What a hoot. I started to write a post about Rep. Todd Akin, R-Missouri, last week, when he announced he wanted to end federal support for school lunch programs because they are unconstitutional. But now that he’s stepped in the rapes-don’t-cause-pregnancy doo doo he’s even more fun. Why haven’t we noticed this guy before?

The national Republican Party has withdrawn funding from the Missouri Senate race in the wake of his development.

National Republican Senatorial Committee Chairman John Cornyn (R-Tex.) informed Rep. Todd Akin on Monday that the national GOP will not spend money to help elect him to the Senate after Akin’s controversial comments about “legitimate rape,” according to an NRSC aide.

Cornyn also told Akin that, by staying in the race, he is endangering Republicans’ hopes of retaking the majority in the Senate, the aide said.

And now I’m seeing that Karl Rove’s Crossroads PAC is pulling funding from the Missouri Senate race. This is serious.

Several elements of the Republican Party are pressuring Akin to drop out of his Senate race against Claire McCaskill. Nate Silver says Akin may have just handed to election to McCaskill.

This incident could serve to make the public aware of Romney-Ryan’s extremist views on abortion, which hasn’t come up that much so far.

The Romney-Ryan campaign has tried to distance itself from Akin, but the Obama campaign released this statement this morning:

“While Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan are working overtime to distance themselves from Rep. Todd Akin’s comments on rape, they are contradicting their own records. Mr. Romney supports the Human Life Amendment, which would ban abortion in all instances, even in the case of rape and incest. In fact, that amendment is a central part of the Republican Party’s platform that is being voted on tomorrow. And, as a Republican leader in the House, Mr. Ryan worked with Mr. Akin to try to pass laws that would ban abortion in all cases, and even narrow the definition of ‘rape.’ Every day, women across America grapple with difficult and intensely personal health decisions—decisions that should ultimately be between a woman and her doctor. These decisions are not made any easier when Mr. Romney and Mr. Ryan treat women’s health as a matter of partisan politics.”

So, you know Obama is going to hang Todd Akin around RR’s lying little necks.

From TPM:

Ryan and Akin largely agree when it comes to abortion rights. Both believe abortion should be illegal even in the case of rape and incest. Both were co-sponsors of H.R. 3, the 2011 bill that would have limited the federal abortion coverage exemption only to victims of “forcible rape” and women whose physical health was in danger from her pregnancy, closing a supposed loophole in health-of-the-mother exemptions conservatives have been crowing about for years.

After massive vocal protest from women’s rights advocates, the sponsors dropped the “forcible rape” language from the bill, giving up their quest to redefine rape in the federal code with little explanation.

But while the Republicans are running from Akin and his “legitimate rape” comments as fast as they can, the Fetus People are standing firm with Akin. So seems to me RR is in a tough position — run too far from Akin, and they may leave a chunk of their base behind.

For the record, Sarah Kliff writes,

Research published in the Journal of American Obstetrics and Gynecology suggests over 30,000 pregnancies result from rape annually. “Rape-related pregnancy occurs with significant frequency,” the trio of researchers from the University of South Carolina concluded. “It is a cause of many unwanted pregnancies.”

A separate 2001 study – which used a sample of 405 rape victims between ages 12 and 45 – found that 6.4 percent became pregnant.

Something Mittens said to an interviewer at Forbes —

“[F]irst there are programs I would eliminate. Obamacare being one of them but also various subsidy programs — the Amtrak subsidy, the PBS subsidy, the subsidy for the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities. Some of these things, like those endowment efforts and PBS I very much appreciate and like what they do in many cases, but I just think they have to stand on their own rather than receiving money borrowed from other countries, as our government does on their behalf. …”

Overlooking the “borrowed from other countries” part — it’s hardly the fault of Amtrack or PBS or the NEA that money has to be borrowed — the issue here is not whether government should pay for these things, or not, but whether we’re going to have them at all. Because, whether conservatives can admit it or not, not everything worthwhile and valuable can be supported through free enterprise.

The Right hates Amtrack because it hates all public transportation; what cannot be privatized must die. IMO a rail transportation system is one of those things, like the electric grid, that the private sector cannot be depended on to maintain. But for now I want to talk about the arts.

It so happens I’m on the board of directors of a local arts organization, which is a chorale. It’s a volunteer position; I take no money for it. I also typeset programs and fliers for the concerts so that we don’t have to pay a typesetter. Chorale members, who have to audition to be accepted, pay dues to the chorale to remain members. We enjoy the patronage of a large church that gives us a big break on renting rehearsal space and a concert venue. Our concerts usually are well attended, at $25 a ticket. We hold fundraisers such as auctions and spaghetti dinners to raise money. We grovel for donations pretty much perpetually.

And it’s still a struggle to stay afloat, because the fact is that it costs a whole lot of money to put on a live performance of a major choral work. Directors, rehearsal accompanists, vocal soloists, concert accompanists, orchestras, the insurance company, etc., all have to be paid, and the costs are way too high to cover with ticket sales, even when ticket sales are robust. In the past, this chorale has had SRO crowds of paying customers and still lost money on the concert. If we priced tickets at what we really needed to recoup cost, we wouldn’t be able to sell them.

It’s a fact of history that the fine arts always have depended on patronage, whether from the Church or the nobility or a government. Although you can find examples of great artists who managed to live on the sale of their works, you can find a lot more — even among the great masters of world art — who would have starved without the patronage of some wealthy individual or the church. And some of them did suffer real poverty at times.

In December the Chorale will be performing Bach’s Cantata 140, Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme, plus the Saint-Saëns Christmas Oratorio, with a small orchestra. In recent years we’ve been keeping costs down by performing works that didn’t require orchestral accompaniment, but now that part of the choral repertoire has been pretty much mined. And choruses tend to dry up if they don’t get to sing masterpieces like Wachet auf now and then. So, fingers crossed we don’t fall into too big a hole.

(BTW, Bach’s compositions didn’t earn him any royalties when he was alive. He depended on the patronage of Austrian royalty, who gave him music director and court composer positions. He was also widely admired as a keyboard performer. The Brandenburg Concertos were written for a Prussian prince as a kind of job application. He didn’t get the job. Bach’s compositions were not much performed in public until about a century after his death.)

It so happens we’re not eligible for state arts funding because we perform only two concerts a year. Any more than that would be pushing our members into more rehearsals and music-learning than most have time for. But there are many genuinely excellent vocal ensembles, orchestras, and even small opera companies I know of that depend on state arts council grants to keep going, and the state arts councils depend on money from the NEA to keep going. And I suspect if that money were to dry up, some of the donations given to our chorale probably would begin to flow to more prestigious groups. Also, many of our musicians and solo performers depend on getting gigs from arts council-funded organizations to pay their own bills, or they’d have to find new careers. So I believe we do benefit indirectly from the state arts council money in circulation.

If the NEA were to disappear, probably only the biggest and best-endowed performing arts organizations would survive. Even some big-city orchestras and opera companies probably would be endangered. And those performing arts organizations really do provide jobs to a lot of people, including sheet music printers and instrument makers. Plus they draw customers to restaurants and other businesses in the concert venue neighborhood. And people really do turn out to hear live performances of masterpieces; I have seen it with my own tired eyes.

So, basically, what we’re talking about is not whether taxpayers should help fund the arts, but whether we have fine arts available to the general public at all. I know less about the economics of visual arts, such as galleries and museums, so I don’t know how much they depend on NEA money. But it would be devastating to performing arts.

And, y’know, it’s going to be a lovely concert, in a beautiful church decorated with Christmas greenery, and people can come into a church to listen to masterpieces of sacred music at Christmastime. You’d think that would be the sort of thing conservatives would want to, you know, conserve. But I guess not.

So let’s get this straight — It’s OK for Mittens to portray President Obama, falsely, as an enabler of welfare queens. It’s OK for Romney staffers to tell the Brits the President does not appreciate Anglo-saxon heritage (wink). But this remark by Vice President Biden —

Has been called out as a new low. A crossing of the political rhetorical Rubicon so extreme and so unprecedented that the entire Right and most of media are swooning in shock.

Andrew Rosenthal:

At an event in Danville, Va., Mr. Biden told a mostly African-American audience “Romney wants to let the—he said the first 100 days—he’s gonna let the big banks once against write their own rules. Unchain Wall Street. They gonna put y’all back in chains.”

Whether or not Mr. Biden meant to call slavery to mind, that’s certainly what he did, and Mr. Romney seized the opportunity to take umbrage. “Mr. President,” he said, “take your campaign of division and anger and hate back to Chicago and let us get about rebuilding and reuniting America.”

Jon Stewart has some thoughts on this …

Dana Milbank also seems to get it —

Forgive me, but I’m not prepared to join this walk down Great Umbrage Street just yet. Yes, it’s ugly out there. But is this worse than four years ago, when Obama was accused by the GOP vice presidential nominee of “palling around with terrorists”? Or eight years ago, when Democratic nominee John Kerry was accused of falsifying his Vietnam War record?

What’s different this time is that the Democrats are employing the same harsh tactics that have been used against them for so long, with so much success. They have ceased their traditional response of assuming the fetal position when attacked, and Obama’s campaign is giving as good as it gets — and then some.

All together now — Give ’em hell, Barry! And yesterday the President was given all kinds of opportunity to apologize for or distance himself from the “chains” remark, and he wouldn’t do it.

Mistermix makes a good point — and has more must-watch videos — at Balloon Juice. Soledad O’Brien at CNN did a masterful job taking John Sununu apart the other day when he tried to claim that the President “gutted” Medicare by $711 billion dollars. She was ready with the facts, and correctly explained what the CBO had actually said, and all Sununu could do is sputter the same talking points. Mistermix said,

I really do think the coddling they get on Fox is hurting the average Republican shill’s ability to appear reasonable on regular TV. Sununu just keeps repeating his weak-ass talking points instead of coming back with a follow-up, because Fox only expects its Republican guests to memorize and repeat what’s on the sheet that Sununu was waving around when he was trying to smack O’Brien down. Finally, there’s some limit to the number of lies the media will tolerate and that limit is probably being reached with the Romney campaign. There’s a general air of disrespect from the Romney people, they campaign almost totally on falsehoods, and they do so arrogantly. I think it’s the arrogance that finally triggered María de la Soledad Teresa O’Brien, and it’s going to be interesting to see who’s next.

Finally — all must worship the Goddess Aretha —