What's the Plural of Uterus? Girl Power

Republished from PoliticusUSA from April 29,2012 here by Rmuse

A conception or mental creation that is baseless or unbelievable is said to be imaginary, and it implies delusion or myth in some contexts. It is hardly appropriate for aggressors to claim their victims are imagining an attack when there is documented evidence of injury, and especially when the aggression continues unabated, but that is precisely what Republicans are claiming in their war on women. Perhaps Republicans hope that by lying often and loudly about an imaginary war on women that women will ignore or forget the devastation and injury they have endured for the past year and support their assailants. Apparently, that is what Republicans are hoping will happen and they are ramping up a campaign to convince voters, and especially women voters, that there is no war on women.

This past week, House minority leader Eric Cantor’s Young Guns group announced a multi-million dollar media campaign called “Woman Up” to convince voters there is no war on women. During a closed-door fundraiser this week, Willard Romney told supporters they needed to “get the women” on board to ensure his election to the White House, and both instances not only fly in the face of reality, they are an epic insult to women. However, no amount of media propaganda or campaign rhetoric will ever convince women that they have not been on the receiving end of the GOP’s assaults on their rights, and this week highlighted the fact that the Republicans are serious in punishing women.

In the House, Republicans successfully passed legislation keeping student loan interest at the current level by paying for it with women’s healthcare funds instead of raising payroll taxes on high-income owners of corporations to the level every other working American pays. In a speech on the floor of the House, Speaker John Boehner displayed faux outrage at Democrats for asking the wealthy to pay their fair share of taxes and accused them of playing politics with student loans and said it was the latest Democratic “plank in the so-called war on women” that was “entirely created by Democrats for political gain.” In the Senate, former presidential candidate John McCain gave a ten-minute rant about Democrat’s politically motivated intention of “dividing the country in the name of fairness and equality” and called the “supposed” war on women “outlandish rhetoric to distract citizens from real issues that really matter.”

McCain obviously does not comprehend that for half the population, what really matters is that their rights are being subverted by Republicans as a matter-of-course and it shows just how out of touch and misogynistic he is when it comes to women’s rights. Women have spent the past year watching Republicans redefine rape, vote for gender pay inequality, restrict their access to cancer screenings and contraception, and give employers the right to deny healthcare if it went against their religious beliefs. Women are patient, but they are not stupid and that is the message Republicans are expressing when they say the war on women is imaginary, or worse, a creation of Democrats who have voted time and time again to give women equal rights the Constitution guarantees. Then there is presumptive Republican presidential candidate Willard Romney telling his supporters they have to “get the women” to support his candidacy.

Romney said, without hesitation, that one of the first acts as president is “getting rid of Planned Parenthood” that serves millions of women with cancer screenings, contraception, and family planning, among others. He supported the Blunt amendment giving employers medical rights over women’s healthcare issues, and said he wants women to have dignity of working at the same time he fawns over his wife because she had the luxury to stay home and raise children. In Romney’s budget, poor and middle class women face massive cuts to programs that provide healthcare and food assistance for their children while the wealthy receive greater tax cuts. It is too late for Romney to “get the women” to support any Republican much less a wealthy elitist who promises to escalate the war on women if he is elected.

President Obama sees the war on women as a war on equal rights and he assailed Republicans for advocating for less government regulations unless it is regulating women. In defending his policies on women, the president said the Affordable Care Act “finally gives women more power to make their own choices about their health care,” and that the Republican war on women was “appalling and offensive, and when it comes to what’s going on out there, you’re not going to close your eyes. Women across America aren’t closing their eyes. As long as I’m president, I won’t either.” Most women, who make up 53% of the electorate, know the President has been fighting for their rights, and as he mentioned, they know what Republicans are doing and their eyes are wide open. The President also noted that Republicans in states are “saying that women can’t be trusted to make their own decisions,” and it is a message women have heard loud and clear since Republicans swept into power after the 2010 elections.

Women are, and should be, incensed at the second-class status that Republicans are legislating them into with law after law abridging their rights and protections. Who do Republicans think they are waging an all-out unrelenting war on women and their rights, and how dare they think that just because they say there is no war on women that women will believe their lies? Women are not stupid, but that is the implication Republicans are making with their media blitz disputing their attacks on women and belief that they can just “get the women” to support their campaign to put women back in the Dark Ages. As the President said, women are not, and have not, closed their eyes to the hideous assault on their rights and yesterday they took the first step to destroy their attackers. In 55 cities, women united against the war on women to tell the entire country they have had enough of Republican misogyny and this is only the beginning.

The sleeping giant that is American women is wide awake and they are livid and looking for retribution. They are not sitting idly by hoping the Republican assault will subside, and the GOP is going to pay in the general election. The march and rallies across the nation should serve notice to Republicans that no impassioned Senate or House floor speeches is going to convince them there is not a war on women, or that Willard’s campaign to “get the women” on board is going to have any success because Republicans have battered women for too long and they are not taking it any longer. It is stunning that Republicans voted against women’s rights and access to healthcare in the same week they are telling them there is no war against them. It is beyond the pale that the GOP has such low regard for women that as they are beating them down, they say there is no war; women will make them pay and they are not alone. The men who love their wives, daughters, mothers, and sisters are just as furious as women and they are mobilizing and supporting women’s movements to end this Republican war on women’s rights which is, in reality, a war on human rights.

Related: Comment on Mysogyny Does Yahoo! Hate Lesbians?

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Ayla, 9, completes springtime Pagan ritual

Cotton Mather Likely AG Pick

I fully expect that Romney, should he become president, will be unable or unwilling to govern from the center. The modern GOP has moved so far to the right that President Mittens would have to go with them. Word around Washington, DC is that Cotton Mather is under serious consideration as Attorney General in a Romney administration. Even if Mather is not available, some other Attorney General is apt to bring back Spectral Evidence into American jurisprudence. I fear that Ayla will be accused of witchcraft based upon this photograph.

Want More Proof?

Ayla channels a vampire

No matter who wins the election of 2012 the problem of Vampire Banks is not likely to be addressed. Instead, the powers that be will ascribe witchcraft status based on these photos.

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The Gypsy Chief and his travelling companion Sugar, 11, just concluded a successful trip to California to see the grandkids for Easter.

On the way back we stopped at Donner Summit to take a picture. Sugar wants everyone to know that dogs are not luggage. The good folks at Dogs Against Romney agree. They were kind enough to retweet.

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From CO Coalition Against Attacking Iran

Initial Call for a Colorado Statewide Peace Conference to Oppose Attacking Iran

(note: This is an initial call for the conference. It is meant mostly for people living in Colorado; but hopefully those of you living elsewhere might do likewise)

Dear Friends,

The cry for an attack on Iran has reached unprecedented, near-hysterical proportions in certain well known quarters.

Like the period before the attack on Iraq, many of the same themes are at play with many of the same players trying to drive our country to war again: creating or greatly exaggerating a threat; vilifying the country’s leadership to suggest that they are `crazy’ and capable of anything; the pliant media that swallow pro-war propaganda and spit it out as truth.

Far from preventing Iran from developing nuclear weapons, an attack would justify their pursuit and will in all probability trigger a regional if not world war, in anticipation of which oil prices have spiked and threaten to a global recession if not worse.

Our elected representatives both in the Oval Office and in Congress who succumb to this propaganda are complicit in dragging us once again down the path to death and destruction as they have in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen and Somalia.

We must stop this madness

With this in mind, the Colorado Coalition Against Attacking Iran was formed recently with representatives from Boulder, Ft. Collins and the Denver Metro Area.

The Coalition is already active:

One of our first steps is to organize a conference on Saturday, May 12, at the First Unitarian Society of Denver Church (14th and Lafayette) in Denver from 9 am to 5 pm. The goal is to organize a Colorado statewide campaign to oppose attacking Iran and for re-orienting our country’s priorities toward rebuilding our fragmented and devastated communities. (Detailed program will follow)

We, the undersigned, long-time Colorado peace activists, endorse this conference and urge you to help build the conference and the campaign to stop yet another insane step toward the abyss. Please contact the Coalition to invite speakers to your area or organization to build the Conference and Campaign.

You can contact the coalition at:

https://sites.google.com/site/cocaati

or contact:

Tom Mayer: Thomas.Mayer@Colorado.Edu

Ibrahim Kazerooni: mikazerooni@gmail.com

Rob Prince: robertjprince@comcast.net

Yours,

Ida Audeh

Clair Cafaro

Stuart Chase

Cheryl Distaso

Bill and Genie Durland

Nancy Fey

Ron Forthofer

Alan Gilbert

Nader Hashemi

Pat Hewett

Ibrahim Kazerooni

Bob Kinsey

Leslie Lomas

Tom Mayer

LeRoy Moore

Rob Prince

Michael Rabb

Tom Rauch

Ken and Mag Seaman

Cheryl Stevenson

Doug Vaughan

Ernesto Vigil

Evan Weissman

Dan Winters

Phil Woods

Gypsy Chief’s comment: Why do we always have enough money for war but never enough for public transit, kids nutrition, alternative energy, etc?

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Related: 98 major advertisers say no to Limbaugh, Beck, Hannity, and other right wing shows

Related: Boycott Rush Limbaugh on Colorado Front Range

This subject, Rushbo’s career and its decline, has special significance to me since Limbaugh got his radio start on KFBK 1530 AM in Sacramento. Folks in The Big Tomato have been trying to live this down ever since. A staple of right wing toxic talk is that others are a threat to you. But Sacramento has been noted as the most ethnically and racially diverse city in America [2002]. Could that diversity have contributed to the rise of Rush Limbaugh?
~~ Gypsy Chief

Limbaugh’s radio career was revived by Norm Woodruff, a San Francisco radio executive who urged friends at Sacramento’s KFBK to hire him at a time when he was essentially unknown in the radio business. Woodruff even took Limbaugh shopping for clothes, improving his appearance to make a better impression on KFBK brass. The station decided to take a chance, putting Limbaugh on in what had been Morton Downey, Jr.’s time slot. His ratings were better than Downey’s, putting Limbaugh’s career back on track. In telling the story of his success, Limbaugh occasionally mentions Woodruff’s help, but he never mentions that Woodruff was openly gay, and died of AIDS in the 1980s.
Source: NNDB.Com

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Courtesy: Moveon.org

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Littleton Police Stop Dogs Against Romney Protestor

In this photo a Dogs Against Romney protestor is stopped by police on his way to an appearance by Willard Mitt Romney. The protestor was recreating an incident in Romney’s past that has dog lovers everywhere wondering what kind of President Mr. Romney would be. Turns out that the roof-mounted dog crate contained a toy dog. Littleton police called it a stunt.

Americans United for Change has gotton into the act by publishing a Mitt’s Greatest Hits album. see their website for details.

Related: Helping Rusty Get the Word Out

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Credit: Wuerking Drawings from Politico

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There was one remark in last night’s GOP debate that we here at PFAW whole-heartedly agreed with. Asked about his view on judicial appointments, Mitt Romney said:

Let me note that the key thing I think the president is going to do, is going to be with the longest legacy. It’s going to be appointing Supreme Court and justices throughout the judicial system. As many as half the justices in the next four years are going to be appointed by the next president.

Judicial nominees will indeed be the most lasting legacy of the next president. And that’s why we can’t afford to hand over those decisions to Mitt Romney.

At last night’s debate, Romney joined his fellow candidates in praising Justices John Roberts, Antonin Scalia, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, the Supreme Court’s ultra-conservative base. Under these justices, the Court has moved farther to the right than it has in decades, consistently privileging big corporations over individual Americans. When Romney declared this summer that “corporations are people, my friend,” he was summarizing, and approving of, the Court’s decision in Citizens United v. FEC.

But it’s not just that Romney wants more Alitos and Thomases on the Supreme Court. Romney sent a signal that he would move the federal courts even farther to the right than they are today when he took on Robert Bork as his campaign’s chief legal advisor. Bork’s conservativism is so extreme that a bipartisan majority of the Senate rejected him for the Supreme Court in 1987. He was against the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He thought it was just fine to criminalize homosexuality. He was a professed fan of censorship. And since then, he has become even more extreme in his defense of corporate power and dismissal of individual rights. But not, apparently, too extreme for Mitt Romney.

Romney is absolutely right that appointing judges will be “the key thing” the next president will do. And it’s exactly the reason why he shouldn’t be president.

More on Robert Bork … here

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From UKIAH (CA) Community Blog published December 16, 2011

As evidence of a failed Obama presidency accumulates, criticism of his administration is mounting from liberal Democrats who have too much moral authority to be ignored.

Most prominent among these critics is veteran journalist Bill Moyers, whose October address to a Public Citizen gathering puts the lie to our barely Democratic president’s populist pantomime, acted out last week in a Kansas speech decrying the plight of “innocent, hardworking Americans.” In his talk, Moyers quoted an authentic Kansas populist, Mary Elizabeth Lease, who in 1890 declared, “Wall Street owns the country…. Money rules…. The [political] parties lie to us and the political speakers mislead us.”

A former aide to Lyndon Johnson who knows politics from the inside, Moyers then delivered the coup de grace: “[Lease] should see us now. John Boehner calls on the bankers, holds out his cup, and offers them total obeisance from the House majority if only they fill it. Barack Obama criticizes bankers as fat cats, then invites them to dine at a pricey New York restaurant where the tasting menu runs to $195 a person.”

As it happens, Moyers’s remarks anticipated the trenchant question posed in an interview by another prominent liberal, Barbara Ehrenreich, just after billionaire Michael Bloomberg and mayors of other cities cleared public spaces of Occupy Wall Street protesters: “Where in all this was Obama? Why couldn’t he have picked up the phone and called the mayors of Portland and Oakland and said: ‘Go easy on these people. They represent the anger and aspirations of the majority.’ Would that have been so difficult?” Well, yes, particularly if your principal occupation is shaking down bankers and brokers for campaign donations on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

Related: Mr. President, Stop Protecting Bankers From These State Law Enforcement Officials

By now it should be obvious that the system, and the Democratic Party, run Obama, not the other way around. Under this arrangement, the president carries out his duties as pre-eminent party functionary—fundraising being at the top of his list of responsibilities—and defers on legislation, leaving it to corrupt Democratic barons such as Sen. Max Baucus (D., Mont.), devoted friend of the insurance, pharmaceutical, and banking crowd, and sworn enemy of reform.

As Ron Suskind’s book “Confidence Men” confirms, there was never any question of doing things differently. Describing the then president-elect’s choice of economic advisers, he notes, “Obama, after all, had selected for his top domestic officials two men [Lawrence Summers and Timothy Geithner] whose actions [in the Clinton Administration] had contributed to the very financial disaster they were hired to solve.” These anti-reform appointments did not go unnoticed by party regulars, even though they were ignored by Obama groupies. “I don’t understand how you could do this,” Suskind quotes Sen. Byron Dorgan (D., N.D.) saying to Obama. “You’ve picked the wrong people!”

The “wrong people” included Rahm Emanuel, now mayor of Chicago, and his replacement as White House chief of staff, William Daley; both of these advisers were four-star generals within the Chicago Democratic machine who cut their teeth in Washington during the campaign to pass that job-killer North American Free Trade Act and who later worked for investment banks. But Obama’s hypocrisy in Osawatomie, Kansas, set a new standard in deception. Among other things, his speech blamed “regulators who were supposed to warn us about the dangers of all this [the unfettered sales of bundled mortgages], but looked the other way or didn’t have the authority to look at all. It was wrong. It combined the breathtaking greed of a few with irresponsibility all across the system.”

What’s truly breathtaking is the president’s gall, his stunning contempt for political history and contemporary reality. Besides neglecting to mention Democratic complicity in the debacle of 2008, he failed to point out that derivatives trading remains largely unregulated while the Securities and Exchange Commission awaits “public comment on a detailed implementation plan” for future regulation. In other words, until the banking and brokerage lobbies have had their say with John Boehner, Max Baucus, and Secretary of the Treasury Tim Geithner. Meanwhile, the administration steadfastly opposes a restoration of the Glass-Steagall Act, the New Deal law that reduced outlandish speculation by separating commercial and investment banks. In 1999, it was Summers and Geithner, led by Bill Clinton’s Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin (much admired by Obama), who persuaded Congress to repeal this crucial impediment to Wall Street recklessness.

And then there’s Afghanistan. Obama should be condemned for escalating this grotesquely expensive, destructive, and self-defeating war. Thoroughly discredited by analysts on both the left and the right, the Afghan madness seems to bore liberals who once would have marched against Vietnam. I suggest they watch the brilliant new documentary “Hell and Back Again” to enhance their knowledge of the war’s casualties. The pitiful story of Marine sergeant Nathan Harris ought to make them furious at our commander in chief; shouldn’t it also spark an intra-party revolt?

Related: Anniversery is apt time to re-evaluate Endless War

I urge people who haven’t given up on politics to examine the career of Allard Lowenstein. Lowenstein founded the Dump Johnson movement in 1967 and, against all odds, persuaded Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota to launch a Democratic primary challenge against the incumbent president over the issue of Vietnam. His example, I hope, might inspire someone to challenge another Democratic incumbent who has forfeited the trust of the people.

You may say it’s too late, that Obama is impregnable. Consider Gene McCarthy’s obscurity on November 30, 1967, when he announced his insurgent crusade. At the time, many Americans confused him with Senator Joe McCarthy (R., Wis.), the notorious communist hunter, and in January 1968 a Gallup poll showed him winning just 12 percent of the votes in a presidential election. But on March 12, McCarthy nearly beat Johnson in the New Hampshire primary. The opposition was galvanized, Robert Kennedy jumped into the race, LBJ announced he would not seek re-election, and American democracy was revived.

Granted, there are big differences between 1968 and 2012 — for one thing, there’s no military draft to frighten the young — but the great issues are the same: an immoral war and a merciless money power. Moreover, high unemployment and the dominance of Wall Street do frighten the young. They need a tribune.

In November 1967, before he announced his candidacy, McCarthy told an audience of college students, “There is deep anxiety and alienation among a large number of people…. Someone must give these groups entrance back into the political processes. We may lose, but at least in the process of fighting within the political framework, we’ll have reduced the alienation.” Two days later, in remarks that would have pertained just as well to the current Occupy Wall Street movement, he said, “Party unity is not a sufficient excuse for silence” and Vietnam was “not the kind of political controversy which should be left to a children’s crusade or to those not directly involved in politics. It should rather be taken up by adult political leaders and activists in America.”

Are there any adults left in the Democratic Party?

~

Related: Barack Obama End of 2010 Scorecard

John R. MacArthur is publisher of Harper’s Magazine and author of the book You Can’t Be President: The Outrageous Barriers to Democracy in America. This column originally appeared in the Providence Journal on December 14, 2011.

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