In all the Senate races this campaign cycle, only one candidate was endorsed in a commercial by Mitt Romney: Richard Mourdock.

Indiana Republican Senate candidate Richard Mourdock said last Tuesday in a Senate debate:

“I know there are some who disagree and I respect their point of view but I believe that life begins at conception. The only exception I have for – to have an abortion is in that case for the life of the mother. I just – I struggle with it myself for a long time but I came to realize that life is that gift from God, and I think even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape that it is something that God intended to happen.”

So we learn that Richard Mourdock’s god gives these women the “gift” of getting pregnant from being violently raped (or, as Republican Vice Presidential candidate Paul Ryan would say, “legitimately raped). It’s kind of like that horrible sweater your aunt knitted you last Christmas, except that you can’t take it off for 9 months, it costs money you may not have to maintain, and instead of horribly stitched reindeer wearing stocking caps it has a picture of your rapist’s face on it. So in retrospect, it’s nothing like that sweater.

And, this being a gift from God and all, you obviously can’t return (read: abort) this gift. I mean, it’s God, right? He obviously knows what he’s doing, and this is all part of his divine plan. Unless of course this glorious gift of a rape baby would cause imminent harm to the mother (excluding emotional trauma leading to rape, which of course is just ridiculous to even consider). In the case where this rape baby gift could kill the mother, it gets to be regifted, because while that rape pregnancy is God’s will, it’s obviously not his will that the mother die. I mean, just ask Richard Mourdock, who obviously knows what is and isn’t part of God’s plan.

He then said:

“God creates life, and that was my point. God does not want rape, and by no means was I suggesting that he does. Rape is a horrible thing, and for anyone to twist my words otherwise is absurd and sick.”

Newsflash: If anything you’ve said necessitates you make a formal public statement asserting that rape is bad, you’ve fucked up. Badly.

But what does this say about your god in the cases where a woman is raped, she gets pregnant, but that pregnancy would kill her by carrying it to term? If her getting pregnant is part of God’s plan, wouldn’t her dying from the pregnancy be part of the plan, too? And who are we, Mr. Mourdoch, to question God’s plan? But maybe it’s his plan to have doctors save this woman from being killed by the pregnancy gifted to her by her rapist. Of course, if this is part of God’s plan, it would point to the inescapable fact that God is a complete fucking prick. A much kinder, gentler god would avoid the whole rape and pregnancy in the first place, since none of them lead to that wonderful gift of life that Mr. Mourdoch and the rest of his staunchly hard-line anti-abortion Republican cohorts. Maybe a kinder god would give the rapist a horrible case of diarrhea that night, keeping the rapist in and avoiding the rape altogether. Or better yet, have his penis fall off. Of course, then maybe he wouldn’t be able to go on spreading the gift of life to other lucky women.

What’s amazing is how many prominent conservative politicians are still putting their support behind this candidate. Maybe they depleted their rape outrage reserves on Todd “Vaginas Know Anti-Rape Sperm Kung Fu” Akin. Or maybe they are ideologues who care more about getting as many Republicans into the Senate as possible, regardless of how immoral, idiotic or ignorant they may be.

Mourdock’s Democratic opponent, Joe Donnelly (who is currently up in the polls by 7 points and growing), is a big time Blue Dog who opposes abortion with exceptions for rape, incest, and the mother’s life. Anti-abortion groups are attacking him, utilizing (read: exploiting) the children of rape victims, all of whom should be told that nobody is trying to force the victims of rape to get abortions, simply not limiting their options to back alleys and coat hangers.

In case it hasn’t been obvious that the Republican party is more interested in their party’s well-being than the country’s, here’s some more information for you. The Republican party has filibustered more than at any time in history. This means that our Senate doesn’t even get a chance to VOTE on important issues.

In case you’re not good at reading charts, simply look at the trends for filibustering. Look at the last three lines, where the Republicans were the minority, and thus the ones calling for a filibuster. You’ll notice that the term the graph uses is “cloture”, not filibuster. That’s because the old days of Strom Thurmond reading the Bible for 24 hours, thereby stalling until after the vote was to be called. Now the minority party simply threatens to filibuster, and thereby ending the whole process without the actual stalling. The reason the Democrats cave in to the cloture instead of forcing the actual filibuster is that, were the Republican party to actually filibuster every measure they oppose, we’d never get a single vote settled. Even though this Congress has gotten very little done, were they having to deal with 15-hour filibusters on every vote, it would have gotten even less done.

And let’s not forget the Standard’s & Poor reducing our credit rating down from AAA for the first time in history. They even warned us that unless we raised the debt ceiling they would be forced to do this. So what did the Republicans do? They held American hostage. And don’t think I’m being hyperbolic in saying this was a “hostage situation.” Just ask Mitch McConnell:

“I think some of our members may have thought the default issue was a hostage you might take a chance at shooting,” he said. “Most of us didn’t think that. What we did learn is this — it’s a hostage that’s worth ransoming. And it focuses the Congress on something that must be done.”

So here’s the main question you need to ask yourself when you go out to vote: do you really want to vote for a party that believes that holding the country hostage to advance their party’s policies rather than doing what’s right and doing what’s best for the country as a whole?

Does anyone remember the American Jobs Act? A year ago President Obama proposed boosting the economy with a combination of tax cuts and spending increases, aimed in particular at sustaining state and local government employment. Independent analysts reacted favorably. For example, the consulting firm Macroeconomic Advisers estimated that the act would add 1.3 million jobs by the end of 2012.

There were good reasons for these positive assessments. Although you’d never know it from political debate, worldwide experience since the financial crisis struck in 2008 has overwhelmingly confirmed the proposition that fiscal policy “works,” that temporary increases in spending boost employment in a depressed economy (and that spending cuts increase unemployment). The Jobs Act would have been just what the doctor ordered.

But the bill went nowhere, of course, blocked by Republicans in Congress. And now, having prevented Mr. Obama from implementing any of his policies, those same Republicans are pointing to disappointing job numbers and declaring that the president’s policies have failed.

Think of it as a two-part strategy. First, obstruct any and all efforts to strengthen the economy, then exploit the economy’s weakness for political gain. If this strategy sounds cynical, that’s because it is. Yet it’s the G.O.P.’s best chance for victory in November.

But are Republicans really playing that cynical a game?

You could argue that we’re having a genuine debate about economic policy, in which Republicans sincerely believe that the things Mr. Obama proposes would actually hurt, not help, job creation. However, even if that were true, the fact is that the economy we have right now doesn’t reflect the policies the president wanted.

Anyway, do Republicans really believe that government spending is bad for the economy? No.

Right now Mitt Romney has an advertising blitz under way in which he attacks Mr. Obama for possible cuts in defense spending — cuts, by the way, that were mandated by an agreement forced on the president by House Republicans last year. And why is Mr. Romney denouncing these cuts? Because, he says, they would cost jobs!

This is classic “weaponized Keynesianism” — the claim that government spending can’t create jobs unless the money goes to defense contractors, in which case it’s the lifeblood of the economy. And no, it doesn’t make any sense.

What about the argument, which I hear all the time, that Mr. Obama should have fixed the economy long ago? The claim goes like this: during his first two years in office Mr. Obama had a majority in Congress that would have let him do anything he wanted, so he’s had his chance.

The short answer is, you’ve got to be kidding.

As anyone who was paying attention knows, the period during which Democrats controlled both houses of Congress was marked by unprecedented obstructionism in the Senate. The filibuster, formerly a tactic reserved for rare occasions, became standard operating procedure; in practice, it became impossible to pass anything without 60 votes. And Democrats had those 60 votes for only a few months. Should they have tried to push through a major new economic program during that narrow window? In retrospect, yes — but that doesn’t change the reality that for most of Mr. Obama’s time in office U.S. fiscal policy has been defined not by the president’s plans but by Republican stonewalling.

The most important consequence of that stonewalling, I’d argue, has been the failure to extend much-needed aid to state and local governments. Lacking that aid, these governments have been forced to lay off hundreds of thousands of schoolteachers and other workers, and those layoffs are a major reason the job numbers have been disappointing. Since bottoming out a year after Mr. Obama took office, private-sector employment has risen by 4.6 million; but government employment, which normally rises more or less in line with population growth, has instead fallen by 571,000.

Put it this way: When Republicans took control of the House, they declared that their economic philosophy was “cut and grow” — cut government, and the economy will prosper. And thanks to their scorched-earth tactics, we’ve actually had the cuts they wanted. But the promised growth has failed to materialize — and they want to make that failure Mr. Obama’s fault.

Now, all of this puts the White House in a difficult bind. Making a big deal of Republican obstructionism could all too easily come across as whining. Yet this obstructionism is real, and arguably is the biggest single reason for our ongoing economic weakness.

And what happens if the strategy of obstruct-and-exploit succeeds? Is this the shape of politics to come? If so, America will have gone a long way toward becoming an ungovernable banana republic.

I’m kinda in love with Paul Krugman.

Everybody knows some of the broad themes of Genesis: God creates earth,the Garden of Eden, the story of Noah, etc. Here are some things that may not have been brought to your attention in Sunday School.

~ God creates day and night on the first day, but doesn’t create the sun or the stars until the 4th. (Genesis 1:3-5, 16-19)

~ God repeatedly refers to himself as “us,” though why (and why only in Genesis) is never explained. (Genesis 1:26, 3:22, 11:7)

~ Adam was not kicked out of the Garden of Eden for eating the forbidden fruit. God became nervous that his newly-enlightened creation would also eat fruit from the tree of life and become immortal.(Genesis 3:22-23)

~ Cain killed Abel because God liked Abel more. Why? Because as a farmer, Cain could only sacrifice plants to God. Abel was a herdsman,and so could sacrifice animals. (Genesis 4:2-5)

~ God’s sons come down from the heaven to have sex with earth women. (Genesis 6:1-2, 4)

~ “There were giants in the earth in those days” isn’t an accurate translation. The word translated into giants was “Nephilim”, which nobody actually knows how to translate. (Genesis 6:4)

~ Noah gets drunk on wine from his vineyard and passes out with his genitals exposed. Ham, his son, accidentally sees this. When Noah wakes up, he punishes Ham by making his youngest son a slave. (Genesis9:20-27)

~ God makes a covenant with Abraham and demands that he and all his descendents become circumcised. God never explains why cutting off the foreskin is important, but it seems quite contradictory to all the other laws about never exposing one’s genitals. What good is a distinguishing self-mutilation that nobody is allowed to see? (Genesis17:10)

~ Rachel and Leah battle for Jacob’s favor by giving him their maids as sex partners. (Genesis 30:1-11)

~ God has a wrestling match with Jacob and loses. To honor the occasion, God changes Jacob’s name to Israel. (Genesis 32:24-30)

~ The “sin of Onan” is not masturbation. Onan wasn’t punished because he “spilled his semen on the ground” but because he didn’t impregnate his sister-in-law.  God kills Onan. (Genesis 38:1-10)

Of course, many of these issues have light shed upon them when the Bible is viewed from a critical, rather than inerrant perspective. For example, God referring to himself as “us” is explained by Wellhausen’s documentary hypothesis. For a great book on how to read the Old Testament in a historical-critical perspective, I highly recommend Brettler’s How to Read the Bible.