Friday, April 12, 2013

April 12


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The above hate group leaders and crackpots have signed a letter to RNC chairman Reince Preibus in which they threaten to end their support for the GOP if the party platform is amended to remove the opposition to same-sex marriage.  Here's an excerpt: 
Many homosexuals are active in the GOP because they agree with Republicans on economic issues. The fact that the Party is strongly committed to traditional marriage has not prevented their involvement through GOProud or Log Cabin Republicans. We deeply resent the insinuation that we have treated homosexuals unkindly personally.

And we would like to point out that in the four blue states where voters narrowly voted for same sex marriage in 2012, Mitt Romney, who refused to discuss the issue, lost by an average of five points more than the state initiatives to preserve marriage. 

We respectfully warn GOP Leadership that an abandonment of its principles will necessarily result in the abandonment of our constituents to their support. We could not change that even if we wished to.

As a gesture of good faith and an affirmation of its positions, we strongly recommend that the RNC meeting in Los Angeles on April 9th pass a resolution reaffirming its support of the 2012 National GOP Platform adopted in Tampa.
The RNC meeting continues until the end of the week. Think Progress has the text of a proposed meeting resolution that reaffirms the continued opposition to same-sex marriage. Hit that link and you'll note that the resolution copiously cites the widely-debunked Regnerus study.

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The Exxon-Mobil Pegasus Pipeline oil spill in Arkansas is apparently much worse than initially estimated.

No one could have predicted.

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What war on women?

In the first quarter of 2013, states have proposed 694 provisions related to a woman's body, how she gets pregnant, or how she chooses to end that pregnancy.

A new report released on Thursday by the Guttmacher Institute takes a comprehensive look at how the War on Women has continued past the election cycle and into 2013. It shows that the new legislatures across the country are still very much dedicated to restricting sex education, availability of medication, and abortion access for women. Indeed, 47 percent of the 694 provisions were directly related to abortion.

Six hundred and ninety four provisions related to women's bodies. In three months. I believe I can say with confidence that Republican legislators did not remember to smile all 694 times they co-sponsored these measures.

I don't know where they find the time to conduct the important business of laying off teachers and passing new tax cuts for corporations amid their crusade on the female body. 694 proposals to legislate vaginas in the span of 90 days must be exhausting.

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First he claimed his office had been illegally wiretapped. Then he altered his wording and said it was "bugged" by "leftist groups." Then he hired a private security company to sweep his office for bugs and they found nothing. And as of yesterday Mitch McConnell has declined to share any details of the FBI's investigation into the recording of his conversation with staffers concerning Ashley Judd.

Regardless of who recorded the conversation, the contents of it are undeniably ugly and may even be evidence of illegal activity conducted by McConnell's office.

Now, according to Talking Points Memo, Mitch McConnell is the one who could face an investigation.

The Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) filed complaints with the FBI and the Senate Select Committee on Ethics on Thursday, calling on officials to investigate whether Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) violated federal law by using Senate staff and/or resources to conduct opposition research against actress Ashley Judd, a former prospective candidate in Kentucky's Senate race.

"Using taxpayer-funded resources to pay staffers to dig up dirt on political opponents isn't just an ethics violation, it's a federal crime," CREW Executive Director Melanie Sloan said in a statement. [...]

CREW cites two aides employed by McConnell's Senate office who appeared to be present during the February meeting at the senior senator's campaign headquarters in Kentucky, Phil Maxson and Josh Holmes.

Being a realist I don't expect this to actually amount to anything. That's Mitch McConnell's privilege. But he sure has made a very shitty bed to sleep in.

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So here's my idea: mandatory background checks on all Republican politicians -- for criminal behavior, mental illnessabject stupidity, and, more broadly, indications of future conduct detrimental to humanity. Who's with me?

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Too stupid to have researched what happened in Florida, Texas Senate Unanimously Votes to Drug Test Welfare Applicants

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So it turns out that Mayor Mike Bloomberg has yet another black eye in his third term – Occupy Wall Street:

After eleven months of talking in the courts, New York City has agreed to pay Occupy Wall Street almost a quarter of a million dollars.

The lawsuit, filed on May 24, 2012, by lawyers representing OWS, claimed that 3,600 of 5,000 books in the free People's Library were destroyed during the violent raid and eviction of the protest camp in Zuccotti Park.

In addition to books, also destroyed were computers, live streaming equipment and bicycles which were owned and operated by an environmental nonprofit, Time's Up.

It's barely a victory... after all, people were harassed and arrested and injured for the crime of protesting and assembling peacefully, and $186,000 of that is eaten up by attorneys' fees... and yet, it's a start.

The greater victory is this: the city actually acknowledged responsibility for the actions of its police officers. This is diametrically opposed to the usual, "Who? Him? Don't know him. Rogue cop."

I can sympathize with the city, but to a limited extent. The administration of a city the size of New York demands some corner-cutting somewhere, and the fact that rights were trumped is indicative of that. Safety and health have importance, too, as well as the rights of other people.

With OWS, however, we see a situation where – some sanitation issues aside – peaceful protestors were using a public space, admittedly provided by a private corporation but in exchange for zoning variances, effectively making it a public space. It was this company that demanded OWS be removed, which started the whole mess back in 2011. Read more »

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Dear Congress: You Are NOT America's "Nobility"


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GOP Congressman Warns Background Checks Will Lead To A Genocide Like In Rwanda

Elizabeth Warren Tears Into Federal Regulators For Shielding Big Banks

Air Force General Defends Overturning Sexual Assault Conviction By Blaming Victim

Internet Activists Seek Justice For Alleged Teen Gang-Rape Victim Rehtaeh Parsons

Man, it would have been nice to avoid writing about the Republicans having a sad over Jay-Z and Beyonce heading to Cuba. We've been pretending the whole thing didn't exist because it is just so much more racist arglebargle, but then Fox News had to get dumber and weirder by whitesplaining the lyrics of Hova's Republican diss track (which is pretty baller, even if our own glorious leader the Editrix disagrees) to try to start a rap beef between Bamz and Jay-Z: READ MORE »


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Say this for Arkansas Republicans: They sure are ambitious! When they're not busy banning abortion over and over and over again, they are hard at work thinking up clever new ways to have more teen moms, please. Yes, Arkansas already has one of the highest teen pregnancy rates in the nation — it's no New Mexico, of course, but it's pretty close. Still, those eager beavers aren't going to give up until they are No. 1:

The Arkansas state Senate passed a measure on Tuesday to defund Planned Parenthood and all other entities that provide abortions or patient referrals for abortions. The bill also cuts the funding for a Planned Parenthood-administered comprehensive sex education program in the state's public high schools. READ MORE »


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This should come as no surprise to anyone who knows the ways of Sen. Ted Cruz.

A full 54 percent of Ted Cruz's statements have been rated "false" or "pants on fire" by PolitiFact. Another 20 percent are only "half true." That's 74 percent of Cruz's statements failing the truth test.

Ted Cruz – just another lying, shameless, gutless sociopath who has found a loving home in the Republican party.






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