Welcome to your Thursday open thread. I say it’s Thursday of the longest week ever. At least it feels that way to me. OTOH, I am enjoying the lower temperatures, so there’s that.
In 2010, the right-wing group Susan B. Anthony List campaigned against anti-choice Democrats who voted for the health care law. To gin voters up against the sitting members, SBA List peddled the fully debunked myth that the health care law included federal funding for abortions — a policy already prohibited by law. After losing his re-election bid, former Rep. Steve Driehaus (D-OH) filed a complaint against SBA List with the Ohio Elections Commission as Ohio law prohibits false campaign statements. Faith in Public Life reports that yesterday, a federal judge ruled against the SBA List’s attempt to have the case dismissed, finding “significant evidence that [SBA’s] statements are false.” SBA Lists’s response to the ruling is that the group “researched Obamacare themselves” and “also read the opinions of other groups” — a defense that, incidentally, calls the group’s own research skills into question.
I remember that the Susan B. Anthony list was one of the first big organizations to endorse Christine O’Donnell in 2010. Now, can we get someone in Ohio to sue Sarah Palin for her “death panels” lie? Also, why don’t we have a national law like this?
Now, the next part of this item will get Republicans’ noses out of joint and will no doubt start Democrats thumping their chests. What Gilligan found was that suicides and homicides started climbing to epidemic levels following the election of a Republican president. If that isn’t annoying enough to the Grand Old Party, he also discovered that the rates remained around epidemic levels throughout the time Republicans occupied the White House. “The increase began during their first year or years in office, and peaked in their last year or years,” Gilligan writes.
And what happened when a Democratic president toodled up to the White House gate in a moving van? Those epidemic levels of violence, according to Gilligan, began to reverse direction in the first year or two of a Democratic administration and the rates reached their lowest point in the last year or years of the Democratic term.
Pure happenstance, right? Gilligan won’t hear of it — his analysis, he says, proves otherwise. The changes in the rates of violence occur “with a magnitude and consistency that could not be attributed to chance alone.”
The researcher says it’s not a correlation/causation error that this is actually real. He hypothesizes that Republicans administrations cut social safety nets and that leads to more crime.