Last Call

It's looking like America has reached a critical mass on same-sex marriage:  in less than ten years, support for same-sex marriage in the US has jumped 26 points in ABC News/Washington Post polling.

Most Americans, moreover, say the U.S. Constitution should trump state laws on gay marriage, a question now before the U.S. Supreme Court. And – in another fundamental shift – just 24 percent now see homosexuality as a choice, down from 40 percent nearly 20 years ago. It’s a view that closely relates to opinions on the legality of same-sex marriage.

That's actually a pretty big jump since just last August, after the President made his views clear and the repeal of DADT happened.  It certainly didn't hurt the President's re-election chances, now did it?

Intensity of sentiment about gay marriage also shows considerable change in this poll, produced for ABC by Langer Research Associates. In 2004, strong opponents outnumbered strong supporters by a broad 34 percentage points. Today strong supporters are ascendant, outnumbering strong opponents by 11 points.

Full PDF of the poll here.

At this point, I'm confident to say that same-sex marriage will be fully legal in all 50 states within ten years.  It may be five.  It may even be less.

Oh, and support of same-sex marriage by minorities now is 61% as opposed to 57% of whites.  Just throwing that out there.

Hillary Clinton And The Evolution Revolution

Hillary too can play the "evolves on gay marriage" game, folks.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is announcing her support for gay marriage.

In an online video released Monday, Clinton says gays and lesbians deserve "the rights of citizenship." She says "that includes marriage."

Clinton's announcement puts her in line with other potential Democratic presidential candidates for the 2016 election, including Vice President Joe Biden and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. Republican Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio also announced his support for gay marriage Friday.

To be 100% fair, as Secretary of State there really wasn't any way she could make her personal political stances known, as she's not allowed to have them, so I wonder if all the "Why is Obama so late to the same-sex marriage equality party" folks will give Hillary a pass or not.  It's of course the right thing to do, but gosh, the logic applied to Obama would be "Well Kerry's been Secretary of State now for a month, where was she?"  Besides, coming in after Rob Portman on this list does seem like a rather big oversight on her part, yes?

Zealots, Lunatics, and Fanatics

President Obama is finally learning that zealots, fanatics and lunatics are immune to negotiation.  They only understand power and its applications.  Zealots like Paul Ryan...

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) told CBS' "Face The Nation" Sunday that he believes Obamacare will "destroy" the country's health care system, even though his budget assumes key savings from the law.

"I really believe it's going to destroy the health care system in America," Ryan said. "We believe the law will collapse under its own weight and that people will be eager for alternatives as the gorey details unfold in the future with its implementation."

Lunatics like Kevin McCarthy...

House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) signaled Sunday on NBC's "Meet The Press" that there is no acceptable ratio of spending cuts to new revenues because tax increases are unacceptable to Republicans, period.

"There are no new tax increases because you don't need it," he said.

His exact words to David Gregory?  "You're going to get nothing." 

And then there's fanatics like Orange Julius.

On ABC's "This Week" Sunday, House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) addressed fellow Sen. Rob Portman's (R-OH) newfound support for same sex marriage, which the senator said was influenced by his son coming out as gay.

Boehner said he appreciates Portman's change of heart, but "can't imagine" that his own opposition to gay marriage would ever change, even if he had a child who was gay.

They will never stop trying to destroy the economy.  They will never stop trying to destroy Obamacare.  They will never stop trying to destroy LGBT rights.  Never.

Why negotiate with them?

 

StupidiNews!

• Two Canadian inmates are back in prison after a daring helicopter escape in full daylight from a Quebec detention center.
• New evidence unearthed by the BBC suggests back channel communications by Iraqi intelligence told both the CIA and Britain's MI6 that Saddam Hussein had no active WMDs.
• Islamist rebels are increasing their hold on three Syrian provinces, with the aim of installing a theocratic government after the fall of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
• Concern that Cyprus's bank levy will be repeated in other EU nations is driving down Asian and European stocks this morning.
• Defense Distributed, the company making firearms with 3-D printing technology, has been granted a federal license to sell its weapons.

Last Call In Steubenville

The Steubenville rape trial reached closing arguments yesterday, and a verdict handed down by Judge Thomas Lipps:  both suspects in the case were found guilty on all charges.

Two Ohio high school football players have been found guilty of raping a drunken 16-year-old girl in a case that roiled a small city and stirred reaction from activists online.

Judge Thomas Lipps ruled Sunday in juvenile court that Steubenville High School students Trent Mays and Ma'Lik Richmond are guilty of attacking the girl after an alcohol-fueled party last August.

The 17-year-old Mays and 16-year-old Richmond were charged with digitally penetrating the West Virginia girl, first in a car and then in a house.

Judge Tom Lipps ordered Richmond held in a juvenile detention facility for at least one year and Mays at least two years. The juvenile system could hold them until age 21. Both were required to register as juvenile sex offenders.

My first reaction to the guilty verdict was this:

Can't wait for the first wave of GOP folks to explain to us that we're too hard on these boys for convincting them of rape.
— Zandar (@ZandarVTS) March 17, 2013

Turns out I was right.  The verdict prompted this awful reaction from, of all people, CNN's Poppy Harlow and Candy Crowley, two women defending Mays and Richmond, not more than an hour and some change later.  Harlow had this to say:

"Incredibly difficult, even for an outsider like me, to watch what happened as these two young men that had such promising futures, star football players, very good students, literally watched as they believed their lives fell apart...when that sentence came down, [Ma'lik] collapsed in the arms of his attorney...He said to him, 'My life is over. No one is going to want me now.' Very serious crime here, both found guilty of raping the sixteen-year-old girl at a series of parties back in August."

This is what the permanent Beltway "Both sides share the blame" mentality brings us.  We have to pity and feel sorrow for these young boys for their "youthful mistake", a "mistake" called "being convicted of rape and sexual assault" because they raped and sexually assaulted a girl.

Ohio AG Mike DeWine, to his credit, isn't letting this one go.  More charges are pending.

Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine, saying that "this community needs assurance that no stone has been left unturned in our search for the truth," announced at a press briefing at Jefferson County Juvenile Court "that we cannot bring finality to this matter without the convening of a grand jury," which he said would convene on or around April 15. "I anticipate numerous witnesses will be called. The grand jury, quite frankly, could meet for a number of days," DeWine said, adding that "indictments could be returned and additional charges could be filed." He mentioned failure to report a felony, tampering with evidence, and "others" as possible charges. He added that the boys who received immunity were likely to retain that right.

As it should be.  The message here is really, really simple.  Don't rape people.  If somehow you're more worried about the two convicted sex offenders than the girl they hurt, then you are part of the problem of Steubenville.  It's people like that who enable this behavior and give it a pass when it happens.  There are thousands of cases like this that go unreported, and the fact that we have a country "divided" on this issue at all is the reason why they will remain so.

Rape.  Is.  Wrong.  There are no qualifiers that make sexual assault okay or justified.  None.  Deal with that.

Got it?

Funny Definition Of "Liberties" You Have There, Rand Paul

Sen. Rand Paul is nothing more than a misogynist Tea Party douchebag like the rest of the Republican party's "conservatives".  The use of sweeping federal power to outlaw choice is fine, as long as it's used against groups that don't include the subset of white Republican male senators.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) on Friday introduced so-called “fetal personhood” legislation that would completely outlaw abortion in the United States.

The Life at Conception Act would declare that human life began at conception, providing fertilized eggs with the same legal status as born persons.

“The Life at Conception Act legislatively declares what most Americans believe and what science has long known – that human life begins at the moment of conception, and therefore is entitled to legal protection from that point forward,” Paul said in a statement. “ The right to life is guaranteed to all Americans in the Declaration of Independence and ensuring this is upheld is the Constitutional duty of all Members of Congress.”

So tell me again how Rand Paul respects individual choice, local freedoms, and states' rights when it comes to using the federal government to tell women what they must do with their own bodies, or face the wrath of the state.

I'm waiting for this explanation.   Do you buy Rand Paul's?

“The Court then admitted that if the personhood of an unborn baby is established, the right to abort ‘collapses, for the fetus’ right to life is then guaranteed specifically by the [14] Amendment,’” he said.

Seems to be he's nothing more than a crackpot Tea Party Republican.  It also explains why so many of his supporters are men.

So please, fill me in on how Rand Paul is a libertarian.  Go ahead.  I could use a laugh.

Operation Cypriot Slip

The big Eurozone news this weekend is the long-anticipated decision on a bailout for the tiny nation of Cyprus has been made, and this time the EU is making no effort to hide who will pay for it through crippling austerity.  Cypriots are scheduled to pay for a healthy chunk of the bailout by having their bank savings taxed.  Felix Salmon:

I stuck my neck out in January, saying that Cyprus was “certain” to default. After all, the Europeans weren’t willing to come up with the €17 billion needed to bail the country out, and EU economics commissioner Olli Rehn told the WSJ’s Stephen Fidler that Cyprus would have to restructure its debt. But now the bailout has arrived, and — in something of a shocker — there’s no default. Instead, €5.8 billion of the bailout is going to come directly from depositors in Cyprus’s banks, in the form of what the EU is calling an “upfront one-off stability levy”.

Don’t for a minute believe that this decision is part of some deeply-considered long-term strategy which was worked out in constructive consultations between the EU, the IMF, and the new Cypriot government. Instead, it’s a last-resort desperation move, born of an unholy combination of procrastination, blackmail, and sleep-deprived gamesmanship.

The details aren’t entirely clear yet: we’re told that deposits of more than €100,000 are going to have to pay a tax of 9.9%, for instance, but it’s not obvious whether that applies to all of the large deposit or just to the amount over €100,000. And there’s still a real chance that the Cypriot parliament could scupper the whole deal. But for the time being, everybody’s going on the assumption that the deal will go through, that Cyprus will get its €10 billion bailout from the EU, and that everybody with a Cypriot bank account in Cyprus (a group which includes members of the UK military) will see their accounts taxed by at least 6.75%.

That's already leading to bank runs in Cyprus.  The trick is, will it lead to bank runs across Spain, Italy, Ireland, Portugal and Greece if they think taxing deposits in those nations are next?  Neil Irwin:

The European Central Bank will now be on high alert, monitoring activity in Greece, Spain and beyond for evidence that the Cyprus precedent will result in new runs on those nations’ banks. Expect a flood of central bank liquidity into those nations if there is any hint that depositors across Europe seem to be thinking that Cyprus is the new normal and that their seemingly safe bank deposits could be reduced 10 percent without warning.

The best the rest of the world can hope for is that Cyprus’s case is sufficiently unique that it won’t spark panic in Athens and Madrid (or in Lisbon, Dublin and Rome).

For the past six months, the global financial markets have become increasingly complacent, convinced that the euro-zone crisis is, for practical purposes, over. Cyprus is the test of whether that is correct, or whether the complacency was instead misplaced.

In other words, if there is going to be a new wave of crisis in Europe, historians will be able to trace its starting point back to today’s Cyprus bank bailout.

It's going to be an ugly week in Europe's markets.  Keep a close eye on things.

Last Call

Recently released and formerly classified phone calls made by Lyndon Johnson show the remarkable depths to which Richard Nixon sunk to in order to sabotage the 1968 Paris peace talks that could have ended the Vietnam War.  Nixon effectively committed treason in order to destroy Johnson and his vice-president, Hubert Humphrey, by assuring the Vietnam War would rage on for years. 

It begins in the summer of 1968. Nixon feared a breakthrough at the Paris Peace talks designed to find a negotiated settlement to the Vietnam war, and he knew this would derail his campaign.

He therefore set up a clandestine back-channel involving Anna Chennault, a senior campaign adviser.

At a July meeting in Nixon's New York apartment, the South Vietnamese ambassador was told Chennault represented Nixon and spoke for the campaign. If any message needed to be passed to the South Vietnamese president, Nguyen Van Thieu, it would come via Chennault.

In late October 1968 there were major concessions from Hanoi which promised to allow meaningful talks to get underway in Paris - concessions that would justify Johnson calling for a complete bombing halt of North Vietnam. This was exactly what Nixon feared.

Nixon sank those talks by saying the South Vietnamese would get a better deal under him, so they agreed to walk away from the table completely instead of brokering for peace.  Johnson knew about it, but realized that in order to reveal Nixon's treason, that he would have had to also reveal that the FBI was bugging the South Vietnamese Ambassador, which in and of itself could have threatened any peace deal.

In one call to Senator Richard Russell he says: "We have found that our friend, the Republican nominee, our California friend, has been playing on the outskirts with our enemies and our friends both, he has been doing it through rather subterranean sources. Mrs Chennault is warning the South Vietnamese not to get pulled into this Johnson move."

He orders the Nixon campaign to be placed under FBI surveillance and demands to know if Nixon is personally involved.

When he became convinced it was being orchestrated by the Republican candidate, the president called Senator Everett Dirksen, the Republican leader in the Senate to get a message to Nixon.

The president knew what was going on, Nixon should back off and the subterfuge amounted to treason.

Publicly Nixon was suggesting he had no idea why the South Vietnamese withdrew from the talks. He even offered to travel to Saigon to get them back to the negotiating table.

Johnson felt it was the ultimate expression of political hypocrisy but in calls recorded with Clifford they express the fear that going public would require revealing the FBI were bugging the ambassador's phone and the National Security Agency (NSA) was intercepting his communications with Saigon.

So they decided to say nothing.

In the end, Johnson and Humphrey decided that Humphrey could win the 1968 election without revealing Nixon's treason.

The rest, as they say, is history.  Nixon won a sharply divided country, taking 301 electoral votes, with the Democrats crippled and split by Johnson's handling of Vietnam and the rise of the Dixiecrats and George Wallace in the South.  The country elected "anti-war" candidate Nixon, who promptly made the war horrifically worse and got re-elected on that, then destroyed the country with Watergate.

If that sounds familiar, it echoes 2000 in my mind.  What would the country have been like if Humphrey or Johnson had been President and not Nixon? 

Funny how that works.

Taxing Your Imagination Yet Again

The non-partisan Tax Policy Center calls shenanigans on Paul Ryan's "balanced in ten years" budget, to the tune of adding $5.7 trillion to the national debt.

In its study, the center concludes that Ryan's budget would add $5.7 trillion to the deficit — because of proposals to simplify the income tax code to two levels of 10 and 25 percent, repeal the Alternative Minimum Tax, repeal certain tax increases from the Affordable Care Act, and cut the top corporate tax rate to 25 percent.

It's "hard to imagine" Ryan's budget plan working out to be revenue neutral, the TPC's Howard Gleckman wrote in a blog post accompanying the study.

But if Ryan plans to implement those tax cuts and still make good on his promise to balance the budget, other taxes would have to be raised by $5.7 trillion. 

According to the study, the Ryan budget's tax cuts would also proportionately benefit upper-income earners. Here's a look at each income bracket's percent change in after-tax income looks in chart form:

To recap, the richest 1 percent would get a 17.4% tax cut, and the richest 0.1% would get a 20% tax cut, or about $1.2 million extra.  Meanwhile, in order to balance this budget, Ryan and his GOP friends are going to have to raise nearly $6 trillion in taxes over ten years on somebody.

Guess who?

If you've been paying attention, you already know the answer.

Republicans Love Wage Slaves

Gallup, earlier this month:

Seven in 10 Americans say they would vote "for" raising the minimum wage to $9 per hour if given the opportunity, while 27% would vote against such a bill. The proposal, made by President Barack Obama in his 2013 State of the Union speech, is backed by over 90% of Democrats and self-described liberals, and by over two-thirds of independents and moderates. Republicans are evenly split on the proposal, while conservatives tilt slightly in favor.

House of Representatives, yesterday:

House Republicans unanimously voted down a measure Friday that would have raised the federal minimum wage, from its current $7.25 per hour to $10.10 by 2015.

Huge businesses like McDonald's and Wal-Mart can't possibly afford to raise the minimum wage in this economy!  

Even as American corporations are raking in record profits, the largest among them are shifting larger amounts of money away from the United States and into offshore tax havens that allow them to pad their bottom lines even more, according to multiple analyses of legal filings made since the beginning of 2013.

The Wall Street Journal found that the 60 largest companies moved $166 billion offshore in 2012, shielding 40 percent of their earnings from American taxes and costing the U.S. billions in lost revenue.

American workers are overpaid and lazy anyway, right?

Real average hourly earnings were up 0.1% from February 2012 to February 2013, but the average workweek was down from a year ago, so average weekly real earnings were down 0.2% from a year ago.

In other words, workers have seen no wage growth over the past year, which again is one reason why so many people are down on the economy even as most of the major stock indexes all strike record highs.

To recap, Republicans are complaining that there are too many jobless people who believe it's easier to not have a job and live off the government teat, and then turn around and say $10 an hour would destroy the economy, because it's too high an hourly wage.

To recap again, House Republicans say they believe in the dignity of hard work and the American dream of upward mobility.  And then every single one of them voted to keep Americans at $7.25 an hour.

Hey Republican voters, do you know anyone who makes less than $10 an hour?  Do you consider that person to be lazy, stupid, or parasitic?  Might want to think about that.

StupidiNews, Weekend Edition!

• Rapper Lil' Wayne is recovering in an LA hospital after reportedly suffering a seizure.
• A federal judge has ruled unconstitutional the Obama administration's practice of issuing "national security letters" that include a gag order on the letter's subject.
• With the news that the new Violence Against Women Act's protections for Native Americans only extends only to those on tribal lands, many of Alaska's tribes are upset.
• California is currently the only state that enforces removing firearms from those deemed mentally unfit, a practice both controversial and dangerous.
• Federal officials have charged two California men with hacking point of sale terminals at Subway franchises to load gift cards and sell them for more than $40,000 in cash.