Deep In The Heartless Of Texas, Again

The 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals has given Texas GOP Gov. Rick Perry his wish:  the end of Planned Parenthood in the state and the beginning of over 100,000 women without affordable health care.

As a result of Thursday’s decision by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Gov. Rick Perry (R) said that state officials will “immediately” begin defunding clinics operated by Planned Parenthood, which does not actually perform any abortions in the state.

Perry announced earlier this year that he’d made defunding Planned Parenthood a priority for his administration, triggering months of legal wrangling with the clinics and the federal government. Federal law requires that states not discriminate against health providers in distributing federal funds, but a court ultimately ruled that Texas could forgo federal assistance entirely and set up its own health program.

That’s precisely what Perry is doing, passing on more than $40 million in federal assistance and directing the state to exclude Planned Parenthood, which provides health care services to more than 130,000 low-income women in Texas. Planned Parenthood has 49 health centers across Texas, many of which will be forced to close due to Perry’s decision.

As an experiment, pro-choice activist Andrea Grimes said in September that she spent six hours trying to locate a women’s health clinic in Austin that isn’t Planned Parenthood but does accept Medicaid. Despite a list of 181 clinics on the state’s website, Grimes said she found just 13 actual doctors in the whole state who perform the necessary procedures and accept Medicaid, explaining that the other listings were repeats, radiology centers, labs and doctors who didn’t take Medicaid at all.

To make matters worse for many low-income women, the Kaiser Family Foundation says that Texas has one of the most restrictive Medicaid programs in the country, requiring that a family of three earn less than $188 a month to qualify for assistance. Under the president’s Affordable Care Act, however, Medicaid was slated to expand dramatically to cover nearly all low-income Americans, but Perry also said he will turn down more than $164 billion in federal money that would have been used to provide health care to 1.2 million Texans through 2023.

So as a result, 130,000 working poor women will lose their health care just to punish them for the crime of being poor in Texas.  But of course, that was the entire point.

There's no GOP War on Women though.  That's just preposterous.

Third Time Is The Charm For Mobile Meth Lab

Last week wasn’t the first time Springfield Police found what they believe was a mobile meth lab in Marshall Rhea’s pickup truck.

They say it was the third time. In as many months.

Rhea, 31, of Springfield, has been charged with multiple counts of manufacturing or intent to manufacture methamphetamine.

Police say they pulled over Rhea for failing to stop at a stop sign in the 700 block of South Fort Avenue. Rhea allowed officers to search the black pickup truck, according to the court documents.

In the bed of the truck, officers found what they believe were components of a particularly volatile type of lab — one that uses the chemical red phosphorous to synthesize the drug. According to the documents, a rubber glove had been placed over a glass container to capture phosphine gas — a highly explosive gas that is also lethal if inhaled.

On the passenger floorboard of the truck, officers found an empty package of 48 pseudoephedrine tablets, according to the documents.

Gee, I wonder if the publicity from this will be hailed by the City Council as they pretend to debate whether to take action against the evils of Dayquil.

We have an idiot with a jar full of explosive gas running stop signs.  Good catch on the part of the cops, too bad they've had to do it three times so far and the dude is still free.  Perhaps we have found the real problem with meth offenders.  

Teen Dies From Caffeine Toxicity

(NECN/WRC: Jim Rosenfield) - The parents of a 14-year-old Hagerstown, Md. girl who died in December are suing the maker of Monster energy drink, claiming caffeine in the product contributed to her death.

Anais Fournier went into cardiac arrest after drinking two 24-ounce Monster drinks within a 24-hour period, according to a complaint filed Friday in California Superior Court in Riverside.

Hers is one of five deaths and a non-fatal heart attack the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is investigating in connection to the energy drinks.

Fournier was rushed to the hospital, but never regained consciousness. 

She was later pronounced dead.

Investigations don't prove the drinks caused the deaths or Fournier's heart attack, FDA spokesperson Shelly Burgess said.

An autopsy found that Fournier died of cardiac arrhythmia due to caffeine toxicity that impeded her heart's ability to pump blood.

We have a major problem with caffeine as a society.  We drink it to wake up, drink way too much to compensate for lack of exercise and stay up too late, which means we will hit the coffee before opening our eyes the next day. Kids are becoming exposed to this at a younger age.  The line between parental responsibility and consumer safety further complicate the issue.  In this case, an unknown condition aggravated the situation, but there are plenty of kids sucking down energy shots and energy drinks, and then washing it down with soda.

Regardless of who is ultimately responsible, this is going to get worse until some common sense is applied.

The Threats Are The Rite-Hite

Add Rite-Hite Safety Systems' CEO Mike White to the list of business owners threatening their employees to vote Romney or else.

The list of corporate CEOs and owners who have tried scaring their employees into voting for Mitt Romney got a bit longer this week thanks to Milwaukee businessman Mike White.

White, the owner of the industrial equipment firm Rite-Hite, sent his 1,400 employees an email this week warning them that they needed to “understand the personal consequences to them of having our tax rates increase dramatically if President Obama is re-elected,” according to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, which was sent a copy of the correspondence. The email goes on to warn that Rite-Hite would consider dropping its contribution to the workers’ retirement plan, blaming tax hikes that White says are on the way if Obama wins a second term, and that workers will lose their health care.

But don't take my word for it.  Take Mike White's.

“The tax rate we pay is not 17%, as Warren Buffett would have you believe; with state taxes it is roughly 45%. President Obama has announced that our planned tax rate would increase to roughly 65%, reducing our after tax income by 36% and dramatically reducing, if not eliminating, your and my RSP contributions.”

As a result, White said the company’s profits would not be reinvested. Instead, he wrote, “the money will be sent into the abyss that is Washington, D.C. So, on top of the burden of having your personal taxes increase dramatically, which they will, your RSP contributions and healthy retirement are also at risk, all for the sake of maintaining an over-sized government that borrows 42% of every dollar it spends.”

P.S.:  White is a big Republican donor.  How would you feel if your boss sent you an e-mail threatening you with the loss of retirement and health insurance if the wrong guy wins?  And remember, this was an e-mail he sent out to all employees publicly.  This wasn't under the radar.

But don't you dare call it class warfare, right?

Oh, and P.P.S...it looks like Mike White broke Wisconsin law.

We Come Not To Praise Teabaggers...

...but E.J. Dionne at the Washington Post has come to bury them.

If conservatism were winning, does anyone doubt that Romney would be running as a conservative? Yet unlike Ronald Reagan and Barry Goldwater, Romney is offering an echo, not a choice. His strategy at the end is to try to sneak into the White House on a chorus of me-too’s.

The right is going along because its partisans know Romney has no other option. This, too, is an acknowledgment of defeat, a recognition that the grand ideological experiment heralded by the rise of the tea party has gained no traction. It also means that conservatives don’t believe that Romney really believes the moderate mush he’s putting forward now. Not to put too fine a point on it, but if the conservatives are forgiving Romney because they think he is lying, what should the rest of us think?

Almost all of the analysis of Romney’s highly public burning of the right’s catechism focuses on such tactical issues as whether his betrayal of principle will help him win over middle-of-the-road women and carry Ohio. What should engage us more is that a movement that won the 2010 elections with a bang is trying to triumph just two years later on the basis of a whimper.

It turns out that there was no profound ideological conversion of the country two years ago. We remain the same moderate and practical country we have long been. In 2010, voters were upset about the economy, Democrats were demobilized, and President Obama wasn’t yet ready to fight. All the conservatives have left now is economic unease. So they don’t care what Romney says. They are happy to march under a false flag if that is the price of capturing power.

I like E.J. Dionne.  I think he's a smart guy and solid political analyst and pundit.

But he has never been more wrong in his life.  Ever. 

The fact that E.J. is writing this column is empirical proof that he too has been taken in by Romney's Etch-A-Sketch campaign.  Dionne sees meaningless blanks.  I see a President far more compliant than Dubya ever was.  He will do exactly what he is told.  It will be the Dubya years all over again, only worse.

And should Romney lose, we will see an even more wingnut crazy candidate in 2016.  Santorum.  Huckabee.  Who knows?  Ryan even.  Madness.

No, what this election represents is the death of GOP moderates.  They are gone from the party for good.  And Romney is their puppet.

StupidiNews!

• Syrian government forces say they will hold a four-day cease fire over the Eid al-Adha holiday starting today, but reserve the right to respond to any rebel "terrorist acts".
• President Obama became the first sitting President to take advantage of early voting in Illinois on Thursday, casting his ballot in Chicago.
• Two drug-sniffing dog cases will be heard by the US Supreme Court next week, raising questions about the Fourth Amendment and search and seizure laws.
• Fish caught off the coast of Japan's Fukushima region show the same level of contamination as they did a year ago, raising fresh safety concerns.
• With Windows 8 out this week, Microsoft will most likely skip any second major service pack for Windows 7.

Last Call

So what about the Senate?

A couple of months ago I would have said that the Dems were in serious trouble.  Now?  With less that two weeks to go, it's looking more and more like the Dems will not only keep the Senate, but actually pick up a number of seats.  Of course, to the Washington Post, that means that the races are "essentially tied" and that "Republicans are very optimistic."

In the battle for control of the U.S. Senate, there are now at least eight critical contests in which polling shows essentially a dead heat, encouraging Republicans’ hopes that they may yet snag the chamber, which very recently seemed beyond their reach.

Some of the GOP boost is coming from the top of the ticket in the form of Mitt Romney, whose recent surge in the polls seems to be helping Republican candidates across the country.

Democrats still have an edge in their effort to keep control of the Senate, and they may have been helped Tuesday when Republican candidate Richard Mourdock in Indiana suggested that pregnancies resulting from rape are God’s will, possibly damaging his chances to succeed Sen. Richard G. Lugar (R).

But both parties agree that many of the most important races have become more competitive in recent days, and their outcomes harder to predict.

Really?  Let's take a look at the WaPo's own predictions.  Right now it has the Dems getting to 50, with 6 toss-ups.  That means in order for the Republicans to get control, they would have to win all six toss-up races and Romney would have to win the White House, making Paul Ryan the tiebreaker.  How is that in any way "optimistic"?

There's no evidence that Romney's surge, being based on Obama's shortcomings in the first debate, had any effect on the Senate races at all.

I don't see it happening.  Even the guys at Power Line, who all but have crowned Romney an easy win in November, are not seeing the GOP takeover of the Senate.

I still say the Dems will pick up a couple of seats.  They could pick up 4, maybe even 5.  It's just as likely as the GOP picking up the six they would need, right?

Pretty Flight For Some White Guys

The latest Washington Post/ABC News poll has some pretty grim crosstab news for the Obama campaign:  Mitt Romney has a massive 33-point lead among white male voters.

The clearest loss for the president is among white men. In 2008, Obama lost white men by 16 points, according to the exit poll. This year, Obama trails Romney double that margin — 33 points — larger than any deficit for a Democratic candidate since Ronald Reagan’s 1984 landslide win over Walter Mondale.

After splitting their votes 47 percent for Obama and 49 percent for McCain in 2008, whites who identify as political independents now favor Romney over Obama, 59 to 38 percent. Nearly half of all of those who supported Obama in 2008 but Romney in 2012 are white independents. (Overall, whites make up more than 90 percent of “switchers.”)

A key element of Romney’s advantage among all whites is that by 55 to 39 percent, more white voters say he, not Obama understands the economic problems people in this country are having. Among whites without college degrees, Romney is up 58 to 35 percent on this score, expanding what was a narrow gap just a few weeks ago. This advantage comes even as 44 percent of white voters say Romney, as president, would do more to favor the wealthy; 38 percent say he would do more to for the middle class.

Do you see now why the Romney campaign has been blaring the race air horns for the last five months, portraying the President as a con artist and a thug who cares more about minorities and women than white men?

Romney's been able to come in behind the President and sell himself as the candidate of middle-class white male America.  And guess what?  Still enough middle-class white male voters to give Romney the win.  He's just credible enough to be a viable alternative to the President, and that's all these switcher voters need.

Having said that, the electoral college math still favors the President.

The way the term “momentum” is applied in practice by the news media, however, it usually refers only to the first part of the clause — meaning simply that a candidate has been gaining ground in the polls, whether or not he might continue to do so. (I’ve used this phrasing plenty of times myself, so I have no real basis to complain about it.)

But there are other times when the notion of momentum is behind the curve — as it probably now is if applied to Mitt Romney’s polling.

Mr. Romney clearly gained ground in the polls in the week or two after the Denver debate, putting himself in a much stronger overall position in the race. However, it seems that he is no longer doing so.

If Romney is winning states like Alabama and Kentucky by 25 points instead of 15, it's not going to make a damn bit of difference in the electoral math unless there's gain in states like Ohio, Virginia and Wisconsin.  And right now, the President is continuing to hold on to those states by 3-5 points.

It's going to be a close race.  But electorally, I still see the President winning.

Grinding Out The Ground Game

The Atlantic's Molly Ball foresees an election so close that the President's Obama For America turnout operation could very well be the difference between a win and a loss.

Four years ago, Barack Obama built the largest grassroots organization in the history of American politics. After the election, he never stopped building, and the current operation, six years in the making, makes 2008 look like "amateur ball," in the words of Obama's national field director Jeremy Bird. Republicans insist they, too, have come a long way in the last four years. But despite the GOP's spin to the contrary, there's little reason to believe Romney commands anything comparable to Obama's ground operation.

And this time, Obama may actually need it.

Though he trounced John McCain organizationally four years ago, the irony was that Obama didn't really need his sophisticated field organization. Riding a wave of voter enthusiasm and Bush fatigue, and crushing McCain with fundraising and TV ad spending, Obama almost certainly would have won the 2008 election anyway. The political operative's rule of thumb is that organization can increase your share of the vote by two percentage points; Obama won the national popular vote by seven points. One academic study looked at Obama's edge in field offices and concluded they probably put a couple of extra states in his column, but he would have won without them.

This year is different. The polls are so close that a lively partisan meta-fight has broken out over which side actually has the upper hand going into the final stretch, with Romney claiming momentum is on his side, while Obama clings to slim leads in enough swing states to take the Electoral College. In an election that's tied in the polls going down to the wire, Obama's ground game could be crucial.

In the closing days of the race, "we have two jobs," Obama campaign manager Jim Messina said Tuesday. "One, to persuade the undecideds, and two, to turn our voters out." The former is the job of the president and his TV and other media ads. As for the latter, "That's the grassroots operation we've been building for the last 18 months." 

I've said all along that this election will come down to turnout, turnout, turnout.  Molly Ball agrees.  I'm putting my money on OFA making the difference in Ohio, Virginia and Colorado to get the win.

The Weirdest Thing To Come Out Of Maine Since Stephen King

SKOWHEGAN, Maine — A 10-year-old girl charged in the death of an infant in Maine is due in court.

The youngster is scheduled for her initial court appearance Monday in District Court in Skowhegan on a juvenile manslaughter charge.

The girl is charged in the July 8 death of 3-month-old Brooklyn Foss-Greenaway, who was staying overnight in the girl's home in Fairfield in the care of the girl's mother.

The state hasn't released the cause of death but Brooklyn's mother was told that her daughter had ingested medication and had been suffocated.

It would seem to be a no-brainer that she was the youngest to face such charges.  But she is only the youngest in thirty years, which makes me wonder what the hell is in the water in Maine.

 

Woman Fakes Out Cops By Saying Kid Locked In Car

Locked out of her car earlier this month, Brenda Crosdale, 49, called 911 and claimed that an infant was trapped in the vehicle.

But when a sheriff’s deputy responded to a “priority one lockout” at Crosdale’s Florida home at around 9 AM on October 6, he “saw no child” inside vehicles parked in the driveway.

When Deputy Michael Cavanaugh asked a male on scene about the whereabouts of the infant, the man replied, “Brenda only said that to get you guys here quicker.”

We have people who can't figure out kids left in cars is a deadly situation, and people who make up kids to get a faster police response.  I would like to beat them with the same ball bat.

The Abdication Of Cowards

Nick Gillespie and his team at Reason magazine are happy to let you know that their glibertarian purity pity party means they are A) better, more principled people than the rest of us suckers, and B) they're not losing an ounce of sleep over this election either.  By my count, there's:

• 19 votes for Gary Johnson,
• 8 people not voting at all, and
• 1 "none of your business".

Not a one of them believes their vote will count or matter in the least in the larger scheme of things, or that voting will basically ever matter in their lifetimes, because Obama and Romney are essentially the same, as all candidates have been the same since forever and why do you sheeple vote, anyway?  They're all for legalization of pot however.

On the other hand, it's not like any of the folks at Reason have to worry about any of the crazy nonsense the GOP will pull on women, minorities, the LGBT community or the poor should they get into power.

All of them seem to think Romney would be a better choice than Obama for some reason, however.  I wonder why that is.

Direct To Cable Derangement

At least one cable TV company covering the important swing states of Pennsylvania and Ohio is offering the odious Dinesh D'Souza smear job movie on the President for free to its customers, just weeks after it was in theaters.

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

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

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

Now gosh, why would a cable TV company be giving away  anti-Obama propaganda here for free right now in places like Pennsylvania and Ohio?  I certainly can't think of a reason a cable TV company would be so generous, do you?

What?  Trying to influence swing state voters before the election with a awful, hate-filled hatchet job on the President for no charge?  Can't imagine why any conservatives would choose to do that, huh.

StupidiNews!

• The Justice Department is suing Bank of America for $1 billion over a subprime mortgage fraud program known internally in the bank as "the Hustle."
• Texas's GOP Attorney General says he will direct law enforcement to arrest international election monitors in the state, saying they have no jurisdiction or authority.
• Hamas is claiming responsibility for a rocket attack into southern Israel, just one day after the Emir of Qatar became the first head of state to visit Gaza in 5 years.
• Former Goldman Sachs director Rajat Gupta has gotten two years in federal prison for insider trading, with his sentence beginning January 8th.
• The collapse of online-gaming darling Zynga continues as the embattled company posted a $52 million loss for the third quarter.

Last Call

As many people suspected, Tagg Romney's comments to the President after Monday's debate (you know, where his dad got his ass handed to him) were in fact an apology for last week's little petulant joke about taking a swing at POTUS.

Tagg Romney, Mitt Romney's oldest son, apologized to President Barack Obama Monday for saying he wanted to "take a swing" at him during contentious presidential debates.

Obama and Tagg Romney were seen speaking on the stage after Monday's final presidential debate, held at Lynn University in Boca Raton, Florida. Two Obama aides said the conversation included an apology for the remark, made last week during a radio interview.

How magnanimous of him.

Asked about the original comments on Thursday, Romney campaign spokeswoman Amanda Henneberg said Tagg Romney was "joking about how frustrating this process can be for family."

It's hard being the Romneys, you know.  Ridiculously rich and entitled to the point of nobility. So difficult to control their barely veiled contempt at the man currently in the office their father is clearly entitled to by dint of being Mitt Romney.

So very difficult indeed.