Rachel Maddow Has A Book to Sell!

... Which, needless to say, she explains far more competently in the video than I could hope to. Even better news, for fans of Dr. Maddow: Crown Publishing not only sent me a copy of DRIFT: The Unmooring of American Military Power, I’ve got a signed hardback copy to give away to one of you lucky readers. Haven’t finished reading my copy yet, but so far it’s both brisk and informative—as anyone who’s listened to Maddow would expect.

So, the Contest: I’ll be re-posting this entry tomorrow, for people who go to bed early or don’t read Balloon Juice on the weekends. Then, between 7pm and 8pm EDT, WordPress willing, I’ll put up a post labelled “CONTEST: Rachel Maddow’s Drift”. The writer of Comment #[redacted] on that post wins the book… and the rest of you can place your pre-orders in time for Tuesday’s release.

While this isn’t optimal for BJ’s overseas readers, it’s the least unfair method I can come up with to give as many people as possible a chance at winning. Any suggestions, please leave me a comment below!

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Just another raucous gathering

We went out to Toledo this morning to see the Vice President speak:

Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Obama administration’s go-to emissary to the Rust Belt, waded into his political sweet zone on Thursday, promoting the White House’s economic record to a raucous gathering at the United Auto Workers Local 12 hall. He talked up the American auto industry, praised the president’s spine and criticized the Republican presidential candidates by name – repeatedly – accusing them of being “about protecting the privileged sector.”
“I am laying out a clear and stark difference between us and our opponents,” Mr. Biden said before a supportive crowd of about 500, many of them employees of Jeep, one of this city’s biggest employers.
Mr. Biden’s drop-in to this electorally vital state was billed by the president’s re-election enterprise as a first salvo of sorts in a more formal phase of the campaign.
Mr. Biden’s rhetoric was also more nakedly campaign-oriented than typically vice presidential. It included explicit denunciations of some of the remaining Republican candidates, Rick Santorum, the former senator of Pennsylvania,Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker, and – particularly – Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, whom the White House still views as its most likely challenger in the fall, despite Mr. Romney’s losses to Mr. Santorum in two Southern primaries this week.
“The verdict is in,” Mr. Biden said. “President Obama was right, and they were dead wrong.”

General raucousness:

Less raucous, but maybe more dangerous. The woman on the left is a neighborhood team leader (Alinskyite, obviously) and the woman on the right calls herself a “volunteer” (ACORN?):

We here in Ohio are going to hear how Mitt Romney wanted to let Detroit go bankrupt each and every day until November.

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Perceived Crimes And Collective Punishment

Expanding on the conversation in ABL’s thread from yesterday, I’m honestly wondering if we do understand that the larger, more salient point of crazy, clearly unconstitutional insanity like Arizona’s “right to fire people for using birth control” bill is to assure the Republican base that the coalition of “others” that elected Barack Obama to the White House: all “those” people who “don’t know their proper place” like African-Americans, Latinos, young people, women, the LGBT community, and “traitor” liberals in general, are going to be punished in 2013 and only they will be punished, right?

Look, Republicans are basically saying “Hey, look, we know you’re scared.  When push came to shove, the America you thought you knew sided with the black guy and for a lot of you that was pretty much the last straw.  So here’s the deal:  we promise to make laws that will assure that, demographic shift be damned, they’re never going to have that kind of financial or political power again for a long, long time.  We’re going to force the reckoning that you know has to be coming soon and we’ll make sure the bill goes to them, not you.  And here’s the best part.  We’ll design the laws to be guilt-free code-word stuff.  We’ll give you the power to make the decisions on winners and losers and keep the losers losing for a long time to come.  We’ve got all kinds of experience with that.  Don’t worry about the courts, we’ve got those covered.  If you side with us now they’ll be backing us for decades, that’s where there real long game is and then the control at the local and state level really pays off.  But we need you with us, because anyone against us, well…you don’t want to be them when this train leaves the station, because it’s going to run over everyone else, got it?  What do you say?”

And yes, that means that a healthy chunk of our political process in this country is motivated by the “plot” of GCB.  It’s all about vengeance, both petty and fever-bright.  Never mind the GOP’s real aim is to screw over the people who support them in the end, but they need the political support for now.  They figure once they get back into power, they won’t make the same mistakes of the Dubya era as far as allowing that power to slip through their fingers again.  It’s time to reboot America, they believe.  They’re not too far away from being able to pull it off, either.  Demographic tides and all be damned if they can lock down power at the state level to simply ignore federal laws they don’t like and simply treat the unwashed “others” unlucky enough to live in a red state as untouchable lepers who need to be driven off to the urban hellholes and liberal enclaves.

Something to keep in the back of your mind when you hear the GOP make their pitches this campaign season.

 

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Omigod!!!!! They Found the Whitey Tape!!!!!

No, not that whitey tape. This is another whitey tape! (Or maybe it’s even worse than a whitey tape!) And it hasn’t been located, exactly—but, as Ben Shapiro tells us over at World O’ Breitbart, or whatever it is they’re calling the site these days, the tape has been identified….

Sources inform Breitbart.com today that Pam Dickler, director of the 1998 production of The Love Song of Saul Alinsky in Chicago that included a panel discussion featuring then-State Sen. Barack Obama, has a video tape of the play.

And she won’t release it.

“There is only one archive tape of the play and I have it,” Dickler informed our source. “It is not in Chicago.”

Dickler told our source that she doesn’t believe she’s ever watched the tape, and she doesn’t know if it “can be viewed.” But she added: “No one is going to see the tape.”

She said she felt “very protective over it … due to all of the interest from conservatives recently.”...

Oh, this is going to keep a large crew of wingnut-welfare cases occupied for months—years, maybe. But really, who knows—does the damn thing even exist? Or is Dickler just messing with Young Ben’s head? And if it does exist, is it just of the play or of the discussion as well?

If the discussion was taped, it’s really hard to imagine that Obama said much—according to the previous story about this, the discussion panel included nineteeen different boldface names, most of whom, unlike the then-little-known “Sen. Baraka Obama,” were locally prominent enough to have their names spelled correctly on the theater’s press release. And those nineteen promised play-discussers were “among many others.” (Click to enlarge:)

Have you ever been to a discussion like this? I know Ben Shapiro and the other Breitbartniks would never have had such an experience, because it’s too commie-liberal for them, but really, if you’ve got that many participants, a lot of them aren’t going to say very much. I’m sure Shapiro thinks this would have been like some Party Congress that went on for hours and hours after the play, with everyone smoking Russian cigarettes, but people get bored after a while, especially if they just sat through a play, so my guess is that it broke up after an hour or so at most, and Obama’s contribution mostly consisted of nodding in agreement. (Though if the tape is ever found, that’s going to be the source of another Breitbart EXCLUSIVE!—“Look! Studs Terkel says, ‘It’s a class issue,’ and Obama nods in agreement! IT’S NOD-GATE!” Or some brief remark by Obama, barely audible over the inevitable feedback whine-note and lost in the theater’s echo, will be misinterpreted: he’ll have said, “How can we raise their standard of living?” and the Breitbartettes will say, “ARGH! ARGH! HE SAID, ‘HONKY, RAISE THEIR STANDARD OF LIVING’!”)

If the tape exists, will it ever be found? My guess is that it fell into the hands of some member of the troupe who subsequently unloaded it after a move to Vancouver or Brooklyn, and now it’s gathering dust in some junk shop, cryptically labeled and wedged in between an Alf lunchbox and a stack of Gino Vannelli LPs. But that’s not going to stop some right-wing plutocrat from doling out several million dollars in expense money to a bunch of pasty-faced College Republicans to try to find it. Wow, that will be money and time well spent.

(X-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog.)

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Practically Frothing For War

The redemption of Rick Santorum as Serious Foreign Policy Thinker(tm) comes courtesy of Michael Ledeen in the WSJ.

After leaving the Senate in 2007, Mr. Santorum wrote about foreign policy frequently for the Ethics and Public Policy Center, where he was a fellow until June of 2011. In essays written for the center, he acknowledges that terrorists are indeed inspired by radical Islam—but he wants to work with Muslims who do not wage jihad, subjugate women or oppress minorities. He’s specific about the radicals: They are evil men who have perverted the meaning of “martyrdom,” changing it from the act of dying for one’s faith to killing others to advance the dominion of one’s faith.

His opposition to tyranny abroad has been a constant in his political career. Even in the final days of his losing 2006 re-election campaign, Mr. Santorum never stopped calling for action against Iran and Syria. Apparently, Pennsylvanians weren’t impressed by his Iran Freedom and Support Act, enacted in 2006, which imposed sanctions on the regime and authorized $100 million annually for the democratic opposition, or his 2003 Syria Accountability Act.

But today he looks prescient and gutsy. Back then, the Bush administration was trying to run away from such ideas. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice at one point turned to a Democrat, then-Sen. Joe Biden, to block Mr. Santorum’s Iran bill, before it finally passed. But Mr. Santorum’s basic vision has prevailed.

And so it goes.  Clearly the Murdoch machine is hedging their bets when it comes to the very real possibility that the man who will carry the GOP’s standard into battle against President Obama is going to be a know-nothing fundamentalist dipstick.  So like Bush 43 before him, the same “scholars” who told us that it didn’t really matter that the Republican candidate is a moron because he would be surrounded by a brain trust of great minds led by the necessary vision and will to “win” are hard at work constructing the exact same fantasy with Iran as their target.

Ledeen and his crew of bloodthirsty ghouls have been after “regime change” in Iran now for over a decade.  To see him latch his lamprey maw onto Santorum’s back to try to ride him into a war with Tehran should be setting off alarm bells in the head of every American old enough to vote.  They want war, and Rick Santorum is the best way to get it.  Ledeen allowed out of his crypt to try to sell Santorum as Commander-in-Chief means that not only is the GOP establishment making plans for Santorum vs Obama in the fall, but that when it comes to all the truly important boxes to be checked, that Ricky will do for them just fine.

The GOP establishment will prevent Santorum from winning over Romney?  Really?  At best they are hedging pretty damn hard, and at worst they are sabotaging the increasingly failtastic Mittens to get the man they wanted all along.  If “probability of deciding to go to war with Iran” is your top criteria for picking a GOP nominee, then Santorum’s the clear choice.  If Murdoch and the neo-cons are backing him, the notion that Santorum will crash and burn long before Tampa is no longer so assured, is it?

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At Least Have The Grace To Oil Up…Again

So last time we talked supply and demand and oil/gasoline prices in the US, there was quite a bit of disagreement about whether or not US demand for gasoline makes any difference in gas prices at the pump at all.  There was agreement that gasoline price increases are pretty elastic (they respond to oil supply cuts and demand increases) but are obnoxiously inelastic when it comes to price decreases (reduced demand doesn’t lower the price of gas.)

We’ve now got evidence that increasing domestic oil production also does not lower the price of gasoline at the pump, because hey, we’re producing more oil domestically under this President.

The United States’ rapidly declining crude oil supply has made a stunning about-face, shredding federal oil projections and putting energy independence in sight of some analyst forecasts.

After declining to levels not seen since the 1940s, U.S. crude production began rising again in 2009. Drilling rigs have rushed into the nation’s oil fields, suggesting a surge in domestic crude is on the horizon.

The number of rigs in U.S. oil fields has more than quad­rupled in the past three years to 1,272, according to the Baker Hughes rig count. Including those in natural gas fields, the United States now has more rigs at work than the entire rest of the world.

“It’s staggering,” said Marshall Adkins, who directs energy research for the financial services firm Raymond James. “If we continue growing anywhere near that pace and keep squeezing demand out of the system, that puts you in a world where we are not importing oil in 10 years.”

There are doubts that energy independence is that close. But many say the booming shale oil fields in Texas and North Dakota and the growth of deep-water drilling in the Gulf of Mexico will allow the nation to cut its reliance on oil imports significantly over the next couple of decades.

But wait…Republicans have told us that increasing oil production now will lower gas prices now.  Certainly Johnny Volcano and Moose Lady ran on a platform like this in 2008.  And yet…gas prices are now going up.  People keep forgetting that President Obama has, on several occasions, said he would increase domestic energy production and work to get technologies on the road to decrease consumption.  Certainly one of the very, very minor bright spots in the Great Recession is that it lowered demand for gasoline in the US.

“Drill baby drill”?  Hey, that’s what we’re doing.  And yet we’re facing $4 gas this summer.  Not only do we have decreased demand, we have increased supply brought on line.  But gas prices are still high.  Here’s another example of President Obama’s policies doing what the Republicans said we should be doing but of course the President not getting any credit for it.  But the big money continues to be put down on long positions.

Hedge funds and other large speculators boosted their net- long position in crude futures to the highest level in nine months, according to the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Managed-money bets that prices will rise, in futures and options combined, outnumbered short positions by 233,889 contracts in the week ended Feb. 14, the Washington-based regulator said in its report on Feb. 17. Net-long positions rose by 28,180 contracts, or 13.7 percent, from a week earlier.

And lo and behold, the long positions are again driving prices up.  But we’re told speculation is “a scapegoat”.  Well, it’s not demand, and now it’s not supply.  Either we can’t do anything about gas prices by affecting production and demand in the US so the Republicans should shut it, or we need to have a little talk about rampant commodities speculation.

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If I wasn’t watching it happen, I wouldn’t believe it

Ladies and Gents, here’s the all-male panel that are debating access to birth control in Congress today:

But it’s much, much bigger than birth control now. This is Adam Serwer on the new Republican proposal to allow any employer a veto on virtually any aspect of health insurance coverage.

Any employer:

In their latest move in the battle over contraception coverage, top Republicans in Congress are going for broke: They’re now pushing a bill that would allow employers and insurance companies to pick and choose which health benefits to provide based simply on executives’ personal moral beliefs. Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), the top GOPer in the Senate, has already endorsed the proposal, and it could come to a vote this week. The measure would make the religious exemptions to President Barack Obama’s health care bill so large they’d swallow it whole.

“This is about gutting the Affordable Care Act and the protections it was meant to establish,” says Leila Abolfazli, a lawyer focusing at the National Women’s Law Center who focuses on health and reproductive rights.

Obama’s Affordable Care Act requires all health care plans to offer certain services and benefits, including birth control. Last week, Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) offered a “conscience amendment,” to the law, pitching it as a way to allay religious employers’ qualms about providing birth control to their employees.

But Blunt’s proposal doesn’t just apply to religious employers and birth control. Instead, it would allow any insurer or employer, religiously affiliated or otherwise, to opt out of providing any health care services required by federal law—everything from maternity care to screening for diabetes. Employers wouldn’t have to cite religious reasons for their decision; they could just say the treatment goes against their moral convictions. That exception could include almost anything—an employer could theoretically claim a “moral objection” to the cost of providing a given benefit. The bill would also allow employers to sue if state or federal regulators try to make them comply with the law.

Care for a pregnancy outside marriage was the first thing that came to mind when I read the bill, because of course any employer could cite a religious reason for refusing to cover that, and state law wouldn’t protect people, because this is federal law.

“One of the fundamental purposes of the Affordable Care Act was making sure all health insurance plans cover basic services. The Blunt amendment would do away with that,” says Sarah Lipton-Lubet, a policy counsel with the American Civil Liberties Union. “A business could deny coverage for cervical cancer screening for unmarried employees, out of opposition to premarital sex.”

Got that? This is a deregulatory push cloaked in a religious objection. President Obama and Democrats are trying to standardize and secure the same access to health care for everyone, and Republicans are deliberately acting to reduce health insurance security, reliability and portability.

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The liberty we don’t hear much about

I’m really grateful that the bishops decided to make a stand on their right to religious liberty because until they did that I did not know there was controversy and discussion going on all over the country on the rights of patients and the mergers of Catholic hospitals with other hospital and health care businesses:

In Arizona:

What began in Sierra Vista, a town about 80 miles southeast of Tucson, as a quiet merger between the Sierra Vista Regional Health Center and the Catholic Carondelet Health Network has turned into a religious and ethical standoff over patients’ rights.
SEVERSON: What the merger means is that Sierra Vista, a rural, secular hospital, must now abide by the Catholic ethical and religious directives which prohibit certain procedures. So physicians can no longer do abortions, even when the mother’s life is in danger, and they can no longer perform sterilizations or provide contraception.

DR. ROBERT HOLDER (Sierra Vista Regional Health Center): I would say that the majority of the medical staff is not really happy with the fact that this is occurring and the way it came about. It was hard for us, thinking long term, how this was going to work out practically.
SEVERSON: Dr. Bruce Silva, another ob-gyn at Sierra Vista, says Catholic directives often go against health care decisions he and his patient think are best.
DR. BRUCE SILVA (Sierra Vista Regional Health Center): The person who makes that decision is not me and the woman. We can make that decision, but then it has to be okay’d by someone else who puts their belief systems and their ethics on me and on my patients, which I just don’t think is right.
SEVERSON: Right or wrong, the Catholic Church takes its directives very seriously. Last year, Bishop Thomas Olmsted of the Catholic Diocese of Phoenix cracked down on this hospital, St. Joseph’s, after a doctor terminated the pregnancy of a mother who had developed pulmonary hypertension, which has a high mortality rate among pregnant women.
DR. HOLDER: It was not an either-or case. That baby was not going to survive because the mother was not going to survive, so the decision is that you let both die or you terminate the pregnancy so the mother can live, and to me that’s a no-brainer.
BISHOP THOMAS OLMSTED (speaking at Catholic Diocese of Phoenix December 21, 2010 Press Conference): In this case, the baby was healthy and there were no problems with the pregnancy. Rather, the mother had a disease that needed to be treated. But instead of treating the disease, St. Joseph’s medical staff and ethics committee decided that the healthy eleven-week-old baby should be directly killed.
REVEREND THOMAS WEINANDY (US Conference of Catholic Bishops): If you directly said the mother could not live unless we aborted the child then that would be contrary to Gospel values and the teaching of the church.
DR. HOLDER: We were advised to send that person 80 miles away to another hospital because there was a heartbeat, and that was a very difficult situation for me to manage.
DR. SILVA: Some people will define abortion if a baby has a heart rate, and you terminate that pregnancy—it’s an abortion. But there are times, for instance, with a pregnancy in the fallopian tube, where babies will have heart rates but that baby can’t survive there. It’s impossible. So there are some places where they do not allow you to terminate that baby. This is the real problem is that it’s defined differently by different bishops, who are the ones that decide how your hospital is going to run.
Sierra Vista Regional Health Center declined to be interviewed, but the circumstances here are not unique. Catholic hospitals have become the largest nonprofit health care provider in the US, with over 600 hospitals. This year, one in six patients will be cared for in a Catholic hospital.
SEVERSON: Sierra Vista’s new directives posed a very real problem for Jessica Graham, who was going to have her second baby by c-section at Sierra Vista and then get a tubal ligation, or have her tubes tied. She and her husband didn’t want any more children.
GRAHAM: So I said, can you tie my tubes while I’m in surgery for a c-section? And when I got pregnant that was the option and that was the plan. Then it changed during my pregnancy when they did the merger here.
SEVERSON: So Jessica was forced to have a second surgery in another city, which could have created problems.People get infected, people can get bowel injuries. You can have a reaction to the anesthetic that can kill people. People die from tubal ligations every year—now very, very, very rarely, but why undergo that risk?
REV. WEINANDY: The fact that they can’t get, receive sterilization or abortions at a Catholic health care facility is not a form of suffering at all. It’s a matter of fact that we are protecting them from evil things that could happen to them.
SEVERSON: Doctor Silva says his Sierra Vista patients can’t get the standard of care they deserve and that some simply can’t afford a second operation at another hospital. He says when he worked at a Catholic Hospital 20 years ago, tubal ligations were permitted.
SEVERSON: Another concern for the protesters outside Sierra Vista is what happens with their end-of-life wishes if the Catholic Church doesn’t agree with them.
DR. SILVA: They talk about the fact that all of your end-of-life wishes will be observed unless they go against Catholic teaching. The problem is what does that last line mean?

In Washington. In Illinois. In Kentucky.

Interesting that a live controversy over mergers between Catholic health care companies and secular health care companies gets absolutely no attention, while a rule change on birth control that offends and enrages church leaders causes a “firestorm”. This actual health care controversy is going on right under our noses, has the potential to affect millions of people, and yet all we hear are outraged church leaders and birth control.

This piece out of Seattle asks that we “re-examine the role of faith in health care delivery”, given that:

consolidations and mergers have resulted in a situation in which nearly 18 percent of all hospitals and 20 percent of all hospital beds in health systems nationwide are owned or controlled by the Catholic Church. In some isolated areas, the only hospitals available are Catholic-run. Non-Catholics are increasingly finding themselves in situations in which the only health care available is subject to care restrictions dictated by the Catholic hierarchy.

Now that the bishops started this fight, I’m sure they’ll be happy to include patients and the broader public in a much bigger and more inclusive discussion that includes the rights of patients. Let’s re-examine.

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How Grover views a President Romney…

Some folks (here and here) are directing attention to a post by David Frum about the speech Grover Norquist gave to CPAC last weekend. In his annual address to the Mavens and acolytes of Wingnutopia, Norquist celebrated Mitt Romney’s emptiness and cravenness as virtues:

“All we have to do is replace Obama. ... We are not auditioning for fearless leader. We don’t need a president to tell us in what direction to go. We know what direction to go. We want the Ryan budget. ... We just need a president to sign this stuff. We don’t need someone to think it up or design it. The leadership now for the modern conservative movement for the next 20 years will be coming out of the House and the Senate. [...]

Pick a Republican with enough working digits to handle a pen to become president of the United States. This is a change for Republicans: the House and Senate doing the work with the president signing bills. His job is to be captain of the team, to sign the legislation that has already been prepared.”

Grover has Mitt Romney’s number. Romney has proven during his five-year run for the White House that he will say and/or do anything to please the potentates, money-men, gasbags and self-appointed leaders of the modern CONservative movement. He has a complete inability to tell any of these weasels “NO” to any request. Romney is spineless, but for Grover that is a virtue. At CPAC Grover made the case that conservatives shouldn’t worry about voting for Mittens because he will do what he is told to do and will not make waves. According to Grover, Mitt and the other clown car race contestants are trained monkeys who will view signing their names—when order to do so—as their only duty of office. As I said, Grover has Mitt’s number and he made the strongest CONservative case yet to support the well oiled weather vane from Massachusetts.

I’ve been reading a lot about George Romney, Mitt’s father. He was an impressive guy with core values, beliefs and principles that he had the courage to fight for throughout his life. George Romney fought his Party and his Church over Civil Rights and he was on the side of justice. As I learn more about George Romney, I wonder, “Why was such a good man cursed with a son like Mitt?”

Where the father was strong, the son is weak. Where the father had beliefs, the son has none. Where the father focused on the needs of others, the son focused on his selfish wants. And when the crazies of his day said “Follow us and do what we say”, George Romney said “NO” and stood his ground. And when the crazies of today bark orders to Mitt, he just grovels, falls in line and says “tell me what to say and do”.

George Romney deserved a better son.

Cheers

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Time to lend Mitt a helping hand…

In French Rarebit, Bugs Bunny finds himself at the center of a battle between two French chefs and he helpfully provides each chef with advice to help move things along.

It is in the spirit of that cartoon that I decided offer Mitt Romney a tip to help him hold back the Santorum surge sweeping though the base of the GOP. Here it is: More »

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I Can’t Quite Put My Finger On It, But…

MoJo’s Nick Baumann again does us an invaluable service by pointing out the obvious fact that President Obama’s “unprecedented assault on America’s religious freedoms” by requiring church-related hospitals and universities to cover contraception at the federal level has actually been on the books for, oh, about 12 years now.

In December 2000, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission ruled that companies that provided prescription drugs to their employees but didn’t provide birth control were in violation of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prevents discrimination on the basis of sex. That opinion, which the George W. Bush administration did nothing to alter or withdraw when it took office the next month, is still in effect today—and because it relies on Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, it applies to all employers with 15 or more employees. Employers that don’t offer prescription coverage or don’t offer insurance at all are exempt, because they treat men and women equally—but under the EEOC’s interpretation of the law, you can’t offer other preventative care coverage without offering birth control coverage, too.

“It was, we thought at the time, a fairly straightforward application of Title VII principles,” a top former EEOC official who was involved in the decision told Mother Jones. “All of these plans covered Viagra immediately, without thinking, and they were still declining to cover prescription contraceptives. It’s a little bit jaw-dropping to see what is going on now…There was some press at the time but we issued guidances that were far, far more controversial.”

After the EEOC opinion was approved in 2000, reproductive rights groups and employees who wanted birth control access sued employers that refused to comply. The next year, in Erickson v. Bartell Drug Co., a federal court agreed with the EEOC’s reasoning. Reproductive rights groups and others used that decision as leverage to force other companies to settle lawsuits and agree to change their insurance plans to include birth control. Some subsequent court decisions echoed Erickson, and some went the other way, but the rule (absent a Supreme Court decision) remained, and over the following decade, the percentage of employer-based plans offering contraceptive coverage tripled to 90 percent.

This fight has been long settled based on Title VII law.  Clinton put it on the books on the way out without controversy, and it was on the books for every single day of the Bush 43 administration without controversy.  It was on the books for three years under the Obama administration, without controversy.  Nine out of ten businesses in the country, including religiously affiliated hospitals, schools, and charities, provided contraception coverage.  27 states went on to put similar provisions on their books without incident.

It wasn’t an issue at all until an African-American Democrat in the White House decided during an election year that “Hey, this is a good idea, let’s put this on the books for all 50 states” just after getting yet another monthly unemployment report that showed that his policies were starting to bring the jobs numbers back around, and that his prospects for re-election were improving along with that uptick on what basically everyone agreed up until that millisecond was the most important issue of the day, the economy itself.

Then, the existing rules of the game for the last dozen years changed literally overnight to fit the theory that the President was “declaring war on Americans’ religious freedoms.”  Then the rules immediately changed to create “a firestorm of controversy”.  Then the rules changed so that people questioned why Catholics in the Obama administration, including the Vice-President and the Secretary of Defense, hadn’t resigned in protest yet.

It wasn’t an issue until the GOP started openly asking if they were going to lose big in November and Newt Gingrich had melted into babbling radioactive slag and Rick Santorum became the latest Anti-Romney, revealing the fatal weakness of “the frontrunner”.

Only now do the god-botherers and the institutional misogynists and the bigots and the pinheads and the weasels have an issue.

Only now.  They are this desperate to defeat President Obama.

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January 20, 2009 changed everything

A person really couldn’t make this stuff up:

Republicans have gone to war against President Obama’s regulation requiring employers and insurers to provide contraception coverage, portraying the measure as a “government takeover” of health care and pledging to repeal the rule in Congress. The measure, which is part of the Affordable Care Act, says that companies offering prescription drug coverage must also provide birth control insurance (but it exempts houses of worship and nonprofits primarily employing and serving those of the same faith).
The Obama measure closely resembles state laws providing equity in insurance coverage for contraception in six states and actually offers far more conscience protections than previous Congressional efforts to expand women’s access to birth control. For instance, a 2001 bill co-sponsored by Republicans Sens. Olympia Snowe (ME), Susan Collins (ME), Lincoln Chafee (RI), Gordon Smith (OR), John Warner (VA), Arlen Specter (PA) — S. 104 — sought to establish parity for contraceptive prescriptions within the context of coverage already guaranteed by insurance plans, but offered no opt-out clause for religious groups who opposed contraception:

SEC. 714. STANDARDS RELATING TO BENEFITS FOR CONTRACEPTIVES.
`(a) REQUIREMENTS FOR COVERAGE- A group health plan, and a health insurance issuer providing health insurance coverage in connection with a group health plan, may not–
`(1) exclude or restrict benefits for prescription contraceptive drugs or devices approved by the Food and Drug Administration, or generic equivalents approved as substitutable by the Food and Drug Administration, if such plan provides benefits for other outpatient prescription drugs or devices; or
`(2) exclude or restrict benefits for outpatient contraceptive services if such plan provides benefits.

“Women shouldn’t be held hostage by virtue of where they live,” Snowe told a Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee hearing in September of 2001. “It simply is not fair.” “All we’re saying in this legislation is that if health insurance plans provide coverage for prescription drugs that that coverage has to extend to FDA-approved prescription contraceptives. It’s that simple.”

Strong principled language from Olympia Snowe! She seems to have lost her voice somewhere along the line.

The rules are different if you’re President Obama. Everything is immediately suspect, everything is a “slap in the face”, and everything is radical and unprecedented. This rule is about as radical as moderate Republicans were waaaay back in 2001.

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Clearly We Need Laws To Protect Us From Republican Voter Fraud

Next time somebody says DEMOCRAT VOTER FRUAD ACORN BLAH BLOOGITY BLAH please calmly direct them to Indiana’s GOP Secretary of State Charlie White being convicted on six of seven voting fraud felony counts while being the state’s top election official.

Indiana Secretary of State Charlie White was convicted of six felonies early this morning, and consequently lost his job.

But the Republican could get it back soon.

White, 42, Fishers, plans to ask a judge to reduce his convictions – all class D felonies – to misdemeanors at sentencing. It’s uncertain whether that move would allow him to reclaim his job.

“We don’t know the right answer to that,” White said. “This is all very new.”

Shortly after White’s verdict was read, Gov. Mitch Daniels announced in a news release shortly before 3 a.m. that he has appointed Jerry Bonnet, White’s chief deputy, as interim secretary of state.

“I have chosen not to make a permanent appointment today out of respect for the judge’s authority to lessen the verdict to a misdemeanor and reinstate the elected office holder,” the Republican governor said in the news release. “If the felony convictions are not altered, I anticipate making a permanent appointment quickly.”

Now, if all of these players were Democrats, what would your reaction to this be, conservatives?  And what is “law and order moderate” Mitch Daniels thinking, allowing to keep a man convicted of voting fraud as the state’s top election official if the charges get reduced to misdemeanors?  If any Democratic party governor tried that, it would be national news about the “corrupt Dem voting fraud machine”.   What it means is Daniels is just as corrupt as the rest of them and always has been.

But reports on the actually corrupt Republican voting fraud machine that exists to the point of a Secretary of State being convicted on voting fraud crimes?  Doesn’t count.  Meanwhile, New Black Panther Party BLAAAAAAAAAARGH!

It’s Okay If You’re A Republican™.

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Scott Walker’s sea of corruption may have run Captain Preibus aground

Courtesy of the We Party Patriots, we learn that Reince Priebus (and there’s a rejected Bond villain name if I’ve ever heard of one) seems to be implicated in the illegal activities that have already resulted in the arrests and indictments of several of Governor Walker’s current and former aides.

Walkergate” is unfolding into a masterwork in American conspiracy as the complaint explaining the charges against two of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s former staff members includes an email that may prove Walker had knowledge of the illegal activities happening around him. The charges have also implicated current chairman of the Republican National Committee, Reince Priebus, and his ties to a voter suppression scandal involving both Americans for Prosperity and former Herman Cain campaign manager Mark Block.

Mark Block is the infamous “smoking man” in that bizarre Herman Cain political ad.

The most recent criminal complaint also mentions Reince Preibus, then Republican Party of Wisconsin chairman and now head of the Republican National Committee. As the President of the RNC, Preibus was one of the main defenders of Herman Cain when his Presidential campaign was rocked by a series of scandals. As it turns out, part of money stolen by Russell was used to visit Herman Cain and his campaign manager, Mark Block, in Atlanta during December of 2010, after Walker had been elected. Mark Block, better known as the “smoking man” in Cain’s most infamous commercial, is the former Wisconsin State Director of Americans for Prosperity.

According to an Alternet article published on January 21, 2011, Block and Priebus participated in massive voter suppression of minorities in both the 2008 Presidential election and the 2010 mid-term election. This included the Wisconsin Gubernatorial race that Walker won and the Senate race which saw Russ Feingold fall to Tea Party backed candidate Ron Johnson. Block and Priebus, with help of Wisconsin Tea Party group Grandsons of Liberty and the assistance of Americans for Prosperity, ran a “voter caging” scam aimed at college students and African-Americans.

Go read the whole thing.

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I’m still not clear on why conservatives don’t want people voting early, yet they do want people voting absentee

Sunshine in the sunshine state:

Election experts and Democratic voting advocates told U.S. senators Friday that a Republican-backed overhaul of Florida election laws will suppress Democratic turnout in the nation’s biggest battleground state next fall.
Democratic Sens. Bill Nelson of Florida and Dick Durbin of Illinois held a field hearing at the Hillsborough County Courthouse that drew a racially diverse crowd that at times resembled an orchestrated Democratic rally. In packed pews in a sixth-floor courtroom, people wore yellow stickers that read “Our voice, our vote” and hissed a witness who defended the law.
Testimony centered on the most controversial changes: reducing early voting from 14 days to eight, from 96 hours to a minimum of 48, and ending it on the Saturday before the election; requiring third-party groups to register and face fines if they turn in voter registration forms after 48 hours; and requiring voters to cast provisional ballots if they moved from another county since they last voted if they did not update their addresses.
Nearly 200 people attended the hearing and about 200 more watched on TV from a nearby room. The crowd erupted into loud applause when Durbin said: “There are people literally fighting and dying for the right to vote in countries like Syria, and we are finding ways to restrict the right to vote?”
As the two-hour forum ended, Nelson said: “The rule of law has been assaulted in this state by this election law under the pretense of cutting down on election fraud.”

I think these field hearings are a great idea. Part of the problem with conservatives changing voting requirements every twenty minutes is that voters don’t know that the rules have changed or what, exactly, the ever-changing rules now require. The more attention voter suppression laws get, the better. Targeted groups have to know they’re targeted before they can act to protect their right to vote.

Nelson called this witness:

University of Florida political science professor Daniel A. Smith will testify Friday before several U.S. senators about Florida’s new voting law.
Smith was invited to the hearing by U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., chairman of the Senate Judiciary subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Human Rights.
The hearing, to be held in Tampa, will examine a Florida law that limits the time available for early voting, makes it more difficult for volunteer organizations to register voters and changes the cause for voters to cast provisional ballots.
Smith was selected by U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson’s office to “speak from an academic viewpoint, not an activist’s,” Smith said. Smith was chosen as a witness because of his work on Florida election law and voting behavior.
Smith’s testimony will look at three features of the new law and how they potentially limit voting rights of Floridians.
“The first is early voting. The new Florida law truncates the early voting period from a 14-day window to an eight-day window, and most importantly, it eliminates the final Sunday before Election Day,” Smith said.

Early voting is popular with voters, yet Republicans are working hard all over the country to limit early voting. The crazed conservative assault on early voting makes even less sense than their other nonsensical, wholly imaginary claims re: voting, because there’s absolutely no difference between an early vote and an election day vote in terms of security or potential fraud. They don’t even have a remotely plausible storyline on Fox News on why we must limit early voting. They have nothing. People like early voting because it’s convenient. Conservatives oppose early voting because… well, we don’t know why conservatives oppose early voting.

Smith and Michael Herron, a professor of government at Dartmouth College, matched the voter file from the 2008 general election with the early voting file from that election, identifying trends such as which ethnic, racial, gender, or age groups were more likely to vote early in 2008, and how the new law likely will affect them.
Smith said they found African-American, Hispanic, youth, and first-time voters were much more likely to vote on the Sunday before the election.

Oh. That explains it.

Maybe at the next hearing we can discuss this:

Not mentioned at the hearing was that Florida has made it easier for voters to cast absentee ballots by mail as an alternative to early voting or visiting the polls on Election Day. But UF’s Smith said the highest likelihood of fraud involves absentee ballots.

If there’s a conservative lawyer out there who can defend the fact that conservatives push absentee balloting, the least secure voting method, while aggressively acting to limit early voting, I’d sure like to hear what they have to say. That doesn’t make any sense, unless they’re targeting voters who disfavor conservatives.

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