Midday open thread

• Despite trad-med reporting, student loan programs would take a hit in the event of a government shutdown:

  In addition, the department said today that although most student federal aid programs would not be impacted by a shutdown, colleges and universities would not be able to draw down and disburse to students any campus-based program awards, such as work-study or the Federal Perkins Loan Program. The impact on the $951 million work-study program would affect about 590,000 students in approximately 3,400 participating institutions. Perkins affects about 673,000 students in some 1,600 participating institutions.

• Because making sure a woman can't get a mammogram is more important than this:

  As the deadline on a possible federal government shutdown looms today, yesterday?s scheduled meeting between House GOP leaders and the sponsors of a bill to extend unemployment benefits for the long-term jobless was canceled so they could focus on negotiations with the president.

• Mother Jones had some fun with the absurdity of Florida Republicans reprimanding Rep. Scott Randolph (D) for daring to publicy utter the word "uterus," asking their readers to come up with limericks. Here's just a couple of my favorites from the "Uterus Monologues."

  The word uterus is naughty, you see
  Not for use in polite company
  They've deprived half the nation
  Of sex education
  Now it burns whene'er they GO P

  The Republicans don't like my uterus.
  Revelations like these aren't new to us.
  They don't care for humanity,
  They've lost their sanity?
  We ALL came from one?unum e pluribus?

• Be sure to read Paul Krugman's takedown of Paul Ryan's so-called budget plan.
• And if Ryan's idea to abolish Medicare isn't draconian enough, the RSG has a few ideas of their own:

  The conservative Republican Study Committee in the House of Representatives has offered its own budget as a ?starkly different alternative? to the plan offered by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI). The plan makes even deeper cuts than what Ryan proposes. ?We have to [make the additional cuts] because the alternative is that we go broke,? said Rep. Jim Jordan, (R-OH).

• As Mississippi goes, so goes, uh, Mississippi:

  Haley Barbour owns his home state, a new Public Policy Polling survey finds.

  The poll of 400 Mississippi Republicans showed the state?s governor commanded 37 percent of the GOP presidential field among those polled ? outpacing his closest competitor by nearly 20 percent.

• Well, sure. Why rush? It's not like it's a matter of life or death:

  A policy directing Michigan health care providers to provide a potentially life saving intervention for people exposed to HIV through consensual or non-consensual sexual activity or drug use has still not been issued by the Michigan Department of Community Health.  [...]

  n-PEP is a prescription of anti-retroviral medications given to a person within 72 hours of an exposure. The prescription is a 28 day course and is considered highly effective in preventing HIV infection. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta issued national guidelines on the chemical prevention in 2005, while the World Health Organization issued international guidelines in 2006.

• The gift from BP just keeps on giving ... check that ... taking:

  National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration officials said 293 dolphins?an abnormally high number?have washed ashore along the Gulf coast since late April 2010, when an explosion aboard the Deepwater Horizon, a rig drilling a BP well, sent millions of barrels of oil into the Gulf. Most of the dolphins were dead, NOAA officials said.

• Poor Glenn:

  The negotiations that led Glenn Beck to announce his departure from the Fox News Channel on Wednesday ended with an expression of "let's part as friends," according to several people with knowledge of the talks. But behind that moment was a torrent of acrimony that underscored just how fractious the relationship between Mr. Beck and the network had become during his three-year run on Fox.

  [...]

  Beck supporters presented a picture of constant sniping, planted stories about his declining ratings, and discomfort with his ability to build a career for himself outside the Fox News brand.

  From Fox's perspective, the facts about Mr. Beck's run on the network have been public and indisputable. Among those were the refusal of hundreds of Fox advertisers to allow their commercials to be placed on Mr. Beck's program, and a history of incendiary comments that attracted harsh backlash, including one where the host called President Obama a racist and another where he compared Reform Judaism to radical Islam. (He later apologized for both comments.)

• You always knew it:

  Liberals have more gray matter in a part of the brain associated with understanding complexity, while the conservative brain is bigger in the section related to processing fear, said the study on Thursday in Current Biology.

Source: http://feeds.dailykos.com/~r/dailykos/index/~3/Ro1YEDspm0k/-Midday-open-thread

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