A Michigan woman threatened a Minnesota newspaper with mass murder for criticizing Rep. Michelle Bachmann (R-MN)'s anti-health reform rally, reports Paul Schmelzer in the Minnesota Independent:
...A woman in Michigan, angered over a newspaper editorial criticizing Bachmann's event, threatened to take a gun to the paper and "do what they did at Fort Hood" in response.
How pro-life.
David Corn of Mother Jones reports that Bachmann (R-MN) may also face an ethics investigation for using her taxpayer-funded website to promote the Tea Pary-Superbowl of Freedom, a partisan political rally to defeat health care reform. The Center for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), a non-profit political watchdog, alleges that Bachmann violated a House rule against using official websites for "grassroots lobbying or [to] solicit support for a Member's position." She literally told her supporters to come to Washington on Nov 5 and tell their representatives to vote against health reform. That's textbook grassroots lobbying and a clear no-no for a taxpayer-funded website.
Speaking of pesky rules and regulations, Rep. Bart Stupak's (D-MI) C Street residence is no-longer tax exempt. Stupak, who became famous for inserting a radical and far-reaching abortion funding ban into the House health reform bill, lives with several other lawmakers at a house on C Street. The house is owned by a secretive fundamentalist sect known as The Family. For years, C Street avoided paying property taxes by claiming to be a church. All that's over now. Ed Brayton of the Michigan Messenger reports that the IRS has finally figured out that C Street is a dorm.
Alex Koppelman reports in Salon that Stupak is reiterating his threat to kill health care reform if his language is stripped from the final bill:
"They're not going to take it out," Stupak said of Senate Democrats during an appearance on "Fox and Friends" Tuesday morning. "If they do, healthcare will not move forward ... At least 10 to 15 to 20 of us will not vote for it."
At Feministing, Jos Truit discusses the Hyde Amendment, a piece of 1976 legislation that bans the use of federal funds for abortions. The Hyde Amendment is back in the news because Stupak is falsely claiming that his amendment merely applies Hyde principles to health insurance.
Does he know that 45,000 born people die every year because they don't have health insurance?
The fight over abortion coverage in a reformed health care system is far from over. It's unlikely that Reid wrote Stupak language into his version of the bill, and it's equally unlikely that anti-choicers have the 60 votes to add it back in as an amendment. (Contrary to popular belief, the Senate is much more pro-choice than the House.) Anti-choice Dems Sens. Ben Nelson and Bob Casey seem to be walking back from their earlier threats to vote against a bill without Stupak language.
Harry Reid announced that Democrats would meet today to preview the Senate's version of the health care bill. The first procedural vote on the Senate bill could come before Thanksgiving.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about health care by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Pulse for a complete list of articles on health care reform, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Mulch, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
I remember the day in 1997 when I listened to my doctor tell me that I had a very large ovarian cyst, also, that I was likely to have a miscarriage. She said it was good that my body seemed to be taking care of things on its own, because the cyst could rupture and hemorrhage and they couldn't operate if I was pregnant because it was a Catholic hospital.
My doctor wasn't mean about it, she just couldn't give me this operation that she'd told me about a minute previous I needed to avert a threat to my life.
I was lucky that I miscarried. As the hormone-induced changes in the cyst caused pain that made it hard to stand upright in a matter of days, it's a good that I didn't have to go through the trouble of finding another hospital covered under my insurance. I went quickly from the terror of waiting to know if I could get that operation to the grim realities of going through it and recovering.
It turned out all right, but I've always remembered since then that I once sat helpless in a doctor's office watching her eyes slide away from mine to the floor as she refused to say anything when I pressed her to tell me what would happen if there wasn't a natural miscarriage. She just skipped ahead to how someone with my blood test results wasn't going to be pregnant much longer.
Opponents of abortion like to center their arguments around the fetus and talk about whether it's a person. Which basically means to me that they don't think women are people with the basic right to determine the conditions of their lives and what will happen to their bodies, who can be forced to suffer or die because it will make someone else feel better.
Fundraising Note: Open Left's incredibly not heavy-handed fundraiser continues, with this brief reminder as I bring you an example of one new aspect of our site, ongoing interview-based reporting on current political developments and their deeper backgrounds. You can DONATE HERE before reading, and feel even better about what you're about to read, knowing you've just helped make more of the same possible well into the new year ahead. We're now over $14,000, enough to take us through mid-April. Our goal is $18,000, enough to take us through late May. This is not a lot of money in the grand scheme of things. If you think progressive infrastructure is important, that's a lot of bang for the buck. If you don't think progressive infrastructure is important, then you're probably reading the wrong blog.After passage of the Stupak-Pitts Amendment and the House Health Care Reform bill, Congresswoman Diana DeGette, Democratic Deputy Whip and Co-chair of the Pro-Choice Caucus, announced she had sent a letter to Speaker Pelosi signed by over 40 members saying they would not support a final bill with Stupak's language in it. While the controversy over Stupak's Amendment had ebbed and swelled this week, DeGette's letter remains a firm backstop to all other efforts to remove Stupak's language... if one believes that its signers will stick by their guns. So Open Left decided to ask her for her view of how things developed, leading to her drafting and circulating the letter, and why it should be taken seriously. We also asked about her closely-related concern for stem-cell research. Not just a leading congressional advocate, she's the author of Sex, Science, and Stem Cells: Inside the Right Wing Assault on Reason.
Open Left:As co-chair of the Pro-Choice Caucus, what's your explanation of how Stupak-Pitts caught people by surprise?
Congresswoman Diana DeGette: What happened was Bart really moved the goal post, because in the Energy and Commerce Committee in the summer he offered several of his amendments and we defeated all of them. So after that he said that he demendad that the Speaker allow him to offer his amendment on the floor, although he wasn't clear which one. When the bill came up and he said that if he was not allowed to offer his amendment, then he would have 40 votes against the rule. So we went out and very industriously got enough votes to pass the rule. And so the Speaker said, 'You know we've got the votes to pass the rule. So I'm not going to support your amendment being in order.'
Then he said, this was like last Thursday or Friday, at the 11th hour, she said 'We've got the votes the votes for the rule, and it's not going to be in order,' and he said, 'Well, fine, if you don't include my amendment in the rule to bring the bill to the floor, then we're all going to vote against the bill. So he sifted the goal post. And what happened was-and the way it would have worked is that his language would have been a part of the rule to bring the bill to the floor, so all of us would have had to vote for it. We would have all had to vote for the biggest expansion of retrictins on a woman's right to choose in our lifetime.
Open Left:Was it just that he had never indicated that he might do that before and people just weren't expecting it, or...
Congresswoman DeGette: Right. Right. No, no, I mean, he's a Democrat, so we did what we needed to do and then he shifted, so he had never threatened to do that before. And so then the Speaker said to him, she said 'We're not going to give you your amendment in the rule. He said, 'Fine, we're just going to vote against the bill.'
I saw too, she was looking at the votes she had for final passage, and if they didn't vote for it, the bill would have died. So she said, 'Okay, I'll give you your amendment on the floor.' Which the pro-choice caucus said, 'We're not going to vote for a rule that contains this awful language.' And so when she said, 'I'll put it on the floor,' we said, 'Fine, we'll just fight against the amendment.'
I think a couple of things happened. Number one, a lot of people did not realize that this wasn't just Hyde, because Congressman Stupak unto this day keeps saying he's just putting Hyde in there. But this is unprecedented, because now it says people with their own money-either in the exchange or the public option--cannot buy insurance policies that buy abortion. So that's a expansion.
Hyde says that no federal funding. Somehow he thinks that if there's public money and private money, that then the private money's tainted by the public money. So, that's not in current law.
Open Left:So do you believe that that confusion is what accounts for the margin that he was able to win on?
Nancy Keenan, head of the national NARAL group (and most obedient of the obedient losers) was apparently personally promised before the health care battle by the Obama administration that they would look after the organization's constituency interests in the health care bill and preserve the status quo. In return, NARAL was asked to stand down its activism.
They did. So with all their colleagues, they got caught with their pants down when a floor vote on the Stupak amendment was imminent.
Today, I got a press release from the DNC, and their Organizing For America project, on their plan to drum up more support for the health care reform bill: targeting Republicans.
It says nothing about women's healthcare. Nothing. Like it isn't even at issue. OFA is still watching NARAL's back, women's backs, as well as they always have.
OFA is crowing about the 500,000 phone calls they've prompted on the health care issue. Were any of them centered around preserving reproductive health care when it mattered? Ha! As Femlaw says at the link, "The idea is to build organizational capacity, so when really critical moments in the campaign happened, OFA could deliver huge numbers."
Targeting Republicans is critical. Encouraging Democrats to stand together for women's health and rights, not critical.
Whee, Joseph Cao voted for the House bill! Too bad it contains the worst blow to women's rights in a generation, while Obama and his pet DNC's reactions continue to be tepid.
(Psst - Did you know that women are supposed to not only get a yearly physical through their family doctor, but have a separate ob-gyn well woman checkup every year from puberty onwards? That's where they check for cervical cancer, look for signs of domestic or sexual abuse, etc. You know, little stuff, but we're supposed to get it checked. Well, neither Obama, nor Congress, nor the DNC seems to know that nor cares. Medical care that all adult women are supposed to get every year won't be going in the required benefits package and there has been no organizing around it.)
The WhiteHouse.gov homepage says nothing about any of this right now. Their women's page says only this:
A clique of anti-choice Democrats in Congress joined forces with Republicans to write abortion access out of the House's health care reform bill last Saturday. Rep. Bart Stupak (D-MI) wants to force women to choose between affordable health insurance and abortion coverage, even if they pay for abortion coverage with their own money.
Pro-choice Democrats and women's health activists are up in arms over the eleventh hour deal. Ellie Smeal of Ms. Magazinedenounces the Stupak amendment as a betrayal of women:
Millions of poor and middle-class women would be denied abortion coverage and millions more would lose the coverage they already have, since 85 percent of private plans now cover abortion. Far from being abortion-neutral, the Stupak amendment is a giant step backward for women. It's unacceptable. In the compromise to get the bill passed, women and their health-care rights were thrown under the bus.
Yesterday, The Pulse interviewed Jodi Jacobson, political director of RH Reality Check, about the implications of the Stupak amendment for reproductive choice in America. Jacobson explained that, if language from the Stupak amendment finds its way into the final health care bill, insurance companies would be forced to eliminate all abortion coverage if they wanted to participate in any aspect of the health care reform plan. Listen to the full interview here. (Note: there's a slight delay before the audio starts.)
Jacobson calls the Stupak language a "monumental setback." If an insurance plan accepts customers who take government subsidies, then nobody on that plan could have abortion coverage-not even those who were paying their whole premium out of pocket. In effect, the Stupak amendment would be "a total ban on public and private money for abortion coverage," Jacobson said.
In TAPPED, Michelle Goldberg accuses the Democrats of "leaving women behind" in their rush to pass health care reform at any cost. Goldberg warns that if the amendment becomes law, Democrats will have handed the anti-abortion lobby its biggest victory since the 2003 Partial Birth Abortion Act.
In the Nation, Eyal Press argues that the Stupak amendment would be an especially cruel blow to poor women:
If this highly regressive amendment makes its way into the legislation that Barack Obama eventually signs, millions of less affluent women who obtain access to affordable health insurance will thus join the ranks of low-income women on Medicaid, most of whom live in states that don't cover abortion procedures. The two-tiered system that dictates who in America has "choice" (more privileged women do, less affluent women do not) will be further entrenched.
Robin Marty of RH Reality Check wonders whether the Stupak amendment would apply to miscarriages as well as elective abortions. Sometimes, when a fetus dies in utero, doctors must surgically remove it. It's the same procedure as an elective termination and it has the same name: Abortion. Last month, Marty lost a much-wanted pregnancy. Doctors laid out her options: a $1500 surgery, a $40 chemical abortion, or an interminable wait to expel the dead fetus naturally. Marty chose the surgery. She worries that the Stupak amendment would take that choice away from other women.
The House bill is not yet the law of the land. There is still time to strip the Stupak language out in conference (the merging process whereby the House bill is combined with whatever comes out of the Senate).
But will it actually get stripped out in the senate? Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE) announced that "If it isn't clear that government money is not to be used to fund abortions, I won't vote for it."
On a conference call yesterday, Sen. Arlen Specter (D-PA) told The Pulse that he was optimistic that a compromise could be worked out. "Ben Nelson said he wasn't going to support a bill if it isn't clear that government money won't be used to fund abortions," Specter said, "Well, we can make it clear that if someone wants to buy abortion coverage with her own money, she can do it."
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about health care by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Pulse for a complete list of articles on health care reform, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Mulch, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
Senator McCaskill is sadly wrong on what the Stupak-Pitts amendment prohibits. Even if she were right, it would still be a wound to the rights of women in this country. Even if the original Stupak amendment passed which only included the public option, not the entire exchanges, that would still have been the biggest blow for women since the original Hyde amendment. Which has always been a vindictive piece of legislation aimed at the most vulnerable among us.
The Hyde amendment is now a festering sore that has suppurated which will deprive American women of all kinds from the poor to middle and even upper class womwn, access to an essential reproductive rights.
But the Senator's understanding is a misunderstanding of great proportions. She is wrong. The prohibition is not on individuals in the exchanges who buy plans but on the plans which GET subsidies.
"But we are talking about whether or not people that get public money can buy an insurance policy that has a coverage for abortion. And that is not the majority of America. The majority of America is not going to be getting subsidies from the government...."
The majority of America now gets coverage from their employers who will be allowed to purchase on the exchanges.
But she is very, very wrong on the mechanism for prohibiting abortion coverage.. She has it backwards. Her misunderstanding is convenient perhaps because it allows her to proceed under the assumption that few people will be affected. Maybe that makes it better in her mind.
She is wrong. Millions of women --now without insurance and even those now with it in the private market will be affected. In a few years all women will be affected as employers are allowed to enter the exchanges. No abortion coverage for anyone at all.
The federal subsidies affect the plan, not just the individuals in the plan. It is not just the individual who has subsides that can't get abortion coverage. It is that any subsidy from anyone taints the entire plan. So any plan that gets subsidies from anyone at all can not offer abortion coverage.
After this health financing reform legislation passes the House, it seems the burden for coming up with the costs associated with pregnancy and pregnancy prevention will likely fall more entirely on women afterwards than before. This is nothing new.
For years uncounted and still today, the vast majority of unpaid labor associated with raising children has fallen on women. Just as the career costs, Social Security benefit costs, unemployment eligibility costs, and most of the other opportunity and financial costs associated with two decades of working for helpless people who can only pay you in hugs, fall largely on women.
On top of all this volunteer work they do, society has collectively decided not to give a damn that women are paid less when they are paid, nor that their greater healthcare costs have to be paid for out of either these smaller salaries, or family money whose use they often have to justify to someone with greater social status.
And today, a few too many Democrats are coming out to stand with Bart Stupak and basically say that they're fine with this unpaid labor of love becoming mandatory for women who can't pay to avoid it, nor have the patience of saints to be abstinent.
This seems to me to be an expression of unimaginable hatred for women, who literally risk their lives every time they decide to carry a child a term, and the poorer a woman is, the less access to medical care and good nutrition she has, the truer that is. It might not be politic to talk about, considering that it can't be measured in money, but each of us owes a debt to our mother that can never be repaid and it's a mockery of the sacrifice of every mother to make motherhood a matter of force.
There is no other circumstance in the present-day US in which a human being is forced to risk their life or health for someone else. When it's done in combat or public service, soldiers get medals, firemen and police get commendations. When it's an organ donation, there's praise and thanks for a generous gift. When women do it in pregnancy, it's no less than they owe.
Women are more than half the population, we are 'most people.' A third of us will have abortions in our lifetimes because either our health was at risk or we simply could not afford a two decade commitment to more unpaid work. Yet in spite of that, too many people see nothing wrong with shaming us, marginalizing our concerns, stigmatizing our necessary health care options, and condemning any independent, not-male-approved exercise of our sexuality.
It's unfair, some say, that 'the rest of society', by which they mean men, should have to support any of women's expenses, in any way, because it isn't like they benefit. And after all, they already did all that exhausting thrusting and pumping, and btw, you're welcome. Words fail.
Jon Walker and David Dayen, both of Firedog Lake, are reporting that the Stupak Amendment which virtually bars BOTH Private Companies AND the Public Option from providing coverage for Reproductive Health Care for Women will receive a Floor Vote today in the House.
As Jon explains-
Stupak's amendment, by not allowing a private insurance company to sell a policy to anyone if they receive any amount of affordability tax credits, would make it impossible for a private insurance plan that covers abortion to survive on the individual and small group market. Stupak has threatened to bring down the entire bill if he does not get his amendment. Rep. Stupak called all previous "compromises" that had been offered "unacceptable."
As David reports-
The Democratic leadership is making a bet that, if it doesn't pass, Stupak and his cadres will sign on to the bill (I highly doubt it; most of them are no votes on health care entirely); and if it does pass, pro-choice Democrats won't sink the bill entirely (also, I highly doubt it). I'm a bit surprised that it's come to this. Also, Stupak appeared to have lied in the Rules Committee about how the deal "fell apart," since he got what he wanted.
This is an enormous bet, and not a well-designed one either, in my view. The Democratic Party will tomorrow give a minority of their caucus an opportunity to amend a large health care bill that would effectively ban abortion services coverage in the individual and small group insurance market, essentially telling private insurance companies what they cannot cover.
The amendment is expected to pass with the combined support of more than 40 anti-abortion Democrats and virtually every House Republican. That likelihood meant that leaders of the much larger group of Democrats who support abortion rights were not happy to learn of the deal.
"There will be no abortion, not just with public funds, but with private funds under the public option, and that's not acceptable," said Rep. Diana DeGette (D-Colo.).
House leaders met with that bloc of Democrats late Friday to try to quell their frustration., but the agreement makes clear that they believe abortion-rights Democrats will find it difficult to vote against the health-care bill even with such a restriction attached to it.
As far as I'm concerned this is a flat out deal breaker.
Health Care Reform with the Stupak Amendment is not worth passing and I intend to call the House Leadership and my Congressperson today to express that opinion.
In the House, Rep. Bart Stupak is trying to both effectively ban insurance coverage for abortion and enact a back door parental/spousal consent law that would apply to the whole country. How's that again?
In sum, the current House bill includes the Capps amendment, explained here by Rep. Lois Capps. I'm not a fan of the Capps amendment, this bill's exemplification of Democratic cowardice in defending women's rights, but one thing anyone with decent reading comprehension can gather is that it forbids federal funding for abortion by continuing the existing ban on same (the same ban that Obama now regards as a hallowed tradition, never to be challenged.) Rep. Stupak has lied, saying that the Capps amendment mandates federal abortion coverage, when it only says that at least one plan covering abortion must be available in the exchange alongside one that doesn't.
As has been pointed out repeatedly, because the majority of private plans now cover abortion, the Capps amendment is a step backward.
Stupak's main lie, popular among misogynists, is that because money is fungible, no effective barrier can be set up between federal premium dollars and coverage for abortion. This was flatly contradicted by the testimony of counsel to the Senate Finance Committee when they were marking up their version of health coverage reform. The Senators were told that not only was it possible to separate the funds, but existing plans already do this in relation to other restrictions on the use of federal money for health care.
Stupak's rule will likely have much of the same chilling effect as a spousal and parental consent law. Also, it will further stigmatize those who've had abortions, by singling out women who need the procedure. Even though the lifetime likelihood of having an abortion is nearly twice, among women, the lifetime risk of prostate cancer in men, and not much less than a woman's lifetime chances of getting diabetes.
A Capitol Hill source confirmed to me that if the House bill is opened to amendments on the floor, leadership expects that conservative Democrats and Republicans will combine forces to enact Stupak's ban on abortion coverage in the insurance exchange. If the bill goes to the floor under a closed rule, no amendments allowed, Bart Stupak will have had a lot to do with it.
It may be shocking to New York magazine bloggers that the right are using Hitler comparisons to talk about the president and the Democratic healthcare proposals, but as offensive and extremely wrongheaded as such comparisons are, they wouldn't seem odd to anyone immersed in the country's anti-abortion movement. Which is to say, almost anyone involved in movement conservatism or fundamentalist Christianity.
I grew up hearing abortion referred to as a Holocaust, and women's health clinicians or their supporters compared to Nazis. It was actually a surprise to me to realize as an adult that people were really bothered by the use of that language to refer to anything besides WWII-era events in Germany. I'd heard it all the time at church, at home, on the radio where Limbaugh has been calling women's rights advocates feminazis for a very long time. It was just the way people talked about things, as far as I knew, and my experience in that world was hardly unique.
I know better now, but people like pastor Rick Warren still don't. And that's still okay with everyone, as far as I know.
With the Autumnal Equinox recently behind us, the leaves are starting to fall and the days are finally cooling. It would seem public opinion on certain hot issues has also started to cool, for better or for worse. Below are findings from recent studies that show a decline in support for legal abortions although still a majority of Americans oppose increasing barriers to abortion access, and a relatively nonchalant attitude toward racial conflict. On the flip side, support for making abortions illegal has gained in popularity, and public opinion is heated around perceived conflict between immigrants and the native-born.
Last weekend I wrote critically about Obama's denial of Jimmy Carter's claim that racism has played a role in the vitriolic opposition that's been expressed to him and his agenda, which has been particularly focused on health care reform the last two months. I'll have more to say about Obama's misguided attitude later this weekend, but my purpose is much broader. I want to argue that we're involved in a conflict of worldviews that's quite different from the New Deal era, at the same time that policy initiatives such as the stimulus package, health care reform, and combating global warming are all grounded to some extent in the dominant New Deal paradigm-whether Obama can admit it or not. There is complex confusion about what the current political options actually are (regardless of questionable convention judgments of viability), and I want to try to clarify them. In a nutshell, my perspective is as follows:
(1) During the New Deal (Fifth Party System) Era, the dominant ideology was New Deal liberalism, which revolved around activist government with a broadly economic populist thrust. The various forms of opposition to it were fragmented and often politically incoherent. The most politically successful Republican counter-move was toward imitative liberalism, which claimed to do a better job of implementing/administrating New Deal-style programs-such as Eisenhower's championing of the Intestate Freeway system. At the same time, the most base-stirring counter-move was the authoritarian jingoism epitomized in full flower by McCarthyism-which had virtually no policy content whatever, but consisted almost entirely of demonizing its perceived enemies.
(2) Tellingly, Richard Nixon, who as a tactical and strategic master of authoritarian jingoism, was the pivotal politician in ending the New Deal Era and introducing the Sixth Party System, which revolved around strategic deployment of political power, with ideology and pragmatic policy both relatively submerged. Nothing much interested Nixon aside from power itself, and demonizing outgroups was his most basic stratagem, which over time came to dominate the Sixth Party System--even though overturning structural bastions of Democratic power was beyond the GOP's reach. Today's Democrats are split like a funhouse mirror reflection of Eisenhower/McCarthy. There are more differences than similarities between the two parties and the two eras, but the fact of the split, and the dominance of the least representative faction are similar.
(3) The historical challenge is that (a) only New Deal liberalism has a template for pragmatic problem-solving (albeit in need of updating), but (b) Obama accepts Sixth Party System framework of politics, including the Nixonian demonization of New Deal liberalism, which effectively eliminates all his realworld pragmatic options, (c) even as he vainly promises to end the demonization-driven polarization that's the very essence of the Sixth Party System. (d) Instead, the polarization only gets worse--the more Obama runs away from big government programs that can work, the more he's accused of being Hitler/Stalin/Big Brother-(e) while his denial of reality on how to confront such polarizing demonization repeats the most self-defeating stratagem of Democrats from throughout the Sixth Party System, and even as far back as the 1940s.
I refer to the above as "my perspective," because I do not presume to argue for it comprehensively in this diary or its follow-up. Rather, I claim that having that perspective in mind helps to make sense of the material I'm about to present, and that no contradictory perspective I'm familiar with can do as good a job. In this diary miniseries, I want to do two things: In Part One, I introduce some new information about the role of authoritarianism in driving polarization, particularly as it is manifested in the health care debate, and compare this with earlier movements toward increased polarization during the Sixth Party System. In Part Two, I pick up on a link from Digby about the role of ritual defamation, and discuss how ritual defamation is an essential stratagem of the GOP in establishing its strategic dominance during the Sixth Party System. If we are to break out of the current holding pattern, and successfully initiate a Seventh Party System that breaks dramatically and necessarily with the past, we must learn to effectively counter and decommission the ritual defamation as a routine political practice.
I remember that at the turn of the century (ha! I've always wanted to get to write that) it seemed like you couldn't read a news outlet anywhere that wasn't running articles on Islam 101 and the institution of Sharia law in some country. In one such article I read, a clerical commentator, iirc, was talking about why the veil was such a big deal to newly instituted Islamic governments.
He said, roughly, that it was because it was a lot easier to prove your piety by insisting that women cover themselves than it was to give up banking with interest.
I've always thought of that story when people go tediously on about the huge, innate cultural differences between Us and Them. It isn't only that women haven't been able to vote in the US for even a full 90 years, that we're only at about the 150 year mark for meaningful property rights for married women, that the states never ratified the Equal Rights Amendment, that women get paid less than men, etc. It's also because still today, our rights and health are often the first bone offered up on the altar of bipartisan consensus.
For the sake of people who believe that undifferentiated cell balls are people, the Democrats routinely ignore the interests of those who believe that women are people. Hence, the uterus remains the only organ that the state can require any adult living or dead to donate the use of for anyone else's sake.
The health financing reform fight has been no exception to this trend, and I don't know if I'm even capable of conveying how angry it makes me that Obama's signaling he's willing to gut reproductive health coverage in even private insurance plans, and almost certainly to exclude it from any public option, just so he can stake a claim to being the "last" president to deal with health care.
If you like the coverage you have, you can keep it. Probably. Unless you're a chick.
Public Christians in US politics can easily prove their piety to peers by punitively, and only, making life harder for women. They are not asked to prove moral fitness by driving out moneychangers, helping the poor, showing mercy, clothing the naked, exemplifying forgiveness, showing hospitality to strangers, being humble, keeping prayer private, sheltering the homeless, ministering to prisoners or feeding the hungry. Indeed, if indifferent cruelty is a spiritual virtue, then majorities in Congress are surely bound for heaven. Such as it would be. Whatever faith that is, it isn't in the Bible, a book I've had to read through cover-to-cover at least twice.
Which also therefore qualifies me to inform you that 'the b*tches got it coming' is neither in the Gospel, which isn't the law, nor the Constitution, which is. Read up.
The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops recently weighed in against a Democratic health care reform proposal, calling it a legal fiction. It may be opposing it on grounds that are a moral one.
Last night, President Obama laid out his vision for health care reform before a special joint session of Congress. The pillars of his plan are: i) Curbing the worst abuses of private insurance, ii) Requiring everyone to have insurance, iii) Insurance exchanges, which are basically government websites where customers can order insurance off a "menu" of plans, the idea being that if tens of millions of people order the #2 Combo, everyone's lunch will be cheaper.
The president made it clear that the country can't afford to wait for reform. Last night, he took on the self-proclaimed fiscal conservatives who claim that they oppose reform because it would increase the deficit. "Put simply, our health care problem is our deficit problem. Nothing else even comes close," Obama said. The president reminded the audience that each of us pays a "hidden tax" of $1000 dollars a year to subsidize charity and emergency care for the uninsured.
It was an impressive performance, but as John Nichols of the Nation observes, it was hardly a rousing, "to-the-barricades" oration:
Obama still talked about "options" and "choices." But he suggested that they would be offered mainly by insurance companies that would be enjoy "incentives"-i.e., new streams of taxpayer dollars-if they agree to abide by consumer-friendly regulations and come up with strategies for covering more of the uninsured.
The president expressed support for a very limited public option, a kind of welfare program that only about 5% of Americans would choose to join. This is not the public option his liberal supporters had in mind. It's non-threatening to the insurance companies, though. Private insurers love the idea of the government low-grading the insurance pool and taking on the sickest people who can't get coverage anywhere else. That means private insurers can make even more money off the remaining healthy, paying customers.
James Ridgeway of Mother Jones is even less optimistic, "As for the public option, that's pretty clearly gone down the drain."
One GOP legislator decided that a joint session of Congress was basically a town hall with the president. Rep. Joe Wilson (SC) screamed "You lie!" when the president explained, for the umpteenth time that undocumented immigrants will not be covered. As with the town halls, Wilson's performance had a whiff astroturf about it. Sure enough, Sue Sturgis of Raw Story found that Wilson pocketed over $2 million in campaign contributions from the health care industry.
The president also reminded America that health care reform will not pay for abortions. (For more on myth-making around women's health, see Laurie Rubiner's excellent post at RH Reality.)
Instead of presenting a vision and asking Congress to line up behind him, the president stressed that he was synthesizing a compromise position incorporating ideas from the left and the right. Instead of a coherent vision, the president's scheme sounds more like a last-ditch compromise plan to enable him to declare victory. Like many Democrats, the president seems to be confusing the strategic with the expedient. If "reform" means saddling ordinary Americans with expensive mandatory insurance without a meaningful public option to keep costs in check he could doom the electoral fortunes of the Democrats for years to come.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about health care and is free to reprint. Visit Healthcare.newsladder.net for a complete list of articles on health care affordability, health care laws, and health care controversy. For the best progressive reporting on the Economy, and Immigration, check out Economy.Newsladder.net and Immigration.Newsladder.net. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and created by NewsLadder.
Ed. note: The Weekly Pulse is becoming the Daily Pulse for September. Every weekday, we'll bring you highlights from the health care reform debate, including exclusive video interviews with leading experts and independent journalists each Friday. Even better, you can be a part of the conversation. Stay tuned to find out more!
A power shift is underway in Washington. Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick announced on Monday that a special election to replace the late Sen. Ted Kennedy would not take place until January 19, 2010. With Kennedy's seat empty, the Democrats no longer have the 60 votes they need to break a filibuster in the Senate. Up until this point, the White House was hoping for a compromise bill that the entire Democratic caucus, and maybe even a few Republicans, could agree on.
Steve Benen of the Washington Monthly notes that the Gang of Six has made itself irrelevant. These powerful members of the Senate Finance Committee were in charge of hammering out a bipartisan health care bill. They forgot that they were only powerful if people believed a bipartisan compromise was attainable.
Talking Points Memo reports that the White House has given up on Republican gangster Sen. Mike Enzi (R-WY). They finally got the hint when Enzi told a radio listeners that Democrats wanted to kill the elderly with comparative efficacy research. The White House should have cut its losses two weeks ago when Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) repeated the "death panel" meme at a town hall meeting. Grassley has also been raising money campaigning against "Obama-care."
It's looking more and more like the Democrats will have to look to budget reconciliation, a special parliamentary procedure that could sidestep a filibuster and pass a healthcare bill by a simple majority vote.
America's Health Insurance Plans, the industry's top lobby group, dispatched 50,000 employees to town halls to fight the public option. Stephanie Mencimer of Mother Jones took a cue from Michael Moore in Sicko. She asks AHIP what kind of insurance their top lobbyist has. Mencimer says AHIP was so standoffish you'd think she had a preexisting condition.
In Mother Jones, Ben Buchwalter and Nikki Gloudeman take a closer look at the corporate megabucks behind the town hall brawls. Corporate enemies of healthcare reform are using front groups like FreedomWorks to organize angry mobs at town hall meetings. Zach Roth of TPM Muckraker reports that "legendary GOP bamboozler" Howard Kaloogian has launched a tea party bus tour to protest healthcare reform.
Speaking of frauds, you've probably heard about so-called crisis pregnancy centers that pose as abortion clinics in order to cajole women into having babies. Ever wonder what happens to those babies? In the Nation, Kathryn Joyce goes inside the world of high-pressure Christian adoption agencies that support desperate women, as long as they promise to give up their babies.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about health care and is free to reprint. Visit Healthcare.newsladder.net for a complete list of articles on health care affordability, health care laws, and health care controversy. For the best progressive reporting on the Economy, and Immigration, check out Economy.Newsladder.net and Immigration.Newsladder.net.
This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and created by NewsLadder.
This week's edition of the Weekly Pulse is shorter than usual. Our team is getting ready for the fourth annual Netroots Nation blogger conference in Pittsburgh, PA. Esther Kaplan, editor of the Nation Investigative Fund, and I are conducting an investigative reporting workshop on Saturday from 1:30-4:15 p.m. Join us and help expose the corporate roots of the Teabagger/Town hall mob movement.
Here's the latest news on the healthcare front: Republicans and their allies are pressuring Democratic healthcare reformers at townhall meetings around the country. Addie Stan has a blockbuster piece in AlterNet that exposes the network of corporate funders and lobbyists behind the mobs.
The Progressive's Ruth Conniff explains the mobs' marching orders, as spelled out in a memo by Bob MacGuffie, a volunteer for the Tea Party Patriots, an anti-reform group with ties to former Republican Rep. Dick Armey's pressure group Freedom Works. MacGuffie instructs town hall protesters to shout at lawmakers and attempt to throw them off their game as they try to make the case for health care reform. So much for reasoned discussion.
As I reported in In These Times, the teabaggers are trying to scapegoat organized labor as the instigators of confrontations at town hall meetings. On August 6, a scuffle broke out in front of a town hall meeting in St. Louis. This video clip shows the last 10 seconds of a scuffle in which a man in an SEIU t-shirt lies prostrate on the ground. A 38-year-old conservative activist claims to have been severely beaten, but the video shows him apparently uninjured, darting around to different cops and trying to convince them that he was attacked. The man's lawyer claims that he saw his client get punched in the face and kicked in the head by SEIU members.
A spokesman for the St. Louis County police told me that the police hadn't reviewed the video because nobody had submitted it to them, despite a call to the public to turn over evidence for the investigation. The fact that the videographer hasn't turned over the video kind of makes you wonder if the teabaggers really take the "evidence" as seriously as they claim.
How's this for irony? According to Talking Points Memo, the activist was asking for money to pay his hospital bills because he's uninsured.
Finally, Jodi Jacobson of RH Reality Check reports that Kansas Now is calling upon AG Eric Holder to restore the Federal Marshall security detail of prominent late-term abortion provider Dr. Leroy Carhart, a friend and colleague of the late Dr. George Tiller. Carhart was placed under protection after Tiller was shot. But the feds didn't even wait for the trial of Tiller's alleged assassin to wrap before pulling Carhart's detail. Now he's on his own, just as the alleged killer's links to a broader coalition of violent anti-choicers are coming to light.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about healthcare and is free to reprint. Visit Healthcare.newsladder.net for a complete list of articles on healthcare affordability, healthcare laws, and healthcare controversy. For the best progressive reporting on the Economy, and Immigration, check out Economy.Newsladder.net and Immigration.Newsladder.net. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and created by NewsLadder.
The Senate Finance Committee is reportedly very close to finishing its healthcare legislation. But as the bill's details leak, anticipation is quickly turning to dejection in progressive healthcare circles. Early word has it that the almost finished a bill includes no public option, no employer mandate, and no insurance exchange. Steve Benen of the Washington Monthly explains why the Senate Finance Committee bill is going to suck.
At TAPPED, Scott Lemieux argues that if the Senate legislation doesn't have a public option or an employer mandate, we'd be better off not passing a healthcare bill. Conventional wisdom is that even a bad bill would be better than nothing: Once we get the basic infrastructure for universal healthcare in place, it will be easier to build on that rather than starting from scratch. However, as Lemieux points out, a bill with no public option would only further entrench the insurance industry and make it easier for them to block reforms in the future.
Remember that the bill that comes out of the Finance Committee still has to be reconciled with other versions, like the version from the Health Education Labor and Pensions Committee. So, it's possible that progressive Senators will win some concessions. However, as we've discussed before, the Senate is the key to passing healthcare reform, and the Blue Dogs are the key to passing the bill in the Senate. Whatever comes out of the Finance Committee is going to carry a lot of weight with the Blue Dogs.
It's no wonder we're fighting over a bunch of lackluster options. As Isabel MacDonald observes in AlterNet, corporate-run media has virtually banished all talk of single-payer healthcare. If you're a single-payer advocate and you want to get on TV, you have two options: Be Bernie Sanders or get arrested in the Senate.
Democrats should try implementing a radical progressive agenda one of these days-they'll be accused of doing so, anyway. Amanda Marcotte of RH Reality Check notes that even though universal healthcare is more likely to cover iPods than abortions, mainstream media and the anti-reform brigade insist on discussing abortion funding as if it were a live option. Here in the real world, pro-choicers don't even have the votes in Congress to overturn the Hyde Amendment, which bans the usual sources of federal funding for abortion. According to some experts I interviewed a few weeks ago for a forthcoming article, there might be a clever legal way to set up the healthcare program so that its funding wouldn't fall under the Hyde Amendment, but no one expects the Democrats to even try.
Make sure to keep an eye out for Ms. Magazine's summer issue, which contains a moving profile of assassinated abortion provider Dr. George Tiller by Michele Kort. The piece is titled "The Man Who Trusted Women" after Dr. Tiller's credo, a phrase that one admirer paid their last respects with, via a funeral wreath with the words "Trust Women" emblazoned in the center. Kort quotes Tiller explaining what that quotation means in practice:
"Chromosomal abnormalities make up about 24 percent of our [late abortion] patients, and sometimes the heart, the lung, the intestines, all of this is outside of the body [of the fetus]. Most places in the United States say that even if you have this kind of a problem you may not have a termination of pregnancy. ...What this says is that...women are not smart enough, they are not tough enough and they do not love enough to make these family decisions about their children and their families."
James Ridgeway of Mother Jones reported that Tiller's alleged assassin, Scott Roeder, was savoring his moment in the media spotlight while he sat in prison, awaiting his first court date on Tuesday. Roeder has been bragging lately about his bigshot anti-choice friends and hinting at a broader conspiracy. Maybe he'll take a few more terrorists down with him. That would be a bright spot on a bleak healthcare landscape.
If the Finance Committee produces a bill with no public option, no employer mandate, and no insurance exchange to bring down costs, then insurance industry gets everything and we get nothing but orders to buy their crappy product. Let's hope things shake out for the best.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about health care. Visit Healthcare.newsladder.net for a complete list of articles on healthcare affordability, healthcare laws, and healthcare controversy. For the best progressive reporting on the Economy, and Immigration, check out Economy.Newsladder.net and Immigration.Newsladder.net.
This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and created by NewsLadder.
As the United States government prepares for further personnel shifts in the administration, Americans are anxious to know the nominees' priorities. How refreshing, then, to see health and justice for the American people trump politics. As Judge Sotomayor faces the scrutiny of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Obama has nominated Regina Benjamin to be the next Surgeon General-- America's "top doctor." Part of what will make, and has made, these women such phenomenal public servants is their refusal to be snagged by the issue of abortion. Instead, they recognize it as just one element of their respective jobs: a doctor working for health and a judge working for justice.
The President's new nominee for Surgeon General, Regina Benjamin, is a Catholic, a recipient of the MacArthur Genius Grant, and has been described as "an angel in a white coat." However, to her patients, she is a doctor first and foremost. A recent article in the Miami Herald addresses the fact that the Catholic nominee's clinic for low income communities offers referrals to abortion providers: "As a physician, she is deeply committed to the philosophy of putting her patients' needs first when it comes to providing care." Why does this sound so novel? A doctor's commitment to her patients' best interests should not be subject to ideology.
Similarly, as the Senate Judiciary Committee questions Judge Sotomayor, she unfailingly shows her commitment to justice above politics. The Los Angeles Times reports on a July 15th exchange between Senator John Cornyn (R- TX) and the nominee. He pressed her on a May Washington Post article purporting that she will undoubtedly support abortion rights and has "generally liberal instincts." Yet, she refuses to fall victim to politics; her response shows clarity: "I promote equal opportunity in America." The judge's words remind us that government, especially the judicial branch, should not play political games at the expense of serving the people and the laws of the United States.
We cannot know how Sotomayor's tenure on the Supreme Court might influence social justice in America, nor should we forget that, as NPR points out, "the surgeon general's entire operations budget, by comparison, is less than one-thousandth of the annual sales budget of Pfizer." However, both of these women's careers constitute an important reframing of the old abortion debate. They force us to address the bigger picture by refusing to allow politics and ideology to fence abortion out of its broader implications. Kudos to these women for talking about abortion in terms of the pursuit of health and justice, in which it can play an integral role.
My first escorting experience was a lot different than Will's was last week. Though we both had about the same number of Anti-abortion protesters ('Anti's'), the ones at my location were a lot more mellow, probably because I was in a progressive, pro-choice part of town. This clinic apparently also has a lot of seasonal protesters, who take the summer off. Many of the Anti's simply prayed outside in front of the clinic, each with rosary in hand, and made no attempt to interact, much less convert or berate any women entering the clinic. Some prayed out loud, some just mouthed their devotions, with a barely audible 'Hail Mary' here and there. One woman's routine actually included some singing. She broke out with a few operatic "Ave Maria"s then continue the rest under her breath. I found my self wondering if they were saying the same prayer, if they each had individual prayers to say, or if they were rotating invocations. I could clearly tell that 'Hail Mary's' were involved here and there, but I couldn't tell if their repertoire went any deeper.
After passage of the Stupak-Pitts Amendment and the House Health Care Reform bill, Congresswoman Diana DeGette, Democratic Deputy Whip and Co-chair of the Pro-Choice Caucus, announced 