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Conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly says Republicans are making a mistake by trying to court Hispanics with comprehensive immigration reform legislation.

"I think that's a great myth because the Hispanics who come in like this are going to vote Democrat," Schlafly told the Focus Today radio program in a clip obtained by Right Wing Watch on Wednesday. "And there is not the slightest bit of evidence they are going to vote Republican."

"And the people the Republicans should reach out to are the white votes -- the white voters who didn't vote in the last election, and there are millions of them," she advised.

Schlafly added that the Republican establishment had given the party a "series of losers" with the nominations of former Sen. Bob Dole, Sen. John McCain and former Gov. Mitt Romney.

"The propagandists are leading us down the wrong path," the activist remarked. "There’s not any evidence at all that these Hispanics coming in from Mexico will vote Republican."

Last month, Schlafly told Republicans that they would be committing "suicide" if they enacted immigration reform.

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An Alabama pastor says that he is banning Boy Scouts from meeting at his church because they are supporting a "sinful lifestyle" by allowing gay members to join the organization.

First Baptist Church of Helena Pastor Greg Walker told WBRC that he was forced to decide that the scouts could no longer meet at his church after the Boy Scouts of America dropped its gay ban.

"It's hard on a personal level to say to a troop of young boys who have done nothing wrong and to the leaders, 'You're not welcome here,'" Walker explained. "I didn't make the decision, Boy Scouts of America did."

"It's an issue as a church pastor and Christian that I can't allow a group to openly support a sinful lifestyle under the umbrella of First Baptist Helena," he added.

In a written statement obtained by WBRC, the Greater Alabama Council of Boy Scouts said that it had anticipated this reaction from some members of the community.

"Early on in this process we decided to make a very strong commitment that if something like this did come up we would continue to support our units in finding and having somewhere to meet," the council noted.

Walker said that he would talk with the leaders of Troop 2 on Wednesday and give them time to find a new place to meet.

"I hate that this had to happen, I really do," the pastor opined.

Southern Baptist Convention President Frank Page told ABC News that he had "warned" the Boy Scouts that there would be a mass exodus if they decided to drop the gay ban.

"I warned Scouting executives that this would happen, and they supposedly realized it would happen, but they thought they would gain more," he said. "I assured them that if your goal is to minister to the largest number of youth, those were their words, then changing this is going to be a detriment to your goal."

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You've just gotta love Fox, without a hint of irony, being capable of conducting an interview with Karl Rove discussing Attorney General scandals with no mention of the politicization of the Department of Justice during the Bush administration, and the IRS "scandal" on these tax exempt groups, when the real scandal is that his group was approved at all.

Instead we had Fox giving Rove some more free air time instead of asking him about this (the post is from Nov. 2012): Watchdog: Karl Rove And His Crossroads GPS Broke Election Law By Failing To Disclose Donors:

The non-partisan Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) filed complaints Thursday with both the Federal Election Commission (FEC) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) alleging that Karl Rove and his secretive Crossroads GPS violated election law and may have engaged in a criminal conspiracy to do so.

Under campaign finance law and FEC regulations, 501(c)(4) groups, like Crossroads GPS, can raise unlimited funds from wealthy individuals and corporations without having to disclose their donors. The only time donors to these secretive groups must be disclosed is when donors give more than $200 explicitly “for the purpose of furthering an independent expenditure.”

As they went onto explain, that's not what Rove's group was doing. Rove loves to go on the air and pretend like he's the victim here when the truth is far from it. As Bold Progressives asked in the banner below, the real question is why did the IRS ignore massive political players and go after only the smaller groups instead? The likely answer is they didn't want to take on their lawyers at the places with the real money, and so they took the easy way out instead, but if that's the case, it's no excuse.

One thing you can be sure of though is you won't see Rove asked about any of this on the air. He'll stay away from the few shows and hosts that would actually ask him about it and none of them are on Fox.

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Lou Dobbs wound up this segment on America Live with Megyn Kelly where they were discussing the Chinese hackers gaining access to "a wide array of weapons and defense systems" by asking when we're going to declare war with China.

DOBBS: Remember, a little over a year ago, the Joint Chiefs made a similar statement, that in certain instances, intrusions in cyberspace will be considered an act of war against the United States and will be treated as such. What more... what in God's name would it take to create an act of war? You couldn't do this in anything but the virtual world and have their be any doubt about it. It's an act of war.

I don't like what's going on either, but I what I would like to know is, what it would take for Fox pundits to quit trying to push us into going to war with one country or another in every other segment on their network?

So how come American politicians don't watch anything cool?

via The Guardian

It’s a bloody tale of warring clans fighting for control of the throne – so it should perhaps come as little surprise to Game of Thrones fans that Julia Gillard is an avid viewer.

Revealing herself as a fan of the HBO series in an interview with Guardian Australia, the prime minister said she had been drawn into George RR Martin’s mythical medieval-like world, in which feuding fiefdoms do battle in pursuit of power.

And her favourite character? Daenerys Targaryen - the woman who emerged triumphant from a trial by fire to be acclaimed as the uncontested leader of her people.

Gillard is backing Targaryen, who carries the title “khaleesi”, to take control of the iron throne. Targaryen is the first female war leader of a tribe called the Dothraki, in the complicated maze of competition between would-be rulers. She’s resolute and at times bloodthirsty – the khaleesi, that is.

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Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus on Tuesday promised that "this is just the beginning" of Republicans in Congress investigating President Barack Obama.

Priebus explained to Fox News host Gretchen Carlson that Republicans like Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) would continue their probes into scandals involving Benghazi, the IRS and the Department of Justice's targeting of reporters until witness came clean about how the president was involved.

"We've got at least eight people around the president that knew something... you start questioning those people," the RNC chairman explained. "And then those people will start talking about what they knew, and then more will come out."

"If the president actually knew something then he's not being truthful and no one around him is," he continued. "If he didn't know anything, I think it suggests a level of aloofness or perhaps even incompetence that I think is pretty disturbing in its own right."

Priebus added: "So this isn't the end of the line, this is just the beginning. And I've got a good feeling that Darrell Issa is going to be having quite a summer in reviewing what's been going on here in the White House as far as this scandal is concerned."

(h/t: The Hill)

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I guess HuckaJesus thinks that the best way to honor our troops over this Memorial Day weekend was to make sure he threw in a little bit of right-wing scandal-mongering and attacking that uppity president of ours for heaven forbid having a Marine hold an umbrella over his head during at press conference with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Erdogan, along with the revival of Benghazi-gate while giving a tribute to those "real heroes" of ours who aren't being taken care of properly at the V.A.

I'd be willing to take Huckabee's feigned concern for our troops that he expressed here a bit more seriously if he and his fellow Republicans were not doing their best to either make excuses for the Bush administration invading Iraq and Afghanistan while refusing to pay for their wars, and passing tax cuts instead, and if they weren't still pushing for our country to be involved in more military conflicts to this day.

Huckabee and his party of austerity that doesn't want to see the richest among us have their taxes raised one penny don't have a leg to stand on when it comes to criticizing anyone about how our troops are taken care of. We've got some huge problems with the V.A. but President Obama is not the one that created the mess where the outdated system was overloaded. He's the one who inherited the mess that George W. Bush helped to create. Now people like Huckabee are bitching that he hasn't fixed it quickly enough.

I'm not happy it hasn't been fixed either, but unless you've got some more constructive criticism about how to fix it, other than bringing up Umbrella-gate, or this fake Benghazi outrage we've been seeing from the right for months on end now, you need to either shut the hell up or decide to actually do something to make the situation better.

If Huckabee or anyone in the media actually cares about this issue, they should be doing things like bringing in computer experts to look at the system we have now, the systems being considered by the V.A., asking questions about the man hours to get the paper records converted and what the most efficient way to do that would be. And if it looked like the V.A. is not going to be using the most up to date technology and most efficient way to fix this mess, ask, "Why not?"

Mike Huckabee doesn't care about that. He cares about blowing the dog-whistles for the far right of his party that we heard here. What's really telling about the mentality of the people who actually take this guy seriously, is the loudest applause from his audience was when he was talking about President Obama and the umbrella being held up for him: Huckabee: Honoring America's Real Heroes:

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This was my first question as well after hearing this story about McCain meeting with Syrian rebel military leaders -- who approved his trip and did the White House know about it? And who provided him with the security? It seems the only thing we have a clear answer to right now is why he wasn't around to make his gazillionth appearance on the Sunday shows this weekend.

McCain visits rebels in Syria:

Sen. John McCain visited rebels in Syria on Monday, his communications director confirmed to CNN, making the Arizona Republican the highest ranking elected official from the United States to visit the war-torn country.

Brian Rogers confirmed a report that originally appeared on The Daily Beast, which indicated McCain entered Syria through Turkey, and remained in the country for several hours.

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During this holiday weekend, when so many Americans are relying on our roads and bridges to get us across the country to celebrate with our friends and relatives, Ed Schultz took the Republicans to task for refusing to do something about our crumbling bridges and infrastructure.

As Ed noted, the failure of the I-5 Washington bridge is just a symptom of a much wider problem and one that's only going to continue to get worse if the House Republicans don't finally decide that preventing Americans from being killed while driving on our roads matters more than making President Obama look bad.

As we have discussed here time and again as well, since actually fixing and repairing our infrastructure would put Americans back to work and potentially make President Obama look good, Republicans have been blocking what used to be easily passed bipartisan legislation.

President Obama has repeatedly been calling on Congress to approve more spending on infrastructure and as Schultz and Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown discussed in the clip below, if we don't get the GOP to quit obstructing on this matter sometime soon, we may not have much of a country left for the next generation. Their hope is that big business finally gets tired enough of it that they start putting the pressure on the Republicans to do something about it.

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Here's more from David Cay Johnston on how foolish the Republican's refusal to spend money on infrastructure now has been: Pay to Fix America’s Crumbling Infrastructure Now, or Pay More Later:

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Fox News Senior Political Analyst Brit Hume clashed with fellow Fox News contributor Juan Williams on Sunday after Williams pointed out that the investigations of reporters had started under George W. Bush's administration and then continued under President Barack Obama.

During a panel discussion about the Department of Justice's investigation into leaks of classified information published Fox News reporter James Rosen, Fox News host Chris Wallace asked Williams if he could defend the president's decision to ask Attorney General Eric Holder to review his own department.

"Republicans have been hammering Eric Holder... to go after the leaks, that they have wanted him to pursue leaks that had to do with how bin Laden was killed to secret prisons to the attack on the cyber network in Iran," Williams explained. "That came from Republicans. And it has been something that the Bush administration started and it has been continued with a vengeance -- to everyone's surprise -- by this administration."

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