Murkowski Becomes First GOP Senator To Co-Sponsor Dem Voting Rights Act Bill

Source: TPM

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) became the first Republican senator to sign on to Senate Democrats' legislation to restore a piece of the Voting Rights Act, The Nation's Ari Berman noted Thursday.

The bill addresses the Supreme Court's 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision, which gutted a provision of the Voting Rights Act that required certain states and localities to get changes to their voting laws pre-approved by the federal government. Called the Voting Rights Advancement Act of 2015, the proposal would bring back those requirement for states and localities that have had certain number of voting rights violations in a given period.

As University of California, Irvine law professor Rick Hasen noted on his election law blog, the Democrats began pushing the Senate legislation after a weaker House version with some Republicans' support failed to gain traction.

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Read more: http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/murkowski-voting-rights-bill

Huckabee: Dred Scott Decision 'Remains To This Day The Law Of The Land'

Source: TPM

Republican presidential candidate and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee said on Wednesday that the Supreme Court decision that upheld slavery "remains to this day the law of the land."

Huckabee appeared on conservative radio host Michael Medved's show to defend Kentucky county clerk Kim Davis, who went to jail for contempt of court after refusing to issue same-sex marriage licenses. The former governor compared the Supreme Court's recent decision to legalize same sex marriage to the Dred Scott decision, which upheld slavery.

“Michael, the Dred Scott decision of 1857 still remains to this day the law of the land which says that black people aren’t fully human," he told the radio host. "Does anybody still follow the Dred Scott Supreme Court decision?”

Medved corrected Huckabee, noting that the Dred Scott ruling was later overturned by a constitutional amendment. “Well the Dred Scott decision was overturned by the 13th amendment and if you go look at the Lincoln-Douglas debates in 1858 right after the Dred Scott decision was adjudicated, Governor — and seriously it’s right there — Lincoln says, ‘we must respect this decision as the will of the court but I think it was wrongly decided and now we must overcome it.’"

(Medved got his history wrong — the 13th amendment abolished slavery, but the 14th amendment overturned the Supreme Court decision.)

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Read more: http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/mike-huckabee-dred-scott-still-law

PHOTOS: Kim Davis Memes Just Keep Getting Better

Second Oregon Judge Stops Performing Weddings After Gay Marriage Ruling

Source: TPM

A second Oregon judge reportedly stopped performing marriages after a federal court struck down the state's ban on gay marriage, citing his personal religious beliefs. Washington County Judge Thomas Kohl told The Oregonian he made the "personal choice" after a federal judge overturned the ban last year.

"Last summer for personal faith-based reasons, I decided to not perform weddings as a judge," Kohl wrote in an email to The Oregonian. The judge has long been known for public displays of faith, and has performed weddings for years, according to the paper.

The news comes days after a state ethics investigation into another anti-gay marriage judge found Marion County Judge Vance Day displayed a photo of Adolf Hitler in the county courthouse. Day was the first Oregon judge to say publicly that he would not marry gay couples because of his religious beliefs.

Under Oregon state law, judges, county clerks, and other officials can perform weddings but are not required to, casting uncertainty on the legality of Kohl's decision. Rowan County, Kentucky clerk Kim Davis has led a highly publicized battle against granting marriage licenses to gay couples, and spent five days in jail for repeatedly refusing to comply with federal law.

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Read more: http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/thomas-kohl-washington-county-stops-weddings

Huckabee Admits Staffer Physically Blocked Ted Cruz From Kim Davis Rally Stage

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee painted fellow GOP presidential candidate Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) as an unwelcome guest at a rally for Kentucky clerk Kim Davis Tuesday, admitting that his staffer physically blocked Cruz from getting on stage.

In a Wednesday appearance on NewsMax TV's "Steve Malzberg Show" first reported by BuzzFeed's Andrew Kaczynski, Huckabee said his campaign planned the event, and he made Cruz's visit with Davis possible.

"Well, Steve, this was our event. My team put it together. We’re the ones who recruited the people not only to be on the program, but we’re the ones who coordinated the effort. We’re the ones who secured the permits, the staging," Huckabee told Malzberg. "We had no idea Ted Cruz was going to show up until the day before and he didn’t call us, he called several other people on the program and asked about it.”

While Huckabee said "anybody's welcome" to attend a free rally, Cruz is "not free to come to an event that we’re putting together and invite himself on the program anymore than I could go a few weeks ago to his event in Des Moines and just show up and expect to be a speaker. It’s real simple." Huckabee went on to say he made a jail visit with Davis possible for Cruz, calling the move "pretty gracious."

Cruz was relegated to the wings during the event, and his planned visit with an incarcerated Davis fizzled. Huckabee took center stage at the rally, not leaving the defiant clerk's side while on stage.

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http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/huckabee-blocked-cruz-kim-davis-rally

Poll: Donald Trump Becomes First GOP Candidate To Top 30 Percent

Source: TPM/CNN

The support of celebrity tycoon Donald Trump's presidential campaign has reached 32 percent nationwide, according to a poll released Thursday morning.

This made Trump the first Republican candidate to bypass 30 percent and he now leads former neurosurgeon Dr. Ben Carson by 13 points. The CNN/ORC poll found Trump has almost tripled his support since launching his campaign in June.

Carson landed in second place at 19 percent — at 10-point jump in support. No other candidate polled in double digits, according to the new poll.

The poll was conducted among 1,012 Americans, 474 of whom were registered voters who self-identified as Republicans or Republican-leaning independents, from Sept 4 to 8. The margin of error among Republican voters was plus or minus 4.5 percent.

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Read more: http://talkingpointsmemo.com/polltracker/donald-trump-ben-carson-cnn-poll-september

Gohmert Vows To Quit Congress And Await 'Nuclear Holocaust' If Iran Deal Passes

Source: TPM

Conservative pundit Glenn Beck said Tuesday that he had received an email from Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) vowing to quit his Congress if the Iran deal went through.

Beck read the email on air during his radio show.

"I just got an email from Louie Gohmert. He said, 'Last week, I announced to the world if the House and Senate will treat Iran — the Iran treaty as a treaty, I will not run for my congressional seat again. It’s the only thing that I have left that our leadership wants beside my integrity,'" Beck said.

President Obama's nuclear deal with Iran had been opposed by some GOPers and 2016 Republican presidential candidates. On Tuesday, it was announced that Obama had enough votes to prevent the Senate from passing a measure disapproving the deal.

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Read more: http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/louie-gohmert-glenn-beck-iran

'Wrong Then, Wrong Now': White House Video Rips Cheney For Iran Deal Criticism

Timed to a speech given by former Vice President Dick Cheney slamming President Obama's Iran deal, the White House released a video highlighting Cheney's continual defense of the Iraq war.

The two-and-a-half-minute video titled "Former Vice President Dick Cheney: Wrong Then, Wrong Now" -- which was featured prominently on the White House homepage Tuesday -- spares no punches.

It begins with a Fox News host asking Cheney last week why anyone who believes Cheney was wrong on Iraq should listen to him about the Iran deal.

"Because I was right about Iraq," Cheney said.

It then segues into the abundant news clips from the run-up to Iraq War in which Cheney offers scores of claims first urging then defending military action -- from touting the presence of weapons of mass destruction to predicting that Iraqis would great American troops "as liberators."

Colin Powell: Iran Deal is "Pretty Good"

Source: TDB/NBC

During a segment of NBC's "Meet the Press" Sunday, former Secretary of State Colin Powell endorsed the Iran Deal on the table. "It's a pretty good deal," he said. He addressed the concern that the deal would allow Iran to get a nuclear weapon faster saying that people "forgetting the reality that (Iranian leaders) have been on a superhighway, for the last 10 years, to create a nuclear weapon or a nuclear weapons program, with no speed limit." Powell thinks the deal will move forward even if Congress doesn't end up agreeing. "Even if we were to kill the deal — which is not going to happen — it's going to take effect anyway, because all of these other countries that were in it with us are going to move forward," he said.

Read it at NBC News

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Read more: http://www.thedailybeast.com/cheats/2015/09/06/colin-powell-iran-deal-is-pretty-good.html

Is Hillary Clinton getting the ‘woman treatment’ from the national media?

NEWSWEEK
06 SEP 2015 AT 09:23 ET

Hillary Clinton’s Woman Problem Explained

September 5, 2015
Nina Burleigh

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It is a common female problem: Women in the public eye are much more likely to be asked to protect and project authenticity than men in comparable positions. Watching her performance with Andrea Mitchell, I was reminded of another televised spectacle in which media and armchair psychoanalysts the world over subjected a woman to an authenticity test. Before her acquittal this year, Amanda Knox, female—younger, less famous and certainly less practiced in the art of facing TV cameras—was found to be inauthentic in her public persona.

Clinton confronts the same sort of challenge every day. Some of that has to do with her personality, the long history in the protective crouch she assumed as the controversial first working-wife first lady being lied to by an unfaithful husband.

But no one knows how a woman with real power is supposed to speak or look to be “authentic,” for the simple reason that women haven’t held much power. As arguably the most powerful political female in the United States, Clinton is sui generis. There’s never been another woman—an avowed feminist, no less—this close to running the only global superpower. She treads uncharted ground every day, making it up along with her legion of advisers. And commentators and viewers apply their own meaning to every move she makes.

Is she real? Is she a fake? What did she really mean? Already this year she’s been subjected to least two body language assessments—ludicrous analyses that, as far as I can tell, no one has yet applied to the male candidates.

After her April U.N. news conference—the first devoted to the issue of the emails—Business Insider found a body language expert to hunt for the nonverbal cues in her hand, facial tic and eye movement.

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http://www.rawstory.com/2015/09/is-hillary-clinton-getting-the-woman-treatment-from-the-national-media/