The Arizona Senate Committee on Healthcare and Medical Liability Reform approved HB 2800 which strips state funding from any group (like Planned Parenthood) that performs abortion even though existing state law and the fucking Hyde Amendment already prohibit the use of state/federal funds for abortion.
Kerrrist.
From Think Progress:
Earlier this week, an Arizona Senate panel approved HB 2800 on a party-line vote. The Arizona Senate Committee on Healthcare and Medical Liability Reform’s move came on the heels of support from the Arizona House, which approved the legislation earlier this month.
If HB 2800 is indeed passed by the full Senate, Gov. Jan Brewer® is expected to sign the legislation into law, stripping state funding from any group such as Planned Parenthood that performs abortions.
Unfortunately, the move would have a pronounced impact on poorer Arizona women who rely on places like Planned Parenthood for many of their health care needs.
snip
Former Surgeon General Richard Carmona, who is running for Arizona’s open U.S. Senate seat, criticized the state legislature, calling the Senate panel’s approval was an “extremely misguided” decision. “As a longtime health care professional,” Carmona told ThinkProgress, “I can say without hesitation that restricting access to reproductive health care is detrimental to the health and safety of women. Period.”
Arizona state law already prohibits using tax dollars for abortions. The real effect of HB 2800 would be to take away necessary health care services to low-income Arizonans.
I’m running out of codas to append to these sorts of blog posts. These bills are flying out of state legislatures so quickly that it’s nearly impossible to keep up. How can I be expected to write something original and pithy each time I’m forced to post about one of these abominable bills. I need to come up with some sort of script.
Republicans hate women.
I want to poke the GOP with asiangrrlMN’s rusty pitchfork™.
I want to slap the GOP with my rusty uterus. No wait.
‘We Have No Choice’: One Woman’s Ordeal with Texas’ New Sonogram Law
This is what government intrusion on a woman’s choice has wrought. It’s heartbreaking.
Halfway through my pregnancy, I learned that my baby was ill. Profoundly so. My doctor gave us the news kindly, but still, my husband and I weren’t prepared. Just a few minutes earlier, we’d been smiling giddily at fellow expectant parents as we waited for the doctor to see us. In a sonography room smelling faintly of lemongrass, I’d just had gel rubbed on my stomach, just seen blots on the screen become tiny hands. For a brief, exultant moment, we’d seen our son—a brother for our 2-year-old girl.
Yet now my doctor was looking grim and, with chair pulled close, was speaking of alarming things. “I’m worried about your baby’s head shape,” she said. “I want you to see a specialist—now.”
My husband looked angry, and maybe I did too, but it was astonishment more than anger. Ours was a profound disbelief that something so bad might happen to people who think themselves charmed. We already had one healthy child and had expected good fortune to give us two.
Instead, before I’d even known I was pregnant, a molecular flaw had determined that our son’s brain, spine and legs wouldn’t develop correctly. If he were to make it to term—something our doctor couldn’t guarantee—he’d need a lifetime of medical care. From the moment he was born, my doctor told us, our son would suffer greatly.
So, softly, haltingly, my husband asked about termination. The doctor shot me a glance that said: Are you okay to hear this now? I nodded, clenched my fists and focused on the cowboy boots beneath her scrubs.
She started with an apology, saying that despite being responsible for both my baby’s care and my own, she couldn’t take us to the final stop. The hospital with which she’s affiliated is Catholic and doesn’t allow abortion. It felt like a physical blow to hear that word, abortion, in the context of our much-wanted child. Abortion is a topic that never seemed relevant to me; it was something we read about in the news or talked about politically; it always remained at a safe distance. Yet now its ugly fist was hammering on my chest.
My doctor went on to tell us that, just two weeks prior, a new Texas law had come into effect requiring that women wait an extra 24 hours before having the procedure. Moreover, Austin has only one clinic providing second-trimester terminations, and that clinic might have a long wait. “Time is not on your side,” my doctor emphasized gently. For this reason, she urged us to seek a specialist’s second opinion the moment we left her office. “They’re ready for you,” she said, before ushering us out the back door to shield us from the smiling patients in the waiting room.
The specialist confirmed what our doctor had feared and sketched a few diagrams to explain. He hastily drew cells growing askew, quick pen-strokes to show when and where life becomes blighted. How simple, I thought, to just undraw those lines and restore my child to wholeness. But this businesslike man was no magician, and our bleak choices still lay ahead.
We need to fight back. We can fight back, if we do it together. That’s what my new Team Uterati Wiki Project is for. (The Team Uterati blog is here.)
We are tracking all anti-women/anti-reproductive rights/anti-choice legislation on a state-by-state basis, as well as providing resources for women’s health. We’re already making great progress. Check out the wiki pages for Pennsylvania, Arizona, and North Carolina. If you want to help, sign up for Team Uterati wiki here, introduce yourself in the forums here, and/or fill out a volunteer application here. 65 people (men and women) have already signed up.
It may seem daunting, but my webninja has made extensive video tutorials. I’ve never built a wiki page before; yesterday I built two.
As a woman, I’ve found the GOP’s eagerness to piss us off with all-male sperm-death panels, state-rape ultrasound-wand legislation, FCC-sponsored slut-shaming, etc., kind of puzzling. Not because the modern GOP has ever given a damn about women, but because it seems dumb for a party to go out of its way to alienate more than half of US voters in an election year.
But a post yesterday by Perfesser Heh Indeedy may reveal the real reason behind this disconnect: Conservatives still can’t tell an actual woman from a cardboard cutout:
WAR AGAINST WOMEN: Woman Raped At Occupy New Haven. #Occupyfail.
UPDATE: I suppose that this should come as no surprise considering the signals that have come from the very top of the Democratic establishment:
At the exact moment Jon Favreau is receiving high praise in pre-inaugural media puff pieces, the 27-year-old chief speechwriter for President-elect Barack Obama (not Jon Favreau, the Hollywood actor/ director) finds himself in a minor mess over a photo from a recent private party showing him groping the breast of a cardboard cutout of Hillary Rodham Clinton as an unnamed pal wearing an “Obama staff” T-shirt kisses and feeds her beer.
If you haven’t seen it, imagine the early stages of the barroom rape scene of “The Accused” with Jodie Foster. Or think prosecutor Mike Nifong’s graphic (though false) descriptions of the Duke lacrosse party. Justin Timberlake and Janet Jackson danced to a similar tune at the 2004 Super Bowl. Fraternities have been closed for less.
Here’s the pic, in case you’ve forgotten. No word on whether Favreau was involved in helping accuse Republicans of running a “war against women.”
For my money, one of the best troll smack-downs in the history of the internet occurred right here on Balloon Juice when the Favreau controversy first erupted. I don’t think I can improve on the words our host used then to squash a nincompoop who was confused about the difference between an actual woman and a cardboard cutout, a brainless frat-boy prank and a hideous crime. So I will paraphrase Mr. Cole to address another nincompoop: Do you want to know what is like rape, Perfesser Heh Indeedy? Rape, you stupid fuck.
I’ll only add that every rape is a tragedy, and the wingnut obsession with any sexual assault that occurs in the same ZIP code as an Occupy encampment is creepy. But while Perfesser Heh Indeedy’s willingness to make political hay out of that particular woman’s personal tragedy is breathtakingly craven, it may shed light on a root cause of the gender gap in US politics. Therefore, it cannot be said that the Perfesser is altogether useless as a teacher.
Having been accused of vagina “fauxrage” in response to my post yesterday about Arizona’s crazy-ass bill which would permit employers to fire women for being slutty birth control users, I feel compelled to make a counterargument.
Actually, I’ll let Susie Madrak at Crooks & Liars make that counterargument for me:
When I was 18, I worked for a publishing company that was a little bit strange. The female department head was a fundamentalist Christian and a member of Jews for Jesus who used to hold Tuesday morning prayer meetings before work. It was well known that if you never did attend a prayer meeting, you could forget about ever getting a raise.
immediate supervisor was a young woman named Janice. One morning, while Janice was in the restroom, the department head went rummaging in her purse and found her birth control pills. Instead of talking to her, she called all the editorial clerks and assistants into her department and announced that we were no longer permitted to socialize with the editors, and that we were nothing more than “Jezebels, sluts and whores of Babylon”. (I found this particularly ironic since one of my co-workers graduated from a genteel and well-known Southern women’s Christian college. She’d confided in me that both her father and grandfather—church elders—had raped her. The father raped her shortly after she tearfully confided in him that she’d been raped by her grandfather. “The family that prays together”, etc. ...)
The department head also announced that if it was discovered that anyone was using birth control pills, she would be fired immediately. And that if anyone didn’t like it, well, she could just resign.
So I went back to my desk and typed up a resignation letter. I also took another piece of paper, drew a swastika and taped it to the department head’s door. (What can I say? I was young.)
This was my introduction to the fact that there are these kinds of people in the world. And now the modern Republican party has adopted the untrammeled craziness that was my former department head.
Fauxrage? I don’t think so. Is the bill unconstitutional? Yes. Are there remedies available for women who get trapped by this craptastic bill? Yes. Is that the point? NO.
Democrats are hitting back hard against the growing threat that Romney poses to women’s health:
I get it, Mitt. You’re pandering to the wingnuts who think that Planned Parenthood is out there aborting babies eight days a week. You’re licking the boots of the wingnuts who believe that 90 percent of what Planned Parenthood does is abortion services. After all, Senator Kyl said it on the floor of Congress, so it must be true. (Of course he later qualified his lie by saying it wasn’t intended to be a factual statement. Funny, that—somehow, almost everything that erupts from the face-holes of Republicans are not intended to be factual statements.) And let’s not forget that in Wingnutopia, Planned Parenthood is erecting abortionplexes nationwide so that women can pop in for a quick mani/pedi and an abortion.
Last week, Senator Johnson tried to derail the fetal heartbeat bill (SB 1274 “Heartbeat Informed Consent Act”) by attaching a vasectomy amendment to it. Although the amendment was rejected, I’m posting about it because the bill language is amazing:
For the past couple weeks, I’ve been highlighting the misogyny and outright disgusting behavior of a cabal of right-wingers, with Oink Limbaugh serving as the Misogynist-in-Chief. (See below for a full list of posts.)
Limbaugh’s sexist rant against Sandra Fluke caused a social media firestorm, and that firestorm has yielded results. More than 150 advertiser have fled from Limbaugh like rats fleeing a sinking ship, forcing Limbaugh’s show to air free PSAs and, in some cases, to air nothing at all. That’s right: radio silence during Limbaugh’s show. It’s never happened before.
The StopRush campaign has done so much damage to Limbaugh that his advertising network, Premiere Networks made the unprecedented and “unusual” move of suspending its ad buys for two weeks. The claimed reason is branding something-or-other and makes absolutely no sense; I suspect that the Limbaugh crew expects that in two weeks, liberals will have moved on to a new issue and forgotten all about Limbaugh.
Sorry, that’s not going to happen. Not this time. We’re not going to let that happen.
While we must keep up the pressure on Limbaugh’s local and national advertisers, and I think it might be time to take a look at the sort of hate speech that CNN —the purported “place for news”—supports by continuing to feature Breitbart’s hate-apprentice and Erik Erickson’s BFF, Dana Loesch.
Dana Loesch, who is valiantly trying (and failing) to carry Breitbart’s torch, has done some digging into Sandra Fluke’s personal life because of course she has.
Loesch, after discovering that Fluke’s boyfriend is the son of an “entrenched Democrat,” and that Fluke and her boyfriend are currently on vacation in California, concludes that Fluke’s boyfriend should be paying for Fluke’s contraception. After all, it’s unfathomable that Fluke can’t fund her own sluttiness when she has a “Democrat” boyfriend and enough money to make the harrowing journey from one coast to the other.
Yes, really. Dana Loesch is that stupid.
Why is Dana Loesch on CNN? Her idiocy is much better suited for Fox News. Why doesn’t CNN bid her adieu? For an organization that is supposed to be a news network [insert derisive snort], CNN is not doing itself any favors by continuing to allow such a mental incompetent and pathological liar to further pollute its brand (such as it is.)
I’m loving this new game of Bill/Counter-Bill that seems to be trending in legislatures nationwide, as Republicans introduce draconian Handmaids-Tale-esque laws and Democrats return fire with purposefully absurd bills. These bills are introduced, of course, to highlight the absurdity of the current legislative war that Republicans are waging against women.
Well, Ohio has thrown its whimsical hat into the ring with a bill that would regulate men’s access to erectile dysfunction drugs like Cialis and Viagra: More »
Greenwald’s latest post is a love song for Dennis Kucinich. Essentially, Greenwald argues that Kucinich has been a staunch advocate against executive power, drones, and secret wars, and that “establishment Democrats” ignore these principled stances in favor of mockery, derision and scorn for Kucinich’s New Age/alien talk.
Personally, I don’t care about the alien/New Age talk (except to the extent that such talk made him unelectable by the public at large). What I care about is his record on reproductive rights—it’s terrible. Ultimately, Kucinich is a pro-life Catholic who flip-flopped to pro-choice in order to win elections, and I’m simply not cool with that.
As with the Arizona bill, the Kansas bill prohibits malpractice suits should the woman or child develop health complications as a result of withholding prenatal information.
The bill also forces women to purchase special abortion insurance (Kansas already passed legislation that removed abortions from health insurance plans), and levies a 6.3% sales tax on women who get an abortion—including rape victims.
The Arizona Senate passed a bill this week that allows doctors to withhold from pregnant women information regarding prenatal problems because disclosing that information might lead to an abortion.
It’s called a “wrongful birth” bill and it’s all about preventing women from having an abortion, even if it kills them. The Arizona Senate passed a bill this week that gives doctors a free pass to not inform pregnant women of prenatal problems because such information could lead to an abortion.
In other words, doctors can intentionally keep critical health information from pregnant women and can’t be sued for it. According to the Arizona Capitol Times, “the bill’s sponsor is Republican Nancy Barto of Phoenix. She says allowing the medical malpractice lawsuits endorses the idea that if a child is born with a disability, someone is to blame.” So Republicans are banning lawsuits against doctors who keep information from pregnant women so as to prevent them from choosing to have an abortion.
is this where we are as a country? We’re withholding medical information from women because that information might lead to abortions while simultaneously passing bills in state after state with such pithy names as “Right to Know” or “Right to Know and See” or “Informed Consent” the claimed purpose of which is to make sure women are fully informed? And not only are we withholding information, but we’re immunizing doctors from liability?
7. Lie #7- Liberals are being hypocrites because Ed Schultz called someone a slut: There is no hypocrisy here whatsoever, because the two don’t even compare in any way whatsoever. Ed Schultz called Laura Ingraham, another prominent right-wing talker, someone who launches barbs with the best of them, a “right-wing slut,” was immediately taken off the air for a week by MSNBC, apologized publicly and profusely to Ingraham, and that was the end of that.
Rush Limbaugh spent three days calling some unknown law student a slut and a prostitute. Not once. Not twice. Not three times. Fifty-three times, to be exact:
1) “testifies she’s having so much sex she can’t afford her own birth control pills and she agrees that Obama should provide them, or the Pope”
2) “they’re having so much sex they can’t afford the birth control pills!”
3) “essentially says that she must be paid to have sex, what does that make her? It makes her a slut, right? It makes her a prostitute. She wants to be paid to have sex. She’s having so much sex she can’t afford the contraception. She wants you and me and the taxpayers to pay her to have sex.”
4) “Sandra Fluke. So much sex going on, they can’t afford birth control pills.”
March 1, 2012:
5) “You’d call ‘em a slut, a prostitute”
6) “she’s having so much sex”
7) “are having so much sex that they’re going broke”
8) “they want to have sex any time, as many times and as often as they want, with as many partners as they want”
9) “the sexual habits of female law students at Georgetown”
10) “are having so much sex that they’re going broke”
11) “having so much sex that it’s hard to make ends meet”
12) “four out of every ten co-eds are having so much sex that it’s hard to make ends meet”
13) “Now, what does that make her? She wants us to buy her sex.”
14) “to pay for these co-eds to have sex”
15) “she and her co-ed classmates are having sex nearly three times a day for three years straight, apparently these deadbeat boyfriends or random hookups that these babes are encountering here, having sex with nearly three times a day”
16) “Therefore we are paying her to have sex. Therefore we are paying her for having sex.”
17) “Have you ever heard of not having sex so often?”
18) “Ms. Fluke and the rest of you feminazis, here’s the deal: If we are going to pay for your contraceptives and thus pay for you to have sex, we want something for it. And I’ll tell you what it is. We want you to post the videos online so we can all watch.”
19) “we want something in return, Ms. Fluke: And that would be the videos of all this sex posted online so we can see what we are getting for our money.”
20) “’If we’re paying for this, it makes these women sluts, prostitutes.’ And what else could it be?”
21) “essentially says that she must be paid to have sex. What does that make her? It makes her a slut, right?”
22) “I’m having sex so damn much, I’m going broke.”
23) “She’s having so much sex that she’s going broke! There’s no question about her virtue.”
24) “having so much sex she’s going broke at Georgetown Law.”
25) “Here’s a woman exercising no self-control. The fact that she wants to have repeated, never-ending, as often as she wants it sex—given.”
26) “She’s having so much sex it’s amazing she can still walk, but she made it up there.”
27) “Maybe they’re sex addicts.”
28) “to pay for her to have sex all the time.”
29) “she wants the rest of us to pay for her sex.”
30) “She wants all the sex that she wants all the time paid for by the rest of us.”
31) “Here this babe goes before Congress and wants thousands of dollars to pay for her sex.”
32) “a woman who is happily presenting herself as an immoral, baseless, no-purpose-to-her-life woman.”
33) “She wants all the sex in the world, whenever she wants it, all the time.”
34) “If this woman wants to have sex ten times a day for three years, fine and dandy.”
35) “to provide women from Georgetown Law unlimited, no-consequences sex.”
36) “so she can have unlimited, no-consequences sex.”
37) “You want to have all the sex you want all day long, no consequences, no responsibility for your behavior”
38) “The woman wants unlimited, no-responsibility, no-consequences sex, and she wants it with contraceptives paid for by us.”
March 2, 2012:
39) “she’s having so much sex, she can’t afford her birth control pills anymore.”
40) “she’s having so much sex, she can’t pay for it—and we should.”
41) “She’s having so much sex, she can’t afford it.”
42) “this, frankly hilarious claim that she’s having so much sex (and her buddies with her) that she can’t afford it.”
43) “And not one person says, ‘Well, did you ever think about maybe backing off the amount of sex that you have?’”
44) “Does she have more boyfriends? Ha! They’re lined up around the block.”
45) “It was Sandra Fluke who said that she was having so much sex, she can’t afford it.”
46) “By her own admission, in her own words, Sandra Fluke is having so much sex that she can’t afford it.”
47) “they’re having a lot of sex for which they need a lot of contraception.”
48) “Her sex life is active and she’s having sex so frequently that she can’t afford all the birth control pills that she needs.”
49) “who admits to having so much sex that she can’t afford it anymore.”
50) “she’s having so much sex, she can’t pay for it.”
51) “As frequently as she has sex and to not be pregnant, she’s obviously succeeding in contraception.”
52) “Ms. Fluke, asserts her right to free contraceptive, to handle her sex life—and it’s, by her own admission, quite active.”
UPDATE: added thanks to your comments,
53) “Ms. Fluke, who bought your condoms in junior high? Who bought your condoms in the sixth grade, or your contraception?”
Yeah, that three day sustained assault on a student is exactly the same as one obnoxious and offensive outburst by Ed Schultz.
