Sahil Kapur looks at what Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia once said about the role of religious liberty, and how he’ll have to jump through some jurisprudence hoops to attack Obamacare’s birth control mandate.
Chris Christie’s own investigation finds that he did nothing wrong in the Bridgegate scandal.
Sarah Erdreich: “This attempt to legislate the private lives and choices of others ignores the reality that giving women and men greater control over their reproductive health is good public health policy.”
Remember the Democratic freakout over Obamacare that was supposed to happen following the Republican win in the Florida special congressional election earlier this month? Weeks later, it still hasn’t happened.
MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski totally shuts down co-host Joe Scarborough’s speculation about the missing Malaysia airplane: “If you want to go to a network that has theories about Pakistan just blared across for hours and hours and hours, you’ve got many choices out there.”
What if you could get science to back your rather unscientific views by buying up a place on a college campus? That’s what the Koch brothers are doing at Boston’s Suffolk University, writes MIT’s Frank Ackerman.
Lin-Fan Wang takes on the danger of giving science and religion equal weight in the fight over the birth control mandate. Wang, a doctor who practices family medicine in the Bronx, writes: “The news coverage of the birth control benefit has been riddled with inaccurate statements, in particular, the allegations that the law requires coverage of abortifacients (medicine that causes abortion) or that the science is unclear on whether the FDA-approved contraceptives are abortifacients.”
This email comes from reader SM on North Carolina Senate candidate and state House Speaker Thom Tillis (R) and the recent discovery of inconsistency in his college credentials:
Although I’m not a native North Carolinian, I moved to NC 10 years ago following law school. My impression, FWIW…
So I have a confession. When I first saw a few weeks ago that the NRA was opposing President Obama’s nominee for surgeon general, I didn’t take it all that seriously. After all, the job has so little if anything to do with guns. I dismissed it as little more than a fundraising pitch for the organization.
By now, it’s clear the NRA has at least damaged if not destroyed the President’s chances of getting his nominee confirmed by the Senate. But as TPM’s Sahil Kapur points out, the nation’s largest gun lobby isn’t going satisfied with merely a win on this one. After more than a year of fighting tooth-and-nail at both the federal and state levels, it wants a win so massive that no one will doubt its prowess, no matter the issue.