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The reading was followed by two minutes of silence at 12:51 p.m., the minute the magnitude-6.1 quake struck. It destroyed thousands of homes and much of downtown Christchurch, causing 30 billion dollars ($ 25 billion) in damage by the government’s estimate.

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The Republican Senate has a problem on their hands with their full throated support of Sen. Roy Blunt’s amendment, which allows any employer to deny coverage of health services to their employees on “moral” grounds. From Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell to Sen. Scott Brown, Republicans are falling over themselves to strike a blow for “religious freedom.” It’s going to be an uphill climb for them.

Public Policy Polling for Daily Kos & SEIU. 2/16-19. Registered voters. MoE ±3.1% (no trendlines):

Q: Do you think employers should be allowed to deny health care coverage to their employees for doctor-recommended health care services if those services are contrary to the employer’s religious beliefs or moral convictions, or do you think all workers should be allowed access to all doctor-recommended health care services, regardless of their employer’s beliefs?

Employers should be allowed to deny coverage based on their beliefs ……….25%

All workers should be allowed to access health care services regardless
of their employer’s beliefs ………………………………………………………………. 67%

Not sure ………………………………………………………………………………………. 8%

The question uses the exact language of the Blunt amendment [pdf], with the phrase “religious beliefs or moral convictions.” Incidentally, that’s the part of the amendment that Brown refuses to acknowledge.

Men, women, Democrats, Republicans, independents, all racial and ethnic groups and every income bracket believes employers should not be able to dictate their employee’s health care on the basis of their personal beliefs. The single group that supports the premise of the Blunt amendment is the tea party, those protectors of personal freedom, at a margin of 51-39. Even self-identified conservatives are more narrowly split, 43-45, against Blunt.

Republicans are determined to try to make this about “religious freedom,” all the while undoubtedly getting the quiet backing of the insurance industry, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other business groups. What this really about is money. It’s the money insurers and employers can save by not having to provide comprehensive coverage to their workers.

While the GOP cries “religious freedom,” the public, the voting public, will think about a different kind of freedom—not having their employers meddle in their private lives by means of their health insurance. They’ll also be thinking about their pocketbook, and how much they’ll have to pay out of their own pocket for the coverage their boss is denying. That’s the argument Elizabeth Warren is making, for good reason. It’s an issue of economic and personal freedom for most Americans, not the “religious freedom” of their bosses.

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Republican presidential contenders Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum have lined up behind a new pledge focused on social issues put forth by Bob Vander Plaats, a former candidate for governor who now reigns as a conservative kingmaker in the Hawkeye State. Vander Plaats heads the Iowa-based Family Leader, a conservative group. Signing “The Marriage Vow — A Declaration of Dependence Upon Marriage and Family” is a requirement for earning the organization’s endorsement. Standing behind the pledge entails supporting a “federal Marriage Amendment to the US Constitution which protects the definition of marriage as between one man and one woman.” Among other things, it also means backing a ban on pornography.
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Rachel Maddow Reality of womens health lost in GOP abortion fixation
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Andre Tartar writes:

A few months ago an AP investigation uncovered an intensive NYPD effort to spy on Muslim students in several New York City colleges. The latest update from the AP finds that the program has actually included surveillance operations at a much wider network of schools, including several outside New York. (Just a few: Yale, Rutgers, Syracuse University, SUNY Buffalo and SUNY Albany.) In many cases, like in the example below, the police used student informants or outright infiltrated Muslim student meet-ups.

 

Police talked with local authorities about professors 300 miles away in Buffalo and even sent an undercover agent on a whitewater rafting trip, where he recorded students’ names and noted in police intelligence files how many times they prayed.

Many of the students reached by the AP were understandably shocked that their names were showing up in reports prepared for NYPD commissioner Ray Kelly, often simply for being active in Muslim student associations or for receiving and forwarding e-mails about upcoming Islamic conferences. [...]

Ultimately, it seems little or no evidence was ever provided of wrongdoing (or even suspicious behavior) on the part of any of the students, and the same largely goes for the Islamic scholars participating in targeted seminars. [...]

Secret (often illegal) police spying is nothing new. Neither is reaching outside municipal boundaries to do it. The late Chief of the Los Angeles Police Department Daryl Gates ran a covert spy, infiltration and agents provocateurs operation that was exposed in the early 1980s but didn’t cost Gates his job. Sometimes, departments work hand-in-glove with federal agencies; sometimes, they do it all on their own.

Always they have their excuses. And always, no matter how many times such behavior has been documented, it takes the media for friggin’ ever to get around to exposing it.

Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2006:

The debate over the administration’s decision to bless a $ 6.8 billion dollar port security bill intensified this morning, with Homeland Security Chief Chertoff defending the deal.  I’d like first to provide some background on the deal which is receiving little attention from critics of the takeover.  Peninsular & Oriental Steam Navigation, a U.K. company, currently controls the U.S. ports in question. Those ports are located in New York, New Jersey, Baltimore, New Orleans, Miami and Philadelphia.  It’s the fourth largest port company in the world. The shareholders of that company agreed to the deal, in which Dubai Ports World (DP World) would pay $ 6.8 billion to take over that company. (DP world has since announced it will take out a loan to finance the cash deal). The Bush administration gave the green light to the deal.  This deal makes DP World the third largest port operator in the world. Before the deal, it was the seventh largest.

Port security is the neglected middle child of our national security debate.  Only some 5% of containers coming into the U.S. are inspected. According to 2004 figures, in the three years after 9/11, we spent about $ 500 million on port security.  That’s what we spend every 3 days in Iraq. [...]

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I’m looking forward to when this brief period of having to care what Rick Santorum says comes to an end.
— @drgrist via TweetDeck

High Impact Posts are here. Top Comments are here. The Overnight News Digest is here.

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On September 21, 2011, a man’s life ended. His death was not natural; it was not a product of anyone’s god; rather, the drug cocktails that caused the heart of Troy Davis to stop beating were purely the result of human artifice.

Davis was a convicted murderer who was put to death by the State of Georgia as punishment for the crimes of which he was found guilty. Like so many other death row inmates who were wrongly convicted of—and sometimes even executed for—crimes they did not commit, Troy Davis may well have been innocent. There was no physical evidence proving his crime, and many of the eywitnesses upon whom Davis’ conviction depended later recanted their testimony, citing undue pressure from prosecutors to finger the person they had apparently already decided was responsible. In the end, however, whether or not Troy Davis was guilty or not is merely salt in the wound of a far bigger outrage.

The Catholic Church officially opposes capital punishment. This doctrine is in the same vein as those opposing abortion, birth control, and physician-assisted suicide: church doctrine dictates that life begins at conception and is a gift from God. Consequently, it is beyond the scope of any soul, no matter how high the earthly authority, to terminate a human life. It does not matter if it is legal, and it does not matter if the rationale is to relieve suffering: the taking of life is God’s department, not ours.

Yet in the middle of September, as opposition to the impending execution of Troy Davis reached a fever pitch and a singular opportunity presented itself for the Church to not just call for an act of mercy, but support a key element of doctrine, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops was silent as the grave. Yes, some local Catholic bishops in Georgia did support the conscience of their doctrine by calling for a reprieve, but the USCCB, the organization most responsible for lobbying and policy advocacy on behalf of the Holy See here in the United States, sat idly by. The execution of a possibly innocent man was not enough to stir the bishops into action. But birth control? That’s a different story altogether.

The directive of President Obama’s Health and Human Services Department that requires employers to cover the cost of contraceptive prescriptions was met with outrage by the USCCB. Never before, they argued, had citizens been forced to pay for things that violated their religious conscience. Not that the Church would have been forced to cover the cost of contraceptives: churches who objected receive an exemption under the directive. The Bishops even rejected a compromise that allowed women who work for affiliated organizations, such as nonprofits and hospitals, to obtain contraceptive coverage directly from an insurer, as opposed to through their employer. Apparently, preserving the “religious conscience” of an insurance company was ground that these bishops simply would not cede.

One could commend the bishops’ commitment to principle if it were based on any sincerity. Unfortunately, that seems not to be the case. Our tax dollars subsidize executions in every state where they are conducted, as well as pay for the wars and occupations that offend a true Catholic conscience, yet these bishops will not lift a finger to stop the execution of one possibly innocent man, let alone work to prevent their believers from paying for these egregious violations of doctrine.

Yes, the hypocrisy is shameful, and it serves as yet another reminder that in this mean-spirited age, the only doctrines that conservatives deem worth standing up for are those that punish and impede, rather than those that demonstrate any inkling of compassion and mercy.

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The 1st District Court of Appeal this week denied a request by the restaurants’ owners that the case be settled through arbitration.

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