March 30, 2015

WATCH: Indiana GOP leader admits ‘No Gays Allowed’ sign would be legal in most of the state

Source: RawStory

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But during the press conference, a reporter noted that Indiana does not have a state law that prohibits discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity.

“You guys have said repeatedly that we shouldn’t be able to discriminate against anyone, but if you just ignore the existence of this law, can’t we already do that now? Can’t so-and-so in Richmond put a sign up and say ‘No Gays Allowed?’” she asked. “That’s not against the law, correct?”

“It would depend,” Bosma replied. “If you were in a community that had a human rights ordinance that wouldn’t be the case.”

“But most of the state does not have that, correct?” the reporter pressed.

“That’s correct,” Bosma admitted.

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Read more: http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2015/03/watch-indiana-gop-leader-admits-no-gays-allowed-sign-would-be-legal-in-most-of-the-state/

March 30, 2015

Emanuel Trying To Raid Indiana Firms Over Religious Freedom Law

Source: TPM

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel (D) is looking to capitalize on the outrage over Indiana Gov. Mike Pence (R) signing a controversial religious freedom law and raid some jobs for his city and state.

Emanuel sent letters to a dozen Indiana based companies criticizing the law and urging them to move their headquarters to Illinois and Chicago in particular, according to Crain's Chicago Business.

In the letter Emanuel writes that Pence's move is "wrong for the people of Indiana, wrong for the individuals who face new discrimination, and wrong for a state seeking to grow its economy."

"I am writing to urge you to consider Chicago as a place to move and grow your business," Emanuel continued. "Our great city's work force, infrastructure and customer base are unparalleled, which is why the Chicago region is home to more than 30 Fortune 500 companies and the city has been ranked the number one city for corporate relocations for two years running."

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Read more: http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/rahm-emanuel-mike-pence-religious-freedom

March 30, 2015

Indiana's Top Lawmakers Looking To Clarify Religious Freedom Law

Source: TPM

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At a press conference early on Monday, Indiana House Speaker Brian Bosma (pictured, left) and Indiana Senate President Pro Tempore David Long said that they would "encourage our colleagues to adopt a clarifying measure of some sort to remove this misconception about the bill." Long said this was a reaction to an "obvious misconception" about what the new law does.

Bosma and Long stressed that they hadn't anticipated the backlash of the law. Asked about both proponents of the law and opponents who said the law effectively discriminated against same-sex individuals. Long said that there was just a "small tribe" of people saying that.

"The fact is that it doesn't do that, it doesn't discriminate and anyone on either side of this issue suggesting otherwise is just plain flat wrong," Long said. Throughout the press conference, both lawmakers said repeatedly the legislation does not directly discriminate against anyone.

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Indiana Democrats quickly responded to the press conference saying that they wouldn't be satisfied with anything less than a full repeal of the law.

Read more: http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/brian-bosma-david-long-indiana-religious-freedom

March 30, 2015

Conn. Gov. Will Sign Executive Order On Travel In Protest Of Indiana Law

Source: TPM

Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy (D) on Monday announced he plans to sign an executive order on state-funded travel in response to Indiana Gov. Mike Pence (R) signing a controversial bill into law that could allow businesses to discriminate against gay people.

Governor Dan Malloy ✔ @GovMalloyOffice

Because of Indiana's new law, later today I will sign an Executive Order regarding state-funded travel. -DM

10:44 AM - 30 Mar 2015

Governor Dan Malloy ✔ @GovMalloyOffice

When new laws turn back the clock on progress, we can’t sit idly by. We are sending a message that discrimination won’t be tolerated. -DM

10:45 AM - 30 Mar 2015

Malloy's announcement is the latest move by a top elected official from another state in protest of Pence signing the law. San Francisco Mayor Edwin Lee (D) last week banned state-funded travel to Indiana last week as a statement against the law. It wasn't immediately clear from Malloy's tweets if the executive editor was exactly the same as Lee's move, although it's expected to be similar.

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Read more: http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/dannel-malloy-executive-order-mike-pence

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Hopefully, Massachusetts two Democratic U.S. Senators will be able to convince our GOP Governor to order the same type action.

March 30, 2015

Obama to make first visit to Kenya as president

Source: ASSOCIATED PRESS

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama will make his first trip as president to Kenya, the country of his father’s birth.

The White House says Obama will visit Kenya in July for the Global Entrepreneurship Summit, which brings together business leaders, international organizations and governments. This will be the first time the summit takes place in sub-Saharan Africa.


Obama visited Kenya as a U.S. senator, but never as president. During a trip to other African countries last year, he said he was likely to visit Kenya before leaving the White House.

The president’s father came to the United States from Kenya for school and returned to his home country after his son’s birth. The elder Obama died more than 30 years ago, though the president has other family still living in Kenya.

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Read more: http://www.salon.com/2015/03/30/obama_to_make_first_visit_to_kenya_as_president/

March 30, 2015

Conservatives’ history problem: Why they’re doomed by their own “Golden Age” - By Michael Lind

Compare the heydays of progressives and conservatives -- and it's clear which one fared better for Americans

MICHAEL LIND

“He who controls the past, controls the future,” George Orwell wrote in 1984. One of the greatest weapons in the arsenal of a political movement is what the literary critic Van Wyck Brooks called “a usable past” and what the historian William McNeill calls “mythistory.” The most potent political narrative in any country on earth goes something like this: “The past was a glorious Golden Age, and the present is dismal. Follow us, and we will create a future as glorious as the Golden Age in the past!”

Until recently, neither the center-left nor the center-right in American politics had agreed-upon historical narratives. But recently each movement has moved toward a greater consensus in its view of America’s past, present and future.

The center-left consensus today holds that the New Deal era of the 1930s through the 1970s, and perhaps its Progressive Era prelude, constituted the Golden Age. The present dismal Bronze or Iron Age began with Ronald Reagan in 1980–or, more accurately, in 1976 with Jimmy Carter elected as the first of three weak, center-right Democratic presidents—Carter, Clinton and Obama–who have followed the last liberal president, Lyndon Johnson. The Glorious Future, according to the emergent progressive consensus, will take the form of a “new New Deal” which, by some combination of policies, will check or reverse growing inequality and plutocracy, in the spirit of the New Deal and its echo, the Great Society.

This new center-left historical consensus marks the defeat of the alternate historical visions of both New Left radicals and New Democrat neoliberals.

New Left historians like the late Martin J. Sklar denounced the Progressive-Liberal tradition of Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson as “corporate liberalism”—a diversion and a substitute from what America really needed, some vague kind of democratic socialism. You don’t hear many progressives, outside of cloistered campuses, denouncing FDR and LBJ nowadays as pawns of the capitalist class. After a generation of corporate conservatism, the supposed “corporate liberal” era looks relatively good in hindsight.

more
http://www.salon.com/2015/03/30/the_rights_history_problem_why_conservatives_are_doomed_by_their_own_golden_age/

March 30, 2015

Destroying democracy is the GOP’s goal: Obstruction, dysfunction and the sneaky, decades-long plan t

Destroying democracy is the GOP’s goal: Obstruction, dysfunction and the sneaky, decades-long plan to steal your vote

It's not hyperbole: There's a dangerous plan behind GOP hardball in Congress & disenfranchisement efforts in states

PAUL ROSENBERG

In early March, Matt Yglesias wrote a Vox article warning “American democracy is doomed,” not right away, perhaps, but eventually. The main reason, he argued, was the essential instability of our presidential system, in which both the president and Congress—especially the House—can plausibly claim popular legitimacy while opposing one another—a theory advanced by the late Yale professor Juan Linz back in 1990:

Since both the president and the Congress are directly elected by the people, they can both claim to speak for the people. When they have a serious disagreement, according to Linz, “there is no democratic principle on the basis of which it can be resolved.” The constitution offers no help in these cases, he wrote: “the mechanisms the constitution might provide are likely to prove too complicated and aridly legalistic to be of much force in the eyes of the electorate.”

There’s obviously something to be said for this idea, starkly contrasting potentially brittle and conflictual presidential systems with more fluid parliamentary ones. But as a systemic explanation, it tends to absolve individuals and groups of bad actors of any blame, and there very clearly are some bad actors involved in our politics. Both sides are not just doing the same thing.

There are pragmatic asymmetries as well: The kinds of policies advocated by each side are not equally suited to actual governing challenges. Denying the existence of climate change is not comparable to a preparing a response involving international emission-reduction agreements, domestic renewable energy policies and local planning. Finally, the presidential system explanation doesn’t tell us why this should become such a problem now. It’s not that America hasn’t faced serious systemic problems before—we had an extremely bloody Civil War, remember? But the presidential system wasn’t the problem. For a clearer picture of the dangers facing our democracy, we need to consider two other factors.

more
http://www.salon.com/2015/03/30/destroying_democracy_is_the_gops_goal_obstruction_dysfunction_and_the_sneaky_decades_long_plan_to_steal_your_vote/

March 30, 2015

My personal Libertarian hell: How I enraged the movement — and paid the price

I used to be a Libertarian. Then I had the gall to criticize them in an article -- and here's what happened next

EDWIN LYNGAR

The most dangerous thing you can do on the Internet is to send your banking information to a mysterious Nigerian prince. The second most dangerous thing you can do is to write even the most tepid criticism of libertarians. I recently wrote piece about my trip to Honduras and how conditions in that country reminded me of a “Libertarian Utopia.” I was inspired not only by the trip but also from reading many articles that have outlined a failing libertarian experiment in that country, here and here, for instance. I focused on just this one small factor when, of course, I also realize that the problems of Central America are historical, entrenched and, above all, complicated. From the reaction online you would have thought I personally kicked Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek square in his wrinkled, decomposed sack.

Reaction was swift and personal, including widely circulated factoids that I’m both fat and bald (guilty on both counts). Some called for my utter, personal ruin. Fair enough. But there were comments that went too far, such as those that addressed my parenting skills or that examined my decade-old divorce. I was unprepared for the fire hose of rage and invective. In fact, it’s hard to overstate just how furious—and proud of it—this segment of America seems. I could provide links, but I’d rather not send them traffic. If you are compelled to see for yourself, feel free to take a refreshing dip into the libertarian cesspool, but try not to get any in your mouth.

I’m tempted to avoid this group altogether, but I think it would be chicken shit of me to back away because of some name-calling and an epic temper tantrum. Every badly written blog and hysterical, spittle-flecked Internet video only further proves the point that these people have serious problems.

I often write about libertarianism from my own personal journey through it. The biggest criticism I’ve heard while writing various pieces is that I was “never really a libertarian.” I was a Ron Paul delegate in Nevada and wrote about it for the Reno Gazette Journal (see above), and I supported other libertarian candidates and policies for years. The overuse of the “no true Scotsman fallacy” raises the question of what level of commitment is required to be considered a libertarian. Must I be branded or tattooed? Does it require ritualistic testicular shaving (nod to Dr. Evil)? Libertarians demand a level of unexamined commitment unmatched by any institution except perhaps church, which makes sense because the movement is less about what is good for society and is more a series of articles in an indefensible faith.

Although not all libertarians hate, a sizable number make the movement look both angry and unstable. They rage against the smallest loss of unearned privilege in society, while screaming about a “meritocracy.” Those who get ahead in our country do so more often from connections, family money and privilege than from any innate goodness or intelligence, and libertarians gloss over all questions of class, race and privilege in the hope of a return to a pure market ideal that has never existed. The history of America is an unending fight between untamed market forces and human beings, and when the free market gets out of hand, real people suffer, as so many did in the Great Recession of 2008.

more
http://www.salon.com/2015/03/30/my_personal_libertarian_hell_how_i_enraged_the_movement_and_paid_the_price/

March 30, 2015

Justices reject appeal by US flag-wearing students

Source: ASSOCIATED PRESS

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court has denied an appeal from former California high school students who were ordered to turn their American flag T-shirts inside out during a celebration of the Cinco de Mayo holiday at school.

The justices did not comment Monday in leaving in place an appellate ruling that found that school officials acted appropriately because their concerns about racial violence outweighed students’ freedom of expression rights. Administrators feared the American-flag shirts would enflame the passions of Latino students celebrating the Mexican holiday.

The onetime students at Live Oak High School in Morgan Hill, California, argued that school officials gave a “heckler’s veto” to the objecting students.

The brother and sister who won a landmark Vietnam era student speech case at the Supreme Court also supported the appeal.

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Read more: http://www.salon.com/2015/03/30/justices_reject_appeal_by_us_flag_wearing_students/

March 30, 2015

Federal Prosecutors To Wrap Up Case Against Suspected Boston Marathon Bomber

Source: ASSOCIATED PRESS

BOSTON (AP) — Prosecutors are expected to wrap up their case against Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev with testimony from medical examiners who will describe the injuries to two people who died in the attack, including an 8-year-old boy.

The prosecution is scheduled to rest its case in the first phase of the trial on Monday. The same jury that will consider 30 federal charges against Tsarnaev will hear additional evidence during the trial's second phase to decide whether Tsarnaev, 21, is sentenced to death or life in prison.

During opening statements, Tsarnaev's lawyer admitted that he participated in the bombings, but said his older brother, Tamerlan, 26, was the mastermind of the terror attack. Three people were killed and more than 260 were injured when two pressure cooker bombs exploded near the marathon finish line on April 15, 2013.

On Friday, a medical examiner who performed an autopsy on Krystle Campbell described her injuries and showed the jury gruesome autopsy photos. Campbell , a 29-year-old restaurant manager, bled to death after the bomb blew gaping holes in her legs and riddled her body with shrapnel.

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Read more: http://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/boston-marathon-trial-dzhokhar-tsarnaev