The State of Our Union

Posted: April 18, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: The Right Wing | Tags: , , , , , , , | 36 Comments

To put it simply – CRAZY!     

I’m beginning to think that there must be something in the drinking water. The Right Wingnuttery has risen to unforeseen heights in the past few weeks. Tracing its beginning isn’t an easy task. I would imagine that, based on our differing ages and our personal experiences that it will be difficult to reach a consensus on exactly what caused the extreme right turn our politics have taken. Let me put forth some of my personal suggestions, not in any particular order:

  • The election of the B movie actor, Ronald Reagan
  • Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority
  • Repeal of the Fairness Doctrine
  • The consolidation of the media
  • The rise of the Mega-Churches
  • Rush Limbaugh and his imitators getting their own bully pulpit on the radio
  • Gingrich’s Contract ON America
  • The stealing of the presidency by George & Jeb Bush & the Supreme Court
  • 9/11
  • The plucking of Sarah Palin from the frontier in Alaska
  • The Fox News Channel
  • The birth of the Tea Party

Some of these may qualify only as fuel for the fire as opposed to being actual triggering events.  Feel free to add to the list.  I’m sure that I’ve forgotten something critical to explaining the mass hysteria that surrounds us.

There is hardly a day that goes by that I don’t spend some time trying to understand the mean-spirited, venomous attacks on nearly everything I support.  Those thoughts are often interrupted by being blind-sided by something else coming under attack.  Let me give you just one recent example that left me speechless and more confused than ever.

One of my employees and I were having a discussion about some mail returned by the post office. She began by complaining about the post office, saying that the first thing she would do would be to get rid of the postal union.

Okay, to some that might not be a moment of confusion.  Her position, however, astounded me. I knew already that she is firmly planted in the Right Wingnuttery camp, but her vehement opposition to the postal union surprised me.  Her husband had worked for the phone company which, because of the CWA, provides its employees with good paying jobs, excellent health care coverage and generous retirement benefits.  I knew this because I had once worked for the same phone company as her husband.  He was able to take early retirement with a 6 figure bonus package.  His job permitted them to live more than comfortably for most of their lives.

None of the benefits this family enjoyed would have been possible without the existence of the CWA.  How could my employee not support unions?  Where was the logic and reason?  My conclusion:  she and the rest of the Wingnuttery bunch do not operate on either logic or reason. Apparently, she and the others who vote for Right Wing candidates have swallowed whole the propaganda fed to them by Fox, Rush, the Republican leadership and their preachers.  That’s the only conclusion I’ve been able to come up with.  If you have a clue, please share.

I can only shake my head and live with fear for the future of America and the rest of the world.  While these Right Wingers look forward to The Apocalypse foretold in their sacred book, I fear the inevitable apocalypse their actions and choices are driving us toward.  I’m grateful I’m on the other side of 60 and hope that younger, stronger, reasonable people can hold off this cataclysm for another 10 or 20 years.

I’ll leave you with two things.  The first is a political awareness test given by The Pew Research Center recently.  I urge you to take the quiz and then look at the results, which are shocking.  I don’t know if the majority of the respondents aren’t interested in politics, are terribly misinformed or a combination of both.

Pew Research News IQ Quiz

And then some of the pictures in a recent email from the employee I referenced above.

Saturday Late Night Open Thread: Gateway Sexual Activity

Posted: April 14, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: birth control, children, fetus fetishists, open thread, Planned Parenthood, PLUB Pro-Life-Until-Birth, Reproductive Health, Surreality, U.S. Politics | Tags: , , , , , , | 19 Comments

Are the Arizona and Tennessee state legislatures competing to see which state can pass the most bizarre, backward, and ignorant laws? Yesterday Dakinikat wrote about the latest anti-abortion bill signed by Arizona Governor Jan Brewer that defines gestational age as beginning on the first day of a pregnant woman’s last period. Peggy Sue has written about Tennessee’s new anti-evolution law, which could lead to a modern-day reprise of the Scopes Monkey Trial.

For the moment, I think Tennessee is winning the competition for most stupid, insane legislation with State Bill 3310, which defines holding hands and kissing as “gateway sexual behaviors.” From the Nashville Tennessean:

The Tennessee Senate voted 28-1 to amend the state’s sex ed curriculum by adding warnings against “gateway sexual activity.” Senate Bill 3310 does not explicitly define what those activities are, but it comes in response to controversies in Nashville and Knox County schools over instruction given to high school students that mentioned alternatives to sexual intercourse.

“ ‘Abstinence’ means from all of these activities, and we want to promote that,” said state Sen. Jack Johnson, R-Franklin, the bill’s sponsor. “What we do want to communicate to the kids is that the best choice is abstinence.”

The Tennessee House is working on a companion bill that is also expected to pass. Just one state senator, Beverly Marrero (D-Memphis) voted against the bill, but not because she thinks abstinence education is a bad idea. She just thinks that focusing on telling kids “don’t do it” won’t reach the kids who are most “at risk.”

According to Nashville Public Radio,

The bill, SB 3310 Johnson/HB 3621 Gotto, replaces three paragraphs in the current state law with nine pages of new definitions and rules. The new proposal even defines the word “puberty.”

The bill was rewritten in the Senate to broaden some definitions of sexual activity. The new amendment reads much like the old bill, except it deletes the words “penis” and “vagina” from the definition of “sexual intercourse.”

The Senate also added a further amendment defining “risk avoidance.”
specifically designating the “risk avoidance” means “an approach that encourages the prevention of participation in risk behaviors as opposed to merely reducing the consequences of those risk behaviors.”

The reference is apparently aimed at the post-activity procedure called “morning-after pills.”

Basically, the bill defines any pre-coital activity among unmarried people as “gateway sexual activity.” That means holding hands and kissing would be verboten for high school and middle school kids. The bill also allows parents to sue teachers who don’t follow the curriculum rules exactly or if they “demonstrate” any gateway sexual activities. In effect, while the legislature claims teachers can talk about contraception, they can’t spell out for kids what it is or how to use it.

And yet, in Tennessee:

According to a 2009 Youth Risk Behavior Study, 61 percent of Memphis City high school students and 27 percent of middle school students have had sex. That’s higher than the national average.

Planned Parenthood said these numbers are why a new sex education bill promoting abstinence is not realistic.

Sigh….

Limbaugh’s Latest Lame Excuse: Liberals Made Him Do It!

Posted: March 5, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: 2012 presidential campaign, 2012 primaries, Republican politics, U.S. Politics, War on Women | Tags: , , , , , , | 42 Comments

So much has been happening with the Rush Limbaugh story today, that I thought I’d post an update.

Rush Limbaugh’s advertisers are dropping like flies. This morning the eighth and ninth sponsors–AOL and Tax Resolution Services Co.–withdrew their ads form his show. This afternoon, two more sponsors–Bonobos and Sears–pulled their ads. It’s practically a stampede! At least one radio station, KPUA in Hawaii, has also cancelled the program.

Even John McCain–the closest thing the Republican Party has to an elder statesman–has now called Limbaugh’s behavior “totally unacceptable.”

Speaking on CNN’s “Starting Point with Soledad O’Brien,” the Arizona lawmaker and 2008 GOP presidential nominee said Limbaugh was an “entertainer,” but that the remarks were “totally unacceptable, totally and completely unacceptable, and there’s no place for it.”

Fluke herself said today on The View that Rush’s faux apology “doesn’t change anything,” noting that Limbaugh hasn’t called to apologize to her personally and she really hopes he doesn’t!

Media Matters has catalogued some of Limbaugh’s greatest hits from his “decades of sexism and misogyny.”

But Rush still doesn’t get it. On his Monday show, Limbaugh once again pretended to apologize for his disgusting behavior, while claiming liberals made him do it. Eric Wemple summarizes Limbaugh’s latest lame effort:

“Give me 30 minutes — I want to explain why I apologized,” said Limbaugh just after noon.

The reason he apologized, he says, is that he descended to such a low, such a scummy, gutter-level depth . . . that he started to resemble liberals: ”I don’t expect morality, intellectual honesty from the left — they’ve demonstrated their willingness to say or do anything. This is the mistake I made: In fighting them . . . I became like them. Against my own instincts, against my own knowledge.”

Limbaugh further mentioned that he felt “very badly” because he’d “used those two words [slut and prostitute] to describe Sandra Fluke and I feel very badly about that. . . . I sincerely apologize to Ms. Fluke for using those two words to describe her. The apology to her over the weekend was sincere. It was simply for using inappropriate words. . . . I ended up descending to their level. It’s important never to be like them.”

I can’t quite make sense of this, but it appears that Limbaugh is only sorry for the two words he used–slut and prostitute–but not for saying Fluke should post sex videos on the internet for him to watch or claiming that she “has so much sex” that she can’t afford all the pills she needs, or for claiming that she has boyfriends lined up around the block to have sex with her.

The show’s parent company Premiere Radio Networks also tried to explain away Limbaugh’s days of repulsive attacks on Sandra Fluke and the 99% of women who have used contraception:

Premiere Radio said in a statement Monday that it respects Limbaugh’s right to express his opinions, and said that “in an attempt at absurdist humor to illustrate his political point, Mr. Limbaugh used words that unfortunately distracted from the message he was trying to convey.”

The company said Limbaugh did the right thing by “expressing regret for his choice of words and offering his sincere and heartfelt apology to Ms. Fluke.”

I guess Premiere Networks and Clear Channel did not realize Limbaugh would spew out more personal attacks at Sandra Fluke today. It seems he is simply unable to control himself. From Think Progress:

LIMBAUGH: Her testimony was not that of an expert, it was just another expert person in this case, Sandra’s case. 30-year old activist after years of a career championing birth control issues. In fact, she told stories less about birth control as a social tool, which is of course the left’s true agenda, and more about birth control as a medication for treating other conditions, such as pregnancy. To the left, pregnancy is a disease. […]

Sandra Fluke gave vague examples based on unnamed friends, who she says couldn’t afford birth control to treat medical conditions they had, since Georgetown University wouldn’t pay for them. … Or so she says. We still don’t know who any of these friends of hers are, these other women, and we don’t know what happened to them. Her testimony was hearsay, and it was unprovable. […]

But the point here is that this was an issue that represents a tiny, tiny slice of what the Democrats really want here. They use Sandra Fluke to create a controversy. Sandra Fluke used them to advance her agenda, which is to force a religious institution to abandon their principles in order to meet hers.

So Fluke isn’t a “slut” anymore–she’s not only a dupe of the Democratic Party but also she’s duping the party into getting what she wants! WTF?! This incoherent moron is the spiritual voice of the Republican Party?

It appears that the suits in charge of Premiere Radio Networks and most likely Limbaugh’s lawyers are trying to get him to apologize, but he just can’t bring himself to do it. This mess has to be hurting the Republican Party, particularly on the eve of Super Tuesday, but it appears that most Republican leaders are still too afraid of this piggish, repulsive man to take any real action. You’d think at least Mitt and/or Ann Romney would speak up, since Bain Capital owns Clear Channel Communications.

I’ll update with any new developments in the comments to this post.

Rick Santorum and Women Voters

Posted: March 4, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: 2012 presidential campaign, 2012 primaries, U.S. Politics, War on Women, Women's Rights | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , | 21 Comments

On February 28, the day after the Michigan primary, there were a number of news stories about Rick Santorum’s problem with women. In fact, Santorum lost the Michigan primary by 3 points and he lost women voters to Romney by 5 points. If he had done better with women, Santorum would have been the winner. Patricia Murphy at The Daily Beast wrote:

Female voters in Michigan spoke out Tuesday night, but they weren’t singing Rick Santorum’s tune. The former Pennsylvania senator lost the Michigan primary to Mitt Romney by 3 points due in large part to his weakness among Michigan women. Although Santorum lost among Michigan men by just 1 point, he lost the women’s vote by a full 6-point margin, leaving him well behind Romney and unable to close the gap with male voters in any way.

Not only did he lose among women voters, Santorum lost in every female demographic group.

Santorum lost every category of women polled Tuesday night, including working women, single women, and married women. He lost working women by 4 points, single women by 7 points, and married women by 3 points.

Of course it shouldn’t be surprising to anyone that women are wary of Santorum. He has repeatedly talked about his opposition to abortion and birth control and his belief that feminists have fooled women into going to college and building careers instead of staying home and home-schooling the children who results from their many pregnancies.

Either Santorum spontaneously remembered that women can vote or his advisers reminded him before he gave his post-Michigan concession speech, because Santorum really laid it on thick about how much he respects women and how many “strong” women he has known and loved.

“I grew up with a very strong mom, someone who was a professional person who taught me a lot of things about [sic] how to balancing work and family, and doing it well, and doing it with a big heart and commitment,” he said. He also praised her for getting a college education in the 1930s and eventually a graduate degree in nursing.

“She worked all of my childhood years. She balanced time, as my dad did, working different schedules, and she was a very unusual person at that time,” Santorum said. “She was a professional who actually made more money than her husband.”

Clearly this was a deliberate change in strategy. Santorum’s advisers even spoke to the Washington Post about their plans to shift gears.

Rick Santorum does not plan to abandon the fiery Christian rhetoric or the shoestring campaign that got him to where he is today. But as a slate of high-stakes Republican presidential primaries approaches, he is being forced to shift his strategy to beat back perceptions that he is obsessed with controversial social issues and harbors outdated ideas about women.

The shift will test Santorum’s skills as a candidate as well as his bare-bones campaign operation, which is struggling to match his status as a top-tier candidate. The operation’s priority this week is to hold on to the candidate’s lead in polls in Ohio, which will vote on Tuesday.

Although Santorum sought to spin the Michigan results as a tie, it is clear that the contest revealed a significant challenge for him. He has been outspoken about contraception, abortion and his wife’s decision to leave her career as a lawyer to home-school their seven children….in at least three speeches in recent days, he has made appeals to women, recalling not only his wife’s career, but also that of his 93-year-old mother. On Wednesday, in Tennessee, he described his daughter Elizabeth as “one of the great women” in his life.

Santorum staffers also emphasized that there are women in senior positions in the campaign.

But as Rebecca Lawless, director of the Women and Politics Institute at American University told the Chicago Tribune, he “threw us a symbolic bone by saying, ‘Hey, I think my mom was great.'”

“It is one thing if it’s one statement, it’s another thing if it’s a broad range of statements that tap into the same problem and that’s where Rick Santorum finds himself,” Lawless says.

Not only is Santorum alienating women writ-large, she adds, but conservative women as well.

“In a lot of ways, the discussion about women’s roles and traditional family arrangements and the use of contraception have taken us back many, many decades,” Lawless says.

Despite his campaign’s recognition of the problem, it may not be possible to right the ship, she adds.

I honestly didn’t think Santorum could carry this off, because he just can’t seem to stop himself from lecturing us all about his 13th century ideas about women’s roles. And it looks like I was right. Santorum appeared on two of the Sunday morning shows and failed to steer the discussion away from social issues or reach out to women in any way.

On Fox News Sunday, Chris Wallace asked Santorum about the defeat of the Blunt amendment, and the former senator actually used the words “grievous moral wrong” in reference to contraception.

Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum says an amendment put forward by Senate Republicans that would have allowed any business to exclude contraceptives from health care plans was not really about birth control.

“The Blunt amendment was broader than that,” Santorum told Fox News host Chris Wallace on Sunday. “It was a conscience clause exception that existed prior to when President Obama decided that he could impose his values on people of faith, when people of faith believe that this is a grievous moral wrong.”

Wallace asked Santorum if he truly believed that 99% of American women have “done something wrong.”

“I’m reflecting the views of the Church that I believe in,” the former Pennsylvania senator replied. “We used to be tolerant of those beliefs. I guess now when you have beliefs that are consistent with the church, you are somehow out of touch with the mainstream. And that to me is a pretty sad situation when you can’t have personally-held beliefs.”

Although Santorum recently has been claiming that he doesn’t plan to impose his 19th century views on the rest of us, it’s important to keep in mind that he said in an October 2011 interview with a religious blog, Caffeinated Thoughts, that he would “repeal all federal funding for contraception.” In addition, he has repeatedly said that he does not believe in separation of church and state.

On Chris Matthews’ show Santorum apparently sidestepped a question about Rush Limbaugh and repeated much of what he had told Chris Wallace at Fox.

Right now, Santorum and Romney are “neck and neck” in Ohio. How will Ohio women vote after a couple more days of being preached at by true believer Rick Santorum? My guess is women’s votes will decide Ohio just as they did Michigan.

Open Thread: Looking at Employer-Based Health Insurance as Part of a Salary Package

Posted: February 19, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: just because, open thread | Tags: , , , , , , , | 41 Comments

Since it’s a slow news day, I thought I’d throw out a question.

The argument about Obama’s birth control mandate for employers is based to some extent on who will be paying for an employee’s health insurance. As I understand it, health insurance is part of a compensation package offered by the employer in order to attract employees. The package might also include retirement benefits, life insurance, paid vacation, paid sick days, and paid holidays.

Obviously, I’m not an economist, but it seems to me that if health insurance is part of the employee’s salary, then the employee should have some control over it. My boss can’t tell me that I have to buy certain kinds of food with my salary or that I have to live in a certain place. It’s my money, because I earned it by working.

I’ve never had an employer try to tell me where I could go on my vacation time, even though the employer was paying me for the time. No, that vacation pay is part of my salary package. So is health insurance. I’m sure employers calculate salaries based on the total cost of the employee, including benefits. So the benefits should belong to the employee.

According to salary.com, benefits are part of an employee’s salary.

Compensation is more than just base pay. It is a total package that should address your overall well-being – financial, physical, emotional, even spiritual. As companies compete for talent in tight labor markets, many are rolling out better benefits to attract and retain the best workers. Companies often strive to make it easy for employees to balance their work and family lives by offering family-friendly benefits, cafeteria plans, and other flexible options.

Benefits can significantly increase the value of the compensation package. The costs to employers for providing benefits such as health insurance, retirement plans, training, vacation and personal days, and perks such as concierge services could be a significant percentage of each employee’s salary. Because benefits boost the value of compensation, always take benefits into consideration when evaluating a job offer or a promotion.

In addition,

Some benefits are required by law. There are also many government regulations that set the minimum standards employers are required to make available to employees.

For example, states can require employers to provide paid sick days and holidays and a minimum amount of paid vacation time. Most states mandate a 10-15 minute break for every 4 hours of work and at least a 30 minute lunch break. Thanks to unions, there are also laws that employees can’t be forced to work more than a certain number of hours per day and week without overtime pay. There are many constraints on employers.

So what is so bizarre about the government requiring that health care plans offer preventive health care that is appropriate for women as well as men? Even though the employer is arranging for the health insurance and I’m getting a better deal as part of a large group, the insurance is still something I’m earning through my work. The employer doesn’t need to know what choices I’m making about my health care and shouldn’t pry into my choices unless they somehow affect my ability to do my work.

The Obama administration is not requiring that any individual use birth control or even that they have to get prenatal testing. But why shouldn’t they be able to specify that these services be available for people to use if they wish? If you look at the question in this way, the Catholic bishops really don’t have a leg to stand on.

Wouldn’t this be a better way for the administration to frame the argument? Am I nuts? What do you think? Feel free to use this as an open thread as well.

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