MSNBC Guest: Obama White House ‘Most Hostile to Media in U.S. History’ (+video)

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Photo Credit: MSNBC Screenshot Here’s something I bet you never imagined someone saying on MSNBC: “This [administration] is the most hostile to the media that has been in United States history.”

Yet there was syndicated columnist and former CNN correspondent Bob Franken saying so on Saturday’s MSNBC Live (video follows with transcript and commentary):

T.J. HOLMES, SUBSTITUTE HOST: Bob, you covered the White House for a long time. You’ve been around, and you were shaking your head there the whole time and wanting to chime in. What is it?

BOB FRANKEN, SYNDICATED COLUMNIST: Well, let’s use the “P” word here. This is propaganda when it comes from the White House: government covering the government. It’s not what you’re supposed to do in the United States of America…

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The War on Conservative Minorities

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Photo Credit: Facebook Members of both political parties use sharp elbows to rough up and discredit the opposition, but the media are supposed to call “foul” on the worst abuses. But when the media are ideologically opposed to conservatives — especially minority conservatives — the abuses sometimes get lost in the shuffle.

Take what happened last week to New Hampshire state representative Marilinda Garcia, who announced she would challenge incumbent Democratic representative Annie Kuster in a highly competitive district that has switched party control in three of the last four elections.

Democrats were clearly rattled by the 30-year-old Garcia’s entry. Democratic-party communications director Harrell Kirstein said she would inevitably be part of a “reckless race to pander to the same extreme right fringe of the Republican Party that forced the federal government shutdown.” He called her a “loyal rubber-stamp” for the “irresponsible” agenda of former GOP house speaker Bill O’Brien.
Tough but in bounds.

But then prominent Democratic state representative Peter Sullivan, a self-described leader of the legislature’s “progressive” bloc, entered the picture. Using his Twitter account, he compared her unfavorably to O’Brien and conservative state representative Al Baldasaro this way:

She’s Al Baldassaro [Sullivan misspelled his name] in stiletto heels, a lightweight and O’Brien clone.

Bill O’Brien + Kim Kardashian = Marilinda Garcia

She is a right-wing, homophobic, anti-worker shill for the Koch Brothers.

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Democrats Running for Re-Election Keep Distance as Obama Popularity Drops

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Photo Credit: J. SCOTT APPLEWHITE, APDemocrats running for re-election in Arkansas, Louisiana and other Republican-leaning states faced enough problems before President Barack Obama’s popularity swooned in November. Now they are awkwardly distancing themselves from him a year before the election, seeking the right balance between independence and betrayal.

A popular president can help his party’s candidates for Congress and governor candidates in mid-term elections. But Democrats increasingly worry they could suffer losses, much as they did in 2010, Obama’s first mid-term elections.

In a twist few expected, Republicans are still hammering the issue that fueled their successes in 2010: the health care overhaul they call Obamacare. They are making life especially uncomfortable for Democratic senators in states Obama lost.

Sen. Mary Landrieu, facing a tough re-election bid in Louisiana, recently posed for photographers exiting Air Force One with Obama after flying from Washington to New Orleans. But she skipped the president’s public event there to attend a small-dollar fundraiser elsewhere, saying it had long been on her schedule…

In Alaska, Democratic Sen. Mark Begich has not asked Obama to campaign for him. If Obama and other federal officials should visit Alaska, said Begich campaign manager Susanne Fleek-Green, the senator wants them to travel to the North Slope “so they understand the opportunities and challenges we face with oil and gas development.”

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Alaska North Slope Crude Production Rises to Highest Since March, But Down From Last Year

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Photo Credit: Paxson Woelber/flickrOil production in Alaska’s North Slope gained to an eight-month high as producers boosted rates in the Prudhoe Bay and Kuparuk fields following seasonal maintenance.

Output climbed 4.1 percent in November from a month earlier to 556,471 barrels a day, the most since March, data posted on Alaska’s Department of Revenue website show. The yield is down 4.5 percent from year-earlier levels, the agency said.

“BP’s North Slope production has returned to normal after a successful turnaround season,” Dawn Patience, a spokeswoman for London-based BP, Alaska’s largest oil producer, said by telephone from Anchorage.

The North Slope, once the largest crude source for the western U.S., has been producing less oil every year since 2002 as output from wells naturally declines and isn’t replaced. The region’s refiners have increasingly depended on oil imports from overseas and shipments from Canada and other U.S. states to counter the shrinking supply, boosting California’s receipts of oil by rail to a seasonal record.

BP has increased output in Alaska after finishing seasonal maintenance in late September, Patience said. The state’s energy producers typically take advantage of warmer weather, lower yield and pipeline shutdowns during the summer to perform routine maintenance in fields.

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Top Planned Parenthood Official ‘Disappointed’ Plan B Hasn’t Changed Unplanned Pregnancy Rate

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Photo Credit: LifeSiteNews “Plan B,” the “morning-after” contraceptive pill, which can be taken up to 72 hours after sex, was supposed to be the “magic bullet” for women who failed to plan ahead.

But Planned Parenthood’s chief medical official admitted this week to NPR that despite the widespread availability of “Plan B,” the rate of unintended pregnancy in the U.S. has held steady, representing about 50 percent of all pregnancies.

“While there’s a lot of data to show it can prevent pregnancy in individual women, we’ve all been disappointed that on the population level, it just hasn’t had the effect we hoped,” Deborah Nucatola, senior director of medical services at the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, told NPR. “The unintended pregnancy rate hasn’t changed at all.”

Previously, Nucatola and others at Planned Parenthood had touted the high-dose hormone pill – which prevents pregnancy by blocking ovulation, or prevents a fertilized egg from implanting – as the definitive answer to stopping unintended pregnancy.

Forgot to take your birth control pills? No problem. The condom broke? No problem. You’re twelve years old and afraid to talk to your parents about sex, but you’ve been having it anyway? No problem. “Plan B” was supposed to have you covered.

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Atheists Start Billboard Campaign as Christmas Season Begins (+video)

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Photo Credit: APAn atheist organization is beginning a billboard campaign in Sacramento, California to encourage other atheists to “come out of the closet” as the Christmas season has believers turning their focus to faith in God.

According to a local ABC news affiliate, the Greater Sacramento Chapter of the Madison, Wisconsin-based Freedom From Religion Foundation is erecting 55 billboards on Monday just as the Christmas season gets into full swing. The campaign, part of an ongoing endeavor titled, “Out of the Closet,” hopes to let atheists know that having God in your life is not a necessity.

“It’s because atheists are starting to speak up and they’re beginning to identify each other and find out they’re not alone,” said Judy Saint, president of the atheists’ group chapter. “There are a lot of non-believers and this time of year, they feel like they’re all alone.”

Saint said the movement is not about being anti-God but that it’s acceptable not to embrace a God. Happiness and goodness, she said, are not exclusive to having a higher being in your life.

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After 12 Yrs of U.S. Occupation, Afghanistan Sets Record for Growing Opium

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Photo Credit: AP/Abdul KhaleqAfter 12 years of occupation by U.S. military forces, Afghanistan set a record for growing opium poppies in 2013, according to newly released data from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.

“Opium poppy cultivation in Afghanistan reached a sobering record high in 2013,” said the UNODC. “According to the 2013 Afghanistan Opium Survey, cultivation amounted to some 209,000 hectares, outstripping the earlier record in 2007 of 193,000 hectares, and representing a 36 per cent increase over 2012.”

In fact, according to the latest worldwide data on opium-poppy cultivation, Afghanistan dedicates more land to the cultivation of opium poppies than all of the rest of the world combined.

According to the UNODC’s “World Drug Report,” published in May–which included data for the world’s primary opium producing regions through 2011–the 131,000 hectares that was devoted to opium cultivation in Afghanistan that year was more than the combined 76,500 hectares used to cultivate opium poppies in other places. This included the 43,600 hectares in Myanmar, the 12,000 hectares in Mexico, the 4,100 hectares in Lao People’s Democratic Republic, the 362 hectares in Pakistan, the 338 hectares in Columbia, and the combined 16,100 hectares under in various other countries.

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Gay Men Push to End 30-Year Blood Donation Ban

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Photo Credit: APA push by activists to ease the 30-year-old blanket ban on blood donations from gay and bisexual men faces a key test this week as a federal panel hears results of the latest research. The findings will be released amid growing pressure from politicians and advocates, including college students, to change the policy.

Critics say the ban is a hangover from the early, fear-filled days of AIDS, stigmatizing gay men and ignoring advances in treatment and detection in the decades since.

Supporters of the policy say politics, not science, is driving the proposed change, which would heighten the risk of spreading HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, when the medical demand for blood donations is decreasing.

Under Food and Drug Administration rules, men who have had sex with men (MSM) since 1977 are ineligible to donate blood. An acknowledgment of having male homosexual relations at any time in one’s life is enough to disqualify a potential donor.

“This policy is discriminatory and inadequate,” said a petition drive at WhiteHouse.gov started in early November by students at the University of Michigan.

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After ‘Holiday Tree’ Controversy, RI State House Has a ‘Christmas Tree’ Once Again

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Photo Credit: THE PROVIDENCE JOURNAL/ BOB BREIDENBACHThe previous two years of Governor Chafee’s administration, the invitation for the annual tree lighting at the State House called it a “holiday tree.”

This year, it is going by another name: “Christmas tree.”

Ahead of Thursday’s tree lighting in the State House, which during the past two years tended to light up controversy over what to call it, the governor said in a statement Monday that in 2011, his “first year celebrating December in the State House I gave a simple six-word instruction to the planners of the annual tree lighting: ‘Do what they did last year.’ ”

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Phobias May Be Memories Passed Down in Genes from Ancestors

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Photo Credit: ALAMYMemories can be passed down to later generations through genetic switches that allow offspring to inherit the experience of their ancestors, according to new research that may explain how phobias can develop.

Scientists have long assumed that memories and learned experiences built up during a lifetime must be passed on by teaching later generations or through personal experience.

However, new research has shown that it is possible for some information to be inherited biologically through chemical changes that occur in DNA.

Researchers at the Emory University School of Medicine, in Atlanta, found that mice can pass on learned information about traumatic or stressful experiences – in this case a fear of the smell of cherry blossom – to subsequent generations.

The results may help to explain why people suffer from seemingly irrational phobias – it may be based on the inherited experiences of their ancestors.

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