Articles of the Day

Some excellent articles you may want to check out.

Wake up: It’s not just Akin

So yes, the current general election conversation may be largely about Medicare. The dialogue may eventually work its way back to the economy and jobs. But don't think for a second that social issues -- particularly abortion -- are not in the GOP's sights. Since the tea party helped pull the GOP back into power in 2010 -- under the guise of controlling government spending -- close to 1,000 anti-abortion bills have been introduced across the country. I can't think of anything approaching that number of bills with the goal of creating jobs in that same time span, can you?

At a Personhood USA "tele-town hall meeting" in December, Santorum, Michele Bachmann, Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry all said they would work to outlaw all abortions, regardless of the circumstances. You can fully expect a Republican Congress to move quickly to ban all abortions, regardless of circumstances.

Quackery and Mumbo-Jumbo in the U.S. Military

The Air Force is training its doctors in “battlefield acupuncture,” mainly due to the efforts of one man, Col. Richard Niemtzow. He reports that there are 40 physicians practicing acupuncture in the military, and that he and one other practice it full-time. He teaches ear acupuncture, a modern variant invented in 1957 by Paul Nogier, a French doctor. Nogier imagined that the external ear looked something like a fetus curled up in the womb. He imagined that every part of the body was represented on the auricle, the outer part of the ear, and that stimulating points on this homunculus could affect distant corresponding organs. (This kind of thinking was parodied in the BMJ in John McLachlan’s butt reflexology spoof, in which he pretended to have found that all parts of the body were represented on the buttocks and that inserting needles there was more effective than using the traditional acupuncture points.) Niemtzow has further refined ear acupuncture to five points on the ear stimulated with short needles that fit under a helmet. He has published no credible clinical research to show that this works.

Todd Akin’s comment brings ‘war on women’ back to prominence

At least until Election Day, Republicans were supposed to pretend that their party’s alleged “war on women” was nothing but a paranoid fantasy stoked by desperate Democrats. Obviously, Rep. Todd Akin (R-Mo.) didn’t get the memo.

Akin, campaigning to unseat Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) in November, was trying to explain his stance against abortion Sunday when he committed what cannot be dismissed as a mere gaffe. It was an abomination that could only stem from benighted ignorance — and it brings the whole “war on women” thing back into scary focus.
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The statutory rape of a child by an adult would not fit the definition the House Republicans tried to impose; nor would the rape of a woman who was drugged, say, or who had limited mental capacity. Never mind the fact that, as far as criminal law is concerned, rape is rape. Never mind the fact that all rape, by its very nature, is “forcible.”
Akin’s assertion about “legitimate” rape is really nothing but an attempt to blame the victim. It stems from the view that the only true victim is a woman who is raped while violently resisting a ski-masked assailant who came in through the bedroom window. Anything short of that, she must have been asking for it.

Why Romney keeps lying about Obama and Welfare

It’s been three weeks since Mitt Romney first took fire for asserting that the Obama administration “gutted” work requirements in welfare. When the first ad was released, PolitiFact took the lead in debunking its claim that under Obama’s plan, “they just send you your welfare check,” giving it the highest rating of “Pants on Fire.” FactCheck.org followed suit, and the Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler offered a similar denunciation, giving the ad “four Pinnochios.”

But this didn’t deter the Romney campaign. The following week, they released another ad using a similar message. Independent observers again hit Romney’s dishonesty, and a key Republican architect of welfare reform said that “there’s no plausible scenario under which [the change] really constitutes a serious attack on welfare reform.”
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Which is why it’s worth pointing out this lie whenever it surfaces. Far more so than Joe Biden — who made an off-the-cuff remark — Romney is playing a deliberate game of racial division, trying to harm Obama’s standing with whites by connecting him to long-circulating stereotypes about African Americans. It’s an ugly move that should be condemned in the harshest terms possible.