Is your rape insured?

The state of Michigan has just passed a measure stripping abortion coverage from insurance plans: women will have to ask for additional coverage to get it. Why excluding this particular health issue is so important that it engages the legislature to specifically write it out is a mystery. It’s not as if they are going through a long list of potential surgical procedures, like say, appendectomies, and deciding for patients and doctors that they have to plan ahead for these things and purchase separate riders for them (hey, that might actually benefit me, since I don’t have an appendix; why should I have to financially prop up all you looters who still walk around with that risk factor in your abdomens?).

Unless…oh, right. Misogyny. Women’s lady parts are weird and unusual and not part of the Standard Human’s equipment, so we shouldn’t be expected to treat them as a mundane part of human health care. At least one person, Gretchen Whitmer, sees the problem of special exceptions.

In a charged hearing Wednesday, Michigan Senate Minority Leader Gretchen Whitmer told the story of her own rape and called the legislation “one of the most misogynistic proposals I’ve ever seen in the Michigan Legislature,” according to the Detroit Free Press. The fact that women are required to plan in advance to have an abortion, Whitmer said, “tells women who are raped … that they should have thought ahead and bought special insurance for it.”

“The fact that rape insurance is even being discussed by this body is repulsive,” she added.

The people responsible for this abomination of a bill are, as you might expect, a so-called Right to Life group in Michigan. Once again, the fetus gets privileges that involving taking away rights from women.

Jesus. Texas.

Four Republican candidates for Lt. Governor of Texas gathered for a debate. They all agreed on the most pressing issue facing the American state today: whether Jesus made dinosaurs.

Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, Sen. Dan Patrick, Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson and Agriculture Commissioner Todd Staples said in the first televised debate of the campaign Thursday night that they favor teaching that there are flaws in the theory that humans evolved from lower life forms.

Late last month, state Board of Education members adopted new high school science books that include full coverage of evolution without the disclaimers sought by social conservatives and other critics of Charles Darwin’s theory.

While none of the lieutenant governor candidates mentioned the board’s decision, three — Patrick, Patterson and Staples — blasted teaching only evolution as a form of “political correctness.” They linked it to what they described as a broader moral decline.

“The breakup of the family in this country has started when we took God out of the classroom,” said Patrick, a radio talk show host.

“As a Christian, certainly creationism should be taught,” said Staples, a former state legislator.

Dewhurst, who is seeking a fourth term, agreed.

“It’s a fair discussion to expose students to both sides and let them make the decision with the advice and counsel of their parents,” he said.

Patterson said the country has gone too far in deleting religious instruction from government institutions such as schools. A 1987 U.S. Supreme Court ruling banned teaching of creationism in science classes.

How do you bear it down there? If you think I’m cranky and rude living in Minnesota, think what I’d be like if I had landed a job in Texas!

Well, most likely dead of apoplexy and barbecue, but other than that.

I’m a bit uncomfortable with this

Gregory Paul says that Nelson Mandela was an atheist. I’ve looked around a bit, and I can’t find any confirmation of that — I wouldn’t be surprised, but at best I find that he was a committed secularist who avoided coming out clearly about religion. Can anyone confirm? I don’t like it when dead people are immediately brought into the fold of a religion when they can’t deny it, so I’m not keen on atheists doing likewise.

Back in the last decade there was a cable talk show titled Faith Under Fire. Hosted by a right wing Christian, it featured theists and atheists in direct conflict over assorted matters. In one segment a theist challenged a leader of an atheist organization to name a single atheist who had become a great moral leader. To my annoyance the had-not-thought-about-that-one-before atheist was stumped. 

A leading example, of course, is Andrei Sakharov. The wholly ungodly leftist physicist started out as the father of the Soviet H-bomb, but became so fed up with dictatorial communism – Khrushchev’s insistence on detonating a colossal 50 megaton thermonuclear device for no practical reason being a factor – that he became the leading dissident against the system, fighting for progressive democracy at considerable expense to himself.

And the other great moral atheist leader of the 20th century was Nelson Mandela. He too was an nontheist of the left (as most are, in the US 3/4s of the nonreligious are progressives, the rest Randian libertarians.)

Now that last bit is interesting. If you’ve been wondering how big the atheist rift is, and are a little tired of vague claims that those jerks are a minority, it at least pins a specific number on them: 25%. Which isn’t small.

The claim is a little overstated, though. They aren’t necessarily Randian libertarians. The basis of that 25% comes from the Pew poll of the “nones”, which found that about a quarter of them were politically conservative.

nones-vote

I looked through the whole thing; no sign that they actually assessed the details of political alignment closely enough to recognize libertarians. But yeah, 25% does sound like a reasonable estimate of the fraction of jerks infesting the atheist movement.

O’Reilly and Stossel are really getting into the true spirit of Christmas

It’s all about kicking the freeloaders to the curb. O’Reilly only gives money to charities that hand the cash over directly to kids (what?), and Stossel demonstrates that panhandlers are all freeloaders because kind people would even give him money, a sure sign of moral bankruptcy.

The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Video Archive

The good news is that John Stossel was so gleeful at getting $11 by sitting on a street corner, waving a cup, that he’s going to grow a beard to match his mustache, give up the journamalism he has been practicing, and squat on the street for his tax free income until he dies. It’s a big win for him: there’s more dignity in that than working for Fox News.

(via Kick!)

Republicans need training

Heh. So the Republicans are running scared: they don’t know how to talk to or about women. So they’re having training sessions to teach Republican candidates how to address (or perhaps, more importantly, how not to address) women..

"The National Republican Congressional Committee wants to make sure there are no Todd Akin-style gaffes next year, so it’s meeting with top aides of sitting Republicans to teach them what to say — or not to say — on the trail, especially when their boss is running against a woman," Politico reports.

One problem: for this to work, Republicans will have to learn how to talk like progressive, liberal Democrats. There might be a small conflict there.

The United States is unsustainable

Sometimes, it’s the little things that just add up and fill me with rage. Like this report on bank employees.

Almost a third of the country’s half-million bank tellers rely on some form of public assistance to get by, according to a report due out Wednesday.

Researchers say taxpayers are doling out nearly $900 million a year to supplement the wages of bank tellers, which amounts to a public subsidy for multibillion-dollar banks. The workers collect $105 million in food stamps, $250 million through the earned income tax credit and $534 million by way of Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program, according to the University of California at Berkeley’s Labor Center.

We are all supplementing banks so that they can screw over their employees at the bottom, and throw more of their cash to the owners at the top. The plutocrats want it both ways: they want a complete absence of regulation so they can continue to plunder profits, and they want poor, desperate people to do their labor for a pittance, with government aid. You might argue that banks have faced all kinds of problems lately, so maybe they’re lean from top to bottom, but we know that’s not true.

Profits at the nation’s banks topped $141.3 billion last year, with the median chief executive pay hovering around $552,000, according to SNL Financial. In contrast, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics pegs the median annual income of a bank teller at $24,100, or $11.59 an hour.

monopoly_banker

This cannot continue, and I’m getting too old to want to live through a revolution.

One law for all

The report takes a little too much glee at poking at the JREF, but it does seem fair: Broward County is cracking down on tax exemptions for non-profits, including the JREF and churches. If they have undeveloped or unused property, property that isn’t being used for a charitable function, they are being told to pay taxes on it.

They lead with the example of the JREF, which has an unused million dollar building up for sale, and they seem to have ambushed Randi about it (I don’t think he’s much involved with the business of the JREF, so he was the wrong person to talk to). They owe about $23,000. At the end of the video, they finally mention that the JREF has paid up about $21,000.

What I find most promising though, is that they also mention going after churches — just on their unused property so far. But they make much of the fact that these exemptions are costing the people money, and that they are going to be much more thorough in auditing tax exempt institutions, which is a good thing.

One can only hope that they eventually get around to rethinking the charitable purpose of sitting around in pews getting hectored by a priest, and start yanking tax exemptions from churches wholesale.

Oh, no, I’ve been doing blogging wrong!

You know, Al Franken is my senator. I voted for him (and far more happily than I did voting for Obama), and I’ve said a few good words about him here. But does he invited me to dinner? Does he ask me to join him out on the shootin’ range? Does he call? Does one of his assistants ever call? No. No politician ever comes a-courtin’.

He does have a very nice beard.

He does have a very nice beard.

I wasn’t feeling snubbed until I heard about Robbie Cooper. Who? He’s a small-time blogger in Austin, and recently Texas Republicans Greg Abbott, Rick Perry, David Dewhurst, and Ken Paxton have invited him in for conversations. See? The Republicans know how to treat their people!

Now, you might be saying to yourself, “But, Myers, you’re a crappy blogger who alienates everyone, it’s no wonder you have no friends in high places.” And, well, that’s true, but that doesn’t stop the Republicans from befriending Robbie Cooper, who is a racist jerk.

Robbie Cooper is very concerned about “The Blacks”, or as he prefers to call them, “The Niggers”.

Screen Shot 2013-09-28 at 6.38.25 PM

Really? I checked out his awful blog, and you get the flavor pretty quickly. He’s obsessed with roving gangs of urban black teenagers running around beating up innocent white people — it seems to be his major theme, that The Blacks are out of control, and Good White People need to get a concealed handgun license so they can shoot them when they get too close. He favorably cites John Derbyshire’s racist advice and condemns places like Philadelphia as “shitholes” because they’re full of urban thugs running rampant and hunting white people. I lived in Philadelphia for many years; I worked in North Philadelphia and walked in black neighborhoods there; the only times I’ve ever been shot at were by a white prostitute in Seattle (I was an innocent bystander in the line of fire when when she opened fire on someone else), and by a good ol’ boy in the farm country east of the Cascades who decided it would be hilarious to open fire with a hunting rifle on some hikers. I’d feel safer in North Philly than I would in rural Texas…and admittedly, part of that is bias, from reading blustering, quick-on-the-trigger bully boys like Cooper.

His other topics seem to be how much he despises liberals, gays, liberals, illegal immigrants, liberals, public schools, liberals, feminists, liberals, and anyone who isn’t white. And that was from just scanning the front page, no need to dig into his archives.

And he’s still called in for chummy little gatherings with Texas Republicans.

So that’s the formula for becoming a politically influential blogger? Write more racist screeds, brag about my guns, become a Republican, and live in Texas? Dang. I can’t do any of those things.

And somehow, I don’t think Al Franken would want to be my friend if I were to do them.

So that’s how religious fantasies directly harm people…

The child-raping and the beheadings get all the headlines, but meanwhile, the machinery of faith keeps clawing at the foundation of society in subtler ways as well — it’s a free-wheeling parasitic scam, an infection that our social immune system is conditioned to tolerate. Answers in Genesis is a beautiful example. They have millions of dollars that they funnel into lying to people and corrupting education, and ultimately, they really are just a grand scam for leaching money out of their environment. I mentioned that they’re selling junk bonds to expand their operations, and that their ridiculous Ark Park is a boondoggle retreating into the distance as they continually promise and fail. Americans United describes their other tactic: hoodwinking secular government into propping up their depradations.

The latest ploy comes courtesy of the city of Williamstown, which is not far from Cincinnati. The town already gave the overtly religious park a 75 percent property tax break, and Bloomberg News reported this week that the city plans to sell $62 million in municipal bonds in December for AiG affiliates. This means the city is actively taking on quite a bit of debt for the sole purpose of funding the Ark Park.

And by “the city”, of course, what they mean are the citizens and businesses of Williamstown, who are being robbed of massive sums of money to support that con man, Ken Ham.

The article also mentions that AiG has received $40 million plus in tax incentives from the state…for a proposal that has only managed to get somewhere around $4 million in donations. That’s a whole lot of huffing and puffing to inflate the lead balloon of the Ark Park. Further, they’re sinking $2 million into improving a road to nowhere, the proposed Ark Park site.

But let’s step back a bit. This isn’t just a sinkhole into which the state of Kentucky proposes to throw money — even if it were to “succeed” as a tourist attraction, the existence of a state-subsidized monument to anti-scientific idiocy ought to be an embarrassment and an impediment to the status of the region. The state of Kentucky and the city of Williamstown seem to be happily shooting themselves over this deal…all because it’s in the name of faith and piety and god.

Simple answers for stupid people

Richard Cohen, one of the dumber conservatives to have a cushy job as a pundit, comments on the Republican Party.

Today’s GOP is not racist, as Harry Belafonte alleged about the tea party, but it is deeply troubled — about the expansion of government, about immigration, about secularism, about the mainstreaming of what used to be the avant-garde. People with conventional views must repress a gag reflex when considering the mayor-elect of New York — a white man married to a black woman and with two biracial children. (Should I mention that Bill de Blasio’s wife, Chirlane McCray, used to be a lesbian?) This family represents the cultural changes that have enveloped parts — but not all — of America. To cultural conservatives, this doesn’t look like their country at all.

Pro-tip: if you find yourself gagging at the thought of interracial marriage, you are racist. You are so racist you are choking on your own racism.

Bonus! If you find yourself uncomfortable with the thought that someone’s partner might have once had a same-sex relationship, you’re also homophobic!

That’s the state of America’s Republicans: racist and homophobic and so stupid that they don’t even realize it.

You want a useful roundup of Cohen’s past idiocies? You got it. It leaves out the time he told a young girl she didn’t need algebra, though.

Aww, Cohen’s feelings are hurt because everyone is calling him a racist. His defense? It’s because he’s a liberal.

Cohen has been criticized for his comments on race in the past. When asked why he thought it was that he keeps getting caught up in racially charged arguments, he said that its because people view him as a liberal and find some of his positions unconventional. "Every once in a while I take an unconventional stance as a liberal — as someone who has always been called a liberal," he said. "If someone on the right wrote this, no one would care. No one would make a big deal about it but because I veer every once in awhile from orthodoxy, or maybe more than once in awhile, I get plastered this way."

Fuck him. Go read Ta-Nehisi Coates instead.