All Purpose News and Politics Thread Part IV: The Center Cannot Hold

[Tami]

Column: Should 11-year-old girls have to bear their rapists' babies? Ohio says yes.

An 11-year-old rape victim in northwestern Ohio is pregnant, according to news reports, and a highly restrictive state law on abortion signed last month says a girl in her position must carry and deliver her rapist’s baby.

In arguing the abortion issue I used to test the zealotry of my anti-choice opponents with a hypothetical question with similar facts, and was often told such a situation was too far-fetched to be probative. But now the hypothetical is real.

A barely pubescent girl has been impregnated, allegedly, by a 26-year-old man who had sex with her on multiple occasions, and the pure anti-abortion position is that the law should prevent her from terminating her pregnancy unless it’s to save her life or spare her grave bodily harm.

Ohio’s Human Rights Protection Act, signed April 11 by Republican Gov. Mike DeWine, is one of those “heartbeat” laws that ban abortion as soon as doctors can detect fetal cardiac activity, which starts at about six weeks of gestation, even before some women know they’re pregnant.

[Tendrin]

She Stopped to Help Migrants on a Texas Highway. Moments Later, She Was Arrested.

"Cruelty is the point"

[SquirrelMan]

Can you imagine Fox News' reaction if Obama had ignored Mothers Day?

[WestPhillyPunisher]

Column: Should 11-year-old girls have to bear their rapists' babies? Ohio says yes.

Love the fetus, don't give a **** about the child. Plain and simple.

====================

Trump Seeks New $15 Billion Subsidy To Protect Farmers From His Own Trade War

The president falsely claims that tariffs are paid “directly” to the U.S. Treasury by China and indicates these nonexistent Chinese funds will cover the subsidy cost. But, hey! Trade wars are easy to win! Dollar Don said so himself! Meanwhile, here's some truth all up in your grill....

**********

Larry Kudlow Admits U.S. Will Pay Tariffs On Chinese Goods, Contradicting Trump

Last week, the president falsely claimed that China was paying tariffs directly to the U.S. Treasury Department. Over/under on when Kudlow is fired/resigned for daring to contradict the Orange Menace? I say four days.

**********

Pregnant Women Are Still Struggling To Keep Their Jobs

The United States has a long way to go when it comes to truly celebrating mothers. Women take a pay hit simply for having children — a 4 percent reduction in pay per child, according to one 2014 study. Mothers aren’t guaranteed paid time off to recover from childbirth or bond with a new baby. As a result, one-quarter of women go back to work within two weeks of giving birth.

Pregnant women, especially those in physically demanding jobs, have a hard time even just doing their work. Often, if they can’t get those extra breaks or a schedule that provides time off for doctor visits or severe morning sickness, they wind up leaving the workplace ― some are fired, some quit, and others are forced out on unpaid leave.

Just this week, CNET reported on seven Amazon warehouse workers who say they were fired after asking for things like more bathroom breaks and less time on their feet. Amazon has consistently denied the allegations.

Forty percent of mothers today are their family’s sole or primary breadwinner, and families depend on their income. Getting fired when pregnant puts these women in a particularly precarious position.

**********

Texas Is Talking Tough About Election Fraud, But Here’s What It Really Looks Like

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has been making a big deal about election fraud cases, but his office hasn’t been able to show much. Gee whiz! What a surprise! NOT!

**********

George Conway Rips Trump’s ‘Malignant’ Self-Interest That Should Cost Him His Job

Instead of considering the “best interests of the nation ... you viewed” the Mueller probe “purely in terms of your own ego,” Conway tweeted. Hmm! I wonder how his wife, Kellyanne of Green Goebbels will spin that in Trump's favor?

[worstblogever]

Can you imagine Fox News' reaction if Obama had ignored Mothers Day?

Can you imagine their reaction if they knew he cheated on Michelle with a porn star while she was pregnant with one of their kids?

[worstblogever]

It was on this day in 2015 that “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day” profiled Nan Hayworth, the former U.S. House Representative who served New York’s 19th District for one term from 2011-2013. During her Tea Party campaign, she was noted for stammering and getting nervous and stammering whenever asked complicated policy questions about Social Security, and once in her 2012 campaign, fled from a constituent who asked if she supported minimum wage increases, only answering that she would make sure we “grow the economy”. While in office, she voted against all women’s issues, including supporting the Hyde Amendment, voting to cut funding to Planned Parenthood, but during her 2012 campaign, she tried claiming she “voted with Obama”, which was patently false. Hayworth was also frequently plagued by her tendency to hire idiots in key campaign staff positions, including their eventual admission that they broke election laws to gain enough signatures to put her on the 2010 ballot in the first place. She also had her 2012 re-election campaign spokesman talk about committing acid attacks against female Democratic Senators (right out of the Taliban playbook), and for whatever reason, Hayworth and her campaign tried defending his remarks for a time. She also had the revelation that her campaign manager, Karl Brabenec make the news for being revealed to have hosted a Young Republicans event in 2003 where he promised attendees “liquor and sex to go around all evening”, and that female attendees should “wear as little clothing as possible”. At least Hayworth didn’t defend that. After losing in both 2012 and 2014 to Patrick Maloney, Hayworth has apparently given up on running for office, and only cameos on Fox News every now and again these days.

It was on this date in 2016 that “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day” profiled Drew Turiano, a Tea Party Republican from Montana who was a 2014 candidate for Congress to represent the state’s “At Large” District, and in 2012, thought about running for governor, but instead, chose to be a candidate for Montana Secretary of State. He didn’t fare well in that race, finishing fourth with 6.7% of the vote. Now, in that first election, what slipped by most of the media was the fact that Turiano had sent out mailers regarding immigration where he claimed that not just undocumented immigrants were “rapists, murders, and thieves”, but he didn’t seem to make the distinction and thought that legal immigrants were part of the problem, too, and called for an end to ALL immigration. As Turiano was prepping for his Congressional run in 2013, he gave a delightful interview with a local TV station, and gave some interesting opinions regarding immigration policy. Like say, to bring back “Operation Wetback”. It would be four months until anyone in the Montana Republican Party or Montana Tea Party batted an eye, and they actually let him file as a candidate again, as he went around the state campaigning on what they eventually even deemed as “racist views”. In February 2014, even prior to registering as a candidate, Turiano posted on his campaign website that he supported states’ rights to nullify or reject any federal law or judicial mandate, citing Roe v. Wade and Obamacare as prime examples, and his belief that President Barack Obama should be impeached. Which, even without the support of the Montana GOP, he went ahead and spent money to rent six billboards to call for Obama’s impeachment. Drew Turiano ended up finishing a distant fifth in the GOP Primary, getting but 1.7% of the voter. The Montana GOP have abandoned him as a candidate for his overt racism, which by today’s Republican standards, is ironic, considering Donald Trump has almost the same ideas on immigration as Turiano. We cannot say with certainty where his eyebrows are, but we hope he finds them



It was on this date in 2017, as well as 2018, that “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day” had its original profile to discuss Tommy Benton, a member of the Georgia House of Representatives who has held office since 2004, and has not faced a Democratic challenger for his seat since 2006. There was some doubt if he was going to be re-elected to a seventh term in 2016, though, after the uproar he caused (more on that in a second), but he lucked out the same way most state legislators do when nobody failed to register to run against him before the deadline to enter the race, and he was allowed to run unopposed. Which is a real shame, considering that only a few weeks before the deadline for other candidates to register to challenge him, he decided, during an interview with the Atlanta Journal Constitution to discuss his support of Confederate landmarks, whose removal he considered “cultural terrorism” that the topic turned to the Confederate monument at Stone Mountain, Georgia, where the Ku Klux Klan was reborn in 1915. At that point, Benton decided to pontificate on the positive things that the Ku Klux Klan did for this country:

”The Klan was not so much a racist thing but a vigilante thing to keep law and order. It made a lot of people straighten up. I’m not saying what they did was right. It’s just the way things were.”

Benton was just warming up, as he continued on, comparing a Democratic colleague, Vincent Fort, who sponsored a bill to remove Confederate monuments to ISIS:

“That’s no better than what ISIS is doing, destroying museums and monuments,” he said. “I feel very strongly about this. I think it has gone far enough. There is some idea out there that certain parts of history out there don’t matter anymore and that’s a bunch of bunk.”

This came, of course, on the heels of Benton having sponsored his own opposing bill to preserve Confederate monuments, as well as one to celebrate General Robert E. Lee’s birthday, as well as Confederate Memorial Day. Oh, and he sponsored a third bill that would revert street names that honored Confederate war heroes back to their original names, which would turn Atlanta’s Martin Luther King Blvd. back into Gordon Road, named after former Confederate officer John B. Gordon, an early leader of the Ku Klux Klan. (Benton certainly is “all in” on a failed rebellion over slavery from a century and a half ago, that’s for sure.)

Over Benton’s career, there are more than a few conservative votes, and a few that would seem to fit into the mindset of a guy who likes to look on the bright side of the KKK, what with his support for stricter Voter ID laws that disproportionately suppress the votes of minorities, the time he sponsored multiple unconstitutional bills to make English the official language of the state of Georgia, as well as his support of Georgia’s disastrous anti-immigrant bill, HB 87, which ended up decimating the population of immigrant farmers in the state enough that crops were left to rot in the fields, unpicked, to the cost of $140 million in lost revenue for the industry. He also voted for a monument of the Ten Commandments to be built at the state capitol building (which have been overturned as violations of the First Amendment in previous rulings like in the Roy Moore case in Alabama), and the failed conservative policy to drug test welfare recipients.

Since we last profiled Tommy Benton, his deep affection for the Confederacy again reared its ugly head, this time when he sent out a campaign mailer that denied that the Civil War started over slavery. If Benton would pull his head out of his ***, he would know that five Confederate states, GEORGIA AMONG THEM, literally wrote letters to the Union stating, plainly, that they were fighting a war against the federal government because they refused to keep slaves. So… yeah, Benton is full of s***, and we’re glad that the Georgia GOP stripped him of all of his placements on Committees in the legislature for being a deranged bigot.

Tommy Benton was up for re-election in 2018, and the Georgia GOP seemed tired enough of his Neo-Confederate antics from the past few years that they found a challenger in the primary to take a crack at him. Alas, the effort failed by a large margin, and Benton was not only re-elected, but the Georgia GOP shrugged off his past offensive statements, and placed him back in a leadership role on the Retirement Committee in the George state legislature. Because of course supporting the Klan should only be a temporary setback in your political career, or so modern Republicans seem content to believe.

[Tendrin]

Hey, WBE! Is Ferb Shubert in the queue?

Rushing’s candidacy was followed in short order by nine other Republicans — including Fern Shubert, who compared homosexuality to pedophilia and Democrats to the Taliban, and Chris Anglin, a former Democrat who sued the state GOP for refusing to include him in party-sponsored events and forums.

[worstblogever]

Hey, WBE! Is Ferb Shubert in the queue?

She certainly is.

[Tami]

john-oliver-goes-off-on-georgia-anti-abortion-heartbeat-bill-it-puts-womens-health-and-lives-at-risk

[Tendrin]

She certainly is.

This is my shocked face.

:|

[WestPhillyPunisher]

john-oliver-goes-off-on-georgia-anti-abortion-heartbeat-bill-it-puts-womens-health-and-lives-at-risk

Hey! Gotta protect Baby Fetus and his/her lot so they emerge into the world and become kids whom this repressive government can keep poor, sick, malnourished and undereducated.

[Tendrin]

Hey! Gotta protect Baby Fetus and his/her lot so they emerge into the world and become kids whom this repressive government can keep poor, sick, malnourished and undereducated.

It's almost like some people want to create a permanent underclass.

Naaaaaaaaaaah. That couldn't be it.

[aja_christopher]

"China Retaliates Against the U.S. With Its Own Higher Tariffs"

"China moved to retaliate against the United States, announcing plans on Monday to raise tariffs on American goods ranging from beer and wine to swimsuits, shirts and liquefied natural gas. The decision, which follows President Trump’s increase in tariffs on Chinese goods last Friday, escalates the pressure in the ongoing trade war. Trade talks between the two sides broke down last week without a deal, causing tensions that have rippled through financial markets and the global economy. American stocks plunged on Monday, extending the recent losses.

Beijing’s retaliation comes at a time when many in China feel that the United States has behaved highhandedly in threatening tariffs. “Mutual trust and respect are of the essence in handling the negotiations,” said Zhu Ning, a Tsinghua University economics professor.

It isn’t clear whether China’s retaliation would end with the tariff increases. In the past, China has slowed imports at customs and launched investigations into foreign companies during times of tension.

Hu Xijin, editor of the Global Times, a tabloid owned by the Chinese Communist Party, tweeted on Monday evening that he was expecting broader retaliation, including halting purchases of American agricultural and energy products, reducing orders for Boeing aircraft and possibly even the sale of part of China’s large holdings of Treasuries."

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/13/b...ade-china.html

[WestPhillyPunisher]

It's almost like some people want to create a permanent underclass.

Naaaaaaaaaaah. That couldn't be it.

Let's not forget perpetual cannon fodder when those kids grow up for the military to use and ultimately abuse for said repressive government's endless wars in the Middle East.

[Malvolio]

Let's not forget perpetual cannon fodder when those kids grow up for the military to use and ultimately abuse for said repressive government's endless wars in the Middle East.

QFT. As George Carlin said, "They want live babies so they can grow up to be dead soldiers."