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Is anyone surprised about a flip-flop on gay marriage?

President Obama today announced that he now supports same-sex marriage, reversing his longstanding opposition amid growing pressure from the Democratic base and even his own vice president.

In an interview with ABC News’ Robin Roberts, the president described his thought process as an “evolution” that led him to this place, based on conversations with his own staff members, openly gay and lesbian service members, and conversations with his wife and own daughters.

“I have to tell you that over the course of several years as I have talked to friends and family and neighbors when I think about members of my own staff who are in incredibly committed monogamous relationships, same-sex relationships, who are raising kids together, when I think about those soldiers or airmen or marines or sailors who are out there fighting on my behalf and yet feel constrained, even now that Don’t Ask Don’t Tell is gone, because they are not able to commit themselves in a marriage, at a certain point I’ve just concluded that for me personally it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same sex couples should be able to get married,” Obama told Roberts, in an interview to appear on ABC’s “Good Morning America” Thursday. Excerpts of the interview will air tonight on ABC’s “World News with Diane Sawyer.”

The president stressed that this is a personal position, and that he still supports the concept of states deciding the issue on their own. But he said he’s confident that more Americans will grow comfortable with gays and lesbians getting married, citing his own daughters’ comfort with the concept.

So, President Obama whose one in six of his political campaign cash bundlers are gay suddenly gets religion. Is this too cynical?

I mean, really, is there anyone out there who did not think Obama favored same sex or gay, homosexual marriage?

Well, this certainly will be a contrast with Mitt Romney who supports traditional marriage. But Obama for what it is worth hedged a bit by saying his position is like Republican Dick Cheney’s – he supports the state’s right to define marriage.

Here is the video link.

So much for President Obama’s reset of Russian foreign policy.

Russia’s most senior military officer said Thursday that Moscow would preemptively strike and destroy U.S.-led NATO missile defense sites in Eastern Europe if talks with Washington about the developing system continue to stall.

“A decision to use destructive force preemptively will be taken if the situation worsens,” Russian Chief of General Staff Nikolai Makarov said at an international missile defense conference in Moscow attended by senior U.S. and NATO officials.

The threat comes as talks about the missile defense system, which the U.S. and its allies insist is aimed at Iranian missiles, appear to have stalled.

“We have not been able to find mutually-acceptable solutions at this point and the situation is practically at a dead end,” Russian Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov said.

Ellen Tauscher, the U.S. special envoy for strategic stability and missile defense, insisted the talks about NATO plans for a missile defense system using ground-based interceptor missiles stationed in Poland, Romania and Turkey were not stalemated.

But she acknowledged Wednesday that the recent elections in Russia and the upcoming elections in the U.S. make it “pretty clear that this is a year in which we’re probably not going to achieve any sort of a breakthrough.”

She reiterated that the U.S.-built system, still in development, is being designed to shoot down Iranian intermediate-range missiles aimed at Europe, not Russian intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs).

Yeah, Yeah, Russia is afraid of missile defense as they always have been since Reagan. And, President Obama and the Democrats in the Congress hate the program.

Just watch Obama capitulate and Romney to jump all over the President, especially since Obama made those flexibility remarks..

Michael Angelo Morales

I am a few days late to this story, but at least someone (her brother) is trying to obtain justice for Terri Lynn Winchell.

The killer of a woman brutally murdered more than 30 years ago still sits on death row. The victim’s brother is suing to resume executions in California. The lawsuit seeks to end the legal logjam that has put a hold on executions at San Quentin State Prison for six years. The delays involve questions over the use of lethal injections.

More than 700 inmates sit on California’s death row. Not one has been executed in six years. Former governors Pete Wilson and George Deukmejian are on a team of lawyers seeking to help the families of murdered victims.

“I get sick to my stomach,” said Bradley Winchell, the victim’s brother. “I am asking this court to set it right.”

Bradley Winchell says he’s been waiting more than three decades for closure. His sister Terri was brutally murdered and raped in 1981 in a Lodi vineyard.

Her convicted killer, Michael Morales, sits on San Quentin’s death row and is one of 14 inmates who have exhausted all their appeals.

But just as Morales was about to be executed in 2006, a judge granted a reprieve, allowing Morales’s lawsuit to move forward after he claimed the three-drug lethal injection method was cruel and unusual punishment.

Winchell just filed a lawsuit of his own, saying he’s waited long enough. He wants the state to resume executions by moving to a one-drug process currently used in other states.

“I consider 31 years excessive delay, injury to not only myself but my family,” said Winchell.

California’s death penalty has been criticized for many years. Delays often result in decades passing before an execution is carried out.

“It’s a sad state of affairs when those officials with the duty to execute the law care so little about the rights of victims of crime,” said Kent Scheidegger, Criminal Justice Legal Foundation.

In the meantime, an initiative qualified yesterday and California voters yet again will be asked to vote on whether the death penalty will continue in the state. I, frankly, think that California voters will approve the death penalty – as they have each time.

Here is a video of a news report that tells the story:

This Californian demands justice for Terri Lynn:

Terri Lynn Winchell

The California Department of Corrections needs to speedily change its execution protocol and get on with it.

Michael Morales would then be one of the first to go:

Michael Angelo Morales current photo

Justice for Terri Lynn!

Previous:

The Death Penalty Archive

While the California Republican Party has endorsed Elizabeth Emken for California United State Senate, the more conservative California Republican Assembly has just announced their endorsement for businessman, Al Ramirez.

Republican U.S. Senate candidate Al Ramirez, an accomplished businessman, received the endorsement of the California Republican Assembly (CRA) at the group’s endorsing convention on Sunday.

“I’m incredibly pleased and honored to have the support of the State’s oldest and largest Republican volunteer organization,” said Ramirez.  ”The endorsement of the CRA demonstrates that our message is resonating with Republicans across the State.  We simply cannot afford more of the same socialistic policies of Feinstein and Obama.  It’s time to restore the American Dream in California.”

The CRA endorsement is one of the most coveted in all of Republican politics.  Ronald Reagan even referred to the CRA as “The conscience of the Republican Party.”

Candidates seeking the CRA endorsement went through a rigorous vetting process which included giving speeches to the entire delegation and facing a session of tough questioning in front of a “Fact Finding Committee.”  In order to receive an endorsement, a candidate must be supported by two-thirds of the voting delegates.

Ramirez was endorsed overwhelmingly by a vote of the entire CRA delegation late Sunday morning.

This endorsement has to deliver a decided edge to Ramirez, especially with so many candidates in the race vying to run against the front-runner and incumbent Senator Dianne Feinstein.

Millions of dollars were embezzled from her campaign. Twenty-two challengers are trying to knock her off in the June primary. And the stakes in the November election are nothing less than control of Capitol Hill.

But U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein isn’t a bit worried. Her campaign is on cruise control, her re-election all but certain — yet again.

After holding elected office for all but five of the last 42 years, Feinstein is the doyenne of California Democrats. She’s so politically bulletproof that no A-list candidates are wasting their time and money trying to dethrone her.

At 78, Feinstein has become the rare lawmaker who plays to her own political base while not overly riling her opponents. “She should have her easiest re-election ever,” said Gary Jacobson, a UC San Diego political science professor.

Feinstein, who won her last two elections in landslides, attributes her success to her work ethic and her ability to get along with fellow Washington politicians during venomous times. “I am known for working hard, and I can tell you if I wasn’t, I would have some major opposition,” Feinstein said in an interview last week.

Just how little she has to worry about was shown in a recent Survey USA poll. It found 51 percent of California’s likely voters intend to vote for Feinstein, while Republicans Elizabeth Emken of Danville and Dan Hughes of Oceanside were backed by 2 percent each. All other candidates clocked in at either 1 percent or zero.

But, will this endorsement be enough for Ramirez to come in second place above Elizbeth Emken and Dan Hughes?

The exterior of a building housing the Jyllands-Posten Copenhagen office is seen. Four Swedes accused of plotting a revenge attack on the Jyllands-Posten newspaper that printed caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad have gone on trial

The trial is set to last until June 15.

Four men went on trial in Denmark on Friday accused of planning a “Mumbai-style” terror attack on the offices of a Danish newspaper whose publication of cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad in 2005 outraged many Muslims.

The men, three Swedish citizens and one Tunisian, pleaded not guilty to involvement in the worst terrorist plot in Denmark to date, denying allegations they had planned to kill a large number of people at the offices of the paper, Jyllands-Posten.

“It is our perception that an unknown number of people were to be killed by shooting,” Chief Prosecutor Gyrithe Ulrich told TV2 News outside the courthouse in Glostrup, near Copenhagen.

Jyllands-Posten was the first to print a dozen cartoons lampooning Islam in 2005, triggering protests against Danish interests abroad and riots in countries from the Middle East and Africa to Asia the following year in which at least 50 people died.

Denmark’s state security police (PET) has said the planned attack was modelled on a 2008 shooting spree in Mumbai, when 10 Pakistani gunmen killed 166 people in a three-day assault at city landmarks, including two hotels and a Jewish centre.

The men belonged to a militant Islamist group and had links to international terrorist networks, the PET has said.

On trial are Mounir Ben Mohamed Dhahri, a Tunisian, and three Swedish citizens – Lebanese-born Munir Awad, Swedish-born Omar Abdalla Aboelazm, and Sahbi Ben Mohamed Zalouti, of Tunisian origin.

The four were arrested in a joint Danish-Swedish police operation in the suburbs of Copenhagen and Stockholm on Dec. 29, 2010. Police, who had been tracking the men for some time, have said that the attack was imminent “within days”.

All four pleaded not guilty to the main charge of terrorism, but Dhari pleaded guilty to the charge of illegally possessing weapons, which the others denied.

Another account of the trial beginning is here.

Again, this terrorist attack was planned because of this cartoon, among the others:

The Muhammed Cartoons Archive.