Todd Akin is the Republican that everybody is still talking about, and to the dismay of folks like RNC chair Reince Priebus, Akin is not going away. In fact, we may be getting to the point where we expect to find outrage and people are repeating hoaxes about him(more on that later). And there are signs that this is still a close race between Akin and Sen. Claire McCaskill, and for the sake of our nation's collective sanity, we must support McCaskill who is the only woman standing between Akin and the Senate.
It may surprise us, but there are some women that actually strongly support Akin as the Washington Post found. Of this group of conservative women, the Post says
They are women who think that they have in some ways become less liberated in recent decades, not more; who think that easy abortion, easy birth control and a tawdry popular culture have degraded their stature, not elevated it.
The operative word in that sentence is easy. It's the perception that readily available abortion(and contraception) makes it "easy" for the woman that needs it, and I strongly suspect that these conservative women have unconsciously absorbed the narrative that women who use contraception are "loose". The truth of the matter is that abortion is not easy for a woman to do even when medically it should be done. And as Sandra Fluke has shown us, the cost of contraception is not a trivial matter to the uninsured or even to those who have steep co-pays on their insurance. Thankfully, the Affordable Care Act aka Obamacare will make it much easier for women who have insurance to have no co-pays on contraception. And when a local environment is so hostile to women being able to exercise their self-evident Reproductive Rights, we see examples of
Texas women crossing the border into Mexico to get an over-the-counter pill that they hope will help terminate an unwanted pregnancy, and they often cannot get proper medical advice on how the pill should be taken.
And we can also see that the Religious Right is made-up of forced birthers of both sexes that peddle the same rhetoric as Mike Huckabee.
Barnes, a local Republican committeewoman, told a reporter that if a woman is raped and becomes pregnant, then God has “blessed this person with a life” that should not be taken.
“I didn’t mean a loving gift,” Barnes later clarified. “The whole concept of rape is so violent, so horrific. I was just trying to say — it’s just hard to express that the child should not be punished.”
I am an agnostic. I believe that the existence of God or a higher power is unknowable. I do not discount the possibility of a Creator. I do however find it impossible for a human being to rightfully discern the will of this alleged Being since God cannot be scientifically proven and thus no way to accurately gauge that a human being is accurately acting in accordance to its will. I will say that blastocysts and zygotes are only potential life that are entirely dependent on their "host", the mother. And fundamentalists and forced birthers can slice and spin it anyway they want, they are giving more rights to a rapist than a rape victim, and in a just society that cannot stand.
The Washington Post article does a good job at probing the psyche of these conservative women, and showing how they acquired the viewpoints that they have. The article details how one of the women went to college in the 70s, and said that she had never felt that she needed liberating and how her parents always told her to do what she wanted and work hard for it. Then it details how she hit the glass ceiling and how she couldn't get the government assistance she needed because her income was too high. I am always amazed at people who vote for those who directly oppose their interests, but then again, the Republican party seems to have a lot of self-haters ranging from the Log Cabin Republicans to women who support misogynists.
The following item shouldn't surprise us. Todd Akin is fighting back hard against the national and local party establishment. Huffington Post detailed how Todd Akin said in a statemtn on his own website that Priebus has a "personal vendetta" against him. This was in response to Preibus saying(and I think that he's lying):
"He can be tied," Priebus said. "We're not gonna send him a penny."
Somehow I doubt the Republicans would concede a dead heat election to the Democrats when they badly want control of the Senate. HuffPo also mentioned that Akin campaign workers are getting pressure from the
Missouri Republican party officials to jump ship.
And Akin's allies, the anti-LGBT group, the Family Research Council commissioned a new poll done that shows that Akin has a narrow 3 point lead over McCaskill. Politico gives some of the poll's details:
The Family Research Council poll was conducted by Wenzel Strategies from Aug. 27 to Aug. 28, testing 829 voters for a margin of error of plus or minus 3.38 percent. The sample was 32.7 percent Democrats, 34.1 percent Republicans and 33.2 percent independents.
The PDFs for the Wenzel poll are
here and
here in case somebody wants to analyze how biased the Wenzel poll is.
The final news item was how some were fooled by a Todd Akin hoaxthat got a few diaries on here yesterday. Huffington Post reported that:
Reporting on the hoax, Mashable contacted founder and editor Daniel Barkeley, who told the site, “We’re surprised and gratified to see the article’s success." But, Barkeley continued, “We certainly don’t try to fool people into thinking our articles are real, but good satire often requires skating as close to the truth as possible while still being ridiculous.”
While the Daily Currant makes its intentions perfectly clear, Internet hoaxes are relatively easy to concoct on purpose
The fact that social media was reporting it as news and it took a while for everyone to realize that it was a hoax should be a warning to us that we should verify the source(and make sure that the article is not snark, satire or the Onion) before widely reporting a story as fact. We need to make sure that only the truth about Todd Akin spreads far into social media so it doesn't dilute how out-of-touch Akin is from the mainstream. We should remember that Akin has also said how "voting is traditionally a state matter" when talking about federal voting laws. Akin has also said that he wants to privatize Medicare and Social Security. These are a number of real, verified and factual reasons why we must continue to support Claire McCaskill, the only woman standing between Todd Akin and the Senate.
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