aimed at short sales that help homeowners get away from underwater mortgages but also help the banks get bad loans off their books, Bloomberg reports:

Bank of America Corp., JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM), and three other banks in last year’s $25 billion foreclosure-abuse settlement spent $19.5 billion through the end of 2012 approving so-called short sales that let homeowners sell for less than they owe on their mortgages, Joseph Smith, the settlement’s monitor, said today. By comparison, the banks spent $6 billion reducing borrowers’ principal to help them stay in their homes, an increase from $2.6 billion at the end of the third quarter.

While the banks are stepping up efforts to help borrowers stay in their homes, they are still spending most of the settlement on short sales and forgiveness of home-equity loans that allow them to take bad loans off their books. Profits from new lending are increasing even as regulators enforce penalties for modification missteps and foreclosures pursued with fraudulent or missing documents. Last year, mortgage revenue at the four largest lenders — Bank of America, JPMorgan, Wells Fargo & Co. (WFC), and U.S. Bancorp –surpassed the amount they spent on consumer settlements and investor demands they buy back faulty loans.

The five banks have spent a total of $45.8 billion as part of the settlement, according to the report from Joseph Smith, the settlement’s monitor. Because they do not receive dollar-for-dollar credit for money spent, they have not yet fulfilled terms of the settlement, which required them to provide $20 billion in mortgage relief. Only Ally Financial has completed its obligation.

Focusing on short sales isn’t a recent development under terms of the mortgage settlement, which has been riddled with problems over the last year. States diverted much of the money they received under the settlement to closing budget gaps, and many homeowners — particularly those hardest hit by the housing crisis — have yet to see relief. Because of the reliance on short sales, banks are “spending more to move people out of their homes than to keep people in them,” the Campaign for a Fair Settlement said in a statement earlier this month.

()

LGBT

Jon Huntsman Endorses Marriage Equality: ‘We Must Demand Equality Under The Law For All Americans’

By Zack Beauchamp on Feb 21, 2013 at 2:30 pm

Former GOP Presidential candidate and Utah governor Jon Huntsman has endorsed marriage equality. Huntsman, a Mormon whose previous support for civil unions set him (and libertarian Gary Johnson) apart from an otherwise virulently anti-gay field, came out in favor of equal marriage rights in an essay in The American Conservative entitled “Marriage Equality Is a Conservative Cause.” In the piece, Huntsman argued that if the Republican Party wants to survive, it needs to be able to appeal to gay Americans and the growing majority of all Americans that support marriage equality:

[I]t’s difficult to get people even to consider your reform ideas if they think, with good reason, you don’t like or respect them. Building a winning coalition to tackle the looming fiscal and trust deficits will be impossible if we continue to alienate broad segments of the population. We must be happy warriors who refuse to tolerate those who want Hispanic votes but not Hispanic neighbors. We should applaud states that lead on reforming drug policy. And, consistent with the Republican Party’s origins, we must demand equality under the law for all Americans…

Today we have an opportunity to do more: conservatives should start to lead again and push their states to join the nine others that allow all their citizens to marry. I’ve been married for 29 years. My marriage has been the greatest joy of my life. There is nothing conservative about denying other Americans the ability to forge that same relationship with the person they love.

Huntsman has a bit of an uphill climb in persuading the rest of the Republican Party to join his inclusive vision of conservatism. Republicans in Congress are still resolutely defending the Defense Of Marriage Act, whose provisions denying equal rights to gay couples in areas ranging from immigration to health care benefits are widely viewed as discriminatory. However, a handful of influential Republicans have come to recognize that the GOP has lost this fight.

The former Utah governor has a long history of iconoclasty. During his 2012 campaign for President, Huntsman got in hot water for saying “I believe in evolution and trust scientists on global warming. Call me crazy.” He also suggested the GOP had lurched so far to the right that Ronald Reagan wouldn’t make it through a primary.

()

Alyssa

Comcast Adopts NBC’s Ban On Gun Ads Company-Wide

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Feb 21, 2013 at 2:07 pm

AdWeek reports that Comcast, which is purchasing the rest of NBC Universal, will begin using that company’s rules for advertising across its whole enterprise. And that includes a ban on firearms advertisements:

In a statement, Comcast said it decided this month it would adopt the advertising guidelines used by NBCUniversal, which will not accept ads for weapons or fireworks. (Last week, the cable giant announced it would acquire the 49 percent of NBCU it didn’t own for $16.7 billion.) NBC’s ad policy, last updated in June 2012, reads: “NBC does not accept advertisements for weapons or fireworks. Commercials that include weapons or fireworks as props will be approved on a case-by-case basis.” News of the policy change was reported by the local ABC affiliate in Flint, Mich. Williams Gun Sight Co. was outraged that its 30-second spot could no longer run on cable. A Comcast spokesperson didn’t know how long the NBC policy banning ads for firearms and weapons had been in place at NBC. “It’s a long-standing policy,” the spokesman said.

Voluntary restrictions on gun ads are relatively common in the wake of gun violence. In 1999, President Clinton asked representatives of the entertainment industry to eliminate advertising that included images of guns and gun violence. In 2003, the Sarasota Herald-Tribune decided it would only accept for ads that were antiques or collectibles after a man murdered his wife with a weapon that he purchased from the Guns & Rifles section of the classifieds. And this January, ESPN refused to renew an advertising contract with East Coast Guns on the grounds that its advertising criteria had changed to exclude ads that featured hand guns and ammunition for those weapons.

Comcast’s decision seems more likely to be the product of standardizing corporate practices as part of the acquisition than a direct response to the Newtown massacre. It would be a public relations problem for the company for a sales representative operating under one set of standards to accept an advertisement that local affiliates are unable to run. But it’s also probably a good call for the company given the current environment. I’ve said this before, but I think one of the most reasonable steps the entertainment industry could take in response to concerns about the impact of violent media would be to align the ratings of products that are being advertised with the ratings of the products they’re being advertised during. It would be labor-intensive to place ads that way. But making sure that viewers who have turned into general-interest or all-ages programming aren’t surprised by images of graphic violence would at least help consumers make viewing choices, even if it wouldn’t address the concerns of people who are worried about the desensitizing impacts of media violence.

()