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As Rachel Maddow noted in her segment above, it looks like Indiana Gov. Mike Pence may be set to follow in Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell's shoes and take over the title of Governor Ultrasound if he ends up supporting this bill that just passed his state's Senate.

Indiana Bill Would Force Women To Undergo Two Transvaginal Probes To Take A Pill (UPDATED):

A medication abortion pill, officially known as RU-486, is the earliest available abortion option for a woman. A patient could be as little as one week pregnant and take the pill to terminate. But despite the incredibly early stage at which the pill is administered, a new bill proposed in the Indiana State Senate would require women to undergo a transvaginal ultrasound before they are permitted to simply swallow the medication.

Indiana’s effort follows a sweeping national trend to mandate the medically unnecessary and invasive procedure as a way to create barriers to abortion access. And theirs goes a step further, by also forcing clinics that administer the pill to meet all of the same requirements as a surgical abortion clinic: [...]

UPDATE: Indiana’s bill is actually twice as invasive as most forced ultrasound bills, the Huffington Post reports. The version that advanced out of a Senate committee today would require women to undergo two transvaginal probes — before and after taking the abortion pill. There’s no medically necessary reason to require an ultrasound after an abortion procedure, since women can simply take a blood test to see whether their hormone levels have returned to normal to verify that they are no longer pregnant.

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An Indiana man convicted of setting fire to a mosque in Ohio told a judge on Wednesday that he committed the crimes because Fox News and conservative talk radio had convinced him that "most Muslims are terrorists."

Randolph Linn, 52, accepted a plea deal in which he pled guilty to all charges in connection to setting a fire in the prayer room at the Islamic Center of Greater Toledo on Sept. 30. Under the deal, Linn is expected to serve 20 years in prison instead of 40.

Linn explained to the court that he had gotten "riled up" after watching Fox News.

"And I was more sad when Judge [Jack] Zouhary asked him that, 'Do you know any Muslims or do you know what Islam is?'" one mosque member who attended the hearing recalled to WNWO. "And he said, 'No, I only know what I hear on Fox News and what I hear on radio.'"

"Muslims are killing Americans and trying to blow stuff up," Linn also reportedly told the judge. "Most Muslims are terrorists and don't believe in Jesus Christ."

Linn claimed that he had consumed 45 beers in the 6 hours before leaving his Indiana home to set fire to the mosque, which he had discovered while working as a truck driver.

After his arrest on Oct. 2, Assistant U.S. Attorney Ava Dusten said that Linn had told officers, "Fuck those Muslims... They would kill us if they got the chance."

Linn is due back in court on April 16, 2013 for a formal sentencing.

A survey released by Fairleigh Dickinson University earlier this year determined that Fox News viewers were actually less informed that Americans who watched no news at all. In fact, at least seven studies in recent years have confirmed that Fox News viewers are more likely to be misinformed than other Americans.

(h/t: News Corpse)

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In tonight's U.S. Senate debate Republican Richard Mourdock put his cards on the table, declaring that if pregnancy from rape occurs it must be something God intended.

Video by the Indiana Democrats.

“I’ve struggled with it myself for a long time, but I came to realize that life is that gift from God. And even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen.”

After the debate, Mourdock backpeddled somewhat from his on-air statements, saying:

“Are you trying to suggest that somehow I think God ordained or pre-ordained rape? No, I don’t think that anyone could suggest that. That’s a sick, twisted – no, that’s not even close to what I said,” Mourdock said.

“It is a fundamental part of my faith that God gives us life. God determines when life begins,” he said. “I believe in an almighty God who makes those calls. … There are some things in life that are above my pay grade.”

His opponent, also a pro-lifer, Democrat Joe Donnelly criticized Mourdock's extremism.

Donnelly, who opposes abortion except in cases of rape, incest and when the life of the mother is threatened, condemned Mourdock’s debate comments.

“Rape is a horrible crisis, an unspeakable crime, and I can’t believe that my God, or any God, would intend it to happen,” he said afterward. "What Mr. Mourdock said is shocking, and it is stunning that he would be so disrespectful to survivors of rape."

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Oops! Richard Mourdock got ahead of himself and released this video celebrating the end of the Affordable Care Act at the hands of the Supreme Court.

Via Politico:

Indiana Treasurer and GOP Senate candidate Richard Mourdock applauds the Supreme Court's decision invalidating the Affordable Care Act in a new video uploaded to his YouTube account.

The catch, obviously, is that the Court hasn't ruled on Obamacare just yet, and won't do so until next week. Mourdock's video, titled "ObamaCare3," is apparently a pretaped message in the event that the health care law goes down, but it hit the web early.

“Well, we’ve had our brief moment of celebration, because the Supreme Court ruled that Obamacare is, in fact, unconstitutional. It’s what many of us argued all along," Mourdock begins. "But don’t sit back and think the fight is over because it isn’t. Barack Obama and Congressman Joe Donnelly are already putting Obamacare 2.0 together and they’re going to try and pass it once again. We cannot let that happen."

Subsequent to Politico's report, the Mourdock campaign pulled the video out of public view, but you know, once a bell has rung, it can't be unrung. A copy of the ad is at the top of this post.

I admit that I was bothered by Mourdock's premature dance in the endzone, even if it appears he did make videos for every possibility. Conventional wisdom holds that what is done at the Supreme Court stays at the Supreme Court until the opinion is released.

But there's that Ginni Thomas factor, and her ties to right wing organizations. Her past includes cozy and deep-pocketed connections with the Kochs, and she's now hard at work for Tucker Carlson's Foster Friess enterprise, The Daily Caller.

I note over on the SCOTUSblog there's a calendar entry for a June 26th summit at the Cato Institute to discuss the "meaning of the Obamacare ruling." Once again, that could simply be contingency planning for whatever the ruling ends up being. But it's worrisome to me that Ginni Thomas is the common denominator in an equation that includes premature end zone spiking by Mr. Mourdock even as John Boehner warns that Republican congressmen should definitely not under any circumstances celebrate if SCOTUS strikes it down.

By now, I'm assuming the court is putting the finishing touches on the opinion(s) and dissent(s) in order to release everything by Monday of next week. So why would Mourdock behave as if he knew the outcome already? Wishful thinking, or inside information? I suggest keeping an eye on The Daily Caller to see how they handle the decision when it's released to the public.

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Former Bush budget director and Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels was more than happy to tout his state's union busting as a model for the country during his interview on Fox News Sunday, but when asked about Indiana's ranking as 46th in state worker gross salary, the best he could come up with is to pretend he'd never heard those stats before.

Daniels bragged that his state has been "rated as one of the best jobs climates in the country by everyone now." I'm guessing "everyone now" means businesses that would like a race to the bottom on wages and benefits and not the workers whose collective bargaining rights he just destroyed.

WALLACE: Well, let's look at what you have done as governor of Indiana. It is a long list. Let's take a look.

In 2005, you ended collective bargaining rights for state workers on first day in office. In 2011, you restricted teachers bargaining rights. In 2012, this year, you signed a right to work law that said people don't have to join a union to get a job.

It sounds, Governor, like a pretty concerted effort to break public and private unions.

DANIELS: I don't see it that way at all. Now, I will say that on the government side, we felt if we were going to do right by taxpayers and if we were going to make government work effectively as it does in Indiana, there was a survey last year in which 77 percent of Hoosiers said they thought the state government was effective. It's the second highest number in the country. If we do those things we have to have freedom to move resources where they were need, move people where they were needed, pay people on the basis of their performance and not simply their seniority, and we are doing that in the state now, I think to a very positive affect.

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More on the execrable Bob Morris here, "Fort Wayne Pol Won't Sign Anniversary Resolution For Girl Scouts".

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Thankfully, it does look like we got some union solidarity from the National Football League Players Association when it comes to Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels and his union busting with the recent passage another god awful right to work for less law in the state that is going to be hosting the Super Bowl this year.

The bad news is how difficult the struggle will be to overturn this union busting with the strength of unions being diminished with every law like this that passes, along with the flood of money pouring into our elections from the Citizens United debacle and the unfettered corporate influence and the ability of the richest among us to buy our elections.

Add that to voter disenfranchisement, on a scale we haven't seen in decades, electronic voting machines we should not be trusting to vote on and and compliant media that cares more about the horse races and conflict than telling anyone the truth, and we've got a long, long way to go to clean up the mess we're in right now and being able to put a stop to what just happened in Indiana and with the union busting across the country, whether our votes will be counted, and whether those who are voting are informed, and not just propagandized by right-wing media and misinformation which has filled our airways.

Here's more from Democracy Now, with Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzales as always, keeping up the fight on the side of the working class on the actions that are being planned for Super Bowl Sunday.

Occupy the Super Bowl: Indiana’s New Anti-Union Law Sparks Protest at Sport’s Biggest Spectacle:

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Republicans apparently are counting on the American public to have short memories, or to not be aware of who Mitch Daniels is and what policies he's endorsed since they decided to tap him to give the response to President Obama's State of the Union Address this Tuesday evening.

Daniels attacked the President for not turning the economy around quickly enough, ignoring the fact that he's personally responsible for a good deal of the debt and deficit we're dealing with now during his time working in the Bush administration.

From Steve Benen back in February of last year -- The Record Mitch Daniels Doesn't Want to Talk About:

A couple of days ago, David Brooks praised Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels (R) for his record of fiscal responsibility. That record, in Brooks' vision, starts in 2004 when Daniels was elected to statewide office.

But there's also that inconvenient period in which Daniels was Bush's budget director, and the U.S. government began the most fiscally irresponsible period in American history. [...]

It's true that Daniels, as Bush's budget director, was helping shape the books during an economic downturn, but I seem to recall Republicans concluding that these details are irrelevant -- Obama inherited the worst economy since the Great Depression, but as far as the GOP is concerned, that's not a good excuse for large deficits.

For that matter, Daniels is correct that his tenure also included 9/11 and the launch of two wars, but every president in American history raised taxes to help pay for previous U.S. wars, to prevent deficits from spiraling out of control. Bush, with Daniels' blessing, approved two massive tax cuts that ultimately added $5 trillion to the debt in just eight years.

It's that same debt that Daniels believes will destroy the country. Funny, he didn't think that way when he was directly responsible for making the problem worse.

Daniels also claimed during this speech that it's his party that wants to "save" our social safety nets, but this is the same man who called Social Security "a Ponzi scheme." And as Media Matters Political Correction posted last May -- GOP "Savior" Mitch Daniels Wants To Voucherize Medicare, Slash Social Security Benefits.

Daniels also claimed his party is concerned about restoring "hope and upward mobility and greater equality" for Americans, but he's been busy pushing "right to work" legislation through his state that would have the opposite effect.

The fact that this man is one of the people that the Republicans and the beltway Villagers in the media are still touting as some sort of "savior" for the Republican Party just speaks to how extremely weak their field of candidates are right now.

I'm sure there will be a lot more fact checking of this speech as people have time and pointing out the lies by Daniels that were made here and his utter hypocrisy, which it deserves. I'll just leave it there for now with the text of the speech below the fold for anyone that would like to weigh in further at this point.

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From Democracy Now -- Naomi Klein on Anti-Union Bills and Shock Doctrine American-Style: "This is a Frontal Assault on Democracy, a Corporate Coup D’Etat":

As a wave of anti-union bills are introduced across the country following the wake of Wall Street financial crisis, many analysts are picking up on the theory that award-winning journalist and author Naomi Klein first argued in her 2007 bestselling book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. In the book, she reveals how those in power use times of crisis to push through undemocratic and extreme free market economic policies. “The Wisconsin protests are an incredible example of how to resist the shock doctrine,” Klein says.

AMY GOODMAN: Rallies for workers’ rights are spreading across the country. In Michigan, over a thousand people rallied at the State Capitol in Lansing to oppose a measure allowing the breaking of labor contracts by placing schools and districts under emergency management. In a scene reminiscent of Wisconsin, hundreds of demonstrators packed the Capitol Rotunda chanting slogans. Protests were also held against anti-union bills Tuesday in Indiana, Ohio, Iowa, Florida and Tennessee.

Meanwhile, in Idaho, the state legislature has given final approval to a measure restricting the collective bargaining of public school teachers. The bill would limit teachers’ collective bargaining to salaries and benefits. It also ends teacher tenure, limits teacher contracts to one year, and removes seniority as a factor in determining layoffs.

As a wave of anti-union bills are introduced across the country in the wake of the Great Recession, many analysts are picking up on the theory that award-winning journalist and author Naomi Klein first argued in her bestselling book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. In it, she reveals how those in power use times of crisis to push through undemocratic, radical, free market economic policies.

Nobel Prize-winning economist, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, recently referenced the book in his column called "Shock Doctrine, U.S.A." He wrote, quote, "The story of the privatization-obsessed Coalition Provisional Authority [in Iraq] was the centerpiece of Naomi Klein’s best-selling book 'The Shock Doctrine,' which argued that it was part of a broader pattern. From Chile in the 1970s onward, she suggested, right-wing ideologues have exploited crises to push through an agenda that has nothing to do with resolving those crises, and everything to do with imposing their vision of a harsher, more unequal, less democratic society.

"Which brings us to Wisconsin 2011, where the shock doctrine is on full display," Krugman wrote.

Well, Naomi Klein joins us today in our studio for the hour. In addition to The Shock Doctrine, she’s the author of two previous books: No Logo: Taking Aim at Brand Bullies and Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate. She’s currently writing a new book which focuses on the public relations campaign distorting climate change facts.

Read on...

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In one of her better segments, Rachel Maddow talked about the fact that the Democratic Party is getting a big reminder this week with just who their base is and that it would do them some good to quit chasing after corporate money and start representing them. As she noted, what's going on in Wisconsin and Ohio and around the country has meant a resurrection for public support of labor unions and progressive groups and that Democrats on the local level are standing with their constituents. She asked when those on the national level and President Obama are going to wake up as well.

She gave a nice plug to all of these groups as well. Thank you Rachel.

Act Blue State Senate Democratic Committee (WI)

AFL-CIO Blog -- Wis. Voters File Recall Petitions Against Anti-Worker Senators

United Mine Workers of America

The Progressive Campaign Change Committee