My State Rep, A Republican, Says Women Will Die If Texas Lege Renders Cancer Screening Unavailable By Forcing Planned Parenthood Clinics To Close

Sarah Davis
(R-TX134)

It is hardly news that the Texas GOP has made repeated attempts to impose the harshest strictures on women's health clinics that offer abortion in Texas, such as Planned Parenthood, no matter what other essential medical services those clinics offer women. It is news (from Tara Culp‑Ressler at Think Progress, March 10) that a Republican legislator has come out in opposition to her party's attempts to kill women by denying them high-quality cancer screening in an attempt to deny them constitutionally protected access to abortion.

That legislator, State Rep. Sarah Davis (R-TX134), represents my district.

I have long since taken a solemn vow not to vote for any Republican unless Abraham Lincoln rises from the grave and runs in a district in which I am registered to vote. At least Lege elections are in even-numbered years, so I have some time to think about this race.

The problem, of course, is not what Rep. Davis would do independently; rather, it's what she could be pressured into doing along with her party. And the R-dominated Texas Lege, under a new, presumably ideologically driven Repub governor, could make laws that could literally kill women by the thousands, and GOPers in the Lege have not been shy about attempting those very laws.

I have often wished for an active pro-choice or at least pro-women's-rights movement within the GOP. All that proves is that one should be careful what s/he wishes for!

Michigan GOP Campaign Mailer Bears Phone Number Of Dem Opponent's 91-Year-Old Mother In Hospice

Catherine Thompson at TPM:

A Democratic candidate for the Michigan House said Thursday that the state GOP sent out campaign mailers this week that urged voters to call him to complain about Obamacare.

The hitch: candidate John Fisher said the phone number printed on the mailer connected voters to his 91-year-old mother, who is receiving hospice care.

"To direct people to call a suffering woman who deserves peace and comfort is beyond the pale," Fisher said in a statement, as quoted by MLive.com. "Their lack of ethics and contempt for personal privacy is just another reason for people to question what – or better, who – the Republican Party stands for, so that they can make a wise decision at the ballot box on Nov. 4."

...

I am more convinced every day: this is who Republicans really are, deep down inside... cruel bastards who would do literally anything to anyone to gain more power. It is not just wrong to negotiate with them, as Mr. Obama wishes: it is wrong to concede them even the smallest point. We must fight, not merely to win elections, but to send this organization of cold, contemptible, morally bankrupt people to the graveyard of history.

GOP To Get Its Just Deserts?

Brian Beutler of TPM says it with no reservation:

GOP’s Long-Predicted Comeuppance Has Arrived

I wish I felt as confident in that as he does, but I have to admit his reasoning seems sound to me:

In normal times, the House and Senate would each pass a budget, the differences between those budgets would be resolved, and appropriators in both chambers would have binding limits both on how much money to spend, and on which large executive agencies to spend it.

But these aren’t normal times. Republicans have refused to negotiate away their budget differences with Democrats, and have instead instructed their appropriators to use the House GOP budget as a blueprint for funding the government beyond September.

Like all recent GOP budgets, this year’s proposes lots of spending on defense and security, at the expense of all other programs. Specifically, it sets the total pool of discretionary dollars at sequestration levels, then funnels money from thinly stretched domestic departments (like Transportation and HUD) to the Pentagon and a few other agencies. But that’s all the budget says. It doesn’t say how to allocate the dollars, nor does it grapple in any way with the possibility that cutting domestic spending so profoundly might be unworkable. It’s an abstraction.

When a party's policy agenda becomes wholly negative... "the policy of the GOP is to prevent President Obama from accomplishing anything whatsoever, especially anything having to do with social programs..." it leads that party to attempt things that rational people would know better than to attempt. My reaction is probably about like that of most long-time Democrats: part of me would love to see the GOP collapse; another part of me is afraid of what happens to the nation if any substantial portion of its government, whether personnel or policy, is irrational. Hope for the best? The best would be for the House GOP to experience a return to rationality, and I fear that will not happen.

In The GOP, It Has Come To This

Wow. Just... wow:

Pablo Pantoja, who previously served as the State Director of Florida Hispanic Outreach for the Republican National Committee, has defected to the Democratic Party.

Citing the GOP's "culture of intolerance," Pantoja confirmed his party change in an email sent Monday to Florida Nation. Pantoja also drew reference to a much-maligned dissertation from the Heritage Foundation's Jason Richwine that sought to discourage non-whites from immigrating to the United States on the basis that those groups have lower IQs. Richwine resigned from his post at Heritage last week.

...

(Bolds mine.)

Here's a party game (Party game?) for you: how many Republicans can you think of whose name contains the fragment "rich"? Anywhere in the name is fine, e.g., "Newt Gingrich" counts.

Why I Do Not Admire Obama

Pema Levy of TPM:

Buddies?

House Speaker John Boehner on Thursday applauded President Obama's outreach to Republicans, which included dinner with a group of Republican Senators Wednesday night and an upcoming visit with Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), calling it a "hopeful sign" during a press conference Thursday.

"[A] hopeful sign" for whom? Need I say more?

Remember Sequestration? Republicans Don't

Remember how Congress, on a bipartisan basis, agreed to automatic sharp cuts in programs of value to both parties, both defense and non-defense programs, for a period of 10 years, as compensation for failure to negotiate targeted cuts?

Well "surprise, surprise": Republicans lied. Paul Ryan announced it today. Here's Brian Beutler of TPM:

If Mitt Romney wins in November, he and a Republican Congress will fast track legislation early next year to replace across the board defense cuts with cuts to food stamps and other programs for needy Americans.

“In January our intention is that if we don’t fix it in the lame duck is to fix it retroactively once a new session of Congress takes place,” Paul Ryan, Romney’s running mate, told a crowd in North Carolina Thursday, “We have procedural way in the Senate to advance that legislation very quickly and get it to the next President of the United States who I believe is going to be Mitt Romney, to pass that into law and retroactively prevent that sequester from taking place in January.”

...

And fuzzy-minded Democrats, including Obama, agreed to this fool's bargain. Even the Democratic Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta rejected defense cuts altogether. It should have been obvious that no such thing would ever actually come to pass.

Do you suppose Obama will ever get tired of the "pull my finger" game played on him by Republicans? I know I am, and the smell in here is getting pretty strong...

Ohio GOP Early Voting Cutbacks: Unequivocally Racially Motivated

... well, that and partisan, too. Ari Berman at The Nation spells out the details, and believe me, they're ugly:

Earlier this month I reported how Ohio Republicans were limiting early voting hours in Democratic counties, while expanding them on nights and weekends in Republican counties.

In response to the public outcry, Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted, who intervened in favor of limiting early voting hours in Democratic counties, issued a statewide directive mandating uniform early voting hours in all eighty-eight Ohio counties. Husted kept early voting hours from 8 am to 5 pm on weekdays from October 2 to 19 and broadened hours from 8 am to 7 pm from October 22 to November 2. But he refused to expand early voting hours beyond 7 pm during the week, on weekends or three days prior to the election (which is being challenged in court by the Obama campaign)—when it is most convenient for many working Ohioans to vote. Rather than expanding early voting hours across the state, Husted limited them for everybody. Voter suppression for all!

[The original vote was unanimous for expanding early voting hours.] ... But in a meeting on August 17, the two Republicans on the [county elections] board reversed their position and opposed expanding early voting hours. With the committee deadlocked between Democratic and Republican members, Husted broke the tie in favor of the GOP, like he’s done in Cleveland, Columbus, Akron and Toledo.

Yet before breaking the tie, Husted ordered Democratic board members Tom Ritchie Sr. and Dennis Lieberman to hold a new meeting and rescind their votes in favor of early voting. When they refused, arguing that Husted’s directive did not apply to weekend voting, Husted suspended them from the county board of elections. (A third of the 28,000 in-person early voters in Montgomery County in 2008 voted on the weekend.)

...

So... how do Ohio GOPers justify this manifest discrimination? Simple: they don't bother:

Why do Ohio Republicans suddenly feel so strongly about limiting early voting hours in Democratic counties? Franklin County (Columbus) GOP Chair Doug Preisse gave a surprisingly blunt answer to the Columbus Dispatch on Sunday: “I guess I really actually feel we shouldn’t contort the voting process to accommodate the urban—read African-American—voter-turnout machine.” Preisse is not some rogue operative but the chairman of the Republican Party in Ohio’s second-largest county and a close adviser to Ohio Governor John Kasich.

Benedict Cumberbatch as Holmes
Holds Sherlock's Strad

 

I have several friends in Ohio, people I know from my music-making days. They live in small towns, where they can find enough teaching jobs, weddings, receptions, etc. to make a living, as they could not in a symphony-dominated city like Cleveland. Many of these friends are Democrats. Still more of them have political inclinations I don't know anything about. But I know one thing for certain: they are all adult American citizens, who deserve to be able to vote and to have their votes counted, with no discrimination. This action by a GOP Secretary of State renders that difficult at best and impossible at worst.

This is not democracy... this is not right. If these restrictions are upheld, democracy has died in Ohio. How long before it dies of similar deplorable acts in your state, or mine?

Greg Palast: The Euro As An Instrument Of Class Warfare

The indomitable Greg Palast, an American with a seemingly steady job at The Guardian, explains how economist Robert Mundell, formerly of the University of Chicago and now of Columbia University, inventor of the concept of supply-side economics, pushed the creation of the euro as a way of obstructing nations inclined to use Keynesian methods to combat recession. Palast quotes Mundell:

...

"It's very hard to fire workers in Europe," he complained. His answer: the euro.

The euro would really do its work when crises hit, Mundell explained. Removing a government's control over currency would prevent nasty little elected officials from using Keynesian monetary and fiscal juice to pull a nation out of recession.

"It puts monetary policy out of the reach of politicians," he said. "[And] without fiscal policy, the only way nations can keep jobs is by the competitive reduction of rules on business.

He cited labor laws, environmental regulations and, of course, taxes. All would be flushed away by the euro. Democracy would not be allowed to interfere with the marketplace – or the plumbing.

...

(You can safely ignore the remark about the plumbing, or read Palast to find out why plumbing is an issue to union-hating Mundell.) More on the euro and Mundell:

Mundell explained to me that, in fact, the euro is of a piece with Reaganomics:

"Monetary discipline forces fiscal discipline on the politicians as well."

And when crises arise, economically disarmed nations have little to do but wipe away government regulations wholesale, privatize state industries en masse, slash taxes and send the European welfare state down the drain.

In other words, power is centralized in Europe's wealthiest nations, and the rest (Greece, Spain, Ireland, etc.) can do little within the confines of the euro to avoid austerity programs, ineffective though they may be, forced upon them by the banksters of the euro. A nation without its own currency can find its back to the wall and no effective response. And this, according to Palast, is exactly what Robert Mundell intended the euro to accomplish. How about that... a real live conspiracy that may be more than just a theory!

Of course, Palast predicted that the 2008 US presidential election would be stolen by the GOP, so his record is not perfect... or is it? Did Republicans allow Obama to win as a kind of scapegoat, after whom the nation would elect an effectively permanent Republican majority? But that's another conspiracy theory (although one which IMHO deserves serious consideration), and we will have to deal with that possibility later.

(H/T Michael Moore , with the usual reservations about linking to his front page.)

ADDED: Thanks to L'Enfant de la Haute Mer, in comments on this post, for pointing us to David Dayen's post on FDL about two weeks ago. Dayen writes about Iceland's experience, how it dealt with mortgage debt, how the fact that it has its own currency (the krona, not the euro) made all the difference in its ability to cope. Dayen:

,,,

But there’s another major reason that Iceland has fared better than its neighbors, one I didn’t get to talk about on the show. Iceland wasn’t in the euro. As a result, they had the ability to manage their own currency. And they predictably and smartly dropped the currency in value. Right now, the krona sits 20% below the euro, even as the euro has plummeted lately. And that makes Icelandic exports competitive, which includes tourism. They have not had to live with another country’s monetary policy.

...

His point, which is much like Palast's, is summarized in his post's title: "Iceland’s Lesson for the World: Control Your Own Currency and Help Your People".

Walker's Wisconsin: Why? - UPDATED

Andy Kroll at MichaelMoore.com offers a long piece contemplating the course of the protest movement, its ultimate effective absorption and co-opting by the traditional Democratic Party, and its downfall in the recall election. This thought-provoking piece gave me much to think about. A couple of my conclusions:

• Traditional establishment Democratic Party candidates do not provide adequate motivation to voters to swing the small undecided vote;
• The Democratic Party, intent on playing elections by the methods they've used for years, are lamentably vulnerable to the overwhelming Republican money advantages brought about in part by Citizens United.

We are all still learning how politics can and cannot work in this brave new world (and I'm using the phrase in the sense of Aldous Huxley, not William Shakespeare). I hope our lefty learning curve improves quickly.

UPDATE: David Dayen of FDL offers an insightful post-mortem. Good comments, too.

UPDATE: Rick Perlstein at Rolling Stone talks about How How Republicans Cheat Democrats - and Democrats Cheat Themselves. Right on target!