After news came out that Holder's DOJ seized two months of telephone records of AP reporters it sent a shock wave through the Beltway media and mostly left-wing bloggers. The fact that it's happening under a Democratic president is even worse, because the left has always stood for freedom of the press. Even though President Obama says he wasn't involved with this investigation and is now offering up a new push to pass federal shield laws, it's still a chilling example of judicial overreach with respects to said freedom of the press. I'd be just as furious over this if Dick Cheney had favorite henchman David Addington pull the trigger.

Now we get the news today that Fox News reporter James Rosen has been tracked by the DOJ since 2010.

Yahoo News:

The Justice Department spied extensively on Fox News reporter James Rosen in 2010, collecting his telephone records, tracking his movements in and out of the State Department and seizing two days of Rosen’s personal emails, the Washington Post reported on Monday. In a chilling move sure to rile defenders of civil liberties, an FBI agent also accused Rosen of breaking anti-espionage laws with behavior that—as described in the agent's own affidavit—falls well inside the bounds of traditional news reporting. (Disclosure: This reporter counts Rosen among his friends.)

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This is not a rhetorical question: Are the deficit hawks consciously trying to kill people? Do they begrudge even this minimal help? All the money in the world for war, but not to feed people? When you have so many people hanging by a thread, cutting the program that's putting food on their table seems like a recipe for a major crisis -- or a revolution:

A heated battle is brewing on Capitol Hill over cuts to the food stamp program, with lawmakers quoting Bible verses at each other and benefits for millions of people hanging in the balance.

Nearly 47 million people – one in seven Americans –  rely on food stamps for some or all of their daily sustenance, according to the Department of Agriculture, a number that has grown nearly 70 percent since the financial collapse of 2008.

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UPDATE: Several children pulled alive from the rubble of Plaza Towers Elementary School. Officials report they may find as many as 32 bodies of young children.

UPDATE: This is how a civilized society reacts to the tragedies of others:

WASHINGTON -- Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano is assuring Oklahoma's governor that the Obama administration will provide all possible help to the state after a massive tornado tore through the Oklahoma City suburbs.

White House officials said Monday that Napolitano called Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin to tell her that President Barack Obama had directed federal emergency management officials and his administration to ensure no needs go unmet.

Remember, the major effect of global warming is more frequent and more powerful storms:

A monster tornado ripped through southern Oklahoma City and the suburb of Moore on Monday afternoon, leaving homes and schools in ruins and fires burning out of control.

There was no immediate word on casualties, but aerial footage showed major destruction: homes in rubble, cars flipped over and crushed, residents milling around in shock.

"A large part of the community has been affected," Jayme Shelton, a spokesman for Moore, told MSNBC.

A forecaster for NBC station KFOR said the tornado was kicking up a debris cloud about 2 miles wide as it tracked east into residential neighborhoods in the Moore area.

Oklahoma City police told NBC News southern portions of the city as well as the Moore suburb sustained "major damage... a lot of damage."

Two elementary schools were heavily damaged, possibly completely destroyed, KFOR reported. Those schools are Briarwood Elementary in Oklahoma City and Plaza Towers Elementary in Moore, Okla.

Tens of millions of people in the Midwest are on edge as forecasters warn severe conditions could continue for the next couple days. NBC News' Jay Gray reports.

It appeared, however, as if the twister was dissipating and would miss the downtown area, The Weather Channel reported.

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I'm not sure what happened, but it appears Candy Crowley has either gotten tired of being beaten up on by right-wingers for being unfair to poor old Mittens during the presidential debates, or she's developed a really bad case of amnesia since she first stunned Romney by fact checking him when he claimed that President Obama did not call the attack in Libya an act of terror.

Whatever the reason, she did a complete 180 and began the right's game of parsing the President's words when interviewing White House advisor Dan Pfeiffer this Sunday: CNN's Crowley Adopts False Right-Wing Claim That Obama Didn't Call Benghazi A Terrorist Attack.

Transcript via CNN below the fold.

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Deputy White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer told ABC's George Stephanopoulos that Republicans owed Susan Rice an apology after they misled the country about the Benghazi emails -- a story that was hyped by his network's correspondent Jonathan Karl. After Stephanopoulos feigned ignorance on the matter, Pfeiffer should have told him ABC owes her an apology as well.

Karl gave a sorry excuse for apology this weekend, saying that he regrets that "the email was quoted incorrectly." More like he regrets getting caught. So to sum things up after reading his statement and listening to this interview -- not only is ABC refusing to come clean about the names of the Republicans who lied to them and conned them into hyping and giving new life to this so-called scandal that was being ignored by most of the networks other than Fox until Karl and ABC decided to lend it some credibility -- Stephanopoulos decides to sit there and pretend he doesn't have any idea why someone might want Republicans to apologize to Susan Rice after what they did to her.

Instead he decided to ask Pfeiffer about the emails without a word on Karl's "apology" or any acknowledgement of his network helping to spread lies for Republicans by hyping doctored versions of them. Stephanopoulos should have been opening This Week with a statement from the network on their shoddy "journalism" and with Karl's statement instead of trying to pretend it didn't happen.

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On Monday, May 20th, hundreds of homeowners facing foreclosure and housing rights activists from across the country will rally outside of the United States Department of Justice to demand Attorney General Holder hold the Wall Street Banks that ravaged America’s economy accountable. Dozens of struggling homeowners are prepared to risk arrest in non-violent civil disobedience or set up an ongoing occupation outside the Department of Justice until demands for Wall Street accountability and relief for their communities are addressed.

Demonstrators today are using their bodies to send a message to Eric Holder that it is time to stop shielding the big Wall Street banks from prosecution. Hundreds of homeowners who have been playing by the rules while the big banks have cheated them are risking arrest at the Department of Justice to make an unmistakable statement: it is about time for the government to side with poor and middle class folks who the bankers have screwed rather than those banks who have been cheating them.

The Campaign for a Fair Settlement and the Alliance for a Just Society put together devastating reports in April and May, the first of which points out that the administration has yet to prosecute a single major bank or top level executive for the widespread fraud leading to the system's collapse, while the most recent report discusses how much better the economy would be if the administration was forcing the big banks to actually help homeowners who had been hurt by the banks. From the report:

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The day may come when the worst nightmare a crooked banker or compromised regulator can have begins with the words, "You have a letter from Senator Warren."

But before we get to that, here's an experience that may seem familiar: You're at a party or family get-together - a Sunday barbecue, perhaps - and someone says something like, "We need less government regulation." Next thing you know you're having an argument.Here's some advice for the next social event: There's no need to get into an argument. You can just ask, "How do you figure?"

With every unreasonable assertion you can ask a reality-based question like, "Where's the study that says that?" Once in a while they may cite a shallow white paper from sine right-wing foundation, but more often than that they won't even get that far. Soon the conversation will peter out with a "Well, uh ..."We can never go wrong asking questions. We only go wrong when we don't ask questions.

That's what makes this letter from Sen. Elizabeth Warren so important. For five years we've watched the Justice Department ignore overwhelming evidence of bank crime, on grounds that Attorney General Eric Holder made explicit only last March when he said that "the size of some of these institutions becomes so large that it does become difficult for us to prosecute them when we are hit with indications that if you do prosecute... it will have a negative impact on the national economy, perhaps even the world economy."

The Securities and Exchange Commission, which has responsibility for pursuing civil bank fraud, has taken the same approach. So has the Federal Reserve, which has regulatory responsibility for the banking industry. They've all been saying pretty much the same thing: That criminal prosecution would destabilize the financial sector and put the world's economy at risk.

With this letter, Sen. Warren is asking these agencies a very simple question: "How do you figure?"

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The Nation editor Katrina Vanden Heuvel on Sunday said that Republicans were succeeding at using "weapons of mass distraction" to obstruct President Barack Obama's second term agenda.

During an ABC News panel discussion about the a number of scandals that Republicans are using to attack the Obama administration, Washington Post columnist George Will asserted that IRS scrutiny of tea party groups was like Watergate because "it's the use of the federal machinery to punish enemies of the administration."

"Watergate? Seriously, George?" Vanden Heuvel replied. "I mean, Watergate was a scandal unique in its depths of criminality. You had a president at the heart of the White House directing the subversion of the FBI and other institutions, including the IRS... And the key scandal -- which you will disagree with -- is that we had after Citizens United a flood of money coming in, and you had groups which were clearly political and partisan trying to use this 501(c)4 [tax-exempt] categorization to escape political scrutiny."

Vanden Heuvel went on to point out that the Republican Party was trying to substitute the so-called scandal at the IRS, attacks in Benghazi and the Justice Department's seizure of Associate Press phone records for a real political agenda.

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Judge Jack Roach is a District Court Judge in Collin County (Fort Worth).

He has up and decided that lesbians are unfit mothers. It appears that he has had no help coming to this decision. You know, like scientific studies or child advocates. Judge Jack Roach thinks children would be better off living with a convicted felon father who really doesn’t want them than a lesbian mother in a stable relation who adores them.

A Republican Texas Judge has ordered a lesbian couple to live apart or give up custody of their children. According to Think Progress, Judge John Roach of McKinney, Texas has given Page Price 30 days to move out of the home she shares with Carolyn Compton and Compton’s two children from a previous marriage because he does not approve of Compton and Price’s “lifestyle.”

Compton cannot have anyone in her home past 9:00 pm unless she is related to them “by blood or marriage.” Gay marriage is illegal in Texas.

I guess that means her kids can’t have sleepovers and New Year’s Eve is gonna be mighty lonely for those kids.

Judge Roach calls himself a conservative. I thought conservatives wanted government out of our lives. I guess that doesn’t apply to the s-e-x part.

They want to stand there and watch that.

Juanita Jean blogs at the World's Most Dangerous Beauty Salon, Inc.

Fox 2 News Headlines
A Marathon spokesperson told Fox 2 they sold the pet coke. It is now the property of Koch Carbon. Koch Carbon is part of Koch Industries, run by Charles and David Koch.

When the huge black mounds that sit on the riverbanks of southwest Detroit just appeared one day, residents were puzzled and concerned.

“One of the biggest concerns when we saw the black piles is what is it, and where is it coming from?” said State Representative Rashida Tlaib (D-Detroit). She said residents contacted her worried that the black piles could be toxic.

Freep.com:

U.S. Reps. Gary Peters, a Democrat from Bloomfield Township, and John Conyers, a Democrat from Detroit, sent a joint letter to the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality urging the agency to consider the material's potential impact on the river and nearby residents.

"We fear the storage of petroleum coke along the river poses a potential threat to water and air quality. The material may contain trace amounts of metal and could have damaging health impacts if fugitive dust enters the air. Petroleum coke that enters the water may continue to frustrate efforts to prevent contamination from runoff," according to the letter.

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