“Thousands of atheists are expected to attend the Reason Rally next month in Washington, D.C., an event that organizers hope will unify a large part of the secular community. On March 24, the National Mall will be populated by those who sympathize with atheist perspectives.” [CBS DC]

Rick Santorum would like to change the subject: “You know, [reporters] sit there and they say nothing, while for 20 years [President Obama] sits in a church with a guy who is a racist. And somehow or another Foster Friess is now who I am? This is just crap.” [NRO, via TPM]

If you’ve been paying attention to the politics surrounding women’s issues for very long, then congressman Darrel Issa’s controversial hearing on contraception yesterday may have had an oddly familiar ring to it. You may have experienced a sense of deja vu, a feeling that somehow we’ve all been here before, that none of this was particularly new. But maybe you just can’t quite put your finger on what it is about Issa’s Inqusition that makes you feel this way. Was it the way that women’s voices were systematically excluded from the hearings? Was it the way that Democrats were not permitted to offer any witnesses of their own? Was it the singular arrogance and patronizing tone of the hearings? Perhaps.

Or maybe it was something else entirely… perhaps it was something distinctly visual.  Permit me to jog your memory a bit. The sense of the uncanny you are experiencing is probably motivated by that photo that’s spread across the internets like a virus, you know the one I’m talking about: the one showing a row of five male witnesses invited to stand before the People’s House and pontificate on the evils of providing contraception to women, with nary a female witness in sight. The reason it seems so familiar may be that it has a political doppleganger, a virtual twin from the year 2003. That was the year that a Republican president signed a bill that, with no medical justification, criminalized a medical procedure known as “intact dilation and extraction” or as opponents refer to it: partial birth abortion.

Reproduced below the fold (to allow you a few moments to put down any breakable heirlooms you may be holding, or to ask an impressionable child to leave the room) is an image of the signing of that bill: Read more »

The world’s oldest surviving film — all 2.11 seconds of it — was shot in 1888.

Within five years, Thomas Edison built the world’s first movie studio.

It took only a year after that to film the world’s first cat video.

[via The Atlantic]

“Mitt Romney and Ron Paul told the Georgia Republican Party, Ohio Republican Party and CNN Thursday that they will not participate in the March 1 Republican presidential primary debate.” The debate has been canceled. [CNN, via TPM]

You’re a veteran network journalist, interviewing Rick Santorum’s Super PAC sugar daddy Foster Freeze Friess live on cable television. And out of the blue, he drops this:

“Back in my days, they used Bayer aspirin for contraceptives. The gals put it between their knees and it wasn’t that costly.”

How do you react? Let’s find out!

[via Political Wire/SFL]

Witnesses at today’s Darrell Issa hearing on contraception, which Issa says is really a hearing on religious freedom.

Democratic Women Boycott House Contraception Hearing After Republicans Prevent Women From Testifying [ThinkProgress]