Embarrassing Tweet ‘O the Day
by digby
… and there have been a boatload of them:
An exceptional empire such as ours does not sully its hands making deals with nations which are not equal in stature to its own. Especially if said second rate country has simultaneously been touted as the greatest global threat to mankind. Because … well, because.
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One third of all American women have an abortion in their lives. Are they all immoral?
by digby
Yes, I know this is very boring, but it needs to be said:
One in three women has an abortion by the age of 45. How many ever talk about it?
Of all the battles in our half-century culture war, perhaps none seems further from being resolved, in our laws and in our consciences, than abortion. It’s a fight now in its fifth decade, yet in the past two years, 26 states have passed over 111 provisions restricting abortion. In Texas, the state where the single, pregnant woman who became Jane Roe sued for access to an abortion 41 years ago, Wendy Davis became a national hero for filibustering abortion legislation, as did her governor for signing it into law.
Lawsuits have been waged and courts have adjudicated, and still we seem no closer to consensus on when, where, how, and if a woman should be able to terminate a pregnancy. Even in Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court was qualified in its judgment: An abortion was a personal decision only in the first trimester; in the second, states could intervene on behalf of the woman’s health; once the fetus was considered “viable,” a state could set whatever limitations it saw fit.
Successive court rulings have granted even more latitude in writing abortion laws, and legislators have responded by creating a patchwork of regulations: Arkansas has banned abortion after twelve weeks, while in Louisiana, a woman is shown her ultrasound before having an abortion. In California, a trained nurse practitioner can now perform an abortion, but in Mississippi, a provider must be an obstetrician with admitting privileges at a local hospital, a rule that could shut down the state’s last remaining clinic. This month, a federal appeals court upheld a similar law in Texas, closing all but a handful of clinics.
But for all the regulations and protests, despite “safe, legal, and rare” and “abortion is murder,” abortion is part of our everyday experience. Nearly half of all pregnancies are unintended; about half of those—1.2 million—will end in abortion each year.
The article examines the fact that despite 1/3 of all American women having an abortion at some point in their lives nobody ever talks about their individual experiences. I would posit that because of the Third Way strategy of making it shameful even among those who support a woman’s right to choose — “safe, legal and rare” is the least of it. How about our avatar of abortion rights activism, Wendy Davis’ recent comments:
Texas state Sen. and Democratic gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis continues to support women’s abortion rights but she wants to reduce the number of abortions, she told a CNN affiliate Monday.
“The goal that we should have is that we see zero abortions,” Davis told KGBT. “But in order to achieve that goal we have to make sure that women are receiving the kind of healthcare and planning that they deserve.”
That will never happen and nobody should be saying it will. Human biology will always trump birth control from time to time and women don’t have abortions just because they don’t have “resources.” Bearing a child is much more than an economic commitment and going through pregnancy and childbirth is not a simple matter of marking time for 9 months until you can just go back to your former life. Women have always had abortions and they always will. This idea that there should be “zero” abortions only reinforces the idea that it is an immoral act.
Anyway, read the article which features a bunch of stories by real women about their reasons for having an abortion. Nothing is more intimate and personal than gestating another life within your own body. And then ponder whether it makes any sense at all for distant strangers in black robes or politicians in legislative bodies to insert themselves into that situation.
Oh, and then there’s this: Abortion restrictions passed in 2012 and 2013
Sunday Funnies
by digby
In case you forgot, the Walton family is personally worth over a hundred billion dollars. But I guess you don’t get that kind of money by failing to pinch your pennies, eh?
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Our very, very sick police culture
by digby
A suburban Detroit police officer admitted he asked a mentally ill black man to sing and dance and video recorded the incident.
Videos and and photos with degrading portrayals of black men were submitted earlier this month to the blog, Motor City Muckraker, purportedly from officers who disseminated them to friends and colleagues in the upper class, majority-white Michigan suburb of Grosse Pointe Park. One video portrayed a voice alleged to be an officer asking black men to do humiliating tasks, including “dance like a chimp.” In another incident, an officer allegedly texted a photo of a black man in the back of his trailer with the text, “Gotta love the coloreds.” The journalist, Steve Neavling, told the Huffington Post that he has more than a dozen videos shot by officers, but has not shared most of them because of their “humiliating nature.”
Friendly reminder: this is 2013, not 1813.
I just can’t …
If this were just an isolated incident we could chalk it up to bad apples. But it’s not. We have a big problem with our police culture in this country. And it’s getting worse.
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“Yes we can” work toward peace
by digby
Neoconnish heads are spinning like tops all over TV this morning, which means they’ve lost a big one and the rest of us have won a bit of sanity on the nuclear front. I can’t see the downside to this deal and it’s hard to find anyone but the most hawkish of “real men go to Tehran” hard cases who do. There will undoubtedly be pushback, but this morning it looks as though we may have taken an important step toward a more peaceful world, or at least one with slightly less potential to blow itself up. That’s very, very, good.
I’ll just make this one observation. I know the job of president is one that encompasses a great many duties and objectives but I think every person who runs for the office has something they feel they’re destined to accomplish. Back in 2007 and 2008 when President Obama was battling it out for the Democratic nomination, this was what I thought he was running to do. All that got lost in the sturm und drang over health care and the ongoing economic crisis, neither of which I ever believed were Obama’s strong suit. (Those were the kind of wonky, weedy issues that animate people like … well, Hillary Clinton.) This big picture, nuclear disarmament, reorienting of the middle east alliances was the passion of the man who’d spent time overseas and had the global perspective since he was a kid. That was where I thought the hope ‘n change had a potential to really happen.
I’ve been a harsh critic of this administration on any number of fronts, including national security and foreign policy where the president has seemed to concentrate all his energies on counter-productive covert warfare. But the two big things they’ve done in the 2nd term are truly hopeful signs of some real progress in this ugly old world: backing down on Syria and this opening up with Iran. They are both bold decisions taken outside of our normal national security framework and are pretty much begging for hysterical criticism from some of the most powerful American allies such as Saudi Arabia and Israel, not to mention the local American lunatics. But nothing is more important than nuclear and chemical disarmament and those two initiatives have put that issue back, front and center, on the agenda.
It turns out that “yes we can” work toward peace. It’s a good day.
*By the way, maybe it’s time to start thinking of disarming ourselves too ….
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Kentucky’s ACA rollout is a reminder of what can happen when the law isn’t being sabotaged
by David Atkins
Yesterday I posted how Republicans were hurting business, the poor and the middle class by sabotaging Obamacare. Meanwhile, here’s a story of what can happen even in a hard-hit red state that isn’t directly sabotaging the program:
Now it was the beginning of another day, and a man Lively would list as Client 375 sat across from her in her office at a health clinic next to a Hardee’s.
“So, is that Breathitt County?” she asked Woodrow Wilson Noble as she tapped his information into a laptop Thursday morning.
“Yeah, we live on this side of the hill,” said Noble, whose family farm had gone under, who lived on food stamps and what his mother could spare, and who was about to hear whether he would have health insurance for the first time in his 60-year-old life.
This is how things are going in Kentucky: As conservatives argued that the new health-care law will wreck the economy, as liberals argued it will save billions, as many Americans raged at losing old health plans and some analysts warned that a disproportionate influx of the sick and the poor could wreck the new health-care model, Lively was telling Noble something he did not expect to hear.
“All right,” she said. “We’ve got you eligible for Medicaid.”
Places such as Breathitt County, in the Appalachian foothills of eastern Kentucky, are driving the state’s relatively high enrollment figures, which are helping to drive national enrollment figures as the federal health exchange has floundered. In a state where 15 percent of the population, about 640,000 people, are uninsured, 56,422 have signed up for new health-care coverage, with 45,622 of them enrolled in Medicaid and the rest in private health plans, according to figures released by the governor’s office Friday.
If the health-care law is having a troubled rollout across the country, Kentucky — and Breathitt County in particular — shows what can happen in a place where things are working as the law’s supporters envisioned.
One reason is that the state set up its own health-insurance exchange, sidestepping the troubled federal one. Also, Gov. Steve Beshear (D) is the only Southern governor to sign on to expanded eligibility parameters for Medicaid, the federal health-insurance program for the poor. The less technical reasons involve what Lively told Noble next.
Obamacare is an inefficient public-private kludge; Single-payer would be better. But the ACA is still pretty decent, all things considered, when it’s not being sabotaged. It’s making a real difference in the lives of these folks in Kentucky.
How long, one wonders, can Republicans continue to openly screw over even their own white Southern base before people start to realize the truth?
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| Homeland insecurity: Torn |
Now, the same right-wingers who would shout “terrorism” from the rooftops if the LAX airport shooter was a Muslim will likely avoid using the word “terrorism” at all since the shooter was a white Italian dude from Jersey. They will characterize this non-Muslim terrorist as a crazy kooky loner whose undiagnosed mental-health issues or work-related stress probably led to the attacks.
Also, these same right-wingers who always call for the “racial profiling” of Arabs and Muslims after every terrorist attack will now be silent since they would now have to call for the racial profiling of every 20-something white dude from New Jersey.
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| Low Country & western: The Broken Circle Breakdown |
meets Scenes from a Marriage
in a generally well-acted but somewhat overwrought 3-hankie mellerdrama called The Broken Circle Breakdown. If you love the sound of banjos, mandolins, and fiddles, topped off by them good old-timey close harmonies, you may be more receptive to this little ditty ’bout Jack and Diane…I mean, Kris and Rita…sorry, Elise and Didier, two Flemish kids livin’ in the low lands. One fateful day, Didier (Johan Heldenbergh) a banjo player in a bluegrass band, waltzes into a tattoo parlor, where he Meets Cute with the fetching, well-inked proprietress, Elise (Veerle Baetens). When he asks her who the “greatest musician of all time” is, she says Elvis. Pshaw, says Didier, because the correct answer is “Bill Monroe”. Who? she says…and they’re off to the races.
, Annie Hall
, (500) Days of Summer 
(my review) and the aforementioned Bergman film. We strap in and join Elise and Didier for a ride on the rollercoaster of Love, Marriage and Parenthood over a period of 9 or 10 years (my educated guess), through sickness and health, good times and bad times, joy and sorrow (I should forewarn depressives that the story tends to favor all the sickness, bad times and sorrow). The musical performances by Elise and Didier’s bluegrass outfit (The Cover-Ups of Alabama) are heartfelt (I’m curious to find out if the actors did their own singing and playing). Unfortunately, I can’t say the same for the drama. The story runs wildly off track once someone has a grief-induced onstage meltdown, resulting in a bizarre political rant that seems to have party-crashed from a wholly different narrative. I’m not the world’s biggest country and/or bluegrass fan, but in this case, I could have used less soap-and more Opry.
A horrible historical memo
by digby
Michael Beschloss tweeted this LBJ memo earlier today. It really brings home the horror of political assassination, doesn’t it?
That transition went pretty smoothly. But according to this article, they don’t always go that way. This one in particular:
The only vice president who thoroughly overshadowed his predecessor was Theodore Roosevelt, governor of New York and a fiery reformer who so frightened the state’s party machine officials that they engineered his selection in 1900 as incumbent William McKinley’s running mate.
When McKinley was shot in September 1901 and died a week later, GOP boss Mark Hanna lamented over the “damned cowboy” now in charge. Roosevelt, who became synonymous with the Progressive era of the early 20th century, initially promised to continue McKinley’s more conservative policies “absolutely unbroken.” He confided his real intentions to a gathering of journalists at the White House.
“I am president,” he told his visitors, “and shall act in every word and deed precisely as if I and not McKinley had been the candidate for whom the electors cast the vote for president.”
Sounds a little like George W. Bush in 2000 …
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Talking points from hell
by digby
That “House Republican Playbook” on Obamacare was, as Kevin Drum points out, pretty impressive. It’s certainly a very professional job. Of course the substance is almost entirely bullshit, but what would you expect?
Kevin highlighted the one that also made me gasp when I read it:
[I]t’s all pretty predictable stuff: Obamacare is an abomination; people are losing their insurance; small companies are being ruined; etc. etc. But I have to say that this is my favorite talking point:
Needless to say, this is primarily because Republicans governors have refused to implement Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion, even though it’s 100 percent paid for at first and 90 percent paid for forever. These governors literally prefer to have their state’s residents pay taxes and get nothing in return rather than give so much as an extra dime to poor people who need health care. It’s truly hard to fathom what kind of human being is callous enough to do this, but apparently there are a bunch of them in the Republican Party.
And then, just to add a cherry of chutzpah on top of this ice cream sundae of spitefulness, they crow about how Obamacare isn’t covering as many people as Obama hoped it would. You really have to marvel.
You do have to marvel at their chutzpah, as always. But, as David said earlier, the level of cruelty involved in all this is beyond any decent person’s ability to understand. It’s sociopathic.
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A little ditty for Mayor Rob Ford
by digby
For your Saturday afternoon pleasure …
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