President Obama’s same-sex marriage endorsement makes a full quarter of Florida voters less likely to cast their ballots for him, according to a poll released Monday.

Quinnipac’s latest poll of the Sunshine State finds that 25 percent of voters say Obama’s endorsement of gay marriage makes them less likely to vote for him. On the other hand, 11 percent say that it makes them more likely to vote for him.

(ALSO ON POLITICO: ‘Pro-choice’ voters at lowest level ever, poll shows)

Among independents, 23 percent say that they’re less likely to vote for Obama over same sex marriage. Older voters (55 and older), born-again evangelical Christians, lower income voters and military veterans are all more likely than other demographic groups to say that Obama’s backing of same-sex marriage will sway them towards Romney.

On the whole, Romney beats President Obama by six points in Florida, leading 47 to 41 percent over the incumbent president.

On the gay marriage issue, national polls have largely showed the issue to be a wash for the president, with roughly equal numbers of voter saying it made them more or less likely to support Obama. That’s in line with national polls that show majority support for gay marriage — but state by state polling that shows high levels of resistance in several key battlegrounds.

Source: Politico.

Colombia’s Chamber of Representatives has approved a bill that would legalize the cultivation of drugs that grow as plants, bringing to fruition the start of more legislative drug reform efforts to come, as promised by South American leaders during the recent Summit of the Americas.

Colombia’s drug crop legalization bill would make growing marijuana, opium, coca and poppies legal, but drug trafficking, including sales, would remain a severe crime, according to Colombia Reports.

The U.S. is a strong ally of Colombia’s and the Obama administration has provided military support to the country, even going so far as to station U.S. soldiers and drone aircraft at Colombian military bases, ostensibly to help combat drug trafficking networks. The country has historically been a key U.S. asset in the region, so much that they’ve even accepted prior U.S. administrations sending aircraft over Colombian poppy and coca fields to spray the indigenous population with herbicide.

CONTINUED at The Raw Story.

Refuses to buy stock over privacy concerns.

In an interview with CNN, Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian said he would refuse to buy Facebook stock because of the company’s appalling attitude to privacy and its support for the CISPA bill.

“I’m not planning on it…I understand the business value to what Facebook is doing. We’ve never seen a company like this before–ever. And it knows things about our private lives that no one else does. And one of the big issues that a lot of us in the tech community have had of late has been their support for bills like CISPA that make it really easy for companies like Facebook to hand over private data about us without any due process. So that’s why I’ll be holding off,” said Ohanian.

Reddit joins Mozilla as the only other major tech company to decry CISPA, with firms like Facebook, Microsoft, IBM, Intel, Oracle, Symantec, AT&T and Verizon all backing the bill. Last week, Mozilla released a statement calling the legislation an “alarming” threat to privacy, adding, “The bill infringes on our privacy, includes vague definitions of cybersecurity, and grants immunities to companies and government that are too broad around information misuse.”

CISPA has been identified by many as a greater threat to privacy than SOPA, which was opposed by a deluge of major tech firms after a viral online opposition campaign, but because CISPA has received less attention, corporate giants have found it easier to stay mute.

Not only would CISPA mandate ISPs to share Internet data of users with government “notwithstanding any other provision of law,” it also empowers the Department of Homeland Securityto monitor the communications of the federal courts and Congress, and intercept tax returns sent to the IRS.

The bill “gives companies a free pass to monitor and collect communications and share that data with the government and other companies, so long as they do so for ‘cybersecurity purposes,’” the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has noted. “Just invoking ‘cybersecurity threats’ is enough to grant companies immunity from nearly all civil and criminal liability, effectively creating an exemption from all existing law.”

CONTINUED at Prison Planet. Written by Paul Joseph Watson. Video at link.

OBO, Central African Republic (AP) — Deep in the jungle, this small, remote Central African village is farther from the coast than any point on the continent. It’s also where three international armies have zeroed in on Joseph Kony, one of the world’s most wanted warlords.

Obo was the first place in the Central African Republic that Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army attacked in 2008; today, it’s one of four forward operating locations where U.S. special forces have paired up with local troops and Ugandan soldiers to seek out Kony, who is believed likely to be hiding out in the rugged terrain northwest of the town. For seven years he has been wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes and crimes against humanity after his forces cut a wide and bloody swath across several central African nations with rapes, abductions and killings.

Part of the LRA’s success in eluding government forces has been its ability to slip back and forth over the porous borders of the Central African Republic, South Sudan and Congo. But since late last year, U.S. forces have been providing intelligence, looking at patterns of movement, and setting up better communications to link the countries’ forces together so that they can better track the guerrilla force.

Sent by President Barack Obama at the end of 2011, the 100 U.S. soldiers are split up about 15 to 30 per base, bringing in American technology and experience to assist local forces.

[Related: 'Kony 2012' audience dips 98 percent for part 2] 

Exact details on specific improvements that the American forces have brought to the table, however, are classified, to avoid giving Kony the ability to take countermeasures.

CONTINUED at Yahoo News.

Almost as quickly as the “KONY 2012″ YouTube video became a viral hit, the reputation of the 30-minute documentary about Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) strongman Joesph Kony crashed. And now “part II” of the story has attracted just 2 percent of the project’s original audience.

The Internet phenomenon that attracted tens of millions of viewers was marred by reports that the non-profit advocacy organization Invisible Children oversimplified the war in Central Africa and failed to acknowledge a crucial fact: Ugandan forces pushed the LRA out of that country six years ago.

Ugandan Prime Minister Amama Mbabazi responded with a taped response on YouTube. AndUgandans started their own movement to counter the KONY 2012 campaign and tell their own story.

Invisible Children CEO Ben Keesey said his group’s motives remain the same. They won’t stop until Kony, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court in The Hague for crimes against humanity, is captured and tried.

Meanwhile, the group’s second Kony-related video, posted earlier this month, addresses some of the nagging issues left over from the first — and tries to bring a dwindling audience back into the fold.

Source: Yahoo News. Video at link.

While scientists believe conditions suitable for life might exist on the so-called “super-Earth” in the Gliese 581 system, it’s unlikely to be transferred to other planets within that solar system.

“One of the big scientific questions is how did life get started and how did it spread through the universe,” said Jay Melosh, distinguished professor of earth and atmospheric sciences. “That question used to be limited to just the Earth, but we now know in our solar system there is a lot of exchange that takes place, and it’s quite possible life started on Mars and came to Earth. There’s also been a great deal of discussion about the possible spread of life in the universe from star to star.”

Moon rocks and Mars meteorites have been found on Earth, which led Melosh to previously suggest living microbes could be exchanged among planets in a similar manner.

A Purdue research team has found that, in contrast to our own solar system, the exchange of living microbes between “super-Earth” and planets in that solar system is not likely to occur.

Laci Brock, a student studying interdisciplinary physics and planetary science, and Melosh will present those findings March 20 at the 43rd Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in The Woodlands, Texas.

CONTINUED at Science Daily.

US and France arm rebels with anti-aircraft missiles.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has admitted that Al-Qaeda and other groups on the State Department’s terror list are on the same side as the United States in Syria and that they are aiding opposition rebels.

In an interview with BBC News (watch video), Clinton states, “We have a very dangerous set of actors in the region, Al-Qaeda, Hamas, and those who are on our terrorist list, to be sure, supporting – claiming to support the opposition [in Syria].”

Clinton’s admission that Al-Qaeda is supporting the armed insurrection in Syria dovetails with reports that the same Al-Qaeda terrorists who helped overthrow Colonel Gaddafi in Libya were airlifted into Syria by NATO forces.

Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahri’s has also publicly expressed support for Syrian rebel forces.

These terrorists have been blamed for bloody attacks that have killed both Syrian regime officials and innocent civilians, including a bombing earlier this month in Syria’s second city of Aleppo which killed 28 people.

CONTINUED at Prison Planet. Written by Paul Joseph Watson.

Coverage from the Veterans For Ron paul march on the White House yesterday.

At the Libertarian Party of Florida state convention held this past weekend, former GOP presidential candidate Gary Johnson didn’t just win the straw poll; with 42 of the 60 votes cast, he wiped the floor.

If Johnson can replicate that success in other states, he’ll have little trouble getting the nomination at the national Libertarian Party convention in May. Compared to fellow former Republican Bob Barr, who was tied for the nomination through five rounds of ballots at the 2008 national convention, getting the backing of the LP is going to be a cakewalk for Johnson.

But what about the rest of America? Johnson is hoping to poll high enough to appear with President Barack Obama and the GOP nominee in a televised debate, and pull 5 percent in the general election. The former two-term governor of New Mexico, an experienced coalition-builder, is having a hard time coralling people who lean libertarian, but aren’t quite.

Take, for instance, his appeals to marijuana voters.

Johnson’s decision to campaign on legalizing marijuana was based on principle: He’s used it, he thinks it’s safer than booze, and he hates the drug war. It was also based on some hypothetical math: “100 million Americans have admitted to using marijuana,” Johnson told me two weeks before the Florida straw poll. “If they all gave me a dollar, that’s a hundred million bucks.”

In theory, it was a swell plan. In practice, Johnson has “done so many events with marijuana. So many marijuana events. Basically, nothing comes out of it other than for an enthusiasm for what I say. No money comes out of it.”

That’s not to say that marijuana policy reform advocates are broke, or cheap. Progressive Insurance founder Peter B. Lewis has donated half a million dollars this election cycle to Prop. 66, which would reform California’s onerous three-strikes law, and another $159,000 to the Drug Policy Alliance Network Committee. (Lewis’s deep pockets also made the Marijuana Policy Project what it is today.)

But what weed money there is, isn’t flowing to Johnson. So he’s going back to the basics: Cutting the size of government. But even that can prove difficult. In a 2012 election in which Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) is promising to cut spending by $1 trillion, Johnson is still searching for a way to earn media attention.

“‘How do you differ from Ron Paul? Ron Paul’s proposing a $1 trillion reduction!’ people say. Well, I’m proposing a $1.4 trillion reduction.” Johnson seldom puts it that way, though. Instead he calls it a 43 percent cut in government spending.

Over dinner, I asked Johnson how to make that message…sexier.

CONTINUED at Reason. Written by Mike Riggs.

Rick Santorum has overtaken Mitt Romney in the race for the GOP primary vote in Michigan, a state long considered a lock for Romney that has become a make-or-break test for his campaign.

New polls from Republican-leaning American Research Group and the Democratic-leaning Public Policy Polling both give Santorum the lead in Michigan, where Romney grew up and his father was a popular governor.

The PPP poll released Monday found Santorum at 39 percent, ahead of Romney with 24 percent, Ron Paul with 12 percent and Newt Gingrich at 11 percent. Similarly, the American Research Group poll found Santorum with 33 percent, followed by Romney at 27 percent, Gingrich at 21 percent, and Paul at 12 percent.

After a trio of wins last week in Colorado, Minnesota and Missouri last week, Santorum has taken the fight for the GOP nomination to Michigan, where he plans to “talk about jobs and opportunities for everybody in America to rise.”

CONTINUED at The Hill.