“Non-Apology” Apology: Limbaugh Sorry For Attack On Student In Birth Control Furor
In an about-face, the conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh said Saturday that he was sorry for denouncing as a “prostitute” a Georgetown University law student who had spoken publicly in favor of the Obama administration’s birth control policy.
On Saturday, a day after President Obama telephoned the student, Sandra Fluke, to say he stood by her in the face of personal attacks on right-wing radio, Mr. Limbaugh published the apology on his Web site.
“For over 20 years, I have illustrated the absurd with absurdity, three hours a day, five days a week. In this instance, I chose the wrong words in my analogy of the situation. I did not mean a personal attack on Ms. Fluke,” Mr. Limbaugh wrote. He then reiterated his opposition to the Obama administration policy, which requires health insurance plans to cover contraceptives for women.
On the Wednesday, Thursday and Friday editions of his talk show, Mr. Limbaugh attacked Ms. Fluke as sexually promiscuous and politically motivated — “an anti-Catholic plant,” he said at one point.
On Wednesday, he called her a “slut” who “wants to be paid to have sex”; on Thursday, he said she was “having so much sex, it’s amazing she can still walk”; and on Friday, after Senate Democrats beat back a Republican challenge to the new policy, he said Ms. Fluke had testified that she was “having sex so frequently that she can’t afford all the birth-control pills that she needs.”
In television interviews, Ms. Fluke said she was stunned and outraged by Mr. Limbaugh’s comments.
In his call on Friday, Mr. Obama thanked Ms. Fluke for publicly backing his regulations mandating contraception coverage.
Mr. Limbaugh’s comments added fuel to a rancorous dispute on Capitol Hill over whether employers should have to provide insurance coverage for contraception. Democrats have said Republican opposition to such coverage amounts to a “war on women.”
Some Republicans also criticized Mr. Limbaugh, including the House speaker, John A. Boehner, who called his comments “inappropriate.”
As the issue gained national attention, liberal activists and other longtime critics of Mr. Limbaugh started to contact his advertisers and ask them to withdraw their ads from his show. By Saturday, six advertisers, including Quicken Loans, said they had done so.
Mr. Limbaugh did not directly address the advertiser pressure in his statement Saturday, but he said, “My choice of words was not the best, and in the attempt to be humorous, I created a national stir. I sincerely apologize to Ms. Fluke for the insulting word choices.”
After the statement was published online on Saturday, the company that distributes “The Rush Limbaugh Show,” Premiere Radio Networks, also sent it to reporters in an e-mail. Premiere, a unit of Clear Channel, declined to comment.
It was immediately dismissed as a nonapology by some of the groups that have mobilized against Mr. Limbaugh. “I think this attempt at damage control labeled as an apology actually makes things worse,” stated a Twitter account called “Stop Rush,” which wants people to pressure to companies to stop advertising on “The Rush Limbaugh Show.”
The account then added, “You know what Rush’s so-called apology means? Your efforts at delivering real accountability are working! Keep at it! Onward!”
Think Progress, a blog run by the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, noted in a post that “Limbaugh often sparks controversy, but it is exceedingly rare for him to apologize.” Lawrence O’Donnell, the MSNBC anchor, was blunt in his interpretation: “Lawyers wrote that apology,” he stated on Twitter.
Reached by telephone, Kit Carson, the chief of staff for Mr. Limbaugh, declined to comment on why the statement was issued. Mr. Carson added, if Mr. Limbaugh has more to say, he would likely do so on his radio show on Monday.
At least one conservative commentator, Dana Loesch, appeared to back Mr. Limbaugh’s original sentiments, writing on Twitter on Saturday, “If you expect me to pay higher insurance premiums to cover your ‘free’ birth control, I can call you whatever I want.”
Despite Mr. Limbaugh’s statement, one company that was planning to pull its ads, Carbonite, said it would still do so. On Facebook on Saturday evening, the company’s chief executive, David Friend, wrote, “We hope that our action, along with the other advertisers who have already withdrawn their ads, will ultimately contribute to a more civilized public discourse.”
By: Brian Stelter, The New York Times,The Caucus, March 3, 2012
“Common Sense Policy”: How Access To Contraception Benefits The Economy
Rush Limbaugh has been on a several day long sexist tirade against Georgetown Law student Sandra Fluke, who testified before Congress on the Obama administration’s proposed rule requiring employers to provide contraception coverage in their health plans. Limbaugh’s misogynistic attacks have earned him the condemnation of 75 Democratic lawmakers and lost him the support of at least four advertisers.
Conservatives have tried to frame the debate over the contraception rule as one of religious freedom, while progressives have countered that it’s simply about women’s health. However, as New Deal 2.0′s Bryce Covert noted, providing access to contraception is also simply good economic policy:
Research consistently demonstrates a link between decreased fertility thanks to contraception and increased female employment. And right on cue, women, freed up from unwanted child bearing and child rearing, consequently flooded the workforce after the pill became widely accessible. In 1950, 18 million women were in the workforce. By the 1980s, the pill’s impact had had such an effect that 60 percent of women of reproductive age were employed. By 2000, the ranks of women in the workforce had more than tripled since the ’50s, rising to 66 million. Overall, from 1970 to 2009 women went from holding 37 percent of all jobs to almost half of them.
This change has had a significant impact on women’s lives and families, the fallout of which is still reverberating throughout the culture wars. But the impact on our economy is easy to quantify. The private sector has long recognized this fact: consulting giant McKinsey explains that without the huge increase in women’s workforce participation since the 1970s, “our economy would be 25% smaller today — an amount equal to the combined GDP of Illinois, California and New York.”
According to the Economist, since the 1970′s, “back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that the employment of extra women has not only added more to GDP than new jobs for men but has also chipped in more than either capital investment or increased productivity.”
And then, of course, there are the health care savings that come with contraception. Nationally, every dollar spent on family planning saves $3 in Medicaid costs. According to the Guttmacher Institute, “every $1 spent on public funding for family planning saves taxpayers $3.74 in pregnancy-related costs.” When California spent $400 million on family planning services in 2002, “$1.1 billion was saved in public funds that would have been spent on medical care, income support, and social services through averting pregnancies up to age two, and $2.2 billion up to age five.”
By: Pat Garofalo, Think Progress, March 2, 2012
There’s More To Women’s Health Than Contraception
If you have been listening to the contraception debate in Washington (sort of hard to avoid, isn’t it?), you may be under the impression that preventive health for women equals contraception. Or contraception equals women’s preventive health. (We’re putting aside, for the purpose of this post, the debate about religion, conscience and the role of government).
The Senate has defeated one bid to overturn the administration rule requiring employers to provide an insurance plan with first-dollar coverage of birth control, and it’s not clear what the House will do. But the issue is likely to percolate in Washington, state legislatures and the courts for some time to come.
The health reform law, and the regulations being developed to implement it, has a far more expansive definition of prevention and what it means for women’s health. Here are more details on the new regulations and a tutorial from Kaiser.edu. According to the new women’s preventive health rule, new health plans must cover, without cost-sharing, a lot more than the pill:
- well-woman visits;
- screening for gestational diabetes;
- human papillomavirus (HPV) DNA testing for women 30 years and older;
- sexually-transmitted infection counseling;
- human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) screening and counseling;
- FDA-approved contraception methods and contraceptive counseling;
- breastfeeding support, supplies, and counseling; and
- domestic violence screening and counseling.
These requirements will go into effect in August (with another year allowed to finalize how the religious exemptions will work). Grandfathered plans won’t have to follow the new rule, while they maintain their “grandfather” status. Over time, many health plans will go through changes that will mean that they will no longer be “grandfathered.” Then they too will have to follow the new regulations.
Of course, more women will get these benefits, simply because more women will be insured. Approximately one in five women of reproductive age is currently uninsured. Most of them will get coverage, including preventive services, starting in 2014 whether through Medicaid, through subsidized coverage in the exchanges or by buying coverage. Right now, coverage of maternity benefits is spotty on the individual insurance market, but the plans in the health exchanges will cover it.
The law also requires many other preventive services – some free – for men, women and children. They have not gotten much attention in the polarized birth control debate.
The conversation (and press coverage) about the contraceptive rules have included lots of misinformation about abortion. Politicians who misstate policy don’t help, but reporters need to know what the law does and does not do.
The health law does not mandate abortion coverage and this preventive health rule does not change that. In fact, states under health reform have the explicit ability to limit abortion coverage in policies sold in state exchanges and several have already taken action to do precisely that. Plans that do cover abortion in the exchange will have to wall that off in a way to keep it apart from the federal subsidies.
A few more stray but relevant facts:
According to the Kaiser.edu materials, about two-thirds of women aged 15 to 44 use contraception – and do so for about 30 years.
Most employer-based insurance plans do cover contraception, though there are often co-pays. Among large employers, more than 80 percent cover contraception.
Federal Medicaid dollars do not cover abortion under the Hyde Amendment (except for rape, incest or when the life of the mother is in danger) – although some states use their own money to cover abortion in some circumstances. But Medicaid does cover contraception. In fact, Medicaid pays for more than 70 percent of publicly financed family planning services.
And Title X funds family planning clinics (created in 1970 under the Nixon presidency). According to HHS, about 5 million women and men get family planning services through more than 4,500 community-based clinics. Someone with religious objections to providing contraceptives for employees is indirectly paying for Medicaid birth control coverage – and indirectly for the tax subsidies of employer-sponsored insurance – just as we all pay taxes that fund some things we agree with and some we don’t.
By: Joanne Kenen, Association of Health Care Journalists, March 1, 2012
Contraception Primer: Here’s How It Works Guys
I am not going to link to the Rush Limbaugh “slut” comment. I have too busy a day ahead to spend the next six hours furiously scrubbing myself in the shower whilst rocking and weeping.
I will, however, attempt a substantive point, since this idea that young women are having so much sex they are going broke and want taxpayers to bail them out seems to be solidifying into an actual, real-life meme (which is a bit astounding given what year it is).
That’s just not how it works! Reading the comments that have been made recently, you get the sense that the people—mostly older guys—puking out these sorts of arguments haven’t quite grasped the basics of circa-20121960s contraceptive technology.
So, to all the people making this argument: Hi! Here’s a quick primer. This debate is mostly about the pill, not condoms. It’s not the case that every time a woman has sex she has to take a pill (though something like that also exists for emergency situations, and I’m aware that this enrages you). Rather, women get a prescription for these things called birth-control pills that are generally taken every day. So it’s a fixed prescription cost, and like many such costs, if insurance doesn’t cover it it can get out of hand really quickly because our medical system is an octopus riding a donkey riding a skateboard into a sadness quarry. But there is no proportional relationship between the amount of sex a woman has and the number of standard birth-control pills she consumes. Why, there are even women who aren’t sexually active who take the pill for medical reasons. Whoa!
I know this is a lot to take in all at once, guys. But there are plenty of online resources available if you have any questions.
By: Jesse Singal, Washington Monthly, Political Animal, March 1, 2012
Susan “Lucy” Collins: The Tragic Death Of “Centrism” In Washington
As I’ve been noting here, one of the key things to watch for in today’s vote on the Blunt amendment is how many Republicans defect from the party’s support for it. On the Senate floor just now, one of the key “centrists” that Dems were watching, Susan Collins, announced she will vote for it.
“I feel that I have to vote for Senator Blunt’s amendment, with the hope that its scope will be further narrowed and refined as the legislative process proceeds,” Collins said, vaguely accusing both sides of “playing politics” with the issue.
Collins had been undecided, and the reason she offered for supporting the Blunt measure is that she had asked the Obama administration for further clarification on how Obama’s contraception mandate compromise — which would be undone by Blunt — would impact self-insured religious organizations. She claimed the answer provided by the administration was insufficient.
The question, of course, is whether any answer would have been sufficient. Given Collins’ repeated role as Lucy to the Dems’ Charlie Brown, it’s fair to ask whether this was merely an excuse to cast the Yes vote on Blunt that she would have cast no matter what reassurances the administration offered.
And this goes to the heart of another debate that’s been raging of late. Olympia Snowe’s announced retirement has prompted a great deal of hand-wringing about how supposed “centrist” politicians no longer have any meaningful role to play in Washington. The demands for ideological purity on both sides, we’re told, have grown so strident that the possibility of bipartisan compromise has vanished.
But here you have a case where one of these “centrists” decided not to opt for the compromise position, and instead is going with the extreme one. Obama’s compromise is supported by six in 10 Americans, including 62 percent of independents, according to a new Kaiser poll. The Blunt position, by contrast, is the ideologically rigid one.
If there is no longer any “center” in Washington, it’s because “centrist” Republicans are not embracing solutions that are actually centrist. If bipartisan compromise is no longer possible in Washington, it’s because “centrist” Republicans are embracing the uncompromising positions, rather than the ones that represent genuine compromise.
By: Greg Sargent, The Washington Post Plum Line, March 1, 2012
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 