Tuesday Reads

Posted: August 21, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: 2012 presidential campaign, abortion rights, misogyny, morning reads, religion, Reproductive Rights, the GOP, U.S. Politics, Violence against women, War on Women, Women's Healthcare, Women's Rights | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , | 43 Comments

Good Morning!!

The latest outrage triggered by Rep. Todd Akin’s claim that women who are “forcibly” (ALA “legitimately”) raped can somehow prevent pregnancy through a magical substance secreted by their sexual organs, has finally brought into wider public consciousness that War on Women that we at Sky Dancing have been documenting for the past year or so.

Although this topic is distasteful–even disgusting–to most of us and triggers traumatic memories in quite a few of us, I believe that Akin has done women a favor. Women around the country who don’t pay attention to daily developments in politics are now going to learn that the Republican Party is actively hostile to women and dismissive of women’s rights and women’s lives. So I’m going to begin with some links on this topic.

The New York Times spoke to experts about Akin’s odd beliefs about rape and pregnancy: Health Experts Dismiss Assertions on Rape. First, there was a doctor who made arguments similar to Akin’s:

Dr. John C. Willke, a general practitioner with obstetric training and a former president of the National Right to Life Committee, was an early proponent of this view, articulating it in a book originally published in 1985 and again in a 1999 article. He reiterated it in an interview Monday.

“This is a traumatic thing — she’s, shall we say, she’s uptight,” Dr. Willke said of a woman being raped, adding, “She is frightened, tight, and so on. And sperm, if deposited in her vagina, are less likely to be able to fertilize. The tubes are spastic.”

But experts that the NYT spoke to ridiculed Willke’s ideas.

“There are no words for this — it is just nuts,” said Dr. Michael Greene, a professor of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive biology at Harvard Medical School.

Dr. David Grimes, a clinical professor in obstetrics and gynecology at the University of North Carolina, said, that “to suggest that there’s some biological reason why women couldn’t get pregnant during a rape is absurd.”

Willke also claimed the rapists are often premature ejaculators, prefer anal sex, or are infertile. The experts responded:

“Yeah, there are all sorts of hormones, including ones that cause your heart to beat fast when you’re frightened,” said Dr. Greene. But he added, “I’m not aware of any data that says that reduces a woman’s risk of getting pregnant.”

As for the contention that a rape victim’s fallopian tubes tighten, Dr. Grimes, formerly of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said, “That’s nonsense. Everything is working. The tube is very small anyway and sperm are very tiny — they’re excellent swimmers.”

Think Progress examined the opinions of Todd Akin’s “spiritual mentor,” D. James Kennedy.

Rep. Todd Akin’s (R-MO) spiritual mentor Reverend D. James Kennedy harbored extreme and sometimes flatly misogynistic views about rape and abortion, according to a ThinkProgress review of Kennedy’s sermons on the topic. The Senate candidate, who set off a massive controversy by claiming this weekend that victims of “legitimate rape” don’t get pregnant, has deep ties to Reverend Kennedy, having cited some of his sermons as key intellectual influences and having been named in Kennedy’s book How Would Jesus Vote? as one of the Reverend’s “favorite statesman.”

Kennedy, who the Anti-Defamation League has termed a “Christian supremacist,” repeatedly railed against legalized abortion, calling it the “American Holocaust” and suggesting that it would lead inevitably to genocide in the United States. But Kennedy’s discussions of rape and abortion in particular betray extraordinarily disturbing views about rape victims.

Those repulsive views are listed at the link.

CNN: Leading social conservatives rally to Akin’s defense. First among those supporters of course, Tony Perkins of the non-mainstream organization Family Research Council.

Truthout’s William Rivers Pitt on Romney’s response to Akin:

Their immediate response to Akin’s statement should be a first-ballot entrant into the Vapid Dishwater Statement Hall Of Fame: “Governor Romney and Congressman Ryan disagree with Mr. Akin’s statement. A Romney-Ryan administration would not oppose abortion in instances of rape.” Perhaps realizing how spectacularly inadequate that response was, the Romney campaign followed up by calling Akin’s words “insulting, inexcusable and, frankly, wrong.”

Not nearly good enough. Mr. Romney has spent his entire political career being for choice before he was against choice before he was for it before he was against it before he was for it before he was against it, and if the American people are going to cast a vote for him, they deserve to hear a better response from him to Mr. Akin’s gibberish than what has thus far been provided. “Nah, that’s not me” does not nearly make the nut, especially since he has anointed himself as the standard-bearer for a GOP base that, in large part, wants to outlaw abortion in all instances, including in cases of rape and incest.

The real problem here for the Republican campaign, however, is Paul Ryan. Mr. Ryan joined forces with Mr. Akin in 2011, co-sponsoring a bill with him to redefine the definition of rape through legislation aimed at changing the working term to “forcible rape,” as a means of annihilating the rape and incest exemptions that currently exist in abortion law. The attempt died a swift death in Congress, but the intention could not be more clear…and the driving force behind it was the Dynamic Duo of Todd “Legitimate Rape” Akin and Paul “Forcible Rape” Ryan.

It is extremely important that Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan not be permitted to get away with pretending that they do not hold the exact same ridiculous and cruel positions as Todd Akin.

Finally, I highly recommend this long read at Alternet by Joshua Holland: The Conservative Psyche: How Ordinary People Come to Embrace Paul Ryan’s Cruelty.

In other news,

President Obama warned Syria against using chemical or biological weapons.

Pointing out that he had refrained “at this point” from ordering US military engagement in Syria, Obama said that there would be “enormous consequences” if Assad failed to safeguard his weapons of mass destruction.

It was Obama’s strongest language to date on the issue, and he warned Syria not only against using its unconventional weapons, but against moving them in a threatening fashion.

“We have been very clear to the Assad regime, but also to other players on the ground, that a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilised,” Obama said. “That would change my calculus.”

“We cannot have a situation where chemical or biological weapons are falling into the hands of the wrong people,” Obama told an impromptu White House news conference. He acknowledged he was not “absolutely confident” the stockpile was secure.

Mitt Romney was in New Hampshire yesterday, and he had the nerve to joke about wanting to pay even less in taxes than he already does.

Mitt Romney may have a lower effective tax rate than many middle-class Americans, but he’s still dreaming of ways to pay even less.

At a town hall-style event in Manchester, New Hampshire on Monday, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee told supporters that he could “save me some tax dollars” if he became a resident of the state, which doesn’t have a tax on W-2 reported wages.

“So many friends here in New Hampshire,” Romney said at the beginning of his remarks. “I feel like I’m almost a New Hampshire resident. … It would save me some tax dollars, I think.”

Not only does he insist on keeping his tax returns secret, he jokes about the possibility of saving even more on his taxes. Would any amount of money ever be enough for this Greedhead?

Romney has finally opened up a little about his religion. He invited members of the media to attend church services with him on Sunday. On Thursday night NBC’s Rock Center will offer an hour-long examination of Mormonism.

TPM learned yesterday that the reported FBI investigation of the Republicans who jumped into the Sea of Gallilee after a night of drinking was actually an investigation of just one participant, Michael Grimm of New York.

Law enforcement sources — noting that skinny-dipping usually doesn’t fall under the FBI’s purview — pointed TPM to a New York Times story from earlier this month about a trip to Cyprus that Rep. Michael Grimm (R-NY) made following his August venture to Israel alongside several colleagues.

Politico, which first reported the skinny-dipping anecdote, said the FBI “looked into whether any inappropriate behavior occurred, but the interviews do not appear to have resulted in any formal allegations of wrongdoing.”

But FBI agents were actually interested in Grimm’s failure to file paperwork related to his trip to Cyprus following his Israeli junket, which had been paid for by the Cyprus Federation of America. The president of that company was arrested on federal corruption charges in June. Grimm had reported the Israel trip in his initial filing in May but did not list the trip to Cyprus until he amended it in June, one day after Cyprus Federation of America’s president was arrested.

Lately it seems as if every week we lose a few more famous elderly people. Yesterday two famous entertainers died: Phyllis Diller and William Windom.

NYT: Phyllis Diller, 1917-2012: Laughs Were on Her, by Design

Phyllis Diller, whose sassy, screeching, rapid-fire stand-up comedy helped open the door for two generations of funny women, died on Monday at her home in Brentwood, Calif. She was 95.

Ms. Diller, who became famous for telling jokes that mocked her odd looks, her aversion to housekeeping and a husband she called Fang, was far from the first woman to do stand-up comedy. But she was one of the most influential. There were precious few women before her, if any, who could dispense one-liners with such machine-gun precision or overpower an audience with such an outrageous personality.

One chestnut: “I once wore a peekaboo blouse. People would peek and then they’d boo.”

Another: “I never made ‘Who’s Who,’ but I’m featured in ‘What’s That?’ ”

William Windom, one of my favorite TV actors also died. Most people will remember him from Murder, She Wrote, but since I’m so old I remember two other shows he starred in: The Farmer’s Daughter and My World and Welcome to it. He also played a lawyer in To Kill a Mockingbird.

Born in New York City on Sept. 28, 1923, Mr. Windom was named after his great-grandfather, a Minnesota congressman, senator and U.S. Treasury secretary. Mr. Windom attended Williams College in Massachusetts before joining the Army during World War II. He later attended the University of Kentucky, among several other higher-education institutions, and decided to pursue acting.

With his genial features, affable manner and extensive theater training, Mr. Windom was an in-demand television character actor for decades.

He chalked up scores of guest credits, including episodes of “The Twilight Zone” and “Star Trek,” in which he played a spacecraft commodore trying to thwart an out-of-control doomsday machine; the ’60s comedy series “The Farmer’s Daughter,” in which he played a widowed Minnesota congressman; and more than 50 segments of “Murder, She Wrote,” starting in the mid-1980s. In that whodunit drama, Mr. Windom played a Maine country doctor opposite series star Angela Lansbury as Jessica Fletcher.

Now it’s your turn. What are you reading and blogging about today?

President Barack Obama: “Rape is Rape.”

Posted: August 20, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: abortion rights, Barack Obama, misogyny, Mitt Romney, PLUB Pro-Life-Until-Birth, torture, U.S. Politics, Violence against women, War on Women, Women's Healthcare, Women's Rights | Tags: , , , , , | 37 Comments

I have to hand it to President Obama. He hit all the right notes today in responding to the disgusting remarks by Missouri Senate candidate Todd Akin. From TPM:

President Obama strongly condemned Rep. Todd Akin (R-MO) during a surprise press conference Monday for his remarks that “legitimate rape” doesn’t cause pregnancy. Obama said Akin’s statement was reflective of the broader Republican Party’s treatment of women.

“Let me first say the views expressed were offensive,” Obama said. “Rape is rape, and the idea that we should be parsing and qualifying and slicing what types of rape we’re talking about doesn’t make sense to the American people and certainly doesn’t make sense to me.”….

Obama, while acknowledging criticism of Akin from within the Republican Party, said that his remarks were indicative of the GOP’s anti-abortion record. He pointedly referenced a House Republican bill co-sponsored by Akin and Rep. Paul Ryan that distinguished “forcible rape” in banning funding for abortion, language that was subsequently withdrawn after an outcry from women’s advocacy groups.

“What I think these comments do underscore is why we shouldn’t have a bunch of politicians, a majority of whom are men, making health care decisions on behalf of women,” Obama said. “So although these particular comments have led Gov. Romney and other Republicans to distance themselves, I think that the underlying notion that we should be making decisions on behalf of women … or qualifying forcible rape versus non-forcible rape are broader issues.”

This is a strong affirmation of the President’s support women’s autonomy that I believe is on a par with the statement he made in support of gay marriage. Michelle, Malia,and Sasha must be very proud today.

During the same surprise appearance in the White House press room, Obama essentially said that Mitt Romney’s entire campaign has been based on a pack of lies. From Greg Sargent:

Obama was questioned sharply by a reporter who pointed to the Priorities USA ad featuring the dead woman and the Obama campaign’s pressure on Romney to release his tax returns, and asked whether he regretted his campaign’s tone. Obama responded, in part:

“I don’t think that Governor Romney is somehow responsible for the death of the woman that was portrayed in that ad. But keep in mind, this is an ad that I didn’t approve; I did not produce; and as far as I can tell, has barely run. I think it ran once. Now, in contrast, you’ve got Governor Romney creating as a centerpiece of his campaign this notion that we’re taking work requirement out of welfare. Which every single person here who’s looked at it says, it’s patently false…

“Everybody who’s looked at this says what Governor Romney is saying is absolutely wrong. Not only are his Super PACs running millions of dollars worth of ads making this claim; Governor Romney himself is approving this and saying it on the stump. So the contrast I think is pretty stark. They can run the campaign that theyw ant; but the truth of the matter is, you can’t just make stuff up. That’s one thing you learn as president of the United States. You get called into account.”

I know some people will condemn me as a “cockeyed optimist,” but I think Obama may have begun developing a backbone since his pitched battle with Republican leadership over the debt ceiling.

This is an open thread.

Dana Millbank: The Family Research Council is “A Mainstream Conservative Think Tank.”

Posted: August 17, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: abortion rights, Reproductive Rights, U.S. Politics, War on Women, Women's Rights | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , | 36 Comments

If Tony Perkins is “mainstream,” we’re all in deep trouble

In his latest column, Dana Millbank takes the Village journalists’ “both sides do it” routine to such irrational extremes that he loses all credibility.

Human Rights Campaign [HRC], the nation’s largest gay rights organization, posted an alert on its blog Tuesday: “Paul Ryan Speaking at Hate Group’s Annual Conference.”

The “hate group” that the Republicans’ vice presidential candidate would be addressing? The Family Research Council [FRC], a mainstream conservative think tank founded by James Dobson and run for many years by Gary Bauer.

The day after the gay rights group’s alert went out, 28-year-old Floyd Lee Corkins II walked into the Family Research Council’s Washington headquarters and, according to an FBI affidavit, proclaimed words to the effect of “I don’t like your politics” — and shot the security guard. Corkins, who had recently volunteered at a gay community center, was carrying a 9mm handgun, a box of ammunition and a backpack full of Chick-fil-A — the company whose president recently spoke out against gay marriage.

Mercifully, the gunman was restrained, and nobody was killed.

Apparently Millbank made the logical leap of assigning cause and effect to two unrelated events that are close in time. Corkins must have read the HRC website and rush out to shoot someone. Or maybe Corkins was browsing the internet and came across the Southern Poverty Law Center website where the FRC is listed as a hate group.
Millbank says

Human Rights Campaign isn’t responsible for the shooting. Neither should the organization that deemed the FRC a “hate group,” the Southern Poverty Law Center, be blamed for a madman’s act. But both are reckless in labeling as a “hate group” a policy shop that advocates for a full range of conservative Christian positions, on issues from stem cells to euthanasia.

I disagree with the Family Research Council’s views on gays and lesbians. But it’s absurd to put the group, as the law center does, in the same category as Aryan Nations, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, Stormfront and the Westboro Baptist Church. The center says the FRC “often makes false claims about the LGBT community based on discredited research and junk science.” Exhibit A in its dossier is a quote by an FRC official from 1999 (!) saying that “gaining access to children has been a long-term goal of the homosexual movement.”

Millbank seems to believe that the FRC is “mainstream” because it has been headed by Tony Perkins and Gary Bauer, and with his exclamation point after “1999” he seems to be implying that there is some kind of statute of limitations on hate speech.

I can’t follow his reasoning at all. He’s twisting himself into a pretzel in order to defend an organization that clearly works overtime to drum up hate, not only against the LGBT community, but also against women and anyone involved in providing family planning or abortion. Perkins has even argued against anti-bullying policies in schools, claiming they are part of the “homosexual agenda” to “redefine families.”

Millbank even quotes the National Organization for Marriage (NOM) to support his arguments!

The National Organization for Marriage, which opposes gay marriage, is right to say that the attack “is the clearest sign we’ve seen that labeling pro-marriage groups as ‘hateful’ must end.”

Here’s a little background on the NOM from Mother Jones:

Spokespeople for the National Organization for Marriage, such as Rev. William Owens, who exaggerated his civil rights background to justify his opposition to same sex marriage, have compared homosexuality to bestiality and child abuse. NOM’s man in Maryland, Bishop Harry Jackson, has compared gay rights groups to Nazis whose actions recall “the times of Hitler.” Most of NOM’s more high-profile spokespersons are more careful with their words, but beyond rhetoric, NOM has argued that gay judges should be barred from ruling on LGBT rights issues and embraced junk science to argue that gays and lesbians make worse parents.

I guess “Pro-marriage” is like “pro-life”–supporting certain kinds of marriage like the anti-abortion crown supports only fetal life.

Millbank may not want to actually blame the SPLC for the shooting, but Tony Perkins didn’t hesitate to do so.

The Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins accused the Southern Poverty Law Center — a civil rights organization dedicated to fighting hate and bigotry — of providing “license” for a man to shoot a security guard in the arm on Wednesday.

“Floyd Corkins was given a license to shoot an unarmed man by organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center that have been reckless in labeling organizations hate groups because they disagree with them on public policy,” Perkins declared during a press conference on Thursday afternoon. “I believe the Southern Poverty Law Center should be held responsible that is leading to intimidation of what the FBI has characterized as domestic terrorism.” Corkins has since been charged for assault with a deadly weapon and could soon face federal charges. The guard, Leo Johnson, is in stable condition.

Asked by reporters why he thought the shooter was motivated by his distate for the group rather than mental incapacity, Perkins quipped, “How many unhinged individuals walk around with 15 Chick-fil-A sandwiches?”

So does that make the FRC responsible for the murders of abortion doctors like George Tiller?

Here are just a few examples of statements from the FRC on gays and lesbians. You can go to the links to read more.

Mother Jones: What the Right Gets Wrong about the FRC Shooting.

Perkins’ Family Research Council has practically cornered the market on anti-gay junk science. The Southern Poverty Law Center’s classification of the FRC as a hate group stems from FRC’s more than decade-long insistence that gay people are more likely to molest children. Spokespeople for the FRC have said that homosexual sex should be outlawed, and Perkins himself has said as recently as 2010 that “the research is overwhelming that homosexuality poses a danger to children.” Research from non-ideological outfits is actually firm in concluding the opposite. Some of the FRC’s more outrageous “studies,” such as the 1999 paper claiming that “one of the primary goals of the homosexual rights movement is to abolish all age of consent laws and to eventually recognize pedophiles as the ‘prophets’ of a new sexual order,” have been scrubbed from the group’s website, but the FRC has not disavowed their contents.

Anti-gay quotes from the FRC compiled by Mathew Shepard Online Resources.

Gays are like a gun to the head of America

“That’s what we’re talking about whenever you’re talking about gay rights. You’re talking about giving somebody a gun to put at the head of anybody who disagrees with them, whether it’s the Boy Scouts, whether it’s a local dry-cleaning establishment or a giant corporation like Shell Oil.” – Robert Knight, http://www.frc.org/net/st96d2.html

Gays oppose monogamy

“one thing that has been interesting to me is the gay literature has come right out and said we can’t keep monogamy in our definition of marriage. We may have a significant relationship we’ll call marriage, but things like monogamy and fidelity, faithfulness, and lifetime kind of till-death-do-us-part commitments are a little unrealistic. So we want it to be marriage, but we don’t want it to be monogamous.” – Kristi Hamrick , http://www.frc.org/net/st96d2.html

Gay parents lead to prison, voyeurism

“I know a guy who has just entered jail, tragically, because he grew up in a lesbian household. He still loves his mother and doesn’t really blame her, but he said, ‘You know, as a boy in a lesbian environment where it was intensely anti-male’ — that’s all he heard, this bitterness toward men — he said that he felt totally disenfranchised, began having sexual problems. He eventually became a voyeur, and he is in on a peeping Tom charge. He was so curious about how normal people have sex. We have other people that are cases like this.” – Robert Knight, http://www.frc.org/net/st96d2.html

See also this “Refresher on Tony Perkins’ Anti-Gay Hits.”

The SPLC posted a response to Perkins on its website, calling the FRC claims “outrageous.”

Perkins’ accusation is outrageous. The SPLC has listed the FRC as a hate group since 2010 because it has knowingly spread false and denigrating propaganda about LGBT people — not, as some claim, because it opposes same-sex marriage. The FRC and its allies on the religious right are saying, in effect, that offering legitimate and fact-based criticism in a democratic society is tantamount to suggesting that the objects of criticism should be the targets of criminal violence.

As the SPLC made clear at the time and in hundreds of subsequent statements and press interviews, we criticize the FRC for claiming, in Perkins’ words, that pedophilia is “a homosexual problem” — an utter falsehood, as every relevant scientific authority has stated. An FRC official has said he wanted to “export homosexuals from the United States.” The same official advocated the criminalizing of homosexuality.

Perkins and his allies, seeing an opportunity to score points, are using the attack on their offices to pose a false equivalency between the SPLC’s criticisms of the FRC and the FRC’s criticisms of LGBT people. The FRC routinely pushes out demonizing claims that gay people are child molesters and worse — claims that are provably false. It should stop the demonization and affirm the dignity of all people.

The Family Research Council is an extreme right wing organization. Dana Millbank should hang his head in shame. Perkins is trying to make his group look like the victim of bigotry instead of the proponent of it, and Millbank is working overtime to help him do it.

Tuesday Reads: Romney’s Gaffe-tastic European Tour, #NBCfail, the War on Women, and More

Posted: July 31, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: 2012 presidential campaign, abortion rights, Barack Obama, Foreign Affairs, George W. Bush, Israel, Mitt Romney, morning reads, Palestine, Reproductive Rights, Russia, The DNC, the GOP, U.S. Economy, U.S. Politics, War on Women, We are so F'd, Women's Healthcare | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 30 Comments

Good Morning!!

Mitt Romney is going to wrap up his gaffe-tastic European vacation today, but the gaffes may not be over yet. I read in JJ’s late night post last night that he’s going to make a speech in which he attacks Russia and Putin and criticize Obama for making efforts to cooperate with Russia on some issues like controlling nukes. Whatever happened to Romney’s promise that he wasn’t going to criticize current U.S. policies while overseas?

After all of Romney’s pandering during his visit to Israel, Ehud Barak spoke highly of President Obama in an interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer yesterday.

Israel’s Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Defense Ehud Barak said the Obama White House has been the most supportive administration throughout the two countries’ diplomatic relations on matters of Israeli security, in an interview to air Monday on “The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer.”

Barak -also a former prime minister of Israel – said that though historically administrations from both political parties have supported the Jewish state President Obama’s support, security-wise, is unparalleled.

“I think that from my point of view as defense minister they are extremely good, extremely deep and profound. I can see long years, um, administrations of both sides of political aisle deeply supporting the state of Israeli and I believe that reflects a profound feeling among the American people,” said Barak. “But I should tell you honestly that this administration under President Obama is doing in regard to our security more than anything that I can remember in the past.”

I’d love to be a fly on the wall when Romney finds out about that.

As JJ also noted last night, NBC is not getting rave reviews on its delayed and edited coverage of the Olympic games. In just one of their #NBCfail updates the Independent reports that Bob Costas, whom I usually like, “made a series of jingoistic remarks, including a joke about Idi Amin when Uganda’s team appeared.” Of course the loudest complaints have been about NBC’s refusal to show any of the events live.

There was feverish anticipation for the debut of the USA men’s basketball “dream team”, who began their hugely hyped Olympic campaign yesterday afternoon. But you wouldn’t have known it by turning on a television in their home country.

While Kobe Bryant and other big names in US sport were completing a 98 to 71-point victory, viewers of American network NBC were forced to watch edited highlights of a women’s cycling race that had been completed several hours earlier.

It was the latest in a string of mistakes by the broadcaster, whose coverage is sparking ridicule from TV critics and outrage from the US public. For most of the weekend, the phrase “NBC Fail” was trending on Twitter.

Why would I bother to watch when the winners and losers have already been announce earlier in the day? I wouldn’t bother watching a delayed broadcast of a Red Sox game either, but sometimes I stay up till all hours watching them when they’re out on the West Coast.

In another update, The Independent reports that one of their reporters, Guy Adams, was suspended from Twitter after NBC complained of his many negative tweets about their coverage.

The NYT Media Decoder reports that another yuppie journalist has bitten the dust.

A publishing industry that is notoriously ill-equipped to root out fraud. A magazine whose famed fact-checking department is geared toward print, not the Web. And a lucrative lecture circuit that rewards snappy, semi-scientific pronouncements, smoothly delivered to a corporate audience.

All contributed to the rise of Jonah Lehrer, the 31-year-old author, speaker and staff writer for The New Yorker, who then executed one of the most bewildering recent journalistic frauds, one that on Monday cost him his prestigious post at the magazine and his status as one of the most promising, visible and well-paid writers in the business.

An article in Tablet magazine revealed that in his best-selling book, “Imagine: How Creativity Works,” Mr. Lehrer had fabricated quotes from Bob Dylan, one of the most closely studied musicians alive. Only last month, Mr. Lehrer had publicly apologized for taking some of his previous work from The Wall Street Journal, Wired and other publications and recycling it in blog posts for The New Yorker, acts of recycling that his editor called “a mistake.”

By Monday, when the Tablet article was published online, both The New Yorker and Mr. Lehrer’s publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, made it clear that they had lost patience with him.

Fabricating quotes from Bob Dylan? How stupid can you get? This guy must have a fear of success.

The War on Women continues apace. In Arizona a judge (a Clinton appointee yet) has ruled that the state’s restrictive abortion law can take effect.

U.S. District Judge James Teilborg said the statute may prompt a few pregnant women who are considering abortion to make the decision earlier. But he said the law is constitutional because it doesn’t prohibit any women from making the decision to end their pregnancies.
The judge also wrote that the state provided “substantial and well-documented” evidence that an unborn child has the capacity to feel pain during an abortion by at least 20 weeks.
Republican Gov. Jan Brewer signed the measure into law in April, making Arizona one of 10 states to enact types of 20-week bans.

Arizona’s ban, set to take effect Thursday, prohibits abortions starting at 20 weeks of pregnancy except in medical emergencies. That is a change from the state’s current ban at viability, which is the ability to survive outside the womb and which generally is considered to be about 24 weeks. A normal pregnancy lasts about 40 weeks.
The New York-based Center for Reproductive Rights and another group filed a notice that they would be appealing Teilborg’s decision to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

The law will result in more babies being born even though they have no chance of survival.

Under a new Arizona abortion law that takes effect Thursday, more babies with fatal fetal defects are expected to be carried to term, even though they will die within minutes, hours or days. But more will also be done to help their families get through the trauma of losing a child.

House Bill 2036 forbids doctors from aborting most fetuses with a gestational age of 20 weeks or older, even in situations where the doctor discovers the fetus has a fatal defect. The law also defines gestational age as beginning on the first day of the woman’s last period, meaning abortions are actually banned starting at 18 weeks of pregnancy — typically about the same time a doctor would perform ultrasounds where most abnormalities are detected.

Eight other states also ban abortions after 20 weeks, but Arizona is the only one with a law that actually pushes the ban back to 18 weeks into the pregnancy.

At Salon Irin Carmon spells out the “insanity” that “prevails in Arizona.

The Clinton-appointed district court judge in Arizona just did something, well, unprecedented. He upheld Arizona’s ban on abortions after 20 weeks, claiming it didn’t actually “ban” abortions before viability, it just “regulates” them down to the most grueling emergencies.

Worse, Teilborg even regurgitated the suspect science of “fetal pain,” a first in the federal courts, though his decision was based on the contorted “regulation” versus “ban” finding. The Supreme Court has repeatedly held that the state can only ban abortions after viability, regardless of the rationale, but Teilborg found that Arizona’s H.B. 2036 “does not impose a substantial obstacle to previability abortions,” because a woman can still get an abortion after 20 weeks if she’s about to die or suffer major physical impairment.

“It’s such a game of semantics, to the point of Alice in Wonderland,” ACLU staff attorney Alexa Kolbi-Molinas told Salon. “When the Supreme Court said you cannot ban any abortions prior to viability, regardless of whether there are any exceptions to that ban, that’s exactly what they meant.”

And Virginia’s abortion clinics are still struggling to meet the ridiculous requirements they have been given by the state’s General Assembly.

Rosemary Codding has tried for months to scrape together enough to pay for a costly renovation to her Falls Church clinic, where women get checkups, Pap smears and abortions.

Codding is still short of the up to $1 million it would take to update the 50-year-old building — it needs wider hallways, new ventilation systems and additional patient rooms — after Virginia enacted some of the nation’s toughest restrictions on abortion clinics.

The General Assembly voted last year to require the guidelines, which were quickly adopted by the state’s Board of Health. In a surprise move, the panel later exempted the state’s existing clinics, including Codding’s on busy Lee Highway.

But Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli II (R) refused to sign off on the board’s decision, arguing that it lacked the legal authority to exclude the operating clinics.

Bill Clinton will play a “key role” at the Democratic Convention.

Former President Bill Clinton will have a marquee role in this summer’s Democratic National Convention, where he will make a forceful case for President Barack Obama’s re-election and his economic vision for the country, several Obama campaign and Democratic party officials said Sunday.

The move gives the Obama campaign an opportunity to take advantage of the former president’s immense popularity and remind voters that a Democrat was in the White House the last time the American economy was thriving.

Obama personally asked Clinton to speak at the convention and place Obama’s name in nomination, and Clinton enthusiastically accepted, officials said. Clinton speaks regularly to Obama and to campaign officials about strategy.

In contrast, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney will not attend the Republican Convention. We still don’t know if Mitt the Twit will invite Sarah Palin.

Elizabeth Warren will also speak in prime time, but will not deliver the keynote speech.

Elizabeth Warren will not deliver the keynote speech at this year’s Democratic National Convention, but instead will speak immediately before former President Bill Clinton on what party officials hope will be an energetic penultimate night.

Warren and Clinton will speak in primetime on Wednesday, Sept. 5, and form a one-two punch aimed at crystallizing the choice between President Obama and Republican Mitt Romney in the general election, the Obama campaign said.

The Massachusetts Senate candidate will contrast the president’s economic plan with Romney’s, and outline the impact it will have on middle-class families across the country.

“At the president’s side, Elizabeth Warren helped level the playing field for all Americans and put in place safeguards to ensure that everyone, from Wall Street to Main Street, play by the same set of rules,” said Stephanie Cutter, a deputy Obama campaign manager.

That’s all I’ve got for today. What are you reading and blogging about?

Disenfranchising the Weakest Among Us from their basic Constitutional Rights

Posted: July 18, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: abortion rights, Voter Ignorance, War on Women | Tags: , | 22 Comments

There are elements in the Republican’s Tea Party movement and in many of their supporters that are so obviously misogynistic, xenophobic, and racist that it is difficult to stomach their political discourse.  I continue to find the Tea Party movement to contain some of the most unhinged individuals we’ve see influence American governance in some time. Here’s the latest example from Tennessee.

Conservatives and Tea Party activists in Tennessee have recently pushed several Republican Party county organizations to pass resolutions criticizing the state’s Republican governor for, among other things, employing Muslims, gay people, and Democrats.

“The action or actions of the Republican elected Governor of the Great State of Tennessee and his administration have demonstrated a consistent lack of conservative values,” a resolution passed by the Stewart County Republican Party reads in part, according to a copy obtained by The Tennessean. (The Tennessean obtained two of the resolutions.)

We’ve known for some times that the right wing would like to completely remove basic rights from women and minorities.  They are striking at not only our immigration laws, our rights to use birth control and abortion, but our basic right to vote and participate in our Democracy.

I’ve read several things just this week that I find terribly disturbing.  The first is that many folks expect that the Supreme Court will strike down the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

It’ll be tough to top the drama of the Supreme Court season that just ended. Or so it would seem. When the justices reconvene in October, they’re likely to consider some of the most contentious social issues dividing the country. And judging from snippets in past opinions, that could mean an upheaval in U.S. civil rights law.

The court has already announced that it will hear a challenge to affirmative action in higher education. In that case, a white student rejected by the University of Texas is arguing that the school doesn’t need to choose students based on racial preferences because it already achieves diversity by guaranteeing admission to state residents in the top 10 percent of their high school class.

Affirmative action was upheld nine years ago, but the composition of the court has changed since then. Five members are now openly skeptical of racial preferences. As Chief Justice John Roberts put it in a 2007 case involving integration at the K-12 level: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

The justices could also deal a blow to minorities if they take up a challenge to the 1965 Voting Rights Act brought by Shelby County, Ala. Officials there say a provision in that law requiring jurisdictions in 16 mostly southern states to get federal clearance before changing their voting rules—so as not to disenfranchise blacks and other minorities—unfairly targets jurisdictions for racial crimes of the past.

“I expect the Voting Rights Act to go down,’’ says Kermit Roosevelt, who clerked for former Supreme Court Justice David Souter and now teaches constitutional law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. “The court has foreshadowed that result, and Roberts seems to want it.” In a 2009 challenge to the landmark law, the justices granted some local governments more leeway in changing their election procedures, and Roberts in particular hinted he’d be sympathetic to striking down the so-called preclearance provision, saying that it raises “serious constitutional questions.”

The approach of the right wing has been to whittle away at basic rights by forcing appointment of extremist judges to the benches on Republican Presidents and blocking appointments to the bench by Democrats.  It also has been using each red state to create serpentine regulations that basically make exercising rights nearly impossible.  Many are set up to create challenges in the courts to long standing precedent like Roe v Wade or Brown v Board.Witness the Mississippi law to shut down the state’s sole abortion clinic by tailor fitting a regulation to that one specific clinic to drive it out of business.   It may be working according to news released today.

The clinic argues that the law will effectively ban abortion in the state and endanger women’s health by limiting access to the procedure. It argued that the law is unconstitutional and would close the clinic “by imposing medically unjustified requirements on physicians who perform abortions.” Lawyers also cite statements from Mississippi officials who said the law was intended to close the clinic.

A denial of admitting privileges could bolster the clinic’s arguments that the law is unconstitutional, a lawyer for the state has suggested. But a final ruling could come only after a trial, and the loser could appeal.

The state argues that the law is intended to enhance the safety of patients. The state’s lawyers have argued that Jordan should disregard statements about trying to close the clinic, a claim he greeted with skepticism in court.

More administrative steps would have to follow before the clinic could be shut. Sharlot said the clinic would have 10 calendar days to respond to any findings. The state’s lawyers have said that a facility not complying with a law would get at least 30 days before an administrative hearing. If a license is revoked at a hearing, the clinic would get 30 days to appeal that decision. Health department officials have said it could take as long as 10 months to close the clinic if it failed to comply.

This is the same shenanigans with Voter ID laws.  Use incremental laws that “sound” reasonable to many low information, Fox-propaganda-challenged citizens that have devastating results on the weakest and the poorest among us.  Then, keep it up and take any legal challenge as far as you can to whittle away at long standing precedent.  The extremists are well aware of the dog whistles scattered throughout these laws and media blitzkriegs.  Also, they frequently cloak their real purpose in some high minded rhetoric.  They want to stop nonexistent voter fraud in the Voter ID case.  It’s making sure ignorant little women are truly informed in the case of exercising abortion rights.  Neither of these are real problems.

Here is a study worth reading.

The Challenge of Obtaining Voter Identification Publications

By Keesha Gaskins and Sundeep Iyer
– 07/17/12

Ten states now have unprecedented restrictive voter ID laws. Alabama, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Mississippi, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Wisconsin all require citizens to produce specific types of government-issued photo identification before they can cast a vote that will count. Legal precedent requires these states to provide free photo ID to eligible voters who do not have one. Unfortunately, these free IDs are not equally accessible to all voters. This report is the first comprehensive assessment of the difficulties that eligible voters face in obtaining free photo ID.

Download the Report (PDF)

Here’s some basic data found in the study and reported in the executive summary.

The 11 percent of eligible voters who lack the required photo ID must travel to a designated government office to obtain one. Yet many citizens will have trouble making this trip. In the 10 states with restrictive voter ID laws:

  • Nearly 500,000 eligible voters do not have access to a vehicle and live more than 10 miles from the nearest state ID-issuing office open more than two days a week. Many of them live in rural areas with dwindling public transportation options.
  • More than 10 million eligible voters live more than 10 miles from their nearest state ID-issuing office open more than two days a week.
  • 1.2 million eligible black voters and 500,000 eligible Hispanic voters live more than 10 miles from their nearest ID-issuing office open more than two days a week. People of color are more likely to be disenfranchised by these laws since they are less likely to have photo ID than the general population.
  • Many ID-issuing offices maintain limited business hours. For example, the office in Sauk City, Wisconsin is open only on the fifth Wednesday of any month. But only four months in 2012 — February, May, August, and October — have five Wednesdays. In other states — Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, and Texas — many part-time ID-issuing offices are in the rural regions with the highest concentrations of people of color and people in poverty.

More than 1 million eligible voters in these states fall below the federal poverty line and live more than 10 miles from their nearest ID-issuing office open more than two days a week. These voters may be particularly affected by the significant costs of the documentation required to obtain a photo ID. Birth certificates can cost between $8 and $25. Marriage licenses, required for married women whose birth certificates include a maiden name, can cost between $8 and $20. By comparison, the notorious poll tax — outlawed during the civil rights era — cost $10.64 in current dollars.

The result is plain: Voter ID laws will make it harder for hundreds of thousands of poor Americans to vote. They place a serious burden on a core constitutional right that should be universally available to every American citizen.

This November, restrictive voter ID states will provide 127 electoral votes — nearly half of the 270 needed to win the presidency. Therefore, the ability of eligible citizens without photo ID to obtain one could have a major influence on the outcome of the 2012 election.

This is disturbing beyond words.  We’ve already heard personal stories from friends here with disabilities of their struggles to obtain these kinds of ID cards.  Right wingers laugh this off with careless disregard for the very things that make our country precious.  It is obvious that winning their agendas by any means necessary is at the heart of all of these kinds of laws.  Every one should be highly concerned about all these laws aimed at whittling away at our basic rights.  This strategy is being used to usurp more of them everyday.  Most of them are aimed at women, racial and religious minorities, and the GLBT community.  What makes this worse is the amount of money being poured into creating these awful laws by religious institutions like the LDS Church and the Catholic Bishops and business sponsored organizations like ALEC.   Tax exempt churches were instrumental in funding efforts to defeat the ERA and push anti-marriage equality and family planning defunding at all levels of government.  Removing votes from voters unaligned with their causes is just one more way to relieve the vulnerable among us of basic rights.

We should be fighting this tooth and nail.

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