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Thursday, April 30, 2015

Then the conservative justices must sit out lots of other cases!

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COMMENTS:
*   On the other hand, the liberal members of the court were SPECIFICALLY chosen for their willingness to ignore issues of Constitutionality and fair play.
     *  As opposed to conservative members of the court being SPECIFICALLY chosen for their willingness to support whatever Corporations tell them to!
*  "Separation of church and state." Say it with me now, wingers.
     *  They can't: they've been programmed not to.
*  So where is the push to ban divorce? Where are the bakeries, the flower shops, the pizza parlors, etc. that refuse to provide services to divorcees?
*  So get the conservatives to sit out on account of their bias against.  leave this to the swing justice (s)
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Faith leaders demand that liberal justices sit out gay marriage case
By Lydia Wheeler, April 27, 2015

Video

Religious leaders are calling on members of the Supreme Court’s liberal wing to recuse themselves from the blockbuster gay marriage case that the court will begin considering on Tuesday.

Standing on the steps of the Supreme Court, Scott Lively, president of Abiding Truth Ministries, told reporters he’s filing a motion with the Supreme Court calling for the recusal of Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Elena Kagan.

“Justices Ginsburg and Kagan, knowing full well that unique legal issues regarding the definition of marriage would soon come before them, deliberately officiated at so-called homosexual wedding ceremonies creating not merely the appearance of bias, but an actual and blatant conflict of interest,” he said.

“In my personal view they have committed an unparalleled breach of judicial ethics by elevating the importance of their own favored political cause of gay rights above the integrity of the court and of our nation.”

The case before the court, known as Obergefell v. Hodges, stems from a 6th Circuit Court of Appeals decision to uphold same-sex marriage bans in Ohio, Tennessee, Michigan and Kentucky. The court has grouped the appeals from the couples in the four states together and will hear two and a half hours of arguments Tuesday morning, 90 minutes more than the court typically allows.

In their rulings, the justices will seek to answer whether states are required to license a marriage between two people of the same sex and whether states have to recognize same-sex marriage licenses from other states under the 14th Amendment.

Lively said Kagan and Ginsburg's “vividly demonstrated disposition” in favor of the same-sex couples shows they are unable to render a fair judgment.

He and more than a dozen leaders of anti-gay-marriage groups stood behind a wall of empty cardboard filing boxes stacked on the steps of the court on Monday morning.

The boxes — 60 in all — were there to "symbolically" represent 300,000 restraining orders that Faith2Action President Janet Porter said will be delivered to the Supreme Court and to Congress to keep the justices from ruling on gay marriage.

“We have appealed to Congress to restrain the judges, and the good news is Congress has heard our cry,” Porter said.

Last week, Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) introduced the Restrain the Judges on Marriage Act of 2015, which would remove jurisdiction to rule on gay marriage from federal courts. In the Senate, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) has introduced The Protect Marriage from the Courts Act, which would also limit the federal courts’ jurisdiction to consider same-sex marriage cases.

“Congress has the ability to remove appellate jurisdiction,” Porter said. “What that means is, we can actually take from them their right to rule on marriage before they even rule on marriage.”

During the press conference, Larry Sternbane, 51, stood quietly back behind the crowd holding a sign that read, “Don’t like gay marriage? Don’t get gay married.”

“This right here is the last gasp of a group that is losing this issue in the public square,” he said. “They are talking to themselves. There are a bunch of tourists listening, and the only ones clapping when somebody ends is them.”
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"It's hard to see, then, how [Huckabee's and Sanford's] 'fears' amount to little more than fear-mongering and political posturing."

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COMMENTS:
*  What the hell is "mandatory gay marriage," a term which we hear constantly from the republican Presidential candidates? The republicans obviously know that their uninformed, mouth breathing base can easily be led to think that people will somehow be "mandated" (what an ironic term!) to marry someone of the same sex if/when marriage equality becomes the law of the land. What fools these republican-voting cretins be. Of course, never let it be said that right wingers let facts get in the way of a good ol' fearmongering lie. God almighty, how I loathe these contemptible, opportunistic GOP swine.
*  "Christians" filed with satanic hate spreading lies. Nothing new there.
*  They just can't seem to get their head around that separation of church and state idea. The government can't force a church to marry people. It can only protect people from being discriminated against in commerce. A church could exist that refused to marry biracial couples. The government couldn't do anything about it.
*  All they are doing is fear mongering and trying to pander to a select group of individuals. As an ordained minister, I have performed many marriages and have turned down several individuals due to my biblical belief. Those same beliefs would come into play if someone asked me to perform a ceremony for a homosexual couple. And as the law is plainly starting to point out, I can refuse to do this based on my biblical convictions. I am in no way obligated to perform a wedding for just anybody that appears on my doorstep. If they make it a law, then I guess I'll just spend some time in jail because I won't do it. As far as Huckabee is concerned, he quit being a pastor a long time ago and is now just a politician that will tell you just what you want to hear.
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Don't Worry, No One's Going to Force You to Marry Anyone
By Hollis Phelps, April 27, 2015

Last week former Arkansas governor and once, and perhaps current, presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee warned a group of conservative pastors over a conference call of the threat that legalized same-sex marriages supposedly pose to clergy. "If the courts rule that people have a civil right not only to be a homosexual but a civil right to have a homosexual marriage," he said, "then a homosexual couple coming to a pastor who believes in biblical marriage who says 'I can't perform that wedding' will now be breaking the law." Huckabee went on to suggest that not performing such weddings may subject clergy to "civil . . . and possible criminal penalties for violating the law."

Huckabee is not a lone voice crying in the wilderness, here. Also last week, a group of pastors gathered at the Texas Capitol to voice their support for H.B. 3567, titled "Freedom of Religion with Respect to Recognizing or Performing Certain Marriages." Filed by Scott Sanford (R-McKinney), who is also Executive Pastor of Cottonwood Creek Baptist Church in Allen, Texas, the bill is designed to protect members of the clergy from performing marriages and related ceremonies that may violate sincerely held religious beliefs:
Sec. 2.601. RIGHTS OF CERTAIN RELIGIOUS ORGANIZATIONS. A religious organization, an organization supervised or controlled by or in connection with a religious organization, an individual employed by a religious organization while acting in the scope of that employment, or a clergy or minister may not be required to solemnize any marriage, provide services, accommodations, facilities, goods, or privileges for a purpose related to the solemnization, formation, or celebration of any marriage, or treat any marriage as valid for any purpose if the action would cause the organization or individual to violate a sincerely held religious belief.
The Oklahoma legislature passed similar bills last week as well. Nevertheless, commenting on H. B. 3567, Sanford notes, "Pastors and churches should not have to live in fear that the government will force them to perform marriages that violate their sincerely held religious beliefs."

I agree in principle, though not, I want to emphasize, with the subtext. Clergy, when acting specifically in that capacity, shouldn't be compelled by government entities or anyone else to perform marriage or other ceremonies that ostensibly violate their religious beliefs. Thankfully, there's no reason that members of the clergy have to "live in fear" in Texas, Oklahoma, or anywhere else, since no one is seriously suggesting otherwise.

The reason is that members of the clergy aren't generally required to marry anyone, at all. That was the case before same-sex marriage became legal in 37 states and the District of Columbia, and it will remain the case if and when it becomes legal in the rest.

Under the law, clergy certainly have the right to perform marriage ceremonies, and such marriages are considered legally binding so long as they conform to the laws of the state in which they occur. Such laws, of course, vary from state to state, though across the board the bar isn't necessarily set that high. Nevertheless, there's a world of difference between having the right to marry individuals and being compelled to marry them, and clergy generally retain the right to refuse to perform marriages, for numerous and varied reasons. Whatever one thinks about that right, no one is really arguing that it should change.

Opponents of same-sex marriage may counter that claim with examples of, say, magistrates being forced to issue marriage licenses or perform same-sex marriages in states where bans have been overturned, such as in North Carolina But this and similar situations are completely different, and do not, strictly speaking, involve clergy acting in a religious capacity but individuals acting in a civil capacity.

Although historically, conceptually, and in practice, there's obviously overlap between the two (in the United States, for instance, the civil provides an umbrella for the religious), but at the end of the day they're not necessarily the same thing theologically speaking, because how we understand marriage varies in, between, and across religious and non-religious traditions and over time. Nevertheless, so long as marriage grants certain rights and benefits, respecting differences actually entails adopting an expansive understanding of marriage at the state and federal level. An expansive civil understanding, which in many cases now includes same-sex marriages, actually allows for and protects particular religious understandings of marriage, for better or worse. That includes the right of clergy to decide whether or not to perform them, even if that right can and often is used for exclusionary purposes.

As ordained ministers, Huckabee and Sanford certainly know all this. It's hard to see, then, how their "fears" amount to little more than fear-mongering and political posturing.
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"... the ability for billionaires [to] spend unlimited sums of money for and against presidential candidates is just a glorious exercise of free speech rights that in no way has a corrupting effect on our politics." [sarcasm off]

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COMMENTS:
*  I guess I have to hand it to Rubio- he IS providing all the bona fides that are required of the ideal republican candidate for prez'nit. He is an intellectual featherweight, a dim bulb, a completely unaware ignoramus, and a cross-eyed drooling ideologue who has no idea WHAT he really thinks; he completely lacks anything akin to principles; he is very malleable and shapeless in his beliefs, and he possesses the ideal type of moral cowardice that allows him to pander to ANYONE who holds the money to float his boat. In other words, Rubio will gladly become Adelson's cute, squirming, adorable  little puppy, with hopes of growing up to be his full-time, blindly obedient lapdog.  Goooood boy, Rubio!
*  He's young, dumb and a major league a hole ... he's got it all for leading the GOP baggers into the 19th century.
*  isn't shameless pandering a bullet point on the gop platform?
*  He is called bubio in Florida by working people.  He lied to get into office.  Rode his heritage to the senate and is about as big a fool as the repugnacants have out there except for the nut in Louisiana.  He is out there all by his lonesome.
*  C.R.A.P. The new acronym for Cruz ,Rubio , Adelson and Paul !!
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Marco Rubio utterly humiliates himself: How shameless pandering won him the Sheldon Adelson primary

Marco Rubio is in line to receive the billionaire's backing after groveling the most

By Jim Newell, April 29, 2015

Marco Rubio loves Israel, and he hates Iran. Did you know this? Well, just in case you didn’t: he does.

Rubio has been going out of his way recently to suggest that, if president, he’ll blow up whatever relationships the United States has with the great world powers in order to serve the right-wing Israeli government. For starters, Rubio has pledged to scrap any deal with Iran as soon as he enters office. At first, he suggested that the United States could then easily nudge Western Europe, Russia and China back into reimposing sanctions on Iran by appealing to “the standing of the United States on the global stage.” He has since recognized that the United States will no longer have any standing on the global stage after scrapping a delicately negotiated deal over Iran’s nuclear program. He understands that sanctions imposed by the United States would be “more effective” if coordinated with other countries — such as the ones that actually do business with Iran — but he’d impose them anyway, and Iran would somehow care. Because Marco Rubio would look tough!

“And in my mind,” Rubio told NPR earlier this month, “if the president wanted this to be a permanent deal that survived his presidency, he would have brought it to Congress.” Thanks to the work of Rubio’s more talented colleague in the Senate, Bob Corker, Obama has since relented and agreed to sign a bill that would bring the deal before Congress. The Corker-Cardin bill, currently undergoing a glacial amendment process in the Senate, would give Congress a shot at killing an Iran deal — though Congress would have to muster a veto-proof majority on a resolution of disapproval, and that’s unlikely. But a small shot is still a shot. And now, Rubio may ruin even that tiny shot, in order to improve his positioning within the Republican presidential primary field.

Rubio has introduced an amendment to Corker-Cardin that would require, as part of any deal, Iran to recognize Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state. This makes Bob Corker a very angry man, since the amendment is a poison pill that would likely bring back the president’s veto threat. Corker has thus far been able to keep together a coalition of Democrats and Republicans willing to swat down amendments to the deal struck in committee — the one President Obama has said he would sign — but no senators are looking forward to voting against this amendment due to the politics of VOTING AGAINST ISRAEL.

Why should Marco Rubio care that he’s irritated all of his colleagues with this stunt, though? It’s paying off quite well for him. Last week, Politico reported that Rubio has taken pole position in the “Sheldon Adelson primary.” This is the new, post-Citizens United presidential tradition in which Republican candidates leap over themselves in pandering to Israeli right wing politics in order to secure the financial backing of casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson. Adelson has been very impressed with this young padawan from Florida’s ability to say whatever he wants to hear at all times. So impressed that he might just throw him tens or hundreds of millions of dollars that he finds under the couch cushion.
Before Iowa and New Hampshire, GOP candidates are competing in the Sheldon Adelson primary, and some will travel to his posh Venetian hotel in Las Vegas this weekend in hopes of winning it. But one candidate — Marco Rubio — has emerged as the clear front-runner, according to nearly a half-dozen sources close to the multibillionaire casino mogul.

In recent weeks, Adelson, who spent $100 million on the 2012 campaign and could easily match that figure in 2016, has told friends that he views the Florida senator, whose hawkish defense views and unwavering support for Israel align with his own, as a fresh face who is “the future of the Republican Party.” He has also said that Rubio’s Cuban heritage and youth would give the party a strong opportunity to expand its brand and win the White House.
Adelson also hasn’t given up entirely on Scott Walker, because they share a common interest in crushing labor unions. One candidate that Adelson may have abandoned, though, is Jeb Bush. National Review reports that Jeb Bush has already “lost the Sheldon Adelson primary” because his record of pandering to the billionaire’s every whim comes in slightly below 100 percent. Though even that overstates Bush’s offense: it’s more that Bush’s record of stopping everyone he knows from pandering to the billionaire’s every whim is slightly below 100 percent. We were half-joking when we wrote about how Bush was dead to Israel hawks when word got out that he speaks to former Secretary of State James Baker from time to time. But when it comes to Adelson, the most important Israel hawk of them all, that’s pretty much exactly what happened. From National Review:
The bad blood between Bush and Adelson is relatively recent, and it deepened with the news that former secretary of state James Baker, a member of Bush’s foreign-policy advisory team, was set to address J Street, a left-wing pro-Israel organization founded to serve as the antithesis to the hawkish American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

J Street has routinely staked out liberal views anathema to those held by Adelson and his allies. Adelson sent word to Bush’s camp in Miami: Bush, he said, should tell Baker to cancel the speech. When Bush refused, a source describes Adelson as “rips***”; another says Adelson sent word that the move cost the Florida governor “a lot of money.”
The worst part about “losing the Sheldon Adelson primary” is that you still can’t say whatever you want once you’ve been eliminated. You still have to maintain fealty to Adelson to ensure that he will at least ignore you, rather than spend tons of money going directly after you. Take Sen. Rand Paul, the supposed “isolationist” who recently learned to love the drone war and wanted to increase military spending by hundreds of billions of dollars. He’s taking dinners with Adelson just to beg them not to wage an all-out assault on him.
For another 2016 hopeful, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, it’s not about winning Adelson’s endorsement — it’s about making sure he doesn’t come after him.

During an appearance on a Jewish-themed radio program last month, Paul, who’s come under fire from the neoconservative wing of his party for his more isolationist foreign policy views, said he’d recently had a private meeting with Adelson and his wife, Miriam, and asked him about a report that he was considering funding a campaign against him.

“They assured me there was no truth to that,” Paul said.
There may be no truth to it now, as long as Paul continues to humiliate himself in pandering to hawks on foreign policy. The minute that rightward momentum peters out, Adelson and his lovely wife will be sure to drop buckets of cash on his head.

But, again, the ability for billionaires spend unlimited sums of money for and against presidential candidates is just a glorious exercise of free speech rights that in no way has a corrupting effect on our politics.
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Wednesday, April 29, 2015

No hoax! "Right-wingers *WILL* believe anything about Harry Reid ..."

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COMMENTS:
*  Conservatives (media or people) never "fall" per se for such hoaxes, they actually willingly JUMP and readily EMBRACE anything that serves to smear anything non-conservative, especially if it's a Democrat!  If such smear helps them win election, they couldn't care less whether it is/was true of not... Who are they to debunk a good smear helping them??
    *  And if they aren't busy falling, jumping, embracing;  they are lying, creating, insinuating it.  Over turning the "truth in broadcasting" that used to be the standard, is just one more reason to dig up raygun's body and beat it some more.
*  benghazi!
    *  Sorry, not today!  Haven't you heard? That's now been put on hiatus until the middle of the election season!  Not that Republicans would be politicizing such a serious investigation, of course!!  ROFLMAO!!!
*  The republican party's dream of  a semi-literate population of gullible half-wits who would follow the party's pied piper of stupidity in the next election is well on course in all the red states.
*  It doesn't matter that this story isn't true. It was reported by the right wing media so on some level it must somehow be true, and the fanatics will never really let it go.  Anyway, I imagine the righties will insist the liberal media is covering up the truth to protect Reid.
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Conservative media falls for a hoax: Harry Reid injury truthers just got played

Right-wingers will believe anything about Harry Reid, which makes for some excellent pranking opportunities

By Jim Newell, April 27, 2015

We return to the saga of WHAT REALLY HAPPENED TO HARRY REID (MUST CREDIT CONSERVATIVE BLOGOSPHERE) only because of dramatic new developments that turn this whole story on its head. THE LATEST DEVELOPMENT: All those other developments that circuited through conservative media were not true, according to the guy who made them up for his own amusement.

Earlier this month, we wrote about longtime conservative blogger John Hinderaker’s gumshoe efforts to expose the truth behind the injuries Harry Reid suffered on New Year’s Day. Reid claimed he injured himself using exercise bands. Since John Hinderaker does not like Harry Reid and has stereotypical impressions of how Nevada politics works, he determined that Reid was lying.

Hinderaker first asserted that “it isn’t hard to guess that [Reid] ran afoul of mobsters.” Later, a friend who had just visited Las Vegas told him that, indeed, the Strip was buzzing with rumors that “Reid had promised to obtain some benefit for a group of mobsters.” Reid was not able to obtain that benefit, alas. “When the mobsters complained, Reid (according to the rumor) made a comment that they considered disrespectful, and one of them beat him up.” The part about Reid making a disrespectful comment sounds about right, but little else of this story rested on a solid evidentiary basis. The sourcing — hot rumors going around Las Vegas!!! — sounded a lot like, say, “No one in Wasilla thinks that Trig is really Sarah Palin’s kid.” Regardless, it was good enough to get some attention from Hinderaker and prompt a further comical exposé at Breitbart News.

Since our last posting, Hinderaker has been running with another story. A man operating under the pseudonym “Easton Elliott” presented him with a story that did not involve mobsters, but did involve Harry Reid’s brother, Larry. Elliott shared with Hinderaker a story about a New Year’s Eve meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous he had attended. (You can tell you’re dealing with a noble source if they’re divulging conversations from an AA meeting.)
Some time between 10:00 and 11:30 p.m., a man entered the meeting. His appearance was striking: there was blood on his clothing, beginning around his midsection. His left hand was swollen. He appeared to be somewhat intoxicated and was visibly agitated. He introduced himself as “Larry.”

In a group discussion that was heard by a number of people, Larry said that he had just had a fight with a family member. Larry said he had been at a family get-together, and he didn’t remember much about the fight because he had blacked out. When he came to, he was rolling on the ground, fighting with a family member, and his clothes were bloody. Now, he said, he was frightened that the Secret Service would come after him.
It took Elliott a little while to put together, but he eventually figured out that this was Larry Reid and he had just come from a fight with his brother, Harry. “That is Easton Elliott’s account,” Hinderaker wrote. “I can’t vouch for it, of course, but if what he says about the AA meeting is accurate, the inferences he draws seem reasonable.” For the uninitiated: this is called the Whoa, if true method of hedging when you’re publishing an uncorroborated rumor about a public figure.

This new mobster-free iteration spread across conservative media, too. Rush Limbaugh, the most powerful figure in conservative media, mentioned it on his radio program. It was brought up on Laura Ingraham’s radio program, too, but only because John Hinderaker happened to be guest-hosting that day.

You can’t make up a story like this. Just kidding, you can, and now that’s what “Easton Elliott” — real name Larry Pfeifer — is claiming he did, just to see how far it would go. Pretty far, Larry!
A Las Vegas man claims he started a false rumor that the injuries suffered by Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid several months ago were the result of an attack by Reid’s brother, not an exercise accident.

Larry Pfeifer, a 50-year-old former consultant in the nightclub and entertainment industry, said he fabricated the story after becoming appalled that right-wing political blogger John Hinderaker published a rumor that Reid’s injuries stemmed from an assault by a Mafia enforcer. Pfeifer said he pitched his fake story about the Reid brothers’ supposed fight to Hinderaker, author of the Power Line blog, to test whether the blogger would publish it, as well. When Hinderaker reported it and the rumor was subsequently spread by others in conservative media, Pfeifer says he began plotting to self-report it as a lie to show the lack of credibility and journalistic standards among partisan media figures.

“It was just so outrageous,” he said. “The fact that someone can say something completely false that can destroy somebody’s life, it’s just wrong. Where’s the moral compass?”
Pfeifer may think that he’s taken conservative media for a ride here. All he’s really done, though, is open an opportunity for mobsters to be reintroduced to the story. I’m not sure it’s happened yet, but it’s only a matter of time before Breitbart or World Net Daily takes this fabrication to its next step: Pfeifer ran afoul of the mobsters who run Alcoholics Anonymous in Las Vegas, and they forced him to recant his story. (Is Thomas Pynchon looking for an idea for his next novel, by any chance?) The story about WHAT REALLY HAPPENED TO HARRY REID is far from over and new theories will arise as old ones collapse. Don’t bother keeping up with the minute-by-minute fluctuations, reader. We here at Salon will write about this once a month or so to keep you updated, until the end of time, because that’s just the kind of people we are.
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Republicans "focused so singularly on the destruction of Obamacare that they didn’t put any time into actually building a consensus on their own policy."

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COMMENTS:
*  They are so focused on "Nooo" on everything that they cannot say "Yes" to a plan of their own because their original plan was the template for Obamacare.  They are in essence an Ouroboros swallowing their own tails.
*  “They focused so singularly on the destruction of Obamacare that they didn’t put any time into actually building a consensus on their own policy.”  But they do agree on the policy:Let people die rather than ask the Job Creators to pay a single penny to benefit someone else.  The disagreement is over how to pitch this policy in such a way that the same people they would rather let die will still vote for them.
*  Ok, but please don't cast this in terms that the King decision might cause the ACA to "die".  The ACA will still be here even if there is an adverse decision.  It will harm those getting subsidies in states without exchanges, but the rest of the law will be intact and there will be huge pressure to fix the subsidies for others.  The Dems should most definitely NOT panic and make bad concessions on the law because they think it is going to "die."  The language and headlines in pieces like this don't help. 
*   The republicans are suffering from end-stage Obama Derangement Syndrome, which has caused them to lose all touch with reality; and also has caused the entire party, and all of it's internally warring factions, to become so vicious, mean, and hateful, even the stupidest and most opaque idiots that comprise the republican electorate are going to start waking up and realizing how cruelly they've been used by their desperate corporate fascist masters.  The republican party is bound and determined to marginalize itself to the very brink of extinction. They are utterly powerless to reverse course at this point.  The thing we should all be very concerned about is, the sociopathic malice of the GOP runs so deep, they will gladly burn this entire country to the ground, and take ALL of us with them down that greased chute to Hell, if we let them. If they can't have ALL the power and ALL the money to themselves, they would just as soon reduce America to a smoldering ruin, so NO ONE can prosper.
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GOP’s creeping Obamacare terror: How health reform’s demise could scorch the party

Republicans were so focused on ending Obamacare that they can't figure out what to do should the law actually die

By Simon Maloy, April 29, 2015

We don’t really hear as much about the Affordable Care Act as we used to. With the 2014 election cycle behind us and the 2016 cycle still puttering along in first gear, there’s no constant drumbeat of campaign-trail Obamacare invective to drive headlines. What’s more, the law is, at this point, functioning very smoothly, and the lack of website crashes and other sundry foul-ups necessarily translates to less press coverage. Nobody really cares too much when a law works as intended.

In fact, the ACA is going through a noticeable upswing in its public image. Obamacare’s approval rating has, per the Kaiser Family Foundation tracking poll, risen eight points since September 2014, while disapproval of the law has fallen 11 points since its high point in July 2014. And people who purchased their insurance through the ACA give fairly good reviews on the quality of their coverage. Meanwhile, the uninsured rate across the nation continues to drop.

But that doesn’t mean there isn’t any drama to be had. After all, the law’s fate is still very much in question – in less than two months, the Supreme Court will hand down its ruling in King v. Burwell, determining the fate of the ACA’s health insurance subsidies in the vast majority of the states. If the subsidies go down, lots of people stand to lose their insurance, and it’s doubtful the ACA would survive. This outcome is exactly what Republicans and conservatives have been pushing for. And as they get closer to realizing this dream, they’re becoming more and more terrified of what might happen.

“For conservatives, the expected June Supreme Court decision in King v. Burwell is laden with opportunity and peril,” begins a new memo from The 2017 Project, a conservative activist group pushing for the repeal of Obamacare. The memo itself deals more with the perils than the opportunities, warning conservatives that they’ll need a plan to prevent too much disruption in the health insurance markets, and dismissing the temptation to simply sit back and let Obamacare collapse in the event of a ruling against the government in King. “The let-it-burn approach may feel cathartic,” the memo states, “but it will hurt the cause of repeal by showing the public that conservatives have no solutions on health care.”

However, the simple fact that a conservative group is putting out a strategy memo this late in the game, warning Republicans that they need to coalesce around a post-King plan, is a fairly good sign of how unlikely it is that that will actually happen. The only thing holding Republicans together on healthcare policy is a shared hatred of the Affordable Care Act. Beyond that, they have no idea what to do.

Right now there are no fewer than four potential post-King plans being floated by Republicans in Congress, and they’re all very different, ranging from a temporary extension of the ACA’s subsidies to a full-blown restructuring a state healthcare markets. The thinking behind these proposals is that they’ll buy time and political cover for the GOP as it finally figures out what the hell it intends to with regard to healthcare policy – a feat that’s eluded them for several years running. While they try and figure it out, the stopgap measures would allow for some of the worst features of the pre-ACA healthcare landscape to creep back in.

And as my colleague Jim Newell points out, before they can agree on which approach is best, they first have to get past conservative opposition to even considering something that isn’t a full-blown Obamacare repeal. The budget reconciliation process offers Congressional Republicans a one-shot opportunity to obviate a Democratic filibuster and get healthcare legislation to President Obama’s desk. The hardline conservatives are dead-set on using that opportunity to force Obama to veto a full repeal – a politically satisfying gesture that would do absolutely nothing to mitigate the damage from an adverse ruling in King. The slightly more practical Republicans in Congress are wondering if they shouldn’t use it to pass an Obamacare “patch” or “bridge” or whatever they’re calling these stopgap plans.

And it gets even more complicated! As the Washington Examiner reported yesterday, if the Republicans wait until after the King decision comes down to pass their contingency plan, the Congressional Budget Office “will no longer assume that the subsidies are valid, meaning that Congress would have to pay for their legislative response for the people losing subsidies by cutting spending elsewhere or increasing the debt.” So now they’re worried about having a fight over paying for additional spending that could be viewed by conservatives as a sneaky way of keeping Obamacare temporarily alive.

The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent neatly mapped out the political minefield Republicans have to navigate:
They openly rooted for a Court decision gutting subsidies. But now they don’t want to sustain political damage from millions losing insurance. So they are floating all manner of contingency plans that would require spending federal money to temporarily cover those millions. But it will anger conservatives if they spend federal money to expand health coverage, because they oppose that in principle and — perhaps worse — it could keep Obamacare going.
The natural response to all this is what we’ve seen for the last six years from the GOP on healthcare policy: paralysis. They focused so singularly on the destruction of Obamacare that they didn’t put any time into actually building a consensus on their own policy. Presented with the chance to realize their dream of a post-Obamacare world, they can’t figure out what to do, and there’s a real possibility they’ll get burned.
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"Democrats’ response is that of course they want to combat terrorism. If Republicans are so intent on doing so, they ask, why did they stall Loretta Lynch’s nomination as attorney general for months?"

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COMMENT:  Land of the free and home of the brave has turned into Land of the oppressed and home of a bunch of scairdy cats. How many terrorists have I encountered? Zero.
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GOP campaign slogan: Be afraid. Be very afraid.
By David Lightman, April 29, 2015

Republican presidential candidates want to win your votes by scaring you.

Thanks to the national security lapses of the Obama administration, “we will pay a terrible price one day,” says Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla.

“The next 20 months will be a dangerous time,” warns Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, but he offers this hint of hope: “January 2017 is coming.”

And so on. Republicans think fears of terrorist attacks are a major issue, and a major political motivator.

“Republicans are looking for some issue where they have a clear advantage,” said Ann Selzer, a Des Moines-based pollster who conducts Iowa and national surveys.

Selzer’s April 6-8 national poll found the percentage of people who name terrorism or the Islamic State as the 2016 campaign’s most important issue had nearly doubled since December.

Among Republicans, one-fourth said terrorism was their top concern. Democrats still listed unemployment as their first worry, with climate change next. Terrorism tied for fourth among Democrats.

Republicans see another big reason to keep pounding away on terrorism. If Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton wins her party’s nomination, they can conveniently brand her as a key architect of President Barack Obama’s national security policy. Clinton was secretary of state in Obama’s first term.

Republicans can also keep talking about the 2012 terrorist attack that killed four Americans in Benghazi, Libya. The House of Representatives has a special committee investigating the incident, and Chairman Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., said he’ll call Clinton to testify. He also wants her to testify separately on conducting government business using email from a private computer server.

This campaign is all part of a narrative that’s become highly popular among the Republican candidates in stump speeches and media appearances.

They tend to start with zingers aimed what they label the Obama administration’s ineptness. “Barack Obama has never run a lemonade stand,” says Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush maintains that Obama is the first post-World War II president who “does not believe that America’s presence in the world as a leader and America’s power in the world is a force for good.”

That’s why, says Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, “We need a commander in chief in this country who, once and for all, will identify that radical Islamic terrorism is a threat to us all.”

Video: Ted Cruz at the 2015 Republican Leadership Summit

Their narrative usually continues with dire warnings.

“There are thousands of people around the world who are plotting to kill Americans here and abroad,” Rubio said recently in New Hampshire. “This risk is real. This is not hyperbole. It needs to be confronted.”

He didn’t mention how the White House has tried to do just that. In February, the president hosted a summit on violent extremism, and cited U.S. involvement in a 60-nation fight against terrorism.

Republicans won’t relent.

Sometimes, tough guy talk backfires, as when Walker said in February that he was equipped to fight terrorists because he fought labor union protesters in his state.

Finally, in the Republican pitch comes the message of hope. “There is a pessimism in the world, but it does not have to be that way,” says former Texas Gov. Rick Perry.

Sometimes Republicans are at war with one another. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., labeled U.S. involvement in Libya a mistake and criticized U.S. policy toward Syria and the rebels. He called Graham and Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., “lapdogs for President Obama.”

McCain fired back, saying, “The record is very clear that he simply does not have an understanding about the needs and the threats of United States national security.”

Video: Marco Rubio at the 2015 Republican Leadership Summit

Democrats’ response is that of course they want to combat terrorism. If Republicans are so intent on doing so, they ask, why did they stall Loretta Lynch’s nomination as attorney general for months?

“With all that this country is facing from terrorism,” asked Sen. Bernard Sanders, a Vermont independent, “How at this vital time can anyone elected to the Senate play partisan politics with something as sensitive as the head of the Justice Department?” Sanders is weighing a bid for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Whether the Republican assault on national security policy becomes a winning strategy depends largely on events. President George W. Bush was able to use the war in Iraq – and the votes of dozens of congressional Democrats for the war – to help himself win re-election in 2004, but war weariness hurt Republicans in 2008 and 2012.

This time, Republicans see the public as weary of Democratic policies, and that’s a big potential plus. “Republicans have always been trusted more on national security,” said Republican pollster Whit Ayres, “and Obama has been a weaker leader than people expected.”
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Tuesday, April 28, 2015

"There is practically no difference in positions on policies between Cruz and the bulk of the party. It's all about being outrageous and destructive."

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COMMENTS:
*  Ted Cruz is no moron, and there is no reason to think that he is a bigot.  He is a self-righteous, bellicose, bomb-throwing demagogue. If you want to find fault with him, his daily utterances are the gift that keeps on giving, But theres no reason to accuse him of things which he is not guilty of.
*  ... you have to be some kind of a loon to go along with anything Cruz says. He should just get a church and become it's head loon. I'm A Christian and Hispanic and can nothing good coming from this man. He is just too angry- as are you.
*  We dislike Cruz because he's a loose cannon who will say anything in order to further his prospects. He rarely says anything that even remotely resembles the truth as he is all about pandering to the far, far right fringe.
*  Greedy Opposition Party, opposed to everything except tax breaks for precisely those who do not need them, & wars. They like wars....& problems, which they do not care to solve, as their party would become superfluous.
*  If Republicans want a chance of winning in 2016, then don't have Ted Cruz be your nominee.
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GOP Can Stop Being Nice to Ted Cruz
By Jonathan Bernstein, April 28, 2015

Ted Cruz’s presidential campaigning consists mainly of saying outrageous things in hopes he can separate himself as a True Conservative while all around him are Republicans In Name Only. “Today’s Democratic Party has decided there is no room for Christians in today’s Democratic Party,” he claimed again over the weekend, while repeating Jonah Goldberg’s “liberal fascism” slur against Democrats.

Conservatives running against Cruz have a choice, since they can't ignore him forever. They can try to top his applause lines, and in so doing teach conservative voters that conservative “thought” is only demagogy.

Or they can make it clear there’s a difference between real conservative politicians such as Ronald Reagan and Barry Goldwater and provocateurs such as Newt Gingrich. Reagan was as prone to exaggeration and fact-fudging as any politician and was more than willing to use those skills against Democrats (many of whom called him a fascist) [1]. But Reagan didn't say flat out that Jimmy Carter or top people in his administration were deliberately trying to help America's enemies, nor did he challenge a rival's religion.

It isn't as if Cruz is the only one trying to push the Republican Party in a conservative direction. There is practically no difference in positions on policies between Cruz and the bulk of the party. It's all about being outrageous and destructive.  

Cruz won't win the Republican nomination, but he is going to be a prominent candidate, quite possibly deep into the primaries. If his tactics aren’t repudiated, they will be mimicked by other candidates who want to compete with him for the slice of the electorate susceptible to demagogy. 

No one checked Gingrich, so the party got Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin and Louie Gohmert and Cruz. And the result will be that more conservative voters will expect harsher oratory and outright lies from their candidates. 

[1] Reagan has been justly accused of using racial symbolism, but it was George H.W. Bush's campaign that ran the infamous Willie Horton ads.  
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"If we want to do true and lasting good in this world, we are morally obligated to fight faith in the open, and root it out from every nook and cranny in which it hides."

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COMMENTS:
*  If people just kept their beliefs to themselves, this wouldn't be much of a problem.  Unfortunately, the indoctrinated feel a false sense of righteousness that emboldens them to shove their shit down everyone else's throat.
    *  There is no comparison in a country where the majority would vote for an ax-murderer over an atheist. Religionists have this sense of persecution when anybody like Maher criticizes the obvious ridiculousness of the whole concept. It sustains their beliefs in a perverse way when in fact they are the overwhelming majority…for now. But in time, things always change in favor of reality. And any belief not based on that is doomed.
*  What is religion really besides the worship of books/texts (and that goes for newer religions like mormanism and scientology).  Take away a religion's text and where would it be?  OF COURSE each book calls itself the words of god/truth but 1) What do you expect the book to do, call itself a scam? And 2) How can each book be true if they contradict one another?
    *  They cant and are not. Worship of books isn't really what religion is about. Religion is, in a nutshell: accepting myths as true in order to assuage fear and foment optimism in the face of an conscious understanding of mortality. People think they need religion to get through the day, because the world is such a grim place. But we have seen throughout the ages that religion brings out as much bad as good, and turns us from science. Religion holds us back.
*  What I would like to know is which of the major 4 or 5 world religions does God most agree with as his word and law?  Or is it one of the smaller religions?  Is there any way God once most favored a religion that is no longer practiced?  And while I'm on a similar subject: Which of the world's man made and drawn up countries does God favor?  Does the Lord truly recognize man made boundries that are drawn on a map but don't exist in nature?  And if so, again how can we humans determine once and for all which "nation" and which Religion He most favors?  And should we perhaps fight about this to help us decide?
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Bill Maher, American hero: Laughing at religion is exactly what the world needs

Maher's stances get him called a bigot. We should thank him instead, for taking a necessary battle to the faithful

By Jeffrey Tayler, April 26, 2015

Bill Maher, the host of HBO’s “Real Time,” is a shining beacon of the New American Enlightenment, radiant with goodness and hope.

But first, a bit of background.

No matter what anyone says, religion is a deeply, if darkly, hilarious topic, and the sundry tomes of the sacred canon read more like joke books than anything else, albeit sick joke books.  How can we, in the 21st century, having mapped (and even edited) the human genome, engineered pluripotent stem cells, and discovered the Higgs Boson, be expected to revere the dusty old Bible, for example, with its quarreling goatherds and idolatrous tribesmen, and its golden calves and talking snakes, to say nothing of its revenge-porn (against unbelievers) finale?  How can we not laugh aloud when Genesis declares that Almighty God made the world in six days and rested on the seventh, yet had to pilfer a rib from Adam to produce Eve?  What are we to make of Numbers 22:28-30, wherein the Lord intervenes, not to part the sea or still the sun, but to set Balaam’s donkey a-jabbering?  How are we supposed to accept Jesus as an up-to-snuff savior when, in Matthew 21:19 and Mark 11:13-14, he loses his temper and cusses out a fig tree, condemning it to death, for not bearing fruit out of season?  Any second-grade science-class student would have known better, and possibly even exercised more self-control.

“Properly read,” declared the science-fiction author and biochemistry professor Isaac Asimov, “the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived.”  He was right.  The same may be said of the Quran, the holy book of Islam, which the late, dearly missed Christopher Hitchens called “not much more than a rather obvious and ill-arranged set of plagiarisms, helping itself from earlier books and traditions as occasion appeared to require.”

The proper response to religion, riddled as it is with absurdities, is, thus, laughter, either of the belly-slapping, table-pounding kind or the pitying, head-shaking sort.  Laughter, but also outrage.  After all, those who take such absurdities as manifestations of the Godhead have, especially since the Reagan years, hogged the moral high ground and commandeered American politics, polluting public discourse with their reactionary cant and halting progress in reproductive rights, science (think the Bush-era ban on stem cell research) and education (to wit: stubborn attempts to have oxymoronic “Intelligent Design” rubbish taught in schools).  Look abroad, and the panorama of savagery religion must answer for curdles the blood.  No rationalist could contemplate all this entirely unnecessary faith-driven regress and backsliding with anything but anger, tempered with despair.  If we want to do true and lasting good in this world, we are morally obligated to fight faith in the open, and root it out from every nook and cranny in which it hides.

Facing such a task, a desire for comic relief is only natural.  Bill Maher is where anger, outrage and religion meet – in humor.  (This essay will address only his stance on religion.)  There is nothing un-American about his faith-bashing – far from it.  Thomas Jefferson, who denied the divinity of Jesus, wrote that, “Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions” – and what is religion but a jumble of unintelligible propositions about our cosmos and its origins?  Yet Maher has incited no small amount of ire among both the faith-addled masses (fully two-thirds of Americans believe Jesus actually rose from the dead, and almost half expect him to return in the coming decades) and their muddleheaded sympathizers for his brutal broadsides against religion, and Islam in particular.  Bigot! Racist! Islamophobe! they cry, at times bemoaning the “offense” they purport to have suffered from his words, and illustrating how far the cognitive capacities of so many of us have deteriorated since Jerry Falwell and his Moral Majority began meddling in politics.  (This can be no coincidence.)  Their real message to Maher: Shut up!

Name-calling is the last resort of losers — in this case, losers waging an unwinnable war against the spread of godlessness.  And “shut up!” is the last command of which the Greats of the Enlightenment and their heirs would have approved.  The 19th-century British philosopher John Stuart Mill, in On Liberty, put it best, referring to suppressed speech: “If the opinion is right, [the shutter-uppers] are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.”  If Maher is really so wrong, why not let him hoist himself by his own petard?

Last fall on “Real Time,” Ben Affleck and the journalist Rula Jebreal carried out flagrant, widely publicized sorties of unreason against Maher in defense of Islam.  I’ve already dealt with them in Salon, so I won’t repeat myself here.  But recently the CNN host and journalist Fareed Zakaria appeared on the show and, unfortunately, even surprisingly, launched his own pundit-certified version of their attacks.  It was not a pretty sight.

Commenting on the recent conviction of Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, Maher muses that sentencing the young terrorist to death would be “giving him what he wants” – paradise.  “Which gets me back to the idea of Islam is the mother lode of bad ideas.”  With a knowing look, he turns to Zakaria.  “Fareed?”

Zakaria, looking already worked-up, tells Maher that badmouthing Islam isn’t going to “change the religion” and amounts to informing Muslims that their faith “is a terrible thing, so shape it up and change it.”  (Applause breaks out.)  He accuses Maher of pandering to his audience, hoping for “applause lines and joke lines,” but “if you really want to change those people, if you want to change that religion, then you have to push for reform, but also with some sense of respect for . . . the spiritual values that people take.”  He adds that he’s not religious himself, but “I know that world, and if you tell everybody that you suck, that your religion sucks, clean it up, then it’s going to get their backs up against the wall.”

Following this, Zakaria slips off the rails, adducing Indonesia (where female genital mutilation is rife and spreading) as a Muslim land where “women are given respect.”  Then he appears to dispute the (indisputable) 2012 Pew survey showing majority support in the Muslim world for all sorts of divinely mandated illiberal beliefs and violent punishments.  (In fact, one can dispute the data: given that polling could not be conducted in the most hard-line Islamic countries, the results skew toward the moderate.)  He goes on: “All I’m telling is the reality is you’re not changing those [Muslims], you’re not changing an average Egyptian.”

“That’s not my job!” Maher interjects, before being cut off by another panelist.

Later, Zakaria says that Muslims “feel like their religion is being insulted,” and this (incomprehensibly) somehow accounts for Pew’s numbers.

It is indeed not Maher’s job, nor has he ever said or implied that it was, to instruct Muslims on how to go about reforming their faith.  He’s a comedian playing to an American audience, and doing so in Hollywood, not exactly renowned as a citadel of theological erudition.  Zakaria’s entire monologue was, thus, misbegotten and malapropos, the equivalent of pronouncing a eulogy at a wedding.  Why Zakaria chose to treat Maher to it is a mystery.

Be that as it may, Zakaria’s request that Maher “respect” the values of Islam deserves close scrutiny.  It amounts to nothing but a veiled exhortation that he censure himself.  When the religious (or their apologists) start calling for “respect” for their faith, they really aim to curtail free speech and shut the vocally godless up.

It should go without saying that in the constitutionally secular United States, neither Maher nor anyone else should feel obliged to show deference to Islam — or any other faith.  The First Amendment inseparably links the right to free speech with the right to practice the religion of one’s choosing, or not to practice any religion at all.  Since faith has historically caused so much strife and led to so much repression, unfettered discourse about it is precisely what must be allowed, no matter what people feel, if they are to be free.  Put another way, in a truly civil society the right to free expression trumps the desire of religious folks not to have their feelings hurt.  The “offense” argument is, therefore, no argument at all; it is tantamount to a selfish, adolescent insistence on conformity, nothing more.  The “offended” just have to grin and bear it.  We left high school long ago.  It’s time to grow up.

It should be obvious to the observant that demands that Maher respect faith, whether issued from Muslims or the Catholic League’s president, Bill Donohue, all stem from a single, flagrant insecurity – that once people begin mocking religion, begin meeting its gaga assertions and goofy proclamations with guffaws instead of genuflection, with ridicule instead of reverence, then religion stands naked, puny and shriveled before its peering “flock,” the members of which will soon start wondering, “maybe my whole life as a Muslim or Catholic (or whatever) is built on a lie?  Maybe I’m a fool to believe all these crazy scriptures?  Now that I think about it, I really have so many doubts about them.  Maybe I should dump my holy book and read something for grown-ups?  Maybe I should check out Bertrand Russell’s “Skeptical Essays” or Philip Larkin’s poem “Aubade”?  Maybe, after all, as Larkin wrote, religion is just a “vast, moth-eaten musical brocade/Created to pretend we never die?”  Maybe I should just start thinking for myself?  After all, I’m no child!”

Just as the brilliant satirists of Charlie Hebdo skewer the institutions, precepts and potentates of Islam and Christianity, so Maher devastatingly unloads on religion, and with consummate mordancy, even stridency – as is his right.  At this stage in the fight against unreason, against this pernicious attachment we have to wicked old myths in gilt volumes, stridency is necessary, if not sufficient.  Nonbelievers are finally making their voices heard in a society programmed to hum along with the numbing cords of faith.  Make no mistake about it: This stridency, this anger, flows from a deep wellspring of offense — offense at the utterly groundless pretensions the Abrahamic faiths espouse, chief among which are: I am saved and you are not; I have a hotline to the divine and you do not; I know what the Almighty wants and you do not; I walk with God, and you do not.

All this matters because religion is no mere spiritual matter; it exceeds the realm of personal conscience and infects public life.  If the faith-deranged in the West can no longer treat nonbelievers to thumbscrews and the rack, flaming pyres and breast-rippers, they continue to stamp their ugly imprimatur on policy, both domestic and foreign, and in the U.S. do so tax-free!  Maher has never let us forget this.  If he succeeds in “de-converting” just a few of his believing, or even doubting, audience members a week with his show, he’s doing us all immeasurable good, and sowing hope for the future.  At the very least, he’s furthering the gloriously heathen Zeitgeist, and we should be thankful.

If humor is Maher’s weapon, paradoxically, one of his most significant monologues offered few laughs, but basically called the expanding ranks of the faithless to arms.  He recorded it for the group Openly Secular.

“It’s not OK to make decisions based on myths.  Don’t let it look like in America that the most reasonable, not to mention correct, fact-based argument is really the weird one, the one held by a tiny minority of misguided eggheads. No! Secularists are bigger than that, way bigger.  But you gotta show yourself.  You might find that you have more friends than you think.”

He’s talking to you, fellow rationalists.  Please, show yourselves.
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"... The business wing runs the GOP, so the GOP opposes 'religious freedom.' ... that might be enough for the 'gays, guns and God' bloc to stay home in 2016."

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COMMENTS:
*  Those who vote for a hate filled opportunist like Cruz, deserve all the misery that he will pile on them just because he can, and the unbound pleasure it brings him.
*  Cruz is making an explicit play for theocracy. Since the Tea Party movement is -- at its core -- a theocratic ideology, and since the Teabaggers now dominate the Republican Party, it may win him the GOP nomination.  But Cruz is so blatantly dishonest, and so smarmy, that even if he gets the Republican nomination, that nomination would probably amount to no more than the unofficial designation as the "mayor of Crazytown." 
    *  The Republican establishment will unanimously back Ted Cruz if they believe he can increase the religious fundamentalist turnout by 4 million votes. They have zero concern about the kinds of religious laws that might be put in place because they know they will not be subject to them. If Ted Cruz can deliver power every establishment Republican in the country will declare him to be the most brilliant leader since Ronald Reagan.
    *  I think Tailgunner Ted is a dangerous demagogue who needs to be exposed and shamed as often as possible.  This oily con man is playing to the lowest common denominator looking to excite and motivate as many racist, anti-immgrant, anti-Gay yahoos as he can.  His method is to invoke religion in an attempt to cloak his hate in holiness.  BTW, I don't believe for a minute that Cruz has any genuine affection for Jews or for Israel either -- he's just looking to get his big, greasy mitts into Sheldon Adelson's ample pockets. Cruz is rotten to the core and the sooner he disappears from American politics, the better off we will all be!
*  This McCarthyite piece of human garbage knows he can't win but his idiotic followers will contribute to his campaign and he will walk away with a large sum of money.  The one thing all Republican candidates have in common is their relentless greed.
*  He was only in it for the campaign funds and not having to work in Washington anymore anyway.  He is just interviewing for a Fox News show next year. 
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Ted Cruz has no path to win: His play for evangelical vote won’t fly as GOP’s Wall Street and Tea Party wings collide

The Texas senator thinks he can improve on Karl Rove's results among "gays, guns and God" voters. Not in 2016...

By John Stoehr, April 28, 2015

For the 2004 election, Karl Rove resolved to avoid a too-close-to-call repeat of the 2000 contest. He believed as many as 4 million white evangelical voters failed to show up in the race between George W. Bush and Al Gore. Four years later, President Bush was enjoying strong approval ratings as a “war president,” but Rove wasn’t taking any chances. He set out to inflame conservative fear with a campaign strategy built on a theme of “Gays, Guns and God.”

White evangelical voters are a fickle lot. They don’t support just any Republican. They need to be courted. Wined and dined, you might say. John McCain, who never cared for social conservatives or their penchant for governmental control over private behavior, saw 2 million fewer white evangelical votes than President Bush did four years prior. Even more stayed home in 2012.

In launching his 2016 campaign at Liberty University, Ted Cruz was making clear his intention to be the Republican candidate of the “gays, guns and God” bloc. But, according to Bloomberg Politics‘ Dave Weigel and Ben Brody, the Texas senator is aiming higher than Rove did. Cruz, they said, is banking on the theory “that 8 million to 9 million white evangelical voters haven’t been turning out. As many as 35 million of their peers had, but if the exit polls were right, enough evangelicals stayed home to lose states like Ohio and Florida” in 2008 and 2012.

So Cruz cut to the chase in Lynchburg: “Roughly half of born-again Christians aren’t voting. They’re staying home. Imagine, instead, millions of people of faith all across America coming out to the polls and voting our values.”

It’s a gamble, as presidential politics tends to be. But his odds are made longer by two factors. One is obvious. Cruz is hoping to double the “gays, guns and God” bloc — 4 million more than Rove got. Not easy. The other reason is more complicated, and it has nothing to do with immigration.

Immigration, liberal commentators pointed out within hours of Cruz’s announcement, was a serious concern among white evangelicals. Indeed, immigration may be a wedge issue facing the entire GOP presidential field. In Cruz’s case, he has sounded a jeremiad against “amnesty” since he took office in 2010, but most evangelicals favor, on moral grounds, a path toward citizenship. In other words, Cruz’s position on immigration is stark, while the position of the constituency he is courting is nuanced.

It’s interesting, this search for a wedge issue among Republicans vis-à-vis immigration, but it’s doomed. White evangelical voters don’t vote for things; they vote against them. And they vote against things by voting for the man who’s against them. Cruz does indeed oppose immigration reform — he pulls at the nativist’s heart strings — but that’s not going to deter the “gays, guns and God” bloc. What deters such voters is a Republican Party insufficiently committed to annihilating gay marriage.

Here, I think, are the makings of a wedge issue. Gay marriage may be headed to the U.S. Supreme Court for a constitutional resolution, but it has been settled socially and culturally, according to public opinion polls. The difference is that we are now seeing that resolution’s political effects. Recent bids by legislatures in Indiana and Arkansas to permit discrimination in the guise of religious liberty were meet with vehement resistance, not from liberal activists so much as the Republican Party’s largest and most powerful wing: business. To be anti-gay is now to be anti-business. If Ted Cruz is smart — and he is — he won’t give the business establishment reason to worry.

From the point of view of someone who genuinely believes that homosexuals, in seeking the blessings of marriage, are defying the will of God, this is infuriating. If the Republicans don’t defend “American values,” who will? GOP candidates are clever enough to find ways of dodging the issue. They’ll say they are personally against it, but defer to the will of the people. They’ll say it’s a matter for the states to decide. These are unsatisfying answers, because they don’t reflect the paranoid authoritarian tendencies of white evangelicals.

To be sure, Republicans like Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal are defying the business establishment. In an Op-Ed on Thursday’s New York Times, he said: “As the fight for religious liberty moves to Louisiana, I have a clear message for any corporation that contemplates bullying our state: Save your breath.” You might say he’s pandering to white evangelicals, and you’d be right, but that’s not all. Jindal is probably running for vice president. After Indiana and Arkansas, it’s clear the business establishment does not want an anti-gay plank on the GOP’s 2016 platform. But if the nominee can’t openly defend “American values,” at least Jindal can.

Even so, that ticket — in which the presidential nominee appeases the business wing while the vice-presidential nominee appeases white evangelicals — is vulnerable to attack. The Democratic Party’s operatives might consider exploiting it. White evangelical voters are fickle for a reason: they are absolutists. A qualified stand against “the encroaching secular theocracy” is the same thing as surrendering to secularization, which is inconceivable to them. In light of debacles in Indiana and Arkansas, the Democrats can now sow the seeds of doubt: The business wing runs the GOP, so the GOP opposes “religious freedom.” With nowhere else to go, that might be enough for the “gays, guns and God” bloc to stay home in 2016.
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Monday, April 27, 2015

"What wins the primary may be the very thing that sets the nominee up for failure in the general."

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COMMENTS:
*  tell republicans (the ones that don't know) that the process to add an amendment opens up all amendments to editing and/or deleting...including THE SECOND AMENDMENT!...do you REALLY want to start the amendment process??? Please proceed...
*  The onus is NOT upon any Secular (non-religious) person to prove that a god does NOT exist, but the onus IS upon “believers” to prove that their god does exist - since they refuse to worship their god in private (a violation of their god’s commandments), and they infringe upon society and other people’s lives with their outlandish beliefs, rituals, traditions, prejudices, mandates, superstitions, and false morals. No person has the right to try to impose their beliefs upon society or upon any other individual.  Freedom FROM Religion! Is that too much to ask? I think not.
*  The "word of god" isn't the supreme law of the land.  The Constitution is. :) 
*  Earth to conservatives: your Bible will never trump my Constitution. Remember that little thing called the Constitution? Please reference it at all times, not just when it suits you. 
    *   Ironically we really are protecting THEIR rights too - their religious lunacy has only been allowed to reach such heights because they live in a country with true religious freedom, guaranteed by the First (without need of further laws that are simply shameless panderings to bigots). It's just that their right to their beliefs is guaranteed by their neighbor's right to his. The catch-22 is that people tend to think their "religious" convictions trump everything else - or maybe it's really that they're so insecure about their own beliefs, so UNconvicted, that they think if they can only force everybody else to group-think with them, it might be true after all.
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Republicans’ Gay-Marriage Hysteria
Most Americans approve of same-sex weddings, but the GOP and its 2016 pack desperately fight on, even proposing to amend the Constitution to stymie an expected Supreme Court defeat.
By Olivia Nuzzi, April 27, 2015

The social conservatism of presidential elections past will be a hard sell in 2016—but apparently no one has informed the Republican candidates. 

Same-sex marriage, which is already legal in 37 states and the District of Columbia, is supported by the vast majority of Americans: 61 percent, a record high, according to a Washington Post-ABC poll released last week.

And on Tuesday, the Supreme Court, which in 2013 struck down the Defense of Marriage Act, will hear oral arguments in Obergefell v. Hodges, the case that will determine, definitively, whether same-sex marriage is legal in America by answering two questions: Is it constitutional for states to deny same-sex couples the right to marry; and are states constitutionally required to recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states. Legal experts predict the court will come down on the side of marriage-equality proponents.

Marriage equality is so overwhelmingly accepted, in fact, that a popular narrative among social conservatives is that those who remain opposed to gay marriage are being bullied and discriminated against by those who support it. 

But if you had been medically frozen in, say, 2003 and thawed out on Saturday at the Iowa Faith and Freedom Coalition Spring Kick-Off event, you would probably be under the impression that a clear victor of this particular culture war has yet to emerge.

At the Point of Grace Church in Waukee, a Des Moines suburb, candidate after candidate (or likely-candidate) pledged support for a constitutional amendment that would overrule the Supreme Court’s decision and allow states to ban same-sex marriage again. (How this would work is not quite obvious.)

Ted Cruz warned the crowd that liberals are trying to enforce “mandatory gay marriage in all 50 states.” He will be praying on Tuesday as the oral arguments take place, he said, and he asked the crowd to join him.

Bobby Jindal, Marco Rubio, Rick Perry, Mike Huckabee, Scott Walker, and Rick Santorum all made similar pronouncements. (Rand Paul somehow managed to steer clear of the topic altogether.)

But Cruz in particular had reason to succumb to hyperbole. While the senator from Texas has maintained a vehemently anti-marriage equality stance for the duration of his political career—even, as a means of appealing to social conservatives, announcing his presidential bid at Liberty University, an evangelical college that he A. did not attend, and B. is not based in the state he represents—he did, last week, make what was perceived as a misstep. 

Cruz was hosted at the New York City apartment of two openly gay hotel magnates. At the gathering, which Cruz insists (and The Daily Beast’s Jay Michaelson reports) was really just about Israel, Cruz said, “If one of my daughters was gay, I would love them just as much.” (The event didn’t just have fallout for Cruz, but for his hosts, who, after facing boycotts, apologized for daring to speak to someone with different beliefs than them.)

It would seem Cruz’s performance at the Faith and Freedom event was bombastic enough to make a full recovery. Not that he was alone—if there is one thing anti-gay marriage types sure love, it’s theater.

Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas, told the audience that the country is “criminalizing Christianity in this country by telling people who hold to an orthodox worldview of biblical marriage that if you still believe that…you will be guilty of discrimination, which could result in some kind of civil or criminal action against you.”

Presumably Huckabee was referring to the plight of Memories Pizza, the independent Indiana pizza shop that became the subject of controversy—and right-wing acclaim—when its owners said they would not cater a gay wedding. The store closed for eight days, during which time the owners raised close to $1 million. On the ninth day, God reopened Memories Pizza to a packed house. Civil or criminal action against you. 

While most of the country favors the legalization of same-sex marriage, Republicans overwhelmingly do not. According to that Washington Post-ABC poll, over 60 percent of Republicans and more than 70 percent of conservative Republicans remain opposed.

Appearing soft on traditional marriage could prove fatal in the primary, where socially conservative voters hold significant power. Candidates prone to more moderate rhetoric on marriage (if not actually moderate policies)—Chris Christie, Jeb Bush, and Rand Paul—must compete with the likes of Cruz and Huckabee, both of whom usually sound like they are on the verge of waving snakes in the air and speaking in tongues. 

This places Republican candidates in a tough position. What wins the primary may be the very thing that sets the nominee up for failure in the general. 
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