Akin for you and Open Thread

 

"Busload of Faith" - Lou Reed

You can depend on the worst always happening
you can depend on a murderer's drive
You can bet that if he rapes somebody
there'll be no trouble having a child

You can bet that if she aborts it
pro-lifers will attack her with rage
You can depend on the worst always happening
you need a busload of faith to get by, yeah

I suppose the Romney campaign won't appreciate this as a suggested campaign song.  (A very Beggar's Banquet sound by Lou here.)

- I can't really add anything to the Todd Akin hootenanny -- I will subcontract it to Amanda -- I fear it is a moment too soon and that he may walk away from the battle before McCaskill gets to beat his sorry hillbilly ass.  The rats jumping off the good ship asshole are creating quite the wake -- Romney, Cornyn, Scott Brown, the Tea Party and even Sean Hannity.     Akin still claims he's staying in.  Let's hope.  McCaskill has been trailing badly in polls, but this one strikes me as the proverbial game changer.  And the Obama campaign wisely appears to be looking to hang Akin around the Romney/Ryan ticket's neck.  So now Romney is going to have to explain Ryan's budget, his Medicare proposal, and his "you must bear your rapist's baby bill."  Good luck with that Mitt.     

- There are few pundits I despise more than Niall Ferguson, an arrogant know nothing who has somehow parlayed his British accent into a professor's slot at Harvard.  Ferguson traffics in pure partisan hackery at this juncture.  The latest is his deeply dishonest attack on Obama on the cover of Newsweek.  His continued presence in Newsweek -- Christ, he doesn't meet the very limited standards for a godamned news weekly -- at the behest of fellow Brit lightweight Tina Brown makes me wish devoutly for Newsweek's demise.  Like its former sister publication the Washington Post, the world will be a better place when both are gone.      

Alright, I turn it over to you.  Have at it.

Comments

[Crissa]

Newsweek is merely an animated corpse now, being run by the Daily Beast.

[Eric Wilde]

My wife only reads Japanese news, generally only from Japan. She doesn't follow American politics at all. And she brought up Akin to me and was abhorred by the fellow. I hope he sticks it out and becomes a real drag on the R national ticket.

[oddjob]

I've read, but haven't confirmed, that at present Akin serves on a House committee devoted to science and technology.

That's a frightening thought!

[oddjob]

GOP Platform Draft Calls For Abortion Ban Without Rape, Incest Exceptions

[oddjob]

Massachusetts butterflies are moving north as climate warms.

[low-tech cyclist]

Apparently Mitt's latest attack on "you didn't build that" goes something like this:

"When a young person makes the honor roll, I know he took a school bus to get to the school, but I don’t give the bus driver credit for the honor roll."

As I said over at Balloon Juice, let's get past the contributions of the bus driver. There's an argument there, but it's an in-the-weeds argument, and it's fundamentally a distraction.

The more important thing is, the taxpayers built and maintained the whole damned school system. You can't make honor roll if there's no damned school.

The taxpayers do in fact deserve most of the credit for those honor roll students, because good schools are going to produce honor-roll-quality students, and the only question then is which students will be the ones on the honor roll.

And if the taxpayers decide they want to pay a lot less for schools, we'll probably still have schools, and we'll probably still have honor rolls, but having one's name on an honor roll won't mean shit anymore, except at private schools that you can't get into unless you chose to be born to affluent parents.

[low-tech cyclist]

oddjob,

1) The butterflies have clearly been misled by a conspiracy of scientists and tree-huggers.

Seriously, you'd think the northward march of various animal and plant habitats would be one of those undeniable bits of evidence that global warming isn't something Algore made up back in 1992. But since nonbelief in global warming has become a tribal thing, most minds simply cannot be changed, even when there ceases to be enough water to supply metro Atlanta.

2) I've been wondering for awhile whether Mitt could control his convention. And it gets harder for Mitt's operatives to control something like the platform when Mitt himself doesn't want to specify where he stands.

The GOP, by and large, believes in fetal personhood - that once the sperm bonks into the egg, the resulting entity is just as much a person as you or me, and its life deserves just as much protection as yours or mine. This is a position that both Romney and Ryan have endorsed (in Ryan's case, by cosponsoring a bill with Todd Akin among other things), and attempts to back away from that position are likely to be too little, too late, as Team Obama has clearly decided to hang Akin around Romney's neck. I think Romney's stuck with this plank, and I think this year it will matter.

I think that in general, this platform will be quite interesting, and will matter in the election.

(If this commment shows up twice, my apologies. I've got one window open that shows that I posted this comment at 11:56am, and another that shows no comments between oddjob's comment at 10:24am, and my later comment at 12:29pm. We'll see which one is the alternate reality. :^)

[oddjob]

And if the taxpayers decide they want to pay a lot less for schools, we'll probably still have schools, and we'll probably still have honor rolls, but having one's name on an honor roll won't mean shit anymore, except at private schools that you can't get into unless you chose to be born to affluent parents.

Well put.

The butterflies have clearly been misled by a conspiracy of scientists and tree-huggers.

That paper also notes the phenomenon has also been reported in Europe (where the tracking of such things has been more systematic thanks to the decadent socialist governments of Europe that have spent money to do that). What is the world coming to when people have the indecency to track and report such deluded butterfly behavior?

[oddjob]

Rep. Steve King (R-IA) keeping it classy:

Rep. Steve King: I’ve Never Heard Of A Girl Getting Pregnant From Statutory Rape Or Incest

[oddjob]

Dinosaur footprint discovered at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.

[paula]

Re.: dinosaur. Is that some kind of omen or something?

As for King, ever been to Appalachia?

[oddjob]

Brown leads Warren by 5% among likely voters.

I suspect he probably always has.

[oddjob]

Is King from Appalachia?

[kathy a.]

The GOP, by and large, believes in fetal personhood - that once the sperm bonks into the egg, the resulting entity is just as much a person as you or me, and its life deserves just as much protection as yours or mine.

like hell. they primarily believe this for other people -- poor people, brown people, sluts, etc. they might occasionally force the wayward daughter to bear a child (this happened to a classmate of mine in HS), just to teach her a lesson; but then again, maybe they will find an exception for a daughter they love. a LOT of people queasy with abortion would find an exception for rape and incest. only the most batshit of the batshit blame the person carrying a zygote or fetus for a miscarriage -- and miscarriages are common as dirt. nature casts off potential unborn life all the time.

just before my daughter started college, we went to a student/parent orientation. while the students were off registering for classes, there was a Q/A session for parents. this one father of a jock jumped up first, and his question was: "what will the university do to protect my boy from false accusations of rape? because that happened to a young man we know and it ruined his life." i felt like screaming, "tell him to keep it in his pants, and not rape anybody." the school had a reasonable response, so i only complained to the dean of students. but i still want to punch the guy, and i bet i know which way he intends to vote.

[nancy]

Sir C, Your link doesn't go to the Newsweek cover story -- but the trail is contained within this summary of Krugman's killer rebuttal.

Here's Fallows disgusted assessment as well.

Crissa, animated corpse . Very nice.

[oddjob]

Ryan is more extreme on abortion than Akin.

[nancy]

From Kate Shepherd's Mother Jones piece at oddjob's link above --

Here's a rundown of other extreme anti-abortion measures Ryan cosponsored:

The Sanctity of Human Life Act: This bill would have written into law that zygotes are legal people from the moment of conception. Like other, similar bills, it grants fertilized eggs the same rights as adult humans, and would make in vitro fertilization and some forms of contraception the legal equivalents of murder.

Murder. Really. Interesting little nugget, since Mitt has three grandchildren, if memory serves, who were conceived through IVF. So who would be arrested, charged and tried? Mitt's son and daughter-in-law as accessories, or the consulting physician and her lab assistants?

I'm hazarding a guess that today's blog silence is due to 'utter nuttery' fatigue. How much more can be said at this point?

Here's my no-nonsense no-wasted words 83-year-old h.s. dropout mom, ever the bellwether and living in red-state KY, from today's e-mail: "what do u think of romneys' vp choice??? i am not happy with obama but i don't want to go back to middle ages...it took 8 yrs to get us in this mess [repubs seem to have forgotten where mess came from] guess i will try to give him 8 yrs to pull us out...." She's never missed a vote. :)

[kathy a.]

go, nancy's mom!

[kathy a.]

candidate for sheriff says he would not reject the use of deadly force to prevent abortions. h/t balloon juice.

that there is a remarkable showing of respect for the sanctity of life. in a sane world, this person would not be allowed to buy guns, but he is running for sheriff.

note that he seems to regard the woman seeking an abortion as the "full-grown" victim. because obviously the little lady is too addled to know what is best for her own life and her own body, after considering her options with her doctor, but a strange dude with a gun will fix that right up.

so. [1] no woman is capable of deciding on an "elective" or late-term abortion. ever. late-term abortions are virtually exclusively because the fetus is terribly deformed, or the mother's life is in danger. no telling wtf "elective" means, but his interpretation is probably that all abortions are "elective."

[2] dude on the street knows better than the woman. any woman. any time. any place. any circumstances.

[3] dude on the street knows better than the woman's doctor. who needs medical training?

[4] dude on the street gets to make up his own laws. faster than a speeding legislature! more powerful than scotus itself! super-dude deserves some kind of award for having reached adulthood with the critical thinking skills of a turnip.

[5] any questions about why women's health care providers worry about getting killed when they go to work?

[kathy a.]

vote vets supports mcclaskill in the race against akin.

[oddjob]

kathy a, it's even nuttier than that. That's how it plays out regarding women and how he apparently thinks adult women aren't able to make informed decisions regarding their health when it comes to reproduction. There are also his beliefs regarding the authority of the county sheriff in New Hampshire:

...Szabo maintains that the county sheriff is a position that doesn't answer to any other public official.

"The county sheriff doesn't have a superior officer," he said. "They are the chief law enforcement officer of the county. If a public official tells them to do something, they need to ask why and not just automatically do it."

Szabo said he doesn't have any background in law enforcement, but he said his business background gives him the experience to run for the position of sheriff.

It's just breathtaking craziness.

[nancy]

My god, it's dweeby "starbursts" retooled, pun intended, for election 2012. Amanda responded. Do read the offending article. It's a beaut, complete with extraordinary family photo.

[oddjob]

In his repeated refusals to be forthcoming Romney himself is making a de facto argument that people should not vote for him.