Saturday, October 26, 2013

Republican Senator Ted Cruz on Cheney shooting incident: 'Look, it happens'

Republican Senator Ted Cruz on Cheney shooting incident: 'Look, it happens'



Add capThis Nov. 5, 2002 photo provided by the White House on Tuesday, Feb. 14, 2006, shows Vice President Dick Cheney hunting quail in Gettysburg, S.D. tion

 

AKRON, IA -- Republicans have become accustomed to defending former Vice President Dick Cheney's political record, but Texas firebrand Sen. Ted Cruz is now defending his reputation as a hunter.
Cruz joined Rep. Steve King, R-IA, for a pheasant hunt in western Iowa on Saturday, and the two discussed the now infamous 2006 incident when Cheney accidentally shot a friend while quail hunting in Texas.
"Look, it happens," said Cruz.
King said the incident "doesn't bother me a bit. The way I understood it, he was standing in the wrong place."
Cheney wounded campaign contributor Harry Whittington, who Cruz said was a friend. The Tea Party Republican said Whittington still has pellets in his shoulder that set off airport metal detectors.
Cruz and King spent hours Saturday trudging through brush in western Iowa with a group of hunters in the hopes of bagging a few pheasants. King has hosted past Republican presidential hopefuls Rick Santorum and Rick Perry for similar hunting outings in the first-in-the-nation voting state.
King also jokingly acknowledged Cruz's status as a political target since the prominent role the senator played in orchestrating the 16-day government shutdown. At a speech in front of Iowa Republicans on Friday, Cruz made the case that the battle against President Barack Obama's Affordable Care Act helped to shed light on the problems with the legislation and will aid the GOP in the 2014 midterm elections.
"There are a lot of people who would like to shoot me and you, I've noticed," King said to Cruz before they took off."That would be a fundraiser to end them all, wouldn't it?"

 

Proof the Republicans are finished - The Wave Effect

What if aliens from space acted the way corporations and GOP do?

How conservatives invented “voter fraud” to attack civil rights

How conservatives invented “voter fraud” to attack civil rights 

 

Phony complaints of voter fraud are the essence of a decade-long effort by the right to reverse civil rights law 


Just when it seemed that the democratic process had reached its apotheosis with the election of America’s first black president, a political earthquake occurred in 2010 that threatened all that had been accomplished since 1965. Two years after Obama’s election, the midterm elections saw a conservative backlash that swept Republicans back into office in droves. As the media focused on the Republican takeover of the House of Representatives and increases in the Senate, more important developments were occurring closer to home. Republicans now controlled both legislative bodies in 26 states, and 23 won the trifecta, controlling the governorships as well as both statehouses. What happened next was so swift that it caught most observers off guard — and began surreptitiously to reverse the last half-century of voting rights reforms.
All across the country following the 2010 midterms, Republican legislatures passed and governors enacted a series of laws designed to make voting more difficult for Obama’s constituency — minorities, especially the growing Hispanic community; the poor; students; and the elderly or handicapped. These included the creation of voter photo-ID laws, measures affecting registration and early voting, and, in Iowa and Florida, laws to prevent ex-felons from exercising their franchise. (Florida’s governor, in secret, reversed the policies of his Republican predecessors Jeb Bush and Charlie Crist, policies that would have permitted one hundred thousand former felons, predominantly black and Hispanic, to vote in 2012.) Democrats were stunned. “There has never been in my lifetime, since we got rid of the poll tax and all the Jim Crow burdens in voting, the determined effort to limit the franchise that we see today,” said President Bill Clinton in July 2011. Once again, the voting rights of American minorities were in peril.
The newly elected Republican officials were able to act so quickly because they had the help of an ultraconservative organization known as the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). Its founder was the late Paul Weyrich, a legendary conservative writer and proselytizer who founded both ALEC and the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think-tank dedicated to limited government, an economy free of federal regulations and the sanctity of traditional marriage. Backed by conservative corporations such as Coca-Cola, Philip Morris, AT&T, Exxon Mobil and Walmart, among many others, and funded by right-wing billionaires Richard Mellon Scaife, the Coors family and David and Charles Koch, ALEC provided services for like-minded legislators and lobbyists. ALEC wrote bills and created the campaigns to pass them. Its spokesmen boasted that “each year, more than 1,000 bills based on its models are introduced in state legislatures, and that approximately 17 percent of those bills become law.”

High on ALEC’s agenda were voter identification laws, which it hoped would have the effect of undercutting Obama’s support base so that conservative politicians who supported ALEC’s goals could be elected. Speaking to a convention of evangelicals in 1980, Paul Weyrich said, “Many of our Christians … want everybody to vote. I don’t want everybody to vote … As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.” Weyrich believed that America was suffering from what he called “a plague of unlawful voting” that the new laws would combat.
But according to the best analyses, there was almost no evidence of illegal voting. Wisconsin’s attorney general, a Republican, examined the 2008 election returns and discovered that out of 3 million votes cast, just 20 were found to be illegal. A wider study conducted by the Bush Justice Department had found similar results for the period 2002 to 2007. More than 300 million people had voted, and only 86 were found guilty of voter fraud, and most of them were simply mistaken about their eligibility.
Nevertheless, the Bush administration and Republicans, believing in the existence of widespread voter fraud, generally made its elimination a top priority. In 2007, the Bush Justice Department fired seven U.S. attorneys for supposedly failing to prosecute cases of voter fraud that the attorneys claimed did not exist. To combat voter fraud, ALEC proposed a state voter ID for those citizens who lacked a driver’s license or other means of identification that had once been acceptable, like a Social Security card. Among the many young politicians ALEC nurtured was Scott Walker, a future governor of Wisconsin.
Wisconsin’s voter photo-ID law was one of the first pieces of legislation the new governor signed into law in 2011, and it became a model many other states followed. It required that potential voters show a current or expired driver’s license, some form of military identification, a U.S. passport, a signed and dated student ID from an accredited state college or university, or a recent certificate of nationalization. If voters had none of these documents, they could present a birth certificate to receive a special photo ID issued by the Wisconsin Department of Transportation. Such requirements made voting extremely arduous for the very people who disproportionately supported Barack Obama in 2008, such as racial minorities, students and the elderly.
Among those who found it difficult to comply with the new law was Gladys Butterfield, who had voted in every local, state and presidential election since 1932. She had stopped driving decades ago, so she had no license. Her birth certificate was also missing. She did have a baptismal record, but that document was not acceptable as proof of identity in her home state. Therefore, under Wisconsin’s new law, she had to obtain a special government ID available only at an office of the Department of Transportation (DOT) before she could vote in the next presidential election. She was wheelchair-bound, and so she was dependent on a family member to drive her to the nearest DOT office. (She could not apply online because she lacked a current license.) A quarter of the offices were open only one day a month and closed on weekends. Sauk City’s office was perhaps the hardest to visit; in 2012 it was open only four days that entire year. Many other states’ DOT offices posed similar problems: odd schedules, distance from public transportation and the like.
With her daughter Gail’s help, Butterfield applied for a state-certified birth certificate, costing twenty dollars, which she could show as proof of American citizenship. Next she had to visit the DOT. Transporting a wheelchair was a problem, as was the inevitable wait in line to fill out the forms and have her picture taken. She was charged $28 because she did not know that it would not have cost her a cent if she had explicitly requested a free voter ID. DOT officials were instructed not to offer applicants a free ID unless applicants requested one. (When an outraged government employee e-mailed friends of the news and encouraged them to “TELL ANYONE YOU KNOW!! ANYONE!! EVEN IF THEY DON’T NEED THE FREE ID, THEY MAY KNOW SOMEONE THAT DOES!!,” he was abruptly fired for “inappropriately using work email,” said an official.)
Before the Republican victory in the 2010 midterms, only two states had rigorous voter ID requirements. By August 2012, 34 state legislatures had considered photo ID laws and 13 had passed them; five more made it past state legislatures only to be vetoed by the Democratic governors of Montana, Minnesota, Missouri, North Carolina and New Hampshire. By that same summer, a number of states already had the new laws in place: Pennsylvania (where it was estimated that 9.2 percent of registered voters had no photo ID), Alabama, Mississippi (approved by referendum), Rhode Island, New Hampshire (whose state General Court overrode the governor’s veto) and five whose sponsors were all ALEC members — Kansas, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Wisconsin. In Alabama, Kansas and Tennessee, people wishing to register or vote must show their birth certificate. To acquire that document, they must pay a fee, which many believe is the equivalent of the poll tax, banned by the Constitution’s twenty-fourth amendment. Minnesota’s citizens would vote on a state constitutional amendment in the 2012 election; if passed, voters could cast their ballot after showing a government-issued photo ID.
What these policies had in common, beside their connection to ALEC, was their negative impact on minorities. The nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice at New York University’s Law School estimated in October 2011 that the new voter ID laws could affect more than 21 million potential voters, predominately African Americans, Hispanics, students, the elderly and the poor.
Other voting laws passed in the wake of the 2010 midterms were just as injurious as the voter ID laws and threatened not merely minorities but also people likely to vote for Democratic candidates. Florida’s new voter law turned Jill Cicciarelli, a 35-year-old civics teacher, into a criminal. She inadvertently ran afoul of H.B.1355, which tightened the state’s already strict regulations governing the registration of new voters. The 158-page bill became law 24 hours after it passed because Governor Rick Scott considered it essential to combat “an immediate danger to the public health, safety or welfare.” Cicciarelli, who taught government and sponsored the Student Government Association at New Symrna Beach High School, was on maternity leave when the law went into effect in July 2011, so when she returned to school that fall she was unaware that she was about to commit a crime. In her senior government class she discussed the 2012 presidential election and, as she had many times before, organized a campaign to preregister those students who would turn 18 before November. Eventually 50 students applied, and after a few days she sent the forms to the county election office. “I just want them to be participating in our democracy,” she said later. “The more participation we have, the stronger our democracy will be.”
The new law required third-party registration organizations to register with the state election office, receive an identification number, undergo training and turn in their application forms no later than 48 hours after their completion. (Previously, registration was voluntary and the completion deadline was 10 days, but it was rarely enforced.) Cicciarelli violated each of the new provisions and could be fined up to $1,000 for missing the due date and an additional $1,000 for failing to register. When Ann McFall, Volusia County Supervisor of Elections, learned of Cicciarelli’s infractions in late October, she reluctantly alerted the secretary of state’s office that the teacher had violated the new law’s requirements, potentially a third-degree felony if investigators determined that she was guilty of “willful noncompliance.” “I was sick to my stomach when I did it,” McFall later told a reporter, “but my job was on the line if I ignored it.”
Republican state representative Dorothy Hulkill, running for reelection in 2012, was one person who liked the Florida law. She believed it would limit voter fraud and stop people from “engaging in shady activities designed to give Democrats an unfair advantage.” Who these people were, she did not say.
The controversy over Florida’s new voting law did not stop there, however. Soon five other teachers were accused of similar infractions. The entire group was dubbed the “Subversive Six” by an Internet blogger who had tired of criticizing the Florida schools’ traditional preoccupations, evolution and sex education.
By targeting a wide swath of American voters not because of race but rather because of their political sympathies, the legislators in these states had struck a serious blow to the suffrage of hundreds of thousands of citizens, all in ways that the creators of the Voting Rights Act had never imagined. Because of Florida’s new law, the state chapter of the League of Women Voters announced that for the first time in 72 years, it would not register new voters in 2012. That time-honored job had become too risky. “It would … require our volunteers to have an attorney on one side and administrative assistant on the other,” said League chapter president Diedre Macnab. She called the law “a war on voters.” Other organizations like Rock the Vote, which registered 2.5 million new voters in 2008, and the Florida Public Interest Research Education Fund also ended their activities. It was not only the young who responded to such registration drives and who now found a well-traveled route to the polls blocked: Census figures indicated that in 2004, 10 million new voters, among them many African Americans and Hispanics, registered with the help of community-based groups. Under the new voting laws, many of these men and women would likely never make it to a voting booth.
Some of these new efforts to restrict voters’ access to the polls exposed significant racial biases on the part of the Republicans responsible for them. Colorado, Iowa and Florida compiled lists of registered voters they thought ineligible and attempted to remove them from the voting rolls. Florida officials determined that 180,000 citizens were suspect; 74 percent of them were African American and Hispanic, groups more likely to be Democrats than Republicans. Governor Rick Scott became so concerned that illegal aliens could vote that he demanded access to the Department of Homeland Security’s database, and they eventually granted his request. The Florida secretary of state found that thousands of registered voters could be considered “potential noncitizens” and removed them from the voting rolls. Further examination by more objective analysts concluded that significant errors had occurred: only 207 of the suspect 180,000 voters were judged unqualified.
Among those caught in the net were elderly World War II veterans and many other longtime American citizens whose only offenses, in many instances, were being nonwhite. Florida’s election supervisors refused to follow the governor’s orders and stopped purging voters from the rolls. Nevertheless, Republican-dominated Lee and Collier Counties continued to remove those they considered suspicious.
Florida’s attempt at voter purging was not a new phenomenon. A more informal practice known as “caging” had been used mostly by Republican campaign officials for decades throughout America. It was simple: Letters marked nonforwardable were sent to black citizens and those that came back unopened resulted in the addressee being removed from the voting lists. No less than the Republican National Committee was found guilty of caging in the 1980s, and a federal decree ordered them to desist at once, although Republicans still employed it decades later.
Some states also attempted to suppress minority voting by curtailing early voting, which had avoided problems such as crowded polling places and voting machinery that often broke down from overuse. Early voting meant that more people could be accommodated over a longer period of time in, for example, Cleveland, Akron, Columbus and Toledo, cities in Ohio with a heavy concentration of pro-Democratic black voters and a scarcity of voting machines. In the two years following the 2010 midterms, Georgia, Maine, Tennessee, West Virginia, Ohio, Florida and Wisconsin all passed laws shortening the period during which citizens could cast their ballots. Ohio and Florida also eliminated voting on the Sunday before the election. This especially could have a profound impact on future minority voting. In 2008, 54 percent of African Americans voted early, many on that Sunday, when churches held “Get Your Souls to the Polls” campaigns that brought blacks and Hispanics to the voting booths. Obama won Florida with 51 percent of the vote in 2008. In Ohio, another narrow victory for Obama, 30 percent of the state’s total voters, 1.4 million people, voted during the early period, which was then 35 days before the election. Under each state’s new law passed in 2011, it was shortened to 16 days.
Voters in Maine were so incensed that the new law had eliminated election-day registration that a coalition of progressive organizations quickly collected 70,000 signatures, enough to trigger the state’s “People’s Veto,” putting the measure to a vote. On November 8, 2011, the law was repealed in a special election: “Maine voters sent a clear message: No one will be denied a right to vote,” noted Shenna Bellows, head of the state’s ACLU.
Although Republicans continued to insist that the new laws were created solely to fight voter fraud, GOP officials twice revealed another motive. At a meeting of the Pennsylvania Republican State Committee in June 2012, Mike Turzai, the House majority leader, boasted openly that Pennsylvania’s new law would affect the next presidential election. Proudly listing the GOP’s achievements, Turzai said, “Voter ID, which is gonna allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania: Done.” Similarly, when, in August 2012, the Columbia Dispatch asked Doug Preise, a prominent Republican official and adviser to the state’s governor, why he so strongly supported curtailing early voting in Ohio, Preise admitted, “I really actually feel that we shouldn’t contort the voting process to accommodate the urban — read African American — voter turn-out machine.” These admissions indicate that winning the presidency by suppressing the minority vote was the real reason behind the laws requiring voter IDs, limited voting hours, obstructed registration, and the like that Republican legislatures passed since the party’s victory in 2010.
Excerpted with permission from “Bending Toward Justice: The Voting Rights Act and the Transformation of American Democracy” by Gary May. Available from Basic Books, a member of The Perseus Books Group. Copyright © 2013.
Gary May is a professor of History at the University of Delaware, and author of "Bending Toward Justice: The Voting Rights Act and the Transformation of American Democracy" (Basic Books; April 2013).

Two huge questions about Obamacare just got answered

 Two huge questions about Obamacare just got answered

 By Ezra Klein, Published: October 25 at 3:18 pm


We now know two things about the Obamacare rescue effort that we didn't know before.
First, we know who's in charge. It's clear now that management consultant Jeff Zients, who previously served as President Obama's chief performance officer, is running the rescue effort on behalf of the White House. And we know that QSSI, which constructed the data hub (which is actually working), will be the lead contractor in charge of the effort.
Second, we know the timeline. "By the end of November, HealthCare.gov will work smoothly for the vast majority of users," Zients said on a call with reporters today (Sarah Kliff has more details from the call).
So far, the White House has refused to offer a timeline, in part because they weren't sure what the timeline was. That meant that even the White House wasn't certain of the scope of the problems, and the difficulty in fixing them.
Now they are. Or, at least, they think they are. As Jonathan Chait writes, there are basically three possibilities here:
1) They know what they're doing.
2) They have fooled themselves into thinking they know what they're doing, but don't.
3) Meteor.
And since a senior administration official assured Chait that the White House did not have secret knowledge that a meteor would destroy the earth on December 1st and thus all of this was moot anyway, that only leaves one and two as live possibilities.
Well, there's one more possibility: That the White House is simply buying time. Saying they can this done by the end of November takes some of the pressure off until then. And if they fail, well, that's such a disaster for the law that adding the extra hit to credibility that would be lost from failing the timeline is almost irrelevant. It's like skinning your knee after cutting off your foot.
But Zients is a serious guy with a reputation to protect. He's unlikely to sign onto that kind of strategy. So let's assume it's #1. If the White House is right and Obamacare's digital infrastructure is working come the end of November the damage to the law will likely be minimal. This graph that Jon Cohn got from Jon Gruber (a lot of Jons in this post) shows the rhythm of sign-ups in Massachusetts:
mass_enrollment_blue
Obamacare isn't on the same timetable. Come the end of November, there will only be four months until the imposition of the penalty. And if a lot of people simply pay the penalty in 2014 that means premiums will be a lot higher for 2015.
Four months is probably enough to relaunch the law and run a serious sign-up campaign. If they can make that deadline they're likely alright. Like Medicare Part D, Obamacare will have had a rough start, but it'll stabilize within the first year. If they can't make that deadline, they're in a lot of trouble.

The implosion of the GOP brand, in one chart

The implosion of the GOP brand, in one chart


By Greg Sargent
Republicans successfully converted the 2010 elections into a referendum on President Obama, the economy, and liberal overreach. As a result, they won big. Now Democrats are hoping to turn the 2014 elections into a referendum on the GOP brand and the destructive excesses of Tea Party governance.
The GOP just might help Democrats succeed.
Polling released this week by the Washington Post and ABC News found the GOP’s unfavorability ratings among Americans at an all-time high of 63 percent.
But a closer look at the numbers reveals that this has been accompanied by a massive collapse in 2013 of the GOP brand among core constituencies important in midterm elections: Independents, women, and seniors. The crack Post polling team has produced a new chart demonstrating that in the last year — since just before the 2012 election – there’s been a truly astonishing spike in the GOP’s unfavorable ratings among these core groups:
 
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
Women
46
Age 65+
65
Independents
White college grads

 

Why Is Obamacare Complicated?

Why Is Obamacare Complicated?

 Paul Krugman - New York Times Blog

Mike Konczal says most of what needs to be said about the underlying sources of Obamacare’s complexity, which in turn set the stage for the current tech problems. Basically, Obamacare isn’t complicated because government social insurance programs have to be complicated: neither Social Security nor Medicare are complex in structure. It’s complicated because political constraints made a straightforward single-payer system unachievable.
It’s been clear all along that the Affordable Care Act sets up a sort of Rube Goldberg device, a complicated system that in the end is supposed to more or less simulate the results of single-payer, but keeping private insurance companies in the mix and holding down the headline amount of government outlays through means-testing. This doesn’t make it unworkable: state exchanges are working, and healthcare.gov will probably get fixed before the whole thing kicks in. But it did make a botched rollout much more likely.
So Konczal is right to say that the implementation problems aren’t revealing problems with the idea of social insurance; they’re revealing the price we pay for insisting on keeping insurance companies in the mix, when they serve little useful purpose.
So does this mean that liberals should have insisted on single-payer or nothing? No. Single-payer wasn’t going to happen — partly because of the insurance lobby’s power, partly because voters wouldn’t have gone for a system that took away their existing coverage and replaced it with the unknown. Yes, Obamacare is a somewhat awkward kludge, but if that’s what it took to cover the uninsured, so be it.
And although the botched rollout is infuriating — count me among those who believe that liberals best serve their own cause by admitting that, not trying to cover for the botch — the odds remain high that this will work, and make America a much better place.

Friday, October 25, 2013

Governor Quinn: Stop the Mississippi Sand Frac Sand Mine Near Starved Rock!

OutFOXedNEWS: Governor Quinn: Stop the Mississippi Sand Frac Sand Mine Near Starved Rock!

Obamacare Special Edition!!!

OutFOXedNEWS: Hacking, DDOS, and the ACA Website.

OutFOXedNEWS: Bill Gates on Obamacare web site

OutFOXedNEWS: How to report Attacks on the ACA Website

OutFOXedNEWS: Company Behind Troubled Obamacare Website Donated Heavily To Republicans In 2012

OutFOXedNEWS: How the Tea Party crashed the Obamacare website

OutFOXedNEWS: One Big Problem With Heritage's New Obamacare Study

OutFOXedNEWS: Obamacare opponents have misrepresented Consumer Reports' position

OutFOXedNEWS: How to avoid mistakes in covering the Affordable Care Act

Shackled and pregnant: Wis. case challenges 'fetal protection' law

When Alicia Beltran was 12 weeks pregnant, she took herself to a health clinic about a mile from her home in Jackson, Wis., for a prenatal checkup. But what started as a routine visit ended with Beltran eventually handcuffed and shackled in government custody – and at the center of a first-of-its-kind federal lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of a state’s fetal protection law.
On July 2, Beltran, 28, met with a physician’s assistant at West Bend Clinic at Saint Joseph’s Hospital in West Bend, Wis., for her prenatal visit. When asked to detail her medical history, Beltran admitted a past struggle with the painkiller Percocet. But that was all behind her, Beltran said: She had been taking Suboxone, a drug used to treat Percocet dependency. Lacking health insurance and unable to afford the medication, Beltran had used an acquaintance’s prescription and self-administered the drug in decreasing doses. She had taken her last dose a few days before her prenatal visit.
According to Beltran, the physician’s assistant recommended she renew her use of Suboxone under a doctor’s supervision. After Beltran declined, she said she was asked to take a drug test, which was negative for all substances except Suboxone.
Two weeks later, a social worker visited Beltran at home and told her that she needed to continue Suboxone treatment under the care of a physician, said Beltran, who again declined. Two days later, Beltran found police officers at her home, who arrested and handcuffed her.
According to the police report, the officers took Beltran to a hospital, where she underwent a doctor’s exam. Her pregnancy was found to be healthy and normal, her lawyers say. Police then took her to Washington County Jail to await a hearing – hours later, she was led into a courtroom, handcuffed and shackled at the ankles, where a county judge ordered her to spend 90 days in a drug treatment center.
“Alicia had no idea she was giving information to the physician’s assistant that would ultimately be used against her in a court of law,” said Linda Vanden Heuvel of Germantown, Wis., one of Beltran’s attorneys. “She should not have to fear losing her liberty because she was pregnant and she was honest with her doctor.”
At the hearing, her lawyers say, the judge told Beltran that an attorney would not be provided for her at that time but that she could seek counsel for her next hearing in the case. And yet, a lawyer had been appointed to represent her fetus. “It’s wrong that an unborn child gets an attorney but Alicia Beltran, the mother of that unborn child did not,” said Vanden Heuvel.
Emails and phone calls to Family Court Commissioner Dolores Bomrad and her office were not returned. Assistant District Attorney of Washington County Mandy Schepper declined to comment on the case.

Courtesy of Melissa Wanta
Alicia Beltran, who was forced to spend more than
two months in a drug treatment facility despite
her insistence that she was not abusing drugs,
 talks with her attorney, Linda Vanden Heuvel
of Germantown, Wis.
At the center of Beltran’s case is a 1997 Wisconsin law that grants courts authority over the fetus of any pregnant woman who “habitually lacks self-control” with drugs and alcohol “to a severe degree” such that there is “substantial risk” to the unborn child. Beltran’s lawyers argue that she was not using any controlled substances at the time of her arrest.
In a petition filed in U.S. District Court in Milwaukee -- the first federal challenge of an arrest of a pregnant woman under such a statute – her lawyers claim that Beltran’s constitutional rights were violated in numerous ways. The language of the Wisconsin statute is vague and lacking in medical terminology, they argue, leaving too much room for speculation. Further, they say the statute fails to guarantee due process, as well as violates other rights, including privacy and physical liberty.
In cases like Beltran’s, “the woman loses pretty much every constitutional right we associate with personhood,” said Lynn Paltrow, executive director of the National Advocates for Pregnant Women and a co-counsel in Beltran’s case.
Experts say that criminal prosecutions of pregnant women, as well as forced drug or psychiatric treatment, have been on the rise in recent years in cases of suspected substance abuse, especially as some states adopt laws granting rights, or “personhood,” to fetuses.
National Advocates for Pregnant Women released a study this year showing that from 1973-2005, 413 pregnant women in 44 states were arrested or forced into treatment. Since 2005, there were an additional 300 cases. But these statistics are likely a substantial undercount, Paltrow said, since many of the proceedings happen behind closed doors.
As of this year, 17 states consider substance abuse during pregnancy to be child abuse under child-welfare statutes, according to a report by the Guttmacher Institute. Three of those states, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and South Dakota, allow pregnant women to be forced into mental health or substance abuse treatment facilities.
Other states have applied criminal charges such as delivery of drugs to a minor or fetal homicide under the same circumstances. And at least 38 states have “feticide” laws on the books, which define fetuses as persons in homicide or manslaughter cases. While these laws are often applied to cases involving violence against pregnant women, they have also been used to prosecute expectant mothers accused of killing a viable fetus.Supporters of these laws say they are intended to protect unborn children. “Child abuse is child abuse, whether it’s in the womb or out of it,” said Jennifer Mason, communication director for Personhood USA, a non-profit organization seeking personhood status for fetuses. Advocates of fetal personhood claimed a victory in January when the Alabama Supreme Court upheld the inclusion of unborn children in that state’s child endangerment statute. Some experts argue that prosecuting pregnant women can ultimately put fetuses at risk, especially when healthcare providers and social workers are the ones reporting women to authorities. There is evidence indicating that women who fear criminal charges or other state intervention are less likely to seek medical care or be honest with their doctors, said Kenneth De Ville, a medical humanities professor at East Carolina University in Greenville, N.C., who published a study on the Wisconsin law. “Prenatal care is really the best thing you can do to enhance fetal health,” he said. “And you’re driving women away from prenatal care.”
The American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists has argued that women who seek prenatal care should not be exposed to criminal or civil penalties and calls for expanded and affordable alcohol and drug treatment services for pregnant women.
Mason said she agrees that women should be given professional treatment before state intervention, but that when there is clear evidence of fetal harm, criminal charges are often appropriate. “It’s a very fine line. The medical professional has to be aware of what puts babies in danger,” she said. “I do not think a pregnant woman’s freedoms should be taken away, but child abuse cases are child abuse cases and have to be treated the same way as a newborn in the home.”
For Beltran, the consequences of her case have hit hard. Her family struggled to visit her regularly during her stint at Casa Clare Women’s Facility in Appleton, Wis., a two-hour drive from her home. After being away from work for an extended period, Beltran lost her job in the food service industry, according to her lawyers. She was released earlier this month, but with the case still open, she is still at risk of being taken into custody or ordered into further treatment, Paltrow said.
Beltran was scheduled for a trial in a Washington County court on Oct. 29. If she is found guilty under the Wisconsin law, the court could order her into counseling, supervision by a social service agency, or mandatory drug treatment, and could terminate her parental rights once her child is born. But the trial has been removed from the court calendar -- county witnesses were unavailable on the given date, and a judge recused himself for being familiar with the witnesses, Beltran’s lawyers said -- and no new date has been set.
“[Beltran’s] happy about this baby and having a child, but she doesn’t know what’s going to happen,” Vanden Heuvel said. She added that in a recent conversation, Beltran, who is due in mid-January, told her, “This is my first pregnancy ever, and I just haven’t been able to enjoy it.”

GOP on School Prayer

Muslims Could Be Downfall of Religious Right’s Agenda

Christian delusions are driving the GOP insane




Christian delusions are driving the GOP insane 

Why aren't Republicans more frightened of a shutdown and a default? Part of the reason is magical thinking 

 

AlterNet This article originally appeared on Alternet.
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dGhY5Hmk9QfXWUfCbOaXxZJUytCkR+ybUpIG4KPEc9zz93Sqm2XGTG9IaZdKBqBwDVsmsvFwJpU8yrg5Cnju0RpvFDkotpIdjoIXk4KhsTjxACR7BRdw5Y7fcrdEXPCSWWloKcYKhnln2DpWcwZrz81sSXiQOp6f7xWpcFv9sz3yrs+8gIzyGOdRJ4m2W1oOklAl2+Pb7UyY0QJbQk74PM+JqV6SyeSxWOXC6zmrlLQiUo6X3AM9e8abTfrin7cmtqslobf06ctbmzekNffFKsb/iG4/jUqOegemz5DEcDw/uV7TwRD+4PzovC0/eFNyZcaIw5IlPttMtjUtxxQCUj10zLiSfdVuQFk+j8LXiGyw6O0WgrWyDyTnGfP9K0a3XBmZFCgod4ePKsdlyYnEXFlzubclC4jLYaaWg9AnAHvVqVUzh7iRUdsxyolSDsemKxUWF6AUnPVmjSrjGt7Tr0l5LbSBkqUcDFfOPFV2Xdb5OmfUffUtH9Oe7n14xRHxvxH8ZARWVksoXrcI5KV0A8QKBHCVrzW4ppamJPUtLMs6VJPLpTrS/lHKYtu3lXW1YWo1QtkKJZ+iPtBqfw1FlXG8MW2DpCpWWipbYWlKSO8VAgjAFQPnR1pHMprX/gHszabbLvbrZDzrpYYUfw0gFRHtUcf/mum7IKCCBambLbUQbeXFxoZ7EqUDlKuZz7c5yNt6bj26O0VeivOshXzkocITnfp059KKUMegp9GYQ/I7R0uanXwSkKV3sajnCc5xyxtXn4phuOHCAk8zoVpPlUbhfVD1NLQw/i+ywWbm8lLww+lKVjVuDvv+lQ/g/tqLveHmHhkGKHfeCkfuaJPhnix4F9tyWmw20uIpRwcZUlfMnrsf0qD8DTKjcpUojCERA3n1qXnHkmqIx/HZi3Nqd0Ec7hFiPBkPNoGtttSxj1DP7VZcDOZIRnIGCMiiJehxCkKIKVApNCnCT7cO4lt0pSGzhRJ5YO9TySi1YbmSqLuY3M4MZXcJetAIU8tQ95JplXA0cnYYHtNHTkqJIUqQh9AQtWlOTuTXjWnHMVpQizT6msvIDngVj+bzNKjjWnxpUcuJ33dbkx/+Mp/RI867KcmcVNNQpKtEdDgde722Byz4+oePsqq4ptaeHWGVPvAuPKISkkDYcz+lM8OXtBtz7IWNfaalYPPbmfKhBSisTG9TUpSeCmv9Li7KiQYqYcBsNsg4SB18SfXVBdSYMJBbUe2k5x00oGxPvO3nToX6bOQ2lacqUEg58aqr5PakXF8peTojqLKEkjZKdvzIJ99GCvLUlk7Ip5r50hIOQajNDO5ry86FuKORjO1dQtIxlQ86Ze7FlnF7iFH1V4b3Ua4l1sMfSJ/uFeG3G9f0iPOmgL3h+E5c58eA0oJW+4GwojOM7Zrc3r/AGXgKFAsrTS1gaEJQnZRBOFOK1esH21i/AMltri62qC0nDwOM+o1q3wgWORxDb2noTSFXCOrKUFwBS2zkEDJwN8H3dKT1Dko9pT0cKU6yjVdky3464qicO2hq6p/8QpS0oS20+BrByeY6d0bj2U/w9xzZeITBEJ4typQUUsObKGM6gcbEgDOM8jWX8dWcNWWxWpmC+xKaacUW3FJcccVnK8aSRgd41Dg/HdtXZoku3SIUiPJQIziFhAcTryoLSc7kA4OOh5ikKo76lc+jjgvF8h98Ndgfu/DbF1iIUX4AUXEY73Yrxq28QUpJ9QNZ9wVPmswkMQGx8odS1Hbfl+gFbZw9xNaL7DaTHfwt4LAYkjS6sJOFHSeY9Y250A2/h9mzcT3qHETpix3kLZGeQcSFafVjl7AKc3eNkQweXPuRK13ePHU88+2hOhXTntyqpiXtU/iBl+NCYWtUfQ644rQhCyfnDxPj7aueNSldjQlZ31dDjpQci4RCmKVLMpbSE5jRUKGjG3eAySTj1UlxGYlIO4lvhMvlTktx2U6ghKknZk+IT+/6UJTeK58SY/FVoUph1TZUlWyikkZ/KiWDMvXyCrfZER2cZ1uLCBvnYjGSagXzg4zLiqS2lLPapClpQNiv6x95rHd4KKEqSf5Cj/jOd9wf3UqmjgVePpFUq61Qpx9GH/EH0jP9H71WsfSn2f6VylVUtjxluPp+fUUc1eyu0qxDcMtjifmivPQV2lW0ZPfX30vrClSpgB+B/jWv6hV1/8AOX/yf8xrlKsVNgrcckf+uW7+lf70xev8c1/VSpUmXkr+P6PK/wD3DC9/6qqe9/jpXtT+lKlW47CKpFuf0A/qFRrX9BM9o/eu0qzLydEs2vmt+2n+qvbSpUIbmRdK5SpU1AP/2Q==So why aren’t they more afraid? Businessweek, hardly a liberal news organization, said the price of default would be “a financial apocalypse” that would cause a worldwide economic depression.  This is the sort of thing that affects everyone. Having a right wing ideology doesn’t magically protect your investments from crashing alongside the rest of the stock market.
The willingness of Republicans to take the debt ceiling and the federal budget hostage in order to try to extract concessions from Democrats is probably the most lasting gift that the Tea Party has granted the country. More reasonable Republican politicians fear being primaried by Tea Party candidates. A handful of wide-eyed fanatics in Congress have hijacked the party. The Tea Party base and the hard right politicians driving this entire thing seem oblivious to the consequences. It’s no wonder, since so many of them—particularly those in leadership—are fundamentalist Christians whose religions have distorted their worldview until they cannot actually see what they’re doing and what kind of damage it would cause.
The press often talks about the Tea Party like they’re secularist movement that is interested mainly in promoting “fiscal conservatism”, a vague notion that never actually seems to make good on the promise to save taxpayer money. The reality is much different: The Tea Party is actually driven primarily by fundamentalist Christians whose penchant for magical thinking and belief that they’re being guided by divine forces makes it tough for them to see the real world as it is.
It’s not just that the rogue’s gallery of congress people who are pushing the hardest for hostage-taking as a negotiation tactic also happens to be a bench full of Bible thumpers. Pew Research shows that people who align with the Tea Party are more likely to not only agree with the views of religious conservatives, but are likely to cite religious belief as their prime motivation for their political views.  White evangelicals are the religious group most likely to approve of the Tea Party. Looking over the data, it becomes evident that the “Tea Party” is just a new name for the same old white fundamentalists who would rather burn this country to the ground than share it with everyone else, and this latest power play from the Republicans is, in essence, a move from that demographic to assert their “right” to control the country, even if their politicians aren’t in power.
It’s no surprise, under the circumstances, that a movement controlled by fundamentalist Christians would be oblivious to the very real dangers that their actions present. Fundamentalist religion is extremely good at convincing its followers to be more afraid of imaginary threats than real ones, and to engage in downright magical thinking about the possibility that their own choices could work out very badly. When you believe that forcing the government into default in an attempt to derail Obamacare is the Lord’s work, it’s very difficult for you to see that it could have very real, negative effects.
It’s hard for the Christian fundamentalists who run the Republican Party now to worry about the serious economic danger they’re putting the world in, because they are swept up in worrying that President Obama is an agent of the devil and that the world is on the verge of mayhem and apocalypse if they don’t “stop” him somehow, presumably be derailing the Affordable Care Act. Christian conservatives such as Ellis Washington are running around telling each other that the ACA  will lead to “the systematic genocide of the weak, minorities, enfeebled, the elderly and political enemies of the God-state.” Twenty percent of Republicans believe Obama is the Antichrist.Washington Times columnist Jeffrey Kuhner argued that Obama is using his signature health care legislation to promote “the destruction of the family, Christian culture”, and demanded that Christians “need to engage in peaceful civil disobedience against President Obama’s signature health care law”.
The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops joined in, demanding that the Republicans shut down the government rather than let Obamacare go into effect. The excuse was their objection to the requirement that insurance make contraception available without a copayment, saying ending this requirement matters more than “serving their own employees or the neediest Americans.”
The Christian right media has been hammering home the message that Christians should oppose the Affordable Care Act. Pat Necerato of the Christian News Network accused the supporters of the law of committing idolatry and accused people who want health care of being covetous. The Christian Post approvingly reported various Christian leaders, including Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, saying things like the health care law is “a profound attack on our liberties” and lamented “Today is the day I will tell my grandchildren about when they ask me what happened to freedom in America.”
Some in the Christian right straight up believe Obamacare portends the end times. Rick Phillips, writing for Christianity.com, hinted that Obamacare might be predicted in Revelations, though he held back from saying that was certain. Others are less cautious. On the right wing fundamentalist email underground, a conspiracy theory has arisen claiming that Obamacare will require all citizens to have a microchip implanted. While it’s completely untrue, many Christians believe that this means the “mark of the beast” predicted in Revelations that portends the return of Christ and the end of the world.
In other words, the Christian right has worked itself into a frenzy of believing that if this health care law is implemented fully, then we are, in fact, facing down either the end of American Christianity itself or quite possibly the end times themselves. In comparison, it’s hard to be too scared by the worldwide financial collapse that they’re promising to unleash if the Democrats don’t just give up their power and let Republicans do what they want. Sure, crashing stock markets, soaring unemployment, and worldwide economic depression sounds bad, but for the Christian right, the alternative is fire and brimstone and God unleashing all sorts of hell on the world.
This is a problem that extends beyond just the immediate manufactured crisis. The Christian right has become the primary vehicle in American politics for minimizing the problems of the real world while inventing imaginary problems as distractions. Witness, for instance, the way that fundamentalist Christianity has been harnessed to promote the notion that climate change isn’t a real problem. Average global temperatures are creeping up, but the majority of Christian conservatives are too worried about the supposed existential threats of abortion and gay rights to care.
Under the circumstances, it’s no surprise that it’s easy for Christian conservatives to worry more about imaginary threats from Obamacare than it is for them to worry about the very real threat to worldwide economic stability if the go along with their harebrained scheme of forcing the government into default. To make it worse, many have convinced themselves that it’s their opponents who are deluded. Take right wing Christian Senator Tom Coburn, who celebrated the possibility of default back in January by saying it would be a “wonderful experiment”. Being able to blow past all the advice of experts just to make stuff up you want to believe isn’t a quality that is unique to fundamentalists, but as these budget negotiations are making clear, they do have a uniquely strong ability to lie to themselves about what is and isn’t a real danger to themselves and to the world.
Amanda Marcotte is a Brooklyn-based freelance writer and journalist. She's published two books and blogs regularly at Pandagon, RH Reality Check and Slate's Double X.

 

Hacking, DDOS, and the ACA Website.

Hacking, DDOS, and the ACA Website.

What is happening to the ACA website? RWNJ's say it is not getting hacked. Technically they're right. DDOS (directed denial of service) attacks are not hacking. They are different. Hacking is an attempt to break into a site or system, while DDOS is an attempt to block access. Hacking usual requires some degree of technical ability, whereas DDOS just requires a bunch of morons tying up bandwidth to slow things down.    OutFOXedNEWS: How to report Attacks on the ACA Website

Even The Daily Show Was Shocked by This Racist GOP Leader's Responses

Even The Daily Show Was Shocked by This Racist GOP Leader's Responses

The Daily Show's "field reporters" have dealt with a fair amount of hilariously oblivious responses from interviewees over the years, but on last night's show, correspondent Aasif Mandvi appeared to have been caught off-guard by just how hilariously oblivious his interviewee was.
Speaking with Buncombe County Republican precinct chair Don Yelton on the subject of North Carolina's controversial voter ID law, Mandvi attempted to prompt a reaction by declaring "the law is not racist, and you're not racist."
Expecting Yelton to fire back with an unequivocal "no," Mandvi was instead treated to several long seconds of introspection, followed by, "well, I've been called a bigot before."
Then, as they say, things got weird.
Yelton attempted to explain away the charges of racism — always a good idea — by: 1. Insisting that one of his best friends is black; 2. claiming that the photo of Obama dressed as a witch doctor that he shared on his Facebook page was making fun of his "white half"; recalling how, when he was young, black people were called "negras"; and bemoaning the fact that black people can use the word "nigger" but he can't.
"You know that we can hear you, right?" asks a visibly nonplussed Mandvi.
But Yelton wasn't done yet: In a stunning acknowledgement of the law's true intention, the GOP leader admitted its main purpose was not to prevent alleged voter fraud, but "to kick Democrats in the butt."
Speaking later with the Mountain Xpress, Yelton seemed aware that his interview might make him seem racist.
Embedded image permalink"The questions were such that the answers can be played with. I expect them to play with my answers for racism," he told the paper.
Update 5:05 p.m.: Don Yelton has resigned his post as precinct chairman effective immediately.
Buncombe GOP Chairman Henry Mitchell called Yelton's comments on The Daily Show "offensive, uniformed and unacceptable of any member within the Republican Party," and called on him to step down.
The state's GOP leadership issued a similar call for his resignation, which he reportedly tendered this afternoon.

Bill Gates on Obamacare web site

GOP Healthcare Plan Website!

Top 10 Findings Of House Committee Investigating Healthcare.gov Glitches

Top 10 Findings Of House Committee Investigating Healthcare.gov Glitches 

 Tea Party Cat

http://winkprogress.com/images/2013/10/House-hearings-on-healthcare-gov-glitches.pngChairman of the House Oversight Committee Darrell Issa called hearings into the glitches on the Obamacare site, healthcare.gov, and what he found is shocking. SHOCKING!
10. Obamacare is the worst thing to ever happen to America, and the GOP were totally NOT dicks for shutting down the government and threatening to destroy the world economy to stop it.
9. Website glitches are at least as bad as anything George W. Bush ever did, including invading Iraq for no reason and leaving people to die after Hurricane Katrina.
8. President Obama was born in a place called Hawaii, which sounds foreign, raising questions about whether he is fit to serve as president.
7. Some congressmen know how to use the View Page Source option in their browsers.
5. President Obama “doesn’t look presidential, if you know what I mean”.
4. President Obama went golfing in the past two years when he could have been personally fixing the code on healthcare.gov.
3. Healthcare.gov is on the Inter-net, which is a series of tubes that is available on computers now.
2. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius put a virus in the code on healthcare.gov that will force every God-fearing Christian woman to have an abortion, even if they aren’t pregnant.
1. Despite how high-tech his campaign was, President Obama hasn’t even debugged ONE LINE OF CODE on the website.
And that’s it for now, but never fear– Darrell Issa knows that if he keeps holding hearings, the full story of Obama’s diabolical plans to subvert the freedom of patriotic Americans will be revealed, and in the meantime there will be plenty of time for grandstanding. And if things get slow, Chairman Issa can always get on the internet and start arguing with satirical cats. http://winkprogress.com/teapartycat/4391/top-10-findings-of-house-committee-investigating-healthcare-gov-glitches/