1. Scott Walker, the soon-to-be ex-Gov. of Wisconsin, has quite a few old friends who are in trouble with the law. Now, if this were Obama, the House Republicans would be impeaching him about now, but, since it’s a good GOP factotum who does what he’s told, the right-wing media are, as usual, mute on Walker’s shady connections.
2. The Teabaggers are a punch line now, but the sign still applies to what’s left of the Republican Party:
3. People marching for their rights and freedom are just like Nazis? Only in Rush Limbaugh’s bizarre little world.
4. Ain’t it the troot. We were better off as a country when wealthy people paid more in taxes, the unions were stronger, and Walmart products were still made in America.
5. Pathetically, this is how some chickenhawk warlovers actually think. Of course, they would quickly change their minds about the necessity for a war with Iran if they had to lead a platoon in the first firefight of that war. Their courage is confined to the office, college dorm or parental basement and tends to wilt suddenly in the gun bursts of combat.
At least banned by some newspapers. Others are shunting it off to the op-ed page. Doonesbury’s dangerous — might make people think about what it’s like to live in a Christopublican theocracy and get angry. There is absolutely no reason for these state-mandated transvaginal exams, or any pre-abortion sonogram, except to satisfy the peculiar religious convictions of the far-right, i.e.: the GOP base. Hmmmm, satisfying the desires of a small minority at the expense of the taxpaying majority and having the government come between you and your doctor — isn’t this what Republicans are continuously harping against? Gary Trudeau rightly focuses on Texas in these strips — bad policy ideas grow down there like turdblossoms. Speaking of which, in 2005 several newspapers refused to run a couple of Doonesbury strips because they had Junior Bush calling Karl Rove by this nickname. The madness never ends.
The Republican fortress of Arizona, foremost in leading the nation back to the Dark Ages with new crapshit crazy laws, does it again. (Read below.) Can you imagine having to discuss your sex life with your employer and prove, if you’re single, that you don’t have one in order to get birth control pills without risking losing your job because you might offend your employer’s morality? I realize the Republicans don’t understand the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution that guarantees a right to privacy (also read the 1967 Supreme Court ruling in Katz v. United States, et al), but how many Republican women, except the kind who speak in tongues and get giddy at pious demonstrations of snake handling, would want their boss grilling them about their personal sex life? The GOP used to bleat that they were the party that believed in less government intrusion — unless you have ovaries, apparently. Here’s a wild idea: How about a government that minds its own business, especially where your sex life is concerned? Unless you’re spreading some dread venereal disease, the government has no legitimate reason for pruriently knowing the details of what you do in the bedroom, with whom or how often, as long as it’s between consenting adults. How hard is that for even a right-winger to understand? OTOH, I’m glad the Anti-Sex League Republicans are showing their ugly, theocratic, drooling, bobbing-overcoat-on-the-lap peep-show side here — this is the kind of nasty business that is going to bury their ludicrous cross-and-flagger-bagger party in a massive landslide next November. (Unless the GOP can jigger enough no-paper-trail voting and counting machines to prevent it.)
A proposed new law in Arizona would give employers the power to request that women being prescribed birth control pills provide proof that they’re using it for non-sexual reasons. And because Arizona’s an at-will employment state, that means that bosses critical of their female employees’ sex lives could fire them as a result. If we could harness the power of the crappy ideas coming out of the state of Arizona, we could probably power a rocket ship to the moon, where there are no Mexicans or fertile wombs and everyone can be free to be as mean a cranky asshole as they want at all times! Arizona Heaven!
Yesterday, a Senate Judiciary Committee endorsed Republican Debbie Lesko’s HB2625 by a vote of 6-2, which would allow an employer to request proof that a woman using insurance to buy birth control was being prescribed the birth control for reasons other than not wanting to get pregnant. It’s all about freedom, she said, echoing everyone who thinks there’s nothing ironic about claiming that a country that’s “free” allows people’s bosses to dictate what medical care is available to them through insurance. First amendment. The constitution. Rights of religious people to practice the treasured tenets of their faiths, the tenets that dictate that religious people get to tell everyone who is not of faith how they’re supposed to live, and the freedom to have that faith enforced by law. Freedom®.
Further, Lesko states, with a straight face, that this bill is necessary because “we live in America; we don’t live in the Soviet Union.”
Ah, yes, the Soviet Union. The sort of place where a woman might think about getting birth control through an insurance plan to which she contributes premiums without having to show her boss her prescription in order to prove that she wasn’t using it to not get pregnant. The Soviet Union. A hellscape where women don’t run the risk of losing their jobs over their sexual practices. What a horrible, awful place where herds of sluts run wild like feral ponies, humping everything in sight. The nightmare of unwilling motherhood evaded is a constant spectre in The Motherland.
Anyway, this bill probably won’t get anywhere; it violates all sorts of privacy laws and I can’t imagine that female citizens of Arizona would be in favor of having their rights further legislated away by a chamber of mostly dudes trying to win votes from Team Jerk Version of Jesus. But that doesn’t make it any less depressing. In fact, it’s almost depressing enough to make a lady consider building a time machine so that she can take it back to 1985 and find some job security in the Soviet Union.
