Month: July 2010

Deadbeat Daddy Party

by digby

My very favorite unctuous Republican phony, Mike Pence, was dispatched to explain why we must take from the Peter’s disabled niece to pay for Paul’s unemployment insurance, but we don’t have to “pay” for Rush Limbaugh and Paris Hilton’s tax cuts. It’s not an easy argument to make, but he tried valiantly:

“Republicans, me included, have supported numerous extensions of unemployment benefits and we’re anxious to do so again,” the Indiana Republican told interviewer Chris Wallace on “Fox News Sunday.” “The deficit this year is a trillion dollars for the second year in a row … The American people have had it with runaway federal spending, deficits and debt, and they want to see men and women in Washington, D.C. make the hard choices…” Fox’s Wallace said he understood the Republicans’ argument that the unemployment benefits be “paid for” — but why not also “pay for” a reauthorization of the tax cuts, which will cost $678 billion? “The reality is that as you study — when President Kennedy cut marginal tax rates, when Ronald Reagan cut marginal tax rates, when President Bush imposed those tax cuts, they actually generated economic growth, they expand the economy, they expand tax revenue,” Pence said. “The point is we’ve got to get this economy moving again and we can’t go back to the tax-and-spend policies of the Democrats or the tax-cut-and-spend policies of the prior administration.”

He’s lying about the effect of Bush’s tax cuts, but that’s just par for the course.

These people are always illustrating government economic policy by comparing it to the average household. So let’s think about this concept in those terms.

We’ll call the government the “Sam” family. And this family is in debt because Mr Sam decided to quit his high paying job as a Hedge Fund manager during the good years but they all spent like there was no tomorrow. Then the economy crashed and they lost a lot of their equity in their house and Mrs Sam got her hours cut back. They had to borrow from their dwindling 401K and Mrs Sam went back to school part time to learn some new skills so she could get a better job. But she needs another year or so before that can pay off.

Meanwhile, Mr Sam insists that everyone go on a diet, sell their possessions, their bodies, whatever it takes, but under no circumstances will he ever go back to work. In fact, he blames everyone in the family but himself for the mess they are in and wants them to pay for him to take a long vacation in Miami so he can stop listening to their whining. He insists that he’s doing his part by tipping the poolboys.

Mr Sam, of course, is a Republican.

And Mike Pence is a jerk.

.

Shocking Reflections

by digby

Reader JL sent in this taser tale from Denver. I think it’s the “probe his ass” part that reveals the essential sadism this weapon brings out in people:

“I can’t breathe . . .” Both say that Booker, 56, was asleep in a chair in a holding area of the jail when his name was called and he was ordered to a processing desk. Half-asleep about 3 a.m., Booker walked to the desk in his socks, forgetting to put on his shoes. The female deputy ordered Booker to sit in a chair in front of the desk. Booker responded that he wished to stand. When the deputy threatened to have him placed in a holding cell if he didn’t sit, Booker told her he would go to the holding cell, said Maten, who had been arrested that morning for resisting arrest in a confrontation with a parking-meter attendant. ” ‘Let me get my shoes,’ ” Maten quoted Booker as saying as he walked toward the chairs to get his shoes. The deputy yelled at him repeatedly to stop, got up and followed Booker. Booker turned and repeated that he was getting his shoes, Maten said. The deputy grabbed Booker by the arm and put a lock on him, Yedo said. Booker, who was 5 feet 5 and weighed 175 pounds, pushed her away. At that point, four other deputies wrestled Booker to the concrete floor. They slid down two steps to the floor in the sitting area. Yedo said the deputies each grabbed a limb while he struggled. ” ‘Get the Taser. Get the Taser,’ ” Yedo quoted one of the deputies as saying. Yedo said he was only about 3 feet away, and Maten said he was close enough that if he stood and took one step, he could reach out and touch one of the deputies. None of the deputies involved in the restraint has been identified. One female deputy was treated at a hospital for an injury she suffered in the confrontation, Gale said. A fifth deputy put Booker in a headlock just as the female deputy began shocking him with a Taser with encouragement from one of the deputies, who kept repeating, “Probe his —,” Maten said. He could hear the Taser crackle repeatedly. Booker said, “‘I can’t breath . . .,” Yedo heard. Then, Booker went limp. Booker’s wrists were handcuffed behind his back in an awkward position when the deputies picked him up, each holding an arm or a leg, and carried him stomach-down to a holding cell with an unbreakable glass door. They set him down on his stomach, with much of his weight on one shoulder and his legs bent, Yedo said. They took the handcuffs off and without checking his pulse, the officers left him on the floor of the holding cell. The deputies walked away high-fiving and laughing, Maten said. Several inmates were saying, ” ‘I can’t believe they’re doing this,’ ” Maten said. Yedo said he stared at Booker, watching his chest, which wasn’t moving. One deputy had stayed next to the cell and was also staring at Booker. “I told the guy, ‘Hey, that guy is not breathing,’ ” Yedo said. The deputy turned and yelled at the sergeant. ” ‘Sergeant, come here. Sergeant, hurry,’ ” Yedo said he yelled.

There’s more to this story at the link. I feel fairly confident that the coroner will find that this man had some sort of underlying health condition which rendered him unable to take repeated taserings, which means it was his own fault.

By the way, the charge against him was possession of drug paraphernalia, which is apparently a death penalty offense.

Update: This reminds of an article I haven’t posted in a while, but which needs to be read every now and then as we think about tasering. It’s called Electricity: A Global History of a Torture Technology.

An excerpt:

Why was electric torture first used so broadly and systematically in Algeria and Vietnam and why did it spread so rapidly after that? Prior to the 1940s, many police forces used third degree methods and torture to interrogate prisoners. Since the dynamo and magneto, the car battery and field telephone, were already available by World War I, why was electric torture not used more frequently? The reason lies in the quasi-democratic context in which the Algerian and Vietnamese conflicts developed. Torturers favor electric torture because it leaves no marks other than small burns that, one can allege, were simply self-inflicted. Such a technique was simply unnecessary for police forces that were not held accountable or in war contexts where it didn’t matter or where there were no courts or journalists to investigate the tortures. This is why we can find no record of Gestapo officers using electric torture for interrogation in Europe, although torture they undoubtedly did. Even among Gestapo allies, only one small group of collaborators in Paris, experimented with electric torture. It also explains why we find few references to electric torture in the Soviet bloc.

In Algeria, it was otherwise. There were courts, journalists, human rights activists, left wing politicians, and theoretically, democracy. In fact, in 1955, the French government was obliged to send Wuillaume, a senior civil servant unconnected to the police, to Algeria to investigate the many allegations of torture. In his notorious report, he concluded that torture, especially electric torture, was widely practiced. Wuillaume argued that since the use of such devices was inevitable and so prevalent, torture so effective, and the danger real, torture should be legalized and administered professionally. Though the report was condemned, the technology lived on and the French colonial police and army became the first disseminators of electric torture by dynamo worldwide. The methods they developed continued long after the last French soldier had left Vietnam and Algeria. U.S. Marines sent to Vietnam stated repeatedly and independently that they were trained to use field telephones for interrogation in Camp Pendleton in the 1960s. The technique they learned was the French technique: “take a field telephone, the TP 3-12, and put the connecting wire to it, then take the other end of the wire and attach it to a person’s testicles and crank it — this causes a high-voltage shock, there is no amperage behind it, just voltage, but it is extremely painful.” By the late 1960s, virtually all police forces that used electric torture in interrogation were either former French colonies or had received extensive American training. The devices and methods remained the same until the 1980s.

We’ve refined the method quite a bit but the application is now accepted a perfectly normal method to use on average citizens who fail to immediately comply with police authority. And that’s interesting since the thesis of the article is that electric torture devices only become popular in democratic societies where police are constrained in how much cruelty they can inflict. What exactly does that say about us?

.

Refudiating The Past

by digby

The other day I was just saying to the spousal unit that I thought Sarah Palin had been created by the Republicans to make Bush look smart by comparison:

She definitely wrote it herself. The word salad is all Palin. And the incorrect correction in the next tweet proves it wasn’t a typo.

How long before Powerline declares her a genius?

.

Going Backwards

by digby

I think this pretty much captures where we’re going as a nation:

Paved roads, historical emblems of American achievement, are being torn up across rural America and replaced with gravel or other rough surfaces as counties struggle with tight budgets and dwindling state and federal revenue. State money for local roads was cut in many places amid budget shortfalls.

The heavy machines at work in Jamestown, N.D., are grinding the asphalt off road beds, grading the bed and packing the material back down to create a new road surface.

In Michigan, at least 38 of the 83 counties have converted some asphalt roads to gravel in recent years. Last year, South Dakota turned at least 100 miles of asphalt road surfaces to gravel. Counties in Alabama and Pennsylvania have begun downgrading asphalt roads to cheaper chip-and-seal road, also known as “poor man’s pavement.” Some counties in Ohio are simply letting roads erode to gravel.

The moves have angered some residents because of the choking dust and windshield-cracking stones that gravel roads can kick up, not to mention the jarring “washboard” effect of driving on rutted gravel.

But higher taxes for road maintenance are equally unpopular. In June, Stutsman County residents rejected a measure that would have generated more money for roads by increasing property and sales taxes.

“I’d rather my kids drive on a gravel road than stick them with a big tax bill,” said Bob Baumann, as he sipped a bottle of Coors Light at the Sportsman’s Bar Café and Gas in Spiritwood.

I think it’s safe to say that when these people say they want their country back, they aren’t talking about the country of the 50s or 60s, with its “Tomorrowland” optimism. They want to go back to the Dust Bowl.

If this guy wasn’t brainwashed, he’d be talking about how the wealthy should be pitching for these roads, but Rush tells him that taxes are evil, even for millionaires, and he believes it so fervently that he’d rather go back to a primitive state than challenge that orthodoxy. This is a sign of a culture in deep decline.

Maybe we need to realize that our old arguments about how Americans are so accustomed to living the good life that they would resist the natural consequence of this new feudalism aren’t going to work. This anti-tax fervor has passed out of the political realm and into the religious. When people would rather that their kids choke on dirt than pay taxes, I’m guessing that pointing out that their unwillingness to pay taxes will result in tainted meat and dangerous drugs won’t convince them. Living in a primitive state is a sign of their devotion.

.

Boehner’s Going To Hate This

by digby

That lazy bastard Dennis Hartley decided to take a week-end off for the first time since 2006, so there won’t be any movie review this week-end. He’ll be back next week.

Meanwhile, if you haven’t voted for your favorite John Boehner billboard the contest is still open. We’ve been getting an amazing response, far exceeding our expectations. We may just be able to keep the billboards up until the election.

Reminder: You can vote by clicking on the image below you like best. We’ll choose the billboard design that gets the most “votes”– a vote being defined as a contribution, regardless of amount. (In other words, whether you give $1.00 or $100, it’s one vote.)

Each billboard is a live link to its respective fundraising page. Click on the one you like best and vote for it.

You just know he’s going to hate this.

Telling It Like It Is

by digby

If you have not had a chance to read Ta-Nehisi Coates’ coverage of the NAACP/Mark Williams story this week, then I urge you to do it. His beautiful writing expresses the fundamental issue better than anyone.

For instance, answering those who immediately criticized the NAACP, he wrote this:

Dave concedes that the NAACP has a case, but concludes that they’re wrong for making it. But they’re only wrong for making it because the broader society, evidently, believes that objecting to a call for literacy tests is, in fact, just as racist as a call for literacy tests. This inversion, this crime against sound logic, is at the heart of American white supremacy, and at the heart of a country that has nurtured white supremacy all these sad glorious years.

It is the Founders claiming all men are created equal while building a democracy on property in human beings. It is Confederates crying tyranny, while erecting a country based on tyranny. It is Sherman discriminating against black soldiers, while claiming that his superiors are discriminating against whites. It’s Ben Tillman justifying racial terrorism, by claiming that he’s actually fighting against terrorism. It is George Wallace defending a system built on bombing children in churches, and then asserting that the upholders of that system are “the greatest people to ever trod this earth.”

Those who employ racism are not in the habit of confessing their nature–inversion is their cloak. Cutting out the cancer means confronting that inversion, means not wallowing in on-the-other-handism, in post-racialism, means seeing this as more than some kind of political game. Someone has, indeed, failed here. It is not the NAACP.

Here’s an excerpt of Coates’ amazingly subtle, then explosively forthright, response to the toxic swill by national tea party leader and FOX News regular Mark Williams:

It’s been asked in comments, a few times, what good has come of the NAACP’s resolution. I would not endeavor to speak for anyone but myself when I say that I owe the NAACP a debt of gratitude. I have, in my writing, a tendency to become theoretically cute, and overly enamored with my own fair-mindedness. Such vanity has lately been manifested in the form of phrases like “it’s worth saying” and “it strikes me that…” or “respectfully…”

When engaging your adversaries, that approach has its place. But it’s worth saying that there are other approaches and other places. Among them–respectfully administering the occasional reminder as to the precise nature of the motherfuckers you are dealing with. It strikes me that this is a most appropriate role for the nation’s oldest civil rights organization.

damn.

And finally, this post, which featured this great routine by Dave Chappelle

I thought this summed up the week, and how a lot of us reacted to Williams racist satire–It was so blatant, you were like “Wow…”

Also, Why Black Writers Tend Not To Shout

And this, the first in the series, The NAACP Was Right

When I was done reading all these posts I was reminded of someone else who had an elegant way with words who found it necessary to remind people of good will that justice isn’t negotiable:

I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

.

The Hitmen’s Ombudsmen

by digby

Joan Walsh thoroughly destroys this absolutely shocking piece of journalism by Washington Post ombudsman Andrew Alexander in which she properly characterizes him as “chiding his paper for ignoring [the Black Panther story] while valiant journalists like Fox’s Megyn Kelly, Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh fought to bring light to the darkness.”

If you have ever questioned the fact that the Village media is living in an alternate universe Alexander’s piece will disabuse you of it. It seems the Post failed miserably by failing to cover the alleged Obama administration cover-up of its BFFs in the New Black Panther Party’s voter intimidation scheme. The fact that it is as bogus as the last hysterical racist rightwing scandal, ACORN, seems to be irrelevant. What matters is that the papers show proper deference to rightwing hitmen, regardless of the substance of the charges.

This is going to be a huge battle.

Be sure to read Joan’s piece. It’s devastating and coming from a professional journalist and editor should be cause for serious discussion among those who care about journalism.

.

Exploding the Social Security Myths

by digby

I have a reading assignment for you. It’s a short one, but an important one. If you don’t get to it right away, bookmark it for some time when you have a few minutes.

The assignment is this and this post by Susan G at Daily Kos about Social Security myths. The first is this one about life expectancy, which is something that has driven me crazy for years. Mush of the literature about “problems” with social security will tell you that longer life expectancy was unanticipated by the people who designed the system, which is ridiculous. They certainly did. And they will also tell you that life expectancy was only 63 at the time social security was designed, which is true, but they neglect to explain that life expectancy in those days was was shorter mostly because of childhood diseases, which means that the financing ratios were never affected. After all, kids who die at 3 never pay FICA in the first place. Anyway, the upshot is this, from Nancy Altman’s important book on the subject The Battle for Social Security: From FDR’s Vision To Bush’s Gamble:

For Social Security purposes, the correct question is not how many live to age 65, but rather how long those reaching age 65 live thereafter. Here the numbers are not as dramatic. In 1940, men who survived to age 65 had a remaining life expectancy of 12.7 years. Today, a 65 year old man can expect to live not quite three years longer than he might have in 1940, or 15.3 years beyond reaching age 65. For women, the comparable numbers are 14.7 years beyond age 65 in 1940; 19.6 years in 1990.

There’s much more to this myth at the link, but it’s important that we all understand this. The most important thing about it is that the designers of social security built all these expectations into the system, nothing has “gone wrong” and technology hasn’t rendered the system ever more expensive because we are all living so much longer. (Medicare, as we all know, is a very different situation. Those extra few years are coming at an ever increasing cost in health care dollars.)Raising the retirement age is not a panacea, and will actually likely be a cause of another group of problems in an age where jobs are hard to come by for everyone, but especially those just entering and those close to leaving the workforce.

The other post is just as important: the misconce3ption that the ratio of workers to recipients is rapidly coming to the point where there won’t be enough workers to cover the retirees. More from Altman’s book:

… [George W.] Bush sought to prove the point that Social Security was unsustainable through the use of a terrible deceptive and misleading factoid. The president announced, “And instead of sixteen workers paying in for every beneficiary, right now it’s only about three workers.”

“Sixteen workers paying in for every beneficiary” is a meaningless statistic that never affected policy in the slightest. The 16-to-1 ratio is a figure plucked from 1950, the year that Social Security expanded to cover millions of theretofore uncovered workers: farm workers, domestic workers, and others. Those 1950 amendments followed the recommendations of the 1948 advisory council ….

… all pension programs that require a period of employment for eligibility, private as well as public, show similar ratios at the start, because all newly covered workers are paying in, but no one in the newly covered group has yet qualified for benefits. The president could just as accurately have said that in 1945, the ratio of works to beneficiaries as 42 workers paying in for every one beneficiary or the equally accurate but misleading ratio from 1937, 26 million workers paying in for about a dozen beneficiaries.

… what is important is not the worker-to-beneficiary ratio at the start of the program but the ratio when the program reaches maturity. Consistent with the meaninglessness of the 16-to-1 factoid, the worker-to-beneficiary ratio was halved to eight workers for every beneficiary within five years, and by 1975, the ratio was where it is today. The 1994-1996 advisory council had not agreed on much, but it made one very valuable contribution. Its report included the appendix that stated that “the fundamental ratio of beneficiaries to workers was fully taken into account in the 1983 financing provisions, and, as a matter of fact, was known and taken into account well before that…

Bob Myers watched Bush on television from his home right outside Washington and stared in disbelief. In 1934, not only could Myers foresee the world as it changed, he had forecast these changes with great specificity. He was the one who had crunched the numbers for Roosevelt’s Social Security proposal. Myers and Otto Richter, the senior actuary with whom he had worked, had been extremely farsighted. Myers knew, in 1934, that people in the twenty-first century would live longer and draw benefits longer.

As it turned out, Myers and Richer were a shade too conservative in their projections, believing the percentage of the population that would be elderly in the future would actually be higher than it turned out to be. Specifically, in 1934, he and Richter projected that, in year 2000, 12.7 percent of the population would be age 65 or older. How accurate were they? According to the 2000 census figures, the percentage of those aged 65 and over was 12.4 percent of the population.

Now it’s true that the baby boom was an anomaly, which is why they passed the changes in 1983. But as Susan points out, they weren’t mathematical cavemen in the 30s and they did anticipate that the ration would shrink as the program matured as the above passages point out.

All of this is to say that social security is not in crisis and it needn’t be part of any Grand Bargain with Republicans who simply want to destroy the program (and will, of course, fail to act in good faith anyway.) It is well financed,efficient, bare subsistence level program for people at the end of their lives that is in no way responsible for the debt. In fact, its surpluses have been covering the Republicans’ insane wars and tax cuts and the nation’s overall rising health care costs for many years. It should be, quite literally, untouchable.

But the right wing and their wealthy owners have been after Social Security since the minute it was created and they have successfully propagated many myths about the alleged financing problems as a way to push their real agenda. They have been lying for 70 years.

Recall:

Ronald Reagan said back in the 1960s:

But we’re against those entrusted with this program when they practice deception regarding its fiscal shortcomings, when they charge that any criticism of the program means that we want to end payments to those people who depend on them for a livelihood. They’ve called it “insurance” to us in a hundred million pieces of literature. But then they appeared before the Supreme Court and they testified it was a welfare program. They only use the term “insurance” to sell it to the people. And they said Social Security dues are a tax for the general use of the government, and the government has used that tax. There is no fund, because Robert Byers, the actuarial head, appeared before a congressional committee and admitted that Social Security as of this moment is 298 billion dollars in the hole. But he said there should be no cause for worry because as long as they have the power to tax, they could always take away from the people whatever they needed to bail them out of trouble. And they’re doing just that.

A young man, 21 years of age, working at an average salary — his Social Security contribution would, in the open market, buy him an insurance policy that would guarantee 220 dollars a month at age 65. The government promises 127. He could live it up until he’s 31 and then take out a policy that would pay more than Social Security. Now are we so lacking in business sense that we can’t put this program on a sound basis, so that people who do require those payments will find they can get them when they’re due — that the cupboard isn’t bare?

…in the 1980’s, Ronald Reagan’s indiscreet budget director David Stockman admitted that the purpose of ginning up the social security crisis was “to permit the politicians to make it look like they are doing something for the beneficiary population when they are doing something to it, which they normally would not have the courage to undertake.”

And then with masterful chutzpah, considering his famous “Choice” speech from 1964 excerpted above, Ronnie then went on to use the so-called “looming” SS crisis to great effect — he flogged the GOP contention that the program was insolvent (as they’d been doing for fifty years) and also raised the payroll taxes which they immediately raided to cover their budget deficit. And now, lo and behold, we are “in crisis” again. Imagine that. Brilliant.

FYI: Nancy Altman, Eric Kingson, Laura Clawson, Bob Borosage and I will be talking about this on the subject on this panel at Netroots Nation next week.

.

Forced Pregnancy For Sick People

by digby

There is a lot of legitimate outrage in the pro-choice community over the administration’s recent statement that the new high risk pools won’t allow women with pre-existing conditions to access abortion overage. Evidently, the Nelson amendment wasn’t restrictive enough, so they agreed to enact Stupak for the sickest, most vulnerable women out there. It was sadly predictable, considering the sturm and drang during the waning days of the health care debate, but it’s still jarring to see just how cowardly the Democrats are these days on this issue.

Conservative epistemic relativism defines this latest skirmish in the abortion wars. You see, they are working themselves into a frenzy over this, which might strike you as odd since the rules for the high risk pools didn’t diverge from the overall health care bill. But the forced pregnancy forces went crazy with misinformation — and the administration backed down in the face of it.

Dana Goldstein explains what happened:

…the new abortion ban is not required by either the health-care reform bill or the president’s March executive order, which promised that no federal funds would be spent on abortions in the health insurance exchanges that launch in 2014. That order stopped short of banning abortion coverage, instead adopting Sen. Ben Nelson’s proposal for a dual accounting system in which federal dollars cannot be used to fund abortion but consumers’ private insurance co-pays and deductibles can. The order did not mention the pre-existing condition insurance plan at all.

The controversy began Tuesday, when the conservative National Right to Life Committee released a statement claiming that Pennsylvania’s version of the pre-existing condition insurance program would use federal dollars to fund abortion coverage. As other social conservative groups, such as the Family Research Council, piled on, a key fact was obscured: Customers in these new high-risk insurance pools are expected to pay up to $600 monthly out of pocket for the coverage, which will be provided by private insurance companies.

In other words, though the federal government subsidized the coverage, there is no reason why abortions could not be paid for by private monies, under the very dual-accounting structure set-up by the president’s executive order.

But instead of clarifying that point, the Department of Health and Human Services responded by declaring, “Abortions will not be covered in the Pre-existing Condition Insurance Plan except in the cases of rape or incest, or where the life of the woman would be endangered.”

This was a perfect “Nelson” example. Women with pre-existing conditions would be allowed to get insurance coverage from a pool of private insurers, some of which could be subsidized by the government. Abortion coverage would not be included in these policies, but a woman who wanted to purchase that coverage could do so by buying a separate rider that only covers abortion and pay for it separately so good Christian money would never have to touch it. That was the deal, and a raw deal it was. Women have a constitutional right to control their own reproductive lives and there is no reason that it shouldn’t be a standard part of any insurance policy.

However, Nelson was the compromise and it is the law: women who buy policies under the auspices of the health care exchanges will be allowed to buy abortion coverage with their own money, and there’s no reason the high risk pools should be governed by the (equally inhumane and stupid) Federal Employees Health Plan, something that was never even discussed as far as I know. Indeed, it’s a much bigger problem for these people because they literally have no choice — they are already sick and can’t get any insurance at all at the moment. Slut shaming women with a serious disease is even more immoral than usual — but that never stopped a “pro-life” advocate from making a cheap political point.

One of the reasons that pro-choice advocates fought Nelson and Stupak so hard was because we knew it was moving the goalposts and would never be enough for the forced pregnancy zealots. And they have just demonstrated in living color that the facts and the Nelson amendment process are not going to matter. When the exchanges come on line and it turns out that some insurer is offering coverage for abortion, they will simply start screaming at the top of their lungs that their tax dollars are funding abortion and the insurers will stop offering it. If they don’t, the insurance executives will find themselves picketed with pictures of bloody fetuses and eventually some nutcase will put the their picture on a web site and somebody will get shot. I think everybody understands the scenario by now. It’s called terrorism, and it’s very effective.

Corporations do not fight for causes and they won’t endanger their bottom lines. They will throw up their hands and surrender without firing a shot. (The Obama HHS just set the example, after all.) Within a short time, there will be no more insurance coverage for abortion in America. It was baked into this Rube Goldberg health care bill from the minute the Stupak forces raised a fuss.(And that’s assuming the Republicans don’t take the majority — they would outlaw abortion coverage in any insurance exchange immediately, which I would like to assume president Obama would veto. Under a GOP president, they’ll definitely pass it.)

Interestingly, Stupak really does seem to have learned a lesson about his fanatical allies in the forced pregnancy camp. Here’s his statement:

“This is the latest example of some right to life groups politicizing life issues in an effort to undermine health care reform. The President’s Executive Order makes clear that federal funds may not be used for abortion under the Affordable Care Act – including the pre-existing condition insurance pools currently being implemented in Pennsylvania and states across the country. In accordance with the Executive Order, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has directed states that federal funds provided under health care reform may not be used to fund abortion. HHS has reiterated this policy in response to the current accusations from the National Right to Life Committee. While these recycled scare tactics may make for good headlines, we should not lose sight of the fact that tens of thousands of individuals across the nation who have been denied coverage by health insurance companies due to pre-existing conditions will for the first time have access to affordable health insurance. We need to take a whole life approach to health care which looks out for those who are out of the womb as well as those in the womb.”

Sounds like somebody’s had a wake-up call that his “pro-life” friends are all lying fanatics. Too bad it’s too late.

.

Race To The Lowest Common Denominator

by digby

Can someone explain to me why Arne Duncan’s “Race to The Top” money is so damned sacred?

We were told we have to offset every damn dime of [new teacher spending]. Well, it ain’t easy to find offsets, and with all due respect to the administration their first suggestion for offsets was to cut food stamps. Now they were careful not to make an official budget request, because they didn’t want to take the political heat for it, but that was the first trial balloon they sent down here. … Their line of argument was, well, the cost of food relative to what we thought it would be has come down, so people on food stamps are getting a pretty good deal in comparison to what we thought they were going to get. Well isn’t that nice. Some poor bastard is going to get a break for a change

I was going to say that I wish the administration would be as protective os social security and then realized what I was saying.

Bur really — food stamps? It sounds like somebody in the White House thought they’d like to see the Democrats get some “credit” for sticking it to the poor … excuse me, “tightening their belts,” without actually having to make the ask.

This is looking more and more like a race for who can look toughest by calling for sacrifice among ordinary Americans hit by hard times.

.