Democratic Diva

Yep, Governor Jan Brewer is a lying liar. From her office’s press release on signing HB2625, aka the “Tell Your Boss Why You’re Taking The Slut Pills” bill into law Friday:

“Let’s not forget why we’re having this discussion: It’s ObamaCare that created this issue by forcing
church-affiliated employers and non-profits to offer services in violation of their religious faith,” said Governor Brewer

Bullpucky. The Arizona Legislature passed a law in 2002 requiring all insurance plans to cover contraception, with a narrow exemption for churches and other organizations with a specifically religious mission. It was essentially the same thing required by the ObamaCare contraception mandate. It was done to rectify what was seen as an unfair and sexist disparity in prescription coverage, since new-to-the-market erectile dysfunction drugs for men were going to be covered. It wasn’t too controversial back then and barely noticed by anyone. Anyone outside of the hysterical prude crowd, that is. They got right on the case. Anti-choicers introduced a bill the very next year to expand the religious exemption to more employers which was, of course, vetoed by then-Governor Napolitano.

Background

Last session, the Legislature passed H.B. 2234 requiring all health insurance plans that provide coverage for prescription drugs to also provide coverage for all Federal Drug Administration approved prescription methods of contraception (Laws 2002, Chapter 57). The law also creates an exemption for “religious employers” to allow them to obtain health insurance contracts without contraceptive coverage. Religious employer is defined as a nonprofit organization that primarily employs persons who share the same religious tenets and primarily serves persons who share its religious tenets. Examples of entities that would be exempted from providing contraceptive coverage are most churches, synagogues, mosques, temples, seminaries and convents.

Some organizations believe the exemption for religious organizations is narrow because it does not include faith-based organizations that provide social services rather than religious services and do not primarily serve or employ members of a specific religious community. Those same organizations believe that requiring such faith-based organizations to include prescription contraceptives in their health plan infringes on the religious tenets of the organization. S.B. 1089 changes the definition of “religious employer” to a nonprofit religious corporation, association, educational institution, charity or society whose religious tenets prohibit the use of contraceptives.

In her veto message, the Governor stated that it would be inappropriate to deny social services agency female employees contraceptive coverage that the law mandates for other similarly-situated women.

Barack Obama was an Illinois State Senator at that time. Hiding behind President Obama to defend signing this reactionary crock of crap is super lame, Governor Brewer.

Our Lady of Sorrows is a Phoenix school that has gotten into the news recently for refusing to play baseball against a team with a female player. The story has gone viral and Twitter is clucking over us zany Arizonans yet again. A few tweets that caught my attention were about the schismatic Catholic organization that runs Our Lady. Turns out they are some very strange and bitter people who long for that good old Vichy government and think everyone should stop picking on the Nazis.

The powerhouse organization of the radical traditionalist Catholic world is a sprawling international order called the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX), founded by the late French archbishop, Marcel-François Lefebvre, in 1970. Although there have been recent attempts by the Vatican to pull SSPX back into the Catholic mainstream, the organization, all of whose priests were excommunicated in the late 1980s, has continued to publish anti-Semitic materials, flirt with Holocaust denial and reject any reconciliation with the Catholic Church.

Lefebvre was always on the hard right. During World War II, he supported the pro-Nazi Vichy regime, a puppet government in the part of France not occupied by the Germans. He lamented the eventual liberation of the country, describing it as “the victory of Freemasonry against the Catholic order of Petain. It was the invasion of the barbarians without faith or law!”

Lefebvre later was on an advisory committee to the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), which enacted several liberalizing and modernizing reforms within the church. But the archbishop refused to sign the council’s final reports on religious liberty and the modern church, the first sign of a rebellion that would only grow in later years. In 1970, he founded SSPX as a seminary in Ecône, Switzerland.

In 1974, Lefebvre publicly denounced as heretical the Vatican II reforms and the subsequent adoption of the new Mass, celebrated in local languages instead of traditional Latin. As a result, Pope Paul VI ordered the archbishop to shut down his Swiss seminary. But Lefebvre refused to comply, leading the Vatican to suspend his right to perform priestly functions (a step short of excommunication) in 1976.

Yikes. And they’re Holocaust deniers too! It occurs that those sweltering Sundays of my childhood summers spent accompanying my very devout and conservative grandmother to those interminably long Masses could have been a lot worse.

Highlights from the Society’s own website include: “Defense of the Inquisition”, “Galileo: Victim or Villain?”, and “Rhythm: The Unhappy Compromise” (1948 condemnation of so-called Natural Family Planning).

Need I mention they have retrograde views on the role of women too?

Two weeks ago a 13 year old Minnesota girl committed suicide by hanging herself. Rachel Ehmke’s parents say she had suffered months of abuse at school:

The constant name-calling started sometime in the fall, Ehmke said.

“She’d say you’d walk by girls in school and they’d holler out things like “slut.” Stuff like this. It was just relentless,” Ehmke said.

At one point the bullies put gum in his daughter’s books and all over her locker, he said.

In a story by the Austin Herald, Rachel’s older sister says the word “slut” had been written on her locker, as well.

Like the bullying of LGBT kids, which sometimes drives them to suicide, this stuff doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Even if parents and adult authority figures don’t explicitly teach kids that gay people are wrong and female sexuality is shameful, it’s inevitable that kids are going to absorb those ideas from the larger culture. It hasn’t helped that abstinence-only sex “educators”, armed with millions of federal and state dollars, descended upon the public school during the Bush administration and continue to operate their misleading programs in districts across the country today, promoting unbelievably retrograde gender stereotypes and homophobia. In the meantime teen pregnancy and STD rates are highest in areas where abstinence-only sex ed dominates the curricula, and there are reports of an uptick in school bullying since 2001.

That’s part of what made yesterday so important. President Obama made a historic statement of equality and inclusion when he expressed support for the right of gay couples to marry. In one stunning moment millions of Americans had their rights to full citizenship validated by the most powerful figure in the nation. Doesn’t erase centuries of bigotry or overturn marriage bans recently passed in 30 states but it’s a step in the right direction. It’s at least a small step toward making the schools safer for gay kids and less accommodating to bullies. It does matter what the people at the top say because kids are watching and listening.

Yesterday was also the day that Governor Jan Brewer indicated she was “more favorable” to allowing religious employers to deny women contraception coverage, under the pretense that it’s a purely objective religious matter and not a direct attack on the dignity of women and our status as full citizens. Brewer denies vigorously that her anti-choice legislation is harmful to women:

Brewer also rejected Democrats’ criticism of the Republican-led Legislature as waging a “war on women” through the contraception bill, one already signed by Brewer to deny government funding to Planned Parenthood for non-abortion services and other legislation.

“But we are the party of women, particularly here in Arizona,” Brewer said, citing the state’s election of female governors and female legislators. “We like women.”

Some girls learn at a young age that being mean to other girls ingratiates them with popular boys. When they grow up to be women who bully other women to impress powerful men they often find a comfortable and lucrative milieu in conservative politics. We already knew that. The waiting periods and mandatory ultrasounds and lectures abortion patients are subjected to are purely rooted in the desire to bully and shame them. And defunding Planned Parenthood is nothing if not a statement that sexually active women are wrong and bad. And again, even if they aren’t paying attention to the day-to-day minutiae of politics at the national or state level, kids pick up on the attitudes of leaders. So while the President made the country a little bit nicer and more generous in spirit yesterday with his statement on marriage equality, Jan Brewer, Republican legislators, and Cathi Herrod and her crowd have spent the entire season doing the exact opposite in Arizona in ways too numerous to recount.

Per EJ Montini today:

According to Brewer, “This is a common-sense law that tightens existing state regulations and closes loopholes in order to ensure that taxpayer dollars are not used to fund abortions, whether directly or indirectly.”

Indirectly?

It’s like when townsfolk get out the pitchforks and torches and try to shut down the local art museum because they object to a single work of art. Or when a mob wants to burn books because of a single novel it finds offensive.

It’s classic cut-off-your-nose-to-spite-your-face.

In this case, Brewer and friends took aim at Planned Parenthood, fired, and hit poor women.

On one level Montini’s analogies of book burning etc. are useful, to the extent they reveal the sheer stupidity of anti-choicers demanding that Planned Parenthood get de-funded on the basis that every health service provided there has abortion cooties on it because of the abortions Planned Parenthood performs using 100% private funds. But the problem with such analogies is that they present at face value the anti-choice claim that their only objection to Planned Parenthood is abortion. The mass right wing meltdown over contraception this year should put that assumption to rest for all time, even if the steady drumbeat of abstinence and anti-contraception propaganda over the past several years hadn’t already demonstrated the full scope of the “pro-life” agenda to you. In other words, if abortion became illegal or Planned Parenthood suddenly stopped performing them, do you seriously think anti-choice legislators would suddenly be eager to fund the organization? The same people who just voted in Arizona to allow your boss to deny you birth control?

Also remember that for several years now the “pro-life” movement has spread blatant lies about hormonal contraception that conflate it with abortion. They claim that the pill extinguishes fertilized eggs and the morning after pill is an abortion pill. So the seamless transition from abortion to contraception as the locus of anti-choice antipathy has already happened to a large extent. As long as Planned Parenthood is in the business of helping low income women plan when they want to be parents and treating all sexually active people with respect and dignity, conservatives are going to hate it and attack it relentlessly. It’s a feature of their program, not a bug. It is the whole library they’re after, not just that one book.

Paul Krugman has been even more excellent than usual lately at debunking the Beltway conventional economic wisdom. Here he is breaking it down in the New York Review of Books:

The truth is that recovery would be almost ridiculously easy to achieve: all we need is to reverse the austerity policies of the past couple of years and temporarily boost spending. Never mind all the talk of how we have a long-run problem that can’t have a short-run solution—this may sound sophisticated, but it isn’t. With a boost in spending, we could be back to more or less full employment faster than anyone imagines.

But don’t we have to worry about long-run budget deficits? Keynes wrote that “the boom, not the slump, is the time for austerity.” Now, as I argue in my forthcoming book*—and show later in the data discussed in this article—is the time for the government to spend more until the private sector is ready to carry the economy forward again. At that point, the US would be in a far better position to deal with deficits, entitlements, and the costs of financing them.

Meanwhile, the strong measures that would all go a long way toward lifting us out of this depression should include, among other policies, increased federal aid to state and local governments, which would restore the jobs of many public employees; a more aggressive approach by the Federal Reserve to quantitative easing (that is, purchasing bonds in an attempt to reduce long-term interest rates); and less timid efforts by the Obama administration to reduce homeowner debt.

But some readers will wonder, isn’t a recovery program along the lines I’ve described just out of the question as a political matter? And isn’t advocating such a program a waste of time? My answers to these two questions are: not necessarily, and definitely not. The chances of a real turn in policy, away from the austerity mania of the last few years and toward a renewed focus on job creation, are much better than conventional wisdom would have you believe. And recent experience also teaches us a crucial political lesson: it’s much better to stand up for what you believe, to make the case for what really should be done, than to try to seem moderate and reasonable by essentially accepting your opponents’ arguments. Compromise, if you must, on the policy—but never on the truth.

The rest of the article is as awesome as that snip so be sure to read it all. But I’m a little more skeptical than Krugman is about there being the political will anytime soon to do the obvious and sensible thing to fix the economy – increase government spending to create jobs. The current deficit mania isn’t about the deficit at all – remember that most of the people squawking the loudest about it now were happily pushing the tax cuts, bloated “national security” budgets, and the Medicare Part D gift to the pharmaceutical industry that transformed Clinton’s surplus into Bush’s deficit. Notice how the Ryan budget that all the Very Serious People are creaming over holds rich people and defense spending harmless. They’re also eager to “reform” so-called “entitlements”, especially Social Security, which has nothing to do with the deficit but is a giant pile of money that a cabal of stupefyingly rich greedbags want to get their hands on. Then you have to consider that right wingers and greedbags alike share a deep and abiding love for economic inequality. Which is really why they love austerity so, which includes low wages for the vast majority of the workforce. But they can’t up and admit that as it would be what we tend to call “widely disliked”. Unfortunately for all us reality-based people, many successful politicians are dependent upon greedbags for contributions and practically all of the successful pundits dispensing conventional wisdom are wholly owned by them.

One overfed greedbag getting a lot of attention lately is Mitt Romney’s top economic adviser and former Bain Capital partner, Ed Conard, who has a new book out called Suck It, Paupers, or something like that. Economist Dean Baker skewered Conard’s oeuvre in a recent blog post:

But the real meat of Conard’s piece is the glorification of those who have gotten incredibly rich, like him. Conard’s celebration of the rich and his airbrushing of what they did to get there is sufficiently out of touch with reality to be scary.

Did Conard really miss the story of Fabrice Tourre (a.k.a. “Fabulous Fab”) the Goldman Sachs mortgage trader who put together collaterized debt obligations that were designed to fail and then hawked them off on unsuspecting clients? Does he not know about the flash traders who make fortunes by designing sophisticated programs that allow them to front-run major trades? (This means that they can detect major trades and jump in ahead, thereby capturing some of the profit.) How about the clever character who invented “dead peasant” insurance policies? These are insurance policies that corporations buy on their line workers, usually without their knowledge, making the company the beneficiary. The purpose is to allow the company to time its earnings and minimize its tax obligations.

The financial sector is chock full of people who have made great fortunes on gimmicks that have no obvious social value but allow their inventors to gain at the expense of others. And, the financial sector is not the only place where the big money often comes from economic rents rather than genuine innovations.

Does anyone who has ever used a Microsoft product think that Bill Gates became the world’s richest person because of the quality of the software he produces? Microsoft gained its preeminence because of Bill Gates’ sharp elbows. Clearly Gates is a highly motivated and intelligent person, but society did not benefit from his success at propelling his inferior software to market dominance.

How much has the pharmaceutical industry profited from using its political power to get Congress to give it ever longer and stronger patent monopolies? We now spend almost $300 billion a year on prescription drugs that would cost us around $30 billion in a free market. The $270 billion a year difference is about five times the size of the Bush tax cuts to wealthy.

So we’re talking about people who not only wrecked the global economy and want to starve grandmas so they can wreck it some more and because they get their jollies from starving grandmas, but they want to be admired for it. Yeah, we should definitely listen to them about the deficit.

Russell Pearce, the former BFF and Mormon mentor of neo-Nazi JT Ready, is correct when he points out that he had nothing to do with Ready’s horrific killing spree in Gilbert yesterday. But it was inevitable that multiple reporters were going to ask him for a statement on it because, duh, they had a long association with each other. If Bill Ayers or Reverend Wright went on murderous rampage does anyone honestly believe President Obama wouldn’t be asked about it, even though his associations with either weren’t even close to the deep friendship Pearce and Ready shared? The decent thing for Pearce to do would be to make a brief and simple statement of sympathy for grieving family and friends and leave it at that. But nooooooo, he had to make it all about himself and released a self-serving diatribe whining about how the meaniebutt media is picking on poor widdle Russell Pearce. Comments in bold are mine.

Our prayers and thoughts are with the surviving family members and friends of the victims of today¹s horrific and evil act. There are no words to adequately express the sadness we share, as a community, with those affected. Shoulda stopped right there, dudebro.

I spent much of my day resisting efforts by those in the media to get me to make a statement. Sure you did. Today¹s events have nothing to do with me and no connection to me. Yet TV news crews started coming to my home seeking comments and my telephone rang nonstop with calls from those who were desperate to score the ugliest of political points off of this tragedy. Now my name is being mentioned in coverage and I have no choice but to respond.

Regarding whether I knew JT Ready, I did, as did many of us who have been involved in Mesa politics for a long time. When we first met JT he was fresh out of the Marine Corp and seemed like a decent person. He worked as a telephone fundraiser for Christian and pro-life groups, he dated the daughter of one of our District 18 members, and his attitudes and spoken opinions were good and decent. At some point in time darkness took his life over, his heart changed, and he began to associate with the more despicable groups in society. They were intolerant and hateful and like so many who knew him from before, I was upset and disappointed at the choices he was making. I worked with others to have him removed from his local position within our Republican Party because there has never been and will never be any room in our Party or our lives for those preaching hatred. He was angry with me and stayed angry with me, and it has been several years since I have had reason to speak with JT.

In the past several years the local media has worked hard to try to tie me to the JT Ready that preached hate, and that is nothing more than a lie.

When I learned the truth about him, I made it clear how wrong I thought it was and I worked to remove him from our Party. After the New Times embarrassed you over it several times. Yet the lie is told and retold over and over again. It is the ugliest form of politics. The most radical groups I have ever belonged to are the Boy Scouts of America and the Fraternal Order of Police, and in my 65 years in Mesa, as a law enforcement deputy, as a judge and as the head of state agencies, I have never been accused of mistreating anyone or of unfair conduct toward anyone I have associated with, hired or supervised.

Finally, while I am frequently critical of the job the mainstream media does in pursuing a political agenda instead of the truth, today¹s behavior is the most reprehensible that I have ever witnessed. On the very day that these unspeakable crimes take place, editors and producers all over town are making a concerted effort to make the story about a politician whose conservative politics they disagree with. Right, they’re making it all about you, Russell, you helpless little lamb.

Today, the Devil won and claimed the soul of one young man and the lives of others, including the most innocent of all, a child. Our thoughts and prayers are with the four beautiful souls that are now in God¹s hands. We pray that He accepts them into his kingdom and that He grants comfort and solace to the friends and surviving family.

What a choad.

Per last Friday’s “5 Minutes for Families”:

Despite being Arizona’s largest abortion provider, Planned Parenthood claims this bill will deny women access to other medical procedures including cancer screenings and women’s health services. Once again, this is not true. The bill does not reduce the funding by one penny – it simply prioritizes the funding to healthcare providers who can provide more comprehensive services. There are plenty of options for women to access care in Arizona.

Herrod is referring to HB2800, which removes AHCCCS funding from Planned Parenthood. According to Bryan Howard, PPAZ’s president, 65000 Arizonans would lose Planned Parenthood as their health care provider. Many Medicaid recipients choose to go to Planned Parenthood clinics because they know they will get respectful and comprehensive health care, which of course includes sexual health. The thought of which sends the puckered-up prudes over at Center for Arizona Policy into a Defcon 1 state of pearl clutching. And make no mistake, this is all about sex. Anti-choicers can’t stop all the ladies from getting their slut pills at Planned Parenthood but there’s generally a clear path for them to make it difficult for poor women who are on public health care. And h/t to my Facebook friend Todd who sent me this link to the Kaiser Foundation’s State Health Facts about Arizona. You can see that 51% of Arizona women are already living in a “Primary Health Professional Shortage Area”. You can also see that 15% of Arizona women aged 18-64 have gone at least 3 years without a PAP test. So where are all those “healthcare providers who can provide more comprehensive services” (whatever that means to Cathi Herrod) going to come from to fill the void left by Planned Parenthood providers who are no longer available to low income women?

Oh, and can we just stop with the “don’t want to fund abortion” business? It should be obvious to anyone with a sentient brain cell that anti-choicers hate pregnancy prevention even more than they hate abortion. At least with abortion they get to scream at the harlot as she enters the clinic. But women who use contraception are just totally going unpunished for their sluttiness and that is simply unacceptable to the misogynist prudes who make up the bulk of the so-called “pro-life” movement.