If a religious institution employs a person who shares their religious doctrine, then there is no conflict of interest, correct?

If a religious institution employs a person who does not share their religious doctrine, then do you think the government should condone that institution forcing their doctrine as it pertains to the health insurance portion of their compensation upon their employee? Why is the health insurance portion somehow different from the salary: if the former is freely restrictable by the employer, why could they not require the employee to, say, not buy any alcohol with their pay?

It's not a matter of religion; it's a matter of protecting employees from having their personal lives directed by their employer.

Unable or unwilling to tell the difference between too much spending and too little revenue caused by the Bush recession, Americans like tbs cheer for the shredding of the social safety net and wish to spend more on their own healthcare premiums to support ERs that currently bear the burden of giving poor-outcome treatment to those who can't afford it. And don't care that Romney has no reply whatsoever to how his budget is an embarrassment to his arithmetic teacher. And for candidates (Ryan) who wish the government to force women to carry their rapists' babies.

Such an institution can freely choose to obey the law and pay a fine (if it is a large enough place) for not offering health insurance at all.

Where is the line to be drawn on religious exemptions in health insurance coverage? What if an employer sincerely believes that cancer doesn't exist; is it alright that they should be able to excise oncology treatment from their health insurance offerings on that basis? If not, then the government is judging the validity of people's religious beliefs.

"The best way to increase dollars to the gov't is by encouraging economic growth in the private sector." - sure, no argument there, but the devil is in the details.

"Obama/Biden have shown they are incapable of managing our government, are divisive and unable to work across party lines" - that's a gross misrepresentation. If there were any good faith on the part of Republicans whatsoever, its leadership would not be saying things like "The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president" (Mitch McConnell); they would not be secretly meeting to obstruct Obama even before he was sworn in (http://swampland.time.com/2012/08/23/the-party-of-no-new-details-on-the-gop-plot-to-obstruct-obama/). It is utterly unreasonable to blame someone for not working with people who are determined to say no to whatever they propose, regardless of its merits.

"They haven't even put a budget on the floor of the Senate since Obama's taken office and the one that Obama proposed in the House got not a single vote from Republicans or Democrats." - spending bills have to originate in the House, so unless they pass one the Senate will see neither hide nor hair of it. Besides, according to Politifact (http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/apr/06/mitt-romney/romney-says-obama-failed-pass-budget/), Obama has without fail submitted a budget to Congress. As for the no yea's, that is explained there too.

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"Where is their plan for saving our safety nets???" - you saw some in the exact same Obamacare that you decry. Medicare is spared from shelling out $716 billion over the next 10 years through its various mechanisms, most notably savings agreed with healthcare providers since they stood to gain from the influx of new patients with new insurance under the new law. Repeal Obamacare - as Romney/Ryan have told us they want to do - and those savings are lost.

"Sandra Fluke is an entitled Georgetown University student, that is most likely on scholarship, buys a daily Starbucks and complains that her Catholic school won't PAY for her birth control pills." - er, perhaps you should tune out the Limbaugh.

"C'mon, your party has become the party of small...arguing about subsidizing Big Bird and Sandra Fluke while this country is headed for a fiscal cliff." - it was Romney who brought up Big Bird. No-one would know Sandra Fluke's name but for the Republican-run House Oversight and Government Reform Committee's refusal to allow her to testify and Rush Limbaugh's slandering of her. You're projecting the Republicans' attempts to distract with these things onto the Democrats, and as a result fall flat on your rhetorical face.

"I also find it highly offensive our leader finds time to be "eye candy" for women on the View" - I'm unfamiliar this issue is I'm afraid; do you have a link?

"and spreads false narratives about how/why our ambassador/navy seals were murdered in Libya." - what false narrative is that? The Benghazi consulate had more Diplomatic Service Agents than had been requested on the night in question (http://www.cnn.com/2012/10/19/world/africa/benghazi-documents/index.html); two of the dead were former SEALs, not active duty ones.

"The only way to SAVE AMERICA is new leadership...and next week the silent majority will get their chance to speak." - as I've said - and you've ignored - Romney is either incapable or unwilling of explaining how his tax cut plans lead to anything other than either a massive middle class tax hike or a budget deficit that would make even Dick Cheney cry. Your statement boils down to "I know Romney must be lying, but I trust him anyway". Which is ridiculous.

1) It's not McConnell's comment that is a problem, nor is it isolated; it is the underlying hostility to any co-operation at all - whether the GOP thought it in the interest of the nation or not. You know what the principal difference is between Obamacare and Romneycare is? Romneycare covers abortions. Obamacare is a GOP policy for crying out loud, but it's only considered bad because he's not a Republican.

2) You just looked at Wikipedia and found that a paper across the country in 2003 once described the TBT as "usually liberal" and apparently that's good enough for you to ignore all the citations Politifact has. I can't help you if you're prepared to ignore citations and direct quotes because the messenger has any link in any way to something that someone once upon a time described using the 'L' word.

3) It's incomplete, to be sure, but Obamacare makes huge strides towards resolving the Medicare Hospital Insurance trust fund (http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=3532). Blanket repeal would be amazingly wrongheaded and bring the date for HI's insolvency towards 2016 - so that's going to affect your over 55's after all. The *only* thing that Romney/Ryan have offered in its stead is the couponization of Medicare, which can only be described as the intending to bankrupt it as soon as possible as private insurers leave the less healthy/unprofitable seniors on the public plan which is left with the same per-capita funding but higher per-capita costs. Nutshell: Obamacare does something positive for Medicare's future stability, Couponcare does the exact opposite, and your conclusion is that _Democrats_ don't have a thoughtful plan?

4) You conveniently ignore my point. The *only* reason these are issues at all is because *Republicans* made them so, so blaming Democrats is bizarre. Big Bird is symbolic of Romney's disconnect from budget realities: somehow eliminating CPB's $400 million or so budget (taking the widest interpretation of his statement) is vital to our nation's fiscal health, but reconsidering pushing $2 trillion onto the Pentagon over its own recommendations is somehow not on the cards.

5) Um... okay.

6) From your RCP link, a conservative author notorious for making things up tells a Glenn Beck outfit that someone alleges that some documents exist that show the President denied requests for additional security; CNN reports a House Oversight Committee member heard two different people describe the security at the time as greater than that requested. Hmm...

On the video front, "We are working to determine the precise motivations and methods of those who carried out this assault. Some have sought to justify this vicious behavior, along with the protest that took place at our Embassy in Cairo yesterday, as a response to inflammatory material posted on the internet." (http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2012/09/197654.htm 9/12/12)

You clearly missed what I was trying to bring across with my phrasing, namely that you were using 'liberal' as a dogwhistle term to dismiss anything associated in even the most tenuous way with it so as to avoid addressing the question at hand.

I'm sorry to have to tell you this, but today's GOP has no conservatives left in its leadership - they're simply a bunch of radicals, the very antithesis of conservativism. Instead of attempting to retain traditional institutions, it's a party that wants to tear down Medicare and the rest of the social safety net contract, send us off a cliff of pollution catastrophe so the world will not be at all similar for our grandchildren, force them to be rapists' child factories and create a Randian society that has no grounding in any traditional value. They have abandoned truth and fact and replaced them with Gish Gallops for political expediency.

These are not conservative policies; they are the policies of _radicals_.

You want know what this country was founded on? You know what the Boston Tea Party was all about? Protesting an unfair tax break given to a powerful entity. If anything at all is American, that is.

I am a conservative, and I reject the GOP radicalism that has tainted the term.