Was the Shutdown Threat All About S-E-X?

In the wake of the near-shutdown of the government, it is becoming crystal clear that the fight was never about money and austerity and deficits. It's about ideology. The cause celebre this go-round was Planned Parenthood and abortion. But it goes beyond reproductive rights. It goes to the heart of the arch-conservative mantra that Sex is Bad.  It's particularly bad, in their view, when it involves the unmarried, the transgender, the gay, the unemployed, the minority.  Let's face it. People like Mike Pence and Rick Santorum and all the goons of Right Wing World don't like the idea of taxpayer money being used, even obliquely, to help people have fun, particularly when it comes to their sex lives.

Title X is a government program that gives about a quarter of its funds to Planned Parenthood, and the rest to other clinics for low-income people throughout the country.  It specifically does not fund abortions, because that is illegal under federal law.  What it does pay for, however, are family planning for both men and women, STD screening, HIV/AIDS, Diabetes, hypertension and cancer screening.  The services are for  ALL people -- married or single, gay or straight. Planned Parenthood offers all of these in addition to abortion services that it funds through private means, adding up to only about three percent of its total program. 

Title X pays for birth control pills on the taxpayer dime and Planned Parenthood does not demand a marriage certificate when women come in seeking the pill. Thus, in Republican World, they are promoters of promiscuity and orgies. Planned Parenthood is also known for its compassionate treatment of transgender patients.  Planned Parenthood supplies free condoms to its clients, thus promoting even more unrestrained sex.  See where this is going?  Way, way beyond the right to life movement. 


Since the radical right culture warriors are also anti-gay and many seem to have sexual phobias of all kinds, could the threatened government shutdown have been about homophobia as well as misogyny? Nobody's telling, but it wouldn't surprise me. 

 Christian fundamentalism as a force in American politics has never died.  The religious fanatics still haven't gotten over the repeal of DADT. Their dogmatism and their demogoguery trump rational thought. It wouldn't shock me if they actually thought that the "X" in Title X stands for X-rated, instead of the number 10.  The right wing crowd probably never studied Roman numerals in school because those numbers are un-American.

The Radical Right is Easily Confused & Obsessed With Sex 

And speaking of Rome, if I didn't know better, I'd swear the Vatican might have a hand in this too.  The American bishops tried to kill the affordable health care act due to abortion issues.  Could this be payback time from the mighty lobby of men in mitered hats?  Nothing would surprise me at this point.  If you'd told me a week ago the government would be shut down over Pap smears, I wouldn't have believed it either.


And then there's the cultish Abstinence Movement, which espouses just saying no as the proper right wing method of birth control. Bristol Palin, teen mom, is the poster child of that movement, or revirgination campaign or whatever you want to call it.  Conservatives even have weird debutante-type affairs called "Purity Balls" in which fathers parade out their daughters in some vaguely creepy chastity sweepstakes.  Daddy's Little Girl is Daddy's Little Girl until marriage do them part.

Not a Planned Parenthood Alumna

And if you still don't believe how far right we've come as a country, take a gander at what President Nixon wrote when he signed Title X into law one Christmas Eve long, long ago: (and Dickie, from all accounts, was one repressed Oedipus "my mother was a saint" Complex dude):

He Put the Planning Back in Family Values

ON JULY 18, 1969, I sent to the Congress a message proposing the creation of a Commission on Population Growth and the American Future. The Congress acted promptly on my proposal and the act establishing the Commission was signed by me on March 16, 1970. The Commission is now functioning: its interim report will be due in the spring of 1971, and its final report will be submitted in the spring of 1972.
 
At the same time, I called for a national commitment to provide adequate family planning services within the next 5 years to all those who want them but cannot afford them. It was clear that the domestic family planning services supported by the Federal Government were not adequate to provide information and services to all who want them on a voluntary basis.
 
To implement this national commitment, I asked for expanded research in contraceptive development and the behavioral sciences, reorganization of family planning service activities within the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, and legislation which would help the Department to implement this important program by providing broader and more precise legislative authority and a clearer source of financial support. The National Center for Family Planning Services was established in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare shortly after my message.
 
The bill before me today, the "Family Planning Services and Population Research Act of 1970," completes the legislation I requested in my message on population. This measure provides for expanded research, training of manpower, and increased family planning services. In addition, it provides for the development of family planning and population growth information and education.
It is noteworthy that this landmark legislation on family planning and population has had strong bipartisan support. I am confident that by working together-at Federal, State, and local levels--we can achieve the goal of providing adequate family planning services within the next 5 years to all those who want them but cannot afford them.
 
I am proud to affix my signature to this important legislation and share this pride with so many who have worked so hard toward its enactment."
 
Wow.  A Republican president proposed what would today be called a socialistic public health law and it was promptly approved in a bipartisan manner by Congress. If Tricky Dick were in office now, Mike Pence would be calling him a Marxist.  No, wait.  Mike Pence would never have been elected to anything except maybe treasurer of some tiny local chapter of the John Birch Society.  And amazing, isn't it, that presidents actually thought up bills to send to Congress all on their own and didn't just shrug and tell them to hash it out among themselves and stop acting like children?

And now we have another down-to-the-wire save, passage of a budget nobody even had the chance to read before voting. And it is merely a stop-gap "bridge" cure, a massive kick-the-can down the road for another week.  At the rate we're going, we won't have a real budget till it's time to vote for next year's. And these hard-right fundamentalists who seem to have a spooky sway over the Democrats who outnumber them aren't going away.  The Democrats are rapidly becoming superfluous in this whole mess we call a government.  The Culture Wars have joined the Class War in what increasingly appears to be a descent into fascism.

The Tainted Cheesiness of Paul Ryan

I don't know who's worse:  pathological zombie politician Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, or the alleged intelligentsia who are cheerleading his "seriousness, courage and bravery".   I am still trying to recover from the David Brooks column in yesterday's Times that treated this two-bit hack like the second coming of Christ.


Read instead the running commentary of Paul Krugman in his New York Times blog for a piece-by-piece evisceration of the Ryan Manifesto of Death by a Thousand Cuts.  After Professor K called out Ryan's (via the Heritage Foundation) projection of only a 2.7 percent unemployment rate in coming years to vindicate his fictional deficit cure, it was mysteriously cut from the online Heritage Foundation version.  But Krugman has posted a screenshot of the original.


The obvious point of the Ryan plan is to Scare Us All To Death, as well as start a generation war between Millennials and their grandparents.  Ryan is fine with leaving Medicare alone for the 55-plus crowd around today, but if you're in the unlucky below-55 age group, you will only get a few thousand bucks to buy crappy junk insurance when you retire.  Meanwhile, you'll be paying to keep old geezers on life support through your payroll deductions. It's the tried and true "divide and conquer" formula all bosses and overlords use to keep their disgruntled workers and subjects in their places. Pit colleague against colleague, private sector versus public sector, young  college graduate minimum wage McDonald's hamburger flipper against the Grandma living in retired "comfort" on his FICA/Medicare deduction dime.  Destruction of the social safety net is the goal. "Family values" in GOP-speak is of the Corleone/Tony Soprano variety only. 

 It's also the old propagandistic bait and switch trick of cutting social programs in order to "save" them -- so as not to burden our children and grandchildren with our bills. We must die for our sins.  Come on.  The real burdensome crowd are the kleptocrats who want to keep their tax cuts for eternity and live off the rest of us like the bloated leeches they are.  It's the class war, stupid.  And speaking of war -- not a mention does Ryan make of our three (official) wars and their terrible cost in money, lives, limbs and mental health.

Ryan is a fall guy being paraded out by the Republicans to provide a sideshow. As my friend Kate Madison pointed out yesterday in her comment on Brooks, he is so despised in his native Wisconsin that he is not expected to even win re-election next year, let alone remain House Budget Committee chairman. 

The Ryan Show is like a Grade Z horror flick that's so bad, it's funny.  What the GOP is really banking on is the  possibility that their outrageous demands for a trillion dollar cut will so scare the spineless Democrats that they might even get a third of what they're asking for. Little Paulie a Whiz Kid?  Cheez Whiz is more like it  -- and that amounts to sacrilege in the Dairy State, the birthplace of labor unions. His artificial cheese product of a budget is held together by intellectual emulsifying agents that don't stand a chance when exposed to heat and light.  He has cheeted with the facts. His mendacious manifesto and his fellow Republicans are becoming as unglued as xanthum gum left out in the rain.

The Fierce Urgency of Town Halls and Political Galas

When President Obama popped in at yesterday's White House press briefing, he gave the impression he'd be personally involved in intense budget negotiations with Republicans to avert what many believe is an imminent government shutdown.

Hovering Above It All

But according to the official schedule released today, the president will be leaving town right after lunch - first, for a Town Hall event in Philly and then to a fundraiser for Al Sharpton in Manhattan.  I guess his "team" will be handling the crisis in  his absence.... the latest in a line of absences both physical and political.  As Kevin Drum of Mother Jones puts it: "Obama has long followed a strategy of letting other people fight pitched battles for awhile and then parachuting in towards the end to act as peacemaker."

But his re-election campaign beckons, so never let a crisis get in the way of a good town hall.  Obama plans to meet with workers at Gamesa, a Spain-based wind turbine company with a factory in Pennsylvania that constructed the Allegheny Ridge Wind Farm.  Since Hispanics will be a key voting bloc in 2012, the President is going a-courting now.  And then, on to his second foray into the Big Apple in less than a week, a political payback of sorts to Al Sharpton at the National Action Networks gala at the Sheraton Hotel.  Sharpton was initially a Hillary supporter, but made up with Obama before the convention.

The president arrives at Kennedy Airport at 5 p.m., just in time for the evening rush.  Local news outlets are treating the story as A Traffic Gridlock of Epic Proportions.  New Yorkers tend to get irate when a president breezes into town at  inconvenient times on an increasingly consistent basis.  But that's okay. Irate New Yorkers will get the chance to let off some steam next weekend (4/15) in what promises to be a gala mass demonstration in Union Square against the banksters and the kleptocrats.  Somehow I don't think any politician of either political party will be in town for the occasion.  

They call the presidential route through Manhattan a Frozen Zone.  And despite all the heated rhetoric coming out of D.C., the budget talks seem to be in the deep freeze as well, at least as far as Obama is concerned.  Here's what he said yesterday:

"The only question is whether politics or ideology are going to get in the way of preventing a government shutdown.  Now, what does this potentially mean for the American people?  At a time when the economy is just beginning to grow, where we’re just starting to see a pickup in employment, the last thing we need is a disruption that’s caused by a government shutdown.  Not to mention all the people who depend on government services, whether you’re a veteran or you’re somebody who’s trying to get a passport or you’re planning to visit one of the national monuments or you’re a business leader who’s trying to get a small business loan.  You don’t want delays, you don’t want disruptions just because of usual politics in Washington.

So what I said to the Speaker today, and what I said to Leader Reid, and what I’ve said to the two appropriations chairs, is that myself, Joe Biden, my team, we are prepared to meet for as long as possible to get this resolved."

Only, he'll be MIA for a total of 10 hours today.  His defenders, or apologists, will likely continue to say he's no-drama Obama, the only grown-up in the room, he likes to stay detached, he knows what he's doing.  In one respect, he's like an annoying helicopter parent, always hovering near the children's activities but never getting directly involved or, heaven forbid, getting angry or showing who's the boss.

Kevin Drum said he likes to parachute in at the last minute.  But I'm afraid that this time, he's merely bailed out.


** Update, 7:05 p.m.  The New York Times now reports that Obama will meet with House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid  immediately upon his helicopter landing tonight at 8:45 p.m. I guess the three-minute quickie phone call he made to Boehner before blowing town earlier today didn't do the trick.

Talking Points for Obamabots

Now that thousands of you have already signed up for Obama '12 and are champing at the bit to work those phones a year and a half before Election Day, here's a script I just unearthed to help you connect one-on-one with the undecided folks in the heartland. If they tell you they won't be voting for Obama, here's what you say:

If you don’t support Barack, you’re enabling the Tea Party

People who criticize the president are racists.

He was a left a mess by Bush and he's doing his best to clean it up.  He’s been trying to drive the car out of the ditch. He has to deal with circumstances beyond his control, every minute of every day.  Give him a break. He’s only been president for 26 months and we’ve had 200 years of bad governance.

Lily Ledbetter, Lily Ledbetter, Lily Ledbetter.

If you don’t support Obama, then Sarah Palin/Newt Gingrich/Michele Bachmann will become president and the world will end.  Is that what you really want?

He was solely responsible for the repeal of DADT. He inspired the Egyptian Revolution. He had to give tax breaks to the rich to save the middle class down the road. Because of him, we will all, someday, have the privilege of buying private health insurance.

He is the only grownup in the room. Everybody else is a child. 

A third party candidate or primary challenger will just be a spoiler.

He is playing three dimensional chess, so give him the benefit of the doubt. You should trust him because he has a higher IQ. than you do.

He has to pander to the corporations now, so he can become the true progressive he wants to be during his second term.  He has to pretend to love Wall Street because without their money he couldn't get re-elected.  That's how politics works.  Can I put you down for $25?

Some people just don't appreciate nuance. 

Pragmatism is the greatest virtue ever invented.

He’s the only thing standing  in the way of a total fascist takeover of the Supreme Court.

Have I left anything out?

Killing Me Softly With his Re-election Announcement

As expected, President Obama has announced he is running for re-election.  I first heard about it from Michael Shear in the New York Times, who characterized the announcement as "soft and low-key".  I felt bad that I didn't get a personal email from the president to tell me this himself, but silly me forgot to check my spam folder - and there it was, right under the Proactiv message.

I read it through, and predictably gagged.  And mean girl that I am, I couldn't resist rifling through the garbage can of my imagination and picturing what his first draft might have said before his PR flacks cleaned it up for the bland vanilla palates of the voting public.  So here, reading between the lines, is the original Barack email:

Karen --

Today, we are filing papers to launch our 2012 campaign.

We're doing this now because the politics we believe in does not start with expensive TV ads or extravaganzas, just forget about that multi- million dollar fundraiser I had last week that barred the press and public but with you – with chumps people organizing block-by-block, talking to neighbors, co-workers, and friends. And that kind of campaign takes chutzpah and an idea-bank chock full of bullshit time to build.

So even though I'm focused on the job you elected me to do, which entails serving my oligarch lords and masters and the race may not reach full speed for a year or more, even though I have never really stopped campaigning and wasting billions of gallons of jet fuel campaigning on the government dime the work of laying the foundation for our campaign must start arbitrarily, a date we just picked out of mid-air today.

We've always known that lasting change wouldn't come quickly or easily. It never does.  And I never really intended it to, at all.  But as my administration and folks across the country fight to protect the progress we've made -- and make more spin and empty promises – we need free labor and unpaid interns  to begin mobilizing for 2012, long before the time comes for me to begin campaigning in earnest. What I have been doing up to now has been insincere campaigning.  The earnest campaigning involves me trying to pretend I love my Democratic base, and it’s hard.  Change will not come easy.

As we take this step, I'd like to share a video that features some folks like you who are helping to lead the way on this journey. Please take a moment to watch:

(  Ed. note. I am not embedding the video.  It is widely available everywhere.  It is inescapable.  It will make your computer melt  And I am not a "folk", dammit! )

In the coming days, supporters like you will begin forging a new organization that we'll build together in cities and towns across the country.  It is an organization of the imagination, in your own minds.  It will have nothing to do with me. And I'll need you to send me your hard-earned dollars and work for free to help shape our plan as we create a campaign that's farther reaching, more focused, and more innovative than anything we've built before.  It is time to rebuild the Obama is Jesus meme of the 21^st century, to reinvent the Obama Personality Cult to draw in as many unthinking Obamabots as I possibly can.

We'll start by doing something unprecedented: coordinating millions of one-on-one conversations between supporters across every single state, with scripts that we provide and you will stick unquestioningly to,  reconnecting old friends, inspiring new naive ones to join the cause, and readying ourselves for next year's fight.  I still have that valuable email list from 2008.

This will be my final campaign, at least as a candidate. Of course, I am counting on all of you to demand a third term and just do away with any more campaigns.  Just make me king.  But the cause of making a lasting difference for our families, our communities, and our country has never been about one person.  I can’t be number one free world leader without legions of fans. And I it will succeed only if we work together.

There will be much more to come as the race unfolds. Today, simply let us know you're in to help us begin, and then spread the word: like good little culties.

http://my.barackobama.com/2012

Thank you,

Barack

A New York State of Mind

New York Protesters Storm Capital Building, Budget Passed Behind Closed Doors (Mike Groll, AP)

Wisconsin has come to New York, home turf of the Wall Street banksters and faux Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo.  In anticipation of a draconian spending package cutting aid to schools and giving huge tax breaks to the rich, a crowd of thousands converged in Albany Thursday to protest. Cuomo and the Legislature cowered behind closed doors to pass the package.  It's one of the rare times in the history of the state that a budget has ever passed before schedule.

And just last week, a crowd of an estimated 5,000 people met at City Hall and marched down Wall Street to protest the budget.  This "Day of Rage" against the state cuts passed by largely unnoticed by the nation at large, because it was not covered by the mainstream media.  The New York Times did not give it any space at all.  I initially found out about it on Al Jazeera, of all places.  You can view a video of the event in the previous post, below.

The New York budget cuts total $10 billion, including $1.5 billion slashed from school aid and $3 billion from health care. 

The protest was organized around several demands, including no cuts to social services, job creation rather than layoffs, improved access to affordable housing, protecting workers' rights, ending school closings and mayoral control and firing Cathleen Black, the controversial chancellor of New York City public schools. She was appointed to the post last year by her friend, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, despite having no prior education experience and never having sent her own children to public schools. 

The marchers called for extending the millionaires' tax, reinstating the stock transfer tax and closing corporate tax loopholes. Extending the millionaires' tax would have raised between $1 billion and $5 billion. Reinstating the stock transfer tax--which is already on the books but is returned every year to the banks it is collected from--would have raised $15 billion per year, enough on its own to eliminate the entire budget deficit and create a surplus instead.

But Cuomo, citing a threat by banks that they would leave the state unless they got their concessions, caved like an Obama clone. Rich New Yorkers currently pay a lower portion of their income in state taxes than those in lower-income brackets. Under current rates, the richest one percent of New Yorkers pay 8.4 percent of their income in state taxes, while middle-income workers (such as state university adjuncts and faculty) pay 11.6 percent. Once the millionaires' tax expires, the state tax rate of the richest 1 percent will drop to just 7.2 percent.

The projected impact of the budget cuts on New York City varies widely. At the low end, Cuomo claims the city would lose $659.4 million, including $579.7 million in education aid.  Bloomberg, on the other hand, claims the city will lose closer to $2 billion, adding that the budget "does not treat New York City equitably" because it cuts a higher portion of aid to the city than other localities, which are facing a mere 2 percent reduction. Shades of that famous Daily News headline "Ford to New York City: Drop Dead!"  -- only this time it was Cuomo giving the Big Apple the shaft.

 But Bloomberg is not getting much sympathy from working people. For one thing, he is threatening to lay off teachers, which is never a good idea.  For another thing, he's a Forbes billionaire and a big friend to Wall Street. You don't hear him griping about the tax breaks given to the banksters.

Last weekend's protest, which lasted about two hours,  was organized by a new coalition calling itself "New Yorkers Against Budget Cuts: Students-Labor-Communities United". Participants included the Transport Workers Union Local 100, which represents New York City transit workers; AFSCME District Council (DC) 37, which is New York City's largest municipal worker union; and the CUNY Mobilization Network. Professional Staff Congress-CUNY (CUNY's faculty union), the United Auto Workers regional office, and Teamsters Local 808.  Other key supporters were the Freedom Party, formed by City Councilmember Charles Barron after he left the Democratic Party, and the recently formed South Bronx Community Congress, as well as the Green Party. You may remember Barron as one of the slew of gubernatorial candidates challenging Carl Palladino and Cuomo last fall.

We knew we were in trouble when The Tea Party factions in New York State actually sent out emails earlier this year urging support for Cuomo and his budget.  Some of us knew we were getting a Republican in Democratic clothing, since Cuomo as attorney general did little to nothing to go after Wall Street crooks.  The new governor rarely speaks to reporters, another warning sign.  Will our next step be a recall?  We can always hope  --  and better yet, march and clamor.  The next big event will be on May 1, with several smaller rallies geared against Cathie Black and college funding cuts scheduled before then.

*  Update (4/3) -- Doug Singsen, of New Yorkers Against Budget Cuts, confirms in an email that his group notified all local and major media outlets of the event, which like Wisconsin, suffered a news blackout: 

" We sent out a press release to all the major media outlets in NYC as well as many of the smaller ones. The reason for the lack of coverage is that America's mainstream media is simply biased against covering any struggle for progressive change (regressive movements like the Tea Party get coverage aplenty, on the other hand), especially if it doesn't involve elected officials or the Democratic Party. (Since the budget cuts are coming from the Democratic Party, we naturally were not working closely with them, although two anti-cuts Democrats did speak at the rally.) We did get some media coverage."

Among the outlets either covering or acknowledging the event were Al Jazeera, the iconic Amsterdam News, News 1 (a 24-hour NYC TV Station) and Telemundo, the Spanish language TV network.  And of course, not a few independent blogs.



New York's Day of Rage



March 24, 2011 DAY OF RAGE: Thousands Of Students & Workers United March...