Today is Flag Day - Celebrate old Glory!

Because I don't think I could top this post from back in 2012, I'm going to do a rare repost here:

Flag Day is TODAY

I like the history of our holidays, major and minor. So in honor of our flag and Flag Day, here is a brief description and history of our holiday. Flag Day celebrates the adoption of a national flag at the Second Continental Congress on June 14, 1777.

Here is the beautifully brief wording:

The Flag Act of 1777 was passed by the Second Continental Congress on June 14, 1777, in response to a petition made by an American Indian nation on June 3 for "an American Flag."^[1] (As a result, June 14 is now celebrated as Flag Day in the United States.) It reads, in its entirety: "Resolved, That the flag of the United States be made of thirteen stripes, alternate red and white; that the union be thirteen stars, white in a blue field, representing a new Constellation." (See Journals of the Continental Congress, 1774 – 1789, 8:464.)

So, you would think that settled the design of our national flag, except that the concept of a national flag as we know it now didn't really exist in the 18th century; it was a later development.

Credit should go to both Wikipedia for some of these images, and to an excellent site, Flag Timeline  of USHistory.org for many of the others.

the Cowpens flag

What the Flag Act resulted in were a number of designs which conformed to that brief wording, including but not only the Betsy Ross flag - although the Betsy Ross flag eventually won the greater recognition.  Here are some of those flags used at the time:

The Francis Hopkinson flag design

and the final selection, the Betsy Ross flag

another Continental Navy flag

the Brandywine flag
note the different proportions

the Forster flag

the Serapis / another
John Paul Jones flag

A New England flag

   The Second Continental Congress started out meeting in Philadephia, but then later in the year moved around Pennsylvania to other locations, including Lancaster and York. The national flag came into existence two years to the day of the official establishment of the Continental Army in 1775. 

However there WAS a flag that was flown as early as 1775 by our newly formed Navy, referred to as the Continental Colors.  It differed from the East India Flag ONLY in the proportions of the Canton.

East India Company Flag in 1775

Wikipedia has a full entry on it for those who have a greater curiosity, but here is an excerpt:

Continental Colors flow by John Paul Jones
note the difference in size and proportions of
the canton from the East India Company flag -
there is a small difference

In the first year of the American War for Independence, the Continental Congress authorized the creation of a navy. A new flag was required representing the Congress and fledgling nation, and distinguishing from the Red Ensign flying from British vessels.
The Continental Colors were first hoisted on the Alfred, in Philadelphia on December 2, 1775, by Lt. John Paul Jones. The event had been documented in letters to Congress.^[2] The Continental Colors were used by the American Continental forces as both naval ensign and garrison flag through 1776 and early 1777.
It is not known for certain when, or by whom, the Continental Colors' design was created, though the flag could easily be produced by adding white stripes to the previous British Red Ensigns.^[3] The Alfred flag has been credited to Margaret Manny.^[4]

And here is a short bio on Margaret Manny, who is less well known than Betsy Ross.

Margaret Manny was a milliner in colonial Philadelphia who made flags for the United States during the American Revolution.
Manny began making jacks and ensigns for ships as early as December 1774.^[1] She also made the Grand Union Flag, or Continental Colors, first flown by John Paul Jones aboard the Alfred on 3 December 1775.

My thanks to our co-blogger Laci for calling my attention to rich history of the East India Company flag, which preceded our own flag by a full seventy years, as a very British and a very corporate flag, first used in Asia. The East India Company flag stripes were somewhat 'variable' in number, ranging from nine to fifteen which mirrored our own experimentation with stripe numbers. The symbol in the upper left corner, the 'Canton' also changed over time, representing changes in the UK. We didn't pioneer that pattern of alteration to reflect growth and change either.

before 1707, when the Acts of Union
combined England and Scotland
into Great Britain

East India Company flag after 1707

After 1801 the flag
contained the Union Flag of
the United Kingdom of
Great Britain and
Ireland in the canton

But the adaptation of the flag of the East India Company, while strikingly similar is not the only theory for the design adopted by the Continental Congress.
Another theory is based on the family coat of arms of Richard Amerike:

"According to the American Flag Research Center in Massachusetts the heraldic origin of the American flag is not positively known; archives in the British Library confirm that the Stars and Stripes was the coat of arms of the Ap Merike family – and that they pre-date Washington's connection with the continent by 300 years".^[64]

The coat of Arms belonging to the family of George Washington has three stars in chief (at the top) on a white field, with two red horizontal stripes across the middle of the escutcheon, underneath it.  The Amerke basis for the flag is generally considered 'revisionist history'.  Clearly neither coat of arms are as similar as the East India Company flag design, but both provide some insight into the heraldic tradition that was the foundation for flag design.
From Wikipedia: In any case, both the stripes (barry) and the stars (mullets) have precedents in classical heraldry. Mullets were comparatively rare in early modern heraldry, but an example of mullets representing territorial divisions predating the US flag are those in the coat of arms of Valais of 1618, where seven mullets stood for seven districts.
The thirteen original colonies were the basis for thirteen stripes and the thirteen original stars on the first official U.S. flag, but in the Flag Act of  1794, that was temporarily expanded to fifteen stripes and stars with the admission of the first two new states.  Had that pattern continued, our flag would now have 50 stripes along with the 50 stars.  It is a fascinating insight into how the flag has changed, but also into how the nation under George Washington thought about our national expansion at the time.  It wasn't until the Flag Act of 1818 that the stripes were codified as representing the original 13 colonies, with the stars changing --  with such changeovers always mandated to occur on July 4th -- to represent the number of states at any time in our nation with only the stars.
Here is the order of the states joining, representing each of those stars, because of course there was no official membership or ratification until AFTER the sessions of the Continental Congress:
Delaware (December 7, 1787), Pennsylvania (December 12, 1787), New Jersey (December 18, 1787), Georgia (January 2, 1788), Connecticut (January 9, 1788), Massachusetts (February 6, 1788), Maryland (April 28, 1788), South Carolina (May 23, 1788), New Hampshire (June 21, 1788), Virginia (June 25, 1788), New York (July 26, 1788), North Carolina (November 21, 1789), and Rhode Island (May 29, 1790) (source - Flag Timeline)

This is a singularly striking image from th 1880s that shows some of the various permutations of our flag over the years, from an old textbook (courtesy of wikipedia):

Ding Dong, the Straw Poll's Gone

Iowa Republicans finally abandoned their sham straw poll, begun in 1979.

In the last 35 years, the straw poll ha only correctly predicted the eventual candidate twice.  That is a success rate lower than a broken clock, which is correct at least twice a day. 

The last epic fail was the win by Michele Bachmann, demonstrating that not only can the straw poll be wrong, it can be spectacularly wrong.

It took the Iowa Conservatives 36 years to get rid of something that demonstrably did not work.

Sadly, that is actually a quicker response to the failure of one of their ideas, policies or traditions than we usually see, which is pretty much NEVER do they respond to objective evidence of failure.  Rather they try to glam up their pig ideas with lipstick in the form of a common sense label for bad ideas or premises.

Conservatives MUST GO!

These are factual figures. Conservatives are lousy at governance, and especially poor at economic policy and foreign policy --- and those two are both closely connected to our failed energy policy. To see the actual statistics on how bad these obsessive ideology failures really are, see the graphic below.

Via Occupy Democrats on Facebook:

Conservatives still believe the debunked nonsense promoted by Art Laffer -- who is currently the personal architect of the failed government tax policy in Kansas.  Tax cuts do not increase revenue, increase job growth or increase growth of GDP.

From Fact and Myth:

Do Tax Cuts Increase Revenues? No, Tax cuts do not Increase Revenue
“The Bush tax cuts led to 50 consecutive months of job growth…It’s demonstrably proven that tax cuts increase revenues” – Rush Limbaugh

The argument that tax cuts create or increase revenue is an old myth that simply refuses to go away. The logic behind this argument is that cutting taxes will stimulate spending (since investors now are  now encouraged through reduced tax rates) that will result in GDP growth.  This growth in GDP will result in increased tax revenues so significant that they will more than offset the drop in tax revenues that result from a lowered tax rate. The inverse to this is that increased taxes lower tax revenue by discouraging investment, which in turn lowers tax revenues so drastically, that they offset the added increase coming from the tax rate increase. One of the reasons Republicans and other self-ascribed fiscal conservatives are able to get away with this is, is the superficially plausible argument that the Reagan and/or Bush tax cuts grew the economy and created revenue.  To understand the fallacy of these arguments, it is necessary to understand economic growth during business cycles and over a long period of time, and how this affects tax revenues.

Correlating Tax Increases and Decreases with Revenue

By conveniently pointing to places where tax cuts were enacted at or around the time of a recovery or boom, tax cut advocates argue that tax cuts increase revenue.   The problem with this is that the revenue increases following the Bush and Reagan tax cuts are dwarfed by the revenue increase following Bill Clinton’s tax increase on the wealthiest Americans.  In fact, as a percentage of GDP, post-Reagan & Bush tax cut revenue falls below the 1965-2005 average. In other words, revenue increased because the economy was recovering/growing, and the tax cuts have little (probably nothing) to do with growth in GDP.  if anything, these tax cuts actually lowered revenue increased from what they would have been otherwise.  So the real question to ask is this: how much revenue did these tax cuts cost us?  See Historical Tax Rates.

Half of the right wing are evangelicals.  From CBS news earlier this year:

White Evangelicals are half of GOP primary voters

(CBS News) NEW YORK -- With nominating contests completed in 27 states and nearly 40 percent of Republican National Convention delegates allocated, Republican primary voters are showing a record-breaking religious bent.
So far, 50 percent of Republican primary and caucus voters have been white evangelical, or born again, Christians, based on CBS News polling of voters entering or exiting their polling places since the first contest in January.
The data comes from entrance polls in two caucus states, Iowa and Nevada, and exit polls in 14 primary states - Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Massachusetts, Michigan, Mississippi, Nevada, New Hampshire, Ohio, South Carolina, Tennessee, Vermont and Virginia.
"Conservative people of faith are playing a larger role in shaping the contours and affecting the trajectory of the Republican presidential nomination contest than at any time since they began pouring out of the pews and into the precincts in the late 1970's," said Ralph Reed, founder and chairman of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, who called our attention to the numbers today.
Reed said conservative Christian turnout among Republicans exceeds its rate from four years ago, when 44 percent of white Republican primary voters described themselves as evangelical. They're not only a factor in the South but also in general election battleground states like Ohio, where 47 percent of Republican primary voters subscribed to the label this year.
Reed estimated that through the primaries in Alabama and Mississippi this past Tuesday, more than 4 million evangelical Christian voters had participated in those 16 primaries and caucuses where entrance or exit polls were conducted by CBS and other news organizations.
"They are indispensable to any winning strategy for the eventual Republican presidential nominee in both the primaries and the general election. Any candidate who ignores these voters and the values that motivate them does so at their own peril," Reed said.

As a general thing, participation in democracy is a good thing.  But because conservatives have engaged in wholesale voter suppression of any demographic that doesn't vote for their candidates and causes, it actually results in the hijacking of representative government, and the inevitable resulting epic failures of fanatics in control. 

Evangelicals specifically, and conservatives generally, appear to struggle with the basic concepts of cause and effect.  They engage in what amounts to magical thinking as a preference to rational thought, and to embrace religious superstitious insanity in the face of overwhelming logic and data.

It is no accident that American secular democracy arose in the era of the highly secular, pro-science  Age of Enlightenment.  And yet we still see stupidity like this, which has no place in government and which is the last thing our founding fathers and mothers wanted to see empowered or respected. 

It doesn't matter if the willful ignorance is the economic policies of Art Laffer and his stupid curve, or the religious right superstitious insistence on controlling everyone's sex choices because they are a bunch of sexuality hating prudes.  They are bad for America, They have to GO.

From the Huff Po :

State Rep Suggests Abortion Is To Blame For California Drought

Scientists are still exploring the causes of California's historic drought, but one local lawmaker thinks it might all come down to one thing: God's wrath over abortion.
While speaking at the California ProLife Legislative Banquet last week, California Assemblywoman Shannon Grove (R) suggested a theory that the state's worst drought in 1,200 years may be divine retribution for California providing women with access to abortions, RH Reality Check reported.
“Texas was in a long period of drought until Governor Perry signed the fetal pain bill,” she told the audience. “It rained that night. Now God has his hold on California.”
Grove was likely referring to House Bill 2, RH Reality Check noted, a Texas abortion bill banning abortions 20 weeks after fertilization, four weeks earlier than the standard set by Roe v. Wade.
Grove did not immediately respond to a request for confirmation that she made the statement at the event, but she elaborated on her theory in a Facebook comment.
"I believe --and most Americans believe --that God’s hand is in the affairs of man, and certainly was in the formation of this country," she wrote. "Is this drought caused by God? Nobody knows. But biblical history shows a consequence to man’s actions."

Dumb bunny and blond bimbo Shannon Grove is wrong.  The correct understanding of cause and effect is the  scientifically established and totally secular  anthropogenic global warming from fossil fuels and other human activity, OTHER THAN ABORTION OR GAY MARRIAGE AND GAY SEX.  These crazies control the right; the only need we have to take back America is from the ridiculous radical right wing nuts who have demonstrated that they are out of touch with REALITY --- and dangerously so.

Conservative Hypocrisy and Double Standards of Justice -- Easy on themselves, MAX Harsh on everyone else

Conservatives are hypocrites.

Conservatives want a lenient justice for them and their children, and the harshest possible justice for other people.


We see this in Jim-Bob Duggar, when it comes to his son being guilty of a sex crime, against his four sisters and another girl.


We see it with Jeb Bush when his kids were guilty of crimes while he was governor, especially when his daughter was a drug addict. Daughter Bush went to rehab, but at least went through the justice system -- but only apparently because Jebbie couldn't avoid it. Jim-Bob Duggar acted as a vigilante, keeping HIS son out of the system of justice entirely, and certainly did not hold him accountable under our system of laws, much less subject him to the death penalty for rape and incest.

We see it when Mike Huckabee used his position as governor to keep his son from being held accountable in the courts for animal cruelty in hanging a stray dog. Then-governor Huckabee is alleged to have used his power and influence to prevent an investigation and prosecution, according to the authorities who attempted to investigate and prosecute the case. Of course, this NEVER stops ol' Mike Hucksterbee, purveyor of quack cures, from being critical of OTHER people's parenting, like his criticism of the Obama's for the choice of music they allow their daughters -- while Huckabee pals around with pedophile Ted Nugent, performing sexually offensive lyrics with him -- and then lying about it.
From Right Wing Watch:

After Mike Huckabee criticized Beyoncé’s music as “obnoxious and toxic mental poison” unfit for children and compared the singer to a prostitute, it didn’t take long for people to point out that he himself had once joined with Ted Nugent to perform a sexually explicit song on his national television program.

Huckabee is, predictably, reacting by pretending that what happened didn’t actually happen, telling the Christian Post today that Nugent “changed the lyrics pretty dramatically” when he sang the song “Cat Scratch Fever” on Huckabee’s Fox News show.

In fact, anyone who watches a video of the performance can see that Nugent didn’t change any of the song’s explicit lyrics as Huckabee accompanied him,

Video available here.  You have to wonder at how much forgiving of the pedophiles Mike "Family Values" I-Wannabe-President REVEREND Huckabee can offer. It appears to be quite a lot, given that among the many examples truly evil sexual conduct in super close friend Ted Nugent, covered by the HuffPo a year ago February:

In fact, in the case of Nugent, we have even come to see alleged child sexual abuse as some sort of eccentricity or harmless vice. Can you imagine anyone else who had been accused of having sex with a 12-year-old, written a song about raping a 13-year-old and adopted a 17-year-old so that he could have sex with her going on to campaign alongside all the most conservative "family values" candidates?

When Ted Nugent was 32 years old, he released the song "Jailbait." Here's a taste of the lyrics (written by him):

Well, I don't care if you're just 13

You look too good to be true

I just know that you're probably clean...

Jailbait you look fine, fine, fine...

It's quite alright, I asked your mama

Wait a minute, officer

Don't put those handcuffs on me

Put them on her, and I'll share her with you

The albums' next track is titled "I Am a Predator."...

Two years before recording "Jailbait," Ted Nugent had the novel idea of becoming legal guardian to a 17-year-old girl, so that they could have sex without, you know, her parents having legal recourse. They acquiesced. "I guess they figured better Ted Nugent than some drug-infested punk in high school," he told VH1, years later. In the same documentary, he claimed to have had several relationships with young girls, and seems to brag about gaining their parents' approval, too. (Though he didn't go so far as to adopt any of them.)

Oh those hypocritical claims of the moral high ground! Another perfect example of the conservative do-as-I-say, not-as-I-do, and- if-it-becomes-inconvenient- lie ideology. Another example of the problem with conservatives, sex, and religion -- because of course, Hucksterbee shares a love of god and guns and maybe grits with gravy with the Nuge, and that makes everything else all okey-dokey and forgiveable.


Justice under conservatives is for OTHER PEOPLE, not 'them" and not "theirs' - and that is dangerous, that is unfair, that is uncivilized, that is not the rule of law under the U. S. Constitution. Justice is for evangelical conservative men, and screw justice and legal protection for women and girls.

Via Patheos:

Before he was the star of 19 Kids and Counting, Jim Bob Duggar was a prominent political figure in Arkansas, serving as a member of the state’s House of Representatives before running for the U.S. Senate in 2002.

Duggar lost his 2002 bid to be the GOP nominee for the U.S. Senate, however, he did take positions as a candidate. While trying to justify his anti-choice, anti-abortion stance, U.S. Senate candidate Jim Bob Duggar stated forcefully and clearly that those guilty of rape and incest should be put to death.

The following appeared on Duggar’s campaign website:

Q. What is your abortion position, and specifically, where do you stand on rape, incest, and threat to the mother’s health?

A. If a woman is raped, the rapist should be executed instead of the innocent unborn baby. Adoption is an option. Many couples would love to adopt and are waiting for a baby. Abortion has been and always will be the destruction of an innocent child. Rape and incest represent heinous crimes and as such should be treated as capital crimes. The developing infant committed no crime and should be allowed to live. In the unlikely event that the life of both mother and baby would both be lost (for example, a tubal pregnancy) all should be done to save the life of the mother.

Here is just a part of what is wrong with what passes for Duggar thinking, above and beyond the draconian punishment that characterizes conservatism. It is that we should not be executing anyone, even rapists. I'll give Duggar this much agreement, rape IS a heinous and terrible crime, for which there should be appropriate and severe consequences AND FOR WHICH THERE SHOULD BE DUE PROCESS IN CRIMINAL COURTS.  Josh Duggar should receive real legal consequences, but he should also receive real treatment, not fake pray-away-the-gay/pedophile and incest pseudo-treatment under restorative sentencing.

But in seeking restorative justice rather than retributive justice (eye for an eye), we should be seeking treatment for offenders, not simply the most extreme punitive action we can devise. Nothing is made whole or better after excessively punitive justice, in contrast to restorative justice where the goal of the process focuses on an outcome that is not based on vengeance, on trying to feel better by hurting a person who did something wrong or bad.

From Wikipedia:

Restorative justice is an approach to justice that focuses on the needs of the victims and the offenders, as well as the involved community, instead of satisfying abstract legal principles or punishing the offender. Victims take an active role in the process, while offenders are encouraged to take responsibility for their actions... In addition, it provides help for the offender in order to avoid future offences. It is based on a theory of justice that considers crime and wrongdoing to be an offence against an individual or community, rather than the state. Restorative justice that fosters dialogue between victim and offender shows the highest rates of victim satisfaction and offender accountability.

We do not have exemptions for abortion as a constitutional right; this is something that conservatives, in their fundamentally flawed concepts of right and wrong, innocence and guilt, are attempting to impose on the women in this nation. Women have a right to abortion (a limited right as established by Roe v. Wade) because women have autonomy over their bodies, because women have a right to determine if they consent to being pregnant rather than having it imposed on them against their will.


Embryos and fetuses are clumps of cells in the process of differentiation into a variety of kinds of tissues and potentially into the component body parts and systems. But embryos and fetuses are NOT PEOPLE, they lack the essential neurological development to have the essential awareness and capability that we define as living human beings. We use the same criteria to determine if someone is alive or brain dead -- and no longer able to think or feel as a living human being, even if there is some residual bodily processes that continue.


The simple reality is that most fertilized ova do NOT go on to become human beings, due to a failure to implant in the uterus and therefore they fail to complete that developmental process, possibly as high a rate of failure as 80% without intervention, and as high as 100% with contraception. The fertilized ova has no rights and deserves no rights, contrary to the efforts of extremist conservatives to force personhood on the nation as law. A conceptus is NOT A PERSON, and is unlikely to become one.


The simple reality is that many embryos and fetuses in nature do not continue to develop either. We can engage in a superstitious idea about reproduction, or we can accept the reality that pregnancy is a choice, and that most attempts at reproduction are not successful, much less entitled to continue at the expense of an unwilling woman's body. 

It is very difficult to rationalize that some omnipotent deity, or the biological system of nature  created by such a deity, produces all these little zygotes, these fertilized ova, and then fails to follow through with them -- but we are supposed to believe that we humans cannot make this conscious decision for ourselves about reproduction?  That is ridiculous on the face of it, and there is nothing anywhere in the Judeo-Christian religious texts which preclude doing so.  In fact quite the opposite is true -- there are a lot of accounts in the Bible of ripping open pregnant women so as to destroy pregnancies among conquered peoples.  The Bible actually requires it in the old testament, unless you posit that God only creates SOME pregnancies but not others.

2 Kings 15:16King James Version¹⁶ Then Menahem smote Tiphsah, and all that were therein, and the coasts thereof from Tirzah: because they opened not to him, therefore he smote it; and all the women therein that were with child he ripped up.

Hosea 13:16King James Version ¹⁶ Samaria shall become desolate; for she hath rebelled against her God: they shall fall by the sword: their infants shall be dashed in pieces, and their women with child shall be ripped up.

Abortion has NOTHING whatsoever to do with guilt or innocence of that potentially developing cellular process. The reasoning that posits this is a human being with rights or guilt or innocence is BADLY FLAWED.


Even if you accept the premise of religion over rational thought, even Jim-Bob Duggar's own faith posits that a conception is not 'innocent', because of the doctrine of original sin -- that EVERYONE is born with sin and guilt. The Duggars, like former ordained pastor Mike Huckabee, are Southern Baptists; but the concept of original sin is a foundational concept and part of most forms of Christianity.

Southern Baptists and the Doctrine of Imputed Sin

Posted on March 21, 2012 by Joshua Breland

James Petigru Boyce (1827-1888), the founding president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, affirmed the federal headship of Adam and the doctrine of original sin. On whether man inherits guilt and is under condemnation prior to actual personal transgression, Boyce writes:Consequently, at the very moment of birth, the presence and possession of such a nature shows that even the infant sons of Adam are born under all the penalties which befell their ancestor in the day of his sin.

In other words, there is no state of innocence unique to the zygote, conceptus, embryo or fetus that places them in a position superior to assert a right over an existing fully formed human being.

It is not for conservatives in their flawed concept of good and evil, innocence and guilt, to decide that women are bad for having sex, so they deserve pregnancy, or that people are to be divided into good and evil -- which is apparently synonymous (or should that be SIN-nonymous) with being part of "them" in a black and white extremism of right and wrong that gives passes to conservatives but imposes the harshest possible outcomes on those they identify as 'other' or different than them.

EVERY human being on this planet, now and in the past and in the future, is a combination of good and bad, regardless of their religious or political beliefs -- or lack of them.

As to the notion that women should simply hand over 9 months of their lives, and their bodies, to continue as victims of rape or incest, because there are lots and lots of waiting adoptive parents......if that were true we would not have so many children in need of adoption already.

When we look at the generous forgiveness of those conservatives supporting the Duggars, including Mike Huckabee who was governor while Jim-Bob was in the Arkansas legislature, and while the Josh Duggar incest crimes were taking place, we see this about the outcomes of the conservative hypocritical justice system, from the fact check of Huckabee's past political ads:
Via On the Issues:

When it comes to violent crimes, a category that includes murders, rapes, robberies and aggravated assaults, Huckabee’s record is mixed: Murders and robberies declined, while rapes and aggravated assaults increased. Overall, the violent crime rate was actually 5.2% higher than in 1996, when he took office.

Thanks to the double standards and conservative hypocrisy of Jim-Bob Duggar and Mike Huckabee, add Josh Duggar's multiple incidents of rape and incest against his four sisters and another young girl to those statistics -- because they were excluded under the term in office of Jim-Bob Duggar and Mike Huckabee in Arkansas.


Conservatives FAIL at governance, because their fundamental - and fundamentalist - concepts of how the world generally, and how government, and especially justice specifically operate are flawed and faulty, and inherently unfair and unjust. Conservatives mean well, but do badly... and they hate being held accountable for those failures and failings. Accountability is reserved for anyone who does not think or believe as they do.


THAT is why not one of the conservatives currently running for office should be elected, and why those who are the most extreme pose the greatest danger to our society and citizens.

My favorite quote of the week, so far: Robert Reich

Sing it Reich, sing it LOUD, sing truth to power!  Texas not only hates the rest of the nation, Texas just passed more lax gun laws, which were promoted and sought - in part - by those who want to secede, and declare they don't mind shooting people to get their way on a range of issues. (my bold and italicize emphasis added in the body of the quote)

Why Federal Disaster Relief Money Poses a Bit of Awkwardness for Texas

Yet Texans have elected people who seem not to have a clue. Indeed, Texas has done more in recent years to institutionalize irrationality than almost anywhere else in America—thereby imposing a huge burden on its citizens.
How many natural disasters will it take for the Lone Star State to wake up to the disaster of its elected officials?

Texas represents the worst of conservative willful and malicious ignorance, magical thinking, failure to grasp the rational concept of cause and effect, but most of all Texas conservatives are masters of hypocrisy.

From the same link above:

As extreme weather marked by tornadoes and flooding continues to sweep across Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott has requested—and President Obama has granted—federal help.
I don’t begrudge Texas billions of dollars in disaster relief. After all, we’re all part of America. When some of us are in need, we all have a duty to respond.
But the flow of federal money poses a bit of awkwardness for the Lone Star State.

After all, just over a month ago hundreds of Texans decided that a pending Navy Seal/Green Beret joint training exercise was really an excuse to take over the state and impose martial law. And they claimed the Federal Emergency Management Agency was erecting prison camps, readying Walmart stores as processing centers for political prisoners.
There are nut cases everywhere, but Texas’s governor, Greg Abbott added to that particular outpouring of paranoia by ordering the Texas State Guard to monitor the military exercise. “It is important that Texans know their safety, constitutional rights, private property rights and civil liberties will not be infringed upon,” he said. In other words, he’d protect Texans from this federal plot.
Now, Abbott wants federal money. And the Federal Emergency Management Agency is gearing up for a major role in the cleanup—including places like Bastrop, Texas, where the Bastrop State Park dam failed—and where, just five weeks ago, a U.S. Army colonel trying to explain the pending military exercise was shouted down by hundreds of self-described patriots shouting “liar!”
Texans dislike the federal government even more than most other Americans do. According to a February poll conducted by the University of Texas and the Texas Tribune, only 23 percent of Texans view the federal government favorably, while 57 percent view it unfavorably, including more than a third who hold a “very unfavorable” view.
Texas dislikes the federal government so much that eight of its congressional representatives, along with Senator Ted Cruz, opposed disaster relief for the victims of Hurricane Sandy—adding to the awkwardness of their lobbying for the federal relief now heading Texas’s way.
Yet even before the current floods, Texas had received more disaster relief than any other state, according to a study by the Center for American Progress. That’s not simply because the state is so large. It’s also because Texas is particularly vulnerable to extreme weather—tornadoes on the plains, hurricanes in the Gulf, flooding across its middle and south.
Given this, you might also think Texas would take climate change especially seriously. But here again, there’s cognitive dissonance between what the state needs and how its officials act.
Among Texas’s infamous climate-change deniers is Lamar Smith, chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, who dismissed last year’s report by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as “more political than scientific,“ and the White House report on the urgency of addressing climate change as designed “to frighten Americans.”
Smith is still at it. His committee just slashed by more than 20 percent NASA’s spending on Earth science, which includes climate change.
...Consider also the consequences for the public’s health. Several deaths in Texas have been linked to the extreme weather. Many Texans have been injured by it, directly or indirectly. Poor residents are in particular peril because they live in areas prone to flooding or in flimsy houses and trailers that can be washed or blown away. What’s Texas’s response?  Texas officials continue to turn down federal funds to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, thereby denying insurance to more than 1 million people and preventing the state from receiving an estimated $100 billion in federal cash over the next decade.

In my experience, Texans, individually, one on one are usually wonderful, hospitable people.  But as an electorate the conservative majority are freakishly, foolishly NUTS. 

At some point, the right has to take their party back from the fringies, the fundies, the cray-cray-crazies, and the rest of the extremists, and most of all the damned hypocrites.

RIP, Beau Biden

He was an exemplary American, who lived a dedicated life in both state government service and in the armed forces.

Celebrating the Real Meaning of Memorial Day

It is too easy to fall into the trap, the habit, of treating Memorial Day as just a selfish personal party day, a vacation day, disconnected from the original purpose of setting aside this holiday as a federal occasion for solemnity and serious thought of others.  Those 'others' made our daily life, our security, our history and even our very existence possible the way we know it.

To all our valued readers, please -- take time this weekend, more than just a few seconds, or a minute, and think long and hard about those who made the ultimate sacrifice for the rest of us.  Appreciate those who have given their time and effort in military service on Veterans day (and we should think of them EVERY day, including those serving currently), but especially think of those who died in service to protecting this country, the ultimate act of patriotism.  That is the purpose of Memorial Day.

Respect and honor them.  Revere them.  Remember them with gratitude.  Please, do not take our security and our heritage for granted.

via KSTP:

Golden Valley Man Continues Mission to Bring Meaning Back to Memorial Day

By: Cassie Hart
An annual tradition of flags lining a street in Golden Valley for Memorial Day continues.
Starting the week before Memorial Day, Golden Valley’s Flag Row runs along Golden Valley Road from Highway 100 to Winnetka Avenue N. It’s lined with hundreds of U.S. flags and POW-MIA flags to pay tribute to those who have fallen.
It’s a tradition that has been kept alive thanks to a few volunteers. But it all started with one man several years ago.
"I put them up a week before Memorial Day to help bring awareness before the holiday," 52-year-old John Giese of Golden Valley said.
The Army and Air Force veteran went to Walgreens the night before Memorial Day 2006 and bought every 12-by-18 inch flag in the store. He typed “Pfc Gavin Colburn, 2005” on pieces of paper and taped them to the sticks of every flag and placed them in front of every house of someone he knew. The 30 flags extended from the Hwy 100 Frontage Road to Oak Grove Church. 
Giese met Colburn, a fellow truck driver, the day he arrived in Iraq with the U.S. Army Reserve. They talked about home and agreed to talk more later. Colburn’s convoy left on a mission. Three hours later, the 20-year-old from Ohio was killed by an improvised explosive device. Giese said he found out about it the next morning.
"That just kind of had an impact on me," Giese said.
He met two more men while on tour who died a short time later.
When Giese got back home, he said he wanted to bring meaning back to Memorial Day.
"I wanted to let people know that it's not only about a four-day weekend," he said.
He continues his mission with Golden Valley’s Flag Row, which has grown to more than 600 flags lining the route.
Giese said those who want to help in his cause should put up a flag at their home.
"Take the time and do something to recognize why you got the day off of work in the first place. Go to a memorial service," Giese said, adding that people should talk to their kids about why they are not in school for the day.
People are encouraged to walk or drive the 1 1/2 mile route on Golden Valley Road to pay tribute to fallen military soldiers. The flags are up until 5 p.m. Memorial Day.
There are 83,126 POWs still unaccounted for since Wold War II.

Conservatism is, LITERALLY, Resulting in the DEATHS of Women and Children

most recent infant mortality rates, 2014

most recent statistics on comparative maternal mortality rates

Last month the Shriver Report, a non-profit that deals with women in the US and feminism (both advances and reversals)did a survey, in part examining the attitudes of men towards a possible female president. It explains a great deal about why conservative men are waging culture and legislative/policy war on women, not only in regards to reproductive issues but rather a broad spectrum of issues.  Worse, those beliefs and the policies and legislation that result from them, are becoming more extreme and more draconian - and deadly.

This part of that survey findings I found to be key in understanding why conservative men, who are opposed to the advances of feminism and are attempting to undo them, perceive a threat to their roles at an emotional level - this is the 'what' and the 'why':

When asked to describe in their own words why it is harder to be a man in their generation compared with their father’s, men are most likely to say this is due to women attaining a stronger position in the workplace, a stronger position financially, and greater gender equality. These men also cite negative assumptions about men, a more competitive job market, greater household responsibilities for men, and greater expectations for men in society today.

There is something deeply and seriously wrong when we could be more scandalized, shocked, or offended by the notion of men experiencing a limited simulation of pregnancy and childbirth than we are aware of or shocked by women and infants dying at an increasing rate, an appalling rate, comparable to other similarly developed first world countries.

I posted this back on May 7, but it does not appear to have been adequately connected to the subsequent posts as part of the theme of why our post-1980 era conservatism, aka the policies and ideology broadly characterized as Reaganism, are massively misogynistic, massively anti-feminist, to such an extreme they constitute a war on women.

Please pay attention to the statistics on infant and maternal mortality in this video from May 5, 2015.



These statistics are shocking, genuinely deeply shocking, deeply disturbing. These statistics require something to push back against these policies, something to undo, or to reverse, this conservative Reaganism thinking at the deepest and most profound level. Because this thinking is an integral part of conservative identity, because it is emotional rather than rational or logical, bringing about that kind of change in a conservative is extremely difficult by reliance on facts and figures, or logic as persuasion.

My co-blogger Penigma has respectfully and constructively criticized me for proposing that conservative men who vote on legislation affecting women and support for families should experience both the simulated labor pains and the discomfort of simulated pregnancy pre-labor with a pregnancy belly appliance. He viewed those suggestions as extremist and as sensationalism. That was never my intent, and I am not so far persuaded that those proposals are either extreme or sensational; rather, given the number of men who try those experiences voluntarily, and given that they are more brief than the actual experience for women, and that men can opt out of them whenever they become too unpleasant for their tolerance threshold, I think the proposal is actually quite benign and positive.  Deaths certainly justify at least considering alternatives when other solutions have been so unsuccessful.


My co-blogger Penigma has also chided me, in his usual very gentlemanly and considerate manner, for focusing too much on pregnancy and labor, and not sufficiently on other aspects related to the war on women, such as the attempts to limit or ban outright access to affordable contraception (as just one example).

I would argue instead that the purpose of proposing those two simulations for conservative male legislators is to provide them a very physical and emotionally visceral, physical understanding of a challenging uniquely female experience as a means to open their hearts and minds to a broader and deeper change of belief about women than only pregnancy and giving birth. I would argue that after experiencing even a brief exposure to simulated childbirth, a conservative legislator would be less likely to find it plausible that poor women become pregnant just to get a free 'Obamaphone'. Of course, there is no such thing as a free Obamaphone; rather a Bush era program continued under Obama where reconditioned phones are provided by corporations with limited minutes on them for the purpose of job hunting, with use monitored and availability strictly means tested, including a requirement for actual job hunting. But those facts are immaterial to the conservative narrative -- as most facts appear to be ignored by conservatives in favor of their ideology narrative against women.

Let me provide you an example from the right - specifically the religious right.  This is a term that has been widely used on right wing media, including (but not limited to) Fox News, via Boingboing back in 2012, although it continues into 2015.  It is not only misogynistic, and anti-sexuality, it is additionally some of the most ugly kind of racism; but this goes a long way towards explaining conservative legislation:

"The Democrats tried to make this election about a single issue: The right to slut. Or more precisely, the right to slut without the responsibility of consequences."
"One thing one has to remember about women, especially slutty ones: They usually don’t make decisions based on reason," he writes, after explaining that sluts want to get abortions so they can be slutty and childless, but that they also want to leech off of welfare to raise welfare babies, which is of course a totally reasoned flow of logic.
"This election cycle shows that the Slut Vote is real, and Republicans lose because they discount the existence of original sin in women," writes B-Skillet. "Abortion is often called the 'third rail of American politics,' but in truth, the third rail is a woman’s right to slut (with cash and prizes)."

The famous “gender gap” isn’t really a gap based on gender. The right overwhelmingly wins older and married women. The “gender gap” should more accurately be called the slut vote.
Women make up about 54% of the electorate. It is very hard to win without winning that segment, or at least losing it only narrowly while winning men big. While the right usually wins married women, the fact is that married women constitute an ever-decreasing share of the female population. Women want to delay marriage as long as possible so they can “have it all,” and usually “have it all” means “have as much hot alpha sex as possible without any consequences.” And thus, less married women and more sluts (not that these two groups are mutually exclusive, per se)
And that’s where the Democrats come in. Contrary to common belief, the primary reason the Democrats own the black vote has nothing to do with civil rights. The Democrats were only partially supportive of civil rights in the 60′s (with southern Democrats advocating “segregation forever”). Lincoln was a Republican, and Republicans in the House and Senate voted for civil rights legislation in the 60s.
Rather, Democrats have won the black vote because the black community is dominated by illegitimacy, and the Democrats are willing to subsidize and support that illegitimacy (as well as provide access to cheap abortions) so as to take away from sluts the consequences of their actions. Consequently, young black people grow up on the dole and not only never realize there might be something wrong with that, but eventually come to believe that’s the way it should be. The Democrats have won the black vote by first “empowering” single black mothers.
This is now beginning to happen in white suburbia, except unlike women in the urban black community, white suburban sluts start from a place of relative wealth and privilege (daddy’s little princess). Thus, food stamps–and increased rewards for having illegitimate kids while on food stamps–don’t (yet) appeal to them.
So instead Obama appealed to rich white sluts by forcing someone else (the Catholic church, in this case) to pay for their birth control, and by scaring them about alleged threats to their ability to take advantage of Planned Parenthood’s services (Planned Parenthood being conveniently located in the minority part of town, of course, so as to provide anonymity to visiting white girls whose white girl friends never go over there–except to visit Planned Parenthood themselves). This created a wedge issue in the suburban community that allowed Obama to play more strongly there than he might have if the election ended up purely about the economy or the national debt.
One thing one has to remember about women, especially slutty ones: They usually don’t make decisions based on reason. So all the Obama administration had to do was scare them that Mitt Romney was going to take away their birth control and their access to abortion. The fear for them is that, without birth control and abortion, they might actually get pregnant and have to give birth. That is scary not simply because of the economic burden of having a child (since, hey, they can get all kinds of cash and prizes if that happens), but because if that happened then everyone would know they’re sluts, and their image as daddy’s pure little snowflake princess goes out the window.
The right loses the female vote primarily because so many of them still operate from a feminist world-view: Women are pure, perfect, kind, and altruistic, and the only reason they “get into trouble” is that some evil, conniving, manipulative man tricked them into sleeping with the entire football team.

Conservatives are broadly anti-abortion, and they have attempted at all levels of government to ban abortion, by claiming it is killing babies. At the same time, they promote policies which actually DO kill babies, not just clusters of cells at the embryonic and fetal level of development which have no established moral, legal or scientific standing as human beings.

This is not exclusively an issue of pregnancy or giving birth however, but part of a larger view of women as the enemy, especially to the degree that women fail to conform to submission to men and conformity to a pre-1950's style of puritanism. This is a worldview of women as a threat, to male dominance and by extension to a rigid social hierarchy which in the view of conservatives equates to order and stability, 'the right(AKA right-wing) way' of doing things.

This is about changing all thinking and beliefs about women, from the minimum wage (which affects women more than men, to pay and pay equality, and as a result affects poverty levels more for women than for men) to health care (including the increased availability of health care through the ACA), to nutritional supplement levels like WIC and SNAP, to the funding of programs like Governor Dayton's pre-K, to the demeaning of single women as a demographic that votes for Democrats more than Republicans being characterized as the 'slut vote', to the belief that women, especially single women, use pregnancy as an ATM card through the social safety network of welfare benefits, to the attitudes about rape which blame the victim not the rapist.

I would ague that it requires a fairly strong, if not drastic solution, when we even see a recurring theme of conservatives figures claiming that women should not have the vote, and when we have a Justice on the Supreme Court who publicly asserts that the U.S. constitution does not prohibit gender discrimination (Scalia, here).

Conservatives do not want to force women back into the bad old days of the 1950s. Conservatives, led by predominantly white males at all levels of governance and politics, want to force women bac to the very bad old days of the 1850s. We need to push back against that -- and push back hard. That I believe requires thinking outside the box of methods we have tried to date, and which have failed. That I believe may require an approach that is not exclusively a logical argument of dry facts which are easily ignored or denied.

As an FYI, since I try to be conscientious about fact checking what I publish, I looked to see if Thom Hartmann had his numbers right -- he did.

From last September, via CBS news and the CDC:

More babies are dying before they turn 1 year old in the United States than in most of Europe and several other developed countries, a new U.S. government report says.
A greater proportion of premature births and deaths of full-term babies are driving the higher rate, which puts the United States below 25 other countries, according to the report, released Sept. 24 by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
"I think we've known for a long time that the U.S. has a higher preterm birth rate, but this higher infant mortality rate for full-term, big babies who should have really good survival prospects is not what we expected," said lead author Marian MacDorman, a senior statistician and researcher in the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics.
The infant mortality rate refers to the percentage of babies born alive who die before their first birthday.
The report compares infant mortality rates in the United States to those of European countries plus Australia, Israel, Japan, Korea and New Zealand in 2010, the most recent year for which data is available.

It looks as if Thom Hartmann may have UNDER reported the data for maternal mortality rates.  From the Association of Reproductive Health Professionals:

Maternal Mortality in the United States: A Human Rights Failure

With 99% of maternal deaths occurring in developing countries, it is too often assumed that maternal mortality is not a problem in wealthier countries. Yet, statistics released in September of 2010 by the United Nations place the United States 50th in the world for maternal mortality — with maternal mortality ratios higher than almost all European countries, as well as several countries in Asia and the Middle East.^{1, 2}
Even more troubling, the United Nations data show that between 1990 and 2008, while the vast majority of countries reduced their maternal mortality ratios for a global decrease of 34%, maternal mortality nearly doubled in the United States.¹ For a country that spends more than any other country on health care and more on childbirth-related care than any other area of hospitalization — US$86 billion a year — this is a shockingly poor return on investment.^{3, 4}
Given that at least half of maternal deaths in the United States are preventable,⁵ this is not just a matter of public health, but a human rights failure.⁶ The Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that “every human being has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and his family, including medical care and necessary social services”.⁷ This means that the United States health care system must provide health care services that are available, accessible, acceptable and of good quality.⁸ In addition, the health care system must be free from discrimination, must be accountable and must ensure the active participation of women in decision-making. Yet, instead, too many women in the United States face shortages of providers and facilities and inadequate staffing; financial, bureaucratic, transport and language barriers; care that is not culturally appropriate or respectful; a lack of opportunity for informed decision-making and the lack of a system to ensure that all women receive high-quality, evidence-based care.

In this larger context, of actual death and suffering, I don't think demanding our legislators voluntarily expand the horizons of their experience to include an exercise in empathy building and consciousness raising.  I certainly do not think that it is reasonable, in this age of popular novel trilogies like 50 Shades of Gray, and at the other end of the spectrum, actual torture of unwilling victims who have no control over what is done to them, for such a demand to be regarded as advocating the torture of men.  I would argue rather that this is one possibility to consider in reversing policies and ideology that are literally killing women and children in this country, and causing a level of suffering that is not adequately known or acknowledged.

We desperately need greater awareness, greater knowledge, and a helluva  lot greater empathy from conservatives, particularly the male conservatives who are the primary initiators of the destructive and damaging legislation, albeit with some level of support from both men and women in their base.  If it takes a bit of abdominal contraction to expand that empathy, so long as it is within their control and voluntary, then that is not abusive, and it is certainly not advocating torture of anyone., but rather it is advocating for women and infants to live and thrive, and as a result, to benefit the nation, to improve the country for all of us.

Irony. Or is it just hypocrisy? Perhaps simply ignorance of American history?

The part about hiding their true faces, however, remains the same.

via Lady Liberals:

Dubya or Jeb, no significant difference between them except how far the neocons have their hands up their arses

GOP Continues the War on Women, in new and uglier ways

How the GOP, apparently,
think babies arrive...

This is in the larger context of state level anti-abortion legislation, as well as state level and federal level cuts to the funding of health care for women, notably Planned Parenthood but also cutting funding to other clinics, and an overall domestic spending that affects poor women and children.  Conservatives consistently act to benefit special interests, primarily wealthy people and corporations while intentionally harming those most vulnerable.  Conservatives are not only appallingly incompetent at any form of economic policy, they do real damage in their failed attempts at governance that harm people individually and weaken the nation as a whole. 

In the previous post, I had suggested that male legislators on the GOP side of the aisle should be required to undergo labor pain simulations before they voted on any legislation that adversely had an impact on women -- especially on choice and reproduction.  While my co-blogger Penigma seems to find this a demand that GOP male legislators be tortured, I would point out that fairly large numbers of men, acting in solidarity with their wives or partners during pregnancy, undergo this experience voluntarily as an exercise in empathy.  That was precisely the purpose for which I presented this demand, as the overwhelmingly male body of legislators at both the state and federal levels, particularly in leadership and policy determining positions, appear to be in dire need of better empathy in their characters.

In that context and for that purpose, in addition to the experience of simulated labor, I would argue as well that the experiences in the video below could only improve on the current deficiencies on the right.




I don't think I'm being too harsh here in my criticism of the failures of compassion and empathy among the right wingers.  Here are a few examples of what I mean.

From the Daily Tribune and the AP (bold face and enlarged type are my emphasis added - DG):

Republican-controlled House passes sweeping cuts to domestic programs
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Jolted to action by deficit-conscious newcomers, the Republican-controlled House passed sweeping legislation early Saturday to cut $61 billion from hundreds of federal programs and shelter coal companies, oil refiners and farmers from new government regulations.
The $1.2 trillion bill covers every Cabinet agency through the Sept. 30 end of the budget year, imposing severe spending cuts aimed at domestic programs and foreign aid, including aid for schools, nutrition programs, environmental protection, and heating and housing subsidies for the poor.
The measure faces a rough ride in the Democratic-controlled Senate, even before the GOP amendments adopted Thursday, Friday and early Saturday morning pushed the bill further and further to the right on health care and environmental policy. Senate Democrats promise higher spending levels and are poised to defend Obama's health care bill, environmental policies and new efforts to overhaul regulation of the financial services industry.
Changes rammed through the House on Friday and Saturday would shield greenhouse-gas polluters and privately owned colleges from federal regulators, block a plan to clean up the Chesapeake Bay, and bar the government from shutting down mountaintop mines it believes will cause too much water pollution, siding with business groups over environmental activists and federal regulators in almost every instance.
"This is like a Cliff Notes summary of every issue that the Republicans, the Chamber of Commerce, and the (free market) CATO Institute have pushed for 30 years," said Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass. "And they're just going to run them through here."
Across four long days of freewheeling debate, Republicans left their conservative stamp in other ways.
They took several swipes at the year-old health care law, including voting for a ban on federal funding for its implementation. At the behest of anti-abortion lawmakers, they called for an end to federal funding for Planned Parenthood.

Republicans awarded the Pentagon an increase of less than 2 percent increase, but domestic agencies would bear slashing cuts of about 12 percent. Such reductions would feel almost twice as deep since they would be spread over the final seven months of the budget year.
Republicans recoiled, however, from some of the most politically difficult cuts to grants to local police and fire departments, special education and economic development. Amtrak supporters easily repelled an attempt to slash its budget.

"The bill will destroy 800,000 American jobs," said House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., citing a study by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. "It will increase class sizes and take teachers out of the classrooms ... It will jeopardize homeless veterans, make our communities less secure, threaten America's innovation."

The Environmental Protection Agency was singled out by Republicans eager to defend business and industry from numerous agency regulations they say threaten job-creation and the economy. The EPA's budget was slashed by almost one-third, and then its regulatory powers were handcuffed in a series of floor votes.

Proposed federal regulations would be blocked on emission of greenhouse gases, blamed for climate change, and a proposed regulation on mercury emissions from cement kilns would also be stopped. Additionally, the bill also calls for a halt to proposed regulations affecting Internet service providers and privately-owned colleges, victories for the industries that would be affected.
The 359-page bill was shaped beginning to end by the first-term Republicans, many of them elected with tea party backing.
Highlights of proposals in House GOP spending bill
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The House Republicans' $1.2 trillion bill for financing federal programs through Sept. 30, when the current budget year ends, includes many spending cuts and prohibitions that make a showdown with President Barack Obama and Senate Democrats inevitable.
Among the biggest flashpoints are provisions that would:
--Cut about $60 billion in spending from last year's levels in many domestic programs, including education, environmental protection and community services.
--Block money to implement Obama's health care overhaul law enacted last year.
--Bar federal funds for Planned Parenthood, which provides abortion and family planning services with its hundreds of clinics across the U.S. The organization says 90 percent of the $363 million a year it receives in government aid comes from Washington or the federal-state Medicaid program.
--Eliminate federal family planning and teen pregnancy prevention grants.
--Block federal aid to overseas groups that provide abortions or counsel women about them.  

Here is another example.  I would point out that the overwhelmingly white male GOP appears to assert on a regular basis that women exaggerate and lie; also that they should just 'keep their legs together', and that they cannot be entrusted with making medical decisions about their own bodies and health with accurate medical information -- so they legalize state-mandated lying and give cover to doctors to lie to their patients under the justification of conscience.  Examples of that would be requiring doctors to give medically inaccurate information to women, such as abortions lead to or cause breast cancer (they do not) or exempting from malpractice claims for providing false information to a patient or withholding information to a patient, if a doctor opposes abortion and believes that patient might consider having one, up to and including deceiving a patient about being pregnant.  No such provision for being dishonest with a patient, for matters of conscience of the doctor, exists for any interaction between a doctor and male patients; no state mandated requirement of false information, intruding on the relationship between doctor and patient, exists for any interaction with male patients either.  These are exclusively male driven, and imposed exclusively on women.

I call that a war on women.  I call it unfair.  I call it discriminatory.  I call it harmful and damaging.  I call it in need of serious correction and change.  It is worth noting that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights does not recognize a right to weapons of deadly force (i.e. guns) but does recognize a right to autonomy and self determination (i.e. reproductive choice) and a right to medical care; the GOP, mired in the last century or earlier (say, the stone age?) believes the reverse, that there in an inherent right to the means to kill other people or yourself, but no right to health care.  How significant and how sad they get it precisely reversed -- and how predictable!

From the RHeality Check.org:

House Passes ‘Disgustingly Cruel’ 20-Week Abortion Ban

The Republican-dominated U.S. House voted 242 to 184 Wednesday to pass a bill that would ban abortion after 20 weeks nationwide, with no exceptions for a woman’s health or fetal anomalies, and with rape and incest exceptions that advocates call callous and cruel.
“This bill is a danger to women’s lives and well-being, an affront to their dignity, and a threat to the rights and liberties all Americans hold dear,” Nancy Northup, president of the Center for Reproductive Rights, said in a statement after the bill’s passage.
While supporters said the bill is necessary because 20-week-old fetuses can feel pain, medical experts disagree. Critics charged that the bill is unconstitutional and intended to help end legal abortion in America by challenging Roe v. Wade.
“It’s the beginning of the end of abortion—at 20 weeks, at 17 weeks, at 12 weeks, at one week, at conception,” Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN) said on the House floor. “This is an anti-abortion bill. It’s not about fetal pain, it’s not about 20 weeks.”
This isn’t the first time the House has passed a 20-week abortion ban, but Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has promised the unprecedented step of taking the bill up in the Senate.
President Obama has threatened to veto the bill. White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest called the bill “disgraceful” at a press conference Wednesday, and said that the president “strongly opposes” it.

And last but not least, the paternalistic notarized note legislation for a woman to make a medical decision about her pregnancy.  I would point out that no comparable legislation exists for any male procedure; for example, no notarized note is required before a man gets a vasectomy, even if that could dramatically affect the options for his spouse to become pregnant.  No, those permission slips are only required for women, never men.

From Rheality Check.org:

Missouri Bill Amending Informed Consent Law to Require Permission From Father Prior to Abortion (HB 131)

HB 131 would amend Missouri’s informed consent law (Mo. Rev. Stat. § 188.027) to add a provision that would prohibit an abortion from being performed or induced unless and until the father of the unborn child provides written, notarized consent to the abortion, except in cases where the woman upon whom the abortion is to be performed or induced was the victim of rape or incest and the pregnancy resulted from the rape or incest.
If the father of the unborn child is deceased, the woman upon whom the abortion is to be performed or induced would be required to sign a notarized affidavit attesting to this fact.
The bill would prohibit a physician from performing or inducing an abortion unless and until the physician has obtained the written consent required in these provisions. The bill would further require the physician to retain a copy of the consent or affidavit in the patient’s medical record.