Maybe a kiss is not just a kiss...

A big hat tip to my friend Pat R. for sending me this fascinating blog post on the power of lesbian kisses.

The health care follies continue

Just the other day, I noted that two liberal blogs are mobilizing to try to save the public option in the health care reform bill.

Unfortunately, the public plan they are trying to save may be only a shadow of its former self, according to Physicians for a National Health Care Plan.

When the “public option” campaign began, its leaders promoted a huge “Medicare-like” program that would enroll about 130 million people. Such a program would dwarf even Medicare, which, with its 45 million enrollees, is the nation’s largest health insurer, public or private. But today “public option” advocates sing the praises of tiny “public options” contained in congressional legislation sponsored by leading Democrats that bear no resemblance to the original model.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, the “public options” described in the Democrats’ legislation might enroll 10 million people and will have virtually no effect on health care costs, which means the “public options” cannot, by themselves, have any effect on the number of uninsured. But the leaders of the “public option” movement haven’t told the public they have abandoned their original vision. It’s high time they did.

Of course, you might expect PHNP to have strong criticism for the public option, given that they are one of the primary groups pushing for a single-payer national health plan. But over at Common Dreams, Jeff Cohen has an interesting post that makes pretty much the same point.

Activists must recognize the surest way to get a strong public option that could compete with the Cadillac of health plans. We needed to mobilize millions of Netroots people, almost every union and 150 members of Congress to endorse a maximum demand: National health insurance . . . enhanced Medicare for All. In other words, a cost-effective single-payer system of publicly-financed, privately-delivered healthcare that ends private health insurance (and its waste, bureaucracy, ads, sales commissions, lavish executive salaries, profiteering).

Had liberal groups sent out millions of emails building a movement that posed an existential threat to the health insurance industry, Sen. Baucus and Blue Dog Democrats and their corporate healthcare patrons might well be on their knees begging for a comprehensive public option – to avert the threat of full-blown Medicare for All.

As things stand now, as writers like Bob Kuttner and Norman Solomon have warned, a weak public option would institutionalize a two-tiered system with healthier, wealthier citizens getting the best (private) plans, and sicker, harder-to-treat people getting an inferior (public) plan. Newt Gingrich couldn’t dream up a better scenario to discredit an enhanced government role in healthcare.

Meanwhile, Bill Moyers and Michael Winship write that as Congressional Republicans and right-wing activists hope to use the health care issue to crush the effectiveness of the Obama's administration, the Obama health care proposal has become more and more watered down:

Alicia Mundy and Laura Meckler recently wrote in The Wall Street Journal, that "the pharmaceuticals industry, which President Barack Obama promised to 'take on' during his campaign, is winning most of what it wants in the health-care overhaul."

Their story describes "a string of victories" plucked from the Senate Finance Committee by drug company lobbyists, including no cost-cutting steps, no cheaper drugs to be allowed across the border from Canada, and no direct Federal government negotiations with the pharmaceutical companies to lower Medicare drug prices.

I wish I had a brilliant concluding sentence to tie all this together, along with a clear and shining strategy to bring some kind of reasonable conclusion to this mess. If I think of anything, I'll keep you posted.

Will healthcare reform undermine abortion rights?

I've been wanting to write a blog post about the way that Republicans and conservative Democrats have been trying to eliminate the availability of abortion coverage under the guise of health care reform. Lucinda Marshall at CommonDreams.org has written the post that I wanted to write. Please read it.

Man charged with shooting Tiller pleads not guilty

The Daily Women's Health Policy says that the man charged with the killing of abortion provider George Tiller has pleaded not guilty to charges of murder and aggravated assault at Wichita, Kansas.

Poll says 76 percent want public option

Even as the Senate moves closer to producing a health reform bill
without a public plan option, a new poll shows that 76 percent of the public wants to have a public option in the bill. This doesn't translate into support for the president's plan, as this Huffington Post story explains.

Meanwhile, Firedoglake and Open Left are calling for political action to pressure supposedly progressive Democrats in Congress to vote against any health care bill that doesn't include a strong public option. Of course, none of these representatives are from Oklahoma, so I'm not sure how much attention they would pay to anyone from around these parts.

Health Care Reform Does Not Equal “Senior Death Warrant”

There are some scary misconceptions out there about President Obama's health care reform proposal. Thanks to Our Bodies Our Blog for a link to the real information on FactCheck.org.

It's an X

I am sitting here in the Red Cup having breakfast, and overheard some folks in the next room discussing whether the baby someone is having is going to be a boy or a girl. Actually, these days they can test for such things, and they knew it was going to be a girl.

The folks in the next room were discussing how raising a girl is different than raising a boy. Certainly they are right, certainly it is a very different thing to have a boy child than it is to have a girl child. We are allegedly living in a post-feminist era when the sexes are equal, but still the most important thing anyone wants to know about a baby is, "Is it a boy or a girl?"

But I am an old-school radical lesbian feminist, and I can remember when we were going to change all that. So I did a little bit of web searching to try to find a story I remember reading in Ms. magazine when I was a teenager back in the seventies, a story about a family determined to raise their child so that its gender truly didn't matter.

The story is called "X: A Fabulous Child's Story." The author is Lois Gold, and you can read the whole thing at The Gender Centre. Please do.

Yours for a world in which we don't just bend gender, but smash it into little bits.

Talking to Myself for a whole year, already

Today is the first anniversary of my little blog.

Yes, you are (a feminist)

I had never seen this classic post over on Tomato Nation, but it's well worth reading.

ERA reintroduced in US House

A friend on Facebook sent me the information that Equal Rights Amendment has been reintroduced in the US House of Representative. I did a little bit of web searching on the topic. Thanks to Sappocrat at Lavender Newswire for a link to the bill introduced by Reps. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) and Judy Biggert (R-IL).

As always, the ERA is short, simple, and to the point. Look, I'll quote the entire proposed amendment right here:

SECTION 1. Equality of rights under the law shall
not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.

SECTION 2. The Congress shall have the power to
enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.

SECTION 3. This amendment shall take effect two
years after the date of ratification.

Thanks to the R.E.A.L.Courage web site for posting this link to ERA web sites and information sources.

Arrested for living in a house while black

One of my very favorite blogs is the blog of Angry Black Bitch, who is at her most eloquent (which is saying quite a bit) in her commentary on the arrest of Professor Gates for living in a house in Cambridge while black.

If by some chance you have missed this widely publicized story, here is the short version. Last Thursday, Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. was returning to his home in Cambridge, Mass. after a research trip to China. His front door wouldn't open. He and the cab driver, who was also black, tried to force open the jammed door. This happened in broad daylight. A white neighbor thought there might be a burglary in progress and called the police.

The police officer who arrived to investigate the call demanded that Gates show ID to prove that he was the rightful owner of the house. According to a statement by Gates's lawyer, Gates went to his kitchen (followed by the officer), and produced his driver's license and his Harvard i.d.

Professor Gates then asked the police officer if he would give him his name and his badge number. He made this request several times. The officer did not produce any identification nor did he respond to Professor Gates’ request for this information. After an additional request by Professor Gates for the officer’s name and badge number, the officer then turned and left the kitchen of Professor Gates’ home without ever acknowledging who he was or if there were charges against Professor Gates. As Professor Gates followed the officer to his own front door, he was astonished to see several police officers gathered on his front porch. Professor Gates asked the officer’s colleagues for his name and badge number. As Professor Gates stepped onto his front porch, the officer who had been inside and who had examined his identification, said to him, “Thank you for accommodating my earlier request,” and then placed Professor Gates under arrest. He was handcuffed on his own front porch

The police report gives a contradictory version of events. Gates has challenged the accuracy of this report. But even if it'ss accurate, Gates, who is in his late 50s, stands 5' 7", weighs 150 pounds, and walks with a cane, obviously posed no threat of violence.  Given this country's long and continuing practice of racial profiling by law enforcement agencies, any distress that Gates might have showed seems entirely understandable.

Furthermore, if you work with public, you need to have a thick enough skin to deal with people who get upset with you. Even taking the arresting officer's version at face value, Gates was arrested because Gates's behavior "caused citizens passing by this location to stop and take notice while appearing surprised and alarmed." In other words, Gates was arrested for being uppity. Is this just one office with an exaggerated sense of his own importance? If we live in a country where we're expected to do absolutely everything a police officer tells us, with no expression of disagreement, we live in a police state. I have to say this police report made my blood run cold.

On Tuesday, the Cambridge police dropped the disorderly conduct charge against Gates. But the story is not going away just yet.

There's an excellent updated analysis of the story at Whose shoes are these anyway? Nordette Adams compares the Gates episode to other recent incidents, including the choking a black paramedic by a white Oklahoma Highway Patrol officer back in May.

Meanwhile The Root has an interview with Gates giving his own story of how the incident took place.

Does Obama’s health care reform merely prop up blood-sucking private insurance companies?

Anyone reading this blog knows that I've vacillated mightily on what to do about health care reform. A single-payer system seems obvious as the best way to make the health care industry work in favor of ordinary people. But maybe the option of allowing folks to buy into a public plan that competes with private insurers would be a workable compromise? I keep going back and forth. I think that I just don't know.

Writing in The Socialist WebZine, Billy Wharton makes a compelling argument that President Obama's proposed health care reform does little to help ordinary people and a whole lot to prop up the private health insurance industry:

The bill does little to address the structural failures of private corporations. Instead of a single-payer plan which would address the problem of cost and coverage by eliminating private health insurers, thereby opening access, the House bill proposes coercive mandates to herd the great mass of the uninsured toward private plans. Key to this is a focus on keeping costs low in the private plans. The problem is that there are only two ways to do this -– offer high-fee, high-deductible plans or offer plans with bare-bones coverage. Both maintain high profitability for the corporations, while fuelling the logic of health-care avoidance and debt accumulation.

Some of the uninsured may resist this drive into private health insurance plans designed for corporate profitability. The House of Representatives, under the advice of President Barack Obama, has therefore designed an intricate system of coercive penalties. Americans will either have to prove enough hardship to qualify for the public option or pay a 2.5% penalty on their annual income. Considering the high costs of monthly health-care premiums, we can imagine that many may opt to pay the fine in order to avoid the higher costs of a private plan.

To make up the difference, the House bill proposes the issue of “affordability credits” in order to, “reduce cost-sharing to levels that ensure access to care”. Where will these credits, read taxpayers' money, be headed? Directly to the private health insurance industry. Here again the new logic of the Obama regime is put to work. Instead of using the state to solve social problems by nationalising, or socialising industry, the administration chooses to toss taxpayers' funds at the private sector. All the while, they employ free-market language –- increased competition, market areas and individual responsibility -– to cover what is essentially a transfer of public funds to large corporations. No wonder nary a word of protest has been uttered by the normally vociferous private health-care industry.

Wharton observes -- accurately, I think -- that only a mass social movement can make real health care reform possible. If anybody knows how to ignite such a movement, would you please share that information with me?

Jimmy Carter leaves Southern Baptists to protest women's subordination

Oklahoma Voice of Reason reports that former president Jimmy Carter has left the Southern Baptist Church, because of that church's support for the subordination of women. I found Carter's explanation of this decision, published in The Age, to be quite moving. Not that I necessarily agree with all of it. Carter writes:

The truth is that male religious leaders have had - and still have - an option to interpret holy teachings either to exalt or subjugate women. They have, for their own selfish ends, overwhelmingly chosen the latter. Their continuing choice provides the foundation or justification for much of the pervasive persecution and abuse of women throughout the world. This is in clear violation not just of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights but also the teachings of Jesus Christ, the Apostle Paul, Moses and the prophets, Muhammad, and founders of other great religions - all of whom have called for proper and equitable treatment of all the children of God. It is time we had the courage to challenge these views.

I not convinced by the argument that a "true" interpretation of the world's major religions would show that they support dignity and equality for women. See, for instance, Elizabeth Cady Stanton's The Woman's Bible.

I'm trying to find words to express all my mixed feelings about Jimmy Carter and his record on women's rights. I cast my first presidential vote in the 1976 election, in which Carter defeated Gerald Ford. I voted for Ford, largely because I was uncomfortable with Carter's Southern Baptist religious background. I feared he would undermine women's rights.

I think that voting for Ford was a mistake, but I think my uneasiness with Carter was justified. Doing online research just now, I'm not finding much to document what I remember. Carter's Wikipedia entry has limited information on his record on women's issues.

Carter (like Presidents Nixon and Ford before him) did give at least lip service to the Equal Rights Amendment. But The Socialist Webzine documents Carter's support for the Hyde Amendment, which cut off Medicaid funding for abortions for poor women. And about.com notes that

In 1977-1978 Bella Abzug served as co-chair of the National Advisory Committee on Women. She was fired by President Jimmy Carter, who had originally appointed her, when the committee openly criticized Carter's budget for cutting women's programs.

Of course, that was then, this is now. Maybe Carter has grown over the years. Feminist Philosophers points out that Carter is now part of a group called The Elders, which has recently taken a stand saying that the use of religion to subordinate women is unacceptable. As Carter himself says:

(M)any political leaders can be reluctant about stepping into this minefield. Religion, and tradition, are powerful and sensitive areas to challenge. But my fellow Elders and I, who come from many faiths and backgrounds, no longer need to worry about winning votes or avoiding controversy - and we are deeply committed to challenging injustice wherever we see it.

The Elders are an independent group of eminent global leaders, brought together by former South African president Nelson Mandela, who offer their influence and experience to support peace building, help address major causes of human suffering and promote the shared interests of humanity. We have decided to draw particular attention to the responsibility of religious and traditional leaders in ensuring equality and human rights and have recently published a statement that declares: "The justification of discrimination against women and girls on grounds of religion or tradition, as if it were prescribed by a Higher Authority, is unacceptable."

I don't share Carter's optimism about the role that religious leaders might play in ensuring women's rights. I think I do respect him for making this statement.

Thinking inside the box

Sotomayor affirms Roe as "Settled Law," in second day of confirmation hearings

John Nichols at thenation.com reports that during her second day of confirmation hearings, Supreme Court nominee affirmed Roe v. Wade as "settled law," and appears to have won a battle of wits with Utah Republican Orrin Hatch.

Hatch was firm with the nominee, especially during a pointed line of questioning about cases involving gun rights. But Judge Sotomayor matched wits with the senior senator point for point, meeting arcane questions with precise responses that referenced footnotes and comments by conservative Justice Antonin Scalia.

Hatch was impressed, telling the nominee at the close of their discourse: "I want you to know I've appreciated this little time we've had together." Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold, a key Democrat who led Judge Sotomayor through a line of questioning about executive powers issues, went even further, telling the committee how much he had "enjoyed" the Hatch-Sotomayor dialogue.

Ginsburg and Sotomayor: Two women justices would have both similarities and differences

With the Democrats holding 60 votes in the US Senate, Sonia Sotomayor is likely to gain confirmation as the third woman and first Latina appointed to the US Supreme Court. Sharon Johnson at Women's eNews has written an interesting analysis of the similarities and differences in legal outlook between Sotomayor and Ruth Bader Ginsberg, the other woman current sitting on the Court. Both women are strong supporters of employment nondiscrimination, but Sotomayor is much weaker than Ginsburg in her support of reproductive choice.

Appeals court requires pharmacists to dispense "morning after" pill

A three-judge panel of the US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals recently ruled that pharmacists may not use their personal religious beliefs to dodge their legal obligation to dispense morning-after contraceptives. Ann Bartow at Feminist Law Professors has the details.

Pondering the history of revolution

Happy Bastille Day. The storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1889 was a major symbolic turning point in the French Revolution. While it held only seven prisoners at the time of the attack, the Bastille had once held numerous political prisoners condemned by royal decree, and symbolized the absolute power of King Louis XVI.

The French Revolution is notorious for devolving into the Reign of Terror. This is used to support the reactionary argument that absolute democracy always leads to horrible abuses. I think it's more accurate to say that, just as there are sincere people who are bigots, there are evildoers who seem quite willing and capable of manipulating good causes to their own purposes. It is also true that empire-builders are quite able to use the trappings of democracy to justify their actions. Like the United States, France has its own history of imperialism and colonialism.

Today, Bastille Day is the French national holiday. But the French don't call it that, they call it le 14 juillet. This holiday is celebrated not only in France, but also in the United States. Is this a sign that US citizens are eager once again to work toward social justice and the ideals of liberty, equality, and sisterhood? Or is it just an indication that Americans are always eager for an excuse to go on a bender?

I remain hopeful of the possibility of an egalitarian future, but it's going to take a lot of hard work to get there.

Paul Krugman on The Stimulus Trap

CommonDreams.org cross-posted Paul Krugman's excellent commentary on what President Obama should do now that the first round of stimulus has proved insufficient to revive the economy.What Mr. Obama needs to do is level with the American people.

He needs to admit that he may not have done enough on the first try. He needs to remind the country that he’s trying to steer the country through a severe economic storm, and that some course adjustments — including, quite possibly, another round of stimulus — may be necessary.

What he needs, in short, is to do for economic policy what he’s already done for race relations and foreign policy — talk to Americans like adults.

Can progressives join forces to fight the health care industry?

Should progressives insist on fighting for a single-payer health care system, or is it more realistic to fight for a public health care plan that competes alongside private insurers. Karen Dolan at the Institute for Policy Studies has an interesting analysis.

A public option may indeed be crafted in such a way to become the wedge that ultimately wins the prize, as public plans under-price costly private plans. The public option could offer public plans designed to adhere strictly to the Congressional Progressive Caucus’ laudable principles of universality, affordability, equality. They could be carefully constructed as to be so cost effective that the Republicans fear that they will crowd out private insurance due to their affordability becomes a reality.

But a public option could also be crafted in such a way to expressly prohibit that outcome by allowing private insurers to cherry-pick the healthiest patients, eventually bankrupting a public plan stuck with the nation's sickest people. If private insurers are allowed to continue the current practice of cultivating and covering the healthiest Americans, the sickest will be dumped into a public plan, thus creating a financially unsustainable situation for the public plans.

These scenarios need to be aired, debated, and dealt with. The way that Obama and progressives on and off Capitol Hill have set the debate thus far, a "robust Public Option" is, effectively, the "left flank," and thereby the very most we can hope for. It becomes the goal rather than the compromise. Had single-payer not been off the table, it might have served as the "left flank," thus making a public option, crafted to lead to single payer, a more politically feasible option, more appealing as the compromise that it is.

Dolan's ultimare message is that members of both camps should cooperate rather than attacking each other.