Category Archives: Republicans

Why Does [Bigot] Tony Perkins Even Bother Going on TV…? (VIDEOS)

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Repost from: Friendly Atheist

Tony Perkins, the head Christian at the Family Research Council, made news this week when he appeared on Piers Morgan‘s show and said this incredibly stupid thing:

Morgan: You have five kids, right?

Perkins: Yes, I do.

Morgan: What would you do if one of them came home and said, dad, I’m gay?

Perkins: Well, we would have a conversation about it. I doubt that would happen with my children, as we are teaching them the right ways that they are to interact as human beings.

In other words, his kids wouldn’t turn out gay because he raised them “right.”

Chris Matthews invited Perkins on Hardball to elaborate on the comment… and, for some reason, Perkins accepted. Barney Frank was there, too, and both he and Matthews went off on Perkins for 15 glorious minutes:

Read more, and watch Barney Frank school Tony Perkins video here . . .

[…]

To add insult to injury, Lawrence O’Donnell took Perkins to task for suggesting there has only been one definition of marriage throughout mankind’s 5,000-year history (wait, what?):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQWxWk1wTAs&feature=player_embedded

Of Bedrooms and Boardrooms

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The 2012 election should be about what’s going on in America’s boardrooms, but Republicans would rather it be about America’s bedrooms.

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. . . Republicans have introduced over four hundred bills in state legislatures aimed at limiting women’s reproductive rights — banning abortions, requiring women seeking abortions to have invasive ultra-sound tests beforehand, and limiting the use of contraceptives.

[…]

Our crisis has nothing to do with private morality. It’s a crisis of public morality — of abuses of public trust that undermine the integrity of our economy and democracy and have led millions of Americans to conclude the game is rigged.

What’s truly immoral is not what adults choose to do with other consenting adults. It’s what those with great power have chosen to do to the rest of us.

[…]

Regressive Republicans have no problem intruding on the most personal and most intimate decisions any of us makes while railing against government intrusions on big business.

Read more . . .

Howard Dean: Republicans ‘Don’t Like Latinos,’ Serve Only Their ‘Corporate Masters’ (VIDEOS)

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Former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean (D) lit into the GOP Tuesday night, attacking what he described as the party’s willingness to abandon Latino voters and instead express concern only for corporate interests.

“[Republicans] don’t care what anybody says except for themselves and their corporate masters, like the Koch brothers. They have one master, and that’s money,” Dean told MSNBC’s Ed Schultz. “They don’t care about the average working American, all they care about is the corporations who are giving them all that money to put them into office. … So who are they going to serve?”

Continue reading and watch videos . . .

FFRF’s ‘Quit the Catholic Church’ ad in today’s Washington Post

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The Freedom From Religion Foundation’s full-page ad, “It’s Time to Quit the Catholic Church,” runs in today’s Washington Post (A-5 Main), urging liberal and nominal Roman Catholics to “quit” their church over its war against contraception.

The provocative ad asks: “Will it be reproductive freedom, or back to the Dark Ages? Do you choose women and their rights, or Bishops and their wrongs?”

The ad is similar to the full-page ad that appeared in The New York Times in March, which is still creating shockwaves among conservative religionists. The Washington Post, unlike the Times, accepted FFRF’s punchy headline, “It’s Time to Quit the Catholic Church.”

Additionally, FFRF has placed the full-page ad with a splash of color on the back of the Washington Express, handed out for free to Metro riders and D.C. residents. Express distributors will be wearing the ad on their vests.

“It’s a disgrace that U.S. health care reform is being held hostage to your church’s irrational opposition to medically prescribed contraception,” the ad states. “No political candidate should have to genuflect before the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.”

Continue Reading . . .

NPR Book Authors Interview: “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism” / Thomas E. Mann (The Brookings Institution) and Norman J. Ornstein (American Enterprise Institute) / (AUDIO)

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Congressional scholars Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein are no strangers to D.C. politics. The two of them have been in Washington for more than 40 years — and they’re renowned for their carefully nonpartisan positions.

But now, they say, Congress is more dysfunctional than it has been since the Civil War, and they aren’t hesitating to point a finger at who they think is to blame.

“One of the two major parties, the Republican Party, has become an insurgent outlier — ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition,” they write in their new book, It’s Even Worse Than It Looks.

Mann, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and Ornstein, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, join Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep to talk about the book, which [came out 05.01.2012].

Read more and listen to the interview here . . .

Noam Chomsky: U.S. and Europe ‘committing suicide in different ways’ (VIDEO)

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In an interview with GritTV’s Laura Flanders, author and MIT professor Noam Chomsky discussed the potentially bleak future facing both the United States and the European Union. Both, he said, are facing historic crises and are going about trying to resolve them in exactly the wrong ways.

According to Chomsky, we are currently living in a period of “pretty close to global stagnation” but that the world’s great powers are reacting to the lack of growth in exactly the wrong manner. “The United States and Europe are committing suicide in different ways, but both doing it.”

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It’s also a mistake, he said, to treat the Republican Party as a genuine political party rather than the “lock-step” policy arm of the superrich. Of course, the wealthy can’t sell the idea of a plutocracy to the population outright, so they mobilize the socially conservative base by stoking the so-called “culture wars.”

Chomsky has a new book, Occupy, about the Occupy Wall Street movement, what it says about society and humanity’s way forward through this time of economic and social stagnation. He calls OWS “the first major public response to 30 years of class war” and believes that the movement’s greatest success has been the introduction of the inequalities of everyday life into the public dialogue.

The nearly half-hour discussion ranges over a number of topics, but keeps coming back again and again to the importance of individual engagement in society and the political system, and the power of Occupy as a force for social and political change.

Watch the full interview here . . .