From the February 26 edition of Fox News' Fox and Friends:Previously: Conservative Media Ignore Obama's Sequester Plan Jay Sekulow Raises Idea Of Impeachment "If The President Lied" About Benghazi Right-Wing Media React To Obama's Re-Election: War, Impeachment, Revolution Original link

In a Supreme Court filing Monday Justice Sonia Sotomayor shown a spotlight on the government's mismanagement of a Texas drug case when she denounced the racially charged remarks of an assistant U.S. attorney as "an affront to the Constitution's guarantee of equal protection of the laws." The lawyer's conduct was referred to the Office of Professional Responsibility at the Justice Department, TPM has learned, but what actions were taken against the attorney for those remarks -- if any -- are unclear. The remarks in question came during the March 2011 trial of Bongani Charles Calhoun, a black man who was convicted on drug conspiracy charges after his companions on a road trip attempted to purchase cocaine from dealers who turned out to be undercover agents from the Drug Enforcement Age...

When the Supreme Court hears oral arguments Wednesday on the Voting Rights Act, opponents will argue that a centerpiece of the law aimed at letting the federal government proactively thwart attempts at voter discrimination has outlived its validity. "The only reason Section 5 was originally justified and upheld by the courts was because of Jim Crow -- the unusual circumstances at the time in terms of voter disenfranchisement," Ilya Shapiro, the editor-in-chief of the Cato Supreme Court Review who filed an amicus brief in the case, told TPM. "I don't think there's a way to justify Section 5 anymore." Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act requires state and local governments across 16 states -- mostly in the South -- to seek preclearance from the Justice Department or a federal court before m...

Republican Gov. Rick Scott's announcement last week that he supports the Medicaid expansion in Florida may not be enough to seal the deal. That's because it still needs budget approval from the overwhelmingly Republican legislature, which has majorities of 28-12 in the Senate and 74-46 in the House, and is wary of going along with one of the key provisions of "Obamacare." Florida's House Speaker Will Weatherford (R) told National Review he's "personally skeptical that this inflexible law will improve the quality of health care in our state and [e]nsure our long-term financial stability." He said the legislature, not the governor, will have the final word. Democrats are taking the threat seriously. "I'd say this threat from leadership is credible," a senior Florida Democratic offici...

By Agence France-PresseTuesday, February 26, 2013 4:31 EST   The US State Department, still mourning the loss of its diplomats in a bloody attack on a mission in Libya, Monday cheered the Oscar win for “Argo” based on a true life tale of diplomatic bravery. “I think we all were excited to see it win,” deputy acting spokesman Patrick Ventrell told journalists of Ben Affleck’s film which picked up the coveted best picture award at the Oscars on Sunday night. The movie tel...

By Agence France-PresseTuesday, February 26, 2013 4:26 EST   The estranged wife of a New York policeman sobbed as she testified Monday that her husband, who is accused of plotting to kidnap and cannibalize women, went online to discuss torturing and killing her. Kathleen Mangan-Valle, 27, was the star witness for the prosecution in a trial that opened with her telling the jury that Gilberto Valle had a desire to “cannibalize human flesh.” The allegations are so gruesome...

By Agence France-PresseTuesday, February 26, 2013 4:23 EST   Fast food giant KFC has cut more than 1,000 farms from its supplier network in China to ensure food safety after a scandal over tainted chicken hurt sales in the key market last year. The issue came to light when China’s commercial hub of Shanghai and the northern province of Shanxi said in December that they were investigating KFC suppliers over claims of high levels of antibiotics in chicken. The food scare ...

Fox News is using a Massachusetts town to suggest that wind turbines cause "devastating" health problems. However, multiple studies have found no evidence that wind turbines are associated with health problems. In late January, two wind turbines built in Falmouth, Massachusetts, were targeted for removal due to noise and supposedly related health concerns sometimes referred to as "wind turbine syndrome." Tuesday, Fox News' America's Newsroom covered the local community's upcoming decision, saying that residents claim to have experienced "devastating" health impacts: But Fox News failed to note that "wind turbine syndrome" has not been substantiated. A 2012 panel of independent physicians and scientists convened by the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection concluded&nbs...

By Agence France-PresseTuesday, February 26, 2013 4:11 EST   Two US sailors Tuesday admitted raping a Japanese woman in Okinawa last October, news reports said, in a case that generated huge anti-American anger on the strategically vital island. Skyler Dozierwalker, 23, and Christopher Browning, 24, attacked the woman in central Okinawa during a brief trip to the semi-tropical island chain. Dozierwalker told Naha District Court he committed the crime, while Browning als...

From the February 26 edition of Premiere Radio Networks' The Rush Limbaugh Show:Related: Republicans Urge Obama To End 'Road Show,' Work With Senate To Avert Automatic Cuts Previously: Under Scrutiny, Fox And Limbaugh Reassert Role Advising GOP Doocy: Obama Is "Going Into Campaign Mode" For SOTU Because He's "A Much Better Campaigner, Many People Have Said, Than President" Original link

By Agence France-PresseTuesday, February 26, 2013 4:03 EST   Japanese whalers and militant conservationists have been involved in dangerous clashes in icy waters off Antarctica, with both sides accusing the other of ramming their vessels. Veteran anti-whaling campaigner Paul Watson said the Japanese factory ship the Nisshin Maru rammed the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society’s much smaller vessel the Bob Barker in the incident on Monday. But on its website, Japan’s Instit...

By Agence France-PresseTuesday, February 26, 2013 3:59 EST   A hot air balloon caught fire and exploded over Egypt’s ancient temple city of Luxor during a sunrise flight on Tuesday, killing 19 tourists including Japanese and Koreans, sources said. The balloon which was carrying 21 people was flying at 300 metres caught fire when it caught fire, a security official said. An employee at the company operating the balloon said the pilot and one tourist survived by jumping o...

By Agence France-PresseTuesday, February 26, 2013 3:52 EST   Justice minister Thomas McNally said parliament should not intervene in the row over where the recently uncovered remains of Richard III will be buried. In a letter issued the day after descendants of the monarch called for the remains to be interred in York, McNally said the decision was to be made by the University of Leicester, which made the discovery. “They have indicated that they intend to reinter the r...

By Mark Dowd, The GuardianTuesday, February 26, 2013 3:34 EST   The anti-gay rhetoric of religious leaders like Cardinal Keith O’Brien often masks deep-seated fears about their own sexuality I approached a director at Channel 4 back in 2000 with a proposal for a documentary on homosexuality and the Roman Catholic church. I had a simple pitch. “I want to show why my church is so anti-gay.” “And why is your church so anti-gay?,” came back the obvious question. “Because it...

Fox News hosts cited a widely criticized Bob Woodward column to falsely claim President Obama's proposal to avert looming government spending cuts -- known as sequestration -- "moved the goalposts" because it offsets some of the cuts with new revenue. In fact, the administration's proposal to avert the sequestration has always included a balanced deficit reduction plan that included additional revenues.Woodward Pushes Myth That Revenue Is New To Obama's Proposal To Avert Sequestration Bob Woodward: When The President Asks For New Revenue, "He Is Moving The Goal Posts." In a Washington Post opinion piece, Bob Woodward accused the Obama administration of "moving the goal posts" with its proposal to replace the sequester with an alternative plan to reduce the deficit, falsely claiming that th...

Fox News host Steve Doocy downplayed the effects of looming automatic budget cuts by comparing them to the national budget, a meaningless comparison since these cuts focus on a specific aspect of the budget known as discretionary spending, which would have a significant effect on many programs. On Fox & Friends, Doocy downplayed the automatic budget cuts, known as sequestration, by saying the cuts are "not going to cut to the bone anyway. The president has described it as a meat cleaver because it's simply an across-the-board cut. It is like a 2.5% cut. It is not really meat cleaver, it's more of a slight little haircut that we're talking about here": But Doocy is wrong about how the cuts will affect the federal budget. Though these cuts are 2.5% of total government spending, the...

The Wall Street Journal published an op-ed on the Voting Rights Act by Edward Blum, founder of the in-house legal project of the right-wing's Donors Trust, but failed to disclose his ties to the Supreme Court's VRA case, Shelby County v. Holder. The op-ed, which identifies Blum as a fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute and director of the Donors Trust-supported Project on Fair Representation, recycles misinformation about the challenge that has been extensively and widely debunked.Blum Pushes Falsehood That Racially-Based Voter Suppression Is No Longer Concentrated In Southern States Blum: "Most Americans Already Recognize" That Voters Of Color In The South Have The Same Opportunities To Vote. Blum claims that the process known as "preclearance," in which jurisdict...

The New Hampshire Union Leader downplayed the effects of the impending sequestration cuts despite the devastating impact they would have on necessary programs in New Hampshire. A New Hampshire Union Leader editorial on February 25 attacked the premise that sequestration would have devastating effects by claiming that it's "NOT the end of the world as we know it" and that it just means "government must start managing its money": First, sequester is NOT the end of the world as we know it. Even if those mandated budget cuts occur, it does NOT mean that government, essentially, is shut down. It does not mean the end of services. It does not mean meat or drugs, would go unexamined, and, thus, would disappear from store shelves. It need not mean the air traffic control system must shut down. It...

By Eric W. DolanTuesday, February 26, 2013 0:11 EST   On his show Monday night, The Daily Show host Jon Stewart observed the United States seemed doomed when it came to looming across-the-board budget cuts known as the sequester. After reviewing a list of federal programs that would be cut, Stewart donned a hazmat suit and in a panic warned, “holy shit, we’re doomed, students without financial aid are going to have to get jobs feeding sick children to old people.” “Pl...

I finally got up the courage to check to see whether Jahn's still exists. Not in Brooklyn, it doesn't, or most anyplace else in New York and Florida where this fondly remembered ice-cream parlor once existed. But apparently there's still this one outlet in Jackson Heights, Queens.by KenHow can you write off as a hellish waste of 24 hours a day that draws to a close with arrangements very likely in place whereby next year on this date I stand to take possession of a "complimentary sweet treat" at a mediocre chain restaurant?Somehow the prospects had seemed a little brighter when I got back to my desk late this afternoon from a physical therapy session for which I had somehow managed to forget to bring along my gym shorts and T-shirt. I mean, how many things did I have to remember? There was...

By Agence France-PresseMonday, February 25, 2013 23:25 EST   Scientists said Monday they have identified a physical mechanism behind the extreme weather that has plagued many parts of the world in recent years — and that it is tied to climate change. Since 2010, for example, the United States and Russia have each suffered scorching heat waves, while Pakistan saw unprecedented flooding. Scientists from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) have traced t...

Ted Cruz, Like Most Texas Republicans, Understands The Danger Of Thinking > I think it was Texas, but it may have been Kansas, but one of the primitive, anti-education states was looking into officially banning "critical thinking" from schools. [UPDATE: Sorry, Kansas; it was in the official 2012 platform of the Texas Republican Party, which advocated eliminating the minimum wage and the prevailing wage, doing away with the Department of Education and Department of Energy, and “reducing taxpayer funding to all levels of education” and opposed multicultural education and “critical thinking skills" because they “focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.”] So T...

Tweet President Obama, who famously used his 2010 State of the Union address to rip activist Supreme Court Justices for removing longstanding barriers to corporate control of the political discourse, did not mention the Court’s wrongheaded Citizens United decision in his 2012 State of the Union address. That was concerning. Not just because the president’s support is needed to expand the campaign to amend the Constitution so that it is clear free speech rights are afforded citizens, not corporations. But because this is a moment when it is essential to explain how Wall Street is using its “money power” to thwart the will of the people when it comes to debt and deficit debates. As the country stumbles toward sequestration, powerful forces are seeking ...

Indiana’s House of Representatives on Monday approved a bill that would require all welfare recipients to undergo drug testing, despite the fact that several courts have ruled such measures are unconstitutional. Public assistance would be denied to any applicant who refused to undergo rehabilitation treatment. The bill would require recipients of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) who tests positive for illegal substances to pay for their own drug tests out of their assistance checks. It would also force anyone with drugs in their system to enroll in a treatment program, but the bill offers no additional funding for such programs: If the individual tests positive on a drug test administered under this chapter, the amount of the cost of any subsequent drug test the individual i...

Lindsay Rosenthal is a Research Assistant with the Women’s Health and Rights team and the Health Policy team at the Center for American Progress. If sequestration is allowed to take effect as scheduled on March 1, $1.2 trillion will be automatically removed from the federal budget in across-the-board spending cuts that would potentially reverse our economic recovery. These cuts — which take money out of critical investments in education, public health services and research, disaster preparedness, and national security — would have devastating consequences in communities around the country and would harm all Americans in a number of ways. Sequestration also institutes several cuts to key public investments that would disproportionately harm women. Low-income women and women of color will be...

Lake Mead and Hoover Dam water intake towers, with previous water level, July 2009. (Photo credit: Cmpxchg8b) As climate change makes the regions of the West, Southwest, and Great Plains warmer and drier, water demand will continue to increase, and the combined effect will place an ever greater burden on the country’s fresh water supplies — possibly completely draining important reservoirs in those areas, under some scenarios. That’s according to a new study authored by researchers with Colorado State University, Princeton and the U.S. Forest Service, and flagged yesterday by Summit County Citizens Voice. This is consistent with other studies on the risk of future water shortages: The Department of the Interior is anticipating that by 2060 the gap between river supply and water demand in t...

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) last week unveiled a supposedly “middle class tax cut.” “”Our middle class tax cut is a down payment on my goal of reducing the tax burden in our state every year I’m in office. I want to cut taxes over and over and over again until we are leading the country in economic recovery,” Walker said. But according to an analysis by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, Walker’s definition of middle class is a bit off. In fact, his tax cut plan would deliver the majority of its benefits to the top fifth of Wisconsin earners. Meanwhile, “the lowest 20% of tax filers would receive a tax cut of just $2 a year.” People in the middle fifth would receive a whopping $43 dollars per year in tax relief. Meanwhile, those in the richest fifth would receive nearly $3...

Former surgeon general C. Everett Koop has passed away at the age of the 96. Koop — who described himself as “the health conscience of the country” — was a surprising advocate of comprehensive sex education, despite the fact that he was a staunch social conservative, as a method of combating the HIV/AIDS epidemic. He also championed anti-smoking campaigns and hoped to reach a day when smoking was completely eradicated in the United States. Appointed under Ronald Reagan in 1981, Koop brought valuable exposure to an HIV epidemic that Americans were only slowly becoming aware of. In 1988, he orchestrated the largest public health mailing in history by sending an educational AIDS pamphlet to more than 100 million U.S. households — without the Reagan administration’s blessing. Although Koop him...

Hans von SpakovskyHans von Spakovsky may be America’s top expert on voter disenfranchisement. How to foster voter disenfranchisement, that is. As an official in the Bush Justice Department, Spakovsky pushed through gerrymandered maps benefiting Republicans, and was a driving force behind the effort to approve voter ID laws — a common voter suppression law targeting student, minority and low-income voters. Since leaving the Bush Administration, Spakovsky’s remained a leading advocate of voter suppression, often making odd claims such as arguing that a common method of disenfranchising voters actually does those voters a favor, or claiming that Attorney General Eric Holder sides with big scary black men who tamper with elections. For the rest of this month, Spakovsky is also an elections off...

Eliot Engel represents AIPAC in Congress, which means he puts Israel's interests above America's. He shouldn't be in Congress to begin with but he certainly should not be the ranking Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Back in 2002 when Bush was looking for backing for his plans for unprovoked war against Iraq, he knew he couldn't do it without bipartisan support. He literally couldn't do it in the House, where he didn't have enough Republican votes. But he found 81 Democrats to rubber stamp his decision. Most Democrats-- 126 + Independent Bernie Sanders-- voted against the war. Eliot Engel joined other Democrats who put the Likud's extreme demands ahead of what was right for America. And now Engel has been made the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee-- a post ...