GOP mega-donors show PAC loyalty

Just 17 donors shelled out about half of the more than $81 million that's flooded into PACs.

By ROBIN BRAVENDER | 3/31/12 4:30 PM EDT

Big GOP super PAC donors have been stubbornly standing by their favorite presidential candidates — even those with doomed campaigns.
Just 17 million-dollar-plus donors have shelled out about half of the more than $81 million that has already flooded into super PACs supporting Republican presidential hopefuls this election cycle. The vast majority of the big super PAC spenders have remained loyal to a single candidate, according to a POLITICO analysis of the most recent campaign filings.

And while some of the biggest givers, including casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, have signaled that they’ll eventually coalesce around the official GOP nominee, most haven’t — and their dollars haven’t either.

The latest filings show super PAC donations through the end of February, when Mitt Romney’s eventual nomination didn’t appear as clear-cut, and big donors may have been hoping for an underdog uprising. Still, mega-donors’ loyalty is another sign that in the new age of candidate-focused super PACs, party faithful are willing to spend millions of dollars to back their favorite candidates and fuel intra-party spats, instead of moving that cash into GOP infrastructure or groups ready to pivot into the general election.

  READ MORE

The Koch brothers' campaign to kill social security

The rightwing industrialists have spent millions funding opinion-forming propaganda to undermine a vital public service
 Robert Greenwald
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 22 June 2011 12.30 EDT


The Brave New Foundation's new film, Counter the Koch Billions; Protect Social Security. Video: Brave New Foundation




Documents and interviews unearthed in recent months by Brave New Foundation researchers illustrate a $28.4m Koch business that has manufactured 297 commentaries, 200 reports, 56 studies and six books distorting social security's effectiveness and purpose. Together, the publications reveal a vast cottage industry comprised of Koch brothers' spokespeople, front groups, thinktanks, academics and elected officials, which has built a self-sustaining echo chamber to transform fringe ideas into popular mainstream public policy arguments.
"The Koch brothers job is to do everything they can to dismember government in general," Senator Bernie Sanders says in this video. "If you can destroy social security, you will have gone a long way forward in that effort."   READ MORE


 

Massive Gas Leak Could Be the North Sea's Deepwater Horizon

North Sea platforms: tjodolv via Flickr

—By Julia Whitty

| Wed Mar. 28, 2012 12:20 PM PDT

A natural gas well in the North Sea 150 miles off Aberdeen, Scotland, sprung a massive methane leak on March 25. The 238 workers were all safely evacuated. But the situation is so explosive that an exclusion zone for ships and aircraft has been set up around the rig, reports the Mail Online. And nearby rigs have been evacuated, reports the New York Times:

Royal Dutch Shell said it closed its Shearwater field, about four miles away, withdrawing 52 of the 90 workers there; it also suspended work and evacuated 68 workers from a drilling rig working nearby, the Hans Deul.

But that's not the worst of it. The platform lies less than 100 yards/meters from a flare that workers left burning as crew evacuated. The French super-major oil company owner of the rig, Total, dismissed the risk, while the British government claimed the flame needs to burn to prevent gas pressure from building up. But Reuters reports:

Elgin Field: Adapted from map by NordNordWest via Wikimedia Commons.

[O]ne energy industry consultant said Elgin could become "an explosion waiting to happen" if the oil major did not rapidly stop the leak which is above the water at the wellhead.   READ MORE

Trayvon Martin Video Shows No Blood or Bruises on George Zimmerman

Screen Capture

Blow up of Zimmerman's Head

By MATT GUTMAN | Good Morning America – Wed, Mar 28, 2012

Video

A police surveillance video taken the night that Trayvon Martin was shot dead shows no blood or bruises on George Zimmerman, the neighborhood watch captain who says he shot Martin after he was punched in the nose, knocked down and had his head slammed into the ground.

The surveillance video, which was obtained exclusively by ABC News, shows Zimmerman arriving in a police cruiser. As he exits the car, his hands are cuffed behind his back. Zimmerman is frisked and then led down a series of hallways, still cuffed. 

Zimmerman, 28, is wearing a red and black fleece and his face and head are cleanly shaven. He appears well built, hardly the portly young man depicted in a 2005 mug shot that until a two days ago was the single image the media had of Zimmerman. 

The initial police report noted that Zimmerman was bleeding from the back of the head and nose, and after medical attention it was decided that he was in good enough condition to travel in a police cruiser to the Sanford, Fla., police station for questioning.

His lawyer later insisted that Zimmerman's nose had been broken in his scuffle with 17-year-old Martin.
In the video an officer is seen pausing to look at the back of Zimmerman's head, but no abrasions or blood can be seen in the video and he did not check into the emergency room following the police questioning.   READ MORE
 

Trayvon Martin: a typical teen who loved video games, looked forward to prom

A photo of Trayvon Martin wearing a hoodie was
used on banners and signs carried by protesters
in New York City on March 21, 2012.
Mario Tama / Getty Images

Trayvon Martin’s death gripped the nation, but in life he was a typical Miami teen who texted his friends, loved video games and saw his future in aviation.

 

By AUDRA D.S. BURCH and LAURA ISENSEE

aburch@MiamiHerald.com

Trayvon Martin spent his 17th birthday, which would be his last, with his family. He ate a home-cooked meal followed by cake, opened presents that included Levis jeans, Adidas sneakers and a bottle of Issey Miyake cologne.

He would be 17 for 21 days. He died Feb. 26, a bullet in his chest, shot by a neighborhood crime watch captain patrolling a suburban gated townhouse community in Sanford, 250 miles from his home, where he had gone with his father after a school suspension. George Zimmerman, the shooter, has not been arrested, sparking a growing wave of outrage manifested in daily rallies, petitions, speeches and media scrutiny.

“He had been so looking forward to going to his junior prom, and he had already started talking about all the senior activities in high school,’’ his mother, Sybrina Fulton, 46, said in a voice hollowed and somber. “He will never do any of those things.’’

As the nation grapples with the killing of an unarmed black teenager wearing a hoodie, his parents patiently offer the simple details of Trayvon’s life, painting the portrait of a typical teenager who would end up in a casket, buried in white suit with a powder blue vest.

Trayvon was 6-foot-3, 140 pounds, a former Optimist League football player with a narrow frame and a voracious appetite. He wanted to fly or fix planes, struggled in chemistry, loved sports video games and went to New York for the first time two summers ago, seeing the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty and a Broadway musical, The Addams Family. He hoped to attend the University of Miami or Florida A&M University, enamored by both schools’ bright orange and green hues.

Also known as “Slimm”, he had a girlfriend and spent endless hours talking or texting on his cell phone. Other times he was quiet, listening to the soundtrack of R&B, reggae, rap and gospel music flowing through his ear buds or watching half-hour re-runs of Martin, his favorite show.  READ MORE

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/03/22/v-fullstory/2708960/trayvon-martin-a-typical-teen.html#storylink=cpy

 

 

Sandusky labeled 'likely pedophile' in 1998 report

Psychologist warned university police, but they weren't able to prove abuse of boy 

More than a decade before former Penn State coach Jerry Sandusky was charged with more than 50 counts of child sex abuse, a psychologist warned university police that his actions fit that of a “likely pedophile’s pattern.”  

The finding by State College, Pa., psychologist Dr. Alycia A. Chambers, the therapist for one of Sandusky’s alleged victims, was contained in the internal Penn State files of a 1998 police investigation of the former coach for showering and bear hugging her client and another young boy in the school’s athletic locker room.
The Sandusky Files: Read the 1998 police report

  READ MORE

For key reports from reliable sources on sexual abuse scandals, click here. 

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

The Absurd Myths Porn Teaches Us About Sex

Photo Credit: Shutterstock

Young people who have learned about sex from watching porn have a treasure trove of sadly mistaken beliefs and misconceptions about sexuality.

March 26, 2012

When Lynette, a college student, first hooked up with an ex-boyfriend, she came face to face with the unrealistic ideals mainstream porn can create about sexuality.

“I had a boyfriend who didn’t realize that women had pubic hair,” she tells us in an interview. “Because he had only watched porn, he had never seen a naked woman outside of porn, so he just sort of failed to realize they had pubic hair.”

“This came up somewhat before my pants came off,” she added, “so you can realize how awkward this was.” She paused. “His face was memorable. In an ‘oh God, what is wrong with me, I am never taking my pants off in front of anyone ever again’ way."

Porn has become immensely popular in the last century. With the rise of Internet pornography, no longer do you have to enter a sleazy sex shop in a shady part of town to witness an astonishing panoply of sex acts. A quick Google brings you sex acts from the mundane (happy amateur couples having missionary intercourse) to the bizarre (could looners, who have a sexual fetish for balloons, ever have met each other outside the Internet?). Many teenagers have their first introduction to sex from the glow of a computer screen.

And these days, it can lead to some hilarious misconceptions.   READ MORE
 ==============================================================
"These myths about sexuality might seem humorous, but they hide a tragic truth. A generation of teenagers grew up under Bush’s record-breaking funding for abstinence-only sex education.

Although Obama has eliminated funding for abstinence-only and funded evidence-based comprehensive sex education, the damage has already been done. And both Santorum and Romney, the frontrunners for the GOP nomination, favor abstinence-only sex education—despite the evidence that it delays loss of virginity only eight months. According to research at the Guttmacher Institute, the rates of pregnancy and STIs among teenagers who received abstinence-only sex education are far greater than the rates among those who didn’t."
 ==============================================================