An Abortion in Texas

post from They gave us a republic... - Front Page on 02 July 2012 06:00:00 PM. © They gave us a republic... - Front Page

By @KYYellowDog

Because the only people who know the truth about abortion are the women who have had one.

Anonymous Texas Woman at Firedoglake:

This is my story of getting an abortion in Texas, of my rights being exercised. Even with the laws in place to convince me otherwise, I still made the right decision no matter how much it hurt. I believe I have the right to go through this painful experience without paternalistic intervention "for my own good" as I am solely responsible for myself and my body.
When I became unintentionally pregnant (40% of pregnancies in the US are unintentional), I wanted to keep the pregnancy but I am unemployed. The cost of raising a child to adulthood is over $220,000. I have two wonderful children already that would suffer if I brought another child into their lives. I would damn myself, and my offspring, to poverty and worse.
SNIP
I knew what I wanted. I took two weeks to attempt to figure out how to make that happen. I couldn't come up with a way that wasn't detrimental to my current family, the potential child and myself, in that order, and there are physical and legal deadlines to making this decision to keep a child or have an abortion. So, I sat in the car with the father, as we got snacks after getting the pregnancy confirmed; and told him my decision. I wasn't going to go through with the pregnancy. I value life and my focus was on the lives that would be impacted by addition of another child.
SNIP
I love life. I love all life. Furry lives, like my pets, and small beings, like my children. I love people, animals, rocks, earth. I am a Christian and I celebrate and thank God every day for the gift a of a body. I want to give that gift someday. I just can't do it if I can't take care of that being. The message I want to leave you with is that you know someone who has had an abortion. You do and they deserve your love, support and respect because it was the single hardest decision they ever made.

Read the whole thing.

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ortion-in-texas

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The Romney Boathouse Is a Lot Nicer Than That
Dump You Live In

post from Firedoglake on 02 July 2012 05:45:02 PM. © Firedoglake

La Famiglia Romney has migrated to their Northern Compound in New Hampshire (because who wants to be in La Jolla in July? Ick) for summertime hijinks and they are having awesome compulsory family fun because Mitt and Ann are all patriarchal/matriarchal[...]

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The Romney Boathouse Is A Lot Nicer Than That
Dump You Live In

post from Firedoglake on 02 July 2012 05:45:02 PM. © Firedoglake

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Failures of Spin

post from The American Prospect on 02 July 2012 05:31:56 PM. © The American Prospect

Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell is ordinarily a spinner of unusual skill. He's relentlessly focused on his message and doesn't let any interviewer frame a question in a way he (McConnell) doesn't like. Which is why it was a little odd to see Fox News' Chris Wallace catch him without a handy talking point when it came to covering the uninsured. This excerpt is a little long, but you have to see the whole thing:

WALLACE: All right, let's move on. If voters elect a Republican president and a Republican Senate, your top priority will be, you say, to repeal and replace "Obama-care." And I want to drill down into that with you. One of the keys to "Obama-care" is that it will extend insurance access to 30 million people who are now uninsured. In your replacement, how would you provide universal coverage?
MCCONNELL: Well, first, let me say the single the best thing we could do for the American health care system is to get rid of "Obama- care," get rid of that half a trillion dollars in Medicare cuts, get rid of the half a trillion dollars in taxes. In other words, the single biggest step we could take in the direction of improving American health care is to get rid of this monstrosity.
WALLACE: But if I may, sir, you've talked about repeal and replace. How would you provide universal coverage?
MCCONNELL: I will get to it in a minute. The first step we need to take is to get rid of what is there, this job-killing proposal that has all of these cuts to existing health care providers. Secondly, we need to go step by step to replace it with more modest reforms. There will not be a 2,700-page Republican alternative. We will not take a meat axe to the American health care system. We will pull out a scalpel and go step by step and make the kinds of more modest changes that would deal with the principal issue which is cost. Things like interstate sales of health insurance. Right now you don't have competition around the country in the selling of health insurance. That is a mistake. Things like lawsuit reform. Billions and billions of dollars are lost every year by hospitals and doctors in defensive medicine. Those kinds of steps...
WALLACE: But respectfully sir, because we are going to run out of time and I just want to ask, what specifically are you going to do to provide universal coverage to the 30 million people who are uninsured?
MCCONNELL: That is not the issue. The question is, how can you go step by step to improve the American health care system? It is already the finest health care system in the world.
(CROSSTALK)
WALLACE: But you don't think the 30 million...
MCCONNELL: What our friends on the other...
(CROSSTALK)
WALLACE: You don't think the 30 million people that were uninsured is an issue?
MCCONNELL: Let me tell you what we are not going to do. We are not going to turn the American health care system into a Western European system. That is exactly what is at the heart of "Obama- care." They want to have the federal government take over all of American health care.

And there you have it. Obviously, McConnell can't come out and speak the truth, which is that while there are a few changes Republicans would like to see on health care, not only isn't it an issue they care very much about, they really don't give a crap about people who don't have insurance. Never have, and probably never will. First of all, those just aren't their people, and second of all, actually helping the uninsured requires things they don't like, such as expanding Medicaid.

But that doesn't mean there's nothing they can say. McConnell ought to know that when asked questions like this, Republicans are supposed to say, "The way you expand coverage to everyone is to increase competition and unleash the free market, not through big government blah blah blah." That way it looks like you've actually responded to the question, even though you haven't actually said anything. The great thing about conservative talking points is that they can be used almost anywhere, no matter how empty they are. McConnell is seriously off his game.

I stand by my prediction that Republicans are going to stop talking about health care within a few days. They just don't feel comfortable with the topic.

Read The Full Article:
http://prospect.org/article/failures-spin

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Republican governors will let people die to make
political point

post from Daily Kos on 02 July 2012 05:12:35 PM. © Daily Kos

Proving that making a political point is more important to Republicans than anything else, including saving potentially millions of lives, an increasing number of Republican governors are announcing that they'll refuse the Medicaid expansion money from the federal government. Think Progress has been tracking the state's decisions and has found, so far, 10 Republican governors will refuse it, and another 19 are unsure.

That Supreme Court ruled that states could refuse the Medicaid expansion because the law went too far in allowing the government to take all existing Medicaid funding away from the states who refused to participate. Predictably, governors like Florida's Rick Scott, Louisiana's Bobby Jindhal, South Carolina's Nikki Haley and Wisconsin's Scott Walker are all ready to keep millions of people uninsured. They're willing to let their constituents die?hundreds of thousands in some states, millions in total?for their perverted notion of states' rights.
Chart showing how many people will be left out of medicaid expansion in 10 states who have said they'll refuse it

Chart showing how many people will be left out of medicaid expansion in 10 states who have said they'll refuse it

This is, by the way, basically free money they're refusing. The ACA provides 100 percent funding for the expansion in the first three years, 90 percent for the next five. Not taking this money is profoundly immoral, and probably profoundly stupid, too, when all those voters find out the scope of what they're being shut out of. That includes some powerful political forces, most notably hospitals who will have to keep taking on these patients regardless, and have been anxious to start getting their charity care dollars recouped.

And while it's still a little early to know exactly what the public opinion fall-out of the ruling will be, the early indications are that the majority of people want this political fight over the ACA to be over and done with already. Additionally, new CNN polling [pdf] shows that Republicans are fairly narrowly divided (for Republicans, anyway) on this part of the Supreme Court decision, with 48 percent saying it's a good idea to allow states to opt out, but 43 percent opposing that decision. Maybe rank and file Republicans aren't quite as bloodthirsty as the governors they elect. Well, and the people they let into Republican debates.

"Let 'em die" might not be the most effect campaign slogan for Republicans when voters start figuring out what their states will be missing out on.

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Cliff-Dive: Lawmakers Consider Letting All Fiscal
Policies Expire, Then Coming Back in 2013 to Fix

post from Firedoglake on 02 July 2012 05:10:38 PM. © Firedoglake

When last we left the fiscal slope situation, we heard that lawmakers were considering extending all the fiscal issues into March, in a kind of "fiscal punt." Now, Reuters claims that lawmakers are looking at doing precisely the opposite, a kind of[...]

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America The Stupid, Part 3

post from Manifesto Joe's Texas Blues on 02 July 2012 05:01:06 PM. © Manifesto Joe's Texas Blues

By Manifesto Joe

I will preface by saying that I don't think Americans are inherently more stupid than any other nationality. Stupidity is something that seems to know no boundaries of nation or group. Daily reading of the international pages of newspapers offers ample evidence of that.

But American stupidity seems less forgivable than that found in other places, because of affluence. And, ironically, it appears that much domestic ignorance is rooted in that very affluence.

Oh, there's certainly a sizable underclass in America. Somebody born to a crack whore for a mother, and who doesn't know who his or her father is, probably doesn't stand much of a chance, decent public schools or not. Income inequality is probably a big factor. And, I can't say that I grew up affluent, at least not by American standards.

But, the middle-class Americans I have known grew up largely taking plenty for granted that can't be taken so elsewhere. Among those things seem to be even the most modest intellectual achievements. Middle-class Americans often grow up complacent, with computer games and Smartphones, generally believing that there will always be "brains" out there who will manage to devise such things. Never mind where they came from. Affluence seems to furnish a path to intellectual laziness.

As Exhibit C, I will offer the findings of Newsweek, which gave 1,000 Americans the U.S. citizenship test. Candidates for citizenship are given a random list of 10 questions from among 100 included in the full test, and they have to get six of them right to pass.

Some 38% of Americans who took that test failed, including 29% who couldn't name the current vice president, and 73% who couldn't correctly say why we fought the Cold War.

I took the test with a sample of 20 questions, and got 18 of them right. I suppose that's very good, but as a career journalist with over three decades of experience, I should have gotten them all. What did I miss? I guessed that there were 26 constitutional amendments, rather than 27, and I named power to regulate interstate commerce as one of the original powers that the Constitution gives the federal government (that didn't come until later).

Here's a link to an article on the subject, and you can also take a version of the test here.

The big problem here is that a lot of those among the 38% who fail are voters. Are these people you want making civic decisions? I'll leave you to ponder that question.

Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.

Read The Full Article:
http://manifestojoestexasblues.blogspot.com/2012/07/america-stupid-part-3.html

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Sorry, Charlie

post from Talking Points Memo on 02 July 2012 05:00:42 PM. © Talking Points Memo

Not quite yet. But Charlie Rangel's primary victory last Tuesday is now looking very tenuous. [...]

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hp

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Spoiler Alert: Non-Duopoly Greens and
Libertarians on Obamacare and More

Joyce L. Arnold, Liberally Independent, Queer Talk, equality activist, writer.

The Green Party presidential candidate is Jill Stein. The Libertarian presidential candidate is Gary Johnson. In the world of the Duopoly, these candidates play, at best / worst, a ?spoiler? role.

From the The Green Party: ?Another U.S. is possible. Another party is necessary.?

From the The Libertarian Party: ?Minimum government, maximum freedom.?

Both, obviously, exist and function within our electoral system, both challenging the Duopoly from within. The SCOTUS decision regarding the Affordable Care Act, or more fundamentally, the whole ACA / Obamacare / Romneycare / Health care as taxable, mandated product fiasco, brought negative responses from Stein (who is a physician, and long time advocate for ?single payer.?) and Johnson.

From Jill Stein.org:

Romneycare and Obamacare are class warfare and failures, says Stein; calls for ?real solution? of Medicare for All. …
Stein noted that ?Obamacare is based on Romneycare, and as with so much else, Obama implemented a Republican scheme to impose mandates that are a regressive tax on working people.

From Libertarian.org:

A President Mitt Romney would not undo ObamaCare. He?ll make it permanent. …
A first-term President Mitt Romney would be far more dangerous to small business, the private sector, and taxpayers than a lame-duck President Obama ? no matter what the Supreme Court decided.

On the Two Party System in general, both Green and Libertarian parties are clear.

The Green Party:

Why does the Green Party run presidential candidates, when it?s so unlikely they will win on Election Day?
The most important reason is that Americans deserve a real choice on Election Day. Voters deserve the right to vote for whichever candidates best represent their interests, ideals, and values ? without being told that their choice is restricted to two candidates. The Democratic and Republican parties together represent a narrow range of ideas and policies. Both established parties and their candidates accept millions of dollars in contributions from powerful corporate lobbies. The Green Party and Green candidates accept no corporate money.

The Libertarian Party:

The two-party system is broken and both parties now support big government policies that are driving us to bankruptcy and eroding our Personal freedoms.

Johnson will be on all fifty states and DC ballots. Stein is currently on ballots in: Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, District of Columbia, Florida, Hawai’i, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Mississippi, New Mexico, New York, Ohio, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, West Virginia and Delaware. There are ongoing petition efforts in: Alaska, Alabama, Connecticut, Iowa, Indiana, Kentucky, Missouri, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Jersey, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia. Both Libertarian and Green presidential candidates (a first for the Greens) will receive matching federal funds

Of course, the chances of media giving anything but passing and sporadic attention to either party, or any of the other ?third? or ?fringe? parties, is small. And when a ?third? party candidate does get much attention, it?s usually in the ?spoiler? role, a framing which assumes that anything that actually presents a challenge to a legacy party candidate is a bad thing. Silly voters, thinking they need, or will be allowed, more than the two Established choices.

In an interview with Matthew Rothschild, Editor of Progressive Magazine, Stein addresses some of the usual questions asked of most everyone except Republican and Democratic candidates. Obviously she?s speaking from the Green perspective, but the underlying arguments can apply for Libertarian and other non-legacy parties challenging the Duopoly. (Transcript via FDL).

?Rothschild: What is the effective response? Would it be better to raise these issues within the Democratic party? Nader had name recognition, and only got 3%. What is the use?
Stein: That is the question isn?t it?
If an effort isn?t made, it?s clear what direction we are going in. The solutions are only getting further away. An effort has already been made to do this within the Democratic party; it?s not a question of if it should, but as a practical matter, it?s just not going to happen.
Many good people have tried a debate within the Democratic party; but the party has been so moribund that there is no prospect of debate on these issues, or salvage from within. …
We need to be there as the old paradigm is falling apart, and as it continues to fall apart. …
Rothschild: What about the spoiler question that comes up; that you are going to elect Romney … & (he) … will be worse than Obama.
Stein: That argument does not stand the test of time.
The politics of fear have brought us everything we were afraid of.
Obama has embraced or intensified all of our worst fears of George Bush. We have learned that silence is not an effective political strategy. …
The question is do we bring back democracy here? And if we absent ourselves right now, and by ?we? I mean those who are not corporate sponsored or Wall Street, if we disappear right now, we are going to get more of the same.
We have to at least engage the fight … . If we don?t … it?s all over? .
And when you talk about ?spoiling,? in the eyes of most people what?s being ?spoiled? is their healthcare, their education … .
They are not thinking about ?spoiling? some politician?s career ? .

For any hope of ending the choke hold of these Two Corporate Parties, challenges from within the existing political / governance systems ? like the Libertarian and Green parties ? and challenges from without ? like Occupy ? are essential. I?m quite happy with efforts to ?spoil? the Two Party Front for the Oligarchy?s reign.

Read The Full Article:
http://taylormarsh.com/blog/2012/07/spoiler-alert-non-duopoly-greens-and-libertar
ians-on-obamacare-and-more/

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That Republican Vision Thing... Back Again

Friday's editorial by the Washington Post ombudsman, Patrick Pexton, is inconvenient for the Romney campaign. They've been frantically trying to split hairs over a key part of the GOP economic agenda-- outsourcing and offshoring-- and Pexton told them, elegantly, to go stuff it; no retraction for you liars.

One of the sectors that Bain invested in during the go-go 1990s, and not in a small way, was newly emerging companies that specialized in helping U.S. technology manufacturers outsource domestically, and move offshore, jobs that were not central to these manufacturers? missions.

Microsoft is a good example. It wanted to focus on software development and not to be distracted by peripheral but necessary jobs such as assembling, packaging and testing its products, and setting up call centers to answer customer questions. At first, Microsoft outsourced these jobs to U.S. companies who put these back-office functions in rural, lower-wage areas of the United States. Later these outsourcing companies moved most of these jobs overseas.

The companies that Bain identified and invested in, while Romney was at the helm, and that were the subject of the disputed June 22 Post article, were these U.S. companies helping the Microsofts of the world to outsource and offshore. ...Bain knowingly and far-sightedly made strategic investments, with Romney at the helm, in these pioneering outsourcing firms in the late 1990s, which grew into some of the largest outsourcing and offshoring companies in the world. And Romney and Bain shared in their profits while he was chief executive and after he left.

This post isn't meant to be another tiresome list of Romney's lies or even of how incapable he is of telling the truth or even dealing with journalists. And it isn't really meant to be about Romney's Trade agenda or his economic policies, or his inability to cope with reality or even about Willard "Mitt" Romney per se at all. This is about the 2012 Republican Party and the party vision for a very much less equal America-- a dystopian America straight out of the GOP's bible, the adolescent novels of Ayn Rand.

Republicans took to the TV talking heads shows yesterday to do damage control on their big loss at the Supreme Court last week. While the many congressional candidates and incumbents are starting to jump overboard on healthcare reform, Boehner was whining on Face the Nation that Republican policy is to not legislate for covering people with pre-existing conditions, something even most Republican voters want as well as vast majorities of Democrats and independents. Miss McConnell played it safer by sticking to GOP-TV but even there, Chris Wallace was more than skeptical of GOP plans to get rid of all the provisions of the Affordable Care Act-- and without replacing them.

WALLACE: One of the keys to ObamaCare is that it will extend insurance access to 30 million people who are now uninsured. In your replacement, how would you provide universal coverage?

MCCONNELL: Well first let me say the first single thing we can do for the American system is get rid of ObamaCare. ? The single biggest direction we can take in terms of improving health care is to get rid of this monstrosity. [...]

WALLACE: But you?re talking about repealing and replace, how would you provide universal coverage?

MCCONNELL: I?ll get to it in a minute. [...]

WALLACE: I just want to ask, what specifically are you going to do to provide universal coverage to the 30 million people who are uninsured?

MCCONNELL: That is not the issue. The question is, how can you go step by step to improve the American health care system. ? We?re not going to turn the American health care system into a Western European system.

Not the issue? Really? Is that why lock-step right-wing zombies like Montana Congressman/Senate candidate Denny Rehberg and West Virginia reactionary David McKinely are campaigning against the Ryan budget based on it's goal of eliminating Medicare? Digby worries the GOP congressional leadership is dazed and confused that John Roberts' interpretation of corporate concerns was different enough from the GOP's that he would abandon them in their time of direst need. "They can't think straight," she wrote and said of Paul Ryan's appearance on ABC's This Week that he was "just talking straight-up gibberish." Digby is confident that eventually they'll all get their talking point straight. But it's what's behind their talking points that Obama has to keep focusing the American people-- at least as much as he can without damaging the tendency among conservative, corporate-friendly Democrats to follow many of the same lines. In his book The Fifteen Biggest Lies About The Economy, author Joshua Holland challenges the underlying assumptions of the GOP vision-- Romney's, Ryans, Miss McConnell's... the whole kit and kaboodle.

One thing practically everyone understands is that what have become known as ?entitlements?--Social Security, Medicare, and other programs that provide a cushion of sorts for working families-- are quite popular.

This presents a challenge for conservatives: you just don?t get very far in U.S. politics on the promise of cutting grandma?s health benefits. It?s worth restating that although people respond positively to the idea of limited government in the abstract, when it comes to specifics, people love big government and most, if not all, of what it does.

They want a government that will educate their children, put out forest fires, pay for their million-dollar cancer treatments, make sure that big chemical companies aren?t poisoning their water, and keep them from having to eat cat food after busting their asses for fifty years in the U.S. workforce. They expect cheap student loans and meat inspections and smooth highways, and even the lowest of ?low-information? voters know they?re not going to get that stuff from the private sector.

So the Corporate Right has had to frame the debate on different terms. They?ve come up with a Big Lie to do it, claiming that the United States is headed toward a gazillion-dollar deficit just around the corner, and the only way to stave off this looming budgepocalypse is to swallow the bitter medicine of ?entitlement reform.?

It?s not that they oppose popular programs like the State Children?s Health Insurance Program-- perish the thought; they?re compassionate!-- it?s just, they claim, that they have the kind of clear vision that?s needed to make the hard choices necessary to ?save? the Republic over the long haul.

Pandering to West Virginia voters, Republican McKinley said he doesn't want to do this on the backs on seniors. But that's exactly what his party-- from Romney, Cantor and Ryan right down to the dregs of the Michele Bachmanns, Joe Pittses, Steve Kings and Patrick McHenrys-- wants to do. Because when it comes to choosing between ordinary working Americans-- of any age-- and the kinds of billionaires who are doling out tens of millions of dollars to politicians like Boehner, Cantor and Romney... well there's never been much of a contest, has there?