Michael Steele and the GOP sent me another survey today. This time asking for my opinions about the state of healthcare in America. As anyone who has read my thoughts on the topic would know, I am a hesitant supporter of reform and am generally fraught with concern about the implications of any solution to the current dilemma, so I am precisely the kind of moderate voter that the GOP should be trying to win over to its side on this issue.
Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal (R) was chosen to deliver the GOP response to President Obama's address to congress tonight. He's young, he's arguably more cool than Fred Thompson and he's measurably less white - which is obviously all that the surviving Republican leadership has learned from recent political events - so he was the obvious choice as the GOP's answer to Obama.
His challenge was to follow an inspirational speech delivered by a popular president during a time of great national stress and not sound like a total Buzz Killington.
Nice try, Gov. Jindal. Thanks for coming out - but you can go home, now.
At a time when even such notable Republicans as Alexander Haig, Colin Powell and even Newt Gingrich are chastising the Republican Party for being out of touch with the American people, I find myself endlessly amazed at the opportunities my erstwhile cohort continues to provide for me to recoil from them. One more good recoil and I will find myself behind myself.
Does anyone really think this woman is prepared to step into the Presidency of the United States if necessary? We need to send her back to Alaska, so she can keep the Russians at bay.
Sarah Palin has been: busted using Yahoo personal email to go around the requirement of transparency and accountability in government affairs; kicked out of a speaking position at a jewish group's event on Monday after trying to turn it into a campaign event; pulled off a trip to California; ordered her husband to commit contempt of court, who will likely be charged for this in January when the Alaskan Legislature is in session; caught taking 11 items through the ten-item lane at Wiggly Piggly...
Mudflats, a blog by Alaskan AKMuckraker has an article today about a rally - organized by eight women over coffee - held to counter the event welcoming Gov. Palin home from her ordeal answering questions for the first time since being nominated by the GOP for President (er: *Vice* President). The turnout dwarfed the Pro-Palin rally yesterday.
Alaskan Women Reject Palin was, by this account, the *"biggest political rally ever, in the history of the state"*. At least 1,400 people showed up, and to put that in perspective that would be akin to 100,000 New Yorker women showing up to a political rally in New York City (we can be fairly certain no-one took the train from New Jersey to Anchorage or drove up from Philadelphia for the event). This compares to perhaps 1,000 Palin fans who showed up for her event that same day.
You have all read the diary about the note written by Anne K in Alaska, or seen other articles about it. Anne lives in Wassilla, has known Sarah Palin for many years and has an experienced opinion of Gov. Palin's history that she wanted to share. She had asked that her thoughts be forwarded with her name attached - she did not want to hide from the responsibility of speaking her mind - though she asked that they not be posted on websites: "there are too many kooks out there..." (you know who you are... ;~).
Somewhere along the way someone posted the email in its entirety as a comment on the Washington Independent. Since that moment, articles and diaries have popped up all over the web (and here's another: curious critters, ain't we?).
There has been discussion about this comment, some of it along the lines of: "Gee, I dunno, I think this may not be real..." So instead of just bantering about the veracity of Anne's words amongst those of us who were reading them second and fifth-hand, I decided to give Anne a call.
The problem is that FFL doesn't just oppose abortion. FFL wants abortion to be illegal. All abortions, period, including those for rape, incest, health, major fetal defects and, although Foster resisted admitting this, even some abortions most doctors would say were necessary to save the woman's life. (Although FFL is not a Catholic organization, its rejection of therapeutic abortion follows Catholic doctrine.) FFL wants doctors who perform abortions to be punished, possibly with prison terms.
It was extremely difficult to get Foster to say what she thought would happen if abortion was banned. At one point she would not concede that women would continue to have abortions if it was recriminalized; at another she argued that criminalization was no big deal: Instructions on self-abortion were posted on the Internet. I had to work to get her to admit that illegal abortion was common before Roe, and that it was dangerous--numbers on abortion deaths were concocted by pre-Roe legalization advocates, she told me. Yet the FFL website prominently features gory stories of abortion mishaps and discredited claims that abortion causes breast cancer. (Challenged on the cancer connection, Foster says they just want women to have medical information. Asked why they don't then link to the 2004 Lancet article debunking their cancer claims, she says they are not medical experts and have considered taking the cancer pages down.) So legal abortion is dangerous but illegal abortion would be safe? When I pointed out that in countries where the operation is banned, such as Brazil and Peru, rates are sky-high and abortion a major cause of injury and death, she professed ignorance.
I got similarly evasive answers when I asked why FFL didn't promote birth control, and when I asked if FFL considered the pill an "abortifacient." She did tell me that "birth control doesn't work" for swing-shift nurses because they lose track of their body clock--interesting, if true--or for teenagers, which I know to be false.
