Midday open thread: Doctors, equality and gay bars

• Today's comic by Tom Tomorrow is Doctor Hand:
  
  
• What you missed on Sunday Kos ...
  

  • The country doesn't like Republicans? Well, Republicans don't like the country either, by Dante Atkins
  • Anti-racism is not ‘anti-white’, no matter what Republicans say, by Denise Oliver Velez
  • For Obama to claim some credibility on the NSA spying scandal, Alexander and Clapper must go, by Laurence Lewis
  • Obama has done nothing to address income inequality. Right, by Ian Reifowitz
  • Makers Versus Takers, We Must Get The Narrative Right, by Egberto Willies
  • No water, no life, by VL Baker
  • Our networks don't always work so well, by DarkSyde

• The times, they are a changin':
  

  A gay couple became the first men to marry each other West Point yesterday. Larry Choate III and Daniel Lennox, both graduates of storied military academy, married Saturday at the U.S. Military Academy's famed Gothic Cadet Chapel.

• Debunking myths about people struggling to survive:
  

  A new survey of panhandlers in downtown San Francisco dispels a number of myths that society propagates about homeless people.

  Conventional wisdom is that those on the sidewalk asking for a dollar are lazy freeloaders who will use the money for alcohol or drugs. Some even think that beggars are living large off of handouts, such as Fox News’ John Stossel, who has bravely used his television perch to take on beggars. “I had heard that some people beg for a living and make big bucks — $80,000 a year in some cases,” Stossel told Fox & Friends. “You really shouldn’t give to these street people,” Stossel concluded. “You are really supporting alcoholism and drug problems.” [...]

  They found that, for the vast majority of beggars, Stossel’s view was simply not true.
  In San Francisco’s Union Square, the typical panhandler is a disabled middle-aged single male who is a racial minority and makes less than $25 per day despite panhandling seven days a week for more than five years. Though Stossel was insistent that panhandlers just use the money for beer and pot, the majority of those surveyed did not. In fact, 94 percent used the meager funds they raised for food.

• They should be so proud:
  

  Last spring, Pat "PJ" Newton applied for a local business license to open a bar and cafe in Shannon, Miss., two hours away from her Memphis, Tenn., home.

  A few weeks later, at the mayor's request, she attended a meeting at the Shannon town hall ... A man in the back stood and held up a petition signed by nearly 200 residents. "We don't want another bar here in the town," Newton remembers him saying. The petition declared that the bar would offer "no benefits or enhancements to the citizens of the Town of Shannon." At the end of the meeting, the town's aldermen voted 4 to 1 to reject Newton's application ... "The children will be influenced," one man said, according to the meeting minutes. One woman said her son practiced soccer in a nearby field. "I don't want my son playing soccer anywhere near the bar," she said, according to Newton. [...]

  Although some people at the town hall meeting said they simply didn't want another bar in town, no matter the sexual identity of its patrons, several residents who signed the petition presented that night confirmed to The Huffington Post that they did so because they knew the bar would cater to gays. One 80-year-old resident, Betty Scott, put it bluntly: "I'm anti-gay."

• Jimmy, back in the day:
  

  "That's the closest I've come to getting into a fist fight with a head of state."

  -- Jimmy Carter, quoted by the South Africa Sunday Times, saying he "almost got in a fight with the president of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki, because he was refusing to let Aids be treated."

• From the weird files:
  

  A small alligator found under an escalator at Chicago’s O'Hare International Airport has left authorities puzzled.

  A maintenance worker discovered the alligator, which is about a foot long, on Friday in Terminal 3, Chicago Police spokesman Jose Estrada said Sunday.

  An officer captured the reptile by putting a trash can over it.

  ‘‘We don’t know where it came from or how long it'd been residing in the airport facilities,’’ Estrada said. ‘‘It’s one of those random incidents.’’

• We're in classic mode once again for today's Kagro in the Morning show, with a pre-2012 election/post-Sandy episode, featuring polling & punditry roundups with a storm-impacted Greg Dworkin. We discussed Chris Christie's cooperation with President Obama, the strange-sounding-but-explainable call of "toss-up" for OH, the punditry's ongoing love affair with "The Narrative," and Republicans' clinging to "The Math." But is "The Math" really just code for "we're cheating"? Plus, more on the astonishing idiocy of attacks on Nate Silver, and Dick Morris has finally written The Dumbest Thing Ever.