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With the exception of Virginia, it's pretty clear that southern Republican support for gay marriage is lower than among Republicans nationally. As such, it's difficult to see how support among southern Republicans will hit 50% anytime before 2040. It's hard to imagine more than the stray Republican voting for same-sex marriage. Polarization is at all-time high, and politicians are more afraid about losing primaries than general elections. Republicans have no need to vote for same-sex marriage.

Thus, unless the federal government jumps in, most, if not all southern states won't legalize same-sex marriage for the foreseeable future. Most of their citizens don't want it, and by the time they do, most Republicans still won't. Considering you'll need a majority or supermajority of state legislators to get the bans reversed, and that Republicans have a strong hold over these chambers, same-sex marriage in the south doesn't have much of a chance anytime soon.

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“The $20.5 billion cut in SNAP is a poison pill,” said Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., at a Thursday press conference. “It means that we shouldn’t be supporting the farm bill.”

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Welcome to The Few, The Proud, The Forgotten. The purpose of this site is to help provide information about the toxic water contamination aboard U.S. Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune..... We've also recently completed a referenced time line of events for the first half of the toxic water contamination aboard Camp Lejeune. Please review this important document and compare it to prior “official” Marine Corps versions found on the page.

The Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) is currently studying the effects of toxic exposure upon former residents of Camp Lejeune. Two separate water distribution systems aboard Camp Lejeune were found to be contaminated, the Tarawa Terrace and Hadnot Point water distribution systems. ATSDR has completed the water modeling for the Tarawa Terrace water distribution system and has determined the system was contaminated from June 1957 until 1 March 1987. The ATSDR water modeling for the Hadnot Point water distribution system is underway but has not been completed. Therefore, the beginning date of the contamination has not been determined for any of those areas that were historically served by the Hadnot Point water distribution system...
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The water provided by the Tarawa Terrace and Hadnot Point distribution systems was highly contaminated with various chemicals, including the VOCs (volatile organic compounds) known as PCE (Tetrachloroethylene aka Perchloroethylene), TCE (Trichloroethylene), DCE (Dichloroethylene), Vinyl Chloride and BTEX (Benzene, Toluene, Ethylbenzene, and Xylene).These chemicals are either known or suspected human carcinogens. Many Marines, Sailors, their families and loyal civilian employees have been affected by the contamination in various ways including, but not limited to: liver cancer, kidney cancer, breast cancer, bladder cancer, ovarian cancer, prostate cancer, cervical cancer, lung cancer, leukemia, non Hodgkins lymphoma, liver disease, miscarriages, birth defects (cleft palate, heart defects, Choanal atresia, neural tube defects, low birth weight, and small for gestational age),etc. Unfortunately, many of these families still have not been notified by the USMC of the danger from their exposure. In 1987 Camp Lejeune was recommended for listing as a Superfund site on the National Priorities List (NPL) by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Camp Lejeune was officially listed as a Superfund site in 1989.

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Today marks the one-week anniversary of the Internal Revenue Service's disclosure that it improperly scrutinized certain conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status. As an inspector general report on the practice found, groups with phrases like "tea party," "patriots" and "9/12 project" were targeted for the "Be On the Look Out" or "BOLO" list, and often ended up waiting two years for notice on their status.

Somewhat lost in the furor over the disclosure is that very few liberal organizations appear to have been approved either. There is no evidence that groups with words like "progressive" or "Democratic" were targeted. But the numbers do suggest that the universe of nonprofit political organizations is small, and that liberal groups were not approved in droves while conservative ones were subject to endless bureaucratic rigmarole.
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Even by this more permissive metric, progressive organizations did not appear to receive special treatment compared to conservative ones, judging only by the numbers of organizations that were approved. That does not absolve the IRS from clearly inappropriate behavior. Nor does it suggest that the other side of the aisle had a massive advantage due to the violation.

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In a statement following the vote, House Speaker John Boehner said the vote was “all about jobs.”

“The president’s health care law is already undermining our economy — employers are cutting workers and cutting hours, costs are going up, and even Democrats are worried the whole thing is headed for a train wreck,” Boehner, R-Ohio, stated.

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The White House released the real emails late Wednesday. Here's what we found when we compared them to the quotes that had been provided by Republicans.

One email was written by deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes.

On Friday, Republicans leaked what they said was a quote from Rhodes: "We must make sure that the talking points reflect all agency equities, including those of the State Department, and we don't want to undermine the FBI investigation."

But it turns out that in the actual email, Rhodes did not mention the State Department. It read: "We need to resolve this in a way that respects all of the relevant equities, particularly the investigation."

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*** Trying to stop the bleeding: After his most difficult stretch of days since winning re-election, President Obama on Wednesday tried to stop the bleeding with two different moves just more than an hour apart -- all in an effort to keep a bad week from turning into a bad month and perhaps ending any chances of a serious legislative agenda. First, at 5:00 pm ET, his White House released 100 pages of emails and documents related to the crafting of the talking points to describe the Sept. 11, 2012 attack in Benghazi. The emails revealed more agency politics (between CIA and the State Department) than electoral politics (as Republicans had accused). Second, a little after 6:00 pm ET, Obama delivered a statement announcing that Treasury Secretary Jack Lew had accepted the resignation of the acting IRS commissioner in the wake of the controversy that the tax agency had targeted conservative-sounding groups for additional scrutiny in their application for tax-exempt status. The president also announced that new safeguards would be put in place to prevent it from happening again, and he pledged to work with Congress to get it fixed. And today at noon ET, he holds a news conference -- with Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan -- where he’ll likely answer reporters’ questions about both actions. There was also an effort to stop the bleeding on a third front: The White House said it supports the re-introduction of a media-shield bill after the Justice Department’s seizure of AP phone records. (Of course, it’s the somewhat watered down version of the shield law that had originally passed the House in 2009 and died in the Senate when Dems had 60 votes.)

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President Barack Obama—exasperated by scandals, a seemingly stalled domestic agenda and armchair chiefs of staff in the media—wants to tell you what he really thinks, Washington. Really let you have it. In fact, he’s so frustrated with all of the inside-the-Beltway BS that he might hire an assassin to target him in a couple of days, but not before he’s really ripped politicians (especially Democrats), denounced the outsized weight of money in elections and used “socialism” as a rallying cry against health insurance companies.

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Updated: 2:18 a.m. Thursday, May 16, 2013

By JOHN L. MONE

The Associated Press

At least 6 confirmed dead in Texas tornado

GRANBURY, Texas —

At least six people were killed Wednesday as a spring tornado outbreak devastated parts of North Texas, destroying or damaging dozens of homes and injuring dozens of people.

The worst-hit city Wednesday was Granbury, where authorities say a deadly tornado tore through two neighborhoods about 8 p.m. Hood County Sheriff Roger Deeds delivered the death toll at a midnight news conference.

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If, on the other hand, we stop taking world leaders at their word and instead think of neoliberalism as a political project, it suddenly looks spectacularly effective. The politicians, CEOs, trade bureaucrats, and so forth who regularly meet at summits like Davos or the G20 may have done a miserable job in creating a world capitalist economy that meets the needs of a majority of the world’s inhabitants (let alone produces hope, happiness, security, or meaning), but they have succeeded magnificently in convincing the world that capitalism—and not just capitalism, but exactly the financialized, semifeudal capitalism we happen to have right now—is the only viable economic system. If you think about it, this is a remarkable accomplishment.

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Larry Connors, a veteran local news anchor at KMOV Channel 4 in St. Louis, says that the Internal Revenue Service has been targeting him since an April 2012 interview he conducted with President Obama -- a fact that he dismissed as coincidence until the recent reports about the IRS targeting conservative groups.

"Shortly after I did my April 2012 interview with President Obama, my wife, friends and some viewers suggested that I might need to watch out for the IRS. I don't accept 'conspiracy theories', but I do know that almost immediately after the interview, the IRS started hammering me," Connors wrote on his Facebook page late Monday night.

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New York (CNN) -- The FBI extensively monitored the Occupy Wall Street movement around the United States, using counterterrorism agents and other resources, according to recently released FBI internal documents.
The heavily redacted documents indicate that FBI counterterrorism agents were in close communication with law enforcement agencies, businesses, universities and other organizations across the country about the Occupy Wall Street movement, even before Occupy Wall Street set up a camp in New York's Zuccotti Park in September 2011.

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WASHINGTON -- The Justice Department secretly obtained two months of telephone records of reporters and editors for The Associated Press in what the news cooperative's top executive called a "massive and unprecedented intrusion" into how news organizations gather the news.
The records obtained by the Justice Department listed outgoing calls for the work and personal phone numbers of individual reporters, general AP office numbers in New York, Washington and Hartford, Conn., and the main number for AP reporters in the House of Representatives press gallery, according to attorneys for the AP. It was not clear if the records also included incoming calls or the duration of calls.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — The Justice Department secretly obtained two months of telephone records of reporters and editors for The Associated Press in what the news cooperative's top executive called a "massive and unprecedented intrusion" into how news organizations gather the news.

The records obtained by the Justice Department listed outgoing calls for the work and personal phone numbers of individual reporters, for general AP office numbers in New York, Washington and Hartford, Conn., and for the main number for the AP in the House of Representatives press gallery, according to attorneys for the AP. It was not clear if the records also included incoming calls or the duration of the calls.
In all, the government seized the records for more than 20 separate telephone lines assigned to AP and its journalists in April and May of 2012. The exact number of journalists who used the phone lines during that period is unknown, but more than 100 journalists work in the offices where phone records were targeted, on a wide array of stories about government and other matters.

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Tea Party and the Right
Salon.com / By Jillian Rayfield

Tea Partyers Boycott Fox News for Being Too “Left”
A three-day boycott of the network protested a lack of coverage of the attacks on Benghazi, among other things.

May 12, 2013 |

A group of Tea Partyers organized a three-day boycott of Fox News in protest of its coverage of Benghazi, tepid opposition immigration reform, and in general “turning to the left” since the election.

David Freedlander of the Daily Beast reports:

The three-day boycott lasted Thursday morning through Sunday morning, and is the second time this group of activists have gone Fox-free in an effort to steer the coverage. Organizers say a two-day boycott earlier this month knocked 20 percent off of the network’s regular viewership. (A Daily Beast analysis of the same data showed that the boycott had little effect.)

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A Heritage Foundation scholar has resigned after a firestorm erupted over his 2009 dissertation alleging Hispanics do not have “IQ parity with whites” and that Hispanic immigrants to the United States will have “low-IQ children and grandchildren.”
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The dissertation, first reported by the Washington Post, was particularly explosive because of Richwine’s role in co-authoring a major Heritage Foundation report – released Monday - on the cost of comprehensive immigration reform.

That report, which was widely criticized by pro-reform Republicans for failing to take into account immigrants' contributions to the economy, estimated that the cost of allowing undocumented immigrants a path to citizenship would top $6 trillion.

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Lindsey Graham and Fox News Channel in particular are each crapping their cages over new allegations from an alleged whistleblower, while they continue to deal in previously debunked falsehoods about the sequence of events during and following the attacks. Fox News is predictably helming the biggest raft of hooey on the situation -- turning its attention to Hillary Clinton in an abundantly obvious early move to stymie her presidential run before it even begins

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May 10, 2013
Equality Texas Blog......Legislative Update 5/10: Dead Bills, Live Bills, Bills on Life Support



I'm Daniel Williams, Field Organizer and Legislative Specialist with Equality Texas. We only have 17 days left in the 83rd regular session! Here at the end of session almost every day is a deadline for something, and with each deadline bills, good and bad, are knocked out of the process.
Great news! Two more Equality Texas endorsed bills made it out of the House this week, ahead of the deadline:

HB 2240 by Sylvester Turner of Houston would conduct a study of homeless youth in Texas. This issue disproportionately affects the LGBT community. By some estimates as much as 40% of homeless youth between the ages of 14 and 22 are LGBT.
The bill is now headed to the Senate for consideration.
HB 3327 by Garnet Coleman of Houston builds on excellent anti-bullying and mental health legislation Coleman passed last session. An identical bill has already passed the Senate so some version of this will soon be headed to the Governor’s desk for consideration.

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