Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell (R) disputed the notion that he’s spending too much time legislating social policy during this morning Politico forum, as he continued to distance himself from a measure that would have required women to undergo an invasive transvaginal ultrasound before receiving an abortion. Under the proposed policy, most women seeking seeking an abortion would have been forced to have a procedure, “in which a probe is inserted into the vagina, and then moved around until an ultrasound image is produced.

The governor explained that he has focused on “getting our budgets under control” and “jobs,” not social policy, and claimed that he hadn’t read the original provision before publicly endorsing it. McDonnell also added that Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, a conservative powerhouse within the Republican party, advised him that the measure was unconstitutional:

MCDONNELL: We realized there were different kinds of ultrasounds and so what I recommended to the General Assembly, and they adopted the other day, is let’s make the requirement for the abdominal ultrasound… I also got legal advice from various people, including my Attorney General, that these kinds of mandatory invasive requirements might run afoul of Fourth Amendment law. So those were the reasons…After talking to lawyers and doctors on my own, after we started hearing some concerns int he legislature, I personally looked at it.

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“Peruvian glaciers have lost more than one-fifth of their mass in the past 35 years, reducing by 12 percent the water flow to the countrys coastal region, home to 60 percent of Perus population. And if warming trends continue … many of the Andes tropical glaciers will disappear within 20 years, not only threatening the water supplies of 77 million people in the region, but also reducing hydropower production, which accounts for roughly half of the electricity generated in Bolivia, Peru, and Ecuador.”

Huantsan, at left, in 2010 (credit: Sophie Denis) and in 1979, at right

by Peter Lehner, cross-posted from the NRDC Switchboard

Soon after my return from Chile, I came across an article in the American Alpine Journal, where climbers report new routes up the mountains of the world. I was struck by a report from Sophie Denis, who recorded her group’s ascent of Huantsan, a mountain in the Peruvian Andes. Her photo of the west face of the mountain shows a sheer, steep face of bare brown rock, with a small cap of frosty glacier at the top.

I know this mountain.

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The first couple of minutes of footage from Brave are out, and not only are they awesome, they contain the best riff on bodice-ripping ever:

We were talking about female action stars and the need to think more creatively about action choreography for women, and Brave and The Hunger Games both seem to me like they might provide an answer for how to design action setpieces that acknowledge that women may be less physically powerful than male foes. Sharp-shooting, something at which both Brave heroine Merida and The Hunger Games’ heroine Katniss Everdeen excel, distances a woman from her target, and eliminates the physical disparities between them and their opponents, be those opponents large bears wandering the Scottish Highlands or tributes from other districts who intend to murder you on live television.

If you want to get into hand-to-hand combat, traditional weapons or contrasting martial arts styles could also make for action scenes that are more interesting and that allow women to fight plausibly against men who are larger or stronger than they are. One of the things that was fun about the core fight scene in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was the way the two fighters moved from weapon to weapon so you could see the advantage of a heavier staff that could do more damage against a lighter, quicker one. It’d be fun to see a woman use muay thai, for example, against a heavy who has no particular style but relies on bigness and brute strength for advantage. It’s no mistake that probably the best action sequence of the last five years, the parkour-inflected chase between James Bond and the terrorist at the beginning of Casino Royale, put styles in witty conversation and said a great deal almost without a word of dialogue.

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Yesterday, President Barack Obama laid out the steps the White House is taking on rising gas costs, telling the Florida crowd that “drill everywhere” rhetoric is a “bumper sticker,” not a solution, but that he’s working to reduce oil demand and rein in Wall Street speculators.

When CNN moderator John King directly asked the Republican candidates for their own plans on gas prices at Wednesday’s debate, Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum completely sidestepped the question by attacking Obama’s foreign policy in Iran. Newt Gingrich, who released a half-hour ad targeting energy prices earlier that day, offered nothing beyond his one-sentence talking point on gas prices:

Well, the first thing I’d do, across the board for the entire region, is create a very dramatic American energy policy of opening up federal lands and opening up offshore drilling, replacing the EPA.

Gingrich, who earlier in the debate said that he could lower gas prices to $2.50, did not explain how any of these policies would lower prices to his promised benchmark, a price economists agree is impossible to achieve. Gingrich omitted that the U.

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Mitt Romney this week unveiled a new tax plan that includes a 20 percent reduction in all marginal income tax rates. Previously, Romney had said that he’s not concerned about the very rich and is “proposing no tax cuts for the rich.” But during this week’s GOP primary debate, he reneged on that position, saying, “number one, I said that were going to cut taxes on everyone across the country by 20 percent, including the top 1 percent.”

Romney’s new tax cut may reduce all tax rates by the same amount, but it gives most of its benefits to the already wealthy. The Tax Policy Center had modeled a 20 percent reduction in all income tax rates, and as this table shows, nearly half the benefit of such a cut would go to the richest 5 percent of Americans, with more than 25 percent of the benefit going to the richest 1 percent, compared with current policy.

Under the plan, someone in the richest 1 percent of Americans would receive a $60,000 tax cut, while someone in the richest 0.

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Critics have attacked Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, the anti-immigrant official who wrote Arizona and Alabama’s harmful immigration policies, for his ties to Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), a Southern Poverty Law Center-designated hate group that promotes anti-immigrant policies. But Kobach, who worked for FAIR’s legal arm, the Immigration Reform Law Institute, claimed in a Salon interview that he had never worked for a racist organization. I have not done any legal work for any organization that expresses or supports racial discrimination, nor will I ever do so in the future,” he said. Kobach also claimed that he was unfamiliar with FAIR’s founder John Tanton’s viewpoints. The SPLC has heavily documented FAIR’s white supremacist history and Tanton’s racist comments, including questioning the “educability” of Latinos.

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Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell (R) said that he respected Maryland’s right to decide the issue of marriage equality, just one day after that state passed legislation same-sex marriage. “The beauty of our regulators under the 10th amendment…is that states are the laboratories are democracy and innovation and they have the freedom to make different choices,” he said during a Politico forum this morning with Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley (D). “Martin and I have different views on this issue, on others, but that’s what’s great about having 50 states.”

But when O’Malley responded by suggesting that the well-being of children informed his own evolution towards marriage equality — “we concluded that it was not right and not just that the children of gay parents should homes that are protected in a lesser way under the law than other children,” he said — McDonnell remained unconvinced, insisting that gays and lesbians make worse parents than heterosexual couples and should thus be the last to adopt children:

MCDONNELL: Most of the data that I’ve read that the best environment for a child to grow up to be fully capable of achieving the American dream and having the best start at life in an intact two-parent family made up of a man and a woman.

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Welcome to Clean Start, ThinkProgress Greens morning round-up of the latest in climate and clean energy. Here is what were reading. What are you?

On Thursday, Lucy Lawless scaled the derrick of the Noble Discoverer, Shell Oil’s drilling ship that is scheduled to travel from New Zealand to the Chukchi Sea to begin exploratory drilling off Alaska’s northwest coast. [Mother Jones]

When a civil case against BP PLC opens on Monday, federal prosecutors plan to accuse the oil giant of making a series of decisions that caused it to be grossly negligent in the deadly explosion on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, according to sealed documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. [WSJ]

More than two decades after Congress passed tough new rules to clean up the nations air, the chief executive officer of Public Service Enterprise Group said yesterday the country should adopt those standards.

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- Protests in Afghanistan against the improper disposal of Muslim holy books continued despite an American apology.

- The deaths of two U.S. soldiers there, widely connected to the Koran burnings, came as the U.S. was already reviewing vetting procedures for the Afghan army after a spate of shootings against Americans.

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Other stories below: Increases in avalanches may foreshadow the future; China Sets up First Renewable Energy Think Tank

Latinos Emerging as New Actors in Fight Against Climate Change

Most people view immigration, education and jobs as the Latino electorates key issues.

Environmentalists want to add climate change to the list.

Its a no-brainer for the Latino community, said Adrianna Quintero of the National Resources Defense Council Thursday at a teleconference including Latino advocates, climate change activists and an environmental scientist.

Recent scientific research backs her up.

Avalanches Taking Toll; Are They Foreshadowing Future?

Already this winter, 19 people have been killed by avalanches in the Western U.

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Maryland’s state Senate passed a marriage equality bill last night despite numerous Republican attempts to derail it. It will take effect next January after Gov. Martin O’Malley (D) signs it into law, though it is expected to be challenged via referendum before then.

Former Florida Republican Governor Jeb Bush warned the GOP presidential candidates are “appealing to peoples fears”. “[I]t’s a little troubling sometimes when people are appealing to people’s fears and emotion rather than trying to get them to look over the horizon for a broader perspective,” Bush told reporters in Texas.

A former Romney staffer turned top fundraiser for the Romney super PAC got a $1.

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