At the risk of dating myself…

I remember the days when the only place a young, sinlgle woman could buy affordable birth control pills– without being judged or lectured– was Planned Parenthood.

I remember riding the Columbus city bus for an hour and a half each way to go to the near east side clinic– to the ghetto. I remember the dark, dingy waiting room packed with young black women, little kids, and college students like me– all waiting for a free exam and contraception.

I remember those days before Roe v Wade legalized abortion in the US.

I remember women in my dorm– crying when they found out they were pregnant. Most of them scraped together the money to fly to New York City or drive to Detroit to have abortions because those were the only places in the US where that service was offered. I even drove a friend to Detroit… a somber, desparate journey.

We don’t want to go back to that time

… a time when women had to deal with the circumstances of an unwanted pregnancy without a full aray of choices.

… a time when only wealthy women had the right to choose what is best for themselves, their bodies, and their families.

Here are two eye-opening stories about how choice is being whittled away by political and religious leaders.

As It Was Before Roe, So It Is Again: “Choice” Often Comes Down to Money

The real impact of a 20 week abortion ban

Here is an awesome commentary on the national debt debate from The Nation…

In the ever-so-smug company of the rich and powerful it is a given that there is never to be any expression of remorse or other acknowledgment of the pain they have inflicted on the lesser mortals they so cavalierly plunder. It’s convenient for them that the media and the politicians, which they happen to own, rarely connect the dots between the scams that made the rich so rich and the alarming rise in the federal debt that is crushing this nation.

The result of this purchased public myopia is that we are left with an absurd debate over how deeply to cut teachers’ pensions and seniors’ medical benefits while preserving tax breaks for the superrich and their large corporations. At a time when 10 million American families will have lost their homes by year’s end, when $5.6 trillion in home equity has been wiped out, when most Americans face steep unemployment rates and stagnant wages, a Democratic president is likely to compromise with Republican ideologues who insist that further cuts in taxes for the rich is the way to bring back jobs.

Let’s deal right off with that canard. There is currently no shortage of corporate profits or excessive executive compensation to explain away the failure of the private sector to create jobs. On the contrary, as the New York Times reports, “In the fourth quarter, profits at American businesses were up an astounding 29.2 percent, the fastest growth in more than 60 years. Collectively, American corporations logged profits at an annual rate of $1.678 trillion.” And to add insult to injury, the top executives, who seem unable or unwilling to create jobs or adequately reward their workers, have increased their own compensation by a whopping 12 percent over the previous year, setting the median pay at $9.6 million per year for those in control of the leading 200 companies. The Times adds that “CEO pay is also on the rise again at companies like Capital One and Goldman Sachs, which survived the economic storm with the help of all of those taxpayer-financed bailouts.”

Lost in this faux debate is the reality that our debt now looms so large because the government had to bail out many of those same corporations, quite a few of which, like General Electric and AIG, pay no taxes and have no problem paying truly obscene amounts to their top executives. GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt, whom President Barack Obama named chairman of the Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, is making as much as he did before the recession hit, a recession that his GE Capital division did much to cause with its reckless loans. AIG, saved with a government infusion of $170 billion, has just lavishly rewarded its top executives but has providing no relief for the homeowners ripped off by its phony credit default swaps.

The AIG deal was engineered by then-President of the New York Fed Timothy Geithner, who was rewarded for his efforts to save the bankers by being named Obama’s treasury secretary. Geithner, an energetic member of the team of Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers that ran Treasury when the Bill Clinton administration cooperated with Congressional Republicans in gutting regulation of the financial community, is proud of saving the banks from the wreckage that they and the Clinton policies caused. Last October he proclaimed the TARP banker bailout program “the most effective government program in recent memory.”

What he is referring to is that in order to escape the federal restrictions on executive compensation, the banks have been eager to pay back the TARP funds. What he and other apologists for the Obama and George W. Bush administrations’ Bankers First program choose to ignore—as Paul Atkins and two other members of the Congressional Oversight Panel for the Troubled Asset Relief Program revealed in a damning Wall Street Journal column titled “TARP Was No Win for the Taxpayers”—is that the banks are not paying back the trillions of dollars in non-TARP governmental assistance that saved them from bankruptcy. “It hides the full story of the government’s financial crisis effort, of which TARP is but a minor part,” the op-ed column said of the maneuvering. The major part is the $1.1 trillion in toxic-mortgage-based securities that the Fed purchased, relieving the banks of their obligations, and the $380 billion bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, organizations that backed those securities, along with “other Fed and FDIC programs [that] added another $2 trillion of taxpayer money at risk to the 19 stress-tested banks alone.”

What Geithner celebrates is a shell game of his own construction in which far more costly federal programs, with no serious restrictions on banker greed, were used by the banks to “repay” the TARP funds. Nothing was obtained in return from those banks in the way of mortgage cramdowns to keep people in their homes or any restrictions on the interest rates that banks charge on credit cards: Clearly usurious rates of more than 25 percent are now the norm for those struggling to keep their families above water. No wonder consumer confidence is down, the housing market is expected to decline an additional 10 percent over the next year, and the job market is predicted by most of the experts to stagnate for years to come. Continued tax breaks for the 1 percent of the population that controls 40 percent of the nation’s wealth will do nothing to restore the confidence of the other 99 percent of consumers who are suffering so.

This at least Obama seems to understand, but count on him to betray his own better instincts by once again following the advice of his treasury secretary and the Wall Street crowd that contributed so lavishly to his first presidential campaign and whose support he seeks once again. [Emphasis added.]

All of the players are counting on the continued myopia of the American public. If we were really paying attention, we wouldn’t stand for this.

No compromise! No negotiation! No discussion! No public input!

These are the rallying cries of the Tea Party in the Arizona Legislature and in the US Congress. Here is a thoughtful editorial on rigidity from the New York Times.

House Republicans have already won so much in this year’s federal budget standoff that they could easily declare victory and put an end to the maddening and dysfunctional cycle. Previous Congresses would have noticed that millions of people are still struggling in an economic downturn and tried to help, but Republicans have succeeded in shutting off that conversation.

They have won the philosophical war, compelling Democrats to agree to tens of billions in spending cuts. Yet that does not seem to be enough for the Republicans who now control the federal steering wheel.

With a hard deadline looming, talks to prevent a government shutdown have been stymied for a week because Tea Party members of the House have demanded everything: not just some of their cuts but almost all of them, and not just a reduction in spending but a reduction only in the programs they don’t like.Many are insisting Democrats also agree to nonbudgetary riders, like ending the financing of Planned Parenthood or health care reform.

They simply will not accede to anything that looks like a compromise with President Obama. Caught in this position, Speaker John Boehner knows the public is likely to blame Republicans for the pain of a shutdown, once it sees that the Democrats offered difficult compromises that his caucus rejected. That is the price he pays for riding to power on the backs of people who don’t understand that government cannot be built out of ideological rigidity.

If Mr. Boehner cannot persuade his members that the public does not want a government shutdown and will blame them, then much of the government will close its doors on April 8, when the current stopgap funding measure runs out. [Emphasis added.]

For the rest of the editorial, click on this link.

What does the Republican Party stand for? Small government and reduced spending. Right? Wrong. That’s their PR story, but that’s not their behavior.

The graphic above leaves little to the imagination when you look at government spending under Republican Presidents Ronald Reagan (the father of the small government ideal), George Bush I, and George Bush II (the winner of the out-of-control spending award who was helped greatly by his 100% Republican-controlled Congress.)

I offer this history lesson because in the coming weeks we are going to hear a lot of Republican rhetoric about spending cuts and balancing our budgets at the kitchen table. Keep in mind that many of the Republicans who will be spouting this new fiscal conservatism marched in lock-step with President Bush as he destroyed our economy with tax cuts and entitlement programs we couldn’t afford, AND they were involved in the Republican Congressional blockade in December 2010 when they held out for tax cuts for the richest Americans and refused to discuss any other legislation until they secured tax cuts (which we couldn’t afford) for their cronies.

Check out Chris Hayes’ smackdown of the Republicans’ disingenuous fiscal policy decisions on the Rachel Maddow Show: GOP haunted by big spending and corporate favors.

The beginning is devoted to the Republican who will deliver the response to President Obama’s State of the Union address tonight. Paul Ryan, Congressman from Wisconsin, is now known as a fiscal conservative and has written the Roadmap for America’s Future which features privatization schemes and a number of draconian cuts– including cuts in Medicare and Social Security but, of course, not military spending. There is a bit of a problem with Ryan wearing the fiscal conservative mantel. You see, during the Bush II era, Ryan was one of the Congressional drunken sailors who spent like there was no tomorrow; he voted for the Republican tax cuts and unfunded expansion of Medicare under Bush II.

At about 7 minutes, Hayes talks about out-of-control spending by Bush and Reagan, and about 10 minutes, he talks with economist James Galbraith.

So, as you listen to state and federal government Republicans in the coming months, take their new-found fiscal responsibility with a grain of salt. We need to be vigilant or we will lose everything that doesn’t help the military-industrial complex.

Dr. Carlos Gonzales on the jumbo-tron in Arizona Stadium. (Photo Credit: Pamela Powers)

FOX News pandered to their base with their lopsided coverage of yesterday’s amazing healing event in Tucsonby dissing Tucsonans for not being somber enough after Saturday’s massacre, characterizing the touching Yaqui blessing delivered by Dr. Carlos Gonzales of the University of Arizona College Medicine as “peculiar”, and putting down the audience for greeting President Obama and the news of Gabrielle Giffords’ recovery with cheers.

FOX pundits called the 26,000+ crowd in Tucson “raucous” and criticized us for “whistles” and “whoops” when we learned that our Congresswoman had opened her eyes. (This is the wild west. Don’t they know that?)

Check out the 17+ minute FOX video coverage below.

At about 8:12 minutes, FOX pundits diss the Tucson audience for cheering too much. They say that the event became “out of control” and turned into a “pep rally”. They really didn’t like it when Gonzales said he was a Mexican/Yaqui and a 5th generation Arizonan– although these statements brought great cheers from Tucsonans in McKale Center and in Arizona Stadium.

At about 9:17 minutes, the FOX pundits say Tucsonans are “not mournful enough” and blame that on the crowd containing too many UA students. (I was in Arizona Stadium; although that crowd was mostly not students, our reactions paralleled the McKale audience.)

At about 9:25 minutes, the FOX pundits mock the Yaqui blessing as “too long” and “most peculiar” and say that he was blessing the “doors of the auditorium”– not knowing that Gonzales was honoring the four directions and what they signify.

They did like UA/Giffords intern Daniel Hernandez (about 12:11 minutes). What’s not to like about him saving his boss’ life? But they put down President Obama, saying that the speech will “affect the perception of the president”; I think it affected his perception in a positive manner!

The FOX pundits said it was a “lovely speech” (killing it with faint praise), but it had “too much politics”. (What politics?, I ask.)

Toward the end, the FOX pundits foreshadow what is to come, warning that next week, it will be business as usual on FOX News. Togetherness and no hate speech? Forget about it. That is not in their script.

President Obama on the jumbo-tron in Arizona Stadium. (Photo Credit: Pamela Powers)

Yesterday in Tucson, President Obama urged us as a nation to move forward from the tragedy of Saturday’s mass shooting and become a better democracy. He invoked the memory of little Christina Taylor Green saying, “I want our democracy to be as good as Christina imagined it to be.”

Last Saturday, we saw 2nd amendment gun rights trample 1st amendment rights of freedom of speech and freedom of assembly. Will the massacre in Tucson prompt us to rethink our lax gun laws– particularly in Arizona? I hope so…

Will this tragedy prompt us to rethink how we have cast aside the mentally ill in our country? I hope so…

Will this tragedy prompt us to set aside racism and hate speech and move forward together as one nation? I hope so…

Is the US on the verge of class warfare? Or in the thick of it? Check out this excerpt from an excellent Blog for Arizona article by the AZ Blue Meanie.

Mr. President, America does not negotiate with hostage takers and extortionists

I have come to the conclusion that all the news reporting and commentary on the Obama-McConnell tax compromise is ignoring the (GOP) elephant in the room. It is all sound and fury to obscure the central issue of our time with which this country has yet to come to grips: a major political party is waging an insurgency war against America. As I have said before:

Republicans are engaged in a class war against the rest of America. This is an insurrection by the wealthy elites against 98% of their fellow American citizens… Republican insurrectionists are holding our government hostage in bad faith for purposes of extortion.

President Obama acknowledged the criminality of Republicans during his press conference on Tuesday:

“I’ve said before that I felt that the middle class tax cuts were being held hostage to the high end tax cuts. I think it’s tempting not to negotiate with hostage takers unless the hostage gets harmed. Then, people will question the wisdom of that strategy. In this case the hostage was the American people and I was not willing to see them get harmed.”

It is not enough for you to recognize the criminality, Mr. President. You must confront it. America does not pay ransom to hostage takers and extortionists. To do so only encourages more hostage taking and more extortionary ransom demands to be paid. Americans will not support any president who accedes to the demands of hostage takers and extortionists. Just ask Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan’s Iran-Contra “arms for hostages” co-conspirators.

This is why so many Americans across the ideological spectrum from the liberal left to the far-right Tea Party were so furious over the bailout of the banksters of Wall Street. These gangsters who turned Wall Street into a criminal syndicate of casino capitalism threatened to destroy the world’s financial system and economy if they were not rescued by the U.S. government. The government paid the ransom and thus rewarded their criminally irresponsible behavior in the interest of preventing collateral damage to the gangsters’ “hostages,” the American taxpayer, who ultimately are paying their own ransom.

These banksters of Wall Street took their taxpayer funded government ransom money and paid themselves excessive bonuses for a “job well done,” while millions of American taxpayers suffered the consequences of the banksters’ criminally irresponsible behavior by losing their jobs and their homes, and then getting stuck with the bill.

These gangsters were not satisfied with this ransom. Oh no, they wanted more. They next took our political process hostage with the help of a conservative activist U.S. Supreme Court in Citizens United v. FEC. Millionaires and billionaires, who will never have to disclose their identity, bought themselves a Congress for Christmas to ensure they will have a compliant Congress that will keep paying their extortionary ransom demands. America’s media conglomerates profited handsomely from all the political advertising. I am sure that the millionaire news anchors of America’s cable and network television stations will all receive a healthy end-of-year bonus as well.

And now it has come to this. The hostage takers are back again making yet another extortionary demand for ransom: tax cuts for the “two percenters” and a sweetheart deal on the estate tax for the über-rich. “Give us what we demand or we will kill any tax benefits for America’s middle class, and we will kill our hostages, America’s unemployed.” President Obama is acceding to the extortionary demands of these hostage takers to save the lives of their hostages. While his humanity and compassion are laudable, it is also misplaced.

By acceding to the hostage takers’ extortionary demands now, it will only encourage more hostage taking and more extortionary ransom demands in the future. These gangsters will take America’s most vulnerable and elderly populations hostage next, and demand that the president and the Congress turn over to them the social security and Medicare trust funds. Like the Grinch Who Stole Christmas took the very last crumb, these gangsters want to steal the very last dime of economic security from America’s middle class. They want it all.

Mr. President, you have a constitutional duty to defend this country against all enemies both foreign and domestic. This insurrection, essentially a civil war grounded upon a class war by the wealthy elite against 98% of their fellow American citizens, invokes that constitutional duty to defend the Constitution and to preserve our long-cherished American principles and values.

President Abraham Lincoln was similarly confronted with a civil war over two competing economic theories, one economic theory grounded upon liberal capitalism, and the other economic theory grounded upon the brutality of slavery. By the time Lincoln took office, 11 insurrectionist Southern states had seceded from the Union and threatened war against the United States if Lincoln did not accede to their extortionary demands.

Lincoln most certainly did not want to see the insurrectionists’ “hostages,” the American people, harmed.

If you want to read the rest, click here.

For all the yammering about fiscal responsibility (particularly from Republicans) during the recent election, I was shocked to open the newspaper this morning and see this headline: Obama, GOP agree: Keep tax cuts for all. (Note the group that is absent from that headline– Democrats.)

So, the party that shouted about how much money was spent on the stimulus package and how irresponsible it was (given the size of the national debt) is working overtime to extend all tax cuts– at a price tag that is higher than the cost of the stimulus package.

Basically, the Republicans are using the unemployed as a bargaining chip. They know the Democrats want to extend unemployment benefits and Republicans want to extend welfare benefits to their schils at FOX News and their corporate masters, so they cold-heartedly held the unemployed hostage to strong-arm Obama into agree with their plan– to the chagrin of his party.

Here is an excerpt from the Star story.

President Obama reached agreement Monday with congressional Republicans to extend and deepen tax cuts temporarily – and extend unemployment insurance – in hopes of stirring the economy and creating jobs.

Obama pointedly refused to drag out the debate any longer over his quest to let taxes increase for wealthier Americans, bowing to the political reality that he couldn’t get the Republicans to agree to extend middle-class tax cuts or jobless benefits unless he also agreed to extend tax breaks for everyone.

In the bargain, he risked rebellion from his own party. Congressional Democrats refused to jump on board immediately, continuing to question tax cuts for the wealthy. They planned to discuss the tax deal at closed-door meetings today, and they still could kill the plan.

Obama acknowledged that many in his own party wanted him to fight rather than compromise.

President Obama, haven’t you been reading my stories on this topic? It’s fiscally irresponsible to extend all of the tax cuts. And extending all of them until 2012 is just silly. No one in the federal government wanted to make any serious decisions during the 2010 election year (It’s amazing healthcare reform and financial reform were passed!) What makes you think they will be braver in 2012?

How much you wanna bet that the standard bearers for extension of all Bush Era tax cuts– Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and John Boehner (R-OH)– plus the newly minted Tea-publican members of Congress will be preaching fiscal restraint in the spring when the Congress has to vote on lifting the debt ceiling or allowing the government to default? Consider this from There Will Be Blood by the NY Times’ Paul Krugman. [Emphasis added.]

Former Senator Alan Simpson is a Very Serious Person. He must be — after all, President Obama appointed him as co-chairman of a special commission on deficit reduction. [AKA Cat Food Commission]

So here’s what the very serious Mr. Simpson said on Friday: “I can’t wait for the blood bath in April. … When debt limit time comes, they’re going to look around and say, ‘What in the hell do we do now? We’ve got guys who will not approve the debt limit extension unless we give ’em a piece of meat, real meat,’ ” meaning spending cuts. “And boy, the blood bath will be extraordinary,” he continued.

Think of Mr. Simpson’s blood lust as one more piece of evidence that our nation is in much worse shape, much closer to a political breakdown, than most people realize.

Some explanation: There’s a legal limit to federal debt, which must be raised periodically if the government keeps running deficits; the limit will be reached again this spring. And since nobody, not even the hawkiest of deficit hawks, thinks the budget can be balanced immediately, the debt limit must be raised to avoid a government shutdown. But Republicans will probably try to blackmail the president into policy concessions by, in effect, holding the government hostage; they’ve done it before.

Now, you might think that the prospect of this kind of standoff, which might deny many Americans essential services, wreak havoc in financial markets and undermine America’s role in the world, would worry all men of good will. But no, Mr. Simpson “can’t wait.” And he’s what passes, these days, for a reasonable Republican…

Thus on the same day that Mr. Simpson rejoiced in the prospect of chaos, Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, appealed for help in confronting mass unemployment. He asked for “a fiscal program that combines near-term measures to enhance growth with strong, confidence-inducing steps to reduce longer-term structural deficits.”

Mr. President, don’t roll that snowball down the hill toward the Republicans because you won’t be able to stop it later. Don’t compromise.

All I can say is that when it happens, the revolution will not be televised.

UPDATE, December 7, noon: Tax Deal Opponents Shut Down White House Phones

Liberal activists angry about President Barack Obama’s concession on tax cuts for upper-income Americans crashed two phone lines at the White House and are gearing up for another onslaught of calls to Senate Democratic leaders in an eleventh-hour push to kill the deal.

Supporters of the New York-based Agenda Project shut down two phone lines for most the day Monday in White House senior adviser Valerie Jarrett’s office, according to the group’s founder, Erica Payne. And even though Obama ultimately announced a bipartisan deal that extends tax cuts for the wealthy, Payne said her group, which boasts 10,000 supporters, has plans to push back every step of the way.