Malkin Spreads More Stupid, Shills for Misogyny
Posted by KTK

Michelle Malkin now takes on the cause, and the rhetoric, of the misogynist anti-autonomy movement and its efforts to eliminate accessible reproductive healthcare.

Planned Parenthood is the largest single provider of prenatal, contraceptive, and abortion care in the US. In a country in which over 85% of all counties have no abortion services provider at all, in which health insurance plans are not required to provide contraception, and in which government-provided health programs for the poor are prohibited from providing abortion or, at times, even information about abortion, Planned Parenthood is often the only reproductive health provider available in many communities, and usually the only one available at reduced cost.

This drives the anti-woman brigade screaming crazy. There has been an organized campaign against Planned Parenthood by the sex-negative right wing for years, using a combination of smear tactics, lies, distortions, and political lobbying. Attacks range across everything from Margaret Sanger’s racism (don’t believe what you hear from hypocritical liars), Planned Parenthood’s practices of murder, malpractice, and coverup (don’t believe what you hear from anti-woman liars), and the - in Malkin’s terms - “obscene profits” Planned Parenthood makes from the lucrative business of providing subsidized healthcare to uninsured patients in poor communities (don’t believe what you hear from financially illiterate liars). The reason, of course, is that Planned Parenthood is doing what they are dead set on wiping out: making reproductive autonomy real for the most vulnerable women in America.

June 4th, 2008 | General, Politics, Legal Issues, Religion, Culture, Health, Privacy, Media, News & Current Events | 23 comments

A Remarkable Day
Posted by Kevin

Barack Obama clinched the Democratic Party’s Presidential nomination last night. It has been a long, hard fought campaign with temperatures running high on both sides of the contest. I think it’s important, though, to not let questions of what Clinton is going to do and will the Party be unified in November to overshadow the moment. An African-American has just been nominated to run for arguable the highest office in the land by one of the two major parties. It is a remarkable moment, becasue there are people still alive today — people my father’s age — who suffered through Jim Crow and the denial of their most basic human rights, including voting. Rev. Wright, to take a high profile example , was a teenager when Emmett Till was brutalized and murdered. Colin Powell was almost thirty when the Voting Rights Act was passed. Maxine Waters was nineteen when the Little Rock Nine were escorted into Central High. I was twenty when the Rodney King cops were set free. My oldest son was five when the noose was hung on the property of a Jena, LA school district after black students had sat under the “white tree” and dismissed by the school authorities as a “prank”. Racism and its legacy is a still very much a part of the American life. That makes Obama’s achievement even more impressive.

This is not to say that racism is not still a major issue. Far form it. But this has been a hard fought, hard won milestone. It is truly a remarkable achievement and an unalloyed good. There is a lot more work to be done, that is true, but we should take a moment to stop and appreciate what has been achieved.

June 4th, 2008 | Politics, Race | 20 comments