Thursday Evening News Wrapup

Posted: April 5, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: 2012 presidential campaign, abortion rights, Austerity, Barack Obama, Corporate Crime, corruption, Domestic terrorism, fetus fetishists, Hillary Clinton, Medicaid, Medicare, Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Planned Parenthood, SCOTUS, SDB Evening News Reads, Social Security, the villagers, Women's Healthcare | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , | 27 Comments

Afternoon Tea, by Mary Cassat

Good Evening! I’ll start off with some good news. Minkoff Minx has arrived home from the hospital and is doing well. She’ll be resting for I a few days, but she should be back to posting regularly sometime next week. I sure do miss her cheery evening reads! I’m doing my best to fill in again tonight.

It’s been a slow news day, but there are a few things happening even though most of Washington, DC–including Congress and many pundits are on a two-week Easter vacay. Why do they get such long vacations anyway? They only work about three days a week and they accomplish very little.

President Obama has waked up to the reality of women’s electoral power. Today we learned that he thinks it’s high time that Augusta Golf Club, which hosts the Masters Tournament, should start accepting women members.

Not to be outdone, and because he obviously has no original thoughts, Mitt Romney announced that he, too, And he discussed the issue in his usual stuffy manner.

When asked if women should be admitted, the Republican presidential frontrunner responded: “Of course.”

“I am not a member of Augusta. I don’t know if I would qualify. My golf game is not that good,” Romney told reporters after an energy-themed event in Tunkhannock, Pennsylvania. “Certainly if I were a member, if I could run Augusta, which isn’t likely to happen, of course I’d have women into Augusta.”

Newt Gingrich thinks his wife Callista would be “great member,” and Callista herself tweeted that she “wants in.” No word on how he-man woman-hater Rick Santorum feels about the issue.

Afternoon Tea, by Cezanne

It’s looking like Romney has the Republican nomination all sewn up–he’s even leading in Santorum’s home state of Pennsylvania now. But at the Daily Beast, Michelle Goldberg explains why conservatives still want Santorum to stay in the race.

Conservative Iowa radio host Steve Deace isn’t convinced. “In the minds of social conservatives, it’s not even close to over,” he says. “The real question is how committed someone like Rick Santorum is to fighting this out all the way to the end. If he’s committed to doing this on a personal level, there’s plenty of social conservatives that will ride him to the finish line.”

Indeed, despite the best efforts of the Republican establishment, many on the religious right are far from ready to accept Romney’s inevitability, or to coalesce behind him. They remain distrustful of his record on abortion, and unsure they can believe his campaign promises. And the harder party elites push Romney on them, the more alienated they become. “The biggest story that everyone in the media has missed this cycle is how frustrated and fed up the Republican Party base is with the Republican Party,” says Deace. “It’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen.”

Goldberg quotes a number of conservative sources who just won’t accept a Romney candidacy and think Santorum to fight to the bitter end at the convention. They sound a lot like Hillary supporters who in 2008 wanted her to take the fight to the convention. Hillary is a loyal Democrat and so she ended up going with the flow, but Santorum is more of a renegade with a lot less to lose than Hillary. In any case, it seems as if the bases of both corporate parties are disgusted with their party elites.

Afternoon Tea Party, by Mary Cassatt

Also at the Daily Beast, Michael Tomasky writes that the Supreme Court is “on the ropes.” Back in the ’80s, Conservative starting pushing for “judicial restraint.” But now that the shoe is on the other foot and there is a Conservative majority on the court, suddenly they love the notion of “judicial activism” that they once reviled (just like they now despise the Heritage Foundaton health care plan now that Democrats have written it into law).

John Roberts has to know and see all this. He has to know that Fifth Circuit Judge Jerry Smith, who asked federal prosecutors for a homework assignment in the wake of Obama’s remarks—a brief stating the Justice Department’s position on judicial review, that had to be at least three pages, single-spaced!—is making conservatives look silly and cheapening the bench. And he has to know that the court’s reputation will suffer an immense blow if it overturns the mandate. It will be seen by a large majority—even a lot of people who weren’t crazy about the law—as completely political. Remember, they didn’t have to take the case in an election year in the first place. They could have put it off. But the court said it must do this now. If it then overturns the ACA, it will look and smell like a political hit job to many Americans. And the court would be saying to America, “We know what you think, and we don’t give a damn.”

What would happen to the court then? Slowly—no; probably quickly—it will come to be seen by most Americans as just another cesspool of political mud wrestling; just another arena where the rich get what they want while everyone else gets screwed (Citizens United); just one more ideological whorehouse full of patrons pretending to be just the piano player.

Despite what we’re all brought up to believe, nothing about the court is sacrosanct. Lifetime appointments can be changed to fixed-year terms. It’d take some doing, but it can be done. And there’s nothing anywhere that says it has to be nine justices. That’s just tradition, but it’s nowhere in the Constitution. It just needs to be an odd number; could be three or 23. For that matter, Congress could disregard Marbury v. Madison. Yep. It could. Tom DeLay used to speak of this from time to time, back in the dear old Terri Schiavo days. He never specifically invoked M v. M, but, referring to judges who would have let Schiavo die, he said things like they had “thumbed their noses at Congress and the president” and would someday pay. He meant a campaign against judicial review. He never got around to it, having been indicted and convicted and all, but that’s what he meant. There’s nothing to prevent liberals from mounting a similar campaign. So far they’ve has held back by their respect for the institution. But that may soon be gone.

There is a heartbreaking story out of Greece: Pensioner’s Suicide Continues to Shake Greece.

Dimitris Christoulas, a divorced and retired pharmacist, took his life on Wednesday in Syntagma Square, a focal point for frequent public demonstrations and protests, as hundreds of commuters passed nearby at a metro station and as lawmakers in Parliament debated last-minute budget amendments before elections, expected on May 6.

In a handwritten note found near the scene, the pensioner said he could not face the prospect “of scavenging through garbage bins for food and becoming a burden to my child,” blaming the government’s austerity policies for his decision.

The incident has prompted a public outpouring, with passers-by pinning notes of sympathy and protest to trees in the square, as well as comment from politicians across the spectrum. A solidarity rally on Wednesday night turned violent when the police clashed with hooded demonstrators in scuffles that left at least three people injured.

I guess we can look forward to similar tragedies here in the U.S. if Congress succeeds in gutting Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. And I don’t exempt the Democrats from my cynicism about support for the social safety net among the Villagers.

Speaking of the rich, powerful, and selfish, Jamie Dimon is once again on the top of the heap in terms of CEO compensation. Richard Escrow writes:

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon is still the poster child for today’s morally degraded, self-entitled banker mentality. I don’t know why he keeps talking, but he’s the gift that keeps on giving.

At every major junction in the post-crisis debate about banking, Dimon has stepped in with a perfectly tactless remark that illustrates both the vacuity and the moral corruption of his industry. This week was no exception.

Excrow provides a number of specific examples of Dimon’s and Chase’s lack of ethics. And yet, Dimon is still whining about “excessive” government regulation.

Dimon just complained that regulators “made the recovery worse than it otherwise would have been” — which is not only wrong, but avoids addressing the issue of the recovery’s cause, which was banks like Dimon’s. Dimon added that the government forced banks to de-leverage “”at precisely the wrong time” — which is precisely wrong. The government’s real error was in not breaking up too-big-to-fail banks like Dimon’s.

“Complexity and confusion should have been alleviated, not compounded,” complains Dimon.

So Dimon and his cronies have formed a superpac to intimidate liberal Congresspeople. Please go read the whole article. It’s really frightening.

The domestic terrorist who tried unsuccessfully to blow up a Planned Parenthood office in Wisconsin has explained his motivation.

Francis Grady, 50, spoke to reporters who were covering his first appearance in federal court since the Sunday night attack. The Green Bay Press-Gazette posted video of him walking through the courthouse followed by a short clip of him speaking to reporters outside.

“There was no bomb,” Grady said. “It was gasoline.”

A reporter asked why Grady attacked the clinic.

“Because they’re killing babies there,” he responded.

The newspaper also got more from inside the federal courtroom, where Grady reportedly interrupted the judge to ask, ““Do you even care at all about the 1,000 babies that died screaming?”

“Screaming?” Fetuses that are aborted in the first trimester aren’t “babies,” and they don’t have nervous systems to feel pain or the ability to scream. The ignorance of these people is beyond belief.

Lizzie Borden

Finally, some new evidence has been found in the Lizzie Borden murder case–journals kept by her attorney.

Borden was acquitted in 1892, and much of the evidence in the case ended up with Andrew Jackson Jennings, Borden’s attorney. The two journals, which Jennings stored in a Victorian bathtub along with other evidence from the case, including the infamous “handless hatchet,” were left to the Fall River Historical Society by Jennings’ grandson, who died last year.

The society received the fragile journals about a month ago but won’t be exhibited until they are properly preserved, curator Michael Martins said.

Each journal is about 100 pages. One contains a series of newspaper clippings, indexed using a lettering and number system that Jennings devised. The second contains personal notes that Jennings assembled from interviews he conducted. Some of the individuals interviewed are people mentioned in the newspaper clippings Jennings retained.

“A number of the people Jennings spoke to were people he knew intimately, on a social or business level, so many of them were perhaps more candid with him than they would have been otherwise,” Martins said. “But it’s also evident that there are a number of new individuals he spoke to who had previously not been connected with the case.”

I hope at least some of those links will pique your interest. What stories have you been following this afternoon and evening?

Women’s Issues are like an Imaginary War on Caterpillars because ?

Posted: April 5, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: War on Women, Women's Healthcare, Women's Rights | Tags: , | 22 Comments

Republicans are denying they have a woman problem.  They are using less-than-artful metaphors.  Several elected state officials have compared our pregnancies to those of livestock.  Now, our disgust with defunding of planned parenthood and restricting access to birth control are just basically an imaginary insect invasion dreamed up by the likes of James Carville.  Yup, the head of the RNC thinks that the War on Women’s reproductive and workplace rights are imaginary and akin to a War on Caterpillars.

Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Preibus talked himself into some trouble this morning after accusing the media of creating a fake gender war and comparing it to a “war on caterpillars.”

“If the Democrats said we had a war on caterpillars and every mainstream media outlet talked about the fact that Republicans have a war on caterpillars, then we’d have problems with caterpillars,” Priebus said in an interview with Bloomberg TV’s “Political Capital with Al Hunt” set to air this weekend. “It’s a fiction.”

Priebus appeared on the show with Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, and the pair debated gender issues, including contraception and requiring women to undergo ultrasounds before getting an abortion.

While Priebus blamed the media for blowing the debate out of proportion, Wasserman Schultz took the opportunity to blast Republicans for their stance on several of these issues.

“The jury of women across America have ruled that the Republicans have been unbelievably extreme and out of touch and hyper-focused on cultural issues,” Wasserman Schultz said on Bloomberg.

Yup, we’ve gone from livestock to insects in the minds of key Republican officials. You can watch this morning’s Caterpillar Catastrophe here. Don’t forget the Georgia “Women as Livestock” bill that severely restricts a woman’s constitutional right to abortion access.

Commonly referred to as the “fetal pain bill” by Georgian Republicans and as the “women as livestock bill” by everyone else, HB 954 garnered national attention this month when state Rep. Terry England (R-Auburn) compared pregnant women carrying stillborn fetuses to the cows and pigs on his farm. According to Rep. England and his warped thought process, if farmers have to “deliver calves, dead or alive,” then a woman carrying a dead fetus, or one not expected to survive, should have to carry it to term.

Romney supporters have been scrambling to recover the number of women fleeing the party.  They insist that women have the same concerns that men do and that the democrats are simply inventing their anti-women positions.  Yet, Romney has recently reversed his old positions on women’s health to win right wing voters by adopting the anti-women positions of Santorum and others. Romney supported the Blunt amendment in a direct reversal of earlier comments that indicated a women’s access to birth control was a private matter.  Here’s his latest anti-women primary positions.

    1. He’s going to ‘get rid of’ Planned Parenthood. In his most blatant attack on basic women’s services, Romney made this claim: “Planned Parenthood, we’re going to get rid of that.” Of course, as a Presidential candidate Romney surely knows that Planned Parenthood provides essential medical services, primarily to low-income women, including mammograms and pap smears, as well as important family planning services. Romney has pledged to defund Title X, a program that provides family planning services.

2. Romney supports the Blunt Amendment which would allow employers to deny health insurance coverage on the basis of moral objections — a rule aimed at allowing employers to opt out of providing benefits that undermined their consciences, including contraceptive coverage. But as governor of Massachusetts, Romney required all health care providers– including Catholic hospitals — to offer emergency contraception to rape victims.

3. Romney is fighting a covert battle against contraception, even if he is doing his best not to call it that. While Romney used to be firmly pro-choice and pro-contraceptives, he has positioned himself in the campaign to be a fighter of morality, saying that the Affordable Care Act (ACA) imposes a “secular vision on America” by requiring employers to provide contraceptives in their insurance coverage. He is also misleading the public on what the ACA will do for women.

4. Romney failed to condemn Rush Limbaugh’s characterization of Sandra Fluke as a “slut.” Romney said “it’s not the language I would have used,” but refused to go any further in condemning Limbaugh’s attacks on the Georgetown Law student who testified in support of the ACA’s contraceptive rule. In not standing up for basic women’s rights, Romney’s complacency is as good as consent.

5. Romney supports restricting access to abortions. He has called Roe v. Wade “one of the darkest moments in Supreme Court history.” He’s even said that he’d support state constitutional amendments to define life at conception, which would effectively outlaw abortions under any circumstance.

Romney and his campaign have decided to use wife Ann as a way to woo women.  Instead of finding out what women want, Romney says he asks his wife.

But Mitt Romney is running for president and he’s talking about the majority of the American electorate like a strange, exotic species to be fully understood only by someone who knows their strange, native ways.

His answer played exactly into the caricature that has emerged of him– incapable of relating to ordinary Americans (in this case women) and so disconnected from reality that he needs a scout to go out into the wilds of normal America and come back with a full report for him to digest on his own.

He could supplement Mrs. Romney’s field reports to him about female voters with some of the data found deep within the swing state poll, which showed that women’s top priorities going into November are health care, gas prices and unemployment.  The deficit comes right after that, but what comes in dead last for women’s own priorities going into the election?  Government policies toward contraception.

On that score, Romney seems to be paying for the sins of his party.  Although he has not raised the issue on his own, the Republican Party itself seems to have made women’s access to contraception and abortion a top priority over the last several months and alarmed independent and moderate women in the process.  Although women in the poll didn’t call the issue a priority for themselves, a majority said they were following the debate on the issue very closely or somewhat closely.

It certainly isn’t helping Romney for Santorum to be out pushing social issues.  Here’s some of the numbers that show that women aren’t buying the Republican arguments. Romney is facing up to an 18% gender gap right now.

A much discussed USA Today poll shows that Romney is headed for defeat because his party is unattractive to women. At the moment, Romney leads Obama among men by 48 to 47 percent; but he trails among women, 54 to 36 percent. The gender gap is wide enough to re-elect the president by a landslide of 51 to 42 percent.

A lot of pundits have leapt on the idea that the recent debates over government-funded or mandated contraception have made the GOP brand toxic to women. But the USA Today poll indicates that the issue’s impact is rather more qualified than that.

Both men and women rate “government policies on birth control” as the least important question in 2012, and 63 percent of them don’t even know where Romney stands on it. About the same proportion dislikes Romney’s position (24 percent) as much as they do Obama’s (25 percent).

The real gender gap in the USA Today poll is that men think the deficit is the most important issue while women think it’s health care. In short, independent women voters are more exercised about the GOP’s opposition to “Obamacare” than they are its objection to free contraception.

Add to all of this the state-level attacks on public education, abortion access, and public worker unions. Many teachers and state employees are women.  These are the bread-and-butter issues that Republicans think they can use to win women?  As a side note, McCain’s gender gap was 13 percent.  Romney has not only spent time railing against planned parenthood but taking “severely conservative” positions on issues of importance to hispanic women.

During the primary, Romney — who has described his record as “severely conservative” — has touted his opposition to abortion rights, backed legislation to allow some employers to deny health insurance coverage for contraception, and said he would stop funding Planned Parenthood, a women’s health organization that provides cancer screenings, routine examinations, and abortion services.

Romney’s problem with Hispanic voters is even more pronounced after he rejected proposals to allow illegal immigrants a path to legalization, including a bill known as the DREAM Act to let undocumented residents brought to the country as babies or young children obtain citizenship if they attend college or join the military. A poll released last month by Fox News Latino found Romney’s support among likely Latino voters at 14 percent. Obama had the backing of 70 percent of respondents in that poll.

And the most recent Gallup poll conducted March 25-26 found Romney trailing the president among independent voters, 40 percent to Obama’s 48 percent.

“Obviously you have to close the gender gap some, and we definitely need an active campaign in the Hispanic community,” said Charlie Black, a Republican campaign strategist who is advising Romney. Romney also needs to spend time, he added, “cleaning up a little bit of any negative perceptions that were created in the primary — and of course, you have to go back and check and make sure your base will rally around you.”

So, can Mr. Etcha Sketch change any one’s mind given that the Republican convention is going to have its socially radical agenda front and center for all to see?  Gingrich and Santorum are not going quietly into the night even though they have stopped winning elections.  It will be interesting to see how women, GLBT, Hispanics, and the black communities react to Tea Party hysteria on prime time TV.   As an independent woman, I can say I am not happy with the lack of support given women by the Democratic party, but the Republicans are now scaring the living daylights out of me.  My daughters and I are not livestock or insects and the obvious orchestrated attack on our rights is not all in our heads or the political strategy of the DNC.

Thursday Reads

Posted: April 5, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: 2012 presidential campaign, Barack Obama, Civil Rights, George W. Bush, Mitt Romney, morning reads, torture, U.S. Politics | Tags: , , , , , , , , , | 21 Comments

Good Morning!!

I think I have a few interesting links for you this morning, so let’s get right to it.

Those New Orleans cops who killed two people on the Danzinger Bridge after Hurricane Katrina got real prison time yesterday.

Four New Orleans police officers were sentenced to 38 to 65 years in prison for convictions including violating the civil rights of two people killed a week after Hurricane Katrina devastated the city in 2005.

U.S. District Judge Kurt D. Engelhardt in New Orleans sentenced a fifth officer today to six years in prison for covering up the crimes.

A federal jury in August convicted officers Kenneth Bowen, Robert Gisevius, Robert Faulcon and Anthony Villavaso of opening fire on unarmed black civilians on the city’s Danziger Bridge and conspiring with others to cover up their actions. The fifth, homicide detective Arthur “Archie” Kaufman, was convicted of conspiring to make the shootings appear justified.

“We hope that today’s sentences give a measure of peace and closure to the victims of this terrible shooting, who have suffered unspeakable pain and who have waited so patiently for justice to be done,” Thomas E. Perez, assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s civil rights division, said in an e-mailed statement. “The officers who shot innocent people on the bridge and then went to great lengths to cover up their own crimes have finally been held accountable for their actions.”

Finally, some justice at a time when we are becoming aware of so many cases of African Americans being killed without any repercussions for the killers.

Last night I wrote about the judges of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ordering the Justice Department to attend a hearing and be lectured about the President of the United States daring to make a few comments about his belief that the Supreme Court would not overturn the ACA. The hearing turned out to be even more ludicrous than I could have imagined. Jeffrey Toobin called it a “judicial hissy fit.”

An appeals court judge who claimed President Barack Obama was challenging the authority of federal courts was just throwing a “judicial hissy-fit,” according to CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin.

“Totally extraordinary and totally inappropriate,” Toobin said. “This was a judicial hissy-fit.”

U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Jerry Smith on Tuesday demanded a “three page, single spaced” letter from the Justice Department regarding the authority of the federal courts to strike down laws passed by Congress. Obama said Monday that the “unelected” Supreme Court should not to take the “extraordinary” and “unprecedented” step of striking down the Affordable Care Act.

“What the President said was entirely appropriate, entirely within his rights as an American citizen to express his opinions about this law,” Toobin continued.

“He wasn’t intimidating the Supreme Court. He couldn’t intimidate the Supreme Court if he wanted to. He was simply saying that he believes this law is constitutional, and this judge, doing this ridiculous patronizing act to the Department of Justice has simply made himself look ridiculous.”

A three-page, single spaced letter? Good grief! Of course the right wing nuts are overjoyed and crowing over this. Remember when they were so much against “judicial activism?” Remember just recently when Newt Gingrich talked about the dictatorship of the judges (or similar words)?

Eric Holder also defended the President’s remarks:

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said Wednesday that the Justice Department will respond “appropriately” to a federal appellate judge in Texas who demanded a letter recognizing federal courts’ authority to strike down laws passed by Congress.

Holder spoke a day after 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Jerry Smith questioned President Barack Obama’s remarks this week about an “unelected” court possibly striking down the president’s health care overhaul. Smith, during oral arguments in a separate challenge to the health law, asked the Justice Department for a three-page, single-spaced letter affirming the federal court’s authority.

When asked during a Wednesday news conference in Chicago what an appropriate response to Smith would be, Holder said, “I think what the president said a couple of days ago was appropriate. He indicated that we obviously respect the decisions that courts make.”

“Under our system of government … courts have the final say on the constitutionality of statutes,” Holder said. “The courts are also fairly deferential when it comes to overturning statutes that the duly elected representatives of the people, Congress, pass.”

Spencer Ackerman at the Danger Room got hold of a memo written by Philip Zelikow, who was an adviser to former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, in which he said that the torture techniques that had been supported by the Bush Justice Department amounted to war crimes.

Zelikow argued that the Geneva conventions applied to al-Qaida — a position neither the Justice Department nor the White House shared at the time. That made waterboarding and the like a violation of the War Crimes statute and a “felony,” Zelikow tells Danger Room. Asked explicitly if he believed the use of those interrogation techniques were a war crime, Zelikow replied, “Yes.”

Zelikow first revealed the existence of his secret memo, dated Feb. 15, 2006, in an April 2009 blog post, shortly after the Obama administration disclosed many of its predecessor’s legal opinions blessing torture. He briefly described it (.pdf) in a contentious Senate hearing shortly thereafter, revealing then that “I later heard the memo was not considered appropriate for further discussion and that copies of my memo should be collected and destroyed.” [….]

Zelikow’s memo was an internal bureaucratic push against an attempt by the Justice Department to flout long-standing legal restrictions against torture. In 2005, he wrote, both the Justice and State Departments had decided that international prohibitions against “acts of cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment which do not amount to torture” do not “apply to CIA interrogations in foreign countries.” Those techniques included contorting a detainee’s body in painful positions, slamming a detainee’s head against a wall, restricting a detainee’s caloric intake, and waterboarding.

Zelikow wrote that a law passed that year by Congress, restricting interrogation techniques, meant the “situation has now changed.” Both legally and as a matter of policy, he advised, administration officials were endangering both CIA interrogators and the reputation of the United States by engaging in extreme interrogations — even those that stop short of torture.

Of course Zelikow couldn’t know back then that the next President, supposedly a Democrat would defend the war criminals in court and refuse to release videos and photos that would reveal the horrors of what the CIA had done.

Former Senator and 1972 presidential candidate George McGovern, who is 89, has been hospitalized in Florida. His daughter Ann McGovern told the AP that her dad

was admitted to Flagler Hospital in St. Augustine, Fla., on Tuesday evening for tests to figure out why he occasionally passes out and loses his ability to speak, she said.

“He’s comfortable. The tests are continuing to see if they can determine what’s causing this,” Ann McGovern said.

Hospital officials said the elder McGovern is in stable condition. McGovern splits his time between Florida and South Dakota, where he was a South Dakota congressman from 1957 to 1961 and a U.S. senator from 1963 to 1981. He has been hospitalized several times in recent months, including for exhaustion.

South Dakota Democratic Party Chairman Ben Nesselhuf said McGovern looked great and was in good spirits when he attended the party’s annual fundraiser, named in his honor, last weekend in Sioux Falls. Nesselhuf said the former senator, who gave a 20-minute speech at the affair, resists efforts to schedule rest periods during such events because “he wants to do everything.”

Yesterday on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Joe Scarborough came out and said what most people who have been watching the Republican clown show are thinking: Mitt Romney has no chance to win the presidency in 2012. In fact, Republicans are already looking ahead to 2016.

Joe Scarborough: Nobody thinks Romney is going to win. Can we just say this for everybody at home? I have yet to meet a person in the Republican establishment that thinks Mitt Romney is going to win the general election this year. They won’t say it on TV because they’ve got to go on TV, and they don’t want people writing them nasty emails. I obviously don’t care. I have yet to meet anybody in the Republican establishment that worked for George W. Bush, that works in the Republican Congress, that worked for Ronald Reagan that thinks Mitt Romney is going to win the general election.

Duh! Who wants to vote for a man who has made himself into a laughing stock?

Have you heard about the giant feathered dinosaur fossils that have been found in China? They were as big as a bus and had fuzzy feathers all over them.

The discovery of a giant meat-eating dinosaur sporting a downy coat has some scientists reimagining the look of Tyrannosaurus rex.

With a killer jaw and sharp claws, T. rex has long been depicted in movies and popular culture as having scaly skin. But the discovery of an earlier relative suggests the king of dinosaurs may have had a softer side.

The evidence comes from the unearthing of a new tyrannosaur species in northeastern China that lived 60 million years before T. rex. The fossil record preserved remains of fluffy down, making it the largest feathered dinosaur ever found.

If a T. rex relative had feathers, why not T. rex? Scientists said the evidence is trending in that direction.

“People need to start changing their image of T. rex,” said Luis Chiappe, director of the Dinosaur Institute at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, who was not part of the discovery team.

Those are my picks for today. What are you reading and blogging about?

The War on Science and Fact-based Reality

Posted: April 4, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: abortion rights, religious extremists, Republican politics, Republican presidential politics, Voter Ignorance, War on Women, Women's Healthcare, Women's Rights | 10 Comments

What does it say about a country where a large segment of the population works to enact laws and policies that are openly hostile to scientific thought and findings?  Hand-in-hand with the war against public education and civil rights has come a war on science.  It relies on billionaire-funded ideological think tanks, ignorant and hateful media blovaiators, and fundamentalist religions.  What is so scary about modernity and scientific findings that a large number of states want to make it illegal?

Evolution is as an accepted theory among biologists as global warming is among scientists who study climate. The idea that a fetus is viable before the third trimester or can feel pain early in development is a view only held outside the medical community.  Why is it that scientists and their life long research are held in less esteem than ideological and theological wishful thinking?

Here’s some great examples of how one major political party is the party of the Age of Unreason.

Tennessee has decided to refight the Scopes Monkey Trial. 

Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam (R) announced yesterday that he will “probably” sign a bill that attacks the teaching of “biological evolution, the chemical origins of life, global warming, and human cloning” by giving broad new legal immunities to teachers who question evolution and other widely accepted scientific theories. Under the bill, which passed the state legislature last month:

Neither the state board of education, nor any public elementary or secondary school governing authority, director of schools, school system administrator, or any public elementary or secondary school principal or administrator shall prohibit any teacher in a public school system of this state from helping students understand, analyze, critique, and review in an objective manner the scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses of existing scientific theories covered in the course being taught.

Although the bill is written to seem benign, as it neither specifically authorizes the teaching of creationism nor permits teachers to do more than criticize scientific theories “in an objective matter,” the practical impact of this bill will be to intimidate all but the heartiest of school administrators against disciplining teachers who preach the most outlandish junk science in their classrooms. Because the bill provides little guidance as to what constitutes an “objective” criticism of a scientific theory, any principal who reigns in teachers who force creationism or Pastafarianism upon their students risks finding themselves on the wrong side of the law.

In reality, of course, there are few, if any, “objectively” valid objections to the theory of evolution (or, for that matter, to global warming). Rather, as Travis Waldron explained when this bill passed a legislative committee nearly a year ago, “Scientists have reached a consensus that evolution is ‘one of the most robust and widely accepted principles of modern science,’ and as such, it is ‘a core element in science education.’”

This is seriously ridiculous given that molecular biology and the associated field of genetics as well as the fossil record have provided more and not less evidence on the Theory of Evolution.  What’s next?  Denying gravity?

Nebraska and other states have banned abortions after 20 weeks under all circumstances.  That even includes situations where the pregnancy will never result in a live baby or healthy mother. So much for the lie of small, unobtrusive government.

Danielle Deaver was 22 weeks pregnant when her water broke and doctors gave her a devastating prognosis: With undeveloped lungs, the baby likely would never survive outside the womb, and because all the amniotic fluid had drained, the tiny growing fetus slowly would be crushed by the uterus walls.

“What we learned from the perinatologist was that because there was no cushion, she couldn’t move her arms and legs because of contractures,” said Deaver, a 34-year-old nurse from Grand Isle, Neb. “And her face and head would be deformed because the uterus pushed down so hard.”

After having had three miscarriages, Deaver and her husband, Robb Deaver, looked for every medical way possible to save the baby. Deaver’s prior pregnancy ended the same way at 15 weeks, and doctors induced her to spare the pain.

But this time, when the couple sought the same procedure, doctors could not legally help them.

Just one month earlier, Nebraska had enacted the nation’s first fetal pain legislation, banning abortions after 20 weeks gestation. So the Deavers had to wait more than a week to deliver baby Elizabeth, who died after just 15 minutes.

Of course, the ultimate lunacy is the denial of global warming. Again, many people embrace the preachings of phony, industry-sponsored propaganda businesses instead of the scientific findings of the research community. What causes this?

They don’t like evolution, they don’t like global warming—none of that stuff. Now a sociologist set out to figure out if that thesis really is true, and concluded that the right in the US is indeed growing increasingly distrustful of science.

Gordon Gauchat of the University of North Carolina published these findings in the forthcoming issue of the American Sociological Review. He looked back at data from 1974 through 2010, and found that trust in science was relatively stable over that 36-year period, except among self-identified conservatives. While conservatives started in 1974 as the group that trusted science most (compared to self-identified liberals and moderates), they have now dropped to the bottom of the ranking.

Chris Mooney–author of The Republican War on Science–has seen this trend as early as the 1970s.

The reason for this, according to Mooney and others, is that the “political neutrality of science began to unravel in the 1970s with the emergence of the new right”—a growing body of conservatives who were distrustful of science and the intellectual establishment, who were often religious and concerned about defending “traditional values” in the face of a modernizing world, and who favored limited government. This has prompted backlash against subjects for which there is broad scientific consensus, like global warming and evolution—backlash that has been apparent in survey data over the past three decades.

Gauchet says this of his study.

“You can see this distrust in science among conservatives reflected in the current Republican primary campaign,” Gordon Gauchat, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Sheps Center for Health Services Research, said in a news release from the American Sociological Association. “When people want to define themselves as conservatives relative to moderates and liberals, you often hear them raising questions about the validity of global warming and evolution, and talking about how ‘intellectual elites’ and scientists don’t necessarily have the whole truth.”

…

“Over the last several decades, there’s been an effort among those who define themselves as conservatives to clearly identify what it means to be a conservative,” he said. “For whatever reason, this appears to involve opposing science and universities, and what is perceived as the ‘liberal culture.’ So, self-identified conservatives seem to lump these groups together and rally around the notion that what makes ‘us’ conservatives is that we don’t agree with ‘them.'”

Meanwhile, the perception of science’s role in society has shifted as well.

“In the past, the scientific community was viewed as concerned primarily with macro structural matters such as winning the space race,” Gauchat said. “Today, conservatives perceive the scientific community as more focused on regulatory matters such as stopping industry from producing too much carbon dioxide.”

As we continue to see laws passed that  reflect hostility to education, science, and reality-based research we will undoubtedly see other countries pull ahead of us in a number of areas.  This has a number of ramifications for our economy, our ability to impact international conversations, and  our future.  Now is the time to get rid of the politicians, the supreme court justices, and the media figures who prefer the 19th century to the 21st.

 

 

Wednesday Reads

Posted: April 4, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: just because | 34 Comments

Good morning, news junkies! I’m filling in for Minkoff Minx this morning since she’s going in for the big surgery today (and sending her big big hugs!)

Perusing memeorandum just now, I found headlines like, “Fox’s Heather Childers Tweets: Did Obama Campaign Threaten To Kill Chelsea Clinton?” Let’s just say that I am particularly unimpressed with the latest “buzz.” So, I’m going to highlight a few stories that have garnered less attention but definitely caught mine over the past few days:

  •  ‘Overdiagnosis’ of breast cancer may be higher than thought. [CNN] Or, as Jezebel sums it up:

So what exactly are we supposed to do about this? Well, mainly just be informed, which is medicalese for “be freaked out with no way to help yourself.” It’s clearly a problem, but there is no clear solution. If you take a more macro view, theoretically we ought to stop screening women so early (unless they have a family history of breast cancer), and we ought to be less aggressive in treating certain breast cancers. But that idea obviously becomes problematic when you try to practice caution on any given individual.

  • This next one is a story here in Houston that started out ‘maddening’ and has taken a turn for ‘inspiring’ in a power-to-the-people sort of way… From my local ABC affiliate… Homeless feeding ordinance protestors stage ‘feed-in’ in front of Houston City Hall [abc13.com]:

HOUSTON (KTRK) — A proposal to regulate the way Houstonians feed the homeless has sparked a backlash among homeless advocates.

The city of Houston is scheduled to vote on the ordnance on Wednesday. It’s already been watered down since it was first introduced but some people are still unhappy and that’s why they protested on Tuesday.

In front of City Hall Tuesday, the homeless lined up for lunch. Sponsors called it a “feed-in” to protest a proposed ordinance that would regulate homeless feedings.

  • I love this magazine (and I know Dr. Dakinikat does too!), so this last one warmed my heart… Anthropologists love Scientific American [SciAm]:

Claude Lévi-Strauss, one of the founders of Anthropology, said, among else, this in his 1977 Massey Lecture:

Let me start with a personal confession. There is a magazine which I read faithfully each month from the first line to the last, even though I don’t understand all of it; it is the Scientific American. I am extremely eager to be as informed as possible of everything that takes place in modern science and its new developments.

Alright, I’m keeping it super short today because the kitties will NOT let me type. They want their cuddles and their breakfast (wet food for all the wet-food-for-cat enthusiasts out there!) So please help a Wonk out and share your reads+rants in the comments, y’all. And, have a terrific Wednesday!

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