Listen up, class!
In the last 48 hours:
1) Rick Santorum has compared Barack Obama to Hitler while comparing prenatal testing to eugenics;
2) Mitt Romney has warned that cutting government spending could hurt the economy.
Two questions, class:
Which one will be a more controversial statement within the Republican Party?
Which candidate will reverse his statement within the next week?
You have five minutes.
Romney cracks!
And there goes Michigan…
I think Mitt has already started walking back his statement…
“Popcorn Quiz”
Who knew this would be so entertaining?
Romney doesn’t like the trees in my state–they are the wrong height for him! He had better walk that back or else. Also we have the wrong kind of lake. I am offended.
As Thomas Dewey, the last presidential candidate who looked like the little man on the wedding cake once said, “Our streams abound with fish.” He meant all streams, in every state, regardless of their race, color, creed, or national origin.
When I was a kid growing up in Upstate NY, we were represented by TWO liberal Republican U.S. Senators – Jake Javits and Charles Goodell. What the hell happened to that party?
Hey, when I was a kid we were governed by a moderate Republican President — Eisenhower. He ended the war, balanced the budget, and sent in the troops to enforce the Supreme Court’s desegregation ruling.
Same question.
Ed Whitney:
What did I miss – did Romney quote Neil Peart’s “The Trees”?
No; he just said that he loved Michigan and its trees which were just the right height. Also that its lakes were wonderful, not only the Great Lakes but the inland ones as well.
Also, when stratplayer was living in NY, Republican Senator Kenneth Keating refused to endorse Goldwater in 1694, and in responses to insinuations that he was a conservative, insisted that he was just as liberal as his challenger, Robert Kennedy, to whom he lost in November.
Tour typo is absolutely perfect!
R-money retracts, and not withing a week, either. Within this week.
As to what happened to the Republican Party, its left wing was formed of the late 19th and early 20th Century Progressives, (e.g., Theodore Roosevelt). It began amputating that wing around 1912. The amputation was complete by about 1992.
Look, I’m not against prenatal tests, but are we really going to pretend people don’t use the information?
Seriously, that is just pure denial. I’m totally pro-choice, btw.
Other threads about this topic have pointed out that there are a number of uses one can make of the results of an ultrasound besides aborting the fetus at that stage. Sometime prenatal care can make a huge improvement or allow survival.
And Mr Santorum is talking about who gets health insurance for ultrasounds. Those who can pay out of their own pockets can continue to make their pre-natal decisions, whether to abort or otherwise. So the moral issue for him seems to be whether to be poor or not.
My intention was not in any way to defend Santorum. Just for the record.
However, if the ACA ends up meaning that only rich people get prenatal testing, I’ll be very surprised. I guess it’s an empirical question which tests will be covered. I’m just saying that one of the likely results of prenatal testing is in fact a form of eugenics. (Of course that doesn’t mean people should be calling the president names.) I’m not sure it’s wrong, and I’m not even sure what I would do, if I got a bad result. But it is what it is. And it doesn’t mean I don’t like disabled people, either.
Of course people use the information. But they don’t always use it in the way you suggest. I know couples (yes, plural) who opted for prenatal testing, found chromosomal abnormalities and decided to carry to term anyway.
Uncertainty is difficult to deal with, and some people prefer to know earlier rather than later.
Besides which, what business is it of anyone’s but the parents? Is Santorum offering to adopt these infants?
Again, I am pro-choice and I did not say that people “always” do anything in particular. I just don’t like the denial here about what some, or even many, or maybe just a few, may do with certain kinds of information. Nor did I express an opinion on what they should or shouldn’t be doing.
Heck, people practice eugenics starting from the time when they’re deciding whether or not to ask someone out on a date.
what michgan tree say