[h/t Daily Kos]

Every time I see one of these reports I end up wondering how exactly it is that Mitt Romney is even in contention for this election, because common sense on everyday kinds of things is so...not there. Here's an ad from the Romney campaign accusing Barack Obama of causing businesses to close in Ohio because he bailed out the auto industry.

Huffington Post:

In the 30-second spot, Al Zarzour, a 61-year-old car dealership owner from Lyndhurst, Ohio, says that in the wake of the auto bailout General Motors shut down his credit line, forcing him to lay off his 30-person workforce.

"In 2009, under the Obama administration's bailout of General Motors, Ohio dealerships were forced to close," a narrator says in the commercial.

But just as the narrator says that at the 5-second mark, the ad shows a streetscape that appears to be in Oklahoma City, as noted by Sarah Burris, managing editor of the progressive blog FutureMajority.com. Google street view confirms that the scene is indeed outside the Advanced Academics building on E. Sheridan Avenue in Oklahoma City.

Burris told The Huffington Post via email that she and her friend, Dwight Clark, who she met in Oklahoma political circles, noticed the mistake while chatting the other day.

"It's amusing at the very least," Burris wrote on her Tumblr. "Looks like the stock footage of 'Ohio' just wasn’t good enough or someone maybe just miss clicked??? Ohio does come right before Oklahoma…. Oops."

Yeah, stupid. But so is the whole commercial. Let's see if I have the accusation right. General Motors, facing its demise in the wake of the financial meltdown, had this little side business called GMAC Credit, which extended lines of credit but also got caught in the whole credit crunch. And so GMAC shut down that guy's line of credit not because GM was bailed out, but because GMAC was a disaster just like the banks and other high-rolling lenders of that time were.

And he blames the bailout? Because he thinks without the bailout GMAC and GM would somehow have kept that line of credit open in the middle of the worst financial credit crisis since the Great Depression? With what? Fairy dust?

How utterly magical of him to think so.

Nothing says leadership more than bravely standing up against a concern that’s not actually a problem. We’ve had a one-sided battle with Sharia Law in the U.S. No one is fighting for replacing U.S. law with an Islamic moral code, but nonetheless Republicans are heroically fighting against it. Same with aborted fetuses in commercial food stuffs: Not something that’s ever happened but earlier this year Republican freshman Oklahoma state senator Ralph Shortey had the temerity to introduce a bill to outlaw it.

Republicans love what they call “simple solutions” but it’s really just the easiest possible answer to a trumped up crisis. In short: busy work. America needs to streamline for the challenges of the future so we can remain competitive (blah blah blah). Yet Republican offers are akin to organizing all the paperclips in the office by color and size.

Republicans and bureaucracy are, after all, frenemies. Sure they tell the media they despise bureaucracy but secretly love it when it makes them appear to be doing something. Even better if it keeps them from doing anything difficult.

For example: We’re in the middle of an obesity epidemic. It’s the number two leading cause of preventable death in this country. The Center for Disease Control estimates 112,000 American deaths a year due to obesity, this is down from their previous estimate of 365,000 deaths from poor nutrition and physical inactivity. The CDC reports in 2008 Americans forked over $147 billion in medical costs on obesity. We’re dying and going broke from being too fat.

But what are Republicans trying to warn us against? Terrorism. China. Russia. Obamacare. ACORN. The New Black Panthers. The Fed. All of which cumulatively killed no Americans last year.

It’s (ironically) lazy to try to and scare Americans about some elusive menace in order to avoid the reality that we’ve become the proverbial elephants in our own living rooms.

Illegal immigration? Republicans say to secure the border—build a fence—arrest anyone who even looks illegal. Mitt Romney said Arizona’s infamous SB 1070 should be a model for the nation. Which would be something if Mexicans were still coming into the U.S. They’re not. Immigration from Mexico is now net zero. That is actually a way bigger problem than undocumented workers (whom we love in boom times for a way to circumvent the minimum wage and exploit a non-litigious underclass). It’s the fact we are no longer an attractive enough country to motivate Mexicans to come here.

But as we saw last week with the Supreme Court ruling on Arizona’s law, governor Jan Brewer’s just doubled down on a non-problem, “We cannot forget that we are here today because the federal government has failed the American people regarding immigration policy, has failed to protect its citizens, has failed to preserve the rule of law and has failed to secure our borders.”

For a party that likes to peddle free market and common sense they sure get a lot of traction ginning up irrational fears.

Our energy plan is stuck firmly in the last century, but that’s not the point the presumptive Republican nominee decided to make. In March Mitt Romney told Fox News President Obama "has done everything in his power to make it harder for us to get oil and natural gas in this country, driving up the price of those commodities in the case of gasoline." Gas prices were the thing Republicans were going to fix by paying attention to them! With little fanfare, gas prices are down now by the way. Production has increased overall under the Obama administration. Republicans managed to sound the alarm and assign blame for a symptom while steadfastly avoiding the cause entirely.

Think I’m way off here? Remember this is the party that in the wake of September 11th—an attack by citizens of Saudi Arabia, organized in Afghanistan by a leader hanging out in Lebanon—decided to invade (wait for it) Iraq.

Because things indirectly involved with real problems hate us for our freedoms.

Cross posted at TinaDupuy.com

State: Ohio

Type of election: Primary

How it works: 63 delegates are at stake. 48 delegates are awarded in winner-take-all congressional districts. Santorum submitted only a partial slate of delegates by the deadline. If he wins in those districts, he can only be awarded only the number of delegates he submitted. The remaining delegates will be designated unbound until a three-member panel from the Republican party's central committee decides who the delegates will be appointed by. The remaining 15 delegates will be allocated to any candidate who gets a majority of the statewide vote or distributed proportionately among any candidates who get at least 20 percent of the vote.

Official election results: Ohio Secretary of State

Republican candidates: Newt Gingrich, Ron Paul, Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum (all others have dropped out or are polling at less than 1 percent)

Democratic candidates: There is no Democratic presidential primary.

Previous performance: In 2008, Romney dropped out prior to the primary, but still received 5 percent of the vote and finished fourth. Paul finished third with slightly fewer votes. Obama finished second with 45 percent of the vote.

Newspapers: Cincinnati Enquirer, Cleveland Plain Dealer, Columbus Dispatch, Toledo Blade, full list

Television stations: Full list

Progressive blogs: Buckeye State Blog, Ohio Daily Blog, Plunderbund

Latest polling: New York Times:

Continue reading »

When the Republican-dominated Virginia senate proposed a bill requiring women to undergo an ultrasound before having an abortion, one of their own finally had had enough. Sen. Janet Howell (D-Fairfax) attached an amendment to the bill that would require men to have a rectal exam and cardiac stress test before being prescribed Viagra for erectile dysfunction. "We need some gender equality here."

She didn't get it. While her amendment failed, the rest of the bill passed. Rush Limbaugh can be reassured Virginia will protect his God-given right to a medically-enhanced stiffy while making sure the women of their fair state will be forced to pay for an unnecessary and expensive ultrasound and view images of the fetus before an abortion can be performed. This particularly cruel act proves yet again that Republicans consider women to be very little more than walking wombs without the same rights over their own bodies that men enjoy over theirs.

But it started a trend. When Republican Senator Brian Crain of Tulsa, Oklahoma, introduced Bill SB 1433, otherwise known as the "Personhood" bill, seeking to legally define human life as beginning at conception, even before implantation in the womb, and offering more legal protection to a one-celled zygote than its fully grown adult mother, Democratic senator Constance Johnson had had enough - she introduced an amendment declaring every sperm must be likewise sacred. "Any action in which a man ejaculates or otherwise deposits semen anywhere but in a woman’s vagina shall be interpreted and construed as an action against an unborn child."

Continue reading »

Amazing that the party allegedly for less government intrusion in our lives finds no problem spearheading this kind of heinous legislation:

Oklahoma just passed the country's strictest law on pre-abortion ultrasounds, along with another law that basically allows doctors to lie to pregnant women.

According to James McKiley Jr. of the Times, the Oklahoma legislature voted today to overturn vetoes of both laws. The first, a similar form of which was struck down by Oklahoma courts last year, requires "a doctor or technician to set up the monitor where the woman can see it and describe the heart, limbs and organs of the fetus. No exceptions are made for rape and incest victims." This is already invasive — Dionne Scott of the Center for Reproductive Rights calls it "the most extreme ultrasound requirement in the country."

The second law, however, is even more disturbing. Basically, it protects doctors from being sued if they decide not to tell patients that their fetus has birth defects. Writes McKinley, "The intent of the bill is to prevent parents from later suing doctors who withhold information to try to influence them against having an abortion."

Just take a minute to digest that. In Oklahoma, it's now legal to keep health information from patients in order to make their reproductive decisions for them. Of course, the doctors who perform prenatal tests won't be raising the children born to the prospective parents they treat. And yet those doctors can have a say — through subterfuge — in whether those parents choose to give birth or not. Now that this has passed, it's tempting to wonder what information Oklahoma doctors will get to lie about next. Perhaps they could tell teen girls that condoms spread AIDS. Or maybe just convince women that they're not actually pregnant until it's too late for an abortion. The possibilities are endless!

All in the deluded notion that somehow they are saving innocent potential babies, they are forcing actual living, breathing American citizens to submit without choice an invasive procedure before she can exercise her legal right to determine what she wants to do with her body. And no exception for rape or incest. It's victimizing those women all over again.

The Center for Reproductive Rights promises a fight.

“It is extremely disappointing that the Oklahoma legislature insists on passing a law that is so clearly unconstitutional and so detrimental to women in the state,” said Stephanie Toti, staff attorney in the U.S. Legal Program of the Center for Reproductive Rights. “The state has already spent the last two years defending this abortion restriction and several others—without success. Another round in the courts won’t change our strong constitutional claims against the law, it will only waste more of Oklahoma taxpayers’ time and money.”

The Center argues that the ultrasound requirement profoundly intrudes upon a patient’s privacy and is the most extreme ultrasound law in the country. The law forces a woman to hear information that she may not want to hear and that may not be relevant to her medical care. It also dangerously discounts her abilities to make healthy decisions about her own life by forcing her to hear information when she's objected. In addition, the statute interferes with the doctor-patient relationship—potentially damaging it—by compelling doctors to deliver unwanted speech.

If you are as outraged by this as I am, you can donate to CRR to help them fight.

I admit that I was never a really devoted Catholic during the time that I identified myself as a Catholic. But I did learn the tenets of the faith and found a place in my heart for Jesus's teachings, which were about love and acceptance and taking care of one another (I had a seriously hippy priest, can you tell?). Maybe because my mind tends not to go into the gutter when contemplating the sacrifice of Jesus's crucifixion--and the symbolic weighty acceptance of the blame for all our sins--I just saw this as "mighty Jesus with six pack abs" rather than "Jesus with an enormous and exposed member". I, apparently, am in the minority:

Churchgoers are outraged over a crucifix in a Catholic church they say shows Jesus with exposed genitalia.

Janet Jaime is the artist who designed the crucifix hanging in St. Charles Borromeo Catholic Church. She was unavailable for comment, but her husband said critics are misinterpreting a common religious icon.

"This isn't just a subjective drawing. This is a historical icon of the church,” said Reggie Jaime, husband of Janet Jaime, an Oklahoma City iconographer commissioned by the church to design the crucifix. “I can't help what you see in things, or she sees in things, or anyone.”

The church's pastor, Father Phillip Seeton, referred questions Wednesday to the Oklahoma City Archdiocese.

Monsignor Edward Weisenburger said he has no problems with the crucifix and referred specific questions back to Seeton.

Critics of the crucifix take issue with what appears to be a large penis covering the abdominal area.

The crucifix is about 10 feet tall and hangs above the church's altar. It is unclear how long it has been there.

Molly Jenkins said she attended a funeral at the church recently and immediately noticed the crucifix.

“I was appalled at the sexualization of Christ,” said Jenkins, who is not Catholic.

Actually, I find it more than a little appalling that in an age where the church points fingers at everyone other than themselves over inappropriate sexual behavior towards children, adults are working themselves into a tizzy over a work of art that reflects where their brains are more than the work itself.

Wow. Just wow.

KOCO 5 (Oklahoma City):

An Oklahoma church canceled a controversial gun giveaway for teenagers at a weekend youth conference.

Windsor Hills Baptist had planned to give away a semiautomatic assault rifle until one of the event's organizers was unable to attend.

The church's youth pastor, Bob Ross, said it's a way of trying to encourage young people to attend the event. The church expected hundreds of teenagers from as far away as Canada.

"We have 21 hours of preaching and teaching throughout the week," Ross said.[..]

"I don't want people thinking ‘My goodness, we're putting a weapon in the hand of somebody that doesn't respect it who are then going to go out and kill,'" said Ross. "That's not at all what we're trying to do."

Ross said the conference isn't all about guns, but rather about teens finding faith.

What Would Jesus Do? Give a semi-automatic weapon to a teenager, naturally. Makes perfect sense to me. (/sarcasm)

Yeah, that would be just horrible, wouldn't it? {{shudder}} I mean, who would want to live in a cosmopolitan place full of art, culture, diversity and some of the best restaurants in the country if it means that your neighbors might be, you know, homosexual??? The bald faced bigotry that people feel comfortable expressing in this day and age never fails to horrify me. PageOneQ:

The town of Eureka Springs is turning into the "San Francisco of Arkansas," warns the American Family Association, and it can happen in your town too.

The presentation in the AFA trailer [available at PageOneQ], "They're Coming to Your Town," tells the tale of an uncharacteristically diverse resort town's government infiltrated by "a handful of homosexual activists" and bent to their will through the enactment of the town's domestic partner registry on June 22, 2007.

"Watch, and learn," says the trailer, "how to fight a well-organized gay agenda to take over the cities of America, one city at a time."

Eureka Springs, most recently, has gotten an honorable mention from unlikely celebrity and Oklahoma House Rep. Sally Kern, who propped it up as an example of the "gay agenda" that she has called a "death knell" and a larger threat than international terrorism, in addition to comparing such an "agenda" to cancer.

Do be sure to see the video that AFA created over at PageOneQ.

We recently posted the vile, anti-gay rant from Oklahoma Republican, Sally Kern, and since that time, Pam's House Blend has been covering Kern's feckless and defiant responses, the aftermath and the growing outrage. Apparently, Ellen Degeneres caught wind of Kern's nasty little tirade and decided to not only play clips of it on her show, she even gave the raging homophobic lawmaker a ring. PageOneQ has the video:

"I feel like there's some misinformation going on here," Ellen said after playing clips of the speech, "and--I think I need to call her."

The automated voice mail system indicated that Kern's inbox was full.

"I bet!" Ellen responds out loud, before opting instead to leave a message for the legislator via television broadcast.

"Hi! It's Ellen DeGeneres," she opens. "The gay one." Read on...

Major thanks to Pam Spaulding for staying on top of this story!

The Falwell Bomber was only the latest....Rick Perlstein:

(It was only later, when I stared studying Watergate, when I wondered about the moral compass of a movement that would elevate as a spokesman a man who was literally thrown in jail for his eagerness to commit violence in service to subversion to the Constitution.) I felt, at a certain point, that something very ugly would soon happen.

Something ugly did soon happen: Timothy McVeigh bombed the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. What is the line between vigilence and paranoia? I really don't know. I only know this, to return to my original point: it's far past the time for the media to start tracking these arrests as a trend—before the next arrest comes post-explosion, not pre.

Digby: I predict that we are going to see a remarkable resurgence of rightwing violence if the Democrats take full control of the government.

How quickly Eric Rudolph has been forgotten.