New York Allows Same-Sex Marriage, Becoming Largest State to Pass Law

NYTimes: ALBANY — Lawmakers voted late Friday to legalize same-sex marriage, making New York the sixth and largest state where gay and lesbian couples will be able to wed. Just five states currently permit same-sex marriage: Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Vermont, as well as the District of Columbia.

The NY State Senate approval was the final hurdle for the same-sex marriage legislation, which was approved last week by the Democrat-led NY State Assembly. The Republican-controlled state Senate passed the bill by a 33-29 vote. Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo signed the measure at 11:55 p.m., and the law will go into effect in 30 days, meaning that same-sex couples could begin marrying in New York by late July.

The marriage bill, whose fate was uncertain until moments before the vote, was approved 33 to 29 in a packed but hushed Senate chamber. Four members of the Republican majority joined all but one Democrat in the Senate in supporting the measure after an intense and emotional campaign aimed at the handful of lawmakers wrestling with a decision that divided their friends, their constituents and sometimes their own homes.

Passage of the NY bill reflects rapidly evolving sentiment about same-sex unions. In 2004, according to a Quinnipiac poll, 37 percent of NY state’s residents supported allowing same-sex couples to wed. This year, 58 percent supported same-sex marriage.

Supporters of the measure described the victory in New York as especially symbolic — and poignant — because NY is considered the home of the "Stonewall movement’s" foundational moment in June 1969. A riot erupted outside the Stonewall Inn, a bar in the West Village, on June 28, 1969 after police raided the tavern frequented by gay patrons. (see history of movement below.)

A huge street party erupted outside the Stonewall Inn Friday night, with celebrants waving rainbow flags and dancing after the historic vote.

Read the rest of the story @ The NYTimes.

History of the Stonewall Movement

The Stonewall Inn was a seedy, mob-owned bar on Christopher Street in New York City's Greenwich Village, a place where gay men and lesbians could drink and dance among themselves at a time when the city was cracking down hard on gay bars and homosexual life. There had been little protest against the harassment, but a bust at the Stonewall in the early hours of June 28, 1969 — and reports that customers were being beaten by cops — provoked a sympathetic crowd into two days of rioting. The movement was born.

Sen. Sanders: Koch Bros. ‘Want To Destroy Social Security’

YouTube video @ Brave New Foundation

Seeing what he called “an enormous amount of disinformation about Social Security” in the media, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) joined with activist filmmaker Robert Greenwald to produce a video that attempts to explains why.

The video shows how the Koch’s create the myth that Social Security is in crisis by funding prominent think tanks like the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation, pundits on Fox News and CNBC, and politicians like Paul Ryan.)

Sanders claims that campaign contributions and hundreds of millions in think tank funding from billionaire industrialist brothers David and Charles Koch help create an “echo chamber” for “misinformation” on the hugely popular federal safety net, like suggesting it is about to go broke or claiming the retirement age must be raised in order to prevent economic collapse.

“Social Security is not going broke,” Sanders insisted. “Social Security has a $2.2 trillion surplus… The Koch brothers want to invest your retirement funds on Wall Street, and you may lose all of your retirement savings when you get old.”

Inside the Koch Brothers' Expensive Echo Chamber by Robert Greenwald @ Huffingtonpost

Documents and interviews unearthed in recent months by Brave New Foundation researchers illustrate a $28.4 million 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, think tanks, academics and elected officials, which have built a self-sustaining echo chamber to transform fringe ideas into popular mainstream public policy arguments.

The Koch brothers' echo chamber has successfully written the messaging for the AARP, a traditional defender of Social Security for all generations, which recently opened the door to cutting benefits.

The Koch echo chamber begins with think tanks like the Cato Institute, Heritage Foundation and Mercatus Center at George Mason University and the Reason Foundation, which owe their founding and achievements to Koch backing. These think tanks take their $28.4 million in Koch funding and produce hundreds of position papers distorting the long-term health of Social Security.

If Congress Does Nothing, The Deficit Will Disappear

TPM: On Wednesday, the Congressional Budget Office released its updated long-term budget forecast, which looked surprisingly like the previous version of its long-term budget forecast.

It showed, as one might expect, that if the Bush tax-cuts remain in effect and Medicare and Medicaid spending isn't constrained in some way, the country will topple into a genuine fiscal crisis -- not the fake one the Congress is pretending the country's in right now.

Republicans, of course, seized on that particular projection, and claimed (a bit ridiculously) that it proved the government must adopt their precise policy views: major spending cuts, particularly to entitlement programs.

While all this -- from the findings to the politicization of them -- is perfectly expected, the forecast also presents another opportunity to remind people that the medium-term budget outlook is perfectly fine if Congress adheres to the law as it's currently written. That means no repealing the health care law, for one, but more significantly it means allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire, and (unfathomably) allowing Medicare reimbursement rates for doctors to fall to the levels prescribed by the formula Congress wrote almost 15 years ago. In other words, no more "doc fixes."

Helpfully, CBO juxtaposed these two alternative futures in a pair of graphs and, just as last time, it projects that deficits will disappear entirely by the end of President Obama's second term (if he gets a second term) if Congress were to just sit on its hands and do nothing.

Take a look.

More Say GOP Would Be Mainly Responsible If No Increase In Debt Limit

Pew Research Center: More Americans believe Republicans in Congress, rather than the Obama administration, would be mainly responsible if the two sides cannot agree on a plan to increase the federal debt limit.

About four-in-ten (42%) say Republicans would bear the most responsibility if the debt limit is not raised and the government is unable to borrow more money to fund its operations.

A third (33%) say the Obama administration would be mainly responsible, according to the latest survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press and The Washington Post conducted June 16-19 among 1,003 adults.

As Vice President Joe Biden holds budget and debt-reduction talks with lawmakers, partisans express strong opinions about which side would be most responsible if no agreement is reached before the limit is hit as soon as early August.

About seven-in-ten Democrats (72%) say Republicans would be mainly responsible. Nearly six-in-ten Republicans (58%) say the Obama administration would be mainly responsible.

But independents are divided: 36% say Republicans would be mainly responsible, while 34% say the Democratic administration would be. Another 17% say the two sides would share responsibility if the debt limit is not raised.

The GOP Bloom Is Fading Fast With Voters

Recent polls have shown that the voters are not really enamored with the Republican Party anymore. Americans think they would be worse off under House Republicans' Medicare overhaul by an overwhelming margin of 57 percent to 34 percent, according to a new Bloomberg National Poll.

Adding to Republicans' woes, 58 percent of Independents — a critical voting block — share those concerns. The House voted in April to replace Medicare with subsidies for private insurance starting in 2022, but the proposal is going nowhere in the Democratic-controlled Senate.

The poll, Bloomberg points out, is likely to encourage Democrats to continue to use Medicare to bash the GOP ahead of the 2012 presidential election. Republicans, however, are urging for bipartisan cooperation on cutting Social Security and Medicare even as they reject any tax increases.

If Democrats go along with Republicans on cutting Social Security and Medicare the GOP echo chamber will blame Democrats for the cuts, just as they did during the 2010 mid-term elections.

(See - The GOP Bait And Switch On Social Security And Medicare Democrats need to stay positioned to run exactly the same Social Security and Medicare messaging campaign in 2012 against the GOP that the GOP used against Democrats in 2010.)

Unemployment	42%
Government spending	17%
Federal deficit	13%
Health care	10%
Afghanistan	5%

The new Bloomberg National Poll (conducted of 1,000 adults between June 17th and June 20th) show movement toward Democrats and away from the Republicans. Here are the top five issues with the public.

The people know that the most important issue facing America is the massive unemployment -- an issue the Republicans are ignoring.

The recession will not truly be over until most Americans are back to work.

And most Americans see the corporations outsourcing of jobs as the biggest impediment to job creation (78%) -- something the Republicans in Congress have voted to support.

And then there's this question on the poll. What scares you the most about the upcoming election? Here's what the voters said:

• 49% said the Republicans getting control of government and damaging or abolishing Medicare.
• 40% said the Democrats getting control of government and resuming their spending.

Medicare is still turning out to be a really bad mistake for Republicans (who want to abolish it and throw the elderly to the mercy of private insurance companies). About 57 % in this poll said the Republican plan would be bad for them, and 55% say supporting the privatization of Medicare would make them likely to vote against a presidential candidate.

President Obama's favorability rating was 54%, with 42% saying they viewed him unfavorably.

Among other presidential candidates, 43% of Republicans viewed Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) favorably and former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty had a 29% favorability rating.

Poll numbers are collapsing for first-term Republican governors across the country. The recent Inside Politics Newsletter gives a snapshot of the GOP's polling growing polling problem.

From Florida to Ohio, Wisconsin to Arizona, the bloom is fading from the GOP's blushing rose very quickly and very badly for Republican Governors who surfed into their respective state capitols on the tea party electoral wave last November.

It’s Still the Economy, Stupid

Newsweek: Fourteen million Americans remain out of work, a waste of our greatest resource. The 42nd president has more than a dozen ideas on how to attack the jobs crisis.

Next week in Chicago, the Clinton Global Initiative will focus on America for the first time, inviting business and political leaders to make specific commitments in support of the former president’s jobs blueprint, which he details below.

14 WAYS TO PUT AMERICA BACK TO WORK

I’ve Had All I Can Stand! I Can't Stands No More!

In this video clip posted on the Netroots Nation YouTube channel, Netroots Nation 2011 keynote speaker Van Jones delivers the fiery last few minutes of his speech.

He humorously invokes “Popeye” cartoons, quoting, “I’ve had all I can stand! I can't stands no more!” and encourages attendees to stand up to the smears and hate-mongering spewed daily by Fox News.

Jones, who joined the White House Staff in March 2009 as Pres. Obama's environmental adviser on green jobs development, resigned in September 2009 after the rightwing media and blogosphere echo chamber ginned up calls for his ouster in over his past statements and activism.

Jones issued two public apologies in the days preceding his resignation, one for signing a petition in 2004 from the group 911Truth.org that questioned whether Bush administration officials "may indeed have deliberately allowed 9/11 to happen, perhaps as a pretext for war" and the other for using a crude term to describe Republicans in a speech he gave before joining the administration.

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said of Jone's resignation on ABC's This Week with George Stephanopoulos," Van Jones decided was that the agenda of this president was bigger than any one individual." The president does not endorse Jones's past statements and actions, "but he thanks him for his service," Gibbs said.

Gilberto Hinojosa Running To Be The Next Texas Democratic Party Chair

A former Cameron County Judge and current party chair for Cameron County is seeking to become the Lone Star State’s top Democrat when Boyd Richie, the current Texas Democratic Party Chair, leaves office next year.

Brownsville-based attorney Gilberto Hinojosa last month filed with the Texas Ethics Commissions to become an official candidate for Chair of the Texas Democratic Party. (website | Facebook)

The next Texas Democratic Party Chair will be elected at the June 2012 Texas state Democratic Convention. Boyd Richie announced at a State Democratic Executive Committee meeting in April that he would not seek re-election in 2012.

Hinojosa named Houston Attorney Cris Feldman treasurer for his Texas Democratic Party Chair campaign. It was Feldman who sued the treasurer of Texans for a Republican Majority on behalf of four Democratic House candidates who were defeated in the 2002 election with the help of "clandestinely funneled illegal corporate cash into the [Texas] elections" by then House majority leader Tom DeLay and his aides. In a 2010 trial DeLay was found guilty on charges of money laundering and conspiracy to commit money laundering in the scheme to illegally funnel corporate cash to Texas Republican candidates running in the 2002 election.

Judge Hinojosa commented on his State Chair campaign:

Personhood At Conception And Criminalizing Birth Control Use

Many people do not remember that the purchase and use of birth control products, even by married couples, was against the law in many states until 1965. Use of birth control products may again be criminalized in many states controlled by conservative lawmakers. There are those who, for the last 46 years, have worked to reverse the 1965 Griswold v. Connecticut Supreme Court finding that Americans have a fundamental right of privacy to make family planning decisions, which includes the right to use birth control contraceptives. This year conservative lawmakers in many states are again close to making the use of birth control products a crime through "personhood" legislative initiatives.

Cities and School Boards Could Be Forced To Move Their Elections From May To November

Late in the regular 2011 82nd Texas legislative session, the Senate passed SB 100. The bill, originally submitted by Texas State Senator Van de Putte, brings Texas in compliance with the federal Military and Overseas Voter Empowerment (MOVE) Act. The MOVE Act, passed by Congress in 2009, requires that vote by mail ballots for federal elections and local elections held in conjunction with federal elections must be available to military and overseas voters at least 45 days before each election day and run-off election day.

Election dates specified in the Texas election code did not allow 45 days between the dates candidates were qualified to be listed on primary election ballots and the uniform primary election dates. SB 100 adjusts legally prescribed primary election dates such that Texas comes into compliance with the MOVE Act.