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RH Reality Check by Jodi Jacobson, Editor in Chief, RH Reality Check

Rallies were held in Texas yesterday on the eve of the elimination of funding to the Women’s Health Program through the state, and subsequently to all Planned Parenthood clinics because… well, because the far right apparently doesn’t like women to have health care.

So 130,000 more women in Texas will be without health care tomorrow, a state in which access to primary reproductive health care has already been made scarce since the legislature cut funds dramatically last year as well. The cuts will take place because Governor Perry is refusing federal funding that otherwise would go to these clinics. Perry, and other opponents of women’s health care in Texas, claim there are “lots of alternatives” to the clinics now providing low-income women–mothers, students, employees–with health services, but as Andrea Grimes reported for us last year, those alternatives just don’t exist.

And as Grimes reported, the 2011 state family planning cuts left 180,000 women without access to contraception and reproductive health services like pap smears and breast cancer screenings.

“The Women’s Health Program serves an additional 130,000 women, bringing the total number of women without access to basic reproductive health care to 310,000,” writes Grimes. “Some estimates put the number closer to 400,000. The Texas Legislative Budget Board has estimated that this will result in up to 21,000 additional births in the state–children born to families who are already in need of government assistance and who would otherwise have sought to avoid an unintended and unwanted pregnancy.

But the anger at these cuts in Texas and across the country is building and even women on the right are fed up. Today, according to the Austin Chronicle, GOP legislative aide, Allison Catalano, who began working for Texas state legislator Myra Crownover last summer, resigned her post, citing Crownover’s support for the cuts to women’s health funding.

In a letter to Crownover, Catalano wrote that she decided to resign her position because of “recent decisions made by you, Representative Crownover, along with other legislators” related to the draconian cuts to the women’s health budget.

According to the Chronicle, in 2010, Planned Parenthood clinics, which make up only 2 percent of all WHP-funded clinics across the state, served 46 percent of the roughly 183,000 program enrollees.

Although the program had always been designed to exclude abortion providers from participation, lawmakers in 2011 directed the Health and Human Services Commission to come up with a new definition for affiliate that would define PP clinics that do not provide abortion care, and were already participating in the WHP, as affiliates of other PP clinics that do provide legally-protected abortion care, but that weren’t actually serving as WHP providers. The feds have said this tinkering in order to exclude an otherwise qualified provider is prohibited by federal law (Title XIX, to be specific).

Hundreds of supporters of women’s health funding rallied tonight in the Texas state capitol to protest the cuts.

“Whether tonight in Austin, or earlier this week in Midland, or in Fort Worth in the pouring rain, women’s health supporters throughout the state are saying loud and clear that Governor Rick Perry needs to stop playing politics with women’s health and women’s lives,” said Cecile Richards, President of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, and native Texan, at the rally. “Women don’t come to Planned Parenthood health centers to make a political statement, they come because they need health care, and it’s time for Governor Perry to stop taking health care away from Texas women.”

Carole Belver, Executive Director and Health Services Director of Community Action, a local Medicaid Women’s Health Program provider, reminded attendees that Governor Perry already slashed the family planning budget by more than two-thirds, which will take health care from another 160,000 women per year. These cuts also affect services including Pap tests, clinical breast exams, and birth control.

State Representative Dawnna Dukes, member of the Texas House Appropriations Committee, articulated the skepticism shared by Texas political commentators, editorial boards and government officials about Governor Perry’s fiscally questionable recent comments that he would reject the federal contribution to Medicaid Women’s Health Program – a contribution that covers 90 percent of the cost – and expend an additional million of state funds to create a new program in order to exclude the largest single provider of women’s health care.

“Governor Perry wants us to pay more for less health care. Governor Perry is slashing education — laying off 25,000 teachers, administrators and other school staff due to a ‘fiscal emergency’ – but suddenly says he can find ‘flexibility’ to score political points,” said Representative Dukes.

Julisa McCoy, a college student from the Rio Grande Valley who currently relies on Planned Parenthood and the Medicaid Women’s Health Program to access preventive health care, also spoke at the rally.

“In my county alone, four clinics were forced to shut down, several employees were laid off, and 15,000 women were displaced from their health care provider: Planned Parenthood,” said McCoy. “The Texas Medicaid Women’s Health Program plays a vital role in the health and livelihoods of women in this state, as does Planned Parenthood. Governor Perry’s ideology has no place in my health care, or the health care of more than 130,000 other women like me in this state.”

This is, perhaps, the answer sought by Beverly McPhail, a provider at the Houston Women’s Resource Center, who asks, “What will it take for Texas women to rise up?”

Read the full story as published @ RH Reality Check.

Related: Don’t LET Them Mess With the Women of Texas: It’s Time to Rise Up!!

Democratic Blog News

Burnt Orange Report:

Governor Romney is finally sealing the deal, even if by eliminating the opponents from a less-than-stellar field, and this looks like the two-man race that most experts predicted 12 months ago. If tomorrow’s Florida primary goes as advertised, Romney wins by at least double-digits, and the run for Tampa becomes a mere formality.

More importantly, within the past week both President Obama and Governor Romney have begun to cement their core economic messages. President Obama’s message will stress Fairness and Capitalism with Rules. Romney’s message is to call Obama a socialist, and demand unrestrained Capitalism. If both campaigns stick to these messages, we can look to four more years of Obama, because Obama’s message is backed by solid evidence, and Romney’s message is not.

On Tuesday, President Obama’s State of the Union Address presented a clear vision of the future of American Capitalism and the role of Government in Capitalism.

President Obama:

“To reduce barriers to growth and investment, I’ve ordered a review of government regulations. When we find rules that put an unnecessary burden on businesses, we will fix them. But I will not hesitate to create or enforce common-sense safeguards to protect the American people. That’s what we’ve done in this country for more than a century. It’s why our food is safe to eat, our water is safe to drink, and our air is safe to breathe. It’s why we have speed limits and child labor laws. It’s why last year, we put in place consumer protections against hidden fees and penalties by credit card companies and new rules to prevent another financial crisis. And it’s why we passed reform that finally prevents the health insurance industry from exploiting patients.”

Thursday night’s GOP Presidential debate, the 19th in this election cycle’s non-stop Debate-o-Rama since this Presidential election season began, saw Mitt Romney find his groove. In taking the fight to Newt Gingrich, his resumed his front runner status. He also restated his major economic theme:

Mitt Romney’s closing debate answer:

“This is a time where we’re going to decide whether America will remain the great hope of the 21st century, whether this will be an American century, or, instead, whether we’ll continue to go down a path to become more and more like Europe, a social welfare state. That’s where we’re headed. Our economy is becoming weaker. The foundation of our future economy is being eroded. Government has become too large. We’re headed in a very dangerous direction.

I believe to get America back on track, we’re going to have to have dramatic, fundamental, extraordinary change in Washington to be able to allow our private sector to once again reemerge competitively, to scale back the size of government and to maintain our strength abroad in our military capacities.”

These two economic themes, along with the release of Romney’s taxes, have presented a clearer view of what Election 2012 will have in store – This election will be about defining the future of American Capitalism.

On the right, Romney is asserting that Obama’s policies will amount to the American adoption of European Socialism. On the Left, Obama is asserting that Romney is seeking to return America to the failed policies of unregulated Capitalism that brought us the Great Recession and the Great Depression.

If Obama, however, makes this fight into a question of what kind of Capitalism we want – a heartless, soulless, brainless Capitalism, or a thoughtful, studied, intelligent Capitalism, then he wins because the same Pew poll found an increasing ability of Americans to see the flaws of Capitalism, even while still preferring it to Socialism.

President Obama can, and must, win this argument. And he will because Romney’s message is factually challenged about President Obama’s policies, and is historically inaccurate by failing to recognize the weaknesses of unregulated Capitalism, or the need for Capitalism with Rules.

If Romney makes this into a fight of “Capitalism versus Socialism” he wins as Americans, according to recent polling from the Pew Research Center, highly favor Capitalism, with independents having a net +20% favorable view of Capitalism.

Read the full article @ Burnt Orange Report

Why are Republicans in general and Romney in particular always calling President Obama a socialist — because everybody hates socialists, even liberals, even Occupy Wall Streeters.

The socialist name calling, echoed without challenge by the main stream press, seems to be working, too. Americans perceive Barack Obama as furthest away from their own political viewpoint, according to a just released Gallup poll.

It is no accident that Republicans picked the “socialist” moniker to pin to Pres. Obama’s coat tails. Socialism is a negative for most Americans with six-in-ten (60%) saying they have a negative reaction to the word.

Socialism is the most politically polarizing of the most common political monikers – the reaction is almost universally negative among conservatives.

These are among the findings of the national survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, conducted Dec. 7-11, 2011.

Related:

• Words That Don’t Work
• I’m So Scared Of This Anti-Wall Effort
• The Billionaires’ Tea Party
• Elizabeth Warren explains the need to hold financial institutions accountable
• The GOP Is Advocating A Tax Increase On The Middle Class
• Elizabeth Warren refutes GOP meme that policy where everyone pays their fair share of taxes amounts to “class warfare” against the wealthy

Democratic Blog News

Today is the one year anniversary of Representative Scott Desjarlais’s (TN-04) Republican Congress of chronic chaos that nearly shutdown the government three times, tried to end Medicare, failed to create jobs, and blindly protected tax breaks for Big Oil and billionaires. With so much work to do to get the economy back on track and Americans back to work, Desjarlais is spending his one year anniversary on vacation — only working 6 days in all of January.
In this first year for Desjarlais’s Republican Congress, their partisan extremism has protected the ultra wealthy at the expense of Medicare for seniors, tax cuts for the middle class, and creating jobs for American workers.

“The first year of Representative Scott Desjarlais’s Republican Congress is marked by extreme partisanship and unbending protection of Big Oil and the ultra wealthy,” said Jesse Ferguson of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. “Desjarlais and House Republicans have spent this first year in chronic chaos — failing to protect the middle class or create jobs — and are now off on vacation rather than putting Americans back to work. Middle income Tennessee families can’t afford another year of Representative Scott Desjarlais choosing to blindly protect tax breaks for Big Oil instead of protecting Medicare for seniors.”

According to new polling by Pew Research Center, voters blame House Republicans like Desjarlais for Congress’s failures and give the Republican Congress its lowest approval rating in history.

HIGHLIGHTS FROM HOUSE REPUBLICANS FIRST YEAR

No Jobs Plan for 365 Days: For 365 days, Republicans refused to introduce a comprehensive jobs agenda. (12/2/11)

Voted for Middle Class Tax Increase: Republicans voted four times against consideration of an extension of the payroll tax cut needed to stop a ,000 tax increase on 160 million working Americans from taking effect on January 1st. (Vote 922, Vote 925, Vote 918, Vote 944)

Voted to End Medicare: Three times, House Republicans passed a plan that ends Medicare. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the Republican plan would increase seniors’ out-of-pocket health care costs by more than ,000 in 2022 and by nearly ,000 in 2030. (Vote 277, Vote 382, Vote 606)

Voted to Slash College Aid: The Republican budget slashes funding for Pell Grants, which make college affordable for millions of students each year. The Republican budget cut the maximum Pell Grant by 45% to the lowest level since 1998. (Vote 277)

Voted to Protect Big Oil: Republicans voted seven times to protect taxpayer subsidies for Big Oil — even while they’re making record profits. (Vote 153, Vote 109, Vote 277, Vote 293, Vote 313, Vote 676, Vote 810)

Voted for Tax Cuts for Millionaires: Making reducing the deficit harder, the Republican budget provides 0 billion in additional tax cuts for the 300,000 people who make over million a year. (Vote 277)

Voted Against Leveling the Playing Field with China: Republicans voted against a bipartisan effort to crack down on unfair Chinese currency manipulations that are currently costing nearly 2.8 million American jobs. (Vote 780)

Voted to Repeal Health Care Reform: Republicans voted to repeal the new law allowing millions of young people (those up to age 26) to receive health insurance coverage by remaining on their parents’ health plan, to repeal new prohibitions that stop insurers from denying coverage to children with preexisting conditions, and to increase prescription drug costs for millions of seniors. (Vote 14)

Voted Against Protecting Social Security and Medicare Benefits from Privatization: Republicans voted against a proposal to prohibit funds from being used to privatize and cut Social Security, or from being used to cut Medicare and turn it into a voucher program. (Vote 178)

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TN Democratic Party News

President Obama touted the benefits of the American Jobs Act while standing on the bridge which connects Ohio and Kentucky.

Gone is the conciliatory Barack Obama. Standing on the Brent Spence Bridge that connects Ohio and Kentucky, Obama no longer was a president patiently trying to coax a budget deal from John Boehner.

No, now Obama simply wants to rain holy hell down on the Republican House speaker.

The president traveled to the cross-state span Thursday to explain how his American Jobs Act could help rebuild that bridge and thousands like it, and put construction workers and manufacturers back to work.

Just hours later, the top official of Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign made clear what was going on: Pressure Boehner into passing the 7-billion jobs bill.

“It has been exactly two weeks since President Obama proposed the American Jobs Act — a fully paid-for plan made up of ideas that both parties have endorsed in the past and ought to be able to get behind now. A wide majority of Americans who have heard about the Jobs Act want to see it passed right away. But Congress has yet to take any action on it whatsoever,” Campaign Manager Jim Messina says in a Thursday evening email to the president’s supporters.

“There’s no excuse for any more delays,” he adds. “The President is out there bringing this plan straight to the American people. It’s on us to help put the pressure on Congress. House Speaker John Boehner — who will be leading the Republicans in negotiations — needs to hear what Americans like you think.”

Messina includes Boehner’s House phone number in the email and asks supporters to call.

“Call Speaker Boehner’s office now at (202) 225-0600 — tell him not to let politics get in the way of creating jobs, and ask him to help make sure Congress passes the American Jobs Act,” he says.

Messina dismisses the Republican complaints of “class warfare” which conservatives have used to reject the tax increase on wealthy Americans that Obama proposed to help pay for the jobs bill.

“As the President said, this isn’t class warfare — it’s simple math. If we want to reduce the deficit and put America back to work, we can’t put the entire burden on the middle class. But we know that’s exactly what congressional Republicans will do if we don’t take action — decimate programs seniors and families rely on, while protecting every loophole and giveaway for billionaires and big corporations,” Messina says. “None of us have time to sit around and wait while our lawmakers dig in for a political fight when there are reasonable solutions for creating jobs on the table right now.”

He urges Obama supporters to help cut through the political posturing: “Call John Boehner in Washington now — and tell him it’s time to pass this jobs bill.

Scott Nance is the editor and publisher of the news site The Washington Current. He has covered Congress and the federal government for more than a decade.

The Democratic Daily

The Lowest Price we could find is .00 .45 In The Liberal Tradition in America (1955), Louis Hartz first put forth his thesis that the American political tradition derives essentially from consensual liberal principles. The many detractors to this theory include Bernard Bailyn, who argued that preliberal, republican values initially held sway in eighteenth-century American politics. [...]
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Muskets are blazing over a Revolutionary War film that will welcome visitors to the new taxpayer-subsidized Boston…

Home – BostonHerald.com

Tagged with: democracy, control, more, government, spending, end, of, our, country, bankers, bailouts, money, wasted, foreclosures, paid, off, obama, state, the, union, speech, economic, defense, crisis, economy, politics, reserve, ron paul This is an excerpt from my article I wrote on Before It’s News called “Wake Up America or the Republic Will Fall” and explains [...]
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The Ogallala Aquifer holds as much water as Lake Huron, but spreads over an area seven times the area. The Ogallala aquifer, one of the most vital water sources for American agriculture, is the single water source for residential and agricultural communities across eight Midwestern states.

The Texas Low-Level Radioactive Waste Disposal Compact Commission (TLLRWDCC), which manages the state’s radioactive-waste dump, voted 5-2 on Tuesday to approve rules governing the process for accepting the out-of-state material.

The new rules pave the way for another 35 states states to export low-level radioactive waste to a remote 1,340-acre Andrews County landfill in West Texas along the Texas-New Mexico border. The landfill is owned by Dallas-based Waste Control Specialists, LLC.

Under the new rules the site will permanently store low-level radioactive waste—contaminated materials and equipment from nuclear plants, research laboratories and hospitals. The material includes everything from parts from dismantled nuclear-energy plants to booties worn by scientists working in labs where radioactive materials are present.

In 2007, Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) staff recommended denying the radioactive waste license, saying that “groundwater is likely to intrude into the proposed disposal units and contact the waste from either or both of two water tables near the proposed facility.” Radioactive contamination of water could result.

The West Texas dump, which will be the fourth such storage site in the US, is mired in controversy, in part because the dump, set to open by year’s end, was conceived and built to take waste from only two states—Texas and Vermont, reports the Wall Street Journal.

Texas Commissioner Bob Wilson has opposed the radioactive waste dumping plans and the rules for some time. He voted against the rules on Tuesday, but largely because he fears the commission is unprepared to deal with the enormity of the task once the 1,340-acre site begins accepting waste from other states. The commission, he said, is largely unfunded, getting ,000 a year from Vermont and money from Texas only to cover meeting and travel costs. In addition, he fears expanding the importation of waste will interfere with the site’s capacity. He also questions whether it will be as profitable as is being predicted. “I thought it was premature,” Wilson said.

Trevor Lovell, a spokesman for Public Citizen, one of the most outspoken opponents of the plan, said his group will meet Wednesday to decide the next step, but he said a lawsuit was possible. “The commission that is moving forward on this has no staff, has no bylaws, and yet they are attempting to make very substantial changes and rules that would allow in radioactive waste from the entire country,” Lovell said.

Lovell also noted that the landfill is over the Ogallala aquifer that provides water to one-quarter of the country’s irrigated land as well as drinking water to thousands of people. “We don’t feel that it’s been demonstrated that the landfill is safe,” Lovell said. Critics of the new radioactive waste dumping rule say that while Simmons will rake billions of dollars from the waste dump operation over the next 15 years, Texans will get the financial burden of managing dump for 10,000 years.

Opponents charge the TLLRWDCC’s rule change process and vote to allow Waste Control Specialists to dump radioactive waste from 36 states at the West Texas landfill demonstrates a conflict of interest between the TLLRWDCC, most of whose members were appointed by Texas Gov. Rick Perry, and the site’s owner, Waste Control Specialists LLC, whose main investor, Harold Simmons, is a Governor Perry’s 2^nd largest individual donor at almost 0,000. The Commission is comprised of 8 members, 6 of whom are Perry appointees. Opponents also charge the commission rigged the 30 day comment period to transpire during the holidays, when most people are too busy to pay much attention to matters of civic engagement, to avoid a repeat of the 2,000 comments from Texans opposed to the rule that the commission received when the rule was first proposed in 2010.

Gov. Perry nuke waste “czar” appointee Michael Ford, chairman of the TLLRWDCC, first proposed a new rule making Texas a 36 state radioactive waste dump site nearly a year ago, but polls showed a majority of Texans didn’t like the proposal. When Bill White made it an election issue, accusing Governor Perry of making the state a radioactive waste dump to benefit his donor, Waste Control Specialists owner Harold Simmons, Ford tabled the proposal.

The day after election day the TLLRWDCC voted 5-2 to repost a rule allowing out-of-state radioactive waste generators – primarily nuclear power plants from 36 states on the coasts and in the Midwest – to dump their waste at the West Texas landfill. The TLLRWDCC officially reposted the 36 state radioactive waste dumping rule the day after Thanksgiving, ensuring the 30 day comment would end the day after Christmas day.

Waste Control Specialists owner Harold Simmons stands to earn billions of dollars from his radioactive waste business at his 1,340-acre Andrews County landfill. After Simmons lost .4 billion from 2008 to 2009 he told Forbes he was “planning to make it back with Valhi’s [parent of Waste Control Specialists] radioactive waste disposal license.” Simmons is listed as #176 on the 2010 Forbes list of richest people on the planet, and the 55th richest in the US, with a net worth of billion.

Simmons said in a February 2010 D Magazine interview, “It took us six years to get legislation on this passed in Austin, but now we’ve got it all passed. We first had to change the law to where a private company can own a license [to handle radioactive waste], and we did that. Then we got another law passed that said they can only issue one license. Of course, we were the only ones that applied.”

The D Magazine story observed: “If things go as planned, Simmons’ nuclear waste dump in West Texas will exist on a scale that is hard to imagine. Waste Control Specialists is currently licensed by the state of Texas to accept up to 57 million cubic feet of low-level radioactive waste from federal sources. Waste Control Specialists has the space to expand its facility to more than 20 square miles.”

Democratic Blog of Collin County – News

In my social studies class, we are following the upcoming presidential elections here in Costa Rica. Most of the students already have a candidate of choice, because of their parent’s favorite choice and because of the candidate’s personality. However, it seems that many of them did not actually know the views and ideals that those [...]
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Speaking of the upcoming midterm elections, I cannot escape the feeling that we are, as a nation, doomed. There are more demonstrably crazy and inadequate GOP candidates running right now than I have ever seen before, and yet the American … Continue reading →
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