Health care lawsuits

Missouri Voters Poised To Reject Health Care Reform, Start Legal Challenges

Christina Bellantoni | August 3, 2010, 1:07PM

Protesting the health care bill in March.

Missouri Republicans today are preparing to celebrate the success of their ballot initiative on health care reform, which asks Missourians whether they want to roll back a critical element of the new law despite significant questions about the constitutionality of doing so.

But opponents of Prop C, the Republican-engineered ballot measure dubbed the "Health Care Freedom Act" that has more political significance than legal precedent behind it, number just in the hundreds and have scant help from the state's Democrats or even Gov. Jay Nixon. The teenage leader of the opposition, in fact, is managing a Facebook campaign against the ballot measure in between his job making sandwiches at Subway.

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Gary Nodler

Missouri GOP Congressional Candidate: Having Gay Soldiers Would Offend Muslim Countries

Eric Kleefeld | February 12, 2010, 1:59PM

State Sen. Gary Nodler (R-MO)

Missouri state Sen. Gary Nodler, who is seeking the Republican nomination for the open seat of GOP Rep. Roy Blunt, has offered up an argument for keeping the ban on gays in the military: That allowing gays to serve openly would endanger the troops, by offending the people of the Muslim countries where we are fighting.

"There are real-world implications," Nodler said, according to columnist Tony Messenger of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. "This is a policy that would directly threaten the lives of soldiers today." Nodler also called the presence of gay troops a "cultural affront" to Muslim countries.

Messenger construed this as meaning: "Sen. Gary Nodler doesn't want to offend the terrorists." Nodler clarified what he meant to Messenger, explaining that he is not sympathizing with terrorists, but with the native populations in these countries. "I don't care what the Taliban thinks about it and I don't care what Al-Qaeda thinks about it," said Nodler. "I do care what Iraqi-allied commanders think about it with American forces integrated into their units."

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