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Catholic Church Threatens to Stop Taking DC's Money if Officials Don't Bow to its Demands on Same-Sex Marriage
Posted by Melissa McEwan, Shakesville on November 12, 2009 at 5:44 PM.
The Catholic Archdiocese of Washington said Wednesday that it will be unable to continue the social service programs it runs for the District if the city doesn't change a proposed same-sex marriage law, a threat that could affect tens of thousands of people the church helps with adoption, homelessness and health care.Under the bill, headed for a D.C. Council vote next month, religious organizations would not be required to perform or make space available for same-sex weddings. But they would have to obey city laws prohibiting discrimination against gay men and lesbians.
Fearful that they could be forced, among other things, to extend employee benefits to same-sex married couples, church officials said they would have no choice but to abandon their contracts with the city.
"If the city requires this, we can't do it," Susan Gibbs, spokeswoman for the archdiocese, said Wednesday. "The city is saying in order to provide social services, you need to be secular. For us, that's really a problem."
Just so we're all on the same page, the Catholic Church doesn't want to extend partner benefits to same-sex married couples, because they view homosexuality as a sin. The Catholic Church also believes that all of its employees are sinners, by virtue of its doctrine viewing all humans as sinners. But they're not arguing that they shouldn't be compelled to extend benefits to those sinners, nor would they argue that providing healthcare coverage to people whose bad health habits they regard as sinful (gluttony! sloth! lust!) is a tacit endorsement of those sins. It's a special argument reserved especially just for the very special case of gay people and their specialized sin.
Catholic Charities, the church's social services arm, is one of dozens of nonprofit organizations that partner with the District. It serves 68,000 people in the city, including the one-third of Washington's homeless people who go to city-owned shelters managed by the church. City leaders said the church is not the dominant provider of any particular social service, but the church pointed out that it supplements funding for city programs with $10 million from its own coffers."All of those services will be adversely impacted if the exemption language remains so narrow," Jane G. Belford, chancellor of the Washington Archdiocese, wrote to the council this week.
Ah, it reminds me of those lovely words spoken by the Savior during his Sermon on the Mount: "And lo I beseech you to fuck over the homeless if the gays get too uppity."
Councilperson David Catania, who sponsored DC's same-sex marriage bill and chairs the Health Committee, sniffed at the church's threat: "They don't represent, in my mind, an indispensable component of our social services infrastructure." Councilperson Mary Cheh was even less generous, saying the church's behavior was "somewhat childish."
News Flash: Latest Right-Wing Conspiracy Theory About Obama Just as Silly as Previous Ones
Posted by Adam Shah, Media Matters for America on November 12, 2009 at 3:57 PM.
A post by RedState.com's Erick Erickson that Rush Limbaugh is hyping falsely claims that a memorandum from the federal Office of Personnel Management (OPM) will "purge the federal government of Republican civil servants" and "forc[e]" former Bush administration political appointees who currently have positions in the federal civil service "out of their jobs."
In fact, the OPM memo does nothing of the sort. It merely beefs up current OPM rules aimed at preventing political appointees from "burrowing in" to the civil service, thereby receiving the job security benefits that civil servants -- but not political appointees -- receive. While the memo states that agencies must seek permission from OPM to hire people as civil servants if they have been political appointees "within the last five years," nothing in the memo creates authority for anyone to fire current federal employees. Therefore, the OPM memo does not "purge" anybody.
Right Swoons Over Bush's Widely Publicized "Unpublicized" Visit to Fort Hood
Posted by Steve M., No More Mister Nice Blog on November 12, 2009 at 1:04 PM.
There's some buzz in the right-wing blogosphere in response to this post on a PUMA blog (yes, PUMA blogs are still around) and this one by Jerusalem Post columnist and editor Caroline Glick, both praising George W. Bush for his "unpublicized" trip last week to see wounded Fort Hood soldiers.
An excerpt from Glick's post:
Missing George W. Bush
A couple of days ago I heard the news that George and Laura Bush paid a private visit to the wounded soldiers at Fort Hood. They specifically requested that the base commander not inform the media of their visit. They came. They comforted the wounded soldiers and the Fort Hood community for a couple of hours. And then they left. And they never had their pictures taken saluting the troops or holding their hands.
When I heard the news, I felt this pain that hasn't gone away. It's a pain that I have been feeling fairly often since last November....
When I heard the news, I was struck by the fact that I heard the news. Isn't it odd how fast word of this "private" visit got around -- on Fox News the next morning, and ultimately all over the media? Darn that base commander, or whoever it was, who informed the press of the visit even though Bush specifically requested that it not be publicized!
A cynic, of course, would say that there's an effort in Bushworld to sell him as a guy who not only visits troops but shuns any publicity for those visits -- and what do you know, there was a story publicizing Bush's aversion to publicity in the Bush-friendly Washington Times last December, just about when Bushies were devoting considerable energy to making the case in the media for his "legacy":
EXCLUSIVE: Bush, Cheney comforted troops privately
For much of the past seven years, President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have waged a clandestine operation inside the White House. It has involved thousands of military personnel, private presidential letters and meetings that were kept off their public calendars or sometimes left the news media in the dark.
Their mission: to comfort the families of soldiers who died fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and to lift the spirits of those wounded in the service of their country....
Read the rest of the post on the flip side »
Rep. Steve King Calls Obama Administration the 'Gangster Government.'
Posted by Faiz Shakir, Think Progress on November 12, 2009 at 12:00 PM.
Rep. Steve King (R-IA), one of the right wing’s most shameless hate-mongers, has propagated all sorts of baseless attacks on Obama. For example, he has said Obama will make America a “totalitarian dictatorship,” that Obama was raised by polygamists, and that “radical Islamists” would be “dancing in the streets” if Obama was elected. In an interview with the Washington News Observer, King offered his latest diatribe, calling Obama’s team of advisers the “gangster government”:
Valerie Jarrett is a product of Chicago politics. This is power politics through Rahm Emanuel and Barack Obama, son and daughter of Saul Alinsky, linked up with Mayor Daley, the one that actually hired Michelle Obama and put her into that link, which may have well been the link that put Barack Obama into that machine. The Chicago Machine, we know what it is. Someone called it gangster government. In Chicago, you have gangester government and Valerie Jarrett’s been in the middle of that. She’s been brokering power for a long time.
Watch it:
King’s attack on Valerie Jarrett comes on the heels of Glenn Beck’s repeated screeds against her on his show.
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ACORN Suing U.S. Gov Over Defunding Law Pushed by GOP
Posted by Joshua Holland, AlterNet on November 12, 2009 at 9:51 AM.
Remember that whole 'separation of powers' dealio? Congress writes the laws, and the courts punish those who break 'em. Neat system; worked OK so far.
If Congress passes a law punishing someone for doing something it thinks wrong, it's usurping the role of the courts, and the Constitution frowns on it! Legislators aren't empowered to punish wrong-doers, both because the "Founders" appreciated the value of a good trial and because they understood that politicians are often motivated by considerations other than the rule of law (shocking, I know!).
So they prohibited the passage of "bills of attainder" -- laws singling out specific groups or individuals for retribution. Which is double-plus good today, when our Congress includes frothing-mad right-wingers shouldering massive grievances and not a few members who are dumb-as-the-proverbial-box-of-rocks.
Speaking of which, you'll recall that the GOP pushed hard back in September to pass a bill that prohibited any federal funding from going to ACORN, the right-wing bogeyman-of-the-day [correction: the bill passed in the House but is still in committee on the senate side). Perhaps sensitive to the Constitutional issue, they wrote the law so broadly that it could apply to just about any contractor, and some suggested at the time that in theory it could, if applied consistently, lead to the entire military-industrial-complex being "defunded." Proponents said it passed Constitutional muster because it applied to everyone.
Read the rest of the post on the flip side »
Pentagon Paying Taliban Who Are Killing US Troops
Posted by Bruce Wilson, Talk To Action on November 12, 2009 at 8:44 AM.
"It is an accepted fact of the military logistics operation in Afghanistan that the US government funds the very forces American troops are fighting." - Aram Roston, The Nation
Read the rest of the post on the flip side »
No Actual Poll Results in First 8 Paragraphs of AP Poll Analysis
Posted by Jed Lewison, Daily Kos on November 12, 2009 at 4:00 AM.
The AP's Liz "Donuts" Sidoti really hates President Obama -- or at least that's the impression she gives, because in the first eight paragraphs of her 'article' on the most recent AP-GfK poll, she doesn't mention a single number from the poll.
Before conceding that President Obama's job approval rating stands at 54% (which is essentially unchanged since July), Sidoti paints a portrait of doom and gloom for a Democratic president in distress:
Confidence in Obama slips more, poll shows
Wave of optimism that swept president into office turns more pessimisticBy LIZ SIDOTI
AP National Political Writer
updated 3:29 p.m. PT, Tues., Nov . 10, 2009WASHINGTON - The euphoria of 2008 is over: America is in a funk.
Elected last November on a wave of optimism, President Barack Obama now finds himself governing an increasingly pessimistic country in recession while muscling through Congress a health care reform overhaul and weighing whether to commit more troops to the 8-year-old Afghanistan war.
The latest Associated Press-GfK poll shows that Americans grew slightly more dispirited on a range of matters over the past month, continuing slippage that has occurred since Obama took office as the year began.
They were more pessimistic about the direction of the country. They disapproved of Obama's handling of the economy a bit more than before. And, perhaps most striking for this novice commander in chief, more people have lost confidence in Obama on Iraq and Afghanistan over the last month.
Ambitious agenda
All that is troubling for a president trying to accomplish an ambitious agenda at home while fighting wars abroad, as well as for a Democratic Party heading into a critical election year in which it will look to stave off losses a new president typically experiences in his first midterms. A third of the Senate, all of the House and most governors' offices will be on the ballot.The findings underscore just how quickly the political environment can change, a lesson in cautiousness for out-of-power Republicans salivating at the murky state of the electorate and buzzing with energy after booting Democrats from rule in Virginia and New Jersey governors' races last week.
It was just over a year ago that Obama won the White House in an electoral landslide and Democrats padded their congressional majorities. The country was riding high with optimism by just about all measures when Obama took office in January.
"Hope" and "change" were en vogue back then. But "change" didn't happen overnight, as the rhetoric of campaigning crashed headlong into the realities of governing. And "hope" slipped in a country that always has clung to it.
In those first eight paragraphs and 363 words, Sidoti manages to claim a new poll shows the Obama administration has "crashed," taking the coountry from "the euphoria of 2008" to a "funk."
To make this claim, she cites exactly zero numbers from the poll.
Sidoti does characterize some numbers from the poll, but there's a reason that she's characterizing them rather than citing them.
For example: in the AP poll, Obama's overall approval is 54/43, essentially unchanged from July's 55/42 rating. His numbers have dropped from the staggering numbers early in his first couple of months (67/24 in February), but that's old news. Since July, things have been steady.
Another example: despite Sidoti's claim that "the euphoria of 2008 is over: America is in a funk," the country's right-track/wrong-track numbers are better now than they were in 2008. The AP poll shows a 38/56 right-track/wrong-track number. That's down from 48/46 in May, but still better than the 2008 numbers (32/60 in December '08, 36/56 in November '08, 17/78 in October '08, and 26/70 in September '08).
It's true that nobody could argue with a straight face that Americans are happy with where things stand in the country today. But Sidoti isn't just claiming that: she's trying to say that people are more pessimistic today than they were a year ago, and she's blaming it on President Obama. In light of that thesis, the real reason she avoided citing any actual numbers in the first half of her article becomes clear: her argument didn't add up, and she knew it.
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