Hammer Mill Days

The jury is in on Curiosity. The bad news: there is no water on Mars. The good news? There's club soda. And tonic water with lime. There's a lot you can say about the Martians, but you can't say they're not civilized. Got some time on our hands, obviously, so we have the luxury of pondering the findings of the latest Mars probe, made available by our mad science adviser Mitch Macaphee (who somehow hacked into Curiosity and has compelled it to act on our behalf as a robotic booking agent on the red planet). Roll, Curiosity, roll, and soon we will be idle no longer. Or something to that effect. Hell - bring back a pizza and the Lincolns will be happy. That would certainly outdo Marvin (my personal robot assistant), and he only has to cross the street to get the great emancipators a third-rate pie. (I'm looking at you , Marvin. You're not good!) Well, I hope you all enjoyed our anniversary edition of THIS IS BIG GREEN , our official podcast. A little something fo...

Don't make the mistake of thinking that Rep. Todd Aiken is some kind of outlier or "knuckle dragger," as Boehner might put it. He represents the core of where the Republican party is on women's reproductive rights today. The tea party-fueled G.O.P. has been on a mission about abortion since they took power in January of last year, advancing radical anti-abortion legislation on both on the federal and the state level. The 2011 "No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion" act - HR3 on the docket, meaning this is literally the third bill they got to since taking power - included in its original form a redefinition of rape that established the somewhat dubiously defined category of "forcible rape". The final version would ban federal funding of abortions in cases of "statutory rape", meaning that rape victims would have to undergo some kind of audit to avoid bringing the child of their rapist to term. The motivation behind this is pretty obvious. Att...