General Briefing

leftish:

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — After months of laboratory work, scientists say they can definitively finger oil from BP’s blown-out well as the culprit for the slow death of a once brightly colored deep-sea coral community in the Gulf of Mexico that is now brown and dull.

In a study published Monday, scientists say meticulous chemical analysis of samples taken in late 2010 proves that oil from BP PLC’s out-of-control Macondo well devastated corals living about 7 miles southwest of the well. The coral community is located over an area roughly the size of half a football field nearly a mile below the Gulf’s surface.

The damaged corals were discovered in October 2010 by academic and government scientists, but it’s taken until now for them to declare a definite link to the oil spill.

READ ENTIRE ARTICLE…

dumbthingswhitepplsay:

polerin:

karnythia:

masteradept:

curiouslycool:

Wow… I can’t even. Just. Wow.

That hurts.

what the holy fuck? Seriously Anonymous, get your shit together.

I’m glad they stopped anything from being emailed to his parents, but deleting…

1. That’s really fucked! And I echo DTWPS: fuck anonymous!
2. I find some irony in the fact that this was an ask submission by Anonymous…

The American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Reproductive Rights on Thursday filed a lawsuit against an anti-abortion “personhood” ballot measure on behalf of six Oklahoma voters.

“By their own admission, the proponents of this initiative aim to strip women and families of their established right to decide whether and when to become pregnant and carry a pregnancy to term,” said Ryan Kiesel, executive director of the ACLU of Oklahoma. “This initiative insults Oklahoma women’s intelligence and dignity by denying access to basic health services.”

The lawsuit urges the state Supreme Court to block Oklahoma’s personhood amendment petition effort because it is allegedly unconstitutional. The amendment would grant fertilized eggs and embryos the same constitutional rights as people, thereby completely prohibiting a woman from terminating her pregnancy, even in cases of incest or rape.

One of the biggest lawsuits against the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) is back in court next week, and for the first time for any DOMA challenge, it is at the federal appeals level. It is also going before a three-judge panel comprised of two Republican and one Democratic appointee, though partisan affiliation has not been a good predictor of outcome in many gay-related cases in recent years.

The April 4 argument is a consolidation of three cases but is generally referred to as Gill v. Office of Personnel Management. The litigation challenged DOMA’s Section 3 restriction: that, for federal government purposes, “the word ‘marriage’ means only a legal union between one man and one woman as husband and wife, and the word ‘spouse’ refers only to a person of the opposite sex who is a husband or a wife.”

Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders (GLAD) and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts won a ruling in the federal district court in Boston on the litigation in July 2010. At that time, they were opposed by the Obama Department of Justice. But in February 2011, the DOJ announced it would no longer argue that DOMA is constitutional and U.S. House Speaker John Boehner hired a private attorney, Republican former Solicitor General Paul Clement, to defend the law.

The Department of Justice will be in court April 4 in Boston. It will be represented by openly gay attorney Stuart Delery, who was promoted February 27 to serve as DOJ’s Acting Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Division. While Delery’s name has not been on the DOJ’s briefs to the First Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in the Gill case, he’s no stranger to gay litigation. He argued a class action lawsuit in the First Circuit that challenged the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” law in 2008. And, according to a 2007 article in the Washington, D.C., gay newspaper Metro Weekly, Delery is raising two children with his partner of nearly 20 years.

The DOJ brief filed in December argues that DOMA Section 3 violates equal protection principles and is unconstitutional. DOJ does not agree with the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, however, that Section 3 also violates the Tenth Amendment.

In his ruling, U.S. District Court Judge Joseph Tauro ruled that DOMA violates the Tenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution by taking from the states powers that the Constitution gave to them. And he ruled that it violates the equal protection principles embodied in the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment in an effort to “disadvantage a group of which it disapproves.”

tartantambourine:

During the last day of Supreme Court hearings about the Affordable Care Act, the justices covered whether or not the entire law could stand if the individual mandate was struck down and the law’s expansion of Medicaid. But Justice Antonin Scalia seemed surprised that someone would have expected the justices to read the text of the health care reform law before the hearings:

JUSTICE SCALIA: Mr. Kneedler, what happened to the Eighth Amendment? You really want us to go through these 2,700 pages? (Laughter.) And do you really expect the Court to do that? Or do you expect us to — to give this function to our law clerks? Is this not totally unrealistic? That we are going to go through this enormous bill item by item and decide each one?

I was stunned by this statement, too. If you get an extremely prestigious job with very high pay for life, plus tremendous benefits, shouldn’t you also be expected to do the work that comes with the honor? Apparently, Justice Scalia thinks not. 

Unlike Mitt Romney, I don’t like firing people. But Scalia deserves to be fired, instead of being paid for not thinking or doing his homework.

A Republican Party Internet advertisement uses altered audio from U.S. Supreme Court oral arguments to attack President Barack Obama’s health-care law.

In the web ad circulated yesterday, the Republican National Committee excerpts the opening seconds of the March 27 presentation of Obama’s top Supreme Court lawyer, Solicitor General Donald Verrilli, in which he is heard struggling for words and twice stopping to drink water.

“Obamacare,” the ad concludes, in words shown against a photograph of the high court. “It’s a tough sell.”

A review of a transcript and recordings of those moments shows that Verrilli took a sip of water just once, paused for a much briefer period, and completed his thought, rather than stuttering and trailing off as heard in the edited version.

truth-has-a-liberal-bias:

rosa—sparks:

I have tears. I’m not crying because Rick Santorum said nigger in public.

I’m sure he says that word all the time.

I’m crying because in 2012, in America, the man who is the President of the United States cannot be referred to or respectfully addressed by anyone.

Barack Obama is nothing but the N-word to Rick Santorum and so many other people in this universe.

And if this educated, kind, brilliant and wonderful man is nothing but a n*gger to a huge swath of people, then imagine what they think of the rest of us.

That all of us People of Color are nothing but n*ggers.

And so I cry.

So yeah.  All of this. It irritates the shit out of me when the Right refers to the President simply as “Obama”.  And they say it with such disdain and they seem to spit it out like a nasty taste in their mouths. Also, I know that most people can’t pick up on it, but basically, I hear “nigger” every time I hear the right call President Obama a socialist.  Mostly because he’s clearly not a socialist.  He’s not even a true progressive.  He’s a freaking centrist, which pisses them off all the more and makes them reach crazy right in order to counter him.  The whole thing just makes me ill.