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Nina Easton

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A regular Fox News commentator on Sunday said that teen pregnancies should be "celebrated," and pointed to President Barack Obama's speech to Planned Parenthood and the alleged horrific crimes of abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell as part of "what’s wrong with our culture."

Fortune magazine's Nina Easton told Fox News host Chris Wallace that the Obama administration was in a "tough spot" after a federal judge ruled that women of all ages should have access to emergency contraception like the Plan B morning-after pill, even though the Food and Drug Administration had previously tried to limit access for girls younger than 15.

"I do think there’s a case to be made for conservatives or anybody who cares about the rate of abortions in this country to deregulate birth control more, although I also understand a need for parents to be involved," Easton explained. "One of the things out of all of this news, including the president’s speech to Planned Parenthood and this Gosnell case of murdering babies, is we’re looking at a culture that produces 1.2 million abortions a year. We’re losing sight of that fact."

"I would say that in addition to deregulating birth control, another thing we need to do is celebrate young women who bring a baby to term and find an adoptive parent," she opined. "There’s such a stigma today to being an adoptive birth mom that you’re more willing to admit that you’ve had an abortion than that you are delivering a healthy newborn to a loving family."

"What’s wrong with our culture that that’s where we are today?"

Think Progress' Aviva Shen observed on Sunday that Easton had "offered up Obama’s speech to Planned Parenthood and the Gosnell trial as evidence of how young women who choose to carry babies to term for adoption are being stigmatized."

"Easton glosses over the difficulty involved in maintaining a normal life for 9 months as a pregnant teenager," Shen wrote. "Moreover, birthmothers under 17 are more likely to change their minds about the adoption and keep the baby, making them vulnerable to dropping out of high school and a permanent cycle of poverty that entraps the majority of teen moms."



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From this week's Fox News Sunday, Bloody Bill Kristol tells host Chris Wallace that "everything should be on the table" and we need some "serious hearings" on gun control in the United States after this tragic shooting at the elementary school in Connecticut this week, as long as that doesn't include anything different than what the Republicans support already. He's right there with the more guns will keep us safer crowd here, no matter how he's trying to spin this.

They can have all the hearings they want, but if our politicians are going to continue to be beholden to the nut job running the NRA right now, nothing's going to change and Kristol knows it. That didn't stop him from trying to pretend like he thinks the Republicans should make some meaningful compromises on the issue of gun control as he did here:

WALLACE: Bill, let’s look at this from the Republican point of view. Will Republicans -- should Republicans change or modify their strong opposition to gun control, especially -- not the right to bear arms but, especially on the question of these weapons of mass destruction? You know, as I say, the handgun that could fire five bullets in a second, the magazines 100 rounds. Should Republicans consider giving on that issue?

KRISTOL: I think Republicans and everyone else should take a serious look at what might work. And I think the speaker could well ask the Republican chairman of the Judiciary Committee to hold hearings, but hold serious hearings, about what would work. Don’t do something symbolic like the assault weapons ban, which did no good and made everyone feel good and ended up evaporating and couldn’t be sustained even in a Democratic -- wasn’t restored when the Democrats controlled everything in 2009, 2010.

So I’m totally open to having serious -- and there’s a lot of social science research on gun control. I don’t think it’s very favorable to most efforts of gun control, and I think -- but everything has to be on the table, too. Is it sensible to have gun- free zones? Maybe elementary -- maybe the money would be better spent having security guards than having, you know, new background checks in a case where this -- the purchase of the guns in this case passed background checks.

Connecticut’s a pretty liberal state. I believe the Democratic Party controls all the branches of government in Connecticut. They chose not to ban the things we’re talking about, I guess, right? They could have, couldn’t they?

EASTON: State laws are useless. I mean, you can order things online now. I mean, it’s, sort of...

(CROSSTALK)

WALLACE: He did buy them in the state...

KRISTOL: I’m just saying, let’s have an honest debate. Let’s have a debate about privacy laws and mental health. But I do think the Republican Party shouldn’t be in the position of saying you can’t even discuss this, and I think the speaker could easily ask, since they control one house of Congress -- Senator Reid could do this on the other side, and so they’d have serious hearings about the legal issues and the public policy issues.



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Holy cow, Bill Kristol actually said something two weeks in a row on Fox News Sunday that I agree with -- we don't need to be lowering the corporate tax rates when these companies are sitting on hoards of cash already and are not hiring.

BREAM: Well, if they have such a hard time doing things like getting the continuing resolution, getting a budget done, getting this debt ceiling done, I mean, who thinks they have the appetite for actually tackling the tax code?

EASTON: Actually, as James Baker said to me not long ago, doing that is actually -- you have gives on both sides, because Democrats get to close loopholes and Republicans get a lowering (ph) of the corporate tax rate. So it actually is -- there is a --

(CROSSTALK)

KRISTOL: I'm the only, like, conservative Republican in the country that actually does not think lowering the corporate tax rate is really the key to America's future.

BREAM: You're the one.

KRISTOL: Corporations have trillions of dollars. If the corporate tax rate is such a burden, how come they have all this money? They're not hiring.

The tax rates on labor are much more onerous, in my view, than the tax rates on corporations. But in any case, this is a heterodox view among conservatives. But nonetheless, this is why this deal can't happen in a year.

I mean, there's a lot of debates that have to happen among Republicans. I think Michele Bachmann probably has a slightly different view of our tax future than Mitt Romney, and this isn't going to happen before November, 2012.



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Ah yes... another Sunday, another week where Fox makes sure we get the neo-cons view on spreading democracy in the Middle East. At least the success of these peaceful demonstrations has Bill Kristol and Liz Cheney praising them instead of pushing for dropping more bombs on poor people's heads, for now anyway.

WALLACE: So I think it is fair to say in these first hours after the fall of Mubarak, everyone is saying the right thing. The government says it is going to turn over power to a democratically elected government, that they are going to honor the peace treaty with Israel, and the demonstrators say they're going to go home.

Bill, how confident are you that this is all going to work out and how much influence does the Obama administration have to try to shape events?

KRISTOL: Confident would be an overstatement, I think. It is the Middle East after all, so you have to be foolish to be confident that anything would work out too well, and revolutions do often go off the rail for various reasons.

Having said that, I think basically for the last three or four weeks the skeptics have been proven to be too skeptical. The naysayers who said it could never happen, it's going to be violent, his departure would mean the Muslim Brotherhood taking over the next day or total chaos in the streets of Egypt, they have been proven wrong. And the notion that the Egyptian people have managed to pull off this democratic, peaceful removal of a dictator, and now have a seemingly a pretty stable situation in the streets of Cairo and the other big cities, with the guarantee or at least a promise of a transition to free and fair elections and no real sense that those elections are -- yet that the elections are going to go in some terrible direction for the U.S. or for Egypt itself.

I think this may be a case where the normal worldly pessimism is too pessimistic and the normal cynicism is too cynical, and one has a right to actually be hopeful about these developments in Egypt.

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I guess it's safe to assume that Sarah Palin is definitely going to run for president since Bill Kristol has predicted she won't on this week's Fox News Sunday. Kristol's other predictions; Haley Barbour's racist past won't hurt him and neither will Newt Gingrich's infidelity. Bloody Bill also thinks that Newt Gingrich and get this... Mike Pence are going to be formidable candidates. Yeah, that intellectual powerhouse Mike Pence.

I guess Kristol thinks formidable means you're really good at mindlessly reciting Republican talking points ad nauseum because Mike Pence doesn't know how to do much else.



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Nina Easton, Ms. Fortune Magazine spokesperson on ClusterFox who I'm quite sure has never had to worry about where her next meal is coming from warned all of us about the dangers of extending unemployment benefits for all of those lucky son of a guns who are living high off the hog from their unemployment benefits. In the world of the Nina Easton's out there, we shouldn't be extending those benefits because those lazy good for nothing workers are just happy to keep collecting their government check rather than, you know, trying to find a job that actually might pay a living wage.

I find it hard to imagine that workers out there who have a chance at making a decent living in another city aren't already moving and that anyone who had a job offer for a wage comparable to what they were making hasn't already moved rather than Easton's scenario of them sitting on their unemployment benefits before doing so. Her ridiculous analogy might be true if there were a lot of jobs to be found out there.

Easton just proves herself to be another heartless Republican that would rather call unemployed Americans lazy and willing to live off of the government rather than to admit that the GOP policies of outsourcing and the refusal of Republicans along with some ConservaDems to properly stimulate the economy have left them unemployed where they're needing the help in the first place.

Easton apparently knew her comments might generate some hate mail and tried to temper that with saying she understood unemployment benefits are "not cushy". Yeah, that makes you accusing people of sitting on their asses with this horrid job market all better Nina. I don't think so. If you get some hate mail for your comments, it's deserved. Most people in this country don't have the benefit of drawing your type of wingnut welfare where standing up for the poor downtrodden rich pays so well.

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Brit Hume Minimizes How Bad the Gulf Oil Spill Is

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After the panel on Fox News Sunday spending some time opining about how bad the Gulf oil spill disaster is going to be for the Obama administration and the MMS under Ken Salazar without managing to mention the name Dick Cheney, Brit Hume does his best to try to minimize how bad the spill actually is. Think Progress has more on Hume's hackery.

Brit Hume Shrugs Off Oil Spill: ‘Where Is The Oil?’:

This morning, Fox News anchor Brit Hume scoffed at the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, wondering, “Where is the oil?” Hume followed the lead of Rush Limbaugh and Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour (R), who have been aggressively downplaying the disaster and bristling at comparisons to the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill. During the Fox News Sunday roundtable, Hume dismissed the expert analysis that many times more oil have spilled already than the Exxon Valdez disaster, a point raised by fellow panelist Juan Williams.

...Independent experts, using both surface and subsea estimates, believe the vast sea of oil gushing from multiple leaks on the seabed surpassed the Exxon Valdez weeks ago. “Scientists are finding enormous oil plumes in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico, including one as large as 10 miles long, 3 miles wide and 300 feet thick in spots.” “The millions of gallons of crude, and the introduction of chemicals to disperse it, have thrown this underwater ecosystem into chaos, and scientists have no answer to the question of how this unintended and uncontrolled experiment in marine biology and chemistry will ultimately play out. ” Read on...

Hume's idea of an "adult conversation" is apparently lying through one's teeth.

Transcript via Lexis Nexis below the fold.

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Kristol cheers 'use of force' to delay Iranian nukes

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The Obama administration should be seriously considering a strike on Iran, according to Fox News contributor Bill Kristol. A Israeli Deputy Defense Minister said last week that he expected Israel would have to attack Iran within a year. Kristol believes it would be better for the US to attack first.

"I think we have to have a credible threat of force and the preparation to use force against Iran. It would be much better if we used force against -- to delay the Iranian nuclear program than if Israel did and there is no evidence that the US government is being at all serious about the use force there," Kristol told Fox News' Chris Wallace Sunday.

Nina Easton, also appearing on the Fox News Sunday panel, quickly rebuked Kristol. "Use of force. You say that so blithely as if use of force -- what happens the next day after the use of force?" she asked.

"Look, precisely because the consequences are so serious whether we use force or Israel uses force, a serious and responsible US government must think that through and play that out," responded Kristol. "I would say the Obama administration is so adverse to even hinting at the use of force that we don't have the kinds of preparations we should have if Israel were to strike."



McConnell: Mass. race a 'referendum' on health care

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Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell told Fox News' Brit Hume that the Senate race in Massachusetts is a referendum on the Democrats' health care reform legislation. "Massachusetts is going to be a very, very close Senate race. Regardless of who wins, we have a referendum on the national health care bill. The American people are telling us please don't pass it," McConnell explained.

Following the interview with McConnell, other Fox News pundits spoke up to agree. "The voters are aware it's a national referendum on the health care bill and Obama big government liberal programs," said Bill Kristol.

"It's a referendum on health care and the Obama agenda," agreed Charles Krauthammer.