Where the right-to-lifers want us all to live

On Wednesday, National Advocates for Pregnant Women (NAPW) announced a lawsuit has been filed in federal court seeking the immediate release from state custody of a pregnant Wisconsin woman who was involuntarily detained at a drug treatment facility despite no evidence she was using drugs while pregnant. 

Alicia Beltran, a 28-year-old pregnant woman confided in health-care workers about her prior use of painkillers and her efforts to end that use on her own during an early prenatal care visit. On July 18, Wisconsin law enforcement officials arrested her under a 1997 Wisconsin law, which gives the state the power to forcibly detain any pregnant woman who “habitually lacks self-control” and poses a “substantial risk” to the health of an egg, embryo, or fetus. 

[snip] 

NAPW notes in its announcement of the lawsuit that Beltran “was forcibly taken into custody by law enforcement when she was 15 weeks pregnant, put into handcuffs and shackles, and brought to a court hearing. Although a lawyer had already been appointed to represent her fetus, Ms. Beltran had no right to counsel—and therefore had no attorney—at the initial court appearance. Then, without testimony from a single medical expert, the court ordered her to be detained at an inpatient drug treatment program two hours from her home.”

Attorney Linda Vanden Heuvel, who represents Beltran, explained in a statement that “[l]ocking up Ms. Beltran, under the Wisconsin law, does not serve the best interests of Ms. Beltran’s future child and most certainly tramples the rights of Ms. Beltran, a woman who was not in fact using any controlled substances at the time of her arrest and who is committed to having a healthy pregnancy.”

Vote Rigging in Wisconsin?

And every other election in the US?

If vote-rigging prospers, none may call it vote-rigging. It simply becomes the new norm. Once again, the universal laws of statistics apply only outside U.S. borders. The recall vote in Wisconsin produced another significant 7% discrepancy between the unadjusted exit poll and the so-called "recorded vote." In actual social science, this level of discrepancy, with the results being so far outside the expected margin of error would not be accepted.

O brave new world

That has such people in't!

Crabby.

Wisconsin

Wisconsin is all of us.



Update: What did Walker know and when did he know it?

Things that make you go eep!

  Dying Honeybees: It Was the Insecticides All Along

With news that the U.S. honeybee population has been so devastated that some beekeepers will qualify for disaster relief dollars, comes a report from Purdue University that one of the causes of honeybee deaths is - as long suspected - neonicotinoids.
I say one of the causes, because the article does. In fact, the levels of neonicotinoid contamination of the powder used to spread seeds - up to 700,000 times the lethal dose - suggest that this pesticide may be the major, or precipitating, cause, with Varroa mites and other problems simply the straw that breaks the camel’s back.

  Snakes blamed for ‘severe declines’ in Florida wildlife

But from 2003-2011, surveys spotted a 99.3 percent decrease in racoons, 98.9 percent fewer opossums and no rabbits or foxes, said the article authored by Michael Dorcasa at Davidson College in North Carolina and colleagues at the Department of Fish and Wildlife Conservation and the National Park Service. Surveys also saw 94.1 percent fewer white-tailed deer and 87.5 percent fewer bobcats. These “severe apparent declines in mammal populations… coincide temporally and spatially with the proliferation of pythons in Everglades National Park,” said the study. During that period, annual removals of Burmese pythons have risen from less than 50 per year to 300-400 annually.

Bus-sized asteroid shaves by Earth

WASHINGTON: An asteroid about the size of a bus shaved by Earth on Friday in what spacewatchers described as a "near-miss", though experts were not concerned about the possibility of an impact. The asteroid, named 2012 BX34, measured between 8 and 18 m in diameter, said Gareth Williams, associate director of the U.S.-based Minor Planet Centre which tracks space objects. The asteroid had been unknown before it popped into view of the Catalina Sky Survey at Mt. Lemmon Survey in Arizona, and the Global Remote Telescope Network (GRAS) Telescope at the Magdalena Ridge Observatory in New Mexico Arizona on Wednesday. It came within 59,044 km of Earth on Friday, said Williams, which is equivalent to about 0.17 times the distance separating Earth and the Moon. "It's a near miss. It makes the top 20 list of closest approaches ever observed."

UPDATE: Walker's Goons and Facebook Threats: You Signed a Petition, So We Know Where You Live!

The Government Accountability Board has been working long hours to scan the 1.9 million signatures into online and publicly accessible pdfs. They are done with the Senate petitions, and are just now finishing up the Walker signatures. The files are arranged as scanned pdf pages in sequences of 50, and can be seen here. A rightwing Walker support group, Verify the Recall, has been creating searchable databases of these pages, crowd-sourcing the data entry. It has been only a matter of (brief) time before the first threats of retaliation against petition signers should surface.

Optical illusion.

American Spring

Al Gore:

“We need to have an American spring,” he said. “Non-violent change, where people from the grassroots get involved again. Not in the tea party style. There are people who are genuinely upset in the tea party, I understand that, but that movement was funded with seed money from right-wing billionaires, the Koch brothers, and promoted on Fox News and turned into a stalking horse for this right-wing agenda that a lot of people have been trying to push on this country for a long time.”

“This country is in trouble,” Gore added. “Our democracy has been withering on the vine. This has been going on for some time.”

Wisconsin. Even though they try to burn down the opposition. But even Governor Walker has to creep away from his plan to shut DMV offices in Democratic areas.



(Lyrics)

Meanwhile

After the fake debt crisis, reality reappears:

Record high radiation at crippled Japan nuke plant

Chile: Snow, rain hit world's driest desert

FAA fiasco won’t be resolved anytime soon

Wisconsin Citizen Jumps Through DMV Hoops to Get Photo ID in Order to Cast Legal Vote

Oh boy...

If cats reported the news

Stripes says everything looks great from his perspective...

Scale of the universe.

Admission by Walker that it was all about union busting. And questions mount over the supreme court vote in Wisconsin.

Atlas Shrugged Part 1.

Bashing teachers is as much fun as hippie punching. Or tasering kids.

Obama's budget cuts

Refighting the Civil War

This is what a decade of war looks like.

Roger Ebert remembers Sydney Lumet

France bans the burqa

Tracking Japanese radiation around the world and the US. And apparently sea salt and baking soda will fight radiation exposure.... (I suggest buying stock)

Firing the entire city management of Benton Harbor, Michigan. You know these guys wanted to do this like forever....

Revenge!

Letting him have it:

Protesters who marched at the home of Wisconsin state senator Randy Hopper (R-Fond du Lac) were met with something of a surprise on Saturday. Mrs. Hopper appeared at the door and informed them that Sen. Hopper was no longer in residence at this address, but now lives in Madison, WI with his 25-year-old mistress.

And adding insult to injury:

Blogging Blue also reports that Mrs. Hopper intends to sign the recall petition against her husband. The petition has already been signed by the family's maid.

On Wisconsin!

Keith Olbermann, to the point describing Governor Scott Walker as: the cross-eyed Koch-sucker.

Wisconsin high school students.

Wisconsin GOP overreaches: Wisconsin GOP Bill Allows State to Fire Employees for Strikes, Walk-Outs

Robert Reich: Governor Walker's Coup D'Etat

Why Wisconsin matters

From Chris Hayes' article:

The other problem is that our system is responsive only to voices at the top of the social pyramid—the bankers and businessmen who are raking in record bonuses and the professional upper middle class, which is recovering much faster than the nation as a whole. In a 2007 paper titled “Inequality and Democratic Responsiveness in the United States,” Princeton political scientist Martin Gilens analyzed 2,000 survey questions from 1981 to 2002, looking for the relationship between public opinion and policy outcomes. He found that “when Americans with different income levels differ in their policy preferences, actual policy outcomes strongly reflect the preferences of the most affluent but bear little relationship to the preferences of poor or middle income Americans.”

There is only so much social distance a society can take. The social science literature shows that as social distance increases, trust declines and aberrant and predatory behavior increases. The basic mechanisms of representation erode, and the social fabric tears. “An imbalance between rich and poor,” Plutarch warned, “is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.”

It’s against this backdrop of creeping dissolution that the word “union” takes on a renewed power. That’s why the struggles of the protesters in Wisconsin have resonated so profoundly. In banding together to oppose Republican Governor Scott Walker’s power grab, the students, teachers, cops, firefighters and neighbors have willed themselves to shrink the social distance those in power are cynically using to pit constituencies against one another. Walker exempted cops and firefighters from his bill’s radical limits on collective bargaining, but they joined the protests anyway. “An assault on one is an assault on all,” proclaimed Wisconsin Professional Firefighters Association president Mahlon Mitchell.

It’s in Wisconsin and across the Midwest that union members like Mitchell and his allies are showing us the antidote to the social distance that threatens the core of American democracy.

Michael Moore saves America

(h/t to Steve Bates)

Governor Scott Walker's lies

20 and counting.

This is what democracy looks like

We Are Wisconsin from Finn Ryan on Vimeo.

(h/t to mahakal on Facebook)

Exactly.

Athenae* [Scout] of First Draft has a video up

From Wisconsin:



*This was done by Scout for First Draft.

Money talks

Koch industries orchestrating anti-union 'Tea Party' protests in Wisconsin

'It seemed a good idea at the time' department

And now for something completely different....

Wild pigs:

Madison, WI (AHN) - The trial of a former Texas man charged with bringing 31 wild pigs into Wisconsin and illegally releasing them in 2000 will resume on Friday.

Robert Johnson, a former Gays Mills elk farmer, allegedly released the pigs near the Kickapoo River in an effort to establish a pig population for hunters. But officials say the animals cause environmental damage by uprooting trees and eating crops and they want to fine him $1,000 per pig.

Wisconsin has declared feral pigs to be an unprotected wild animal with no closed hunting season or harvest limit because of the damage they do.

A twenty pound hamburger: Man eats 20.2lb burger in five hours. (With before and after pictures. He does look a little... odd at the end there.)

Chasing a rolling cheese:

Every year a bunch of fearless men and women hurl themselves down a near-vertical English hill in pursuit of a giant rolling cheese. Although gravity ensures they all make it down the slope, not all competitors do so in one piece.

And then there's Greece:

The one-day pagan fertility festival in this town of 15,000 people near the central Greek city of Larissa marks the beginning of Lent, the fasting period before Easter, and is one of the most famous carnivals in Greece.

Come prepared. Passersby tend to be grabbed and rocked over a pot of boiling "bourani" spinach soup while a ceramic penis is placed between their legs. They must kiss the phallus, then drink tsipouro -- a strong local spirit -- from its tip, and then stir the soup before they're let go.

Phallus-kissers are rewarded with ash-streaks on their face, which presumably absolves them from having to go through the procedure again, unless of course they would like to.