“Thank you @BarackObama for the acknowledgment of our collective pain.”
Via: Carolyn Kaster / AP
His remarks made an impact on many people who had been eager for the president to personally address the jury's decision that Zimmerman was not guilty of murder in the shooting death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin.
A difficult time for the Tennessee Congressman.
Congressman Steve Chen slammed CNN anchor Chris Cuomo for what he saw as off-color remarks about his relationship with a woman he had thought was his illegitimate daughter.
Cohen discovered Thursday that a woman he thought was his illegitimate daughter wasn't related to him after a DNA test administered by CNN proved he was not model Victoria Brink's father.
Cohen relationship with the young woman first came to the pubic's attention after Twitter used noticed he was tweeting a 24-year-old blonde woman during the president's State of the Union address in January.
After the report on CNN's morning show New Day Chris Cuomo said it was "a weird twist." Cuomo added "and I wonder if now for the Congressman, because of the test, to now go back to fact that he was tweeting someone and it was kinda creepy."
Cohen took issue with the comments and in a tweet said "u didn't pay 4 my DNA test.Your snide creepy comment wasuncalled4/inappropriate.y didn't u ask Victoria who told her I was Dad?"
Via: twitter.com
As a new secretary takes over the helm at the Labor Department, LGBT advocates raise questions about inaction on transgender workers’ protections — and the White House’s role in that inaction.
President Obama talks with his then-nominee for Labor Secretary, Thomas Perez, March 18, 2013, in the East Room of the White House.
Via: Pablo Martinez Monsivais / AP
WASHINGTON — LGBT advocates Friday raised questions about the Labor Department's enforcement of LGBT workers' rights, with one charging the White House has forced the department's hand and "forbade" them from "formally adopting" protections for transgender people working for federal contractors.
As Thomas Perez prepares to take the helm of the Labor Department and as the nation's largest LGBT political group, the Human Rights Campaign, announced it had hired the department's chief of staff to help run its organization, two officials with Freedom to Work spoke out against the department and the administration's inaction on the issue.
HRC announced Thursday it had hired Ana Ma as its new chief operating officer and chief of staff, hours before the Senate confirmed Perez as the next labor secretary. In announcing Ma's hiring, HRC did not mention any specific work Ma had done to advance LGBT rights.
The Freedom to Work officials, president Tico Almeida and advisory board chair Dana Beyer, raised questions about the Labor Department's record on one area of LGBT rights — although Almeida ultimately placed the blame with the White House. Nonetheless, they expressed optimism that Perez would bring a change to the department.
Over the course of the past 15 months, Labor Department officials have declined numerous requests for information about whether it has applied an April 2012 ruling of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission that protects transgender workers from discrimination to its implementation of an existing executive order that bans discrimination among federal contractors. The EEOC, in Mia Macy's case, held that Title VII's ban on sex discrimination includes transgender-based discrimination, and the Labor Department has, in the past, applied the EEOC's interpretation of Title VII to its interpretation of Executive Order 11246, which was signed by President Lyndon Johnson.
Beyer told BuzzFeed, "I am hopeful Secretary Perez will move the Department of Labor into active support of last year's EEOC decision in the Macy case, which brought trans persons protection under Title VII, and break the 15-month silence of the Labor Department, a silence which has mirrored that of our national LGBT organizations since the April 20, 2012 ruling."
Almeida mentioned Ma specifically, saying, "With all of the progressive and openly LGBT appointees that have worked in senior positions at the Labor Department — from Mary Beth Maxwell to Ana Ma — it has been conspicuous and disappointing that the agency has stalled for well over a year and not yet officially adopted the historic Macy decision of the EEOC as governing law for the federal contractor executive order."
He added, however, "But I don't fault Mary Beth or Ana because I am told that the Labor Department leadership has been severely controlled by the senior White House staff, which I'm told has forbidden Labor officials from formally adopting the Macy decision. I believe that the Labor Department's leadership did everything they could to push for the correct outcome."
Almeida said he has been told by high-level employees in multiple agencies, multiple LGBT organizations, and House and Senate offices that the roadblock is at the senior level of White House staff. "Everyone in Washington, D.C. is pointing their finger in the exact same direction," he said.
An HRC spokesman did not respond to a request for information about whether it asked Ma about the Labor Department's enforcement of Executive Order 11246 beyond pointing to the news release announcing her hire.
The question of the White House's involvement in controlling the Labor Department's movement on the issue follows Obama's decision, reiterated often by administration officials, not to issue his own executive order that would explicitly prohibit federal contractors from discriminating against transgender workers — as well as lesbian, gay and bisexual workers.
A White House spokesman did not respond to a request for comment on Almeida's claim, and a Labor Department spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment on the question of whether it was enforcing transgender protections under the existing executive order. As to the proposed new executive order, the Obama administration has said in the past that it would prefer legislative action on the issue in the form of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, which would ban most employers, including federal contractors, from discriminating against LGBT employees.
Regardless, Almeida said, "Wherever the political calculations and policy logjam may exist, the important thing is that Secretary Perez should now instruct his agency to follow the lead of the bipartisan EEOC. Based on his impressive intellect and strong commitment to LGBT freedom to work, I hope that Secretary Perez will also succeed in persuading President Obama to follow through on his five-year-old written campaign promise to sign the federal contractor executive order. I know his Civil Rights Division at DOJ was supportive of the executive order, so I am optimistic Labor Secretary Perez will be on the side of LGBT workers rather than anti-gay federal contractors like ExxonMobil."
As nation sizzles, ice cream trucks available on demand.
Source: theverge.com
Ernest Dronenburg says California officials exceeded their authority by ordering county clerks to marry same-sex couples. He’s asked the California Supreme Court to issue an order that he not do so.
Via: Mike Blake / Reuters
Source: arcc.sdcounty.ca.gov
On Wednesday, Obama returns to the site of a 2005 economic speech in Illinois to make his pitch “that the American economy works best when it grows from the middle out, not the top down,” according to the White House. The speech was previewed in a White House video Sunday night.
WASHINGTON — The White House announced Sunday night that President Obama is set to make a series of fresh economic proposals in speeches over "the next several weeks," according to an email senior presidential adviser Dan Pfieffer sent to the White House Listserv.
Pfieffer's email hints that Obama's new economic push will include a lot of tough talk for Republicans.
The first of the speeches will come Wednesday at Knox College in Illinois, site of an economic speech Obama made shortly after taking office as a U.S. senator in 2005. The White House says Wednesday's speech will be a major one, and will continue the themes Obama laid out eight years ago.
"It's a vision that says America is strongest when everybody's got a shot at opportunity — not when our economy is winner-take-all, but when we're all in this together," Pfeiffer wrote in the email to the White House list.
The White House released a video Sunday night previewing the speech and tying it to past Obama economic addresses.
The email from Pfeiffer promises a mix of "new ideas and new pushes for ideas [Obama] has discussed before," in the coming weeks, including "steps Congress can take, steps he'll take on his own, and steps the private sector can take that benefit us all."
The email also suggests Republicans in Congress are in for a rhetorical pummeling.
"Instead of talking about how to help the middle class, too many in Congress are trying to score political points, refight old battles, and trump up phony scandals," Pfeiffer wrote.
The shift back to the economy comes as the White House waits to see what the Republican-controlled House will do with immigration. House Republicans have signaled they won't do much on the subject until the end of the year, giving Obama little reason to keep all his focus on the topic, Pfeiffer's email suggests.
"Why now?" he wrote. "Well, we've made important progress with the Senate passing comprehensive immigration reform and will continue to work with the House to push to get that enacted into law. But the President thinks Washington has largely taken its eye off the ball on the most important issue facing the country."
The Obama economic speeches come as Washington prepares for a new round of battles over the debt ceiling that are expected to see Republicans demand deep cuts in government spending in return for preventing the country from defaulting on its debts. Meanwhile, the country is still dealing with the impacts of the sequester and an economic recovery that has yet to put a significant dent in the unemployment rate.
Pfeiffer wrote that Obama's fresh focus on the economy will lay out the president's vision for how America gets back to the boom times.
"The point is to chart a course for where America needs to go — not just in the next three months or even the next three years, but a steady, persistent effort over the long term to restore this country's basic bargain for the middle class," Pfeiffer wrote.
A former marriage equality advocate turns his attention to what he calls the Obama administration’s greatest hypocrisy: pushing for a higher minimum wage while relying on unpaid interns. And he’s got help from some powerful White House allies.
John Gara/BuzzFeed
WASHINGTON — At some point in the near future, an intern could be standing over a hot photocopier spitting out White House talking points on the president's campaign to raise the minimum wage — and getting paid exactly $0.00 per hour to do so.
To Mikey Franklin, the man trying to blow up Washington's unpaid intern culture, the scene is nothing short of ridiculous.
"We are not impressed," Franklin said. "The White House is fighting for a raise in the minimum wage while still taking on, at any one time, dozens of staff at $7.25 below the minimum wage."
In the coming weeks, Franklin and elements of the labor movement plan to launch the Fair Pay Campaign, a grassroots lobbying effort aimed at fundamentally upending the way internships work in Washington. And they're starting by calling on President Obama to provide paychecks to the legions of interns that help run his White House.
No one knows for sure how many interns there are in the federal government, but advocates estimate the number at around 20,000 to 30,000 each summer, the vast majority of whom don't receive paychecks. While rules are changing to require most of the private sector to pay everyone who does work for them, special loopholes allow the federal government to maintain a massive, unpaid intern workforce that fills every corner of government and virtually every congressional office. And while Washington's annual "intern season" is the subject of snickering among the city's full-time political class, most will acknowledge that D.C. institutions heavily rely on the free labor.
Pay-the-interns advocates say the fundamental unfairness in the current system transcends the lack of a weekly paycheck. In Washington, internships function as a method of funneling ambitious young go-getters into full-time jobs: By requiring that applicants be willing to work without pay, the argument goes, the government has effectively built a socio-economic glass ceiling that prevents people from poor and working-class families from taking advantage. Supporters of unpaid internships in Washington say they are educational opportunities as good as if not better than a semester on a college campus.
Fair Pay plans to start its campaign to pressure the White House around Labor Day, eventually expanding it to cover the rest of the federal government and nonprofit sector in D.C. Franklin says the group will conduct research, publish studies, and pursue other efforts aimed at educating the public and prompting legislation on Capitol Hill. The nascent effort is still coming together, but the early focus will be on forcing internships in Washington to change by organizing students not to take unpaid internships and favor paid internships instead. It's a heavy lift in a city where prestige is everything and unpaid internships are often among the most prestigious, but Franklin said that by using organizing techniques gleaned from the labor movement, they can slowly change the system.
But in the age of sequestration and deficit-slashing fervor, calling on the federal government to spend money paying workers it doesn't pay now is a tough sell. Advocates say it's a fight worth taking on — and they point to dozens of anecdotes and stories as proof.
Interns living in Washington, one of America's most expensive cities, told BuzzFeed they wouldn't be able to do it without serious financial help from the home front.
One intern working in the executive branch on foreign policy and law-related issues said he pays his bills "through a mix of financial aid and parental support." (He asked to remain anonymous in case his candor would upset his bosses.) The intern, a 24-year-old third-year law student at UCLA — a school that offers a small stipend to students with public service internships — says he's enjoying his time in D.C. thanks in large part to checks from his parents.
"If one was living strictly on the stipend, you'd be living not so nicely in D.C. and eating not so nicely," he said.
What do D.C. interns do? Experts say a lot of it is the kind of mind-numbing grunt work you'd expect. But not all of it. Ross Eisenbrey, a scholar at the union-backed Economic Policy Institute think tank in Washington, has been studying D.C. internships for years. On the Hill, they include a lot of the annoying stuff no one else wants to do. But they also include jobs people used to be paid to do.
"Most of what the interns end up doing is just plain work. Nobody is supervising them except maybe another intern, and they end up doing a lot of work that used to be done by a paid clerk. Writing letters, answering the mail, preparing charts. Doing real research," he said. "It isn't all scut work, some of it really important intellectual work."
The executive branch intern agreed.
"As an intern with the government, you're going to be able to get your hands on a lot [of] higher-profile issues and a lot more substantive work than you'd be doing in the private sector," he said. "And the networking opportunities, especially with the federal government and being in Washington, where there's such a concentration of federal agencies, is invaluable from my perspective."
Losing that access isn't worth winning the war over paychecks, the intern said.
"In an ideal world, everyone would be paid. But if you're in a position to do an unpaid internship, you do it," he said. "If it came down through the courts or whatever that the government had to start paying interns, you'd see a severe reduction in the number of internships available. Maybe there would be no internships available in some agencies. And I think that would have a really negative impact on sort of generating the next cadre of government leaders."
"And so if it has to be that interns don't get paid, then so be it," he said.
Franklin himself could easily be a top-flight D.C. intern. Though he fits most of the profile to a T — early twenties, smart, ambitious, political nerd — he also has more obligations and experience than many of the fresh-faced students who arrive on Washington's doorstep every summer. He's married, to a school teacher, and he has a résumé packed with political experience, including organizing for the Labour Party in his native Britain, interning for Howard Dean's Democracy For America, and a gig on the staff of Equality Maryland, which successfully helped bring same-sex marriage to the state.
After that job ended, Franklin looked for work in D.C. but everyone told him the same thing: You've got to work for free in this town before you can work for money. Shortly thereafter, the Fair Pay Campaign was born.
"I was thinking about maybe going for a job on the Hill or with the government. And essentially everyone said, 'You can't go straight to a job; you've got to start as an unpaid intern.' And I said, 'I can't afford to do that. I can't afford not to eat and not live anywhere,'" he said.
In addition to pressuring the government to pay interns, Fair Pay will hire organizers to work on college campuses and push applicants to seek only internships that pay. At the same time, the group plans to help advertise nonprofit and federal internships that pay, borrowing a technique from the LGBT rights movement.
"The same way that if you're very LGBT-friendly, the Human Rights Campaign will accredit you and you can put the little equal sign on your recruitment page, we're going to do the same thing," he said. "In addition to criticizing organizations that don't pay their interns, we're going to celebrate the ones that do."
Fair Pay is backed by private donors and union money, though Franklin declined to list his backers by name. Focused on the thousands of Washington internships in the government and nonprofit sector, Fair Pay brings a national debate over internships in the private sector to the Beltway. It's a fight the interns have been winning lately: Earlier this month, a federal judge ruled that Fox Searchlight Pictures violated labor laws by not paying interns on the production of Black Swan. The intern behind that suit, 43-year-old Eric Glatt, is a Georgetown law student and therefore well-versed in the ways of the Washington internship. He's considering a seat on the board of Fair Pay and the fight for paying government interns is a fight Americans should care about.
"This is the people's business. This is the work that people have asked the government to do through the processes of voting and the government we have in place. And I think it's absolutely unconscionable to have the people's work being done with a significant staff of volunteers who basically now internalize a kind of privilege, a class privilege," he said. "Why should the prestige of a White House internship be preserved for a small sliver of society? it's just absolutely wrong."
Weaning Washington off unpaid interns "will be an uphill battle," Glatt said. "But it's possible to make a really strong case."
A White House spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment on this story.
On its website, the White House makes no bones about the rigors of its highly prestigious intern program: Applicants should be prepared to work 40 hours a week or more, and to do it for nothing more than a résumé line. The White House FAQ explains that interns are expected to be on the job "at least Monday-Friday, 9:00 AM - 6:00 PM."
As for housing, food, and a paycheck in one of the world's most expensive cities? White House interns are on their own — and they'd better be careful where their money comes from.
"White House Internships are unpaid positions," the site reads. "Any outside income, funding or housing assistance received as a White House intern must be pre-approved by the Office of the White House Counsel."
This kind of thing makes Franklin and his supporters furious. But one former White House intern, who's worked as a leader and coordinator of D.C. internship programs for 15 years, says the advocates for paying White House and other federal interns are missing the point. Eric Woodard interned in the Clinton White House and then went to work for Hillary Clinton. (He's no longer part of her team.) Woodard is the author of two books on internships and a passionate advocate for keeping unpaid internships in Washington just the way they are. His argument is simple: Internships are some of the best educational opportunities around, and making them more expensive will make them go away.
"What's nice about it is you have, what, 30,000 or so students a summer — and there's even some in the fall or spring — come to Washington, and they're learning and they're engaging in public service. But the main thing is they're learning," Woodard said. "And the lessons they learn, I would argue, are priceless."
"A lot" of members of Congress used to be interns, Woodard said. Other leaders in the government did too. Woodard said that proves his point that an unpaid internship is actually teaching people the ins and outs of the capital. A proper internship, he said, should involve working with a mentor to learn about how the government functions. The intern-season jokes prove that what interns are doing are not "jobs" in the classic sense.
"If that intern goes away, as most interns do, in August, what happens to the organization?" he said. "I look at Washington, it still functions when all these summer interns we see roaming around go away. That's evidence right there that [these interns] are not displacing anyone, they're here to learn. And that's what the government should be doing."
Woodard recognized the criticism that unpaid internships are essentially pathways for the rich and powerful toward the halls of wealth and power, but he said trying to survive an unpaid internship in Washington is really no different than the struggle faced by the underprivileged at an Ivy League school, for example. In the case of the ultra-prestigious White House internship, a poor student would get more bang for his or her limited buck on the White House grounds than on the campus of an expensive four-year school, he said.
"A kid from an underserved community might not be able to get into Harvard," he said. "But he can sure get a White House internship or a Department of Energy internship or whatever. And more than that, they don't have to pay tuition for it."
The push to pay for internships isn't coming from underserved communities, as far as Woodard sees it.
"It seems to me that a lot of people who are crying havoc about how it's discriminatory, they all look alike," he said, before making a not-so-veiled reference to Glatt. "It's not any of the people who might be victims, it's people who are going to Georgetown Law. You know, these are people — they're fine."
What happens if the advocates succeed in getting Washington's interns paid? "The vast majority of these opportunities would go away," Woodard said.
"Look, I am very sympathetic to labor, obviously. I fully support people's right to have a living wage, but I still come back to the point that it's not a labor issue. This is about education," he said. "You don't have labor in classrooms, defending students because they're getting too many papers assigned. And that's what this is. Nobody's forcing anybody to do an internship."
In his first term, Obama made some fundamental changes to the way the federal government handles interns, eliminating a Clinton-era program critics in the labor movement said allowed federal agencies to circumvent hiring rules by essentially hiring anyone at anytime to be "an intern," a catchall take on the traditional idea of internships that led to more than 100,000 workers coming into government over the course of the program's life. Obama replaced the program with one that requires interns to be accepted while they are students or within two years of graduating.
"There's really very little to distinguish them on the surface from private sector or nonprofit internships, except that Congress granted itself a special exemption from paying its interns and the law surrounding interns in other agencies is somewhat unclear," said Ross Perlin, author of the 2012 book Intern Nation. Intern rules aren't set across federal agencies, meaning applicants can't be sure exactly what to expect.
"Just as there are companies that run ethical, paid, training-oriented internships and companies that don't, there are also parts of the government that do a good job and other parts that don't," Perlin said. "It varies greatly."
Glatt, Franklin, and Perlin aren't the first to take on the federal government's intern addiction. The Campaign for America's Future, a left-leaning advocacy group based in Washington, has about 8,000 signatures on its online petition calling for the White House to pay its interns.
"We see this in the context of our larger push to raise wages and improve standards for all workers," CFAF's blog editor Isaiah Poole said.
Supporters of unpaid internship programs say that without them, Washington won't be able to get as much done. Some say forcing interns to be paid in the public sector will eliminate internships altogether, forcing agencies and nonprofits to hire full-time staffers rather than offer interested people the chance to sample various jobs with temporary programs. Franklin has heard the criticisms, but says they don't address the underlying unfairness that internships as they currently stand in Washington bring.
"If these interns are so crucial to the running of Washington, then why don't they deserve a salary?" he said.
Still, Franklin recognizes it's not easy to sell paying interns in a city used to free labor.
"I'm pissing off quite a lot of my friends," he said. "We're not a progressive organization per se; we're not associated with the progressive movement and we're certainly not partisan. But I came up in the progressive movement. None of my friends don't support our campaign, but lots of them say they can't support us publicly because their employer has unpaid interns or they themselves have unpaid interns. So, yeah, we are fighting a culture that's deeply ingrained."
Some weren’t sure what they signed on for. And as some mayoral members of Bloomberg’s group leave office, their successors are hesitant to sign up.
Via: Kena Betancur / Getty Images
New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg's gun control group Mayors Against Illegal Guns is finding it hard to keep its membership up, thanks to dozens of resignations and lost elections over the last few months.
Worse for Bloomberg, who has become one of the faces of the gun control movement: the people replacing his lost comrades aren't particularly eager to sign up with the organization, a rare group battling in the trenches against the well-organized and deep-pocketed National Rifle Association. Some appear not quite to have signed on for that level of political heat.
"The original focus, I thought, was going to be on focusing on better on enforcement of our existing laws, and if anything, we have talked about not getting involved with things like banning assault weapons and banning magazine clips," said Rockford, Il. Mayor Lawrence Morrissey, who left the group in June because, he said at a town hall meeting, the group had veered from what he originally thought it was about.
Bloomberg's group has come under fire recently for naming murder suspects, including Boston bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev, in its list of victims of gun violence and for hosting its website on New York City government servers.
According to an old version of its member list, saved on a blog dated back to late February, more than 50 mayors who were then listed on MAIG's website are no longer there. Most of the mayors whose names are no longer affiliated with the group are off the list either because they resigned or lost an election, but others have specifically asked to be removed.
BuzzFeed reached out to dozens of the replacement mayors and none of them would confirm if they planned to join the group or if they were even considering it.
Mayors Against Illegal Guns Director Mark Glaze brushed the issue off. Glaze said the group stays up to date with its mayors who leave office so they can send a letter to the newly elected mayor to try and get them on board, which he said is a process that can take a little while. Glaze said they try not to push new mayors too hard to join as they settle in to office.
"Mayors come and go," Glaze said. Adding, "We lose them on occasion, but it's going upward."
Glaze said that though MAIG has lost some mayors recently, the group is growing much faster than it is shrinking.
Nashua, N.H. mayor Donnalee Lozeau removed her name from the MAIG website when the group released an attack ad, which claimed that Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-NH), who voted against the failed Manchin-Toomey gun legislation, was misleading voters when she claimed to have supported background checks in the past.
"I simply cannot be part of an organization that chooses this course of action instead of cooperatively working with those that have proven over a lifetime of work their true intentions," Lozeau said in a statement to Nashua's the Telegraph. "I have faith that Senator Ayotte will continue to work toward finding a responsible solution relative to these issues."
Cyril Kleem of Berea, Ohio, simply opted-out without making a statement or clarifying to his staff why exactly he no longer wanted to be associated with the group. Several other currently sitting mayors names have disappeared from the list as well but were unable to be reached by BuzzFeed in time for publication.
Another former mayor, Bill Rappaport of Star Valley, Ariz., was forced out of his mayorship specifically because of his support for background checks during private sales at gun shows and over the internet. He was forced to resign when other members of the city council allegedly began waging personal attacks against him for his views. In an op-ed to the Payson Roundup, Rappaport defends his position and highlights his National Rifle Association membership.
"For the life of me, I cannot understand why anyone would stand in opposition to making it harder for felons, the mentally ill, and other potentially dangerous people to acquire guns," he wrote. "The members of the council should know that 90 percent of Arizonans are in favor of requiring background checks for all gun sales."
“Yweaaah.”
Source: youtube.com
“Of course, I’m talking about…the fly.”
Via: AP/Dorsey Shaw Photoshop
Virginia Attorney General and Republican gubernatorial candidate Ken Cuccinelli chose a much a lighter tone than usual in his latest debate recap email. The conservative politician wants to inform voters about his experiences with a fly during his Saturday morning debate with Democrat Terry McAuliffe.
"A doggone fly decided my head would be a fine landing pad!" Cuccinelli writes in an email to supporters.
"Terribly annoying," the attorney general says. "Bzzzzzzzzzzz..." he later adds.
Cuccinelli ends his email with a jab at his opponent.
"We'll have more on the debate after we digest some of the many, many whoppers Terry told and fact check organizations are already challenging," he concludes.
The text of Cuccinelli's full email in below.
Dear Friends & Fellow Virginians,
Much has been written about our recent victory in the first debate, but I wanted to share with you one little item that was noticed by very few folks other than me and Terry.
Of course, I'm talking about...the fly.
Late in the debate a doggone fly decided my head would be a fine landing pad!
You know, I prepared for a lot of things. Weird questions, lots of topics, but I never gave any thought to flies!
So, there I am thinking and talking at the same time – always a dicey proposition to begin with (but unavoidable in a debate!) – and I've got this darn fly whizzing around my head. Periodically landing which is terribly annoying.
So, while I'm thinking and talking at the same time, I'm also trying to decide things like: 'can anyone else see this fly?' Because if they can't, and I start swiping at it, I'm going to look like I've lost my mind. And if they can see it in the room, can folks see it on T.V.
And 'should I take a swipe?' What are my odds of actually getting this thing in one shot?
Bzzzzzzzzzzz...
I was fighting hard to ignore it, but it's awfully tough to do with a fly buzzing around right in your face!
As the exchanges between me and Terry continued, the result was that I did brush it off once, but otherwise didn't react to it.
I found out later from Teiro, that my friendly fly found its way to Terry too, as he took a swipe at it too.
I guess for the next debate I'll have to practice with flies buzzing around ... Yikes!
We'll have more on the debate after we digest some of the many, many whoppers Terry told and fact check organizations are already challenging!
Sincerely,
Ken Cuccinelli, II(P.S. If you missed the debate, make sure to check out my campaign's Tumblr page with debate coverage. To see it, click here.)
The “war on women” rallying cry that helped win several House and Senate races last year has gone quiet now that Democrats are in the spotlight. “The difference is that Republicans’ words and personal actions are backed up by an actual party legislative agenda that hurts women,” said an Emily’s List spokeswoman.
San Diego Mayor Bob Filner
Via: Don Bartletti/Los Angeles Times/MCT
WASHINGTON — If you ask five Democratic women about San Diego Mayor Bob Filner, accused of multiple instances of sexual harassment, you'll get five different answers.
It's a stark contrast with how it sounds when an elected Republican says or does something offensive — then Democratic women speak as one.
The "war on women" has been a charge Democrats have been making against the GOP, as the Republican House and state legislatures have taken up bills restricting abortion rights, causing many Republican men to make some notable and cringe-worthy soundbites.
When talk show host Rush Limbaugh called Sandra Fluke a "slut" for her advocacy on no co-pay birth control, Democrats from President Obama on down roundly condemned him. Former Rep. Todd Akin's now infamous remark that pregnancies from "legitimate rape" were rare became a point of debate in elections across the country in 2012.
But a string of Democrats, like Filner, either finding themselves mired in controversies of their own or trying to rebuild political careers across the country, are not finding themselves under the same kinds of attacks that Republicans have in the past.
Democrats aren't rushing to the defense of Filner, who served with many of them during his almost 20 years in the House, but they have largely avoided talking about him all together.
"The people will take care of it and I just should stay out," Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., said. "I think everybody knows the sensitivity around sexual harassment. It's very serious and I think men have to learn. He said he's asked for help. To the extent that he can get help and still be mayor, I don't know, I can't comment on that."
Filner has been accused of sexually harassing coworkers and constituents, including charges that he forcibly kissed at least two women and told a woman she would do a better job "without your panties on." Filner has denied harassment claims and said he will not resign but did apologize for having "failed to fully respect the women who work for me and with me, and that at times I have intimidated them." On Friday, the San Diego Democratic Party declined to ask Filner to step down.
Meanwhile across the country, disgraced Gov. Eliot Spitzer, who stepped down after news broke he frequented prostitutes, is attempting to launch a political comeback by running for New York City comptroller. And of course Anthony Weiner, who resigned from Congress after sending lewd messages to women on Twitter, has been doing remarkably well in the New York mayoral race.
But Democratic women from New York have likewise remained remarkably mum on the two candidacies.
New York Rep. Carolyn Maloney sarcastically said, "That's an excellent question, I'll get back to you," when asked if she thought Weiner and Spitzer hurt the Democrats' messaging with women.
"No seriously, excellent question," she said, rolling her eyes.
That's not to say they won't be throwing their political weight behind Spitzer and Weiner's opponents. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand on Monday endorsed Spitzer's opponent Scott Stringer for the comptroller job.
"Scott will fight hard for middle class families and has the temperament and judgment to be extraordinarily successful," Gillibrand said in a statement. But Gillibrand made no mention — direct or otherwise — to Spitzer's past patronage of prostitutes.
A spokeswoman for Emily's List, a group that works to elect women supportive of abortion rights, argued the difference between Filner's — or Weiner's or Spitzer's for that matter — behavior and that of Republican gaffe-prone men has to do with the legislative priorities of the GOP.
"The difference is that Republicans' words and personal actions are backed up by an actual party legislative agenda that hurts women — this stuff goes from infuriating and outrageous to genuinely frightening when they're trying to back it up with real live laws that roll back the clock to a time when women were treated as second class citizens," Emily's List Communications Director Jess McIntosh said. "Akin only mattered because Republicans had already tried to redefine rape in legislation — the Republicans gaffing all over the place when it comes to women are not outliers. They are reflective of their party's actual agenda."
Top California Democratic women — from Sen. Barbara Boxer to Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi — have hedged on explicitly calling on Filner to step down but made their disapproval with his behavior clear.
Pelosi told a reporter on Thursday to not identify Filner "as my former colleague" and said at her weekly press conference, "What goes on in San Diego is up to the people of San Diego…my colleagues who do represent San Diego have made their statements on the subject."
Boxer, who led the charge in the Senate against Republican Sen. Bob Packwood in the 1990s when he was accused of repeated sexual harassment, told BuzzFeed that the accusations against Filner "shocked" her and said that resignation "certainly should be on his plate, and he ought to consider it."
"I've watched him support all of these pro-family, pro-women policies so I was totally shocked," she said.
Rep. Maxine Waters said she "couldn't believe" the news about Filner and said there was no indication to her he behaved that way in Congress.
"I don't want to comment further," she said. "From what I've read in the news, it's crazy but I don't know much more than that."
Sue Davis, the representative in the House from San Diego, has called on Filner to step down.
"His behavior, if not illegal, is reprehensible," she said in a statement.
Liz Mair, a Republican strategist, says the fact that more Democratic women haven't called for Filner's resignation is telling.
"The relative silence has certainly been informative and shows that for many liberal 'women's rights advocates' (I use the quotation marks deliberately to denote those whose behavior shows they only engage in such advocacy selectively), politics reign over principles," she said in an email. "If this were a Republican, a lot of people who are saying little would be screaming from the rooftops and using the allegations to trash not just him, but in fact an entire political party, as grade-A misogynist."
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this post misstated the amount of time Bob Filner served in the House of Representatives. He served for almost 20 years. (7/22/13)
“He wants the government on my back and my husband off it,” Joy Behar says. Cuccinelli is asking the Supreme Court to hear a case involving Virginia’s sodomy law.
The ad for the Whitehorse City Council, which airs Mondays at 7:30 p.m. on Community Cable 9, is the most exciting thing to come out of the Yukon since the gold rush.
Source: youtube.com
The interview with Fusion’s Jorge Ramos is as awkward as you imagine it would be.
"Congressman, you recently compared immigrants to dogs," Ramos said, of the comments from May 2012. King bristled at the charge. "No I didn't, that's a mischaracterization."
Source: youtube.com
Via: Getty Images
Via: AP
“The only problem is nobody wants any pride parade.”
Police officers push a gay rights activist away from the scene of a Gay Pride event to prevent clashes with anti-gay protesters in St. Petersburg on June 29.
Via: Alexander Demianchuk / Reuters
WASHINGTON — People in the West proposing a boycott of the Sochi Olympics due to Russia's news anti-gay laws should seek psychiatric help, the leader of a pro-Kremlin think tank in New York said on Monday.
"I think that people who propose these kinds of ideas, they need to go to examine their head at a psychiatrist's," said Andranik Migranyan, the director of the Institute for Democracy and Cooperation, in an interview with BuzzFeed. "Because one must be absolutely crazy to propose these kind of ideas, because the Olympics have nothing to do with laws Duma passed."
Calls for the international community to mobilize against these laws have multiplied in the run-up to the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi, Russia. Actor Harvey Fierstein wrote an op-ed in The New York Times Sunday arguing that "with Russia about to hold the Winter Games in Sochi, the country is open to pressure."
"American and world leaders must speak out against Mr. Putin's attacks and the violence they foster," Fierstein wrote. "The Olympic Committee must demand the retraction of these laws under threat of boycott."
Migranyan, who acts in his capacity with the Kremlin-approved Institute as an unofficial spokesman for Putin's policies, dismissed the argument that Russia's new laws — which include laws against "homosexual propaganda" and a law that would allow Russian police to arrest tourists suspected of being gay — are anti-gay.
"In Russia, nobody is persecuting homosexuals," Migranyan said. "In Russia, overwhelming majority of people consider that they have to live as they would like to live and leave others alone, and don't impose their way of life on the others."
"Under Soviets we had very strict regulation of this area, homosexuality was a criminal activity," Migranyan said. "Now you don't have anything like that in Russia."
The meaning of the laws — which are credited with sparking a recent wave of anti-gay violence — he said, is "don't try to impose your way of life and do propaganda of your way of life. And if anyone is perceiving this another way, they must check his head."
Migranyan argued that the 1980 boycott of the Moscow Olympics proves the facetiousness of arguments like Fierstein's.
"That was Soviet Union, communist totalitarian regime, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan," he said. "A great great event for all the globe and the impact of this invasion could be enormous — that was why there was a mobilization of the Western world."
"The people who are trying to push forward these kinds of crazy ideas, they have no idea what's going on in Russia, what is public mood, what Russian authorities are trying to regulate," Migranyan said. "That's why they really need to go to doctor."
"At this moment Russia is one of the most free countries in the sense of respecting every kind of right, every kind of minorities," Migranyan said. "The only problem is nobody wants any pride parade because as I said, nobody wants any propaganda of any way of life which one part of society wants to impose on the others. Leave us alone and we'll leave you alone."
Correction: The Moscow Olympics took place in 1980. (7/22/13)
Married on July 11 in Maryland, John Arthur is in hospice care and “certain to die soon.” He and his husband have sued to ensure their marriage is recognized by Ohio officials at Arthur’s death.
Via: Photo courtesy of Jim Obergefell
A federal judge in Ohio ordered state officials Monday to recognize the marriage of two men that was performed in Maryland on the death certificate of an Ohio resident in hospice care who the judge says "is certain to die soon."
"The end result here and now is that the local Ohio Registrar of death certificates is hereby ORDERED not to accept for recording a death certificate for John Arthur that does not record Mr. Arthur's status at death as 'married' and James Obergefell as his 'surviving spouse,'" Judge Timothy Black wrote in granting the couple a temporary restraining order Monday. The order is in effect until 5 p.m. Aug. 5, unless the court extends the order at a later date.
"By treating lawful same sex marriages differently than it treats lawful opposite sex
marriages," the judge concluded, Ohio's 2004 constitutional amendment banning recognition of same-sex couples' marriages and Ohio's statute addressing the same issue "likely violate[] the United States Constitution."
The couple's attorney, Al Gerhardstein, said in a statement, "This order is a major step on the march toward marriage equality in Ohio."
Addressing the constitutional question, Black explained, "Although the law has long recognized that marriage and domestic relations are matters generally left to the states, the restrictions imposed on marriage by states, however, must nonetheless comply with the [U.S.] Constitution."
To that end, the court examined the Supreme Court's decision striking down part of the Defense of Marriage Act this June in United States v. Windsor, the 1996 decision in Romer v. Evans, and in other decisions addressing differential treatment found to be unconstitutional under the Constitution's guarantee of equal protection of the laws.
Looking at Ohio's bans on recognizing same-sex couples' out-of-state marriages, while acknowledging its recognition of the marriages of opposite-sex couples who would not be allowed to marry in Ohio, Black concluded, "The purpose served by treating same-sex married couples differently than opposite-sex married couples is the same improper purpose that failed in Windsor and in Romer: 'to impose inequality' and to make gay citizens unequal under the law."
According to the order, Obergefell and Arthur live in Cincinnati, Ohio, and "have been living together in a committed and intimate relationship for more than twenty years." The order also notes "they were very recently legally married in the state of Maryland pursuant to the laws of Maryland recognizing same sex marriage."
The order notes that Arthur is dying of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), which prompted the couple to fly to Maryland on July 11 to get married.
As Black put it, the couple "traveled to Maryland in a special jet equipped with medical equipment and a medical staff necessary to serve Mr. Arthur's needs, whereupon Plaintiffs were married in the jet as it sat on the tarmac in Anne Arundel County, Maryland. They returned to Cincinnati that same day."
The lawsuit seeking to have the couple's marriage recognized was filed against Gov. John Kasich and other state and local officials on July 19.
Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine's office defended the state's laws in filings with the court on Monday, but Cincinnati city lawyers representing Dr. Camille Jones, the vital statistics registrar for the city, declined to defend the law, telling the court, "The City will not defend Ohio's discriminatory ban on same-sex marriages,but the City's vital statistics registrar is bound to follow Ohio law until that law is changed or overturned."
Asked about the court's issuance of the order on Monday evening, Kasich spokesman Rob Nichols told BuzzFeed, "We don't comment on pending litigation other than to say the that the governor believes that marriage is between a man and a woman."
[Updated at 6:55 p.m. with Kasich spokesman comment, at 7:10 p.m. with additional legal analysis, and at 8:20 p.m. with comment from the plaintiffs' attorney. Update at 12:15 a.m. Tuesday with information about the other filings.]
“I think that what John Kerry faces now is even maybe more formidable than it was back in those days.”
Former President Jimmy Carter said Monday that he didn't think Israel-Palestinian peace is easier today than when he was president. Carter said so while participating in a discussion on the status of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process as well as the conflict in Syria hosted by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
"I don't think it's easier now than it was when I was there," Carter said when asked about there being possibly more resistance now to things that were understood in the past as conditions to peace talks. "You have to remember that when I become president there was no demand on me to be engaged in peace talks. There had been four terrible wars during the previous 25 years. And we felt that when Menachem Begin was elected that was the end of the possibility for peace talks. I found that Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin were strong enough, and courageous enough, and wise enough to reach an agreement. So we just proceeded to make an effort."
Carter continued, speculating what John Kerry faced today could be more
"formidable" than what he faced as president.
"I think that what John Kerry faces now is even maybe more formidable than it was back in those days," Carter said. "I can't say that for sure, but it's hard to judge, both times are very difficult. The key issue is whether the Palestinian people and the Israeli people want peace enough to prevail on their leaders 'lets make some compromise for peace.'"
The disgraced former New York governor released a new video on Monday in which he directly addressed the prostitution scandal that led to his resignation.
"Look, I failed big time. I hurt a lot of people." Spitzer concedes in the video. "When you dig yourself a hole, you can either lie in it the rest of your life, or do something positive. That's why I'm running."
Michigan libertarian Justin Amash is getting results in the House, and that may translate into a Senate bid.
Rep. Justin Amash
Via: Carlos Osorio / AP
WASHINGTON — Rep. Thomas Massie likes to joke that he calls his Michigan colleague Justin Amash "Mr. Speaker."
Massie cast the sole vote for Amash for House speaker back in January, and proudly wears a "LIBERTY" pin on his lapel — a gift from Amash — under his official member pin
"He's only got to get 217 more votes," Massie, a Kentucky Republican, said laughing.
While he may not be close to becoming speaker of the House, Amash has slowly but surely become one of the more prominent Republicans in the rebellious wing of the House conference, as evidenced Monday when he effectively forced the actual Speaker of the House John Boehner to allow a vote on his amendment to partially defund the National Security Agency as part of the Department of Defense appropriations process.
The revelations that the NSA had been collecting the phone and internet data of millions of Americans en masse has given Amash a prime opportunity to move forward with some of his most important priorities.
Boehner and Amash had been negotiating over the amendment and Amash had threatened to vote against a procedural vote on the bill — and bring some 20 Republican votes along to defeat it — if his amendment did not get a vote.
"I would be very surprised if you could get a Department of Defense appropriations rule through this house with out a reasonable amendment like this being allowed on the floor," Amash said last week in an interview with BuzzFeed.
But Amash appears to have gotten what he wanted and in turn proved himself a powerful leader in the Republican conference — enough that he forced leadership to take him seriously.
"We're optimistic that his amendment will pass, and if it does, it will give him the opportunity to vote for final passage," said Amash spokesman Will Adams.
That attitude didn't go over well with leadership aides, who bristled at the notion Amash had extracted something from his leaders. "The leaders have been clear with members whose amendments are being made in order that they are expected to vote for the bill on final passage if their amendments are adopted," a leadership aide said.
Michael Steel, a spokesman for Boehner, said the speaker "does not support the Amash amendment."
Since his arrival in Washington as part of the 2010 GOP tidal wave, Amash has not only been a consistent thorn in the side of his own leadership, which view him on good days with suspicion, to the point they booted him from the budget committee in December.
Amash said his beef with Republican leadership isn't personal, even though they kicked him off the budget committee last year. He tweeted out a thanks to John Boehner Monday for "working diligently toward resolving significant concerns over the amendment process w/r/t #NSA."
"There's no personal tension, we do have disagreements on where we need to go and I think they have a deep misunderstanding of the Republican grassroots," he said.
Another bill he introduced with Democratic Rep. John Conyers to defund portions of the NSA, similar in language to the DoD amendment, now has 43 co-sponsors. Members who've signed on include some of the House's most liberal and most conservative representatives.
Political observers are closely watching what exactly Amash's next move will be. He's been traveling around Michigan, out of his district, meeting with fundraisers further fueling speculation he'll run for Senate. He's not quite sure if he'll end up running, but there's no question he's seriously weighing it.
"Yes, I'm considering it," he said in an interview with BuzzFeed. "I am confident I would win the primary, but I think the general election is highly dependent on national mood. If the national mood favors Republicans, then a state a like Michigan is in play and can be won. If it's neutral, I think Michigan becomes difficult for any Republican.
"But I certainly believe, based on all my interactions in the state and in my community that a Republican like me has the best chance of winning the Senate seat."
A potential Senate bid could ruffle national party feathers: Establishment Republicans haven't exactly been shy about criticizing Amash. Recently Karl Rove called him "the most liberal Republican" in the House, which prompted Amash to quickly tweet out a link showing he voted with Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi the least often of any Republican member.
There are no indications that Amash plans to quit throwing punches at what he disparagingly calls the "establishment" GOP.
"Those who are in the establishment are totally out of touch with what's happening on the ground, totally out of touch with our communities, and don't understand what republicans think in today's world," he said.
"People want a congressman to be honest with them about what's going on here. They are sick and tired of the lies, the deceit, the condescension, the arrogance. They want someone to tell the truth to them. Even those who might not agree with my positions on particular legislation appreciate the fact that I'm transparent and consistent, and principled rather than partisan."
