† A Teeny Weenie Scandal: With the odds against the plausibility of Rep. Anthony Weiner's explanation of events growing longer with the revelation that another woman claims to have gotten 200 explicit sext messages from the Democratic member of Congress, he held a weepy late afternoon press conference to admit that he had inappropriate online relationships – and possibly phone sex - with several women both before and after his marriage to Huma Abedin, an aide to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, but that none of them had become physical. In a modified limited hangout, Weiner explained that he claimed his Twitter account had been hacked because he panicked and wanted to avoid bringing further embarrassment to himself and hurting his wife. He said he accepted “full responsibility” for his actions but then failed to actually accept full – or any – responsibility by, you know, resigning.

† The Ultimate Terror Attack: In a new video message released on the internet Friday, American-born al Qaeda spokesman Adam Gadahn exhorts Muslims in the U.S. to each be a jihadi army of one and purchase automatic guns and start shooting, ABC News reports:

"What are you waiting for?" asks Gadahn in English, and then adds that jihadis shouldn't worry about getting caught, since so many have been released. "Over these past few years, I've seen the release of many, many Mujahideen whom I had never even dreamed would regain their freedom."

The two-part, two hour video appeared on jihadi websites Friday with images of jihadi leaders as well as snapshots of alleged underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab and accused Fort Hood shooter Major Nidal Hasan. Both Hasan and Abdulmutallab are charged with carrying out attacks inside the U.S.

Called "Do Not Rely on Others, Take the Task Upon Yourself" and produced by al Qaeda's media arm, as Sahab, the tape mixes Gadahn's new message with clips from old videos of Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and other al Qaeda leaders praising one-man attacks. They call on jihadis in the West to carry out lone wolf operations. …

"Muslims in the West have to remember that they are perfectly placed to play an important and decisive part in the Jihad against the Zionists and crusaders, and to do major damage to the enemies of Islam, waging war on their religion, sacred places, and things, and brethren," says Gadahn. "This is a golden opportunity and a blessing."

† Romney Didn’t Win Any Converts: The Washington Times suggests that former Gov. Mitt Romney's (R-MA) Mormon faith is "still a hurdle":

[F]our years after his first bid, analysts say he will once again face the same unique hurdle: his Mormon religion.

This time, though, he could have company from former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr., who also is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) and has spent the past few weeks testing the waters for a bid. …

John G. Geer, chairman of Vanderbilt University's political science department, told The Times that his studies show that while there has been a steep decline in prejudice against many groups in the United States, that hasn't been the case with Mormons, Muslims or atheists.

"This would drop down once people realize that a lot of the stereotypes out there are not founded," Mr. Geer said. "But it's a puzzle because we have this big decline in bias in a lot of ways - bias against women is down, as well as bias against Latinos and African-Americans, but the bias against Mormons is still there."

He pointed to a recent Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll that shows less than 50 percent of those surveyed said they would be comfortable with a Mormon running for president.

Evangelicals, fundamentalists and other traditional-leaning Christians widely consider the LDS Church not to be a Christian body - claiming it either denies or unrecognizably redefines such Christian doctrines as the Trinity, original sin, the atonement, the continuity of the church and the canon of Scripture.

For this reason, The Washington Post wonders, "Can a Mormon candidate win over the Republican evangelical base?":

Conservative Christians constitute a crucial part of the GOP base, one that can win elections if they are motivated to turn out. They represented as much as a third of all those who showed up to vote in the 2010 election that returned the House to Republican control, according to analyses of exit polls. …

A Pew Research Center poll released Thursday showed how this could be a problem. While one in four of the 1,509 surveyed overall said they would be less likely to support a presidential candidate if he or she is a Mormon, the percentage among white evangelical respondents was 34 percent - the highest of any religious group. By comparison, only 19 percent of Catholics and white mainline Protestants said they would be more reluctant to support a Mormon.

† Updates To Previous Posts (last item, A To Z Approach On Illegal Immigration In AZ):

The Republican-controlled AL legislature passed an bill to curb illegal immigration that’s expected to be signed into law by Gov. Robert Bentley (R), The New York Times reports:

“Alabama is now the new No. 1 state for immigration enforcement,” said Kris Kobach, a constitutional lawyer who is secretary of state in Kansas. He has helped write many state bills to curtail illegal immigration, including Alabama’s. …

The Alabama bill includes a provision similar to one that stirred controversy in Arizona, authorizing state and local police officers to ask about the immigration status of anyone they stop based on a “reasonable suspicion” the person is an illegal immigrant. Federal courts have suspended most of that Arizona law.

Alabama’s bill goes beyond Arizona’s. It bars illegal immigrants from enrolling in any public college after high school. It obliges public schools to determine the immigration status of all students, requiring parents of foreign-born students to report the immigration status of their children.

The bill requires Alabama’s public schools to publish figures on the number of immigrants - both legal and illegal - who are enrolled and on any costs associated with the education of illegal immigrant children.

The bill, known as H.B. 56, also makes it a crime to knowingly rent housing to an illegal immigrant. It bars businesses from taking tax deductions on wages paid to unauthorized immigrants.

“This is a jobs-creation bill for Americans,” said Representative Micky Hammon, a Republican who was a chief sponsor of the bill. “We really want to prevent illegal immigrants from coming to Alabama and to prevent those who are here from putting down roots,” he said.

† Updates To Previous Posts (third item, King Of The Heels): The campaign finance and conspiracy charges against former presidential candidate John Edwards may not be a slam dunk, The AmLaw Daily blog reports. For one thing, the case was fobbed off on the local U.S. attorney's office in Raleigh, NC, instead of being handled by the DOJ. Also, misuse of campaign funds cases are difficult to prove and the one against Edwards is based on a novel theory without precedent in federal election law.

† Updates To Previous Posts (third item, Media Irrelevancy – A Self-Inflicted Wound): The Washington Times’ Emily Miller argues that the six-count indictment today against former presidential candidate John Edwards “vindicate the story that the National Enquirer broke four and a half years ago,” and that the paper should have been honored with a Pulitzer Prize for its reportage:

Executive Editor Barry Levine oversaw the Enquirer's team of reporters and photographers who relentlessly pursued the story that turned out to be a blockbuster. "It's been a long road and today's indictment is vindication that this little supermarket tabloid exposed this massive cover-up," Mr. Levine told The Washington Times. "We did our job. We got the facts right on this from the get-go. It's amazing and a shame that the mainstream media couldn't have followed our lead and pursued the story." …

In December 2007, the Enquirer printed a photo of an eight-month pregnant Rielle Hunter and alleged that Mr. Edwards was not being fully honest about what happened. It reported campaign aide Andrew Young paid for Miss Hunter to move into a gated community in North Carolina. "We first said hush money was being paid to Andrew and Rielle to cover this thing up," Mr. Levine explained. While on the presidential campaign trail, Mr. Edwards denied the affair and cover-up, saying, "The story is false, it's completely untrue, ridiculous." …

Reporters on the campaign bus with the candidate did not purse the story, but the Enquirer kept on it throughout 2008. Mr. Levine said that during that period, he was "just flabbergasted" that no one else followed up. "Here was a guy running for president who was betraying his cancer-stricken wife and his own campaign workers. If the mainstream media didn't want to believe us, investigate yourselves. We literally drew a map to the people involved and no one wanted to go down that road." …

[T]he self-appointed media elite who run the Pulitzer committee did not give the paper even a mention in the prizes. The previous year, The New York Times won for its work exposing the Eliot Spitzer sex scandal, which did not end in criminal charges - instead he got his own show on CNN.

† Updates To Previous Posts (fourth item, A Conservative Playwright Comes Out (And Lives To Tell About It): The revelations in conservative columnist Ben Shapiro new book, “Prime Time Propaganda: The True Hollywood Story of How the Left Took Over Your TV,” prompted prominent Hollywood conservative producer Lionel Chetwynd to quit his membership in the Caucus for Producers, Writers and Directors, which was formed to promote “open dialogue among professional creatives and those who distribute their work in the interest of promoting diverse quality independent programming content,” New York Times blog Media Decoder reports:

Mr. Chetwynd cited remarks by Vin Di Bono, a fellow steering committee member whose credits include “America’s Funniest Home Videos” and “MacGyver.” In a recorded interview with Mr. Shapiro, Mr. Di Bona said it was “probably accurate” that scripted television reflects a liberal bias, and that he was “happy about it, actually.” …

“Those comments make clear that views held dearly and passionately by me, and my sense of the American story, render me unsuitable for continued membership,” wrote Mr. Chetwynd, who had been instrumental in presenting conservative-leaning politicians like Eric Cantor and Tom Ridge before the Caucus. “What I now understand is the disgust was not for their views, but for their very person,” Mr. Chetwynd wrote.

† Updates To Previous Posts (fifth item, Mortgage Loan Modification Less Than Advertised: Unless President Barack Hussein Obama can reverse the slide in housing prices – especially in swing states – he will be a one-term wonder, The Washington Post reports:

Past economic troughs may have been characterized by old cities with idled assembly lines and abandoned factories. This one is defined by places such as Flagler [FL] where half-built subdivisions have little hope of ever being filled and thousands of carpenters, landscapers, mortgage brokers, furniture salespeople and interior designers thrown out of work have little hope of regaining their jobs. …

Reversing the economic decline fueled by the housing bust is a paramount test for President Obama as he campaigns for reelection. The president’s challenge is particularly pressing in potential swing states such as Florida, Nevada and Arizona, where stubborn joblessness and the pain from the collapse in real estate is most acute.

It is in these places where Obama will face pointed questions from voters who think the administration’s policies have done little to make things better. …

The economic uncertainty is producing political volatility. Two years after voting for Obama in 2008, voters in Flagler and across Florida cast majorities for tea party Republican Rick Scott for governor, largely on his promise to create 700,000 jobs and reduce the size of state government.

So far, Scott is making good on part of his promise. The state has created 73,000 jobs since he took office in January, and the jobless rate has dipped by 1.1 points, in part because the number of Floridians looking for work has shrunk by nearly 33,000 people since January.

Obama appears clueless about how to fix the housing market, so his Plan B is to redistribute taxpayer income to buy the support of these voters by reducing the amount they owe on their mortgages through principal reduction.

† Updates To Previous Posts (eighth item, Rearranging The Deck Chairs): Johnson & Johnson, which prides itself on its “sustainability” but has otherwise little else to be proud of in its corporate  conduct suffered another black eye and hit to its bottom line when a judge in SC ordered the company’s Ortho-McNeil-Janssen Pharmaceuticals unit to pay more than $327 million in penalties for deceptive marketing of antipsychotic drug Risperdal, Bloomberg news reports:

[J&J] violated the state’s consumer-protection laws by sending a 2003 letter to doctors touting Risperdal as superior to rival drugs and including deceptive information in the product’s warning label, Judge Roger Couch in Spartanburg, South Carolina, concluded. …

The state’s case centered on drug-safety claims that J&J and Janssen made in November 2003 correspondence to about 700,000 doctors across the U.S., including more than 7,000 in South Carolina.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration responded with a warning letter saying J&J made false and misleading claims that minimized the potentially fatal risks of diabetes and overstated the drug’s superiority to competing products. …

[Couch] concluded penalties were warranted for 7,180 letters Janssen officials mailed to physicians in the state along with another 36,372 instances in which the drugmaker’s salespeople used the missive to market Risperdal in person, according to court records.

Couch awarded South Carolina a total of $174.2 million in penalties over the letter based on a rate of $4,000 per violation of the state’s consumer-protection laws, according to his ruling.

He also found 509,499 sample boxes of Risperdal distributed in the state contained labels with deceptive materials that warranted penalties. The judge awarded the state $152.8 million in penalties over the label at a rate of $300 per violation. …

Janssen official said yesterday they’ll appeal Couch’s order and maintained the company fully disclosed Risperdal’s health risks and properly marketed the antipsychotic medicine.

Similar lawsuits have been filed in other states with mixed results. J&J was ordered to pay $257.7 million in damages plus $73 million in legal fees to LA last October. But a suit against J&J filed in PA was recently dismissed, and a 2009 verdict against the company in WV was overturned on appeal. 

† Updates To Previous Posts (last item, 10 Reasons Michelle Obama Should Be Proud – Really Proud – Of America): This latest installment in The Stiletto Blog’s ongoing series meant to help instill the necessary pride of country in Michelle Obama’s consciousness to enable her to serve as an unofficial ambassador focuses on Diane Granito, who was hired by NM's Children, Youth and Families Department, and came up with an idea to recruit foster and adoptive parents that has led to a national organization, has been replicated in other states and has resulted in 5,000 adoptions, Reuters reports:

Granito, the adoption events manager for New Mexico's Children, Youth and Families Department, asked some of the state's most talented photographers to help capture the beauty and spirit of the state's foster children. A large-scale art show at a local gallery would help spread the word, she thought.

This weekend marks 10 years since the first exhibition of the Heart Gallery. There are now 130 different Heart Gallery organizations around the country, and two recently started in Ontario, Canada.

Granito recently launched a national organization, Heart Gallery of America, and hopes to expand in Europe.

That first exhibition of the Heart Gallery broke gallery records, drawing more than 1,200 people to Santa Fe's upscale Gerald Peters Gallery in a single evening. On display were 50 various-sized photos of children who had been removed from their homes because of abuse or neglect and were looking for their forever families.

"When I walked into that gallery and saw all those beautiful portraits looking at me, I knew we were on to something," Granito told Reuters. …

Indeed, six children were matched with families that first night, including a group of three siblings and one child who was adopted by a photographer who was asked to take portraits. …

Nationally, about half a million children are in foster care, and about 119,000 of those cannot go home again because their parents' rights have been terminated, Granito said.