Daily Kos

President Obama sets aside politics this week for an Easter and Passover message to Christians and Jews:

For millions of Americans, this weekend is a time to celebrate redemption at God’s hand. Tonight, Jews will gather for a second Seder, where they will retell the story of the Exodus. And tomorrow, my family will join Christians around the world as we thank God for the all-important gift of grace through the resurrection of His son, and experience the wonder of Easter morning.

After recounting the Christian background and meaning of Easter, Obama includes all Americans in the lessons that can be taken from this day:

Christ’s triumph over death holds special meaning for Christians. But all of us, no matter how or whether we believe, can identify with elements of His story. The triumph of hope over despair. Of faith over doubt. The notion that there is something out there that is bigger than ourselves.

These beliefs help unite Americans of all faiths and backgrounds. They shape our values and guide our work. They put our lives in perspective.

And if not that, there's always candy.

Complete transcript below the fold.

We all know that humans could not possibly change the climate, that this was in fact decreed by Republican Yaweh—except possibly when we're cooling it, as that gets a special-pleading magic pass. We'd better hope that's true, because a new study tells us just what separated the last ice-age from the ensuing warm period that changed the face of earth and contours of every coastline, and it wasn't much:

The team behind the study says its work further strengthens ideas about global warming. "At the end of the last ice age, CO2 rose from about 180 parts per million (ppm) in the atmosphere to about 260; and today we're at 392," explained lead author Dr Jeremy Shakun. "So, in the last 100 years we've gone up about 100 ppm - about the same as at the end of the last ice age, which I think puts it into perspective because it's not a small amount. Rising CO2 at the end of the ice age had a huge effect on global climate."

• As the pic from the Smithsonian above shows, a single new feathery find in China may rewrite textbooks and FX specials on large dinosaurs including T. rex. Everything Dinosaur has lots more:

  This new discovery, reported in the academic journal “Nature”, suggests what a number of palaeontologists have thought for sometime, that even the biggest Theropods could have been feathered.

• Grats to Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Sane w/Ovaries): On Thursday, April 5, it was announced that one of the world's largest astronomy archives and an exploding star in space have been named in her honor.
• How did cute cuddly bunnies evolve, and what exactly does the Easter Bunny do the rest of the year anyway?
  
• Remember the mystery of the honey-bee over the last few years, where beekeepers reported their hive populations suddenly crashing? A culprit may have been found:

  Bees that are exposed to non-lethal doses of Neonicotinoid pesticides forage abnormally, have "olfactory memory" problems, are easily disoriented and become poor learners. Essentially, a dose of this sort of pesticide may make it impossible for a bee to return to the nest.

_{Visual source: Newseum}

Gail Collins summarizes the Republican to-do list, starting with the daily denial there's a war on women.

Dana Milbank:

No fewer than three Romney claims in that one speech merited PolitiFact’s “Pants on Fire” rating: that Obama led “a government takeover of health care,” has been “apologizing for America abroad” and is ending “Medicare as we know it.” Romney’s assertions that Obama “is the only president to ever cut $500 billion from Medicare” and that eliminating Obamacare saves “about $100 billion” were rated false.

That Romney resorts to such gratuitous falsehoods discredits his leadership more than his opponent’s.

Now we know what the Etch a Sketch is for.  Inconvenient facts? Just erase them. Get caught lying? it never happened (fetch the Etch a Sketch).

LA Times:

Gas prices have soared about 15% in the last six months, hitting $3.94 a gallon on average nationwide, and $4.29 in California.

The mood of motorists? Meh.

Partisan finger-pointing aside, polls suggest that most people aren't as worked up over gas prices as they were four years ago, when a gallon of regular hit a national average of $4.11 a gallon. Nor has there been as much clamor for drastic measures, such as tapping the Strategic Petroleum Reserve in Texas and Louisiana.

But... but... gas prices are dooming Obama! Don't you watch cable news?

Frank Newport/Gallup:

The key takeaway from our March Gallup/USA Today update of voters' attitudes in 12 key swing states:  Barack Obama is better positioned against Mitt Romney now than he has been -- at least, for the moment.

Gallup:

Black Americans' views differ dramatically from those of nonblacks regarding the circumstances involved in the death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Fla., on Feb. 26. Blacks are paying much closer attention to the news of the incident; overwhelmingly believe that George Zimmerman, the individual who shot Martin, is guilty of a crime; believe that racial bias was a major factor in the events leading up to the shooting; and believe that Zimmerman would already have been arrested had the victim been white, not black.

And speaking of Gallup, don't miss Obama's job approval in the volatile Gallup tracker is back up to 50, for a day at least.

TPM:

The Obama administration is hoping for a Friday three-fer.

Amid a political fight over women’s rights that has caused GOP support among women to collapse; a Friday jobs report expected to show that the economy continues to grow rapidly; and an election year fight over the Republican Party’s controversial budget, the White House will host a forum on women and the economy — to highlight the administration’s accomplishments in the area of women’s rights, particularly in contrast with the Republican Party’s governing platform.

The goal is to capitalize on all three simultaneously.

How about 2 out of 3?

Two from Commonweal, here:

This is, as Verrilli put it, the “result of the social norms to which we’ve obligated ourselves.” To which Justice Antonin Scalia (a Catholic) replied, “Well, don’t obligate yourself to that.” The implication of Scalia’s remark was chillingly clear: if victims of car accidents arrive at the emergency room without insurance, hospitals must be allowed to let them die on the curb, because that’s what the founding fathers would have wanted.

That seems doubtful. It is certainly not what most Americans want now, or what human decency demands. Most people want the sick and injured to get as much care as they need, and most people want them to help pay for their own treatment if they can. This is precisely what the Affordable Care Act was designed to make happen. By requiring insurance companies to cover those with “pre-existing conditions,” it guarantees that the people who most need access to health care will have it. And by requiring everyone above a certain income level to buy insurance or pay a penalty, the law prevents free-riding, which drives up insurance premiums and taxpayer-funded Medicare and Medicaid payments. While not everyone may want to buy health insurance, everyone with a pulse will eventually need health care. The only questions are when and how much. Because we can’t answer those questions in advance, we need a way to distribute the risk of serious illness as broadly, and therefore efficiently, as possible. Hence the mandate. There’s nothing tyrannical about it, and even if there were, voters wouldn’t need the Supreme Court to provide a cure. The Constitution itself insures an adequate remedy for tyranny. It’s called the ballot box.

and here:

But how will people know if they are enrolling in a plan that covers abortion? Richard Doerflinger of the U.S. Catholic bishops’ prolife office says that “government will forbid the insurers to give people any special warning that abortion is included.” Is there a malicious plot afoot to trick people into signing up for abortion coverage, perhaps as a political gift to abortion providers?

Not at all. Under the ACA and the exchange regulations, people will learn whether a plan covers abortion in the same way they will learn about all the other features of available plans: through the Summary of Benefits and Coverage.

Jon Perr writes:

On Monday, President Obama unsurprisingly expressed confidence that the Supreme Court would uphold the 2010 Affordable Care Act. Even less remarkable, Obama rightly reminded Americans that "conservative commentators" have for year said "the biggest problem on the bench was judicial activism or a lack of judicial restraint -- that an unelected group of people would somehow overturn a duly constituted and passed law." Nevertheless, Republicans quickly accused the President of "unprecedented" effort to "intimidate the Supreme Court."

Of course, this is a case of the pot calling the kettle black (to put it mildly). After all, denouncing "judicial activism" has been a GOP talking point for years. Not content to rest there, the party's members of Congress and presidential candidates have pushed to limit the federal judiciary's jurisdiction on a range of issues, abortion not least among them. And as their incendiary rhetoric during the Terri Schiavo saga and other episodes reveals, Republican leaders didn't hesitate to issue none-too-thinly veiled threats of violence against the nation's judges.

Following the President's statement, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell led the GOP charge:

"This president's attempt to intimidate the Supreme Court falls well beyond distasteful politics. It demonstrates a fundamental lack of respect for our system of checks and balances."

Of course, back in 2005, McConnell played a pivotal role in the GOP effort to disregard the 19 rulings by Florida and federal courts, including the Supreme Court, in the case of Terri Schiavo. As he explained to an incredulous Brit Hume of Fox News:

What we simply did was grant to the courts an opportunity to review the case, something they do in habeas corpus petitions in death penalty cases all the time. It's not unusual for a death decision. And in effect, that's what's happening here.
A decision to let Ms. Schiavo die would be reviewed in the courts. That's all Congress did. The courts took a look at it, decided not to review it. And this tragic matter obviously is soon going to come to an end.

Not if Texas Senator John Cornyn had his way. Cornyn, himself a former chief judge of the Texas Supreme Court and author in 2010 of an attack on Obama nominee Elena Kagan titled, "I Sense a Judicial Activist," took the Republican assault on the judiciary to a new and frightening level. Cornyn was one of the GOP standard bearers in the conservative fight against so-called "judicial activism" in the wake of the Republicans' disastrous intervention in the Terri Schiavo affair. On April 4th, Cornyn took to the Senate floor to issue a dark warning to judges opposing his reactionary agenda. Just days after the murders of judge in Atlanta and another's family members in Chicago, Cornyn offered his endorsement of judicial intimidation:

"I don't know if there is a cause-and-effect connection, but we have seen some recent episodes of courthouse violence in this country...And I wonder whether there may be some connection between the perception in some quarters, on some occasions, where judges are making political decisions yet are unaccountable to the public, that it builds up and builds up and builds up to the point where some people engage in, engage in violence."

Facing criticism for his remarks seemingly endorsing right-wing retribution against judges, Cornyn held his ground. [...]

Perr has more.

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Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2007:

It must have happened while I was sleeping.  Somewhere, in the last few months we've crossed the magic dividing line.  The line beyond which even the "mainstream" media seems to have realized that Bill Clinton's pants are not an adequate cover for every Republican scandal, and 9/11 is not a blanket excuse for idiocy of all stripes.

For years, those answers have served.  A score of Republican legislators on the take?  Yes, Katie, but Bill couldn't keep it in his pants.  Thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis dead with no end in sight to the bloodshed.  Well, Brit, there's 9/11.
Somehow, we've gotten past that.  How can I tell?  Because the Republicans and their pet media are desperately trying to take a good thing -- Nancy Pelosi's willingness to lead abipartisan delegation to actually speak with the president of Syria -- and turn it into a bad thing. [...]

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Tweet of the Day:

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High Impact Posts  High Impact Posts.  Top Comments.

Now that the real political agenda of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is becoming publicized, companies who've been members and financial supporters of the group are thinking twice about being associated with it. Yesterday, Coca Cola joined PepsiCo in leaving the organization.

Today it's Kraft Foods and Intuit.

The companies began dropping their memberships after the black advocacy group Color of Change launched an online campaign calling on Coca-Cola to end its support.

Color of Change has been pressuring corporate sponsors to terminate their memberships with ALEC since last year. Until recently, the campaign was focused on ALEC’s support for voter identification laws. At the end of last year, Pepsi was the first group to notify Color of Change that it wouldn’t be renewing its sponsorship.

Kraft's statement downplays the politics of their decision.

"We belong to many external groups, including ALEC, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that promotes growth and fiscal responsibility.

"ALEC covers numerous issues but our involvement has been strictly limited to discussions about economic growth and development, transportation and tax policy. We did not participate in meetings or conversations related to other issues.

"Our membership in ALEC expires this spring and for a number of reasons, including limited resources, we have made the decision not to renew."

Intuit is also being circumspect on the issue: "Intuit's [Bernie McKay, Vice President of Government Affairs] explained to [Center for Media and Democracy] that the company doesn't 'usually issue statements about membership in any organization' and declined to comment further."

A few high-profile corporations are staying their ground. This one is no surprise: "'Yes, we plan to continue our membership in and support of ALEC,' said Philip Ellender of Koch Companies Public Sector, LLC." Neither is this one, Wal Mart: "Our membership in any organization does not affirm our agreement with each policy created by the broader group." Others Reuters reports as sticking are Pfizer, Reynolds American, Altria/Philip Morris and non-board ALEC member Procter & Gamble.

(There's much more discussion in diaries from Bekah, jamess and elwior.)

In Washington, Republican budget chief Sen. Joe Zarelli wants to dump the state’s Disability Lifeline with a $90 million cut. The program provides non-cash assistance to disabled adults who can’t work. Zarelli himself receives a monthly $601 disability check from the government because of a back injury he says occurred when he was in the Navy.

But that's different, according to him. The folks on Disability Lifeline, he says, are drunks and addicts, people who made poor lifestyle choices:

"What I do know from those types of so-called disabilities is that aiding and abetting them does not make them better," Zarelli said. "If you enable people to participate in that type of a lifestyle—you support it and make it more comfortable for them—all you are doing is aiding in their demise."

Seems to me that cutting off the only assistance flowing to a disabled person might be aiding in their demise. But I've never been a Republican, so what do I know? Perhaps kicking somebody's cane out from under them will make them more self-sufficient. Perhaps taking away their medical care will allow some of them to spontaneously heal themselves.

Disability Lifeline programs don't hand over hundred-dollar bills to participants. They provide medical care, temporary housing and stuff like toiletries and bus passes. The basics. No cash. About half the participants have substance-abuse problems. None of them work. But it takes more than that to qualify. Some 60 percent of participants  have a mental health issue, and 40 percent a physical problem. About 40 percent are also homeless.

It would be cruel—or perhaps Republican—of me to suggest that Zarelli's disability check might possibly be not for a back injury but for a "back injury." You know, the kind without a discernible cause. The kind that allows one to play golf and tennis without ill effect. The kind for which a disability check abets a welfare queen lifestyle.

You know what, Sen. Zarelli? Fuck You. No, Seriously, Fuck You.™

The Motion Picture Association of America's recalcitrance on the rating of the documentary film Bully has garnered a great deal of attention, as the R rating given to the movie would effectively prevent its been seen by exactly the kids who need to see it. The filmmakers felt, backed up by distributor the Weinstein Co., that it was important to show that, yes, kids bullying each other say "fuck" sometimes, and especially that the power of the film required showing, unexpurgated, a particularly brutal scene in which "fuck" was said three times—more than is allowed in a PG-13 movie. But a compromise has been reached, and starting next weekend a PG-13 version of the movie will be out:

The new cut of the Lee Hirsch film makes some concessions to the MPAA: It removes an obscenity that begins with the prefix “mother” in an early scene, along with two other quickly uttered F-words. Audio will be dropped out in all three instances.

But the new cut leaves intact a controversial scene on a school bus in which three F-words are used against a bullied child. [...]

Stephen Bruno, head of marketing for the Weinstein Co., told 24 Frames that “I can say with no stutter that we would have remained unrated if we had to change that scene.”

With the change, unaccompanied kids of any age will be able to see Bully, and, perhaps most importantly, the door is open for schools to show the movie in the future. More than half a million people had signed a Change.org petition calling for the rating to be changed.

I just want to take a small portion out of your day to point out that Republican Rep. Steve King, in addition to being a probable sociopath, also is a gigantic liar. Huge! He'll lie to your face for no good reason, which I think to Iowa Republicans passes for good family values, because they voted for the guy, right?

Via Think Progress, here's Steve King imagining himself as the one-man Spanish Inquisition of Meat Products:

I sit on the Ag Committee and we had a hearing before the Ag Committee when we invited in the president of the Humane Society of the United States, HSUS, President Wayne Pacelle. And we had one or two other witnesses from the anti-meat crowd or anti-animal husbandry crowd. PETA was there and one other animal activist group. So we just asked them, under oath, “are you a vegetarian?” And they confessed they were vegetarians, all of them. Well there they are with an agenda for our diets.

Ha ha ha! Take that, people who care marginally for the basic living conditions of factory-farmed animals! You eat meat, therefore your arguments are invalid! Only people who do not eat meat are allowed to have opinions on how it should be produced, and they aren't allowed either, because they don't even eat meat! Checkmate, you evil possibly-meat-eating-or-not communists!

In addition to being profoundly stupid, however, which is the hallmark of pretty much all stories involving Steve King, it turns out his story is apparently completely made up. Never happened. Maybe King daydreamed it was happening while doodling little pictures of himself pulling the plug on grandma during the hearings, but apparently he's the only one who heard himself ask those great gotcha questions:

ThinkProgress went back to review the hearing transcripts to determine whether King’s story is accurate. It is not. The congressional hearing on animal welfare that King appears to be referencing occurred on May 8, 2007. There were no witnesses from PETA. King did not ask anyone “are you a vegetarian?” In fact, it was another member — Steve Kagen (D-WI) — who asked the Humane Society witness to say he was a vegetarian.

I forget—is compulsive lying a characteristic of sociopathy, or just the mark of a rotten human being? Oh heck, let's be generous and just say it's probably evidence of both. Coming up next: Steve King tells of the time he fought off a bear by asking it snide questions until it ran off in shame. This totally happened, and if you say otherwise it's because you're a communist.

"No, no, no," would have been the instant response of a smart campaign boss. When a guy best known for writing Arizona's notoriously racist, anti-immigrant law says it's "identical" to the policies of the fellow you're trying to elect to the presidency, you want to sever that connection immediately.

Unless, of course, the party of that fellow you want to elect is filled with racist, anti-immigrant elected officials and rank-and-file voters. Then you have to put on your electoral calculus hat to see how many moderates and independents you might gain, weighing this against how many peckerheads you might lose by such severing.

You especially want to put some distance between that guy and your candidate if that guy is Russell Pearce, a recalled Arizona state senator, formerly one of notorious Sheriff Joe Arpaio's deputies who beat his wife and forged his way out of a state job as well as palled around with white supremacists, one of whom was a neo-Nazi Marine-reject whom Pearce backed for a city council seat in 2006.

Making the connection between himself and Romney is exactly what Pearce did in an interview Tuesday. He said he's endorsing Mitt Romney in the November elections, in part because of Romney's position on illegal immigration:

"I don’t want to take credit for being there and helping him write it, but much of his policy was modeled—by people who I’ve worked with—after my legislation."

Romney backers might quibble and argue that their candidate hasn't directly endorsed Pearce's law. But the candidate's "self-deportation" stance is, as Felicia Sonmez writes, the "idea at the root of SB 1070."

So far, the Romney campaign itself is not arguing with Pearce's characterization. Still, apparently, running their calculators.

From the GREAT STATE OF MAINE…

Oh! More Things I Know:

> The Supreme Court says corporations are people. The Supreme Court also says that people can be strip-searched for any reason whatsoever. Therefore, corporations can now be strip-searched for any reason whatsoever. Let's start with…[Snaps on latex glove]…oh, how 'bout Koch Industries.

> All the experts who were wrong about today's jobs numbers still have their jobs.

> Mitt Romney runs from his Mormon faith in public faster than a streaker at a British soccer match.

> For his next gig Keith Olbermann should deliver news and comment by projecting his head directly onto the moon every night.

> The Republican plan for healthcare reform is straight out of the Ron Popeil playbook: "Repeal it...and forget it!"

> Today we are all caterpillars.

> There's a 63.8 percent chance that Chief Justice John Roberts will fuck up again while administering the oath of office to Obama next January.

> Knowing I'm thiiiiis close to having a mid-life crisis is, in itself, a mid-life crisis.

> Conservatives get on the New York Times bestseller list by buying their books back in bulk to inflate their numbers. Rachel Maddow gets on the New York Times bestseller list by selling a ton of books.

> The biggest assholes in the country at this moment in time are Michigan Republicans.

> What Howard Dean sounds like when he's teaching a baking class: "YOU have the flour and YOU have the flour and YOU have the flour…!!!"

C'mon down below the fold and say hi. We're microwaving peeps.

Your west coast-friendly edition of  Cheers and Jeers starts below the fold... [Swoosh!!] RIGHTNOW! [Gong!!]

The Obama campaign takes seven of Mitt Romney's attacks on President Obama and exposes each one of them as transparent lies in this 84 second, must-watch video:

From time to time, all politicians stretch the truth, but Mitt Romney is in a league of his own. Whether he's talking about himself or his opponent, he's one of the most consistently dishonest politicians ever to seek the presidency. He spouts so much nonsense it's almost like he's delusional, but he's not. He knows he's lying. He's not the kind of guy who actually believes in conspiracy theories. He's the kind of guy who, when it serves his own interest, creates conspiracy theories for others to believe. And the great thing about this video is that it efficiently and persuasively exposes Romney for who he really is: an unscrupulous salesman.

Reposted from Comics by Tom Tomorrow