Justified Open Thread

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Raylan is sleeping with his bartender. Winona is pregnant. Arlo is locked up. Boyd and Ava are up to no good. A lot of people in Harlan are dead but Raylan only killed half of them.

Justified Season Four starts tonight on FX at 7pm Klownifornia time.

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The Trillion Dollar Coin Trick

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If you’ve lost Stephen Colbert . . .

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333,964 doesn’t sound “rare”

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Planned Parenthood’s New Annual Report: We Did 333,964 Abortions; 1 Every 94 Seconds

Planned Parenthood Federation of America’s latest annual report for 2011-2012 says that its affiliated clinics performed 333,964 abortions in fiscal 2011.

That works out to an average of one abortion every 94 seconds.

The 333,964 abortion Planned Parenthood did in fiscal 2011 is an increase of 4,519 from the 329,445 abortions it did in 2010, according to a fact sheet that Planned Parenthood published last year.

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Of course when you divide that number by the number of women of childbearing age you get a percentage that’s not so impressive. There are slightly over 4 million children born in the U.S. each year, so that’s about 8% of all pregnancies. I don’t know what percentage of abortions in the U.S. are performed by Planned Parenthood, but if I recall correctly they are by far the largest provider.

The article doesn’t tell us how many of those abortions were related to rape, incest or protecting the health of the mother. We also don’t know how many of them involved some kind of diagnosed birth defect.

I am pro-choice, but I believe that abortion should be safe, legal and rare. Ignorance is no longer an excuse. Neither is poverty – effective birth control is cheap and widely available. I guarantee you that if a guy has to choose between paying for contraception or not having sex, he’ll come up with the money.

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Honesty Isn’t Always The Best Policy

Rob Parker

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ESPN fires Rob Parker

Rob Parker, the commentator who created controversy when he questioned whether Redskins quarterback Robert Griffin III is a “cornball brother” because he has a white fiancee, has been fired by ESPN.

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Rob Parker was fired for being too honest. He pulled back the curtain and exposed some of the racist views that are widely held in the black community. We certainly can’t have any of that!

I talked to some people down in Washington, D.C. … but my question, which is just a straight, honest question, is he a brother or is he a cornball brother? …

Well, he’s not really. Okay, he’s black, he does his thing, but he’s not really down with the cause. He’s not one of us. He’s kind of black, but he’s not really like the guy you really want to hang out with because he’s off to something else … That’s just all I want to find out about him. I don’t know because I keep hearing these things. We all know he has a white fiancee and there’s talk about that he’s a Republican, which there’s no information at all. I’m just trying to dig deeper into why he has an issue.

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This is post-racial America, where only white people can be racists.

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Who Are The Crazy Ones Here?

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Kevin Drum, discussing the Trillion Dollar Coin Trick:

But put that aside for a moment. I want to ask something else: is this really the road liberals want to go down? Do we really want to be on record endorsing the idea that if a president doesn’t get his way, he should simply twist the law like a pretzel and essentially do what he wants by fiat? My recollection is that we didn’t think very highly of this kind of thing when we thought George Bush was doing it.

This whole thing is not just a ridiculous idea, it’s a bad idea too. Republicans seem willing to set the country on fire to please their increasingly fever-swampish base, and eventually they’ll pay a price for that at the polls. Sooner than that, they’ll pay a price with the business community. This is a problem that we should work out via politics and public opinion, not by pretending the law allows the president to do anything he wants.

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Gee Kevin, who are the crazy ones here?

We are currently OVER SIXTEEN TRILLION DOLLARS IN DEBT. On one side are the people who want to get a handle on government spending and set our fiscal house in order. On the other side are people who are asserting that there should be no restraints on the President’s power to keep spending money we don’t have.

Reasonable people can disagree, but the Vile Progs won’t accept that anyone who disagrees with them is being reasonable. That’s an article of their faith, not a negotiating ploy. Which, of course, makes compromise out of the question.

For the record, I am opposed to any radical ideas for achieving budgetary sanity. We have a moral obligation to take care of our children, elders and the disabled. I would not want to live in a nation that let people starve in her streets or let the sick and injured go untreated. On the other hand we cannot turn to confiscatory taxation as a solution to all of our financial problems.

But we are not facing such stark choices, at least not yet. We have been spending money we don’t have like crackheads with a stolen credit card. There is no painless solution to our problem. We cannot spend our way out of debt and we have a moral obligation to our children and grandchildren not to dump the cost of our extravagance on them.

Sooner or later there will be accountability. It took us years to get in this mess and it will take years to get out of it. The sooner we deal with it, the better for all of us.

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The First Rule of Holes: “When you’re in one, stop digging”

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Put me down as “no opinion”

Chuck Hagel

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President Obama Names Chuck Hagel for Defense, John Brennan for CIA

President Obama today rounded out his second-term national security team, nominating former Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel to head the Department of Defense and counterterrorism adviser John Brennan to lead the CIA.

Obama heralded the credentials of both candidates during an East Room press conference, flanked by both men and their predecessors, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and acting CIA chief Mike Morell.

“Chuck Hagel is the leader that our troops deserve,” Obama said. “He is an American patriot.”

Turning to Brennan, a 25-year veteran of the CIA, Obama said he was one of the “most skilled and respected” members of his national security team, contributing “strong analytic insights” and “invaluable perspective.”

“I hope that the Senate will act on these confirmations promptly,” Obama said. “When it comes to national security, we don’t like to leave a lot of gaps between the time that one set of leaders transitions out and another transitions in, so we need to get moving quickly on this.”

But two weeks before his inauguration, Obama’s selection of Hagel is expected to trigger a political storm over his confirmation in the Senate, where a bipartisan group of critics has already lined up against the pick.

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I honestly have no opinion on either one of these guys and I don’t feel like doing the research necessary to form one. If you have anything to say about either or both of them, have at it.

If not, this is an open thread. I really don’t care.

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