Welcome to your Wednesday open thread. We finally got a break in the weather, just in time for our holiday weekend.
Will Rand Paul piss off all constituencies? He had a bit of trouble when talking to a home-schooling group.
Republican senatorial candidate Rand Paul told a group of Christian home schoolers in Kentucky on Friday that he favors a separation of church and state, saying allowing the government into religious institutions “scares” him.
The tea party favorite also voiced his opposition to government faith-based initiatives that have been used to funnel federal and state funds into religious organizations.
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Paul, a Presbyterian layman, campaigned at a Christian Home Educators of Kentucky convention where he was peppered with questions about his religious beliefs, brushing aside one about the age of the earth that he later described as ridiculous.
“I’m not running for minister,” Paul said later. “I’m more than willing to stand up and say I’m a Christian, but I don’t think I have to go into every detail of what my religious beliefs are. If I were going to be the minister of their church, they’d have a right to ask me that.”
So is Paul saying he’s not sure or does he just not want to admit that he’s not a Young Earth Creationist?
nemski already blogged about the Boehner interview to the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, but the interview was full of nuttiness. Greg Sargent points out another part of the interview, where Boehner dismisses the financial regulation bill as overkill.
Dems and bloggers are jumping on this interview that John Boehner gave to the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, in which he appeared to deride financial reform as “killing an ant with a nuclear weapon.”
That line is the only direct Boehner quote about FinReg in the interview — the rest was parahprased — so I was at first skeptical. But the Tribune reporter on the story sends over Boehner’s full quote, and it is indeed about FinReg. Boehner:
“This is killing an ant with a nuclear weapon. There are faults in our regulatory system, some in terms of transparency, most as a result of ineffective enforcement by the bureaucracy who have no idea what these financial products look like today. That could’ve been fixed, but that’s not what we have here.
“This bill institutionalizes too big to fail, puts the government on the hook and gives them the ability to bail out anyone, and allows these unelected bureaucrats to make decisions on behalf of the government in terms of who they’re going to bail out, who they’re going to take over, who they’re going to control, whether they’re a financial firm or not….
“I just hope this bill is out there for several weeks so that the American people can see it and the American people can understand it.”
In the same interview, Boehner also said we should raise the age for Social Security benefits to 70 (but only for people 20 years away from retirement). Thanks John!