Midday open thread

• From Elon James White at TWiB:

• And in TWiSOBAD (This week in Speaking of Being a Dick), check out what TPM calls "Halperin's finest 3 minutes."
• This is just shocking: Twitter is ruining the ability of the White House press corps to report on scoops?you know, like deep thoughts from Sarah Palin's Facebook page.
• Suck on it, jackass:

  After serving a prison sentence for disobeying deployment orders on the grounds that President Obama's standing as commander-in-chief was invalid because he couldn't prove his citizenship, Army Lt. Col. Terry Lakin is hoping to retain some of the retirement benefits he lost by falling a couple of years short of the 20-year milestone.

• With the passage of the same-sex marriage law in New York last week, the homophobic bigots at The National Organization for Marriage (NOM) are threatening to spend millions to oust the four Republican state senators who voted for the measure. One of them, Sen. Mark Grisanti, says bring it on:

  It was not going to be a political vote. It was a vote of my conscience and it was a vote basically, definitely of fairness, and a balance that personified what I stated on the floor, that same sex couples should have the same right that I enjoy with my wife that I love. The other side of it is that the religious organizations, the non-profits and the benevolent organizations, they?re all protected.
  

• Sorry, Sarah, you're going to have to stick to shooting wolves from helicopters:

  ... in 2008, media mega-star Sarah Palin was still the governor of Alaska. Fearing that protecting the polar bear would ?cripple oil and gas development? off Alaska?s coasts, Palin ? a well-worn climate science denier ? sued the government to remove the species from the list. Palin pointed to the high population of polar bears in 2008 and dismissed climate models that predict continued loss of sea ice as ?unreliable,? ?uncertain,? and ?unproven.?

  But U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan backed the government scientists? finding this week ?that global warming is threatening the survival of the polar bear.? In a 116-page opinion, Sullivan dismissed Palin and hunting groups? arguments as ?nothing more than competing views about policy and science? and ruled on the side of science.

• Fairness and the law?go figure:

  Today the U.S. Sentencing Commission unanimously voted to retroactively apply the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010, enabling 12,000 prisoners who were convicted under a previous law that applied harsh sentences to minor crack offenders to be released.

• Soon the fish will be providing their own containers before adding "Fillet-O" to their name:

  Southern California researchers found plastic in nearly 1 in 10 small fish collected in the Pacific Ocean in the latest study to call attention to floating marine debris entering the food chain.

  The study published this week by scientists at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego estimated that fish in the middle depths of the northern Pacific Ocean are ingesting as much as 24,000 tons of plastic each year.

Source: http://feeds.dailykos.com/~r/dailykos/index/~3/aO-FdYCCHdA/-Midday-open-thread

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