A Sex Ed 101 curriculum for conservatives
Recent national kerfuffles over abortion and contraception access bring up many important questions: Should employers retain control over your wages and benefits after they sign them over to you? Is contraception, a service used by 99 percent of American women, really so controversial? How much state regulation should there be over women’s most private decisions? But amidst all those questions is one overarching one: Do conservatives need a crash course in sex ed?
Usually, when we think of the sex education debate, we think of junior high and high school kids putting condoms on bananas. But recent events indicate that this country needs remedial sex education for adults, specifically social conservatives who wish to hold forth on reproductive rights without seeming to know the basics regarding who has sex and how it works in 2012. With that in mind, I designed a quick curriculum for these surprisingly necessary courses.
Intercourse 101: It Takes Two to Tango. After voting for a mandatory ultrasound bill that serves no other purpose than to shame abortion patients for their sexuality, Virginia delegate David Albo complained in the legislature that he’s not getting the sex he feels entitled to from his wife. CNSNews columnist Craig Bannister shamed women on the pill for being “sex-crazed co-eds” who exhibit too much “sexual zeal” — before ending his piece by wistfully wishing he could have sex with all the sexually active women he just insulted. Rush Limbaugh, who is on his fourth marriage and is an admitted Viagra user, called Sandra Fluke, a Georgetown University law student who testified before Congress about her use of contraception, a “slut” and a “prostitute.”
In this first section of the remedial sex education course, we will discuss this sexual double standard: When having sex, men are behaving well and women behaving badly. The midterm will be an essay on the following prompt: “If women are supposed to say no to sex, whom do you propose straight men sleep with?”
Contraception 101: History as Prologue. Many conservatives appear to believe that prior to the Obama administration requiring employers to fully cover contraceptive care as part of their health plans, contraception wasn’t considered a medical service, but something more like a party item you pick up with your beer and cigarettes. Tina Korbe of Hot Air argued that supporters of the new regulation “labor under the illusion that contraception is a medical necessity.” Limbaugh argued that health insurance covering contraception means women are “paid to have sex.” The reaction on the right suggests that this is the first time in history someone has suggested that contraception care be included in general health benefits.
During this portion of the class, we will look at the history of medicalized birth control. Students will learn (in conjunction with another mandatory class, The Pill 101) that the birth control pill has always been controlled by doctors and pharmacies, and that insurance companies treat it as medical care by offering the drug with a co-pay. Special attention will be paid to the 28 states that already require contraception coverage, the existing Medicaid coverage of contraception, and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission decision that found that contraception coverage is a normal part of women’s healthcare that should be covered by healthcare plans.
The GOP’s hunt for Latino voters
Jon Huntsman suspended more than just his campaign this week. He also put an end to any hope the GOP had of making strides in the Latino community.
And despite the stereotypes, because of the Obama administration’s policies, there really was hope. The administration has increased the number of deportations to nearly 400,000 people a year since taking office, according to ABC News. Likewise, in Secretary Janet Napolitano’s annual report to Congress, she describes the Department of Homeland Security’s efforts to be at “record highs.” President Obama’s first term has featured twice the number of deportations as George W. Bush’s by instituting a systematic approach to immigration enforcement not seen since the infamous days of “Operation Wetback,” a program in which President Dwight Eisenhower deported over a million Mexican nationals, among them American citizens.
One might think this would be an opportunity for the GOP to make inroads with the Latino community, but the Republicans seem confident they can sit idly by as Latinos simply run into their arms. The GOP claims economics are Latinos’ most important issue, but with over half of Hispanics within a generation of the immigrant experience, migration is also a profound issue (and one with profound economic consequences). And on that issue, most of the GOP candidates have done little to distinguish themselves.
But Huntsman was different. He was perhaps the only candidate who managed not to offend Latinos throughout the primary. Huntsman rightfully saw the wall on our southern border as repugnant to American values. By arguing for tough border control, yet also supporting in-state tuition for the children of unauthorized residents, Huntsman was able to conceptually distinguish the dangers of an unmanaged border from the benefits of those who came in search of a better life.
Huntsman also comes from the same Utah Mormon milieu that produced the Utah Compact, a set of principles endorsed by civic and business leaders, and the LDS Church, that asks politicians to “adopt reasonable policies addressing immigrants in Utah.” The Utah Compact also opposes a policy that unnecessarily separates families, a significant acknowledgement of the harm our immigration laws do to Hispanic families.
Perhaps most important, Huntsman differentiated himself from other Republicans as the only cosmopolitan who was comfortable with diversity. A former ambassador to China, he has direct experience with diversity in languages and customs. As a person fluent in Chinese, he saw diversity as an advantage rather than a threat. Latinos are familiar with the benefits of bilingualism, and as we continue to engage and compete in a global environment, it will become increasingly important to the success of our economy.
But now the remaining candidates only inflame the underlying hostility against minorities in the GOP’s base. To make strides with Latinos, they’ll have to counteract that and support a more humane approach to immigration. And this is not just about making friends — it’s about winning elections.
Reasons for unemployment: (a) growth has been stalled because the government is propping up bad debt and failed economic groups – the sooner they’re allowed to be liquidated, growth can resume (b) taxpayer resources are being diverted to wasteful wars, military bureaucracies abroad, propping up failed banks, wasteful Federal spending, (c) the government is blinding itself to the real economic problems just because it can get the Fed to print more greenbacks. The US direly needs a President like Ron Paul who is brave enough to take on the corrupt failed banking systems and the selfish, manipulative military industry complex.
Santorum and the Tea Party crackup
By Michelle Goldberg
The views expressed are her own.
It’s easy to read too much into Rick Santorum’s stunning finish in the Iowa caucuses after months of dismal poll numbers. In some ways he won by default, emerging as the last conservative candidate standing because no one took him seriously enough to attack him. Nevertheless, by virtually tying with Mitt Romney, he has become the leading conservative alternative in the race. And that should put to rest the exhausted conventional wisdom that the American right is primarily motivated by a desire for small government. Because Rick Santorum sure isn’t.
Since the Tea Party burst onto the political scene in 2009, we have heard over and over again that the revolt against president Obama was driven by anxiety about government expansion. Because conservatives told pollsters they were most concerned about fiscal issues, conventional wisdom hyped the belief that the culture wars were passé. In Politico, for example, Ben Smith wrote that the Tea Party had “banished the social issues that are the focus of many evangelical Christians to the background.”
Certainly, Tea Party voters wanted to shrink government spending and lower taxes. That’s perfectly in line with the ideology of the religious right, which holds that families and churches should provide the social safety net. According to Ralph Reed, the Christian Coalition’s main legislative goals in 1994 and 1995 were tax cuts for middle-class families with children and balancing the budget. And fifteen years later, polls showed that the Tea Party was largely the old Christian right in a new guise. A September Public Religion Research Institute survey found that three quarters of Tea Partiers describe themselves as Christian conservatives, while only a quarter identify as libertarians. The Tea Party-inspired House prioritized anti-abortion legislation even when it meant raising taxes, championing a bill that would have ended current tax breaks for individuals and small businesses buying health care plans that cover abortion, as the vast majority of plans now do. Nevertheless, the notion of the Tea Party as a libertarian force endured.
Santorum’s emergence as the anti-Romney, though, should make it impossible to ignore the fact that many on the right, including large numbers of self-described Tea Partiers, want more government control of our lives, not less. According to a CNN entrance poll, Santorum won a plurality of Iowa Tea Party sympathizers—64 percent of voters overall—with 29 percent, followed by 19 percent each for Romney and Ron Paul. He’s getting at least some Tea Party support in New Hampshire, winning the endorsement of Jerry DeLemus, chairman of the Granite State Patriots Liberty PAC. This despite the fact that Santorum has often disparaged limited government. In 2005, for example, he told NPR that conservatives who have taken a “Goldwaterish libertarian point of view when it comes to the interaction of government in people’s lives” have done so “to the determent of the country.”
“What’s left is weaker than the sum of its parts”
Yes, but less shaky ground and a healthier foundation to restart. Always a trade-off i’m afraid…
Michele Bachmann’s glass house
By Amanda Marcotte The views expressed are her own.
Of all the candidates who rose and fell during the prolonged Republican primary campaign going into Iowa, Michele Bachmann took the wildest ride. Bachmann won the 2011 Ames Straw Poll in August, taking 28 percent of the vote, mainly due to conservative evangelicals who supported her strong anti-abortion views and her ease in speaking Christianese. But a mere five months later, after a disastrous showing in Iowa where she only took 5 percent of the vote, Bachmann is dropping out of the race.
The campaign has blamed sexism for her precipitous fall. It’s an accusation that hasn’t done her any favors with defensive voters, but this may be one of those rare occasions when the Bachmann camp has correctly assessed reality. As a conservative female politician with an evangelical base, Bachmann was forced to hang her ambitions on voters who believe in traditional gender roles. It’s a strategy—a woman who rejects feminism who also wants to use feminism to gain serious power–that causes cognitive dissonance for voters, like fruit-flavored beer. The novelty will generate some sales, but at the end of the day, people will return to the half-dozen other beer-flavored beers available.
The sustained culture war that has created modern conservatism has many aspects to it: homophobia, racialized resentments, hostility to immigration. But anger about feminist gains surely rises to the top, with a special anger reserved for reproductive rights that free women from the kitchen and allow them to compete with men in the workplace. Bachmann herself gloated frequently about her love of traditional male power, noting publicly that she submits to her husband and strictly forbids her daughters to take the lead with boys, forcing them to adopt a strictly passive role in dating. Unsurprisingly, her belief that women should not control when they give birth has been a major platform for her, one she routinely describes as her number one priority.
That these opinions created an initial bout of enthusiasm for Bachmann is unsurprising. For decades now, conservatives have loved an anti-feminist woman, believing, correctly, that having women express hostility to women’s rights dilutes the feminist ideology. Putting anti-feminist views in a woman’s mouth allows conservatives to argue that many women are perfectly happy allowing men to take the lead. Additionally, anti-feminist women can be used to shame feminists, by asking them why they can’t just accept the status quo like conservative women do. Many pundits and writers have made a career being the woman who opposes women’s empowerment: Phyllis Schlafly, Ann Coulter, Beverly LaHaye, among others. As long as these women’s actions are seen as fundamentally supportive of male dominance, they’re applauded for speaking out, and make money doing it.
The problems arise when anti-feminist women start to seek real power for themselves. Bachmann is far from the first female candidate whose anti-feminist views gained her a flurry of enthusiasm but whose conservative base reneged at the last minute. That base is unable to grant serious power to a woman, no matter how much she promised to use it to disempower other women. Michele Bachmann is simply the latest conservative woman who has found that she’s trapped not under a glass ceiling, but in a glass house: stuck in the role of champion for male control, unable to get a piece of the pie for themselves.
It is no big secret those like Bachmann and the amazing ‘Frothy Mix’ would have us in some 14th century theocracy waging Holy War against the Muslims in Jerusalem while praying and waiting patiently for Armageddon to come given half a chance.
For those of you getting your conservative panties in a twist, if you read, she is leveling the beam squarely at Evangelical fundies at the extremes. Be they a minority or not, they are still nauseatingly vocal. Can’t we just carve out an area in the middle of Nebraska and ship them all there so they can have their fundie Utopia and left the rest of us the Hell alone?
Gingrich’s anger management
By Michael A. Cohen
The views expressed are his own.
WINDHAM, N.H.—Newt Gingrich is flying high these days – on top of national Republican polls and currently leading in three of the first four Republican primary and caucus states. He hasn’t been this relevant in American politics since Bill Clinton sat in the White House and Titanic was the biggest movie in America. But while the new Newt is clearly enjoying himself, seeing him on the campaign trail brings back familiar glimpses of the old Newt, defined far more by his acid tongue than he was by his policy acumen.
On Monday night, Gingrich took his frontrunner status on the road to New Hampshire, where he spoke at a packed town hall in Windham to crowds that were as ecstatic for him as they would have been for Leo and Kate. More than a thousand Republican partisans were there to greet him. What they got was the sort of grandiose ideas and red-meat political attacks against liberals – and in particular President Obama – that have been the hallmark of Gingrich’s political career, the key to his recent political rise, and perhaps his best hope for winning the Republican nomination. In a year in which Republican voters are angry with Obama and angry with Washington, all the GOP wannabes are cultivating conservative ire – but no one quite does it as effectively and as gleefully as Newt.
For Gingrich then, New Hampshire is a win-win state. The state is generally seen as Mitt Romney’s fail-safe; the place where he must—and should be able to—win in order to keep his election hopes alive. Moreover, the state GOP tends to be less socially conservative than their Iowa brethren; more attuned, it seems, to a Romney rather than Newt candidacy. Nonetheless, Gingrich’s numbers in New Hampshire are beginning to tick up, becoming Romney’s top rival and within shouting distance of first place. If he loses, the world won’t come to an end – and if he wins it could be the killer blow to Romney’s campaign. All the more reason, it seems, for Gingrich to play up his frontrunner credentials and critique Romney.
Ironically, however, Gingrich opened the proceedings by calling on Romney to end all negative campaigning. He even pledged that he would tell all his supporters to refrain from such behavior unless attacked – and such a letter was drafted by the Gingrich campaign and sent out yesterday. The tactic of decrying negative campaigning is Frontrunner 101 – if your opponent can’t attack you, he probably can’t beat you either. Of course, as these things go, this call for a cease and desist came less than ten hours after the former Speaker said of Romney that “he’s earned money bankrupting companies and laying off employees over the years at Bain.” Clearly for Gingrich some habits die hard.
to oneofthesheep reagan did have a way of getting people to trust him. unfortunately that trust started the huge deficit slide we have seen since then, with 80% of the deficit increases coming under the past three gop presidents. reagan and bush 1 took the deficit from 900B to over 4T in 12 years, and bush 2 added an additional 8T (including war costs) to that in just 8 years! what both reagan and bush 2 were able to accomplish were huge give-away tax breaks to the wealthy and large corporations, with little or no “trickledown” as promised. now the rest of us “sheep” are to believe another round of huge tax breaks to the same group will turn things around. we can’t be that stupid can we?
from Paul Smalera:
How Obama wins the election: the economy, stupid, and everything else
Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich, and the entire Republican presidential field before them, have enjoyed painting Barack Obama as a European-style socialist, an apologizer, an appeaser, a president who is ceding America’s place in the world. Their stump speeches and debate soundbites seem to always end with some variety of the phrase, “when I’m your president, I’ll make America great again.” It would seem the nation is hungry for that kind of leadership; after all, polls now say that Obama’s job approval ratings are worse than Carter’s at the same point in his term. The game clock would seem to be running down on his re-election hopes. But what if it turns out we’ve been reading the scoreboard wrong, and Team Obama already has the lead? What if, by the time Americans get to vote, less than a year from now, America is already great again?
Coming off the heels of a nasty recession and horrible intertwined crises in banking, housing and economic confidence, every decision President Obama and his team made on the country’s way forward has come under intense scrutiny. Inevitably, the left has called some decisions, like the smaller-than-hoped-for size of his stimulus bill, weak sauce. The right has decried everything this administration did, as with health care reform, as lurching us towards socialism. Even Rockefeller Republicans have changed their spots in order to make libertarian arguments, as when Mitt Romney argued in the New York Times that the auto-industry bailout was wrong and Detroit should have been allowed to go broke.
One shouldn’t feel bad for Obama -- this kind of scrutiny comes with the job, after all. But the criticism his administration has endured from all sides has seemed particularly craven, perhaps because the stakes have been so very high these past few years. And yet, the political capital invested in his centrist, negotiated policies are now paying dividends. Perhaps Bill Clinton was a smoother operator, but it’s beginning to look a lot like Obama’s triangulation of policy, politics and the press is working, and that may deliver him to a political comeback and a 1996-style election victory.
Take the economy: Unemployment numbers are still bad, but they are improving, reaching levels not seen since the very start of the crisis. GDP growth has been anemic but it long ago stopped contracting, as it was when Obama first took office, thanks to effects of the global financial crisis and US credit crunch. Asset management firm BlackRock, meanwhile, predicts that GDP growth will increase in the last quarter, hitting the 3% mark that puts the economy beyond “treading water” territory into real growth that companies large and small will invest in, both in terms of equipment and real estate upgrades, and new hiring. Macroeconomic Advisors puts the figure at 3.7%.
The GOP would love to challenge Obama on foreign policy, but here he is nearly unimpeachable. He’s steadfastly refused to commit U.S. resources to overseas adventures, resisting the “nation-building” that candidate George W. Bush had promised to not engage in. He corrected the Bush-era excesses by pulling out of Iraq and announcing a timetable to withdraw from Afghanistan. If a president John McCain had used drone strikes as much as Obama did, Republicans everywhere would be crowing about the president’s use of “smart power” in the War on Terror.
As Todd Purdum recently explained in Vanity Fair, in an article about George Kennan and his disillusionment with our country’s military-driven growth and global-policeman interventionist foreign policy stance, there should never have been anything inevitable about the U.S. jumping into global hot spots just because it could. Obama is perhaps the only president in the last fifty years to successfully resist committing huge numbers of American lives and treasure to an overseas engagement. With that accomplishment, he joins only Dwight Eisenhower, who ended the Korean War, if we go back a little further. And yet, when asked Thursday at a press conference if he was engaging in a policy of appeasement with Iran, he smartly suggested that the reporter “ask Osama bin Laden and the 22 out of 30 top al-Qaida leaders who have been taken off the field whether I engage in appeasement. Or whoever is left out there, ask them about that.” The GOP may try to pin Obama on foreign policy, but when he starts defending his record in such stark terms, it’s pretty easy to see how this is a losing fight.
If the economy rebounds even partly, and his foreign policy continues to be effective, what can the Republicans pin on Obama? The birth certificate is public and the country has grown comfortable, or at least used to, seeing him on the world stage. The “otherness” that plagued him during the early days of his presidency has been all but eradicated. The incumbent advantage will begin to manifest itself as the GOP nominee struggles to present a vision for America that differs significantly from where we already are. With social issues always being marginalized in general elections (and with Rick Perry proving even the GOP primary season is barely hospitable to his anti-gay TV spots), it’s becoming clear that no credible alternative narrative to the Obama era is going to emerge from this Republican party or its Tea Party wing.
The only reason Obama will win in 2012 is because unlike when Jimmy Carter’s Presidency was tanking, Obama doesn’t have a well-spoken, charismatic opponent running against him. Our out-of-touch President will win because his opponents are even more out-of-touch. A lose-lose for all Americans.
George W. Bush: The GOP’s forgotten man
The former president has only been mentioned by GOP candidates 19 times in 10 debates. Why?
By Michael Cohen The opinions expressed are his own.
There are a lot of words you can expect to hear at tonight’s Republican debate in Washington, D.C. – “apologist,” “exceptionalism,” maybe “Uz-beki-beki-stan.” But here are two words you are almost certainly not going to hear – “George Bush.” Two years and ten months ago a two-term Republican President departed office. Today those seeking his former job are loath to mention him.
I reviewed the transcripts of the first 10 Republican presidential debates and could find only 19 references by a candidate to Bush – four offered tepid applause, five were downright negative and the rest were offered in passing or referenced Bush’s tenure as Governor of Texas and his positions as a candidate in 2000. Criticisms ran the gamut, from Bush’s support for government bailouts; his hiring of Ben Bernanke to head the Federal Reserve; and his lack of ardor in isolating Iran.
But even when sticking up for the former President, there were caveats. For example, Mitt Romney, in offering support for government bailouts deemed “essential” to preventing a “complete meltdown of the financial system,” had this to say about the deeply unpopular policy: “Was it perfect? No. Was it well-implemented? No, not particularly. Were there some institutions that should not have been bailed out? Absolutely. Should they have used the funds to bail out General Motors and Chrysler? No, that was the wrong source for that funding.” Rarely has praise been so qualified.
The only contender to speak warmly of Bush was the man who is holding his former job – Texas Governor Rick Perry. Yet as quickly as Perry had kind words for Bush he just as soon made clear his policy differences over the prescription drug benefit for Medicare and No Child Left Behind (which Huntsman also criticized) – renewing a long-standing policy rift that has developed between the two men.
History will remember Bush as sinking the titanic. As for immigration, the US is not immigration friendly anymore. Many people in the US do not trust either political party, and want a new system of government that is based on principles of direct democracy and jury-based justice.
What happens after Obama’s jobs bill dies?
By Nicholas Wapshott The opinions expressed are his own.
You can add to the list of hollow cries from history–such as “Ban the Bomb!” and “Bring the Troops Home!”–the president’s favorite refrain, “Pass the Jobs Bill Now!” Like the rest, Obama’s oft repeated demand is a sham, a mere slogan. Neither he nor his party, and certainly no Republican, believes Congress is going to pass even a small part of the bill, for it combines two elements his opponents detest the most: public works and higher taxes on the rich.
While the GOP squabbles over which of a barely electable field to pick as its candidate, Obama has already begun his reelection campaign in earnest. The simple message he is taking on the road is that Congress should “pass the jobs bill now!” That’s a plea he knows is sure to be ignored, leaving him in a position, he believes, to blame persistent joblessness on the Republican obstructionists. He is onto something. As Jimmy Carter found out, Americans hold their presidents to account when the economy is tanking; they expect them to improve the economy and are prepared to fire them when they don’t. It is a lesson for conservatives who believe that governments can’t and shouldn’t attempt to change the economic weather. Voters blame the government anyway, whether they intervene or not.
Obama, like Franklin Roosevelt, believes in trying to fix the symptoms of a broken economy, while his GOP opponent, whoever it turns out to be, must hold to the Hayekian orthodoxy insisted upon by the Tea Party and the Republicans’ fiscally conservative wing that there is nothing much governments can or should do to improve the economy and that stimulus spending either does not work at all or will only make the smallest of differences in the short term. As Obama gleefully knows, a rival promising austerity, the long haul, a far worse economy before it gets better, and a dim light at the end of a long, long tunnel will be running against the spirit of optimism that Americans feel and like to hear from their leaders.
Obama’s American Jobs Act is a thinly disguised second Keynesian stimulus designed to pump $450 borrowed billions into the economy to raise aggregate demand and give jobs to some of the 9.3 percent of Americans out of work. Obama’s task is to convince the American people that stimuluses work. The results of his first hurried stimulus, all $814 billion of it, are mixed. It set off a burgeoning cottage industry among conservative economists taking it in turns to prove that the stimulus did nothing or little to improve growth or job creation. Take Alan Reynolds of the Cato Institute: “There’s no evidence for the theory that state spending has shortened this or any other slowdown.” Or this, from John F. Cogan and John B.Taylor, of the Hoover Institution: “Beware of politicians proposing public works and other government purchases as a means to stimulate the economy. They did not work then and they are not working now.”
It is easier to show that Obama’s initial stimulus did not work well – the money went to pay off private debt, or went into private savings, or was spent on foreign goods, or replaced state and local government borrowing with federal government handouts – than the broader point: that stimuluses don’t work in any circumstances. So, will Obama’s stimulus work? We will never know, because it will not be enacted. If the president is reelected he will have to propose a new stimulus to suit the conditions of November 2012.
That leaves a whole year for his economic advisers to come up with a stimulus that works. There can be no excuse next time that the stimulus was flawed because to avert an imminent economic crisis it had to be brought in quickly without adequate planning. There is no need to find elusive “shovel ready” public works projects that can be started immediately as there is a whole year to find and design job-creating schemes that will not entail pouring billions into the sand. There is a whole year to find ways of giving cash only to those who will spend it on other Americans, not blow it on foreign consumer goods or hoard it as has happened the last time.
After the disaster of GWB he had the right plans to deal with the problems, but he was to nice, he tried to find consensus, he should not have…..In his road towards the next election he should include a lot of the principles behind the occupy movement, in my opinion that will strike home with a hell of a lot of American people. And he should go back to his initial plans for job creation and push them hard, after all he can now straight forward GOP and right wing democrats for the failure to do just that. May-be he could also bring forward the idea of doing away with lobbying, which after all is legal corruption.
from Ian Bremmer:
Why the GOP is punting on foreign policy
By Ian Bremmer The opinions expressed are his own.
Three years ago in the presidential primary debates, it would’ve been stunning if practically the only mention of foreign policy had come when a candidate suggested sending troops to Mexico to help fight the drug war. Yet in this year’s contentious Republican debate season, that’s exactly what’s happened, with Texas Governor Rick Perry being the one to float the lead trial balloon.
The surprise here isn’t that Republican candidates’ views on foreign policy are both underdeveloped and unimportant to their base -- more on both of those points later -- but how dramatically our world has changed in the past three years, largely due to the global financial crisis and recession.
Let’s think back even further, to 2000, when another Texas Governor, George W. Bush, promised America that he wouldn’t engage in Clintonian “nation-building” if elected. Needless to say, the shock of 9/11 changed the international calculus, forcing the Bush administration to develop a response that involved two wars and intense diplomacy with nearly every global power and international institution in existence. But the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks has provided a symbolic moment of closure. More importantly, President Obama has largely kept his promise to withdraw troops from Iraq and Afghanistan, outlining a plan more in line with opinion polls than General Petraeus’ guidance. (Sadly, the withdrawal doesn’t mean Afghanistan won’t face quagmire -- it just means U.S. forces won’t be the ones bogged down.)
When the boldest foreign policy idea GOP candidates put forward is to send troops to Mexico, the internationalism that mainstream Republicans once preached is at a nadir. That’s probably because that internationalism was more Wilsonian in nature, and the ideological base of the Republican party has shifted to the right. Unfortunately for Republicans, this is going to create a conflict down the line in how they present their nominee to the general electorate.
Right now, Republican candidates are talking the Tea Party’s language -- energizing the base by focusing on cutting spending and entitlements at home, and delivering them the “Fortress America” they thirst for. Yet military spending has been America’s largest single budget expenditure for decades now. And the military-industrial complex employs an awful lot of people around the U.S. The Tea Party’s other big underpinning is of course patriotism. How does the Republican nominee square a “strong” U.S. with the need to reduce spending by cutting budgets at the Defense Department?
It stands to reason that GOP candidates give voters what they want: they’re pledging to cut spending and create jobs while maintaining a strong defense. But the promises the presidential candidates are making are simply incompatible under scrutiny. That’s why, when pressed at the debates on which departments they’d cut first, they resort to low-hanging fruit like the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Education. But GOP candidates are going down this path with a purpose: maintaining a laser-like focus on the economy works. They are hammering away at President Obama’s failure to provide an economic U-turn in his first term, which is all straw poll and primary voters want to hear about.
According to the US Census Bureau, exports to China about 91 billion in 2010. Imports from China (lost American economic activity) about 365 billion. A trade war or “taxing the rich” would be a benefit to the American worker.
Financial reform bill puts GOP in dilemma
- John Kemp is a Reuters market analyst. The views expressed are his own -
Financial reform legislation is set to reach the Senate floor as early as this week. With U.S. President Barack Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid holding most of the cards, pressure on Senate Republicans and Wall Street to find a compromise is becoming intense. (more…)
>”But to require a private employer to act against their moral conscience and provide a benefit they otherwise would not include or support is UNCONSTITUTIONAL”<
No it isn’t. You have no understanding of the constitution and the first amendment. Your “morality or religious” beliefs don’t play into it at all. We don’t govern this country by bending to the individual morality of 300 million people. Obviously if we did, society couldn’t function. Everybody could claim a moral objection to anything they don’t like.
The First Amendment reads; “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercize thereof”. And it seems that your objection to everything is based upon the second (Free Ex)clause. The problem with your argument is that the sentence “congress shall make no law…prohibiting the free exercise thereof” makes absolutely no sense. The “Thereof” refers back to the first clause to get its meaning. Therefore, logically and grammatically, whatever counts as religion for the purpose of free exercize, must also count as religion for the purpose of establishment. The establishment clause says that Congress may make no law respecting an establishment of “religion,” while the free exercise clause says that Congress cannot prohibit the free exercise “thereof.” Again, logically, the word “thereof” must have the same content as the object to which it refers. Accordingly, what counts as “religion” for one clause must count as “religion” for the other.
Birth Control Pills are not a religion. But if you are going to use them for the purpose of free exercize, then you must logically use them for the purpose of establishment as well. The state, for example, abridges free exercise when it tells students they cannot pray during school, even if it allows them complete freedom to practice all other aspects of their faith. Similarly, the state cannot tell a church it must provide contraception coverage even if the church is otherwise left free to use its property as it wishes. The Obama Compromise deals with this. Private prayer and contraception are protected by the free exercise clause despite the fact that neither of these practices constitutes religions in and of themselves.
If prayer and contraception count as “religion” for the purposes of the free exercise clause, they must also count as “religion” for the purposes of the establishment clause. Just as the state abridges religion when it tells a student she cannot pray, so too does it establish religion when it requires prayer to be said in the schools. Just as the state abridges religion when it tells a church it must provide contraception coverage, so too does it establish religion when it makes a law that would deny contraception coverage to people based on a religious exemption to those outside the realm of the church at public expense. The state does not cross the line to establishment only when it goes to the trouble and expense of setting up a state church; it crosses that line when it sets up any religious practice that constitutes “religion” for the purposes of free exercise. To the extent that Republicans want to read the “thereof” in the free exercise clause broadly, they must also accept a broad reading of “religion” in the establishment clause. That’s basic logic. Logic isn’t a Republican or Democrat thing. It has no bias to it. You can’t ignore this fact, without illustrating yourself as an irrational putz.
The Blunt Amendment is an absurd and totally transparent attempt to undermine the Affordable Care Act. It opens a loophole that you could drive a battleship through. It gives a religious or moral exemption to anything an employer may object to. If an employer decides that prayer cures all, then he could deny any kind of health care to his employees based on a religious or moral objection. It introduces government mandated discrimination based on religious or moral objections outside the title VII exemption of the Civil Rights Act for the church. If held as valid, then logically that same argument could be used for denying a veteran a job because the employer doesn’t believe in War, and it could also introduce discrimination based on a host of other moral or religious objections.
We cannot function with 300 million people making decisions over what laws they will follow based on moral or religious objections.