Franklin County Democrats

Wow.

Intelligent beings managing things

“We were put on this Earth as creatures of God to have dominion over the Earth, to use it wisely and steward it wisely, but for our benefit not for the Earth’s benefit,” Santorum told an audience at the Colorado School of Mines where he was a guest speaker Monday at the Colorado Energy Summit.

“We are the intelligent beings that know how to manage things and through the course of science and discovery if we can be better stewards of this environment, then we should not let the vagaries of nature destroy what we have helped create,” Santorum said to applause from the conservative crowd.

It’s disturbing enough that we now have mainstream politicians who publicly articulate ideas that were once considered far outside the window of political acceptability, but to say them and generate a room full of applause instead of gasps of disbelief is simply mind blowing.

Sadly, in our short-attention-span, fast-food nation, if you can’t distill your political campaign down to a slogan that will fit neatly onto a bumper sticker you are probably going to have trouble connecting with voters. Josh Marshall at TPM has a suggestion for team Obama:

GM is alive; bin Laden is dead.

CBS Poll

Boy, there was a time when Republicans knew how to pick a wedge issue during an election year and mercilessly pummel Democrats with it but they must be losing their touch.

A new CBS poll finds that a huge majority of the American people support birth control and believe religious employers should be required to cover it. Even self-professed Catholics support Obama’s new rule on contraception by a margin of 61/32. Oops.

If the kings of controversy were hoping birth control and “religious liberty” were going to be their ticket to electoral success in the fall they’ve badly miscalculated. Maybe they should try proposing actual solutions to our nation’s problems instead of preying on people’s fears and anxieties to get votes.

There’s just one thing to keep in mind when you hear the outrage coming from The Catholic Church over contraception: When the Church failed to act on child sexual abuse cases committed by priests who preyed on the innocent for decades (possibly centuries), and then actively engaged in covering it up once victims started going public, it lost all of its moral authority where anything related to children is concerned.

Kaili Joy Gray has an excellent post up at DailyKos that gets to the heart of what’s really behind the hissy fit the Church is having over the new health care requirements for women in regard to birth control …

[...] the pope is especially concerned that if such a policy is implemented, and if Americans continue to not give a damn about what the Church has to say on such “intrinsically evil practices” as contraception—as the vast majority of American Catholics don’t—this will “delegitimize the Church’s participation in public debate.”

That, of course, is the real fear, isn’t it? That the Church will lose its influence over policy debates, that it will continue to lose its moral authority to dictate what our laws should be. And that is why the Catholic Church, from the pope to the Conference of Catholic Bishops to the priests in churches across the country, has declared war—to further assert its “legitimacy.”

Maybe when the Holy Church cleans up its own house we can listen to their moralizing on birth control, but until then they are preaching to empty pews.

We just knew this was coming …

Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell (R), a Mitt Romney surrogate, said Sunday that the improving economic situation is thanks to Republican governors, not President Obama.

“Look, I’m glad the economy is starting to recover but I think it’s because of what Republican governors are doing in their states. Not because of the president,” McDonnell said on CNN’s State of the Union.

“It’s been a complete failure of leadership,” he said of Obama.

You see, week before last the poor economy was all on account of Obama’s policies making things worse. But now that there are signs that things might be improving, well, that’s because of Republican governors like McDonnell. Never mind that Virginia was among the states that received the most federal stimulus funding in 2009.

LOL

There are flickers of hope in our recovery and certainly they’re welcome,” the speaker said. “But the American people were promised by the president that unemployment would not exceed 8 percent. And here we are 36 straight months with unemployment over 8 percent.

President Obama promised to rescue the family station wagon after we drove it into a ditch but the paint got scratched in the process so he’s a failure. Now give us the keys back!

If this keeps up it’s going to put a crimp in the GOP’s narrative that Obama’s policies have made things worse.

From the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics …

Total nonfarm payroll employment rose by 243,000 in January, and the
unemployment rate decreased to 8.3 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor
Statistics reported today. Job growth was widespread in the private
sector, with large employment gains in professional and business
services, leisure and hospitality, and manufacturing. Government
employment changed little over the month.

That’s the lowest unemployment rate since 2009 when Obama had just been sworn in after the Bush Administration left the economy in a tailspin. Also in the BLS report, the private sector generated 257,000 jobs in December, while government jobs declined during the last 12 months. So much for the “Obama is a socialist” meme.

But don’t worry. By the time Dems get the economy nearly fixed the American people will reward them by putting Republicans back in charge so they can trash it and we can start the process all over again. This is how it has been going the last three decades. You’d think middle class working people would wise up already … but no.

Sure, the Koman Foundation’s break with Planned Parenthood has been a public relations disaster, but it’s also a terrible business decision. One of the best observations I’ve read on this point comes from Balloon Juice …

Check out list after list after list of Komen’s corporate sponsors. Do you think New Balance, Ford and Georgia-Pacific signed on for a public fight over Planned Parenthood? When Yoplait put a pink lid on its yogurt, did they do it to make it easier to boycott their products? Because that’s what’s going to happen. Unlike most boycotts, it’s easy to figure out which products you shouldn’t buy: anything that displays a pink ribbon with the Komen name.

Think about that. Businesses spent millions on co-branding with a non-controversial breast cancer charity. Suddenly, these same companies find themselves publicly in support of a “pro-life” breast cancer charity. That sends an entirely different message to consumers and is probably not the marketing plan they had in mind when they joined in solidarity with Komen. The pink ribbon they thought would be a complimentary image for their goods and services may now serve as a scarlet letter. It won’t surprise me if we see some lawsuits over this before it’s all over.

So what’s Republican Sen. Brian Nieves so worked up about these days? Is it the fact that two of the counties in his district rank among the unhealthiest in the state? Is it that, of the 114 counties in Missouri, Franklin County is the 5th most polluted and Ameren Missouri’s coal-fired power plant in Labadie is the second worst mercury polluter in the nation. Perhaps it’s that Missouri now ranks number one in job loss? Nope. None of those things.

Of all the things that there are for a state Senator to get righteously pissed off about the thing that has Nieves seething white hot with anger is his belief that parking for the press at the state capitol is too convenient. So meter maid, Brian Nieves, has introduced groundbreaking legislation that aims to do something about this travesty of injustice.

Sweet Jesus. Is this the best we can do in District 26?

This is pretty sick.

JEFFERSON CITY — Orange stickers with an image of rifle crosshairs were found Tuesday on the office doors of several Democratic state senators, prompting an investigation by Missouri Capitol Police, Senate Administrator Jim Howerton said.

“We are taking all the precautions we can,” Howerton said.

One similar sticker was found on the nameplate outside the door of state Rep. Scott Dieckhaus, R-Washington. He was the only Republican and the only House member who found one of the stickers.

The stickers were on the doors of all four Democratic women in the Senate — Jolie Justus and Kiki Curls, both of Kansas City, and Maria Chapelle-Nadal and Robin Wright-Jones, both of St. Louis, Justus said.

“If anyone thinks this was a prank, it is not a prank,” Justus said after discussing the discovery of the stickers on the Senate floor. “You don’t joke about someone’s personal safety.”

A sticker also was found on the door of Sen. Victor Callahan, D-Kansas City and the Democrats’ floor leader.

In light of the fact that Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords has been all over the news lately regarding her miraculous comeback from gun shot wounds she received to the head a year ago this is especially creepy. Not sure why Dieckhaus would be targeted along with five Democratic state senators. Very curious to know what that’s all about. Stay tuned.