WASHINGTON — Secretary of State Hillary Clinton got testy on Capitol Hill Wednesday in response to a query from Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), who called into question her department’s accounting of the Sept. 11, 2012, attack in Benghazi, Libya.

Facing expected scrutiny from Republicans during her testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Clinton appeared to take exception to Johnson’s pointed inquiry into the State Department’s initial report that the attack had been mounted spontaneously as a reaction to an anti-Islam YouTube video.

“With all due respect, the fact is we had four dead Americans,” Clinton responded, raising her voice at Johnson, who continued to interrupt her. “Was it because of a protest or was it because of guys out for a walk last night who decided to kill some Americans? What difference at this point does it make? It is our job to figure out what happened and do everything we can to prevent it from ever happening again, Senator.”

Clinton continued, defending the State Department’s efforts in the wake of the assault. “Honestly, I will do my best to answer your questions about this, but the fact is people were trying their best in real time to get to the best information,” she said.

Earlier in the hearing, Clinton spoke about the aftermath of the attack, her voice cracking as she recalled meeting the families of the four Americans killed, including that of U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens.

UPDATE: 2:00 p.m. — Johnson spoke with Milwaukee radio host Charlie Sykes shortly after Clinton’s hearing, accusing the secretary of state of evading his question and instead making a “big show” of the exchange.

“It was theatrics,” Johnson told Sykes. “Again, she didn’t want to answer questions so she makes a big show of it.”

Johnson continued, saying that he would have liked to ask more questions and defending himself against suggestions that he might have been “too aggressive” in his cross-examination.

“You only have five minutes, so you can’t let the witness or somebody testifying before you filibuster you,” the senator said. “You actually have to — I try and politely interrupt when I hear enough of an answer and I realize she’s just filibustering. … I’m not trying to be obnoxious here, I’m just trying to get the answers I believe the American people deserve to hear. It’s been four months.”

More on Clinton’s testimony from the Associated Press:

Her testimony focused not only on the attack but the growing threat from extremists in northern Africa, pointing out that Libya was not an isolated incident.”The Arab revolutions have scrambled power dynamics and shattered security forces across the region,” she said. “And instability in Mali has created an expanding safe haven for terrorists who look to extend their influence and plot further attacks of the kind we saw just last week in Algeria.”

She said the Obama administration is pressing for a greater understanding of the hostage-taking and rescue effort there that left three Americans dead.

In a packed hearing room, Clinton parried tough questions from Republicans, offering a detailed timeline of events on Sept. 11 and the Obama administration efforts to aid the Americans in Libya while simultaneously dealing with protests in Cairo and other countries.

She also took House Republicans to task for recently stripping $1 billion in security aid from the hurricane relief bill.

In something of a valedictory, Clinton noted her robust itinerary in four years and her work, nearly 1 million miles and 112 countries.

“My faith in our country and our future is stronger than ever. Every time that blue and white airplane carrying the words ‘United States of America’ touches down in some far-off capital, I feel again the honor it is to represent the world’s indispensable nation. And I am confident that, with your help, we will continue to keep the United States safe, strong, and exceptional.”

Clinton is the sole witness at back-to-back hearings before the Senate and House foreign policy panels on the September raid.

Clinton had been scheduled to testify before Congress last month, but an illness, a concussion and a blood clot near her brain forced her to postpone her appearance.

Absent from the hearing was Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., the man tapped to succeed Clinton. His swift Senate confirmation is widely expected. Kerry’s confirmation hearing is scheduled for Thursday.

Clinton’s testimony was focusing on the Libya attack after more than three months of Republican charges that the Obama administration ignored signs of a deteriorating security situation there and cast an act of terrorism as mere protests over an anti-Muslim video in the heat of a presidential election. Washington officials suspect that militants linked to al-Qaida carried out the attack.

“It’s been a cover-up from the beginning,” Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., the newest member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said Tuesday.

Politics play an outsized role in any appearance by Clinton, who sought the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008 and is the subject of constant speculation about a possible bid in 2016. The former first lady and New York senator — a polarizing figure dogged by controversy — is about to end her four-year tenure at the State Department with high favorable ratings.

A poll early last month by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press found 65 percent of Americans held a favorable impression of Clinton, compared with 29 percent unfavorable.

On the panel at the hearing were two possible 2016 Republican presidential candidates — Florida’s Marco Rubio and Kentucky’s Rand Paul, also a new member of the committee.

Clinton did little to quiet the presidential chatter earlier this month when she returned to work at the State Department after her illness. On the subject of retirement, she said, “I don’t know if that is a word I would use, but certainly stepping off the very fast track for a little while.”

With respect to Benghazi, the State Department review singled out the Bureau of Diplomatic Security and the Bureau of Near East Affairs, saying there appeared to be a lack of cooperation and confusion over protection at the mission in Benghazi. The report described a security vacuum in Libya after rebel forces toppled the decades-long regime of strongman Moammar Gadhafi.

The report made 29 recommendations to improve diplomatic security, particularly at high-threat posts.

Asked for the number of State Department employees fired for their handling of Benghazi, State Department spokesman Victoria Nuland said four people were put on administrative leave. They included Eric Boswell, who resigned from the position of assistant secretary of diplomatic security.

But Nuland declined to say if Boswell and the others still are working for the department in some capacity.

At the presidential inauguration Monday, all eyes will be on Obama. But it’s also a time for us to celebrate the First Family — particularly First Lady Michelle Obama, who turned 49 this week.

At the last inauguration, we couldn’t take our eyes off Michelle, not just because she looked stunning, but because we wondered how she would define herself in her new role. Since we haven’t had a woman president (yet!), presidents’ wives have so far been the female face of the presidency and also in many cases reflected the social issues of their era. See Betty Ford‘s support for the ERA in the 70s and Hillary Clinton’s controversial statement after years of climbing the 80s career ladder, “I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas, but what I decided to do was to fulfill my profession.” A few of them in have especially captured our admiration (you all know how we feel about Hillz), so this seemed like the appropriate moment to commemorate their characters and contributions. How? With a little quiz.

If you were First Lady, who would you be most like? Do you prefer to change things from behind the scenes, like Abigail Adams, or out in the open like Hillary Clinton or Michelle Obama? Are you willing to speak publicly about an illnesses or addiction to reduce stigma around it, as Betty Ford did, or do you prefer to work out your issues in private like Eleanor Roosevelt? Take the quiz below to find out: click here

By 1968, President Lyndon Johnson — a man brought into office by an assassin’s bullet — had already convinced Congress to pass the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act the following year.

The bills put the full force of federal law behind the rights of black and other disenfranchised Americans to vote and use a wide variety of public facilities. But one other measure that Johnson and many civil rights activists saw as essential — The Fair Housing Act — had languished in Congress for three years. In April of that year, Congress finally passed the bill. It was just days after another assassin’s bullet sliced through Martin Luther King Jr.’s neck and jaw, killing the civil rights leader in Memphis.

Nearly 45 years later, the desire to memorialize King and his nonviolent struggle for a broad range of civil, labor and economic rights, has changed. Most notably, in some circles, civil rights work is publicly disparaged and described as the focus of opportunists and racists, according to historians, political scientists and social activists who spoke with Huffington Post this week. The climate around civil rights has shifted. Conditions often appear unfriendly, the experts said.

This year, the Supreme Court is set to hear and decide cases that could rip the heart out of the Voting Rights Act, eliminate affirmative action in higher education admissions decisions and govern the ability of gay Americans to legally marry. But most public efforts to memorialize King and his work will focus largely on when and where to volunteer on the federal King holiday, rather than push for broad social change or expanded equality, said Rashad Robinson, executive director of Color of Change, a nonprofit civil rights organization that uses technology and modern organizing tactics to challenge inequality, injustice and discrimination.

“The movement for service is important, and it does absolutely reflect one aspect of King’s intentions,” said Robinson.

Color of Change may be best known for its efforts to reduce the influence of the American Legislative Council (ALEC), and this week, for its role in what The Daily Beast/Newsweek described as the still-unconfirmed plans of the Oxygen cable network to cancel a planned reality TV show featuring a rapper and the 10 women who are the mothers of his 11 children, called “All My Babies’ Mammas,” after advertiser push-back. Color of Change is one of just a few civil rights organizations that do not accept corporate funding.

“But beyond service, Dr. King’s work was about us stepping up and being better servants to humanity,” Robinson said. “So it is nice to say, ‘We want to go and paint the school and volunteer [on the Martin Luther King holiday],’ but we also need to ask the hard questions about why the schools in some neighborhoods need to be painted or cleaned and some don’t. And if we aren’t asking those questions or demanding answers and change, then we aren’t doing Dr. King’s work.”

In the years after King’s death, a series of social and political events left the country with a Congress that was increasingly unwilling — and some say unable — to aggressively add to the nation’s stock of civil rights laws or closely monitor and strengthen those already in place, said Nathan K. Kotz, the journalist, writer and historian behind the 2006 book, Judgment Days: Lyndon Baines Johnson, Martin Luther King Jr., and the Laws That Changed America.

The trio of civil rights bills passed by Congress between 1964 and 1968 ushered in a political backlash and new era in which race became a still-frequent, but less explicit, force in American public life, said Kotz. Southern states started sending Republicans — most of them deeply opposed to civil rights legislation — to Congress. Johnson, first distracted then stymied by efforts to escalate the nation’s involvement in the Vietnam War, had a harder time in those years championing measures focused on expanding access to opportunity, creating real equality or reducing poverty, Kotz said.

Democrats who could no longer count on the votes of working-class white voters in the North or South became increasingly worried about what the integration of schools, neighborhoods and industries would mean in their own lives. In the years that followed, politicians beginning with Richard Nixon perfected the dark art of appealing to those fears in coded, sometimes oblique, but racially charged ways. Congress became what some economists describe as irrationally fixated on reducing the country’s deficit through limits on domestic social program spending, Kotz said.

“Sound familiar? It should,” Kotz said. “There are some definite parallels between that time, this rather stagnant period for civil rights following the monumental gains of the 1960s, and now.”

After the November presidential election, Mitt Romney attributed his loss, in part, to the “gifts” or social programs that Obama “gave” to minorities.

To be clear, King and other activists involved in the struggle for civil rights in the 1960s weren’t universally lauded in their lifetimes, said Lewis V. Baldwin, a long-time King scholar and professor of religious studies at Vanderbilt University. Baldwin wrote the 2002 book To Make the Wounded Whole, along with seven others about King.

Some regarded King as a communist, a rabble-rouser interested in publicity or upsetting the social order and regional “traditions.” Some thought he wanted to push too much change on the country too quickly — including some of black America’s most prominent figures. The FBI tapped King’s phones and surveilled his activities. But King’s writings and speeches, degrees from top-tier schools, and even his tailored-suit and hat-wearing approach to activism seemed to convince successive generations of progressive activists that social movements could not only be successful and respectable, but also that they did not have to include physical confrontations or violence.

“Of course today, Jesse Jackson and the Rev. Al Sharpton, people like the Rev. Calvin Butts in New York — and yes, even the Rev. Jeremiah Wright — point out the inequalities and injustices that remain in this country, its history and its truth, and they are called publicity-seekers and charlatans and un-American,” Baldwin said.

In December 2011, the U.S. Justice Department discovered that the Fair Housing Act, first passed in 1968 just after King’s death, didn’t stop some of the nation’s biggest banks and mortgage lenders from steering and then approving black and Latino homebuyers for higher-cost and riskier loans than were offered to white buyers with similar credit scores. As a result, many black and Latino families saw their wealth dissolve into thin air, eroding much of the economic progress made over the last 30 years.

“It’s become really popular to talk about how race doesn’t matter,” said Robinson. “As a matter of fact, in the 10 to 20 minutes after Gabby Douglas won a medal, you had Bob Costas opining for a national audience about how race doesn’t play that much of a role unless ‘they see themselves that way,’ as if people of color sort of make up the problems of race.”

Obama is president. Oprah Winfrey is one of the wealthiest women in the world. Both rank consistently among the nation’s most admired citizens. And Obama was reelected to a historic second term with the support of 41 percent of white voters.

But nearly 28 percent of the nation’s black population lived in poverty in 2011, the most recent year for which detailed data is available, compared to about 13 percent of whites and 25 percent of Latinos. Wage gaps remained so prevalent that women collectively earn 77 cents for every dollar earned by men, according to Census data. And for black and Latina women, the figures remain far worse.

Blacks and Latinos frequently receive harsher sentences for crimes. In the nation’s schools serving large numbers of students of color, stringent security is more common than top-notch teachers, Robinson said.

“That moment after Gabby Douglas won,” said Robinson, “would have been a good moment to say that the fact that in 2012 she can participate and win, but remains such an anomaly — the very fact that there aren’t six more Gabby Douglases waiting in the wings — those are examples of the real challenges that we still face in this country.”

source …..

Dr. Logan Levkoff

Sexologist and AASECT-certified sexuality educator

Stress. I’m slightly on edge just writing the word. It brings up thoughts of all of the things I have yet to accomplish. Of all the resolutions I have (thought about) but not yet followed through with (and it hasn’t even been two weeks). After years of managing work, marriage, children and relatives, I can tell you that when I’m stressed, I’m not that pleasant to be around. And when it comes to sex, stress makes your sex life suffer. In fact, stress is one of those weird issues that can not only affect your sex life, but also be alleviated by having sex. So if you want to get rid of stress, why don’t you just go have sex? OK, that’s all.

You didn’t really think that I was going to leave it there, did you?

The effects of stress are insidious. It takes a toll on your physical, emotional and relationship health, probably more than you realize. Here are five ways stress can impact your sex life:

1. Stress contributes to a negative body image. Bad body image = bad sex.
The hormones produced in association with stress can impact our metabolism. If we feel sluggish or if we gain weight (unintentionally), it can make us feel badly about our physiques. If we don’t like our bodies, it is pretty difficult to find the desire to shed your clothes and jump into bed with your partner. Now, I am not suggesting that you should just get it over with, but it’s a vicious cycle. Lower self-image equals less sex and less sex creates relationship problems. Ideally, our relationship should enhance who we are, not make us feel more stressed. And one of the biggest stressors we can have is our relationship, if we don’t take the time to nurture it.

2. Stress takes a toll on our libido.
By now, we know that hormones affect our bodies in numerous ways from childhood to adolescence, pregnancy, menopause and beyond. Cortisol is one of the hormones produced by stress, and you might have heard of it if you’ve ever seen those late night diet pill commercials with the image of the pixelated woman gaining weight in her abdomen. Our bodies need this hormone, but in small doses for short bursts of time. If elevated levels of Cortisol are being produced for a prolonged period of time, they suppress our sex hormones. Lower quantity of sex hormones equals lower libido.

3. Stress makes us question our relationships and our partners.
As I mentioned earlier, when we are stressed, we are not that pleasant to be around — and vice versa. You don’t want a partner who flies off the handle and snaps at you because he or she is overwhelmed. And you don’t want to be the one who incites those feelings of frustration in someone that you love. Who wants to go to bed with an emotional monster? Relationships suffer when we are stressed, especially if we stop communicating. Or if our communication consists of rolling our eyes and grunting at a loved one.

4. Stress can lead to excessive drinking. Excessive drinking makes for bad sex.

It’s not a surprise that lots of people use alcohol to escape. I, like many women I know, have been known to long for happy hour — any happy hour. But this isn’t about a glass of wine, a bottle of beer or a drink with one of those smile-inducing hot pink umbrellas in them. This is about excessive, prolonged drinking. More than one or two drinks a day. (And we can even debate whether that is too much.) This is the type of drinking that you probably hide from friends. It may be the type of drinking that begins long before happy hour does and goes on far later. Or it may just be one drink beyond that early, feel-good buzz.

We know that men have difficulty getting an erection when they drink too much. But what about us? As it turns out, alcohol can dull sex, making it less pleasurable. Alcohol dehydrates us, making lubrication challenging. Without lubrication, sex is painful. Without lubrication and sufficient arousal, we can kiss the idea of orgasm (or pleasure in general) goodbye. After a number of pleasure-less or mildly painful sexual experiences, we are not going to want it. Would you?

5. Stress impacts our fertility and our menstrual cycle. When we are stressed, our hormones levels take a dive.

I mentioned stress as a factor in why our libidos suffer when we’re stressed. But who would have thought that fertility would be challenged, too? (Yes, I know what you’re thinking, if you’re not having sex, you’re probably not getting pregnant. You’re right, but there’s more to this — and besides, not all women are heterosexual, and they try to get pregnant, too.)

Stress can impact our pituitary gland, which controls the thyroid, adrenal glands and ovaries. If our ovaries aren’t functioning properly, your menstrual cycle is adversely affected. Our periods may become irregular or we may stop menstruating. (This is called amenorrhea and if stress-related, not a permanent condition.)

If you are trying to get pregnant, you need to decrease your stress. Which (as I know) can be difficult, because there are few things more stressful than trying to become pregnant and not being able to do so.

So it’s time to make some changes.
Exercise, relax, take a bath, drink one glass of wine (not four), masturbate (yes, I said masturbate), make out with your partner and delegate some responsibilities to others. It will make 2013 a lot less stressful… and hopefully, a lot more enjoyable.

So what will you do to alleviate stress in 2013?

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