Female Voters Give Obama Edge on Contraception, Abortion

On social issues and certainly issues surrounding women's rights There is no way around the conclusion that the GOP has allowed the most extreme elements of the Christofascist party base to become the architects for the current party platform.  I mean really, Tony Perkins as a main author of the GOP policies on "marriage."  Why not appoint a Grand Inquisitor of old?  Fortunately, many women are not as stupid and easily misled as Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan - and in Virginia, George Allen - thought would be the case.  An article in The Hill looks at how the GOP prostitution of itself to religious extremists is biting the party in the ass when it comes to women voters.  Here are some article highlights:

President Obama's contraception mandate is helping him enormously with female voters, a new USA Today/Gallup poll says.

Obama has found two winning issues in birth control and abortion.  Romney and Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) have attacked the administration's contraception mandate as an assault on religious liberty. But the USA Today poll indicates that emphasizing the policy could help Obama more than Romney.

A greater emphasis on abortion rights could also help bolster Obama's standing with female voters, according to the USA Today poll. Nearly 40 percent of women cited abortion as the most important election issue for women. And respondents who cited abortion preferred Obama by a 3-1 margin.

"That could signal an opening for Obama among women in the second debate and the final 21 days of the campaign," USA Today said in its write-up of the poll results.

The administration's contraception mandate could also help Obama with women.  Thirty-one percent of female voters said birth control policy will be "extremely important" in influencing their vote. And Obama holds a 21-point advantage over Romney — 56 to 35 percent — on the issue.

The Moral Bankruptcy of the Knights of Columbus

As many readers know, I was raised Roman Catholic and was an altar boy for a 10 years and went on to join the Knights of Columbus achieving the 4th Degree eventually.  But I ended up leaving both the Knights and the Catholic Church when it became sickeningly obvious that both the Church hierarchy and the leadership of the Knights of Columbus suffered from shocking moral bankruptcy after the sex abuse scandal exploded in the Archdiocese of Boston over a decade ago.  As we all now know, the Church hierarchy from the Pope on down engaged in what can only be described as a global criminal conspiracy to enable, aid, abet and protect sexual predator priest who have left a trail of victims worldwide numbering in the hundreds of thousands.  As for the Knights of Columbus, not a peep has been said against the Church leadership from an organization founded to aid and protect widows and children.  Instead, the Knights have slavishly groveled and brown noised to the Church hierarchy (former Bishop Timothy Daly who was documented to have threatened and intimidated victims and their families under Cardinal Law remained the Supreme Chaplain for the Knights until his retirement despite his known wrong doing against victims of child rapists).  With its wealth and unrivaled power in the Catholic Church, the Knights could have been a force for reform and a house cleaning of those who enabled and protected sexual predators.  Instead, the Knights have aligned themselves with those who ought to be behind bars (including Benedict XVI) and have become the Church's principal fundraiser for the Church's anti-gay jihad against normal, well adjusted gays who merely want full CIVIL legal rights. The Minneapolis Star Tribune looks at the sick upside down values of the Knights in the war against LGBT citizens.  Here are highlights:

In Minnesota, the Knights of Columbus are best known for hosting charitable free-throw contests, collecting pennies to support seminarians and conducting Tootsie Roll drives to aid people with disabilities.

Less well known is that members of the nation's largest Catholic fraternal organization are quietly positioning themselves to be a powerful and potentially decisive force in passing the marriage amendment, which would amend the state Constitution to define marriage as between one man and one woman.

The state branch of the Knights has spent months raising money, staffing phone banks and leading seminars urging people to vote for the measure. The Minnesota Knights of Columbus are following a battle-tested formula used in several other states that passed marriage amendments. The local chapters quietly provide fundraising and crucial organizational infrastructure while the national organization pumps millions of dollars into major groups masterminding the effort to block laws around the country allowing same-sex marriage.

In the last four years, the group has given at least $3.6 million to groups leading marriage fights across the country. Now the group is trying to make its mark in Minnesota, and has directly given more than $130,000 to the fight.

The Minnesota chapters so far have given at least $31,000 to pro-amendment groups. The national headquarters has given another $100,000. But the group's 43,500 Minnesota members could prove far more valuable. In a race shaping up to be decided by a razor-thin margin, a committed bloc of thousands of energized, like-minded voters could make all the difference.

Several longtime Catholics who oppose the marriage amendment said they were surprised and troubled by the Knights' involvement in the marriage issue. They said they only knew the group for its charity work, locally and abroad.

Now they are crushed to learn the group is at the forefront of the anti-gay marriage effort and that some of their contributions might have gone to the cause.

"I don't think it is at all clear to the congregations," said Greg Seivert, a lifelong Catholic from Mendota Heights. When he was growing up, Seivert said, the Knights "were a charitable group that did the work of charity and mercy. This strikes me as a very different role. I would be very leery of contributing in any sort of way with their involvement in this political brouhaha."

The bulk of the national group's significant financial firepower comes not from its 1.8 million members, but from its lucrative and highly rated life-insurance business, Knights of Columbus Insurance.

Sharon Groves, director of the Human Rights Campaign's religious and faith program, said the group's secrecy is most troubling. The myriad entities shuffling money around to marriage-related groups makes tracking the group's contributions nearly impossible, she said.

"The Knights are really an organization pulling the wool over the eyes of many Catholics," Groves said. "They do a lot of important work, but people are being sold a bill of goods, thinking that all this work is helping the needy when really it is going toward some pretty sinister stuff."

The next time you see a Knights of Columbus fundraiser, walk on by and give your hard earned money to an organization that protects children rather than the monsters who have allowed so many young lives to be damaged or ruin - or ended by suicide.

Day One at Sea

View of Norfolk from the Cruise Terminal

So far the cruise has been pleasant and the boyfriend and I are enjoying ourselves.  The satellite Internet, however, sucks majorly and doing some necessary law firm work was down right painful and maddening.  Blogging hasn't been much easier since the Internet speed is akin to old fashion dial up service.  Tomorrow we arrive in Nassau and hopefully service will be better!   Thanks for stopping by the blog.

Monday Male Beauty

Mitt Romney: Master Speculator But No Businessman

Much of Mitt Romney's sales pitch has been that he's an experienced businessman who knows how to create jobs. It's a line of bullshit if there ever was one because in truth Romney was a vulture capitalist or, as David Stockman - yes, Ronald Reagan's David Stockman who was budget director - argues in The Daily Beast a master speculator. Neither one adds up to the skilled businessman Romney seeks him self to be.  But then, who ever accused Romney of being anything but a liar.  Here are excerpts from Stockman's lengthy and detailed must read piece:

Bain Capital is a product of the Great Deformation. It has garnered fabulous winnings through leveraged speculation in financial markets that have been perverted and deformed by decades of money printing and Wall Street coddling by the Fed. So Bain’s billions of profits were not rewards for capitalist creation; they were mainly windfalls collected from gambling in markets that were rigged to rise.

Nevertheless, Mitt Romney claims that his essential qualification to be president is grounded in his 15 years as head of Bain Capital, from 1984 through early 1999. According to the campaign’s narrative, it was then that he became immersed in the toils of business enterprise, learning along the way the true secrets of how to grow the economy and create jobs.

Except Mitt Romney was not a businessman; he was a master financial speculator who bought, sold, flipped, and stripped businesses. He did not build enterprises the old-fashioned way—out of inspiration, perspiration, and a long slog in the free market fostering a new product, service, or process of production. Instead, he spent his 15 years raising debt in prodigious amounts on Wall Street so that Bain could purchase the pots and pans and castoffs of corporate America, leverage them to the hilt, gussy them up as reborn “roll-ups,” and then deliver them back to Wall Street for resale—the faster the better.

That is the modus operandi of the leveraged-buyout business, and in an honest free-market economy, there wouldn’t be much scope for it because it creates little of economic value. But we have a rigged system—a regime of crony capitalism—where the tax code heavily favors debt and capital gains, and the central bank purposefully enables rampant speculation by propping up the price of financial assets and battering down the cost of leveraged finance.   The vast outpouring of LBOs in recent decades has been the consequence of bad policy, not the product of capitalist enterprise.

In truth, LBOs are capitalism’s natural undertakers—vulture investors who feed on failing businesses. Due to bad policy, however, they have now become monsters of the financial midway that strip-mine cash from healthy businesses and recycle it mostly to the top 1 percent.  .  .  .  . The credentials that Romney proffers as evidence of his business acumen, in fact, mainly show that he hung around the basket during the greatest bull market in recorded history.

Romney’s record at Bain is so completely perverse. The record is actually all about the utter unfairness of windfall riches obtained under our anti-free market regime of bubble finance. 

The startling fact is that four of the 10 Bain Capital home runs ended up in bankruptcy, and for an obvious reason: Bain got its money out at the top of the Greenspan boom in the late 1990s and then these companies hit the wall during the 2000-02 downturn, weighed down by the massive load of debt Bain had bequeathed them. In fact, nearly $600 million, or one third of the profits earned by the home-run companies, had been extracted from the hide of these four eventual debt zombies.

Bain’s acclaimed success with another retailer—Staples—is also not what it is touted to be.   . . . . . this honest capitalist efficiency, which benefited millions of customers, was achieved by a rampage of job destruction among tens of thousands of Main Street stationery and office-supplies stores and other traditional distributors.

The larger point is that Romney’s personal experience in the nation’s financial casinos is no mark against his character or competence. I’ve made money and lost it and know what it is like to be judged. But that experience doesn’t translate into answers on the great public issues before the nation, either. The Romney campaign’s feckless narrative that private equity generates real economic efficiency and societal wealth is dead wrong.

Sunday Morning Male Beauty

Why Romney's Lying About the Availability of Health Care

I often disagree with much of what Nicholas Kristof writes, but in today's New York Times he hits a home run as he looks at the continuing tragedy of those who find themselves without health care insurance either through no fault of their own or through carelessness and/or a false sense of immortality.  Mitt Romney has pledged to undo the Affordale Health Care Act ("AHA") - derisively called "Obamacare" by the far right and Republicans - which among other things seeks to increase the number of Americans.  In Romney's mind, just as 47% of Americans are moochers and parasites, so too are millions of Americans disposable.  Simply unworthy or unimportant trash to be discarded.  Kristof begins his column by looking at the unfortunate situation of a friend and then looks at what Romney and the GOP would do to millions of citizens.  Here are column excerpts:

Yet for all his innate prudence, Scott now, at age 52, is suffering from Stage 4 prostate cancer, in part because he didn’t have health insurance. President Obama’s health care reform came just a bit too late to help Scott, but it will protect others like him — unless Mitt Romney repeals it. 

If you favor gutting “Obamacare,” please listen to Scott’s story. He is willing to recount his embarrassing tale in part so that readers can learn from it.   I’ll let Scott take over the narrative:

•

It all started in December 2003 when I quit my job as a pension consultant in a fit of midlife crisis. For the next year I did little besides read books I’d always wanted to read and play poker in the local card rooms.

I didn’t buy health insurance because I knew it would be really expensive in the individual policy market, because many of the people in this market are high risk. I would have bought insurance if there had been any kind of fair-risk pooling. In 2005 I started working seasonally for H&R Block doing tax returns.

As seasonal work it of course doesn’t provide health benefits, but then lots of full-time jobs don’t either. I knew I was taking a big risk without insurance, but I was foolish.

In 2011 I began having greater difficulty peeing. I didn’t go see the doctor because that would have been several hundred dollars out of pocket — just enough disincentive to get me to make a bad decision.

A normal P.S.A. test for prostate cancer is below 4, and mine was 1,100. They also did a CT scan, which turned up possible signs of cancerous bone lesions. Prostate cancer likes to spread to bones.

Let’s just stipulate up front that Scott blew it. Other people are sometimes too poor to buy health insurance or unschooled about the risks. Scott had no excuse. He could have afforded insurance 

He’s the first to admit that he screwed up catastrophically and may die as a result. .  .  .  .  Yet remember also that while Scott was foolish, mostly he was unlucky. He is a bachelor, so he didn’t have a spouse whose insurance he could fall back on in his midlife crisis. In any case, we all take risks, and usually we get away with them. Scott is a usually prudent guy who took a chance, and then everything went wrong. 

The Mitt Romney philosophy, as I understand it, is that this is a tragic but necessary byproduct of requiring Americans to take personal responsibility for their lives. They need to understand that mistakes have consequences. That’s why Romney would repeal Obamacare and leave people like Scott to pay the price for their irresponsibility. 

To me, that seems ineffably harsh. We all make mistakes, and a humane government tries to compensate for our misjudgments. That’s why highways have guardrails, why drivers must wear seat belts, why police officers pull over speeders, why we have fire codes. In other modern countries, Scott would have been insured, and his cancer would have been much more likely to be detected in time for effective treatment. Is that a nanny state? No, it’s a civilized one. 

President Obama’s care plan addresses this problem inelegantly, by forcing people like Scott to buy insurance beginning in 2014. Some will grumble about the “mandate” and the insurance cost, but it will save lives. 

Already, Obamacare is slowly reducing the number of people without health insurance, as young adults can now stay on their parents’ plans. But the Census Bureau reported last month that 48.6 million Americans are still uninsured — a travesty in a wealthy country. The Urban Institute calculated in 2008 that some 27,000 Americans between the ages of 25 and 65 die prematurely each year because they don’t have health insurance. Another estimate is even higher. 

You want to put a face on those numbers? Look at Scott’s picture. One American like him dies every 20 minutes for lack of health insurance.

Romney's statement that no one goes without health care is a lie.  And it costs lives literally daily.  It is a scandal that the USA does not provide health care coverage like every other modern industrialized nation.  It's an even bigger scandal that those seeking to repeal AHA  are the same ones who claim to be godly Christians even as they utterly ignore the Gospel message of Christ.  The hypocrisy of it all in mind numbing.

PPP Ohio poll: Obama 51, Romney 46

Many Democrats I know remain worried about what will happen on election day as candidly, so do.  But worrying and wringing ones hand's doesn't change anything.  What people need to do is stay involved, make the case to friends and family as to why they need to make sure they vote and why the greed, racism, religious extremism, and anti-gay bigotry that are the pillars of today's Republican Party do not serve the best interest of the nation or even most average Americans.  Fortunately, a poll out of Ohio may help buoy spirits and get folks off their butts and working hard in other states.  Here are excerpts from Politico on the poll results that  should encourage the faint of heart:

The full writeup hasn't posted yet on the Public Policy Polling website, but the Democratic firm previews the top lines from its latest Ohio survey on Twitter:

@ppppolls Barack Obama leads our new Ohio poll 51-46, not much different from 2 weeks ago when it was 49-45
@ppppolls 19% of Ohioans say they've already voted and Obama has a 76-24 advantage with them. Romney up 51-45 with folks who haven't voted yet
@ppppolls Ohio voters think Biden won the debate Thursday night 46-37, including 44-32 with independents

This is the third public poll -- following CNN and NBC/WSJ/Marist -- to show the president holding onto his lead in Ohio even as Mitt Romney's standing has improved nationally in the aftermath of the first debate.

If it's Really "About the Children," Conservative Must Support Gay Marriage

One of the things I find most disgusting and revolting about the anti-gay gay marriage forces is that they constantly whine and wail about children "needing a mother and father."   Never mind that for millions of children that scenario is never going to happen be it due to death of a parent, divorce - or having a same sex couple as one's parents.  If the Christianists actually gave a rat's ass about children - which they do not - then they would be lobbying hard for marriage equality and same sex couple adoption so that countless children would have increased financial security, better access to health care and increased stability in their lives.  Instead, these "Christians" do all in their power to make the lives of such children less secure and stable.  The hypocrisy is damning.  But then again, the word "hypocrisy" is in my view increasingly synonymous with the phrase "conservative Christian."  A piece in the Washington Post looks at the plight of children who are deprived stability and security because of their parents' inability to marry or, as is the case in Virginia, for same sex adoption by one's partner.  Here are highlights:

[W]hen they left a delivery room in Montgomery County last year, after Rice had given birth to twin boys, they quickly fell into the legal bog of every lesbian couple with a child in Maryland. Because Rice was the one to give birth, she was, in the eyes of the state at least, the twins’ mother. Dabney was a legal stranger, her name not on the children’s birth certificates.

In the 14 months since the twins were born, the legal limbo had hung over their lives. Dabney had quit her job as a home decorator to care for the boys. She was the one who built the pirate-themed nursery and painted a mural of sea creatures.

But the simple task of taking them to a doctor’s appointment meant she had to go armed with a permission slip from Rice. Before too long, it could mean not being able to pick them up from school if they were sick, or even to sign them up to play T-ball. At worst, if Rice were to die, it could mean a monstrous legal battle to keep Dabney and the boys together.

If Maryland becomes the first state to legalize same-sex marriage by a popular vote next month, the victory would be built in part on a campaign message pushed by Gov. Martin O’Malley. Vote for gay marriage, he often says, “for the kids.”

“We cannot rightly conclude that the children of some parents should have lesser protections under the law than children of other parents,” O’Malley (D) recently told a group of deep-pocketed donors in the District, imploring them to open their checkbooks to fund an ad campaign defending the state’s same-sex marriage law.

If Maryland voters affirm the law, lawyers say raising children will become easier for same-sex couples who marry.  Both of the women in a lesbian marriage would become presumed parents if one gives birth to a child. Same-sex couples would also have greater rights to act as legal guardians. And if gay couples break up, both may be able to retain legal rights to help raise a child. They would still need to adopt to ensure their parental rights when traveling to states where gay marriage isn’t recognized as legal.

The Cross in the Closet: How a Conservative Christian's Eyes Were Opened By Pretending to be Gay

You never really know what the lives of others are like until you walk in their shoes.  Or at least that was the premise of Timothy Kurek (pictured above center) who had graduated from Liberty University, in my opinion a Christianist blight on the Commonwealth of Virginia.  Kurek did something unthinkable for most Liberty graduates: for a year he pretended to be gay telling family, friends and others and getting to see society from the eyes of a gay man and getting a taste of the hate and vitriol that were face daily from "godly Christians."   In his book, "The Cross in the Closet," Kurek recounts his experience and had a conversion, if you will, and came to recognize the humanity of LGBT individuals - something lost on most of the Liberty University crowd, including Matt Staver and Matt Barber who pump out anti-gay lies virtually daily and make a strong case why one would not want to be a Christian.  Kurek says that the experience strengthen his faith even though it lost him many "friends" he had known during his days at Liberty University.  Here are excerpts from The Guardian that review Kurek's book and his experience:

Timothy Kurek grew up hating homosexuality. As a conservative Christian deep in America's Bible belt, he had been taught that being gay was an abomination before God. He went to his right-wing church, saw himself as a soldier for Christ and attended Liberty University, the "evangelical West Point".

But when a Christian friend in a karaoke bar told him how her family had kicked her out when she revealed she was a lesbian, Kurek began to question profoundly his beliefs and religious teaching. Amazingly, the 26-year-old decided to "walk in the shoes" of a gay man in America by pretending to be homosexual.

For an entire year Kurek lived "under cover" as a homosexual in his home town of Nashville. He told his family he was gay, as well as his friends and his church. Only two pals and an aunt – used to keep an eye on how his mother coped with the news – knew his secret. One friend, a gay man called Shawn – whom Kurek describes as a "big black burly teddy bear" – pretended to be his boyfriend. Kurek 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 result was a remarkable book called The Cross in the Closet, which follows on the tradition of other works such as Black Like Me, by a white man in the 1960s deep south passing as a black American, and 2006's Self-Made Man, by Norah Vincent, who details her time spent in disguise living as a man. "In order to walk in their shoes, I had to have the experience of being gay. I had to come out to my friends and family and the world as a gay man," he told the Observer.

Kurek's account of his year being gay is an emotional, honest and at times hilarious account of a journey that begins with him as a strait-laced yet questioning conservative, and ends up with him reaffirming his faith while also embracing the cause of gay equality.

Along the way he sheds many friends, especially from Liberty, who wrote emails to him after he came out asking that he repent of his sins and warning that he faced damnation. He does not regret their loss. "I now have lots of new gay friends," Kurek said.

However, there was a cost to the experiment. In order to gauge his mother's true reaction to the news that her son was gay, Kurek read her private journal. In it he found that she had written: "I'd rather have found out from a doctor that I had terminal cancer than I have a gay son." But Kurek's journey also became her own. Eventually she too was won over and changed her views. "My mom went from being a very conservative Christian to being an ally to the gay community. I am very proud of her," he said.

Kurek also experienced firsthand being called abusive names. Though he himself had once called gay protesters at Liberty "fags", he found himself on the other side of the fence of insults. During a softball practice session in Nashville, a man walking his dogs called Kurek and his team-mates "faggots".

Kurek also said that he felt his experience not only should show conservative Christians that gay people need equal rights and can be devout too, but that it can also reveal another side of evangelicals to the gay community.  "The vast majority of conservative Christians are not hateful bigots at all. It is just a vocal minority that gets noticed and attracts all the attention," he said.

I am sure that there are many decent conservative Christians.  However, as long as they remain timid and fail to loudly reclaim the Christian brand from hate merchants and professional Christians like those at FRC, AFA and other registered hate groups, they are little better than the "good Germans" who allowed Hitler to come to power and then silently allowed the Nazi atrocities to occur.   When you fail to act and stand up to hate and untruths, you become part of the problem.   Sadly, those who most need to learn the message of Kurek's book are those least likely to ever read it.  Indeed, I am certain many will condemn Kurek for his new found advocacy for LGBT equality.