GOP senators are unwilling to go on record as opposing violence against abortion providers.

A resolution introduced by Minnesota’s Sen. Amy Klobuchar is the target of an anonymous hold by an unidentified GOP Senator, preventing it from coming to a vote.

The Republicans take offense at the resolution’s use of the phrase “reproductive health care. The Republicans consider this a glorification of abortion.

You know, there’s a reason these people are called wingnuts.

Now some wingnut is calling on God to kill President Obama.

Wiley Drake, Baptist preacher and former executive of the Southern Baptist Association, is praying for Obama’s demise.

Drake also has asked God to kill people who contested his church’s tax status after he endorsed Mike Huckabee, claimed George Tiller was murdered in response to his prayers, and finds time to minister to the Minuteman Project.

You may remember the guy who prayed for rain to fall on last year’s Democratic National Convention. Yep, that was him.

Health insurance companies “confuse their customers and dump the sick, all so they can satisfy their Wall Street investors,” says a retired CIGNA executive.

Wendell Potter told ABC, “They look carefully to see if a sick policyholder may have omitted a minor illness, a pre-existing condition, when applying for coverage, and then they use that as justification to cancel the policy, even if the enrollee has never missed a premium payment. (D)umping a small number of enrollees can have a big effect on the bottom line.”

Surprise, surprise.

While we’re all pondering the actions of Mark Sanford, the Amazing Disappearing Governor, I just want to ask this: Did he intend to come back?

Think about it. Sneaking away, not telling anyone where you were going, ignoring legal requirements regarding transfer of executive power, and laying a false trail are all indicative of someone who was running away and did not want to be found.

While were on the subject of wacky politicians, here’s one who was world class. More than 40 years ago a city commissioner in Dayton, Ohio, married with two children, disappeared for almost two months. Turned out he ran away with the family’s 17-year-old babysitter.

From Melanie Phillips comes more evidence that looney conservatives (yes, that is redundant) can’t be trusted to be anywhere near the reins of power.

Riffing on this week’s wingnut meme that Obama has been weak and timid on Iran, Phillips whines thusly: “What a disgrace that this man is leader of the free world; and at such a point in history. If he had put America stoutly behind the protesters and championed them against the regime, by now they might have toppled it.”

What does Phillips think is supposed to happen? That the Islamic Republic of Iran would collapse if, and only if, Obama would wag his fingers, stomp his feet and jump up and down? Essentially, she is arguing that American influence around the globe, even in a place like today’s Iran, is so great that regimes fall whenever the president says “Boo!”.

The fundamental disconnect with reality is obvious.

It is tempting to assume this is just one more instance of stereotypical conservative abject amoral political opportunism at work. On the other hand, it is more likely that Phillips and all the others really believes this stuff. True believers always eventually convince themselves that the lies are true. (Via Sullivan)

Tim Bray pens a convincing post explaining why words remain the most enriching and valuable components of the Net. He breaks it down like this:

Words are more valuable than pictures.

Text is more valuable than audio or video.

Twitter is more valuable than FriendFeed.

He’s got it right. Sure, I listen to music on the Net (Pandora is open right now) and watch my share of YouTube clips. But, the word that I automatically apply to my interaction with the Net is “read”.

As more than one comment on Bray’s post suggests, use of the Net to distribute movies, TV, music, etc., may soon seem to eclipse every other aspect of the web, especially for everyone out to make a buck. However, popularity and financial payoffs do not equate to valuable and enriching.

Attacking President Obama for lacking sufficient testosterone in his comments to date on the ruckus in Iran, Ed Morrissey, writing at Hot Air, manages to combine Dumbness with I-Haven’t-Been-Paying-Atttention-ness.

His general theme is the neocon rant du jour, that Obama is not basing his response to the Iranian crisis on an old John Wayne flick. He cites Glenn Kessler in the Washington Post asserting that Obama is “calibrating” his comments in order to “avoid having the demonstrators accused of being American stooges” and wants to “preserve the possibility of negotiating directly with the Iranian government…”

Leaving aside the implicit assumption that Kessler speaks for the Obama administration, Morrissey seems shocked at the notion that an American president would actually consider the impact of his comments before opening his mouth, otherwise known as calibrating. I guess if you spent eight years in pig heaven with a president whose first concern when speaking in public was to avoid biting off his own tongue that might seem odd to you.

Morrissey also seems to ignore the fact that Khamenei and Ahmadinejad are, in fact, calling the shots in Iran at the moment. If he thinks that the U.S. should avoid talking to Iran regardless of who is in charge, then Morrissey should just say that. If so, perhaps he might explain how the kind of presidential chest thumping he seems to want is going to change Iranian policy regardless of who is in charge.

In the not-paying-attention category, Morrissey opines that it is useless to fret about “the mullahs” linking the reformists with the U.S.: “The mullahs aren’t going to go for it anyway. They need big-time scapegoats to explain big-time repression. We can expect the mullahs to blame the US and Israel for this crisis…”

Truth is, “the mullahs” have already blamed the U.S. So, Morrissey gets a point for having a clue about Iranian propaganda tropes, but he loses a point for not keeping up with the news.

Finally, the headline to Morrissey”s piece is “Can Obama still want talks with Iranian mullahs?”, as if to suggest that Mousavi and other folks, like Rafsanjani, are not also “mullahs”. That suggests either much ignorance of contemporary Iran or wholesale wishful thinking. Mousavi is leading a reform movement within an Islamic Republic context. We simply have no reason to believe he would launch a Western-style democratic era in Iran.

The subtext of Morrissey’s criticisms of Obama, and of the other right-wing attacks, is that if Obama merely wagged his finger and yelled at the hardliners they would withdraw from the scene in panic, to be replaced by a Mousavi who has always really been a card-carrying member of the American Enterprise institute.

Silly boys.

In Rome, the UN says hunger on the planet has reached 1 billion, more than at any time in history.

In Portland, Oregon, two acres of unused county land is turned into a garden. The produce will go to the Oregon Food Bank. Demand for emergency food is up by more than 15 percent in Oregon.

You connect the dots.

American tobacco growers are in a tizzy over proposed Canadian legislation that would ban the flavored and candied cigarettes often made from U.S. tobacco.

“If other countries follow Canada’s lead, the market for American-style tobacco products will be nonexistent outside the U.S.,” said Wayne Pryor, president of the Virginia Farm Bureau Federation.

Uh-huh. That would be the point. It’s long past time for American tobacco growers to get out of the business. They’re in a business that’s just as dirty as opium farming.

David Scheiner, the Chicago internist who was President Obama’s physician for more than 20 years, wants “’Medicare for all,’ a single-payer system where the government would cover everyone and pay for it by cutting out waste in the system.”

Scheiner worries that Obama is being advised by people who aren’t in the health care trenches and, hence, doesn’t undetstand how bad things really are. “I’m not sure he really understands what we face in primary care,” he told Forbes.

He adds, “A neurosurgeon gets paid $20,000 for cutting into the neck of my patient. Have him get paid $1 million a year instead of $2 million or $3 million. He won’t starve… It’s nonsense that the private insurance companies need to be protected. Why? Because they’ve done such a good job?”