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Contraception Insurance Debate

March 28, 2012 by · Comments Off on Contraception Insurance Debate 

Contraception Insurance Debate, Lately, there has been a fairly big uproar over contraception. It started with the Obama Administration decision to force religious employers to provide contraception as part of their health insurance offerings, despite the fact that contraception goes against the beliefs of certain religions. After a large outcry, Obama amended his decision.

He said that he recognized the beliefs of religious employers and would require insurance companies to reach out separately to female employees. This has been touted by the Obama Administration as a compromise that preserves the beliefs of religious employers while still making contraception affordable to all women. However, this is little more than a ploy to placate a fairly large voting bloc-Catholic voters.

If an insurance company knows it will have to provide birth control coverage for free to women at religious employers, they are just going to add that cost into the overall plan offered to that employer. There’s no way they’re just going to eat those costs themselves.

The biggest problem with this debate, though, is how we look at birth control. The Obama Administration insists that it is some basic human right that all women should have access to affordable birth control.

But why is that? For some reason, today’s society has decided that fertility is a disease, some terrible burden that no woman should have to bear if she chooses not to. But I can’t think of a single other medication that is used to treat not a disease, but a reflection of a healthy body. Women who are infertile often have other health problems to cause it. Fertility is a sign of a woman’s body working the way it is supposed to. And yet, millions of women take a magic pill to treat this “terrible condition.”

Now, this isn’t to say that no one should ever use birth control, as that’s a very personal decision. Some women use it to help with real medical issues. And some women use it so they won’t get pregnant. That’s fine; just don’t try to tell me it’s some medical necessity.

And what has come out of birth control? Suddenly we can take this “magical” pill and all the consequences of sex go away. Or at least, that’s what we’re told and assume to be true. No matter that it’s a drug that can have serious side effects. And the consequences of sex don’t really go away. We look at the rates of marriage and divorce and are shocked to see one so low and the other so high. But should we really be surprised? One reason men and women get married is so that there will be a stable family environment to bring children into. But now that you can have sex and not worry about kids resulting, why bother? Commitment is hard and scary.

Sandra Fluke Rush Limbaugh

March 28, 2012 by · Comments Off on Sandra Fluke Rush Limbaugh 

Sandra Fluke Rush Limbaugh, Rush Limbaugh’s opponents are starting a radio campaign against him Thursday, seizing upon the radio star’s attack of a Georgetown law student as a “sl*t” to make a long-term effort aimed at weakening his business.

The liberal Media Matters for America is using a past campaign against Glenn Beck as a template. In Limbaugh, however, they’re going after bigger game. He’s already fighting back and the group’s stance has provoked concerns that an effort to silence someone for objectionable talk is in itself objectionable.

Media Matters is spending at least $100,000 for two advertisements that will run in eight cities.

The ads use Limbaugh’s own words about student Sandra Fluke, who testified at a congressional hearing that contraception should be paid for in health plans. Limbaugh, on his radio programs, suggested Fluke wanted to be paid to have sex, which made her a “sl*t” and a “prostitute.” In return for the money, he said Fluke should post videos of herself having sex. Under sharp criticism, Limbaugh later apologized.

In one of the anti-Limbaugh ads, listeners are urged to call the local station that carries Limbaugh to say “we don’t talk to women like that” in our city.

Ad time was purchased in Boston; Chicago; Detroit; Seattle; Milwaukee; St. Louis; Macon, Ga.; and Cedar Rapids, Iowa. The cities were selected to support active local campaigns against Limbaugh or because of perceptions Limbaugh may be vulnerable in that market, said Angelo Carusone of Media Matters.

Rush Limbaugh First Job Shining Shoes

March 26, 2012 by · Comments Off on Rush Limbaugh First Job Shining Shoes 

Rush Limbaugh First Job Shining Shoes, Limbaugh also displayed his incredible ignorance of how elections work (“if Mickey Mouse and Adolf Hitler can sign a recall petition, there’s no doubt in my mind they can also vote”). Of course, anybody can sign a recall petition with any name, and organizers are obligated to turn in all of the names. But fake names aren’t counted, nor can they vote.

Still, the strangest and most disturbing comment by Limbaugh today had nothing to do smearing unions, but instead was about smearing shoe polish. Fondly recalled his days shining shoes in a barbershop, Limbaugh declared: “I loved making shoes shine….it was a f***sh.”
Rush Limbaugh’s racism is becoming more and more obvious as he lets his hatred of Obama shine through in openly bigoted ways. And to push that racism, he’s even turned to fabricating quotes that have never been uttered. On Friday, Rush declared on his show,

Obama has not built ’em the new kitchen that he promised or led them to believe that were gonna get in Tampa. And there are no new cars for everybody. And white people are not shining the shoes of black people. Well, I remember that Tampa fundraiser, that Tampa town hall, we had audiotape of some black people who said, “From now on you all are gonna be waiting on us.” Remember that? That’s what the election meant to some people.

Obviously, the idea of “white people” shining the shoes of black people was what the 2008 election meant to Rush Limbaugh, and he hates it. But for most Americans, the 2008 election was not seen through the prism of racial paranoia that Rush Limbaugh uses.

Limbaugh’s racist fear of “white people” subservient to black people drew surprisingly little criticism, except from Media Matters and a few bloggers on the left.

On his April 25, 2011 show, Limbaugh said nothing about his lies about Henrietta Hughes or Obama and his supporters, nor did he over any evidence to support his fictional claims. But Rush did express outrage that Dr. Wallace Charles Smith, pastor of a church Obama has attended, in a sermon earlier last year “saw fit to compare me to the modern-day KKK.” It is indeed an outrageous comparison. The KKK is widely denounced for its racism by nearly everyone today; Rush Limbaugh’s racism, on the other hand, is rarely criticized in any mainstream media outlet.

In fact, I can’t find anyone in the mainstream media who bothered to report on the astonishing fact that the leading conservative talk show host in the country declared that Obama was elected to make white people serve blacks.

But Limbaugh’s shining example of racism was only the beginning of his bigotry. I investigated his claim that black people said, “From now on you all are gonna be waiting on us.” It appears to be completely fabricated.

Rush Limbaugh Sl*t

March 2, 2012 by · Comments Off on Rush Limbaugh Sl*t 

Rush Limbaugh Sl*t, The Republican party has a ‘Suitable Boy’ kind of problem: In love with one guy but being forced to settle for the other. “I feel like the bride in an arranged marriage I can’t get out of,” wails one loyal voter in despair at the prospect of a Mitt Romney nomination. Too-dull-to-lose Mitt just doesn’t get that conservative blood thumping quite like, say, a Rick Santorum with his steamy speeches about Satan.

Sure, the liberal media thinks he’s a little craaazy, but Santorum is indeed – as that rightwing Yoda Rush Limbaugh would tell you – “the last real conservative still standing.” But sadly, the man who has won the Republican heart – or rather base – is having a tough time wooing the rest of America. As naysayers point out, all that ‘barefoot and pregnant’ talk opposing contraception and working women is not going to win him the ring come November. Nor will frothing at the mouth about satanic liberal universities, Hitler-like Democrats, or the secret plan to execute Christians:

They are taking faith and crushing it. Why? When you marginalize faith in America, when you remove the pillar of God-given rights then what’s left is the French Revolution. What’s left is a government that gives you rights. What’s left are no unalienable rights. What’s left is a government that will tell you who you are, what you’ll do and when you’ll do it. What’s left in France became the the guillotine.

Beelzebub and guillotines. How did it come to this sad pass?

Sure, the liberal media thinks he’s a little craaazy, but Santorum is, indeed, “the last real conservative still standing.” Reuters
Since the rise of Ronald Reagan, and America’s famous right turn, loving the unelectable has been a Democratic pastime. The base falls in love with some wild-eyed liberal, but the party settles for a more “moderate” guy who will be more palatable to the parents, i.e. the rest of America. Republicans, on the other hand, were glad to hitch their fortunes to any guy who checked all the right boxes: anti-abortion, anti-gay; tax cuts; law and order; foreign policy hawk. Bob Dole was fine as was George Bush Sr. and his son. As long they were meat-and-potatoes Republicans no one expected their guy to wear his ideology on his sleeve. Hence, the triumph of the “kinder and gentler” conservatism, best served with an affable ‘gee shucks!’ smile. The ideologue-in-sheep’s clothing GOP strategy was first perfected by Reagan and imitated by countless others – most successfully Dubya. And it’s worked pretty well for the most part.

So what went wrong this time around? Answer: The Tea Party. The combination of Obama’s election and the never-ending recession has unleashed a fire and brimstone breathing genie. Gentle conservatism no longer appeases a base baying for blood. They want a “conservative with conviction” who wears his hard-core ideology on his sleeve. Hence, the rising fortunes of a Santorum who in previous elections would have been the typical hard right candidate who would gain attention but never sufficient traction.

In 2012, however, he is the bona fide rival who will never win – a spoiler who will weaken Romney by a) making him look like RINO (Republican In Name Only); and b) pushing him to take ever more extremist positions.

The ‘Suitable Boy’ conundrum is, therefore, a symptom of a party whose base is increasingly out of step with the mainstream. Democrats faced this problem in the past because they had to win power in a society that had moved to the right after the Reagan realignment. “The ruling ideas of our time are conservative, just as in the ’60s, when politics was marching in the liberal direction… So the context, the zeitgeist, if you want to put it so pretentiously, is conservative, just as the zeitgeist in the 1960?s was liberal,” says Adrian Wooldridge, co-author of The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America. Therefore, any candidate who made the true-blue liberals happy was bound to be unelectable in a national election.

Blunt Amendment

March 1, 2012 by · Comments Off on Blunt Amendment 

Blunt Amendment, Republicans are trying to add an amendment to a highway bill currently in the Senate that would allow employers to opt out of a new federal health-care mandate for their employees if they have religious objections. The Senate is expected to vote Thursday morning.

A recently announced rule in the health care law would have forced businesses including those affiliated to the Catholic Church to provide health-care options that included access to contraception – something the Catholic Church opposes. Mr. Obama has offered a compromise on the rule, but conservatives say it doesn’t go far enough.

Senate Republicans – with exceptions – are framing the amendment by Sen. Roy Blunt (R) of Missouri as a defense of a fundamental constitutional right.

Senate Democrats – also with exceptions – see the issue as a war on women and a deliberate bid to obstruct passage of a long-delayed bill that would fund major construction and repair projects, affecting millions of jobs.

The issue goes to the heart of the culture wars, also roiling the GOP presidential primary.

“This issue gets right at the heart of who we are as a people,” said Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R) of Kentucky, in an opening floor speech on Thursday. “It is not in the power of the federal government to tell anybody what to believe or to punish them for practicing those beliefs,” he added.

But Democrats say the highway bill shouldn’t become a venue for the contraception issue.

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