"If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrement"

"No woman can call herself free who does not own and control her body. No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother."  ~Margaret Sanger

This article is eight years old (one of my Twitter-peeps led me to it), but in many ways it's more relevant than ever. The steady erosion of Roe v. Wade at the state level makes it a nightmare for many women to access a legal medical procedure, and the possibility that it may be overturned altogether is not out of the question.

Not that abortion's legality or lack thereof will stop a woman who has determined in her own mind and heart that she cannot, and will not, have a baby.


The arguments would be endless, but they would be irrelevant to the facts: From the moment I started looking for an abortion, not once did I even consider going through with the pregnancy. Not for one second. It simply was not going to happen. Nothing, and I mean nothing, was going to stop me, and it could have cost me my life. And this is what I had in common with millions and millions of women throughout time and history. When a woman does not want to be pregnant, the drive to become unpregnant can turn into a force equal to the nature that wants her to stay pregnant. And then she will look for an abortion, whether it's legal or illegal, clean or filthy, safe or riddled with danger. This is simply a fact, whatever our opinion of it. And whether we like it or not, humans, married and unmarried, will continue to have sex -- wisely, foolishly, violently, nicely, hostilely, pleasantly, dangerously, responsibly, carelessly, sordidly, exaltedly -- and there will be pregnancies: wanted, unwanted, partly wanted, partly unwanted.


A society that does not accept the facts is a childish society, and a society that makes abortion illegal....is a cruel and backward society that makes being female a crime. 

I watched the Republican debate in South Carolina tonight. Close to the end, there was approximately a ten-minute back-and-forth about abortion, with the four rich white guys on the stage (who will never have to worry about an unplanned pregnancy) basically trying to out-pro-life each other. What struck me, though, that throughout all of this freewheeling more-forced-birther-than-thou, not once was the word "woman" ever mentioned.

Not once was the carrier of said holy fetus, a real person with hopes, dreams, wants, needs, and actual human rights despite possessing a uterus, ever brought up.

If that doesn't say something about the deplorable state of the modern-day Republican Party, I don't know what does.

"The willingness to share makes one free"

"At the heart of my politics has always been the value of community, the belief that we are not merely individuals struggling in isolation from each other, but members of a community who depend on each other, who benefit from each other's help, who owe obligations to each other. From that everything stems: solidarity, social justice, equality, freedom."  ~Tony Blair

Another must-read piece from Charlie Pierce, about his nightmare of navigating the health-insurance maze to receive medication for a chronic illness. It ends this way.


I mention all of this because, tomorrow night, the five remaining Republican candidates will get up on stage and they will promise to repeal even the tepid, insurance-friendly reform of the way we do health-care in this country. Willard Romney will do this even though the tepid, insurance-friendly reform is one he virtually invented. They will have nothing to replace it. They will argue for "market-based" solutions. The above — that is a "market-based solution." And, by the way, this is the kind of thing that zombie-eyed granny starver Paul Ryan wants to put elderly people through in place of Medicare. Phone trees. Automated voices. Hours of their dwindling lives on hold, waiting for purportedly live persons who won't be able to help them. And zombie-eyed granny-starver Paul Ryan is considered by people in my business to be a serious thinker on these matters.

Every single one of these Republicans will make the argument that, because of the entire morning I spent dealing with the preposterous way we do health-care in this country, that I am a "freer" person than are the people in Canada, or New Zealand, or Germany, or Finland. That I had to spend an entire morning mired in bureaucratic absurdity means I have retained my "freedom" as an American.

I work for the Veterans Administration. For all its shortcomings, people who need care can damn well get it. People who need medication can get it. I see it every day. It is "socialist medicine," probably not at its finest, but it bloody well works.

Republicans want to deny this or any other health-care reforms to Americans, and throw them to the insurance-company sharks, all in the name of profit and "market solutions."

President Obama's Affordable Care Act is not in the realm of VA care, and certainly not comparable to Canadian or European health care, but I'll take it. And if further down the line we can get rid of for-profit health care altogether and institute Medicare for all or VA-style health care for all, so much the better.

It is high time we grew up as a country, put aside our selfish, immature Wild West "bootstrap" mentality, and realize that we are indeed our brothers' and sisters' keepers. As Kris Kristofferson so eloquently stated, "Freedom's just another word for nothin' left to lose."

"Reality bites...and doesn't let go"

"How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg? Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg." ~Abraham Lincoln

This is just beautiful.

Why I'm Leaving the Republican Party and Endorsing President Obama

The Republican Party refuses to look at what works and what doesn’t — they simply base policy on whether it fits into a rigid anti-government philosophy, whether it is good policy or not.  Essentially, the effectiveness of policy is completely and totally irrelevant to Republicans.  Additionally, the Republican Party believes more strongly in obstructing anything that President Obama proposes than in real solutions that would create jobs and help the average American.

(snip)

Even worse, the Republican Party has bamboozled the American people by portraying themselves as the party of fiscal responsibility.  Any person who can recognize that some numbers are larger than other numbers know the obvious fact that the biggest spending Presidents are Republicans.  Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush alone are responsible for most of the national debt.  Bill Clinton cut government and actually spent less money than was taken in…but George W. Bush quickly changed that.


I believe in smart government that effectively does what it should and leaves the rest to the private sector, while still recognizing the legitimacy of the existence of government.  I believe in equal rights for all Americans, whether gay, straight, female, male, immigrant or naturally born.  The Republican Party no longer believes in any of that.

This is called "living in the real world," the same place I am proud to admit I also inhabit. I will admit, I didn't always feel this way. Once upon a time, I used to (horrors!) watch Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity--the latter more because I thought he was cute than because I was really into what he was saying.

(Needless to say, that caveat does not apply to Bill O'Reilly.)

But the more I read, the more I followed links on the Internet and basically opened my mind, the more I realized these people--and by extension, anyone on Fox News and at Townhall--were simply not telling the truth. Or at the very least, distorting their "facts" beyond all recognition. The more I stepped back and thought about it, the more I realized the modern Republican "Party" had long ago abandoned the definition of a political party and was, in fact, taking on the mark of a religious cult...with Grover Norquist serving as its Grand High Poobah.

Last night's debate certainly drove home that point. I cannot believe one of those babbling idiots is going to win the nomination. Jon Huntsman sounded far and away the sanest of them all, and as others have remarked, he has a snowball's chance in hell of winning the nomination.

Really, what does that say about the Republican Party as a whole?

Any honest conservative should be saddened and dismayed by this turn of events. I would be tempted to feel sorry for them, if it weren't for the fact that if any of these yahoos gets into the White House, the country will crash and burn along with the party.

Be afraid, America. Be very afraid.

"He uses his folly like a stalking horse"

The obvious types of American fascists are dealt with on the air and in the press. These demagogues and stooges are fronts for others. Dangerous as these people may be, they are not so significant as thousands of other people who have never been mentioned.  ~Henry Wallace


I love the articles from the Guardian about American politics.

One can only guess what John Boehner's strategy has been during the past week over the payroll tax cuts. But it looks like he employed the "full bowel technique" with equal success. His Tea Party caucus kept stuffing him with rhetorical bran muffins so that every time he went to a microphone he was full of it. 

Poor muffins. I feel sorry for them. It can't be easy being forced into the service of Tea Party nonsense.

Adrenalin could keep the Tea Party going only so long outside the fetid ecosystem of Fox News, talk radio and the internet, before reality intervened and forced some kind of reckoning.

It continues to amaze me how obvious the reality of Fox News and talk radio is to the rest of the world, and how strenuously Tea Partiers and most Repubicans continue to deny it, clinging to their noxious little Roger Ailes bubble.

I don't agree with everything this writer says--he doesn't understand the depth and depravity of Republican hostage-taking, for example, especially over the debt ceiling. See here for an excellent analysis of how the President beat the Republicans at their own game.

The article's got the Tea Party Republicans nailed, however.

The Tea Party keeps thrashing around for someone, anyone, in whom they can invest their zeal and who the rest of their party (never mind the rest of the country) can live with. They've pretty much been through the pack and just when you think they've hit bottom they plumb new depths. It turns out there is no one who both makes sense to the Tea Party and the rest of the world, let alone their fellow Republicans. These are the people who have been dictating the pace and shape of economic reform for the last year. These are the birthers who believe in death panels, hate government intrusion unless it involves a woman's uterus and love wars and tax cuts but hate budget deficits. 

Hopefully they'll thrash themselves right out of Washington.

In the meantime, we desperately need a press who will tell the truth about what's happening, no matter the howls and whines from Republicans about "liberal bias." Facts are facts, and if they lean towards liberals, so be it. That's called reality. But if the American press won't provide this, it's good to know that there's someone in the world who will.

"Nothing weighs lighter than a promise"

"Some persons make promises for the pleasure of breaking them."  ~William Hazlett

Cthulhu on a cracker. Now the House Republicans want to gum up the works, after John Boehner gave Mitch McConnell the green light to negotiate an agreement on the payroll tax cut with Harry Reid.

Boehner said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” program that the two-month renewal would create added uncertainty for workers, and employers and Congress should delay its holiday break to ensure that a one-year extension was passed.

Well, gee whiz, isn't that what the President demanded in the first place?

By opposing the Senate bill, Boehner is siding with conservative and Tea Party-backed Republicans in the House whom he has had difficulty bringing under control all year, particularly on budget and spending measures.

They defied his leadership in debt-limit negotiations that brought the United States to the brink of default over the summer and cost Washington its prized Triple-A credit rating from Standard & Poor’s.

This just shows what a terrible Speaker of the House John Boehner is. Nancy Pelosi would have these lizards quivering under their rocks by now.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Democrat, noted on Sunday that Boehner had left negotiations on a compromise deal to Reid and his Republican counterpart Senator Mitch McConnell.

Boehner was also known to have been kept informed of the Senate negotiations that produced a deal on Friday night.

And now he's reneging. This isn't surprising, and certainly not out of the ordinary for Republicans. That doesn't make it any less reprehensible.

Moral of this story: If you want better legislation, don't yell at President Obama. Get off your ass and work to elect a better Congress.

Start with getting rid of all these Tea Party non-Patriots.

"Illusion is the first of all pleasures"

"To treat your facts with imagination is one thing, but to imagine your facts is another."  ~John Burroughs

So. Last night I finally gave in to my probably fatal curiosity and watched part of a Republican debate.

Honest to God, I thought I was viewing the Fox News version of the Colbert Report. The sad part is, they're totally serious.

A bigger train wreck I have never seen unfold. If any of these people are elected to the Presidency, it will be an unmitigated disaster for this country and the world.

When Michelle Bachmann declared herself a "serious candidate for President" and asserted that her statements were "factually accurate" (not that Newtie wasn't being condescending, but come on), the planet shook on its axis.

One could wish the multiverse did in fact exist, so I could be spun into a universe far, far away from this madness.

"The ballot is stronger than the bullet"

"A man without a vote is a man without protection." Lyndon B. Johnson

Charlie Pierce goes ballistic, and righteously so, over the subject of voter suppression.


I admit it: I am a fanatic about voting. I vote in every damn election every damn time. I buy stuff I shouldn't be eating at the bake sale. Pay attention, I tell people. A while back, when nobody was looking, a bunch of creationist fanatics took over the school board in Dover, Pennsylvania and rammed through an "intelligent design" program in the local high school. Parents sued. The fanatics lost, and it eventually cost the local school board over a million bucks in legal fees. All because not enough people paid attention to a school-board election. Don't take an election off, because you never know what the bastards are trying to pull. I say this all the time to young people and, most of the time, they act as though I've asked them if they've heard the new Wishbone Ash album, or seen the latest Pennebaker doc. But things changed over the past 10 years, and especially in the last five. The 2008 campaign was a revelation to cynical old souls like me. It took a lot to break down a generation of apathy about how government works and our place in it. That new spirit is still very fragile. One hinked-up national election and it's gone again, maybe for good. That is what I'm worried about.


The same thing that can be said about the people in Dover could also be said of the people who stayed home in Wisconsin and woke up with Scott Walker as their governor, and Ron Johnson as their senator, and a legislature full of wingnuts whose respect for actual American values doesn't extend much past what fits in their wallets. And this is why they are making it so hard for people to vote there. Not because they're concerned about the "integrity of the process" (Scott Walker? The integrity of the process? Stop me before I bust a rib here) but because they're afraid the basic integrity of the process — one man, one vote, all together — will reassert itself against the inattention that gave them the power to screw with all John Lewis accomplished.

There's also a very telling comment from Barry Friedman.

Just because there are two sides to every story doesn't mean there are two legitimate (and sane) sides to every story.

This Republican canard about "voter fraud" should be rebutted at every opportunity, because It. Simply. Is. Not. True. Period. But by using this fear-mongering myth, elderly people, and poor people, and brown people, and students, are being denied their right to vote. (Hopefully, Eric Holder will put his money where his mouth is and crack down on this odious practice.)

Still, one must ask why this is so popular among certain Republican governors and legislatures. Well, which party do poor people, and brown people, and students, and even a fair amount of elderly people, vote for?

I'll give you one guess: it sure ain't the Gerrymandering Obstructionist Pinheads. (The only useful word Bill O'Reilly ever made up.)

This should be a national scandal. Hearings should be held, and journalists should be shouting this from the rooftops. The Repugs basically hate President Obama so much they are willing to do anything to defeat him, including rigging the game in their favor. Of course, the Republican propaganda machine, Fake Noise, is a big help in convincing people this falsehood is true.

We can't afford to get distracted with this election, folks. The Republican endgame is in sight.