Last Call For Another Secession Session

Angry rural counties are at it again, this time in upstate New York, where towns in at least 4 counties want to leave the Empire State and become part of Pennsylvania over Gov. Cuomo's statewide fracking ban.

Fifteen towns in upstate New York have expressed interest in secession after the state banned fracking, according to an interest group researching the economic benefits of such a move.

The Upstate New York Towns Association said 15 towns expressed interest breaking away to join Pennsylvania, which allows fracking, according to television station WBNG. Although the group declined to name specific towns involved in the effort, WBNG reported the towns are located in Broome, Delaware, Tioga and Sullivan counties. 

Those counties are located in or near New York's natural gas-rich Southern Tier, which borders Pennsylvania. 

The secession seed apparently was planted by Conklin, N.Y. town supervisor Jim Finch (R) back in December when New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) announced a ban on the gas extraction technique. Conklin is part of the towns association. 

"The Southern Tier is desolate," Finch told WBNG. "We have no jobs and no income. The richest resource we have is in the ground." 

New York state Sen. Majority Deputy Leader Tom Libous (R) also included a question on secession in a recent survey of his constituents. 

"After the one-two punch to our community from the recent casino and gas drilling decisions, my office received many emails, phone calls and messages from constituents calling for a Southern Tier secession from New York State," Libous said in a statement to WBNG. "While getting my constituents' opinion on spending the $5 billion surplus was our top priority, I thought a question on secession should also be included in the survey."

Boy if people figure out they can just up and secede over every little state law, there's not going to be very many states left in this whole United States of America thing.  Note too that this didn't become a problem until president 44 came along.

Just because you lost the vote in a Democracy doesn't mean you can just up and leave, guys.  No, I take that back, you can leave, and you can move.

So, whatever.

Patriot Games

Glenn Reynolds may be pulling one of the better Poe’s Law fast ones here, but it sure looks like the guy is saying (in his always baffling weekly USA Today column, how he keeps that I’ll never know) that, rather than questioning President Obama’s patriotism, it may be time to do something about those unpatriotic liberal voters who put him into power twice.

Perhaps we need to pay closer attention to these questions where presidents are concerned, but perhaps we should go a step farther: In a country like ours, where voters reign supreme, it seems as if concern about the patriotism of rulers ought to also apply to voters.

Science fiction writer Robert Heinlein, in his famous novel Starship Troopers, envisioned a society where voters, too, had to demonstrate their patriotism before being allowed to vote. In his fictional society, the right to vote came only after some kind of dangerous public service — in the military, as a volunteer in dangerous medical experiments, or in other ways that demonstrated a willingness to sacrifice personally for the common good. The thought was that such voters would be more careful, and less selfish, in their voting. 

So when the five-day wonder of questioning Barack Obama’s patriotism is over, perhaps we should address another question: How patriotic is the electorate? And how long can we survive as a nation if the answer is “not very”? And we should proceed from there.

Actually bringing up Starship Troopers as an example of a voting society and implying in the next paragraph that maybe having voting and citizenship be earned somehow by “patriots” is so ridiculously and completely peg-the-needle fascist that I honestly believe Reynolds is pulling our leg here, but there’s not anything in the rest of the column that makes me think this is satire or parody.

I think he might actually be serious.

I mean isn’t this the next logical step for the party that’s trying to limit the number of people who are allowed to vote, those trying to depress the electorate to the point of apathy leaving only the true believers to cast ballots, who believes the Voting Rights Act is an outdated relic, and is actively blocking any attempt to try to update it for the 21st century? Why not open fascism where only the right people are allowed to vote? That would certainly prevent that whole “demography as destiny” problem the GOP is facing, yes?

I dunno, nothing really surprises me anymore about these guys.

Another Nail In First Look's Coffin

First Look Media, the increasingly silly broken toy of tech billionaire Pierre Omidyar, helmed by Glenn Greenwald, continues to fall apart.  This time it's the loss of reporter Ken Silverstein, who left because of "management's incompetence and bad faith."  Here are some of Ken's Facebook posts on the issue from this weekend, from Jim Romanesko:

February 20 at 10:26pm
You know what’s cool about being a former employee of First Look/The Intercept? That Glenn Greenwald, Jeremy Scahill, Betsy Reed and Pierre Omidyar all believe in Free Speech and the First Amendment so they won’t mind my writing about my time working for and with them. Tentative title: “Welcome to the Slaughterhouse.”

February 20 at 11:39pm
I have to go to sleep soon but before I forget, you know what my favorite part of working for First Look was? Last year’s holiday party when two of our fiercely independent staffers “interviewed” Pierre Omidyar and asked him what he did in the morning. Since you are all hanging on the edge of your seats, he drinks tea and reads stuff, the NYT and other things and then The Intercept was about #5 (he claims). And for the record, I boycotted this embarrassing affair and sat in a conference room with two other people, one who no longer works there and one who may or may not. It’s hard to keep track. What a joke.

February 21 at 11:34am
Wow, it is amazing how good it feels not to work for The Intercept. And what feels even better is the incredible support I have received from friends and editors (some editors who are friends). I have lots of work lined up and the day could not be better. Also, just one last comment on First Look Media: The fact that that it hired so many talented people to create Racket and spent millions of dollars on it and in the end fired everyone and Racket never published a single story is probably the greatest squandering of money and example of criminal ineptitude in the history of modern journalism. Again, what a pathetic joke. Oh yeah, I was not originally hired to work at Racket and didn’t get fired, so I am not including myself in the group of “talented” people I mentioned above. Thanks again everyone.

February 22 at 10:24am
So this will be my last post about First Look. First, let me say I’ve had a great weekend enjoying by status as a former FL employee and hanging out with my son and talking to friends and otherwise having a fine time. Though it may appear otherwise, I am not blindly lashing out at FL. My prior posts reflect the anger and disillusionment I feel towards the company, and my anger and disillusionment is shared by many former employees. I am one of a many employees who was hired under what were essentially false pretenses; we were told we would be given all the financial and other support we needed to do independent, important journalism, but instead found ourselves blocked at every step of the way by management’s incompetence and bad faith….

Ouch.

Can't say you weren't warned.  Those of us who saw through Double G years ago knew what he was about: monetizing attacking the Obama administration from the left.  Snowden was his chance of a lifetime, and since then he's been coasting on fumes, realizing that he's being used by any number of people (and maybe the Russians) to make Obama and America look bad.

It's got to suck, but what has The Intercept done except fail?  Look at the people who left without writing a single decent article, who were driven out and lied to.  They all have the same story, like Silverstein does, time and time again.

That's a serious problem for First Look and at this point they have no credibility left.

StupidiNews!

• "Birdman" took home Best Picture and Best Director Oscars last night taking four total awards, matching "Grand Budapest Hotel".
• Hundreds of inmates from Willacy County Correctional Facility in Texas are being relocated to other prisons after Friday's riots damaged heating and cooling systems.
• Ukrainian officials say they cannot withdraw heavy artillery from the battlefield under terms of last week's ceasefire because pro-Russian rebels are still attacking their positions.
• US banks have now bought more than $2 trillion in US treasury bonds rather than loan money out to customers, prompting worry over the lending market.
• LA schools superintendent Ramon Cortines says the district's project to provide tablets for all students is officially dead.

Last Call For Plus Ca Change

It'll be 2007 for the next two years for these Republican assholes.

Wondering if Obama's Jakarta elementary education Ages 6-10) led him to believe that Islam was woven into the US from the beginning.
— Rep. Jeff Duncan (@RepJeffDuncan) February 21, 2015

They can do this whenever the narrative looks like Obama might accomplish something, and voters will never punish them for it.

Scientific Objectivity, For A Price

It's difficult to pass your research on climate change as "ground-breaking" or "the smoking gun" when you're taking millions from right-wing think tanks and corporations that want to see all of climate science and 98% of climate scientists "proven guilty of fraud".

For years, politicians wanting to block legislation on climate change have bolstered their arguments by pointing to the work of a handful of scientists who claim that greenhouse gases pose little risk to humanity.

One of the names they invoke most often is Wei-Hock Soon, known as Willie, a scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who claims that variations in the sun’s energy can largely explain recent global warming. He has often appeared on conservative news programs, testified before Congress and in state capitals, and starred at conferences of people who deny the risks of global warming.

But newly released documents show the extent to which Dr. Soon’s work has been tied to funding he received from corporate interests.

He has accepted more than $1.2 million in money from the fossil-fuel industry over the last decade while failing to disclose that conflict of interest in most of his scientific papers. At least 11 papers he has published since 2008 omitted such a disclosure, and in at least eight of those cases, he appears to have violated ethical guidelines of the journals that published his work. 

The documents show that Dr. Soon, in correspondence with his corporate funders, described many of his scientific papers as “deliverables” that he completed in exchange for their money. He used the same term to describe testimony he prepared for Congress.

Though Dr. Soon did not respond to questions about the documents, he has long stated that his corporate funding has not influenced his scientific findings.

This guy is the 2015 equivalent of the studies by cigarette companies that show that smoking doesn't cause cancer.  At this point that's a laughable scientific stance t have on smoking, and hopefully this is the beginning of "climate change is a hoax" being just as laughable.

The Erasure Of Race

FOX News contributor Juan Williams takes to the WSJ to write a paean to Justice Clarence Thomas entitled "America's Most Influential Thinker on Race".  It's true in the same way Hurricane Katrina was America's Most Influential Hurricane on Race.

Justice Thomas, who has been on the court nearly a quarter-century, remains a polarizing figure—loved by conservatives and loathed by liberals. But his “free”-thinking legal opinions are opening new roads for the American political debate on racial justice.

His opinions are rooted in the premise that the 14th Amendment—guaranteeing equal rights for all—cannot mean different things for different people. As he wrote in Fisher v. University of Texas (2013), he is opposed to “perpetual racial tinkering” by judges to fix racial imbalance and inequality at schools and the workplace. Yet he never contends racism has gone away. The fact that a 2001 article in Time magazine about him was headlined “Uncle Tom Justice” reminds us that racism stubbornly persists.

His only current rival in the race debate is President Obama. At moments of racial controversy the nation’s first black president has used his national pulpit to give voice to black fear that racial stereotyping led to tragedy. But that is as far as he is willing to go. His attorney general, Eric Holder , has gone further by calling Americans “cowards” when it comes to discussing race. And some critics have chastised him even for that.

Justice Thomas, meanwhile, is reshaping the law and government policy on race by virtue of the power of his opinions from the bench. Thurgood Marshall, the first African-American on the Supreme Court, stood up as a voice insisting on rights for black people. Justice Thomas, the second black man on the court, takes a different tack. He stands up for individual rights as a sure blanket of legal protection for everyone, including minorities.

Thomas has taken it upon himself to address racism by dismantling the civil rights era protections of the law over the last 50 years and saying "those were training wheels, you have to succeed on your own."  This, he argues, will magically create the respect from white America necessary to rid the country of racism.

This only works of course if you believe that the direct victims of racism (which Thomas does absolutely recognizes as still existing in America) are white people, and that the corrective actions of the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act and the Fair Housing Act other legislative fixes were the problem for the last two generations, and in no way part of the solution.

Thomas has many like-minded comrades on SCOTUS when it comes to this with the goal of putting America back to 1965, and that the Civil Rights era was a massive error, a huge mistake which has damaged America for decades.

Rather, Thomas's solution is simple: the burden to rise above racism is placed upon minorities to simply be better and to succeed in spite of it, solely through personal responsibility. If racism exists (and Thomas again admits it does) then your duty as a black or Latino or Asian or other minority is to overcome it.  That's all upon you to choose to do so.

If that sounds insane, and it sounds like "Hey, Thomas is absolving all of white America of racism even though he knows it exists in 2015" and "Why are minorities the bad guys here?" then you're correct.  The free market will fix this.  It's dangerous thinking, and yet the evidence is pretty solid that the Civil Rights era in America is ending, thanks in large part to Thomas.

Last Call For Just Not Like Us

Jonathan Greenberg at the New York Observer puts forth one of the most obnoxious and truly stupid theories on radical Islam that I've ever had the misfortune to read, so to spare you I'll summarize it:

Bell Curve for Muslims.

The Obama Administration believes that people everywhere share the same basic values as Western civilization: we all negotiate in good faith to seek positive-sum solutions (this is the fallacy that drives administration policy on Iran), we all prefer an uncomfortable peace to war, and we are all more or less motivated according to Maszlow’s hierarchy. This is Prof. Landes’ meaning of cognitive egocentrism. Despite tremendous evidence pointing to the fact–and it is a fact–that the people we are fighting are zero-sum barbarians who glory in brutal war motivated by religious fanaticism, our leaders are more comfortable thinking that, deep down, they’d be happier manning the check-out lane at Wal-Mart.

It is, of course, terribly out of fashion to acknowledge that different people in different societies are different. Far more fashionable is the obnoxious bigotry that everyone–yes, everyone–is pretty much exactly like us! Hurrah!

Pause.

Rewind.

"It is bigotry to believe that Muslims share any values at all with people of the West."  If that odious argument sounds disturbingly familiar, replace "Muslims" with "the blacks" and you have the entire Southern Strategy of the last 50 years. Greenberg calls his opinion "fact".  It's ridiculous on its face.  And then he continues.

Fashionable or not, we can no longer afford leaders who refuse to believe their lying eyes about the motivations and values of radical Islamists. Are there deep-seated reasons for cultures becoming what they are? Of course. But we can’t go back to school every time someone beheads one of our journalists. We can’t have leaders who agonize about root causes and long-term economic development while Coptic Christians are butchered by the dozen.

The enemy, of course, hears our assessment of the “root causes” and cackles maniacally. Even if it doesn’t represent administration policy, just once I’d like to hear something from the State Department that indicated an understanding that people in Tehran and Damascus and Sanaa and Gaza are listening.

Marie Harf is, of course, only a mouthpiece for Administration policy. What she said, while insipid, is only dangerous insofar as it reflects the public and private thinking of the Obama foreign policy team. Until our leaders start seeing the world as it is instead of as they wish it were, we’d better start killing our way out of this war. Because our cognitive egocentrism is preventing us from winning in other, preferable ways.

Got that?  Treating Muslims as human beings instead of vermin is making the war worse.

Let that sink in for a moment.

Like I said, utterly ridiculous nonsense.

Splitting Hairs In Colorado

Police have arrested a suspect in last month's bombing of an NAACP office in Colorado Springs, but the suspect is saying he wasn't targeting that office(?) KUSA in Colorado Springs:

Investigators are looking into the possibility a tax preparation business may have been the target of the bombing as opposed to the NAACP.

Thaddeus Murphy, 44, of Colorado Springs has been arrested by federal law enforcement officials, but so far charges haven't been officially filed against him.

9Wants to Know has learned Murphy was taken into federal custody sometime on Thursday.

According to high-level sources close to the investigation, Murphy's home was searched, and investigators found items that connect to the bombing.

The FBI, ATF and Colorado Springs law enforcement officers were seen executing a search warrant in Colorado Springs on Thursday.

Murphy told investigators he intended to target the tax preparation company and not the NAACP during an interview, according to sources.

An affidavit said Murphy was targeting an accountant named Steve Dehaven who "wouldn't return to him his tax records from 2006 to the present and wouldn't return his phone calls." The affidavit says Murphy had to file bankruptcy and needed the records due to his financial issues.

The affidavit claimed he "flipped out" and "built the pipe bomb as a warning."

The right seems to think this is now okay and that the real bad guys here are anyone who "jumped to the conclusion" that the NAACP office was the target, despite the fact that the NAACP office was indeed damaged.  You know, I'm the bad guy here rather than the guy who planted a pipe bomb and a can of gas.

Apparently being thought of as racist is worst than a terrorist act of using an explosive on a place of business in order to terrorize someone.  "As a warning". 

Funny, entirely not-racist world we live in, huh.

"MSN Be-See"-ing Ya

The good news is Ronan Farrow's awful MSNBC show is gone.  The bad news is so is Joy-Ann Reid's show, and the Sword of Phil Griffin is set to fall on Chris Hayes, Al Sharpton and more as NBC's corporate master Comcast no longer wants to offend conservatives with pesky nonsense like "liberal opinions".

It was hardly a surprise Thursday when ratings-challenged MSNBC announced the cancellation of the poor-performing afternoon programs hosted by Ronan Farrow and Joy Reid after less than a year, with veteran news anchor Thomas Roberts stepping in to preside over the two-hour block from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m.

Until a permanent replacement is named for Roberts’ 5:30 a.m. program Way Too Early, the 6 a.m. Morning Joe hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski will temporarily take up the slack by starting a half-hour earlier.

But according to knowledgeable sources at the Comcast-owned cable network, Thursday’s moves were only the opening salvo in a wider programming shakeup.

In the relatively near term, two well-placed sources predicted to The Daily Beast, Chris Hayes will be relieved of his weak-performing 8 p.m. show All In,to be replaced by the current 9 p.m. host of The Rachel Maddow Show, while a talent search is underway to fill the prime-time slot to be vacated by Maddow.

An MSNBC spokesperson—who tried put a happy face on the demotions with talk of prime-time specials and “multiplatform” national reporting for the still-employed Farrow and Reid—declined to comment on the Hayes-Maddow scenario.

In the longer term, these sources said, the Rev. Al Sharpton—a larger-than-life personality who attracts a 35 percent African-American audience but continues, after 3½ years of nightly practice, to wrestle with his Teleprompter—could eventually be moved from his weeknight 6 p.m. slot to a weekend time period, as MNSBC President Phil Griffin attempts to reverse significant viewership slides by accentuating straight news over left-leaning opinion.

“Everybody in the food chain from top to bottom understands that the Olbermann era is over,” said an MSNBC source, referring to the glory days during George W. Bush’s administration when incendiary liberal Keith Olbermann regularly attracted a million viewers—many of them seeking refuge from White House and Republican talking points.

The MSNBC source said, “Going left was a brilliant strategy while it lasted and made hundreds of millions of dollars for Comcast, but now it doesn’t work anymore...The goal is to move away from left-wing TV.”

MSNBC had moved away from left-wing TV when they got rid of Olbermann and the cold hard fact is there's no place on the entirely of the cable spectrum for smart, nuanced news that a FOX News nation will tolerate.

Here's the bigger issue: TV news itself is all but dead.  My generation is cutting the cable, and anyone younger than me doesn't watch TV news at all.  Hell, I stopped watching Chris Hayes and Rachel Maddow years ago, because I was sick of them entertaining guests who constantly attacked President Obama.  Hell, Hayes should have never been moved from his "Up" time slot on weekend mornings.

We'll see what happens, but I get almost none of my news from cable TV anymore.

And here's a free hint, MSNBC.  The real problem is Phil Griffin.

Last Call For America Haters, Unite

Kevin Williamson over at National Review neatly gets around the thorny race issues that Rudy Giuliani questioning the patriotism of President Obama brings up by arguing that the patriotism of any and every liberal must be questioned, ergo it can't be racist to do so.

Does Barack Obama love his country? Call me a rube for saying so, but it’s a fair question. 

To ask the question is not the same as venting the familiar swamp gasses: that he’s a foreigner, at heart if not in fact; that he’s a Manchurian candidate sent to undermine the republic; that he’s a secret Marxist or secret jihadist sympathizer; etc. Put it this way: Why would anybody who sees the world the way Barack Obama does love America?  

For the progressive, there is very little to love about the United States. Washington, Jefferson, Madison? A bunch of rotten slaveholders, hypocrites, and cowards even when their hearts were in the right places. The Declaration of Independence? A manifesto for the propertied classes. The Constitution? An artifact of sexism and white supremacy. The sacrifices in the great wars of the 20th century? Feeding the poor and the disenfranchised into the meat-grinder of imperialism. The gifts of Carnegie, Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, Morgan, Astor? Blood money from self-aggrandizing robber barons. 

And this lovely pile of ad nauseum nonsense ends up in an indictment of liberals themselves.

Barack Obama has a great, big, heaping dose of Holden Caulfield in him. That and chutzpah: When as a candidate he was in trouble because of his association with the racist lunacy of the Reverend Wright, he responded by giving the American public at large a lecture on racism and its culpability therein, while his minions began proclaiming that the only reason to oppose this politician with the racist associates was — presto-change-o! — racism. But if you believe that the system is basically rotten, that the society that produced that system is basically rotten, that the game is rigged, that your opponents are all phonies and hypocrites, then what’s a little intellectual dishonesty in the service of the common good? There is very little that a man with Barack Obama’s views and proclivities should love about the country, beyond the fact that its people are so vulnerable to insipid sentimentality that they twice elected him president.

And boom, Rudy Giuliani is absolved.  He can't be racist because all liberals hate America, so saying that Barack Obama, being a liberal, hates his country is not an opinion but fact, along with the fact that 66 million or so people who voted for him also hate America.  We're not a part of Williamson's America, and never will be.  We'll always be "the other", to be hated, shunned, pitied, and exterminated.

Nothing's changed since 2001 for the NRO set.  It's always "We're taking America back!" for them.

Still Terrified Of Israel

Greg Sargent notes that while Democrats overwhelmingly see Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu's maneuver to join the GOP in attacking the President as unacceptable, only 23 House Democrats have signed a letter calling for a delay in Bibi's visit and big name House Dems aren't anywhere near it:

Missing from this list are House Democratic members and leaders whose voices could make a real difference here: Foreign Affairs ranking Dem Eliot Engel; Whip Steny Hoyer; DNC chairperson Debbie Wasserman Schultz. 

All in all, the failure of more Democrats to sign this letter suggests many still fear the politics of appearing out of sync with whatever Israel wants. It’s true that a number of Democrats have said they will skip the speech. But many of those have clarified that this isn’t due to any organized boycott, and far more are attending. And, really, all the talk of a “boycott” is misdirection. It shouldn’t be all that difficult for Democrats to call for amere delay in this speech, while rebuffing efforts to portray such a move as “anti-Israel,” given how egregious the circumstances surrounding this event really are. 

To be sure, given the aforementioned Democratic skittishness, the fact that two dozen Democrats have signed this letter does suggest that a political space is opening up for Democrats to feel like it might not necessarily be suicidal to occasionally appear at odds with Israel, even if it is a small one. 

But still, Congressional Democrats face a problem here: What are they going to do now? The CNN poll I referenced above strongly suggests the Democratic base is not happy with the fact that Netanyahu will be going forward with this speech, which has been portrayed by many commentators as forcing Congressional Democrats to choose between Netanyahu and Obama. If most are not willing to call for a delay in the speech, what will they prove willing to do? If they do nothing, how do they explain that to rank and file Democratic voters?

Very, very few House Democrats, only 23 out of 188, are willing to publicly go to bat for their own President on this.  The others are sitting on their damn hands, and yes, that includes Nancy Pelosi. There should be 188 signatures on that letter, or at least 100.  But 23?  That's only 12% asking for a delay of something that according to that CNN poll, 81% of Democrats are totally against.

Sargent implies at the very least an astonishing lack of support for the President from his own party, and in the worst case this is outright cowardice from Dems in Congress.

Again.

The Dumbing Down Continues

Oklahoma Tea Party nutjobs want to end AP History courses in the state because they teach too much of the bad parts of history, like that messy land grab from Native Americans and all that slavery and civil rights crap, and instead want to teach real US history, like the Ten Frigging Commandments.

An Oklahoma bill banning Advanced Placement U.S. History would also require schools to instruct students in a long list of “foundational documents,” including the Ten Commandments, two sermons and three speeches by Ronald Reagan. 

The bill, authored by Oklahoma Rep. Dan Fisher, designates a total of 58 documents that “shall form the base level of academic content for all United States History courses offered in the schools in the state.” Many of the texts are uncontroversial and undoubtedly covered by the Advanced Placement U.S. History course, such as the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence and Gettysburg address. But the bill also has an ideological and religious bent. In addition to 3 speeches by Reagan, the curriculum as includes a speech by George W. Bush but nothing from any Democratic president since Lyndon Johnson.

Fisher’s bill was approved by the Education committee on an 11-4 vote.

And yes, those "foundational documents" include the Ten Commandments, as part of "Objects of historical significance that have formed and influenced the United States legal or governmental system and that exemplify the development of the rule of law".  Also, let's keep in mind that the bill would in fact form the basis of all US history taught in the state at all levels, and that the list of approved documents includes George Kennan's infamous "The Sources of Soviet Conduct", which was written post-WWII and ended up being the basis of the Cold War "containment" policy against the USSR.

It's great stuff if you want to raise a state full of conservative think-tank weenies.  Not so much for an objective view of United States history, but apparently Oklahoma Tea Party types are going to decide what these kids are going to learn, dammit!

StupidiNews

• UN officials say Houthi rebels in Yemen who have already overthrown the government there are willing to negotiate in order to prevent a civil war in the country.
• After a federal judge issued a same-sex marriage license to a lesbian couple in Texas, the state's Supreme Court stepped in to stop any other same-sex marriage from happening on Thursday.
• Greece and EU official both say they are now close to reaching a bailout deal for Athens as the clock ticks down to the expiration of existing bailout money at the end of the month.
• The US says a spring offensive by the Iraqi army to retake the city of Mosul could come as early as April if training and conditions are favorable.
• The newest media app on Microsoft's Xbox One console is from ABC News, offering live news, video, and broadcasts on the platform.

A Clown, A Jerk, And 9/11

Rudy Giuliani is still a terrible person, just in case you forgot that fact for a sec.

Rudy Giuliani went straight for the jugular Wednesday night during a private group dinner here featuring Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker by openly questioning whether President Barack Obama “loves America.” 

The former New York mayor, speaking in front of the 2016 Republican presidential contender and about 60 right-leaning business executives and conservative media types, directly challenged Obama’s patriotism, discussing what he called weak foreign policy decisions and questionable public remarks when confronting terrorists. 

“I do not believe, and I know this is a horrible thing to say, but I do not believe that the president loves America,” Giuliani said during the dinner at the 21 Club, a former Prohibition-era speakeasy in midtown Manhattan. “He doesn’t love you. And he doesn’t love me. He wasn’t brought up the way you were brought up and I was brought up through love of this country.”

Well I don't love Rudy Giuliani either, you know.

How you know President Obama is winning the argument: GOP responds with "He's not like us!" directly from 2007. Might stop a guy with a weird-sounding name like Obama from winning a third term, I dunno.

This code-word racist crap is all they have now, and it's all they ever had against him in the first place. It's also why they lost.