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I seem to remember suggesting that the press cared an awful lot about black anti-semitic leaders, but tended to ignore white anti-semites and other bigots who are fundamentalists:

The thing is, everyone is missing the point about how fucking stupid this line of questioning was. When was the last time Timmeh took on some right wing fundamentalists for being anti-semitic? So why isn’t George Bush asked about every anti-semitic rant by LaHaye or Wildmon since by the transitive property Timmeh is invoking, Bush has close spiritual adivisors who work closely with them?

The Council on National Policy alone contains a whole host of anti-semitic right wing Christians who hobnob with the Tony Perkins and the Richard Lands and the Dobsons of the world, but that transitive connection would never be brought up would it? This isn’t just a connection of someone who goes on a trip with or says something nice, it’s a working group of conservative fundamentalists who welcome anti-semitism into their efforts to bring about a Christian government. Of course, the Bush administration has routinely played footsy with Wildmon, not just had a friend of his be nice to him on occasion.

This would never be an issue for a white candidate and shame on Timmeh for trying to do it to Obama. If Timmeh wants to be concerned about anti-semitism he should start asking the Mike Huckabee’s of the world about their supporters who they actually work with to get elected.

Who could possibly be another example that is relevant to John McCain? I just don’t know….

John Hagee!

Hagee isn’t anti-semitic though. He’s anti-Catholic.  He likes Jews. They are necessary for the apocalypse.

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His views on the Catholicism are, ahem, interesting…..He most often uses the dogwhistle Church of Rome to refer to the Catholic Church, a phrase that n many fundamentalist circles essentially argues that the Catholic Church is evil and will produce a Pope who will be the anti-christ.  Check out Rapture Ready for the phrase

What does Straight Talkin’ John McCain think about the guy:

Mr. McCain deflected a question about whether he agreed with Mr. Hagee’s end-times theology in which he connects Iran’s nuclear threat with the Apocalypse, the final battle of good and evil on earth.

“All I can tell you is I’m very proud to have pastor Hagee’s support,” Mr. McCain said.

Perhaps, Timmeh, the Catholic boy from Buffalo can ask McCain what he’s proud of?

The larger issue is that if a black religious conservative bigot like Farrakhan opens his mouth, every black person running for office has to play the game of denouncing him no matter how tenuous the relationship.

But when it comes to white religious conservative bigots like Hagee, LaHaye, and others from groups like the Council for National Policy who are anti-Catholic or anti-semitic and actually interact with political leaders, the press is silent.  Bush himself addressed them in 2000 and Cheney made a special trip last year.

Lying twice wasn’t enough over at Illinois Review, they pulled in Phyllis Schlafly to lie a third time about the ERA and Social Security.

The passage Eaton and Schlafly are lying about is on page 206 in Sex Bias in the U.S. Code

Here is what they claim supports them on page 206:

“Congress and the President should direct their attention to the concept that pervades the Code: that the adult world is (and should be) divided into two classes – independent men, whose primary responsibility is to win bread for a family, and dependent women, whose primary responsibility is to care for children and household. This concept must be eliminated from the code if it is to reflect the equality principle.”

This, of course, is out of context given directly following this passage is:

Underlying the recommendations made in this report is the fundamental point that allocation of responsibilities within the family is a matter properly determined solely by the individuals involved.  Government should not steer individual decisions concerning household or breadwinning roles by casting the law’s weight on the side of (or against) a particular method of ordering private relationships.  Rather, a policy of strict neutrality should be pursued.  That policy should accomodate both traditional and innovative patterns.  At the same time, it should assure removal of artificial constraints so that women and men willing to explore their full potential as human beings may create new traditions by their actions.

I also cited page 45 and since Eaton and Schlafly continue their lie, let’s cut and paste pages 45 and 46 of the report.

1. Revise social security law to provide father’s benefits in all cases where mother’s benefits are provided under present law;

2. Eliminate the dependency requirement for husband’s or widower’s benefits;

3. Provide derivative social security benefits to divorced husbands;

4. Make the age 62 computation point applicable for men born prior to 1913;

5. Eliminate the 20-of-4O quarter work test required now to qualify for disability
benefits;

6. Establish an occupational definition of disability for workers 55 years and older;

7. Make eligibility for benefits available all disabled widows and disabled surviving divorced wives regardless of age, and make the benefits not subject to actuarial
reduction;

8. Provide benefits to disabled spouses of beneficiaries;

9. Define dependents to include relatives live in the home;

10. Reduce the duration of marriage requirement from 20 to 5 or 10 years for a divorced spouse to qualify for benefits on the basis of the wage-earner spouse’s earnings record, and remove the requirement of consecutive years of marriage. In the alternative, divorced wife’s right to receive benefits should be based on the economic relationship between the parties and not the length marriage;

11. Allow additional dropout years to relate benefits more to current earnings;

 12. Compute primary benefits and spoused benefits to increase the primary benefits for workers by approximately one-eighth, and reduce the spouse’s proportion from one-half to one-third, maintaining thereby the current total benefit of 15 percent for a couple while at the same time improving the protection for single workers, working couples, and surviving spouses; and

13. Amend the Social Security Act to eliminate separate references to men and women.

Phyllis Schlafley is lying and doing it badly.  When the report (it wasn’t a book by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, it was a report to The United States Commission on Civil Rights) was issued men did not receive the same survivor benefits women did.  That was changed not long after the report actually and as such, the lie at the center of this scare tactic was made moot nearly 30 years ago.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg wasn’t arguing that survivor and spouse benefits should be eliminated to make individuals more equal, she was arguing that men should receive the same benefits in the same situation.  The reason for this is that families should decide upon the proper roles within the family, not the government. The point was to increase liberty while still providing the same level of benefits–which is what the system has done over this time.

That Eaton and Schlafly would so boldly lie isn’t terribly surprising.  Schlafly is still touting unisex bathrooms. The issue is why does anyone give them any attention or space to print this crap other than on wingnut blogs.  Eaton took her lie to the Southtown Star and got it pubished presumably because it was an opinion piece. It was an opinion piece, it just had several facts supporting the claims wrong.  And not just wrong, but the opposite of her claims.

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Eaton tries to lie herself out yesterday’s lie. She claims the below proves that Ginsburg thought the ERA would eliminate survivor benefits for women who choose to stay home.

“Congress and the President should direct their attention to the concept that pervades the Code: that the adult world is (and should be) divided into two classes – independent men, whose primary responsibility is to win bread for a family, and dependent women, whose primary responsibility is to care for children and household. This concept must be eliminated from the code if it is to reflect the equality principle.”

Of course, this is directly contradicted by the text of page 45 in which the recommendations for Social Security changes include making the language gender neutral so that men and women have equal access to survivor benefits regardless who who works and who might stay at home.

But what is even more telling is how she uses the quote above that doesn’t even make the argument she claims it makes.  It talks about making the code gender neutral, not eliminating benefits for women who didn’t work outside the home.

What Fran cannot do is cite the next paragraph that demonstrates just how much of a liar Fran is:

Underlying the recommendations made in this report is the fundamental point that allocation of responsibilities within the family is a matter properly determined solely by the individuals involved.  Government should not steer individual decisions concerning household or breadwinning roles by casting the law’s weight on the side of (or against) a particular method of ordering private relationships.  Rather, a policy of strict neutrality should be pursued.  That policy should accomodate both traditional and innovative patterns.  At the same time, it should assure removal of artificial constraints so that women and men willing to explore their full potential as human beings may create new traditions by their actions.

Combine this with the recommendations on page 45 and what is clear is that Ginsburg argued for expanding benefits to widowers as well as widows, not to eliminate benefits to widows.

Why Eaton feels the need to lie about the report is beyond me, but she clearly did.  And the Southtown Star helped her in that endeavor.

Fran Eaton pulls out the Phyllis Schlafley lie book on the ERA

Pro-traditional family activists are very concerned that with the ERA, states will be forced to issue marriage licenses to any two persons who request them because the ERA eliminates discrimination based on sex.

The horrors.  But more to the point, passing the ERA would require than any differentiation based on sex by the government at any level be a suspect classification that would require a strict scrutiny test.  The ERA wouldn’t eliminate any differentiation based on gender, it would simply put the burden on the state to demonstrate there was a compelling state interest in treating the sexes differently.  Abortion rights and same sex marriage rights in states that have adopted them have primarily relied upon privacy rights. Those that do rely upon state level ERA provisions largely have more sweeping interpretations of text.  To put it simply, the ban on same sex marriage hits both genders the same way so no differentiation occurs.  The exceptions to such an interpretation are far smaller than the interpretation of the few states that have even considered the argument. Abortion wise, there are only two states where such an argument has been successful.  Federal law bases abortion on privacy grounds, not gender differentiation.

But Madigan may not be aware that stay-at-home moms and widows will be affected by the passage of the ERA. Women who have chosen a career of taking care of their families instead of a career outside the home no longer will be able to tap into their husband’s Social Security reserves upon his retirement or death.

Because sex no longer will be a factor, provisions within Social Security set aside for women who haven’t paid into the system will be discontinued. This is the opinion of none else than U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

This is where one asks if the Southtown Star has editors. For those interested in the report, I have uploaded it here.

The problem here is, this report was written 30 years ago and much has changed. The  gender bias in the Social Security code is largely eliminated with survivors or either gender eligible for Social Security benefits under the same conditions.
But where Fran is lying outright is in stating the opinion of Ruth Bader Ginsburg.  First, though kind of a secondary point, the report doesn’t address what the passage of the ERA would do, it simply lays out where the authors find evidence of differential treatment by sex in the US Code.

More importantly, Eaton specifically lies about Ginsburg’s position in the report because Ginsburg and her co-author argue to make it easier for women or men who stay at home to collect Social Security benefits, not that eliminating the bias would lead to a loss of benefits.  Don’t believe me?  Read page 45 of the report.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg actually argued for improved support for individuals who stayed at home and worked instead of entering the formalized workforce.

In other words, the Southtown Star has let one of their columnists brazenly lie about a matter of public policy in their pages.  It’s not an opinion Eaton is offering, she states the argument based on what she claims to be a fact about the report which is demonstrably false.  There is simply no excuse for this sort of shoddy work by a newspaper.  One expects it out of Eaton who seldom concerns herself with accuracy, but putting it in the Southtown start is inexcusable.

But not only will the ERA’s passage stir the hackles of little old ladies and helpless widows, 18-year-old college women may be up in arms

No longer will military registration be required of just males, it also will be required of females – again, no discrimination based on sex. While more and more young women are choosing the military as a career option, if the draft were to be enacted in a stepped-up defense in the war on terror, our 18-year-old women would be forced into service along with our 18-year-old men.

This is, of course, completely baffling.  If the country were to require the draft to be reinstated, there is no argument made by her against drafting women other than women might not want to go.  Most guys don’t either.  Hence, why one has a draft.  Given physical standards would largely separate women and men, women could take over a large share of the support functions along with the men who don’t meet physical standards for combat.

Yes, that’s right.  Prohibiting unequal treatment due to gender would be against families and be pro-choice. Fran Eaton says so

This can be seen as nothing less than rubbing the prolife/profamily movement’s face in the fact that Democrat liberals are in control of Illinois and, well, they have to live up to their quid pro quo agreement with the pro-abort, anti-traditional family lobby in Springfield.Mark this day as the day Mike Madigan has shed the pro-life disguise he has been hiding behind for years as he so wittingly convinced gullible pro-life and pro-family lobbyists for years that he’s “one of them.”

The tragedy is that phony disguise has kept Madigan in power for so long. I, for one, am weary of having our noses disgracefully rubbed in the fact that we strive to defeat the ERA in order to protect innocent life, defend traditional families and hold on to the greatness of a constitution that already treats the sexes equally.

And has anyone pointed out to Mr. Madigan that someday he may have to explain to one of his daughter Lisa’s little ones that == thanks to Grandpa and the maneuvers he pulled while Speaker of the Illinois House in 2008 — that when they turn 18, those little girls will be required to register for the draft?

The obvious question being why shouldn’t women have to register for the draft if men do?

The radical danger to families:

Section 1. Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.

Section 2. The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.

Section 3. This amendment shall take effect two years after the date of ratification.

You have to be batshit paranoid insane to believe the above is a bad idea

Kirk Cameron witnessing to gang bangers

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Someone put the Keyes moments together

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angry.wav

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Zahm screws up the petition challenge in Illinois 14.

Local conservative political operative Jon Zahm, a volunteer on state Sen. Chris Lauzen’s campaign, was one of the two objectors to claim that many of the signatures on Dilger’s petition are invalid, putting him below the minimum amount needed to run for the office.

In a three-page report issued Thursday, Illinois State Board of Elections hearing officer Kelly McCloskey Cherf recommended that the full board reject that objection on a technicality. Cherf stated that the objectors should have identified the specific objection for each signature in an attachment to their objection petition.

Since the GOP’s Daddy Complex is showing, I think JSF’s comment deserves elevation:

OK, or how about in Fast Times.

Damone gets Stacy knocked up.  She says she wants an abortion.  But Mike Damone is a real man.  He isn't paying for any abortion.  And then, he treats Stacy like the slut that she is.

Congrats to you, Mike Damone.  You too win a Stannie Award for excellence in cinemagraphic heroism in the face of abortion.

Mike Damone, A Man’s Man

He also has great advice for getting women 

Perhaps she should have a talk with Jill

I’ll be honest.  I wasn’t sure what the term “beat it like a rented mule” meant at the time, but it was easy to figure out he meant to disrespect and degrade Senator Clinton.  I am guilty myself of doing that among friends, don’t get me wrong, but for a U.S. Senator to say something like that about a colleague and a female to boot — no matter how private the meeting, even among strangers — was appalling.

I was thinking about the term “beat her like a rented mule” again today when I saw the Obama story.  Urban Dictionary has three definitions for the term.  Read them for yourself HERE, I’m too embarrassed to copy and paste them on Illinois Review.

You tell me which one YOU think the good Senator McCain meant when he answered my question “How do you intend to beat Hillary Clinton?”

It may be how the “big boys” talk behind closed panel doors, but McCain revealed that day how out of touch he is and how he has no chance of gaining the support of the conservative movement’s female half, and thus, the GOP nomination.

These aren’t issues, they are subscriptions:

One of the best scenes in the Godfather movie trilogy was in “Godfather II,” when Kay Corleone (Diane Keaton) told her husband Michael (Al Pacino) she was taking their two children and leaving him. The dialogue:

Michael: Do you expect me to let you take my children from me?…. Don’t you know that’s an impossibility, that that could never happen, that I’d use all my power to keep something like that from ever happening?…. I know you blame me for losing the baby. Yes. I know what that meant to you. Kay. I swear I’ll make it up to you…. I’ll change. And you’ll forget about this miscarriage, and we’ll have another child, and we’ll go on, you and I, we’ll go on.

Kay: Oh – oh, Michael, Michael, you are blind. It wasn’t a miscarriage. It was an abortion, an abortion, Michael! Just like our marriage is an abortion, something that’s unholy and evil. I didn’t want your son, Michael! I wouldn’t bring another one of your sons into this world! It was an abortion, Michael. It was a son, a son, and I had it killed, because this must all end. I know now that it’s over. I knew it then. There would be no way, Michael, no way you could ever forgive me, not with this Sicilian thing that’s been going on for 2,000 years….

SLAP.

Michael: You won’t take my family!

And she doesn’t.

That spontaneous slap was the reaction of a real man who a woman had just told she aborted his baby. Compare that to the modern day cowardly male response, “It’s your choice. Whatever you decide, I’ll support you.” Or worse, his threat to abandon her if she does not abort.

It was this fierce devotion to family that strangely endeared us to the Corleone men despite their otherwise heinous behavior.

 More recently

In Mr. Brooks, the teenage daughter of serial killer Earl Brooks (Costner) turns up pregnant midway through her first semester of college. When Jane tells her parents, Earl emphatically states abortion is out of the question and offers to raise the baby. Jane is equally emphatically abortion minded until that moment, when she says she will reconsider. Typical. If a mother in a crisis pregnancy is offered love and support, she will most often choose life.

I won’t give away the end of Mr. Brooks except to say the prospect of his seeing future grandchild became Earl’s motivation for a life or death decision.

All of this is way twisted, I know. But similar to Godfather II, even a schizophrenic serial killer knows abortion is wrong, and similar to Godfather II, this became a redeeming quality of one who had no others.

Mr. Brooks’ pro-life stance was an obviously planned juxtaposition.

On one hand he was a serial killer no better than Dahmer and Gacy.

On the other, he was pro-life. Of of all possible character attributes, the writer and director chose this as Mr. Brooks’ one featured nobility, something they decided demonstrated the exact opposite of the schizophrenic killer mentality.

Why is that?

The comments are even more, ahem, interesting.  I know and respect many people who are pro-life. You aren’t helping their cause.

Isn’t so bad according to Fran over at Illinois Review

Seems like good enough reasons to push these cold-blooded murderers ’til just short of the breaking point, doesn’t it?  Waterboarding is carefully monitored torture — something they can avoid if they tell what they know.

And because these radical extremists decapitate innocent journalists and strap bombs to children, we know they will not fight according to traditional war decorum, they choose to operate outside the protection of the Geneva Convention Rules.

Careful monitoring of torture is apparently fine.  But torturing someone without careful monitoring—ooooohhhhh noooooo.  We don’t do that.

In other fun, George Dienhart suggests that since George Bush isn’t doing the same things as Musharraf, it’s silly to criticize the President. It is left unclear as to when one might start complaining, but let me suggest a few criteria:

• Politicizing the Justice Department
• Ignoring Habeas Corpus enshrined in 1215
• Ignoring the 4th Amendment (no one is against wiretapping calls, they just want warrants–even if the warrants can be granted retroactively)
• Torture–something we specifically forbade because of a previous tyrant’s abuses
• Issuing signing statements that directly contradict US Law
• and more if you want

He’s not protecting the free world by damaging the rule of law.

But everything can be blamed on Bill Clinton

We knew that Nuclear Weapons in Pakistan were bad. At least I knew. Apparently, the Clinton administration had no strong feelings either way. On May 28, 1998 Pakistan announced that it had successfully conducted five nuclear tests You remember 1998. It was toward the end of the Clinton administration. Pakistan could have built nuclear weapons during the Reagan and Bush administrations. They did not. Again, we see that Bill Clinton is responsible for a major foreign policy blunder. This one could potentially result in thousands of American deaths.

Nice story, but it’s not true:

India’s 1974 testing of a nuclear “device” gave Pakistan’s nuclear program new momentum. Through the late 1970s, Pakistan’s program acquired sensitive uranium enrichment technology and expertise. The 1975 arrival of Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan considerably advanced these efforts. Dr. Khan is a German-trained metallurgist who brought with him knowledge of gas centrifuge technologies that he had acquired through his position at the classified URENCO uranium enrichment plant in the Netherlands. Dr. Khan also reportedly brought with him stolen uranium enrichment technologies from Europe. He was put in charge of building, equipping and operating Pakistan’s Kahuta facility, which was established in 1976. Under Khan’s direction, Pakistan employed an extensive clandestine network in order to obtain the necessary materials and technology for its developing uranium enrichment capabilities.

In 1985, Pakistan crossed the threshold of weapons-grade uranium production, and by 1986 it is thought to have produced enough fissile material for a nuclear weapon. Pakistan continued advancing its uranium enrichment program, and according to Pakistani sources, the nation acquired the ability to carry out a nuclear explosion in 1987.

Why Does Illinois Review Hate America?

Seriously, someone at the Trib smack Dold over the head for allowing this crap in his paper.

The problem with dismissing the Carroll study because it is epidemiological is that you’ll also have to dismiss a multitude of public health studies, including ones claiming a link between radon and lung cancer. These are the same epidemiological studies that alarmed millions of Americans, frightening them into buying radon detectors and creating a huge radon mitigation business. No study is perfect, and Carroll’s shortcoming is that his data do not allow comparisons of individual women over time. But other major studies have, and according to one unchallenged compressive analysis of those studies, they show that a pregnant woman who has never had a child before and aborts in the first term increased her chance of breast cancer by 50 percent.

Let me offer up the model from the paper

Two explanatory variables are selected for modeling: (abortion)and (fertility).The trends for abortion and fertility are shown in Figures 8 and 9 for countries considered. The Mathematical Model is then:

Y_i = a + b₁x_1i + b₂x_2i + e_i

where Y represents cumulated cohort incidence of breast cancer within a particular age group; a is intercept, b₁ and b₂ are coefficients, and e is random error.

That creates a guffaw from those who know statistics at all.

He has a correlation Coefficient of .98.

Those who understand correlation coefficients are shooting liquid through their nose if they were drinking anything right now. I had to look at it about 20 minutes to understand this moron was trying to sell a .98 correlation coefficient.
What he has done is take mass data that shows one factor increasing (abortion) and another decreasing (fertility) and then regresses it upon a variable that is increasing-incidence of breast cancer.

So if I were to regress the number of abortions and the fertility rate on the number of televisions sold per person, I’d get about the same result over this period of time. So I can, according to this dumbass, claim credibly that television leads to breat cancer. Or, as the Orac points out, the reduction in the number of pirates has led to global warming.
There’s a variety of problems in this study starting with he throws out independent variables well established by other studies. In the case of linear regression, the problem is that if you do not include other variables, you cannot control for those variables and so not are just theoretical variables excluded, but well established variables demonstrated over and over are excluded from the analysis. To say the least, this is an underspecified

A regression model is underspecified if the regression equation is missing one or more important predictor variables. This situation is perhaps the worst-case scenario, because an underspecified model yields biased regression coefficients and biased predictions of the response. That is, in using the model, we would consistently underestimate or overestimate the population slopes and the population means. To make already bad matters even worse, the mean square error MSE tends to overestimate ?², thereby yielding wider confidence intervals than it should.

No one accepts a .98 coefficient. No one. That is essentially regressing one variable on itself and in this case, it’s the regressing less restrictive abortion laws with a number of factors that have led to an increase in breast cancer.

Ecological inference is not an acceptable means of imputing causation on individuals from macro level data and this study violates the principle. One might use it to explore potential causes and whether there is a gross correlation, but not to determine causality. For that one requires cohort information or some other way to address individual observations.

It’s junk science. Yet the Chicago Tribune keeps publishing a clown who insists there is a link, but is wholly unqualified to judge that and uses crappy studies to do it. Why?