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December 13, 2013, 01:42 pm Pelosi: GOP 'disrespects' women By Mike Lillis Republicans in Congress have a general "disrespect" for women that's reflected in their legislative agenda, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi charged Friday, adding that she applauds the prospect of America having its first female president. The California Democrat said the GOP's policy priorities – from reproductive health to the economy to the environment – are evidence they have little concern for the issues women care the most about. "[It's] disrespect," Pelosi said in an interview with MSNBC's Alex Wagner that aired Friday afternoon. "Whether it's pay equity and...

Dayna Morales, the waitress who was fired after falsely claiming that patrons denied her a tip, is not the only person to falsely claim she suffered discrimination because of virulent homophobia. Megan Thode sued to have her C+ grade raised to a B – and to be granted $1.3 million in damages – alleging that her professor at Pennsylvania's Lehigh University gave her low marks because she supported same-sex "marriage." Thode also requested a written apology from her teacher, Amanda Carr. She got a zero in the mandatory classroom participation portion of her class because, according to Carr, she did...

Remember the terrible murder of Matthew Shepard in Laramie, Wyo. in 1998 -- tortured, beaten and left hanging on a fence to die -- because he was gay? The American people were led from the outset to believe that Shepard was the victim of a hate crime, murdered because he was gay. And that is how virtually every American still views the story. In the words of Congressman Sean Patrick Maloney (D-N.Y.), "Matthew Shepard is to gay rights what Emmett Till was to the civil rights movement." A play based on Shepard's killing, "The Laramie Project" became, according to the...

As the 2014 midterm election season begins, the Democratic Party is in full bloom as the political home of the modern American woman. For the last half-century, women were swing voters between the parties. A gender gap emerged in the 1980s with single women leaning toward the Democrats on issues from abortion rights to national defense. Over the last decade, Democrats have tried to widen the gap by charging the GOP with conducting a “War on Women.” There are several fronts in that war, Democrats say: Republicans oppose easy access to contraception, oppose abortion rights and oppose expansion of entitlements...

For 75 million Americans who get their insurance through large companies, the Affordable Care Act is a mixed bag.  Experts tell NBC News the new healthcare law is only slightly increasing premiums next year, but causing some companies with the most generous plans to reduce their employees’ benefits. Aaron Baker, 36, his wife Billie and their two young children are covered under a generous health insurance plan offered by the private Midwestern university where he’s worked for 10 years. When they opened their benefits notice this year, they were pleased to see their $385 premium is only up by four...

Yesterday, the House Homeland Security Committee published a video on their Youtube page highlighting a portion of the committee questioning Roberta Stempfley, acting assistant secretary of the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Cyber-security and Communications, who confirmed at least 16 attacks on the Affordable Care Act’s portal Healthcare.gov website in 2013. Roberta Stempfley highlighted one successful attack that is designed to deny access to the website called a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. A DDoS attack is designed to make a network unavailable to intended users, generally through a concerted effort to disrupt service such as repeatedly accessing...

I've tried my level damndest to ignore the latest Richard Cohen column controversy, because life is short and Cohen will stumble into another racial contretemps within six weeks or so. And I don't like the idea of a columnist being Mau-Mau'd out of a job because he's a casual bigot. The smarmy-sounding Fred Hiatt defense—that Cohen "isn’t afraid to take on subjects where culture and politics and emotion overlap"—isn't entirely wrong. Past-their-prime white guys have opinions, too. No, the problem with Cohen's column was that he made an assertion about an entire class of people being racist, and did no...

On Piers Morgan Live Tuesday, guest Bill Maher openly admitted Obama “lied” about Americans keeping their insurance plans, but insisted that he had to because of unified Republican opposition—and the increasingly “stupider” American public. Morgan trotted Maher on for a number of political issues, including the Obamacare meltdown and the most recent episode in the NSA scandal saga. Morgan opened by asking Maher if the scandal-failure-filled week was “any worse than it’s always been?” Maher said, in essence, yes: Well, I think the country in general is on a decline. Rather than citing the failure of the administration though, Maher’s explained he believes...

Senate Democrats on Tuesday closed ranks behind Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius, declaring she should keep her job despite problems plaguing the Affordable Care Act’s insurance exchanges. Democrats sought to deflect criticism by Republicans who have called for Sebelius’s ouster over what even Democrats acknowledge has been a botched rollout of the landmark law. Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), the chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, praised the implementation of ObamaCare for proceeding smoothly compared to other massive federal programs. “If you compare it to all kinds of other programs of large magnitude, it’s actually ahead of schedule,...

Gone is yesterday’s equivocating defense on the millions of distributed insurance cancellations currently shattering the great ObamaCare myth that was “If you like your plan, you can keep it.” After Valerie Jarrett‘s… er… “creative” contribution to the discussion last night, Carney was much more prepared for the question at today’s White House briefing with a more shrewdly crafted offensive strategy — because as we’re all well aware by now, unintentional concessions (don’t even think about apologies, not gonna’ happen) rarely last long in this administration before giving way to well-rehearsed, righteously indignant spin-doctoring. (Be sure to check out Sebelius’s planned...

The liberal claim that Republicans are engaging in a perpetual “war on women” seems to have taken a new turn on MSNBC. No longer does the term “war on women” apply only to access to abortion but now encompasses voting rights as well. Appearing on MSNBC on October 29, liberal MSNBC host Thomas Roberts claimed that Republicans are trying to restrict a woman’s access to the ballot box. This comes one week after fill-in host Michael Eric Dyson made a similar complaint on The Ed Show. [See video after jump.]  MSNBC's Roberts: Republicans Want To Stop Women From Voting Speaking...

Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) removed a Facebook post Monday that alleged a House GOP leader told President Obama “I cannot even stand to look at you” at a private meeting. Durbin said he did not immediately take down the post after it was proven false last week because he wanted to leave it in the proper context. "If I'd have raced to take it off, [the media] would have done that story too: `Durbin races to take this off.' I wanted to put into context how I got into this situation," he told the Associated Press. After Durbin...

In an e-mail to supporters yesterday (and on his Tumblr), filter-deficient Florida congressman Alan Grayson, as is his wont, suggested that the t in tea party stands for a burning cross. As to his assertion that the tea party is actually "no more popular than the Klan," 26 percent of Americans support the tea party according to a new Washington Post/ABC News poll, and we couldn't find any polls measuring support for the KKK but ... it's probably lower than that. Grayson does not offer a source for the claim in his e-mail. Instead, it was hyperlinked to a campaign-donations...

The Director of Research at the Brookings Doha Center, Shadi Hamid, tweets out about the Egyptian media depicting Obama as a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. Newspaper also claims that son of Muslim Brotherhood leader threatened Obama with release of “papers” revealing his MB membership.

UPDATE: 8/23/13 1:00PM PDT Its seems there’s blunders to go around. The Washington Post now says they “misquoted” Gore. Given his penchant for saying and doing dumb things in the past related to his views on climate, color me “skeptical”, especially when he makes ugly comparisons about people like he did below. It may be more of a case of some deal was worked out behind the scenes to salvage Gore’s waning credibility. I suppose we’ll never know, but I have asked WaPo to put the relevant audio of the tape recorded session online so we can verify that Gore...

<p>NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Beyonce called in a concert for a moment of silence for Trayvon Martin, rapper Young Jeezy released a song in Martin’s memory and Russell Simmons called for peace after George Zimmerman was acquitted by a Florida jury in the death of the teenager.</p>

The latest evidence that climate change is already causing massive damage Extreme weather patterns spawned by global warming are a serious threat to the nation's energy infrastructure, according to a new report from the Department of Energy, and their destructive effects are already being felt nationwide. "Increasing temperatures, decreasing water availability, more intense storm events, and sea level rise will each independently, and in some cases in combination, affect the ability of the United States to produce and transmit electricity from fossil, nuclear, and existing and emerging renewable energy sources," the report states. In the most striking example, the report...

President Obama angrily blasted climate change skeptics during his energy policy speech Tuesday at Georgetown University, saying he lacked "patience for anyone who denies that this problem is real."

False complaints of sexual abuse in the military are rising at a faster rate than overall reports of sexual assault, a trend that could harm combat readiness, analysts say. Virtually all media attention on a Pentagon report last week focused on an increase in service members’ claims of sexual abuse in an anonymous survey, but unmentioned were statistics showing that a significant percentage of such actually investigated cases were baseless. From 2009 to 2012, the number of sexual abuse reports rose from 3,244 to 3,374 — a 4 percent increase.

The cat is finally out of the bag. A blogger for the liberal Huffington Post has finally admitted that liberal mainstream media outlets made a conscious decision to ignore the Kermit Gosnell abortion-murder trial. In a HuffPost Live segment today on the issue, host Marc Lamont Hill admitted what many pro-life advocates have been thinking: “For what it’s worth, I do think that those of us on the left have made a decision not to cover this trial because we worry that it’ll compromise abortion rights. Whether you agree with abortion or not, I do think there’s a direct connection...