Tag Archives: Topic: Politics

The Hill: “As newly-elected Republican governors plot ways to push back against the healthcare law, the Republican Governors Association (RGA) is preparing an organized effort aimed at helping governors fight its implementation.”

“I don’t think the court should be in the business of telling the governor and the Legislature how to spend the people’s money. But we’ll see what the court rules.”

CNSNews: “Rep. Steve King (R.-Iowa) says that House Republicans should include language that prohibits any funding for implementation of Obamacare in literally every appropriations bill that passes the House of Representatives this year, thus forcing a showdown on the issue with the Democratic majority Senate and President Barack Obama.”

Robert Knight writing in the Washington Times: “Over the past year, it has become obvious that what leftists cannot win at the ballot box, they will accomplish via bureaucratic dictate . . . The new House should propose legislation and hold hearings as soon as possible, before the sticky web of bureaucratic tendrils gets too dense to penetrate.”

Christian Science Monitor: “This year also saw a low profile for social conservative groups as Congress debated the repeal of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell.’ The Senate’s decision to allow openly gay service members in the armed forces – a vote that eight Republicans backed – sent a signal that the influence of social conservative groups on Capitol Hill is slipping.”

Globe Gazette: “My issue with all of this is not being for or against same-sex marriages. It’s with people who stomp on the Constitution and on state law when they don’t get their way.”

Washington Examiner: “Comparing the words of the Constitution to the actions of our leaders in recent years will surely make clear the enduring wisdom of James Madison’s warning that ‘there are more instances of the abridgement of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments by those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.’ Talking seriously about this condition is the first step to remedying it, just as Madison and the rest of the Founders intended.”

The Hill: “Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.) is distancing himself from a memo sent by his office that urged health reform advocates not to advertise new end-of-life counseling regulations to avoid reviving talk of ‘death panels.’”

RNC Debate: “View the debate live on Monday, January 3, 2011 at 1:00 PM ET, here and at www.dailycaller.com.”

The Hill: “Democrats will control the Senate in the 112th Congress but lawmakers and aides expect a different power dynamic with Republicans in control of 47 seats. Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) will take a bigger role in crafting the floor strategy and freshman Republicans are poised to take over the role Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) has played in challenging the Senate GOP leadership.”

Breitbart.tv

“Legislation to end or curb same-sex marriage and abortion is beginning to take shape as the Iowa General Assembly prepares for a busy 2011 session.”

Erin McPike writing at RealClearPolitics: “Of the eight Republican senators who voted for repeal, five are among the youngest in the upper chamber – and they’re not all moderates . . . LaSalvia said that younger generations of Republicans are becoming increasingly familiar with issues affecting homosexual Americans. Older generations, he noted, generally don’t have the same experience of having as many contemporaries who are openly gay.”

The New York Observer: “The New York chapter of the Log Cabin Republicans just sent out a missive saying that they are preparing a major effort next year, beginning on the first day of 2011.”

The Jewish Week: “Almost two years into the administration of President Barack Obama the faith based initiatives created by his predecessor are mostly still in place, and groups like Americans United for Separation of Church and State are howling mad. But the reaction from Jewish groups has been muted, which leads to an intriguing question: is the decades-old church-state focus of Jewish “defense” organizations getting blurrier?”

GoLocalProv: “In some ways Gordon Fox is the anti-Speaker. Charming, smart and experienced melded with a lower-middle-class background, biracial and openly gay. If America is the world’s melting pot, then Fox is America’s poster child.”

The Bilerico Project (“daily experiments in LGBTQ”): “The underwritten story of the DADT repeal is how significant a role the Log Cabin Republicans played in lobbying GOP members of Congress. The question is now – will LGBT Democratic progressives seek common ground with their partisan counterparts to move the equality agenda forward in 2011?”

The Boston Globe: “Senator Scott Brown’s decision to buck his party leadership in recent days on the ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ military policy and on a nuclear arms treaty has set off a new wave of anger among some of the activists who helped elect him — and renewed talk among conservatives that he might face a primary challenge.”

Michael Barone writing at Townhall: “The fact is that there is an ongoing truce on the social issues, because for most Americans they have been overshadowed by concerns raised by the weak economy and the Barack Obama Democrats’ vast increase in the size and scope of government.”

Associated Press: “Nearly two months after the election, Sen. Lisa Murkowski is about to be certified the winner of Alaska’s U.S. Senate race.”

The Hill / Ballot Box: “Only 12 House Democrats out of the 40 who represent districts won by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) in 2008 survived the November election.”

Wall Street Journal: “For some, the Vatican’s efforts on behalf of Christian minorities in Islamic countries or among China’s population of 1.3 billion is regarded as worthy and admirable, but only a footnote against the grand sweep of current geopolitical concerns. Iran’s bomb, China’s economic importance and all that. This is a mistake. In these times, the pope’s agenda is the civilized world’s agenda. The pope’s agenda is individual freedom.”

Wall Street Journal Editorial [full text via Google News]: “The drama began in May, when Republican Governor Chris Christie declined to reappoint sitting state Supreme Court Justice John Wallace, instead nominating Anne Patterson to fill the seat. While Mr. Christie’s authority to make the change is granted by the New Jersey constitution, his audacity in exercising it was greeted by his political opponents as a moral outrage.”

WIBW: “Kansas Democrats have harsh criticism of appointments by Governor-elect Sam Brownback and incoming Secretary of State Kris Kobach. Brownback named Caleb Stegall his Chief Counsel and Kobach named Eric Rucker his Assistant Secretary of State.”

Wall Street Journal editorial: “Under highly centralized national health care, the government inevitably makes cost-minded judgments about what types of care are ‘best’ for society at large, and the standardized treatments it prescribes inevitably steal life-saving options from individual patients . . . Democrats and the press corps accused Mrs. Palin of misrepresentation to avoid reckoning with this inexorable rationing reality that President Obama has himself implicitly acknowledged.”

LifeNews: “In the latest move in the contentious debate over the next Speaker of the Texas House of Representatives, Texas Alliance for Life announced today it has endorsed Rep. Ken Paxton.”

Fox News: “After failing to get climate-change legislation through Congress, the Obama administration plans on pushing through its environmental policies through other means, and Republicans are ready to put up a fight.”

The Portland Press Herald: “Baldacci signed the bill into law May 6 — about an hour after the Senate took final action. He invited reporters into his office to announce his decision only after he had signed it — explaining that, while he once opposed gay marriage, he had ‘come to believe that this is a question of fairness.’”

“Bob Vander Plaats . . . says Gronstal’s politically vulnerable because Gronstal promises to continue blocking a proposed amendment to the Iowa Constitution which would ban gay marriage.”

“Governor-elect Terry Branstad will not comment on news that three Republicans who’ve been elected to the Iowa House plan to try to impeach the four remaining Iowa Supreme Court Justices.”

Verde Independent: “The dust-up over the process of nominating candidates for the Independent Redistricting Commission is giving new ammunition to those who want to scrap Arizona’s merit selection process for judges. Several key state lawmakers say they would welcome the chance to revisit the 1974 constitutional amendment, which took away the right of voters to directly elect judges to the Arizona Supreme Court, the state Court of Appeals and the superior courts in Maricopa and Pima counties.”

WorldNetDaily: “Two of the nation’s premier moral issues organizations, the Family Research Council and Concerned Women for America, are refusing to attend the Conservative Political Action Conference in February because a homosexual activist group, GOProud, has been invited.”

LifeNews: “Republican Party chairman candidate Maria Cino is coming under fire for releasing a new statement over the weekend that touts her pro-life views but avoids her past connections to a pro-abortion group.”

NJ.com: “The court is in the midst of an unprecedented crisis, dragged into a high-stakes controversy because of a standoff between Gov. Chris Christie and Senate President Stephen Sweeney that has lasted for seven months with no end in sight . . . ‘The Senate has sat around and created this crisis,’ Christie said Thursday. ‘We wouldn’t be having this crisis if they would just have their hearings and do their jobs.’”

Rob Boston of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, writing at Opposing Views: “The Alliance Defense Fund and its allies in the Religious Right were working to persuade pastors to endorse or oppose candidates from the pulpit during Sunday services. AU repeatedly reminded pastors and congregants that such actions are a violation of federal law. Under the Internal Revenue Code, all 501(c)(3) non-profit groups are barred from intervening in campaigns by endorsing or opposing candidates.”

“Incoming House Majority Leader Linda Upmeyer says she’s not making any decision yet on whether a measure to bring impeachment charges against the four remaining Iowa Supreme Court justices will be debated in the upcoming legislative session.”

The Hill: “An anti-abortion group announced Wednesday it will launch a widespread e-mail campaign to elect a like-minded Republican National Committee chairman. The Susan B. Anthony (SBA) List, which is co-sponsoring a Jan. 3 RNC chairman debate, said it will reach 500,000 socially conservative activists with its campaign.”

FindLaw (AP): “A surge of Hispanic residents and other population gains have Texas poised to add more congressional clout than any other state, but a partisan fight now looms over exactly where the new seats should go.”

Jakarta Globe: “While the antics of the hard-line Islamic Defenders Front frequently make headlines, other radical groups are working quietly behind the scenes to build a wide base of support, a nonprofit has said. The Setara Institute for Democracy and Peace on Wednesday released a report detailing how radical Muslim groups were shoring up their support by forging political alliances and embracing more liberal groups and moderate clerics.”

BBC: “The European Commission has rebuffed a call from several former Soviet bloc countries for the EU to legislate against the condoning or denial of totalitarian crimes.”

LifeSiteNews: “Andrew Stiles at National Review Online observes in a Dec. 20 analysis of Burr’s ‘surprising vote’ that the GOP caucus did not put up a vigorous defense of DADT. He quotes Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) admitting to NRO that repeal was ‘something people knew was going to happen.’ Corker said he believes that if Democrats actually did have hearings, even more Republicans may have jumped on board. These events should set off alarm bells for cultural conservatives: the message is no longer resonating the way it did in 1993.”

LifeNews: “In the aftermath of the vote in the Canadian House of Commons on a bill the prevent forced and pressured abortions, Prime Minister Stephen Harper is coming under fire for opposing the measure . . . The legislation would have made it illegal for anyone to coerce a woman into an abortion through threats of violence, withdrawal of financial resources or denial of a place to live.”

“[A]n informed source told CNSNews.com that the 31-member board has in fact voted to approve GOProud as a participating organization in the 2011 CPAC, and GOProud itself is saying that it has been approved as a participating organization.”

The Hill: “Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) lashed out at fellow Republicans Tuesday for a ‘capitulation … of dramatic proportions’ to Democrats and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) in the lame-duck Congress.”

Stanley Kurtz writing at National Review Online: Obama could easily have confessed his youthful radicalism and explained how he’d come to abandon it. As a man with national ambitions, we might have expected him to do so. Instead, Obama has consistently identified himself with a profession, community organizing, he knew to be quietly socialist . . . As I show in Radical-in-Chief, the young Obama was no hack, but a committed, hard-core Marxist. He didn’t fool his organizing mentors into believing that he shared their views; rather, those mentors taught him how to do socialism the pragmatic way, the sellable way, the Lawrence O’Donnell way.”

Rasmussen Reports: “The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey shows that 38% of Likely Voters believe religious leaders have too much influence on government policy, while 25% say they don’t have enough. Thirty percent (30%) believe religious leaders have about the right amount of influence when it comes to actions by the government.”

The Hill: “New data released Tuesday by the Census Bureau shows sizable shifts in population from Democratic-leaning states in the Industrial Midwest to Republican-leaning states in the Sun Belt.”

Stanley Fish writing at The New York Times / Opinionator: “The left is right to point to the withdrawal of state funds from public universities as precipitating ‘the neoliberal rush to privatize and vocationalize all facets of higher education’ . . . But the right is right to point out that the faculty who work within these ever-more-pinched spaces are predominantly liberal and have over the years created ‘new inter-disciplinary fields whose inspirations were ideological and closely linked to political activism’ . . . Each side, then, has its points and some evidence to support them, but what is most interesting is that each looks backwards to the same idealized past and laments the loss of the same values and practices.”

“The magic numbers are 266 and 16 — two-thirds of the House and Senate, respectively — the number of votes needed to override what is expected to be Gov. John Lynch’s veto of any repeal bill.”

“After a monthslong blockade, Senate Republicans have agreed to let at least 19 of President Barack Obama’s non-controversial judicial nominees win confirmation in the waning days of the congressional session in exchange for a commitment by Democrats not to seek votes on four others.”

The Sunday Business Post: “If, as seems certain, the next government is formed in the coming months by Fine Gael and Labour, the negotiations on the Programme for Government have just got a little more combustible . . . ‘Abortion becomes election issue,’ declared the front page of the Irish Times in the wake of the decision.”

Tiffany Stanley writing at The New Republic: “[W]hen Obama took office, the Democrats’ faith outreach began to fall by the wayside. Several of those who had led the religious aspects of the Obama campaign landed in the OFBNP, which is legally barred from electoral politics, and thus faith-based political outreach . . . At the same time, the national party began to strip down its religious outreach programs . . . Current DNC Chairman (and former missionary) Tim Kaine has made vague statements denying that he would allow faith outreach to falter, but evidence of the DNC’s clear commitment to faith-based coordination is hard to come by.”

Jennifer Rubin comments at The Washington Post: “You have to imagine that value voters lack core convictions — an obvious bit of cognative dissonance — to miss why it is that religious voters disapprove of the Democrats these days. It’s the agenda.”

Maureen Dowd has this piece at the New York Times speculating on the question and lamenting the extent of opposition in the country to the homosexual agenda.

The Independent: “A Deputy Commons Speaker has come out as gay ahead of today’s launch of a support group for homosexual MPs and parliamentary staff.”

CBS: “Just days after Saturday’s historic passage of a stand-alone Senate bill repealing ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,’ David Brock, founder and CEO of the liberal watchdog group Media Matters for America, has announced the launch of Equality Matters – a new media initiative that aims to promote lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender equality. The initiative, which Brock describes in a press release as a ‘communications war room for gay equality,’ comes as activists start to shift their focus to other issues in the fight for gay rights. ”

LifeSiteNews: “Brazilian President Luiz Lula da Silva has become the ‘Santa Claus for gays’ as his reign comes to an end, approving hundreds of millions of dollars for pro-homosexual propaganda, as well as a new government agency to promote the gay agenda.”

New York Times: “Under the proposed ‘repeal amendment,’ any federal law or regulation could be repealed if the legislatures of two-thirds of the states voted to do so.”

Jeremy Dys writing at the Family Policy Council of West Virginia’s Engage Family Blog: “[T]he DADT repeal passed 65-31 in the U.S. Senate. Of that, 8 – EIGHT – GOP Senators voted in favor of repeal. Frankly, Manchin’s family obligations gave him convenient political cover, but it was an effective vote against repeal – which is more than can be said 1/5th of the republicans in the U.S. Senate!”

Bryan Fischer writes at Renew America: “The Saturday morning cloture vote on the repeal of ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ was the critical vote. It needed 60 votes and got 63, because of Republican renegades Scott Brown, Mark Kirk, George Voinovich, Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe. If these traitors to national defense had voted in line with the Republican Party platform, the cloture motion would have received just 57 votes and would have failed.”

WorldNetDaily: “Operating much like a ‘memory hole’ in George Orwell’s classic novel ’1984,’ the Obama administration has replaced the content of the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America website, providing additional evidence the White House intends to implement the SPP agenda by executive action, below the radar of public opinion and outside the framework of congressional approval.”

Gay Politics: “California Assemblymember Toni Atkins, D-San Diego, an out lesbian in her first term as a state legislator, has been named majority whip by Speaker John Pérez.”

Philadelphia Enquirer: “The city’s proposed sale of the historic Boy Scouts of America local headquarters to the group was back on track Thursday, but a formidable coalition of gay-rights and other civic leaders has lined up against it.”

Reuters: “Pope Benedict’s invitation to address German parliament during his visit to his homeland next September 22-25 has not sat well with some members of the opposition. Volker Beck, the Green party floor leader, has protested that inviting a religious leader to address parliament, the Bundestag, is unprecedented and the wrong place to speak about religion.”

Eagle Tribune: “A Democratic Party attack on Rep. David Bates, R-Windham, is attracting national attention and demands the party apologize for ‘religious intolerance.’”

Hugh Hewitt writing at Townhall: “The divide in the GOP is deep and, while largely unreported, it will have consequences far more profound for the party than the divide among Democrats that has gotten most of the attention since President Obama announced the ‘compromise’ on Monday, December 6 . . . Simply put, the base wants to fight it out now, and the D.C. GOP does not want a battle they don’t think they can win against the combined forces of the president, Harry Reid backed by the rules of the Senate and the MSM.”

Religion Clause: “Religion Dispatches reports that the White House yesterday hosted a call for reporters with four members of the clergy who are supporting passage of the DREAM Act. The Act offers citizenship to young people brought to the U.S. illegally as children who pursue higher education or join the military.”

“. . . Kevin Smith, head of Cornerstone Policy Research, is calling on the Democratic Party to apologize for the attack.”

CNSNews: “Sen. Jeff Session (R.-Ala.) told CNSNews.com on Wednesday that there is “no way” someone could master the full 1,924-page, $1.1 trillion omnibus spending bill before Congress votes on it later this week.”

“If the people of Iowa demand that the remaining four justices on the state Supreme Court be impeached, Speaker-elect Kraig Paulsen (R-Hiawatha) said Wednesday he would not stand in the way . . . . . . State Sen. Kent Sorenson (R-Indianola) said Monday that he will also push for impeachment proceedings.”

Daniel Henninger writing in the Wall Street Journal [full text via Google News]: “Do we pay taxes to support federal, state and local government, to reduce the deficit, or just maybe for something else? . . . What balance between the private and public economies will best allow the U.S. to remain the world’s pre-eminent economic (and military) power for the next generation? That premise matters to how one answers the question about taxation’s purpose.”

The Hill: “Republicans will paralyze the Senate floor for 50 hours by forcing clerks to read every single paragraph of the 1,924-page, $1.1 trillion omnibus spending bill.”

LifeNews: “Senate Democrats introduced an omnibus spending bill yesterday to keep the federal government running into the next fiscal year and the measure contains abortion concerns. The introduction of the bill, which Republicans and pro-life advocates are already opposing, comes as new polling data shows Congress’ approval rating continues at rock bottom.”

SCOTUSblog: “The Justice Department, disagreeing with a strategy preferred by the state of Virginia, plans to go to a federal appeals court rather than directly to the Supreme Court when it appeals a federal judge’s ruling Monday against the new health insurance mandate.”

“With a loose web of conservative plaintiffs leading the charge, and judicial rulings breaking thus far along ideological lines, the drive to scuttle the Obama health care law is once again highlighting the role of partisanship in America’s courts.”

Christian Post: “The interview, which took place in Dallas last week, was broadcast on the ministry’s daily radio program on Monday and Tuesday . . . ‘But it took me a while to understand that religion is not a course in self-improvement. Religion is a surrender – that you allow a living God into your life by surrendering to that living God. And then you improve to please God, not please yourself.’”