Wednesday, January 9, 2013

Chicago Cardinal Condemns Illinois Lawmakers For Considering Marriage Equality This Week

According to the Windy City Times, Illinois lawmakers may begin consideration of marriage equality as soon as this afternoon, when a bill is introduced in committee, with a vote as early as tomorrow. To pass before the end of the lame duck session, it must pass both the House and Senate by January 9th. This past weekend, the White House encouraged the effort, claiming, “Were the President still in the Illinois State Legislature, he would support this measure.” But the Catholic Archdiocese in Chicago was quick to rebuke the measure with a statement from Cardinal Francis George trying to claim the Church is not anti-gay because it supports gays and lesbians (if they’re chaste):

The Archdiocese offers Mass and other spiritual help to those who live their homosexuality anonymously (Courage groups) and also to those who want to be publicly part of the gay community (AGLO, which celebrates its twenty fifth anniversary this year). People live out their sexual identity in different ways, but the Church offers the means to live chastely in all circumstances, as the love of God both obliges and makes possible.

Should the lame duck legislature or the new Assembly take up the passage of a “same-sex marriage” law, it will be acting against the common good of society. We will all have to pretend to accept something that is contrary to the common sense of the human race.

George went on to claim that marriage equality puts society “in danger” because “our individual lives become artificial constructs protected by the civil ‘rights’ that destroy natural rights.” Aside from intending to sound scary, it’s unclear that the Church is able to articulate any valid consequence for marriage equality, choosing instead to demean same-sex families by claiming it’s “physically impossible” for them to “consummate a marriage.” George has a history of such incendiary rhetoric, having compared the gay rights movement to the Ku Klux Klan in December, 2011.

A poll conducted in early December shows a plurality of Illinois voters (47 percent) support marriage equality, especially those under the age of 45 (58 percent).


View the original article here

House Republicans Refuse To Hold A Vote On Hurricane Sandy Relief

After finally passing the Senate’s bill to narrowly avoid the fiscal cliff late Tuesday evening, Republicans put an end to the do-nothing 112th Congress by refusing to hold a vote on Hurricane Sandy disaster relief funding.

Late last week, the Senate passed a $60 billion relief package with the help of several Republicans, but Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) did not even take up the bill. On Wednesday morning, Boehner’s office told The Hill that the Speaker intends to pass a relief bill in the new Congress later this month, but the delay means that the Senate will have to draft and pass an entirely new bill for the 113th Congress.

A parade of congressmen from the impacted region raised strong objections on the House floor, including several Republicans. “Mr. Speaker, tonight’s action not to hold this vote on the supplemental is absolutely indefensible,” said Rep. Peter King (R-NY), whose Long Island district was among the most heavily impacted by the storm. “Everybody played by the rules, except tonight when the rope is pulled out from under us. Absolutely inexcusable, absolutely indefensible. We have a moral obligation to hold this vote.”

Watch it:

Hurricane Sandy caused an estimated $78.7 billion in damage across New York and New Jersey alone when it made landfall in late October. In the last few years, House Republicans have embraced the practice of holding disaster relief hostage in exchange for Democratic concessions on spending cuts, but in each instance they have ultimately backed down and passed relief aid.


View the original article here

House Passes Senate’s Fiscal Cliff Bill

After threatening to amend the Senate’s fiscal cliff bill to include spending reductions, the House passed the measure Tuesday evening by a vote of 257-167, with 85 Republican votes. 151 Republicans, including House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) and Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), and 16 Democrats voted against the bill. The “American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012” now goes to President Obama for his signature.

During debate, Rep. Dave Camp (R-MI) urged Republicans to support the bill, arguing that it “settles the level of revenue Washington should bring in.” The GOP has indicated that it would not support revenue increases in the upcoming battles to raise the debt ceiling, turn off the sequester cuts, and keep the government running through a continuing budget resolution. Instead, conservative lawmakers in both the House and the Senate have said that they will take advantage of these critical debates to extract deep cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

“I just don’t want the gentleman’s statement that this settles permanently how much revenue will be made available,” Rep. Sandy Levin (D-MI) said in response to Camp. “The President has made clear there has to be a balanced approach and no one should be misled into thinking otherwise. No one.”

As the House began voting on the measure, Grover Norquist gave his blessing, tweeting that since the vote took place in the new year — after the Bush tax cuts have technically expired — “Every R voting for Senate bill is cutting taxes and keeping his/her pledge.”

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) explains why he voted in favor of the bill: “When you like something, you vote for it. …I wasn’t afraid.” House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH), who usually doesn’t vote, also backed the measure.

In a statement from the White House, President Obama praised the bill as “one step in the broader effort to strengthen our economy.” But he admitted that “the deficit is still too high” and called for a balanced approach of raising new revenues by closing tax loopholes and eliminating deductions for rich individuals and corporations and cutting government spending. Obama called Medicare the “biggest contributor to our deficit” and said that Congress must “find a way to reform our program without hurting seniors who count on it to survive.” He also drew an important line in the sand, reiterating that he “will not have another debate with this Congress over whether or not they should pay the bills that they’ve already racked up, through the laws that they passed.” If Congress refuses to raise the debt ceiling, Obama said, “the consequences for the entire global economy would be catastrophic, far worse than the impact of a fiscal cliff.”


View the original article here

U.N. Says 60,000 Killed In Syrian Civil War

NEWS FLASH

U.N. Says 60,000 Killed In Syrian Civil War | The United Nations released a new analysis today finding that at least 60,000 Syrians have died in the country’s two-year long civil war, with, the AP reports, “monthly casualty figures steadily increasing.” “The failure of the international community, in particular the Security Council, to take concrete actions to stop the blood-letting, shames us all,” U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay said in a statement. “Collectively, we have fiddled at the edges while Syria burns.”

By Ben Armbruster on Jan 2, 2013 at 10:30 am


View the original article here

The Morning Pride: January 2, 2013

Welcome to The Morning Pride, ThinkProgress LGBT’s daily round-up of the latest in LGBT policy, politics, and some culture too! Here’s what we’re reading this morning, but please let us know what stories you’re following as well. Follow us all day on Twitter at @TPEquality.

- The Huffington Post highlights 25 anti-LGBT villains of 2012.

- Equality Matters highlights the National Organization for Marriage’s ten biggest fails of 2012.

- Outgoing Rep. Charles Bass (R-NH) became the third Republican to support repealing the Defense of Marriage Act before leaving office.

- A Change.org petition is calling on the National Geographic Channel to condemn the Boy Scouts of America’s anti-gay policies before airing its new show, Are You Tougher Than a Boy Scout?

- The state of Kansas is punishing a lesbian couple’s family by suing their sperm donor for child support.

- A Baptist Church in Iowa City has decided to begin recognizing same-sex marriages.

- A pizza food truck refused to serve a customer that was accosting a gay couple, and its other patrons stood up for the couple as well.

- Two polls show a majority of Brits support marriage equality.

- Mexico has apparently lifted its ban on gay and bisexual men donating blood.

- In Argentina, 5,839 same-sex couples have gotten married since 2010, and 1,720 transgender people have obtained new IDs since they were able in 2012.

- Torii Hunter of the Detroit Tigers says that “as a Christian,” he would find it “difficult and uncomfortable” to accept openly gay baseball players.

- In what may be a first, ESPN showed an openly gay male pro athlete, bowling champion Scott Norton, kissing his husband on the air:


View the original article here

Thanks To Gerrymandering, Democrats Would Need To Win The Popular Vote By Over 7 Percent To Take Back The House

America Wanted This Woman To Be Speaker of The House

As of this writing, every single state except Hawai’i has finalized its vote totals for the 2012 House elections, and Democrats currently lead Republicans by 1,362,351 votes in the overall popular vote total. Democratic House candidates earned 49.15 percent of the popular vote, while Republicans earned only 48.03 percent — meaning that the American people preferred a unified Democratic Congress over the divided Congress it actually got by more than a full percentage point. Nevertheless, thanks largely to partisan gerrymandering, Republicans have a solid House majority in the incoming 113th Congress.

A deeper dive into the vote totals reveals just how firmly gerrymandering entrenched Republican control of the House. If all House members are ranked in order from the Republican members who won by the widest margin down to the Democratic members who won by the widest margins, the 218th member on this list is Congressman-elect Robert Pittenger (R-NC). Thus, Pittenger was the “turning point” member of the incoming House. If every Republican who performed as well or worse than Pittenger had lost their race, Democrats would hold a one vote majority in the incoming House.

Pittenger won his race by more than six percentage points — 51.78 percent to 45.65 percent.

The upshot of this is that if Democrats across the country had performed six percentage points better than they actually did last November, they still would have barely missed capturing a majority in the House of Representatives. In order to take control of the House, Democrats would have needed to win the 2012 election by 7.25 percentage points. That’s significantly more than the Republican margin of victory in the 2010 GOP wave election (6.6 percent), and only slightly less than the margin of victory in the 2006 Democratic wave election (7.9 percent). If Democrats had won in 2012 by the same commanding 7.9 percent margin they achieved in 2006, they would still only have a bare 220-215 seat majority in the incoming House, assuming that these additional votes were distributed evenly throughout the country. That’s how powerful the GOP’s gerrymandered maps are; Democrats can win a Congressional election by nearly 8 points and still barely capture the House.

For two months, the nation has suffered through a “fiscal cliff” argument that threatened to plunge the nation into another recession. If the incoming Congress bore any resemblance to the one the American people voted for, however, this threat would have disappeared on Election Day because Speaker-elect Nancy Pelosi would have no problem rounding up the votes to eliminate this so-called cliff and set America back on the path to economic growth.

Worse, top Republicans are already threatening to use the looming debt ceiling fight to torpedo the entire U.S. economy unless Congress agrees to slash Social Security or Medicare benefits for seniors. They will have the leverage to attempt this because the incoming House bears no resemblance to the one America actually voted for. And individual Republican House members will be able to engage in this political dangerous game of chicken comfortable in the knowledge that partisan gerrymandering makes many of them untouchable in a general election.

Partisan gerrymanders, like the one that now all but locks the GOP majority in place, have been the subject of repeated court challenges. America can thank the five conservative justices on the Supreme Court for allowing these gerrymanders to continue.


View the original article here

Study: Rick Scott’s Long Voting Lines Cost Obama A Net 11,000 Votes In Central Florida

Credit: Joe Skipper/Reuters Credit: Joe Skipper/Reuters

Thanks in large part to a law signed by Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R), which cut early voting opportunities in that state, many Florida voters endured six hour lines simply to cast a ballot. These lines did not wind up costing Obama Florida’s electoral votes, but, according to an Ohio State University study, they reduced the President’s margin of victory by thousands of votes in central Florida alone:

[A]s many as 49,000 people across Central Florida were discouraged from voting because of long lines on Election Day, according to a researcher at Ohio State University who analyzed election data compiled by the Orlando Sentinel.

About 30,000 of those discouraged voters — most of them in Orange and Osceola counties — likely would have backed Democratic President Barack Obama, according to Theodore Allen, an associate professor of industrial engineering at OSU.

About 19,000 voters would have likely backed Republican Mitt Romney, Allen said.

This suggests that Obama’s margin over Romney in Florida could have been roughly 11,000 votes higher than it was, based just on Central Florida results. Obama carried the state by 74,309 votes out of more than 8.4 million cast.

In the wake of the long lines triggered in the wake of Rick Scott’s law, several top Republicans admitted the entire purpose of this law was to keep Democrats from the polls. Indeed, one GOP consultant explained that “cutting out of the Sunday before Election Day [from early voting] was one of their targets only because that’s a big day when the black churches organize themselves.” African-American voters overwhelmingly favored President Obama last November.


View the original article here

January 2 News: Fiscal Cliff Deal Extends Wind Tax Credits One Year

The wind energy industry in the U.S. breathed a sigh of relief as Congress passed a fiscal cliff deal on Tuesday that included an extension of the wind energy tax credits for wind projects that start in 2013. [GigaOm]

A bill to provide tens of billions of dollars in federal aid to states pummeled by Hurricane Sandy was in danger of dying Tuesday night as the House seemed headed for adjournment without taking up the legislation. [New York Times]

This year, summer came on like a grudge, with record-breaking heat, inescapable drought, and the sense that the effects of climate change had arrived – and that life in America’s mythic frontier might never be the same. [Men's Journal]

A new analysis of temperature records indicates that the Western Antarctic Ice Sheet is warming nearly twice as fast as previously thought. [BBC]

Annual gas prices hit a record high in 2012, the AAA motor club said Monday. On average, the national gas price for the year was $3.60 per gallon, eclipsing last year’s record of $3.51 per gallon. AAA attributed the increase to weather events and global turmoil. [The Hill]

A new study published this week in the journal Geophysical Research Letters provides a look at a dynamic that may further accelerate the Arctic ice melt: the rate at which the ocean underneath the ice absorbs sunlight. [New York Times]

Renewable energy has not yet won the battle for market share over fossil fuels but it appears to be doing well when it comes to mind share, according to a survey by Dow Jones’ Factiva service. [Forbes]

jQuery(document).ready(function(){jQuery('#comment_submit').click(function(){if(jQuery('#comment_check:checked').length

View the original article here

National Security Brief: Former Top U.S. Ambassador Praises Hagel


Ryan Crocker, former U.S. ambassador to Lebanon, Kuwait, Syria, Pakistan, Iraq and Afghanistan, offered strong praise for former Republican senator Chuck Hagel in a Wall Street Journal op-ed today and endorsed his potential nomination to be the next Defense Secretary. “Chuck Hagel is a statesman, and America has few of them,” said Crocker, “He knows the leaders of the world and their issues. At a time when bipartisanship is hard to find in Washington, he personifies it. Above all, he has an unbending focus on U.S. national security, from his service in Vietnam decades ago to his current position on the Intelligence Advisory Council.” Crocker, along with 8 other former U.S. ambassadors, signed a letter last month calling Hagel an “impeccable choice” for Defense Secretary.

In other news:

The Washington Post reports that the Obama administration has embraced the practice of holding and interrogating terrorism suspects in other countries without due process — also known as rendition.
An influential Afghan warlord told the Daily Telegraph that he fears a decent into chaos and anarchy after NATO troops leave Afghanistan, a similar situation that occurred after the Soviet Union withdrew in the late 1980s.
The AP reports: Clashes between government troops and rebels on Tuesday forced the international airport in Aleppo to stop all flights in and out of Syria’s largest city, while fierce battles also raged in the suburbs of the capital Damascus. Meanwhile, pro-opposition Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said Syrian rebels, some from Islamist units, fired machineguns and mortars at helicopters grounded at a northern military air base near the main Aleppo-Damascus highway on Wednesday.

View the original article here