Following up on the Todd Akin saga, a Missouri Republican Committeewoman has managed to say something even stupider. From The Raw Story: Missouri Republican official: ‘God chose to bless’ women with pregnancies from rape

GOP 4th Senate District Committeewoman Sharon Barnes told The New York Times “that abortion is never an option.”

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Barnes “echoed Mr. Akin’s statement that very few rapes resulted in pregnancy,” according to the Times, and she added that “at that point, if God has chosen to bless this person with a life, you don’t kill it.”

Jeff Greenfield points out that Senate candidate Todd Akin's reprehensible comments on rape, are in line with the GOP platform.

Jumping ship: The party platforms no one stands on anymore (Yahoo! News)

In the furor over Todd Akin’s inventive understanding of biology, we should not lose sight of another matter. His position on abortion--that the victim of rape should be compelled to bear her rapist’s child--has been the official position of the Republican Party for more than thirty years.

Indeed, the language of the GOP platform--all but certain to be adopted in Tampa next week--goes further. It declares that: "Faithful to the 'self-evident' truths enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, we assert the sanctity of human life and affirm that the unborn child has a fundamental individual right to life which cannot be infringed.”

Greenfield says that it doesn't matter, because party platforms don't matter. I don't agree; a platform plank is an endorsement.

The Republican Party has officially endorsed the idea that a rape victim should be forced to carry her attacker's child. Anyone who remains affiliated with the Republicans, shame on you.

(This is not an endorsement of the Democrats, BTW.)

If you've been paying attention, you know that the GOP has been big on voter suppression since 2000, when their tactics in Florida gave Gore a narrow-enough margin of victory for the Bush team to steal it away. The Nation reports on recent developments in Ohio: Ohio GOP Admits Early Voting Cutbacks Are Racially Motivated

Why do Ohio Republicans suddenly feel so strongly about limiting early voting hours in Democratic counties? Franklin County (Columbus) GOP Chair Doug Preisse gave a surprisingly blunt answer to the Columbus Dispatch on Sunday: “I guess I really actually feel we shouldn’t contort the voting process to accommodate the urban—read African-American—voter-turnout machine.” Preisse is not some rogue operative but the chairman of the Republican Party in Ohio’s second-largest county and a close adviser to Ohio Governor John Kasich.

Like Pennsylvania House majority leader Mike Turzai, who said his state’s voter ID law “is gonna allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania,” Preisse said publicly what many Republicans believe privately—keeping turnout down among Obama supporters is the best way for the GOP to win the 2012 election.

Suicide among our soldiers is a terrible problem. But rather than ending the use of our military as pawns in a game of imperialist capitalism, let's drug them with something that creates a rapid "euphoric and calming effect." That couldn't possibly go wrong. (Anyone else reminded of the future soldiers we see in the pilot episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation?)

Could a nose spray lower the Army's suicide rate? (Yahoo! News)

More soldiers have committed suicide this year than the number who have died in combat, so the Pentagon is investing $3 million into a quick-acting solution

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How To Succeed in Business Without Adding Value - In These Times

Appelbaum also finds that when private equity firms take over, they do not create jobs faster than comparable businesses, but they do destroy jobs faster. (So much for “job creation.”) Meanwhile, Shaxson reports that a Bain internal study concluded that there is “little evidence that private equity owners, overall, added value” to the companies they took over.

All this means that even when a private equity firm “succeeds” (usually after buying an above-average business), much of their gains are reaped simply by transferring large amounts of wealth to themselves. The losers are usually the companies they acquire, their investor partners, taxpayers, government agencies and workers–ultimately, the entire economy.

NYPD: Muslim spying led to no leads, terror cases (Yahoo! News)

In more than six years of spying on Muslim neighborhoods, eavesdropping on conversations and cataloguing mosques, the New York Police Department's secret Demographics Unit never generated a lead or triggered a terrorism investigation, the department acknowledged in court testimony unsealed late Monday.

The Demographics Unit is at the heart of a police spying program, built with help from the CIA, which assembled databases on where Muslims lived, shopped, worked and prayed. Police infiltrated Muslim student groups, put informants in mosques, monitored sermons and catalogued every Muslim in New York who adopted new, Americanized surnames.

1) People who can't get guns are still capable of deadly mayhem. 2) Civilians with guns can often stop people intent on deadly mayhem. Man wielding sword in Dairy Queen dies after being shot by employee (Las Vegas Review-Journal)

A masked man wielding a sword tried to rob a central valley Dairy Queen on Sunday afternoon but was shot and killed by an employee, Las Vegas police said.

It would be nice if the various yahoos who yell about "Marxism" and "socialism" knew what these things mean. The Raw Story reports on how a CNN reporter tried to get one well-know GOP politician to define her terms: Soledad O’Brien tries to get Christine O’Donnell to define the word ‘Marxist’

CNN host Soledad O’Brien finally had an Inigo Montoya moment on Monday, and all it took was former Republican Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell misusing the word “Marxist.”

Granted, it’s not the first time O’Donnell, a longtime anti-abortion activist, has called the president or Democrats “Marxist.” She even used the term to describe her Democratic opponent, Chris Coons, drawing exclamation points across the conservative blogosphere. But when she rolled it out on O’Brien’s show Monday, describing the president’s public statements as “Marxist sound bites,” it was little more than a nonstarter.

From allout.org: "Add your voice to the international outcry against Putin before he attends the September United Nations Leaders meeting in New York."

Madonna is a hooligan... and so are you

Putin is pissing the whole world off. Take action and join the Russian riot.