Evans Liberal Politics
February 25, 2012
The Best in Liberal Christian News
and US Politics
State Attorneys General Sue Obama Administration
Over Birth Control Rule (Updated)
State Attorneys General Sue Obama Administration Over Birth Control Rule, The Raw Story, February 23, 2012, by Eric W. Dolan, quoted verbatim, used with permission: Evans Liberal Politics is happy to partner with The Raw Story to bring you cutting edge news, UPDATED, with poll results, below:
Seven state attorneys general have filed a lawsuit against the Obama administration that seeks to block the implementation of new federal government rules regarding contraception coverage.
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The attorneys general of Florida, Michigan, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Texas, along with some Catholic organizations, said in their lawsuit that the new rule violates the First Amendment.
In recent weeks, a controversy has erupted over the policy, which requires virtually all private insurance policies to cover family planning, including female contraceptives, essentially guaranteeing near universal access to birth control once all the provisions of the Affordable Care Act are implemented.
“Obamacare’s latest mandate tramples the First Amendment’s Freedom of Religion and compels people of faith to act contrary to their convictions,” said Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott. “The President’s so called ‘accommodation’ was nothing but a shell game: the mandate still requires religious organizations to subsidize and authorize conduct that conflicts with their religious principles.”
The White House offered to change the rules by exempting religion-related organizations with moral objections. Instead, the insurance companies would be required provide those services free of charge. Republicans have derided the compromise as an “accounting gimmick.”
The lawsuit alleges that the proposed compromise is too narrow because it does not exempt businesses and organizations that primarily serve or employ persons who do not share their religious tenets.
The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court of Nebraska.
According to a Quinnipiac University national poll released Thursday, 54 percent of Americans approve of Obama’s compromise concerning insurance coverage for birth control. Thirty-eight percent disapprove. Women are slightly more likely than men to approve of the compromise, while white Catholics are split 46 percent to 48 percent. Not surprisingly, Democrats are much more likely to approve of the compromise than Republicans.
Eric W. Dolan has served as an editor for Raw Story since August 2010, and is based out of San Diego, California. He grew up in the suburbs of Chicago and received a Bachelor of Science from Bradley University. Eric is also the publisher and editor of PsyPost. You can follow him on Twitter @ewdolan.
Also Watch Jon Stewart – The Daily Show: The Vagina Ideologues, February 14, 2012.
You Are Especially Encouraged to Read Rethinking the Abortion Debate from a Liberal Christian Perspective (Updated), Evans Liberal Politics, May 13, 2011, by Paul Evans.
UPDATE: See Contraception debate divides swing voters, according to new Gallup poll, The Ticket on Yahoo News, February 24, 2012, by Olivier Knox:
The fight over whether religious-based employers should provide birth control coverage as part of their health plans sharply divides Americans, six in ten of whom say they have been following the volatile debate on the issue, according to a new a href=”http://www.gallup.com/poll/152963/Contraception-Debate-Divides-Americans-Including-Women.aspx” target=”_blank”>Gallup poll.
Overall, 48 percent of Americans say they back religious leaders who object to extending such coverage against 45 percent who say they back President Barack Obama’s administration.
Believe what you will about Gallup’s numbers, but you owe it to yourselves to also see: Poll: Most back White House birth control rule, Politico, February 23, 2012, by MJ Lee:
A slim majority of Americans approve of President Barack Obama’s recent change to the administration’s rule that mandated religiously affiliated institutions offer free contraception coverage to their employees, according to a new poll Thursday.
More than half of American voters, 54 percent, said they approve of Obama’s plan to allow faith-affiliated employers to refrain from offering free birth control to employees while mandating that it be covered by insurers. Thirty-eight percent said they disapprove of the plan, a Quinnipiac survey found.
Paul Evans: Looking at these two poll results, given that both pollsters are usually reliable and unbiased, I would say there has to be a problem with the methodology in one or the other. Here are still two more polls you may want to take a look at on contraception:
See Support Is Found for Birth Control Coverage and Gay Unions, The New York Times, February 14, 2012, by Marjorie Connelly.
Recommended: In Polls, Obama Wins on Contraception Compromise, Catholics Hold Steady, The Daily Beast, February 19, 2012, by Douglas Schoen.
Listening Post – Drums of war: The Media on Iran, Syria and in Libya
Evans Liberal Politics
February 25, 2012
Listening Post – Drums of war:
The Media on Iran, Syria and in Libya
Commentary by Evans Liberal Politics owner Paul Evans: Below is a fairly long (25:05) video produced by AlJazeera, the independent Arabic news operation which does a good job with the English language versions of its news and has a global reach. In my experience, they have been fairly unbiased as a news source. So when AlJazeera does a segment describing the current media frenzy regarding an imagined necessity of going to war with Iran, and comparing that to the run-up to the Iraq war, it sends chills down my spine. And it should for you, too.
If you remember,there was absolutely no need to go to war with Iraq. There were no weapons of mass destruction, and even the last U.N. inspectors who had been in Iraq (not too long before the war) stated that, while there was no transparency in the inspection process, there also was no evidence of a dangerous capacity in regard to WMD. Moreover, Saddam Hussein (the dictator in Iraq) was a secular Muslim, who hated fundamentalist groups such as Al Qaeda. There was no Al Qaeda in Iraq before the U.S. invaded.
Do you remember all the speeches Bush made about WMD and “yellowcake” going to Iraq from Africa and “significant contacts” between Iraq and Al Qaeda? Do you remember the sham speech that Colin Powell was conned into making at the U.N., which gave us the necessary backing to go to war with Iraq?
In this video, the second and third sections are about the media in Syria and the altogether new, free media in Libya.
Please at least watch the first part, describing the building media hysteria about going to war with Iran. Going to war with Iran is a much bigger deal, than was going to war with Iraq, too. You would see the whole Middle East region go up in flames. Israel would be fighting a war on three fronts, against Hamas, Hezbollah and Syria. Probably the U.S. and likely Saudi Arabia would be fighting Iran inside Iraq. (Iraq and Iran share a 906 mile (1458km) border.)
It is also likely that it would be necessary to re-instate the draft, and that gasoline prices would double, destroying the economy’s fragile recovery and sending America deep into an economic depression.
There is no evidence that Iran’s nuclear enrichment program has reached the level of 90 percent purity, necessary to produce an atomic weapon. The last news I read about it had their enrichment level at 20 percent, which is a level consistent with medical uses.
One fifth of the world’s oil passes through the 21 mile-wide Straits of Hormuz, adjacent to Iran. There are two (and only two) main Saudi oil terminuses and Iran has 1,000 or more ballistic missiles. Do you think we could put in a sufficient number of Patriot missile batteries so that the Saudi oil terminuses remained safe? Likewise, Israel has only two major cities, Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. So that would give Iran only four primary targets for 1,000 or 1,500 ballistic missiles.
Folks, do we really want to do this?
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