Marriage Amendment Wins BIG In North Carolina While Obama ‘Wins’ Really, REALLY Small In NC’s And WV’s Democrat Primaries

To frame what follows into proper perspective, North Carolina is a state that Obama won in 2008.

As Joe Biden told America that he and basically his boss couldn’t tell the difference between a mother and father and their children and a pair of gay guys holding hands, this is what just happened in North Carolina (as of the most recent count, the amendment passed by a 61-39% vote).

I’m posting the MSNBC version because you can almost hear the whining tone:

North Carolina marriage amendment could impact gay and straight couples
By Miranda Leitsinger, msnbc.com

Updated at 10:30 p.m. ET: North Carolina voters approved a constitutional amendment Tuesday night banning gay marriage and – going a step further than most other states with an anti-gay marriage amendment – scrapping civil unions for gay and straight couples.

The state becomes the last southern state to approve an anti-gay marriage amendment and joins 30 others with similar measures. Incomplete returns Tuesday night showed the amendment passing by 60 percent of the vote.

The amendment, also known as Amendment 1, would make marriage the only legal domestic union that would be valid in the state. But opponents say the measure is unnecessary because a state statute has banned gay marriage in North Carolina since 1996. They say domestic partners – both straight and gay – and their children could lose health benefits.

Making this a constitutional amendment was important, said Rachel Lee, a spokeswoman for Vote For Marriage NC, because “those statutes are vulnerable to the will of an activist judge or future legislature who could overturn the law with a single court ruling or by a single vote of the legislature.”

Lee watched the election results at a party in Raleigh with grassroots coordinators and coalition members. When it became clear the amendment had passed, they cut a vanilla wedding cake topped with a figurine of a bride and groom.

“If you looked at a map of our country, you saw North Carolina as the only one in the southeast without an amendment preserving marriage between a man and a woman,” Lee said after the results had come in. “North Carolina had a target on her back.”

Half of Americans support gay marriage in new Gallup Poll

To overturn the amendment approved Tuesday night, the legislature would have to overrule the amendment by a three-fifths vote and get voter approval. Before the amendment passed, a judge or legislative majority could have overturned the statute.

“This puts up a bigger barrier,” said John Dinan, a political science professor at Wake Forest University.

Dinan said the amendment was introduced after Republicans won a majority in both houses of the state legislature in 2010.

“It’s been a pretty easy win in every southern state,” Dinan said. “It never got to the ballot in North Carolina because Democratic legislatures never let it get there.”

Dinan said the amendment’s impacts would not be immediate.

“The one place it could make a difference is in eight or nine cities in North Carolina that give out insurance benefits to same-sex couples,” Dinan said. “Lawyers might have to start taking a real close look at those insurance benefits that are given out and they might have to change those.”

Melissa and Libby Hodges of Durham could be among those affected by the amendment. They worry their 5-year-old daughter may lose her health benefits, as she is covered by Libby, who cannot legally adopt her. By Tuesday afternoon, the moms had filled out paperwork for private insurance.

Jeremy Kennedy, campaign manager for Protect All NC Families said he worries that the eight or nine cities that currently offer domestic partnership benefits to public employees may drop those benefits if the amendment passes.

“We know the consequences that we’re listing, but there’s a whole bunch of unintended consequences that we probably haven’t even thought of yet that will come up in the courts after this,” Kennedy said.

Thomas Peters, cultural director of the National Organization for Marriage, which supports the amendment, said children of gay parents in other states where similar amendments have passed have not lost their health insurance. He said he doubts that would happen in North Carolina.

Lee said the amendment would “in no way impact domestic violence protections, child custody or end of life desires.” 

Voting began early Tuesday on the marriage amendment and candidate races in the 2012 primary, but 512,000 people – or 8 percent of registered voters – already have participated through absentee ballot, according to the State Board of Elections. That record turnout surpassed even the 2008 primary, which included Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton on the ballot, according to Democracy North Carolina.

Several high-profile figures – from former President Bill Clinton to evangelist Billy Graham – and national advocacy groups have weighed in on the amendment.

“We’re having a great debate about marriage in this country, and it’s not at all settled about which way we’re going to go,” said Thomas Peters, cultural director of the National Organization for Marriage, which supports the amendment.

In only one of the 30 states is the constitutional amendment facing a challenge: In California, where a federal judge’s decision to overturn it was set aside pending appellate review. The last state to approve a constitutional amendment was in 2008. Eight states and the District of Columbia allow same-sex marriage.

But the Human Rights Campaign, which works on equal rights for the LGBT community, said that backing for anti-gay marriage measures was falling over time, citing statistics that showed the percentage of defeat at the ballot box dropping from 2004 to 2008.

Back in Durham, Libby and Melissa Hodges are debating whether to move to another state, where gay marriage would be legal.

They moved to North Carolina from Georgia in part because at the time, North Carolina allowed gay partners to adopt their children. That is no longer legal.

“My brother said, ‘If the amendment passes, North Carolina will be more backward than Georgia, will you move back to Georgia then?’” Melissa Hodges said. “I said, ‘You’re so wonderfully sweet, but no.’”

But leaving North Carolina would be hard. Both are city planners close to being vested in the state’s pension plan. Selling their home would be difficult, Melissa Hodges added, and their daughter was accepted into their first-choice kindergarten. Plus, another move would take her away from her brother, with whom she is close.

On Tuesday night, the Hodges watched the results online after putting their daughter to bed.

“She asked us before we put her to bed to make sure to tell her in the morning that we won,” Melissa Hodges said. “She doesn’t get the stuff with health insurance, but we told her that we’ll always take care of her, not to worry about that.”

Msnbc.com’s Isolde Raftery contributed to this report.

It’s rather funny that the people who were dedicated to overturning anything SHORT OF a constitutional amendment are crying about how this measure was unnecessary.

Of course no it’s not; I live in a state – California – which passed a measure defining marriage as the union of one man and one woman TWICE only to be overturned by fascist judges who frankly couldn’t give a rodent’s hindquarters about the will of the people.  In 2000 Californian’s overwhelmingly passed Prop 22 with 61.4% of the voters approving the one sentence definition of a valid marriage.  Fascist judges said screw you; it is our very essence as fascist judges to impose our will on the people.  And then we passed Prop 22 and of course a homosexual judge did the same damn thing and overturned it.  And then he resigned so he could enjoy the rest of his life collecting benefits paid for by the people whose will he just pissed all over.

In Iowa, judges who decided that their feelings mattered far more than what the rest of the state believed just got honored for pissing on voters:

May 7, 2012 11:40 AM 
Iowa judges ousted after legalizing same-sex marriage to receive Profiles in Courage Award

(CBS/AP) BOSTON – President John F. Kennedy’s only surviving child is celebrating what would have been his 95th birthday this month by honoring three Iowa judges who were ousted after the court unanimously decided to legalize same-sex marriages.

Caroline Kennedy will also recognize the U.S. ambassador to Syria who risked his life to support opponents of President Basher Assad’s regime.

Kennedy heads the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation, which promotes the late president’s memory and legacy. She is set to present the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award on Monday to former Iowa Chief Justice Marsha Ternus and justices David Baker and Michael Streit, all of whom were pushed off the bench in a 2010 retention vote that capped a contentious campaign.

The three judges will receive a sterling silver ship’s lantern symbolizing a beacon of hope. The award, which was designed by Kennedy’s husband, Edwin Schlossberg, and crafted by Tiffany & Co., resembles one belonging to the U.S. Navy’s oldest commissioned warship, the USS Constitution, or “Old Ironsides.”

Ternus, Baker and Streit were among seven justices who unanimously decided in 2009 that an Iowa law restricting marriage to a man and a woman violated the state’s constitution. Conservative groups and other gay marriage foes spent about $1 million on a political campaign to oust the judges, who chose not to raise money or campaign themselves to avoid dragging the judiciary into politics.

“The three judges are interesting and courageous on many levels,” Kennedy told The Associated Press. “… Like many of the people who get this award, they don’t consider that they are doing anything particularly courageous, they just feel they’re doing what’s right, they’re doing their job.”

Kennedy, who is a lawyer, said the three “knew when they were writing this decision that it was gonna be a pioneering decision and a landmark decision and would face a lot of popular opposition. They also were following very carefully the Iowa constitution and the rights that it gives to its citizens.”

Just imagine it being the other way around: the voters of a state overwhelmingly want gay marriage by a nearly 3 to 1 margin – and a conservative judge says to hell with all of you, only MY vote matters, and I vote to say to hell with the will of the people.  Is that judge going to be honored for his “courage,” do ya think???

Joe Biden says that the “marriage” of two men or two women is EVERY BIT as “valid” as the holy union under God between a man and a woman, and that married men and women and the families they create are no better or more positive for society than homosexual “matrimonies,” and North Carolina just responded with a great big giant “Up YOURS!”

That may have something to do with what over twenty percent of North Carolina DEMOCRATS said to Obama in the state’s Democrat primary for president:

“No preference” is another way of saying “no confidence” in the ONLY candidate on the ballot.

In West Virginia, it got even worse, with 42% of Democrat voters choosing an INCARCERATED FELON over Obama (who SHOULD be a convicted felon).  Obama has been a holocaust for that state, pure and simple.

And in Wisconsin, the hated conservative Governor Scott Walker easily won a larger percentage of the vote than BOTH of his Democrat challengers COMBINED and nearly as many as EVERY DEMOCRAT VOTE COMBINED.  With Wisconsin Republicans easily maintaining control of the state Senate.  Oh, and it’s also now known that the rabid Democrat recall effort has an unpaid debt of $17 million in back taxes.  Because to be a Democrat is to be a fascist who wants OTHERS to work and pay for what THEY then get to “redistribute” to their unions and their special interests.

Stuff like that helps me understand the dismal opening Obama got to the official opening of a re-election campaign that really never ended from 2008.

I see the potential for a major conservative ass-kicking coming.  And the ONLY thing standing in the way of that ass-kicking is the fact that Barack Obama – the worst and most cynical political whore who EVER walked the earth – has attended more fundraisers than the previous FIVE presidents COMBINED.  It won’t be easy to throw out our Crony Capitalist Fascist Whore in Chief given his enormous money-grubbing advantage.  Particularly since he has repeatedly used the American people’s taxpayer money as his own political slush fund.

Meanwhile, the same Obama who is too much of a weasel to tell us what he’s going to do with the ballistic missile shield he essentially turned traitor over, or the same Obama who is punting the Keystone pipeline until after the election so he can kill it once and for all, is the same weasel who doesn’t have the courage to look at the American people and tell them that he is going to “fundamentally transform” the institution of marriage on them.

He is a small, weak, skinny little runt in every way imaginable.  That is the essence of a weasel.

Congratulations on standing up for the sacred definition of marriage and for standing against the weasel who wants to undermine this nation’s greatest institutions, North Carolina.

Democrat Rips Into Obama For Total Failure Of Leadership

Well, it is now officially bipartisan: Barack Obama is a total failure as a president and a total failure as a leader:

Manchin Rips Obama
March 8, 2011 12:42 P.M. By Andrew Stiles   

In an impassioned speech on the Senate floor this morning, Sen. Joe Manchin (D., W.Va.) rebuked President Obama for sitting on the sidelines in the debate over federal spending. “Why are we doing all this when the most powerful person in these negotiations — our president — has failed to lead this debate or offer a serious proposal for spending and cuts that he would be willing to fight for?” Manchin asked.

The freshman senator slammed both parties for proposing spending plans that are “extremely partisan and unrealistic.” The Democratic plan to cut $4.7 billion “doesn’t go nearly far enough [and] utterly ignores our fiscal reality,” he said. “It continues to sail forward as if there’s no storm on the horizon.”

But, he said, the House Republican plan (H.R. 1) to cut $61 billion was “even more flawed . . . [and] blindly hacks the budget with no sense of our priorities or our values as a country.”

But ultimately, Manchin blamed the president for the sloppy state of the negotiations. “This debate will be decided when the president leads these tough negotiations, and right now that is not happening,” he said. “The bottom line is this — the president is the leader of this great nation, and when it comes to an issue of significant national importance, the president must lead.”

Manchin’s speech comes as a number of other Senate Democrats are expressing concern over their own party’s willingness to cut spending (and the NRSC is running ads like this).

Rather than lead on dealing with our crippling deficit and our even more lethal national debt, Barack Obama is actually sitting back waiting for the Republicans in the House to lead so he can lead the charge in demonizing them as the party that wants to starve the poor if they try to save America from a 100%-guaranteed-to-happen financial implosion.  He literally doesn’t care if America self-destructs in a few years – as long as he and his radical ideology can benefit from it (note: Cloward and Piven alert -see also here).

Well, clearly the president is clearly not leading.  But, if it’s any consolation, the community organizer is busy communitiy agitating (see also here).

Leading Democrat Says Obama “beginning not to be believable to me”

Oops.  Joe Wilson was right all along.  He just didn’t phrase it politely enough.

West Virginia Democrat Senator Jay Rockefeller ended his description about Obama lying to him on coal by saying, “And he doesn’t say it in the minds of my own people. And he’s beginning to not be believable to me.”

So maybe Joe Wilson would have been okay if he’d just shouted out, “You’re beginning to not be believable to me!”

There’s that saying, “Fool me once, shame on you.  Fool me twice, shame on me.”  I wonder what they say after someone has been fooled like 50,000 times.

I only know what you’d call such a person: a liberal.

Obama’s starting to be “not believable” on coal …
posted at 4:54 pm on February 12, 2010 by Ed MorrisseyWhen it comes to coal, Barack Obama lost all of his credibility with the Right when he told the San Francisco Chronicle in January 2008 that any new coal-burning plant would get bankrupted in an Obama presidency, thanks to tough environmental policies he planned to use to discourage fossil fuel use.  As for Democrats and crossover voters in Coal Belt states such as Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and West Virginia, they clung to Obama’s promise to support clean-coal technology, and to his appointment of a supposedly coal-friendly EPA chief.  Now, however, after the EPA has announced its plans to consider carbon dioxide a dangerous emission and the halting of coal-mining permits, not even Senator Jay Rockefeller can maintain the illusion any longer (via Geoff A):

For too long, some coal-state members of Congress accepted Obama’s promises without noticing the 800-pound gorilla in the room – administration policies. There is evidence that may change.

Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., seems to have become a convert. Last week he signaled strongly that promises from the White House are not enough. During a Senate hearing on Obama’s proposal for the 2001 budget, Rockefeller lashed out.

According to one published report, Rockefeller made it clear “he isn’t sure he trusts the president’s commitments to coal. …” Referring to Obama’s pledges to support coal, the senator complained that, “He says it in his speeches, but he doesn’t say it in (his budget proposal). He doesn’t say it in the actions of (EPA Administrator) Lisa Jackson. And he doesn’t say it in the minds of my own people. And he’s beginning to not be believable to me.”

Gee … ya think? How thick-headed does one have to be to not understand Obama’s point in saying this:

The problem is not technical, uh, and the problem is not mastery of the legislative intricacies of Washington. The problem is, uh, can you get the American people to say, “This is really important,” and force their representatives to do the right thing? That requires mobilizing a citizenry. That requires them understanding what is at stake. Uh, and climate change is a great example.

You know, when I was asked earlier about the issue of coal, uh, you know — Under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket. Even regardless of what I say about whether coal is good or bad. Because I’m capping greenhouse gases, coal power plants, you know, natural gas, you name it — whatever the plants were, whatever the industry was, uh, they would have to retrofit their operations. That will cost money. They will pass that money on to consumers.

They — you — you can already see what the arguments will be during the general election. People will say, “Ah, Obama and Al Gore, these folks, they’re going to destroy the economy, this is going to cost us eight trillion dollars,” or whatever their number is. Um, if you can’t persuade the American people that yes, there is going to be some increase in electricity rates on the front end, but that over the long term, because of combinations of more efficient energy usage, changing lightbulbs and more efficient appliance, but also technology improving how we can produce clean energy, the economy would benefit.

If we can’t make that argument persuasively enough, you — you, uh, can be Lyndon Johnson, you can be the master of Washington. You’re not going to get that done.

Is Rockefeller sincere? I find it difficult in the extreme to believe that anyone with enough cranial power to breathe without written instructions could have misinterpreted what Obama promised in this Chronicle interview. It didn’t get made public until a few days before the election, and people in the Coal Belt may not have heard about it in time, but it’s been part of the record ever since. And as Rockefeller himself points out, the administration’s actions on coal for the past thirteen months have made clear their animus towards that “great natural resource.”

If Rockefeller is sincere, then he deserves a Captain Louis Renault Award for his shock, shock! at Obama’s hostility towards the industry that powers his home state. If not, then West Virginians need to replace Rockefeller at the first opportunity — unfortunately, four years out — to send someone a little more honest and less clueless to the US Senate. Either way, all of the rest of us who have been warning about Obama’s environmental extremism can certainly add Rockefeller’s belated complaint to the mountain(top) of evidence for our argument.

“There’s a sucker born every minute”, goes the famous phrase.

With “sucker” being a correct but impolite expression for “Democrat.”  Just like “he’s beginning to not be believable to me” is a polite way of saying, “YOU LIE!’

For myself, I’m trying to remember if there are any promises that Obama actually HAS kept.  At best, the nays far outnumber the ayes.