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Tuesday, September 13, 2011

Youth Win, Immigration Opponents Lose in First Post-Utoya Norway Elections « Student Activism

Youth Win, Immigration Opponents Lose in First Post-Utoya Norway Elections « Student Activism:

Youth Win, Immigration Opponents Lose in First Post-Utoya Norway Elections

Norway held its first elections since the Utoya massacre Monday, and the results show a repudiation of the views — and the party — of the man responsible for the carnage.

It’s been seven weeks since anti-immigration zealot Anders Breivik murdered sixty-nine people at a Labor Party youth retreat on the island of Utoya. Yesterday’s results showed 33.2% of voters supporting Labor candidates, giving that party its best result in a municipal election in two decades. The big swing came on the right, however, as the anti-immigrant Progress Party, of which Breivik was a member until 2006, lost more than a third of its


Michele Bachmann Gets Weird After Tea Party Debate

At last night’s CNN/Tea Party Republican presidential debate, Texas governor Rick Perry was slammed for his 2007 support of a state program vaccinating girls against Human Papilloma Virus — a sexually-transmitted virus that can lead to cervical cancer.

In the debate itself Michele Bachman described the vaccine as a “government injection,” and Perry’s decision as “a violation of a liberty interest.” She also accused Perry, whose chief of staff was a former lobbyist for vaccine manufacturer Merck Pharmaceutical, of pushing the program as payback for campaign donations from Merck.

But after the debate, in a CNN interview, she took it to a really weird place.

One objection to the HPV vaccine is the idea that it might encourage promiscuity by reducing the risks of sexual