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Open the books: U.S. contractors should disclose political spending
By the Editorial Board, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, April 1, 2015
President Barack Obama is currently faced with an opportunity to force government contractors to make public their campaign contributions to candidates and political parties.
The way it stands now, private sector companies receive nearly half-a-trillion dollars per year in contracts from the federal government. Twenty-five of those companies receive about 40 percent of the contracts, an estimated $184 billion in 2014.
It would be naive to imagine that the companies in question do not attempt to influence the awarding of these government contracts through campaign contributions to candidates of both parties, to the parties themselves, and to the various organizations that undergird America’s political world.
The kicker is that, as of now, there is no requirement for these companies and their senior executives to disclose their political contributions to any oversight body. What they do with their money can remain in the dark, out of sight of the taxpayers who put up the money that goes to pay them through the government contracts they receive.
What that means in effect is that taxpayer money can be channeled through companies, to the companies’ advantage, without the taxpayers having any idea how much or to whom the cash flows.
President Obama could fix this piece of injustice easily, with an executive order requiring all companies receiving government contracts to disclose to the Federal Election Commission, or — given the toothlessness and tardiness of the FEC in acting — to the Department of Justice, all the money it puts into the electoral process.
What is remarkable is that he has not done this yet, having been in office more than six years already. An earlier draft of just such an order was shelved after push-back from the business community. Not facing election again himself removes any venal or partisan constraints there might have been on his doing so. Now is definitely time for him to act, quickly, before the 2016 campaign proceeds further.
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Tuesday, March 31, 2015
"There’s a reason big business, small business, and even sports franchises are embracing gay America. It’s popular with the American people. And it is good for business."
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Indiana law: Bashing gay people isn't good politics
Indiana Gov. Mike Pence thought he was doing something politically smart when he signed Indiana's religious freedom law. He wasn't.
By John Feehery, March 31, 2015
I’m not going to weigh in on the legal details of the fight over Indiana’s new law (which I assume will be repealed or modified in the coming months).
I have read arguments on both sides, and I honestly don’t know enough about the legal technicalities to decide who is right and who is wrong.
But I can tell you about the politics.
And they aren’t good for the conservative side of the equation.
I remember when bashing gay people was good politics.
I remember when the Republicans had a party chairman (who later revealed himself to be gay) who designed a strategy to get votes on ballot initiatives banning gay marriage in order to make it easier for the W. to win.
I remember when the Republicans forced Bill Clinton to sign a Defense of Marriage bill into law because it was such toxic politics for the Democrats. That law was later declared unconstitutional.
This was before “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy."
And then everything changed.
The media culture changed overnight. Bashing gays was suddenly really bad politics.
Laws started popping up all over the country, making gay marriage acceptable and legal.
The former Republican Party chairman changed sides and became a leading proponent of gay marriage.
Close friends of mine, conservative Republicans, not only announced they were gay, but got themselves married when it was legal to do so.
When your gay friends get married, it gets harder and harder to condemn them for getting married. You end up celebrating, because that’s what normal people do.
Even the new pope asked the question on homosexuality: “Who am I to judge?”
When the leader of the Catholic Church starts to equivocate, you know it’s time to to take some time to really understand the broader political question.
There’s a reason big business, small business, and even sports franchises are embracing gay America. It’s popular with the American people. And it is good for business.
Mike Pence, who I know and who I like, thought he was doing something politically smart when he signed that law.
It wasn’t politically smart. And fellow Republicans who think it is smart to support Pence on this issue better rethink the politics.
Bashing gays is not good politics.
Indiana’s former governor, Mitch Daniels, once said that the Republican Party should call a truce on social issues, a comment that riled up conservatives and made it more difficult for him to run for president.
I don’t think on other social issues a truce is necessary. But on gay issues, a truce is the best we can hope for.
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Indiana law: Bashing gay people isn't good politics
Indiana Gov. Mike Pence thought he was doing something politically smart when he signed Indiana's religious freedom law. He wasn't.
By John Feehery, March 31, 2015
I’m not going to weigh in on the legal details of the fight over Indiana’s new law (which I assume will be repealed or modified in the coming months).
I have read arguments on both sides, and I honestly don’t know enough about the legal technicalities to decide who is right and who is wrong.
But I can tell you about the politics.
And they aren’t good for the conservative side of the equation.
I remember when bashing gay people was good politics.
I remember when the Republicans had a party chairman (who later revealed himself to be gay) who designed a strategy to get votes on ballot initiatives banning gay marriage in order to make it easier for the W. to win.
I remember when the Republicans forced Bill Clinton to sign a Defense of Marriage bill into law because it was such toxic politics for the Democrats. That law was later declared unconstitutional.
This was before “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy."
And then everything changed.
The media culture changed overnight. Bashing gays was suddenly really bad politics.
Laws started popping up all over the country, making gay marriage acceptable and legal.
The former Republican Party chairman changed sides and became a leading proponent of gay marriage.
Close friends of mine, conservative Republicans, not only announced they were gay, but got themselves married when it was legal to do so.
When your gay friends get married, it gets harder and harder to condemn them for getting married. You end up celebrating, because that’s what normal people do.
Even the new pope asked the question on homosexuality: “Who am I to judge?”
When the leader of the Catholic Church starts to equivocate, you know it’s time to to take some time to really understand the broader political question.
There’s a reason big business, small business, and even sports franchises are embracing gay America. It’s popular with the American people. And it is good for business.
Mike Pence, who I know and who I like, thought he was doing something politically smart when he signed that law.
It wasn’t politically smart. And fellow Republicans who think it is smart to support Pence on this issue better rethink the politics.
Bashing gays is not good politics.
Indiana’s former governor, Mitch Daniels, once said that the Republican Party should call a truce on social issues, a comment that riled up conservatives and made it more difficult for him to run for president.
I don’t think on other social issues a truce is necessary. But on gay issues, a truce is the best we can hope for.
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"So is big business just winning elections? Or is it running the whole show?"
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How Is Big Business Buying U.S. Elections?
By Sarah Schweppe, March 29, 2015
Gearing up for the 2016 presidential election means talking about more than just candidates. It also means talking about money — specifically where all the money for campaigns will come from. While potential candidate Hillary Clinton continues to be critiqued for allowing donations to Clinton Foundation to come from countries that don’t respect women’s rights, we’re about to see the fruits of political spending in the 2016 elections and won’t even know where it’s coming from.
Elections are getting more and more expensive. According to the New York Times, a record $6.3 billion was spent on presidential and congressional elections in 2012, and it’s estimated that spending will be more like $7.5 to $8 billion for 2016. That’s an outrageous amount of money, and what’s worse: We don’t know where a lot of it is coming from because the Securities and Exchange Commission still does not have a law requiring corporations to disclose their political spending. And most politicians are just fine with this.
The American public, on the other hand, is not. Last fall, activists gathered to protest the SEC’s failure to move forward with a rule that would require the disclosure of such spending. After the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision loosened campaign finance rules and brought forth millions of dollars of undisclosed political spending by businesses and individuals, many began petitioning the SEC, arguing that the commission is meant to protecting investors, not politicians.
At a recent congressional hearing, SEC Chair Mary Jo White responded to a legislator who asked why the SEC had not made disclosing this kind of political spending a law with her usual rhetoric that it’s not the most important issue to the commission, according to the New York Times. According to Reuters, in the past, she has said she opposes writing rules to exert “societal pressures on companies.”
But the amount of money — and how much money can affect elections — is serious. After the Citizens United ruling, this undisclosed campaign spending exploded. An example: Charles and David Koch, founders of Koch Industries, run a network of roughly 300 political spenders made up mostly of nonprofit groups that are not required to disclose their spending. In 2012, their $400 million contribution to the elections didn’t successfully get a Republican into the presidential office (their spending supports primarily conservative candidates). But their group seems to be doubling down and planning to spend nearly $900 million for 2016, according to the New York Times.
This kind of spending puts the Koch’s network on par with the Democratic and Republican Parties. (The Republican National Committee and the party’s two congressional campaign committees spent a total of $657 million for the last presidential election, according to NYT.) This amount of undisclosed from corporations is unprecedented and overpowering.
“It’s no wonder the candidates show up when the Koch brothers call,” said David Axelrod, a former senior adviser to President Barack Obama, to the New York Times. “That’s exponentially more money than any party organization will spend. In many ways, they have superseded the party.”
These networks and super PACs not only use their money to support certain candidates winning, but also continue to have the ears of these candidates. So is big business just winning elections? Or is it running the whole show?
...................................................................................................................................................................
How Is Big Business Buying U.S. Elections?
By Sarah Schweppe, March 29, 2015
Gearing up for the 2016 presidential election means talking about more than just candidates. It also means talking about money — specifically where all the money for campaigns will come from. While potential candidate Hillary Clinton continues to be critiqued for allowing donations to Clinton Foundation to come from countries that don’t respect women’s rights, we’re about to see the fruits of political spending in the 2016 elections and won’t even know where it’s coming from.
Elections are getting more and more expensive. According to the New York Times, a record $6.3 billion was spent on presidential and congressional elections in 2012, and it’s estimated that spending will be more like $7.5 to $8 billion for 2016. That’s an outrageous amount of money, and what’s worse: We don’t know where a lot of it is coming from because the Securities and Exchange Commission still does not have a law requiring corporations to disclose their political spending. And most politicians are just fine with this.
The American public, on the other hand, is not. Last fall, activists gathered to protest the SEC’s failure to move forward with a rule that would require the disclosure of such spending. After the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision loosened campaign finance rules and brought forth millions of dollars of undisclosed political spending by businesses and individuals, many began petitioning the SEC, arguing that the commission is meant to protecting investors, not politicians.
At a recent congressional hearing, SEC Chair Mary Jo White responded to a legislator who asked why the SEC had not made disclosing this kind of political spending a law with her usual rhetoric that it’s not the most important issue to the commission, according to the New York Times. According to Reuters, in the past, she has said she opposes writing rules to exert “societal pressures on companies.”
But the amount of money — and how much money can affect elections — is serious. After the Citizens United ruling, this undisclosed campaign spending exploded. An example: Charles and David Koch, founders of Koch Industries, run a network of roughly 300 political spenders made up mostly of nonprofit groups that are not required to disclose their spending. In 2012, their $400 million contribution to the elections didn’t successfully get a Republican into the presidential office (their spending supports primarily conservative candidates). But their group seems to be doubling down and planning to spend nearly $900 million for 2016, according to the New York Times.
This kind of spending puts the Koch’s network on par with the Democratic and Republican Parties. (The Republican National Committee and the party’s two congressional campaign committees spent a total of $657 million for the last presidential election, according to NYT.) This amount of undisclosed from corporations is unprecedented and overpowering.
“It’s no wonder the candidates show up when the Koch brothers call,” said David Axelrod, a former senior adviser to President Barack Obama, to the New York Times. “That’s exponentially more money than any party organization will spend. In many ways, they have superseded the party.”
These networks and super PACs not only use their money to support certain candidates winning, but also continue to have the ears of these candidates. So is big business just winning elections? Or is it running the whole show?
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If a "small group of House Democrats" has started voting with Republicans in hopes of eventually getting a Senate seat, are they still Democrats in good standing?
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The House Democrats Who Are Voting With Republicans More Often
By Derek Willis, March 31, 2015
A small group of House Democrats has begun moving to the right in the current Congress, breaking from a majority of colleagues on votes that pit lawmakers from liberal areas against those from more rural and conservative districts.
The lure of a Senate seat, which in many cases requires shifting from a narrower ideological focus to a broader one, and the threat of a well-funded challenger are among the reasons for this this shift.
A few members of this group, which numbers fewer than a dozen, are congressional veterans like Collin Peterson of Minnesota, who survived a tough challenge in 2014 and is voting with a majority of his fellow Democrats 64 percent of the time, down slightly from the previous Congress.
But most are new to the House and have known life only in the minority, with Republicans controlling the schedule and agenda. These Democratic lawmakers have voted against Democratic legislation such as the alternative budgets proposed by the Congressional Progressive Caucus and the Congressional Black Caucus.
Their ranks include John Delaney of Maryland, who was first elected in 2012 and narrowly defeated his Republican challenger last fall, and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, who won easily in 2014 but may be considering a run for the Senate (and, notably, did not vote for Nancy Pelosi for Speaker of the House in January). Ms. Sinema’s party voting percentage has dropped to 73 percent from 80 percent this year, while Mr. Delaney’s score has fallen further, to 80 percent from 92 percent.
Patrick Murphy of Florida is another example; he’s already running for the Senate seat currently held by the Republican Marco Rubio, and his party voting score has dropped from 83 percent in the last Congress to 77 percent in this one.
Also in the group are four California Democrats who have voted less often with their party in the current Congress than in the previous one, including Julia Brownley, who has joined a majority of Democrats on 84 percent of votes in 2015 compared with 91 percent the previous two years.
Retirements and election defeats thinned the ranks of moderate and conservative House Democrats last year, including many of those who previously voted to repeal all or parts of the Affordable Care Act. The remaining Democrats who are voting against their party more often represent a less liberal part of the caucus, but there are limits to their willingness to cross party lines. No Democrats voted for full repeal in February, and none voted for the Republican-written budget that also repeals the law.
The bills that have attracted the support of the small group of Democrats have included ones that provide tax cuts; support the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline; and change the ways the Environmental Protection Agency and other federal agencies study and approve regulations.
...................................................................................................................................................................
The House Democrats Who Are Voting With Republicans More Often
By Derek Willis, March 31, 2015
A small group of House Democrats has begun moving to the right in the current Congress, breaking from a majority of colleagues on votes that pit lawmakers from liberal areas against those from more rural and conservative districts.
The lure of a Senate seat, which in many cases requires shifting from a narrower ideological focus to a broader one, and the threat of a well-funded challenger are among the reasons for this this shift.
A few members of this group, which numbers fewer than a dozen, are congressional veterans like Collin Peterson of Minnesota, who survived a tough challenge in 2014 and is voting with a majority of his fellow Democrats 64 percent of the time, down slightly from the previous Congress.
But most are new to the House and have known life only in the minority, with Republicans controlling the schedule and agenda. These Democratic lawmakers have voted against Democratic legislation such as the alternative budgets proposed by the Congressional Progressive Caucus and the Congressional Black Caucus.
Their ranks include John Delaney of Maryland, who was first elected in 2012 and narrowly defeated his Republican challenger last fall, and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, who won easily in 2014 but may be considering a run for the Senate (and, notably, did not vote for Nancy Pelosi for Speaker of the House in January). Ms. Sinema’s party voting percentage has dropped to 73 percent from 80 percent this year, while Mr. Delaney’s score has fallen further, to 80 percent from 92 percent.
Patrick Murphy of Florida is another example; he’s already running for the Senate seat currently held by the Republican Marco Rubio, and his party voting score has dropped from 83 percent in the last Congress to 77 percent in this one.
Also in the group are four California Democrats who have voted less often with their party in the current Congress than in the previous one, including Julia Brownley, who has joined a majority of Democrats on 84 percent of votes in 2015 compared with 91 percent the previous two years.
Retirements and election defeats thinned the ranks of moderate and conservative House Democrats last year, including many of those who previously voted to repeal all or parts of the Affordable Care Act. The remaining Democrats who are voting against their party more often represent a less liberal part of the caucus, but there are limits to their willingness to cross party lines. No Democrats voted for full repeal in February, and none voted for the Republican-written budget that also repeals the law.
The bills that have attracted the support of the small group of Democrats have included ones that provide tax cuts; support the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline; and change the ways the Environmental Protection Agency and other federal agencies study and approve regulations.
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"... the Religious Freedom Restoration Act is a joke. The problem is that it’s just not all that funny."
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DISCRIMINATION HIDING BEHIND RELIGIOUS FAITH
By Jason Stanford, March 30, 2015
Where is Leslie Knope when we need her?
Indiana’s “Religious Freedom Restoration Act,” which purports to protect Christians from being forced to apply the Golden Rule to gays and lesbians at work, resists sober interpretation. The only way to understand it is as government-sponsored fan fiction for NBC’s recently departed “Parks & Recreation.”
For those of you who don’t like fun things and may have missed the show, “Parks & Recreation” depicted the goings-on of a city government department in the fictional town of Pawnee, Indiana. Amy Poehler played Leslie Knope, who started out as the deputy parks director and ascended in the series finale to a two-term governor of Indiana. She would’ve vetoed this, and we know this because she once presided over the marriage of two boy penguins.
The local moral gendarmes took offense, first demanding that Knope annul the penguins’ marriage. When she refused, arguing that the penguin wedding was “cute,” they demanded she be fired. If you are the sort who doesn’t like the idea of making fun of clenched-hearted scolds who see a gay penguin wedding as a sign of the apocalypse, then do yourself a favor and don’t watch “Parks & Recreation” on Netflix.
Just to clarify, two penguins of the same sex cannot legally marry in Indiana, but two humans of the same gender have been able to get hitched in the Hoosier State since 2014. This freaks out the kind of people who would get upset at a gay penguin wedding, and right now they control the Indiana legislature. That’s how we ended up with a law allowing businesses to refuse service to gays and lesbians if doing so would conflict with their religious faith.
Apparently some people are so busy loving their neighbor that they don’t have any time for dudes who love dudes. As far as I know, this religious protection does not extend to other sins listed in the bible. For example, there is no state-sanctioned discrimination against those who bear false witness, but that could just be the politicians carving out a loophole for themselves.
For those of us who loved the good-hearted characters who formed the core of that show for seven seasons, the idea of Leslie Knope taking on Gov. Mike Pence begs for a reboot of the television series. He is behaving like a comic foil for Knope, insisting, “This bill is not about discrimination” while signing it into law in private. When asked, he could not name one actual wrong that this law would have righted. We’re only slaying hypothetical dragons here.
One imagines what sport “Parks & Recreation” would have made of this. Would the Pawnee City Council have debated installing “gaydar” at city hall? Would Tom Haverford, played by Aziz Ansari, have been refused service at The Glitter Factory because he didn’t look straight enough?
We have political fiction to tell the stories about government and politics in a way that the news can’t capture. The newspaper can tell me about the companies that are canceling investments in Indiana. ESPN can tell me Charles Barkley wants the NCAA to pull the Final Four from Indianapolis. The nightly news can show me the thousands of protestors outside the Indiana statehouse. But only Leslie Knope can dramatize the shameful absurdity of this situation.
Instead, all we have is ourselves. This law puts the power of the government behind a dime-store version of Christianity. We don’t need a television show to tell us that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act is a joke. The problem is that it’s just not all that funny.
...................................................................................................................................................................
DISCRIMINATION HIDING BEHIND RELIGIOUS FAITH
By Jason Stanford, March 30, 2015
Where is Leslie Knope when we need her?
Indiana’s “Religious Freedom Restoration Act,” which purports to protect Christians from being forced to apply the Golden Rule to gays and lesbians at work, resists sober interpretation. The only way to understand it is as government-sponsored fan fiction for NBC’s recently departed “Parks & Recreation.”
For those of you who don’t like fun things and may have missed the show, “Parks & Recreation” depicted the goings-on of a city government department in the fictional town of Pawnee, Indiana. Amy Poehler played Leslie Knope, who started out as the deputy parks director and ascended in the series finale to a two-term governor of Indiana. She would’ve vetoed this, and we know this because she once presided over the marriage of two boy penguins.
The local moral gendarmes took offense, first demanding that Knope annul the penguins’ marriage. When she refused, arguing that the penguin wedding was “cute,” they demanded she be fired. If you are the sort who doesn’t like the idea of making fun of clenched-hearted scolds who see a gay penguin wedding as a sign of the apocalypse, then do yourself a favor and don’t watch “Parks & Recreation” on Netflix.
Just to clarify, two penguins of the same sex cannot legally marry in Indiana, but two humans of the same gender have been able to get hitched in the Hoosier State since 2014. This freaks out the kind of people who would get upset at a gay penguin wedding, and right now they control the Indiana legislature. That’s how we ended up with a law allowing businesses to refuse service to gays and lesbians if doing so would conflict with their religious faith.
Apparently some people are so busy loving their neighbor that they don’t have any time for dudes who love dudes. As far as I know, this religious protection does not extend to other sins listed in the bible. For example, there is no state-sanctioned discrimination against those who bear false witness, but that could just be the politicians carving out a loophole for themselves.
For those of us who loved the good-hearted characters who formed the core of that show for seven seasons, the idea of Leslie Knope taking on Gov. Mike Pence begs for a reboot of the television series. He is behaving like a comic foil for Knope, insisting, “This bill is not about discrimination” while signing it into law in private. When asked, he could not name one actual wrong that this law would have righted. We’re only slaying hypothetical dragons here.
One imagines what sport “Parks & Recreation” would have made of this. Would the Pawnee City Council have debated installing “gaydar” at city hall? Would Tom Haverford, played by Aziz Ansari, have been refused service at The Glitter Factory because he didn’t look straight enough?
We have political fiction to tell the stories about government and politics in a way that the news can’t capture. The newspaper can tell me about the companies that are canceling investments in Indiana. ESPN can tell me Charles Barkley wants the NCAA to pull the Final Four from Indianapolis. The nightly news can show me the thousands of protestors outside the Indiana statehouse. But only Leslie Knope can dramatize the shameful absurdity of this situation.
Instead, all we have is ourselves. This law puts the power of the government behind a dime-store version of Christianity. We don’t need a television show to tell us that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act is a joke. The problem is that it’s just not all that funny.
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"... the Republican opposition is mystifying, if for no other reason than Ms. Lynch’s confirmation would end the reign of Mr. Holder, who is widely disliked in conservative circles." So suck it up, GOP, and vote for her!
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In Delaying Vote on Loretta Lynch as Attorney General, G.O.P. Is in a Quandary
By Jonathan Weisman and Jennifer Steinhauer, March 29, 2015
Senate Republicans bolted for a two-week spring recess with the confirmation of Loretta E. Lynch as attorney general in jeopardy, and themselves in a quandary: Accept a qualified nominee they oppose because she backs President Obama’s policies or reject her and live with an attorney general they despise, Eric H. Holder Jr.
The nomination of Ms. Lynch, a seasoned United States attorney from New York, has laid bare the difficult politics confronting the new Republican majority. Lawmakers have found nothing in Ms. Lynch’s background to latch on to in opposition, and many are loath to reject the first African-American woman put forth to be the nation’s top law enforcement officer.
But, they say, their constituents have told them that a vote for Ms. Lynch affirms Mr. Obama’s executive actions on immigration, which she has said she finds lawful.
Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, now finds himself in the conundrum that has bedeviled his counterpart in the House, Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio: Members of his party will vote no on Ms. Lynch but hope “yes” — that she will squeak through.
“Perhaps she’ll be confirmed,” Senator Roger Wicker, Republican of Mississippi, said after a long pause and a deep audible breath, “but she won’t be confirmed with my vote. That’s what my constituents want of me, to make a stand against someone who has basically taken the position that the executive branch has unlimited, almost czarlike powers.”
A confirmation vote for Ms. Lynch, delayed longer than any other attorney general nominee in three decades, is vexing for a Republican Party seeking to counter accusations that it is indifferent to women and minorities.
Some Republicans concede Mr. Obama could not be expected to nominate an attorney general who rejects his policies. “The president is clearly going to nominate someone who’s most likely aligned with his policy positions,” said Senator Thom Tillis, Republican of North Carolina.
At the same time, almost no one has an unkind word for Ms. Lynch. Senator Shelley Moore Capito, Republican of West Virginia, said she could hardly expect a better nominee, “not in terms of qualifications or personal attributes.”
Yet, she cannot see herself voting for her.
Ms. Capito said she is holding out for the prospect that the president could offer a nominee not quite so stalwart in defense of the president’s policies.
“I would say it’s probably realistic to think somebody could convince me that they’re going to be more objective about it, yes,” Ms. Capito said.
The opposition to Ms. Lynch has raised the question of whether any significant nominee can be confirmed for the rest of Mr. Obama’s term.
“This shows you how difficult the whole nominating process is going to be,” said Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York.
So far, Senators Susan Collins of Maine, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Orrin G. Hatch of Utah and Jeff Flake of Arizona are the only Republicans who have announced their intention to support her. That would allow Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. to cast a tiebreaking vote.
But there is a complicating factor. Federal officials say Senator Robert Menendez, Democrat of New Jersey, is considering abstaining from casting a vote on the attorney general, since he faces the threat of a federal indictment and his fate is tied to the Justice Department.
That would leave Democrats in need of one more vote — and most likely two. No Republican would relish being the lone deciding vote, nor do Republican leaders wish for the spectacle of Mr. Biden’s being whisked dramatically to Capitol Hill. Two Republican votes would be their preference.
The pressure has fallen on Senators Mark S. Kirk of Illinois, Dean Heller of Nevada, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Thad Cochran of Mississippi and Rob Portman of Ohio to announce their positions.
Mr. Kirk and Mr. Portman face re-election next year in states with large African-American populations. Mr. Cochran barely staved off a Tea Party challenger in his state’s Republican primary last year, winning only because black voters crossed party lines to support him.
Mr. Cochran, who said he could not recall if he had met with Ms. Lynch, said race would not be a consideration.
To Ms. Collins and Mr. Graham, the Republican opposition is mystifying, if for no other reason than Ms. Lynch’s confirmation would end the reign of Mr. Holder, who is widely disliked in conservative circles. Mr. Holder has said he will stay until a successor is confirmed.
“One of my arguments is that we need a change of leadership at the Justice Department, and here we have this very well qualified, 30-plus-year prosecutor who can step in and replace the current attorney general,” Ms. Collins said. “I think that’s a good thing from whatever perspective you look at it.”
Mr. Graham echoed the point: “I dread the thought of having a fight with Eric Holder for the next 20 months. It’s just not good for the country.”
Ms. Lynch’s wait for a confirmation, by the time the Senate returns in mid-April, will surpass Togo D. West Jr.’s 147-day wait to be President Bill Clinton’s secretary of veterans affairs, which was the longest for a cabinet-level nominee in the last three administrations.
For other nominees, signs of tension are already there: No judges have been confirmed in this Congress, compared with 15 during the same period in the 110th Congress, when Democrats were in the majority approving President George W. Bush’s nominees. That deficit is likely to grow.
In the end, Mr. Flake said, the votes are likely to be there for Ms. Lynch to prevail.
Mr. Kirk said that he had met at length with Ms. Lynch and that the president’s immigration policies had not come up.
“The entire conversation was focused on the Gangster Disciples, a criminal gang that has 18,000 members in Chicagoland,” he said, declining to say which way he was leaning. But, he added, “I found her answers related to gang violence pretty on the money.”
Senator Cory Gardner, Republican of Colorado, said he had received written answers to questions he asked Ms. Lynch on federalism, Washington’s legal supremacy and his state’s marijuana legalization.
Her answers, not necessarily her position on the president’s immigration actions, could determine his vote, he said.
For now, Republicans are clearly uncomfortable with their position, and many would like Mr. Holder out of office, even if they plan to vote against Ms. Lynch.
“I’m ready for him to leave also,” said Senator John Boozman, Republican of Arkansas and an opponent of Ms. Lynch’s confirmation. “I don’t want to argue. That’s where I’m at, and that’s where the people of Arkansas are.”
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In Delaying Vote on Loretta Lynch as Attorney General, G.O.P. Is in a Quandary
By Jonathan Weisman and Jennifer Steinhauer, March 29, 2015
Senate Republicans bolted for a two-week spring recess with the confirmation of Loretta E. Lynch as attorney general in jeopardy, and themselves in a quandary: Accept a qualified nominee they oppose because she backs President Obama’s policies or reject her and live with an attorney general they despise, Eric H. Holder Jr.
The nomination of Ms. Lynch, a seasoned United States attorney from New York, has laid bare the difficult politics confronting the new Republican majority. Lawmakers have found nothing in Ms. Lynch’s background to latch on to in opposition, and many are loath to reject the first African-American woman put forth to be the nation’s top law enforcement officer.
But, they say, their constituents have told them that a vote for Ms. Lynch affirms Mr. Obama’s executive actions on immigration, which she has said she finds lawful.
Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, now finds himself in the conundrum that has bedeviled his counterpart in the House, Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio: Members of his party will vote no on Ms. Lynch but hope “yes” — that she will squeak through.
“Perhaps she’ll be confirmed,” Senator Roger Wicker, Republican of Mississippi, said after a long pause and a deep audible breath, “but she won’t be confirmed with my vote. That’s what my constituents want of me, to make a stand against someone who has basically taken the position that the executive branch has unlimited, almost czarlike powers.”
A confirmation vote for Ms. Lynch, delayed longer than any other attorney general nominee in three decades, is vexing for a Republican Party seeking to counter accusations that it is indifferent to women and minorities.
Some Republicans concede Mr. Obama could not be expected to nominate an attorney general who rejects his policies. “The president is clearly going to nominate someone who’s most likely aligned with his policy positions,” said Senator Thom Tillis, Republican of North Carolina.
At the same time, almost no one has an unkind word for Ms. Lynch. Senator Shelley Moore Capito, Republican of West Virginia, said she could hardly expect a better nominee, “not in terms of qualifications or personal attributes.”
Yet, she cannot see herself voting for her.
Ms. Capito said she is holding out for the prospect that the president could offer a nominee not quite so stalwart in defense of the president’s policies.
“I would say it’s probably realistic to think somebody could convince me that they’re going to be more objective about it, yes,” Ms. Capito said.
The opposition to Ms. Lynch has raised the question of whether any significant nominee can be confirmed for the rest of Mr. Obama’s term.
“This shows you how difficult the whole nominating process is going to be,” said Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York.
So far, Senators Susan Collins of Maine, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Orrin G. Hatch of Utah and Jeff Flake of Arizona are the only Republicans who have announced their intention to support her. That would allow Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. to cast a tiebreaking vote.
But there is a complicating factor. Federal officials say Senator Robert Menendez, Democrat of New Jersey, is considering abstaining from casting a vote on the attorney general, since he faces the threat of a federal indictment and his fate is tied to the Justice Department.
That would leave Democrats in need of one more vote — and most likely two. No Republican would relish being the lone deciding vote, nor do Republican leaders wish for the spectacle of Mr. Biden’s being whisked dramatically to Capitol Hill. Two Republican votes would be their preference.
The pressure has fallen on Senators Mark S. Kirk of Illinois, Dean Heller of Nevada, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Thad Cochran of Mississippi and Rob Portman of Ohio to announce their positions.
Mr. Kirk and Mr. Portman face re-election next year in states with large African-American populations. Mr. Cochran barely staved off a Tea Party challenger in his state’s Republican primary last year, winning only because black voters crossed party lines to support him.
Mr. Cochran, who said he could not recall if he had met with Ms. Lynch, said race would not be a consideration.
To Ms. Collins and Mr. Graham, the Republican opposition is mystifying, if for no other reason than Ms. Lynch’s confirmation would end the reign of Mr. Holder, who is widely disliked in conservative circles. Mr. Holder has said he will stay until a successor is confirmed.
“One of my arguments is that we need a change of leadership at the Justice Department, and here we have this very well qualified, 30-plus-year prosecutor who can step in and replace the current attorney general,” Ms. Collins said. “I think that’s a good thing from whatever perspective you look at it.”
Mr. Graham echoed the point: “I dread the thought of having a fight with Eric Holder for the next 20 months. It’s just not good for the country.”
Ms. Lynch’s wait for a confirmation, by the time the Senate returns in mid-April, will surpass Togo D. West Jr.’s 147-day wait to be President Bill Clinton’s secretary of veterans affairs, which was the longest for a cabinet-level nominee in the last three administrations.
For other nominees, signs of tension are already there: No judges have been confirmed in this Congress, compared with 15 during the same period in the 110th Congress, when Democrats were in the majority approving President George W. Bush’s nominees. That deficit is likely to grow.
In the end, Mr. Flake said, the votes are likely to be there for Ms. Lynch to prevail.
Mr. Kirk said that he had met at length with Ms. Lynch and that the president’s immigration policies had not come up.
“The entire conversation was focused on the Gangster Disciples, a criminal gang that has 18,000 members in Chicagoland,” he said, declining to say which way he was leaning. But, he added, “I found her answers related to gang violence pretty on the money.”
Senator Cory Gardner, Republican of Colorado, said he had received written answers to questions he asked Ms. Lynch on federalism, Washington’s legal supremacy and his state’s marijuana legalization.
Her answers, not necessarily her position on the president’s immigration actions, could determine his vote, he said.
For now, Republicans are clearly uncomfortable with their position, and many would like Mr. Holder out of office, even if they plan to vote against Ms. Lynch.
“I’m ready for him to leave also,” said Senator John Boozman, Republican of Arkansas and an opponent of Ms. Lynch’s confirmation. “I don’t want to argue. That’s where I’m at, and that’s where the people of Arkansas are.”
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Right-wingers are so eager to challenge any part of the ACA that they jumped the gun-- this isn't 2019!
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COMMENTS:
* How many times will the right go after this law? There are things that need fixing - but until republicans actually offer something concrete all they have is partisan bickering and backstabbing. They have tried to repeal it how many times now? This is NOT how government is supposed to solve issues.
* there is no death panel get over it already facts are such wonderful things use them
* The GOP is funny. With Obamacare they say don't look at the intent of the law, parse each word, yet with their discrimination law in Indiana, they say oh the law is not intended to allow discrimination, just ignore what the words say.
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U.S. Supreme Court rejects Obamacare 'death panel' challenge
By Lawrence Hurley, March 30, 2015
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear a new challenge to President Barack Obama's healthcare law that took aim at a bureaucratic board labeled by some Republicans as a "death panel" because it was designed to cut Medicare costs.
The high court left intact a ruling by the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that threw out the lawsuit.
The court’s action in an unsigned order was a victory for Obama administration, which has faced a barrage of legal challenges to the 2010 Affordable Care Act, often called Obamacare. The court is currently weighing a separate case challenging health insurance subsidies that are key to Obamacare’s implementation. A ruling is due by the end of June.
In the case that the justices rejected on Monday, Arizona-based business owner Nick Coons and Dr. Eric Novack, an orthopedic surgeon, sued in 2011 in litigation backed by a conservative legal group.
Among other things, they challenged the Independent Payment Advisory Board, or IPAB, a 15-member government panel dubbed by some Republicans as a "death panel" because of its intended role in trimming costs within Medicare, the government healthcare program for the elderly and disabled.
Lower courts threw out the lawsuit. In its August 2014 ruling, the appeals court said that the plaintiffs had not shown they had suffered any harm that they could sue over.
On the IPAB claim, the court noted that under the terms of the healthcare law, the board acts only if Medicare spending increases at a certain level. The earliest it could ever take any action that could potentially reduce Novack’s Medicare reimbursements would be in 2019.
The plaintiffs, represented by the Phoenix, Arizona-based conservative Goldwater Institute, also challenged a provision of the law, known as the individual mandate, that requires Americans to obtain health insurance. Those claims were also rejected.
The Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the individual mandate in 2012.
The case on which the court acted on is Coons v. Lew, U.S. Supreme Court, No. 14-525.
...................................................................................................................................................................
COMMENTS:
* How many times will the right go after this law? There are things that need fixing - but until republicans actually offer something concrete all they have is partisan bickering and backstabbing. They have tried to repeal it how many times now? This is NOT how government is supposed to solve issues.
* there is no death panel get over it already facts are such wonderful things use them
* The GOP is funny. With Obamacare they say don't look at the intent of the law, parse each word, yet with their discrimination law in Indiana, they say oh the law is not intended to allow discrimination, just ignore what the words say.
...................................................................................................................................................................
U.S. Supreme Court rejects Obamacare 'death panel' challenge
By Lawrence Hurley, March 30, 2015
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear a new challenge to President Barack Obama's healthcare law that took aim at a bureaucratic board labeled by some Republicans as a "death panel" because it was designed to cut Medicare costs.
The high court left intact a ruling by the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that threw out the lawsuit.
The court’s action in an unsigned order was a victory for Obama administration, which has faced a barrage of legal challenges to the 2010 Affordable Care Act, often called Obamacare. The court is currently weighing a separate case challenging health insurance subsidies that are key to Obamacare’s implementation. A ruling is due by the end of June.
In the case that the justices rejected on Monday, Arizona-based business owner Nick Coons and Dr. Eric Novack, an orthopedic surgeon, sued in 2011 in litigation backed by a conservative legal group.
Among other things, they challenged the Independent Payment Advisory Board, or IPAB, a 15-member government panel dubbed by some Republicans as a "death panel" because of its intended role in trimming costs within Medicare, the government healthcare program for the elderly and disabled.
Lower courts threw out the lawsuit. In its August 2014 ruling, the appeals court said that the plaintiffs had not shown they had suffered any harm that they could sue over.
On the IPAB claim, the court noted that under the terms of the healthcare law, the board acts only if Medicare spending increases at a certain level. The earliest it could ever take any action that could potentially reduce Novack’s Medicare reimbursements would be in 2019.
The plaintiffs, represented by the Phoenix, Arizona-based conservative Goldwater Institute, also challenged a provision of the law, known as the individual mandate, that requires Americans to obtain health insurance. Those claims were also rejected.
The Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the individual mandate in 2012.
The case on which the court acted on is Coons v. Lew, U.S. Supreme Court, No. 14-525.
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Monday, March 30, 2015
"If Republicans want a fix, there is only one choice: and that is repeal this law ..."
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COMMENTS:
* One cockroach is too many. The insanity of American christianism has to be curtailed before it gets to be indistinguishable from fundamentalist Islam. The only real difference between those 2 delusions is the way they spell the name of their imaginary god(s).
* I think the people of Indiana got what they voted for. Instead of crying about hurting their pocket books they need to look inward to understand why they voted for these idiots in the first place. Suck it up hoosiers you did it.
* I hope that someone, somewhere is creating a data base to track any business that so discriminates.
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Fallout over ‘religious freedom’ law hits business community
By Zach Blanchard, March 30, 2015
Indiana state lawmakers are facing growing pressure after the state’s controversial Religious Freedom Restoration Act was signed by Gov. Mike Pence last week, prompting some of the nation’s top companies to take direct aim at the state’s economy.
On Monday’s Rundown, CNBC’s Mary Thompson reported that the reaction has been “relentlessly negative” for the business community, on both a local level and a national one.
The nation’s largest companies, including Paypal and the NCAA, have spoken out against the RFRA, with business-review site Angie’s List going as far as to put a hold on an expansion plan that would add 1,000 jobs to the state by 2016.
Most notably, Apple CEO Tim Cook, who is openly gay, said that corporate America decided long ago that discrimination was “bad for business.”
On a local level, Thompson reports, many store owners throughout Indiana have placed signs in their windows to ensure customers they do not discriminate in order to prevent a loss in business. “To some this is a source of frustration, because they feel they shouldn’t even have to hang these signs at all in order to make their customers feel comfortable,” Thompson said.
Republican leaders responded directly to national opposition that claims the law discriminates against the LGBT community Monday as they attempt to clarify the law, with Indiana House Speaker Brian Bosma calling it a “misconception” that the law “allows the denial of services to any Hoosier.”
But Democrats are standing firm, saying that there is only one solution to the problem resulting from the Republican-crafted legislation. “If Republicans want a fix, there is only one choice: and that is repeal this law,” State Sen. Tim Lanane said in a press conference on Monday.
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COMMENTS:
* One cockroach is too many. The insanity of American christianism has to be curtailed before it gets to be indistinguishable from fundamentalist Islam. The only real difference between those 2 delusions is the way they spell the name of their imaginary god(s).
* I think the people of Indiana got what they voted for. Instead of crying about hurting their pocket books they need to look inward to understand why they voted for these idiots in the first place. Suck it up hoosiers you did it.
* I hope that someone, somewhere is creating a data base to track any business that so discriminates.
...................................................................................................................................................................
Fallout over ‘religious freedom’ law hits business community
By Zach Blanchard, March 30, 2015
Indiana state lawmakers are facing growing pressure after the state’s controversial Religious Freedom Restoration Act was signed by Gov. Mike Pence last week, prompting some of the nation’s top companies to take direct aim at the state’s economy.
On Monday’s Rundown, CNBC’s Mary Thompson reported that the reaction has been “relentlessly negative” for the business community, on both a local level and a national one.
The nation’s largest companies, including Paypal and the NCAA, have spoken out against the RFRA, with business-review site Angie’s List going as far as to put a hold on an expansion plan that would add 1,000 jobs to the state by 2016.
Most notably, Apple CEO Tim Cook, who is openly gay, said that corporate America decided long ago that discrimination was “bad for business.”
On a local level, Thompson reports, many store owners throughout Indiana have placed signs in their windows to ensure customers they do not discriminate in order to prevent a loss in business. “To some this is a source of frustration, because they feel they shouldn’t even have to hang these signs at all in order to make their customers feel comfortable,” Thompson said.
Republican leaders responded directly to national opposition that claims the law discriminates against the LGBT community Monday as they attempt to clarify the law, with Indiana House Speaker Brian Bosma calling it a “misconception” that the law “allows the denial of services to any Hoosier.”
But Democrats are standing firm, saying that there is only one solution to the problem resulting from the Republican-crafted legislation. “If Republicans want a fix, there is only one choice: and that is repeal this law,” State Sen. Tim Lanane said in a press conference on Monday.
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Good decision, SCOTUS!
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COMMENTS:
* Why must you have religious services in school? Why won't Jesus provide a church for you?
* Don't pray in my school, and I won't think in your church
* SCOTUS finally gets one right. Blind squirrels find nut, film at eleven.
* Damn churches don't want to pay taxes yet, they want to use the buildings that taxes paid for
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Supreme Court preserves New York ban on worship services in schools
By Lawrence Hurley, March 30, 2015
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday left intact New York City's ban on religious worship services inside school buildings after hours.
In a brief order, the court said it would not hear an appeal filed by the Bronx Household of Faith, a conservative Congregational church. The court's action leaves intact an April 2014 ruling by the New York-based 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which upheld the ban.
The appeals court had said the New York City Board of Education's regulation, created so the city would not be perceived as endorsing religious activity in a public forum, "was consistent with its constitutional duties."
That court said the ban was a reasonable way to abide by the so-called Establishment Clause of the U.S. Constitution, which provides for separation of church and state.
The rule prohibits school buildings from being used for religious worship services or as houses of worship, but the city allows groups to use schools for non-religious activities.
The appeals court reversed a June 2012 decision from U.S. District Judge Loretta Preska, who permanently enjoined the city from enforcing the ban. Preska had held that allowing the worship services did not suggest that the school would be endorsing religion.
The case is Bronx Household of Faith v. Board of Education, U.S. Supreme Court, No. 14-354.
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COMMENTS:
* Why must you have religious services in school? Why won't Jesus provide a church for you?
* Don't pray in my school, and I won't think in your church
* SCOTUS finally gets one right. Blind squirrels find nut, film at eleven.
* Damn churches don't want to pay taxes yet, they want to use the buildings that taxes paid for
...................................................................................................................................................................
Supreme Court preserves New York ban on worship services in schools
By Lawrence Hurley, March 30, 2015
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday left intact New York City's ban on religious worship services inside school buildings after hours.
In a brief order, the court said it would not hear an appeal filed by the Bronx Household of Faith, a conservative Congregational church. The court's action leaves intact an April 2014 ruling by the New York-based 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which upheld the ban.
The appeals court had said the New York City Board of Education's regulation, created so the city would not be perceived as endorsing religious activity in a public forum, "was consistent with its constitutional duties."
That court said the ban was a reasonable way to abide by the so-called Establishment Clause of the U.S. Constitution, which provides for separation of church and state.
The rule prohibits school buildings from being used for religious worship services or as houses of worship, but the city allows groups to use schools for non-religious activities.
The appeals court reversed a June 2012 decision from U.S. District Judge Loretta Preska, who permanently enjoined the city from enforcing the ban. Preska had held that allowing the worship services did not suggest that the school would be endorsing religion.
The case is Bronx Household of Faith v. Board of Education, U.S. Supreme Court, No. 14-354.
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"We live in an era in which politicians and the supposed experts who serve them never feel obliged to acknowledge uncomfortable facts ..." Lying is easier, don't you know.
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COMMENTS:
* “A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” ― Mark Twain
* That was before the internet. Lies travel 10 times faster now.
* The "Passing Strange" aspect of this is that in MA when the RNC backed mandatory universal health insurance (or else) the focus was on the cost to society of the "deadbeats" that refused to have insurance and passed their costs on to the general population. The logic was, quite correctly, that an insured person got his bills paid by the insurance company, not handed off to the town, county and state governments and the taxpayers covered the loss. I guess the RNC figures it can have it both ways.
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Imaginary Health Care Horrors
By Paul Krugman, March 30, 2015
There’s a lot of fuzzy math in American politics, but Representative Pete Sessions of Texas, the chairman of the House Rules Committee, recently set a new standard when he declared the cost of Obamacare “unconscionable.” If you do “simple multiplication,” he insisted, you find that the coverage expansion is costing $5 million per recipient. But his calculation was a bit off — namely, by a factor of more than a thousand. The actual cost per newly insured American is about $4,000.
Now, everyone makes mistakes. But this wasn’t a forgivable error. Whatever your overall view of the Affordable Care Act, one indisputable fact is that it’s costing taxpayers much less than expected — about 20 percent less, according to the Congressional Budget Office. A senior member of Congress should know that, and he certainly has no business making speeches about an issue if he won’t bother to read budget office reports.
But that is, of course, how it’s been all along with Obamacare. Before the law went into effect, opponents predicted disaster on all levels. What has happened instead is that the law is working pretty well. So how have the prophets of disaster responded? By pretending that the bad things they said would happen have, in fact, happened.
Costs aren’t the only area where enemies of reform prefer to talk about imaginary disasters rather than real success stories. Remember, Obamacare was also supposed to be a huge job-killer. In 2011, the House even passed a bill called the Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act. Health reform, opponents declared, would cripple the economy and in particular cause businesses to force their employees into part-time work.
Well, Obamacare went into effect fully at the beginning of 2014 — and private-sector job growth actually accelerated, to a pace we haven’t seen since the Clinton years. Meanwhile, involuntary part-time employment — the number of workers who want full-time work but can’t get it — has dropped sharply. But the usual suspects talk as if their dire predictions came true. Obamacare, Jeb Bush declared a few weeks ago, is “the greatest job suppressor in the so-called recovery.”
Finally, there’s the never-ending hunt for snarks and boojums — for ordinary, hard-working Americans who have suffered hardship thanks to health reform. As we’ve just seen, Obamacare opponents by and large don’t do math (and they’re sorry when they try). But all they really need are a few sob stories, tales of sympathetic individuals who have been impoverished by some aspect of the law.
Remarkably, however, they haven’t been able to find those stories. Early last year, Americans for Prosperity, a Koch brothers-backed group, ran a series of ads featuring alleged Obamacare victims — but not one of those tales of woe stood up to scrutiny. More recently, Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington State took to Facebook to ask for Obamacare horror stories. What she got instead was a torrent of testimonials from people whose lives have been improved, and in some cases saved, by health reform.
In reality, the only people hurt by health reform are Americans with very high incomes, who have seen their taxes go up, and a relatively small number of people who have seen their premiums rise because they’re young and healthy (so insurers previously saw them as good risks) and affluent (so they don’t qualify for subsidies). Neither group supplies suitable victims for attack ads.
In short, when it comes to the facts, the attack on health reform has come up empty-handed. But the public doesn’t know that. The good news about costs hasn’t made it through at all: According to a recent poll by Vox.com, only 5 percent of Americans know that Obamacare is costing less than predicted, while 42 percent think the government is spending more than expected.
And the favorable experiences of the roughly 16 million Americans who have gained insurance so far have had little effect on public perceptions. Partly that’s because the Affordable Care Act, by design, has had almost no effect on those who already had good health insurance: Before the act, a large majority of Americans were already covered by their employers, by Medicare or by Medicaid, and they have seen no change in their status.
At a deeper level, however, what we’re looking at here is the impact of post-truth politics. We live in an era in which politicians and the supposed experts who serve them never feel obliged to acknowledge uncomfortable facts, in which no argument is ever dropped, no matter how overwhelming the evidence that it’s wrong.
And the result is that imaginary disasters can overshadow real successes. Obamacare isn’t perfect, but it has dramatically improved the lives of millions. Someone should tell the voters.
...................................................................................................................................................................
COMMENTS:
* “A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” ― Mark Twain
* That was before the internet. Lies travel 10 times faster now.
* The "Passing Strange" aspect of this is that in MA when the RNC backed mandatory universal health insurance (or else) the focus was on the cost to society of the "deadbeats" that refused to have insurance and passed their costs on to the general population. The logic was, quite correctly, that an insured person got his bills paid by the insurance company, not handed off to the town, county and state governments and the taxpayers covered the loss. I guess the RNC figures it can have it both ways.
...................................................................................................................................................................
Imaginary Health Care Horrors
By Paul Krugman, March 30, 2015
There’s a lot of fuzzy math in American politics, but Representative Pete Sessions of Texas, the chairman of the House Rules Committee, recently set a new standard when he declared the cost of Obamacare “unconscionable.” If you do “simple multiplication,” he insisted, you find that the coverage expansion is costing $5 million per recipient. But his calculation was a bit off — namely, by a factor of more than a thousand. The actual cost per newly insured American is about $4,000.
Now, everyone makes mistakes. But this wasn’t a forgivable error. Whatever your overall view of the Affordable Care Act, one indisputable fact is that it’s costing taxpayers much less than expected — about 20 percent less, according to the Congressional Budget Office. A senior member of Congress should know that, and he certainly has no business making speeches about an issue if he won’t bother to read budget office reports.
But that is, of course, how it’s been all along with Obamacare. Before the law went into effect, opponents predicted disaster on all levels. What has happened instead is that the law is working pretty well. So how have the prophets of disaster responded? By pretending that the bad things they said would happen have, in fact, happened.
Costs aren’t the only area where enemies of reform prefer to talk about imaginary disasters rather than real success stories. Remember, Obamacare was also supposed to be a huge job-killer. In 2011, the House even passed a bill called the Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act. Health reform, opponents declared, would cripple the economy and in particular cause businesses to force their employees into part-time work.
Well, Obamacare went into effect fully at the beginning of 2014 — and private-sector job growth actually accelerated, to a pace we haven’t seen since the Clinton years. Meanwhile, involuntary part-time employment — the number of workers who want full-time work but can’t get it — has dropped sharply. But the usual suspects talk as if their dire predictions came true. Obamacare, Jeb Bush declared a few weeks ago, is “the greatest job suppressor in the so-called recovery.”
Finally, there’s the never-ending hunt for snarks and boojums — for ordinary, hard-working Americans who have suffered hardship thanks to health reform. As we’ve just seen, Obamacare opponents by and large don’t do math (and they’re sorry when they try). But all they really need are a few sob stories, tales of sympathetic individuals who have been impoverished by some aspect of the law.
Remarkably, however, they haven’t been able to find those stories. Early last year, Americans for Prosperity, a Koch brothers-backed group, ran a series of ads featuring alleged Obamacare victims — but not one of those tales of woe stood up to scrutiny. More recently, Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington State took to Facebook to ask for Obamacare horror stories. What she got instead was a torrent of testimonials from people whose lives have been improved, and in some cases saved, by health reform.
In reality, the only people hurt by health reform are Americans with very high incomes, who have seen their taxes go up, and a relatively small number of people who have seen their premiums rise because they’re young and healthy (so insurers previously saw them as good risks) and affluent (so they don’t qualify for subsidies). Neither group supplies suitable victims for attack ads.
In short, when it comes to the facts, the attack on health reform has come up empty-handed. But the public doesn’t know that. The good news about costs hasn’t made it through at all: According to a recent poll by Vox.com, only 5 percent of Americans know that Obamacare is costing less than predicted, while 42 percent think the government is spending more than expected.
And the favorable experiences of the roughly 16 million Americans who have gained insurance so far have had little effect on public perceptions. Partly that’s because the Affordable Care Act, by design, has had almost no effect on those who already had good health insurance: Before the act, a large majority of Americans were already covered by their employers, by Medicare or by Medicaid, and they have seen no change in their status.
At a deeper level, however, what we’re looking at here is the impact of post-truth politics. We live in an era in which politicians and the supposed experts who serve them never feel obliged to acknowledge uncomfortable facts, in which no argument is ever dropped, no matter how overwhelming the evidence that it’s wrong.
And the result is that imaginary disasters can overshadow real successes. Obamacare isn’t perfect, but it has dramatically improved the lives of millions. Someone should tell the voters.
...................................................................................................................................................................
"... sincere and faithful people, when they feel the imprimatur of both the law and the Lord, can do very ugly things."
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COMMENTS:
* All businesses that don't want to be labeled as discriminatory should place a sign in their window stating that they do not discriminate against anyone. This allows us to know what kind of establishment we are spending our money at.
* Incidentally, and sad to say… but even as a Christian, I generally steer clear of businesses that wear their faith on their sleeve in the form of labeling themselves a "christian business" - sadly, too many times these have turned out to be the WORST companies! I just think
* This entire religious "freedom" bill nonsense just shows the entire desperation of Republicans and right wingers which live in a world that they can't control anymore and scares the hell out of them.
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What makes Indiana's religious freedom law different?
By Garrett Epps, March 30, 2015
No one, I think, would ever have denied that Maurice Bessinger was a man of faith.
And he wasn’t particularly a “still, small voice” man either; he wanted everybody in earshot to know that slavery had been God’s will, that desegregation was Satan’s work, and the federal government was the Antichrist. God wanted only whites to eat at Bessinger’s six Piggie Park barbecue joints; so His servant Maurice took that fight all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which in 1968 decided that his religious freedom argument was “patently frivolous.”
Until the day he died, however, Bessinger insisted that he and God were right. His last fight was to preserve the Confederate flag as a symbol of South Carolina. “I want to be known as a hard-working, Christian man that loves God and wants to further (God’s) work throughout the world as I have been doing throughout the last 25 years,” he told his hometown newspaper in 2000.
Growing up in the pre-Civil Rights South, I knew a lot of folks like Maurice Bessinger. I didn’t like them much, but I didn’t doubt their sincerity. Why wouldn’t they believe racism was God’s will? We white Southerners heard that message on weekends from the pulpit, on school days from our segregated schools, and every day from our governments. When Richard and Mildred Loving left Virginia to be married, a state trial judge convicted them of violating the Racial Integrity Act. That judge wrote that “Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents … The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.”
That’s a good background against which to measure the uproar about the Indiana Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which was signed into law by Governor Mike Pence last week. I don’t question the religious sincerity of anyone involved in drafting and passing this law. But sincere and faithful people, when they feel the imprimatur of both the law and the Lord, can do very ugly things.
There’s a factual dispute about the new Indiana law. It is called a “Religious Freedom Restoration Act,” like the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act, passed in 1990. Thus a number of its defenders have claimed it is really the same law. Here, for example, is the Weekly Standard’s John McCormack: “Is there any difference between Indiana’s law and the federal law? Nothing significant.” I am not sure what McCormack writer was thinking; but even my old employer, The Washington Post, seems to believe that if a law has a similar title as another law, they must be identical. “Indiana is actually soon to be just one of 20 states with a version of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, or RFRA,” the Post’s Hunter Schwarz wrote, linking to this map created by the National Conference of State Legislatures.
The problem with this statement is that, well, it’s false. That becomes clear when you read and compare those tedious state statutes. If you do that, you will find that the Indiana statute has two features the federal RFRA—and most state RFRAs—do not. First, the Indiana law explicitly allows any for-profit business to assert a right to “the free exercise of religion.” The federal RFRA doesn’t contain such language, and neither does any of the state RFRAs except South Carolina’s; in fact, Louisiana and Pennsylvania, explicitly exclude for-profit businesses from the protection of their RFRAs.
The new Indiana statute also contains this odd language: “A person whose exercise of religion has been substantially burdened, or is likely to be substantially burdened, by a violation of this chapter may assert the violation or impending violation as a claim or defense in a judicial or administrative proceeding, regardless of whether the state or any other governmental entity is a party to the proceeding.” (My italics.) Neither the federal RFRA, nor 18 of the 19 state statutes cited by the Post, says anything like this; only the Texas RFRA, passed in 1999, contains similar language.
What these words mean is, first, that the Indiana statute explicitly recognizes that a for-profit corporation has “free exercise” rights matching those of individuals or churches. A lot of legal thinkers thought that idea was outlandish until last year’s decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, in which the Court’s five conservatives interpreted the federal RFRA to give some corporate employers a religious veto over their employees’ statutory right to contraceptive coverage.
Second, the Indiana statute explicitly makes a business’s “free exercise” right a defense against a private lawsuit by another person, rather than simply against actions brought by government. Why does this matter? Well, there’s a lot of evidence that the new wave of “religious freedom” legislation was impelled, at least in part, by a panic over a New Mexico state-court decision, Elane Photography v. Willock. In that case, a same-sex couple sued a professional photography studio that refused to photograph the couple’s wedding. New Mexico law bars discrimination in “public accommodations” on the basis of sexual orientation. The studio said that New Mexico’s RFRA nonetheless barred the suit; but the state’s Supreme Court held that the RFRA did not apply “because the government is not a party.”
Remarkably enough, soon after, language found its way into the Indiana statute to make sure that no Indiana court could ever make a similar decision. Democrats also offered the Republican legislative majority a chance to amend the new act to say that it did not permit businesses to discriminate; they voted that amendment down.
So, let’s review the evidence: by the Weekly Standard’s definition, there’s “nothing significant” about this law that differs from the federal one, and other state ones—except that it has been carefully written to make clear that 1) businesses can use it against 2) civil rights suits brought by individuals.
Of all the state “religious freedom” laws I have read, this new statute hints most strongly that it is there to be used as a means of excluding gays and same-sex couples from accessing employment, housing, and public accommodations on the same terms as other people. True, there is no actual language that says, All businesses wishing to discriminate in employment, housing, and public accommodations on the basis of sexual orientation, please check this “religious objection” box. But, as Henry David Thoreau once wrote, “Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.”
So—is the fuss over the Indiana law overblown?
No.
The statute shows every sign of having been carefully designed to put new obstacles in the path of equality; and it has been publicly sold with deceptive claims that it is “nothing new.”
Being required to serve those we dislike is a painful price to pay for the privilege of running a business; but the pain exclusion inflicts on its victims, and on society, are far worse than the discomfort the faithful may suffer at having to open their businesses to all.
As the story of Maurice Bessinger shows us, even dressed in liturgical garments, hateful discrimination is still a pig.
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COMMENTS:
* All businesses that don't want to be labeled as discriminatory should place a sign in their window stating that they do not discriminate against anyone. This allows us to know what kind of establishment we are spending our money at.
* Incidentally, and sad to say… but even as a Christian, I generally steer clear of businesses that wear their faith on their sleeve in the form of labeling themselves a "christian business" - sadly, too many times these have turned out to be the WORST companies! I just think
* This entire religious "freedom" bill nonsense just shows the entire desperation of Republicans and right wingers which live in a world that they can't control anymore and scares the hell out of them.
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What makes Indiana's religious freedom law different?
By Garrett Epps, March 30, 2015
No one, I think, would ever have denied that Maurice Bessinger was a man of faith.
And he wasn’t particularly a “still, small voice” man either; he wanted everybody in earshot to know that slavery had been God’s will, that desegregation was Satan’s work, and the federal government was the Antichrist. God wanted only whites to eat at Bessinger’s six Piggie Park barbecue joints; so His servant Maurice took that fight all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which in 1968 decided that his religious freedom argument was “patently frivolous.”
Until the day he died, however, Bessinger insisted that he and God were right. His last fight was to preserve the Confederate flag as a symbol of South Carolina. “I want to be known as a hard-working, Christian man that loves God and wants to further (God’s) work throughout the world as I have been doing throughout the last 25 years,” he told his hometown newspaper in 2000.
Growing up in the pre-Civil Rights South, I knew a lot of folks like Maurice Bessinger. I didn’t like them much, but I didn’t doubt their sincerity. Why wouldn’t they believe racism was God’s will? We white Southerners heard that message on weekends from the pulpit, on school days from our segregated schools, and every day from our governments. When Richard and Mildred Loving left Virginia to be married, a state trial judge convicted them of violating the Racial Integrity Act. That judge wrote that “Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents … The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.”
That’s a good background against which to measure the uproar about the Indiana Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which was signed into law by Governor Mike Pence last week. I don’t question the religious sincerity of anyone involved in drafting and passing this law. But sincere and faithful people, when they feel the imprimatur of both the law and the Lord, can do very ugly things.
There’s a factual dispute about the new Indiana law. It is called a “Religious Freedom Restoration Act,” like the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act, passed in 1990. Thus a number of its defenders have claimed it is really the same law. Here, for example, is the Weekly Standard’s John McCormack: “Is there any difference between Indiana’s law and the federal law? Nothing significant.” I am not sure what McCormack writer was thinking; but even my old employer, The Washington Post, seems to believe that if a law has a similar title as another law, they must be identical. “Indiana is actually soon to be just one of 20 states with a version of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, or RFRA,” the Post’s Hunter Schwarz wrote, linking to this map created by the National Conference of State Legislatures.
The problem with this statement is that, well, it’s false. That becomes clear when you read and compare those tedious state statutes. If you do that, you will find that the Indiana statute has two features the federal RFRA—and most state RFRAs—do not. First, the Indiana law explicitly allows any for-profit business to assert a right to “the free exercise of religion.” The federal RFRA doesn’t contain such language, and neither does any of the state RFRAs except South Carolina’s; in fact, Louisiana and Pennsylvania, explicitly exclude for-profit businesses from the protection of their RFRAs.
The new Indiana statute also contains this odd language: “A person whose exercise of religion has been substantially burdened, or is likely to be substantially burdened, by a violation of this chapter may assert the violation or impending violation as a claim or defense in a judicial or administrative proceeding, regardless of whether the state or any other governmental entity is a party to the proceeding.” (My italics.) Neither the federal RFRA, nor 18 of the 19 state statutes cited by the Post, says anything like this; only the Texas RFRA, passed in 1999, contains similar language.
What these words mean is, first, that the Indiana statute explicitly recognizes that a for-profit corporation has “free exercise” rights matching those of individuals or churches. A lot of legal thinkers thought that idea was outlandish until last year’s decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, in which the Court’s five conservatives interpreted the federal RFRA to give some corporate employers a religious veto over their employees’ statutory right to contraceptive coverage.
Second, the Indiana statute explicitly makes a business’s “free exercise” right a defense against a private lawsuit by another person, rather than simply against actions brought by government. Why does this matter? Well, there’s a lot of evidence that the new wave of “religious freedom” legislation was impelled, at least in part, by a panic over a New Mexico state-court decision, Elane Photography v. Willock. In that case, a same-sex couple sued a professional photography studio that refused to photograph the couple’s wedding. New Mexico law bars discrimination in “public accommodations” on the basis of sexual orientation. The studio said that New Mexico’s RFRA nonetheless barred the suit; but the state’s Supreme Court held that the RFRA did not apply “because the government is not a party.”
Remarkably enough, soon after, language found its way into the Indiana statute to make sure that no Indiana court could ever make a similar decision. Democrats also offered the Republican legislative majority a chance to amend the new act to say that it did not permit businesses to discriminate; they voted that amendment down.
So, let’s review the evidence: by the Weekly Standard’s definition, there’s “nothing significant” about this law that differs from the federal one, and other state ones—except that it has been carefully written to make clear that 1) businesses can use it against 2) civil rights suits brought by individuals.
Of all the state “religious freedom” laws I have read, this new statute hints most strongly that it is there to be used as a means of excluding gays and same-sex couples from accessing employment, housing, and public accommodations on the same terms as other people. True, there is no actual language that says, All businesses wishing to discriminate in employment, housing, and public accommodations on the basis of sexual orientation, please check this “religious objection” box. But, as Henry David Thoreau once wrote, “Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.”
So—is the fuss over the Indiana law overblown?
No.
The statute shows every sign of having been carefully designed to put new obstacles in the path of equality; and it has been publicly sold with deceptive claims that it is “nothing new.”
Being required to serve those we dislike is a painful price to pay for the privilege of running a business; but the pain exclusion inflicts on its victims, and on society, are far worse than the discomfort the faithful may suffer at having to open their businesses to all.
As the story of Maurice Bessinger shows us, even dressed in liturgical garments, hateful discrimination is still a pig.
...................................................................................................................................................................
"... Republicans wonder why they have a problem with younger women voters." The Carlson brothers are examples of why!
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Carlson brothers’ ugly behavior won’t help Right
By Nicole Gelinas, March 29, 2015
Some people see sexism, misogyny and homophobia everywhere. They are not everywhere — but they do exist. The Carlson brothers — Tucker and Buckley — provided a particularly gruesome and loathsome example last week.
One brother responded to a woman just doing her job with extreme objectification and porn-ification of that woman. The other brother thought this response was perfectly fine.
Both brothers should be ashamed — and they should feel a bit badly, too, for hurting the conservative cause just a little bit more among younger people and single women.
What happened? Well, what started the mess was that a person who works for former Crossfire star Tucker Carlson at his conservative Web site, the Daily Caller, wrote an article with a mistake about Mayor de Blasio. The author wrote that de Blasio wasn’t happy with President Obama’s infrastructure plan, when what the mayor said is that he is semi-happy.
One of the mayor’s media people, Amy Spitalnick, wrote to ask for a correction. The author of the piece responded with a respectful disagreement. When Spitalnick held her ground and provided more supporting evidence, an editor told her to stop being “whiny.” Spitalnick complained to Carlson about his staff’s unprofessional response.
It was Tucker Carlson — the boss, and the guy who sets the culture for the Web site — who decided that this was a good opportunity to defend the workplace against female whininess by lecturing a woman on, you know, her comportment.
What the editor had “complained about was your tone,” Tucker wrote to Spitalnick, “which, I have to agree, was whiny and annoying.”
Continuing “in the spirit of helpful correction,” Tucker said that “adults” write “cheerful” e-mails, “something to keep in mind.”
There are two problems here. First is the factual issue of whether Spitalnick was whiny and annoying. Nope — she was perfectly polite (she even said “please” twice, like all good little girls).
But what she didn’t do was back down. She kept quietly requesting her correction — and she was direct, firm and even blunt in doing so.
The second problem is that — yes, it’s true: In a man, this is called being assertive and doing your job. In a woman, it sometimes means that you’re rude and uncooperative.
Of course, a mature adult just ignores one instance of perceived rudeness, no matter the gender of the offender — it’s generally unproductive to escalate misunderstandings or bad moods. But it’s hard to imagine Carlson e-mailing his lecture on tone to a man.
They are by far not a majority, but there are still plenty of powerful men out there who expect women in the workplace to be flirty (but not, you know, slutty), cheerful, subservient and quiet. If the women aren’t like that, it probably means they are lesbians, sex addicts or frigid. Insane?
Consider how Tucker’s brother, Buckley, praised Tucker’s missive to Spitalnick to be more ladylike in his own e-mail (it’s not exactly clear why it takes so many grown men to deal with one unruly lady, but nevertheless).
“Whiny little self-righteous bitch,” Buckley said.
The rest of his response is unprintable in a family paper, because it involves subjecting Spitalnick — in the heads of the two brothers, at least — to degrading, submissive oral-sex images that come straight from watching far too much online smut (at least no one can get pregnant that way; Republicans’ birth-control problem solved!). Buckley then signed off with a lesbian slur.
What was Tucker’s response? He didn’t say that his brother has a poor tone and should be more polite and cheerful.
No, Buckley was just being “nice.” One supposes that womenfolk should be obsequiously grateful that the less famous Carlson brother sees them only as unwilling porn stars.
Most bad behavior is best ignored. But this isn’t boys will be boys — many men pointed out online that this behavior is extreme. Still, though, Tucker Carlson is a conservative figure. The Daily Caller is a big conservative Web site.
And so here we have a conservative celebrity — one who has written admiringly of the idea that unmarried women should be sexually virtuous — saying that it’s “nice” to treat a woman just doing her job as a mindless sexual device.
There’s no way to varnish it: The Carlson brothers behaved disgustingly and inexcusably. Their failure to express some public remorse is deviant — even in a porn-numbed culture.
And Republicans wonder why they have a problem with younger women voters. The answer isn’t to argue that “Democrats do bad things, too.” It’s to hold your own side to a higher standard.
...................................................................................................................................................................
Carlson brothers’ ugly behavior won’t help Right
By Nicole Gelinas, March 29, 2015
Some people see sexism, misogyny and homophobia everywhere. They are not everywhere — but they do exist. The Carlson brothers — Tucker and Buckley — provided a particularly gruesome and loathsome example last week.
One brother responded to a woman just doing her job with extreme objectification and porn-ification of that woman. The other brother thought this response was perfectly fine.
Both brothers should be ashamed — and they should feel a bit badly, too, for hurting the conservative cause just a little bit more among younger people and single women.
What happened? Well, what started the mess was that a person who works for former Crossfire star Tucker Carlson at his conservative Web site, the Daily Caller, wrote an article with a mistake about Mayor de Blasio. The author wrote that de Blasio wasn’t happy with President Obama’s infrastructure plan, when what the mayor said is that he is semi-happy.
One of the mayor’s media people, Amy Spitalnick, wrote to ask for a correction. The author of the piece responded with a respectful disagreement. When Spitalnick held her ground and provided more supporting evidence, an editor told her to stop being “whiny.” Spitalnick complained to Carlson about his staff’s unprofessional response.
It was Tucker Carlson — the boss, and the guy who sets the culture for the Web site — who decided that this was a good opportunity to defend the workplace against female whininess by lecturing a woman on, you know, her comportment.
What the editor had “complained about was your tone,” Tucker wrote to Spitalnick, “which, I have to agree, was whiny and annoying.”
Continuing “in the spirit of helpful correction,” Tucker said that “adults” write “cheerful” e-mails, “something to keep in mind.”
There are two problems here. First is the factual issue of whether Spitalnick was whiny and annoying. Nope — she was perfectly polite (she even said “please” twice, like all good little girls).
But what she didn’t do was back down. She kept quietly requesting her correction — and she was direct, firm and even blunt in doing so.
The second problem is that — yes, it’s true: In a man, this is called being assertive and doing your job. In a woman, it sometimes means that you’re rude and uncooperative.
Of course, a mature adult just ignores one instance of perceived rudeness, no matter the gender of the offender — it’s generally unproductive to escalate misunderstandings or bad moods. But it’s hard to imagine Carlson e-mailing his lecture on tone to a man.
They are by far not a majority, but there are still plenty of powerful men out there who expect women in the workplace to be flirty (but not, you know, slutty), cheerful, subservient and quiet. If the women aren’t like that, it probably means they are lesbians, sex addicts or frigid. Insane?
Consider how Tucker’s brother, Buckley, praised Tucker’s missive to Spitalnick to be more ladylike in his own e-mail (it’s not exactly clear why it takes so many grown men to deal with one unruly lady, but nevertheless).
“Whiny little self-righteous bitch,” Buckley said.
The rest of his response is unprintable in a family paper, because it involves subjecting Spitalnick — in the heads of the two brothers, at least — to degrading, submissive oral-sex images that come straight from watching far too much online smut (at least no one can get pregnant that way; Republicans’ birth-control problem solved!). Buckley then signed off with a lesbian slur.
What was Tucker’s response? He didn’t say that his brother has a poor tone and should be more polite and cheerful.
No, Buckley was just being “nice.” One supposes that womenfolk should be obsequiously grateful that the less famous Carlson brother sees them only as unwilling porn stars.
Most bad behavior is best ignored. But this isn’t boys will be boys — many men pointed out online that this behavior is extreme. Still, though, Tucker Carlson is a conservative figure. The Daily Caller is a big conservative Web site.
And so here we have a conservative celebrity — one who has written admiringly of the idea that unmarried women should be sexually virtuous — saying that it’s “nice” to treat a woman just doing her job as a mindless sexual device.
There’s no way to varnish it: The Carlson brothers behaved disgustingly and inexcusably. Their failure to express some public remorse is deviant — even in a porn-numbed culture.
And Republicans wonder why they have a problem with younger women voters. The answer isn’t to argue that “Democrats do bad things, too.” It’s to hold your own side to a higher standard.
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It's all up to us, the voters, to create that unemployment.
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Sunday, March 29, 2015
"Today’s social thinkers say just being religious is neither a prerequisite to being moral nor an assurance that a person will be moral." Got that, Sen. Allen?
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COMMENTS:
* Christianity is anything but "moral". Religions are nothing but scams.
* So the right gets upset when it is suggested that everyone should vote but thinks making everyone attend church is just fine
* In their pea brains they just can't imagine that some of us don't believe in a Sky Daddy.
* "Can you be moral if you’re not religious?" Religion has nothing to do with morality. Just ask a priest or a Mullah, right before they rape or burn you alive.
* Religion is a matter of personal choice, and should not be forced. Many moral people do not practice any religion, and many immoral people have their brands of religion.
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One State Legislator Thinks You Should Be in Church Today—Whether You Want to or Not
By Harry Bruinius, March 29, 2015
In a “flippant” remark during a concealed-carry gun bill debate in the Arizona legislature this week, a Tea Party Republican senator, bewildered by opposition to the bill, opined that the state should require mandatory church attendance to battle the country’s moral decay.
People should be allowed to carry concealed weapons into public buildings because “there’s a moral erosion of the soul of America,” and people now feel the need to arm themselves, even in public spaces, argued state Sen. Sylvia Allen.
“It’s the soul that is corrupt—how we get back to a moral rebirth I don’t know, since we are slowly eroding religion at every opportunity that we have,” she said during a committee meeting debating the proposal. “Probably we should be debating a bill requiring every American to attend a church of their choice on Sunday to see if we can get back to having a moral rebirth.”
A Democratic colleague posted her remarks online, and it’s caused a bit of stir. Setting aside constitutional issues just for a moment, there is a centuries-long debate that goes back to the European Enlightenment and the dawn of liberal democracy: Can you be moral if you’re not religious?
“For many people, religion is a source of great comfort that provides clear moral orientation and a supportive community to encourage moral practice,” said Evan Selinger, an ethics philosopher and a professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology. “But one doesn’t have to be religious to be moral. Not only has history shown that there are many secular ways to develop a rich sense of conscientiousness, but many compelling moral theories don’t justify exacting standards of rightness and wrongness by the demands of divine expectations.”
For Sen. Allen and many like-minded religious conservatives, the country’s morals have been in a shambles since the 1960s, with the rise of a more permissive sexual ethos, the legalization of abortion, and the current widespread acceptance of homosexuality across the country.
At the same time, there’s been what some scholars call “the great decline” in church attendance and membership since the 1950s, including a sharp decline in the past decade, numerous surveys show.
But after her quip about debating mandatory church attendance, Allen explained the growing controversy about her comments by doubling down and invoking the simpler, and what she considers more moral and religious, era of her youth in the 1950s.
“It was a different time. People prayed. People went to church. I remember on Sunday the stores were closed. You didn’t go to stores because they weren’t open,” she said on the Senate floor.
“But the biggest thing is, religion was kicked out of our public places, out of our schools, Ten Commandments were no longer allowed in public, monuments of Ten Commandments. Things have changed,” Allen said.
For many Americans, especially millennials, the sexism, homophobia, and religious justifications for racism in the 1950s appear more immoral today than an individual’s consensual sexual conduct.
“It’s overly simplistic to believe that genuine moral sensitivity can be engineered,” Selinger said. “People can regularly participate in religious rituals...and still turn out to be insensitive, selfish, apathetic, and even cruel.”
Even so, despite the general decline, the United States remains an outlier among wealthy nations, maintaining a robust religious citizenry compared with other industrialized states.
And as one Arizona commentator quipped back about the “halcyon” 1950s era: “I know what you’re thinking: civil rights problems. Voting rights problems. Segregated schools,” wrote E.J. Montini, a columnist with The Arizona Republic.
By contrast, many point out, U.S. crime rates have reached historic lows and are continuing to fall.
And like many since the Enlightenment, many social thinkers today base morality on universally applied rational rules or deep-seated human sentiments rooted in the empathy of the “golden rule.” That maxim of reciprocity is common to many religions, including Confucianism and Buddhism, and is found in Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. During the Enlightenment, the philosopher Immanuel Kant placed the golden rule in a rational, secular perspective. Today’s social thinkers say just being religious is neither a prerequisite to being moral nor an assurance that a person will be moral.
“Even militant atheists like the French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre claimed that no one can accept responsibility for free will without fundamentally being concerned about all of humanity and continually striving to avoid hypocrisy,” Selinger said.
Now, back to the Constitution.
“Even if you believe that would stem the moral decay, I think the Constitution makes it very clear that our country is founded on the pillar of separation of church and state,” said state Sen. Steve Farley, the Tucson Democrat who posted Allen’s remarks.
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COMMENTS:
* Christianity is anything but "moral". Religions are nothing but scams.
* So the right gets upset when it is suggested that everyone should vote but thinks making everyone attend church is just fine
* In their pea brains they just can't imagine that some of us don't believe in a Sky Daddy.
* "Can you be moral if you’re not religious?" Religion has nothing to do with morality. Just ask a priest or a Mullah, right before they rape or burn you alive.
* Religion is a matter of personal choice, and should not be forced. Many moral people do not practice any religion, and many immoral people have their brands of religion.
...................................................................................................................................................................
One State Legislator Thinks You Should Be in Church Today—Whether You Want to or Not
By Harry Bruinius, March 29, 2015
In a “flippant” remark during a concealed-carry gun bill debate in the Arizona legislature this week, a Tea Party Republican senator, bewildered by opposition to the bill, opined that the state should require mandatory church attendance to battle the country’s moral decay.
People should be allowed to carry concealed weapons into public buildings because “there’s a moral erosion of the soul of America,” and people now feel the need to arm themselves, even in public spaces, argued state Sen. Sylvia Allen.
“It’s the soul that is corrupt—how we get back to a moral rebirth I don’t know, since we are slowly eroding religion at every opportunity that we have,” she said during a committee meeting debating the proposal. “Probably we should be debating a bill requiring every American to attend a church of their choice on Sunday to see if we can get back to having a moral rebirth.”
A Democratic colleague posted her remarks online, and it’s caused a bit of stir. Setting aside constitutional issues just for a moment, there is a centuries-long debate that goes back to the European Enlightenment and the dawn of liberal democracy: Can you be moral if you’re not religious?
“For many people, religion is a source of great comfort that provides clear moral orientation and a supportive community to encourage moral practice,” said Evan Selinger, an ethics philosopher and a professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology. “But one doesn’t have to be religious to be moral. Not only has history shown that there are many secular ways to develop a rich sense of conscientiousness, but many compelling moral theories don’t justify exacting standards of rightness and wrongness by the demands of divine expectations.”
For Sen. Allen and many like-minded religious conservatives, the country’s morals have been in a shambles since the 1960s, with the rise of a more permissive sexual ethos, the legalization of abortion, and the current widespread acceptance of homosexuality across the country.
At the same time, there’s been what some scholars call “the great decline” in church attendance and membership since the 1950s, including a sharp decline in the past decade, numerous surveys show.
But after her quip about debating mandatory church attendance, Allen explained the growing controversy about her comments by doubling down and invoking the simpler, and what she considers more moral and religious, era of her youth in the 1950s.
“It was a different time. People prayed. People went to church. I remember on Sunday the stores were closed. You didn’t go to stores because they weren’t open,” she said on the Senate floor.
“But the biggest thing is, religion was kicked out of our public places, out of our schools, Ten Commandments were no longer allowed in public, monuments of Ten Commandments. Things have changed,” Allen said.
For many Americans, especially millennials, the sexism, homophobia, and religious justifications for racism in the 1950s appear more immoral today than an individual’s consensual sexual conduct.
“It’s overly simplistic to believe that genuine moral sensitivity can be engineered,” Selinger said. “People can regularly participate in religious rituals...and still turn out to be insensitive, selfish, apathetic, and even cruel.”
Even so, despite the general decline, the United States remains an outlier among wealthy nations, maintaining a robust religious citizenry compared with other industrialized states.
And as one Arizona commentator quipped back about the “halcyon” 1950s era: “I know what you’re thinking: civil rights problems. Voting rights problems. Segregated schools,” wrote E.J. Montini, a columnist with The Arizona Republic.
By contrast, many point out, U.S. crime rates have reached historic lows and are continuing to fall.
And like many since the Enlightenment, many social thinkers today base morality on universally applied rational rules or deep-seated human sentiments rooted in the empathy of the “golden rule.” That maxim of reciprocity is common to many religions, including Confucianism and Buddhism, and is found in Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. During the Enlightenment, the philosopher Immanuel Kant placed the golden rule in a rational, secular perspective. Today’s social thinkers say just being religious is neither a prerequisite to being moral nor an assurance that a person will be moral.
“Even militant atheists like the French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre claimed that no one can accept responsibility for free will without fundamentally being concerned about all of humanity and continually striving to avoid hypocrisy,” Selinger said.
Now, back to the Constitution.
“Even if you believe that would stem the moral decay, I think the Constitution makes it very clear that our country is founded on the pillar of separation of church and state,” said state Sen. Steve Farley, the Tucson Democrat who posted Allen’s remarks.
...................................................................................................................................................................
"... growth through immigration is growth with remarkably little downside."
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Debunking the Myth of the Job-Stealing Immigrant
By Adam Davidson, March 24, 2015
When I was growing up in the 1980s, I watched my grandfather — my dad’s stepdad — struggle with his own prejudice. He was a blue-collar World War II veteran who loved his family above all things and was constantly afraid for them. He carried a gun and, like many men of his generation, saw threats in people he didn’t understand: African-Americans, independent women, gays. By the time he died, 10 years ago, he had softened. He stopped using racist and homophobic slurs; he even hugged my gay cousin. But there was one view he wasn’t going to change. He had no time for Hispanics, he told us, and he wasn’t backing down. After all, this wasn’t a matter of bigotry. It was plain economics. These immigrants were stealing jobs from “Americans.”
I’ve been thinking about my grandfather lately, because there are signs that 2015 could bring about the beginning of a truce — or at least a reconfiguration — in the politics of immigration. Several of the potential Republican presidential candidates, most notably Jeb Bush, have expressed pro-immigration views. Even self-identified Tea Party Republicans respond three to two in favor of a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. Every other group — Republicans in general, independents and especially Democrats — is largely pro-immigrant. According to Pew, roughly as many people (18 percent of Americans) believed in 2010 that President Obama was a Muslim as believe today that undocumented immigrants should be expelled from the United States. Of course, that 18 percent can make a lot of noise. But for everyone else, immigration seems to be going the way of same-sex marriage, marijuana and the mohawk — it’s something that a handful of people freak out about but that the rest of us have long since come to accept.
Scratch the surface, though, and you’ll pretty quickly find that many Americans are closer to my grandfather’s way of seeing things than they might find comfortable acknowledging. I am referring not to the racial animus but to the faulty economic logic. We generally support immigration when the immigrants are different from us. People in the middle and upper-middle classes don’t mind poorly educated, low-skilled immigrants entering the country. Nor do we mind highly educated professionals coming in — unless, that is, we are in the same profession ourselves. More broadly, those of us advocating an immigration overhaul are basically calling for official recognition of the status quo, through offering legal status to some of the roughly 11.2 million undocumented workers who aren’t going away. Few of us are calling for the thing that basic economic analysis shows would benefit nearly all of us: radically open borders.
And yet the economic benefits of immigration may be the most settled fact in economics. A recent University of Chicago poll of leading economists could not find a single one who rejected the proposition. (There is one notable economist who wasn’t polled: George Borjas of Harvard, who believes that his fellow economists underestimate the cost of immigration for low--skilled natives. Borjas’s work is often misused by anti-immigration activists, in much the same way a complicated climate--science result is often invoked as “proof” that global warming is a myth.) Rationally speaking, we should take in far more immigrants than we currently do.
So why don’t we open up? The chief logical mistake we make is something called the Lump of Labor Fallacy: the erroneous notion that there is only so much work to be done and that no one can get a job without taking one from someone else. It’s an understandable assumption. After all, with other types of market transactions, when the supply goes up, the price falls. If there were suddenly a whole lot more oranges, we’d expect the price of oranges to fall or the number of oranges that went uneaten to surge.
But immigrants aren’t oranges. It might seem intuitive that when there is an increase in the supply of workers, the ones who were here already will make less money or lose their jobs. Immigrants don’t just increase the supply of labor, though; they simultaneously increase demand for it, using the wages they earn to rent apartments, eat food, get haircuts, buy cellphones. That means there are more jobs building apartments, selling food, giving haircuts and dispatching the trucks that move those phones. Immigrants increase the size of the overall population, which means they increase the size of the economy. Logically, if immigrants were “stealing” jobs, so would every young person leaving school and entering the job market; countries should become poorer as they get larger. In reality, of course, the opposite happens.
Most anti-immigration arguments I hear are variations on the Lump of Labor Fallacy. That immigrant has a job. If he didn’t have that job, somebody else, somebody born here, would have it. This argument is wrong, or at least wildly oversimplified. But it feels so correct, so logical. And it’s not just people like my grandfather making that argument. Our government policy is rooted in it.
The single greatest bit of evidence disproving the Lump of Labor idea comes from research about the Mariel boatlift, a mass migration in 1980 that brought more than 125,000 Cubans to the United States. According to David Card, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, roughly 45,000 of them were of working age and moved to Miami; in four months, the city’s labor supply increased by 7 percent. Card found that for people already working in Miami, this sudden influx had no measurable impact on wages or employment. His paper was the most important of a series of revolutionary studies that transformed how economists think about immigration. Before, standard economic models held that immigrants cause long-term benefits, but at the cost of short-term pain in the form of lower wages and greater unemployment for natives. But most economists now believe that Card’s findings were correct: Immigrants bring long-term benefits at no measurable short-term cost. (Borjas, that lone dissenting voice, agrees about the long-term benefits, but he argues that other economists fail to see painful short-term costs, especially for the poor.)
Economists have shifted to studying how nations so quickly adjust to new arrivals. The leading scholar on this today is Giovanni Peri of the University of California, Davis, who has shown that immigrants tend to complement — rather than compete against — the existing work force. Take a construction site: Typically, Peri has found, immigrants with limited education perform many support tasks (moving heavy things, pouring cement, sweeping, painting), while citizens with more education focus on skilled work like carpentry, plumbing and electrical installation, as well as customer relations. The skilled native is able to focus on the most valuable tasks, while the immigrants help bring the price down for the overall project (it costs a lot to pay a highly trained carpenter to sweep up a work site). Peri argues, with strong evidence, that there are more native-born skilled craftspeople working today, not fewer, because of all those undocumented construction workers. A similar dynamic is at play on Wall Street. Many technical-support tasks are dominated by recent immigrants, while sales, marketing, advising and trading, which require cultural and linguistic fluency, are typically the domain of the native-born. (Whether Wall Street’s technical wizards have, on balance, helped or hurt the economy is a question for another day.)
This paradox of immigration is bound up with the paradox of economic growth itself. Growth has acquired a bad reputation of late among some, especially on the left, who associate the term with environmental destruction and rising inequality. But growth through immigration is growth with remarkably little downside. Whenever an immigrant enters the United States, the world becomes a bit richer. For all our faults, the United States is still far better developed economically than most nations, certainly the ones that most of our immigrants have left. Our legal system and our financial and physical infrastructure are also far superior to most (as surprising as that might sometimes seem to us). So when people leave developing economies and set foot on American soil, they typically become more productive, in economic terms. They earn more money, achieve a higher standard of living and add more economic value to the world than they would have if they stayed home. If largely open borders were to replace our expensive and restrictive lottery system, it’s likely that many of these immigrants would travel back and forth between the United States and their native countries, counteracting the potential brain drain by sharing knowledge and investment capital. Environmentally, immigration tends to be less damaging than other forms of growth, because it doesn’t add to the number of people on earth and often shifts people to more environmentally friendly jurisdictions.
To me, immigration is the greatest example of our faulty thinking, a shortsightedness that hurts others while simultaneously hurting ourselves. The State Department issues fewer than half a million immigrant visas each year. Using the 7 percent figure from the Mariel boatlift research, it’s possible that we could absorb as many as 11 million immigrants annually. But if that’s politically untenable, what about doubling the visas we issue each year? It would still be fewer than a million, or less than 0.7 percent of the work force. If that didn’t go too badly, we could double it again the next year. The data are clear. We would be better off. In fact, the world would be better off.
Whenever I’m tempted by the notion that humans are rational beings, carefully evaluating the world and acting in ways that maximize our happiness, I think of our meager immigration policies. For me, it’s close to proof that we are, collectively, still jealous, nervous creatures, hoarding what we have, afraid of taking even the most promising risk, displaying loyalty to our own tribe while we stare, suspiciously, at everyone else. It’s nice to believe that I am part of a more mature, rational generation, that my grandfather’s old ways of thinking are dying away. But I’m not so sure. We might be a lot more like him than we want to think.
...................................................................................................................................................................
Debunking the Myth of the Job-Stealing Immigrant
By Adam Davidson, March 24, 2015
When I was growing up in the 1980s, I watched my grandfather — my dad’s stepdad — struggle with his own prejudice. He was a blue-collar World War II veteran who loved his family above all things and was constantly afraid for them. He carried a gun and, like many men of his generation, saw threats in people he didn’t understand: African-Americans, independent women, gays. By the time he died, 10 years ago, he had softened. He stopped using racist and homophobic slurs; he even hugged my gay cousin. But there was one view he wasn’t going to change. He had no time for Hispanics, he told us, and he wasn’t backing down. After all, this wasn’t a matter of bigotry. It was plain economics. These immigrants were stealing jobs from “Americans.”
I’ve been thinking about my grandfather lately, because there are signs that 2015 could bring about the beginning of a truce — or at least a reconfiguration — in the politics of immigration. Several of the potential Republican presidential candidates, most notably Jeb Bush, have expressed pro-immigration views. Even self-identified Tea Party Republicans respond three to two in favor of a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. Every other group — Republicans in general, independents and especially Democrats — is largely pro-immigrant. According to Pew, roughly as many people (18 percent of Americans) believed in 2010 that President Obama was a Muslim as believe today that undocumented immigrants should be expelled from the United States. Of course, that 18 percent can make a lot of noise. But for everyone else, immigration seems to be going the way of same-sex marriage, marijuana and the mohawk — it’s something that a handful of people freak out about but that the rest of us have long since come to accept.
Scratch the surface, though, and you’ll pretty quickly find that many Americans are closer to my grandfather’s way of seeing things than they might find comfortable acknowledging. I am referring not to the racial animus but to the faulty economic logic. We generally support immigration when the immigrants are different from us. People in the middle and upper-middle classes don’t mind poorly educated, low-skilled immigrants entering the country. Nor do we mind highly educated professionals coming in — unless, that is, we are in the same profession ourselves. More broadly, those of us advocating an immigration overhaul are basically calling for official recognition of the status quo, through offering legal status to some of the roughly 11.2 million undocumented workers who aren’t going away. Few of us are calling for the thing that basic economic analysis shows would benefit nearly all of us: radically open borders.
And yet the economic benefits of immigration may be the most settled fact in economics. A recent University of Chicago poll of leading economists could not find a single one who rejected the proposition. (There is one notable economist who wasn’t polled: George Borjas of Harvard, who believes that his fellow economists underestimate the cost of immigration for low--skilled natives. Borjas’s work is often misused by anti-immigration activists, in much the same way a complicated climate--science result is often invoked as “proof” that global warming is a myth.) Rationally speaking, we should take in far more immigrants than we currently do.
So why don’t we open up? The chief logical mistake we make is something called the Lump of Labor Fallacy: the erroneous notion that there is only so much work to be done and that no one can get a job without taking one from someone else. It’s an understandable assumption. After all, with other types of market transactions, when the supply goes up, the price falls. If there were suddenly a whole lot more oranges, we’d expect the price of oranges to fall or the number of oranges that went uneaten to surge.
But immigrants aren’t oranges. It might seem intuitive that when there is an increase in the supply of workers, the ones who were here already will make less money or lose their jobs. Immigrants don’t just increase the supply of labor, though; they simultaneously increase demand for it, using the wages they earn to rent apartments, eat food, get haircuts, buy cellphones. That means there are more jobs building apartments, selling food, giving haircuts and dispatching the trucks that move those phones. Immigrants increase the size of the overall population, which means they increase the size of the economy. Logically, if immigrants were “stealing” jobs, so would every young person leaving school and entering the job market; countries should become poorer as they get larger. In reality, of course, the opposite happens.
Most anti-immigration arguments I hear are variations on the Lump of Labor Fallacy. That immigrant has a job. If he didn’t have that job, somebody else, somebody born here, would have it. This argument is wrong, or at least wildly oversimplified. But it feels so correct, so logical. And it’s not just people like my grandfather making that argument. Our government policy is rooted in it.
The single greatest bit of evidence disproving the Lump of Labor idea comes from research about the Mariel boatlift, a mass migration in 1980 that brought more than 125,000 Cubans to the United States. According to David Card, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, roughly 45,000 of them were of working age and moved to Miami; in four months, the city’s labor supply increased by 7 percent. Card found that for people already working in Miami, this sudden influx had no measurable impact on wages or employment. His paper was the most important of a series of revolutionary studies that transformed how economists think about immigration. Before, standard economic models held that immigrants cause long-term benefits, but at the cost of short-term pain in the form of lower wages and greater unemployment for natives. But most economists now believe that Card’s findings were correct: Immigrants bring long-term benefits at no measurable short-term cost. (Borjas, that lone dissenting voice, agrees about the long-term benefits, but he argues that other economists fail to see painful short-term costs, especially for the poor.)
Economists have shifted to studying how nations so quickly adjust to new arrivals. The leading scholar on this today is Giovanni Peri of the University of California, Davis, who has shown that immigrants tend to complement — rather than compete against — the existing work force. Take a construction site: Typically, Peri has found, immigrants with limited education perform many support tasks (moving heavy things, pouring cement, sweeping, painting), while citizens with more education focus on skilled work like carpentry, plumbing and electrical installation, as well as customer relations. The skilled native is able to focus on the most valuable tasks, while the immigrants help bring the price down for the overall project (it costs a lot to pay a highly trained carpenter to sweep up a work site). Peri argues, with strong evidence, that there are more native-born skilled craftspeople working today, not fewer, because of all those undocumented construction workers. A similar dynamic is at play on Wall Street. Many technical-support tasks are dominated by recent immigrants, while sales, marketing, advising and trading, which require cultural and linguistic fluency, are typically the domain of the native-born. (Whether Wall Street’s technical wizards have, on balance, helped or hurt the economy is a question for another day.)
This paradox of immigration is bound up with the paradox of economic growth itself. Growth has acquired a bad reputation of late among some, especially on the left, who associate the term with environmental destruction and rising inequality. But growth through immigration is growth with remarkably little downside. Whenever an immigrant enters the United States, the world becomes a bit richer. For all our faults, the United States is still far better developed economically than most nations, certainly the ones that most of our immigrants have left. Our legal system and our financial and physical infrastructure are also far superior to most (as surprising as that might sometimes seem to us). So when people leave developing economies and set foot on American soil, they typically become more productive, in economic terms. They earn more money, achieve a higher standard of living and add more economic value to the world than they would have if they stayed home. If largely open borders were to replace our expensive and restrictive lottery system, it’s likely that many of these immigrants would travel back and forth between the United States and their native countries, counteracting the potential brain drain by sharing knowledge and investment capital. Environmentally, immigration tends to be less damaging than other forms of growth, because it doesn’t add to the number of people on earth and often shifts people to more environmentally friendly jurisdictions.
To me, immigration is the greatest example of our faulty thinking, a shortsightedness that hurts others while simultaneously hurting ourselves. The State Department issues fewer than half a million immigrant visas each year. Using the 7 percent figure from the Mariel boatlift research, it’s possible that we could absorb as many as 11 million immigrants annually. But if that’s politically untenable, what about doubling the visas we issue each year? It would still be fewer than a million, or less than 0.7 percent of the work force. If that didn’t go too badly, we could double it again the next year. The data are clear. We would be better off. In fact, the world would be better off.
Whenever I’m tempted by the notion that humans are rational beings, carefully evaluating the world and acting in ways that maximize our happiness, I think of our meager immigration policies. For me, it’s close to proof that we are, collectively, still jealous, nervous creatures, hoarding what we have, afraid of taking even the most promising risk, displaying loyalty to our own tribe while we stare, suspiciously, at everyone else. It’s nice to believe that I am part of a more mature, rational generation, that my grandfather’s old ways of thinking are dying away. But I’m not so sure. We might be a lot more like him than we want to think.
...................................................................................................................................................................
"... the American public views Bush’s time in the White House as 'overwhelmingly negative.'" We don't need another Bush!
...................................................................................................................................................................
COMMENTS:
* Please feel free to focus on Bush all you want, I have not spoken to a single Republican who would vote for him.
* In fact, all of the Republicans running are new faces...but are still using the Bush platform . You can put lipstick on a pig..but its still a pig
* I am 100% Republican and if this man, Jeb Bush, is the best that we have to offer, then we may as well just detonate all nukes on ourselves, we would be better off.
...................................................................................................................................................................
DNC unveils clip reel tying Jeb Bush to brother’s policies
New Bush. Same policies.
That’s what the Democratic National Committee hopes to hammer home about the possibility of another Bush presidency.
The DNC strung together a news-clip reel of presumptive GOP presidential candidate Jeb Bush agreeing with former President George W. Bush on every issue.
“I’m the only Republican that was in office when he was in office as president that never disagreed with him. And I’m not gonna start now. Why would I do that now after two years?” he said in an interview used in the reel.
The DNC shared the reel with Yahoo News on Wednesday in conjunction with a fundraiser featuring the Bush brothers in Dallas.
It reveals a potential main line of attack against the former Florida governor — a blatant attempt to link him to his polarizing older brother.
“His own man? I think not. The Bush economy favors the richest over the middle class, and on that core agenda there is absolutely no daylight between Jeb Bush and his brother,” said DNC national press secretary Holly Shulman.
As the 43rd president, George W. Bush’s approval rating fluctuated from a high of 92 percent in the aftermath of 9/11 to historic lows, just 19 percent, toward the end of his time in the Oval Office, according to the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research.
It is for this reason, in part, that in 2008, then-Sen. Barack Obama invoked Bush during presidential debates — prompting his opponent, Sen. John McCain, to reply, “Sen. Obama, I am not President Bush. If you wanted to run against President Bush, you should have run four years ago.”
The Pew Research Center says the American public views Bush’s time in the White House as “overwhelmingly negative.”
“A Jeb Bush presidency would be about looking out for himself and people like him over the middle class. Sound familiar?” Shulman said. “Not only has that been Jeb Bush’s record as governor, but we know what to expect from a Bush presidency because we’ve seen it before: policies that wreck the economy and give massive breaks to the wealthy and corporations at everyone else’s expense.”
But the Bush brothers have not always been in lockstep. At times, it has looked more like sibling rivalry played out on the national stage.
The elder Bush repeatedly denied Jeb’s requests for disaster relief in Florida — at a rate greater than the national average.
In other words, as The Boston Globe points out, other governors had better luck getting federal aid from George.
And two are playing the guilt-by-association game.
The Republican National Committee is similarly seeking to connect likely Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton to Obama.
According to the RNC, the former secretary of state promoted a health care plan that is identical to Obamacare and has been “a key player in the White House’s failed leadership on foreign policy.”
Meanwhile, plenty of people are simply upset that — with the election of Jeb or Hillary — the White House will have been passed back and forth between two families since 1989, barring the Obama years.
...................................................................................................................................................................
COMMENTS:
* Please feel free to focus on Bush all you want, I have not spoken to a single Republican who would vote for him.
* In fact, all of the Republicans running are new faces...but are still using the Bush platform . You can put lipstick on a pig..but its still a pig
* I am 100% Republican and if this man, Jeb Bush, is the best that we have to offer, then we may as well just detonate all nukes on ourselves, we would be better off.
...................................................................................................................................................................
DNC unveils clip reel tying Jeb Bush to brother’s policies
New reel suggests Democratic attack strategy should the former Florida governor win the GOP primary
By Michael Walsh, March 25, 2015New Bush. Same policies.
That’s what the Democratic National Committee hopes to hammer home about the possibility of another Bush presidency.
The DNC strung together a news-clip reel of presumptive GOP presidential candidate Jeb Bush agreeing with former President George W. Bush on every issue.
“I’m the only Republican that was in office when he was in office as president that never disagreed with him. And I’m not gonna start now. Why would I do that now after two years?” he said in an interview used in the reel.
The DNC shared the reel with Yahoo News on Wednesday in conjunction with a fundraiser featuring the Bush brothers in Dallas.
It reveals a potential main line of attack against the former Florida governor — a blatant attempt to link him to his polarizing older brother.
“His own man? I think not. The Bush economy favors the richest over the middle class, and on that core agenda there is absolutely no daylight between Jeb Bush and his brother,” said DNC national press secretary Holly Shulman.
As the 43rd president, George W. Bush’s approval rating fluctuated from a high of 92 percent in the aftermath of 9/11 to historic lows, just 19 percent, toward the end of his time in the Oval Office, according to the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research.
It is for this reason, in part, that in 2008, then-Sen. Barack Obama invoked Bush during presidential debates — prompting his opponent, Sen. John McCain, to reply, “Sen. Obama, I am not President Bush. If you wanted to run against President Bush, you should have run four years ago.”
The Pew Research Center says the American public views Bush’s time in the White House as “overwhelmingly negative.”
“A Jeb Bush presidency would be about looking out for himself and people like him over the middle class. Sound familiar?” Shulman said. “Not only has that been Jeb Bush’s record as governor, but we know what to expect from a Bush presidency because we’ve seen it before: policies that wreck the economy and give massive breaks to the wealthy and corporations at everyone else’s expense.”
But the Bush brothers have not always been in lockstep. At times, it has looked more like sibling rivalry played out on the national stage.
The elder Bush repeatedly denied Jeb’s requests for disaster relief in Florida — at a rate greater than the national average.
In other words, as The Boston Globe points out, other governors had better luck getting federal aid from George.
And two are playing the guilt-by-association game.
The Republican National Committee is similarly seeking to connect likely Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton to Obama.
According to the RNC, the former secretary of state promoted a health care plan that is identical to Obamacare and has been “a key player in the White House’s failed leadership on foreign policy.”
Meanwhile, plenty of people are simply upset that — with the election of Jeb or Hillary — the White House will have been passed back and forth between two families since 1989, barring the Obama years.
...................................................................................................................................................................
"Wiggly"? Just call it what it is-- flip-flopping!
...................................................................................................................................................................
COMMENTS:
* The Conservative approach to illegal immigrants: They must all be deported. A wall must be built to keep them out. Candidates (all but Senator Cruz) have supported some sort of "path to Citizenship" in the past. In order to get support in the primaries they must, hypocritically, change their positions. The flip-flopping has already begun. Flip-Flop
* This republican party lineup stands for nothing and wiggles on every issue.
It would be hard to vote republican even if they had a decent intelligent man running for president. Look at the congress thats enough to make me turn away even if I was a republican* It takes money to deport people. The Repubs have not come up with the Funds. The repubs have not come up with a bill. The bills that the repubs come up with are full of holes. And they want to resolve the issues. Stop the B S talk and Start now and see what you can do.
...................................................................................................................................................................
Wiggly words on immigration policy from 2016 GOP contenders
By Nicholas Riccardi, March 28, 2015
Thanks to Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, it's becoming even clearer that immigration is the banana peel of 2016 Republican presidential politics.
Just ask Florida Sen. Marco Rubio.
He stepped up as a Senate leader on immigration only to slip and fall in a tea party ruckus over the issue. In a moment of candor, Rubio remembered the months of trying to get back up as "a real trial for me."
Others, too, have shifted on the matter.
Now it's oops for Walker.
In 2013, Walker said it "makes sense" to offer a way to citizenship for immigrants in the country illegally. Early this month, however, he said he no longer supports "amnesty."
Complicating that switch, Walker recently discussed immigration with New Hampshire party leaders. One of them, state leader Jennifer Horn, says that Walker favored legal status, a position many conservatives equate with "amnesty."
Worse for Walker, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that he actually said he favored a path to citizenship, though Horn denies Walker said that.
Even former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who has a strong voice — and a book — on immigration, has wiggled.
Rubio and Walker are not alone in embracing an immigration overhaul at some point. But doing so raises the specter of "amnesty" in the minds of those who want people unlawfully in the country to be given no relief from the threat of deportation.
"All the candidates have mixed statements — they have statements that seem to support amnesty and they all have ones that seem to oppose it," said Roy Beck, executive director of Numbers USA, which seeks to reduce immigration. "They're torn between the big-money people who gain from high immigration and the voters who oppose it."
Luis Alvarado, a California-based GOP strategist, said most Republican officials privately acknowledge that the country has to legalize the status of people who are here unlawfully while also bolstering border security. "They believe that no one in their conscious mind can deport 11 million people from this country," Alvarado said. "But, politically, they have to play word games to be elected in the primary."
Among the potential 2016 hopefuls:
—Bush has said he will not back away from his support for giving legal status to many in the country illegally. But his 2013 book outlining that stance marks a departure from an earlier position that envisaged eventual citizenship.
—Before he shied away from the issue, Rubio co-wrote a bill with a path to citizenship that passed the Senate and failed in the House. He now says the bill does not have the support to become law and the first focus should be on border security, a standard GOP position. Rubio ultimately wants to create a process that leads to legal status and then citizenship.
—Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul voted against Rubio's bill but says the millions of people in the country illegally cannot all be sent home.
—New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie once supported an overhaul; now he won't say where he stands. His state, though, is backing other Republican-led states in a suit against President Barack Obama's orders deferring deportation for some immigrants.
—Former Texas Gov. Rick Perry is talking tougher on immigration than when he called his 2012 campaign rivals heartless if they opposed a law that lets some children of immigrants in the U.S. illegally pay in-state tuition at public colleges. Even so, he says the U.S. will not deport all people here illegally.
Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, the only declared candidate so far, has kept a fairly consistent tough line on the issue.
Matt Schlapp, chairman of the American Conservative Union, said "the ground has shifted" on the issue for two reasons. He cited the influx of Central American youth crossing the border illegally last summer overwhelmed federal officials, and said Obama's unilateral acts to shield some immigrants from deportation made it politically impossible for a Republican to embrace a pathway to citizenship.
"You've got to cut these guys some slack," Schlapp said of the presidential hopefuls and their wavering words.
But Frank Sharry of America's Voice, which supports an overhaul, said some of Bush's rivals are "going to be accused of flip-flopping and that's going to become a character issue" playing into Bush's hands.
The wide-open nature of the GOP race also brings to light a tension between what some Republican fundraisers want — an overhaul with a legal path — and what conservative primary voters wish for.
Spencer Zwick, finance chairman for 2012 Republican nominee Mitt Romney, is one donor who has said he will only support candidates who favor such an overhaul. At this early stage, the competition for dollars has been more intense than the competition for votes.
"Once they get into the debates, this all changes," Beck of Numbers USA predicted, meaning he expects the candidates to rally behind a harder line.
...................................................................................................................................................................
COMMENTS:
* The Conservative approach to illegal immigrants: They must all be deported. A wall must be built to keep them out. Candidates (all but Senator Cruz) have supported some sort of "path to Citizenship" in the past. In order to get support in the primaries they must, hypocritically, change their positions. The flip-flopping has already begun. Flip-Flop
* This republican party lineup stands for nothing and wiggles on every issue.
It would be hard to vote republican even if they had a decent intelligent man running for president. Look at the congress thats enough to make me turn away even if I was a republican* It takes money to deport people. The Repubs have not come up with the Funds. The repubs have not come up with a bill. The bills that the repubs come up with are full of holes. And they want to resolve the issues. Stop the B S talk and Start now and see what you can do.
...................................................................................................................................................................
Wiggly words on immigration policy from 2016 GOP contenders
By Nicholas Riccardi, March 28, 2015
Thanks to Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, it's becoming even clearer that immigration is the banana peel of 2016 Republican presidential politics.
Just ask Florida Sen. Marco Rubio.
He stepped up as a Senate leader on immigration only to slip and fall in a tea party ruckus over the issue. In a moment of candor, Rubio remembered the months of trying to get back up as "a real trial for me."
Others, too, have shifted on the matter.
Now it's oops for Walker.
In 2013, Walker said it "makes sense" to offer a way to citizenship for immigrants in the country illegally. Early this month, however, he said he no longer supports "amnesty."
Complicating that switch, Walker recently discussed immigration with New Hampshire party leaders. One of them, state leader Jennifer Horn, says that Walker favored legal status, a position many conservatives equate with "amnesty."
Worse for Walker, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that he actually said he favored a path to citizenship, though Horn denies Walker said that.
Even former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who has a strong voice — and a book — on immigration, has wiggled.
Rubio and Walker are not alone in embracing an immigration overhaul at some point. But doing so raises the specter of "amnesty" in the minds of those who want people unlawfully in the country to be given no relief from the threat of deportation.
"All the candidates have mixed statements — they have statements that seem to support amnesty and they all have ones that seem to oppose it," said Roy Beck, executive director of Numbers USA, which seeks to reduce immigration. "They're torn between the big-money people who gain from high immigration and the voters who oppose it."
Luis Alvarado, a California-based GOP strategist, said most Republican officials privately acknowledge that the country has to legalize the status of people who are here unlawfully while also bolstering border security. "They believe that no one in their conscious mind can deport 11 million people from this country," Alvarado said. "But, politically, they have to play word games to be elected in the primary."
Among the potential 2016 hopefuls:
—Bush has said he will not back away from his support for giving legal status to many in the country illegally. But his 2013 book outlining that stance marks a departure from an earlier position that envisaged eventual citizenship.
—Before he shied away from the issue, Rubio co-wrote a bill with a path to citizenship that passed the Senate and failed in the House. He now says the bill does not have the support to become law and the first focus should be on border security, a standard GOP position. Rubio ultimately wants to create a process that leads to legal status and then citizenship.
—Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul voted against Rubio's bill but says the millions of people in the country illegally cannot all be sent home.
—New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie once supported an overhaul; now he won't say where he stands. His state, though, is backing other Republican-led states in a suit against President Barack Obama's orders deferring deportation for some immigrants.
—Former Texas Gov. Rick Perry is talking tougher on immigration than when he called his 2012 campaign rivals heartless if they opposed a law that lets some children of immigrants in the U.S. illegally pay in-state tuition at public colleges. Even so, he says the U.S. will not deport all people here illegally.
Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, the only declared candidate so far, has kept a fairly consistent tough line on the issue.
Matt Schlapp, chairman of the American Conservative Union, said "the ground has shifted" on the issue for two reasons. He cited the influx of Central American youth crossing the border illegally last summer overwhelmed federal officials, and said Obama's unilateral acts to shield some immigrants from deportation made it politically impossible for a Republican to embrace a pathway to citizenship.
"You've got to cut these guys some slack," Schlapp said of the presidential hopefuls and their wavering words.
But Frank Sharry of America's Voice, which supports an overhaul, said some of Bush's rivals are "going to be accused of flip-flopping and that's going to become a character issue" playing into Bush's hands.
The wide-open nature of the GOP race also brings to light a tension between what some Republican fundraisers want — an overhaul with a legal path — and what conservative primary voters wish for.
Spencer Zwick, finance chairman for 2012 Republican nominee Mitt Romney, is one donor who has said he will only support candidates who favor such an overhaul. At this early stage, the competition for dollars has been more intense than the competition for votes.
"Once they get into the debates, this all changes," Beck of Numbers USA predicted, meaning he expects the candidates to rally behind a harder line.
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