td11 wrote:chinese twitters apparently lit up with reports that kim jung un was assassinated in beijing today. nothing confirmed yet, so it's most likely BS, but who knows.

reddit page with some links

drsmooth wrote:Congressman Steve King (R - IA?) has a shaky grasp of biology. He just asserted on some show that he believes the Pill aborts unborn babies

td11 wrote:chinese twitters apparently lit up with reports that kim jung un was assassinated in beijing today. nothing confirmed yet, so it's most likely BS, but who knows.

“Human beings have a purpose, or ‘end,’ a telos,” Santorum writes in his book. According to the tradition of natural law, every part of our bodies has a telos too. In the case of our genitalia, that natural end is heterosexual sex for the purpose of procreation. It follows that marriage between a man and a woman “is fundamentally natural,” Santorum writes. “The promise of natural law is that we will be the happiest, and freest, when we follow the law built into our nature as men and women. For liberals, however, nature is too confining, and thus is the enemy of freedom.” Later on, he elaborates on his jaundiced view of freedom with a quotation from Edmund Burke: “Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains on their appetites.”

How could Tea Partiers who once dressed in three-cornered hats and waved “Live Free or Die” flags now swoon to reasoning like this? The truth is that the Tea Party’s demand for “strict construction” of the Constitution and a return to the Founders’ “true intentions” is not really a cry for unfettered freedom. It is an attempt to uncover the immutable, divine will of the Founders — a homegrown version of natural law that would provide grounds for forbidding abortion, same-sex marriage and “Obamacare” in the name of American liberty.

dajafi wrote:

... In the case of our genitalia ...

jerseyhoya wrote:This isn't like a hidden ball trick or anything.

jerseyhoya wrote:Mitt wins Maine

With 2,190 votes

What we can do... is take modest steps, in areas where culture and economics intersect, to make it easier for working-class Americans to cultivate the virtues that foster resilience and self-sufficiency. Here are four such steps:

First, if we want the poor to be industrious, we should do everything possible to make their industry pay off. The current tax-and-transfer system imposes a tax on work — the payroll tax — that falls heavily on low-wage labor, and poor Americans face steep marginal tax rates because of how their benefits phase out as their wages increase. Both burdens can and should be lightened. There are ways to finance Social Security besides a regressive tax on work, and ways to structure benefits and tax credits that don’t reduce the incentives to take a better-paying job.

Second, if we want lower-income Americans to have stable family lives, our political system should take family policy seriously, and look for ways to make it easier for parents to manage work-life balance when their kids are young. There are left-wing approaches to this issue (European-style family-leave requirements) and right-wing approaches (a larger child tax credit). Neither is currently on the national agenda; both should be.

Third, if we expect less-educated Americans to compete with low-wage workers in Asia and Latin America, we shouldn’t be welcoming millions of immigrants who compete with them domestically as well. Immigration benefits the economy over all, but it can lower wages and disrupt communities, and there’s no reason to ask an already-burdened working class to bear these costs alone. Here the leading Republican candidates have the right idea: We should welcome more high-skilled immigrants, while making it as hard as possible for employers to hire low-skilled workers off the books.

Finally, if we want low-income men to be marriageable, employable and law-abiding, we should work to reduce incarceration rates. Prison is a school for crime and an anchor on advancement, and there’s a large body of research — from scholars like U.C.L.A.’s Mark Kleiman and Berkeley’s Franklin E. Zimring — suggesting that swift, certain punishment and larger police forces can do as much to keep crime low as the more draconian approach to sentencing that our justice system often takes.

dajafi wrote:Watching Jack Lew on the George Snuffalopagus show. Why is it that the Democrats have NOBODY who can advance an argument in a forum like this?