Hence why Rachel Maddow should moderate a debate, and not John King. Ask a question that matters!!!!

Who knew a Mormon would be the most sensible GOP presidential candidiate? No, I’m not talking about Mit Romney. I’m talking about Jon Hunstman! After Rick Perry made comments about global warming being an unproven theory John Huntsman tweeted “To be clear. I believe in evolution, and trust scientists on global warming. Call me crazy.” Not only intelligent, but snarky. I like it! Huntsman made further comments about his tweet on This Week saying:

“The minute that the Republican Party becomes the party — the anti-science party, we have a huge problem. We lose a whole lot of people who would otherwise allow us to win the election in 2012. When we take a position that isn’t willing to embrace evolution, when we take a position that basically runs counter to what 98 of 100 climate scientists have said … about what is causing climate change and man’s contribution to it, I think we find ourselves on the wrong side of science, and, therefore, in a losing position.”

These remarks come after John Huntsman was the only GOP candidate to openly support civil unions for gays and lesbians at the Republican debate that was held a couple weeks ago.

I like you, John Huntsman! If I were a Republican, I would vote for you. Hell, if you were a Democrat I might vote for you. Unfortunately for you logic and reason are not virtues held in high esteem by the Republican party. You are a minority, John Huntsman, and that is sad. It is sad that supported and probable theories like evolution and climate change are looked down upon. I wish someone would explain science to Rick Perry, Michele Bachman, and Mit Romney. Then they might know that you can never prove a theory. You can only support or refute a theory. A theory is either likely to be true or unlikely to be true.

By David A. Fahrenthold, Wednesday, August 17, 7:39 AM

If the House ran America, what would America look like?

It would no longer have a far-reaching health-care law. The House voted to repeal that legislation in January.

It would no longer have federal limits on greenhouse gases. The House voted to ax them in April.

And it would not have three government programs for homeowners who are in trouble on their mortgages. The House voted to end them all.

These and many other changes are included in an ambitious slate of more than 80 bills that have passed since Republicans took control of the chamber this year.

Most of these measures will die in the Democrat-controlled Senate. Still, they are a revealing kind of vision statement — the first evidence of how a tea-party-influenced GOP would like to reshape the country.

That vision is aimed at dismantling some Democratic priorities. The GOP’s philosophy holds that paring back an expensive and heavy-handed government bureaucracy would help restore the country’s financial footing and give private businesses the freedom to grow and create jobs.

After seven months, it is still only half a vision.

On major issues such as health care, climate change and bad mortgages, the House has affirmed that fixes are needed — if it can ever manage to repeal the old ones.

It hasn’t said exactly what those changes should be.

“The Republican Party is sort of united in terms of what they’re against. But there’s not a great deal of consensus right now in terms of what they’re for,” said Michael D. Tanner, a senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute and an expert on health-care reform and recent GOP history.

This month, a divided Congress finally staggered into its summer recess. Its business has been split between the terrifyingly urgent — including standoffs that threatened a government shutdown and a national debt default — and the purely theoretical.

The theoretical part has come because neither the House nor the Senate is likely to approve big ideas dreamed up by the other. The Democrat-held Senate has reacted to this by withdrawing into legislative hibernation.

House Republicans have instead been passing bills that tell a story — about the country they want but can’t quite get.

“The new House Republican majority was voted into office to change the way Washington does business and make the government accountable to the American people once again. Our agenda has reflected these goals,” said Laena Fallon, a spokeswoman forHouse Majority Leader Eric Cantor (Va.).

But even within the Republican ranks, there is a desire for more details about the party’s vision for replacing Democratic policies.

Rep. Trey Gowdy (S.C.) said the GOP must put forward its own solutions on issues such as health care, job creation and mortgage assistance. He said he is not convinced that there is a need to take on climate change in the same way.

“Being the party of ‘no’ . . . is an appropriate response” in some cases, Gowdy said. “It’s not appropriate when you’ve been extensively critical of someone else’s ideas” and have none to replace them, he said.

“For substance reasons, and for credibility reasons, we also need to have a comprehensive . . . alternative that goes beyond saying, ‘Your plan is bad,’ ” Gowdy said.

The best-known part of the House’s vision has to do with spending. The chamber passed a budget that calls for a Medicare overhaul that would force new recipients to buy private insurance after 2022. It also passed, with five Democratic backers, a bill thatdemanded a balanced budget amendment: essentially, a spending limit written into the Constitution.

But the House’s measures have gone far beyond the budget.

It has passed legislation to forbid new energy-efficiency standards for light bulbs and to punish shining a laser pointer at an airplane in flight. It voted to take away federal funding for National Public Radio and for public financing of presidential campaigns.

The House also took a stand against President Obama on the military campaign in Libya, rejecting a motion to approve U.S. involvement. And it voted to rein in Environmental Protection Agency efforts against “mountaintop-removal coal mines” by requiring the EPA to defer to decisions by state regulators.

On three major issues, the House seemed to acknowledge that simply repealing a Democratic idea might not be enough — and that it did not have its own solutions.

On Jan. 19, for instance, 242 Republicans and three Democrats voted to repeal the landmark health-care law.

In place of the legislation, Republicans had said they would craft their own solutions for problems involving high costs and the denial of coverage for preexisting conditions. Their slogan, outlined in last fall’s Pledge to America, was “Repeal and Replace.”

No replacement has occurred.

A bill that would limit liability in malpractice lawsuits has passed in committee. Other ideas are being developed, aides said.

On climate change, the EPA is requiring larger power plants and industrial facilities to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to obtain new permits.

But many in Congress worried that the effort would drive up energy prices and kill jobs. So in April, 236 House Republicans and 19 Democrats voted to make the EPA stop in its tracks.

In place of regulations, they approved only a vaguely worded “sense of the Congress” about climate change.

“There is established scientific concern over warming of the climate system,” the bill says. It adds that Congress should attack the problem “by developing policies that do not adversely affect the American economy, energy supplies, and employment.”

But how? When? The measure doesn’t say.

And it doesn’t need to, said Tim Phillips, president of the conservative group Americans for Prosperity. He said his group thinks that simply repealing this legislation — and the health-care law — is enough for now.

“The big-government assault [has been] so damaging to the economy and the government. They’re doing the right thing by just trying to stop and reverse,” Phillips said.

Environmental groups have said that the House’s bill would leave the nation powerless to fight an escalating global problem.

“They clearly aren’t going to pass any legislation themselves that would address that pollution,” said Dan Lashof of the Natural Resources Defense Council.

The House also has voted to eliminate three federal programs meant to aid homeowners in danger of foreclosure. Two help modify loans to create lower payments. The third gives no-interest loans to borrowers who are in trouble. All have been criticized for moving too slowly and helping too few.

In March, the House decided to do away with them. The Congressional Budget Office said that doing so could save taxpayers $2.4 billion.

“None of the programs . . . have been successful,” Michael Steel, a spokesman for House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio), wrote in a statement.

© The Washington Post Company

By Zachary A. Goldfarb and Peter Wallsten,  Updated: Wednesday, August 17, 8:45 PM

ALPHA, Ill. — President Obama has decided to press Congress for a new round of stimulus spending and tax cuts as he seeks to address the great domestic policy quandary of his tenure: how to spur job growth in an age of austerity.

Obama will lay out a series of ideas in a major address right after Labor Day, when he and
a largely antagonistic Congress will return from vacation, the White House said Wednesday.

The president is thinking about proposing tax cuts for companies that hire workers, new spending for roads and construction, and other measures that would target the long-term unemployed, according to administration officials and other people familiar with the matter. Some ideas, such as providing mortgage relief for struggling homeowners, could come through executive action.

Obama also plans to announce a major push for new deficit reduction, urging the special congressional committee formed in the debt-ceiling deal this month to identify even more savings than the $1.5 trillion it has been tasked with finding.

In packaging the two, he will make the case that short-term spending can lead to long-term savings.

“We can’t afford to just do one or the other. We’ve got to do both,” Obama said Wednesday in this farming town in northwestern Illinois, population 671, the last stop of his three-day bus tour through the rural Midwest.

He did not reveal details. But his remarks and additional comments from advisers and others familiar with the White House’s planning suggest that he will pressure Republican lawmakers this fall to back off their objections to additional spending in the short term. Many Democrats have expressed frustration that the White House allowed Republicans during the debt-ceiling negotiations to focus solely on deficit reduction while not pushing harder for steps that would energize the economy.

“When Congress gets back in September, my basic argument to them is this: We should not have to choose between getting our fiscal house in order and jobs and growth,” Obama said in an earlier stop Wednesday in Atkinson, Ill.

The president’s decision to lay out a jobs plan — announced on the final day of his bus tour — follows months of criticism from lawmakers in both parties that the White House has not addressed the country’s stubbornly high unemployment rate.

The issue is consistently a top concern for voters, and with 15 months to go before Obama stands for reelection, polls show deep disappointment in his handling of the economy.

A Gallup poll released Wednesday showed that just 26 percent of Americans approve of the president’s handling of the economy. More than a third, according to a Washington Post-ABC News survey last month, said he has made economic matters worse.

Deficit reduction

Compounding the White House’s challenge is the fact that many voters, particularly independents, who have been turning their backs on the president in recent surveys, want to see serious deficit reduction — a goal that might seem at odds with any program to boost spending.

Republican lawmakers signaled Wednesday that they are unlikely to embrace any new spending.

“We must put an end to the policy uncertainty constantly being driven by this administration,” House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (Va.) wrote in a memo to colleagues. “That means stopping the discussions of new stimulus spending with money that we simply do not have.”

The question hanging over Obama’s economic speech next month is how far he will go beyond the ideas he has already proposed, including the renewal of a payroll tax cut and the passage of three free-trade bills.

White House officials have largely reached a consensus that the president should propose more steps to help the economy, but that the American public doesn’t have an appetite for heavy federal spending and that Congress is unlikely to a pass anything new of significant ambition.

At a corn seed factory on Wednesday in Atkinson, Obama touched on an idea that could be under consideration: an overhaul of unemployment insurance that would make the program more flexible, pay for job training and pay companies to hire jobless workers. The federal government in the past has tried, with mixed success, to spur hiring through a special tax cut.

A wide range of independent economists agree that the best prescription for the ailing recovery is pairing efforts to boost the economy now, which would include spending increases and tax cuts, with efforts to tame the national debt over the coming decade, through spending cuts and tax increases when the economy is in better shape.

White House allies, many of whom have pushed Obama in recent weeks to focus on job creation, said Wednesday that the president faces a stiff political test in explaining to voters the merits of short-term spending and long-term reduction of the federal deficit.

“That’s not that easy from a public relations perspective, but the imperative is to change the debate to job creation,” said John Podesta, president of the liberal Center for American Progress.

Rep. Chris Van Hollen (Md.), one of six Democrats on the newly formed “supercommittee” that will try to find ways to cut the debt, said Obama will have to “clearly articulate why those twin goals work together and why they do not work at cross purposes.”

He added: “The good news is that the American people seem to be in the same place that the right policy would dictate. Clearly they want to focus on jobs and the economy, but they also recognize the need to develop a long-term plan to reduce the deficit.”

Obama faces pressure from his own base. On Wednesday, a leading member of the Congressional Black Caucus lashed out at him for not visiting any black communities during his bus trip. The comments from Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), coming at a caucus jobs event in Detroit, illustrated the brewing tensions between African American political leaders and the first black president over black unemployment, which now tops 16 percent.

“We’re getting tired,” Waters said, according to a video taken at the public forum and published by the Web site TheGrio.com. “We want to give the president every opportunity to show what he can do and what he’s prepared to lead on. . . . But our people are hurting. The unemployment is unconscionable. We don’t know what the strategy is.”

Obama’s challenges

Obama’s performance during the bus tour illustrated the multiple challenges he faces — and the multiple messages he’s seeking to deliver.

At times, he struck the pose of an above-it-all leader urging Washington to compromise on a “balanced” agreement to cut the nation’s debt. Other times, he was a partisan infighter attacking the 2012 Republican presidential candidates and Congress. At times, he adopted the role of an everyman coming to the heartland to hear what locals had to say.

“You’ll hear a lot of folks . . . say that government is broken. Well, government and politics are two different things,” Obama said in Cannon Falls, Minn., on the first day. “Government is Social Security.  Government are teachers in the classroom. Government are our firefighters and our police officers.”

The next day, at a rural economic forum in northeastern Iowa, he expressed a more limited view of Washington.

“America is going to come back from this recession stronger than before,” he said. “I’m also convinced that comeback isn’t going to be driven by Washington.”

In the end, he said later in the day, “it’s not either-or.”

Wallsten reported from Washington. Staff writers David Nakamura and Peyton Craighill in Washington contributed to this report.

© The Washington Post Company

Ezra Klein says that the media needs to spend less time on “dumb things that don’t matter.” I say there’s nothing wrong with making fun of these fools rallying for votes. Especially when they are full of hatred and discrimination i.e. Michele Bachman! It’s funny, and there is 24 hours of air-time that needs to be fill up.