Fiscal Cliff

GOP misplaces their Binders full of Women, House Committee to be chaired by all men

By Anomaly

The contrast in our political climate is telling when Democrats throw support behind female candidates as much as men, and call out Republicans for their War on Women, and yet twelve of the major House committees will be chaired by men in the 113th Congress. House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) announced who will chair all of the major House committees in the next Congress on Tuesday, while apparently disregarding any female possibilities, as if they are confirming their bias. So much for ‘soul searching.’ Certainly no one can say there are no worthy females for such positions — as Mitt Romney noted, he has binders full of them.

There isn’t one woman or minority included in the 19 House committee chairs — this is coming from the party, that now wants to be inclusive, after the election results poured in.
Via Politico:

Target, Walmart, and Other Big-Box Stores Abolish Thanksgiving

By Josh Harkinson
People who work in America's big-box stores don't have much to be thankful for, so maybe it's for the best that many of them can no longer celebrate Thanksgiving.
At Walmart, Target, and numerous other large retailers, Black Friday has become Black Thursday—a day that's much darker because it puts corporate profits ahead of, well, pretty much everything else that our country is supposed to care about.
This sad trend began last year at (where else?) Walmart, which announced that it would begin offering Black Friday specials at 10 p.m. on Thanksgiving night. Not to be outdone this year, Target announced a 9 p.m. Thanksgiving opening. But Walmart responded by pushing up the start of this year's Black Thursday to 8 p.m.
You don't have to be a marketing expert to see where our labor standards are going: retro. Like pre-1621 retro.
Thanksgiving is "one of the three days us retail workers get off a year: a day most of us spend with family we only get to see on that day," says Renee C, the author of a widely circulated petition to get Target to say no to "Thanksgiving Creep."
Target spokesperson Molly Snyder defended the company's decision to open on the holiday. "Target's opening time was carefully evaluated with our guests, team, and the business in mind," she told me in an email. "Thanksgiving weekend is one of the busiest of the year, and we appreciete our Target team's flexibility on this weekend and throughout the holiday season."

Solvency?

Sad Investment

What could have been accomplished with that money had it been put to a better use?

Taking Care Of Business

 

Progressives can take comfort in the fact that the Court's ruling on corporate cash in elections is nothing compared to the peoples' resolve to push back against what it represented. The American people did not vote for cuts in programs, they voted for higher taxes on the very wealthy.

 The Electoral College that actually decides presidential elections makes President Obama's win look like a landslide. But it also makes networks trying to keep viewers tuning in so they can sell air space look desperate. The Presidents performance over the next four years, without the worry of re-election, will determine the chances of a Democrat getting in the White House in 2016. Who's going to replace Obama? Now is the time to start grooming a successor either within the administration or in Congress.

This election also marks a cultural shift. Ballot measures that had failed for years, allowing the marriage of two men or two women in Maine and Maryland and legalizing marijuana in Washington State and Colorado, were voted into law.  Change is the one constant.

Like it or not, the reality is that after two victories by a person of color, the Republican Party stands on the brink of being irrelevant. How can or will the Republicans make themselves relevant as a national political party?The day of the angry white male voter rule is over. Of course, in some states, especially the South, it will linger for a long time.

Beware of Romneycare

by James Surowiecki

 

Mitt Romney can be a hard man to pin down. But there is one thing that he’s been clear about: if he becomes President, he will repeal Obamacare. That simple promise, more than any other that Romney has made, illuminates what is most at stake in this year’s election. The campaigns may spend most of their time talking about taxes and jobs. But health care is where the election’s outcome will have the most immediate and powerful impact on how Americans live.

Abolishing Obamacare would eliminate subsidies for people buying insurance and rescind regulations requiring insurance companies to guarantee coverage and benefits (for instance, to people with preëxisting conditions). Romney’s proposed alternative is to give individuals a tax break when they buy insurance and to push them toward high-deductible insurance plans, which he believes will make them more rigorous and price-conscious in choosing doctors and treatments. Romney also wants to reform Medicare by encouraging more competition among private insurers. The details are skimpy, but the core principle is that unleashing the power of the free market will bring down costs and raise quality.

If we were made in god's image, then why aren’t we invisible too?

Religion has convinced people that there’s an invisible man…living in the sky, who watches everything you do every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a list of ten specific things he doesn’t want you to do. And if you do any of these things, he will send you to a special place, of burning and fire and smoke and torture and anguish for you to live forever, and suffer and burn and scream until the end of time. But he loves you. He loves you and he needs money.

WHAT HAPPENED TO THE G.O.P.?

 

Seems like in the past they used to care about society and how to keep things working.

Today they seem to care primarily about only a handful of Americans and want to keep things (and people) from working.

GOP Candidates Ditching Romney Like Rats Abandoning A Sinking Ship

A growing number of Republican candidates deserve some credit. Either they’ve figured out that 47% of the population involves numbers too big to ignore at election time, or they realize that elected officials are actually put in office to represent the entire population. Whatever the case, prominent GOP-ers are quickly distancing themselves from Mitt Romney and the awkward truth-telling moment when he candidly said he isn’t concerned with 47% of the American public.

New Mexico’s governor isn’t currently running for office, having just assumed her post a year and a half ago. But when asked if she was offended by Romney’s dismissal of those he says are dependent on the government and wouldn’t vote Republican anyway, Governor Susana Martinez replied, “New Mexico has many people who are living at the poverty level and their votes count just as much as anyone else.”

New Study Finds High-Income Tax Cuts Don’t Stimulate Economic Growth

New Study Finds High-Income Tax Cuts Don’t Stimulate Economic Growth: Congressional Republicans and their party’s presidential nominee have both pushed plans to cut taxes on the wealthiest Americans in hopes that such a move would stimulate the economy and aid the recovery from the Great Recession. A new study, however, indicates that tax cuts for the wealthiest earners fail to generate economic growth at the [...]/

"Attention whore...? Moi?"

Why Even Run?

When you're that filthy rich, why expose your personal life in public for a position where you'll have less power and freedom than you currently have? If he really wants the attention (which I think he does), he could just go out and buy a country and play king.

Since When Did Paul Ryan Become a Liar?

By Jonathan Chait

A week ago, Paul Ryan’s political assets included — alongside his chiseled torso, plainspoken Midwestern demeanor, and the unshakable loyalty of the entire Republican Party — a firm reputation for honesty among the mainstream media. That reputation has suffered a massive, swift erosion. News stories about his speech at the Republican National Convention focused on its many rhetorical sleights of hand. Over the weekend, the revelation that he dramatically misstated a marathon time added a crucial, accessible piece of evidence to the indictment. Now liberals are calling him “Lyin’ Ryan” — a nickname that, a few weeks ago, would have seemed silly, like “Wimpy Palin.” Now mainstream pundits are defending Ryan with versions of the “well, all politicians fib” defense. Given that this constituency was once portraying Ryan as unusually honest, this represents a huge retreat for his political brand.

What happened?

Here’s what has not happened: Paul Ryan did not begin telling an unprecedented series of lies that suddenly exposed a predilection for shading the truth. His marathon boast is certainly odd and may well be a deliberate lie, but it could also be a simple failure to recall. The New Yorker’s Nicholas Thompson, arguing for the prosecution, contends that “for someone who does run seriously,” missing a marathon time by as a vast a level as Ryan does is nearly impossible. On the other hand, given that the race occurred in 1990 and was Ryan’s only marathon, perhaps the explanation is that Ryan just isn’t a serious runner.

It's Official

Care and Care Alike

Disasters such as Hurricane Isaac reminds us to consider whether we should be a country that comes to the rescue when people are in trouble, or if this should be a place where the rule is the survival of the fittest and those who suffer are on their own.

Coal miners say they were forced to attend Romney event and donate | The Raw Story

Apparantly the only way they can "fill the seats" is to threaten the employees and then take money away from them for complying. Is this a foreshadowing of the type of dictatorship we can expect?

A group of coal miners in Ohio feel they would have been fired if they did not attend an Aug. 14 event with presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney and contribute to his campaign — and to make matters worse, they lost of day of pay for their trouble.
full story at the following link:
Coal miners say they were forced to attend Romney event and donate | The Raw Story

Legitimate Rape

Paul Ryan was for stimulus spending before he was against stimulus spending

Was Paul Ryan lying then, or is he lying now? Either way, he's a loser. It seems to prove that he and the rest of the Republican party is all about obstructionism.

As if Mitt wasn’t bad enough! | BlogsCanada.ca

This is shared from a sometimes political blogger that I follow from Canada
http://allans-perspective.blogspot.com/2012/08/as-if-mitt-wasnt-bad-enough.html

Since the United States is so important to our well being and peace of mind here in Canada, your hard working reporter sent the Perspective Research Department team out to find the latest poop on Mitt Romney’s new running mate……………… and it don’t look good, kids!

1. His economic plan would cost America 1 million jobs in the first year. Ryan’s proposed budget would cripple the economy. He’d slash spending deeply, which would not only slow job growth, but shock the economy and cost 1 million of us our jobs in 2013 alone and kill more than 4 million jobs by the end of 2014.[1]

2. He’d kill Medicare. He’d replace Medicare with vouchers for retirees to purchase insurance, eliminating the guarantee of health care for seniors and putting them at the mercy of the private insurance industry. That could amount to a cost increase of more than $5,900 by 2050, leaving many seniors broke or without the health care they need. He’d also raise the age of eligibility to 67.[2]

3. He’d pickpocket the middle class to line the pockets of the rich. His tax plan is Robin Hood in reverse. He wants to cut taxes by $4.6 trillion over the next decade, but only for corporations and the rich, like giving families earning more than $1 million a year a $300,000 tax cut. And to pay for them, he’d raise taxes on middle- and lower-income households and butcher social service programs that help middle- and working-class Americans.[3]

Medicareless

Paul Ryan Used Insider Information To Avoid 2008 Crash...

The Paul Ryan Watch: Paul Ryan Used Insider Information To Avoid 2008 C...: While most of us working saps were left to the merciless invisible hands controlling our modest mutual fund accounts and helplessly watch...

In A Romney World

National Day Of Intolerance

It’s not easy to get behind the so-called “Chick-fil-A National Day Of Intolerance.” The response to Dan Cathy’s statement is confusing to me. Whether or not you agree with them, how are his conservative Christian views news?

Dedicating a day to shove a chicken sandwich in the face of your enemies doesn’t seem like a very Jesus-like thing to do.

If love for Jesus is at the heart of this “appreciation day”, which I think is the case, then the church’s response to their perceived persecution should be more like Jesus’ responses when he was persecuted or when he saw others persecuted.

He ate with them, talked with them, healed them, defended them, and when that didn’t work, he died for them.

Shoving it in their face just doesn’t seem like the response of the Jesus who said “turn the other cheek.” Even if you strongly disagree with gay marriage, the response Jesus expects from you is clear: love them.

Frankly, Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day just doesn’t seem very loving to me. It seems a lot more like a battle to prove who’s right and who’s wrong.

For Christian, the battle over truth has already been fought and won in the death and resurrection of Jesus. He doesn’t need you to refight that battle. He needs you to love your enemies and pray for those who you perceive to be wrong.

Romney Invested in Medical-Waste Firm That Disposed of Aborted Fetuses

And these documents challenge Romney's claim that he left Bain Capital in early 1999.—By David Corn

 

Joe Burbank/Orlando Sentinel/Zuma

Earlier this year, Mitt Romney nearly landed in a politically perilous controversy when the Huffington Post reported that in 1999 the GOP presidential candidate had been part of an investment group that invested $75 million in Stericycle, a medical-waste disposal firm that has been attacked by anti-abortion groups for disposing aborted fetuses collected from family planning clinics. Coming during the heat of the GOP primaries, as Romney tried to sell South Carolina Republicans on his pro-life bona fides, the revelation had the potential to damage the candidate's reputation among values voters already suspicious of his shifting position on abortion.

But Bain Capital, the private equity firm Romney founded, tamped down the controversy. The company said Romney left the firm in February 1999 to run the troubled 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City and likely had nothing to with the deal. The matter never became a campaign issue. But documents filed by Bain and Stericycle with the Securities and Exchange Commission—and obtained by Mother Jones—list Romney as an active participant in the investment. And this deal helped Stericycle, a company with a poor safety record, grow, while yielding tens of millions of dollars in profits for Romney and his partners. The documents—one of which was signed by Romney—also contradict the official account of Romney's exit from Bain.
The Stericycle deal—the abortion connection aside—is relevant because of questions regarding the timing of Romney's departure from the private equity firm he founded. Responding to a recent Washington Post story reporting that Bain-acquired companies outsourced jobs, the Romney campaign insisted that Romney exited Bain in February 1999, a month or more before Bain took over two of the companies named in the Post's article. The SEC documents undercut that defense, indicating that Romney still played a role in Bain investments until at least the end of 1999.

Here's what happened with Stericycle. In November 1999, Bain Capital and Madison Dearborn Partners, a Chicago-based private equity firm, filed with the SEC a Schedule 13D, which lists owners of publicly traded companies, noting that they had jointly purchased $75 million worth of shares in Stericycle, a fast-growing player in the medical-waste industry. (That April, Stericycle had announced plans to buy the medical-waste businesses of Browning Ferris Industries and Allied Waste Industries.) The SEC filing lists assorted Bain-related entities that were part of the deal, including Bain Capital (BCI), Bain Capital Partners VI (BCP VI), Sankaty High Yield Asset Investors (a Bermuda-based Bain affiliate), and Brookside Capital Investors (a Bain offshoot). And it notes that Romney was the "sole shareholder, Chairman, Chief Executive Officer and President of BCI, BCP VI Inc., Brookside Inc. and Sankaty Ltd."

The document also states that Romney "may be deemed to share voting and dispositive power with respect to" 2,116,588 shares of common stock in Stericycle "in his capacity as sole shareholder" of the Bain entities that invested in the company. That was about 11 percent of the outstanding shares of common stock. (The whole $75 million investment won Bain, Romney, and their partners 22.64 percent of the firm's stock—the largest bloc among the firm's owners.) The original copy of the filing was signed by Romney.
Another SEC document filed November 30, 1999, by Stericycle also names Romney as an individual who holds "voting and dispositive power" with respect to the stock owned by Bain. If Romney had fully retired from the private equity firm he founded, why would he be the only Bain executive named as the person in control of this large amount of Stericycle stock?

The documents—one of which was signed by Romney—also call into question the account of Romney's exit from Bain that the company and the Romney campaign have provided.

Stericycle was a lucrative investment for Romney and Bain. The company had entered the medical-waste business a decade earlier, when it took over a food irradiation plant in Arkansas and began zapping medical waste, rather than strawberries, with radiation. The company subsequently replaced irradiation with a technology that used low-frequency radio waves to sterilize medical waste—gowns, masks, gloves, and other medical equipment—before it was transported to an incinerator. By mid-1997, Stericycle was the second-largest medical-waste disposal business in the nation. Two years later, it was the largest. With 240,000 customers, its operations spanned the United States, Canada, and Puerto Rico. Fortune ranked it No. 10 on its list of the 100 fastest growing companies in the nation.
But the company had its woes, accumulating a troubling safety record along the way. In 1991, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration cited its Arkansas operation for 11 workplace safety violations. The facility had not provided employees with sufficient protective gear, and it had kept body parts, fetuses, and dead experimental animals in unmarked storage containers, placing workers at risk. In 1995, Stericycle was fined $3.3 million—later decreased to $800,000—by Rhode Island for knowingly exposing workers to life-threatening diseases at its medical-waste treatment facility in Woonsocket. Two years later, workers at another of its medical-waste processing plants in Morton, Washington, were exposed to tuberculosis. In 2002 and 2003—after Bain and its partners had bought their major interest in the firm—Stericycle reached settlements with the attorneys general in Arizona and Utah after it was accused of violating antitrust laws. It paid Arizona $320,000 in civil penalties and lawyers' fees, and paid Utah $580,000.
Despite the firm's regulatory run-ins, the deal worked out well for Bain. In 2001, the Bain-Madison Dearborn partnership that had invested in the company sold 40 percent of its holdings in Stericycle for about $88 million—marking a hefty profit on its original investment of $75 million. The Bain-related group sold the rest of its holdings by 2004. By that point it had earned $49.5 million. It was not until six years later that anti-abortion activists would target Stericycle for collecting medical waste at abortion clinics. This campaign has compared Stericycle to German firms that provided assistance to the Nazis during the Holocaust. A Stericycle official told Huffington Post that its abortion clinics business constitutes a "small" portion of its total operations. (Stericycle declined a request for comment from Mother Jones.)

In 1995, Stericycle was fined by Rhode Island for knowingly exposing workers to life-threatening diseases at its medical-waste treatment facility.

In response to questions from Mother Jones, a spokeswoman for Bain maintained that Romney was not involved in the Stericycle deal in 1999, saying that he had "resigned" months before the stock purchase was negotiated. The spokeswoman noted that following his resignation Romney remained only "a signatory on certain documents," until his separation agreement with Bain was finalized in 2002. And Bain issued this statement: "Mitt Romney retired from Bain Capital in February 1999. He has had no involvement in the management or investment activities of Bain Capital, or with any of its portfolio companies since that time." (The Romney presidential campaign did not respond to requests for comment.)
But the document Romney signed related to the Stericycle deal did identify him as a participant in that particular deal and the person in charge of several Bain entities. (Did Bain and Romney file a document with the SEC that was not accurate?) Moreover, in 1999, Bain and Romney both described his departure from Bain not as a resignation and far from absolute. On February 12, 1999, the Boston Herald reported, "Romney said he will stay on as a part-timer with Bain, providing input on investment and key personnel decisions." And a Bain press release issued on July 19, 1999, noted that Romney was "currently on a part-time leave of absence"—and quoted Romney speaking for Bain Capital. In 2001 and 2002, Romney filed Massachusetts state disclosure forms noting he was the 100 percent owner of Bain Capital NY, Inc.—a Bain outfit that was incorporated in Delaware on April 13, 1999—two months after Romney's supposed retirement from the firm. A May 2001 filing with the SEC identified Romney as "a member of the Management Committee" of two Bain entities. And in 2007, the Washington Post reported that R. Bradford Malt, a Bain lawyer, said Romney took a "leave of absence" when he assumed the Olympics post and retained sole ownership of the firm for two more years.
All of this undermines Bain's contention that Romney, though he maintained an ownership interest in the firm and its funds, had nothing to do with the firm's activities after February 1999. The Stericycle deal may raise red flags for anti-abortion activists. But it also raises questions about the true timing of Romney's departure from Bain and casts doubt on claims by the company and the Romney campaign that he had nothing to do with Bain business after February 1999.

HYPOCRITIC OATH: Anti-Obamacare Lawmakers Still Use It For Their Kids

  Erin Mershon, Greg Rosalsky, Cole Stangler, Nate Willis and Jeffrey Young contributed reporting.

WASHINGTON -- Congressional Republicans may not have been happy about the Supreme Court's ruling upholding the Affordable Care Act, but many of their children probably are.
According to an analysis by The Huffington Post, dozens of Republicans who want to repeal Obamacare have adult children who are allowed to stay on their parents' health plans thanks to the law, which extended this benefit nationwide. Many of the lawmakers' children are employed and on their own health care plans, but others continue to take advantage of their parents' coverage.
"He [My 24-year-old son] is on his health plan right now -- on his mother's plan -- but again, that wouldn’t weigh in on where I stand on the issue," said Rep. Joe Walsh (R-Ill.) last week, before the Supreme Court handed down its ruling. "Again, I just think the whole thing needs to be scrapped. And I don’t even want to think about certain provisions yet."
But Walsh and his GOP colleagues are soon going to have to start thinking about which provisions they want to keep if they are going to try to repeal Obamacare. Republicans are almost completely unified in wanting to get rid of the health care law, but they are significantly more divided on what a plan would look like going forward -- and whether they should keep some of the law's most popular provisions.
On Sunday, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) said Republicans would not require parents' health insurance plans to extend eligibility to adult children if Obamacare is repealed.
Walsh demurred when asked if he supported maintaining the provision.
“No, I don’t know that I do. I don’t know that I do," he said. "I don't know where I am on that, and that's a lousy thing to say. My oldest is 24. That doesn’t matter to me, though, irregardless of that."
Rep. Mark Amodei (R-Nev.), however, wants to keep it.
"There are good things in the health care bill, and that's one of them," said Amodei, who has a 25-year-old daughter with her own health insurance. "I haven't talked with anybody who thinks that's something we ought to get rid of."
"I support it. Oh, sure. ... It would be [incorporated] in any Republican proposal," added Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Texas), whose 22-year-old son is a full-time student.
So far, Republicans have not put forward a comprehensive alternative plan to Obamacare, focusing mostly on talk of "patient-centered reforms" that allow the "market to work." While three large health insurance companies promised to keep covering adult children on their parents' plans regardless of the Supreme Court ruling, many children would have lost coverage if the court had struck the law down.
Since the Affordable Care Act became law in March 2010, the share of Americans aged 18 to 25 without health insurance dropped to 23 percent from 28 percent.
Before the law was passed, 34 states had enacted laws that extended eligibility for adult children to stay on their parents' health plans, according to a study published in the journal Pediatrics and conducted by researchers at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York. But as the National Conference of State Legislatures noted, many of these states had tighter restrictions on the age and other eligibility requirements for dependents than are in the Affordable Care Act.
After Colorado, New Jersey and South Dakota enacted mandates for young people in 2005 and 2006, young adults reported increases in health insurance coverage, more physical exams, a greater likelihood of having a primary care physician and fewer occasions when they went without medical care because of costs than their counterparts in 17 states that do not mandate insurance coverage for that age group.
Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) has at least one of his daughters on his health care plan (he isn't sure about the second). He said he liked the provision. He believes, however, that the market would have provided the extra coverage for adult children, even if the Supreme Court had struck down the Affordable Care Act.
"They're going to continue that [provision] anyway," he said. "I think the insurance companies have all kind of decided that that's an okay thing. They were in our office, they've been in our office in the last few weeks."
The reason that health insurers began widely offering such benefits, however, is because Obamacare mandated it. The provision proved to be extremely popular with the American public. Without the law in place, it's unclear how long insurers would continue to offer such coverage, since they would no longer be required to do so.
Rep. Scott Rigell (R-Va.) has a 21-year-old daughter on his health care plan, which his spokeswoman noted was not the federal plan that members of Congress receive. He has declined federal benefits -- including health insurance and retirement -- and instead has coverage through a private insurance plan that he pays for through his business, Freedom Automotive.
Rigell was not elected until 2010, after Congress had already voted for health care reform, but he would like to see it repealed going forward. Still, he also said he supports the provision covering young adults.
"I think that is a good provision," he said. "There are parts of the Affordable Care Act that I support."
Rep. Bob Turner (R-N.Y.), however, was less sure.
"I haven’t really thought too much about this," he said. "I do know, whether your kid is 22 or 26, who’s gonna pay for that? Is it everybody pays for that or is it the person who has the kids pays for it? So I'm gonna let this sort itself out when we get through the bill."
"I don't think this is going to be one of the biggest drivers of things -- that particularly," Turner said. "High-risk pools, portability -- such important issues. This one has some merit, but I don't consider this one important."
Lawmakers who want to both keep their children on their health plans and repeal the Affordable Care Act could face political problems, as has Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.).
Brown has said his 23-year-old daughter is still on his health care plan, despite his opposition to Obamacare.
"Of course I do," he replied when the Boston Globe asked him whether he keeps his daughter on his plan.
Elizabeth Warren, Brown's Democratic challenger, immediately hit him with charges of hypocrisy, with a spokeswoman saying, "He says he likes being able to keep his daughter on the family health insurance plan; what he doesn't say is that he voted to stop other parents from doing the same."

Is Health Care Ruling Part of a Conservative Master-Plan?

July 2, 2012

By sanghoee

The Supreme Court’s upholding of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is a victory for President Obama, but one with a big problem attached to it. After all, there is a deadly tripwire concealed inside the court’s seemingly benign ruling, and that is the court’s declaration that the individual mandate provision, the heart of Obamacare, is legally valid because it is a de facto “tax.”

By labeling the mandate a tax, the Supreme Court has given the Republicans powerful ammunition for the Presidential campaign. From now till November, it is a safe bet that Mitt Romney will take every opportunity to demonize the healthcare law as a vehicle for more taxation, and in the tough economic climate of today, his argument might hold some power. Scaring voters with the specter of new taxes may not be novel, but it is tried and tested.

So now we have to ask, what exactly did the Supreme Court do here? On the surface, they acted in a non-partisan manner to deliver real justice, but reading between the lines, it seems more as if Justice John Roberts deliberately sandbagged President Obama. Had the Supreme Court ruled against the healthcare law, or even just the mandate, the public’s respect for the court would have declined dramatically, and Justice Roberts knew that. As an alternative, it appears as if he hatched a strikingly clever plan: uphold the law but interpret it in such a way as to give the Republicans a real chance to rally support against Obamacare and hopefully repeal it in the future. Not only that, but the ruling also limits Congress’ authority to regulate commerce and weakens its power over the states.
One of Justice Roberts’ statements in the opinion, which he wrote himself, drives his personal prejudice home very clearly: “It Is Not Our Job to Protect the People From the Consequences of Their Political Choices.” It does not take a political analyst to decipher the ominous implication in that statement — Justice Roberts thinks that the American people made the wrong choice by electing Obama and then letting him pass the healthcare law, but that it’s just not the Supreme Court’s role to do anything about it. Talk about passive aggressive.
The current Supreme Court may not be malicious but neither is it entirely impartial in its rulings, or apolitical. From Citizens United to immigration (by upholding the “show your papers” provision of the Arizona law) and now healthcare, the conservative wing of the court has repeatedly shown its preference for ideology over law.
Since the healthcare ruling, the news has been full of commentary about how Justice Roberts preserved the integrity of the court by upholding the president’s signature law, but the truth is he did nothing of the sort. What he actually did was play a masterful stroke of chess that protects him and the other conservative Justices from public ridicule (save from a few right-wing extremists) while still playing ball with the Republicans. Justice Roberts may be conservative in his judicial thinking but he is also smart enough to know that striking down a populist law that will provide relief for millions of middle class and poor Americans is really bad politics.
Given all this, we should stop idolizing Justice Roberts’ seemingly noble gesture and recognize it for what it really is — a political gambit to help Romney win the elections in November and to push the United States towards the conservative agenda incognito. Only time will tell what this all leads to, but there is a very real chance that the vote that Justice Roberts cast in favor of the healthcare law was his most conservative one yet.

It's Not a Tax!

What's the Matter With Creationism?

(AP Photo/Jae C. Hong, file) 
Do you know what the worst thing about the recent Gallup poll on evolution is? It isn’t that 46 percent of respondents are creationists (“God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last ten thousand years or so”). Or that 32 percent believe in “theistic evolution” (“Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided this process”). Or that only 15 percent said humans evolved and “God had no part in this process.” It isn’t even that the percentage of Americans with creationist views has barely budged since 1982, when it was 44 percent, with a small rise in the no-God vote (up from 9 percent) coming at the expense of the divine-help position (down from 38 percent). Or that 58 percent of Republicans are creationists, although that does explain a lot.

It’s that the proportion of college graduates who are creationists is exactly the same as for the general public. That’s right: 46 percent of Americans with sixteen long years of education under their belt believe the story of Adam and Eve is literally true. Even 25 percent of Americans with graduate degrees believe dinosaurs and humans romped together before Noah’s flood. Needless to say, this remarkable demonstration of educational failure attracts little attention from those who call for improving our schools.

My brilliant husband, a sociologist and political theorist, refuses to get upset about the poll. It’s quite annoying, actually. He thinks questions like these primarily elicit affirmations of identity, not literal convictions; declaring your belief in creationism is another way of saying you’re a good Christian. That does rather beg the question of what a good Christian is, and why so many think it means refusing to use the brains God gave you. And yes, as you may have suspected, according to the Pew Research Center, evangelicals are far more likely than those of other faiths to hold creationist views; just 24 percent of them believe in evolution. Mormons come in even lower, at 22 percent, although official church doctrine has no problem with evolution.
Why does it matter that almost half the country rejects the overwhelming evidence of evolution, with or without the hand of God? After all, Americans are famously ignorant of many things—like where Iran is or when World War II took place—and we are still here. One reason is that rejecting evolution expresses more than an inability to think critically; it relies on a fundamentally paranoid worldview. Think what the world would have to be like for evolution to be false. Almost every scientist on earth would have to be engaged in a fraud so complex and extensive it involved every field from archaeology, paleontology, geology and genetics to biology, chemistry and physics. And yet this massive concatenation of lies and delusion is so full of obvious holes that a pastor with a Bible-college degree or a homeschooling parent with no degree at all can see right through it. A flute discovered in southern Germany is 43,000 years old? Not bloody likely. It’s probably some old bone left over from an ancient barbecue. To celebrate its fifth anniversary, the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, has installed a holographic exhibit of Lucy, the famous proto-human fossil, showing how she was really just a few-thousand-year-old ape after all.
Patricia Princehouse, director of the evolutionary biology program at Case Western Reserve University, laughed when I suggested to her that the Gallup survey shows that education doesn’t work. “There isn’t much evolution education in the schools,” she told me. “Most have no more than a lesson or two, and it isn’t presented as connected with the rest of biology.” In fact, students may not even get that much exposure. Nationally, Princehouse said, at least 13 percent of biology teachers teach “young earth” creationism (not just humans but the earth itself is only 10,000 years old or thereabouts), despite laws forbidding it, and some 60 percent teach a watered-down version of evolution. They have to get along with their neighbors, after all. In Tennessee, home of the Scopes trial, a new law actually makes teaching creationism legal. “No one takes them to court,” Princehouse told me, “because creationism is so popular. Those who object are isolated and afraid of reprisals.” People tend to forget that Clarence Darrow lost the Scopes trial; until the Supreme Court ruled otherwise in 1968, it was illegal to teach evolution in public schools in about half a dozen states.
Kenneth Miller, a biology professor at Brown University and practicing Catholic who is a leading voice against creationism, agrees with Princehouse. “Science education has been remarkably ineffective,” he told me. “Those of us in the scientific community who are religious have a tremendous amount of work to do in the faith community.” Why bother? “There’s a potential for great harm when nearly half the population rejects the central organizing principle of the biological sciences. It’s useful for us as a species to understand that we are a recent appearance on this planet and that 99.9 percent of all species that have ever existed have gone extinct.” Evangelical parents may care less that their children learn science than that they avoid going to hell, but Miller points out that many of the major challenges facing the nation—and the world—are scientific in nature: climate change and energy policy, for instance. “To have a near majority essentially rejecting the scientific method is very troubling,” he says. And to have solidly grounded science waved away as political and theological propaganda could not come at a worse time. “Sea-level rise” is a “left-wing term,” said Virginia state legislator Chris Stolle, a Republican, successfully urging its replacement in a state-commissioned study by the expression “recurrent flooding.”
The group Answers in Genesis, which runs the Creation Museum, has plans to build a full-size replica of Noah’s Ark as part of its Ark Encounter theme park. If that “recurrent flooding” really gets going, you may wish you’d booked a cabin.

Katha Pollitt

June 14, 2012 | This article appeared in the July 2-9, 2012 edition of The Nation.

Romney's Profit From Bain Buyouts:

Up to $20,000 Per Laid-off Worker

By TheStreet.com

By Lauren Bloom

As the 2012 presidential campaign season swings into high gear, we're going to hear a lot about presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney's record on job creation.

Between his tenure at Bain Capital and his time as governor of Massachusetts, there'll be plenty for politicians and pundits alike to discuss.

Here are some of the highlights we can expect to hear from the campaign trail:

Bain Capital: The Good, the Bad and the Hard-to-Quantify.
In 1984, Romney left management consulting firm Bain & Company to co-found the spinoff private-equity investment firm, Bain Capital. For the next 15 years, Romney presided over Bain Capital's operations, which shifted focus over time from venture capitalism to leveraged buyouts. Make no mistake about it -- Bain Capital's purpose was to make money for its investors, and it did so hand over fist. From its 1986 success investing in what was then a small office supply store called Staples (Romney fondly recalls stocking store shelves himself) until Romney left in 1999, Bain made billions. Along the way, it purchased at least five companies that subsequently ended up in bankruptcy even as Bain walked away with eye-popping profits:

• American Pad & Paper: Bain invested $5 million in the small paper company in 1992, and reportedly collected $100 million in dividends on that investment. AMPAD went bankrupt in 2000, laying off 385 employees.
• Dade Behring: Bain Capital invested $415 million in a leveraged buyout in 1994, borrowed an additional $421 million, and ultimately walked away with $1.78 billion. Dade filed for bankruptcy in 2002, and 2,000 workers lost their jobs.
• DDI Corporation: Bain Capital reportedly invested $46.3 million in 1997, reaping $85.5 million in profits and an additional $10 million in management fees. When the company later went bankrupt, 2,100 workers were laid off.
• GS International: In a somewhat less profitable transaction, Bain Capital invested $60 million in 1993 and received $65 million in dividends. This company, too, went bankrupt in 2002, and 750 workers lost their jobs.
 • Stage Stores: Bain invested $5 million to purchase the company and took it public in the mid-'90s, reaping $100 million from stock offerings. Stage filed for bankruptcy in 2000, and 5,795 workers reportedly were laid off.

Romney himself profited handsomely from his time running Bain Capital. Although the exact details of his personal finances are not available, news reports estimate his net worth at somewhere between $190 and $250 million, much of it derived from his Bain Capital days. Very rough math might suggest that Romney made as much as $20,000 per job lost.

In fairness to Romney, however, Bain Capital purchased more than 115 companies during his tenure, and Staples wasn't its only success. The Romney campaign points to household-name companies like Domino's Pizza and Sports Authority to support its claim that Bain Capital actually created approximately 120,000 jobs during the Romney era. But that number may also be misleading: Job creation at successful companies is usually more attributable to dedicated management than to investors or consultants.

Romney's job as head of Bain Capital was to make a handsome return for investors. His goal would have been to maximize efficiency and profits, not to ensure that people with steady jobs got to keep them. Consequently, although jobs were created, it's not clear how much of the credit should go to Bain and Romney.

The Massachusetts Miracle – or Not. Romney proudly attempts to tout his success at creating jobs in Massachusetts, but the facts may not support him. According to MarketWatch, Massachusetts ranked 50th out of the 50 states in job growth during Romney's first year in office, and things improved very little thereafter. By the end of his term, Massachusetts was still 47th, ranking above only rustbelt states Michigan and Ohio and Hurricane Katrina-wracked Louisiana. While jobs were growing nationwide at more than 5%, Massachusetts limped along at a bare 0.9% growth rate. So yes, some jobs were created in Massachusetts during Romney's tenure, but not at a rate that unemployed American voters are likely to find reassuring
So, who is the real Mitt Romney? It's clear that Romney will continue to portray himself as a savvy businessman who can put America back to work, and that President Obama will want to characterize him as a heartless corporate pirate who got filthy rich on other people's misery. The truth undoubtedly lies somewhere in between, but Romney's tendency to publicly stumble over his own wealth won't help him in the polls. The Internet is already full of awkward Romney quotes like:

• "Corporations are people, my friend."
• "I like being able to fire people."
• "I'm not concerned about the very poor."

All of those quotes have been taken out of context and stripped of whatever nuance Romney intended. Taken together, though, they form a fairly compelling -- if not necessarily accurate -- picture of a man with far more money than heart.

And why should investors care? If corporate America likes Romney's promise of a business-friendly White House, there should be plenty of concern about how Romney's job creation record plays on the campaign trail. Corporations may be able to donate big money to presidential candidates these days, but it's still individual human voters who'll decide whether to vote Romney in or not.

Perhaps, instead of essentially promising to create jobs himself, Romney should focus his message on how making companies profitable and encouraging economic growth will create the need for well-paid workers. It's an honest message, and one that might just appeal to voters. If Romney gets mired in his arguably ambiguous record, or continues to arm his critics with quotes suggesting that he's just too rich to care about ordinary Americans, President Obama is almost certain to win another four years in the White House.

Voter Fraud?

Top Ten Groups Of Americans The GOP Hates

By Justin "Filthy Liberal Scum" Rosario
Let’s just get the obvious out of the way: The GOP runs on hate. Their entire political platform consists of opposing things they can’t stand. They don’t stand for anything; they stand against. They don’t stand for family values; they stand against alternate lifestyles. They don’t stand for freedom; they stand against the rights of others. It permeates every word they speak and every law they pass (or filibuster). But there are some people they hate more than others and, oh boy, does it show!
Just for fun, when you’re finished, post how many of these groups you fall into. I actually only fall into 2. I’m so lucky! The GOP only hates me a little!
http://www.addictinginfo.org/2012/06/06/top-ten/

HARD WORK

Conservatives seem to believe that the rich will work harder if we give them more, and the poor will work harder if we give them less

Obama Spending Binge Never Happened

By Rex Nutting, MarketWatch

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — Of all the falsehoods told about President Barack Obama, the biggest whopper is the one about his reckless spending spree.

As would-be president Mitt Romney tells it: “I will lead us out of this debt and spending inferno.”

Almost everyone believes that Obama has presided over a massive increase in federal spending, an “inferno” of spending that threatens our jobs, our businesses and our children’s future. Even Democrats seem to think it’s true.

Government spending under Obama, including his signature stimulus bill, is rising at a 1.4% annualized pace — slower than at any time in nearly 60 years.

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/obama-spending-binge-never-happened-2012-05-22

HOORAY AMERCIA!

OF BEDROOMS AND BOARDROOMS

by ROBERT B. REICH,
The 2012 election should be about what’s going on in America’s boardrooms, but Republicans would rather it be about America’s bedrooms.
Mitt Romney says he’s against same-sex marriage; President Obama just announced his support. North Carolina voters have approved a Republican-proposed amendment to the state constitution banning same-sex marriage. Minnesota voters will be considering a similar amendment in November. Republicans in Maryland and Washington State are seeking to overturn legislative approval of same-sex marriage there.
Meanwhile, Republicans have introduced over four hundred bills in state legislatures aimed at limiting womens’ reproductive rights – banning abortions, requiring women seeking abortions to have invasive ultra-sound tests beforehand, and limiting the use of contraceptives.
The Republican bedroom crowd doesn’t want to talk about the nation’s boardrooms because that’s where most of their campaign money comes from. And their candidate for president has made a fortune playing board rooms like checkers.
Yet America’s real problems have nothing to do with what we do in our bedrooms and everything to do with what top executives do in their boardrooms and executive suites.
We’re not in trouble because gays want to marry or women want to have some control over when they have babies. We’re in trouble because CEOs are collecting exorbitant pay while slicing the pay of average workers, because the titans of Wall Street demand short-term results over long-term jobs, and because of a boardroom culture that tolerates financial conflicts of interest, insider trading, and the outright bribery of public officials through unlimited campaign “donations.”
Our crisis has nothing to do with private morality. It’s a crisis of public morality – of abuses of public trust that undermine the integrity of our economy and democracy and have led millions of Americans to conclude the game is rigged.
What’s truly immoral is not what adults choose to do with other consenting adults. It’s what those with great power have chosen to do to the rest of us.
It is immoral that top executives are richly rewarded no matter how badly they screw up while most Americans are screwed no matter how hard they work.
Regressive Republicans have no problem intruding on the most personal and most intimate decisions any of us makes while railing against government intrusions on big business.
They don’t hesitate to hurl the epithets “shameful,” “disgraceful,” and “contemptible” at private moral decisions they disagree with, while staying stone silent in the face of the most contemptible violations of public trust at the highest reaches of the economy.
We must protect and advance private rights of individuals over intimate bedroom decisions. We must also stop the abuses of economic power and privilege that are characterizing so many decisions in the nation’s boardrooms and executive suites.

Being 'Born-Again' Linked to More Brain Atrophy

 -- Older adults who say they've had a life-changing religious experience are more likely to have a greater decrease in size of the hippocampus, the part of the brain critical to learning and memory, new research finds.
According to the study, people who said they were a "born-again" Protestant or Catholic, or conversely, those who had no religious affiliation, had more hippocampal shrinkage (or "atrophy") compared to people who identified themselves as Protestants, but not born-again.

As people age, a certain amount of brain atrophy is expected. Shrinkage of the hippocampus is also associated with depression, dementia and Alzheimer's disease.
In the study, researchers asked 268 people aged 58 to 84 about their religious affiliation, spiritual practices and life-changing religious experiences. Over the course of two to eight years, changes to the hippocampus were monitored using MRI scans.

The researchers suggested that stress over holding religious beliefs that fall outside of the mainstream may help explain the findings.
"One interpretation of our finding -- that members of majority religious groups seem to have less atrophy compared with minority religious groups -- is that when you feel your beliefs and values are somewhat at odds with those of society as a whole, it may contribute to long-term stress that could have implications for the brain," Amy Owen, lead author of the study and a research associate at Duke University Medical Center, said.

The study authors also suggested that life-changing religious experiences could challenge a person's established religious beliefs, triggering stress.
"Other studies have led us to think that whether a new experience you consider spiritual is interpreted as comforting or stressful may depend on whether or not it fits in with your existing religious beliefs and those of the people around you," David Hayward, research associate at Duke University Medical Center, added. "Especially for older adults, these unexpected new experiences may lead to doubts about long-held religious beliefs, or to disagreements with friends and family."

The Deficit Is A Republican Creation

The excellent chart above (from the blog Progressive Eruptions) shows where the federal deficit has come from. When President Clinton left office, he left his successor (George W. Bush) a surplus in the government's yearly budget. But even though the Republicans like to brag about how frugal they are with the taxpayer's money, it didn't take Bush and his GOP cohorts long to bust the budget and create a massive deficit.

First, he passed huge tax cuts (which mostly benefitted the richest Americans). That action alone created nearly half of the current deficit (about 48%). If he had done nothing else, that one ridiculous act would have created a deficit out of the surplus he inherited. But Bush didn't stop there. He increased the Homeland Security and military budgets and started two unnecessary wars. That accounted for another 35% of the budget deficit -- and added to the tax cuts for the rich, makes up 83% of the deficit.

But the congressional Republicans have an amazing ability to ignore the obvious reality. They are blaming the entire deficit on the small rise in spending on entitlements (10%) and domestic programs (7%). It doesn't matter to them that the so-called "entitlements" (Social Security and Medicare) could be easily fixed and funded far into the future by simply removing the cap on payroll taxes (so that the rich pay the same percentage as working Americans). And the small rise in domestic spending could easily have been covered if the tax cuts for the rich had not been enacted.

What is the Republican "solution" to fixing the deficit? They want to abolish Medicare and cut (or privatize) Social Security (in spite of the easy fixes available), and then they want to deeply slash spending for domestic programs (which are badly needed by American hurt by the GOP recession). And they want to double-down on the two biggest budget-busters, by raising military spending and giving the rich even more huge tax cuts.

It doesn't take a genius to figure out that would increase the federal deficit instead of lowering it. It becomes obvious now why the GOP wants to eliminate the Education Department and cut funds for education. Only an uneducated public could fall for the outrageous Republican economic plan.
by Ted McLaughlin

The Biggest Lie in American Politics

April 25,2012

By Bob Cesca:

 The press and the Republican Party are almost equally driven to totally destroy Social Security as we know it. The 2012 Social Security Trustees Report was released this week and here are several headlines from three of the top newspapers in the country:

The Wall Street Journal: “Stress Rises on Social Security”
The Los Angeles Times: “Social Security is slipping closer to insolvency”
The New York Times: “Social Security’s Financial Health Worsens”
And you know, come to think of it, it’s not just Republicans and the press. Senator Mark Warner (D-VA) tweeted yesterday: “SocSec to run dry in 2033 – Medicare by 2024. Trustees: ‘more options/time’ if Congress acts ‘sooner, not later.’”
All of these reactions would be acceptable if they even vaguely resembled what the Trustees reported.
They don’t.
Social Security does not “run dry” in 2033. It doesn’t. “Run dry” and “insolvency” mean dead. Out of money. Nothing left. The trustees, in fact, reported that Social Security will run a surplus until 2033. 21 years. I can’t emphasize this enough. Two decades! Can you imagine if any program in the federal government was projected to run a surplus for even half of that time? Budget hawks would crap their cages demanding immediate action to give back the taxpayers’ money by slashing the program to the line. (To be fair, the date was adjusted back in time due to the Great Recession. Other years, however, the Trustees move the date forward in time. Either way, 2033 is barely on the horizon.)

Are Republicans trying to kill social security?

And once 2033 rolls around, Social Security will be capable of paying 75 to 80 percent of total benefits in 2033 money, which, accounting for inflation, is more than Social Security recipients receive today. Furthermore, these are projections based on zero legislative action. In other words, if Congress does nothing by way of tweaking payroll taxes, Social Security will be perfect until 2033, then it’ll still be capable of paying benefits after that.
But, naturally, something will happen to tighten the loose ends. It always does. Preferably that “something” will be low-key and non-disruptive. For example, lost somewhere in the American memory hole, President Reagan raised the payroll tax.

In 1983, for example, he signed off on Social Security reform legislation that, among other things, accelerated an increase in the payroll tax rate, required that higher-income beneficiaries pay income tax on part of their benefits, and required the self-employed to pay the full payroll tax rate, rather than just the portion normally paid by employees.

Without touching benefits or raising payroll taxes, Congress could follow suit by entirely eliminating the income cap on the payroll tax (the FICA tax found on your paycheck stub), forcing everyone who earns more than $110,000 per year to pay into the system based on their full income. That’s around six percent of the population. According to experts, this would allow Social Security to pay full benefits until 2087. To put that date into perspective, in 2087, if they retire at age 65 and survive to their 100th birthdays, Tim Tebow, Bradley Manning, Hilary Duff, Ke$ha and every American born in 1987 could collect full Social Security benefits for 35 years each.
So why all the fuss and panic?
For starters, far-right Republicans have been trying to kill Social Security since it was established during the Depression. It’s socialistic commie pinko welfare, they say in private. And so they act like the world’s most duplicitous concern trolls by exploiting minor setbacks and lying about “bad news” in order to sell their unbelievably stupid privatization plan — a massive giveaway to corporate America. They twist logic and pretend to “rescue” Social Security by disbanding it — investing the trust fund in the totally safe and never unstable stock market.
They’ve been so good at framing and branding unmitigated fiction about this issue that they’ve successfully shoved the broader discussion well beyond reality into some kind of brutally dishonest phantom zone where “full benefits for 20 years, and much longer if we tweak the payroll tax” means, “OMFG! Social Security is DOOOOOMED! AAAAAAAHHH!” If they’re not pitching their awful privatization scam, they’re deliberately undermining the system by proposing things like raising the retirement age or cutting benefits. Both of these ideas only manage to hurt old people while simultaneously breeding disillusionment about the reliability of Social Security among younger people.
President Eisenhower once wrote:

“Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H. L. Hunt (you possibly know his background), a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.”

Modern far-right Republicans are aware of Eisenhower’s prediction and so instead of killing Social Security outright, they’re trying to kill it by a thousand cuts and even more lies. Sadly, it seems like the rest of the D.C. establishment is going along with their framing in spite of the reality from the Trustees themselves, making the “insolvency” panic-mongering the biggest lie being foisted upon the American people today.

The Flight From Conversation

WE live in a technological universe in which we are always communicating. And yet we have sacrificed conversation for mere connection.    

    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/22/opinion/sunday/the-flight-from-conversation.html?partner=rss&emc=rss#

ESTIMATE: At Least 48 Million Could Become Uninsured Under Paul Ryan’s Budget

ESTIMATE: At Least 48 Million Could Become Uninsured Under Paul Ryan’s Budget: pSince Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) new budget eliminates $1.5 trillion from the Affordable Care Act, cuts $770 billion from Medicaid and reduces Medicare spending by $200 billion, Ezra Klein points out that “it would be very interesting to see an estimate of the uninsured population under Ryan’s budget.” The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) analysis of [...]/p

Youth Turned Off by Religion and Politics, Turn Away From Church

By Napp Nazworth , Christian Post Reporter

March 19, 2012|1:11 pm

Young people are turning away from churches because they associate Christianity with Republican politics, a study reveals.

Political science Professors David Campbell (University of Notre Dame) and Robert Putnam (Harvard University) published their findings, "God and Caesar in America: Why Mixing Religion and Politics Is Bad for Both," in the March/April edition of Foreign Affairs. Campbell and Putnam also wrote American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us (2010), which was recently released in paperback. For that book, they have been surveying the same group of people from 2006 to 2011. The same data was used for the Foreign Affairs article.
One of the most surprising findings from the data they collected, Campbell said in a March 13 interview with The Christian Post, was that people are driven away or toward religious involvement because of their political leanings. In particular, those who are politically conservative, or Republican, are more likely to become churchgoers and those that are politically liberal, or Democratic, are more likely to turn away from religion.
This is the opposite of previous understandings of the interaction of religion and politics. Social scientists believed that people first got involved in a particular religion, which then influenced their politics in some way. Increasingly, more studies like Campbell and Putnam's are finding, though, that politics is more likely to determine religion than religion determine politics.
Campbell likes to use the image of a "brand" from marketing. The Republican brand has been increasingly associated with religion and social conservatism due to the influence of the Christian Right, a social movement which has been a part of the Republican coalition since the 1980s. Moderates and Democrats are uncomfortable with that brand and seek to not be identified with it.
"A lot of what goes on in politics is not so much people thinking through political positions but it's sort of a visceral reaction you have to a brand, whether it be Republicans or Democrats," Campbell said.

Political conservatives and Republicans, who identify positively with the brand, have been more likely to attend church regularly. Campbell suspects that is due to conservatives being more likely to associate with other churchgoers in their social networks.

"You're a conservative, you're around people who are churchgoing, so you begin to adopt the idea that, well, this is what it means to be someone who is conservative, I ought to attend church regularly, I also think of myself as religious," Campbell explained.
While these trends were found in the general population, Campbell and Putnam found them to be much stronger among young adults, those under 30, and especially those under 25.
"Anything you might say about the general population, double it or square it when you talk about the young," Campbell said.
Since young voters are more likely to be politically liberal, especially on the issue of gay rights, they have been driven away from the church by the perception of a close association between religion and Republican politics.
To young adults, Campbell and Putnam write, "'religion' means 'Republican,' 'intolerant,' and 'homophobic.' Since those traits do not represent their views, they do not see themselves – or wish to be seen by their peers – as religious."
Campbell and Putnam report that between 2006 and 2011, the proportion of the population that reported having no religion rose modestly, from 17 percent to 19 percent, but among young Americans rose five times as much.
While it has been true that young people of previous generations have been less interested in religion, then become more religious as they become older, today's generation of young adults are more likely than previous generations of young adults to be without a religious affiliation. About one-third of 20-somethings were without religion in 2011 compared to about one-fourth of 20-somethings in 2006.
Campbell noted that the trends he and Putnam identified are mostly among those who can be described as "nominally" religious. Those who are the least committed to a church or denomination are the ones who are most likely to drop out. When they do drop out, they are not likely to become atheists. Formerly churchgoing young adults remain comfortable with a belief in God but uncomfortable with organized religion.
"The reason this is important for clergy is these are not people who are lost completely to religion. It's almost like they're an untapped constituency, or untapped market, that could be brought back to a different kind of religion, or a religion that they thought was stripped of politics," Campbell argued.
There is a trend among nondenominational evangelical congregations that attract younger Christians to avoid involvement in politics. Campbell believes that the pastors of these congregations understand more intuitively what his data is showing more crudely – that young people dislike their religion mixed with politics.