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.

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.

They must think Women are Really Stupid

Posted: April 11, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: abortion rights, War on Women, We are so F'd, Women's Healthcare, Women's Rights | Tags: , | 31 Comments

Unless Harvard MBA math is radically different from the math taught in this universe, the Romney campaign must have decided that women are really gullible and stupid.  They realize they have a gender gap and have decided giving us bad math and no answers is the answer.  The Republican moves to regain ground with women are akin to an ad campaign coming from the writers of Mad Men. It’s a blast from the stereotype past.  Not only is the ad lame and dated, but it doesn’t hold up to fact checking and questioning which is very easy to do on today’s internet database.  Etcha Sketch positions and lies don’t cut it with most of the women I know.

First, we learned Romney keeps in touch with women by sending his wife–the great white rich huntress–out to stalk the elusive beasts that are rare animals in the world of venture and plunder finance. How does Romney answer questions about women’s concerns?

Virtually every time, Romney answers by invoking his wife of 43 years, and reports what’s she’s told him about what women want.

“She reports to me regularly that the issue women care about most is the economy, and getting good jobs for their kids and for themselves,” Romney told the Newspaper Association of America on Wednesday. “They are concerned about gasoline prices, the cost of getting to and from work, taking their kids to school or to practice and so forth after school. That is what women care about in this country, and my vision is to get America working again.”

A few days earlier in Middleton, he was asked how he’d counter the Democrats’ narrative on contraception. He prefaced his answer this way: “I wish Ann were here … to answer that question in particular.”

Then, we saw Republican Fembots out on the talk circuit–Nikki Haley being one–to say that women really want good jobs for their sons and don’t care at all about their health concerns like pregnancy prevention and access to mammograms for women without private health insurance.

During an appearance on ABC’s The View, co-host Elisabeth Hasselbeck asked Haley how conservatives could make the case that Republicans represent the interest of women.

“All of my policy is not based on a label,” Haley remarked. “It’s based on what I’ve lived and what I know: Women don’t care about contraception. They care about jobs and the economy and raising their families and all of those things.”

Then, they send Prince Reibus to the chat spin zone who says the War on Women was a campaign ploy with as much validity as a War on Caterpillars after we’ve endured about two years with of laws to defund Planned Parenthood, remove state equal pay laws, and block women’s constitutional right to access abortion, birth control, and health care in general. Then there are the Ryan spending priorities which hit women, the elderly and children hardest while giving millionaires more tax breaks.  Here’s a few headlines just to remind you what they’ve been up to the first two weeks of April alone.  Notice that the list of restrictions aimed at women are aren’t exactly coming from the most blue states with Democratic Governors.   Don’t forget Romney has vowed to get rid of Planned Parenthood and Title X and supports the Blunt Amendment.

The Los Angeles Times: Mississippi could close state’s sole abortion clinic, by Richard Fausset

ABC News: Texas Teacher Fired for Unwed Pregnancy Offered to Get Married, by Christina Ng

USA Today: Ariz. House OKs bill banning abortions after 20 weeks, by Alia Beard Rau

WEAU-TV: Controversial abortion bill among several Walker quietly signed into law, by Aaron Dimick

ACLU press release: ACLU and Women’s Health Groups File Lawsuit to Protect Vital Health Services in Oklahoma

Let’s put that in perspective for the years 2011 and 2012 to date.

“We’re looking at about 430 abortion restrictions that have been introduced into state legislatures this year, which is pretty much in the same ballpark as 2011,” says Elizabeth Nash of the Guttmacher Institute, a research and policy group that focuses on health and reproductive rights. This year, Nash says, “is shaping up to be quite busy.”

Keep in mind, 2011 was already a watershed year for abortion restrictions: States passed 83 such laws, more than triple the 23 laws passed in 2010. And much of that had to do with the 2010 election, when Republicans gained control of many state legislatures. With the political makeup of state capitols unchanged, lawmakers are continuing to put more limits abortion.

The latest Romney lie should make Romney’s nose reach all the way around the world to touch the back of his head. Romney just doesn’t spin a story to his advantage, he makes things up from whole cloth.  This time he’s playing numbers games with unemployment statistics.

Mitt Romney’s campaign wants you to know that the same president who argues for contraceptive coverage and suggests that a Congress with more female members would get more accomplished has also presided over disproportionate job losses among women.

On April 6, 2012, Romney’s press secretary Andrea Saul tweeted, “FACT: Women account for 92.3% of the jobs lost under @BarackObama, a claim also made on Romney’s website.

She followed it up a few hours later with this: “@BarackObama touts policies for women & 92.3% jobs lost under him r women’s. He’s even more clueless than we thought.”

When we asked for backup for the claim, the campaign cited national employment figures spanning four years. We found that though the numbers are accurate, their reading of them isn’t.

Here is the real bottom line from PolitiFact.

… if you count all those jobs lost beginning in 2007, women account for just 39.7 percent of the total.

Romney denies that his gender gap is due to the many laws passed recently to restrict women’s civil liberties and rights.

As the Republican field winnowed Tuesday, Mitt Romney made an appeal to a voting bloc key to any candidate’s success in November: women.

Though the day’s headlines revolved around a decision by former Sen. Rick Santorum to suspend his campaign, Mitt Romney barreled forward with a push against Democrats as to who could best appeal to female voters.

Speaking at a Delaware structural steel factory, Romney responded to Democratic claims his party had waged a “war on women” and alienated female voters. Romney turned the argument around, accusing President Barack Obama’s administration of failing working women.

“The real war on women has been the job losses as the result of the Obama economy,” he told an audience in Wilmington, saying women had lost 92.3% of jobs lost under the Obama administration.

Romney said his private sector career had helped him understand what women worry about: jobs and the economy.

“If we’re going to get women back to work and help women with the real issues women care about – good jobs, good wages, a bright future for themselves, their families, and their kids, we’re going to have to elect a president who understands how the economy works, and I do.”

I would argue that understanding the unemployment  rates would be one of them.   So given that, wouldn’t you think Romney would know what he thinks about the Lilly Ledbetter Act and its status as Obama’s signature law to help women and pay?  This happened this morning. 

Given that Tea Party/Koch Puppet Governor Walker of Wisconsin just repealed his state’s equal pay act, you think some one in the Romney campaign would realize it’s an important question for women who work.  Obviously, the DNC and the Obama campaign have already asked the question.

The Democratic National Committee chairwoman called out Republican Gov. Scott Walker today for repealing Wisconsin’s Equal Pay Enforcement Act, a law intended to lower the cost for plaintiffs suing employers for pay discrimination.

“He tried to quietly repeal the Equal Pay Act. Women aren’t going to stand for that,” Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

The law allowed for victims to sue employers in state court which is often less expensive than filing in federal court.

The Republican controlled state Senate passed the measure in November, followed by passage in the state Legislature in February. Walker then repealed it Thursday.

“The focus of the Republican Party on turning back the clock for women really is something that’s unacceptable and shows how callus and insensitive they are towards women’s priorities,” the Florida congresswoman said.

National Republicans have yet to comment on the Wisconsin repeal but the Obama campaign has seized the opportunity to tie Walker’s law to Mitt Romney, who has argued that women voters in 2012 only care about pocketbook issues.

“Does Romney think women should have ability to take their bosses to court to get the same pay as their male coworkers? Or does he stand with Governor Walker against this?” Obama campaign representative Lis Smith said Friday.

This sounds a lot like Romney’s journey to the Blunt Amendment this year.  First, Romney says no state is trying to make birth control illegal, then he says that birth control is a private issue, then, he supports the intrusive Blunt Amendment within the hour of not supporting it.

Presidential candidate Mitt Romney said Wednesday he opposed Senate Republicans’ effort that critics say would limit insurance coverage of birth control, then reversed himself quickly in a second interview saying he misunderstood the question.

Romney told Ohio News Network during an interview that he opposed a measure by Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., that was scheduled for a vote Thursday. “I’m not for the bill,” Romney said before urging the interviewer to move on.

Romney later said he didn’t understand the question.

“Of course I support the Blunt amendment. I thought he was talking about some state law that prevented people from getting contraception so I was simply — misunderstood the question and of course I support the Blunt amendment,” Romney later told Howie Carr’s radio program in Boston, noting that Blunt is his campaign’s point man in the Senate.

Just hours earlier, ONN reporter Jim Heath asked Romney about rival Rick Santorum and the cultural debate happening in the campaign and the legislation proposed by Blunt and co-sponsored by Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla.

“He’s brought contraception into this campaign. The issue of birth control — contraception, Blunt-Rubio — is being debated, I believe, later this week. It deals with banning or allowing employers to ban providing female contraception. Have you taken a position on it?” Heath said. “He (Santorum) said he was for that. We’ll talk about personhood in a second, but he’s for that. Have you taken a position?”

Romney replied: “I’m not for the bill, but look, the idea of presidential candidates getting into questions about contraception within a relationship between a man and a woman, husband and wife, I’m not going there.”

So, the Romney camp holds a campaign call on “women’s issues”, wants to talk about women and jobs, then has no idea what the Lilly Ledbetter Act is or what Romney thinks about it.  This is major fail imho and just like the clueless response on the Blunt Amendment Dosado.  Maddow sums this up succinctly.

Romney has cited a misleading statistic, and his aides couldn’t defend it. Romney has said current policies are keeping women from getting more jobs, and given three separate chances to say something coherent, his aides couldn’t explain what would change if the former governor is elected president. Were they not expecting these kinds of question?

To borrow a Casey Stengel line, can’t anybody here play this game?

As for the Fair Pay law, Lilly Ledbetter released a statement shortly after the Romney campaign wouldn’t state the former governor’s position on this.

“I was shocked and disappointed to hear that Mitt Romney is not willing to stand up for women and their families. If he is truly concerned about women in this economy, he wouldn’t have to take time to ‘think’ about whether he supports the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. This Act not only ensures women have the tools to get equal pay for equal work, but it means their families will be better served also. Women earn just 77 cents to every dollar that men earn for the same job, which is why President Obama took decisive action and made this the first bill that he signed when he took office. Women should have the ability to take their bosses to court to get the same pay as their male coworkers.

“Anyone who wants to be President of the United States shouldn’t have to think about whether they support pursuing every possible avenue to ensuring women get the same pay for the same work as men. Our economic security depends on it.”

Eventually, after Ledbetter’s statement was released to the media, the Republican campaign said a Romney administration wouldn’t try to repeal the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, but wouldn’t say whether Romney supported the law itself. (Remember, the vast majority of congressional Republicans opposed the law when it passed in 2009.)

I can’t imagine the circumstances under which I would vote for this schmuck.  I say this as women who ran as a Republican in the 1990s and who is squarely an independent today.  You have to be a seriously self loathing woman to consider voting for today’s Republican Party.  They’ve gone way off the deep end and Willard’s gone right with them.

News Flash: Women still expected not to age or put on weight

Posted: April 10, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: War on Women, Women's Healthcare, Women's Rights | Tags: , , | 28 Comments

We haven’t heard recently from Demi Moore whose meltdown was plastered every where. After having a lot of plastic surgery for a Charlie’s Angels movie and serving as the poster child for Cougar relationships, she evidently couldn’t deal with the expectations and her aging.  Demi’s not the only one whose body and relationships have been the obsession of an older woman hating media and culture.  The current object of weight jokes and speculation is pregnant Jessica Simpson.  Here’s supposedly feminist Joy Behar heaping the guilt on to Simpson.

The 31-year-old recently posed nude on the cover of Elle magazine, paying tribute to Demi Moore’s iconic cover, and she tweeted about it by making a joke of it.

“Last chance to see me ‘fat’ aka PREGNANT on the cover of Elle,” the mother-to-be tweeted. “I loved this shoot, [and it’s] only on stands for a few more days!”

Just last week while co-hosting The View, Joy Behar slammed Simpson’s weight gain during her first pregnancy. Talking to her fellow morning show hosts, the 69-year-old said: “Remember the time that Jessica Simpson was criticized because she didn’t know the difference between chicken and tuna? That kind of thing is more fun to criticize than the fact that the girl is fat.”

She also added: “Most women who are pregnant are not supposed to gain more than 25lbs. She looks like she gained a lot more than that.”

Sue me, but I think pregnancy weight gain is between a woman and her doctor.  I also don’t think it’s very sisterly of Behar to pile on, of course you can use effective methods like latex waist cinchers for weight loss and help yourself a little with that.

Ashely Judd has written an excellent piece on how the media gangs up on women who dare to age, not exercise maniacally and eat like anorexics, or who look okay because if they dare to look okay it must be due some kind of plastic surgery.  Judd also hits on the classic woman on woman jujitsu and the messed up meme that a woman who “lets herself go” is also losing her husband, boyfriend, whatever.

This expert from recent post on https://www.newyorkplasticsurgeryallure.com is worth sharing: The Conversation about women’s bodies exists largely outside of us, while it is also directed at (and marketed to) us, and used to define and control us. The Conversation about women happens everywhere, publicly and privately. We are described and detailed, our faces and bodies analyzed and picked apart, our worth ascertained and ascribed based on the reduction of personhood to simple physical objectification. Our voices, our personhood, our potential, and our accomplishments are regularly minimized and muted.

Very few women live their lives with healthy attitudes towards their aging bodies.  One of the few brave women has been Jamie Lee Curtis.

Jamie Lee Curtis discusses aging gracefully with co-hosts Gayle King and Erica Hill, live today, April 6, 2012, on CBS THIS MORNING on the CBS Television Network (7:00 AM – 9:00 AM).

Below is an excerpt from the interview.

KING: When there are so many women who don’t want — who are so afraid — to go there with the age. Why are you so comfortable with it?

CURTIS: I am pretty happy with who I am, and what I am doing, and it’s much more about the content of my character than the contour of my face.

We used to talk a lot about this in the good old days of “Our Bodies, Our Selves”.  However, most of us were not in the same shape as we are now.  We now have an entire category of mental illness called body dismorphic disorder which includes a range of behaviors like anorexia, bulimia and obsessive, perpetual plastic surgery.  The Hollywood frenzy feeders appear to feed these tendencies loudly and continually.  Judd’s article outlines exactly what she’s experienced.  Notice the sources aren’t all Perez Hilton or Joan Rivers.

However, the recent speculation and accusations in March feel different, and my colleagues and friends encouraged me to know what was being said. Consequently, I choose to address it because the conversation was pointedly nasty, gendered, and misogynistic and embodies what all girls and women in our culture, to a greater or lesser degree, endure every day, in ways both outrageous and subtle. The assault on our body image, the hypersexualization of girls and women and subsequent degradation of our sexuality as we walk through the decades, and the general incessant objectification is what this conversation allegedly about my face is really about.

A brief analysis demonstrates that the following “conclusions” were all made on the exact same day, March 20, about the exact same woman (me), looking the exact same way, based on the exact same television appearance. The following examples are real, and come from a variety of (so-called!) legitimate news outlets (such as HuffPo, MSNBC, etc.), tabloid press, and social media:

One of my best friends suffers from body dismorphia.  I watched horrified as this friend of mine–a gorgeous woman in her mid-30s came back from a few years in California with all kinds of plastic surgery scars and changes.  She was trying to recreate a Glamour spread she had done while a teenager.  She also had done a stint on All My Children.  I guess this and other experiences contributed to an obsession with plastic surgery. She’s gotten help and is doing well now.  But, I was really worried about her for many years. I also worry whenever my very skinny youngest daughter thinks she’s getting fat.  Despite the knowledge we now have and diagnosis of this obsession as a mental illness, we still have the press–and other women–perpetuating the mean.

What makes me most sad about this is the number of women in the media–like Joy Behar–that contribute to the sense that no woman has the right to age.  It’s also a shame that the same expectations hoisted on us from the pin up girl days to now are still pervasive and doing damage.   We need to be brave like Judd and Curtis and speak out against unrealistic  views of women’s bodies and our  aging processes. The emphasis should be on what is healthy which varies from woman-to-woman.  We also should be aware of any false expectations of ourselves and others that are leading to this continuing, unhealthy trend and change our attitudes towards ourselves and other women.

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