Monday, March 5, 2012

Headlines - Monday March 5

oh you apologize after your sponsors drop you you must be  - Condescending Wonka 

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Please sign and share this petition to get Rush Limbaugh off Armed Forces radio NOW! No tax money for abusive, divisive, insulting language.

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Rick Santorum says that if elected he would ensure that all existing same-sex marriages will be nullified. That's not too surprising actually, but that's a step further than we've heard from the other GOP tools.

There are 18,000 married gay and lesbian couples in California and at least 131,000 nationwide according to the 2010 census, conducted before New York state legalized same-sex marriage in July. Rick Santorum says he'll try to unmarry all of them if he's elected president. Once the U.S. Constitution is amended to prohibit same-gender marriages, "their marriage would be invalid," the former Pennsylvania senator said Dec. 30 in an NBC News interview. "We can't have 50 different marriage laws in this country," he said. "You have to have one marriage law."

Romney also wants a federal constitutional ban on same-sex marriage, but has said he would allow existing marriages to remain legal. The Family Research Council (hate group) yesterday voiced their support for Santorum's plan to rip apart gay families.

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U.S. Backers of Israel Pressure Obama Over Policy on Iran

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Nothing to see here:

The Earth's oceans may be acidifying faster than at any point during the last 300 million years due to industrial emissions, endangering marine life from oysters and reefs to sea-going salmon, researchers said.

The scientists found surging levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere forced down the pH of the ocean by 0.1 unit in the last century, 10 times faster than the closest historical comparison from 56 million years ago, New York's Columbia University, which led the research, said yesterday in a statement. The seas absorb CO2 from the atmosphere, forming carbonic acid. The lower the pH level in the seas, the more acidic they are.

Past instances of ocean acidification have been linked with mass extinctions of marine creatures so the current one could also threaten important species, according to Baerbel Hoenisch, the paleoceanographer at Columbia who was lead author of the paper that appeared in the journal Science.

The study can be found here.

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Nothing to see here, either:

A new NASA study revealed that the oldest and thickest Arctic sea ice is disappearing at a faster rate than the younger and thinner ice at the edges of the Arctic Ocean's floating ice cap.

The thicker ice, known as multi-year ice, survives through the cyclical summer melt season, when young ice that has formed over winter just as quickly melts again. The rapid disappearance of older ice makes Arctic sea ice even more vulnerable to further decline in the summer, said Joey Comiso, senior scientist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md., and author of the study, which was recently published in Journal of Climate.

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Via echidne, we find this:

During a month when the issues of birth control and women's access to health care flared up and became major topics of debate on the presidential campaign trail and in Washington, the Sunday morning talk shows once again loaded up their programs by hosting newsmaker interviews with men. Lots and lots of men.

This past Sunday, for instance, NBC's Meet the Press, CBS's Face The Nation, ABC's This Week, Fox News Sunday and CNN's State of The Union hosted 16 interview subjects, 14 of which were with men. That imbalance has been consistent throughout the month. A total of 56 guests were booked on the Sunday programs to discuss national affairs in February. Of those, 52 were men. (The newsmaker tally does not include guests invited to participate in roundtable discussions this month.)

Not exactly an unusual dynamic, but the timing was particularly relevant:

And yes, the paucity of female guests this month was especially odd considering the controversy that erupted regarding the administration's plan to require religious institutions to offer contraception as part of their health care plan for employees. The Sunday programs discussed that story with 24 of their newsmaker guests, only two of whom were women -- former GOP vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin and former GOP presidential candidate Michele Bachmann. (The topic was also covered in several roundtable discussion, which did include more female participants

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Peaceful Rally for Women's Health Dispersed by SWAT Team in Richmond, VA

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Sorry victims of the recent Tornado super-outbreak which flattened several small towns in Ohio, there will be no federal aid for you. So sayeth Governor John Kasich.

Ohio Gov. John Kasich said thanks but no thanks to immediate federal disaster relief Saturday, even as governors in Indiana and Kentucky welcomed the help.

Kasich did not rule out asking for assistance later, but his decision means tornado-ravaged towns in Ohio will not get federal aid now and are not eligible at this time for potentially millions of dollars in payments and loans.

The governor said Ohio can respond to the crisis without federal help and he would not ask federal authorities to declare the region a disaster area.

Okay. I get it. Modern conservative principles dictate that you should turn down help from the diabolical federal government when its offered to you, but this is hardly the time to be playing politics. People have lost everything.

Republican governors in battleground states continue to be the best campaigners Democrats could ever hope for.

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Cato Institute: Koch Bros are engaged in a "hostile takeover"

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Jill: I wonder if people in towns hit by tornadoes still want government "out of their lives"

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As usual, the freakazoids are seeking help from their imaginary ghost friends, and will give credit to their invisible sky wizards for the actual help that will come from the federal government.

Thirty-nine people dead in five states; 21 of them in Kentucky. The next hardest-hit state is Indiana, with 13 deaths.

Residents of West Liberty in Morgan County, and those in Menifee, Laurel and Kenton Counties should be on their knees thanking their Democratic Governor Steve Beshear for seeking federal disaster aid from Democratic President Barack Obama, and on their knees again thanking President Barack Obama for being a big enough person not to hold their stupid votes for repugs against them, because he will send them the millions of dollars in help that only the federal government can provide.

Speaking of which, I notice that Kentucky's U.S. Senators, Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul, and the Representatives of the stricken counties, Geoff Davis and Hal Rogers, repugs all, are dead silent on the subject of federal aid for their suffering constituents. Either they will stay silent, pretending that federal largesse just fell from the sky, or they will set new standards in hypocrisy saying that this spending is necessary but not spending to create jobs or make sure Kentuckians have enough to eat and basic health care.

Remember that at the voting booth, Kentuckians: your repug federal officials don't want your tax dollars spent on anything other than making already filthy rich people and corporations even filthier richer.

And in a related comment from Blue Girl in KC:

I would like to thank Gov. Kasich for delivering electoral-rich Ohio to President Obama in November with his admonition to Ohioans to "Suck it up, Buckeyes! Show 'em what you're made of!"

Let me restate something I say every time a natural disaster gets politicized. Disaster response is exactly what the feds are uniquely qualified to deliver. I have pointed this out for ages, but it hasn't taken yet so I'll keep saying it...When you rely on the locals to respond to a disaster, you are putting people who have been directly affected by it in the position of delivering the response, and that is untennable. It isn't fair to the people who need help, and it isn't fair to the people who are torn between their communities and their families.

I was one of the local first responders to the Andover Tornado in 1991. That disaster taught me an important lesson in reality: A federal response is necessary when natural disasters strike, local first responders are directly affected because they have homes and families in harms way. When that disaster struck, I had co-workers who literally lost everything and their families were sheltered in auditoriums and gymnasiums.  Because an adequate federal response was mounted at that time, they were able to go to their families and put their lives back together along with the rest of the community.

And you know what else? Not one person in deep red Kansas ripped the cloth from their breast and shrieked that our freedoms were being snatched away by the oppressive hand of gubmint. I didn't hear one wingnut go on about tyranny and liberty, and no one held up a copy of the Constitution and demanded that one of us bleeding-heart do-gooders show them where, exactly, we would find the authorization for such an affront to freedom as emergency declarations and response therein. No one went there even in Wichita, the home of Koch industries.

But as a country, we have gotten a whole lot stupider, meaner and more spiteful over the last two decades. It has now come to the point where governors make a point of telling us just how averse to government they are, and then set out to prove it by deliberately scaling back or removing entirely services that ordinary people rely on. But it's cool, because your freedom (to be cold, hungry, impoverished, sick, mentally ill, etc) is just. fine.

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This is from the tax free American FAMILY Association that promotes family and moral values by opposing gay marriage, trying to deregulate the oil industry, and now supporting Rush Limbaugh calling Sandra Fluke a slut. Fun fact: the American FAMILY Association has been Labeled a hate group by Southern Poverty Law Center:
 

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