The Pentagon wants Congress to shift $9.6 billion of this year’s Defense Department budget toward expenses for the Afghanistan war, transportation and other items.  Moving $1.3 billion to the Army “to support funding shortfalls” in Afghanistan is the largest request, Bloomberg reports, citing budget documents. The Pentagon also wants to funnel $1 billion into the transportation budget to pay for higher-than-expected fuel costs. The money would mostly come from smaller research programs and weapons-buying accounts, according to Bloomberg. The Pentagon sent the request to Congress along with its $79.4 billion war-fighting budget proposal. The House Armed Services Committee will begin consideration of the defense bill next week. The Defense Department is in the process of scaling back ...

"Ewww. Don't do it, Patrick. Don't do it. Dogs pee here." A woman was giving my husband a hard time because our 10-month-old son had dropped his banana on the ground. Patrick picked it up, licked it and was about to hand it back to our boy. Seamus grabbed for it eagerly and scarfed it down. A minute or two later, he was grunting for more. The woman was disgusted. I was too. Not by Patrick, of course, but by a judgmental woman who hadn't shown any interest in our adorable boy until he was in danger of being exposed to whatever lurked in the grass on the Norwich town green. "If we threw away everything this child dropped," I said with just a hint of heat, "he would be skin and bones. We do this kind of thing all the time. As you can see, he is the picture of health." Seamus is the pic...

Fox News Sunday selected Victoria Toensing and Joseph diGenova, attorneys who represented witnesses at a Republican-led hearing on the attacks at a U.S. diplomatic facility in Benghazi, Libya, for its "power players of the week," an unfortunate choice given that both individuals misled Fox News and its viewers about allegations of threats and intimidation against their clients and about efforts by the administration to prevent their clients from testifying. Though Fox News Sunday aired certain aspects of Toensing and diGenova's biographies, the segment neglected to mention that the two have a history of poor professional conduct, including criticism from a Democratic congressman for inappropriate behavior and actions while they worked as congressional investigators due to their constant m...

Sunday talk shows on NBC, CBS, and ABC compared reports that the Internal Review Service (IRS) applied extra scrutiny to conservative groups to President Nixon's Watergate scandal, a comparison which people who worked on both sides of the Watergate scandal agree is baseless. IRS Inspector General Report Found Agency Used "Inappropriate Criteria" For Some Tax-Exempt Applicants IG Report: "IRS Used Inappropriate Criteria" For Some Conservative Applicants. On May 14, the IRS' Inspector General released a report on how the IRS applied additional scrutiny to some conservative applicants for federal tax-exempt status. As CNN reported, the IG report found "lax oversight at the Internal Revenue Service allowed for the singling out of some conservative groups, resulting in lengthy delays in t...

Fox News Sunday Anchor Chris Wallace Repeats Falsehood That "No Forces [Were] Deployed" To Benghazi | Video | Media Matters for America Blog Video Research Issues DONATE © 2013 Media Matters for America. All rights reserved. Original link

ABC's Jon Karl Tells CNN He Regrets Getting Benghazi Talking Points Reporting Wrong | Video | Media Matters for America Blog Video Research Issues DONATE © 2013 Media Matters for America. All rights reserved. Original link

CNN's Crowley Adopts False Right-Wing Claim That Obama Didn't Call Benghazi A Terrorist Attack | Video | Media Matters for America Blog Video Research Issues DONATE © 2013 Media Matters for America. All rights reserved. Original link

NBC's David Gregory Mainstreams Theory That Obama Personally Fomented IRS Focus On Conservative Groups | Video | Media Matters for America Blog Video Research Issues DONATE © 2013 Media Matters for America. All rights reserved. Original link

"Good night, thou false world!" PAPAGENO: Right, then, that's still how it is!Since there is nothing holding me back,good night, thou false world! -- most of our Magic Flute translations by Robert A. Jordan Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau (b), Papageno; Berlin Philharmonic, Karl Böhm, cond. DG, recorded June 1964Or in English: "Fare thee well, thou world of pain!" [in English] John Brownlee (b), Papageno; Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, Bruno Walter, cond. Live performance, Dec. 26, 1942by KenWe were just looking at Mozart's and Beethoven's exceptional use of minor keys for opening movements of symphonies and concertos, and one point I could have made more explicit is how frequently -- among these admittedly infrequent cases -- the "thematic" material that inspires such a plan is more "motivic" th...

Barbaric, primitive priests spread fear and hatred in Georgia Yesterday I wrote about how primitive, Bronze Age notions regarding the subjugation of women in the patriarchal societies of the 3 major Abrahamic religions, still leads to thousands of brutal murders and barbaric treatment of women all over the world. Friday saw a demonstration related to that mentality in Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia. This time the victims of the primitive religionists, though, were gay people. The first thing an international traveler notices on arriving in Tbilisi, capital of Georgia, is that the road leading from the airport to downtown is George W. Bush Avenue. It's a warning. Although rated a "safe" city, many people are backward and very primitive so there is always a certain danger, like the violent...

By Agence France-PresseSunday, May 19, 2013 10:28 EDT   Like Raw Story on FacebookTweet Iran is tightening control of the Internet ahead of next month’s presidential election, mindful of violent street protests that social networkers inspired last time around over claims of fraud, users and experts say. The authorities deny such claims, but have not explained exactly why service has become slower. Businesses, banks and even state organisations are not spared by the widespread disruption in the Internet, local m...

By David EdwardsSunday, May 19, 2013 11:10 EDT   Like Raw Story on FacebookTweet Former Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan (R-WI) on Sunday used the news that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) had scrutinized tea party groups to slam the agency’s connection to President Barack Obama’s heath care reform law. Host Chris Wallace pointed out to Ryan on Fox News Sunday that the Treasury inspector general had suggested that a recent IRS scandal had been a “bureaucratic snafu” because tea party groups...

By Eric W. DolanSunday, May 19, 2013 11:32 EDT   Like Raw Story on FacebookTweet An 18-year-old girl was arrested for statutory rape over a same-sex relationship in Florida because of bigoted parents, according to the mother of the arrested teen. Kaitlyn Ashley Hunt was arrested February 16 by the Indian River County Sheriff’s Office on two counts of lewd or lascivious battery on child. Her mother, Kelley Hunt Smith, explained on Facebook that Kaitlyn began a “mutual consenting” relationship with a girl at Se...

By David EdwardsSunday, May 19, 2013 12:21 EDT   Like Raw Story on FacebookTweet Republican strategist Karl Rove says that Crossroads GPS, which is a part the American Crossroads super PAC that he founded, is a legitimate tax-exempt organization because it promotes “social welfare” like the NAACP. During a panel discussion on Fox News Sunday about the IRS scrutinizing tea party groups, host Chris Wallace asked why Rove’s political action committee qualified as a tax-exempt status as a social welfare group. “...

By Agence France-PresseSunday, May 19, 2013 12:26 EDT   Like Raw Story on FacebookTweetPresident Barack Obama was riding high in a new opinion poll released on Sunday showing that 53 percent of Americans approve of the way he’s doing his job, despite a flurry of recent scandals. The survey of 923 adults by CNN and the ORC International polling organization found that 45 percent of respondents disapprove of Obama’s job performance. In early April, the same poll gave the president a 51 percent approval rating, sh...

By Eric W. DolanSunday, May 19, 2013 13:04 EDT   Like Raw Story on FacebookTweet Seven teenage students in North Carolina were arrested on Thursday and charged with a misdemeanor for throwing water balloons during a school prank. A parent was also arrested during the incident. The seven boys, all between the ages of 16 and 17, threw balloons filled with tap water as an end-of-year prank at Enloe High School in Raleigh. The balloons were rumored to be filled with “other substances,” but Wake County Public Schoo...

By Matt Williams, The GuardianSunday, May 19, 2013 13:38 EDT   Like Raw Story on FacebookTweetThe fatal shooting of a gay man just blocks from New York’s historic Stonewall Inn was a hate crime and could be linked to a rash of recent homophobic attacks, police said. Before opening fire early Saturday, the gunman confronted the victim and his companion in Greenwich Village, yelling: “What are you, gay wrestlers?”. The suspect then asked if the pair “want to die here” before shooting victim Marc Carson in the fac...

By Dominic Rushe, The GuardianSunday, May 19, 2013 13:41 EDT   Like Raw Story on FacebookTweetThe Obama administration’s decision to seize phone records from the Associated Press was “unconstitutional” and sends a message that “if you talk to the press, we are going to go after you”, the news agency’s boss Gary Pruitt said Sunday. AP revealed last week that the Justice Department had obtained two months’ worth of phone records of calls made by reporters and editors without informing the organisation in advance....

By Eric W. DolanSunday, May 19, 2013 13:49 EDT   Like Raw Story on FacebookTweet A liberal-leaning Jewish organization on Sunday called on Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) to apologize for linking U.S. foreign policy to the rise of Adolf Hitler. “Senator Grassley’s Hitler comparison is absolutely inappropriate,” Aaron Keyak of the National Jewish Democratic Council said. “Grassley’s remark unfortunately places him among the usual cranks spouting similar nonsense every day on Twitter and is unbefitting of a U.S. Sena...

By David EdwardsSunday, May 19, 2013 13:54 EDT   Like Raw Story on FacebookTweet Neoconservative Washington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin on Sunday demanded that CNN “mute” Take Action News host David Shuster for using what she insisted were “Media Matters talking points” to slam ABC News White House correspondent Jonathan Karl for inaccurately reporting details about the way the Obama administration handled the response to last year’s terrorists attacks in Benghazi. On May 10, Karl had suggested that he had se...

Reuters reported on Wednesday that China’s environmental ministry has okayed the construction of a new hydroelectric dam on the Dadu River in the Sichuan province, which when completed will be the country’s largest. China’s energy mix was 9.4 percent renewable as of 2011, and the Sichuan project is part of the country’s effort to boost itself to 15 percent by 2020. Hydroelectric power is anticipated to make up most of that increase. The environmental ministry acknowledged that the project is massive enough to damage the local ecology, negatively effecting certain rare fish species and plant life. The dam’s developers have promised to try and offset those effects with “counter-measures,” and the project still requires the approval of China’s ruling cabinet. To be built over 10 years by a su...

On this week’s Fox News Sunday, host Chris Wallace pressured White House Senior Advisor Dan Pfeiffer about why the Obama administration didn’t act sooner to address the IRS’s inappropriate targeting of conservative groups applying for 501(c)(4) tax status, arguing that Treasury officials and administration officials were aware of an ongoing investigation. Pfeiffer argued that it would have been “wholly inappropriate” for anyone in the White House to interfere with an ongoing investigation and claimed that the administration was never aware of the specifics of the probe. Treasury Deputy Secretary Neal Wolin was informed about the matter last year and the White House counsel’s Office learned of the examination in late April, before the results were available. “[House Oversight Committee Cha...

Rep. Glenn Gruenhagen On Wednesday night, Minnesota State Representative Glenn Gruenhagen (R-Glencoe) took to the House floor to talk about climate change and renewable energy. Using sources such as the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), Gruenhagen told his colleagues that climate change is a “complete United Nations fraud and lie…. The latest facts from CPAC show that in the last sixteen years there’s been no global warming.” While it is common practice among climate skeptics to claim that the Earth is no longer warming, the fact is global temperatures are rising. 2010 was the hottest year on record and every year of the 2000s was warmer than 1990s average. Over 30 million people were displaced by climate-related extreme weather events in 2012, and it is increasingly likely ...

On Sunday, during an appearance on Meet The Press, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) — the GOP leader in the senate — distanced himself from Republican efforts to portray the Obama administration’s response to the attacks on a U.S. diplomatic issue in Benghazi, Libya as a Watergate-level scandal that should result in impeachment. McConnell’s comments come just days after the White House released 100 pages of emails undermining GOP claims that administration officials doctored the public talking points U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice used to discuss the incident on the Sunday morning talk shows. “You’re talking about others who may have said various things about this, let me tell you what I think about it. It’s clear there was inadequate security out there and it’s very clear that it was inconvenient...

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) went on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday to use the IRS scandal to attack the Obama administraiton, but flubbed a key part of his case: he couldn’t defend the claim that IRS was targeting conservative groups as part of a political strategy to help the White House. Paul, like most Republicans, has been spinning the scandal as an Obama Administration attack on dissenters. “What the IRS did is how the KGB used to target dissidents,” he wrote in a CNN op-ed. “It is how they deal with troublemakers in China.” Some have argued the extra IRS scrutiny was part of a failed attempt to implement election law, as opposed to a political crackdown. Host Candy Crowley asked Paul why this interpretation was wrong. He couldn’t give her a reason: CROWLEY: We do know this one place pr...

(Photo: Amb. Chris Stevens, left, in Tripoli, Libya in Aug. 2012, Credit: AP) I didn’t know Chris Stevens. I admit that the first I’d heard of the U.S. Ambassador to Libya was the morning of Sept. 12, when I woke up and, along with the rest of the country, learned that he and three others had died in an attack on a diplomatic mission in Benghazi. By all accounts, Stevens was well-respected among his peers and adored by his family and friends. I didn’t know Ambassador Stevens, but I do know one thing: he deserved better from his government all in these weeks and months after his death, from the Republican party that chose to place him center ring in an embarrassing circus to the Obama administration that failed in its responsibility to keep him safe. In retrospect, the original Republican a...

The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein points us to the ever-growing scandal that will echo through the ages: When future generations look back on the scandals of our age, it’ll be the unchecked rise in global temperatures, not the Benghazi talking points, that infuriate them. Yes, unchecked warming is likely to prove the greatest scandal in U.S. history. Certainly it’s the one that will ruin the lives of the most people, far more than Watergate did if our government doesn’t act to expose what’s going on and work to put an end to it — before it puts an end to our stable climate: Scandalous: Projected warming this century (in red, via recent literature) if humanity allows current carbon pollution trends to continue compared to the temperature change over past 11,300 years (in blue, via Science, ...

Jason Richwine. (Credit: The Heritage Foundation.)Over 1,000 Harvard students delivered a petition to Harvard University’s JFK School on Saturday, demanding an investigation into how and why the school approved a 2009 doctoral thesis arguing that Hispanics have lower IQs. The thesis was written by Jason Richwine, a co-author of a paper by the conservative Heritage Foundation that argued immigration reform would cost taxpayers $6.3 trillion. The discovery of Richwine’s paper by the Washington Post sparked a firestorm around the Heritage study, and several days later Richwine resigned from the think tank. Now Harvard students want to know how a thesis built on those views and assumptions was able to make it through the approval process in the first place. “Academic freedom and a reasoned deb...

(Credit: Associated Press) The Virginia Republican Party this weekend nominated for lieutenant governor a minister who has a history of virulent anti-gay statements, accuses the Democratic Party of enslaving African Americans, and criticized President Obama for having “Muslim sensibilities.” The former Senate candidate ,who in 2012 garnered less than 5 percent of the vote in the Republican primary, bested six other candidates during the Virginia GOP convention, and will join conservative Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli on the Republican ticket, as the first black candidate the state party has endorsed since 1988. Here are some of the most alarming facts you need to know about E.W. Jackson: Original linkOriginal author: Nicole Flatow

Last summer the cover-up of the epidemic of military rapes at Lackland-- engineered by House Armed Services Committee chairman Buck McKeon-- began to unravel, due, primarily, to the tireless efforts by Protect Our Defenders. POD battled McKeon's determination to cover up the scandal and keep it out of the public view. At all times, he insisted on closed briefings rather than the public hearings this kind of scandal demanded. And who was McKeon's point person on the Committee, with his own peculiar take on rape? Todd Akin, of course. It was two of Congress' most backward, patriarchal and misogynistic Neanderthals that John Boehner put in charge of "protecting" the Pentagon... and leaving the rape victims to twist in the wind. This from last summer: For one of the most misogynistic members ...