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August 23, 2012 03:33 PM UTC

Thursday Open Thread

  • 34 Comments
  • by: Colorado Pols

“Please your eye and plague your heart.”

–William Cobbett

Comments

34 thoughts on “Thursday Open Thread

  1. http://www.utsandiego.com

    If the president took responsibility, right now, for his record – for the gap between his promises and what he’s accomplished – the election would be over.

    Instead, the president believes his unpopularity stems from the failures of others. The last president. House Republicans. Voters who can’t figure out how wonderful he’s been.

    This list keeps growing. On Aug. 7, The New York Times reported that Obama didn’t care for the mainstream media coverage of him. And on Monday, Politico reported Obama was down on some members of his campaign team and administration over the state of his re-election campaign.

    It’s not his fault, you see. It never is.

    You see, you didn’t build that, but it’s your fault.

    1. Here’s a present for you from Rasmussen, the only polling you ever cite and straight from the official Rasmussen site, too:

      What a difference one TV interview can make. Embattled Democratic incumbent Claire McCaskill has now jumped to a 10-point lead over her Republican challenger, Congressman Todd Akin, in Missouri’s U.S. Senate race. Most Missouri Republicans want Akin to quit the race while most Missouri Democrats want him to stay.

      The latest Rasmussen Reports telephone survey of Likely Voters in the Show Me State finds McCaskill earning 48% support to Akin’s 38%. Nine percent (9%) like some other candidate in the race, and five percent (5%) are undecided. (To see survey question wording, click here.)

    2. Somedays, I wake up lazy. If I am smart enough to look for your comments on Pols before I start my day, it gives me renewed dedication to combat the crazies in Colorado — those who honestly believe giving more money to rich people increases the likelihood they will be more patriotic Americans, investing those gifts on American soil. It motivates me to speak out against those who are so selfish they literally justify taking food from the mouths of school children and orphans, medicine out of the hands of those most vulnerable, and books out of the hands of those who yearn to learn. Your words inspire me to knock on doors, make phone calls, write articles, and share stories on social media. Your blind allegiance to those who are committed to lining their own pockets under the guise of spirituality is very inspiring.

      G-d forbid we should let your people win a single election.

  2. I commented on this yesterday, asking SOMEONE to please try to defend this.

    But I can’t find where I posted it, what with 7 threads yesterday on Akin and the “war on women.”  

    In what way, by what interpretation, is this statement defensible ?  

    1. jabbering about, Barron?  When isn’t rape rape in your doctrine?

      Besides, the first two posts of utter lunacy each day belong to ‘Tad.   Oh, I see, you sly parador . . . hope you find you lost post.  [wink]

    2. But I can tell you Paul Ryan said the same thing all over television yesterday, despite the fact his own bill made distinctions between different types of rape. (Apparently, leaving room for future definitions such as, if someone is raped by a Republican with ties to the party it’s not “legitimate rape?”)

    3. and what could possibly be “indefensible” about it escapes me. It’s also the official Republican talking point response on the subject, including by those who have in the past claimed a distinction between real (forcible) rape and other categories.  Even most Republican co-sponsors and supporters of bills worded that way now say simply “rape is rape” and refuse to explain what they meant by their own wording.  

      Of course, as I recall you aren’t a Republican and I suppose you’ll vote for whatever American (anti, if you ask me) Constitutional Party candidates are available, including for President and thanks for that. Maybe they have a menu of definitions that you don’t find indefensible.

      In the meantime I think it’s you who ought to explain to us under what circumstances rape isn’t rape, rather than the other way around, as you seem to be in a distinct minority on the subject.

    4. Looks like you’re objecting to the implication that all rapes are alike.

      As someone who has volunteered for several organizations that help victims of sexual assault, I can tell you that this is sort of a case where that’s so untrue that it’s true. Not all rapes are alike. But there is no rational or useful way to separate them into categories if the goal is to help the victims.

      See, to someone who has not been sexually assaulted, it’s easy to say that non-penetrative sexual assault is less bad than statutory rape is less bad than date rape is less bad than stranger-in-a-dark-alley rape. Or something like that. We have, in our heads, a hierarchy of less-worse for rapes. But that reliably has absolutely nothing to do with how victims react. The level of trauma a person experiences from a rape is completely individual, is not predictable, and does not follow a set pattern. There are women who are penetratively raped at gunpoint who go straight to the police, report the crime, and then head in to work, apparently unharmed. There are women who are “only” touched inappropriately by an acquaintance who need years of therapy to get past feelings of shame and the desire to self-harm.

      One could easily also blame parenting, religious conditioning, or any other early influences for the difference in victims’ ability to recover from rape, but that does not seem to be a predictably significant factor, either. Some previously sexually assaulted people are assaulted a second time and experience cumulative trauma; others are hardly affected at all, having gotten through it once. Some become hypersexual. Others become asexual or very nearly so.

      Rape is rape — in that after every rape, the victim’s experience is her (or his) own to cope with, and no external party can judge, predict, or categorize that. There is no “normal.” There is no abnormal, either. Each person copes differently, and each person deserves support according to their individual needs, not according to the type of rape they experienced.

      Bringing it full circle to Akin, for rape survivors who become pregnant, some individuals will feel that what they need in order to recover is to have, love, and raise their baby. Others will feel that what they need is an abortion.

      Treating people who have experienced sexual assault is an incredibly difficult task even for experienced professionals. This is such a complicated traumatic event and fraught with external complications, from the horrors of going to trial to the shame that goes with not reporting it out of fear of a trial. If even people who’ve dedicated their whole lives to caring for survivors of sexual assault cannot predict the recovery process based on categories of rape, then the government has absolutely no business legislating based on categories of rape.

        1. does not involve a consensual act. Whether the issue is force, threats, inability to give consent due to age or lack of consciousness, consensual rape is an oxymoron. So, once again, what on earth is your point?  If a 35 year old man talks a 12 year old girl into sex. it’s “consensual rape” and the 12 year old is responsible? The courts wouldn’t agree with you.  Neither would the dictionary.

        2. Rape and statutory rape (actually in Colorado, it’s called unlawful sexual contact, but statutory rape is the term people are more familiar with) are different things, although both can be either not terribly damaging or extremely damaging depending on the individual victim.

          As Blue said, rape, by definition, is not consensual. In my experience, a majority of rape victims have at some time had some degree of contact with their rapist prior to the rape. Many were on a date and the rapist did not respect “no” to sex. Some were already in a relationship with the rapist, but the rapist chose to force sex on them at a time when they did not consent.

          I have seen exactly one completely false rape accusation in which the reporter had consensual sex with the accused and later reported a rape. It would be inappropriate to give details, so I will not. However, the detectives I have worked with have discretion to charge an accuser in this situation if they wish to do so. Filing a false police report would be the usual charge, or perjury if it went to court, but that is quite rare as I understand.

          I’d say less than 15% of rapes in this area are committed by a stranger–probably much less, but that’s an estimate based on the people who report it and receive services from volunteer organizations. Obviously, someone raped by a stranger is more likely to report than someone raped by a friend, husband, or boyfriend where the rapist has access to the victim and can convince them not to report.

          The Colorado law for unlawful sexual contact with a minor is fairly liberal. For instance, a 25-year-old can have sex with a 16-year-old. I have not seen any case in which unlawful sexual contact was reported and the victim did not also report manipulation or coercion. In other states, the “parents don’t like the older boyfriend” issue crops up with age ranges like 16-19, but Colorado’s law is constructed to really only punish age differences large enough that pretty much any case that occurs will involve coercion or abuse by a person in a position of trust.

    5. not all rape victims are female. just sayin…

      and a HT to PCG for another excellent comment. Well thought out and well written.

      nicely done…   🙂

      1. Male victims underreport at alarming rates, as do women victimized by women. In Jefferson County, everyone should be aware that for children, Ralston House can perform sexual assault examinations in a non-hospital, non-police setting with trained professionals. This environment is much less frightening than reporting and examination at a hospital, and seems to be more conducive to allowing boys who are victimized to open up and discuss it.

  3. Mitt Romney compared the Tea Party to a “ferret in the dishwasher” in a conversation with former Sen. Bob Bennett (R-Utah), according to a new book. The longtime senator lost his seat in a 2010 state party caucus vote because of a surge in Tea Party support for his opponent, now-Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah).

    The anecdote was published in Time magazine in an adapted excerpt from Michael Grunwald’s “The New New Deal,” a sharply reported book about how the stimulus came to passage.

    Bennett says his friend Romney commiserated with him about the Tea Party’s ingratitude, telling a presumably apocryphal story about getting bitten by a ferret he had tried to rescue from a dishwasher. “Mitt said the Tea Party people are like that ferret in the dishwasher,” he says. “They’re so frightened and angry, they’ll even bite Bob Bennett, who’s trying to get the country out of this mess.”

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/

    Gonna take that lying down? If I were you I’d vote for a third party candidate just to show him!

    1. pissed at being thrown into the dishwasher for his bath right after just having ridden several hundred miles strapped to the roof of Willard’s station wagon.

      Willard’s just not very good with animals or other non-millionaires . . .  

    2. Hey, it’s better than a dog on the roof. Plus, have you ever tried to clean a ferret? Need pots ‘n’ pans cycle to even get started on the little things.

  4. http://www.indecisionforever.c

    We most know how Charles and David Koch spend their time: playing the part of stereotypical Hollywood villains with massive donations to plutocratic political causes in between writing aggrieved op-eds complaining about the lack of deference some Americans exhibit in the face of their economic betters.

    But what has Bill Koch, the Daniel Baldwin of the Koch brothers, been up to?

     

    There’s a new town in Colorado. It has about 50 buildings, including a saloon, a church, a jail, a firehouse, a livery and a train station. Soon, it will have a mansion on a hill so the town’s founder can look down on his creation. But don’t expect to move here – or even to visit.

    …Koch’s project manager has told county officials that the enclave in the middle of the 6,400-acre Bear Ranch won’t ever be open to the public.

    Whatever you may say about Bill Koch, he’s not a very good businessman. The other Koch brothers would have just bought a mayor – a much cheaper investment than an entire city –  and let the place deteriorate until it resembled a syphilis-ridden 19th century town.

    1. for public land with a road running through it from which the riffraff might be able to gaze upon his fantasy domain. Locals I know are agin it.

      Oh, on a totally unrelated note, I’ve been getting called by either human or automated polls up to 5 times a day and after 9PM too.  I usually will answer the really short ones.

      Last night the poll included questions about state senate candidates not running in my district.  I had a really hard time getting the human, who sounded like he was in a foreign country, to understand that I didn’t intend to vote for either, not because I wasn’t going to vote but because they wouldn’t be on my ballot.  

      Just got an automated poll which is the second one including a question about the congressional race but not the one here in CD6.  I live in Littleton proper and, in spite of all the redistricting, I’m still CD6, SD26, and HD38 just like I was before but these polling outfits won’t believe me. They seem to think I’m just ignorant. So I’m thinking their results aren’t going to be super reliable on the state and local stuff.  

  5. http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-

    Early findings from the documents yielded a report reinforcing previously reported evidence that Romney was still associated with Bain Capital after he retired from in 1999, according to Gawker. Documents in the cache also show that a fund in blind trust in which Romney had invested gave a casino owned by Sheldon Adelson, a major donor to Republicans, $3 million.

    Audit files in the document dump also show that Romney has kept a number of offshore accounts through a Swiss bank and a Bermuda shell corporation. Through those accounts, Romney was not “subject to United States federal income or withholding tax on its income from United States sources,” according to a 2009 audited financial statement on Bain Capital Fund VIII LP included in the document dump.

    1. I wonder which additional Romney blind trusts will be revealed to contain the other $97 million that Adelson has promised to spend on Romney’s campaign.  

    2. because he just wants to stay on message. He could have been back on message weeks ago if he’d just released the info himself. He’s not releasing because he’s hoping to hide, a pointless hope nowadays.  

  6. Being where I am, fifty miles south of Tampa, I’ve been tracking Isaac like a hound dog. All models now have it pretty far out in the Gulf of Mexico, and each update puts it a bit farther west.

    If you are interested, http://www.hurricanecity.com is great, plus the National Hurricane Center site.

    But never, ever believe those models!  Hurricane Charley was supposed to come into the Gulf and hit Tampa, but when it was about 100 miles away decided to hang a hard right into Charlotte County.  

    1. If it misses, God loves the Republicans and wants Obama to be defeated.  if it hits ,God is mad at the Republicans for not standing with Akin. You’ll notice the silence from the usual blame bomb tossing big rightie media preachers back when the fire hit conservative, Focus on the Family Colorado Springs but missed liberal, artsy neighbor Manitou Springs. The other way around and they would have been all over it.

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