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 Paul Ryan that distinguished “forcible rape” in banning funding for abortion, language that was subsequently withdrawn after an outcry from women’s advocacy groups.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.

Monday Reads

Posted: August 20, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: morning reads | Tags: , , , , , , , , | 71 Comments

Good Morning!

Be careful driving across any bridge in this country.  Chances are that it’s unsafe.

The American Society of Civil Engineers, the nation’s oldest national engineering group, has awarded America’s roadways a grade of D-, rated one in four bridges as “structurally deficient or functionally obsolete” and warned that thousands of American dams are on the verge of failure. It warned that unless tax dollars are redirected, the whole thing could crumble.

Altogether, Americans spend 4.2 billion hours a year stuck in traffic because of poorly maintained roads at a cost of $78.2 billion annually in squandered time and fuel.

The average age of America’s 600,000-plus bridges has reached 43 years old, and Congress needs $17 billion a year to make them safe for use.

The nation has 6,000 deficient dams, with 1,800 of them rating a high “hazard potential,” which means that structural failure could kill people.

The society’s complete report card can be found here.

I live next to two drawbridges over the canal with the levees that flooded and killed so many in the lower ninth ward.  The two of those things predate WW 1 and are out of commission a lot.  They even look rickety any more.  I just shudder to think what will happen one day.

Sit down.  I just about fell off my chair when the ACLU tweeted this one last night.

Some school officials in West Virginia think boys and girls are so “hard-wired” to learn differently that they have implemented some major changes in their middle school: boys and girls are separated into different classrooms for all their academic classes and  taught using radically different methods.

At Van Devender Middle School (or Vandy), a public school in Wood County WV, the boys’ classroom is brightly lit and cool, and the students are allowed to run around to blow off steam. They can sit in beanbag chairs if they wish and their desks are moveable and do not face each other. The girls’ classrooms are warm and dimly lit, and students are expected to remain in their seats and face each other while they work, even if they find that distracting.
 Girls are supposed to discuss their feelings about novels while boys are supposed to discuss the action in the books.

Adding insult to injury, this is their neighborhood middle school, to which they were assigned by the Board of Education.

The explanation for implementing this radical version of single-sex education there?  On some state-standardized measures, Vandy students were performing less well than the rest of the county.  Somehow, separating the students by sex for all of their academic core curriculum classes and teaching them differently was supposed to fix this problem.  Even though all the other middle schools – the ones supposedly outperforming Vandy – were coed.

This separation was based on the work of Leonard Sax and the organization he founded and runs, the National Association for Single-Sex Public Education (NASSPE), which holds conferences and teacher trainings to promote the theory that boys’ and girls’ brains are so different that they should be placed in separate classrooms and taught using different methods. These theories have traction because they are simple to implement.

You may want to stay seated for this one too.  GOP freshmen Congressmen go wild in Israel. Kansas Republican Rep. Kevin Yoder puts the junk in junket.

The FBI probed a late-night swim in the Sea of Galilee that involved drinking, numerous GOP freshmen lawmakers, top leadership staff – and one nude member of Congress, according to more than a dozen sources, including eyewitnesses.

During a fact-finding congressional trip to the Holy Land last summer, Rep. Kevin Yoder (R-Kan.) took off his clothes and jumped into the sea, joining a number of members, their families and GOP staff during a night out in Israel, the sources told POLITICO. Other participants, including the daughter of another congressman, swam fully clothed while some lawmakers partially disrobed. More than 20 people took part in the late-night dip in the sea, according to sources who were participants in the trip.

Since we’re on stupid Republican Congress critterz, did you know Paul Ryan’s new found fame has led to increased sales of Rand’s books?  How depressing is that?

While Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney didn’t get an appreciable bounce after naming Paul Ryan as his running mate, the late Ayn Rand sure did.

The philosopher who favored individualism over collectivism has won renewed attention with the choice of Ryan, who in 2005 credited Rand as being “the reason I got involved in public service.”

Ryan has since scaled back that praise, citing  Rand’s atheism. Rand died in 1982.

The Rand box set of two of her works – “Atlas Shrugged” and “The Fountainhead” – cracked the Top 100 “Movers & Shakers” list on Amazon.com earlier this week. The online retailer’s gauge measures the biggest increases in sales ranking compared with the previous 24 hours. Rand’s books jumped 20 percent in the rankings yesterday.

Romney didn’t enjoy quite as big an uptick in support, according to the Gallup tracking poll released on Aug. 15, which showed support for the Republican increased 1 percentage point to 47 percent of registered voters in the three days following the Ryan announcement.

Hypocrisy seems to be Ryan’s strong point. He supported Economic Stimulus under Dubya.

As it turns out, Ryan’s stimulus hypocrisy extends back at least an entire decade. In 2002, Republican President George W. Bush proposed a similar — if less ambitious — stimulus plan to the one President Obama signed in 2009. Like Obama, Bush sought to goose the economy through an influx of public sector cash. His stimulus plan included an extension of unemployment benefits and a plan to mail checks directly to millions of Americans. Ryan took to the House floor to defend this plan, accurately noting that additional government spending would help move the economy out of a recession:

We have a lot of laid off workers, and more layoffs are occurring. And we know, as a historical fact, that even if our economy begins to slowly recover, unemployment is going to linger on and on well after that recovery takes place. What we have been trying to do starting in October and into December and now is to try and get people back to work. The things we’re trying to pass in this bill are the time-tested, proven, bipartisan solutions to get businesses to stop laying off people, to hire people back, and to help those people who have lost their jobs. . . .

We’ve got to get the engine of economic growth growing again because we now know, because of recession, we don’t have the revenues that we wanted to, we don’t have the revenues we need, to fix Medicare, to fix Social Security, to fix these issues. We’ve got to get Americans back to work. Then the surpluses come back, then the jobs come back. That is the constructive answer we’re trying to accomplish here on, yes, a bipartisan basis.

A Newsweek/Daily Beast op ed By Niall Ferguson has economists and journalists alike fact checking his wrong economics. We call Shenanigans!  Krugman calls it unethical.

There are multiple errors and misrepresentations in Niall Ferguson’s cover story in Newsweek — I guess they don’t do fact-checking — but this is the one that jumped out at me. Ferguson says:

The president pledged that health-care reform would not add a cent to the deficit. But the CBO and the Joint Committee on Taxation now estimate that the insurance-coverage provisions of the ACA will have a net cost of close to $1.2 trillion over the 2012–22 period.

Readers are no doubt meant to interpret this as saying that CBO found that the Act will increase the deficit. But anyone who actually read, or even skimmed, the CBO report (pdf) knows that it found that the ACA would reduce, not increase, the deficit — because the insurance subsidies were fully paid for.

Now, people on the right like to argue that the CBO was wrong. But that’s not the argument Ferguson is making — he is deliberately misleading readers, conveying the impression that the CBO had actually rejected Obama’s claim that health reform is deficit-neutral, when in fact the opposite is true.

More than that: by its very nature, health reform that expands coverage requires that lower-income families receive subsidies to make coverage affordable. So of course reform comes with a positive number for subsidies — finding that this number is indeed positive says nothing at all about the impact on the deficit unless you ask whether and how the subsidies are paid for. Ferguson has to know this (unless he’s completely ignorant about the whole subject, which I guess has to be considered as a possibility). But he goes for the cheap shot anyway.

We’re not talking about ideology or even economic analysis here — just a plain misrepresentation of the facts, with an august publication letting itself be used to misinform readers. The Times would require an abject correction if something like that slipped through. Will Newsweek?

Joe Wiesanthal at BI shows how Ferguson gets wrong a lot.  There’s a list of things he’s been wrong on that’s quite lengthy as well as putting the blame on Obama for China’s huge GDP which is on target to surpass ours some time in 2017.  That’s the comment below that mentions that some tings are inevitable.

Niall Ferguson has a huge piece in The Daily Beast saying Obama needs to get fired titled: “Hit The Road, Barack.”

It’s basically an ell-encompassing takedown of Obama’s record on the economy (it still sucks), the deficit (it’s getting bigger) and America’s standing in the world (The Mideast has not gotten safer).

It even hits Obama for stuff like this, which seems totally inevitable at some point, regardless of who is President.

Anyway, as you read Niall Ferguson, it’s worth noting that he has been wrong on economics ever since Obama took office.

I’m getting really tired of putting up a huge list of Republicans who seem to have caught the pathological lying disease.  What’s happened to the GOP?  It seems like ever since they got religion, they also got a bad case of Pants-on-Fire.  It gives all of us a case of Hair-on-Fire.

What’s on your blogging and reading list today?

Did David Koch Buy the VP Nomination for Paul Ryan?

Posted: August 18, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: 2012 presidential campaign, the GOP, U.S. Economy, U.S. Politics | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , | 18 Comments

Roger Stone

Via Shawn Russell at Dailykos, former Republican dirty trickster Roger Stone claims to have learned from “sources” that Mitt Romney picked Paul Ryan as his VP at the behest of David Koch, who promised in return to donate another $100 million to the Romney/Ryan cause. Stone writes at his blog The Stone Zone:

I’ve waited a few days to lay out my analysis of the selection of Paul Ryan for the VP slot on the Romney ticket. Unlike politicos like Dick Morris who bad-mouths the selection privately and shills for it publicly, I’ll tell you what I really think. My sources tell me David Koch played a key role in Ryan’s selection and that Koch’s wife Julia had been quietly lobbying for Ryan. The selection was cemented at the July 22nd fundraiser Koch held for Romney at the former’s sumptuous Hamptons estate.

Koch pledged $100 million more to C-4 and Super PAC efforts for Romney for Ryan’s selection.

It sounds like a conspiracy theory, but even Joe Conason has weighed in on it. According to Conason:

Any such transaction would represent a serious violation of federal election laws and perhaps other statutes, aside from the ethical and character implications for all concerned. Although Stone is not the most reputable figure, to put it mildly, he has been a Republican insider, with access to the party’s top figures, over four decades. His credentials date back to Nixon’s Committee to Reelect The President and continue through the Reagan White House, the hard-fought Bush campaigns, and the Florida fiasco in 2000, when he masterminded the “Brooks Brothers riot” that shut down the Bush-Gore recount in Miami-Dade. Peruse his site and you’ll see his greatest hits and the attention he has drawn from major publications.

I’ve known Roger personally for years and always considered him intelligent and amusing; also extremely dangerous and even erratic. Sometimes I’ve been surprised by how much he knows about the inner-most workings of his party – even when he is clearly persona non grata among the current power elite. 

Conason says there is a “ring of candor in Stone’s story.” As Conason notes, Roger Stone may have scores to settle with the Republican Party, which he left early this year to register as a Libertarian. Here is what Stone wrote at the time:

To real conservatives the freedom of the individual is paramount. No one should be able to tell you what you can eat, drink, smoke, or marry, or what kind of gun you can own. We don’t want to be snooped on by an all-knowing big brother government. That is the essence of liberty. The Republican Party has become both a party of big government and also an authoritarian party that would tell us how to live.

That the Republican Party can only produce Mitt Romney, who was an independent during the Reagan-Bush years (and only converted to conservatism after serving one term as governor, never intending to run for re-election while always planning to run for president), Newt Gingrich, a thrice-married egomaniac with delusions of grandeur and Rick Santorum, a religious fanatic, who would tell other people how to live, as presidential candidates proves the GOP may be going the way as the Whigs.

As Conason noted, Stone is a wingnut and unpredictable, but he knows everyone in the Republican Party–he was an insider’s insider. He worked for Nixon’s Committee to Reelect the President (CREEP), and worked in the campaigns of every Republican President since Nixon and served as Senior Adviser to Jack Kemp. Stone was accused of being involved in the Willie Horton ads for Bush I, and he is believed to have been the organizer of the “Brooks Brothers Riot” during the Florida recount in 2000.

In 2008, Stone founded Citizens United Not Timid in 2008. He formed the group in order to slime Hillary Clinton (note the initials in the name), and it ultimately morphed into the infamous Citizens United.

In his blog post, Stone wrote of his distaste for Paul Ryan’s claim of being a libertarian. He even criticized Ryan’s wardrobe!

The idea of Paul Ryan as a libertarian is a joke. Ryan is a big government, Washington DC Republican who votes to fund foreign interventionism and the erosion of our civil liberties. Ryan began his political career as an acolyte of one of my heroes, Rep. Jack Kemp. Yet Ryan has wandered far from Kemp’s genuine concern about the poor and disadvantaged. Ryan has become more of a faux deficit hawk and less of a pro-growth proponent.

Then there is the question of Ryan’s clothes. I’m not sure if he gets his threads from the Salvation Army or the Goodwill. His suits are too large as are his dress shirts. He appears to be wearing a plastic belt. The Romney team should enlist supply-side guru Larry Kudlow to coach Ryan, not on economics but on how to dress.

It could be that Stone’s admiration for Jack Kemp is at the root of his disgust with Ryan. Ryan claims Kemp as a mentor, but hasn’t really followed his example.

Yes, I know this sounds crazy, but look at all the craziness we’ve seen so far in the 2012 campaign. We have to ask ourselves: after all the dishonesty we have seen from Mitt Shady, can anyone who is paying attention really dismiss Stone’s allegations out of hand?

UPDATE: Roger Stone was not involved in the founding of Citizens United. That organization was founded in 1988 and has been headed by David Bossie since 2000. Thanks to Violet Socks for the correction.

Saturday Morning Lightweight Reads

Posted: August 18, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: 2012 presidential campaign, Mitt Romney, morning reads, U.S. Politics | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , | 53 Comments

Good Morning!!

Since it’s Saturday, this will be a somewhat lightweight news roundup.

You probably heard that TMZ found a picture of Paul Ryan topless “after relentless research.” It was taken six years ago–before he started the now famous P90X workout.

The entire Internet is losing its collective mind over a shirtless pic of vice presidential candidate, and fitness freak, Paul Ryan. Before the photo was even uncovered by TMZ, “Paul Ryan shirtless” began trending on Google. We the people really, desperately want to see the 42-year-old’s legendary midsection.

Feverish coverage of the congressman’s grueling P90X workout routine, and reports of his 6 to 8 percent body fat, have helped stoke the fire. So too have his good looks: Media outlets from TMZ to the New York Times have waxed poetic this week about his sex appeal. There’s also the fact that some see his physique as rock-hard proof of his true character: As my colleague Willa Paskin said, it’s like people are thinking, “He really must be as disciplined and serious as he pretends. Look at those abs! Those are not the abs of a dilettante!”

Frankly, of those three guys pictured above, I’ll take the pale, unmuscled, slightly flabby–but really smart and interesting–Bill Clinton. And thank goodness The Daily Beast didn’t find a shirtless photo of Mitt Romney! They did post shirtless photos of a few other politicians though. My favorites were Rick Santorum and Vladimir Putin–check them out at the link.

RalphB posted this one in the comments last night, and I just had to include it in this mornings must reads: Romney Loves Ryan: What Mitt Sees in His New Beau, by Paul Constant at The Stranger.

If we’re being generous, Wisconsin congressman Paul Ryan is a man of contradictions. If we’re being honest, Wisconsin congressman Paul Ryan is an idiot. Mitt Romney’s vice presidential pick has problems beyond the basic teabagger contradiction of claiming to be for small government then passing an obscenely large military budget, voting to ban gay marriage, and enacting laws that lessen a woman’s access to abortion and birth control. This is a Republican who unabashedly supported George W. Bush’s war in Iraq and the Patriot Act, but also claims to be a big Rage Against the Machine fan. There is a dissonance, a bifurcation in Ryan’s brain that demands further investigation.

As I write this, the media’s love affair with Paul Ryan is still running hot and heavy. Since rumors of the Ryan pick broke late Friday night, reporters have not been able to say enough nice things about the man: good-looking, remarkably fit (anywhere from 6 to 8 percent body fat, multiple bloggers have cooed; a CNN headline on Monday swooned: “Paul Ryan’s workout: Is P90X for you?”), young, a decent public speaker, well-loved in his home district around Janesville, Wisconsin, where he was born and still lives today with his beautiful wife and children. Hell, compared to the stiff, awkward, and biologically unlikable Romney, Ryan is the second coming of George Clooney, with a practiced aw-shucksiness and a closely cultivated cowlick that are meant to imply Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.

Constant spends the rest of the piece describing Ryan’s hypocrisy and his ability to lie and obfuscate at the drop of a hat. He’s the perfect match for Romney.

Is it any wonder that Romney loves Ryan, can seemingly spend hours sitting next to him and softly chuckling while gazing in his direction, his hands awkwardly curled up in his lap? It must be like looking into a mirror that shows you all your life’s possibilities. It must be like looking at all the potential he used to have. Here’s the distillation of everything Romney believes, and by some fluke, people even like this other guy. If Romney didn’t make Ryan his vice presidential candidate, he’d probably have killed him in a fit of jealous pique.

Perfect! I wish I had written that.

In science news, a new species of spider with really scary claws was discovered by some people exploring a cave in Oregon.

Amateur cave explorers have found a new family of spiders in the Siskiyou Mountains of Southern Oregon, and scientists have dubbed it Trogloraptor — Latin for cave robber — for their fearsome front claws.

The spelunkers sent specimens to the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, which has the West Coast’s largest collection of spiders. Entomologists there say the spider — reddish brown and the size of a half dollar — evolved so distinctly that it requires its own taxonomic family — the first new spider family found in North America since the 1870s.

“It took us a long time to figure out what it wasn’t,” said Charles Griswold, curator of arachnids at the academy. “Even longer to figure out what it is. We used anatomy. We used DNA to understand its evolutionary place. Then we consulted other experts all over the world about what this was. They all concurred with our opinion that this was something completely new to science.”

One more science story: Likely footprint of spiky dinosaur has NASA’s Md. campus on cloud nine

Eons before man dreamed of exploring the heavens, dinosaur tracker Ray Stanford is convinced, a low-slung armored beast roamed what is now a NASA campus in Greenbelt, stamping a huge footprint that went unnoticed until he spied it this summer.

A scalloped mini-crater with four pointy toe prints pressed into ruddy rock, the putative dinosaur track juts out from a scruffy slope at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, home to 7,000 scientists, engineers and other workers with their eyes firmly turned skyward.

Maryland’s signature dinosaur, an armored browser known as a nodosaur, made the track with its back left foot 112 million years ago, Stanford said as he led an entourage of NASA officials to the print Friday morning.

Sticking out of the grass in plain view, the elephant-foot-size impression — nearly 14 inches wide — elicited gasps. “Unbelievable!” said a NASA photographer. Someone else said, “Oh, my!”

Read more at the link.

I was amazed when I read this one: Construction Worker Survives After a Metal Bar Pierces his Head in Brazil

A 24-year-old construction worker survived after a 6-foot metal bar fell from above and pierced his head, doctors said Friday.

Luiz Alexandre Essinger, chief of staff of Rio de Janeiro’s Miguel Couto Hospital said doctors successfully withdrew the iron bar from Eduardo Leite’s skull during a five-hour surgery.

“He was taken to the operating room, his skull was opened, they examined the brain and the surgeon decided to pull the metal bar out from the front in the same direction it entered the brain.” Essinger said.

He said Leite was conscious when he arrived at the hospital and told him what had happened.
He said Leite was lucid and showed no negative consequences after the operation.

Phineas Gage

The reason I was so amazed is that this accident is so similar to one that everyone learns about in Psychology 101–the case of Phineas Gage.

The story of Phineas Gage illustrates some of the first medical knowledge gained on the relationship between personality and the functioning of the brain’s frontal lobe. A well-liked and successful construction foreman, Phineas Gage was contracted to work on the bed preparation for the Rutland & Burlington Railroad in Cavendish, Vermont in late 1840’s. On the 13th of September 1848, while preparing the railroad bed, an accidental explosion of a charge he had set blew a 13-pound tamping iron straight through Gage’s head, landing many yards away.

From all accounts, the front part of the left side of his brain was destroyed. Incredibly, almost immediately after the accident, Gage was conscious and able to talk, and insisted on walking to the cart that would take him into town to be treated. Despite his torn scalp and fractured skull, Gage remained lucid and rational during the ride and was able to speak with his attending physician, Dr. John Martyn Harlow. Dr. Harlow, a young physician in Cavendish, noted that although the tamping iron appeared to have gone directly through Gage’s frontal lobes, Gage was still able to speak rationally and answer questions about the injury. Gage was treated by Harlow and returned home to Lebanon, New Hampshire 10 weeks later.

Unfortunately, Gage’s recovery was not a complete success. The once friendly and well-liked man became “fitful, irreverent, and grossly profane, showing little deference for his fellows.” He was also “impatient and obstinate, yet capricious and vacillating, unable to settle on any of the plans he devised for future action.” Those who knew him before the accident said he was “no longer Gage.”

A couple of years ago the above portrait of Gage turned up and his story was all over the news for awhile. It remains to be seen whether Eduardo Leite will have a better outcome than Gage did. The bar that went through Gage’s head damaged his frontal lobes–basically giving him a prefrontal lobotomy. The doctor who operated on Leite claims that “the bar entered a ‘non-eloquent’ area of the brain, an area that doesn’t have a specific, major known function.” I have a feeling we’re eventually going to learn from Leite’s post-operative experiences what that part of the brain does.

I’ll end with a sad but heartwarming story from The New York Times Vows column: Angela Sclafani and Michael Olexa. I’m not going to excerpt from it, because you really need to read the whole thing. Just be sure to have a box of Kleenex handy.

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

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.

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