Politics Plus

I can’t honestly say that I’m happy with everything Barack Obama has done as President.  I’m not angry, because both times that I voted for him, I knew I was voting for a centrist, even though I would rather have voted for a progressive, but I also knew that the only electable alternatives would have brought with them the end of representative government.  Even though they hold only one branch of the federal government, they are still using every lie, trick and theft they can muster in attempts to insert themselves into every position of power and between every woman’s legs.  At least with respect to the latter, he is fighting back.

For most of the last year, the Supreme Court has forced the Obama Administration into an elaborate dance, where the Court hands down orders casting doubt upon the administration’s efforts to ensure that all women have access to affordable birth control — while simultaneously implying that everything would be fine if the administration just designed their birth control policy a different way. Friday, the administration is expected to announce a new policy that appears designed to end this dance and force the justices to rule definitively [Faux Print delinked] on whether employers with religious objections to birth control effectively have the power to restrict their employees’ access to birth control coverage, no matter how the government structures its regulations.

Up until now, the administration’s rules treated non-profit and for-profit employers as separate entities. Religious non-profits who object to birth control could exempt themselves from the requirement to offer contraceptive care to their employees by filling out a specific form that informs the government of their objection, and sending a copy of the form to their insurance provider or administrator. In most cases, once the non-profit employer submitted this form, their insurer would then contract separately with their workers to ensure that those workers had contraceptive coverage. These non-profit rules spawned one round of litigation brought by religious non-profit organizations which claim that even being required to fill out a short form violates their religious liberty.

Meanwhile, for-profit employees were required to comply with their legal obligations to their employees. Prior to the Supreme Court’s June decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, which significantly reworked the balance of power between employers and employees, the law was clear that for-profit businesses could not invoke their owners’ religious beliefs to exempt themselves from their legal obligations to their workers. “When followers of a particular sect enter into commercial activity as a matter of choice,” the Court held in its 1982 decision in United States v. Lee, “the limits they accept on their own conduct as a matter of conscience and faith are not to be superimposed on the statutory schemes which are binding on others in that activity.” Hobby Lobby, of course, was the culmination of a second round of litigation brought by for-profit employers whose owners have religious objections to birth control. And it effectively eliminated the protections Lee extended to workers, at least with respect to federal law….

…In any event, however, the Obama Administration’s new rules will likely put an end to the Supreme Court’s ability to move the goalposts every time someone raises a new objection to the administration’s policy. The administration has now crafted its rules to comply almost to the letter with the requirements suggested by previous Supreme Court opinions. Now, the rest of the country will have to wait to find out whether Hobby Lobby actually permits this latest set of rules — or whether the language in that decision leading the Obama Administration in this direction will simply end with Lucy pulling away the football one more time…

Inserted from <Think Progress>

Click through for how the five Injustices SCROTUS (Republican Constitutional VD) have resorted to trickery to violate the Constitution while blaming their First Amendment violations on regulations.  It is my hope that Roberts will flip in an attempt to preserve the legacy of the Court,not that Obama is denying him regulations as an excuse.  Make sure to prevent any more Republican appointments to the court until children ask, “What’s a Republican?”, and nobody remembers.

I was expecting some rather strange behavior from Republicans, as they look for ways to undermine Obama’s foreign policy in Iraq.  After all, they do sedition so well.  However, it came as a complete shock to me that a prominent Republican evangelist would so so far as to agree with ISIS that people Obama is trying to protect are worthy of extermination!

I’m not sure if there are enough ways to call Bryan Fischer insane, but his own words might suffice.

My thesaurus is wearing thin on adjectives to describe hate-filled pseudo-Christians like Bryan Fischer, but my aggravation is going full-tilt over the fact that he makes these statements on the taxpayers’ dime.

Isn’t there a time where we start to say that free speech is fine, but taxpayers are under no obligation to forego American Family Association’s tax payments in the name of Jesus? [not the real Jesus]… [emphasis original]

Inserted from <Crooks and Liars>

Major Barf Bag Alert!!

When you come down to it, the only difference between Republican Supply-side pseudo-Christians like Fischer and Republican Supply-side pseudo-Muslims like ISIS is the religion they are abusing.

Furthermore, Fischer is flat-out lying.  Just like ISIS is persecuting Yazidis, they are also persecuting Chaldean Christians.  The Yazidi refugees fled to Mount Sinjar.  Thousands of Christian refugees fled to Erbil, where Kurdish Muslims are harboring and protecting them.  They are one of the refugee groups in that city that Obama is protecting with airstrikes.  Despite Fischer’s fraudulent claim, Obama is lifting far more than just a finger to protect Christians.

In case your wondering why this lying Republican didn’t get a Parade for this, it’s because he has already had one.