I'm not sure why the right decided to launch this anti-VA nonsense, but so long as conservatives are pushing this line, it's worth setting the record straight.
Why privatizie one of the most successful departments in the federal government?
Because it's successful, that's why. Like Social Security and Medicare, the VA proves that government can do things right. Big things, important things. Social security is cradle-to-grave welfare, Medicare is single-payer and VA healthcare is socialized medicine. All are hugely popular. All point the way to the kind of prosperous, peaceful socialistic paradise Europeans enjoy.
And Americans will enjoy that kind of effective, popular government over the repugs' dead bodies.
The repug plan here is simple: destroy successful, popular government programs through privatization, then point to failures as proof government can't work.
They've been doing it since 1981, picking off the low-hanging fruit like defense contracting. All that's left are the three behemoths of successful, popular liberal government: Social Security and VA.
As WikiLeaks prepares to release 400,000 Iraq war documents, two former government security officials argue that WikiLeaks could have prevented 9-11, if the website had been around in 2001.
The two ought to know: Coleen Rowley, the Minneapolis FBI agent who tried to sound the alarm a month before 9-11, and Bogdan Dzakovic, a special agent for the FAA’s security division, who was a leader of the agency’s “Red Team” that was warning officials about vulnerabilities in airport security just before 9-11.
“Things might have been different if there had been a quick, confidential way to get information out,” the two write – and WikiLeaks could have provided exactly that, according to their op-ed in the L.A. Times on Friday.
Remember the 2000 Senate race in New York? Rick Lazio refused to shake his opponent's hand after a debate because he was pissed about an ad. Hillary Rodham Clinton beat his ass by a mile.
A debate filled with unabashed personal attacks concluded Sunday night with Republican Rand Paul briskly brushing past Democrat Jack Conway, refusing to shake the hand of an opponent who raised questions about his religious beliefs.
“Jack, have you no decency? Have you no shame?” Paul asked Conway during the fourth of five scheduled debates between Kentucky’s U.S. Senate candidates.
Paul said Conway’s actions were “a disgrace” that should disqualify Conway from the heated contest Kentuckians will decide Nov. 2.
Paul’s initial comments in the debate focused on a Conway TV ad that began airing over the weekend that says Paul was in a secret brotherhood while in college at Baylor University that mocked Christianity. It also alleged that he tied up a woman while in college and forced her to bow down to a god named “Aqua Buddha.”
This shouldn't be a surprise, coming from the man who thinks his job as the number-one law enforcement official in the Commonwealth of Kentucky is to spend millions of taxpayer dollars arguing in court that Kentuckians don't need no steenkin' laws cuz an invisible sky wizard does magic for us.
Democratic U.S. Senate nominee Jack Conway questions the religious faith of his Republican opponent, Rand Paul, in a new television ad launched Saturday.
“Why was Rand Paul a member of a secret society that calls the Holy Bible a hoax …?” asks the ad. “Why did Rand Paul once tie a woman up. Tell her to bow down before a false idol and say his God was Aqua Buddha?”
Paul’s campaign immediately attacked the ad, saying Conway “stepped way over the line” in “a shameful and despicable ad that questions Dr. Paul’s Christian faith.”
Paul said in a statement that he is a “pro-life Christian” who has “never written or spoken anything that would indicate otherwise.”
Paul is a member of The Presbyterian Church of Bowling Green, where his wife Kelley is a deacon.
The Conway campaign said Paul needs to explain why he joined a secret society in college after the president of Baylor University banned it in 1978, two years before Paul attended the Texas school, because it “made fun of not only the Baptist religion, but Christianity and Christ.”
Paul is, of course, a Mitch McConnell/Jim Demint repug, more than happy to carry water for corporations, Wall Street, the obscenely wealthy and the Xian Taliban. That's disgusting, depressing and un-American, but unfortunately neither illegal nor unconstitutional.
Attorney General Jack Conway, however, by attacking Paul's religious belief, is flouting the Constitutional prohibition on establishing a religious test for political office.
In that ad, Conway is saying that Rand Paul is not qualified to be a U.S. Senator because he is not Christian enough.
That is an absolutely outrageous thing for anyone who calls himself an American to say. It is despicable.
As I have written before, I think that belief in the efficacy of prayers to an invisible sky wizard of any denomination is sufficient proof of rational incompetence to bar anyone from any position of responsibility.
I would love to have the opportunity to vote for a candidate who proudly declares her atheism and insists that devotion to reality makes her a better candidate than a christian or muslim or jew or hindu or buddhist whose belief in a myth trumps facts, logic and reason.
But I would never declare a candidate unqualified for office for not being freakazoid enough.
(The last despised minority is, of course, rational thinkers. Otherwise known as atheists.)
Turns out those campaign ads against Democrats aren't just funded by anonymous corporations and illegal foreign donations; they're also full of proven lies.
And if that was all, it'd be pretty awful. But Greg Sargent reminds us today that Rove isn't just lying to the public and the media about campaign financing, he's also lying to voters in the ads he's helping finance.
Here's something important that's getting lost in the firefight over the money funding the ads by the U.S. Chamber and Karl Rove's groups: Many of the ads themselves have been debunked by independent fact checkers as false, grossly misleading, or marred with distortions.
I've compiled a list below, and the totality is striking. Thus far the media focus has understandably been on the flap over the White House's foreign money charges. But there's another big part of the story that's going undercovered: The scope of the dishonesty and distortion that's flowing from the conservative side of this debate.
Not only are the ads themselves getting widely debunked, but the justifications the groups are offering for the ad onslaught (that liberals and labor do this too) are also demonstrably false or misleading. We're witnessing a massive disinformation campaign flooding airwaves across the country that could change the outcome of major races and shift the balance of power in Congress, funded by money from undisclosed sources, justified with still more falsehoods and disinformation.
Greg ran a list of Senate campaign ads -- some financed by Rove's attack operations, some by the Chamber -- and literally all of them include demonstrable falsehoods.
The layers of deception are getting tough to keep up with. But the bottom line remains the same: Karl Rove and his fellow GOP hatchetmen are raking in obscene amounts of undisclosed money, using it to lie to voters, all the while lying about the campaign finance fiasco that's allowing them to buy an election cycle.
Greg concluded, "[T]he sheer scale and dimension of dishonesty and distortion coming from the conservative side of this debate is a very big part of the story. And it's largely going untold."
Have you made calls for your Democratic Congressional candidate today?
It comforts the freakazoids to think of liberals as idle rich do-gooders and drugged hippies in their ivory towers plotting to destroy ril murkins. But liberals all come from the same place: seeing first-hand the horrific effects on everyday people of I-got-mine politics.
As Margaret worked in New York's Lower East Side with poor women who were repeatedly suffering due to frequent childbirth and self-induced abortions, she began to speak out for the need of women to become knowledgeable about birth control. While she was working on duty as a nurse, Margaret met Sadie Sachs when she was called to her apartment to assist her after she had become extremely ill due to a self-induced abortion. Afterward, Sadie begged the attending doctor to tell her how she could prevent this from happening again, to which the doctor simply gave the advice to remain abstinent. A few months later, Margaret was once again called back to the Sachs’ apartment, only this time, Sadie was found dead after yet another self-induced abortion.
Did everybody catch that? Abstinence advice led directly to death by self-induced abortion.
This was a turning point in Margaret’s life. Sadie Sachs’ predicament was not at all uncommon during that time period. Margaret came to believe then, more than ever, that she needed to do something to help desperate women before they were driven to pursue dangerous and illegal abortions.
Margaret Sanger, founder of the American Birth Control League (now Planned Parenthood), established her clinic in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn at 46 Amboy St. It took the cops nine days to figure out what was going on before they raided the joint and arrested her.
Sanger, whose activism was well known from her column, "What Every Girl Should Know" in the New York Call, was charged with maintaining a public nuisance and jailed for a month. Released, Sanger reopened her clinic and got jugged again.
Sanger's clinic stood in defiance of the Comstock Act, passed in 1873, which banned birth control outright and made it a crime to send contraceptives through the mail. Sanger's defiance brought the legal system down on her head, forcing her to flee the country at one point to avoid prosecution. (Happily, she fled to Europe, where she learned a whole lot more about contraception and the politics of sexuality.)
Sanger saw birth control not only as a woman's issue but as a class issue. Although contraception was technically illegal for everyone, it was widely known that wealthy Americans practiced it freely, obtaining their devices — condoms and spermicidal jelly, mostly — from abroad.
In 1938, with Sanger once again forcing the issue in court, a judge lifted the federal ban on birth control devices. This, in effect, ended the Comstock era. Almost immediately, the diaphragm became a popular method of contraception.
Nevertheless, the United States remained shackled to its Puritan heritage and didn't get around to completely legalizing birth control methods for married couples until 1965. A year before Sanger's death, the Supreme Court struck down a Connecticut law banning the practice, citing a couple's right to privacy. It would take another seven years for that right to be extended to unmarried sex partners.
Saying you're against abortion and against contraception is like saying you're against teenagers driving cars and against a minimum driving age. The latter defeats the former. And yet that is exactly the bizarre position of repug candidates like Sharron Angle, Christine O'Donnell and Rand Paul.
At 8:30 a.m. eastern on Monday, be sure to call 800-704-9804, code 82558442#, to get in on the teleconference of the latest meeting of the ... wait for it ...
Kentucky Climate Action Council.
No, seriously.
KENTUCKY CLIMATE ACTION PLAN COUNCIL TO MEET
Public encouraged to attend
FRANKFORT, Ky. (Oct. 14, 2010) – The Kentucky Climate Action Plan Council will hold a full-day meeting beginning at 8:30 a.m., Monday, Oct. 18, at the Department for Environmental Protection in Frankfort, Ky.
WHAT: Kentucky Climate Action Plan Council WHEN: Monday, Oct. 18, 2010; 8:30 a.m. – 4:30 p.m. EDT WHERE: Department for Environmental Protection Large Conference Room 301D 300 Fair Oaks Drive Frankfort, Ky.
Members of the public may attend in person or by teleconference. The call-in phone number is 800-704-9804 and the conference code is 82558442#.
Background materials for this meeting may be viewed at www.kyclimatechange.us.
Once upon a time, Kentucky had a Natural Resources and Environmental Protection Cabinet, which had responsibility for regulating the coal industry, and an Energy Cabinet, which had responsibility for promoting the coal industry. NREP may not have been the most zealous regulator on the planet, but at least it was not constantly compromised by a competing internal priority.
Now we have an "Energy and Environmental Protection Cabinet" which states right up front, in the name, what is its first priority.
The agenda is as follows:
1. Welcome and Introductions 2. Approval of KCAPC Meeting No. 4 Summary 3. Purpose and Goals for KCAPC Meeting No. 5 4. Status and Next Steps of the KCAPC Process 5. Review and Approval of Elements of Policy Option Documents from the Technical Work Groups and Presentation of Initial Quantification Results for Selected Options 6. Review of the TWG Specific Common Assumptions Memos for Quantification of the Policy Options 7. Next Steps for KCAPC and Technical Work Groups 8. Agenda, Time, and Date for Next Meeting 9. Public Input 10. Announcements 11. Adjourn
Note the "public input" has been scheduled at the end of the day, when everybody is paralyzed by boredom and dying to leave.
Please, somebody, suggest that the best thing Kentucky could do in the way of Climate Action is to outlaw the coal industry. Be sure to record the response. Just for shits and giggles.
For those cynics who have any sense of irony at all, it's going to be fucking hysterical.
Last week, Kevin Drum mused about the conservative success in creating and perpetuating a "brand" of politics that has become conventional wisdom, and the failure of liberals to do the same.
So our brand is never going to be as strong as theirs. Sure, egalitarianism will always be at its core, but that expresses itself in different ways in different times. It's opposition to slavery in one era, support for women's suffrage in another, and a push for national healthcare sometime after that. These may all spring from a roughly similar impulse, but their political manifestation is so different that it's hard for most people to see that.
So today's liberals want to fight global warming, something we didn't even know existed 50 years ago. We're for reproductive rights and gay marriage, things we didn't care about a century ago. We support more humane immigration laws, something that wasn't even on anyone's radar screen two centuries ago. There's just no way to take a history like this and turn it into a timeless brand. Yes, we're generally for the have-nots — though even that's been suspect over the past few decades — but beyond that I'm not sure there's much more long-term branding we can do. For good or ill, adaptable but fuzzy might just be part of the package.
Bob Somerby thinks that liberal branding isn't as hard as some of us think:
For ourselves, we think it’s very easy: The people, not the powerful! You have to explain where things go from there, of course.
Yep. You have to explain where things go from there. But that's the whole problem, isn't it?
Actually, I think that's exactly what liberals have been missing: 8 short, punchy syllables that will fit on a bumper sticker in readable-at-60-mph font size.
And it covers everything. You don't even have to know what the issue is: if the powerful are for it, liberals are against it. If the powerful are against it, liberals are for it.
Yes, it's simplistic. Name a GOP brand meme that isn't simplistic. Simplistic wins. It's also easily misinterpreted by morons - in liberals' favor. Win again.
Have you made calls for your Democratic Congressional candidate today?
Steve M. writes that Chris Coons missed a huge opportunity during his debate with Christine O'Donnell:
Yes, Coons should have said, as he did, that he was referring to himself facetiously when he said a college trip to Kenya turned him into, in his friends' eyes, "a bearded Marxist." But he should also have said:
Ms. O'Donnell, this is a McCarthyite attack. It's the kind of attack that's very common among you and your friends in the conservative movement and the tea party. You can't accept that we have some disagreements on tax rates or the role of government -- you have to accuse anyone who disagrees with you of being disloyal to this country and of not having this country's best interests at heart.
And excuse me, Miss O'Donnell -- the capital gains tax is Marxist? We've had a capital gains tax in this country for nearly a century, under Republican presidents and Congresses as well as Democratic presidents and Congresses. Republicans as well as Democrats have sometimes felt the need to raise taxes as well as lower them. Are you calling all of these leaders Marxist? Ronald Reagan raised some taxes. Was he a Marxist? Was Franklin Delano Roosevelt a Marxist? Was George Bush the father, who was shot down fighting for this country in World War II, and who raised taxes -- was he a Marxist? Were these people disloyal to America? Were they trying to destroy this country because the tax rates they presided over were higher than the ones you support? Was Eisenhower's use of taxes to pay for the interstate highway system Marxist? Are Medicare and Social Security Marxist? Were those who fought for those benefits being disloyal to this country?
I just want to know how far you think the disloyalty goes. I'm just one candidate, and you're free to smear me all you want. But you and your movement spend a lot of time smearing everyone in this country who sees things differently from the way you do, and that is outrageous.
This isn't Alan Grayson-style I'm-not-the-Antichrist-you're-the-Antichrist hyperbole. This would be somber, measured righteous indignation. It's something we never get from a Democrat. And this country is in peril the longer we go on without a single politician who'll say something like this.
Personally, I don't think Grayson's attacks are remotely close to hyperbolic, but I take Steve's point.
Righteous indignation is exactly the missing element in Democratic campaigns over the past 20 years.
The only logical response to every single thing the wingnut freakazoids have said and done - from shutting down the government and impeaching Clinton to handing $700 billion we don't have to the already obscenely rich - is this:
Are you fucking kidding me?
But instead of toning that down slightly - to perhaps "Ask the doctors to check your medication - it's making you hallucinate" - Democratic candidates accept the parameters of republican insanity where facts and reality can never win.
Have you made phone calls for your Democratic Congressional candidate today?
WHEN LIFE RESEMBLES A MONTY PYTHON SKETCH....There's a classic Monty Python sketch from 1972 called the "Argument Clinic." It goes like this: a man who enjoys a good, substantive debate goes to a business that ostensibly provides one, but after paying his fee, he quickly discovers that the man on the other side of the desk simply contradicts literally everything he says.
The customer, exasperated, eventually tries to explain, "An argument is a connected series of statements intended to establish a proposition." His adversary replies ,"No, it isn't." He tries again, "Argument is an intellectual process. Contradiction is just the automatic gainsaying of any statement the other person makes." After a short pause, the antagonist responds, "No, it isn't."
A little too often, the "Argument Clinic" sketch reminds me of efforts to engage conservative Republicans in any kind of discourse. The NYT, for example, had an item this week about right-wing Senate candidate Pat Toomey (R) in Pennsylvania, which included this gem:
Mr. Toomey says he favors making the Bush-era tax cuts permanent for all Americans -- which would add $700 billion more to the deficit over 10 years than the plan advocated by President Obama to let the lower rates expire for the rich. But he also expresses a desire to reduce the deficit.
At the ironworks shop, Mr. Toomey brushed aside a question from a local reporter who pointed out that real income for American workers dropped after the Bush tax cuts, saying he did not believe the data.
Well, no, of course not. The data is legitimate, but it would tell Toomey what he doesn't want to hear -- so he brushes it aside. Any of us could go to Toomey, data and charts in hand, and point at the evidence showing that income levels dropped after Bush cut taxes. He'd reply, "No, they didn't."
The problem, of course, is that the phenomenon goes much further than Toomey. The other day, Rick Santorum insisted on national television that under the Bush administration, poverty rates among poverty among African Americans and among single unmarried women were "at the lowest rate ever in the history of this country."
That's not even close to true, but if you went to Santorum and explained that reality shows he's wrong, he'd reply, "No, it doesn't."
This comes up just about every day. Here's overwhelming evidence showing that global warming is real. "No, it doesn't." Here's extensive data showing that tax cuts for the wealthy increase the deficit. "No, it doesn't." Here's plain-text proof showing that the Affordable Care Act isn't socialized medicine or a government-takeover. "No, it doesn't."
This isn't about lying, per se, though that's certainly a problem, too. This is about an entire political party rejecting reality and replacing it with a fantasy. "Contradiction is just the automatic gainsaying of any statement the other person makes." It's also the hallmark of American political discourse in the 21st century.
I'll go further and say that life doesn't "resemble" a Monty Python sketch; politics in this country has become a Monty Python sketch.
More importantly, contradiction is not the hallmark of American political discourse - it's the hallmark of republican political discourse.
And while the individual practitioners of just-say-"no" discourse may be sincere in their reality-denial, the widespread phenomenon is a deliberate one. It is a carefully planned and brilliantly executed operation of pure desperation.
Republicans cannot govern in the classic sense of providing public service, so they shut down the entire mechanism of government, preventing Democratic leaders from governing and proving that government doesn't work no matter who's in charge.
If every adult citizen in this country actually voted, republicans would never win another election, so they commit widespread election fraud to prevent non-republican groups from voting. They cover up their election fraud with false accusations of voter fraud against the very groups they are illegally preventing from voting.
Factual, disinterested news coverage exposes republican malfeasance and corporate ownership, so they destroyed the concept of objective news with a cable channel that spews propaganda and calls it news.
Republicans can't compete in clean elections that ban large donations, so their loyalists on the Supreme Court permit the corporations that already own republicans to buy elections for them - and do it in secret.
Yet it's not enough. People still want a working, effective federal government. They want every adult citizen to vote. They turn away when Fox jumps the shark with obvious lunatics like Beck. They reject political advertisements bought by secret foreign donors.
So republicans have no choice but to attack the enemy at its source. They're destroying the very concept of facts and reality with candidates who stand there and deny gravity.
Have you made phone calls for your Democratic Congressional candidate today?
I'd say the state and national Democratic parties are missing a big opportunity by not backing Ed Marksberry to the hilt, but of course Ed Marksberry is a Real Democratic candidate, who puts people before the powerful, and that's exactly the opposite of what our repug-led KDP and corporate-owned DNC really want.
Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale is probably the only thing that comes close to describing what the freakazoid-led repugs have in mind for young women who have sex.
Yes, ladies, you are whores and assumed guilty of blastocyst-murder, making false rape charges, sullying the chastity of pure young men and generally destroying the moral fiber of the nation.
And don't think they're not going to punish you for it.
It has long been obvious to me that most anti-choice zealots think women who have abortions are whores, but I've rarely seen it demonstrated so clearly --- and by a Republican Senate candidate no less -- teabagger Ken Buck.
Yesterday I posted about the story McJoan at DKos put together in which his failure to pursue a rape case looks more and more like a belief that the woman had it coming. Today it appears that anti-choice fanatic Buck --- who has expressed skepticism that even "saving the life of the mother" is necessarily a valid excuse for abortion --- believed that the rape victim had had an abortion (which she denied) and thus had a motive for claiming her former boyfriend had raped her. The kicker here is that the accused rapist admitted the rape. The only way any of this craziness makes sense is if he figured that whatever happened, the baby killing whore deserved what she got.
This is a very twisted, fundamentalist misogynist --- and he's not the only one running for office as a Tea Party candidate. And while they may seem like outliers who don't really have an impact on American life, it's foolish to take that for granted. These people are mainstreaming ideas that up until recently were on the fringes of right wing discussion. It wasn't long ago, after all, that the idea that women at least have a right not to bear their rapist father's child was considered to be only common sense. A ban on all abortions, regardless of reason, is now on the mainstream menu.
Granted, only hysterical, unserious women who don't understand the important issues seem to care about this, but it's having an effect on serious "real" politics whether Democratic political consultants like it or not. Liberal women, especially young liberal women, are among the least enthusiastic voters among the electorate and yet they are essential to the Democratic vote this fall. Apparently, the strategists have belatedly figured out that it might be useful to stop using women's bodies as bargaining chips (at least until the election.) You can't blame women for feeling that this late concern isn't exactly a profile in principled sincerity:
Republicans have won points with many voters by promising a conservative overhaul of taxes and spending, but Democrats are working hard in the closing weeks of the campaign to convince voters that a conservative social agenda is waiting in the wings, too, should Republicans be elected in large numbers.
Abortion rights is the flash point, being wielded by the left in hard-fought races from New York’s contest for governor, to Senate races in Florida and California, as Democratic candidates or groups try to rally their base and attract moderate Republican or independent women — a slice of the electorate that is even more coveted than in years past.
[...]
New York Times/CBS News national polls also say that the political divide between men and women — more men than women gravitating toward Republican candidates, a pattern dating back to Ronald Reagan’s election as president in 1980 — is bigger than average heading into November. And between Mr. Bennet and Mr. Buck, that gender gap is immense. A CNN poll released in late September said that men were 15 percentage points more likely than women to support Mr. Buck, while women were 16 percentage points more likely than men to prefer Mr. Bennet.
“This isn’t a gap, it’s a canyon,” said Susan Carroll, a senior scholar at the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University, who said the average gender difference in presidential races was about seven or eight percentage points.
This new Tea Party GOP is going to be much more hardcore on women's issues. And the more flaccid and overly compromising the Democrats are in return, the more they will turn off one of their largest voting blocs.
Have you made phone calls for your Democratic Congressional candidate today?
All the ads, all the claims, all the flips, all the lies, all the crazy ideas - all on video, plus analysis and snark, and all at Barefoot and Progressive and Page One Kentucky.
It's too bad our media isn't taking this opportunity to talk about mining safety instead of just focusing on the fact that it was something akin to a miracle that these workers have survived this ordeal.
No, not a miracle, but apparently a circus entertaining enough to allow the mine operators to escape punishment for nearly killing 33 men.
In the Herald, Kentucky miners and mine safety advocates discuss the Chilean rescue and what it means.
I still say the midterms are gonna be a wash: lots of seats changing hands, but the numerical result the same. If we get out the Democratic vote, I say five more dems for Nancy and at least one for Harry.
But the real victory might come even if Democrats lose a dozen or two seats in the house and three or four in the Senate. Why? Because the most vulnerable Democratic members of Congress are the anti-choice Blue Dogs who consistently vote with the repugs and sabotage every real Democratic initiative. And now they are getting paid exactly what they've earned.
I wish I could feel sorry for these anti-choice Dems who are being hounded out of office by anti-choice groups, but I just can't. Apparently, they didn't realize what it was like to be in the cross hairs of anti-abortion fanatics who are drunk on their own deluded sense of reality before. Well, now they know:
On a chilly January morning in Erie, Pa., members of the anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony List stood outside Rep. Kathy Dahlkemper’s office to thank her for opposing a health care bill that didn’t include stringent abortion restrictions.
Ten months later, Dahlkemper and other anti-abortion Democrats are at risk of becoming an endangered species in the House.
She and others eventually signed on to the health reform law, endorsing an executive order that barred federal funding of abortions. But SBA List and other anti-abortion groups opposed the executive order, contending it was too weak.
Now, SBA List is engaged in a multimillion-dollar attack on its former allies, replete with bus tours and billboards alleging that members “voted for taxpayer-funded abortion.” The group invested $1.5 million in its “Votes Have Consequences” bus tour in August, targeting anti-abortion Democrats who supported health reform. Just last week, SBA List spent $55,000 on 32 billboards dotting the districts of three vulnerable Democrats.
[...]
“It’s been extremely frustrating at times,” Dahlkemper told POLITICO. “All along, I have donated. I have marched. I have been an unmarried pregnant woman who chose life. I have lived this. Now I’m 52, and in the last six months, all of a sudden, people are questioning who I am.”
Really? And they are doing it based on utter bullshit too? How uncomfortable that must make her. Not quite as uncomfortable as it is for young girls who are harassed on their way into a clinic or for a doctor's family when he is murdered by anti-abortion zealots, but uncomfortable nonetheless.
SNIP
I suppose it's too much to ask that the press explain that the anti-choice lobby's complaint is total nonsense and that the health care bill actually restricted access to abortion. (That would be considered rude and beyond the pale, I'm sure.) But the fact is that these anti-abortion Democrats did vote for an anti-abortion bill --- all the Democrats did. What these people are getting stabbed in the back for is failing to derail a bill that the GOP (though its mendacious social conservative faction) desperately wanted derailed. It is simple political payback for refusing to fall on their swords for the Republican party over a completely made up issue. Lie down with dogs ...
As far as I'm concerned, it's good riddance to bad Democrats. These people work against something that I consider fundamental and the leadership ends up using women's bodies as a negotiating chip whenever they need something to throw to the Republicans. The parties breaking down on lines that more clearly show who is and isn't for women's autonomy will make it far less likely that they'll consider it a useful "bipartisan" chip to use whenever they hit a stalemate.
Moreover, these anti-choice Democrats have been willing dupes of a social conservative movement that is far more concerned about its political clout than it is about principles or honesty --- and that political clout resides in the Republican Party. If they lose, they should run as liberal anti-choice Republicans next time and see how anxious the GOP really is to find "common ground." Somehow, I don't think even they can be so deluded as to think that was ever a two way street.
It's just a shame that Wire Hangar DINO Ben Chandler, who managed to fuck over women's rights twice by voting FOR the medieval Stupak amendment and then AGAINST health care reform, is unlikely to be among the ranks of the beaten.
See the rest of both speeches here, as well as the speeches of Senator Wendell Ford, who for 24 years held the seat for which Conway is running, BlueDog DINO Ben "Wire Hangar" Chandler, repug-lite KY-6, and Lt.-Gov.-without-portfolio Daniel "Sour Grapes" Mongiardo.
"Blue" in Blue in the Bluegrass refers to my politics, not my state of mind, although being progressive-democratic in Kentucky is not for the faint of heart.
The Bluegrass Region of Kentucky is Central Kentucky, the area around Lexington. It's also sometimes known as the Golden Triangle, the region formed by Louisville in the west, Cincinnati in the north and Lexington in the east-south corner. This is the most economically advanced, politically progressive and aesthically beautiful area of the state. Also the most overpopulated by annoying yuppies and the most endangered by urban sprawl.
A Yellow Dog Democrat is one who will vote for even a yellow dog if it is running as a Democrat. I can't claim to be quite that fanatically partisan, especially since quite a few candidates who run as Democrats in Kentucky are more Republican than a lot of Republicans I can name.
But I do love the story Kentucky House leader Rocky Adkins never tires of telling about the old-timer in Eastern Kentucky who was once accused of being willing to vote for Satan if Satan ran as a Democrat. Spat back the old-timer:
"Not in a primary, I wouldn't!"
Amen.
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