Tuesday Night with Ann and Mitt

Posted: April 24, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: 2012 presidential campaign, 2012 primaries, Republican presidential politics, U.S. Politics, Voter Ignorance | Tags: , , , , , | 17 Comments

Good Evening everyone!

Tonight’s post is dedicated to Ann and Mitt Romney. I have some more background on Ann Romney’s “struggles,” as a follow up to Dakinikat’s earlier post. And, since Mitt Romney will essentially wrap up the Republican presidential nomination tonight, I’ve collected some advice for Mitt Romney from various sources.

As everyone knows by now, Ann Romney is a stay-at-home mom. And she has lots of homes to stay at home in. But Ann is more than a mom. She has a hobby that is very important to her. A very expensive hobby. Her passion is collecting and riding dressage horses.

Now I don’t want to be cruel about Ann’s expensive hobby, because she says it has helped her to deal with her multiple sclerosis; but, let’s face it, very few multiple sclerosis sufferers can afford the Ann Romney cure.

After the notorious Hilary Rosen remark about Ann Romney not working a day in her life, Dave Weigel wrote a piece called The Ann Romney Wars, in which he linked to some articles about Ann’s hobby. I hadn’t heard about it before.

First up, a NYT piece by Jodi Kantor from 2007: The Stay-at-Home Woman Travels Well. Kantor writes about Ann’s diagnosis with multiple sclerosis in 1998 and her efforts to treat the disease.

Though she used steroids to combat her initial attack, today Mrs. Romney takes no medicine for her disease, instead relying on alternative therapies such as horseback riding — she calls it “joy therapy”— to keep herself well. But doctors say that only medication, which patients often resist because of unpleasant side effects, slows the long-term progress of the disease.

Ann had ridden horses as a child–like her husband, she comes from a wealthy family.

During her rehabilitation from her initial attack, she took up dressage, going from a novice so weak that she could barely sit in the saddle to a winner of top amateur medals. She sometimes enters professional-level contests, against the advice of her trainer, Jan Ebeling. “She wants to measure herself against the best,” he said.

Dressage is a sport of seven-figure horses and four-figure saddles. The monthly boarding costs are more than most people’s rent. Asked how many dressage horses she owns, Mrs. Romney laughed. “Mitt doesn’t even know the answer to that,” she said. “I’m not going to tell you!”

Ann Romney in 2008

For more detail on Ann’s dressage career, read this article from 2008: Dressage Makes Ann Romney’s Soul Sing. And here’s a more recent article from March, 2012: For Ann Romney, Horses are a Lifeline.

She has competed in amateur rounds of major dressage tournaments. She has funded dressage horses and riders of Olympic caliber. She and her husband, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, have at least part-ownership of four warmbloods (as the kind of horse often used for dressage is known), according to a campaign spokeswoman.

“My horses rejuvenate me like you can’t believe” she told Fox News last week. “They give me balance. They give me energy. I think it’s because I love them so much.”

How nice for her.

Dressage demands agility and finesse — and money….Dressage, whose roots date to ancient Greece, got its name (and its pronunciation, dress-AHGE) from a French term that means “training.” According to the U.S. Dressage Federation, “its purpose is to develop the horse’s natural athletic ability and willingness to work making him calm, supple and attentive to his rider.” Unlike other types of holdings, dressage horses are living investments whose value can tumble with the wrong turn of a hoof.

The Romneys, through a campaign aide, declined to tally how much they spend on dressage, saying, “We are not required to disclose this information.” But some of their animals cost more than $100,000, and the Romneys continue to sink tens of thousands of dollars into year-round training and feeding, plus veterinary bills.

Ann learned how to use horseback riding for healing at a very exclusive clinic

run by an accomplished trainer and German emigre named Jan Ebeling, owner of state-of-the-art stables north of Simi Valley at a ranch known as the Acres. Ebeling and his wife, Amy, hosted Romney often. “I would probably come out once a month to once every six weeks for about a week,” Romney recalled.

The Acres is home to a 40-stall barn, indoor arena, dressage ring and obstacle courses. There are steep and dusty trails on the state-owned acreage nearby. Trusted James Herriot-type veterinarians and farriers and a young German assistant tend to the animals and take them through their paces; other horses, nursing injuries or strains, are pampered in the barn.

On Ann’s birthday, Donald Trump threw a party for her and provided a cake that celebrated her love of horses and dressage.

The cake, created by celebrity chef Buddy Valastro, of the TV show “Cake Boss,” is topped with a sugar-coated Romney riding atop a horse standing in a field of green frosting. Romney is an avid horseback rider and often goes riding to soothe the symptoms of her multiple sclerosis.

These two people really are not like you and me. Is it so cruel to point that out? I really do have a hard time feeling sorry for Ann. She and Mitt desperately need to learn how to deal with the wealth issue. At HuffPo, English professor Mark Cassello offered some free advice:

It is not Romney’s wealth that makes him unable to relate. It is his incapacity to acknowledge the privileged position from which he began. It is admirable that he worked his way up from being an “entry level” consultant to an executive in the Boston Consulting Group. Unfortunately, this achievement will not resonate with the real grinders who build, fuel, and deliver America. For them, being a consultant is as foreign an experience as choosing a car elevator for a new house in La Jolla.

If the question about being too rich to relate is asked again (and it will be), Romney should answer this way: “I understand why people might feel that way about me. Most Americans do not have parents who are governors or corporate executives. I was born in a very fortunate financial situation. But the more important, and more American, story is how my family labored for generations to provide me with the opportunities that have blessed my life. As president, I want to bring opportunity to a new generation of Americans, so they will feel empowered to pursue the dreams they have for their families and for their communities.”

It’s good advice, but somehow, I just can’t imagine Romney having the humility to say something like that.

Charles Pierce, who knows the Romneys better than most journalists, offered some suggestions for Romney on his path to dumping the Tea Partiers and tacking away from the far right agenda he’s been pushing during the primaries. Unfortunately, I can’t quote the whole thing, but here’s a taste:

God, you people are saps. You didn’t see this coming? I pandered and I pandered, and then, every night, I went back to my hotel room, stuck my fingers down my throat, and then had a good laugh. You think that whole “Etch-a-Sketch” thing was a staff blunder? Honkies, please. Could I have signaled more clearly that your audience with me was over? Smedley? Show these lovely people waving their Bibles and their rubber fetuses the door, will you? Lovely to have met you. Really. We must do this again some time. Say, if we’re all really lucky, and I’ve always been luckier than you poor deluded hayshakers, maybe the summer of 2015? It’s a date. We have a lovely parting gift for you.

Me.

Haven’t you goobers caught on yet? I am running for president because I am supposed to be president. That is the essence of my political philosophy. That is the basic tenet of my fundamental ideology. I should be president because I am rich and handsome and my great-granchildren are already financially bulletproof to the point where, if my pals in the financial-services “industry” crash the economy completely, and animal hides become the medium of exchange again, my great-grandchildren will have more pelts than anyone else, and they will rule the world. I should be president because I should be president. And because…

I’m Mitt Romney, bitches, and I’m all you got left.

Now that’s more like it! There’s lots more at the link.

Tuesday Reads

Posted: April 24, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: 2012 presidential campaign, Barack Obama, Civil Liberties, Health care reform, Media, Medicaid, Medicare, morning reads, Patriot Act, Republican presidential politics, The Media SUCKS, U.S. Economy, U.S. Politics | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 16 Comments

Good Morning!! Let’s see what’s in the news today.

Mitt Romney has been whining about the “liberal media” giving him a hard time, but a new Pew survey has found that the “liberal media” are friendlier to Mitt Romney than President Obama. Adam Serwer at Mother Jones:

The Liberal Media has consistently given more positive coverage to likely Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney compared to President Barack Obama, according to a new survey of media coverage from the Pew Research Center’s Excellence in Journalism Project.

During the early weeks of 2012, Romney’s media coverage was slightly negative—between January 2 and February 26, 33 percent of the stories about the ex-Massachusetts governor were positive and 37 percent were negative, according to Pew’s analysis. But Romney has received mostly positive coverage since then (47 percent positive to 24 percent negative). By contrast, according to the report, President Barack Obama “did not have a single week in 2012 when positive coverage exceeded negative coverage.”

Check out the full report at the Pew link.

Florida Rep. Allen West was booted from an NAACP fund-raiser because of his claim that around 80 Democrats in the House of Representatives are card-carrying members of the Communist Party.

Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.) was supposed to be the keynote speaker at a fundraiser for his district chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) this past Saturday. But days before the event, the group canceled the gathering and asked West not to come back when they rescheduled. Why?

“There’s a certain statement he made about Communists,” Jerry Gore, president of the Martin County NAACP, told Scripps Treasure Coast Newspapers. “That statement alone … we do not represent that type of atmosphere.”

But that didn’t keep West from making more ludicrous remarks. Yesterday, he claimed that the Muslim Brotherhood is “being allowed to influence strategy.”

Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.) criticized the FBI on Monday for removing nearly 900 pages of training material it deemed to be offensive, saying it showed extremist Muslim groups were influencing national strategy.

The FBI made the move after Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) complained about some passages, including one that advised agents to “never attempt to shake hands with an Asian” and another that said agents should expect “outbursts” from Arab minds.

West said that by removing such passages, the FBI was committing “cultural suicide” and allowing groups like the Muslim Brotherhood to influence U.S. policy.

“We have to understand that when tolerance becomes a one-way street it leads to cultural suicide,” West told “Fox and Friends” on Monday. “We should not allow the Muslim Brotherhood or associated groups to be influencing our national strategy.”

When asked if he believed those groups were influencing U.S. strategy, West responded, “Oh, absolutely,” and cited the Fort Hood, Texas, shooting report that didn’t mention the suspect’s Muslim faith as a potential motive for the killings.

In another throwback to the McCarthy era, a few days ago Bill O’Reilly accused Robert Reich of being a communist.

Yesterday, Reich responded: Communist Accusations Matter.

For the record, I’m not a communist and I don’t secretly adore Karl Marx.

Ordinarily I don’t bother repeating anything Bill O’Reilly says. But this particular whopper is significant because it represents what O’Reilly and Fox News, among others, are doing to the national dialogue….

O’Reilly based his claim on an interview I did last week with Jon Stewart on the Daily Show, in which I argued that because America’s big corporations were now global we could no longer rely on them to make necessary investments in human capital or to lobby for public investments in education, infrastructure, and basic R&D. So, logically, government has to step in.

Since when does an argument for public investment in education, infrastructure, and basic R&D make someone a communist or a secret adorer of Karl Marx?

Since the Tea Party crazies crawled out from under their rocks and took over the Republican Party, I guess. I sure wish they’d crawl back where they came from.

Now this is refreshing. Sen. Tom Harken defended Social Security in the Huffington Post yesterday, and proposed some solutions to future problems:

To strengthen America’s retirement system, my proposal would increase Social Security benefits and greatly improve the financial stability of the program. It does so by:

• Increasing the amount of earnings covered by higher replacement rates in order to increase benefits by approximately $60-70 per month
• Changing the way the COLA is calculated so that it better corresponds to the typical expenses of seniors
• Removing the cap, currently $110,100, that unfairly protects the highest earning Americans from paying into Social Security like the majority of hardworking Americans.

All told, according to the Social Security Actuary, this proposal would extend the life of the Social Security Trust Fund to 2052 while cutting the long term funding deficit in half.

I’m sure Mitt Romney will explain to Senator Harkin why it would be wrong to try to raise payroll taxes on high income “job creators.”

Speaking of Willard, the LA Times had an interesting story on Romney’s health care plan–they call it “revolutionary,” and not in a good way.

In public, Romney has only sketched the outlines of a plan, and aides have declined to answer questions about the details. But his public statements and interviews with advisors make clear that Romney has embraced a strategy that in crucial ways is more revolutionary — and potentially more disruptive — than the law Obama signed two years ago.

The centerpiece of Romney’s plan would overhaul the way most Americans get their health coverage: at work. He would do so by giving Americans a tax break to buy their own health plans. That would give consumers more choices, but also more risk.

Critics and independent analysts say the impact would probably leave a larger number of Americans without insurance.

In addition,

While offering consumers more choices, Romney’s plan would give companies strong incentives to stop providing insurance to workers. It also would overhaul the 46-year-old Medicare and Medicaid programs for the elderly, poor and disabled.

The plan could swell the federal deficit; a similar plan backed by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) during the 2008 presidential campaign would have cost more than $1 trillion over 10 years, on par with the price tag for the Obama healthcare law.

Romney keeps claiming he’s going to cut the deficit. Somehow I don’t think privatizing Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid will do that. Maybe he thinks he can end those programs completely.

Democracy Now has been running a series on NSA spying. A good starting point is this article at Alternet: Whistleblower: The NSA is Lying — The U.S. Government Has Copies of Most of Your Emails

National Security Agency whistleblower William Binney reveals he believes domestic surveillance has become more expansive under President Obama than President George W. Bush. He estimates the NSA has assembled 20 trillion “transactions” — phone calls, emails and other forms of data — from Americans. This likely includes copies of almost all of the emails sent and received from most people living in the United States.

While you’re at Alternet, here’s another article you should read: How Obama Became a Civil Libertarian’s Nightmare

When Barack Obama took office, he was the civil liberties communities’ great hope. Obama, a former constitutional law professor, pledged to shutter the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and run a transparent and open government. But he has become a civil libertarian’s nightmare: a supposedly liberal president who instead has expanded and fortified many of the Bush administration’s worst policies, lending bipartisan support for a more intrusive and authoritarian federal government.

Please go read the whole thing and then check out Glenn Greenwald’s take on the story.

As I’m sure everyone here knows, we don’t live in a democracy anymore.

So what are you reading and blogging about today?

Cookiegate: Mitt Romney’s Latest Foot-in-Mouth Episode

Posted: April 18, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: 2012 presidential campaign, education, Republican presidential politics, U.S. Economy, U.S. Politics | Tags: , , , , , | 12 Comments

Turtle Thumbprint cookies from the Bethel Bakery

On Tuesday, Mitt Romney met with several preselected middle-class couples. They sat around a picnic table in Bethel Park, PA and discussed taxes. “over a table of lemonade, pretzels, chips and cookies from Bethel Bakery.” The Bakery is beloved by the community and is considered a local “landmark.”

The meeting got off to a rocky start, however, when the governor sat down at a picnic table set with food and made an apparent attempt at humor.

“I’m not sure about these cookies,” Mr. Romney said. “They don’t look like you made them,” he said turning to one of the women at the table. “Did you make those cookies? You didn’t, did you? No. No. They came from the local 7-Eleven bakery or wherever.”

The cookies, in fact, were donated from the popular Bethel Bakery around the corner from the community center, and once Mr. Romney’s comment was broadcast on local airwaves offended residents took to Facebook and Twitter to complain.

Next, the locals attempted to explain to the oblivious and smirking Mr. Romney the need for community services like teachers and good schools.

One woman at the gathering said she was scared about the fate of her public schools, given deep cuts to the state budget (incidentally, the man who pushed those cuts, Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett, endorsed Romney today). “I don’t like to see cuts made in anything in education,” she said, citing her daughter’s experience. Another man chimed in, noting that “the fat” had already been trimmed and now important education programs were being hit.

A man then told Romney,

“None of us like to pay more taxes, but sometimes that’s necessary.” Another woman added, “It’s a necessary evil.” “Right, right,” a third person said as everyone in the group nodded.

Later, the Bethel Bakery offered a “Cookiegate special.”

Julie Lytle, the bakery’s sales and marketing assistant, said the popular local fixture since 1955 “turned a negative into a positive” by printing a sign offering customers a “CookieGate Special!” — a free half dozen cookies with the purchase of a dozen cookies today and Thursday.

“I was a little shocked,” Ms. Lytle said. “I didn’t think too much of it at the time, and I didn’t think it would blow up like it has. We decided to have fun with it and not to get offended.”

Tuesday Morning Reads

Posted: April 17, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: morning reads, Reproductive Rights, Republican presidential politics, the internet, The Media SUCKS, the villagers, U.S. Military, U.S. Politics, War on Women | Tags: , , , | 33 Comments

Good Morning!!

The Villagers have returned from their two-week Easter vacation, so there’s a bit more news today than we have had recently.

First up, I want to call attention to an important series of articles the UK Guardian will be running all week on the “Battle for the Internet.” There will be a major story every day this week:

Over seven days

The Guardian is taking stock of the new battlegrounds for the internet. From states stifling dissent to the new cyberwar front line, we look at the challenges facing the dream of an open internet

Day 1: the new cold war
China may have the world’s most internet-savvy government but Beijing has been struggling to keep a lid on bold social networks, writes Tania Branigan

Day two: the militarisation of cyberspace
Internet attacks on sovereign targets are no longer a fear for the future, but a daily threat. We ask: will the next big war be fought online?

Day three: the new walled gardens
For many, the internet is now essentially Facebook. Others find much of their online experience is mediated by Apple or Amazon. Why are the walls going up around the web garden, and does it matter?

Day four: IP wars
Intellectual property, from copyrights to patents, have been an internet battlefield from the start. We look at what Sopa, Pipa and Acta really mean, and explain how this battle is not over. Plus, Clay Shirky will be discussing the issues in a live Q&A

Day five: ‘civilising’ the web
In the UK, the ancient law of defamation is increasingly looking obsolete in the Twitter era. Meanwhile, in France, President Sarkozy believes the state can tame the web

Day six: the open resistance
Meet the activists and entrepreneurs who are working to keep the internet open

Day seven: the end of privacy
Hundreds of websites know vast amounts about their users’ behaviour, personal lives and connections with each other. Find out who knows what about you, and what they use the information for

Be sure to check out this interview with one of Google’s founders: Web freedom faces greatest threat ever, warns Google’s Sergey Brin

Next up, lots of news coming out of Columbia, where President Obama participated in the Summit of the Americas. It didn’t go well. Reuters:

President Barack Obama sat patiently through diatribes, interruptions and even the occasional eye-ball roll at the weekend Summit of the Americas in an effort to win over Latin American leaders fed up with U.S. policies.

He failed.

The United States instead emerged from the summit in Colombia increasingly isolated as nearly 30 regional heads of state refused to sign a joint declaration in protest against the continued exclusion of communist-led Cuba from the event.

The rare show of unity highlights the steady decline of Washington’s influence in a region that has become less dependent on U.S. trade and investment thanks economic growth rates that are the envy of the developed world and new opportunities with China.

Obama also certified the U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement which will take effect on May 15, despite Colombia’s continuing human rights violations including the murder of labor leaders. AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka called the decision “deeply disappointing and troubling.

Leaders of national labor organizations in Colombia joined Trumka in opposing today’s announcement, saying:

[T]he underlying trade agreement perpetuates a destructive economic model that expands the rights and privileges of big business and multinational corporations at the expense of workers, consumers, and the environment. The agreement uses a model that has historically benefitted a small minority of business interests, while leaving workers, families, and communities behind.

In April 2011, the U.S. and Colombia agreed to an Action Plan on Labor Rights intended to “protect internationally recognized labor rights, prevent violence against labor leaders, and prosecute the perpetrators of such violence” in Colombia. Although the Action Plan includes some measures that Colombian unions and the AFL-CIO have been demanding for years, its scope was too limited: it resolved neither the grave violations of union freedoms or human rights.

Some two dozen Colombian trade union leaders were killed last year alone, and an AFL-CIO report released last fall found that the Action Plan, which was billed as a major step to ending violence against trade unionists and protecting the right of workers to come together in unions “has failed to achieve improvements on the ground for Colombia’s working families.”

And then there was the Secret Service scandal, which keeps on getting worse. The latest from the WaPo:

A probe into the alleged misconduct of nearly a dozen U.S. Secret Service agents has expanded to include more than five military personnel, Defense Department officials said Monday, as the scandal that erupted during President Obama’s trip to Colombia last week put high-level officials on the defensive.

A preliminary investigation by the Defense Department, which included a review of video from hotel security cameras, found that more military personnel than initially thought might have been involved with the Secret Service in the carousing at the center of the probe. Already, 11 Secret Service agents have been placed on leave amid allegations they entertained prostitutes, potentially one of the most serious lapses at the organization in years.

The charges are triggering scrutiny of the culture of the Secret Service — where married agents have been heard to joke during aircraft takeoff that their motto is “wheels up, rings off” — and raising new questions at both the agency and the Pentagon about institutional oversight at the highest levels of the president’s security apparatus.

There’s a lot more detail in that article. Ron Kessler, who used to work for the WaPo and now writes for NewsMax (is that a comedown or a horizontal move?) says the head of the Secret Service should be fired.

Ron Kessler, the author who broke the Secret Service prostitution story in the Washington Post over the weekend, has been making the morning talk-show rounds, saying the director of the agency should be fired after agents were alleged to have solicited local prostitutes ahead of President Obama’s trip to Colombia.

“This is the worst scandal in the history of the Secret Service,” Kessler said on NBC’s “Today” show on Monday. “The Secret Service, under Mark Sullivan, has gone from one debacle to another.”

The only scandal that comes close to this one, Kessler said on CNN, was in 2009, when Tareq and Michaele Salahi crashed the state dinner at the White House.

“It goes back to a culture of laxness in the Secret Service,” Kessler said. “Corner cutting. Just a lax attitude which contributes to this kind of thing.”

Funny, I would have thought that Secret Service agents getting drunk the night before the JFK assassination and then not doing much to protect him would have been the worst scandal, but what do I know?

Now that Congress is back in session, the Senate didn’t waste any time dumping the President’s proposed “Buffet Rule” that would have made millionaires pay something resembling a fair share of taxes.

By a near party-line 51-45 tally, senators voted to keep the bill alive but fell nine votes short of the 60 needed to continue debating the measure. The anti-climactic outcome was no surprise to anyone in a vote that was designed more to win over voters and embarrass senators in close races than to push legislation into law.

At the White House, Obama denounced the vote, saying Republicans chose “once again to protect tax breaks for the wealthiest few Americans at the expense of the middle class.” In a statement issued after the vote, he said he would keep pressing Congress to help the middle class.

Another victory on the road to serfdom.

And of course there’s the new media meme: because of a poorly worded remark by Democratic strategist Hilary Rosen, the Republican War on Women is over and the Democrats have declared a War on Motherhood.

Never mind that the War on Women is real–based on horrible Republican anti-abortion, anti-family planning, anti-Planned Parenthood policies that have been implemented in state legislatures around the country. Never mind that the “War on Motherhood” is based on hysterical pearl-clutching by cynical Romney campaign strategists. The media has swallowed the fairly tale bait hook, line, and sinker.

And so the horrendous insult to poor little Ann Romney was a prime topic on the Sunday news shows. Meet the Press’s idiot host David Gregory had a whole panel discussion on it. Naturally Charlie Pierce had a great writeup on that yesterday.

the panel, which included my man Chuck Todd and complete political failure Harold Ford, Jr., was talking about Hilary Rosen and hookers. Savannah Guthrie said that the Obama administration moved so quickly to distance themselves from Hilary Rosen, Warrior Queen Of All Liberals:

In some ways it had the equal and opposite effect. They worked so hard to disown Hilary Rosen that you almost felt, well, they must own her, they must be allied with her. It didn’t betray a lot of confidence about their position with women.

See that rock at your feet? Pick it up. Throw it as far as you can. Remember, though, the farther you throw it away, the closer it is to hitting you in the head. Savannah Guthrie, Theoretical Physicist. (Later, she talked about how the administration wanted to draw a line in the sand so that “six months from now,” if somebody said something about Michelle Obama etc. etc. Six months from now? Has Guthrie been on Tuvalu for three years?) My head was descending rapidly toward my desk when Harold Ford chimed in, and it accelerated downward faster than it ever has before. Harold liked very much what his nutty former colleague said about how stay-at-home moms are more attuned to the economy than they are the attempts by a bunch of white men to make sure there’s a little more mommin’ to be done while they stay at home. It’s truly hard to believe that, in a Democratic wave election, the people of Tennessee rejected this titan….

“I thought Michele Bachmann, whom I don’t often agree with, made some pretty valid points. This issue here is more powerful in some ways that the conversation about contraception… No one goes around talking about that. People go around talking about raising their kids. Wome are insulted if you say if they stay at home instead of working then something’s different about them.

It is important to remember that these people wouldn’t even be discussing a whopping 19-point gender gap if it weren’t for Republican attempts to control the unauthorized use of ladyparts, the Dildos Mandating Dildos legislation in the various states, and all that other stuff that Harold Ford, Jr. says women don’t talk about.

Sorry about the long quote, but I just had to use that whole section. It’s perfect!

Anyway, as everyone knows by now, the Romneys blew it bigtime by talking too loud at a $50,000-a-plate fund raiser in Palm Beach. They didn’t realize the press could hear them when they gloated about what a great “gift” Hilary Rosen had given them.

Mrs. Romney acknowledged Republicans’ deficit at present with female voters, and urged the women in attendance to talk to their friends, particularly about the economy. She also discussed the criticism she faced this week, and her pride in her role as a mother.

“It was my early birthday present for someone to be critical of me as a mother, and that was really a defining moment, and I loved it,” Mrs. Romney said.

Gov. Romney went further in engaging the so-called “war on moms” that followed in the media — upon which his campaign has been aggressively fundraising — calling it a “gift” that allowed his campaign to show contrast with Democrats in the general election’s first week.

Um…no one was critical of you as a mother, Ann.

But maybe it wasn’t such a “gift” after all, because women voters are apparently not as stupid as the Romneys think they are. According to a CNN poll taken two days after Rosen dropped her bomblet and the the Republicans took to the fainting couch, Obama still leads among women by 16 points and he is even ahead among men by 3 points.

But the Romneys still think they won something, and they’re using it to raise money with a new video in which Romney waxes as poetic as a robot can about his beloved wife Ann. For the brave souls among us, here’s the Romney campaign’s “Happy Birthday, Mom” video. Don’t watch it unless you have a strong stomach and normal blood sugar levels.

As an antidote, please read this NYT op-ed by Nancy Folbre, an economist from U. Mass. Amherst on the real meaning of the gender gap.

Those are my suggested reads for today. What are yours?

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.

 

 

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