It’s unfair of me to point out Santorum’s idiotic views on religious freedom when Romney said the same exact thing earlier today.
“They are now using Obamacare to impose a secular vision on Americans who believe that they should not have their religious freedom taken away.”
You keep on using that phrase “religious freedom.” I do not think it means what you think it means.
This new “religious freedom” schtick is because the Obama administration has dared to say that all hospitals – even Catholic ones – need to provide health insurance that covers contraception. And despite the Catholic outrage being utter bullshit, it looks like the Obama administration will cave. Oh joy.
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Sun-um-beech better not cave. What a pushover he is !~! I may withhold my vote if he continues in this vein.
That’s the problem isn’t it? Yes, Obama looks ready to buckle on an issue that the majority of the country, heck the majority of Republicans and Catholics support! But are you really going to take a chance that someone who’d like to eliminate all birth control and college gets in? How about someone who’d repeal child labor laws? And of course we could all look forward to paying double the income tax rate of our wealthy overlords.
I’m as disappointed in Obama as anyone. In many ways, he’s been a disaster. But what’s the alternative? I’m going to have to hold my nose and vote for him. If the economy turns around, maybe we can get an actual democrat in 2016.
The difference between Romney and Santorum is that Romney doesn’t really believe it. He just says what he thinks his audience wants to hear. The best thing you can say about Romney is that he’s passionless while his GOP rivals are passionately crazy. If he somehow became President, we’d have a right leaning moderate in the White House who is a more than capable executive. Every other GOP contender has been frightening as hell.
I’m as disappointed in Obama as anyone. In many ways, he’s been a disaster. But what’s the alternative? I’m going to have to hold my nose and vote for him. If the economy turns around, maybe we can get an actual democrat in 2016.
Perhaps you should organize a write-in for someone who actually deserves to be President?
IMO, for someone to deserve to have that kind of power, the number one criterion is not to want it in the first place.
Of course 53% of Catholics agree with Obama and the vast bulk who do not were not potential voters for him anyway …
Don’t tell me Obama is going to cave on this?! Right after the Supreme Court unanimously supported a church’s right to ignore labour law in relation to its treatment of employees, up to and including the termination of an employee with a disability because of the disability?
Maybe we can arrange something here? Maybe all the people in the US who want to live in a just society can move to Canada and all the people in Canada who want to live in a country that might have Romney for president can move to the US and we’ll just have 2 different countries.
Or, as a Canadian, I’ve often thought how cool it would be for the 30+ Million American Atheists to move to Canada so that Atheists would make up more than 50% of the population. Or for the Blue States (you might not have noticed, but almost all the Blue States share a common border between themselves and us) to decide they’ve had enough of the crazy and annex themselves to the Canadian government and become happy Canadians
It’d be nice to go someplace warm for the winter and stay inside my own country. :-)
It’d be interesting to see, even if only for the “Blame Canada” style attack ads on Faux News.
Please don’t compare your president’s term of office to a falling sky.
If anyone else wants to make a write-in presidential campaign for Neil Degrasse Tyson, I’m all in.
I’m pretty sure Western Washington would be HAPPY to become a southern extension of BC.
Also, the Columbia makes a much more logical border than some arbitrary ::cough::Point Roberts::cough:: latitude line.
I think the “Romney is a phony, so he’s less scary” argument is missing something. He really seems like he doesn’t believe in the Republican agenda beyond a desire to rig society as fully as possible in favor of people like Mitt Romney. It’s unlikely he’d appoint the fifth Supreme Court justice needed to ban abortions on his own hook.
But he won’t be on his own. Any plausible scenario with Romney winning the election probably also involves Republicans keeping the House of Representatives and being a slim minority in the Senate. So Romney will not be left to his own devices, he’ll have his party’s House members throwing at him Planned Parenthood defundings, demands for abstinence-only sex education, repeals of equal pay laws, a revival of the “faith-based initiatives” gravy train for conservative religious groups, etc.
While Mitt might not personally want to do these things, he’d have to fight his own party to stop them. He’s far more likely to just go along on issues like the above, which he doesn’t much care about.
We’ve got a similar dynamic in Michigan, where the Republican governor, Rick Snyder, is a businessman who crashed the Republican primary and is generally a social moderate concerned mostly with changing the state’s tax system. But we still just ended up with a state law banning municipalities from offering domestic partner benefits. Snyder signed that and negotiated them down by demanding a bill that preserved universities’ right to offer such benefits if they so chose. He could have vetoed the bill, but chose to compromise rather than fight his own party.
I had a bit of a rage attack last night watching Lawrence O’Donnell interview someone who was presented as some sort of liberal icon (The guy has a show on NPR,I can’t remember his name. After giving the old BS about how christians are the only reason for the abolition movement, the civil right movement and all other advancements of social justice, ever he claimed that the Obama administration is trying to tell catlicks that they can’t be themselves because they require them to obey the same rules as the rest of us.
I think the problem is cable news. Or, more precisely, that political insiders care about it.
Proportionally, very few Americans do. But the sort of so-called liberal pundits that populate places like that (Chris Matthews, E.J. Dionne, guys like that) are much more sympathetic to the Catholic Bishops’ point of view and tend to conflate it with “Catholics.” The actual Catholics in the pews have tended to cheerfully ignore the hierarchy on birth control and the hierarchy has generally agreed not to inquire deeply into why it is that Mr. and Mrs. O’Malley only have 2.5 kids rather than 12.
Political insiders watch this crap, though, and seem to think “people are mad.”
But Fox News, the most popular cable news outfit, averages about 2.2 million viewers in primetime. CNN has about 500,000 on its its main channel and Headline News has about the same. MSNBC gets another million. In a country of 312 million people, that’s not very many. It’s about the number of people who belong to the Assemblies of God church.
It’s basically the people who find politics interesting all the time. Who are also the type of people very likely to already have an opinion on these issues. It’s a strange, self-selected demographic, in other words, and politicians and their advisors shouldn’t give it undo weight.
I had a tweet fest with a Catholic Priest who insisted that the money for his premiums would be spent for birth control, sterilization, and abortions. Tried as I might, I couldn’t get him to understand that the money he pays for his insurance premiums is not magically isolated somewhere in his insurance company. Technically, he’s already paid for it.
He agreed, but stayed on me about sterilizations, abortions, and his favorite: Ella. I couldn’t get through to the guy whatsoever. And these are the people we’re dealing with here – the law of the land doesn’t matter to them, only their particular dogma.
I shit you not, the man actually told me that I shouldn’t be having sex for fun. I’ll quote him, “Sex is fun, but sex for fun is not good. You deserve better, my friend.” Well, me and my wife of 18 years respectfully fucking disagree.
It was the most surreal Twitter conversation I’ve ever had…
Obama a disaster? You are kidding, right? Boy, the GOP talking points have even permeated the progressive sphere.