Tuesday, March 04, 2014

Solution to the Bigoted Baker Problem

Everybody knows about the crazy idea in Arizona that Christians would be discriminated against if they had to do business with sinners. The salient image was if a Christian baker were asked to bake a cake for a gay wedding. Both houses of the state legislature passed a bill giving businesses permission to discriminate on religious grounds. Luckily the governor vetoed that bill, well it would have been a million laughs seeing how they managed it, but ... I'm glad it didn't come to that.

Dan Savage has a really pretty good idea for how to deal with homophobic cake-bakers. It is so straightforward that it seems like they should really do this.
But here's a suggestion for all the hatey, butt-sore, anti-gay bakers in Arizona: start an organization—The Arizona Association of Homophobic Bakers—and publicly identify yourselves as homophobic bakers. Put up a website with a list of bakeries that don't want to do business with LGBT people. Put signs in your windows that clearly state that gay and lesbian customers are not welcome and will be turned away.

As Anderson Cooper pointed out earlier this week, gays and lesbians are not covered by existing anti-discrimination law in Arizona. So it's perfectly legal right now for bakers—and florists and caterers and photographers—to discriminate against LGBT customers. Discriminating against LGBT people was legal in Arizona before Jan Brewer vetoed the turn-away-the-gays bill, and it remains legal after her veto. So homophobic bakers who identify themselves as haters and bigots run no legal risk. They can't be sued by the individual gay people they discriminate against and the authorities can't fine 'em or shut 'em down. Don't want gay customers? Great. Let us know who you are. Put up a list online, hang signs in your windows, and we will take our business elsewhere. A Baker Refused to Make Your Wedding Cake?
It is perfect. Maybe businesses could have little icons in their front windows, sort of like the array of credit-card symbols you see now, only these would announce the groups that the company refuses to do business with. They could use the stick-figure-in-a-skirt that we already use on restrooms to represent women, maybe an outline of a man in a big sombrero for Hispanics, and so on, put a red slash through them to tell the world your religion requires you to reject that group as customers.

It would be service to shoppers, too, you could identify right away the places that you should not waste your time researching. You are not going to use that baker anyway, if he refuses to bake for "your type."

Ah, but now Savage gets sensible.
The homophobic bakers of Arizona will do no such thing of course. Because hater bakers know that putting "We Don't Serve Gay People" signs in their windows will not only cost them our business—business they don't want—but also the business of our straight friends, family members, and neighbors. Business they do want. And they'll also lose the business of fair-minded straight people who think discrimination is wrong. And they'll lose the business of straight people who worry about where this kind of selective, hypocritical, faith-rationalized discrimination could ultimately lead.

But if homophobic bakers don't have the courage to put up a list—if they don't have the courage of their own sincerely-held, faith-based convictions—then LGBT activists in Arizona should do it for them. How many bakeries are there in Arizona? Can't be more than few hundred. Get a group of people together, call all the bakeries in the state, find out who doesn't want our business, and post the list online. Then encourage LGBT people and our friends, family members, and neighbors to consult that handy list of hater bakers before ordering wedding or birthday cakes.
This is an important point. Arizona homophobes want the government to approve their hate, but when you get right down to it I don't think very many really want to say they're the ones who won't serve gays. I wonder how they were actually planning on implementing this -- if the law had been passed, how would anybody know what companies they couldn't shop at? Would you have to go in and actually trip their gaydar and have a rude encounter? It seems that there would have to be a mechanism for informing possible victims of discrimination about what is coming.
That's not the way homophobic bakers want it to work. Or homophobic florists or photographers or caterers for that matter. They want to quietly and discreetly refuse to serve individual customers who happen to be gay without their other customers finding out. They wanna hate on the down low because they know that customers who may not be gay themselves—people who know and love LGBT people, customers who don't approve of discrimination on principal, other minorities who worry that they could be next—will take their business elsewhere.
Hating on the down low. That's good.

It wouldn't work to put a cross or other religious identification symbol on the front of a business because, oddly enough, a lot of Christian people love their neighbors and forgive sinners. Just being Christian doesn't mean you're a bigot. But people need to know somehow.

210 Comments:

Blogger Priya Lynn said...

While its true that many, perhaps most christians aren't anti-gay, anti-gay christians have gone a long way towards making christianity synonymous with anti-gay bigotry. 31% of young people who've left their religion of birth say it was partly or entirely due to the poor way their religion treats gays. When you consider that a large percentage of the young people who have left their religion left a gay supportive religion it shows you the bigoted attitudes of some religion have had a huge impact in turning people off from christianity.

March 04, 2014 6:40 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

you know Jim, I thought Logic used to be something you believed in....
so what is to prohibit me from going into a muslim bakery next week and asking for a cake with Muhammad's image on it, and then suing the bakers if they won't make it for me ?

or, better yet, asking a lesbian bakery to bake a cake for the westboro ministry that says "gods hates fags"....

on what grounds could the bakery turn away that business, and couldn't the very same anti-discrimination laws you use be used to force the bakery to do something they don't believe in ?


March 04, 2014 8:16 PM  
Blogger JimK said...

Theresa (?), I don't "believe in" logic. In fact, I think logic is too weak for solving most real world problems. I do "believe in" fairness, kindness, happiness, and common sense. Oh, and humor.

That being said, you've got nothing to complain about here. The bigoted bakers don't have to serve gays or any minority their religion prohibits. It just makes it easier if they identify themselves, so gay and lesbian people don't accidentally try to take their business to a place that won't serve them.

Lesbian bakers can put up a sign that says "No Westboro" people here, too. Then the church members can avoid going to the trouble of ordering a God Hates Fags cake from the wrong place.

JimK


March 04, 2014 8:36 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

you've got some points here, Jim, but, as usual, you go too far

the mere profit motive makes discrimination a non-issue

instead of trying to action to attack people who don't share your values, though, why don't you just do business with those who do and leave it at that?

I'm pretty sure that most Christians, of any type, would be happy to bake cakes for gays, in general

they would just refuse to make cakes that celebrate homosexual relationships

but why should anyone have to make excuses for who they want to do business with?

if you're just dying to have a cake from someone opposed to gay marriage, just buy a tube of confectioner's paste and write the message yourself

sounds like Arizona's laws are fine, as is


March 04, 2014 9:05 PM  
Blogger JimK said...

Nobody has to make any excuses. Bigoted bakers can just put up a sign, "No cakes for gays." Or if their religion accepts gay people but believes it's an abomination for them to marry one another, they can just put up a sign that says, "No cakes for gay weddings." It's not an excuse, it is simply a matter of standing up for what you believe in.

You're right, the law in Arizona is fine for religious homophobes as it stands, this would just make it easier for everybody, because the gays would know where they are not welcome and the Christians would not have to deal with disgusting sinners.

JimK

March 04, 2014 9:12 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

actually, dealing with disgusting sinners practically defines Christianity

no need for special signs for gays

if someone comes in wanting a gay wedding cake, they will simply be told that the bakery doesn't believe in that

it's not a matter of hiding it, it just matter of not making sexual preference such a focus

if gays take offense, they are free to make the online lists you suggest

I doubt anyone would pay attention

truth is, most Christian bakers, if not all, would love to serve gay customers, if not for profit, then to engage them in a relationship that might develop into sharing the gospel

lazy Priya, in a rare lucid moment recently, had this right, saying religion has nothing to do with discrimination against gays but is used as an excuse by some

I'm sure that's true of almost anyone who wouldn't bake a non-message cake for a gay customer

still, whoever it is, and for whatever reason, they have a right to associate and do business with whomever they choose

there is no reason for the government to intervene

no one, gay or not, anywhere in America, has any trouble finding someone to bake them a cake

March 04, 2014 9:57 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

jim.
you didn't address my question.
I am tempted to go order a Muhammad cake just to prove a point.

don't put it past me.....
rules are rules, they need to apply to EVERYONE.

If there is no such things as a religious objection, I am entitled to my Muhammed cake.

To heck with who it offends. and I will do it, just to prove a point.


If there are no religious protections for Christians, there shouldn't be any for Muslims, either ?

AGREED?

Of give me a LAW and LEGAL language that can codify your "let's be nice" point.



Theresa

March 04, 2014 9:58 PM  
Blogger JimK said...

Theresa, this is not about people coming in and asking Christians to make a Jesus cake. Or a Satan cake, for that matter.

If a Christian or a Moslem doesn't believe they should bake a cake for a gay person in Arizona, then they don't have to. I don't see what you have to complain about.

You seem uncomfortable with the idea that bigoted bakers should have the conviction to make their religious beliefs public by putting a discreet sign on the door saying, "We don't bake cakes for gay people." It sounds to me like a good idea, it will save everybody time and hassle. Yes, it might be unpopular, but did Jesus teach that you should only engage in popular behaviors, or should you show your faith in your actions?

If you order a Mohammed cake from a Moslem I bet they won't bake it for you. And then what? Nothing. They don't have to bake you a cake, unless you can prove they are discriminating against you because you belong to a protected group. It's a dumb idea and will prove nothing.

JimK

March 04, 2014 10:36 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"You seem uncomfortable with the idea that bigoted bakers should have the conviction to make their religious beliefs public by putting a discreet sign on the door saying, "We don't bake cakes for gay people.""

you continue with your fallacy, Jim

there may be "bigoted bakers" but that bigotry is not based on a religious belief

it's simply people who are either insecure about their sexuality or people who can't control their disgust long enough to make a buck

to the extent such people exist, why would gays want to patronize them?

maybe a sign that says "we don't bake cakes for weddings that exclude either gender" would be appropriate

March 04, 2014 10:56 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...


OK jim.

we are both getting old.
really old.

so I really must be losing it.

did you just say ?

"If a Christian or a Moslem doesn't believe they should bake a cake for a gay person in Arizona, then they don't have to. I don't see what you have to complain about."

wasn't that what the whole lawsuit was about ? that a Christian baker refused to bake a cake for gay wedding ? wasn't that the entire issue ? and if so, why is the agnostic wanting a Muhammad cake any different ?

did I just miss something, or were you, as a scientist, trained in logic, trying to convolute yourself into why logic doesn't matter ?????

March 04, 2014 11:14 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

or are you just trying to justify " why the constitution and laws don't matter" horseshit of the of the left, therefore NO laws matter. Jim/


If he can decide which laws matter, why have laws ?

sorry, confused.....

March 04, 2014 11:29 PM  
Anonymous You must be kidding! said...

"it's not a matter of hiding it, it just matter of not making sexual preference such a focus...

there may be "bigoted bakers" but that bigotry is not based on a religious belief"


Who makes sexual preference of their customers such a focus but doesn't want to advertise that fact??

Hater bakers do and they hide that fact when they refuse to alert shoppers they will refuse to bake wedding cakes for such couples!

Why do these hater bakers want to refuse to bake cakes for same sex couples?

Because of their own religious beliefs!

March 05, 2014 10:18 AM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Theresa, I'm still waiting to hear what you think about bad anonymous changing public opinion polls on the October governemnent shutdown and swapping the percentage number blaming the Democrats with the percentage number blaming the Republicans.

How about offering some admonishment for your teamate lying or are you just fine with people on your side lying?

March 05, 2014 10:48 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"Who makes sexual preference of their customers such a focus but doesn't want to advertise that fact??

Hater bakers do and they hide that fact when they refuse to alert shoppers they will refuse to bake wedding cakes for such couples!"

one problem with the gay movement is that they seek a lot more than the right to do what they want behind closed doors

there's an exhibitionist tendency that wants constant focus on their sexual preferences

if bakers who oppose gay "marriage" don't want to play that game, they are smart

Jim has alleged that they are trying to hide their beliefs

it's a baseless allegation

"Why do these hater bakers want to refuse to bake cakes for same sex couples?"

they only object if the cakes present a message they oppose

in general, they'll bake cakes for anyone

they have no obligation to participate in something they find morally offensive

"Because of their own religious beliefs!"

only insofar as messages of support and celebrations of immoral lifestyles

if a anybody, including gays, wants a cake, they'll bake it for a fee

March 05, 2014 10:51 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"I'm still waiting to hear what you think about bad anonymous changing public opinion polls on the October governemnent shutdown and swapping the percentage number blaming the Democrats with the percentage number blaming the Republicans"

lazy Priya, when will you admit you lied when you said that global warming hasn't stopped for the last sixteen years?

also, when will you learn to use spell-check?

btw, other than an occasional remark exchanged here, I don't know Theresa

March 05, 2014 10:55 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

A Tennessee College is Forcing its Faculty to Swear They Believe Adam and Eve Existed

March 05, 2014 11:16 AM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Bad anonymous, I told the truth about global warming, it has continued unabated for the last 15 years:

The rate of atmospheric temperature increases may have slowed over the last 15 years, but the overall warming of the entire climate system has continued rapidly over the past 15 years, even faster than the 15 years before that. If you look at this graph you can see that while the rate of temperature increase in the atmosphere has slowed, the atmospheric heating represents only 2% of the overall warming of the global climate. The rates of temperature increase for the remaining portions of the global climate such as upper and deep ocean temperatures, and land and ice temperatures have increased at a far greater rate.

I've never intentionally stated something that isn't true. Its you who lies and lies pathologically. And that is very well documented here.

March 05, 2014 11:35 AM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Theresa, still waiting to hear where you stand on your teamate lying. Do you want to admonish him for it or is lying okay by you if it promotes your agenda?

March 05, 2014 11:37 AM  
Anonymous Live and learn said...

Chick-fil-A president Dan Cathy may still think that equal marriage is the equivalent of shaking a fist at God (or something), but his chicken franchise’s corporate foundation is giving less money to noted anti-LGBTQ groups than previous years.

As Josh Israel at Think Progress notes, Chick-fil-A’s foundation increased its grants to anti-LGBTQ groups from $1.9 million to $3.6 million between 2010 and 2011. But according to the foundation’s 2012 public disclosures, it reduced its donations to anti-LGBTQ groups to $25,390 that year — more than 99 percent.

March 05, 2014 11:46 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

the gay obsession with individuals is pathetic

March 05, 2014 11:49 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"The rate of atmospheric temperature increases may have slowed over the last 15 years, but the overall warming of the entire climate system has continued rapidly over the past 15 years"

no one other than you seems to think that's relevant

the IPCC felt they had to address the ceasing of global warming and they didn't bring that up

"I've never intentionally stated something that isn't true"

I'll take your word for it but it shows you are not well-informed

this has been widely discussed, it's not an arcane secret

not only that, you continued to rant even after I provided links demonstrating it

I'll just assume you weren't paying attention

March 05, 2014 12:29 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Bad anonymous said "no one other than you seems to think that's relevant".

Thats one of the dumbest things you've ever said on this blog. Every climatoligist thinks this is relevant.

Bad anonymous said "the IPCC felt they had to address the ceasing of global warming and they didn't bring that up".

They most certainly did bring it up and they most certainly did not say global warming had "ceased". Its you who's uninformed (and dishonest). Fundemental to the position of the IPCC is that the slowing of the atmospheric temperature increases in the last 15 years is that it is TEMPORARY. You keep dishonestly leaving that out when you make claims about what the IPCC said.

March 05, 2014 1:01 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Still waiting Theresa. Do you consider honesty optional for Republicans?

March 05, 2014 1:03 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"climatologist" "Fundemental"

really, lazy Priya, take the time to spell correctly

"Fundemental to the position of the IPCC is that the slowing of the atmospheric temperature increases in the last 15 years is that it is TEMPORARY. You keep dishonestly leaving that out when you make claims about what the IPCC said."

it's not dishonest to report the fact and leave out the opinion

that cessation has occurred is a fact that IPCC has conceded

whether that cessation is TEMPORARY is matter of opinion

btw, the track record of IPCC, with their various prophecies, is poor

March 05, 2014 1:36 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

btw, lazy Priya

I'm not a Republican

March 05, 2014 1:37 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

There's been no cessation of global warming as the research I posted the link to proves.

In no way did the IPCC say global warming has ceased - you're a chronic liar.

A person who spends decades campaigning for Republicans is a Republican, regardless of what misleading label you like to apply to yourself.

March 05, 2014 3:25 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

the IPCC has noted the cessation of global warming

I've provided the link but, honestly, anyone can find it

it's true that they think it will resume, and, in your mind, you've convinced yourself that means it hasn't ceased

but that's simply the opinion of those who have been repeatedly in error before

I've never in my life campaigned for a Republican

decades ago, I did become involved in the Jimmy Carter campaign

other than that, I'm apolitical and don't put much hope in it

you're confused because I often defend Republicans from the unfair attacks they suffer here

March 05, 2014 3:45 PM  
Anonymous There you go again... said...

More Kochsh*t, Anonymous?

Koch Industries love polluting our planet Earth with their big oil investments, hence they pay bullshit artists like yourself to muddy the waters.

Meanwhile, actual scientists are studying facts and are not swayed with KochKash.

Actual scientists like those at NASA who report:

Long-term global warming trend sustained in 2013

"With the exception of 1998, the 10 warmest years in the 134-year record have all occurred since 2000, with 2010 and 2005 ranking as the warmest years on record."

Now if 10 of the warmest years in the past 134 years have all occurred since 2000, who would think warming of planet Earth had stopped?

Those who are willfully blind to inconvenient facts like the 10 warmest years in the 134-year record have all occurred since 2000.

March 05, 2014 4:37 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"Now if 10 of the warmest years in the past 134 years have all occurred since 2000, who would think warming of planet Earth had stopped?"

anyone with a mind

if the warmest year was nine years ago, that means that either the warming has plateaued or it is cooling

only if the temperature has increased significantly, which it hasn't since 1998, could you say warming is still occuring

the planet has stopped going through the process of heating up, as you demonstrated with your little recap of the last 15 years

cheer up

maybe that disaster you so long for will still happen some day

it's not happening now

March 05, 2014 6:02 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

let's hope global warming will resume someday and get our economy going:

"Severe weather across much of the United States took a toll on shopping and consumer spending in recent weeks, leading to slower economic growth or outright contraction in some areas of the country, the Federal Reserve said on Wednesday.

The Fed, in its anecdotal Beige Book report, said economic activity in January and February shrank in two of its 12 districts, New York and Philadelphia, mostly due to "unusually severe weather.""

if only Al Gore had been right

of course, Sarah Palin was right when she said Russia would invade the Ukraine

you remember, in the 2008 campaign, and the brilliant Barack Obama just scoffed

March 05, 2014 6:13 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

The link posted by good anonymous wasn't working. Here is that link again:

Long-term global warming trend sustained in 2013

March 05, 2014 6:25 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

thanks for posting that link so we can drop all pretense and see that you are willfully lying:

"NASA scientists say 2013 tied with 2009 and 2006 for the seventh warmest year since 1880, continuing a long-term trend of rising global temperatures.

With the exception of 1998, the 10 warmest years in the 134-year record have all occurred since 2000, with 2010 and 2005 ranking as the warmest years on record."

so, the ten warmest years have been since 2000

2001-2012

that's twelve years

six of them have been warmer than 2013

two tied with 2013

four were cooler, but not much

that's not a climbing trend

the planet is not warming

it has stayed roughly the same since 1998

your own link proves you a liar

March 05, 2014 8:41 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

when will lazy Priya admit to the lies?

March 05, 2014 8:43 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Priya never will.

It's an on-going characteristic of liberals.

I thought it was really quite funny when Kerry was shocked that Putin claimed there were no Russian troops in Crimea.

Harry Reid, after all, got on the Senate floor and claimed that all the Obamacare horror stories were lies, when what the cancellation notices are up to 6.5 million some ?

the behavior is unbelievable. you can't rationalize with them, it's impossible.

I was however, quite amused to see Kerry get a taste of the Dems own medicine. Putin probably did it on purpose... figuring that hey, the truth is whatever I say it is... Just like Obama does all the time.

"what, he really said that ?"

too funny.

now he knows how we feel.

March 05, 2014 9:52 PM  
Anonymous Robert said...

I agree with you Theresa, queer people don't need to order cakes from bigots. Cakes are a minor issue.

Nevertheless, anti-discrimination laws do have a place.

I was taught as a child in my religion that white children should not play with children of color. This was presented as a religious reason for segregation.

Cakes are a small matter, but loans, housing and jobs are not. The danger of allowing religious exemptions to laws is that they can be used to justify anything.

rrjr

March 06, 2014 7:21 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"I was taught as a child in my religion that white children should not play with children of color. This was presented as a religious reason for segregation."

unless you were raised in the Nation of Islam, I find that hard to believe

can you document that your religion was teaching you that as a child?

March 06, 2014 7:57 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"Cakes are a small matter, but loans, housing and jobs are not"

generally, we have always allowed banks, landlords and employers to take into account behavior and character when making decisions about who to associate with

why should sexual deviance be exempt?

religion has little to do with

if the characteristic make the relationship risky, it's OK to discriminate based on risk

that's rational

if you don't like it, reduce your risk factor, or seek out those who don't consider it a risk factor

March 06, 2014 8:05 AM  
Anonymous Robert said...

Independent Baptist.


"can you document that your religion was teaching you that as a child?"

Don't you believe me, darling? I've never lied to you. I was a scout, and a scout is honest.

March 06, 2014 8:50 AM  
Anonymous Robert said...

Come to think of it, it might not have been a tenet of the church (I was a child, what would I know?). It might have been that particular pastor or Sunday-school teacher.

Nevertheless, you know as well as I do the history of religion used to support all sorts of discrimination.

March 06, 2014 9:06 AM  
Anonymous Ignore Alaska! Be sure to keep your head in the sand! said...

Toll climbs in Iditarod -- 10 knocked out of race on Tuesday

"The Iditarod Trail exacted a terrible toll on Tuesday.

Nine mushers officially left the race, many with bruised bodies and broken sleds. The group included two who finished in last year's top 10 and another who had never scratched in 16 previous races...

...Combined with Cindy Gallea's decision to drop out on Monday, the departures leave the race with 58 mushers out of the field of 69 that started Sunday in Willow.

Gallea, of Wycoff, Minn., ended her race in Skwentna due to illness, but most of Tuesday's departures were by mushers who fell victim to poor trail conditions.

Berkowitz, 27, was stranded for hours on the snowless Farewell Burn, a mine field of brush, rocks and stumps, on Tuesday after his sled was broken beyond repair.

Unable to get his dogs to either the checkpoint behind him (Rohn) or the one ahead (Nikolai), he eventually signaled for help. Iditarod officials sent two planes to retrieve Berkowitz and his dogs, race marshal Mark Nordman said...."

March 06, 2014 9:23 AM  
Anonymous It's more recent than your childhood, Robert.... said...

"Posted: 12/02/11

In a move to "promote greater unity" among its body and the Pike County community it serves, a small Kentucky church voted to ban interracial couples from membership and from participating in certain worship activities, Kentucky.com reports.

Though reminiscent of some Jim Crow-era mandate, the Gulnare Freewill Baptist Church actually made the decision earlier this month, following a visit from 24-year-old Stella Harville, daughter of the church's secretary and clerk, and her 29-year-old fiance, Ticha Chikuni, a native of Zimbabwe.

According to Harville's father, Dean Harville, Stella brought Chikuni to the church in June where they performed a song for the congregation.

Following the visit, former pastor Melvin Thompson told Harville that his daughter and her fiance could not sing at the church again. Thompson later proposed that the church go on record saying that while all people were welcome to attend public worship services there, the church did not condone interracial marriage.

His proposal, which was accepted by a 9-6 vote last week, also suggested that married interracial couples be prohibited from becoming members and used in worship activities, except for funerals.

"It's not the spirit of the community in any way, shape or form," said Randy Johnson, president of the Pike County Ministerial Association, according to Kentucky.com.

While Pike County and the surrounding community come to grips with the church's decision, researchers at Ohio State University and Cornell University say black-white marriages in the United States are soaring, increasing threefold, from 3 percent in 1980 to 10.7 percent in 2008.

March 06, 2014 10:06 AM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

As to the hypotheticals of a Muslim baker being asked to bake a cake with Mohammed's image on it or a lesbian baker being asked to put "god hates fags" on a cake, yes, you're damn right they should both be required to bake that cake. If you're in business to serve the public you're obligated to serve all of the public. If you don't want to do so then take the penalty for falling to do so with a smile on your face or find a different job - no one will force you to stay in a job that requires you to bake cakes for people you don't like. And as far as the hypothetical goes about the Muslem baker, he would CURRENTLY have to bake that cake as religion is a protected class against discrimination and if someone said it was part of their religion to have Mohammed on a cake he'd be obligated to do so.

If you don't want to abide by the regulations required to operate a business then get the hell out of business and find a job you do want to do. Putting a person's "sincerely" held religious beliefs above the law makes the person a law unto themselves and is unconstitutional on the face of it.

The idea that allowing discrimination against gays will never be a problem for them because the free market always wants to make money is total bullsh*t. We don't have to speculate about whether not that is true, we can look to history to see that's a lie. When people were able to discriminate against blacks it was regularly a problem for them to get services, most, if not all white owned businesses in some areas had no qualms whatsoever about forgoing the profit serving black people would have brought them and this would be doubly true for gays today. Gays represent a small percentage of the population and it would be trivially easy for any business to do without the small amount of business the gay population represents. There are lots of communities in the United States where most people are anti-gay and would discriminate against gays if they had the chance thus making it very difficult for gays in that community to live. The small amount of business the LGBT community represents most certainly isn't enough to ensure there is always going to be an abundance of people wanting to serve it.

News flash for conservatives: The free market DOES NOT solve everything. It frequently is dysfunctional and businesses collude to diminish competitition and raise prices, and do unethical or destructive things. The free market left to itself will NOT result in Utopia, people have bad sides and that will always surface in business practices if they are completely unregulated. Some regulation is an absolute necessity if we are to have a fair, just, productive, and safe society.

These business owners are not themselves required to engage in sex they find objectionable or to be only allowed a same sex marriage, their objection is that they don't want others doing it. Thus the intererference with their freedom that anti-discrimination laws impose is trivial or insubstantial and does not in any way interfere with actual religious belief or practice.

March 06, 2014 10:52 AM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

The idea that religious belief is some sort of special category that takes precedence over non-religious belief is utter nonsense. A belief doesn't become extra special just because it is religious in nature. I sincerely believe the combination of technology and religion will cause the extinction of the human race and maybe on that basis I'd like to refuse service to all christians but the current law wouldn't let me do so. My belief is just as important as any religious belief and deserves the exact same consideration (or lack thereof).

NO special rights for religion. Religious people don't have a right to opt out of laws everyone else must follow.

March 06, 2014 10:59 AM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Also, regarding Theresa's scenario of lesbian bakers being asked to make a cake that says "god hates fags", if the law she wants that allows discrimination against gays was passed those lesbians would still have to bake that cake because all the states that proposed such laws have overriding laws in place that disallow discrimination on the basis of religion.

So while Theresa suggests we all should accept a law that allows discrimination based on "sincerely" held religious beliefs that would NOT allow those lesbians to turn down that business. Bigots like Theresa try to justify these laws in the most dishonest way.

March 06, 2014 11:06 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Robert.

I have an issue with anti-discrimination laws to the extent that they infringe on someone else's rights, religous or otherwise. And they tend to be abused, exorbitant fines that don't justify the harm...

So, not to debate a really old point, but if a cross-dresser want a job at a Catholic school, sorry the answer is no. I also think a Catholic school should be able to dismiss an unwed teacher who is visibly pregnant ! What do you think about that one, since it is not as politically charged....

I have a couple of male gay tenants, they are nice and very neat and quite helpful.
one of them also seems to know quite a bit about plumbing, and will go out of his way to try and figure the issue out before asking me to call a plumber, which is so appreciated.

so you are right Priya, I am a bigot that doesn't want to rent to gay people.

March 06, 2014 11:19 AM  
Anonymous Robert said...

Gay people can often be nice and helpful.

March 06, 2014 11:38 AM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

We know you're a bigot Theresa, now where do you stand on Bad anonymous switching the Democrat and Republican percentage poll numbers as to who the public blamed for the government shutdown?

Do you want to admonish your compatriate for his dishonesty, or is lying okay with you when its in service of a Republican agenda?

March 06, 2014 11:40 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"...It is God who set the bounds, and man has always tried to move them.

God gave Israel a land to possess. In order for her to possess it, she must first cast out many nations.
“When the Lord thy God shall bring thee into the land whither thou goest to possess it, and has cast out many nations before thee, the Hittites and the Girgashites, and the Amorites, and the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, and the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations greater and mightier than thou.” Deuteronomy 7:1.

These are descendants of Canaan (black folks). Genesis 1:15‐17.

Notice what God said about these seven black nations.
“And when the Lord thy God shall deliver them before thee; thou shalt smite them, and utterly destroy; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor shew mercy unto them: Neither shalt thou make marriages with them: thy daughter thou shalt not give unto his son, nor his daughter shalt thou take unto thy son.” Deuteronomy 7:2‐3.

Not once do you find God saying it is alright to marry up with Hamites as long as you don’t serve their gods, or as long as they are saved. Every time these are mentioned, it will be the same thing. Marriages with Hamites were forbidden. It was God who chose Israel above all people. Deuteronomy 7:6....


http://www.applebybaptistchurch.com/Articles/IRM.pdf

March 06, 2014 11:44 AM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Theresa said "I have an issue with anti-discrimination laws to the extent that they infringe on someone else's rights, religous or otherwise. And they tend to be abused, exorbitant fines that don't justify the harm...".

Freedom is never absolute Theresa one person's rights always infringe to a degree on another person's rights and the point is to balance the two. Having to do the same job you've done hundreds or thousands of times before once more for a gay person is a trivial imposition on a person's freedom while struggling to find a place that will provide you service is a major imposition on a person's freedom as black people old enought to remember will tell you. The proper balance is not to give all the freedom to bigots who are trivially imposed upon and none to the person who's just looking to go about a normal life

Theresa said "So, not to debate a really old point, but if a cross-dresser want a job at a Catholic school, sorry the answer is no. I also think a Catholic school should be able to dismiss an unwed teacher who is visibly pregnant ! What do you think about that one, since it is not as politically charged....".

There are exemptions in all these anti-discrimination laws that protect gays for religious institutions (there shouldn't be, but there are) so your hypothetical is irrelevant as it can't happen.

When you're campaiging to allow people to discriminate against gays and you're trying to deny gays the right to marry you're a bigot regardless of who you choose to rent to.

March 06, 2014 11:47 AM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

I forgot to add one more point. Theresa said "I have an issue with anti-discrimination laws to the extent that they infringe on someone else's rights, religous or otherwise. And they tend to be abused, exorbitant fines that don't justify the harm...".

So, then your problem is with the severity of the punishment rather than the existence of punishment itself. Do you even know how much the fine is in these cases(not f'n likely)? That being the case then there should be a punishment you can name that fits the crime - how about it?

March 06, 2014 11:51 AM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

And as far as Theresa's claim that these anti-discrimination laws are abused, that's absurd.

The bigots have only the same handful of highly debateable examples they complain about. Out of a country of 350 million people five or six examples of what only they think is an abuse of these laws means by their own admission such "abuse" of anti-discrimination laws is virtually non-existant.

March 06, 2014 11:59 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

The chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus is calling House Oversight Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) to be stripped of his gavel for his behavior at a contentious IRS hearing on Wednesday.

Rep. Marcia Fudge (D-Ohio) told Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) on Thursday that Issa’s conduct in the hearing — which included cutting off the microphone of Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), the ranking Democrat — amounted to “an affront to the expectations of the American people.” Fudge also said Issa should apologize on the House floor.
“The American people have the right to expect that their elected leaders be held to the highest possible standards of conduct. Congressional committee leaders are held to an even higher standard due to their unique positions,” Fudge wrote in a letter to Boehner.

“Congressman Darrell Issa of California abused his authority and therefore must be reprimanded to ensure the dignity of the House of Representatives is preserved.”

Fudge’s letter comes in the wake of remarkable House Oversight hearing with Lois Lerner, the former IRS official at the center of the agency’s targeting controversy. While the Oversight Committee is no stranger to conflict, the hearing turned rowdy even by the committee’s usual standards.

At the hearing, Lerner again invoked her Fifth Amendment rights, as she had at a May 2013 hearing.

Cummings then tried to make a statement, after Issa had adjourned the hearing. When Issa cut the microphone, Democrats yelled “Shame!” and later demanded an apology.

Cummings went on to loudly criticize Issa’s handling of the investigation without the microphone, calling it one-sided and “un-American.”

“I am a member of the United States Congress of America! I am tired of this!” he yelled.

Democrats are using the hearing to push the message that Republicans are running the House in a heavy-handed manner.

Dozens of Democrats appeared on the House floor Thursday to demand that the House condemn Issa, a call that Fudge put forward separately in a privileged resolution.

"Chairman Issa's abusive behavior on March 5 is part of a continuing pattern in which he has routinely excluded members of the Committee from investigative meetings, and has routinely provided information to the press before sharing it with Committee members," the resolution reads.

It also said Issa has violated House rules, which say members must "behave at all times in a manner that shall reflect creditably on the House."

March 06, 2014 12:04 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"“The curse of Ham,” an old-time Biblical (mis)interpretation used to vilify black people and justify slavery and laws against racial intermarriage, is still alive and spreading bigotry in the United States.

The Appleby Baptist Church in Nacogdoches, Texas, is among this country’s scattered, independent fundamentalist churches still openly promoting the idea that the Biblical Noah pronounced a curse on descendants of his son, Ham. Ham had sexually molested Noah as he slept in a drunken stupor, and Noah realized it, the story goes. The curse ultimately fell on Canaan, Noah’s grandson, whose descendants were black and fated to be an underclass of slaves, according to this version of the Bible, which has been widely discredited by mainstream religious scholars."

March 06, 2014 12:16 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Priya.

will resume this weekend. Have too many other things I need to take care of, including my job.

but you are incorrect about the gender identity law exempting religous organizations, esp. Montgomery Countys. It does not, it exempted churches but not for instance, Catholic schools.

barney franks suggested edna law exempted places of shared nudity, the MC law does not and neither does the MD law...

so again, you are setting up gym bathrooms, highschool gym showers for sharing by males and females .... sorry unless you have had a sex change operation I am going by your genitalia.

so you are directly interfering on the rights of one class with the perceived rights of another.


theresa

March 06, 2014 12:20 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

cummings has not called for ALL emails from louis lerner to be given to the investigation.

therefore any statements he makes are irrelevant.

the ones that have been revealed, very very damaging.

go read the emails, they are unbelievable.

they pretty clearly show bias, calling the tea party dangerous and then cautioning that their investigation could be seen as "political" and that this was problematic.

so what does cummings do ? bluster and throw insults. he really has no other course of action left. however, I think what he is doing as a result is calling more attention to the whole issue.


March 06, 2014 12:26 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"As to the hypotheticals of a Muslim baker being asked to bake a cake with Mohammed's image on it or a lesbian baker being asked to put "god hates fags" on a cake, yes, you're damn right they should both be required to bake that cake."

you're damn wrong

no one should be required by a capricious government to perform services for anyone

baking a cake for someone in exchange for a fee does not obligate to do it for anyone

any such law should be resisted by free people everywhere in any way necessary

"If you're in business to serve the public you're obligated to serve all of the public."

the idea that you need to apologize for making a living and supporting yourself is evil

the "public" is not an entity with rights

it is a term for all individuals collectively, including the baker

a healthy society will resist collectivism

"If you don't want to do so then take the penalty for falling to do so with a smile on your face or find a different job - no one will force you to stay in a job that requires you to bake cakes for people you don't like."

every one should use their gifts

they may not have any other skills

March 06, 2014 1:07 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

“Congressman Darrell Issa of California abused his authority and therefore must be reprimanded to ensure the dignity of the House of Representatives is preserved.”

this is how you know when Democrats are losing an argument

they start accusing the other side of unsocial behavior

remember when people liberals were accusing the Tea Party of being a bunch of thugs?

Lois Lerner is obviously hiding something

and what we already know is pretty bad

Richard Nixon was impeached and his aides went to jail for using the IRS to harass their enemies

the worthless tub of lard named Elijah Cummings is trying to protect Barack Obama when what happened is very clear

March 06, 2014 1:22 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Theresa in society there are always rights of one individual that conflict with another individual. Just because this happens is not a reason not to make or not make any particular law.

The question is the apropriate balance of rights. Your right to swing your fist ends when it meets my nose. In a just society this cannot continue to be a case where LGBT people are always asked to make major sacrifices to prevent religious people from making trivial ones. Just because an anti-discrimination law doesn't allow a religious person absolute power to whatever they please doesn't mean its a bad law.

I personally don't believe religious schools should have the right to discriminate. If you serve the public, you serve all of the public and you employ any qualified person. Churches can do whatever they want because they are not providing a public service.

As far as transgendered people in showers goes, it is a tricky balancing act. I can appreciate that some people are uncomfortable with the thought of a male genitaled person in female bathrooms or showers. I myself felt I owed it to women not to use their spaces until after I had my sex reassingment surgery but as I transitioned I and was continuing to use male bathrooms I started getting this head snap back "what are you doing in here" look from men and I became quite fearful for my safety so I started using the ladies bathroom prior to my surgery.

Realistically speaking a pre-op transwoman like me was far, far more likely to be assaulted in a men's room than a genetic woman was to be assaulted by a pre-op transwoman in a female bathroom. The truth of the matter is that there's never been an incident of a transgendered person assaulting someone in the bathroom or shower they choose to use, its simply not an issue in practical terms, its just a scare mongering tactic to promote hatred and oppression.

As for me, I feel a pre-op transperson should forego using public showers until reassingment surgery has been completed, I don't think that's too much of an imposition. But bathrooms are a different story, we can't always avoid the need to use a public bathroom and its unreasonable to ask a pre-op transwoman to use the men's bathroom and risk violent assault, or even death.

You strike me as a person with a lot more integrity than bad anonymous. If that's true you'll address his dishonesty on issues such as the poll blame numbers on the government shutdown rather than just looking the other way.

March 06, 2014 1:46 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

just a reminder about lazy Priya's alarmist lies:

"NASA scientists say 2013 tied with 2009 and 2006 for the seventh warmest year since 1880, continuing a long-term trend of rising global temperatures.

With the exception of 1998, the 10 warmest years in the 134-year record have all occurred since 2000, with 2010 and 2005 ranking as the warmest years on record."

so, the ten warmest years have been since 2000

2001-2012

that's twelve years

six of them have been warmer than 2013

two tied with 2013

four were cooler, but not much

that's not a climbing trend

the planet is not warming

it has stayed roughly the same since 1998

March 06, 2014 1:47 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"there are always rights of one individual that conflict with another individual"

what lazy priya doesn't get is that nobody has the right to services performed by another

it's the obligation of each individual to set up their own associations and relationships

in short, if you want someone to bake you a cake, it is your obligation to convince them to do so

that's the "give-and-take" we call life

anti-social elements would like government to force everyone to be their friend because they won't have any otherwise

"You strike me as a person with a lot more integrity than bad anonymous. If that's true you'll address his dishonesty on issues such as the poll blame numbers on the government shutdown rather than just looking the other way."

pathetic

March 06, 2014 1:56 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Did anyone else just hear a series of farts?

March 06, 2014 2:08 PM  
Anonymous ah, global warming is getting hot-hot-hot said...

no, as usual, you're hearing voices

voices of your imaginary friends

now that global warming is over, the planet is recovering nicely

Water levels in the Great Lakes are expected to continue a steady recovery this year, courtesy of widespread ice cover that is slowing evaporation and snowfall that has approached record amounts in some cities, federal experts said Wednesday

The siege of polar air that has gripped the region this winter has caused the most extensive freeze-over of the lakes since the record-setting year of 1979, when nearly 95 percent of their surface area solidified. On Tuesday, the ice cover reached its highest point since then - 91 percent, said George Leshkevich, a physical scientist with the federal Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory in Ann Arbor.

Meanwhile, the towering snowpack rimming the watershed will melt this spring and much of the water will flow into the lakes or the streams that feed them. The runoff is expected to be bountiful.

beware the ides of March:

A storm responsible for ice in portions of Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi on Tuesday will swing farther east in the South later this week with snow and ice.

As the storm from Tuesday moves toward the Atlantic coast, it is forecast to strengthen later this week

According to Mark Mancuso, "The storm could strengthen just enough to tap into just enough cold air in parts of northern Georgia, the Carolinas to portions of southern Virginia to bring some freezing rain, sleet and wet snow later Thursday into Friday."

This is the zone that has a chance at receiving some wet snow or a wintry mix from the storm later Thursday into Friday.

Cities that have a chance at receiving some wet snow or a wintry mix of snow, ice and rain include Gainesville, Ga.; Charlotte, Raleigh and Greensboro, N.C.; Greenville, Spartanburg and Rock Hill, S.C.; and Charlottesville, Roanoke and Richmond, Va. The possibility of wet snow and a wintry mix also includes some of the northern and eastern suburbs of Atlanta.

According to Bernie Rayno, the odds favor wet snow over ice over northern Georgia to upstate South Carolina, then more of a chance of freezing rain and sleet farther to the northeast over North Carolina to southern Virginia.

Enough snow or a wintry mix could fall in this swath to cover grassy surfaces and perhaps bring slippery travel. Ice could weigh down trees and perhaps cause sporadic power outages.

Farther south, the storm system will bring drenching, locally gusty thunderstorms over the Florida Peninsula on Thursday.

There is a slight chance the storm may track far enough to the north to bring a mixture of rain and wet snow to Washington, D.C, Baltimore, Philadelphia and Atlantic City, N.J., later Friday morning.


March 06, 2014 2:31 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

More good news. A new ABC News Washington Post poll shows support for marriage equality at a record high.

Record numbers of Americans support gay marriage, say adoption by gay couples should be legal and see gays and lesbians as good parents. Most oppose a right to refuse service to gays, including on religious grounds. And, by a closer margin, more also accept than reject gay marriage as a constitutional right.

The results continue a dramatic transformation of public attitudes on the issue, led by political, legislative and court-ordered developments alike. Seventeen states now allow gay marriage, and federal courts in four others – most recently Texas and Virginia – have rejected laws banning it.

Support for gay marriage has advanced from 32 percent in 2004 to a majority for the first time three years ago and on to 59 percent in this survey, a new high. Opposition, at 34 percent, is down by 6 percentage points since last summer and 13 points in less than a year and a half.

Other changes in this survey, produced for ABC by Langer Research Associates, are equally profound:

•In a Time/CNN poll in 1992, just 29 percent of Americans supported allowing gay couples to adopt children. That advanced to 49 percent in an ABC/Post poll in 2006 – and to 61 percent now, a sizable majority.

•In a question posed by a Newsweek poll in 1996, 57 percent said gays “can be as good parents as straight people.” Today, 78 percent say so, a 21-point jump.

•Sixty-five percent, another high, say being homosexual is just the way people are, rather than the way they choose to be – similar to a year ago (62 percent) but up from 49 percent when first asked by ABC/Post polls in 1994. The number who see being gay as a choice has ebbed from 40 percent two decades ago to 25 percent now.

March 06, 2014 2:36 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"Record numbers of Americans support gay marriage, say adoption by gay couples should be legal and see gays and lesbians as good parents. Most oppose a right to refuse service to gays, including on religious grounds. And, by a closer margin, more also accept than reject gay marriage as a constitutional right."

proving homosexuals need no special protection against discrimination

if one baker refuses to make a cake with a guy figurine buggering another on top, there are record numbers just dying to

March 06, 2014 3:11 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

March 06, 2014 3:14 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

O-oh, bad anonymous is getting "dispassionate" again. You can always tell when he's losing the argument, he can't control his temper.

March 06, 2014 3:24 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Another interesting poll number:

Only 19% of Americans who oppose marriage equality are aware that the majority of Americans support it.

American conservatives - always far out of touch with reality.

March 06, 2014 3:37 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"Only 19% of Americans who oppose marriage equality are aware that the majority of Americans support it"

well, assuming your poll numbers are valid (and, btw, Washington Post/ABC is not exactly the gold standard for pollsters), it's a fairly recent development

unlike global warming, arrested 16 years ago, and lazy Priya "I live on the web" Lynn has still not heard

but everyone knows there will always be enough people to bake you a cake

"O-oh, bad anonymous is getting "dispassionate" again. You can always tell when he's losing the argument, he can't control his temper"

oh no

is lazy Priya lying again?

unfortunately for the slothful sofa spud from Sasktchewan, most people saw it before Jim deleted it and know it was no more than a terse affirmation of the post before

that kinda thing really ticks him off


March 06, 2014 3:56 PM  
Anonymous Dont forget these facts about the Great Lakes said...

" The runoff is expected to be [SO] bountiful

More paragraphs omitted by AnonymousLiar:

"... that some areas will be in danger of flooding, a prospect that could be worsened by ice jams on swollen rivers.

Any additional rainfall on top of that snowpack would add to that flood threat," said Keith Kompoltowicz, hydrology branch chief with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers district office in Detroit. "We're certainly paying very close attention to the weather in the next few weeks."

Lakes levels dropped sharply in the late 1990s and have remained mostly below normal since. Scientists blame a warming climate, which promotes evaporation and limits ice cover, and occasional dry spells.

The drop-off was most severe on Lakes Michigan and Huron, which hydrologists consider one water body because they are connected and at the same height above sea level. They fell to the lowest point on record in January 2013, while the three other Great Lakes - Superior, Erie and Ontario - were well below average.

The prolonged slump hammered the shipping industry, forcing vessels to carry lighter loads to avoid scraping bottom in channels and ports. Marina owners lost money as slips were too shallow for boats to dock. Vegetation sprang up along waterfronts, frustrating hotel and cottage owners..."


There's more at:

http://weather.aol.com/2014/03/06/snow-ice-cover-will-boost-great-lakes-levels/

Note: That's "weather.aol" not "climate.aol"

March 06, 2014 3:59 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Remember the New Mexico photographer who got sued after declining to photograph a lesbian couple's wedding, citing religious objections to same-sex marriage? Her name is Elaine Huguenin. In Slate, Mark Joseph Stern has branded her a "homophobe" and an "anti-gay bigot" whose actions sprung from hatred.* He offers no evidence in support of those charges. Insofar as I've found, nothing in the public record establishes that this Christian photographer is afraid of gay people, or intolerant of them, or that she bears any hatred toward gays or lesbians.

The facts of her case do suggest that she regards marriage as a religious sacrament with a procreative purpose, that her Christian beliefs cause her to reject same-sex marriage, and that her business discriminates against same-sex weddings because she believes wedding photography requires artistic efforts to render the subject captured in a positive light. She believes making that effort would be wrong.

In America, there is plenty of homophobia, plenty of anti-gay bigotry, and plenty of people whose antagonism to gays and lesbians is rooted in hatred. Sometimes the language of religious liberty is used to justify behavior that is anything but Christ-like. But the Slate article is implicitly trafficking in its own sort of prejudice. The working assumption is that homophobia, anti-gay bigotry, and hatred are obviously what's motivating anyone who declines to provide a service for a gay wedding.

That assumption is wrongheaded. A closer look at the photographer's case is the best place to begin. Jonathan and Elaine Huguenin lost a case before the New Mexico Supreme Court, and have now appealed the ruling. As noted in their petition to the U.S. Supreme Court, the Huguenins' photography business does serve gay and lesbian clients, just not same-sex weddings. Insofar as a photographer can distinguish between discriminating against a class of client and a type of event—there is, perhaps, a limit—their business does so: "The Huguenins gladly serve gays and lesbians—by, for example, providing them with portrait photography—whenever doing so would not require them to create expression conveying messages that conflict with their religious beliefs."

The photography business has also turned down clients other than gay and lesbian couples while citing religious objections. "They have declined requests for nude maternity pictures," their petition states, "and photographs portraying violence."

Finally, it isn't just same-sex weddings they'd be uncomfortable photographing: their petition states that they'd also refuse business capturing a polygamous marriage.

March 06, 2014 4:11 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Set aside for a moment the tension here between individual liberty and non-discrimination law. Whether you think the New Mexico Supreme Court decided the case rightly or wrongly, that is separate from the question of what motivated Elaine Huguenin. I've never met the woman. None of us can look inside her heart. But her petition presents a perfectly plausible account of why she would refuse to photograph same-sex weddings for perfectly common religious reasons that have nothing to do with fear of gays, intolerance toward gays, or hatred of gay people.

This shouldn't be surprising to anyone who has spent an appreciable amount of time around practicing Christians. In such circles, there are plenty of ugly attitudes toward gays and lesbians, as well as lots of people who think gay and lesbian sex and marriage is sinful, but who bear no ill will toward gays and lesbians themselves. I wish even the latter group would reconsider. I don't regard homosexuality as sinful. Unlike my friends in the orthodox Catholic community, I don't regard sex before marriage or masturbation or the use of contraceptives or failing to attend Sunday Mass as sinful either. Knowing those Catholic friends neither fear me nor treat me with intolerance nor bear hatred toward me, it's easy for me to see how they could view gay sex or marriage as sinful without hating gays or lesbians.

March 06, 2014 4:12 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

There's no such thing as opposing the right of gays to marry and not being a bigot.

Religion is merely an excuse to be a bigot. Bigots who claim they oppose gays or gay marriage because of their religion are merely attempting to make their bigotry sound legitimate and principled.

Religion is a facade. There's only two reasons people oppose equal rights for gays and those are the same reasons the people who wrote the bible(pretending to be a god) had for making the bible anti-gay:

1) gays are icky
2) they are struggling to suppress their own same sex attractions and attacking gays is a surrogate for attacking the part of themselves they can't accept.

March 06, 2014 4:33 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

People are no more sincere about their religious "belief"(excuse) that gayness is a sin then they are sincere about believing people who eat or work at Red Lobster are sinners.

March 06, 2014 4:35 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

And the way you can tell Elaine Huguenin was not sincere about religion being the reason she refused to photograph that committment ceremony is the fact that she could have easily avoided doing so by simply telling the couple she was all booked up, or on vacation or some such thing and there would have been no lawsuit. But it was not good enough for her just to not photograph the ceremony, she had to make a point of telling the couple she was not doing it because they were not good enough. She had to make a point of telling that couple she saw them as sinners, as bad people. She was more concerned with slapping the lesbian couple in the face than she was with simply not doing the work.

March 06, 2014 4:43 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

March 06, 2014 4:50 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

By all means bad anonymous. Email me at priya dot lynn at sasktel dot net and I'll tell you where to send the money - I can't wait!

March 06, 2014 5:44 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I can't afford it myself with all the taxes that Obama has stolen from me

I was just making an appeal for people who are on the public dole to send in some of their excess cash for the cause

you obviously need help but Jim has now gone and deleted it

how about that lie you posted about global warming?

March 06, 2014 5:52 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Don't give me this B.S. about how you can't afford it. Just last year you were bragging about touring Europe for months, buying a winery, eating in five star restaurants, vacationing in the caribbean and how much money you have.

Were you lying then about how rich you are, or are you lying now about how broke you are?

March 06, 2014 6:01 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Barack O took it all

I barely have enough for the sailing trip I'm taking to Bora Bora next month

you sound like you think you have an entitlement to psychiatry

I guess it would to society's benefit to help you get better

maybe those millions who won't have to work anymore because of Obamacare can help out

to bad Jim deleted your chance for a big score

March 06, 2014 6:22 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

That's bad anonymous for you. He'll contradict himself at anytime if it suits his immediate purpose - no integrity whatsoever.

March 06, 2014 6:38 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

again, displaying your need for help

btw, I also dropped a bundle on a reservation aboard the new Virgin space plane

March 06, 2014 6:45 PM  
Anonymous Robert said...

What you're describing is "separate but equal." The court ruled in 1954 in Brown that that separate was intrinsically unequal and a violation of due process when some groups or individuals have greater power or resources than others.

You, I suppose, would assert that in private transactions the due process and equal protections clauses don't apply. I would assert that the same logic applies, and Arizona was establishing state-supported "separate."

Again, it matters not so much in matters such as cakes in florists, since your profit motive would provide such services in all but the most rural areas. But for housing, jobs and loans, it matters.

Btw, you mentioned risk. I've never heard that queer people are a greater risk in housing, loans and jobs. Do you have any suggestions of where I could find that, other than in your posts?

rrjr

March 07, 2014 5:05 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"to bad Jim deleted your chance for a big score"

Too bad spellcheck won't help you with that one.

March 07, 2014 7:44 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

yes, to bad with it

March 07, 2014 8:11 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

U.S. Evangelicals Forced On The Defensive Following Uganda's Anti-Gay Laws

"(RNS) American evangelicals are denouncing a new Uganda law that criminalizes homosexuality, reiterating a position that many have held for years but which has nonetheless drawn scrutiny and skepticism from critics.

Since 2009, several American pastors and leaders have condemned legislation in Uganda that in its initial version imposed the death penalty for some offenders. Under the revised law signed recently by President Yoweri Museveni, the death penalty was removed and replaced with life in prison in some cases.

Now, American evangelicals who insist they never supported either version of the law nonetheless find themselves playing defense, saying their statements against homosexuality at home are being twisted as an endorsement of harsh penalties against gays and lesbians abroad.

Decrying laws in countries such as Uganda and Russia, Russell Moore, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, said he knows no evangelicals who would support legislation like Uganda’s.

“We always must balance a fear of Western cultural imperialism with a responsibility to speak to global human rights around the world,” said Moore, who has also denounced Russia’s anti-gay laws because he has adopted sons from Russia.

“Those of us who hold to a Christian sexual ethic don’t want to see those who disagree with us jailed; we want to see them reconciled to God through the gospel.”

The timing of Uganda’s legislation coincided with heated debates in the U.S. over the proposed legislation in Arizona that would have allowed businesses in the state to deny services to people who are gay if they felt that serving them would violate their religious rights.

“The situations in Uganda and Arizona are galaxies apart,” Moore said. “I think that in Arizona and several other states, in an attempt to preserve our religious liberties, regardless of how we agree with how it’s being done, can hardly compare with persecution around the world.”

California megachurch pastor Rick Warren, too, posted on his Facebook page on Sunday (March 2) denying allegations that he ever supported the Uganda bill. In 2009, Warren posted an “encyclical video” on YouTube saying he opposes the criminalization of homosexuality.

“Last week, the nation of Uganda passed a bad law, which I have publicly opposed for nearly 5 years,” Warren wrote. “I still oppose it, but rumors persist because lies and errors are never removed from the internet....”


Not a rumor, lie or error: Matthews Gets Family Research Council's [Peter] Sprigg To Admit He Thinks Homosexuality Should Be Outlawed

March 07, 2014 8:19 AM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

This comment has been removed by the author.

March 07, 2014 12:28 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Evangelical christians were instrumental in getting the laws in Uganda and Russia on the books. Evangelical Scott lively and a team of other evangelicals made a trip to Uganda in 2009 and promoted the ideas that Nazis were gays, gays were responsible for the Rwandan genocide, and are all pedophiles who choose to be gay and can become straight if they choose. Lively assisted in the drafts of the Uganda law and bragged after the trip that he had "dropped a nuclear bomb on the gay agenda in Uganda". When asked if he supported the original draft of the law that called for the death penalty he said "Its a step in the right direction".

After that Lively and other U.S. evangelicals made repeated trips to Uganda to fan the flames of hatred and encourage the brutal criminalization of gays and any heterosexual supporters. Lively and many other evangelicals such as Brian Brown from the national organization "for" marriage also travelled to Russia to promote and help write the anti-gay laws there and many of them are bragging now that they played an instrumental role in getting the Russian anti-gay laws passed.

American evangelicals realize they've lost the war on gays at home and so are exporting their hatred and oppression to backwards countries that are suceptible to anti-gay myths and lies that Americans are too smart to buy. They hope to keep their jobs as professional bigots by getting the gravy train in places like Africa, Russia, and Jamaica flowing as it dries up in the U.S.

March 07, 2014 12:32 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

If you have a president that chooses what laws to follow and what laws to ignore, you no longer have a President.

TERM LIMITs

balanced budget amendment

eliminate ANY ability of folks that serve in Congress to return as lobbyists.

and this is why Ted Cruz is a far better candidate than Chris Christie.

March 07, 2014 4:51 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"American evangelicals realize they've lost the war on gays at home and so are exporting their hatred and oppression to backwards countries that are suceptible to anti-gay myths"

this is so bass-ackwards

only in the U.S., Canada, Western Europe and Australia are homosexuals tolerated

in most of the globe they are not

only in countries with a Judeo-Christian heritage

March 07, 2014 10:39 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

The Washington Post has the bombshell story of the month: “A pair of surveys released on Thursday suggest that just one in 10 uninsured people who qualify for private health plans through the new marketplace have signed up for one—and that about half of uninsured adults has looked for information on the online exchanges or plans to look.” Well, and there goes the famed rationale for the health-care law—which was to bring the people, numbering anywhere between 31 million to 47 million depending on how and whom you count, without insurance into the system.

Why aren’t they signing up? First off, there will always be people who choose to live on the margins in some way or other. They don’t want to be in the system, they’re paranoid about the system, they keep their money in their mattress and lots of cans in the basement. But mostly, people aren’t signing up now and haven’t had health care before because of the cost: “Of people who are uninsured and do not intend to get a health plan through the marketplaces, the biggest factor is that they believe they could not afford one.”

Since October 1 of last year, the coverage of the Obamacare disaster has centered on the technical catastrophe of the healthcare.gov and the transitional problems afflicting insurers, employers, and the insured alike—and more recently the administration’s desperate efforts to delay the penalties and controls imposed by the law to limit the political fallout. It is safe to say, though, that this is the worst possible news for Obama and his people. They have thrown the entire health-care system into unprecedented chaos for a population that is, it seems, staying as far away from it as possible. Little has been fixed; much has been made far worse; nothing makes sense; and good luck to the Democrats who have to defend their votes for this colossal cock-up in November.

March 08, 2014 6:44 AM  
Anonymous GOP Minority Outreach = Oxymoron said...

Big problem for GOP. Most important #CPAC2014 panel. Topic: minority outreach. View: largely empty room.

March 08, 2014 8:55 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"If you have a president that chooses what laws to follow and what laws to ignore, you no longer have a President."

"President George W. Bush made the constitutional challenges within signing statements (in)famous by citing problems with approximately 1,200 provisions of legislation; double the amount of all the previous presidents combined. Those challenges can be found within Bush’s 112 first-term statements and his 50 second-term statements.

The Obama administration has only issued 22 statements during his first term. While these statements are chock-full of constitutional challenges, the lack of frequency with which the administration issues them leaves Obama nowhere close to Bush in terms of the number of provisions challenged over a similar timeframe."

March 08, 2014 9:03 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"Big problem for GOP. Most important #CPAC2014 panel. Topic: minority outreach. View: largely empty room."

Big problem for Democrats.

Topic: Minorities can't find jobs.

Obama response: trust the teachers' unions

brilliant anon:

"If you have a president that chooses what laws to follow and what laws to ignore, you no longer have a President."

brain-dead TTFer:

"President George W. Bush made the constitutional challenges within signing statements (in)famous by citing problems with approximately 1,200 provisions of legislation; double the amount of all the previous presidents combined. Those challenges can be found within Bush’s 112 first-term statements and his 50 second-term statements.

The Obama administration has only issued 22 statements during his first term. While these statements are chock-full of constitutional challenges, the lack of frequency with which the administration issues them leaves Obama nowhere close to Bush in terms of the number of provisions challenged over a similar timeframe."

George Bush made constitutional challenges. He swore an oath to defend the Constitution.

Obama has unilaterally altered the law in violation of the Constitution, for political purposes

see the difference?

the former President was a former Texan governor; son of a President, CIA Director, ambassador, Ambassador, Republican Party Chairman; grandson of a Senator; uncle of a rising Hispanic politician

he was committed to strengthening America

the latter President was a former community organizer who got elected to the Senate and immediately began running for President; congregant in a church where the pastor changed the words of God Bless America to "God Damn America'; son of a radical socialist Kenyan professor;

he is committed to managing the decline of America

March 08, 2014 9:50 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"he was committed to strengthening America"

Yet left the nation's economy careening toward the Great Recession.

Only a bubblehead calls that "strengthening America."

March 08, 2014 10:02 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Unemployment rates Jan 2004-Jan 2014

The unemployment rate as of January 2009, when Bush left and Obama took over the Presidency, was 7.8%, but today it under Obama's leadership, it stands at 6.7%.

"the former President was a former Texan governor; son of a President, CIA Director, ambassador, Ambassador, Republican Party Chairman; grandson of a Senator; uncle of a rising Hispanic politician"

Well it's a good thing Bush has family members you can add to his CV to pad his frat boy credentials.

Bush was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and yet Historical rankings of Presidents of the United Stated show Obama above Bush in most US Presidential surveys.

"[Obama] was a former community organizer" like Jesus, and the son of a broken mixed race marriage, who despite his meager family origin, managed to win the Presidency on his own merit, not the reputation and monied connections of his family.

March 08, 2014 10:28 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

they are measuring unemployment differently now, we are at the lowest job participation rate since the great depression...

the unemployment number as quoted now is pretty irrelevant.

just like deportations, Obama admin claimed more, but they are counting people that were turned back at the border, which wasn't how they measured it before.

this administration is more corrupt than any administration in history, and history will see it as such.

that is, if they don't see it all cratering and there are no Americans left to write history books.

why is it crazier think that it might all truly come crashing down, than to think we can continue printing funny money with no consequences ?

March 08, 2014 12:00 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

The American right admires Putin. They want to gush over how manly and strong he is while simultaneously calling him a tyrant. That’s where all this “wrestles bears” bullshit comes from. Like Putin, the American right only has one definition of masculinity and that’s the tendency to be authoritarian and violent.

If Putin were an American politician, he would be a wildly popular conservative. He hates all the right people, strikes the macho pose whenever possible, advocates for theocratic government and is a hyper-nationalist. He’d fit in perfectly.

Bad anonymous said "only in the U.S., Canada, Western Europe and Australia are homosexuals tolerated in most of the globe they are not only in countries with a Judeo-Christian heritage".

Bad anonymous is living in his fantasy world where whatever he claims to be magically is. In heavily christian Uganda gays are amongst the most persectuded in the world and the same goes for other mainly christian african countries. Half of all the countries that criminalize gayness are in Africa.

And as Russia has moved from atheism to chrisitianity it has become dramatically more anti-gay and the christian church there plays a central role in promoting the legal oppression of gays.

Its in countries that are the least religious that gays fair the best and that many of these used to be christian is besides the point, its the movement away from christianity that has allowed them to embrace gay rights. Its in the countries more attached to christianity like the United States that progress has been slowest. The most religious states in the U.S. are also the ones that had highly popular bans on gay marriage and the least religious states that are the most accepting of gays.

It's no coincidence that much less christian countries like Canada got marriage equality before the much more christian United States. And the, for all practical intents and purposes, atheist countries in Scandinavia were the first to embrace recognition for same sex couples. Christians like to lie and pretend these countries are strongly christian because, for example, in some of them almost 100% are registered as christians but that registration take place at birth as a routine tradition and surveys show very few of these "christians" believe in god or adhere to any christian traditions.

Bad anonymous is starting to behave just as I predicted: As he realizes more and more his war on gays is lost he'll start claiming it was christianity that was responsible for the acceptance of gayness and the existance of marriage equality.

The christians did the same thing with slavery and the civil rights movement. Christians stood strongly against equal rights for blacks and justified their bigotry by claiming it was mandated by their "sincerely" held religious beliefs. Decades after they lost the war on blacks they started claiming it was christianity that was responsible for black equality when it was christians in the first place opposing it(don't foget the KKK).

No, the bigots like bad anonymous can see they're going to lose their war on gays so now they're trying to hide their role in it and take credit for something happening they opposed from the very beginnning.

March 08, 2014 12:03 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

While the battle rages over equality for LGBT people it may be difficult to see how much things will change over the next couple decades, but as Amanda Marcotte correctly points out, it is almost a certainty that Christianity will become less and less anti-gay as time goes by.
Douthat is right about this much:

The more unfashionable and distasteful anti-gay bigotry becomes, the more religious people will cut it out. Some will come up with theological rationalizations for their change of mind, which is probably the best solution. Some will simply recede to muttering about the gays behind closed doors as they slowly die off. Preaching homophobia from the pulpit will increasingly become taboo. It’s true that Douthat, as Beutler accuses, doesn’t have the confidence that the supposed rightness of religious bigotry will be enough to allow believers to hold fast in face of changing tides. That shows Douthat has little faith, but he does actually understand the real world in this.

I just want to point out that the reason that Douthat knows this is how it goes is because this is how it went down when it came to the end of Jim Crow and segregation. In the decades leading up to the Civil Rights Act, it was common for Christian preachers to rail from the pulpit about the evils of race-mixing. As Ian Milhiser explained, much to most of the justifications for segregation were religious in nature. The KKK, like many anti-gay groups now, held itself out primarily as a Christian organization dedicated to preserving the family. Brown v the Board of Education was largely battled out on religious grounds, with Christian groups starting private schools for the purpose of excluding black students on religious grounds...

Since then, a lot has changed. Like I said, I heard religious justifications for racism from people in the 90s, but these were things people uttered breathlessly behind closed doors, instead of bellowed from the pulpit. While there’s a lot of de facto segregation still, what used to be unthinkable in conservative Christian circles—racially mixed congregations, desegregated religious schools, acceptance of interracial marriage—have all become normal and accepted. What used to be a prime motivator for the religious right—resisting desegregation—has become a dirty secret of the past that they try to pretend never happened.

March 08, 2014 12:11 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

This is what Douthat clearly and openly fears will happen on the question of homophobia. He knows that churches will never be forced to marry gay couples. They aren’t forced to marry interracial couples now. But the cultural tides shifted in the wake of anti-discrimination legislation, and most churches that would have balked at marrying interracial couples 40 years ago wouldn’t bat an eye at doing it now. That’s why his hand-waving over how these situations are so different is so utterly dishonest. He knows the reason that the reason “remaining adherents” to a homophobic worldview “can be marginalized, set against one other, and encouraged to conform” is because that’s exactly what happened to the people who tried to hold fast to the notion that racism was also biblically mandated.

As historical patterns go, this could hardly be more plain. Until the last half century, American Christianity was largely (though not entirely) convinced that racism and segregation were demanded by their religion. Until a century ago, it was largely convinced that the Christian position on women’s suffrage was to oppose it. Until a century and a half ago, it was largely of the view that slavery was a divinely-commanded institution. There were liberal Christian churches on the right side of all those battles, of course, but the weight of institutional Christianity was squarely on the wrong side.

But today those religious beliefs are consigned to the dustbin of history and now exist only on the extreme fringes of society. Christianity has evolved, like every institution does. It has been humanized by contact with Enlightenment ideals of liberty, justice and equality and that evolution continues today. They will evolve again, finding fanciful theological means of reinterpreting those anti-gay verses in the Bible just as they’ve reinterpreted, and largely done away with, the curse of Ham and other justifications for bigotry. And then they’ll start pointing to Gene Robinson and other pro-equality Christians and claiming it was their idea from the start, quickly erasing all the relevant facts of history in the process.

March 08, 2014 12:12 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I actually have to admit I am so horrified by the country's financial situation that I haven't been paying that much attention to the social issues.

we will all end up back on farms - those that survive anyway - if the govt keeps spending at this rate.


March 08, 2014 12:19 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

What's wrong with farms?

March 08, 2014 1:43 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"they are measuring unemployment differently now, we are at the lowest job participation rate since the great depression"

One of your GOPers did try to change the calculation of how we measurement unemployment, noted here: GOP lawmaker calls for change to how government measures unemployment

Which pointed out:

"...Since the inception of the survey in 1940, only relatively minor changes have been made to the official definition of unemployment, despite numerous outside reviews and ongoing assessments by academicians, business and labor organizations and various interest groups. The official measure has withstood the test of time largely because of its objectivity,” wrote John Bregger, former assistant commissioner for current employment analysis..."

"I am so horrified by the country's financial situation"

Oh you poor uninformed worry-wart.

You apparently missed the news about the country's financial situation.

Living in the bubble is hazardous to your knowledge.

CBO: Deficit Will Fall To Just 3.0% Of GDP This Year [2014]

"There's a brand new report out from the Congressional Budget Office on the deficit:

The federal budget deficit has fallen sharply during the past few years, and it is on a path to decline further this year and next year. CBO estimates that under current law, the deficit will total $514 billion in fiscal year 2014, compared with $1.4 trillion in 2009. At that level, this year’s deficit would equal 3.0 percent of the nation’s economic output, or gross domestic product (GDP)—close to the average percentage of GDP seen during the past 40 years...."


Oh yeah. And don't forget, polls reveal everybody knows Bush squandered the 2000 Clinton budget surplus.

March 08, 2014 2:13 PM  
Anonymous Demographics said...

WASHINGTON – Most of America’s young adults are single, don’t go to church and while half say they have no loyalty to a political party, when pushed they tend to swing further left politically than those before them.

A new Pew Research Center survey out Friday showed that half of America’s young adults, ages 18 to 33, consider themselves political independents, identifying with neither party. But asked which way they lean politically, half of the so-called millennials say they lean toward the Democratic Party, the highest share for any age group over the last decade.

In addition, young adults seem to be turning away from their predecessors’ proclivity for religion and marriage. Almost two-thirds don’t classify themselves as “a religious person.”

And when it comes to tying the knot: Only about 1 in 4 millennials is married. Almost half of baby boomers were married at that age.

The new survey shows how the millennial adults are “forging a distinctive path into adulthood,” said Paul Taylor, Pew’s executive vice president and co-author of the report.

This can especially be seen when it comes to politics. Only 27 percent said they consider themselves Democrats and 17 percent said Republicans. The half of millennials who say they are independent is an increase from 38 percent back in 2004.

“It’s not that they don’t have strong opinions, political opinions, they do,” Taylor said. “It’s simply that they choose not to identify themselves with either political party.”

The number of self-described independents is lower among their predecessors. Only 39 percent of those in Generation X said they were independents, along with 37 percent of the boomers and 32 percent of the Silent Generation.

Pew describes Gen Xers as those from age 34-49, boomers as 50-68 and the Silent Generation as those 69-86.

When the self-identified Democratic millennials are combined with the self-described independents who lean Democratic, half – 50 percent – of the millennials are Democrats or Democratic-leaning while 34 percent are Republicans or Republican-leaning.

“They don’t choose to identify, but they have strong views and their views are views that most people conventionally associate with the Democratic Party,” Taylor said. “They believe in a big activist government on some of the social issues of the day – gay marriage, marijuana legalization, immigration. Their views are much more aligned with the Democratic Party.”

Taylor said they don’t know whether millennial voting trends will stay the same as they get older.

“People can change over the course of their lifetimes,” he said. “At the same time, the behaviors, attitudes, the voting patterns and experiences that generations sort of encounter as they come of age in their late teens and early 20s are important.”

Millennials also haven’t bought into the idea that they should go to church or get married early.

Only 36 percent of the millennials said the phrase “a religious person” described them very well, compared with 52 percent of the Gen Xers, 55 percent of the baby boomers and 61 percent of the Silent Generation. And they’re significantly less religious than their immediately predecessors, the Gen Xers. When they were the same age, almost half of the Gen Xers – 47 percent – identified themselves as religious.

The 64 percent of the millennials who say that they are not religious “is the highest for any age group we’ve ever measured,” Taylor said.

March 08, 2014 2:49 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Further to good anonymous's last comment, young people are the least religious by far and also the most supportive of marriage equality by far unlike the older christian population.

March 08, 2014 4:07 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

nothing is wrong with farms. actually, if it all does come crashing down, those that don't work will starve.

though there is nothing wrong with temporary help, this has become endemic in our society, and it creates a culture of dependence. which is what the democrats want, since that is the primary source of their voting base.

the labor participation rate is at a 30 year low and we have more people on foodstamps than ever before.

half the country does not pay federal taxes. either because they are not working or they are managing small businesses and declaring far less income than they actually bring in...


it is just not sustainable.

did you know that the price of gold has been artificially manipulated to lower rates than the govt incessant printing would have otherwise shot it to ? that just came out on the past couple of days....

did you know that Germany asked for it's gold back and we couldn't give it to them ?

did you know that China is no longer buying US bonds ?

did you know that nine bankers have committed suicide in the past 3 months ?

while you have folks that don't pay any taxes and capable of voting able to vote themselves more entitlements ... well you have a vicious cycle.

The priya's of the world will vote for more and more money from everyone else's pocket.... because the priya's of the world don't want to contribute to society.

my son had an interesting idea, if you don't pay federal taxes you don't vote.

not quite sure how that hits retirement folks... I believe some pensions and SS in some cases are taxable.

but in concept, I like this idea.

basically strips the entitlement class of their voting rights, and college kids living off their folks that haven't started working yet.

just like my daughter's idea of mandatory sterilization for folks that cannot support the kids they have and keep having more... well it is radical but we have to do something.

we cannot continue on this path.
we cannot continue to not pay our bills to the rest of the world, they will give up on us... (and they should).

March 08, 2014 10:16 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Crocuses blooming in Silver Spring today, March 8, 2014

March 08, 2014 10:21 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

lol.
I took my son's 200K plus beater in for a new tire this past weekend.

there was another parent (much younger dad) waiting in the shop for his car as well.

he about had me in tears talking about his comments to the flower buds in his yard that were trying to bloom...

and, st. paul's Methodist has a big sign out front "Have faith. Spring IS coming".

March 08, 2014 10:28 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...


Theresa, I'm still waiting to hear what you think about bad anonymous changing public opinion polls on the October governemnent shutdown and swapping the percentage number blaming the Democrats with the percentage number blaming the Republicans.

How about offering some admonishment for your teamate lying or are you just fine with people on your side lying?

March 09, 2014 12:01 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

You should stop listening to Glenn Beck about investing in gold. He's got a vested interest in some gold sales as a spokesperson for Goldline International, which was ordered to refund $4.5 million to defrauded customers after it was found to employ "bait and switch" sales tactics, which cost Beck his show on FOX News.

Beck only urges frightened people to buy gold, especially "'numismatic' (or antique) coins rather than standard government-issued bullion" as an investment to enrich himself.

Tell your kids the truth: It's corporate welfare that is not sustainable:

"Twenty-six of the most powerful American corporations – such as Boeing, General Electric, and Verizon – paid no federal income tax from 2008 to 2012, according to a new report detailing how Fortune 500 companies exploit tax breaks and loopholes.

The report, conducted by public advocacy group Citizens for Tax Justice (CTJ), focuses on the 288 companies in the Fortune 500 that registered consistent profit every year from 2008 to 2012. Those 288 profitable corporations paid an “effective federal income tax rate of just 19.4 percent over the five-year period — far less than the statutory 35 percent tax rate,” CTJ states."


Does your son also suggest all paid employees of those 26 non-income tax paying corporations should be unable to vote?

March 09, 2014 12:08 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

And how does your son feel about retired veterans who served their country in the military but no longer make enough money to have to pay income taxes?

Does you son want to deny these non-income tax paying vets their right to vote too?



March 09, 2014 12:12 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

nope haven't been buying gold....

gold prices artifically manipulated

looking at getting a farm in Kentucky.

hey, and even Cynthia was in agreement with me on this. what we are doing is not sustainable.

this site has some interesting articles.

www.zerohedge.com

March 09, 2014 12:19 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

and I agree that the corporate tax code, indeed the entire tax code, needs to be thrown out and we need to start over.

and corporation can write off everything, with no AMT.

I am sure that the statistics on that (corporation total taxes versus personal income taxes overall paid) would be fascinating, but I am determined to get my aero garden seeds started today, so off to that.

March 09, 2014 12:26 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Theresa said "my son had an interesting idea, if you don't pay federal taxes you don't vote."

With the gap between the rich and the poor astronomical and growing, that's a great idea - only the rich people get to vote.

Here's a better idea, anyone with a net worth of over $500,000 doesn't get to vote. Rich people can do whatever they want so they don't need to have any control over the government

Typical rich b that theresa, scapegoating the poor in a vain attempt to try to make up for the unhappiness in her life. News Flash Theresa: most poor people work far harder than you, people aren't poor because they're lazy or rich because they work harder.

The rich have gamed the system, rigging it to add ever more riches to their pockets while keeping the poor down.

You want to do something about government spending Theresa, promote raising the minimum wage to 10.10 an hour, that would cut food stamp usage by 4.6 billion a year. Stop having the government subsidize the rich by making up for the wages they don't pay their lowest workers (so they can take more millions they don't need out of the economy).

we cannot continue on this path.

we cannot continue to have the government and poor people subsidize the rich and create an income gap that historically has lead to revolution.

March 09, 2014 12:31 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Priya.

You have admitted that you find work demoralizing. and you blog all day. I'm curious who paid for your reassignment surgery, the Canadian tax payer ?


I sit here and wonder why in the world I bothered to work so hard all my life, that I spend my weekends trying to keep up with taxes and my rentals balancing checking accounts and other junk and desperately trying to get my kids through college without exorbitant debt, when if I just quit working they would qualify for loans off my husband's salary.

at some point you end up with no extra income for working because the govt takes so much of the incremental income that it becomes a disincentive. that is especially true of the obamacare subsidies.

I like my job, if I didn't you really would have to question what the motivation is for working.

we continue to spend close to 4T a year when we spent 2.8 T under bush, a lot of this spending is the increases built into the system because of Obama's stimulus. we are up to 1 trillion dollars in welfare subsidies of various forms, Obama extended those subsidies to able bodied americans, not just the elderly and not just women with children.

if everyone paid the sort of taxes I do, we wouldn't have a deficit. if everyone paid taxes even at the same rate I do, (and I am including corporations) we wouldn't have a deficit.

you seem to think that everyone is trying very hard to work and trying very hard to support themselves, and working two or three jobs but still not able to get by.... but I don't believe that is the case. I think there is an entire culture that is used to not working and doesn't work....


and an entire culture that capitalizes on the EIC and child credit to get negative taxation (ie, money back with nothing paid in). there's 4 billion dollars in money going to illegal aliens right now for those credits.

I am not even picking on Priya, I am as furious at my own brother... who sends me emails telling me that I am living in a state of fear when his wife divorced him (because he wasn't working and wasn't helping)... who SITs in front of a TV playing with his phone all day, and he doesn't try. he hasn't worked in 4 years. he doesn't try. I have seen this behavior at my mom's beach-house when I couldn't even get him to come upstairs to help pack his kids suitcases (and I refused to do it for him). He wants to take the kids crabbing and who ends up getting the bait and tackle ready, packing the car, packing lunches, and when you try to divvy the work up ... I'll make lunches you pack the car and get the bait ready. He does nothing, he just sits and sits. It is unbelievable. and he doesn't seem panicked about it either... he has run through all of his 401K money and is about to be completely out. his wife is supporting their two children, and he gives her 400.00 a month, that's it, and for the activities fee he is supposed to be splitting, well, he hits my mom up for that. what do I say " don't give him any more money mom, you are channeling Obama. that's what you are doing. you are enabling his behavior. " so no, I don't feel sympathy for folks that don't try when I try so hard all the time. none at all. and if it does come crashing down, these are the folks that are going to have to finally figure it out.

at some point, there are more people sitting in the wagon NOT WORKING then there are pulling.

and your society will collapse.

March 09, 2014 1:33 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...



I have already indicated that I think that the corporate tax code should be overhauled and I actually am not all that opposed to the buffet tax.

but I also believe that we cannot keep encouraging folks to not work through negative taxation schemes and that you have to do something about the welfare moms.

you can't keep paying them to have babies, and more with each child they have when they can't support the ones they already have. you have to fix that.

when I hire folks to help around here, I pay them very well if they work hard. and I fire the ones that don't.



so I like my son's scheme that if your household doesn't pay taxes you don't vote (clearly you need some sort of exception for veterans and retirees in general), and I like my daughter's scheme of mandatory birth control for those that continue to have babies they can't support.

I had a long political conversation with a Swedish citizen about this whole issue (he leans very left)... do you know what they do in Sweden if you have a second child you can't support... - they take the child. he was fine with that.

if you continue to let folks who live on entitlements vote, they will vote themselves more entitlements. it's not that difficult to see how it all come crashing down.

whatever, I have a million things to accomplish today and this was not on the list.

get outside and enjoy some of the sun before we get our next storm later this week.

March 09, 2014 1:33 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

oh, and by the way, when I had to spend a beautiful Saturday moving stuff from 9 to 7 last spring (between helping my law school daughter move and helping my college daughter move and moving my son over to YSP at UMD) I offered to pay my brother 30.00 an hour cash to drive and help organize (so my husband could get a break).

He had no job at the time. He refused, even though I was careful to schedule the move on a weekend he did not have his kids. I continue to offer to way overpay him for various stuff. He has no computer skills, I offered to pay for an introductory class if he just got a passing grade. he never signed up.

so don't tell me that everyone is trying and working hard and I am just being so MEAN to them. I know differently Priya, I have seen it, and you dear, are quite the shining example yourself.

I believe in the bible somewhere it says ...if he shall not work, let him not eat....

we are getting ready to go back to that, because when not if it comes crashing down, it's the EBT card folks and the city dwellers that will be out of luck the fastest.

and if I have money Priya, it's because I WORKED FOR IT.

and now, I have spent 45 minutes blogging and I have a million other things to accomplish.

have a good day. go outside and enjoy the fresh air, hopefully it is sunny up in Canada as well.

March 09, 2014 1:46 PM  
Anonymous Robert said...

Did you really suggest mandatory sterilzation? Twice? Shudder.

March 10, 2014 8:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Okay Robert, what's your solution ? if you continue to pay for something you get more of it. right now we are exploding the food stamps and public assistance rules. the children born to these moms are not raised in a stable environment and a rule end up on welfare or in jail.

How do you encourage young women to stay in school, not have children, and not go on welfare ?

http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/year_spending_2014USbn_15bs2n_401013#usgs302

I think making them take a monthly birth control shot when they pick up their check for the one kids they already have that they can't support is reasonable.

Sweden takes the kids if they have more than one they can't support... how do you feel about that one?

we are spending 800 billion out of 3.7 trillion on Medicaid or welfare...

thoughts ?

March 10, 2014 11:08 AM  
Anonymous Robert said...

When governments engage in such oppressive acts as forced sterilization, where does it stop? Who decides who should be sterilized? The rich? The powerful? The majority? The religious authorities?

It is a shocking statement, one of the most shocking I have ever read in this often shocking comments section. If I were you, I would keep these thoughts close to your chest, and not share them in with anyone.

March 10, 2014 11:36 AM  
Anonymous Robert said...

This is what I read online about Sweden and child support:

Sweden places a major importance on their children. They do everything in their power to ensure the children of the country have a good future, and that their parents can take care of them finanicially and physically. Sweden's social welfare gives every parent a child allowance, an opportunity for their child to obtain a loan for their university studies and a loan for adults wanting to go back to school, and a set amount of money for the parents when the have a child so they can support the child, as well as themselves, while out of work. The loan given to the children allow the student to study and have some ting to live off of. They do not have to work and study at the same time, if they do not want to.

Parental Leave

When a mother has a child, she or her husband are given fifteen months of pay, while out of work, to split between the two of them any time during the first eight years of the child's life. After the child is born, the mother or the father can take anywhere from a year to a year and a half off of work and receive eighty percent of their normal pay up to a maximum of $35,300. The parent gets paid the flat rate of eight dollars a day for the remaining ninety days. This is called parental benefit. The parents are also given three months off of work yearly, with pay, for childcare or sickness. This gives parents time to spend with their kids and also a chance to work while supporting their children. This social system makes the povert level in Sweden practically invisible. Sweden cares so much for their children, and only wants the best for them.

Are you suggesting this?

March 10, 2014 11:40 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Robert.
apparently Swedish social services stays actively involved with any family that they deem on the borderline, and if the mother cannot support that child, the child is taken away. that in practice, is what the Swedish citizen told me. they have a extremely socialistic govt that takes close to 65% or so of every dollar earned, and yes socialized medicine and extremely generous leave policies.

It is not mandatory sterilization. It is temporary birth control in order to pick a welfare check that came out of other people's pockets to support your child because you were not capable of supporting the child yourself. don't want the shot, support the child yourself.

I don't think that is radical at all.

suggest another solution if you don't like that one.

this is right only the lines of mandatory drug testing for welfare checks. mandatory birth control for welfare moms.

if the govt is supporting you, yes you lose some freedoms.

I don't think that it is radical at all.

suggest some other way to bring the welfare roles down then.... because right now we have an unsustainable debt.... and paying folks to not work is very clearly leading to more folks not working.

March 10, 2014 11:50 AM  
Anonymous Robert said...

Extraordinary.

March 10, 2014 12:32 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Theresa said "I'm curious who paid for your reassignment surgery, the Canadian tax payer ?".

I'll answer that when you tell me where you stand on bad anonymous swapping the Democrat and Republican poll blame numbers on the October government shutdown.

I'm still waiting - is it okay to you if people on your side lie to advance their agenda or do you condemn that sort of dishonesty?

March 10, 2014 1:02 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Theresa has a scary sense of entitlement. She thinks its the right of her and rich people like her to dictate who gets to vote and who gets to procreate.

Its not surpising actually, studies show rich people are four times more likely to lie, cheat, or steal than poor people.

The studies were conducted using thousands of participants from across the United States. The rich also demonstrated less empathy, ruder behavior and became more demanding as simulated wealth and power increased.
The results indicate what many people have sensed all along, that the rich feel more “entitled” than others, believing that they’ve earned success, even when it’s been given to them on a silver platter.

March 10, 2014 1:09 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

And its bullsh*t that there's some sort of crisis with the number of people on welfare. Government spending on welfare is a tiny fraction of the bloated spending on defense which is also a form of welfare, albeit one that commonly pays people $50,000 a year to produce goods and services that are not just worthless but counterproductive.

The U.S. spends more on defense than the next 14 highest spending countries combined. U.S. defense spending could easily be cut by 75% with no effect whatsoever on its ability to defend itself. That would save several, perhaps dozens of times as much money as is spent on the other form of welfare Theresa inexplicably despises.

As good anonymous pointed out the U.S. defict is now at its historical level of 3% of GDP - its simply a lie that government spending is out of control, presents any sort of real threat, or that the current spending supporting needy families is unsustainable.

Theresa is just terribly unhappy with her life, bitching that it doesn't make financial sense for both her and her husband to work and yet she is so enslaved by the almighty buck she can't stop working and is overwhelmed by resentment of women like me who are homemakers just as the Republican dogma suggests we be.

March 10, 2014 1:19 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

And now if you'll excuse me I have to sit on the couch, watch soap operas and eat bon-bons just to p* Theresa off.

March 10, 2014 1:23 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

One more thing before I go, its about Theresa's hypocrisy. She's got no end of condemnation for me blogging all day and not working but she never criticizes her Republican teamate, bad anonymous, who does the same thing. He's collecting welfare to surf the internet all day (albeit a private company pays his welfare rather than the government) but Theresa is okay with that because he's on her side. At least I don't accept a paycheck for lounging around.

The double standard never ends with Theresa.

March 10, 2014 1:27 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

priya.
I am trying to put my kids through college, therefore I work.
and you are darn right I resent the outrageous amount of taxes I pay. every dollar they take out of my pocket to pay people like you to sit around is a dollar I would have put towards their education.

you don't have kids, and you are not of retirement age, most "home makers" have children they are taking care of, which yes, is a job.

welfare is not a fraction of defense spending, it EXCEEDS it.
look at the link, if you add welfare spending and the Medicaid spending captured under health, and include state and govt it is about 983 billion. Defense is 830 billion. If you go back and look at the history, it is growing by leaps and bounds. the deficit went to 530 billion this year, back down from over 1.4 trillion some the year Obama took office (fiscal year runs from sep-sep)... (08 which includes stimulus bill, omnibus bill, the trillion some the dems passed after getting into office). it is projected to increase again up over a trillion in a couple of years. It was about 560 billion bush's last full year, all of the years since has been over a trillion.

it is most definitely NOT sustainable. and yes, when you have major economists everywhere warning of another downgrade, China criticizing us on our debt, you have a problem. a big problem.

Robert, would you agree that in general it is better for folks NOT to be on welfare ? if so, how would YOU fix the single mom with multiple kids welfare problem.

whatever, I have work to do, will check back later.

March 10, 2014 1:51 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Theresa, you're not much more honest than bad anonymous. The welfare you constantly bitch about is the amount given to people who don't have jobs to help them live such as I once received. That is the Family assistance food and nutrition and a portion of the housing allowance which together adds up to 168 billion for 2013 which is a FRACTION of defense spending and that amount is DECLINING.

You need to stop going to those right wing B.S. web sites that told you the average person on welfare gets over $50,000 a year when in reality the average is $7000 per year for a family of three.

Most of medicaid does not go to people who do not work, it goes to the working poor and if you begrudge the working poor (who often work two jobs and far harder than you) government assistence to make ends meet then you trully are unbelievably despicable.

Your other deception is the claim that Bush had a 500 billion dollar deficit in 2008 and Obama's was 1.4 trillion. The reason it was that way is because of ongoing spending incurred as a result of Bush programs which included the unpaid for costs of two wars and the ongoing Bush tax cuts which the Republicans prevented Obama from repealling and the medicare drug benefit. The costs Bush started are recurring and the one's Obama incurred in his first year were almost all one time expenses.

The large deficits that occurred after Obama took office were due to Bush policies and programs he started not Obama's.

March 10, 2014 2:44 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

And it is certainly not true that all the deficits since Bush's last year in office have been over 1 trillion, it was 680 billion in 2013 and is projected to be 514 billion in 2014 and although projected to rise in later years it is expected to be only slightly higher than average in those years.

So, you are simply full of it when you claim the present situation isn't sustainable. The country has been run this way since the 1960's and there is no truth to your "the sky is falling" catastrophizing. Obama inherited a bad situation from Bush and has done a fantastic job of turning that around given Republican efforts to derail the economy at every step along the way.

If you want to cut government aid to poor families than stop opposing raising the minimum wage to 10.10 per hour which will take (if I remember correctly) 9 million people out of poverty and cut government spending on food stamps by 4 -5 billion per year. You bitch and bitch about welfare spending for poor people but have no complaints about government welfare that goes to millionaires and their multi-billion dollar businesses.

I'm sick of your chronic whining over nothing. Our family income is $57,000 a year (28,500 per person) and we live very comfortably. Your family income is $200,000 per year(50,000 per person) and its disgraceful that you bitch and bitch about not having enough when you've got far, far more than you need. Quit complaining and stop scapegoating the poor for the unhappiness you can only blame on yourself.

March 10, 2014 2:45 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

wrong Priya.

Bush passed a budget before he left office, it was the last one passed for 5 or 6 years. the budget he PASSED was 560 some billion deficit. Obama took office and jacked that same year's deficit to 1.4 trillion something with the omnibus bill and the stimulus bill, neither of which were in bush's original budget (which did include the existing spending, including the bush tax cuts etc).

if you would like to have more income Priya, I would suggest you get a job.

my income goes right now primarily to put kids through college, which is unbelievably expensive.

the total deficit as a percentage of GDP has NEVER been this high, with the possible exception of WWII.

we have NEVER had this many people on govt assistance, EVER.

the CBO has been warning that it is unsustainable, why do you think you know better than them ?

you can keep saying it's fine, but it's not.

March 10, 2014 3:06 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

debt unsustainable

oh, and the previous numbers I quoted of 831 billion of defense spending vs 983 of welfare, didn't include an additional 168b on ss disability.

How would you suggest you motivate people to get off the public dole, Priya. ?

what would have motivated you ?

March 10, 2014 3:16 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"apparently Swedish social services stays actively involved with any family that they deem on the borderline, and if the mother cannot support that child, the child is taken away. that in practice, is what the Swedish citizen told me."

And then what? Do they roast the kids to feed to their poor starving masses?

< eye roll >

And you believed him?

Show us what documentation you have found documenting this law exists in Sweden or any other country.

I think the Swede was pulling your big fat old scaredy cat leg!

March 10, 2014 3:25 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

No, you're wrong Theresa. Bush passed a budget but it didn't pay for the ongoing Bush policies like the Bush tax cuts, the Medicare drug benefit or two wars that Bush started. So, yes the first deficit Obama had was much higher than the last of Bush's but THAT WAS DUE TO THE ONGOING COST OF BUSH POLICIES AND DECISIONS.

The spending Obama undertook was a great deal smaller than the ongoing expenses Bush undertook and Obama's spending programs were mostly onetime such as the stimulous package while Bushs were ongoing.

Bush is responsible for the large deficits of 2009-2011 even though the expenses happened while Obama was in office.

March 10, 2014 3:42 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Theresa said "if you would like to have more income Priya, I would suggest you get a job.".

Oh, please, stop pretending to be stupid. As you're well aware, I'm very happy with the income we have, its YOU whose constantly bitching that having far more than that isn't enough. I'm pointing out the contrast between you and I, I'm happy with what I've got and even though you have far more you're constantly whining its not enough - you're pathetic and unbelievably greedy with a scary sense of entitlement.


Theresa said "my income goes right now primarily to put kids through college, which is unbelievably expensive.".

I'm playing the worlds tiniest violin for you. That's discretionary spending. No one paid for my education, I had to and no one paid for any of my siblings education, we all paid for it ourselves. So, cry me a goddamn river Theresa, paying for your children's education isn't a necessity. If you choose to do that that's your problem, not the problem of the poor people you want to take money from.

Theresa said "the total deficit as a percentage of GDP has NEVER been this high, with the possible exception of WWII.".

You're LYING. Look at the link I posted, the deficit as a percent of GDP was slightly more than 3% in 2013 and is predicted to be 3% of GDP in 2014 and only slightly above 3% in the coming years and 3% WAS THE AVERAGE

Theresa said "we have NEVER had this many people on govt assistance, EVER.".

Of course not, the population of the states is ever growing so of course each year there are normally more people on government assistance than ever. And most of those people on government assistance are there due to the economic crash Bush left Obama with and there'd be a lot less of them if Republicans hadn't obstructed every one of Obama's efforts to create jobs by forcing him to eliminate far more government jobs than Bush ever did and blocking programs like the American Jobs Act which economists (including John Mccains economic adivsor) said would have created 2 million jobs.


Theresa said "How would you suggest you motivate people to get off the public dole, Priya. ?

what would have motivated you ?".

The premise of your question is false as I'm sure you know. The vast majority of people don't want to be on welfare, they're there because they couldn't get jobs, or as is the case with most of the spending you call "welfare" they're the working poor getting supplemental assistance to subsidize the filthy rich businesses that won't pay them a working wage because they want to give top executives more millions to take out of the economy.

This is standard Republican B.S. take some anecdote about a person on welfare that could but doesn't want to work or who buys lobster with food stamps and pretend that's typical of all people on assistance - it most certainly isn't. You lowlifes just want to scapegoat the poor and demonize hard working people and those for whom there's no jobs largely because of Republican obstructionism.

There was nothing that would have "motivated" me to get off welfare. I couldn't work and if the assistance had been cut off I would have killed myself which is probably what people like you want the poor to do.

March 10, 2014 4:03 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I got excited for a minute there at that link.

But then I clicked your link and confirmed you prefer to cite FOX News (which contains no links to the CBO report it claims to be about) rather than the actual CBO report itself, which does not come loaded with rightwing spin.

Are you happy with the DO NOTHING HOUSE?

"Obama joked last week ahead of the vote.
“You know what they say, ’50th time is the charm.’

Maybe when you hit your 50th repeal vote, you will win a prize,” he said."

March 10, 2014 4:04 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Theresa's paying for her kid's education and then once the spoiled brats are working they'll talk about how the poor are leaches and they'd be rich too if they weren't lazy when virtually none of the poor can afford post-secondary education partly because Republicans have blocked or cut funding to every attempt to help poor people out of poverty.

The rich game the system to corral all the money and keep the people making it for them poor and then whine about people who have to live on peanut butter and sphagetti having too much.

March 10, 2014 4:08 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

You're right good anonymous, you certainly can't trust anything Fox attributes to the CBO. They're the ones that falsely claimed the CBO said obamacare would destroy 2 million jobs when the CBO said no such thing, what they said was people with Obamacare would be better off and choose to work less which would be the equivalent of 2 million people quitting there jobs -the jobs would still be there and filled by unemployed people thus reducing the unemployment rate.

Fox is notorious for claiming the CBO said things they didn't. Studies have shown that conservatives lie more than democrats.

March 10, 2014 4:18 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I continually find it amazing that you complain about us taking money from poor people when it is our money, the money we worked for, that you are talking about.

it's my money, I worked for it, it's not yours Priya.

and then you complain about my kids starting to work and complaining about others not working ... yes they probably will.

that might have some validity if you had ever really worked Priya, but you haven't and it is amazing to me that you continue to complain about the people that are pulling the wagon you are sitting inside of...

you are sitting the wagon.
be grateful someone is pulling for you and you didn't starve.

but instead of thank you for working all your life, your attitude is PULL HARDER YOU LAZY BITCH.

I am done.

when it all comes crashing down, I will just say I told you so ...

I have to go back to work.

March 10, 2014 4:46 PM  
Anonymous Pot, kettle, black said...

Ann Coulter at CPAC:

"Shaming is good, this is how, I mean it’s almost a cruel and selfish thing, for lack of a better term, for the upper classes, the educated, for the college graduates to refuse to tell the poor people, ‘keep your knees together before you’re married.’”

March 10, 2014 4:46 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Screw you Theresa. You never contributed one penny to supporting me. Stop acting like you carried the whole load you whining spoiled brat.

March 10, 2014 4:48 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

And you already admitted what was burdening you by far the most was spending on your children's education which is a luxury, not a necessity so stop pretending that people on welfare are some sort of burden to you.

March 10, 2014 5:15 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

they keep trying to take more money from me to pay for people that aren't working.
so yes, it is a burden on me.

how could you say it wasn't ?

I am working to give that money to my kids and pay for their college.

that's why.
you seem to think I should pay for everybody else's college and I should continue to give more and more and more...

and at some point, all of us who have been supporting this society will just say "ENOUGH".

I have had it with the lazy people.

March 10, 2014 5:34 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

"you seem to think I should pay for everybody else's college and I should continue to give more and more and more...".

No, I never said any such thing. I said I paid for my own college, all my siblings paid for their own college and if you think its such a burden to pay for your children's college then STOP DOING IT.

And stop pretending that the portion of taxes you pay that goes to needy people is some sort of burden to you. I have everything I've ever wanted in life and you have a lot more money than we do so you have MORE than enough. Stop your goddamn whining.

You didn't get to where you are all on your own. You have a society that helped educate you, that provides the infrastructure to allow the business to exist that employs you and so on. You keep most of the money you make, you've earned it but stop pretending you don't owe something back to the society that helped you succeed.

March 10, 2014 5:46 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Theresa, you and your husband make 3 or 4 times the amount of money you need to live a very comfortable life. Your greedy whining that its not enough is unseemly. Stop embarrasing yourself.

March 10, 2014 6:17 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

so priya, I had those children so I feel responsible to launch them.

if all the welfare moms felt the same way, we wouldn't have a huge deficit.

If people believed in responsibility for their own actions, we wouldn't have people on welfare for years and years at a time... like you !

they would feel guilty taking charity and money from people when they haven't earned it.

did you even listen to the dinesh de'souza interview about Obama and the sandwich. hint, your the one taking the sandwich and I am the one providing the sandwich.

but I will keep on working because that is what I do.

your welcome by the way. care to say thank you to all the working Canadians who paid for your existence while on welfare ? or do you just think they owed it to you ?

March 10, 2014 6:32 PM  
Anonymous IPCC says lazy Priya is wrong about California drought said...

BOULDER, Colo. — CALIFORNIA is now in the midst of the third year of one of its worst droughts on record. As our planet gradually warms from our rampant burning of fossil fuels, it’s only natural to wonder what role climate change has played in California’s troubles.

The answer is this: At present, the scientific evidence does not support an argument that the drought there is appreciably linked to human-induced climate change.

The drought has many attributes of historical droughts over that region — in particular, a lack of storms and rainfall that would normally arrive from the Pacific Ocean with considerable frequency. It resembles the droughts that afflicted the state in 1976 and 1977. Those years were at least as dry as the last two years have been for the state as a whole.

Barack Obama has foolishly suggested climate change as an explanation for the area’s drought.

In short, the drought gripping California has been observed before. And it has occurred principally because of a lack of rain, not principally because of warmer temperatures. Indeed, it should be quite familiar to anyone who lived in California in the mid-1970s, as I did. We can also say with high confidence that no appreciable trend toward either wetter or drier conditions has been observed for statewide average precipitation since 1895. This drought is not part of a long-term drift toward reduced precipitation over the state.

What’s different this time, however, is that the demand for water has greatly increased in the state, and it may very well be that the current stress created by the failed rains is more severe than for similar rainfall deficits 40 years ago. It is at least intuitive that growth patterns, population increases and the rising value of the state’s agricultural sector have increased California’s vulnerability to drought and reduced its resiliency — that is, the state’s ability to adapt and cope with less precipitation.

Other indicators and aspects of rainfall behavior could also be conducive to drought. These include the gap between rainy days, the intensity of rains when they do occur and the effects of warming temperatures in California and for the planet as a whole. Even if the average seasonal rainfall isn’t changing, changes in these other factors could alter the risk of drought. What is the evidence there?

One way of accounting for the combined effects of rainfall and temperature on drought is to examine soil moisture. Long-term soil moisture observations are not readily available, but have been estimated using sophisticated models. The 2012 report on extreme events by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change examined the evidence for regional changes in soil moisture since 1950, and made the following assessment for western North America:

“No overall or slight decrease in dryness since 1950; large variability; large drought of the 1930s dominates.”

The team of 42 scientists who made that assessment assigned it a rating of “medium confidence” that they were correct. The report also assessed the scientific evidence for how drought over western North America will change in the 21st century, finding an “inconsistent signal in consecutive dry days and soil moisture changes.”

A 2013 report by the I.P.C.C. reaffirmed that finding and concluded: “Recent long-term droughts in western North America cannot definitively be shown to lie outside the very large envelope of natural precipitation variability in this region, particularly given new evidence of the history of high-magnitude natural drought and pluvial episodes suggested by paleoclimatic reconstructions.”

Thus, the scientific evidence does not support an argument that human-induced climate change has played any appreciable role in the current California drought.

March 10, 2014 8:13 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

oh well, LP can always get all alarmed about the warm iditiarod

March 10, 2014 8:15 PM  
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March 11, 2014 2:45 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"we wouldn't have people on welfare for years and years at a time..."

Stop repeating this favorite right wing lie.

We haven't had people on welfare for "years and years" since the mid 1990's.

Reagan's "welfare queens" do not exist any more.

Clinton changed all that nearly 20 years ago as follows:

"...Years ago, a Republican-led Congress worked with a Democratic President to fix a broken welfare system. President Bill Clinton rallied the nation to “end welfare as we know it” and his call to action was well founded. Under the old system, 65 percent of families were dependent on welfare for an average of eight years or more, and individuals obtained welfare benefits for an average of 13 years throughout the course of a lifetime. Due to a lack of focus on work, failed welfare policies left families trapped in a cycle of dependency and poverty.

In response, Congress passed and President Clinton signed into law the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PL 104-193). The law replaced the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program with the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) block grant program. The bipartisan law promoted work as a central focus of helping low-income families achieve self-sufficiency. Individuals were required to work, prepare for work, or look for work as a condition of receiving public assistance...."


Quit watching FOX News because Fox Pushes Debunked Myth To Attack Obama On Welfare Work Requirements

When in fact:

"... the Obama administration has not removed work requirements from welfare. In July 2012, the administration announced that it would comply with governors' requests -- including Republicans -- to consider proposals to create more efficient ways to report on the work requirement for people receiving TANF benefits. According to Health and Human Services, any program that weakened or undercut welfare reform would not be approved, and waivers would only be granted to proposals that "move at least 20% more people from welfare to work."

The Center on Budget and Policies Priorities found that these waivers would strengthen welfare reform by "giving states greater flexibility to test more effective strategies for helping recipients prepare for, and retain jobs." The New York Times reported that the new requirements continued the administration's efforts "to peel back unnecessary layers of bureaucracy and allow states to spend federal money more efficiently."

But despite overwhelming reporting to the contrary, conservative media have repeatedly pushed the false claim that this plan "guts" welfare reform."

March 11, 2014 3:05 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

right.
and that is why 70% of govt payouts are transfers to other people....

and why food-stamps payouts are close to what, 50 million people.

whatever, I like the govt spending link I posted because it just takes the CBO numbers and makes them clickable.

really convenient.

what you need to understand is that those of us that always work (you can say because we were privileged, you can say because we were raised that way) have just about given up on those that don't work. at least those of us that still identify with the WORKING class, that like knowing we have accomplished something at the end of the day.

my son is at B-CC. I have the "why bother" argument with him all the time. he is brilliant, 750 on math and 720 on English.

and I can't get him to really buckle down. I can't get him to try hard. He doesn't understand why he should bother. He gets by, even at full IB, but he could do much better.
He is not performing at the level he should be capable of with his intellect.

and I have always worked hard. Maybe that is why Priya really gets to me... I am not sure how you get folks that are bright to try and contribute to society. and if they beg out and give up, what the heck does that say for our future as a country ?

Robert if you have ideas I am all ears.

and my son is brilliant, and he is also compassionate. but he does not believe in working to give the fruits of his efforts to someone that doesn't try.

maybe it is my approach, I certainly come off abrasive, as does ted cruz (maybe why I like cruz so much).....

but if we ALL stop working, it all falls apart.

whatever.

I am currently working on a website detailing the horror story I went through with blue shield of md.

I kept good notes, and it is truly unbelievable.

that company should be avoided at all costs.

any ideas on keeping the country from falling apart, or on motivating people to keep working when successful intelligent people are demonized for trying,
hey I am all EARS.


March 11, 2014 10:23 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

you know, when I was a kid my dad used to tell me you can accomplish anything you want, you can help astronauts fly to the moon...

you can keep the country safe.

you are my daughter, and you can be anything you want to be.

I was born in the early 60's and I was the first female to graduate with a double major mechanical engineering and computer science ANYWHERE in the country in the mid 1980s.

I watched COSMOS the other night with my husband. The presenter - don't remember his name - was talking about the history of evolution and it was funny - my husband the atheist and I the - well - believer in a higher power - found many things on which to agree/disagree. A show like that can make you feel small. I doubt any of our kids watched it. anyway, it was interesting because it was talking about how the universe started from nothing (in the beginning....) and how the stars burst into being (let there be light)....

we agreed to disagree, as we always do...

it's funny how when we are young our most important thing is figuring this out, and then it fades in importance as we get pulled into supporting those around us, but it's the base we should be giving our kids...

why do we exist ?

and you would say that I am cruel in not wanting to give to folks that aren't working... and I would say your are WRONG.

your self worth comes from DOING something, and we are raising a generation of lackards.

Do something. anything.

It will make you feel worthwhile.

but we insist on compensating folks for doing NOTHING.

for just existing.

I know we can't agree on much, and we disagree on just about everything, but can we agree that paying folks to do nothing is wrong ?

I am concerned that we as a society are failing to give our children a goal, ANY goal.

Theresa


March 11, 2014 10:44 PM  
Anonymous For Ayn Rand fans, check the facts said...

"Looking back on the events of last week, I’m struck by how lucky Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., was to be awarded the uncoveted early-Thursday speaking slot at CPAC Thursday morning.

Because though kicking things off at a three-day event like CPAC means speaking to smaller audiences and fewer cameras, it also means that there are three days of intensifying stagecraft ahead of you to distract attention from whatever errors you might make.

And Paul Ryan made a doozy of an error. It attracted plenty of coverage anyhow, but probably would’ve attracted more if it hadn’t happened before all the jousting began. In case you missed it, Ryan recounted a story he heard secondhand about a poor child who felt bad about being on a subsidized school lunch program while other kids brought their lunches to school in brown bags, to serve the argument that parents who can’t afford to bag their children’s lunches for them don’t care about their kids as much as better-off parents do.

The view he expressed is strange enough. Being an impoverished parent isn’t actually coterminous with being a “poor” parent, in the normative sense of the word. And even though children on school lunch programs are surely stigmatized by their peers in some communities, the solution is to combat the stigma, not to moot it by just letting those kids go hungry.

But as you’ve probably heard by now, the story he told never happened. He recapitulated the erroneous testimony of a fellow social spending scold without vetting her story, which she had taken from some pro-social spending literature and tortured beyond recognition.

For someone like Ryan who often treats politics as a contest of character, that’s a pretty epic blunder. He’s since apologized for not checking his facts, which undoes some of the damage. But that mainly just changes the frame of the story. In addition to making an incredibly questionable moral argument, he also exposed the depths of his most politically problematic ideological fixation. Either he doesn’t care about truth, or his faith in the ubiquity of poverty traps and dependency and so on is so strong that he sees no reason to doubt any corroborative anecdotes, no matter how apocryphal.

This is a familiar epistemic problem, but I’m bringing it up now because it has metastasized into a national campaign strategy.

If you’re sure your ideas are correct and confident your solutions are the right ones you’ve already erected a significant barrier to self-examination. And when admitting error carries enormous financial, personal and ideological risk, it feels easier not to check. You’re shocked when your candidate loses, because none of your friends voted for the other guy. And you just pass along stories they tell you about the soul-crushing nature of welfare, or the horrors of the Affordable Care Act, without bothering to apply a smell test.

Combine that instinct with a well-heeled, amoral campaign apparatus and you get a bunch of Americans for Prosperity ads that wither under scrutiny.

For instance: “A Dexter cancer patient featured in a conservative group’s TV ad campaign denouncing her new health care coverage as ‘unaffordable’ will save more than $1,000 this year under the plan, The Detroit News has learned.”

(They’re referring to Julie Boonstra, whose story we’ve examined multiple times, and have confirmed what I and others long suspected.)

That’s not to diminish the annoyance and uncertainty she felt when her old plan was eliminated, but to say that the premise of her complaint about her new plan is wrong. AFP probably doesn’t care; it’s just as likely that they never bothered to check. Here’s what Boonstra had to say.

When advised of the details of her Blues’ plan, Boonstra said the idea that it would be cheaper “can’t be true.”

“I personally do not believe that,” Boonstra said.

Of possible relevance to her incredulity: “Boonstra is the ex-wife of Mark Boonstra, the former Washtenaw County GOP chairman whom Gov. Rick Snyder appointed to the Michigan Court of Appeals in 2012.”..."

March 12, 2014 9:03 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

the process of ending the Democratic majority has begun:

Republican David Jolly defeated Democrat Alex Sink in the special election to fill Florida’s 13th district on Tuesday night, delivering a stinging blow to Democrats that underscores their vulnerability to ObamaCare attacks.

With all precincts reporting, Jolly topped Sink 48.4 percent to 46.5 percent, winning by 3,417 votes. Libertarian Lucas Overby took nearly 5 percent of the vote.

Sink’s loss in the race to succeed the late Rep. Bill Young (R-Fla.) was seen by Republicans as evidence the political winds are blowing hard against Democrats in their uphill pursuit of the 17 seats they’ll need to take back the House.

“Tonight, one of Nancy Pelosi’s most prized candidates was ultimately brought down because of her unwavering support for ObamaCare, and that should be a loud warning for other Democrats running coast to coast," National Republican Congressional Committee Chairman Greg Walden (Ore.) said in a statement.

A swing district won by President Obama in 2012, Florida’s 13th district is exactly the playing field Democrats need to win in this cycle to be successful.

March 12, 2014 9:59 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

The divergence between Democrats and voters over global warming is reaching new heights. Last night, Senate Democrats actually stopped all other business to talk about climate change in an all-night session – even though they have not introduced any actual climate change legislation they can talk about specifically. They wouldn’t dare. As The Post’s Ed O’Keefe points out, there have only been 35 instances in the past 100 years when senators have kept the Capitol open through the night to debate an issue. The futility of the Democrats’ exercise was made more obvious by the fact that four of the most endangered Senate Democrats – Senators Mark Begich (D-Alaska), Kay Hagan (D-N.C.), Mary Landrieu (D-La.) and Mark Pryor (D-Ark.) – were no-shows for the talk-a-thon.

It’s not clear who the Democrats were trying to reach with this stunt. Certainly not stressed, overtaxed American workers who don’t want to pay more for their electricity at home. Certainly not American businesses, whose bottom lines are already under attack because of Obamacare requirements and which can’t withstand more gratuitous regulations and forced higher costs for energy.

Over at the State Department, Secretary John Kerry sent out a surreal message to American diplomats around the world, saying, “I’m counting on Chiefs of Mission to make climate change a priority for all relevant personnel and to promote concerted action at posts and in host countries to address this problem. I’ve also directed all bureaus of the Department to focus on climate change in their day-to-day work.”

Kerry, who probably has the highest personal carbon footprint of anyone in the Obama Administration (and that’s saying something), is telling our diplomats to lecture their host governments about “speeding the transition to a low-carbon, climate-resilient future.” He provides seven action items to guide American diplomats in their harangues to foreign governments — and he wants them to do this every day. I hope this doesn’t diminish the time allotted in our diplomats’ day-to-day work for preventing terrorism, enhancing national security and promoting American business.

Politically it seems like Democrats should ratchet back their global warming fantasies and come up with a more credible, serious approach to climate change instead of doubling down on the tiresome lectures and pointless, expensive programs. Given what we know about the technical science and the political science of climate change, Democrats need to get this out of their system or risk alienating more voters before the elections.

March 12, 2014 10:04 AM  
Anonymous twilight of socialism said...

President Barack Obama is struggling to overcome widespread pessimism about the economy and deep frustration with Washington, notching the lowest job-approval ratings of his presidency in a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll.

The results suggest Mr. Obama will weigh on fellow Democrats in midterm elections this fall, particularly in the conservative states that will play a large role in deciding whether his party retains its Senate majority.

Mr. Obama's job approval ticked down to 41% in March from 43% in January, marking a new low. Some 54% disapproved of the job he is doing, matching a previous high from December, when the botched rollout of his signature health law played prominently in the news. The latest survey also showed the lowest-ever approval in Journal/NBC polling for Mr. Obama's handling of foreign policy.

The findings come amid dissatisfaction with elected leaders in Washington. The GOP leads when the public is asked which party should control Congress.

Mr. Obama's power to help his party's candidates appear limited, said pollster Bill McInturff.

"The president is being taken off the field as a Democratic positive," Mr. McInturff said. "These numbers would suggest that, beyond his behind-the-scenes fundraising, it's hard to imagine the president on the road and hard to imagine where he would campaign."

For Democrats, agreed Mr. Yang, "the wind is in our faces."

Americans surveyed in the poll said they were less inclined to support a candidate if the person had been endorsed by Mr. Obama or was a "solid supporter" of his administration. Approval of Mr. Obama is particularly weak in the South and Midwest, regions where Democrats could have a tough time defending Senate seats.

Unease over the economy continues to drive these concerns. Sixty-five percent of those polled said the country is on the wrong track, compared with the 26% who said it was on the right one, a wider spread than in the midterm-election years of 2006 and 2010. Roughly one-quarter of the respondents think the economy will improve over the next year, while 57% believe the U.S. is still in a recession, despite years of modest economic growth and robust stock-market gains.

Mr. Obama's weakening position is due in part to slippage within his own party. The poll tallied his highest-ever disapproval rating from fellow Democrats, at 20%, a cause for concern for the party heading into midterm elections that often are defined by which side turns out its base. In particular, Mr. Obama's support is softening among blacks, Hispanics and women.

Respondents in the poll said they were likely to favor candidates who say they are committed to cutting federal spending, an aid to Republicans.

The 2010 health law remains more unpopular than popular. Those polled were likely to support a Republican candidate.

March 12, 2014 10:33 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"In particular, Mr. Obama's support is softening among blacks, Hispanics and women."

ha-ha

remember, after the election when all the liberal nuts said Republicans would have to "chaaange" to get Hispanic votes

turned out they just had to let Obama loose

March 12, 2014 10:37 AM  
Anonymous roll out the barrel said...

Tuesday night's special election in Florida is a serious scare for Democrats who worry that Obamacare will be a major burden for their party in 2014. Despite recruiting favored candidate Alex Sink, outspending Republicans, and utilizing turnout tools to help motivate reliable voters, Democrats still lost to Republican lobbyist David Jolly—and it wasn't particularly close.

The Republican tool: lots of advertisements hitting Sink over Obamacare, even though she wasn't even in Congress to vote for it. Sink's response was from the Democratic playbook: Call for fixes, but hit her opponent for supporting repeal. Sink only won 46 percent of the vote, 4 points below President Obama's 2012 total in the district.

Special elections don't necessarily predict the November elections, but this race in a bellwether Florida district that both parties aggressively contested comes as close as possible to a November test run for both parties. Democrats worked to clear the field for Sink, while Republicans missed out on their leading recruits, settling for Jolly, a lobbyist who once worked for Rep. Bill Young, the late congressman whose 13th District vacancy Jolly will fill. Sink outspent Jolly $5.4 million to $4.5 million.

"She's known as a tough independent businesswoman who knows how to get things done, yet her campaign seemed to run a more process-oriented message," said one Democratic operative involved with the Sink campaign. "I wonder if they ever really thought they could lose."

The results are a clear warning sign to Senate Democrats, whose majority is threatened thanks to a Republican-friendly map and a national environment that's tilted in the GOP's favor. At least seven Democratic-held Senate seats are being contested in states more conservative than the Florida House battleground. Conservative groups are already airing ads blasting Democratic senators for their support of Obamacare, and their attacks have negatively impacted the incumbents' poll numbers.

One of the key questions in the race was whether a "fix, don't repeal" message would resonate with voters dissatisfied with the health care law but unwilling to give up on it. The verdict is an early sign the depth of anger over Obamacare. Democrats are hoping for higher turnout in the November midterms, but core Democratic groups usually show up in lower numbers in off-year elections, too.

"Alex Sink followed the Democrat playbook to the tee and she couldn't escape the weight of Obamacare in even an Obama district," National Republican Congressional Committee Executive Director Liesl Hickey said.

March 12, 2014 11:05 AM  
Anonymous roll out the barrel said...

Another key test in this race is whether flawed Republican candidates can cost the party seats in otherwise-winnable races. Democrats are hoping to make challenging Senate races a referendum between likable incumbents and undefined challengers in red-state races in Louisiana, North Carolina, and even Arkansas with freshman Rep. Tom Cotton. Jolly's background was about as unfavorable as it gets—a Washington influence-peddler. That was the theme of attacks from Sink and other Democratic outside groups. It's a sign that the national environment could trump the micro-advantages battle-tested incumbents bring to the table.

The results from this special election weren't the biggest sign of the challenges Democrats face in the November midterms. Obama's mediocre approval ratings, the nagging unpopularity of the health care law, and the Republican intensity advantage are all leading indicators.

Even more significant are the risks Republican candidates have shown they're willing to make to take advantage of the promising 2014 environment. Rep. Cory Gardner of Colorado, a famously cautious pol, jumped into the Senate race against a household name, Sen. Mark Udall—thanks to polling showing him running competitively with the freshman senator. Former Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie decided to run against the highly popular Sen. Mark Warner in the battleground Old Dominion—after no one else was interested. It's looking like Scott Brown is close to challenging Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, even though she's got sterling favorability ratings. Like Jolly, they're betting they can nationalize the races on the senators' votes for Obamacare.

Jolly's surprising victory is merely the latest indicator of 2014 shaping up to be a favorable Republican year. Senate Democrats were already facing a difficult map, but Tuesday's results suggest it's also going to be a difficult environment, too.

March 12, 2014 11:05 AM  
Anonymous jolly vs gay said...

hate to break it to you kids, but as Jolly's victory indicates clearly, the Republicans will have a veto-proof majority in Congress for the last two years of Obama's pathetic presidency

and you know what that means:

rollback of the gay agenda

hardy-har-har

March 12, 2014 11:43 AM  
Anonymous Huck a bee said...

that's a great piece of taunting, right there

this is going to be a fun election

March 12, 2014 11:44 AM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Study disproves GOPs only economic plan:

Republican Rand Paul referred to the famous definition of insanity as trying something again and again while expecting a different result.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Liberals don’t seem to get the point that if you’re trying something and the objective evidence shows that it’s not working, why not try something different?”

The Kentuckian used the example of “what we’ve done for the people of Appalachia in my state. For 40 years, we’ve been sending money there but it’s still very poor.

“So, what I’ve been saying is, ‘Why don’t we do something different? Why don’t we dramatically cut the taxes in Eastern Kentucky, in Detroit and other places that are suffering?”

Paul explained how tax deductions are particularly effective in helping people “because they go directly to people who have businesses and create jobs.”

Ah yes, cut taxes and unleash the economic boom, aka the only economic plan Republicans ever have. He could not have picked a better example of trying the same thing over and over again even when the evidence shows that it doesn’t work. The Congressional Research Service studied this question going all the way back to 1945 and guess what they found? Cutting taxes does not spur more economic growth, but it does increase income inequality, reduce government revenue and increase deficits.

When Ronald Reagan cut taxes on the wealthy in 1981, it did not boost growth. In fact, we soon were in what was then the deepest recession since the Great Depression (a record we unfortunately broke in 2008 and 2009). But it did drop government revenue and dramatically increase the deficit. When Bill Clinton raised tax rates in 1993, it did not slow down growth. In fact, we had the longest period of sustained economic growth since the 1950s. It also boosted federal revenue and eliminated the deficit. When George W. Bush cut tax rates against in 2001, we had sluggish growth for the next few years followed by a near-depression, along with flagging revenue and a huge increase in the deficit. Still wanna stick with that definition of insanity, Sen. Paul?

March 12, 2014 12:49 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

This comment has been removed by the author.

March 12, 2014 1:01 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Once again, Republican policies create the problems they portend to fix:

The Contraceptive Choice Project, a long-term research study by Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, is destroying a lot of commonly made Christian right claims about birth control. First it showed that offering free birth control to low-income women dramatically reduces abortion rates. Now it shows that free birth control does not increase risky sexual behavior.

Most of the women did report that they were having sex more frequently — but they were doing it safely. The majority of participants, 70 percent, reported that there was no difference in the number of their sexual partners. The women who did report an increase were most likely to have gone from zero sexual activity to a sole sexual partner. There also weren’t any increased rates of sexually transmitted infections among the group that got no-cost contraception.

“Increasing access to no-cost contraceptives doesn’t translate into riskier sexual behavior,” Jeffrey Peipert, the study’s senior author, explained. “It’s not the contraception that drives their sexual behavior.”

Indeed, even among the women who indicated that they wanted to start using birth control specifically so they could become sexually active, more than 45 percent had not actually started having sex after a year of using contraception.

The new research paper directly refutes arguments from groups like the right-wing Family Research Council, which argues that it’s important to restrict access to contraception todissuade teens from having sex. Nonetheless, the debate over Obamacare’s birth control provision has largely centered on this myth about female sexuality. Particularly after Sandra Fluke testified in favor of the policy, conservatives were quick to bash her for being a “slut” who wanted the government to finance her promiscuous sex life. Two years later, Republican lawmakers are still repeating this line of reasoning.

Birth control should be absolutely free for everyone. It empowers women and gives them control over their reproduction, reduces unwanted pregnancies (and thus abortions), and ultimately will save us far more money than it costs to provide it for everyone.

March 12, 2014 1:02 PM  
Anonymous Pop Pop Pol got the bubbles... said...

"and you know what that means:

rollback of the gay agenda

hardy-har-har"


Well maybe if the House was the only part of government that acted on laws, you'd be right.

However, the President will veto laws reintroducing discrimination against some citizens and the courts will continue to uphold the equal protection clause of the US Constitution, as they have already.

You may want to refresh your memory about the facts of these recent court decisions:

Lawrence v. Texas

Supreme Court DOMA decision rules federal same-sex marriage ban unconstitutional

Texas' ban on gay marriage ruled unconstitutional

Kentucky's ban on same-sex marriage ruled unconstitutional

Virginia's same-sex marriage ban ruled unconstitutional

Oklahoma's state ban on same-sex marriage ruled unconstitutional

Utah's gay marriage ban ruled unconstitutional

Ohio's ban on recognizing same-sex marriages performed in other states rule unconstitutional.

March 12, 2014 1:33 PM  
Anonymous Bubbles turning to foam said...

"remember, after the election when all the liberal nuts said Republicans would have to "chaaange" to get Hispanic votes"

You mean the GOP "liberals" who published their Growth and Opportunity Project calling for outreach like:

"Demographic Partners
1. A Growth and Opportunity Inclusion Council
2. Hispanics
3. Asian and Pacific Islander Americans
4. African Americans
5. Women
6. Youth"


What was that liberal nut's name who presented that report?

Oh yeah.

It was Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus

And the committee he formed who wrote that GOPGOP included such liberal nuts as:

"Henry Barbour
Sally Bradshaw
Ari Fleischer
Zori Fonalledas
Glenn McCall}

March 12, 2014 1:53 PM  
Anonymous Pick your poll said...

"President Barack Obama is rebounding from record-low approval ratings as he remedies the botched rollout of his health-care website and moves past the budget standoffs of the last several years.

Less than eight months before the November midterm elections, Americans are evenly split, with 48 percent approving of Obama’s job performance, up from 42 percent in December -- the biggest positive change of his presidency, according to a Bloomberg National Poll. He’s also registering an improved favorability rating at 49 percent, the highest since last June."

March 12, 2014 2:39 PM  
Anonymous how dreary to be a Dem said...

how about today's Gallup?

I've heard they're pretty good at this kind of thing

40% approve
55% disapprove

March 13, 2014 3:38 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Millionaires Rebound From Recession in Record Numbers - March 13, 2014

"Millionaires are coming back from the financial damage of the Recession in the best way they can — by adding more millionaires to their ranks than ever before.

The number of U.S. households with a net worth of $1 million or more reached a new high in 2013 of 9.63 million, an increase of more than 600,000 from 2012, according to a report by Spectrem Group. The net worth amount doesn’t include the value of the primary residence.

The Recession reduced the number of millionaires in the United States to 6.7 million in 2008, though its population has grown ever since. Its previous high was 9.2 million in 2007, before the Recession started.

There are more rich Americans than ever because the stock market has rebounded so well since the Recession.

“Most of the financial damage done by the Recession has been erased by recent record-high markets in 2013 as well as continued rebound in the real estate markets,” says George H. Walper Jr., president of Spectrem Group, in a statement. “In terms of the affluent investor, it is fair to say they have finally recovered from the economic downturn.”

All classes of millionaires, and even those with $100,000 or more, are growing, according to the report:

-Those with $100,000 or more in net worth climbed to a record high of 38.6 million from 37.4 million in 2012. The total had been at 31.2 million in post-recession 2008.
-Those with $5 million or more in net worth also reached a record high of 1.24 million from 1.14 million in 2012. There were only 840,000 in 2008.
-Those with $25 million or more in net worth grew by 15,000 to 132,000 in 2013. In 2008, there were 84,000 with $25 million or more in net worth."...

March 14, 2014 11:27 AM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...


Children of same-sex parents are doing as well or better than the rest of the population on a number of key health indicators.

That is the initial finding from the world’s largest study on the children of same-sex parents, under way at Melbourne University.

The Australian Study of Child Health in Same-Sex Families collected data on 500 children nationwide, up to the age of 17.

An interim report found there was no statistical difference between children of same-sex couples and the rest of the population on indicators including self-esteem, emotional behaviour and the amount of time spent with parents.

However, children of same-sex couples scored higher than the national average for overall health and family cohesion, measuring how well the family members get along…

”Because of the situation that same-sex families find themselves in, they are generally more willing to communicate and approach the issues that any child may face at school, like teasing or bullying,” lead researcher Dr Simon Crouch said.

”This fosters openness and means children tend to be more resilient. That would be our hypothesis.”

March 14, 2014 12:57 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"An interim report found there was no statistical difference between children of same-sex couples and the rest of the population on indicators including self-esteem, emotional behaviour and the amount of time spent with parents.

However, children of same-sex couples scored higher than the national average for overall health and family cohesion, measuring how well the family members get along…

”Because of the situation that same-sex families find themselves in, they are generally more willing to communicate and approach the issues that any child may face at school, like teasing or bullying,” lead researcher Dr Simon Crouch said."

huh?

so, it's healthy if you're used to being bullied?

good to know

obviously, all studies in this field have long ago become irrelevant because of the biases which create pre-judged research

in short, if you don't already believe this, you'll be ostracized from the field

btw, Huckabee now leads the Republican field

laugh it up

and get used to saying President Huckabee




http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2016/president/us/2016_republican_presidential_nomination-3823.html

March 14, 2014 3:32 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Bad anonymous said "so, it's healthy if you're used to being bullied?".

They never said any such thing. They said any child may face bullying and gay couples are particularly good at helping children deal with that.

Bad anonnymous said "obviously, all studies in this field have long ago become irrelevant because of the biases which create pre-judged research

in short, if you don't already believe this, you'll be ostracized from the field".

If there was any evidence to the contrary anti-gay bigots would have had it published in peer-reviewed journals. Instead all they've got is the Regnerus study which didn't even study children raised by same sex couples and which the experts say didn't support the conclusions Regnerus drew from it. Even the University where he works has condemned the charade he tried to perpetrate.

One thing the Regnerus report did show is that children raised by gay men and heterosexual women or lesbians and heterosexual men do poorly because they're parents are in a dysfunctional and unstable relationship. Noteably that is precicely the sort of relationship you've long promoted for gays and lesbians. Based on your side's research its time you stopped doing that.

Bad anonymous said "btw, Huckabee now leads the Republican field laugh it up and get used to saying President Huckabee."

LOL, this is why you're such a joke, you make absurd predictions long before elections when so much can and will change between now and then. You'll note I never predict election outcomes so I never end up repeatedly looking like a fool as you do.

You've done worse at predicting election outcomes than would be expected if you were flipping coins to choose a winner. Each time you assure us its impossible for you to be wrong and you give us all these absurd reasons why that's the case such as "when a war hero runs against a community organizer the war hero always wins" and "Romney's going to win because Clint Eastwood gave people permission to mock the president", and so on.

Tell, us, given your abismal history of picking election winners why should anyone treat your election predictions as anything other than a joke?

March 14, 2014 5:19 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

I'm still giggling over your prediction a couple of days before the 2012 election when you fatuously said "popular vote: Romney 52, Obama 48 you heard at TTF first, people".

Yes, we heard it and we won't let you forget it.

March 14, 2014 5:22 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

And talk about "biases that create pre-judged research", there's no better example of that than right wing religious bigots who start from the assumption that the bible is inerrant and condemns gays and then try to build pseudo-science to buttress their pre-judgment.

The only "researchers" who start researching gay parenting with a pre-judgment of what conclusions must be reached are the religious ones.

March 14, 2014 5:41 PM  
Anonymous Robert said...

The notion of President Huckabee frightens a great deal. He would write me out of the society he would lead.

March 14, 2014 6:31 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

3 to 6 inches for St Patty's Day, here in the capital of the world's greatest country

I just can't take any more global warming

March 15, 2014 2:59 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

How are you liking today's beautiful clear sunny 68 degrees?

My daffodil plants are 6 inches high and crocuses are in full bloom, even on the north side.

March 15, 2014 5:15 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

crocuses and daffodils are typical on the Ides of March

global warming isn't happening

it's been halted for the last 16 years

just ask lazy Priya

March 15, 2014 6:38 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"The notion of President Huckabee frightens a great deal. He would write me out of the society he would lead."

Robert, are you serious?

Could you elaborate on this comment?

March 15, 2014 8:39 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

poor daffodils.
what do they think they are doing ?
they are going to get pulverized on Monday.

we should find that ground hog and shoot him.
then he can never see his shadow again.

March 16, 2014 12:19 PM  
Anonymous Teaching facts said...

"they are going to get pulverized on Monday"

Whatever winter weather comes tomorrow will not pulverize any daffodil shoots that are already up, reaching for the warmth of the sun.

"Q: A couple of weeks ago and before the snow, my daffodils and snow drops were poking through the ground. Will all the snow and cold weather kill them?

A. No, the weight of the snow will not kill your daffodil (Narcissus) and snowdrop (Galanthus) bulbs. The snow will actually insulate them from the cold temperatures. What you may see when the snow melts is that the foliage is more yellow than green. The yellowing is from a lack of light getting through the snow depth. Once the snow is gone and the soil warms, the foliage will gradually green and start to grow with the flowers not too far behind."


"we should find that ground hog and shoot him."

"When Phil is not busy predicting the weather at Gobbler’s Knob, a rural area about two miles outside of Punxsutawney proper, he lives in the town library."

Happy hunting, but I suggest you shoot him with a camera.

March 16, 2014 4:22 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Ten People Show Up For Worldwide 'White Man March'
By David March 16, 2014 8:15 am

"Police in Birmingham believe that six signs saying diversity will lead to white genocide are connected to a group called "White Man March," and their attempt to stage a "worldwide" protest on Saturday.

Police in Birmingham believe that six signs saying diversity will lead to white genocide are connected to a group called "White Man March," and their attempt to stage a "worldwide" protest on Saturday.

According to AL.com, the "diversity = white genocide" were found hanging along interstates throughout the city on Saturday.

"We just removed the signs," Birmingham Police Lt. Sean Edwards noted. "We don't want stuff like that. We want to remove it quickly. We don't want to alarm the citizens. We don't welcome that type of mentality and behavior here."

"White Man March" organizer Kyle Hunt had been calling for supporters to hang the signs as part of a "coordinated pro-white activity" on March 15.

"The purpose is to spread information through activism, but also to make a statement that White people are united in their love for their race and in their opposition to its destruction," Hunt's website explains.

The site adds: "We will make it clear that we will not sit idly by as our race is discriminated against, mocked, displaced, and violently attacked, all of which amount to white genocide, according to the United Nation’s own definition of genocide. This is why one of our big messages, which will be displayed on many large banners, is 'DIVERSITY” = WHITE GENOCIDE.' These banners will spread the message to the public at large in the most effective way possible. This “diversity” agenda is being directed at white countries (and only at white countries) with various programs to ensure that there are less white people at schools and in the work force, which is unfair and discriminatory, taking away money and opportunities from the White citizens. 'Diversity' is a codeword for White Genocide."

Hunt recently told Vice that he could be "president of the United States in 2020, but for right now I am supporting some pro-White candidates from the American Freedom Party."

Cincinnati.com reported that only 10 people showed up at intersection in Florence on Saturday for the so-called "march." No other marches were reported in the media during Saturday's worldwide event.


Make that eleven.

There was one white man standing next to a sign propped up in a wooden chair that said "DIVERSITY = WHITE GENOCIDE" yesterday in Wheaton where Viers Mill Road dead ends and merges onto Georgia Avenue.

March 16, 2014 5:18 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

The son of the founder of the Westboro Baptist Church said his father is "on the edge of death."

Fred Phelps Sr. became famous for organizing picket lines of brightly-colored signs carrying hateful messages against tolerance during the funerals of military personnel and famous figures.

March 16, 2014 10:37 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Bad anonymous repeated one of his favourite lies "global warming isn't happening it's been halted for the last 16 years".

As he's well aware. there's no truth to that. While the rate of atmospheric temperature increases have slowed over the last 15 years, the overall warming of the entire climate system has continued rapidly over the past 15 years, even faster than the 15 years before that. If you look at this graph you can see that while the rate of temperature increase in the atmosphere has slowed, the atmospheric heating represents only 2% of the overall warming of the global climate. The rates of temperature increase for the remaining portions of the global climate such as upper and deep ocean temperatures, and land and ice temperatures have increased at a far greater rate. It is a myth that global warming has paused, or halted.

March 17, 2014 11:42 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

well, then it's a myth that the IPCC has bought into, as they discussed this in their latest report

here, in the nation's capital, we had ten inches overnight

we were dreaming of a green St Patty's Day, not white

alas, there's no global warming

March 17, 2014 12:21 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

There you go again, moron, confusing WEATHER with CLIMATE.

These are just early snowy April showers.


March 17, 2014 12:33 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Bad anonymous lied "well, then it's a myth that the IPCC has bought into, as they discussed this in their latest report".

The IPCC never said global warming has "halted", that's just you trying to put your words in their mouth. They discussed how the excess heating is in the oceans in their report. They agreed with what the research has shown - global warming has been concentrated in the oceans and land masses in the last 15 years.

You're just an unrepentant liar who ironically presumes to lecture gays and lesbians on morality.

March 17, 2014 12:51 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Good anonymous said "There you go again, moron, confusing WEATHER with CLIMATE.".

Oh, he knows the difference, we've educated him well. He just chooses to ignore the difference because his goal here isn't rational honest debate, his goal is to be an internet troll and to annoy and anger. That's why he chooses to constantly return to the same deceptions despite knowing better.

Of course he could just as easily point to those warmer than normal days instead or the fact that global warming predicts more frequent and severe storms and say this proves global warming but balance has no place in bad anonymous's arguments.

March 17, 2014 1:28 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

And while bad anonymous claims the IPCC bought into the myth that global warming has halted and never discussed that the warming of the oceans has continued unabated, let's see what they really said:

The IPCC's Sea Level Rise and "Hiatus"
In the latest U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report are two key areas that deserve special attention: sea level rise and a recent slowdown in global warming.

The new report incorporates new information on the melting of Greenland and Antarctica, data that had prevented the Nobel Prize-winning panel from making confident projections of sea level rise in its previous reports.

Meanwhile, the slowdown in the rate of warming in recent years has attracted the attention of skeptics of manmade climate change, who argue that climate computer models failed to anticipate the slowdown, which they say calls into question longer-term projections of a warming climate.

By significantly raising the projected rates and amounts of sea level rise through 2100, the IPCC is sounding alarms for coastal cities worldwide, many of which are already being forced to adapt to increased flooding. The devastation wrought by Hurricane Sandy in New York in 2012 drove home the lethal combination of long-term sea level rise and extreme weather events, and the IPCC’s projections show that urban planners have a major challenge.

For example, a recent study on coastal flooding of the world’s largest coastal cities found that Hong Kong has $60.7 billion sitting at or below the 100-year flood level. That study found that if no actions are taken to boost Hong Kong's flood defenses, coastal flooding could put $140 billion in infrastructure at-risk if sea levels rise by 15.8 inches.

March 17, 2014 1:53 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Sea level rise is one of the most visible effects of climate change, and the report found that sea levels are increasing more rapidly than in previous decades. During the 1901-2010 period, the report said, global averaged sea level rise was 0.07 inches per year, which accelerated to .13 inches per year between 1993 and 2010.

The IPCC’s four scenarios of the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere through 2100 all show faster rates of sea level rise compared to that observed during 1971-2010, the report said.

The new report projects that global mean sea level rise for 2081-2100 will likely be in the range of 10.2 to 32 inches, depending on greenhouse gas emissions. However, the report notes, as other studies have found, that local amounts of sea level rise could be much higher in some coastal areas.

The scenario with the highest amounts of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere shows a mean sea level rise range between 21 and 38.2 inches, which would be devastating for many highly populated coastal cities at or near current sea levels.

Rising sea levels can combine with extreme weather events to flood coastal infrastructure, as occurred during Hurricane Sandy in 2012 at the Hoboken, N.J., transit station.

The sea level rise projections in the report’s Summary for Policymakers were higher than those contained in the draft document before it underwent government review. They were also much higher than the projections in the 2007 report, which projected a global mean sea level rise of 7.1 to 23.2 inches by 2100, but it did not include the influence of rapid melting of the Greenland ice sheet as well as portions of Antarctica because not enough information was known at the time.

March 17, 2014 1:53 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Because of the long atmospheric lifetime of CO2, with about 15 to 40 percent of emitted CO2 remaining in the atmosphere longer than 1,000 years, as well as the lag in the ocean’s response to warming, Friday’s IPCC report said that sea levels would likely increase for centuries beyond 2100 and global average air temperatures would remain at elevated levels as well. This notion of the “irreversibility” of global warming on human timescales underscores the need to begin making emissions reductions in the near-term, scientists and policy makers said.

The report also addressed the controversial recent slowdown in the rate of global warming, noting that the report states that the rate of warming over the past 15 years is about 0.09°F per decade, which is smaller than the trend since 1951, which is about 0.21°F per decade.

The report said that natural climate variability, such as volcanic eruptions, solar cycles, and “redistribution of heat within the ocean” are the most likely causes of the short-term hiatus in warming. “Trends based on short records are very sensitive to the beginning and end dates and do not, in general, reflect long-term climate trends,” the report said.

At a press conference, authors of the report cautioned against concluding that climate models can’t project global temperature change, since many of them accurately capture the longer-term climate record. The report itself said that climate models are “not expected to reproduce the timing of internal variability” in the climate system.

“There is not a lot of published literature that allows us to delve deeper at the required depth of this emerging scientific question,” he said. Stocker said another 20 years without much warming, along with continued high emissions of greenhouse gases, would be required before serious questions about the accuracy of climate models would be raised.

March 17, 2014 1:54 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Most of the extra heat being put into the climate system by greenhouse gases is going into the oceans, accounting for more than 90 percent of the energy accumulated between 1971-2010, the report found. In recent years, deep ocean heat content, particularly in the Southern Ocean, has increased rapidly even while global air temperatures have slowed their rate of increase.

Scientists said the ocean heat content would yield further increases in global temperatures in the coming years, as the heat slowly percolates through the ocean layers and enters the atmosphere.

March 17, 2014 1:55 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"the rate of warming over the past 15 years is about 0.09°F per decade, which is smaller than the trend since 1951, which is about 0.21°F per decade."

Excellent fact teaching, Priya!

Increasing temperature by "0.09°F per decade" is not cooling. Warming of the planet continues to occur and there is no record of any "cooling" in the past 15 years.

"global warming hasn't stopped for the last sixteen years"

In fact, the rate of warming over the past 15 years has continued by 0.09°F per decade

March 17, 2014 4:40 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Right good anonymous. If someone wanted to make the case that global warming isn't happening the last 15 years rather than being slightly warmer would have to have been dramatically cooler than normal to balance all the much warmer than normal years. But instead the last year that was cooler than average was 1976

March 17, 2014 6:02 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"Sea level rise is one of the most visible effects of climate change"

IKR

that's why Al Gore has multiple waterfront properties

he wants to have a dog in the fight

hahahaha!!

"If someone wanted to make the case that global warming isn't happening the last 15 years rather than being slightly warmer would have to have been dramatically cooler than normal to balance all the much warmer than normal years"

this foolishly wrong

"warming" is a process

it can be said to stop without reversing

yesterday, 97% of Crimeans chose to join a repressive country without any human rights

about the same percentage of scientists who believe human activity caused the global warming that has now ended

coincidence?

March 17, 2014 7:17 PM  
Anonymous Last minute ACA enrollment surge, just like Romneycare in Massachusetts said...

"Obamacare Sign-Ups Hit 5 Million

New figures show some 800,000 Americans have selected plans on the Affordable Care Act's exchanges since the beginning of this month, thanks to an aggressive marketing push by the Obama administration, as the March 31 deadline to buy health coverage approaches

With less than two weeks to go before the end of open enrollment, the Obama Administration says 5 million people have signed up for new health care plans under the Affordable Care Act.

In a blog post published Monday, Marilyn Tavenner, the head of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, wrote that enrollments reached the milestone over the weekend.

The Department of Health and Human Services previously said that, as of March 1, about 4.2 million Americans had signed up for plans through a federal insurance exchange and those run by states. That means some 800,000 consumers selected plans in just the previous 17 days...."


Romneycare enrollment figures

March 18, 2014 9:27 AM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Bad anonymous said "yesterday, 97% of Crimeans chose to join a repressive country without any human rights".

You've been bragging repeatedly about how great Russia is for denying human rights to gays and lesbians. Funny how you don't mind contradicting yourself if doing so suits your immediate B.S.

Bad anonymous = zero integrity

March 18, 2014 12:12 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Bad anonymous said ""warming" is a process it can be said to stop without reversing".

That can be said if you're a liar. As research shows and the IPCC agrees the slowdown in atmospheric warming is accompanied by a dramatic increase in the temperatures of the oceans over the last 15 years. Global warming has continued unabated.

March 18, 2014 12:16 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Bad anonymous said "yesterday, 97% of Crimeans chose to join a repressive country without any human rights about the same percentage of scientists who believe human activity caused the global warming that has now ended coincidence?".

I'd be willing to bet 97% of Crimeans think global warming isn't happening too. That's no coincidence, when you're uneducated and flooded with propaganda you tend to both believe things that aren't true and choose to be led by a country that abuses human rights.

And of course as the facts show global warming has not ended and the scientific community is virtually unanimous on this point.

Bad anonymous tries to claim that there's a global conspiracy amongst hundreds of thousands of scientists to perpetrate a hoax on people and somehow no one has been able to expose that - its patently absurd.

I just watched a documentary on Monsanto and how conservative governments have quashed scientific research that shows genetically modified foods aren't safe and bad anonymous is trying to tell us powerful conservative governments can't silence their own scientists who are supposedly lying about global warming. Bad anonymous's arguments are just childishly stupid. But of course because he's wrong that's all he's got.

March 18, 2014 12:29 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

And of course the Crimean referendum only offered voters two options: 1) join Russia now
2) join Russia later

But of course bad anonymous wouldn't let a little lying through ommission get in the way of making his non-sequitor.

March 18, 2014 12:40 PM  

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