“According to the Republican Party Platform and the man who wants to be one heartbeat away from the presidency, if a woman wants to have a baby via in vitro fertilization, she cannot.  Rape?  She has to.”  -Jon Stewart

If we start forcing women to have babies when they have been raped, it will cause such social chaos - and these men who would seek to be in charge of our White House, our Supreme Court, and our United States Senate, are a danger to the health of women. Rape causes post traumatic stress disorder, suicide attempts, visceral reactions. I can tell you as a rape survivor, every time one of these buffoons opens their mouth, Chris, I really recoil, physically recoil, with how disgusting this is, and it brings up terrible memories.

U.S. Congresswoman Gwen Moore, on Hardball, discussing Indiana Senate candidate Richard Mourdock’s statement that pregnancy from rape is “something God intended to happen.”

She was on fire today.

(Source: mamaatheist)

Doonesbury

[T]his promise of free voter ID is a mirage. In the real world, poor voters find shuttered offices, long drives without cars, and with spotty or no bus service, and sometimes prohibitive costs. For these Americans, the promise of our democracy is tangibly distant. It can be measured in miles.

Midwest states where Obama faces new challenges.

Gov. Scott Walker’s proposal to privatize work determining who is eligible for food assistance in the state would violate federal law and could expose the state to a loss of more than $20 million in federal money, federal officials say.

By the way, Dennis Smith, the man Walker appointed to head the Department of Health Services, wrote all of this for the Heritage Foundation.

The exhibit, Will Steacy, 48 Hours examines the struggling middle class through a portrait of the economic challenges confronting two cities. Steacy says, “I spent 24 hours in Madison, Wisconsin, photographing the events unfolding in and around the capitol building before Governor Scott Walker signed his anti-union, anti-collective bargaining bill. I spent the following 24 hours in Gary, Indiana, home of the first US Steel plant, whose rise and fall has become the face of the deindustrialization of America. I photographed city institutions and local businesses that line Broadway, Gary’s main artery, looking at the grim realities that face this once vibrant city, and at what results when we abandon our workers and let the middle class fall.”

And then, guess what? Yesterday afternoon, none other than Eugene Victor Debs, organizer and leader of the first successful strike against a major American industry, the railroads, was waiting for me at the far end of the blue tunnel.

We hadn’t met before. This great American died in 1926 at the age of 71, when I was only four years old. I thanked him for words of his, which I quote again and again in lectures. “As long as there is a lower class, I am in it. As long as there is a criminal element, I am of it. As long as there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”

He asked me how those words were received here on Earth in America nowadays. I said they were ridiculed. People snicker and snort, I said. He asked what our fastest-growing industry was. The building of prisons, I said. What a shame, he said.

-Kurt Vonnegut.  America lost a great one 4 years ago today.

linked above. Notably, this is the second prosecutor from Indiana to lose his job recently for advocating violence in Wisconsin.  Creepy.

Story here. 

This is how quickly people can be stripped of their rights when elected officials abuse power.  If it happened in Wisconsin, it could happen anywhere.

motherjones:

Yep, it’s in the fine print: Scott Walker can declare a “state of emergency” and fire teachers, firefighters, and janitors if they so much as stage a sick-out. Democracy in action!

The Wisconsin Governor’s desire to be at the forefront of his perceived GOP revolution may not only have doomed the anti-union effort, but it may forever label him has the man who gave the Democrats the gift that keeps on giving: the return of the union rank and file into the arms of the Democratic Party.

One of the saddest things I’ve read in The New York Times recently was a comment by Richard Freeman, a Harvard economist, who said that he views the current hostility toward unions by members of the general public as a sign of the erosion of the aspirational nature that has for so long characterized Americans. “It shows a hopelessness,” he said. “It used to be, ‘You have something I don’t have; I’ll go to my employer to get it, too. Now I don’t see any chance of getting it. I don’t want to be the lowest one on the totem pole, so I don’t want you to have it either.’

Check them out here. 

This Wisconsinite is profoundly grateful for the show of support.  Thank you.  So much.