Month: May 2013

When “pro-life” means death for everyone

by digby

I suppose it’s possible that anti-abortion activist Lila Rose believes this, but I doubt it:

“We can do better than pitting the life of a mother against her child,” she told The Huffington Post in an interview on Friday. “Abortions are never medically necessary. Some doctors prescribe abortion as if it’s a treatment for a disease or a problem, but that’s not a solution a truly compassionate and just society should turn to.”

You’ll notice that she doesn’t acknowledge that the “child” is missing its brain and will not live no matter what happens to this woman. That’s kind of an important detail don’t you think?

But then Lila Rose is a con artist who specializes in hoaxes designed to inflame simple-minded anti-abortion zealots and misogynists, so she is the last person on earth who would be interested in telling the truth about a complicated situation such as this.

Rose said the U.S. should look to Ireland as an example of a successful abortion ban. “Ireland is abortion free, and look at the way they’ve succeeded in protecting both the woman and the child,” she said. “That’s why Ireland has the lowest maternal mortality rate in the world.”

Ireland’s mortality rate may be among the lowest in the world, but the country experienced its own version of the Beatriz situation in late 2012. Savita Halappanavar, a 31-year-old woman who was 17 weeks pregnant at the time, died from an infection after doctors at a hospital in Galway refused to give her an abortion while she was experiencing severe pregnancy complications.

Rose said the consequences of abortion are worse than the consequences of requiring women to continue their pregnancies. “Think about what a late-term abortion does to a woman,” she said. “We can do better than pitting the life of a mother against her child.”

So, what this really comes down to is a depraved philosophy that would rather sentence both the mother and the child to death than allow an abortion. And the joke is that they call themselves “pro-life.”

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Oh look, Medicare’s not going broke as fast after all

by David Atkins

Not only is the deficit shrinking to the great consternation of conservatives who want to use it as an excuse to slash social spending, it looks like Medicare is in better shape than previously thought as well:

The financial outlook for Medicare has improved because of a stronger economy and slower growth in health spending, and the financial condition of Social Security has not worsened, but is still unsustainable, the Obama administration said Friday.

And why?

“The projections in this year’s report for Social Security are essentially unchanged from last year, and those for Medicare have improved modestly,” said Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew.

The Medicare trustees — four federal officials and two public representatives — said “the modest improvement in the outlook” for Medicare’s long-term finances reflected lower projected spending for skilled nursing homes and private Medicare Advantage plans….

The administration says the outlook for the Medicare trust fund is brighter because of the 2010 health care law, which squeezed nearly $500 billion out of Medicare over 10 years. The law trimmed Medicare payments to many health care providers on the assumption that they would become more productive.

Imagine that. An improved economy and the defunding of the corporate welfare program that is Medicare “Advantage” are helping Medicare’s long-term fiscal outlook.

This isn’t to say that the program is sustainable in its current form. It probably isn’t, for the obvious reason that an insurance pool covering the sickest and oldest Americans is always going to have challenges as healthcare costs rise. The answer to that is to either spend more money on it and make it a higher national priority, or better yet simply expand the Medicare pool to cover younger, healthier people.

You know, single-payer universal healthcare. like pretty much every other sane country on the planet.

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Factoids ‘o the day

by digby

Economic recovery, huzzah!

1. Corporate profit margins just hit another all-time high. Companies are making more per dollar of sales than they ever have before.
2. Wages as a percent of the economy just hit another all-time low. Why are corporate profits so high? One reason is that companies are paying employees less than they ever have as a share of GDP.
3. Fewer Americans are working than at any time in the past three decades. The other reason corporations are so profitable is that they don’t employ as many Americans as they used to. As a result, the employment-to-population ratio has collapsed

Happy Friday everybody.

(Click the links for charts!)

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Unintended consequences

by digby

This would indicate that it was the national GOP that told Bachman it was time to go:

Democrat Jim Graves, who was expected to challenge U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann in the 6th District congressional race next year, dropped out of the race Friday following Bachmann’s decision to not seek another term.

“After meeting with my closest family members, friends and supporters, we he have decided to suspend Jim Graves for Congress indefinitely,” Graves said in a statement.

“This was never about Jim Graves; this was about challenging the ineffective leadership and extremist ideology of Michele Bachmann on behalf of those she represents. As of Wednesday, that goal was accomplished, and our supporters should be incredibly proud of that accomplishment.”

That “goal” was Bachmann’s decision, announced in a pre-dawn video on Wednesday, not to seek another term.

The decision was a disappointment to Minnesota Democratic leaders, who counted on Graves to run a strong race. They immediately began a search for a replacement in what is now a wide-open race.

Depending on who replaces Bachmann as the GOP candidate, her decision could make the race much harder for any Democrat because the 6th is considered a reliably Republican district.

If the goal was the desire to chase Bachman out of the race it was shortsighted. In these races where Democrats are running against lunatic Tea Party weirdos in safe GOP districts, the point should be to win the seat so the Democrat has a chance to gain the power of incumbency and deliver for the district so they’ll see that a Democrat is a better representative.

For me, it matters little if Bachman is gone and replaced by a slightly less flamboyant wingnut who answers to the same moneyed interests and Republican extremists. It’s highly doubtful that his or her voting record will be any better. I agree that there is some utility in beating a flamboyant wingnut, if only to prove that there is a price to pay for being that nutty. But in the end, a conservative replacing a conservative doesn’t really change the dynamic much.

It’s too bad she quit. We might have had a real Democrat in that seat.

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A very manly meeting of the minds

by digby

Jonathan Schwarz points out that Erik Erickson is in very prestigious political company when it comes to understanding the natural roles of men and women. For instance:

He says the tank looks beautiful when its canon is pointing forward, and a man looks great when he fights while looking ahead and when he is truthful. Citing the example of sheep and chicken, [he] says that the male species has always been charged with fighting and protecting the female.

I’ll let you click over to find out who it was.

Jonathan observes:

Erick left out the beautiful tank part, but I think it’s implied.

Indeed. It think it’s obvious that he loves a beautiful canon “pointing forward.”

Update: Apparently right winger Megyn Kelly wasn’t amused by Dobbs and Erickson’s ranting:

Someone should alert her to the fact that conservatism and “traditional values” are based upon the ideas that Erik Erickson espouses. She is the very definition of a “useful idiot” (Not to be confused with a plain old idiot, which she is not.)

She should at least be just a little bit startled by the fact that these bozos still think it’s perfectly ok to express these throwback views on national television in 2013. That says something.

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think

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Oh heck, it turns out the GOP IRS Commissioner wasn’t plotting with the WH after all

by digby

When I read this piece in the Daily Caller yesterday, I have to admit I thought “oh hell.” I assumed there was a good explanation for why the IRS commissioner had spent so much time in the White House (they aren’t so dumb that they would openly plan an IRS jihad against the Tea Party right in the oval office) but I also knew this story would feed the scandal.

Garance Franke-Ruta of The Atlantic cleared it all up this morning:

The latest twist in the conservative effort to tie the IRS tax-exempt targeting scandal to the president is to focus on public visitor records released by the White House, in which former IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman’s name appears 157 times between 2009 and 2012. Unfortunately, few of those pushing this line have bothered to read more than the topline of that public information. Bill O’Reilly on Thursday called them the “smoking gun” and demanded of Shulman, “You must explain under oath what you were doing at the White House on 157 separate occasions.” His statement built on a Daily Caller story, “IRS’s Shulman had more public White House visits than any Cabinet member.” An Investors Business Daily story and slew of blog items repeated the charges.

“The alibi the White House has wedded itself to is that it had to work closely with the IRS to implement ObamaCare,” the Investor’s Business Daily has written — as if that were not true.

And yet the public meeting schedules available for review to any media outlet show that very thing: Shulman was cleared primarily to meet with administration staffers involved in implementation of the health-care reform bill. He was cleared 40 times to meet with Obama’s director of the Office of Health Reform, and a further 80 times for the biweekly health reform deputies meetings and others set up by aides involved with the health-care law implementation efforts. That’s 76 percent of his planned White House visits just there, before you even add in all the meetings with Office of Management and Budget personnel also involved in health reform.

Complicating the picture is the fact that just because a meeting was scheduled and Shulman was cleared to attend it does not mean that he actually went. Routine events like the biweekly health-care deputies meeting would have had a standing list of people cleared to attend, people whose White House appointments would have been logged and forwarded to the check-in gate. But there is no time of arrival information in the records to confirm that Shulman actually signed in and went to these standing meetings.

Indeed, of the 157 events Shulman was cleared to attend, White House records only provide time of arrival information — confirming that he actually went to them — for 11 events over the 2009-2012 period, and time of departure information for only six appointments.

Read on  for the full documentation.

I recall this sort of exaggeration happening a lot during the Whitewater/Lewinsky imbroglios but this may be among the most sloppy. (Or perhaps the internet makes it more difficult for what used to be mostly talk radio gossip to stick.) Either way, this debunking of the story should put this mini-scandal to rest.

I said should. The right wing noise machine rarely lets the facts get in the way of a good scandal. The test will be how the major media deal with it and how much oxygen the right wing gasbags give it over the next few days. They tend not to care too much about facts when they think they’ve got a juicy scandal on the hook. We’ll see. Remember, the idea here is to create an atmosphere of scandal.  Each scandal point is less important than the impression of “where there’s smoke there’s fire.” Not that you don’t have to knock this nonsense down.  But there is never any end to it, once the right gets it into their heads that they can completely cripple a president.

Everyone thinks trumped up scandals work against the right, but even if they lose in the short term it feeds their long term project. It’s such a beautiful scam.  They are the greatest practitioners of that which they claim to loathe but the more they demonstrate their own dishonesty and decadence, the more they convince the general public of their central thesis that government is unresponsive to the people’s needs, too big and essentially corrupt. And we know where that leads.

Update:  Greg Sargent illustrates one of the reasons the right finds scandal-mongering to be such a useful tactic in this post.  If all else fails they can claim that any presidential proposals they don’t like are attempted “distractions” from the scandal.

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14-year-old carrying puppy choked by police for the audacity of looking at them wrong

by David Atkins

Racism is dead in America, and if you’re not doing anything wrong you have nothing to fear. Right?

Fourteen-year-old Tremaine McMillian didn’t threaten police. He didn’t attack them. He wasn’t armed. All the black teenager did was appear threatening by shooting Miami-Dade police officers a few “dehumanizing stares,” and that was apparently enough for the officers to decide to slam him against the ground and put him in a chokehold.

During Memorial Day weekend, McMillian was rough-housing with another teenager on the sand. Police approached the teen on an ATV and told him that wasn’t acceptable behavior. They asked him where his parents were, but MicMillian attempted to walk away. The officer jumped off the ATV, and tried to physically restrain the teen. According to CBS Miami, police say the 14-year-old kid gave them “‘dehumanizing stares,’ clenched his fists and appeared threatening.”

McMillian says he was carrying a six-week old puppy at the time and couldn’t have been clenching his fists because he was feeding the dog with a bottle. He claims that during the confrontation the dog’s front left paw was injured while officer forcibly separated him from the dog.

The officer then forced McMillian to the ground and put him in a choke hold.

There needs to be better psychological profiling of police officers in this country. While most officers are dedicated public servants who often put themselves in harm’s way, it’s all too obvious that many of these guys are joining up for entirely the wrong reasons and don’t belong within a thousand feet of a badge.

We can do better than this as Americans.

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The NRA’s spawn

by digby

Yikes. This is the ricin letter than was sent to Bloomberg:

(You have to love the fact that this loon believes he has a “constitutional God given right” to own firearms. Where does that show up in the Bible exactly?)

Apparently, someone sent a similar letter to the president.

The world is full of nuts and it’s generally a mistake to assume that this is connected to anything but individual nuttiness. But this is bigger than that.

This article by Alec MacGillis reports that the NRA is dead and the gun-control movement is coming back aggressively.  I would imagine that has contributed to the paranoia.   But the fact is that there is no movement to take away this man’s guns — he’s been persuaded of it by people with a political agenda. Those people are lying and should be held at least somewhat responsible for ginning up this paranoia.

The president was moved to take up this issue because of what happened in Newtown.  There had not been any proposals on gun proliferation in years up to that point.  He reacted like any decent human being to the horror of a school full of six year olds being gunned down by a lunatic who had easy access to deadly weapons. This isn’t about politics to anyone but the NRA which needs to stoke this paranoia to stay relevant.

I guess those mother penguins are emasculating bitchez too

by digby

Here are a few wealthy, political TV celebrity guys talkin’ bout babes and whatnot:

Media Matters excerpted it for us:

On his Fox business program, Dobbs described the Pew study as “showing that women have become the breadwinners in this country, and a lot of other concerning and troubling statistics.” He went on to call the report suggestive of “society dissolv[ing] around us.”

Fox contributor Juan Williams agreed, calling record female breadwinners indicative of “something going terribly wrong in American society”:

What we’re seeing with four out of 10 families, now the woman is the primary breadwinner. You’re seeing the disintegration of marriage, you’re seeing men who were hard hit by the economic recession in ways that women weren’t. But you’re seeing, I think, systemically, larger than the political stories that we follow every day, something going terribly wrong in American society, and it’s hurting our children, and it’s going to have impact for generations to come.

Erick Erickson, one of Fox’s newest contributors, was troubled by female breadwinners and claimed that people who defend them are “anti-science.” Erickson told viewers:

When you look at biology, look at the natural world, the roles of a male and female in society, and the other animals, the male typically is the dominant role. The female, it’s not antithesis, or it’s not competing, it’s a complimentary role. We as people in a smart society have lost the ability to have complimentary relationships in nuclear families, and it’s tearing us apart.

Oh noes. Is the world going to hell in a handbasket again because the wimmins refuse to submit to the Real Men? I hate when that happens.

Erickson says today that feminists and liberals have their “panties in a wad” over this (which just proves what a macho, alpha-male he is) and which qualifies him to offer up his highly qualified scientific analysis. This is basically: women should get their biscuits in the oven and their buns in the bed.

I’d unpack this more but I’m tired. And anyway,Ed Kilgore, Steve Benen and Amanda Marcotte already did the honors. I especially enjoyed this from Amanda:

Erickson must have [learned] this nifty scientific “fact” by studying the animals in the well-known academic text, The Berenstain Bears, which clearly shows Papa Bear going out and earning the money while Mama Bear stays at home and cooks the food for the cubs. Of course, in the actual natural world, bears don’t make money — plus there’s a lot of diversity in how animals raise their young. (In case you’re wondering, outside of the two weeks of maternity leave mothers take to nurse their babies, foxes embrace a fairly egalitarian approach to child rearing where both parents go out and get food for their young.) One thing, however, is certain: Other primates besides humans mostly shun the male-dominated monogamy that Erickson prefers, with most species living in large bands with lots of kinky partner swapping.

Oooh baby.

Also too, as she says, it’s not about whether men or women are bringing home more of the bacon. Our problem is that neither men or women can bring home enough bacon because the 1% are hogging all the wealth.

But let’s not talk about that — look, over here dudes! Blacks … oh wait, Mexicans …oh wait, women are stealing your jobs and ruining everything.

Oh, and about those penguins:

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Ted Cruz is a dangerous man

by David Atkins

Meet America’s most dangerous demagogue:

“I think Mitt Romney’s a good and decent man, and he ran a very hard campaign. But what I mean is the narrative of the last election. The narrative of the last election was, ‘The 47 percent of Americans who are not paying income taxes, who in some way are dependent upon government. We don’t have to worry about them.’ That’s what was communicated in the last election.

“I have to tell you, as a conservative, I cannot think of an idea more opposite to what we believe. I think Republicans are and should be the party of the 47 percent.”

Cruz also pushed back against another Romney and party narrative: The line “you didn’t build that,” a reference to an off–the-cuff remark from President Barack Obama during a campaign speech.

Cruz said he thought Romney’s twist on the line, “You did build that,” was the campaign’s “best” slogan.

“And yet, as good as it was, it could have been a lot better,” Cruz said. “Because it was addressed to people who had already built their businesses. How much better would it have been if the Romney campaigned had said, ‘You can build that’?”

Cruz clearly understands the core problem with the Republican message. He’s got a good gut sense for politics and messaging.

It would be one thing if Cruz’ understanding were related to a kinder, softer Republicanism that could bring the party back from its crazy extreme and create space for even halfway decent policy. But it’s not. Cruz is one of the most ideologically outrageous hyperconservatives in the entire U.S. Congress. He opposes job creation, he favors cuts to Medicare and Social Security, he opposes immigration reform, etc.

Yet because of Republican incompetence in understanding the pain Americans are feeling, and because of Democratic incompetence in actually creating policies that serve the middle class and impoverished rather than market stockholders, Cruz has the space to talk a good game while doing his best to destroy the fabric of society.

That makes him very dangerous indeed.

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