Good morning — and a happy 89th to Yogi Berra. Known as much for his quirky quotes as his Hall of Fame career with the Yankees, Berra insists: “I never said most of the things I said.” And we know exactly what he means.
Dangerous ignorance –> Wyoming became the first state to reject new K-12 science standards over objections to its treatment of climatology as hard science. Bob Moen reports for Time. ALSO: Marco Rubio said on “This Week” that he thinks it’s an “enormous stretch” to attribute current weather incidents to climate change. ALSO, TOO: Paul Krugman predicts that forthcoming EPA rules are going to unleash a ton of “crazy climate economics” from polluters’ conservative allies.
“Substantial gaps in oversight” –> A new report from the Government Accountability Office says the government “failed to inspect thousands of at-risk oil and gas wells,” according to the AP (via The Guardian).
BENGHAZI! is a distraction from Obamacare –> The Hill’s Elise Viebeck reports: “not a single House committee has announced plans to attack the healthcare law in the coming weeks.”
Related –> At TNR, Ari Rabin-Havt reports that House Oversight Committee Chair Darrell Issa has parlayed his endless supply of faux scandals into “one of the most successful and impressive direct mail operations in the House of Representatives” — and raked in millions in campaign contributions in the process.
“Freedom” isn’t the only thing our wars spread –> Simeon Bennett, Khurrum Anis and Augustine Anthony report for Bloomberg that polio, measles and typhoid are on the rise in Pakistan since the US used a fake vaccination campaign to unearth Osama Bin Laden. The Pakistani Taliban also banned vaccinations “in retaliation for US drone strikes.”
A rock and a hard place –> Juan Tamayo has an interesting story in The Miami Herald about the fate of elderly Cuban exiles who were captured decades ago mounting attacks against the Castro regime. Now out of jail, the US won’t allow them to return because they had been terrorists, and the Cubans make their lives miserable.
“The most extreme voices of the day” –> House Majority Leader Eric Cantor was “booed and heckled” by tea party activists at an event just a few miles from his home. The tea partiers also rejected Cantor’s choice to head up his district’s Republican committee. Jenna Portnoy reports for WaPo.
What Piketty left out –> Salon’s Thomas Frank thinks Capital in the Twenty-First Century “destroys right-wing lies” about inequality, but fails to appreciate the role union-busting played in bringing about our new Gilded Age.
Not lovin’ it –> At MoJo, Kiera Butler tells of attending an annual convention of nutritionists that was catered by McDonald’s.
They don’t have a First Amendment –> A British man was visited by the police after tweeting out a “fact-check” of claims made by the UK’s far-right UKIP Party. No further action was taken, but the man claims police told him he couldn’t tweet about their investigation. Jon Stone reports for Buzzfeed.
Change of heart –> One of George Zimmerman’s staunchest defenders — a former neighbor who served on the same neighborhood watch — says he now believes Zimmerman racially profiled Trayvon Martin, who would be alive today were he “a white kid on a cell phone, walking through our neighborhood.” Tom Boggioni reports for The Raw Story.
Practical advice –> Jesse Emspak at LiveScience: “How to build a gamma-ray laser with antimatter” (via Fox News).
