All Links Possible

Echidne ponders the question of why so many men hate women? I’ve asked the same question.
•The struggle to protect endangered fish stocks (menhaden specifically) in the Atlantic. As someone’s who’s seen similar reactions in Florida (there is no need for regulation! Stocks are booming! You’re killing the industry!) it’s of great interest.
•A 1970s Canadian attempt at eliminating poverty. Interestingly, people receiving enough to live on did not convert to the welfare queens of right-wing nightmares.
•Mitt Romney, the man who thinks too many people have health insurance.
The idea that health insurance, particularly employer-provided health insurance, interferes with what would otherwise be an ideal market (because it prevents people from having worry about cost) is not original with Romney. But the counter-argument, as one person notes in the piece, is that the medical market doesn’t respond well to market forces: Without group policies, there’s no financial incentives for health insurers to extend policies to people who aren’t healthy, for instance.
•One downside of health insurance: The bill gets bigger.
•A look at Obama’s willingness to go to war. And at how the administration has decided that if the president looks at secret evidence and decides someone needs killing, that constitutes “due process” (something I get into in my last And column). The Guardian weighs in too.
•A writer argues that gay Marvel super-hero Northstar getting married is actually a step back because it avoids any scenes of him dating, kissing, etc.
•Is every American soldier who dies a hero? In a related vein, Digby discusses a war memorial by anti-war veterans (and here touches on the “heroes” question).
•A look at the Iranian terrorist group MEK and the push to treat them as Iranian freedom fighters instead.
•A man discovers his father was actually a Guatemlan military officer who took him in after his real parents were killed in a massacre.
•The Guttmacher institute argues that abortion bans are not a good way to prevent sex-selective abortions. More discussion here.
•North Carolina developers don’t like scientists predicting that rising sea levels will hurt development. So they want the state to ignore such research.
•A Tennessee county fights a mosque. While over in Florida, Repub Allen West brags about beating and torturing prisoners in Iraq (knowing my home state, I think it’s a smart political move).
•A Republic spokesman suggests throwing acid at women in congress.
•You may have heard that eating organic makes you a jerk. That’s not what the study shows.
•Apparently Cardinal Timothy Dolan thought the solution to pedophile priests was to pay them to retire. As Charles Pierce notes, Dolan also objects loudly that the church shouldn’t be forced to pay for contraception because it’s immoral. Contradiction much?
•Speaking of abortion, you may have heard that when a nine-year-old Brazilian girl was raped and impregnated, the church excommunicated her mother and her doctors for providing a life-saving abortion, but not the rapist.
Right-to-lifers talk about the importance of protecting the “conscience” of people who don’t want to participate in abortion. But if someone acted in this case in the US to save the girl’s life, they’d receive no protection. Apparently people who look out for nine-year-old rapists don’t have a conscience.
•Speaking of contraception, once again an anti-birth control activist insists that cutting off access is for women’s own good.
•Florida’s stand-your-ground law has not worked out the way it’s supposed to (the fact originator Durrell Peaden—from my neck of the woods—is out of the state senate is a Good Thing).
•FAIR scoffs at the doom-laden predictions that military budget cuts will leave us helpless. This is SOP for the military-industrial complex when cuts are on the table, of course.
•Sora Chemaly reminds us men did not invent the Internet alone.