Rand Paul’s poop is more important than any mere woman

I’m stunned. People actually elected this lunatic, Rand Paul?

So, somehow, Rand Paul, who is 100% anti-abortion, deeply resents the fact that the government wants to enforce energy efficiency and insist that we should conserve resources, because it infringes on his right to buy old hot wasteful light bulbs and toilets that use lots of water when they flush. Priorities!

If only we could impeach on the basis of criminal stupidity, 90% of the Rethuglicans and half of the Democrats would be thrown out of office.

(via Jezebel)

Bravo, Oregon!

The Oregon House has passed a bill removing the special protections for faith healers. Sorry, god-botherers in Oregon, you don’t get to claim the approval of gods to justify torturing, maiming, and killing your children with neglect.

It passed unanimously, too, although of course a couple of Rethuglicans had to voice reservations. Why? Because they’re idiots.

Rep. Jim Weidner, R-Yamhill, said he worried “we might be heading down a slippery slope.” He said he prayed earlier in the day about his son’s severe tonsillitis. His wife took his son to the doctor Thursday morning, he added, but “am I going to go to prison because I took the time to pray with my child?”

No. Notice the part where his wife took his son to the doctor? That’s what’s important. Not whether he also mumbled magic words, or patted the kid on the head, or went home and sacrificed a chicken for the child’s good health. All that matters is that you don’t neglect necessary care because your superstitions say it is alright.

More Rethuglican inhumanity

For a party that campaigns on small government and reducing interference in private lives, the Rethuglicans sure are ready to heap more restrictions on women. Look at the consequences of Nebraska’s anti-choice law.

In Nebraska, one law already in existence heaped needless trauma on a mother’s tragedy. Thirty-four-year-old Danielle Deaver was 23 weeks pregnant when she faced a fate “worse than your own death”— her baby would not make it. Her water broke early and, without amniotic fluid, the fetus would not develop lungs to survive outside the womb. Deaver and her husband decided they wanted to let “nature take it’s course” and would not risk harming the child further, so they asked their doctor to help “put an end to this nightmare.”

But because of Nebraska’s law prohibiting any abortion after 20 weeks, the doctor could not assist or he would “face criminal charges, jail time, and lose his medical license.” Her doctors told her “she’d just have to wait.” So she did, in “torture,” and gave birth to Elizabeth at 3pm, watched her gasp for breath, and then watched her die at 3:15pm on December 8, 2010. “The outcome of my pregnancy, that choice was made by God,” said Deaver, but “how to handle the end of my pregnancy, that choice should’ve been mine.”

Why, she sounds like some godless liberal atheist who deserved everything she got.

More states, including Minnesota, are considering forcing more women to go through that pain. Fortunately, our Democratic governor has announced his intention to veto any such bill.

Union-busting jerks

Don’t you know it’s my birthday? There’s supposed to be some happy news to lighten my evening. But no, instead I learned that Wisconsin Rethuglicans made an end run to approve their governor’s union-busting bill.

Phil Neuenfeldt, president of the state AFL-CIO, said Wednesday night’s maneuver “shows that Scott Walker and the Republicans have been lying throughout this entire process.”

“None of the provisions that attacked workers’ rights had anything to do with the budget,” Neuenfeldt said. “Losing badly in the court of public opinion and failing to break the Democratic senators’ principled stand, Scott Walker and the GOP have eviscerated both the letter and the spirit of the law and our democratic process to ram through their payback to their deep-pocketed friends.”

This is what happens when we weaken labor — the rich have free rein to milk the middle-class even further.

Nutjobs in Ohio plan to ask invisible blobs of fetal tissue to speak

This is a 5-week-old human fetus.

i-039ea37186dd98d25aaa3b750f5527b3-5week.jpeg

It’s an awesomely cool period of development. Organogenesis is well under way, segmentation is completely, limb buds are forming. The heart is beating, which is neat, but then you have to keep in mind that you can tease a heart apart into individual cells in a dish and the cells will throb, so it’s not exactly a magical indicator of sentience. Also, the embryo is only 2-3 millimeters long, which I find to be a highly evocative size: that’s exactly how big my zebrafish embryos are when they have the same level of organization, with segments and organ rudiments and a beating heart.

In Ohio, they are proposing to have these fetuses “testify” in support of an anti-choice bill.

Two fetuses will be presented as witnesses before an Ohio legislative committee that is hearing a bill to outlaw abortions after the first heartbeat can be detected inside a woman’s womb.

The fetuses will appear live and in color before the committee on a video screen projecting ultrasound images taken from their pregnant mothers’ bodies. Janet Folger Porter, head of Faith2Action, an anti-abortion group, said the fetuses will be the youngest witnesses to ever testify when they come in front of the House Health and Aging Committee Wednesday morning.

Oh, really? The legislators might want to read up on first trimester ultrasound, first of all.

Transabdominal ultrasound cannot reliably diagnose pregnancies that are less than 6 weeks gestation. Transvaginal ultrasound, by contrast, can detect pregnancies earlier, at approximately 4½ to 5 weeks gestation. Prompt diagnosis made possible by transvaginal ultrasound can, therefore, result in earlier treatment.

Early ultrasound examinations will primarily detect the presence of the extraembryonic sac, not the embryo itself. It’s too small. Around 5 weeks, you might be able to see a fuzzy small blob with a flutter that is the beating heart, but that’s about it, and you do have to use transvaginal ultrasound to pick it up — that is, you have to insert the ultrasound probe deep into the vagina. That isn’t usually done; any mothers out there will tell you about the gel smeared all over their bellies and the external probe pressed up against them, but the transvaginal examinations are only done if there is suspicion of something going wrong.

So I’ll be very curious to see what these “‘live and in color” images actually look like. I’m already suspicious that they’ll be faked — I can already guarantee you that the color will be entirely false. But maybe someone has a higher resolution ultrasound machine than I’m aware of, which is entirely possible.

But even if they do get a nice image of a curled, fishlike embryo that is maybe a tenth as sharp as the worst images of zebrafish embryos that I see in my low-power dissecting scope, so what? It’s not testifying. It’s twitching. You’d get a more intelligent response if you dragged a cow in front of the committee and asked it to moo against slaughterhouses.

And the bill is ridiculous. They want to prohibit all abortions of embryos that have a detectable heartbeat…but 1) heartbeat isn’t a valid measure of personhood, and 2) pragmatically, it shuts down almost all abortions. The heart starts beating at approximately one month after fertilization; the woman may not have even noticed more than a delayed period at that time, and the early symptoms of some water retention and possibly morning sickness are unreliable. There will be many women who are responsible and want to end a pregnancy as early as possible who will be denied a first trimester abortion because it was too late when they were diagnosed!

Ohioans: bills sponsored by the deranged lunatics really shouldn’t be passed. I’m hoping your lawmakers will realize that during this ginned-up spectacle.

Oh, yeah, that’s exactly what we need

I predict it will quickly vanish from public attention. The University of Arizona is creating something called the National Institute for Civil Discourse. Just the title makes me want to gag.

Announced just last week by the University of Arizona, the new civility institute will have as honorary chairmen former Presidents Bill Clinton and George H. W. Bush. Together with the institute’s director, Brint Milward, they will promote compromise among opposing political parties and views and focus on political disagreements “from the grass roots all the way to the top.”

Because, when the country is going down the toilet, the one thing we want to discourage is any troubling of the swirling status quo.

I do like the Bierce quotation: “Politeness, n. The most acceptable hypocrisy.”

Why did our government give special preference to Christian pseudo-insurance companies?

This country recently managed to pass a rather lame compromise on health care: there is now a mandate that requires everyone to have health insurance, even if it is from a hodge-podge of insurance companies, with the intent of fairly distributing the expense. Unfortunately, one group got singled out with an exception from this requirement. Can you guess who?

Yep, Christians.

Did you know that if you are a Christian you are exempt from the taxes, penalties and regulations imposed by the recently enacted health insurance law?

All you have to do is to affirm a statement of Christian beliefs and pledge to follow a code that includes no tobacco or illegal drugs, no sex outside of marriage, and no abuse of alcohol or legal medications and pay a monthly fee to join a religious health care sharing ministry plan, a plan that specifically does not guarantee the payment of your medical bills in any fashion and holds members solely responsible for payment of said bills.

And the reason for this exemption? According to the spokeswoman for the Senate committee responsible for writing much of the legislation, lawmakers granted the exemption out of respect for religious freedom.

That’s a rather large loophole, and it’s also preferentially sectarian. It’s also non-surprising. What it means is that a few Christian scam-artists get to get richer, while lots of gullible Christians get screwed. The con is to set up a Christian “bill-sharing” cooperative in place of a real insurance plan; members send in monthly premiums, which can be quite substantial, but do not have to buy in to any other insurance plan, and then the bill-sharing program offers to help cover medical expenses, but “The payment of your medical bills…is not guaranteed in any fashion.” It’s a great deal for the Christian bill-sharing plan; if your medical expenses get so high that they cut into their profits, they can just elect not to pay, and then you have to go begging to join some other insurance pool.

Absolutely brilliant. Send me money now, and maybe, if I feel like it, I’ll help you out with some bills later. But I am not obligated.

And this is such a profitable plan that they managed to lobby congress to support it, all under the cloak of Christianity.

A man who should be dancing at the end of a rope

I oppose the death penalty, but there are people who challenge my commitment to that principle, and Donald Rumsfeld is one of them. He was on the Daily Show, and I had to watch that evil man with clenched teeth and clenched fists. Here’s part of the interview; the rest is available on Salon.

He shouldn’t be on the Daily Show. He should be facing the people of Iraq, and then we’d see how persuasive his folksy chortling would be.

Big time beast

Little Dougie (aka Ian Murphy) has hit the big time: he punked the Governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker, by calling him up and pretending to be über-Rethuglican puppet master David Koch…and Walker believed him and babbled like a little kid on Santa’s lap. It’s a self-aggrandizing embarrassment, with Walker bragging about how he was Reaganesque, that he was pitting stereotypical blue-collar workers against the unions, and how he has a baseball bat in his office that he’d use to enforce his demands with the Democrats. It’s dreadful stuff, and when caught with his guard down it’s very clear that Scott Walker is against us, the people of this country, and sides entirely with the plutocrats and oligarchs. As Murphy sums it up:

So there you have it, kids. Government isn’t for the people. It’s for the people with money. You want to be heard? Too fucking bad. You want to collectively bargain? You can’t afford a seat at the table. You may have built that table. But it’s not yours. It belongs to the Kochs and the oligarch class. It’s guarded by Republicans like Walker, and his Democratic counterparts across that ever-narrowing aisle that is corporate rule, so that the ever-widening gap between the haves and the have-nots can swallow all the power in the world. These are known knowns, and now we just know them a little more.

But money isn’t always power. The protesters in Cairo and Madison have taught us this–reminded us of this. They can’t buy a muzzle big enough to silence us all. Share the news. Do not retreat; ReTweet.

The revolution keeps spinning. Try not to get too dizzy.

Good work, Mr Murphy.

Oh, wait…that name sounds so familiar. I got a phone call once from Ian Murphy, too! And he interviewed me! At least I don’t think I was as big an idiot as Scott Walker.

“I have not yet ordered the use of force, not yet ordered one bullet to be fired…when I do, everything will burn.”

Lies and threats, that’s what Gaddafi is reduced to now. I won’t shed a single tear when he’s deposed, but I will hope that he isn’t removed by impaling his head on a stick. He has just given a blustering speech. I think he’s doomed.

Although I wish there were less chanting about Allah, I do think it’s great that the people of the Muslim world are rising up. Is this another 1848?