Bobby Jindal: Republicans Can Continue Discriminating Against Gays And Still Win Elections

Gov. Bobby Jindal (R-LA) — a possible Republican candidate for president in 2016 — rejected former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman’s argument that conservatives must embrace marriage equality for gays and lesbians if they want to survive as a party and reiterated his support for “traditional marriage.”

“Look, I believe in the traditional definition of marriage,” Jindal said during an appearance on Meet The Press on Sunday, and went on to claim that Republicans don’t have to make the case on social issues to attract young voters and win future elections and instead should continue focusing on economic issues. “We lost [the 2012 election] because we didn’t present a vision showing how we believe the entire economy can grow, how people can join the middle class. We’re in aspirational party and we need policies that are consistant with that aspirational private sector growth.”

In an essay for The American Conservative entitled “Marriage Equality Is a Conservative Cause,” Huntsman — a Mormon whose previous support for civil unions set him apart from Republican presidential candidates in 2012 — argued that if the Republican Party wants to survive, it must enhance its appeal to gay Americans and the growing majority that supports marriage equality.

“[I]t’s difficult to get people even to consider your reform ideas if they think, with good reason, you don’t like or respect them,” Huntsman wrote. “Building a winning coalition to tackle the looming fiscal and trust deficits will be impossible if we continue to alienate broad segments of the population….Consistent with the Republican Party’s origins, we must demand equality under the law for all Americans.”

Polls show that most Americans support marriage equality, with many telling pollsters that their minds have evolved on the issue.

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The 1996 Illinois Senate Campaign And How Candidates Can Win On Gun Safety

A look at the 1996 United States Senate campaign between then Democratic U.S. Rep. Dick Durbin and Republican Illinois State Rep. Al Salvi sheds an all-too-familiar light on how the effort to prevent gun violence has become a make-or-break issue for Illinois voters in next Tuesday’s special election to fill former Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr’s seat.

After edging out the moderate Republican candidate Lt. Gov. Bob Kustra in the 1996 GOP primary, Al Salvi represented the most appealing, convincing candidate the Republican Party had presented in Illinois and was believed to have a legitimate chance at winning the Senate seat. The young NRA poster boy for Illinois spent his time on the campaign trail asserting the ’94 federal assault weapons ban was “silly,” calling the ’93 Brady Handgun Bill “cosmetic,” and offering to legalize concealed weapons in order to cut crime.

Meanwhile, Salvi’s opponent, then Representative Durbin was actively campaigning for sensible gun violence prevention measures. After co-sponsoring the ’93 Brady Handgun bill and supporting the ’94 assault weapons ban, he told Illinois voters, “We will not be a safer nation, a safer state, if people are carrying guns around shopping malls and restaurants.” Durbin joined forces with President Reagan’s former press secretary and gun-control activist Jim Brady to film a campaign ad that portrayed Salvi as an extremist on gun issues. In a Sunday radio interview just days before the election, Salvi responded by falsely charging that Jim Brady “used to sell” machine guns. Salvi later apologized and conceded, “Turns out that was a different Jim Brady.”

Salvi’s last-minute gaffe and extreme stance on guns proved to fracture the Illinois Republican party and rally Illinois voters around candidates who supported gun violence prevention. In one example, the Chicago Fraternal Order of Police opted to support Democratic House candidate Rod Blagojevich over the Republican incumbent, U.S. Rep Michael Flanagan, who earlier that year had supported an attempt to repeal the federal assault weapons ban. In his endorsement, the union’s president, Bill Nolan, said, “(It’s) almost a one-issue thing, and that is the guns.”

Salvi’s extreme stance on guns cost him the election. Durbin won the race by a landslide, leading Salvi 57 percent to 40 percent. Durbin acknowledged in his victory speech how important gun violence prevention was to Illinois voters: “I hope this victory tonight is a message that no political official in this state should ever, ever be cowered by the gun extremists.”

Salvi learned his lesson and two years later completely reversed his position, coming out in support of commonsense gun violence prevention measures, including the Brady law and the federal assault weapons ban. He wrote a guest editorial in the Chicago Sun Times making the about face in the hopes of positioning himself for another Senate run. Salvi explained: “I’m a solid conservative who recognizes I made a mistake on presenting my position on the gun issue. I lost the big picture. I was wrong.”

Seventeen years later, the gun debate, yet again, takes center stage in the Chicago-area congressional race to fill former Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr.’s vacated seat.

New York City mayor, Michael Bloomberg, a vocal advocate for commonsense gun violence prevention measures, has shown a considerable interest in the first election since the shooting in Newtown, Connecticut. His super PAC, Independence USA, has already spent $2.1 million in TV ad buys attacking former Congresswoman Halvorson and other candidates who refuse to take a stand on gun violence prevention measures. The Independence USA ad endorses former state Rep. Robin Kelly who released her own video highlighting her support for sensible gun measures, including bans on assault weapons and high capacity gun magazines.

While Halvorson was the expected frontrunner as a result of her previous time in Congress and earlier rise to state Senate majority leader, her extremist stance against commonsense gun laws and “A” rating from the gun-manufacturing sponsored NRA may cost her the election, much like it did Al Salvi. There is no doubt that the Independence USA spending has put Halvorson at a disadvantage and sets an example for NRA-backed candidates in future elections.

In a race to represent a district severely shaken by gun violence, the movement to prevent gun violence again proves to be a critical issue. If history is any indication of which candidate Illinois voters will elect, Debbie Halvorson’s extremism may cost her.

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What One ‘Conservative’ Approach To Health Care Reform Looks Like — And Why It’s A Bad Idea

Avik Roy — who advised Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney on health care policy — and Doug Holtz-Eakin published an op-ed for Reuters earlier this week in which they outlined their vision for a “free market” approach to health care reform. It’s a serious proposal, albeit one that makes the same fallacious argument as Whole Foods CEO John Mackey’s assertion that Switzerland’s health care is more “entrepreneurial” than Obamacare is. Unfortunately, that claim is simply the least worrying aspect of a plan that is riddled with benefit cuts and shifting health care costs onto consumers.

First of all, mentioning Switzerland in the piece at all is essentially a red herring, as the duo’s proposal doesn’t actually shift American health care in the direction of the Swiss system — quite the opposite, in fact. While Switzerland shares important aspects with Obamacare, particularly its federally-subsidized health insurance marketplaces — a fact that Roy and Holtz-Eakin acknowledge, to their credit — the country’s health care program can hardly be described as a less regulated system, since it actually provides more generous insurance subsidies, requires insurers to offer at least one “nonprofit plan” akin to a public option, and imposes stricter price controls and negotiations between the government, drug makers, and health care providers.

Instead, what Roy and Holtz-Eakin want to see is a modified, and far more regressive, version of the proposal that Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) and former Sen. Michael Bennett (R-UT) proposed first in 2007 and then again in 2009 during the health care reform debate. Under Roy-Holtz-Eakin, Medicaid and Medicare beneficiaries would be shifted away from public insurance into private plans on Obamacare’s insurance marketplaces, consumer protections and regulations governing the marketplaces would be rolled back to encourage “innovation,” federal insurance subsidies would be limited to Americans up to 300 percent of the federal poverty level (FPL) instead of the Obamcare-mandated 400 percent FPL, and the Medicare eligibility age would be raised by three months every year indefinitely.

These are really poor ideas that would shift costs onto consumers and force many to forgo care, cut Americans’ health benefits by depriving them of Medicaid’s unique benefits, and create costlier private insurance premiums by siphoning seniors out of Medicare — all while doing absolutely nothing to lower the actual cost of American health care, which is the only real way to reduce national health expenditures.

Roy-Holtz-Eakin also caps federal insurance subsidies at 300 percent FPL rather than 400 percent FPL in an effort to contain government expenses. In the op-ed, the authors implicitly justify this by citing the example of Massachusetts — the birthplace of Obamacare — where reform has been working pretty well. But that ignores the fact that Massachusetts is a relatively wealthy state with unemployment and poverty below the national average. For the rest of the country, that cap would be pretty devastating, pricing millions of Americans out of the health care system. Roy and Holtz-Eakin also do not want subsidies to increase faster than inflation, even though that provision is meant to address the well-established reality that health care inflation tends to accelerate faster than regular inflation.

Although Roy-Holtz-Eakin may be an honest proposal for curbing costs, it is largely based on the dishonest notion that relinquishing more responsibility — a euphemism for shifting costs — onto consumers and making them pay more for their care will somehow magically curb the cost of health care. It won’t — but it will make Americans avoid receiving treatment, leading to a form of self-rationing that is particularly ironic given Roy and Holtz-Eakin’s goal of preventing government rationing of health care.

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Obama administration brief: Defense of Marriage Act is unconstitutional

President Obama’s administration said Friday that the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) was unconstitutional, filing a brief weeks ahead of scheduled arguments before the Supreme Court.

In its brief, the Justice Department said that DOMA, which defined marriage as only between a man and a woman, “violates the fundamental constitutional guarantee of equal protection.”

“The law denies to tens of thousands of same-sex couples who are legally married under state law an array of important federal benefits that are available to legally married opposite-sex couples,” the brief added.

Obama has already ordered his administration not to defend DOMA, and announced he supported same-sex marriage during the heat of last year’s presidential campaign.

The Supreme Court will hear arguments next month on the case of Edith Windsor, who was forced to pay taxes on the estate of her deceased partner, Thea Spyer. 

The couple had married in Canada, and their marriage was recognized in their home state of New York at the time Spyer died in 2009. But Windsor was forced to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in estate taxes that would not have been required if her deceased spouse had been a man. 

House Republicans have taken up the defense of DOMA, which overwhelmingly passed Congress in 1996 and was signed by former President Clinton. 

Congressional Democrats are currently pushing measures that would repeal DOMA, in addition to groups’ legal efforts to have the law ruled unconstitutional. 

The Supreme Court is also scheduled to hear arguments about California’s Proposition 8, a ballot initiative to ban same-sex marriage approved in 2008.

According to reports, the administration plans to file a brief in that case that supports the constitutionality of same-sex marriage.

“I have to make sure that I'm not interjecting myself too much in this process, particularly when we're not a party to the case,” Obama told a San Francisco television station this week. 

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NRA touts internal Justice Dept. memo contesting Obama gun-control measures

The National Rifle Association (NRA) has obtained an internal Justice Department memo that it says shows President Obama's gun-control measures would not be effective without firearms seizures and national gun registration, the Associated Press reports.

The gun lobby is citing the nine-page memo in ads running in 15 states, including several swing states with Senate elections next year. In the ad, the NRA says the memo proves that the administration “believes that a gun ban will not work without mandatory gun confiscation” and thinks universal background checks “won't work without requiring national gun registration,” according to the AP.

Obama has not proposed either of those ideas. Instead, he has called for a ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines as well as universal background checks for gun purchases – ideas included in Senate legislation introduced last month by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.).

The memo, a preliminary document signed by Justice Department research director Greg Ridgeway, casts doubts on all of those proposals. It has not been made public.

The memo says the ban would have little impact – especially if the many people who already have assault weapons and high-capacity magazines are allowed to keep them – because assault weapons account for a small number of gun deaths. And it says the usefulness of background checks would depend in part on “requiring gun registration,” something the president has shied away from in the face of bitter opposition from gun-rights advocates.

“Senators of both parties are working together on tough new laws to prevent anyone from buying guns for resale to criminals. Police chiefs are asking our help to get weapons of war and massive ammunition magazines off our streets, because they are tired of being outgunned,” Obama said during his State of the Union address. “Each of these proposals deserves a vote in Congress.”

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McCain: Hagel likely to get up-or-down vote on Pentagon nomination soon

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said Sunday that he expected President Obama’s nominee for Defense secretary, Chuck Hagel, to get an up-or-down vote in the coming days.

“I think it will happen, barring some additional revelation concerning his comments on Israel and all those other really unfortunate things he’s said in the past,” McCain said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

Hagel’s nomination was filibustered earlier this month, after GOP senators wanted more information on both Hagel’s financial records and to pressure the White House to answer additional questions about the attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya. 

On Sunday, McCain stressed that he didn’t believe Hagel was qualified to head up the Pentagon. But he added that he still believes the president’s nominee deserves a vote, which is why he didn’t sign a recent letter from Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Texas) asking Obama to withdraw Hagel’s nomination.

“I do believe that elections have consequences, unfortunately,” McCain said. “And the president of the United States was re-elected.”

Fifteen GOP senators signed the letter asking Obama to withdraw Hagel nomination. 

Hagel is likely to be confirmed if he receives an up-or-down vote. He has the backing of Democrats, who control the chamber, and has received the support of three Republicans: Sens. Thad Cochran (Miss.), Mike Johanns (Neb.) and Richard Shelby (Ala.).

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Republicans: Obama wants higher taxes

With less than a week before deep spending cuts kick in, Republicans in their weekly address accused President Obama of being ready to plunge the economy into a tailspin to extract higher taxes.

“The fact is: Republicans in Congress, right now, will provide the flexibility to make the necessary spending reductions and address our deficit and debt, instead of going through the sequester. In fact, House Republicans have already passed two bills to replace the President’s sequester,” said Sen. John Hoeven (R-N.D.). “So the question is: Why won’t he work with us? And the answer, quite simply, is because he wants higher taxes.”

Obama has been traveling the country to create momentum for legislation that would replace the automatic, across-the-board cuts with a mix of tax hikes on the rich and specific cuts. He is expected to travel to Virginia next week to continue pressing his message even as Republicans have sought to pin the blame for the sequester on him.

"Hope springs eternal,” Obama said Friday. “And I will just keep on making my case, not only to Congress but more importantly the American people."

Hoeven repeated Saturday that the idea for the sequester originated in the White House, even if Republicans voted for it in the House and Senate. He said it's the president's whole approach – not just his tax policy – that's failing.

"The right way to address our deficit and debt, and get past the sequester, is not higher taxes or just better spending control,” he said. “It’s by creating jobs, growing the economy, and expanding the tax base.”

“Above all, you have to get the economy growing. That creates jobs and revenue from economic growth, not higher taxes. President Obama, however, not only wants higher taxes; he’s actually preventing economic growth and private-sector job creation. He is blocking it with more regulation, red tape, and bureaucracy.”

Hoeven, a former governor of North Dakota, went on to excoriate Obama for failing to approve the Keystone XL Pipeline that would allow Canadian crude – and oil from Hoeven's own state – to flow to refineries in the southern United States. The project, which faces stiff opposition from environmentalists, needs approval from the State Department to move forward.

“The Keystone XL project will carry 830,000 barrels of oil a day to U.S. refineries,” he said. “That includes not only oil from Alberta, Canada, but also 100,000 barrels per day of light, sweet crude from the U.S. Bakken region in Montana and my home state of North Dakota.”

He said polls show widespread public support for the project.

“Why, Mr. President, are you blocking a project that the American people support overwhelmingly? Clearly, it appears to be because of special interest groups,” he said. “It’s time to do things differently, Mr. President. It’s time to turn our country around with the right approach, and we stand ready to work with you to do it."

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European Economy Expected To Contract Even More In 2013

The European economy, beset by high unemployment and austerity measures aimed at reducing debts and deficits, will contract again in 2013, according to the continent’s official economic body. That would make 2013 the second consecutive year, and third in the past five, in which the 17-nation Eurozone’s economy will have shrunk, adding to its already record-high unemployment rate and further complicating the deficit reduction efforts it has pursued without fail since the end of the global recession.

Another contraction would especially hit the countries that have already been hurt the most by the recession and resulting austerity, the European Commission said. The Wall Street Journal reports:

The European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, forecasts a 0.3% contraction for 2013 and sees falling spending by businesses, consumers and national governments pushing euro-zone unemployment to a new high. Mass joblessness is expected to increase in the countries hardest hit by the crisis, with the average unemployment rate expected to reach 27% in Greece, 26.9% in Spain and 17.3% in Portugal.

Slow growth, and in some cases the lack of growth at all, has already hampered deficit reduction efforts, causing Spain, Greece, and France to miss deficit targets. French president Francois Hollande announced this week that he would not pursue further austerity to hit this year’s deficit target. The Eurozone officially fell back into recession in November.

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Biden to mark Black History Month with trip to Selma

Vice President Joe Biden will commemorate Black History Month with a trip to Selma, Ala., where he will participate in the annual ceremonial crossing of the Edmund Pettus Bridge, The Root reported Friday.

The vice president will also attend the Martin and Coretta King Unity Brunch.

The annual bridge crossing is held the first weekend every March to commemorate "Bloody Sunday" — the 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery, Ala.,  to protest the killing of civil rights protester Jimmie Lee Jackson by an Alabama state trooper. As hundreds of protesters reached the Edmund Pettus Bridge, state troopers fired tear gas into the crowd. Many protesters were badly beaten, and seventeen were hospitalized. 

A second wave of protesters, organized by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., returned two days later, but a restraining order issued by a federal judge stopped them again from crossing the bridge. Two weeks later, that decision was overturned, and protesters — galvanized by the brutal images from the initial march — proceeded to Birmingham, Ala.  The White House has prioritized outreach to the African-American community in recent days, with President Obama taping three radio interviews with black radio hosts. The president also met Thursday with African-American leaders at the White House for a discussion of the economy, sequestration and education.

Next week, Obama will attend the dedication of the statue of Rosa Parks being added to Statuary Hall on Capitol Hill.

“To think that a seamstress who was subject to discrimination her entire life ends up in the same hall as some of the titans of American political history, I think says a story about how change comes about in this country," Obama said in an interview with Joe Madison on SiriusXM. "It doesn’t come from the top down— it comes from the bottom up. And she represented better than anybody the kind of strength and determination that so many ordinary Americans show every single day in pursuit of a better country."

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Welcome to the Revolution … I Think

by Auden Schendler

There’s a taboo and terrifying thing people do in the mountains called “trundling.” It means pushing an often frighteningly big rock off the side of a mountain, then watching it roll down, bounce, explode, crush trees, and smoke off into the valley below. It is not sanctioned; it is dangerous to the trundler and to others; people who do it don’t talk about it. But it happens.

If you have ever “trundled” a big rock (and I’m not saying I have, at least not intentionally) you know that the moment it tips from massive geologic inertia to kinetic energy is both terrifying and thrilling.

That is the uncomfortable point we may have reached in the climate movement. I saw this at a rally in Denver last week, which I attended with my wife and two young children:

The first characters we ran into wore black bandannas as facemasks and backpacks. And there were a lot of them. My response was a gut feeling of panic. What, exactly, did these guys think was going to happen here? They seemed ready for the Seattle world trade protests, or something gnarly out of Eastern Europe.

I had thought this protest was about stopping the Keystone XL pipeline as a way for Obama to draw a line in the sand on climate. But there were people railing against just about everything connected to the environment, including social justice, indigenous people’s rights, and fracking. “What the Frack!” was one chant. There was a guy carrying a book on Marx, there were some homeless guys with the agenda of not being bored. Later, at the rally, a child activist (who emceed the event) talked about suing Boulder for violating the public trust by polluting the air.

Suing Boulder, one of the greenest cities in the world, seems like an odd tactic: it’s like suing Jesus for not being loving enough. (Turns out, on further research, they were suing Colorado, not Boulder.) Whatever—there were many different viewpoints, from the hobo who blessed me, to the 12 year old radical, and many of them I did not agree with. It was both a rainbow coalition and a Babel of agendas.

Despite the facemasks, the event was civil: I never saw a cop, and I heard grumbling from some of the several hundred marchers that “when we have half a million, that’s when we’ll take over the street…” and “this is the only protest march that stayed on the sidewalk…” Point being, it might have even been too civil. See “At climate rally, some signs of fraying in a movement’s big tent.”

Only at one point did the event tip slightly to the radical.

Almost at the park where the rally was to be held, the crowd surged across a heavily trafficked four-lane road in defiance of the stoplight. In the streets the Marxists and the anarchists were exhorting people to ignore the lights. The traffic was honking now out of outrage, not support. A woman fell down and several people hauled her back up. “Now,” I thought, not particularly happily, “maybe something is happening.” I held my children well back on the curb and waited for the light.

I have become skeptical of the idea of working within the system for change, because I think the system itself is corrupted—by money in politics, by crackpot governance (the filibuster, gerrymandering) and by apathy. But when things start to get even a little bit crazy, the system starts looking pretty damn good. That’s why I was on the sidewalk, an unintentional gesture in support of the status quo. I had an urge to envelop my kids in my arms.

And yet, waiting awkwardly at a stoplight in the middle of a revolution, we were no better off. My children would be no safer in a world warmed by 4 degrees C than out on the most dangerous streets. This corner was a place of false refuge. On my wife’s urging, we surged into the road, with the crowd, in defiance of the light.

Barry Lopez calls the uncomfortable balance point between fear and accomplishment “the cusp on which human life finds its richest expression.” Perhaps only at these scary points in our lives, or in history—when neither forward nor backwards nor stasis is ideal—does the object you have been pushing on begin to move.

– Auden Schendler is Vice President of Sustainability at Aspen Skiing Company and author of the book Getting Green Done: Hard Truths from the Front Lines of the Sustainability Revolution.

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Parents Sue School For Making Children ‘Religious Guinea Pigs’ — By Teaching Them Yoga

Children being indoctinated

A San Diego couple is suing the area’s school district for allegedly violating their children’s religious freedom by offering yoga classes for physical education.

Stephen and Jennifer Sedlock actually have the option to opt their children out of taking the classes, which the school’s superintendent describes as, “stretching, moving, breathing.” But their lawyer, a part of the conservative National Center for Law and Policy, still believes there is a strong case for why yoga classes are an unconstitutional violation religious freedom:

In a press release issued by Escondido-based National Center for Law and Policy, attorney Dean Broyles said the Encinitas yoga program was a “breach of public trust” that sets a “dangerous precedent.”

“This is frankly the clearest case of the state trampling on the religious freedom rights of citizens that I have personally witnessed in my 18 years of practice as a constitutional attorney,” Broyles said.

The lawsuit, which alleges civil rights violations, was filed in San Diego Superior Court. It ultimately seeks to suspend the yoga program indefinitely and “restore traditional physical education to the district.”

If the couple’s lawyer thinks that this is “the clearest case of the state trampling on [religious] freedoms” that he has witnessed, he may want to look a little harder. The First Amendment does not simply protect against legitimate threats to the free exercise of faith, it also forbids the government from endorsing religious views or forcing religion upon others — most often non-Christians. So when an Indiana lawmaker proposes requiring “the recitation of the Lord’s Prayer at the beginning of each school day,” that’s a violation of religious freedom. When a conservative judges places a massive Ten Commandments monument in the middle of the Alabama Judicial Building, that’s a violation of religious freedom.

When a child does a yoga pose, on the other hand, that’s just a good way to stay in shape.

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