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New Poll Shows Armed Rebellion Supported By 44% Of Republicans

(Poll at http://publicmind.fdu.edu/2013/guncontrol/]) This goes to show that the sensationalistic endorsement of fringe conspiracy theories that are driven forward in the name of freedom and small government by the conservative right are starting to take hold. The history of politics has shown us time and time again that the words that win vocabulary dominance can end up influencing or deciding which way public support goes — and the Republican side of things has proven itself to be quite effective of making use of fear as a motivator, especially through their propaganda wing, Fox News.

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It is said that Republicans are too out of touch, too socially conservative on issues like right-to-life and gay rights. "When you look at the population growth," says GOP consultant Steve Schmidt, "the actual party is shrinking. It's becoming more white. It's becoming older."

Consider the Electoral College picture.

Of the seven mega-states, California, New York and Illinois appear lost to the GOP. Pennsylvania has not gone Republican since 1988. Ohio and Florida, both crucial, are now swing states. Whites have become a minority in Texas. When Texas goes, America goes.

This year could be the last hurrah. Excerpts from http://townhall.com/columnists/patbuchanan/2012/07/27/ in_the_long_run_is_the_gop_dead/page/full/

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Bush aide: 'GOP is shrinking daily before our eyes'

When center-left pundits are critical of Republican extremism, it's expected. When a former aide to George W. Bush and John McCain does it, the criticism resonates a little louder. In this case, it's Mark McKinnon, who wants "a new Republican Party."

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Increasingly, it is becoming clear that the party is against everything and for nothing.

Nothing on taxes. Nothing on gun control. Nothing on climate change. Nothing on gay marriage. Nothing on immigration reform (or an incremental, piece-by-piece approach, which will result in nothing). It's a very odd situation when the losing party is the party refusing to negotiate. It may be how you disrupt, but it is not how you govern, or how you ever hope to regain a majority.

And so, we have a Republican Party today willing to eliminate any prospect for a decent future for anyone, including itself, if it cannot be a future that is 100 percent in accordance with its core beliefs and principles. That's not governing. That's just lobbing hand grenades. If you're only standing on principle to appear taller, then you appear smaller. And the GOP is shrinking daily before our eyes.

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Send in the Clowns

WHEN thinking about the state of the Republican Party, I defer to a point that the Democratic consultant James Carville made the other day: “When I hear people talking about the troubled state of today’s Republican Party, it calls to mind something Lester Maddox said one time back when he was governor of Georgia. He said the problem with Georgia prisons was ‘the quality of the inmates.’ The problem with the Republican Party is the quality of the people who vote in their primaries and caucuses. Everybody says they need a better candidate, or they need a better message but — in my opinion — the Republicans have an inmate problem.” The political obsessions of the Republican base — from denying global warming to defending assault weapons to opposing any tax increases under any conditions, to resisting any immigration reform — are making it impossible to be a Republican moderate, said Carville. And without more Republican moderates, there is no way to strike the kind of centrist bargains that have been at the heart of American progress — that got us where we are and are essential for where we need to go.

Republican politicians today have a choice: either change your base by educating and leading G.O.P. voters back to the center-right from the far right, or start a new party that is more inclusive, focused on smaller but smarter government and market-based, fact-based solutions to our biggest problems.

But if Republicans continue to be led around by, and live in fear of, a base that denies global warming after Hurricane Sandy and refuses to ban assault weapons after Sandy Hook — a base that would rather see every American’s taxes rise rather than increase taxes on millionaires — the party has no future. It can’t win with a base that is at war with math, physics, human biology, economics and common-sense gun laws all at the same time.

Do you know how troubled this party is? Two weeks ago, the former G.O.P. Senate majority leader Bob Dole, a great American, went to the Senate floor in his wheelchair to show his support for Senate ratification of the U.N. Convention on the Rights of People With Disabilities. Nevertheless, the bill failed to win the two-thirds needed for ratification, because only eight Republicans dared to join Democrats in support of the treaty, which was negotiated and signed by George W. Bush! It essentially requires other countries to improve to our level of protection for the disabled, without requiring us to change any laws. It has already been ratified by 126 countries. But it failed in the Senate because Rick Santorum managed to convince the G.O.P. base that the treaty would threaten U.S. “sovereignty.” Santorum stopped just short of warning that space aliens would take over our country if we ratified the treaty.

Because they control the House, this radical Republican base is now holding us all back. President Obama was moving to the center in these budget negotiations. He reduced his demand for higher tax revenues to $1.2 trillion from $1.6 trillion; he upped the level at which Americans who would be hit with higher taxes to those earning $400,000 a year from $250,000; and he made his own base holler by offering to cut long-term spending by lowering the inflation adjustment index for Social Security. It seemed that with a little more Republican compromise, Obama would have met them in the middle, and we could have had a grand bargain that would put the country on a sounder fiscal trajectory and signal to the markets, the world and ourselves that we can still do big hard things together. That will have to wait. Now the best hope is some mini-, crisis-averting, Band-Aid.

The G.O.P. today needs its own D.L.C. The Democratic Leadership Council was founded by a group of Democratic governors and activists, led by Bill Clinton, in 1985 to lead the party back to the center from a failing leftward course that had resulted in it being repeatedly shut out of the presidency, except after Watergate. I asked Clinton’s pollster, Stan Greenberg, what Republicans could learn from the Clinton/D.L.C. experience.

“There is a lot of pain,” said Greenberg. “You can’t change the party without pain. You can’t just make some head-fakes to Hispanics.” The D.L.C., he noted, started by building an organization over 10 years and by running more centrist Democrats “in the primaries.” It didn’t just wait to pivot to the center in the general election. It fought for and educated the Democrat base in the primaries, by D.L.C. candidates running in support of free trade, Nafta and welfare reform. “With Clinton, we won the primaries in a way that defined us, so that he could run in the general election as the candidate of broad appeal.” That fractured the party and produced Ralph Nader, which cost Al Gore the 2000 election. But after losing that election, said Greenberg, the Democrats came together around a moderate-left core and did not engage “in dysfunctional primaries.”

Republicans need to go through a similar process of building new institutions and coalitions to support candidates who can move the party back to the center-right. Today, all their institutions, from think tanks to Fox TV, said Greenberg, “are reinforcing the trends that are marginalizing their party.”

Unfortunately, we don’t have a decade to wait for a G.O.P. D.L.C. Some leaders in that party need to stand up for sane compromises right now. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/23/opinion/sunday/friedman-send-in-the-
clowns.html?ref=opinion&_r=0

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Attending Same-Sex Weddings Will ‘Harm Relationship With God’ Says Bishop

Not entirely unexpected but disgusting all the same. Rhode Island Roman Catholic Bishop Thomas Tobin has written a pastoral letter underlining his church’s backwards views on marriage equality. Rhode Island became the tenth U.S. state to legalize marriage equality last week, the culmination of 16 years of battle in the heavily Catholic state.

But, as with any struggle for justice, the outworn ways of thinking are slow to die. Bishop Tobin is one of those dinosaurs who believes that homosexuality is a sin and that gays are lesser beings without the rights afforded to the rest of us. He proved that with his May 2 pastoral letter:

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At this moment of cultural change, it is important to affirm the teaching of the Church, based on God’s word, that “homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered,” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, #2357) and always sinful. And because “same-sex marriages” are clearly contrary to God’s plan for the human family, and therefore objectively sinful, Catholics should examine their consciences very carefully before deciding whether or not to endorse same-sex relationships or attend same-sex ceremonies, realizing that to do so might harm their relationship with God and cause significant scandal to others.

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(There's) the word "objective". The way he uses it, “… therefore objectively sinful…” is directly opposite of the word’s actual meaning. An objective principle is one that is uncolored by an opinion. Facts are objective. While Bishop Tobin might like to think that his archaic laws are objective, that is just not true.

As to “… harm(ing) their relationship with God” goes, who is Bishop Tobin to say that? Yes, I realize that the Catholic church sees men like Tobin as intercessors between God and the members of their church but Martin Luther had a thing or two to say about that several hundred years ago. As far as the theory of intercession goes, I’m with him. Every person’s relationship with God (however they see Him/Her/It) is personal, everyone has their own relationship with the Divine. Every person should be able to decide what weddings they want to attend and base that on their own understanding of God. Perhaps people who do decide to attend same-sex weddings will be thinking of Jesus’ command to love one another instead of trying to find ways to hate others. More at http://www.addictinginfo.org/2013/05/05/attending-same-sex-weddings-wi
ll-harm-relationship-with-god-says-bishop/

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Harvard’s Niall Ferguson Suggests Keynes’ Economic Theories Were Flawed… Because He Was Gay

Conservative Harvard professor Niall Ferguson reportedly told a large group of financial advisers and investors in California this week that the problem with John Maynard Keynes‘ economic philosophy was that he didn’t care about future generations. Ferguson came to this conclusion because Keynes was gay and had no children.

Financial Advisor magazine’s Tom Kostigen was the first to report the statements by Ferguson, writing:

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Ferguson responded to a question about Keynes’ famous philosophy of self-interest versus the economic philosophy of Edmund Burke, who believed there was a social contract among the living, as well as the dead. Ferguson asked the audience how many children Keynes had. He explained that Keynes had none because he was a homosexual and was married to a ballerina, with whom he likely talked of “poetry” rather than procreated. The audience went quiet at the remark. Some attendees later said they found the remarks offensive…

[Ferguson said] it’s only logical that Keynes would take this selfish worldview because he was an “effete” member of society. Apparently, in Ferguson’s world, if you are gay or childless, you cannot care about future generations nor society.

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Ferguson evidently realized his comments were controversial and potentially offensive, as he published an “unqualified apology” on his website today:

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I should not have suggested – in an off-the-cuff response that was not part of my presentation – that Keynes was indifferent to the long run because he had no children, nor that he had no children because he was gay. This was doubly stupid. First, it is obvious that people who do not have children also care about future generations. Second, I had forgotten that Keynes’s wife Lydia miscarried.

My disagreements with Keynes’s economic philosophy have never had anything to do with his sexual orientation. It is simply false to suggest, as I did, that his approach to economic policy was inspired by any aspect of his personal life. As those who know me and my work are well aware, I detest all prejudice, sexual or otherwise.

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http://www.mediaite.com/online/harvards-niall-ferguson-suggests-keynes
-economic-theories-were-flawed-because-he-was-gay/

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