Daily Kos

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) is going to stand behind no one in the race to take health care away from hundreds of thousands of women by defunding Planned Parenthood and, while he's at it, taking food away from 45 million by shutting down government. That, he says, is just the by-product of standing up for human rights. And when he says human, you can presume he means "man" and "fetus." Cuz ladies, you're just incubators.

When asked how far he will go as President to defund Planned Parenthood, Republican presidential candidate Sen. Marco Rubio (FL) said during a Tuesday interview on "Special Report with Bret Baier," that defunding the healthcare organization is not a "political issue" for him, but a "human rights issue."

“To me that’s not even a political issue, that’s a human rights issue," Rubio told anchor Bret Baier.

He went on and on to explain his views of the "sanctity of life, and how "someone, just because they haven't been born and don't have a birth certificate and haven't yet been named, doesn't mean they don't have rights." And then, of course since he's a Republican and a piece of shit, he lied, saying Planned Parenthood has "been caught repeatedly and now on video trafficking in fetal tissue of aborted children. It's an outrageous practice." No, Rubio. It's an outrageous lie. No number of cooked videos by so-called undercover journalists and deranged fellow candidates will ever make that true.

But, ladies, he does think your health is still "important," (he's not Jeb!, after all) so he says the money should go to "federally qualified health centers." Which we already know can't take on the additional burden of all the women who would lose care. So that's utter crap.

It's fetus rights. Just fetus rights. As usual. Once that kid is born, it can starve to death for all he cares. And might.

Sign if you agree: Democrats must stand strong. No cuts to Planned Parenthood. No government shutdowns.

---

Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2012—Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, and Conservative Economics:

If Mitt Romney were to declare that his plan for Medicare relied on fairy dust, people would laugh. If he said that he was waiting for Superman—literally Superman, the one with the blue red 'S' and the dangling spit curl—to teach America's children, everyone would assume it was a joke. If Romney swore that bug-eyed aliens were central to his foreign policy, it would generate well-deserved snickers.

And if he said any one of these things over and over, if he insisted they were true, if he included them in nearly every speech, proudly repeated them to the press, and made them the centerpiece of his campaign... if he did that, the laughter would turn sour. Surely Romney wouldn't be able to give a speech without being met with derision. He wouldn't make it through an interview without the media tearing into his ridiculous and unworkable plans. He'd be laughed right out of the race.

So when Mitt Romney declares that his economic plan involves reducing taxes on the wealthy as a means of growing the economy... where's the laughter?

---

Tweet of the Day

An actual Christian comes to America and Conservatives be like...

#PopeInDC #PopeFrancis #PopeInUSA pic.twitter.com/bRS8DcjVYL

— Jade Helm Commander (@Anomaly100) September 23, 2015

---

On today's Kagro in the Morning show: There was just too much left to say about the bizarre drug price-raising CEO story to let it drop. At first glance, Martin Shkreli comes off as the typical multimillionaire boy-genius. But a look at his history shows a streak of diabolical fiendishness. After all that, will he change? In other business follies—and hey, why not run the government like this, right?—we examine the record of Carly Fiorina, both at HP and in her previous job at Lucent, which also pretty much collapsed. Hmm! And of course, we have to ask WTF, VW? Finally, in our Entrepreneurial Spirit corner: who says you have to "own" or "have rights in" property you put on AirBnB? Find us on iTunes | Find us on Stitcher | RSS | Donate to support the show!

---

High Impact Posts • Top Comments

On the evening of Friday, August 7, two New Jersey police officers wildly fired at least 18 shots at 14-year-old Radazz Hearns. Seven shots hit Hearns from behind and caused catastrophic injuries. The other 11 bullets hit cars and homes in the quiet neighborhood where Hearns collapsed after being shot repeatedly. Miraculously, he lived.

He was unarmed.

This is a big fucking deal.

What followed Hearns' horrific shooting is a messy cover-up. It was an attempt to frame and criminalize a young man in order to protect the police from the consequences of their unlawful actions.

More details below.

In Portland, Maine, a local jail will end a baffling policy requiring female attorneys to remove their underwire bras before entering to visit clients.

Citing the fact that the bras set off the metal detector, employees at Cumberland County Jail put in place a new policy on September 10 stating that attorneys visiting their clients must either remove their bras or forego their visit. At least two attorneys said they were offended at the request and refused to remove their bras when confronted at the jail’s entrance by deputies.

"It’s absolutely outrageous," said attorney Amy Fairfield. He said, ‘Are you wearing an underwire bra? Might I suggest you go to the bathroom and take that off?’ I said, ‘I will not. I am completely offended at that notion.'"

Fairfield sent a letter to Sheriff Kevin Joyce and to the chief judge of Maine's Superior Court citing her offense and concern, and stated that she considers the discriminatory policy to be a "constitutional issue."

While Sheriff Joyce said Monday that female attorneys will no longer be requested to take off their underwire bras, he also refused to apologize for the practice, even after allegedly promising a public apology to one of the attorneys. Read on for his rationalization.

Republican presidential candidates are finding it as hard to wrap their heads around the whole "pope talking about morality beyond sex" thing as congressional Republicans are, and they're coming to the same basic answer: if we disagree with it, it counts as politics, not religion, so the pope can stuff it.

Even as Francis was in Havana on Sunday, Gov. Chris Christie (R-N.J.), a practicing Catholic, told CNN: “I just think the pope was wrong. And so the fact is, that his infallibility is on religious matters, not on political ones.”

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), another Catholic, expressed a similar view on ABC. While he follows the pope “100 percent” on spiritual matters, including teachings on the sanctity of life, Rubio said, “the pope, as an individual, an important figure in the world, also has political opinions. And those, of course, we are free to disagree with.”

The problem here is that the pope is talking about poverty and inequality as a religious issue—and it's kind of hard to dismiss that with any degree of honesty when you consider that Jesus also had a thing or two to say on those topics. And so it goes in Francis's encyclical on climate change, in which he wrote:

Never have we so hurt and mistreated our common home as we have in the last two hundred years. Yet we are called to be instruments of God our Father, so that our planet might be what he desired when he created it and correspond with his plan for peace, beauty and fullness.

But whatever. Marco Rubio and Chris Christie say they get to decide what's a political opinion they can ignore rather than a religious argument they should listen to.

Five years after Breitbart ran a fraudulently-edited hit piece on USDA employee Shirley Sherrod, she finally reached a settlement in her lawsuit.

A federal judge says former Agriculture Department official Shirley Sherrod has reached a tentative settlement with the widow of a conservative blogger over a video of Sherrod supposedly making racist remarks.

Sherrod sued blogger Andrew Breitbart and his colleague Larry O'Connor in 2011, a year after Breitbart posted an edited video of Sherrod making the remarks. She sued for defamation and emotional distress after she was asked to resign, and the video ignited a racial firestorm.

The full video showed that Sherrod's words were an attempt at racial reconciliation, not racism.

While this is certainly progress, it does not appear that the Breitbart platform has learned any lessons whatsoever from this. The site's writers continue to post lies and false information about African-American leaders every chance they get. Having experienced this myself, I have no faith that they have any true motivation to change their fraudulent ways. It appears this isn't just a conservative smut site, but a cover for racism and white supremacy of the worst kind.

Hillary Clinton followed up on her tweeted vow Monday to do something about price-gouging by pharmaceutical companies if she becomes president. As promised, she released her plan to build on Obamacare and start bringing down the cost of prescription drugs.

The Democratic presidential candidate's proposal would place a monthly cap of $250 on covered out-of-pocket prescription drug costs to help patients with chronic or serious health conditions. It would also deny tax breaks for televised direct-to-consumer advertising and require drug companies that receive taxpayers' support to invest in research and development.

"We will start by capping how much you have to pay out of pocket for prescription drugs each month. And we're going to hold drug companies accountable as we work to drive down prices," Clinton said at a campaign event Monday in Louisiana. […]

Clinton's campaign said a typical senior on Medicare spends more than $500 annually on out-of-pocket costs to buy prescription drugs and those with chronic health conditions or serious illnesses can spend thousands of dollars a year outside their coverage.

Her plan also, importantly, includes a proposal from her 2008 campaign to allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices. That's also one of Bernie Sanders' proposals for healthcare reform, and it's a smart one that should be a top priority not just for Democratic presidential candidates, but for congressional candidates as well. It should be one reform that's achievable, or would be if Republicans actually believed their rhetoric about cutting Medicare spending, because that's precisely what it would do.

Clinton's plan is actually pretty moderate, for all the panic it's caused in big PhRMA. For a lot of folks on fixed incomes, $250/month is still a pretty high cap, but it sure does beat the status quo. And speaking for the general television viewing audience, the idea of trying to reduce the number of ads about erectile disfunction is most welcome. But bringing back the ban on them would be even better.

Reposted from Daily Kos Labor by Laura Clawson Hillary Clinton's union endorsement total has risen to six national unions with the recent endorsement of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America joining the American Federation of Teachers, the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, the International Union of Bricklayers and Allied Craftworkers, the United Association of Journeymen and Apprentices of the Plumbing and Pipefitting Industry, and the United Union of Roofers, Waterproofers and Allied Workers.

Clinton also has the endorsement of the New Hampshire branch of the National Education Association. Bernie Sanders, meanwhile, has the endorsement of National Nurses United and over the weekend picked up the endorsement of the New Hampshire Postal Workers Union. But two major unions just passed up opportunities to endorse. Both the SEIU and AFSCME recently held board meetings without moving forward on an endorsement.

Although neither union had endorsed by this point in the 2008 cycle—AFSCME endorsed in late October 2007 and SEIU in February 2008 after allowing its locals to endorse earlier—according to Politico's Annie Karni, the decision not to endorse now is "a move labor insiders attribute in part to the uncertainty Vice President Joe Biden’s potential run has inserted into the Democratic primary." Activist support for Sanders and the member backlash against the AFT's early endorsement may also have been a factor, though:

[SEIU] officials said the polls so far show Clinton with the highest level of support from members, with 75 percent of members feeling favorable toward her.

But it has also faced vocal pressure from Sanders supporters to refrain from endorsing. Ahead of its September meeting, hundreds of SEIU leaders, members, retirees and staff signed a petition urging the union to hold off, arguing that an early Clinton endorsement would put the union in direct opposition to a growing movement of Sanders’ supporters fighting for progressive causes, like the Fight for $15.

Some of Sanders' labor supporters hailed the SEIU and AFSCME non-endorsements as good news. Whether the Vermont senator ultimately picks up either of those endorsements, it is a win for him to avoid labor consolidating behind Clinton.

Rampant privatization is leading to collateral consequences. In almost every possible part of the criminal justice process, privatization results in a system that disproportionately punishes the indigent. Now the International Business Times reports there is a new way that for-profit justice is ruining the lives of the poor: GPS tracking.

In South Carolina, a traffic violation resulted in the arrest and $2,100 bail of Antonio Green, a father of five. One of the conditions of his bail was being forced to wear an electronic monitoring device. And not only did have to wear it—he had to pay for it. According to the article, "In Richland County, South Carolina, any person ordered to wear the ankle monitor as a condition of their bail must lease the bracelet from a private, for-profit company called Offender Management Services (OMS)."

Green was living on $900 a month, but was charged a $179.50 set-up fee, plus $9.25 a day to wear the device. In other words, the device ended up costing him half his monthly income that first month, and a third of his income every month after.

He didn't have much of a choice. After all, those that can't pay go back to jail. Keep reading to find out what happened next.

I'm old enough to remember when net neutrality was a nonpartisan kind of thing. Those days are long over, and now Republican presidential candidates are running on their plans to sell off the internet to the highest bidder. Specifically, here's Jeb! Bush and his plan to wreck everything good.

If Jeb Bush eventually overcomes Donald Trump, secures the GOP's presidential nomination, and gets elected, the FCC's still-young net neutrality rules could be eradicated. [Tuesday], Bush issued a promise for regulatory reform, pointing to a "regulatory crisis in Washington" under the Obama administration that includes Dodd-Frank, environment-focused regulations, and the net neutrality framework passed early last year—with the strong support of Obama. Bush has vowed to dismantle the net neutrality rules, which give the commission strict oversight of ISPs and prohibit paid fast lanes, speed throttling, and targeted app blocking.

Specifically, Jeb!'s beef with net neutrality is that the "rules prohibit one group of companies (ISPs) from charging another group of companies (content companies) the full cost for using their services." Right, it's all about the full cost to the poor, beleaguered ISPs to run the internet and not the ability of every content creator (and they're not all companies) to be able to provide their content just like every other creator. But when have Republicans ever been about fairness when there's a buck to be made by a powerful corporation?

Tell Congress to stop the sneak attacks on net neutrality. Tell them to block any appropriations riders that threaten to undermine the FCC and the internet.

People who deny the reality of climate change will no longer be called climate change deniers under the influential Associated Press style guidelines. They also won't be called skeptics, a change for which there's at least some rational basis, unlike the ban on deniers as a term to deny scientific reality. The AP explains:

Some background on the change: Scientists who consider themselves real skeptics -- who debunk mysticism, ESP and other pseudoscience, such as those who are part of the Center for Skeptical Inquiry -- complain that non-scientists who reject mainstream climate science have usurped the phrase skeptic. They say they aren’t skeptics because “proper skepticism promotes scientific inquiry, critical investigation and the use of reason in examining controversial and extraordinary claims.” That group prefers the phrase “climate change deniers” for those who reject accepted global warming data and theory. But those who reject climate science say the phrase denier has the pejorative ring of Holocaust denier so The Associated Press prefers climate change doubter or someone who rejects mainstream science.

Oh, so using a factual word might hurt the fee-fees of people who want us to hasten the destruction of the world we live in based on denial of scientific fact. We can't have that! The new AP guidelines call for these lovely people to be described as "climate change doubters" or "those who reject mainstream climate science," the latter of which is at least accurate even if it's incredibly clunky.

What's next? "Those who reject mainstream science on the earth going around the sun"? "Those who reject mainstream science on viruses and bacteria, not the four humors, causing disease"?

Daily Kos uses a customized version of the AP stylebook. I think it's safe to say this is one change we will not be embracing.

Reposted from Comics by Barbara Morrill Pope Francis is the "Pope of the People" and arrived this week to his first ever visit to the USA. I hope he had a good time, and I'm sure he adapted well to American culture. This is how I see El Papa after five long days in our fabulous country.

I'm against the death penalty—100 percent.

There's a whole host of reasons why, but recent studies showing how the death penalty is selectively applied down racial and economic lines makes its continued existence in America more disturbing than ever.

Black men constitute 61 percent of homicide victims in Louisiana — nearly 13,000 black men were killed in this state since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976. Yet only three people have been executed for killing a black man in all of this time. That’s less than 6 percent of the rate of executions for individuals who kill someone other than a black man, and 1/48th of the execution rate for people who kill white women, according to a study that will appear in the Loyola University of New Orleans Journal of Public Interest Law.

This isn't to advocate that more people receive the death penalty. But what we are learning is that killing a white person—particularly a white woman without a criminal record—is far more likely to warrant the death penalty than killing an African American, or anyone without a college degree, or anyone with a criminal record.

In essence, our criminal justice system has found new ways to show us that some lives are more deeply valued than others. For instance:

Scott Phillips, a sociology and criminology professor at the University of Denver, published a study last month in the Law & Society Review focusing on the imposition of death sentences in relation to the victim's social status. Phillips studied capital cases in Harris County (Houston), Texas, between 1992 and 1999 and found that the social status of the victim in the underlying murder had a significant influence on whether the death penalty would be sought and imposed on the defendant. In examining 504 cases, Phillips found that defendants are six times more likely to receive a death sentence if they kill the highest status victims.

These are horrible, indisputable facts.

The death penalty is basically used to penalize people who are found guilty of murdering certain folk. Then there's Dale Cox, the Louisiana district attorney single-handedly responsible for sending more people to death row than any other DA in the state. Cox has openly admitted that for him, it's all about revenge.

"I'm a believer that the death penalty serves society's interest in revenge. I know it's a hard word to say and people run from it, but I don't run from it because I think there is a very strong societal interest as a people," Cox said. "I think (revenge) is the only reason for it."

This is a key clue into the mindset of those who pursue and apply the death penalty. It's hard to imagine a DA seeking the death penalty as revenge for someone they didn't truly value in the first place.