Shoppers more important than tax breaks

Jeremy Hooper, writing in his personal blog, looks forward to Newt Gingrich being the GOP prez. nominee. Newt, on his third, marriage, would put the Fundies and the GOP into such a conniption that it would advance the cause of marriage equality.



Way back in June when New York legalized gay marriage, Janice Daniels put a derogatory sentence on her Facebook page. Not many people noticed and she was elected to be mayor of Troy (one of the nice suburbs outside of Detroit). It is only now that bad sentence is getting airtime. Ms. Daniels is upset over the firestorm (annoyed that gays won't forgive her), but has not apologized. That made for some tense times in a recent city council meeting where 80 residents -- including lots of students -- lined up to speak in protest. Timothy Kincaid of Box Turtle Bulletin provides some insight.



Last Monday Andrea Seabrook of NPR talked to people in Cincinnati about what they think of Congress and its abysmally low approval rating. One comment caught my attention. She talked to Danny Korman, who owns a small business and is supposed to be someone who doesn't want his taxes raised. Seabrook's summary of Korman's comments:

"It's more important to Korman that lots and lots of shoppers have money in their pockets to spend, than that he gets a tax break."

The United Health Foundation has released a ranking of states according to how healthy their citizens are. Top 5: Vermont, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Hawaii, and Massachusetts. What attracted my attention (and that of Rob Tisinai) to the list? Four of the five are marriage equality states. The other two states, New York and Iowa, are in the top ten. Hawaii has civil unions that are gay marriage in all but the name.

Yes, Tisinai warns, correlation is not causation. There could be other factors at work. But there is a reason for bringing it up. The National Organization for marriage has been trumpeting a different list to make the claim that anti-gay laws don't impact business in a state. Of the top 5 states for income growth -- Wyoming, North Dakota, Louisiana, Montana, and Oklahoma -- four have marriage protection amendments and the fifth doesn't have gay marriage.

And that claim is just as bogus as the first one.




The German magazine Der Spiegel has an article describing the GOP prez. candidates. Run it through Google Translator and the fractured English has just about the right absurdity to capture the bunch. "Even Cain is a caricature of content." Then scroll down to comment #4.