I'm also thankful I don't have to put up with assholes jumping over my fence while I'm eating dinner.
Have a good holiday, folks.
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
Like many Americans, I was deeply disturbed by the footage of the fatal shooting of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald. This Thanksgiving, I ask everybody to keep those who’ve suffered tragic loss in our thoughts and prayers, and to be thankful for the overwhelming majority of men and women in uniform who protect our communities with honor. And I’m personally grateful to the people of my hometown for keeping protests peaceful.
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) says religious believers are called to “ignore” laws that violate their faith.
“In essence, if we are ever ordered by a government authority to personally violate and sin — violate God’s law and sin — if we’re ordered to stop preaching the Gospel, if we’re ordered to perform a same-sex marriage as someone presiding over it, we are called to ignore that,” Rubio said in an interview with CBN on Tuesday.
“So when those two come into conflict, God’s rules always win,” he added.
Rubio said Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision creating a constitutional right to abortion, is open to revision.
“It’s current law; it’s not settled law,” he said. “No law is settled. Roe v. Wade is current law, but it doesn’t mean that we don’t continue to aspire to fix it, because we think it’s wrong.”
The Republican presidential candidate, who is rising in the polls, encouraged the faithful to work within the political process to change laws that violate their conscience.
“If you live in a society where the government creates an avenue and a way for you to peacefully change the law, then you’re called to participate in that process to try to change it,” he said.
Georgia sheriff has staked out his ground in the U.S. culture wars by posting a large sign cautioning visitors that his community is proud to be “politically incorrect.”
“WARNING: Harris County is politically incorrect,” reads the sign posted on Tuesday under a welcome banner and the official seal of the county, located in central Georgia near the border with Alabama.
“We say: Merry Christmas, God Bless America and In God We Trust. We salute our troops and our flag,” says the sign placed in front of the Harris County Sheriff’s Office. “If this offends you … LEAVE!”
Sheriff Mike Jolley said the concept was suggested by his staff members, who “saw the verbiage on the Internet somewhere.”
The elected sheriff, a U.S. Army retiree who has been in the position for 23 years, personally paid for the $553 sign, which includes an image of the county’s official seal.
“I believe it’s time for the silent majority to speak their minds,” Jolley told Reuters on Wednesday in a phone interview.
So far the response has been “overwhelmingly, humbling positive,” said Jolley, noting that his office has received phone calls of support from as far away as Hawaii. He has also heard from critics.
“There are some people who don’t like it, and I respect that,” the sheriff said. “That’s why I put on the sign that if you don’t like it, leave.”
Tanya Robertson, State Republican Executive Committee member for Senate District 11, which covers parts of Harris, Galveston and Brazoria counties, said she'll present the resolution at the committee's December 4 meeting in Austin, and that she already has support from a few other members.
"There's been a big groundswell of Texans that are getting into the Texas independence issue," she said, citing conversations she's had with constituents. "I believe conservatives in Texas should have a choice to voice their opinion."
Texas GOP chairman Tom Mechler said Tuesday that many resolutions are presented each year for consideration on the primary ballot, but that he did not believe sufficient support existed within the SREC to approve the secession item.
Still, Robertson will present the resolution to a 12-member resolutions committee, which will decide whether or not it will face the full 60-member assembly on December 5 for a vote on its placement on the March 1 ballot.
Robertson got the idea for the resolution from the Texas Nationalist Movement, a small secessionist group that has tried but so far failed to raise the necessary 75,000 signatures to put a non-binding secession vote on the March ballot. When she heard that news she thought she could help, though she isn't a member of the TNM.
She cited dissatisfaction with politicians in Washington D.C. and dismay with federal spending as reasons for a secession vote.
While Rubio’s attempt to scrap risk corridors altogether was unsuccessful, his push contributed to a policy rider that was inserted into a 1,603-page spending bill passed at the end of 2014.
Under the provision, which is still in effect, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) could no longer tap other accounts — like its overall appropriations or its Medicare funding — to fund the risk corridors program.
Now Rubio is taking his crusade against the "bailout" program to the presidential campaign trail.
The senator and dozens of other Republicans are seeking to renew the policy rider — or repeal risk corridors altogether — in the year-end budget bill that Congress must pass by Dec. 11 to avoid a government shutdown.
“So far, we’ve succeeded in stopping the Obama administration from bailing out healthcare companies under ObamaCare, and it’s critical that Congress once again stand with taxpayers to stop any taxpayer bailout of health insurers from happening,” Rubio wrote in a letter to GOP leaders of both chambers on Tuesday.
The damaging effects of the budget-neutral requirement became clear in October.
The Obama administration disclosed it could only afford to pay 13 cents of every dollar owed to the insurance companies — after insurers had already locked in their rates for the upcoming year.
“Obviously what happened was exactly what we thought would happen – there’d be an imbalance. Most of the companies lost money,” said Joseph Marinucci, a senior analyst with Standard & Poor.
“You have to be able to deal with unanticipated events, such as the legislation that would restrict the funding of its corridors,” he said.
Within weeks, about a dozen start-up insurers known as CO-OPs announced they’d be shutting their doors, in most cases because they lacked the cash flow to stay solvent. And at least two other insurers — WinHealth Partners in Wyoming and Moda Health in Washington — pulled out of the exchanges.
Then came the shocking announcement from the insurance giant, UnitedHealthCare, that it might cut its losses as well.
“Essentially what is happening now, and why you’re seeing all of these plans reevaluate their participation [in ObamaCare], they have to rely on their reserves over the next two years,” one industry source said. “It’s caused everyone to reevaluate and consider what changes they have to make to remain viable and stay in the market.”
The outgoing Democratic governor of Kentucky signed an executive order Tuesday to restore the right to vote and hold public office to thousands of non-violent felons who've served out their sentences.
The order from Gov. Steve Beshear — who leaves office next month — does not include those convicted of violent crimes, sex offenses, bribery or treason. Kentucky already restores voting rights to some nonviolent convicted felons, but the felon must apply to the governor's office, which approves them on a case by case basis.
This new order automatically restores voting rights to convicted felons who meet certain criteria upon their release. Those who have already been released can fill out a form on the state Department of Corrections' website.
"All of our society will be better off if we actively work to help rehabilitate those who have made a mistake," Beshear said. "And the more we do that, the more the entire society will benefit."
Kentucky was one of four states that did not automatically restore voting rights to felons once they completed all the terms of their sentences. About 180,000 in Kentucky have served their sentences yet remain banned from casting ballots.
The Kentucky legislature has tried and failed numerous times to pass a bill to restore voting rights to felons. The Republican-controlled Senate would agree only if there was a five-year waiting period, which Democrats refused.
Democrats control state government until next month, when Republican Gov.-elect Matt Bevin takes office. Bevin could repeal Beshear's order or allow it to stand. Bevin spokeswoman Jessica Ditto said Bevin supports restoring voting rights to nonviolent offenders, but added he was not notified of Beshear's order until a few minutes before he announced it.
"The Executive Order will be evaluated during the transition period," she said.
Since last month, U.S. warplanes have struck Islamic State's oil infrastructure in Syria in a stepped-up campaign of economic warfare that the United States estimates has cut the group's black-market earnings from oil by about a third.
In finding their targets, U.S. military planners have relied in part on an unconventional source of intelligence: access to banking records that provide insight into which refineries and oil pumps are generating cash for the extremist group, current and former officials say.
The intent is to choke off the Islamic State's funding by tracking its remaining ties to the global financial system. By identifying money flowing to and from the group, U.S. officials have been able to get a glimpse into how its black-market economy operates, people with knowledge of the effort have said.
That in turn has influenced decisions about targeting for air strikes in an effort that began before Islamic State's Nov. 13 attacks on Paris and has intensified since, they said. While Islamic State's access to formal banking has been restricted, it retains some ties that U.S. military and financial officials can use against it, the current and former officials said.
"We have done a really good job of largely keeping the Islamic State out of the formal financial system," said Matthew Levitt, who served as deputy assistant secretary for intelligence at the U.S. Treasury in the George W. Bush administration. "But we haven't been entirely successful, and that may not be a bad thing."
Donald Trump leads PPP's newest poll by a wide margin...on which candidate Americans think would be the most likely to say something inappropriate at the table and ruin Thanksgiving Dinner. 46% say they think Trump would be the candidate most likely to ruin Thanksgiving, as much as all the rest of the candidates combined. Hillary Clinton at 22%, Bernie Sanders at 7%, Jeb Bush and Ben Carson at 6%, Ted Cruz at 4%, and Marco Rubio at 1% round out the standings on who people think would be most likely to wreck the holiday.
When it comes to which Presidential candidate people would actually like to have over for Thanksgiving Dinner Clinton wins out with 24% to 18% for Carson, 17% for Trump, 11% for Sanders, 8% for Cruz, and 6% each for Bush and Rubio. Interestingly even though Trump leads the Republican field when it comes to who people want to be the nominee for President, Carson beats him out on the dinner invitation front, 31% to 24%. Clinton leads Sanders 51/17 among Democrats.
The examples of the GOP's reflexive opposition to President Obama's agenda are many but this may be the best one yet: by a 27 point margin Republicans say they disapprove of the President's executive order last year pardoning two Thanksgiving turkeys (Macaroni and Cheese) instead of the customary one. Only 11% of Republicans support the President's executive order last year to 38% who are opposed- that's a pretty clear sign that if you put Obama's name on something GOP voters are going to oppose it pretty much no matter what. Overall there's 35/22 support for the pardon of Macaroni and Cheese thanks to 59/11 support from Democrats and 28/21 from independents.
As the nation relentlessly diversifies, both in its racial composition and religious preferences, White Christians now represent just 46 percent of American adults, according to Pew data provided in response to a request from Next America. That’s down from a 55 percent majority as recently as 2007, and much higher figures through most of U.S. history.
Yet even as White Christians shrink in their overall numbers, they still account for nearly seven-in-10 Americans who identify with, or lean toward, the Republican Party, the Pew study found. White Christians, in fact, represent as large a share of the Republican coalition today as they did of American society overall in 1984, when Ronald Reagan won reelection. A clear majority of all White Christians across the United States now identify as Republican, Pew found.
In sharp contrast, the Pew data show, the Democratic coalition has evolved into a three-legged stool that divides almost evenly between White Christians, non-White Christians, and those from all races who identify either with a non-Christian faith or, increasingly, with no religious tradition at all. Most Americans who don’t identify with any religious faith—a rapidly growing group—now align with Democrats.
These diverging profiles create electoral challenges for each side. Republicans face the tension of balancing the morally conservative preferences of their religiously devout base with the deepening instinct toward cultural tolerance of a society that is growing more secular, particularly among the young.
Democrats must weigh the culturally liberal instincts of their now mostly secular wing of upscale Whites with the often more traditional inclinations of their African-American and Latino supporters, who are much more likely than White Democrats to identify with Christian faiths. In a landmark shift, fewer than half of White Democrats with a college degree now identify as Christians; that’s a much smaller percentage than among the party’s Blacks and Latinos.
Above all, the end of majority status for White Christians marks another milestone in America’s transformation into a kaleidoscope society with no single dominant group.
In 1944, polls showed that White Christians accounted for more than eight-in-10 American adults, notes John C. Green, an expert on religion and politics and dean of the college of arts and sciences at the University of Akron. Surveys found that number declined only slightly, to just under eight-in-10, by 1964. Even in 1984, White Christians still accounted for just under seven-in-10 American adults. The annual merge of results from other national surveys conducted by Pew, though not directly comparable with the huge Religious Landscape poll, suggest that White Christians dipped below majority status sometime between 2012 and 2013. The latest figures placing White Christians at just 46 percent of the adult population confirm a trend, Green says, in which “the relative size of White Christians [has] fallen at an increasing rate over the post-W.W. II period.
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) has found a silver lining in the Paris terror attacks that left 130 people dead: he said the violence prompted Americans to have a serious conversation about national security, and he suggested that conversation in turn has benefited his presidential campaign.
Rubio made the comment while discussing his rising poll numbers with "Fox News Sunday" host Chris Wallace. When Wallace asked whether Rubio thought his foreign policy credentials gave him a polling boost in the wake of the Nov. 13 terror attacks, the Florida Republican replied that his team doesn't put much stock in polls that were "going to fluctuate" this early in the primary race.
He went on to argue that the attacks led to a "positive" shift to national security in the political conversation, one he wanted to see continue "not just for political advantage."
"I obviously am not happy about the events that happened last week in Paris," Rubio told Wallace. "But I think it's a positive development that it suddenly has forced Americans to confront more carefully the issue of national security because it is the most important thing a President will do and it is the most important function of the federal government."
"I hope that we focus on that note more, not just for political advantage but because the world has become a very dangerous place," he added.
Democrats felt very good about winning the Louisiana governor’s race until the Paris attacks happened on Friday the 13th.
Republican Sen. David Vitter, trailing by double digits in the polls, immediately seized on whether the United States should admit Syrian refugees. The issue let him get off the mat after weeks of attacks over his 2007 prostitution scandal. He went to Washington to give a floor speech on Syria, publicly sent a letter warning of a “missing” refugee and got on TV just a little more than 48 hours after the carnage in France with an advertisement invoking the horror.
Vitter and his Republican allies had struggled mightily to make the red-state, off-year race against Democratic state Rep. John Bel Edwards a referendum on President Obama. This gave them the chance.
Elisabeth Pearson, the executive director of Democratic Governors Association, suddenly had flashbacks to last year’s midterm elections. Several winnable contests broke away from them at the last minute because of voter fears about the Ebola outbreak, ISIS beheadings and children pouring across the border. Particularly in Maine, the Democrat was considered the favorite but Republican Gov. Paul LePage came from behind to win by publicly chastising quarantined nurse Kaci Hickox for returning to the state.
The Democratic candidate initially botched his response. A note on Edwards’ Facebook page said he’d work to “both accommodate refugees who are fleeing from religious persecution and ensure that all our people are safe.” Then he edited “accommodate” to “assist,” before putting out a statement that declared, “In light of the recent tragedy in Paris, it’s imperative for us to pause the influx of refugees flowing into our state without more information on the security measures in place.”
Gumbo PAC got its counterattack ad on the air by Wednesday. “It’s David Vitter who said he didn’t believe Syria posed a threat to the United States or our allies,” the narrator said, insisting that Edwards opposed allowing refugees in. The response ad also borrowed a page from the Republican’s 2014 playbook, attacking Vitter for missing “two-thirds of the committee hearings he was supposed to attend on Syria.”