Comment On Gop: Economy Tops Gay Marriage As Campaign Issue

Justin Bieber’s pet monkey, which was seized by German customs in March, officially became German property Tuesday after the Canadian pop sensation failed to claim the animal, officials said. Mally, a capuchin monkey, is temporarily in an animal refuge in the southern city of Munich where he was visited Tuesday by Germany’s environment minister. “Animals are not toys,” Peter Altmaier was quoted by DPA news agency as saying in a warning against people having animals they are unable to care for. Munich customs authority spokesman Thomas Meister told AFP that Bieber “has not come forward” since the monkey was confiscated at the city’s airport at the end of March when the teen heartthrob was unable to present the necessary documents for importing a live animal. The pet was reportedly a birthday present from Bieber’s record producer and accompanied him on a private jet to Munich while the 19-year-old toured Germany and Austria. Authorities had said that the singer had four weeks to provide the required paperwork and claim his pet or else Mally would be kept permanently at an animal shelter. Although that deadline passed on Friday night, they decided to wait until Tuesday morning before definitively holding the animal. Bieber has however six weeks to appeal. According to the customs authority, the singer is expected to have to foot the bill, which may come to several thousand euros (dollars), for the monkey’s upkeep since its arrival in Germany. Animal protection services could also fine the singer. In the meantime, Mally will be housed in a “secret” place in Germany to shelter it from attention. “It needs calm,” the spokesman said, adding that after this quarantine period, it would have to re-adjust to living with other monkeys.

Villagers installing a water pipe in southwestern Mexico stumbled onto an ancient granite statue depicting a player from a pre-Hispanic ball game, the national anthropology institute said Monday. The stone had been sliced at the neck, like a decapitation, and buried in a ritual that was common at the time, the National Anthropology and History Institute said in a statement. There are indications that the 1.65-meter (5-foot-4) tall statue, which depicts a bow-legged ballplayer with his arms crossed, was built onto an I-shaped ball game field before it was buried and could be more than 1,000 years old. Mesoamericans would paint objects in red and “kill” them by breaking them as offerings for rituals at the end of calendar cycles. The monument was discovered in the pre-Hispanic site of Piedra Labrada, which includes five ancient ball fields in which teams battled to put a rubber ball through a circular stone by bouncing it on their hips. The statue may have been carved by the Mixtec indigenous group around the year 600. Archeologist began to dig in the Piedra Labrada site more than a year ago and have since found 50 medium-sized buildings of up to five meters in height as well as around 20 sculptures ranging from snake heads to snails and humans with animal features. The ball game fields along with temples and public squares show that Piedra Labrada was a “city with an important ritualistic role,” the institute said.

A bill to legalise gay marriage in Britain was set to pass a crucial hurdle in parliament on Tuesday, after Prime Minister David Cameron was forced to strike a last-minute deal with the opposition to stop members of his own party wrecking the plans. Lawmakers in the lower House of Commons were expected to approve the bill following a marathon debate on Monday, which saw Cameron join forces with Labour to defeat a “wrecking amendment” backed by dozens of rebellious right-wingers from his Conservative party. Their amendment to allow straight couples to form civil partnerships would have heavily delayed the bill, but MPs opposed it by 375 votes to 70. They instead backed a Labour plan to discuss the rebel proposition further without blocking the main part of the legislation. After Tuesday’s vote the bill will pass to the upper house of parliament, the House of Lords, where it is expected to face stiff opposition in a further headache for Cameron. The debate has sharply divided lawmakers, with Conservative former minister Norman Tebbit stoking controversy by claiming gay marriage could result in a lesbian queen giving birth to an heir by artificial insemination. “When we have a queen who is a lesbian and she marries another lady and then decides she would like to have a child and someone donates sperm and she gives birth to a child, is that child heir to the throne?” Tebbit said in an interview with The Big Issue magazine. Despite the parliamentary wrangles, Britain has seen none of the mass protests over gay marriage held across the channel in France, which last weekend became the 14th country in the world to legalise it. Some 54 percent of Britons are in favour of allowing same-sex couples to marry, according to a YouGov poll for the Sunday Times. The rancour over gay marriage within the Conservatives has heaped further pressure on Cameron, who is already facing bitter opposition from many Tories over his leadership style and a promised referendum on Britain’s EU membership. The prime minister was forced to send a mass email to Conservative activists late Monday after an unnamed ally reportedly called them “mad, swivel-eyed loons”. “I am proud of what you do. And I would never have around me those who sneered or thought otherwise,” he wrote. The “loons” comment fuelled accusations that Cameron is out of touch with traditional Tories and that the prime minister surrounds himself with people from his own privileged background. Party co-chairman Lord Andrew Feldman, who strongly denies rumours he was behind the comment, was a schoolmate of Cameron’s at the elite Eton College. Many Conservative supporters fear that with a general election two years away, Cameron’s backing for gay marriage is driving traditional Tory voters to the UK Independence Party (UKIP). The anti-immigrant, anti-EU party is a fast-rising force in British politics and made strong gains in local elections last month. UKIP leader Nigel Farage said Tuesday he would not expel members for voicing “old-fashioned” views about homosexuality, after reports that one of the party’s candidates branded gay sex “disgusting” on an online forum. A new poll suggested that support for the Conservatives has slumped to 24 percent — just two percent ahead of UKIP — although a different poll put the Tories on 31 percent. Last week, more than a hundred Conservative MPs took the unprecedented step of backing a motion expressing regret that the government’s legislative plans for the year contain no guarantee of a referendum on EU membership, which Cameron has promised for 2017. Lawmakers are allowed a free vote on gay marriage, meaning they are not required to follow party directions because it is considered an issue of conscience. MPs were expected to approve the bill on Tuesday by a comfortable margin, despite the opposition of many Conservatives. When it was last debated in February, almost half voted against it. Providing the bill passes through the Commons, it will then move to the House of Lords for further scrutiny. The bill is set to be presented in the Lords on Wednesday but they will not begin debating until June 3.

Democrat Jim Graves was feeling good as he sat down for an interview with Salon in Washington Monday, the same day his campaign released a poll showing him two points ahead of Rep. Michele Bachmann, whom he narrowly lost to in 2012.This time around, he'll start with higher-name ID -- "I think we started off last time around at 18 percent and now we're pushing 75 to 80 percent" -- and more support from national Democrats, who were initially skeptical about his chances and didn't get heavily involved until mid-October. "I don't think they jumped in at all," Graves quipped of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, before quickly excusing them in a typical Minnesota-nice fashion: "There was lower-hanging fruit, I don't blame them."Continue Reading

Still popular. In the wake of CNN's poll showing the GOP have reached historic unpopularity while the president and his party gained popularity, ABC/Washington Post confirms the trends. The president’s approval rating, at 51 percent positive and 44 percent negative, has remained steady in the face of fresh disclosures about the IRS, the Benghazi attack and the Justice Department’s secret collection of telephone records of Associated Press journalists as part of a leak investigation. A majority of poll respondents believe the IRS deliberately harassed tea party groups, and 55 percent say the administration is hiding facts about Benghazi (boosted by Republicans at 81 percent, along with 60 percent of independents). These results are quite interesting—they support what I wrote yesterday, that people just don't care about these "scandals". In other words, the problem isn't that the public doesn't understand these issues. Apparently they do. They've heard the Republican arguments, they've considered them, majorities think the administration was wrong and they still don't care. Why? Probably because none of this supposed scandals affect people directly, while the improving economy does. Perhaps the public is willing to give presidents some leeway as long as they get something in return. During the Bush years, it was a feeling of security. Now, it's a feeling of economic well-being. But part of it could be the blatant overreach by Republicans. They're taking what Americans clearly see as minor breeches and trying to turn them into a death penalty case. And Beltway conventional wisdom has taken note. Here's Stu Rothenberg a week ago, arguing the "scandals" would hurt Dems in 2014: Forget background checks and gun control, divisions within the GOP on immigration, and Republican intransigence on negotiating a budget deal with the president. The current triple play of Benghazi, the IRS and now the Justice Department’s seizure of journalists’ phone records has the potential to be a political game changer for 2014. One week later: Republicans failed to capitalize on President Bill Clinton’s inappropriate conduct by over-playing their hand and pushing impeachment. Not only did they fail to drive him from office, the GOP ended up losing a handful of House seats in the 1998 midterms instead of adding seats as initially expected. Republicans allowed themselves to look as if they were primarily interested in scoring political points and overturning the results of the 1996 election, even if it meant paralyzing the government. That same danger exists once again for the GOP. And Charlie Cook: One wonders how long Republicans are going to bark up this tree, perhaps the wrong tree, while they ignore their own party’s problems, which were shown to be profound in the most recent elections. Clearly none of these recent issues has had a real impact on voters yet. Republicans seem to be betting everything on them, just as they did in 1998—about which even Newt Gingrich (who was House speaker that year) commented recently to NPR, “I think we overreached in ’98.” Let me stress the big takeaway from that ABC poll: The American people generally agree with the GOP's crazy claims that the Obama Administration is engaged in coverups in the IRS and Benghazi "scandals", but they don't care. Screaming louder, which is the GOP's modus operandi, won't exactly change that equation. Rather, it seems to be rallying people to the president's side.