Tag: abortion

Health Care Reform: Lip stick on a pig

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Instead of real health care reform (Medicare for all, everyone in and everyone pays) the Democratic health care bills in the House and the Senate are just expanded Medicaid with a public option that isn’t an option to the public at all.  Thanks to Stupak, they’ll pay for prayer therapy and Viagra while restricting payments for abortions.  Apparently Stupak has no problem with killing 45,000 born babies and their parents each year.

Like the bank bailouts and Medicare Part D, Democratic health care reform is just another corporate rip off of the middle class; and for this privilege, they cut Medicare benefits and raised Medicare’s monthly premiums.  So much for no increases to people who make fewer than 250K a year.  

With Democrats like Stupak in Washington, it really doesn’t matter which party wins election because Republicans and religious zealots like Stupak win either way.  Instead of lipstick on a pig, a local official in the local newspaper on a totally different subject said in this way: “it’s like putting whip cream on a turd”.  

They will pass a corporate health care bill, declare victory, and expect applause.   Maybe if we clap hard enough, we can make them all disappear.  

Deal Breaker

Jon Walker and David Dayen, both of Firedog Lake are reporting tonight that the Stupak Amendment which virtually bars BOTH Private Companies AND the Public Option from providing coverage for Reproductive Health Care for Women will receive a Floor Vote tomorrow in the House.

As Jon explains-

Stupak’s amendment, by not allowing a private insurance company to sell a policy to anyone if they receive any amount of affordability tax credits, would make it impossible for a private insurance plan that covers abortion to survive on the individual and small group market. Stupak has threatened to bring down the entire bill if he does not get his amendment. Rep. Stupak called all previous “compromises” that had been offered “unacceptable.”

As David reports-

The Democratic leadership is making a bet that, if it doesn’t pass, Stupak and his cadres will sign on to the bill (I highly doubt it; most of them are no votes on health care entirely); and if it does pass, pro-choice Democrats won’t sink the bill entirely (also, I highly doubt it). I’m a bit surprised that it’s come to this. Also, Stupak appeared to have lied in the Rules Committee about how the deal “fell apart,” since he got what he wanted.

This is an enormous bet, and not a well-designed one either, in my view. The Democratic Party will tomorrow give a minority of their caucus an opportunity to amend a large health care bill that would effectively ban abortion services coverage in the individual and small group insurance market, essentially telling private insurance companies what they cannot cover.

Quoting the Washington Post, David continues-

The amendment is expected to pass with the combined support of more than 40 anti-abortion Democrats and virtually every House Republican. That likelihood meant that leaders of the much larger group of Democrats who support abortion rights were not happy to learn of the deal.

“There will be no abortion, not just with public funds, but with private funds under the public option, and that’s not acceptable,” said Rep. Diana DeGette (D-Colo.).

House leaders met with that bloc of Democrats late Friday to try to quell their frustration., but the agreement makes clear that they believe abortion-rights Democrats will find it difficult to vote against the health-care bill even with such a restriction attached to it.

As far as I’m concerned this is a flat out deal breaker.

Health Care Reform with the Stupak Amendment is not worth passing and I intend to call the House Leadership and my Congressperson tomorrow to express that opinion.

I urge you to do the same.

The Personal Face of Abortion

The current squabbling over whether or not abortion would be government funded in some kind of back door fashion accentuates how conflicted we are as a nation regarding the procedure.  When many private plans cover the procedure, I find most unfair to expect somehow that government coverage would not include the same provision in the spirit of strict parity.   If some are holding government to some kind of moral higher standard than the sainted private sector, then I guess I can’t understand why anti-choice legislators are attempting to impose their will upon a supposedly evil, fallen entity whose name is government in ways that they are unwilling to extend to business, whose radiant goodness is known to all.  This discrepancy continues to show how much of a shill certain politicians have become for the rich, the powerful, and the well connected at the expense of sense and even their own stated convictions.  

Fear Of Reform, What The Right Is Selling

No one following the health care debate can fail to know the Conservative movement in this nation is doing everything they can to stoke the level of fear of their base in an effort to spread the disease of fear to the nation as a whole and the Members of Congress in particular. Their overall goal is to keep any major changes in how health coverage is sold (which is what we are really talking about in this round of reform) from happening.

Originally posted at Squarestate.net

Damned – A personal abortion essay

That’s how I felt then, trapped and damned.

Photobucket  He didn’t want the baby.

He wasn’t even sure about me after a year.

I understood the fear he came from, the betrayal he felt when he and Jill fell apart. I loved him so, and he would leave me if I had it. Maybe. He said he wasn’t sure, but he was positive he wasn’t ready to be tied to a child with me. We had little money. We weren’t even living together. He thought himself too unstable, I thought him the most sane being, the most enlightened being on the planet. I suppose in retrospect, with the adults I grew up with, he was by comparison. I was 22, he was 37. He had a thousand reasons, and let me know every one of them.

I always wanted a dozen kids. But I knew this man was my soul-mate. Knew upon knowing it was he that I would spend my life with, believed with all the certitude and bravado of youth. I couldn’t lose him. Couldn’t. He was my world, and introduced me to so much more of the world than my sheltered past had. He was my guide, my mentor, and I suppose a bit of the father figure that I lacked.

He claimed that I loved him now, but would tire of him as we aged, that I would be too young to want an old man later. He said he had taken lousy care of the kid he already had.He said abortion was really the only option. He railed on it, endlessly.

Finally, after many tears, he conceded it was my body, and ultimately my choice, but not to count on him in it.

I needed time to think. I had other concerns going too….

The new face of anti-abortion activists tapped by Obama

From Raw Story:

President Barack Obama has tapped an anti-abortion activist to a senior Health and Human Services “faith-based” position just a week after the murder of prominent abortion doctor George Tiller.

Alexia Kelley is executive director of Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good (CACG), and will head the Center for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships at the Department of Health and Human Services.

According to The American Prospect, a liberal magazine, “Kelley is a leading proponent of ‘common ground’ abortion reduction — only CACG’s common ground is at odds with that of Obama. While the administration favors reducing the need for abortion by reducing unintended pregnancies, Kelley has made clear that she seeks instead to reduce access to abortion.”

But wait!  There’s more to the story.  Ms. Kelley is a progressive who supported Obama as well as Kathleen Sebelius as head of HHS, in opposition to her own Bishop.

Protect Your First Amendment Rights, Don’t Limit Them

The terrorist assassination of Dr. Tiller there have been calls on the Left for to abhorring the words of people like Bill O’Reilly and Fox News as well as those involved with Operation Rescue and other anti-reproductive freedom groups.  It is understandable when such a horrible act is committed to want to react in such a way as to prevent it from ever happening again. This has lead to calls for restricting the ability of those whose words may have encouraged and incited the anti-reproductive freedom terrorist, Mr. Roeder, to do so in the future. This is an understandable desire but one that should be strongly resisted.

Originally posted at Squarestate.net

The Terrorists Among Us

In a Wichita, Kansas church on Sunday, radical anti-abortion wingnut Scott Roeder allegedly gunned down a physician named George Tiller in cold blood. Because Dr. Tiller provided abortion services to women whose right to decide whether or not to have a child has been the ‘Law of the Land’ since 1973. Roeder (and his ilk) don’t like it.

We know these murdering terrorists all too well, as Tiller isn’t the first doctor they’ve attacked and/or killed. The goal of killing doctors who provide legal medical services is not to end abortion. Abortion is as old as the hills. Safe medical abortion is relatively new.

Humans of course have more choices than bears and deer and burrowing critters who consume certain plants to induce abortion. Humans decide to have sex (most of the time), then they decide to have or not have a baby. It is apparently the freedom to choose that the antis so vehemently disagree with, so they engage in acts of terrorism with the intent to scare doctors away from providing the safe medical procedure.

John McCain’s Sex (and Woman) Problem-Part II

First, let’s all take a page from the Maverick…sometimes you just have to laugh (in this case, to help from crying):

McCain’s Sex (and Woman) Problem

How do you square this:

I told her with a little luck she could be the only woman ever to serve as both as First Lady and Miss Buffalo Chip.

With this:

I will be a pro-life President and this presidency will have pro-life policies.

But if I did, well really, what’s it to you? (reprise)

Here I go. Hot button item. Why am I repeating myself?  

Why open up wounds and unanswered questions and misunderstandings and anger, to throw it all into the arena again for debate? Women’s rights are human rights everywhere.

There is one thing that should be perfectly clear. If you understand that women’s bodies are their own, do not vote for John McCain.

It goes like this

the fourth the fifth,

the minor fall and the major lift…

(Normally, I don’t like to retrace old ground. But the topic of human rights, women’s rights, pro-choice, pro-life, whatever your favorite tagline – is such a godd**m muddle for so many voters who don’t have the time, the backstory on the candidate, or the inclination to understand who it is they are voting for. So I’m throwing up an issue I’ve written about before, just a hair over two years ago to this day, revised it and dusted it off a bit, and added some newly relevant links. Will it add clarity? I don’t know. But thanks for reading.)

Compassion Is The Answer, But What Is The Question?

No one event triggered this devolution, but it undeniably was pushed along many times by the moral relativism of the last 50 years, when most of society’s widely accepted norms were undermined by the quicksand of nonjudgmentalism; when the concepts of right and wrong, good and bad, were abolished in favor of differences that were to be respected if not celebrated, and codified when necessary to surmount widespread public opposition.

Paradoxically, people and institutions whose beliefs do not permit them to tolerate the most abhorrent differences were judged to be evil. Through rigid enforcement of increasingly fascist speech and thought codes, relativists turned America into a nation of lip-biters who with their silence condoned as normal behaviors and beliefs that are irrefutably unnatural and inherently immoral.

snip

No, the [recent California Supreme Court] ruling merely answered homosexuals’ purely emotional plea for cultural acceptance by giving civil unions their proper label – “marriage” – the will of Californians, as democratically expressed twice, and the dark societal consequences be damned.

–Editorial in the May 17, 2008 Waterbury Republican.

link: http://www.rep-am.com/articles…

Anyone who regularly reads my blogs probably thought to log in and find the latest news from Myanmar, or of the earthquake in China.

But today I want to write about something that underpins almost every headline here and abroad: human suffering. The answer on how to understand human suffering has been written about and expounded upon by far more eloquent and profound people than me. Everyone from Martin Luther King, to Gandhi, to the Dalai Lama agrees that compassion is the ultimate answer.

But what is the question?

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