Monthly Archives: February 2012

Send in the Clowns

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Don’t bother, they’re here –I cannot let the day go by without commenting on “Lines Crossed: Separation of Church and State. Has the Obama administration trampled on Freedom of Religion and Freedom of Conscience?” That’s the hearing today chaired by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), which consisted of a bunch of male clergymen complaining that they can’t have women working for them who might be using contraceptives.

Seriously. If you don’t have to pay for it, dudes, what is your problem?

Democrats had requested that a pro-choice woman be heard, and Daryl Issa refused. The hearing was not about birth control, he said. Except that it was about birth control. And all the news stories are calling it a hearing on contraception, and highlighting the fact that first panel consisted of only men. See Ed Kilgore, “When ‘framing’ Goes Horribly Wrong.”

However, it is not true there were no women’s voices heard today. NH Republican Jeanine Notter spoke up to let the panel know that birth control pills cause prostate cancer.

You can’t make this up.

This Way to the Tar Pits

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Word is that Harry Reid is going to allow the Senate to vote on the Roy Blunt amendment that would allow employers to opt out of mandated health insurance coverage for “moral” reasons.

There are all kinds of polls out now that say a majority of the public favors President Obama’s policy on mandated birth control coverage. The battle with the bishops hasn’t hurt Obama even among Catholic voters.

If Republicans are clueless enough to keep fighting this fight, then let ’em. We could end up with a nice stockpile of videos of old white guys ranting about the immorality of family planning.

Speaking of old white guys — now that the GOP nomination race is between Frothy and Mittens, I want to point to some data from a recent CNN/ORC poll (click to enlarge).

Click to Enlarge

Note that women tend to favor Mittens and men prefer Frothy. Notice also the conspicuous lack of nonwhites and people under 50. Heh. You’d think with all their antipathy to birth control there’d be some younger folks represented in the sampling.

The Tao of Politics

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Or, why the GOP presidential candidates are such losers — Paul Krugman writes,

How did American conservatism end up so detached from, indeed at odds with, facts and rationality? …

… My short answer is that the long-running con game of economic conservatives and the wealthy supporters they serve finally went bad. For decades the G.O.P. has won elections by appealing to social and racial divisions, only to turn after each victory to deregulation and tax cuts for the wealthy — a process that reached its epitome when George W. Bush won re-election by posing as America’s defender against gay married terrorists, then announced that he had a mandate to privatize Social Security.

Over time, however, this strategy created a base that really believed in all the hokum — and now the party elite has lost control.

You’ll recognize that “appealing to social and racial divisions, only to turn after each victory to deregulation and tax cuts for the wealthy” was the subject of Thomas Frank’s book What’s the Matter With Kansas? And of course cultural/racial warfare was cranked up back when red-baiting was losing its punch. This has been going on for decades. So why are the chickens coming home to roost now?

The complete answer probably is the stuff Ph.D. dissertations are made of. Possibly the single biggest reason is the Faux News factor, or the degree to which the Right has managed to manipulate mass media into delivering its message while freezing out progressive perspectives. A big chunk of the electorate is being “informed” exclusively by Heritage Foundation talking points.

But in the past, the message was still being mostly controlled by the elite, so the masses would all be herded in the same direction. Thanks to Citizens United, however, anybody with a few million bucks to throw around can manipulate public opinion, too!

In 2000, there was no Sheldon Adelson underwriting videos about George W. Bush’s business career, for example. The GOP was able to package and market Bush as a successful business man and governor. Were Dubya running today, I doubt he could get away with that. It’s like a hundred Karl Roves have bloomed.

So, yeah, the GOP field is a pathetic mess. But were other recent presidential candidates any better? Here’s the complete list of candidates for 2000, according to Wikipedia:

George W. Bush, Governor of Texas
John McCain, Senator from Arizona
Alan Keyes, former U.S. ECOSOC Ambassador from Maryland
Steve Forbes, businessman from New Jersey
Gary Bauer, former Undersecretary of Education from Kentucky
Orrin Hatch, Senator from Utah
Elizabeth Dole, former Secretary of Labor from North Carolina
Pat Buchanan, publisher and author from Virginia
Dan Quayle, former Vice President from Indiana
Lamar Alexander, former Governor of Tennessee
Robert C. Smith, Senator from New Hampshire
John Kasich, Representative from Ohio
Herman Cain, CEO of Godfather’s Pizza from Nebraska

There’s a couple of ’em who were possibly not crazy, but that’s about all I can say for them. And Bush was as big a joke as the rest of them, but the GOP elites had tight enough control of the message to package Bush as a respectable candidate.

Jesse Singal wrote,

When Citizens United first came down, there was a lot of sturm und drang about how the GOP would use the new rules to beat up on Obama and Democratic candidates in general. I’m not sure people gave enough thought to how these rules would affect primary races, or to the fact that the first party to really be affected by them would be the GOP, since they actually have to choose a candidate for 2012.

Maybe when this election is over, Republicans will rethink their opposition to election reform.

Mitch McConnell: WTF?

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Do Republicans think this will be a winning issue for them?

Not satisfied with President Obama’s new religious accommodation, Republicans will move forward with legislation by Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO) that permits any employer to deny birth control coverage in their health insurance plans, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said Sunday.

“If we end up having to try to overcome the President’s opposition by legislation, of course I’d be happy to support it, and intend to support it,” McConnell said. “We’ll be voting on that in the Senate and you can anticipate that that would happen as soon as possible.” …

…The push indicates either that Republicans believe there’s still an opportunity to score political points against Obama, or that they’ve simply calculated they cannot back down now. Regardless, the success of the strategy now rests on the gamble that Republicans will be able to continue framing the issue as one over religious liberty and not contraception, despite the new accommodation Obama carved out.

I know we’re talking about crazy people, but I can’t see how even Mitch McConnell thinks this is going to help the GOP.

Punked and Clueless

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Sorry I’ve been scarce. This upper respiratory infection has just wiped me out.

Anyway — I have been following the contraception flap and am persuaded President Obama played the bishops, and the Republicans, like a fiddle (see Blue Girl for commentary). The best article I’ve read on this is by Helene Cooper and Laurie Goodstein in the New York Times. According to Cooper and Goodstein, the President didn’t give a hoo-haw about appeasing the Catholic bishops. However, he was getting some flak from people like Sister Carol Keehan, head of an influential Catholic hospital group, and Sister Simone Campbell, executive director of Network, a nuns’ social activist group. Now the sisters are happy and Planned Parenthood is happy, so it’s all good.

Even better, the bishops are still pissed. They and some GOP politicians are holding out for allowing employers to pick and choose what health care coverage their employees may have. So if the employer is a Christian Scientist, does nothing get covered?

Poll after poll says the public is in favor of the HHS policy. This includes a majority of Catholics. Yet cluelessness abounds. Possibly the oddest commentary is from rightie blogger Tom Maguire, who titles his post “The Contraception Controversy Would Have Been Avoided If Obama Were President.” The implication, of course, is that the President is not in charge, but based on my reading of Cooper and Goodstein, the President has been driving this issue exactly where he wants it to go.

And see the comment by Extraneus —

It’s amazing that they’re [the Obama Administration] willing to go to the mat for … birth control? Seriously?

We should already have a candidate who’s up ten points on this douchebag.

This brought to mind a post by John Cole from a few days ago:

Others here have talked about the issue in more detail, but I really just can’t believe that in the year 2012, with everything that is going on, Republicans want to pick a losing fight over condoms and the pill. I thought they were stupid, but I didn’t think they were that stupid. It’s like they’ve given up on taking us back to 1950 and have just decided to pretend it is 1950 all over again.

Or, to paraphrase — It’s amazing that they’re willing to go to the mat to stop … birth control? Seriously?

See, unlike fantasy issues like the President’s birth certificate and imaginary death panels, birth control actually makes a difference in the lives of real people. Yes, many people fork out the money themselves. But since we’re talking mostly about women’s health care, when contraception is not covered by insurance it amounts to a womb tax.

Cluelessness abounds. The congenitally clueless Ruth Marcus writes at WaPo,

The biggest puzzle is how the administration landed itself in this fix. There was going to be no satisfying the Catholic bishops. From the church’s point of view, no exemption could be broad enough. In a letter to the Department of Health and Human Services, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops argued that contraception “is not properly seen as basic health care” and that the mandate “should be rescinded in its entirety.”

But the public was not in an uproar about the mandate itself. The administration’s self-inflicted wound involved its refusal to write a large enough exemption.

Marcus, you dimwit — the public was not in an uproar at all. The public overwhelmingly is opposed to allowing Catholic hospitals an exemption from birth control coverage.

And, of course, we’ve got some “Obama caved” snorting coming from the Left (see especially comments). I think this was a fight the President needed to have, however, and I think on the whole he has come out of this in better shape than he went in.

Stuff to Read

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I’m still out of it with the motherbleeping cold. Entertain yourselves —

Matt Taibbi, Wall Street Should Stop Whining

Inside the New Hate

Ed Kilgore, Poor Handel-ing

The Bishops Overreach — see also USA Today —

The White House is “all talk, no action” on moving toward compromise, said Anthony Picarello, general counsel for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. “There has been a lot of talk in the last couple days about compromise, but it sounds to us like a way to turn down the heat, to placate people without doing anything in particular,” Picarello said. “We’re not going to do anything until this is fixed.”

That means removing the provision from the health care law altogether, he said, not simply changing it for Catholic employers and their insurers. He cited the problem that would create for “good Catholic business people who can’t in good conscience cooperate with this.”

“If I quit this job and opened a Taco Bell, I’d be covered by the mandate,” Picarello said.

From what I’ve heard, the White House is not caving. Fingers crossed.

Andrew Rosenthal, “It’s Not About Religious Freedom”

Contraception: A New Third Rail?

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Last night Rachel Maddow argued that banning contraception is a losing issue, even in Mississippi.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Rachel makes some of the same points about the HHS rules on contraception as part of employee benefit packages as Sarah Posner —

Obama’s greatest sin, in this view: violating the religious beliefs of the Catholic hierarchy. Not the beliefs or practices of lay Catholics, or the Catholic and non-Catholic employees of Catholic institutions.

The fact is, the enormous majority of Catholic women have used birth control. Apparently a whopping majority of American Catholic lay women quietly have decided the bishops ain’t gonna go through labor and raise the baby, so they don’t get to make the rules.

However, Joan Walsh writes,

I knew the president’s decision would be controversial, but I underestimated the firestorm he would face. Since 98 percent of Catholics practice forms of contraception forbidden by the church at some point in their lives, according to the Centers for Disease Control, I assumed many of them would speak out in favor of the new regulations. How could they expect the president to follow church teachings if they did not?

I was wrong. Too many Catholics are insisting that while they may personally disagree with the church on contraception, they defend the bishops’ opposition to the HHS moves as a matter of “religious liberty.” Others are silent. But silence lets the most right-wing forces of reaction prevail. It’s time for the 98 percent to speak up.

What cognitive dissonance hath wrought. But I suspect the silent ones will pay no more attention to the bishops in the voting booth than they do in the bedroom.

Further, I question whether standing up to the bishops would hurt Obama among non-Catholic religious voters who might otherwise vote for him. I suspect most Protestants and Jews respect the Catholic bishops about as much as they respect telemarketers.

So why does anyone care what the bishops think? Republicans are trying to make an issue out of the bishops, but Republicans seem to have entered a suicide pact on a lot of issues lately.

There’s a lot of talk abut whether President Obama will walk back the HHS decision for political reasons. I personally think he would lose more support than he would gain by doing so. The people screaming about it aren’t likely to vote for him anyway, and I think everybody else would be disappointed if he backed down. As the recent Komen for the Fail debacle showed us, a whole lot of people out there are getting fed up with letting a small bunch of screaming jack-booted whackjobs dictate public policy that impacts everyone.

See also:

Obama Weighed Religious Politics Before Contraceptive Decision

Public Health Includes Women

Many Catholic Universities, Hospitals Already Cover Contraception In Their Health Insurance Plans

Catholics, the Contraception Mandate, and Public Opinion