Rep. Todd Akin has made up his own responses to rape and women…

Rep. Todd Akin has made up his theories about the female body being able to turn off responses to rape.

This is pretty stupid for the Tea Party… and female bodies when subjected to rape do not have ways to shut the whole thing down.

This is not the situation that is defined by response by women to the Tea Party view.

Related articles

• Todd Akin: Claire McCaskill was like a “wildcat” in debate (washingtonpost.com)
• Todd Akin’s wife to GOP: Stop raping my husband! (dailykos.com)
• “The Arbiter For Women”: Todd Akin Just Can’t Seem To “Shut It Down” (mykeystrokes.com)
• Rep. Todd Akin’s comments prove need for sex ed in schools (suntimes.com)
• Rep. Todd Akin Says It’s Rare Women Get Pregnant from ‘Legitimate Rape’ (theatlanticwire.com)
• Todd Akin: ‘Legitimate’ rape victims don’t get pregnant (dailykos.com)
• Claire McCaskill: Todd Akin ‘Makes Michele Bachmann Look Like A Hippie’ (huffingtonpost.com)

What I worry about the most… Opinions of remarkably uninformed Republican voters.

If this were only one woman, I could walk away from it without worrying. The fact is, she is one of millions who have absorbed this Tea Party crap and WILL get out and vote.

Nothing will educate these folks. Nothing.

Went to Green Drinks in Harper’s Ferry…

Green Drinks is a group that gets together once a month so that people with interests in conservation, green energy and related subjects can interact with each other. Elly has been going to this since it relates to Sustainable Shepherdstown. Tonite I went along with her.

There was a speaker this evening, something I’m told doesn’t usually happen at these events. His name is John Amos and his company is SkyTruth. This is an organization which uses satellite and aerial photography to evaluate the effects of oil drilling and shale fracking and other destructive things that people do to the earth. He has been especially involved with viewing BP’s oil leak history in the Gulf.

Amos gave a slide presentation with amazing pictures that got us all worked up and had us considering what we could do to help correct the situation… not an easy thing to do.

More on the solutions later.

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Matt Taibbi on the Tea Party Movement…

The current issue of Rolling Stone has an investigative article by Matt Taibbi entitled: Tea and Crackers: How corporate interests and Republican insiders built the Tea Party monster. Allow me to say that it is both amazing and revealing. Here is a brief section… please, please, please go in and read the whole thing… you will not regret it:

By  Matt Taibbi

Sep 28, 2010 7:01 AM EDT

This is an article from the October 15, 2010 issue of Rolling Stone.

It’s taken three trips to Kentucky, but I’m finally getting my Tea Party epiphany exactly where you’d expect: at a Sarah Palin rally. The red-hot mama of American exceptionalism has flown in to speak at something called the National Quartet Convention in Louisville, a gospel-music hoedown in a giant convention center filled with thousands of elderly white Southerners. Palin — who earlier this morning held a closed-door fundraiser for Rand Paul, the Tea Party champion running for the U.S. Senate — is railing against a GOP establishment that has just seen Tea Partiers oust entrenched Republican hacks in Delaware and New York. The dingbat revolution, it seems, is nigh.

“We’re shaking up the good ol’ boys,” Palin chortles, to the best applause her aging crowd can muster. She then issues an oft-repeated warning (her speeches are usually a tired succession of half-coherent one-liners dumped on ravenous audiences like chum to sharks) to Republican insiders who underestimated the power of the Tea Party Death Star. “Buck up,” she says, “or stay in the truck.”

Stay in what truck? I wonder. What the hell does that even mean?

Scanning the thousands of hopped-up faces in the crowd, I am immediately struck by two things. One is that there isn’t a single black person here. The other is the truly awesome quantity of medical hardware: Seemingly every third person in the place is sucking oxygen from a tank or propping their giant atrophied glutes on motorized wheelchair-scooters. As Palin launches into her Ronald Reagan impression — “Government’s not the solution! Government’s the problem!” — the person sitting next to me leans over and explains.

“The scooters are because of Medicare,” he whispers helpfully. “They have these commercials down here: ‘You won’t even have to pay for your scooter! Medicare will pay!’ Practically everyone in Kentucky has one.”A hall full of elderly white people in Medicare-paid scooters, railing against government spending and imagining themselves revolutionaries as they cheer on the vice-presidential puppet hand-picked by the GOP establishment. If there exists a better snapshot of everything the Tea Party represents, I can’t imagine it.

After Palin wraps up, I race to the parking lot in search of departing Medicare-motor-scooter conservatives. I come upon an elderly couple, Janice and David Wheelock, who are fairly itching to share their views.

“I’m anti-spending and anti-government,” crows David, as scooter-bound Janice looks on. “The welfare state is out of control.”

“OK,” I say. “And what do you do for a living?”

“Me?” he says proudly. “Oh, I’m a property appraiser. Have been my whole life.”

I frown. “Are either of you on Medicare?”

Silence: Then Janice, a nice enough woman, it seems, slowly raises her hand, offering a faint smile, as if to say, You got me!

“Let me get this straight,” I say to David. “You’ve been picking up a check from the government for decades, as a tax assessor, and your wife is on Medicare. How can you complain about the welfare state?”

“Well,” he says, “there’s a lot of people on welfare who don’t deserve it. Too many people are living off the government.”

I’d love to go on here, but I owe it to Rolling Stone to have you go THERE.

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• The best and funniest Tea Party exegesis ever…. (tagg-lines.com)
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