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Bunch of dudes stand for their right to own ladies
Steve Doocy expresses a falsehood
Chris Matthews assists in deception
On this episode of Reality Cast, I'll be interviewing John Marcotte about his efforts to ban divorce in California. Also, I'll be talking up the role of boobies and other lady parts in the ongoing health care reform frenzy.
So the right wing organization the American Center for Law and Justice put out a trailer for their upcoming documentary chronicling the rise of the anti-choice movement. See if you can spot what's interesting about all the people they have to interview.
- nuts *
Yep, all men. In fact, the only women you really see in the trailer are the pro-choicers, which creates this real sense that this movie is about a bunch of evil men that are so certain that they own women's bodies that they're willing to dedicate their lives to it. Which is probably not the message they wanted to send, but is nonetheless accurate.
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Did you hear that a task force recently released a set of new recommendations for breast cancer screening?
- boobies 1 *
Well, that was the reaction that the panel's findings received. Personally, I was relieved to hear that the panel didn't really see a point in starting mammograms until you're 50 if you don't have any risk factors. I'm looking forward to 10 more years free of boobie-squishing. Also, they found that self exams don't do much, which is a shame, but also means that most of us who forget to do them have less cause to beat ourselves up about it. This whole story shouldn't really have been that big a deal, but it just so happened to come out right as right wingers are both raising false fears about health care rationing while also rationing your access to abortion. And so a lot of people immediately grew concerned that this was about finding a way to cut back on health care at the expense of women's lives.
Concerned, or in the case of most of the conservatives trumpeting this, faux concerned for politically convenient reasons. Opponents of health care reform immediately and falsely implied that this panel had created a binding recommendation that all people would have to live with under health care reform. For instance, David Horowitz and Glenn Beck pushed this lie.
- boobies 2 *
This is what we like to call in the biz a straight-up lie. The Democrats have nothing to do with this independent panel's recommendation, and the HHS has already declared they're keeping the old standards in place. The panel's recommendations were based in a desire to help women, because the current standards are creating too many false positives for every case of cancer detected, and that's no small thing, when you consider how false positives can sometimes result in painful or harmful treatment. Also, the tests themselves are painful and give you a significant and dangerous dose of radiation.
But this reality hasn't stopped health care opponents from saying the most outrageous things about how the Democrats just made this up because they're stealing from you. Republican Rep. Marsha Blackburn went on TV and outright claimed that the HHS is behind this. Luckily, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz was there to fight with her about it.
- boobies 3 *
The problem is that opponents of health care reform are allowed to just lie like this on TV without anyone stepping in to correct them, except other politicians, and so the audience is left splitting the difference. In this instance, it was even more disturbing, because you had 3 people lying and only one person telling the truth. It was unbelievably frustrating to watch.
Of course, no cavalcade of dishonesty is complete lately without Sarah Palin hopping in.
- boobies 4 *
In fact, the only threat of taking people's actual care they currently have away is one that Palin and her buddies support, the Stupak-Pitts amendment, which does get between you and your right to abortion care. But of course, Palin, like all the rest is lying about this. The government has made it clear they're sticking to the 40 plus recommendation. What's interesting is the bigger lie that's being pushed, the idea that more women will die of breast cancer if we pass health care reform. In fact, the opposite is true. Right now, if you don't have health insurance and you get breast cancer, good luck with that. What reform will do is make sure that women who currently aren't getting screened or treated because they can't afford it will get that care.
Mammograms aren't the only kind of cancer screening that's being reconsidered in light of new evidence about the dangers of false positives. Another panel indicated that cervical cancer screenings could also be less frequent, which some conservatives used to lie and fear monger.
- boobies 5 *
This is doubly dishonest, because younger women who are at risk of cervical cancer are even less likely to see a doctor regularly because of lack of health insurance. Also, the same conservative voices that are suddenly so concerned about cervical cancer were singing a different tune with the HPV vaccine was invented, and the religious right faced losing an entire STD to scare kids with. But to be fair, right wingers aren't hitting this note as much. That's probably because they know they're simply not going to reach younger women with this scare-mongering, and are more interested in playing to older people who have been falsely told that Medicare is threatened.
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insert interview
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Now the Senate has started to debate health care reform, and the good news is, as expected, while the Senate is generally more conservative than the House overall, there is a much lower chance of seeing an explicit ban on private abortion funding like the Stupak-Pitts amendment. Which means, you guessed it, another round of anti-choice hysteria and lies. Bill O'Reilly is leading the dishonesty charge.
- abortion 1 *
This is a blatant lie, of course. If Stupak-Pitts is stripped, there will not be any federal funding of abortion. All that will change is that women who buy private insurance through the health care exchange, most of whom will have some subsidies to do so, will maintain privately-funded abortion coverage. Privately funded. There is no way that federal dollars will be going to abortion. That's already explicitly banned by the Hyde Amendment.
Now make no mistake. The Hyde Amendment is a very bad thing, and it's incoherent, too. The idea behind it that anti-choicers have a special right not to pay taxes for something because they don't like. The rest of us, however, have to pay for all sorts of things we don't like, such as killing actual people in war. Which is to say that the Hyde Amendment puts Sperm Magic on a higher pedestal than any other thing in our society, bar none. That's a lot of penis power right there.
Still, the Stupak-Pitts amendment does the Hyde Amendment one worse, because it prevents private companies from using private money to pay for women's private medical decisions. But defenders of it are denying that this is true and implying that it's more limited than that. For instance, here's Steve Doocy lying on Fox & Friends.
- abortion 2 *
Ha! I wish they banned federal money from ending a life. That would mean an immediate pull out from Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as an end to the federal death penalty. What he said has no actual relationship to the Stupak-Pitts amendment, which very specifically bans insurance companies from using private funds to cover abortions for women receiving subsidies to buy health insurance. But nice how Doocy inadvertently revealed that the only "life" that counts to anti-choicers is that of non-sentient fetuses.
Bart Stupak has been burning the midnight oil at one thing and one thing only, which is misleading the public on what it is exactly that his amendment does. And many so-called journalists are letting him do it, even when he's not on the Fox Propaganda Network. For instance, Chris Matthews let Stupak lie on air.
- abortion 3 *
See? Blew right past that blatant lie without batting an eyelash, even though I do believe that Matthews is technically pro-choice. Stupak-Pitts is not consistent with current law. It expands it, and this means that abortions that would be covered under current law will not be covered in the future. That's a change, and therefore is not consistent with current law.
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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, let's make that subtext the text edition. I've been saying for months now that a lot of the opposition to health care reform can be best understood if you see that the opponents are afraid they'll have to sit in waiting rooms next to poor people and people of color. Well, leave it to Lamar Alexander to nearly come right out and say that.
- Medicaid *
Yep, he just compared universal health care to forcing so-called Real Americans to live in a ghetto. Nothing racist about that, no sir.
