Caught Red Pawed! Woodchuck Takes Cemetery Flags

Here’s the best evidence the GOP knows the IRS scandal doesn’t reach into the White House: Now they’re saying they don’t need to find evidence that President Obama directed or even knew about the investigation of Tea Party groups’ non-profit status; his actively campaigning for reelection represented a “dog whistle” to tell the agency to target his political enemies.The dog whistle quote came via NBC's “Meet the Press” Sunday from Peggy Noonan, who can no longer be taken seriously as a writer or pundit. When host David Gregory pressed her on the lack of evidence for her claims that the IRS scandal was worse than Watergate, Noonan insisted that the president “was giving a dog whistle to people who could launch this thing." The former Reagan-Bush speechwriter vividly summed up, in her thousand points of crazy style, where the IRS “scandal” went over the last few days: Obama didn’t need to order the tax agency to harass Tea Party groups (and his critics don’t need proof that he did so): his criticizing the group during the 2012 campaign, as well as blasting the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, represented an implicit order to do so.Continue Reading

Matthew Rothschild at The Progressive writes House Republicans say no free lunch for poor kids: [T]he poor and the hungry shouldn’t have to suffer because of Wall Street’s excesses and George Bush’s wars. If Republicans wanted to make reasonable cuts out of the Farm Bill, they should have gone after corporate welfare to the giant food companies. But no, they’d rather take a poor kid’s meal away. Greg Grandin at The New York Times writes Slaughter Was Part of Reagan’s Hard Line: Once in office, Reagan, continued to supply munitions and training to the Guatemalan army, despite a ban on military aid imposed by the Carter administration (existing contracts were exempt from the ban). And economic aid continued to flow, increasing to $104 million in 1986, from $11 million in 1980, nearly all of it going to the rural western highlands, where the Mayan victims of the genocide lived. This aid helped the Guatemalan military implement a key part of its counterinsurgency campaign: following the massacres, soldiers herded survivors into “model villages,” detention camps really, where they used food and other material supplied by the U.S. Agency for International Development to establish control. Ellen Bravo at In These Times writes The Right to Call In Sick: In each location, the movement for paid sick days is backed by a broad coalition that includes dozens of partners from labor (including unions like UFCW and AFSCME, and Working America and the Working Families Party) together with small-business owners and groups that advocate for women, children, seniors, public health, racial justice and LGBT rights (Portland’s coalition is a member of the Family Values @ Work Consortium, a network of 21 state coalitions working for policies like paid sick days, of which I serve as executive director). But what’s most notable is how these groups have engaged new activists like Lund, who hadn’t been politically active before, but who share the common experience of fearing for their jobs if they or their child gets sick. Below the fold are more pundits to read.

The man who police say hurled homophobic slurs at a gay man on a Manhattan street before firing a single fatal shot to his head appeared in court Sunday to face a charge of murder as a hate crime. Elliot Morales, who appeared in Manhattan Criminal Court, is also charged with criminal possession of a weapon and menacing, according to the complaint filed Sunday by the Manhattan district attorney's office. Authorities said the Greenwich Village resident used a silver revolver to kill 32-year-old Mark Carson early Saturday as he walked with a companion in Morales' neighborhood. Morales was ordered held without bail pending another court appearance on Thursday. His attorney, Reginald Sharpe, could not be reached for comment. On Saturday, seconds before opening fire in the lively Village streets just after midnight, police say Morales followed Carson and a companion through the Village, asking if they "want to die here," Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said. Police said Morales then yelled anti-gay slurs before shooting Carson point-blank in the face in a neighborhood long known as a bedrock of the gay rights movement. Morales was soon arrested a few blocks away. He has a previous arrest for attempted murder in 1998, police said. Details of that arrest weren't immediately clear. Saturday's shooting scene is a few blocks from the Stonewall Inn, the site of 1969 riots that helped give rise to gay rights when patrons reacted to police harassment. Saturday's violence follows a spate of recent bias attacks on gay men in New York, but this was the first deadly one. Kelly said police were looking into possible links between the incidents. The shooting stunned a city where, in many neighborhoods, same-sex couples now walk freely holding hands. It also comes at a time when the gay marriage movement is gaining momentum in many parts of the United States. Twelve states have legalized same-sex marriage, including New York in 2011. Copyright 2013 The Associated Press. Image via Facebook / Gothamist