Sunday, October 21, 2012 5:40:56 AM
Vandals spraypaint swastikas on Obama Colorado campaign office
By Arturo Garcia
Friday, October 19, 2012 17:26 EDT
For the second time in a week, a Colorado field office for President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign has been targeted.
KUSA-TV reported Friday [ http://www.9news.com/news/article/295086/222/Obama-campaign-office-vandalized-with-swastikas ] that the campaign’s field office in Conifer, Colorado, was found with swastikas spray-painted on it.
According to The Denver Post [ http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_21810827/vandals-spray-paint-swastikas-obama-campaign-office-conifer ], a spokesperson for the Johnson County Sheriff’s Department said a deputy answering a vandalism report that morning found three windows and five campaign signs for the president had been vandalized, though he did not know what had been spray-painted on them.
The swastika symbol is widely associated with the Nazi parties and accompanying philosophies like white supremacy.
Conifer is less than 60 miles away from Denver, where a gunshot was fired [ http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/10/12/report-obama-campaign-field-office-in-colorado-hit-by-gunfire/ (and see the first item in the post to which this is a reply)] at an Obama campaign field office Oct. 12. A Denver Police spokesman said the bullet was recovered from inside the office, but he did not have an update on that investigation.
Members of the Obama campaign at the Conifer office refused to comment on Friday’s incident.
KUSA’s report on the swastika incident, aired Friday, can be seen below.
[video embedded]
Copyright © 2012 Raw Story Media, Inc.
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/10/19/vandals-spraypaint-swastikas-on-obama-colorado-campaign-office/ [with comments]
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Swastika Found On Obama Campaign Office In Colorado
By John Celock
Posted: 10/19/2012 2:05 pm EDT Updated: 10/19/2012 7:59 pm EDT
WASHINGTON -- A swastika was found painted on the window of President Barack Obama's campaign office in a Denver, Colo., suburb late Thursday.
The black Nazi symbol was found by building owners painted outside a window of the office, located in the Denver suburb of Conifer, 9News.com reported [ http://www.9news.com/news/article/295086/222/Obama-campaign-office-vandalized-with-swastikas ]. The office opened recently in the Jefferson County hamlet.
The Jefferson County sheriff's office did not immediately return a request for comment. 9News.com reports that Obama's campaign has not commented on the incident, which comes a week after a shot was fired into a window [ http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/shot-fired-obama-campaign-office-denver-17468680 ] of Obama's Denver campaign office.
In 2009 during a Tea Party rally held to oppose the stimulus package on the day Obama signed the bill, a participant waved a sign [ http://www.denverpost.com/headlines/ci_11726655 ] bearing a swastika in the "O" of Obama's name. The sign holder had a picture taken [ http://www.coloradopols.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=8899 (picture next below)]
with conservative activist Michelle Malkin and was reportedly on stage when then-state Senate Minority Leader Josh Penry (R-Grand Junction) spoke.
The swastika incident occurs two weeks after an Obama supporter in Tulsa, Okla., who had an Obama sign on his lawn reported receiving a death threat from a neighbor [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/12/kyle-counts-obama-death-threat-oklahoma_n_1961540.html (the third item in the post to which this is a reply)]. Kyle Counts, a 27-year-old law student, told HuffPost that the neighbor engaged him an argument after seeing the sign and then yelled the threat, which was captured on video.
UPDATE: 7:55 p.m. -- Scott Lorditch, a volunteer at the Conifer office, told The Huffington Post that when he arrived at the office on Friday, staffers told him the vandalism occurred overnight. Lorditch said that Obama lawn signs in front of the office were also shredded. He said that while he did not see the damaged signs, when he arrived the signs were no longer in front of the office.
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/19/obama-swastika-colorado-office_n_1988128.html [with comments]
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U.S. Rep. Mike Coffman duplicated others' words in Post, DBJ op-eds
10/20/2012
A pair of columns published by Republican U.S. Rep. Mike Coffman of Aurora within the past year contain passages of previously published work by other House members but did not attribute the source of the information or writing.
The op-ed columns on different subjects were published beneath Coffman's byline in The Denver Post [ http://www.denverpost.com/opinion/ci_20384851/house-plan-protects-medicare ] and the Denver Business Journal [ http://www.bizjournals.com/denver/print-edition/2012/08/24/small-businesses-looking-over-edge-of.html ].
The Post op-ed contains [ http://extras.mnginteractive.com/live/media/site36/2012/1019/20121019_074339_20121019_064146_rep-mike-coffman-plagiarism_4.pdf ] unattributed material from a budget proposal crafted by Republican U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan [ http://budget.house.gov/uploadedfiles/pathtoprosperity2013.pdf ] of Wisconsin, while the Business Journal op-ed contains material earlier published by U.S. Rep. Sam Graves of Missouri [ http://smallbusiness.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=305351 ].
[...]
http://www.denverpost.com/breakingnews/ci_21813492/u-s-rep-mike-coffman-duplicated-others-words [with comments]
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Roger Rivard Picks Up Backing From Wisconsin Family Values Group After Saying 'Some Girls Rape Easy'
State Rep. Roger Rivard (R-Rice Lake) is losing support from fellow Republicans after he made controversial comments about rape.
By Amanda Terkel
Posted: 10/17/2012 3:42 pm Updated: 10/17/2012 3:58 pm
WASHINGTON -- Prominent Republicans in Wisconsin quickly dropped their support [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/12/roger-rivard-wisconsin-republicans-rape_n_1961124.html ] for state Rep. Roger Rivard (R-River Lake) after he told a newspaper that "[s]ome girls rape easy [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/10/roger-rivard-rape_n_1956491.html ]." But much like after Rep. Todd Akin (R-Mo.) made his controversial comments about "legitimate rape [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/19/todd-akin-abortion-legitimate-rape_n_1807381.html ]" and lost the backing of the GOP establishment, social conservatives and at least one "family values" group are rushing in to help.
On Wednesday, the Wisconsin Family Action PAC -- which bills itself as committed to "strengthening and preserving marriage, family, life and liberty" -- endorsed Rivard.
"We are very pleased to endorse candidates who recognize the importance of America's and Wisconsin's best natural resource -- her traditional families -- and who realize that our state's and our country's well-being is closely tied to the strength of this resource. These are candidates who will, in both policy and practice, work to help ensure that our families become or remain independent of government," said WFA PAC director Julaine Appling in a statement [ http://www.wifamilyaction.org/files/trya.campaigntoolbox.org/downloads/WFAPAC_PR_101612_0.pdf ].
Appling told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel [ http://www.jsonline.com/blogs/news/174410561.html ] that WFA PAC endorsed Rivard because of his stance on issues, but she declined to comment on his rape remark.
Rivard actually made his controversial remark -- which he said was advice shared with him by his father -- in December, when he talked to The Chetek Alert newspaper about the case of a 17-year-old high school student who was charged with sexual assault after having sex with an underage girl in the band room. The interview came to wider public notice after the Journal-Sentinel reported [ http://www.jsonline.com/news/statepolitics/state-legislator-criticized-for-comments-on-rape-hj76f4k-173587961.html ] on it last week.
Rivard told the Journal-Sentinel that his comments were "taken out of context," saying his father meant to convey that if "you do (have premarital sex), just remember, consensual sex can turn into rape in an awful hurry."
"Because all of a sudden a young lady gets pregnant and the parents are madder than a wet hen and she's not going to say, 'Oh, yeah, I was part of the program.' All that she has to say or the parents have to say is it was rape because she's underage. And he just said, 'Remember, Roger, if you go down that road, some girls,' he said, 'they rape so easy,'" Rivard said.
The district attorney involved in the case recently said that there was nothing consensual about the incident [ http://www.jsonline.com/news/statepolitics/prosecutor-says-sex-case-rivard-discussed-wasnt-consensual-v8784th-174290421.html ]; rather, that it was "a sex act perpetrated by force against the will of the victim."
Rivard is a freshman lawmaker and is stuck in a tight race for reelection against Democrat Stephen Smith.
He has since lost the backing [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/12/roger-rivard-wisconsin-republicans-rape_n_1961124.html ] of Wisconsin GOP Senate candidate Tommy Thompson, Gov. Scott Walker (R) and Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.).
The pattern of what Rivard is going through is similar to what Akin experienced in his bid for the U.S. Senate in Missouri, after he said that women are physically able to stop themselves from being pregnant if they are victims of a "legitimate rape." The GOP establishment -- including the National Republican Senatorial Committee and Karl Rove's Crossroads GPS -- pulled their financial support from Akin, and many Republicans called for him to bow out. Social conservatives [ http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2012/08/20/leading-social-conservatives-rally-to-akins-defense/ ], however, stuck by his side and have remained committed to helping him defeat Sen. Claire McCaskill (R-Mo.).
Since then, the GOP establishment has slowly begun moving back into the race [ http://go.bloomberg.com/political-capital/2012-09-26/akin-endorsed-by-santorum-demint/ ], with former presidential candidates Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum, as well as the National Federation of Independent Business [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/15/todd-akin-endorsed-nfib_n_1968318.html ], all endorsing Akin.
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/17/roger-rivard-wisconsin-family-values-rape_n_1973952.html [with comments]
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Mitt Romney's Contraception Strategy: Change The Subject
By Laura Bassett
Posted: 10/17/2012 3:58 pm Updated: 10/17/2012 11:58 pm
Earlier in his campaign, Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney took a clear stand [ http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-57388129-503544/romney-clarifies-stance-on-blunt-amendment-of-course-im-for-it/ ] on the issue of contraception coverage by stating that he would support legislation that allowed all employers to refuse to cover employees' birth control for moral reasons. But lately, when Romney is pressed on that particular stance, he dodges the question in a way that gives the impression he has reversed his previous position.
"I just know that I don't think bureaucrats in Washington should tell someone whether they can use contraceptives or not, and I don't believe employers should tell someone whether they have contraceptive care or not," Romney said during Tuesday night's debate. "Every woman in America should have access to contraceptives and the president's statement on my policy is completely and totally wrong."
Romney's answer subtly changes the subject from insurance coverage of contraception to the more general issue of access to contraception, and it strategically leaves enough wiggle room for his campaign to say that his position has not changed. Romney campaign adviser Kerry Healey did exactly that in an interview with MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell on Wednesday.
Romney did "not in any way" change his position, Healey said. "Governor Romney is both a strong supporter of religious freedom and also believes in access to contraception for American women."
Pressed on the details of the Blunt amendment, which would have allowed employers to refuse to cover birth control on moral grounds and which Romney previously said he would support, Healey changed the subject. "The question of whether or not we should force someone to give up their religious freedom to provide insurance coverage in some hypothetical situation is not really the point to most women out there," she said. "There are 5.5 million unemployed women in the country."
What's lost in both Romney's and Healey's answers on the contraception issue is the point that President Barack Obama made Tuesday night, which is that for many women, having birth control fully paid for by their insurance plans is an economic issue. "In my health care bill, I said insurance companies need to provide contraceptive coverage to everybody who's insured, because this is not just a health issue, it's an economic issue for women," he said. "It makes a difference. This is money out of that family's pocket."
Romney also changed the subject on birth control [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/09/mitt-romney-moderate-contraception-_n_1953132.html ] earlier this month when a reporter for the Des Moines Register asked him if insurers should be required to cover it. "Well it’s a question as to, should you get a car painted, you know, red or blue," he said. "I mean you can decide which you’d like. People who want to have contraceptive health insurance can choose that in their policy. Those that don’t have -- that choose not to can buy a policy with or without."
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/17/mitt-romney-contraception_n_1974752.html [with comments]
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Mitt Romney On Women At Bain: They Don't Want To Work There
10/18/2012
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/17/mitt-romney-women-bain_n_1974837.html [with comments]
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Romney 1994 on Women At Bain
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGq-08tk0NE [via/more at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/18/mitt-romney-women-bain_n_1980919.html (with comments)]
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Mitt Romney Adviser On Lilly Ledbetter Act: 'He Was Opposed To It At The Time' [UPDATE]
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/17/mitt-romney-lilly-ledbetter_n_1973446.html [with comments]
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Paul Broun, Charles Darwin Face Off: Republican Faces Odd Write-In Opponent In Georgia House Race
In this Wednesday, July 2, 2008 file photo, 10th Congressional District Republican candidate Rep. Paul Broun speaks on the set of Georgia Public television in Atlanta. The Georgia representative said in videotaped remarks on Sept. 27, 2012 that evolution, embryology and the Big Bang theory are "lies straight from the pit of hell" meant to convince people that they do not need a savior. The Republican lawmaker made those comments during a speech at a sportsman's banquet at Liberty Baptist Church.
By RAY HENRY and RUSS BYNUM
10/17/12 08:35 PM ET
ATLANTA — Having denounced evolution as a lie "straight from the pit of hell [see (linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=80286479 ]," Republican Rep. Paul Broun has won himself a new political opponent: Charles Darwin.
An ultraconservative congressman whose district includes the University of Georgia campus, Broun told a Baptist church last month that evolution, embryology and the Big Bang theory were lies spread by scientists out to erode people's faith in Jesus Christ. He also claimed the Earth is roughly 9,000 years, a view held by fundamentalist Christians based on biblical accounts of creation.
Now scientists are questioning whether Broun, a medical doctor and a Baptist from Athens, should serve on the House Science, Space and Technology Committee if he rejects widely accepted scientific ideas. And a talk radio host in nearby Atlanta is trying to rally voters to cast write-in votes for Darwin, the English naturalist who first published his theory of evolution in 1859.
Religious fundamentalists like Broun damage the Republican brand, said Neal Boortz, the libertarian-leaning radio host who has a strong following among Georgia conservatives.
"It makes Republicans look like knee-dragging, still-tending, tobacco-spitting Neanderthals," Boortz said.
A Facebook page promoting Darwin for Congress went up Oct. 8 urging supporters to take a stand against Broun.
But the laws of political science hold that Broun will likely win re-election to a fourth term. He has no Democratic opponent in the election Nov. 6 and Georgia law requires write-in candidates to register by early September. That, and Darwin is long dead.
"Dr. Broun welcomes Mr. Darwin as a challenger and is particularly looking forward to the debate portion of the campaign," the congressman's spokeswoman, Meredith Griffanti, said in an e-mail Wednesday evening. "We're sure it will be very lively."
The write-in campaign is tongue-in-cheek, said Jim Leebens-Mack, a plant biologist at the University of Georgia who started the Facebook page. But its supporters hope Darwin gets enough votes to pressure Republicans into removing Broun from a leadership post on the House Science Committee. Kevin Smith, a spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner, did not immediately return a message seeking comment.
"I'd think the Republican Party would want to put a serious legislator in this seat rather than have Paul Broun," Leebens-Mack said.
Griffanti had previously said the congressman's Sept. 27 comments to a banquet at Liberty Baptist Church of Hartwell were intended as off-the-record statements about his personal beliefs. The church posted video of the congressman's speech on its website.
"God's word is true," Broun said in the video. "I've come to understand that. All that stuff I was taught about evolution and embryology and Big Bang theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of hell. And it's lies to try to keep me and all the folks who are taught that from understanding that they need a savior."
Mark Farmer, the biological sciences chairman at the University of Georgia, said Broun should resign his committee seat or be removed.
"If you truly don't understand or accept the basic tenets of modern science, I find it difficult to see how you could be making basic judgments about science policy," Farmer said.
Bynum reported from Savannah.
Copyright 2012 The Associated Press
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/17/paul-broun-charles-darwin_n_1974054.html [with comments]
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Louie Gohmert: Slavery Was 'A Blot On Our Existence,' But We're Farther From God Now
By Nick Wing
Posted: 10/17/2012 2:37 pm
Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) stated on Tuesday that the legacy of slavery in the United States was a particularly ugly moment in the nation's history, but that the situation now is even worse [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/gohmert-america-worse-off-now-slavery (next item below)].
Speaking on a conference call with far-right pastor Rick Scarborough, Gohmert warned listeners that the nation could be coming "toward the end of [its] existence," as evidenced by its leaders and citizens allegedly neglecting to remain true to biblical teachings.
"We strayed away different times. Andrew Jackson’s time was not a great time, different times slavery was a blot on our existence," Gohmert said. "But the trouble is we have never as an entire nation overall been so far away from God’s teaching and so openly rebelling, even from the top, against God’s teachings in the Bible."
Listen to the audio from Right Wing Watch [id.]:
[audio embedded]
Gohmert frequently speaks about what he sees as the degradation of religious principles in American society. Over the summer he blamed the supposed trend [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/20/louie-gohmert-aurora-shootings_n_1689099.html ] for the mass-shooting in Aurora, Colo.
"You know what really gets me, as a Christian, is to see the ongoing attacks on Judeo-Christian beliefs, and then some senseless crazy act of terror like this takes place," Gohmert said hours after the massacre in which 12 people were killed and 58 were wounded. "Some of us happen to believe that when our founders talked about guarding our virtue and freedom, that that was important. ... Whether it's John Adams saying our Constitution was made only for moral and religious people ... Ben Franklin, only a virtuous people are capable of freedom, as nations become corrupt and vicious they have more need of masters. ... We have been at war with the very pillars, the very foundation of this country."
Gohmert was also a leading proponent [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/26/louie-gohmert-media-muslim-brotherhood_n_1707025.html ] of a controversial push over the summer to investigate top Obama administration aides for supposed ties to the Muslim Brotherhood.
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/17/louie-gohmert-slavery_n_1974425.html [with comments]
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Rep. Gohmert Says America is Worse off Now than During Slavery
Submitted by Brian Tashman on Tuesday, 10/16/2012 5:20 pm
Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) joined the fervently [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/rick-scarborough-aids-gods-judgment-immoral-act ] anti-gay [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/scarborough-needs-money-stop-sodomites ], anti-Latino [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/latino-democratic-councilman-partners-anti-latino-pastor-rick-scarborough ] pastor Rick Scarborough of Vision America for his “40 Days to Save America” conference call today, and delivered a somber message to participants about how America is on the verge of collapse if their prayer efforts to shift the election [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/scarborough-leading-40-days-prayer-remove-ungodly-office ] don’t work. “The truth is if you look at great nations, great civilizations, great powers throughout recorded history, when they’ve passed some of the milestones we have as a nation, that was the sign that they were toward the end of their existence,” Gohmert said. He stated that “the only reason I continue to run for Congress is because I still have hope" as he urged Americans to “follow the rule book as to what blesses a nation” and join Scarborough’s prayer initiative.
[audio embedded]
The congressman argued that our Founders “followed biblical teachings” and therefore gave us “more liberties, more individual freedoms and values, ease of living, quality and standard of living than even more than Solomon’s Israel.” Gohmert went on to claim that the U.S. is in a state of such spiritual disrepair that the country is even worse off than during slavery, arguing that while “Andrew Jackson’s time was not a great time, at different times slavery was a blot on our existence,” America has “never as an entire nation overall been so far away from God’s teaching and so openly rebelling, even from the top, against God’s teaching in the Bible.”
[audio embedded]
There is so much that is so critical to whether or not this country continues, the greatest gift of a country to any people in history: more liberties, more individual freedoms and values, ease of living, quality and standard of living than even more than Solomon’s Israel. No explanation as to why we’ve been so blessed other than the people who went before us were blessed, they followed God’s rule book, in our founding they followed biblical teachings. We strayed away at different times, Andrew Jackson’s time was not a great time, at different times slavery was a blot on our existence, but the trouble is we have never as an entire nation overall been so far away from God’s teaching and so openly rebelling, even from the top, against God’s teachings in the Bible.
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© 2012 People For the American Way
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/gohmert-america-worse-off-now-slavery
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Tommy Thompson's Son Made Birther Joke On More Than One Occasion (VIDEO)
10/17/2012
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Tommy Thompson Underestimates His Iran-Linked Stock During Debate
10/19/2012
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/19/tommy-thompson-iran-stock_n_1989632.html [with comments]
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Richard Mourdock Visits Controversial Fundamentalist Church That Uses Paddling
By Michael McAuliff
Posted: 10/15/2012 4:18 pm Updated: 10/15/2012 4:37 pm
Indiana state treasurer and Senate candidate Richard Mourdock has been trying to soften his hard-right image lately, but that didn't stop him from recently visiting [ http://www.nwitimes.com/news/local/porter/congregation-hosts-candidates/article_dcd30c2a-20c0-5159-bb54-60a6bba9eedc.html ] a fundamentalist church with extreme views.
Mourdock beat Sen. Dick Lugar in the GOP primary by shunning bipartisanship and pledging to be an uncompromising conservative in the U.S. Senate. But facing tightening polls against Rep. Joe Donnelly (D-Ind.) and unease among independents, Mourdock has been singing a much more bipartisan tune lately, even cutting an ad [ http://www.wbiw.com/local/archives/2012/08/new_tv_ad_featuring_lt_governo.php ] that promised he'll work with everyone.
The visit to the Fairhaven Baptist Church and its academy suggests he intends to continue catering to his base, however.
The Fairhaven school was in the news last year for maintaining a harsh disciplinary environment that features public whipping and humiliation of students. Rev. Roger Voegtlin, who runs the church, had a run-in with the law in the 1970s, but was cleared of all charges. In a CNN feature last year [ http://www.cnn.com/video/?/video/us/2011/09/23/tuchman-ungodly-discipline-part-3.cnn ( http://www.cnn.com/video/?/video/us/2011/09/23/tuchman-ungodly-discipline-part-3.cnn#/video/us/2011/09/23/tuchman-ungodly-discipline-part-3.cnn )], he said he still prescribes spanking children in a humiliating fashion.
"Yes. It is still done today," Voegtlin told the cable outlet. "And I suppose it is humiliation, but again, humiliation is not the big thing."
The church's controversial practices also got local coverage [ http://blogs.post-trib.com/davich/2011/10/church-scandal-column-sparks-b.html ].
Mourdock's campaign declined to discuss the visit, but posted a couple of pictures on the campaign's Flickr feed [ http://www.flickr.com/photos/mourdock2012/8080738139/in/photostream/ ].
Voegtlin praised Mourdock [ http://www.nwitimes.com/news/local/porter/congregation-hosts-candidates/article_dcd30c2a-20c0-5159-bb54-60a6bba9eedc.html ] and told his congregants, “I believe with all my heart this is the most important election in my lifetime.”
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/15/richard-mourdock-church-paddling_n_1968133.html [with comments]
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Matt Reisetter, Iowa State Senate Candidate, Says Divorce Is 'Evil,' Opposes Same-Sex Marriage
Iowa state Senate candidate Matt Reisetter
By John Clelock
Posted: 10/19/2012 5:15 pm EDT Updated: 10/19/2012 5:31 pm EDT
A Republican candidate for the Iowa state Senate told a group of college students that divorce is "evil" and that same-sex marriage should be blocked, along with criticizing his in-laws' marriage, in an undated video released by local Democrats.
Matt Reisetter, a staffer with the conservative group The Family Leader, outlined his positions in a lecture called "Homosexuality: Is It OK To Be Gay?" that he gave to students in 2010 at the University of Northern Iowa [ http://www.northern-iowan.org/mobile/uni-students-discuss-different-perspectives-of-homosexuality-1.2219609 ]. Another group, the Northern Iowa Democrats posted the video [ http://www.northerniowademocrats.com/2012/10/will-real-matt-reisetter-please-stand-up.html (direct link https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B09DpwKP2vaTdlhDQUVEcWxubXM )] on its website this week. Reisetter is challenging Sen. Jeff Danielson (D-Waterloo) for the seat.
In the lecture, Reisetter discusses biblical views and outlines his thoughts on same-sex marriage and homosexuality in general, along with divorce. The speech included questions from a liberal-leaning student audience.
"Social scientists, whether they be pagans or Christians, alike agree that the best environment to raise a child has one mom and one dad," Reisetter said.
He noted that same-sex marriage does not allow for a man and a woman to raise a child, and is hurting the development of children. He also noted that divorce causes similar problems by splitting up families and that divorce laws should be made harder, not easier.
"Divorce sucks, it's evil and it's wrong," Reisetter said.
He also cited studies that said that men engaging in anal sex have a higher rate of being exposed to the HIV virus than those who do not. Labeling the issue a public health risk, and comparing it to smoking bans, Reisetter questioned why the government is sanctioning same-sex marriage, which would lead to two married men having consensual sex.
When students countered that marriage would lead to monogamy, Reisetter said he does not believe gay men want to practice monogamy. Gay men are "by and large not into marriage," he said, while lesbians are more in favor of same-sex marriage.
He said, in general, laws should provide assistance to the larger population. "The role of law is to put laws on the books that promote the best beliefs," Reisetter said.
Reisetter rejected arguments that compare same-sex marriage with interracial marriage, saying that people are born with a skin color but not with a sexual orientation. He told the audience that no studies have proved 100 percent that someone is born with a sexual orientation, and that even if someone is born to do something, it does not mean they should.
"I was born to have sex with as many women as I was attracted to, I was born to take things that were not mine, I was born to be selfish," Reisetter said. "Being born gay does not win the argument. I was born to do things that are wrong."
Reisetter also addressed his in-laws' marriage early in his presentation, noting that they have the "worst marriage" as part of his questioning over who should be married. "(They) have the worst marriage that I have ever seen on screen or in real life," Reisetter said. "It is the worst, it is terrible. My wife would agree with me. My mother-in-law would agree with me."
Reisetter and his spokesman did not return multiple messages left for comment.
Danielson told HuffPost that he is opposed to Reisetter's views, saying that the video shows that the Republican has "radically extreme views about social issues."
"I think that Matt Reisetter's radical extreme social views are unbelievable to voters," Danielson said. "I believe that they want a senator who is thoughtful and understanding when it comes to our differences."
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/19/matt-reisetter-iowa-senate-divorce-gay-marriage_n_1989084.html [with comments]
===
Timothy Kurek, Straight Christian Man, 'Comes Out' And Pretends To Be Gay For A Year
Posted: 10/13/2012 11:59 am Updated: 10/18/2012 4:29 pm
Thousands of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people weren't the only ones celebrating National Coming Out Day [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/11/national-coming-out-day-celebrities-closet_n_1957679.html ] on Thursday. A Christian man from Tennessee appeared on ABC News to talk about his own coming out experience but -- he's straight.
Timothy Kurek "came out" to his family and friends and lived as a gay man for a year in order to experience what life is like as an LGB person. The Liberty College graduate told ABC News [ http://abcnews.go.com/Health/cross-closet-straight-christian-lives-year-gay-man/story?id=17443219 ], "You learned to be very afraid of God [in church]... [And you learned] the loving thing to do is to tell my friend who is gay, 'Hey, listen, you are an abomination and you need to repent to go to heaven.' I absolutely believed in that lock, stock and barrel."
But four years ago a lesbian acquaintance of his relayed the story of how her family rejected her when she came out to them and Kurek was moved to take action.
"I feel God really kicked me in the gut," he said. "She was crying in my arms and instead of being there for her, I was thinking about all the arguments to convert her."
Soon after Kurek decided to go under cover and "come out" as a gay man.
"I came out to everybody! My friends, family, everyone," Kurek told HuffPost blogger George Elerick [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/george-elerick/jesus-in-drag-straight-christians-comes-out-for-book_b_1569051.html ]. "I just knew that I needed to understand, as realistically as possible, how the label of gay might change my life. The social experiment itself demanded all or nothing."
According to the Guardian [ http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/oct/13/bible-belt-conservative-year-gay ], Kurek even "got a job in a gay cafe, hung out in a gay bar and joined a gay softball league, all the while maintaining his inner identity as a straight Christian."
The only people that knew the truth about what Kurek was doing were an aunt, a close friend and a gay friend who was recruited to play his boyfriend.
"I needed protection to keep me balanced and teach me the nuances of gay culture and how they flirt, and to give me an excuse when guys hit on me," said Kurek.
While Kurek claims that after he "came out" nearly 95 percent of his friends stopped talking to him, it was his mom who initially took the experiment the hardest.
"I snooped in my mother's journal one day [ http://abcnews.go.com/Health/cross-closet-straight-christian-lives-year-gay-man/story?id=17443219&page=2 ] after I had come out and she'd written, 'I'd rather have found out from a doctor that I had terminal cancer than have a gay son.'" But he says she eventually came to terms with his "sexuality" and "went from being a very conservative Christian to being an ally to the gay community [ http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/oct/13/bible-belt-conservative-year-gay ]."
Kurek used his experience to write a book, "The Cross In The Closet [ http://www.amazon.com/The-Cross-Closet-ebook/dp/B009L9F0YW ]," some of the proceeds from which he says he will donate to LGBT homeless youth centers.
"What I went through is NOTHING compared to the experience of the average gay and lesbian. They were never able to say 'only 12 or eight or six more months of this before I get to be me again,'" Kurek told Elerick [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/george-elerick/jesus-in-drag-straight-christians-comes-out-for-book_b_1569051.html ]. "So what I consider to be the most eye-opening facet of my year was really only a glimpse of how bad the closet really is."
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/13/timothy-kurek-straight-christian-pretends-gay_n_1963657.html [with ABC News video report embedded, and comments]
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Rachel Held Evans, Evangelical Author, Uses The Word Vagina, Has Book Passed Over By Largest Christian Chain
By Meredith Bennett-Smith
Posted: 10/16/2012 1:05 pm
One woman's vagina is causing quite a ruckus in evangelical circles. Well known evangelical blogger Rachel Held Evans spent the past year trying to "live biblically" by following the Bible's instructions -- from calling her husband "master" to camping out in her front yard during her period -- for her new book, "Year of Biblical Womanhood." Last week, Evans learned her book will not be carried by LifeWay, one of the biggest Christian bookstore chains in the country [ http://www.lifeway.com/ ].
"Vaginagate," as Evans has called the controversy [ http://rachelheldevans.com/victory-vagina ], is focusing attention on the Christian publishing business, as fans and fellow Christian writers have come forward in solidarity, signing petitions and sharing stories of their own censorship [ http://blog.christianitytoday.com/women/2012/03/when_christian_bookstores_ban.html ] at the hands of the lucrative industry. While the reasons behind the chain's decision have not been disclosed, Evans said she was warned this summer that if she refused to take out a reference to her 16-year-old self's vagina, her book might be banned [ http://rachelheldevans.com/christian-industry ].
Evans claims she is not some radical trying to shake up the church structure. As Slate magazine pointed out in a September post about the book, Evans' blog draws thousands of "highly evangelical readers [ http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2011/09/a_year_of_biblical_womanhood.html ]" every day and she speaks at Christian universities across the country. Her father is a professor of Christian thought and Biblical studies at a small religious college in Tennessee where Evans still lives with her college sweetheart.
In September, Evans was featured on Christianity Today's list of 50 Christian women [ http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2012/october/50-women-you-should-know.html ] shaping "evangelical church and North American society," alongside such high-profile women as Michelle Bachmann.
"A Year of Biblical Womanhood [ http://www.amazon.com/Year-Biblical-Womanhood-Liberated-Covering/dp/1595553673 ]" is Evans' follow-up to her successful 2010 memoir, "Evolving in Monkey Town [ http://www.amazon.com/Evolving-Monkey-Town-Answers-Questions/dp/0310293995 ]." According to the Amazon book description [ http://www.amazon.com/Year-Biblical-Womanhood-Liberated-Covering/dp/1595553673 ], "Evans embarked on a radical life experiment—a year of biblical womanhood. Intrigued by the traditionalist resurgence that led many of her friends to abandon their careers to assume traditional gender roles in the home, Evans decides to try it for herself, vowing to take all of the Bible’s instructions for women as literally as possible for a year."
The basic premise of the book is simple, and its language is "super-PG" Evans told Slate [ http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2012/10/a_year_of_biblical_womanhood_rachel_held_evans_followed_the_bible_and_wrote.2.html ], with no bad words and none of the mildly feminist thinking that has got her into some squabbles in the past. Evans' references of the currently infamous v-word are twofold: firstly in the description of a woman raped in the Congo, and second in a description of a teenaged Evans signing an abstinence pledge card as a promise "to God and my vagina."
In March, her editor at Thomas Nelson suggested she take that second vagina out, lest it be passed over by stores like LifeWay, which is considered to have some of the strictest editorial standards while controlling 160 stores in 26 states, according to the magazine.
On her blog, Evans admitted to having conflicted feelings about the request [ http://rachelheldevans.com/christian-industry ]. "[My publisher] won’t let me use the word “vagina” in my book because we have to sell it to Christian bookstores, which apparently have a thing against vaginas," she wrote. "I make a big scene about it and say that if Christian bookstores stuck to their own ridiculous standards, they wouldn’t be able carry the freaking Bible."
Evans went on to decry what she saw as the "chokehold" of Christian bookstores [ http://www.christianpost.com/news/lifeway-drops-rachel-held-evans-a-year-of-biblical-womanhood-82971/ ] on the Christian publishing industry. "As a result, the entire Christian industry has been sanitized, while its best artists look elsewhere for publication," she wrote.
Outraged fans have rallied around her [ https://twitter.com/AndieRedwine/statuses/255716626069090304 ].
Andie Redwine
@AndieRedwine
This proud vagina owner just pre-ordered a new book @rachelheldevans - "A Year Of Biblical Womanhood" - can't wait! amzn.to/PTyFrB
9 Oct 12
Some started an online petition, "Put the word "vagina" back into Rachel's book! [ http://www.amazon.com/word-vagina-back-into-Rachels/forum/Fx2RGUU4576JDI9/TxQ5C3ICR5ERRW/1/ ]" and others made "Team Vagina" t-shirts [ http://www.zazzle.com/ericmichael84 ]. Evans put the word back in.
Then LifeWay announced it would not, after all, carry the book in its stores [ http://rachelheldevans.com/lifeway-year-of-biblical-womanhood ] (although it may be available online, Evans seemed unclear on this point.)
Evans is quick to point out that LifeWay has declined to comment on why her book will not be carried, and she mentioned a source who said off the record it may have been more of a content issue. The book was panned in a blog post on John Piper's blog, and some have even questioned Evans' evangelical credentials.
On the other hand, LifeWay has allowed other "less-than-clinical" references to male and female body parts--in books written by male authors, including popular Seattle megachurch pastor Mark Driscoll’s recent book "Real Marriage." Driscoll's advice book includes approving descriptions of anal sex, role playing, and sex toys [ http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/01/13/mark-driscoll-s-sex-manual-real-marriage-scandalizes-evangelicals.html ].
Evans told Slate that she wishes the saga had played out differently.
“I often hear from evangelical leaders, ‘Oh we’re really eager to have more female leaders,’ ” she said. “I want to say, ‘This is my voice. This is what it sounds like.’ ”
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/16/rachel-held-evans-evangelical-authors-uses-vagina-book-passed-over_n_1970574.html [with comments]
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Live Action Undercover 'Sting' Targeting Four Women's Advocacy Groups
By Laura Bassett
Posted: 10/15/2012 4:27 pm Updated: 10/16/2012 10:43 am
An anti-abortion activist group notorious for its undercover "sting" operations on Planned Parenthood is currently attempting a similar secret investigation of the family planning provider and at least three other progressive advocacy groups, Planned Parenthood told The Huffington Post on Monday.
Live Action, which most recently tried to catch Planned Parenthood [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/23/planned-parenthood-live-action_n_1446527.html ] facilitating sex-selective abortions in April, sent a woman posing as the owner of a Malibu, Calif., abortion clinic to meet with at least four women's health advocacy organizations -- Planned Parenthood Action Fund, NARAL Pro-Choice America, EMILY's List and Priorities USA -- during the first week of October. The woman called herself "Wendy Reed," presented a business card with that name on it, and promised to make a "substantial donation" to each organization if they agreed to meet with her and answer her questions, the organizations confirmed to The Huffington Post.
The woman asked each organization a similar pattern of questions having to do with President Barack Obama's plans for abortion policy in his second term. She asked whether the groups expected him to repeal the long-standing Hyde Amendment, which prevents the use of federal funds to pay for abortions, and whether they or the president supports late-term abortions, or so-called partial birth abortions. She also inquired about the groups' political strategies and pressed for information about how closely the groups worked with the Obama campaign.
All of the organizations said they immediately suspected that the woman was not a legitimate donor.
"She showed up unannounced at our office on a Wednesday, claiming that she wanted to make a sizeable contribution to our electoral efforts. That raised a red flag right away," said Beth Shipp, political director of NARAL Pro-Choice America. She said NARAL sent lower-level staffers from its development team to meet with the woman at a Caribou Coffee in Washington, D.C., on October 5 because it was a "high-trafficked public place."
Dawn Laguens, executive vice president for communications at PPAF, said the woman raised PPAF's suspicions by asking "kooky questions" about abortion policy that a donor would not normally ask. "We're focused on birth control and protecting Roe v. Wade and making sure your boss can't take away insurance coverage, and she's digging on these very obscure policy topics," Laguens said. "That was an alert."
PPAF became so suspicious of the woman that they set up a second meeting with her to get a better image of her face on the security camera. When the woman returned, the security guard asked for her identification, and she presented a Costco ID that listed her name as "Wendy Wilmowski." Laguens said PPAF was then able to confirm that Wilmowski was working with Live Action and that the website [ http://privatewomenscare.org/ ] listed on her business card was a hoax.
"[Live Action has] a history of hoax videos, but now they've added that they will even impersonate a medical provider and mislead people out in the world with this fake website," Laguens said.
Live Action did not return a call for comment.
None of the organizations are worried that the people with whom Wilmowski met on their donor teams said anything that could be used against them, but they did express concern that Live Action would heavily edit the videos [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/02/24/planned-parenthood-funding_n_827886.html ] before releasing them to the public as it has done in the past.
"We told her the truth, which is that we don't lobby and we exist solely to elect these pro-choice women and to make a better America for women and their families," said Jen Bluestein, communications director for EMILY's List. "That said, these people have proven again and again that the truth is not where their commitments lie. I fully expect they'll try to turn everything that was said against our candidates and against our president, because reporting the truth and campaigning on their own agenda to roll back women's access to health care would not be a winning approach."
Shipp said Wilmowski could not have any dirt on NARAL, because the staffers directed all of Wilmowski's abortion questions to NARAL's policy team. "The fact that they're using live videotapes and trying to trip people up and get people to say things that aren't true and cut and slice -- that's despicable," Shipp said. "If that's the only way you can win an election, that's downright shameful."
Priorities USA confirmed that Wilmowski met with members of its development team, but declined to comment for this story.
PPAF has taken steps to retaliate against Live Action by writing a letter to California Attorney General Kamala Harris requesting that her office investigate Wilmowski's fake website and, if necessary, prosecute the people involved.
"If this medical website is a hoax and is falsely holding out services to women in need, it should be immediately taken down and the persons responsible for the site should be held accountable," Laguens wrote in the letter, dated October 11. "Politicizing women's health by creating false identities and advertising sham medical services should be widely condemned by all."
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/15/live-action-undercover-sting_n_1968136.html [with comments]
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Arizona Planned Parenthood Victory: Federal Judge Bars State From Restricting Funding To Health Clinics
10/20/2012
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/19/arizona-planned-parenthood_n_1990572.html [with comments]
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Congressman Joe Walsh Is the Latest Republican to Say Ridiculous Thing About Abortion
Legitimate health of the mother?
By Dan Amira
October 19, 2012 at 9:33 AM
Turn the "Republican Congressman Saying Ridiculous Thing About Abortion" sign back to zero! During a debate last night, incumbent Illinois congressman Joe Walsh declared that he's against abortion rights without exception, including life of the mother, a position on which elaborated later [ http://www.wgnradio.com/news/top/chi-walsh-duckworth-clash-on-medicare-abortion-20121018,0,4118256.story ]:
Asked by reporters after the debate if he was saying that it’s never medically necessary to conduct an abortion to save the life of a mother, Walsh responded, “Absolutely.”
“With modern technology and science, you can't find one instance,” he said. “... There is no such exception as life of the mother, and as far as health of the mother, same thing.”
Needless to say, Walsh's claim is as false as a giant crate of false teeth manufactured by False Teeth Incorporated. Ectopic pregnancies are but one example of a condition that may require an abortion to save the mother's life. Such a pregnancy occurs when the fertilized egg implants itself somewhere outside of the uterus — usually, in the fallopian tubes. Ectopic pregnancies are often aborted because, if they're not, the mother can die. From the CDC [ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21422853 ]:
Between 1980 and 2007, 876 deaths were attributed to ectopic pregnancy. The ectopic pregnancy mortality ratio declined by 56.6%, from 1.15 to 0.50 deaths per 100,000 live births between 1980-1984 and 2003-2007; at the current average annual rate of decline, this ratio will further decrease by 28.5% to 0.36 ectopic pregnancy deaths per 100,000 live births by 2013-2017. The ectopic pregnancy mortality ratio was 6.8 times higher for African Americans than whites and 3.5 times higher for women older than 35 years than those younger than 25 years during 2003-2007.
We're sure Congressman Walsh would have Googled this information if he wasn't too busy berating his constituents [ http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2011/11/congressman-joe-walsh-flips-out-when-hes-hungry.html ] and denigrating his opponent's war heroics [ http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2012/07/joe-walsh-tammy-duckworth-true-hero.html ] — time-consuming activities, both.
Copyright © 2012, New York Media LLC
http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2012/10/joe-walsh-abortion-health-mother.html [with comments]
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Joe Walsh: Gay Marriage Is A 'Socioeconomic Issue'
10/20/2012
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/20/joe-walsh-gay-marriage_n_1992637.html [with comments]
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Walsh to Employers: Threaten Your Employees Jobs, Health Insurance to Get Their Vote
Rep. Walsh speaking at a campaign event in Bloomingdale, IL on Saturday 10/13/12 told business owners in the audience to threaten their employees jobs and health insurance to get them to vote Republican.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxKERQRdmz0 [via/more at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/17/joe-walsh-obama-supporters-vote_n_1974914.html (with comments)]
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Putin On The Mitts
Romney Using The Same Campaign Tactics That “Number One Foe” Uses
To: The Koch Brothers [ http://www.nsfwcorp.com/desk/koch-brothers ] Desk
From: Mark Ames [ http://www.nsfwcorp.com/author/mark-ames ]
Salt Lake City
Friday, October 19th, 2012
One of the biggest shocks for me since getting tossed out of Russia four years ago was coming back to an America that’s taking on Russia’s worst traits: oligarchy, inequality, a two-tier justice system depending on your wealth.
Now that Romney and his financial backers are openly pressuring company employees to vote for Romney, add "Putin-style elections" to the list of Russian traits America is acquiring.
Last year, I first broke this story [ http://www.thenation.com/article/160062/big-brothers-thought-control-koch ] with Mike Elk for The Nation about how the Koch brothers were ramming political propaganda down their workers’ throats, advising them which candidates to vote for — all right-wing freemarketeers, nearly all Republican — warning their employees that if their slate of candidates weren’t elected, their jobs could be lost due to economic catastrophe.
The Kochs and other employers can do this thanks to Citizens United, which has done more to speed up the Putin-ization of America than Putin himself could have dreamed of in his darkest fantasies. From the time of the New Deal labor laws until the Citizens United decision in 2010, employers were barred from pressuring their employees on how to vote in elections, for the obvious simple reason that employers have an enormous amount of leverage over employees.
As Marquette University law professor Paul Secunda told me last year [non-working link]:
"Before Citizens United, federal election law allowed a company like Koch Industries to talk to officers and shareholders about whom to vote for, but not to talk with employees about whom to vote for. Now, companies like Koch Industries are free to send out newsletters persuading their employees how to vote. They can even intimidate their employees into voting for their candidates. It’s a very troubling situation."
This past week, Mike Elk reported [ http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/14017/koch_industries_sends_45000_employees_pro_romney_mailing ] that the Kochs are once again pressuring their employees on how to vote—for Mitt Romney, in case you’re wondering. Here’s what Elk wrote:
"In a voter information packet obtained by In These Times, the Koch Industries corporate leadership informed tens of thousands of employees at its subsidiary, Georgia Pacific, that their livelihood could depend on the 2012 election and that the company supports Mitt Romney for president. The guide was similar to one the company distributed before the 2010 midterm elections, which Mark Ames and I reported on in The Nation last year.
The packet arrived in the mailboxes of all 45,000 Georgia Pacific employees earlier this month."
Elk quotes a letter from Koch Industries COO warning company employees:
"If we elect candidates who want to spend hundreds of billions in borrowed money on costly new subsidies for a few favored cronies, put unprecedented regulatory burdens on businesses, prevent or delay important new construction projects, and excessively hinder free trade, then many of our more than 50,000 U.S. employees and contractors may suffer the consequences, including higher gasoline prices, runaway inflation, and other ills."
And then on Wednesday, Elk posted [ http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/14046/romney_instructed_employers_to_tell_employees_how_to_vote_in_conference_cal/ (and see {linked in} http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=80642155 and preceding (and any future following)] the audio of a conference call Mitt Romney gave to the National Federation of Independent Business telling employers to put pressure on their employees to vote Romney:
"I hope you make it very clear to your employees what you believe is in the best interest of your enterprise and therefore their job and their future in the upcoming elections. And whether you agree with me or you agree with President Obama, or whatever your political view, I hope, I hope you pass those along to your employees."
The employers’ association that Romney spoke to, the National Federation of Independent Business, didn’t even bother hiding the audio that Elk reposted—because now, thanks to Citizens United, it’s no longer illegal to apply that pressure on employees, as Romney himself cheerfully noted in his conference call:
"Nothing illegal about you talking to your employees about what you believe is best for the business, because I think that will figure into their election decision, their voting decision and of course doing that with your family and your kids as well."
It may not be illegal, but then again, in a tinpot oligarchy or pseudo-democracy, a lot of anti-democratic things are "legal."
And the Kochs are hardly alone among pro-Romney plutocrats pressuring their employees. Gawker outed billionaire Peter Seigel, CEO of Westgate Resorts, for threatening [ http://gawker.com/5950189/the-ceo-who-built-himself-americas-largest-house-just-threatened-to-fire-his-employees-if-obamas-elected (and see {linked in} http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=80501886 and preceding and following)] to fire his 7,000 employees if Obama wins. The New Republic exposed [ http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/108140/coal-miners-donor-mitt-romney-benefactor ] how the largest private coal company in America, Murray Energy, strong-armed its employees to not only vote Republican, but to donate money as well—Murray Energy’s CEO even kept lists of employees who didn’t attend Republican fundraisers and rallies, and attacked them by name.
The irony of course is that this is exactly how Putin and the Kremlin "win" their elections—and it’s the sort of election fraud that sparked huge demonstrations last December. What Romney's CEO billionaire backers are doing—with Romney's encouragement—is exactly the sort of antidemocratic fraud that American-backed NGOs and election monitors, like the beleaguered Golos, denounce when Putin's cronies use the same authoritarian pressure tactics.
Last December, in the lead-up to Russia’s rigged parliamentary elections, the US-funded Golos developed an interactive map of election violations and fraud. It was perhaps the first time since Putin took power that a US-backed NGO connected with frustrated Russians (anything US-backed had been in the doghouse and discredited since the disastrous Yeltsin days).
The sort of electoral fraud and violations that Golos collected on its "Map of Violations" sound like standard stuff for the Romney campaign, as reported in the New York Times [ http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/03/world/europe/russian-court-fines-election-monitor-1000.html?_r=0&pagewanted=print ]:
"4,500 reports alleging illegal campaign tactics, including stories of employers threatening workers with pay cuts and local officials ordering business leaders to pressure subordinates."
In the 2007 Russian parliamentary elections, which allowed Putin to move from President to Prime Minister for awhile (he’s now President again, good for him!)—Golos reported similar violations, as reported in the Moscow Times [ http://www.themoscowtimes.com/news/article/ngo-says-absentee-ballots-moving-fast/351992.html#ixzz29flOEUcv ] back then:
"Golos, a nongovernmental organization funded by U.S. and EU donors, among others, said it suspected that employers and bosses were forcing employees to receive the ballots to ensure that they actually vote, in order to gain a higher turnout. Such pressure would violate election law."
Note that, unlike in America, in Russia it is at least technically illegal for employers to pressure employees on how to vote. So in that sense, we’ve already regressed further from democracy than Putin’s Russia. America’s elections, by the standards of the same elections monitors we fund over in Russia, are looking increasingly as rigged and undemocratic as Russia’s.
Golos was shut down briefly by Russian courts for doing its job — which largely consisted of collecting and exposing incidents in which bosses applied pressure on their workers to vote for Putin's Party in the Duma elections. This year, the Kremlin moved to cut off western funding for Golos, after they exposed similar antidemocratic tactics in the vote that reinstalled Putin as Russia's president.
In other words, for authoritarian oligarchy to survive, it needs to be able to work with CEOs to pressure their employees—what Romney is doing today, thanks to Citizens United.
And yet, even Romney’s top Russia policy advisor to his campaign, Leon Aron, in denouncing Putin’s sham elections, singled out [ http://www.tnr.com/article/world/98226/putin-russia-elections-protests ] "forcing state employees to vote" among the list of sins.
So Mitt Romney has adopted the same anti-democratic electioneering tactics of the same villain that Romney has promised to start a new Cold War with once he becomes president, having already designated Russia as "our Number One geopolitical foe [ http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2012/0328/Russia-to-Romney-How-could-we-be-your-No.-1-enemy%22 ]."
In the comedy version of this story, Putin and Romney finally meet in a showdown, wherein Putin tells Romney, "You and I, we’re alike Mr. President—is that why you hate me so?"
In the real-life version, we get none of the irony and comedy, and all of the corruption, authoritarianism, and oligarchy.
Copyright 2012 NSFWCORP
http://nsfwcorp.co/wbp3h1 [via http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/19/putin-on-the-mitts-romney-campaign-tactics_n_1989860.html (with comments); temporary link that will shortly expire; a sub-required ( http://www.nsfwcorp.com/ ) site]
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Michael Fredrich, MCM Composites Owner, Plans To Lay Off Workers To Avoid Health Care Regulations
By Janean Chun
Posted: 10/19/2012 11:57 am EDT Updated: 10/19/2012 11:57 am EDT
Michael Fredrich says he cares deeply about his employees. So much so that he plans on firing seven of them.
The Wisconsin business owner is planning the drastic move to skirt the new health care law, which mandates that by 2014 businesses with more than 50 workers must offer an approved insurance plan or pay a penalty.
"I don't relish the idea of talking to those seven people and saying 'Sorry, we have to go below 50 and you're the ones,'" said Fredrich, who bought Manitwoc-based MCM Composites in 2001. His workers, he said, are "like family."
Fredrich is the rare small business owner who has formulated a plan for dealing with the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. In interviews with The Huffington Post over the past few months, small business owners have said they feel anxious and uncertain about the new law. Few said they completely understand its implications, and most said they haven't begun to dig into its rules and requirements, which don't go into full effect until 2014.
At the presidential debate on Tuesday night Mitt Romney portrayed the new regulation as a small-business killer: "The thing I find most troubling about Obamacare -- well, it's a long list, but one of the things I find most troubling is that when you go out and talk to small businesses and ask them what they think about it, they tell you it keeps them from hiring more people," Romney said.
Fredrich, whose business expects revenues of $7 million in 2012, is joining a chorus of larger firms that have announced bold, and in some cases unanticipated, measures in order to deal with the law. Darden Restaurants, which owns Olive Garden and Red Lobster, announced [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/10/health-care-reform-part-time-work_n_1952455.html (and see {linked in} http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=80445493 and preceding (and any future following)] it would boost the number of part-time workers in order to skirt Obamacare's requirements. Papa John's earlier this year said it would pass higher costs on to customers [ http://www.politico.com/politico44/2012/08/papa-johns-obamacare-will-raise-pizza-prices-131331.html ].
Fredrich’s decision echoes the sentiments expressed by other small businesses. After the Supreme Court upheld the health care law in June, Rose Corona, owner of Big Horse Feed and Mercantile in Temecula, Calif., said, “I’m going to have to reduce the size of [my] labor force.”
Dan Galbraith, owner of Solutionist, a visual communication, sales and marketing firm in Greensburg, Pa., predicted that, like Fredrich, “Those who employ 60 are going to lay off 11. Those who employ 49 will hire nobody.”
The administration has strongly countered the idea that Obamacare will be a "job killer," pointing to research from Urban Institute, a nonpartisan think-tank [ http://www.urban.org/index.cfm ], which found that under the law, small businesses would save 8.7 percent compared with their current premium contributions [ http://www.urban.org/UploadedPDF/412319-Affordable-Care-Act-Affect-Jobs.pdf ].
Fredrich said he believes the plan he currently offers his workers -- a high-deductible health savings account (HSA) with an out-of-pocket deductible of $2,500 per individual and $5,000 deductible per family -- not meet the new requirements of coverage under Obamacare.
Health care experts who've studied the law don't necessarily agree. Christine Eibner, senior economist at RAND Corp. [ http://www.rand.org/topics/health-and-health-care.html ] who has analyzed health insurance costs for small businesses and studied the health care law, and said Fredrich may not face such a "dire tradeoff" in 2014. She believes he could maintain his current insurance plan past 2014 under a grandfather clause that exempts existing plans from the new regulations.
According to a fact sheet from the Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) [ http://www.healthcare.gov/news/factsheets/2010/06/keeping-the-health-plan-you-have-grandfathered.html ], many small firms will lose or relinquish their grandfathered status by 2013 -- the estimate runs from 49 to 80 percent.
Even if Fredrich's plan isn’t grandfathered in, Eibner pointed out that he could find something comparable through state exchanges or through the newly regulated small group market. "He may be able to find another plan that is cost effective or works for him," she said.
Though Obama has repeated variations of his 2009 statement that “if you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan,” the HHS has yet to reveal the full details of Obamacare that could clear up some of the confusion for business owners like Fredrich.
While doing his own calculations, Fredrich did consider one other alternative to cutting employees: "discontinue offering health care at all. Honestly, from a dollars and cents standpoint, that's our best approach," he said.
The total number of people insured through MCM, including 26 employees, their spouses and children, is 43. Fredrich said MCM Composites' total annual premium is $135,000. With employees paying about 30 percent, Fredrich's annual cost is $104,000.
In 2014, businesses with more than 50 full-time equivalent employees that don't offer health insurance must pay a $2,000 penalty for each full-time employee in excess of 30 employees. For Fredrich, that means a $54,000 penalty for 27 employees -- about half of what he's currently paying for insurance. "That's a good deal," he said, but it's not one he's considering. "When you have a small business, you know everybody's names, how many children they have. I'm not going to cut their insurance," Fredrich said.
Corona also said she knows of “a lot of others who will cut out health care altogether, pay the fine and leave the people to the government to insure.”
The option of sidestepping the new law by forfeiting health care and taking the penalty may appeal to some small business owners [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/28/health-care-law-mandate-small-business-reacts_n_1634123.html ], but Eibner believes they're not considering the ripple effect. "Even if it cuts your health care expenditures in half, it'll have an adverse effect on employees," she said. "An employer can't just cut part of the compensation without anticipating some fallout, like people leaving or having a harder time recruiting. It might seem like a cost savings, but when you look at the total costs, it might not be."
Fredrich is frustrated by the expectations workers place on small businesses to cover their insurance costs in the first place. "I never bought this company to be in the health insurance business," he said.
Small business owners have been pummeled with the skyrocketing costs of health care, which rose at an accelerated rate in 2011, increasing 4.6 percent to $4,547 per person, according to a report from the Health Care Cost Institute [ http://www.healthcostinstitute.org/2011report ]. Fredrich said his insurance premiums increase every year by 10 to 18 percent.
Rick Newby, a quality technician who has worked with MCM Composites for more than 12 years, said his health care was covered 100 percent in the '90s, but he's now used to his health care plans constantly changing. "Mike's always looking for the cheapest route for us, but it's getting harder," Newby said.
Though at times he has paid up to $1,000 out-of-pocket for medical expenses, Newby said he is satisfied with his current plan. If Fredrich does take the option of laying off employees to keep health care costs low, Newby said he'll take a roll-with-the-punches approach. "I don't want to see that happen, but I have to live with the times."
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/16/health-care-law-small-business_n_1916850.html [with comments]
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Arthur Allen, CEO Of ASG, Sent Email Pressuring Employees To Donate To Mitt Romney
Posted: 10/20/2012 10:30 am EDT
The CEO of a major corporation went much further [ http://tv.msnbc.com/2012/10/20/ceo-to-employees-help-yourself-by-donating-to-romney/ ] in his effort to persuade his employees to back Mitt Romney than has been previously reported, according to an email obtained by MSNBC's Up w/Chris Hayes and provided to HuffPost.
Arthur Allen, CEO of ASG Software Solutions, was previously exposed [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/14/arthur-allen-romney-email_n_1963965.html ] by Hayes as having urged his employees to vote for Mitt Romney for president. A new email from Allen shows he encouraged employees to donate to Romney to "help ASG and yourself."
"I am encouraging everyone to go to the Romney for President web site and contribute as much as you can to his campaign for President, up to the maximum of $2500.00 per person," he wrote. "Please help ASG and yourself by contributing to the Romney/Ryan campaign."
Romney has urged bosses [ http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/14046/romney_instructed_employers_to_tell_employees_how_to_vote_in_conference_cal/ ] to pressure their workers to support him, as have the Koch brothers [ http://nsfwcorp.co/7f0082 (temporary link to the NSFWCORP piece second above)] and other executives.
Read the full ASG email below:
To all ASG domestic employees,
This coming Monday, Mitt Romney will be officially nominated as the Republican Presidential candidate. I am encouraging everyone to go to the Romney for President web site and contribute as much as you can to his campaign for President, up to the maximum of $2500.00 per person. I am also encouraging you to contact all of your friends and relatives and ask them to support Romney and to go to the polls and vote on election day.
ASG, like many companies, is still struggling, even after 4 years. You probably heard that we tripped a bank leverage covenant on June 30th, and now must go through yet another round of unfavorable treatment by our lenders. Many of our domestic employees are still on the 4 day work week. Many of our customers are waiting until they see the results of the election before beginning to invest again. We need to elect a fiscally conservative President and Vice-President and stop this ridiculous government spending. I believe that Romney and Ryan can put us back on the path to sanity, but even then it is not going to be painless for our country and ASG.
Please help ASG and yourself by contributing to the Romney/Ryan campaign.
Mr. Allen
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/20/arthur-allen_n_1992370.html [with the Chris Hayes segment embedded, and comments]
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Another Right-Wing Phony Embroiled in Sex Scandal -- Why Does Sexual Hypocrisy Flourish on the Right?
Let’s call this Conservative Chaos Theory. Without hypocrisy, the conservative mind would explode from the sheer force of its eternal contradictions.
By Lynn Stuart Parramore
October 17, 2012
Forty years ago, conservatives awakened to the fact that their agenda was getting little traction in American public life. So they hatched a plan turn things around. Pooling their considerable financial resources, they would invest in the marketplace of ideas and fund books, professors, journalists – anything to promote, amplify, and disseminate their right-wing worldview. In short, they would buy the American mind.
Quite a bargain, that. One of their most successful investments was the support of an eager young man who got his start writing for the Dartmouth Review, a conservative newspaper founded in 1980 by disgruntled students who thought that the college’s daily paper was way too liberal. Dinesh D’Souza was carefully groomed to flower into what he is today – a vitriolic, one-sided, outrageously craven wingnut who will say anything and everything as long as it supports the most rancid right-wing agenda. You might think of him as the inhabitant of the deepest, darkest spot in our political discourse, the Mariana Trench of American intellectual life.
If you look back over recent decades, you will find this creature surfacing in any number of conservative crusades. Stirring up jingoistic anti-Obama fantasies [ http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/movies/2012/09/dinesh-dsouzas-2016-obamas-america.html ], for example. Or protecting traditional marriage from gays.
Which is why it has been amusing to hear D'Souza, the president of an evangelical college, explaining just how he came to be sharing a hotel room [ http://www.nydailynews.com/blogs/pageviews/2012/10/conservative-political-writer-and-evangelical-college-president-alleged-to-have-ha ] with a woman who is not his wife and introducing her as his fiancée. Apparently D’Souza was in the process of ending his marriage of twenty years, but had not quite gotten around to signing the divorce papers when he shacked up with his lady friend at a South Carolina conference. He has since “suspended” his engagement.
Frankly, as far as scandals go, this one ranks low on the excite-ometer. It would have been more fun if he had been caught sharing a men’s room stall with Larry Craig.
But hell, we’ll take it. The question of why religious conservatives are so likely to be caught in the act is eternally compelling.
From the Pentecostal televangelist Jimmy Swaggart’s love for prostitutes to abstinence-preaching senator David Vitter’s extracurricular romps, hardly a year passes when some big-time right-winger isn’t found to be coloring outside the box. Now lefties really don’t care if Vitter, fondly known on the web by his fetish moniker “Diaperman [ http://wonkette.com/412391/david-vitter-now-pooping-in-ladies-underwear ]”, likes to get his kicks wearing adult diapers and paying someone to powder his butt. In fact, we might encourage him to let his freak flag fly and march in the diaper fetish parade. As long as the sexual activity doesn't hurt anyone, who cares? It’s the fetish for moralizing, sermonizing, and finger-wagging that sets our teeth on edge. Particularly when it ossifies into laws that make it impossible for many women to manage their reproductive lives or prevents loving partners from getting hitched. Not only do public pieties fail to prevent personal improprieties, they seem to have an unusually strong correlation. When legendary conservative Strom Thurmond was promising [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/30/books/review/strom-thurmonds-america-by-joseph-crespino.html?pagewanted=all ] never to force southern whites to admit blacks (not the word he used) “into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches,” he neglected to mention that at the age of 22 he had admitted one into his bed and impregnated the family’s 16-year old black maid. His daughter was a secret until his death in 2003.
So what is that? Why condemn what you desire? Part of the answer can be found in the style of religion you embrace if you are a right-winger. Monotheistic religions like Christianity are especially patriarchal and tend to be built on the denial of the feminine and a special abhorrence of those flesh packages known as "bodies." If you’re only going to have one god, that god is probably going to be male, and so you’ve got suppress the female element of spirituality so that He doesn’t have any competition. Women are associated with the processes of nature, which can be scary, and you’ve got to do something about that, too. They give birth, and anything that is born must die, which is an unpleasant thought, so to get rid of that you just go around pretending that life is eternal and that everything really springs from the Great Celestial Father. Pretty soon you have concocted possibly the most unnatural idea in human history: the Virgin Mother.
Polytheistic religions don’t tend to operate this way, which is why you can see male and female gods frolicking with abandon on the walls of ancient Egyptian temples. Which is also why the Second Commandment [ http://www.keyway.ca/htm2003/20030319.htm ] in the Bible tells you not to ever, ever look at them. In fact, you’re really not supposed to look at or think about bodies at all. They are inconvenient encumbrances to your eternal life, and the sooner you get rid of them, the better. Anything that upsets the fragile order of this strange system where males are celestial beings and women are nasty creatures whose bodies reek of dirty sex – like gay love, for example – will have to be squelched at all costs. Holding all these contradictory thoughts in your head deforms the mind into a labyrinth of twists and turns and on top of that there’s a phantom floating around in there.
Thanks to Freud, we know that humans are often haunted by something called The Return of the Repressed [ http://www.answers.com/topic/return-of-the-repressed ]. The more you try to deny the undead incarnation of your repressed desires, the stronger he becomes, and he will hunt you down. Before long you find yourself in a park restroom in Florida [ http://firstandcourt.blogspot.com/2007/07/gay-republican-hypocrites-mccain.html ] asking an undercover policeman to fellate you for twenty bucks. And your boss John McCain is pissed.
D’Souza himself provides a curious perspective on the subject. In a meditation [ http://conservatives.mbhs.edu/phil1.html ] on the high standards of conservatives in which he deplores the adulteries of both Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich, D’Souza imparts this gleaming nugget of insight:
“Even hypocrisy is in the conservative view preferable to a denial of standards because such denial leads to moral chaos or nihilism.”
Let’s call this Conservative Chaos Theory. Without hypocrisy, the conservative mind would explode from the sheer force of its eternal contradictions and Dinesh D’Souza, along with his phantom, would be sucked into The Void. Hypocrisy is the glue that holds it all together. Tolerance for others is corrosive to hypocrisy and must be avoided at all costs. In that South Carolina hotel room, Dinesh D’Souza was taking a stand against moral relativity. Maybe even the General Theory of Relativity. Anything which denies the absolutes and standards that protect the insecure human from the knowledge of his mortality—and ultimately, his insignificance in the great design of things. People, this is courage. And I submit that it is not easy to take a stand while you are lying down.
This is why, friends, that you will very likely soon turn on the news to hear that yet another promoter of God’s word has been caught with his pants down.
In motel rooms across America, these men are bravely resisting chaos.
Amen.
Copyright 2012 AlterNet
http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/another-right-wing-phony-embroiled-sex-scandal-why-does-sexual-hypocrisy-flourish [ http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/another-right-wing-phony-embroiled-sex-scandal-why-does-sexual-hypocrisy-flourish?paging=off ] [with comments] [also at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lynn-parramore/another-right-wing-phony_b_1980850.html (with comments)]
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HPV Vaccine Does Not Increase Sexual Activity: Study
By Catherine Pearson
Posted: 10/15/2012 12:08 am Updated: 10/15/2012 12:08 am
Vaccinating girls against the sexually-transmitted human papillomavirus (HPV) [ http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/hpv.html ] does not make them more likely to have sex, according to a new study. The findings are the latest in a string of research [ http://www.ajpmonline.org/article/S0749-3797(11)00733-1/abstract ] showing that vaccination does not encourage promiscuity, the authors say, and should go a long way in extinguishing lingering concerns about "disinhibition" among pre-teenage girls who receive the vaccine.
Study co-author Robert Bednarczyk, a clinical investigator with the Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Research–Southeast, said in an interview with The Huffington Post that researchers found "no difference" in sexual activity when comparing girls who were vaccinated to those who were not.
In findings published [ http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/early/2012/10/10/peds.2012-1516.abstract ] in the journal Pediatrics [ http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/ ] on Monday, investigators combed the electronic medical records of nearly 1,400 girls who were between the ages 11 and 12 from 2006 to 2007 -- the year following the Food and Drug Administration's approval of the first vaccine. Nearly 500 of the girls had received it; 900 had not.
Unlike previous studies that have largely relied on self-reported sexual activity, the new study measured clinical signs of sexual activity over several years, like whether the girls had been tested for a sexually transmitted infection, received contraceptive counseling or become pregnant.
"What we've done here is take a more objective approach and use clinical data to look at outcomes that are related to sexual activity and compare them," Bednarczyk said.
Vaccination was not linked to any increased sexual activity, according to the measures used by the researchers.
"This article supports what several years of data have shown again and again," said Gypsyamber D'Souza, an assistant professor at the cancer prevention and control program at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, who did not work on the study. "There are no differences in sexual behavior in those getting the vaccine compared those who have not."
Recent reports suggest that many girls are not vaccinated in part because of fears about increased sexual activity. One such report, a 2011 paper in the journal Sexually Transmitted Infection [ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21357601 ], found that 16 percent of parents in areas of North Carolina felt that teenage girls who were vaccinated might be more likely to have sex.
"The reality is that [the rate] of HPV vaccination is substantially lower than other recommended adolescent vaccines," said Dr. Matthew Davis, an associate professor of adult medicine and pediatrics at the University of Michigan's C.S. Mott Children's Hospital.
In 2011, some 80 percent of teens were vaccinated against tetanus, an infection of the nervous system, and 70 percent against meningitis, an infection of the membranes around the brain and spinal cord, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates [ http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/who/teens/vaccination-coverage.html ]. But only 35 percent of teenage girls received the full three doses of the HPV vaccine, which has been recommended for all girls age 11 or 12 by the CDC since 2006. (The recommendation also extends to women up to age 26 who were not vaccinated when they were younger.) The vaccine protects against infection by certain strains of HPV, about 30 types of which can lead to cervical cancer in women.
Davis recently led a poll [ http://www.mottnpch.org/reports-surveys/public-reluctant-support-teen-hpv-vaccination-without-parental-consent ] using a national sample that found that 40 percent of parents have moral or ethical concerns about the HPV vaccination, while 36 percent said they felt pre-teen girls were too young to get it.
"Those [rates], to me, indicate that there remain concerns that adolescent's choices will be influenced by this vaccination," he said.
But D'Souza argued that other factors may be more influential.
"Parents have concerns about the cost of the vaccine, the utility of the vaccine, its side effects and whether it's truly necessary," she said, also noting that the way doctors describe the vaccine to patients can impact patients' perception of it. Cost is a major issue, especially for college-age women, D'Souza added. Though most private insurers now cover the HPV vaccine, and the federally-funded Vaccines for Children [ http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/programs/vfc/index.html ] program provides free shots for eligible individuals, many young women do not know that.
Davis said parents' fears about risky sexual behavior are a powerful deterrent, but expressed hope that the new findings could impact their thinking.
"It's hard to know what impact a study like this can have on parental opinions," he said. "We do know that physicians and nurses can be very trusted sources of information about vaccines for parents. Therefore, if health care providers hear this news and can themselves reassure parents that teenagers' sexual behaviors are not likely to change based on this vaccination, that may reassure parents."
"I would say the reason why HPV has been so controversial is precisely because it goes right to the heart of sexual behavior," Davis said. "HPV is spread sexually, and not through other means."
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/15/hpv-vaccine-sexual-activity-study_n_1959630.html [with comments]
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Peter Kinder, Missouri Lieutenant Governor, Depicted As Bobblehead In New Ad
Missouri Lt. Gov. Peter Kinder
By John Celock
Posted: 10/17/2012 12:48 pm Updated: 10/17/2012 2:51 pm
Missouri Lt. Gov. Peter Kinder (R) is depicted as a cartoon bobblehead on a stripper pole in a new ad [ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ilYdeZ9ir0 (next below)]
The ad, which former state Auditor Susan Montee's campaign debuted Tuesday evening, shows Kinder's head on a cartoon body in a series of scenes showcasing a stripper scandal and a controversy over the amount of tax dollars he spent on hotel rooms. Kinder and Montee are locked in a competitive race for the Show Me state's number two spot. Montee sent an email to supporters Tuesday afternoon asking for money to keep the bobblehead ad on television statewide.
"Everyone I meet, Democrat or Republican, says Missouri can't take four more years of Peter Kinder," Montee wrote in the email. "If my television ads keep playing until the election, I promise you I will win the race for Lieutenant Governor."
In the email, Montee says that a 30-second commercial on a newscast in St. Louis costs $1,200 and asks donors for $40 to pay for a second or $4 to fund a tenth of a second. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported Monday [ http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/govt-and-politics/political-fix/kinder-montee-in-a-dead-heat-for-campaign-cash/article_e30c7aec-1717-11e2-995b-001a4bcf6878.html ] that the candidates are close in cash on hand; Montee reported $270,000 and Kinder reported $267,911 on Monday, with Kinder outraising Montee in the last fundraising quarter.
Kinder's campaign spokesman, Logan Thompson, declined to comment on the ad Wednesday morning saying he wanted to discuss the ad with Kinder first.
Kinder, a two-term Republican from Cape Girardeau, dropped a planned race for governor [ http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/govt-and-politics/peter-kinder-drops-out-of-governor-s-race/article_79b64b04-1b40-5593-bc89-72d3f4c20e43.html ] late last year following reports that he billed the state for luxury hotel rooms he stayed in during political trips and that he had a relationship with a stripper, who he invited to move into a St. Louis condo he rented using campaign funds. Kinder reimbursed the state [ https://www.stlbeacon.org/#!/content/26285/lager_kinder_debate_kansas_city ] for the hotel rooms.
The stripper, Tammy Chapman, said Kinder made romantic advances while a state senator in the 1990s. Kinder, who is single, said he and friends would stop by the strip club where she worked after St. Louis Cardinals games, but that he never received a lap dance [ https://www.stlbeacon.org/#!/content/15448/kinder_says_his_only_relationship_with_stripper_was_to_watch_her_dance ] from Chapman, only watched her dance on stage.
Chapman told the Riverfront Times in 2011 that Kinder appeared at a bar [ http://www.riverfronttimes.com/2011-08-11/news/former-penthouse-pet-and-stripper-says-missouri-lieutenant-governor-peter-kinder-was-one-of-her-best-customers/ ] where she was bartending in St. Louis and offered her the opportunity to move into the condo. Kinder denied offering the condo [ http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/govt-and-politics/peter-kinder-explains-romantic-attraction-at-a-strip-club/article_d9dc0f3d-0d37-5a22-84c0-74456e432a84.html ] to Chapman, saying he stopped in the bar to use the bathroom and then had a glass of wine when he noticed Chapman behind the bar.
Last year, Kinder's car was stolen [ http://www.semissourian.com/story/1721679.html ] after he left his keys in it. The car was rammed into a gun shop and used for a trip to buy food from McDonald's before being torched, the Southeast Missourian newspaper reported.
UPDATE: 2:49 p.m. -- Kinder's campaign responded to Montee's commercial by releasing a 2010 video [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n44vz91BUL0 (next below)]
"That is so good. I think we got a new idea." Montee says in the video. "Margarita machine fundraiser."
Montee dismissed the video in a 2010 interview with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch saying that she was "at a social event being social [ http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/govt-and-politics/political-fix/updated-in-video-montee-drink-in-hand-praises-margarita-machine/article_c6e499f4-d7da-11df-bf78-0017a4a78c22.html ]" and that the video's release was an attempt to influence her 2010 reelection campaign for auditor. Montee lost the 2010 race to Republican Tom Schweich.
On Wednesday, Montee spokesman John Knoll reiterated Montee's comments from 2010 and said the video received little press coverage in 2010. "That video was Susan being social at a social event," Knoll told HuffPost.
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/17/peter-kinder-susan-montee-lieutenant-governor_n_1973806.html [with Montee's ad embedded, and comments]
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Tea Party Activists Fight Agenda 21, Seeing Threatening U.N. Plot
Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley (R) signed a property rights bill targeting Agenda 21.
(AP Photo/Phillip Rawls)
By Nick Carey
Posted: 10/15/2012 12:59 am
CEDAR FALLS, Iowa, Oct 15 (Reuters) - Tea Party activist Judd Saul admits that he can sound a little unhinged when he gets talking about an issue close to his heart that most Americans have never heard of.
"Agenda 21 is an elusive enemy that floats in and chokes you gradually," said Saul, of the Cedar Valley Tea Party in Cedar Falls, Iowa. "They want to destroy the middle-class way of life."
"Agenda 21 aims to undermine your property rights and force you" to live in cities, Jake Robinson told Tea Party members at a meeting in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, in April.
For Joe Dugan, leader of the Myrtle Beach Tea Party in South Carolina, "Agenda 21 is nothing short of treason."
If you don't know what Agenda 21 is, you're not alone - only about 15 percent of Americans do. It is a nonbinding U.N. resolution signed by more than 170 world leaders (including Republican U.S. President George H.W. Bush) at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro as a way to promote sustainable development in the face of a rapidly growing global population.
A small percentage of Americans say it is an attack on their very existence - part of a grand conspiracy to take away their gun rights, destroy suburbia and turn America into a modern-day Soviet state.
At a local level across the country, conservative activists linked to the Tea Party movement have rallied around the cause of blocking development they say is part of the conspiracy.
Kim Simac, a member of the Northwoods Patriots in northern Wisconsin, believes a local sustainable development plan will shut down her horse-riding school because her business takes up more land than the plan allows for. Heather Gass says she has been fighting sustainable development plans in the San Francisco area that she says will include hefty road tolls and deliberately drive up gas prices "because they want to force us out of our cars."
"It sounds crazy, but it's true," she added.
Activists dislike the use of multi-unit apartment buildings in city plans - which they call "stack 'em and pack 'em" units - as well as bike lanes and other zoning restrictions they say impinge upon the value of their property and rights.
"Property ownership is the essence of the American dream and a cornerstone of the American economy," said John Anthony, a conservative small business owner in New Jersey who has devoted a lot of time to studying Agenda 21. "When you diminish property values, you shrink the net worth of the entire middle class."
Republicans at the state level have passed or tried to pass laws aimed at Agenda 21 and the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI), an international association of local governments. ICLEI was formed in 1990, and its promotion of sustainable development at the local government level has made it synonymous with Agenda 21 to Tea Party opponents. Activists have gone after the ICLEI in their attacks and the group has lost 29 U.S. members as a result.
This summer, Alabama passed a property rights bill targeting Agenda 21, which was signed by Governor Robert Bentley - his office did not respond to a request for comment. Anti-Agenda 21 resolutions were also passed in Kansas and New Hampshire.
Campaigners managed to persuade the Republican National Committee to pass a resolution on the "destructive and insidious" plan being "covertly pushed into local communities," and the party's 2012 platform approved in August stated: "We strongly reject the U.N. Agenda 21 as erosive of American sovereignty."
AND YET...
After all that, things have gone a bit quiet. The issue barely registers in the presidential election campaign, and the Republican National Committee did not respond to a request for a comment.
At a local level, there are signs of a backlash.
A June poll of 1,300 U.S. voters commissioned by the American Planning Association found that when asked whether they supported or opposed U.N. Agenda 21, 85 percent of respondents said they did not know enough to form an opinion. Nine percent supported Agenda 21, 6 percent opposed it.
"I think the Tea Party people who turn up to shout at planning meetings are heading for a McCarthy moment," said Ron Littlefield, the mayor of Chattanooga, Tennessee, referring to the Communist witch hunts of Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s.
"They have been heard, and many people are sick of their scare tactics," added the mayor, whom local Tea Party activists have been trying to recall for raising property taxes.
Don Knapp, U.S. spokesman for the ICLEI, rejected the notion of an anti-American plot. "Sustainable development is not a top-down conspiracy from the U.N., but a bottom-up push from local governments," he said.
An anti-sustainable development bill in Arizona died this spring when the Arizona Chamber of Commerce successfully lobbied against it, arguing it was vague and could drive away corporations that have embraced sustainable development.
"We thought this was a wrongheaded approach," said chamber spokesman Garrick Taylor. "It would be bad for business."
Many conservatives also vehemently disagree with the global warming arguments behind Agenda 21. But planners and developers say sustainable development plans are needed to meet future shifts in the size and age of the U.S. population.
According to U.S. Census Bureau projections, America's population should grow by more than 40 percent by 2050 to 440 million, requiring millions of new housing units. Demographers and developers also warn that as baby boomers start turning 70 in 2016 and seek to downsize their homes, there will be a spike in demand for multi-apartment buildings in walkable areas.
"What I want to hear from opponents of sustainable development is where are you going to put 50 million new housing units over the next few decades?" said Mitchell Silver, head of planning for Raleigh, North Carolina, who is also president of the American Planning Association (APA). "So far, I haven't gotten an answer to that question."
Another problem some Tea Party activists acknowledge is that few local officials have heard of Agenda 21. This was the case in Garland, Texas, during a debate on the city's strategic plan. Anti-Agenda 21 activists objected to bike lanes, efforts to determine what types of businesses to allow into Garland and any reference to "sustainable development."
"We found if we mentioned Agenda 21, our officials' eyes would glaze over," said Katrina Pierson of the Garland Tea Party. "So we focused on parts of the plan we didn't like."
Her group managed to have significant portions of the city plan changed and got Garland to quit its membership in the ICLEI.
Judd Saul was not so successful when he went to battle against Cedar Falls 2020, the city's development plan. Saul says his studies of Agenda 21 began after he discovered that the requirement to have a lockbox at the back door of his family's restaurant containing keys for emergency service access to his property was "based on international fire regulations."
Saul says that rather than taking on the parts of Cedar Falls 2020 he disliked most, he focused instead on Agenda 21 at a public meeting to discuss the plan. As almost no one in attendance knew what he was talking about, Saul says his words met with blank stares.
"I wish I'd focused on why the plan was bad," he said, "instead of talking about Agenda 21 and looking like a wacko nut job."
(Editing by Claudia Parsons and Prudence Crowther)
Copyright 2012 Thomson Reuters
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/15/agenda-21-tea-party_n_1965893.html [with comments]
===
Anti-Pot Legalization Ex-DEA Boss Won't Reject Suggestion Obama Takes 'Laundered Drug Money'
NEW YORK -- A conference call organized to oppose marijuana legalization quickly went off the rails on Monday when the former head of the Drug Enforcement Administration refused to reject the suggestion that the Obama campaign is accepting contributions from drug dealers [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxPnP1rRDW0 (above, as embedded)].
The call's organizers made clear that the goal was to pressure Attorney General Eric Holder to speak out against three state-level ballot measures that if passed, would legalize marijuana. But when a journalist from the Lyndon LaRouche-affiliated Executive Intelligence Review asked whether President Barack Obama had not spoken out against the ballot measures because of "reports" that "both his 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns have been financed in part by laundered drug money," no one on the call spoke out against the suggestion.
Peter Bensinger, who was appointed head of the DEA by President Gerald Ford and then served under Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, simply said "I can't speculate on the rationale" for Obama's silence.
When pressed by The Huffington Post whether he would reject the insinuation, Bensinger said "I won't comment on it, and I don't have knowledge that that is the case. We're not here to discuss his campaign funding, or his -- the politics that are involved in this."
"I won't entertain it," he said, when asked again.
The insinuation that Obama is accepting such contributions is unsubstantiated.
[...]
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/15/marijuana-legalization-obama_n_1967817.html [with comments]
===
Gun Industry Thrives During Obama's First Term
10/19/12 02:57 PM ET EDT
WASHINGTON — Tennessee lawyer Brian Manookian says he never considered himself a gun enthusiast. He owns just one handgun and was raised in a gun-free home. But the firearms industry has proven so successful in recent years that he decided to give up practicing law and make guns his livelihood.
It's a decision that's put Manookian on track to earn four times what he made as a corporate health care attorney, a job that earned him six figures right out of law school, he said.
And he's far from alone. An analysis by The Associated Press of data tracking the health of the gun industry shows that President Barack Obama has presided over a heyday for guns.
Sales are on the rise, so much that some manufacturers cannot make enough fast enough. Major gun company stock prices are up. The number of federally licensed, retail gun dealers is increasing for the first time in nearly 20 years. The U.S. gun lobby is bursting with cash and political clout. Washington has expressed little interest in passing new gun laws, despite renewed calls to do so after recent deadly shootings in Colorado and Wisconsin.
Four years ago the gun lobby predicted Obama would be the "most anti-gun president in American history." Yet it is hard to find a single aspect of the gun world that isn't thriving.
"The driver is President Obama. He is the best thing that ever happened to the firearm industry," said Jim Barrett, an industry analyst at C.L. King & Associates Inc. in New York.
Obama has made no pledges to push for new gun control legislation and does not have the support in Congress or among voters even if he did. During this week's presidential debate, he did suggest renewing a U.S. ban on assault weapons and coming up with an overall strategy to reduce violence. But both Obama and Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney said the real need is for the government to enforce gun laws already on the books.
Meanwhile, sales are brisk.
Since opening a $5 million armory in Nashville last month, Manookian and his business partner have outdone their own expectations, selling inventory three to four times faster than they expected. The facility has high ceilings and granite fixtures in the bathroom and provides instructional courses and a shooting range in addition to firearms for sale.
"It is a very strong investment," Manookian said.
Others agree.
For the first time since 1993, the number of federally licensed retail gun dealers in the U.S. increased slightly in 2010 and 2011. The country added 1,167 licensed retail gun dealers, according to Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives records. After the assault weapons ban of 1994 – now expired – the number of gun dealerships dropped annually until 2010. As of October 2012, there were 50,812 retail gun dealers – 3,303 more than in 2009.
"Business has been very good," said Frederick Prehn, who a year ago opened a small gun store above his dentistry practice in Wausau, Wis. In the past year, Prehn has relocated twice to larger spaces and gone from one employee to eight.
Some gun store owners can't keep shelves stocked, said Brian Jones, owner of Bullseye Shooter's supply in Painted Post, N.Y. Jones said he opened his gun store in November 2010. In his first year, he said he sold between 600 and 700 guns. A little more than halfway through his second year, he's already sold 700.
For the first time in the company's history, Sturm Ruger & Co. Inc. stopped taking orders for a couple of months this year. Ruger, one of the nation's largest gun manufacturers, has since resumed taking orders, though gun-sellers say demand is still outpacing production.
Dan Wesson Arms, Inc., a small gun manufacturer that sells to a niche market, stopped taking orders this spring because the company had sold out the entire year's production, spokesman Jason Morton said. The company has stopped taking orders before, but never so early on the entire line, he said.
"Wouldn't you want to be in a business where customers are just begging to hand you money?" said Bill Bernstein, owner of East Side Gun Shop in Nashville.
Obama is not yet through his first term, but the federal government already has conducted about as many background checks for gun owners and prospective buyers on his watch as it did during the first six years of George W. Bush's presidency. In the first 3 1/2 years of the Bush administration, the FBI conducted about 28 million background checks. During the same period of the Obama administration, the FBI conducted more than 50 million. The gun industry uses the number of background checks as a reliable indicator of demand.
Ruger and Smith & Wesson represent nearly 30 percent of the U.S. gun manufacturing industry and lead the market in production of pistols and revolvers, according to government statistics. The two companies have been running production lines around the clock, hiring workers and operating at maximum capacity, said Barrett, an industry analyst who also owns Ruger stock.
Ruger's sales have increased 86 percent since Obama took office, and Smith & Wesson's sales have gone up nearly 44 percent, compared with 18 percent for overall national retail sales.
And the companies have big expectations for the industry's future, as they're spending more money on research and development than ever before.
The NRA itself has done well, too. The lobbying organization has had more cash on hand during the Obama years than it had since 2004, finishing 2010 with more than $24 million, according to the most recent figures available.
"Which makes it incredibly ironic that the gun lobby is opposing Obama," said Dan Gross, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. Gross said Obama, who initially campaigned to reinstate the assault weapons ban that expired under Bush, has done what he said was "disappointingly little" on gun control.
But the gun lobby says the success of the industry does not indicate that Obama is good for Second Amendment rights.
"This is the most dangerous election in our lifetimes," NRA chief executive officer Wayne LaPierre said in February, a point he's made regularly during the NRA's campaign to defeat Obama.
The gun lobby stands by its 2008 predictions that Obama would be anti-gun. NRA spokesman Andrew Arulanandam noted Obama's appointment of two Supreme Court justices whom the NRA considers anti-gun, plus Obama's support of a United Nations arms trade treaty and the botched operation called Fast and Furious, which the NRA says was concocted as part of a plan to enforce new gun restrictions.
"Gun owners and hunters fear that a second Obama administration with no future political campaigns to worry about will try to destroy this great American freedom," Arulanandam said.
Fears of a Democratic president taking office and issuing stricter gun control laws led to an initial spike in gun sales in 2008, giving dealers some of the highest profit margins they'd ever seen. But even after it became clear Obama was not going to make gun control a priority as president, the industry has continued to do well.
Fear of crime may be driving some sales. The number of violent crimes rose by 18 percent in the U.S. in 2011, according to Justice Department figures released this week. It was the first year-to-year increase for violent crime since 1993, marking the end of a long string of declines.
Firearm sales typically increase during poor economic times, said Steve Sanetti, chief executive officer and president of the National Shooting Sports Foundation, a trade association for the industry. More Americans are hunting and shooting for recreation as well, he said. Sanetti attributes that to military servicemen and women with firearms experience returning to civilian life and wanting to keep up with shooting as a pastime. He also said recreational shooting is a relatively cheap and accessible hobby, drawing in new buyers.
Voters have made clear that gun control isn't a priority. A recent AP-National Constitution Center poll found that 49 percent of adults felt laws limiting gun ownership infringe on the public's right to bear arms, while 43 percent said such laws do not infringe on those rights. After the recent mass shootings in Colorado and Wisconsin, 52 members of Congress sponsored a bill to track bulk sales of ammunition, but the legislation went nowhere.
The firearms industry entrepreneur Manookian said it is clear that guns are a priority for Americans. People around the country are waiting in lines at shooting ranges, he said, cash registers at gun stores are ringing with $1,000 purchases and his brand new armory in Nashville is in the black two weeks after it opened.
Associated Press writers Matt Apuzzo and Pete Yost, AP News Survey Specialist Dennis Junius, and researcher Rhonda Shafner in New York contributed to this report.
Copyright 2012 The Associated Press
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/19/obama-guns_n_1985826.html [with the AP video report (at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_37itpHmthg ) as embedded, and comments]
===
Obama picks McCormick Place for election night rally
October 18, 2012
President Barack Obama plans to hold his election-night rally at Chicago’s McCormick Place convention center, a move aimed at easing concerns over weather and security, sources with knowledge of the event said Wednesday.
Given the indoor location, the event seems unlikely to match the electric atmosphere of Obama’s 2008 outdoor victory rally in Grant Park. That event drew an estimated 240,000 people downtown and created picturesque images of the city’s skyline that were seen worldwide.
While the decision to use McCormick Place will tamp down the crowd size, it will provide the president with greater security.
McCormick Place was the site of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization summit in May, an event designated as a “national special security event” by the federal Department of Homeland Security.
Obama’s election-night rally is expected to receive the same designation.
[...]
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/chi-source-obama-election-night-rally-to-be-at-mccormick-place-20121017,0,3435098.story [with embedded video report, and comments]
===
GOP voter registration scandal widens
Colin Small
A Virginia official is busted for tossing voter forms. Turns out he works for the national party, too
By Brad Friedman
Friday, Oct 19, 2012 01:15 PM CDT
A man originally reported to have been working for the Republican Party of Virginia was arrested by the Rockingham County, Va., Sheriff’s Office on Thursday and charged with attempting to destroy voter registration forms by tossing them into a dumpster behind a shopping center in Harrisonburg, Va.
“Prosecutors charged him with four counts of destruction of voter registration applications, eight counts of failing to disclose voter registration applications and one count of obstruction of justice,” according to a report late Thursday afternoon from TPM’s Ryan Reilly [ http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/10/colin_small_virginia_gop_voter_registration_fraud.php ]. More charges could be forthcoming, according to officials.
But there is more to the story, as evidence emerges to document that it ties into a still-expanding nationwide GOP Voter Registration Fraud Scandal that the BRAD BLOG first began reporting in late September [ http://www.bradblog.com/?p=9586 ], after we’d learned that the Republican Party of Florida had turned in more than 100 allegedly fraudulent and otherwise suspect voter registration forms in Palm Beach County. The story has continued to widen ever since, to a dozen Florida counties and several other states, now including Virginia, and even to the upper-echelons of the Republican Party itself.
The man arrested today was 23-year-old Colin Small of Phoenixville, Pa. As it turns out, he does not only work for the Virginia Republican Party. According to an online profile, he appears to be working for the Republican National Committee and, prior to that, served as an Intern for Rep. Mike Kelly, R-Pa. [ http://kelly.house.gov/ ], in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Joseph Tanfani at the Los Angeles Times is reporting [ http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-voter-registration-gop-arrest-20121018,0,5352175.story ] that Small was “working as a supervisor as part of a registration operation in eight swing states financed by the Republican National Committee.”
He was first hired, says Tanfani, by Strategic Allied Consulting, the firm owned by the disgraced GOP operative and paid Mitt Romney political consultant Nathan Sproul. Even before this year’s registration fraud scandal, which began with Strategic in Florida, Sproul’s companies have long been accused of, though never charged with, destroying Democratic voter registrations in election after election and state after state, going back to at least 2004. Despite that, Sproul was hired by the Bush/Cheney campaign in 2004, by the McCain/Palin Campaign in 2008, and by Romney during the Republican Primary cycle.
Sproul’s company, Strategic Allied Consulting, was hired by the RNC in August for more than $3 million, reportedly as its sole voter registration company this cycle. His company was said to have been fired by the RNC [ http://www.bradblog.com/?p=9592 ] and five different battleground state Republican parties several weeks ago, after fraudulent voter registrations began to emerge across Florida. Some of those questionable applications included address changes for existing voters, such that Florida election officials told the BRAD BLOG [ http://www.bradblog.com/?p=9590 ] they worry voters could find themselves disenfranchised come Election Day. In Florida, as in many states, provisional ballots cast at precincts other than where voters are officially registered will not be counted. So changing the addresses on voter registrations without voters’ knowledge is a serious crime with potentially very serious consequences.
Reilly’s report at TPM says that Small “worked for PinPoint, a company hired to register voters on behalf of the Republican Party of Virginia.” In fact, PinPoint Staffing placed ads to hire workers for Strategic Allied Consulting in FL, VA and a number of other states, though the BRAD BLOG has learned that the company removed many of those ads once the scandal began to break in Florida. They have since modified some of their newer ads to hide their ties to the Republican Party.
In response to queries we sent to Sproul late Thursday, his crisis spokesperson, David Leibowitz, attempted to distance his client from the arrest of the Republican Party worker in Virginia, claiming that “the only connection between Sproul and Pinpoint is that Nathan has, on occasion, used Pinpoint to hire some workers.”
It was PinPoint Staffing, in fact, which reportedly hired the man Strategic blamed for the fraudulent registration forms turned in originally in Palm Beach. But while PinPoint continues to seek workers for GOP-related efforts around the country, and as Sproul’s operations continue in “as many as 30 states”, it is the Republican National Committee’s response to the entire affair, including to the arrest today, that may be the most troubling…
The RNC ‘firing’ deception
Colin Small, according to his LinkedIn profile, as captured by the NotLarrySaboto blog [ http://notlarrysabato.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451b13369e2017c32a0a23a970b-pi ] (which was the first to highlight the initial report [ http://notlarrysabato.typepad.com/doh/2012/10/virginia-gop-caught-destroying-voter-registration-forms.html ] of a man with PA license plates tossing a bag of Virginia Voter Registration Forms into a Harrisonburg dumpster), wasn’t only working for the state GOP or for Strategic Allied Consulting or for PinPoint. He was working as a “Grassroots Field Director at the Republican National Committee,” according to LinkedIn.
[Update: NBC News is reporting [ http://nbcpolitics.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/10/19/14556980-gop-registration-worker-charged-with-voter-fraud ] this morning that RNC Communications Director denies Small was "directly employed by the RNC" and that he will be "told to take down that." Small is currently in jail and unable to respond to clear up the question, however.]
Last month, several days after fraudulent voter registration forms collected by Strategic Allied Consulting and turned in by the Florida GOP began to be discovered by County election officials in Florida, the RNC claimed to have fired Strategic [ http://www.bradblog.com/?p=9592 ].
Sean Spicer, the RNC’s Communications Director, boasted that the party took “swift and bold action” after learning of the fraud, claiming they have “zero tolerance” for it or for those who commit it. However, as we summarized in our very first report on this scandal [ http://www.bradblog.com/?p=9586 ], Sproul’s companies have a long history of workers being paid per Republican registration form and for being accused of destroying Democratic ones.
Despite that, they were hired once again this year by the RNC who, Sproul says, asked them to create the new company in June without his name on it to avoid it being tied to him. Not very bold or zero tolerancy of them. Though Spicer said he had no knowledge of that arrangement, Sproul told the BRAD BLOG he stands by his assertion.
Beyond that, last Thursday we reported [ http://www.bradblog.com/?p=9627 ] that Sproul’s firms, including what appeared to be a “clone” operation of Strategic Allied Consulting, calling itself Issue Advocacy Partners, were still found working for Republicans and right-wing ballot initiatives in at least 10 states. Subsequently, on Friday, the Los Angeles Times reported [ http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-fired-rnc-consultant-canvassing-campaign-20121012,0,2171682.story ] that, in fact, Sproul was still “hiring workers for a voter canvassing operation this fall in as many as 30 states.”
On Thursday, following Small’s arrest, Sproul’s spokesman Leibowitz hedged that number by telling us via email: “What we said on the record to various media outlets is that his companies are working in ‘as many as 30 states.’ That could mean 1 state. Or 2. Or 30. You get the idea, I’m sure.”
We do. The idea is Sproul does not want to come clean about his ongoing operations and who it is that he continues to work for, preferring instead to live up to the “shady” adjective that’s often applied to him in the media. Despite our follow-up request, Leibowitz did not identify the exact number of states that Sproul was still working in, or who was paying him to do so.
Strategic was said to have been hired by state Republican Parties, at the request of the RNC, for voter registration drives in five states (Florida, North Carolina, Virginia, Nevada and Colorado) and for “Get Out the Vote” campaigns in Ohio and Wisconsin. When both RNC and state GOP officials claimed to have fired them, it seems they didn’t really mean it.
In Tanfani’s report at LA Times late Thursday, Spicer confirms that, really, it may have only been Sproul who the party claimed to be “boldly” cutting ties with. The operations Sproul created for the Party beginning in August, the ones that led to fraudulent voter registrations in Florida and destroyed applications reported in Colorado and Nevada as well, are still in place.
“After Sproul was dumped,” Tanfani reports, “the registration operation that he assembled continued working under the supervision of party officials, Spicer said. He said the workers will continue to do get-out-the-vote work until the election.”
The firing of Sproul and Strategic Allied Consulting was a deception.
Moreover, as The BRAD BLOG detailed on Tuesday [ http://www.bradblog.com/?p=9632 ] the company’s mailing address, according to documents released [PDF] [ http://bradblog.com/Docs/ElectionsFraudComplaint_StrategicAlliedConsulting_092712.pdf ] by the Florida Dept. of Law Enforcement upon announcement of their statewide criminal investigation of Strategic [ http://www.bradblog.com/?p=9609 ] (the firm is also being criminally investigated in CO [ http://www.bradblog.com/?p=9622 ]), was registered as a corporation last June out of the same law office run by top-level Republican National Committee election attorneys where both Karl Rove’s American Crossroads Super-PAC and the Koch Brothers’ Americans for Prosperity are also based.
Despite Spicer’s attempt to downplay the VA incident on Thursday — “He made a mistake and he’s being charged with it, which we fully support” — as he similarly did for the FL incidents previously, it’s become clear that the RNC’s deceptive and often illegal registration and canvass operations are toxic, widespread, and very high-reaching.
Ironically, or perhaps not at this point, Romney, who hired Sproul late last year as a “political consultant” for some $71,000, appears to have committed both voter registration fraud and voter fraud himself [ http://www.bradblog.com/?p=9397 ] in Massachusetts, when he voted in the January 2010 U.S. Senate Special Election between Scott Brown and Martha Coakley. While he owned houses in both California and New Hampshire at the time, he did not own a Massachusetts home until July of that year. Instead, he used the basement of his son’s Belmont, Mass., home as his own registration address in apparent contravention of Massachusetts state residency laws. [See our still-growing list of other very high-profile GOPers recently involved in apparent election fraud crimes [ http://www.bradblog.com/?p=9467 ].]
Trashed registration forms in Virginia
According to FEC filings obtained by CBS 6 in Richmond [ http://wtvr.com/2012/09/27/virginia-republicans-fire-voter-registration-group/ ] last month, the Virginia Republican Party reportedly paid some $500,000 to Strategic for registration work before the state GOP claimed to have fired them, several days after the fraudulent forms collected by Strategic and submitted to county Supervisors of Elections by the Florida GOP began to surface in the Sunshine State. As we now know, only Sproul was fired. The voter registration operation itself continued.
Small, the man arrested on Thursday and charged with eight felony counts and five misdemeanors after allegedly having been found to have tossed at least eight registration forms into a dumpster in Harrisonburg, Va. (Rockingham County), was reportedly working for an operation named PinPoint on behalf of the Virginia GOP, according to Reilly at TPM.
In an earlier report on the matter at TPM [ http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/10/virginia_sheriff_republican_voter_registration.php ], before Small’s arrest later in the day, Reilly noted that “Virginia does not register voters by political party, so it would be difficult for someone to discard forms from their political opponents.”
Not really.
Reilly’s assessment does not take into account the very specific and purposely deceptive process used by Sproul’s companies — and, as suggested by evidence we’ve collected, perhaps other Republican-based voter registration outfits across the country — to identify and register only Republicans to vote, while attempting to filter out Democratic-leaning voters.
In an investigative report earlier this month, the BRAD BLOG detailed [ http://www.bradblog.com/?p=9600 ] video-taped and other evidence from nearly half a dozen states, demonstrating a deceptive, national Republican voter registration strategy where voter registration workers purposely misrepresented themselves as pollster to potential registrants.
Essentially, as detailed in video clips and other testimony in that report, the GOP voter registration workers hired by Sproul were trained to pretend to be taking a poll and to ask voters if they supported Mitt Romney or Barack Obama. If the answer was “Obama”, the potential registrant was thanked and sent on their way. If the answer came back as “Romney”, they were given the opportunity to register to vote. In that way, the thousands of workers employed by Sproul, the former head of the Arizona Republican Party and Christian Coalition, kept many Democratic-leaning voters from registering to vote at all.
In one YouTube video that went viral last month [ http://www.bradblog.com/?p=9583 ], a young Colorado registration worker — who, it turned out, had been working for Sproul’s Strategic Allied Consulting on behalf of the state GOP — is seen doing exactly that. Another videoposted by Las Vegas ABC affiliate Action News 13 [ http://www.ktnv.com/news/local/166966656.html ], shows a worker there playing out the same pollster scheme in Nevada. Sproul shared an email with The BRAD BLOG in which he had boasted to other company officials that the Vegas video tape captured their worker carrying out her training “perfectly”.
In Virginia, where the Pennsylvania man working for the state GOP was arrested Thursday, Chesterfield County’s General Registrar Larry Haake was seen explaining to Richmond’s CBS 6 [ http://wtvr.com/2012/09/27/virginia-republicans-fire-voter-registration-group/ ] in late September that he had received complaints of Strategic employees discovered doing the same thing in a library last month.
“They were responsible for people that appeared in some libraries in Chesterfield County, supposedly to conduct voter registration drives,” Haake said, “but they were asking voters for whom they are going to vote.”
Haake says he informed the GOP of the incident at the time, but, apparently, no action was taken.
If, in fact, Small, or the workers he is said to have supervised, were using the same technique of misrepresenting themselves to voters about being a pollster, rather than being a registration worker, it’s likely he would have been able to glean whether those registrations he was allegedly seen tossing into a dumpster were for Democratic or Republican-leaning voters.
The ‘PinPoint’ piece of the puzzle
In that same story on the Sproul/RNC voter registration deception [ http://www.bradblog.com/?p=9600 ], we cited a 9/28/12 report by the Los Angeles Times [id.] that tied PinPoint Staffing to Sproul.
The article quoted William T. Hazard, the Strategic employee said by the company to have turned in the original fraudulent registration applications in Palm Beach County, Fla. He says he “did nothing wrong”, but told the paper that he was trained “to approach people and ask whom they supported in the presidential election. When people answered with President Obama, he said, he wished them a good day. If someone said Mitt Romney, he asked if they were registered to vote. If not, he handed them forms to fill out.”
He says that it was a help wanted ad placed by PinPoint that led him to the work for Strategic, Sproul, and the Republican Party.
“He got the voter registration job after responding to a Craigslist ad placed by a company called PinPoint Staffing seeking people to do ‘voter surveys’,” the Times reported at the time. “The ad specified that all applicants had to be registered Republicans and active voters.”
Further, the paper says, “Although he reported to a PinPoint Staffing office in West Palm Beach, he said, ‘I thought I was dealing with the Republican Party.’”
PinPoint was key to Sproul’s operations. So who are they?
Over our three-week long investigation of Sproul and the GOP Voter Registration Fraud Scandal, we had collected dozens of help wanted ads posted by PinPoint Staffing that were nearly identical to others published on behalf of Strategic. Some of those ads placed in North Carolina had proved instrumental, originally, to theBlueNC blog’s Greg Flynn [ http://www.bluenc.com/republican-paid-voter-registration-operation-linked-fraud ] in late August when they were key to his uncovering Sproul’s previously-secret ownership of Strategic Allied Consulting.
Many of the PinPoint ads on Craigslist and other sites — seeking “VOTER REGISTRATION SUPPORT” by “REPUBLICAN PARTY SUPPORTER(S)”, for example — were hastily removed from the Internet at nearly the same time that Sproul and Strategic were being outed and supposedly fired. The BRAD BLOG captured many of them before they were taken down, some with the message: “This posting has been flagged for removal.”
We discovered ads by PinPoint Staffing in dozens of cities, in Virginia, North Carolina and Washington D.C., as well as all across Florida, from Pensacola in the panhandle, down to Palm Beach County where the first fraudulent registration forms were discovered [ http://www.bradblog.com/?p=9586 ] in late September.
More recently, PinPoint ads for “Political Jobs” or “Campaign” or “Canvassing” operations began to no longer include references to “Republican Voters” or “Romney” or the “Republican Party”. Instead they might read “ARE YOU LOOKING FOR YOUR BIG BREAK INTO POLITICS?”. Such ads have been found this month in Virginia, Wisconsin, New York, Arizona and Florida.
During our research on our report last week detailing the state’s where Sproul was confirmed to still be working [ http://www.bradblog.com/?p=9627 ], we found evidence of his continuing operations under the names Issue Advocacy Partners and Grassroots Outreach in Alabama, California, Georgia, Louisiana, Oregon, Wisconsin, Iowa, Virginia, New York, New Jersey and, possibly, Ohio (where the RNC had previously admitted that Strategic had been scheduled to do “Get Out the Vote” work this year before the “firing”.)
At TPM, Reilly reports that “A man who answered the phone at Pinpoint and only gave his name as Ryan said he was not allowed to comment. ‘I really want to stay out of it,’ he said.”
Ads for Strategic placed in late Summer by PinPoint in Alachua, Fla., and in September in Winston Salem, N.C., told perspective employees to “Contact Ryan.”
The phone number given on the ads was from Phoenix, AZ. Sproul’s main operation is based just outside of Phoenix, in Tempe.
“Let me be as unequivocal as possible. Nathan Sproul and his businesses have no ownership interest in Pinpoint,” his spokesperson Leibowitz, hired by Sproul to manage the crisis several weeks into it, insisted to The BRAD BLOG late Thursday. “He doesn’t control it, nor is he affiliated with it.”
“The only connection between Sproul and Pinpoint is that Nathan has, on occasion, used Pinpoint to hire some workers.”
When we followed up to ask if Sproul had used PinPoint to hire workers in FL, VA or anywhere else, whether any of his current companies are still using them, and for what services he has used them in the past, or if he has since stopped, Leibowitz demurred.
“Given that Nathan’s companies have no connection to the Pinpoint-related story you cited earlier, we see no need to go into any further detail.”
Deborah Newell Tornello [ http://litbrit.blogspot.com/ ] contributed research to this report.
Investigative journalist and broadcaster Brad Friedman is the creator and publisher of The BRAD Blog [ http://bradblog.com/ ]. He has contributed to Mother Jones, The Guardian, Truthout, Huffington Post, The Trial Lawyer magazine and Editor & Publisher. More Brad Friedman [ http://www.salon.com/writer/brad_friedman/ ].
Copyright © 2012 Salon Media Group, Inc. (emphasis in original)
http://www.salon.com/2012/10/19/gop_voter_registration_scandal_widens/ [with comments]
===
Tricksters Trying To Suppress Vote With Deceptive Phone Calls
Early voting appears to have moved up the clock on dirty tricks, as some voters get phone calls with misinformation about voter identification or when and how to vote.
By Dan Froomkin
Posted: 10/16/2012 11:52 am Updated: 10/16/2012 11:59 am
Some African American, Spanish-speaking and elderly voters in Florida and Virginia are apparently being targeted by anonymous voter-suppression groups trying to trick them or intimidate them into not voting in the November presidential election, according to election officials and voter protection organizations.
The Virginia State Board of Elections [ http://www.pwcgov.org/Documents/RumorBuster.pdf ] is warning residents that "some Virginia voters, particularly older Virginians, are receiving phone calls from unidentified individuals informing voters that they can vote over the phone. This information is false."
In Florida, the 866-OUR-VOTE election protection hotline run by the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law has received a report of a similar calls in Florida [ http://www.866ourvote.org/newsroom/news/deceptive-calls-received-in-florida ].
The lawyers' committee is also investigating reports from callers into African-American and Spanish-language radio stations in Florida that they had received warnings over the phone that election officials would be checking car insurance and registration status at the polls.
Attempts to deceive members of certain demographic groups into not voting have become an unfortunate staple of the American electoral process, but they normally don't start until much closer to Election Day, said Eric Marshall, manager of legal mobilization at the lawyers' committee.
In Florida, the voter who alerted the hotline described a phone call in which the caller said that a new law has passed that allows voters to vote by phone with just a name and address, he said. The caller knew the voter’s name, address and party affiliation.
Marshall said the caller evidently had access to voter rolls, and read back the information "to make it sound more official." "This isn't necessarily a new tactic," he said. "But it's early."
And just to be clear: "You cannot vote by phone," Marshall said.
What has changed the trickster calendar? "I guess with the increase of early voting, they're moving these types of tactics up earlier," Marshall said.
People who get such calls should try to get as much information about the call as possible, he said. They should get the caller's phone number and ask questions about where they're calling from. If the call is a recording, they should record it, and then report it to 866-OUR-VOTE, Marshall said.
Other historical attempts at voter suppression have included calls, fliers and even door-to-door campaigns trying to trick people into not going to vote. One of the most infamous attempts was in Virginia in 2008, when a flier [ http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Misinformation_campaign_tells_Dems_to_vote_1028.html ] was distributed telling Democrats they were supposed to vote on Wednesday, not Tuesday.
The disinformation campaign would appear to be a sort of illegal corollary to the Republican-backed campaign to demand photo identification from voters. What opponents say they seem to have in common is an intent to particularly block or dissuade African American, Latino and elderly voters from casting ballots.
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/16/voter-suppression-tricksters_n_1970272.html [with comments]
===
Of Republicans and Race Cards
Why I Used to Believe That Voter ID Laws Really Were Just Common Sense
By Jeremiah Goulka
[author of/see also in particular the first item at (linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=79791661 and preceding and following]
October 14, 2012
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175604/ [also at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeremiah-goulka/republicans-voter-id_b_1966848.html (with comments)]
===
Amber Gilleylen Alleges Anti-White 'Discrimination' After McDonald's Employee Denies Her New Biscuits
The McDonald's restaurant in St. Ann, Mo., where the incident occurred.
By Bonnie Kavoussi
Posted: 10/19/2012 11:20 am EDT Updated: 10/19/2012 11:21 am EDT
A white woman is suing after a black McDonald's employee would not give her an additional free order of biscuits when she complained about the quality of those she was given.
Amber Gilleylen of St. Louis, Mo., sued McDonald's employee Tonya Wesley, her manager Pardeep Roe, and M&M Management, the operator of the St. Ann, Mo., McDonald's franchise, where the incident occurred, for alleged "discrimination" on Monday.
The complaint claims that on Nov. 30, 2011, when Gilleylen complained about her food, Wesley said: "The white chick has a problem with her biscuits."
Wesley and her manager allegedly told Gilleylen that she could have her money back, but not another serving of food for free, according to the complaint, which doesn't specify what was wrong with Gilleylen's biscuits.
"Defendants refused to serve [Gilleylen] based on her color, race and sex," the complaint says. "Defendants denied [Gilleylen] full and equal use and enjoyment of a place of public accommodation based on her color, sex and race."
Gilleylen is not alone in perceiving discrimination. White people now believe [ http://now.tufts.edu/news-releases/whites-believe-they-are-victims-racism-more-o ] they are the primary targets of racial discrimination in the U.S., according to a study released last year by researchers at Tufts University and Harvard Business School.
The complaint claims that Wesley "threatened [Gilleylen] with bodily harm," and that she caused Gilleylen to "suffer apprehension of offensive contact" and become "damaged in the form of emotional distress and humiliation." Overall, the complaint states, the defendants' actions were "outrageous" because of their "evil motive or reckless indifference to the rights of others."
Gilleylen filed a charge with the Missouri Commission on Human Rights (MCHR) in February, and MCHR gave her the right to sue for alleged discrimination in July, according to the complaint.
This isn't the first time a major fast food restaurant has been accused of racism. A Domino's Pizza delivery driver wrote [ http://www.wral.com/news/local/story/8173902/ ] the N-word and "DON'T TIP" on the receipt for the order delivered to a black North Carolina woman in 2010, according to WRAL. A recent lawsuit also alleges [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/06/in-n-out-burger-lawsuit_n_1861897.html ] that In-N-Out Burger discriminates against blacks in its hiring process.
(Hat tip: Courthouse News Service [ http://www.courthousenews.com/2012/10/18/51403.htm ].)
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/19/amber-gilleylen-mcdonalds-discrimination_n_1986268.html [with comments]
===
New Evidence That Racism Isn't 'Natural'
The reaction to African-American faces was found to be weaker in people with racially diverse peers.
Oct 17 2012
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/10/new-evidence-that-racism-isnt-natural/263785/ [with comments]
===
John Yoo, 'Torture Memo' Author, Says Obama Violated Constitution With Deferred Action Policy
10/15/2012
John Yoo, the George W. Bush-era Justice Department lawyer who penned so-called "Torture memos" authorizing controversial interrogation techniques, accused the president Friday of holding a "radical vision of executive power" and usurping the Constitution with his recently enacted policy to stop deporting some young undocumented immigrants.
"Obama’s order has pushed the executive power beyond all constitutional limits," Yoo wrote in a Fox News op-ed posted Friday [ http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2012/10/12/obama-has-pursued-dangerous-change-in-powers-president/ ], adding later that it appeared to be a political move to shore up the Latino vote ahead of the election. "Worried about Hispanic support for his re-election ... Obama simply decided to unilaterally enact his own legislation."
[...]
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/15/john-yoo-obama-deffered-action_n_1966955.html [with embedded video report, and comments]
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Hypocrisy? Torture Memo Creator: Obama Violated Constitution
"John Yoo, the George W. Bush-era Justice Department lawyer who penned so-called "Torture memos" authorizing controversial interrogation techniques, accused the president Friday of holding a "radical vision of executive power" and usurping the Constitution with his recently enacted policy to stop deporting some young undocumented immigrants.
"Obama's order has pushed the executive power beyond all constitutional limits," Yoo wrote in a Fox News op-ed posted Friday, adding later that it appeared to be a political move to shore up the Latino vote ahead of the election. "Worried about Hispanic support for his re-election ... Obama simply decided to unilaterally enact his own legislation."
Obama announced in June that some undocumented immigrants who entered the United States as children would be granted deferred action -- two years reprieve from deportation concerns -- and work authorization. GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney said earlier this month that he would end the policy."* Jimmy Dore (The Jimmy Dore Show) and Steve Oh (COO of The Young Turks) break down Yoo's opinion and Steve explains why Yoo is a hypocrite and "the worst Korean-American in history."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HaYmmf9HncA
===
Joe Arpaio Critics Dress Up As 'King Arpaio' And Jesters, Disrupt Meeting
Critics of Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio dressed as a king and jesters to disrupt a meeting Wednesday.
10/17/2012
PHOENIX -- The nation's self-professed "Toughest Sheriff" Joe Arpaio is pretty good at getting attention, be it through birther investigations or keeping undocumented immigrants in a tent city and forcing them to wear pink underwear [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/29/joe-arpaio-pink-underwear-jail_n_1387708.html ].
Some of his constituents in Maricopa County, Ariz., are sick of it. And on Wednesday, they proved they're capable of creating a spectacle, too.
Anti-Arpaio protesters carried a man posing as "King Arpaio" into a Maricopa County board of supervisors meeting Wednesday morning to protest the board's failure to condemn the sheriff. The "king," a grey-haired and balding man wearing a gold crown, aviator sunglasses and a red velvet cape, was carried by a "royal posse" wearing jester's hats. He yelled that he would win four more years -- Arpaio has been in office for two decades and is 80 years old -- and that he has plenty more pink underwear to distribute.
One hundred or so other protesters, organized by progressive group Citizens for a Better Arizona and led by the group's president, Randy Parraz, yelled back that Arpaio will be ousted soon. They followed the "king" in disrupting the meeting with prayers, chanting and singing until the frustrated chairman, Republican Max Wilson, finally adjourned it and said he would meet with Parraz and a small group of others.
[...]
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/17/joe-arpaio-protest-king-arpaio_n_1975003.html [with comments]
===
Allen West plagued by scam PACs
10/17/12
There’s a new super PAC popping up in this year’s campaign: SCAM PAC.
In the presidential race, and tied to the coattails of Republican firebrand Rep. Allen West, a cottage industry has sprung up in which groups with such seemingly innocuous names as “Patriots for Economic Freedom” use high-profile campaigns and big names like West to raise money for themselves and build their email lists.
It’s the inevitable, if unsightly, convergence of the Internet, tea party, the post-Citizens United campaign-finance era and the presence of a Democrat in the White House who is despised by many conservatives. Political operatives can create a PAC and corresponding website on the cheap, drop some cash to rent an email list and, voilà— in come the small-dollar contributions from grass-roots Republicans eager to support any effort aiming to turn out President Barack Obama or reelect the fiery West.
Except those chunks of $25 and $50 don’t often find their way to any serious campaigns to beat Obama or boost West.
“The vast majority of the groups that we know are engaged in this have done nothing for West,” said Jill Holtzman Vogel, the congressman’s campaign attorney.
And, with the outfits that have given to West, those contributions pale in comparison to the money they’ve raised using the freshman Republican’s name.
According to media trackers and West campaign officials, none of the many conservative super PACs purportedly raising money for the congressman is airing TV ads on his behalf.
[...]
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1012/82498.html [with comments]
===
Billy Graham's organization removes Mormonism from its list of cults
October 18, 2012
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-250_162-57535071/billy-grahams-organization-removes-mormonism-from-its-list-of-cults/ [with comments]
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Graham family tightens ties with Romney as presidential election nears
Republican presidential candidate, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, left, meets with Rev. Billy Graham, center, and his son Franklin Graham, Thursday, Oct. 11, 2012, in Montreat, N.C.
(AP Photo/ Evan Vucci)
Evangelistic Association’s website cuts Mormonism from listing of ‘cults’
By Michael Gordon
Posted: Thursday, Oct. 18, 2012
The election-year embrace of Mitt Romney by some evangelical Christians now borders on a bear hug, given a series of moves by Billy Graham and his family that appear to say it’s OK to vote for a Mormon.
This week, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association removed Mormonism from its list of religious cults.
The reclassification follows Romney’s visit to Graham’s mountain home last Thursday, a meeting that also included Graham’s son Franklin, who now runs the association for his 93-year-old father.
Mormons consider themselves Christians and say their faith tracks the teachings of Jesus. But they give equal stature to the Book of Mormon and the Bible. Several of their beliefs – including that God the Father, the Holy Spirit and Jesus are separate deities and not part of the divine Trinity – further separate them from mainstream Christian teachings.
An article on the Graham website had classified Mormons, along with Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Unification Church, Unitarians, Spiritists and Scientologists, among others, as cults.
“Our primary focus at the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association has always been promoting the Gospel of Jesus Christ,” Ken Barun, the evangelical association’s chief of staff, said in a prepared statement.
“We removed the (cult) information from the website because we do not wish to participate in a theological debate about something that has become politicized during this campaign.”
The Grahams, however, long ago waded into the politics of the presidential campaign. In the current issue of the association’s Decision magazine, Franklin Graham poses the question in a column titled: “Can an Evangelical Christian Vote for a Mormon?”
He answers it with a rousing yes.
“We are at a profound crossroads. Our secularized society has shaken its fist in God’s face and rejected his very name,” Franklin Graham writes. “… We must not silence our voices when government clashes with the worship of God.
“I pray that all Christians and God-fearing Americans will put aside labels and vote for principles – God’s principles.”
While Billy Graham has never formally endorsed a candidate, the ties between the family and Romney have grown tighter, starting with Franklin’s call before the South Carolina presidential primary for conservative Christians to not hold Romney’s religion against him. “We are not electing a pastor-in-chief,” he said at the time.
Mark DeMoss, Franklin Graham’s longtime spokesman, is now a Romney adviser. DeMoss told The Associated Press last week that Franklin Graham “is doing everything he can to encourage churches to encourage their people to get out and vote.”
The younger Graham has also had his run-ins with President Barack Obama. In 2010, the Army withdrew an invitation for Franklin Graham to speak at a Pentagon prayer breakfast because of his criticism of Islam.
In February, Graham questioned Obama’s Christianity while raising the possibility that the president is a Muslim.
In his Decision magazine column, Franklin Graham cites a statement by former President Bill Clinton that Obama has a plan to “rebuild America.”
“God-fearing Americans have no desire to see America rebuilt – but rather restored,” he writes. “To ‘rebuild it’ would be to create a new nation without God or perhaps under many Gods.”
The Grahams’ actions could further cement conservative Christian support for Romney in the Nov. 6 election, even though most evangelicals don’t consider him a Christian.
That religious divide cost Romney heavily in the South Carolina primary, when he finished a distant second to Newt Gingrich, a Catholic who is twice divorced.
“Romney’s Mormonism will be more a cause of concern than Gingrich’s infidelity,” the Rev. Brad Atkins, president of the S.C. Baptist Convention, said at the time.
Mark Harris, pastor of First Baptist Church of Charlotte and president of the North Carolina Baptist State Convention, says evangelicals now have a clear choice.
“While certainly we differ and have deep theological issues with Gov. Romney’s religion and faith, we do share similar values,” Harris said.
On topics such as same-sex marriage and abortion, “our values are far more similar than nonsimilar.”
Move to the mainstream
Throughout his six-decade career, Billy Graham made several moves that made Southern evangelicals uncomfortable – from preaching for integration to including Catholics and more moderate denominations on his crusade teams.
For their part, Mormons have moved more to the cultural, economic and political mainstream, says Bill Leonard, professor of Baptist studies, church history and religion at Wake Forest University.
“Up until the 1950s, you either were a Mormon or you despised the Mormons, because they were considered so weird in the minds of the evangelical majority that there was an almost demonic quality to them.”
Since then, Mormons such as Romney’s father, George, who was the governor of Michigan and ran for president in 1968, and Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch broke public barriers. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints also broke with its longstanding tradition of polygamy. The Mormon Tabernacle Choir became a cultural icon.
Today, Mormons make up about 2 percent of the U.S. population. The Carolinas are home to some 115,000 of the church members.
A Pew Research Center survey earlier this year found that 66 percent of Mormons consider themselves conservative, and almost 75 percent described themselves as Republican or Republican-leaning.
Attempts to reach a local church spokesman were unsuccessful.
In his October column in Decision magazine, Franklin Graham called for the rebirth of a political alliance built on faith – “made up of Christians, Jews, Mormons, Catholics … to take a stand for our religious freedoms and rights.”
Conservative Christians now need those partnerships, Leonard said, given a Pew study this month that showed Protestants are no longer the religious majority in the United States. The fastest-growing religious groups, those not affiliated with a particular church, tend to vote Democratic.
“You could make the case that for the religious right, this is a last-ditch effort in terms of their public privilege, in terms of being the religious majority,” Leonard said.
Some still doubt Mormonism
For now, some other Conservative Christian groups have not followed the Grahams’ move.
The Christian Research Institute of Charlotte, which was begun in 1960 to counteract the threat posed by “cults and other alternative religious systems,” still considers Mormonism a cult.
It says Mormon doctrines “compromise, confuse or contradict the nature of God, the authority of Scripture, and the way of salvation.”
Even the Billy Graham Evangelical Association website has not been completely scrubbed of concerns about the Mormon religion.
Under the section of “Billy Graham’s My Answer,” a questioner who has been invited by a couple “to come to their assembly hall to study the Bible” is warned to be wary of those (like Mormons) that claim “the books their founder wrote or ‘discovered’ are from God, and have equal authority to the Bible.”
“Ask God to lead you to a church where Christ is honored and the Bible is taught,” the website counsels.
Copyright 2012 The Charlotte Observer
http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2012/10/18/3603920/graham-family-ties-tighten-with.html [with comments]
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Billy Graham's Anti-Gay Fundamentalism
10/17/2012
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-g-long/billy-grahams-anti-gay-fundamentalism_b_1968858.html [with comments]
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Billy Graham Launches 'Biblical Values' Ads After Meeting Mitt Romney
10/18/2012
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/18/billy-graham-ads-mitt-romney_n_1983113.html [with comments]
===
(linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=80565177 and preceding (and any future following)
By Arturo Garcia
Friday, October 19, 2012 17:26 EDT
For the second time in a week, a Colorado field office for President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign has been targeted.
KUSA-TV reported Friday [ http://www.9news.com/news/article/295086/222/Obama-campaign-office-vandalized-with-swastikas ] that the campaign’s field office in Conifer, Colorado, was found with swastikas spray-painted on it.
According to The Denver Post [ http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_21810827/vandals-spray-paint-swastikas-obama-campaign-office-conifer ], a spokesperson for the Johnson County Sheriff’s Department said a deputy answering a vandalism report that morning found three windows and five campaign signs for the president had been vandalized, though he did not know what had been spray-painted on them.
The swastika symbol is widely associated with the Nazi parties and accompanying philosophies like white supremacy.
Conifer is less than 60 miles away from Denver, where a gunshot was fired [ http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/10/12/report-obama-campaign-field-office-in-colorado-hit-by-gunfire/ (and see the first item in the post to which this is a reply)] at an Obama campaign field office Oct. 12. A Denver Police spokesman said the bullet was recovered from inside the office, but he did not have an update on that investigation.
Members of the Obama campaign at the Conifer office refused to comment on Friday’s incident.
KUSA’s report on the swastika incident, aired Friday, can be seen below.
[video embedded]
Copyright © 2012 Raw Story Media, Inc.
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/10/19/vandals-spraypaint-swastikas-on-obama-colorado-campaign-office/ [with comments]
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Swastika Found On Obama Campaign Office In Colorado
By John Celock
Posted: 10/19/2012 2:05 pm EDT Updated: 10/19/2012 7:59 pm EDT
WASHINGTON -- A swastika was found painted on the window of President Barack Obama's campaign office in a Denver, Colo., suburb late Thursday.
The black Nazi symbol was found by building owners painted outside a window of the office, located in the Denver suburb of Conifer, 9News.com reported [ http://www.9news.com/news/article/295086/222/Obama-campaign-office-vandalized-with-swastikas ]. The office opened recently in the Jefferson County hamlet.
The Jefferson County sheriff's office did not immediately return a request for comment. 9News.com reports that Obama's campaign has not commented on the incident, which comes a week after a shot was fired into a window [ http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/shot-fired-obama-campaign-office-denver-17468680 ] of Obama's Denver campaign office.
In 2009 during a Tea Party rally held to oppose the stimulus package on the day Obama signed the bill, a participant waved a sign [ http://www.denverpost.com/headlines/ci_11726655 ] bearing a swastika in the "O" of Obama's name. The sign holder had a picture taken [ http://www.coloradopols.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=8899 (picture next below)]
with conservative activist Michelle Malkin and was reportedly on stage when then-state Senate Minority Leader Josh Penry (R-Grand Junction) spoke.
The swastika incident occurs two weeks after an Obama supporter in Tulsa, Okla., who had an Obama sign on his lawn reported receiving a death threat from a neighbor [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/12/kyle-counts-obama-death-threat-oklahoma_n_1961540.html (the third item in the post to which this is a reply)]. Kyle Counts, a 27-year-old law student, told HuffPost that the neighbor engaged him an argument after seeing the sign and then yelled the threat, which was captured on video.
UPDATE: 7:55 p.m. -- Scott Lorditch, a volunteer at the Conifer office, told The Huffington Post that when he arrived at the office on Friday, staffers told him the vandalism occurred overnight. Lorditch said that Obama lawn signs in front of the office were also shredded. He said that while he did not see the damaged signs, when he arrived the signs were no longer in front of the office.
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/19/obama-swastika-colorado-office_n_1988128.html [with comments]
===
U.S. Rep. Mike Coffman duplicated others' words in Post, DBJ op-eds
10/20/2012
A pair of columns published by Republican U.S. Rep. Mike Coffman of Aurora within the past year contain passages of previously published work by other House members but did not attribute the source of the information or writing.
The op-ed columns on different subjects were published beneath Coffman's byline in The Denver Post [ http://www.denverpost.com/opinion/ci_20384851/house-plan-protects-medicare ] and the Denver Business Journal [ http://www.bizjournals.com/denver/print-edition/2012/08/24/small-businesses-looking-over-edge-of.html ].
The Post op-ed contains [ http://extras.mnginteractive.com/live/media/site36/2012/1019/20121019_074339_20121019_064146_rep-mike-coffman-plagiarism_4.pdf ] unattributed material from a budget proposal crafted by Republican U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan [ http://budget.house.gov/uploadedfiles/pathtoprosperity2013.pdf ] of Wisconsin, while the Business Journal op-ed contains material earlier published by U.S. Rep. Sam Graves of Missouri [ http://smallbusiness.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=305351 ].
[...]
http://www.denverpost.com/breakingnews/ci_21813492/u-s-rep-mike-coffman-duplicated-others-words [with comments]
===
Roger Rivard Picks Up Backing From Wisconsin Family Values Group After Saying 'Some Girls Rape Easy'
State Rep. Roger Rivard (R-Rice Lake) is losing support from fellow Republicans after he made controversial comments about rape.
By Amanda Terkel
Posted: 10/17/2012 3:42 pm Updated: 10/17/2012 3:58 pm
WASHINGTON -- Prominent Republicans in Wisconsin quickly dropped their support [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/12/roger-rivard-wisconsin-republicans-rape_n_1961124.html ] for state Rep. Roger Rivard (R-River Lake) after he told a newspaper that "[s]ome girls rape easy [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/10/roger-rivard-rape_n_1956491.html ]." But much like after Rep. Todd Akin (R-Mo.) made his controversial comments about "legitimate rape [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/19/todd-akin-abortion-legitimate-rape_n_1807381.html ]" and lost the backing of the GOP establishment, social conservatives and at least one "family values" group are rushing in to help.
On Wednesday, the Wisconsin Family Action PAC -- which bills itself as committed to "strengthening and preserving marriage, family, life and liberty" -- endorsed Rivard.
"We are very pleased to endorse candidates who recognize the importance of America's and Wisconsin's best natural resource -- her traditional families -- and who realize that our state's and our country's well-being is closely tied to the strength of this resource. These are candidates who will, in both policy and practice, work to help ensure that our families become or remain independent of government," said WFA PAC director Julaine Appling in a statement [ http://www.wifamilyaction.org/files/trya.campaigntoolbox.org/downloads/WFAPAC_PR_101612_0.pdf ].
Appling told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel [ http://www.jsonline.com/blogs/news/174410561.html ] that WFA PAC endorsed Rivard because of his stance on issues, but she declined to comment on his rape remark.
Rivard actually made his controversial remark -- which he said was advice shared with him by his father -- in December, when he talked to The Chetek Alert newspaper about the case of a 17-year-old high school student who was charged with sexual assault after having sex with an underage girl in the band room. The interview came to wider public notice after the Journal-Sentinel reported [ http://www.jsonline.com/news/statepolitics/state-legislator-criticized-for-comments-on-rape-hj76f4k-173587961.html ] on it last week.
Rivard told the Journal-Sentinel that his comments were "taken out of context," saying his father meant to convey that if "you do (have premarital sex), just remember, consensual sex can turn into rape in an awful hurry."
"Because all of a sudden a young lady gets pregnant and the parents are madder than a wet hen and she's not going to say, 'Oh, yeah, I was part of the program.' All that she has to say or the parents have to say is it was rape because she's underage. And he just said, 'Remember, Roger, if you go down that road, some girls,' he said, 'they rape so easy,'" Rivard said.
The district attorney involved in the case recently said that there was nothing consensual about the incident [ http://www.jsonline.com/news/statepolitics/prosecutor-says-sex-case-rivard-discussed-wasnt-consensual-v8784th-174290421.html ]; rather, that it was "a sex act perpetrated by force against the will of the victim."
Rivard is a freshman lawmaker and is stuck in a tight race for reelection against Democrat Stephen Smith.
He has since lost the backing [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/12/roger-rivard-wisconsin-republicans-rape_n_1961124.html ] of Wisconsin GOP Senate candidate Tommy Thompson, Gov. Scott Walker (R) and Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.).
The pattern of what Rivard is going through is similar to what Akin experienced in his bid for the U.S. Senate in Missouri, after he said that women are physically able to stop themselves from being pregnant if they are victims of a "legitimate rape." The GOP establishment -- including the National Republican Senatorial Committee and Karl Rove's Crossroads GPS -- pulled their financial support from Akin, and many Republicans called for him to bow out. Social conservatives [ http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2012/08/20/leading-social-conservatives-rally-to-akins-defense/ ], however, stuck by his side and have remained committed to helping him defeat Sen. Claire McCaskill (R-Mo.).
Since then, the GOP establishment has slowly begun moving back into the race [ http://go.bloomberg.com/political-capital/2012-09-26/akin-endorsed-by-santorum-demint/ ], with former presidential candidates Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum, as well as the National Federation of Independent Business [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/15/todd-akin-endorsed-nfib_n_1968318.html ], all endorsing Akin.
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/17/roger-rivard-wisconsin-family-values-rape_n_1973952.html [with comments]
===
Mitt Romney's Contraception Strategy: Change The Subject
By Laura Bassett
Posted: 10/17/2012 3:58 pm Updated: 10/17/2012 11:58 pm
Earlier in his campaign, Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney took a clear stand [ http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-57388129-503544/romney-clarifies-stance-on-blunt-amendment-of-course-im-for-it/ ] on the issue of contraception coverage by stating that he would support legislation that allowed all employers to refuse to cover employees' birth control for moral reasons. But lately, when Romney is pressed on that particular stance, he dodges the question in a way that gives the impression he has reversed his previous position.
"I just know that I don't think bureaucrats in Washington should tell someone whether they can use contraceptives or not, and I don't believe employers should tell someone whether they have contraceptive care or not," Romney said during Tuesday night's debate. "Every woman in America should have access to contraceptives and the president's statement on my policy is completely and totally wrong."
Romney's answer subtly changes the subject from insurance coverage of contraception to the more general issue of access to contraception, and it strategically leaves enough wiggle room for his campaign to say that his position has not changed. Romney campaign adviser Kerry Healey did exactly that in an interview with MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell on Wednesday.
Romney did "not in any way" change his position, Healey said. "Governor Romney is both a strong supporter of religious freedom and also believes in access to contraception for American women."
Pressed on the details of the Blunt amendment, which would have allowed employers to refuse to cover birth control on moral grounds and which Romney previously said he would support, Healey changed the subject. "The question of whether or not we should force someone to give up their religious freedom to provide insurance coverage in some hypothetical situation is not really the point to most women out there," she said. "There are 5.5 million unemployed women in the country."
What's lost in both Romney's and Healey's answers on the contraception issue is the point that President Barack Obama made Tuesday night, which is that for many women, having birth control fully paid for by their insurance plans is an economic issue. "In my health care bill, I said insurance companies need to provide contraceptive coverage to everybody who's insured, because this is not just a health issue, it's an economic issue for women," he said. "It makes a difference. This is money out of that family's pocket."
Romney also changed the subject on birth control [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/09/mitt-romney-moderate-contraception-_n_1953132.html ] earlier this month when a reporter for the Des Moines Register asked him if insurers should be required to cover it. "Well it’s a question as to, should you get a car painted, you know, red or blue," he said. "I mean you can decide which you’d like. People who want to have contraceptive health insurance can choose that in their policy. Those that don’t have -- that choose not to can buy a policy with or without."
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/17/mitt-romney-contraception_n_1974752.html [with comments]
===
Mitt Romney On Women At Bain: They Don't Want To Work There
10/18/2012
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/17/mitt-romney-women-bain_n_1974837.html [with comments]
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Romney 1994 on Women At Bain
Published on Oct 18, 2012 by Andrew Kaczynski
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGq-08tk0NE [via/more at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/18/mitt-romney-women-bain_n_1980919.html (with comments)]
===
Mitt Romney Adviser On Lilly Ledbetter Act: 'He Was Opposed To It At The Time' [UPDATE]
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/17/mitt-romney-lilly-ledbetter_n_1973446.html [with comments]
===
Paul Broun, Charles Darwin Face Off: Republican Faces Odd Write-In Opponent In Georgia House Race
In this Wednesday, July 2, 2008 file photo, 10th Congressional District Republican candidate Rep. Paul Broun speaks on the set of Georgia Public television in Atlanta. The Georgia representative said in videotaped remarks on Sept. 27, 2012 that evolution, embryology and the Big Bang theory are "lies straight from the pit of hell" meant to convince people that they do not need a savior. The Republican lawmaker made those comments during a speech at a sportsman's banquet at Liberty Baptist Church.
By RAY HENRY and RUSS BYNUM
10/17/12 08:35 PM ET
ATLANTA — Having denounced evolution as a lie "straight from the pit of hell [see (linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=80286479 ]," Republican Rep. Paul Broun has won himself a new political opponent: Charles Darwin.
An ultraconservative congressman whose district includes the University of Georgia campus, Broun told a Baptist church last month that evolution, embryology and the Big Bang theory were lies spread by scientists out to erode people's faith in Jesus Christ. He also claimed the Earth is roughly 9,000 years, a view held by fundamentalist Christians based on biblical accounts of creation.
Now scientists are questioning whether Broun, a medical doctor and a Baptist from Athens, should serve on the House Science, Space and Technology Committee if he rejects widely accepted scientific ideas. And a talk radio host in nearby Atlanta is trying to rally voters to cast write-in votes for Darwin, the English naturalist who first published his theory of evolution in 1859.
Religious fundamentalists like Broun damage the Republican brand, said Neal Boortz, the libertarian-leaning radio host who has a strong following among Georgia conservatives.
"It makes Republicans look like knee-dragging, still-tending, tobacco-spitting Neanderthals," Boortz said.
A Facebook page promoting Darwin for Congress went up Oct. 8 urging supporters to take a stand against Broun.
But the laws of political science hold that Broun will likely win re-election to a fourth term. He has no Democratic opponent in the election Nov. 6 and Georgia law requires write-in candidates to register by early September. That, and Darwin is long dead.
"Dr. Broun welcomes Mr. Darwin as a challenger and is particularly looking forward to the debate portion of the campaign," the congressman's spokeswoman, Meredith Griffanti, said in an e-mail Wednesday evening. "We're sure it will be very lively."
The write-in campaign is tongue-in-cheek, said Jim Leebens-Mack, a plant biologist at the University of Georgia who started the Facebook page. But its supporters hope Darwin gets enough votes to pressure Republicans into removing Broun from a leadership post on the House Science Committee. Kevin Smith, a spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner, did not immediately return a message seeking comment.
"I'd think the Republican Party would want to put a serious legislator in this seat rather than have Paul Broun," Leebens-Mack said.
Griffanti had previously said the congressman's Sept. 27 comments to a banquet at Liberty Baptist Church of Hartwell were intended as off-the-record statements about his personal beliefs. The church posted video of the congressman's speech on its website.
"God's word is true," Broun said in the video. "I've come to understand that. All that stuff I was taught about evolution and embryology and Big Bang theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of hell. And it's lies to try to keep me and all the folks who are taught that from understanding that they need a savior."
Mark Farmer, the biological sciences chairman at the University of Georgia, said Broun should resign his committee seat or be removed.
"If you truly don't understand or accept the basic tenets of modern science, I find it difficult to see how you could be making basic judgments about science policy," Farmer said.
Bynum reported from Savannah.
Copyright 2012 The Associated Press
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/17/paul-broun-charles-darwin_n_1974054.html [with comments]
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Louie Gohmert: Slavery Was 'A Blot On Our Existence,' But We're Farther From God Now
By Nick Wing
Posted: 10/17/2012 2:37 pm
Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) stated on Tuesday that the legacy of slavery in the United States was a particularly ugly moment in the nation's history, but that the situation now is even worse [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/gohmert-america-worse-off-now-slavery (next item below)].
Speaking on a conference call with far-right pastor Rick Scarborough, Gohmert warned listeners that the nation could be coming "toward the end of [its] existence," as evidenced by its leaders and citizens allegedly neglecting to remain true to biblical teachings.
"We strayed away different times. Andrew Jackson’s time was not a great time, different times slavery was a blot on our existence," Gohmert said. "But the trouble is we have never as an entire nation overall been so far away from God’s teaching and so openly rebelling, even from the top, against God’s teachings in the Bible."
Listen to the audio from Right Wing Watch [id.]:
[audio embedded]
Gohmert frequently speaks about what he sees as the degradation of religious principles in American society. Over the summer he blamed the supposed trend [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/20/louie-gohmert-aurora-shootings_n_1689099.html ] for the mass-shooting in Aurora, Colo.
"You know what really gets me, as a Christian, is to see the ongoing attacks on Judeo-Christian beliefs, and then some senseless crazy act of terror like this takes place," Gohmert said hours after the massacre in which 12 people were killed and 58 were wounded. "Some of us happen to believe that when our founders talked about guarding our virtue and freedom, that that was important. ... Whether it's John Adams saying our Constitution was made only for moral and religious people ... Ben Franklin, only a virtuous people are capable of freedom, as nations become corrupt and vicious they have more need of masters. ... We have been at war with the very pillars, the very foundation of this country."
Gohmert was also a leading proponent [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/26/louie-gohmert-media-muslim-brotherhood_n_1707025.html ] of a controversial push over the summer to investigate top Obama administration aides for supposed ties to the Muslim Brotherhood.
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/17/louie-gohmert-slavery_n_1974425.html [with comments]
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Rep. Gohmert Says America is Worse off Now than During Slavery
Submitted by Brian Tashman on Tuesday, 10/16/2012 5:20 pm
Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) joined the fervently [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/rick-scarborough-aids-gods-judgment-immoral-act ] anti-gay [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/scarborough-needs-money-stop-sodomites ], anti-Latino [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/latino-democratic-councilman-partners-anti-latino-pastor-rick-scarborough ] pastor Rick Scarborough of Vision America for his “40 Days to Save America” conference call today, and delivered a somber message to participants about how America is on the verge of collapse if their prayer efforts to shift the election [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/scarborough-leading-40-days-prayer-remove-ungodly-office ] don’t work. “The truth is if you look at great nations, great civilizations, great powers throughout recorded history, when they’ve passed some of the milestones we have as a nation, that was the sign that they were toward the end of their existence,” Gohmert said. He stated that “the only reason I continue to run for Congress is because I still have hope" as he urged Americans to “follow the rule book as to what blesses a nation” and join Scarborough’s prayer initiative.
[audio embedded]
The congressman argued that our Founders “followed biblical teachings” and therefore gave us “more liberties, more individual freedoms and values, ease of living, quality and standard of living than even more than Solomon’s Israel.” Gohmert went on to claim that the U.S. is in a state of such spiritual disrepair that the country is even worse off than during slavery, arguing that while “Andrew Jackson’s time was not a great time, at different times slavery was a blot on our existence,” America has “never as an entire nation overall been so far away from God’s teaching and so openly rebelling, even from the top, against God’s teaching in the Bible.”
[audio embedded]
There is so much that is so critical to whether or not this country continues, the greatest gift of a country to any people in history: more liberties, more individual freedoms and values, ease of living, quality and standard of living than even more than Solomon’s Israel. No explanation as to why we’ve been so blessed other than the people who went before us were blessed, they followed God’s rule book, in our founding they followed biblical teachings. We strayed away at different times, Andrew Jackson’s time was not a great time, at different times slavery was a blot on our existence, but the trouble is we have never as an entire nation overall been so far away from God’s teaching and so openly rebelling, even from the top, against God’s teachings in the Bible.
*
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Has the Muslim Brotherhood Infiltrated the Romney Campaign?
10/19/12 @ 12:45
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/has-muslim-brotherhood-infiltrated-romney-campaign
Right Wing Round-Up - 10/18/12
10/18/12 @ 5:39
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/right-wing-round-101812
Big Love at King’s College: D'Souza's Mistress Was Also Married
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Scarborough: God Allowed Benghazi Attack Because 'America is Mired in Sin'
10/18/12 @ 2:14
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Jeffress: 'Cult' Member Romney Still Better than Obama, who has his 'Fist in the Face of God'
10/18/12 @ 1:45
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/jeffress-cult-romney-better-obama-fist
D'Souza Accused Obama of 'Attacking the Traditional Values Agenda' Just Before Sex Scandal Revelations
10/18/12 @ 10:45
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Janet Huckabee: 'Women are Really on Fire for Todd Akin'
10/17/12 @ 1:20
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CWA Tries to Win Over Women By Claiming Romney Can’t Overturn Roe v. Wade
10/16/12 @ 4:25
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/cwa-tries-win-over-women-claiming-romney-can-t-overturn-roe-v-wade
Homeschooling Advocate Warns Public Schools are Similar to Hitler Youth
10/12/12 @ 5:00
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/homeschooling-advocate-warns-public-schools-are-similar-hitler-youth
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© 2012 People For the American Way
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/gohmert-america-worse-off-now-slavery
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Tommy Thompson's Son Made Birther Joke On More Than One Occasion (VIDEO)
10/17/2012
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/17/tommy-thompson-son-birther-joke_n_1974001.html [with comments] [the YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Y-VO6YkHrw ] [and see (linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=80560982 and preceding and following]
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Tommy Thompson Underestimates His Iran-Linked Stock During Debate
10/19/2012
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/19/tommy-thompson-iran-stock_n_1989632.html [with comments]
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Richard Mourdock Visits Controversial Fundamentalist Church That Uses Paddling
By Michael McAuliff
Posted: 10/15/2012 4:18 pm Updated: 10/15/2012 4:37 pm
Indiana state treasurer and Senate candidate Richard Mourdock has been trying to soften his hard-right image lately, but that didn't stop him from recently visiting [ http://www.nwitimes.com/news/local/porter/congregation-hosts-candidates/article_dcd30c2a-20c0-5159-bb54-60a6bba9eedc.html ] a fundamentalist church with extreme views.
Mourdock beat Sen. Dick Lugar in the GOP primary by shunning bipartisanship and pledging to be an uncompromising conservative in the U.S. Senate. But facing tightening polls against Rep. Joe Donnelly (D-Ind.) and unease among independents, Mourdock has been singing a much more bipartisan tune lately, even cutting an ad [ http://www.wbiw.com/local/archives/2012/08/new_tv_ad_featuring_lt_governo.php ] that promised he'll work with everyone.
The visit to the Fairhaven Baptist Church and its academy suggests he intends to continue catering to his base, however.
The Fairhaven school was in the news last year for maintaining a harsh disciplinary environment that features public whipping and humiliation of students. Rev. Roger Voegtlin, who runs the church, had a run-in with the law in the 1970s, but was cleared of all charges. In a CNN feature last year [ http://www.cnn.com/video/?/video/us/2011/09/23/tuchman-ungodly-discipline-part-3.cnn ( http://www.cnn.com/video/?/video/us/2011/09/23/tuchman-ungodly-discipline-part-3.cnn#/video/us/2011/09/23/tuchman-ungodly-discipline-part-3.cnn )], he said he still prescribes spanking children in a humiliating fashion.
"Yes. It is still done today," Voegtlin told the cable outlet. "And I suppose it is humiliation, but again, humiliation is not the big thing."
The church's controversial practices also got local coverage [ http://blogs.post-trib.com/davich/2011/10/church-scandal-column-sparks-b.html ].
Mourdock's campaign declined to discuss the visit, but posted a couple of pictures on the campaign's Flickr feed [ http://www.flickr.com/photos/mourdock2012/8080738139/in/photostream/ ].
Voegtlin praised Mourdock [ http://www.nwitimes.com/news/local/porter/congregation-hosts-candidates/article_dcd30c2a-20c0-5159-bb54-60a6bba9eedc.html ] and told his congregants, “I believe with all my heart this is the most important election in my lifetime.”
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/15/richard-mourdock-church-paddling_n_1968133.html [with comments]
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Matt Reisetter, Iowa State Senate Candidate, Says Divorce Is 'Evil,' Opposes Same-Sex Marriage
Iowa state Senate candidate Matt Reisetter
By John Clelock
Posted: 10/19/2012 5:15 pm EDT Updated: 10/19/2012 5:31 pm EDT
A Republican candidate for the Iowa state Senate told a group of college students that divorce is "evil" and that same-sex marriage should be blocked, along with criticizing his in-laws' marriage, in an undated video released by local Democrats.
Matt Reisetter, a staffer with the conservative group The Family Leader, outlined his positions in a lecture called "Homosexuality: Is It OK To Be Gay?" that he gave to students in 2010 at the University of Northern Iowa [ http://www.northern-iowan.org/mobile/uni-students-discuss-different-perspectives-of-homosexuality-1.2219609 ]. Another group, the Northern Iowa Democrats posted the video [ http://www.northerniowademocrats.com/2012/10/will-real-matt-reisetter-please-stand-up.html (direct link https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B09DpwKP2vaTdlhDQUVEcWxubXM )] on its website this week. Reisetter is challenging Sen. Jeff Danielson (D-Waterloo) for the seat.
In the lecture, Reisetter discusses biblical views and outlines his thoughts on same-sex marriage and homosexuality in general, along with divorce. The speech included questions from a liberal-leaning student audience.
"Social scientists, whether they be pagans or Christians, alike agree that the best environment to raise a child has one mom and one dad," Reisetter said.
He noted that same-sex marriage does not allow for a man and a woman to raise a child, and is hurting the development of children. He also noted that divorce causes similar problems by splitting up families and that divorce laws should be made harder, not easier.
"Divorce sucks, it's evil and it's wrong," Reisetter said.
He also cited studies that said that men engaging in anal sex have a higher rate of being exposed to the HIV virus than those who do not. Labeling the issue a public health risk, and comparing it to smoking bans, Reisetter questioned why the government is sanctioning same-sex marriage, which would lead to two married men having consensual sex.
When students countered that marriage would lead to monogamy, Reisetter said he does not believe gay men want to practice monogamy. Gay men are "by and large not into marriage," he said, while lesbians are more in favor of same-sex marriage.
He said, in general, laws should provide assistance to the larger population. "The role of law is to put laws on the books that promote the best beliefs," Reisetter said.
Reisetter rejected arguments that compare same-sex marriage with interracial marriage, saying that people are born with a skin color but not with a sexual orientation. He told the audience that no studies have proved 100 percent that someone is born with a sexual orientation, and that even if someone is born to do something, it does not mean they should.
"I was born to have sex with as many women as I was attracted to, I was born to take things that were not mine, I was born to be selfish," Reisetter said. "Being born gay does not win the argument. I was born to do things that are wrong."
Reisetter also addressed his in-laws' marriage early in his presentation, noting that they have the "worst marriage" as part of his questioning over who should be married. "(They) have the worst marriage that I have ever seen on screen or in real life," Reisetter said. "It is the worst, it is terrible. My wife would agree with me. My mother-in-law would agree with me."
Reisetter and his spokesman did not return multiple messages left for comment.
Danielson told HuffPost that he is opposed to Reisetter's views, saying that the video shows that the Republican has "radically extreme views about social issues."
"I think that Matt Reisetter's radical extreme social views are unbelievable to voters," Danielson said. "I believe that they want a senator who is thoughtful and understanding when it comes to our differences."
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/19/matt-reisetter-iowa-senate-divorce-gay-marriage_n_1989084.html [with comments]
===
Timothy Kurek, Straight Christian Man, 'Comes Out' And Pretends To Be Gay For A Year
Posted: 10/13/2012 11:59 am Updated: 10/18/2012 4:29 pm
Thousands of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people weren't the only ones celebrating National Coming Out Day [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/11/national-coming-out-day-celebrities-closet_n_1957679.html ] on Thursday. A Christian man from Tennessee appeared on ABC News to talk about his own coming out experience but -- he's straight.
Timothy Kurek "came out" to his family and friends and lived as a gay man for a year in order to experience what life is like as an LGB person. The Liberty College graduate told ABC News [ http://abcnews.go.com/Health/cross-closet-straight-christian-lives-year-gay-man/story?id=17443219 ], "You learned to be very afraid of God [in church]... [And you learned] the loving thing to do is to tell my friend who is gay, 'Hey, listen, you are an abomination and you need to repent to go to heaven.' I absolutely believed in that lock, stock and barrel."
But four years ago a lesbian acquaintance of his relayed the story of how her family rejected her when she came out to them and Kurek was moved to take action.
"I feel God really kicked me in the gut," he said. "She was crying in my arms and instead of being there for her, I was thinking about all the arguments to convert her."
Soon after Kurek decided to go under cover and "come out" as a gay man.
"I came out to everybody! My friends, family, everyone," Kurek told HuffPost blogger George Elerick [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/george-elerick/jesus-in-drag-straight-christians-comes-out-for-book_b_1569051.html ]. "I just knew that I needed to understand, as realistically as possible, how the label of gay might change my life. The social experiment itself demanded all or nothing."
According to the Guardian [ http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/oct/13/bible-belt-conservative-year-gay ], Kurek even "got a job in a gay cafe, hung out in a gay bar and joined a gay softball league, all the while maintaining his inner identity as a straight Christian."
The only people that knew the truth about what Kurek was doing were an aunt, a close friend and a gay friend who was recruited to play his boyfriend.
"I needed protection to keep me balanced and teach me the nuances of gay culture and how they flirt, and to give me an excuse when guys hit on me," said Kurek.
While Kurek claims that after he "came out" nearly 95 percent of his friends stopped talking to him, it was his mom who initially took the experiment the hardest.
"I snooped in my mother's journal one day [ http://abcnews.go.com/Health/cross-closet-straight-christian-lives-year-gay-man/story?id=17443219&page=2 ] after I had come out and she'd written, 'I'd rather have found out from a doctor that I had terminal cancer than have a gay son.'" But he says she eventually came to terms with his "sexuality" and "went from being a very conservative Christian to being an ally to the gay community [ http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/oct/13/bible-belt-conservative-year-gay ]."
Kurek used his experience to write a book, "The Cross In The Closet [ http://www.amazon.com/The-Cross-Closet-ebook/dp/B009L9F0YW ]," some of the proceeds from which he says he will donate to LGBT homeless youth centers.
"What I went through is NOTHING compared to the experience of the average gay and lesbian. They were never able to say 'only 12 or eight or six more months of this before I get to be me again,'" Kurek told Elerick [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/george-elerick/jesus-in-drag-straight-christians-comes-out-for-book_b_1569051.html ]. "So what I consider to be the most eye-opening facet of my year was really only a glimpse of how bad the closet really is."
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/13/timothy-kurek-straight-christian-pretends-gay_n_1963657.html [with ABC News video report embedded, and comments]
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Rachel Held Evans, Evangelical Author, Uses The Word Vagina, Has Book Passed Over By Largest Christian Chain
By Meredith Bennett-Smith
Posted: 10/16/2012 1:05 pm
One woman's vagina is causing quite a ruckus in evangelical circles. Well known evangelical blogger Rachel Held Evans spent the past year trying to "live biblically" by following the Bible's instructions -- from calling her husband "master" to camping out in her front yard during her period -- for her new book, "Year of Biblical Womanhood." Last week, Evans learned her book will not be carried by LifeWay, one of the biggest Christian bookstore chains in the country [ http://www.lifeway.com/ ].
"Vaginagate," as Evans has called the controversy [ http://rachelheldevans.com/victory-vagina ], is focusing attention on the Christian publishing business, as fans and fellow Christian writers have come forward in solidarity, signing petitions and sharing stories of their own censorship [ http://blog.christianitytoday.com/women/2012/03/when_christian_bookstores_ban.html ] at the hands of the lucrative industry. While the reasons behind the chain's decision have not been disclosed, Evans said she was warned this summer that if she refused to take out a reference to her 16-year-old self's vagina, her book might be banned [ http://rachelheldevans.com/christian-industry ].
Evans claims she is not some radical trying to shake up the church structure. As Slate magazine pointed out in a September post about the book, Evans' blog draws thousands of "highly evangelical readers [ http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2011/09/a_year_of_biblical_womanhood.html ]" every day and she speaks at Christian universities across the country. Her father is a professor of Christian thought and Biblical studies at a small religious college in Tennessee where Evans still lives with her college sweetheart.
In September, Evans was featured on Christianity Today's list of 50 Christian women [ http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2012/october/50-women-you-should-know.html ] shaping "evangelical church and North American society," alongside such high-profile women as Michelle Bachmann.
"A Year of Biblical Womanhood [ http://www.amazon.com/Year-Biblical-Womanhood-Liberated-Covering/dp/1595553673 ]" is Evans' follow-up to her successful 2010 memoir, "Evolving in Monkey Town [ http://www.amazon.com/Evolving-Monkey-Town-Answers-Questions/dp/0310293995 ]." According to the Amazon book description [ http://www.amazon.com/Year-Biblical-Womanhood-Liberated-Covering/dp/1595553673 ], "Evans embarked on a radical life experiment—a year of biblical womanhood. Intrigued by the traditionalist resurgence that led many of her friends to abandon their careers to assume traditional gender roles in the home, Evans decides to try it for herself, vowing to take all of the Bible’s instructions for women as literally as possible for a year."
The basic premise of the book is simple, and its language is "super-PG" Evans told Slate [ http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2012/10/a_year_of_biblical_womanhood_rachel_held_evans_followed_the_bible_and_wrote.2.html ], with no bad words and none of the mildly feminist thinking that has got her into some squabbles in the past. Evans' references of the currently infamous v-word are twofold: firstly in the description of a woman raped in the Congo, and second in a description of a teenaged Evans signing an abstinence pledge card as a promise "to God and my vagina."
In March, her editor at Thomas Nelson suggested she take that second vagina out, lest it be passed over by stores like LifeWay, which is considered to have some of the strictest editorial standards while controlling 160 stores in 26 states, according to the magazine.
On her blog, Evans admitted to having conflicted feelings about the request [ http://rachelheldevans.com/christian-industry ]. "[My publisher] won’t let me use the word “vagina” in my book because we have to sell it to Christian bookstores, which apparently have a thing against vaginas," she wrote. "I make a big scene about it and say that if Christian bookstores stuck to their own ridiculous standards, they wouldn’t be able carry the freaking Bible."
Evans went on to decry what she saw as the "chokehold" of Christian bookstores [ http://www.christianpost.com/news/lifeway-drops-rachel-held-evans-a-year-of-biblical-womanhood-82971/ ] on the Christian publishing industry. "As a result, the entire Christian industry has been sanitized, while its best artists look elsewhere for publication," she wrote.
Outraged fans have rallied around her [ https://twitter.com/AndieRedwine/statuses/255716626069090304 ].
Andie Redwine
@AndieRedwine
This proud vagina owner just pre-ordered a new book @rachelheldevans - "A Year Of Biblical Womanhood" - can't wait! amzn.to/PTyFrB
9 Oct 12
Some started an online petition, "Put the word "vagina" back into Rachel's book! [ http://www.amazon.com/word-vagina-back-into-Rachels/forum/Fx2RGUU4576JDI9/TxQ5C3ICR5ERRW/1/ ]" and others made "Team Vagina" t-shirts [ http://www.zazzle.com/ericmichael84 ]. Evans put the word back in.
Then LifeWay announced it would not, after all, carry the book in its stores [ http://rachelheldevans.com/lifeway-year-of-biblical-womanhood ] (although it may be available online, Evans seemed unclear on this point.)
Evans is quick to point out that LifeWay has declined to comment on why her book will not be carried, and she mentioned a source who said off the record it may have been more of a content issue. The book was panned in a blog post on John Piper's blog, and some have even questioned Evans' evangelical credentials.
On the other hand, LifeWay has allowed other "less-than-clinical" references to male and female body parts--in books written by male authors, including popular Seattle megachurch pastor Mark Driscoll’s recent book "Real Marriage." Driscoll's advice book includes approving descriptions of anal sex, role playing, and sex toys [ http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/01/13/mark-driscoll-s-sex-manual-real-marriage-scandalizes-evangelicals.html ].
Evans told Slate that she wishes the saga had played out differently.
“I often hear from evangelical leaders, ‘Oh we’re really eager to have more female leaders,’ ” she said. “I want to say, ‘This is my voice. This is what it sounds like.’ ”
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/16/rachel-held-evans-evangelical-authors-uses-vagina-book-passed-over_n_1970574.html [with comments]
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Live Action Undercover 'Sting' Targeting Four Women's Advocacy Groups
By Laura Bassett
Posted: 10/15/2012 4:27 pm Updated: 10/16/2012 10:43 am
An anti-abortion activist group notorious for its undercover "sting" operations on Planned Parenthood is currently attempting a similar secret investigation of the family planning provider and at least three other progressive advocacy groups, Planned Parenthood told The Huffington Post on Monday.
Live Action, which most recently tried to catch Planned Parenthood [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/23/planned-parenthood-live-action_n_1446527.html ] facilitating sex-selective abortions in April, sent a woman posing as the owner of a Malibu, Calif., abortion clinic to meet with at least four women's health advocacy organizations -- Planned Parenthood Action Fund, NARAL Pro-Choice America, EMILY's List and Priorities USA -- during the first week of October. The woman called herself "Wendy Reed," presented a business card with that name on it, and promised to make a "substantial donation" to each organization if they agreed to meet with her and answer her questions, the organizations confirmed to The Huffington Post.
The woman asked each organization a similar pattern of questions having to do with President Barack Obama's plans for abortion policy in his second term. She asked whether the groups expected him to repeal the long-standing Hyde Amendment, which prevents the use of federal funds to pay for abortions, and whether they or the president supports late-term abortions, or so-called partial birth abortions. She also inquired about the groups' political strategies and pressed for information about how closely the groups worked with the Obama campaign.
All of the organizations said they immediately suspected that the woman was not a legitimate donor.
"She showed up unannounced at our office on a Wednesday, claiming that she wanted to make a sizeable contribution to our electoral efforts. That raised a red flag right away," said Beth Shipp, political director of NARAL Pro-Choice America. She said NARAL sent lower-level staffers from its development team to meet with the woman at a Caribou Coffee in Washington, D.C., on October 5 because it was a "high-trafficked public place."
Dawn Laguens, executive vice president for communications at PPAF, said the woman raised PPAF's suspicions by asking "kooky questions" about abortion policy that a donor would not normally ask. "We're focused on birth control and protecting Roe v. Wade and making sure your boss can't take away insurance coverage, and she's digging on these very obscure policy topics," Laguens said. "That was an alert."
PPAF became so suspicious of the woman that they set up a second meeting with her to get a better image of her face on the security camera. When the woman returned, the security guard asked for her identification, and she presented a Costco ID that listed her name as "Wendy Wilmowski." Laguens said PPAF was then able to confirm that Wilmowski was working with Live Action and that the website [ http://privatewomenscare.org/ ] listed on her business card was a hoax.
"[Live Action has] a history of hoax videos, but now they've added that they will even impersonate a medical provider and mislead people out in the world with this fake website," Laguens said.
Live Action did not return a call for comment.
None of the organizations are worried that the people with whom Wilmowski met on their donor teams said anything that could be used against them, but they did express concern that Live Action would heavily edit the videos [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/02/24/planned-parenthood-funding_n_827886.html ] before releasing them to the public as it has done in the past.
"We told her the truth, which is that we don't lobby and we exist solely to elect these pro-choice women and to make a better America for women and their families," said Jen Bluestein, communications director for EMILY's List. "That said, these people have proven again and again that the truth is not where their commitments lie. I fully expect they'll try to turn everything that was said against our candidates and against our president, because reporting the truth and campaigning on their own agenda to roll back women's access to health care would not be a winning approach."
Shipp said Wilmowski could not have any dirt on NARAL, because the staffers directed all of Wilmowski's abortion questions to NARAL's policy team. "The fact that they're using live videotapes and trying to trip people up and get people to say things that aren't true and cut and slice -- that's despicable," Shipp said. "If that's the only way you can win an election, that's downright shameful."
Priorities USA confirmed that Wilmowski met with members of its development team, but declined to comment for this story.
PPAF has taken steps to retaliate against Live Action by writing a letter to California Attorney General Kamala Harris requesting that her office investigate Wilmowski's fake website and, if necessary, prosecute the people involved.
"If this medical website is a hoax and is falsely holding out services to women in need, it should be immediately taken down and the persons responsible for the site should be held accountable," Laguens wrote in the letter, dated October 11. "Politicizing women's health by creating false identities and advertising sham medical services should be widely condemned by all."
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/15/live-action-undercover-sting_n_1968136.html [with comments]
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Arizona Planned Parenthood Victory: Federal Judge Bars State From Restricting Funding To Health Clinics
10/20/2012
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/19/arizona-planned-parenthood_n_1990572.html [with comments]
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Congressman Joe Walsh Is the Latest Republican to Say Ridiculous Thing About Abortion
Legitimate health of the mother?
By Dan Amira
October 19, 2012 at 9:33 AM
Turn the "Republican Congressman Saying Ridiculous Thing About Abortion" sign back to zero! During a debate last night, incumbent Illinois congressman Joe Walsh declared that he's against abortion rights without exception, including life of the mother, a position on which elaborated later [ http://www.wgnradio.com/news/top/chi-walsh-duckworth-clash-on-medicare-abortion-20121018,0,4118256.story ]:
Asked by reporters after the debate if he was saying that it’s never medically necessary to conduct an abortion to save the life of a mother, Walsh responded, “Absolutely.”
“With modern technology and science, you can't find one instance,” he said. “... There is no such exception as life of the mother, and as far as health of the mother, same thing.”
Needless to say, Walsh's claim is as false as a giant crate of false teeth manufactured by False Teeth Incorporated. Ectopic pregnancies are but one example of a condition that may require an abortion to save the mother's life. Such a pregnancy occurs when the fertilized egg implants itself somewhere outside of the uterus — usually, in the fallopian tubes. Ectopic pregnancies are often aborted because, if they're not, the mother can die. From the CDC [ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21422853 ]:
Between 1980 and 2007, 876 deaths were attributed to ectopic pregnancy. The ectopic pregnancy mortality ratio declined by 56.6%, from 1.15 to 0.50 deaths per 100,000 live births between 1980-1984 and 2003-2007; at the current average annual rate of decline, this ratio will further decrease by 28.5% to 0.36 ectopic pregnancy deaths per 100,000 live births by 2013-2017. The ectopic pregnancy mortality ratio was 6.8 times higher for African Americans than whites and 3.5 times higher for women older than 35 years than those younger than 25 years during 2003-2007.
We're sure Congressman Walsh would have Googled this information if he wasn't too busy berating his constituents [ http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2011/11/congressman-joe-walsh-flips-out-when-hes-hungry.html ] and denigrating his opponent's war heroics [ http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2012/07/joe-walsh-tammy-duckworth-true-hero.html ] — time-consuming activities, both.
Copyright © 2012, New York Media LLC
http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2012/10/joe-walsh-abortion-health-mother.html [with comments]
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Joe Walsh: Gay Marriage Is A 'Socioeconomic Issue'
10/20/2012
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/20/joe-walsh-gay-marriage_n_1992637.html [with comments]
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Walsh to Employers: Threaten Your Employees Jobs, Health Insurance to Get Their Vote
Published on Oct 17, 2012 by CREDO SuperPAC [ http://www.youtube.com/user/CREDOsuperpac ]
Rep. Walsh speaking at a campaign event in Bloomingdale, IL on Saturday 10/13/12 told business owners in the audience to threaten their employees jobs and health insurance to get them to vote Republican.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxKERQRdmz0 [via/more at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/17/joe-walsh-obama-supporters-vote_n_1974914.html (with comments)]
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Putin On The Mitts
Romney Using The Same Campaign Tactics That “Number One Foe” Uses
To: The Koch Brothers [ http://www.nsfwcorp.com/desk/koch-brothers ] Desk
From: Mark Ames [ http://www.nsfwcorp.com/author/mark-ames ]
Salt Lake City
Friday, October 19th, 2012
One of the biggest shocks for me since getting tossed out of Russia four years ago was coming back to an America that’s taking on Russia’s worst traits: oligarchy, inequality, a two-tier justice system depending on your wealth.
Now that Romney and his financial backers are openly pressuring company employees to vote for Romney, add "Putin-style elections" to the list of Russian traits America is acquiring.
Last year, I first broke this story [ http://www.thenation.com/article/160062/big-brothers-thought-control-koch ] with Mike Elk for The Nation about how the Koch brothers were ramming political propaganda down their workers’ throats, advising them which candidates to vote for — all right-wing freemarketeers, nearly all Republican — warning their employees that if their slate of candidates weren’t elected, their jobs could be lost due to economic catastrophe.
The Kochs and other employers can do this thanks to Citizens United, which has done more to speed up the Putin-ization of America than Putin himself could have dreamed of in his darkest fantasies. From the time of the New Deal labor laws until the Citizens United decision in 2010, employers were barred from pressuring their employees on how to vote in elections, for the obvious simple reason that employers have an enormous amount of leverage over employees.
As Marquette University law professor Paul Secunda told me last year [non-working link]:
"Before Citizens United, federal election law allowed a company like Koch Industries to talk to officers and shareholders about whom to vote for, but not to talk with employees about whom to vote for. Now, companies like Koch Industries are free to send out newsletters persuading their employees how to vote. They can even intimidate their employees into voting for their candidates. It’s a very troubling situation."
This past week, Mike Elk reported [ http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/14017/koch_industries_sends_45000_employees_pro_romney_mailing ] that the Kochs are once again pressuring their employees on how to vote—for Mitt Romney, in case you’re wondering. Here’s what Elk wrote:
"In a voter information packet obtained by In These Times, the Koch Industries corporate leadership informed tens of thousands of employees at its subsidiary, Georgia Pacific, that their livelihood could depend on the 2012 election and that the company supports Mitt Romney for president. The guide was similar to one the company distributed before the 2010 midterm elections, which Mark Ames and I reported on in The Nation last year.
The packet arrived in the mailboxes of all 45,000 Georgia Pacific employees earlier this month."
Elk quotes a letter from Koch Industries COO warning company employees:
"If we elect candidates who want to spend hundreds of billions in borrowed money on costly new subsidies for a few favored cronies, put unprecedented regulatory burdens on businesses, prevent or delay important new construction projects, and excessively hinder free trade, then many of our more than 50,000 U.S. employees and contractors may suffer the consequences, including higher gasoline prices, runaway inflation, and other ills."
And then on Wednesday, Elk posted [ http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/14046/romney_instructed_employers_to_tell_employees_how_to_vote_in_conference_cal/ (and see {linked in} http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=80642155 and preceding (and any future following)] the audio of a conference call Mitt Romney gave to the National Federation of Independent Business telling employers to put pressure on their employees to vote Romney:
"I hope you make it very clear to your employees what you believe is in the best interest of your enterprise and therefore their job and their future in the upcoming elections. And whether you agree with me or you agree with President Obama, or whatever your political view, I hope, I hope you pass those along to your employees."
The employers’ association that Romney spoke to, the National Federation of Independent Business, didn’t even bother hiding the audio that Elk reposted—because now, thanks to Citizens United, it’s no longer illegal to apply that pressure on employees, as Romney himself cheerfully noted in his conference call:
"Nothing illegal about you talking to your employees about what you believe is best for the business, because I think that will figure into their election decision, their voting decision and of course doing that with your family and your kids as well."
It may not be illegal, but then again, in a tinpot oligarchy or pseudo-democracy, a lot of anti-democratic things are "legal."
And the Kochs are hardly alone among pro-Romney plutocrats pressuring their employees. Gawker outed billionaire Peter Seigel, CEO of Westgate Resorts, for threatening [ http://gawker.com/5950189/the-ceo-who-built-himself-americas-largest-house-just-threatened-to-fire-his-employees-if-obamas-elected (and see {linked in} http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=80501886 and preceding and following)] to fire his 7,000 employees if Obama wins. The New Republic exposed [ http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/108140/coal-miners-donor-mitt-romney-benefactor ] how the largest private coal company in America, Murray Energy, strong-armed its employees to not only vote Republican, but to donate money as well—Murray Energy’s CEO even kept lists of employees who didn’t attend Republican fundraisers and rallies, and attacked them by name.
The irony of course is that this is exactly how Putin and the Kremlin "win" their elections—and it’s the sort of election fraud that sparked huge demonstrations last December. What Romney's CEO billionaire backers are doing—with Romney's encouragement—is exactly the sort of antidemocratic fraud that American-backed NGOs and election monitors, like the beleaguered Golos, denounce when Putin's cronies use the same authoritarian pressure tactics.
Last December, in the lead-up to Russia’s rigged parliamentary elections, the US-funded Golos developed an interactive map of election violations and fraud. It was perhaps the first time since Putin took power that a US-backed NGO connected with frustrated Russians (anything US-backed had been in the doghouse and discredited since the disastrous Yeltsin days).
The sort of electoral fraud and violations that Golos collected on its "Map of Violations" sound like standard stuff for the Romney campaign, as reported in the New York Times [ http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/03/world/europe/russian-court-fines-election-monitor-1000.html?_r=0&pagewanted=print ]:
"4,500 reports alleging illegal campaign tactics, including stories of employers threatening workers with pay cuts and local officials ordering business leaders to pressure subordinates."
In the 2007 Russian parliamentary elections, which allowed Putin to move from President to Prime Minister for awhile (he’s now President again, good for him!)—Golos reported similar violations, as reported in the Moscow Times [ http://www.themoscowtimes.com/news/article/ngo-says-absentee-ballots-moving-fast/351992.html#ixzz29flOEUcv ] back then:
"Golos, a nongovernmental organization funded by U.S. and EU donors, among others, said it suspected that employers and bosses were forcing employees to receive the ballots to ensure that they actually vote, in order to gain a higher turnout. Such pressure would violate election law."
Note that, unlike in America, in Russia it is at least technically illegal for employers to pressure employees on how to vote. So in that sense, we’ve already regressed further from democracy than Putin’s Russia. America’s elections, by the standards of the same elections monitors we fund over in Russia, are looking increasingly as rigged and undemocratic as Russia’s.
Golos was shut down briefly by Russian courts for doing its job — which largely consisted of collecting and exposing incidents in which bosses applied pressure on their workers to vote for Putin's Party in the Duma elections. This year, the Kremlin moved to cut off western funding for Golos, after they exposed similar antidemocratic tactics in the vote that reinstalled Putin as Russia's president.
In other words, for authoritarian oligarchy to survive, it needs to be able to work with CEOs to pressure their employees—what Romney is doing today, thanks to Citizens United.
And yet, even Romney’s top Russia policy advisor to his campaign, Leon Aron, in denouncing Putin’s sham elections, singled out [ http://www.tnr.com/article/world/98226/putin-russia-elections-protests ] "forcing state employees to vote" among the list of sins.
So Mitt Romney has adopted the same anti-democratic electioneering tactics of the same villain that Romney has promised to start a new Cold War with once he becomes president, having already designated Russia as "our Number One geopolitical foe [ http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2012/0328/Russia-to-Romney-How-could-we-be-your-No.-1-enemy%22 ]."
In the comedy version of this story, Putin and Romney finally meet in a showdown, wherein Putin tells Romney, "You and I, we’re alike Mr. President—is that why you hate me so?"
In the real-life version, we get none of the irony and comedy, and all of the corruption, authoritarianism, and oligarchy.
Copyright 2012 NSFWCORP
http://nsfwcorp.co/wbp3h1 [via http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/19/putin-on-the-mitts-romney-campaign-tactics_n_1989860.html (with comments); temporary link that will shortly expire; a sub-required ( http://www.nsfwcorp.com/ ) site]
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Michael Fredrich, MCM Composites Owner, Plans To Lay Off Workers To Avoid Health Care Regulations
By Janean Chun
Posted: 10/19/2012 11:57 am EDT Updated: 10/19/2012 11:57 am EDT
Michael Fredrich says he cares deeply about his employees. So much so that he plans on firing seven of them.
The Wisconsin business owner is planning the drastic move to skirt the new health care law, which mandates that by 2014 businesses with more than 50 workers must offer an approved insurance plan or pay a penalty.
"I don't relish the idea of talking to those seven people and saying 'Sorry, we have to go below 50 and you're the ones,'" said Fredrich, who bought Manitwoc-based MCM Composites in 2001. His workers, he said, are "like family."
Fredrich is the rare small business owner who has formulated a plan for dealing with the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. In interviews with The Huffington Post over the past few months, small business owners have said they feel anxious and uncertain about the new law. Few said they completely understand its implications, and most said they haven't begun to dig into its rules and requirements, which don't go into full effect until 2014.
At the presidential debate on Tuesday night Mitt Romney portrayed the new regulation as a small-business killer: "The thing I find most troubling about Obamacare -- well, it's a long list, but one of the things I find most troubling is that when you go out and talk to small businesses and ask them what they think about it, they tell you it keeps them from hiring more people," Romney said.
Fredrich, whose business expects revenues of $7 million in 2012, is joining a chorus of larger firms that have announced bold, and in some cases unanticipated, measures in order to deal with the law. Darden Restaurants, which owns Olive Garden and Red Lobster, announced [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/10/health-care-reform-part-time-work_n_1952455.html (and see {linked in} http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=80445493 and preceding (and any future following)] it would boost the number of part-time workers in order to skirt Obamacare's requirements. Papa John's earlier this year said it would pass higher costs on to customers [ http://www.politico.com/politico44/2012/08/papa-johns-obamacare-will-raise-pizza-prices-131331.html ].
Fredrich’s decision echoes the sentiments expressed by other small businesses. After the Supreme Court upheld the health care law in June, Rose Corona, owner of Big Horse Feed and Mercantile in Temecula, Calif., said, “I’m going to have to reduce the size of [my] labor force.”
Dan Galbraith, owner of Solutionist, a visual communication, sales and marketing firm in Greensburg, Pa., predicted that, like Fredrich, “Those who employ 60 are going to lay off 11. Those who employ 49 will hire nobody.”
The administration has strongly countered the idea that Obamacare will be a "job killer," pointing to research from Urban Institute, a nonpartisan think-tank [ http://www.urban.org/index.cfm ], which found that under the law, small businesses would save 8.7 percent compared with their current premium contributions [ http://www.urban.org/UploadedPDF/412319-Affordable-Care-Act-Affect-Jobs.pdf ].
Fredrich said he believes the plan he currently offers his workers -- a high-deductible health savings account (HSA) with an out-of-pocket deductible of $2,500 per individual and $5,000 deductible per family -- not meet the new requirements of coverage under Obamacare.
Health care experts who've studied the law don't necessarily agree. Christine Eibner, senior economist at RAND Corp. [ http://www.rand.org/topics/health-and-health-care.html ] who has analyzed health insurance costs for small businesses and studied the health care law, and said Fredrich may not face such a "dire tradeoff" in 2014. She believes he could maintain his current insurance plan past 2014 under a grandfather clause that exempts existing plans from the new regulations.
According to a fact sheet from the Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) [ http://www.healthcare.gov/news/factsheets/2010/06/keeping-the-health-plan-you-have-grandfathered.html ], many small firms will lose or relinquish their grandfathered status by 2013 -- the estimate runs from 49 to 80 percent.
Even if Fredrich's plan isn’t grandfathered in, Eibner pointed out that he could find something comparable through state exchanges or through the newly regulated small group market. "He may be able to find another plan that is cost effective or works for him," she said.
Though Obama has repeated variations of his 2009 statement that “if you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan,” the HHS has yet to reveal the full details of Obamacare that could clear up some of the confusion for business owners like Fredrich.
While doing his own calculations, Fredrich did consider one other alternative to cutting employees: "discontinue offering health care at all. Honestly, from a dollars and cents standpoint, that's our best approach," he said.
The total number of people insured through MCM, including 26 employees, their spouses and children, is 43. Fredrich said MCM Composites' total annual premium is $135,000. With employees paying about 30 percent, Fredrich's annual cost is $104,000.
In 2014, businesses with more than 50 full-time equivalent employees that don't offer health insurance must pay a $2,000 penalty for each full-time employee in excess of 30 employees. For Fredrich, that means a $54,000 penalty for 27 employees -- about half of what he's currently paying for insurance. "That's a good deal," he said, but it's not one he's considering. "When you have a small business, you know everybody's names, how many children they have. I'm not going to cut their insurance," Fredrich said.
Corona also said she knows of “a lot of others who will cut out health care altogether, pay the fine and leave the people to the government to insure.”
The option of sidestepping the new law by forfeiting health care and taking the penalty may appeal to some small business owners [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/28/health-care-law-mandate-small-business-reacts_n_1634123.html ], but Eibner believes they're not considering the ripple effect. "Even if it cuts your health care expenditures in half, it'll have an adverse effect on employees," she said. "An employer can't just cut part of the compensation without anticipating some fallout, like people leaving or having a harder time recruiting. It might seem like a cost savings, but when you look at the total costs, it might not be."
Fredrich is frustrated by the expectations workers place on small businesses to cover their insurance costs in the first place. "I never bought this company to be in the health insurance business," he said.
Small business owners have been pummeled with the skyrocketing costs of health care, which rose at an accelerated rate in 2011, increasing 4.6 percent to $4,547 per person, according to a report from the Health Care Cost Institute [ http://www.healthcostinstitute.org/2011report ]. Fredrich said his insurance premiums increase every year by 10 to 18 percent.
Rick Newby, a quality technician who has worked with MCM Composites for more than 12 years, said his health care was covered 100 percent in the '90s, but he's now used to his health care plans constantly changing. "Mike's always looking for the cheapest route for us, but it's getting harder," Newby said.
Though at times he has paid up to $1,000 out-of-pocket for medical expenses, Newby said he is satisfied with his current plan. If Fredrich does take the option of laying off employees to keep health care costs low, Newby said he'll take a roll-with-the-punches approach. "I don't want to see that happen, but I have to live with the times."
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/16/health-care-law-small-business_n_1916850.html [with comments]
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Arthur Allen, CEO Of ASG, Sent Email Pressuring Employees To Donate To Mitt Romney
Posted: 10/20/2012 10:30 am EDT
The CEO of a major corporation went much further [ http://tv.msnbc.com/2012/10/20/ceo-to-employees-help-yourself-by-donating-to-romney/ ] in his effort to persuade his employees to back Mitt Romney than has been previously reported, according to an email obtained by MSNBC's Up w/Chris Hayes and provided to HuffPost.
Arthur Allen, CEO of ASG Software Solutions, was previously exposed [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/14/arthur-allen-romney-email_n_1963965.html ] by Hayes as having urged his employees to vote for Mitt Romney for president. A new email from Allen shows he encouraged employees to donate to Romney to "help ASG and yourself."
"I am encouraging everyone to go to the Romney for President web site and contribute as much as you can to his campaign for President, up to the maximum of $2500.00 per person," he wrote. "Please help ASG and yourself by contributing to the Romney/Ryan campaign."
Romney has urged bosses [ http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/14046/romney_instructed_employers_to_tell_employees_how_to_vote_in_conference_cal/ ] to pressure their workers to support him, as have the Koch brothers [ http://nsfwcorp.co/7f0082 (temporary link to the NSFWCORP piece second above)] and other executives.
Read the full ASG email below:
To all ASG domestic employees,
This coming Monday, Mitt Romney will be officially nominated as the Republican Presidential candidate. I am encouraging everyone to go to the Romney for President web site and contribute as much as you can to his campaign for President, up to the maximum of $2500.00 per person. I am also encouraging you to contact all of your friends and relatives and ask them to support Romney and to go to the polls and vote on election day.
ASG, like many companies, is still struggling, even after 4 years. You probably heard that we tripped a bank leverage covenant on June 30th, and now must go through yet another round of unfavorable treatment by our lenders. Many of our domestic employees are still on the 4 day work week. Many of our customers are waiting until they see the results of the election before beginning to invest again. We need to elect a fiscally conservative President and Vice-President and stop this ridiculous government spending. I believe that Romney and Ryan can put us back on the path to sanity, but even then it is not going to be painless for our country and ASG.
Please help ASG and yourself by contributing to the Romney/Ryan campaign.
Mr. Allen
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/20/arthur-allen_n_1992370.html [with the Chris Hayes segment embedded, and comments]
===
Another Right-Wing Phony Embroiled in Sex Scandal -- Why Does Sexual Hypocrisy Flourish on the Right?
Let’s call this Conservative Chaos Theory. Without hypocrisy, the conservative mind would explode from the sheer force of its eternal contradictions.
By Lynn Stuart Parramore
October 17, 2012
Forty years ago, conservatives awakened to the fact that their agenda was getting little traction in American public life. So they hatched a plan turn things around. Pooling their considerable financial resources, they would invest in the marketplace of ideas and fund books, professors, journalists – anything to promote, amplify, and disseminate their right-wing worldview. In short, they would buy the American mind.
Quite a bargain, that. One of their most successful investments was the support of an eager young man who got his start writing for the Dartmouth Review, a conservative newspaper founded in 1980 by disgruntled students who thought that the college’s daily paper was way too liberal. Dinesh D’Souza was carefully groomed to flower into what he is today – a vitriolic, one-sided, outrageously craven wingnut who will say anything and everything as long as it supports the most rancid right-wing agenda. You might think of him as the inhabitant of the deepest, darkest spot in our political discourse, the Mariana Trench of American intellectual life.
If you look back over recent decades, you will find this creature surfacing in any number of conservative crusades. Stirring up jingoistic anti-Obama fantasies [ http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/movies/2012/09/dinesh-dsouzas-2016-obamas-america.html ], for example. Or protecting traditional marriage from gays.
Which is why it has been amusing to hear D'Souza, the president of an evangelical college, explaining just how he came to be sharing a hotel room [ http://www.nydailynews.com/blogs/pageviews/2012/10/conservative-political-writer-and-evangelical-college-president-alleged-to-have-ha ] with a woman who is not his wife and introducing her as his fiancée. Apparently D’Souza was in the process of ending his marriage of twenty years, but had not quite gotten around to signing the divorce papers when he shacked up with his lady friend at a South Carolina conference. He has since “suspended” his engagement.
Frankly, as far as scandals go, this one ranks low on the excite-ometer. It would have been more fun if he had been caught sharing a men’s room stall with Larry Craig.
But hell, we’ll take it. The question of why religious conservatives are so likely to be caught in the act is eternally compelling.
From the Pentecostal televangelist Jimmy Swaggart’s love for prostitutes to abstinence-preaching senator David Vitter’s extracurricular romps, hardly a year passes when some big-time right-winger isn’t found to be coloring outside the box. Now lefties really don’t care if Vitter, fondly known on the web by his fetish moniker “Diaperman [ http://wonkette.com/412391/david-vitter-now-pooping-in-ladies-underwear ]”, likes to get his kicks wearing adult diapers and paying someone to powder his butt. In fact, we might encourage him to let his freak flag fly and march in the diaper fetish parade. As long as the sexual activity doesn't hurt anyone, who cares? It’s the fetish for moralizing, sermonizing, and finger-wagging that sets our teeth on edge. Particularly when it ossifies into laws that make it impossible for many women to manage their reproductive lives or prevents loving partners from getting hitched. Not only do public pieties fail to prevent personal improprieties, they seem to have an unusually strong correlation. When legendary conservative Strom Thurmond was promising [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/30/books/review/strom-thurmonds-america-by-joseph-crespino.html?pagewanted=all ] never to force southern whites to admit blacks (not the word he used) “into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches,” he neglected to mention that at the age of 22 he had admitted one into his bed and impregnated the family’s 16-year old black maid. His daughter was a secret until his death in 2003.
So what is that? Why condemn what you desire? Part of the answer can be found in the style of religion you embrace if you are a right-winger. Monotheistic religions like Christianity are especially patriarchal and tend to be built on the denial of the feminine and a special abhorrence of those flesh packages known as "bodies." If you’re only going to have one god, that god is probably going to be male, and so you’ve got suppress the female element of spirituality so that He doesn’t have any competition. Women are associated with the processes of nature, which can be scary, and you’ve got to do something about that, too. They give birth, and anything that is born must die, which is an unpleasant thought, so to get rid of that you just go around pretending that life is eternal and that everything really springs from the Great Celestial Father. Pretty soon you have concocted possibly the most unnatural idea in human history: the Virgin Mother.
Polytheistic religions don’t tend to operate this way, which is why you can see male and female gods frolicking with abandon on the walls of ancient Egyptian temples. Which is also why the Second Commandment [ http://www.keyway.ca/htm2003/20030319.htm ] in the Bible tells you not to ever, ever look at them. In fact, you’re really not supposed to look at or think about bodies at all. They are inconvenient encumbrances to your eternal life, and the sooner you get rid of them, the better. Anything that upsets the fragile order of this strange system where males are celestial beings and women are nasty creatures whose bodies reek of dirty sex – like gay love, for example – will have to be squelched at all costs. Holding all these contradictory thoughts in your head deforms the mind into a labyrinth of twists and turns and on top of that there’s a phantom floating around in there.
Thanks to Freud, we know that humans are often haunted by something called The Return of the Repressed [ http://www.answers.com/topic/return-of-the-repressed ]. The more you try to deny the undead incarnation of your repressed desires, the stronger he becomes, and he will hunt you down. Before long you find yourself in a park restroom in Florida [ http://firstandcourt.blogspot.com/2007/07/gay-republican-hypocrites-mccain.html ] asking an undercover policeman to fellate you for twenty bucks. And your boss John McCain is pissed.
D’Souza himself provides a curious perspective on the subject. In a meditation [ http://conservatives.mbhs.edu/phil1.html ] on the high standards of conservatives in which he deplores the adulteries of both Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich, D’Souza imparts this gleaming nugget of insight:
“Even hypocrisy is in the conservative view preferable to a denial of standards because such denial leads to moral chaos or nihilism.”
Let’s call this Conservative Chaos Theory. Without hypocrisy, the conservative mind would explode from the sheer force of its eternal contradictions and Dinesh D’Souza, along with his phantom, would be sucked into The Void. Hypocrisy is the glue that holds it all together. Tolerance for others is corrosive to hypocrisy and must be avoided at all costs. In that South Carolina hotel room, Dinesh D’Souza was taking a stand against moral relativity. Maybe even the General Theory of Relativity. Anything which denies the absolutes and standards that protect the insecure human from the knowledge of his mortality—and ultimately, his insignificance in the great design of things. People, this is courage. And I submit that it is not easy to take a stand while you are lying down.
This is why, friends, that you will very likely soon turn on the news to hear that yet another promoter of God’s word has been caught with his pants down.
In motel rooms across America, these men are bravely resisting chaos.
Amen.
Copyright 2012 AlterNet
http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/another-right-wing-phony-embroiled-sex-scandal-why-does-sexual-hypocrisy-flourish [ http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/another-right-wing-phony-embroiled-sex-scandal-why-does-sexual-hypocrisy-flourish?paging=off ] [with comments] [also at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lynn-parramore/another-right-wing-phony_b_1980850.html (with comments)]
===
HPV Vaccine Does Not Increase Sexual Activity: Study
By Catherine Pearson
Posted: 10/15/2012 12:08 am Updated: 10/15/2012 12:08 am
Vaccinating girls against the sexually-transmitted human papillomavirus (HPV) [ http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/hpv.html ] does not make them more likely to have sex, according to a new study. The findings are the latest in a string of research [ http://www.ajpmonline.org/article/S0749-3797(11)00733-1/abstract ] showing that vaccination does not encourage promiscuity, the authors say, and should go a long way in extinguishing lingering concerns about "disinhibition" among pre-teenage girls who receive the vaccine.
Study co-author Robert Bednarczyk, a clinical investigator with the Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Research–Southeast, said in an interview with The Huffington Post that researchers found "no difference" in sexual activity when comparing girls who were vaccinated to those who were not.
In findings published [ http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/early/2012/10/10/peds.2012-1516.abstract ] in the journal Pediatrics [ http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/ ] on Monday, investigators combed the electronic medical records of nearly 1,400 girls who were between the ages 11 and 12 from 2006 to 2007 -- the year following the Food and Drug Administration's approval of the first vaccine. Nearly 500 of the girls had received it; 900 had not.
Unlike previous studies that have largely relied on self-reported sexual activity, the new study measured clinical signs of sexual activity over several years, like whether the girls had been tested for a sexually transmitted infection, received contraceptive counseling or become pregnant.
"What we've done here is take a more objective approach and use clinical data to look at outcomes that are related to sexual activity and compare them," Bednarczyk said.
Vaccination was not linked to any increased sexual activity, according to the measures used by the researchers.
"This article supports what several years of data have shown again and again," said Gypsyamber D'Souza, an assistant professor at the cancer prevention and control program at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, who did not work on the study. "There are no differences in sexual behavior in those getting the vaccine compared those who have not."
Recent reports suggest that many girls are not vaccinated in part because of fears about increased sexual activity. One such report, a 2011 paper in the journal Sexually Transmitted Infection [ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21357601 ], found that 16 percent of parents in areas of North Carolina felt that teenage girls who were vaccinated might be more likely to have sex.
"The reality is that [the rate] of HPV vaccination is substantially lower than other recommended adolescent vaccines," said Dr. Matthew Davis, an associate professor of adult medicine and pediatrics at the University of Michigan's C.S. Mott Children's Hospital.
In 2011, some 80 percent of teens were vaccinated against tetanus, an infection of the nervous system, and 70 percent against meningitis, an infection of the membranes around the brain and spinal cord, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates [ http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/who/teens/vaccination-coverage.html ]. But only 35 percent of teenage girls received the full three doses of the HPV vaccine, which has been recommended for all girls age 11 or 12 by the CDC since 2006. (The recommendation also extends to women up to age 26 who were not vaccinated when they were younger.) The vaccine protects against infection by certain strains of HPV, about 30 types of which can lead to cervical cancer in women.
Davis recently led a poll [ http://www.mottnpch.org/reports-surveys/public-reluctant-support-teen-hpv-vaccination-without-parental-consent ] using a national sample that found that 40 percent of parents have moral or ethical concerns about the HPV vaccination, while 36 percent said they felt pre-teen girls were too young to get it.
"Those [rates], to me, indicate that there remain concerns that adolescent's choices will be influenced by this vaccination," he said.
But D'Souza argued that other factors may be more influential.
"Parents have concerns about the cost of the vaccine, the utility of the vaccine, its side effects and whether it's truly necessary," she said, also noting that the way doctors describe the vaccine to patients can impact patients' perception of it. Cost is a major issue, especially for college-age women, D'Souza added. Though most private insurers now cover the HPV vaccine, and the federally-funded Vaccines for Children [ http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/programs/vfc/index.html ] program provides free shots for eligible individuals, many young women do not know that.
Davis said parents' fears about risky sexual behavior are a powerful deterrent, but expressed hope that the new findings could impact their thinking.
"It's hard to know what impact a study like this can have on parental opinions," he said. "We do know that physicians and nurses can be very trusted sources of information about vaccines for parents. Therefore, if health care providers hear this news and can themselves reassure parents that teenagers' sexual behaviors are not likely to change based on this vaccination, that may reassure parents."
"I would say the reason why HPV has been so controversial is precisely because it goes right to the heart of sexual behavior," Davis said. "HPV is spread sexually, and not through other means."
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/15/hpv-vaccine-sexual-activity-study_n_1959630.html [with comments]
===
Peter Kinder, Missouri Lieutenant Governor, Depicted As Bobblehead In New Ad
Missouri Lt. Gov. Peter Kinder
By John Celock
Posted: 10/17/2012 12:48 pm Updated: 10/17/2012 2:51 pm
Missouri Lt. Gov. Peter Kinder (R) is depicted as a cartoon bobblehead on a stripper pole in a new ad [ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ilYdeZ9ir0 (next below)]
from the campaign of his Democratic opponent.
The ad, which former state Auditor Susan Montee's campaign debuted Tuesday evening, shows Kinder's head on a cartoon body in a series of scenes showcasing a stripper scandal and a controversy over the amount of tax dollars he spent on hotel rooms. Kinder and Montee are locked in a competitive race for the Show Me state's number two spot. Montee sent an email to supporters Tuesday afternoon asking for money to keep the bobblehead ad on television statewide.
"Everyone I meet, Democrat or Republican, says Missouri can't take four more years of Peter Kinder," Montee wrote in the email. "If my television ads keep playing until the election, I promise you I will win the race for Lieutenant Governor."
In the email, Montee says that a 30-second commercial on a newscast in St. Louis costs $1,200 and asks donors for $40 to pay for a second or $4 to fund a tenth of a second. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported Monday [ http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/govt-and-politics/political-fix/kinder-montee-in-a-dead-heat-for-campaign-cash/article_e30c7aec-1717-11e2-995b-001a4bcf6878.html ] that the candidates are close in cash on hand; Montee reported $270,000 and Kinder reported $267,911 on Monday, with Kinder outraising Montee in the last fundraising quarter.
Kinder's campaign spokesman, Logan Thompson, declined to comment on the ad Wednesday morning saying he wanted to discuss the ad with Kinder first.
Kinder, a two-term Republican from Cape Girardeau, dropped a planned race for governor [ http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/govt-and-politics/peter-kinder-drops-out-of-governor-s-race/article_79b64b04-1b40-5593-bc89-72d3f4c20e43.html ] late last year following reports that he billed the state for luxury hotel rooms he stayed in during political trips and that he had a relationship with a stripper, who he invited to move into a St. Louis condo he rented using campaign funds. Kinder reimbursed the state [ https://www.stlbeacon.org/#!/content/26285/lager_kinder_debate_kansas_city ] for the hotel rooms.
The stripper, Tammy Chapman, said Kinder made romantic advances while a state senator in the 1990s. Kinder, who is single, said he and friends would stop by the strip club where she worked after St. Louis Cardinals games, but that he never received a lap dance [ https://www.stlbeacon.org/#!/content/15448/kinder_says_his_only_relationship_with_stripper_was_to_watch_her_dance ] from Chapman, only watched her dance on stage.
Chapman told the Riverfront Times in 2011 that Kinder appeared at a bar [ http://www.riverfronttimes.com/2011-08-11/news/former-penthouse-pet-and-stripper-says-missouri-lieutenant-governor-peter-kinder-was-one-of-her-best-customers/ ] where she was bartending in St. Louis and offered her the opportunity to move into the condo. Kinder denied offering the condo [ http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/govt-and-politics/peter-kinder-explains-romantic-attraction-at-a-strip-club/article_d9dc0f3d-0d37-5a22-84c0-74456e432a84.html ] to Chapman, saying he stopped in the bar to use the bathroom and then had a glass of wine when he noticed Chapman behind the bar.
Last year, Kinder's car was stolen [ http://www.semissourian.com/story/1721679.html ] after he left his keys in it. The car was rammed into a gun shop and used for a trip to buy food from McDonald's before being torched, the Southeast Missourian newspaper reported.
UPDATE: 2:49 p.m. -- Kinder's campaign responded to Montee's commercial by releasing a 2010 video [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n44vz91BUL0 (next below)]
of Montee taken at a Democratic event in Hannibal sipping a margarita. In the three-minute video, which was shot at a Democrat Days event in March 2010 and posted on YouTube in October of that year, Montee is seen talking about the event and a margarita machine used by the Steelworkers union, then joking about purchasing her own machine.
"That is so good. I think we got a new idea." Montee says in the video. "Margarita machine fundraiser."
Montee dismissed the video in a 2010 interview with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch saying that she was "at a social event being social [ http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/govt-and-politics/political-fix/updated-in-video-montee-drink-in-hand-praises-margarita-machine/article_c6e499f4-d7da-11df-bf78-0017a4a78c22.html ]" and that the video's release was an attempt to influence her 2010 reelection campaign for auditor. Montee lost the 2010 race to Republican Tom Schweich.
On Wednesday, Montee spokesman John Knoll reiterated Montee's comments from 2010 and said the video received little press coverage in 2010. "That video was Susan being social at a social event," Knoll told HuffPost.
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/17/peter-kinder-susan-montee-lieutenant-governor_n_1973806.html [with Montee's ad embedded, and comments]
===
Tea Party Activists Fight Agenda 21, Seeing Threatening U.N. Plot
Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley (R) signed a property rights bill targeting Agenda 21.
(AP Photo/Phillip Rawls)
By Nick Carey
Posted: 10/15/2012 12:59 am
CEDAR FALLS, Iowa, Oct 15 (Reuters) - Tea Party activist Judd Saul admits that he can sound a little unhinged when he gets talking about an issue close to his heart that most Americans have never heard of.
"Agenda 21 is an elusive enemy that floats in and chokes you gradually," said Saul, of the Cedar Valley Tea Party in Cedar Falls, Iowa. "They want to destroy the middle-class way of life."
"Agenda 21 aims to undermine your property rights and force you" to live in cities, Jake Robinson told Tea Party members at a meeting in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, in April.
For Joe Dugan, leader of the Myrtle Beach Tea Party in South Carolina, "Agenda 21 is nothing short of treason."
If you don't know what Agenda 21 is, you're not alone - only about 15 percent of Americans do. It is a nonbinding U.N. resolution signed by more than 170 world leaders (including Republican U.S. President George H.W. Bush) at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro as a way to promote sustainable development in the face of a rapidly growing global population.
A small percentage of Americans say it is an attack on their very existence - part of a grand conspiracy to take away their gun rights, destroy suburbia and turn America into a modern-day Soviet state.
At a local level across the country, conservative activists linked to the Tea Party movement have rallied around the cause of blocking development they say is part of the conspiracy.
Kim Simac, a member of the Northwoods Patriots in northern Wisconsin, believes a local sustainable development plan will shut down her horse-riding school because her business takes up more land than the plan allows for. Heather Gass says she has been fighting sustainable development plans in the San Francisco area that she says will include hefty road tolls and deliberately drive up gas prices "because they want to force us out of our cars."
"It sounds crazy, but it's true," she added.
Activists dislike the use of multi-unit apartment buildings in city plans - which they call "stack 'em and pack 'em" units - as well as bike lanes and other zoning restrictions they say impinge upon the value of their property and rights.
"Property ownership is the essence of the American dream and a cornerstone of the American economy," said John Anthony, a conservative small business owner in New Jersey who has devoted a lot of time to studying Agenda 21. "When you diminish property values, you shrink the net worth of the entire middle class."
Republicans at the state level have passed or tried to pass laws aimed at Agenda 21 and the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI), an international association of local governments. ICLEI was formed in 1990, and its promotion of sustainable development at the local government level has made it synonymous with Agenda 21 to Tea Party opponents. Activists have gone after the ICLEI in their attacks and the group has lost 29 U.S. members as a result.
This summer, Alabama passed a property rights bill targeting Agenda 21, which was signed by Governor Robert Bentley - his office did not respond to a request for comment. Anti-Agenda 21 resolutions were also passed in Kansas and New Hampshire.
Campaigners managed to persuade the Republican National Committee to pass a resolution on the "destructive and insidious" plan being "covertly pushed into local communities," and the party's 2012 platform approved in August stated: "We strongly reject the U.N. Agenda 21 as erosive of American sovereignty."
AND YET...
After all that, things have gone a bit quiet. The issue barely registers in the presidential election campaign, and the Republican National Committee did not respond to a request for a comment.
At a local level, there are signs of a backlash.
A June poll of 1,300 U.S. voters commissioned by the American Planning Association found that when asked whether they supported or opposed U.N. Agenda 21, 85 percent of respondents said they did not know enough to form an opinion. Nine percent supported Agenda 21, 6 percent opposed it.
"I think the Tea Party people who turn up to shout at planning meetings are heading for a McCarthy moment," said Ron Littlefield, the mayor of Chattanooga, Tennessee, referring to the Communist witch hunts of Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s.
"They have been heard, and many people are sick of their scare tactics," added the mayor, whom local Tea Party activists have been trying to recall for raising property taxes.
Don Knapp, U.S. spokesman for the ICLEI, rejected the notion of an anti-American plot. "Sustainable development is not a top-down conspiracy from the U.N., but a bottom-up push from local governments," he said.
An anti-sustainable development bill in Arizona died this spring when the Arizona Chamber of Commerce successfully lobbied against it, arguing it was vague and could drive away corporations that have embraced sustainable development.
"We thought this was a wrongheaded approach," said chamber spokesman Garrick Taylor. "It would be bad for business."
Many conservatives also vehemently disagree with the global warming arguments behind Agenda 21. But planners and developers say sustainable development plans are needed to meet future shifts in the size and age of the U.S. population.
According to U.S. Census Bureau projections, America's population should grow by more than 40 percent by 2050 to 440 million, requiring millions of new housing units. Demographers and developers also warn that as baby boomers start turning 70 in 2016 and seek to downsize their homes, there will be a spike in demand for multi-apartment buildings in walkable areas.
"What I want to hear from opponents of sustainable development is where are you going to put 50 million new housing units over the next few decades?" said Mitchell Silver, head of planning for Raleigh, North Carolina, who is also president of the American Planning Association (APA). "So far, I haven't gotten an answer to that question."
Another problem some Tea Party activists acknowledge is that few local officials have heard of Agenda 21. This was the case in Garland, Texas, during a debate on the city's strategic plan. Anti-Agenda 21 activists objected to bike lanes, efforts to determine what types of businesses to allow into Garland and any reference to "sustainable development."
"We found if we mentioned Agenda 21, our officials' eyes would glaze over," said Katrina Pierson of the Garland Tea Party. "So we focused on parts of the plan we didn't like."
Her group managed to have significant portions of the city plan changed and got Garland to quit its membership in the ICLEI.
Judd Saul was not so successful when he went to battle against Cedar Falls 2020, the city's development plan. Saul says his studies of Agenda 21 began after he discovered that the requirement to have a lockbox at the back door of his family's restaurant containing keys for emergency service access to his property was "based on international fire regulations."
Saul says that rather than taking on the parts of Cedar Falls 2020 he disliked most, he focused instead on Agenda 21 at a public meeting to discuss the plan. As almost no one in attendance knew what he was talking about, Saul says his words met with blank stares.
"I wish I'd focused on why the plan was bad," he said, "instead of talking about Agenda 21 and looking like a wacko nut job."
(Editing by Claudia Parsons and Prudence Crowther)
Copyright 2012 Thomson Reuters
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/15/agenda-21-tea-party_n_1965893.html [with comments]
===
Anti-Pot Legalization Ex-DEA Boss Won't Reject Suggestion Obama Takes 'Laundered Drug Money'
10/15/2012
NEW YORK -- A conference call organized to oppose marijuana legalization quickly went off the rails on Monday when the former head of the Drug Enforcement Administration refused to reject the suggestion that the Obama campaign is accepting contributions from drug dealers [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxPnP1rRDW0 (above, as embedded)].
The call's organizers made clear that the goal was to pressure Attorney General Eric Holder to speak out against three state-level ballot measures that if passed, would legalize marijuana. But when a journalist from the Lyndon LaRouche-affiliated Executive Intelligence Review asked whether President Barack Obama had not spoken out against the ballot measures because of "reports" that "both his 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns have been financed in part by laundered drug money," no one on the call spoke out against the suggestion.
Peter Bensinger, who was appointed head of the DEA by President Gerald Ford and then served under Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, simply said "I can't speculate on the rationale" for Obama's silence.
When pressed by The Huffington Post whether he would reject the insinuation, Bensinger said "I won't comment on it, and I don't have knowledge that that is the case. We're not here to discuss his campaign funding, or his -- the politics that are involved in this."
"I won't entertain it," he said, when asked again.
The insinuation that Obama is accepting such contributions is unsubstantiated.
[...]
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/15/marijuana-legalization-obama_n_1967817.html [with comments]
===
Gun Industry Thrives During Obama's First Term
By EILEEN SULLIVAN and JACK GILLUM
10/19/12 02:57 PM ET EDT
WASHINGTON — Tennessee lawyer Brian Manookian says he never considered himself a gun enthusiast. He owns just one handgun and was raised in a gun-free home. But the firearms industry has proven so successful in recent years that he decided to give up practicing law and make guns his livelihood.
It's a decision that's put Manookian on track to earn four times what he made as a corporate health care attorney, a job that earned him six figures right out of law school, he said.
And he's far from alone. An analysis by The Associated Press of data tracking the health of the gun industry shows that President Barack Obama has presided over a heyday for guns.
Sales are on the rise, so much that some manufacturers cannot make enough fast enough. Major gun company stock prices are up. The number of federally licensed, retail gun dealers is increasing for the first time in nearly 20 years. The U.S. gun lobby is bursting with cash and political clout. Washington has expressed little interest in passing new gun laws, despite renewed calls to do so after recent deadly shootings in Colorado and Wisconsin.
Four years ago the gun lobby predicted Obama would be the "most anti-gun president in American history." Yet it is hard to find a single aspect of the gun world that isn't thriving.
"The driver is President Obama. He is the best thing that ever happened to the firearm industry," said Jim Barrett, an industry analyst at C.L. King & Associates Inc. in New York.
Obama has made no pledges to push for new gun control legislation and does not have the support in Congress or among voters even if he did. During this week's presidential debate, he did suggest renewing a U.S. ban on assault weapons and coming up with an overall strategy to reduce violence. But both Obama and Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney said the real need is for the government to enforce gun laws already on the books.
Meanwhile, sales are brisk.
Since opening a $5 million armory in Nashville last month, Manookian and his business partner have outdone their own expectations, selling inventory three to four times faster than they expected. The facility has high ceilings and granite fixtures in the bathroom and provides instructional courses and a shooting range in addition to firearms for sale.
"It is a very strong investment," Manookian said.
Others agree.
For the first time since 1993, the number of federally licensed retail gun dealers in the U.S. increased slightly in 2010 and 2011. The country added 1,167 licensed retail gun dealers, according to Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives records. After the assault weapons ban of 1994 – now expired – the number of gun dealerships dropped annually until 2010. As of October 2012, there were 50,812 retail gun dealers – 3,303 more than in 2009.
"Business has been very good," said Frederick Prehn, who a year ago opened a small gun store above his dentistry practice in Wausau, Wis. In the past year, Prehn has relocated twice to larger spaces and gone from one employee to eight.
Some gun store owners can't keep shelves stocked, said Brian Jones, owner of Bullseye Shooter's supply in Painted Post, N.Y. Jones said he opened his gun store in November 2010. In his first year, he said he sold between 600 and 700 guns. A little more than halfway through his second year, he's already sold 700.
For the first time in the company's history, Sturm Ruger & Co. Inc. stopped taking orders for a couple of months this year. Ruger, one of the nation's largest gun manufacturers, has since resumed taking orders, though gun-sellers say demand is still outpacing production.
Dan Wesson Arms, Inc., a small gun manufacturer that sells to a niche market, stopped taking orders this spring because the company had sold out the entire year's production, spokesman Jason Morton said. The company has stopped taking orders before, but never so early on the entire line, he said.
"Wouldn't you want to be in a business where customers are just begging to hand you money?" said Bill Bernstein, owner of East Side Gun Shop in Nashville.
Obama is not yet through his first term, but the federal government already has conducted about as many background checks for gun owners and prospective buyers on his watch as it did during the first six years of George W. Bush's presidency. In the first 3 1/2 years of the Bush administration, the FBI conducted about 28 million background checks. During the same period of the Obama administration, the FBI conducted more than 50 million. The gun industry uses the number of background checks as a reliable indicator of demand.
Ruger and Smith & Wesson represent nearly 30 percent of the U.S. gun manufacturing industry and lead the market in production of pistols and revolvers, according to government statistics. The two companies have been running production lines around the clock, hiring workers and operating at maximum capacity, said Barrett, an industry analyst who also owns Ruger stock.
Ruger's sales have increased 86 percent since Obama took office, and Smith & Wesson's sales have gone up nearly 44 percent, compared with 18 percent for overall national retail sales.
And the companies have big expectations for the industry's future, as they're spending more money on research and development than ever before.
The NRA itself has done well, too. The lobbying organization has had more cash on hand during the Obama years than it had since 2004, finishing 2010 with more than $24 million, according to the most recent figures available.
"Which makes it incredibly ironic that the gun lobby is opposing Obama," said Dan Gross, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. Gross said Obama, who initially campaigned to reinstate the assault weapons ban that expired under Bush, has done what he said was "disappointingly little" on gun control.
But the gun lobby says the success of the industry does not indicate that Obama is good for Second Amendment rights.
"This is the most dangerous election in our lifetimes," NRA chief executive officer Wayne LaPierre said in February, a point he's made regularly during the NRA's campaign to defeat Obama.
The gun lobby stands by its 2008 predictions that Obama would be anti-gun. NRA spokesman Andrew Arulanandam noted Obama's appointment of two Supreme Court justices whom the NRA considers anti-gun, plus Obama's support of a United Nations arms trade treaty and the botched operation called Fast and Furious, which the NRA says was concocted as part of a plan to enforce new gun restrictions.
"Gun owners and hunters fear that a second Obama administration with no future political campaigns to worry about will try to destroy this great American freedom," Arulanandam said.
Fears of a Democratic president taking office and issuing stricter gun control laws led to an initial spike in gun sales in 2008, giving dealers some of the highest profit margins they'd ever seen. But even after it became clear Obama was not going to make gun control a priority as president, the industry has continued to do well.
Fear of crime may be driving some sales. The number of violent crimes rose by 18 percent in the U.S. in 2011, according to Justice Department figures released this week. It was the first year-to-year increase for violent crime since 1993, marking the end of a long string of declines.
Firearm sales typically increase during poor economic times, said Steve Sanetti, chief executive officer and president of the National Shooting Sports Foundation, a trade association for the industry. More Americans are hunting and shooting for recreation as well, he said. Sanetti attributes that to military servicemen and women with firearms experience returning to civilian life and wanting to keep up with shooting as a pastime. He also said recreational shooting is a relatively cheap and accessible hobby, drawing in new buyers.
Voters have made clear that gun control isn't a priority. A recent AP-National Constitution Center poll found that 49 percent of adults felt laws limiting gun ownership infringe on the public's right to bear arms, while 43 percent said such laws do not infringe on those rights. After the recent mass shootings in Colorado and Wisconsin, 52 members of Congress sponsored a bill to track bulk sales of ammunition, but the legislation went nowhere.
The firearms industry entrepreneur Manookian said it is clear that guns are a priority for Americans. People around the country are waiting in lines at shooting ranges, he said, cash registers at gun stores are ringing with $1,000 purchases and his brand new armory in Nashville is in the black two weeks after it opened.
Associated Press writers Matt Apuzzo and Pete Yost, AP News Survey Specialist Dennis Junius, and researcher Rhonda Shafner in New York contributed to this report.
Copyright 2012 The Associated Press
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/19/obama-guns_n_1985826.html [with the AP video report (at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_37itpHmthg ) as embedded, and comments]
===
Obama picks McCormick Place for election night rally
October 18, 2012
President Barack Obama plans to hold his election-night rally at Chicago’s McCormick Place convention center, a move aimed at easing concerns over weather and security, sources with knowledge of the event said Wednesday.
Given the indoor location, the event seems unlikely to match the electric atmosphere of Obama’s 2008 outdoor victory rally in Grant Park. That event drew an estimated 240,000 people downtown and created picturesque images of the city’s skyline that were seen worldwide.
While the decision to use McCormick Place will tamp down the crowd size, it will provide the president with greater security.
McCormick Place was the site of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization summit in May, an event designated as a “national special security event” by the federal Department of Homeland Security.
Obama’s election-night rally is expected to receive the same designation.
[...]
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/chi-source-obama-election-night-rally-to-be-at-mccormick-place-20121017,0,3435098.story [with embedded video report, and comments]
===
GOP voter registration scandal widens
Colin Small
A Virginia official is busted for tossing voter forms. Turns out he works for the national party, too
By Brad Friedman
Friday, Oct 19, 2012 01:15 PM CDT
A man originally reported to have been working for the Republican Party of Virginia was arrested by the Rockingham County, Va., Sheriff’s Office on Thursday and charged with attempting to destroy voter registration forms by tossing them into a dumpster behind a shopping center in Harrisonburg, Va.
“Prosecutors charged him with four counts of destruction of voter registration applications, eight counts of failing to disclose voter registration applications and one count of obstruction of justice,” according to a report late Thursday afternoon from TPM’s Ryan Reilly [ http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/10/colin_small_virginia_gop_voter_registration_fraud.php ]. More charges could be forthcoming, according to officials.
But there is more to the story, as evidence emerges to document that it ties into a still-expanding nationwide GOP Voter Registration Fraud Scandal that the BRAD BLOG first began reporting in late September [ http://www.bradblog.com/?p=9586 ], after we’d learned that the Republican Party of Florida had turned in more than 100 allegedly fraudulent and otherwise suspect voter registration forms in Palm Beach County. The story has continued to widen ever since, to a dozen Florida counties and several other states, now including Virginia, and even to the upper-echelons of the Republican Party itself.
The man arrested today was 23-year-old Colin Small of Phoenixville, Pa. As it turns out, he does not only work for the Virginia Republican Party. According to an online profile, he appears to be working for the Republican National Committee and, prior to that, served as an Intern for Rep. Mike Kelly, R-Pa. [ http://kelly.house.gov/ ], in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Joseph Tanfani at the Los Angeles Times is reporting [ http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-voter-registration-gop-arrest-20121018,0,5352175.story ] that Small was “working as a supervisor as part of a registration operation in eight swing states financed by the Republican National Committee.”
He was first hired, says Tanfani, by Strategic Allied Consulting, the firm owned by the disgraced GOP operative and paid Mitt Romney political consultant Nathan Sproul. Even before this year’s registration fraud scandal, which began with Strategic in Florida, Sproul’s companies have long been accused of, though never charged with, destroying Democratic voter registrations in election after election and state after state, going back to at least 2004. Despite that, Sproul was hired by the Bush/Cheney campaign in 2004, by the McCain/Palin Campaign in 2008, and by Romney during the Republican Primary cycle.
Sproul’s company, Strategic Allied Consulting, was hired by the RNC in August for more than $3 million, reportedly as its sole voter registration company this cycle. His company was said to have been fired by the RNC [ http://www.bradblog.com/?p=9592 ] and five different battleground state Republican parties several weeks ago, after fraudulent voter registrations began to emerge across Florida. Some of those questionable applications included address changes for existing voters, such that Florida election officials told the BRAD BLOG [ http://www.bradblog.com/?p=9590 ] they worry voters could find themselves disenfranchised come Election Day. In Florida, as in many states, provisional ballots cast at precincts other than where voters are officially registered will not be counted. So changing the addresses on voter registrations without voters’ knowledge is a serious crime with potentially very serious consequences.
Reilly’s report at TPM says that Small “worked for PinPoint, a company hired to register voters on behalf of the Republican Party of Virginia.” In fact, PinPoint Staffing placed ads to hire workers for Strategic Allied Consulting in FL, VA and a number of other states, though the BRAD BLOG has learned that the company removed many of those ads once the scandal began to break in Florida. They have since modified some of their newer ads to hide their ties to the Republican Party.
In response to queries we sent to Sproul late Thursday, his crisis spokesperson, David Leibowitz, attempted to distance his client from the arrest of the Republican Party worker in Virginia, claiming that “the only connection between Sproul and Pinpoint is that Nathan has, on occasion, used Pinpoint to hire some workers.”
It was PinPoint Staffing, in fact, which reportedly hired the man Strategic blamed for the fraudulent registration forms turned in originally in Palm Beach. But while PinPoint continues to seek workers for GOP-related efforts around the country, and as Sproul’s operations continue in “as many as 30 states”, it is the Republican National Committee’s response to the entire affair, including to the arrest today, that may be the most troubling…
The RNC ‘firing’ deception
Colin Small, according to his LinkedIn profile, as captured by the NotLarrySaboto blog [ http://notlarrysabato.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451b13369e2017c32a0a23a970b-pi ] (which was the first to highlight the initial report [ http://notlarrysabato.typepad.com/doh/2012/10/virginia-gop-caught-destroying-voter-registration-forms.html ] of a man with PA license plates tossing a bag of Virginia Voter Registration Forms into a Harrisonburg dumpster), wasn’t only working for the state GOP or for Strategic Allied Consulting or for PinPoint. He was working as a “Grassroots Field Director at the Republican National Committee,” according to LinkedIn.
[Update: NBC News is reporting [ http://nbcpolitics.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/10/19/14556980-gop-registration-worker-charged-with-voter-fraud ] this morning that RNC Communications Director denies Small was "directly employed by the RNC" and that he will be "told to take down that." Small is currently in jail and unable to respond to clear up the question, however.]
Last month, several days after fraudulent voter registration forms collected by Strategic Allied Consulting and turned in by the Florida GOP began to be discovered by County election officials in Florida, the RNC claimed to have fired Strategic [ http://www.bradblog.com/?p=9592 ].
Sean Spicer, the RNC’s Communications Director, boasted that the party took “swift and bold action” after learning of the fraud, claiming they have “zero tolerance” for it or for those who commit it. However, as we summarized in our very first report on this scandal [ http://www.bradblog.com/?p=9586 ], Sproul’s companies have a long history of workers being paid per Republican registration form and for being accused of destroying Democratic ones.
Despite that, they were hired once again this year by the RNC who, Sproul says, asked them to create the new company in June without his name on it to avoid it being tied to him. Not very bold or zero tolerancy of them. Though Spicer said he had no knowledge of that arrangement, Sproul told the BRAD BLOG he stands by his assertion.
Beyond that, last Thursday we reported [ http://www.bradblog.com/?p=9627 ] that Sproul’s firms, including what appeared to be a “clone” operation of Strategic Allied Consulting, calling itself Issue Advocacy Partners, were still found working for Republicans and right-wing ballot initiatives in at least 10 states. Subsequently, on Friday, the Los Angeles Times reported [ http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-fired-rnc-consultant-canvassing-campaign-20121012,0,2171682.story ] that, in fact, Sproul was still “hiring workers for a voter canvassing operation this fall in as many as 30 states.”
On Thursday, following Small’s arrest, Sproul’s spokesman Leibowitz hedged that number by telling us via email: “What we said on the record to various media outlets is that his companies are working in ‘as many as 30 states.’ That could mean 1 state. Or 2. Or 30. You get the idea, I’m sure.”
We do. The idea is Sproul does not want to come clean about his ongoing operations and who it is that he continues to work for, preferring instead to live up to the “shady” adjective that’s often applied to him in the media. Despite our follow-up request, Leibowitz did not identify the exact number of states that Sproul was still working in, or who was paying him to do so.
Strategic was said to have been hired by state Republican Parties, at the request of the RNC, for voter registration drives in five states (Florida, North Carolina, Virginia, Nevada and Colorado) and for “Get Out the Vote” campaigns in Ohio and Wisconsin. When both RNC and state GOP officials claimed to have fired them, it seems they didn’t really mean it.
In Tanfani’s report at LA Times late Thursday, Spicer confirms that, really, it may have only been Sproul who the party claimed to be “boldly” cutting ties with. The operations Sproul created for the Party beginning in August, the ones that led to fraudulent voter registrations in Florida and destroyed applications reported in Colorado and Nevada as well, are still in place.
“After Sproul was dumped,” Tanfani reports, “the registration operation that he assembled continued working under the supervision of party officials, Spicer said. He said the workers will continue to do get-out-the-vote work until the election.”
The firing of Sproul and Strategic Allied Consulting was a deception.
Moreover, as The BRAD BLOG detailed on Tuesday [ http://www.bradblog.com/?p=9632 ] the company’s mailing address, according to documents released [PDF] [ http://bradblog.com/Docs/ElectionsFraudComplaint_StrategicAlliedConsulting_092712.pdf ] by the Florida Dept. of Law Enforcement upon announcement of their statewide criminal investigation of Strategic [ http://www.bradblog.com/?p=9609 ] (the firm is also being criminally investigated in CO [ http://www.bradblog.com/?p=9622 ]), was registered as a corporation last June out of the same law office run by top-level Republican National Committee election attorneys where both Karl Rove’s American Crossroads Super-PAC and the Koch Brothers’ Americans for Prosperity are also based.
Despite Spicer’s attempt to downplay the VA incident on Thursday — “He made a mistake and he’s being charged with it, which we fully support” — as he similarly did for the FL incidents previously, it’s become clear that the RNC’s deceptive and often illegal registration and canvass operations are toxic, widespread, and very high-reaching.
Ironically, or perhaps not at this point, Romney, who hired Sproul late last year as a “political consultant” for some $71,000, appears to have committed both voter registration fraud and voter fraud himself [ http://www.bradblog.com/?p=9397 ] in Massachusetts, when he voted in the January 2010 U.S. Senate Special Election between Scott Brown and Martha Coakley. While he owned houses in both California and New Hampshire at the time, he did not own a Massachusetts home until July of that year. Instead, he used the basement of his son’s Belmont, Mass., home as his own registration address in apparent contravention of Massachusetts state residency laws. [See our still-growing list of other very high-profile GOPers recently involved in apparent election fraud crimes [ http://www.bradblog.com/?p=9467 ].]
Trashed registration forms in Virginia
According to FEC filings obtained by CBS 6 in Richmond [ http://wtvr.com/2012/09/27/virginia-republicans-fire-voter-registration-group/ ] last month, the Virginia Republican Party reportedly paid some $500,000 to Strategic for registration work before the state GOP claimed to have fired them, several days after the fraudulent forms collected by Strategic and submitted to county Supervisors of Elections by the Florida GOP began to surface in the Sunshine State. As we now know, only Sproul was fired. The voter registration operation itself continued.
Small, the man arrested on Thursday and charged with eight felony counts and five misdemeanors after allegedly having been found to have tossed at least eight registration forms into a dumpster in Harrisonburg, Va. (Rockingham County), was reportedly working for an operation named PinPoint on behalf of the Virginia GOP, according to Reilly at TPM.
In an earlier report on the matter at TPM [ http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/10/virginia_sheriff_republican_voter_registration.php ], before Small’s arrest later in the day, Reilly noted that “Virginia does not register voters by political party, so it would be difficult for someone to discard forms from their political opponents.”
Not really.
Reilly’s assessment does not take into account the very specific and purposely deceptive process used by Sproul’s companies — and, as suggested by evidence we’ve collected, perhaps other Republican-based voter registration outfits across the country — to identify and register only Republicans to vote, while attempting to filter out Democratic-leaning voters.
In an investigative report earlier this month, the BRAD BLOG detailed [ http://www.bradblog.com/?p=9600 ] video-taped and other evidence from nearly half a dozen states, demonstrating a deceptive, national Republican voter registration strategy where voter registration workers purposely misrepresented themselves as pollster to potential registrants.
Essentially, as detailed in video clips and other testimony in that report, the GOP voter registration workers hired by Sproul were trained to pretend to be taking a poll and to ask voters if they supported Mitt Romney or Barack Obama. If the answer was “Obama”, the potential registrant was thanked and sent on their way. If the answer came back as “Romney”, they were given the opportunity to register to vote. In that way, the thousands of workers employed by Sproul, the former head of the Arizona Republican Party and Christian Coalition, kept many Democratic-leaning voters from registering to vote at all.
In one YouTube video that went viral last month [ http://www.bradblog.com/?p=9583 ], a young Colorado registration worker — who, it turned out, had been working for Sproul’s Strategic Allied Consulting on behalf of the state GOP — is seen doing exactly that. Another videoposted by Las Vegas ABC affiliate Action News 13 [ http://www.ktnv.com/news/local/166966656.html ], shows a worker there playing out the same pollster scheme in Nevada. Sproul shared an email with The BRAD BLOG in which he had boasted to other company officials that the Vegas video tape captured their worker carrying out her training “perfectly”.
In Virginia, where the Pennsylvania man working for the state GOP was arrested Thursday, Chesterfield County’s General Registrar Larry Haake was seen explaining to Richmond’s CBS 6 [ http://wtvr.com/2012/09/27/virginia-republicans-fire-voter-registration-group/ ] in late September that he had received complaints of Strategic employees discovered doing the same thing in a library last month.
“They were responsible for people that appeared in some libraries in Chesterfield County, supposedly to conduct voter registration drives,” Haake said, “but they were asking voters for whom they are going to vote.”
Haake says he informed the GOP of the incident at the time, but, apparently, no action was taken.
If, in fact, Small, or the workers he is said to have supervised, were using the same technique of misrepresenting themselves to voters about being a pollster, rather than being a registration worker, it’s likely he would have been able to glean whether those registrations he was allegedly seen tossing into a dumpster were for Democratic or Republican-leaning voters.
The ‘PinPoint’ piece of the puzzle
In that same story on the Sproul/RNC voter registration deception [ http://www.bradblog.com/?p=9600 ], we cited a 9/28/12 report by the Los Angeles Times [id.] that tied PinPoint Staffing to Sproul.
The article quoted William T. Hazard, the Strategic employee said by the company to have turned in the original fraudulent registration applications in Palm Beach County, Fla. He says he “did nothing wrong”, but told the paper that he was trained “to approach people and ask whom they supported in the presidential election. When people answered with President Obama, he said, he wished them a good day. If someone said Mitt Romney, he asked if they were registered to vote. If not, he handed them forms to fill out.”
He says that it was a help wanted ad placed by PinPoint that led him to the work for Strategic, Sproul, and the Republican Party.
“He got the voter registration job after responding to a Craigslist ad placed by a company called PinPoint Staffing seeking people to do ‘voter surveys’,” the Times reported at the time. “The ad specified that all applicants had to be registered Republicans and active voters.”
Further, the paper says, “Although he reported to a PinPoint Staffing office in West Palm Beach, he said, ‘I thought I was dealing with the Republican Party.’”
PinPoint was key to Sproul’s operations. So who are they?
Over our three-week long investigation of Sproul and the GOP Voter Registration Fraud Scandal, we had collected dozens of help wanted ads posted by PinPoint Staffing that were nearly identical to others published on behalf of Strategic. Some of those ads placed in North Carolina had proved instrumental, originally, to theBlueNC blog’s Greg Flynn [ http://www.bluenc.com/republican-paid-voter-registration-operation-linked-fraud ] in late August when they were key to his uncovering Sproul’s previously-secret ownership of Strategic Allied Consulting.
Many of the PinPoint ads on Craigslist and other sites — seeking “VOTER REGISTRATION SUPPORT” by “REPUBLICAN PARTY SUPPORTER(S)”, for example — were hastily removed from the Internet at nearly the same time that Sproul and Strategic were being outed and supposedly fired. The BRAD BLOG captured many of them before they were taken down, some with the message: “This posting has been flagged for removal.”
We discovered ads by PinPoint Staffing in dozens of cities, in Virginia, North Carolina and Washington D.C., as well as all across Florida, from Pensacola in the panhandle, down to Palm Beach County where the first fraudulent registration forms were discovered [ http://www.bradblog.com/?p=9586 ] in late September.
More recently, PinPoint ads for “Political Jobs” or “Campaign” or “Canvassing” operations began to no longer include references to “Republican Voters” or “Romney” or the “Republican Party”. Instead they might read “ARE YOU LOOKING FOR YOUR BIG BREAK INTO POLITICS?”. Such ads have been found this month in Virginia, Wisconsin, New York, Arizona and Florida.
During our research on our report last week detailing the state’s where Sproul was confirmed to still be working [ http://www.bradblog.com/?p=9627 ], we found evidence of his continuing operations under the names Issue Advocacy Partners and Grassroots Outreach in Alabama, California, Georgia, Louisiana, Oregon, Wisconsin, Iowa, Virginia, New York, New Jersey and, possibly, Ohio (where the RNC had previously admitted that Strategic had been scheduled to do “Get Out the Vote” work this year before the “firing”.)
At TPM, Reilly reports that “A man who answered the phone at Pinpoint and only gave his name as Ryan said he was not allowed to comment. ‘I really want to stay out of it,’ he said.”
Ads for Strategic placed in late Summer by PinPoint in Alachua, Fla., and in September in Winston Salem, N.C., told perspective employees to “Contact Ryan.”
The phone number given on the ads was from Phoenix, AZ. Sproul’s main operation is based just outside of Phoenix, in Tempe.
“Let me be as unequivocal as possible. Nathan Sproul and his businesses have no ownership interest in Pinpoint,” his spokesperson Leibowitz, hired by Sproul to manage the crisis several weeks into it, insisted to The BRAD BLOG late Thursday. “He doesn’t control it, nor is he affiliated with it.”
“The only connection between Sproul and Pinpoint is that Nathan has, on occasion, used Pinpoint to hire some workers.”
When we followed up to ask if Sproul had used PinPoint to hire workers in FL, VA or anywhere else, whether any of his current companies are still using them, and for what services he has used them in the past, or if he has since stopped, Leibowitz demurred.
“Given that Nathan’s companies have no connection to the Pinpoint-related story you cited earlier, we see no need to go into any further detail.”
Deborah Newell Tornello [ http://litbrit.blogspot.com/ ] contributed research to this report.
Investigative journalist and broadcaster Brad Friedman is the creator and publisher of The BRAD Blog [ http://bradblog.com/ ]. He has contributed to Mother Jones, The Guardian, Truthout, Huffington Post, The Trial Lawyer magazine and Editor & Publisher. More Brad Friedman [ http://www.salon.com/writer/brad_friedman/ ].
Copyright © 2012 Salon Media Group, Inc. (emphasis in original)
http://www.salon.com/2012/10/19/gop_voter_registration_scandal_widens/ [with comments]
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Tricksters Trying To Suppress Vote With Deceptive Phone Calls
Early voting appears to have moved up the clock on dirty tricks, as some voters get phone calls with misinformation about voter identification or when and how to vote.
By Dan Froomkin
Posted: 10/16/2012 11:52 am Updated: 10/16/2012 11:59 am
Some African American, Spanish-speaking and elderly voters in Florida and Virginia are apparently being targeted by anonymous voter-suppression groups trying to trick them or intimidate them into not voting in the November presidential election, according to election officials and voter protection organizations.
The Virginia State Board of Elections [ http://www.pwcgov.org/Documents/RumorBuster.pdf ] is warning residents that "some Virginia voters, particularly older Virginians, are receiving phone calls from unidentified individuals informing voters that they can vote over the phone. This information is false."
In Florida, the 866-OUR-VOTE election protection hotline run by the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law has received a report of a similar calls in Florida [ http://www.866ourvote.org/newsroom/news/deceptive-calls-received-in-florida ].
The lawyers' committee is also investigating reports from callers into African-American and Spanish-language radio stations in Florida that they had received warnings over the phone that election officials would be checking car insurance and registration status at the polls.
Attempts to deceive members of certain demographic groups into not voting have become an unfortunate staple of the American electoral process, but they normally don't start until much closer to Election Day, said Eric Marshall, manager of legal mobilization at the lawyers' committee.
In Florida, the voter who alerted the hotline described a phone call in which the caller said that a new law has passed that allows voters to vote by phone with just a name and address, he said. The caller knew the voter’s name, address and party affiliation.
Marshall said the caller evidently had access to voter rolls, and read back the information "to make it sound more official." "This isn't necessarily a new tactic," he said. "But it's early."
And just to be clear: "You cannot vote by phone," Marshall said.
What has changed the trickster calendar? "I guess with the increase of early voting, they're moving these types of tactics up earlier," Marshall said.
People who get such calls should try to get as much information about the call as possible, he said. They should get the caller's phone number and ask questions about where they're calling from. If the call is a recording, they should record it, and then report it to 866-OUR-VOTE, Marshall said.
Other historical attempts at voter suppression have included calls, fliers and even door-to-door campaigns trying to trick people into not going to vote. One of the most infamous attempts was in Virginia in 2008, when a flier [ http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Misinformation_campaign_tells_Dems_to_vote_1028.html ] was distributed telling Democrats they were supposed to vote on Wednesday, not Tuesday.
The disinformation campaign would appear to be a sort of illegal corollary to the Republican-backed campaign to demand photo identification from voters. What opponents say they seem to have in common is an intent to particularly block or dissuade African American, Latino and elderly voters from casting ballots.
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/16/voter-suppression-tricksters_n_1970272.html [with comments]
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Of Republicans and Race Cards
Why I Used to Believe That Voter ID Laws Really Were Just Common Sense
By Jeremiah Goulka
[author of/see also in particular the first item at (linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=79791661 and preceding and following]
October 14, 2012
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175604/ [also at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeremiah-goulka/republicans-voter-id_b_1966848.html (with comments)]
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Amber Gilleylen Alleges Anti-White 'Discrimination' After McDonald's Employee Denies Her New Biscuits
The McDonald's restaurant in St. Ann, Mo., where the incident occurred.
By Bonnie Kavoussi
Posted: 10/19/2012 11:20 am EDT Updated: 10/19/2012 11:21 am EDT
A white woman is suing after a black McDonald's employee would not give her an additional free order of biscuits when she complained about the quality of those she was given.
Amber Gilleylen of St. Louis, Mo., sued McDonald's employee Tonya Wesley, her manager Pardeep Roe, and M&M Management, the operator of the St. Ann, Mo., McDonald's franchise, where the incident occurred, for alleged "discrimination" on Monday.
The complaint claims that on Nov. 30, 2011, when Gilleylen complained about her food, Wesley said: "The white chick has a problem with her biscuits."
Wesley and her manager allegedly told Gilleylen that she could have her money back, but not another serving of food for free, according to the complaint, which doesn't specify what was wrong with Gilleylen's biscuits.
"Defendants refused to serve [Gilleylen] based on her color, race and sex," the complaint says. "Defendants denied [Gilleylen] full and equal use and enjoyment of a place of public accommodation based on her color, sex and race."
Gilleylen is not alone in perceiving discrimination. White people now believe [ http://now.tufts.edu/news-releases/whites-believe-they-are-victims-racism-more-o ] they are the primary targets of racial discrimination in the U.S., according to a study released last year by researchers at Tufts University and Harvard Business School.
The complaint claims that Wesley "threatened [Gilleylen] with bodily harm," and that she caused Gilleylen to "suffer apprehension of offensive contact" and become "damaged in the form of emotional distress and humiliation." Overall, the complaint states, the defendants' actions were "outrageous" because of their "evil motive or reckless indifference to the rights of others."
Gilleylen filed a charge with the Missouri Commission on Human Rights (MCHR) in February, and MCHR gave her the right to sue for alleged discrimination in July, according to the complaint.
This isn't the first time a major fast food restaurant has been accused of racism. A Domino's Pizza delivery driver wrote [ http://www.wral.com/news/local/story/8173902/ ] the N-word and "DON'T TIP" on the receipt for the order delivered to a black North Carolina woman in 2010, according to WRAL. A recent lawsuit also alleges [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/06/in-n-out-burger-lawsuit_n_1861897.html ] that In-N-Out Burger discriminates against blacks in its hiring process.
(Hat tip: Courthouse News Service [ http://www.courthousenews.com/2012/10/18/51403.htm ].)
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/19/amber-gilleylen-mcdonalds-discrimination_n_1986268.html [with comments]
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New Evidence That Racism Isn't 'Natural'
The reaction to African-American faces was found to be weaker in people with racially diverse peers.
Oct 17 2012
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/10/new-evidence-that-racism-isnt-natural/263785/ [with comments]
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John Yoo, 'Torture Memo' Author, Says Obama Violated Constitution With Deferred Action Policy
10/15/2012
John Yoo, the George W. Bush-era Justice Department lawyer who penned so-called "Torture memos" authorizing controversial interrogation techniques, accused the president Friday of holding a "radical vision of executive power" and usurping the Constitution with his recently enacted policy to stop deporting some young undocumented immigrants.
"Obama’s order has pushed the executive power beyond all constitutional limits," Yoo wrote in a Fox News op-ed posted Friday [ http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2012/10/12/obama-has-pursued-dangerous-change-in-powers-president/ ], adding later that it appeared to be a political move to shore up the Latino vote ahead of the election. "Worried about Hispanic support for his re-election ... Obama simply decided to unilaterally enact his own legislation."
[...]
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/15/john-yoo-obama-deffered-action_n_1966955.html [with embedded video report, and comments]
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Hypocrisy? Torture Memo Creator: Obama Violated Constitution
Published on Oct 16, 2012 by TheYoungTurks
"John Yoo, the George W. Bush-era Justice Department lawyer who penned so-called "Torture memos" authorizing controversial interrogation techniques, accused the president Friday of holding a "radical vision of executive power" and usurping the Constitution with his recently enacted policy to stop deporting some young undocumented immigrants.
"Obama's order has pushed the executive power beyond all constitutional limits," Yoo wrote in a Fox News op-ed posted Friday, adding later that it appeared to be a political move to shore up the Latino vote ahead of the election. "Worried about Hispanic support for his re-election ... Obama simply decided to unilaterally enact his own legislation."
Obama announced in June that some undocumented immigrants who entered the United States as children would be granted deferred action -- two years reprieve from deportation concerns -- and work authorization. GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney said earlier this month that he would end the policy."* Jimmy Dore (The Jimmy Dore Show) and Steve Oh (COO of The Young Turks) break down Yoo's opinion and Steve explains why Yoo is a hypocrite and "the worst Korean-American in history."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HaYmmf9HncA
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Joe Arpaio Critics Dress Up As 'King Arpaio' And Jesters, Disrupt Meeting
Critics of Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio dressed as a king and jesters to disrupt a meeting Wednesday.
10/17/2012
PHOENIX -- The nation's self-professed "Toughest Sheriff" Joe Arpaio is pretty good at getting attention, be it through birther investigations or keeping undocumented immigrants in a tent city and forcing them to wear pink underwear [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/29/joe-arpaio-pink-underwear-jail_n_1387708.html ].
Some of his constituents in Maricopa County, Ariz., are sick of it. And on Wednesday, they proved they're capable of creating a spectacle, too.
Anti-Arpaio protesters carried a man posing as "King Arpaio" into a Maricopa County board of supervisors meeting Wednesday morning to protest the board's failure to condemn the sheriff. The "king," a grey-haired and balding man wearing a gold crown, aviator sunglasses and a red velvet cape, was carried by a "royal posse" wearing jester's hats. He yelled that he would win four more years -- Arpaio has been in office for two decades and is 80 years old -- and that he has plenty more pink underwear to distribute.
One hundred or so other protesters, organized by progressive group Citizens for a Better Arizona and led by the group's president, Randy Parraz, yelled back that Arpaio will be ousted soon. They followed the "king" in disrupting the meeting with prayers, chanting and singing until the frustrated chairman, Republican Max Wilson, finally adjourned it and said he would meet with Parraz and a small group of others.
[...]
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/17/joe-arpaio-protest-king-arpaio_n_1975003.html [with comments]
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Allen West plagued by scam PACs
10/17/12
There’s a new super PAC popping up in this year’s campaign: SCAM PAC.
In the presidential race, and tied to the coattails of Republican firebrand Rep. Allen West, a cottage industry has sprung up in which groups with such seemingly innocuous names as “Patriots for Economic Freedom” use high-profile campaigns and big names like West to raise money for themselves and build their email lists.
It’s the inevitable, if unsightly, convergence of the Internet, tea party, the post-Citizens United campaign-finance era and the presence of a Democrat in the White House who is despised by many conservatives. Political operatives can create a PAC and corresponding website on the cheap, drop some cash to rent an email list and, voilà— in come the small-dollar contributions from grass-roots Republicans eager to support any effort aiming to turn out President Barack Obama or reelect the fiery West.
Except those chunks of $25 and $50 don’t often find their way to any serious campaigns to beat Obama or boost West.
“The vast majority of the groups that we know are engaged in this have done nothing for West,” said Jill Holtzman Vogel, the congressman’s campaign attorney.
And, with the outfits that have given to West, those contributions pale in comparison to the money they’ve raised using the freshman Republican’s name.
According to media trackers and West campaign officials, none of the many conservative super PACs purportedly raising money for the congressman is airing TV ads on his behalf.
[...]
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1012/82498.html [with comments]
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Billy Graham's organization removes Mormonism from its list of cults
October 18, 2012
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-250_162-57535071/billy-grahams-organization-removes-mormonism-from-its-list-of-cults/ [with comments]
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Graham family tightens ties with Romney as presidential election nears
Republican presidential candidate, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, left, meets with Rev. Billy Graham, center, and his son Franklin Graham, Thursday, Oct. 11, 2012, in Montreat, N.C.
(AP Photo/ Evan Vucci)
Evangelistic Association’s website cuts Mormonism from listing of ‘cults’
By Michael Gordon
Posted: Thursday, Oct. 18, 2012
The election-year embrace of Mitt Romney by some evangelical Christians now borders on a bear hug, given a series of moves by Billy Graham and his family that appear to say it’s OK to vote for a Mormon.
This week, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association removed Mormonism from its list of religious cults.
The reclassification follows Romney’s visit to Graham’s mountain home last Thursday, a meeting that also included Graham’s son Franklin, who now runs the association for his 93-year-old father.
Mormons consider themselves Christians and say their faith tracks the teachings of Jesus. But they give equal stature to the Book of Mormon and the Bible. Several of their beliefs – including that God the Father, the Holy Spirit and Jesus are separate deities and not part of the divine Trinity – further separate them from mainstream Christian teachings.
An article on the Graham website had classified Mormons, along with Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Unification Church, Unitarians, Spiritists and Scientologists, among others, as cults.
“Our primary focus at the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association has always been promoting the Gospel of Jesus Christ,” Ken Barun, the evangelical association’s chief of staff, said in a prepared statement.
“We removed the (cult) information from the website because we do not wish to participate in a theological debate about something that has become politicized during this campaign.”
The Grahams, however, long ago waded into the politics of the presidential campaign. In the current issue of the association’s Decision magazine, Franklin Graham poses the question in a column titled: “Can an Evangelical Christian Vote for a Mormon?”
He answers it with a rousing yes.
“We are at a profound crossroads. Our secularized society has shaken its fist in God’s face and rejected his very name,” Franklin Graham writes. “… We must not silence our voices when government clashes with the worship of God.
“I pray that all Christians and God-fearing Americans will put aside labels and vote for principles – God’s principles.”
While Billy Graham has never formally endorsed a candidate, the ties between the family and Romney have grown tighter, starting with Franklin’s call before the South Carolina presidential primary for conservative Christians to not hold Romney’s religion against him. “We are not electing a pastor-in-chief,” he said at the time.
Mark DeMoss, Franklin Graham’s longtime spokesman, is now a Romney adviser. DeMoss told The Associated Press last week that Franklin Graham “is doing everything he can to encourage churches to encourage their people to get out and vote.”
The younger Graham has also had his run-ins with President Barack Obama. In 2010, the Army withdrew an invitation for Franklin Graham to speak at a Pentagon prayer breakfast because of his criticism of Islam.
In February, Graham questioned Obama’s Christianity while raising the possibility that the president is a Muslim.
In his Decision magazine column, Franklin Graham cites a statement by former President Bill Clinton that Obama has a plan to “rebuild America.”
“God-fearing Americans have no desire to see America rebuilt – but rather restored,” he writes. “To ‘rebuild it’ would be to create a new nation without God or perhaps under many Gods.”
The Grahams’ actions could further cement conservative Christian support for Romney in the Nov. 6 election, even though most evangelicals don’t consider him a Christian.
That religious divide cost Romney heavily in the South Carolina primary, when he finished a distant second to Newt Gingrich, a Catholic who is twice divorced.
“Romney’s Mormonism will be more a cause of concern than Gingrich’s infidelity,” the Rev. Brad Atkins, president of the S.C. Baptist Convention, said at the time.
Mark Harris, pastor of First Baptist Church of Charlotte and president of the North Carolina Baptist State Convention, says evangelicals now have a clear choice.
“While certainly we differ and have deep theological issues with Gov. Romney’s religion and faith, we do share similar values,” Harris said.
On topics such as same-sex marriage and abortion, “our values are far more similar than nonsimilar.”
Move to the mainstream
Throughout his six-decade career, Billy Graham made several moves that made Southern evangelicals uncomfortable – from preaching for integration to including Catholics and more moderate denominations on his crusade teams.
For their part, Mormons have moved more to the cultural, economic and political mainstream, says Bill Leonard, professor of Baptist studies, church history and religion at Wake Forest University.
“Up until the 1950s, you either were a Mormon or you despised the Mormons, because they were considered so weird in the minds of the evangelical majority that there was an almost demonic quality to them.”
Since then, Mormons such as Romney’s father, George, who was the governor of Michigan and ran for president in 1968, and Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch broke public barriers. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints also broke with its longstanding tradition of polygamy. The Mormon Tabernacle Choir became a cultural icon.
Today, Mormons make up about 2 percent of the U.S. population. The Carolinas are home to some 115,000 of the church members.
A Pew Research Center survey earlier this year found that 66 percent of Mormons consider themselves conservative, and almost 75 percent described themselves as Republican or Republican-leaning.
Attempts to reach a local church spokesman were unsuccessful.
In his October column in Decision magazine, Franklin Graham called for the rebirth of a political alliance built on faith – “made up of Christians, Jews, Mormons, Catholics … to take a stand for our religious freedoms and rights.”
Conservative Christians now need those partnerships, Leonard said, given a Pew study this month that showed Protestants are no longer the religious majority in the United States. The fastest-growing religious groups, those not affiliated with a particular church, tend to vote Democratic.
“You could make the case that for the religious right, this is a last-ditch effort in terms of their public privilege, in terms of being the religious majority,” Leonard said.
Some still doubt Mormonism
For now, some other Conservative Christian groups have not followed the Grahams’ move.
The Christian Research Institute of Charlotte, which was begun in 1960 to counteract the threat posed by “cults and other alternative religious systems,” still considers Mormonism a cult.
It says Mormon doctrines “compromise, confuse or contradict the nature of God, the authority of Scripture, and the way of salvation.”
Even the Billy Graham Evangelical Association website has not been completely scrubbed of concerns about the Mormon religion.
Under the section of “Billy Graham’s My Answer,” a questioner who has been invited by a couple “to come to their assembly hall to study the Bible” is warned to be wary of those (like Mormons) that claim “the books their founder wrote or ‘discovered’ are from God, and have equal authority to the Bible.”
“Ask God to lead you to a church where Christ is honored and the Bible is taught,” the website counsels.
Copyright 2012 The Charlotte Observer
http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2012/10/18/3603920/graham-family-ties-tighten-with.html [with comments]
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Billy Graham's Anti-Gay Fundamentalism
10/17/2012
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-g-long/billy-grahams-anti-gay-fundamentalism_b_1968858.html [with comments]
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Billy Graham Launches 'Biblical Values' Ads After Meeting Mitt Romney
10/18/2012
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/18/billy-graham-ads-mitt-romney_n_1983113.html [with comments]
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