• Today’s comic by Matt Bors is The diary of Anne Frank: Mormon heaven:
  
  
• What’s coming up on Sunday Kos …
  

  • Ohio and Super Tuesday preview, by Greg Dworkin
  • George Will, Paul Krugman, and “opportunity,” by Hunter
  • New York City’s flawed data fuels the right’s war on teachers, by Laura Clawson
  • Super PACs and the law of intended consequences, by Georgia Logothetis
  • On “Wrecking Ball,” Bruce Springsteen takes aim at robber barons and
    bankers, by Laura Clawson
  • Women of color in women’s history. Part one: Native American, by Denise Oliver Velez
  • Defying the odds: A vision for victory in North Carolina, by Scott Wooledge
  • Part II of the encroachment of religion on our secular government, by Armando
  • How Olympia Snowe should have fought against polarized politics, by Dante Atkins

• The Dover Air Base mortuary supervisor who should have been fired long ago gives his bosses an out by resigning.
  

  He was one of three supervisors at Dover whom the Air Force in November accused of “gross mismanagement” at the military’s primary mortuary for handling America’s war dead. An 18-month investigation, spurred by whistleblowers who worked for Keel, documented instances of missing body parts and the sloppy handling of human remains, among other problems.

• U.S. Troops in transit find it’s far cheaper to call home from Afghanistan than from German airport pay-phones.
• Pollution from tar sands mining shows up on NASA photos. The emissions come from excavators, dump trucks, extraction pumps and wells, and the facilities where the oil sands are partially refined.
• The homecoming kiss that went viral is still getting a lot of positive feedback, according to Sgt. Brandon Morgan, the gay Marine who kissed and wrapped his legs around his partner inside an aircraft hangar at a base in Hawaii. The outpouring has included 40,000 “likes” on the Gay Marine page on Facebook and a deluge of reporter requests for interviews. Morgan also has had a discussion with higher-ups:
  

  Feedback from fellow Marines has been positive too, Morgan said, though he has some regret for jumping on Wells. He called that “excess amount of public display of affection.” His superiors have talked to him about it, he said, and he agrees he went a little too far. The Marines have rules, even at homecomings, Morgan said.

  “I love him so much. It was my chance to show him how much I love him openly. But then again, I’m still a Marine,” he said.

• Suck-ups in the right-wing media did everything they could think of to ingratiate themselves with Sarah Palin, according to her emails released as part of an open-records request by Mother Jones.
• Jaroslav Flegr should make sure to avoid any pootie diaries. He believes that a single-celled protozoan, Toxoplasma gondii, excreted by cats in their feces, messed with his personality, making him behave in strange and self-destructive ways. He was ignored for a long time, but is now gaining respectability:
  

  [I]f Flegr is right, the “latent” parasite may be quietly tweaking the connections between our neurons, changing our response to frightening situations, our trust in others, how outgoing we are, and even our preference for certain scents. And that’s not all. He also believes that the organism contributes to car crashes, suicides, and mental disorders such as schizophrenia. When you add up all the different ways it can harm us, says Flegr, “Toxoplasma might even kill as many people as malaria, or at least a million people a year.”

• Another fossil-fuel billionaire has joined Mitt Romney’s energy policy team. This time it’s newly mega-rich Harold Hamm, who made his $ 12 billion fortune off North Dakota shale oil. He will be leading a team that includes coal lobbyist Jim Talent and tar sands lobbyist David Wilkins.
• Oceans may be turning acidic faster than they did at any time in the past 300 million years, a period in there were four major extinctions, says a new study in Science. In the earlier periods “natural pulses of carbon sent global temperatures soaring,” but the current rise comes from human-caused emissions.

Daily Kos