Well, this is infuriating, to say the least. And I just turned down an invite to an open house for NARAL, hosted by the wife of the former head of MN’s Dem party. Crap! Head, meet butt. What’re they thinking?

Thinking of going out for a lunch of steamed veal.

I went to a NARAL meeting in NOVA the week after Reagan was elected. What a hopeless bunch of mopes.

Democrats don’t need enemies. Pogo was right.

Thanks for this info, Jane. I would like to say that local NARAL organizations may not be as bad as the national. Def. do not send money to the national, check out what your locals are up do before giving.

@barbara: it’s helpful to remember that what NARAL does on the national level doesn’t always reflect what goes on at the local level. So while the open house may have been a good opportunity to pass a message along to useless Nancy Keenan, your local chapter MAY actually be doing something useful.

That said, on the national level, NARAL is about as useful as the Pope’s balls.

Jane, you really ought to run for Pres of NARAL, get a copy of the bylaws and start mapping your strategy now.

LOL

there is a Front Page article over at Big Orange right now – asking us to commend 36 Democrats in tough districts for their Yes on HCR votes – 19 of whom voted for Stupak – including Stupak his own ridiculous self

the front fu***ng page

Teh stoopid knows no bounds.

You are on it again. It is damn fine to have real news available. I think we need something else. FDL should be the starting point. As I am reasonably sure each of you gets a dozen to 5 dozen requests a day for donations, acts of letter, petition and various other emails begging us to act in behalf of the petitioner.
Who are these people? I have been the recipient of emails after the failure on a vote asking me to thank the person that allowed the loss, and many other strange emails with very bad timing. All of them political.

We need a clearing house so that those among us are not taken in by our outpouring of help and welfare to the people and the planet. We need to know who is pulling our chain. And for those of you not as old as this tree, “pulling the chain” is how things used to be flushed down the toilet from it’s early days until everyone had to have it just a whole lot more elegant. It’s still a toilet, and we need to know who and what to flush as they come knocking.

I rarely read DK – it’s like a bunch of people screaming at the same time and I can’t figure out where they are going. I’m not likely to congratulate anyone on their vote.

I made the mistake of clicking on the comments – some sister Kossacks pointed it out immediately, but there was all kinds of rationalizing and excusing the anti woman votes that I am certain would have never been made had the Amendment been about Sickle Cell or Tay-Sachs

eye opening – welcome to Stupakistan sisters !

What’s wrong with NARAL?

NARAL has to be the most self-defeating advocacy group in existence. Honestly, they have spent the last decade or more backing centrist Democrats and Republicans who have repeatedly thrown abortion rights under the bus at the first whiff of challenge.

Come on, people. Support politicians who actually, you know, support what you stand for. Stop enabling the Bart Stupaks of the world with your lack of righteous vengeance when you’re betrayed. Again.

all too true about the diaries – but never expected to see blatant sexism on the gd front page.

yeah, i saw that and added a comment that began “really? REALLY?!?”

Stupak = sepsis, please keep the votes coming.

it’s called infiltration, they’ve infiltrated the democratic party with republican, they’ve infiltrated the entertainment industry with corporatists and they’ve infiltrated liberal groups with right wingers

Jane answers your question within the context of the current battle here

Lieberman being poster boy for infiltration…

IMO that’s the first thing we need to take care of. I plan to write both of my Senators (Boxer and DiFi) and demand that something be done about Joe. It may not do any good but I think that if everyone wrote their Democratic Senators and made that demand, they might at least realize that we are angry about a traitor.

Poor Jane, NARAL Pres., US Pres., Saint. A busy schedule but one I am sure she will handle nicely.

Thanks for bringing up the NARAL mess again Jane…. it needs to be aired frequently until the bumbleheads at national realize that life long supporters no longer can support their shenanigans.

umm.. isn’t Chafee a Republican? I mean, I know he ran as an independent once but to the best of my knowledge, he never caucused with us (unlike Lieberman.. or Stupak for that matter). Why should we expect that he would’ve been on our side of this issue, whatever NARAL might’ve deluded themselves into thinking? I don’t really understanding the point we’re trying to make here. Republicans cannot be trusted to be pro-choice. Period. It doesn’t matter how pretty they look or what nice things they might say when they try to make nice.

EPU’d, sort of: comments like this one from a TPM reader re Stupak are infuriating –

I will be the one liberal to admit this: elective abortion is not health care. The consitutional right to choose in one thing; the right to have a subsidized abortion? I don’t think that there is such a right.

o/t

Jane – have you seen this ?

Rep Diana DeGaudette claiming she’s got 41 signatures for a No vote on any bill out of Conference containing Stupak Amend.

I concur with Sargent – zero wiggle room

Chaffee provided a nominal fig leaf of “bipartisanship” to NARAL; apparently that’s all that mattered to them.

No mention of elective pregnancy?

The facts are that under Clinton and Janet Reno, access to reproductive services became unavailable to women living in 2/3 of US counties.

NARAL has become complacent, and as they’ve been nailed into the veal pen, public sentiment has gone against them and they’ve not been able to mount a campaign to challenge that erosion of support.

That absence by NARAL for the past 20 years, ceding the field to the fetus fetishists is what gave cover to the Stupak amendment.

rethugs reject the concept of elective pregnancy. It’s a religious duty.. or an expression of patriotism, or somethin’…

Absolutely no wonder at all, as I blogged this debacle on Saturday, that this felt like the Alito cloture vote all over again.

Because it fucking was the Alito cloture vote. AGAIN.

The next thing readers need to be asking and talking about in tandem with batting cleanup on this mess: who’s the next Supreme Court justice candidate? Because there’d better not be yet another Alito in the literal sense.

McCaskill is totally okay with Stupak amendment in the Senate bill:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/11/09/mccaskill-senate-could-li_n_350625.html

crap!

“DeGuette”

Ian Welsh over at Open Left:

I would suggest that if progressives ever want their threats to be taken seriously by anyone again they go into opposition against this bill until such a time as it both has a robust public option and the Stupak amendment is out. Failure to do so will show that their threats were always hollow, that they are willing to sell out child-bearing age women, and that they prioritize the interests of older people over younger and poorer people.
…

Obama and the Democratic leadership’s bottom line is they must pass some bill called “health care reform”. Unless you threaten to take away their bottom line, they will take away anything that isn’t progressives bottom line – and that includes practical abortion access, and a robust public option.

There’s a good McJoan diary up. Here’s the closing paragraph:

Remember the promises? Reform was about expanding choices, not allowing government to come between you and your doctor, no one will lose their coverage, and if you like your current plan you get to keep it. Apparently being female is a preexisting condition that exempts us from the promises, too.

McCaskill has long been identified as Head WH Cheerleader in the Senate

that’s okay !
that’s alright !
c’mon Sisters, bite, bite, bite !

This is sort of OT but I just saw this headline at msn.com based on an article at MSNBC stating ” A government health insurance plan included in the House bill is unacceptable to a few Democratic moderates who hold the balance of power in the Senate.” The article quotes only Lindsey Graham, Joe Lieberman and Mary Landrieu. Who knew these were the moderate Democrats? Amazing.

Yeah, and about those caucus members who pledged not to vote for a bill without a robust public option? What says this “pledge” is any stronger?

Nancy Keenan, a Montanan, is the head of what I consider a bogus organization. I stopped giving money to them with the whole Alito and Roberts debacles. I only give directly to family planning clinics who are actually dealing with women and not lobbyists dealing with men in Congress. When I complained on a phone call to Max Baucus staffer Jim Messina about Baucus non support for a filibuster, he forcefully retorted, “Max has 100% NARAL approval.”
I thought and I think replied something like, “So What? I’m interested in opposing a corporatist who will screw women in other ways than the abortion issue.”

That’s when it really dawned on me that Democrats use their NARAL credentials to keep the women’s vote while working doggedly to undermine health care reform and continue economic injustice for women. After that phone call I ended my support of NARAL.

Keenan was a decent Secretary of Education and should have been our representative instead of Denny Rehberg who waged a dirty campaign against her. But that doesn’t mean the organization is needed.

There must be something in the water here in Montana to produce people willing to participate in the Kabuki theater that is Washington. More likely, it’s because Montana has been treated like a colony for its whole history with money from mining shipped back East. It breeds lackeys for corporatists. Montanan Celinda Lake should retire with her polls and bad euphemisims like having Democrats parrot “affordable and accessible” health care. And then there is Max, Jon, Messina…

Thank goodness we also produced Barbara Ehrenreich.

My Congresswoman has had my support, of money and time, in both her elections however, a couple of months ago I let her know that I would not be supporting her with time or money and would not vote for her if she voted for less than a very robust public option which she professed to support.
The other day she voted for the piece of shit bill that came out of the house and has, subsequently, lost my support. Will it make any difference to her? Probably not but I have no other recourse. Carol Shea Porter may well win this election but I will work my butt off for another, more honest candidate, in the hopes of defeating her in the future.

That’s when it really dawned on me that Democrats use their NARAL credentials to keep the women’s vote while working doggedly to undermine health care reform and continue economic injustice for women.

Jane refers to it as the ‘Good Gyno Seal of Approval’

p.s. – didn’t know Ehrenreich was yours. I always remember Jeanette Rankin and Montana being first to let women vote

by the way, Stupak’s office is having a bad day.
any attempt to ask a question about the amendment is literally met with screams from the woman answering the phone. i know, because it just happened to me. She screamed at me almost as soon as the words “i have a question about the Stupak Amendment” came out of my mouth. And then she tried to shout me down before hanging up on me, and to be honest, i hadn’t even rasied my voice.

So i called back, tried to calm her down, and said that I’d gotten conflicting information. she refused to let me speak to a legislative aide, refused to put me through to voicemail, said she was too busy to answer ym question, and encouraged me to call back “after 5:30″, which is of course when the office is closed.

just to give you an idea of what they’re dealing with, deservedly so, in DC.

It would be helpful if an appositive were used to identify the meaning of names such as NARAL because there must be someone else out there almost as ignorant as I about its meaning. Perhaps, an URL?

I’m guessing after googling that this is the political action group that claims to be pro-choice? Seems like a doltish/corrupt lot not to support health care and social justice for all.

As many have said. The MSM, the various .orgs and congress along with the massivly rich are all members of teh village. The revolving doors, the party nites where all show up. The good neighbor act when questions(softball) are asked on sunday shows. Everything. We the sheeple are somehow left out of the mix. We have a governing class, who all get along together after hours with the 4th estate, the ones who were supposed to watch the watchers have joined the wolves in looting the state. What we really need is a reformer like TR was back in the early 1900s. A trust buster, someone who can, once more, bring us back from the brink. Except that I do not think its gonna happen again. We had our chance, had strong laws in place to prevent the rich from screwing the masses. Except the rich bought off congress while we were all watching TV and saying that “govt has no effect on my life, so why should I vote”. The corps slithered back in while we wern’t watching and took over again. So now we have mega corps again, a few companies controlling us once more. The regulating agencies are now a joke, we have how many recalls of bad food? We have emasculated the agencies set up to protect us from what John Updike wrote about, yet the places that prepare our food are as bad as they have ever been. We passes laws to prevent another depression, then a sen, Phil Gramm R Tx, sneaks in a law in the dead of nite, and Clinton signs a bill deregulating the banks. Credit card companies charge intrest rates that we once called usury and put people in jail for. And yet we continue to line up like good little sheep so that our bought and paid for congress can screw us over and over. We are sheeple, our “leaders” know that we are and know how easy it is to manipulate us. “DEATH PANELS”, “ABORTION”, “WAR” we are so easy it is pathetic. Ain’t no damn way we will ever have another TR or a FDR. Instead we get incompetents(but great guys to have a beer with) like gwb or criminals like nixon-who should have been tried and convicted, if he had maybe we would find the balls to try gwb and cheney for their crimes rather than sweeping them under the rug.
And our education system, despite pouring money into it, we still have a 30% drop out rate. Our future is looking worse because we do not educate our kids. Rethugs hate science and way to many get elected to school boards-because we the freekin people are too damn lazy to vote. 6% voted in the election just past in my city. 6 freekin %. Our apathy will destroy the country, because if only the politically committed vote, then only extremists get elected to congress. Only 65% of those eligble to vote in 2008 actually voted. Think about that. One last thing. in 1914 when the first federal drug law was enacted, the govt estimated that 1.3% of us were addicted to illegal drugs. In 1970 when the “WAR ON DRUGS” began the govt estimated that 1.3% of us were addicted to illegal drugs.40 years and 39 million arrests later the govt says 1.3% of us are addicted to illegal drugs. That is the only statistic that has never changed. Other than the drug gangs, who profits from the “war on drugs”? Try your local police.and the easy votes you local congressman gets for being “tough on crime” and how easy it is to brand the liberal candidate as “soft on crime” The rethugs are the ones standing in the way of stopping the war on drugs, the war we lost a long time ago. Just like prohibition increased criminal gangs, corrupted cops and made millions of people break the law, so does the war on drugs.
Remember when our national speed limit was 55? Remember that no one paid any attention to it? If you make a law that everyone in the polity rejects, all you get is the citizens of that polity having contempt for law, that attitude will go on to many other laws, the people will have contempt for those who enforce the laws-like the NRA calling BATF “jackbooted thugs”. I see it daily in the contempt that everyone has for traffic laws, which the cops mostly ignore. Then small crimes get committed, which the cops ignore-the last time I was in LA if you got into an accident the cops would not even show up unless someone was injured. If your house or car gets broken into does anyone bother to investigate? Check in your area, many cities will not even take a report they just say call your insurence. So it goes, more crimes get committed yet the police can not do anything as the local govt will not pay for the police that they need. The same with courts, in some cases if you simply ignore them they will go away. A general contempt for the laws that govern society so that we can live in close proximity without killing each other

dude! paragraph breaks, please

Hope they have many more bad days. When they hand my body over to the Pope, I get a little cranky.

I think it was Wyoming that first let women vote. But Jeanette Rankin was the first female representative to Congress before women could vote. She voted against WWI and WWII. She ran as a Republican. Great woman. Mike Mansfield and Lee Metcalf were statesmen. Burton K. Wheeler was a senator who ran on the Progressive ticket with Bob La Follette.

We passed a beautiful new constitution in 1972 that made a healthful environment a right. Article 3, section 2.

All persons are born free and have certain inalienable rights. They include the right to a clean and healthful environment and the rights of pursuing life’s basic necessities, enjoying and defending their lives and liberties, acquiring, possessing and protecting property, and seeking their safety, health and happiness in all lawful ways. In enjoying these rights, all persons recognize corresponding responsibilities.

But our female progressive Mayor just lost to a right wing old white fart. So we had a brief moment of civility and now it’s back to good old modern Montana misogyny. This is the most misogynist place I’ve lived. (Raised in Illinois, schooled in Michigan, 15 years NYC, 2 years LA…well Hollywood is bad). And believe me, it’s not about just the tea bonkers. The Democrats here more often than not are bullies.

Most excellent!

Oh, if you ever do manage to get through to their office, ask them if they realize they’re trying to force women who’ve miscarried to risk sepsis and death rather than get an abortion.

Just called. The guy wouldn’t let me finish, talked over me, and hung up on me. When I tried to call back, he said I could call back when I wasn’t “yelling at him” (I wasn’t yelling) and hung up on me again.

202-225-4735. Let’s give them an interesting afternoon.

HEY NARAL …NOT ONLY ALITOS WIFE IS CRYING …

Uh-huh, uh-huh, I gotcha I gotcha

Abortion rights should a footnote be
I can pretend this is lib-er-ty
I will vote against a women’s right
To own her body without a fight
I will make her march I will make her yell
I will make her life a living hell
But its MY freedom she steps upon
When she has a choice, if she doesn’t spawn

Uh-huh, uh-huh, I gotcha, I gotcha

My religion drives me, I am down with God
I own your womb, but your kids are flawed
I refuse to care when they die and starve
Living poverty for all,this we proudly carve
Yes your womb is mine, let us kill and shoot
All abortion people, ‘cuz then “life” is moot
I will support you hang, support you die
Just as long as your womb I can keep nearby

Uh-huh. uh-huh, I gotcha I gotcha …

Just off the top of my head …

True. New York, NARAL, is a strong organization, and not one NY rep voted for Stupak.

I know I’m late on this thread. Was watching the dominos falling in Berlin…. great show! *g*

but OpenLeft has it exactly right: the House bill has now become intolerable. Time to kill it unless Stupak is taken out and robust public option is put back in. For a moment I felt guilty that I didn’t know Stupak was about to fuck up abortion rights, but then I realized he & the Catholic bishops kept it secret until the last second. We were clearly outplayed on this one. We never had a chance to whip it or do a money bomb to prove our determination.

What shall be done?

remember in 2006 NARAL endorsed Chafee over Dem, preferring as they said to have a pro-choice Republican than more Democrats in Senate – after the Alito vote you discuss… at that time I didn’t see Chafee as really a great pro-choice candidate, and NARAL as hypocritical. I cancelled my membership. Who is really fighting for reproductive freedom anymore?

The Stupak Amendment was taken out like a knife behind our backs and used to all but nullify what would have been good about H R 3962, as women will now have a choice alright: they can choose between voluntarily giving up their reproductive rights in order to get the benefits from H R 3962, on the one hand, and not getting the benefits at all, on the other.

And which women, I wonder, will be hurt the most by this?

They handed out a victory and nullified it at the same time.

Please help me understand why you think this betrayal is ok, or give me some hint as to what comes next.

dude, that’s been how they have been ALL DAY.

I have already done so. I finally got a guy who wasn’t in hysterics, told him i write for the philly weekly and was doing research (true), and he passed me along to media.

i spoke to a pleasant woman named michelle, i sent them the link from kos (what the coathanger amendment really does) and asked for clarification.

hopefully, I’ll hear back from them.

Nothing that’s not wrong with the National Chamber Of Commerce or who they REALLY represent.

I’d like to know what kind of funding and revenues Chafee brought with him from less than liberal/prog sources that demanded NARAL water down and soften their positions across the board . . .

LIkely, NARAL and it’s board members were all bought off long ago.

Ya think?

LOL

But Dude makes good points, and in the face of it all, shit sure seems overwhelming.

Thank dawg it wasn’t all caps, too.

*G*

Well done this morning on Democracy Now, Jane.