The unprecedented level of economic inequality in America is undeniable. In an extended essay, Bill Moyers shares examples of the striking extremes of wealth and poverty across the country, including a video report on California’s Silicon Valley. There, Facebook, Google, and Apple are minting millionaires, while the area’s homeless -- who’ve grown 20 percent in the last two years -- are living in tent cities at their virtual doorsteps.

“A petty, narcissistic, pridefully ignorant politics has come to dominate and paralyze our government,” says Bill, “while millions of people keep falling through the gaping hole that has turned us into the United States of Inequality.”

Full transcript below the fold.

Continue reading »

It’s almost unspeakable. Three young sisters aged 5, 9, and 11 were walking home from school on Valentine's Day when they disappeared. Now, it’s being reported that the girls were found raped and murdered two days later, and the police never launched a proper investigation. After discovering the sisters’ bodies in an old well, police recorded their deaths as “accidental.” It was only after the people from the girls' remote village staged a protest that blocked a national highway Wednesday did officials look into the matter, leading to a medical investigation that revealed the rape and murder. The girls’ mother was offered one million rupees in compensation, but she says, “No amount of money is going to bring my girls back.”

The Guardian reports:

The young mother's tragedy in a remote village once again demonstrated how the police in India often fail to adequately respond to major crimes, especially when it involves women and children.

When a young physiotherapist was brutally gang-raped in a moving Delhi bus in December, the extraordinary public outrage across the country forced Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's government to promise better policing and faster legal action to protect Indian women at home and outside.

But even as lawmakers prepared to discuss a new law against sexual offences on Friday, news of the latest atrocity, involving three young girls in a village more than a thousand kilometres from the Indian capital, was kept under a veil of silence until villagers rioted and blocked the national highway demanding a proper investigation.

"There was no nationwide outrage in response to the latest heinous incident of rape," said a CNN-IBN news anchor. "Why is the nation silent? Or have we become numb?"

A recent study released by Human Rights Watch that said one in three reported rape victims in India were children.

*Trigger Warning* A film by Eve Ensler and Tony Stroebel

One In Three Women On The Planet Will Be Raped Or Beaten In Her Lifetime.

One Billion Women Violated Is An Atrocity.

One Billion Women Dancing Is A Revolution.

Join V-Day on 02.14.13 in a global strike to demand an end to violence.

Strike! Dance! Rise!

#ReasonToRise
http://www.onebillionrising.org/

Hand out photo from the Irish Times on Wednesday shows Savita Halappanavar, who died after being refused a termination of her pregnancy at a hospital in Galway.

A 31-year-old woman admitted to a hospital in Galway, Ireland, late last month with severe back pain was revealed to be miscarrying, but doctors repeatedly refused to abort the fetus.

Savita Halappanavar, who was 17 weeks pregnant at the time, eventually developed septicemia -- a life-threatening infection -- and she died in the intensive care unit a week later.

Via:

Praveen Halappanavar told the Irish Times that his wife, Savita, was suffering intense pain and had been told her baby would not survive. Upset but resigned to losing her child, she was denied an abortion despite repeated pleas with their Galway hospital as she suffered shakes and vomiting, Halappanavar told the newspaper.

“The consultant said it was the law, that this is a Catholic country. Savita said, ‘I am neither Irish nor Catholic,’ but they said there was nothing they could do,” Halappanavar told the newspaper from India.

Abortions are illegal in Ireland except in cases where the mother's life might be at risk.

The fetal heartbeat stopped on the third day, and the dead fetus was removed, but it was too late for Savita. Her condition worsened, and by Saturday she was in organ failure and died shortly after.

The hospital extended its sympathy to the Halappanavar family, but could not discuss any of the details of the case due to investigations underway by both the Health Service Executive, and an internal hospital investigation.

Pat Robertson is shocked and awed that 30% of women in the United States of America love porn. Women are "involved in" pornography? Men "struggle with it?"

Robertson, who has watched a lot of porn -- but only so he can report back to the world on the evils of porn, naturally -- described it as "boring." Then he implied that the best-selling novel "Fifty Shades of Grey" was to blame for the mass corruption leading women to the formerly exclusive to men world of porn. "Mommy porn" he called it, apparently never having heard of "romance novels."

Just wait until he wakes up and finds out there's a black man in the White House.

H/T RightWingWatch for the video.

And rape really does cause pregnancy sometimes...

In an election season in which the Republican Party learned the limitations of appealing almost exclusively to white male voters, a handful of otherwise anonymous white, male, Republican candidates distinguished themselves with a questionable grasp of human reproduction and some disturbing perspectives on rape.

Rachel Maddow reviews the litany of GOP candidates who made the mistake of expressing their offensive ignorance about rape and/or women's bodies out loud in public and notes that the American voting public rejected them at the ballot box.

DOWNLOADS: (110)

PLAYS: (1325)

Embed

Thanks to Heather for the video embed.

In response to a question about what the candidates would do to address gender inequality in the workplace, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney said that when he was governor and looking to fill his cabinet, women's groups brought him "whole binders full women."

Here's an excerpt of Mitt Romney's remarks:

CROWLEY: Governor Romney, pay equity for women?

ROMNEY: Thank you. An important topic, and one which I learned a great deal about, particularly as I was serving as governor of my state, because I had the chance to pull together a cabinet and all the applicants seemed to be men.

And I -- and I went to my staff, and I said, "How come all the people for these jobs are -- are all men." They said, "Well, these are the people that have the qualifications." And I said, "Well, gosh, can't we -- can't we find some -- some women that are also qualified?"

And -- and so we -- we took a concerted effort to go out and find women who had backgrounds that could be qualified to become members of our cabinet.

I went to a number of women's groups and said, "Can you help us find folks," and they brought us whole binders full of women.

I was proud of the fact that after I staffed my Cabinet and my senior staff, that the University of New York in Albany did a survey of all 50 states, and concluded that mine had more women in senior leadership positions than any other state in America.

Now one of the reasons I was able to get so many good women to be part of that team was because of our recruiting effort.

Guess what? Romney's answer isn't true, he never asked for such a study.

From David Bernstein:

What actually happened was that in 2002 -- prior to the election, not even knowing yet whether it would be a Republican or Democratic administration -- a bipartisan group of women in Massachusetts formed MassGAP to address the problem of few women in senior leadership positions in state government. There were more than 40 organizations involved with the Massachusetts Women's Political Caucus (also bipartisan) as the lead sponsor.

They did the research and put together the binder full of women qualified for all the different cabinet positions, agency heads, and authorities and commissions. They presented this binder to Governor Romney when he was elected.
...

First of all, according to MassGAP and MWPC, Romney did appoint 14 women out of his first 33 senior-level appointments, which is a reasonably impressive 42 percent. However, as I have reported before, those were almost all to head departments and agencies that he didn't care about -- and in some cases, that he quite specifically wanted to not really do anything. None of the senior positions Romney cared about -- budget, business development, etc. -- went to women.

Secondly, a UMass-Boston study found that the percentage of senior-level appointed positions held by women actually declined throughout the Romney administration, from 30.0% prior to his taking office, to 29.7% in July 2004, to 27.6% near the end of his term in November 2006. (It then began rapidly rising when Deval Patrick took office.)

Romney's odd phrase "binders full of women" really stuck with viewers of the debate. Twitter users immediately caught onto the comment, with "binders" and "binders full of women" being mentioned at one point in the evening more than 40,000 times in one minute, according to data from Topsy, a social web analytics tool.

The comment also spawned a "Binders Full Of Women" Tumblr account, a "Binders Full Of Women" Facebook page that already has 179,000 likes, and a new Twitter account, @BindersofWomen has over 1,300 followers.

Patrons celebrating "Coming Out Day" at a Moscow club were caught off guard by an attack on Friday when they initially thought masked men were part of a planned performance for an open mic session.

NYT:

The police in Moscow on Friday were seeking two dozen masked men who stormed one of the city’s most popular gay bars early Thursday and beat patrons — most of them women — with fists and bottles. More than 10 people were injured, and three women and a man were hospitalized after the attack, which coincided with a “Coming Out Day” party, club employees said.

The violence comes during an unnerving year for gay men and lesbians in Russia. Three cities, including St. Petersburg, have passed laws criminalizing “homosexual propaganda,” and a spokesman for the Russian Orthodox Church, the country’s predominant faith, has endorsed an initiative to introduce the laws nationwide.

So far, no such law has been passed in the capital. However, a measure banning gay pride parades in Moscow for a century, until May 2112, was upheld by the city’s highest court in August.

Although homosexuality was decriminalized in 1993, discrimination against gays remains strong in Russia. Attempts to hold gay pride events have provoked violence by police and militant Orthodox activists.

Independent monitors say this was the seventh violent attack against gays in reported in Russia this year, but said the true number is much higher since many attacks go unreported due to the stigma.

*Trigger Warning* A film by Eve Ensler and Tony Stroebel

One In Three Women On The Planet Will Be Raped Or Beaten In Her Lifetime.

One Billion Women Violated Is An Atrocity.

One Billion Women Dancing Is A Revolution.

Join V-Day on 02.14.13 in a global strike to demand an end to violence.

Strike! Dance! Rise!

#ReasonToRise
http://www.onebillionrising.org/

DOWNLOADS: (95)

PLAYS: (982)

Embed

H/T to Heather for the video embed

On the first primetime night of the Republican National Convention, the GOP dispatched Ann Romney to score points with women voters, and lessen some of the damage done by the abortion and rape debate inflamed by recent comments from Senator Todd Akin.

"Tonight, we salute you and sing your praises."

"I'm not sure if men really understand this, but I don't think there's a woman in America who really expects her life to be easy. In our own ways, we all know better!"

"And that's fine. We don't want easy. But these last few years have been harder than they needed to be. It's all the little things — that price at the pump you just can't believe, the grocery bills that just get bigger; all those things that used to be free, like school sports, are now one more bill to pay. It's all the little things that pile up to become big things. And the big things — the good jobs, the chance at college, that home you want to buy, just get harder. Everything has become harder."

Mrs. Romney's personal touch may well sway some women voters, especially if their politics leaned Republican to begin with. The reason her speech may score those crucial women's votes is because she can call attention to any of today's hot button issues without having to address how the Romney-Ryan platform will help or hinder these issues for Americans.

And if her personal anecdotes of growing up in small town America (No mention of that small town being the 4th wealthiest in the nation), meeting and falling in love with her husband at a school dance helped humanize Mitt Romney for anyone, that will just be icing on the cake come November.

"When Mitt and I met and fell in love, we were determined not to let anything stand in the way of our life together. I was an Episcopalian. He was a Mormon."

"We were very young. Both still in college. There were many reasons to delay marriage, and you know? We just didn't care. We got married and moved into a basement apartment. We walked to class together, shared the housekeeping, and ate a lot of pasta and tuna fish. Our desk was a door propped up on sawhorses. Our dining room table was a fold down ironing board in the kitchen. Those were very special days."

"Then our first son came along. All at once I'm 22 years old, with a baby and a husband who's going to business school and law school at the same time, and I can tell you, probably like every other girl who finds herself in a new life far from family and friends, with a new baby and a new husband, that it dawned on me that I had absolutely no idea what I was getting into."

"That was 42 years ago. Now we have five sons and 18 grandchildren and I'm still in love with that boy I met at a high school dance."

This part of the speech fell flat for me, because I've heard most of it so many times before from other women. Young and in love, living in a basement apartment eating tuna and pasta while using a door propped on sawhorses for either a table or desk, and a fold down ironing board in the kitchen that doubled as a table. I'm wondering now if it's a chapter out of some old romance novel that's been passed around for years and years; "Chapter 3: What Have I Gotten Myself Into?" But an example of hardship? Not so much.

"I read somewhere that Mitt and I have a "storybook marriage." Well, in the storybooks I read, there were never long, long, rainy winter afternoons in a house with five boys screaming at once. And those storybooks never seemed to have chapters called MS or Breast Cancer."

"A storybook marriage? No, not at all. What Mitt Romney and I have is a real marriage."

What? A "real marriage," is that anything like a "legitimate" marriage? This came across as a slam, but aimed at whom? If your marriage failed it wasn't "real"? People without large families? The Obamas?

"No one will move heaven and earth like Mitt Romney to make this country a better place to live!"

Mitt Romney in April 2007: [Romney] said the country would be safer by only “a small percentage” and would see “a very insignificant increase in safety” if al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden was caught because another terrorist would rise to power. “It’s not worth moving heaven and earth spending billions of dollars just trying to catch one person,” Romney said.

"You can trust Mitt."

Release your income tax returns.