Last Call For Rainbow-Colored Glasses (Of Beer)

Sam Adams Brewery is making a hell of a statement by pulling out of Boston's Southie St. Patty's Day parade over LGBTQ equality issues:

We have been participating in the South Boston St. Patrick’s Day Parade for nearly a decade and have also supported the St. Patrick’s Day breakfast year after year. We’ve done so because of the rich history of the event and to support veterans who have done so much for this country.

We were hopeful that both sides of this issue would be able to come to an agreement that would allow everyone, regardless of orientation, to participate in the parade. But given the current status of the negotiations, we realize this may not be possible.

We share these sentiments with Mayor Walsh, Congressman Lynch and others and therefore we will not participate in this year’s parade. We will continue to support Senator Linda Dorcena Forry and her St. Patrick’s Day breakfast. We wish her all the best in her historic stewardship of this tradition.

The collapse in negotiations between advocacy group MassEquality and parade sponsor Allied War Veterans Council over allowing gay veterans to march in the parade has now triggered Sam Adams pulling out.  For Boston (and especially Southie) this is a hell of a big deal.

“Mayor Walsh obviously is disappointed that these two parties could not come to an agreement for this year’s St. Patrick’s Day parade,’’ said Lisa Pollack, communications chief for Walsh. He “will always hold out hope that we can find a way for everybody to be included.”

Parade organizer Philip J. Wuschke Jr. did not return calls for comments Wednesday. Lynch also could not be reached for comment. An aide to Lynch did not respond to questions about whether the congressman would march Sunday and continued to strike a hopeful tone.

“Talks regarding the parade are ongoing,” Meghan Aldridge, Lynch’s press secretary, said. “Congressman Lynch remains hopeful that a solution agreeable to all parties involved can be reached in time for Sunday’s parade.”

There's only 36 hours or so left at this point before the parade, and it's looking like Boston's most famous brew isn't going to be at Boston's most famous yearly event.  Looks like I underestimated Mayor Walsh.

Besides, it's 2014.  Get over it, Southie.

Flights Of Fancy

The mystery of missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 is now getting very, very weird.

Military radar data suggests a Malaysia Airlines jetliner missing for nearly a week was deliberately flown hundreds of miles off course, heightening suspicions of foul play among investigators, sources told Reuters on Friday.

Analysis of the Malaysia data suggests the plane, with 239 people on board, diverted from its intended northeast route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing and flew west instead, using airline flight corridors normally employed for routes to the Middle East and Europe, said sources familiar with investigations into the Boeing 777's disappearance.

Two sources said an unidentified aircraft that investigators believe was Flight MH370 was following a route between navigational waypoints when it was last plotted on military radar off the country's northwest coast.

This indicates that it was either being flown by the pilots or someone with knowledge of those waypoints, the sources said.

The last plot on the military radar's tracking suggested the plane was flying toward India's Andaman Islands, a chain of isles between the Andaman Sea and the Bay of Bengal, they said.

Waypoints are geographic locations, worked out by calculating longitude and latitude, that help pilots navigate along established air corridors.

A third source familiar with the investigation said inquiries were focusing increasingly on the theory that someone who knew how to fly a plane deliberately diverted the flight.

People just don't hijack planes anymore, but that appears to be what has happened.  Where the plane was flown to and why, we don't know.  But nobody seems to know where the flight went to, whether it landed safely or if it crashed, or what.  If it went way off course and then crashed without giving off any transponder signal, planet Earth is a pretty big place to lose something.

We'll see.

Vox In A Box

Ezra Klein's new media venture, Vox.com, is getting off the ground soon and he's managed to hire a number of talented people, including Matthew Yglesias, Sarah Kliff, and more.  Unfortunately, as the American Prospect's Gabe Arana points out, his newest hire on the LGBTQ beat is Brandon Ambrosino, arguably one of the worst self-hating gay hacks out there.

The problem with hiring Ambrosino is not that Klein isn't entitled to bring someone on board whose views the gay community finds distasteful. It's that Ambrosino's quick rise to notoriety—and now, his ticket aboard the profession’s hottest new upstart—is an object lesson in the way new media equates click-bait contrarianism with serious thought and gives hacks a platform in the name of ideological balance.

A 23-year-old graduate of Jerry Falwell's Liberty University...

Well that right there explains everything you need to know about Ambrosino, yes?

Ambrosino has earned his name as a journalist—and his coveted spot at Vox Media—by being the gay writer who comes to the defense of gay-rights antagonists. He most recently stirred up a storm by proclaiming, at The New Republic, that homosexuality is a choice and that he has chosen to be gay. Time magazine gave him space to call gays the real bigots for piling on Duck Dynasty's Phil Robertson, who had equated homosexuality with bestiality and said gays weren't going to heaven (still, Ambrosino says he wouldn't mind going fishing with the guy). At The Atlantic, Ambrosino threw his hat in the ring for the founder of his alma mater, who blamed September 11 on gays and accused them of trying to "recruit" children; Ambrosino says liberals like Bill Maher have slandered the Moral Majority founder and says, in Falwell's defense, that the guy with the "big fat smile" probably wouldn't have had him stoned to death if he'd known about Ambrosino's sexuality. Ambrosino also defends the views of ex-gay therapists and same-sex marriage opponents, whom he says aren't motivated by bigotry. In The Baltimore Sun, Ambrosino went after the guys in "butt-less chaps and high-heels" at gay-pride marches who earn society's prejudice with their "hypersexual antics": “I think there is a subversive power in living out my gay life in a way that seeks to emphasize the common ground I share with straight communities,” he wrote. “I don't want to participate in an event that seeks to highlight how countercultural I am.” Unsurprisingly, the religious right has been thrilled to find an acolyte among the fallen.

Now, Ambrosino is a known quantity, and Vox knew exactly what they were doing when they hired him.  In Ezra Klein's defense, why should Slate, Salon, BuzzFeed, Politico and HuffPo make all the money off of regularly trolling liberals?  The guy apparently understands exactly how the game works, guys.

In other words, this is how Ezra rolls.  Our"new" liberal media is just as bad as the current bunch of clowns.

StupidiNews!

• A new Senate deal has enough Republican support to restore extended unemployment benefits to millions, but it may already be doomed in the House.
• Colorado law enforcement officials have launched a new campaign to stop people from driving while under the effects of newly legalized marijuana.
• Bank of America is back before a federal judge as the Department of Justice wants the company to pay $2.1 billion in penalties stemming from its Countrywide mortgage unit.
• The Obama administration has lifted the government contracting ban on energy giant BP enforced in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
• Food supplement maker Soylent is delaying shipments of its product due to shortages in filling the firm's protein needs, but the product should be on its way in April.

Last Call For We Don't Need No Education

Seems Ohio Republican State Rep. Andrew Brenner has decided that public education needs to go in America, because it's socialism.

In the post, titled "Public education in America is socialism, what is the solution?," Brenner laid out his argument. He noted that the Tea Party, which "will attack Obama-care relentlessly as a socialist system," rarely brings up "the fact that our public education system is already a socialist system[…] and has been a socialist system since the founding of our country." He addressed teachers unions -- "an outgrowth of our socialistic education system" -- which he granted originally improved things "temporarily" before they ultimately "became bureaucratic and they started to take the place of school boards and school management."

"I’m not blaming the teachers unions or the local school boards who are bound to the contracts, because if they don’t they will end up with strikes and an arbitrator will rule against them," Brenner wrote. "These issues all stemmed from the fact that we have a socialist education system in the first place."

Brenner's solution: more privatization.

"In a free market system parents and students are free to go where the product and results are better," he wrote. "Common core and standardized tests under such a system will not be necessary, because the schools that fail will go out of business. Government will not be there to prop them up with more tax dollars and increased regulations. Successful schools will thrive. The free-market system works for cars, furniture, housing, restaurants, and to a lesser degree higher education, so why can’t it work for our primary education system?"

It can, if you've decided that the goal of primary education is "Only those with money get educated."   Everyone else?  Well, I guess you don't need to be educated to greet people at Wallyworld or flip burgers at Mickey D's.  After all, if the parents really cared, they'd either work those extra jobs in order to afford to send their kids to school, or they'd stay home and teach the kids themselves, right?

I bet this guy hates the Interstate Highway System.

Oh, did I mention Brenner is the number two Republican on the Ohio House Education Committee?

Paul Ryan, Master Of GOP Minority Outreach

Apparently the entire thrust of GOP Rep. Paul Ryan's interest in poverty statistics is to once again blame it all on black men for being lazy.

House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) previewed his upcoming legislative proposals for reforming America’s poverty programs during an appearance on Bill Bennett’s Morning in America Wednesday, hinting that he would focus on creating work requirements for men “in our inner cities” and dealing with the “real culture problem” in these communities. “We have got this tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work, and so there is a real culture problem here that has to be dealt with,” he said.

I guess he thinks we black men are too stupid to see through that nonsense, but that's kind of his point, isn't it?  It's black culture that doesn't value hard work, cause we're all thugs and drug dealers and...well wait a minute, drug dealers and thugs actually do know the value of hard work, now that I think about it.  So I guess he sees someone like me as subhuman maybe?

Ryan also cited Charles Murray, a conservative social scientist who believes African-Americans are, as a population, less intelligent than whites due to genetic differences and that poverty remains a national problem because “a lot of poor people are born lazy.”

And yet this lovely pile of racist garbage was the Republican choice for Vice-President in 2012.  Sure does make me want to vote Republican.  You know, if I wasn't so lazy and/or stupid.

Today, Ryan apologized.  Sort of.

After some reflection, Ryan said Thursday "it is clear that I was inarticulate about the point I was trying to make." 

"I was not implicating the culture of one community - but of society as a whole."

Sure he was.  Especially when he cited Murray and his Bell Curve nonsense.  He must think we're pretty stupid.

Oh wait, he does, and he said so.  On multiple occasions.  Look, even if you somehow can make the argument that Ryan isn't a racist asshole citing other avowed racist assholes in his policy work, at the very least his entire budget is based on the fact he thinks poor people only exist because they are all  one hundred percent of them lazy to a person.

And again, this guy was going to be Vice-President of the United States if the GOP had their way.

The Derpy Carson Show

By all means Republicans, do everything you can to put Dr. Ben Carson in the hotseat for 2016.

Ben Carson, a renowned neurosurgeon and a popular figure among conservatives, compared the United States to the Third Reich in an interview.

Asked to elaborate on his previous comments about the U.S. living in "a Gestapo age," the conservative firebrand argued the country has become "very much like Nazi Germany."

"I know you're not supposed to say Nazi Germany, but I don't care about political correctness," he said in an interview Monday with the conservative news outlet Breitbart.

His comments came at the New York Meeting, a gathering of conservative politicians, journalists and business leaders.

Carson, who came in third in the GOP presidential nomination straw poll at last week's Conservative Political Action Conference, has been a fierce critic of the administration on the IRS controversy. The tax agency admitted last year to scrutinizing conservative political groups, though it maintains the error was not done out of political bias.

"You had the government using its tools to intimidate the population," Carson said. "We now live in a society where people are afraid to say what they actually believe."

And yet, here's Ben Carson, complaining that imaginary tyrants are preventing him from saying what he believes, and he's getting to say exactly what he believes.  He sure looks intimidated, huh.

In all seriousness, with FOX, the news shows, and endless coverage of everything they say, who actually believes that these clowns don't get to freely say what they want 24/7?

StupidiNews!

• Chinese government officials say a surveillance satellite may have picked up what is believed to be the crash site of missing Malaysian Airlines Flight 370.
• The death toll is up to three, with at least 36 people injured in a suspected gas explosion in the middle of a block of Manhattan apartment buildings.
• European Union officials have outlined a framework for imposing financial sanctions on Russia in the wake of the invasion of Crimea.
• Australia's economy posted its biggest monthly job creation gain in 22 years as gains in housing and low interest rates are fueling growth.
• On the 25th anniversary of the invention of the World Wide Web, inventor Tim Berners-Lee is calling for a new "digital Magna Carta" agreement to secure internet freedom globally.

Last Call For Not Everything In The Cosmos

Of course you knew some red state Fox affiliate was going to cut any mention of evolution out of the new Cosmos series.  Accidentally, of course.

In what appeared to be an editing error, a Fox affiliate in Oklahoma managed to remove the only mention of evolution from Sunday night's Cosmos science documentary by cutting only 15 seconds from the broadcast.

The much-anticipated reboot of Carl Sagan's legendary Cosmos premiered on Sunday with an overview of the history of the Universe, from the Big Bang to the advent of humans.

It wasn't until the last 10 minutes of the show that host Neil deGrasse Tyson hinted at human evolution.

"We are newcomers to the Cosmos," he explained. "Our own story only begins on the last night of the cosmic year."

"Three and a half million years ago, our ancestors -- your and mine left these traces," Tyson said, pointing to footprints. "We stood up and parted ways from them. Once we were standing on two feet, our eyes were no longer fixated on the ground. Now, we were free to look up and wonder."

But for viewers of KOKH-TV in Oklahoma City, that 15 second paragraph was replaced by an awkwardly-inserted commercial for the evening news. The edit was caught on video and uploaded to YouTube by Adam Bates.

Yep, totally a mistake.   Pretending evolution doesn't exist, well, have to keep those Oklahomans happy.  Hell, they might have learned something, and we can't have that.

Time For More Time And A Half

In the age of record corporate profits, President Obama will use power given to him by Congress through the Fair Standards Labor Act to classify more salaried professional workers as eligible for overtime.

On Thursday, the president will direct the Labor Department to revamp its regulations to require overtime pay for several million additional fast-food managers, loan officers, computer technicians and others whom many businesses currently classify as “executive or professional” employees to avoid paying them overtime, according to White House officials briefed on the announcement.

Mr. Obama’s decision to use his executive authority to change the nation’s overtime rules is likely to be seen as a challenge to Republicans in Congress, who have already blocked most of the president’s economic agenda and have said they intend to fight his proposal to raise the federal minimum wage to $10.10 per hour from $7.25.

Bush used the FSLA to push the number down to its current threshold, $455 a week, or about $11.38 an hour, back in 2004. 

Keep in mind that comes out to under $24,000 a year.  If you make the equivalent of more than that, and your job is management or  technical in nature where your workload isn't directly determined by others (like help desk or customer service), the dirty secret of the business world is that you're salaried and get worked however many hours over 40 you can be worked, no OT.  This is especially the case in management and in IT/clerical positions.  Pretty fun to work a job making two grand a month and have to put in 60-70 hours a week, every week, right?  Why, that works out to making less than minimum wage...

In addition, Mr. Obama will try to change rules that allow employers to define which workers are exempt from receiving overtime based on the kind of work they perform. Under current rules, if an employer declares that an employee’s primary responsibility is executive, such as overseeing a cleanup crew, then that worker can be exempted from overtime.

White House officials said those rules were sometimes abused by employers in an attempt to avoid paying overtime. The new rules could require that employees perform a minimum percentage of “executive” work before they can be exempted from qualifying for overtime pay.

“Under current rules, it literally means that you can spend 95 percent of the time sweeping floors and stocking shelves, and if you’re responsible for supervising people 5 percent of the time, you can then be considered executive and be exempt,” said Ross Eisenbrey, a vice president of the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal research organization in Washington.

Needless to say, Republicans are howling.  After all, Bush got businesses the power to classify millions of workers as "executive" and leave them stuck working nights and weekends for free.  They loved him for it.  Obama is about to piss some people off.

And I say good.

My Old (Hatred) Kentucky Home

Once again my state manages to distinguish itself in the field of awfulness over equality.

Sunrise Children’s Services is working to recover from a massive budget shortfall after Kentucky churches withheld $7 million because the children’s home had proposed ending its policy of discrimination against LGBT employees.

Bill Smithwick, the then-director of Sunrise Children’s Services, proposed last year that the home allow employees who were openly gay and lesbian over fears that government funding would dry up.

After churches in Kentucky began withholding their donations, Smithwick was forced to resign, and the children’s home did not change its policy.

But the damage was done, and Sunrise Children’s Services was already facing a $7 million budget shortfall, according to WDRB.

So the Kentucky Baptists Convention instructed churches to withhold donating money to kids in need because of gay people.  And the whole reason Smithwick decided not to discriminate?  It's federal goddamn law to not discriminate, that's why.

Smithwick was in his 16th year at the helm of Sunrise when he floated the proposal to open employment to gays. He had said he feared the agency's ban would eventually lead to a loss of millions in government funding, meaning the agency would have to drastically scale back its budget, since most of its funding — Smithwick said 85 percent of about $27 million — comes from government sources.

So yes, these "good Christians" are more than willing to let these kids rot because gay people are so awful.  You want our money to keep these kids in food and shelter?  You have to hate fags.

That's a hell of a lesson to teach these kids.

StupidiNews!

• A major fire at a construction site in San Francisco has prompted several hundred evacuations as over 150 firefighters took on the blaze for hours.
• Peruvian officials are asking tourist to stop taking nude photos and leaving graffiti at world heritage sites like Machu Picchu.
• Federal investigators are looking into whether General Motors is criminally liable for failing to disclose 13 deaths related to last month's ignition switch recall.
• Russia has declared US loan aid to Ukraine as illegal under US laws preventing aid to any regime that uses force to take power, as it considers Ukraine's new government to be a violent coup.
• A federal judge has ordered all assets frozen in the case of bankrupt Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox, allowing a class action suit against the CEO and company to continue.

Last Call For Alex, Sunk

In the special election for Florida's 13th district to replace the late career GOP Rep. Bill Young, Democrat Alex Sink couldn't flip the seat as Republican David Jolly won 48.5% to 46.6%, with independent Lucas Overby serving as spoiler and taking 4.8% of the vote, enough to split the opposition to Jolly and allow the GOP to keep the seat.

The outcome does not change anything for Democrats in their calculus for retaking the House in next November's midterms. They still need to pick up 17 seats.

Political handicappers consider that a tall order, considering the shrinking number of competitive congressional districts nationwide.

Jolly served as a former general counsel for Young and also worked as a lobbyist.

"Tonight brings an end to this election," a victorious Jolly told supporters. "Tomorrow provides the opportunity for us to embark together on a new journey of representation here in Pinellas County."

Sink, the former Florida Chief Financial Officer, narrowly lost the 2010 gubernatorial election to Rick Scott.

She conceded the contest more than an hour after the polls closed, expressing pride in her campaign and thanking volunteers and supporters.

"I have congratulated David Jolly and wish him the best success in representing the voices of Pinellas in Congress," she said.

Florida-13 is a swing district in a swing state. It covers most of Pinellas County between Tampa Bay and the Gulf of Mexico, including parts of St. Petersburg. 

This is a district that voted Young pretty handily in 2012, but also helped President Obama win the state in his re-election.  Republicans are already saying this portends absolute doom for the Dems in 2014, but unless the GOP plans to help run glibertarian douchebags like 27-year old Overby in all the competitive districts to split the youth vote, it's not indicative of the country as a whole.

On the other hand, Jolly has to now immediately defend the seat in November, and I'm betting 8 months of doing nothing by voting against Obamacare isn't going to get him the win when turnout should be higher than the 39% this special election brought around.

We'll see.

Meanwhile, In Ukraine...

The saber-rattling is getting pretty, well, rattling if you ask me.

Ukraine may have to arm itself with nuclear weapons if the United States and other world powers refuse to enforce a security pact that obligates them to reverse the Moscow-backed takeover of Crimea, a member of the Ukraine parliament told USA TODAY.

The United States, Great Britain and Russia agreed in a pact "to assure Ukraine's territorial integrity" in return for Ukraine giving up a nuclear arsenal it inherited from the Soviet Union after declaring independence in 1991, said Pavlo Rizanenko, a member of the Ukrainian parliament.

"We gave up nuclear weapons because of this agreement," said Rizanenko, a member of the Udar Party headed by Vitali Klitschko, a candidate for president. "Now there's a strong sentiment in Ukraine that we made a big mistake."

His statements come as Russia raised the possibility it may send its troops beyond the Crimean peninsula on the Black Sea into the eastern half of Ukraine.

The Russian Foreign Ministry said lawlessness "now rules in eastern regions of Ukraine as a result of the actions of fighters of the so-called 'right sector' with the full connivance" of Ukraine's authorities.

Rizanenko and others in Ukraine say the pact it made with the United States under President Bill Clinton was supposed to prevent such Russian invasions.

The pact was made after the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991 and became Russia, leaving the newly independent nation of Ukraine as the world's third largest nuclear weapons power.

I'm hoping this is the opinion of a grumpy Soviet-era hardliner who's still kicking around Kiev's parliament some 25 years later.  But former heavyweight boxer Vitali Klitschko and the Udar party have been arguably the highest profile players in Ukraine's revolution.  But it shows that the situation in Ukraine is getting increasingly perilous, and that Putin has raised the stakes considerably with his actions.

Good thing we have President Obama at the helm, and not McCain or Romney.

Fish With Martyr Sauce

CBS reporter Sharyl Attkisson has apparently had enough of the network not running her Benghazigate pieces and is, I assume, leaving for someplace where she can happily smear the President more often over in Winger Welfare land.

Sources at CBS told the Washington Post's Erik Wemple that Atkisson was upset that the network hadn't used more of her reporting on the Sept, 11 2012 attack in Benghazi, Libya, and she's currently working on a book that details her struggles with the Obama administration (title: "Stonewalled: One Reporter's Fight for Truth in Obama's Washington").

But Atkisson had long ago carved out a special place in the hearts of conservatives.

Not only did she earn a reputation for relentlessly hounding the Obama administration over Benghazi, she also doggedly reported on the federal government's gun-walking operation known as "Fast and Furious," another conservative obsession.

The right showed its appreciation for her "Fast and Furious" coverage in 2012, when Atkisson received the Accuracy in Media's Reed Irvine Accuracy in Media Award at the Conservative Political Action Conference.

Her reporting was also regularly picked up by the aforementioned conservative news sites. Peruse through the archives at Breitbart, The Blaze and Townhall, and you'll find Atkisson's work cited frequently.

Of course, maybe it was because Attkisson is basically working for the GOP and helping to launder leaks to damage the Obama administration as recently as November.

On November 11, a CBS News report cited selectively leaked partial transcripts from Affordable Care Act (ACA) opponent Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) to claim that "the project manager in charge of building the federal health care website was apparently kept in the dark about serious failures in the website's security." The network was criticized by Maddow producer Steve Benen when he found that the warnings referenced a function of the health care website that won't be active until early 2014 and has nothing to do with the parts of the website that are currently in use. A Democratic staffer Benen talked to also said that this part of the website "will not submit or share personally identifiable information."

CBS' faulty report aired just days after the network faced widespread criticism and was forced to apologize for failing properly vet an unreliable source that was prominently featured in the network's October 27 60 Minutes report on the Benghazi attack. But CBS wasn't the only outlet to promote misleading claims from the leaked Oversight Committee transcript.

On November 11, The New York Times reported that The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services' Henry Chao, "[t]he chief digital architect for the federal health insurance marketplace," was "not aware of tests that indicated potential security flaws in the system, which opened to the public on Oct. 1," citing excerpts released by Issa. The same day, FoxNews.com claimed that Obamacare security concerns had been "withheld," but never mentioned that its story was based on a partial transcript. CNN's New Day, and Fox News' America's Newsroom and On The Record with Greta Van Susteren all ran the story on November 12. The Associated Press repeated the claim "Chao was unaware of a memo earlier that month detailing unresolved security issues" as late as November 13 -- after contradictory reports had surfaced.

The media's failure to confirm the suggestions made by partial transcripts from the House Oversight Committee is a significant oversight, considering the committee chairman Darrell Issa's history of releasing misleading material the press.

So yes, she gladly wants to run false and misleading pieces to hurt Democrats, and is upset that maybe, in the wake of Lara Logan's 60 Minutes Benghazi fiasco that had to be publicly retracted, that the network is actually being more critical of GOP propaganda pieces.

That's enough to make you a "victim of liberal bias" when you quit your job.