Rush Limbaugh Eviscerates Media: Thrill Kill of White Athlete is ‘Trayvon Martin in Reverse, Only Worse’

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh went after the mainstream media over its shallow coverage of the racial details in the Oklahoma shooting of student Chris Lane “for the fun of it.” On his radio show Wednesday, he said the case is like “Trayvon Martin in reverse, only worse.”

“This is nowhere near self-defense…this was cold-blooded, first-degree, recreational, for the fun of it because they were bored, murder,” Limbaugh said.

As TheBlaze previously reported, Lane, a 22-year-old Australian student and baseball player, was shot by three teenagers who were reportedly bored. Two of the suspects are black and one is white.

James Edwards, 15, and Chancey Luna, 16, were reportedly charged with first degree murder and face life in prison if convicted. They are being held without bond. Michael Jones, 17, was reportedly charged with using a vehicle to facilitate the discharge of a weapon and accessory after the fact of murder in the first degree.

“No matter where you look in the media, it’s not a racial event. This is the epitome of media irresponsibility,” Limbaugh reflected. “This is a classic illustration of just what role the mainstream media is playing in the destruction of American culture and society.”

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Levin: Republican Party Stands for Mush (+video)

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Photo Credit: YouTube

Photo Credit: YouTube

Mark Levin: “The issue is ‘are you going to have a civil war that’s going to hurt the Republican Party.’ The issue is ‘What’s right for America?’…I want a 1980 a 1984 those were the administrations I served under where I saw a conservative Republican president who knew what he was doing, who took on the establishment. And the Republican Party after he left lurched back to its neo-statist roots…. So what the hell are the Republicans going to run on? …

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Boehner Super-PAC Aides Push Senate Amnesty Bill

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Photo Credit: Business Insider

Photo Credit: Business Insider

Senior GOP aides of a super PAC linked to Speaker John Boehner are lobbying House Republicans to pass the Senate “Gang of Eight” immigration bill, legislation that Boehner has said he will not bring to the House floor.

The lobbying effort is coming under the umbrella of the American Action Network, a nonprofit 501(c)(4) “action tank” led by former senator Norm Coleman, which is touting the “major positive economic impact” of the Senate bill in e-mails sent to individual House Republican offices.

AAN is housed in the same office as the Congressional Leadership Fund, a super PAC associated with Boehner, and the two organizations share senior aides, including Brian O. Walsh, the president of both organizations, and Dan Conston, the spokesman for both.

Boehner spoke at a fundraiser for CLN earlier this summer and also headlined the organization’s inaugural event. The group’s website has posted links to numerous news stories that refer to the group as “Boehner’s” super PAC.

The AAN’s e-mail, sent to GOP offices, touts the number of jobs the group estimates the Senate bill would create for the congressional district and state of that office. The group also released an embeddable “widget” that allows users to find out how many jobs the Senate bill would create in the district of their representative.

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Corker: Lawmakers Learn More about NSA from Newspaper than Briefings

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Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) is demanding a new round of briefings on U.S. domestic surveillance operations.

In a blistering critique of past briefings, Corker argued lawmakers learning more on the front page of the newspaper than behind closed doors with security officials.

In a Wednesday letter to the White House, Corker said briefings by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, National Security Agency (NSA) chief Gen. Keith Alexander and others have not provided a full account of U.S. surveillance.

Briefings have “generally been limited to simply discussing the facts underlying specific public disclosures” of domestic surveillance operations, he said.

“As a result, members of Congress regularly read new revelations on the front pages of various newspapers,” Corker wrote.

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Al Gore Explains Why he’s Optimistic about Stopping Global Warming

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Photo Credit: Recyclebank

Photo Credit: Recyclebank

Ezra Klein: In 2005, when “An Inconvenient Truth” came out, I remember that the hope was we could keep the carbon load in the atmosphere to 350 parts per million, and the fear was we would hit 400ppm. Now we’ve hit 400ppm and people are hoping to avoid 450ppm. This seems to be getting out of hand, and fast.

Al Gore: We have already crossed the 400 parts per million mark. We crossed it earlier this year. The question now is how high it will go before we begin bending the curve. But in spite of the continued released of 90 million tons of global warming pollution every day into the atmosphere, as if it’s an open sewer, we are now seeing the approach of a global political tipping point.

The appearance of more extreme and more frequent weather events has had a very profound impact on public opinion in countries throughout the world. You mentioned my movie back in the day. The single most common criticism from skeptics when the film came out focused on the animation showing ocean water flowing into the World Trade Center memorial site. Skeptics called that demagogic and absurd and irresponsible. It happened last October 29th, years ahead of schedule, and the impact of that and many, many other similar events here and around the world has really begun to create a profound shift.

A second factor is the sharp and unexpectedly steep decrease in prices for electricity produced from wind and solar and the demand destruction for fossil fuel energy from new efficiency improvements. The difference between 32 degrees fahrenheit and 33 degrees fahrenheit seems larger than just one degree. It’s the difference between water and ice. And by analogy there’s a similar difference between renewable electricity that’s more expensive than electricity from coal and renewable electricity that’s less expensive. And in quite a few countries in the world and some parts of the United States we’ve crossed that threshold and in the next few years we’re going to see that crossed in nations and regions containing most of the world’s population.

Another way to think about this is that back when mobile telephones first appeared, the market projections for how quickly they would increase market share turned out to be not just wrong but way wrong. This is a point made by Dave Roberts at Grist, but the projections made 5-10 years ago for the installation of solar and wind technologies were, similarly, not just wrong but way wrong. We’ve seen a dramatic increase that’s far more rapid than anybody projected and it’s accelerating — not just in the United States but even more rapidly in developing countries.

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Syria’s Darkest Hour: Hundreds of Children’s Bodies Piled High After Nerve Gas Attack Near Damascus Leaves up to 1,300 Dead (+video)

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Photo Credit: Reuters

Photo Credit: Reuters

The world has looked on in horror as graphic images emerged showing the aftermath of a dawn poison gas attack in the suburbs of Damascus that wiped out 1,300 people as they lay sleeping in their beds.

Syrian activists accuse President Bashar al-Assad’s forces of launching the nerve gas attack in what would be by far the worst reported use of poison gas in the two-year-old civil war.

Activists said rockets with chemical agents hit the Damascus suburbs of Ain Tarma, Zamalka and Jobar before dawn…

The accounts could not be verified independently and were denied by Syrian state television, which said they were disseminated deliberately to distract a team of United Nations chemical weapons experts that arrived three days ago.

Syria’s Information Minister called the activists’ claim a ‘disillusioned and fabricated one whose objective is to deviate and mislead’ the UN mission. Al Jazeera’s Nisreen El-Shamayleh, reporting from neighbouring Jordan, said there were videos allegedly showing both children and adults in field hospitals, some of them suffocating, coughing and sweating.

(Video: CAUTION Graphic Content)

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Hasan Says ‘Illegal War’ Provoked Fort Hood Massacre (+video)

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Photo Credit: Fox News

Photo Credit: Fox News

The soldier on trial for the 2009 Fort Hood shooting rampage rested his case Wednesday without calling any witnesses, but later told the judge that the attack was provoked because “these were deploying soldiers who were going to engage in an illegal war.”

Maj. Nidal Hasan is representing himself but told a military judge Wednesday that he wouldn’t be calling any witnesses in his defense.

The jury was dismissed after the prosecution asked for more time to prepare jury instructions and logistics before closing arguments.

But after jurors were dismissed, Hasan told the judge, Col. Tara Osborn, that the jury shouldn’t have the option of convicting him on the lesser charge of voluntary manslaughter.

“I would like to agree with the prosecution that it wasn’t done under the heat of sudden passion,” Hasan said. “There was adequate provocation — that these were deploying soldiers that were going to engage in an illegal war.”

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New Audit Finds IRS Can’t Keep Track of its Own Software

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Photo Credit: WatchDog

Photo Credit: WatchDog

The Internal Revenue Service soon will have a larger role to play in managing the health records of Americans. But they’re having a hard time managing their own records, it seems.

A new audit report from the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, which oversees the IRS, found the agency was not keeping track of its software licenses and did not employ specialized tools to track and manage the multitude of licenses being used daily at the IRS.

“Efficient and cost-effective management of the IRS’s software assets is crucial to ensuring that information technology services continue to support the IRS’s business operations and help it to provide services to taxpayers efficiently,” auditors wrote in their report.

The division of the IRS charged with managing the licenses could not provide auditors with the proper licenses for 24 of the 27 software products reviewed.

The IRS spent $235 million on computer software products during 2011, according to the audit. Keeping better records of licenses could save the agency money by preventing unnecessary duplicate purchases of the same software, the auditors noted.

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Bradley Manning to Request Pardon from Obama Over 35-Year Jail Sentence

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

Bradley Manning will send a personal plea to Barack Obama next week for a presidential pardon after he was sentenced on Wednesday to 35 years in prison for passing hundreds of thousands of classified military documents to WikiLeaks.

The sentence was more severe than many observers expected, and is much longer than any punishment given to previous US government officials who have leaked information to the media.

Manning showed no emotion, neither when the sentence was delivered, nor after being escorted into a side room, where his lawyers and members of his family were waiting, some of them in tears.

“Everyone in his defence team was emotional, including myself,” his lawyer, David Coombs, told the Guardian. “The only person that wasn’t emotional was Brad. He looked to us and said: ‘It’s OK. I’m going to move forward and I’m going to be all right’.”

Coombs told a press conference that next week he will formally submit the request for a pardon, “or at the very least commute his sentence to time served”. That request will contain a personal appeal from Manning to Obama, which his lawyer read out.

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‘North Colorado’ Secession Movement Inches Forward

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Photo Credit: Daily Caller

Photo Credit: Daily Caller

Voters in Weld County will vote on whether to secede from Colorado after commissioners this week unanimously agreed to put the question on November’s ballot.

Weld County, the largest of several that have been seriously discussing breaking away to form their own state, joins three other counties in putting the question to its citizens. Several others are also considering referring the measure to voters or waiting to see if citizen initiatives show support for the idea.

The so-called 51st State Initiative is a result of rural Coloradans feeling abandoned by politicians in Denver. The last legislative session, which was controlled by Democratic majorities in both chambers, saw the passage of numerous controversial laws, many of which thumb their noses at rural values, commissioners in the plains counties have said.

Chief among them was a controversial bill requiring rural electricity cooperatives to double the amount of renewable energy they offer by 2020, a mandate that doesn’t apply to city utilities and which opponents have said will raise electricity rates on rural customers.

County leaders have also been alarmed at attempts to strengthen regulations on oil and gas developers, which are heavily invested in rural counties. And they’ve also been riled by tough new gun laws that limit the size of ammunition magazines and require universal background checks for all firearms transfers.

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