Last Call For Bridge To Nowhere

Meanwhile, in New Jersey, GOP Gov. Chris Christie is convinced that Bridgegate is over and that it will have no effect on his future political career, "zero", because "I didn't do anything".  That was Wednesday.  Today he's dealing with his former campaign manager confirming Christie knew about the lane closings well in advance.

Gov. Chris Christie’s former campaign manager says he told the governor about plans to close lanes on the George Washington Bridge in December, contradicting Christie’s claims he had no prior knowledge.

Bill Stepien, who lost his job in the scandal, contends he told Christie about the GWB traffic plans on Dec. 12, a day before the governor told reporters his staff didn’t know about them. Christie issued a public apology on Jan. 9, claiming he was lied to by members of his staff on the controversy. Stepien’s lawyer, Kevin Marino, blasted an internal investigation the governor ordered that concluded Stepien had misled Christie about the politically motivated September closures.

 Oops.

So he lied to reporters, lied to his staff, lied to New Jersey, and lied to America.  Any wonder that Christie's 2016 prospects are fading fast?   He's in fifth place now, behind Mike Huckabee of all people.

That bridge is collapsing.  Fast.

The Spy Who Came In For The Cash

Seems Double G and Team Dudebro Defector made quite a nice deal for selling the rights to his new book to Sony Pictures.  Only one problem, as The AV Club points out:  He trashed Sony Pictures 18 months ago for the "propaganda film" Zero Dark Thirty.

Like a columnist jumping all over a movie he hasn’t seen, Sony Pictures has pounced on the movie rights to Glenn Greenwald’s new book, No Place To Hide: Edward Snowden, The NSA, And The U.S. Surveillance State.

“I’m very happy to be working with Amy Pascal, Doug Belgrad and the team at Sony Pictures Entertainment, who have a successful track record of making thoughtful and nuanced true-life stories that audiences want to see,” said Greenwald of the same executives he had previously accused of producing “the ultimate hagiography of the most secretive arm of America’s National Security State” when they made Zero Dark Thirty, but now heartily endorses, because they’re giving him lots of money.

“We are extremely proud that […] Glenn chose Sony to bring this riveting story to the big screen,” added Belgrad, president of Columbia Pictures, the Sony subsidiary Greenwald likened to the Nazi propaganda machine a year and a half ago, but which now owns the rights to Greenwald’s book.

Odd.  Double G thought these same executives were pretty much human scum back in December 2012, effectively working for the CIA.

Indeed, from start to finish, this is the CIA's film: its perspective, its morality, its side of the story, The Agency as the supreme heroes. (That there is ample evidence to suspect that the film's CIA heroine is, at least in composite part, based on the same female CIA agent responsible for the kidnapping, drugging and torture of Khalid El-Masri in 2003, an innocent man just awarded compensation this week by the European Court of Human Rights, just symbolizes the odious aspects of uncritically venerating the CIA in this manner).

It is a true sign of the times that Liberal Hollywood has produced the ultimate hagiography of the most secretive arm of America's National Security State, while liberal film critics lead the parade of praise and line up to bestow it with every imaginable accolade. Like the bin Laden killing itself, this is a film that tells Americans to feel good about themselves, to feel gratitude for the violence done in their name, to perceive the War-on-Terror-era CIA not as lawless criminals but as honorable heroes.

AV Club leaves with this stinger:

The exact specifics of Greenwald’s deal remain unknown, but it is expected to be even more profitable than the time he changed his mind about the War on Terror.

Douchebag.  Forever and always. And like any intelligence agent trying to recruit human assets on the ground, money will make people do pretty much anything.

Nobama Country, Even Over Our Dead Bodies

Eastern Kentucky in the Appalachian mountains contains some of the poorest counties in America.  They are overwhelmingly poverty-stricken, overwhelmingly on government assistance programs, and overwhelmingly white.  But they hate Barack Obama with a passion here, and it has everything to do with the fact that America's first black president wants to help them and backs the programs to do just that, but people like Jim Feltner will never give him credit in places like in Wolfe County.

A victim of two heart attacks, he lives off disability checks, and $105 a month in government food stamps.

Feltner voted for a previous Democratic president, Bill Clinton, but now says: “I will vote for anybody against Obama.

“I don’t care who runs against him, I’ll vote for him. I don’t care if it’s a Democrat, a Republican, an Indian, a Pakistani — even a Frenchman!”

The first reason is coal. He accuses Obama of dooming this mining region of the Appalachian mountains with environmental regulations.

Since 2011, 30 percent of the mining jobs — around 4,000 — in the region have vanished. Competition from natural gas is another factor in the decline.

“Here’s what he said about the coal business: ‘Go ahead, build your coal-fired energy plants, we will shut them down,’” Feltner alleged.

“Is that something for a president to say?,” he added. “He’s got a problem with the poor people.”

Got news for you Jim, coal in Kentucky is on the way out anyway.  Natural gas is king now, and it doesn't matter that coal companies ravaged the area, destroyed the environment, and cut corners to that coal miners died, trapped underground.  It's all the black guy's fault because he clearly hates poor people.

The same aversion to Obama is heard in Jackson, 13 miles down the road.

Eric Miller, 28, with bad teeth and an accent as thick as his tattooed arms, says he does not care about politics. He voted once, but can’t remember for whom. But one thing is clear: He does not like Obama.

“I guess Democrats just worry about money in their pocket, what they and their friends are doing. They’re not worried about us small people,” Miller said.

“The Republicans, they are the ones that know … raised up like we have, you know. Know what it’s like, what we need, what shouldn’t been taken away,” Miller added.

“If there weren’t government programs, it would be a ghost town,” Miller said. He gets $380 on the sixth of every month, and with that he has to support himself and his girlfriend.

The money is loaded onto credit cards that are accepted at certain stores, just for food, although there is a black market in which goods thus bought can be exchanged for cigarettes and painkillers.

The bitter racist contempt for the President here is heart-rending, but nobody should be surprised.  The same Republicans that Eric Miller praises would cut those programs in a heartbeat if they had their way, but they've convinced Miller and thousands like him that the Democrats are the bad guys  Surely Miller qualifies for Medicaid and help under the Affordable Care Act, but don't you dare tell this asshole that, he won't believe a word you say and will vote for Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul to take the same programs he counts on away from him.

So why is Barack Obama, who supports food stamps and whose Democratic allies in Congress tried and failed to stop a Republican-backed cut in the program, so deeply unpopular?

Racism is a taboo subject that simmers just under the surface of many a conversation here.

Jackson is 98 percent white, and the region has checkered past. In late 2011 a church further to the east triggered an uproar by barring mixed race couples.

But Bryant says voters’ main motivation when they go to the polls are coal and social issues: abortion, guns, and same-sex marriage, which he labels “the three biggies.” This is conservative Christian country.

But convincing the poor to vote against their self-interest has been the GOP specialty for 35 years now.  Nothing's more demonstrative of the modern GOP than a 98% white county with a crippled economy and half the people on food stamps complaining that Democrats hate poor people.

Welcome to Nobama Country.

StupidiNews!

• LA Clippers owner Donald Sterling reportedly will refuse to pay his $2.5 million fine and reject the lifetime courtside ban for racist statements made on tape and will sue the NBA instead.
• Operation American Spring will begin a "sustained, Occupy-style" movement in DC today with the eventual goal of overthrowing leaders of both political parties.
• India opposition candidate Narendra Modi's party won the largest election victory in 30 years, with the BJP landslide expected to mean Modi will be the country's new Prime Minister.
• Credit Suisse is close to a deal with the US Justice Department over a guilty plea to tax evasion and a $2.5 billion fine.
• Jupiter's Great Red Spot, the massive, bigger than planet Earth-sized storm constantly swirling on its surface for centuries, may be shrinking according to the latest observations.

Last Call For Unauthorization

Senate majority leader Harry Reid is finally, finally backing efforts to revisit the Eternal War that Bush started...and maybe finally putting an end to it.

Although Reid did not take a specific stand on how the law should be changed, in an interview with BuzzFeed he argued the time has come to revisit the Authorization of Use of Military Force.

“It’s easy to be a Monday morning quarterback, but 9/11 was a very difficult time in the history of this country,” said Reid, who voted for the law in 2001.

“[But] I definitely think its something we should definitely take a look at. I think 9/11 is a long time ago, and it’s something that needs to be looked at again. I have no problem with that,” Reid added.

The AUMF gave military and intelligence agencies wide leeway to pursue individuals and organizations with suspected ties to al Qaeda. The law provided the legal groundwork for the administration’s aggressive counterterrorism strategy, from armed drone strikes to “kill/capture” missions, raids similar to the Navy SEAL raid that killed Osama Bin Laden in 2011.

Although anti-war elements in Congress have long complained about the broad scope of the scant 60-word law, over the last several years members on both sides of aisle have increasingly raised concerns with the law, worried that it can be used for attacks across the globe against people or groups that were never intended by Congress.

“We are still operating in a war declared on Sept. 14, 2001,” Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine said Wednesday during a speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “And both the Bush and Obama administrations have determined that that war can be carried out against members of al Qaeda, against anyone who associates with affiliates or associates of al Qaeda, no matter when those associates pop up … so long as the al Qaeda or affiliated organizations have violent intentions against the U.S. or coalition partners. That’s sort of a vague phrase.”

“I don’t think Congress passing that AUMF Sept. 14, 2001, that 13 years later we’d be still engaged in war,” Kaine added.

The Warren Terrah will be 13 years old in September.  That's how long we've been at "war" with Al Qaeda and terrorism, a third of my entire life.  It's ridiculous and it needs to end.  I'm glad we're finally taking the first steps to see this come to a close.  It's cost us millions of lives and trillions of dollars over the last 13 years.

It has to end.  Now's the time.  I'm all for this.

The Gender Gap Suddenly Exists

Despite all the talk that the gender gap is a myth from the right, they're suddenly crowing about...the gender gap in the NY Times firing of Editor-in-Chief Jill Abramson.  In fact, even CBS News assured us that the pay gap between men and women simply doesn't exist, even in the same industry and job.

According to all the media headlines about a new White House report, there's still a big pay gap between men and women in America. The report found that women earn 75 cents for every dollar men make. Sounds pretty conclusive, doesn't it? Well, it's not. It's misleading.

According to highly acclaimed career expert and best-selling author, Marty Nemko, "The data is clear that for the same work men and women are paid roughly the same. The media need to look beyond the claims of feminist organizations."

On a radio talk show, Nemko clearly and forcefully debunked that ultimate myth - that women make less than men - by explaining why, when you compare apples to apples, it simply isn't true. Even the White House report: Women in America: Indicators of Social and Economic Well-Being explains why. Simply put, men choose higher-paying jobs.

Except that's not what happened in Abramson's case.

Fellow-journalists and others scrambled to find out what had happened. Sulzberger had fired Abramson, and he did not try to hide that. In a speech to the newsroom on Wednesday afternoon, he said, “I chose to appoint a new leader of our newsroom because I believe that new leadership will improve some aspects …” Abramson chose not to attend the announcement, and not to pretend that she had volunteered to step down.

As with any such upheaval, there’s a history behind it. Several weeks ago, I’m told, Abramson discovered that her pay and her pension benefits as both executive editor and, before that, as managing editor were considerably less than the pay and pension benefits of Bill Keller, the male editor whom she replaced in both jobs. “She confronted the top brass,” one close associate said, and this may have fed into the management’s narrative that she was “pushy,” a characterization that, for many, has an inescapably gendered aspect. Sulzberger is known to believe that the Times, as a financially beleaguered newspaper, needed to retreat on some of its generous pay and pension benefits; Abramson had also been at the Times for far fewer years than Keller, having spent much of her career at the Wall Street Journal, accounting for some of the pension disparity. Eileen Murphy, a spokeswoman for the Times, said that Jill Abramson’s total compensation as executive editor “was directly comparable to Bill Keller’s”—though it was not actually the same. I was also told by another friend of Abramson’s that the pay gap with Keller was only closed after she complained. But, to women at an institution that was once sued by its female employees for discriminatory practices, the question brings up ugly memories. Whether Abramson was right or wrong, both sides were left unhappy. A third associate told me, “She found out that a former deputy managing editor”—a man—“made more money than she did” while she was managing editor. “She had a lawyer make polite inquiries about the pay and pension disparities, which set them off.”

So you can't have it both ways, guys.  Either the gender gap is a complete myth, or it exists, we need to do something about it, because even the NY Times is guilty of it.

Pick one, conservatives.

Bogged Down By Democrats

The Michael Boggs judicial nomination by President Obama has run into the Honey Badger buzzsaw, and the entire process has turned into a complete mess, as Ed Kilgore points out.

As you may have heard, Senate Democrats—now including Majority Leader Harry Reid—are bailing on the president’s nominee for a district court position in Georgia, Michael Boggs, a state judge who was once a Blue Doggy Democratic state legislator representing a district in southeast Georgia. Mostly at issue are Boggs’ votes in the Georgia legislature for maintaining Confederate symbols on the state flag, placing restrictions on abortion providers, and enacting a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage (this last position came with some inflammatory conservative rhetoric about “judicial activism” as well. At his confirmation hearings yesterday, Boggs took the standard approach of not talking about his specific positions on specific issues, though he did indicate his support of the abortion restriction bill was the product of ignorance, and admitted his Flagger vote was a nod to his constituents’ convictions.

What I hope angry progressives do understand is that Boggs’ appointment was the product not of the Obama administration’s wishes, but of the system—imposed against significant precedents by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Pat Leahy (D-VT)—of requiring positive “blue slips” (basically statements of approval) from both senators in the state where any judicial nominee would serve.

The Blue Slip process allows senators to cut deals, and in this case, the deal was to allow Boggs nomination to go through in order to get Georgia's two GOP senators to sign on to Jill Pryor's nomination to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, which they have been blocking since 2012.  The deal has clearly crumbled and the permanent holds will continue on Obama nominees.

Yet another example of President Obama willing to negotiate, and then getting his throat cut by his own party.  And people wonder why Republicans control the House and the vast majority of states right now.

StupidiNews!

• President Obama is warning that the Highway Trust Fund, used to pay for road and bridge repairs across the nation, will be out of money by the end of the summer unless Congress acts.
• The National September 11 Memorial Museum finally opens this week to families of the victims, and next week to the general public, at the site of the World Trade Center buildings.
• Wildfires continue to rage in Carlsbad, California near San Diego as hundreds in the path of the blaze have been evacuated.
• Pressure on Japan to legalize casino gambling in time for the 2020 Tokyo Summer Olympics is growing as the time window for building the grand resorts before then is closing.
• Federal officials say a former Subway franchisee scammed the company out of nearly $40,000 in gift cards by putting in back doors to point of sale terminals his company sold.

Last Call For Spies Like Us

This Jack Devine piece in Politico sums up every problem I have with Team Dudebro Defector:

In his new book, No Place to Hide, Glenn Greenwald tells how Edward Snowden once confided to him, “with a hint of embarrassment,” how much he had learned from playing video games. In the black-and-white world of video games, “the protagonist is often an ordinary person, who finds himself faced with grave injustices from powerful forces and has the choice to flee in fear or to fight for his beliefs,” Greenwald writes.

But Edward Snowden’s video-game world is not the real world. I see Snowden in a very different light. My colleagues and I spent our careers in the CIA looking for people like him—on the other side, that is. We worked hard to locate the kind of person who could be persuaded to give up his country’s secrets: narcissistic, often delusional under-achievers whom we could hope to turn into loose-lipped sources in our enemies’ camps and other hostile locations. We understood just how valuable it was to every aspect of our foreign policy to know the plans and intentions of our enemies; the best way to do this was to look for a source and exploit people like Snowden, the National Security Agency leaker, ­ to target for this purpose.

The Russians weren’t slouches either in searching for sources of classified information. They were looking for their Snowdens too. You don’t have to go back too far to see their success in recruiting American spies with unique access – John Anthony Walker, Aldreich Ames, and Robert Hanssen – who did immense damage to our national security. Moreover, Ames and Hanssen’s compromises led to the death of many of our top Russian sources. Walker’s compromise, by contrast, allowed the Soviets to know the locations of U.S. submarines around the world. One shudders to think what more could have been done against us if they had had Snowden’s access to sensitive communications and his technical know-how on how to extract it from the system. Some people think of Snowden as a latter-day Daniel Ellsberg, a noble whistle-blower. Clearly I do not.

Once again, if your goal was to do as much damage as possible to the intelligence capability of the US, Edward Snowden could not have done a more crushingly thorough job.  The debate over the NSA's role and oversight is something that needs to happen and continues to be ongoing.  But the debate over whether or not the actions taken by Snowden, Greenwald and others caused lasting harm to the country is over, and we lost.

Terrorist group al Qaeda and its offshoots have created new encryption software in the wake of the June 2013 leaks by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, according to a new report from Big Data firm Recorded Future.

While U.S. government officials have contended that its adversaries would respond to revelations on NSA surveillance techniques with counter-measures of their own, there has been little public evidence that’s been the case. This is some of the first tangible evidence that al Qaeda and others may have responded by creating new encryption software.

Since 2007, the main encryption software for al Qaeda was called Asrar al-Mujahideen which means Mujahideen Secrets. Four to six months after the Snowden leaks, three Middle Eastern groups released three significant new tool sets for encryption, against a baseline of basically no new products for seven years, said Christopher Ahlberg, CEO of Recorded Future, which uses large quantities of publicly available online data to predict the timing and targets of future cyberattacks.

“Of course, this could be random, but it seems unlikely,” said Mr. Ahlberg, in an email. “Snowden provided the motivation and his leaks highlighted the means.”

So the debate now shifts to cost analysis:  how much damage is the NSA doing with its techniques, versus how much damage has been done by exposing them.  That's the debate we should be having at this point.  Yes, the NSA has violated the public trust, but so did Edward Snowden.  It remains to be seen which will have more long-lasting detrimental effects to our country.

You Say You Want A Revolution

This weekend is apparently FREEDOMPALOOZA Get The Black Guy Operation American Spring, where millions of "patriots" will magically appear in Washington DC in order to drive President Obama (and the GOP leadership!) out of office at gunpoint with their patriotic guns that shoot patriotism, or something.

“We are calling for the removal of Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Harry Reid, Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, Nancy Pelosi, and Eric Holder as a start toward constitutional restoration,” said retired Army Col. Harry Riley, leader of the Operation American Spring protest group. “They have all abandoned the US Constitution, are unworthy to be retained in a position that calls for servant status.”

Operation American Spring aims to pressure those lawmakers who remain – or are replaced by officials of their own choosing – “to sponsor and pass very Constitutionally crafted State legislation to dissolve the size, powers, scope and spending of the U.S. Government by 2/3rds.”

The activists say they expect 10 million to 30 million like-minded Americans to join them Friday in the nation’s capital for a rally patterned after Occupy Wall Street and “Arab Spring” protests.

They also plan a sister event the same day in Bunkerville, Nevada, where militia groups have gathered to support scofflaw rancher Cliven Bundy in his dispute with the federal government.

Organizers also anticipate “incremental nullification” by state legislatures of “all withholding taxes, employment taxes, employer taxes, and income taxes.”

“This will effectively DOUBLE the size of ALL American Middle Class family weekly paychecks and cause our local city and town economies to boom,” the group promises on its Facebook page.

Oh wow, ten to thirty million "patriots" armed to the teeth and ready to cause a second American Revolution!   I'm sure the President will immediately surrender at the sight of 47 guys with AK-47s and the DC police totally won't round up these idiots and chuck them in the drunk tank for a weekend.

Here's the best part:

Or, as a blogger speculated at Before It’s News, the whole operation could be a false flag planted by the Obama administration to launch a civil war.

Keep on truckin', clowns.

Dear America

"The Selfie Administration?  That seems about right.  Obama's teenage clowns aren't ready to run anything, they certainly weren't able to solve the disasters Bush left for them both foreign and domestically and everybody basically hates the uppity bastard.  He certainly doesn't have the gravitas of George W. Bush and his top political adviser, Karl 'Turd Blossom' Rove."

--Bruce McQuain, Hot Air

Bonus Verbatim Stupidity:

It is a pretty fair and devastating summary of an immature, selfie-taking, hashtag loving administration. Intentions speak louder than action in their world. They don’t take criticism well. And they are about as petty as it comes when talking about their opposition. They demand respect for the man in office, but the man in office shows no respect to those whose views differ from him.

He is also given very little if any respect in the world because he’s really done nothing to earn it (and quite a bit to unearn any he had when he took office).

Right, because the party that insisted President Obama was The Kenyan Usurper and regularly portrayed him as an African savage, regularly attacked him as a Communist dictator and traitor to America for doing things other Presidents were happily allowed to do (recess appointments, executive orders, judicial appointments), that tried to repeal Obamacare 50+ times, and when that didn't work, launched yet another pointless Benghazi investigation certainly cannot be classified as petty, thin-skinned, or disrespectful towards the views of those who disagree with them.

Instead, he's just the Affirmative Action president.  The only thing he did to deserve the office was, you know, win an election and then win re-election, but screw him, right?  That's not how we really select presidents or anything.

If Barack Obama really was as awful a person as they project on to him daily, some people would have been shot by now.  That's all I'm saying.

StupidiNews!

• In a new book, a Louisiana man claims his biological father was really the infamous Zodiac Killer, who killed five people in California in 1968 and 1969.
• An explosion at a coal mine in western Turkey has killed at least 151 workers and trapped more than 700 underground, with the death toll expected to rise.
• Chinese police are claiming that the head of drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline's China division ordered his subordinates to commit bribery, bringing in billions of additional revenue for the company.
• Former Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner must provide documents in Standard & Poor's lawsuit against the Justice Department over fraudulent mortgage securities ratings.
• Russia is warning that continued US sanctions over Ukraine may "force" it to abandon support of the International Space Station project.

Last Call For You Can't Handle The Truth

There are some really screwed-up, awful human being on this earth, but few are as perniciously evil as Sandy Hook Truthers, the assholes who somehow believe that the massacre in Newtown Connecticut 18 months ago never actually happened, and that everyone is somehow involved in a huge Obama conspiracy theory to use imaginary dead kids to justify taking people's guns.  And yes, these people are pretty much human pond scum.

A playground in Mystic, Connecticut, dedicated to a girl shot during the Newtown massacre, is allegedly being vandalized by "truthers" who claim the shooting never took place.

A vinyl sign weighing 50 pounds was stolen last Tuesday from the Grace McDonnell Playground.

The sign featured a peace symbol that was based on the 7-year-old girl's drawing. She is one of the 20 children shot by Adam Lanza at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut on Dec. 14, 2012.

Grace's mother, Lynn McDonnell, found out about the theft when a man claiming to have stolen the sign called her.

During a brief conversation, the sign-stealer allegedly told McDonnell that he took the sign because he believes the school shooting was a hoax, CBS2.com reports.

He also taunted her that her daughter never existed, a comment that suggested he thought McDonnell was part of the alleged conspiracy.

What an awesome thing to say to a grieving mother, right?  "I vandalized the playground named after your dead kid because the NRA hobgoblins living inside my head told me your kid never existed and that you're in on a plan to take my guns!"

There's 26 more playgrounds being built, by the non-profit group that made this possible, the Where Angels Play Foundation.  If you live in the area near any of these playgrounds, or want to help, drop by the website and click on the "Support Us" button.  They could use funds and volunteers.

The GOP Energy Drain

The big Senate energy bill is now dead, the hostage having been killed by Republicans who wanted to insert amendments that would have permanently crippled the EPA's regulatory power over clean air and water, ended green energy projects, stopped Department of Energy research, and a host of other GOP anti-environment and anti-science initiatives.

Oh yeah, and the bill would have been a victory for two red state Democrats up for re-election.  Can't have that.

Only three Republicans, including its chief GOP sponsor, Sen. Rob Portman (Ohio), voted to end debate and move to a final vote. Supporters needed 60 votes to overcome a filibuster from Republicans angered that Democrats wouldn't allow votes on their amendments.

Monday's 55-36 vote followed days of negotiations that failed to yield a deal on amendments.The stalemate denied an important victory to the bill’s other sponsor, Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), who faces a general-election challenge from former Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.).

Democrats accused Republicans of sinking the bipartisan bill to prevent Shaheen from touting a win on the campaign trail. She worked with Portman for three and a half years on the bill.

The legislation would have strengthened energy efficiency requirements for new homes and commercial buildings and encouraged private sector companies to develop energy efficient technology.

The filibuster also thwarted Sen. Mary Landrieu (La.), another vulnerable incumbent who sought a vote on the pipeline. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) promised a vote on Keystone if Republicans let the Shaheen-Portman energy efficiency bill reach a final vote.

So no energy bill, no Keystone XL vote, no anything because the Republicans were never willing to negotiate, just make more and more demands.

Reid said the final straw came after he promised Republicans a vote on a stand-alone bill authorizing Keystone. They again upped their demand by insisting on several other energy-related amendments, he said.

“They have held this bill hostage, this energy efficiency bill, as demand after demand has been met but even now they are still seeking a ransom,” Reid said Monday before the vote.

Shocking, I know.  And so another bill dies thanks to Mitch the Turtle and the useless GOP sacks of crap who block everything, and then blame President Obama for nothing getting done. 

Meanwhile, In Antarctica, Sheet Just Got Real

Ice sheets, that is.  NASA's latest calculations are that we've gone past the point of no return on stopping polar ice cap collapse.

The collapse of large parts of the ice sheet in West Antarctica appears to have begun and is almost certainly unstoppable, with global warming accelerating the pace of the disintegration, two groups of scientists reported Monday.

The finding, which had been feared by some scientists for decades, means that a rise in global sea level of at least 10 feet may now be inevitable. The rise may continue to be relatively slow for at least the next century or so, the scientists said, but sometime after that it will probably speed up so sharply as to become a crisis.

“This is really happening,” said Thomas P. Wagner, who runs NASA’s programs on polar ice and helped oversee some of the research. “There’s nothing to stop it now. But you are still limited by the physics of how fast the ice can flow.”

No longer a question of "if" on catastrophic sea level rising, but of how quickly it happens.

Richard B. Alley, a climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University who was not involved in the new research but has studied the polar ice sheets for decades, said he found the new papers compelling. Though he has long feared the possibility of ice-sheet collapse, when he learned of the new findings, “it shook me a little bit,” Dr. Alley said.

He added that while a large rise of the sea may now be inevitable from West Antarctica, continued release of greenhouse gases will almost certainly make the situation worse. The heat-trapping gases could destabilize other parts of Antarctica as well as the Greenland ice sheet, causing enough sea-level rise that many of the world’s coastal cities would eventually have to be abandoned.

Insert your own beachfront property in Nevada joke here.   These predictions have been around since the late 70's, folks, effectively my entire lifetime.  We've done nothing.  Hell, half of us refuse to believe this is even happening, and that it's really a HUGE LIBERAL PLOT and stuff.

Make sure you tell your great-grandkids about New York City.