Assault Weapons: No One Needs Those Guns

On Tuesday night, Rachel Maddow’s guests were the siblings of Newtown shooting victim Victoria Soto, who was a teacher at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Rachel asked Carlos Matthew Soto, brother of Victoria, what he would like to see congress change. “It would probably be the assault weapon ban. Just because, no one needs those guns,” said Soto. “There’s no reason to have them unless your military.”

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Conservatives Believe The Sequester Is Moral

George Lakoff, professor of linguistics at UC Berkeley, has a blunt analysis of conservative support of the automatic spending cuts (the sequester). “They [conservatives] believe that Democracy gives them the liberty to seek their own self-interests by exercising personal responsibility, without having responsibility for anyone else or anyone else having responsibility for them,” says Lakoff. “They take this as a matter of morality. They see the social responsibility to provide for the common good as an immoral imposition on their liberty.”

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Some Republicans Come Out In Favor Of Same-Sex Marriage

As if we needed further evidence that the mainstream Republican Party is out-of-touch with the majority of America, a number of prominent Republicans have signed a legal brief in support of same-sex marriage, denouncing the official party platform. The brief will be used in a case heading to the U.S. Supreme Court arguing against California’s Proposition 8, a ballot-initiative that made same-sex marriage illegal in the state.

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Climate Change False Choice: Jobs Or The Environment

If there is one thing in the debate over climate change that irks me the most, well, after climate change deniers, it’s the false choice of jobs or the environment. Even if addressing climate change meant the loss of thousands or millions of jobs, that would not be a valid reason to do nothing. Yeah, you read that correctly. Let’s simply face facts. We are all selfish about our wants and our needs compared to the wants and needs of future generations. But as recent climate-fueled events like Hurricane Sandy have shown us, not only are future generations at risk, our future is at risk.

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Sequestration: Blame President Obama? – Only Congress Can End It

There’s plenty of talk about who is to blame for the sequestration, the automatic spending cuts set to kick in on Friday. Obama blames congress. Prominent Republican members of congress, like Speaker John Boehner, blame the president. Bob Woodward wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post putting the blame squarely on White House. “My extensive reporting for my book ‘The Price of Politics‘ shows that the automatic spending cuts were initiated by the White House,” said Woodward. It was the “brainchild of [Jack] Lew and White House congressional relations chief Rob Nabors — probably the foremost experts on budget issues in the senior ranks of the federal government.”

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