An Eloquent Voice Raised

A friend sent this copy of a letter she wrote to her Senator. I think it eloquently lays out a key argument against this atrocious health "care" bill.

Dear Senator _____,

Thank you for voting against the Nelson-Hatch Amendment. I appreciate hearing from you. More needs to be done.

In regard to federal funding of abortion: Please do not buy into “current law” propaganda, and please do not embarrass yourself by selling it. The so-called current law is far from settled law. Social conservatives have worked tirelessly and invested heavily to re-label and sustain the perception that this crazed sexist disconnect passes for evenhandedness and moral rectitude.

What good is the right to reproductive care if there is no way to access it? Access to abortion is a federally guaranteed right. It follows that federal funding for abortion coverage should also be legal. Preserving a right without providing a vehicle for implementation of that right is schizophrenic. Requiring women, especially economically disadvantaged women, to purchase private insurance (that they obviously can’t afford) for abortion coverage establishes an uneven and unjust baseline. The Mikulski Amendment is in the same disquieting class, since the MA has been fitted to the insurance industry, not to the rights of women. Shame on her, by the way, for offering tidbits and for not going further.

When you write that the Senate bill “strikes the right balance” in regard to reproductive care, you echo the reactionary (and disgusting) statement made by the President, for whom upsetting the “status quo” would apparently be a really bad thing. His words not mine.

The President’s status quo, a.k.a. current law, includes the following privative measures: The Hyde Amendment, conscience clauses, and the Bush appointed U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, all of which should be abrogated or dissolved. The President, with a nod to the Medieval Era, has said that he is “a believer in conscience clauses”, which he thinks should be “robust”. It’s one of the opinions he shares with the former Grand Inquisitor in Rome, Pope Benedict #16. I wish I were exaggerating, but sadly, according to his own statements, I’m not.

Here’s the 21st century view: Those who formulate or defend federal approbation of gender victimage contravene and circumvent a woman’s rights under the law. Make no mistake, they are wrong, unquestionably, and they should be defeated, unquestionably. The “status quo” is exploitative, anti-science and anti-woman. It is not possible for you, or any other well-intentioned person, to strike a rational, i.e. right, or ethical balance with people who are motivated by gender-bias, superstition, and fear. Why are Congressional Democrats letting the gynophobes win?

This is the time for Democrats to prove that reproductive issues, indeed all gender issues, mean more than electioneering slogans and political expediency. Universal, equal access must become – must be made to become – intrinsic to the healthcare items now under consideration in the Senate. It is vastly more important for you to do this for us, your constituency, than it is for you to please the feckless ephebe in the White House.

It is time to reverse the “current” stigmatizing of women’s health care needs. Health care reform is the perfect venue to bring abortion funding into full compliance with settled law. This is the moment to act.

A bone to pick with Charles Krauthammer

I have a bone to pick with Charles Krauthammer – especially with his most recent article for the Washington Post “The Environmental Shakedown”.

First off I should say that I like Charles Krauthammer, I like his intelligence and his acerbic wit, I like his refusal to suffer fools, I like the way he uses language. I like him to the point where I sometimes forget that he’s an ideologue.


Fortunately, he can’t help himself and, from time to time, he reminds me of his ideological blinders. Take his latest article: “The Environmental Shakedown” where he attempts to cast the Copenhagen climate “summit” as an attempted shakedown of the rich countries by the Third World:

“One of the major goals of the Copenhagen climate summit is another NIEO shakedown: the transfer of hundreds of billions from the industrial West to the Third World to save the planet by, for example, planting green industries in the tristes tropiques.”

He then engages in classic conspiracy theory to conflate the BO(zo) administration’s EPA announcement into a vast hippie conspiracy to, well… reduce global carbon emissions

“On the day Copenhagen opened, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency claimed jurisdiction over the regulation of carbon emissions by declaring them an "endangerment" to human health.”

And he goes on further to cast the entire collections of events as a left wing power grab of unprecedented proportions.

“Since we operate an overwhelmingly carbon-based economy, the EPA will be regulating practically everything. No institution that emits more than 250 tons of CO2 a year will fall outside EPA control. This means over a million building complexes, hospitals, plants, schools, businesses and similar enterprises. (The EPA proposes regulating emissions only above 25,000 tons, but it has no such authority.) Not since the creation of the Internal Revenue Service has a federal agency been given more intrusive power over every aspect of economic life.”

Aside from its unintended humor, his article is very revealing both by what it does not say and by its very wording. What Mr. Krauthammer desperately wants to avoid dealing with is what he finally mentions in as a boogeyman negative:

“Either the Senate passes cap-and-trade, or the EPA will impose even more draconian measures: all cap, no trade.”

Well, yes, that’s exactly where we must go: “all cap, no trade”. Trade is just that – pushing carbon around from one place to another, what we need to do is stop pushing carbon out at all.

The other aspect of his article that apparently got through proofreading is the inherent assumption that those grubby little “Third World kleptocracies” are robbing the “hard-working citizens” of their rightful rewards.

”In the name of equality -- wealth redistribution via global socialism -- with a dose of post-colonial reparations thrown in.

The idea of essentially taxing hard-working citizens of the democracies in order to fill the treasuries of Third World kleptocracies went nowhere, thanks mainly to Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher (and the debt crisis of the early '80s).”

This is filled with unintended humor but the glaring omission is that Mr. Krauthammer doesn’t seem to know where or how the “democracies” got hold of all this wealth. Think of it: the entire history of the plundering of the third world by the industrialized West (ongoing today even as we speak)… disappeared and the concept of compensatory relief reduced to a “heist” perpetrated by the “Third World kleptocracies” on the poor rich countries.

Shame on you Mr. Krauthammer, not because you dislike the third world, nor because you defend capitalism. Shame on you for the mendacity and disingenuousness of this article. I’m used to better intellectual honesty from you but I guess that’s what happens when ideology trumps intelligence.