Everyone knows women can be bitches sometimes, right? Unless they’re cougars, that is, on the prowl — or if they’re a bit younger, they’re more like vixens, kinda foxy. They henpeck when married and go wet and wild when single. They can take out their claws out or put them away. (Who doesn’t love a good catfight?)

Less dangerous are the girls and the young women, softer and fuzzier, who are more like bunnies, or, as the English say, like birds. Either way, diminutive and harmless. Girls like these are more like pets. Chicks or kittens.

Everyone does it, using language that renders women as animals;the list is endless. This culturally ingrained misogyny, as reflected in acceptable language that dehumanizes half the world’s population, is not limited to any one country or religion, or followers of one or another ideology.

But in U.S. politics, a particular trend has emerged among a certain set of conservatives: that of equating a woman with a farm animal. When, last week, Safeway Senior Vice President General Counsel Bob Gordon stood before a shareholders’ meeting telling a quot;jokequot; that portrayed Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi as being worth less than a pair of hogs,he clearly had no reservations about publicly making this joke and obviously thought it was funny. After all, he was only elaborating on a meme that’s been evolving among right-wing Republican politicians in state legislatures.

The financial firepower that fueled the rise of a network of conservative advocacy groups now pummeling Democrats with television ads can be traced, in part, to Box 72465 in the Boulder Hills post office, on a desert road on the northern outskirts of Phoenix.

That’s the address for the Center to Protect Patient Rights, an organization with ties to Charles and David H. Koch, the billionaire brothers who bankroll a number of conservative organizations.

During the 2010 midterm election, the center sent more than $55 million to 26 GOP-allied groups, tax filings show, funding opaque outfits such as American Future Fund, 60 Plus and Americans for Job Security that were behind a coordinated campaign against Democratic congressional candidates.

A member of the National Labor Relations Board accused of leaking inside information has resigned, the agency announced Sunday.

Terence Flynn had been under pressure to leave since March, when the board’s inspector general found that Flynn committed ethics violations by improperly revealing confidential details on the status of pending cases.

Flynn, a Republican, shared the information with two former board members, including a one-time labor adviser to presidential hopeful Mitt Romney’s campaign. That adviser, Peter Schaumber, left the Romney campaign in December, around the time the investigation into Flynn began.

Flynn submitted a letter to President Obama and to the board’s chairman, Mark Pearce, late Saturday saying he would resign effective July 24, but would recuse himself from all agency business until he departs.

While Flynn did not mention the allegations against him, he had previously denied any wrongdoing. Flynn’s personal lawyer had claimed any discussions about board proceedings were not illegal.

Flynn is one of five members of the board, which oversees union elections and enforces labor laws. It has been the focus of intense partisan wrangling, with Republicans and business groups complaining that it leans too heavily in favor of labor unions.

Obama bypassed the Senate to appoint Flynn and two Democratic nominees to the board in January. Republicans had filibustered the nominations for months.

In two separate reports, the board’s inspector general said Flynn improperly leaked information about the status of cases, how other board members planned to vote, and the board’s internal strategy for handling litigation against it.

In one instance, the inspector general found that Flynn secretly helped Schaumber draft an opinion column denouncing a board decision that favored unions.

The alleged ethical violations occurred in 2010 and 2011, when Flynn was a staff lawyer for the board.

The case has already been referred to the Justice Department for a separate investigation. It also has been forwarded to the U.S. Office of Special Counsel to investigate potential violations of the Hatch Act, which prohibits federal employees from engaging in partisan political activity.

Congressional Democrats and union leaders had been calling on Flynn to resign, saying his disclosures compromised the agency’s integrity.

The airlines would note that they still make efforts to seat families together. But it’s becoming increasingly difficult to make such arrangements online, in advance. Sometimes, you have to call a special number listed in the fine print that many customers may not notice.

In 2010, Mr Schumer got five big American airlines to promise not to charge fees for carry-on bags, so it’s possible that a voluntary pledge could resolve this, too. But airlines struggling to expand profit margins in a not-very-profitable business are going to keep running into customer pushback and threats of government regulation as long as they keep introducing policies that are easy to criticise. (Advising politicians to stop weighing in on these issues is as futile as telling grass to stop being green.)

Here’s a hint: politicians and consumer advocates are going to have a very hard time protesting against increases in base ticket prices. If airlines think the market will bear it, they should just charge more and stop making everyone’s life more difficult with complicated added fees. We’re moving towards a system that both hides the true price of flying and adds to travellers’ annoyances. That’s too bad. There’s something to be said for simplicity.

Yet Mr. Christie has been adamant that New Jersey is on the way back, and that this makes room for, you guessed it, tax cuts that would disproportionately benefit the wealthy.

Last week reality hit: David Rosen, the state’s independent, nonpartisan budget analyst, told legislators that the state faces a $1.3 billion shortfall. How did the governor respond?

First, by attacking the messenger. According to Mr. Christie, Mr. Rosen — a veteran public servant whose office usually makes more accurate budget forecasts than the state’s governor — is “the Dr. Kevorkian of the numbers.” Civility! By the way, even Mr. Christie’s own officials are predicting a major budget shortfall, just not quite as big. And the two big credit-rating agencies, Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s, have recently issued warnings about New Jersey’s budget situation, which S.& P. called “structurally unbalanced” because of the governor’s optimistic revenue assumptions.

New Jersey, then, is still in dire fiscal shape. So is our tough-talking governor willing to reconsider his pet tax cut? Fuhgeddaboudit. Instead, he wants to fill the hole with one-shot budget gimmicks, including reneging on a promise to reduce borrowing for transportation investment and diverting funds from clean-energy programs. So much for fiscal responsibility.

Will Mr. Christie’s budget temper tantrum end speculation that he might become Mr. Romney’s running mate? I have no idea. But it really doesn’t matter: whoever Mr. Romney picks, he or she will cheerfully go along with the budget-busting, reverse Robin Hood policies that you know are coming if the former governor wins.

For the modern American right doesn’t care about deficits, and never did. All that talk about debt was just an excuse for attacking Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and food stamps. And as for Mr. Christie, well, he’s just another fiscal phony, distinguished only by his fondness for invective.

At the height of the Iraq war in 2004, veterans gave President George W. Bush a 16-percentage-point edge over his Democratic rival. Four years later, Barack Obama trailed among the former military members by 10 percentage points.

But Mr. Obama’s campaign said it thinks his three and a half years as commander in chief have turned the tables on the issue, giving him a good chance at winning the veteran vote this year.

One of Mr. Obama’s first campaign ads — released just this week — was aimed directly at war-weary service members and their families.

“It’s because of what they’ve done that we’ve been able to go after al-Qaeda and kill Bin Laden,” Mr. Obama says in the ad. “And when they come home we have a sacred trust to make sure that we are doing everything we can to heal all of their wounds, giving them the opportunities that they deserve to find a job and get the education that they need.”

The ad is part of Mr. Obama’s efforts to capitalize on a very different profile than is typical for a Democratic president.

Having come into the White House on an antiwar platform, Mr. Obama nonetheless increased American involvement in Afghanistan even as he began drawing down troops in Iraq. Now, both wars are winding down — a
relief to many military members and their families.

In addition, Mr. Obama has embraced the use of drones to assassinate terrorist leaders. And he authorized the raid that led to the killing of Osama bin Laden.

“President Obama is committed to ensuring that all of our men and women who’ve served in uniform can find work when they return home, receive the health care and benefits they’ve earned and have the chance to get a college education through the post-9/11 G.I. Bill,” said Clo Ewing, a campaign spokeswoman.

Working in Mr. Obama’s favor may be the changing face of the American military, which is becoming younger and more diverse. Advisers to the president note that he actually won in 2008 among veterans who were under 60 years old.

The military is also changing in its attitudes toward social issues, the Obama campaign believes. Mr. Obama’s decision to end the “don’t ask, don’t tell” ban on gays serving openly will be a benefit, they say.

There is little recent polling to suggest how the two candidates are faring among veterans. But advisers to Mr. Romney scoff at the idea that Mr. Obama will steal away a traditional Republican advantage come Election Day. They argue that the president’s economic policies have been especially detrimental to veterans and their families.

Governor Perry’s office and anti-choice lawmakers in the state have rallied behind the claim that “There are more than 2,500 qualified providers in the WHP that operate more than 4,600 locations across the state,” downplaying the significant role Planned Parenthood plays in bringing WHP access to low-income women. What Perry’s office doesn’t mention is that most of those providers are small clinics and individual doctors that aren’t currently equipped to take on the tens of thousands of women who will have to leave Planned Parenthood should the courts rule in favor of the State of Texas.

I set out to test the WHP’s non-Planned Parenthood provider listings over the past week and found that while initial searches of TexasWomensHealth.org turn up what appear to be hundreds of available providers, many of them don’t provide any kind of contraceptive care, don’t take Medicaid Women’s Health Program clients, or are simply misleading duplicate listings.

In Austin, for example, many WHP clients visit the Downtown Austin Clinic for contraceptives and cancer screenings. What if a resident of the 78702 zip code who formerly relied on Planned Parenthood had to suddenly find a new doctor?

A search for providers within 30 miles of 78702 turned up 137 doctors and clinics–initially, a very promising number. But once the duplicates were weeded out there were just 49 individual providers, including those like the Austin Endoscopy Center. When I called to try to make a gynecological appointment there, I was understandably turned down: “This is a colon cancer center,” the operator told us. No women’s health care there.

Several times, locations listed on the Texas WHP website weren’t taking new Medicaid clients, were only taking those within a limited age range, or simply did not accept Medicaid Women’s Health Program patients. The People’s Community Clinic, which serves low-income and uninsured clients, said they were only taking adolescents or pregnant women—and pregnant women are, by definition, excluded from the WHP.

The Austin Regional Clinic, which has several locations in Austin, looked promising, but they don’t accept Medicaid WHP clients. Neither does the similarly situated Austin Diagnostic Clinic.

Ultimately, I found nine providers within a 30-mile radius of the selected zip code that accepted the WHP and were taking new patients—some could see a patient for an annual exam as soon as the following day. Provided, of course, that clients are able to travel. The Lone Star Circle Of Care, which also focuses on underserved populations, had appointments in neighboring cities.

But for a WHP enrollee who may not have a car or who can’t afford to take a day or a half-day off from work, it may be a matter of having to make the difficult decision of choosing between several hours’ worth of pay—which could mean making rent or buying baby formula—or getting her annual exam.

And if Planned Parenthood is excluded from the WHP in Texas, there’s a good chance that WHP patients wouldn’t have the good luck to find nine available providers if, as a George Washington University study predicts, existing providers simply will not be able to fill in the gaps left by Planned Parenthood. From the study:

In FY 2010, PPFA clinics accounted for approximately 49 percent of all WHP-financed care, furnishing services to 51,953 WHP clients out of 105,998 WHP clients served. Of the 1,469 providers that billed the WGP in FY 2010, 908 (62 percent) served 10 or fewer patients, while 368 (25 percent) served only one patient. The authors conclude that the WHP program lacks any reasonable access alternative.

Multiply just one caller looking for care by 51,953, and it’s easy to imagine that a morning of phone calls to doctor after doctor—again, if a woman working and managing a family had the time to dedicate to it—might turn up no available appointments, or appointments that could only be made months in advance.

It’s also important to remember that an imagined Austin-based client lives in a major metropolitan area with public transportation and multiple hospitals and women’s health centers. WHP clients in other areas of Texas, especially those in rural towns, will have even fewer options.

I asked a Texas Planned Parenthood representative what area of Texas the group thought would suffer most if it could no longer participate in the WHP. The results were dismal: based on their research, nearly 80 percent of WHP clients get their care from family planning clinics, and they turned over a list of 25 cities that have no family planning clinics other than Planned Parenthood that serve WHP clients. The top four results–Edinburg, McAllen, San Juan and Weslaco, Texas—are all located near the Texas-Mexico border, an area that has been hit especially hard by clinics closing.

And if women in South Texas can’t see their Planned Parenthood doctors and nurses for WHP care, the Texas WHP website won’t be much help either: A search for doctors within the McAllen zip code on the WHP site turned up anesthesiologists, pediatricians and a night clinic in their top results–plus one provider that did not take WHP clients.

If the State of Texas wants to exclude Planned Parenthood from the Women’s Health Program, they’re going to need to go beyond technical support for their website to invest huge sums of money increasing access to care throughout the state, replicating the system they are seeking to eliminate.

This week 43 Catholic institutions, including the Archdioceses of New York and Washington DC as well as Notre Dame University, sued the Obama administration over its mandate requiring employers to provide contraception in their health insurance plans.

The move not only escalated an unusual fight between church and state but also threatened to cause splits within the Catholic Church itself.

The Catholic Bishop of Stockton, California, Stephen Blaire, told America magazine that he was concerned the campaign against the mandate was becoming too political.

He said he was worried his fellow bishops were being co-opted by political conservatives.

Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, a Republican, is likely to survive a recall election on June 5, according to recent nonpartisan polls of the state.

Mr. Walker leads his Democratic opponent, Mayor Tom Barrett of Milwaukee, by an average of six percentage points in those polls and has not trailed in any poll since February.

Some polls issued by Democratic-affiliated groups have shown a somewhat tighter race, with Mr. Barrett trailing by about three percentage points instead. Partisan-affiliated polls have a long track record of somewhat exaggerating their candidate’s standing, however, and it may be telling that even these polls do not show Mr. Barrett ahead.

In a typical November election, a 6-point lead with two weeks to go would translate into a high probability of winning — roughly on the order of 90 percent, based on the historical accuracy of polls of governors’ races.

The dynamics of a recall election may be slightly more uncertain. But with high turnout expected, which tends to make polling more reliable, Mr. Barrett would most likely need a last-minute change in momentum to have much of a chance of prevailing.

Mr. Walker’s approval rating was poor at this time last year, after he stripped collective bargaining rights from most of the state’s public workers. In May 2011, his job approval rating averaged 42 percent across different polls, versus an average disapproval rating of 55 percent.

In an average of polls conducted so far this May, however, Mr. Walker’s approval rating averages 50 percent, with 46 percent disapproving.

You’d think Montgomery County, Texas, would’ve learned its lesson. In 2011, when its Sheriff’s Office was preparing to become the first police agency in America to order a drone that could carry weapons, Chief Deputy Randy McDaniel said, “I’m tickled to death,” adding, “It’s so simple in its design and the objectives, you just wonder why anyone would choose not to have it.” That was before the day of the most famous drone test in Texas. It seemed like a perfect photo-op. They’d get out the BearCat armored vehicle they own, which looks like a small military tank, and fly a bad-ass $300,000 drone above it. The problem came when the drone operator lost control of the unmanned aircraft, which plummeted earthward, hitting the BearCat on the way down.
The accident got them ridiculed on the Internet. But they never wavered in their commitment to drones. And now, apparently still tickled to death, Chief Deputy McDaniel has been quoted telling the press that tear gas and rubber bullets might be added to the unmanned aerial vehicle. CBS News quotes him explaining that “those are things that law enforcement utilizes day in and day out and in certain situations it might be advantageous to have this type of system.” That’s rather vague, but there’s no getting around one thing: the situations would all involve police deliberately shooting rubber bullets or tear gas clouds at civilians from an unmanned drone.

Actually, before I get to that, let me take a moment to debunk a fairy tale that we’ve been hearing a lot from Wall Street and its reliable defenders — a tale in which the incredible damage runaway finance inflicted on the U.S. economy gets flushed down the memory hole, and financiers instead become the heroes who saved America.

Once upon a time, this fairy tale tells us, America was a land of lazy managers and slacker workers. Productivity languished, and American industry was fading away in the face of foreign competition.

Then square-jawed, tough-minded buyout kings like Mitt Romney and the fictional Gordon Gekko came to the rescue, imposing financial and work discipline. Sure, some people didn’t like it, and, sure, they made a lot of money for themselves along the way. But the result was a great economic revival, whose benefits trickled down to everyone.

You can see why Wall Street likes this story. But none of it — except the bit about the Gekkos and the Romneys making lots of money — is true.

For the alleged productivity surge never actually happened. In fact, overall business productivity in America grew faster in the postwar generation, an era in which banks were tightly regulated and private equity barely existed, than it has since our political system decided that greed was good.

What about international competition? We now think of America as a nation doomed to perpetual trade deficits, but it was not always thus. From the 1950s through the 1970s, we generally had more or less balanced trade, exporting about as much as we imported. The big trade deficits only started in the Reagan years, that is, during the era of runaway finance.

And what about that trickle-down? It never took place. There have been significant productivity gains these past three decades, although not on the scale that Wall Street’s self-serving legend would have you believe. However, only a small part of those gains got passed on to American workers.

So, no, financial wheeling and dealing did not do wonders for the American economy, and there are real questions about why, exactly, the wheeler-dealers have made so much money while generating such dubious results.

A week after Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ) held Congressional hearings on a bill that would prevent doctors in D.C. from performing abortions after 20 weeks, protesters descended on the Arizona Congressman’s office — who represents a district 2,300 miles and two time zones away from the nation’s capital — to ask “Mayor Franks” to fix pressing local concerns like pot holes , broken street lights and traffic lights:

A unanimous Senate Armed Services Committee took a bipartisan shot at Pakistan on Thursday for the sentencing of the physician who helped catch Osama bin Laden, approving a $631.4 billion defense policy bill that withholds aid to the wavering ally until supply lines are open, support for terrorist networks ceases and the doctor, Shakil Afridi, is released.

The committee’s defense measure for the fiscal year that begins in October largely sticks to the budget caps agreed to last summer and is $4 billion below the version approved by the House on Friday. It leaves in place a delicate compromise on detainee policy from last year that some critics believe authorizes the indefinite detention of terrorism suspects apprehended on U.S. soil.

But he doesn’t seem that enamored with Mitt Romney either.

In an appearance on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” program Wednesday morning, Mr. Powell, a Republican who did endorse Mr. Obama in 2008, despite having worked under President George W. Bush, chided Mr. Romney for listening to conservative foreign policy advisers.

Mr. Powell noted that Mr. Romney recently said that Russia was the “No. 1 geopolitical foe” of the United States.

“Well, c’mon Mitt, think. It isn’t the case,” Mr. Powell said. “I don’t know whether Mitt really feels that.”

Asked whether he thought Mr. Romney’s advisers told him to say that, Mr. Powell said: “I don’t know. You ask him.”

Mr. Powell said Mr. Romney’s comment had been “catching a lot of heck from the regular G.O.P. foreign affairs community.”

“We’re kind of taken aback by it,” he said. “Look at the world. There is no pure competitor to the United States of America.”

Earlier in the interview, Mr. Powell described Mr. Romney’s foreign policy advisers as “quite far to the right.’

“Sometimes, they, I think, might be in a position to make judgments or recommendations to the candidate that should get a second thought,” Mr. Powell said.

House Minority Leader, responding to an expected acceleration of John Boehner’s timeline on the Bush tax cuts, fired off a letter to the Speaker asking for immediate consideration of an extension of just the “low end” tax cuts – which include the Bush-era marginal rates for households making up to $1 million. This represents a shift in the dividing line for the Bush tax cuts, which has traditionally been at $250,000.

The Bush tax cuts at every level up to $1 million in annual income, in other words, are now framed as “middle-income tax cuts.” She says it right here in the letter:

Without further delay, the Majority Leadership should schedule a vote on extension of the middle-income tax cuts, as early as next week, to increase certainty for millions of American taxpayers and for the economy. We should not delay passing this legislation that will help afford all Americans the opportunity to reach their goals and realize the promise of the American Dream.

We must ask the very wealthiest Americans to pay their fair share. Democrats believe that tax cuts for those earning over a million dollars a year should expire and that we should use the resulting revenues to pay down the deficit.

First of all, if you make the dividing line at $1 million a year in annual income, there simply won’t be all that many revenues generated to pay down that deficit. When the dividing line was $250,000 a year, the revenue was around $800 billion over a ten-year period. I don’t have a strong grasp of what the numbers would be at $1 million, but my guess would be half that, if not more. So from a deficit reduction standpoint, this makes pretty much no sense.

Second of all, because of our marginal tax rate system, high-income earners at the $1 million
level would still benefit from all the tax cuts on the first $1 million of their income, which are substantial. In fact, you’d be giving hundreds of billions of dollars – whatever the difference is between letting the tax cuts expire at the $250,000 level and the $1 million level – entirely to well-off people.

Most states are still more than two years away from returning to prerecession employment levels, according to a new analysis.

Only four states — Alaska, North Dakota, Texas, and Louisiana — have created enough jobs since the recovery to get back to where they were prior to the recession, according to economist Steven Frable of IHS Global Insight . All four of those states have benefited from an energy boom, and Louisiana was starting at a low level of employment after taking a major hit from Hurricane Katrina.

Two more states, New York and West Virginia, are expected to return to their prerecession peak later this year, and 10 more should reach the mark next year. But the majority of states still won’t get there until after 2014. Meanwhile, returning to peak employment levels doesn’t necessarily mean jobs markets are healed. In fact, getting back to where a state started doesn’t account for the jobs needed by new entrants to the labor force over the past four years.

Eighteen states still are more than 5% below their 2007 employment levels, and the two worst-hit states — Nevada and Michigan — are still more than 10% off their peaks. Frable estimates those two states, as well as Rhode Island which has seen sluggish job growth, won’t return to prerecession peaks until sometime after 2017.

The Metropolitan Police has implemented a system to extract mobile phone data from suspects held in custody.

The data includes call history, texts and contacts, and the BBC has learned that it will be retained regardless of whether any charges are brought.

The technology is being used in 16 London boroughs, and could potentially be used by police across the UK.

Campaign group Privacy International described the move as a “possible breach of human rights law”.

Until now, officers had to send mobiles off for forensic examination in order to gather and store data, a process which took several weeks.

Under the new system, content will be extracted using purpose built terminals in police stations.

It will allow officers to connect a suspect’s mobile and produce a print out of data from the device, as well as saving digital records of the content.

China can bypass Wall Street when buying United States government debt in what is the Treasury’s first direct relationship with a foreign government, according to documents viewed by Reuters.

The relationship means the People’s Bank of China can buy United States debt using a different method from any other central bank.

Other central banks, including the Bank of Japan, which has a large appetite for Treasuries, place orders with Wall Street banks designated by the government as primary dealers. Those dealers then bid on their behalf at Treasury auctions.

China, which holds $1.17 trillion in Treasuries, still buys some through primary dealers, but since June 2011 it has been able to bypass them.

The documents viewed by Reuters show that the Treasury Department has given the People’s Bank of China a direct computer link to its auction system, which means that it can participate without placing bids through primary dealers. The Chinese first used the access in late June 2011 to buy two-year notes. China still has to go through the market if it wants to sell.

The change was not announced publicly or in any message to primary dealers.

“Direct bidding is open to a wide range of investors, but as a matter of general policy we do not comment on individual bidders,” said Matt Anderson, a Treasury Department spokesman.

While there is no prohibition on direct bidding by foreign government entities, the Treasury’s accommodation of China is unusual.

The Treasury’s sales of debt to China have become part of a politically charged public debate about China’s role as both the largest exporter to the United States and the country’s largest creditor.

The privilege may help China obtain United States debt for a better price by limiting Wall Street’s knowledge of its orders.

Primary dealers are not allowed to charge customers money to bid on their behalf at Treasury auctions, so China is not saving money by cutting out commission fees. Instead, China is protecting information about its bidding habits.

Democrats have enjoyed trying to keep Republicans on the defensive about women’s issues, and on Tuesday, they tried to keep the debate going by reintroducing a wage gap measure that failed in the Senate in 2010.

Senator Barbara A. Mikulski, Democrat of Maryland, with other female senators and a number of advocacy groups, planned a news conference on Wednesday urging Congress to pass the Paycheck Fairness Act. The legislation, which builds on the Equal Pay Act of 1963, is designed to help close the wage gap between women and men working equivalent jobs.

Ms. Mikulski made the preliminary announcement with a stream of Twitter posts on Tuesday, calling the measure a “down-payment” for ending the pay gap. “It’s outrageous that 49 yrs after Equal Pay Act, women still earn 77 cents to every $1 men make,” she wrote. “Wage gap is real – costing women & families thousands over their career. Women deserve #EqualPay 4 equal work.”

In 2010, when the Paycheck Fairness Act came up for a procedural vote in the Senate, no Republican supported it.

The Paycheck Fairness Act would require employers to demonstrate that wage gaps between men and women doing the same work have a business justification, and it would prohibit employers from retaliating against employees who shared salary information with their co-workers. The measure would also create a competitive grant program to provide training in negotiation for girls and women.

Senator Harry Reid, the Democratic majority leader, is expected to file a motion on Thursday that would end debate on the bill and bring it up for a vote.

CHICAGO — President Obama and the leaders of America’s NATO allies on Monday agreed to end their guiding role in the decade-long war in Afghanistan next summer, saying it is time for the Afghan people to take responsibility for their own security and for the United States-led international troops to go home.

Declaring that “our forces broke the Taliban’s momentum,” Mr. Obama used the summit meeting of NATO leaders here in his adopted hometown to begin an exit from a conflict he embraced during his first campaign for president as America’s good war.

“We’re now unified behind a plan to responsibly wind down the war in Afghanistan,” Mr. Obama said during a news conference after the meeting. He called the decision a “major step” toward the end of the war.

But Mr. Obama acknowledged that “real challenges” remained in dealing with the problems across the border in Pakistan, and that the conference had not resolved the impasse over reopening supply lines or the other tensions about the fight against insurgents operating from safe havens there.

“We think that Pakistan has to be part of the solution in Afghanistan,” he said. “Neither country is going to have the kind of security, stability and prosperity that it needs unless they can resolve some of these outstanding issues.”

Pakistan closed supply lines to Afghanistan after an American airstrike in November that killed 24 Pakistani solders. Mr. Obama has refused to apologize for the strike, as Pakistan has demanded in negotiations with the Americans, and he pointedly exchanged only a few words with the country’s president, Asif Ali Zardari, during the two-day summit meeting — “very brief, as we were walking into the summit,” he said. The two men also stood and spoke briefly with the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, before all three joined the other leaders for a group photograph.

The plans to withdraw from Afghanistan are “irreversible,” Mr. Obama and the world leaders said in their communiqué, a deliberate word choice that underscored the political reality in America and in Europe. After 10 years of war and with the global economy reeling, the nations of the West no longer want to pay, either in treasure or in lives, the costs of their efforts in a place that for centuries has resisted foreign attempts to tame it.

Mr. Powell, a retired four-star general and Republican former secretary of state, praises Mr. Obama for having “stabilized the financial system.”

And Mr. Powell is supportive of the president’s Afghanistan policy.

Nearly four years after lending his military stature and his political prowess to Mr. Obama with a critical endorsement, Mr. Powell sounds happy with the result. And yet, he is not quite ready to endorse the president again.

“I don’t want to throw my weight behind somebody,” Mr. Powell said on NBC‘s “Today Show” on Tuesday morning. “I feel as I private citizen I ought to listen to what the president says and what the president’s been doing. But I also have to listen to what the other fellow says. I’ve known Mitt Romney for many years, good man.”

The decision by Mr. Powell could just be a gracious delay from a man who served President George W. Bush during wartime. He said on NBC that he does “owe the Republican Party some consideration.”

And if Mr. Powell decides to endorse Mr. Obama again, he might want to time the announcement to have more impact that it might in late May.

In the year since President Obama released his long-form birth certificate, tax payers are partly-funding Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s investigation into whether or not the president was truly born in the United States.

The Arizona Republic and the Honolulu Star-Advertiser report that two men identifying themselves as Michael Zullo and Brian Mackiewcz arrived at the Hawaii Department of Health on Monday and requested verification of Obama’s birth. They left after a Hawaii deputy attorney provided them information on the legal requirements for obtaining that documentation. Zullo is a volunteer in Arpaio’s inquiry, but Mackiewcz provided a business card identifying him as a public employee who works in the Threats Management Unit of the sheriff’s office.

Arpaio, who has previously claimed that the investigation was being funded through private donations, dismissed concerns about tax dollars funding the conspiracy quest and said “he hopes the agency will be paid back through private donations”:

May 22 (Reuters) - ATLANTA - When he entered the race for the Republican presidential nomination in May 2011, Newt Gingrich was the prosperous head of a small empire commonly known as Newt Inc, which included both for-profit consultancies and nonprofit foundations. Altogether, these entwined ventures pulled in more than $110 million over the past decade. Now the vestiges of this empire are mired in debt, as is Gingrich’s campaign fund. A bankruptcy proceeding under way in Atlanta will determine whether the one company still owned by Callista Gingrich, Gingrich Productions, will lose an expected payout that now constitutes the bulk of the Gingriches’ net worth.

Despite the persistent gender gap in opinion polls and mounting criticism of their hostility to women’s rights, Republicans are not backing off their assault on women’s equality and well-being. New laws in some states could mean a death sentence for a pregnant woman who suffers a life-threatening condition. But the attack goes well beyond abortion, into birth control, access to health care, equal pay and domestic violence.

Republicans seem immune to criticism. In an angry speech last month, John Boehner, the House speaker, said claims that his party was damaging the welfare of women were “entirely created” by Democrats. Earlier, the Republican National Committee chairman, Reince Priebus, sneered that any suggestion of a G.O.P. “war on women” was as big a fiction as a “war on caterpillars.”

But just last Wednesday, Mr. Boehner refuted his own argument by ramming through the House a bill that seriously weakens the Violence Against Women Act. That followed the Republican push in Virginia and elsewhere to require medically unnecessary and physically invasive sonograms before an abortion, and Senate Republicans’ persistent blocking of a measure to better address the entrenched problem of sex-based wage discrimination.

On Capitol Hill and in state legislatures, Republicans are attacking women’s rights in four broad areas.

The chart above is from the invaluable people at Voteview, who use data on Congressional voting to measure political positions and polarizations. What it shows is what should be obvious, but much of the Beltway chattering class still refuses to acknowledge: there has been a huge increase in polarization, and it’s because Republicans have moved right, not because Democrats have moved left. (You want to look at the Northern Democrat line; the southern Democrats disappeared or became Republicans).

As I said, this is obvious; yet people who try to say this get frozen out of the discourse, even when — like Mann and Ornstein — they have heretofore been pundits in good standing. Instead, you’re supposed to wring your hands over partisanship in the abstract.

And when the attempt to turn this hand-wringing into actual political effort flops, you blame it on the false equivalency police!

The facts have a well-known anti-centrist bias.

In a 2-to-1 decision, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit upheld a main provision of the Voting Rights Act on Friday, rejecting an Alabama county’s challenge to the landmark civil rights law. The provision requires governments with a history of discrimination to obtain approval from the Justice Department or from a federal court in Washington for changes in election procedures. It applies to all or parts of 16 states. The court said that Congress developed extensive evidence of continuing racial discrimination when it reauthorized the provision six years ago.

The United States on Thursday announced the imposition of antidumping tariffs of more than 31 percent on solar panels from China.

The move by the Commerce Department is certain to infuriate Chinese officials already upset after recent bilateral frictions over China’s human rights policies and its increasingly confrontational approach toward American allies like the Philippines and Japan.

The antidumping decision is among the biggest in American history, covering one of the largest and fastest-growing categories of imports from China, the world’s largest exporter.

The department said the United States bought $3.1 billion worth of Chinese solar cells last year, giving China more than half the American market for the devices.

Many solar panel installers in the United States have opposed tariffs on Chinese panels, contending that inexpensive imports have helped spur many homeowners and businesses to put solar panels on their rooftops. The new tariffs are likely to mean a substantial increase in the price of solar panels here.

Chinese officials have been indignant at American criticism of their solar power industry, pointing out that the United States has urged China for years to embrace renewable energy as a way to reduce air pollution, combat climate change and limit the need for oil imports from politically volatile countries in the Mideast.

Government support for solar energy is an important feature of China’s current Five-Year Plan, which runs through 2015, although Premier Wen Jiabao publicly cautioned in March that he was becoming concerned about overcapacity in the sector.

Shooting photos or video of police officers is a Constitutionally-protected right, says the U.S. Department of Justice.

In a win for technology, citizen journalism, and our Constitutional rights, the U.S. Department of Justice has issued a letter to the Baltimore City Police Department reconfirming that photographing, video- and audio-recording on-duty police officers is a Constitutional right protected by the First, Fourth, and Fourteenth Amendments.

“Because recording police officers in the public discharge of their duties is protected by the First Amendment, policies should prohibit interference with recording of police activities except in narrowly circumscribed situations,” reads the DoJ’s letter (pdf). “More particularly, policies should instruct officers that, except under limited circumstances, officers must not search or seize a camera or recording device without a warrant. In addition, policies should prohibit more subtle actions that may nonetheless infringe upon individuals’ First Amendment rights. Officers should be advised not to threaten, intimidate, or otherwise discourage an individual from recording police officer enforcement activities or intentionally block or obstruct cameras or recording devices.”

The letter, which was brought to our attention via photojournalist Carlos Miller of PixIQ (who says in his bio that he’s been arrested three times for recording police), comes in response to a lawsuit brought forth by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of Christopher Sharp, against the BPD, whose officers confiscated Sharp’s cellphone and deleted a video of police arresting his friend at the 2010 Preakness Stakes horse race.

After the DoJ first took interest in the lawsuit earlier this year, the BPD issued a seven-page General Order to officers stating that citizens have the “absolute right” to record police doing their duties, provided the recording does not violate any other laws, like obstruction of justice. Rather than stick to these principles, however, BPD simply adopted a broader interpretation of the law, which led to further crackdowns on recording. The DoJ’s most recent letter, issued on May 14, says that the BPD’s order does not go far enough to protect the rights of citizens.

The DoJ’s letter, written by Jonathan Smith, chief of the special litigation section of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, also reconfirms that members of the press and other private citizens share the same right to record police, and that displaying press credentials should not be a prerequisite for recording police officers.

Newt Gingrich closed down his campaign early this month with at least $4.8 million in debt, according to campaign records filed with the Federal Election Commission on Saturday.

Among the biggest debts Mr. Gingrich accumulated were $181,977 for public relations consulting, $165,000 for Web advertising, $1 million to Moby Dick Airways, a charter company, and over $466,370 for security services. Mr. Gingrich also owes himself $580,134 in travel expenses.

His campaign reported $100,000 in debts to Crimson Hexagon, a Massachusetts firm, for software licenses, but a notation indicates that the campaign is disputing those bills.

During April, with his campaign effectively over, Mr. Gingrich raised just $786,782. He ended the month with $806,950 in cash on hand.

Mr. Gingrich’s debt is significant against the roughly $23 million he raised over the course of a tumultuous Republican primary.

The leaders of the G8 group of the world’s most powerful economies say they want debt-stricken Greece to remain in the eurozone.

In their summit communique, G8 leaders also committed themselves to promoting growth alongside fiscal responsibility.

However, the leaders acknowledged “the right measures are not the same for each of us”.

Greece’s possible exit from the eurozone was high on the agenda, following inconclusive elections there.

The leaders of France, Germany, the US, the UK, Italy, Japan, Canada and Russia have been meeting at Camp David in the US state of Maryland.

WASHINGTON — In the 1980s, the military had its infamous $800 toilet seat. Today, it has a $17,000 drip pan.

Thanks to a powerful Kentucky congressman who has steered tens of millions of federal dollars to his district, the Army has bought about $6.5 million worth of the “leakproof” drip pans in the last three years to catch transmission fluid on Black Hawk helicopters. And it might want more from the Kentucky company that makes the pans, even though a similar pan from another company costs a small fraction of the price: about $2,500.

The purchase shows the enduring power of earmarks, even though several scandals have prompted efforts in Congress to rein them in. And at a time when the Pentagon is facing billions of dollars in cutbacks — which include shrinking the Army, trimming back purchases of fighter jets and retiring warships — the eye-catching price tag for a small part has provoked sharp criticism.

The Kentucky company, Phoenix Products, got the job to produce the pans after Representative Harold Rogers, a Republican who is now the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, added an earmark to a 2009 spending bill. While the earmark came before restrictions were placed on such provisions for for-profit companies, its outlays have continued for the last three years.

The company’s owners are political contributors to the congressman, who has been called the “Prince of Pork” by The Lexington Herald-Leader for his history of delivering federal contracts to donors and others back home.

Military officials have said the pans work well, and Mr. Rogers defended them.

“It’s important that Congress do what it can to provide our military with the best resources to ensure their safety and advance our missions abroad, while also saving taxpayer dollars wherever possible,” Mr. Rogers said in a statement. “These dripping pans help accomplish both of these goals.”

But Bob Skillen, the chief engineer at a small manufacturer called VX Aerospace, which has a plant in North Carolina, said he was shocked to see what the Army was spending for the Black Hawk drip pans. He designs drip pans that his company sells to the military for a different helicopter, the UH-46, for about $2,500 per pan, or about one-eighth the price that his Kentucky competitor charges. The pans attach beneath the roof of the helicopter to catch leaking transmission fluid before it can seep into the cabin.

The board of the N.A.A.C.P voted to endorse same-sex marriage on Saturday, putting the weight of the country’s most prominent civil rights group behind a cause that has long divided some quarters of the black community.

The largely symbolic move, made at the group’s quarterly board meeting in Miami, puts the N.A.A.C.P in line with President Obama, who endorsed gay marriage a little over a week ago. Given the timing, it is likely to be viewed as both a statement of principle as well as support for the president’s position in the middle of a closely contested presidential campaign.

All but two of the organization’s board members, who include many religious leaders, backed a resolution supporting same-sex marriage, according to people told of the decision.

Borrowing a term used by gay right’s advocates, the resolution stated: “We support marriage equality consistent with equal protection under the law provided under the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution.”

In a statement, Roslyn M. Brock, chairwoman of the board, said that “we have and will oppose efforts to codify discrimination into law.”

A spokesman for the group declined to discuss a breakdown of how the board members voted.

The practical implication’s of the the N.A.A.C.P.’s decision is unclear. Several of its leaders have already expressed support for same-sex marriage, and local branches have repeatedly opposed measures
to ban such unions, most recently in North Carolina, where voters just passed a referendum against weddings and civil unions for gay people.

Children from racial and ethnic minorities now account for more than half the births in the US, according to estimates of the latest US census data.

Black, Hispanic, Asian and mixed-race births made up 50.4% of new arrivals in the year ending in July 2011.

It puts non-Hispanic white births in the minority for the first time.

Sociologists believe the ongoing economic slowdown has contributed to a greater decline in birth rates among white people.

The US Census Bureau recorded 2.02m babies born to minorities in the year to July 2011, just over half of all births, compared with 37% in 1990.

‘Important landmark’
US birth rates have been declining, but the drop has been larger for white people.

The number of white births has fallen by 11.4% since 2008, compared with 3.2% for minorities, according to Kenneth Johnson, a sociologist at the University of New Hampshire.

William Frey, head of demographics at the Brookings Institution, described the data as a “tipping point” that would present a new set of challenges to the US in years to come.

Senator John McCain, who refused to make President Obama’s association with the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright an issue during his 2008 presidential campaign, repudiated a proposal by Republican strategists to “do exactly what John McCain would not let us do” — open an incendiary, racially tinged attack on the president.

Mr. McCain also shrugged off the slights against him in a proposal for the political ad campaign, which was brought to light by The New York Times.

“I don’t know whether to be offended or not,” Mr. McCain said with a smile. “It is what it is. Look, my life has moved on.”

He added that such third-party attacks are “a way for political operatives to continue to make money.”

The authors of the ad campaign, timed to rock the Democratic National Convention in September, asserted that “if the nation had seen that ad, they’d never have elected Barack Obama.”

WASHINGTON — The Senate on Thursday confirmed two nominees chosen by President Obama for the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, overcoming Republican objections and bringing the seven-member board to full strength for the first time since 2006, before the economic crisis.

There can be no doubt that James Buchanan was gay, before, during and after his four years in the White House. Moreover, the nation knew it, too — he was not far into the closet.

Today, I know no historian who has studied the matter and thinks Buchanan was heterosexual. Fifteen years ago, historian John Howard, author of “Men Like That,” a pioneering study of queer culture in Mississippi, shared with me the key documents, including Buchanan’s May 13, 1844, letter to a Mrs. Roosevelt. Describing his deteriorating social life after his great love, William Rufus King, senator from Alabama, had moved to Paris to become our ambassador to France, Buchanan wrote:

I am now “solitary and alone,” having no companion in the house with me. I have gone a wooing to several gentlemen, but have not succeeded with any one of them. I feel that it is not good for man to be alone; and should not be astonished to find myself married to some old maid who can nurse me when I am sick, provide good dinners for me when I am well, and not expect from me any very ardent or romantic affection.

Despite such evidence, one reason why Americans find it hard to believe Buchanan could have been gay is that we have a touching belief in progress. Our high school history textbooks’ overall story line is, “We started out great and have been getting better ever since,” more or less automatically. Thus we must be more tolerant now than we were way back in the middle of the 19th century! Buchanan could not have been gay then, else we would not seem more tolerant now.

This ideology of progress amounts to a chronological form of ethnocentrism. Thus chronological ethnocentrism is the belief that we now live in a better society, compared to past societies. Of course, ethnocentrism is the anthropological term for the attitude that our society is better than any other society now existing, and theirs are OK to the degree that they are like ours.

The US state of Texas is likely to have executed an innocent man due to careless handling of the case, a report by US law students claims.

Carlos de Luna was killed by lethal injection in 1989 for the brutal murder of a single mother six years earlier.

Right up until his execution, de Luna maintained a fellow Hispanic called Carlos Hernandez was the real culprit.

The Columbia University report backs his claim. It says “shoddy police work” probably led to the wrong man dying.

Under the supervision of Professor James Liebman, 12 students spent five years painstakingly dissecting the 1983 murder of Wanda Lopez in the Texan city of Corpus Christi. The petrol station clerk was stabbed in the chest with a lock-blade buck knife.

The students combed through endless police files and crime scene footage, and interviewed more than 100 witnesses, including detectives who had worked on the case.

Former President George W. Bush jumped back into presidential politics this week, endorsing presumptive 2012 GOP nominee Mitt Romney. He also, according to the New York Times, plans to release a book in two months that will lay out his advice on boosting economic growth:

Gingerly, the 43rd president is beginning to add his voice back into the national dialogue. A month ago, he spoke publicly in favor of one of his defining domestic legacies, the tax cuts that still divide the country. Two months from now, he plans to publish a book outlining strategies for economic growth. And on Tuesday, he made a rare return to Washington to promote freedom overseas.

That Bush believes the country needs his thoughts on how to create economic growth is laughable. After all, under his watch, “growth in investment, GDP, and employment all posted their worst performance of any post-war expansion,” while “overall monthly job growth was the worst of any cycle since at least February 1945, and household income growth was negative for the first cycle since tracking began in 1967.” As the Economic Policy Institute found, “between the end of the 2001 recession (2001Q4) and the peak of that expansion (2007Q4), the U.S. economy experienced the worst economic expansion of the post-war era.”

As this chart shows, the only economic indicator on which Bush exceeded the average is corporate profits:

D.C. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton announced today that she will not be given the opportunity to testify during a congressional hearing on a bill that would prohibit abortions in D.C. after 20 weeks.

This Thursday the House Subcommittee on the Constitution will consider the bill introduced by Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.) in January. (A companion bill was introduced in the Senate by Republican Utah Sen. Mike Lee.) Last week Norton requested the right to speak—which could have been granted by Franks, who is also the committee’s chair—as she has for other hearings in which legislation directly targeting D.C. is considered. Her request was denied.

“The post-20-week D.C. abortion ban bill targets an entire group of individuals, women who live in the District of Columbia, and their constitutional rights. Using the women of one congressional district to reach for extreme encroachments on women’s reproductive rights has become a pattern of the House Republican majority, but also reflected nationwide. We will vigorously fight the bullying tactics of the Republican majority against the District’s women, and in standing up for ourselves, we recognize that we are also in the larger fight to protect the reproductive rights of women everywhere,” said Norton in a statement.

Norton announced that she would participate in a press conference before the hearing with Mayor Vince Gray and Christy Zink, a professor at the George Washington University who had an abortion after 20 weeks due to the malformation of the fetus. Zink will be testifying against the bill.

In response to Franks’ bill, DC Vote is encouraging D.C. residents to bring their constituent problems to “Mayor” Franks’ D.C. Constituent Services Day on May 23. In March a small group of pro-choice and pro-D.C. activists protested outside Franks’ district office in Glendale, Arizona against the bill.

The Virginia legislature considered a similar restriction this year and rejected it. The 20-week restrictions have been passed in Alabama, Idaho, Nebraska, Oklahoma and Kansas.

Federal spending is lower now than it was when President Obama took office. I’ll pause to let you absorb the news.

In January 2009, before President Obama had even taken the oath of office, annual spending was set to total 24.9 percent of gross domestic product. Total spending this year, fiscal year 2012, is expected to top out at 23.4 percent of GDP.

Here’s another interesting fact. Taxes today are lower than they were on inauguration day 2009. Back in January 2009, the CBO projected that total federal tax revenue that year would amount to 16.5 percent of GDP. This year? 15.8 percent.

One last nugget. The deficit this year is going to be lower than what it was on the day President Obama took office. Back then, the CBO said the 2009 deficit would be 8.3 percent of GDP. This year’s deficit is expected to come in at 7.6 percent.

The Federal Reserve is worried about the impact on the US economy if government spending is cut sharply.

“The possibility of a sharp fiscal tightening in the United States was also considered a sizable risk,” the US central bank said in the minutes of its April meeting.

Automatic budget cuts that will slash $1.2bn (£754m) will happen at the end of this year if a budget deal is not reached.

The Fed held rates at a record low.

“If agreement is not reached on a plan for the federal budget, a sharp fiscal tightening could occur at the start of 2013,” the minutes said.

“Uncertainty about the trajectory of future fiscal policy could lead businesses to defer hiring and investment.”

After a fierce political debate that saw budget talks go to the wire, Republican and Democratic leaders reached an agreement in August 2011 on raising the US debt limit and avoiding a first default.

Under the the agreement, the US deficit will be reduced by at least $2.1tn over 10 years.

The House of Representatives Republican leader, John Boehner, has indicated he is again prepared to battle President Barack Obama over the budget.

The Fed has vowed to keep rates at “exceptionally low levels” all the way to late 2014.

“Several members” of the Fed also said, the minutes showed, that additional support could be needed if the economic recovery lost momentum.

Congress also bears substantial responsibility for the anti-scientific, anti-empirical aspects of American drug policy. If Mitt Romney and Barack Obama are able to define the terms of the upcoming presidential election, this issue won’t come up. But voters have consistently shown interest in the subject when permitted to directly question politicians, and Gary Johnson, the Libertarian Party nominee, is eager to challenge Obama and Romney on this issue given the chance. When opportunities for these challenges arise, the classification of marijuana is one of the most vulnerable parts of the status quo to attack.12 states have pending medical marijuana legislation.

In any other rich country, Nikki probably would have been fine, notes T. R. Reid in his important and powerful new book, “The Healing of America.” Some 80 percent of lupus patients in the United States live a normal life span. Under a doctor’s care, lupus should be manageable. Indeed, if Nikki had been a felon, the problem could have been averted, because courts have ruled that prisoners are entitled to medical care.

As Mr. Reid recounts, Nikki tried everything to get medical care, but no insurance company would accept someone with her pre-existing condition. She spent months painfully writing letters to anyone she thought might be able to help. She fought tenaciously for her life.

Finally, Nikki collapsed at her home in Tennessee and was rushed to a hospital emergency room, which was then required to treat her without payment until her condition stabilized. Since money was no longer an issue, the hospital performed 25 emergency surgeries on Nikki, and she spent six months in critical care.

“When Nikki showed up at the emergency room, she received the best of care, and the hospital spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on her,” her step-father, Tony Deal, told me. “But that’s not when she needed the care.”

By then it was too late. In 2006, Nikki White died at age 32. “Nikki didn’t die from lupus,” her doctor, Amylyn Crawford, told Mr. Reid. “Nikki died from complications of the failing American health care system.”

“She fell through the cracks,” Nikki’s mother, Gail Deal, told me grimly. “When you bury a child, it’s the worst thing in the world. You never recover.”

We now have a chance to reform this cruel and capricious system. If we let that chance slip away, there will be another Nikki dying every half-hour.

That’s how often someone dies in America because of a lack of insurance, according to a study by a branch of the National Academy of Sciences. Over a year, that amounts to 18,000 American deaths.

Hundreds of millions of dollars meant to provide a little relief to the nation’s struggling homeowners is being diverted to plug state budget gaps.

In a budget proposed this week, California joined more than a dozen states that want to help close gaping shortfalls using money paid by the nation’s biggest banks and earmarked for foreclosure prevention, investigations of financial fraud and blunting the ill effects of the housing crisis. California was awarded more than $400 million from the banks, and Gov. Jerry Brown has proposed using the bulk of that sum to pay the state’s debts.

The money was part of a national settlement valued at $25 billion and negotiated with five big banks over abuses in their mortgage and foreclosure processes.

The settlement, reached in February after a year of talks and intervention by the Obama administration, was the second-largest in history involving the states, trailing the tobacco industry settlement, and represented the first large-scale commitment by banks to provide direct aid to borrowers.

As part of the settlement, the banks agreed to pay the states $2.5 billion, money intended to help homeowners and mitigate the effects of the foreclosure surge. But critics complained that this was the only cash the banks were required to pay — the rest comes in the form of “credits” for reducing mortgage debt and other activities. Even that relatively small amount has proved too great a temptation for lawmakers.

Only 27 states have devoted all their funds from the banks to housing programs, according to a report by Enterprise Community Partners, a national affordable housing group. So far about 15 states have said they will use all or most of the money for other purposes.

In Texas, $125 million went straight to the general fund. Missouri will use its $40 million to soften cuts to higher education. Indiana is spending more than half its allotment to pay energy bills for low-income families, while Virginia will use most of its $67 million to help revenue-starved local governments.

Like California, some other states with outsize problems from the housing bust are spending the money for something other than homeowner relief. Georgia, where home prices are still falling, will use its $99 million to lure companies to the state.

Now, none of this is to discount Saverin’s own contributions to Facebook’s success. Though he was only there at the beginning—and although he had some pretty terrible ideas for Facebook, including his plan to show interstitial ads when you went to add a friend—let’s assume that he did in fact add $4 billion of value to the world.

The question is, what’s fair for him to keep?

As an immigrant myself, I’ve got no patience for the argument that he should keep all of it. Pretty much everything in my life that I enjoy wouldn’t have happened without my being in the United States. My education, my job, my wife and family, the fact that I’m not persecuted for my race or religion (I was born in South Africa), the fact that I can sometimes forget to lock my doors at night and not end up killed by marauding bands —I hate paying taxes as much as the next guy, but when I think about all the ways that the United States has been integral to everything in my life, taxes seem like a tiny price.

Now, remember that the tax rate on long-term capital gains is only 15 percent. In other words, Saverin gets to keep 85 percent of everything he’s making from Facebook’s IPO. Given how much of his wealth depends on the government, that’s more than fair.

He was the spitting image of the killer, had the same first name and was near the scene of the crime at the fateful hour: Carlos DeLuna paid the ultimate price and was executed in place of someone else in Texas in 1989, a report out Tuesday found.

Even “all the relatives of both Carloses mistook them,” and DeLuna was sentenced to death and executed based only on eyewitness accounts despite a range of signs he was not a guilty man, said law professor James Liebman.

Liebman and five of his students at Columbia School of Law spent almost five years poring over details of a case that he says is “emblematic” of legal system failure.

DeLuna, 27, was put to death after “a very incomplete investigation. No question that the investigation is a failure,” Liebman said.

FORT WORTH - The U.S. government didn’t offer a reward for the capture of Houston grandmother Elisa Castillo, nor did it accuse her of touching drugs, ordering killings, or getting rich off crime.

But three years after a jury convicted her in a conspiracy to smuggle at least a ton of cocaine on tour buses from Mexico to Houston, the 56-year-old first-time offender is locked up for life - without parole.

“It is ridiculous,” said Castillo, who is a generation older than her cell mates, and is known as “grandma” at the prison here. “I am no one.”

Convicted of being a manager in the conspiracy, she is serving a longer sentence than some of the hemisphere’s most notorious crime bosses - men who had multimillion-dollar prices on their heads before their capture.

The drug capos had something to trade: the secrets of criminal organizations. The biggest drug lords have pleaded guilty in exchange for more lenient sentences.

Castillo said she has nothing to offer in a system rife with inconsistencies and behind-the-scenes scrambling that amounts to a judicial game of Let’s Make A Deal.

“Our criminal justice system is broke; it needs to be completely revamped,” declared Terry Nelson, who was a federal agent for over 30 years and is on the executive board of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition. “They have the power, and if you don’t play the game, they’ll throw the book at you.”

Castillo maintains her innocence, saying she was tricked into unknowingly helping transport drugs and money for a big trafficker in Mexico. But she refused to plead guilty and went to trial.

In 2010, of 1,766 defendants prosecuted for federal drug offenses in the Southern District of Texas - a region that reaches from Houston to the border - 93.2 percent pleaded guilty rather than face trial, according to the U.S. government. Of the defendants who didn’t plead not guilty, 10 defendants were acquitted at trial. Also, 82 saw their cases dismissed.

The statistics are similar nationwide.

The latest case in point came this week with the negotiated surrender of a Colombian drug boss Javier Calle Serna, whom the United States accuses of shipping at least 30 tons of cocaine.

While how much time Calle will face is not known publicly, he likely studied other former players, including former Gulf Cartel lord Osiel Cardenas Guillen.

Cardenas once led one of Mexico’s most powerful syndicates and created the Zetas gang. He pleaded guilty in Houston and is to be released by 2025. He’ll be 57.

Then they asked each member of the group how they would handle the defence budget if they were a member of Congress. They found

Presented the base national defense budget for 2012 and given the opportunity to set a level for 2013, three quarters reduced it, including two thirds of Republicans and 9 in 10 Democrats. On average defense spending was lowered 23%. A majority lowered it at least 11%.

When participants were asked to get more specific and propose changes to the levels of spending in nine areas, a majority cut all nine. “All areas combined were cut 18% on average, with Republicans cutting 12% and Democrats 22%,” the study notes. Most participants were surprised by the level of America’s defence spending when it was held up against the rest of the discretionary budget, historical levels of spending, and the defence spending of other nations. A previous poll showed similar results—support for defence cuts—when participants were informed about the comparable size of the 31 largest categories in the federal discretionary budget.

The potential cuts to the Pentagon contained in last year’s budget deal are actually less than those proposed by the PPC study group on average. So it may seem odd that America’s politicians are now scrambling to avoid those reductions. Instead, Republicans have proposed cuts to food stamps, Medicaid, social services and other programmes for poor Americans, while Democrats have proposed raising taxes on the rich. Few have pushed back against the military spendthrifts, who argue that America would swiftly decline were it to return to the level of funding George Bush laboured under at the end of his peaceable presidency.

But the statistics suggest the country has not lost its way due to laziness. If you look at the average annual hours worked by each worker, the Greeks seem very hard-working.

Figures from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) show that the average Greek worker toils away for 2,017 hours per year which is more than any other European country.

Out of the 34 members of the OECD, that is just two places behind the board leaders, South Korea.

On the other hand, the average German worker - normally thought of as the very epitome of industriousness - only manages 1,408 hours a year. Germany is 33rd out of 34 on the OECD list (or 24th out of 25 looking at the European countries alone).

New York City police officers stopped and questioned more than 200,000 people in the just the first three months of 2012, setting up a record pace for much criticized tactic. The “Stop, Question, Frisk” policy has been a major initiative for the NYPD, which credits the tactic as a key contributor to a years-long drop in street crimes. However, numerous studies have shown that the stops overwhelmingly target black and Latino males. A recent study by the ALCU released last week showed that were 168,000 stops of young black men last year, which exceeds the actual population of young black men living in the city.

Police have been given the authority ”stop and frisk” anyone on “reasonable suspicion” of being involved in a crime — a much lower standard than probable cause — yet more that 90 percent of those stopped are never charged with anything. Despite such criticisms, the department continue tout the policy as an important factor in keeping the peace. On they same day they released the street stop numbers, they NYPD also announced that there have been just 129 murders through the first 132 days of the year, putting the city on pace for fewest number of homicides since reliable statistics have been tracked. The 471 homicides in 2009 is the lowest total on record.

The United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit has ruled that the First Amendment protects the right of private citizens to record the actions of police while they are performing their duties in public places. The decision resulted from a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois against the state’s unusually broad eavesdropping statute. It criminalizes all audio recordings made without the consent of the parties involved, even of public officials in public places.

“The act of making an audio or audiovisual recording is necessarily included within the First Amendment’s guarantee of speech and press rights as a corollary of the right to disseminate the resulting recording,” wrote the two-judge majority in a Tuesday decision. The Illinois statute “interferes with the gathering and dissemination of information about government officials performing their duties in public. Any way you look at it, the eavesdropping statute burdens speech and press rights and is subject to heightened First Amendment scrutiny.”

But Judge Richard Posner disagreed with his colleagues. Posner is the judge who raised concerns in oral arguments that striking down the statute would lead to more “snooping around by reporters and bloggers.”

The majority’s ruling “casts a shadow over electronic privacy statutes of other states,” Posner wrote in his dissent. He worried that crime victims would be hesistant to report crimes to police officers in public out of fear that the conversation might be recorded by a third party’s cell phone and posted to the Internet.

In short: We know you’re using your role as governor to endorse belief in god and you can’t do that.

The FFRF litigants wanted previous Colorado Day of Prayer proclamations declared unconstitutional and they want to prevent further proclamations from being issued. Initially, a judge said FFRF had the right to sue on behalf of Colorado taxpayers but the governor wasn’t doing anything illegal.

FFRF didn’t like that ruling and wanted to challenge it. The Governor didn’t like that FFRF had a right to sue. So they took the case to a state Appeals court.

There, the judges said FFRF still has the right to sue.

The Governor’s people didn’t want to address the Constitutionality of the proclamations — they just said it was a part of state history. But the court said that was a lie:

There [was] no indication in the record that, at the time of Colorado’s founding or at any time before 2004, Colorado’s governors had an annual tradition of proclaiming, separately from Thanksgiving, a Colorado Day of Prayer.

Furthermore, they said, it’s not a secularized day, like Christmas or Thanksgiving. It’s “avowedly religious.” The court then said “we conclude that the six Colorado Day of Prayer proclamations have predominantly religious content.”

The OpenSecrets blog of the Center for Responsive Politics in Washington says the Supreme Court ruling “allowed non-profit corporations under the Tax Code 501c to spend unlimited amounts of money running … political advertisements while not revealing their donors.” The blog said “conservative non-profit groups [have] spent $121 million without disclosing where the money came from.”

The blog ticks off other results of Citizens United.

“The percentage of spending coming from groups that do not disclose their donors has risen from 1 percent to 47 percent since the 2006 midterm elections.”

Spending by those secretive 501c non-profits “increased from zero percent of total spending by outside groups in 2006 to 42 percent in 2010.”

OpenSecrets said the “amount of independent expenditure and electioneering communication spending by outside groups has quadrupled since 2006.”

Meanwhile, 72 percent of “political advertising spending by outside groups in 2010 came from sources that were prohibited from spending money in 2006.”

The Center for Public Integrity, which is devoted to investigative journalism, reports 62 percent of the money raised by the two conservative groups “associated with former Bush adviser Karl Rove have come from mystery donors, a statistic that shows the increasingly important role being played by non-profits in a post-Citizens United political world.”

US Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul is to end active campaigning, a statement says, and will not campaign in states yet to hold primaries.

Battling on would require millions of dollars that the Ron Paul operation does not have, his campaign said.

But the Texas congressman will continue to try to win delegates awarded at forthcoming state conventions.

Mr Paul has 104 delegates, behind Mitt Romney’s 966, with 1,144 delegates needed to secure the nomination.

“We will no longer spend resources campaigning in primaries in states that have not yet voted. Doing so with any hope of success would take many tens of millions of dollars we simply do not have,” he said in a statement.

“In the coming days, my campaign leadership will lay out to you our delegate strategy and what you can do to help.”

Mr Paul is a libertarian-leaning Republican who has opposed the US Federal Reserve monetary system and US military engagement abroad.

The 76-year-old, a former obstetrician-gynaecologist, has a small base of staunch supporters and enjoys popularity among many younger voters.

In the 2012 election campaign, Mr Paul was consistently ranked in the middle of the pack, neither rising to challenge Mr Romney’s front-runner status nor trailing at the bottom of opinion polls.

But then it starts to get bizarre. The moderator of the day is introduced. Mads Christensen. I slowly realize; THAT Mads Christensen. A media personality known (among many other charming traits) for his very conservative and critical approach to women in the work place.

So here I am at Dell’s huge and very professional summit with founder Michael Dell, top people from Microsoft and Intel, impressive power points, expensive commercials, matching polyester ties and all that jazz, and then the – by Dell chosen – moderator starts to rejoice the lack of women in the room. “The IT business is one of the last frontiers that manages to keep women out. The quota of women to men in your business is sound and healthy” he says. “What are you actually doing here?” he adds to the few women who are actually present in the room.

Dell’s moderator continues talking about his two Rolex watches and he then presents the next speaker from Intel. After the break Mads Christensen shares with us his whole “show” about the bitchy women who want’s to steal the power in politics, boards and the home. “Science” he calls it and mentions that all the great inventions come from men. “We can thank women for the rolling pin” he adds. And then the moderator of the day finishes of by asking all (men) in the room to promise him that they will go home and say “Shut up bitch!”.

I turn pale. Not because I am personally offended. I know Mads Christensen and what he stands for and I don’t usually pay much attention to what he says. I am pale because I am in a state of chock realizing that a large professional company as Dell will conciously hire someone with the well known agenda Mads Christensen has.

What happend in that meeting where that decision was made?

Some of what Mitt Romney did as a schoolboy definitely falls into that category. My high school classmates tormented various teachers routinely. Leading a blind teacher into a door is cruel, but it’s still within the category of prank, in part because it targets authority. Bart Simpson pranks. But Nelson Muntz bullies. And the story of the attack on the young nonconformist gay boy is a particularly ugly piece of bullying. It was a vicious and violent assault by a mob organized by Romney, who held him down on the floor, and cut his hair with a pair of scissors.

I do not believe Romney has no memory of this. I believe he is lying. His absurd statement that he has no memory of the event but that he didn’t target the boy for being gay is hilarious for its self-contradiction. A boy who routinely snickered “Atta girl!” when one young gay kid in his class spoke up is not just bashing hippies. I went to an all boys high school in the 1970s. What Romney did was a gay-bashing.

Should we judge a man today by what he did all those years ago?

Not entirely. He has apologized. But there is surely something here: the notion that being privileged and conformist requires actual punishment of the marginalized and under-privileged; that you pick on younger, weaker boys, not older ones; and that you psychologically traumatize the victim by permanently marking his body.

And this matters because today these attacks on gay kids drive many to suicide, others to despair; they wreck lives and self-esteem. It matters that we know that one candidate for president was an anti-gay bully in high school, targeting a weak and defenseless kid and humiliating and traumatizing him. Today, he does the same thing in a larger, more abstract way: targeting a small minority as a way to advance his own power. It gives me the chills.

The United States is resuming sales of some weapons to Bahrain, but says it will not supply the Gulf state with any crowd control equipment.

The US State Department says the shipment will help Bahrain “maintain its external defence capabilities.”

Arms sales were frozen last year after the Bahraini government suppressed pro-democracy demonstrations.

Amnesty International says 60 people have been killed since the protests began in February 2011.

It is thought a frigate and other coast guard vessels will be supplied, along with upgraded engines for F-16 fighters.

The State Department says an order for Humvee all-terrain vehicles and a new type of wire-guided missile will not be included.

Bahrain is a key US ally in the Gulf, hosting the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet.

Officials in Washington say the Obama administration still has concerns about human rights in Bahrain.

But human rights campaigners have condemned this move, saying it is out of step with the United States’ commitment to reform in Bahrain.

A US judge has refused to throw out charges against two-time former presidential candidate John Edwards.

Lawyers for Mr Edwards argued that the prosecution had failed to prove he intentionally violated the law.

The former Democratic North Carolina senator’s lawyers will begin presenting their case on Monday.

The 58-year-old denies six counts of campaign finance law violations to hide a pregnant mistress, and faces up to 30 years in jail if convicted.

Prosecutors at the trial in Greensboro, North Carolina, rested their case on Thursday by playing a tape of a 2008 national television interview of Mr Edwards.

The video shows Mr Edwards confessing to his affair with Rielle Hunter, but denying having fathered her baby. At the time his late wife, Elizabeth Edwards, was fighting breast cancer.

In the ABC News recording, he also rejects suggestions that he used money from his campaign to hide an affair.

To prove Mr Edwards guilty, prosecutors must show that he knew about the money used in the cover-up, and also that he knew he was violating the law.

Rush Limbaugh today dismissed a Washington Post report detailing “pranks” and “troubling incidents” Mitt Romney engaged in as a high school student, saying: “You had long hair in 1965, you were gonna get razzed. It didn’t matter. They weren’t gonna think you were in the Beatles. If you had long hair in 1965, you were gonna get made fun of.” Limbaugh added: “See, 1965’s a great year; bullying was legal.”

Limbaugh blamed a “pro-Obama media” for making this a story, saying, “The Washington Post can find out what Romney was doing in high school but they can’t be bothered to find out what Obama’s transcripts — even some of his writings from college and law school.” He continued:

LIMBAUGH: This is the campaign. This is exactly — you’ve been warned. You knew. You don’t need to be warned. You know this kind of stuff’s coming. This is what the drive-by media does in conjunction with the Democrat in the White House. When I saw this, I just — I started laughing.

[…]

LIMBAUGH: Now maybe I’m wrong, but I think most people are gonna laugh at this. It’s so obvious now — it is so pathetically transparently transparent what this is. Media ganging up on Romney — a pro-Obama media ganging up on Romney. 1965 — probably a stretch to say it had anything to do with the kid being presumed gay. You had long hair in 1965, you were gonna get razzed. It didn’t matter.

They weren’t gonna think you were in the Beatles. If you had long hair in 1965, you were gonna get made fun of. See, 1965’s a great year; bullying was legal.

Limbaugh added: “Watch that be a quote that shows up at Media Matters: ‘Limbaugh praising bullying while defending Romney.’ “

Alas, the Tea Party movement won’t be setting up shop in Zurich anytime soon.

Representative Michele Bachmann has asked the Swiss government to withdraw her dual citizenship, saying she’s all American.

“Today I sent a letter to the Swiss Consulate requesting withdrawal of my dual Swiss citizenship, which was conferred upon me by operation of Swiss law when I married my husband in 1978,” Mrs. Bachmann, Republican of Minnesota, said Thursday in a statement.

“I took this action because I want to make it perfectly clear: I was born in America and I am a proud American citizen. I am, and always have been, 100 percent committed to our United States Constitution and the United States of America. As the daughter of an Air Force veteran, stepdaughter of an Army veteran and sister of a Navy veteran, I am proud of my allegiance to the greatest nation the world has ever known.”

Politico reported late Tuesday that Mrs. Bachmann had become a Swiss citizen in March, a month after her husband, Marcus, the son of Swiss immigrants, registered with the Swiss consulate. (Foreign women who married Swiss men before 1992 received automatic Swiss citizenship.)

Becky Rogness, a spokeswoman for Mrs. Bachmann, said Wednesday that the Bachmanns recently decided to obtain Swiss citizenship as a family because “some of their children wanted to exercise their eligibility for dual-citizenship.”

Her Swiss citizenship didn’t go over well with some conservatives, who expressed their displeasure on Wednesday.

Democrats were casting the general election fight as a referendum on whether moderates should still have a place in Washington, while Tea Party organizers said it would be seen as a national test of the movement’s enduring strength.

Democratic leaders, who had doubted their odds against Mr. Lugar, a Republican so moderate that even the leaders admitted that plenty of Democrats liked him, sounded giddy about their November opponent: Richard E. Mourdock, a Tea Party-supported Republican who seized a remarkable 61 percent of the vote in part by denouncing bipartisanship and pledging to an unwavering conservative approach.

“Democratic donors across the country are going to see this as a prime pickup opportunity,” said Matt Canter, a spokesman for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, who added that the Indiana seat would fall among five top Republican-held seats being targeted in the fight for control of the Senate.

Labor leaders, too, said they saw an opportunity now in Indiana. “We’re all ramping up our plans as we speak,” said Nancy J. Guyott, president of the Indiana A.F.L.-C.I.O.

National conservative groups, some of which had poured more than $3 million to benefit Mr. Mourdock in the primary, were poised to send still more if needed. The number of such outside groups also appeared likely to grow if the contest here, against Representative Joe Donnelly, a Democrat, appears truly competitive — a notion some conservative leaders remained skeptical about, given Indiana’s Republican leanings.

“It’s a big race because a lot hinges on our success,” said Brendan Steinhauser, director of federal and state campaigns at FreedomWorks, which trains Tea Party members and which spent about $850,000 in Mr. Mourdock’s victory and plans to be similarly involved in the general election.

“If Mourdock were not to win,” Mr. Steinhauser said, the gloating would come not just from Democrats but establishment Republicans, pointing to the Tea Party. “They would want to blame that on us — ‘See, we told you so,’ ” he said.

By Wednesday, the outlines of a new political battle were emerging, with Democrats trying to paint Mr. Mourdock as a far-right candidate with little appeal for independents or moderate Republicans, and conservatives portraying Mr. Donnelly as a typical Democrat.

The Club for Growth, which had spent money on television and radio commercials against Mr. Lugar in the primary and said it would contribute more, if needed, in the general election, said Mr. Donnelly was “an economic liberal who votes in lock-step” with Democratic leaders.

WASHINGTON — Congressional ethics investigators concluded in a report released Wednesday that Representative Vern Buchanan, a Florida lawmaker who leads House Republican fund-raising operations nationwide, appeared to have tried to illegally influence the testimony of an ex-business partner regarding allegations of campaign finance violations in his own race.

I wrote earlier about the electoral implications of the defeat of longtime Senator Richard G. Lugar of Indiana in the Republican primary on Tuesday. It should make the seat much more competitive and will increase Democrats’ odds of retaining the Senate, although the nominee that Republicans chose instead, Richard E. Mourdock, the state treasurer, is perhaps a very slight favorite over the Democratic nominee Joe Donnelly.

The bigger story here, however, is that Mr. Lugar is the latest in a long line of relatively moderate Republican senators to meet an electoral demise. In fact, most moderate Republicans who served in the Senate just a few years ago will no longer be in the Congress when it meets again 2013. This is quite simple to illustrate.

I took the 55 Republican senators that served in the 109th Congress from 2005 through 2007 and divided them into two groups, moderates and conservatives, according to their voting records as analyzed by the statistical system DW-Nominate. Because there were an odd number of Republican senators in that year, I could not divide them exactly evenly, but I put 27 in the moderate group and 28 in the conservative group, with the dividing line falling between Senator John McCain of Arizona and Senator John Thune of South Dakota.

Of the 27 moderates, at most six will return to the Congress in 2013: Mr. McCain, Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Thad Cochran of Mississippi, Lamar Alexander of Tennessee and Charles E. Grassley of Iowa.

Republicans took to the Senate floor Tuesday to denounce a bill proposed by Democrats that would freeze student loan rates by closing a loophole that allows wealthy individuals to avoid paying Social Security and Medicare taxes on some of their income, in anticipation of a procedural vote on the measure Tuesday afternoon. Democrats have referred to the bill as the Edwards bill, as it targets the tax strategy former presidential candidate John Edwards was criticized for using.

But in the past, many conservatives have dinged the same tax loop hole Democrats now seek to close.

Republicans have denounced the bill — which would pay for the $5.9 billion loan rate freeze by preventing individuals with incomes exceeding $250,000 who file their taxes as a small business to avoid paying Social Security and Medicare payroll taxes on some of their income – as punishing wealthy individuals at a high cost.

“Sadly the misguided government solution we will vote on today will be counter productive for our job creators,” said Senator Mike Johanns, Republican of Nebraska, on the Senate floor.

But conservatives have often had a dim view of this loop hole. In 2004, the Wall Street Journal editorial page lamented:

“Senator Edwards talks about the need to provide health care for all, but that didn’t stop him from using a clever tax dodge to avoid paying $591,000 into the Medicare system. While making his fortune as a trial lawyer in 1995, he formed what is known as a ‘subchapter S’ corporation, with himself as the sole shareholder. Instead of taking his $26.9 million in earnings directly in the following four years, he paid himself a salary of $360,000 a year and took the rest as corporate dividends.”

The conservative columnist Robert Novak, that same year, wrote, “It is one of the last loopholes left in the Internal Revenue Code, and it is a big one.” Even Sean Hannity of Fox News got in on the act that year saying: “Hey, John Edwards is worth, what, $30 million to $40 million, set up a sub-S corporation to keep him from paying Medicare taxes on 90 percent of his income, and then he lectures the rest of us how Medicare is going broke.”

The House has passed its own version of a bill to that would keep rates on subsidized undergraduate loans from reverting from its current 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent by stripping $5.9 billion from a program within the health care law to pay for the freeze.

Senator Mitch McConnell, the minority leader from Kentucky, said Monday: “For Republicans, well, we don’t think young people should have to suffer any more than they already are as a result of this President’s failure to turn the economy around. We just disagree that we should pay for a fix by diverting $6 billion from Medicare and raising taxes on the very businesses we’re counting on to hire these young people.”

Why do otherwise rational people think it’s a good idea to profile people at airports? Recently, neuroscientist and best-selling author Sam Harris related a story of an elderly couple being given the twice-over by the TSA, pointed out how these two were obviously not a threat, and recommended that the TSA focus on the actual threat: “Muslims, or anyone who looks like he or she could conceivably be Muslim.”

This is a bad idea. It doesn’t make us any safer—and it actually puts us all at risk.

The right way to look at security is in terms of cost-benefit trade-offs. If adding profiling to airport checkpoints allowed us to detect more threats at a lower cost, than we should implement it. If it didn’t, we’d be foolish to do so. Sometimes profiling works. Consider a sheep in a meadow, happily munching on grass. When he spies a wolf, he’s going to judge that individual wolf based on a bunch of assumptions related to the past behavior of its species. In short, that sheep is going to profile…and then run away. This makes perfect sense, and is why evolution produced sheep—and other animals—that react this way. But this sort of profiling doesn’t work with humans at airports, for several reasons.

Gay marriage is in the news, as the White House scrambles to explain President Obama’s “evolving” position on the issue even as other members of the administration — notably Vice President Joe Biden — find their personal evolutions progressing more rapidly. Obama’s caution on the issue is widely assumed to be not a matter of personal conviction but one of political calculation. So where are the American people on the issue?

The answer, according to a new Gallup poll : sharply divided. The survey finds 50 percent say gay marriage should be legal and valid, compared to 48 percent who said it should not.

That’s a slight, statistically insignificant downtick from the last time Gallup polled — last year, 53 percent of Americans favored gay marriage . But the long-term trend has support for gay marriage gradually climbing and opposition gradually waning. It was just last year that the trend lines crossed for the first time, and support for gay marriage outperformed opposition. Clearly, both socially and politically, this is an issue in rapid transition in terms of public opinion.

A look at the breakdowns across subgroups in the poll, which Gallup provided to me, is also revealing: Support for gay marriage is strongest among women, college graduates, the nonreligious, and the young. Democrats overwhelmingly support legal gay marriage, but not as overwhelmingly as Republicans oppose it; independents are also strongly in favor. And there is no real difference between whites and nonwhites in their views on the issue.

The age breakdown is particularly revealing: Two-thirds of Americans aged 18-34 favor legal gay marriage, compared to just 40 percent of those 55 and older. Generational turnover is a major reason that activists on both sides of the issue expect the overall trend of support for gay marriage to continue. At the same time, the political debate continues to lag, from the president to the voters of North Carolina, who are expected to approve a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage in Tuesday’s election. The question now is when the political debate flips, and supporting gay marriage — rather than tepidly opposing it — becomes the safe position to campaign on

Richard G. Lugar , a six-term Republican senator from Indiana, lost his bid to stay in office after his Tea Party -backed rival questioned his conservative credentials and accused Mr. Lugar of losing touch with Indiana and its voters.

Richard E. Mourdock, the state’s treasurer, defeated Mr. Lugar in the Republican primary on Tuesday, according to networks and The Associated Press. Mr. Mourdock will face Joe Donnelly, a Democratic member of the House, in November.

The results of the primary end the career of one of the longest-serving members of the Senate and provide a new trophy for the Tea Party movement. Mr. Lugar, 80, leaves after three decades as one of the chamber’s leading foreign policy experts and with a reputation as a voice of moderation in his party.

That reputation — and a sense among his constituents that he had long ago become a creature of Washington — doomed Mr. Lugar, who had not faced a primary challenger in more than a quarter-century.

Mr. Mourdock repeatedly accused Mr. Lugar of not being conservative enough for Indiana. He pointed to Mr. Lugar’s votes to confirm President Obama ’s Supreme Court nominees, support for immigration legislation known as the Dream Act and his backing of bank bailouts during the economic crisis.

Conservative organizations with connections to the Tea Party movement flocked to Mr. Mourdock, hoping to add to the list of moderate senators they had helped to oust over the past several years. (Bob Bennett, Republican of Utah, and Lisa Murkowski , Republican of Alaska, both lost primary battles to Tea Party candidates, though Ms. Murkowski ran as an independent and kept her seat.)

But Mr. Mourdock also benefited from the perception that Mr. Lugar had long ago abandoned Indiana for a life in Washington. The senator and his wife live in suburban Washington, having sold their house in Indiana years ago.

Mitt Romney often finds himself on the defensive in Rust Belt states for having been against the auto industry bailout, which many credit with saving the industry. Now, he is taking a new tack on the sensitive issue: he’s taking credit for the industry’s rebound.

Though Mr. Romney’s closest aides acknowledge that he is politically vulnerable over his opposition to the government bailout — immortalized in a New York Times op-ed in 2008 titled “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt” — Mr. Romney on Monday told WEWS-TV in Cleveland that he deserved some praise for the auto industry’s recovery. (In fact, that headline was written by the paper, not Mr. Romney, who originally submitted the piece as, “The Way Forward for the Auto Industry.”)

“I’ll take a lot of credit for the fact that this industry’s come back,” Mr. Romney told the local news station after a campaign event in Euclid, Ohio.

In opposing the bailout, Mr. Romney instead lobbied for a process of “managed bankruptcy,” which he said would have allowed the car companies to restructure and emerge stronger than before.

“My own view is that the auto companies needed to go through bankruptcy before government help,” Mr. Romney said. “And frankly, that’s finally what the president did. He finally took them through bankruptcy.”

The federal government eventually did help the companies restructure through bankruptcy, but only after providing billions of dollars in loans.

Mr. Romney’s opposition to the auto industry bailout presents a challenge to his hopes of winning Michigan, his native state, in November. While campaigning in Lansing on Tuesday, he did not mention the bailout at all, though he made sure to talk about his plans to “help usher in a revival in American manufacturing.”

The Canadian firm trying to build an oil pipeline from Alberta to the US Gulf Coast has formally proposed a new route, the US state department says.

The route from the US-Canada border to Steele City, Nebraska is expected to avoid environmentally sensitive land.

The White House previously put the plan on hold, saying it needed more time to assess the environmental impact of the $7bn (£4.3bn) Keystone XL pipeline.

But opponents said it would create jobs and reduce dependence on foreign oil.

The fate of the oil pipeline has been debated as petrol prices have risen - an issue that Republicans are attempting use to attack President Barack Obama during an election year.

But correspondents say the new application by pipeline firm TransCanada could dampen criticism of the Obama administration’s initial rejection.

The new plan includes new routes through the state of Nebraska, where environmentalists had complained of possible damage to a major aquifer.

There’s such a blizzard of misinformation out there that it’s hard to pick any one thing to single out, but David Frum picks up on one bit from the Paul/Paul show : the remarkable way many on the right now portray the postwar years of prosperity as a triumph of libertarian principles.

Yeah, it was a libertarian paradise all right — with a top marginal tax rate of 91 percent, a third of the work force in unions, and a minimum wage much higher relative to the average wage than it is today.

Propose a return to those conditions now, and everyone on the right would predict utter disaster. What we actually had was unprecedented prosperity.

Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng has telephoned a US Congressional hearing to plead for help in his attempts to leave China with his family.

Mr Chen said he feared for the safety of his family and wanted to meet visiting US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton face-to-face.

The activist is in a Beijing hospital sealed off by Chinese police.

He had spent a week at the US embassy but left after initially accepting China’s assurances of his safety.

Mr Chen said that only after leaving the embassy did he fully realise the threats that had been made against his family members.

Rick Santorum told his supporters in an e-mail Monday night that he was endorsing Mitt Romney as the Republican presidential candidate and that “all hands on deck” would be needed to defeat President Obama in the fall.

Mr. Santorum, the former senator from Pennsylvania who dropped his bid for the Republican presidential nomination last month after making a strong showing in multiple states, said he met privately with Mr. Romney in Pittsburgh last Friday.

During that hour-long meeting, Mr. Santorum said that he felt a responsibility to assess Mr. Romney’s commitment to issues that are important to social conservatives and tea party supporters, among others. He said he also wanted a commitment from Mr. Romney, assuring him that there would be “appropriate representation” of conservatives in a Romney administration.

He said they also discussed the role of the family in the country’s economic success. “I was impressed with the Governor’s deep understanding of this connection and his commitment to economic policies that preserve and strengthen families,” Mr. Santorum said.

Mr. Santorum noted that he had repeatedly raised concerns during the Republican primary fight over whether Mr. Romney would take on Mr. Obama’s health care policy. However, in the e-mail, he told his supporters that he had no doubt that Mr. Romney would work with a Republican Congress to repeal it and replace it.

“Above all else, we both agree that President Obama must be defeated,” Mr. Santorum said. “The task will not be easy. It will require all hands on deck if our nominee is to be victorious. Governor Romney will be that nominee and he has my endorsement and support to win this the most critical election of our lifetime.”

He closed by saying that while his conversation with Mr. Romney was productive, he intended to keep the lines of “communication open with him and his campaign.”

Despite Mr. Santorum’s praise for Mr. Romney in his endorsement, the Democratic National Committee was trying to make sure that people did not forget all the unkind things he said about his fellow Republican during the campaign that were captured on video.

Although most of the outrage has focused on the comparison between those who accept the evidence for climate change and murderers, many of the statements in the release are simply false. Many of the people and groups who do accept the evidence are anything but “the radical fringe of society.” And, despite what the Heartland would like to think, there’s absolutely no evidence that “Scientific, political, and public support for the theory of man-made global warming is collapsing.”

In many cases, the Heartland has suggested that their difference with climate science is primarily an issue with scientifically questionable “alarmism” of the sort typified by James Lovelock . With these ads and the accompanying announcements, however, it makes it clear that their issue is with the very basics of climate science and anyone who accepts it.

This is now creating a problem for the Institute as a whole. The Heartland is ostensibly focused on offering free-market solutions for various policy issues and has attracted a wide range of backing from corporations that favor limited regulation. But for both secondhand smoke and climate change, it has decided to attack the scientific evidence that is driving policy rather than offering a solution. And that is causing some of its backers to rethink their involvement with Heartland. Several of them dropped support when the internal documents were leaked, and others are doing so now. One report indicates that an entire initiative done in cooperation with the insurance industry is at risk.

The Heartland’s continued efforts in this area seem to risk turning it into a single-issue think tank. And that may actually make sense; the leaked financial documents indicate that some of its largest donations come from single individuals who are targeting money for climate efforts.

In any case, the Institute’s climate conference will occur towards the end of this month and, now that the ads have been pulled, most of the planned speakers will still attend. If years past are any indication, it will feature opinions ranging from questioning of basic facts (some speakers have claimed temperatures and sea levels haven’t gone up) to a general sense that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates of temperature changes are probably overstated. About the only common theme among the speakers is the belief that scientific mainstream is wrong.

Joe Wiesenthal says something that can’t be said enough:

The fact of the matter is that there’s no example in Europe, yet, where the bond market has rewarded austerity.

Actually, that may be a bit too strong — Latvia, which never had much debt to begin with, is back in the graces of the bond market, although still deeply depressed.

But consider Ireland, which has been proclaimed an austerity success story not once but twice — in 2010 and again last fall. Strange to say, markets have remained firmly unconvinced. Here, for example, is the CDS spread from Bloomberg (which moves closely with the bond spread):

EUCLID, Ohio — At a town hall Monday afternoon, Mitt Romney at first did not offer a public rebuke to a female supporter who stood and said that President Obama “should be tried for treason,” but he later clarified to reporters on the rope line that he did not agree with the woman’s remarks.

“We have a president right now who is operating outside the construction of our Constitution,” Mr. Romney’s supporter said aloud at the campaign event at Stamco Industries, an engineering and metal-stamping plant in Euclid, a suburb of Cleveland. “And I do agree he should be tried for treason. But I want to know what you are going to be able to do to help restore balance between the three branches of government and what you’re going to be able to do to restore our Constitution in this country?”

“As I’m sure you do, I happen to believe that the Constitution was not just brilliant, but probably inspired,” Mr. Romney said, sidestepping the woman’s comments about treason, a crime still punishable by death in the United States. Mr. Romney also allowed the woman a follow-up question.

Later, when specifically asked by reporters if he agreed with the woman’s assertion, Mr. Romney clarified that he did not believe Mr. Obama should be charged with treason.

“No, no, no, of course not,” Mr. Romney told reporters, vigorously shaking his head, when asked on the rope line after the event if he agreed with his supporter’s assertion that the president should be tried for treason.

Explaining his reluctance to correct the woman publicly, Mr. Romney told CNN: “I don’t correct all of the questions that get asked of me. Obviously I don’t agree that he should be tried.”

In 2008, Senator John McCain of Arizona famously corrected a voter at one of his town halls who stood up and declared that she could not trust Mr. Obama, who she called “an Arab.”

“No, ma’am,” Mr. McCain said at the time, taking the microphone away from the questioner. “He’s a decent family man, citizen, that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues, and that’s what this campaign is all about.”

Mr. McCain’s comments, which occurred during a period of increasing heated oratory during the 2008 campaign, were largely heralded as an example of courage on his part, and were even reprised in the HBO movie “Game Change.”

A Romney spokesman at the event had no immediate comment as to why Mr. Romney did not choose to correct the inflammatory statement during the town hall, and the presumptive Republican nominee’s campaign did not offer a comment beyond what was said on the rope line. The Obama campaign, however, criticized Mr. Romney’s in-the-moment silence.

It’s a little reported anecdote, but in 1981 presumptive Republican Presidential nominee Mitt Romney was arrested for disorderly conduct. The issue of Romney’s arrest first came to light during his 1994 Senate run against incumbent Senator Ted Kennedy, appearing at an unfortunate time while Romney was running ads talking to police officers with sirens in the background, promising to be tough on crime

According to what Romney told the Boston Globe in 1994, he had taken his family of to Wayland, Mass.’s Lake Cochituate, about an hour outside Boston, for a summer excursion. As Romney prepared to put his family boat into the water, a park officer told Romney not to launch because his license appeared to have been painted over. The officer told Romney if he put his boat into the water he would face a $50 fine.

Romney felt that his license was still visible and decided to ignore the order from the officer and pay the fine.

“I figured I was at the state park with my kids. My five kids were in the car wondering why we weren’t going out in the boat, so I said I’d launch and pay the fine,” Romney said in 1994.

Romney said the office didn’t tell him not to launch his boat, just that he would face a fine for doing so.

“I was willing to pay the fine. But if he had said don’t launch the boat and not mentioned the fine, I would not have done it,” Romney said.

After Romney put the family put into the water, the office reappeared visibly angry and arrested Romney for disorderly conduct. Romney was handcuffed on the scene, taken to the local police station, and booked.

“There I was, dripping wet in a bathing suit,” Romney told the Globe. A magistrate let him go without bail.

Several days later, Romney appeared in Natick District Court and threatened to sue the arresting office for a false arrest. The charges were dropped and sealed at Romney’s request.

“He did not have the right to arrest me because I was not a disorderly person. This was an obvious case of false arrest,” Romney said. “The officer obviously agreed because he agreed to dropping the case.”

This is beyond heinous:

A group of partiers on the roof of a Cornell frat house allegedly taunted black students and threw objects — including an empty Jack Daniels bottle — at them as they passed on the street.

Beverly Fonkwo, a sophomore, says she and a friend were walking home when people began throwing things at them from the Sigma Pi roof. When she confronted the crowd, she says, they threw more trash and a full beer can, saying “come on up here, Trayvon” and making other racist remarks.

The president of the fraternity, Zach Smith, told the Cornell Daily Sun on Sunday that the frat had “figured out who the perpetrator was, and will turn his name over to police.” Smith claimed that only one person was involved in the attack, and that the perpetrator was not a member of the fraternity.

The Cornell Sun reports that Cornell’s Chief of Police Kathy Zoner has confirmed people were making racist slurs and throwing bottles from the roof, but would not report more as an investigation by Ithaca Police is ongoing. But according to that statement and the students’ account of what must have have been a ridiculously fucked and scary experience, there were multiple people involved in the attack.

“I feel like it was targeted and racially motivated … we felt very threatened,” Beverly Fonkwo said, adding that the assailants “were just laughing at the whole situation until we called the police and then they ran inside.”

We’ll keep you posted on any updates.

The House Budget Committee is set to meet today on a new GOP plan to stave off further cuts in military spending that are mandated by the Budget Control Act’s sequestration trigger. The Pentagon will be required to trim $55 billion from its budget next year and House Republicans think they’ve figured out a way to prevent that: cut programs for the poor, the AP reports:

The Republicans who control the House are using cuts to food aid, health care and social services like Meals on Wheels to protect the Pentagon from a wave of budget cuts come January. […]

Fully one-fourth of the House GOP spending cuts come from programs directly benefiting the poor, such as Medicaid, food stamps, the Social Services Block Grant, and a child tax credit claimed by working immigrants.

As CAP’s Melissa Boteach, Lawrence Korb and Max Hoffman noted in a report last month, with the cuts they are calling for, House Republicans will be protecting “largely useless” weapons systems, preserving funding for unnecessary programs like the V-22 Osprey, and adding two nuclear submarines to the U.S. military’s already “overwhelming preponderance of sea power.”

At the same time, the GOP plan would, for example, cut food stamps for 2 million people and reduce the same benefits for 44 million others. Nearly 300,000 school children would lose free school meals and hundreds of thousands could lose their Medicaid or CHIP coverage.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops last month criticized the GOP’s cuts to food stamps, tax credits for immigrant families, and other safety net programs as “unjustified and wrong.”

And while the AP notes that the GOP plan “will be dead on arrival” in the Democrat-controlled Senate, “they’re likely just a sample of what’s in store next year from Republicans if Mitt Romney wins the White House and the GOP takes back the Senate.”

An al-Qaeda leader in Yemen wanted in connection with the 2000 bombing of the American warship USS Cole has been killed in an air raid.

A tribal leader in the east of the country says Fahd al-Quso was killed by two missiles fired from a drone.

His death was confirmed by al-Qaeda and Yemen’s embassy in the US. At least one other man died in the strike.

The US had offered a $5m (£3.1m, 3.8m-euro) reward for information leading to his capture.

A US official welcomed the death of the “senior terrorist operative”. He told AFP news agency that al-Quso had been planning further attacks against the US and Yemen.

The USS Cole was attacked in October 2000 in the Yemeni port of Aden. Militants in a boat packed with explosives blew a hole in the destroyer’s side, killing 17 US sailors and wounding 40.

The US has never formally acknowledged the use of drones against Yemeni al-Qaeda suspects, but is thought to have carried out eight other attacks of this kind so far this year.

In April, The Washington Post newspaper said that the CIA was asking for authorisation to carry out more drone strikes in Yemen.

The State Department, responding to a wave of complaints from foreign students about abuses under a summer cultural exchange program, issued new rules on Friday significantly revising the types of jobs the students can do, prohibiting them from most warehouse, construction, manufacturing and food-processing work.

The rules are the most extensive changes the State Department has made to its largest cultural exchange program since several hundred foreign students protested last summer at a plant in Pennsylvania that packs Hershey’s chocolates. The students said they were forced to work on grueling production lines lifting heavy boxes, often on night shifts, isolated in the plant from any American workers.

After paycheck deductions, the students said, they were paid so little they could not afford to travel in the United States, as the program promised.

Robin Lerner, deputy assistant secretary of state for private sector exchange, said the department’s goal with the revisions was “to bring the program back to its core cultural purposes.”

The five-decade-old Summer Work Travel Program brings more than 100,000 foreign university students here each year to work for up to three months and then travel for a month. The program, which uses a visa known as J-1, is designed to give students who are not from wealthy backgrounds a chance to experience the United States. The students’ trips are arranged by American sponsoring agencies that find jobs and housing for them.

The department said “the work component” of the program “has too often overshadowed the core cultural component” that Congress intended. The department also said the changes responded to concerns raised by the students at the Hershey’s packing plant.

Those students were “concentrated in single locations for long hours in jobs that provided little or no opportunity to interact with U.S. citizens,” the department wrote to explain the rules. They were “exposed to workplace and safety hazards” and “subjected to predatory practices through wage deductions” for housing.