Justin's Political Corner
(via Huffington Post: Sen. Lindsey Graham on Fox News Sunday: “Sacrifice Obamacare To Avoid Sequester”)
To avoid a March 1 sequester, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) suggested on Fox News Sunday that Congress save money by cutting the Affordable Care Act instead.
“Here’s my belief: Let’s take Obamacare and put it on the table,” he said. “People are leaving the private sector because their companies can’t afford to offer Obamacare. If you want to look at ways to find $1.2 trillion in savings over the next decade, let’s look at Obamacare. Let’s don’t destroy the military and just cut blindly across the board.”
The White House recently released a fact sheet detailing the devastating effect a sequester could have on the economy if Congress fails to pass spending cuts by March 1, including a reduction in loan guarantees to small businesses by $900 million. The blame, Fox News anchor Chris Wallace pointed out on Sunday, would likely fall on Republicans, who are digging in their heels to protect tax cuts.
What a dummy.
Nancy Pelosi went on Fox News Sunday and absolutely destroyed the false premise that video games, not guns, are the main cause of gun violence.
WALLACE: Gun control will be a big part of the president’s agenda in the State of the Union address Tuesday night. But I want to ask you about another part of the effort to stop these horrible, repeated acts of mass violence. As part of your plan, you call for more scientific research on the connection between popular culture and violence.
We don’t need another study, respectfully. I mean, we know that these video games, where people have their heads splattered, these movies, these TV shows, why don’t you go to your friends in Hollywood and challenge them, shame them, and say, “Knock it off”?
PELOSI: Well, I do think, whatever we do, because when you talk about evidence-based, we have that throughout our proposal. In other words, we don’t want to just anecdotally writing bills. We want to have the evidence to say –
WALLACE: Well, I’m not sure you want to write bills anyway. But don’t you — I mean, what would — you have a lot of friends in Hollywood. Why don’t you go to them and publicly say I think challenge you to stop the video games?
PELOSI: I do think — see, I understand what you’re saying. I’m a mother, I’m a grandmother. But, they tell — not they, not Hollywood, but the evidence says that, in Japan, for example, they have the most violent games and the rest, and the lowest — death, mortality from guns. I don’t know what the explanation is for that except they may have good gun laws.
But I think you took one piece of it. We are talking about — we are talking about stop — no further sales of assault weapons. What is the justification for an assault weapon? You know, no further sales of those.
No further sales of the increased capacity, 30 rounds in a gun. We are talking about background checks which is very popular, even among gun owners, and, hunters. We avow the First Amendment, we stand with that, and say that people have a right to have a gun to protect themselves in their homes and their jobs, whatever. And that they — and their workplace — and that they, for recreation and hunting and the rest.
But we are in the questioning their right to do that —
Doing an interview on Fox News must be a lot like talking to small child. Pelosi actually had to explain to Wallace why it is important to have evidence of a problem before a bill is written to address it. Wallace’s notion of “knowing” why a problem is occurring without research or study is a very Republican way of governing. It is just like how Republicans “know” that there is voter fraud, so they pass voter ID laws.
Pelosi ripped apart the NRA’s favorite excuse that guns don’t cause gun violence, but video games do. Pelosi asked a good question. If violent video games cause gun violence, then why isn’t the problem as severe around the world as it is in the United States? They play lots of violent video games in Canada, Europe, and Asia too, yet other parts of the developed world don’t have the same level of gun violence as the United States.
The difference, as Leader Pelosi pointed out, is the laws. The Japanese play lots of violent video games, but they have the lowest mortality rate from gun violence because of strict gun laws.
The CEO of the National Rifle Association (NRA) says that the American public should not trust President Barack Obama’s push for new gun control laws because the administration lied about “Obamacare” being a tax and a universal background check would just be a “check on law-abiding people.”
“It’s a fraud to call it universal,” the NRA’s LaPierre told Fox News host Chris Wallace on Sunday. “It’s never going to be universal, the criminals aren’t going to comply with it, they could care less.”
“We ought to quit calling it right now a universal check, the real title ought to be the check on law-abiding people all over this country,” he insisted.
LaPierre showed Wallace a flyer from Obama’s 2012 campaign which he claimed said that the president was “not going to take away your rifle, shotgun, handgun.”
“And now he’s trying to take away all three!” he declared.
“He’s not taking away shotguns,” Wallace pointed out.
“Have you looked at the Feinstein [assault weapons ban] bill that he supported?” LaPierre shot back. “That’s exactly what it does. I think that what they’ll do is they’ll turn this universal check on the law abiding into a universal registry of law-abiding people. And law-abiding people don’t want that.”
Wallace, however, argued that “there’s nothing that anyone in the administration’s said that indicates they’re going to have a universal registry.”
“And Obamacare wasn’t a tax until they needed it to be tax,” LaPierre quipped. “I mean, I don’t think you can trust these [people].”
Bill O’Reilly rather strongly reprimanded Neil Munro, a now-infamous reporter at Tucker Carlson‘s The Daily Caller, for interrupting President Obama in the middle of a speech announcing his administration’s new policy shift on the deportation of young immigrants. He said that Munro was “absolutely wrong” to interrupt Obama, and even if a person does not like a particular president, they should have enough sense to respect the office they hold.
In a Talking Points segment focused on President Obama’s newly announced immigration policy, O’Reilly admitted the plan is fair and it would be unfair to punish kids who were brought to the United States by their parents. He said whether or not the policy is humane is up for debate, but what he could not dispute was that Munro was disrespecting the president.
“Mr. Munro was absolutely wrong in interfering with the president’s statement. As Talking Points always says, you must respect the office of the presidency, even if you don’t like the person in it. Mr. Obama was correct in calling Munro out.”
(via David at Crooks and Liars: Palin Not Sure Romney Will ‘Instinctively Turn Right’)
Former Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin isn’t convinced that former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney is the best presidential candidate because she’s not sure he will “err on the side of conservatism.”
Fox News host Chris Wallace on Sunday asked Palin if Romney was an “instinctive conservative.”
“I trust that his idea of conservatism is evolving,” Palin replied. “I base this on a pretty moderate past that he has had — in some case even cases, a liberal past. Here, he agreed with mandating on the state level what his constituents needed to be provided, needed to purchase in the way of health care under Romneycare, which, of course, was the precursor to Obamaneycare — to Obamacare.”
