"Interior Secretary Ken Salazar reportedly threatened to punch a reporter with the Colorado Springs Gazette after he asked him about the Bureau of Land Management's wild horses program at an Election Day get out the vote event."

Because of the Citizens United decision, spending on the 2012 election by fossil-fuel and anti-environmental-regulation groups was enormous. The actual results of the election seem to suggest that these business lobbies made some disastrously bad investments. The common media narrative that big money makes big business omnipotent (or omniscient) may be due for fact-checking.

"A couple of weeks ago, Munich Re, one of the world’s largest reinsurance firms, issued a study titled 'Severe Weather in North America.' According to the press release that accompanied the report, 'Nowhere in the world is the rising number of natural catastrophes more evident than in North America.' The number of what Munich Re refers to as 'weather-related loss events,' and what the rest of us would probably call weather-related disasters, has quintupled over the last three decades."

"LARAMIE, Wyo. -- The idea behind the sculpture that appeared on the University of Wyoming campus about 16 months ago was simple but provocative: a swirl of dead wood and lumps of coal, intended to show the link between global warming and the pine beetle infestation that has ravaged forests across the Rockies."

"Media have dubbed the hurricane barreling toward the mid-Atlantic and northeast a 'Frankenstorm.' But despite the hysteria surrounding Hurricane Sandy, not one major newspaper has reported the scientifically established link that carbon pollution fuels more extreme weather."

"Documents obtained by Greenpeace show officials controlling information about wildlife affected by the disaster."

"Genetic engineering of crops is essentially the same as centuries-old, conventional plant breeding, except more precise, scientists say." As voting time nears on California's Proposition 37, arguments about science, safety, and the public's right to know intensify.