Palin: Obama 'stalling and stirring chaos' with phony claim...

'Second Term Scandals - Phony?': 
Armed with 'redneck clipboard,' former governor Sarah Palin gives theory behind president and White House's claims that they have been distracted by 'phony scandals'
From Gretta...

The Lincoln Memorial Is Vandalized!

Lincoln Memorial is shut down after vandals splash paint on it!!!
From The Washington Post
By Maggie Fazeli Fard and Michael E. Ruane
The Lincoln Memorial was shut down Friday morning after vandals splashed light green paint on the statue of the nation’s 16th president and the marble floor around it, U.S. Park Police said.

No words or symbols were painted or written on the memorial, police said. No damage was reported at the Mall’s other memorials and monuments.

Police are reviewing surveillance footage from the popular tourist attraction on the west end of the Mall, but so far no information has been released about who may have been responsible for the vandalism or what may have motivated it.

Carol Bradley Johnson, a spokeswoman for the National Mall and Memorial Parks division of the National Park Service, called the incident “heartbreaking.”

Authorities believe the memorial was defaced about 1:30 a.m. Paint was splattered onto the left leg and base of the 19-foot-high statue of Lincoln, who is depicted sitting in a throne-like chair, gazing toward the Washington Monument and, further east, the Capitol.

A crew removed the paint from the memorial floor using a pressure-washer, the National Park Service said at a news conference, and there did not appear to be any permanent damage.

Workers used ladders to reach paint that was higher up on the statue and scrub it off. The park service reopened the portico steps at 10:13 a.m., and said the chamber would reopen once all the paint was removed. 

The neo-classical memorial to the president who emancipated the slaves was designed by Henry Bacon and modeled after an ancient Greek temple. Inscribed on the walls around the statue are Lincoln’s famous Gettysburg Address and second inaugural address.

The memorial is surrounded by 36 fluted Doric columns, representing the 36 states at the time of Lincoln’s assassination. 

________________________________________________

Must have been Conservative White Youths with nothing better to do...  That's been the history of monument defacing, right? 
Young Whites carrying buckets of paint around at night and splashing it on our most revered monuments...
Yeah, young Conservatives did this...
Yeah... Right...
 

The Justice Department Want's To Try George For Hate Crimes

Attorney General Eric Holder, in his first post-verdict comments, confirmed Monday during a speech in Washington, D.C., that his department continues to investigate while signaling concern for the position of the Martin family and those -- such as the NAACP -- pressuring the DOJ. He said the department is "mindful of the pain felt by our nation" over the "tragic, unnecessary shooting death" of Martin. LINK

Which Trayvon do you want living next to you?
The 12 year old the TV news has been showing you...?

Or the 17 year old that dealt drugs and was a known thief...?

You decide...                            

Red, Divided and Blue Fly This Independence Day

I think this guy has nailed it...!
__________________________________________

Red, Divided and Blue Fly... This Independence Day
By Ronald Brownstein - From The National Journal
It seems entirely revealing, if dispiriting, that the days before the July Fourth holiday showed Red America and Blue America pulling apart at an accelerating rate.

Of all of our national holidays, Independence Day is the one most intimately rooted in our common history and shared experience.
Yet this year it arrives against a background of polarization, separation, and confrontation in the states and Washington alike.  With municipal politics as the occasional exception, the pattern of solidifying agreement within the parties—and widening disagreement between them—is dominating our decisions at every level.

On almost all of our major policy choices, the common thread is that the election of 2012 did not "break the fever" of polarization, as President Obama once hoped it might.   Last November, Obama became only the third Democrat in the party's history to win a majority of the popular vote twice.  
But congressional Republicans, preponderantly representing the minority that voted against Obama, have conceded almost nothing to his majority—leaving the two sides at a stalemate.   Meanwhile, beyond the Beltway, states that lean Democratic and those that lean Republican are separating at a frenetic pace.

Consider a few recent headlines.
The Supreme Court decision upholding the lower-court invalidation of California's Proposition 8 restored gay marriage in the nation's largest state.   It also capped a remarkable 2013 march for gay marriage through blue states, including Delaware, Minnesota, and Rhode Island (with Illinois and New Jersey possibly joining before long).

The consensus is solidifying fast enough that 2014 could see several blue-state Republican gubernatorial candidates running on accepting gay-marriage statutes as settled law. Former California Lt. Gov Abel Maldonado, a likely 2014 GOP gubernatorial contender who this week reversed his earlier opposition to support gay marriage, may be an early straw in that breeze.

The story in red states, though, remains very different.
Almost all of them have banned gay marriage.   Some activists believe Justice Anthony Kennedy's embrace of equal-protection arguments in the decision striking down the federal Defense of Marriage Act might enable litigation challenging those bans; but if not, it may take a very long time for the support for gay marriage among younger voters to dissolve the resistance to the idea in culturally conservative states.

Absent further Supreme Court action, the nation could remain a "house divided" on gay marriage for longer than many may expect: The high court's ruling striking down the remaining 16 state laws banning interracial marriage came in 1967—nearly two centuries after the first state had revoked its ban (Pennsylvania in 1780).

Meanwhile, as gay marriage advances in blue states, red states are competing to impose the tightest restrictions on abortion since the Supreme Court established the national right to it in Roe v. Wade.

In Ohio this week, Republican Gov. John Kasich signed legislation requiring ultrasound exams before abortions, effectively cutting off funding for Planned Parenthood and making it more difficult for abortion providers to transfer patients to public hospitals. In Texas, after the dramatic filibuster by Democratic state Sen. Wendy Davis temporarily disrupted his plans, Republican Gov. Rick Perry this week opened another legislative special session that is likely to ban abortion at 20 weeks and impose stringent new safety requirements that would shutter most of the state's abortion providers.

All of this follows a cascade of legislation restricting abortion in Republican-run states from Arkansas and Louisiana to Kansas and North Dakota—most of which are already facing legal challenges.

In Washington, there's little sign of convergence.
Hopes for a budget "grand bargain" are flickering.   In the Senate, the two parties have worked together to pass a farm bill, and more dramatically a sweeping immigration overhaul that won support from all 54 Democrats and 14 Republicans.  

But House Republicans, who recently collapsed into chaos when they couldn't pass a farm bill, are pledging to block any reform that includes a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants—an indispensable component of legislation as far as Democrats are concerned.   On big issues, the Supreme Court looks just as chronically divided, and the split often comes down to Republican- and Democratic-appointed justices.

All of this reveals a political system losing its capacity to create common ground between party coalitions divided along economic, racial, generational, and even religious lines. Some variation in state policy is healthy, but states are now diverging to an extent that threatens to undermine equal protection under the law.  
The stalemate in Congress reflects genuine differences, but the reluctance to compromise—most intractable among House Republicans—prevents us from confronting common challenges.

In all these ways, our contemporary politics is ignoring the simple truth that none of us are going away—not the cosmopolitan coasts, nor the evangelical South.   Our choices ultimately come down to bridging our differences or surrendering to endemic separation in the states and stalemate in Washington.

This week we celebrate the moment when the authors of the Declaration of Independence concluded they had no choice but "to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another." It's an excellent opportunity to consider how ominously our own "political bands" are fraying.