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Justice

GOP U.S. Senate Candidate Calls Rape Pregnancies A ‘Gift From God’

By Ian Millhiser and Travis Waldron on Oct 23, 2012 at 8:32 pm

GOP Presidential Candidate Mitt Romney & Senate Candidate Richard Mourdock

NEW ALBANY, Indiana — At a debate this evening with his Democratic opponent Rep. Joe Donnelly (D-IN), Indiana GOP Senate candidate Richard Mourdock claimed that raped women should be forced to carry their rapist’s baby to term because their forced pregnancy is a “gift from God”:

I believe life begins at conception. The only exception I have for to have an abortion is in the case of the life of the mother. I struggled with myself for a long time but I came to realize life is that gift from God, even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape. It is something that God intended to happen.

Watch it:

Throughout his campaign, Mourdock has left no doubt that he believes in a sacred right to life that begins at conception and ends at birth. Earlier this year, Mourdock mocked the very idea that Social Security and Medicare — programs that millions of seniors depend on to save their lives — are even constitutional.

Update

In his post-debate press conference, Mourdock repeatedly asserted that he believes “God creates life” but, seemingly contradicting his own remarks from the debate, said God does not “pre-ordain[] rape.”

“What I said was, in answering the question form my position of faith, I said I believe that God creates life. I believe that as wholly and as fully as I can believe it. That God creates life,” Mourdock said. “Are you trying to suggest that somehow I think that God pre-ordained rape? No, I don’t think that. That’s sick. Twisted. That’s not even close to what I said. What I said is that God creates life.”

Mourdock did, however, re-assert his belief that abortion should be illegal even for victims of rape and incest.

“I’ve said that consistently,” Mourdock said. “I’ve said that for a long, long time.”

Watch his post-debate comments:

Update

Earlier this week, GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney starred in an ad calling upon Indiana voters to “join me in supporting Richard Mourdock for U.S. Senate.” This is the first time this election that Romney cut such an ad for a fellow Republican candidate. Watch it:

Election

Major Cable Provider In Ohio Offering Anti-Obama Film For Free

By Judd Legum on Oct 23, 2012 at 8:12 pm

A major cable provider is offering a notorious anti-Obama movie to all its subscribers for free. The company, Armstrong Cable, operates in six states including Pennsylvania and the critical swing state of Ohio. The move comes just days after the Armstrong’s Chairman of the Board donated tens of thousands of dollars to the Romney campaign and the Republican National Committee.

The film, “2016: Obama’s America,” has been widely panned by fact checkers. Written and narrated by conservative author Dinesh D’Souza, it claims Obama’s “worldview…was largely shaped by the anti-colonalist, anti-white and anti-Christian politics of Obama’s supposedly radical Kenyan father,” who was largely absent from his life. The point of the movie, according to a review in the Washington Post, is to convince viewers “that Obama hates America.” It was panned as “fear-mongering of the worst kind.”

Armstrong recently started offering the movie for free, on demand, to all of its subscribers.

An Armstrong executive confirmed to the Pittsburgh City Paper that “this is the first time the cable provider has offered such a deal for a recently released feature film.” Armstrong claims it will offer a free recently released film each month to encourage use of its premium on-demand offerings. But the company acknowledges no other recent releases are currently available without charge.

On September 21, just days before the promotion began, Armstrong Chairman Of The Board Jay Sedwick gave the maximum $5,000 to Mitt Romney’s campaign and an additional $25,000 to the Republican National Committee.

Armstrong cable is available in over 50 cities and towns in 10 Ohio counties. Analysts believe the outcome in Ohio may determine the outcome of the election. Most current polls in the state are within the margin of error.

Update

The Armstrong Group also gave American Crossroads, Karl Rove’s SuperPAC in support of Romney, $1.3 million in “in-kind cable access” in September. [HT: @asmith83]

Climate Progress

U.S. Poised To Be World’s Top Oil Producer, Part Of ‘The New Middle East’. The Bad News: We’ll Also Have Their Climate.

By Joe Romm on Oct 23, 2012 at 6:50 pm

Drill, Baby, Drill Strategy Won’t Lower Gasoline Prices, Will Enrich Big Oil

North Dakota Oil Derrick. AP Photo.

This is a good news, bad news story, which the media, characteristically, gets half right.

The AP reports today:

U.S. oil output is surging so fast that the United States could soon overtake Saudi Arabia as the world’s biggest producer. Driven by high prices and new drilling methods, U.S. production of crude and other liquid hydrocarbons is on track to rise 7 percent this year to an average of 10.9 million barrels per day.

This will be the fourth straight year of crude increases and the biggest single-year gain since 1951….

The increase in production hasn’t translated to cheaper gasoline at the pump, and prices are expected to stay relatively high for the next few years because of growing demand for oil in developing nations and political instability in the Middle East and North Africa.

So much for consumers benefiting from Drill, Baby, Drill. But hey, at least America can be #1 again:

The Energy Department forecasts that U.S. production of crude and other liquid hydrocarbons, which includes biofuels, will average 11.4 million barrels per day next year. That would be a record for the U.S. and just below Saudi Arabia’s output of 11.6 million barrels. Citibank forecasts U.S. production could reach 13 million to 15 million barrels per day by 2020, helping to make North America “the new Middle East.”

Here is the ironic cover of that recent 92-page Citibank  report (which, it must be noted, never mentions either “climate change” or “global warming” as potential risks to this scenario):

See, when your farmland turns into the Sahara thanks to unrestricted emissions from burning coal, oil, and gas, you’ll have a bunch of cool oil derricks to show for it.

And lest you were worried that there aren’t enough oil and gas shale plays to cover all our future Dust-Bowlified farm land, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) has this reassuring chart of North American shale plays, which can be tapped by fracking and horizontal drilling:

Read more

Health

Companies Fail To Regulate Pro-Smoking Content In Smartphone Apps

By Sy Mukherjee on Oct 23, 2012 at 6:45 pm

Since the adoption of the World Health Organization’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (WHO FCTC) by 168 member countries in 2005, it has been illegal for companies to publicly advertise tobacco products via any medium — including the internet. But as News-Medical reports, the tobacco industry is circumventing this public health convention by exploiting lax oversight in the smartphone app market, peddling pro-smoking, often youth-targeted digital content in violation of international and local laws.

A recent study on tobacco advertising undertaken by the University of Sidney finds that the popular Apple and Android app marketplaces are filled with “pro-tobacco” apps — i.e., apps that provide information on various tobacco brands, point users towards tobacco vendors, or contain depictions or simulations of tobacco product use — that do not meet most countries’ regulatory standards:

“The regulation of these apps is lagging behind the legislation in Australia and many other countries which ban tobacco advertising including through the internet and virtual stores,” said Nasser Dhim, lead author of the study and a PhD candidate from the [University of Sidney's] School of Public Health.

“This is despite the fact that the Apple and Android app stores have the technological infrastructure to block the sale of apps in accordance with local laws. As we show in our study Apple has already used this technology to ban access to certain content on its app store, in both China and Saudi Arabia.”

The study identified 107 English language pro-smoking apps looking at the two dominant marketplaces – 65 from the Apple app store and 42 from the Android app store.

By February 2012, the pro-smoking apps available in Google Play were downloaded by an average of 11 million users worldwide over the lifetime of the apps. These figures are only for the Android apps as those for Apple apps are unavailable but are likely to be even higher, given the greater popularity of its store.

Strikingly, many of these apps are available under categories more likely to appeal to children, such as “Entertainment” and “Games” — others, ironically, under “Lifestyle” and “Health and Fitness.” Smoking simulation apps might be cleverly branded as resources to help smokers kick the habit — but the University of Sydney study’s Nasser Dhim believes they actual serve a far more nefarious purpose. “This is because other independent studies have shown that such virtual images of cigarettes are more likely to trigger smoking craving behavior than to help them quit,” Dhim says. And youth-targeted advertising aimed at recruiting lifelong users at a vulnerable age is nothing new for alcohol and tobacco distributors.

Unfortunately, despite a concerted anti-tobacco backlash by elected officials in the last decade, global smoking rates are still quite high and investment in anti-smoking initiatives relatively low — this, despite the fact that investments in anti-tobacco programs can have up to a 50:1 return on investment.

Justice

More Hispanic Voters In Arizona Given Wrong Date For Election Day By Maricopa County Officials

By Adam Peck on Oct 23, 2012 at 6:10 pm

For the second time in as many weeks, election officials in Maricopa County, Arizona are in hot water for providing Hispanic voters with false information about when election day is.

Last week, ThinkProgress reported on how Maricopa County Elections Department officials attached a document to voter registration forms that gave the wrong date for anyone reading it in Spanish. The English version of the same document provides the correct date — November 6 — next to “8 de Noviembre.”

At the time, county officials dismissed the error as a clerical mistake, saying that only 50 people received the incorrect document. But a local ABC News affiliate has uncovered at least one more incident of the wrong date being disseminated in Spanish by Maricopa’s Elections Department.

Paper bookmarks found in three separate election counters throughout the county again give November 8th as election day, and again the mistake is reserved to just the Spanish version of the document. Activists who were perhaps willing to overlook the first incident as a genuine mistake are no longer keeping quiet:

Randy Parraz, President of Citizens For A Better Arizona, says the blame lies squarely with Maricopa County Recorder Helen Purcell.
“It shows she’s incompetent and not qualified,” said Parraz.
[...]
“The moment you found the first problem, there should have been an inventory,” said Parraz, referring to the voter ID document. “Anyone with common sense would have done an inventory on everything that’s been printed to catch this.”

Maricopa County happens to be the home of the controversial and xenophobic Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who has led the nation’s most anti-Latino police force for years.

Security

NYPD Paid Man To ‘Bait’ Muslims Into Criminal Activity, Spy On Innocent People

By Zack Beauchamp on Oct 23, 2012 at 5:45 pm

The New York Police Department used a 19-year-old paid informant to infiltrate New York’s Muslim community and then spy on it and entice individuals into criminal acts, according to a painstaking review of related evidence by the Associated Press. The activites in question:

Shamiur Rahman, a 19-year-old American of Bengali descent who has now denounced his work as an informant, said police told him to embrace a strategy called “create and capture.” He said it involved creating a conversation about jihad or terrorism, then capturing the response to send to the NYPD. For his work, he earned as much as $1,000 a month and goodwill from the police after a string of minor marijuana arrests. ….

Rahman said he received little training and spied on “everything and anyone.” He took pictures inside the many mosques he visited and eavesdropped on imams. By his own measure, he said he was very good at his job and his handler never once told him he was collecting too much, no matter whom he was spying on.

The story is written by Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman, two of the lead reporters in the AP’s Pulitzer-prize winning expose on NYPD surveillance of Muslims. The AP’s earlier work found that the NYPD created lists of devout Muslims to watch, treated name changes as worthy of investigation, and snuck informants into mosques. This program may have broken the law and yielded no leads or cases.

In 2005, Mitt Romney supported stepped up surveillance of mosques along similar lines. GOP members of Congress today accuse top Muslim White House aides of disloyalty and candidates compete over who can be more Islamophobic. Islamophobic incidents in the United States hit an all-time high this year.

Economy

CHARTS: ‘Uncertainty’ Is Not Holding Back The Economy

By Pat Garofalo on Oct 23, 2012 at 5:40 pm

Congressional Republicans love to blame “uncertainty” — ostensibly caused by the Obama administration’s tax and regulatory policies — for the country’s still too slow job growth. “By pursuing a steady repeal of job-destroying regulations, we can help lift the cloud of uncertainty hanging over small and large employers alike, empowering them to hire more workers,” said House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA), in one example.

However, two economists from Goldman Sachs took a look at the evidence and found that “uncertainty” is just something that comes along with a weak economy, not something that causes the economy to be weak:

In fact, the U.S. is right on pace for a recovery that takes place in the wake of a financial crisis:

However, the economists did find other events that cause “uncertainty” can hurt the economy: “The only real exception is the 2011 debt ceiling crisis, which did cause a large rise even in the purged policy uncertainty index.” So a debt ceiling standoff initiated by House Republicans caused more harm than any Obama administration proposal to raise taxes on the rich.

This jibes with the findings of other economists. “In my opinion, regulatory uncertainty is a canard invented by Republicans that allows them to use current economic problems to pursue an agenda supported by the business community year in and year out. In other words, it is a simple case of political opportunism, not a serious effort to deal with high unemployment,” said Bruce Bartlett, a conservative economist who worked for both the Reagan and H.W. Bush administrations. The Economic Policy Institute found that “a simple review of investment and employment trends — what businesses are actually doing — reveals that employers are not behaving according to the narrative described in the uncertainty story.” (HT: Joe Weisenthal)

Election

GOP Congressman Relied On Millions In Government Contracts To Build His Company

By Aviva Shen on Oct 23, 2012 at 5:32 pm

Rep. Steve King (R-IA) has enthusiastically embraced the Romney campaign myth that Obama attributes businesses’ success to government, exemplified by the RNC slogan “We Built It.” When it comes to his own construction business, however, it seems that King did not in fact build it. Salon reports that the construction company King prides himself on building “up from one bulldozer” was in fact sustained by more than $1.66 million in government contracts between 1994 and 2011:

But, as King now acknowledges, government contracts were a key part of his business going back some time. In 1987, he sued a client who had not paid him. An affidavit King filed includes a letter the future congressman sent to a customer in 1985 requesting payment. Explaining his urgency, King wrote at the time, “as you are aware, we are in a very depressed farm economy and my only other market for my works is contract work from various government agencies.”

Documents show that King’s company worked regularly for various local governments throughout the 1990s and 2000s. In 1994, he demolished a firehouse for the City of Odebolt for $15,500. In 1998, he took about $82,000 from the same city for a memorial walk. In 2002, the company made $64,000 from Crawford County to stabilize a building, followed a few months later by a $141,000 contract with the City of Battle Creek for wastewater treatment improvements.

The next year, King was elected to Congress and his son took over the company, taking in at least 10 other municipal contracts through 2011 worth up to $200,000 each for everything from road construction to water treatment improvements. Altogether, from the firehouse demolition in 1994 to through a grading job for a local utility last year, King Construction made at least $1,665,000 in government contracts.

When asked about his company and its substantial government assistance, King told Salon, “I built it. I built it on low-bid — both private and public — contracts. I created jobs and saved the taxpayers money on every road I built.”

King is just the latest Republican whose anti-government rhetoric is tripped up by a personal experience of how important government assistance can be to business owners. Even vice presidential candidate Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) family business relied on government contracts, while almost every small business featured by the Romney campaign has had some financial help from the government.

NEWS FLASH

Michael Bloomberg And Bill Gates Donate $500K To Marriage Equality | Both New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg (I) as well as Bill and Melinda Gates have donated $500,000 to marriage equality campaigns. Bloomberg’s funding will be divided among the campaigns in Maine, Minnesota, and Washington, complementing the $250,000 donation he already made to the Maryland campaign. The Gates’ have given their half-million directly to the Washington campaign, adding to the $100,000 Bill gave earlier this year.

Climate Progress

Heartland Calls Wahhmbulance, Anticipates PBS Frontline will Report Truth Tonight

By Climate Guest Blogger on Oct 23, 2012 at 5:22 pm

by Peter Sinclair, via Climate Denial Crock of the Week

Heartland Institute, famous for billboard craziness (see above) and hosting the semi-semi-annual woodstock for wackjobs known as the International Conference on Climate Change (hereafter “Denia-Palooza) – which this year featured the (wildly applauded) racist rantings of “Lord” Christopher Monckton, once mere climate crank, now AIDS curer and full-on Obama birth certificate nut-job – that Heartland – has now released a press release pre-protesting whatever treatment they might get in tonights PBS Frontline production “Climate of Doubt”.

Heartland screed as follows:

On Tuesday, October 23, PBS’s “Frontline” program will broadcast a special titled “Climate of Doubt.” It promises to go “inside the organizations” that helped turn the tide of public opinion, and then of elected officials, away from excessive concern over the possible threat of man-made global warming.

The Heartland Institute is likely to be a central figure in this program as we welcomed “Frontline” producer Catherine Upin and her crew to our Seventh International Conference on Climate Change in Chicago in May. Heartland Institute Senior Fellow James M. Taylor also gave a three-hour interview to the film crew in August. Earlier this year, The Economist called Heartland “the world’s most prominent think tank promoting skepticism about man-made climate change.”

We hope the program is accurate and fair, but past experience both with PBS and other mainstream media outlets leads us to predict it will be neither. Several Heartland staff will be watching the program and commenting live via Twitter and on our blog, Somewhat Reasonable.

The Frontline crew, rumor has it,  have been doing some exhaustive digging into the climate denial movement. My only hope would be that the affair doesn’t boomerang with too much face time for crazy people, and not enough for explanatory science.

Moreover, at that conference, a well known denier told me that his biggest concern about public opinion was that it might be swayed by extreme events. I told him to bet on it.  That was a few weeks before we knew that the corn crop was in trouble – and subsequent polling has confirmed his premonition. This summer was a hinge-point in US Public awareness of climate change.

If you think Mitt Romney’s recent threats against Public Broadcasting were about budgets or Big Bird, think again. The reason the right hates PBS is that sometimes it commits the unpardonable sin of journalism.

Peter Sinclair is editor of Climate Denial Crock of the Week. This piece was originally posted at his website and was reprinted with permission.

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