Chris Christie to Occupy protester } You’re going down, sweetheart (Report & video)

 By David Edwards 

At a rally for GOP hopeful Mitt Romney Sunday, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) called an Occupy Wall Street protester “sweetheart” and told her she was going to “go down.”

Romney was first to be interrupted by the chant “Mitt kills jobs!”

“You know, it’s wonderful to live in a country where people are able to express their views,” the candidate said. “We’re happy to have you guys express your views. Next time, try to do it with more courtesy.”

After Christie took the stage, protesters changed their message to “Christie kills jobs!”

“Really?” Christie sneered, walking towards the protesters in a menacing way. “You know, something may go down tonight, but it ain’t gonna be jobs, sweetheart.”

After the protesters were removed from the event, the New Jersey governor used the opportunity to rant about President Barack Obama, who he had previously called “the most pessimistic man I’ve ever seen in the oval office.”

“If she wasn’t so blinded by her Barack Obama-induced anger, she’d know that American jobs are coming back when Mitt Romney is the next president of the United States!” Christie exclaimed. “And if she wasn’t so disorientated by the loss of hope and change, she’d understand that Mitt Romney is the hope for America’s future!”

“See, beware — this is a warning, this is a cautionary tale to be inspired by someone who has built a life that America can be proud of, not by a Chicago ward politician,” he added. “I doubt he is, but I hope the president’s watching. I have a message for you, Mr. President: This is the type of disoriented anger your cynicism and your division is causing in our country. Bring our country together — stop dividing it, Mr. President.”

 

Topics: Chris Christie ♦ mitt romney ♦ President Barack Obama

 

David Edwards has served as an editor at Raw Story since 2006. His work can also be found at Crooks & Liars, and he's also been published at The BRAD BLOG. He came to Raw Story after working as a network manager for the state of North Carolina and as as engineer developing enterprise resource planning software. Follow him on Twitter at @DavidEdwards.

Does Your Dog Knows What Your Noodle is Cooking?

 A new study claims that dogs are able to read our facial expressions and anticipate our desires — just like human babies do

It may be more than a look: New research finds that dogs sense human emotion based on our eye contact and facial expressions. Photo: Alessandra Schellnegger/Corbis 

Crazed doggy parents will eagerly tell you that their dogs are able to understand and communicate, and are surely capable of basic levels of human cognition. Turns out these dog parents may not be so crazy after all. A new study has found that dogs are able to make eye contact and take cues from humans in a manner similar to a 6-month-old infant. Here, a brief guide:

What did the study find?
Dogs, like human babies, read our facial expressions. They don't just rely on verbal cues to ascertain what humans want. They also use eye contact to anticipate our desires. "Dogs are receptive to human communication in a manner that was previously attributed only to humans," says one of the study's co-authors, Jozsef Topal of the Hungarian Academy of Science.

How did researchers come to this conclusion?
Topal and his associates worked with 29 canine test subjects. The dogs were shown a video of a woman who would call them, stare straight at them to get their attention, and then look down at an object beside her. Then the dogs were shown a second video in which the woman would silently turn her head and stare at the object without ever making direct eye contact. In most cases, the dogs followed the woman's gaze in the first video. In the second video, in which she made no direct eye contact, the dogs didn't follow her gaze. Similar experiments have been conducted with babies, and 6-month-old infants exhibited the same behavior as the dogs.

How did dogs come to behave this way?
Topal thinks it's a trait the animals developed as they worked and bonded with generations of humans. "Dogs have evolved to sharing their lives with humans," he says. "And they gained new skills that support their social interaction with humans." Give me a break, says dog trainer Deleta Jones. "Dogs normally speak [to each other] through body language and facial expression," she says. This is obviously just "natural to them."

What have other studies into the doggy mind found?
A study published last year in Learning & Behavior found that dogs were more prone to beg for food from a person who was looking at them than from someone paying them no mind. Stanley Coren, an expert in canine behavior, has found that in terms of developmental ability, dogs are on par with human 2-year-olds.

What does this mean for my dog and I?
"This should reinforce that if we want our dog's attention, we should be clear about it," says Adam Goldfarb with the Humane Society of the United States. "For those people who talk to their dog in a baby-talk voice, they should keep it up. Your dog knows that you're talking to him or her and will pay more attention."

Sources: MSNBC, USA Today

Steam Room Stories } Getting Some

This may be my favorite Steam Room Stories video yet. Mainly because I totally know this happens, have watched it happen, or have been the guy on the left, instigating the situation. Getting Some Ass is the title of this new webisode from the boys and it lives up to every sense of it’s title. While getting their steam on, cast members Steven Snyder (left) and Joe Fidler (right) discuss Steven’s night prior and why he’s a little sleepy.

Turns out, he was up all night with his girlfriend getting it in. However, he proceeds to say, “she wasn’t the only one who got some ass last night.” Intrigued, Joe pries for a little more information. The result is a conversation between the boys discussing whether or not watching a porn with more dudes than chicks in it is gay and beyond. Want to know what happens next? You’ll have to watch the video below.

 

Gay Spray: RuPaul, Seth MacFarlane and Others spout off re: Santorum, political debate

Posted by duy | metroweekly.com/

Good, bad or whatever ... famous Tweeters have a lot to say about LGBT issues.
Tom Arnold:

These debates R a disgrace. Will people vote 4 guys whose sole platform seems to be"hate Obama and gay people and all will be well" ... My gay brother is a conservative Rep but I believe he deserves equal rights.

Joy Behar:

Why is a thrice married adulterer lecturing on the sanctity of marriage? Gingrich is the biggest hypocrite on this.

Sarah Silverman:

Dear GOPs, In what way does gay marriage hurt ur life & how will taking that right away make it better? thanks in adv. s

Sandra Bernhard:

they want gay people to go away that's what. understanding and considerate for 3,000 years what was going on before that? ... sit down and speak to a gay couple in their living room? no gay couple would let them in

Alan Cumming:

I just got married!!!!! On the 5th anniversary of our wedding in London grant and I tied the knot again in NYC!!! #eatmericksantorum

Seth MacFarlane:

Rick Santorum's stance on homosexuality is so fucking gay.

Garry Shandling:

Rick Santorum seems so homophobic that I'm surprised he even allows another man to vote for him.

Albert Brooks:

Santorum thinks if gays marry it will ruin the country. What's to ruin? Has he ever been to Applebee's?

RuPaul:

This nation was founded by men wearing wigs http://politi.co/x9bIaX

To view the related debate, skip to 5:00 in this video:

 To view the related debate, skip to 5:00 in this video:

Ron Paul's Un-useful Idiots on the Left

I saw a gay man get a kinda high 5 at Fb for writing that he hoped Ron Paul would win but that was asking for too much. What the heck?…..These guys are uninformed,,,that’s how we got George Bush and every lousy lying politician that’s come along.  By people that don’t get informed and follow the history of a particular candidate. If they started out as a grape, maybe they became a raisin, but  for sure not a plum. Saying a different story than they said before is the way the slime out of situations..but in this age of information and the internet ignorance internet ignorance, specially by younger people is

 is not acceptable. adamfoxie*

Progressives who make common cause with Paul on US foreign policy ignore his stunningly reactionary views on everything else

• 
• • Megan Carpentier
  • guardian.co.uk, 

Republican presidential hopeful Ron Paul. Photomontage by Jamie Turner; photograph: Guardian

If you told a liberal in 2008 that progressives ought to give Republican Texas Congressman Ron Paul a chance because he was the most anti-war candidate on the ballot, you would have been laughed out of the room – or, more likely, the bar. But in 2012, some prominent (and white, male) progressives are arguing exactly that. What's changed? Not Ron Paul, that's for certain.

He's still the same guy who thinks the US should withdraw from the WTOand the United Nations, and who wants to eliminate foreign aid and theDepartment of Commerce and all its trade regulation and promotion activities. But, we are told, since he advocates for a complete, immediate withdrawal from Afghanistan (which military intervention, notably, he voted for), he's a better foreign policy candidate than President Obama.

And, if his newest converts are to be believed, his support for the withdrawal from Afghanistan, his impassioned pleas for a return of Americans' civil liberties from an overreaching government and his opposition to the drug war are reason enough to give the man a chance. After all, they say, President Obama has not delivered on his promises and supporters' expectations in those areas, either. But to the women, minorities and LGBT people (and their supporters) who have paid attention to Paul's record, it comes as little surprise that his most vociferous supporters on the left are pale and male … and their arguments stale.

This is the man who, to trumpet his pro-life agenda in Iowa to social conservatives, released an ad that questions whether repealing Roe v Wade would eliminate women's abortion rights in enough states, since it would create "abortion tourism" (a situation with which the Irish and the British are already familiar). He opposed the Obama administration's decision to declare birth control a preventative medicine, which pressures insurance companies to cover it without co-pays. He has said he would allow states to decide same-sex marriage rights for their citizens but keep the Defense of Marriage Act intact – which restricts federal rights, including immigration and social security survivor benefits (among others) to opposite-sex married couples.

He also opposes the US supreme court decision in Lawrence v Texas that decriminalised consensual sodomy in the United States. Heopposes the 1964 Civil Rights Act. He wants to restrict birthright citizenship, denying the children of immigrants legal status in the United States if they are born here, voted to force doctors and hospitals to report undocumented immigrants who seek medical treatment, and sponsored bills to declare English the official language of the United States and restrict government communications to English. And that's just for starters.

Nonetheless, there have been calls by progressives, most notably Glenn Greenwald, to ignore all of that and more, and focus instead on Obama's policy failings to have "an actual debate on issues of America's imperialism". He went on to argue that there are no policy priorities more imperative than those – certainly not abortion, immigration rights, LGBT equality, racial justice or any other aspect of the US's extensive foreign policy. (Greenwald, who is gay, was in the relatively privileged position of being able to travel to Brazil to circumvent Doma.) And so people whose lives, safety, livelihoods and health depend on them should accept that they are trading their concerns for, say, the lives of Muslim children killed by bombs in Afghanistan.

In fact, many of Ron Paul's newest supporters on the left look strikingly like the majority of the ones on the right who have been following him for years: the kinds of people whose lives won't be directly affected by all those pesky social conservative policies Paul would seek to enact as president, either due to their race, class, gender or sexual orientation.

And so, to the women who worry they'd be left without access to reproductive healthcare, immigrants who need to see a doctor or understand a government form (like an immigration form), African Americans who rightly wonder what this country would look like in the absence of a civil rights act, and LGBT people who would like to get married and get access to the rights straight Americans take for granted on a daily basis, all are told, again, to wait: there are more important issues to talk about, more important problems to be solved, more life-or-death situations that we're simply ignoring out of selfishness.

Seems like there's a lot of that going around.

9 Nine Things That Makes Up This Lube Politician

As soon as the conservative ex-senator stepped into the national spotlight, critics began attacking Santorum's long history of odd claims and far-right beliefs

 

Rick Santorum is no stranger to controversial opinions, saying earlier this week, for instance, that he opposes welfare programs that "make black people's lives better." Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images 

 theweek.com

Most pundits are attributing Rick Santorum's 11th-hour Iowa sprint from the back of the Republican presidential pack to a statistical tie for first place to something Santorum did right, says Ezra Klein at The Washington Post. "But there's a simpler explanation, too: Santorum finished in the top three because he was lucky." Nobody took him seriously until mere days before Tuesday's Iowa caucuses, so Santorum never got the media scrutiny and voter vetting that sank his once-high-flying rivals. Well, people are taking Santorum seriously now, and he's getting all kinds of scrutiny. Here, nine of the zanier or more controversial things Santorum has said over the past decade:

1. Opposing birth controlQuote: "One of the things I will talk about, that no president has talked about before, is I think the dangers of contraception in this country.... Many of the Christian faith have said, well, that's okay, contraception is okay. It's not okay. It's a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be." (Speaking withCaffeinatedThoughts.com, Oct. 18, 2011)

Reaction: This is "pretty basic: Rick Santorum is coming for your contraception," says Irin Carmon at Salon. "Any and all of it." Threatening to "send the condom police into America's bedrooms" is pretty bad politics: More than 99 percent of sexually active women have used some form of birth control, and "helping people get access to birth control is actually a popular issue," supported by 82 percent of Americans. But a national contraception ban is "clearly the world Santorum wants."

2. Keeping moms at homeQuote: "In far too many families with young children, both parents are working, when, if they really took an honest look at the budget, they might find they don't both need to. ... What happened in America so that mothers and fathers who leave their children in the care of someone else — or worse yet, home alone after school between three and six in the afternoon — find themselves more affirmed by society? Here, we can thank the influence of radical feminism." (Santorum's 2005 book, It Takes a Family: Conservatism and the Common Good)

Reaction: Santorum is actually right, says Bonnie Alba at Renew America. Degrading "the stay-at-home wife and mother while idolizing women who chose careers" is "certainly part and parcel of the feminist ideology which has twisted our society into a pretzel of me-ism."

3. Re-spinning the CrusadesQuote: "The idea that the Crusades and the fight of Christendom against Islam is somehow an aggression on our part is absolutely anti-historical. And that is what the perception is by the American Left who hates Christendom. ... What I'm talking about is onward American soldiers. What we're talking about are core American values." (South Carolina campaign stop, Feb. 22, 2011)

Reaction: "If you were worried there wouldn't be a 2012 candidate touting the pro-Crusades platform, then today is your lucky day!" says Jillian Rayfield at Talking Points Memo. The religiously sanctioned European military campaigns were aimed at recapturing Jerusalem, and "along the way the Roman Catholic forces massacred thousands of Jews, among others." I know the Crusades predated the U.S. by a few centuries, but how exactly does this military campaign reflect "core American values"?

4. Rejecting the very idea of "Palestinians"Quote: "All the people who live in the West Bank are Israelis, they're not Palestinians. There is no 'Palestinian.' This is Israeli land." (Campaign stop in Iowa, Nov. 18, 2011)

Reaction: "The striking thing about his comments is that they represent an even more conservative position than that taken by the Israeli government," says Glenn Kessler at The Washington Post. Israel's anti-Palestinian position itself isn't "accepted by much of the world, but it seems that the very least a potential U.S. president could do is accept the definitions used by the Israeli government."

5. Reminding America that some view Mormonism as "a dangerous cult"Quote: "Would the potential attraction to Mormonism by simply having a Mormon in the White House threaten traditional Christianity by leading more Americans to a church that some Christians believe misleadingly calls itself Christian, is an active missionary church, and a dangerous cult?" (Santorum's Philadelphia Inquirer column, Dec. 20, 2007)

Reaction: Santorum was responding to Mitt Romney's famous speech reassuring evangelical Christians that he shares their values, and to be fair, "Santorum's ultimate verdict on Romney was more or less positive," says Dan Froomkin at The Huffington Post. But he draws plenty of "distinctions between Mormonism and Christianity that others have avoided lest they seem overly inflammatory."

6. Dissing welfare programs that "make black people's lives better"Quote: "I don't want to make black people's lives better by giving them somebody else's money; I want to give them the opportunity to go out and earn the money." (Campaign stop in Iowa, Jan. 2, 2012)

Reaction: "This is the sort of subtle racism" that should, but won't, harm Santorum among Republicans, says Steve Benen at Washington Monthly. Why did he single out black people when talking about cutting government aid?

7. Bringing race into Obama's abortion viewsQuote: "The question is — and this is what Barack Obama didn't want to answer — is that human life a person under the Constitution? And Barack Obama says no. Well if that person — human life is not a person, then — I find it almost remarkable for a black man to say, 'We're going to decide who are people and who are not people.'" (CNS News interview, Jan. 19, 2011)

Reaction: Equating fetuses to slaves got Santorum some pretty bad press,says David Weigel at Slate. But critics don't "appreciate how mainstream Santorum's point is among pro-life activists" who commonly "consider their work a continuation of other movements that protected human life and elevated the status of people whom the law doesn't consider 'human.' In the 19th century, it was African-Americans; in the 21st century, it's children in the womb."

8. Equating gay marriage to loving your mother-in-lawQuote: "Is anyone saying same-sex couples can't love each other? I love my children. I love my friends, my brother. Heck, I even love my mother-in-law. Should we call these relationships marriage, too?" (Santorum's Philadelphia Inquirer column, May 22, 2008)

Reaction: Did noted "homophobe" Santorum just admit to a "weird sexual relationship with his mother-in-law" and brother? says Michael J.W. Stickings at The Reaction. He may be atop the Republican heap, "but make no mistake about it, Santorum's still a bigot and a moron."

9. Comparing homosexuality to "man-on-dog" sexQuote: "If the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual [gay] sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything. Does that undermine the fabric of our society? I would argue yes, it does. ... That's not to pick on homosexuality. It's not, you know, man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be. It is one thing." (AP interview, April 7, 2003)

Reaction: "Rick Santorum has expended a great deal of thought and energy to finding new words to disparage gay marriage," says Daryl Lang at Breaking Copy. And even if you agree with Santorum, "would you really want a president who is this obsessed" with gay sex?