Spintested: 05/23/11

Wisconsin, Tennessee Try To Pull Planned Parenthood Funding

Monday, May 23, 2011

Have you seen his latest?
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Libya Resolution Agreed To By Senate Democrats, Republicans

I've looked at your comment history -- You're a liberal like Joe Lieberman's a liberal. Like Christopher Hitchens and Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. You're a neoliberal, which bears no relationship to liberalism.
About U.S. Senate
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Libya Resolution Agreed To By Senate Democrats, Republicans

The Nation's John Nichols explained that Obama's unilateral decision "was a violation of the provision in the founding document that requires the executive to attain authorization from Congress before launching military adventures abroad." Put simply, as DanielLarison concluded in an analysis last week, "the war was illegal from the start."

But even for those who chose to cling to the fiction that the presidential war in Libya was authorized by the WPR, that fiction is now coming to a crashing end. Friday will mark the 60th day of the war without Congress, and there are no plans for authorization to be provided. By all appearances, the WhiteHouse isn't even bothering to pretend to seek one.

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2011/05/19/libya/index.html
About U.S. Senate
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Libya Resolution Agreed To By Senate Democrats, Republicans

Liberals do not support Obama's action on Libya.

When the next Bush or some other Republican president does something like this, are you going to support him?
About U.S. Senate
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Libya Resolution Agreed To By Senate Democrats, Republicans

"The President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation" -- candidate Barack Obama, December, 2007

"No more ignoring the law when it's inconvenient. That is not who we are. . . . We will again set an example for the world that the law is not subject to the whims of stubborn rulers" -- candidate Barack Obama, August 1, 2007
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Libya Resolution Agreed To By Senate Democrats, Republicans

When Obama ordered the US military to wage war in Libya without Congressional approval (even though, to use his words, it did "not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation"), the administration and its defenders claimed he had legal authority to do so for two reasons: (1) the 1973 WarPowersResolution (WPR) authorizes the President to wage war for 60 days without Congress, and (2) the "time-limited, well defined and discrete" nature of the mission meant that it was not really a "war" under the Constitution (Deputy NSA Adviser BenRhodes and the Obama OLC). Those claims were specious from the start, but are unquestionably inapplicable now.

From the start, the WPR provided no such authority. Section 1541(c) explicitly states that the war-making rights conferred by the statute apply only to "a national emergency created by attack upon the UnitedStates, its territories or possessions, or its armed forces." That's why YaleLawProfessor BruceAckerman -- in an article in ForeignPolicy entitled "Obama's Unconstitutional War" -- wrote when the war started that the "The WarPowersResolution doesn't authorize a single day of Libyan bombing" and that "in taking the country into a war with Libya, Obama'sAdministration is breaking new ground in its construction of an imperial presidency."

Ackerman detailed why Obama's sweeping claims of war powers exceeded that even of past controversial precedents, such as Clinton's 1999 bombing of Kosovo, which at least had the excuse that Congress authorized funding for it: "but Obama can't even take advantage of this same desperate expedient, since Congress has appropriated no funds for the Libyan war."

KEEP READING
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Wake Up Women! The Republicans Want You Barefoot and Pregnant

You're not paying for anyone's abortion except the woman in your life, should she and you choose to.
About Planned Parenthood
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Wake Up Women! The Republicans Want You Barefoot and Pregnant

I hate to break this to you, but we didn't get here, where it's d@mmed near impossible to get the legal procedure of abortion, through Republicans alone. Democrats have failed women terribly, dropped the ball, and deliberately, using it as a political football for decades.

Professional Democrats for at least the last 30 years have been moderate Republicans ideologically. They're pro-corporate, pro-war, and pay lip service to social issues around the edges, but do little or nothing to actively advance those social issues while standing around and allowing opposing forces to make deep assaults.

While ab0rtion is still legal, so many obstacles have been put up that ab0rtion services don't exist in 92 percent of the counties in the US. "You can have one if you can find someone to perform it". Poor women who need it the most are left with no choice.
About Planned Parenthood
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Wake Up Women! The Republicans Want You Barefoot and Pregnant

If men weren't in charge of or involved in making these decisions at all, if men weren't writing legislation to defund Planned Parenthood, teaching metaphors like this wouldn't be necessary -- Women could bypass men entirely and not bother trying to explain it.

But men are inserting themselves into this decision, so Maddow's talking in terms that men understand, that men appreciate.

FWIW, men take care of their cars better than they take care of themselves, their own bodies.

Within families, it's women who make the healthcare decisions for the family, and most of the decisions, in general, for the family. It's women who purchase the health insurance, for example. If Dad takes the baby to get a new pair of shoes, it's because Mom has determined that the baby has outgrown the old ones and told Dad to do it. The old joke between men is that their wives make all of the little decisions (when to replace the refrigerator, etc.) and men make all of the big decisions (about world peace, etc.).

FYI: During WWII, in concentration camps, women (those who made it past the selections) survived in greater numbers than men. That was due to the skills and their role as the family's 'organizer' pre-war. Women tended to be multi-lingual and bartered better (from their skills acquiring food from town square markets pre-war) and then back in the barracks they pooled resources, whatever they managed to scrounge around the camps and shared more nutritious meals that kept them healthier. Their propensity for better hygiene was also another factor in keeping themselves healthier than their male counterparts. Men in concentration camps were generally loners and that didn't put them in good stead for survival.
About Planned Parenthood
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Wake Up Women! The Republicans Want You Barefoot and Pregnant

Who's responsible for teaching the parents? Who's responsible for making sure the parents are doing it? Who's responsible for making sure that the parents have the correct information?

At some point, children are no longer the responsibility of their parents and enter the society with the rest of us.

The schools' role is to prepare children to be responsible, productive and law-abiding citizens. Don't you think that should include some very basic information as to how to protect themselves from AIDS and unwanted pregnancies? Do you really want babies having babies, unable to support themselves much less an infant? What kind of world do you want us all to live in? Your own children are going to be living in that world where people are forced to have babies they neither want nor are capable of raising into responsible adulthood.
About Planned Parenthood
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Wake Up Women! The Republicans Want You Barefoot and Pregnant

They're "dvmb as hammers" about their reproductive health and birth control. Receiving "some or a lot of information about s3x and s3xual relationships" (from parents, friends, TV, movies, etc.) doesn't mean it's accurate information.

If schools are teaching abstinence-only, students aren't getting the information they need to protect them from STDs and unwanted pregnancies.
About Planned Parenthood
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Wake Up Women! The Republicans Want You Barefoot and Pregnant

By that same logic, taxpayers' money going to faith-based initiative programs frees up religious groups' money to be spent on evangelizing, indoctrination and the anti-choice campaigns.

The fact is that performing abortions is a very minor part of what Planned Parenthood does as a health delivery facility, and abortion is one of an array of medical procedures that women require access to.
About Planned Parenthood
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Wake Up Women! The Republicans Want You Barefoot and Pregnant

If ever there was someone who needed to see this, it's you. "Personal responsibility", indeed.
About Planned Parenthood
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Wake Up Women! The Republicans Want You Barefoot and Pregnant

You do know that birth control is not 100% effective, don't you?

You also know that in cases of rape, birth control isn't typically uppermost on the raplsts' agenda?

Then there's the religious right's crusade against sex education in schools, so that students come out of high school as dvmb as hammers.
About Planned Parenthood
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Wake Up Women! The Republicans Want You Barefoot and Pregnant

I don't think that men who would be educated by that would feel they were being condescended to.
About Planned Parenthood
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Wake Up Women! The Republicans Want You Barefoot and Pregnant

Did you watch it?
About Planned Parenthood
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Wake Up Women! The Republicans Want You Barefoot and Pregnant

Why would or should feminists be up in arms about that?
About Planned Parenthood
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Wake Up Women! The Republicans Want You Barefoot and Pregnant

The US government ISN'T funding abortions. Period.

How many times do you need to hear it, who has to tell you that in order for you to believe it?
About Planned Parenthood
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Rob Woodall On Medicare: 'When Do I Decide I'm Going To Take Care Of Me?'

A teaching moment to show the wrong-headedness of the market theory used to defend the idea of private health insurance exchanges, like those found in the Democrats’ health care reform law and the Medicare privatization plan passed by the Republican House.
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Medicare Cuts Unpopular In Swing States, Polls Suggest

For Health Insurance Exchanges to Work, We Must All Be Actuaries and Fortune Tellers
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Newt Gingrich: 'I'm Not A Washington Figure' (VIDEO)

Gingrich never left Washington government. When BushCheney got into the White House, Gingrich was put on the Defense Policy Board, a think tank for the Department of Defense dominated by neoconservatives and criticized because of the perceived conflicts of interests of its members, many of whom have strong ties to defense contractors that could benefit from sensitive information gleaned at policy board meetings. Gingrich is one of eight Hoover fellows with seats on the 31-member board.

In the days after September 11, 2001, Gingrich and his colleagues met to discuss what to do about the attack. As the New York Times reported, the members of that meeting agreed to attack Iraq as soon as the initial phase of the war with Afghanistan was over. Gingrich said in an interview at the time, ''If we don't use this as the moment to replace Saddam after we replace the Taliban, we are setting the stage for disaster.'' In a speech around the same time, Gingrich told an audience at the American Enterprise Institute, "We have to talk about replacement, not about punishment" of Hussein.
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Wake Up Women! The Republicans Want You Barefoot and Pregnant

Rachel Maddow explains it in a way that men can understand -- Women as cars, and 'preventative maintenance'.
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Republicans Quietly Press for Dangerous Expansion of War on Terror

Democratic voters have mistakenly believed that Obama and Democrats want what they want. The DLC-controlled Democratic Party gives lip service to all populist issues (like ending the wars, living wages, civil rights protections, restoring habeas corpus, public healthcare, Wall Street reform, environmental & energy issues, etc.).

If the Bush years taught us anything, it's that anyone can sell anything and ANYONE to Americans, if you're stolid and relentless in your sales pitch and tactics. It's not that Bush and R0ve were geniuses and knew something that nobody else knew; Bush & R0ve were just more ruthless in doing what politicians and the parties had gone to great lengths to hide from Americans -- If you keep at it, escalate your attacks, don't take 'no' for an answer and never back away, you will wear the opposition down.

Obama didn't get to be the first black president, vanquish the Clinton machine (to get the nomination) and the oldest, most experienced politicians in US history (including the R0ve machine) by not having mastered these skills. Nor do Democratic politicians (more incumbents than ever, in office longer) not know how to do it. How do you think Democrats managed to keep impeaching Bush and Cheney off the table, have us still reelecting them and not marching on Washington with torches and pitchforks?

Obama and Democrats know how to do it -- They don't want to do it.

The trick for them has been to keep the many different populist groups believing that they really do support our issues, but they're merely inept. And to get us to keep voting for them despite their failure to achieve our alleged shared objectives.

Getting Democratic voters (and Obama's 'most ardent supporters') to understand that Democratic politicians have been taking us all for suckers and patsies is the most immediate problem and the challenge.

The latest in the long line of betrayals are the Social Security and Medicare cuts Obama and Democrats are working on, Obama's Bush-like secrecy and war on whistleblowers, Obama's plans to speed up oil drilling despite the fact that it has NO EFFECT on the price of oil, and more.

It's not just the Republicans.
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White House Beefs Up Online Rapid Response

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/social/Marcospinelli/obama-libya-speech-_n_841311_82373231.html
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Frank Bailey Speaks Out On Tell-All Book About Sarah Palin

Bill Kristol and the neocon cabal fell in love with her on a cruise they took to Alaska in 2007.
About Sarah Palin
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Obama, Cameron To Start U.S.-Britain National Security Strategy Board

Thomas Drake, the NSA whistleblower, was on 60 Minutes this evening. I’ll have more to say about his appearance and case going forward, but I just wanted to highlight a critical detail revealed by 60 Minutes: the relative cost of Trailblazer–the SAIC implemented program Michael Hayden championed–and ThinThread–the program Drake and others claim was more effective and had privacy protections.

One of them was Lieutenant General Michael Hayden, the head of the agency: he wanted to transform the agency and launched a massive modernization program, code named: “Trailblazer.” It was supposed to do what Thin Thread did, and more.
Trailblazer would be the NSA’s biggest project. Hayden’s philosophy was to let private industry do the job. Enormous deals were signed with defense contractors. [Bill] Binney’s Thin Thread program cost $3 million; Trailblazer would run more than $1 billion and take years to develop.
“Do you have any idea why General Hayden decided to go with Trailblazer as opposed to Thin Thread, which already existed?” Pelley asked.
“I believe he was convinced by others that going with a large-scale, industrial strength solution was the approach that NSA needed to take. You can’t really understand why they would make that kind of a decision without understanding the culture of NSA,” Drake said.
Asked to elaborate, Drake said, “Careers are built on projects and programs. The bigger, the better their career.” [my emphasis]

So Drake was complaining about a program that cost 300 times as much as the one he championed (ultimately, Trailblazer cost $1.2 billion, so actually 400 times as much). It’s not an apples-to-apples comparison. Trailblazer, according to a government filing, worked across more platforms. ThinThread, according to a Siobhan Gorman story, had additional functionality, including privacy protections.
But still, Drake complained about a program that did what ThinThread did–at 300 to 400 times the cost.
As one of the other NSA employees who whistleblew about Trailblazer, J. Kirk Wiebe, explains,

“How does a man see 9/11 happened, know that some part of it is due to corruption and mismanagement and sleep at night. How does a man do that? He obviously couldn’t,” Wiebe told Pelley.

Yet the government wants to put Drake in jail for 35 years because he tried to make sure incompetence that led to 9/11 doesn’t continue.

http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/2011/05/22/thomas-drake-complained-about-michael-hayden-spending-1b-to-do-what-3m-could-do/
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Obama, Cameron To Start U.S.-Britain National Security Strategy Board

To what end? The NSA mounting cameras on every street corner, like in London? To what end? Listening devices in every home, like in N. Korea?
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Obama: Ireland, U.S. Have 'Blood Link' (VIDEO)

It's not unique to the right -- Read here.
About Barack Obama
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Obama: Ireland, U.S. Have 'Blood Link' (VIDEO)

Treat the online support for Obama with suspicion:

[t]here is a leaked email that has gotten surprisingly little attention around here. It's the one where AaronBarr discusses his intention to post at DailyKos - presumably something negative about Anonymous, the hacking group. But that's not the email I'm talking about here.

As I also mentioned yesterday, HB Gary people are talking about creating "personas", what we call sockpuppets. This isn't new. PR firms have been using fake "people" to promote products and other things for a while now, both online and even in bars & coffee houses.

But for a defense contractor with ties to the federal government, Hunton & Williams, DOD, NSA, and the CIA - whose enemies are labor unions, progressive organizations, journalists, and progressive bloggers, a persona apparently goes far beyond creating a mere sockpuppet.

According to an embedded MS Word document found in one of the HB Gary emails, it involves creating an army of sockpuppets, with sophisticated "persona management" software that allows a small team of only a few people to appear to be many, while keeping the personas from accidentally cross-contaminating each other. Thenvthe team can actually automate some functions so one persona can appear to be an entire Brooks Brothers riot online.

In another Word document, one of the team spells out how automation can work so one person can be many personas:

Using the assigned social media accounts we can automate the posting of content that is relevant to the persona. In this case there are specific social media strategy website RSS feeds we can subscribe to and then repost content on twitter with the appropriate hashtags. In fact using hashtags and gaming some location based check-in services we can make it appear as if a persona was actually at a conference and introduce himself/herself to key individuals as part of the exercise, as one example. There are a variety of social media tricks we can use to add a level of realness to all fictitious personas

It goes far beyond the mere ability for a government stooge, corporation or PR firm to hire people to post on sites like this one. They're talking about creating the illusion of consensus. And consensus is a powerful persuader. What has more effect, one guy saying BP isn't at fault? Or 20 people saying it? For the weakminded, the number can make all the difference
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