Under fire this week for plagiarizing some of his speeches, Paul shrugged off the allegations and proclaimed that he’s being “unfairly targeted by hacks and haters.”

During a speech on the Cuccinelli campaign trail, Paul directly quoted a Wikipedia page about the movie ‘Gattaca.’ Comparing abortion to eugenics, Paul said, “In the movie ‘Gattaca’ in the not-too-distant future, eugenics is common, and DNA plays a primary role in determining your social class.” The Wikipedia article in question reads: In ‘the not-too-distant future,’ eugenics is common, and DNA plays the primary role in determining social class.

While MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow first broke the story on Monday night, additional allegations have come out this week. According to Buzzfeed author Andrew Kaczynski, an entire portion of Paul’s book, Government Bullies, was taken directly from a Heritage Foundation case study, andanother Wikipedia page for the film ‘Stand and Deliver’ was quoted in an immigration speech.

Let me interrupt this write from Think Progress to show you the video from Maddow’s show:

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Woo Hoo Rachel!

Okay back to the write:

On Stephanopolous’ show, Paul defended himself, arguing that he’s written “scientific papers” and knows how to quote sources. However, he admitted that he’s never footnoted thousands of his speeches, and went on to say that those accusing him, including Maddow, are “hacks and haters.”

“The spoken word shouldn’t be held to the same, sort-of, standard that you have if you’re giving a scientific paper.”

Paul Ryan’s Democratic Opponent Is Alien Conspiracy Theorist, 9/11 Truther

When 35-year-old Amardeep Kaleka recently declared his intention to run for the Democratic nomination to challenge Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) in 2014, most news coverage focused on one facet of his story: his father was one of the murder victims of the 2012 massacre at a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin. That murder convinced Kaleka to run as a Democrat and advocate for enhanced gun control.

But during a recent interview with the Madison Capital Times, Kaleka, who is not the only Democrat looking to run against Ryan, revealed another side of his biography: conspiracy documentary filmmaker. Kaleka directed the 2013 film Sirius, a documentary that purports to uncover evidence of extraterrestrial life on Earth and suggests that the September 11 terrorist attacks were a “false flag” operation. Kaleka is also listed as editor and director of photography and shares credit for the documentary’s “story idea.” The film has slightly better production values than your typical conspiracy diatribe, but it hinges on some far-out concepts.

Kaleka founded Neverending Light, the studio that produced Sirius. He couldn’t be reached for comment in time for publication, but he told the Capital Times, “I don’t think that any knowledgeable human would say that extraterrestrials don’t exist.”

Here’s a short trailer for the movie:

The film, which is posted below, is based on Hidden Truth: Forbidden Knowledge, a book by Steven Greer, an osteopath who now leads searches for evidence of extraterrestrial life on Earth. Greer mixes a bit of made-up science with a strong vein of spirituality in explaining why aliens have visited our planet. “When we started detonating thermonuclear weapons, atomic weapons, and developing these sort of destructive technologies the civilizations that have been watching this planet for millennia said, ‘Oh my god, these people are going way off the reservation. They are now an existential threat to themselves, but also to other planets potentially,’” Greer says in the film.

Sirius includes a number of confusing scenes during which Greer and his companions, including Kaleka, are filmed stargazing, claiming to spot alien aircraft. “It’s got a path,” Kaleka says in one such scene , as he looks at the sky. “It’s got like a movement. And then it’s gone.” Onscreen text describes the congressional candidate as a “UFO Witness.”

The movie also features a dose of 9/11 trutherism. “The question, on some people’s minds, is whether or not this disaster was exploited, or worse, engineered,” the narrator says midway through the movie. He asserts that 9/11 was a “false flag” operation mounted by the government a few months after a major conference of alien watchers in order to distract the public and suppress the truth, and he likens the 9/11 attacks to the Gulf of Tonkin incident during the Vietnam War. The movie goes on to suggest that the Bilderbergers and Rockefellers were behind a series of global conspiracies.

Kaleka’s documentary highlights a six-inch-long body that an amateur archeologist discovered in a ghost town in the Atacama Desert in Chile in 2003. One of the film’s experts refers to it as an EBE—that is, an extraterrestrial biological entity. Siriusshows footage of the supposed alien being dissected; its lingering cranial material autopsied for DNA. The organism appears otherworldly, yet the truth is far more mundane: according to Science magazine, an immunologist from Stanford determined that the skeleton is from our planet, and probably a mummified stillborn fetus.

Kaleka’s film is not an examination of those who believe in extraterrestrials. It’s a sympathetic vehicle to promote their views to a wider audience. Ufologist Greer anchors the film by pacing a stage and giving a lecture, as if he’s channeling Al Gore in An Inconvenient Truth. Near the end of the movie, Greer states that there have been over 4,000 cases of extraterrestrial vehicles landing on Earth.

If aliens definitely are among us, why don’t most people know about it? According to Kaleka’s film, it’s all the military-industrial complex’s fault. “The problem is not proving that UFOs exist, it’s when you begin to expose the energy and propulsion systems of how they’re getting here,” Greer says. “You’re talking about unveiling a new science that would replace oil, gas, coal, nuclear power, public utilities. This is the $600 trillion dollar problem.” If the public knew about alien visitors, Greer contends, a whole new world of technologies would become available, including “inertial shielding” and gravity manipulation. But the “petro-fascists” (as he calls them) controlling the government hide alien discoveries to maintain their oil oligarchy. “These sciences have been out there for decades; they have been ruthlessly kept secret because of the power of a centralized petro-dollar,” Greer maintains.

Kaleka’s film fits into that sweet spot where the fringes of left-wing and right-wing ideology overlap. At one point, the narrator ominously states that  the US government doesn’t actually manage the Federal Reserve Bank. Instead, viewers are told, the Fed is “owned by a private banking cartel.” To back up this claim, the film cuts to a scene of Ron Paul berating Fed chairman Ben Bernanke at a congressional hearing.

Sirius hints that several extraterrestrial researchers have contracted diseases, apparently because the government is trying to stymie damning ET revelations. “I don’t take anything for granted, frankly,” Greer says, “so each time that I do a presentation or lead a group. I think, ‘This may be the last time.’”

The New York Times reviewed the film in May. “It perhaps exceeds the earthly purview of a humble film critic to evaluate claims of extraterrestrial life, but it’s definitely unwise to bury the audience in suggestive statements and footage without dwelling long enough on any one thing to persuade,” reviewer Nicolas Rapold wrote. “Though the would-be mini-alien yields some suspense, Mr. Kaleka’s film feels a bit like wandering into a hotel convention hall full of true believers who have been chatting for hours.”

Kaleka won’t necessarily face Ryan in the general election. Rob Zerban, Ryan’s 2012 opponent, announced last week that he will run again.

*******

Recent headlines out of Nebraska show the tragedy of the logical conclusion of focusing on the affects of birth and abortion on children, rather than on women.

Note: skip this if you’re weak of stomach or terrible court rulings drive you to depression rather than frenzy.

In 2011, Nebraska changed its abortion laws to require minors to undergo extensive counseling against abortions, receive a parental signature consenting to the procedure, and wait 24 hours for the hassle and discouragement to sink in before underage women can choose not to give birth. This law did no less than imply that young women were not mature enough to vote, serve in the military, drive cars, marry, or have abortions, but they were mature enough to give birth provided their parents refuse to sign the permission slip. Parents could literally force their daughters to give birth by not granting their signature.

In gray-area cases, such as a recent case involving a minor legally separated from her parents, parental guardianship is often unclear. This 16-year-old anonymous girl was physically abused by her parents, legally separated from them by a court, and has lived as a ward of the state with foster parents since 2011. Back in May, when she was ten weeks pregnant and only just legally separated from her parents, she requested an abortion. But who would sign that permission slip? Up through the system her case went until earlier this week, when the decision from the Nebraska Supreme Court delivered its opinion.

They ruled that she was not “sufficiently mature and well informed to decide on her own whether to have an abortion.” The now four-months pregnant teen was declared too immature to have an abortion, yet mature enough to have the baby. Let that sink in: according to the Nebraska Supreme Court, a 16-year-old is too young to decide she doesn’t want to have a baby, yet she’s A-OK to have that baby. She now, as a result, is forced to give birth to a baby she can’t support, and against her will.

In this context, Republican hoopla over fetus’ rights, the capacity to feel pain, and heartbeats seems like a clever diversion from the real-life hardship resulting from forcing women to give birth to babies they state openly they won’t be able to properly care for or support. Forcing her to have that baby in the same political climate in which programs helping such women, like the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC), are facing serious threatsto their existence, raises a serious question about Republican policy aims.

What is the end goal here? To me what comes to mind is a United States with record number of impoverished children whose mothers were forced to have them, yet denied the supplemental support required to raise their children by those same lawmakers; streets full of barefoot children groomed for a future of underemployment and malnutrition.

I think the left needs to take the offensive in light of cases like these. The issue is not about fetus’ rights, the sanctity of life (how sacrosanct is a life of almost certain poverty?), or fetal personhood. It’s about forcing women to have babies. What will Republican lawmakers do when called out in instances like this, where they force a young woman against her will to undergo childbirth because of a set of paper thin principles? Does the likelihood of her birth being publicly paid for and the lifetime of hardship her and her child will face stack up to the rhetoric of fiscal responsibility they espouse? And what about the considerable pain they’re mandating women to undergo? Forcing women to give birth against their will is forcing women to pay the dearest cost for having sex, a cost only they could ever possibly pay.

It’s state-sanctioned pain and future hardship so a group of politicians and their constituency can stick to their patriarchal principles. File another one under the voluminous category of “Evidence of the GOP Empathy Gap.”

Unless you’ve been bamboozled by the frantic fictions of the right wing, you know that the Affordable Care Act, familiarly known as Obamacare, has begun to accomplish its first goal: enrolling millions of uninsured Americans, many of whom have been living one medical emergency away from the poorhouse. You realize those computer failures that have hampered sign-ups in the early days — to the smug delight of the critics — confirm that there is enormous popular demand. You have probably figured out that the real mission of the Republican extortionists and their big-money backers was to scuttle the law before most Americans recognized it as a godsend and rendered it politically untouchable.

What you may not know is that the Affordable Care Act is also beginning, with little fanfare, to accomplish its second great goal: to promote reforms to our overpriced, underperforming health care system. Irony of ironies, the people who ought to be most vigorously applauding this success story are Republicans, because it is being done not by government decree but almost entirely with market incentives.

Using mainly the marketplace clout of Medicare and some seed money, the new law has spurred innovation and efficiency. And while those new insurance exchanges that are now lurching into business will touch roughly 1 in 10 Americans (the rest of us are already covered by private employer plans or by government programs like Medicare), these systemic reforms potentially touch every patient, every taxpayer.

“This is the 90 percent of the story that doesn’t make the headlines,” said Sam Glick, who follows health care reform for the Oliver Wyman consulting firm.

Since the Affordable Care Act was signed three years ago, more than 370 innovative medical practices, called accountable care organizations, have sprung up across the country, with 150 more in the works. At these centers, Medicare or private insurers reward doctors financially when their patients require fewer hospital stays, emergency room visits and surgeries — exactly the opposite of what doctors have traditionally been paid to do. The more money the organization saves, the more money its participating providers share. And the best way to save costs (which is, happily, also the best way to keep patients alive) is to catch problems before they explode into emergencies.

Thus the accountable care organizations have become the Silicon Valley of preventive care, laboratories of invention driven by the entrepreneurial energy of start-ups.

These organizations have invested heavily in information technology so they can crunch patient records to identify those most at risk, those who are overdue for checkups, those who have not been filling their prescriptions and presumably have not been taking their meds. They then deploy new medical SWAT teams — including not just doctors but health coaches, care coordinators, nurse practitioners — to intervene and encourage patients to live healthier lives.

Advocates of these reforms like to say that they are transforming medicine from the treatment of disease to the treatment of patients — and ultimately the treatment of populations.

At Cornerstone Health Care, a 250-doctor organization in North Carolina, patients with a history of congestive heart failure get a daily phone call from a nurse asking them to step on a scale and report their weight, the best early indicator of an impending emergency. The next stage, Grace Terrell, the president of Cornerstone, told me, will be to give these patients scales that automatically transmit their weight directly to the nurse. (“If the N.S.A. is Big Brother, we’re Big Mother,” Terrell says of the weight surveillance program.) Diabetes patients are invited in for low-cost pedicures. Why? Because diabetics are notoriously vulnerable to infections that lead to amputation, and a common cause of those infections is ingrown toenails. (Both of these practices were pioneered by CareMore, a California-based company that runs clinics for Medicare patients and that has become a major role model since Obamacare.)

The Heritage Provider Network, a huge accountable care organization in California, offers Medicare patients free dance lessons, healthy cooking classes and casino excursions that feature “brain power” activities on the bus. The Greater Buffalo United Accountable Healthcare Network, a new, seven-doctor practice in upstate New York, is building a gym and a teaching kitchen for its patients, who are mostly inner-city minorities.

“Most doctors were on treadmills,” plodding through their routines, said Raul Vazquez, the chief executive of the Buffalo venture. Now they’re reinventing health care for the inner city with an invigorated sense of mission.

This is not the heroic medicine that turns surgeons into gods and emergency rooms into Hollywood material. Don’t expect to see a toenail-clipping episode on “Grey’s Anatomy.” But these services address the embarrassing fact, reiterated in study after study after study, that Americans pay much more for medical care than other developed countries, with no better results. Obamacare addresses this problem by going, as Willie Sutton famously advised, where the money is. It concentrates resources on the unhealthiest. According to Kaiser Health News, the sickest 1 percent of patients account for 21 percent of health care costs; 5 percent account for half of the total costs.

“There are organizations that are bringing emergency room visits down by 15 to 20 percent,” Glick said. “Hospital admissions, you see numbers like 20 and 30 percent. That can make a huge difference not only in the cost of care but also in the quality of care.”

The best sign that these innovations are beginning to go viral is that they have caught the attention of some giant businesses. Drugstore chains like Walgreens and CVS are now partnering with hospitals or accountable care organizations to give patients convenient points of access and to coordinate treatment. Companies that spend heavily on employee health care plans are learning the best lessons of the Obamacare laboratory. Walmart, the country’s biggest private employer, will fly workers who need transplants or heart or spinal surgery to premier facilities like the Mayo or Cleveland Clinics to assure that their problems get fixed right the first time, avoiding costly readmissions.

Obamacare has also had some important indirect consequences. According to Catherine Dower of the Center for the Health Professions at the University of California at San Francisco, since the Affordable Care Act states have become more aggressive about challenging some of the protectionist laws that prevent well-qualified medical professionals — pharmacists, nurse practitioners, physician assistants, emergency medical technicians — from offering some kinds of primary care. California just passed a law that will allow pharmacists to check your blood pressure and cholesterol level and to dispense prescription birth control and antismoking drugs. Letting pharmacists perform services that don’t require seven years of medical training makes those services cheaper and more convenient, increasing the chances consumers will take better care of themselves.

Dower said that while the formal doctor lobby continues to resist this as a threat to the M.D. cartel, many physicians have embraced it, recognizing that outsourcing some of these services leaves them more time to do what only doctors can do. And with an estimated 29 million new clients expected to join the ranks of the insured, there is a lot of work to share.

The emerging system is far from perfect. As Elisabeth Rosenthal reported in The Times on Sunday, Congress buckled to drug company lobbying and refused to let Medicare use its purchasing power to bring down obscenely inflated drug prices. And like any upheaval, the reform of health care will produce some losers. Not all of the new organizations will make a go of it. Since hospitals account for about a third of our health care bill, they are a particular target of cost-cutters; some will fail to adapt and will go out of business. Taking costs out of the system means taking money out of somebody’s pockets. This is what the business world calls “creative destruction.”

Grace Terrell of Cornerstone said that of its 250 doctors, “20 percent are still, ‘Down with Obamacare,’ though even they like the private-enterprise approach; 30 percent really get it; and the others are moving faster than the market. We may ultimately fail, but we’re pretty far ahead of the curve.”

One reason you may not have heard much about this part of the Obamacare story is that it is numbingly complicated. (Stephen M. Davidson of Boston University has written a concise and accessible guide to the law and its consequences.) But I suspect another reason is partisan spite. The Democrats were passionately in favor of enrolling the uninsured, but many would have preferred a government-run program, or at least a public option. What Obamacare has wrought is the kind of market-driven reformation that Republicans pretend to believe in. Which makes you wonder how much of their opposition rests on the merits, and how much is just a loathing for anything associated with Barack Obama.

******

900,000

BY CAP ACTION WAR ROOM ON OCTOBER 16, 2013 AT 5:18 PM

GOP Crises Alone Have Killed 900,000 Jobs

After shutting down the government for over two weeks in a failed attempt to deny affordable health insurance to millions of Americans, the prospect of a catastrophic economic shutdown caused by an unprecedented default on our obligations has finally brought enough Republicans to their senses. A bipartisan deal negotiated by senators to re-open the government and avoid a default appears set to pass both the House and the Senate this evening.

President Obama and Democrats stood strong and refused to grant Republicans any of their ransom demands in exchange for Congress agreeing to simply do its job, but unfortunately the series of crises manufactured by the GOP over the past few years has already taken a terrible toll on the economy.

A new report out yesterday pins the number of jobs killed by the GOP’s government-by-crisis strategy over the past few years at 900,000.

As ThinkProgress notes, the report also finds that the painful and unnecessary austerity spending cuts (themselves largely imposed by the GOP using crises and threats) in place have cost us more than a million jobs:

The report also finds that cuts to discretionary spending from 2011 to the present have cost the country 1.2 million jobs and 0.7 percentage points of GDP growth. About three-quarters of the $2.4 trillion in total deficit reduction enacted since the fall of 2010 was in the form of spending cuts. The Peterson-commissioned estimate of what that steep reduction in government expenditures has cost is a bit more conservative than previous estimates by other economists, but only slightly less negative.

This graphic from our Center for American Progress colleagues illustrates how many more Americans would have jobs in a world without austerity:

Finally, a different report out this evening finds the current shutdown crisis pulled $24 BILLION out of the economy and will slash more than a half-percentage off GDP growth.

BOTTOM LINE: It’s time for Republicans to stop trying to govern by crisis, hostage-taking, and extortion. The fight over the debt limit is over. Period. It’s now time for us to come to a long-term agreement on the budget that gets rid of the damaging sequester cuts and is instead focused on our real problems: jobs and economic growth.

It’s also time for Speaker Boehner to abandon his failed attempts to appease the extreme Tea Party wing of the GOP and instead seek a bipartisan governing majority focused on doing what’s best for our country, including the passage of immigration reform with a pathway to earned citizenship.

Evening Brief: Important Stories That You Might’ve Missed

Houston Chronicle regrets endorsing Ted Cruz.

POLLS: Shutdown hurting GOP Senate chances, even in red states.

Right-wing group that orchestrated shutdown overt Obamacare now admits that “everybody knows” Obamacare can’t be repealed.

Ted Cruz admits the shutdown was all about building email fundraising lists.

Anti-tax crusader says defunders owe conservatives an apology.

Senate Republicans: GOP didn’t get anything out of shutdown.

Tea Party already seeking purge of non-extremists in 2014.

Tea Party congresswoman who voted to shut down the government now wants billions in disaster aid.

More than five million poor Americans won’t get health coverage because of the GOP’s refusal to expand Medicaid.