The point-blank murder of Mark Carson, who was targeted specifically because he was gay, has shaken the LGBT community nationwide, particularly in New York City. After a vigil Saturday night and huge march on Monday, not one conservative group had yet spoken about the incident. This prompted Daily Kos blogger Scott Wooledge to point out a harsh juxtaposition, noting that mere hours after a shooter opened fire at the Family Research Council in August, wounding a security guard, a large coalition of LGBT groups issued a joint statement condemning the violence. Through his infographics studio Memeographs, he produced the image at right criticizing the anti-gay groups. Only after its viral distribution did conservative groups begin to issue statements. Brian Brown of the National Organization ...

An infographic from the International Displacement Monitoring Centre and Norwegian Refugee Council of populations displaced by climate change and extreme weather disasters. [The Guardian] More than 32 million people fled their homes last year because of disasters such as floods, storms and earthquakes – 98% of displacement related to climate change. Asia and west and central Africa bore the brunt. Some 1.3 million people were displaced in rich countries, with the US particularly affected. Floods in India and Nigeria accounted for 41% of displacement, according to the International Displacement Monitoring Centre and Norwegian Refugee Council. The House plans to vote today on a bill forcing the approval of the Keystone XL pipeline, while the Obama Administration issued a firm statement “stro...

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) (Credit: AP)Civil rights leaders slammed an amendment added to the Senate’s comprehensive immigration reform bill that would subject immigrants from Muslim countries for extra scrutiny. The measure, introduced by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and added to the bill with the support of at least two Democrats, would require additional review for undocumented immigrants applying for legal status who are from “a region or country known to pose a threat, or that contains groups or organizations that pose a threat, to the national security of the United States.” Under the underlining bill, all undocumented immigrations are required to undergo three separate background checks before obtaining legal status. In defending his amendment during the Senate Judiciary Committee ma...

By Michael D. Lemonick via Climate Central When 97 percent of Greenland’s ice experienced at least some melting in July 2012, scientists wondered if it was a one-time phenomenon. Now a new study in Geophysical Research Letters indicates it is a sign of things to come and by 2025, there is a 50-50 chance of it happening annually. Extent of surface melt over Greenland’s ice sheet on July 8, 2012 (left) and July 12, 2012. In just a few days, the melting had dramatically accelerated and an estimated 97 percent of the ice sheet surface had thawed. Credit: NASA. It’s not clear what the effects of such melting will be: the majority of Greenland’s ice loss, which has accelerated significantly over the past decade, comes from glaciers shedding more ice into the sea, and moving faster toward the se...

An example of the content that regularly appears on Facebook promoting violence against womenA coalition of sexual violence prevention and women’s equality organizations are joining forces to pressure Facebook to take a stand against any messages that “trivialize or glorify” violence against women, which they say the company should recognize as gender-based hate speech. The activist groups — led by Women, Action & the Media, the Everyday Sexism Project, and author Soraya Chemaly — are asking Facebook to commit to removing this type of content from its platform. And until it does, they’re telling companies to pull their advertising from the site. In an open letter to the organization, the groups point out that Facebook’s content moderators already police some images of women. In fact, i...

A new poll from Vanderbilt University shows that support for legally recognizing same-sex couples continues to grow in Tennessee, but at rates slower than the rest of the country. A 49 percent plurality now support civil unions or marriage equality, while 46 percent remain opposed to both. Still, 62 percent believe that gays and lesbians should receive health insurance and other employee benefits for their partners, while only 31 percent oppose that idea. A number of anti-gay bills related to education died in the Tennessee legislature this year, but lawmakers did designate August 31 as “ido4life Traditional Marriage Day,” a day committed to condemning same-sex marriage.   Original linkOriginal author: Zack Ford

The biggest banks were already huge before the financial crisis, and concentration in the banking industry was in fact one of the causes of the crash. Yet they have gotten even bigger since then. Just 12 banks, 0.2 percent, control nearly 70 percent of total bank assets, and the 20 biggest hold assets equal to nearly 85 percent of the country’s entire economic output. This has many concerned that the problem of too big to fail still hasn’t been resolved since the passage of the Dodd-Frank financial reform act. Worse, banks may now be too big to jail, as the Justice Department has warned that going after potentially illegal behavior could have negative economic consequences. These problems led Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) to grill Treasury Secretary Jack Lew at a Senate banking committee h...

Last August, a woman in Josephine County called 911 and pleaded with dispatchers to send police — “my ex-boyfriend is trying to break into my house. I’m not letting him in but he’s like, tried to break down the door and he’s tried to break into one of the windows.” The woman had good reason to be afraid of this man, as she told the dispatcher on the other side of the phone, this same abusive ex had put her in the hospital just a few weeks before. But the dispatcher has no one to send. Because the local sheriff’s department recently lost millions in federal funds, it laid off 23 of its 29 deputies and limited their availability to eight hours on Mondays through Fridays. The woman’s call to 911 took place on a Saturday. With no deputies available, the 911 dispatcher transferred the woman to ...

(Credit: How Stuff Works) The U.S. government has tapped pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline to create new antibiotics meant to fight the rise of drug-resistant bacteria and safeguard against bioterrorism. The first-of-its kind public-private partnership could be worth up to $200 million when all is said and done. The deal may raise some eyebrows considering GSK’s massive corporate resources and recent controversies surrounding the company’s marketing practices and safety procedures. Last year, GSK plead guilty to criminal charges for promoting off-label drug use and not reporting safety data for a popular diabetes medication. The British drug maker also paid $3 billion to the Justice Department in a fraud settlement. But officials consider the unusual arrangement between GSK and the U.S...

By Senator Robert Menendez (D-NJ) As Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, I see a lot of fanfare applauding increased oil production in the U.S. and the increase is truly remarkable. We are producing nearly 2 million more barrels of oil a day than government (EIA) experts had predicted ten years ago. But here’s what is truly astounding: We are consuming over 5 million barrels less in oil a day than had been predicted in 2003. So, there is no question we are making dramatic strides in the oil sector, but we are doing twice as well on the conservation side of the ledger than we are in production. Oil conservation lacks the sizzle that energy production enjoys. After all, you don’t see people striking it rich by taking a train to work, by driving an electric car, or converting their b...

Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA)The top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee in a letter to President Obama on Tuesday praised the president’s renewed commitment to close the Guantanamo Bay prison but urged Obama to appoint a senior official charged with working to close the facility. “I write to add my strong support to your efforts to re-engage with Congress on this issue,” Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA) said. “I will do everything I can to aid those efforts.” The State Department in January reassigned Daniel Fried, the special envoy for closing Gitmo, and did not replace him. Attorney General Eric Holder said this month that the administration is “in the process now” to fill the position, and Smith is urging action: I ask you to appoint a senior official, either to your White House staff or t...

(Credit: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images) Over five days of intensive and sometimes emotional debate, the Senate Judiciary Committee passed the first hurdle of advancing the immigration legislation by reaching a 13-5 vote on Tuesday night, with Sens. Lindsay Graham (R-SC), Orrin Hatch (R-UT), and Jeff Flake (R-AZ) siding with the Democrats who voted unanimously. The measure will move to floor debate in June. Of the 161 amendments offered during markup, the panel accepted numerous provisions to strengthen the bill, while keeping out any poison pills that could endanger the legislation. Below is a list of how the Senate Judiciary Committee improved immigration reform: 1. Racial profiling serves as a disincentive to prosecute an individual. Blumenthal 10 would prohibit federal government from r...

Virginia Lt. Gov. nominee E.W. Jackson (R) (Credit: Associated Press)Birtherism is passe these days, save for a few Onoda-esque holdouts. The new conspiracy, if E.W. Jackson gets his way: Harry Reid is faking his faith. Jackson, a highly-controversial figure thrown into the limelight after Virginia Republicans nominated him to be their Lieutenant Governor nominee this past weekend, argued that Reid was just pretending to be a Mormon during an appearance on Glenn Beck’s TV show on October 18, 2012. After Beck said he couldn’t understand how he and Reid can share the same religion yet have such different policy views, Jackson reasoned that the Senate Majority Leader must not actually believe his faith. “I think some of the people who claim to be Mormon or claim to be this or claim to be that...

While President Obama’s proposal to make preschool universally accessible is being pushed on the federal level, six states in the country – Florida, Georgia, Oklahoma, Illinois, New York, and West Virginia – are already working on such plans. Maine is poised to join that group with a bipartisan bill introduced on May 17, as Education Week reports: The legislation would set up a framework for early-childhood education and aims to have the plan in place by the start of the 2017-18 school year, a press release from the Senate Democrats states. Currently, 60 percent of Maine’s school districts offer preschool, the Associated Press reports. About 4,500 4-year-old attend such programs—32 percent of the eligible population. […] [State Senate Majority Leader Seth] Goodall’s bill would offer up mo...

When Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In was released earlier this year, I, to use the oft-repurposed and much-misunderstood lingo of Sandberg herself, leaned out. The book was the subject of a feminist furor, fueled by a quotation from an interview Sandberg gave for the documentary Makers that was unfairly truncated to suggest that she saw herself as some sort of social visionary, and the suggestion that readers form “Lean In Circles,” a sort of consciousness-raising-meets-corporate-boardroom series of study groups. The fray seemed unappealing, and besides, I’d reasoned, I was doing a decent job of leaning in, even if I haven’t yet complicated my work-life balance with marriage and children. But last week, a good girlfriend suggested I give Lean In a try, and I finished it just as Anne Applebaum pu...

(Credit: AP)During the just-concluded trial on the New York Police Department’s stop-and-frisk program, the city argued that officers’ disproportionate targeting of black and Latino New Yorkers was not due to racial profiling but because each stopped individual was doing something suspicious at the time. The data, however, tells a different story: weapons and drugs were more often found on white New Yorkers during stops than on minorities, according to the Public Advocate’s analysis of the NYPD’s 2012 statistics. White New Yorkers make up a small minority of stop-and-frisks, which were 84 percent black and Latino residents. Despite this much higher number of minorities deemed suspicious by police, the likelihood that stopping an African American would find a weapon was half the likelihood ...

Dr. Ernest Moniz was sworn in as the new Energy Secretary this week. Last week, the previous Secretary, Dr. Steven Chu, gave an interview to Stanford where he is returning as a physics professor. The Nobel laureate was asked “What’s the No. 1 problem on your list?” His answer: Climate change. We’re heading into an era where if we don’t change what we’re doing, we’re going to be fundamentally in really deep trouble. We’re already in trouble. So we have to transition to better solutions. We’re not too far away from producing a lot of renewable energy, and doing it cheaply. Solar power is going to become cheaper and cheaper – costs have plummeted three-fold in six years, partly because of the dropping price of modules and electronics. Wind energy is within 15 percent of the cost of new...

On Wednesday, Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ) held an anti-abortion press conference for the bill he intends to reintroduce that restricts women’s abortion rights nationwide. A direct challenge to Roe v. Wade, Franks’ bill bans abortions after 20 weeks, before a fetus even reaches the point of viability. Just this week, an appeals court stuck down a 20-week abortion ban enacted by Franks’ home state of Arizona. The lawmakers slated to speak today included nine House Republicans in addition to Franks — Republicans Chris Smith (NJ), Joe Pitts (PA), John Fleming (LA), Randy Weber (TX), Steve King (IA), Steve Daines (MT), Joe Wilson (SC), and Louie Gohmert (TX). Michele Bachmann (MN) was the only woman member of Congress listed for the event. Pictured above on the right is Susan B. Anthony List‘s Ma...

The bridge is yours. -Nashville undergoes changes as it prepares for season two. -Jennifer Westfeldt joins season three of Girls. -I’ll believe this when I see it, but Steven Spielberg is producing a Halo series for X-Box. -General Zod has some thoughts for us: Original linkOriginal author: Alyssa Rosenberg

Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett (R-PA) brushed away a question about Latinos working in his administration during a roundtable discussion at The Union League in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on Friday, telling the moderator, “If you can find us one let me know”: MODERATOR: Do you have staff members that are Latino? CORBETT: No, we do not have any staff members in there. If you can find us one, please let me know. MODERATOR: I am sure that there are Latinos that… CORBETT: Do any of you you want to come to Harrisburg? See?! Watch it: “I represent every one of you, I’ve been elected by the people of Pennsylvania to make it better than I found it,” Corbett said at the event. “We need to be able to develop a stronger relationship with all communities…we’re in the process now of getting much m...

One day after a Senate hearing during which Apple executives explained how they avoid nearly all taxation on tens of billions in international sales, European leaders are reportedly reshuffling an agenda summit to zero in on corporate tax avoidance: The four-hour summit was originally called to discuss energy policy, but investigations in Britain, France and the United States exposing how little tax major international companies have been paying by carefully structuring their European operations has forced the issue to the top of the agenda. France and Britain in particular have grown concerned by the sheer scale of the legal tax schemes, with a U.S. investigation revealing on Monday that Apple Inc had paid just 2 percent tax on $74 billion in overseas income, largely by exploiting a looph...

As Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld supported the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” recognizing that the time for open service in the military “had arrived.” In an interview with Larry King, however, Rumsfeld explained that he doesn’t support marriage equality, because he’s concerned it will lead to polygamy. He also doesn’t believe marriage is a civil right: KING: Do you support same-sex marriage? RUMSFELD: You know, I’m, I guess, of a generation that I don’t — I wonder — I listened to some of the Supreme Court justices and one of them said, ‘Well what’s next after that? Is it two people, three people?‘ KING: But you were a strong supporter of civil rights in Congress — I remember that. RUMSFELD: You bet I was, throughout the 60s. I was proud of the work that the Congress did in the...

We’re still early in the rollout of this summer’s blockbusters, so it’s a bit early to say this is a trend. But I was struck by a problem that Iron Man 3 and Star Trek Into Darkness, both movies with very long second acts, and short, action-heavy conclusions had in common, and that marred their action sequences: bad villain design. I’ve talked about villain design before as an advantage that movies based on DC Comics, at least in Christopher Nolan’s Batman franchise, have had over Marvel, with the exception of Loki, so far. For the most part, it’s been a matter of ideas and motivations rather than action choreography. Ra’s al Guhl’s totalitarianism, the Joker’s anarchism, and Bane’s vision of class warfare all posed very specific challenges to Bruce Wayne’s vision of a Gotham capable of sa...

Virginia Lt. Gov. nominee E.W. Jackson (R) (Credit: Wikimedia Commons)During the Tea Party’s uprising of 2009, E.W. Jackson, the controversial Republican candidate for Virginia Lieutenant Governor, founded a socially conservative organization named Staying True To America’s National Destiny (STAND). Though the website has since been heavily scrubbed, a cached version from October 9, 2009 shows that Jackson’s group initially spelled out its “Top 7 Issues”. The second most important issue, he argued, was “to bring an end to the hyphenated American.” Jackson warned that by referring to oneself as Jewish-American or Hispanic-American, it comes “at the expense of our national unity.” STAND FOR AN END TO THE HYPHENATED AMERICAN It is time to bring an end to the hyphenated American. We have balka...

As medical costs continue to rise, the annual health costs for a family of four now exceed the typical of cost of their groceries during the same time period, according to a new report from consulting firm Milliman, Inc. The firm estimates that a typical family of four with an employer-sponsored health plan will end up incurring about $22,030 for all of their medical costs in 2013. That represents a 6.3 increase from last year, when the typical family racked up $20,728. Some of that total sum ends up being covered by the family’s health insurance plan — the firm’s analysts found that employers paid about 58 percent of the total health care costs — but a big chunk of it falls onto the family themselves. The average family pays more than $9,000 in payroll deductions and out-of-pocket bills...

New York Times columnist Bill Keller joined Fox News' scandal machine in calling for a special prosecutor to investigate the Obama administration's role surrounding the Internal Revenue Services' (IRS) improper scrutiny of conservative groups. In an opinion piece titled, "Bring Back Ken Starr," Keller ignored the independent investigations already underway as well as the fact that Starr's last round of investigations as special counsel set records for the cost to the American taxpayer and encouraged a hyper-partisan environment that can still be felt today. After the Fox-led GOP investigation into the attacks in Benghazi collapsed, Fox News geared up its scandal machine to focus on President Obama and the IRS and promptly called for a special prosecutor. In a May 21 op-ed, New York Times c...

Fox News contributor and Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer attacked IRS official Lois Lerner for planning to invoke the Fifth Amendment during congressional hearings on IRS scrutiny of conservative groups, a change from his previous support for a Bush administration official doing the same. A May 21 Los Angeles Times article reported that Lerner, "[a] top IRS official in the division that reviews nonprofit groups," will invoke her Fifth Amendment rights and not testify before the House Oversight Committee due to an ongoing criminal investigation and to avoid possible self-incrimination. On Fox News' The O'Reilly Factor, Krauthammer responded to host Bill O'Reilly's claim that Lerner's invoking the Fifth Amendment was evidence that the IRS controversy "was really building," sayi...

Fox News falsely claimed Ambassador Thomas Pickering was "reluctant to testify" to Congress about his investigation into the September 2012 attacks on a U.S. diplomatic facility in Benghazi, Libya, ignoring Pickering's volunteering to testify in a public hearing. Republican Rep. Darrell Issa (CA), Chair of the House Oversight Committee, has subpoenaed Pickering, the co-chair of the independent Accountability Review Board that investigated the State Department's handling of the Benghazi attacks, to testify before Congress on the investigation's findings. On Fox & Friends, co-host Steve Doocy claimed Pickering was "reluctant to testify" and had to be "forced" to do so with the subpoena, implying that this undermined Pickering's credibility as an investigator. On-air text also claimed Pic...

Laura Ingraham: "I Will Primary Challenge Senator Jeff Flake Myself" To Defeat Immigration Reform | Video | Media Matters for America Blog Video Research Issues DONATE © 2013 Media Matters for America. All rights reserved. Original link

Laura Ingraham Attacks Senate Panel Approval Of Immigration Bill: "Si Se Puede Destroy American Sovereignty" | Video | Media Matters for America Blog Video Research Issues DONATE © 2013 Media Matters for America. All rights reserved. Original link