Month: November 2012

Rick ‘America’s Pastor’ Warren Compares Being Gay to Punching Someone in the Nose, Adultery and Arsenic

Jon Ponder

Warren
Pres. Obama’s favorite bigot, megachurch hatemonger Rick Warren, who once boasted about his ties to Martin Ssempa, a leader in the “kill the gays” movement in Uganda, has stepped in it again:

RICK WARREN: Here’s what we know about life. I have all kinds of natural feelings in my life and it doesn’t necessarily mean that I should act on every feeling. Sometimes I get angry and I feel like punching a guy in the nose. It doesn’t mean I act on it. Sometimes I feel attracted to women who are not my wife. I don’t act on it. Just because I have a feeling doesn’t make it right. Not everything natural is good for me. Arsenic is natural.

You know what else is “natural,” Pastor Rick? Stupidity. Some people are just born that way.

After Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008, he stunned his gay supporters by giving Warren a prominent speaking role at his inauguration. Just weeks before the event, Warren betrayed+ his true colors in an interview when he compared gay marriage to incest and pedophilia. In December 2009, after his relationship with Ssempa and Uganda’s kill-the-gays were exposed, Warren denied they had ever existed.

House GOP Is Squandering Its Chance to Prove They’re Not Petty, Malicious Rogues

Jon Ponder

Republicans have another chance to demonstrate that they’re Americans first and petty, malicious rogues second, and naturally they’re squandering that chance. The manifest fanaticism of Republicans on everything from prudent fiscal measures as confiscatory socialism to Rhodes-scholar ambassadors as treasonous nincompoops to accessible healthcare as Big Brother tyranny are merely the more prominent symptoms of a party gone hopelessly mad. Really. They’ve reached a point of political psychosis.

– P.M. Carpenter

Millennial Voters May Usher in New Era of Liberalism

Buck Banks

How doomed are conservatives? Pretty doomed, if you look carefully at the Pew Research Survey’s close analysis of the youth vote in the 2012 elections. The Republicans’ long-term dilemma has generally been framed in racial terms, but it’s mainly a generational one. The youngest generation of voters contains a much smaller proportion of white voters than previous generations, and those whites in that generation vote Republican by a much smaller margin than their elders. What’s more, younger voters supported President Obama during the last two election cycles for reasons that seem to go beyond the usual reasons — social issues like gay marriage and feminism, immigration policy, or Obama’s personal appeal — and suggest a deeper attachment to liberalism. The proclivities of younger voters may actually portend a full-scale sea change in American politics.

— Jonathan Chait, writing in New York Magazine.

Cole Recommends Extending Bush Tax Cuts for All but 2 Percent

Buck Banks

I think we ought to take the 98 percent deal right now. It doesn’t mean I agree with raising the top 2. I don’t.

— Rep. Tom Cole (R-OK), urging colleagues in a private session “to vote to extend the Bush tax rates for all but the highest earners before the end of the year — and to battle over the rest later,” Politico reports. The conservative Republican said that he believes such a vote would not violate Grover Norquist’s anti-tax pledge and that he’s not alone within Republican circles.

Increased Corporate Taxes Decreases Unemployment

Buck Banks

10%

Increase in the corporate tax rate is associated with a drop of 2.1 percentage points in the unemployment rate, according to a study by Horst Feldmann of the University of Bath in the UK of data on 19 industrial countries. Although raising corporate taxes has been shown to reduce economic growth, it unexpectedly prompts companies to substitute labor for capital and spurs unions to reduce their wage demands to avoid job losses.

Wrong Man: John McCain Doubles Down on Criticism of Administration’s Benghazi Report While Ignoring His Own Record of Misstating Facts

Jon Ponder

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

After U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice met today with her most vocal critics, GOP Sens. John McCain, Lindsay Graham and Kelly Ayotte, to discuss events after the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, the three senators rushed to the microphones to double down on their insistence that Rice had played a role in a conspiracy by the Obama White House to cover up the fact that the attack was a terrorist plot — this in spite of the fact that the president himself labeled it a terror attack within 24 hours after it occurred.

“When Ronald Reagan stood up for workers of Gdansk in Poland, when he stood up for the people of Czechoslovakia in Prague Spring, and America did”
– John McCain, incorrectly ascribing actions to Pres. Reagan, who was governor of California during the Prague Spring

On one of the Sunday shows, Graham compared the conspiracy to the Iran-Contra affair, the Reagan-era scandal in which top Reagan official, including his secretary of defense, only escaped serving time in prison because they were pardoned by their alleged co-conspirator, Reagan’s vice president, George H.W. Bush, after he was elected president. A more realistic assessment came from the Washington Post editorial board, which referred to the Benghazi non-scandal as “bizarre.”

Perhaps the most bizarre aspect — and certainly the most hypocritical part of it — is that it is McCain who is leading the charge against Rice simply because she went on the Sunday shows and said something that proved to be incorrect. No senator has appeared on more Sunday shows than John McCain, and few politicians (who were not currently on the payroll of Fox News) have made as many statements that proved to be wrong.

[…]