Month: February 2012

Everything You Need to Know About Mitt Romney

by David Atkins

During last night’s GOP debate, John King asked each candidate to name the top misconception about them. Romney’s answer:

JOHN KING, CNN: Governor Romney?

MITT ROMNEY: We’ve got to restore America’s promise in this country, where people know that with hard work and education that they’re going to be secure and prosperous and that their kids will have a brighter future than they’ve had.

For that to happen we’re going to have to have dramatic fundamental change in Washington, D.C. We’re going to have to create more jobs, have less debt, and shrink the size of government. I’m the only person in this race…

KING: Is there a misconception about you? The question is the misconception.

ROMNEY: You know, you get to ask the questions you want, I get to give the answers I want.

KING: Fair enough.

Except to repeat whatever talking points his consultants give him, I don’t think Mitt has ever in his life been forced to toe anyone’s line but his own. And it shows.

Also, John King’s attitude is pretty reflective of the current state of our traditional media. The wingers can say whatever they want, regardless of whether it has any bearing on the truth or the questions asked, and that’s just fine by them.

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So, it looks as if Virginia’s Governor has decided that he didn’t want to sign a state rape bill after all. In his statement he cited the argument that no person should have their bodies invaded against their will:

Mandating an invasive procedure in order to give informed consent is not a proper role for the state. No person should be directed to undergo an invasive procedure by the state, without their consent, as a precondition to another medical procedure.

Huzzah. No mandatory probe. But he’s still spouting nonsense on the subject. He also said:

It is clear that in the majority of cases, a routine external, transabdominal ultrasound is sufficient to meet the bills stated purpose, that is, to determine gestational age. I have come to understand that the medical practice and standard of care currently guide physicians to use other procedures to find the gestational age of the child, when abdominal ultrasounds cannot do so. Determining gestational age is essential for legal reasons, to know the trimester of the pregnancy in order to comply with the law, and for medical reasons as well.

Doing ultrasounds to determine the gestational age for medical reasons is none of the state’s business and the state has no business compelling them for legal reasons. Moreover, doing them in the first trimester in most cases would not necessarily be helpful in that endeavor — in fact, that was the excuse these forced childbirth zealots gave for requiring the transvaginal ultrasounds in the first place: they couldn’t properly reveal the fetus.

There is only one right way to do this. Leave it up to the doctor and the patient to decide what tests are medically necessary before having an abortion, period.

This is just so dumb. Everyone knows what this is really about:

Ultrasounds have been at the forefront of the anti-abortion movement for the last few years. Lawmakers have introduced mandatory ultrasound laws in an increasing number of states; activists have featured fetuses “testifying” at capitols; and anti-abortion Congressman Cliff Stearns (R-Fla.) has proposed legislation to direct federal funding to crisis pregnancy centers for the purpose of purchasing ultrasound equipment.

According to the Guttmacher Institute (PDF), 19 states have some type of abortion-related ultrasound policy. In six of those states, all women wanting an abortion must first undergo an ultrasound. Last year the Texas Legislature went further than most states, not only mandating an ultrasound for every woman wanting an abortion, but forcing women to hear an explanation of the sonogram image, unless she is a victim of sexual assault or incest. Texas women who live up to 100 miles from an abortion provider have to wait at least 24 hours after they receive the ultrasound before they can get the abortion. Virginia lawmakers have also included this rule in their proposal.

At anti-abortion rallies and conferences throughout the country, leaders in the movement consistently talk about the power of ultrasounds — that they allow a pregnant woman to see a head and hear a heartbeat.

In a paper on ultrasound policy (PDF), Jeanne Monahan, the director of the Center for Human Dignity at the Family Research Council, suggests that ultrasound examinations might result in more desired pregnancies. The paper refers to statistics from studies conducted at anti-abortion pregnancy centers to assert claims like “eight in ten pregnancy resource centers report that ‘abortion-minded’ women decide to keep their babies after seeing ultrasound images,” and “[a]ccording to an executive director of an Iowa pregnancy resource center, 90 percent of women who see their baby by ultrasound choose life.” This argument is then used in legislative language (PDF) and floor debates.

Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) introduced a federal mandatory sonogram bill last year and — citing the conservative policy group Focus on the Family — told Congress that “78 percent of women who see and hear the fetal heartbeat choose life.” She was later corrected by Focus on the Family, which deemed her statement “inaccurate.”

The anti-abortion group Americans United for Life has created model legislation for ultrasound policy (PDF) that, according to the organization, has influenced some of the recent state bills, including Texas’. In the model, Americans United authors assert: “[M]edical evidence indicates that women feel bonded to their children after seeing them on the ultrasound screen.” The footnote attached to this claim points to a 1983 medical study that uncovered two cases in which women in the late first or early second trimester of pregnancy reported “feelings and thoughts clearly indicating a bond of loyalty toward the fetus.”

I suppose these people have the right to try to use the state to force their moral belief system on everyone else. At least it’s done frequently enough to assume it’s part of the process. But forcing medical practitioners to perform superfluous tests on law abiding citizens as a political strategy goes in a direction that’s too creepy to think about.

A Textbook Example of the Ad Hominem Fallacy

By tristero

Fact 1: Scott Ritter was right about Iraq. Absolutely right. Dead right. He was in a position to know, and he spoke out. Had this country listened to him, we would be in a lot better shape, financially, morally, and in terms of foreign relations than we are.

Fact 2: Scott Ritter is one very sick individual. He is not being framed or unfairly persecuted.

Fact 3: Fact 2 does not make Fact 1 any less of a fact.

The White House Tacks Hard Right on Gas Prices. It Won’t Help.

by David Atkins

I don’t know whose votes the White House thinks it’s going to win with this strategy:

President Obama will move aggressively this week to deflect blame for rising gas prices.

Republicans are accusing the administration of exacerbating pain at the pump with policies that raise energy costs.

Obama will visit the University of Miami on Thursday to discuss steps the administration has taken to increase domestic oil and gas production, senior administration officials said Tuesday.

He will highlight the fact that production is up and imports have fallen, and will note additional steps the nation can take to deal with higher gas prices, the officials said.

This tactic is mind-bogglingly dense, but typical of the Obama Administration’s strategy of tacking so far to right on hot-button issues that they try to take the Republicans’ best arguments away from them. It doesn’t work, of course. Hardcore anti-immigrant racists aren’t going to care how many poor Latinos the Obama Administration deports. They’re going to vote against the President, anyway. In the same vein, the “drill here, drill now” crowd is going to vote against the President and against the Democrats, anyway. There’s not much to be gained by talking about how much more gas and oil we’re drilling now.

Meanwhile, anyone who cares about the facts knows that oil is sold on a world market, which means that producing more oil domestically doesn’t mean we get to keep our hands on that lovely crude. We don’t. It pumps out to the world market, where its influence on world oil prices (and thus gas prices) is basically nothing. Pumping more oil out of America makes practically zero difference to gas prices. Depending on whom you listen to, gas and oil prices are a function of two things: commodity futures speculation, and unrelenting increased demand from India and China. Neither of those are affected by the piddling amount of oil being extracted now. The Canada tar sands may make a difference many, many years down the line assuming it’s refined inexpensively, and assuming there are major shortages in the Middle East. And speaking of the Middle East, even if North American oil production were to increase in such a way as to affect overall supply enough to drive down prices (impossible given the numbers involved), OPEC could simply reduce its own production quotas to keep prices artificially high.

In other words, reality-based people know that domestic production has zero effect on prices, and wouldn’t be able to even if it tried.

And then, of course, there’s the President’s utter abrogation of his base–not just among progressives, but among anyone tilting even slightly to the left on the national spectrum. There are huge numbers of Americans who are deeply concerned about climate change, about the effect of drilling and fracking on the coastal and mainland environments, and about moving to a future based on renewable energy. By highlighting his Administration’s oil drilling credentials, the President leaves his entire putative voting base cold and abandoned.

Facing a summer of high gas prices, the President and his advisers had two options:

1) They could use the issue as an opportunity to go after Wall Street speculators, do a little demagoguery against Middle Eastern OPEC oil regimes, attack greedy and unpopular domestic oil corporations, make clear for the first time in American politics that drilling more oil does nothing to bring down prices, and use the issue as a launching pad for a jobs-producing American renewable energy Apollo Program;

or

2) Try to outdo the Republicans on “drill, baby, drill” while conceding to the right wing every fallacious argument about the relationship between domestic energy production and global energy prices.

Choice number two is such resoundingly bad politics that it matters little whether the decision was made out of a desire to please the big money on Wall Street, or whether it was made in a misguided attempt to win “centrist” voters. It’s an academic argument.

Whether the President wins re-election in 2012 or not, the terms of the debate itself will set this country and the world back on the wrong track for years if not decades.

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Whose moral conscience is it anyway?

by digby

This article from Jonathan Cohn on the practices in Catholic hospitals is chilling:

The hospital did not perform elective abortions, which is typical for small conservative communities. But the obstetricians were accustomed to terminating pregnancies in the event of medical emergencies. And just such a case presented itself one November morning, when a woman, 15 weeks pregnant, arrived at the emergency room in the middle of a miscarriage. According to a deposition later obtained by The Washington Post, the woman had been carrying twins and passed the first fetus at home in the bathtub. When she arrived via ambulance, she was stable and not bleeding. But the umbilical cord from the first fetus was coming out of her vagina, while the second fetus was still in her uterus.

Robert Holder, the physician on duty who gave the deposition, said the odds of saving the second fetus were miniscule. Doctors would need to tie off the umbilical cord and put the woman at severe risk of infection. After discussing the options, the family, with some difficulty, opted for a medical termination. But, under the new rules, Holder had to get approval from a nurse manager and eventually a more senior administrator. When Holder briefed the administrator, she asked whether the fetus had a heartbeat. It did, he said. “She replied that I had to send the patient out for treatment,” Holder later recalled. He arranged for the woman to get the procedure at the nearest major medical institution—in Tucson. According to his account, the 90-minute trip put her at risk of hemorrhaging and infection, which did not happen, and “significant emotional distress,” which did.

Holder said that an official from Ascension Health, which oversees Carondelet, told him earlier that the rules permit terminating a pregnancy when a spontaneous abortion seems inevitable. (Officials from Ascension and Sierra Vista were not available for comment.) But Bruce Silva, another obstetrician on staff and an early skeptic of the merger, told me that confusion over the rules was common. “We couldn’t get a straight answer,” Silva says. “There was so much gray area. And sometimes you need to make these decisions quickly, for medical reasons.” Even when the new rules were clear, Silva adds, they sometimes prevented physicians from following their best clinical judgments, not to mention their patients’ wishes. A prohibition on tubal ligations, a surgical form of sterilization that severs or blocks the fallopian tubes, meant women had to go elsewhere for this procedure. However, physicians routinely perform this operation as part of a cesarean section, either when patients have requested the procedure or when it’s medically recommended, in order to avoid a second invasive surgery and the attendant medical risks. “I had a patient who was blind. She and her husband were working but poor, and she was diabetic, too,” Silva told me. “She was having her second baby, and that’s all she wanted and she’s got these medical issues. She asked for a tubal ligation. And I can’t do it.”

He points out that the Catholic Hospital system has been growing as they take over more and more community hospitals around the country. He also points out that they receive many millions of taxpayer dollars to do it. So, what about my conscience? It is truly offended by this behavior and I’m not being facetious. Why does this only go one way?

This isn’t just about lady parts, although they are as obsessed with them as ever. This is about dying with dignity as well, another extremely personal decision that these religious people take out of the hands of individuals and their families and insist on their own religious practices, regardless of the medical necessity among other extremely personal issues.

I find that story morally reprehensible and I deeply resent contributing to such practices. Maybe it’s time for non-believers and those of other faiths to seriously start challenging this with their own arguments. Many of doctors who’ve been forced into these institutions chafe at what they are required to do as well. Perhaps they should invoke the Hippocratic oath and stop doing harm as well.

Cohn concludes:

For better or worse, the government depends on Catholic hospitals to provide vital services—and the hospitals depend on the government for money to provide them. Convoluted solutions may be the only way for this convoluted mix of public purpose and private institution to survive.

Maybe we should be thinking about ways to change that mix.

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Muckrakers and sanctimony

by digby

I wonder if most people have heard of a book called The Jungle? Here’s a little refresher:

The Jungle is a 1906 novel written by journalist Upton Sinclair. Sinclair wrote the novel with the intention of portraying the life of the immigrant in the United States, but readers were more concerned with the large portion of the book pertaining to the corruption of the American meatpacking industry during the early 20th century, and the book is now often interpreted and taught as a journalist’s exposure of the poor health conditions in this industry.

The novel depicts in harsh tones poverty, absence of social programs, unpleasant living and working conditions, and hopelessness prevalent among the working class, which is contrasted with the deeply-rooted corruption on the part of those in power. Sinclair’s observations of the state of turn-of-the-twentieth-century labor were placed front and center for the American public to see, suggesting that something needed to be changed to get rid of American wage slavery.

The novel was first published in serial form in 1905 in the socialist newspaper Appeal to Reason. It was based on undercover work done in 1904: Sinclair spent seven weeks gathering information while working incognito in the meatpacking plants of the Chicago stockyards.

This was called “muckraking” in which progressive journalist reformers “deceitfully” went undercover in various industries to expose the bad practices and working conditions.It was never particularly popular with business, but it did create results.

Today we call this investigative reporting and some of the practices remain controversial. The government is trying to prosecute journalists who publish documents obtained by whistleblowers. And business fights back:

One hidden camera investigation, of Food Lion, backfired on ABC when Food Lion sued. Food Lion sued for trespass and breach of loyalty, claiming that the report was produced under deceptive pretenses, and ABC employees hired by Food Lion wearing hidden cameras filmed other Food Lion employees without following proper notification procedures. Food Lion did not sue for libel, as the one-year statute of limitations had already run by the time it received all the footage shot by ABC, and prior to receiving the footage, its attorneys believed it would be difficult to prove that ABC acted with actual malice. A jury awarded Food Lion $5.5 million, but later appeals by ABC to the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals resulted in the damages reduced to $2.00.

So, considering this long history of investigative journalism and undercover activism, why in the world is everyone, including liberals and activists, coming down on the man who used a false name to persuade a conservative environmental think tank to give him internal documents? Here’s the New York Times:

One way or the other, Gleick’s use of deception in pursuit of his cause after years of calling out climate deception has destroyed his credibility and harmed others. (Some of the released documents contain information about Heartland employees that has no bearing on the climate fight.) That is his personal tragedy and shame (and I’m sure devastating for his colleagues, friends and family).

Really? I guess Upton Sinclair should have jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge then. Here’s Eric Loomis at Lawyers Guns and Money:

Imagine yourself in Gleick’s position. You are a committed activist with a long history taking on horrible people doing horrible things. You can be a feminist, gay rights activist, environmentalist, unionist, whatever. You are on these people’s e-mail lists. And suddenly they include you on an e-mail where they spill the goodies.

What are you going to do? “Oh, dear sir, I think you have made a mistake! These documents detailing exactly how you intend on destroying the world are not intended for me. Please remove me from your e-mail list!!!” Of course you aren’t. You are going to string this out to get the dirt. What do these people really do behind the scenes? And then you are going to give the information to your friends in the media and embarrass the hell out of these jerks…

See, I’d call using a false identity to get inside a diabolical organization “journalism.” It might not be respectable and won’t get you invited to fun corporate-sponsored events. But Gleick has thrown the curtain back. And of course, he’s at fault here. Even if he broke the law, is that the real issue here? What is worse, using a false identity or advocating for policies that will destroy the entire nation of Tonga? Using a false identity or lobbying the U.S. government to halt changes in mileage standards for cars so that we don’t become a bunch of hippie Europeans or something and continue to change the climate with ever-greater rapidity?

I think I know which side contains the moral monsters here. And it ain’t Peter Gleick.

Exactly. Talk about not seeing the forest for the trees. Gleick has subsequently apologized for his actions, which I think is foolish. Putting this particular form of ethical consideration before the ethical consideration of saving the planet isn’t really ethical in my book. By that logic everyone should have disavowed Upton Sinclair because he deceived the meat packing industry which was selling lard made of rendered human fat from the bodies of workers who’d fallen in the vats. Lying to an employer is apparently the worst sin imaginable, second only to giving a false name to an institution with which you have no affiliation at all.

It seems to me that muckraking is especially necessary when the malefactors of great wealth have decided that their financial interests have become so paramount that they are willing to put lives — and even the planet — at risk. It takes courage to do what that man did, particularly in this world of overweening sanctimony.

Unfortunately, because so many are anxious to prove their ethical superiority, it’s highly likely that the real truths that were uncovered will be tainted and the conservative institutions will be strengthened by it. The lesson here is that if he hadn’t done it the documents would not have been revealed — but that it doesn’t matter anyway because people are more concerned about the ethics of revealing them than what they contained. Sad.

Update:Now the conservative think tank in question is saying that the activist in question forged one of the documents. If so he obviously went a bridge too far. But if it’s true, it’s odd that any right wing organization would have a problem with it. Usually they fete such people like heroes.

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Gulling the rubes

by digby

Charlie Pierce has the definitive take-down of Ross Douthat and his budding bromance with Rick Santorum. Here’s a taste:

[C]an we please have a better definition of “populism” than the one embodied in Rick Santorum, which can be fairly summarized as, “Gulling the rubes so that I’m in a position to lower the corporate tax rate to zero and eliminate the estate tax, all the while maintaining my position as a ‘ho for what’s left of the K Street Project”? Thank you.

[Douthat Quoting Jonathan Chait now] ‘Think of disaffected blue-collar workers, downscale white men who love guns, hate welfare, oppose free trade, and want higher taxes on the rich and corporations.’

Okay, I’m thinking of them. I think I’ve met two of them in my entire life. Most of the ones that I’ve met will settle for the first three things there and figure that, well, hell, the whole system’s rigged and we’ll never get tax the rich boys at what they deserve to be taxed, but as long as my money’s not going to Them, life’s good here at deer camp. They’re the salt of the earth. They’ve also been the prime suckers for 30 years of bait-and-switch politics that sent all their money zooming to the top, a politics that produced, among other blights, Rick Santorum. What Ross is asking here is whether Rick can bring the big con home one more time.

Yep. That’s the con. It’s also a con that continues to tempt certain corners of the Democratic consulting class who think if they can just get these non-existent good ole boys to believe they aren’t giving it all away to the you-know-whos, they’ll be eager to vote for the Democrats. Sometimes you have to wonder who it is that’s being conned.

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Maybe we should enlist PETA

by digby

You’ve probably heard of the Illinois Republican attempt to pass a state rape bill. But I didn’t know the committee involved was taking time away from its duties legislating farm animal policy, although I should have guessed:

Illinois women who want to get abortions might be required to either view an ultrasound before the procedure or decline to do so in writing, under proposals that passed an Illinois House committee Tuesday.

The two measures call for more regulations on centers that perform abortions — including requiring doctors to ask if the patient wants to see an ultrasound and additional building regulations on the actual clinics — were passed overwhelmingly in the Agricultural Committee. They head to the House floor for debate.
[…]
Rep. Deborah Mell, a Chicago Democrat, was one of the two members voting against the bills and criticized the assignment to a committee that generally handles farming issues.

“We’re not talking about abortions for cows and pigs, right? We’re talking about women?” she said.

According to the article, it was assigned to the agriculture committee because it’s dominated by conservatives — which means there’s not much difference. Women are just another form of livestock to these fine folks. When you buy yourself a nice brood mare or a good milker, you want to get your money’s worth. These folks are there to make government policies that protect your investment and ensure a plentiful supply.

The rest of the article discusses another gambit that’s being tried all over the country as well as Illinois — demanding hospital building and staffing standards for any clinic that performs abortions. This is all part of a bigger strategy to restric access to abortion called a TRAP bill:

TRAP stands for Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers. TRAP bills single out abortion providers for medically unnecessary, politically motivated state regulations. They can be divided into three general categories:

a measure that singles out abortion providers for medically unnecessary regulations, standards, personnel qualifications, building and/or structural requirements;
a politically motivated provision that needlessly addresses the licensing of abortion clinics and/or charges an exorbitant fee to register a clinic in the state; or
a measure that unnecessarily regulates where abortions may be provided or designates abortion clinics as ambulatory surgical centers, outpatient care centers, or hospitals without medical justification.

It’s kind of ironic that the anti-regulation right wing is using this particular method to stop women from exercising their right to abortion, but they actually delight in such hypocrisy. Someone should ask Ron Paul what he thinks of this sort of thing. I’d be interested in knowing the answer.

h/t to VW

Santorum’s Moral Perversion

by David Atkins

An intrepid blogger at ThinkProgess discovers this Santorum gem from 2008:

“Woodstock is the great American orgy. This is who the Democratic Party has become. They have become the party of Woodstock. The prey upon our most basic primal lusts, and that’s sex. And the whole abortion culture, it’s not about life. It’s about sexual freedom. That’s what it’s about. Homosexuality. It’s about sexual freedom.”

This is a man who is absolutely terrified that someone, somewhere, might be having more fun and staying truer to themselves than he is. And he’s bound and determined to stop it. He desperately needs a good psychiatrist to talk through whatever repressed, latent urges he’s feeling and bring them out in a more healthy way.

On a broader note, it’s mind-boggling that the same people who are obsessed over what two or more people might be doing consensually and harmlessly in their bedrooms or at a music concert, hurting no one and enjoying themselves, are utterly unconcerned with the horrific damage done by billionaire greedheads who pollute and impoverish entire nations simply to buy a few more yachts and private jets. It’s repulsive moral perversion of the highest order, and sane observers shouldn’t be afraid to call it that for fear of offending their delicate sensibilities.

Something is really, really wrong with these people. Not just the politicians, but their supporters, too.

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The internet is not Rick Santorum’s friend

by digby

Offered without comment:

h/t to Dante Atkins