When Did Anti-Abortion Radicalization Become Acceptable?
On Thursday, the House Homeland Security Committee held a hearing on the threats Muslim “radicalization” poses to America.
Meanwhile, a woman seeking healthcare at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Denver, or anywhere in the country, was screamed at as she walked through the door. How about some Homeland Security for her?
Every day in this country, reproductive healthcare providers at Planned Parenthood clinics, and abortion doctors at other facilities, and the patients who need them, are routinely harassed and threatened. When did this become OK?
Dr. George Tiller, an abortion provider in Kansas, used to wear a bulletproof vest to work. He made the mistake of not wearing one to his church, which is where he was shot and killed. How many other civilian professionals have to wear a bulletproof vest to do their job?
We have so normalized the anti-choice extremism in this country that a certain level of mundane, daily ugliness has become unremarkable. It’s a yawner to policymakers, unfit for congressional hearings or regular news coverage.
And if the harassment inside the building isn’t enough, now policymakers are forcing harassment inside the building. Texas Republicans in the state legislature voted this week to force any woman seeking an abortion—even if she’s a victim of rape or incest—to undergo a sonogram and a lecture about the fetus. Similar laws have passed and are likely to pass in other states. Because, apparently, women are too dumb to think through the implications on their own.
This harassment even extends to ballot measures. Last fall I worked on the No on 62 Campaign, part of a broad-based coalition opposing an anti-choice amendment to the Colorado Constitution. Part of our training for the No on 62 Campaign included a briefing by Planned Parenthood security officers, many of whom have worked in law enforcement for years.
The Planned Parenthood clinic in Denver where we often met—and this is a pro-choice city in a pro-choice state—is ringed with a 10-foot-high fence, cameras, and manned by a guard at the gate. Every day, a group of about a dozen people parks outside with grisly pictures and bullhorns and screams at anyone—patient, provider, visitor—who enters the clinic. Even our campaign headquarters were the object of nasty phone calls—our pregnant admin person, who answered the phones, got called some ugly names at least a couple times a week. It became a humorous game of epithet bingo—“Have you been called a fornicating whore today?”
Our press conference in Colorado Springs was hijacked by the opposition, who shoved people out of the way to grab the microphone and start yelling. Our Facebook page was hijacked by the opposition posting gruesome pictures and accusing us of being “No on 62 Nazis,” and put up their own Facebook page stating the same. And when I accompanied one of our spokespeople, Jeremy Shaver from the Interfaith Alliance, to a debate, there were armed guards in the room keeping an eye on the other side.
It’s not the posturing about “outside agitators” that worries me. It’s the acceptance of a level of hatred directed at women, especially poor women, seeking reproductive healthcare and abortions. And it’s the acceptance of threats and violence directed at the doctors, staff, and healthcare workers trying to provide it to them.
By: Laura Chapin, U.S. News and World Report, March 11, 2011
Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker Shows Why Ideologues Can’t Govern
Ideologues make lousy politicians, even worse office holders. The ideological straight jacket does just what you would expect–it constricts movement. Everything is nice and neat and tight but not conducive to serious efforts to move forward. Politicians such as Scott Walker, who put themselves in ideological straight jackets, either live to regret it or are thrown out on their ear, or both.
Intellectuals sometimes make good ideologues, cultural commentators make very thought provoking arguments, philosophers have the luxury of being way out on the edge at times, but those who go into office find that they are rejected very quickly by the public when all they have is their ideology.
Scott Walker is the latest example of an ideologue–combined with a self righteous, bullying approach, not backed up by intellectual rigor.
My guess is that the events of the last month will not only harm him politically in the short run but will result in a serious problem for those who follow in his footsteps.
First and foremost, his approach to governing won’t work. Cutting taxes for ideological reasons, rather than pragmatic ones, prohibiting local governments from paying for education with their own decisions on local taxes, cutting services to the bone, breaking collective bargaining with unions, making them a scapegoat, just won’t wash.
Look at the governors who are putting forth a balanced, reasonable approach to focusing on the dual realities of too much spending and too little revenue. They are not engaging in a hard and fast ideological battle. They are pragmatic. They do not focus only on slash and burn cuts but, rather, are flexible enough to include tax and fee increases.
What was Walker thinking, cutting taxes by $117.2 million as his first act when his state faced a deficit of $137 million? I guess I get the million dollars he included to encourage businesses to move to Wisconsin but I sure as heck don’t understand a $49 million tax cut for health savings accounts. The rich will take advantage of that boondoggle and it won’t create jobs.
That was ideology, not pragmatism.
Look at Gov. Jerry Brown in California, or Mark Dayton in Minnesota, or John Kitzhaber of Oregon, John Lynch of New Hampshire, Pat Quinn in Illinois, or Andrew Cuomo in New York. These are governors, many of whom have a lot tougher problem than Wisconsin, who are struggling and succeeding, not resorting to hard ideology, not refusing to look at the revenue side of the equation.
If members of Congress take lessons from the states, they should learn a whopper from Wisconsin. Don’t follow in Walker’s footsteps, look to the governors listed above.
In fact, they can even look to Ronald Reagan who as governor way back in 1967 raised taxes by $1 billion in California as well as cut the budget. As president, he raised taxes in every year but one, when it was necessary. He learned very quickly about “never saying never.” He didn’t put himself in the ideological straight jacket that many now fantasize about. I am not a Reagan fan, but I do recognize he was pragmatic.
Walker is in way over his head. Sadly, he has been a train wreck for his state. Let’s not let his style and approach be a train wreck for the nation.
By: Peter Fenn, U.S. News and World Report, March 11, 2011
Toilets, Light Bulbs and Reproductive Rights: Rand Paul Is Pro-Choice For Toilets
The senator gives a stunning rant against energy efficiency — and reproductive choice
Ladies and gentlemen, this is what we are up against. In a diatribe as bizarre and petulant as anything out of Charlie Sheen’s or any recent star of “The Bachelor’s” mouth, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul went on a tear Thursday about how abortion is somehow interfering with his God-given right to incandescent light bulbs. Clearly, there wasn’t one illuminating over his head when he started down the crazy path.
On Friday, Irin Carmon at Jezebel beautifully drilled down the essence of the rant — that “Rand Paul Thinks His Toilet Is More Important Than Your Abortion Rights.” In a mind-boggling display of foot stamping during an energy hearing, Paul asked deputy assistant energy secretary for efficiency Kathleen Hogan if she was “pro-choice,” leading the visibly puzzled Hogan to reply she’s pro-choice on light bulbs. Rand then launched into full cri de coeur mode, comparing the choice of abortion to being “anti-choice on every other consumer item, including light bulbs, refrigerators, toilets. You can’t go around your house without being told what to buy. You restrict my purchases. You don’t care about my choices.” Boo hoo hoooooo!
Who knew that reproductive choice was a consumer purchase? Who knew you could run out to Best Buy and pick up one of them late-term abortion thingies with an Energy Star rating? Paul then went on to overshare that “My toilets don’t work in my house. And I blame you and people like you.” We get it — Rand Paul has a fiber diet and a low flush toilet. “I can’t find a toilet that works!” he blurted angrily again later. So if you’re a pregnant teenage rape victim, maybe you should start thinking about how Rand Paul is suffering to get a little perspective.
Much of Paul’s speech doesn’t even make sense: If he’s so ticked about some perceived limitation of his “choice,” why does his Web page insist “I believe in a Human Life Amendment and a Life at Conception Act as federal solutions to the abortion issue.” You don’t like government regulation? The government regulates abortion. Where’s your free market now, Paul?
The whole piece is a truly remarkable piece of irony-rich rantitude, sure to be included in the next volume of Now That’s What I Call False Equivalencies and White Male Solipism! Paul said he finds it “troubling, this busybody nature that you want to come into my house — my bedroom, my bathroom …” But a woman’s womb, hey, that’s up for grabs.
Yet when he kvetched to Hogan that “I find it insulting … appalling and hypocritical,” it was clear the parallels to how he feels and the sentiments of many of us on the side of reproductive freedom are stunningly similar. Just because Rand Paul has problems with his plumbing, it’s astonishing that he believes he has the right to meddle in ours. But when he declared, “You busybodies are always trying to tell us how we can live our lives better — keep it to yourselves,” I had to admit, Rand Paul, you dismissive, whiny jerk, that I could not agree more.
By: Mary Elizabeth Williams, Salon, March 11, 2011
Meanwhile…Washington’s Budget Folly
The Senate on Wednesday voted down the House budget bill, with its string of $61 billion in mostly political cuts through Sept. 30. That formally puts an end to the House’s grandstand play. But the Senate also rejected its Democratic leaders’ own plan to cut $6.5 billion. The government’s financing is due to run out in eight days. To prevent a shutdown, the two chambers will probably have to agree to yet another short-term financing bill.
That would be politically and fiscally irresponsible. But the House Republicans will be happy to agree, as long as Democrats agree to a vigorish of $2 billion a week in cuts to vital government programs.
Unless the White House and Democratic lawmakers start pushing back a lot harder — and do a better job of explaining the disastrous effects on the economy and everyday life — the Republicans will win the argument. If it keeps going on this way, they will get the $61 billion they demanded.
The White House again threatened on Wednesday to veto the House bill, and said it supported the Democratic bill that did not even draw a simple majority. It has been hosting what appear to be unproductive talks among legislative leaders; Vice President Joseph Biden Jr., who is nominally in charge of the talks, is now visiting Eastern Europe and tried to mediate by telephone.
President Obama has yet to take a firm public stand and make clear his bargaining limits and priorities. Understandably, he does not want the government to shut down and is hoping that quiet negotiations will produce better results than loud declarations of principle. But there is no sign that the House freshmen have an interest in compromise, or that Representative John Boehner, the House speaker, has any control of his caucus.
A brief shutdown, painful as it would be, would be far less damaging than a sudden withdrawal of tens of billions in government spending from the economy, which would lead to widespread layoffs.
Mr. Obama could well follow the example of Senator Charles Schumer of New York, the third-ranking Democrat in the Senate, who on Wednesday called for a “re-set” of the negotiating process. The only way to have a meaningful discussion of the budget, he said in a speech, is to consider all of its parts at once over the long term, not for a few weeks or months at a time. That includes all the issues the Republicans wouldn’t deal with in their bill: cuts to the entitlement programs and to the Pentagon budget and ways to raise revenues at the same time.
The Republicans, as Mr. Schumer noted, aren’t really interested in lowering the deficit. If they were, they would never have insisted on $800 billion in tax cuts for the wealthy without paying for them, or on repealing the health care law, which saves $230 billion over a decade.
They are only interested in slashing government, no matter the cost to the country. It is time for the president — and responsible Congressional leaders of both parties — to reject their tactics and their goal.
By: Editorial, The New York Times, March 9, 2011
State Crises Mean New Language Of Deceit
For most of history, we had undebatable definitions of words such as “bailout” and “bankruptcy.” We understood the former as an undeserved public grant, and the latter as an inability to pay existing bills. Whatever your particular beliefs about these concepts, their meanings were at least agreed upon.
Sadly, that’s not the case during a deficit crisis that is seeing language redefined on ideological terms.
“Bailout” was the first word thrown into the Orwellian fire. As some lawmakers recently proposed replenishing depleted state coffers with federal dollars, the American Conservative Union urged Congress to oppose states “seek(ing) a bailout” from the feds. Now, Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., says, “Should taxpayers in Indiana who have paid their bills on time, who have done their job fiscally be bailing out Californians who haven’t? No.”
Ryan, mind you, voted for 2008’s TARP program — a bank bailout in the purest sense of the term. But one lawmaker’s rank hypocrisy is less significant than how the word “bailout” is being used — and abused. Suddenly, the term suggests that federal aid would force taxpayers in allegedly “fiscally responsible” Republican states to underwrite taxpayers in supposedly irresponsible Democratic ones.
Aside from stoking a detestable interstate enmity, this thesis ignores the fact that state-to-state wealth transfers are already happening. According to the Tax Foundation, most Republican-voting states receive more in federal funding than they pay in federal taxes, while most Democratic-voting states receive less federal money than they pay in federal taxes.
That means traditionally blue states like California are now perpetually subsidizing — or in Ryan’s parlance, “bailing out” — traditionally red states like Indiana. Thus, federal aid to states could actually reduce the state-to-state subsidies conservatives say they oppose.
Congressional Republicans will undoubtedly ignore these facts. Their proposed solution to the budget emergency could instead be a Newt Gingrich-backed initiative letting states default on outstanding obligations by declaring bankruptcy. Again, the word is fraught with new connotations.
Whereas sick or laid-off individuals occasionally claim a genuine inability to repay debts and thus a need for bankruptcy protections, states can never legitimately claim such a need because they are never actually “bankrupt.” Why? Because they always posses the power to raise revenue. The power is called taxation — and destroying that authority is what the new bankruptcy idea is really about. It would let states avoid tax increases on the wealthy, renege on contractual promises to public employees and destroy the country’s creditworthiness.
Blocking state “bailouts” and letting states declare “bankruptcy” are radical notions, especially in a bad economy. One would result in recession-exacerbating public layoffs; the other would institutionalize an anti-tax zealotry that destroys tomorrow’s middle class in order to protect today’s rich. That’s why advocates of these ideas have resorted to manipulating language. They know the only way to make such extremism a reality is to distort the vernacular — and if we aren’t cognizant of their scheme, they will succeed.
By: David Sirota, Syndicated Columnist, Sun Journal-published March 8, 2011
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