Full Birther, Iowa GOP! Congratulations! [Orly Taitz and Reince Priebus in Green Acres.]

Open Thread Below....

New Joe Bonamassa. Just released. I missed the show. drat. But, I'm goin to see Taj Mahal this Sunday. :D

Whatcha listening to this evening?

Continuing Newstalgia's look at Conventions past, here is the Keynote address by Mrs. Franklin Roosevelt at the 1956 Democratic Convention. Adlai Stevenson was once again the Standard Bearer and it was this convention that the name of Sen. John F. Kennedy was first foisted into the spotlight as potential Presidential material, by being considered a vice-Presidential running mate for Stevenson. Kennedy declined and the VP slot went to Estes Kefauver, whose Crime Committee hearings made him a household name to millions of voters.

Here is Eleanor Roosevelt's complete address from that convention.

[H/t scarce]

I get the low mordant chuckles whenever I hear Republican strategists complaining that [sniffle] it's so unfair that Democrats enjoy a significant advantage among Latino voters right now. Especially because I know that nativist wingnuts like Rep. Steve King will always be around to remind those voters exactly why they would never want to vote Republican, as he did yesterday:

Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, compared immigrants to dogs at a town hall meeting yesterday, telling constituents that the U.S. should pick only the best immigrants the way one chooses the “pick of the litter.”

King told the crowd in Pocahontas, Iowa, that he’s owned lots of bird dogs over the years and advised, “You want a good bird dog? You want one that’s going to be aggressive? Pick the one that’s the friskiest … not the one that’s over there sleeping in the corner.”

King suggested lazy immigrants should be avoided as well. “You get the pick of the litter and you got yourself a pretty good bird dog. Well, we’ve got the pick of every donor civilization on the planet,” King said. “We’ve got the vigor from the planet to come to America.”

This is nothing new for King. He's previously compared Latino immigrants to cattle, as well as farming commodities like beans and corn. It's all part of his longtime record of mainstreaming hateful rhetoric and demeaning falsehoods when discussing Latino immigrants.

Of course, Mitt Romney is out there trying to mend fences with Latino voters right now, in the vain hope that they'll forget he used vicious anti-Latino rhetoric during the GOP primaries. Indeed, the whole GOP outreach to Latino voters is not going very well right now.

And it just got measurably worse.

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Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin says presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney should "go rogue" and attack President Barack Obama for his former associations with Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Marxists and radicals.

During an interview on Fox News on Monday, host Sean Hannity told Palin that he thought the president's former pastor was "relevant" even though Romney had repudiated a proposal to use Wright in attack ads.

The half-term Alaska governor replied: "I thought so in 2008 and that's why I went rogue, if you will, and disagreed with some of John McCain's advisers when they said, no, a lot of these issues like past associations and Rev. Wright and Bill Ayers and those that helped shape Obama's world view needed to be off the table and not discussed. I disagreed then, I disagree now."

"Barack Obama in 2008 was an empty vessel," she continued. "The public did not know who or what filled this vessel in order to create what has become a very confused and mission and visionless leader for our country. Well, now it's not too late to change course and this next go around understand what has filled up that vessel. Who are these people? Who are the radicals, the Marxist professors that he said he would hang out with, some of his friends and associations."

Hannity noted that Democrats and the media were willing to bring up Romney's alleged 1965 gay bullying incident, putting a dog on his car roof, the so-called war on women and "throwing granny over the cliff" by privatizing Medicare -- but Republicans were refusing employ the same type of tactics.

"Amen, brother," Palin agreed. "A one-sided, cease-fire call is not something to agree to. Some of these GOP operatives, Sean, they seem to have the fighting instinct of [Sesame Street character] Mr. Snuffleupagus. And if you remember him, he would hide, he would back down, he would run the other direction."

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The foreign press is warning of the potential for a major catastrophe for the northern hemisphere from the remaining fuel pools at Fukushima - but the American media is strangely silent. Their focus is on Reactor 4, which is open to the elements and at high risk of disaster in the event of another major earthquake:

More than a year after a devastating earthquake and tsunami triggered a massive nuclear disaster, experts are warning that Japan isn't out of the woods yet and the worst nuclear storm the world has ever seen could be just one earthquake away from reality.

The troubled Reactor 4 at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant is at the centre of this potential catastrophe.

Reactor 4 -- and to a lesser extent Reactor 3 -- still hold large quantities of cooling waters surrounding spent nuclear fuel, all bound by a fragile concrete pool located 30 metres above the ground, and exposed to the elements.

A magnitude 7 or 7.5 earthquake would likely fracture that pool, and disaster would ensue, says Arnie Gundersen, a nuclear engineer with Fairewinds Energy Education who has visited the site.

The 1,535 spent fuel rods would become exposed to the air and would likely catch fire, with the most-recently added fuel rods igniting first.

The incredible heat generated from that blaze, Gundersen said, could then ignite the older fuel in the cooling pool, causing a massive oxygen-eating radiological fire that could not be extinguished with water.

"So the fear is the newest fuel could begin to burn and then we'd have a conflagration of the whole pool because it would become hotter and hotter. The health consequences of that are beyond where science has ever gone before," Gundersen told CTVNews.ca in an interview from his home in Vermont.

There are a couple of possible outcomes, Gundersen said.

Highly radioactive cesium and strontium isotopes would likely go airborne and "volatilize" -- turning into a vapour that could move with the wind, potentially travelling thousands of kilometres from the source.

The size of those particles would determine whether they remained in Japan, or made their way to the rest of Asia and other continents.

"And here's where there's no science because no one's ever dared to attempt the experiment," Gundersen said. "If it flies far enough it goes around the world, if the particles stay a little bigger, they settle in Japan. Either is awful."

Essentially, he said, Japan is sitting on a ticking time bomb.

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President Obama spoke at the high school commencement Monday night about the power of community, the "bigness of spirit," and the value of unity.

The gist of his message centered on how a community set aside its differences to come together and rebuild after the tornado that nearly wiped out the entire city. His themes touched on the "power of shared effort," and forging a new vision when everything seems hopeless. His primary themes of hope and community are woven throughout the entire twenty minutes. I thought it was an inspiring and touching speech. If it needs a summation, it is his statement that "we are better together than on our own."

At one point in the speech, he mentioned that right after the tornado, the community came together for a meeting and each person was given a Post-it note to write down what their vision was for the community. 1500 Post-its later, there is a wall with all of them on it, and architects are following the suggestions for the rebuilding process. The President quipped, "I'm thinking of trying it with Congress! Give them some Post-it notes."

In a climate where cynicism and negativity seems to rule the day, it's worth taking the twenty minutes to watch this and no matter what you think of the man, his message is true, and it does not depend on him. For me, it's worth remembering that I do this thing, writing, researching, sharing -- blogging -- because I want a record that says we truly are better together than we are alone, and working toward that goal every day is worth enduring the negative and the cynical.

I hope it inspires you today, at least a little bit.

After Cory Booker went out and undermined some of the recent attack ads by the Obama campaign during his appearance on Meet the Press this weekend, and President Obama's defense of those attacks, telling reporters that the issue is not a distraction but instead critical to evaluating Mitt Romney's qualifications to be president, Paul Krugman agreed during his appearance on Current TV's The War Room with Jennifer Granholm.

Krugman: Romney ‘really does not understand the economy at all’ :

Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman joins Jennifer Granholm in The War Room to discuss candidate Mitt Romney. Krugman says, in spite of his protestations, Romney’s business career is fair game. “Yes, he made a lot of money. He made a lot of money in ways that were often not good for workers.” Krugman points out that what made Romney an effective businessman may be the opposite of what’s needed from the leader of a country: “What a President needs to do is not what you need to do if you’re trying to make a bunch of money for private equity for investors.”

Krugman also pointed out the need for more stimulus spending right now to get the economy out of this depression we've been in:

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Here we go again with another bigoted pastor spewing hate from the pulpit in North Carolina: Pastor wants to fence in gays:

At the rate we're going, we might need to create a special Rewrite category dedicated to North Carolina pastors. Violent rhetoric against gays and lesbians continued to be spewed from the pulpits over the weekend.

Pastor Charles Worley told his congregation at Providence Road Baptist Church in Maiden, North Carolina he wants to put an electric fence around gays and lesbians in order to make sure they "die out." And that's a quote.

In our book, he officially overtook Sean Harris as the Most Offensive Pastor in the state of North Carolina. In Harris' hot mess hate sermon, as we mentioned before, he encouraged church-goers to vote against marriage equality, make "butch" daughters "smell like girls" and punch effeminate boys. They're making people like Rev. Dr. William J. Barbero of Goldsboro, North Carolina seem like a rarity.

Martin Bashir, filling in for The Last Word's Lawrence O'Donnell brought in Anthea Butler, Assoc. Professor of Religious Studies, University of PA, to discuss the recent increase in this sort of event, ever since President Obama came out in favor of gay marriage. I'd personally like to start seeing some of these churches lose their tax exempt status for this sort of thing, but sadly I don't think we'll ever see that happen.

Raw Story has more on the pastor's remarks and a planned protest of his church as well: North Carolina pastor: Send LGBT people to concentration camps to die:

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Be forewarned. This is a rant. It is not a test of the emergency rant system. It is an outright, full-throated rant.

That image is of a full-page newspaper ad taken out in the Janesville Gazette, the local newspaper in Paul Ryan's district. What it is, is thuggery in typeset letters. The names you can't read in the image are the names of teachers in Janesville who signed the petition to recall Scott Walker. Next to their names, is their salary. At the bottom of the ad, there is a space to sign to "opt-out" of any teacher's classroom who signed the petition.

This is part of the strategy the Heartland Institute laid out for breaking the teachers' union and holding onto the their water boy, Scott Walker. According to Blogging Blue, this is part of an intimidation strategy to suppress enthusiasm, free speech, and the right to have a voice in one's government. Cognitive Dissidence outlines the strategy as outlined in Heartland's 2012 Funding Plan, released in January:

The recall elections of 2012 amount to a referenda on collective bargaining reform at the state level, making them of national interest. Successful recalls would be a major setback to the national effort to rein in public sector compensation and union power. Heartland is the largest and most influential national free-market think tank in the Midwest, so we are in the right place and with the right resources to help defend and secure Wisconsin’s recent gains.

We are contemplating five projects:

1. Recruit and promote superintendents who support Act 10
2. Explain the benefits of Act 10
3. Document the shortcomings of public schools in Wisconsin
4. Expose teacher pay in key districts
5. Create blogs that shadow small town newspaper coverage of the controversy

We anticipate that this project will cost about $612,000. Maureen Martin, Heartland’s legal counsel, with be the chief researcher and writer for this project. The anonymous donor has pledged $100,000 toward this project. We are circulating a proposal to other potential funders.

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