Todd Akin Isn't the First Republican to Be Ignorant of Basic Biology

So in Missouri the Republicans have a nominee for the Senate named Todd Akin, currently a Congressman.  Rep. Akin is running for Senate, trying to take the seat of Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill, a seat that was looking like the Republicans were going to get, and with it the very real possibility of the Senate tipping into Republican control.

That just became a whole lot harder, thanks to Akin's asinine comment when asked whether he would still oppose abortion in rape cases.  His response was:

"From what I understand from doctors, that's really rare," Akin said of pregnancy resulting from rape. "If it's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down. But let's assume maybe that didn't work or something. I think there should be some punishment, but the punishment ought to be on the rapist."

But Akin is by far not the first Republican to make some idiotic/incredibly offensive remark about rape.  How about these zingers:

North Carolina state lawmaker Henry Aldridge: "The facts show that people who are raped -- who are truly raped -- the juices don't flow, the body functions don't work, and they don't pregnant.  Medical authorities agree that this is a rarity, if ever."

Federal Judge James Leon Holmes (appointed by G.W. Bush): "Concern for rape victims is a red herring because conceptions from rape occur with approximately the same frequency as snowfall in Miami."

Pennsylvania Republican Steven Freind insisted that women who are being raped "secrete a certain secretion" that kills the sperm of a rapist.

Clayton Williams, former GOP nominee for governor of Texas on the subject of rape: "It's like the weather.  If it's inevitable, relax and enjoy it."

One has to ask -- are these Republicans really that ignorant?  Did their parents make them skip health class?  Or is this a case of a few morons whose anti-abortion views are so extreme that they can't fathom that a woman could get pregnant after being raped?  And what does Clayton Williams not understand about the terrifying, invasive crime that is rape that he thinks women should "relax and enjoy it"??

Rep. Akin's comments about rape and conception are a very inconvenient truth for Rep. Paul Ryan, the newly-minted GOP veep nominee.  Mitt Romney's campaign came out with a statement saying a Romney/Ryan administration would not oppose abortion in the case of rape (although I believe Romney said otherwise before -- oops, yet another flip-flop).  This counters what Ryan believes, and that is that abortion should only be allowed in cases where the mother's life is in danger.  He is in favor of a "personhood" amendment, which would make a fertilized egg a "person" in the eyes of the law.  Rep. Ryan is all into facts and figures, since he loves budgeting so much, so in this case I will share with him the formula for making a baby, since he doesn't really seem to understand the process:

Egg from mother +

1 lucky-ass sperm from father +

implantation into womb of said Mother +

many weeks of gestation =

BABY

Now, if you only have the first two ingredients, guess what - there's no baby!  You can put a sperm and an egg together in a petri dish and leave them there for nine months or nine years, and you still ain't gonna get no baby!  If there's no implantation in the womb, there's no baby!  Period.  Sheesh, I wish they would learn that simple fact. 

But then, with comments like the ones above, I despair of them ever having the intelligence to figure it out.

Paul Ryan Can't Explain Mitt Romney's Plan

OK, first, I HAVE to do this -- sorry, it's just too funny:

I know I shouldn't, but....

Now to the budget.  Paul Ryan went on Republican Party propaganda network Fox News and sat down for an interview with Brit Hume to talk -- what else -- budget (because let's face it, Ryan knows jack about anything else, like foreign policy).  You would think he would have had an easy time.  But I have to hand it to Hume, he didn't just throw softballs at the new VP nominee.  He did try to get some actual answers out of him.  Trouble is, Ryan couldn't answer anything concerning the budget of the man who chose him for his veep slot.  

Hume: "The budget plan you're now supporting would get to balance when?"

Ryan: "Well, there are different -- the budget plan that Mitt Romney is supporting gets us down to 20% of GDP (gross domestic product) government spending by 2016. That means get the size of government back to where it historically has been. What President Obama has done is he brought the size of government to as high as it hasn't been since World War II. We want to reduce the size of government to have more economic freedom."

Hume: "I get that. What about balance?"

Ryan: "I don't know exactly what the balance is. I don't want to get wonky on you, but we haven't run the numbers on that specific plan. The plan we offer in the House balances the budget. I'd put a contrast. President Obama, never once, ever, has offered a plan to ever balance the budget. The United States Senate, they haven't even balanced, they haven't passed a budget in three years."

Hume: "I understand that. But your own budget, that you --

Ryan: "You are talking about the House budget?"

Hume: "I'm talking about the House budget. Your budget will be a political issue in this campaign."

Ryan: "The House budget doesn't balance until the 2030s under the current measurement of the CBO (Congressional Budget Office) baseline."

Oh, oh!  So they haven't "run the numbers" on Romney's plan?  WHAAATT???  You just can't make this sh*t up.  Seriously.  They haven't "run the numbers."  So neither he nor Romney has a clue what Romney's budget would cost or what it would do to the economy.

Now, Ryan already has his own budget, which has been run through the House a couple of times, so he knows it backwards and forwards.  What did he say about it?  That it wouldn't balance until the 2030's.  Actually, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office said it would take until at least the 2050's.  The problem is it's hard to tell exactly what it would do, since it calls for huge tax cuts for the wealthy (Romney himself would pay almost nothing) and large corporations, but pays for it by taking money out of everything from Medicare to education to food stamps to transportation to PBS and Big Bird.  

The Ryan plan would like people to choose independent insurance companies instead of Medicare.  Why?  Because large insurers donate a lot of money to Republicans.  The Ryan plan would like to spend more for defense even though we don't need it.  Why?  Because large defense contractors donate a lot of money to Republicans.  The Ryan plan wants to cut taxes for large corporations -- guess why.  Ryan thinks renewable energy is a "fad," and wants to cut out all loans to green energy companies in favor of expanding natural gas and oil drilling.  Why?  Well, oil companies aren't sending a lot of big checks to Democrats. In short, it's corruption, pure and simple.  Being bought by the very people who keep you in office, and to hell with what happens to the environment, the middle class and especially the poor.  There is no better argument for public funding of political campaigns than that.

And by the way, his wife is a lawyer and former corporate lobbyist.  Ryan is worth millions because he married money, so naturally he will do whatever he can to benefit those like himself.  

Paul Ryan believes wholeheartedly in the Ayn Rand philosophy of economics, which essentially says that the wealthy are to be pampered while the middle class and the poor should be left to fend for themselves.  According to her, it's not up to the government to help anyone other than the wealthy.  (People do tend to forget that Social Security, Medicare and unemployment payouts are paid for with taxes taken out of your paychecks.)  It used to be that Republicans were more surreptitious about their elitism, but now they've become very bald-faced about their "let 'em eat cake" philosophy.  And why not?  People still vote for them, even though they're voting against their own best interests.  Should Romney and Ryan win this election, the people who voted for them will get the government they deserve.  Unfortunately, the rest of us will have to live with it, too.

Mitt Chooses Paul Ryan as Veep; Obama Gets Present

Watching Morning Joe yesterday, when the hosts and panelists were discussing the possibility that GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney would choose Rep. Paul Ryan as his running mate, I was thinking - YESSSSS!!!  Pleeeease pick Paul Ryan!  But then I thought Mitt was too smart to do that.  My thinking was that he would pick someone boring like Rob Portman or Tim Pawlenty.  

Clearly I overestimated Mitt Romney.  According to news outlets, he has in fact made just about the most ridiculous veep choice he could have made (outside of Sarah Palin) in choosing Ryan.

For those who may not know Rep. Ryan, he is the much-heralded -- on the right, anyway -- architect of the Ryan Budget Plan.  The plan that eliminates Medicare as we know it, privatizes it and replaces it with a voucher system (there goes the senior vote).  The so-called Bush tax cuts which went almost entirely to the wealthy -- and, we must remember, were put in place because Bill Clinton left behind a budget surplus -- would be made permanent.  The plan would actually increase defense spending, even though we are winding down Bush's two unpaid-for wars.  It would repeal the Dodd-Frank bank regulation measures, because who  needs pesky government regulation anyway?

Ryan's budget would slash the top tax rates from 35 to 25 percent for individuals and corporations (most large corporations pay little or no income tax now, btw).  Pell grants, which many students rely on to help pay for their college education, would be cut back to 2008 levels.  Food stamps and low-income housing for the poor would be cut drastically (but then, according to Romney, the poor are doing fine anyway.  Someone please give Romney a definition for the word 'poor'.)  And you can guess what he'd like to do to things like the Obama health care plan and environmental protections.

But wait, it gets better!  Ryan is Catholic.  Bishops, nuns, and other leaders of the Catholic Church have ripped Ryan a new one about this budget, calling it, among other things, downright immoral.  Immoral!  His own church has pointed out that it's very non-Christian to take money from the poor and the middle class to give it to people who are already wealthy, not to mention downright stupid if you want to get this economy moving again.  But that's exactly what Ryan's budget plan does.  But then again, Ryan is a devotee of Ayn Rand, who was famously an atheist.  Oops.  That's sure to piss off the Church.

Romney, Ryan and other members of the GOP are out to do one thing and one thing only - destroy the middle class in order to give even more to the wealthy.  

Congratulations, President Obama.  Your ad writers can take a vacation.  The ads will now write themselves.

Information about Ryan's plan, called "The Path to Prosperity," can be viewed here and here.  A .pdf of it is here.

The Chick-Fil-A Debate From a Secular Point of View

I passed a Chick-Fil-A restaurant yesterday and outside on the lawn were some pro-gay discrimination people with a sound system and a mike, just to make sure as many people as possible could hear their hate speech.

Since I've now decided I will have to give up my waffle fries and egg and cheese biscuits (I'm a vegetarian so I don't eat chicken anyway), I do have a dog in this fight, so to speak.  I have friends and co-workers who are gay and I feel their pain at being discriminated against.  I am myself a somewhat "closeted" secularist, as I have had idiotic comments directed toward me regarding my lack of belief in a supernatural creature before, so I understand the ignorance and intolerance of some Christians toward people who don't believe as they do.

I may not understand on a personal level why someone would be attracted to a person of the same gender, but here's what I understand that Christians do not... I don't have to get it.  Gay people are people, they're human beings, they're not "God's mistakes" -- because there is no "God" in the first place -- and they should have the same rights as everyone else, including the right not to be discriminated against because of the circumstances of their birth.  To use one line from a book that was clearly written not by "God" but by men as an excuse to hate and discriminate against an entire segment of the population, even though this same book preached tolerance and "loving thy neighbor," is simply moronic. 

If someone wants to believe there's a supernatural creature in the sky that's their prerogative, and I pretty much like to leave Christians alone with their illusions.  But when they want to legislate their beliefs through our political process, or when they want to use the words in a book that has no basis in reality as a bald-faced excuse for hatred, then I get my back up. 

Besides, I'm already paying more in taxes than I should because the religious write off their church contributions on their tax returns, and churches (which have been preaching politics from the pulpit in a clear violation of the separation of church and state guaranteed by the Constitution) get to keep the money they make tax-free as well.  But that's a whole 'nother post. 

If you're a Christian take your money and your intolerance to Chick-Fil-A if you will, but I won't be joining you.