Last Call

Obama campaign deputy manager Stephanie Cutter takes on the Romney campaign's latest ad blitz accusing President Obama being soft on China and bad for manufacturing jobs, and sets the record straight.

“Here’s the full story: Over the last two-and-a-half years we’ve added more than a half million manufacturing jobs. They’re actually the first manufacturing job gains since the 1990s,” says Cutter.
She also attacks Romney’s tax plans, saying that his proposals to give tax breaks to American companies overseas could send 800,000 jobs abroad, to “China, Mexico, and other countries.”

“His plan encourages companies to create jobs there instead of here at home,” she says, proceeding to hit Romney on his record at private-equity giant Bain Capital and for investing in Chinese companies.

Cutter dismisses Romney’s claims that the administration failed to be an effective advocate against unfair trade practices, accusing Romney of “actually attacking the president for being too tough on China when they were flooding the market with tires.”

“Seriously, when the president stepped up on behalf of American tire workers, saving more than a 1,000 jobs, Romney said it was ‘bad for the nation and our workers,’” she says, citing a passage from Romney’s 2010 book “No Apology.” Romney had criticized the president’s decision early in his administration to side with the United Steelworkers and impose a 35 percent tariff on Chinese tire makers.

Looks pretty bad for Romney, but remember, the facts simply don't apply to them anymore, by their own admission.  It's pretty one sided when you fact check him, because they simply don't care if they're caught lying.  It becomes "So what?"

So what, America?

So what are you going to do about it in November?

Podcast Versus The Stupid!

This weekend's episode: Romney Shambles, as Bon and I discuss the Romney campaign falling apart so badly that the winger blogs are calling on President Obama to resign, why you need to vote, and why down ticket Senate and House races are so important this year.  Do give a listen.

Listen to internet radio with Zandar Versus The Stupid on Blog Talk Radio

As always, you can download the episode in mp3 or Windows Media Player format, listen in iTunes, or check out the archived episodes of PVTS on the Archive page. And if you like what you hear, consider throwing in a couple of bucks via secure PayPal donation, eh?

Thanks!

Dina Lohan - Acting Fail

Dina Lohan tells TMZ ... she had NOT BEEN DRINKING before her interview with Dr. Phil ... and blames the editing for making her appear intoxicated. 

The interview -- set to air on Monday -- was taped several months ago ... and a new promo for the episode features a seemingly confused Dina acting bizarre .. and many people suspect she was blitzed. 

In fact, the promo features a clip in which Dina's ex-hubby Michael Lohan asks Phil if Dina had been drinking before the interview. 

But Dina is adamant she was sober ... telling TMZ, "I don’t care what it looks like. I’m fine and I don’t care what anyone says."

She continues, "All people saw was two minutes edited of an hour long interview. Of course they cut it to make it interesting. That’s their job . I don’t blame them for doing that. Some of the comments were taken out of context but I’m fine. I’m fine.”
 

Sounds  a bit like denial.  Which makes sense, as it's the same lines Lindsay said over and over, while she lost weight, looked haggard, went to jail and stayed in trouble for years.  She learned from the best liar there is... her mother.

There is no Jedi editing trick to make this woman look bad.  She did it herself.  I cannot imagine what the full hour would be like, I'll pass.

Blind Affection

Stolen shamelessly from cheezburger.com.  The generosity of a stranger.  The love of a lifetime.  I bawled for a several minutes, and then cheered up when I realized we live in a great world where someone can care so much, and a blind cat can still find your laptop and decide to place themselves right on the keyboard.  All is right with the world.

4 years ago while I was on holiday in the south of Italy (was living in the north) I found a tiny kitten desperately crying with the power of a thousands suns. I decided to take care of her during my holiday, so that she would be stronger and more capable to survive when I would leave back home. At the time she was obviously too young to survive alone under a 43 degrees Celsius (109 F) sun. 

Her legs were clearly not okay, the mouth was also asymmetrical and impossible to close, probably because of a trauma, but the worst news still had to come. The following day I brought her to the vet who said that her eyes were closed not only because she was still too young but also because an infection ate both eyeballs. The vet also said that she was too weak, and that he thought that she could not survive. 

In the following days my brother and I started to take care of her eyes infection, ears infection, intestine worms and fever, while keeping her warm, feeding her with warm powder milk every 4 hours and teaching her to follow the noise of our steps and clapping hands. After 15 days Skunky was still weak but alive, but I had to leave. So I changed my plane reservation to include a pet, and long story short, Skunky is now sleeping in my bed, with the body under my covers and her head on my pillow. 

…what Skunky gives to me everyday is worth 10 times more what I might do for her.

 

Your Sunday Morning Read

I'm going to try to give you folks an in-depth piece to read on Sunday mornings from here on out, and you're going to want to start with MoJo's brilliant Mac McClelland as she goes back to her working-class roots and meets her old college roommate Erin and her husband Anthony and family in suburban Ohio and asks "whither the middle?"  If you want to know why the GOP is losing in the Buckeye State after 2010 swept in the GOP, you don't have to go too far past "Ohio's War On The Middle Class."

We've been roommates before. But that was back when we went to Ohio State, from which we graduated almost 10 years ago. Now Erin has a grown-up job as a public school teacher and a husband who's a public information specialist for the Ohio agency that keeps tabs on local utilities and makes sure they don't go all Enron on consumers. They have a baby, Jocelyn, who is extremely cute and well behaved, as well as a gray cat named Princess Vespa and a black cat named Barack Obama. For a long time, my contact with Erin has been limited mostly to occasional phone check-ins during which we brief each other on, like, how adulthood is going. Now I'm taking up temporary residence here not as a fun former roomie but as a reporter. I write Erin a rent check for a third of the mortgage—$430. She says she's really happy to see me, even though she knows the grown-up reporter reason I'm here is that she and her husband are state employees, so something bad is bound to happen to them in the next month. That $430, she tells me, might make an important difference in their finances soon.

It's people like Anthony and Erin who are suffering when the battle cry in states like Ohio turns to "government employees are parasites."  But it's not just Ohio that has declared war on their own citizens.  Plenty of other red state governors have gone after state employees, not just John Kasich in Ohio.  When you slash budgets to give tax cuts to the rich, and cut jobs in the process, people suffer.  And guess what?  These people have friends, they have families, they affect people's lives, and when they say "Well, one of us just got laid off due to government cuts" people start thinking "Hey, these are good people, their kids play with my kids.  They're not parasites."

But they see the people who are parasites:  the ultra-rich, profiting off these tax cuts, and then they remember they can vote in November.

Erin and Jocelyn have been going to these protests in Columbus. Neither one of us was really an activist or even especially politically minded in college, but lately, a phone conversation that starts about these amazing ice cream bars ends with news about what Kasich is doing or some kind of fretting, like she's doing right now. With the news that Anthony will likely lose his job, she's panicked that she missed the open enrollment period for her health insurance plan because she assumed, with the faith that professionals tend to default to when they're employed, that no one in her family was about to be jobless. All three Rodriguezes are currently on Anthony's insurance, because it's much better, and cheaper. Luckily, it's not too late to switch. By the end of the week, she'll drive to the appropriate office to drop off the paperwork. And then she'll cry in the car for an hour while Jocelyn's asleep in the backseat, which she'll confess to me when I tell her she's handling her "freaking out" well.

Erin recognizes that she could do a lot worse; if her nightmare of losing her house ever did come close to a reality, her parents would likely rescue her, she knows, as much as she would hate to have to take their money. But her friend, for example, who had a baby at the same time, has been surviving with her husband on his teaching-assistant salary only because they fell into a situation with free rent. Now they have to move, and they have no idea what they're going to do. And a parent of several of Erin's former students had to choose between sending his kid to college and working, since the only job he could get didn't pay enough to cover tuition—and financial aid would be available only if he were unemployed. Erin acknowledges that having to downgrade to a less-great health insurance plan is the sort of thing the upwardly mobile liberals of our generation like to refer to on the internet as "white people problems." A layoff might knock her back an income class or two. But not everyone she knows has a spare income class to fall.

Now, Erin eyes her 11-month-old when she says, "Thank God I have a job. And a job with insurance. Anthony's applying for jobs like crazy, but he's not getting any bites."

But gosh, I thought the tax cuts for the rich was supposed to free up capital so that private sector jobs would be created to keep the people laid off from government work employed.  Surprise!  Not happening.  Ohio's unemployment rate is 8.6%, higher than the national average.  Mac goes on to talk about some of those private sector jobs she's seen that replace these higher-paying "government parasite" jobs:  $9 a hour shifts in a warehouse with no AC in summer or heat in the winter, and where you get fired for not being on the floor 98% of your day.

These workers are all hired as temps by Susie's company. If they make it 90 days, they have the opportunity, in theory, if there's an opening, to become full employees of the logistics company, which means better benefits and about an extra dollar an hour. It has been six months since the logistics company graduated someone here from temp to employee status. At one of the other locations Susie manages, no one has been hired as a real employee for two years. One of the workers in this warehouse has been a temp for a year and a half.

After we walk past workers stuffing inflated plastic air pockets in boxes and a guy continuously taping shut the bottoms of just-made cartons, we go to Susie's office. "Hold on, I gotta fire somebody real quick," she says, picking up the phone. She calls a man who's been working for her for two months. She's sorry, she tells him, but she has to let him go because one of the supervisors caught him talking on the floor. The man, who she thinks is in his late 40s or early 50s, protests that he only asked a new guy where he was from. That's just not the culture, Susie tells him. You know the rules. The logistics company sets them, and she has no choice but to enforce them.

It does say in the new-employee handout that there are no personal conversations allowed on the warehouse floor. Also, no cell phones are permitted. Like a high school teacher, Susie has a pile of phones she's confiscated in a plastic bowl on her desk. Two sick days are allotted per year, and workers must be excused to take them without penalty; after that, the temp is terminated, doctor's note or no. Every temp is allowed one 30-minute break per day, and it must be taken on company premises. Every temp is required to have an ID badge. The cost of this badge, more than an hour's worth of wages, is deducted from the temp's first paycheck.

These are the jobs that globalization creates.  These are the companies that spring up when unions are destroyed and benefits are destroyed, where you lose your job if you talk at work.  This is what the "middle class" looks like now in Ohio.  This is the GOP path to "prosperity", a $9 an hour job that might mean $10 an hour someday in the future.  Maybe.  No guarantees.

But we have to get rid of teachers and state workers and unions and collective bargaining because they make too much money and we're TAXED ENOUGH ALREADY.  

"We" of course being the one percent.  This is what they bring to the table.

Go read the whole thing.

Last Call

But gosh, isn't President Obama supposed to be losing the Jewish vote because he's not loyal enough to Israel?  Could have fooled actual Jewish voters, it seems.

President Barack Obama is extending his lead with Jewish voters, leading among registered voters 70-25 percent according to unreleased Gallup daily tracking poll data .

The data, obtained through a Democratic source, shows Obama up from leading 64-29 in polling this spring — and on par with his 2008 performance at this point when he led 69-25 over John McCain in Gallup polling. The data is drawn from tracking polls taken between July 1 and September 10th.

Despite a heated debate on Israel, most Jewish voters are Democrats and align closely with the Democratic Party on domestic issues from abortion to taxes and spending, and Republicans have tried without success for years to pry the group away from the Democratic Party. The Israel debate, meanwhile, often aims at a broad national audience that sees Israel as an ally, rather than specifically at American Jews.

Every election cycle, Republicans say "This is the year when American Jews turn on the Democrats and vote Republican."  Just like they say women, African-Americans, and Latino voters are going to do.  It'll happen any time now, I'm sure.

Any time now...

Values-Added Stupidity

The annual Values Voter Summit continues this weekend in Washington DC, with the creme' de la creme' of the wingnut elite spouting epic levels of hate along with Mitt's veep choice.  Friday was everything you expected from the Obama Derangement Conference, headed by the American Family Association's Bryan Fischer.  But the conference quickly turned into a circular firing squad as Mitt Romney's crash and burn routine continued.

“If Barack Obama wins this election the Republican Party as we know it is finished, it is dead, it is toast — you can stick a fork in it,” he told TPM Friday at the Values Voter Summit in Washington. “And conservatives, grassroots conservatives, are either going to start a third party or they are going to launch a hostile takeover of the Republican Party.”

Fischer said he believed Romney would be leading national polls by double digits at this point if he had followed Paul Ryan’s lead and offered more detailed conservative positions on the budget and social issues.

“The biggest mistake is they put a bag over Paul Ryan’s head,” he said. Fischer said he was “deeply disturbed” that Ryan didn’t mention the campaign’s opposition to gay marriage in his speech to the summit on Friday.

Ryan spent his speech time saying the most important issue in the election was making abortion illegal in all cases.

“‘We’re all in this together’ — it has a nice ring,” Ryan said. “For everyone who loves this country, it is not only true but obvious. Yet how hollow it sounds coming from a politician who has never once lifted a hand to defend the most helpless and innocent of all human beings, the child waiting to be born.”

Ryan, who believes that abortion should be outlawed even in cases of rape and incest, cast Obama as an abortion extremist in the speech.

“President Obama has chosen to pander to the most extreme elements of his party,” Ryan said. “In the Clinton years, the stated goal was to make abortion ‘safe, legal and rare.’ But that was a different time, and a different president. Now, apparently, the Obama-Biden ticket stands for an absolute, unqualified right to abortion — at any time, under any circumstances, and even at taxpayer expense.”

PS, that includes outlawing contraception, too, folks.  Of course, the day wouldn't have been complete without entertainment, ranging from "former Islamist terrorist who found Jesus" Kamal Saleem...

“I started working for whoever paid the best to advance Islamism.” he said, pacing back and forth onstage. “Saddam Hussein pays better money than anybody else. He was very generous.”

If Saleem’s story sounds unbelievable it’s because there’s little sign any of it ever happened. News investigations into his past haven’t turned up any corroborating evidence of his terrorist resume, but they’ve found plenty of former colleagues and acquaintances who doubt the veracity of Saleem’s autobiographical details.

For one, Mother Jones reports Saleem, real name Khodor Shami, spent over a decade before his “ex-terrorist” act as a staffer at Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network and James Dobson’s Focus on the Family. And despite Saleem’s claims that the FBI relies on him for insight into jihadist thinking, they claim they’ve never heard of him. A 2008 expose by CNN’s Anderson Cooper found similar holes in his story, which paralleled other equally dubious figures making their living off the “ex-terrorist” talk circuit. 

...to professional racist dog-whistler Gary Bauer.

Conservative pundit Gary Bauer, the former president of the Family Research Council, which puts on the Values Voter Summit each year, told the crowd at the 2012 conference Friday that it needs to turn out in great numbers to defeat President Obama’s army of welfare recipients and fraudulent votes.

After his speech, Bauer told TPM “voter fraud is rampant in urban areas” and he expected that to help Obama.

Bauer also told TPM that “there are a lot of people who will vote this November because they depend on government largesse,” meaning checks from Washington. He expects those voters to go Obama as well.

“They will vote for their own perceived interests, which is they don’t want anybody cutting back the size of the checks,” Bauer said.

Yep, because we black people are just stupid, stupid negroes stuck on Obama's plantation.  Bauer didn't have a lick of evidence, but racism, chicanery, fear and facism is all the GOP has left, folks.

They're done.

Jackass Part II

They apparently even make jackasses bigger in Texas:

A Texas police department is defending an officer who is seen on a dashcam video pulling a 77-year-old woman out of her car during a traffic stop.

Sgt. Gene Geheb, an officer from the Keene Police Department, pulled Lynn Bedford over Aug. 19 for driving 66 mph in a 50 mph zone. But their stop grew heated when Bedford refused to hand over her driver's license and insurance card, according to police reports and video from the officer's dashcam. The officer was also wearing a microphone and camera.

"The incident has been reviewed thoroughly by the Keene Police Department and the city of Keene administration," a statement from the Keene Police Department said. "All parties have concluded that Sgt. Geheb did not violate any state laws or department policies, and in fact was following department policy in regards to violators not providing information."

It's nice to know that pulling an old woman out of her vehicle is following department policy.  Even if he had decided to arrest her, he didn't have to be such a jackass.

This does not imply there was not a better way to handle this, because of course there was.  There is no mention of the officer trying to calm the situation, instead it looks like he overreacted and made it worse.

And this concludes today's jackassapalooza.

Jackass Part I

(AP) STOCKHOLM - A drunk, middle-aged man falls off a subway platform and is knocked unconscious as his head hits the tracks.

A bystander who witnessed the accident jumps down after him — but not for a daring rescue before the train arrives.

Instead, the witness steals the man's valuables, climbs back on the platform and leaves his victim to be hit by a train.

"To me it's incredible that one could steal or rob from somebody who is lying in such a place where you know that, if I don't do something, then this person will, in a worst-case scenario, get killed by the train that is coming. Because the train is going to come," police inspector Dan Ostman told TV4.

He calmly walked out of the subway station, waving to the ticket vendor, as a train ran over the victim on the tracks below. 

That man will never be the same.  He survived, but lost part of his foot.   I award this man Jackass of the Day, but be ready for the 2:30 post.  He has competition.

If your rage-o-meter hasn't buried itself in the red, I recommend checking out the full article.  This covers the highlights, such as they are.

The Mask Slips Again...

...and Republicans accidentally tell the truth.  This time it's House majority leader Eric Cantor on the GOP's orchestrated campaign to destroy the economy through obstruction of government remedies and blame President Obama:

It’s an article of faith amongst Republicans that government can’t create jobs, and that cutting government spending will lead to job growth. Republicans even pushed the nation to the brink of a debt default in order to secure cuts in federal spending in 2010.

But with the consequences of that debt ceiling deal due to hit in January — at which point the so-called “sequester” will cut into both military and non-defense discretionary spending — House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) is seemingly having a change of heart. On Thursday he tweeted that the sequester would hurt federal spending in key areas, and thus kill jobs:


 

Well gosh, Eric.  You mean government spending cuts destroy jobs?  But what happened to "government spending cuts free up capital for jobs to be created in the private sector?"

Not if those cuts are at the Pentagon, apparently.  So government spending cuts are bad for jobs?  Who knew?

Eric Cantor does, apparently.

StupidiNews, Weekend Edition!

Two Marines were killed in a "sustained attack" on a joint US/UK base in Helmund Province, Afghanistan as the newly deployed Prince Harry was the possible target.
President Obama, Vice-President Biden and Secretary Clinton were on hand as the four Americans killed in Libya on Tuesday were flown home to Joint Base Andrews.
New attacks on US embassies in Tunisia and Sudan rattled already high tensions at American diplomatic compounds across the globe on Friday.
The Dow hit its highest level since before the 2008 recession began as markets rallied further on the Fed's newest qualitative easing program.
Intel is working on its latest series of processors, the Rosepoint chips will have two Atom processors and a WiFi radio built in.

Last Call

Well, that was fast.

Seems our racist Birther asshole friend from Kansas didn't even last 24 hours in the spotlight before he decided he was the victim and that black people are sooooooo mean and why can't you let him be a racist and kick President Obama off the ballot in Kansas in peace, you guys.   Sheesh.

A Kansas man dropped his complaint on Friday that could have led to President Barack Obama being removed from the November ballot there.

Joe Montgomery of Manhattan, Kan., wrote in an email to state officials that he no longer wanted them to investigate whether Obama was really a natural-born U.S. citizen or eligible to run for reelection. The email said that he, along with his friends and colleagues, faced a significant backlash after a state elections board took up his case and agreed to look into whether the president’s birth certificate was real.

“There has been a great deal of animosity and intimidation directed not only at me, but at people around me, who are both personal and professional associations,” Montgomery wrote in an email to the office of Secretary of State Kris Kobach, which released it to TPM. “I’m don’t wish to burden anyone with more of this negative reaction, so please immediatley [sic] withdraw any action on this objection.”

Yeah, I'm so very sorry for the guy who is now blaming all the people who called him out for being a racist douchebag, when he was being a racist douchebag.  Jamelle Bouie sums it up nicely:

The real question isn’t whether race affects our political disputes, it’s how. This isn’t an easy question. Yes, there are clear racial implications to things like Mitt Romney’s false charge that Obama is “ending the work requirement” in welfare and simply cutting checks to recipients. But, when it comes to the role race plays in voting—did Obama lose votes because he’s black—it’s a little complicated.

In any case, if you’re trying to answer the question of race and opposition to Obama, here’s something to remember: we’re only 47 years removed from the official end of Jim Crow. White supremacy was the governing idoelogy for the vast majority of this country’s history, and—in the broad scheme of things—we’re still in the first legs of our journey toward racial equality.

But hey, Mitt Romney gets asked about his birth certificate all the time and Democratic Secretaries of State of the various blue states threaten to remove him from the ballot constantly, right?

School Of Life

Gawker's John Cook analyzes the Chicago Teachers Union strike and Rahm Emanuel's ongoing disaster as Mayor and has an interesting solution to the public education problem in America:  get rid of private schools and level the playing field for all kids.

This would of course be a radical and highly disruptive step. It would involve forcibly transferring ownership of all existing private schools to the school district in which they reside, and readjusting local tax schemes to capture the tuition parents currently pay (the nationwide average is $8,549 per year, which means a total of $47 billion is spent each year on opting out of the public education system). Then access to the newly "nationalized" schools would have to be distributed on some fair basis to local students, with the wealthy kids who don't make the cut into their old schools being sent to the regular ones, without air conditioning or libraries. And resources would have to be redistributed within the school districts so that the resources formerly lavished on private schools could be spent shoring up the failing public ones.

This is not an original idea. Billionaire wise hobbit Warren Buffet once told school reformer Michelle Rhee that the easiest way to fix schools was to "make private schools illegal and assign every child to a public school by random lottery." In England, the notion of banning private education—while highly unlikely—has long been a part of the political debate entertained by major-party candidates.

And while it would have the practical effect of forcing school boards and municipalities to be accountable to their privileged elite as well as their poor families, there's also a moral argument for banning private education. Put simply: Equality of opportunity demands that children should not be penalized—or advantaged—by the accident of their birth. Educational benefits, which are the most crucial resource when it comes to determining the life-outcomes for children of all backgrounds, shouldn't be distributed based on how rich your parents are. They should be distributed equally. Even if we stipulate that radical inequality is OK for adults—once you are out in the world, you rise or fall by the work of your own hands—when it comes to children, it's perverse to dole out educations based on arbitrary circumstances completely beyond their control.

In other words, if Mitt Romney's sons and Barack Obama's daughters had to attend public schools, I'm betting public schools would be remarkably better than they are.  Instead, America seems increasingly going the opposite direction:  privatization (and profitization) of public education.  We're already seeing the disastrous results of that in Florida and Louisiana.  When the point of public school become making a profit and not teaching kids, everybody loses in the end.

But of course, Cook's solution will never happen.  The rich will continue to stay rich through domination of national resources, and that includes education.  He who has the gold, makes the rules.  We've been Darwining off the lower class in this country for decades.  now with globalization, we're Darwining off the middle-class too.

The Full Bernanke

Helicopter Ben just pushed the Big Candy-like Red Button, kids.

The Federal Reserve launched another aggressive stimulus program on Thursday, saying it will buy $40 billion of mortgage debt per month and continue to purchase assets until the outlook for jobs improves substantially. 

In a significant shift in the direction of U.S. monetary policy, the Fed has tied its unconventional bond buying directly to economic conditions, a move that is likely to be controversial among central bank critics.

“If the outlook for the labor market does not improve substantially, the committee will continue its purchase of agency mortgage-backed securities, undertake additional asset purchases, and employ its other policy tools as appropriate until such improvement is achieved in a context of price stability,” the Fed said in a statement.

In an additional step that reflects just how concerned Fed officials have become about the health of the economy, policymakers said they would not likely raise rates from current rock-bottom lows until at least mid-2015. Previously, it had set such guidance at late 2014.

Not only is it QE3, but it’s got no set expiration date, apparently.  You know, exactly the kind of sustained growth program that everyone’s been screaming for now for a couple of years.  That sound you hear is Austrian-school economists exploding like microwaved giant jawbreakers, not to mention the sound of Mitt Romney’s campaign guys going “Umm…we argued that something had to be done, but we refused to provide specifics…now what?”

I gotta fiver says House Republicans will try to impeach somebody before the week’s out.

Congressional Republicans, wary of the Fed’s recent efforts to stimulate the recovery, said Wednesday that the its political independence could be jeopardized if officials embark on another round of stimulus so close to Election Day.

“It really is interesting that it is happening right now before an election,” said Rep. Raul Labrador (R-Idaho). “It is going to sow some growth in the economy, and the Obama administration is going to claim credit.”

“I am shocked, just shocked, that politics are going on in this city!” Rep. Tom McClintock (R-Calif.) said sarcastically.

Yeah, let's think about that.  For helping the economy and following its dual mandate of lowering  inflation and lowering unemployment,  the Fed must be punished.  The American people are being helped economically by the federal government, a crime that probably merits Bernanke's public flogging, right?

Expect to hear more of this utter nonsense from batshit crazy Republicans in the days ahead.

Show Me Screwed

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. (AP) -- Missouri senators have voted to override Gov. Jay Nixon's veto of a bill expanding religious exceptions for insurance coverage of birth control.

The vote Wednesday sends the bill to the House, where a two-thirds vote also is needed for an override.

The legislation lets individuals, employers and insurers cite religious or moral exemptions from mandatory insurance coverage for abortion, contraception and sterilization.  It's intended as a rebuff of an Obama administration policy that requires insurers to cover birth control at no additional cost to women, including those employed by religious nonprofits such as hospitals, colleges or charities.

Jay Nixon vetoes the bill, which is a miracle in and of itself.  Now we find ourselves facing the same battle again.  And again.  And again.

Birth control is a medical need, and our employers should have no say whatsoever in how we use our insurance coverage.  This is ridiculous!  Every business who uses this to deny fair coverage to women employees should be ashamed.  And if I get half a chance I'll lead the shaming.