Last night, Mississippi voters decisively rejected a ballot initiative to redefine fertilized eggs as people. As of Wednesday morning, the measure stood defeated by a margin of 58% to 42% with nearly all precincts reporting. This is a surprising result. On the eve of the vote, most observers expected the measure to pass.

November Sidney Award winner Irin Carmon takes a closer look at how Mississippi beat Initiative 26 in Salon. Grassroots activists, including rape survivors, doctors, parents by in vitro fertilization, and members of the clergy joined forces with national organizations like Planned Parenthood and the ACLU. It probably helped that a PersonhoodUSA spokesman predicted on national radio that Initiative 26 would ban the birth control pill.

As underwhelming as their performance was last night, this is a high water mark for the egg-as-person movement. If you can’t declare a fertilized ovum a full-fledged human being in Mississippi, you can’t do it anywhere in America. Similar proposals were defeated by 40-point margins in Colorado in 2008 and 2010. Undeterred by the overwhelming evidence, PersonhoodUSA has vowed to introduce similar measures in Florida, Montana, Ohio, Oregon, Nevada and California in 2012.

Anti-choicers often claim that their opposition to abortion is based on Judeo-Christian teachings. They stake their claim to religious authority so loudly, so confidently, and so often that it’s easy to forget that their interpretations of scripture aren’t the only ones.

Elissa Strauss interviewed Rabbi Jill Jacobs and Reverend Chloe Breyer to find out what the Bible says about when life begins.

The anti-choice argument from Judeo-Christian texts rests on surprisingly shaky theological foundations.

Elissa correctly stresses that no one’s religious beliefs should dictate the law. And the Judeo-Christian tradition is just one among many. But there’s no question that a lot of people’s views on reproductive rights are influenced by what they assume their religion teaches on the subject.

As an atheist, I’m continually impressed by the marketing triumph of religious anti-choicers. They’ve managed to make their tenuous interpretation of scripture synonymous with “the religious perspective” on abortion.

[Photo credit: Zyada, Creative Commons.]

• “I am the Koch brothers’ brother from another mother!” Herman Cain proclaimed during an appearance at Americans for Prosperity, Friday. This delicious scoop comes from Dave Weigel of Slate.
• Cain’s campaign accepted tens of thousands of dollars of legally dubious in-kind contributions from Prosperity USA, a non-profit headed by Cain’s chief of staff, Mark Block, Mark Bice of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel revealed late last week. Block is also the former head of the Wisconsin chapter of Americans for Prosperity, a non-profit co-founded by the arch conservative Koch Brothers.
• Nick Confessore of the New York Times reported that an outside lawyer would be looking into the Cain campaign’s finances to determine whether the tax-exempt Prosperity USA violated campaign finance laws by paying for a variety of expenses for the Cain campaign including iPads and a trip for Mark Block to meet David Koch.
• In other campaign finance news, the downfall of New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine and his bankrupt brokerage firm MF Global may prove embarassing for President Obama, considering that Corzine raised at least $500,000 as an Obama bundler, according to Dan Eggen and T.W. Farnam of the Washington Post. They note that MF Global recently wrote a clause into a bond issue promising to raise interest rates by 1% if Corzine was appointed to a post in the Obama administration. As MF Global went into the eighth-largest bankruptcy in U.S. history, it was revealed that the firm had “lost track” of an estimated $633 million in client funds. The FEC is investigating whether MF Global gambled and lost other people’s money.

[Photo credit: Wandermule, Creative Commons.]

These aren’t used cars so much as usury cars….

In a special three-part series, Ken Bensinger of the L.A. Times investigates the wildly profitable but little known world of “Buy Here Pay Here” used car dealerships. These lots cater to a very specific clientele: People with terrible credit who need a car to hold a job.

In part 1, Bensinger explains the Buy Here Pay Here business model: sign, drive, default, repossess, and resell.

Faced with the choice between getting hosed buy a used car dealer and sleeping on the street, buyers will pay any price and accept financing on any terms. The dealers know it. Cars are priced above their Blue Book value and financed at an average interest rate of 20.7%, triple the national average.

Buy Here Pay Here dealerships are only nominally selling cars. Their real business is financing. And because they write their own loans, they are exempt from most forms of regulation. The “Pay Here” part of the name indicates that the buyer delivers payments in cash to the dealership.

You’d think that selling cars on credit to the country’s least reliable borrowers would be an unprofitable business. Not so. The average BHPH dealership turns a 38% profit.

The thing is, these dealers don’t care if customers make their payments. In fact, it’s better if they don’t. These cars come standard with hidden GPS trackers and remote ignition locks for easy repo. If a customer falls behind, the car is seized an resold. Bensinger found that cars were often resold at higher prices the second and third times around. 

In part II, Bensinger reveals that Wall Street is in on the racket. (At this point the reader may experience a sinking feeling in the pit of the stomach and an unshakeable sense of deja vu. That’s a common side effect of devastating investigative reporting. Do not be alarmed. Be enraged.)

Financial chopshops have sprung up on Wall Street to cash in on the BHPH boom. Loans originated by BHPH dealers are being securitized, meaning that financial wizards are chopping up these ultra-subprime auto loans and packaging them into securities for investors to buy. Some of these products are rated AAA.

This is the exact scam that led to the subprime mortgage crisis. Bad loans are being repackaged as securities backed by what are surely inflated ratings and pawned off on hapless investors.

These securities will turn into so much worthless paper if the BHPH industry can’t keep all the balls in the air. But neither the securitizers nor the used car dealers care because, they’ll have already made their money.

The third part of the series will run tomorrow. Sidney can hardly wait.

If the word gets out, Occupy the Lot could be the next phase of the Occupy Movement.

[Photo credit: SeeMidTN.com, Creative Commons; visit SeeMidTN.com on the web.]