“The Legitimate Rape Caucus”: Rep. Phil Gingrey Says Todd Akin Was “Partly Right” On “Legitimate Rape” Assertions
Add Georgia representative Phil Gingrey to the ever-growing list of Republicans who can’t stop making offensive comments about rape.
According to the Marietta Daily Journal, Gingrey argued during a Cobb Chamber of Commerce breakfast that failed Missouri Senate candidate Todd Akin was “partly right” when he claimed last year that women rarely become pregnant as the result of a “legitimate rape,” because “the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”
First, Gingrey attempted to defend Akin’s use of the term “legitimate rape”:
And in Missouri, Todd Akin … was asked by a local news source about rape and he said, ‘Look, in a legitimate rape situation’ — and what he meant by legitimate rape was just look, someone can say I was raped: a scared-to-death 15-year-old that becomes impregnated by her boyfriend and then has to tell her parents, that’s pretty tough and might on some occasion say, ‘Hey, I was raped.’ That’s what he meant when he said legitimate rape versus non-legitimate rape. I don’t find anything so horrible about that. But then he went on and said that in a situation of rape, of a legitimate rape, a woman’s body has a way of shutting down so the pregnancy would not occur. He’s partly right on that.
Then Gingrey — who is an OB-GYN, and currently serves as co-chair of the GOP Doctors Caucus — defended the offensive sentiment behind Akin’s gaffe, although he stopped short of fully endorsing the pseudo-science:
And I’ve delivered lots of babies, and I know about these things. It is true. We tell infertile couples all the time that are having trouble conceiving because of the woman not ovulating, ‘Just relax. Drink a glass of wine. And don’t be so tense and uptight because all that adrenaline can cause you not to ovulate.’ So he was partially right wasn’t he? But the fact that a woman may have already ovulated 12 hours before she is raped, you’re not going to prevent a pregnancy there by a woman’s body shutting anything down because the horse has already left the barn, so to speak. And yet the media took that and tore it apart.
According to… legitimate experts, Gingrey and Akin are simply wrong. As Dr. Sharon Phelan — a fellow at the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, and professor in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of New Mexico — told CNN after Akin’s original remarks, “chronic stress can decrease fertility” but “the acute stress [caused by rape] does not have the same impact.”
Even if they never abandon the junk science that motivates the “legitimate rape” caucus, one has to wonder when Republicans will see the political costs of publicly endorsing such theories. In 2012, Akin’s remarks doomed what was seen as an almost-guaranteed Republican victory over vulnerable Democratic incumbent Claire McCaskill. Similarly, Indiana Republican Richard Mourdock saw his Senate campaign collapse after arguing that a child born from rape is “God intended,” and Pennsylvania Republican Tom Smith lost his Senate race by 9 percent after comparing pregnancies caused by rape to “having a baby out of wedlock.”
Although Gingrey — who won re-election with 70 percent of the vote in his conservative district — is unlikely to face direct electoral consequences for his remarks, he has certainly made life harder for his more vulnerable colleagues.
In the 2012 presidential election, President Barack Obama beat Mitt Romney among female voters by 12 percent — representing the largest gender gap in recorded history. Unless Republicans like Phil Gingrey stop running their mouths on issues like rape — or better yet, moderate their extremist policies — the GOP’s problem is going to get worse before it gets better.
By: Henry Decker, The National Memo, January 11, 2013
“Gun Sanity Needs Bipartisanship”: A Political Truth That Must Be Faced By Republicans
The first and most important victory for advocates of sensible gun laws would, on almost any other matter, seem trivial. But when it comes to firearms, it’s huge: Since the tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School, attention to the issue has not waned and pressure for action has not diminished.
Please don’t dismiss this achievement. Consider that until so many children were gunned down, the National Rifle Association and the gun manufacturers for which it speaks were able to block calls for a legislative response in the wake of one massacre after another.
After the shootings at a Colorado movie theater last summer, politicians were quickly intimidated into reciting bromides that drowned a real debate in blather. Nothing happened.
And nothing happened in January 2011 after the mass shooting at a town meeting in Tucson, where Rep. Gabby Giffords was shot in the head. Six people were killed, and 13 others, including Giffords, were wounded.
Her gradual recovery has been a miracle of modern medicine and her determination. Now she and Mark Kelly, her astronaut husband, have been moved by the Newtown, Conn., shootings to help lead the nation’s new turn on gun violence. They marked the second anniversary of the Tucson episode to announce the formation of Americans for Responsible Solutions, and they minced no words in an op-ed piece in USA Today on Tuesday, criticizing “special interests purporting to represent gun owners but really advancing the interests of an ideological fringe.”
“Weapons designed for the battlefield have a home in our streets,” they wrote. “Criminals and the mentally ill can easily purchase guns by avoiding background checks. Firearm accessories designed for killing at a high rate are legal and widely available.”
Giffords embodies this embrace of a new attitude that one might call “solutionism.” It’s heartening that political leaders from states and districts with long histories of supporting gun rights are now breaking with the gun lobby’s extremism.
It’s also encouraging that Vice President Biden, charged by President Obama with responsibility for proposing a comprehensive approach to the problem, is reportedly going big. He is ready to start with the necessary minimum — a renewal of a more effective ban on assault weapons, a ban on high-capacity magazines and extending background checks on private gun sales. The last really matters, since the group Mayors Against Illegal Guns estimates that perhaps 40 percent of all gun sales are made by unlicensed private dealers.
But Biden is also looking at how to improve enforcement of existing laws. The authorities should not be prevented from collecting the data they need both for intelligent policy and to track illegal guns. Measures to crack down on gun trafficking, along the lines proposed by Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand and Charles E. Schumer of New York, should thus be included, too.
But there is a political truth that must be faced: Absolutely nothing positive will happen on this issue unless a substantial number of Republicans insist that we act. And before you give up hope, it’s worth remembering that in 1994, 38 House Republicans supported the assault-weapons ban on a roll call in May, and 46 supported the crime bill, which included the ban, that eventually passed later in the year.
Yes, the GOP is very different now, more conservative and more dominated by Southern and rural voices. But key Republican senators, including Mark Kirk, John McCain and Dan Coats, have been willing to back reasonable gun laws in the past. The GOP’s House majority includes 12 members from New York and New Jersey, 13 from Pennsylvania, 44 from the Midwestern states of Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio and Wisconsin, and 20 from the West Coast.
A large share of these Republicans, particularly those from the Northeast, are growing impatient with the extent to which their party’s image is being shaped by the wishes and opinions of its most right-wing members, many of them from one-party districts in the South. Suburban Republicans especially need to declare their independence from viewpoints antithetical to those held by the vast majority of their constituents.
New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has been working hard with such Republicans, but he needs allies. Groups such as No Labels tout the virtues of nonpartisanship. They could demonstrate their effectiveness by joining Bloomberg’s efforts.
And New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is enjoying plaudits from those who see him as blazing an independent path. The former prosecutor should be eager to earn them by standing up for tough action on guns.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, January 9, 2013
“The Big Fail”: Too Many Republicans Responsible For Economic Failure Retain Power And Refuse To Learn From Experience
It’s that time again: the annual meeting of the American Economic Association and affiliates, a sort of medieval fair that serves as a marketplace for bodies (newly minted Ph.D.’s in search of jobs), books and ideas. And this year, as in past meetings, there is one theme dominating discussion: the ongoing economic crisis.
This isn’t how things were supposed to be. If you had polled the economists attending this meeting three years ago, most of them would surely have predicted that by now we’d be talking about how the great slump ended, not why it still continues.
So what went wrong? The answer, mainly, is the triumph of bad ideas.
It’s tempting to argue that the economic failures of recent years prove that economists don’t have the answers. But the truth is actually worse: in reality, standard economics offered good answers, but political leaders — and all too many economists — chose to forget or ignore what they should have known.
The story, at this point, is fairly straightforward. The financial crisis led, through several channels, to a sharp fall in private spending: residential investment plunged as the housing bubble burst; consumers began saving more as the illusory wealth created by the bubble vanished, while the mortgage debt remained. And this fall in private spending led, inevitably, to a global recession.
For an economy is not like a household. A family can decide to spend less and try to earn more. But in the economy as a whole, spending and earning go together: my spending is your income; your spending is my income. If everyone tries to slash spending at the same time, incomes will fall — and unemployment will soar.
So what can be done? A smaller financial shock, like the dot-com bust at the end of the 1990s, can be met by cutting interest rates. But the crisis of 2008 was far bigger, and even cutting rates all the way to zero wasn’t nearly enough.
At that point governments needed to step in, spending to support their economies while the private sector regained its balance. And to some extent that did happen: revenue dropped sharply in the slump, but spending actually rose as programs like unemployment insurance expanded and temporary economic stimulus went into effect. Budget deficits rose, but this was actually a good thing, probably the most important reason we didn’t have a full replay of the Great Depression.
But it all went wrong in 2010. The crisis in Greece was taken, wrongly, as a sign that all governments had better slash spending and deficits right away. Austerity became the order of the day, and supposed experts who should have known better cheered the process on, while the warnings of some (but not enough) economists that austerity would derail recovery were ignored. For example, the president of the European Central Bank confidently asserted that “the idea that austerity measures could trigger stagnation is incorrect.”
Well, someone was incorrect, all right.
Of the papers presented at this meeting, probably the biggest flash came from one by Olivier Blanchard and Daniel Leigh of the International Monetary Fund. Formally, the paper represents the views only of the authors; but Mr. Blanchard, the I.M.F.’s chief economist, isn’t an ordinary researcher, and the paper has been widely taken as a sign that the fund has had a major rethinking of economic policy.
For what the paper concludes is not just that austerity has a depressing effect on weak economies, but that the adverse effect is much stronger than previously believed. The premature turn to austerity, it turns out, was a terrible mistake.
I’ve seen some reporting describing the paper as an admission from the I.M.F. that it doesn’t know what it’s doing. That misses the point; the fund was actually less enthusiastic about austerity than other major players. To the extent that it says it was wrong, it’s also saying that everyone else (except those skeptical economists) was even more wrong. And it deserves credit for being willing to rethink its position in the light of evidence.
The really bad news is how few other players are doing the same. European leaders, having created Depression-level suffering in debtor countries without restoring financial confidence, still insist that the answer is even more pain. The current British government, which killed a promising recovery by turning to austerity, completely refuses to consider the possibility that it made a mistake.
And here in America, Republicans insist that they’ll use a confrontation over the debt ceiling — a deeply illegitimate action in itself — to demand spending cuts that would drive us back into recession.
The truth is that we’ve just experienced a colossal failure of economic policy — and far too many of those responsible for that failure both retain power and refuse to learn from experience.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, January 6, 2013
“The Old World Order”: Are We Still Fighting The Civil War?
Politically speaking, we live by caricature. Particularly in the age of satellite TV news and Internet fulmination, the temptation is to melodrama. So I wasn’t terribly surprised to read a recent article in the online magazine Salon arguing that “even though it’s a truism of American public discourse that the Civil War never ended, it’s also literally true.”
Never mind that author Andrew O’Hehir appears to be one of those overheated writers who use the adverb “literally” as an all-purpose intensifier meaning “figuratively.” Salon supposedly has editors. Elsewhere, O’Hehir concedes that the imagined conflict won’t “involve pitched battles in the meadows of Pennsylvania, or hundreds of thousands of dead.”
So it won’t be a war at all then. As a Yankee long resident in the South, maybe I should be grateful for that. O’Hehir also acknowledges that while today’s “fights over abortion and gays and God and guns have a profound moral dimension,” they “don’t quite have the world-historical weight of the slavery question.”
Um, not quite, no.
But then as O’Hehir also categorizes Michigan as a “border state” for the sin of having a Republican governor, it’s hard to know what Democrats there should do. I suppose fleeing across the border into Ontario would be an option.
Is it possible to publish anything more half-baked and foolish? Oh, absolutely. Here in Arkansas, we had more than our share of cartoon-think before the 2012 election. Three would-be Republican state legislators wrote manifestoes in favor of the old Confederacy.
One Rep. Jon Hubbard of Jonesboro delivered himself of a self-published book arguing that “the institution of slavery that the black race has long believed to be an abomination upon its people may actually have been a blessing in disguise.”
Fellow GOP candidate Charles Fuqua of Batesville—like Jonesboro, a college town—self-produced an e-book entitled God’s Law: The Only Political Solution. In it, he not only called for expelling all Muslims from the United States, but returning to the Biblical practice of stoning disobedient children to death.
Not many stonings, Fuqua thought, would be necessary to restore sexual morality and good table manners among American youth.
Then there was Rep. Loy Mauch of Bismarck. An ardent secessionist, Mauch had written a series of letters to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette arguing that since Jesus never condemned slavery, it had Biblical sanction.
Mauch also condemned Abraham Lincoln as a “fake neurotic Northern war criminal,” frequently likened him to Hitler, and deemed the rebel flag “a symbol of Christian liberty vs. the new world order.”
Comparing Hubbard’s views to those of Robert E. Lee and John C. Calhoun, New York Times columnist Charles Blow expressed alarm at “the tendency of some people to romanticize and empathize with the Confederacy.”
Ah, but here’s the rest of the story, which Blow barely mentioned: All three “Arkansaw lunkheads,” as Huck Finn might have called them, were not only repudiated by the state Republican Party, but lost badly to Democratic opponents last November in what was otherwise a big year for the GOP here.
Unimpeded by the burdens of office, they can now get back to self-publishing their neo-Confederate hearts out.
The point’s simple: these fools certainly weren’t elected due to their crackpot fulminations, or even in spite of them. Their views were simply unknown. As soon as they became an issue, they became an embarrassment. Now they’re ex-state legislators. The end.
This is not to deny that there’s a strong regional component to the nation’s current political impasse. The New Republic’s John R. Judis did the numbers on the recent “fiscal cliff” vote in the U.S. House of Representatives. Altogether, 85 Republicans voted for the Senate’s resolution, 151 against.
Broken down by region, however, the differences were stark. Republicans outside the South actually voted for the bipartisan compromise, 62-36.
GOP congressmen representing the old Confederacy voted against, 83-10—including unanimous opposition from Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Virginia, Tennessee, and South Carolina. But for Florida, opposition would have been nearly unanimous.
For all the good it did them. Because the Old South is visibly shrinking. Florida and Virginia are already gone; given demographic trends, Texas is on its way. Even Arkansas, which voted for Bill Clinton something like eight times, seems unlikely to become a one-party state.
As for the rest, Mike Tomasky correctly observes that “over time…the South will make itself less relevant and powerful if it keeps behaving this way. As it becomes more of a one-party state [sic] it becomes less of a factor.”
From that perspective, few recent political events have been as telling as the outrage of northeastern Republicans Rep. Peter King and New Jersey governor Chris Christie at the House’s foot-dragging on Hurricane Sandy relief. A few more stunts like that, and the GOP could end up as fragmented and futile as Alabama governor George Wallace’s American Independent Party.
No Civil War necessary.
By: Gene Lyons, The National Memo, January 9, 2013
“An Inane Idea”: With A Trillion Dollar Coin, President Obama Can Fight Dumb With Silly
A trillion dollar platinum coin? Really? Has our politics really reached a point where such an obviously inane idea is gaining traction? Well, yes. When your capitol has become Clowntown, U.S.A., you sometimes need to fight bad ideas with silly ones.
The idea, if you haven’t heard, is for President Obama to defuse the forthcoming debt ceiling crisis Republicans are busily manufacturing by directing the Treasury to mint a platinum coin worth $1 trillion. With an extra trillion on the books, the debt ceiling would no longer be an issue. While the Federal Reserve ordinarily is in charge of printing money, there’s a law on the books allowing the Treasury secretary to produce platinum coinage of whatever value s/he sees fit.
Sure, the purpose of the law was to permit the Treasury to issue commemorative coins. But so what? The purpose of the debt ceiling wasn’t to give one party the leverage for a global, economic hostage crisis. Were the debt ceiling not raised, the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein writes, “the damage to the economy would be tremendous, and it would occur at every level, from individuals looking for a loan to buy a house to hedge funders trying to play the markets.” His full article on what happens if we breach the debt ceiling is worth a read.
So when one political party is acting like a political version of a James Bond villain (“Give in to my demands or I will wreck the world economy!”) maybe the answer is for the president to channel his inner Dr. Evil (“One trillion dollars.”)
Again, it all sounds silly but some very serious folks are lining up behind it, including the New York Times’s Paul Krugman, who has a Nobel Prize lying around his office. New York Rep. Jerrold Nadler is also a fan. And despite some suggestions that none of this is legal because it’s not what the law was intended for, Philip Diehl, a former director of the Mint, told Klein that it’s perfectly legal.
So is it a silly idea? Yes. But Republican extremists have brought us into an age of political asymmetrical warfare, passing off crazy, dangerous ideas as serious. Why should the president unilaterally disarm on that front?
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, January 9, 2013
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