Month: August 2012

Family Values in the sea of Galilee

by digby

My eyes!

House Republican leaders reprimanded 30 lawmakers last August for antics including drinking and skinny-dipping during a fact-finding trip to Israel, according to published reports.

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) and House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) scolded the lawmakers — many of them freshmen — and senior GOP staffers for a late-night swim in the Sea of Galilee. At least one of the lawmakers swam nude, according to a report published Sunday night by Politico. The FBI later inquired about the incident to determine whether there was any impropriety, the report said.

According to the report, Rep. Kevin Yoder (R-Kan.) took off his clothes and jumped into the sea, joining a number of partially-clothed members, some spouses and family members and the staffers, “more than a dozen sources, including eyewitnesses” told Politico.
[…]
Yoder said that he and his wife joined colleagues for dinner at the Sea of Galilee. “After dinner I followed some Members of Congress in a spontaneous and very brief dive into the sea and regrettably I jumped into the water without a swimsuit,” Yoder said in the statement. “It is my greatest honor to represent the people of Kansas in Congress and [for] any embarrassment I have caused for my colleagues and constituents, I apologize.”

Yoder, elected in 2010, represents the 3rd Congressional District of Kansas, which encompasses an area west of Kansas City.

The report said that other lawmakers involved in the late-night swim included Rep. Steve Southerland (R-Fla.) and his daughter; Rep. Tom Reed (R-N.Y.) and his wife; and Reps. Ben Quayle (R-Ariz.) and Jeff Denham (R-Calif.).

In an e-mail, Reed spokesman Tim Kolpien said that the lawmaker and his wife swam with the group “appropriately clothed” and that “there was no impropriety, and he is unaware of any investigation.” Spokesmen for the other members did not return requests for comment.

Imagine what these people are going to get up to in Tampa next week?

Update: Spinster aunts Romney and Ryan had this to say:

“I think it’s reprehensible,” Romney said. “I think it’s another terrible mistake by individuals.”

“This is unbecoming of a member of Congress,” Ryan said. “It’s behavior that shouldn’t be tolerated. I think they know that.”

They’re running for President and Vice President for Pete’s sake!

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Where do these crackpots get their crackpot ideas?

by digby

In case you were wondering where Todd Akin’s loony ideas about pregnancy and rape come from, here’s a possible source — Christian Life Resources:

Let’s look, using the figure of 200,000 rapes each year.

Of the 200,000 women who were forcibly raped, one-third were either too old or too young to get pregnant. That leaves 133,000 at risk for pregnancy.

A woman is capable of being fertilized only 3 days (perhaps 5) out of a 30-day month. Multiply our figure of 133,000 by three tenths. Three days out of 30 is one out of ten, divide 133 by ten and we have 13,300 women remaining. If we use five days out of 30 it is one out of six. Divide one hundred and thirty three thousand by six and we have 22,166 remaining.

One-fourth of all women in the United States of childbearing age have been sterilized, so the remaining three-fourths come out to 10,000 (or 15,000).

Only half of assailants penetrate her body and/or deposit sperm in her vagina,1 so let’s cut the remaining figures in half. This gives us numbers of 5,000 (or 7,500).

Fifteen percent of men are sterile, that drops that figure to 4,250 (or 6,375).

Fifteen percent of non-surgically sterilized women are naturally sterile. That reduces the number to 3,600 (or 5,400).

Another fifteen percent are on the pill and/or already pregnant. That reduces the number to 3,070 (or 4,600).

Now factor in the fact that it takes 5-10 months for the average couple to achieve a pregnancy. Use the smaller figure of 5 months to be conservative and divide the avove figures by 5. The number drops to 600 (or 920).

In an average population, the miscarriage rate is about 15 percent. In this case we have incredible emotional trauma. Her body is upset. Even if she conceives, the miscarriage rate will be higher than in a more normal pregnancy. If 20 percent of raped women miscarry, the figure drops to 450 (or 740).

Finally, factor in what is certainly one of the most important reasons why a rape victim rarely gets pregnant, and that’s physical trauma. Every woman is aware that stress and emotional factors can alter her menstrual cycle. To get and stay pregnant a woman’s body must produce a very sophisticated mix of hormones. Hormone production is controlled by a part of the brain that is easily influenced by emotions. There’s no greater emotional trauma that can be experienced by a woman than an assault rape. This can radically upset her possibility of ovulation, fertilization, implantation and even nurturing of a pregnancy. So what further percentage reduction in pregnancy will this cause? No one knows, but this factor certainly cuts this last figure by at least 50 percent and probably more. If we use the 50 percent figure, we have a final figure of 225 (or 370) women pregnant each year. These numbers closely match the 200 that have been documented in clinical studies.

I’m sure I don’t need to tell you the problems with this “statistical analysis.” But I can see where cretinous throwbacks like Todd Akin would find it convincing. It has numbers and everything.

If you want to know the real statistics, there have been real studies done and as you might imagine, they paint a very different picture.

h/t to DK

If it’s murder, who is the murderer?

by digby

I posted this some time back, but it’s worth watching again. Here you have some pro-life activists being cornered on the question of why women shouldn’t be prosecuted if abortion is murder. It’s very interesting:

The way the smarter people deal with this is by saying that women are like children who don’t know what they’re doing and can’t be held responsible. But it doesn’t scan very well, does it?

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Akin puts the Romney campaign in further peril

by David Atkins

Whatever effect Akin’s reinforcement of the real GOP position on women and abortion might have in Missouri, the spillover has already moved far beyond the Show Me State. It is now doing damage to the Romney campaign in two significant ways.

First, the Romney campaign has avowed its support for the right to an abortion in cases of rape or incest. It might be tempting to view this as an advantage for Romney–an opportunity to “Sistah Souljah” the more ardent elements of the social conservative wing to make himself look better by contrast.

But the problem is that as I and others have noted before, the electorate is fairly static, with few undecideds left. Whatever gains Romney might make from people who are uncomfortable with social conservatism but would be placated by a “rape/incest only” provision would be quite small. But the damage from his base would be substantial. Certainly 98% of conservative voters will still vote for Romney over Obama, anyway. But this election will likely be won or lost at the margins in many states, and the True Believer crowd does make a difference at the margins.

The True Believers actually think that we are in a pre-Tribulation period, where demonic forces of darkness operate to corrupt governments worldwide, and only the True Believers will be spared the wrath of God. These are people for whom climate change doesn’t matter because they believe the world won’t be around that much longer, anyway. For them, unless they can be convinced that a person who shares their values will help “purify” the land to save more souls, they don’t care. Policy preferences on taxes are largely irrelevant to these people. If many of these people stay home rather than vote for Romney, that could seriously sway the election in some swing states.

But there’s also a second problem for the Romney camp: the official abortion position also highlights further divides between Romney and Paul Ryan:

Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan say they disagree with Missouri Representative Todd Akin’s opposition to abortions for rape victims, but Akin’s reference Sunday to “legitimate rape” recalled the “forcible rape” language contained in a bill Ryan co-sponsored last year…

Last year, Ryan joined Akin as one of 227 co-sponsors of a bill that narrowed an exemption to the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits federal funding for abortions. The Hyde Amendment allows federal dollars to be used for abortions in cases of rape and incest, but the proposed bill — authored by New Jersey Representative Christopher H. Smith — would have limited the incest exemption to minors and covered only victims of “forcible rape.”

House Republicans never defined what constituted “forcible rape” and what did not, but critics of the bill suggested the term could exclude women who are drugged and raped, mentally handicapped women who are coerced, and victims of statutory rape.

The “forcible” qualifier was eventually removed before the bill passed in the House last May. The Democrat-controlled Senate did not vote on the measure.

Ultimately, the problem with constantly lying to the public about one’s real views and depending on an out-of-control extremist base is that it’s hard to keep all the lies straight and the extremism under wraps.

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Balanced approach redux

by digby

This ad came out at the beginning of the month before the Ryan announcement. I was hopeful that they would drop this line since the best play is to give a simple, muscular defense of the social safety net as Joe Biden did last week with social security.

Unfortunately, he said it again today:

Still, the biggest thing Congress could do for the economy is to reach a deal on “a sensible approach” to reducing the deficit, he said. Obama specifically urged congressional leaders to revisit the revenues and spending cuts that were on the table during last year’s negotiations on the debt.

“I continue to be open to seeing Congress approach this with a balanced plan that has tough spending cuts, building on the $1 trillion worth of spending cuts we’ve already made, but also asks for additional revenue from folks like me, folks in the top 1 or 2 percent.”

That would give more “certainty” to families and small businesses.

I don’t have a clue how to stop this train. Having the zombie eyed granny starver on the ticket hasn’t changed their view that the Grand Bargain to slash 4 trillion in government programs in the middle of an epic slump is still great policy and even better politics. But don’t worry. They’ll ask millionaires to “pay a little more” so it’s all good. I’m feeling more “confident” already.

Basically we have a choice between the Republican dystopian hellscape or the Democrats’ long slow jobless recovery with even more insecurity for the poor and middle class. Or actually, it’s more likely to be a “compromise” between the two. After all, these are the opening bids.

Pray for gridlock.

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No means no — exceptions

by digby

What’s really important about the Todd Akin controversy isn’t his moronic belief that women who get raped can’t get pregnant. It’s so stupid that even the wingnuts are disavowing him. And the “legitimate” rape comment (or “honest rape” as Ron Paul called it) is horrible, but it doesn’t get to the underlying principle. The real problem is that his “no exceptions” belief has become mainstream in the Republican party. Recall:

[T]he big news to come out of the forum was the rightward shift in Rick Perry’s already very conservative position. In the past, Perry has been committed to banning abortion with very narrow exceptions. But last night, he said he’d changed his mind, and now doesn’t support any exceptions at all. “This is something that is relatively new,” he said, citing a meeting with Rebecca Kiessling, a spokeswoman for Personhood USA who was adopted after her mother, a rape victim, tried and failed to abort her. “Looking in her eyes, I couldn’t come up with an answer to defend the exemptions for rape and incest,” he said. “And over the course of the last few weeks, the Christmas holidays and reflecting on that…all I can say is that God was working on my heart.”

That’s bad enough, but as David Frum says in his piece, the anti-abortion belief that life begins at conception makes that morally logical, even though they have not admitted that until recently. What is even more worrying to me is the fact that they are starting to push the idea of no exception to spare the life of the mother, which presents a much different moral question.

As for life of the mother, Akin explained his view on that issue well: he urged doctors to “optimize” life, ie, sometimes to choose the mother, but sometimes to choose the child when the child’s life seems more optimal.

Perhaps they can take a vote in the operating room to decide which life seems more “optimal.”

What Krugman Says

by tristero

Complete with sly Coen brothers reference in the title, Krugman makes much the same point I’ve been making, that contrary to all the rejoicing amongst the punditocracy that finally we’ll have a Real Debate about the future of this country, Ryan’s nomination to the vice presidency is, at best, a… well, let’s let Dr. Krugman tell it:

What Mr. Ryan actually offers, then, are specific proposals that would sharply increase the deficit, plus an assertion that he has secret tax and spending plans that he refuses to share with us, but which will turn his overall plan into deficit reduction.
If this sounds like a joke, that’s because it is. 

But tell us what you really think:

So will the choice of Mr. Ryan mean a serious campaign? No, because Mr. Ryan isn’t a serious man — he just plays one on TV. 

Exactly.

Running from Ryan (but not far)

by David Atkins

I’ve mentioned before that one of the biggest and most overlooked consequences of the Paul Ryan pick is the ease with which Democrats will now be able to nationalize Congressional races. Republicans across the country are being forced to run from the Ryan plan, but not far enough to annoy their conservative base.

One example of this phenomenon is right in my backyard in Ventura County, where progressive Assemblymember Julia Brownley is doing battle with ardent anti-tax tea partier Tony Strickland for a newly redistricted open Congressional seat. This seat would be a pickup for Democrats if Julia were to win it.

Tony Strickland knows that the Ryan pick is bad for him. Indeed, Ms. Brownley was able to make significant hay of potential votes on the Ryan budget during the primary against “independent.” Timm Herdt of the Ventura County Star says it right out loud:

With Parks having been eliminated in the primary, Democrats will now turn their attacks on the Ryan budget and seek to use them against GOP candidate Tony Strickland. Unlike incumbent Republican House members, Strickland does not have a record of voting for the Ryan budget, but in an interview with me this spring he expressed strong support for what the Ryan plan seeks to accomplish.

“I give a lot of credit to Paul Ryan for coming up with ways to reform Medicare,” Strickland told me. “There’s no question that actuarially it’s not sound. If we do nothing right now. Medicare and Social Security will be 100 percent of the budget.”

Democrat Julia Brownley lost little time in seeking to tie Ryan and his budget plans to Strickland. Within hours of the announcement of the Ryan pick Saturday morning, the campaign issued this statement from Brownley: “The Ryan budget puts millionaires and billionaires ahead of seniors, women and the middle class by turning Medicare into a voucher system, raising the age of eligibility to 67, and making devastating cuts for women’s health and education. This would be a disastrous plan for Ventura County and the nation, and it’s clear that Tony Strickland would be another rubber-stamp vote in Congress for the Mitt Romney-Paul Ryan agenda.”

The end result may be that voters in Ventura County this fall will get a chance to hear a full debate about the future of Medicare — both the question of whether cutting costs and/or raising revenues is a national imperative and whether the cuts proposed by Ryan and House Republicans go too far. That will mean that the 26th CD campaign will be nationalized to a level that it probably wouldn’t have been had Romney chosen some other VP nominee.

Precisely. And that will be happening in every single competitive district in the country, if the campaigns have an ounce of competence to them.

So what is Tony Strickland’s response? To “reject” the Ryan plan to voucherize Medicare for everyone under 55 by…voucherizing it for everyone under 50 instead. No, that’s not a joke. Timm Herdt follows up:

As I noted in that post, in a pre-primary, April 5 interview, Strickland told me that he gave “a lot credit” to Ryan for attempting to address the longterm solvency of Medicare. He said at the time that he did not believe Medicare rules should be changed for those approaching retirement, but that changes need to be made for “people my age” — folks in their 20s, 30s and 40s (Strickland is 42).

We did not discuss a specific age where a potential cutoff for any future changes would be. And that, Strickland told me this morning, is where he has a serious disagreement with the Ryan plan. It envisions making an insurance-voucher system (rather than automatic enrollment in the government-run plan) optional for those under 55. Strickland says no changes should be considered for anyone 50 or older.

“Those folks paid into the system for years and planned their future,” he said. “You cannot take the rug out from underneath them. I personally oppose any effort to take anything from people 50 and older.”

Karoli at Crooks and Liars was actually on the scene at a Strickland event a few days ago and has the details:

The purpose of this particular event, beyond the obvious fundraising and opportunity for some good old fashioned Republican lies, was for Strickland to sign his “Social Security & Medicare Protection Pledge” with great aplomb and faux sincerity. Here it is, signed by the man himself before the grannies and grampies off to the side in their wheelchairs and the young bucks sitting in front of him.

RL Miller was also there, putting it succinctly enough.

Sure enough, here’s Strickland claiming that he would have voted no on the Ryan budget because – and this is a true profile in courage, or something – the Ryan plan would give vouchers in lieu of Medicare for those 55 and younger, while Strickland’s cutoff is age 50. In other words, while Ryan’s plan is a huge, neon-orange, screaming

if you’re under 55, FUCK OFF, YOU DON’T MATTER

Strickland’s version is

if you’re under 50, FUCK OFF, YOU DON’T MATTER

Voters aren’t going to buy this little dance. Even if seniors were to be persuaded that ending Medicare for people under 55 (or 50) wouldn’t hurt them, these people also have adult children in their 30s and 40s. They surely want Medicare to be around for them, also.

All of which leads back to the same question: why did Romney pick this guy, again?

The downfall of Christian Reconstructionist

by digby

I’m with Ed Kilgore on this. I’m gobsmacked that Christian Reconstructionist psuedo-historian David Barton has been unceremoniously debunked by conservative Christian academics:

[T]urns out I underestimated conservative evangelical scholarship, which has turned against Barton with a vengeance, as noted by Thomas Kidd in the latest issue of World magazine:

Jay W. Richards, senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, and author with James Robison of Indivisible: Restoring Faith, Family, and Freedom Before It’s Too Late, spoke alongside Barton at Christian conferences as recently as last month. Richards says in recent months he has grown increasingly troubled about Barton’s writings, so he asked 10 conservative Christian professors to assess Barton’s work.

Their response was negative. Some examples: Glenn Moots of Northwood University wrote that Barton in The Jefferson Lies is so eager to portray Jefferson as sympathetic to Christianity that he misses or omits obvious signs that Jefferson stood outside “orthodox, creedal, confessional Christianity.” A second professor, Glenn Sunshine of Central Connecticut State University, said that Barton’s characterization of Jefferson’s religious views is “unsupportable.” A third, Gregg Frazer of The Master’s College, evaluated Barton’s video America’s Godly Heritage and found many of its factual claims dubious, such as a statement that “52 of the 55 delegates at the Constitutional Convention were ‘orthodox, evangelical Christians.’” Barton told me he found that number in M.E. Bradford’s A Worthy Company.

Barton is Glenn Beck’s most important intellectual adviser, along with large numbers of right wingers who desperately want to believe that America was founded as an evangelical theocratic state. It may even be that some of these Christian academics want to believe that too but apparently they also believe that you should just make shit up to bolster your case, which is what Barton’s been doing.

It’s so bad that his publisher has pulled back his latest book. And in those circles, that’s really saying something. As Kilgore says:

So next time you hear some pol or gabber say confidently that it’s a “well-known fact” this was intended to be a “Christian Nation” with eternal constitutional rules of governance which happen to coincide with the conservative movement’s economic and social prejudices, you might want to ask: “Who Says?” If it’s David Barton, it might be time to laugh.

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The Republicans have a number of cretinous throwbacks running for office, but this guy has to take the cake:

Rep. Todd Akin, the Republican nominee for Senate in Missouri who is running against Sen. Claire McCaskill, justified his opposition to abortion rights even in case of rape with a claim that victims of “legitimate rape” have unnamed biological defenses that prevent pregnancy.

“First of all, from what I understand from doctors [pregnancy from rape] is really rare,” Akin told KTVI-TV in an interview posted Sunday. “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”

Akin said that even in the worst-case scenario — when the supposed natural protections against unwanted pregnancy fail — abortion should still not be a legal option for the rape victim.

“Let’s assume that maybe that didn’t work, or something,” Akin said. “I think there should be some punishment, but the punishment ought to be on the rapist and not attacking the child.”
[…]
His claim about “legitimate” types of rape is not completely foreign to the current Republican Congress, however. In 2011, the House GOP was forced to drop language from a bill that would have limited federal help to pay for an abortion to only victims of “forcible rape.” Akin was a co-sponsor on the bill.

Nor is this Akin’s first time suggesting some types of rape are more worthy of protections than others. As a state legislator, Akin voted in 1991 for an anti-marital-rape law, but only after questioning whether it might be misused “in a real messy divorce as a tool and a legal weapon to beat up on the husband,” according to a May 1 article that year in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

According to TPM, Akin leads McCaskill by a margin of 49.7 percent to 41.3 percent.

This sounds very stupid because Akin added that ridiculous part about rape victims not getting pregnant. But the “no exceptions” policy is mainstream in the GOP.

One of the most linked posts I ever wrote was called “The Sodomized Virgin Exception”, about the comments by a South Dakota lawmaker as to what might constitute a legitimate reason for an abortion. Here’s the gist:

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Napoli says most abortions are performed for what he calls “convenience.” He insists that exceptions can be made for rape or incest under the provision that protects the mother’s life. I asked him for a scenario in which an exception may be invoked.

BILL NAPOLI: A real-life description to me would be a rape victim, brutally raped, savaged. The girl was a virgin. She was religious. She planned on saving her virginity until she was married. She was brutalized and raped, sodomized as bad as you can possibly make it, and is impregnated. I mean, that girl could be so messed up, physically and psychologically, that carrying that child could very well threaten her life.

I commented at the time:

Do you suppose all these elements have to be present for it to be sufficiently psychologically damaging for her to be forced to bear her rapists child, or just some of them? I wonder if it would be ok if the woman wasn’t religious but she was a virgin who had been brutally, savagely raped and “sodomized as bad as you can make it?” Or if she were a virgin and religious but the brutal savage sodomy wasn’t “as bad” as it could have been?

Certainly, we know that if she wasn’t a virgin, she was asking for it, so she should be punished with forced childbirth. No lazy “convenient” abortion for her, the little whore. It goes without saying that the victim who was saving it for her marriage is a good girl who didn’t ask to be brutally raped and sodomized like the sluts who didn’t hold out. But even that wouldn’t be quite enough by itself. The woman must be sufficiently destroyed psychologically by the savage brutality that the forced childbirth would drive her to suicide (the presumed scenario in which this pregnancy could conceivably “threaten her life.”)

This was in 2006, and there was a fair amount of blowback that I was (as usual) being hyperbolic and rude, that this was a fringe sweller and I was unfairly tarring the good hearted pro-lifers as extremists.

Fast forward five years later. Nick Bauman in Mother Jones writes:

For years, federal laws restricting the use of government funds to pay for abortions have included exemptions for pregnancies resulting from rape or incest. (Another exemption covers pregnancies that could endanger the life of the woman.) But the “No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act,” a bill with 173 mostly Republican co-sponsors that House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) has dubbed a top priority in the new Congress, contains a provision that would rewrite the rules to limit drastically the definition of rape and incest in these cases.

With this legislation, which was introduced last week by Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.), Republicans propose that the rape exemption be limited to “forcible rape.” This would rule out federal assistance for abortions in many rape cases, including instances of statutory rape, many of which are non-forcible. For example: If a 13-year-old girl is impregnated by a 24-year-old adult, she would no longer qualify to have Medicaid pay for an abortion. (Smith’s spokesman did not respond to a call and an email requesting comment.)

Given that the bill also would forbid the use of tax benefits to pay for abortions, that 13-year-old’s parents wouldn’t be allowed to use money from a tax-exempt health savings account (HSA) to pay for the procedure. They also wouldn’t be able to deduct the cost of the abortion or the cost of any insurance that paid for it as a medical expense.

There used to be a quasi-truce between the pro- and anti-choice forces on the issue of federal funding for abortion. Since 1976, federal law has prohibited the use of taxpayer dollars to pay for abortions except in the cases of rape, incest, and when the pregnancy endangers the life of the woman. But since last year, the anti-abortion side has become far more aggressive in challenging this compromise. They have been pushing to outlaw tax deductions for insurance plans that cover abortion, even if the abortion coverage is never used. The Smith bill represents a frontal attack on these long-standing exceptions.”This bill takes us backwards to a time when just saying no wasn’t enough to qualify as rape.”

No word on what constitutes “force” but I’m quite sure that Bill Napoli’s comments serve as a working definition for most of these people.