Breaking News: Singer Whitney Houston dead at 48

Posted: February 11, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: just because | 33 Comments

Her death is of unknown causes at this time.

Sadly enough, she was rumored to have been losing her voice.

Live Blog: Obama Announces “Accommodation” on Contraception Rule

Posted: February 10, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: just because | 121 Comments

Obama: "Yes sir, may I have another?"

We all expected it, but I’m still enraged and horrified. I’m beyond livid. I don’t know if my blood pressure will ever get back to normal.

At 12:15, our faux Democratic President will genuflect to a hoard of pedophile-enabling old men who really should be in jail right now for the hard they have caused to children and families. I thought we needed a live blog to follow the media circus that leads up to Obama’s upcoming impersonation of a scared little boy who is afraid there are monsters under his bed. After that we can document the reactions of the DC press corps–who knew they were mostly elderly Catholic prep school boys?

RH Reality Check says the change is going to be good for women.

Today, the White House did the right thing for women, public health and human rights. Despite deep concerns, including my own, based on what transpired in the past under health reform, the White House has decided on a plan to address the birth control mandate that will enable women to get contraceptive coverage directly through their insurance plans without having to buy a rider or a second plan, and without having to negotiate with or through religious entities or administrations that are hostile to primary reproductive health care, including but not limited to contraception.

Under this plan, every insurance company will be obligated to provide contraceptive coverage. Administration officials stated that a woman’s insurance company “will be required to reach out directly and offer her contraceptive care free of charge. The religious institutions will not have to pay for it.”

Moreover, women will not have to opt in or out; contraceptive care will be part of the basic package of benefits offered to everyone. Contraceptive care will simply be “part of the bundle of services that all insurance companies are required to offer,” said a White House official.

“We are actually more comfortable having the insurance industry offer and market this to women than religious institutions,” said the White House official because they “understand how contraception works” to prevent unintended pregnancy and reduce health care costs. “This makes sense financially.”

The way it works is this: Insurers will create policy not including contraceptive coverage in the contract for religious organizations that object. Second, the same insurance company must simultaneously offer contraceptive coverage to all employees, and can not charge an additional premium. This provides free contraceptive coverage to women. The reason this works for insurance companies is because offering contraception is cost-neutral and cost-effective; companies realize the tremendous cost benefits of spacing pregnancies, and limiting unintended pregnancies, planned pregnancies and health benefits of contraception.

I doubt if this will mollify the Catholic bishops, and I still have a problem with the President responding to their complaints in the first place. Their goal is obviously to get their foot in the door so to speak, so they can continue to press for outlawing contraception along with abortion.

Dakinikat says that Terry O’Neill was on the Ed Show last night. She said that Obama has been talking personally to the bishops but has refused to deal directly with any women’s groups. Unbelievable!
Greg Sargent: Has Obama found a way out of the contraception mess?

On a conference call with reporters just now, senior Obama administration officials announced the outlines of the “accommodation” the White House has settled on with regard to the contraception controversy.

The gist is that women who work for religious institutions that object to offering birth control coverage will get contraception for free, directly from their insurers. The institutions won’t have to pay for it. The White House argues that this preserves both the “liberty” of those institutions and the core, inviolate principle that all women will have equal access to birth control, no matter where they work.

On the politics of this “accommodation,” Sargent writes:

Obviously you can argue over whether the administration should have reached any accommodation at all, and the politics of this, as Kevin Drum notes, could still prove a morass for the administration. Some on the left will see the administration’s efforts to appease the U.S. Conference of Bishops as unnecessary appeasment. Meanwhile, it seems all but certain that the Conference of Bishops, which had previously insisted that the rule be scrapped altogher, will not be mollified in the slightest, and Republican officials and the 2012 GOP candidates will still continue attacking the Obama administration over this, pushing not only the “war on religion” line but also the subtext, i.e., that Obama is forever looking to expand the reach of government.

But the Obama team is betting that any further objections to this policy will unmask opponents primarily as hidebound foes of birth control at any costs, a politically difficult position to sustain, rather than as defenders of religious liberty. Indeed, this looks like an effort to reframe the debate to Obama’s advantage: If Team Obama has its way, the argument will now be about whether all women should have access to contraception, and not about whether these institutions should have their religious freedom impinged upon.

They’ve already been exposed, as far as I’m concerned; but I guess Obama feels he has to convince the Catholic boyz in the DC press. Good luck with that. Frankly, Mark Shields, Chris Matthews, and E.J. Dionne are dead to me now, regardless of how they react to this. Dead. To. Me.

What do you think?

We Have Choice

Posted: February 8, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: just because | Tags: , , , , | 36 Comments

We’ve watched the Republicans flail in all directions, trying to find a message, a mission, an issue to drive them to victory in November.  It’s been tough going for the GOP with less than stellar candidates and the endless circus ride the public has witnessed.  Now down to four ‘iffy’ wannabes, attention has focused on flaws, egos, missteps and gaffes.  Uncle Newt appeals to the confederate South.  Ron Paul is loved by the Ayn Rand aficionados. Reptilian Rick Santorum cheers and warms the cockles of the Religious Right.   And Mitt Romney.  Poor Mitt is loved by virtually no one.

So, I can only imagine the excitement with the new-but-old controversy boiling over birth control and reproductive freedom.  The right to choose.  It sticks in the craw of the Republican Party, even as the loudest voices scream about liberty and individual rights.  This isn’t a question of abortion at this juncture.  We’re talking about the basics: contraception, the freedom to choose how many children we have and when we have them.  And privacy.  A woman’s right to decide these things herself in the privacy of her own space, heart and mind, with or without a husband, with or without government or religious leaders telling her, demanding she turn one way or the other.

To listen to the likes of Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum and the faux religious warriors, one might think that all religion, but particularly Christianity, has been put on the rack, whipped into humiliating submission or fed to the lions for the vile amusement of secular humanists.

Enough with the lying!  Enough with the bully pulpit exhortations with the emphasis on ‘bully.’

Demanding equal access to healthcare, expecting reproductive freedom and sexual/gender equality is not a Satanic plot.  It’s what reasonable people do and think.  We are not living in the Middle Ages [though I suspect many fundamentalists think of the era as ‘the good ole days].  If anyone doubts the politicization of women’s healthcare issues, please review the past week’s headlines, the unseemly expose of the Komen Foundation, more concerned about dissing Planned Parenthood than serving lower-income women with breast screenings.  Or the manufactured outrage of the Catholic Church hierarchy and their mouthpieces, who [sputter, sputter] decry the Administration’s insistence on equitable healthcare service as a vicious attack on religious freedom.

Really?  Twenty-eight states require organizations offering prescription insurance to cover contraception.   Ninety-eight percent of Catholic women use birth control and many Catholic institutions offer the benefit to their employees.

Let’s review some recent statistics:

Two-thirds of Catholics, 65 percent, believe that clinics and hospitals that take taxpayer money should not be allowed to refuse procedures or medications based on religious beliefs. A similar number, 63 percent, also believe that health insurance, whether private or government-run, should cover contraception.

A strong majority (78 percent) of Catholic women prefer that their hospital offers emergency contraception for rape victims, while more than half (55 percent) want their hospital to provide it in broader circumstances.

Yet despite these numbers, the Church, the Religious Right and the heat-seeking Republican establishment are foaming at the mouth, waving mummified fists in righteous indignation.

Make no mistake.  This is an old war.  I wrote about the struggles and absolute determination of Margaret Sanger a few days ago.  She fought these battles.  The arguments were identical; the accusations the same.  She fought the religious establishment, she fought the righteous, small-minded moralists 100 years ago.  If anything this should be a wakeup call: the defense of reproductive rights, which are basic human rights, need to be taken seriously, day-in, day-out.  Freedoms gained can quickly become freedoms lost. Gender equality, which is a matter of civil rights, should be supported with voices and votes pitched against the ugliness of bigotry and discrimination.

This is a power play wrapped in thin prayer and religious dogma.  It’s a desperate attempt by traditional religion to regain ground lost to modernity, a world where the old stories and myths have lost their power, their ability to control by fear, a world in which human dignity applies to all our members, a world where the mysteries of the Universe and our place in it is far grander than our words and imaginations can conjure.

We have choice.  We always have.  It’s time to put away childish things and become accountable, rational adults if we’re ever to deal with the problems facing us.  We can fearfully grasp the old ways, allow ourselves to be drawn into self-limiting dictums.  We can argue how many angels dance on the head of a pin with religious fanatics and the politicians who love them.

Or we can say, ‘No!’  We have that choice.

Swarms of flying robots

Posted: February 8, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: just because | Tags: , , , , | 6 Comments

A small follow-up to our earlier post on drones. Here we are a few days later: fleets of tiny drones flying in formation in a lab. To tell you the truth, I want a set of about fifty or so. I’d spend days flying them around the house, cackling wildly. But, wouldn’t you know, the first thing everyone says is, “Military applications!”

Larry Summers And Another Luddite Analogy

Posted: February 7, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: just because | Tags: , , , | 10 Comments

A hattip to United Republic, their new site Republic Report and for this ‘most’ enlightening tidbit on Larry Summers.

This Larry Summers.

The Larry Summers that President Obama chose to head the White House National Economic Council, even after the blowback from Summers receiving beaucoup speaking fees in 2008 at banking meetings, as in JP Morgan dishing out $67, 500 for a February engagement.  This, after JP Morgan reaped $25 billion in Government bailouts.  Or Citigroup, another happy camper after receiving $50 billion in taxpayer monies, found enough spare change to pay Summers on two occasions, once for $45,000 and two months later for $54,000.  Or everyone’s favorite, Goldman Sachs. Sachs was really generous after receiving $10 million in bailout funds but managed a double decker of $135,000 for one appearance and another for $67,500 eight weeks later.

Oh, and Summers also had managed another $5.2 million, an easy-peasy salary from D.E. Shaw, which just happens to be a major hedge fund.

Who says government doesn’t work?

When Summers exited his WH duties, he hit the lecture circuit once again. His love of giving speeches seems to have slipped under the radar.  Until it didn’t.  Interest appears to have shredded the text of his presentation at a particular business forum.  Mysteriously, the stirring words disappeared and no one could retrieve then.  Poof!  But here’s what we know: this time Summer’s concluding keynote speech celebrated the wonders of outsourcing and off-shoring jobs.  Here’s a brief statement from the catalog introduction of the 2011 World BPO/ITO Forum:

Resisting the prospect of offshoring withholds a major totem of competitive parity from the most profitable producers of economic progress, Dr. Summers said. “It is to deny the US and American businesses an opportunity to participate in this revolution in emerging markets, which is the most important economic story of our time.” He added that increasing trade in tasks makes businesses more efficient and competitive, and allows them to exploit different skills, capacities and labor costs anywhere in the world. Critics who automatically label outsourcing or offshoring a threat to prosperity “resemble luddites who took axes to machinery early in England’s industrial revolution,” he said. Instead of killing jobs, as luddites feared, machines spawned millions of jobs and better standards of living.

Oh yes, I’m sure the majority of Americans now collecting unemployment or those working two, three jobs to pay the electric bill, buy the Kraft mac and cheese dinners in bulk, while hoping to God no one in the family gets sick could appreciate this finely-tuned statement.  But this statement [though applicable to many workers] was specifically directed to business process [as in payroll, tax and benefits] and IT workers—you know, all those geeky kids that were told ‘Go for the computer degree.  You can’t go wrong.’

Oops.

Because those innocent initials in the forum’s title?  That would stand for ‘business process outsourcing/information technology outsourcing.’

And people wonder why there are so many college grads with gargantuan school loans associated with the Occupy Wall St. Movement.  These grads are mad as hell and not getting over it.

But notice the analogy that Summers uses for describing critics of massive outsourcing of jobs, jobs, jobs.  Critics are Luddites, Summers says, no better than the extremists who smashed machinery during the early days of the Industrial Revolution.  I suspect there are ‘things’ citizens would enjoy smashing right now.  And it’s not the machines.

But here’s the word that flew out at me: exploit, as in exploitation:

an act or instance of exploiting<exploitation of natural resources> <exploitation of immigrant laborers> <clever exploitation of the system>

Ding, ding, ding!  We exploit our natural resources, our fellow citizens.  We exploit immigrant workers, every chance we get.  And we exploit the system by having people like Larry Summers, whirling through the revolving door of government/business, and then pretending the damage left behind is a good thing, the most important economic story of our time.

How about the biggest heist of all time!

But it gets better.  We get to exploit workers in other countries, too, making their lives so miserable they threaten to commit suicide en masse.

What’s not to love?

If this sort of thing wasn’t so sickening, it would be laughable.

I am not laughing.

Btw, the Republic Report site will be tapping none other than Jack Abramoff for an insider’s view of  DC corruption and influence peddling.  Super-lobbyist Abramoff, released from jail last year, will be a regular contributor to RR because if you want to catch a bunch of rats what better strategy than employ a King Rat?

Could get very interesting!

← Older Entries
Newer Entries →