ECHIDNE OF THE SNAKES

Generally speaking, are you in favor of using public funds for abortions when the woman cannot afford it, or are you opposed to that?

The health care reform bill that narrowly passed in the House of Representatives on November 7 included tight restrictions on the use of federal money for abortion coverage. Abortion rights activists strongly oppose such restrictions.

"Roughly one in five Americans who oppose the House health care bill do so because it is not liberal enough," said CNN polling director Keating Holland. "The abortion issue may be one reason why. But for most Americans, potential restrictions on abortion may not be a deal-breaker."

Now think about women who are covered by private health insurance plans that are paid by private individuals or employers with no money from the government involved. Do you think private insurance plans should cover some or all of the costs of an abortion, or do you think that women who want to get an abortion should have to pay the complete costs of that abortion out of their own pockets?

A recent study in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) pointed out the evidence for this. Breast cancer statistics for women in the Unites States has not shown a reduction of advanced breast cancers being diagnosed, despite the widespread use of mammography.

One would expect that if mammograms diagnosed breast cancers earlier and women were then treated for these cancers, over time there would be a reduction in the diagnosis of more advanced cancers from the "successful" screening. But this is not the case. Advanced cancers continue to be diagnosed with greater than expected frequency.

Dr. Diana Petitti, vice chairwoman of the task force and a professor of biomedical informatics at Arizona State University, said the guidelines were based on new data and analyses and were aimed at reducing the potential harm from overscreening.

While many women do not think a screening test can be harmful, medical experts say the risks are real. A test can trigger unnecessary further tests, like biopsies, that can create extreme anxiety. And mammograms can find cancers that grow so slowly that they never would be noticed in a woman's lifetime, resulting in unnecessary treatment.

Over all, the report says, the modest benefit of mammograms — reducing the breast cancer death rate by 15 percent — must be weighed against the harms. And those harms loom larger for women in their 40s, who are 60 percent more likely to experience them than women 50 and older but are less likely to have breast cancer, skewing the risk-benefit equation. The task force concluded that one cancer death is prevented for every 1,904 women age 40 to 49 who are screened for 10 years, compared with one death for every 1,339 women age 50 to 74, and one death for every 377 women age 60 to 69.

But, as Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg observed not long ago, abortion rights "center on a woman's autonomy to determine her life's course, and thus to enjoy equal citizenship stature." Every diminishment of that right diminishes women. With stakes of such magnitude, it is wise to weigh carefully the difference between compromise and surrender.

Yet it was that big, ugly Democratic Party that from Franklin Roosevelt to Lyndon Johnson pushed through Social Security, the Wagner Act, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Tennessee Valley Authority, Food Stamps, Head Start, Medicare and Medicaid (with occasional help from the then-extant progressive wing of the GOP). Some of the Democratic bigots opposed these economic reforms, to be sure. But others backed them; they genuinely wanted to curb the savagery and chaos of unfettered capitalism. They just wanted to preserve white, male supremacy too.

This was the devil's pact that defined the Democratic Party for more than three decades, until the civil rights and women's movement forced party leaders to choose. They reluctantly chose racial and gender equality, and so the racists and the misogynists drifted away. The Democratic Party became culturally liberal: pro-affirmative action, pro-choice, and smaller, since the old racists and sexists, now repackaged as racial and sexual conservatives, flocked to the GOP. Starting in 1968, Democrats began consistently losing the presidency. And in 1994, the realignment finally trickled down to the House of Representatives, and the Democrats lost that, too.

But had big-tentism been merely a strategy by Democratic leaders, it would have failed. Just as important was the emergence, in the Bush years, of a new liberal grassroots—the "netroots"—which is generally hostile to single issue litmus tests, especially on culture war issues. While prior generations of liberal activists had often rallied under the banner of gender equality or civil rights, the netroots demanded that those causes be subsumed within a larger progressive agenda. And they showed a particular affinity for candidates willing to challenge corporate power—even candidates like Virginia's James Webb and Montana's Jon Tester, who sometimes ran afoul of liberal cultural orthodoxy.

For cultural liberals, it was ugly. They had better get used to it: Big parties are ugly. But if you want to rebuild the American welfare state, there is no alternative.

American workers are overpaid, relative to equally productive employees elsewhere doing the same work. If the global economy is to get into balance, that gap must close.

Of course, workers in the United States should earn more than their peers in China, Moldova or Vietnam. Americans take advantage of the higher productivity that makes their country rich: better education and infrastructure, abundant capital and a strong work ethic. But how much higher should American wages be?

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Global wage convergence is great for the poor but tough on the overpaid. It's possible to run the numbers to show that American manufacturing workers should take average real wage cuts of as much as 20 percent to get into global balance.

The required cut may be smaller. But if American wages get stuck above global market-clearing levels, as in the 1930s, the result could well be something approaching Depression-era levels of unemployment.

Anything would be better than that. Both moderate inflation to cut real wages and a further drop in the dollar's real trade-weighted value might be acceptable.

Having briefly surveyed the fragments of evidence concerning Mesopotamian women in different cultures over a 1400-year span, what have we learned? We have seen ample evidence of societies in which the active participation of women in economic, religious, and political life was taken for granted. Equally taken for granted was their dependence on and obligation to male kin and/or husbands.

For the ruling elite, their self-interest as usurpers to the kingship demanded that the form in which they establish power become what one observer has aptly called "patrimonial bureaucracy." The security of their power depended on installing family members in important subordinate positions of power. Such family members were, in this early period, quite often women --who, so to speak, become the first liege-lords of their husband/father/king. Thus emerged the role of the "wife-as-deputy", a role in which we will find women from that period forward.

We have seen the extent and the limits of her power represented by Queen Shibtu carrying out her husband's orders in ruling the realm and in selecting women for his harem from among the captives. Her image can serve as an apt metaphor for what it means, what it meant then, and what it has meant for nearly 3000 years, for a woman to be upper class. Queen Shibtu's role of "wife-as-deputy" is the highest to which such women can aspire. Their power derives entirely from the male on whom they depend. Their influence and actual role in shaping events are real, as is their power over the men and women of lower rank whom they own or control. But in matters of sexuality, they are utterly subordinate to men. In fact, as we have seen in the cases of several royal wives, their power in economic and political life depends on the adequacy of the sexual services they perform for their men. If they no longer please, as in the case of Kirum or Kunshimatum, they are out of power at the whim of their lord.

She is a feeling and passionate environmentalist who, seemingly so disturbed by geongineering, is compelled to cast our own horse-dung story right back at us with a splat.

[I]f her Wikipedia page is correct, she somehow accomplished all this with a degree from Yale in … literature.

The time has probably come to admit that neither of us were Ku Klux Klan members either, or sumo wrestlers or Realtors or abortion providers or schoolteachers or even pimps. And yet somehow we managed to write about all that without any horse dung (well, not much at least) flying our way.