Midday open thread

post from Daily Kos on 20 February 2012 03:00:03 PM. © Daily Kos

Today's comic by Tom Tomorrow is Sex talk with Rick Santorum:
What you missed on Sunday Kos ...
- Sunday's comic was A rising tide lifts all... oh, never mind..., by Matt Wuerker
- Where were the Bishops when Troy Davis died, by Dante Atkins
- Book review: The Hockey Stick and the Climate Change Wars, by DarkSyde
- Why we must win the Wisconsin recalls, by Chris Bowers
- Restaurant industry screws women, while $2.13 tipped worker minimum wage makes it worse, by Laura Clawson
- You don't own me, by Mark Sumner
- A quick guide to the scientific consensus on Climate Change, by Laurence Lewis
- Is your neighborhood integrated, by Denise Oliver Velez
Who else misses Herman Cain?
The former GOP presidential hopeful, campaigning on behalf of former House speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), told a crowd at Collins Hill High School here that when it came to voters, ?50 percent of the American people do fall in the category of either stupid or ignorant as to what?s going on in this country.?
?Some people don?t like me because I tell the truth like it is,? Cain said. ?Those of us who are informed outnumber the stupid people, but not if we stay home.?
No word on how the informed portion of the electorate outnumbers the stupid part if it?s a 50-50 split.
Some seriously twisted priorities:
An area Catholic food pantry whose mission is to feed the hungry says no to Planned Parenthood.
As part of its Martin Luther King food drive, Planned Parenthood collected 50 pounds of food. It hoped to donate the food to Paul's Pantry.
?What was told to me was that they simply said we do not want any food donations from you period,? said Lisa Boyce, a spokesperson for Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin.
Great news for BP:
Oil giant BP, the company behind the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, reported profits of $7.7 billion for the last quarter of 2011. Company executives and industry analysts sounded bullish about the company's future in a recent New York Times article, saying they had set aside enough money to compensate victims of the Gulf spill and had plans to expand drilling operations in the Gulf.
... for people living and working there, not so much:
The Gulf has been plagued with a suite of unexplained afflictions. Gulf fishermen say this is the worst season they can remember, with catches down 80 percent or more. Shrimp boats come home nearly empty, hauling in deformed, discolored shrimp, even shrimp without eyes. Tar balls and dead dolphins still wash up on beaches. Scientists report huge tar mats below the sand, "like vanilla swirl ice cream."
Good thoughts for Stephen and his mother:
A representative for Stephen Colbert says ?The Colbert Report? will return Monday after a sudden break due to the ailing health of the star?s mother. [...]
Colbert is expected to address his absence on Monday. His 91-year-old mother, Lorna Colbert, is ill.
In the dictionary under people who have way too much money to waste:
PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel donated another $1.7 million in January to the super PAC supporting Ron Paul?s presidential bid, according to documents released Monday.
Theil, a billionaire who runs the hedge fund Clarium Capital, has donated a total of $2.6 million to the pro-Paul group Endorse Liberty since it was founded on Dec. 20.
It was 50 years ago today:
John Glenn plans to mark the 50th anniversary of his historic spaceflight with a series of events Monday at Ohio State University, including a celebratory dinner and a chat with the International Space Station.
The astronaut and senator from Ohio became the first American to orbit the Earth on Feb. 20, 1962, circling it three times in five hours and helping to lead the nation into space. The trip helped the United States catch up to the Soviet Union's accomplishments, and Glenn said he thinks it was a turning point for the national psyche.
While the New York Times didn't repeat it, the slur I saw was "chink":
ESPN announced Sunday that it had fired one person and suspended another for using an ethnic slur last week in describing Knicks point guard Jeremy Lin. It also said that it had discovered a third use of the offensive phrase, on Friday night.
The fired employee posted a headline on ESPN.com?s mobile Web site that used the phrase in a headline about Lin that appeared from 2:30 a.m. to 3:05 a.m. Saturday, after the Knicks? loss to the New Orleans Hornets the night before. The phrase had two meanings, one of them an ethnic slur. The name of the employee was not released.
Max Bretos, an ESPN anchor, was suspended for 30 days for using the same phrase during an interview about Lin on ESPNews with Walt Frazier, the Knicks? TV analyst for the MSG Network. Lin is of Chinese descent; his parents are Taiwanese.

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Who You Gonna Call

post from They gave us a republic... - Front Page on 20 February 2012 03:00:00 PM. © They gave us a republic... - Front Page

By @KYYellowDog

Again, Occupy steps up to do the hard political work no one else wants to tackle.

Digby:

OWS Gets Wonky
Here's a fascinating interview by Mike Konczal with one of the writers of the Occupy SEC comment letter that's been getting so much praise. I think it's significant for a couple of reasons. The first is that it's clear they came up with a process that worked for getting a consensus document addressing a particular issue, which is a good thing. But more importantly, this document came from Occupy Wall Street, the heart of the movement and ground zero for the 99% vs the 1% claim. Beyond the specifics, which have been received as substantive, serious and important, the significance of a successful collaboration to reform a flaw in the financial system from OWS cannot be understated. As Joe Biden would say, this is a big fucking deal.
Read the whole interview and if you haven't familiarized yourself with the document, you can read these posts by DDay, Felix Salmon, Matt Yglesias, Swampland, The Nation. It's pretty great.

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ou-gonna-call

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Euro Nations Continue to Insult, Strangle,
Threaten Greece

post from Firedoglake on 20 February 2012 02:45:23 PM. © Firedoglake

This a.m. Atrios highlights an op ed at the Financial Times by Wolfgang Münchau pointing out that Greece now faces the bitter choice of defaulting if it wants to preserve any pretense of democracy and national sovereignty. That follows a week or more of[...]

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By The Numbers

post from LeftWingConspiracy.com on 20 February 2012 02:39:10 PM. © LeftWingConspiracy.com

By The Numbers I Hate To Break It To You Guys, But If There Is A God At Least 2 Of You Are Going To Hell

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Breakfast at 4:30 AMA Helpful Waiter, A Book To
Read And A Good Start To The Day

post from Texas Liberal on 20 February 2012 02:32:44 PM. © Texas Liberal

Due to an unsual set of circumstances, I was out and about this morning around 4:30 AM. It usre is nice and quiet at 4:30 AM. I think I’d enjoy being out at that hour more often. I decided to stop at a 59 Diner along the 1-10 east feeder road for breakfast. I ordered [...]

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-a-book-to-read-and-a-good-start-to-the-day/

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Rick Santorum attacks President Obama on
prenatal screening

post from Daily Kos on 20 February 2012 02:12:19 PM. © Daily Kos

Rick Santorum, getting creepier by the day. (Rick Wilking/Reuters)Rick Santorum was really on a roll this weekend, apparently assuming that his surge means that he'll be the nominee, putting President Obama in his incredibly skewed sights. First, he stepped in it over Obama's "phony theology." Having gone there, it wasn't much of a stretch to turn Obama into a eugenics-supporting monster. Because, in Santorum's world, the fetus is king.

He lambasted the president's health care law requiring insurance policies to include free prenatal testing, "because free prenatal testing ends up in more abortions and therefore less care that has to be done because we cull the ranks of the disabled in our society."
"That, too, is part of Obamacare, another hidden message as to what President Obama thinks of those who are less able than the elites who want to govern our country," Santorum said.

He went on in this vein in his Face the Nation appearance on Sunday.

The? the bottom line is that a lot of prenatal tests are done to identify deformities in? in utero and the customary procedure is to encourage abortions and in fact, prenatal testing that? that particularly amniocentesis. I'm not talking about general prenatal care. You said prenatal care. I? I didn't say prenatal care shouldn't be covered. We're talking about specifically prenatal testing and specifically amniocentesis, which is a? which is a procedure that actually creates a risk of having a miscarriage when you have it and is done for the purposes of identifying maladies of a child in the womb. In? in which in many cases and in fact most cases a physicians recommend, particularly if there's a problem, recommend abortion. [...]

When asked specifically by Scheiffer if Santorum meant to say that "the President looks down on disabled people," Santorum doubled down, and went on a rant about late term abortion, concluding "The president has a very bad record on the issue of abortion and children who are disabled who are in the womb."

President Obama wants to kill special children, that's the message. While free prenatal testing might sound like a critical tool for women to have the healthiest pregnancies and babies, it's really a trick to get rid of "those who are less able than the elites who want to govern our country."

But when that severely disabled child is born, either because affordable prenatal testing wasn't available or the parents decided to keep the fetus, well, that family is on their own. Suck it up, Santorum has told one parent struggling to afford to keep her child alive.

11:43 AM PT: Excellent reminder from middleagedhousewife in the comments: the kind of testing Santorum is talking about is not mandated to be free in the ACA.

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Rick Santorum Flunks Basic History Again, This
Time About Public Education

post from Crooks and Liars on 20 February 2012 02:02:04 PM. © Crooks and Liars

enlarge

It's difficult to recall a presidential candidate who had such a poor grasp of the basic facts of history than Rick Santorum. He's mangled the Crusades. Less than two weeks ago, he botched the French Revolution. And Saturday, he revealed an astonishing ignorance of U.S. history as well with his remarks on public education.

At one appearance here, he said the idea of schools run by the federal government or by state governments was ?anachronistic.? Mr. Santorum did not say public schools were a bad idea, and he said that there was a role for government help in education.
[...]
?Yes the government can help,? Mr. Santorum added. ?But the idea that the federal government should be running schools, frankly much less that the state government should be running schools, is anachronistic. It goes back to the time of industrialization of America when people came off the farms where they did home-school or have the little neighborhood school, and into these big factories, so we built equal factories called public schools."

That's absolutely false.

The idea that the government should be running schools goes back to the Founders and Thomas Jefferson, who originally promoted public education in his home state of Virginia.

To secure the broadest level of popular education Jefferson prepared his "Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge" as part of the revision of Virginia's laws. As chair of the committee, Jefferson proposed a three level system in 1779, (never adopted): three years of primary education for all girls and boys; advanced studies for a select number of boys; a state scholarship to the College of William and Mary for one boy from each district every two years.

Jefferson, who so strongly believed that government-run public education was absolutely necessary for a healthy democracy, also proposed it at the federal level in his 1806 State of the Union address.

Their patriotism would certainly prefer its continuance and application to the great purposes of the public education, roads, rivers, canals, and such other objects of public improvement as it may be thought proper to add to the constitutional enumeration of Federal powers.

Santorum is clearly and deliberately distorting the facts of history to comport with his right-wing ideology. There's something creepily fascist about his revisionism.

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Freudian Crypto-Islamic Slip

Rick Santorum spokesperson Alice Stewart got tied up in knots on MSNBC a short time ago talking about President Obama's "radical environmental policies" and instead referred to his "radical Islamic policies." Watch.[...]

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The Robo-Signed Foreclosure Fraud Settlement

The state and federal regulators may complain that criticism of the bank settlement without actual terms are distortion, and that they have a very difficult job to figure out the terms for 49 states and multiple federal agencies, and they're just working[...]

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Majority of Virginia voters oppose
state-sanctioned rape and 'personhood'

vaginal probe Not that it matters to Republicans in the Virginia House and Senate, but their recent efforts to return women to the 19th century:

... Bill 1 on personhood at conception passed on a 66-32 vote. And on a 63-36 vote, the House passed a bill that requires women to have a "transvaginal ultrasound" before undergoing abortions.

... are opposed by most Virginia voters:

Of those polled, 55 percent say they oppose the requirement and 36 percent support it ... those surveyed oppose defining life beginning at conception 52-41 percent ...

But the Constitutional rights of allegedly celibate men in Rome is at stake, so, suck it up Virginia.