ECHIDNE OF THE SNAKES

Invoking the memory of Edward M. Kennedy, Democrats united Saturday night to push historic health care legislation past a key Senate hurdle over the opposition of Republicans eager to inflict a punishing defeat on President Barack Obama. There was not a vote to spare.

The 60-39 vote cleared the way for a bruising, full-scale debate beginning after Thanksgiving on the legislation, which is designed to extend coverage to roughly 31 million who lack it, crack down on insurance company practices that deny or dilute benefits and curtail the growth of spending on medical care nationally.

The spectator galleries were full for the unusual Saturday night showdown, and applause broke out briefly when the vote was announced. In a measure of the significance of the moment, senators sat quietly in their seats, standing only when they were called upon to vote.

In the final minutes of a daylong session, Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., accused Republicans of trying to stifle a historic debate the nation needed.

"Imagine if, instead of debating whether to abolish slavery, instead of debating whether giving women and minorities the right to vote, those who disagreed had muted discussion and killed any vote," he said.

The Republican leader, Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, said the vote was anything but procedural — casting it as a referendum on the bill itself, which he said would raise taxes, cut Medicare and create a "massive and unsustainable debt."

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?

...

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.

For some years, Democrats have denounced parodies that cast their party as utterly closed to the views of those who oppose abortion. Last weekend, Democrats proved conclusively that they are, indeed, a big tent -- and many in the ranks are furious.

From the outraged comments of the abortion-rights movement, you'd think that Rep. Bart Stupak's amendment to the House version of the health-care bill would all but overturn Roe v. Wade.

No, it wouldn't. The Michigan Democrat's measure -- passed 240 to 194, with 64 Democrats voting yes -- would prohibit abortion coverage in the public option and bar any federal subsidies for plans that included abortion purchased on the new insurance exchanges.

Last Friday night, Stupak put forward a final compromise to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that would have prohibited abortion coverage in the public plan but would have allowed an annual vote on the abortion ban for the private plans. Pro-choice Democrats rejected this, and the stronger version of Stupak's proposal then passed.

What happens now? Democratic supporters of abortion rights need to accept that their House majority depends on a large cadre of antiabortion colleagues. They can denounce that reality or they can learn to live with it.

The truth is that even with the Stupak restrictions, health-care reform would leave millions of Americans far better off than they are now -- including millions of women. This skirmish over abortion cannot be allowed to destroy the opportunity to extend coverage to 35 million Americans. Killing health-care reform would be bad for choice -- and very bad for the right to life.

And I did forget
My holy song:
And I had no strength
In Babylon.

By the rivers dark
Where I could not see
Who was waiting there
Who was hunting me.

And he cut my lip
And he cut my heart.
So I could not drink
From the river dark.

You know what I don't want to hear right now about the Stupak-Pitts amendment banning abortion coverage from federally subsidized health insurance policies? That it's the price of reform, and prochoice women should shut up and take one for the team. "If you want to rebuild the American welfare state," Peter Beinart writes in the Daily Beast, "there is no alternative" than for Democrats to abandon "cultural" issues like gender and racial equality. Hey, Peter, Representative Stupak and your sixty-four Democratic supporters, Jim Wallis and other antichoice "progressive" Christians, men: why don't you take one for the team for a change and see how you like it?

For example, budget hawks in Congress say they'll vote against the bill because it's too expensive. Maybe you could win them over if you volunteered to cut out funding for male-exclusive stuff, like prostate cancer, Viagra, male infertility, vasectomies, growth-hormone shots for short little boys, long-term care for macho guys who won't wear motorcycle helmets and, I dunno, psychotherapy for pedophile priests. Men could always pay in advance for an insurance policy rider, as women are blithely told they can do if Stupak becomes part of the final bill.

President Obama, too, worries about the deficit. Maybe you could help him out by sacrificing your denomination's tax exemption. The Catholic Church would be a good place to start, and it wouldn't even be unfair, since the blatant politicking of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops on abortion violates the spirit of the ban on electoral meddling by tax-exempt religious institutions. Why should antichoicers be the only people who get to refuse to let their taxes support something they dislike? You don't want your tax dollars to pay, even in the most notional way, for women's abortion care, a legal medical procedure that one in three American women will have in her lifetime? I don't want to pay for your misogynist fairy tales and sour-old-man hierarchies.

The group saw no evidence that Hasan, 39, was violent or a threat. It was more that he repeatedly referred to his strong religious views in discussions with classmates, his superiors and even in his research work, the official said. His behavior, while at times perceived as intense and combative, was not unlike the zeal of others with strong religious views, and some doctors and staff were concerned that their unfamiliarity with the Muslim faith would lead them to unfairly single out Hasan's behavior, the official said.

...we wrote about the economics of prostitution. But we wrote about some more serious topics, too...

While everyone considers Demi to be the O.G. cougar, she doesn't see it that way.

"I'm certainly not the first person to be in a relationship with a younger man, but somehow I was plucked out as a bit of a poster girl," she says. "I don't know why that is. But I just kind of step back sometimes and say, 'There is some reason, and what is it that I have to share in a positive way?' I'd prefer to be called a puma."

("Puma" is already used to describe women in their 30s who go for younger men, so 47-year-old Demi doesn't really fall into that category. But she thinks "she came up with the new designation," so maybe it's best to let her go on believing that?)

Now about her 31-year-old husband. She loves him. A lot.

We started down this road in 1976 when the Hyde Amendment passed and when, in 1980, the Supreme Court upheld the principle that the federal government had the right to enact policies that favored childbirth over abortion by restricting funding for abortion. Most Democrats saw that giving antiabortion taxpayers greater moral standing than women who choose abortion was a political power play. After all, taxpayers don't get any other say in how their taxes are used. Pacifists' dollars support war; anti-bailout Americans saw their taxes go to banks just this year. Except on the issue of abortion, if you want to be a tax resister, the only thing to do is not pay your taxes and go to jail.

Despite weeks of media attention paid to the now-infamous "C Street" house owned by The Family, a secretive Christian group, U.S. Rep. Bart Stupak — who lives at the house near the U.S. Capitol — denied any knowledge of the nature of the mysterious Washington, D.C., rowhouse and any involvement with the organization that owns it and uses as a seat of influence on Capitol Hill.

During a conference call with reporters Thursday morning, Michigan Messenger asked Stupak, a Menominee Democrat, about the house where he has lived for many years and his connections to the shadowy organization that owns it. The longtime Upper Peninsula legislator claimed to have "no affiliation" with the group, which is known as The Family or The Fellowship.

"I don't belong to any such group," Stupak said. "I rent a room at a house in 'C Street.' I do not belong to any such group. I don't know what you're talking about, [The] Family and all this other stuff."

The C Street house, a former convent, is still listed on official tax documents as a church but it functions largely as a boarding house, with six to eight members of the U.S. House and Senate living there at any given time. Current residents include Stupak, Rep. Zach Wamp (R-Tenn.), Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), Rep. Mike Doyle (D-Pa.) and Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.), and Rep. Heath Shuler (D-N.C.).

...

Jeff Sharlet, contributing editor at Harper's magazine and the author of "The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power," lived for a time at Ivanwald, another boarding house owned by the group in Arlington, Va., this one for younger men without political power.

Sharlet said that Stupak's denial of any knowledge of The Family or its activities is false. "When I lived with The Family at Ivanwald, a house for younger men being groomed for leadership, I was told that Stupak was a regular visitor to the Cedars," Sharlet said. The Cedars is yet another compound owned by The Family, one that hosts weekly prayer events led by former Reagan-era Attorney General Ed Meese.

Sharlet said that Stupak had much greater involvement with the group than he is admitting, noting that the congressman was "a Family-assigned mentor to one of my brothers at Ivanwald." That Ivanwald resident, Sharlet said, "regularly left for what he and others described as mentoring sessions."

A private is comforted outside Fort Hood Army base after the shooting deaths of at least a dozen people at a personnel and medical processing office and at a theater, both on base. (Ben Sklar / Getty Images)

Sgt. Anthony Sills comforts his wife as they wait outside the army base Thursday. They had to wait for a lockdown to be lifted before they could collect their three-year-old son, was in daycare on the base. (Jack Plunkett/Associated Press)

Soldier comforts his wife.

Daniel Clark hugs and comforts his wife Rachel after the shooting by Nidal Malik Hasan at the Fort Hood army base near Killeen, Texas. Photograph: Rodolfo Gonzalez/AP

Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Tex.), the head of the Republicans campaign committee, caused a stir at last night's Rules Committee meeting when he suggested that treating female-related health conditions was comparable to insurance-company imposed restrictions on smokers.

"Why should a woman pay more than a man?" asked New Jersey Democrat Frank Pallone, according to the Courthouse News Service.

"Well, we're all different," Sessions explained. "Why should a smoker pay more?" he said before interrupted.

In a study of 3000 people, those who did not regularly eat breakfast in their early teens said they lost their virginity at an average age of 17.5, versus an overall average age of 19 for all Japanese.

Those who had a morning meal when they were younger had their first sexual experience at 19.4 years.

The study...concluded that a stable home life discouraged early sex.

"Those unhappy with their parents - such as for not preparing breakfast - may tend to find a way to release their frustration by having sex," said Kunio Kitamura, head of the Japan Family Planning Association who led the research.

"If children don't feel comfortable in their family environment, they tend to go out."

The police officer who brought down a gunman after he went on a shooting rampage at the Fort Hood Army base was on the way to have her car repaired when she heard a report over a police radio that someone was shooting people in a center where soldiers are processed before they are deployed abroad, authorities said on Friday.

As she pulled up to the center, the officer, Kimberly Munley, spotted the gunman, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, brandishing a pistol and chasing a wounded soldier outside the building, said Chuck Medley, the director of emergency services at the base.

Sergeant Munley bolted from her car and shot at Major Hasan. He turned toward her and began to fire. She ran toward him, continuing to fire, and both she and the gunmen went down with several bullet wounds, Mr. Medley said.

Whether Sergeant Munley was solely responsible for taking down Major Hassan or whether he was also hit by gunfire from another responder is still unclear, but she was the first to fire at him.

Sergeant Munley, who is 34, is an expert in firearms and a member of the SWAT team for the civilian police department on the base, officials said.

this female MP was the first responder

What does her gender have to do with it??????
Hecate, Runnymeade Conspirator | Homepage | 11.05.09 - 9:29 pm | #

everything, because it shows that woman can't fucking kill someone when they have to.
BURP | 11.05.09 - 9:30 pm | #

The trade publication Publishers Weekly likely wanted to provoke discussion with its annual list of the year's best books, but not like this. In its issue of Nov. 2, Publishers Weekly compiled its PW Top 10, a decidedly subjective ranking of the best fiction and non-fiction published in 2009, including the biography "Cheever: A Life" by Blake Bailey; the novel "Await Your Reply" by Dan Chaon; and the graphic novel "Stitches" by David Small. But as The Guardian reports, the ranking has drawn protests from a women's literary group, which notes that there are no female writers on the list.

In her introduction to the year-end lists, Louisa Ermelino, the reviews director of Publishers Weekly, wrote, "We ignored gender and genre and who had the buzz," adding: "It disturbed us when we were done that our list was all male."

Before making judgments about the shootings at Fort Hood, a thorough investigation needs to take place, Sen. John Cornyn of Texas said Thursday.

"It is imperative that we take the time to gather all the facts, as it would be irresponsible to be the source of rumors or inaccurate information regarding such a horrific event," Cornyn said in a statement.

"Once we have ascertained all the facts, working with our military leaders and law enforcement officials on the ground, we can determine what exactly happened at Fort Hood today and how to prevent something like this from ever happening again," he said.

At least one gunman killed 12 people and wounded 31 in a shooting on Thursday afternoon at Fort Hood in Texas. Military police killed one shooter, who had two guns, and at least two soldiers are in custody.

Lt. Gen. Robert W. Cone, the commanding officer at Fort Hood, the largest active military installation in the country, said the base was in lockdown as military authorities, with the help of the Federal Bureau of Investigation investigate the rampage.

"This was a terrible tragedy," said General Cone, speaking at a news conference Thursday afternoon. "Stunning."'

An Army spokesman, Gary Tallman, said that the dead gunman was an Army major. A law enforcement official identified the him as Malik Nadal Hassan.

Consider what happened when the subject of women's preventive healthcare services came up in the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee (HELP) in July, after the minimum benefits package had already been determined. Because some essential care for women wasn't included in the list, HELP committee member Senator Barbara Mikulski proposed an amendment that would require the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) to stipulate that basic women's health services would be covered. The language said nothing about abortion, referring only to "preventive care and screenings."

Yet the voting on the amendment went exactly along pro- and anti-choice lines. The amendment passed by just one vote, with all the committee's Republicans as well as Pennsylvania Senator Robert Casey, an anti-abortion Democrat, voting against it. The committee's discussion of the amendment was dominated by Republicans' worry about the possibility of government money winding up in the hands of Planned Parenthood. Since there is no similar language included in the just-released House bill, the only hope for requiring full coverage for these essential services now lies with the Senate.

Adding insult to injury, birth control isn't on the list of essential services insurers are required to cover in a basic plan. Thanks, House and Senate! Probably another nod to the religous right, who also hate contraception.

Police say a rapist living in an Ohio home where several bodies have been found has been charged with five counts of aggravated murder.

Cleveland police spokesman Lt. Thomas Stacho (STOCK'-oh) says 50-year-old Anthony Sowell was also charged Tuesday with rape, felonious assault and kidnapping.

Police recovered the bodies of six women last week from Sowell's home. A Cleveland television station reported Tuesday that two more bodies were removed from the home.

Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation, a Washington think tank, says the study design and survey data are solid. But he says the findings are neither surprising nor troubling.

"That's effectively like saying that at some point in a 20-year period, a parent would be unemployed for a month or so," Rector says.

"There's no evidence that even consistent poverty in the U.S. produces a nutritional risk," he says, noting that rich and poor children tend to have about the same intake of protein, vitamins and minerals.

The American health care systems perform impressively, producing what they are designed to deliver: cost inflation, inefficiency, and inequity. At regular intervals, local pundits declare that the outcomes of the incentive structures in the constituent parts of the systems are unacceptable, usually emphasising that "the nation cannot afford to spend 16 percent of GDP on health care". Such "insights" ignore the fact that inflation is a consequence of the systems' perverse incentives and that improved control of expenditure inflation would oblige physicians, nurses, hospitals, and the pharmaceutical industry to moderate their lifestyles.