US Politics Mega-thread - Page 2530

The Dartmouth Review listed epithets that were hurled at white students, including ‘F*** you, you filthy white f***s!’ and ‘F*** you, you racist s****!’

It reported that as well as the profanity, both male and female students were shoved.

Ohio Gov. John Kasich is proposing a new federal agency to spread Judeo-Christian values throughout the world as a way to combat the Islamic State.

"We need to beam messages around the world about what it means to have a Western ethic, to be a part of a Christian-Judeo society," Kasich said in an interview Tuesday with NBC. "It means freedom, it means opportunity, it means respect for women, it means so many things."

The GOP presidential contender laid out his proposal during a larger discussion of his plan to defeat the Islamic State. The agency would promote the Judeo-Christian beliefs to places such as China, Russia, and the Middle East, Kasich told NBC.

He defended the creation of the new agency, despite vows by some of his GOP rivals to shrink the federal government.

"There's nobody who's spent more time shrinking government and cutting budgets than I have," Kasich said, according to NBC.

Faith-based groups, who play a key role in resettling refugees to the United States, say they are dismayed by the wave of anti-refugee fervor set off by the Paris terrorist attacks and are urging supporters to contact elected officials on behalf of victims of the Syrian civil war.

Evangelical Christians, as well as Christians more broadly, are a core group in the Republican electoral base and are among the most passionate advocates for aiding refugees.

A push by Republican presidential candidates to ban Syrian refugees "does not reflect what we've been hearing from our constituencies, which are evangelical churches across the country," said Jenny Yang, vice president for advocacy at World Relief, an evangelical organization that helps resettle refugees. "Most of the people have been saying we want to continue to work with refugees, that what happened in Paris ... doesn’t reflect who refugees are."

Reports that a Syrian migrant may have played a role in last week's attacks in Paris, which killed more than 130 people, have set off a GOP-led backlash over the Obama administration's plans to admit 10,000 Syrian refugees next year. More than half of U.S. governors have said they do not want Syrian refugees resettled in their states, while House Speaker Paul Ryan says he wants a vote this week on GOP-drafted legislation to halt the administration's plans.

World Relief is one of nine groups, several of them faith-based, that help the U.S. resettle up to 70,000 refugees from around the world in the United States each year. Others include the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, and the Church World Service. Many other faith-based groups, including evangelical Christian organizations, also perform aid work overseas specifically aimed at refugees fleeing conflicts.

For Republican presidential contenders such as former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who have been working hard at shoring up evangelical support in a crowded field, harsh words against refugees carries a risk of looking politically opportunistic instead of compassionate. Some advocates were particularly shocked when Republican presidential candidate Chris Christie, New Jersey's governor, said that the U.S. should bar Syrian orphaned toddlers if necessary.

On November 18 2015 10:09 Acrofales wrote:
I believe that institution already exists. It's called the Roman Catholic Church...

But yeah. Who needs a secular state.

On November 18 2015 10:22 KwarK wrote:

Or the Simpsons. Or pretty much every movie. Everyone knows what America is about at this point.

On November 18 2015 10:25 GreenHorizons wrote:


Except American's maybe.

Between 100,000 and 240,000 women in Texas aged 18 to 49 have tried to induce an abortion at home, according to a new study released on Tuesday.

In the first study of its kind, the Texas Policy Evaluation Project (TxPEP), run by the University of Texas, attempted to show the prevalence of self-induced abortions in the state in the wake of legislators’ attempts to limit women’s access to abortions. Last week the supreme court agreed to hear a challenge to one of Texas’s most stringent abortion laws, known as HB2, which has led to the closure of more than half the state’s clinics.

Presented alongside the TxPEP data were interviews with 18 women who had tried to end their pregnancies at home – with varying degrees of success and differing medical consequences – in the past five years. The women were interviewed between October 2014 and October 2015.

A 24-year-old from the lower Rio Grande valley used the abortion medication misoprostol to try to end her pregnancy.

“It was the worst cramping I’ve ever had and probably one of the worst pains I’ve gone through,” she wrote. “And there was also the fact that I’m doing it at home, we’re not – though we have all of the information as to how much bleeding is too much bleeding, you know, or that, there’s always that slight uncertainty of, like, I don’t really know what I’m doing.”

A 20-year-old Houston woman wrote about taking black cohosh, vitamin C and “a special root pill” to try to end her pregnancy.

“And after a while taking all the pills was very nauseating and I didn’t want to do it any more,” she wrote. “So, it was just a lot to take in and I wasn’t taking it well, but I kept doing it anyway.”

She, like the other five women who tried taking herbs or vitamins, had to obtain a surgical abortion when it became clear that these methods were not working.

To determine the prevalence of self-induced abortions in Texas, investigators surveyed women and asked them whether they had ever tried to end a pregnancy outside a clinical setting, or if their best friend had. The best-friend measure was included because women tend to under-report abortions in studies.

In April 2013, 41 licensed abortion providers were open in Texas; today only 18 remain open. HB2 went into effect in November 2013.

On November 18 2015 10:34 Plansix wrote:
Nothing but a superiority complex and inability for introspection. There have been plenty of western, violent Christians in the last 50 years.

On November 18 2015 11:34 xDaunt wrote:

I hate to break it to you, but the radical Muslims don't give two shits about your hilarious equivocation. It's completely irrelevant to the conversation of how to proceed.

President Barack Obama could be close to nominating the first-ever woman to become the head of a military combatant command, Pentagon sources tell NPR.

The U.S. military divides the world into areas of responsibility run by four-star generals and admirals, but none has ever been female. Obama wants to change that before the end of his term, Pentagon sources say, by naming a woman to take command of U.S. Northern Command, which also runs the well-known North American Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD.

NORAD and NorthCom are charged with defending the U.S., including scrambling Air Force fighters to respond to the recent intrusions by Russian bombers near American airspace. There's talk that its current commander, Navy Adm. Bill Gortney, could be retiring before his term is up at the end of next year, which would create the opportunity to make history with a female commander.

Two names on the shortlist are Air Force Gen. Lori Robinson, who now commands U.S. Air Forces in the Pacific, and Adm. Michelle Howard, who today serves as the vice chief of the Navy.