If the draft regulation were to prompt some insurance companies to drop coverage for prescription birth control, "that would be fantastic," said Tom McClusky, a strategist with the conservative Family Research Council.Read More......
Anti-choicers are DISGUSTED at Planned Parenthood Columbia Williamette's new sex ed website, TakeCareDownThere.org. Dawn Eden promised it was "truly degrading" and "gross, gross, gross," so I was expecting something at least as bad as the barf-inducing STD slide show from my old high school abstinence class.
Fortunately, it's nowhere near as disgusting as that. It's actually a pretty funny website. Kudos to Planned Parenthood for giving teens information about condom use and STD screenings in a fun and positive way.
If the Trail of Lights was held today, there wouldn't be much twinkle.This is awful! :( Read More......
"It angers me, it really does," Troy Houtman with the city's Parks and Recreation Department said.
Houtman is angry because someone stole nearly 3 miles of buried power lines at Zilker Park. The lines, made mostly out of copper, are used to power the annual holiday light show. (...)
Now, they just need to find a way to come up with the almost $100,000 it will take to replace the stolen copper.
"We don't have the budget to replace that because that's not an item we typically replace," Houtman said.
I'm confused... Jewell Leon has been charged with tampering with evidence (a third degree felony) for throwing away her miscarried fetus.
How is a miscarried fetus "evidence?" Is it illegal to have a miscarriage in Ohio, or something?
Brilliant. Antigone at Punkassblog has compiled some pertinent information about America's most prominent anti-abortion groups.
When investigating Pro-Life Organizations, I choose to focus on 6 factors: are they secular or religious, does it appear to be women leading the organization, do they support sexual education, or contraception, or welfare for new mothers, and are they violent or peaceful?The results are no surprise, of course. Of the 29 major anti-choice groups:
OLATHE, KAN. -- When Sean Tevis decided to run for a seat in the Kansas Legislature, he faced a serious problem: money. Local political advisors warned the campaign novice that he would need a war chest of at least $26,000 to compete against his entrenched Republican rival.Read More......
It seemed like a fortune to the 39-year-old Democrat. Everyone he knew here was either on a fixed income, worried about losing a job or fretting that the nation's stumbling economy could spread to this southwestern suburb of Kansas City, Kan.
So Tevis created a droll online cartoon strip to appeal to potential supporters wherever they might be, using stick figures to represent himself, his GOP opponent and others.
In one panel, a stick-figure Tevis greets a constituent by rattling off a stream of personal facts he's found online about her -- including her birthdate, voting pattern, divorce, paycheck, credit card balances and medical history -- to illustrate his interest in protecting individual privacy.
When she slams the door in his face, the cartoon Tevis muses, "Maybe I should rethink my approach."
"I figured I'd raise a few thousand dollars, at most," for his bid to become a state representative, said Tevis, a computer systems manager who works for an industrial manufacturing company.
In fact, before he created the comic strip, Tevis spent weeks asking cash-strapped friends and family for help and walking door-to-door in the district. He raised $1,525.
The comic strip -- at www.seantevis.com/3000 -- was first posted online July 16. Today, when he files his campaign finance forms with the Kansas secretary of state's office, Tevis will report that he has raised $95,162.76 in donations through PayPal, the online service that allows payments and money transfers via the Internet.
Sorry We Asked, Sorry You ToldOh, snap! Read the whole article! It's great that the country is finally coming around and seeing the deranged homobigots for what they are. (Hat-tip.) Read More......
By Dana Milbank
Thursday, July 24, 2008; A03
Don't ask, don't tell. And, whatever you do, don't ask Elaine Donnelly to tell you what she thinks about gays in the military.
The House Armed Services personnel subcommittee made just such a miscalculation yesterday. Holding the first hearing in 15 years on the "don't ask, don't tell" policy, lawmakers invited a quartet of veterans to testify on the subject and also extended an invitation to Donnelly, who has been working for years to protect our fighting forces from the malign influence of women.
Donnelly treated the panel to an extraordinary exhibition of rage. She warned of "transgenders in the military." She warned that lesbians would take pictures of people in the shower. She spoke ominously of gays spreading "HIV positivity" through the ranks.
"We're talking about real consequences for real people," Donnelly proclaimed. Her written statement added warnings about "inappropriate passive/aggressive actions common in the homosexual community," the prospects of "forcible sodomy" and "exotic forms of sexual expression," and the case of "a group of black lesbians who decided to gang-assault" a fellow soldier.
At the witness table with Donnelly, retired Navy Capt. Joan Darrah, a lesbian, rolled her eyes in disbelief. Retired Marine Staff Sgt. Eric Alva, a gay man who was wounded in Iraq, looked as if he would explode.
Inadvertently, Donnelly achieved the opposite of her intended effect. Though there's no expectation that Congress will repeal "don't ask, don't tell" and allow gays to serve openly in the military, the display had the effect of increasing bipartisan sympathy for the cause.
Rep. Vic Snyder (D-Ark.) labeled her statement "just bonkers" and "dumb," and he called her claims about an HIV menace "inappropriate." Said Snyder: "By this analysis . . . we ought to recruit only lesbians for the military, because they have the lowest incidence of HIV in the country."
Jill Stanek, Dawn Eden and someone at Michelle Malkin's blog are all in a tizzy over the fact that the government's Women, Infants and Children website has a link to Planned Parenthood.
What, you don't see it? It's right there! In the Learning Center!
Still don't see it? Scroll down until you find the link for "Health Care."
Still don't see it? It's right there! Fifteenth link from the top! See it?
Scandalous!!
Next thing you know, women on WIC will be having regular pap smears and HIV screenings! They'll be using birth control and preventing unintended pregnancies! They might even take advantage of the free condoms, and prevent the spread of STDs!!
Anti-choicers sure do pick strange things to get upset over.
So I was watching Black in America on CNN when Anderson Cooper breaks in to play this video of John McCain wandering around a grocery store, looking lost and out of place, and giving a speech before a case of deli cheese. LOL WUT
Read More......
A photograph taken in the first days of the war had made the medic from New York's Long Island a symbol of the United States' good intentions in the Middle East. When he returned home, he was hailed as a hero.Read More......
But for most of the past five years, the 31-year-old soldier had writhed in a private hell, shooting at imaginary enemies and dodging nonexistent roadside bombs, sleeping in a closet bunker and trying desperately to huff away the "demons" in his head. When his personal problems became public, efforts were made to help him, but nothing seemed to work.
This broken, frightened man had once been the embodiment of American might and compassion. If the military couldn't save him, Knapp thought, what hope was there for the thousands suffering in anonymity?
* God, I am so glad this story is getting media coverage. "Congressional Democrats are criticizing the Bush administration for a draft proposal they say would change the definition of abortion and limit women's access to contraception."
* America is still pro-choice.
By a 63 - 33 percent margin, American voters support the 1973 Roe v Wade decision. But Americans remain divided on the issue of abortion:
* 19 percent say abortion should be legal in all cases;
* 38 percent say it should be legal in most cases;
* 24 percent say it should be illegal in most cases;
* 14 percent say it should be illegal in all cases.
I'm sorry I don't blog much. It's summer and I'm so busy with summertime family stuff, I don't usually feel like writing. But here is something I just HAD to blog about:
The Austin American-Statesman's Melissa Mixon recently did an extremely informative series on abstinence education in Texas that is WELL worth the read:
* Texas spends big for abstinence programs, but teenagers aren't always buying it
* Abstinence: The message vs. the reality
* Texas puts tight restraints on what teachers can teach about sex
* Students talk about sex education and abstinence
* What isn't being taught starts with what's not in the textbooks
* A reality check on the 'human use reality rates' for contraceptives
The Bush administration wants recipients of federal health dollars, like family planning clinics, to be forced to hire doctors and nurses who refuse to provide birth control.
In the proposal, obtained by The New York Times, the administration says it could cut off federal aid to individuals or entities that discriminate against people who object to abortion on the basis of “religious beliefs or moral convictions.”They certainly would. Under this rule, clinics like Planned Parenthood could be forced to hire nurses and doctors who would then refuse to provide birth control to patients, or lose their federal birth control funding. Either way, poor and uninsured women are screwed out of their birth control. Read More......
The proposal defines abortion as follows: “any of the various procedures — including the prescription, dispensing and administration of any drug or the performance of any procedure or any other action — that results in the termination of the life of a human being in utero between conception and natural birth, whether before or after implantation.”
Mary Jane Gallagher, president of the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association, which represents providers, said, “The proposed definition of abortion is so broad that it would cover many types of birth control, including oral contraceptives and emergency contraception.”
“We worry that under the proposal, contraceptive services would become less available to low-income and uninsured women,” Ms. Gallagher said.
