Tag Archives: republican

Republicans Need to Speak Up About Alabama Gay Marriage Ruling

by FredericFisken Posted on February 11, 2015

Mother Jones

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Steve Benen has a question for Republican presidential candidates:

Last week, after Gov. Chris Christie (R-N.J.) and Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) made controversial comments about vaccines, almost immediately political leaders in both parties were asked to explain their own position on vaccinations. Within a day or two, every likely presidential candidate was on record, endorsing an anti-disease position.

It’d be nice if we saw similar scrutiny today about developments in Alabama. There are all kinds of political figures poised to launch presidential campaigns, and last week they told us what they think about vaccines. Maybe this week they can tell us whether they’re comfortable with Alabama counties ignoring the federal courts?

In case you missed it—not likely, but I guess you never know—earlier this week a federal judge struck down Alabama’s law banning same-sex marriage. Alabama’s chief justice then ordered local judges to ignore the federal ruling and refuse to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. A hearing to resolve the issue in federal court is scheduled for Thursday.

But tomorrow’s hearing isn’t really at issue. A federal court has made a ruling, and the Supreme Court has already declined to issue a stay. The court’s decision is now good law. So the question is: should local judges follow the law, or should they continue to oppose same-sex marriage and refuse to issue licenses?

Like Benen, I’d sure like to hear what everyone has to say about this. The tap dancing would be entertaining. Chris Christie would probably pull his usual cowardly schtick and simply refuse to take a position. Jeb Bush might insist that it’s strictly a matter for Alabama and it would be improper for him to take a position. Mike Huckabee would probably counsel civil disobedience. And Scott Walker? Good question. I don’t know what he’d say. But I’d like to find out.

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Republicans Need to Speak Up About Alabama Gay Marriage Ruling

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America’s Largest Health Care Company Tells Supreme Court That Anti-Obamacare Argument Is "Absurd"

by KatheriPohlman Posted on February 10, 2015

Mother Jones

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If getting rid of Obamacare is such a good idea, why isn’t corporate America getting behind King v. Burwell, the Supreme Court case designed to demolish the Affordable Care Act? More than 52 different parties have weighed in with briefs in advance of oral arguments on March 4. Of those, 21 have been filed on behalf of the plaintiffs, who claim millions of Obamacare consumers are receiving illegal health insurance subsidies. The groups filing these briefs include libertarian think tanks, pro-life organizations, Christian legal shops, and some conservative Republican legislators. But not a single business group—not the US Chamber of Commerce, not any of the health industry companies and trade groups that opposed the law when it was being drafted—has presented a brief endorsing this lawsuit.

Meet the Unusual Plaintiffs Behind the Supreme Court Case That Could Destroy Obamacare

These outfits are either backing the Obama administration’s attempt to defeat the suit or sitting out this case. Briefs in the case help explain why: Obamacare is working. There’s no better evidence of this than a brief filed on behalf of the government in King by the Hospital Corporation of America, better known as HCA, the largest health care provider in the country (once run by Obamacare foe Florida Gov. Rick Scott). HCA argues that the legal theory advanced by the plaintiffs is “absurd,” but, more importantly, it presents detailed data drawn from its own operations that demonstrate that the health care law is helping patients and the company itself.

One of Congress’ goals in passing the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was to cut down on the number of uninsured people using expensive emergency rooms for medical care that would be better delivered in an ordinary doctor’s office. HCA notes in its brief that its data from 15 states that use the federal Obamacare exchange show this is exactly what’s happening. The company says that in 2014, uninsured patients visited the ER in its facilities 10 times for every one admission to the hospital—a sign that most of those ER visits weren’t emergencies. People insured through the exchange are visiting the ER three times for every one admission. HCA estimates that “uninsured patients are 300% more likely than Exchange patients to rely on ER care.”

Moreover, the data shows that a person who has obtained insurance through the federal Obamacare exchange is nearly twice as likely to use outpatient care—an indication that they are taking better care of themselves and obtaining care in a much less expensive fashion than those without insurance. “Thus, at the same time that Exchange patients are relying less on the ER, they are receiving more outpatient care than the uninsured, including care (such as chemotherapy) that is typically unavailable in the ER,” HCA says in its brief. “That care is being provided in more appropriate and cost-effective settings.”

DV.load(“//www.documentcloud.org/documents/1658126-hca-amicus-aca.js”, width: 630, height: 500, sidebar: false, container: “#DV-viewer-1658126-hca-amicus-aca” ); HCA Amicus Brief Filed in Supreme Court (PDF)
HCA Amicus Brief Filed in Supreme Court (Text)

HCA’s data also note that women are benefiting immensely from the Obamacare exchanges. The company reports that 53 percent of its uninsured patients are female. But 65 percent of its patients receiving exchange insurance are women. And many of them are using this insurance coverage to obtain cancer treatment.

Seventy-seven percent of the oncology treatments HCA provided to its exchange-based patients went to women. The ACA has, according to HCA, made breast cancer treatment vastly more available to women. Its federal exchange patients are more than three times more likely than uninsured women to get an ultrasound for a breast lump or abnormal mammogram.

HCA has an obvious interest in this case, for the plaintiffs in King are threatening the company’s sizable bottom line, as well as the grand bargain promised by the Obama administration and the law’s drafters in the effort to get it passed. In its brief, HCA says that Obamacare has already cost it more than $600 million in revenues between 2010 and 2014—and that’s just in the 15 states that haven’t created their own exchanges and where HCA has at least one facility. The decreases were part of the deal forged by the drafters of the ACA. The plan was for hospitals to agree to cuts in federal reimbursement for treating the uninsured, but in exchange they would benefit from an influx of newly insured patients.

HCA says that it has only recently begun to see new revenue come in. (Of the roughly 134,000 patients with federal exchange-based insurance who visited an HCA facility last year, 62 percent had never been there before. This suggests that the new insurance program was definitely driving business to HCA’s hospitals and clinics.) If the Supreme Court kills off the Obamacare subsidies, HCA says it will have to absorb about $350 million in initial losses and far more in the future.

In effect, HCA is telling the court that Obamacare is good for both corporate America and individual Americans getting insured through it.

An HCA lawyer didn’t return a call for comment, but that argument—emphasized by HCA in its brief, which mentions the lack of business community support for the King plaintiffs—may be aimed squarely at Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. Lawyers for the King plaintiffs have publicly opined that the conservative justices on the court will relish this opportunity to kill the ACA. But these attorneys may be miscalculating when it comes to Roberts, who provided the fifth critical vote to save Obamacare the last time the ACA faced a major challenge in the Supreme Court.

Roberts is a conservative, but he’s also a former corporate lawyer. During his tenure, he has consistently sided with corporate America and the Chamber of Commerce in all sorts of cases. An ideologically driven case like King might provide good fare for the court’s conservatives—but Roberts may draw the line at ruling in these plaintiffs’ favor when they are threatening the profits of big business. At least, that’s what one of the nation’s biggest health care companies is now hoping for.

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America’s Largest Health Care Company Tells Supreme Court That Anti-Obamacare Argument Is "Absurd"

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Arming Ukraine? Sorry, but Europe Simply Isn’t On Board

by EmilWUNhxbb Posted on February 9, 2015

Mother Jones

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Republican hawks have insisted from the start that President Obama isn’t being tough enough in his approach to the Ukraine crisis. And perhaps he isn’t. It’s a point that’s arguable by reasonable people.

But what’s not arguable is that regardless of what Obama would do if he had a truly free hand, he pretty clearly doesn’t have a free hand. Ukraine is, first and foremost, a European problem, and the leadership of Europe just isn’t on board with a more aggressive strategy against Russia:

Through nine months of struggle to halt Russia’s military thrust into Ukraine, Western unity has been a foremost priority for American and European leaders. Now, with the crisis entering a dangerous new phase, that solid front is in danger of collapsing.

….A growing number of U.S. officials, and some in Europe, particularly in countries bordering Russia, believe that the only way to dissuade Russian President Vladimir Putin from continuing what they see as an invasion of Ukraine is to raise the military cost to Moscow. That means giving the Ukrainians better weapons, they say.

….But the Germans, French and many other European leaders are equally convinced that arming the Kiev government will not halt Putin, but will increase carnage in a war that already has killed about 5,300 people and risk an all-out East-West confrontation.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, speaking at a security conference in Munich, Germany, made clear that not only would Germany not contribute arms, but it also opposed allies doing so. “Military means will lead to more victims,” she said, arguing that the West should apply a patient containment approach toward Russia.

I’m skeptical about providing arms to the Ukrainians, but I remain open to arguments that it’s the only way to stop Vladimir Putin’s aggression. However, there’s just no way that this will work without European cooperation. End of story. The US can’t pretend that acting on its own has even the slightest chance of success.

So the hawks need to stop obsessing over Obama’s alleged weakness, and instead look overseas. The truth is that Obama has been one of the most aggressive of the Western leaders in the fight against Putin, while it’s Merkel and her colleagues who have insisted on a less confrontational approach. If John McCain and his buddies want to arm the Ukrainians, they need to figure out a way to persuade Merkel that it’s the right thing to do. That might be less congenial for their tea party buddies, whose interest in Ukraine is pretty much zero aside from its role as a way of painting Obama as a weak-kneed appeaser, but it’s the only way they might get what they say they want.

So that’s their choice. Continue bashing Obama, which feels good but will get them nowhere. Or start pressing our European allies, which is boring and difficult and pays no political dividends—but which might actually get them closer to what they claim is their goal. Which is it going to be, boys?

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Arming Ukraine? Sorry, but Europe Simply Isn’t On Board

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John Boehner’s Big Triumph Is Now Just a Big Shit Sandwich

by AbelSmallwood Posted on February 7, 2015

Mother Jones

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I could use a good laugh, and this afternoon I got one. For starters, as the White House hinted yesterday, Joe Biden won’t be attending Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech next month before a joint session of Congress. Apparently he’ll be out of the country that day:

The vice president’s office on Friday confirmed the plans to skip the March 3 speech. “We are not ready to announce details of his trip yet, and normally our office wouldn’t announce this early, but the planning process has been underway for a while,” a spokesperson for the office said.

So where exactly will Joe be? Well, um, somewhere. The planning process “has been underway for a while,” the White House insists with a straight face, but they don’t know yet what country they’ve been planning to send him to. But they’ll think of one. Maybe Latvia or something.

This is all part of the mounting fury from Democrats in Congress and the White House over the speech, and it’s become increasingly clear that the whole thing is a major blunder for Netanyahu. But who to blame? The invitation came from Speaker of the House John Boehner, so why not blame him? Today Netanyahu did exactly that, throwing him under the proverbial bus with barely a passing glance:

A senior Israeli official suggested on Friday that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had been misled into thinking an invitation to address the U.S. Congress on Iran next month was fully supported by the Democrats….“It appears that the speaker of Congress made a move, in which we trusted, but which it ultimately became clear was a one sided move and not a move by both sides,” Deputy Israeli Foreign Minister Tzachi Hanegbi told 102 FM Tel Aviv Radio on Friday.

Poor John Boehner. You almost feel sorry for the guy sometimes. President Obama has been running rings around him for months now, infuriating the Republican caucus and causing Boehner endless headaches over Cuba, immigration, net neutrality, Homeland Security shutdowns, and dozens of other subjects. No matter how hard he tries, Boehner just hasn’t been able to get ahead of any of this. Instead he’s been forced over and over to respond to Obama’s agenda while desperately trying to keep the peace among the tea partiers who control his future.

Then, finally, it looked like he’d pulled something off. He announced the Netanyahu speech two weeks ago, catching the president off guard and garnering huzzahs from every corner of the the conservative movement. Finally, a victory!

But now it’s all turned to ashes. His big spectacle is in tatters, with Democrats in open revolt and pundits of all stripes agreeing that he overreached by going around the White House on a foreign policy matter. It’s been nothing but a headache, and even Netanyahu has joined the lynch mob now. What’s worse, there’s nothing he can do. The speech is still four weeks away, and Boehner has no choice but to let the whole dreary debacle play out. He already knows his show is a flop, but the curtain has to come up anyway and Boehner has to keep a stiff upper lip the whole time.

Poor guy.

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John Boehner’s Big Triumph Is Now Just a Big Shit Sandwich

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Score one for ALEC: West Virginia is first state to repeal a renewable energy standard

by LynnePilkington Posted on February 5, 2015

Score one for ALEC: West Virginia is first state to repeal a renewable energy standard

By on 5 Feb 2015commentsShare

This week, West Virginia Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin (D) signed a bill repealing the state’s renewable energy standard, which would have required major utilities to get at least 25 percent of their energy from renewable sources by 2025.

It’s a clear win for right-wing activists, led by the corporate-backed American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). They’ve been campaigning for years to roll back state-level renewable standards, mostly without success. But last year, they managed to freeze Ohio’s renewable standard at a less-than-ambitious level. And now they’ve had their first total success — a complete rollback of a renewable portfolio standard.

Ironically, it was under Tomblin’s tenure as Senate president that the standard was first passed. The West Virginia Coal Association, an industry trade group, also supported the legislation back in 2009 — and even helped write it — but has since turned against it, citing increased regulation of the coal industry. “We understand economic drivers and factors change over time, and the Act as it was passed in 2009 is no longer beneficial for our state,” Tomblin said. (Politics also change: West Virginia, once a blue state, is becoming increasingly Republican, and environmental regulation has, since 2009, become even more anathema to the GOP. In the state legislature, Republicans have put bolstering the state’s coal industry’s high on their 2015 agenda.)

Clean energy is also under attack in Colorado, where this week the Republican-controlled state Senate advanced a bill to weaken that state’s renewable energy standard, though its chances in the Democratic-controlled House are not so hot. Legislators in Kansas, Ohio, and Oklahoma are considering cutting back their renewable energy standards too.

Meanwhile, ALEC et al. are trying to roll back state net-metering policies, which make it more affordable for homeowners to have rooftop solar arrays. A bill being considered in Indiana “would slash net metering credits and add fixed charges to the bills of solar customers,” Greentech Media reports. But in this case, solar fans have some right-wing backers of their own, led by Tea Party activist and solar advocate Debbie Dooley: “Indiana Republicans should be championing free-market choice — not government-created utility monopolies,” says Dooley. “This is a deliberate attempt to kill solar and protect monopolies from competition, and this is going on in other states.”

This year, you can expect state-level clean energy battles to just keep getting more heated.

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Score one for ALEC: West Virginia is first state to repeal a renewable energy standard

Posted in Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, green energy, LAI, LG, Mop, ONA, solar, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Score one for ALEC: West Virginia is first state to repeal a renewable energy standard

How In the World Did This Man Raise $12 Million to Draft Ben Carson?

by Amilianp2t Posted on February 2, 2015

Mother Jones

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Dr. Ben Carson, the neurosurgeon, author, tea party hero, and Stuck On You star, is contemplating a presidential bid in 2016. He’s being cheered on by conservative activists—and by the National Draft Ben Carson for President Committee, a super PAC founded in 2013 to urge Carson to run. The PAC sends out emails touting Carson, gathers signatures for petitions aimed at coaxing him into the race, and it raises money from conservatives enthralled with the prospect of a Carson presidency. A lot of money. According to Federal Election Commission filings, the Draft Carson PAC has raised an impressive $12.2 million since its founding—slightly more than Ready for Hillary, the pro-Hillary Clinton super PAC. Draft Carson has, in fact, done very little besides fundraise.

The guy responsible for collecting and managing Draft Carson’s huge haul is Vernon Robinson, the PAC’s political director and a notorious, perennial candidate with a history of rabid anti-immigrant rhetoric. An African-American, ex-Air Force officer from North Carolina, Robinson has repeatedly run unsuccessful campaigns for Congress. He calls himself “the black Jesse Helms”—a comparison the director of the late senator’s foundation declared “sad.” His congressional campaign ads—one of which characterized undocumented immigrants as flag-burners and sex offenders—are so out-there that political science professors use them to illustrate mudslinging at its dirtiest. In 2006, a Republican running against Robinson in a House primary said that he “scares me.” But win or (almost always) lose, the common thread in his political career has been remarkable fundraising success, with a big chunk of the proceeds Robinson has raised flowing to a small camp of conservative fundraisers, and sometimes, himself.

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How In the World Did This Man Raise $12 Million to Draft Ben Carson?

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David Koch’s Americans for Prosperity is Fighting a Tax Perk He Once Exploited

by FlorencDutton Posted on January 30, 2015

Mother Jones

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Americans for Prosperity, the free-market advocacy group established by the Koch brothers, mounts battles around the country on issues big and small via its nationwide network of chapters. Right now in North Carolina, AFP is vigorously opposing the revival of a state tax credit for renovating historic properties. The credit, which can be claimed by a company or a person, expired at the end of 2014, and the state’s Republican governor, Pat McCrory, is pushing to renew it. AFP is working hard to thwart him. But the group’s lobbying on this issue might be a tad awkward for one of its main benefactors: David Koch, who cofounded AFP organization and currently serves as chairman of the AFP Foundation. He used a near-identical tax credit when he renovated his historic Palm Beach villa—and saved money at local taxpayers’ expense.

Donald Bryson, the director of AFP-North Carolina, recently told the Fayetteville Observer that the restoration perk was “another one of those tax credits that complicates the tax code.” Bryson went on, “We’re all for historic preservation, we have no problems with that. But if people are going to do it, they need to do it within the private market. I don’t know why that requires a state tax credit.”

What Bryson probably didn’t know was that David Koch relied on the same type of tax credit when he spruced up Villa el Sarmiento, his 25,000-square-foot historic oceanfront mansion on Palm Beach’s swanky South Ocean Boulevard, a decade ago.

In January 2002, the Palm Beach Post reported that Koch’s waterfront mansion received one of six tax breaks approved by the town council under Florida’s historic restoration tax credit. At the time, Koch was planning a $12 million remodeling of Villa el Sarmiento, a Mediterranean revival-style structure built in 1923 and designed by famed architect Addison Mizner. Koch’s tax break was expected to cost the city $48,000.

Asked about David Koch’s 2002 tax deal and his group’s opposition to North Carolina’s housing restoration credit, Bryson said the current debate is “a different matter altogether.” He added: “The historic tax credit in North Carolina was scheduled to sunset under an agreement made by the Governor and General Assembly in 2013. AFP has consistently advocated for simplifying the tax code, including allowing this credit to sunset. However, as long as these tax credits exist, we don’t begrudge taxpayers making use of them.”

A spokesman for Americans for Prosperity’s national office pointed me to Bryson. A spokeswoman for Koch Industries, where David Koch is an executive vice president and board member, did not respond to a request for comment.

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David Koch’s Americans for Prosperity is Fighting a Tax Perk He Once Exploited

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Grover Norquist Turns on His Anti-Tax Bae Sam Brownback

by ColemanCroteau Posted on January 30, 2015

Mother Jones

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Grover Norquist—the president of Americans for Tax Reform and the man who for decades has served as conservatives’ leading anti-tax zealot —had seemingly found his ideal politician in Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback. After Brownback was elected governor in 2010, he went on a mission to eradicate his state’s income tax—slashing rates across the board in two rounds of cuts and setting rates to drop further over the coming years—eventually to zero if everything clicked in place.

Read more about how Sam Brownback created a Kochtopia in Kansas.

Norquist loved it. He visited Topeka in 2013 to show his support during Brownback’s State of the State address. In an interview with National Review a year ago, Norquist touted Brownback as a strong contender for the 2016 presidential nomination.

But political allies often prove fickle. Brownback’s tax cuts have wrecked the state budget and forced the governor to propose raising taxes in order to avert fiscal calamity. And Norquist is now rallying conservatives in the Kansas Legislature to oppose the Republican governor’s plan.

Earlier this week, Norquist penned a letter to state lawmakers encouraging them to thwart Brownback’s proposal to raise taxes on liquor sales and tobacco products. Although Norquist hewed to his normal claims that taxes end up hurting the state’s bottom line, he also adopted a tactic that you’d normally hear from liberals: Don’t raise these specific taxes because they overburden the poor. “The fact is, so called ‘sin taxes’ like the cigarette tax and alcohol tax disproportionately impact consumers who can afford the tax increase least. A pack-a-day smoker would end up paying an extra $547.50 in taxes a year,” Norquist wrote in the letter, according to the Topeka Capital-Journal. “Kansans living along the Missouri border may opt to avoid the tax altogether by purchasing their tobacco products in Missouri—where the tax would be lower.”

A spokesperson for Americans for Tax Reform didn’t respond to several interview requests.

It’s a bit rich for Norquist to show concern for plight of low-income Kansans now. Spending on social services plummeted during Brownback’s first term in office. And the tax cuts that Norquist praised predominantly favored the state’s wealthy citizens—particularly thanks to a decision to zero-out taxes for nearly 200,000 privately held companies. An analysis by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities last year noted that the total effects of all the tax code changes in Kansas in fact raised taxes by 1.3 percent on the bottom 20 percent of the state’s earners.

And although slashing state income taxes may have earned Brownback praise from the likes of Norquist and Reagan taxmaster Arthur Laffer, they left the governor in a tricky spot. There’s a $710 million hole in the state’s budget through June 2016. Brownback isn’t relying on tobacco and liquor taxes alone to close that gap. He has also proposed slowing down planned decreases in the state’s income-tax rates. But Brownback still vowed to stick with his original endgame. “We will continue our march to zero income taxes,” he said in this year’s State of the State address. Even when the evidence might suggest otherwise, conservatives like Brownback must still bow before the infallible altar of trickle-down economics.

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Grover Norquist Turns on His Anti-Tax Bae Sam Brownback

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Future President Ben Carson Wrote 6 Books. We Read Them So You Don’t Have To.

by RosalinPigott Posted on January 27, 2015

Mother Jones

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Former neurosurgeon Ben Carson rallied Republicans at the Iowa Freedom Summit on Saturday, stirring up speculation once more that the conservative activist will seek his party’s presidential nomination next year. Carson has never run for office and only recently registered as a Republican, but as the author of six books over more than two decades, he does have a considerable paper trail—and it’s starting to get him into trouble.

In his 1992 book Think Big, for instance, Carson proposed a national catastrophic health care plan modeled on federal disaster insurance, which would be funded by a 10-percent tax on insurance companies. He also proposed re-thinking best practices concerning end-of-life care, advocating for a “national discussion that would help us all rethink our culture’s mind-set about death, dying, and terminal illness”—similar to the provisions of the Affordable Care Act that conservatives now dismiss as “death panels.” (A Carson spokesman told BuzzFeed last week that the health care proposal is “as relevant to his view today as our current military action in Afghanistan is compared to our military strategy in Afghanistan two decades ago.”)

Although filled with inspiring stories of medical miracles and his own rough-and-tumble roots, Carson’s books also reflect the views of a social-values warrior whose anti-gay comments recently caused him to withdraw as a commencement speaker at Johns Hopkins University, his longtime employer. A sampling:

On intelligent design (from Take the Risk):

From what I know (and all we don’t know) about biology, I find it as hard to accept the claims of evolution as it is to think that a hurricane blowing through a junkyard could somehow assemble a fully equipped and flight-ready 747. You could blow a billion hurricanes through a trillion junkyards over infinite periods of time, and I don’t think you’d get one aerodynamic wing, let alone an entire jumbo jet complete with complex connections for a jet-propulsion system, a radar system, a fuel-injection system, an exhaust system, a ventilation system, control systems, electronic systems, plus backup systems for all of those, and so much more. There’s simply not enough time in eternity for that to happen. Which is why not one of us has ever doubted that a 747, by its very existence, gives convincing evidence of someone’s intelligent design.

On the failing of the fossil record (from Take the Risk):

For me, the plausibility of evolution is further strained by Darwin’s assertion that within fifty to one hundred years of his time, scientists would become geologically sophisticated enough to find the fossil remains of the entire evolutionary tree in an unequivocal step-by-step progression of life from amoeba to man—including all of the intermediate species.

Of course that was 150 years ago, and there is still no such evidence. It’s just not there. But when you bring that up to the proponents of Darwinism, the best explanation they can come up with is “Well…uh…it’s lost!” Here again I find it requires too much faith for me to believe that explanation given all the fossils we have found without any fossilized evidence of the direct, step-by-step evolutionary progression from simple to complex organisms or from one species to another species. Shrugging and saying, “Well, it was mysteriously lost, and we’ll probably never find it,” doesn’t seem like a particularly satisfying, objective, or scientific response. But what’s even harder for me to swallow is how so many people who can’t explain it are still willing to claim that evolution is not theory but fact, at the same time insisting anyone who wants to consider or discuss creationism as a possibility cannot be a real scientist.

On abortion (from America the Beautiful):

This situation perhaps crystallizes one of the major moral dilemmas we face in American society today: Does a woman have the right to terminate another human life because it is encased in her body? Does ownership convey absolute power of life and death over the owned subject? If it does, then NFL quarterback Michael Vick was unfairly imprisoned for torturing and killing dogs in Atlanta.

On gay parents (from The Big Picture):

Recently a homosexual couple brought a child in to be examined on one of our neurosurgical clinical days. During lunch, after the couple had left, one of my fellow staff members commented favorably on the couple’s obvious love and commitment to the child. He said to me, “I know you don’t approve of homosexual relationships and wouldn’t consider their home a healthy atmosphere in which to raise a child. But I was impressed by that couple. I think their sexual orientation is their business. Think what you want, but it’s just your opinion.”

My response wasn’t nearly that politically correct. “Excuse me, but I beg to differ,” I said. “How I feel and what I think isn’t just my opinion. God in his Word says very clearly that he considers homosexual acts to be an ‘abomination.'”

On how gay marriage brought down the Roman Empire (from America the Beautiful):

I believe God loves homosexuals as much as he loves everyone, but if we can redefine marriage as between two men or two women or any other way based on social pressures as opposed to between a man and a woman, we will continue to redefine it in any way that we wish, which is a slippery slope with a disastrous ending, as witnessed in the dramatic fall of the Roman Empire.

On WashingtonRedacted owner Dan Snyder (from One Nation):

On the other hand, many of the greatest achievers in our society never finished college. That includes Bill Gates Jr., Steve Jobs, and Dan Snyder, who is the owner of the Washington NFL franchise.

(Carson elsewhere defended Snyder’s refusal to change his team’s name and called the oft-criticized owner “far from the demonic characterization seen in the gullible press that allows itself to be manipulated by those wishing to bring about fundamental change in America.”)

On Independence Day (from Think Big):

I do not get to see many movies, but when I watched the video of Independence Day with my sons, I was struck by the portrayal of the resistance efforts mounted against the alien invaders from outer space. The frail and arbitrary distinctions so often made between various segments of society, even between different countries and ideologies, instantly melted away as the people of the entire world focused not on their differences but upon a common threat and the common goal uniting them—the protection of the planet from alien invaders.

Unlike some of his fellow candidates, though, Carson has made little effort to sugar-coat his most polarizing views. Even before he revealed any political ambitions, he’d moonlighted as a traveling Creationism advocate, giving speeches on the subject and even debating skeptic Richard Dawkins on evolution in 2006:

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Future President Ben Carson Wrote 6 Books. We Read Them So You Don’t Have To.

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Netanyahu to American Jews: Get Lost

by TeddyLowrance Posted on January 27, 2015

Mother Jones

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It was not so shocking that House Speaker John Boehner would seek to undermine President Barack Obama and his attempt to negotiate a nuclear deal with Iran by inviting Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu to deliver an address to Congress, in which Netanyahu will presumably dump on Obama’s efforts. Nor was it so shocking that Netanyahu, who apparently would rather see another war in the Middle East than a deal that allows Iran to maintain a civilian-oriented and internationally monitored nuclear program, agreed to mount this stunt two weeks before the Israeli elections—a close contest in which the hawkish PM is fighting for his political life. Certainly, Netanyahu realized that this audacious move would strain his already-ragged ties with the Obama administration and tick off the president, who will be in office for the next two years and quite able to inconvenience Netanyahu should he hold on to power. (Even Fox News talking heads acknowledged that Boehner’s invitation and Netanyahu’s acceptance were low blows.) But what was surprising was how willing Netanyahu was to send a harsh message to American Jews: Drop dead.

For the past six years, one big question has largely defined US politics: Are you for or against Obama? The ongoing narrative in Washington has been a simple one: The president has tried to enact a progressive agenda—health care, gun safety, a minimum-wage hike, climate change action, immigration reform, Wall Street reform, gender pay equity, expanded education programs, diminishing tax cuts for the rich—and Boehner and the Republicans have consistently plotted to thwart him. The GOP has used the filibuster in the Senate to block Obama initiatives and routine presidential appointments. The House Republicans have resorted to extraordinary means—shutting down the government, holding the debt ceiling hostage, ginning up controversies (Benghazi!)—to block the president. All this has happened as conservative allies of the Republican Party have challenged Obama’s legitimacy as president (the birth certificate) and peddled vicious conspiracy theories (he’s a Muslim socialist who will destroy the nation). Throughout the Obama Wars, one demographic group that has steadfastly stood with the president is American Jews.

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Netanyahu to American Jews: Get Lost

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