Since TransCanada first applied for a permit to build the Keystone pipeline in 2008, the State Department’s handling of the review has been plagued by conflicts of interest, insider influence and a heavy pro-pipeline bias. Rather than being an impartial judge of whether the Keystone pipeline is in the national interest, the State Department has acted liked Big Oil’s best friend in Washington. Friends of the Earth is calling on the State Department to halt the environmental review of the Keystone pipeline until the Office of Inspector General can determine how ERM, a firm with ties to TransCanada and the oil industry, was allowed to write the U.S. government’s environmental impact statement on Keystone XL and why no one at State investigated the company’s claims to have no such ties. We are very concerned that, in hiring ERM to write the bulk of the draft environmental review of the Keystone XL, the State Department: •Hired a company (ERM) that has worked for TransCanada in the past three years, despite signing a declaration that they had not done so. •Hired a company (ERM) that has done extensive work for many of the oil companies that stand to gain if Keystone XL is built, despite claiming on their official forms that they had no such ties. •Hired a company (ERM) that is a dues-paying member of the American Petroleum Institute. •Concealed evidence of ERM’s close connections with Big Oil, by redacting contractors’ biographies from ERM’s technical proposal. •Failed to use the thorough conflict of interest vetting processes recommended by State’s own Office of the Inspector General in 2012. Send a letter to Secretary of State John Kerry demanding that he halt the Keystone XL review process until he gets to the bottom of this blatant conflict of interest.

The banks have been paid for its mortgage loans. No one is on the hook for this money. Find a team of lawyers that can prove this point in a court of law.

(To be clear, I have no idea who Phillip Ranly is, but I'll stand up for any man or woman's right to grow their hair the way they like it. No matter the aesthetic cost.)

This spring Christie-appointed Superintendent Cami Anderson pushed through a school budget that cut $56 million from Newark schools, slashing funding for some schools by as much as 15%. Nearly 1,000 Newark students walked out of class in protest. The Newark Board of Education gave her a vote of no confidence and the City Council unanimously called for a moratorium on any more of her ‘reforms.’ But like the CEO of a bailed out bank, Anderson is somehow still up for as much as a $50,000 bonus. Giving Anderson a massive bonus while Newark schools bleed is cronyism at its very worst, and it's an insult to New Jersey students, educators, and taxpayers.

Deficit reduction should not come at the expense of low-income families with children, our seniors and the disabled, or our veterans. Without housing stability, many will remain homeless, find it difficult to maintain a job or find one, let alone provide stability and schooling for their children. I understand this message at gut level. When I was ten, my father, suffering from mental problems and not able to find work, left the family. Welfare programs provided a bridge for my mother, my three siblings and me until she could find a job to support us. Three of us children went on to earn college degrees.

We have a sheriff eviction notice to vacate our home this next Thursday July 25th. My wife of 27 years is unable to work and is being denied disability benefits and my daughter is a full time student trying to complete college.

How is it that my brother gets 40 years for guns that he was never caught with or around, yet Zimmerman stalks and shoots a kid and gets off Scott free????

On average, New Jersey’s 2,500 school buildings are 50 years old and are four times more densely populated than office buildings. Age, overcrowding, and deferred maintenance strain ventilation, heating, and electrical systems, which, in many cases, result in dangerous conditions that threaten the health of students and staff and impede students’ learning. Everyday, students in New Jersey are exposed to hazardous conditions like mold, lead, PCBs, and poor indoor air quality resulting from decades of delayed repairs and the failure to start and complete new school construction projects. On May 24, 2011, the New Jersey Department of Education, together with the New Jersey Schools Development Authority, requested that each SDA district (formerly known as Abbott Districts) identify and describe any potential emergent conditions that may exist in the district’s school facilities. The DOE regulations 2 define an emergent condition as “so injurious or hazardous that it causes an imminent peril to the health and safety of students and staff.” In response, school districts submitted more than 700 applications for emergent projects to be reviewed by the DOE on an “expedited basis” as required by the regulations. In the spring of 2012, a mere seventy-six of the applications were approved. Now, over a year later, the SDA has completed only a few of these projects and has not committed to complete the remaining projects by the beginning of the 2013-2014 school year. This is unacceptable. Allowing repairs to wait for over two years unnecessarily exposes students and staff to unsafe and unhealthy conditions. We request that you ensure all approved emergent projects be completed by this September -- before our children and staff return to school. Communities across the state remain in desperate need of functioning, modern, and safe school facilities. Every day our students and those entrusted to teach and care for them, enter buildings that are unhealthy and unsafe. If we expect to have thriving schools and effective learning environments, these emergent repairs must be addressed. Every child has a right to receive a quality education and the facilities in which these students receive their education should be of high quality, and sound structure.

How is it that my brother gets 40 years for guns that he was never caught with or around, yet Zimmerman stalks and shoots a kid and gets off Scott free????

I want a National Registry for convicted animal abusers. It should include cross reference between States, stiffer sentences, mandatory home inspections, and the convicted shall never own an animal or sit for an animal again! The Registry will require each convict to provide valid proof of residency from either a driver's license or State ID that will be kept in the Registry's data base. In the event a convict moves, and/or changes his/her name and does not provide this information to the Registry, the convict will be charged with evading local authorities and sentenced to 10 years at a Federal Prison.

The Texas State Board of Education (TXSBOE) has already begun working on its once-a-decade adoption of science textbooks for Texas classrooms. And for years, an anti-science faction of that board has done all it can to undermine the science of evolution and climate change by giving equal weight to nonscientific beliefs like climate change denial and the idea that dinosaurs and humans coexisted. Whether you have school-aged kids or not, this fight is too important to the future of Texas and the nation to ignore. With over 5 million students, Texas is one of the country's biggest buyers of textbooks. And that has an impact on other states, because book publishers often follow our lead so that they don't have to create different versions of the same science books.

Millions of Americans are affected by the plight of childhood sexual abuse. As a survivor I want to bring to light this issue,an especially as it pertains to African American men, which more times than not goes unnoticed and is taboo in the African American community (''Black men are everything but they cant be child molesters'').