Sunday Open Thread [6.30.13]

Lt. Governor Matt Denn:

I want to take special note of the work that newly-elected Representative Paul Baumbach did this year to get both landowners and residents to agree on a bill to set some limits on rent increases for manufactured home residents. Working with Senator Bruce Ennis, who has championed this issue for years, Paul helped do what the General Assembly had been unable to do for well over a decade. Thousands of manufactured home residents, many of them on fixed incomes, will benefit when the Governor signs the bill this afternoon. Paul was quietly effective, and even after the bill’s passage has sought little attention for himself — but he deserves it. Kudos to both him and Senator Ennis.

Indeed, Paul Baumbach hit Leg Hall running and has been a progressive champion.

Former Sen. Alan Simpson (R-WY):

“If you can’t learn to compromise on an issue without compromising yourself, you sure as hell should never be in the legislative body. Every document of this country was a compromise. Go home and bitch and raise hell around the city council or something. Go haunt someone else. But you should never come to Congress. And you should never get married.”

Peter Wehner:

“Mike Huckabee is not only recruiting Jesus to be a foot soldier in the culture wars; he’s trying to raise money for his political action committee on it. I understand that how one views this is entirely subjective, but I for one find this kind of thing to be, at a minimum, tasteless and crass. We all get the game that’s being played: the Supreme Court renders a verdict on a hot-button social issue –and within hours ‘Jesus wept’ is used as a fundraising tool. One has to strike while the iron is hot, after all. Still, you might think that a Christian would use a good deal of caution when it comes to leveraging poignant verses about Jesus into three dollar donations for HuckPAC.

I will say that on policy, Mr. Huckabee and I are fairly close in the views we hold (though certainly not identical). But what troubles me, and what I would hope would trouble Huckabee, is we’ve seen what happens when Christians use their faith as a blunt political instrument. It isn’t good for politics; but it’s a good deal worse for Christianity. A politicized faith is discrediting. It pushes people away. And it frankly distorts who Jesus was.”

Indeed. Jesus Christ never said a single word about homosexuality or gays. He certainly never addressed gay marriage, or marriage equality. He was too busy telling the rich that they would have a very difficult time getting into heaven. He was too busy caring for the sick, the needy, the disabled, the elderly. He was too busy hanging around with 12 men and a prostitute named Mary.

Evangelical Christians really are not Christians at all, for the word Christians implies that they adhere to Jesus’s actual teachings of compassion and love. Rather, they are Leviticusians. Adherents to Old Testament rules of human behavior that likewise condoned slavery, concubines, stoning, and other behaviors that we today find abhorrent.

The New York Times reports on new Republican efforts to damage Secretary Clinton ahead of the 2016 election, what with the failure of their Benghazi hearings.

“The 2016 election may be far off, but one theme is becoming clear: Republican strategists and presidential hopefuls, in ways subtle and overt, are eager to focus a spotlight on Mrs. Clinton’s age. The former secretary of state will be 69 by the next presidential election, a generation removed from most of the possible Republican candidates.”

Attacking a candidate’s age might work when the candidate is a man, a la John McCain or Bob Dole. I wonder how it will work when the candidate is a woman. I think it would further galvanize women’s support of Hillary.

Here is something cool. The JFK Presidential Library released last week a nearly two hour video of the late President’s trip to Europe during the summer of 1963. Amazingly, it had not been released before now.