If all printers were determined not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed. -- Benjamin Franklin
Sen. Rand Paul at CPAC on Thursday asked President Obama: "Do you hate poor people, or do you just hate poor people with jobs?"
Paul later in his speech admitted he doesn't actually think President Obama hates poor people.
Rubio has sold his proposal—introduced Jan. 31 as the "Religious Freedom Restoration Act," or S. 2043—as a way to counter President Barack Obama's controversial rule requiring even religiously affiliated schools and universities to offer copay-free birth control to their employees. But health care experts say that its implications could be far broader.
If passed, the bill would allow any institution or corporation to cut off birth control coverage simply by citing religious grounds. (You can read the bill here or in the DocumentCloud embed below.) It has 26 cosponsors in the Senate; a similar proposal sponsored by Rep. Jeff Fortenberry (R-Neb.) has 148 cosponsors in the House. On Wednesday, Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-Ohio) vowed to repeal Obama's rule, and Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) pointed to Rubio's bill as a potential model for doing so.
In English, this means that no entity has to cover birth control in a health plan if it can point to a religious reason for not doing so. And the entity itself is not required to have any religious affiliation. It could just be a plain old corporation. That means that if the middle-aged white guy who runs your company is religiously opposed to birth control, he can have it stripped out of your insurance plan—even if his Viagra is still covered. You could wake up the next morning and find you're paying full price for drugs that you once got for free or at much-reduced prices.
“Under our Constitution, religious organizations have the freedom to follow their beliefs, and government should honor that,” Senator Manchin said. “The Obama Administration's position on this mandate is wrong and just doesn't make any sense to me. I'm proud to introduce this bipartisan legislation with Senator Rubio, which will ensure that the First Amendment rights of religious employers are afforded the respect they deserve.”
The final details of the pact were still being negotiated Wednesday night, including how many states would participate and when the formal announcement would be made in Washington. The two biggest holdouts, California and New York, now plan to sign on, according to the officials with knowledge of the matter who did not want to be identified because the negotiations were not completed.The deal grew out of an investigation into mortgage servicing by all 50 state attorneys general that was introduced in the fall of 2010 amid an uproar over revelations that banks evicted people with false or incomplete documentation. In the 14 months since then, the scope of the accord has broadened from an examination of foreclosure abuses to a broad effort to lift the housing market out of its biggest slump since the Great Depression. Four million Americans have been foreclosed upon since the beginning of 2007, and the huge overhang of abandoned homes has swamped many regions, like California, Florida and Arizona.In New York State, more than 46,000 borrowers will receive some form of benefit, with an estimated 21,000 expected to see what they owe reduced through a principal reduction, according to estimates by the Department of Housing and Urban Development.The five mortgage servicers in the settlement — Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citigroup and Ally Financial — have largely set aside reserves for the expected cost of the accord and investors are likely to cheer its announcement because it removes one more legal worry for the industry, analysts said.“I wouldn’t say it’s a panacea for the housing industry but it is good for the banks to get this behind them,” said Jason Goldberg, an analyst with Barclays.
We’ll now have to listen to banks and their sycophant defenders declaring victory despite being wrong on the law and the facts. They will proceed to marginalize and write off criticisms of the servicing practices that hurt homeowners and investors and are devastating communities. But the problems will fester and the housing market will continue to suffer. Investors in mortgage-backed securities, who know that services have been screwing them for years, will be hung out to dry and will likely never return to a private MBS market, since the problems won’t ever be fixed. This settlement has not only revealed the residential mortgage market to be too big to fail, but puts it on long term, perhaps permanent, government life support.
The financial services industry went from having a 19 percent share of America’s corporate profits decades ago to having a 41 percent share in recent years. That doesn’t mean bankers ever represented anywhere near 41 percent of America’s labor value. It just means they’ve managed to make themselves horrifically overpaid relative to their counterparts in the rest of the economy.
A banker's job is to be a prudent and dependable steward of other peoples’ money – being worthy of our trust in that area is the entire justification for their traditionally high compensation.
Yet these people have failed so spectacularly at that job in the last fifteen years that they’re lucky that God himself didn’t come down to earth at bonus time this year, angrily boot their asses out of those new condos, and command those Zagat-reading girlfriends of theirs to start getting acquainted with the McDonalds value meal lineup. They should be glad they’re still getting anything at all, not whining to New York magazine.
A new Michigan-based, national coalition of medical marijuana advocates is coming together to defend the rights of patients and dispensaries.
The National Patients Rights Association (NPRA) will lobby legislators, prosecutors and local governments to uphold medical marijuana laws in 16 states and Washington, D.C.
Michigan voters legalized the use of cannabis for medical purposes in 2008 with the passage of the Michigan Medical Marihuana Act. There are now more than 100,000 registered patients in the state.
Although there have been legal challenges to the use of medicinal marijuana since California first legalized its use in 1996, opposition in Michigan has been especially strong under the state's current attorney general, Bill Schuette.
Democratic Rep. Jamie Pedersen, a gay lawmaker from Seattle who has sponsored gay rights bills in the House for several years, said that while he and his partner are grateful for the rights that exist under the state's current domestic partnership law, "domestic partnership is a pale and inadequate substitute for marriage."
Pedersen cited Tuesday's ruling by the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals during his remarks on the House floor.
"The court addressed the question of why marriage matters directly," he said, and read a section from the ruling that stated "marriage is the name that society gives to the relationship that matters most between two adults."
"I would like for our four children to grow up understanding that their daddy and their poppa have made that kind of a lifelong commitment to each other," he said. "Marriage is the word that we use in our society to convey that idea."
Several Republicans argued against the bill, saying that it goes against the tradition of marriage.
Rep. Jay Rodne, R-Snoqualmie, said that the measure "severs the cultural, historical and legal underpinnings of the institution of marriage."
"This bill is really an exercise of raw political power," he said. "It contravenes human nature and it will hurt families and children."
“If the president does not reverse the Department’s attack on religious freedom, then the Congress, acting on behalf of the American people and the Constitution we are sworn to uphold and defend, must,” Boehner said. “This attack by the federal government on religious freedom in our country cannot stand, and will not stand.”
The Speaker said the House would take matters into its own hands with committee hearings and legislative action to push back if the administration declines to act.
“In the days ahead, the House will approach this matter fairly and deliberately, through regular order and the appropriate legislative channels,” Boehner said. He called on the Energy & Commerce Committee, which has jurisdiction over the issue, to take steps against the rule and “consider all possible options.”
Pro-choice Republicans are begging their party to drop this fight over contraception before it’s too late. Turning to a discussion about access to birth control will be nothing short of a disaster, they say.
The new and unexpected war over contraception may not end up as only a battle between the White House and the Republican party. It could end up as a fight between the GOP and itself. As we saw during the 2011’s push to defund Planned Parenthood — when some Republican Senators rebuked their colleagues in the House for attacking the organization — Republicans on Capitol Hill do not speak with one voice on matters of women’s health. Now, as Speaker John Boehner seemingly prepares to turn the House GOP’s attention to contraception, pro-choice Republicans are warning that the GOP may become the next Komen For The Cure.
Is this hypocritical of Obama? For the thousandth time, no, no, no. The playing field is the playing field, and once a public policy has been legally put in place you'd be a sap not to play by the same rules as everyone else. If you oppose the mortgage interest deduction as a matter of policy, you still have every right to take the deduction as long as the rest of the country keeps it in place. If you're a Republican governor who objects to the stimulus bill, you'd be actively irresponsible not to take your share of the money once it's there. If you oppose earmarks, you still have an obligation to your district to take them as long as they exist.
We have to live in a world as it is, not how we want it to be.
So, what were the totals last night? In Minnesota, with nearly all of the precincts reporting, 47,826 Republicans participated in the caucuses, down about 23% from four years ago.
In Colorado, with all of the precincts reporting, 65,479 GOP voters showed up, a drop of nearly 7% from the 2008 totals.
And in Missouri's non-binding primary, with all of the precincts reporting, turnout stood at 251,868. That's quite a few for a primary dismissed as a "beauty pageant," though as Cohen noted, the comparison is admittedly flawed.
Nevertheless, we can start to take some larger lessons away from the larger trajectory. For one thing, none of this makes Mitt Romney look especially impressive -- he's losing states he won four years ago; he's struggling to get his supporters to participate; and he's failing badly to match his 2008 vote totals at this stage in the process. It's starting to look like Romney only wins when he spends several million dollars on attack ads to destroy his main challenger.
For another, this is part of a pattern. As was reported on "The Rachel Maddow Show" on Monday night, if we look just at self-identifying Republicans in the exit polls, turnout dropped 11% in Iowa, 15% in New Hampshire, and 16% in Florida. Though turnout in South Carolina was strong, it's proving to be the exception, as evidenced by additional weak numbers in Nevada and in yesterday's contests.
Republican presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich today brought his talk of family, jobs and God straight to where he hoped it would resonate - Cincinnati's West Side.
And it did. The popular Price Hill Chili was packed with 200 people who cheered and clapped as Gingrich promised he'd put people on unemployment into job training and cut corporate taxes. "Large-scale" change is needed, he said, and he's the man to bring it.
"It is fundamentally wrong to give people 99 weeks of money for doing nothing," he said, prompting the crowd to yell, "Newt! Newt!"
He drew his biggest cheers when he talked about oil and said, "No American president will ever again bow to a Saudi king."
He said he doesn't want to run just a Republican campaign, but one that unleashes "the American people so they can go out and rebuild the America we love." A woman shouted, "Yes! Yes!"
When someone in the crowd yelled, "Lead us back to the Bible, Newt!" he didn't miss a beat: "What I want is to lead you back to the Declaration of Independence... The fact is, in America, we believe that power comes from God to each of you personally" and you loan it back to the government."
Jim Ferneding of Montgomery wanted the chance to shake Gingrich's hand, and he got it. He told him: "You're the one with the strength. Just concentrate on condemning Obama and you will win."
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