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MIAMI (Reuters) – A U.S. military judge is considering splitting up the trial of five Guantanamo prisoners accused of plotting the September 11 attacks because of conflicts in scheduling and strategy, lawyers in the case said on Friday. The defendants, including the professed mastermind of the hijacked plane attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, are to appear in court at the Guantanamo Bay U.S. naval base in Cuba on June 12 for the next pretrial hearing in the death penalty case. …

President Barack Obama’s May 9 announcement that he favors same sex marriage led to a huge spike on YouTube, according to data assembled by the popular video sharing site.

Oh my God, I will never live this down.
(Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)

The other day George W. Bush, or as Mitt Romney calls him, He Who Must Not Be Named, gave Mitt a rousing endorsement in the form of a four-word “I’m for Mitt Romney” muttered from behind closing elevator doors.

Given that, I would have liked to be a fly on the wall for this one:

Bush and Romney spoke with each other after the former president offered his fleeting support for the Republican candidate in an elevator this week, a person on Romney’s campaign tells ABC News.

The Romney aide wouldn’t disclose details of the call and wouldn’t say if Romney thanked Bush for his endorsement.

That’s some top-secret phone calling right there. He won’t even say whether Mitt thanked Bush?

“Hi George. Look, I’m pretty sure we talked about this, and I thought I was pretty clear on how you needed to not say anything for the next six months.”

“Sorry, Mitt. It just slipped out. Want me to take it back?”

“Jeez … no, no, that’d probably look worse. All right, we’ll just go with it. But now please, please promise me you won’t say anything supportive of me from now on? I mean Christ, George, your favorability ratings are still three points behind leprosy.”

“Yeah, but I think I’m gonna be vindicated anytime now. You seen how much brush I’ve been clearing lately? I fuckin’ hate brush. Little thorny terrorists, all of them.”

“Fine, George, whatever. Listen, I have to go. Just please, take a vow of silence or something. Now’s not the time.”

Yeah, I like that version pretty well. The other version would be that Bush and Mitt actually get along fine and have a lot of the same ideas, on things like tax cuts, hurting poor people and not really giving a flying damn about any of that foreign policy stuff unless they’re forced to by outside events, and that Mitt’s actually sucked in a lot of old Bush advisers because hey, their advice all worked out great the first time around, but that version’s just too scary to contemplate.

Republican presidential challenger Mitt Romney on Friday criticized a restored 19th century bridge as another “Bridge to Nowhere” and a fresh symbol of the waste he says is rampant in President Barack Obama’s economic stimulus plan.

We are in the second half of the second round, which means we’ll now start choosing the quarterfinal matchups. The bracket is here. Today’s winner will face off against the GOP debate audience booing the gay soldier.

1. FOR EVERY WOMAN CAIN HARASSED, THERE ARE THOUSANDS HE DIDN’T

“I value my character and my integrity more than anything else. And for every one person that comes forward with a false accusation, there are probably, there are thousands who would say none of that sort of activity ever came from Herman Cain.”

So there you have it! “Your honor, I didn’t kill this man, because there are probably thousands more who would testify that I never murdered them.”

As a punchline—the conservative audience cheered wildly in response.

2. MITT ROMNEY’S BFFs

“Some of my best friends profit from your sports consumption habits!” (John Gress/Reuters)

Mitt, salt of the earth:

Asked by an Associated Press reporter as he was greeting NASCAR fans [at the Daytona 500] whether he follows the sport, Romney said: “Not as closely as some of the most ardent fans. But I have some great friends that are NASCAR team owners.”

Romney admitted shortly thereafter that perhaps that wasn’t the best way to connect with voters.

During a stop at his campaign headquarters in Livonia, Mich., a reporter asked Romney whether he realized that comments accentuating his wealth were hurting his campaign.

“Yes. Next question,” Romney simply stated.

So he never did it again. Except that he did it again.

“Well, you know I’m surprised to hear that Denver’s thinking about him, they’re — I don’t want him in our neck of the woods to Miami or to the Jets,” Romney said. “But I’ve got a lot of good friends, the owner Miami Dolphins, and the New York Jets — both owners are friends of mine.”

It’s been tough on Mitt. Why can’t the voters be as suitably impressed about his coterie of friends as his country club mates?

In Virginia, Gov. Bob McDonnell runs TV ads hailing the state’s business growth. Ohio Gov. John Kasich tells anyone who will listen that 100,000 jobs have been created or retained on his watch. And Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder promotes a state budget that’s on solid ground for the first time in a decade.

• Today’s comic by Matt Bors is Mitt Romney’s advice for jerkface bullies:

• What’s coming up on Sunday Kos …

• William Galston talks 2012 election with Daily Kos, by DemFromCT
• Two Daily Kos/SEIU polls show why Americans Elect failed, by Chris Bowers
• Billionaire donors drive anti-teacher, pro-testing education reform agenda, by Laura Clawson
• Injustice and jury selection, by Denise Oliver Velez
• Mitt Romney is a coward, by brooklynbadboy
• A conversation with future voters, by Dante Atkins

• Former Vice President Walter Mondale, now 84, has some things to say about the Supreme Court’s politicization:
  

  “Our Court, as long as I’ve been around, has been in many ways our nation’s most remarkable institution,” Mondale said. “It has been bipartisan, we’ve had great judges with a lot of vision. Without it, we wouldn’t have civil rights, we wouldn’t have so many things that have made America more open, more fair, more trustworthy. Now it’s become a kind of harsh, partisan institution. You have ‘Citizens United,’ you have the Florida case, you have some real bummers coming up here. I really worry about what it’ll do to the country. I’ve been around once during the worst of the Vietnam War when I really began to worry whether this place was going to blow up, whether the center would hold. We’re nowhere near that now. But don’t toy with that. Always try to act in a way that sustains trust, public trust. It’s hard to explain but what makes us strong as a nation, fundamentally, is that people trust the system. And I don’t think we should keep playing with that like we are now.”

• Absolutely the cutest photo you’ll see all day, guaranteed
• An apology for work on “gay cure”:
  

  Dr. [Robert] Spitzer in no way implied in the study that being gay was a choice, or that it was possible for anyone who wanted to change to do so in therapy. But that didn’t stop socially conservative groups from citing the paper in support of just those points, according to Wayne Besen, executive director of Truth Wins Out, a nonprofit that fights antigay bias. [...]

  “You know, it’s the only regret I have; the only professional one,” Dr. Spitzer said of the study, near the end of a long interview. “And I think, in the history of psychiatry, I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a scientist write a letter saying that the data were all there but were totally misinterpreted. Who admitted that and who apologized to his readers.”

• Up to no good:
  

  Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on my parahippocampal gyrus. Scientists at the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute have found that suspicion resides in two distinct regions of the brain: the amygdala, which plays a central role in processing fear and emotional memories, and the parahippocampal gyrus, which is associated with declarative memory and the recognition of scenes.

  “We wondered how individuals assess the credibility of other people in simple social interactions,” said Read Montague, director of the Human Neuroimaging Laboratory and the Computational Psychiatry Unit at the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute, who led the study. “We found a strong correlation between the amygdala and a baseline level of distrust, which may be based on a person’s beliefs about the trustworthiness of other people in general, his or her emotional state, and the situation at hand. What surprised us, though, is that when other people’s behavior aroused suspicion, the parahippocampal gyrus lit up, acting like an inborn lie detector.”

• North Carolina vote on marriage equality reflects a rural-urban divide. The perception that African Americans are somehow uniquely opposed to marriage equality has been debunked for Proposition 8 in California and now, despite steady commentary to the contrary, the same has been done for North Carolina’s Amendment 1:
  

  It’s impossible to calculate exactly how black voters came down on Amendment 1, because there was no exit polling and voting precincts are rarely single-race. What is clear is that urban voters opposed the amendment; rural ones supported it; and that division cut cleanly across the color line.

  In each of North Carolina’s five largest cities, voters in majority-black precincts rejected the measure: Charlotte (52 percent), Raleigh (51 percent), Greensboro (54 percent), Winston-Salem (55 percent), and Durham (65 percent). Durham’s results were dramatic: Not a single majority-black precinct supported the amendment. Several crushed it by margins of 3-to-1 and even 4-to-1.

• Rare victory:
  

  A federal district court in New York has ruled that the federal government cannot enforce the domestic military detention provisions of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) of 2012 because it unconstitutionally infringes on the rights of journalists and activists to associate with people the government might consider terrorists—exposing them to arrest and indefinite detention without a trial.    

  “This court is acutely aware that preliminarily enjoining an act of Congress must be done with great caution,” wrote U.S. District Judge Katherine B. Forrest, in a 68-page decision handed down on Wednesday. “However, it is the responsibility of our judicial system to protect the public from acts of Congress which infringe upon constitutional rights.”

• A corner of the unexplored galaxy in your kitchen.
• The FBI investigating possible influence-peddling in Ohio’s GOP.
• President Obama will visit tornado-devastated Joplin, Missouri, Monday to deliver the graduation address at Joplin High School.
• Long  Island, N.Y., goes solar. It  has launched the nation’s first Clean Local Energy Accessible Now (CLEAN) program using a feed-in tariff system that stoked Germany’s solar energy boom. The name CLEAN was chosen because the tariff system under its European name was a tough sell in the States. The system sets a firm price for electricity generated by solar, allowing investors to feel confident about their return.

Forget a president’s first 100 days. Mitt Romney’s first television ad of the general election, “Day One,” comes as close as anything in describing the most urgent priorities of a President Romney upon taking office. What do we know about those proposals?

In the fury Thursday that greeted the leaking of a proposal that would try to taint Barack Obama by once again attaching him to the fiery sermons of Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Mitt Romney botched his response with a “whatever” statement that will go down in the record books of political stumbles. One person said it was as if his mouth were falling down the stairs.

Whether or not billionaire Joe Ricketts of the Ending Spending Action Fund Super PAC had given a preliminary green light to the $10 million race-baiting proposal made little difference. By the end of the day, the Rev. Wright and the race issue had once again been brought to foreground. But not in the way the right-wingers planning for a big splash at the Democratic Convention were hoping. Instead of their proposal helping to weaken President Obama with a sneak attack three months down the road, the premature leak of its contents had diverted attention away from the economy, where the Romney camp sees Obama as vulnerable. Simultaneously, it provided the circumstances for Romney to upstage his worst previous stumble-tongue performance with a new worst-in-show.

Being compelled by the firestorm to repudiate the attack plan, the candidate drew attention to his own deficits as well as to the holes in the proposed attack on Obama itself. Romney’s face-palm display also illustrated by implication the president’s strengths both as a public speaker, who—whatever his policy flaws—connects with people at a personal level, and on the matter of race itself, where the president has, since his widely acclaimed Philadelphia speech in March 2008, boxed in the more obvious racists. As Conor Friedersdorf points out at The Atlantic:

Although hard core conservatives can’t see it, President Obama is adept at talking about race in America. He’s thought about the issue long enough to speak about it with simple words and sophisticated nuance. He invokes the best of America when telling the story of his life. He can tell a story about why he attended that church that makes white people listening feel good about their country and themselves. Mitt Romney cannot talk about race like that, nor does he benefit from an inquisition into how he could participate in his own faith given its flaws over the last five decades.

So it isn’t just that Mitt Romney wants to be talking about the economy. It’s that making an issue of Wright risk conversations about race and Mormonism, subjects Romney lacks the charisma to finesse, and that would be utter disasters if all his surrogates had to discuss them.

It wasn’t just the awfulness of Romney’s “whatever” meander in response to his own past linking of the Rev. Wright to Obama but also the tepidness of his overall response to the attack proposal that made Thursday a disastrous day for the GOP candidate. The Obama campaign lost no time in zeroing in on the reality that Romney failed to go anywhere near far enough in blasting a plan, which, in another line that will surely make it into the annals of campaign stupidity, says Obama has tried to characterize himself as a “metrosexual Black Abe Lincoln.”

“Today, Mitt Romney had the opportunity to distance himself from his previous attempts to inject the divisive politics of character assassination into the presidential race,” said Obama spokesman Ben LaBolt in an email to reporters late Thursday. “It was a moment that required moral leadership, and once again he didn’t rise to the occasion.”

Because he can’t.

House Republicans ignored the requests of the generals and a White House veto threat today, passing their bloated defense spending authorization bill, 299-120.

The bill breaks the spending agreement made last year as part of the Budget Control Act, and spends much more than the Pentagon has asked for on programs it opposes.

That includes: a new missile defense system on the east coast; keeping ships and aircraft that the Pentagon is trying to retire; rejecting the military’s request for domestic base closings; and about $4 billion more than the administration and the Pentagon set as a spending limit.

And there’s more, including a ban on “same-sex marriages and ‘marriage-like’ ceremonies on military bases.” Additionally, it includes “indefinite detention without trial of terrorism suspects, including U.S. citizens, captured on U.S. soil,” despite a decision by a federal judge issued yesterday to block implementation of indefinite detention as included in last year’s National Defense Authorization Act.

For these reasons, and more, the White House has said it will veto the bill.

12:04 PM PT: Final roll call here.