Be ignorant

We have taught you to think of education as a code you can crack. We have taught you to value grades and scores more than learning. But as you graduate, remember that all learning begins with ignorance. Be willing to embrace wonder, to experience unexpected discovery, and to go in unknown directions. A posture of ignorance compels you to keep learning. Never become so enamored of your own smarts that you stop signing up for life’s hard classes. Keep your conclusions light and your curiosity ferocious. Keep groping in the darkness with ravenous desire to know more.

Be passionate

As educated Americans you have choices that most do not have. Even with the vast inequalities and continuing economic crises in our country, your diploma or degree places you among the most privileged in a privileged country. Most people are forced to work jobs that pay the bills and starve their spirits. You may be able to escape this fate, but only if you are brave enough to follow your passions even when the economic rewards are not completely clear. Never trade your soul for a paycheck.

Be of service

You are taking your degree into a society dominated by concentrated poverty and a vulnerable middle class, a society where it is harder to pay for education, harder to find a job, harder to buy a house and harder to hold onto those things even if you manage to get them. You are  entering adulthood during a period of mass incarceration and near constant war. There is a lot for you to do. Service is the rent you pay for the space you take up on the earth, and as a relatively privileged American you take up a lot of space. We are the most consuming, polluting, wasteful nation on earth.  So your rent is steep.  Pay it with service.

Make mistakes

We have asked you to excel in every endeavor and to avoid anything that might diminish your record of excellence. We rewarded you for following the rules and not for making your own.  But you must not be afraid to make mistakes. If you are unwilling to make mistakes you cannot find your way to your passion or be of service.  Mistakes are the tool of all invention. They litter the path to greatness.  Throw your imperfect self headlong into the crazy, scary, painful, humbling world. Please.

Because, Class of 2013, we are counting on you. We are sending you out into an imperfect world with imperfect skills, but what you do with it will define more than your generation. It will define our nation and our world.

The sticking point? Disagreement over cuts to the program that accounts for nearly 80% of the farm bill’s costs—the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program, or SNAP—formerly known as food stamps.

Well, here we are again.

Congress has finally gotten around to reauthorizing the Farm Bill, and both chambers have put SNAP on the chopping block. The Senate Agriculture Committee is proposing a $4.1 billion cut. But the House version—as an enticement to deficit hawks to get on board—went five times farther with a $20.5 billion reduction in the program that feeds America’s hungry families.

So my letter this week is to the chairman of the House Agriculture Committee.

Dear Chairman Frank Lucas,

It’s me, Melissa.

I understand your job as committee chair is a lot like herding cats. So job well done on bringing your Republican colleagues to heel by offering them that huge slice of SNAP reduction catnip.

You can all rest well in the knowledge that—if your bill passes—the deficit will no longer be burdened by that $20 billion worth of excessive spending and government inefficiency.

Only, here’s the thing: SNAP has a 96% efficiency rate. By and large, it does exactly what it was intended to do—put food on the table for those who need it most.

I know you’re used to thinking about these things in terms of line items on a budget. But let’s be very clear about the people sitting around that table: More than 23 million households, more than 47 million individuals, and almost half of those individuals are children. And your bill would mean nearly two million fewer seats at that table.

Fewer families like Gale and Alfonso. This Philadelphia couple relies on SNAP to feed their five children, including their youngest—twin daughters. Put yourself in their shoes, Congressman Lucas.

Imagine if you had to explain to your three children and grandchild that they had to go to bed hungry because the deficit in the national budget is more important than the deficit of food on the table.

And it’s not like SNAP is even a worthy sacrifice for the altar of deficit reduction. Your cuts to SNAP will do very little to solve the nation’s long term fiscal challenges since spending on the program is expected to decrease, according to the Congressional Budget Office’s projections.

The dramatic increase in SNAP recipients between 2007 and 2011 is an indication that the program was responding to Americans who were struggling to feed their families during the recession and slow recovery.

Put simply, more people are using SNAP because there are more people facing poverty and unemployment.

Here’s a crazy thought—how about you and your colleagues in Congress do something about that. Because SNAP really doesn’t need you to interfere.

As the economy recovers, and  the number of Americans in need of help declines, so too will the growth in spending on SNAP. In the meantime, SNAP has been one of few reliable lifelines in our weak social safety net. It lifted 4.7 million families out of poverty in 2011, including 2.1 million children.

So here is my proposal, Congressman Lucas. No member of the U.S. Congress should be allowed to introduce a bill reducing SNAP benefits until you have personally taken the Food Stamp challenge. That means eating on a budget of about one dollar per person, per meal.  If you and all your colleagues can do that for a full month and still think we should cut SNAP, then feel free to introduce a reduction. Until then, just have a seat.

Sincerely,

Melissa

There are times when every presidential spokesman would like that anonymity and a moment of humor when everyone can share a laugh. There has not been much of that these days at the White House.

The relationship between the White House press corps and the president’s press secretary is necessarily an adversarial one. The spokesman is there to answer questions and provide information about the president’s actions, decisions, and thinking on every conceivable topic. The press is there as surrogate for the American people—to raise questions on the public’s behalf which help hold the executive accountable. The role of the press, as Finley Peter Dunne’s Mr. Dooley once said, is “to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable” especially if there is some sense that the executive has grown too comfortable in the use or abuse of its power.

There is a lot of affliction today in the White House and in its relationship with the media. The relationship has grown bitter and the atmosphere in the briefing room is often sulfurous. The press is often cynical and snarky in posing questions to the president’s representatives, while the president’s staff is often dismissive of the press and sometimes brags about its ability to reach critical audiences on its own, using selective interviews with publications and broadcasts which reach niche audiences.

Revelations that reporters’ call records were seized as part of a Justice Department leaks inquiry obviously makes matters worse. But good for the White House that they swiftly moved to resurrect legislation that would shield reporters as they do their work.

I’ll confess that part of the problem today is the live televised coverage of the press secretary’s briefing. This is something I more or less let happen on my watch and it ends up having been a bad idea. The daily briefing has become a spectacle of posturing and it all seems done for the benefit of the camera and not the public. The briefing is supposed to be for gathering and disseminating the raw ingredients of what will later be cooked into the sausage of good reporting on the news of the day.  It’s not supposed to be “news” itself. No one needs to watch that sausage being cooked.

So here are my humble suggestions on what both sides might do to improve their working relationship at the White House.

First, turn off the daily briefing. Yes, it should be available for coverage and for use, especially by broadcast journalists. But adopt the rules that exist at the State Department (which I should have done in the first place.) The briefing is embargoed for delivery until it is over. No live coverage except in rare circumstances when a request for a “filing break” is requested and real news is happening. This would require reporters to report instead of posture. It would require the White House to have real answers.

Second, return the gaggle. “Gaggle”—think a flock of geese—is the nickname for an informal, off-camera session with the press secretary in the morning where correspondents come into the press office and sit down to discuss breaking news, hear what the White House has planned for the day, and argue for  what should be open for coverage or not. It was a great forum in my day for previewing the day ahead. It was also a great way for me to convey to my colleagues at the White House why our carefully planned events sometimes would not work because the media was interested in something else. The press needs to believe someone on the inside in the West Wing is looking out for their interests.

Finally, start treating each other with respect. Don’t call the White House staff “liars” on TV because that suggests ill motives they don’t have. They are just piecing the story together like you are. And stop calling reporters with abusive complaints and cursing at them. How about a Golden Rule in this relationship? Do unto them what they would do unto you.

New challengers are pressing the fight against Obamacare with lawsuits in Oklahoma and Washington, D.C. While their claims turn on an obscure technicality, the suits have the potential to cause major problems for the Affordable Care Act. If the lawsuits were to succeed, lower-income Americans in more than two dozen states could be ineligible for tax credits that are a key part of the act. And employers in those states could be exempt from the “employer mandate”—a requirement that larger employers offer insurance plans or pay a hefty penalty. Without those pieces in place, the act wouldn’t work as intended in large swaths of the country.

The stakes are high even though the lawsuits are getting far less attention than they did in the first go-around. That, no doubt, is partly because the arguments this time are a far cry from the lofty claims about “individual freedom” that dotted last year’s Supreme Court case. Instead, they turn on obscure details of how the Affordable Care Act was written—details, as one commentator put it, that “could make even a seasoned tax lawyer’s head hurt.”

The issue boils down to what Obamacare supporters say was nothing more than a drafting mistake by Congress. The Affordable Care Act calls for each state to set up an insurance “exchange”—the law’s term for a regulated marketplace where consumers can shop for insurance. But, recognizing that some states might delay or refuse to set up exchanges, the act also says the federal government must take on that task in any state that drags its feet.

That’s where the technicality crops up. A centerpiece of the Affordable Care Act is its tax credits: The act was designed to offer the credits to lower-income Americans who enroll in health care through exchanges as a way to make the coverage more affordable. But when Congress drafted that part of the law, it wrote that applicants are eligible for credits if they enroll “through an Exchange established by the State.” It said nothing about exchanges established by the federal government in states that haven’t taken action.

Obamacare critics, seizing on that omission, began arguing two years ago that there is a gaping hole in the act. More than half the states have made no move to set up exchanges. That means, according to the law’s opponents, that residents in those states can’t get the tax credits designed to make coverage more affordable; after all, those credits are only available to those who enroll through an exchange “established by the State.” What’s more, the opponents say, it means employers in those states are not subject to the “employer mandate,” which requires larger employers to offer affordable insurance to their workers or pay a tax penalty of at least $2,000 per employee. That’s so, they say, because of the way Congress wrote the employer mandate: It doesn’t kick in unless at least one of the employer’s workers is eligible for an Obamacare tax credit.

Recognizing the potential problem, the Internal Revenue Service issued a rule last year clarifying that individuals are eligible for credits if they’re enrolled in any exchange, state or federal. That’s what triggered the new round of litigation. The state of Oklahoma, a group of small businesses and other plaintiffs have sued, arguing that the IRS’s rule is illegal because it extends tax credits and the employer mandate further than Congress authorized. Congress limited the credits and the mandate to states that set up their own exchanges, the plaintiffs say. They say the limitation was not a drafting error at all, but a choice by Congress that the IRS must honor.

Affordable Care Act supporters, for their part, say the statutory wording is nothing more than a glitch . They say other parts of the act, and the history surrounding the Act’s drafting, make clear that Congress meant for the tax credits—and thus the employer mandate—to apply to all states, not just those that set up their own exchanges. After all, they say, why would Congress extend the credits to residents in some states but not others? That would undercut the purpose of the law: to encourage as many people as possible to enroll in health coverage.

These lawsuits are not the only game in town; many other groups are continuing to fight the Affordable Care Act on other grounds. And the lawsuits are still in their early stages. But they bear watching. If courts were to accept the plaintiffs’ arguments and strike down the IRS rule, it would mean trouble for the Affordable Care Act—and potentially another trip to the Supreme Court a year or two down the road.

Up until this week, it hadn’t been a good two years for the Tea Party. Since their 2010 high water mark, the Tea Party has lost momentum. In the most recent election they got stuck with the most un-Tea Party candidate out there, Mitt Romney; their Senate candidates got trounced; and Democrats started to claim back seats both in Congress and the state level. But perhaps the most decisive blow was the re-election of President Barack Obama, the individual who inspired the rise of the Tea Party movement in the first place.

Outside of Texas and South Carolina it looked like the Tea Party was on its deathbed.

Today, the Tea Party has a new lease on life. The issue trifecta of Benghazi, the IRS audits, and the AP investigations has resuscitated the near moribund Tea Party.  While each of these issues deals with different agencies and actors they share the common denominator of heightening distrust in the government.

Intrusion on personal finances: check. Intrusion on free speech: check. Lack of foreign policy transparency: check. Regardless of what is uncovered, the perception of an overbearing government has been checked off.  These scandals validate what the extreme fringe of the Republican Party has been saying. The administration has given the Tea Party an “I told you so” moment.

But just as important as the Tea Party having issues that reinforce its claims of government intrusion is the fact that there are eager and willing political entrepreneurs ready to lead the charge. The Palins and Bachmanns are so 2010.  Even former Senator DeMint is old Tea Party news.

The fresh young faces of the Tea Party are that of Senators Ted Cruz and Rand Paul. Over the past several months they had appeared to be political gadflies.  Even fellow Republican Senators such as John McCain and Lindsey Graham made their annoyance at these young Tea Partiers known. But today, Cruz and Paul are positioned exactly where they want to be–at the head of the charge against a scandal-weakened administration. And most importantly, both Cruz and Paul have burning presidential aspirations that will drive them to generate as large and broad a Tea Party 2.0 movement as possible.

From the Tea Party’s perspective the timing couldn’t be better.  Although we are more than a year away from the mid-term election, we are on the heels of primary season. As we head into the summer, the Tea Party will be able to start beating the government conspiracy drum and re-energize Tea Party rank and file members and recruit potential candidates. The fact that the 2010 redistricting drew extremely homogenous Republican districts will only facilitate the Tea Party’s 2014 effort.

The medium-term danger for Democrats is electoral. The new Tea Party is poised to make inroads into purple America. Deep red states will remain red and deep blue states blue. But those states in between are those most likely to cede ground to the Tea Party.  Although by November of 2014 Benghazi, the IRS, and the AP will be out of the headlines, they will be front and center in the campaign ad wars and stump speeches.

The short-term danger for Democrats rests in the survival of immigration reform and a renewed attempt at gun control. If an anemic Tea Party was able to fend off background checks, just think what an emboldened Tea Party will be able to do.  The core of the ideological opposition to gun control has always been rooted in a distrust of the government, which this week was served to them on a silver platter.

On immigration, it seemed that except for the Tea Party outliers of Senator Ted Cruz and Representative Peter King, this was an issue both Republicans and Democrats could get behind. That bipartisan good feeling is rapidly draining into Tea Party-based calls to oppose “amnesty” and the immigration reform that calls for it. In the wake of the administration’s perceived foreign policy bungles–Benghazi and the Boston bombings—the Tea Party can better make the case to remain insulated.

The Republican far right has a new lease on life. The offensive strategy is already starting to peek through. The administration’s lack of transparency and perceived spin has only boosted the Tea Party.

But the true test of the Tea Party’s endurance rests with the Democrats. In 2010 Democrats did not take the Tea Party movement seriously. As a result, the Democrat defense was small and uncoordinated against the 2010 offensive surge. The events of the past week will surely provide the Tea Party new momentum but just how far that momentum goes will depend on the Democrats.

It reminds me of the drills that kids a little older than me did at school during the Cold War: “Duck and Cover.” Crawling under the desk wouldn’t save 1950s kids from a nuclear bomb, and lame “Who me?” press conferences won’t protect the Obama White House from all the incoming fire.

Attorney General Eric Holder and White House Press Secretary Jay Carney were especially weak in their press briefings, with Holder claiming that all avenues of probing national security leaks had been “exhausted” before 100 Associated Press reporters were put under surveillance. This is absurd on its face.

In his Monday news conference, the president wasn’t much better. Pique at Republicans for obsessing over Benghazi talking points is no substitute for creative thinking on how to get out of this mess.

Summer is coming—high season for Washington scandals. There are fewer distractions in the dog days–and the witnesses sweat more.

To make matters worse, Obama is a second term president, which means he’s a lame duck and has his second-string players on the field with him. It was no coincidence that Watergate didn’t ignite until Richard Nixon’s fifth year in office. Same for Iran-contra in Ronald Reagan’s second term and impeachment in Bill Clinton’s. Just because some Republicans are hyperventilating with silly predictions about impeaching Obama doesn’t mean the situation isn’t serious for the president.

If he doesn’t pull it together, he risks the rest of his legislative agenda and his legacy.

So it’s time to call in reinforcements and prepare a battle plan that works:

APPOINT A SPECIAL PROSECUTOR FOR THE IRS: Special prosecutors were discredited during the 1990s when they become rogue elephants who rummaged around for years with no limits. There’s a reason the Office of Independent Counsel is now defunct.

But that doesn’t mean that special prosecutors can’t be useful, especially if asked to prepare their report and possible referrals for prosecution in, say, six months.  If they find partisan malfeasance or even mere bureaucratic incompetence, heads should roll.

Obama should ask a pair of former heads of the IRS to issue a report that gets to the bottom of how and why conservative groups were targeted. But the report should also explain how the tax-collectors let Karl Rove on the right and Bill Burton on the left get away with claiming their 501(c)4 organizations were engaged in “social welfare” when their purpose was explicitly political.

Rove’s Crossroads GPS, which would end up spending $70 million in untraceable money in 2012, told the IRS in a confidential filing in 2010 that it would focus on legislation and education and that influencing elections was “not the organization’s primary purpose.” This was flatly untrue. Such statements—from both sides of the spectrum—should be as much a part of the IRS probe as the singling out of Tea Party groups. The IRS should be chastised for underreaching—not enforcing the law– as well as overreaching.

SCRAP THE COMFORT ZONE: Obama is famous for surrounding himself with people he’s comfortable with. This is a recipe for an uncreative, second-rate staff. It’s not that everyone in the White House is a sycophant; several can tell the boss hard truths. But they are mostly young and without their own independent careers, which means they operate almost as his surrogate children. This makes it easier for the president to disregard what they say. Obama needs people he’s a little uncomfortable with, who will challenge him as a peer. They have to be tough enough to not care whether he likes them or not.

BRING IN SOME ASS-KICKING WOMEN:  Old Washington hands can nominate their own candidates, from David Gergen to Paul Begala. My own nominees are a triumverate of tough women: Anita Dunn (a communications expert who worked on the 2008 campaign and came into the White House for a few months  in 2009), Stephanie Cutter (nicknamed “The Ninja” for slicing up Mitt Romney during the 2012 campaign) and Mandy Grunwald (Hillary Clinton’s media consultant and a veteran of Bill Clinton’s partisan wars).

Republicans want Obama to just curl up and retreat from political combat, then resign like Nixon.

That isn’t going to happen. But to save his presidency he needs some fresh blood and he needs it now.

Jonathan Alter is an MSNBC contributor and author of the new book “The Center Holds: Obama and His Enemies.”

News organizations across the country should unite to fight this unprecedented threat to the core of what journalists do: gather information to hold government accountable.

A cursory reading of the Justice Department’s guidelines on issuing subpoenas of reporters strongly suggests that officials might have ignored their own rules.

And that is a story—a big story.

Every news organization with a reporter in Washington should dispatch journalists to demand answers from the attorney general and the White House about who knew what, and when, in the authorization and execution of a subpoena that in all likelihood collected phone numbers of sources for every story—hundreds, if not more—that AP reporters were working on during a two-month period in 2012 in Washington, New York, Hartford and at the House of Representatives.

The AP’s president and CEO, Gary B. Pruitt, wrote a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. seething with rage. But it’s not enough. The AP should not be left to fight alone against this brazen infringement on freedom of the press.

Why? Because you could be next.

The technology exists for the government to track all of us, especially reporters and their sources. The AP presumably wouldn’t have known about the government’s intrusion if the Justice Department hadn’t revealed the subpoena’s existence.

Unfortunately, in recent years, journalists have fallen for the divide-and-conquer approach taken by government officials who sense weakness in the news business because of its struggle to profit in the digital era.

Lawyers for reporters cut deals with prosecutors in the Scooter Libby perjury case and with plaintiffs’ lawyers in the civil lawsuits filed by former Los Alamos scientist Wen Ho Lee, who was the subject of a misguided investigation into spying for China, and Dr. Steven Hatfill, the ex-U.S. Army scientist who was the target of a flawed FBI investigation into the deadly anthrax attacks in 2001.

Such shortsighted deals only serve to embolden government agents, prosecutors and plaintiffs’ attorneys into believing they can do whatever they want to journalists.

From August 2007 to February 2009, I resisted a federal judge’s threats to fine me into personal bankruptcy for refusing to identify sources who had provided information for stories I wrote about the FBI’s anthrax investigation.

In the Hatfill case, five reporters were ordered to disclose the names of their sources in August 2007. In a matter of months, I found myself alone, the target of a contempt-of-court motion in a hearing in a federal courtroom where I once covered the legal troubles of others.

I continue to wonder what would have happened if all of the subpoenaed reporters had banded together. Instead, our lawyers, the plaintiffs’ attorneys and the judge capitalized on our fears of being fined personally and sent to jail, and especially on our competitive natures to get us to race each other to obtain “waivers” of our promises of confidentiality from our sources.

They played us, and when I realized what was happening, I said, “Enough.” I refused to wheedle, cajole or trick sources into giving themselves up to protect me.

It is time to tell the Obama administration the same thing.

In the coming days, reporters should be relentless in figuring out whether the Justice Department followed its rules, 28 CFR 50.10, in obtaining and executing the AP subpoena.

Those rules begin with a poignant caution against abuse of power: “Because freedom of the press can be no broader than the freedom of reporters to investigate and report the news, the prosecutorial power of the government should not be used in such a way that it impairs a reporter’s responsibility to cover as broadly as possible controversial public issues.”

How the U.S. government deals with terrorism—from drones to waterboarding to foiling attacks—fits my definition of a controversial public issue.

The Justice Department’s rules also suggest that negotiations with the media should be attempted when a subpoena of phone records is considered, unless an assistant attorney general determines that such a discussion isn’t necessary or would jeopardize an investigation.

Did an assistant attorney general make that call? If so, which assistant attorney general? Why?

The attorney general is supposed to have final say on whether to subpoena a reporter to testify, or to demand phone records, according to the rules. Holder says he recused himself early on and turned over supervision of the leak investigation to the deputy attorney general.

Did the DAG, James M. Cole,  know this was happening? When was he told? What was he told?

Until these questions are answered, reporters’ sources, often people seeking to reveal government waste and abuses of power, will continue to be sacrificed in the Obama administration’s overzealous pursuit of leaks.

Dear Secretary Hagel,

It’s me, Melissa.

Congratulations again on your new position in the Obama administration. I know you have a lot on your plate between an ongoing war in Afghanistan and unrest in the Middle East. But I want to make sure that in the midst of complex international conflicts, you don’t forget about another crisis confronting our men and women in uniform every day–sexual assault in the military.

I am deeply troubled by the new report from your department this month finding an estimated 26,000 reported cases of sexual assault took place in the military last year–that’s more than 70 instances of sexual assault every day. But what makes those numbers even more troubling is the other news coming out about how sexual assault prevention is being handled.

This week the Air Force chief officer in charge of sexual assault prevention programs was himself arrested… for sexual battery. And that happened only shortly after he completed his sexual assault training course. I have to wonder, what was being taught in that course?

Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel had plenty of fire in response to the Pentagon report on military sexual assault this week, but host Melissa Harris-Perry is counting concrete action from him.

Because if it was anything like the brochure uncovered this week by Wired‘s Spencer Ackerman, there is cause for great concern. The training brochure from Shaw Air Force Base in Sumter, South Carolina includes tips on how to avoid sexual assault, like “don’t walk or jog alone,” “avoid doorways, bushes, and alleys,” and, in the case of an attack, “it may be advisable to submit than to resist.” Do you see the pattern here? What the brochure fails to mention? Mr. Secretary, the sexual assault training brochure fails to mention to not commit sexual assault in the first place. Instead, it shifts the entire responsibility of preventing assaults to the victims.

And then there’s the cases of Matthew Herrara and James Wilkerson, both military officials who were convicted of sexual assault. But because commanding officers have the power to reverse criminal convictions, both men had their charges dismissed – in one  case, against the advice of the commanding officers’ legal team. And in both cases, no public explanation was provided about why convicted assaulters should be allowed to return to their posts.

Secretary Hagel, taken by themselves, each of these incidents is problematic. But together they spell out a grave institutional failing–that, despite the attention military sexual assault has received in the past few years, something isn’t working.

Mr. Secretary, you are to be commended for the steps you have already taken to address many of these issues. But sir, you gotta stay on it.

We heard about the changes the military would make and the promises of “zero tolerance” after the hallway horrors of the Tailhook convention in 1991, after the Aberdeen Proving Ground rape scandal in ’96, and after the explosive reports of sexual assault at the Air Force Academy in ’03. And yet, here we are again! This time it has to be different.

Our service members need real, institutional changes that allow victims to report crimes without fear of retaliation or humiliation. They need a cultural shift that puts blame on the assaulters—and sets out real, immutable consequences determined outside the chain of command.

And Secretary Hagel, we are counting on you to lead the change.

Sincerely,

Melissa

The president first suggested that one solution to poverty is to create good jobs. People need jobs that pay decent wages, offer long-term security and health benefits, and provide a path to upward mobility. Who could be against that?

However, it becomes more complex when we consider the Pew Center’s 2008 finding that nearly one in 100 adults in the U.S. is behind bars and the National Employment Law Project’s estimation that nearly 65 million U.S. residents have a criminal record on file. This leaves them vulnerable to employment discrimination based solely on a conviction, no matter how long ago it occurred. What makes a lot more sense is a national ban on previous convictions inquiries until after an applicant has been deemed otherwise qualified.

Additionally, the president proposed a raise in the minimum wage to $9.00 an hour, which is long overdue. But a higher minimum wage means nothing if jobs are not available to the people who need them most. One factor that has been a driver of mass criminalization and mass incarceration is the loss of manufacturing and low-skill jobs. Epidemic joblessness, combined with the emergence of a thriving drug trade—feeding addiction and careers in an underground economy—have made residents in inner cities and poor rural areas vulnerable to the criminal justice system.

Not only are millions left without the skills or work experience that are relevant to the current labor market, but they are saddled with the additional burden of criminal conviction. For them, an increase in the minimum wage is meaningless unless it is accompanied by a movement to create opportunity vulnerable individuals who desire to move their lives in a positive direction.

The president also reminded us that we need to invest in the type of educational system that better prepares people to succeed in today’s highly technical labor market, which has significant implications for individuals with criminal history records for at least two reasons.

To start, the drastic reduction in post-secondary educational opportunities inside of correctional facilities which resulted from the 1994 removal of Pell Grant eligibility for incarcerated students makes it nearly impossible for people to earn meaningful credentials while incarcerated. This, despite the fact that numerous studies have proven that education is the most reliable predictor of reduced criminal recidivism. Furthermore, according to a study by the Center for Community Alternatives, nearly 60% of colleges and universities nationwide now screen students for criminal records at the onset of the college application process. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that past arrests, even those which didn’t result in a conviction, are also part of the consideration process—one led by people who may not know the implication of what they’re asking.

Any serious effort to reduce poverty by increasing relevant workforce training and academic education must also include a serious effort to restore educational opportunities to students in prison and to assure that individuals with criminal histories records have fair access to college in the community.

Early childhood education is another investment of which the president spoke of—for the millions of children with incarcerated parents, poverty is a much more likely destination. Destabilized living situations, and suffer various emotional problems that make it difficult for them to access quality early childhood education and related services. Furthermore, children of incarcerated parents are at risk of increased homelessness and foster care placement, among other things. Programs that provide specialized services connecting these children to quality early childhood education will be necessary in order for any strategy to benefit these vulnerable children.

President Obama offered a fifth and final proposal to address poverty in America: supporting and strengthening families. Secure and healthy family environments are difficult for individuals with criminal record histories to maintain. Their families, and the communities in which they live repeatedly experience the negative repercussions (including loss of income) of people cycling in and out of prison. This impact is not short-term, or even temporary.

A 2009 research study concluded that growing incarceration has significantly increased poverty, regardless of how you measure it—and that the official poverty rate would have fallen considerably during the period had it not been for mass incarceration. The only way to reverse this trend and to prevent future damage is to be vigilant about considering the needs of those who have been marked by criminalization and incarceration as we seek ways to address poverty in America.

The second half of Sunday’s discussion about poverty and criminal justice can be found below.

It was a symbolic act of solidarity that earned the President praise from reproductive rights advocates. Just a week later, however, the Obama administration made a substantive decision that greatly eroded the sense of his support for reproductive rights and angered those same advocates.

Last week, a federal judge ordered the Food and Drug Commission to lift all age restrictions on the “morning after” pill, the emergency contraception that can prevent pregnancy for up to five days after unprotected sex. The order makes the pill available over the counter to anyone, of any age, starting in early May. Then, to the disappointment of many supporters, the Obama administration decided to appeal that decision.

Currently, the one-step pill known as Plan B is available over the counter to patients aged 17 and over. The FDA had tried to make the pill available without an age restriction. But the Department of Health and Human Services put one in place in 2011. Obama supported the move, stoking concerns that with less than a year before the presidential election, he was allowing politics to influence healthcare policy. The judge who ordered the lifting of all age restrictions leveled a similar claim, writing that the motivation “was obviously political,” and calling HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius’s decision ”arbitrary, capricious and unreasonable.”

That judge was correct.

The scientific evidence in favor of making the morning after pill available is clear. Anyone with an interest in lowering the rate of abortion in America, or in sparing teenagers the physical, emotional, and financial burden of a pregnancy they haven’t planned and don’t want, ought to welcome the wider availability of the morning after pill. There have been concerns that access to Plan B will make teenagers more likely to have sex.

Obama seemed to share them, despite a lack of evidence, when he argued in 2011 that an age restriction was a good idea.

“As the father of two daughters, I think it is important for us to make sure that we apply some common sense to various rules when it comes to over-the-counter medicine,” the president said then. He went on to explain that the decision was made after Sebelius felt it was possible that a girl as young as 10 could find the medication “alongside bubble gum or batteries,” and “if not used properly, could end up having an adverse effect. And I think most parents would probably feel the same way.”

As uncomfortable as it is for some parents to imagine their teenage children as sexual beings, that discomfort is no excuse for denying all teenagers this form of healthcare.  Evidence shows that readily available contraception, and education on its proper use, makes teenagers less likely to become pregnant before they want to be. A good proportion of American teenagers have sex for the first time at age 15 or earlier, and almost a quarter of them won’t use contraception during that first time they have sex. This means that there are girls under the age of 15 who want and need the morning after pill. There is no evidence, however, that access to contraception makes teenagers more likely to have sex, and we ought to ask ourselves what it is about teen sex that makes us so uncomfortable that we are willing to throw science to the wind.

The Obama administration’s decision to appeal the court ruling and to ask for continuing age restrictions on healthcare for teenagers is a victory of squeamishness over science. And while reproductive rights advocates were rightly pleased to see the president show up to show his support in April, that symbolism is far less important than the substantive steps he took to restrict reproductive rights last week. Given the choice, those advocates whose tireless efforts in 2012 helped to get the president reelected would have preferred that he demonstrate his support in deeds, not simply in words.