NEWSBYCHRIS CASSIDY

No court has decided whether Walmart discriminated against over one million female employees from 1998 onward, but four times federal courts have ruled the that such a suit may proceed as a legitimate class action. Preferring to handle each allegation one-by-one, in an endless torrent of legal maneuvering, Walmart appealed certification of the class action decision to the Supreme Court this week.

The suit was filed in 2001 by six women who had worked at Walmart and were armed with a study showing that only 1/3 of the corporation's managers were female, but women composed 2/3 of the company's overall workforce.

In a statement released by the mega-retailer this week, Walmart claimed that its is "an excellent place for women to work and has been recognized as a leader in fostering the advancement and success of women in the workplace." Walmart argues that the class action cannot move forward because the allegations of gender discrimination vary too much among over one million women who work or worked at Walmart.

"Only the size of the case is unusual, and that is a product of Wal-Mart's size and the breadth of the discrimination we documented," argues Brad Selignman, lead attorney for the plaintiffs. There is no 'too big to be liable' exception in civil rights laws."

Whether a class action can be too big is now a question before a Read More »

Ads advocating the legalization of marijuana were abruptly removed from Facebook last week, after producing substantial traffic to the behemoth social networking site's page for Just Say Now, a pro-legalization coalition.

Facebook spokesman Adam Noyes wrote an email to the group, saying, "The image of a pot leaf is classified with all smoking products and therefore is not acceptable under our policies." After conflating the marketing of an unhealthy product (tobacco) with the increasingly national political issue of legalizing marijuana — one on the ballot this November in our country's most populous state — Noyes promptly left for vacation, according to The Huffington Post's Ryan Grim.

Grim also points out that Noyes was wrong about Facebook's advertising policies banning "smoking products." In fact, the rules only ban promotion of "tobacco products," further demonstrating the social network's illogical equation of profiting from cigarette sales and advancing a criminal justice reform bearing bi-partisan support.

The fault lines for legalizing marijuana fail to align with the standard left/right dichotomy that generally divides those with opinions on the death penalty, prison conditions and handgun regulations.

Progressives like Representatives Pete Stark, Barbara Lee and George Miller, as well as the NAACP and firedoglake, support legalizing marijuana. California's top five Democrats, however, indicate that they oppose an initiative on the state's ballot this November to do just that. Proposition 19 would change state law to legalize, tax and regulate the recreational marijuana industry.

The otherwise admirable Kamala Harris, who is running to replace gubernatorial candidate Jerry Brown as California's Attorney General, voiced her antipathy to Prop. 19 through a spokesperson, who said little more than this: "Harris supports the legal use of medicinal marijuana but does not support anything beyond that." Harris appears eager to distance herself from the issue, with her campaign website failing to offer a single mention of the top initiative on her state's ballot this fall. Perhaps the closest that Harris comes to sharing her views on point is here, where she boasts about increasing San Francisco's convictions for drug crimes during her time as District Attorney there.

If you want evidence of how absurdly draconian California's Three Strikes law is, look no further than the case of Gregory Taylor, whose release was recently ordered after he spent 13 years behind bars.

Taylor was 35 years old, addicted to drugs, showing signs of mental illness and homeless when police caught him searching for a meal at the church where he occasionally volunteered. Even though the church's priest testified that he was welcome there, a jury found Taylor guilty nonetheless. And under California's Three Strikes law, Taylor was sentenced to 25 years-to-life.

His two previous crimes — committed several years prior — were an unarmed attempted robbery and snatching a purse containing $10 and a bus pass. No one was injured in either crimes.

At trial, Taylor's attorney failed to introduce evidence of his mental illness, exposure to domestic violence as a child, or other factors that should've helped him escape such a harsh sentence.

And unfortunately, Taylor's case isn't an anomaly. Enacted in 1994, California's harsh Three Strikes law has to date sent over 4,000 inmates to prison for nonviolent offenses. In fact, 10 years after the Three Strikes was passed by ballot initiative, a review found that nearly 60% of those sentenced under the law were found guilty of only nonviolent offenses, while people of color were (not surprisingly) disproportionately affected by the law.

California, you have got to be kidding me.

The state's Republican governor — you know, that yahoo by the name of Arnold Schwarzenegger — has spent his entire governorship besieged by the state's budget crisis. And now, apparently bent on being remembered as the governator who terminated any chance of California ever returning to fiscal stability, Schwarzenegger just announced his intent to pour $65 million into a new pet project.

What could possibly justify adding to California's $19 billion (with a "B") budget deficit? Could he be worried about the decline of a once-premier state university system? Might the governor be interested in restoring state employees to, say, full-time status? Is it possible he's investing in California's deteriorating infrastructure?

No. Schwarzenegger is building a new death row.

Forget about the fact that California already spends over $100 million annually on capital punishment. Even if you set aside the fact that the death sentence doesn't actually deter criminals — and that it's distributed in a racially discriminatory way — investing more in California's death penalty is utterly ridiculous. Considering that the state has only executed 13 people since 1976, even the most staunchly pro-death advocates have to be scratching their heads about Schwarzenegger's latest move.

Had your daily dose of ridiculous? Here comes another serving.

When reporters asked some poor sap at the Department of Finance about whether

Is the death penalty fair to people of all races? This week, scores of prisoners on North Carolina's death row took the chance to try and test that question.

Last year, North Carolina approved the Racial Justice Act, which empowers judges to overturn a person's death sentence if she finds that racial bias occurred in the sentencing process. Signed a year ago this week by Gov. Beverly Purdue, the law gave the state's 159 death row inmates one year to appeal their sentence. By the deadline — this past Tuesday — fully 119 had filed complaints alleging racial bias in their sentencing.

For my money, they have a pretty good shot and proving their case. Here in the U.S., the color of a victim's skin is the best predictor for whether a convicted murderer will be sentenced to death. As Te-Ping Chen blogged here earlier this summer, defendants in North Carolina are three times more likely to receive the death penalty if they're convicted of murdering a white person.

Racial bias is systemic: Southern prosecutors, for example, are particularly well-known for their efforts to keep their juries lily-white — by dismissing black jurors for any number of reasons, including for being "too vocal" or "arrogant" (as one Alabama prosecutor declared this spring).

Focus on the Family's target market: football fans.

Earlier this year, football fans met Focus on the Family, which supports depriving women and families of the right to make their own reproductive health decisions. The anti-choice, homophobic organization aired an ad at the Super Bowl featuring the then-college football star Tim Tebow and his mother Pamela discussing her concerns over whether he would survive, which came as part of a larger anti-abortion message detailed on their website.

The details of Pamela's pregnancy and Tim's upbringing shed considerable light on Tebow's endorsement of Focus on the Family's radical evangelical mission. When Pamela was pregnant with Tim, she and her husband Robert were serving as Christian missionaries in the Philippines. During her pregnancy, she contracted a life-threatening illness and slipped into a coma. The drugs used to revive her and treat other symptoms caused a problem with her pregnancy. Pamela refused the abortion that doctors recommended to save her life and she survived. Tim also survived, of course, was homeschooled by his mother who adamantly instilled the family's Christian beliefs in her children, and went on to become a football star and evangelical poster child.

Tim's story demonstrates the power of family history in supporting one's faith and may be a powerful tool for those eager to strike down the separation between church and state. Focus on the Family, ever a savvy political player, is greedily latching on to Tebow's story in hopes of advancing its theocratic agenda.

Robert Girvets, a 78-year-old retiree, has replaced his occasional martini with a hit from a vaporizer. Sarika Simmons, 35, prefers a fruit-flavored cigar rolled with marijuana, but only after she's put her three daughters to bed. John Wade is a 43-year-old event lighting specialist who sneaks a toke on the golf course to steady his puts.

"I don't walk around in Bob Marley T-shirts or have a marijuana flag in my room," said Kyle Printz, 44, a Marin County software engineer who told the Sacramento Bee that he occasionally smokes after a long day of writing computer code. "It alters your state of mind a bit and does help you relax."

The Bee just published results of a new field poll that illustrates the changing face of pot smokers in the Golden State. The results suggest that marijuana is going mainstream — and with 51% of respondents supporting legalization, the poll should be heartening to supporters of California's Proposition 19.

This November, California voters will have the opportunity to back Prop. 19, which would change state law to allow local governments to legalize growth, possession and distribution of marijuana for recreational use. In these budget-strapped times, support for the initiative is growing: another recent poll showed support for Prop. 19 zooming ahead, with 52% of voters favoring it (versus 36% opposed).

If you want to see the latest evidence of how the Obama administration continues to backpedal away from its onetime progressive ideals, look no further than the White House's determination to try a boy who was 15 years old when he attacked U.S. troops in a military tribunal.

Forget about rule of law. Right now, what we have is a national security agenda that's been hijacked by conservative talking points. The Founders wrote the Constitution to prevent the powerful from running roughshod over the rights of the disempowered. This week — as America condones using coercion to force a confession from a severely wounded teenage boy — they must be rolling in their graves.

Omar Khadr was 15 years old when he allegedly hurled the grenade that killed U.S. Army Sgt. 1st Class Christopher Speer. According to the judge presiding over Khadr's trial in Guantanamo Bay this week, that act was neither a crime, nor an act of war — it was a war crime, and though Khadr confession was coerced, it can still be used against him in a military tribunal.

If Sabbar Kashur were Jewish, he would not have been convicted of rape.

But while Kashur is many things, he is not Jewish. He's an Arab living in Jerusalem — a married man and father of two. He is a man who met a Jewish woman at the grocery store two years ago, spoke with her for 15 minutes, and engaged in what both parties agree was consensual sex in a nearby building. He's since been convicted in an Israeli court — for, of all things, so-called "rape by deception."

That's because according to the complaint filed against Kashur and early reports on the case, Kashur lied about his ethnicity, indicating that he was Jewish. Later, it emerged that Kashur never stated his ethnicity, but only offered his nickname — DuDu, which is a common Jewish nickname in Israel, and one that Kashur has gone by his whole life. "My wife even calls me that," Kashur explained.

Kashur's adultery and alleged lying may be immoral, but they should not be punished as crimes.