Tuesday Morning Reads

Posted: April 17, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: morning reads, Reproductive Rights, Republican presidential politics, the internet, The Media SUCKS, the villagers, U.S. Military, U.S. Politics, War on Women | Tags: , , , | 33 Comments

Good Morning!!

The Villagers have returned from their two-week Easter vacation, so there’s a bit more news today than we have had recently.

First up, I want to call attention to an important series of articles the UK Guardian will be running all week on the “Battle for the Internet.” There will be a major story every day this week:

Over seven days

The Guardian is taking stock of the new battlegrounds for the internet. From states stifling dissent to the new cyberwar front line, we look at the challenges facing the dream of an open internet

Day 1: the new cold war
China may have the world’s most internet-savvy government but Beijing has been struggling to keep a lid on bold social networks, writes Tania Branigan

Day two: the militarisation of cyberspace
Internet attacks on sovereign targets are no longer a fear for the future, but a daily threat. We ask: will the next big war be fought online?

Day three: the new walled gardens
For many, the internet is now essentially Facebook. Others find much of their online experience is mediated by Apple or Amazon. Why are the walls going up around the web garden, and does it matter?

Day four: IP wars
Intellectual property, from copyrights to patents, have been an internet battlefield from the start. We look at what Sopa, Pipa and Acta really mean, and explain how this battle is not over. Plus, Clay Shirky will be discussing the issues in a live Q&A

Day five: ‘civilising’ the web
In the UK, the ancient law of defamation is increasingly looking obsolete in the Twitter era. Meanwhile, in France, President Sarkozy believes the state can tame the web

Day six: the open resistance
Meet the activists and entrepreneurs who are working to keep the internet open

Day seven: the end of privacy
Hundreds of websites know vast amounts about their users’ behaviour, personal lives and connections with each other. Find out who knows what about you, and what they use the information for

Be sure to check out this interview with one of Google’s founders: Web freedom faces greatest threat ever, warns Google’s Sergey Brin

Next up, lots of news coming out of Columbia, where President Obama participated in the Summit of the Americas. It didn’t go well. Reuters:

President Barack Obama sat patiently through diatribes, interruptions and even the occasional eye-ball roll at the weekend Summit of the Americas in an effort to win over Latin American leaders fed up with U.S. policies.

He failed.

The United States instead emerged from the summit in Colombia increasingly isolated as nearly 30 regional heads of state refused to sign a joint declaration in protest against the continued exclusion of communist-led Cuba from the event.

The rare show of unity highlights the steady decline of Washington’s influence in a region that has become less dependent on U.S. trade and investment thanks economic growth rates that are the envy of the developed world and new opportunities with China.

Obama also certified the U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement which will take effect on May 15, despite Colombia’s continuing human rights violations including the murder of labor leaders. AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka called the decision “deeply disappointing and troubling.

Leaders of national labor organizations in Colombia joined Trumka in opposing today’s announcement, saying:

[T]he underlying trade agreement perpetuates a destructive economic model that expands the rights and privileges of big business and multinational corporations at the expense of workers, consumers, and the environment. The agreement uses a model that has historically benefitted a small minority of business interests, while leaving workers, families, and communities behind.

In April 2011, the U.S. and Colombia agreed to an Action Plan on Labor Rights intended to “protect internationally recognized labor rights, prevent violence against labor leaders, and prosecute the perpetrators of such violence” in Colombia. Although the Action Plan includes some measures that Colombian unions and the AFL-CIO have been demanding for years, its scope was too limited: it resolved neither the grave violations of union freedoms or human rights.

Some two dozen Colombian trade union leaders were killed last year alone, and an AFL-CIO report released last fall found that the Action Plan, which was billed as a major step to ending violence against trade unionists and protecting the right of workers to come together in unions “has failed to achieve improvements on the ground for Colombia’s working families.”

And then there was the Secret Service scandal, which keeps on getting worse. The latest from the WaPo:

A probe into the alleged misconduct of nearly a dozen U.S. Secret Service agents has expanded to include more than five military personnel, Defense Department officials said Monday, as the scandal that erupted during President Obama’s trip to Colombia last week put high-level officials on the defensive.

A preliminary investigation by the Defense Department, which included a review of video from hotel security cameras, found that more military personnel than initially thought might have been involved with the Secret Service in the carousing at the center of the probe. Already, 11 Secret Service agents have been placed on leave amid allegations they entertained prostitutes, potentially one of the most serious lapses at the organization in years.

The charges are triggering scrutiny of the culture of the Secret Service — where married agents have been heard to joke during aircraft takeoff that their motto is “wheels up, rings off” — and raising new questions at both the agency and the Pentagon about institutional oversight at the highest levels of the president’s security apparatus.

There’s a lot more detail in that article. Ron Kessler, who used to work for the WaPo and now writes for NewsMax (is that a comedown or a horizontal move?) says the head of the Secret Service should be fired.

Ron Kessler, the author who broke the Secret Service prostitution story in the Washington Post over the weekend, has been making the morning talk-show rounds, saying the director of the agency should be fired after agents were alleged to have solicited local prostitutes ahead of President Obama’s trip to Colombia.

“This is the worst scandal in the history of the Secret Service,” Kessler said on NBC’s “Today” show on Monday. “The Secret Service, under Mark Sullivan, has gone from one debacle to another.”

The only scandal that comes close to this one, Kessler said on CNN, was in 2009, when Tareq and Michaele Salahi crashed the state dinner at the White House.

“It goes back to a culture of laxness in the Secret Service,” Kessler said. “Corner cutting. Just a lax attitude which contributes to this kind of thing.”

Funny, I would have thought that Secret Service agents getting drunk the night before the JFK assassination and then not doing much to protect him would have been the worst scandal, but what do I know?

Now that Congress is back in session, the Senate didn’t waste any time dumping the President’s proposed “Buffet Rule” that would have made millionaires pay something resembling a fair share of taxes.

By a near party-line 51-45 tally, senators voted to keep the bill alive but fell nine votes short of the 60 needed to continue debating the measure. The anti-climactic outcome was no surprise to anyone in a vote that was designed more to win over voters and embarrass senators in close races than to push legislation into law.

At the White House, Obama denounced the vote, saying Republicans chose “once again to protect tax breaks for the wealthiest few Americans at the expense of the middle class.” In a statement issued after the vote, he said he would keep pressing Congress to help the middle class.

Another victory on the road to serfdom.

And of course there’s the new media meme: because of a poorly worded remark by Democratic strategist Hilary Rosen, the Republican War on Women is over and the Democrats have declared a War on Motherhood.

Never mind that the War on Women is real–based on horrible Republican anti-abortion, anti-family planning, anti-Planned Parenthood policies that have been implemented in state legislatures around the country. Never mind that the “War on Motherhood” is based on hysterical pearl-clutching by cynical Romney campaign strategists. The media has swallowed the fairly tale bait hook, line, and sinker.

And so the horrendous insult to poor little Ann Romney was a prime topic on the Sunday news shows. Meet the Press’s idiot host David Gregory had a whole panel discussion on it. Naturally Charlie Pierce had a great writeup on that yesterday.

the panel, which included my man Chuck Todd and complete political failure Harold Ford, Jr., was talking about Hilary Rosen and hookers. Savannah Guthrie said that the Obama administration moved so quickly to distance themselves from Hilary Rosen, Warrior Queen Of All Liberals:

In some ways it had the equal and opposite effect. They worked so hard to disown Hilary Rosen that you almost felt, well, they must own her, they must be allied with her. It didn’t betray a lot of confidence about their position with women.

See that rock at your feet? Pick it up. Throw it as far as you can. Remember, though, the farther you throw it away, the closer it is to hitting you in the head. Savannah Guthrie, Theoretical Physicist. (Later, she talked about how the administration wanted to draw a line in the sand so that “six months from now,” if somebody said something about Michelle Obama etc. etc. Six months from now? Has Guthrie been on Tuvalu for three years?) My head was descending rapidly toward my desk when Harold Ford chimed in, and it accelerated downward faster than it ever has before. Harold liked very much what his nutty former colleague said about how stay-at-home moms are more attuned to the economy than they are the attempts by a bunch of white men to make sure there’s a little more mommin’ to be done while they stay at home. It’s truly hard to believe that, in a Democratic wave election, the people of Tennessee rejected this titan….

“I thought Michele Bachmann, whom I don’t often agree with, made some pretty valid points. This issue here is more powerful in some ways that the conversation about contraception… No one goes around talking about that. People go around talking about raising their kids. Wome are insulted if you say if they stay at home instead of working then something’s different about them.

It is important to remember that these people wouldn’t even be discussing a whopping 19-point gender gap if it weren’t for Republican attempts to control the unauthorized use of ladyparts, the Dildos Mandating Dildos legislation in the various states, and all that other stuff that Harold Ford, Jr. says women don’t talk about.

Sorry about the long quote, but I just had to use that whole section. It’s perfect!

Anyway, as everyone knows by now, the Romneys blew it bigtime by talking too loud at a $50,000-a-plate fund raiser in Palm Beach. They didn’t realize the press could hear them when they gloated about what a great “gift” Hilary Rosen had given them.

Mrs. Romney acknowledged Republicans’ deficit at present with female voters, and urged the women in attendance to talk to their friends, particularly about the economy. She also discussed the criticism she faced this week, and her pride in her role as a mother.

“It was my early birthday present for someone to be critical of me as a mother, and that was really a defining moment, and I loved it,” Mrs. Romney said.

Gov. Romney went further in engaging the so-called “war on moms” that followed in the media — upon which his campaign has been aggressively fundraising — calling it a “gift” that allowed his campaign to show contrast with Democrats in the general election’s first week.

Um…no one was critical of you as a mother, Ann.

But maybe it wasn’t such a “gift” after all, because women voters are apparently not as stupid as the Romneys think they are. According to a CNN poll taken two days after Rosen dropped her bomblet and the the Republicans took to the fainting couch, Obama still leads among women by 16 points and he is even ahead among men by 3 points.

But the Romneys still think they won something, and they’re using it to raise money with a new video in which Romney waxes as poetic as a robot can about his beloved wife Ann. For the brave souls among us, here’s the Romney campaign’s “Happy Birthday, Mom” video. Don’t watch it unless you have a strong stomach and normal blood sugar levels.

As an antidote, please read this NYT op-ed by Nancy Folbre, an economist from U. Mass. Amherst on the real meaning of the gender gap.

Those are my suggested reads for today. What are yours?

Who’s Zooming Who?

Posted: April 15, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: War on Women, Women's Healthcare, Women's Rights | 36 Comments

I’m still brooding about the disingenuous way the political class has reignited the Mommy Wars.  There are so many hypocrisies at play in this conversation that it’s easy to forget that what this is really about are narratives that reinforce stereotypes of women.  It’s also about the ways politicians manipulate the insecurities of women–especially in their mother roles–to ensure that we are divided as they conquer.  We’ve been told that all those laws passed and introduced in the last two years that severely restrict women’s access to abortion, health care, equal pay and protection and now birth control are not part of a concerted effort by one of the parties to remove our progress to achieve equal access to jobs, society, and autonomy.  Now, we’re once again being regaled on that marble column with the label “Mom: Most Important Job Holder in the World”.   However, in their world and their laws, it appears some mothers are more equal than others.  There is no where this double standard is more true than how they bestow sainthood on stay-at-home wealthy women while they assign poor mothers of children the role of lazy slut who breeds to stay home, live off the government, and do nothing.  After all, welfare allows one to live such a life of luxury that big screen tvs and bons bons automatically come with each public housing unit.

Yup, the same group of folks that fought the family leave act, that are defunding all education-related expenses except ones associated with religious indoctrination and really hate family planning and pre-natal care are all in for all sainted moms.  I’ve had about all the faux outrage I can take about poor Sainted Stay-at-Home Mom, Ann Romney, who has that well-defended full time, most important job while her husband’s been out on the republican speaking circuit saying that welfare moms need the “dignity of work”.  So, Mrs. Romney has the dignity of being a stay home mom that can spend all that time doing the hardest job on the planet, but welfare moms don’t have the dignity of work unless they have a job?   What kind of hypocritical nonsense is this?

Poor women who stay at home to raise their children should be given federal assistance for child care so that they can enter the job market and “have the dignity of work,” Mitt Romney said in January, undercutting the sense of extreme umbrage he showed when Democratic strategist Hilary Rosen quipped last week that Ann Romney had not “worked a day in her life.”

The remark, made to a Manchester, N.H., audience, was unearthed by MSNBC’s “Up w/Chris Hayes,” and aired during the 8 a.m. hour of his show Sunday.

Ann Romney and her husband’s campaign fired back hard at Rosen following her remark. “I made a choice to stay home and raise five boys. Believe me, it was hard work,” Romney said on Twitter.

On Sunday, Romney spokeswoman Amanda Henneberg told The Huffington Post in an email, “Moving welfare recipients into work was one of the basic principles of the bipartisan welfare reform legislation that President Clinton signed into law. The sad fact is that under President Obama the poverty rate among women rose to 14.5 percent in 2011, the highest rate in 17 years. The Obama administration’s economic policies have been devastating to women and families.”

Mitt Romney, however, judging by his January remark, views stay-at-home moms who are supported by federal assistance much differently than those backed by hundreds of millions in private equity income. Poor women, he said, shouldn’t be given a choice, but instead should be required to work outside the home to receive Temporary Assistance for Needy Families benefits. “[E]ven if you have a child 2 years of age, you need to go to work,” Romney said of moms on TANF.

Recalling his effort as governor to increase the amount of time women on welfare in Massachusetts were required to work, Romney noted that some had considered his proposal “heartless,” but he argued that the women would be better off having “the dignity of work” — a suggestion Ann Romney would likely take issue with.

So, who has dignity here and who doesn’t and what are the rules?  It seems to me to put an awful lot of women in a no win situation.

The Romney campaign, hoping to make up its deficit among women voters, jumped on the comment. “I happen to believe that all moms are working moms,” said Romney.

It turns out he doesn’t. If you’re a poor mother in Massachusetts and you go to sign up for TANF, you’ll see you need to fulfill a “work requirement.” And you cannot fulfill it by being “a mom.” And that’s because of policy that Romney signed into law in Massachusetts, and Bill Clinton signed into law nationally.

That law has seen some real successes: The poverty rate for single mothers is lower now than before the legislation passed in 1996, and the labor-force participation rate is higher. Both parties brag about it routinely. But those numbers are only successes if you believe, as both parties do, that being a stay-at-home mother is not the same as working.

Over the past week, both parties decided to pander to stay-at-home mothers by forgetting this policy consensus and claiming they have always believed being a stay-at-home mother is “work.” But while they certainly believe parenting is toil, they don’t believe it is, in any real sense, work. And you can see that in the laws they’ve made.

After all, it’s not just TANF that doesn’t recognize parenting as “work.” Social Security doesn’t count parenting as “work.” The tax code doesn’t count parenting as “work.” The Bureau of Labor Statistics doesn’t count parenting as “work.”

Obviously, poor women don’t have the same routes to dignity that upper class women do.  In other words, I small a hypocrite.

An Immodest Proposal

Posted: April 13, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Voter Ignorance, War on Women, We are so F'd | Tags: , , | 20 Comments

I’m spitting mad about the attacks on Hillary Rosen and the crocodile tears of folks like Rush Limbaugh and others that are trying to say that the war on women is really about evil feminists and real women. You’ll notice that most of this fabrication is coming from right wing men who have a lot to gain by reigniting the Mommy wars. Just follow this link to the WSJ op ed  page and read how the real misogynists are Feminists. There is nothing more disingenuous that the rant that says feminists don’t support women and child rearing in what ever form that takes.  Most feminists would love to see a situation more like Germany where the country actually supports extended parental leave for babies and toddlers and extends training and quality of day care providers and access to nursery school for all types of families.  If this were really about how to do best by our children we would be having a completely different conversation. We would protect them better from abuse and give them and their parents the kind of support they need to be healthy, happy, and well-educated.  This hoopla is only about splitting the women’s vote.

The heart of the argument needs to be aimed squarely back at the folks that are defunding everything from family planning,  Planned Parenthood, Title X, preschools, school lunches, student loans and all things that support a functioning society.  This includes public health and education structures more than anything else.  Any mother–working a paying job or not–wants institutions in place that support her children.  The real anti-family agenda is from people who do not support the basic structures of civilization.   Folks that can’t write checks for tutors, nannies, preventative health care measures, prenatal services, childhood illness treatment, extra curricular activities and fancy schools and colleges rely on society recognizing the benefits of good health and education for its members.  A decent society provides decent public goods. We pool our funds to benefit the economic security and health of our country. Our recent spending priorities have been wars, weapons, and subsidies to businesses that pollute, gamble, and abuse our resources. None of this is healthy for the future of our children.

These interests have now set up a cat fight between women to take our minds off the real problems.   Feast your eyes on the Ryan Budget and you will see–as Paul Krugman puts it–who is cannibalizing our future and our families.

One general rule of modern politics is that the people who talk most about future generations — who go around solemnly declaring that we’re burdening our children with debt — are, in practice, the people most eager to sacrifice our future for short-term political gain. You can see that principle at work in the House Republican budget, which starts with dire warnings about the evils of deficits, then calls for tax cuts that would make the deficit even bigger, offset only by the claim to have a secret plan to make up for the revenue losses somehow or other.

And you can see it in the actions of Chris Christie, the governor of New Jersey, who talks loudly about acting responsibly but may actually be the least responsible governor the state has ever had.

Mr. Christie’s big move — the one that will define his record — was his unilateral decision back in 2010 to cancel work that was already under way on a new rail tunnel linking New Jersey with New York. At the time, Mr. Christie claimed that he was just being fiscally responsible, while critics said that he had canceled the project just so he could raid it for funds.

Now the independent Government Accountability Office has weighed in with a report on the controversy, and it confirms everything the critics were saying.

Chris Christie lied on a project that would shorten commutes, provide jobs, and basically create a better situation for families in the northeast corridor.  I have only to ask why?  Well, if you take a look at the Ryan Budget and the Norquist mentality, the deal is that most of these folks don’t want the community and its families to succeed, they want their cronies to be able to make a buck off of everything.  They want all the power and all the money within their plutocracy. I’m not talking about government ownership of airlines, telecommunications, or any other move that one could logically equate with socialism.  I talking funding and providing infrastructure improvements and the taxes that would enable them for the benefit of all.  These kinds of public projects  are ones that only a government can do successfully because of the scale and related economies.  Jonathan Alter demonstrates that today’s republicans don’t recognize that the benefits from legitimate public projects bring benefits that far outweigh the costs for every one.

Grover Norquist, the tax-cutting champion, famously said he wanted to shrink the federal government “down to the size where we can drown it in the bath tub.”

With gargantuan deficits, that seems like a pipe dream, but it may be time to start running the water.

The new plan offered by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan and approved recently by Mitt Romney and congressional Republicans puts the Republicans on record supporting a federal government that within a decade will consist of little more than national defense, entitlements and interest on the national debt.

Those are largely transfer payments to defense contractors, seniors and bankers. The rest of what the government actually does would be eviscerated, from building roads to environmental protection to medical research.

Ryan has abandoned the Republican fantasy on display during the primaries that cutting liberal spending programs will be enough to restore fiscal sanity. He’d go where the big money is — entitlement reform — and also eliminate a series of tax deductions used by the affluent, though in an April 10 editorial board session with Bloomberg View he was still mum on which ones.

Ryan does not represent the historical positions of any Republican administration.  The first Republican Project that required some taxes was the civil war. The used taxes on the rich–among other things–to fund that, reconstruction, and expansion into the westward part of the country.

To fund the war, the federal government taxed as it had never taxed before. The tariff, long the main source of government revenue, was raised sharply. So were excise taxes on commodities such as liquor. The government also instituted the country’s first income tax, which imposed a 3 percent levy on incomes above $800. It was soon raised to 3 percent on earnings of more than $600 and 5 percent on those that exceeded $10,000.

In the mid-19th century, anyone would have considered a person with a $10,000 annual income “rich.”

With the war’s end, government outlays declined sharply. In 1865, they had been almost $1.3 billion, the first time any government anywhere had spent more than $1 billion in a year. By 1870, they had declined to $309 million.

The income tax was allowed to lapse in 1873, and excise taxes were lowered as well. What remained very high was the tariff. But the purpose of a high tariff wasn’t solely to fund federal operations; it was so high that the government ran budget surpluses for 28 straight years, from 1866 to 1893.

Rather, the tariff was kept high to protect the booming industrialization of the American economy in the postwar years. That was very popular in the Northeast and Midwest, where the industry was concentrated, but deeply unpopular in the South and West.

The Republicans also wanted a transcontinental railroad. Look back to the article for the kinds of things built by Republican Presidents–still useful today–that wouldn’t pass muster with today’s Republican Party.  This again comes from the Alter article cited above.  All of these things improved commerce, provided jobs, and made the country much better off.  Each generation of Americans–up until now–were always better off than our predecessors because they invested in a future for us.

The 1856 Republican platform demanded that “the Federal Government render immediate and efficient aid in [the] construction” of a transcontinental railroad. Money was also pledged for “the improvement of rivers and harbors.”

Soon thereafter, Abraham Lincoln signed laws creating hundreds of new colleges (the Morrill Land Grant Act), helping Americans buy property (the Homestead Act), establishing a new Cabinet department (Agriculture) and protecting public land from development (Yosemite).

Today’s Republican Party is on the other side of each of those Lincoln-era achievements, voting to slash money for education (Pell grants, which are discretionary, would be eviscerated in the Ryan budget), withdraw federal loans to buy property (closing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac), shut Cabinet departments (Romney has said he’d shutter a few, though not which ones) and open up more coastlines for drilling.

The idea of using government money to invest in the future hardly died with Lincoln. Theodore Roosevelt built the Panama Canal; Dwight Eisenhower constructed the interstate highway system; and Republicans have voted for smaller such investments repeatedly over the years.

You get the idea.  We shouldn’t even have to introduce the other items coming from Democratic Presidents like FDR that did projects like the Hoover Dam, rural electrification, and the blue star highways that were predecessors to Eisenhower’s interstate system.  If you look at countries that have made priorities of internet systems and/or solar energy projects rather than let a few for-profit businesses piece together networks around urban areas, you’ll see the benefits of federal projects that we’re losing right now.  We may not only see rural Americans loose the benefit of these things but also of something as basic as the constitutionally mandated postal service.  If some one can’t make extraordinary profit from it, today’s Republicans don’t want it.

I”ll let Paul Krugman have the last word.

America used to be a country that thought big about the future. Major public projects, from the Erie Canal to the interstate highway system, used to be a well-understood component of our national greatness. Nowadays, however, the only big projects politicians are willing to undertake — with expense no object — seem to be wars. Funny how that works.

But think beyond that, public education, the national park system, great science projects like the moon shots or huge telescopes would not be done by private industry without huge amounts of federal largess or protection.  Then there’s medical research like Nuclear medicine, genetics, and prevention of diseases by vaccinations.  All of these started out as government funded projects before they were profitable enough to be transferred to the private sector. Why do today’s republicans think small for the country and big only for the 1%?  Why are they creating a cat fight to take us off the real problems that challenge our children’s future?

Friday Reads

Posted: April 13, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: abortion rights, Foreign Affairs, Iran, morning reads, War on Women, Women's Rights | 20 Comments

Good Morning!

More news in the “imaginary” War on Women.  As usual, many Republican Fembots are sadly selling out our interests. Wacko Tea Party Arizona Governor Jan Brewer signs another bill designed to remove the constitutional right to access to abortion.  The state is banning abortions from 18 weeks forward.  This directly conflicts with Roe v. Wade and medical science.  Welcome to the beginning of the world of The Handmaiden’s Tale.  Jan Brewer is no Fay Dunaway either.

Despite its name, critics derided the Women’s Health and Safety Act that Arizona Governor Jan Brewer signed into law today as cruel, dangerous, and hostile to women—likely to deter many Arizona women from seeking an abortion, and to distress those who nonetheless go through with one.

Life starts earliest in Arizona, which now defines gestational age as beginning on the first day of a woman’s last period, rather than at fertilization. In practice, that means the state has banned abortions after about 18 weeks (20 weeks from the last menstruation) except in the case of medical emergencies. While that provision has been much discussed, abortions after that point account for only about 1 percent of the procedures currently performed.

The stipulation likely to be most widely felt is what experts are calling an effective shutdown of medication abortions. These nonsurgical abortions are usually performed within the first nine weeks of pregnancy, and account for between 17 and 20 percent of all abortions, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive-rights advocacy group. While women often take the pills at clinics and in their homes, the bill now mandates that a medical provider must have hospital privileges within 30 miles of where the procedure takes place. Many times clinics or homes are not within 30 miles of hospitals, and the distance prevents providers from other cities or even states from caring for women, says Elizabeth Nash of the Guttmacher Institute. Another factor that could contribute to what Nash called a “shutdown” of medication abortions is that the law requires abortion pills to be administered using outdated protocols, confusing providers and obscuring proper use of the drugs.

While it becomes the seventh state to pass such legislation in the past two years, many Arizonans believe theirs is the most restrictive and sinister because of the degree to which it will legislate health care, thwart evidence-based medicine, and shame women. One in three women will have an abortion before age 45 according to Guttmacher, and more than half of those women already have a child.

The Virginia Speaker of the House who also is an ex-ALEC Chair was heard telling a woman ‘I’m Not Speaking In Little Enough Words For You To Understand’.

ProgressVA recently released a report on the legislative influence of the corporate-funded American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) — which began hemorrhaging donors in the wake of a campaign raising awareness of its efforts to disenfranchise voters and enact Florida-style “stand your ground” laws. The group noted that the Commonwealth of Virginia has spent $232,000 of taxpayer’s dollars over the past decade to send legislators to ALEC conferences and meetings.

Virginia House Speaker William Howell (R), himself a national board member of ALEC and its 2009 national chairman, took issue with the report and called it “inaccurate.”

In an exchange caught on camera, Howell berates the group’s executive director Anna Scholl, mocking the group’s website and her. Howell criticizes the Washington Post’s article about the group’s as “full of half-truths or un-truths.”

In a failed attempt to back up his accusation, Howell notes that while the Commonwealth paid about $230,000 on ALEC-related expenses, it spent even more on travel for the same and other legislators to attend conferences by the bipartisan National Conference of State Legislators.

When by Scholl pressed as to how omission of that irrelevant detail constituted an inaccuracy, Howell berated her:

I guess I’m not speaking in little enough words for you to understand.

When Scholl responded to the slight, telling him “I’m a smart girl, actually I went to the University of Virginia,” more than capable of understanding polysyllabic words. Howell curtly replied, “We’ll good for you.”

Planned Parenthood has sued Texas.

The Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA) has filed a lawsuit in federal court against the state of Texas over the state’s exclusion of the nonprofit group’s clinics from a state women’s health program primarily funded by federal dollars.

PPFA told Austin American Statesman reporter Chuck Lindell that they’ve already closed 12 clinics across Texas since last year, after Texas Republicans slashed family planning funds by $74 million. Exclusion from Medicaid funding will see another $10-$13 million pulled from the group, which would trigger the closure of even more clinics serving lower-income communities.

Texas Republicans say they are within their lawful authority to deny funding to the nonprofit group because abortion providers are not considered to be qualified organizations. To those ends, the legislature last year passed a new rule that bans abortion providers from receiving taxpayer money.

PPFA, however, insists that only 3 percent of services performed across the whole country in 2010 had to do with abortion: the vast majority of their work, they claim, relates to breast and cervical cancer screenings, reproductive health, education and contraceptive support.

The Obama Administration said last month that Texas’s move was illegal, and began to cut off federal funds for the Texas Medicaid Women’s Health Program because of the state’s decision to exclude PPFA.

 

 A study conducted by U.S. government scientists are linking the rise in earthquakes in the U.S. to fracking.

A spate of earthquakes across the middle of the U.S. is “almost certainly” man-made, and may be caused by wastewater from oil or gas drilling injected into the ground, U.S. government scientists said in a study.

Researchers from the U.S. Geological Survey said that for the three decades until 2000, seismic events in the nation’s midsection averaged 21 a year. They jumped to 50 in 2009, 87 in 2010 and 134 in 2011.

Those statistics, included in the abstract of a research paper to be discussed at the Seismological Society of America conference next week in San Diego, will add pressure on an energy industry already confronting more regulation of the process of hydraulic fracturing.

“Our scientists cite a series of examples for which an uptick in seismic activity is observed in areas where the disposal of wastewater through deep-well injection increased significantly,” David Hayes, the deputy secretary of the U.S. Department of Interior, said in a blog post yesterday, describing research by scientists at the U.S. Geological Survey.

N.C. Gov. Bev Perdue is arguing that those pushing a highly restrictive marriage amendment could wind up invalidating the states’s domestic violence laws.

North Carolina Gov. Bev Perdue warned on Thursday that Amendment One, which defines marriage as between one man and one woman, could remove protections against domestic violence for unmarried women.

“It would ban the state from recognizing civil unions, strip away domestic partner benefits and it actually could eliminate legal protections for all unmarried couples in the state,” she said in a video on YouTube. “This will harm the stability and security of North Carolina families like never before.”

“The amendment I believe is dangerous for women,” Perdue continued. “There is a real risk that some laws we have on the books now to protect the victims of domestic violence may no longer apply to many women in the state.”

Because the proposed amendment states that marriage between a man and women is the “only domestic legal union that shall be valid or recognized,” opponents have said that it could render domestic violence laws invalid for unmarried couples.

After Ohio passed a similar marriage amendment, some judges dropped domestic violence charges in cases involving unmarried couples.

Yeah, right, no war on women here.

Seymour Hersh has evidence that the Bush administration trained Iranian terrorists in Nevada.  Amy Goodman interviews Hersh on the subject.

AMY GOODMAN: In what appears to be a first for U.S. foreign policy, new revelations have emerged that the Bush administration secretly trained an Iranian opposition group despite its inclusion on the State Department’s list of foreign terrorists. Writing for The New Yorker magazine, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh reports U.S. Joint Special Operations Command trained operatives from Mujahideen-e-Khalq, or MEK, at a secret site in Nevada beginning in 2005. According to Hersh, MEK members were trained in intercepting communications, cryptography, weaponry and small unit tactics at the Nevada site up until President Obama took office. The MEK has been included on the State Department’s list of foreign terrorist groups since 1997. It’s been linked to a number of attacks, spanning from the murders of six U.S. citizens in the ’70s to the recent wave of assassinations targeting Iranian nuclear scientists.

Although the revelation that the U.S. government directly trained the MEK comes as a surprise, it’s no secret the group has prominent backers across the political spectrum. Despite it’s designation as a “terrorist” organization by the State Department for 15 years, a number of prominent former U.S. officials have been paid to speak in support of the MEK. The bipartisan list includes two former CIA directors, James Woolsey and Porter Goss; former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge; New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani; former Vermont Governor Howard Dean; former Attorney General Michael Mukasey; former FBI Director Louis Freeh; former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton; and former Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell.

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?

 

Punking Hilary Rosen

Posted: April 12, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: religious extremists, right wing hate grouups, Rush Limbaugh, the GOP, War on Women, We are so F'd, Women's Rights | Tags: | 36 Comments

Hilary Rosen provided the right wing noise machine with a two second sound byte that has been used to reignite the Mommy Wars.  They have purposefully obfuscated what Rosen said thinking they will dupe women into voting for Romney.  I am not falling for it.  I can’t imagine most of the women I know will fall for it either.  Any one that thinks that Hilary Rosen believes that stay-at-home parents without access to maids, nannies, yard crews, and millions of dollars don’t work, raise your hand! I thought so.  It’s different when you have the ability to just write a check to get anything done. Ann Romney does not have the day-to-day experience of 99% of the women in this country, housewife or not. Most women who work inside and outside of the home have to do stuff for themselves. They can’t just write a check and call on an army of servants. Not so with Ann Romney. So, why is every one punking Hillary Rosen? That Punk’d treatment  would include that provided by “this is what a feminist looks like” President Obama and his gang of campaign boyz.

President Obama strongly disagreed with Democratic strategist Hilary Rosen’s controversial comment about Ann Romney, saying today that “there’s no tougher job than being a mom.”

“Anybody who would argue otherwise, I think, probably needs to rethink their statement,” the president told Bruce Aune of ABC’s Cedar Rapids affiliate KCRG.

Rosen sparked a political firestorm when she questioned Wednesday whether Ann Romney is qualified to gauge women’s economic concerns, claiming the mother of five has “never worked a day in her life.” The Romney campaign pounced on the comments as an opportunity to boost the GOP frontrunner’s standing among female voters, while the president’s campaign and the White House publicly distanced themselves from Rosen.

My mom was a “housewife” too.  However,  Mildred cleaned our house.  Mrs. Anders watched me and my sister when we weren’t at Miss Margaret’s pre-school, Miss Donna’s ballet lessons, or Mrs. Donna’s swimming classes. My mom played a lot of bridge, spent a lot of time at the country club, and then did things for junior league like volunteering at the hospital gift shop or attending lunches for the local Red Cross.  Mrs Olsen did all our laundry except for our clean ironed bed sheets that were dropped off by Kimball’s laundry at  our front door. My dad did the grocery shopping since mom hated doing that and he cooked dinner any way so it was pointless for her to do that.  So, as you can see the life of an upper middle class house wife is just full of challenges.  Most of the women I’ve mentioned here–like Miss Donna who taught me ballet or the Mrs Donna that taught me swimming–were either widowed or divorce.  Mildred and Mrs. Anders had husbands that were old and not able to make money any more since their bodies had way gone pass the point of being able to do the kinds of physical work their educations would allow.  Mrs. Olsen was putting her son through college.  Yup, my mom had the toughest job in the world.  Did I mention that we were the poor ones in my family?  My mother’s brother and sister had live-ins for all of that.  Of course,  my aunts were “housewives” too although I came to think of them more as country club wives.   They never worried about much of anything except boredom and when to pick us up.  None of us were rich enough to have chauffeurs.  Some how, I can’t imagine Ann Romney cleaning any of those multitudes of houses, can you? So,  I wish I was reading a lot more articles in support of Hillary Rosen, like this one from The Nation.  My mother had the ability to pay a lot of other people do a lot of things. She didn’t have to worry about making ends meet, for example.  She had other women doing a lot of work because they needed that money just to stay in their houses.  I don’t think my mother could’ve related to Mrs. Olsen’s concerns any more than Ann Romney could relate to most women. The issue is not if you choose to work or not.  The issue is if your life is completely underwritten by millions of dollars or a struggle to keep food on the table.

Rosen was responding to Mitt Romney’s constant trotting out of Ann when he gets a question on women’s issues:

What you have is Mitt Romney running around the country saying, well, you know, my wife tells me that what women really care about are economic issues. And when I listen to my wife, that’s what I’m hearing.Guess what, his wife has actually never worked a day in her life. She’s never really dealt with the kinds of economic issues that a majority of the women in this country are facing in terms of how do we feed our kids, how do we send them to school and how do we—why do we worry about their future?

There’s nothing there about stay-at-home moms, or the idea that that raising children isn’t work. Rosen was referring to the fact that Ann Romney—an incredibly rich and elite woman—likely does not understand the economic concerns of most American women. Again, it was unfortunate choice of words—but she wasn’t wrong.

The Romney campaign, predictably, has grabbed onto this “controversy” in an attempt to divert attention from their missteps around equal pay and the war on women yesterday. Ann Romney joined Twitter, and her first two messages were about the flap, writing that “all moms are entitled to choose their path” and that she “made a choice to stay home and raise five boys.”

Since all moms are “entitled” to “choose” their path, I’m very much looking forward to the Romney’s plan for national mandated paid parental leave. I’m also wondering, since they believe that women’s domestic labor is valuable and real work, when they will come out in support of wages for said work. (Or perhaps women are only entitled to make their “choice” when they have the financial means to do so.)

Focusing on this slip-up just brings more attention to the way in which a Romney presidency wouldn’t support mothers. Because empty platitudes about motherhood “being the hardest job in the world” doesn’t change the reality of most moms’ lives, or make their job any easier.

But it’s not just that Romney is bad for women (whether they work outside the home or not). What’s being lost in this conversation is the incredibly facile and insulting notion that just because a woman made the decision to marry Romney and occasionally talk to him about other women, that he is somehow well-informed on women’s issues. Ann Romney is not an expert on women’s issues just because she happens to be one. And she’s not an expert in what mothers need just because she has children. Believing otherwise is infantilizing and reduces women’s very important and complex concerns to beauty parlor chitchat.

What’s disappointing to me is that most of the press and even many Democrats are allowing the right wing to frame and punk single mother Hillary Rosen. Here’s a little sample of the right wing smear going on right now.

No one is arguing that raising children isn’t work. Democratic strategist and CAP Action board member Hilary Rosen is a single mother of twins who had to go through the expensive and challenging process of adoption with her then partner Elizabeth Birch. Now, she’s trying to stick up for other mothers who don’t have the luxury of millionaire husbands to help fund their child-rearing duties, and the backlash is getting ugly. Catholic League president Bill Donohue attacked her family on Twitter this morning:

@CatholicLeague: Lesbian Dem Hilary Rosen tells Ann Romney she never worked a day in her life. Unlike Rosen, who had to adopt kids, Ann raised 5 of her own.

So, just so you know this is right wing spin, here’s Limbaugh and the newly fabricated “democratic war on mothers”.  So, the defunding and removing access to prenatal care, school lunches, family planning services, preschool, maternal leave, and a myriad of other family-friendly programs wasn’t enough evidence of a republican war on mothers that we need to invent things out of thin air?

Rush Limbaugh jumped into the firestorm on Thursday created by Democratic strategist Hilary Rosen’s jab at stay-at-home-mom Ann Romney as the radio talk show host accused the Democratic Party of launching a “war on mothers.”

Limbaugh spent the bulk of his three-hour afternoon program griping about Rosen’s charge Wednesday that Mitt Romney’s wife has “never worked a day in her life,” telling listeners that the comment summed up the Democrats’ position on women’s role in society.

“This is big because it’s such a teachable moment. It’s such an illustration of who these people are, the left. It’s such an illustration of phonies of feminism. It is an illustration of the absolute hostility that the left has for women who stay at home,” the conservative radio host said, speaking before Rosen issued a statement apologizing to Ann Romney.

He continued, “Obama and the Democrats are not content to just divide men and women. They want to go deeper and dive working mothers from stay at home mothers. And they want to attach the virtue to working mothers and assign no virtue to stay at home moms. Now you talk to most women, even those who consider themselves feminists … they will tell you that they thought that was a battle they fought and won and ended years ago.”

Limbaugh also personally defended Ann Romney, referring to her as a “role model.”

“They’ve gone after the wrong woman here. Ann Romney is not disliked. Ann Romney is not unlikeable. Ann Romney isn’t controversial. Ann Romney isn’t telling anybody how to live. … Ann Romney’s a role model. Don’t care what you think of Mitt. That’s not the point here. She is a role model for living and trying to live a fulfilling life,” he said.

No one but Ann Romney knows if her life is fulfilling and if she considers herself any kind of a role model. I would hope my daughters would not consider Ann Romney’s life one worth copying but then that’s my values. For one, I love my father a lot. If he were an outspoken atheist like Ann Romney’s was, I certainly would have never allowed any one to sneak-baptize him into any religion after his death. I consider that the panultimate disrespect. I also would not for a minute raise my daughters in any tradition where women must call 18 year old man children “elders”, where tons of money is spent defeating the ERA, and where women are not allowed access to “heaven” with out a husband sponsor. That’s just the short list of the kinds of patriarchal, women-hating stuff that goes on in Romney’s religion. I don’t consider that much of a role model for self respect. I also would’ve put my husband on the roof of the car if he’d have tried to put the family dog up there.  However, Ann Romney has to live with all of these decisions and her life. That’s the deal with being a mother, you should be able to choose the way you do it. I can’t imagine any one thinking Ann Romney’s choices or lifestyle is common to all but a few women and I challenge all of us that see this backlash and stand behind Hillary Rosen. For a group of people that scream class war at the drop of a hat, the misogynists sure have done a great job of missing the point of class and money in Rosen’s comments.

endnote:

I’ve just been told that David Pflouffe is on Lawrence O’Donnell acting lie a complete ass.  He just called the pillorying of Rosen a “rare moment of bi-partisan agreement”.  This is just another example of the inability of Democratic men to really stand up for what’s right.  Unbelievable! This is akin to them joining in the swift boating of Kerry.  This has nothing to do with the choice of not working or working.  It has everything to do with being a member of a privileged elite that’s far removed from the rest of us.  We need to be very vocal about this.

or as Hillary herself puts it on her facebook:

I’ve nothing against @AnnRomney. I just don’t want Mitt using her as an expert on women struggling $ to support their family. She isn’t.

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