Daily Clips: November 17th, 2015

Obama tells Republican governors it’s “not American” to only accept Christian refugees: At the G20 summit, Obama had harsh words for our nation’s top xenophobic governors, stating, “When I hear political leaders suggesting that there would be a religious test for which person who’s fleeing from a war-torn country is admitted, when some of those folks themselves come from families who benefited from protection when they were fleeing political persecution, that’s shameful.” He also urged leaders to not give in to their “dark impulses” when it came to this matter.

David Brooks is misleading you or he’s an idiot: In his latest spiritual-babble column, Brooks laments how the “secular substitutes for religion — nationalism, racism and political ideology — have all led to disaster.”

You’ve got to be kidding me. As a secularist, I find it highly insulting that Brooks thinks I substitute religious meaning in the world for nationalism, racism and political ideology. The man’s a bigot. And it appears he’s not very well acquainted with secularism, however that unfortunately did not stop him from writing about it.

Rubio’s plan to keep the poor out of higher education: “But education is not what Republicans are about, and this debate was aimed, naturally, at GOP primary voters. Hence, swipe at egghead philosophers, who by definition (in the Tea Party view), belong to the liberal intelligentsia. That was just the very well-educated, not-a-welder Marco Rubio playing to his nativist party’s epic anti-intellectualism.”

Yellen urges rejection of rule-based monetary policy proposal: According to Reuters, “Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen on Tuesday condemned a proposal in the U.S. Congress that would require the central bank to tie interest rate policy to a mathematical rule, arguing this would ‘severely damage the U.S. economy.'”