Last Call For Drowning Down Under

A right-wing government budget that plans to all but eliminate climate change research and renewable energy and dump that money into subsidies for Big Energy?  America isn't the only country with anti-science conservatives beholden to coal, oil, and natural gas.  Our friends in Australia have taken a sharp right turn since the government of PM Tony Abbott came to power, and now they're paying the price.

Tony Abbott is the true "inter-generational thief" for boosting fossil fuels at the expense of renewable energy, increasing the likelihood of Australians paying a big price from climate change, Greens leader Christine Milne said.

Both the Prime Minister and Treasurer Joe Hockey have based their budget sales pitch on the need to raise taxes and slash spending to rein-in future debt that had been projected to balloon above $600 billion without policy changes.

"We could not go on running up massive debts for our children and grandchildren to pay," Mr Abbott told ABC's Insiders on Sunday. "That would be a form of inter-generational theft."

Senator Milne, though, said the increases in subsidies for big miners – which rise by $720 million to almost $14 billion over the forward estimates – and efforts to promote more coal seam gas, coal mines and coal ports were the real form of "future theft".

"Not only is it bad for the environment but these will be stranded assets which the next generation will have to pay for," Senator Milne told media in Sydney. "Tony Abbott is the one selling-out future generations."

The budget is extremely unpopular, with nearly three-quarters of Australians saying they would be worse off, and it seems the voters may be ready to do something about Abbott.

The Greens would welcome a double dissolution election, if the Coalition called one. 

"I say bring that on," Senator Milne said. "The Australian community has been betrayed by the Prime Minister. Nobody signed up for this budget. Nobody knew who the PM was before the election. 

"People are well and truly ready to show him what a trust deficit looks like."

Will the Abbott government come apart over climate change denial?  If there's any country that is dealing with major effects of climate, it's Australia.  Stay tuned...

Dinesh D'Guilty

Noted conservative scold, budding propaganda filmmaker and human embodiment of "Well, actually..." nonsense Dinesh D'Souza, has plead guilty to campaign finance violations in order to head off his trial expected to start today in a Manhattan court.

D'Souza, known for his biting criticism of President Barack Obama, pleaded guilty to one criminal count of making illegal contributions in the names of others. A second count concerning the making of false statements is expected to be dismissed once he is sentenced.

The plea came four months after Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara charged D'Souza with using "straw donors" to give funds in 2012 to Republican Wendy Long's U.S. Senate campaign in New York. Long, who met D'Souza while they were students in the 1980s, lost to Democratic incumbent Kirsten Gillibrand.

"I knew that causing a campaign contribution to be made in the name of another was wrong and something the law forbids," D'Souza, 53, told U.S. District Judge Berman on Tuesday. "I deeply regret my conduct."

Prosecutors said D'Souza asked two friends and their spouses to contribute $10,000 each to Long's campaign and then reimbursed them. At the time, campaign finance regulations limited individual donations to a maximum of $5,000 during an election cycle.

One of the friends was Denise Joseph, who was engaged to D'Souza while he was still married to another woman. D'Souza resigned as president of King's College, a small Christian school in New York City, after the media revealed his relationship with Joseph in 2012.

This guy's a real champ.  Also, nice of him to cop a plea and avoid the truly nastier parts of our criminal justice system, but you can do that when you've got as much money as D'Souza does (enough to bankroll a 2012 anti-Obama campaign propaganda film and stuff).

It's not stopping GOP senators from coming to his defense, so you know he was never going to spend a day in jail.  But he is guilty, and it's hard to make the case that he's somehow being persecuted when he's pleading guilty to a crime.  Kinda funny if you think about it, as these senators insisted that Obama was personally going after D'Souza as part of a Nixonian "enemies list" and he of course was innocent of all wrongdoing.

Just because you publicly hate and want to destroy the President doesn't mean you can break the law, kids.  In the end, Republicans are really bad judges of character.

Oregon-na Get Hitched

In another win for equality advocates, Oregon has become the latest state where a federal judge has struck down the state's same-sex marriage ban as unconstitutional, and for once it's a state where officials will not choose to contest the ruling, meaning same-sex couples can get married immediately.

Oregon cannot bar same-sex couples from marrying, a federal judge ruled Monday.

“Because Oregon’s marriage laws discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation, the laws violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution,” U.S. District Court Judge Michael McShane wrote.

The ruling from McShane is the 12th federal trial court ruling since last summer’s Supreme Court ruling striking down the Defense of Marriage Act to find a state ban on same-sex couples’ marriages and/or on recognition of such marriages to be unconstitutional.

Two federal appeals courts, those in Denver and Richmond, already have heard appeals of challenges from three states, Utah, Oklahoma, and Virginia.

Unlike most of the other challenges, however, none of the government officials in Oregon plan to appeal McShane’s ruling. In McShane’s order, issued moments after his opinion was released shortly after noon PT, he stated that the order stopping enforcement of the ban is effective immediately. Although Oregon law has a three-day waiting period for issuing marriage licenses, there are exceptions to that waiting period that mean couples could marry on Monday.

Add another state to the growing list where same-sex marriage is 100% legal.  It won't be long before that number is 50.

StupidiNews!

• Thailand's military has declared martial law to the apparent surprise of embattled PM Yingluck Shinawatra in what is being called a "half coup d'etat."
• Republicans in North Carolina are putting forth legislation that will criminalize revealing what chemicals energy companies are using in fracking processes.
• California's record drought could cost the state's agriculture business as many as 14,500 jobs as officials see no end to the three years of dry conditions.
• Russia is looking to seal a $400 billion natural gas deal with China to offset EU economic sanctions over Ukraine.
• Anti-identity theft service Lifelock has suspended its iOS and Android apps over concerns they may not adequately protect user data.

Last Call For King Of The Kaiju

Got a chance to see Godzilla this evening, and I have to say for those of you that enjoyed last year's Pacific Rim and curse the name of Matthew Broderick for the lame 1998 version of this film, Bryan Cranston and some breathtaking CGI work steal the show.  This is a Godzilla movie about Godzilla kicking ass, fitting for his 60th anniversary, and not about a bunch of tiny, pitiful humans.



OK, sure, the pitiful humans do play a part.  In 1999, a Japanese scientist named Dr. Serizawa (Ken Watanabe) arrives at a collapsed mining cavern in the Philippines, to discover that the miners have broken through into the nest of a Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organism (MUTO).  The beastie has gotten loose, and meanwhile in nearby Japan, nuclear engineer Joe Brody (Bryan Cranston) has noticed distinct, regular seismic activity heading for the plant he works at.  He tries to convince the plant owners to shut the place down, but the warning comes too late:  both the nuclear plant and his wife are destroyed by whatever created the seismic phenomena.

Fast forward 15 years to 2014 and Joe's son Ford (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) is now a Navy Lieutenant and bomb disposal expert (natch) who finds out his dad is still insisting there's a massive cover-up at the nuclear site (in chilling shades of the Fukushima disaster in our timeline) and they investigate their old house only to discover Joe's seismic research, the fact there's no radiation at all, and that there really is a massive cover-up and Joe's not insane.

Turns out Dr. Serizawa has been hutning this seismic phenomenon too, and he has a very good reason:  He's part of an international program called MONARCH that has been working to contain and hide the fact these MUTO monsters have been set loose on earth's surface since man has learned to split the atom, and there's a massive MUTO cocoon at the plant site that's feeding off the radiation and giving off regular EM pulses as a result, and the cocoon is waking up.  All hell breaks loose, and the rising MUTO has only one natural predator...

Gojira.  Godzilla.  The fraggin' King of Monsters.  Guess who's coming to dinner?

At this point you'll want to strap in for some serious action and some breathtakingly beautiful cinematography.  and some utterly amazing disaster footage.  These kaiju don't just fight, they rampage and decimate.  They make the beasts in Pacific Rim look like toys.  Colossal doesn't begin to describe these forces of nature, and Godzilla is the biggest one of them all in a big, BIG way.

Definitely see this one for the last 30 minutes alone.

A Climate Hostile To Logic, Con't

As I said in the article below, global climate change skeptics try to pretend that the science is on their side and they explain that the debate is over what should be done about climate change, rather than if it's happening. The problem of course is that it's impossible to take them seriously when the reality is Big Energy lobbies that fund these skeptics instruct state legislatures to reject science education standards in order to lie to students and parents, because an ignorant population is more easily controlled.

Sitting in the headquarters of the Wyoming Liberty Group, Susan Gore, founder of the conservative think tank, said new national science standards for schools were a form of “coercion,” adding, “I don’t think government should have anything to do with education.”

Ms. Gore, a daughter of the founder of the company that makes Gore-Tex waterproof fabric, was speaking here weeks after the Republican-controlled Legislature made Wyoming, where coal and oil are king, the first state to reject the standards, which include lessons on human impact on global warming. The pushback came despite a unanimous vote by a group of Wyoming science educators urging acceptance. Wyoming was the first state to say no, but likely not the last. A House committee in Oklahoma last week voted to reject the standards, also in part because of concerns about how climate change would be taught.

Amid a growing cascade of studies documenting melting ice caps and rising temperatures, schools are increasingly teaching students about climate change and the new guidelines, known as the Next Generation Science Standards, have been adopted so far by 11 states and the District of Columbia. They assert that human activity has affected the climate.

Many here and elsewhere consider that liberal dogma rather than scientific consensus and want their children to hear it as theory rather than fact. What is more, some Wyoming lawmakers say, such teaching is a threat to the state’s economic engine.

The scientific fact is a threat to Big Energy, so it must be obliterated.  Your kids have to remain ignorant in order to protect the profits of these companies, so they can continue to wreck our environment (and they fully expect taxpayers to deal with the mess.)  These companies aren't just greedy, they are truly evil.

In Wyoming, after 18 months of study and comparison with standards from other states, a committee of science educators unanimously recommended last fall that the State Department of Education adopt the guidelines. In March, at the tail end of the state’s legislative session, lawmakers passed a footnote to the biennial budget, prohibiting any public spending to implement the new standards.

And last month, the State Department of Education ordered the committee of science educators to come up with a new set of standards. Mr. Micheli, the chairman and a cattle rancher from Fort Bridger, said he was concerned about any teaching on climate change that did not consider “the cost-benefit analysis in terms of the expenditure of the effort to bring under control global warming.”

Scientific education is now subject to cost-benefit analysis in an America run by Republicans and their multi-billion dollar industrial backers.  Imagine the sentence "concerned about any teaching on slavery that did not consider the cost-benefit analysis in terms of the expenditure of the effort to emancipate slaves" and you're beginning to see how shockingly ludicrous the Wyoming GOP's position on this is.

They are wholly owned by the energy companies, and these companies are the ones making decisions about what kids are now allowed to learn.  We have to say "Well there's controversy" because you know, teaching that mad-made climate change is happening right now due to consumption of petroleum products might get people to think that this level of consumption is unsustainable.

By the way, here in Kentucky?

In other states, the debate is also intense. Last fall, the Legislature in Kentucky voted to reject the new science guidelines but Gov. Steven L. Beshear overruled the Legislature and put the standards in place with an executive order.

We were nearly the first state to reject climate change education standards.  A Democrat prevented that.   Don't tell me there's no difference between the two parties.

A Climate Hostile To Logic

Power Line's Steven Hayward summarily dismisses the fact that 97% of climate science supports man-made global climate change because there's too much data supporting climate change, so it's really just noise that covers up the fact that we should continue to do nothing about it.

No really, that's his entire argument.

No one can possibly keep up with the flood of scientific articles published on climate-related topics these days (we’re spending way too much on climate research right now, but that’s a topic for another day), so it is ridiculous to offer sweeping generalizations like this about the character of the scientific literature. I keep up with a fair amount of it in Nature, Science, and a couple of the other main journals, and what is quite obvious is that most climate-related articles are about specific aspects of climate, such as observed changed in localized ecosystems, measurement refinements (like ocean temperatures, etc), energy use and projections, and large data analysis. Many of these articles do not take a position on the magnitude of possible future warming, and fewer still embrace giving the car keys over to Al Gore. Only a handful deal with modeling of future climate change, and this is where the debate over climate sensitivity and the severe limitations of the models (especially as relates to clouds) is quite lively and—dare I say it—unsettled. (Just read the IPCC Working Group I chapter on climate models if you don’t believe me.) The “97 percent of scientists ‘believe in’ climate change” cliché is an appalling abuse of science, and a bad faith attempt to marginalize anyone who dissents from the party line that we need to hand our car keys over to Al Gore. The tacit message is: if you dissent from the party line, you must be in that 3 percent who think you shouldn’t brush your teeth, take painkillers for headaches, etc.

Got that?  Hayward admits there is an overwhelming amount of data that shows climate is changing, but now the "unsettled science" is "should we bother to do anything about it" and that's just too complex for science to prove that we should.

Better to do nothing, as he goes on to attack the 97% figure with one example from one paper, declares all of climate science to be junk, then declares it a moot point, even though he's just got through explaining how climate change exists and rails against the 3% that somehow believes it's a myth and how dare you put him in that category, because he believes in science, dammit.

The basis of climate denial is this:  the models predicting the climates of the future vary widely.  Because they vary widely due to the complexity of all the factors of climate, the majority of the models can't possibly all be 100% right, so we have to assume that the vast, overwhelming majority are flawed in some way.  Therefore, we can't possibly construct national political policy, let alone international policy, based on these models that we've just proven are all flawed in some way.  We can't take action that could be cost-effective based on this uncertainty.  The only safe path is to do nothing.

This of course is akin to saying "Well we don't know how long a person will live when they are born, and the majority of the models predicting a person's lifespan are going to be historically incorrect or flawed in some way.  Therefore, we shouldn't bother to spend money on public education, police and fire safety, medical advances, clean air and water, or a safe food supply because we don't know if that will really extend a person's lifespan or not in a cost-effective way. We can't predict the future based on this uncertainty, so the only safe path is to do nothing."

You see where the problem begins.  Hayward obviously doesn't.

StupidiNews!

• South Korean President Park Geun-hye apologized for April's deadly ferry disaster that killed nearly 300 and will disband the country's Coast Guard for their role in failing to prevent the disaster.
• Heavy gunfire has been reported in Libya's capital of Tripoli as the Libyan military has announced the suspension of the country's parliament.
• AT&T will buy DirecTV in a $48.5 billion stock and cash deal that will make the company the second largest television provider in the the US.
• As predicted by polling, Swiss voters have rejected a 22 franc minimum wage ($25) by a nearly 4 to 1 margin as 90% of Swiss earn more than the proposed rate.
• Direct evidence of the "long winter" global cooling effect after the asteroid impact that killed the dinosaurs has been found in the geological record in Texas rocks.

Last Call For A Bitter Cocoatastrophe

Supply shortages from growers, exponential increase in demand of emerging markets, political turmoil in Africa and global climate change affecting harvests are playing havoc with the world's chocolate numbers, and indulging your sweet tooth may soon get a lot more expensive.

Juergen Steinemann, head of Barry Callebaut, the leading supplier of cocoa and chocolate to manufacturers and food professionals, doesn't hide his concern despite the Swiss-based company's current sweet performance.

Barry Callebaut has positioned itself well to benefit from growth in emerging markets, where its sales jumped nearly a fifth last year and now account for a quarter of overall sales.

But if consumers in emerging markets quickly develop a sweet tooth for chocolate, a severe shortage of cocoa beans could develop.

At the current moment consumers in emerging markets eat just 50 grams of chocolate per person per year, compared with European and US consumers who gobble up 10 to 12 kilos per person.

Steinemann said even an increase of average annual consumption per head from 50 grams to two kilos in emerging markets would put a major strain on supplies of the cocoa beans that are the key ingredient in chocolate.

And remember, a third of the world's cocoa bean supply comes from Ivory Coast, making an exploitable bottleneck for speculators.

The average size of cocoa plantations in Ivory Coast is just two or three hectares five-seven acres), with most farmers having had little formal agricultural training and using techniques handed down to them by the parents.

"Producers can much improve their yields if they remove old bad fruit, the bad leaves with some kind of disease," said Steinemann. "It's all very simple things to do, it's gardening as you do in your garden."

Fertiliser use is currently scant and could also help in achieving the project's goal of of doubling yields from 400 to 800 kilos per hectare in Ivory Coast by 2020.

"It will be easy to get farmers to return to cocoa if we help them obtain better yields, better quality and thus better profits," said Janvier.

Barry Callebaut doesn't hold out much hope however for genetically-modified cocoa, which Steinemann said doesn't suit the taste as well as health concerns of consumers in Europe, still the biggest market.

The tight supply situation has made the cocoa market attractive for commodity speculators.

"I was very angry, but the fact is that you can't keep them out," said Steinemann.

So yes,  all indications are that cocoa is going to go up, up up.  Chocoholics, beware.

Sunday Long Read: Eric Holder And The Subtle Knife

Attorney General Eric Holder's commencement speech at Baltimore's Morgan State University yesterday was astounding as he spoke to the crowd at this historically black university about Brown v Board of Education, the civil rights movement, and the subtle, institutionalized racism that still exists in America today.  It's your Sunday long read, and it's worth diving into.

Over the last few weeks and months, we’ve seen occasional, jarring reminders of the discrimination – and the isolated, repugnant, racist views – that in some places have yet to be overcome. These incidents have received substantial media coverage. And they have rightly been condemned by leaders, commentators, and citizens from all backgrounds and walks of life.

But we ought not find contentment in the fact that these high-profile expressions of outright bigotry seem atypical and were met with such swift condemnation. Because if we focus solely on these incidents – on outlandish statements that capture national attention and spark outrage on Facebook and Twitter – we are likely to miss the more hidden, and more troubling, reality behind the headlines.

These outbursts of bigotry, while deplorable, are not the true markers of the struggle that still must be waged, or the work that still needs to be done – because the greatest threats do not announce themselves in screaming headlines. They are more subtle. They cut deeper. And their terrible impact endures long after the headlines have faded and obvious, ignorant expressions of hatred have been marginalized.

Nor does the greatest threat to equal opportunity any longer reside in overtly discriminatory statutes like the “separate but equal” laws of 60 years ago. Since the era of Brown, laws making classifications based on race have been subjected to a legal standard known as “strict scrutiny.” Almost invariably, these statutes, when tested, fail to pass constitutional muster. But there are other policies that too easily escape such scrutiny because they have the appearance of being race-neutral. Their impacts, however, are anything but. This is the concern we must contend with today: policies that impede equal opportunity in fact, if not in form.

To hear the Attorney General of the United States of America admit this in any speech is nothing short of amazing, and yet he is absolutely correct.  And yes, no discussion of institutionalized racial bias can be complete without discussion of the incarceration industry in this country, and discussion of voter suppression.

For instance, in our criminal justice system, systemic and unwarranted racial disparities remain disturbingly common. One study released last year by the U.S. Sentencing Commission indicated that – in recent years – African-American men have received sentences that are nearly 20 percent longer than those imposed on white males convicted of similar crimes. Another report showed that American Indians are often sentenced even more harshly. The Justice Department is examining these and other disparities as we speak – and taking a variety of steps to ensure fair sentences that match the conduct at issue in individual cases. Like a growing chorus of lawmakers across the political spectrum, we recognize that disparate outcomes are not only shameful and unacceptable – they impede our ability to see that justice is done. And they perpetuate cycles of poverty, crime, and incarceration that trap individuals, destroy communities, and decimate minority neighborhoods.

And until the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, African Americans’ right to the franchise was aggressively restricted based solely on race. Today, such overt measures cannot survive. Yet in too many jurisdictions, new types of restrictions are justified as attempts to curb an epidemic of voter fraud that – in reality – has never been shown to exist. Rather than addressing a supposedly widespread problem, these policies disproportionately disenfranchise African Americans, Hispanics, other communities of color, and vulnerable populations such as the elderly. But interfering with or depriving a person of the right to vote should never be a political aim. It is a moral failing. In recent years, thousands of Americans, the pride of our nation, have given their lives – and deal even today with the scars of war – so that hopeful, striving people who live continents away could proudly hold up their purple fingers after voting in a truly democratic process. America is now 50 years from Freedom Summer. And we must not countenance, within our own borders, practices that would make it difficult or impossible to exercise the right for which so many have given so much.

This is why I deeply respect Eric Holder, and this is why he is despised so much by the right.   This is why I harp so much and so often on voting rights and implore you, the reader, to exercise your right to vote.  There's an entire political party dedicated to make it as difficult as possible to vote in a representative democracy.  It is a core belief and key plank in their platform.  And the nation's top cop recognizes how pernicious and corrosive that is, and is working to stop it.

Republican Sneak Attacks

Mississippi Republicans will be voting in the June 3rd primary to determine if Sen. Thad Cochran merits replacement by Tea Party challenger, state Sen. Chris McDaniel.  So far Cochran seems to be weathering the attack from his right flank fairly well, but if this story can be traced back to McDaniel, the primary is over and Cochran will win in a landslide.

A Pearl man who runs a political blog is accused of sneaking into a nursing home where U.S. Sen. Thad Cochran's wife is bedridden and photographing her, then posting the image in a video political "hit piece" on the internet.

Madison Police arrested Clayton Thomas Kelly, 28, of Pearl on Friday night on a charge of exploitation of a vulnerable adult. He's being held on a $100,000 bond.

Kelly is accused of sneaking into St. Catherine's Village in Madison, where Rose Cochran has resided since 2000, suffering from progressive dementia and now bedridden.

Donald Clark, attorney for Sen. and Rose Cochran, said the Cochrans' "privacy and dignity have been violated."

"We became aware of an unauthorized picture, posted on the internet, of Mrs. Cochran, taken literally in her room by her bedside at St. Catherine's," Clark said. "Sen. Cochran retained my law firm on this matter, and we looked at various legal options. We notified the proper authorities, which in this case is the city of Madison Police Department."

Clark said St. Catherine's is also conducting an internal investigation.

It doesn't matter what McDaniel does at this point.  Distancing himself from Kelly is still going to leave an awful taste in voters' mouths, and screaming that Kelly is somehow a Cochran plant when Cochran was up by double digits makes him look even worse.

Nope, this race is pretty much over, and I'm trying to figure out why any Tea Party douchebag would go to such ridiculous lengths to try to win in what is obviously the most stupid plan imaginable.

Oh wait, I answered my own question.

Last Call For Thirty Million Patriots

So that Operation American Spring thing, where tens of millions of patriots were going to descend upon Washington DC and shut the country down, oust President Obama and the "traitor-enabling" GOP leadership, and issue in a new wingnut utopia the way the Arab Spring brought down tyrants in the Middle East and North Africa, didn't exactly go as planned.

“It’s a very dismal turnout,” Jackie Milton, the head of Texans for Operation American Spring, told The Washington Times. “We were getting over two inches of rain [an] hour in parts of Virginia this morning. … Now it’s a nice sunny day. But this is a very poor turnout. It ain’t no millions. And it ain’t looking like there’s going to be millions. Hundreds is more like it.”

And even that number was being generous.  30 million became, well, thirty.

It's fun to laugh at these idiots, it really is.  But the bottom line is that if these clowns were right about President Obama, he would have them all arrested as traitors.  The fact that they're allowed to protest and go home back to their kids and jobs is more than the people in the Arab Spring ever got under real, actual tyranny where protestors were set upon by the military.

Your First Amendment rights give you the ability to peaceably assemble and voice your opinions and congratulations for exercising them.  It also gives the rest of us the ability to laugh at you for being ignorant morons, too.

Welcome to America.  Don't like Obama?  Vote.  Oh wait, we did.  You guys lost.  Twice.

Deal with it.

Not Sorry In The Least

Yep, good to know racism is dead in America and we're all holding hands and singing songs and crap.

Residents of Wolfeboro, N.H. are demanding that their police commissioner resign for calling President Barack Obama the n-word -- then refusing to apologize.

A Wolfeboro resident wrote to the town's manager to complain that she overheard Robert Copeland, 82, call Obama the n-word in March at a restaurant, according to Manchester TV station WMUR.

Copeland didn't offer an apology after the resident complained to his bosses.

"I believe I did use the 'N' word in reference to the current occupant of the Whitehouse (sic)," Copeland wrote in an email to the resident, as quoted by WMUR. "For this, I do not apologize -- he meets and exceeds my criteria for such."

At least 100 residents gathered at a town meeting Thursday night to demand Copeland's resignation to no avail, according to WMUR. The police commission, which consists of Copeland and two others, planned to meet and determine what further action to take.

The takeaway from this is that Copeland is 82.  His generation is dying out, and today's kids are growing up in an era where a black president is not only possible, but the guy got re-elected.  Pretty sure he'll be joined by the first female president in a couple of years.  But hey, this guy's a town police commissioner and stuff, so.

New Hampshire, Vermont and Maine all have a black population of about 1%, too.  Just throwing that out there.  By the way, if you're wondering, the state with both the smallest number of black residents and the lowest percentage is Montana, according to the 2010 Census.  Kentucky's 7.71% is actually the median of US states.

Game Of Clowns

That famed confederacy of dunces apparently had a bit of a confab this week, as former NRO and now Washington Post GOP beat reporter Robert Costa explains.  It seems the culture warriors and Tea Party darlings aren't going out without that brutal internal GOP civil war I've been talking about, and the situation just got "serious".

Thursday’s gathering at the Ritz-Carlton in Tysons Corner, Va., was coordinated by Reagan-era attorney general Edwin Meese III and former congressman David McIntosh (Ind.) as part of an initiative called the Conservative Action Project.

It included dozens of leaders from across the conservative movement, including tea party organizer Jenny Beth Martin and interest group executives such as Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform and Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council. The meeting, which featured speeches from Sens. Ted Cruz (Tex.) and Mike Lee (Utah), marked the first time this year that prominent national conservatives have come together to candidly assess the GOP and their strategy for shaping it.

The day-long session underscored how simmering tensions between rival factions in the Republican Party appear to be growing, even as polls point to the potential for a major GOP victory in midterm elections in the fall.

Congressional Republicans have been grappling over whether to compromise on immigration, some Republicans are calling for a smaller military, and same-sex marriage is fading as a top issue in this year’s campaigns.

It seems that the establishment GOP isn't going to put up with more Todd Akin-style "legitimate rape" gaffes and want to win enough seats to seriously damage the Democrats, oh and throw aside the Tea Party for good.

Many GOP strategists and party leaders think that tea party activists’ successes in recent years nominating ideological purists resulted in weak candidates and crippling general-election losses. They worry that efforts to revive the base could threaten Republican hopes again.

“What’s clear is that we ought to be focusing on economic security for the future, not divisive social issues. That’s how we lost several key Senate races last cycle and plays into the Democrats’ hand,” said GOP consultant Brian Walsh, a former communications director for the National Republican Senatorial Committee.

But the bigots, the misogynists, and the god-botherers won't be denied.

But even in the tightknit room, there was not universal agreement. Norquist, for example, supports legalization for many illegal immigrants and has pushed for more scrutiny of the defense budget. In an interview, he said he attended Thursday’s meeting to back the broad efforts on the right to unite, rather than endorse the document line by line.

Most activists expressed dismay that they seemed to have a diminished voice in the party.

“What we’re doing and saying is not resonating, so we are trying to come to grips with that,” said Grace-Marie Turner, the president of the Galen Institute, a conservative research group. “We have to learn to relate our solutions to people’s struggles.”

What they all have in common is that they're already counting their Senate and House victories six months ahead of time and are already fighting over who will be driving the clown car when it crosses the finish line.

Perhaps they need a rude awakening at the polls in November.

StupidiNews, Weekend Edition!

• Dr. Robert Petzel, undersecretary for health in the Department of Veteran's Affairs, has resigned in response to growing questions about secret "wait lists" at VA hospitals.
• Minnesota has become the latest state to approve limited legalization of medical marijuana, bringing the total number of states with at least some legalization to 22.
• General Motors will pay $35 million in fines for its failure to address the issue with vehicle ignition switches in a timely manner, putting millions at risk.
• Ukrainian separatists have announced that the Donetsk region of the country has formed their own independent government and will break away from Kiev.
• The FCC's latest figures on cable TV rates find prices went up by over 6% in 2013, in line with yearly increases over the last 18 years.