Links

by: Rob Kailey

Tue Feb 01, 2011 at 16:28:25 PM MST

Jay's link posts are deeply missed (at least by me.)  So let me offer my humble replacement.  It's true and certain that the doings in Egypt and the Storm-That-Shall-Destroy-Us-All are dominating the news cycle, but the human mind can multi-task. Allow these tidbits of distraction from the BIG NEWS, and a few things about the big news too.

The big news to those of us in Montana is that Dennis Rehberg will challenge Jon Tester for his Senate seat. Dennis already has one resounding endorsement from a Montana ex-pat, who apparently thinks we need our comeuppance.  

My brief take.  Dennis Rehberg is a coward.  He sees the current political environment as one favorable to his manner of 'hide and campaign', allowing name and party to do his work for him.  I agree with Pogie that this is a different horse for him to drunkenly fall off of.  A Senate seat is not an easy pick up, despite what the Republicans are crowing.  Dennis is going to have to work for it, something he's shown a poor aptitude for.  He would never have the courage to challenge Baucus or Schweitzer, so this is his best opportunity to be a wined, and more wined, and a little more wine, please, and dined politician-for-life sucking at the teats of the taxpayer.  Tying himself to Michelle Crazed Bachman won't likely help him in his quest to avoid doing anything useful and calling it 'public service'.  I have faith that Montanans aren't quite as stupid as Dennis Rehberg thinks we are.

So what of wonder boy, Steve Daines?  I had desperately hoped that he would opt to primary Rehberg for the Senate seat he has declared himself fit for.  But no.  He shows no more political courage than Rehberg.  The current scuttlebutt is that he will step aside and run for Denny's vacant seat. He is scheduled to be scheduled for making an announcement, on schedule, come this Thursday.  I will respect him more if he decides to run for Governor, but I guess we'll have to wait and see.  Either way, it appears that Franke Wilmer will be running for the US House on the Democratic ticket.  I do not speak for Left in the West, or any other poster here, when I say that she has my full hearted endorsement.

Opposition expected to stiffen against ban on subsidized Viagra

by: Jay Stevens

Fri Nov 13, 2009 at 11:51:03 AM MST

I have a moral objection to paying for any kind of erectile dysfunction medicine in the new health reform bill and I think men who want to use it should just pay for it out of pocket. After all, I won't ever need such a pill. And anyway, it's no biggie. Just because most of them can get it under their insurance today doesn't mean they shouldn't have it stripped from their coverage in the future because of my moral objections. (I don't think there's even been a Supreme Court ruling making wood a constitutional right. I might be wrong about that)....

Given the makeup of the SCOTUS, I wouldn't make any bets...

I realize that many people disagree with my moral objections to men getting erections which God clearly doesn't want them to get, but my principles on this are more important to me than theirs are to them. So too bad. If you want a boner, pay for it yourself.

Sure, digby's jokingly responding to the justification behind Stupak amendment, and the House vote disallowing insurance purchased in the health insurance exchange from covering abortion...but, hell! She's got a point! Why does insurance cover Viagra? It's not like it actually affects any urgent medical condition...? And it certainly isn't as critical to men as abortions are to women...

But just as the members of the Republican party look to impose penalties on the rest of us that they don't feel apply to themselves, don't hold your breath that a bunch of old white guys will be preventing private insurers from paying Viagra claims...

Banning abortion doesn't reduce abortion rates

by: Jay Stevens

Thu Oct 15, 2009 at 10:37:19 AM MST

On the other hand, making contraceptives widely available actually reduces unwanted pregnancies and, surprisingly enough!, abortions.

The best way to reduce abortions is not to criminalize them, but to provide women with good, affordable, and effective health care that includes neo-natal care and access to contraceptives. And if you really wanted to bite into the numbers, you should consider funding job training programs, beef up college assistance, and provide assistance for daycare. Well funded drug rehabilitation programs would probably help, too.

But we have tax cuts to hand out to major corporations!

AG Allows Initiative Backers to Play "Bait-and-Switch" with Constitutional Rights

by: Montana Cowgirl

Thu Sep 03, 2009 at 17:06:06 PM MST

So why would he allow Rick Jore and Trevis Butcher to put forward another fraudulent ballot initiative (Yep, this same Butcher is on the board of this initiative campaign)  --this time,  an initiative to amend the constitution to strip away the privacy rights of all Montana women without tipping off the voters as to what this proposed initiative  would really do and its exorbitant costs to Montana taxpayers?

First, there are some obvious problems with the latest Butcher/Jore amendment:

If passed, it would prevent a woman from getting an abortion - even if her life is in jeopardy - prevent treatments like in vitro fertilization, and allow legislators and the courts to dictate permissible activities and medical care for pregnant women.

I would think the AG would also be worried that the proposed initiative could seriously burden the court system by requiring court-appointed guardians to advocate for fertilized eggs and fetuses. Yet, the Attorney General didn't even bother request a fiscal impact statement on the potential costs to the state.

Maybe someone dropped the ball and this just fell through the cracks.

It couldn't have been a political decision--even arch religious conservative groups like the Montana Catholic Conference, Right to Life Montana and the Montana Family Foundation, have rejected this proposed initiative as too extreme.

It couldn't have been that he couldn't find substantive legal problems with the language. The Billings Gazette has already reported on some of the many legal problems with the language pointed out by Legislative Services Attorney David Niss such as

... the proposed ballot statements fail to make it clear that the three proposals apparently are intended to prohibit abortion.

You don't have to be an Attorney General to know that initiative language is supposed to tell voters what the initiative will actually do.   It has some other wacky legal implications too.  Implications that were pointed out for Bullock in this handy memo.

For example, the proposed initiative seeks to grant constitutional due process rights to all fertilized human eggs by amending the due process section of the Montana Constitution to define "person" as "from the beginning of the biological development." This definition is so broad that it could include unfertilized eggs and sperm, potentially impacting all sexual activity of men and women. Also, by requiring the Legislature to implement "this section by appropriate legislation," the initiative could remove every Montanans' current ability to pursue claims of due process violations.

Who's the criminal?

by: Jay Stevens

Fri Jun 05, 2009 at 13:57:14 PM MST

...Dr. Warren Hern leaves no window uncovered.

Full-length blinds shroud the bulletproof entryway; in his office, vinyl shades block a small window.

This is one of the facts of Hern's life -- no windows, ever. That was how Dr. Barnett Slepian's killer shot him in upstate New York, through a kitchen window. Slepian, like Hern, performed abortions.

"I can't sit in front of an open window. The shades have to be drawn," Hern said.

After Slepian's shooting in 1998, Hern predicted another would follow. "Will I get to live out my life?" he asked in a newspaper column in 2001. ". . . Who's next?"

And this is the comment from the local pro-life movement:

Bob Enyart, spokesman for Colorado Right to Life, which has demonstrated against Hern for decades, said that although his group doesn't condone Tiller's slaying, abortion providers should expect that violence begets violence.

"If a Mafia hit man gets killed, people recognize it's an occupational hazard," he said.

Remember, abortion is a legal and often necessary medical procedure. Scott Roeder, member of Operation Rescue, with links to the Army of God, murdered a man on the steps of his church. You tell me which person here resembles a hit man. You tell me which groups are using violence to intimidate its political opponents.

Meanwhile, Roeder himself is shocked - shocked! - that he's being treated "like a criminal" by Kansas officials. I guess he expected the pro-life's version of forty virgins or something...

Terrorist strikes in Kansas

by: Jay Stevens

Sun May 31, 2009 at 20:55:53 PM MST

President Obama said this afternoon that he was "shocked and outraged" by the killing of abortion doctor George Tiller, who was shot while attending church in east Wichita.

Tiller's clinic was often a target of abortion protesters. His clinic was blocked by protesters during the 1991 "Summer of Mercy" and bombed in 1986. Tiller himself was shot earlier in 1993 by an anti-abortion activist.

The suspect in this case - Scott Roeder - is an anti-tax extremist who was convicted and sentenced for building bombs, and was a member of Operation Rescue. I'm guessing Tiller was killed for political reasons, which pretty much is the definition of "terror." In fact, as Jon Perr points out, "Tiller's suspected assassin Scott Roeder is a poster child for precisely the kind of the anti-government extremism detailed in the recent DHS report on right-wing terror threats..."

Hey Dan McGee, is this your idea of "civil war"?

NARAL has a fact sheet on violence against abortion providers (pdf), and there hasn't been a murder since 1998, when Dr. Barnett Slepian was killed in his home by James Kopp. Anti-abortion terror was at a pretty high level during the 1990s, during the Clinton administration. Let's hope another Democratic administration doesn't re-up the terror activity of anti-abortion extremists.

Matthew Yglesias wrote a smart thing about this kind of right-wing extremism:

Random murder of civilians in order to coerce political concessions doesn't have a great track-record. But direct action terrorist violence against abortion providers has, I think, proven to be a fairly successful tactic. Every time you murder a doctor, you create a disincentive for other medical professionals to provide these services. What's more, you create a need for additional security at facilities around the country. In addition, the anti-abortion protestors who frequently gather near clinics are made to seem much more intimidating by the fact that the occurrence of these sorts of acts of violence.

In general, I think people tend to overestimate the efficacy of violence as a political tactic. But in this particular case, I think people tend to understate it.

Absolutely true. If you've ever been in a clinic that does family planning services, you know what he means. Security, bulletproof doors, etc & co. I know that clinic workers face an unrelenting barrage of threats and intimidation on a near-daily basis. And that's not even considering how intimidating it is to go into one of these places, especially when there's a pack of protesters outside.

Very few anti-abortion activists are violent. But the violence in the movement makes even peaceful demonstrations threatening. Especially when you read stuff like this:

I can't escape the conclusion that killing Tiller was the right thing to do. I am uncomfortable with this conclusion because it's dangerous. But nevertheless, it was the ethical thing to do. Tiller would have continued to take numerous lives. Nothing was going to stop him. So someone did stop him. And now fewer lives will be taken.

Here we go again...

by: Jay Stevens

Thu May 21, 2009 at 10:59:20 AM MST

The Montana ProLife Coalition is proposing a 2010 constitutional initiative that ultimately could ban abortion by declaring that human life begins when an egg is fertilized....

Legislative efforts by Jore and Sen. Dan McGee, R-Laurel, failed in 2007 and 2009, respectively, to place similar proposed constitutional amendments on the ballot. Jore and other backers of a separate initiative fell more than 18,000 votes short of qualifying it for the 2008 ballot.

And, it bears repeating:

"This dangerous measure would establish legal rights, starting at fertilization with the intent of banning legal abortion in our state and threatening stem cell research, in vitro fertilization and birth control," said Allyson Hagen, executive director of NARAL Pro-Choice Montana.

She called instead for Montanans to find common ground and work to reduce unneeded pregnancies and the need for abortion by increasing women's access to affordable reproductive health care and birth control and by providing teens with medically accurate sex education.

Remember, this initiative was a little too crazy for the Catholic Church, let alone Montanans.

What is interesting about this go 'round, however, is that ProLife Coalition board member, Roland Horst, claims the initiative grants rights throughout an individual's life, "including the aged, infirm, and people with disabilities."

Now, I don't have the wording of last election cycle's CI-100 before me, but all I recall about it was that it defined life as beginning with conception. There weren't really any other "rights" added on to that initiative - it was simply a way of outlawing abortion. So...how would that initiative extend to others? Is it currently legal to, say, kill old people? Or the disabled?

Most reasonable people might expect these folks to honor the "life" after it emerges from the womb. Guaranteeing, say, health care for all. Or day care for the children of low-income parents. You know, taking some responsibility in society, especially after using the state to force women to carry to term. But I wager most reasonable people would be mistaken. I'd wager Horst is getting all Terry Schiavo on us. I don't think Horst et al want to expend the energy and, especially, the money, to help care for the living.

Update: I just saw the language of the proposed amendment, which (correct me if I'm wrong) was pretty much identical to that in 2008's CI-100. Here it is, as it would appear in Section 1, Article II, section 3 of the state's constitution:

All persons have a fundamental and inalienable right to life.

With respect to the right of life, the word "person" applies to all human beings from the beginning of their biological development, including fertilization.

Again, it's easy to imagine a plethora of crazy legal ramifications from something like this. Would a mother of a miscarriage be a murder suspect? Should a fetus get a social security number? Do they count as a deduction on our taxes? Does this make the national guard illegal? Certainly killing someone out of self defense would be unconstitutional, never mind the death penalty.

It's the sex, stupid

by: Jay Stevens

Tue May 19, 2009 at 06:01:45 AM MST

...I don't consider a fertilized egg the size of the period at the end of this sentence to be the equivalent of the Gerber baby, and find people who do to be curious, especially for the anger they bring to the debate. If being pro-life meant an across-the-board reverence for life -- if pro-life activists were also Human Rights Watch members, also fierce opponents to capital punishment and vigorous battlers of AIDS in Africa, and of course anti-handgun and anti-war -- then I could almost understand the compressed rage that pro-lifers often exhibit.

But they aren't. Nor are they in favor of the contraception that would prevent abortions, a tipoff that this -- at its core -- is not about preventing violence to the unborn so much as it is about unraveling a modern society where women are able to plan their pregnancies. Stealing is bad, and religion speaks against it, but no congregation ever took to the streets to protest theft. There is an intensity -- at times a frenzy -- behind the abortion debate, which hints that something else is going on, that religion is attacking modern sexually open society at its weakest point, taking a stand that requires them to not only see abortion as a morally significant act, which it is, but to insist that morality cannot shift under any circumstance, and that having an abortion is the same if you're 14, or 24, or 64.

The "abortion is murder" line is just that -- a slogan. The people saying it obviously don't really believe that, in their hearts, because otherwise they'd be even more extreme than they already are. If it's murder, then why aren't they talking about, not only banning abortion, but also conducting enormous public trials to prosecute the millions of women who have had one? That doesn't seem to be on the table.

...If you believe that sex is for procreation and nothing else, then a pro-life stance flows naturally. If you believe it's for procreation, at certain times, but also for fun, then you're pro-choice. Don't hate me for bringing the news, but the for-fun element seems to be winning, no matter what last week's poll numbers say.

Seems to sum it up pretty well. And let's remember that, of the people identifying themselves at "pro-life," only a small subset of that group wants to outlaw abortion in all cases. Most people want abortion to remain legal in some capacity.

It's ironic, then, that while the anti-abortion rhetoric over the decades has created doubt about abortions, especially in the later stages of pregnancies, that this propaganda hasn't changed many people's views about sex or women's rights. That's probably because all the ire and signs and videos and pictures have concentrated on pregnancy and the fetus; little of it has attacked sexual mores. When it does, it turns people off.

This is something I write about a lot, but there are ways to reduce abortion. Real sex-ed (which, by the way, should tout abstinence). Access to birth control. Accessible and affordable health care. Accessible and affordable day care. Continuing ed classes, more drug treatment programs, etc & co. But, oddly, you don't see many hardcore lifer activists working on any of those issues. In fact, many of the extreme anti-abortionists are expressly opposed to any of those reforms.

Reminds me of an encounter I had during last year's primaries when I was collecting signatures for the CHIP expansion at the Lolo polling place. There was a signature-gatherer for Rick Jore's anti-abortion constitutional amendment there - you remember, the one that would define life as starting at conception, the initiative that was too much even for the Catholic church - so I sauntered over for a chat and to ask her to sign my sheet, and maybe let folks signing her petition know we were there...

Only instead of a signature, the woman - I swear - burst a blood vein in her forehead while yelling at me, calling me a "socialist" and a host of other names unfit for this fine publication. Never mind that extending health care coverage to children of low-income families might actually sway some would-be mothers to carry to term. Never mind that her initiative, if passed and written into the Montana constitution, might cause some low-income families to sink into poverty (because abortion bans always impact the poorest among us the worst - a rich woman can always find a way to safely end her pregnancy).

Confronted with a choice between her ideology and the children she ostensibly was campaigning for, she chose her ideology.  

Between a rock and a hard place...

by: Jay Stevens

Thu Apr 23, 2009 at 10:22:05 AM MST

But at the National Abortion Federation, a hotline for women seeking abortion information has been "ringing off the hook," according to the group's president, Vicki Saporta.

"We are currently getting more calls from women who report that they or their partner have recently lost their job, and we are also hearing from more women facing eviction," she said.

One recent inquiry came from a 24-year-old married woman in Colorado who was evicted after her landlord went into foreclosure. Another came from a 32-year-old pregnant mother in Virginia who had lost her job and health insurance.

"As more and more women and families are struggling due to the crisis, it's affecting more than just low-income families. Now more middle-class and working class families are facing the types problems that we've heard from low-income women," Saporta said.

As with many other nonprofits, abortion assistance groups are being inundated with requests for aid just as funding is drying up.

It'll be interesting to see conservatives contort themselves opposing abortion and health care reform, because apparently they're inversely related.

I've said it before, I'll say it again, the best way to reduce abortion is to improve access to health care and day care. Certainly the answer isn't to use the state to impose draconian, 14th-century morality on the people. And, h*ll, that didn't work too well back in the 14th century, either...

Dan McGee wrestles with his fantasy life

by: Jay Stevens

Wed Apr 01, 2009 at 08:09:00 AM MST

It is truly unfortunate that the big business of killing babies has so persuaded the Democratic Party that they will disallow the people of Montana the opportunity to express themselves on this extremely vital issue," [Dan] McGee said.

I can't figure it out -- is McGee a liar or deluded? Seriously, the belief that people support women's reproductive rights because they're beholden to some monolithic baby-killing corporate industry is...weird, to say the least. But then this isn't McGee's first foray off into unexplored territory, is it? I guess someone has to fill Roger Koopman's shoes...

Update: In the comments, Allyson pointed out even more hysterical rhetoric from McGee:

McGee said Republicans attempted to work with Democrats on these issues but it did not seem to take. He also compared abortion with slavery and predicted an upheaval comparable to the Civil War. "You bet there will be," McGee said.

That's right! McGee's going to protect the "sanctity of life" by killing people that don't agree with him!

Unbelievable.

Children's health care, hate crimes, and abortion at the Montana legislature

by: Jay Stevens

Fri Jan 30, 2009 at 10:59:36 AM MST

What's HB 157, you ask? Why, it's the bill that implements the expansion of CHIP, as dictated by the "Healthy Montana Kids" initiative that Montanans passed this passed election.

Oh, you say, yawn. Of course it passed.

Wait! There had been an amendment inserted to the bill that would have stripped "preemptive eligibility" from the law.

Er, what?

Preemptive eligibility -- that's a provision that allows applicants (that is, children) to receive health care insurance during the three months it takes to verify that the family meet the program's eligibility standards. Apparently someone thought -- hey! They've been without insurance this long...what's another three months? and slipped in an amendment.

The good news is that the amendment striking down preemptive eligibility was withdraw, and the bill is now headed to the floor.

Those three votes against HB 157 in the Appropriations Committee? Ray Hawk, Roy Hollandsworth, and Dave Kasten all voted against the bill.

Bad news from the legislature on equal representation before the law: SB 223 was tabled in committee.   Gary Perry, Jim Shockley, Aubyn Curtiss, John Esp, Greg Hinkle, Dan McGee, and Terry Murphy voted to deliberately exclude gays and lesbians from Montana's existing hate crimes statute.

And a quick note on SB 46 -- Dan McGee's ballot initiative, which will be heard before the Judiciary Committee on February 11 -- which adds, "the protection of unborn human life is a compelling state interest," after "the right of individual privacy is essential to the well-being of a free society and shall not be infringed without the showing of a compelling state interest."

A couple of thoughts. First, abortion was deemed a right of women under Roe v. Wade due to privacy concerns. McGee's bill is striking directly at that decision. It's an obvious attempt to criminalize abortion.

Second, basically what McGee is saying, is that a woman, if pregnant, has no right to be free from state control. A radical, like Rick Jore, would probably argue that the state has power over all women of child-bearing age, as he considers life to begin at conception. That is, the state has a vested interest in women's sex lives.