In Which I Substitute an Email Exchange With Melissa for an Actual Post

A little while ago, I sent this missive to Melissa:

From: [SKM]
Subject: Blah blah blah blab Biden
Date: March 23, 2010 11:38:32 AM EDT
To: [Melissa McEwan]

Yeargh--Joe Biden is on the Teevee yarning on about how Obama "delivered on a promise". Yeah, a promise to corporations not to dent the insurance industry's income too much! Blergh.
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Subject: RE: Blah blah blah blab Biden
Date: March 23, 2010 12:36:58 PM EDT

LOLOLOL! You should post that.

So I did.

Seriously, though: while I am sick of seeing politicians break their arms patting themselves on the back while they use my bodily autonomy (and thus my full citizenship) as a bargaining chip, I am glad for the positive changes that the law will supposedly bring, such as an end to pre-existing condition exclusions (for those 19 and under) and rescissions this year. But I feel that the work has barely begun.

Jodi Jacobson has a post at RH Reality Check this morning entitled The Health Care Bill and Women's Health: Wins, Losses, and Challenges that provides an excellent summary of the health care reform and some directions for improvement.

CHALLENGES:

In the coming months, and to truly fulfill his campaign promises, President Obama--along with Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid--must lead the nation and the Congress in making the following changes to the foundation of health reform put in place today.

At a minimum, the Administration and Congress should:

-Amend the health reform bill to establish a public option thereby increasing competition in the health insurance market. As most analysts note, the public option is popular and also would prevent insurance companies from increasing rates by exhorbitant amounts as recently happened in California.

-Eliminate the Nelson language in the health reform bill and revoke the Executive Order signed by the President.

-Eliminate gender-rating in all policies, starting in 2011.

-Eliminate pre-existing conditions for all people in 2011. It is not clear why we need to wait four years for insurance policies to eliminate pre-existing conditions. Between this moment and four years from now, untold numbers of people will have to pay exhorbitant premiums to get coverage in high-risk pools due to pre-existing conditions. It is nice to know these will be eliminated, but waiting four years defeats the purpose.

-Remove the 5-year cap on immigrants who are legal residents and allow undocumented workers to use their own funds to purchase health insurance through an exchange.

At the signing ceremony this morning, President Obama said that "we are not a nation that scales back its aspirations". Well, I don't plan to either.

UPDATE below the fold!

Melissa just sent me this with the note, Btw, have you seen this video of Biden "whispering" in Obama's ear, "This is a big fucking deal"...? LOL! Someone still doesn't understand "microphones."

Biden: Ladies and Gentleman, The President of the United States of America, Barack Obama!
Biden (to Obama): This is a big fucking deal!
Obama: Thank you, everybody!

*wild applause*

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Two-Minute Nostalgia Sublime

Deee-Lite: "Groove Is In The Heart"

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Meet-Up Reminder

The next Chicagoland Shakesville meet-up is this Saturday, March 27!

The plan, as always, is to go to our favorite Celtic pub in the early afternoon, take over their party room, and while away the afternoon and evening.

To answer some frequently asked questions...

* There is no community participation threshold one has to meet to attend. We've had lurkers at every event, and all are welcome.

* There's no age limit. It's a restaurant and pub, so you don't have to be 21 to enter; if you're old enough to read the blog and get yourself there, you're old enough to attend! And it's not a young person's event, either. We have multiple generations at every event.

* You can come anytime and stay as long (or as briefly) as you like. We've got the room for the day, starting at 1:00pm CST, and you're welcome to come and stay the whole time, or pop in just for a bit.

* There's no fee to get in. Most people who attend have something to eat and/or drink (they do separate checks for us). It helps offset the cost of the room rental for us, but it's not required.

* It is bully-free zone. Every event has had attendees who are fat, who have a visible disability, who are gender queer... Come as you are.

* The meet-ups have ranged in size from 12 people to around 50.

* Don't be intimidated! If you're shy, or have social anxiety, you'll fit right in! At every meet-up, someone has told me they almost didn't come because they're shy, or because they thought they wouldn't be clever enough to keep up with the conversation—but they're so glad they did! It's not an academic event; it's casual, mellow, silly, and fun. More than anything, we laugh.

I hope some of the previous attendees will jump into comments and share some of their experiences, to encourage others to come.

At this point, we just need to get a handle on how many people will be there, so please drop a line in comments or email Official Organizer of Meet-Ups, Shaker RedSonja, at sonja1023-at-gmail-dot-com if you're planning on coming.

As always, details will be provided to Shakers who have signaled an interest in attending.

Looking forward to seeing everyone who can come!

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Swell

Actual Headline at Politico: It's back: Abortion debate reignites.

After nearly derailing the health care bill that passed the House on Sunday, the abortion issue is poised to make a political comeback, returning the familiar wedge issue to the campaign trail after a brief hiatus.

I couldn't be more thrilled (where "thrilled" = "filled with a creeping feeling of dread and anxiety").

Not because the issue is "poised to make a political comeback," which is, as I've previously pointed out, total bullshit—the battle over abortion has never gone away; it's just been moved into different territory—but because the media are signaling a renewed interest in their largely dormant game of "Let's Use Abortion to Play Political Football!"

Some of the most irresponsible reporting I've seen in my life has been about "the abortion issue," inflaming defenders of choice and their opponents with rhetoric about the morality of abortion, while wholly ignoring the inarguable immorality of the terror campaign waged by anti-choice extremists.

The Washington Post's whitewashed profile of anti-abortion terrorist Randall Terry last July was quite the opening salvo in this tiresome and dangerous game. At the time, I wrote: "Are the editors over there worried there won't be anything left to write about if there isn't an incessant and constantly escalating abortion battle in this country? Are the lives of the people hurt—the doctors murdered, the clinic staff endangered, the patients harassed and threatened—by people like and/or associated with Terry so insignificant, their value totally contingent on their newsworthiness as targets, that the WaPo would actually aid Terry in a comeback?" The answer was yes.

The ongoing campaign against women and the people who provide abortion services and safe havens for them is demonstrably a campaign of terror—but no one in our media will call it terrorism.

More alarmingly, neither will anyone in our Democratically-led government. There are, in fact, a lot of things that don't get called terrorism in this country, but few of them approach the breadth of the long-term, flagrant campaign of intimidation, harassment, exhorted violence, attempted violence, actual violence, and murder of abortion providers and abortion-seeking women.

Still, our government is unwilling to call this orchestrated, overt, unapologetic campaign against women and their healthcare providers terrorism, even as increasing numbers of doctors say offering the legal service to their patients is not worth the risk—the very definition of effective terrorism. Even as physician champions of women's right to choose are murdered in cold blood. Even as "pro-life" groups openly celebrate his death and take the position that he deserved it. In the history of this blog, I've gotten death threats accompanied by pictures of dead fetuses right in my comments threads by people who know that the government, and the media, will not take them seriously.

And will, in fact, happily throw fuel on the fire, as long as the conflagration makes money. Or as long as the threat to abortion (never mind the threat to abortionists, or abortion-seekers, or abortion activists) keeps driving voters to the polls.

It's frankly devastating to see this particular mill getting handed more political grist during a Democratic presidency, but Obama the Great Bipartisan continues to treat abortion (wrongly) as a mere difference of opinion on which middle ground can be found.

Upon hearing of Dr. Tiller's death, President Obama said he was "shocked" and "outraged," but if he had been paying the slightest bit of attention to the realities of the front line of the fight to protect women's bodily autonomy, he would not have been shocked. This wasn't even the first attempt on Dr. Tiller's life; it was the merely the first successful one.

And yet President Obama still admonishes pro-choice advocates to respect the views of anti-choice activists, despite the fact there is very good reason not to afford a modicum of respect for a viewpoint that would force women to relinquish control over their own bodies to the state. Like the fact that both sides of this "debate" aren't equal, and it's not just because one side contains mainstream organizations who tacitly encourage the murder of doctors.

It's absolutely infuriating we've got a president who invites to do the invocation at his inauguration a man who equates abortion with the Holocaust, who tells lies himself about pro-choice advocates in order to play a bullshit game of "both sides are just as bad," who panders to anti-choice elements in his own party, the party ostensibly there to protect choice, and he doesn't seem to recognize or care how perilously inflammatory it all is.

Obama, and the Democrats, have ceded ground on abortion. The media is eager to play the fun and frenetic game of Abortion Tug-o-War with two "equal" sides again. And so here we are.

"It's Back." Like a B-movie monster.

Except, unlike B-movie monsters, the abortion "debate"—and its accommodation of extremists to protract a battle that should have been settled a lifetime ago—will leave real people dead in its wake.

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Bread and Teaspoons Twenty-Seven

Good morning (unless it isn't where you are, in which case I wish you Good $TIME_PERIOD), and welcome to this week's installment of Shakesville's networking post, Bread and Teaspoons*.

This is a (theoretically) weekly post providing a spot for Shakers to network a little with one another, see if we can help each other out some.

NB: I have added a bit to the guidelines for what’s on-topic here, to allow the posting of useful job resources for progressives.

Also remember, if you’re running or part of a small business, you’re encouraged to drop links here for that. I’m happy to see Shakers makin’ their own way in whatever manner that is.
Here's how it works: There should be four sorts of comments here.

1) You comment here with any details of work you're seeking: where, what, that sort of thing. You give an e-mail address at which you can be reached - feel free to set up a special e-mail for it, if you don't want to post your regular one for the world to spam - and if another Shaker has a lead, they can contact you directly to pass it along.

A work-seeking comment should include:

• - a short summary of the skillset you're seeking work with;


• - a short summary of your experience


• - where you're looking for work to happen


• - your contact e-mail

Please do NOT include information such as your full name or telephone number, as this is and will remain a public post, and once posted, there's no taking it back (because it'll be spidered by a search engine, not because we don't want you to).

It is explicitly alright to comment to this each week with similar info.

For example, I might post a comment saying:

I'm a professional translator of French, German and Russian, with nearly 17 years of experience. I'm looking for basically any translation job, academic, commercial, personal, genealogical, you name it, with one exception: I do not currently have certification, so if you need a certified translator (usually for legal docs: birth certificates, divorce decrees, wills), you need someone else.

I am also available as a writer or editor, for academic, journalistic, creative, marketing-oriented or any other type of written communication. Basically, if you'll pay me, I'll write or edit it. My company website is found here.

You can contact me for business purposes through my business address, cait@cogitantes.net.

2) The second type of comment would be task offering: if you've got a job you think might suit someone here, consider posting it as a comment. Use the same guidelines as above: give general information here, and specific information when you exchange e-mails. An offered task might look something like this:

I have a doctoral thesis which needs proofing and editing by Thursday, is anyone available? You can reach me at ABDShaker@shakesville.miskatonic.edu.

In addition to that, I’ve decided to welcome also appropriate job resource sites for progressives, e.g. Canada’s Charity Village, which specializes in jobs with non-profits and NGOs.

3) The third kind of comment I'd love to see is success stories! We’d love to know when this works out, and people actually find some employment through our efforts. If you feel like sharing, tell us how it worked out for you. :)

**NEW CATEGORY ADDED**

4) If you’re a progressive working for or running a small business and would like to include a pointer to your business, you may do so. If you’ve never otherwise posted before here (i.e., you’re a lurker), I may check in with you to be certain you’re a Shaker and not a spammer. If it turns into a spamfest, or we start getting businesses that are of dubious progressive credentials, we may need to revisit this one, but let’s give it a try.

So, that's what we'd like to see.

What we do NOT want to see:

• - recommendations/references, even for other Shakers - leave those for the contact phase of your negotiation


• - rates info - again, leave this for the contact phase of your negotiation; we don't want to encourage bidding wars between Shakers


• - illegal employment - whatever we may think of a given law against a certain activity, we don't want to put Shakesville in any awkward spots legally

So there. Have at it, Shakers, for Bread and Teaspoons!

Important disclaimers: Shakesville makes no endorsement or claim as to the capabilities of anyone commenting to this post, and anyone considering hiring someone should be prepared to treat it like any other business situation: DO YOUR DUE DILIGENCE. We're not doing any screening of this, so you'll want to make sure you check references, use safe-payment procedures (e.g., ask for a deposit), all the things you'd do when working with any stranger on the Internet. While this is intended for Shakers in general, remember that there is no real obstacle to being able to comment here, and do the things you need to do to keep yourself safe.

* As might be evident, this is an intentional reference to Bread and Roses, a longtime slogan of the left. In this case, though, my hope is that if we achieve steady bread, we will use it to power our teaspoon use.

The last several Bread and Teaspoons: Twenty-One. Twenty-Two. Twenty-Three. Twenty-Four. Twenty-Five.
Twenty-Six.

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Bob Herbert Says Brilliant Things (Again)

From his column, An Absence of Class:

Some of the images from the run-up to Sunday's landmark health care vote in the House of Representatives should be seared into the nation's consciousness. We are so far, in so many ways, from being a class act.

...In Washington on Saturday, opponents of the health care legislation spit on a black congressman and shouted racial slurs at two others, including John Lewis, one of the great heroes of the civil rights movement. Barney Frank, a Massachusetts Democrat who is chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, was taunted because he is gay.

At some point, we have to decide as a country that we just can't have this: We can't allow ourselves to remain silent as foaming-at-the-mouth protesters scream the vilest of epithets at members of Congress — epithets that The Times will not allow me to repeat here.

It is 2010, which means it is way past time for decent Americans to rise up against this kind of garbage, to fight it aggressively wherever it appears. And it is time for every American of good will to hold the Republican Party accountable for its role in tolerating, shielding and encouraging foul, mean-spirited and bigoted behavior in its ranks and among its strongest supporters.

...Back in the 1960s, John Lewis risked his life and endured savage beatings to secure fundamental rights for black Americans while right-wing Republicans like Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan were lining up with segregationist Democrats to oppose landmark civil rights legislation.

Since then, the right-wingers have taken over the G.O.P. and Mr. Lewis, now a congressman, must still endure the garbage they have wrought.

Case in point: Glenn Beck being a total jackass yet again by howling about Lewis and other Dems "comparing] themselves to the civil rights activists. How dare you!"

Which is sort of a perfect encapsulation of the conservative strategy, right there: Faux outrage on behalf of people they don't know, don't recognize, don't understand, don't care about at all.

[Related Reading: Rank (and File) Bigotry.]

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Open Thread

Hosted by the Mystic Seer.

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Question of the Day

What are the best and worst healthcare experiences you've had?

(Please make sure to include in your answer where you're located and/or what type of healthcare system in which these experiences occurred.)

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Someone Get This Guy His One-Way Ticket to Costa Rica Already

Rush Limbaugh, conservative media hack and noted Horrible Human Being, is all fired up about the healthcare legislation and opened his show today with the following:

Today, as we start the radio program, America is hanging by a thread. So we have to see what we can do with a thread.

Yes, America is hanging by a thread, a purpose for which you and your conservative white male listeners must determine in relation to our black male president who's done something you don't like. I definitely DON'T think you're dog whistling a lynching at all. (I definitely do think that.)

At the end of the day, our freedom has been assaulted.

HA HA it's funny how you think that our freedom has been assaulted, but you thought that actual assaults on actual people during the Bush torture regime were a "fraternity prank." You are funny, Rush Limbaugh. Ha ha ha I hate you.

[Related: Quote of the Day.]

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Quote of the Day

"If I could start a country with a bunch of people, they'd be the folks who were standing with us the last few days. Let's hope we don't have to do that! Let's beat that other side to a pulp! Let's take them out. Let's chase them down. There's going to be a reckoning!"—Congressperson Steve King (R-IA), speaking to Tea Party protesters on Capitol Hill protesting the healthcare legislation yesterday.

Yeah, that's appropriate.

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[Trigger warning.]

Only in a rape culture would it be considered remotely acceptable for a family court judge to order "two young girls to spend weekends with their sex offender father provided he puts a door on their bedroom they can lock," even after the oldest of those children, ages 8 and 10, has "told counsellors that she was afraid to stay overnight with her father" after he brought her into his bed and "demonstrated affection toward her in a way that was, in all the circumstances, inappropriate for a child of that age."

Or, one imagines, any age.

I would love to say this story is unbelievable, but it is, of course, exhaustingly, frustratingly, and rage-makingly believable.

[H/T to Shaker Alyssa.]

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Daily Kitteh

Tilsy watches some busy birds out the front window.



"WTF is going ON out there?"

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Today's Edition of "Conniving and Sinister"

See Deeky's archive of all previous Conniving & Sinister strips here.
[In which Liss reimagines the long-running comic "Frank & Ernest," about two old straight white guys "telling it like it is," as a fat feminist white woman and a biracial queerbait telling it like it actually is from their perspectives. Hilarity ensues.]

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Monday Blogaround

Today's blogaround is brought to you by Shaxco, makers of Deeky's Post-Racial-Goo Gone. Stuck with xenophobic stickers? Dissolve the hatred away with new Post-Racial-Goo Gone!

I have chosen United States healthcare-themed readings, but your links need not be related to health care.

abby jean at FWD/Forward: The Community First Choice Option

six until me: Health Care Reform: How Does it Affect People with Diabetes?

Historiann has a great link round-up of things historians are saying about health care reform passage: History was made, and You Are There!

Women's Media Center Blog: Victory on Health Care Reform, but a Partial One

PalMD: With or without health care reform, doctors' jobs get harder

Shark-Fu: On shock and tolerance

Bruce Benidt: “Being a Woman Will No Longer Be A Pre-existing Condition”

Rosalind Joffe: you can lose insurance benefits because you didn’t disclose

Racialicious: Politics Open Thread: Health Care Reform And The March For America

Paul Krugman: Fear Strikes Out

San Francisco Chronicle: California stands to gain most from health bill

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Two-Minute Nostalgia Sublime

Big Star: "In the Street"

Alex Chilton, the profoundly influential lead singer of The Boxtops and Big Star, died last week.
He was 59. RIP Alex.

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It's a Wonderful Death?: Seneca Falls, Bureaucracy, and Feminism

by Shaker EastSideKate, a feminist teacher/scholar/mother/partner/derbygirl from Upstate New York.

Seneca Falls has the odd distinction of being the only municipality in the world that is reasonably famous for not being the location where It's a Wonderful Life was filmed. I don't understand, either. The village is more famous (in some circles), as the one time home of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, whose residence served as the setting for the Seneca Falls Convention.

On March 16, voters in Seneca Falls approved dissolving the village. As is common in former colonies, New York State's system of government is arcane. Essentially, villages (such as Seneca Falls) are cute, baby municipalities, embedded within towns (think townships, ala the ever-popular Land Ordinance of 1785).

Soon, the government of the village of Seneca Falls (population 7000-ish) will dissolve, while the town of Seneca Falls (population 9000-ish) will pick up the slack.

These things happen. Brooklynites now get to elect Manhattanites to rule over them as mayor of New York. Indianapolis confuses and terrifies me. Systems of government aren't necessarily static and self-explanatory.

I admit I'm strangely sad to see Seneca Falls go, even if it is being replaced by a larger, pre-existing Seneca Falls. This isn't really about Seneca Falls, though. In New York, some citizens increasingly see dissolving villages as a means of fixing the problems with (or of) government.

I'm a sucker for symbolism. While it might be fun to hear Elizabeth Cady Stanton muse about recent events (the dissolution of Seneca Falls, the waning likelihood of wine in grocery stores, wev.), it also would be fabulous to hear Lucretia Mott handicap the 2010 World Series. These things aren't going to happen.

However, I find some Americans' thoughts on government vexing, and I'd like to frame populist anti-government movements as an issue that should concern feminists.

I'm still trying to figure out whether we, the people, ever came to a shared understanding of what government should (and shouldn't) do, nor who should (and shouldn't) pay for it. Sure, most of us pay taxes to multiple governments. Yet the system isn't particularly progressive.

Moreover, things seem pretty top-heavy. I personally pay a lot of income tax to the Federal government, with a smaller amount of income tax to state government, as well as sales taxes and fees going to various state and local entities. Were I to own land, I'd be directly responsible for local property taxes. Higher levels of government (say, at the federal and state level) typically redistribute some funding to lower government agencies. Of course, this funding frequently dissolves when times are tight, leaving each lower level of government to raise taxes and/or pass the pain on to increasingly local bodies.

To me, feminism is about nothing if not local bodies. What do local bodies need? We need water to let us live, schools and libraries to help us learn, and parks in which to play. Heat and sanitation are always welcome, too.

The people with the most money can always buy trucks full of water, private book collections, estates, trucks full of fuel, personal generators... whatever they need. It seems to me that this is pretty much always the case. But what about the rest of us? Should the government not help ensure, if not equality of living standards, equality of opportunity? This was as a problem for many, many, people in the 19th Century. It is still a problem for many of us today.

Little of this has to do with the structure of government. In my mind, any number of prototypical governments (including the lack thereof) is capable of doing just fine by all of us, provided that everyone involved shares the same priorities.

That's what strikes me as so frustrating about the current discourse about politics; while dissolving governments may increase negative liberty by releasing us from oppression (or taxes), on its own, doing away with some aspect of government does nothing to increase positive liberty. Selfish people acting with the backing of powerful governments don't necessarily produce different results from powerful selfish people acting in the absence of government.

Those without privilege do not fare well when the privileged fail, as is so often the case, to yield their advantage.

The Declaration of Sentiments was primarily concerned with the form of government, notably with respect to the disfranchisement of women. However (and not uncoincidentally), it also echoes to same themes as the Declaration of Independence and other documents Americans pretend to have read—the themes of freedom from oppression, and happiness. To me, happiness involves working water mains (wooden ones tend to break after a century or so, making people very unhappy), and functioning schools for all.

Creating hope and opportunity does not so much require reorganizing and dissolving governments, as much as it does reorganizing priorities to put local bodies and human needs first.

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Hopeyness

Atrios says:

[The healthcare reform bill] does not do the important work of sowing the seeds of the insurance industry's destruction, leaving the skimmers in place, and only takes baby steps towards moving them to the regulated public utility model. It also doesn't get rid of their anti-trust exemption, leaving the effective monopolies in place. This leaves us open to continued abuses by the industry and fails to do the most important cost-cutting measure, cutting out the paper pushers who serve no useful purpose in the economy.

He adds that, because "there is good in the bill, too," it's still "both on substance and politics, better to pass it than not" and hope "that over time demands by the public will" pave the way for reform that doesn't detrimentally insulate the insurance companies.

Momentarily setting aside my strong reservations, ahem, about the way in which the healthcare legislation was passed, I nonetheless hope that's right, and fear that it's not.

Because when the cost of healthcare inevitably spirals, and people are denied care from insurance companies that are still in the business of making profits, I fear that the blame will be laid at the feet of "Obamacare," rather than the insurance companies; I fear that this legislation will be viewed as having gone too far! rather than having not gone far enough.

I hope that's not so, but fear that it will be.

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Radio Shakesville

One-Year Anniversary Show

I play some old stuff, some new stuff, and generally waste your time. Enjoy!

Here is a link to the podcast blog where you can download the show.

And this is the list of all songs used in this week's ep.

You can also play the show in a pop-up.
(Which is the recommended way to read Shakesville, just FYI.)

The show is available via iTunes, and on Feedburner.
The RSS is here, if you need it.

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The Amazing Randi: Now With 100% More Fabulous!

I can't say it better than my dear friend, a certain northern trollish type (but the GOOD kind of trolls!): The Amazing Randi is now also The Fabulous Randi.

Let me be the first at Shakesville to say "Bravissimo!" to Mr. Randi, and welcome him to the Loyal Siblinghood of Dirty Awful Queerbait.

You can pick up your toaster oven on the way home. :)

Tip of the CaitieCap to the above-mentioned friendly troll, and Shaker KarateMonkey (via Liss).

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In Which I Admire Healthcare Reform from Under the Bus

So. Healthcare reform has passed the House:

House Democrats approved a far-reaching overhaul of the nation’s health system on Sunday, voting over unanimous Republican opposition to provide medical coverage to tens of millions of uninsured Americans after an epic political battle that could define the differences between the parties for years.

With the 219-to-212 vote, the House gave final approval to legislation passed by the Senate on Christmas Eve. Thirty-four Democrats joined Republicans in voting against the bill. The vote sent the measure to President Obama, whose yearlong push for the legislation has been the centerpiece of his agenda and a test of his political power.

It's about as close to a done deal as it gets without actually being a done deal.

I love this headline: McCain repulsed by health care bill 'euphoria.' LOL.

There are some truly important pieces of reform in this legislation, ten of which that take immediate effect Karoli details here, like, for instance: "No more lifetime or annual caps on coverage" and "No more rescissions. Effective immediately, you can't lose your insurance because you get sick." Good stuff, that.

And I wish I could be undilutedly happy about it. But I can't.

Because, to get it done, President Obama promised to "issue an executive order on abortion after the House approves the health-care bill assuring that no federal funds would be used to subsidize the procedure." And so he did.

I have detailed my objections to this Hyde Amendment bullshit many, many, many times before, and I'm not going to waste my time doing it again. I will merely agree with NOW President Terry O'Neill that the President's decision to use the full weight of his office to capitulate to anti-choice Democrats "breaks faith with women."

Laying aside the practical realities of withholding federal funds from women who need them for a legal medical procedure, the symbolism of this maneuver is horrendously illiberal and, frankly, un-American. The Hyde Amendment has been more deeply entrenched by presidential fiat, and the bodily autonomy of half the population of this country has been once again treated like a bargaining chip by the one party who claims to defend their equality.

The profundity of my contempt is cavernous.

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