---

On Sunday, six days after a furious and deadly tornado, President Obama will reportedly head to Moore, Oklahoma. It took less than 48 hours for the truthers to furiously accuse the White House — perhaps by way of George Soros — of creating the tornado itself. If you thought 9/11 conspiracy theorists were bad, or the Sandy Hook and Boston bombing truthers were reckless, Obama's meteorological manipulation — all to distract a country from three Washington scandals — well, that might be a new level of ridiculous.
....
The conspiracy theory of the moment goes something like this: The Obama administration is being asked how much they knew about three apparent scandals — Benghazi, the IRS, the Justice Department's double leak investigations — and in order to make Americans think about something else, the administration manipulated the weather and created the mile-wide Moore tornado.

---

---

Sending police and informants to entrap high-school students is sick,” says Tony Newman, director of media relations at the Drug Policy Alliance. “We see cops seducing 18-year-olds to fall in love with them or befriending lonely kids and then tricking them into getting them small amounts of marijuana so they can stick them with felonies. We often hear that we need to fight the drug war to protect the kids. As these despicable examples show, more often the drug war is ruining young people's lives and doing way more harm than good.”

---

---

http://gawker.com/haaay-to-the-chief...-con-486133694

Haaay to the Chief: The Military-Industrial Complex Conquers the Homos

Last week, it seemed that the San Francisco LGBT Pride Committee was planning this year’s march with an enormous set of ovaries. As the Bay Area Reporter wrote, "Pride's electoral college, which is made up of former grand marshals, has selected Army Private First Class Bradley Manning as its choice for grand marshal. Manning has admitted to leaking 700,000 classified U.S. government documents to WikiLeaks and is facing court-martial.”

[Quoted Article: Truncated] © Gawker Media 2013

---

---

Source Link: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...#ixzz2U4SGtDGz

---

---

Rumsfeld said he doesn’t view the gay rights movement in the same light as the civil rights movement.

“I was proud of the work that the Congress did in the 1964 legislation and 1965 legislation,” Rumsfeld said. “I guess I just don’t equate the two. And it’s not a subject I’m knowledgeable about, and I guess the Rumsfeld Rule here is, ‘I don’t know.’”

---

---

By an identical margin — 51-44 percent — those surveyed agreed that Obama “is mainly concentrating on things that are important to you personally.” Just 33 percent agreed that Republicans in Congress are working on issues of importance to them.

---

---

Benghazi does not appear to have dented approval for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Clinton is a frontrunner for the Presidency in 2016.

---

---

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), one of the Republicans who has said the LGBT provision would be a poison pill, repeatedly voiced his argument that he could not support the bill if the amendment was added.

---

---

On Monday night, Colbert learned that his PAC, a 501(c)(4), was never granted tax exempt status by the IRS because the Colbert Super PAC SHH never filed for it, even though it is a registered Delaware corporation and hundreds of thousands of dollars have passed through it.

“Your lawyers advised you that there is no legal requirement that you file with the IRS an application for exemption,” Potter explained.

“Wait a second,” Colbert replied. “You can form a 501(c)(4) without asking to form one? These tea party anti- big government organizations didn’t have to ask big government for permission but they did anyway?”

“Right,” Potter replied.

---

---

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.

---

---

“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.”

---

---

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...
....
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.

---

---

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.
....
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.

---

---

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.

---

---

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."

---

---

*** 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.)

---

---

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.

---

---

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.

---