!!!

http://www.salon.com/2013/06/18/gop_lawmaker_extreme_abortion_ban_justified_because_of_masturbating_fetuses/singleton/

Rep. Michael Burgess (R-TX) said on Monday that he supports the proposed federal ban on abortion at 20 weeks because he has personally witnessed male fetuses with their hands “between their legs” pleasuring themselves at 15 weeks.

“There is no question in my mind that a baby at 20-weeks after conception can feel pain. The fact of the matter is, I argue with the chairman because I thought the date was far too late. We should be setting this at 15-weeks, 16-weeks,” said the former OB/GYN during the House Rules Committee debate on the “Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act.”

“Watch a sonogram of a 15-week baby, and they have movements that are purposeful,” he continued. “They stroke their face. If they’re a male baby, they may have their hand between their legs. If they feel pleasure, why is it so hard to believe that they could feel pain?”

I strongly doubt that the figures projected by the UN will be reached. Apparently, their projection is based on current fertility rates, but those rates are unlikely to stay that high in future.

High fertility is mostly a rural phenomenon and strongly determined by education and (lack of) social security. In the countryside, many children mean a higher chance of enough of them surviving to support their parents during their old age. The cost of having children is relatively low - food is home-grown, the house is crowded anyway but may be extended relatively easily if needed, the children can help with the harvest or gain some additional family income, etc., and there are enough relatives around to look after the children if the mother is busy with other activities. In the cities (slums), it is completely different. Food needs to be purchased at the market, the house cannot be expanded, clothing is more (and earlier in the child's life) an issue, etc. Suddenly, having another child becomes a financial issue.

The next factor is access to and quality of health services. As long as half of your children die before they are five years old (as they do in many rural parts of Africa) you better have a few more to ensure your old-age support. At a decent level of maternal and child health care, that motivation goes away - not immediately, but gradually.

Education - costly for the parents, but an investment that pays off, especially if you are already living in a city. Many parents quickly realise that it is better to have 2-3 well educated children that will earn a decent income from which they will pay for their parents' old age, than 6-8 that are all struggling themselves to survive and hardly have resources for supporting their parents.

Last but not least, there are alternative forms of old-age security developing - government or large-scale company pensions, but most importantly a variety of financial products, from life insurance and pension funds down to simple savings accounts. And in many cases, it is more economical to invest into one of these financial products than into another child to secure your old age.

All theory? I haven't looked it up, but I am pretty sure that in the 1980s, the projection would have been similar in its totals, but with India and Indonesia on the top of the list. However, between 1970 and 2005, the average fertility in India has gone down from 5,35 children per mother to 2.88. In Indonesia, it decreased from 4.78 to 2.56. The reasons - all of the above (urbanisation, improved access to health and education, emergence of financial products). Not to the extent that these two countries are in any way comparable to North American or European levels (if they were, they would also have similar reproduction rates), but enough to bring fertility down to a more or less sustainable level.
Or take Ghana, one of the "African tigers" with strong and steady economic growth over the last decade. The fertility rate has gone down from 7.04 in 1970 to 4.03 now. If economic and social development continues, they should be around 2.5 births / mother in around 25 years.

Most of the "high population growth" countries listed by the UN are ridden by economic problems, political instability and armed conflicts. If the situation prevails, the high fertility will go along with high mortality (in fact, the two almost always go hand in hand), resulting in a much slower population growth than predicted.
More likely, however, is an economic upturn after strong population growth. Remember the 1980s slogan "Even if every Chinese only drinks one bottle of Coke per year, it is still 1 billion bottles you can sell there". Global companies just cannot afford to leave out such highly-populated countries - first for essential products (food, soap etc.), than a few consumer goods plus stuff like bicycles, then comes the first motor vehicle assembly, etc. Results: Urbanisation, (public revenue for) better education & health, a market for financial service providers - and the fertility rate drops.

A high-population growth country must be pretty mismanaged to be left out - neither Chinese Communism, nor India's and Indonesia's corruption and public sector mismanagement did scare off international investors in the 1980s and 1990s. Somalia may actually be such a case, but the other "top growth countries", namely Nigeria, DR Congo, Ethiopia, Uganda and Tanzania all range between manageable (Nigeria, DR Congo) to pretty low (Ethiopia, Uganda) investment risk and problems.  Ethiopia, e.g., has seen quite some foreign investment and economic development over the last years. Its fertility rate has decreased from 6.83 in 1985 to 4.8 now, and I am pretty confident it will continue to fall further.

 

Very interesting. Thanks for the analysis.

Torie hasn't engaged in some good concern trolling for some time. Nice to see him back in form.

I'm surprised with Republicans deciding to compete in Massachusetts but leave the Democrats running essentially unopposed in New Jersey.

The morning-after pill is considered "controversial"

Welcome to 1956.

The Jay Cost assessment is accurate and incomplete.
 They, the recession proof, are the ones who finance the anti-capitalist position's so too protect their already environmental capitalist take.
 The answer to your one question is best witnessed by the lengths of lawlessness, which the present day insurgents of the Obama/Clinton Federal Rule of Transformation Consortium - renaissance, that is currently in imploding mode and seeks, at will, at any cost, to protect.

 A Democrat just recently said, all of this is just theater, just the same, best still prepare for a ending.

In English please.

I thought Anthony Kennedy was a freedom-loving libertarian. Apparently taking DNA samples against somebody's will is less intrusive than demanding from him to have health care coverage.

Also, what the heck was Breyer thinking?

Seems like a BFD to me.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-05-29/the-biggest-supreme-court-ruling-you-haven-t-heard-of.html

The Supreme Court has yet to decide this year’s attention-grabbing cases on same-sex marriage, affirmative action and the Voting Rights Act. But last week, a divided court decided Arlington v. FCC, an important victory for Barack Obama’s administration that will long define the relationship between federal agencies and federal courts.

The underlying question was this: If a law is ambiguous, who gets to interpret it? Federal judges or the agency that carries it out? Who interprets the crucial ambiguities in the Affordable Care Act, the Clean Air Act or the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act?

The divisions within the court defied the usual ideological predictions. In a powerful and convincing opinion by Justice Antonin Scalia, the court’s majority ruled that even when the agency is deciding on the scope of its own authority, it has the power to interpret ambiguities in the law. Scalia was joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Clarence Thomas.

In an agitated dissent, Chief Justice John Roberts, joined by Justices Samuel Alito and Anthony Kennedy, contended that the courts, not the agency, must decide on the scope of the agency’s power. (Justice Stephen Breyer wrote separately and only for himself.)

English and Romanian. I pretty much understand Italian but don't ask me to speak it.

Any good patriot should oppose the nomination of a Commie.

I can't believe Krazen would dare show his face in this thread. Hmph.

Never underestimate krazey's stupidity.

Whoever voted for this subhuman deserves to be banished from civilized society.

[BS]

Cotton has a BS in Government

Indeed, he has.

Next item, Republican outreach to African-Americans.

D+1

If only our own religious leaders dared to say such a thing.

What the hell was the VA GOP thinking?

Thinking? That's for liberal wussies. Real men go with their gut.

I would expect this kind of nonsense from the citizens of Tulsa or Wheeling, not one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the US.

Confidence is back.

[The Internal Revenue Service]

Let's get a dose of reality from someone more serious than than the Politico crowd.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/05/16/the-scandals-are-falling-apart/

On Tuesday, it looked like we had three possible political scandals brewing. Two days later, with much more evidence available, it doesn’t look like any of them will pan out. There’ll be more hearings, and more bad press for the Obama administration, and more demands for documents. But — and this is a key qualification — absent more revelations, the scandals that could reach high don’t seem to include any real wrongdoing, whereas the ones that include real wrongdoing don’t reach high enough. Let’s go through them.

1) The Internal Revenue Service: The IRS mess was, well, a mess. But it’s not a mess that implicates the White House, or even senior IRS leadership. If we believe the agency inspector general’s report, a group of employees in a division called the “Determinations Unit” — sounds sinister, doesn’t it? — started giving tea party groups extra scrutiny, were told by agency leadership to knock it off, started doing it again, and then were reined in a second time and told that any further changes to the screening criteria needed to be approved at the highest levels of the agency.

...

2) Benghazi: We’re long past the point where it’s obvious what the Benghazi scandal is supposed to be about. The inquiry has moved on from the events in Benghazi proper, tragic as they were, to the talking points about the events in Benghazi. And the release Wednesday night of 100 pages of internal e-mails on those talking points seems to show what my colleague Glenn Kessler suspected: This was a bureaucratic knife fight between the State Department and the CIA.

...

3) AP/Justice Department:. This is the weirdest of the three. There’s no evidence that the DoJ did anything illegal. Most people, in fact, think it was well within its rights to seize the phone records of Associated Press reporters. And if the Obama administration has been overzealous in prosecuting leakers, well, the GOP has been arguing that the White House hasn’t taken national security leaks seriously enough. The AP/DoJ fight has caused that position to flip, and now members of Congress are concerned that the DoJ is going after leaks too aggressively. But it’s hard for a political party to prosecute wrongdoing when they disagree with the potential remedies.

Politico is synonymous with "Beltway Conventional Wisdom". And we all know how accurately it portrays what happens in the real world.

Why would he be impeached?

Well, because he is a Kenyan-born, America-hating commie of course.

Are some people forgetting that Stark is crazy? He actually threatened to call CPS on a former Assemblyman who refused to endorse him. Nobody made his atheism is issue, that's a complete misrepresentation, what was an issue was his increasing instability. He didn't even live in the state anymore. Those things couldn't be ignored because he is an liberal atheist.

Democrats can't criticize Republicans for electing crazy or unethical types, then turn around and expect to keep crazy people like Stark in office.

How is that a misrepresentation? Swalwell attacked Stark for voting against re-affirming "in god we trust" as the national motto. Stark was standing up for those who do not believe in god, and Swalwell attacked him for it. It is even on Swalwell's own website.

http://www.swalwellforcongress.com/do_we_trust_pete_stark_to_represent_our_views

That's a serious faux pass for a (supposedly) liberal Democrat, in California of all places. There is no point in trying to sugarcoat this blatant example of Rovian tactics.

I think the appropriate I-word we should use about Republicans is "intervention".

Considering Rove's success during the last election cycle I must say that Hillary ought to be thrilled by the news.