SDB Evening News Reads for 122911: Woman of the Year

Good Evening…

Pardon the lameness of this post, I was hit with a migraine and it is a bad one…so I will make it a short evening reads.

On Jezebel a big vote is going on!

h/t Wonk sent me this: Vote For Jezebel’s Woman of the Year

Hillary Clinton
Mona Eltahawy
Leymah Gbowee
Gabrielle Giffords
Melissa McCarthy
Iman al-Obeidi
Elizabeth Warren
Dr. X

The nominations for Jezebel’s Woman of the Year are in, and while it was a tough decision, we’ve managed to narrow the field down to eight frontrunners. Read more about them below, then cast your vote!

Polls close at midnight on Thursday, Dec. 29, so make sure to cast your vote for Woman of the Year before then!

In Tennessee, another voter is being disenfranchised, this time it is a 93 year old woman who cleaned the Capitol for 30 years…

A 93-year-old Tennessee woman who cleaned the state Capitol for 30 years, including the governor’s office, says she won’t be able to vote for the first time in decades after being told this week that herold state ID failed to meet new voter ID regulations.

Thelma Mitchell was even accused of being an undocumented immigrant because she couldn’t produce a birth certificate:

Mitchell, who was delivered by a midwife in Alabama in 1918, has never had a birth certificate. But when she told that to a drivers’ license clerk, he suggested she might be an illegal immigrant.

Thelma Mitchell told WSMV-TV that she went to a state drivers’ license center last week after being told that her old state ID from her cleaning job would not meet new regulations for voter identification.

A spokesman for the House Republican Caucus insisted that Mitchell was given bad information and should’ve been allowed to vote, even with an expired state ID. But even if that’s the case, her ordeal illustrates the inevitable disenfranchisements that result when confusing voting laws enable state officials to apply the law inconsistently.

This is bullshit!

As ThinkProgress reported, one 96-year-old Tennessee woman was denied a voter ID because she didn’t have her marriage license. Another senior citizen in Tennessee, 91-year-old Virginia Lasater, couldn’t get the ID she needed to vote because she wasn’t able to stand in a long line at the DMV. A Tennessee agency even told a 86-year-old World War II veteran that he had to pay an unconstitutional poll tax if he wanted to obtain an ID.

What a great way to pick and choose who gets to vote!

In other GOP news, Perry is just applying the PLUB mantra…he is pledging to ignore any decision from SCOTUS that will strike down “Personhood” amendments and laws.

At a radio forum sponsored by the anti-abortion and anti-birth control group Personhood PersonhoodGov. Rick Perry said that he would refuse to obey a Supreme Court decision striking down the group’s signature anti-choice proposal:

QUESTION: You have agreed to “endorse legislation making clear that Fourteenth Amendment protections apply to unborn children” . . . . What happens if the U.S. Supreme Court attempts to strike down this legislation, and replace it with one of its own edict denying the inalienable right to life for all persons born or unborn? Would you enforce the inalienable right to life or the Court’s opinion as the law?

PERRY: Well, obviously you enforce the right to life opinion.

Perry’s promise to openly defy the Supreme Court is disturbing, but it is also far from original. Fellow candidates Michele Bachmann and Newt Gingrich have also pledged to treat binding Supreme Court opinions as if they were merely optional, and Gingrich even supports legitimizing his radical view of the Constitution through a campaign of intimidation against judges who disagree with him.

These candidates for the GOP are ridiculous, how the hell are they getting away with this kind of crap?

Last link for you tonight, and I am off to hide under my covers…Mystery behind Hitchcock’s Birds is solved at last!

It has taken 50 years, rather than the shorter running time of one of his famous horror films, but Alfred Hitchcock’s most enduring whodunit appears to have finally been solved.

Scientists at Louisiana State University claim to have discovered why thousands of seagulls began killing themselves along the coast of northern California in the summer of 1961.

The mysterious avian deaths, in which many of the birds flew, Kamikaze-style, into houses along the Monterey Bay shore, south of San Francisco, were cited as one of the major inspirations for Hitchcock’s 1963 film The Birds.

Now a team of marine biologists, who have been conducting post-mortems of seabirds killed during the 1961 incident, have reached a credible conclusion about their deaths: the creatures were poisoned.

I did not know there was an actual event where seabirds went berserk.

Writing in the latest edition of the journal Nature Geoscience, the researchers say that they examined the stomach contents of seagulls and turtles collected during the period, and discovered unusual quantities of a nerve-damaging toxin called domoic acid. The acid, which most likely came from anchovies and squid which formed part of the birds’ natural diet, can sometimes cause brain damage. In severe cases, it leads to them becoming confused, suffering seizures, and dying.

Sibel Bargu, leading the research, said domoic acid was found in 79 per cent of the plankton ingested by anchovies and squid. Over a short period, that would become sufficiently concentrated to cause fatal injuries to predators who ingested the creatures.

Although this theory has previously been cited as a potential explanation for the 1961 event, Ms Bargu writes, no direct evidence has been obtained by scientists to support it. Until now. “Here we show that plankton samples from the 1961 poisoning contained toxin-producing Pseudo-nitzschia, supporting the contention that these toxic diatoms were responsible for the bird frenzy that motivated Hitchcock’s thriller,” she writes.

The toxic domoic acid is connected with runoff of pesticides. The report notes that there was a large housing boom in the area at the time, and that leaking domestic septic tanks could be the reason behind the large amounts of acid that were found in the birds food sources.

Have a good evening, and go vote for Jezebel’s Woman of the Year!