SPORTS BUZZThe mighty Abby Wambach scored her third goal in five days, and the U.S.A. defeated France 3-1 in today's Women's World Cup semifinal.The United States will face Japan on Sunday in the Championship Match of 2011 Women's World Cup.
The U.S.A. took an early lead after Lauren Cheney scored in the 9th minute to put them up 1-0.
France answered with a goal from Gaetane Thiney in the 55th minute to tie the game 1-1. (Photo viaTimes Online)
Abby Wambach broke the tie in the 79th minute, burying a header in the back of net off a Cheney corner kick.
Three minutes later, Alex Morgan tacked on an insurance goal to put the United States up 3-1.
The U.S. will face Japan - who defeated Sweden 3-1 in the second semifinal - on Sunday, July 17 in the Women's World Cup Championship match. (Photo viaNYdailynews.com)
Here's Japan's third goal (from deep) that finished off Sweden in today's second semifinal. (ViaDirty Tackle)
There are three reasons why I’m not very hopeful about the outcome of the debt-limit battle.
1. There is no unity in the GOP camp.
Republicans have been all over the map during this fight. Some of them want a balanced budget amendment. Some want a one-for-one deal of $2 trillion of spending cuts in exchange for a $2 trillion increase in the debt limit. Others want some sort of spending cap, akin toSenator Corker’s CAP Act. Some want to mix all these ideas together in a cut-cap-balance package. Others want Obamacare repeal. And the latest proposal is Sen. McConnell’s proposal to let Obama unilaterally raise the debt limit.
These are mostly good ideas, but the failure to coalesce around one proposal – preferably one that is easy to understand – has made the Republican position difficult to define, defend, or advance.
2. The fear of demagoguery is high.
As I explained months ago, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner are trying to spook financial markets with hyperbolic warnings about a risk of default. This is blatant dishonesty and demagoguery, but Republicans are nervous that this tactic might be successful if there is a high-stakes showdown as the government’s borrowing authority runs out.
For those with short memories, this is what happened with TARP back in 2008. The initial bailout proposal was rejected, leading to short-run market gyrations, and many Republicans panicked and switched their votes to yes.
3. Republicans don’t control the Senate or the White House.
I’m stating the obvious, of course, but people seem to forget that any debt limit increase will need to get through the Senate and get signed by Obama.
Imagine you are Harry Reid or Barack Obama. Is there any reason why you would acquiesce to Republican demands? Yes, you need to at least pretend to care about big government, wasteful spending, and red ink, but why not hold firm and then strike a deal based on make-believe spending cuts? That’s exactlywhat happened during the “government-shutdown” debateearlier this year.
This post, incidentally, is not an attack on Republicans. I’mvery willing to attack GOPerswhen they do the wrong thing, but I’m not sure they deserve to get hammered in this case.
Simply stated, I don’t think there’s a winning strategy, so I don’t see any point in going nuclear.
If nothing else, at least Republicans resisted thesiren song of tax increases, which is not a trivial achievement since Democrats clearly were hoping to trick GOPers into giving up one of their strongest political positions.
After holding its fire for weeks, America’s biggest business lobby pushes Congress to reach a debt deal, warning the consequences without one are too devastating.
America's most influential business lobby is wading into the thicket of the debt-ceiling negotiations, pushing the Tea Party wing of the Republican Party that has been holding out on compromise to take whatever actions necessary to avoid America defaulting on its debt.
"We believe it is vitally important for the U.S. government to make good on its financial obligations and to put its fiscal house in order," wrote the Chamber of Commerce in a letter signed by nearly 500 American CEOs that was sent to the White House and all Capitol Hill offices. "Now is the time for our political leaders to put aside partisan differences and act in the nation's best interests. We believe our nation's economic future is reliant upon their actions and urge them to reach an agreement."
The high-profile signers included Tom Donahue, the influential chairman of the Chamber of Commerce; Robert Koch, CEO of Koch Enterprises; and James Gorman, president of Morgan Stanley.
The message highlights a new fracture among conservative leaders, many of whom have pushed for Republicans to oppose a debt-ceiling increase without assurances from the White House that a deal would not include tax hikes.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (second from left) has floated a plan that would allow President Obama to raise the debt ceiling., Susan Walsh / AP Photo
But seeing the urgency of reaching an agreement, some Republicans have lowered their standard to ensure that a deal is reached prior to the hard August 2 deadline the White House has set.
Long an opponent of President Obama's position in the talks, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell on Tuesday suggested a backup plan that would allow Obama to raise the debt ceiling at a smaller increment but with approval from only about one third of Congress.
The statement came with intense blowback from some wings of the Republican Party that have urged the GOP to stand strong against the Democrats' negotiating position in hopes of extracting larger concessions from Democrats. The Heritage Foundation, the conservative advocacy group, said it was shocked at McConnell's idea and disappointed it had not been consulted prior to the Republican leader's statements.
“The message highlights a new fracture among conservative leaders, many of whom have pushed for Republicans to oppose a debt-ceiling increase without White House assurances that a deal would not include tax hikes.”
"We think it's a total walkback of the GOP position and gives up leverage to Democrats with their overspending policy," said Mike Needham, chief officer of Heritage's policy wing, Heritage Action. "It's critical that Republicans be seen as fighting hard for real change. The backup plan would be incredibly demoralizing to GOP grassroots."
Even if McConnell's plan were to become the framework of a deal, the remaining question is how much of the House Republican caucus would support the proposal, even with the lower vote threshold. Over several days of frequent talks between parties, GOP House leaders led by Rep. Eric Cantor have appeared to harden their opposition against any new forms of government revenue included in a final package.
The White House has not directly engaged McConnell's proposal, saying simply that it was still focused on a larger package that leaders could agree upon.
In the first six months of 2011, states enacted 162 new provisions related to reproductive health and rights. Fully 49 percent of these new laws seek to restrict access to abortion services, a sharp increase from 2010, when 26 percent of new laws restricted abortion. The 80 abortion restrictions enacted this year are more than double the previous record of 34 abortion restrictions enacted in 2005—and more than triple the 23 enacted in 2010. All of these new provisions were enacted in just 19 states.
A Mix of Old and New Strategies to Curb Access to Abortion Care
Counseling and waiting periods.Five states (IN, KS, ND, SD and TX) adopted laws related to abortion counseling and waiting periods in 2011, but a measure adopted by South Dakota at the end of March went significantly farther than those approved in other states. The law expands the pre-abortion waiting period to 72 hours, requires the woman to visit a crisis pregnancy center in the interim and mandates that abortion counseling be provided in-person by the physician who will perform the procedure. The counseling must include information on all known risk factors related to abortion, even when the information is not supported by mainstream medical opinion and is methodologically unsound. The law is currently not in effect, pending the outcome of a legal challenge.
Gestational bans.Legislators in 15 states introduced measures based on a law adopted in Nebraska last year. The provision bans abortions at and after 20 weeks’ gestation, based on the spurious assumption that a fetus can feel pain at that point. Under the measure, abortions may be performed after 20 weeks only if the woman’s life is endangered or if there is a risk of “substantial and irreversible physical impairment of a major bodily function.” So far this year, similar measures have been adopted in five states (AL, ID, IN, KS and OK; seeState Policies on Later Term Abortion). These laws appear to conflict with Supreme Court rulings barring states from placing an undue burden on women seeking an abortion prior to viability, a point that occurs well past 20 weeks.
“Heartbeat” bill.Ohio is taking a different approach to achieve the same goal of banning abortion. In June, the House adopted a measure that would ban abortion once a fetal heartbeat can be detected, which usually occurs between six and 10 weeks’ gestation. The bill is awaiting action in the Senate.
Banning abortion coverage in new insurance exchanges.With plans for the implementation of health care reform underway in most states, the issue of insurance coverage for abortion was considered in 24 states, and restrictions were enacted in eight. In four states (KS, NE, OK and UT), the new laws restrict abortion coverage under all private health insurance plans. These restrictions will apply to coverage that will be available through the health exchanges being set up, as will new measures enacted in four other states (FL, ID, IN and VA). Including these new laws, eight states now restrict abortion coverage that is offered in any private health plan (including coverage through an exchange), and six others have restrictions that apply only to coverage through health exchanges (seeRestricting Insurance Coverage of Abortion).
Medication abortion.Legislatures devoted significant attention to medication abortion for the first time during the 2011 session; measures were introduced in 14 states and enacted in six. Medication abortion has become an integral part of abortion care, now accounting for 17 percent of procedures provided in nonhospital clinics. Lawmakers considered two types of restrictions related to medication abortion:
Laws enacted this year in Kansas and Oklahoma require abortion providers to use a protocol that was specified by the FDA when the method was approved in 2000. This protocol has since been supplanted by a new one that, based on a substantial body of evidence, supports a more streamlined procedure under which women are given a lower dose of the medication and allowed to take the second dose at home, eliminating a second visit to the abortion provider. The new protocol also allows use of medication abortion up to 63 days’ gestation, rather than the 49 days permitted under the FDA protocol. A similar restriction that was enacted by Ohio in 2004 was recently upheld in federal court.
In an entirely new approach to restricting access to abortion, five states (AZ, KS, ND, NE and TN) banned the use of telemedicine for the provision of medication abortion, a procedure through which a woman can go to an abortion provider, receive counseling via videoconference from a physician in another location who then authorizes on-site staff to dispense the medication. Use of telemedicine in general has been growing rapidly in recent years, and is widely credited with expanding access to medical care in areas, especially rural communities, where services have often been inaccessible.
Family Planning Programs in the Crosshairs
For the first time in recent memory, state legislatures devoted significant attention to issues related to family planning in 2011. Much of this came in the context of state budget bills.
Holding the line in some states.Considering the historic fiscal crises facing many states, it is significant that family planning escaped major reductions in nine of the 18 states (CO, CT, DE, IL, KS, MA, ME, NY and PA) where the budget has a specific line item for family planning.
Deep cuts in others.The story, however, was different in the remaining nine states. In six (FL, GA, MI, MN, WA and WI), family planning programs sustained deep cuts, although generally in line with decreases adopted for other health programs. In the other three states, however, the cuts to family planning funding were disproportionately large: Montana eliminated the family planning line item, and New Hampshire and Texas cut funding by 57 percent and 66 percent, respectively.
Expanding Medicaid eligibility.It is especially noteworthy in this fiscal climate that two states moved to expand Medicaid eligibility for family planning. In Maryland, the legislature directed the state to extend coverage to individuals with an income up to 200 percent of the federal poverty level; the state currently has a limited expansion that extends coverage only to women following a Medicaid-funded delivery. The state received approval for this change from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the federal agency that administers Medicaid, at the end of June, and the expansion is expected to go into effect in January 2012. Washington State dramatically reversed earlier attempts to roll back its existing Medicaid family planning expansion entirely. The legislature directed the state to raise eligibility under the program from 200 percent to 250 percent of the federal poverty level.
Targeting providers.Nonetheless, five states moved to restrict funding to family planning providers, largely paralleling similar attempts made in Congress earlier in the year. These states took three distinct approaches:
Two states moved to restrict eligibility for family planning funds for providers that have any association with abortion. Indiana prohibits agencies that provide abortion from receiving any funding through the state, including Medicaid. (On June 30, a federal district court blocked enforcement of the legislation pending resolution of a legal challenge filed by the state’s Planned Parenthood affiliate.) Wisconsin prohibits agencies that provide abortion services or referrals from receiving funding through the state. Neither state is a Title X grantee, so Title X funds are not affected by the restriction. Planned Parenthood is the only agency that is affected in either state. These new measures join long-standing provisions in three other states (CO, OH and TX) requiring agencies that receive funding—either state family planning funds or federal block grant allotments—through a state agency to be separate from agencies that provide abortion services (seeState Family Planning Funding Restrictions).
North Carolina adopted a measure that explicitly bans Planned Parenthood from obtaining funding, including Medicaid, through the state. Since North Carolina is a Title X grantee, the measure blocks Planned Parenthood affiliates in the state from receiving Title X funds. (Planned Parenthood of Central North Carolina has filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of this provision; as of this writing, the measure remains in effect.)
Two additional states took aim at agencies that provide mostly family planning services, regardless of whether they have any connection to abortion. Kansas enacted a measure that limits the distribution of Title X funds to health departments, hospitals and community health centers; other types of family planning providers are not eligible. (Planned Parenthood of Kansas and Mid-Missouri has filed a legal challenge to the provision; as of this writing, the measure remains in effect.) Texas, meanwhile, adopted a measure that gives priority to health departments, community health centers and hospitals in the distribution of family planning funds, including Title X funds; other family planning providers may receive funding should any remain.
The 2011 state legislative season is rapidly drawing to a close, with only 10 state legislatures remaining in session. Additional states are likely to adjourn in the coming weeks.
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan (AP) — President Hamid Karzai climbed into his slain half-brother's grave Wednesday and sobbed alongside the coffin, mourning the loss of the most powerful figure in southern Afghanistan before appointing another brother to take the man's place.
Ahmed Wali Karzai, the head of the Kandahar provincial council and the president's most powerful emissary in the south, was shot to death Tuesday by a trusted friend at his mansion in Kandahar.
"My message for them (the Taliban) is that my countrymen, my brothers, should stop killing their own people," President Karzai said after the funeral, which was attended by thousands of mourners. "It is easy to kill and everyone can do it, but the real man is the one who can save people's lives."
Just hours later, a suicide bomb blast killed five French troops in the east of the country.
The Taliban claimed responsibility for both attacks. But Afghan officials cast doubt that the militants really were behind the killing of the president's brother. The gunman's motive remained unclear.
Shortly after the funeral, Karzai named another sibling, Shah Wali Karzai, to replace Wali Karzai. The move signaled the importance of continuity in a country where power vacuums are often filled with violent confrontations. Still, the new tribal elder is a relative unknown, and it was unclear if will be as able an operator as Wali Karzai.
"The president will have to be very careful to move quickly to consolidate and maintain his power structure in Kandahar," said Rustam Shah, former Pakistan ambassador to Afghanistan.
He said Wali Karzai's death exposed the fragility of the security infrastructure in the southern provinces, particularly Kandahar, where the Americans have made progress in wresting territory from the Taliban.
"It will be a big blow to the government's image in the Taliban stronghold in southern Afghanistan," he said.
Wali Karzai served as the enforcer of the government's tenuous rule over the ethnic Pashtuns, who also dominate the insurgency.
To the international community, he offered indispensable reach and ruthlessness, but he was also an embarrassment — a partner whose other partners were said to include opium dealers and smugglers. He denied those charges.
"He appears not to understand the level of our knowledge of his activities," reads a confidential 2010 U.S. State Department cable posted on Wikileaks, "and that the coalition views many of his activities as malign."
Thousands of mourners gathered Wednesday morning in the Karzai family's home village of Karz. Pushing through a ring of his security men, Karzai climbed into his half brother's freshly dug grave Wednesday and sobbed.
When the president's relatives and bodyguards urged him to come out, he refused. Finally, two pallbearers locked his arms under theirs and pulled him up.
Ahmed Wali's assassin, Sardar Mohammad, was an elder in their tribe. He worked beside Wali Karzai for seven years as his security adviser and his representative to various power interests in the south.
After Mohammad opened fire on Wali Karzai, bodyguards ran in and killed him.
Mohammad's corpse was later photographed hanging from a building in a public intersection.
Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid issued a statement Wednesday saying that insurgent fighters killed Wali Karzai because he cooperated with U.S., British and Canadian forces in the south.
Afghan security forces were a conspicuous presence at the burial Wednesday, with troops and intelligence agents dispersed around and within the crowd.
Despite heightened security, two members of the Afghan intelligence service were injured on their way to the funeral Wednesday when their vehicle struck a roadside bomb in Kandahar's Maiwand district, said Daoud Ahmadi, a spokesman for the governor of Helmand.
___
Moore reported from Kabul. Associated Press writers Kathy Gannon in Islamabad and Adam Goldman in Washington contributed to this report.
In a meeting with a small group of reporters in his Capitol Hill office this morning, House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, criticized President Obama and White House officials for their lack of resolve in negotiations.
“Dealing with them the last couple months has been like dealing with Jell-o,” Boehner said. “Some days it’s firmer than others. Sometimes it’s like they’ve left it out over night.”
Boehner explained that talks broke down over the weekend because, he said, the president backed off entitlement reforms so much from Friday to Saturday, “It was Jell-o; it was damn near liquid.”
“By Saturday, they’d spent the previous day and a half just going backwards” on reforming entitlement programs such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.
“The only thing they’ve been firm on is these damn tax increases,” the Speaker said.
The Speaker also made it clear that he believes the President waited too long to get personally involved. When he phoned the president Saturday to give him the bad news about talks breaking down, President Obama seemed surprised but not shocked, the speaker said. The phone call lasted 35-40 minutes.
Boehner said that the tax increases the White House has been pushing for as part of what the president calls “a balanced package” cannot make it through Congress. “What the president is asking us to do just won’t pass,” he said.
The Ohioan said that he believes the public supports the GOP line in the sand. “The American people want us to hang tough,” he said. White House officials “know they’re not winning.”
White House officials of course dispute this assertion and many others that the speaker made.
One thing Boehner and Obama both agree on – they do not want the U.S. government to default on its debts.
“Nobody wants to go there, because nobody knows what’s going to happen,” Boehner said. “It’s a crapshoot.”
That said, according to both Republicans and Democrats familiar with the negotiating process, the path forward remains unclear.
“We’re in a spot where we need to be,” said a Republican official. “It’s not a bad place for us to be” to get a deal done.
Boehner said that since January, ever since he saw the president he urged him to lock arms with him and “go big” on changes to reduce the deficit. The Speaker said that he will continue to push for major reforms to entitlement spending and the tax code even if those provisions do not end up part of this deal.
An unemployed man looks over job listings on a board at a New York State Department of Labor Employment Services office. (CHRIS HONDROS/GETTY IMAGES)With 15 million people unemployed, and more than 20 million underemployed, you’ve got a fairly large constituency for action on the jobs crisis. But it’s not a constituency that has any evident power in Washington. Over the past few days, a number of writers have put forward a variety of interesting theories as to why, but I think they may be missing the most obvious explanation. But we’ll get to that in a minute. Catherine Rampell kicked off the discussion inthis column, where she noted that the unemployed don’t vote in high numbers:
In 2010, some 46 percent of working Americans who were eligible to vote did so, compared with 35 percent of the unemployed, according to Michael McDonald, a political scientist at George Mason University. There was a similar turnout gap in the 2008 election.
David Leonhardtsaysit’s because persistent unemployment means that though many people are unemployed, fewer people have had a recent brush with unemployment than was true in previous recessions:
In 1982, the unemployment rate averaged between 9 and 10 percent — and fully 22 percent of the labor force experienced unemployment at some point during the year. In 2009 (the most recent year of data), the unemployment rate also averaged between 9 and 10 percent, but only (or maybe “only”) 16.4 percent of the labor force experienced unemployment at some point during the year ... the share of the labor force that experienced unemployment in 2009 was lower than in the early 1960s, when the unemployment rate was generally below 7 percent.
Matthew Cameronsaysit’s because the unemployed are concentrated in populous states that are underrepresented in the U.S. Congress:
In 2010, there were 17 states with working age populations that exceeded the per-state average. Among these states, which accounted for 70 percent of the U.S. working age population, the average unemployment rate was 9.9 percent. The other 33 states with below average working age populations, however, had an average unemployment rate of 8.2 percent. The situation is even starker when looking at the extremes. The average unemployment rate among the 10 most populous states was a whopping 10.3 percent in 2010. Among the 10 least populous states, however, average unemployment was only 7 percent.
I’m sure all of these theories are at least partially right. But they’re missing the big one that has the best evidence behind it: The unemployed don’t have very much money. And it’s money that gets the political systeminterested in your agenda:
Gilens has been collecting the results of nearly 2,000 survey questions reaching back to the 1980s, looking for evidence that when opinions change, so too does policy. And he found it — but only for the rich. “Most policy changes with majority support didn’t become law,” Hacker and Pierson write. The exception was “when they were supported by those at the top. When the opinions of the poor diverged from those of the well-off, the opinions of the poor ceased to have any apparent influence: If 90 percent of poor Americans supported a policy change, it was no more likely to happen than if 10 percent did. By contrast, when more of the well-off supported a change, it was substantially more likely to happen.”
If 15 million college-educated professionals were unemployed right now, the political system would care.
“Never has the time been so right,” Louisiana State Representative Noble Ellington told conservative legislators gathered in Washington to plan the radical remaking of policies in the states. It was one month after the 2010 midterm elections. Republicans had grabbed 680 legislative seats and secured a power trifecta—control of both legislative chambers and the governorship—in twenty-one states. Ellington was speaking for hundreds of attendees at a “States and Nation Policy Summit,” featuring GOP stars like Texas Governor Rick Perry, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor. Convened by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)—“the nation’s largest, non-partisan, individual public-private membership association of state legislators,” as the spin-savvy group describes itself—the meeting did not intend to draw up an agenda for the upcoming legislative session. That had already been done by ALEC’s elite task forces of lawmakers and corporate representatives. The new legislators were there to grab their weapons: carefully crafted model bills seeking to impose a one-size-fits-all agenda on the states.
Founded in 1973 by Paul Weyrich and other conservative activists frustrated by recent electoral setbacks, ALEC is a critical arm of the right-wing network of policy shops that, with infusions of corporate cash, has evolved to shape American politics. Inspired by Milton Friedman’s call for conservatives to “develop alternatives to existing policies [and] keep them alive and available,” ALEC’s model legislation reflects long-term goals: downsizing government, removing regulations on corporations and making it harder to hold the economically and politically powerful to account. Corporate donors retain veto power over the language, which is developed by the secretive task forces. The task forces cover issues from education to health policy. ALEC’s priorities for the 2011 session included bills to privatize education, break unions, deregulate major industries, pass voter ID laws and more. In states across the country they succeeded, with stacks of new laws signed by GOP governors like Ohio’s John Kasich and Wisconsin’s Scott Walker, both ALEC alums.
The details of ALEC’s model bills have been available only to the group’s 2,000 legislative and 300 corporate members. But thanks to a leak to Aliya Rahman, an Ohio-based activist who helped organize protests at ALEC’s Spring Task Force meeting in Cincinnati,The Nationhas obtained more than 800 documents representing decades of model legislation. Teaming up with the Center for Media and Democracy,The Nationasked policy experts to analyze this never-before-seen archive.
The articles that follow are the first products of that examination. They provide an inside view of the priorities of ALEC’s corporate board and billionaire benefactors (including Tea Party funders Charles and David Koch). “Dozens of corporations are investing millions of dollars a year to write business-friendly legislation that is being made into law in statehouses coast to coast, with no regard for the public interest,” says Bob Edgar of Common Cause. “This is proof positive of the depth and scope of the corporate reach into our democratic processes.” The full archive of ALEC documents is available at a new website,alecexposed.org, thanks to the Center for Media and Democracy, which has provided powerful tools for progressives to turn this knowledge into power. The data tell us that the time has come to refocus on the battle to loosen the grip of corporate America and renew democracy in the states.
First Posted: 7/13/11 04:44 PM ETUpdated: 7/13/11 04:52 PM ET
WASHINGTON - Tim Pawlenty may have finally figured out who he wants to be as a candidate.
The former Minnesota governor'ssix-minute videoexplaining the importance and impact of the Christian faith to him and his wife Mary is something new, and it gives voters a glimpse of something real and substantive about Pawlenty, while drawing contrasts with each of the other Republican candidates in the race.
The video, released Wednesday, comes at a critical time for Pawlenty, who hasstruggled for monthsto find his groove and now desperately needs a jolt of momentum with one month left before the Ames straw poll in Iowa, scheduled for Aug. 13. Some might see the release of the video, with its somewhat overwrought presentation, as a Hail Mary, but it will no doubt play well with the socially conservative Iowans who are active in the Hawkeye State's Republican party.
In certain ways, the topics addressed in the video are less than fresh: Pawlenty expresses his strong pro-life position and voices support for heterosexual marriage and religious freedom -- not exactly controversial stands with the GOP base.
But the video allows Pawlenty to decline to sign the 'vow' currently being circulated by a powerful Iowa social conservative leader, Bob Vander Plaats.
"I deeply respect, and share, Bob Vander Platts' [sic] commitment to promoting the sanctity of marriage, a culture of life, and the core principles of the Family Leader's Marriage Vow Pledge," Pawlenty said in a statement sent to reporters not long after his video was released.
Then Pawlenty pointed to the video as an explanation for why he was choosing not to sign the pledge: "However, rather than sign onto the words chosen by others, I prefer to choose my own words, especially seeking to show compassion to those who are in broken families through no fault of their own," he said.
Pawlenty's evasion of the socially conservative pledge is an awkward moment for him, and it could be seen as another sign of weakness. But he is seeking to use it instead to draw a contrast with other candidates.
He makes clear early in the video that he thinks voters are due an explanation from him -- and from other candidates -- as to what exactly it is that they believe.
"When somebody is running for or holds high office, whether it's mayor, governor, or president of the United States, voters want to know, and deserve to know, 'Who is this person?' You know, 'What shaped their values? What are their values? Is this a person that's good to their word? Can we count on them?'" Pawlenty says in the video, aiming squarely at fellow candidates Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman, who are both of the Mormon faith.
"And for me, my faith is very important to me. It influences all that I do and it informs people about what my values are. And of course that has a great bearing on how you conduct yourself in public office," he says.
Both Romney, a former Massachusetts governor, and Huntsman, a former Utah governor and ex-U.S. ambassador to China, have taken pro-life positions and spoken in favor of heterosexual marriage, yet they have generally tried to avoid making social issues a focus.
Pawlenty draws a sharp contrast between their faith and his, making an explicit confession of Christianity. Speaking of his Catholic upbringing and journey into evangelicalism after meeting his wife, he discusses the way in which his faith helped him cope after his mother died when he was 16 years old. "Our faith is not in these earthly things, but it's in Jesus Christ," he says.
But Pawlenty is currently competing for the social conservative vote most directly with Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn), and how his call for clarity about religious beliefs will impact his attempt to overtake Bachmann in Iowa is less clear.
Bachmann is in very strong standing with many Christian conservative voters. Past statements by her and her husband Marcus about their views of homosexuality are drawingincreasing scrutiny, and so Pawlenty could benefit if he is seen as a strong Christian who is less militant when he speaks about his faith.
There are also small touches that will play very well with Christian conservatives. For example, Pawlenty's wife Mary talks early in the video about how she often starts her day with a time of Bible reading and prayer, a practice that many devout Christians make a habit of.
The ideological meat of Pawlenty's statement in the video comes when he talks about the separation of church and state. The idea of separation, he says, was "intended to protect people of faith from government, not government from people of faith."
"And now we have all this revisionism around what was intended and where those lines really are drawn," he continues. "And I think the founders of this nation made it very clear. We were founded as a nation under God. It's not only in our founding documents nationally. It's in the founding documents of 49 of the 50 states."
This ties in to a closing argument that Pawlenty makes at the end of the video, sounding very much like a line soon to be featured regularly in his stump speech.
"I'm running for president because I love this country and I know it was founded under God, and I've got the record, the results, the experience, the leadership, the judgment and the values and beliefs to lead it to a better place," he says.
The key phrase: "I know it was founded under God."
It is Pawlenty's attempt to tap into the deep sentiment among many Tea Party voters that the country has lost its moral and religious compass, and that the solutions to its problems will require more than government programs.
