Florida’s WFTV is reporting that the FBI May Charge George Zimmerman With a Hate Crime.

SANFORD, Fla. —  WFTV has learned charges against George Zimmerman could be getting more serious.

State prosecutors said Zimmerman, a neighborhood watchman, profiled and stalked 17-year-old Trayvon Martin before killing him, so the FBI is now looking into charging him with a hate crime.

Zimmerman admitted to killing Martin in February during a confrontation. However, he claims the shooting was in self-defense. He’s facing a second-degree murder charge, which carries a maximum possible sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole. But if Zimmerman is charged and found guilty of a federal hate crime involving murder, he could face the death penalty.

FBI investigators are actively questioning witnesses in the retreat at the Twin Lakes neighborhood, seeking evidence for a possible federal hate crime charge.

The state of Missouri inducted Rush Limbaugh into their “Hall of Famous Missourians” yesterday, at an invitation-only ceremony closed to the public and guarded by armed members of the Highway Patrol: Doors Locked, Dems Banned as Missouri Honors Limbaugh.

Rush Limbaugh was inducted into the Hall of Famous Missourians yesterday, but the whole affair seemed strangely cloaked in secrecy.

The AM talker was ushered into an invite-only ceremony that took place behind closed doors inside the State Capitol’s House chambers, “which were locked and guarded by armed members of the Missouri Highway Patrol while the ceremony took place,” according to the Kansas City Star.  Democratic lawmakers were banned from the induction.  

A bust of Limbaugh, a Cape Girardeau native, was unveiled at the Hall of Fame ceremony. But for the first time in memory the chamber galleries were closed to the public. And the Republican Speaker of the Missouri House, Steve Tilley, who selected Limbaugh for the honor, gave the media just twenty minutes notice before the event took place. 

The hush-hush nature of the event, which more closely resembled a clandestine political event than a feel-good acknowledgement, likely stemmed from the extraordinary controversy the selection sparked. Owing to Limbaugh’s growing toxicity outside the narrow confines of right-wing talk radio, the backlash to the Missouri announcement was swift and fierce, coming as it did directly on the heels of Limbaugh’s searing Sandra Fluke controversy.

Here’s the President on ABC’s ‘The View’ this morning, talking about Joe Biden, gay marriage, and what’s going to be important in the election.

Not one, but two new national polls show that Americans are increasingly comfortable with same-sex relationships and unions:

CBS News/New York Times Poll: Most Americans Support Same-Sex Unions:

Overall, 38 percent of those who responded to the survey said same-sex couples should be allowed to marry, just like any other couple. Another 24 percent said civil unions should be used to grant same-sex couples legal rights similar to male-female partnerships. Combined, that means 62 percent - close to two thirds - of Americans believe that same-sex unions should be recognized by law.

Of all those who participated, 33 percent said there should be no legal recognition for same-sex couples.

One of the most striking figures revealed by the survey comes when the responses are broken down by age. Americans between the ages of 18 and 44 are far more likely than people 45 and older to support full marriage rights for same-sex couples.

Gallup Poll: U.S. Acceptance of Gay/Lesbian Relations Is the New Normal:

PRINCETON, NJ — The slight majority of American adults, 54%, consider gay or lesbian relations morally acceptable. Public acceptance of gay/lesbian relations as morally acceptable grew slowly but steadily from 38% in 2002 to 56% in 2011 and is now holding at the majority level.

This Gallup trend mirrors the growth in public support for legalizing gay marriage, which has risen from 42% support in 2004 to 50% or greater support in the last two years. Americans’ support for gay rights on both questions leveled off in this year’s Values and Beliefs poll, conducted May 3-6.

Gallup’s longer-term question measuring U.S. attitudes about gays asks whether gay or lesbian relations should or should not be legal. The 63% now saying gay relations should be legal nearly matches the record-high 64% of a year ago, which came after a long-term increase in support for legality from 32% in 1986.

Where does GOP presumptive nominee Mitt Romney stand on foreign policy? That’s a question that even his advisers are asking. He went and said that we shouldn’t negotiate with the Taliban and that we should defeat the Taliban, even as many of his advisers and supporters are looking at a negotiated end to the fighting in Afghanistan — a political settlement.

Set aside for the moment that many of Mr. Romney’s supporters and foreign policy advisers argue that after a decade at war, the only option is a political settlement, which means talking to some elements of the Taliban. Stephen Hadley, the former national security adviser to George W. Bush, has argued this ‘would not — as some have suggested — constitute ‘surrender’ to America’s enemies.’ A co-chairman of Mr. Romney’s working group on Afghanistan and Pakistan, James Shinn, who also served Mr. Bush, was co-author of perhaps the best single unclassified document on the complexities of those negotiations, entitled ‘Afghan Peace Talks: A Primer.’ It argued that a negotiated deal would ‘obviously be desirable’ if elements of the Taliban could be persuaded to renounce violence and take ‘some role in Afghan governance short of total control.’

It was just one example of what Mr. Romney’s advisers call a perplexing pattern: Dozens of subtle position papers flow through the candidate’s policy shop and yet seem to have little influence on Mr. Romney’s hawkish-sounding pronouncements, on everything from war to nuclear proliferation to the trade-offs in dealing with China. In the Afghanistan case, ‘none of us could quite figure out what he was advocating,’ one of Mr. Romney’s advisers said. He insisted on anonymity — as did a half-dozen others interviewed over the past two weeks — because the Romney campaign has banned any discussion of the process by which the candidate formulates his positions.

‘It begged the obvious question,’ the adviser added. ‘Do we stay another decade? How many forces, and how long, does that take? Do we really want to go into the general election telling Americans that we should stay a few more years to eradicate the whole Taliban movement?’ In phase one of a long presidential campaign, Mr. Romney could duck those questions: the spotlight moved to the wisdom of the economic stimulus and the auto-industry bailout, contraception and, now, same-sex marriage and high school bullying.

It’s one thing to sound tough and make definitive statements that somehow distinguish oneself from the President and his foreign policy positions. It’s quite another to find that those positions don’t even hold up to closer scrutiny within the party, let alone in the general election campaign.

Some of this is ongoing fallout from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and trying to figure out the direction for American foreign policy in coming years — assessing threats, how and where to use military power and other foreign policy efforts to achieve strategic and tactical interests for the US and its allies, and how to reconcile competing interests in places like Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The ongoing row over Iran’s nuclear ambitions is a case in point. Romney wants people to believe that if President Obama is reelected Iran will have a nuclear weapon, but if Romney’s elected they will be thwarted. That flies in the face of the evidence that shows Iran will continue working towards nuclear weapons regardless of who is in the White House, and that unless there’s concerted military action against multiple targets within Iran, there’s not much the US or anyone else could do to stop Iranian nuclear ambitions.

Sanctions can only do so much, and once you shine a light on Romney’s actual policy choices on Iran, there’s not much there there. His silence and ambiguity on the subject masks the fact that the US faces a situation with no good outcomes and few positive alternatives.

Negotiations and working with the EU and Russia will have to continue, and a multilateral position may not keep Iran from going nuclear, but it will make taking action down the line easier than if the US takes the unilateral approach.

Thus, he’s left with trying to claim that he’ll somehow do things differently without actually saying what his different actions would be.

When Wisconsin GOP Senate Candidate Jeff Fitzgerald decided to use a song by the Dropkick Murphys as walk-on music, the band was not amused.

“The stupidity and irony of this is laughable,” the band wrote. “A Wisconsin Republican U.S. Senate candidate - and crony of anti-Union Governor Scott Walker - using a Dropkick Murphys song as an intro is like a white supremacist coming out to gangsta rap!”

This complaint led Fitzgerald to utter today’s quote of the day:

“I like their music, and that’s the song from ‘The Departed.’ I always liked the beginning of that song. My last name is Fitzgerald,” he said. “We Republicans don’t have a lot of songs we can choose from.”

There’s always Toby Keith.

The new advertisement from the Obama campaign takes direct aim at Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital, with the story of GST Steel — a company laid waste by Bain’s predatory business practices.

The right wing already has their talking point ready to go for this story: Romney left Bain Capital before GST Steel declared bankruptcy.

But while this is true, it doesn’t come close to telling the whole story: Retirement Deal Keeps Bain Money Flowing to Romney.

Almost 13 years ago, Mitt Romney left Bain Capital, the successful private equity firm he had helped start, and moved to Utah to rescue the Salt Lake City Olympic Games and begin a second career in public life.

Yet when it came to his considerable personal wealth, Mr. Romney never really left Bain.

In what would be the final deal of his private equity career, he negotiated a retirement agreement with his former partners that has paid him a share of Bain’s profits ever since, bringing the Romney family millions of dollars in income each year and bolstering the fortune that has helped finance Mr. Romney’s political aspirations.

The arrangement allowed Mr. Romney to pursue his career in public life while enjoying much of the financial upside of being a Bain partner as the company grew into a global investing behemoth.

In the process, Bain continued to buy and restructure companies, potentially leaving Mr. Romney exposed to further criticism that he has grown wealthier over the last decade partly as a result of layoffs. Moreover, much of his income from the arrangement has probably qualified for a lower tax rate than ordinary income under a tax provision favorable to hedge fund and private equity managers, which has become a point of contention in the battle over economic inequality.

(h/t: Gus.)

I guess it’s going to be like this until November — every day a new bogus outrage for the right wing blogs to hysterically scream about.

Here’s today’s blatantly dishonest post at Breitbart.com by one of their hackiest writers, Ben Shapiro: WRIGHT: OBAMA TRIED TO BRIBE ME TO KEEP QUIET IN 2008.

No, Ben, that is not what Rev. Wright said to the New York Post. The Post, of course, also misrepresents their own story, but notice that their headline isn’t quite as egregious as Shapiro’s overheated version: Obama Team Tried to ‘Bribe’ Jeremiah Wright to Keep Quiet: Book - NYPOST.com.

The facts as reported in this article: Rev. Wright claims that an email was sent to a member of his church, offering him $150,000 to “not preach at all until the November election.”

Wright does not say the email was sent by Obama or the “Obama team,” he says it came from “one of Barack’s closest friends.” Even if (and that’s a big “if”) Wright’s story is true, there’s no evidence at all that this offer came from the Obama campaign.

‘Man, the media ate me alive,” Wright told me when we met in his office at Chicago’s Kwame Nkrumah Academy. “After the media went ballistic on me, I received an e-mail offering me money not to preach at all until the November presidential election.”

“Who sent the e-mail?” I asked Wright.

“It was from one of Barack’s closest friends.”

“He offered you money?”

“Not directly,” Wright said. “He sent the offer to one of the members of the church, who sent it to me.”

“How much money did he offer you?”

“One hundred and fifty thousand dollars,” Wright said.

The Post’s headline is bad enough, because the article contradicts its claim that the “Obama team” offered money to Wright. But Ben Shapiro’s Breitbart.com headline takes it a step further and says Obama himself tried to “bribe” Wright.

Again we see the right wing blogs in a frenzied uproar over a bogus report that they’re hyping and distorting even beyond the New York Post’s already distorted version.

And of course, if Rev. Wright had said something positive about President Obama, they’d all be calling him a liar.