"Please, God. Just let this election be over"

Me and Jon Stewart.  “Please, God.  Just let this election be over.” 

All of this pure crap over abortion, rape, birth control, etc. has me so disgusted I can’t believe that at my age I can still get so enraged!!  Unfortunately for those around me, when I get in this state, my really sick sense of humor tries to bring some sort of sanity to the argument.  Usually not too successfully.

Consequently, I awoke last night thinking that all of these middle-age+ white men aren’t worried at all about abortion being ‘homicide’.  What they are really concerned about is ‘spermicide’.  Since they care not a fig about the child once it is born, nor are they ever concerned about the life of the woman or what happens to her, it is logical to assume that what they are really concerned about is whether their little sperm gets its chance to life, “as God intended”.

Bringing God into it absolves their conscience about wanting government out of business, but wanting government into the lives of women without of course asking women their opinion about these plans.  My view is, without any documentation, that men assume that for a woman to have a baby is sort of like a man having an orgasm.  Very enjoyable, with some more very enjoyable feelings after, but that’s about it.    Nothing could be further from the truth.  If the man is irresponsible, the woman is in it for the long haul of 20 years or so.  Or if something happens to the man like war, sickness or an accident, the woman, through no fault of her own, is the sole parent and/or provider.  This can happen to a responsible man, of course.  Vice-President Joe Biden is the most notable example.

And if the pregnancy is the result of rape, it is even worse.  I give great credit to women who chose to carry the baby to term.  But I can certainly not fault the women who chose to make sure this pregnancy does not occur.  Usually within the time that a normal miscarriage might occur anyway.  (See last week’s blog.)

There are so many factors involved in pregnancy for a woman that men have not a clue about, for most not because they don’t care, but it is so far from their realm of experience.  The only analogy I can think of is the difference between someone who is color blind, and someone who has an acute sense of color.  Try to explain this acute sense of color to someone who can’t experience it.

Men who insist that they are being objective and only acting on facts are delusional when it comes to pregnancy and women’s concerns about abortion, birth control and rape.  There is simply no way they can know completely, even if they sincerely want to and try hard.  There is a really simple solution to this problem, however.

Just include women in the conversation!!!

 

 

 

Personhood or Wackadoodleness?

Last February I wrote a blog entitle “Wackadoodles” which described some of the more ridiculous actions of some Republicans.  To wit: Congressman Daryl Issa of California holding a Congressional hearing on women’s health issues without having any women on the panel.  After a considerable uproar, on the second day he had two women, carefully screened ahead of time to make sure they were in line with men making these decisions for women.  In that hearing, Bishop Lori compared government involvement in the requirements for employers to provide birth control (which never really existed) to government requiring a Kosher deli to serve pork.  Needless to say, there was even more of an uproar since there is no woman who likes being compared to a piece of meat, regardless of whether it is pork, lamb or beef. 

At that time Rick Santorum was sounding off about birth control, and at the same time wanting to take away state and federal funding for education.  Also I wrote about the stupid comment Mitt Romney made about tying his dog’s kennel to the roof of the car, with dog in it, to take a 12 hour long trip.  He said there was no problem, the kennel was airtight.  Had the kennel been airtight, after 12 hours the poor dog would have been dead.  As it is, no one has particularly mentioned whatever happened to the dog after that trip.

I thought we had reached the end of our wackadoodleness until this personhood thing turned up wherein a fertilized egg would be proclaimed to have full human rights, perhaps even including property rights.  This would, of course, require a constitutional amendment, but don’t let a little thing like that get in your way.  So we have Todd Aikin, current Congressman and Senate candidate from Missouri pronouncing that rape cannot result in pregnancy because a woman’s body knows that little illegal sperm is up to no good, and shuts itself down!  And we have Congressman Joe Walsh, Illinois, saying that with modern science and technology there is no way a pregnancy can harm the mother; that claiming this is just the way to get an abortion! 

There have also been proposals, which fortunately have gone nowhere, to make miscarriages criminal, just as the fundamentalists want to make abortions, probably because the medical term for a miscarriage, the lay term, is spontaneous abortion.  After a Google search of the frequency of spontaneous abortions, it is estimated that about 1 in 3 women will have, and I return to the lay term since that is what I am, a miscarriage.  Some women experience this so early in the pregnancy they may not even know they are pregnant, unless they are using a pregnancy kit to determine if they are. 

This is a subject that most women don’t talk about.  If they didn’t know they were pregnant, the reason for not talking about it is obvious.  But later in the pregnancy, particularly if the baby was desperately wanted, the event was too personal and painful to discuss with anyone but their partner and/or doctor.  If the personhood amendment would actually be passed, and any cessation of a pregnancy would be criminalized as the murder of a real person, how devastated the woman would be by the fact that not only did she lose her baby, but now she is in jail, at best!  I assume that this would apply to married women as well as unmarried women.  To avoid the stigma of being criminalized, women will not report that they have had a miscarriage.  Generally speaking this is ok, but not always.  If the ‘spontaneous abortion’ is not complete, and some tissue remains, certainly a septic condition can occur.  The sepsis may damage her uterus, thus preventing future pregnancies, or at is worst, cause the death of the woman.  Is it reasonable to assume that if a personhood amendment passes, the same fundamentalists will have eliminated Obamacare in favor of high-priced medical Insurance, as we have now?

What is it with these wackadoodles anyway?  They talk about how they are so pro-life, about the miracle of life, but when it comes to women, they seem to be pro-who cares?

Two Down -- Two to Go

Two down and two to go.  Debates, that is.  This last one with VP Joe Biden and Congressman Paul Ryan was pretty interesting.  Since I am not a debate aficionado I hesitate to judge who was the winner based on style, manner of presentation, etc., but I do know a lie when I hear one.  I’m not talking here about incorrect statements such as Biden’s when he commented that Ryan had written two letters asking for stimulus funds.  According to The Huffington Post, Ryan had actually written four.  A goof like this has no bearing on the point Biden was trying to make, nor did it change the direction of the discussion.  An incorrect statement, yes.  A lie, no. 

What is a lie is when Ryan started throwing all sorts of numbers around over taxes and who would pay what.  I learned years ago in politics that when someone does that, almost invariably they are trying to obfuscate what is being said.  Most people concentrate on the numbers and don’t hear the words.  Since I am terrible at numbers I don’t listen to them, but concentrate on the words.  My, oh, my.  What one can hear!!  Or when Ryan tried to state that some budget plan of his had bi-partisan support because Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon supported it.  Even I knew that Wyden had withdrawn his support.  For Ryan to say that plan had bipartisan support was a lie.

I really wish lying were a major part of calculating who had won a debate and who hadn’t.  The pundits could say, “It appears that so and so has won this debate, but we haven’t heard from the fact checkers yet, and when we do we’ll reevaluate our opinion and let you know”.  The fact checkers, of course, will have to have some criteria such as that which I have outlined above in order to keep goofs and gaffes from being called downright lies.  But that shouldn’t be hard to craft.

This next debate should be a humdinger!

The Last Word on the First Debate

The Last Word on the First Debate

 

Most of you know by now that I view the world sideways.  When in the 4^th grade, my beloved public school teacher, Mrs. Clippinger, explained this to me very nicely without giving me any negative thoughts about it. 

So, I believe Der Mitt really lost the debate the other night.  President Obama wasn’t at his best, for whatever reason.  Perhaps, just perhaps, he was goading Der Mitt into lying, although Der Mitt doesn’t need any goading to do that.  It seems to be sort of spontaneous.  But then these lies could be used in campaign ads.  This might be real because by the next morning, the President’s campaign committee had ads up and running on Der Mitt’s lying.  One comment I heard, from Martin Bashir, I believe needs repeating, and that is that debating Mitt Romney is like debating a bowl of jello. 

On to Der Mitt.  Of course there have been innumerable analyses, news stories, pundits, etc., which and who have commented on his lies, so I need only mention here that he did.  Perhaps I don’t know the rules of debating, but it would seem to me that straight out lying ought not to be allowed, much less just sort of discounted in the final analysis of who won.  On this issue alone I would say Der Mitt lost the debate. 

Poor Jim Lehrer has been on the receiving end of much wrath over how he conducted the debate.  Jim Lehrer is not only a gentleman, but he is out of the tradition that in a debate, the debaters respect the moderator’s instructions.  I doubt very much that he has ever had, over the years, someone who seems to actually believe that rules do not apply to him personally.  He is a child of privilege, leads a privileged life, and rules are for those ‘losers’ over there. This total disregard for the agreed upon rules would have, in my opinion, tossed Der Mitt out of the debate right there.   

And then we have that god-awful condescending smirk that Romney had during all of the time he wasn’t talking.  He looked to me as though he were thinking, “Well, those mooching 47%ers voted this guy into office.  He isn’t very bright because he’s never made a payroll, and I can run over him in time, but right now unfortunately I have to be quiet and let him talk.  But I don’t have to like it!”  President Obama, on the other hand, was faulted for not smiling (so no smirk), smiling too much, smirking while smiling, and on and on.  I have seen that Romney smirk on many people’s faces in different places.  On men who think they are superior to women when women are talking, on the faces of fundamentalists of any religion when someone of another religion is talking about religion, on women who think they are superior to whomever it is they are talking to.  I doubt if smirks are part of debate scoring, but I certainly found it quite offensive.   

One point that no one else seems to have picked up is when Romney compared the President to his own sons when they were younger, saying that he used to tell them that no matter how many times they said something, it didn’t make it true.  That statement is correct, but by comparing the President to his much younger sons, he was basically calling him “boy”.  That didn’t sit well with me at all, and I am a medium beige.   

During the time in the debate that Romney actually got excited, his voice went up a bit and he began to speak very fast.  The picture of a Macaque Rhesus monkey popped into my head, calling out and sort of chittering up there in the trees.  It indicated a lack of self-control on Der Mitt’s part, to say the least. 

On the subject of taxes, when Der Mitt denied ever having heard any law giving a company a tax break for taking jobs overseas, he was technically right.  There are a series of them in the tax code that gives a tax break to companies that take jobs overseas.  To start with, on the basis that a company must pay taxes in the new country, the company is allowed to postpone paying taxes here, although the tax rate is based on the amount of taxes paid in the new country.  So the company searches out the countries with the lowest tax rate.  When it is time to pay back taxes here, the taxes paid here are based on the tax rate of the country there, so essentially the company is given a tax break. 

Let’s compile these negatives that I have written about above:

1.       Lying,

2.      Being above the mundane rules of the schedule and moderator,

3.      Condescending smirk,

4.      Obliquely calling the black President of the United States a “boy”,

5.      Trouble with voice control,

6.      Trouble with taxes. 

Do we actually want a President of the United States who lies, doesn’t think he has to follow the laws that others do, feels superior to other human beings, denigrates the current President by equating him to his sons when younger (Imagine what he might call a Middle East head of state).  The tax issue is a bit more complicated.  Perhaps this is what is in Romney’s tax returns.  That he has gotten a considerable “tax break” by taking jobs overseas.  I use a phrase from my youth regarding pigs.  (For those who are unacquainted with pig anatomy, the best cuts of pork come from near or at the back bone.)  By getting these significant tax breaks for taking American jobs overseas, Der Mitt is living high on the hog, while he begrudges the rest of us even pickled pig’s feet!