Photo Credit: By United States Mission Geneva [CC-BY-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
August 24, 2013 |
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1. Justice Scalia wonders aloud if citizens should have rocket launchers.
How do you solve a problem like Scalia? The Supreme Court’s most shoot-from-the-hip, right-wing, Tea Partying, really un-judge-like judge mused this week in a speech in Montana about what sort of arms are protected under the Second Amendment. Might “shoulder-fired rocket launchers” be protected? Perhaps, he concluded. Scalia reminded the crowd that the framers of the Constitution put that amendment in there, after all, to preserve the right of the people to revolt against a tyrannical leader.
OK, that’s kind of extreme. Even the gun nuts aren’t making that argument, usually defending their right to bear all kinds of arms for some sort of self-defense against real or imagined criminals.
So it’s a tad off for a Supreme Court justice to be suggesting armed insurrection, no? And, of course, these days, that would probably require significantly more powerful weaponry than the muskets that helped win the Revolutionary War.
As if the gun nuts need any more encouragement to up their firepower.
2. Colorado legislator: Poverty higher among blacks because they eat too much chicken.
At a task force meeting to address economic opportunity and poverty reduction, Colorado State Sen. Vicki Marble (R) delivered a rambling monologue suggesting that the reason for poverty among certain minority groups was their diet, specifically chicken; but no offense, because it’s really delicious chicken.
Here’s what she said verbatim:
“When you look at life expectancy, there are problems in the black race: sickle-cell anemia is something that comes up, diabetes is something that’s prevalent in the genetic makeup and you just can’t help it… Although I’ve got to say, I’ve never had better barbecue and better chicken and ate better in my life than when you go down south and you — I mean love it and everybody loves it. The Mexican diet in Mexico with all of the fresh vegetables. And you go down there and they’re much thinner than when they come up here… they change their diet.”
Let us pause for a fact-check moment: The UN Food and Agriculture Organization recently found obesity rates are higher in Mexico than the United States.
After that, another task force member, Rep. Rhonda Fields (D) had heard quite enough. “The title for this committee is Economic Opportunity Poverty Reduction; and one of the things I will not tolerate is racist and insensitive comments about African Americans.” She added that she would not “engage in a dialogue where I’m in the company, where you are using these stereotyped references about African American and chicken and food… this is not what this committee is all about… it’s not about chicken.”
Meeting adjourned.
3. Fox guest says Oklahoma shooting was partly because shooters could have been aborted.
Yes, you read that right. Janet Morana, the executive director of Priests for Life, an anti-abortion group, said that the three teenagers accused of shooting a jogger for fun are actually survivors of
Roe v. Wade—everyone born after 1973 is, actually—and that could have messed them up, and contributed to their desire to engage in thrill-killing. “There’s a thing called ‘survivor syndrome,’” she explained. “Just the fact that you could have been aborted can affect you. So that’s factor one.”
Then she went on to discuss the less important factors like lack of parenting, and the fact that the accused shooters watched lots of violent video games.
But, yeah, survivor syndrome. It’s a thing. Knowing you could have been aborted. Think about it.
4. Bryan Fischer: Christians are the new blacks.
The American Family Association spokesman took this week’s New Mexico Supreme Court’s decision that a wedding photography business violated the state’s anti-discrimination law by refusing its services to a same-sex couple very hard. How dare they not be allowed to discriminate? Discrimination is what this country was built on. Fischer encouraged all right-thinking businesses like the one in question to “fight fire with fire” and file countersuits, because preventing people from discriminating is discrimination, yup, against Christians. When are Christians going to start suing for the right to discriminate, huh?
“Essentially what this court has done and what the Obama administration has done with this abortifacient mandate is that they have turned Christians into Dred Scott,” Fischer expounded on his show Focal Point. “Christians have no rights which this court is bound to respect. So to me this looks like Jim Crow is alive and well, we’ve got Jim Crow laws right back in operation, Christians are the new blacks.”
Okay, so orange is not the new black? Confused.
5. Alabama GOP candidate: “Homosexuals should stop pretending like they’re married” and Republicans must sign a pledge to make them stop doing that.
Dean Young is running for Congress in Alabama in part because he does not think same-sex couples should have the right to marry, and in part because he does not think Republicans in Congress are sufficiently outraged about gay marriage. He wants to go and straighten everyone out, so to speak.
“I’m against homosexuals pretending like they’re married,” he told a local NBC affiliate. “If you want to have homosexuals pretending like they’re married, then go to the Democrat party.”
He added: “Congress is weak and spineless,” he said. “We get these mealy-mouthed politicians that just want to move up the ladder, and they won’t tell people where they stand.”
He has gone so far as to compose a six-part pledge to fight marriage equality that he wants all Republicans in the race (and probably all Republicans) to sign. It starts with the belief that marriage should only be between a man and a woman and ends with: 6. I support the by-law change to expel any member of the Republican Executive Committee who opposes the party position by supporting gay marriage.”
6. Rep. Mike Coffman (R-CO): Climate change is a conspiracy; only ‘radical environmentalists’ get grants.
Al Gore may feel like the conversation on climate change has improved, and feel a little hopeful that the planet can be saved, but the growing, rather late-in-the-day consensus is only making the nut-job climate science deniers more vehement.
One example is Rep. Mike Coffman, who told a local Colorado radio station that you can only get a grant to do science research if you “submit to the…orthodoxy of climate change by the radical environmentalists.” Coffman also said 97 percent of scientists were wrong, and that climate change is “naturally occurring” with “man-made influences” being “debatable.”
7. Heritage Foundation’s Jim DeMint’s alternative to Obamacare: emergency rooms.
For weeks, we’ve been saying that the Party of "No” just doesn’t seem to have an alternative to Obamacare, which they are so doggedly and hopelessly fighting. But that turns out not to be true. They do have an alternative. Emergency rooms. Why didn’t we think of that? It’s not as if emergency rooms have been proven to be costly, inefficient and all too often ineffective ways to deliver healthcare.
Thankfully Heritage president and former South Carolina senator Jim DeMint pointed this sensible alternative out in a recent town-hall meeting in Tampa, Florida this week. He’s been waging quite a campaign to defund the Affordable Care Act. “This might be that last off-ramp to stop Obamacare before it becomes more enmeshed in our culture,” he warned the room. The law “is not about getting better healthcare,” he continued. Uninsured Americans “will get better healthcare
just going to the emergency room.”
Never mind the inconvenient fact that, as Think Progress points out, in 1989, “the Heritage Foundation was at the forefront of advocating for a requirement to purchase coverage through as system of regulated healthcare marketplaces, the very centerpiece of Obama’s healthcare reform, and later lobbied congressional Republicans to offer the initiative as an alternative to President Bill Clinton’s health proposal.
More than a decade later, Heritage
boosted former Gov. Mitt Romney’s (R-MA) health reform law and the individual mandate included in it, describing the requirement as ‘one that is
clearly consistent with conservative values.’”
Wait, pause, we thought conservative values were the kind that don’t change.
There’s more from Think Progress: “A Heritage healthcare analyst said Romney’s proposal would reform the state’s ‘uncompensated-care payment system,’ force residents to take ‘
personal responsibility for their healthcare and prevent them from simply showing up ‘in emergency rooms.’”
All righty then, that should clear up the Heritage Foundation’s position on that.
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