Biden endorses same-sex marriage, White House
tries to take it back

post from US Politics | AMERICAblog News on 06 May 2012 11:00:17 AM. © US Politics | AMERICAblog News

These ongoing episodes of gay panic from the White House are, sadly, expected but not helpful.

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-marriage-white.html

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Right-Wingers' Desperation to Disclaim J.T. Ready
Hits New Depths After Massacre

post from Crooks and Liars on 06 May 2012 11:00:05 AM. © Crooks and Liars

enlarge Credit: Phoenix New Times

Just wondering: Is there any blogger out there more brazenly dishonest than Jim Hoft of Gateway Pundit?

I know we have plenty of Malkins and Instahacks and nutbar Pammies to go around on the wingnutosphere. But it's hard to think of any blogger who more openly and remorselessly attempts to tell his readers that up is down, black is white, and that no, he doesn't have his head up his ass while speaking through his belly button.

I know a lot of people had chalked all this up to stupidity on Hoft's part. I don't know if he's stupid. I do know he is just flatly dishonest, a purveyor of brazenly false information.

For instance, in response to neo-Nazi J.T. Ready's massacre of his family earlier this week, Hoft posted this:

Horror!? Neo-Nazi #Occupy Phoenix Protester Goes On Shooting Rampage ? 5 Dead"
Neo-Nazi Jason Todd (J.T.) Ready pictured on left patrolling the Occupy Phoenix protest and on right at Southern Poverty Law Center website.
Of course, since this was not a Tea Party rally the story was never picked up by the liberal media.

The problem with this? J.T. Ready was a regular fixture at Arizona Tea Party events. Indeed, as Matt Gertz at Media Matters reported back when Hoft first trotted out this nonsense, Ready not only regularly appeared at such events, he was regularly given a speaker's platform and even organized one such event featuring J.D. Hayworth.

That's in stark contrast to his single Occupy appearance, where he was confronted by other protesters and asked to leave, and he was not permitted to speak. He was there, as we explained, purely as an opportunist:

Let's be clear: J.T. Ready is a neo-Nazi, a classic totalitarian/authoritarian, someone who despises and loathes and sneers at the kind of democracy-in-action that the Occupy movement represents. He likes chaos, though, and he sees the movement's unsettling effect as something he can use. And showing up at protests always is good for a little attention. That's why he did this.

At least Russell Pearce was more honest and forthcoming in discussing his past associations with Ready:

After resisting for hours, Pearce relented late in the day and released a lengthy statement detailing how he came to know JT Ready and what eventually led to their falling out. Multiple media outlets in Arizona posted the statement in whole.
Pearce said he, like others in the Phoenix suburb of Mesa, got to know Ready for his interest in Republican politics.
?When we first met JT he was fresh out of the Marine Corp and seemed like a decent person,? Pearce wrote. ?He worked as a telephone fundraiser for Christian and pro-life groups, he dated the daughter of one of our District 18 members, and his attitudes and spoken opinions were good and decent.?
According to the Phoenix New Times, Pearce became a mentor to Ready. The powerful lawmaker helped the young man convert to the Mormon religion and he was there for Ready?s first baptism.
But Pearce said Ready?s demeanor changed somewhere along the way. Pearce described it as a ?darkness.? Ready began spending time with hate groups, including the National Socialist Movement, which is the largest neo Nazi organization in the U.S.. After pressure from fellow Republicans, Pearce eventually disavowed the friendship.
?He was angry with me and stayed angry with me, and it has been several years since I have had reason to speak with JT,? Pearce said in the statement.

Over at Phoenix's Fox 13, Pearce gave a relatively forthcoming interview:

Russell Pearce: Pioneer Against Illegal Immigration or Racist?: MyFoxPHOENIX.com

Hilariously, even after all this was pointed out by Charles Johnson of LGF, Hoft just doubled down:

As Jim Treacher says, ?The Occupy Camp is a great incubator for domestic terrorism.?
That?s an understatement!
More? It looks like poor unhinged Charles Johnson jumped the gun on this one. JT wasn?t a rightwinger after all, huh Chuck? Hopefully Mr. Johnson will be honest enough to post an update with corrections.

Yeah, because Jim Hoft knows all about honesty.

Pretty soon he'll start regurgitating the claim being spread by J.T. Ready's supporters that the massacre was actually carried out by Mexican drug cartels in order to frame Ready. (Kind of like Laine Lawless's defense of another Arizona child killer, Shawna Forde.) Go for it, dude.

Read The Full Article:
http://crooksandliars.com/david-neiwert/right-wingers-desperation-disclaim-j

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GOP Responsible for 78% Of Political Ads In
Wisconsin

post from ThinkProgress on 06 May 2012 11:00:05 AM. © ThinkProgress

With a key Senate race and a much-watched recall election in the state, an unprecedented amount of money is being spent on political ads in Wisconsin, but Republicans and their super PAC allies are dominating the airwaves. According to an analysis by Gannett, more than $18 million had been spent on ads as of April 25, including millions from outside groups — more than ever before — but an astonishing 78 percent of that is supporting GOP candidates. The biggest spender is a group backing Gov. Scott Walker (R) in his recall bid, but the state’s large field of Republican Senate candidates are also buying plenty of advertisements, hoping to face off against progressive Rep. Tammy Duckworth (D-WI) in November. “There’s nothing to compare this to, there really is not,” said Mike McCabe, executive director of the good government advocacy group Wisconsin Democracy Campaigns. “We are in uncharted territory.”

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http://thinkprogress.org/election/2012/05/06/478814/gop-responsible-for-78-of-ads
-in-wisconsin/

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Decades Of Data Show Spring Advancing Faster Than
Experiments Suggest

post from ThinkProgress on 06 May 2012 11:00:05 AM. © ThinkProgress

“This suggests that predicted ecosystem changes — including continuing advances in the start of spring across much of the globe — may be far greater than current estimates based on data from warming experiments.”

From NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies

Plants are leafing out and flowering sooner each year than predicted by results from controlled environmental warming experiments, according to data from a major new archive of historical observations assembled with the help of a NASA researcher.

Researchers use experiments that manipulate the temperature of the environment surrounding small plots of plants to gauge how specific plants will react to higher temperatures. The observed plant responses can then be incorporated into models that predict future ecosystem changes as temperatures around the globe continue to rise. But when a group of scientists compared these results to a massive new archive of historical observations, they found that the warming experiments are dramatically underestimating how plants respond to climate change.

The results were published online in the journal Nature on May 2. In addition to quantifying how a broad collection of plant species have responded to date to rising temperatures, the study suggests that the way warming experiments are conducted needs to be re-evaluated.

“This suggests that predicted ecosystem changes — including continuing advances in the start of spring across much of the globe — may be far greater than current estimates based on data from warming experiments,” said Elizabeth Wolkovich, who led the interdisciplinary team of scientists behind the new research while she was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, San Diego. “The long-term records show that phenology is changing much faster than estimated based on the results of the warming experiments. This suggests we need to reassess how we design and use results from these experiments.”

Benjamin Cook, of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Columbia University, New York, worked with Wolkovich to create the massive new archive of long-term, natural phenology observations to gauge the accuracy of the phenological predictions based on these plant warming experiments. The archive includes data from 1,558 species of wild plants on four continents. The historical records showed that leafing and flowering will advance, on average, five to six days per degree Celsius — a finding that was consistent across species and datasets. These data show that estimates based on data from warming experiments are underpredicting advances in flowering by eight and a half times and advances in leafing by four times. The authors expect the data archive to be an important benchmark in future phenology studies.

“These results are important because we rely heavily on warming experiments to predict what will happen to ecosystems in the future,” said Cook, who helped bring together a research team including support from the National Center on Ecological Analysis and Synthesis to build the archive of real-world observations. “With these long-term observational records you may be able to pick up a shift in a plant community over a few years that you wouldn’t be able to observe in an experiment.”

The study of phenology, the timing of annual plant events such as the first flowering and leafing out of spring, provides one of the most consistent and visible responses to climate change. Long-term historical records, some stretching back decades and even centuries, show many species are now flowering and leafing out earlier, in step with rising temperatures. Because these records aren’t available everywhere and predicted future warming is often outside the range of historical records, ecologists often use controlled experiments that create warmer conditions in small plots to estimate how different species will respond to expected temperature increases.

The timing of plants’ flowering and leafing out in spring is not only a basic, natural indicator of the state of the climate. Predicting plant responses to climate change has important consequences for human water supply, pollination of crops and overall ecosystem health.

Wolkovich, Cook and colleagues suggest a number of potential reasons the estimates based on experimental data have underpredicted the plant response to higher temperatures. There could be additional effects of climate change not mirrored in the controlled experiments, or from the fact that the methods used to create warmth in the studies could be creating counteracting effects such as drying out soils or reducing the amount of sunlight reaching the plants.

“Continuing efforts to improve the design of warming experiments while maintaining and extending long-term historical monitoring will be critical to pinpointing the reasons for the differences, and will yield a more accurate picture of future plant communities and ecosystems with continuing climate change,” Wolkovich said.

This research was originally published at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. The study is here (subs. req’d).

Related Post:

Dust-Bowlification and the Grave Threat It Poses to Food Security

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http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/05/06/477959/decades-of-data-show-spring-ad
vancing-faster-than-experiments-suggest/

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Cartnoon

post from Docudharma - Front Page on 06 May 2012 10:49:57 AM. © Docudharma - Front Page

Bonafide Hero: Captain Duck Dodgers is the series finale and originally aired November 11, 2005.Since I started posting these episodes slightly over 39 weeks ago many of them have been pulled for whatever reason which I think is a shame.At some point I[...]

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Vice President Joe Biden Comes Out for Marriage
Equality on Meet the Press

post from Firedoglake on 06 May 2012 10:40:49 AM. © Firedoglake

The Vice President: "I am absolutely comfortable with the fact that men marrying men, women marrying women and heterosexual men marrying women are entitled to the same exact rights." The President, however, is "still evolving."[...]

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Dumbing democracy down: Leadership is not a
drinking game

post from Daily Kos on 06 May 2012 10:15:04 AM. © Daily Kos

Abraham Lincoln A drinking buddy? (Wikimedia Commons)I don't know about the rest of you, but when I'm looking for a new doctor the first thing I consider about the candidates is whether or not I'd like to have a beer with them. When I was diagnosed with cancer, I immediately headed out to a bar to find an oncologist. I use the same criterion when searching for lawyers and accountants, and you can be sure that I would never hire anyone who prefers wine or tea or orange juice. I'm also certain that school administrators use the beer standard when interviewing applicants for teaching positions, and it goes without saying that nothing could be more important when evaluating police officers and firefighters and operators of heavy machinery. Education, skill, intelligence, experience, courage and integrity are nothing compared to the consummate definition of competence, talent and wisdom that is being able to shoot the shit over a beer.

Of course, no one would take that first paragraph seriously. No one who is a serious person, anyway. It's absurd at face value. And yet a recurring theme that pretty well defines the degradation and insipidity of our national political theater is the idea that we should seek political candidates with whom we'd like to have a beer. It's supposed to be some sort of test of character, but it's actually a testament to the level of idiocy with which some regard the very concept of governance. It was one of the means by which the traditional media manipulated the 2000 presidential election. Al Gore was so clearly much more qualified and prepared to be president that some other standard had to be established to create at least some semblance of a rationale for the very candidacy of the Lesser Bush. So it was the beer standard.

The idea behind the beer standard is that it makes someone a regular guy, which was particularly absurd as applied to Bush, because the son of a president, the grandson of a senator, and the snotty child of privilege and aristocracy whose young adulthood was most notable for the number of times he got arrested for being a reckless boorish asshole will ever be a regular guy. But the standard was even more absurd by its own standard, because who would want to waste precious moments of a life with a dissolute lout who squandered endless opportunities to become something more than a dissolute lout who squanders opportunities? But then the traditional media helped cast Bush as a rancher, despite his not having any actual cattle on his ranch, and as a cowboy, despite there being no evidence that he even knew how to ride a horse. But the bigger problem with the beer standard wasn't Bush; it was the very concept that in evaluating presidential candidates, we should be looking for a regular guy, invented or otherwise.

The national press corps hated Al Gore. They sneered at him for acting like he was the smartest guy in the room, mostly because they felt diminished by the fact that he actually was. They were petty and vindictive and intimidated and insulted, and they never really bothered to notice that the smartest guy in the room had the smartest ideas about running the country. So we ended up with an administration that incompetently ignored screaming warnings about what would turn out to be the worst terrorist attack ever on American soil, an administration that incompetently allowed the perpetrator of that attack to get away, an administration that then manipulated the national trauma over that attack to launch two failed wars (one of which had nothing to do with that terrorist attack), an administration that manipulated the national trauma over that attack for the most cynical means of political gain, an administration that then ignored the screaming warnings that a great city was in imminent danger from a natural disaster that turned into an unnatural catastrophe, and an administration that crashed the economy. Al Gore ended up with a Nobel Peace Prize.

(Continue reading below the fold)

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Supermoon

Amazing images of the supermoon seen around the world. [...]

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Ted Nugent says Romney camp asked him to continue
using violent language

And the Romney camp is refusing to deny the story.

Ted Nugent, after a Secret Service investigation, a canceled Army concert and an outpouring of criticism, said presumptive GOP nominee Mitt Romney's camp "expressed support" for the controversial comments he made about President Obama last month at the annual National Rifle Association meeting.

The no-holds-barred Texas rocker told CBS' "This Morning" that Romney's campaign told him to "stay on course" and not to tone it down after Nugent said he will "either be dead or in jail by this time next year" if President Obama is re-elected.

The Romney campaign responded by re-issuing the statement it put out two weeks ago, shortly after Nugent's comments at the NRA went viral.

Except the earlier statement had nothing to do with whether the Romney campaign had privately urged Nugent to continue with his controversial, and somewhat violent, comments.

It's odd that the Romney camp has such a hard time clearly condemning extremism. Then again, they let a gay spokesman go rather than defend him against anti-gay religious right hate groups. Not exactly a backbone of steel on this guy.

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Michele Bachmann: My Campaign was 'Very Careful'
and 'Almost Mistake-Free'

What color is the sky in her world? Because I'm pretty sure we're not sharing the same universe.

Former presidential candidate and current Minnesota congresswoman (and loony) Michele Bachmann told CBN's David Brody that the Lord had called her to run (no word on whether the Lord was interested in her wasting vast amounts of money or just having some fun with her for a few months) and that divine inspiration is to be credited for her running an "almost mistake-free" campaign. The only two blemishes? Not knowing Elvis Presley's birthday and John Wayne's birthplace. That's it:

?I think one thing I learned is a person has to be extremely careful with what they say,? said Bachmann. ?Make sure you have Elvis Presley?s birthday down, because that?s very important, and know where John Wayne was born. Those are two extremely important pieces of information.
?The media loves to beat everybody up,? said Brody.
?What they focus on is kind of amazing, when it looks like the house is burning down around us, that?s what they care about,? Bachmann responded.
Brody went on to say that Bachmann ran ?a pretty impeccable campaign? to which Bachmann responded ?it really was.?
?We were extremely careful and we were almost mistake free but for those two points,? said Bachmann referring to the Elvis and John Wayne gaffes.

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! *wipes tears from my eyes* Next she's going to tell Brody that Marcus is a very manly man. Look, I don't even like Politifact because they have a demonstrable right wing bias, and even they noted that Michele Bachmann--given every benefit of doubt--had the highest "False/Pants on Fire" record of the presidential candidates, at 59 percent (only 9 percent was rated "True"). So perhaps it's not surprising that she has no memory of saying

That it's not true people forgo health insurance because of cost;
That she wanted to pull the US embassy out of Iran;
That the Iraqi people should be paying us for invading and occupying their country;
that President Obama has spent $805 billion and cost 4,400 lives liberating Iraq;
that HPV vaccinations cause mental retardation;
and that President Obama's trip to India cost $200 million a day.

And that's just what I found with a cursory search of this site when we bothered to cover her at all.

But go ahead and believe it was nothing more than John Wayne and Elvis Presley marring your campaign.