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Election

Romney Loses Cool With Local Reporter: ‘Aren’t There Issues Of Significance You’d Like To Talk About?’

By Alex Seitz-Wald on May 9, 2012 at 9:01 pm

Mitt Romney displayed a flash of tempter during an interview with a local CBS affilate in Denver today, interrupting and scolding a reporter for asking questions about same sex marriage and civil unions, the DREAM Act, and medical marijuana. Romney fielded several questions about gay marriage in light of President Obama’s historic announcement today, but after a series of questions on the issue and the DREAM Act, CBS 4 reporter Shaun Boyd asked Romney about his stance on medical pot, which is legal in Colorado, and Romney bristled, suggesting that the issues weren’t of “significance.”

“Aren’t there — aren’t there issues of significance that you’d like to talk about?” he said, cutting off her question. “This is a significant issue in Colorado,” she replied. “We’ve got enormous issues that we face, but you want talk about — go ahead — you want to talk about marijuana?” Romney said, sounding a bit exasperated. Romney explained that he wanted to talk about national issues like the economy and Iran. Watch it:

While Romney’s popular image is that of a staid, almost robotic businessman, his temper has flared up publicly on occasion. His own family has a term for these moments: “Mitt-frontations.”

Climate Progress

UPDATE: Heartland Institute De-Lists Roger Pielke Jr. As A ‘Heartland Expert’

By Joe Romm on May 9, 2012 at 7:32 pm

UPDATE (5/10 3:15 pm): Heartland Institute de-listed Roger Pielke Jr. as a ”Heartland Expert” today after Pielke asked them to make clear he has no affiliation with them in any way. Yet as recently as last night, in a response to this post, he asserted, “If they chose to highlight me as an expert, that is their business.” #FAIL. The other amazing thing is that Pielke knew about the listing as far back as May 4! Anyway, we’re now seeing an “exodus” of “Heartland experts,” since Benny Peiser also got de-listed after my post. Pielke’s original page is cached here. The delisted page is here.

Leo blog : The Heartland Institute conference billboard in Chicago

On day 6 of Heartland-gate, we visit their distinguished list of “Experts.”

As you know, the Heartland Institute is still unapologetic for its ad comparing the Unabomber to those who accept climate science or report on it. And they still insist on their website that “the most prominent advocates of global warming aren’t scientists. They are murderers, tyrants, and madmen.”

Their website also lists as “Heartland Experts” many of the most prominent advocates of climate science denial: John Christy, Joseph D’Aleo, Myron Ebell, Richard Lindzen, Bjorn Lomborg, Phelim McAleer, Ann McElhinney, Patrick Michaels, Steve Milloy, Lord Christopher Monckton, Marc Morano, Benny Peiser, Ian Plimer, Harrison Schmitt, Fred Singer, Fred Smith, Roy Spencer, Anthony Watts, and, last but not least, Roger Pielke.

Now, I’m sure you’re thinking, well, of course, Foreign Policy’s “Guide to Climate Skeptics” included Roger Pielke, Jr., but surely he isn’t an official “Heartland Expert.” And I say to you, stop calling me Shirley!

UPDATE: On his blog, Roger states he has “absolutely no relationship with Heartland — never have, never will. Period.” That’s great. Then he falsely claims that I said he is “official expert for Heartland” when I merely asked the obvious question. He amazingly asserts in the comments that he “looked at the webpage and there is nothing there that says that I am in anyway associated with them.” Anyone can look at the web page above and see that Heartland lists him as a “Heartland expert” — with his bio and photo. How anyone could have guessed this wasn’t official is, well, Pielke-esque. Glad to know it isn’t.

Even more amazingly, however, Pielke then goes on to say:

If they chose to highlight me as an expert, that is their business.

So he is apparently fine with how he appears on their website. I guess that makes him an unofficial Heartland Expert. Hope that clears things up.

UPDATE: Pielke claimed in a tweet to Prof. Scott Mandia that he “Learned of it on my blog ~48 hrs before Romm’s post.” But Mandia points out in a response that Pielke knew on May 4 (!). #FAIL

The point is that Pielke has known that Heartland listed him as a “Heartland expert” for a number of days now and had no problem with it whatsoever. Interestingly, the long-debunked, hard-core denier Benny Peiser appears to have gotten Heartland to remove him from the list within 12 hours of my post. Go figure!

Read more

NEWS FLASH

Sen. Harry Reid: ‘I Believe That People Should Be Able To Marry Whomever They Want’ | Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), who personally opposes marriage equality, has responded to President Obama’s embrace of same-sex marriage by issuing an extremely supportive statement reiterating that his private beliefs should not prevent people from marrying “whomever they want”:

“My personal belief is that marriage is between a man and a woman. But in a civil society, I believe that people should be able to marry whomever they want, and it’s no business of mine if two men or two women want to get married. The idea that allowing two loving, committed people to marry would have any impact on my life, or on my family’s life, always struck me as absurd.

“In talking with my children and grandchildren, it has become clear to me they take marriage equality as a given. I have no doubt that their view will carry the future.

“I handled a fair amount of domestic relations work when I was a practicing lawyer, and it was all governed by state law. I believe that is the proper place for this issue to be decided as well.”

Related Posts

NEWS FLASH

Following Obama’s Lead, Sen. Jack Reed Announces Support For Marriage Equality | He announced his new position in support of same-sex marriage on Twitter:


The Senate Judiciary Committee advanced the Respect for Marriage Act back in November, but it has yet to be scheduled for a vote before the full Senate. The measure would repeal the Defense of Marriage Act and allow the federal government to provide benefits to couples in same-sex marriages.

NEWS FLASH

Colin Powell: Bush Security Team ‘Never Met — And Never Would Meet — To Discuss’ Iraq Invasion | Former Bush administration Secretary of State Colin Powell writes in a forthcoming book that Pres. George W. Bush’s top security advisers never met to discuss the invasion of Iraq, according to a review of the book on the Huffington Post. Powell wrote that when he delivered his “infamous” speech to the United Nations in early 2003, the decision to go to war had already been made — but not by Bush’s National Security Council (NSC). “By then, the President did not think war could be avoided,” wrote Powell. “He had crossed the line in his own mind, even though the NSC had never met — and never would meet — to discuss the decision.” The administration asked military planners in December 2001 — amid the hunt for Osama Bin Laden — to draw up plans for the costly war that President Obama drew to a close last year.

By Ali Gharib on May 9, 2012 at 6:30 pm

LGBT

Best Twitter Reactions To Obama’s Support For Marriage Equality

By Annie-Rose Strasser on May 9, 2012 at 6:15 pm

Following President Obama’s announcement in support of marriage equality today, politicians, celebrities, and just about everyone else on Twitter broke into a firestorm of emotional, political, and sometimes hateful reactions.

We’ve compiled some of the best tweets about the President’s announcement:

Did you see any other good tweets? Let us know so we can add them to our list.

NEWS FLASH

House Ethics Committee Will Investigate Rep. Vern Buchanan (R-FL) | A statement released this evening by the House Ethics Committee’s chairman and ranking member reveals that the panel has decided to investigate allegations against Rep. Vern Buchanan (R-FL). Buchanan has been accused of encouraging a business partner to file a false affidavit related to illegal campaign contributions. The statement says that to gather more facts, “the Committee will review the matter.” Last night, a Tampa Bay television station aired a story highlighting these and other ethical allegations against the third-term Congressman. Despite Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s promised “zero-tolerance” policy on ethical scandals, Buchanan continues to serve on the powerful House Ways and Means Committee.

Economy

House Keeps Undermining Financial Regulation, Denies Funding To Foreclosure Fraud Task Force

By Pat Garofalo on May 9, 2012 at 5:50 pm

The Nation’s George Zornick noted today that House Republicans — aided by some Democrats — are refusing to appropriate funds for the Residential Mortgage-Backed Securities working group, which is supposed to investigate foreclosure fraud and other mortgage abuses by the financial sector:

Yesterday, Representative Maxine Waters, a member of the caucus, made the first attempt to get the RMBS group funding—and it didn’t work.

She offered an amendment to a large appropriations bill, created by Republicans, that would fund, in part, the Department of Justice. The bill provided only a fraction of the $55 million the DoJ asked for in its budget request for “investigating and prosecuting financial and mortgage fraud.” Waters proposed re-appropriating some money in the bill from the NASA program to fully fund the $55 million request…Unfortunately, when put up for a voice vote, the Waters amendment failed in the Republican-dominated chamber.

The RMBS working group has been slow in getting off the ground, and lack of funding certainly won’t help. Of course, this is standard operating procedure when it comes to the House GOP and financial regulation: having failed to prevent Dodd-Frank from becoming law, they have sought to undermine it by not funding the regulators charged with implementing it.

Case in point, in March, House Republicans refused to fully fund the Securities and Exchange Commission. JP Morgan Chase spends four times the SEC’s entire budget on information technology alone, yet House Republicans think that the SEC already has enough resources to police the financial markets. House Republicans won’t even fund efforts to collect the economic data necessary to prevent future financial crises.

Considering the stories that have come out regarding the banks’ mortgage malfeasance, funding an investigation into their practices should be a no-brainer. Foreclosure scams have already increased 60 percent in 2012.

Security

Romney Still Unfamiliar With Basic Facts Of The Raid That Killed Osama Bin Laden

By Ali Gharib and Ben Armbruster on May 9, 2012 at 5:26 pm

Osama Bin Laden's hideout in Pakistan

Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney doesn’t seem to understand the myriad considerations that went into President Obama’s decision to carry out the special operations raid that killed Osama Bin Laden. An ad put out by the Obama re-election campaign highlighting the president’s decision to strike into Pakistani territory to kill Bin Laden sparked a furor by questioning whether Romney would have made the same call.

Since the ad appeared, Romney, his surrogates, and so-called independent groups like the nouvelle swift-boaters have all rehashed the same dubious line in Romney’s defense: That any American president (or “any thinking American“) would have ordered the bin Laden raid. Just last night on Sean Hannity’s Fox News Channel show, Romney yet again issued this defense:

ROMNEY: But if the president wants to remind people of his decision, well, that’s entirely appropriate. But I think it was a big mistake for the president to try to make in this a political event by suggesting that I would not have done the same thing. I mean, frankly, Sean, almost any American in the position of presidency hearing that Osama bin Laden could have been taken out would have certainly pressed the button and said: get rid of the guy.

HANNITY: Oh, absolutely.

ROMNEY: And of course I would have.

Watch the video:

However, Romney and his allies’ repeated responses to the ad that “any thinking American” would have ordered the raid don’t account for the actual events surrounding Obama’s call.

  • Romney assumes that Obama was 100 percent sure bin Laden was at the compound in Pakistan. However, the intelligence was far from certain:

    “There wasn’t any direct evidence that he was there. It was all circumstantial.” — Robert Gates

    “The circumstantial case of Iraq having WMD (weapons of mass destruction) was actually stronger than the circumstantial case that bin Laden is living in the Abbottabad compound.” — CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell

    “Ultimately, it was a 50/50 proposition as to whether this was actually bin Laden.” — President Obama

  • Romney thinks that anyone would have ordered the raid based on his assumption that bin Laden’s whereabouts were known. In fact, Vice President Biden and Robert Gates opposed a special operations assault that the president ultimately decided on, particularly because of uncertainty as to whether bin Laden was at the compound.

  • Romney claimed that “we haven’t heard all the different military options there were” for the bin Laden raid. But various reports have outlined a number of courses of action Obama could have taken. “Most were variations of either a JSOC raid or an airstrike. Some versions included cooperating with the Pakistani military; some did not,” the New Yorker reported.

    • In an analogous choice in 2005, George W. Bush and then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld decided not to strike at senior Al Qaeda commanders in Pakistan because of the potential risk to relations with the notoriously sensitive country. When Obama said in his first presidential campaign that he would strike in Pakistan to get bin Laden, McCain criticized him as irresponsible. Romney echoed this concern when he said in August 2007, “I do not concur in the words of Barack Obama in a plan to enter an ally of ours.”

    LGBT

    Romney’s Timid Response To Obama’s Marriage Endorsement: ‘I Know Other People Have Differing Views’

    By Alex Seitz-Wald on May 9, 2012 at 5:22 pm

    At a press conference in Oklahoma this afternoon, presumed GOP nominee Mitt Romney responded to President Obama’s historic endorsement of marriage equality. But instead of attacking Obama for supposedly undermining the institution of “traditional marriage,” or for “flip-flopping” on his position, as many conservatives already have, Romney just restated his own “preference” and said it would be up to others to decide if Obama had changed his mind.

    “My view is that marriage itself is a relationship between a man and women, and that’s my own preference, I know other people have differing views,” he said. Asked if he Obama had flip-flopped, Romney said only, “you’re a better judge of that than I,” to a reporter. “If that’s the case, you’ll be able to make that determination on your own,” he added. Watch it:

    As governor of Massachusetts, Romney took a hard line against same-sex marriage after the state Supreme Court legalized it. “On my watch, we fought hard and prevented Massachusetts from becoming the Las Vegas of gay marriage,” he declared to the conservative crowd at CPAC this year. He also signed the anti-gay National Organization For Marriage’s (NOM) pledge, in which he promised to fight for an amendment to the U.S. Constitution banning gay marriage and defend the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). In 2003 and 2004, Romney touted his opposition to marriage equality to curry favor with the GOP base, and even testified before the Senate Judicial Committee in favor of a federal ban on same-sex marriage.

    Now, Romney says that excluding gay people from marrying is merely his “preference”? With this muted response, he’s a bit all over the map.

    When Romney was locked in a tough Republican primary against hardcore social conservatives, it suited him to go on the attack on marriage. But now that he’s trying to appeal to independents in the general election and talk exclusively about the economy, he’s just trying to move on as quickly as possible. But the social conservatives who never quite trusted him may not let him.

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