From this Friday night's Piers Morgan on CNN. Ron Paul apparently believes that only women who have been raped should have the right to an abortion. But even worse, he qualified the term with the word "honest." Lauren Kelley over at AlterNet weighed in on a couple of the reasons that Paul's statements during this interview are extremely troubling, to put it mildly.
Last night, CNN's Piers Morgan sat down with Ron Paul for an interview leading up to this weekend's Nevada caucus. One of the topics Morgan brought up was abortion, and specifically a woman's right to choose if she has been raped. Paul's answer was at once befuddling and enraging, and it really gets to the heart of the anti-choice war on women's bodies and choices. [...]
There are many myths to debunk here, but I'll just quickly point out the two most obvious (and most dangerous) ones:
1. Women do get raped by their husbands and partners. That's not some out-there hypothetical. Intimate partner rape is a major problem -- and yes, it happens to well-to-do women like Ron Paul's daughters too.
2. Although Paul keeps going back to women seeking abortions late in their pregnancies, the reality is that 90 percent of abortions occur in the first trimester. So his focus on late-term abortions is disproportionate to the number of women actually seeking late-term abortions.
Ron Paul might have a few things in common with liberals when it comes to military interventions and starting wars, but it's his views on economics and his social issues like this that paint a pretty clear line as to why he's over with the extreme right wing of the Republican base on most everything else.
Full transcript below the fold and Paul's response to Morgan didn't get any better as he rambled on. It's pretty pathetic when even as big of a hack as Piers Morgan manages to make sure the audience realizes you're being completely inconsistent with your answers, which Paul was.
Paul claims he believes in "personal liberties" but apparently those liberties don't apply when it comes to a woman and her body and her reproductive rights.
Federal Election Commission filings released this week showed that conservatives groups are amassing an ocean of cash for the 2012 presidential campaign. Thanks to the likes of the Koch brothers, the Walton clan and other of the usual suspects on the right, in 2011 conservative SuperPAC's outraised their liberal counterparts by more than seven to one. But if they win, rich Republican donors could more than get back the millions they invested. As it turns, just one law they are trying to buy - the elimination of the estate tax - could put billions of dollars back into their families' bank accounts. Of course, that gaping hole would have to be filled by all other American taxpayers.
As Mother Jones reported, as of December 31, 2011 conservative SuperPAC's reaped $60 million of now-unlimited contributions, compared to just $8 million for liberal groups. That tidal wave of corporate cash and play money from the wealthy has filled the coffers of Karl Rove's American Crossroads, Mitt Romney's Restore the Future, Newt Gingrich's Winning the Future and a litany of other right-wing SuperPACs. And as Amanda Terkel detailed, at a secret conclave last week, the Koch brothers pledged to raise much more to defeat President Obama:
At a private three-day retreat in California last weekend, conservative billionaires Charles and David Koch and about 250 to 300 other individuals pledged approximately $100 million to defeat President Obama in the 2012 elections.
A source who was in the room when the pledges were made told The Huffington Post that, specifically, Charles Koch pledged $40 million and David pledged $20 million.
According to a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation, the Koch brothers' heirs' would save a combined $17.4 billion in estate taxes thanks to Romney's plan.
Each of the Koch brothers -- Charles and David -- is worth about $25 billion. They are each married, so they would receive an exemption on the first $10 million that they pass down, and then theirs heirs would pay a 35 percent tax, or $8.7 billion, on the rest of their vast fortunes.
Now, this is an exceedingly rough calculation, as it's almost certain that the Koch's have engaged in extensive estate planning and would pay nowhere near that amount. But 35 percent is the rate on the books, and Romney's plan to eliminate the estate tax entirely would undeniably save the Kochs a boatload of money.
Here's why. Despite Republican mythology about family farms and businesses being lost to the so-called "death tax," by 2009 only 0.24 percent of estates even paid the levy. And that was before the December 2010 compromise President Obama inked with Congressional Republicans extending the Bush tax cuts further slashed the estate tax. The reduced 35 percent tax is now applied only to couples with estates greater than $10 million, a change which will cost Uncle Sam roughly $15 billion a year. Now, the Tax Policy Center calculated, only 0.1 percent of estates are impacted. Only 50 family farms and small businesses will be affected, and they contribute "less than one tenth of 1 percent point of the total revenue the tax will collect." Who pays the estate tax?
TPC estimates that 8,600 individuals dying in 2011 will leave estates large enough to require filing an estate tax return (estates with a gross value under $5 million need not file a return in 2011). After allowing for deductions and credits, an estimated 3,270 estates will owe tax. Roughly 90 percent of these taxable estates will come from the top ten percent of income earners and nearly half will come from the top one percent alone./em>
Estate tax liability will total an estimated $10.6 billion in 2011. The top ten percent of income earners will pay 98 percent of this total. The richest 1 in 1,000 will pay $5.4 billion or 51 percent of the total.
Among that richest 1 in 1,000 are the Koch brothers and the family behind Walmart, the Walton clan.
I don't think Thom spent nearly enough time on this, but it was perhaps the most provocative thing said at the World Economic Forum. South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu told the audience that's time for men to step aside and let women be in charge:
When we exclude women, we diminish ourselves
This shouldn’t be such a difficult topic for people of faith. It seems entirely consistent with the teachings of the world’s great religions that men and women are equal in the eyes of God. God isn’t stupid – He created Eve because Adam couldn’t make it on his own. Kofi Annan, receiving a report from the UN Alliance of Civilizations, said it is the faithful who are the problem - not the faiths.
Nevertheless, faith and gender remains a sensitive subject. My colleagues indulged me and allowed me to reflect on the apartheid era when the majority of South Africans were excluded and marginalised for something they could do nothing about: their ethnicity.
It seems to me that women are also sidelined for something they can do nothing about,their gender and humanity is the poorer for it. In my own church, which decided only in 1992 that women could be ordained as priests and bishops, it was quite a shock to realise how much we had diminished ourselves in our ministry when we saw the difference women made.
In this volatile time, when there is so much distress and dissatisfaction, we are wasting a huge source of talent and wisdom by not including women as equals in all aspects of life – whether in politics, business or religion.
Not surprisingly, this didn't go over well in the male-dominated WEF. But I think Tutu has a point. Look at this line up...it's not only pasty white, but overwhelmingly male, both hosts and guests. We women are 51 percent of the population and yet are only 17 percent of either house of Congress. Studies have shown that the more a society works towards gender equity, the higher the aggregate education of the entire population, the lower the birth rates, the lower the child mortality, the lower the incidences of domestic abuse and other forms of violent crime. All in all, by all measures, society improves when women have more of a voice in shaping their future. So maybe it is for us to work towards a more equitable society. By the way, if you want to hear more of my thoughts on this, Jacob Dean, producer of Thom Hartmann, has an internet radio show on Nicole Sandler's network every Monday evening and we talked about a women's revolution last week. Tell me if you don't agree that we need to put more gender balance in our society.
ABC's "This Week." Topic: Politics. GOP presidential candidate Ron Paul. Economic Roundtable: Glenn Hubbard, Lawrence H. Summers, Diane Swonk. Political Roundtable: George Will, Matthew Dowd, Arianna Huffington, Dana Loesch.
NBC's "Meet the Press." Topics: Politics; and the Super Bowl. GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich; New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg; Govs. Mitch Daniels, R-Ind., and Deval Patrick, D-Mass.; Rep. Xavier Becerra, D-Calif.
NBC's "The Chris Matthews Show" - Panel: Richard Stengel, Andrea Mitchell, Howard Fineman, Nia-Malika Henderson. Topics: Mitt Romney's gaffe on the very poor; negative campaigning in the general election.
MSNBC's "UP with Chris Hayes" - Panel: Melissa Harris-Perry, Michelle Goldberg, Amy Goodman, Anne-Marie Slaughter. Topics: Nevada Republican Primary results; Israel; Susan G. Komen vs. Planned Parenthood; The Obama Administration’s birth control requirement for Catholic institutions
CBS' "Face the Nation." Topic: Politics. Gingrich; former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. Roundtable: Michael Kranish, Norah O’Donnell, John Dickerson.
CNN's "State of the Union." Topics: Politics; the economy; and the Middle East. Govs. Martin O'Malley, D-Md., and Bob McDonnell, R-Va.; Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council; Dick Armey, chairman of FreedomWorks; Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Ala. Roundtable: Alice Rivlin, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, Ron Brownstein.
CNN's "Reliable Sources with Howard Kurtz" - Topics: Coverage of GOP; Nevada caucus coverage. Panel: Jonathan Martin, Politico; Christina Bellantoni, PBS; Michael Shear, New York Times; Michelle Cottle, Daily Beast; Matt Lewis, Daily Caller; Felix Salmon, Reuters; Mark Potts, University of Maryland.
CNN's "Fareed Zakaria GPS" - Topics: Mitt Romney, GOP, religion, and Russia. Panel: David Brooks, New York Times; David Remnick, New Yorker; Peggy Noonan,Wall Street Journal; Chrystia Freeland, Reuters; Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong of Singapore.
"Fox News Sunday." Topic: Politics. GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum; McDonnell; former Rep. J.C. Watts, R-Okla. Panel: Bill Kristol, Liz Marlantes, Liz Cheney, Juan Williams.
Happy Saturday night, folks! It's Blue Gal from The Professional Left Podcast, bringing you this week's podcast round up. Be aware that these podcasts are also available on i-Tunes, and may not be safe for work.
After four new murders of labor leaders in Columbia in January, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka called on U.S. President Barack Obama to delay the implementation of the Colombia Free Trade Agreement indefinitely. The agreement, which was passed last year, was delayed for years because of violence against labor leaders. More than 2900 Colombians involved in the labor movement have been killed in the last 25 years. Colombia is the deadliest country for union members in the world. Killings have continued unabated in 2012:
The letter states that through January, one union member was killed by Colombian troops, a second was shot to death along with his wife, a third worker was “brutally murdered” and a fourth union member employed by the National Industry of Sodas (Coca-Cola) was “murdered by gunfire.”
When the bill passed, it included a Labor Action Plan designed to deal with the violence, but Colombian labor leaders say that has failed:
We applaud the creation of the April 7, 2011, U.S.-Colombia Labor Action Plan that intends to take important steps in addressing endemic labor issues in Colombia. However, the Plan continues to face serious challenges in its implementation. Union leaders and labor activists continue to be assassinated, threatened, and intimidated, and the perpetrators enjoy almost complete impunity.
The reaction to January's jobs report shows how tragically our expectations have fallen, especially among some Democrats and their supporters. Their cheerleading isn't just bad policy or bad politics, although it is both of those things. It's also callous and insensitive to the misery of millions.
It's important to keep explaining what needs to be done to end that misery. To do otherwise is to serve, however unintentionally, an insidious agenda from the right that would lower our expectations until these tragic levels of unemployment are seen as the "new normal."
An increase in jobs is a good thing, of course, even if it's far from what's needed. Here's something else that was good about the report: Conservatives keep telling us that manufacturing jobs have moved offshore permanently, but 50,000 of them were created last month. Now we can put that argument to bed and can get to work creating more of them.
The Good, the Bad, and the Urgent
But millions of Americans - including minorities and the young - have already endured years of catastrophe, with years more to come if nothing is done. Why won't more people express support for their plight and explain what needs to be done to help them?
Here's the real story: Government intervention has created millions of jobs. But those interventions were too small, so we're still years away from fixing the problem. To claim anything else is to reinforce the delusions that created the problem in the first place.
If the president and his supporters make that case clearly and forcefully, the country will be able to choose between competing visions in November. It's more likely to choose an end to its misery. The pitch is pretty simple, really: The medicine's working, but let's not stop before the patient gets well. And despite this month's report, the patient is still very, very sick.
National Park Police invaded Occupy DC, McPherson Square in the early hours of Saturday morning with riot police, a dozen horses and a strategic plan to eliminate the encampment.
Then throughout the day, they went section by section with a fully dressed hazardous materials team, cordoning each part of the camp off with heavy wrought iron fencing and inspecting and bagging up protesters' property. Any tent with a semblance of camping materials inside was confiscated along with all belongings inside.
By the late afternoon only a few tents were left standing in the cleared sections. The small number of protesters, which never grew over 200 people, attempted to shout down and fight back police, but they were easily overwhelmed by the large police presence. Most of the time the police matched protesters in numbers.
The clearing of the camp signals a possible end for the rowdy, 128-day-old McPherson camp, which had gained notoriety after a testy protest at an Americans for Prosperity event at the DC Convention Center. The police action proved that even federal police will enforce camping bans at Occupy protests, even if there is doubt about whether it's constitutional under the First Amendment.
The police did not close down the park, or ask protesters to leave. In that way they respected the occupiers' right to a 24-hour vigil while simultaneously enforcing a camping ban, which they notified the camp they would do last Friday.
"They've met us intellectually," said Kelly Mears, a programmer who has helped out the Occupy DC tech team, "They're allowing the 24-hour vigil while enforcing camping regulations. I'm glad they didn't just come in here and beat people."
"You can't fault the cops for doing this, they can't just let them live here forever," said a bystander wearing a peacoat who had come to watch the clearing.
The only times the clearing became violent was when protesters attempted to block police from fencing off sidewalks to clear sections of the camp. Police slowly moved down the sidewalk with their riot shields forcing screaming protesters off to the side while they set up barricades. I saw one man get knocked down by a riot shield and multiple protesters struck with batons as they tried to force police back.
