dinar_stud

I am not anti anything race related, but I am anti stupidity and self induced ignorance. No problem whatsoever, but nice to see you throw out the race card. It’s an interesting question, but there’s no law that says you have to get your SSN from a Social Security office in the state where you reside. Nowadays, they are all processed centrally and the assignment is based on the zip code of the return address. My guess (and that’s all it is) is that Obama got his SSN as a child living in Indonesia and the application was just processed in Connecticut. That is the way they were processed.

Parts Of The GOP’s Obamacare Alternative Just Rip Off Obamacare House Republicans are planning to unveil a unified alternative to the Affordable Care Act this spring, the Washington Post reported on Monday. Though details of the plan remain sketchy, the measure is “hardly intended as a full replacement of the federal health-care law” and will focus on filling gaps in the health care system. According to the Post, lawmakers will endorse “ability to buy insurance across state lines, guaranteed renewability of policies and changes to medical-malpractice regulations.” Once Obama’s health care reform law is repealed, insurers will be able to discriminate against individuals with pre-existing conditions, though the GOP-backed proposal will offer sicker individuals coverage through “high-risk insurance pools” managed and subsidized by the states.” The alternative will also promote health savings accounts, allow small businesses “to purchase coverage together” and permit young people to stay on their parents’ health care plan until age 26. If that last plank sounds a whole lot like the Affordable Care Act, that’s because it is. Of the seven provisions outlined by the Post, five — save health savings accounts and malpractice reform — are already included in the law in one way or another. The provisions may not be drafted exactly the GOP’s liking, but they accomplish very similar goals: A GOP alternative is not a certainty, however. Republicans had promised to introduce a single party-backed alternative to the law since 2009 and have repeatedly reneged on that pledge. Some conservative lawmakers are still “wary of the push to have House Republicans sing as a unified chorus,” arguing that the party out of power does not have to offer a detailed governing agenda and could make gains in 2014 by criticizing the unpopular law. A detailed proposal could also open the party up to policy criticism. When Republicans last offered a leadership-supported plan in 2009 — which closely resembles the above mentioned principles — the Congressional Budget Office estimated that “the number of non elderly people without health insurance would be reduced by about 3 million relative to current law, leaving about 52 million non elderly residents uninsured.”

What This President Said About U.S. Security Needs To Be Tattooed On Every Congressperson's Hand Franklin Delano Roosevelt laid out a Second Bill of Rights, or an Economic Bill of Rights, in 1944. Little did he know that 70 years later we'd still be fighting for what he knew this nation needed.

Zullo irrelevant in Alabama There are rumors swirling among the birthers that the Alabama Supreme Court will rule on the McInnish v. Chapman case this week. I don’t have any reason to think one way or the other about this prediction, but whatever the Court says, the affidavit of Mike Zullo, submitted to the court in an amicus brief, is irrelevant. (On March 12, there was a Zullo Affidavit page on the Cold Case Posse Web site, but it was gone this morning. I don’t know if it was intentionally scrubbed or if it was lost in the recovery from a recent hacking incident.) The problem with predicting what the Alabama Supreme Court will do is that there are at least two birther sympathizers on the court, Chief Justice Roy Moore and Associate Justice Tom Parker. It’s possible there there will be a split decision and it is also possible for them to rule against McInnish, but insert birther-friendly language whining about having their hands died by the law in an otherwise serious question about Obama. I have confidence in the ultimate victory of right over chaos and so I think the Alabama Supreme Court will look at the merits of the case and affirm two lower court rulings. The sole question to be decided by the Alabama Supreme Court is whether or not the Secretary of State of Alabama had a duty in the last election to investigate President Obamas qualifications to appear on the ballot in Alabama. The parties to the case and an amicus brief from the Alabama Democratic Party argue the issues upon which the court will rule. Several nut case amicus briefs were also submitted making wild claims about President Obama; they are not relevant to the question of law in this case. One of those amicus briefs is the affidavit of Mike Zullo. The first few sentences show that it is incompetent. Zullo swears that he has personal knowledge of things he’s heard from other people and that’s not how it works. Such testimony would not be allowed in court. One would think that anyone who was familiar with law enforcement would know what is testimony and what is not, but Zullo appears not understand this, nor apparently does he know what’s being decided in Alabama. But whatever opinion one has of the Zullo affidavit, it is irrelevant to this Alabama Supreme Court decision because it does not address the questions of law that the Court is deciding.

There you go fabricating more BS

hahahahahahahahahahahaha Since when is calling BS to the birther movement hating the white race??? Now that is the craziest race card I have ever heard. you cant blame amercainc that most if not all birthers are white.

Dont believe in imaginary entities created to keep the masses in check, under the guise of religion. Sorry to tell you their are no such things as Obamaphones. If you want to keep the truth alive we should call them reaganphones or Bushphones. You are correct we the people. and yet you ignore that the Affordable care Act is for the people, the millions of US citizens that could not afford or were denied medical care because of prior conditions. And you also forget it was deemed constitutional so it is covered under the "We the people" part because its there to help the people, even thou you ignore the part where it also says in the constuitution "in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare"

When you start fabricating BS, its hatred, jealousy or just plain ignorance. name your poison.

You know this has always confused me too. Is this coming Friday "this" Friday? Or is it "next" Friday? Is this Friday the next Friday, or is next Friday the Friday after this Friday which would be the Friday after next? I'm so confuzzled.

. Soooooooo if we go by your skewed stand point. Cable TV should have a higher priority over healthcare??? Facebook and twitter should have a higher priority over healthcare??? When things in my house get bad I reduce cable TV, I even have reduced my internet speed so i can pay less so that i can move that money to more important things. Its called setting priorities. And you should remember that that government "imposed healthcare disaster" as you put it 1. has historical precedent when the Act for the relief of sick and disabled seaman was imposed in 1798. and 2. Its a exact copy paste of the, conservative republican think tank, Heritage Foundation proposed to the republican party in 1989/ Republicans have tried 50 times and struck out every single time

He actually said and I quote Tell me where did he say cut???

The ultimate guide to debunking right-wingers’ insane persecution fantasies Conservatives love to pretend they're being denied their religious liberty. Here's how to prove them wrong Excerpted from “Taking Liberties: Why Religious Freedom Doesn't Give You the Right to Tell Other People What to Do” Certain words should not be tossed around lightly. Persecution is one of those words. Religious right leaders and their followers often claim that they are being persecuted in the United States. They should watch their words carefully. Their claims are offensive; they don’t know the first thing about persecution. One doesn’t have to look far to find examples of real religious persecution in the world. In some countries, people can be imprisoned, beaten, or even killed because of what they believe. Certain religious groups are illegal and denied the right to meet. This is real persecution. By contrast, being offended because a clerk in a discount store said “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas” pales. Only the most confused mind would equate the two. We have worked hard in the United States to find the right balance concerning religious-freedom matters. Despite what the religious right would have Americans believe, this is not an issue that our culture and legal systems take lightly. Claims of a violation of religious freedom are usually taken very seriously. An entire body of law has evolved in the courts to protect this right. The right of conscience is, appropriately, considered precious and inviolable to Americans. Far from being persecuted, houses of worship and the religious denominations that sponsor them enjoy great liberty in America. Their activities are subjected to very little government regulation. They are often exempt from laws that other groups must follow. The government bends over backward to avoid interfering in the internal matters of religious groups and does so only in the most extreme cases. What the religious right labels “persecution” is something else entirely: it is the natural pushback that occurs when any one sectarian group goes too far in trying to control the lives of others. Americans are more than happy to allow religious organizations to tend to their own matters and make their own decisions about internal governance. When those religious groups overstep their bounds and demand that people who don’t even subscribe to their beliefs follow their rigid theology, that is another matter entirely. Before I delve into this a little more, it would be helpful to step back and take a look at the state of religious liberty in the United States today. Far from being persecuted, I would assert that religion’s position is one of extreme privilege. Consider the following points: I have created this list not necessarily to criticize or call for changing these policies (although some of them are overdue for scrutiny) but to make the point that the leaders of religious organizations have very little reason to complain. Their position is an exalted one. They are well regarded by lawmakers, and their institutions are not only tax supported in some cases but are also beyond the reach of secular law. What they are experiencing is not persecution; it is preferential status. Why, then, is there so much complaining from the religious right? (And it does come primarily from religious conservatives. Mainline and moderate clergy tend to understand their position of privilege and appreciate it.) Why do we hear so many cries about persecution? Primarily we hear this because, despite their cushy position in society, religious groups do not get everything they want. In the case of ultraconservative religious groups, some of what they want is unrealistic or would require a complete reordering of society and perhaps a different constitution. In other words, our nation is not the theocracy that many in the religious right would prefer. When they attempt to make our society more theocratic, plenty of Americans resist. Our refusal to roll over and submit to them is, to their mind, a form of persecution. Evolving cultural trends have also led to a certain degree of panic among religious conservatives. For years, they engaged in *** bashing with abandon. They were confident that the public was on their side, and for some years, the picture did indeed remain murky when it came to questions of LGBTQ rights. But then the pendulum began to swing. It’s hard to say exactly when this happened. Certainly by the late 1970s, attitudes toward gays were changing. This shift was even reflected in the popular culture, with the introduction of sympathetic *** characters on television sitcoms and in films. The trend continued throughout the 1980s and ’90s. These early battles tended to focus over issues that sound jarring to today’s ears. For example, in 1978, California voters faced Proposition 6, a measure that would have made it mandatory for public schools to fire *** teachers. The measure was defeated by nearly 60 percent, and even Ronald Reagan, then governor of the state, opposed it. Mobilized by such campaigns, the LGBTQ community went on the offensive through legislative action and attempted to change public opinion, employing an organized campaign that had many facets. It urged gays to come out of the closet and make their sexuality known to friends, family, coworkers, neighbors, and so on. At the same time, it worked to dispel misperceptions about gays and debunk stereotypes. Polls began to show a shift toward a position of tolerance. Religious right groups were alarmed but continued to argue that public opinion was on their side. They even managed to win court victories. In 1986, the Supreme Court upheld a Georgia law that banned acts of consensual sodomy between adults. (In 2003, the ruling was overturned when a new case reached the high court.) As years passed, public opinion on issues such as the ability of same-sex couples to adopt or gays to receive employment protection continued to change. In 2003, another milestone occurred when same-sex marriage became legal in Massachusetts in the wake of a ruling by the state’s supreme judicial court. While the ruling may have cheered LGBTQ activists, it opened up another front in the culture wars. States became battlegrounds. Several states adopted constitutional amendments to bar same-sex marriage after campaigns led by the religious right and, in the case of California, bankrolled by the Catholic Church and the Mormons. Opponents of marriage equality looked to be on a roll. Then, in 2012, their momentum stalled. Three states—Maryland, Maine, and Washington—voted for marriage equality. A fourth, Minnesota, voted down a state constitutional amendment barring same-sex marriage. Not long after that, public-opinion polls began to show, for the first time ever, majority support in favor of marriage equality. Among younger people, the question wasn’t even close. One poll showed that 81 percent of younger Americans said they favored marriage equality. Statistics like this really put religious conservatives into a state of panic. It looked as if the work they had done to roll back same-sex marriage might be undone in the future. As the national discussion shifted to marriage equality, something important was overlooked: how much ground the religious right had lost over the issue of LGBTQ rights in general. Fifteen years ago, even most LGBTQ activists weren’t pushing for samesex marriage; many of them considered that a long-term goal. Suddenly the issue was thrust into the national spotlight, and indications were that public sentiment was shifting. In the face of this, religious right groups could do little but start to spin wild tales of persecution. They argued that they had been forced to accommodate LGBTQ Americans in certain ways, or that they soon would be. Much of this was only so much carping, barely worthy of a response. Religious conservatives know full well that houses of worship in America can’t be forced to give admission or provide services to anyone. Churches have an absolute right to determine their own membership and the qualifications for earning it. Some houses of worship have an open-door policy and more or less welcome everyone. Others are stricter. Many churches, especially those affiliated with the more conservative end of the theological spectrum, apply certain moral standards or expect certain behaviors from their members. Those who run afoul can be counseled to correct their ways or summarily excommunicated. This is entirely a private matter. A person who is kicked out of a house of worship or denied membership has no legal recourse. In light of this, it’s difficult to determine where some religious conservatives got the notion that the government was prepared to make them do anything when it comes to *** rights. As I noted in chapter 3, the state has no power to compel houses of worship to perform same-sex marriages. The First Amendment guarantees against that. Yet the rhetoric continues to escalate. In April of 2013, a rightwing radio talk-show host named Janet Mefferd made the inevitable Nazi comparison. Mefferd, who was angry after a public high school in Michigan cancelled a speech by antigay politician Rick Santorum, said she can see the “day when every Christian who supports real marriage might be made to wear a yellow patch on the sleeve, a ‘badge of shame’ to identify us as ‘anti-*** haters.’ Kind of like the Jews in Nazi Germany.” I don’t have to explain why talk like this is so off-base and offensive. It collapses under the weight of its own absurdity. Yet we hear more and more of it. Why do some religious conservatives embrace such lurid rhetoric? They seem to be extremely troubled by the shifts of cultural opinion. They are aware that if current trends continue, their views on LGBTQ issues will become antiquated and, eventually, socially unacceptable. But note what I said: socially unacceptable, not legally. That distinction is crucial. There was a time when some churches espoused racism and segregation. Few churches today would do this. Of course, nothing in the law would stop a church from espousing these views today, and who can say, there may be some on the fringes that still do. Churches dropped these views because of societal pressure, not government action. The religious right’s beef, then, would seem to be with the direction of the culture. To be sure, the legislature and the legal system can sometimes push the culture along. When Massachusetts’s supreme court ruled that marriage must be extended to same-sex couples, some residents of that state were undoubtedly upset. Some even lobbied for changing the state constitution to bar the practice. But that effort failed, and, in time, the waters calmed. No house of worship has been forced to admit *** members or perform services for them. By and large, most people seem to have moved on—except for a fundamentalist fringe. It is not the job of the government to protect houses of worship from the backlash they may experience if their views on same-sex marriage (or some other issue) are perceived as antiquated and out of step with majority opinion. As long as that backlash takes peaceful forms and doesn’t involve actual assaults on churches, the state has no obligation to intervene. At times, it seems as if the religious right’s real problem is mere coexistence with LGBTQ Americans. This may sound harsh, but in listening to their rhetoric, it is sometimes difficult to draw any other conclusion. In late March of 2013, Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, appeared on a conservative radio program and warned that if the Supreme Court were to strike down state constitutional provisions barring same-sex marriage, a literal revolution might occur. “If you get government out of whack with where the people are and it goes too far, you create revolution,” Perkins said. “I think you could see a social and cultural revolution if the court goes too far on this.” Perkins added that a ruling favoring same-sex marriage “could literally split this nation in two and create such political and cultural turmoil that I’m not sure we could recover from [it].” It’s difficult to conceive of the source of such rhetoric. If the past is any guide, the country actually does quite well with cultural change, despite problems along the way. Many people opposed the right of women to vote in 1920, but the alteration was made without violent revolution. The civil-rights era of the 1960s did, of course, spark violence, riots, and assassinations. But, in the end, the country held together and moved forward. We will survive the era of *** rights as well. I think it’s a safe bet that relatively few people are willing to take to the streets in armed conflict because same-sex couples are able to get married. Even in the heartland of America, in Iowa, where same-sex marriage was enforced by a judicial ruling in 2009, no civil war has arisen, and so far no one has seen fit to try to pull the state from the union. Perkins speaks of turmoil so serious that the country could not recover. Yes, there has been some turmoil and sharp differences of opinion over same-sex marriage in the states where it is legal, but those jurisdictions have not been split apart, and succession movements, if they exist, aren’t getting any traction. (As a matter of fact, the only state that regularly talks about pulling out of the union is Texas, which doesn’t recognize same-sex marriage in any form.) As of this writing, same-sex marriage was legal in California, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington State, and Washington, DC. I monitor church-state and religious-liberty issues very closely for a living. If any houses of worship or any member of the clergy had been persecuted in those states for refusing to serve LGBTQ residents or for speaking harshly of them, I would know about it. In fact, all of us would know about it. Such a story would gain national headlines. It hasn’t happened. The rights of religious groups in this area are secure. There is no persecution. We’re much more likely to see fallout from private citizens who own businesses and who decide that, due to their religious beliefs, they will not deal with LGBTQ people. There have already been some cases like these involving wedding photographers, caterers, florists, bakers, and others who refuse to provide services to same-sex couples. They say their religious beliefs preclude them from offering business services to these couples. Forcing them to do so, they argue, would be a form of persecution. But is it really persecution? Remember, we’re talking here about retail establishments, not houses of worship. Generally speaking, public-accommodation laws in the United States prohibit retail stores and establishments that offer services from discriminating on the basis of race, color, religion, or national origin. These protections are found in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and were intended, in part, to address issues such as hotels and restaurants that refused to serve African Americans. Sexual orientation is not included on the list of protected classes in federal law, but some states and cities do have laws that protect gays. No one would seriously argue today that forcing the owner of a business to end discriminatory policies is a form of persecution. It makes no difference if those policies are motivated by religious belief, it is still discrimination. Some Americans today are Islamophobic and don’t want to deal with people who are Muslim or whom they perceive to be Muslim. Requiring that they do so, as the law mandates, is not persecution. It’s an attempt to ensure a fair and just society. A nondiscrimination policy doesn’t prohibit anyone from worshipping as he or she pleases. It doesn’t block that person from attending the house of worship of his or her choice, praying, reading religious books and so on. Such policies do require owners of businesses to serve the public. This is not too much to ask. Perhaps people who do not wish to serve all members of the public should not open shops, since the understanding is that retail establishments do, in fact, serve the public. A second area where one often hears the cry of persecution involves public schools. As I’ve noted elsewhere in this book, public schools serve young people from a variety of religious and philosophical backgrounds. They are not the exclusive property of any one religious group. Yet fundamentalist Christians, looking at the schools and seeing all of those “unsaved” youngsters, can’t help but salivate. They tend to view the schools as mission fields. Public schools can never be that. Courts have been clear about this. That hasn’t stopped the religious right from trying. When they are curbed in their efforts to use the public schools for evangelism, they often cry persecution and assert that their religious freedom is being violated. Religious freedom gives every student the right to pray in a public school in a private and non-disruptive way. Students may also read religious texts during their free time and engage in voluntary religious activities with their friends (again, in a non-disruptive way). Many secondary schools now have student-run religious clubs that meet during non-instructional time. Why isn’t this enough for the religious right? It’s because all of these activities are focused on individuals. They don’t really allow for aggressive forms of proselytizing. And proselytizing is what the religious right wants. Public schools are a focal point for so many culture-war battles for a good reason: a lot of children attend those schools. No other institution provides such a large gathering of young people on a regular basis. Religious conservatives seek to use the nation’s compulsory school-attendance laws and network of public schools to spread their faith. A lot of people don’t just resist this, they go to court to stop it. Several recent cases have dealt with so-called student-led prayer at school events. Religious-right legal groups came up with this ruse some years back to get around earlier court rulings striking down compulsory prayer in public schools. Their thinking was that if teacher-led prayer in public schools was unconstitutional (and clearly, it was), the practice might survive if shifted to students. Federal courts have generally taken a dim view of the scheme, but this hasn’t slowed down the religious right. Public-school graduation ceremonies are not like Speakers Corner in London, where anyone can get up and say anything. They are controlled events, often carefully timed and choreographed to send certain messages that school officials want to convey. Since these are public schools we’re talking about, it’s not surprising that one of these may be a message of inclusion: all students are welcome here. It’s hard to send that message if a student hijacks the event and begins preaching. At many schools, education officials ask to review the comments that the valedictorian or salutatorian plans to offer. This is acceptable because, again, a public-school graduation ceremony is not open-mic night at the local improv club. And it’s not just inappropriate religious proselytizing that may be removed or curtailed. Any comments deemed not fitting for the ceremony or grossly off topic will likely be removed as well. This is not persecution because there is no constitutional right to take over a public school event and turn it into a quasi church service. Likewise, we often hear claims of persecution when government refuses to help religious groups enforce their theology or spread sectarian messages. Earlier, I discussed the controversies that often arise over the presence of religious symbols on public land. On the occasions when courts order these symbols removed, claims are made of persecution. Again, these claims are misguided. If the government invaded the sacred and private space of churches and attempted to tell clergy which symbols they could post on their own property, then that would indeed be persecution. It would not be tolerated. But that’s not what’s happening when aggressive religious groups are told they do not have the right to monopolize public space and link their symbols to government. Americans United and the American Civil Liberties Union have been involved in several cases challenging the display of the Ten Commandments in public schools or at courthouses. These schools and courthouses are public, tax-supported institutions. They must represent and serve all people in the community, not just those who venerate the Ten Commandments as a holy document. Defenders of the Ten Commandments often argue that the document is merely legalistic in nature. Anyone who takes the time to read it can see that this isn’t true. Several of the commandments on the first tablet are religious in nature and have no counterpart in our secular laws. The clear purpose of displaying the Ten Commandments is to promote one religious view above others. This is made obvious by backers of these displays, who often talk about using the commandments to influence people’s religious behavior. It’s not persecution to stop the government from endorsing one religious view over others. Our Constitution, the Supreme Court has noted several times, calls for neutrality on religious issues. It’s not neutrality when the laws of a certain theological perspective are elevated to a position of prominence above all others. As I mentioned elsewhere in this book, the purpose of such displays is almost always to send a message: Certain believers are insiders with the government and enjoy its favor. All others are on the outside and are, at best, second-class citizens. If there’s any persecution going on here, it’s against the people deemed lesser citizens because they don’t share the theology expressed on those tablets. The government is not persecuting anyone or any religious group when it prevents them from trying to run the lives of others. Religious conservatives yearn to tell others what to do and to make their theology the supreme law of the land. The state can’t help them with this; indeed, it has an obligation to protect the rights of others by ensuring that this does not happen. The great irony here is that what the religious right is trying to do—forge a government that bows to its repressive theology—would result in a great deal of persecution. We’ve had a taste of this already, and it’s a bitter taste indeed. Across the country, legislators, prodded by religious right groups, are trying to pass laws banning the imposition of Islamic law. (Newsflash for these guys: the First Amendment already bans the imposition of religious law.) Some of these measures are so sweeping or poorly written that they would ban purely religious practices that Muslims consider to be part of a personal law that is binding on believers of that faith. In other cases, right-wing religious zealots have actually gone to court to try to block Muslims from building mosques on land that they own and that has been zoned for religious use. No legal argument is put forth in these cases, just bigotry. These same organizations often raise money and incite public opinion by trading in the crudest forms of Islamophobia. They stir up hate and turn American against American. And we’re supposed to believe these very organizations are the ones being persecuted? It’s not persecution to tell someone to stop being a jerk or to demand that they respect the Constitution. It’s not persecution to tell one group of believers that they must extend to other groups the same rights they themselves demand and even take for granted. It’s not persecution to remind a band of religious extremists who are convinced that they and they alone possess religious truth that, while they have the right to believe such a thing, their zeal confers upon them no power to tell others what to do. When the religious right raises bogus claims of persecution, it belittles the sufferings of those believers who truly are persecuted. I would advise members of that movement to learn what real persecution is. Go to Saudi Arabia, where it’s illegal to even open a Christian church, and experience the fear of those Christian believers who dare to worship in private homes, aware that at any moment they may be imprisoned. Visit North Korea, where all religions have been swept away and replaced with a bizarre form of worship of the state and its leader that purports to promote self-reliance but, in reality, merely serves as a vehicle for oppression. Visit any region under the control of the Taliban, a movement so extreme that, in Afghanistan, they trashed that nation’s cultural heritage by blowing up two sixth-century statutes of Buddha because they were declared false idols by religious leaders who are intolerant of any other faith but Islam.. There is real religious persecution in the world. Right-wing Christians in America aren’t experiencing it. The fact that a same-sex couple may live on your block is not persecution; a huge department store choosing to display secular holiday symbols in December is not persecution. A court ruling enforcing the separation of church and state by removing sectarian symbols from the courthouse is not persecution. Nor is spirited opposition to the political goals of religious groups persecution. Any group — religious or secular — that enters the political arena must be prepared for organized opposition to its agenda. Such opposition is certainly to be expected in the case of ultraconservative religious groups because their agenda is so controversial. It’s true that the rhetoric gets a little heated sometimes, and unfortunate things may be said. That’s the rough-and-tumble of American politics. It’s hardly persecution. In light of what I wrote earlier in this chapter about religious groups and their ability to lobby and their often-easy access to the offices of legislators, there would seem to be little ground for them to complain. Of course, many of them do complain—chiefly because, despite their unfettered ability to lobby in Washington, DC, and state capitals, they still don’t get everything they want. The right wing’s persecution complex often goes hand in hand with another unfortunate trait: paranoia. In the 1990s, it was not uncommon to hear dark talk of “black helicopters” that supposedly harassed the right wing. Claims were made that Bill Clinton was planning to somehow remain in office after his second term ended, and so on. Admittedly, this stuff was more common on the very fringes of the right, but, like the various conspiracy theories centering around President Obama’s birth certificate, these kooky claims would occasionally cross over to the large religious right groups. In 2010, I attended a meeting of the Family Research Council, the nation’s largest religious right organization and one that labors to portray itself as “mainstream.” Among the speakers was a man named Dale Peterson, a garrulous cowboy from Alabama and a Republican Party activist. Employing borderline-racist rhetoric, Peterson took potshots at Obama’s lineage, remarking, “I don’t know what he is.” After his speech, Peterson told a reporter that he does not believe Obama was born in the United States. The persecution complex and the paranoia give birth to a third phenomenon: an almost messianic belief that only Far Right religious conservatives can save the country from certain doom. In my years of attending religious right gatherings, it’s this talk that has struck me the most. I sometimes get the feeling that extreme religious conservatives, despite their frequent displays of hyper-patriotism and their tendency to venerate national symbols, such as the American flag, don’t like the country much. Modern America is too secular, too *** friendly, too focused on sex, and so on. Every year these gatherings are predicated on the promise of a pending divine punishment that never seems to come (although some among the religious right are sure that things like hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, and other bad storms are signs of the deity’s displeasure). Backsliding, sin-obsessed America is due for a hiding very soon, speakers at these events love to say. The only thing that can save us is to allow fundamentalist religious zealots to make the rules for everyone. Speakers at religious-right events love the concept of the false choice. One of their favorites is to insist that *** rights and religious freedom can’t coexist. We must choose one or the other, so which will it be? During the 2010 meeting of the Family Research Council, I heard Bryan Fischer, a public-policy analyst at the American Family Association, explain this for the crowd. “We must choose between the homosexual agenda and religious liberty, because we simply cannot have both,” Fischer wailed. Again, it is the classic false choice. We can’t have both? Who says? . . . Other than Fischer, that is. To the extent that there is such a thing as a “homosexual agenda,” and assuming it is represented in part by the legalization of same-sex marriage, then we already know that we can have both. Massachusetts has both. Iowa has both. New York has both. I am confident that, at some point not too far off from now, the entire nation will have both. Of course, there are some things that can’t peacefully coexist: democracy and theocracy, for example. Real religious liberty can’t survive in the face of ongoing attacks by fundamentalists who are convinced that they have a God-given mandate to tell others what to do. One side will win, and the other will lose. On its website, the ADF states that it “seeks to recover the robust Christendomic theology of the 3rd, 4th, and 5th centuries.” That’s really the problem, isn’t it? When leaders and members of the religious right go looking for heroes of religious freedom, they don’t turn to Roger Williams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, or even the Baptist preacher John Leland. They turn to Constantine the Great. It’s no surprise that many Americans would rather not live in a society governed by a fifth-century understanding of church and state. Many Americans believe that to even suggest it and hold it up as a good thing is alarming. Many Americans are going to do all they can to resist anyone or any movement attempting to impose that on them. Standing up to and resisting this type of fundamentally anti-American interpretation of the relationship between religion and government is far from persecution. Many of us would consider it something quite different: good, old-fashioned patriotism.

Rand Paul backs bill that could lead to crack down on states where voters legalized weed Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) has thrown his support behind legislation that Republicans could use to force President Barack Obama to crack down on legal marijuana in states like Colorado and Washington. Speaking to Fox News on Thursday, the libertarian-leaning senator said he supported the Enforce the Law Act, which has been approved by the House. The legislation would allow Congress to sue the president for failing to faithfully execute laws. Paul said that Obama appeared to be “writing his own laws whenever he feels like it.” “He also does need to enforce the law. We write laws and he is just deciding willy-nilly if he likes it he enforces it, if he doesn’t, he won’t enforce it, and we really think he needs to be chastened, rebuked, and told that he needs to obey the constitution,” he added. Republicans have championed the bill as a way to make President Barack Obama enforce immigration and health care laws, and prevent the executive branch from overstretching its regulatory authority. But a committee report submitted by a co-sponsor of the bill suggested Republicans would also use the law to try to force Obama to crack down on marijuana in states that have legalized its possession and sale. The report stated that Obama was not faithfully executing federal law by allowing states to legalize marijuana for recreational and medical use. The federal Controlled Substances Act lists marijuana as a Schedule I substance, the most prohibited classification, which is reserved for dangerous drugs with no medical value. Not enforcing federal drug laws in states that have legalized marijuana “infringes on Congress’s lawmaking authority,” the report said. An official statement for the bill said “failing to enforce federal drug laws in states that permit medical and recreational marijuana use and the announcement that the Justice Department will stop prosecuting low-level drug offenders under mandatory minimum sentencing laws” were both examples of Obama’s executive overreach. Paul, who is typically considered an ally of drug reform advocates, did not discuss the legislation’s potential effects on states’ marijuana laws during his Fox News interview. He has previously said he supports states’ rights to legalize marijuana. Obama has said he will veto the bill if it comes to his desk, but the legislation is unlikely to survive the Democratic-led Senate. Watch video below. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0HZyno0KEJY

Jesse Ventura rips b*tchy billionaires: The poor work just as hard as you do Tuesday on his show “Off the Grid,” former Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura “called bullsh*t” on the “one percent” who are complaining about anti-rich persecution despite being allowed to run amok in the United States. “With great power comes great responsibility, and with great wealth comes the right to b*tch and moan when you’re being persecuted. Not on my watch. I’m knocking the silver spoons out of the number one percenters mouths on today’s ‘Off the Grid,’” he remarked. Venture capitalist Tom Perkins recently wrote in the Wall Street Journal that wealthy people like himself could end up being forced into Nazi-like concentration camps if liberals continued to wage a “progressive war on the American one percent.” In 2010, another venture capitalist, Steve Schwarzman, compared tax increases to Hitler’s invasion of Poland. Ventura said it looked like the ultra-rich had a “sickness” and were dangerously addicted to money. “I think that’s what’s wrong with these one percenters. They have so much money they couldn’t spend it in their lifetime or their grandchildren’s lifetime, but it truly becomes a sickness.” Ventura also questioned the conventional wisdom that billionaires earn their enormous salaries because they work more than the rest of Americans. He laughed at the notion that the one percent “work harder.” “Is it work pushing numbers around on papers and moving decimal points?” he said. “Or is it work washing dishes or digging a ditch? Because I highly doubt that any of these one percenters — I’d love to know how many of them began like I did, at Mama Rosa’s restaurant washing dishes for $1.50 an hour. That’s work, and it’s as hard of work washing them dishes all day long as it would be doing what these CEOs do.” “I’ve been a CEO, they don’t get their hands dirty very often,” Ventura added. “They go to all sorts of free meals all the time. They may put in the time and effort, but what you define as work, well, maybe it is mental work, but it is certainly not physical work.” Watch video below.

And yet laws that allow to discriminate on religious beliefs is not divisive?? Or ahow about laws that allow people to bully others based on their religious beliefs is not divisive?. Pleeeeeeeeeease. The truth only divides those that wish to ignore it and prefer to impose their version of the truth.

5 disturbing ways the religious right is trying to rewrite American history Disregarding the separation of church and state is just the beginning... Former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay captured headlines recently with a claim that God wrote the U.S. Constitution. The strange assertion does a great disservice to James Madison, who is generally acknowledged as the “Father of the Constitution,” but it’s hardly the weirdest thing members of the far right have said about U.S. government over the years. The truth is, many leaders of the Religious Right and their followers could use a civics lesson. Their descriptions of American government and the history behind it are usually bound up more in wishful thinking than reality. Like creationists who made up a fake “science” because they don’t like evolution, Religious Right acolytes are prone to rewrite our nation’s governing documents to fit their preconceived notions. Here are some great moments in Religious Right civics (mis)education: 1. David Barton says the three branches of government come straight from the Old Testament. David Barton is a Texas-based pseudo-historian much beloved by the Religious Right. Barton doesn’t actually have a degree in history—he graduated from Oral Roberts University with a degree in Christian Education—but that hasn’t stopped him from posing as a professor. Barton is buddies with Glenn Beck, who uses him as “faculty” for online classes that are marketed to gullible people. In 2010, Talking Points Memo actually paid money to view some of the classes. In one lecture, Barton helpfully explained that the three branches of the U.S. government are based on a passage from the Book of Isaiah. The Old Testament is full of autocratic kings, not democracy. So where did Barton come up with this notion? You just have to know how to read the book. In case you’re wondering, the passage in question, Isaiah 33:22, reads, “For the Lord is our judge, the Lord is our lawgiver, the Lord is our king; he will save us.” That pretty much settles it. Elsewhere in the video, Barton explained that the separation of powers comes from Jeremiah 17:9 and tax exemption for churches (which, by the way, isn’t even mentioned in the Constitution) comes from Ezra 7:24. 2. Bryan Fischer advocates limiting voting to those who own property. Fischer, director of issue analysis for government and public policy at the American Family Association, seems to pine for the 19th century. In January, he outdid himself by advocating limiting voting to property holders only. “You know, back in the day, the colonial period, you had to be a landowner, a property owner, to be eligible to vote, and I don’t think that’s a bad idea,” Fisher said on his radio program. “And the reason is very simple: If somebody owns property in a community, they’re vested in that community. If they’re renters, they’re gonna be up and gone. They could leave the next day. They’ve got no tie to the community, they’ve got no long-term investment in the community. But someone who owns property, he cares, now he cares, about the public policies that manage that community.” Aside from Fischer’s dubious assertions—who says renters don’t care about their communities?—what he’s advocating here is elitist and fundamentally anti-democratic, which is why such policies no longer exist. Although common during the colonial era, property qualifications for voting began disappearing in the early 1800s and were pretty much a memory by 1850. 3. Pat Robertson says nothing in the Constitution calls for separation of church and state. TV preacher Pat Robertson holds a law degree from Yale Law School, but you would never know that based on the things he says about the Constitution. According to Robertson, “there is no such thing in the Constitution” as church-state separation; that concept is “a lie of the left.” Robertson has asserted that the separation of church and state comes from “the constitution of the communist Soviet Union.” Robertson publications have compared the “wall of separation between church and state”—a metaphor used by Thomas Jefferson—to the Berlin Wall. Robertson’s attacks on church-state separation go back to the early 1980s and continue at a brisk pace today. Last year Robertson marked the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on his “700 Club” program by once again bemoaning the supposed lack of religious faith in America, which he blamed on the separation policy. He also asserted (incorrectly) that religion has been eliminated from public schools. Americans, Robertson said, have gone astray. “The reason is they have lost their faith in God, they have lost their faith in Jesus Christ, they don’t believe in what the Bible says and the core values of our society have gone away,” Robertson groused. “We’ve done it here in America. We’ve abolished prayer in the schools, we’ve taken out Bible-reading in the schools and little by little by little we’ve eroded the rights—we keep talking about separation and this that and the other.” 4. Jay Sekulow says the Ten Commandments symbolize American law. Sekulow, chief attorney for TV preacher Pat Robertson, is a big fan of the Ten Commandments. His right-wing legal group, the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ), frequently litigates in court to defend displays of the Ten Commandments in courthouses and other government buildings. The Ten Commandments, Sekulow’s ACLJ asserts, “have long stood as a symbol of the ideals embodied in America’s judicial system” and “form a bright strand in the fabric of America’s heritage and legal development.” There’s a big problem with statements like these: They are pretty much the exact opposite of the truth. The Ten Commandments would be the basis for a theocratic government, not one based on religious liberty. Several of the commandments attempt to regulate humankind’s relationship to God and have no reflection in U.S. secular law. (In other words, in this country you’re allowed to worship “false gods,” you can bow before graven images and you don’t have to remember or keep holy the Sabbath.) In 2003, a collection of 41 historians and legal scholars demolished the “Ten-Commandments-Is-The-Basis-Of-U.S.-Law” school of thought once and for all. In a case from Alabama, they filed a devastating legal brief. The scholars surveyed the sources used by the Founders when writing the Constitution and found no references to the Ten Commandments. Instead, the Founders relied on English common and statutory law, Roman law, the civil law of continental Europe and strains of international law. American law, they pointed out, was also influenced by the writings of William Blackstone, John Locke, Adam Smith and others as well as the Magna Carta, the Federalist Papers and other sources. “Each of these documents had a far greater influence on America’s laws than the Ten Commandments,” asserted the brief. “Indeed, the legal and historical record does not include significant and meaningful references to the Ten Commandments, the Pentateuch or to biblical law generally….[A]s can best be determined, no delegate ever mentioned the Ten Commandments or the Bible.” 5. Ben Carson says divine intervention created America. Carson is a surgeon and author of inspirational, quasi-Christian self-help books. He’s also quite popular among the Religious Right, and his name has been bandied about as a possible presidential candidate for the Republican Party in 2016. Like a lot of right-wingers, Carson believes God loves America best and takes a special interest in our nation. In a recent opinion column, Carson asserted, “There are many well-documented stories about God’s intervention on behalf of our country during the War of Independence.” Despite claiming there are “many” of these stories, Carson told only one: a hoary chestnut about Benjamin Franklin leading the delegates in prayer during a particularly difficult moment of the Constitutional Convention. The tale was much loved by U.S. Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) who delighted in telling it on the floor of the Senate in the 1980s when arguing for school prayer amendments. Of course, it’s false. Franklin did indeed make a suggestion for prayer during the 1787 convention, but his motion was not acted on. Instead the delegates broke up the meeting and reconvened later, where they managed to finish work on the Constitution relying solely on human intervention. Instead of trying to rewrite American history to make the Constitution say things it plainly does not say, Religious Right leaders would do better simply to admit that they find that document lacking and yearn for a do-over. Every now and then, one of them does that. In 2008, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, who was running for president at the time, told an audience in Michigan, “I have opponents in this race who do not want to change the Constitution. But I believe it’s a lot easier to change the Constitution than it would be to change the word of the living God. And that’s what we need to do—to amend the Constitution so it’s in God’s standards rather than try to change God’s standards so it lines up with some contemporary view.” Of course, Huckabee doesn’t want to rewrite the Constitution according to God’s standards. He wants to rewrite it according to what Mike Huckabee thinks are God’s standards. Those two concepts may not have much in common, which is why, at the end of the day, it’s best to tell Huckabee and other Religious Right zealots to hang up their powdered wigs and leave the handiwork of James Madison alone.

For those who’d happily forgotten, here’s what Romney said in March 2012. The trick here is that Romney decided to define geopolitical antagonism somewhat arbitrarily and narrowly as being a menace on the United Nations Security Council. It’s not that Russia isn’t a menace, its that its broader influence is significantly more limited than, for instance, China’s, which Romney more or less dismissed as an afterthought. And in a way, the fact that this supposedly great adversary keeps making a menace of itself in bordering, former Soviet republics more or less demonstrates the opposite of what the revisionists think it proves.

GOP’s pathetic Putin debacle: How their foreign policy politicking backfiredFrom Sarah Palin to Lindsey Graham, the right's posture on Russia has revealed the movement's biggest flaws I’d intended to let this go, because it’s so incredibly derpy and I don’t really want to jump waist-deep into derp, but now I see that jumping waist-deep into derp is the price of entry into any argument about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, so here we go. When I noticed yesterday that Sean Hannity had invited special guest Sarah Palin on to his show to sound off about developments in Ukraine, I offhandedly mocked both of them on Twitter. After all, what could be less informative than two lightweight reactionaries deceiving themselves and their viewers about why developments in a part of the world where U.S. interests are relatively minor has everything to do with Barack Obama’s failed presidency. What I didn’t know was that, in anticipation of her appearance, right-wing twitter had already drenched itself in onanistic emissions, because Palin claimed to have predicted the invasion as a vice presidential candidate back in 2008. “After the Russian Army invaded the nation of Georgia,” Palin explained. “Senator Obama’s reaction was one of indecision and moral equivalence, the kind of response that would only encourage Russia’s Putin to invade Ukraine next.” What happened next would vindicate Palin the same way a small spike in the price of gold six years from now will vindicate Glenn Beck. Obama beat John McCain in a landslide and Russia didn’t invade Ukraine. Russia continued to not invade Ukraine through Obama’s first term, during which it ratified a new bilateral treaty with the U.S. committing to a dramatic reduction in the size of its nuclear arsenal. After Obama’s re-election, Russia, again, didn’t invade Ukraine, and proceeded to not invade Ukraine for over a year, until internal developments (which Palin somehow omitted from her 2008 warning) gave Putin a pretext and incentive to invade Ukraine, at which point he ordered troops into Crimea. But that’s only knee-high levels of derp. The rest of it comes from other Republicans, who reverse engineered the crisis and miraculously found that its catalysts all happen to substantiate their previously held obsessions and grievances — and from a handful of journalists #slatepitching or getting taken in by this spin. For Palin it’s Obama’s moral equivalence, but for Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-SC, it’s Benghazi, for Rudy Giuliani it’s that Obama lacks Putin’s impressive testicular fortitude (see Syria), and for much of the GOP, it’s Obama’s inability to understand geopolitics as well as that foreign policy redoubt Mitt Romney. Most of this is just cheap point scoring. Having slowly realized they can’t fault Obama’s response to Russia’s invasion, they’ve retreated instead to attributing the whole thing to one or another of Obama’s perceived, but unrelated weaknesses or failures. To swallow any of this you need to believe that Putin would’ve begged off but for some unrelated historical curiosity that by pure coincidence happens to be the subject of some long-standing GOP obsession or political attack. But it also requires treating Russia’s decision to invade as one undertaken specifically to weaken or embarrass the U.S. or endanger its interests. In other words, to conceding Romney’s much-mocked argument that Russia is the United States’ top geopolitical foe. I understand why Republicans would make that argument now. “I told you so’s” make great politics. But a few opinion writers have fallen for it too. It’s still wrong. For those who’d happily forgotten, here’s what Romney said in March 2012. The trick here is that Romney decided to define geopolitical antagonism somewhat arbitrarily and narrowly as being a menace on the United Nations Security Council. It’s not that Russia isn’t a menace, its that its broader influence is significantly more limited than, for instance, China’s, which Romney more or less dismissed as an afterthought. And in a way, the fact that this supposedly great adversary keeps making a menace of itself in bordering, former Soviet republics more or less demonstrates the opposite of what the revisionists think it proves.

Republicans in congress. They have done it 8 times in the last 6 years. And the republican congress does??? I dont think so.

2015 Budget: Obama Seeks More Money for Veterans Two years after Congress turned him down the first time, President Barack Obama is seeking money for a jobs program that would put veterans to work in national parks and elsewhere. The president’s budget proposal for the fiscal year starting Oct. 1 includes $1 billion for the Veterans Jobs Corps, an idea Mr. Obama first stumped for in his 2012 State of the Union speech and which Congress snuffed out later that year. Overall, Mr. Obama is asking Congress for a 6.5% bump in veterans spending over 2014 levels, to $163.9 billion. That total includes $68.4 billion in spending authority for medical care and other discretionary programs, plus $95.6 billion in veterans’ entitlements such as pensions and disability compensation. If Congress gives the president what he’s asking for, the Department of Veterans Affairs will spend $1 of every $25 in federal spending in 2015. With the nation at war for more than 12 years and the Vietnam generation proving an aggressive lobbying force, the VA budget has proved immune to the overall climate of budget austerity in recent years. There are no audible voices on Capitol Hill proposing budget cuts for veterans programs. Veterans service organizations, such as the Veterans of Foreign Wars and Disabled American Veterans, hold considerable clout and brought that power to bear on Congress last month when they mobilized to strip an unpopular measure from the Congressional appropriations bill that would have reduced many retirees cost of living increases by 1 percentage point. The president’s jobs initiative is intended to address the high rate of unemployment among younger veterans. While veterans overall tend to have a relatively low jobless rate, younger veterans often struggle to find work. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that veterans between the ages of 18 and 24 faced an unemployment rate of 14.2% at the end of last year, compared with 9.8% for those aged 25 to 34. Mr. Obama’s proposal would boost hiring of veterans as first responders and for a conservation program resembling President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal effort to put the unemployed to work building the national-park system. In the 2015 budget, Mr. Obama tied this initiative to the Department of the Interior’s Centennial Upgrade program to rebuild the national parks. The VA expects an uptick of veterans seeking medical care, psychological support, housing, disability compensation and other services next year, with total VA enrollment seen jumping to 9.3 million from 9 million. Factors behind the increase include a surge of Vietnam veterans reaching the age of increased medical needs, as well as Iraq and Afghanistan veterans leaving the military and seeking free health care. The VA is reaching out to veterans to let them know the services available to them, said Joe Davis, spokesman for the Veterans of Foreign Wars. “As a service-driven organization, they need to increase their customer base, and that’s why they have some tremendous outreach programs to advertise their service to America’s veteran population,” he said. And, as the military draws down from wartime highs, a wave of new veterans is becoming eligible for VA services. “The Army at its post-9/11 peak was around 570,000,” said Mr. Davis. “They’re drawing down to 440,000 to 450,000; that’s 120,000 troops who are all eligible for some type of VA program or service.” To help handle the increase, the president is asking Congress for $65.3 billion in discretionary authority, plus the right to spend $3.1 billion the VA pulls in from insurance companies and patient copays. The proposed budget would increase funding for programs to address veterans homelessness and boost money for prosthetic research and systems to handle the persistent backlog of disability benefits claims. The president’s budget keeps funding flat for mental health services, an area that could come under new scrutiny, especially following results of a decade-long Army and National Institute of Mental Health study showing that approximately one-quarter of troops, who have never even seen combat, exhibit some sort of psychological disorder.

Rep. Paul Ryan misused data to show poverty programs don’t work, say economists he cited. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) misrepresented or misunderstood the data he cited in his exhaustive critique of the federal safety net, said some of the economists he cited in his 204-page report. The former vice presidential candidate relied heavily on academic research for his report, “The War On Poverty: 50 Years Later,” which was released Monday and noted the poverty rate remained stuck at 15 percent – the highest in a generation. “And the trends are not encouraging,” Ryan wrote. “Federal programs are not only failing to address the problem. They are also in some significant respects making it worse. Changes are clearly necessary, and the first step is to evaluate what the federal government is doing right now.” But some authors of that research said Ryan apparently left out or ignored statistics that showed federal anti-poverty programs worked exactly as they were intended, reported The Fiscal Times. For example, the Republican lawmaker left off data measured in a recent study of the two most successful years in President Lyndon Johnson’s war on poverty to argue that federal efforts hadn’t worked. Researchers at the Columbia Population Research Center examined the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM), which factors in government benefits such as food stamps and the earned-income tax credit, and found the poverty rate had dropped from 26 percent in 1967 to 15 percent in 2012. But Ryan only cited data from 1969 onward, noted one of the Columbia study’s authors, ignoring 36 percent of the total decline. “It’s technically correct, but it’s an odd way to cite the research,” said Jane Waldfogel, a professor at Columbia University. “In my experience, usually you use all of the available data. There’s no justification given. It’s unfortunate because it really understates the progress we’ve made in reducing poverty.” Ryan also cites the same research paper to support his claim that a 1996 welfare reform program caused a decline in child poverty, but its lead author said the lawmaker had ignored a major expansion in the earned-income tax credit in 1993 and the economic expansion at the time. “While our data can’t disentangle those three things, attributing the decline in poverty after 1993 to the welfare reform of 1996 seems to go beyond what the data show,” said Columbia researcher Chris Wimer. Another researcher said Ryan misstated the findings in one of her papers on the effects of housing assistance on labor. Barbara Wolfe, a professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told The Fiscal Times that Ryan’s report misstated by $260 the average annual decline in earnings in the first year of voucher assistance and by $229 in the five years afterward. “Our findings are a decrease of $598 NOT his $858 and in five years the decrease we estimate is $47.46 (which is not statistically different from zero),” Wolfe said in an email. She also noted that Ryan’s paper ignored another study by the same researchers that found “the housing program has more benefits than costs so focusing on only one outcome is insufficient from a policy perspective.” Wolfe also objected to the Wisconsin lawmaker’s use of another study she wrote, saying Ryan had misrepresented its narrow and now obsolete findings about some Medicaid recipients prior to the 1996 welfare reform bill. Ryan cited a study by Jeffrey Brown and Amy Finkelstein on Medicaid’s effect on private long-term care insurance to claim an “implicit tax” of up to 90 percent is passed along to consumers who purchase private plans. But Brown, a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said Ryan ignored data that show other factors would limit the size of the private market even if Medicaid was reformed. A spokesperson said Ryan welcomed the criticism because it encouraged debate about federal anti-poverty programs. “This report will help start the conversation,” Ryan himself said Monday. “It shows that some programs work; others don’t. And for many of them, we just don’t know.”

What? You dont like the truth??? The whole benghazi "scandal" has been debunked from day 1. This is just more proof. I wonder where was all the conspiracy theories and ire when we were attacked 13 times with more then 50 deaths, including the life of a US ambassador. I know where it was, No Where. The day you start demanding the investigation of those 13 embassy attacks under Bush let me know.

Fox News host calls out Darrell Issa for ‘highest level of falsehood’ on Benghazi Fox News host Chris Wallace on Sunday confronted Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) after he was rated as having the “highest level of falsehood” for his obsession with the terrorist attacks in Benghazi. Last month, The Washington Post investigated Issa’s recent suggestion that former Secretary of State Hillarious Clinton had told Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta to “stand down” instead of letting the U.S. military fight the 2012 terrorist attack. “Issa is crossing a line when he suggests there was no response — or a deliberate effort to hinder it,” fact checker Glenn Kessler concluded. A fact check last year had found that Issa was wrong to assert that Clinton approved an embassy cable in Libya because her “signature” was on it. In fact, the secretary’s signature is stamped on all cables. “For the second time, they gave you ‘Four Pinocchios,’ which is their highest level of falsehood,” Wallace told Issa on Sunday. Issa defended himself by saying he was just “quoting something that was in somebody else’s report” when he accused Clinton of approving the embassy cable. And in the case of the so-called “stand down” order, he said that the former secretary of state was responsible for the overall normalization policy in Libya. “Witnesses have told us that they asked for help,” Issa opined. “The president himself implied that he told Leon Panetta, then-secretary of defense, to use what efforts they could. And what we know for a fact is, not one rescue of DOD was launched to get there in that 8.5 hours.” “But to be honest, you do not have any evidence that secretary Clinton told Leon Panetta to stand down,” Wallace pressed. Issa argued that he wasn’t using the term ‘stand down’ as it normally applied to military operations, “but rather, the failure to react.” “The fact that only State Department assets, and only assets inside the country were ever used,” he declared. “That members of the armed forces, gun-carrying trained people were not allowed to get on the aircraft to go and attempt the rescue. Those kinds of things, through State Department resources, represent a stand down.” “Not maybe on the technical terms of ‘stand down, soldier,’ but on what the American people believe is a failure to respond when they could have.” Watch the video below from Fox News’ Fox News Sunday, broadcast March 2, 2013. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3byuirFy7Nw

Third: Farah is simply lying when he claims that "Obama has not worn that flag pin since that day." How do we know? Look at the picture of Obama on the "Death Blow" cover to your left of WorldNetWeekly (WND's repackaging of stories into a magazine-like e-publication) that came out the same week as Farah's column. What is it that Obama has on his lapel? Why, it's a flag pin. Unless Farah can prove that this photo was taken before the above-referenced incident, this means Farah's own website has proven him a liar. So why is Farah engaged in peddling these easily discredited lies? Because he wants you to send him some money: One great way to remind ourselves and others how important it is to ensure Obama doesn’t get another four years in office is to start wearing the same symbol he disdained in 2008 – and ever since. That’s why I have ordered thousands of American flag lapel pins – just like the one Obama discarded – and am making them available to real Americans across the land to wear proudly leading up to Election Day in November. Unlike Obama, I think it is an excellent, inexpensive and powerful way to demonstrate one’s patriotism. In the hopes of popularizing this campaign, the WND Superstore is making available at low cost and high volume these pins – made in America, by the way. It’s a small act of defiance. It’s a small gesture. It’s a way to remind yourself all those with whom you come into contact in the coming months that Obama must go.In other words, Farah is lying in order to sell some flag pins. How shameless and utterly craven. At the end of his July 31 column, in which he accused Obama of having "mocked" the Bible -- in fact, Obama simply pointed out the undisputed fact that people interpret it differently and that in an exclusively Christian society it would be difficult to agree on "whose Christianity" to teach -- Farah asserts, "No one has seen Obama attend a church service or attend a Bible study since he got to the White House." Again, Farah is simply lying through his teeth. Here's Obama going to church in January 2010. And September 2010. And December 2011. And January 2012. And March 2012. And April 2012. In short: The vast majority of the American public has seen Obama go to church. The fact that Farah missed this tells us all we need to know about WND's newsgathering capabilities. Or it just makes Farah a sloppy liar. Farah even lies about himself Despite getting caught telling such sloppy lies, Farah continued to do it. In his Aug. 8 column, Farah repeated his falsehood from two months earlier that Anita Dunn "fawn over the greatest mass murderer in history, Mao Zedong. (She calls him one of her two 'favorite political philosophers.')" Farah's mendacity is so ingrained and pervasive that he'll even lie about himself. Farah started his Aug. 30 column with a falsehood: that the Southern Poverty Law Center "inspir[ed] a shooting attack on the Family Research Council in Washington." In fact, nobody -- not even the FRC's Tony Perkins -- has provided any evidence whatsoever to prove that. The rest of Farah's column is devoted to whining about a new SPLCpiece on WND, which Farah claims "mixes misinformation, innuendo and outright lies to paint a picture of an extremist organization rather than what it admits is one of the most popular news organizations on the Internet." Farah then tried to rebut some of the article's alleged falsehoods, telling new lies in the process. For instance: One of my board members is credited with joining me in an effort to revive the Sacramento Union, the daily newspaper I once ran, in 2004. Neither one of us was involved in any such effort. The SPLC cites ConWebWatch for this claim, apparently taken from a 2007 article citing a Sacramento Business Journal article stating that "WorldNetDaily.com execs and contributors Richard Botkin and Farah" are on the advisory board if the Union revival. In other words, Farah is lying through his teeth. Again. Farah also complains: SPLC attempts to link me with R.J. Rushdoony, whom it identifies as the “father of Christian Reconstructionism.” Yet, reconstructionists, including the late Rushdoony, all know or knew I do not subscribe to their theological views. Farah seems to be trying to split hairs here. He doesn't explain what "theological views" of Rushdoony he does not "subscribe to," but it's clear that Farah moves in reconstructionist circles -- the two were both (and Farah may still be) members of the secretive right-wing group the Council for National Policy, and WND board member Wayne Johnson is also on the board of the Rushdoony-founded Chalcedon Foundation. And as ConWebWatch has documented, Farah does hold some reconstructionist views, like opposition to public education and the death penalty for moral crimes such as adultery. Farah writes: The article contends an organization I founded, Western Journalism Center, “was hit with a $2 million libel suit for promoting a ‘report’ suggesting that White House Deputy Counsel Vincent Foster had been the victim of foul play, rather than suicide. (The suit was later dismissed.)” No such lawsuit was ever filed – though the Bill Clinton White House did, in fact, order a highly publicized Internal Revenue Service audit of WJC as a result of the investigation. The SPLC's wording on this is imprecise, which Farah is trying to take advantage of. The specific allegation appears to be that a WJC-published article by Christopher Ruddy claimed that the Park Police had staged the scene of Foster's death, which resulted in a lawsuit by one of the Park Police officers named in Ruddy's article. That is sourced to Dan Moldea's book "A Washington Tragedy: How the Death of Vincent Foster Ignited A Political Firestorm."Farah denounced Moldea's book in a 1998column as a "journalistic con job" and, even worse, boring -- but he did not challenge Moldea's depiction of the lawsuit. Farah writes: SPLC claims I was “scheduled to be a featured guest at a 2007 conference run by Vision Forum Ministries, an ultraconservative outfit whose director Doug Phillips is the son of Constitution Party co-founder Howard Phillips.” I have never been invited to speak at such an event! The Vision Forum Ministries page on the conference (which appears to have been canceled) would seem to prove him wrong. Farah also writes: SPLC makes the completely unfounded accusation that “WND shilled for a publication titled ‘The Antichrist Identity’ that claimed President Obama is a crypto-Communist ‘apostle’ of the ‘New World Order’ who is setting up the planet for a takeover by ‘Jewish Masonic’ elites who will reduce the population by 5.5 billion and ‘enslave all of mankind under the thumb of a Jewish master race led by a world messiah of Jewish ancestry who is to rule from Jerusalem.’” This is a complete fabrication – made up out of whole cloth. The SPLC points out that the publishers of "The Antichrist Identity" rented WND's mailing list to promote it, so it's not entirely untrue to call that "shilling." Besides, WND is no stranger to portraying Obama is the Antichrist, so it's unlikely that they saw the book as so extreme they should not accept money to rent out its mailing list to promote it. Farah also repeats his disingenuous claim that WND has a wide variety of opinion because it published a couple of token liberals: Yes, there are “ultra-conservative” views expressed at WND. But, of course, SPLC neglects to mention there are also ultra-liberal views expressed at WND in what is the broadest spectrum of political opinion to be found anywhere in the world. Repeatedly, SPLC caricatures WND’s Judeo-Christian worldview as “anti-***” and “anti-Muslim” – an incendiary and explosive combination that, according to the assailant, inspired a recent violent attack on Family Research Council, one of its other prominent targets, that resulted in the shooting of its security guard. What SPLC does next is to use partial quotes from a long list of individual commentators over a 15-year period to suggest all of their opinions somehow represent those of WND. Of course, SPLC doesn’t quote from a single liberal contributor – people like Bill Press and Ellen Ratner – because that would contradict the thesis that WND is a monolithic, extremist company that pushes Christian dominionism. In fact, of the three dozen or so columnists WND regularly publishes, Press and Ratner are the only liberals, apparently kept around only so Farah can claim that WND has "the broadest spectrum of political opinion to be found anywhere in the world." They're never promoted the way the "ultra-conservative" columnists are -- of which there are many more -- usually buried at the bottom of the commentary page while all the conservatives and right-wingers get better placement. Farah even complains of the SPLC article that "The race card is repeatedly played, too – ignoring the fact that WND showcases twice as many black columnists than any other news or commentary forum in the world." The fact that Farah treats that as a bragging point suggests that the only reason WND has so many black conservative columnists -- many more than the total number of liberals he publishes, by the way -- is to inoculate it from charges of racism. That presumably gives WND license to publish Pat Buchanan, known for his racially charged work, and to engage in arace-baiting campaign by publishing Colin Flaherty's articles depicting blacks as mob-prone thugs. After all these disingenuous lies and misrepresentations, Farah still claims that "SPLC is a dangerous, repulsive group of liars and frauds with only two things in mind – making money through direct-mail scare tactics and recklessly putting targets on the backs of 'enemies,' like me, whom it demonizes with false accusations and misrepresentations." Farah, it seems, truly does lack a conscience. If he is so amoral as to tell lie after lie to his readers, why should anyone trust anything else WND has to say? Lies spread across WND Indeed, Farah's disregard for facts is spilling over into the rest of his organization. An Aug. 24 article by Bob Unruh carried the headline, "Is your smartphone donating to Obama's campaign?" The implication, of course, is that Obama is stealing money from you through your smartphone -- a shocking allegation if it were in any way true. Needless to say, it's not -- and not even Unruh accused Obama of theft. Rather, it's about potential scams perpetrated by gaining access to personal information stored in smartphones. Unruh's only mention of Obama doesn't come until the 17th paragraph of his article, and it's limited to noting that "Barack Obama’s campaign already uses a campaign app to identify registered Democrats by first name, last initial and age." How did WND's headline writer take that minor mention and concoct the idea that Obama was stealing money from smartphone users? Maybe Obama should file a libel lawsuit against WND so we can all find out. An Aug. 30 WND article by Aaron Klein on a court blocking a new voter ID law in Texas carries the head line "Texas voter ID ruling based on 'faked' data." As with the previous article, not even Klein argues that "faked" data was cited in the case. Rather, Klein spends his article attacking the Brennan Center for Justice, who he claims "was heavily instrumental in opposing the voter ID law in Texas, including providing key data to the Justice Department and to the organizations behind the lawsuit against the law." Klein asserts that the Brennan Center is a "radical group that has a history of biased research," but at no point does Klein address the quality of the data allegedly used in the Texas case, let alone claim that it was "faked." Instead, as part of documenting the Brennan Center's alleged "history of questionable research," Klein rehashes a decade-old attack in which the right-wing Weekly Standard claimed that the Brennan Center "deliberately faked" in support of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law. Klein didn't mention, however, that the Weekly Standard's Brennan-bashing has been dismissed as a partisan attack. The Brookings Institution's Thomas Mann wrote: Sound familiar? Harsh and unsubstantiated personal attacks from seemingly independent voices. Highly selective and contentious bits of information packaged to conjure up a vast conspiracy. Amazing strategic and rhetorical consistency in the nominally uncoordinated campaign to discredit a very inconvenient body of research. And confidence that the media will lend the charges credibility, if only by framing stories in the familiar "he said, she said" crossfire. I am appalled by the nature and ferocity of the attack on this body of research. I say this as someone who was present when this research was first conceived, served on a Brennan Center committee to explore its policy implications, and testified publicly on its quality and significance. I am a supporter of the new law and believe its major provisions are constitutional. But I am willing to place on the line my professional reputation, built on more than three decades of work at the American Political Science Association and the Brookings Institution, in asserting that the demonization of this research is bogus and in no way undermines its central conclusions. Of course, WND isn't terribly interested in fairness or telling the truth. Or even following established journalistic standards. Given this record of perfidy, anything that WND publishes should be viewed skeptically at best and should probably be ignored completely. The Perils Of Trusting WorldNetDaily his week actual journalist Rachel Maddow learned the hard way what happens when you trust the "journalism" published by WorldNetDaily. It began on the August 4 edition of her show, during a segment about how birthers view President Obama's 50th birthday, when Maddow played a clip of Limbaugh saying, "Tomorrow is Obama's birthday -- not that we've seen any proof of that." Newsbusters – and Limbaugh himself – pounced on Maddow, claiming she had misleadingly presented a year-old clip as being only a day old. In response, she issued a correction on her show the next day, in which she explained where the error came from: As the screenshot after the jump demonstrates, an August 4 WND article did indeed claim Limbaugh had made the relevant remarks earlier that very same day. WND has since disappeared the article without issuing a correction or apology. It remains in Google cache for the time being. WND does this sort of thing a lot. For instance, earlier this year, columnist Jack Cashill peddled the loony conspiracy theory that a photo of Obama had been Photoshopped into a picture of his grandparents. In fact, he was clearly Photoshopped out, as evidenced by the presence of Obama's knee in the purported "original" photo. After Media Matters noted the error, WND deleted the claim without issuing a correction. When Salon's Justin Elliott pressed WND founder and editor Joseph Farah on why WND didn't issue a correction, all he got in return were insults ("How long have you been in this business, punk?") and an admission that "we publish some misinformation by columnists." (And how!) WND is all too willing to put its rabidly anti-Obama agenda before the facts, as evidenced by their birtherobsession and unhinged rhetoric. That a "news" site would make such a basic mistake regarding one of its closest allies -- then bury the mistake instead of owning up to it -- only confirms that it can't be trusted, period.