Better than expected

Despite running TYG in to work, doing some needed errands and dealing with the Orkin man, I had a productive day. Admittedly that’s partly because I counted printing up The Impossible Takes a Little Longer as part of my writing time, so I got to do other things simultaneously. But now that it’s up, I can do my final draft, reading through it aloud and making the absolute final changes. And then, finally, sending it out again …
Unfortunately with the added errands, I’m still running late when I really wanted to be reading.
In the meantime, here are some links:
•First, my own And column on Romney’s 47 percent remarks.
•Blogger Susie Madrak vents about rape. Here we have another look at how factually inaccurate Todd Akin’s claims that rape won’t get you pregnant are (as you can see, I’m running behind on my bookmarks, but the points are still good). This article discusses, among other things, how even some of the founding thinkers of Christianity foreshadowed some of Akin’s thoughts.
•A reminder about some of the bad planks—or more accurately, worst planks—in the Repub platform. The objections to Homeland Security monitoring right-wing terrorism remind me how POd some conservatives got when I touched on the subject.
•A Christian writer argues young-earth creationism (the believe Genesis is literal and the world’s no older than 6,000 years) should be called “demonic.”
•A supposed incident of anti-Christian repression in schools never happened. That being said, Christians do get mistreated (told they can’t read the Bible during a study period or write papers on religious topics relevant to the theme) but so do Wiccans, Jews, Sikhs and Muslims.
•An argument in favor of the morality of getting your children vaccinated. Despite the protests in the comments, there’s no indication vaccines cause autism.
•A column rejecting the return to the gold standard Republicans want. More at one of the links here.
•It isn’t voter fraud that’s the problem, it’s what happens when we have partisan and sometimes incompetent election supervisors.
•Mother Jones notices how completely absent W is from politics just now.
•Racial fears on the right wing. My own thoughts on nostalgia as a fuel for conservatism are here. Ta-Nehisi Coates offers more thoughts about Obama and Race.
•Offering forgiveness without accountability gives power to the oppressor, Slacktivist says.
•Thoughts on Romney making birther jokes. Oh, and Mitt’s investments include private prisons.
•The 1956 Republican Party platform: Pro immigration, pro an equal-rights amendment for women, pro a minimum wage and Social Security.
•Gun companies object to steps that make it easier to identify guns used in crime.
•A conservative reluctantly concedes that right-wing historian David Barton is full of crap. Case in point of his crappiness, asserting the Seventh Amendment proves abortion is unconstitutional.
•I discussed the continued urge for America to have an aristocracy here. Digby asserts it’s fundamental to conservatism.
•Bloomberg Businessweek doesn’t think Republican economics add up. More recently New York magazine notes how Paul Ryan insists the math that makes his budget factual is just toooo complicated for him to actually explain it.