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Gov. Bill Haslam hired an amazingly talented business attorney to serve as the international director to handle the Tennessee Department of Economic and Community Development’s new focus on expanding the state’s overseas exports.

The new hire, Samar Ali, is a Tennessee native, Vanderbilt law graduate, a recent White House Fellow, a former associate attorney at Hogan Lovells and has one of the most impressive resumes of international humanitarian service I’ve ever seen.

She’s also Muslim.

As a result, several county Republican groups and a Tea Party group went berserk and began churning out petitions and resolutions calling for Ali to step down and for Haslam to receive “appropriate action.”

A couple of resolutions also condemn Haslam for allowing “open homosexuals to make policy decisions in the Department of Children’s Services.”

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“The effect is something like when you are driving a car and the photons from your headlights are pushing you backward. It is very subtle,” said Dr Slava Turyshev of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena and lead author of a paper published in the June 12 issue of the journal Physical Review Letters (arXiv.org).

[Quote]:

Investigators for an Arizona sheriff’s volunteer posse have declared that President Barack Obama’s birth certificate is definitely fraudulent.

Members of Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s posse said in March that there was probable cause that Obama’s long-form birth certificate released by the White House in April 2011 was a computer-generated forgery.

Now, Arpaio says investigators are positive it’s fraudulent.

Okay, that’s it. I’ve added a “batshitinsane” category for these kind of news reports.

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People in South Africa and across the world are celebrating Nelson Mandela’s 94th birthday by dedicating 67 minutes of their time to help others.

He’s been in politics (including prison) for 67 years.

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To Rush Limbaugh, it can’t be a coincidence. The villain in the new Batman film, “The Dark Knight Rises,” is named “Bane.” The name of Mitt Romney’s old private-equity firm? Bain Capital.

“Do you think that it is accidental that the name of the really vicious fire breathing four eyed whatever it is villain in this movie is named Bain [sic]?” Limbaugh asked on his radio show today, according to a transcript of the audio on his show’s website.

But the character Bane first appeared in Batman comics in 1993. The Bane character in “The Dark Knight Rises” was chosen in early 2011.

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Some schools in England have opted out of the HPV vaccination programme because their pupils “follow strict Christian principles” and “do not practise sex outside marriage”.

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Turns out it’s legal to have a weapon of mass conception at the airport.

Explanation: How do galaxies like our Milky Way form?Since our universe moves too slowly to watch, faster-moving computer simulations are created to help find out. Green depicts (mostly) hydrogen gas in the above movie, while time is shown in billions of years since the Big Bang on the lower right.Pervasive dark matter is present but not shown.As the simulation begins, ambient gas falls into and accumulates in regions of relatively high gravity. Soon numerous proto-galaxies form, spin, and begin to merge. After about four billion years, a well-defined center materializes that dominates a region about 100,000 light-years across and starts looking like a modern disk galaxy.After a few billion more years, however, this early galaxy collides with another, all while streams of gas from other mergers rain down on this strange and fascinating cosmic dance.As the simulation reaches half the current age of the universe, a single larger disk develops.Even so, gas blobs — some representing small satellite galaxies — fall into and become absorbed by the rotating galaxy as the present epoch is reached and the movie ends. For our Milky Way Galaxy, however, big mergers may not be over — recent evidence indicates that our large spiral disk Galaxy will collide and coalesce with the slightly larger Andromeda spiral disk galaxy in the next few billion years.

[Quote]:

The ads, which started airing yesterday, feature testimonials from former workers at GST Steel and Ampad, companies bought by [Romney]‘s former firm, Bain Capital. The ads accuse Romney of laying off workers and denying them health benefits.

Romney, speaking at a City Year volunteer event in Dorchester, said he had no role in those decisions. He said he was on leave from Bain Capital, running for the US Senate in 1994, when the company acquired Ampad. And at the time of the GST Steel layoffs, he said, he was on leave again, organizing the 2002 Winter Olympics. From February 1999 until now, Romney said, he had “no association” with Bain Capital.

I wish I could get a six-figure income from having “no association” with a company.

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Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) defended Mitt Romney from Democratic speculation that he passed on him as a 2008 running mate after reviewing his tax returns, saying Sarah Palin was simply the better choice at the time.

If that’s a defense of Romney, I’d love to see an attack by McCain…