A pregnant woman is just a “host” that should not have the right to end her pregnancy, Virginia State Sen. Steve Martin (R) wrote in a Facebook rant defending his anti-abortion views.
Martin, the former chairman of the Senate Education and Health Committee, wrote a lengthy post about his opinions on women’s bodies on his Facebook wall last week in response to a critical Valentine’s Day card he received from reproductive rights advocates.
“I don’t expect to be in the room or will I do anything to prevent you from obtaining a contraceptive,” Martin wrote. “However, once a child does exist in your womb, I’m not going to assume a right to kill it just because the child’s host (some refer to them as mothers) doesn’t want it.” Martin then changed his post on Monday afternoon to refer to the woman as the “bearer of the child” instead of the “host.”
Martin voted for Virginia’s mandatory ultrasound bill and supported a fetal personhood bill, which would ban all abortions and could affect the legality of some forms of contraception. The Virginia Pro-Choice Coalition had sent him a Valentine’s Day card asking him to protect women’s reproductive health options, “including preventing unwanted pregnancies, raising healthy children and choosing safe, legal abortion.”
Martin reacted strongly to their letter.
“If it’s your expectation that I should support such nonsense, I will be breaking your heart,” he wrote. “You can count on me to never get in the way of you ‘preventing an unintentional pregnancy.’ I’m not actually sure what that means, because if it’s ‘unintentional’ you must have been trying to prevent it.”
Fort Lee, N.J. Mayor Mark Sokolich met Friday with federal prosecutors who wanted to talk about the George Washington Bridge lane closures, Sokolich’s attorney confirmed to TPM on Monday.
The meeting, which was first reported by The Wall Street Journal, was a voluntary one. In a statement, Sokolich’s attorney declined to discuss details of his client’s conversation with members of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the district of New Jersey.
“Since there is an ongoing criminal investigation, neither Mayor Sokolich nor I will comment on the substance of those discussions,” attorney Tim Donohue wrote. “The Mayor is grateful for the efforts of the US Attorneys Office, and the Mayor and his entire administration will continue to cooperate fully with this investigation as well as the Select Committee’s investigation.”
Sokolich has been at the center of the bridge scandal from the start. The lane closures caused a massive, multi-day traffic jam in Fort Lee. The same week they began, Sokolich told a local columnist that he had begun to wonder if the closures were intended to send him “some sort of message.” Democrats in the state have since suggested that the closures were retaliation against Sokolich’s decision not to endorse Christie’s re-election last year — an allegation that has not been proven.
The subject of the latest debunked Obamacare horror story is finally talking, and of course it’s to Fox News.
Julie Boonstra is a Michigan resident with leukemia, and she appeared in an Americans For Prosperity ad against Democratic Senate candidate Rep. Gary Peters, saying that Obamacare made her cancer treatment unaffordable because of out of pocket spending. Subsequent fact checking, though, found that her monthly premium payments were essentially cut in half, and the limits the law imposes on out of pocket expenses means that at worse, she’d break even between those costs and her premium saving.
The ad also implied she lost access to her doctor, though fact checking determined that her doctor is included in the plan she picked on the exchange.
So with no real basis to the story she presented in the ad, how does Boonstra respond? The only way she can, the way Republicans always go, playing the victim.
“They’re not scaring me. Cancer scares me,” she said. “I battle cancer every day. They’re not going to intimidate me.” […]
“Under my old policy, I knew what I could afford every single month because I wasn’t hit with extra charges. Now I don’t know what I have to pay month to month,” she said. “Leukemia tests are extremely expensive.”
Just to set the record straight, pointing out factual inconsistencies is not intimidation. No one is saying that Boonstra isn’t experiencing real angst over having to change health insurance in the middle of her fight with cancer. No one is diminishing her fight with cancer, they’re just pointing out some basic truths which show that her story just doesn’t add up.
And as Brian Beutler points out, if the Koch brothers achieved what they’re trying to with this and other ads—repeal—then she would really become a victim. The protections she now has under this law—to never be kicked off her health insurance plan, to never have to worry about having health coverage because of her leukemia, having her annual out of pocket expenses limited, and never having to worry about reaching an annual or lifetime cap where her coverage is just cut off—would be gone if the campaign she’s participating in succeeds. Which is, yes, insane.
If Boonstra is a victim, she’s the willing victim of the Koch brothers and AFP who would ultimately throw her to the wolves. But if she hates the law that much, fine, whatever. What she’s doing, though, jeopardizes every other cancer patient in the nation.
In yet another episode of guns killing people, a man from Fort Wayne Indiana is dead after his gun discharged in his home. He was not shooting at anything, he was not being careless with his weapon, he was just trying to sell the darn thing when it went off, hitting him in the chest.
Fort Wayne Police responded to the man’s residence and first aid was administered, but it was already too late. He was pronounced dead at the scene.
Police spokesman Chris Felton had this say, a little warning to those who still think guns are not a problem. “Always treat the gun as if it’s loaded. Even if you’re sure it’s unloaded, still treat it as if its loaded. Never point a gun at anything or anyone you’re not willing to destroy. Treat it as loaded all the time.”
Advice I’m sure the gun owner already knew, but, he’s no longer alive.
In case you missed it, the anti-union movement is alive, well, and gloating over its success while working people in both the public and private sectors suffer from stagnant and negative wages, more expensive benefits and the prospect of losing what dignity they have at the altar of unfettered free enterprise and wealthy-worship.
The story of the UAW’s loss at the Volkswagon plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee last week because of scare tactics imposed by Republican national and state legislators is well-known. The surprising part is that VW seemed to be friendly to the idea of representation given that they had envisioned a workers council, which is prevalent in many other countries, that would protect worker’s rights and act as a partner in running the plant. This could still happen, despite the right’s irrational fear of unions, but it weakened the already-fragile union movement and did damage to its efforts in the south.
The picture is similarly bleak in the Midwest, as Governor Scott Walker’s Wisconsin experiment is burying public union workers. A new report in the New York Times shows that many towns and cities are finding that they have more money to spend, or at least less debt, because of the anti-union laws passed in 2011, but that workers are being devastated by the law, called Act 10. In short, public unions were stripped of their collective bargaining rights on anything except salaries, but even they were to be capped at no higher than the inflation level. The result is a one-two punch.
One:
Demoralization is the flip side of Act 10. In Oneida County in northern Wisconsin, the county supervisors jettisoned language requiring “just cause” when firing employees. Now, said Julie Allen, a computer programmer and head of the main local for Oneida County’s civil servants, morale is “pretty bad” and workers are afraid to speak out about anything, even safety issues or a revised pay scale. “We don’t have just cause,” she said. “We don’t have seniority protections. So people are pretty scared.”
Assessing Act 10, Lisa Charbarneau, Oneida County’s director of human resources, said: “It’s been a kind of double-edged sword. It’s saved some money, but it’s hurt morale. It’s put a black eye, so to speak, on being a government employee, whether management or hourly. All government employees seem to have taken a hit, there’s this image that they’re sucking all these good benefits.”
Two:
Leah Lipska, the president of Local 1, scoffs at Mr. Walker’s famous suggestion that public employees are the “haves” in society, noting that many earn less than $35,000 a year. And the law, says Ms. Lipska, an information systems technician with the state corrections system, has made things much worse.
“My family is now on food stamps,” said Ms. Lipska, a mother of three who earns $18.62 an hour. (Her husband’s computer installation business is struggling.)
This simply reinforces the idea that GOP orthodoxy on economics is dangerous. Taking money out of people’s pockets and making them afraid to speak up because they might lose their jobs will not in any way help the economy to grow. And Scott Walker wants to be president (shudder).
Meanwhile, here in New Jersey, where the governor also wants to be president but won’t be, the end of Education Commissioner Christopher Cerf’s term is proving rather dangerous for teacher rights. The Superintendent of Newark’s schools is asking Cerf for a waiver so she can ignore seniority while making massive cuts to Newark’s teaching force. Even better, or worse, is the suspicion that Anderson is doing this to protect the Teach for America teachers she’s hired at the expense of more expensive, experienced educators. Anderson was a former executive at Teach for America.
This assault on both tenure and negotiated rights would be the most serious attempt by the know-nothing corporatists on the teacher’s associations in the state. It would also be an opportunity for Cerf to make a final, lasting imprint on the state’s education system that has already seen an ineffective evaluation system and massive cuts to school programs go into effect during his and Christie’s term. My sense is that Cerf won’t do it because the governor is facing multiple investigations into questionable behavior by his aides, and Christie won’t need the added attention, but this would be an opportunity for both men to show their conservative bona-fides and take some eyeballs of the GW Bridge and Sandy affairs.
The bottom line is that the bottom line is guiding everything the GOP touches these days and public workers continue to be obstacles to knock over and criticize. Never mind that these are the same middle class workers who need to start spending if the economy is to make a broad rebound and will need to lead the country if it is to educate its next generation of citizens.
An Iowa law allowing the legally or completely blind to acquire permits to carry guns in public has stirred up debate as to whether or not the visually impaired should have “full access” to firearms.
“Up until 2011, it was solely up to the sheriff of your county who decided who got a gun permit and who did not,” Cedar County Sheriff Warren Wethington, who has been granting gun permits to the visually impaired since he became sheriff in 2007, told ABCNews.com. “So you were basically at the mercy of whether you had a pro-gun sheriff or an anti-gun sheriff.”
In 2010, Iowa became a “shall-issue” state when the legislature amended a law to create a uniform procedure for issuing gun permits statewide. As a result, Iowa residents could get a gun permit so long as they did not have a criminal background or history of mental illness, Wethington said.
“Once those restrictions were limited, we basically had to approve anybody who applied for a permit,” said Delaware County Sheriff John LeClere. “Our opinion no longer matters and our information on an individual, as far as their character, was something we could no longer consider.”
While applicants need to take a firearm safety course to obtain a permit, it is available online and does not need to include hands-on firearms training, which “makes it a little difficult,” LeClere said.
“If we have a person who is possibly eyesight impaired, he is certainly entitled to defend himself,” he said. “But should he be carrying [a firearm] in public? Should there be further restrictions placed on him based on eyesight?”
“I have some reservations about full access for people who are blind,” said Patrick Clancy, superintendent of the Iowa Braille and Sight Saving School in Vinton, Iowa. “That’s just because shooting requires a lot of vision to be accurate outside of controlled settings with safety courses.”
Name calling is now a staple of today’s Republican party and being that they have nothing else to offer the American people, these Republicans resort to what they know best.
Charlie Crist, who was a Republican governor of Florida, then left the party because of the downward spiral Republicans adopted in recent years, held a book signing to promote his new book, The Party’s Over, How the Extreme Right Hijacked the GOP and I Became a Democrat. The party he wrote about showed up to the book signing and protested. Then naturally, the name calling began.
A Miami Sun-Sentinel‘s political reporter — who tweets under the name @BrowardPolitics — wrote on Twitter, “On his way out, one of the Republican protestors called @CharlieCrist a ‘commie whore.’ And that was the most printable comment.”
Shark-Tank.com reported that the protester who shouted that Crist looked “like an AIDS victim” repeated the remark three times as the governor walked to his car after the event.
Actress and singer Bette Midler noted the incident and tweeted a message alluding to the Tea Party’s history of posing as a grass roots movement while actually receiving support from corporations and wealthy oligarchs like billionaires Charles and David Koch.
“Yesterday, at book signing in Fort Lauderdale, @TeaPartiers shouted ‘commie whore’ at @CharlieCrist and other insults. Wonder who paid ‘em?” she wrote.
In an unexpected move, the lawyer for Gov. Chris Christie’s office in the George Washington Bridge scandal withdrew this week as counsel to the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey in an ongoing federal lawsuit, setting off speculation about what it means and why he did it.
Randy Mastro, a head litigation partner of the law firm of Gibson Dunn & Crutcher, represents the governor’s office in the bridge scandal and other controversies tied to Hurricane Sandy aid. At the same time, he had served for more than a year as a lead attorney for the Port Authority in a federal lawsuit focused on controversial toll hikes.
Christie hired Mastro in January after the disclosure of emails showing that a Christie aide allegedly orchestrated a four-day closure of two local-access lanes to the bridge, causing massive traffic jams in Fort Lee. Many suspect the closures were retaliation after the borough’s Democratic mayor didn’t endorse the Republican governor for re-election.
In recent weeks, some attorneys and legal observers had expressed concern about Mastro’s dual role, especially because Mastro’s duties for Christie include his firm assisting with an internal review of the governor’s office’s actions, including events tied to the Port Authority.
On Wednesday, Mastro quietly withdrew as counsel to the Port Authority in the ongoing lawsuit brought in federal court in Manhattan by the New York and North Jersey chapters of the AAA. The suit aims to block toll increases at six bistate bridges and tunnels, contending that the Port Authority violated federal law by imposing toll hikes as part of a plan to finance certain capital projects unrelated to transportation.
Mastro declined comment Friday. In mid-January, he told the Wall Street Journal through a spokesperson that there was no conflict of interest in his “firm’s separate representation of the Port Authority and the governor’s office in these separate matters.”
TODAY – Jimmy Fallon closed out his first week hosting “The Tonight Show” in what fans were calling “the best thing ever.“
In other words, the comedian spent an entire hour with his partner in musical laughs, pop star Justin Timberlake. And even better, the duo launched into the fifth edition of their popular “History of Rap” series from “Late Night” before a single word was uttered during JT’s interview.
This time, the pair dropped the rhymes of LL Cool J, Beastie Boys, Tone Loc, Will Smith, Salt-N-Pepa, Notorious BIG, Snoop Dogg/Lion, Warren G, Kriss Kross, Ludacris, Run DMC and many, many others.
They didn’t just show off their smooth flow during the medley, but some pretty great comedic timing as well. As Fallon ferociously rapped NWA’s “Straight Outta Compton” and suddenly got in the camera’s face, Timberlake quickly interjected, “Hey hey hey! Hold on a second! … You’re straight outta compton?!” And just in time too, as Fallon was about to drop some of the tune’s naughty words.
In this week’s address, President Obama says this is a year of action, and he will do everything he can to restore opportunity for all. The President already lifted the wages for federal contract workers, and he calls on the American people to tell Congress to finish the job by boosting the federal minimum wage for all workers to $10.10 and give America a raise.
How do you help the middle class? Well, how about doing what Rick Snyder, the governor of Michigan did – cut a billion dollars from education and tax the poor and elderly while providing tax cuts to companies shipping jobs overseas.
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