My take on it is this:

1) Yes, he took a while to come around, but he did come around. It would have been more pandering for him to try and do this during the NC election.

2) And he wasn’t against it before he was for it.

3) He’s expressing his personal opinion – as POTUS, opinions from his office are still legal. Much different than LEGISLATING his opinion, as was done yesterday in NC.

But as usual, it’s never enough for some folks. Never enough.

If it’s government failure by design, then hold those designers accountable. Lugar is gone. How many more will fall by the wayside in November?

It’s up to us. Definition of insanity. We can’t expect the ones in charge now to change. They won’t. We must do it for them by electing others in their place.

And don’t moan in your beer when it’s your guy that gets bounced.

This morning on CNBC, the general consensus was that if Greece pulled out of the euro zone, their value would fall by about 50% putting them in an outright depression. The government position there is so unsustainable that there would be no choice. I got the impression that Germany would actually welcome their departure so that Greece’s problems would no longer be Germany’s but that is only my conjecture.

Bipartisanship is a political situation, usually in the context of a two-party system (e.g. the United States), in which opposing political parties find common ground through compromise.

Quote from Republican Senate candidate Richard Mourdock: ‘I have a mindset that says bipartisanship ought to consist of Democrats coming to the Republican point of view.’

Ok, then. This kind of genius is what we have to look forward to.

One of my high school friends living in NC posted on FB that she voted this amendment down – voted no. She has, so far, 10 friends marking it a ‘like’.

Over on a different board, this same story was reported and also noted that white registration was down by similar numbers.

The current electoral process is the problem. People have been getting beat over the head in the US for over a year regarding this election (it started immediately after the mid-term elections in 2010 and has continued unrelentingly since). The process was developed to facilitate voting in the predominantly agricultural, pre-Internet US economy. That economy no longer exists, but the process is stuck there.

Proposal: No campaign may formally organize until January 1 of said election year (if you organize before, you are banned from the ballot – all States). One national primary election, held in May. One national general election, held in November. No official media results until midnight close in Hawaii and Alaska (if you announce anything prior to midnight, you lose your license to broadcast; print media and internet need a similar ban and penalty). Elections are moved from first Tuesday to first Saturday and polls are open 24 hours that day. Allow same day registration with valid form of ID or a verifiable residential bill (e.g., a utility bill or mortgage statement to compare with the residential list in one’s community).

End game – no excuses. You have the time and the place to vote.

If the US is so exceptional, why is the voting process so unexceptional?

E-mailed my congresscritter, but he’s probably too busy running for the open Senate seat (finally getting rid of Joe Lieberman for good this time). The hypocrite had an X in all three columns. Asked him how I was supposed to take him seriously, if he hasn’t gotten around to actually signing the letter to move a bill forward that the fool co-sponsored, for Heaven’s sake.

Heck, I see this as an opportunity for some entrepreneur with good programming skills to put a package together that a station could buy for a reasonable rate. All the formatting is there, it’s standardized and all one has to do is upload a spreadsheet from a template out of their Finance department.

Some technical person oughta be able to do that in the time it would take to pass this bill and make a nice little pile of cash out of it.

TS, and only because, probably, there was no long term care market in the 1930s, you may be right.

I understood that this was one of the possible outcomes of the SCOTUS ruling on the ACA – that they might have to punt until 2014, or whenever it is, that the onerous portions of the law go into effect.

They aren’t supposed to rule on a maybe. They’re supposed to rule on something having actually happened, where harm has actually taken place.

Not sure this court would understand the difference, but that was what I was understanding, historically.

I am still confused on how the mandate for Health Insurance is any different from the mandate on Social Security. The program was a Federal program designed to keep Granny from abject poverty in the 1930s. And it’s done a fine job, and would do far better if the annual income cap were removed and the Congress critters would keep their paws off the fund for other unrelated, unfunded mandates.

But I digress…

I pay into the program for every day I work whether I want to or not. So does my employer. There is no mechanism for opting out. If you’re self-employed, you pay both halves of the contribution. No one asks you if you want to. It’s law and you cannot avoid it.

Certainly, long-term care is not a Federal issue but a States rights issue, yet this program has gone on for more than 70 years with nary a challenge once it went into effect.

So if the mandate for ACA is knocked down, can we expect to see a case made for knocking down the mandate for Social Security?

I’ll wait for the screaming to commence.

Sadly, we forget that Rick lost his home State when he ran for re-election last time by some 18 points. It wasn’t just a loss; it was a repudiation then for all his ridiculous talk.

I bet, even if he loses PA, he won’t leave the race. He still thinks, kind of like the de-limbed knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, that without winning a primary outside of the deep South he can force a brokered convention.

So add ‘delusional’ to his list of character traits.

Although not the best resource in the world, last week on Real Time with Bill Maher, Andrew Sullivan said that most Catholics don’t hold the same belief structure as Santorum does. They may profess to be Catholic, but they don’t cotton to the Pope’s view of the world, which Santorum apparently espouses.

Sullivan said most of the US Catholics are like this, so Rick isn’t necessarily going to do well with them.

Andrew made this statement as an openly practicing Catholic, who said none of the folks in his parish gave a hoot on the topic of his partner.

I am far and away most shocked by this lunatic and how he even gets any light shown on his insanity. I have come to believe of late that we are more in danger from our own ‘Talibanistic’ candidates than we have to concern ourselves with the false fear of Sharia law being implemented within our borders.

By continuing to give any credence to this candidate, i am convinced that the electorate will become more and more convinced of his ‘truthiness’. This guy is completely serious in his beliefs. Implementation of such would easily roll our society back decades without improving anything. He has readily scapegoated women (feminists, I tell you. FEMINiSTS!!!!!!) and gays and now even some Christians as the foundation of America’s demise. It honestly has all the smackings of 1930s Germany. And we all know how that turned out.

I’ve been thinking since I heard this: the GOP, particularly the Tea Party, wants government to get out of personal decision making. So they reject the government ‘interference’ that makes the incandescent light bulb a thing of the past, but have no problem insisting that the government needs to be deeply involved in bedroom and doctor office decisions. The level of hypocrisy is overwhelming.

And for this, they were prepared to hold up funding the US government. Astounding…..

There’s entirely too much great historical footage of Newt from his previous governing days that will be recycled into wonderful Obama campaign commercials to remind the general public why Newt is not a good idea on any level.

Wait for it. It’ll come. And if Romney manages to do the work for the Democrats’ campaign, look at all the money saved.

As a regular attendee of church services, I am deeply offended by idiots like the guy in this video. I can never quite understand what Bible they’re reading from, but it’s not the one I’ve been dealing with since infancy. I don’t walk around banging the drum or thumping a Bible, but I work hard every day to LIVE what I’ve learned and not beat people up who don’t agree with me. If I had a dollar for every time someone asked me to post about my beliefs on Facebook, I’d have enough to feed a family of four for a week. What’re these guys doing? Proposing to take away the very charity that we were told from the beginning is the cornerstone of religion. ” ‘I tell you the truth, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’ How does this crew possibly reconcile their ‘cut the safety net’ position with this line right out of the New Testament? There’s no taking this out of context.

My point is this – beating up on people with a different belief structure that conflicts with your perception of your religion isn’t your job. It’s between each of us and G-d. Co-opting religion as ‘you’re on my side or you’re going to hell’ as part of a political campaign? Dead wrong and you lose credibility with me the minute you start that crap.

As a travelling consultant, I work all over the east coast – in this case, it’s NJ. Don’t have access to my other states’ work this year. But I know I’ve seen UI deductions frequently, but not consistently.

cwaltz – I just looked at my most recent paystub – there’s a deduction on there for unemployment insurance. I am most certainly paying in to the program.

I suppose all this will be true, if and only if a reasonable third party candidate doesn’t enter the arena between now and a year from now. Before we all think it can’t happen, who knew about Obama a year before the election?

Of course, if some nitwit decides to be a tea party candidate in a third party ballot position (and I wouldn’t put it past any of the current crop of GOP’ers), it should be a pretty interesting election.