Well, bravo. This is a stance that none of his opponents in the current GOP race would take, needless to say; especially not at this point when they’re all appealing to the right-wing before they Etch-A-Sketch to the middle for the general election.
Let’s do this thing in November, Minnesota. From the local MN elections all the way up to the Presidential elections. Get informed, get smart, and get active. The future can be awesome if we make it.
I always forget to not rub my eyes when I’m super-gluing jalapeños to live scorpions.
Since the founding of America, singers, songwriters and performers have been a powerful force for social justice. On September 28-30, 2012, Americans United is sponsoring a country-wide weekend of musical events to celebrate – and defend – the vital principle of church-state separation. There will be house or club concerts in every state and major concerts in different cities.
Sign up to get more news and information here: http://www.voicesunitedconcerts.com/, and Like them on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/VoicesUnitedConcerts
Executions in the U.S. Could you claim that not a single one was wrongly convicted?
Good news for death penalty opponents. One more state is almost a lock to get rid of it. California votes on it in November.
It’s a very charged discussion every time it pops up; but the fact that it IS so charged with racial, economic and fairness/revenge overtones means that it’s a dangerous tool to use. We are not so objective or enlightened as to apply it consistently, and the justice system we use to impose it is so imperfect in the first place.
It’s a human trait to come up with stories to explain the things we see: we are pattern-matching machines, we like things to make sense as part of a continuum, and we like to connect events, places and people… even when there is nothing there to connect them. We notice coincidences and assign them way too much meaning, and we decide to ignore the times when our just-so stories fail to match reality. Stories make us comfortable, in that they help us as we try to convince ourselves that in the end of the telling the world makes sense, there is an arc, there is a finale that will wrap things up neatly.
Even then there is no guarantee that it will. In fact, quite the contrary, as history has proven over and over and over again.
We love telling stories, we love hearing them, and we love making them up almost just as much. The problems arise when we start taking our stories seriously enough to hate, ostracize, torment and kill other people for not believing them, when we’ve forgotten that they were made up in the first place.
Stories have lessons, stories have morals. Those are good things to listen to and learn from, and they are fun to tell. But the moment you start arguing about how there really WAS a ruler and the clothes WERE real and we have archaeological PROOF of the city where the ruler once ruled… well, I’m afraid that you’ve lost the point of the story.
Which was, at the end of the day, that the Emperor was wearing no clothes, and at one time we were all afraid to call him on it.
Romney’s opponents for the GOP nomination seem to be really pushing the argument that he is “too similar” to Obama on policies and positions. Not a stretch, to be fair, especially with the PPACA front and center in the news. Rick Santorum in particular, especially in his recent “bullshit” rant against NTY reporter Jeff Zeleny, appears to be hammering the issue that Romney is a terrible candidate because of perceived similarities between the PPACA and the Massachusetts healthcare insurance reform law that Romney signed.
But considering he’s the GOP frontrunner, it seems to me that Romney’s opponents are making the case that the vast majority of the country apparently wants either Obama… or someone who is not very different from Obama. So they are setting up the November vote to be a decision on whether people want to vote for the (current President) Democrat Obama or the Republican version of Obama, who is kind of similar if you squint.
Is that such a great position for the GOP to take, with Romney all but guaranteed the nomination? Is that the message they really want to send? That, hey, maybe this Obama guy’s ideas aren’t that bad after all, since we’re sending in a nominee that is kind of hard to distinguish from the guy who is already in the position… It seems to undermine the call for change quite effectively.
Not that I am complaining. Imitation, after all, is the sincerest form of flattery.
I actually think Santorum was right in calling out Zeleny: his statements about Romney being “worst Republican” seem to have always been in the context of positioning him as the least-desirable candidate to go up against Obama on healthcare, because of Romney’s MA healthcare initiative. The selective quoting is something we decry all the time when Fox News pulls quotes from our candidates out of context, so it’s fair play (and the right thing to do) to call out the NYT for doing it.
Don’t get me wrong, he’s still a bigoted ultra-right-wing fundie who shouldn’t even be running for President of his local homeowner’s association, so it’s not like I’m changing my mind on his candidacy.
I may be wrong about the contextual statement, and if anyone can show me video or audio of Santorum calling Romney the worst Republican outside of specific comparative contexts of “worst”, then I’ll reassess. But calling Zeleny out was correct.
The manner in which he did it, by shouting “bullshit!” over a dozen open mics? Well, there’s a lot to quibble about there, but his anger and profanity in a forum like that is a sign of something deeper that each side will spin their own way: his supporters as an example of his passion and frustration with the media, his detractors as a stain on his “family values conservative” image, and an example of how he doesn’t have the temperament and level-headedness to lead the country.
It doesn’t change my opinion much, since I find so many of his opinions and positions to be execrable, no matter which words he chooses to describe them. And I’ve used the same word to describe his overall campaign, so I can’t really complain much.
An excellent idea, then AND now. (Photo credit: typebalance)
If you think that you would be better off in a world where there were no separation of Church and State, this is a useful graphic. The National Post has put up a breakdown of the world’s major religions. It is by no means exhaustive, and it provides the misleading impression that large groups like “Catholics” and “Orthodox” Christianities or “Hinduistic” Eastern religions are coherent and homogeneous. They are not, by any stretch of the imagination, and have hundreds upon hundreds of subdivisions, sects and partitions, each with their own sets of contradictory (sometimes opposing) beliefs.
Remember: no matter what religion you believe in, the vast majority of people in the world think you are wrong. Don’t assume that if we remove the wall of separation between Church and State that it will be your religion that everyone agrees to impose on the rest of the population; you may end up with a set of laws that force you to follow the religious law of a group with which you don’t especially agree. This is why the Establishment Clause (“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion…”) together with the Free Exercise Clause (“… or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”) are SO critical your YOUR religious freedom. It is up to you and I, no matter what our personal beliefs, to ensure that this separation continues.
Big boats turn slowly, but once they start…
This is interesting because, while the bill to repeal gay marriage in NH was sponsored by Republicans (as it always seems to be the case), there were 109 GOPers who voted against it, in opposition to the party’s own platform in the state. One wonders where they were a couple of years ago when the laws making same-sex marriage legal were passed along pretty strict party lines. I hope it just means they have noticed that NH has not become a cesspool of sin, and that they feel their marriages have not suddenly become undermined by providing equal rights to all.
One could be cynical and note that since the Ninth Circuit decision on Prop 8’s constitutionality, even the Republicans in the NH House realized that they couldn’t sustain opposition to same-sex marriage once you already had people married in the state: it would create a group of citizens with different (fewer) rights than others, which would be unconstitutional. But it’s hard to not be cynical when so many of the Republicans who voted against same-sex marriage in 2007-2008 are now suddenly saying things like “small government” and “private rights” and “these people are just like you and me”. This wasn’t also true back then?
And yet here in MN, we’re not even where NH was in 2007: here we’re fighting to defeat amendments that would make same-sex marriage unconstitutional, not fighting to pass laws that would make it legal. Progress comes slowly, and unevenly distributed.
Live free or die!
It’s good to finally hear from the doctors, even if it’s anonymously: this from a guest post over at John Scalzi’s blog.
I do not feel that it is reactionary or even inaccurate to describe an unwanted, non-indicated transvaginal ultrasound as “rape”. If I insert ANY object into ANY orifice without informed consent, it is rape. And coercion of any kind negates consent, informed or otherwise.
There is no POSSIBLE justification for these laws that doesn’t fall completely afoul for Fourth Amendment of protection of privacy and dignity. To force doctors to act as agents of the state and violate a woman’s body in a medically unnecessary way is so beyond the pale of what is acceptable that it should force the immediate removal from office of anyone who proposed or supported the law, on the basis that they are unfit to serve the public’s interest.
Like a blog, but for humans 
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