Posted on 08/23/2012 2:38:25 PM PDT by Tailgunner Joe
After days of ignoring Republican pleas to abandon his U.S. Senate campaign in Missouri, Rep. Todd Akin today received an even more damning message: A new Rasmussen poll shows that Akin, who held a tidy lead before making his controversial comments about rape and pregnancy, is now down 10 percentage points (48-38 percent) to incumbent Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill.
Never fazed, the Akin campaign shot back with an unlikely proposal.
“The fact that Claire McCaskill is only polling at 48 percent after 72 hours of constant negative attacks on Todd Akin shows just how weak she is,” Akin spokesman Perry Akin said in a statement. “If she can’t break 50 percent after a week like this, Democrats should ask Claire to step down.”
McCaskill, whose political career might well have been saved by Akin’s moment of madness, went online to cast doubt on the validity of the survey.
“Rasmussen poll made me laugh out loud,” she tweeted. “If anyone believes that, I just turned 29. Sneaky stuff.”
McCaskill then linked to a story from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel claiming Rasmussen, with its ties to high-powered Republican operatives like Karl Rove, had intentionally stretched the spread in an effort to push Akin out of the race.
The final deadline for Akin to withdraw is Sept. 25. After that his name cannot be replaced on the ballot. But there is no indication he’s even considering it.
Today, he reported on his Facebook page, ”Thousands and thousands of people have stepped up today and helped us raise over $100,000 in donations as small as $3. The message is loud and clear… the people of Missouri believe they should pick candidates, not party bosses or Washington elites.”
(Excerpt) Read more at abcnews.go.com ...
I found it quite refreshing he told Romney to mind his own business.
Akin is the sort of man we need in Congress to stand up to the establishment.
That is not even close to being true.
Rand Paul on Abortion (Libertarians attacking Paul for being too Pro-Life)Toward that end, he supports "any and all legislation that would end abortion or lead us in the direction of ending abortion," including "a Human Life Amendment and a Life at Conception Act as federal solutions to the abortion issue." A Human Life Amendment would declare all fetuses to be persons with a right to life guaranteed by the 14th Amendment. A Life at Conception Act would seek to accomplish the same goal by statute. Hence either measure, rather than denationalizing the issue and letting states decide how to regulate abortion, would make abortion murder under federal law and render unconstitutional any state laws allowing it.
November 6, 2012, 7:05 PM, And this just in, with 10% of the vote now counted it looks like Claire McCaskill has been re-elected for SIX MORE YEARS. Yes, the network is calling the race for McCaskill. No surprise there now was there?
I'd be surprised if it takes 'til 7:05 p.m. for the networks to call the race for the Claire Witch Project. Probably more like 12:00 noon.
Mitt Romney's goal is to cleanse social conservatism from the party.
If the Republican party saw a leg off Reagan's three-legged stool, it needs to be shoved up the collective behinds of those running it.
I'd say thousands and thousands, suckers for the Huckster and a few dozen suicidal "conservatives."
I'm sure there will be plethora of posts from him telling us how wonderful Mitt Romney is.
To: MelasTrying to inject some facts and science into this absurd non-story.
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(This one is a bit technical but the following section sums it up rather well.)We should bear in mind that an acute-stress-induced surge of LH is shortly preceded by an elevation of serum progesterone from the adrenal glands. This fact suggests that such an elevation of serum progesterone may advance the secretory transformation of the endometrium resulting in embryo-endometrium asynchrony and consequently reduced chances of implantation and pregnancy if ovulation and fertilization took place.
http://www.rbej.com/content/8/1/53
“The most common causes of failure to ovulate are:
Stress, weight fluctuations, Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome (P.C.O.S.). Other causes may include disorders of the pituitary gland, thyroid gland and raised prolactin levels.”http://cairoivf.com/treatments-ovulation_induction.html
“In conclusion, acute stress on the day of proestrus can affect female reproductive physiology. Moreover, the angiotensinergic system, through AT(1) receptors, participates in the effects of acute stress in the morning of proestrus.”
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17573075
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Animal breeding also is affected by stress. Zoos, in particular, have difficulty getting some animals to reproduce in captivity, Bentley said.
Based on animal experiments, researchers attribute much of this stress effect on sexual function to an increase in glucocorticoids - stress hormones - produced by the adrenal gland. In the brain, these glucocorticoids suppress the main reproductive hormone, GnRH, which in turn causes a shut-down of the release of the gonadotropins luteinizing hormone and follicle-stimulating hormone by the pituitary, and then a suppression of testosterone, estradiol and sexual behavior.
In 2000, however, a new reproductive hormone was discovered in birds and dubbed gonadotropin-inhibitory hormone (GnIH) because it had the opposite effect of GnRH - it inhibited release of gonadotropins, thereby suppressing reproduction.
“It’s very adaptive to not be wasting resources on reproduction during times of acute stress, to just shut down reproduction for 24 hours or so until the stress is gone,” said co-author Daniela Kaufer, a UC Berkeley assistant professor of integrative biology who looks at how stress affects molecular processes in the brain. “These functions go back in evolution a long way.”
. . ..Kirby showed that acutely stressed rats showed increased RFRP levels for several hours, but that levels returned to normal by the next day. Chronically stressed rats, however, were left with longer-term elevations of RFRP levels in the dorsomedial hypothalamus area of the brain, and suppression of activity in the reproductive axis - the hypothalamus-pituitary-gonadal hormone cascade - that is associated with lowered sexual activity.
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/releases/154116.php
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There certainly are instances of “illegitimate rape.” There are the women who cry rape the morning after, statutory rape as mentioned earlier, false rape claims like the Duke case, and other circumstances wherein the image of a violent, forced rape is not the truth of the matter. Perhaps “illegitimate” was the wrong word to use among people whose only definition of “illegitimate” is “fake” or “born outside of wedlock,” but the word can be used as a synonym for invalid or otherwise not generally accepted.
A more savvy politician would recognize that too many of our neighbors are painfully ignorant with pathetic English language skills but I was under the impression we wanted real people to run for office, people who haven’t been schooled in the fine art of politics. Seems I was wrong.
Oh well. I still think this Akin thing is going to fizzle out like the Fluck fiasco no matter which way it ends up.
It underlines that “certain percent’s” disillusionment.
But, the "good" people as a group keeping voting for evil men like Romney. Then, they end up shocked when the Republican party lead by men like Romney move the country to the left.
Sadly, I don't see an end the mentality or any hope for the nation as a result.
That works for me.
The legislation would be immediately struck down if we didn’t have a solid conservative USSC, and the amendment route stands NO chance of enactment.
Amendments, by design, are damned difficult to enact.
Just a very small segment. But they think they're huge and make a difference.
Just a very small segment. But they think they're huge and make a difference.
“What ifs” aren’t exactly a rebuttal to my reply. Your absolute statement was patently false.
Yep. But they believe they make a difference.
Not all conservatives have been run off the site yet.
Not all conservatives have been run off the site yet.
Not all conservatives have been run off the site yet.
how about some real science:
American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology
Volume 175, Issue 2 , Pages 320-325, August 1996
Rape-related pregnancy: Estimates and descriptive characteristics from a national sample of women
OBJECTIVE: We attempted to determine the national rape-related pregnancy rate and provide descriptive characteristics of pregnancies that result from rape. STUDY DESIGN: A national probability sample of 4008 adult American women took part in a 3-year longitudinal survey that assessed the prevalence and incidence of rape and related physical and mental health outcomes. RESULTS: The national rape-related pregnancy rate is 5.0% per rape among victims of reproductive age (aged 12 to 45); among adult women an estimated 32,101 pregnancies result from rape each year. Among 34 cases of rape-related pregnancy, the majority occurred among adolescents and resulted from assault by a known, often related perpetrator. Only 11.7% of these victims received immediate medical attention after the assault, and 47.1% received no medical attention related to the rape. A total 32.4% of these victims did not discover they were pregnant until they had already entered the second trimester; 32.2% opted to keep the infant whereas 50% underwent abortion and 5.9% placed the infant for adoption; an additional 11.8% had spontaneous abortion. CONCLUSIONS: Rape-related pregnancy occurs with significant frequency. It is a cause of many unwanted pregnancies and is closely linked with family and domestic violence. As we address the epidemic of unintended pregnancies in the United States, greater attention and effort should be aimed at preventing and identifying unwanted pregnancies that result from sexual victimization. (Am J Obstet Gynecol 1996;175:320-5.)
http://www.ajog.org/article/S0002-9378(96)70141-2/abstract
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